I left Pokhara on the most beautiful day imaginable. With the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas towering over me, I mounted the bike and slowly rode south, out of the mountains, stopping often to watch the Annapurna range recede. In the photo below you can just barely catch a glimpse of Fishtail over there on the right, just before it faded from view for the last time. The euphoria of the day quickly transformed into a foreboding dread. Why did I have to leave this place, especially when all I had to look forward to for the next 1000km was boring, flat nothingness and then INDIA – aggressive people, diarrhea, and burning trash piles everywhere?
Maybe I had just gotten too settled in Pokhara, and had too good a time at Maya Universe Academy. For whatever reason, I found myself in quite a bad mood, not at all looking forward to the days to come, especially since I knew that I was just going to Delhi to catch a plane to Kyrgyzstan, rather than cycle the whole way. Well it turned out that awesomeness exists everywhere, even in the flat plains of the Tarai in Nepal, and India’s most populous province and capital city. I should’ve never doubted that at all.
This is what the western half of Nepal along the “main highway” looks like.
People like to be creative everywhere.
On the way out of Nepal I managed to make a detour to Bardia National Park to meet Vikram the Rhino.
Vikram’s story is really quite interesting. He’s a captive rhino who lives in a pen near the park headquarters. Apparently he was released into the wild several times, but just kept coming back so eventually the park staff let him hang around permanently and wander freely. Up until a couple years ago, park visitors could just go up and say hello as he wandered around. But eventually Vikram killed a man, so they put him in this pen. Now he’s kind of sad and unhealthy looking, but hey Vikram, that’s what you get for crushing a dude.
Vikram’s skin looks and feels like stone. He is hard as a rock; it’s amazing that poachers can even kill these guys. I would think the bullets would just bounce off.
Outside the park entrance there are several places to find accommodation, ranging from $3 mud-huts (me) to $30/ night slightly nicer mud-huts where a lot of old white people were staying. On the way in I met Lydia and Maren, from Australia, and we hunted down the cheapest accommodation we could find. Then we arranged for a couple of guides to show us around the jungle and show us where all the wild tigers were.
Prem (left) and Krishna (right) got us up at 5 freakin’ thirty to have a quick breakfast before spending the next 12 hours out in the bush/savannah/jungle/whatever. These guys were awesome, and I can’t thank them enough for taking us out.
The first thing we saw was this monkey, and then a whole lot of other monkeys. And then these weird red bugs.
We traipsed out further into the wilderness, and as we walked down this dirt track, all the old white people came careening past us in a jeep. Ah so that’s what you get for $30/night. Meh.
Friendly elephant collecting its own food.
Some kind of mini-orchid?
Uber poisonous spider. Maybe.
Prem insisted that this was a tiger paw print.
Jungle deer.
Jungle chickens. You can tell that I do not have my nature photography equipment with me. I left my 600mm f2.8 lens at home, unfortunately, so this is as zoomed-in as my wildlife photos will get. It’s ok because about 10 feet from where I was standing, there was another guy who DID bring his 600mm f2.8 lens with him. I’m sure he got some good shots.
Mostly what we did during the day was go from spot to spot sitting in trees waiting for the tigers to show up.
Unfortunately, tigers were a no-show, so we walked back to our accommodation, and slept for 12 hours. As disappointed as I was that the tigers did not want to show their faces and pose for my camera, it was still an awesome day and I got to see a one of the last remaining habitats for such animals as tigers and rhinos. Seriously, their territory used to range from Pakistan all the way east to Burma and beyond, but nowadays all these places are so full of people and farms that these beautiful animals have to stick to what must seem to them tiny plots of land. No wonder they don’t want to come out and say hi.
The rest of the trip to Delhi was pretty uneventful. I rode about 100km down a road that was lined with marijuana plants on both sides. Weed sure does grow like a weed in this part of the world.
I stopped to take a break in this riverside grove of huge trees, and like zombies smelling the flesh of the living, these Nepali children sensed my presence from somewhere, and slowly amassed around me and my bicycle, silently staring until one of them got up the nerve to ask “What you name?” After that it was all giggles and questions until I had to go find a place to take a dump.
Upon crossing into India, the population seemed to triple. Quiet streets were replaced with honking trucks and vehicles overflowing with humanity.
