Cycling India... Delhi to Agra

After spending far too long in Delhi Mark, my new cycling companion, and I were eager to get on the road. First leg was down to Delhi on National Highway 2. National Highway 2. Hmm. Could prove to be interesting but I couldn't see any other way of doing it. We'd planned on an early, 6AM start in order to try and beat the traffic but in the end we didn't hit the road until around 9:30. Ah well, can't say I'm surprised. The navigation went OK, after a quick stop at India Gate we were soon on NH2 and heading south! Woo-hoo! The traffic getting out of Delhi was challenging but not actually hellish, although the city and suburbs we went through extended some 40km. Eventually we got to the country and off we went!



Spent the first night on the road in a dhaba (roadside cafe type place). Now that was a mistake... they didn't have menus so we just ordered some food. Got the bill the next morning. Aside from 150 rupees per person to sleep there (which was outrageous to start with but beat the 1200 rupees for a twin room at the hotel we'd just passed) they'd charged silly prices for food. 275 rupees for a paneer dish. To put it in perspective, that's going on for 4 pounds. In a good roof top restaurant in Delhi you'd pay maybe 80 rupees for the same dish. The total came to 1410 rupees (around 18 quid) including 250 "service charge". We were not best pleased and left after calling them "Ali Babas". Needless to say we did not pay the service charge. So, the moral here is always ask the price first if there's no menu.

Another days cycling with a wonderful headwind soon took us to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. Unfortunately during the course of the day my stomach, which has been a bit dicey for days, took a turn for the worse. Oh, made it to Agra easily enough but I couldn't eat solid food so I was powered on cola (mmm, sugar!). The Taj Mahal really is wonderful (although bloody crowded and expensive for non-Indians).



We were going to be setting off on the road again today but that was a non-starter. My stomach has spent the past 48 hours getting worse and I'm currently self medicating on antibiotics in the hope of clearing it, and my head which feels totally fogged up. Even the smell of food is making me feel sick! See how it goes tomorrow anyway.

Arriving in India

Arriving in Delhi at 5am I was worried I was going to be blown away by the place. As it is, it's big and chaotic, full of surprises and stuff that is out of the ordinary for a European. Having said that, having spent a little time in Africa and South East Asia, and having visited Chennai seems to have inoculated me somewhat, at least to the extent where I'm not running screaming too often (aside from to the loo).



I'm staying in the Pahar Ganj area, pictured above, for a few days. The area is certainly interesting, vibrant and full of "characters" one might say. I'm waiting to team up with another British cyclist who's flying here from Istanbul on the 16th, after which the plan is to head towards Goa. Had been planning to train it up to Amristar and still might, but unfortunately booze and inertia have intervened for now.

More later!

Leaving Iran. Thoughts and reflections

It's been the best part of a week since I left Iran now and I guess some sort of summary is in order. Getting out was quite easy. Due to the lack of Pakistani visa I'd got a flight booked over to Delhi with Gulf Air. Contrary to their stated policy online (bikes are carried for US$30 but must be bagged or boxed before the airport) when I rang them I was told my bike was to be transported as part of my luggage allowance (30kg + 5kg discretionary + hand luggage, after that US$7 per kg) and would be made ready for travel at the airport. Spent the day before flying ditching or posting back to the UK anything that was surplus weight which meant I posted 5kgs of kit back and did the first proper clean out of my bags in months.

At the airport the bike had to be X-rayed then various passport stamping when on. When it came to the check in bike and bags came to 34.5kgs and carry on luggage to about 8kgs. And I was wearing pretty much all I could as well! Wrapping the bike was a nightmare though, with a man using a clingfilm machine and his mate not rotating the vertically held bike properly. Crunch. I've still not brought myself to unpack it...

Iran is without doubt the most hospitable country I've visited on this trip, although it's hard to know how much of the hospitable character is a genuine old time thing and how much comes from their relative isolation. I think, going from my experiences in Eastern Turkey and Serbia it's made up much more of the former rather than the later. At times it's wonderful, at other times a little annoying and sometimes dangerous, such as the time I ended up flanked by motorbikes in heavy traffic, with four people trying to talk to me at once and both motorbikes slowly moving in to the point where I felt it was all going to end in tears. So the people, with one or two dishonourable mentions were fantastic (yes, there were one or two pricks, but far less than elsewhere).

