Transmission 20 – The Art of Micro-trips

I’ve burned maybe three liters of fuel in the last two months, and that’s alarming for me. I’ve had to rediscover and re-imagine creative ways to stay in the saddle during the cyclic nature of the lockdown while the nation is on hiatus. When all consumerist business is stripped down to their undergarments, and only basic amenities and provisions remain, a unique feeling of decade shifting emerges. Take away the signs and advertisements, the parked cars and the western fashions on the street, and you are essentially living in a pioneer marketplace, where the townies all know each other, and most foreigners have gone home or have become ‘locals’. Life in India has progressively become more like what I imagine it may be in the 70’s, a slowed down, cleaner, and more tranquilized version of a world population hub.

Like any well tuned animal, I have adapted to the successive extensions of lockdown, and ‘found my spots’ to secure provisions, and my sparse material needs of the modern world, while continuing to strive in other arenas of my life. I get my bread at the Germany Bakery, my barber of choice still shaves my beard and skull with his red straight razor, there’s the organic post to rely on for high caliber food, and one or two produce trolleys that have the freshest farm selections. It is ironic to think of collecting a ‘stock’ of calories, resources, or gear while I had no intentions to get too comfortable here, but that is quite closely approximated to what I have done. Not that I wouldn’t trade it all for the next flight home that won’t completely pilfer my bank account. I’m secretly dreaming of a helicopter or bush plane to land in the jungle and carry me back over the atlantic, back to the farm fields and boreal forests of the best country there is. It could happen maybe in the 50’s if I knew a pilot and there were less technology scanning the air space, sigh…

Alas, I have learned the intimate and exciting art of the micro-adventure, and have made a few forays out from ‘home base’ which I affectionately have started referring to as ‘the ranch’. I rallied with a few friends from Israel, Turkey, and Boston and vied to make an attempt to cross the Ram Jula bridge, to see if we could get into the Rajaji forest, for a jungle cruise, and a little fresh air in our lungs. The forest that flanks the edges and swathe the hillsides of Rishikesh are filled with wild megafauna, every colored birds, and deer that traipse through the trees with their ears perked for danger, not to mention the cliff views, and green therapy. So we woke early and stopped for the obligatory caffeine hit at the brewhouse, at this point the only one in town with the magic beans still filling our mugs, then bought lunch and cakes for some struggling children, the same ones from the last post.

Thereafter puffing our motors out of Tapovan along the shady highway before doubling back on a lower road to the suspension bridge. Zohar rode the bullet with his Turkish delight, and Jamal from Mass. took back seat on the Himalayan. They dismounted as we rode across the narrow hanging structure, fording the Ganges river from sixty feet up. An entire family of cows checked our progress but we went around them. An officer in a sand colored uniform sparked at me, but I had a rule, one time hollered, and I drove on, twice beckoned, and I slowed down to check my mirrors lest I may be the one in such high demand, three times ushered, and I stopped and turned around. This may sound a little indecent, but you would be surprised how effective it is. I can’t approach the amount of times I have been cajoled by a normal civilian or even a policeman, only to want a bribe or ask some ridiculous questions of me. Often when I look back in the glass, he has already lost attention with me and turned back to his guard, his phone, or the next two wheeler coming ’round the mountain, and I am free to go. In this case, I got one call, and kept moving. There was nothing illegal about what I was doing, and he wasn’t on a bike or with a gun, so there was no risk of a chase, or bullet. We were hot targets to them, but that was part of the game.

