TRUCK DRIVER STOP

TO PURI: MARCH 14

Pimples on the arse are the inevitable result of hours sweating on a bike seat. Germolene stops infection. 520 kilometers yesterday was too much. How do I feel this morning? Wrecked. I'll make do with 260 to Puri today where the revered Jagganath Temple attracts many thousands of Hindu pilgrims. A great beach and relaxed attitude to Bhang was the original attraction for backpackers. A rash of hotels and restaurants resulted. I am on the road by 8 a.m. and stop for breakfast at a truck driver's stop. The owner was a customs officer at Delhi airport for twelve years and speaks English. Where am I from? Where am I gong? How long have I been on the road? When will I go home? Am I married? Children? Grandchildren? Truck drivers listen as he translates my answers. What do the drivers earn? 8000 to 10000 rupees a month.

NORTHWARD FAST

NORTHWARD FAST: MARCH 14
Another day on Highway 5 northward across the same flat countryside from Andra Pradesh into Orissa. Orissa is poor. Frighteningly poor. Depressing. The Highway is being widened. Ungraded dirt deviations bypass bridges and culverts under construction with one logjam after another as truck and bus drivers jostle senselessly for non-existence space. The setup on the Stunner is more pain-giving on bad roads than the Cargo I rode through the Americas. The seat angle throws the rider's weight forward onto his hands and I end a ten hour day at Srikakulam with bruised palms and a pain in the butt. The hotel is overpriced at 650 rupees. A dhossa for dinner at a workman's cafe costs 20. I set the kilometer trip to zero this morning. It registers 522, good going for an Oldie in his dotage.

HARD SLOG NORTH

NORTHWARD FAST: MARCH 13
I long to experience fresh territory and mountains. The North East States beckon, Darjeeling, Assam, Sikkim, perhaps Nagaland, then west again to Lucknow and north into Kashmir and Ladakh (if the road is open and snow-free).
Kolkata first. Bypassing Chenai takes three hours,then up National Highway 5, dual carriageway and a good surface with the usual crop of crashed trucks, countryside flat, mostly reaped rice paddy.The Honda cruises happily at 80 KPH and I manage 420 kilometers to a reasonable hotel in Vijayawada.

AIRCRAFT SEATS FOR MEDITATION

MAMALLAPURAM

A German couple arrive at the Sunrise Guest House from an Ashram on the Holy Mountain. Merely breathing the same air as the Maharishi was an uplifting and joyous experience. No need for talk. Nor for teaching. The Maharishi's presence was sufficient. Mostly they meditated, surely a suitable holiday for a designer of state-of-the-art aircraft seats. He presumes that I must know which Holy Mountain and which Maharishi. Disabusing him would be impolite. He is a vegetarian. They run a vegetarian household. She eats steak when they eat out and teaches handicapped children. I suspect that she hopes for more than meditation in the future.

INACTIVE OPTIMIST

MAMALLAPURAM CONVERSATION:
I chat with a young Indian couple, university sudents, in the Internet cafe during one of many power cuts. They share a hotel room – they must be liberals. Or is this common amongst the young educated in India? Asking would be impolite.
She doesn't talk much. Embarrassed?
He is vocal. His father is a senior military officer. The student believes India has a great future. Central Government is building new power stations in every State. Power cuts will be history.
And Indian salaries are the fastest rising world-wide. The brain drain to the US will stop.
Corruption is the greatest problem. Corruption amongst politicians is endemic. We must change everything. He doesn't know how. Neither he nor any of his friends vote. They aren't interested in politics. However change will come from the people. The people vote.

ROYAL ENFIELDS, ROMANTIC OR WORK HORSE?

ROYAL ENFIELD FACTORY, CHENAI:







