Like this truck. I drafted these guys for about an hour. Drafting is fun to do when the conditions are right. You have to be on a really flat road in good condition, and just as a slow-moving vehicle (the larger the better) accelerates past you, you must quickly accelerate yourself to match speed, and then ride about 5 feet (1m) behind the vehicle to take advantage of the wind-void (I’m sure there’s a technical term for this, what is it?). Suddenly it’s like the truck is pulling you along, and you barely have to pedal at all. My normal cruising speed on flat ground is 20-25km per hour, but if done right, drafting a big truck like this can bump you up to 35-40km per hour, almost doubling your average speed, and getting you where you’re going way faster. Plus, it’s a lot of fun, and a little dangerous. Maybe pretty dangerous. But anyway as soon as I pulled up behind these guys, they spent about 30 seconds trying to figure out how I was riding behind them without pedaling, and then they all whipped out their camera phones and began filming me. So I took a picture. Thanks for the aerodynamic-assist!
Yours truly double fisting sugar-cane juice at a road-side stand.
Finally, ten days after leaving Pokhara, I arrived in Delhi. Above you see Paharganj, the backpacker ghetto. I was in Delhi in 2008 with an ex-girlfriend, and OMG has it changed since then. The road you see above was dirt and filled with cows roaming around. Now it’s poorly paved, animals are close to zero, and the number of people sleeping on the streets and dwindled dramatically as well.
Things in general seemed much cleaner and the people better-off. I went to watch the sunset near the India Gate, and the park was filled with middle-class Indians having a good time with their families. Not that they weren’t doing that back in 2008, or that there weren’t any completely destitute people this time around, but things seemed to have improved, in a nebulously hard to pinpoint kind of way.
A quick googling reveals that India’s per-capita GDP has gone up by 50% between 2008 and 2013, and is probably even higher now in 2015, so I guess the data confirms what my gut instinct already knew.
These guys selling chiku were so prosperous, they could even afford to give me a free one! Yummmm.
This crazy fellow tried to close me up in his umbrella with him.
Connaught Place is looking more legit these days, filled with at least 3 McDonald’s’s and a slurry of other fancy shops like a Hane’s underwear store.
In the middle of Connaught Place (which is a giant circle surrounded by a roundabout), is a humongous Indian flag. This photo doesn’t do it justice, but the thing is just too damn big.
I think there are some politicians in there or something.
These guys were the happiest inflatable pool vendors I’ve ever met.
Wooo fun sunset glitch art.
Finally, on my last day in Delhi, I met up with the K-folks again! They are on their way to Istanbul , and my flight to Bishkek is the first leg of their journey to Constantinople. Yay, good times were had by all!
Although pretty hot and steamy, and still quite dirty even 8 years later, Delhi is by no means “hell.” I’ve had a love/hate relationship with India. In the words of one documentary narrator, “India is a land of extremes.” What to say? Some of my best and worst travel memories come from experiences in India. Maybe someday I’ll come back, but for the foreseeable future, I’m ready to get the hell out of Dodge. It’s time for some yurts and fermented mare’s milk, baby! Central Asia, here I come!
Maybe I had just gotten too settled in Pokhara, and had too good a time at Maya Universe Academy. For whatever reason, I found myself in quite a bad mood, not at all looking forward to the days to come, especially since I knew that I was just going to Delhi to catch a plane to Kyrgyzstan, rather than cycle the whole way. Well it turned out that awesomeness exists everywhere, even in the flat plains of the Tarai in Nepal, and India’s most populous province and capital city. I should’ve never doubted that at all.
This is what the western half of Nepal along the “main highway” looks like.
People like to be creative everywhere.
On the way out of Nepal I managed to make a detour to Bardia National Park to meet Vikram the Rhino.
Vikram’s story is really quite interesting. He’s a captive rhino who lives in a pen near the park headquarters. Apparently he was released into the wild several times, but just kept coming back so eventually the park staff let him hang around permanently and wander freely. Up until a couple years ago, park visitors could just go up and say hello as he wandered around. But eventually Vikram killed a man, so they put him in this pen. Now he’s kind of sad and unhealthy looking, but hey Vikram, that’s what you get for crushing a dude.
Vikram’s skin looks and feels like stone. He is hard as a rock; it’s amazing that poachers can even kill these guys. I would think the bullets would just bounce off.
Outside the park entrance there are several places to find accommodation, ranging from $3 mud-huts (me) to $30/ night slightly nicer mud-huts where a lot of old white people were staying. On the way in I met Lydia and Maren, from Australia, and we hunted down the cheapest accommodation we could find. Then we arranged for a couple of guides to show us around the jungle and show us where all the wild tigers were.
Prem (left) and Krishna (right) got us up at 5 freakin’ thirty to have a quick breakfast before spending the next 12 hours out in the bush/savannah/jungle/whatever. These guys were awesome, and I can’t thank them enough for taking us out.
The first thing we saw was this monkey, and then a whole lot of other monkeys. And then these weird red bugs.
We traipsed out further into the wilderness, and as we walked down this dirt track, all the old white people came careening past us in a jeep. Ah so that’s what you get for $30/night. Meh.
Friendly elephant collecting its own food.
