Ah…finally the day’s here. The last day is spent in wrapping up stuff at work, which, despite the best planning and delegation, seems to always be like trying to pack an overstuffed suitcase. You want to get it over with and get on with the journey, but annoyingly and embarrassingly, there’s always a towel or a pair of undies sticking out from somewhere or the slippers that you plain forgot to pack.
So, the other two fellow riders are here too. Darius, from work who’s come in from Jaipur. He will be riding his spanking new 350cc Enfield Electra. And Nitin, old buddy from XLRI on his 350 cc T’bird, aka ‘The Babe’. I have my trusty eleven and a half year old ‘Dhanno’, who has recently been converted from an Enfield 350 to a 500 cc by reboring the engine, replacing the piston & cylinder kit, a new head and a new crank. I still am a couple of hundred kilometers short of the targeted 2000 km run-in.
Nitin, the technophile and knower of things unknown to most, like the wise magi, comes bearing strange gifts…or well, props for the ride at least. For instance, a small GPS unit connected via Bluetooth to his cell phone loaded with the Google maps application. His logic, “even if we get stranded somewhere and freeze our asses off…we will know exactly where.”
There’s a mobile phone charger that gets connected to the bike battery and an emergency mobile phone charger that is a manually wound up wheel. Developed by IIT Mumbai engineers. Piece of art. We also take time to admire the t-shirts that we have gotten made for this trip. Yup, we went the whole hog.
Considering we are likely to get rain on the way, everything has to be stuffed into plastic bags and then into the bags that we will be carrying. This takes a while. This is by no means the final packing and the realization hits that every time we stop for the night, all this crap will have to be unpacked and repacked. Anyway, we’re excited, but also tired and it’s going to be a long day. The first of many. So we sleep.
Nitin kept insisting the night before, that we have to be out by 5 am. I said, ‘thoda easy’ but he was firm, saying that he’d kick my ass. I was kinda looking forward to the said ass-kicking so deliberately made no effort to get up early. However by 6 am I decided it was enough, and so I was the one to wake up Darius and Nitin with chai. Little did we know that pretty much every day, we would be starting late.
Nitin kept insisting the night before, that we have to be out by 5 am. I said, ‘thoda easy’ but he was firm, saying that he’d kick my ass. I was kinda looking forward to the said ass-kicking so deliberately made no effort to get up early. However by 6 am I decided it was enough, and so I was the one to wake up Darius and Nitin with chai. Little did we know that pretty much every day, we would be starting late.
We took off by 8:30 am after various trials of loading half of Bangladesh’s GDP onto our bikes. Nitin and I were using cramsters plus other bags strapped on, but Darius had Ladakh carriers…a large metallic frame with metallic boxes. Practical, but very heavy. His bike’s behind looked like that of a Buick. In case you’re not much into automobiles, let me use a Bollywood example. Say, a rear shot of Asha Parekh with a veena and a tanpura slung over her shoulders like guitars…poetry in motion, yes, but not just a few lines, the entire omnifrikkin’bus.
Well, not much excitement the first day except that it was freakishly hot, so had to stop every hour or so to cool off and drink water. Surprise surprise…the Royal Enfield Himalayan Odyssey guys who should have left at 5 am also, were still pottering around on the GT road. Riders from all over the country, especially Maharashtra and the south. Dressed in heavy biking gear (riding jackets, elbow/knee guards, boots…the friggin’ works) in that heat. These guys seemed serious. Plus they are accompanied by a team of mechanics and a vehicle carrying their stuff and spares.
So, once again, you wonder if you’re prepared enough…and then you remember the blog of the 54 year old man who rode solo from Pune to Leh and back…or that maverick Gaurav Jani who even made a friggin’ documentary riding alone all over Ladakh (Riding Solo to the Top of the World) as a one man film crew. We’d be ok.
It was nice to once again be on the road…chugging along, feeling the wanderlust creep back. Nitin and I had not done any serious riding for 4 years. Dunno why that happened, whether we got too busy or lazy, or because we imagined our riding days were over. However, this part of the ride in 40 degree plus heat is still just commute. Wetting your t-shirt and club soda face washes will only help so much. So, by 3:30 pm after nearly getting a heat stroke, we reached my parents’ house in Chandigarh, thankful to be indoors.
Rested for a bit and in the evening went out to get together a puncture kit. This involved going to a blacksmith and getting tyre irons fashioned. Once that is done, we are mostly in splits for the next twenty minutes because they look like the ‘soorang banane ka auzaar’ from ‘Sholay’ that Asrani, acting as the Jailor, discovers. And that’s what they are called for the rest of the trip.
The next day, we were to head out to Manali. Finally, the mountains. It was nice to know we had a fortnight of this ahead of us. The longest bike trip ever in our lives till now, had just begun. A fair bit of levity, anticipation and some trepidation about what the Himalayas had in store for us.
This was big boy territory.
