Finally...My Bike!

Bike Trip 1 014, originally uploaded by Benjamin Long.

Things have changed greatly since I last posted any news. I am now the proud owner of a reconditioned 1994 model pink Royal Enfield Motorcycle. It took me a month to finally muster up the courage to follow through with my original plan of buying a bike due to the treacherous driving conditions. To the casual onlooker on the street or even the passenger in the back of a bus, driving in India is the most chaotic, dangerous, and frustrating debacle ever witnessed and rightfully so. Might is right on the roads. Buses stop for no one; not even passengers for they must run alongside and somehow manage to climb aboard with their luggage and sometimes children. India has the fastest growing middle class in the world and that means people are starting to buy more cars. Getting a license can’t be that difficult because most people really can’t drive worth a damn. More cars on the mostly the same infrastructure build by the British Raj with lots of bad drivers spells congestion and accidents. Throw into the mix the mopeds carrying three to five people, numerous other motorcycles with delusions of ESPN XGames grandeur, donkeys, camels, cows all pulling carts of some sort, nomadic cows wandering the streets as if it is their right (it is in India), monkeys waiting eagerly on the side of the roads awaiting the right moment to dart across the road, goat herders guiding their flocks on the curb, landslides, more cows and who know what else…maybe an Elephant!

You are probably thinking who in their right mind would even attempt to drive a motorcycle, much a less a pink one under such conditions. I talked myself out of it until I took my first trip to the north with friends I met from Delhi. It was the weekend of Holi, the festival of color that was meant to welcome the spring and win the blessings of Gods for good harvests and fertility of the land but has turned into an excuse to drink Bhang (a drink that has opium in it), cover unsuspecting tourists with colored ink, and dance the night away very intoxicated. During this weekend, I decided to leave Delhi and head north into the mountains. We took two different hikes at the base of the Greater Himalayan range; one to Tungnath Temple ( a holy Hindu temple) and the other to a lake above a small village called Sari. It was a crazy experience to be surrounded with Bhang silly Indians dancing around fires, dogs with steel collars to at least give them a chance if and when they attacked by leopards, six and seven thousand meter peaks dotting the horizon and small villages scattered across the Himalayan foothills with intricate terrace farming networks carved out of the hillsides. After the hike, I stayed behind in Rishikesh (the Yoga capital of the world and also the place where the Beatles visited to study meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi). After a couple days of watching old men take heaps of cow manure and turn them into dried out disks of manure, people sharing the food and bottled water with random cows on the street and people even giving cows massages on the street, I decided it was time to go back to Delhi to get a bike so I can visit more small towns in the mountains. A bike would offer me the freedom to see all of the small towns and not just the tourist hot spots. I did take a swim in the Ganga (Ganges) while I was in Rishikesh. It was cold and refreshing.

Once back in Delhi, I contacted a bike shop called Bullet Wallas (wallas means ‘guy’. So a bricklayer will be a brick walla for instance). After wandering the streets of Pahar Ganj, a very crowded and dirty neighborhood of Delhi, I finally found the bike shop. To my surprise it was run by a American guy from New Mexico named Balu. That isn’t his real name but since he was a big bear of a guy in India and someone made the Kipling connection and called him Balu. This is where the story gets really bizarre. I tell him I am from WV and he is taken aback and says he has been deer hunting in White Sulphur Springs, basically right next to my home in Lewisburg. Who would have thought that in the middle of India I would meet an American biker that has been hunting in my home county in WV. It is a small world!

I tell Balu I want a bike to head to the mountains. He was also shocked by the amazing coincidence and is more than willing to help me out. We go to the shop to find a newly built Enfield bike that just so happened to be Petal Rose Pink with a tan leather seat. “I’ll take it” were the first words to come out of my mouth. I ordered stickers to be put on the bike that say, “Bullet Wallas West Virginia” with two orange dueling banjos in the center (that was Balu’s idea). While my bike was being finished, I met four English guys that had the same idea as me, to buy a bike and head north. We decided it would be safer and more fun if we all hit the road together.

Buying a bike and driving around India sounds like a great idea but here is the catch, I have never actually driven a motorcycle. I left that part of the story out when I was purchasing my bike from Balu. I simply said that I had limited experience on a bike. That was the understatement of the trip! About the third day when I was hanging around the shop waiting for all of the bikes to be ready, Balu threw me the keys to my bike and told me to go fill her up with petrol. It was about 4PM, right in the middle of rush hour in Delhi, and I had never ridden a motorcycle. I figured I had to learn somehow and I took off. I made it about 100 meters before I stalled out and couldn’t get it restarted. A crowd soon gathered to laugh at the foreigner that couldn’t get his pink Enfield to start. One man out of about a hundred finally offered to start the bike for me. I was off again and this time only made it 20 meters. The crowd followed laughing and jeering at my inability to drive. I finally made it out of the alleys and side streets and onto the main street where I again stalled out in the middle of bumper to bumper traffic five rows deep. After another crowd formed to heckle the foreigner, I realized I was out of gas. After pushing the bike for thirty minutes, filling up with petrol, stalling out about nine more times, I finally managed to get it back to the shop in one piece. Luckily!

My second ride wasn’t any better but much more comical. Balu took all five of us to a deserted park to practice before he sent us out on the open rode. I finally got the hang of the gears and was doing quite well. We were all excited, trying tricks, and weaving in and out of trees with ease but then it came, a thunderstorm. Out of nowhere, a torrential rain moved in over us. Balu, the only man that knew the way home, took off and yelled, “every man for himself.’ We ended up stuck hiding underneath an archway for at least an hour with dozens of homeless people staring at us. A hell of a day!

I am now in Manali, a hill station about 500km north of Delhi. (Hill stations are towns in the mountains that offer modern amenities such as internet, restaurants, and better hotels). The ride to Manali was an eventful one with many breakdowns, wrecks, monkeys, cows, goats, snow-capped mountains, and much more. It was a great ride and we all made it here in one piece. It was definitely a group effort. The four English lads I am traveling with are good company and we hit it off immediately. I plan to visit some more goshalas (homeless cow shelters) around Manali. It is more for comic value than anything else. I have been in email contact with one Goshala that signs off every email with ‘yours in service of Lord Krishna and His cows.’ I am not joking. I can talk forever about my visits with the goshalas but that warrants another post.

I have decided to name my pink stallion ‘Chibuku Gopa’ which means ‘Chibuku the Cow herder.’ Chibuku is the name of a local African alcoholic brew that I ran across in Malawi. The drink is kind of like mixing sour milk, bread dough and alcohol together and drinking it. Wretched! But, the Malawians had a very catchy song and dance to go along with the drink that I loved and that is where Chibuku gets her name.