The government, however, I as less than chuffed with, and talking to people I'm pretty certain the country is going to change. Either the government is going to manage that change and start making limited controlled changes (which would be in their best interests obviously) or the country is liable to explode into bloody violence. The majority of the population is in the 15 to 30 age bracket and when you're that age you think you're immortal. Your friends might die but you won't, and those are the people who will be the cannon fodder. I spoke with one person, well to do in a very senior station who told me about the Sepah (you might know them as the Revolutionary Guards) unofficially sending out videos of how they'd tortured kids after the summers uprising. The one that shook him (and he wanted to share it with me) was of hooded detainees being led to the edge of a third story roof then told to step down the "stairs". The video captured the falling and the landing and was made and released purely to affect the parents of those who might be involved in the next round.

Still, I believe (although I have no particular evidence to base this on bar talking to a self selecting sample) that change will come within the next five or ten years, provided, of course, that the Americans or Israelis don't intervene and cock it all up as usual. And when it does Iran I'm of the opinion that it will become a secular democracy. Democratic because even now Iran is nominally a democracy. And after all, Iran was establishing increasingly more democratic systems in the early twentieth century despite British and Russian interference. Killed off by the American and British coup in 1953 of course (organised out of the US Embassy btw, which goes some way to explain just why the siege of 1979 and 1980 happened). And as to secular well the vast majority of those I spoke (and yes, it was a small sample etc etc) not only despised the government but also increasingly Islam and Arabs. Loathed them with a passion in fact. I'll end with an interesting statistic I came across: 1.4% of Iranians go to the mosque on a Friday. In the UK the figure for church attendance is around 7%.

Couple of Iranian bits I didn't bother posting whilst there

Definitely playing catch up with the blog here, in no small part because the internet is quite restricted by the government in Iran. Speeds are deliberately throttled, a lot of sites blocked and some webmail can be shut down, as my Yahoo based account was last week, during anti-government protests.

This will be kind of a condensed what I've been up to and one or two things I didn't really feel comfortable talking about in Iran: not because the Iranian govt have got a shit hot cyber team but just, well, because you know. Sometimes a bit of paranoia can be healthy. The first little thing, which seems laughable now, is not getting fingerprinted when entering the country. I was emphatically told while going through entry formalities that the police would take my dabs (OK, whatever) but somehow managed to wander through three sets of officials without this little formality taking place. Nobody had wanted to take them. OK, fair enough. But then with the long hours on the bike with no one to talk to but myself I began to get a little paranoid. The official who'd told me I needed to be fingerprinted had beem pretty damn insistent about it. What if they were to be carried in the passport as some countries insist you do with things like currency declarations? Could be a problem at police checkpoints or leaving the country and the last thing I wanted was trouble with the authorities in Iran. In the end I spoke to the tourist information chap in Tabriz who just laughed and said yes, they were fingerprinting Brits but don't worry about, it's just low level harassment and the prints were filed in the bin! Well that's alright then.

Second thing that got the rampant high level paranoia going was potentially more serious. I was in a hotel chilling with a pot of tea one evening when a gentleman engaged me in conversation. Usual stuff to start with, where are you from, do you like Iran, what do you think of the government. Then it started getting a little bit too heavy for my tastes. The guy claimed to be an engineer. Hypothetically, he asked, hypothetically, if someone knew the location of a secret nuclear installation and went to the American Embassy in Ankara or Delhi, did I think the American government would help this person and his family get out of Iran and relocate them to the USA? To which my response was "Uh... WHAT?!? I do not want to have this conversation. If we did have this conversation I would say this man is a suicidal fool, the Americans probably know about the site anyway and would fuck him over. Now, I think I have to be going." Wouldn't let me get straight away but insisted on inviting me up to a mountain village for a few days or at least dinner at his house. As they say I made my excuses and left. Kids, never discuss nuclear secrets in a paranoid fucked up theocracy with the occasional tendency to look foreigners up as Israeli spies. It could be a set up (don't laugh, shit like that happens), it could be genuine... which is potentially just as bad! Walk away, just walk away.

A good days cycling

My blog entries may be a little disjointed for a while, decent Internet access is proving to be hard to find, ability to upload photos more so.

I described doing my first hefty climb in Turkey a few weeks back. Since then I've gotten more and more used to mountains to the point where I'm starting to look forward to them. I've not got to the point where I'd go out of my way to find one but when one is on the map it's not something to be avoided

Yesterday I started the day in the town of Abarkuh, some 145km from my next
destination, Yazd, according to my dodgy map. On close scrutiny it seems that the days ride would be divided into three sections. The first would take me from an elevation of 1525m, 60km across a flat desert plane where the mountains began. The second an indeterminate distance up and over the mountains (guesstimated height of 2200 to 2500m) then the last section would drop me down to the city of Yazd, at an elevation of around 1250m. Time was a worry as dusk is around 5:30 here at the moment, and I started around 8:15 so the day would be a race against the clock. The start was not that promising, I had to stop to make minor mechanical adjustments against a dark sky that seemed to promise rain in the hours ahead.

