We have spent the last week or so travelling around the south of India. The people are friendly, maybe less obsessed with the bike which is great… The food less spicy than I was hoping… And, at least on the west coast, a little more aware of the environment and keeping it clean… Clearly a big job still lays ahead for them though…

Riding through as many national parks and elevated areas as we could, we have seen some beautiful tea plantations (acres and acres, something like our vineyards at home), beautiful scenery and some wild elephants…. Completely wild… No sanctuary where tourists can ride them or clean them… Wild… It was really cool!

It’s so much nicer riding through the hills and is always a harsh jolt back to reality when we find ourselves back on main roads… I don’t think I need to go on about that anymore… My uncontrollable screaming at a bike who was unnecessarily smashing his horn this evening made me (and him!) realise that I may be loosing the plot so I’ll keep that to myself… The amount of middle finger jabs, swear words (sorry Mum) and  violent kicks out to cars threatening to kill us is also another thing I am trying to find my inner peace with … It’s a challenge 😁😊😇🙏🏻😑

Mysore is where we are now…actually the first proper city we have been in. It’s actually pretty chilled, nothing much to see except a palace which is really pretty. There are more bars here which is nice 😊. The bars still make you feel like you are a dirty scrap of society that doesn’t deserve to be seen. All the bars so far in India are underground or on a roof away from the public in a dark dirty corner with no sunlight … They are a little better here, in the state of Karantaka… Some have a bit of sunlight allowed through some of the windows, but still pretty dingy…. We are however also a little desperate so we persevered and found a place which had sunlight AND fresh air and a SHIT load of westerners with the same scared vacant look that we had, grasping their gin/vodka/beer like it may evaporate. It was all very nice but I got a bit peeved when I was told that my daiquiri would be made with ice cream…

‘Ice cream??!! Can you make it without?’

‘No’

‘Really?! Ice cream?! Don’t worry about it then’

Even after a visit to the bar to personally speak with the bartenders and ask them if they could alter the recipe, I was rejected… I may have been dry for 3 weeks by now, but ice cream in a daiquiri?! I’ll skip thanks 😉

Anyway…. Patience… This is what India is trying to teach me!  

We ended up at a bar with no windows, with cigarette smoke and rock music… Dean hated it for the first half a beer but after that he was head banging to the rock music, drinking more beer than I was margaritas and making DJ requests for ‘System of a down’ (and I was contemplating asking for Prince) …this is when I knew it was time to pull us away from the bar… He has now crashed out… Bless ☺️

Thankfully (as you can see) things have improved marginally in the south of India. 
The traffic is a little less suicidal, people mob us less, and the scenery in some parts is really beautiful.
We did ride 4000km to get here though so it’s taking some time to forgive 🙂
A few days ago we ended the day in shitsville being mobbed by people who were climbing all over the bike, then Betsy wouldn’t start, and eventually she ran on one cylinder all the way back to our room.
That was a low point.
Today we’re in improved spirits, the beer is cold, the shower hot, and Betsy is running great, so the journey continues 🙂

With 10 hours everyday in my helmet I have so many thoughts  that go round and round my head…

 You often get told by other travellers how ‘amazing’ India is…  Today I was thinking about the things that ‘amazed’ me about India. Here are some of the thoughts I had today kilometre number 3051 day 13 hour 8… 

I find it amazing that nobody knows the rule of ‘keep left unless overtaking’ 😤

I think it’s amazing that cows, goats and dogs are free to roam as they please across the 2/3 (4 if it’s really busy) lane highway 😳

I think it’s amazing that the women wear brightly coloured saris and look stunning against the grey dusty dirty backdrop 💃🏾

It’s amazing how much rubbish there is everywhere and the complete disregard the people have of their country and environment ☹️

It’s amazing to see the amount of men that need to urinate in full view of everyone at any given time of the day (today I counted 30) 😷😑

I think it’s amazing that tea (chai) and biscuits is such a massive part of day to day life… Chai places are everywhere! The British left 70 years ago and it’s the only other place I’ve seen people dunking biscuits into tea!🇬🇧🍪☕️

I think its amazing that we haven’t had a drink for over two weeks!🍷🍸

And the attention betsy gets is completely ridiculous!

Despite all this, I can’t say I dislike the place or the culture. Everyday there are numerous sights, smells and people that put a smile on our face despite the gruelling day we have had. Choosing to ride a bike around India may not be the smartest thing we’ve ever done but we have only just started so that could still change.
We haven’t seen more than 5 other westerners so we have been in pretty remote areas up until now, we are sure a lot will change once we get to more touristy areas. We’re hoping that now things will start to be a bit more beautiful and we will take things a bit easier. Less highway miles, less traffic, less urine…. It can only get better 😉 x

 Ps our head camera has died so we don’t have as many photos… I’m afraid emojis is where it’s at at the moment! ❤️

we have no idea what this man was doing!

