Hello friends,
I hope your weekend was a good one. I spent quite a lot of mine thinking about the places we discover when we’re en route to somewhere else. As ever, I have a lot to say on the matter.
The first bike tour of my adult life was in the summer of 2007. I had been working in Delhi for six months (as a financial editor – and the only useful thing I learned during that time was that the corporate life was not for me), and taken almost no exercise since I left the UK. The bike I optimistically bought to cycle to work on was stolen within days, which left me with the only options of walking round Gurgaon’s malls, and jumping at every opportunity to leave the city. Sometimes I would book a train ticket to somewhere like Jaipur, or a flight to Calcutta or Bangalore (which is what everyone still called them back then). Occasionally I would club together with some colleagues and hire a driver, who would pick us up from work and convey us overnight to a hill station like Kasauli or Nainital, where we would briefly escape the searing heat of the plains, and I could swim in rivers and hike up hills.
All I wanted to do was ride my bike. I remember, as we drove up the winding mountain road to get to Manali, thinking what fun it would have been to cycle, and telling a no-doubt-bored colleague about all the preparations my audax friends were making to ride Paris-Brest-Paris a couple of months thence. (Perhaps, I thought, one day in the future I might ride it myself. I still haven’t.) I had only been a cyclist for nine months or so when I left for Delhi, but it already felt like an inextricable part of my being, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the rides I would do when I got home – and wishing I had found myself in South Asia in different circumstances, because if you discounted the terrible traffic around Delhi, there would surely be some very good cycling here. I spent a week down in Coorg, as the monsoon was breaking, and thought constantly about good it would be to ride along these quiet, misty roads, as they undulated gently through forests and coffee plantations. During my first week in my job, a Dutch colleague, who was just about about to leave and getting rid of all his stuff, passed on a book called Full Tilt, which I read on my sunny balcony, eating oranges from the fruit stall on the corner, sipping endless cups of tea, and wishing I could be like Dervla Murphy. And as I queued outside the Pakistan Embassy, waiting for a visa that would allow me to spend a week with friends in Lahore, I happened to spot a European man locking up a bright red Cannondale across the street. I rushed over to speak to him, and listened enviously as he told me of his ride across Asia, and his plans to cycle across the border to Lahore. I was going by plane – there was still a train between Delhi and Lahore at that point, but it had been bombed a month or so previously, which had put me off a bit.
So, as we can see, many of the seeds of my grand adventures to come were already planted by this point, and the few years I spent couriering would very effectively germinate them (mainly by helping me develop the courage I would need to realise these ambitions). But the most immediate effects of all this were that I arrived back in the UK absolutely itching to get back on my bike, and with a vague sense that I now knew India better than the country I had grown up in, and ought to put this right.
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