The 257 km that pour out of Munnar are growing in a perpetual blanket of lush jungle and bathed in the unique light of valleys. Banana plantations fringe the roadsides and we ride through pockets of cool air and on past rushing falls. The staggering beauty of the ride feels dangerous in itself as I catch myself darting my eyes to the lands offerings of the endless scenic view, rubernecking to take in the panoramic vistas, I remind myself to surrender my attention to the few feet stretching ahead of me, or stop for some pictures. The balance of the bike is different riding with a pillion, but I feel competent enough with the extra carriage and passenger, and the dispersion feels even so I hardly notice it above 30 clicks an hour, which is about my average speed in these higher altitude climes, where straight lines are rare in the roads.
I pulled over near a chocolate tree to stretch my legs, and take a few sips of coffee from my flask, then realized that the cacao plantation was more prolific than a single tree. A simply dressed man walking at a good pace down the tarmack and who spoke not a word of english made a friendly glance, and I asked him to take a picture. He used my friends phone and took off set, distant pictures with his finger in front of the lens, then I realized he had probably never held a phone before. I laughed later about it, but we did get one good one together. Not much happened to us on the remaining trek from the mountains to the sea. I felt dizzy in the last 70km, and took shade under a tree while I drank half a litre of water and street tea with lots of jaggery. I asked my friend to talk with me, the six hour ride was long enough where I tended to lost the uprightness in my spine, hold my breath and become sleepy by the lack of air getting to my brain. Riding with someone else had the advantage of bringing great draughts of air into my lungs and energizing me, thus I felt more alert. Solo, I would sing mantras or country songs, to give the same effect, and it worked handsomely.
I liked the coast for the simple reasons that they connected me with every other peace of shoreline I had stood, from the black beaches of Iceland to the pacific sands of Mexico, and the Mediterranean of Africa. They were liminal places, when the sea life seemed to literally walk out of the water and onto land. We tended to mimic this evolutionary process when we swam, as we played in one world and grounded ourselves in the other.
The seafood was abundant here, and by night the men were arranging their catch on steel tables layed out on ice; red snapper, giant prawns, crabs and swordfish, all waiting in limbo for whom of the many seaside joints would received an order of fresh fish or crustacean. I watched from a terrace as the swordfish was filleted over the course of an hour and collected by different hands and brought back to kitchens of restaurants that fringed the Varkala cliff We found a guesthouse managed by a man named Ram, which functioned as a hope for the hungry, sick and homeless in the three surrounding villages, and those destitute souls who lounged on train station decks, temple stairs, and bus stops. The money we paid for our bunks all went to cooking meals for these less fortunate. The layout of the place was all very sensible and inviting, with wrap around balconies, terraces, and no more than six beds to a room, compared to the eight or ten in conventional hostels.
On my second day in this sun baked village, I met a small man sitting on the walkway leading to the beach. He had a wooden box with a parrot inside. The lid of the box flipped up showed a picture of christ. Another compartment in the box held a green mango, which I assume was for the bird. For 50 rupees I could have my future read. Now I was starting to surrender a little more of my conceptions about magic and miracles and tried to let India impress upon me a little more, so I thought the sum was not a major loss, even if it was a scam, and I flipped the man the bill and squatted down to receive the saga of my oncoming life. He opened the hatch to the eager friend inside and out hopped the parrot. It walked up to a deck of cards of the same height, and started to peel off card by card with its beak, removing nine or ten cards before settling on one, which it carried over to his masters hand and promptly went back into the box. Good trick I thought, now I’ll hear all about where I’m headed. The dark wrinkled man with what looked like a dish towel wrapped on his head pinched the card which was actually an envelope holding a folded image inside. The image seemed to be a devotional picture pasted on to the back of a soap wrapper. Then I recognized the image of Shiva and Shakti in brilliant colors. It was an image of their wedding scene, with Hanuman, Ganesha and the other cast of the Hindu pantheon in attendance leaning into them as if giving their holy support. The man trifled on in an unknown tongue, maybe Marathi about the significance of the image, and a translator who accompanied him did his best to give me the just. He knew about my marriage, he knew about the problems, he later intuited the motorcycle accident I had south of Mumbai, and he knew I worshiped Lord Shiva. He told me to wear my Rudraksha beads, for Shiva would protect you. Why I didn’t have them on that day, and how he knew I had a set in the first place was a slight intriguing. That he knew about the union, and the motorbike incident had me pondering my stance when it came to miracles. If miracles were those events that bely our common understandings and bend the rules of our reality paradigm, then this may have been a small one.
