Thursday we’re woken up at 5.00am again. A strange hangover from the Toddy lingers as I watch a spectacular pink and purple sunrise, then we fettle our machine’s engines, top them up with oil, pack our packed lunches, fill up with drinking water and eat our breakfast. After breakfast it’s the morning meeting with dictated directions and yesterdays accident summaries. Someone had run over a piglet and ridden off, please be aware of livestock. Fair enough, but what happens if you hit a cow? Someone had hit a child, fortunately the child was unhurt, but the message to slow down in towns and villages is clear.
After breakfast some of us experience the joys of Indian toilets, the ones famous for being like a porcelain shower tray with two small raised sections, for your feet, either side of a hole in the ground. They are in reality nothing worse than those experienced, until relatively recently, in areas of France except that these ones have no locks on the door.
We set off following our explicit directions, until we come to the level crossing, which is shut. There are workmen indicating that we should turn around, yet offering no alternative route. We follow our noses through the city, which is littered with signs saying Toddy for sale, it seems to be a speciality of the area. This city makes London in rush hour seem relatively calm, it’s far more chaotic with vehicles of every shape and size jostling for position and, at times, driving on any side of the road offering tarmac space. After stopping for petrol, which makes the owner of the establishment very happy, not only do they manage to fill up fifty motorcycles in one hit but they also manage to double charge some people claiming that they’ve not paid when clearly they have.
After some confusion caused by our detour we find ourselves on the smelly state highway, NH47, heading for Coimbatore. Having a population of two million we have been sent on a route which by-passes Coimbatore, with strict instructions of don’t go to Coimbatore, you’ll hate it. In the meeting this morning, Jean-Mark had warned us not to overtake lorries on the inside, as this winds the drivers up and they have a tendency to run you off the road. We’re following one of these lorries on the state highway, so Mike decides to overtake it on the inside. Jean-Mark was right, the lorry forces him into dirt track at the side of the road only there’s another lorry parked there. He locks up the rear wheel of his mono braked bike and it slides to a halt, just inches before slamming into the back of the parked lorry. We both sigh with relief and decide to slow it down a bit.
The peculiar hangover from the Toddy is playing havoc on my intestines, and all who sampled it are complaining of feeling rough. Fortunately, about two hours after setting off, we come to a town with a large temple. Again people flock around us pleading to have their photo taken after asking our names and introducing themselves.
The temple is about thirty or forty feet tall, fifty feet wide and made up entirely of hand carved icons painted in bright colours. An old man tries to beg some change, then we see a young woman on a stall selling coconut. She holds the coconut in one hand and with the other swipes it with a machete just an inch from her fingers. Upon discretely checking how many fingers she has, it’s obvious that she’s never got it wrong. Some of the riders recommend the coconut juice to calm the hangover and the stomach, so I decide to buy one. As the old beggar comes over to ask us for money, I have my first really pleasant experience of the day, this non-alcoholic hair of the dog really cures my hangover.
We leave the town and catch up with Jules and Sophie from GS promotions, they’re eating and drinking soda at a road side stall when we join them. I try to eat my packed lunch, but it’s too disgusting. It’s a pancake in a plastic bag accompanied by another plastic bag containing a sloppy red liquid, which seems to pickle the vegetables it surrounds. I open the pancake, pour in the worrying looking vegetable goo and roll the pancake up, wondering whether the food or the dirt on my filthy hands will make me ill. I pick up the pancake and try to stuff it quickly into my mouth before it disintegrates due to the consistency of the inky red goo. This pancake thing, tastes nothing short of disgusting, but has become such a challenge that I feel I have to finish it. I do, however it seems to have permanently dyed large areas of my jeans red, also the red slop and dirt on my hands seem to have stained them a sort of browney purple.
The lunch is so disgusting that I give up the challenge of trying to eat it, putting the other two pancakes back in the bag along with the red sludge, the fibrous chapati, I get up to look for a bin. Upon standing up, it becomes apparent that I’ve been watched eating my lunch by several of the locals. I feel really embarrassed knowing that they’ve spied me, eating the way I imagine a ghoul would eat in a “Hammer House Of Horror” film. There’s no bin to be found amongst the litter strewn along the dusty patch at the side of the road, and the thought of the vaguest possibility of the red gunge escaping into my bag, contaminating my personal belongings proves too much. I leave my litter at the side of the road, ever so neatly, in the hope that a hungry local will appreciate it, but doubtful knowing the appalling contents of that lunch bag.
We roar off, and I feel ashamed of my littering, my red goo and dirt-stained hands, and my disgusting beast-like eating display. As the shame passes we ride past a tree by the side of the road, and hanging in that tree is a familiar sight. There, dangling in the shade, suspended from a branch is one of the groups lunch bags, and suspended from the branch above is a stringy chapati, I could recognise it anywhere. I feel a little less guilty, after chuckling to myself.