We have arrived in Kerala (the South of India), holy cow (get it?) what a long three days of riding!
We ascended 2000m in 30km of road this afternoon to arrive in a mountain town called Kodaikanal.
Tired but very happy, from here we’re moving more slowly with lots to see along the way (hopefully!).
xoxo

After 13 days straight riding from Chiang Mai to Calcutta we needed some rest! The day before yesterday we didnt quite reach our planned rest destination, a little beach side town called Puri that’s described as “a golden sandy beach” in WikiTravel… undeterred we left early next morning and rode through a craft village (where they make mostly lamp shades, yawn), and then went to see the Temple of the Sun on the way to Puri. It was 10 rupias entry fee for Indians, and 250 rupias for anyone else… we’ve seen a lot of temples by now, so we skipped it and headed straight to the golden sandy beach.

Arriving there was the usual debacle of finding somewhere to stay, made more difficult by me needing space to dismantle the carburettors to fix a flat spot that’s developed, so a shady secure parking spot was needed.  Eventually we forked out for a ncie hotel and crashed a bit before hitting the sand.

Now if there there is a hell, and if hell has a beach, I think we found it.

The sun almost blocked out by the haze of cook fires and pollution, rubbish washed up all along the sand, a long stretch of beach just up from our room where the locals go to poo, yes shit –  EVERYWHERE.  A few hundred metres south of poo point  a small river flows into the ocean, a river of untreated sewage…  (this is not an exaggeration).

There are black crows all over the place picking through the rubbish, fighting and crawing like a ghoulish scene from some hitchcock film.  Cows roam the beach too, adding to the smell, along with goats and camels that have been dressed up in lurid colours, which somehow make the whole thing look even more crazy.  Indians swim in the water, (in between the poo river and the poo point), and they ride the camels too.

To make matters worse there is no alcohol allowed on the beach, but some entrepreneurial guys are selling it anyway, they put the bottle into a plastic bag so no one knows it’s beer, but we spotted it from 100m away…

“that guy has a frikkin beer!”

“are you sure it’s beer?”

“it looks like beer, and he’s a fat old white guy, it must be beer”

To say we were expecting more would be a slight understatement.  Anyway, we made the most of it… in search of a gin and tonic we walked up the beach  5km past the poo river to the next town where hundreds of Indians were eating on the beach, we asked in every hotel on the foreshore there if they had a bar… but everyone said “NO” while waggling their heads in a very disapproving way. So eventually we gave up and walked back to poo point this time along the road, with crows and cows and car horns for company.

Nearing our area we passed a super luxurious hotel…

“this place has got to have a bar” cried Sally!

“ok lets check it out”

and sure enough, there was a bar, with overpriced Bombay Saphire Gin, and Schweppes Tonic, and a billiard table and… 2 bowling alleys… random!  But anyway it was good!

That night I passed out mid sentence and woke to the sound of horns and crows early the next morning.  The work on the bike took me half the day, not easy dismantling a pair of carburettors in the the parking lot of a hotel, where small children come to play with your tools and grown men appear at regular intervals asking…

“how much the bike?”  or

“where is it here?”

or they just stand half a meter away and stare at me without uttering a word, not even when I say hello to them…

I did meet a very nice French guy though, (hi Bastille!), and we had a beer with him and his family later that afternoon on the golden sand beach, eating peanuts and admiring the camels while trying to hide our bottles.

We reluctantly decided to push on from Puri this morning, aspecially since the Indian prime minister was visiting this afternoon, and we didn’t want to get caught in the crowd.  Today we rode almost exlusively on the highway and it was actually pretty easy going for the first time here.  Not too many oncoming buses and generally manageable traffic.

Tonight we’re in a little town called Annavaram, famous for nothing in particular, but the restaurant in the bus station serves great dosa and idli 🙂

3 more days to reach Kerala, our first real stop.

Cows at the beach… Unbelievable.

There is not a second that passes where I don’t hear the sound of a car/truck/bus/push bike/tuk tuk/tractor/motorbike horn… All day long… My throat feels swollen and sore from inhaling so much dust/smoke and pollution… I bounce from loving the place to hating everything (which usually corresponds with the amount of traffic we are tackling at the time) and every day we are debating if we are doing the right thing by traveling around India on a motorbike or if it’s the absolutely most ridiculous stupid thing ever.

If the people were rude and the food was bad, this would be a total nightmare. Thankfully it isn’t hot yet so we don’t have that against us either!