He open a small box that emerged out of the larger one and pointed at a roll of what seemed like gold foil. I thought it was a beedy cigarette, but from the swirling motion he made above his head, I could defer that it was not for smoking, and he wanted me to have it. A man standing behind a cashew table beside us tried as well to explain its significance, and the translator fermented down the meanings in words I could comprehend. I was to take the roll, which was actually some kind of metal, and revolve it thrice around my head in the way in which the sun turns, then toss it into the ocean. I asked if this was literally for wrapping around my head and questioned if the small roll would even go once around my skull. But the roll was not to be opened, only spun around and then left as flotsam in the waves, and I was to do this just now. This would be the assurance to clear my karmic defects, and would favor another marriage in the future. I agreed to the rather odd ritual, and laid my hand bare to receive the gold colored roll. 400 rupees! He beckoned. So this is how he makes his income I thought, but truth be said I did not have this sum, and would not pay it for such a trivial piece of tin. His sense of urgency was annoying but also slightly important. I did feel like there was a tinge of magic to be played with, so I offered a low ball sum of 120, to which he eventually accepted. I had not a rupee more to give on my person, and he handed me this thing. I took it down to the sea, and rolled up my pant legs then walked into the waves. Much weirder things have been offered up on the shores of India, someplace on the coast of Mumbai lies hundreds of Ganesha statues at the bottom of its waters. This one gesture seemed a trifle compared to this, but all the same I treated it with utmost diligence. I meditated on the implications of what had just happened, envisioned the image of shiva and shakti again in their union, and then the face of my wife, offering a few silent thoughts and an absent mantra while spinning the gold paper above me with eyes closed, then releasing it, like a bottle thrown from a stranded boat holding a message. I turned around, and saw a temple on the sandbanks that I had not seen before and it fixed my eyes. I did feel different, lighter, freer even. The translator, who had followed me to the beach to watch that I actually did it, then approached me again, “Your karma is now cleared”. I’m not sure I grock what that actually meant, but the rest of the day I experienced a buoyancy and bliss that seemed easily accessible whenever I wanted it.
My last night on Varkala was a full moon, so I recognized this third lunation of my journey and joined a motley band of beach hippies, gypies and snowbirds in a circle gathering where we sung rainbow songs until the sun said goodnight, and the constellations revealed themselves over the Asian night sky. I met a woman from America with a sweet voice and a penchant for motorcycles. She rode a Harley at home and was skilled in reiki energy therapy. We compared dreams, and lofty idealisms of how our life would evolve. She was the biker queen who healed people as she moved around the world. I was the Viking farmer, running a yoga ashram in the forests of Canada. My route would take me away from the Arabian sea for the second time in this journey come morning, and also for the second time of this trip I experienced a slight dread of the entourage. Once when launching out of Mumbai for the first time, and now fleeing from this beautiful beachside village where not much happened, and that was alright.