We’re having a really good ride as we start our ascent into the mountains, this is some of the most beautiful scenery, and the views are startling. We have been warned in this mornings meeting that when we descend the mountain, our brakes will probably become so hot that they’ll fade and stop working. If that happens, stop riding for about twenty minutes, to allow them to cool.
As we ascend the mountain the colours are so full and bright, everything is bursting with luscious life in spite of the heat. There are coconut trees and tea plantations, trees with small orange flowers, bushes with red flowers and bushes with large white flowers. We’re just enjoying some uphill sweeping curves when we spot a load of our bikes up ahead so we stop to see if we can help. It’s Piers, an entrepreneur from Cambridge who runs an animal sanctuary. He has hit a bus head-on as he took a corner on the wrong side of the road, then the person behind him crashed into him and fell off.
Neither one of them is particularly badly hurt, in spite of the fact that Piers had taken the ill-fated corner flat out and that the bus was coming round the corner at quite a rate. He’s certainly suffering from shock, his behaviour is of overly good humour, bordering on manic, he looks very white and shaky. We go on our way after offering some Sudo cream.
We keep a fairly slow pace, enjoying the scenery, and have only been going for about five minutes, when we come across another of our riders, having also just gone head-on into a bus, fortunately at low speed. He has only suffered some minor cuts and appreciates the Sudo cream.
We push on for a few more kilometres and come to a mountain village where there’s a crowd of Indians in bright orange clothes. The road is blocked by a priest who kneels down, sets light to something, runs to the side of the road, sets light to something else, and runs down the mountain road followed by villagers, one of whom bangs a drum and others banging small bunches of bells. The villager’s mood is happy and festive. We stop to photograph some of these events and look at the sort of miniature shrine of rocks by the side of the road in amazement. The village had been a hive of activity for two minutes of our stay and has now fallen silent.
We ride on for about half a kilometre and the view just has to be captured on film. By the road there’s a cow tethered, next to another little make-shift temple with charred cinders in it. This little village is in the middle of nowhere in Tamil Nadu, yet ironically, it has a satellite dish, as it seems all towns and villages do in Southern India.
We continue on further up the mountain and start the descent. There’s a very tourist oriented teashop so we stop to rest for a while. We manage to buy some film, which is fortunate having run out, drink cinnamon tea, and decide it’s going to get dark on us if we didn’t move it, so it’s time to up the pace.
We enjoy miles of sweeping curves and stunning views, then thinking we only have about twenty kilometres to go upon arriving in Ooty, a town which was colonised by the British years ago having named part of the town Charring Cross. We stop and get some fuel, go to the Savoy Hotel to buy some post cards, and rapidly leave after discovering that the destination is in fact another fifty kilometres further down the mountain, and sunset is not far away. We pick our way down the part of the mountain renowned for fading the brakes.
This part of the road proves to be both challenging and interesting, most of the corners require first gear and they descend sharply as they double-back on themselves, offering absurd cornering lines so as to avoid crater-like potholes. The straights provide little in the way of speed, rarely allowing anything more than second gear and thirty kph. We avoid the dreaded brake fade by using the gears and alternating the front and rear brakes, having taped Mike’s front brake lever on in anticipation of this event, which works fairly well.
When we get to the bottom of the mountain we arrive on a flat plane and the road degenerates into a dirt track. The sun is laying on a spectacular sunset, which commands sufficient respect from us that we sit down on the plane by our bikes, then listen to and watch the skies glory. Somehow it feels to me like I’m in Africa, even though I’ve never been there, I keep thinking that I’m in that continent and not in India. It feels like a zebra, gazelle, lion or panther could calmly wander past. Black trees are silhouetted against the fiery purple sky, and behind us, the black mountains heave their silhouettes into the warm evening setting sun.
The place we’re staying is called “Quiet Corner”, and is only about half a kilometre from where we’re sitting on the plane. We had been told in the morning meeting that drinking and smoking are prohibited on the premises of “Quiet Corner” as it’s an animal sanctuary run by deeply religious people. We’re allowed to smoke and drink provided that we go outside the gate of the residential part of the estate. Like last nights accommodation it’s a series of dormitories with mats on the floor for bedding.
After dinner, Mike and I decide to go for a walk on the plane, so as to have a beer and a smoke. After about a ten-minute walk we find an enclosure with a low wall around it, so we stop, sit on the wall and notice that inside the enclosure there are some graves. It feels calm and the plane is a peaceful place to be. Then we hear some dogs howling near by, so I howl back at them, more dogs join in and it seems as though there’s some kind of communication going on. Certainly every time I howl it provokes some of the local dogs into howling, much to our amusement for the next half an hour. Then we decide to make our way back and get lost for a further five minutes, which takes us past a group of huts where the howling dogs are. They snarl and bark at us however, fortunately, my howling humour fails me and we pass quietly through the din and find “Quiet Corner” again.
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