We waited for our comrades to join us, and both cleared the pass without much hang ups. For the lady, it was easier to explain her passage across the bridge, you simply say your getting medicine for menstrual pains, and the cops never bat an eyelash or raise defenses. We regrouped after a little awkward encounter with another cop taking photos on his smart phone, as we deftly avoided them, and rolled out towards the giant blue Shiva statue sitting at the river. I should mention that we were traveling in a green zone, wearing helmets with shields, and were socially distancing ourselves by getting away from the urban core. I just thought it ironic in a pandemic that people were encourage to stay indoors in their own bubbles, cut off from the access to nature, sunlight, fresh air, open spaces, animals and the healing spaces of rivers or beaches. I think wearing a mask over and over again did more to make you sick by collecting bacteria, dead skin, and saliva in the vicinity of your mouth, and to see so many hundreds of people decked out in gauntlet gloves, plastic ponchos, masks and even head coverings seem so clinical and deadening. For me, it made complete sense to colonize myself with more bacteria so as to not be overwhelmed by one particular strain that went rampant in the ecology. I pet all the dogs and cows, and still ate with my hands. I ramped up my intake of fermented foods like sour milk, miso, yogurt, and kombucha, and took every opportunity to collect the solar vitamins from being out on the sand, and getting as much natural light as possible. That said, I know I’m not indestructible which was yet another reason for the small micro-trips away from our hotel. While I remained healthy and vigorous in my life, I wanted to use all my life force towards having the most peak experiences possible, for when I could not have them. If a virus like corona, a bacteria from lyme ticks, or a disease like cancer were to infect my body some day, I wanted to feel that I had done everything I could to become resilient, and vital, and maybe strong enough to fight it off, to win those small battles of natural selection.

Back on the bikes we cruised past the Beatles ashram and onto the jungle tarmac, and spent the next half hour reveling in the freedom of a full tank. The four of us made good company, and I could easily see myself carrying on a road trip with them in the future. I heard some feral chickens, and we traded stories like currency on a cliff side over looking the ganges valley. On the return trip we found a hollowed out combi-van resembling the early VW westphalia models. It was wrapped around a tree, completely toast. The natural silence had the opposite effect of deafness, every minute ambient sound made itself heard ever subtly through a labyrinth of trees. Back over the bridge, we went to visit a young couple who were actually living in the same style van, camped out by the river, my style of life I thought. An Israeli brother and his Australian girlfriend who had traveled over 500 km from the border of Pakistan in Rajasthan to get here before lock down once the rumors of border closings began to surface. They told me their story in lucid detail, outrunning the police at border checks, driving without stopping for food, and continuing into the night, from the Thar desert to the Himalayas, all in a day’s work. They were young and energetic, and matched our crew affably well. The girl was cute, probably my age, and I had to recall to myself when I had seen one who wasn’t. She spoke a southern drawl, in a way that captured your attention no matter what she said. More stories traded, and tunes buffering from the van. I took my friends down to a cave in the river I had found before while cold bathing. I felt like a million bucks that day. We did not miss on much.

Other occasions paved the way for some time off the bike, and back on the trail, my other lover. Like an animal venturing away from home base to redefine more and more of it’s territory. I enjoined to myself the pleasure of finding somewhere completely unawares, without tracker maps, or any sense of time. To the north I found cascades of mountain spring water, unpolluted green space and hikers havens, where held sentinel with tremendous banyan and palm trees, and on one occasion climbed to the mesa of the mountain on the eve of a thunderstorm while silver furred primates and bedecked peacocks wailed, and bellowed through the forest of the incoming tumult, raising a ruckus and sending echoes of their cries that blended with the thunder rolling through the valley. At the cascades I was joined by a Turkish honey and another from Texas that was as much banshee as woman. Jamal came with me, we had been regulars to these particular waterfalls, and they felt like secret lodgings when the noose of the town started to feel tight.

 

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I returned here once more with a farm family to chop a particular kind of wood that they testified gave the best flavor to wood fired chapattis. I didn’t care much for the chapattis but swinging an axe, and cutting deadwood was a particularly good emotional release. One morning I witnessed a flurry of activity on a construction site, deeply impressed by the synchronicity and calibrated operation of the young muscled Indians who worked in 40c heat to pour a new concrete ground floor beside the hostel. Three of them with buckets of sand on their heads moved cyclically between the grit pile and the mixer, while another heaved a mattock to fill the buckets and raise onto their carefully coiled turbans that would support the burdens on top the skull. Three others wheeled metal barrows over narrow plankboards overlapping each other, spanning a latticework of rebar. One man spun the drum of the cement mixer back and forth to load and unload the mortar, while another spread the mixture evenly and yet another used a long jackhammer style tool that seemed to eliminate air pockets and blend everything together. It was a far superior and more entertaining version of the construction sites in Canada, where two guys worked and six stood by smoking. Just another aspect of urban India where there is more than meets the eye.