The First Section, getting there
Despite the sky and minutes lost adjusting the bike things started well. A slight downwards slope and a tailwind meant the first 40km sailed by in a couple of hours. The downwards slope turned into a slight gentle rise slowing my speed but allowing me to start to gain some of the height for the mountains. I put on around 1300 feet over the last 20km although my speed dropped to around 10mph. I got to the last village before the mountain, grabbed a can of cola (ah, sugar!) and on to...

The Second Section, the Climb
Time to wax lyrical, sorry.
The road curves up and to my right as it makes it's way into the mountains. I've still a mild tail wind but the gradient is much higher, biting into my speed. As I ascend the drivers I meet are tooting their horns and waving, more so than usual. There's something about watching a fully loaded tourer going up a hill that seems to make people want to lend their support. And you know what? I appreciate it, even though it gets to be an effort to wave back.

It doesn't take too long for my muscles to start aching and odd pains to start shooting through my right calf. I need food and water throughout the climb and whilst the former is easy enough to do on the move the latter is more problematic. I'm well beyond the countries where energy or muesli bars are available and today I'm carrying lavash (thin flat unleavened bread) and feta. Good stuff but I'm going up a bloody mountain and taking a break is the last thing I want to do. If I stop for more than a couple of minutes the lactic acid build up in my muscles comes to the fore and it takes me maybe 10 minutes of slow painful cycling to regain my pace. So food is grabbed quickly maybe three times of the course of the two hour ascent, shoved in the mouth, another piece in hand and off again, all within a minute.

Muscles aching, encouraged by fellow road users I'm sloggin my way up the foothills. Initial speeds of 10mph drop to around 8mph as fatigue takes it toll and gradients increase. Then down to a steady 6, sometimes lower as I slowly wind my way up. As I get higher and it gets progressively harder I start to curse people. Myself, for being an idiot: why the hell am I doing this? Why am I putting myself through it? The road builders! Stupid bloody way to build a road, why not use that valley over there instead? No, truth to tell this seems to be a good road, uphill without no sudden 100 or 200 meter drops to be made up again, making me cycle the same altitude twice. Then I hit a series of undulations that drop me down a few tens of feet with a steep rise afterwards. Four or five hours of constant cycling with 50kg of bike and gear has taken its toll. Fucking incompetent road builders! Why couldn't they level this!?

Cursing, sweating despite the falling temperature wondering why I do THIS SHIT I slowly ascend. I'm checking the altimeter, trying to work out when I'm going to top out. I find it's generally difficult to know when you've reached the high point of a pass until you actually do and today is no exception. The road twists and turns round the peaks. Round this bend and over that rise, surely that must be it... no, just another sodding rise! Why do I do this, I must be mad! The height on the altimeter rises slowly and steadily, while the temperature drops. 7500 feet... 12c... 7500 feet, hmmm, what's that in meters? Divide by 3.3, it's, er, damm, whatever! 7550, 7600 and I'm tyring to signal to oncoming trucks "is this it, is it downhill after this last push?" but it's hard to convey that in the time it takes for them to rush by beeping their horns and waving.

On and up and it's spotting with rain. Finally this must be it, must be. Yes! YES! I've topped out at 8411 feet, which must be, what, 2600 meters or thereabouts. Time to stop, refill the water bottles from one of the big bottles bungied to my rear rack. Pull the fleece on against the cold and rain, 7c now. More bread, cheese.

Now for the pay off! In the time it's taken to stop, refuel and set off again I've come from gruelling I'm-an-idiot to an endorphin and adrenalin fuelled high that you have to experience to believe as I start to fly down the other side. Stunning vistas open up as I hit 30 mph with ease, then 40, then 44... I'm not waving to the ongoing traffic any more, I'm punching the air with sheer body filling joy, I'm high as a kite in more ways than one! THIS is IT! THIS is the pay off for two hours of sheer hard bloody grind, for salt encrusted hair, shirt, trousers, for the pain, THIS is why I do it, I LOVE IT, I LOVE IT, I LOVE IT! FUCK YEAH!