A day with Royal Enfield and priority for any long-distance traveler is comfort and I've bounce-tested each model: 350 and 500, military, Classic, the new low rider, single seat and dual. My favourite? The big broad single saddle mounted on coil springs. .
My final conclusion: Enfields look and sound as a bike should. This, of course, is the opinion of a biker born before the war. I hear my four sons chant in unison, “Which war, Dad? The Boer War?” Not kind, but I'm accustomed to it.
I rode a BSA Bantam in the early fifties. Cops were called Bobbies and patrolled on silent water-cooled Velocettes. Vincents were power with speed. Sunbeams were deluxe touring. AJS, Norton, Triumph - all deceased and gone to Heaven. Royal Enfield in Reditch was a casualty. What miracle saved Royal Enfield here in Chenai?
“Why buy an Enfield?” is a reasonable question to ask Royal Enfield's marketing manager, Sachin.
Sachin's reply is as off-beat as hand spraying gas tanks. “There's no logical reason,” he says. “Enfields are heavy. They're slow. They are not fuel efficient.”
“India's Hog,” I suggest.
“Not so,” counters Sachin. “It doesn't matter where, Harleys always dominate. The Bullet becomes part of where ever it is.” Originally British as fish and chips, the Bullett is now quintessentially Indian. T India's most lethal beer is named after it, BULLETT SUPER STRONG, and in Rajastahn you'll find a temple dedicated to a Bullett. Remove it from the temple and it will be back by sunrise – so they say
“So it is romantic,” I insist. “The Morgan of the bike world.”
Again Sachin disagrees. Morgans are in a high price bracket, status symbols. Bullets are workhorses. A horse rider feels the muscles bunch and flow and listens to the rythm of the horse's breathing. The rider of the Bullet feels the beat of the engine and the slow glorious thump of the exhaust.
And that is the Bullet's magic.
Sachin, of course, will disagree. Magic has no place in his vocabulary – strange, as he is so obviously a romantic.

JAPANESE FILM CREW

Determination to bring the writing up to date keeps me yoyoing for five days between a table on the roof-top restaurant at the Sunrise Guest House and an Internet cafe. The grass park below stretches some three hundred meters to the sea. I believe we camped in the palm trees to the left. We sat one morning on a stone ledge at the back of a temple cave and contemplated the God. Which God? I don't recall. Nor do I search. Memories are sufficient. A truck braked outside the cave. Four Japanese entered and set up lights and lighting screens and three canvas chairs one of which had DIRECTOR written in large square letters on the back. The Director arrived in a white Morris Ambassador (India's luxury car of the day). The Japanese filmed the God and left without once acknowledging our existence. Now stone walls protect caves and temples against future tsunamis. Buy a ticket to enter.

BED ROLES OBLIGATORY

Foreign tourists were a rarity in India forty years ago. Hotels existed only in major cities and state capitals. Government officials on tour stayed in Government Rest Houses. Stay in a Rest House and you brought your own bedding (including the mattress). Government officers on tour were recognisable instantly by the bulky canvas bed roles on the roof rack. Our bedding was a fat, King-size, cotton-stuffed paliasse rolled in Afghan kilims. Vanessa and I would check with different Government Departments, Indian Civil, PWD, Railway, Forestry. No Rest House available, we rigged a mosquito net to a tree and unrolled the mattress.
My memories of Mamallapuram are of a small village on a dirt track, shore temples, a few fishing boats dragged up on the sand and not much else. The cook and the owner of The Sunrise Guest House confirm that there wasn't even a bus service. Vanessa and I camped in the first lines of palm trees above the beach. I remember a cool sea breeze after swimming and that we built a fire and grilled fresh fish over the embers.

LONELY PLANET PRISON CELL

Mamallapuram is crammed with foreign tourists, tourist touts and Sunday day trippers. Lonely Planet recommends Tina's Lodge. The proprietor shows me a single room down a dank dark corridor. Were it a jail cell prisoners would complain justifiably to the European Court of Human Rights. The so-called bathroom? Ugh! A young Israeli woman in a marginally better room laughs at the speed of my retreat. An even better room will be available tomorrow. The better room has a terrace that the breeze can't reach. I peer through the open door at a heat-haggard tourist sweating on the bed, remount and go exploring. The Sunrise Guest House isn't listed in the guide book. Maybe it is too distant from the main tourist strip for the Lonely Planet researcher to walk on a hot day. I am offered a room three times the size of the Tina prison cell. Both room and bathroom are spotless. Wall to wall windows face the park and the sea. Open the windows and a splendid sea breeze lifts the curtains. Same daily rate as the hell hole cell and with satellite TV. Climb stairs to the thatch-roof restaurant and I can plug the lap-top into a power point. Fried rice with calamari is good. What more could I want?

FORGETFUL OLD FOOL

crash of the day






















Finished with Goa so back to the present and Kodaikanal. Next stop. Mamallapuram, a backpacker and tourist haven for twenty years. Idiot that I am, I left my wonderful Eicher road atlas in the lobby of the J Heritage Hotel in Kodai. Why do I imagine that Mamallapuram is north of Chenai? I have bypassed Chenai and am heading for Kolkata before realising my error and head back south through the city. Chenai bus traffic is fearful even on a Sunday. All locals consulted on the route have difficulty in differentiating left from right. Ironic that a bus labeled as heading for Mamallapuram is my saviour. I follow out to the coast road.