We entertained a lot of visitors at the hostel; two ladies from south america came frequently for coffee hour. One of them took me off guard when she told me she was reading about the Hyperborean pagans of the northern society. Another young couple hailing from Sweden and Lithuania came for a Hindu fire ceremony, and something about them seemed familiar. I had seen them carrying bundles of chopped feed and dishing it out to the street cows, now I had a bit more of their story. In the process I broke down some of the concrete understanding of other cultures, and social situations of those hailing from their countries. I forged some pretty good relations with an inner circle of individuals, including the young Turk with the curly hair. It’s exquisite and interesting how routine can be wrapped around a single person, even with surefire routines and rituals built into ones existence. The better part of many afternoons were spent trying to harness a whole new set of lovely emotions inspired by this beautiful stranger. Lying half naked in my room watching animal documentaries, sweating in the noonday sun of forays out of doors, figuring out how being a hopeless romantic can be vivifying when it comes to non-platonic courtship rituals, or else whiling the idle hours of the evening listening to indie Turkish singer songwriters. But life in the hostel was getting a bit strained, and some internal conflicts arose between the travelers and the staff. The mayhem was about to come loose from the lion’s mouth.

A couple incidents of theft, including some sentimental things went missing from me, triggered a backlash from our twenty-something commune of travelers. My compadre from Venezuela had 40,000 rupees hijacked from his duffel bag, while some handmade gifts vanished from doormats. After much humming and hawing at what we should do, a democratic talking circle was established, and was to include the staff of the hostel. We had some ideas what was going on but we had no access to the cameras, which were on a server locked behind bars in a bedroom beside the kitchen that we had no key for. Property was being taken, and a culture of suspicion was allowed to sprout between those in charge, and those at large, so we put the pressure on the staff to gain access to the cctv archives. For the first time in my life, I found myself actually relying on these annoying contrivances that have eyes in every corner. It is not something I firmly enjoyed carrying out, but felt morally responsible to trigger the events that led to its remediation.

The days passed and no progress was being made, promises were made and broken, and still no key was supplied to open the door. One of the middle eastern travelers took a brick to the lock and bashed it pretty good but the jaws stayed shut, only the wooden door was harmed. There was a lot of commotion and back and forth between the managerial staff and us. I tried to survey the situation with some degree of severity and maturity, while remaining just aloof from the turmoil and mayhem of bitterness that oozed out of it. I knew it would just make a global lockdown situation feel more brazen and insecure if I got caught in the snares of spite and domestic stressors. There is a time to be savage, and there is a time to be gentleman, and I assumed the position of the latter, at least this time. Unexpectedly one evening sitting around drinking India’s favorite, the younger of the staff took a hefty hammer to the lock and busted it open. He was the least likely in my mind to do it, and finally we had access. An ironic evening followed, as we huddled around two side by side laptops with snacks and coffee, watching archival streams of low contrast video from the past days. We all glued our eyes on the screen as we watched everyone migrate from room to room, upstairs and down, and egging on our suspicious behaviors. It felt a little voyeuristic and edgy to be seeing the common activity of everyone in the hostel, but we made light fun of it. I found my culprit, and confronted him myself, but we could not weed out the burglar of the money.

Some of our band was brought into the local police station for questioning, four cops to four travelers. Compromises were made, and a peace assembly subsumed the turmoil of the initial conflict. Some uncouth and uncalled for remarks were made online on behalf of one of the partners of the hostel who stonewalled any responsibility for the circumstances created and black-washed the travelers in question by publicly shaming their identity and reputation in what to me was an ugly and cowardly display of egotism. This fake news was probably the tipper for our community, and over yet another round table meeting, this time without the staff, we voted for an exodus to a new hotel where we could be more safe. We would scout tomorrow. A few of us looked within Tapovan, and turned up some princely results. Private rooms with king size beds, full size kitchens and easier on the budget. Not that I needed luxury, or was starving for money, but I had a new romantic attention, and some privacy and a bed for a king sounded like maybe my karmic returns were in good favor these days, and at three hundred rupees, I wasn’t about to turn down the deal. We haggled a deal for a new hotel, which remained closed during lock down until they were confronted with the lucrative opportunity of renting out the entire building. We were essentially our own managers, bookkeepers and custodians, and for once I had to choose which side of the bed I wanted to sleep on.