The next four days were a blur of riding, retiring early in hostel bunks, motorcycle maintenance and recovering from the vibrations of the bike shaking every bone in my body and loading all the tension into my joints. In Fort Kochi, I stayed one night by the quay at a place called Tom & Jerrys. The bike was making terrible grating sounds that sounded as if a pound of gravel was in the motor. One of the hosts at the hostel guided me around in a wild goosechase to find a garage that was open on Sundays, with no luck. In the end I found a two wheeler parts and service shop that sold a liter of high performance oil for
enduro bikes and haggled a deal for 260 rupees. It turns out my oil was depleted entirely, which would explain why the bike was running so hot. In the evening I walked down cafe streets that could have been Paris or Copenhagen, and watched the fishermen toss their nets into the canal, dubious of whether their catch would be much cleaner than the water. Massive Chinese fishing nets hung over the lapping waters, suspended on logs which pivoted on long wooden decks. An old man hunched on the curb carved hair combs resembling fish out of cattle horns. I saw a beautiful tree that resembled a cobra, and smelt like tulips, which I found out was sacred to Shiva, so I put one in my windshield. The morning ride began with a ferry.A ride on, ride off deal that led to nearly half an hour of blissful coast riding with the cooler temperatures of morning filtering through my jacket.
The roads to Wayanad felt like one unending town, my only reprieve came as I crossed the Bharathappuzha river and left the bike alone for an hour to swim, eat lunch, and take pictures. The last 20km finally left behind the madness and mayhem of the city life and rose into the Wayanad hills, where the silence permeated and I moved into the domain of Kerala’s megafauna. The hostel felt like a luxury mansion and in fact it was built on site of the Fathima farms estate. A bonfire was lit at night, and a delicious but simple buffet was served out of large tiffins. I decided to take a short foray out from the hostel on my rest day, and scaled up a black slope of granite that had once cascaded with waterfalls, but now was a measly trickle. Through the bushes I heard a kind of horn bellowing but could not place its location, until a massive gaur leapt at full tilt and crashed through the jungle surrounding the black falls, which instantly sent my heart racing. Barking deer were chuffing in all directions, and a kingfisher shot past me like a bullet. The thrill of being so close to wildlife and danger gave me great pleasure, but I opted to lend some space to whatever beasts may be around and return to the estate. The sky was darkening and this was tiger country, and I didn’t intend to become dinner.
The Brahmagiri hills in Coorg were lingering with the smell of fresh roasted coffee, and I passed the night in a heritage house near the source of the Kaveri river. The home had a prayer room and a kitchen garden. A stream of memorable scenes arrested the briefest but sincerest of attentions from me, as I whisked past on the motorcycle as time stretched itself over the long haul; women crouching with their broomsticks sweeping the streets, one lane villages of rust colored in states of ruin, or in process of being built, an intensely flowering purple tree that looked akin to a lilac bush, children running with sticks pushing a tyre down the road as if a scene from a movie, hundreds of goats in herds being corralled down the freeway, so many looks catching mine, eyes that have not stared into those of a foreigner. There were overloaded trucks full of tar, gravel, industrial equipment and monolithic amounts of hay, and 200cc motorbikes carrying enormous loads ranging from entire families, to construction materials, to the makeups of a whole shop front, tables included. I had seen everything and everything being carried on two wheelers, after saddlebags and cargo, it seemed there was no limit to what could be transported; pails of milk, sacks of burlap, chaffs of wheat, cotton and corn, hundreds of coconuts tied with ropes onto every available hitching point, instruments, a skateboard, ice cream coolers, even a goat.
Lunch time was always an interesting occasion to meet the locals. En route to Hampi, I stopped for idly’s and chutney, as several men came in from the road for luch, including one road cop, as we maintained the basest of communication with each other. I noticed the chai glasses were getting smaller as I moved north, and wondered if this had to do less milking cattle towards the interior, or a rationing of tea spices, or both. The landscapes approaching Hampi were some of the most interesting in India so far from misty jungle hills where I actually shivered for the first time on this trip, to dry arid boulder fields resembling the badlands of California. Over these four separate days of the trip I tacked on another 2000km to the odometer with another 1000km until I reached Maharastra and a small coal village called Chandrapur where a friend lived, whom I met earlier in Goa and had invited me to stay with her. Hyderabad was still in my path and I reckoned I would stay one night there before reaching the ashram, then a retreat into hermitage would be just what my soul craved.
the motorcycle mantras 