We’re still trying to work out if travelling through this traffic on terrible roads and risking our lives everyday is worth it. Today it took us an hour to pass about 5kms worth of trucks and buses that had come to a stand still for reasons we still can’t work out. This involved riding in between trucks, off the side of the road going in both directions, riding head on into trucks and riding in fields along the side of the road. We have so many close calls with buses and trucks driving at us and animals crossing in our path it makes for very stressful days! Having to ride off the road to avoid being hit is a daily occurrence. Poor Dean 😔

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it’s been a bit of a mind game so far, it seems that either we’re in dense slow moving traffic, it’s dusty, loud and generally horrible, or we’re on a quiet 4 lane divided road.  So either we’re hating it, or it’s quite easy, there’s not much in between.  On the congested narrow road, after an hour (including ten near misses and half a dozen exit stage lefts to avoid oncoming traffic), I’m hating it.  But then inexplicably the narrow crappy road turns into a 4 lane highway and off we go at 90km/hr, now able to remain mostly on the road, even when things come at us in the wrong direction.  This lasts anywhere between 5mins and an hour, then, as randomly as it began, the 4 lane highway turns back into a narrow dusty road, and after 5 mins I’m back to wondering what the hell we’re doing here…  Hopefully we get a bit more consistency soon!

a bit of today’s helmet intercom dialogue…

S “i need to get out of these warm clothes” (it was really hot in amongst all the trucks)

D “I need to get out of this country…”

S “I want to go home 🙁 ”

Standard daily traffic

At the end of these hard days we end up in a dusty town where we (Betsy) attracts a massive crowd (today the crowd created a traffic jam which got the police involved and the local media along) and it’s almost impossible to find a drink to calm the nerves.

A few of Betsy’s admirers

Thankfully every town is very lively so it’s always nice to walk around and take in the chaos and try random plates of food.

Another very long day ahead of us tomorrow… We are just preying we are on a dual lane highway…. that doesn’t end abruptly and turn in to a single track dirt road at a seconds notice 😁

betsy is in there somewhere!

Just pulled into a town called Burdwan, I went to look for a room and returned to find over 100 people crowding around the bike… No kidding, total chaos, the traffic was stopped, media turned people up and tried to interview us complete with video cameras!!
Finally got the room, parked the bike downstairs and was asked for picture after picture, someone even asked for my autograph!!  Hilarious 🙂
An entertaining end to an otherwise tough day, traffic here is not much fun.  Ten days straight riding, we’re due for a rest soon.
More later xoxo

So how is it??

Well… we crossed the border expecting suicidal traffic, congestion, polluition and staring people who make you feel uncomfortable.  What we’ve found is most of that, but also some surprises.

cows… everywhere.

We’re still in the far east of India, the part that’s surrounded by Bhutan on top, Myanmar to the east, and Bangladesh to the west.  So we dont really feel like we’re in India just yet, which is dumb, because obviously we are, but it somehow doesnt ‘feel’ like it.

For the first few days we were in the mountains, where there is a mix of regular Indian (???) and Hill tribe ethnicity, the Indians look like… Indians, but the hill tribe people look more Mongol.  Either way, everyone is really friendly, interested, helpful and very honest.  No dodgy scams at the border, no overcharging for food or drinks, just really nice people.

these tricycles are also everywhere.

Everywhere we stop we get a crowd of something like 50 people gathered to look at Betsy, I’m not sure she’s ever gotten so much attention before – I think Sal is a little jealous 😉   They have KTM’s that are actually made in India for sale here too, in shiny new orange showrooms, so everyone knows what a KTM is, they just havent ever seen one as big before.

“yes it’s the same as the Duke we have here…”

“the 200 duke?”

“yes, what is this one?”

“950”

“my god! it’s nearly 5x bigger, Oh My God!!”  you need to imagine the accent 🙂

We keep having kids on motorbikes follow us for kilometers taking pictures and video, I wheelied away from one bike and the kids were so excited they could barely speak…

“that thing you do with the front in the sky, please do again, i like very much your bike!!”

so many people staring!

We entered India in Manipur state (a dry state), and the next region had a ban on alcohol for the last and first days of the month (guess when we arrived?), so tonight’s beer was my first for five days, which may be a record, consequently I’m quite sleepy now so will keep this shortish.

The traffic is not as bad as I expected, but still pretty bad.  Being run off the road is a regularity, cars/trucks/motorbikes/bicycles/cows/people going the wrong way on dual carriage road is also quite normal (i’m serious, imagine cows on the expressway… unbelievable!), alhtough I’m just pleased there is some dual carriage road!!

Cows are literally everywhere.  As are goats, people and dogs.  At this stage it’s quite manageable though, we’re not hating the roads yet, which is good as we have another 8,000km to get through here 🙂

Petrol is 1.30 a litre, we’re paying about $20 a night for a room, and 20c-$1 for a plate of street food, or $3 for a curry in a restaurant.  The food is really heavy though, lots of deep fried stuff and obviously curry, but also momo’s (dumplings) which is a nice healthy break.

tired now, over and out xoxo

PS we also saw some elephants, 6 actually!  I stopped to take a pic and they crossed the road to see us, quite scary!  (and also 2 rhinocerous  off in the distance)

these are the actual elephants we saw 🙂

it was a long way off, but still visible, pretty cool huh!

Samosa’s and tea, very British India!  HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM!!!