Turns out that having passion in spades can also be a detractor of attention from certain kinds of women, and sometimes love is actually just lust with their best dress on. I won a draw, at least sort of, I received a key with a placard of a number that matched my room, which was chosen at random. My prize was not ideal for a wild man that lives fourteen hours outside in the summer, and I ended up looking out on a concrete wall, with a window that only opened halfway and no natural light. What resembled more of a solitary confinement cell than a comfortable place to lay my hat, if I had a hat. Whatever, I was not planning on moving in permanently and I counted on the lock down lifting by the 17th of May.

In an effort not to waste any time, I took longer forays into the jungle and mapped some new territory of trails that I could accomplish by foot within a medial distance from the hotel door. On one occasion with Jamal and my friend from Peru, a guide himself, went as a trio to said jungle paths for a morning divorced from the modern world. It could have been the mesas of Mexico, or the highlands of Arizona. I half expected Don Juan to be hiding behind the cactus ready to snatch our attention and whisk us off on some shamanic adventure of self discovery. The banyan vines and scaly palms like ancient relics left over from the Jurassic age, the prickly pear cactus, hummer birds, crowing roosters and flashy peacocks accentuated the terrestrial views with organic life and color. My smile was almost constant, and strain was met with striving, as one foot passed the other into grounds previously trodden. This was where I thrived, and I forgot about the world wide crisis for awhile.

On one occasion we had brought a loaf and some mountain jam to make some sandwiches, and hoofed it up the valley to a ridge area where we could get our minds quiet and survey the scene. We approached to a scree slope which formed a white cliff of loose boulders and sharp gravel. The lip of which was sodden, and held ledges of root clumped trees that held the earth in place enough for one to sit. In my mind I saw it as a good perch to climb up to and camp myself there in heart of the valley, fill my belly, and enjoy a fine summer Sunday.

So I went first, launching myself up the scree of rocks and shaley stones, sending some piles cascading down behind me, hoping this would clear the ground for more solid footholds for my companions. I gripped a large boulder and a wedge of earth to yank myself to a natural platform of thick sod, where a mat of vegetation held me long enough to hoist my limber body upwards and onto precipice. More of the earth was eroding than I thought, and send more tumbling paperweights down the slope, one just nair missing my friends forehead. That was about the time when we called off this free climbing event, though I still needed to come down. Naturally I followed the same route down, but not on my feet. When I anchored my left hand into the skull of a boulder that I thought was locked into the gravel enough to bear me, it calved off the side of the hill, and left me with no competent handhold and both arms came off the wall. So instead of a three point connection as I always maintained when free soloing, I had only my two feet in an awkward angle of gait against a sixty degree scree slope with a rumble of larger backbreaking stones above and below me. I lost balance and tumbled with the stoney avalanche I had set off, never getting airborne but instead getting caught in a fall that I could not control. For twenty five feet or so, my body somersaulted and deathrolled until I got stock between a rock and many hard places, with my feet in the air, and my body contorted in a pit. At first my muscles were so shocked that I couldn’t move, so I was stuck there in the fetal position up to the sky and I could feel something wet on my arms, a hot stinging, and a brutal hammering on my coccyx bone, and the cartilage of my right knee cap. Needless to say I wasn’t feeling so brazen cowboy, or restless Viking at this point. More like a turtle that god kicked over its back.