The Third Section, the way down
The descent is on with some 80km (50 miles) to go. I know I'm going to make it well before dusk now. The scenery is stunning with mountains and canyons that wouldn't look out of place in a cowboy film. Except this is Iran. I gradually come down, taking time to pause, take photos and have photos taken of me though goodness knows I must look a right state. Finally I get to the outskirts of Yazd. I've covered the last fifty miles in a little over two and a half hours, cruising between 16 and 26 miles an hour aided by a tail wind and 1400 meters worth of stored kinetic energy. By the time I reach a hotel at 4pm, I've covered 99.86 miles according to my speedometer, not bad, not bad at all.

And relax...

Qazvin to Esfahan... the unthinkable happens

After getting down from Alamut by taxi I then cashed in the last of cycling cred by getting a bus to Esfahan. My visa is getting down to it's last week and as I'm not relying on it to be renewed and given that I want to see more of the country I saved time and miles by bussing it down to Esfahan. Getting the bus itself had it's moments. The first ticket I got was for a 15.15 bus that would get me into Esfahan for 22:30. Bit late to arrive really but then I found another bus company with a 13:00 departure which was far better. I braced myself for a "discussion" over a refund but there was no trouble at all. The guy who sold me the first ticket came with me, explained the bus I wanted and handed over the money. Easy!

Getting the bike actually on the bus wasn't that hard either. Front wheel off, saddle lowered and in it went. Then the driver charged me for it... he started at 150,000 Rial (about 9 pounds) which was two and half times the cost of the ticket! I got him down to 100,000. I say got him down, I mean he snatched it out of my hand and went off with a big grin on his face.

Esfahan is a nice city in the south of Iran. Got some very scenic areas and the usual mad Iranian traffic. Crossing the road is like a game of frogger... top tip, make sure there's an Iranian between you and the traffic. This generally means stand in the middle of a crowd as the traffic comes from every direction! Probably the main tourist focus is the Iman Square, pictured below.



I ended up spending longer than I thought I would in Esfahan, partly because there were a lot of other travellers there, and it was good to talk to them.

Alamut Valley... home of the assassins!

One thing about being in Iran is I'm doing a lot more touristing, because I really want to see more of this place than just a couple of cities and 2000 km of desert! Well, my route was taking me a mere 106 km from the site of the Alamut castle of Hassen-i-Sabbeh, founder of the Hashashin, or assassins as the word has become. Not just Alamut castle but 50 other assassin castles. A mere 100km or so? Looking at the map it seemed like a good morning of cycling over a mountain range then down and into the valley. Call it two days of exploring by bike, maybe get back for the third day. Great.

After a fairly late start, delayed by the usual tea and chat, I set off. And up the mountain I went. My map is fairly large scale and looking at it I judged the mountain to peak at around 6000 feet. Not the 7500 it proved to be. Still, no problem really, just a lot of hard work. The reward was a breath taking view of the valley and a descent down 4500 feet to the 3000 foot level. Then another steep, steep climb. By the time the sun was going down I'd done maybe 60 of those 106 kilometers. Hmm. Yes. He was called the Old Man of the Mountains wasn't he, not the Old Man of the Well Thought Out Gently Rising Cycle Path. I see where I went wrong...

The next day I was up and on the road by 7 AM. Took me four hours to make those 40 kilometers to a village by the name of Ghazor Kahn where the remains of Hassen-i-Sabbeh's castle stood. Again a lot of steep hills. I left my bike and had to walk up the last part. The castle is pretty destroyed and what's left is clad in scaffolding and corregated iron by the archeologists working there, but it's still amazing. This is the view from the top. You can see the village below and the last few kilometers of road.



Had a good old stooge around, a wonderfully atmospheric place. It struck me as a sort of cross between Tintagel in Cornwall and Sigiriya in Sri Lanka. Notice the wall I'm leaning on... trying not to lean too hard as there are some scary drops involved.



One thing I had to do was sit down and listen to Hawkwind a couple of times. Those of you who know what I'm talking about know what I'm talking about. Flashbacks to gigs I'd been to in the 80s. Ah, happy days. On a par to listening to Spinal Tap at Stone 'enge. One last photo from the castle.



After wandering around there for a couple of hours I went back down to the village and picked up a lovely little place to stay for around 3 Euros (I think). The next day though I did the unthinkable. It was going to take me two days to get back to Qazvin where I'd come from and time is running low. I arranged to put the bike in a savari (shared taxi) and thus ended the pure cycling. I had a bloody heaving heart then I can tell you. While I know it's the rational thing to do it just feels so wrong.

Anyway, song for the day... again, youtube is blocked here so I can't vouchsafe for it's quality.