GOA ENDING

Of Goa there are other memories. The young French heroin addict asking if she could shoot up in our bedroom at the house on Calangute beach. Vanessa and I were in bed. The French girl sat at the end of our mattress. I picture her now as she licked the needle as if it were her lover - I with a terror of needles. I was five years old when a course of injections killed my father. I overheard our nanny speak of it.
There was Slugs Jerry's tame guru who cured two Canadian girls of gonorrhea with prayer, meditation, herbal potions and the antibiotics secreted at the bottom of his Aruvedic medicine chest.
And trying to meet Blind George one perfect morning, he walking through the palm trees back from Baga beach, I walking in the other direction. George, with only 10% peripheral vision, faced 45 degrees from the direction of his walk and someone had fed me a powerful cookie for breakfast. Calculating a point of intersection was beyond me.
And of course the arrest of Caroline for nakedness on the beach and the gold smuggler paying her fine – but that story I wrote for The Lady magazine last month. It all happened forty years ago. Enough...
Except to thank Fiona and Paul for their company and for their kindness and generosity. Stray dogs are their normal house guests. A fat old snoring Brit on a bike was an extra.

REMARKABLE AND PRECIOUS MOMENTS

GOA: FEBRUARY 14
I took a wrong road, reached an unhappy destination, then began again in a fresh direction. All that remains of that period is remorse, a few stories and a few memories of remarkable and precious moments. Attempting to revisit those moments is futile. I tried yesterday. The memory is of four of us in my open VW. I had driven to Mapsa market. As I turned right at the end of the market to head back to Calangute, someone yelled my name. None of the others heard. I was certain. I reversed back round the corner. An old friend, Hamish Crawford, swayed on the sidewalk. He was seriously sick with jaundice and his then wife had abandoned him for a particularly unattractive red-headed Brit. God knows where Hamish found the strength to reach Mapsa. He saw my VW take the corner and he thought, That is the type of car Simon would drive if he came to India. So, yes, a remarkable moment, but impossible to revisit. Mapsa market is unrecognisable. Memory is memory. Let it be.
John seems to me stuck in the past – that book, all those photographs.

WALKING JOHN

GOA: FEBRUARY 15
The erstwhile manufacturer of silver snake belts has telephoned with a number for Walking John. I call and we meet at John's house. It seems to me a sad house, old and long and narrow and dark and neglected. Presumably it was bought as a resurrection project. If so, the resurrection stalled early.
And John, though ten years the younger, seems to me old. We sit opposite sides of a wood table in the dimly lit entrada and he tells me of his health. He has cataracts and had a cancer cut out from close to his nose and too close to his eyes for radio therapy. Whether the surgeon removed all the cancer is uncertain. John has wondered often what happened to me, so he says, and talks of me often to those he sees from the old days. He commiserates with me for having arrived too late to take part in last month's reunion of the old Goa stagers – though most who came were from the 80s or later. He shows me a book commemorating the reunion with photographs of then and now. Long hair is the uniting feature. The faces are foreign to me. Even when here, I wasn't part of that. The inside cover lists the dead.
John mentions two. Vanessa Jack is the shock, dead young in her sleep. I have been trying to trace her on the world wide web for the past six months. We traveled together forty years ago. Our journey was hers as much as mine. We were good together. Certainly there was love - yet I abandoned her in Nepal. I was taking that wrong road and didn't want her involved.

SUNDAY LUNCH AT THE BEACH

GOA: FEBRUARY 14
Fiona and Paul (Dutch) are giving a Sunday luncheon party at a French restaurant on the beach in Goa (ex-Portuguese. Of their guests, I am the only non-Indian. A major industrialist with homes here in Goa and in Delhi and Bombay and in France and in New York (two) talks of the British in the years after Indian Independence. He lists companies then famous in British industry, all swept away by superior Indian management. Britain had lost interest in India. British industry sent their weakest managers.
I doubt whether British managers existed who could have saved British interests in India. If so, why didn't they save British industry at home? Car manufacturers deceased. Truck manufacturers deceased. Locomotive manufacturers deceased. Motorcycle manufacturers deceased. And so on and so on and so on...

AMIN

GOA: FEBRUARY 13
Amin de Souza has invited me to lunch. We will meet at the steps below Panjim's biggest church. I arrive early, park the bike and sit in the cool of the nave. I am digging into happenings that have lain heavily on me for forty years - surely an inappropriate time to practice dying...so protected by the massive walls of the church, I surrender to the quite and cool and peace and finally simply accept for the first time the futility of my search. I did what I did. I knew that it was wrong, that I hurt people dear to me. But it is done. Remorse changes nothing. Time to move on.
So with Amin I sit and say little but, at peace, listen to the history of his life, of a father increasingly erratic and increasingly frail to whom, in nursing, Amin gave chunks of his life and on whose death, Amin managed to clean, if not the emotional distress his father bequeathed, at least the financial chaos.
It seems to me as I listen that suffering from his father's actions and the collapse of his parent's marriage, then suffering for his father in his illness has made Amin very self-contained. He has tested himself and learned the futility of anger. He is become a man to trust, a man of remarkable integrity, a man good to be with.