Well my two good friends were there in a man’s time of need, and picked me up and hoisted me onto a spongy bed of plants in the shade of a stunted palm. The future faded away a little, and my deep base tan turned to gothic white as I lost all my color, and vigor drained from my eyes. Only utterances of words and primitive mouth noises came from my throat. Jamal checked my life signatures, he came from a career of western medicine and the American hospital system, and I knew I was in good hands. The Peruvian made me some calorie dense sandwiches so I could re-nourish with some energy, and poured spring water over my forehead and wounds. Fortunately, my military backpack that I wore saved my spine from any real damage or cracking my vertebrae into little pieces. My inner warrior laughed softly, and thanked these soldiers for taking good care of me. After about half an hour I was able to stand under my own power, and the Peruvian took me by the elbow like a proper gentleman escorting his date to the ball, and we swaggered back out of these badlands. My hide was pretty scratched up, and I walked with a swagger, and felt pretty bruised up. I tried not to show it too much as we passed some patrol cops, and I watched on old ornery bull with huge balls rear a small calf airborne with his horns, and take over his grazing position for some cut green food laid out on the road. Looked like I wasn’t the only one getting beat up. So I was felled down like an old hickory, but a hickory just the same, and I learned what it feels like to be eighty-five. Comically, I spent the next couple days exploring what I could do if I lived to be that long in tooth and claw. What kind of physical veracity could I muster with a fragile frame and a little slower on my feet. It was an interesting meditation on my own fragility power, and a reminder I am not indestructible.

Luckily I had exchanged rooms to an upper level with some natural ambience, so I was happy to rest and re-coop for a couple days. The news traveled pretty easily in the hotel, and suddenly my room was a hub of company, storytelling and a reckoning of activity. My friends brought me hot mint tea and coffee, creamy pumpkin soup, carrot cake, egg biryani and toast, small pots of dried nuts, and bowls of fresh fruit. Javier insisted on hooking up the ‘smart’ tv with one of those three hour fireplace videos, so I could watch the logs burn down, and let the digital glow of the hearth warm my spirit as I lay supine in my bed. I couldn’t be more grateful, and all the good timing and love that I felt almost remedied the fact of learning that another extension of the lockdown was soon to take heed. Suppose I was not going to be making any escapes any time soon, and home felt further away. I started to question if I would make it back for summer solstice.

Over the 60+ days not withstanding the fact I have not been able to move further than a few kilometers afield, I have actually appreciated much of the ripple effects of an international lock down. There are no hagglers on the street asking me to come see their shop because nothing has been open, consumerism has been exclusively focused on things I can eat, therefore I am spending less. There is more space between where my body ends and another begins, which being a northerner I am rather fond of. And at least by India’s standards, there is less pollution, noise, and activity, which has over the half year I have now been year become commonplace and almost normal for me, and that is worrying.

Secret hikes in the forest and nature walks are more fulfilling as they are deemed ‘non-essential’, romantic love is more exciting in the private breaching of social distancing, and when I do meet another young traveler out on their errands, we already have something in common of being stranded in a foreign country, so there is less pressure in breaking the ice. Obviously, even as a countryman with few attachments to the modern world, and even less affairs with the global industrial society, I still wish to see certain segments of civilization shape up again, and for small scale businesses that I wholeheartedly support to get back on the horse.

Especially in small towns, these norms are hitting the hardest. I enjoy writing letters to friends for instance and rely a fair deal on the post office, and ordering books, tools and hygiene products through the mail. I would like to visit my local farmers markets again, and have potluck gatherings at my neighbors without considering how far from my friends I sit. I want to ride my motorcycle with the Old Bastards, the club I joined last August, and resume our bi-weekly breakfast moots at our town hall. I would miss all the traditional festivals, rural recreational culture, and farm work parties that are integral to my lifestyle. There is a slew of other things too that don’t involve a great deal of money, or heavy ecological footprint. I intend to stay localized in my travel, and grow a much tighter connection to the land.

Tomorrow the last repatriation flights to pick up Canadians left India for Toronto and Vancouver, and the extortionate overhead cost would sink me. Other flights leaving the country to evacuate Indians in other parts of the world are fully claimed. There is no sign of when commercial flights will be available, and I have my name on two waiting lists for a ticket home that won’t cost me an arm and a leg. In the medieval ages you could sell your soul to the devil for a boon like that, but I probably wouldn’t make that gamble even if I could, who knows which corporation he works for these days. In the meantime I am milking the situation for what it’s worth, coloring outside the lines, prospering in unfamiliar territory and hoping I’ll be out of here well before the monsoon.

Ride, shoot straight, and always tell the truth!