Some kind of mini-orchid?
Uber poisonous spider. Maybe.
Prem insisted that this was a tiger paw print.
Jungle deer.
Jungle chickens. You can tell that I do not have my nature photography equipment with me. I left my 600mm f2.8 lens at home, unfortunately, so this is as zoomed-in as my wildlife photos will get. It’s ok because about 10 feet from where I was standing, there was another guy who DID bring his 600mm f2.8 lens with him. I’m sure he got some good shots.
Mostly what we did during the day was go from spot to spot sitting in trees waiting for the tigers to show up.
Unfortunately, tigers were a no-show, so we walked back to our accommodation, and slept for 12 hours. As disappointed as I was that the tigers did not want to show their faces and pose for my camera, it was still an awesome day and I got to see a one of the last remaining habitats for such animals as tigers and rhinos. Seriously, their territory used to range from Pakistan all the way east to Burma and beyond, but nowadays all these places are so full of people and farms that these beautiful animals have to stick to what must seem to them tiny plots of land. No wonder they don’t want to come out and say hi.
The rest of the trip to Delhi was pretty uneventful. I rode about 100km down a road that was lined with marijuana plants on both sides. Weed sure does grow like a weed in this part of the world.
I stopped to take a break in this riverside grove of huge trees, and like zombies smelling the flesh of the living, these Nepali children sensed my presence from somewhere, and slowly amassed around me and my bicycle, silently staring until one of them got up the nerve to ask “What you name?” After that it was all giggles and questions until I had to go find a place to take a dump.
Upon crossing into India, the population seemed to triple. Quiet streets were replaced with honking trucks and vehicles overflowing with humanity.
Like this truck. I drafted these guys for about an hour. Drafting is fun to do when the conditions are right. You have to be on a really flat road in good condition, and just as a slow-moving vehicle (the larger the better) accelerates past you, you must quickly accelerate yourself to match speed, and then ride about 5 feet (1m) behind the vehicle to take advantage of the wind-void (I’m sure there’s a technical term for this, what is it?). Suddenly it’s like the truck is pulling you along, and you barely have to pedal at all. My normal cruising speed on flat ground is 20-25km per hour, but if done right, drafting a big truck like this can bump you up to 35-40km per hour, almost doubling your average speed, and getting you where you’re going way faster. Plus, it’s a lot of fun, and a little dangerous. Maybe pretty dangerous. But anyway as soon as I pulled up behind these guys, they spent about 30 seconds trying to figure out how I was riding behind them without pedaling, and then they all whipped out their camera phones and began filming me. So I took a picture. Thanks for the aerodynamic-assist!
Yours truly double fisting sugar-cane juice at a road-side stand.
Finally, ten days after leaving Pokhara, I arrived in Delhi. Above you see Paharganj, the backpacker ghetto. I was in Delhi in 2008 with an ex-girlfriend, and OMG has it changed since then. The road you see above was dirt and filled with cows roaming around. Now it’s poorly paved, animals are close to zero, and the number of people sleeping on the streets and dwindled dramatically as well.
Things in general seemed much cleaner and the people better-off. I went to watch the sunset near the India Gate, and the park was filled with middle-class Indians having a good time with their families. Not that they weren’t doing that back in 2008, or that there weren’t any completely destitute people this time around, but things seemed to have improved, in a nebulously hard to pinpoint kind of way.
A quick googling reveals that India’s per-capita GDP has gone up by 50% between 2008 and 2013, and is probably even higher now in 2015, so I guess the data confirms what my gut instinct already knew.
These guys selling chiku were so prosperous, they could even afford to give me a free one! Yummmm.
This crazy fellow tried to close me up in his umbrella with him.
Connaught Place is looking more legit these days, filled with at least 3 McDonald’s’s and a slurry of other fancy shops like a Hane’s underwear store.
In the middle of Connaught Place (which is a giant circle surrounded by a roundabout), is a humongous Indian flag. This photo doesn’t do it justice, but the thing is just too damn big.
I think there are some politicians in there or something.
These guys were the happiest inflatable pool vendors I’ve ever met.
Wooo fun sunset glitch art.
Finally, on my last day in Delhi, I met up with the K-folks again! They are on their way to Istanbul , and my flight to Bishkek is the first leg of their journey to Constantinople. Yay, good times were had by all!
Although pretty hot and steamy, and still quite dirty even 8 years later, Delhi is by no means “hell.” I’ve had a love/hate relationship with India. In the words of one documentary narrator, “India is a land of extremes.” What to say? Some of my best and worst travel memories come from experiences in India. Maybe someday I’ll come back, but for the foreseeable future, I’m ready to get the hell out of Dodge. It’s time for some yurts and fermented mare’s milk, baby! Central Asia, here I come!