PETER HENRY AND THE BUDHIST PRINT SCAM

GOA: FEBRUARY 12
My turn for a question. What happened to Walking John.
Walking John was a Brit in his mid twenties. His base was a bed-sit with bathroom on Bombay's Marine Drive - nowadays as costly as a walk on the moon. John wintered in Goa and summered trekking in the Himalayas. John liked to tell of his walking and Peter Henry was a listener. One of John's tales concerned the Buddhist monastery closest to Base Camp on Mount Everest. The monks had become rich and lazy on the leavings of Everest expeditions. In earlier days they survived on the sale of religious prints on handmade paper. Climate made printing difficult. Either the inks froze or humidity made the inks bleed. According to Walking john printing was possible only six weeks a year.
Eastern Spirituality was big business. Peter Henry loaded John and two young Californian women with natural colour inks and hand-made paper bought at an art supply store in Bombay and instructed John to reach the monastery at the beginning of the window, rent the blocks from the monks and print print, print.
Peter Henry took the prints to New York for Christmas and set up a display (at Bergdorf Goodman, if I remember correctly) with photographs of Everest and the monastery and monks coached to look spiritual plus a few monastic geegaws - one was a silver-edged bowl fashioned from a aged human cranium. Genuine Buddhist print from the Monastery at Everest Base Camp and blessed by the Abbot made a great Christmas present at $100. The outlay was five cents.Walking John complained that he never saw the profit. Such is the risk in joining forces with a scam artist.
So where is Walking john now?
“Almost certainly in Goa,” says my host, though he may need a day or two to come up with a telephone number.

WHAT HAPPENED TO PETER HENRY?

GOA: FEBRUARY 12
My past is surfacing at a party in Goa. First Amin de Souza. Now, “What happened to Peter Henry,” asks my host.
Last I knew of him, Peter was in Liverpool preparing designs for a flash Chinese restaurant and overseeing the work. The Chinese had paid Peter up front - always an error with Peter. So is scamming the Chinese. Peter disappeared. That was thirty years ago and Liverpool is a sea port. The tide goes out twice a day. Those of us who knew him well fear that he went out on the tide.

PETER HENRY AND THE SIVER SNAKE BELT SCAM

GOA: FEBRUARY 12
Peter Henry was an accomplished scam artist. Antique silver snake belts were a fashion item in Europe and North America and young Westerners on their travels were scouring the bazaars for belts. Peter Henry spotted a short cut. Surely snake belts were as easy to manufacture as metal watch straps. My present host had a watch strap factory. Peter Henry ordered a few hundred belts. He packed the belts in a net and buried them in the sand at the low water mark. Two weeks and the belts had gained the wear of a century. Peter Henry headed for New york in time for Christmas, reaped a splendid profit and swamped the market. Snake belts were no longer a fashion item.

PETER HENRY

GOA: FEBRUARY 12
Why did Amin de Souza remember me? With this thought, my own memory clicked. I knew our host. Used to know him. I'd been to his home in Bombay more than once. He was married to a difficult German then. We were seated beside each other now on the stone parapet. The garden lights were dim – not that good light would have helped. Forty years changes a man. “Simon Gandolfi,” I said. “You manufactured the belts for Peter Henry and the silver snake belt scam.”

POCKET FULL OF TOOTHPICKS AND OLIVE STONES

GOA: FEBRUARY 13
I don't do parties in the UK. Eight people in a room is a maximum. More and I become claustrophobic. Cocktail parties are my particular hate. Stand with a drink in one hand, nibbles in the other and nod intelligently to someone whom you can't hear above the general babble. And what do you do with the trash? Leave with a pocket full of toothpicks and olive stones? Outdoors is different, room to breathe and usually somewhere to sit. This party is hosted by a Bombayite and his English companion. I sit on a stone parapet of comfortable height and talk with a Goan civil engineer.
Does he know of a Goan architect with a Danish wife?
De Souza - yes , of course. He is dead, she back in Denmark with their daughter. However the son, Amin, lives here in Panjim.
I recall Amin as a small boy.
“We'll telephone him.”
“At ten o'clock?”
Absolutely – and he does. “Amin, I have someone here who wants to talk to you,” and hands me his mobile.
“Amin, you won't remember me. Simon Gandolfi.”
“Simon Gandolfi! Of course I remember. You used to drive us to the beach in one of your open Volkswagen...”