HISTORY

n Cairo I had a 36-hour break between flights, put up in a nice hotel at EgyptAir’s expense. I tried again to get an Indian visa, and failed again. I didn’t go to see the pyramids again, but spent my time seeing the newer and relatively rich suburb of Heliopolis. From there I flew on to Karachi. The airport there wasn’t the tiny concrete box I expected, but a modern plush facility that would’ve fit in well in Europe or North America. I never left it, but simply bought a ticket on to Rawalpindi.

In ’Pindi I immediately felt back in Asia again, surrounded by noise and pollution and humidity. It felt good, surprisingly, after almost a year in Africa. I settled in at a local hotel and collected maps and guidebooks and finally got my Indian visa. When I applied for this in Islamabad they told me the same thing I had heard in Harare; “we have to FAX your country of residence.” However, in Islamabad the official went on to add “but I won’t put Hong Kong: tell me some place in Canada.” So, I put down Vancouver and got my visa easily.
Rawalpindi and Islamabad between them offered quite a bit to see. ’Pindi, the old town, bustled with looping chaotic streets roamed by auto rickshaws and other strange contraptions. Islamabad, the new town, was arranged in an orderly grid with modern buildings. Around town were cool evergreen forests. Islamabad also boasted a huge modern mosque, and not far out of town were the ancient ruins (not well preserved) of Taxila. Entrepreneurs seemed to be everywhere, running efficient restaurants and shops out of ramshackle buildings. Popular western magazines could be bought cheap, and it seemed all of them were trumpeting boom times for Asia. Just reading them made me want to run out and leap headfirst into business, investing and wheeling and dealing. After a few days touring town, I met another cyclist, Martin from England, and we debated which route to take going north. There were three choices; west to Peshawar then north, north directly along the Karakoram Highway or east to Murree and then north. Peshawar took too long for him and the lower KKH looked boring so we headed for Murree. Since the short road there looked easy we decided to take a back route for a little variety, and left Islamabad climbing the Margalla Hills. My maps weren’t very accurate, though, and on the other side the road degenerated to a rough track leaving us in the middle of an unknown valley. We bumbled along, fording streams and dodging mudholes, drinking whatever questionable water we could get as it was quite hot, until finally we found the main highway. At sunset we had just reached the bottom of the final thousand-metre climb up the hill to Murree. Here, unlike in Africa, I had no worries about bandits but we also had no moonlight and there was a real chance of simply riding over the edge of a cliff in the dark, so we rode up in a mining lorry full of gravel.
Murree was a hill station and should have been pleasant but wasn’t really. Instead it was overdeveloped, busy and polluted. We left immediately, heading towards Abbottabad. The hill country farther north was beautiful; ridges crested with evergreens and scenic cliff-hanging villages. People were somewhat reserved, possibly because of our cycling shorts. I knew locals didn’t like shorts and had no desire to offend them but if we wore long trousers we would have collapsed in the heat, or at best managed less than half the daily distance we were doing. I solved this problem by putting on my long trousers any time I got off my bike for more than half an hour, but Martin couldn’t solve it because he had no other clothes with him. Soon after Murree, Martin started to develop stomach problems, and the day after that I also did. We rested a day in Dunga Ghali, a small village looking down two sides of a high hill, with green forest in all directions. Then we set off to Abbottabad and Mansehra. Both these towns seemed noisy and dusty, but the first looked a bit more modern and colonial, whereas the second seemed much older, with narrow winding lanes. After a night looking around town and window-shopping for submachine guns, we turned east and cycled over a couple easy hills into the Kaghan Valley. The lower reaches were easy going on a well-surfaced road which wound up and down steep hillsides in a narrow valley. We stopped for the night at Balakot. The next day continued on much the same, along steep green hillsides until finally we descended to the river and over a flood plain into Naran,
the tourist centre of the valley.We had to stop yet again for a day’s rest. Near the village were many short hikes up various hills and mountains, some showing glaciers. We had no energy for them, though. Then after a day we continued on, winding higher up into the mountains. The valley grew wider and drier, still green but with fewer trees. The road also degenerated, becoming a bumpy and rocky track. Sheep wandered and were herded. That night we paid to sleep in a small, low tent at a seasonal village. The next day we crossed the river a few more times, skirted a small mirror lake and passed a couple villages with hostile residents. Shepherds ran along the hillsides, toting machine guns. Finally the road slanted up from the valley bottom and headed more or less directly to the Babusar Pass. At some 4100 m, this was the highest point on my trip. Getting to it exhausted me. The road was straight but rocky, and I felt the altitude. The top of the pass didn’t offer great monuments, just a small pile of rocks and a couple comfortable places to sit for lunch. Coming down the far side, I met a couple boys who wanted to push my bicycle for me “while I walked ahead.” I declined their offer. (I was told later that this section of road was somewhat bandit-ridden. This was no surprise.) On the north side of the pass, the track wound down from a roughly circular basin, making numerous switchbacks. It eventually reached the bottom of the valley, near a small winding stream. Farther down, the stream became the road and I found myself carrying my bike over impossible boulders through a torrent of water.
We thought the ride downhill would be easy so didn’t bother to top up our water bottles during the next day’s ride. This was a mistake. The road did indeed zoom down the hillside, but as it did so the river dropped farther and farther below the road until at the last minute the road suddenly turned a corner and climbed up again, with no shade and no chance by then to get more water. Nevertheless, we did make it the last few kilometres into town, then had lunch and rode down the very last hill to the Indus, stopping in a small town called Chilas. The valley near there had a lot of rock carvings left by pilgrims on the Buddhist trail a couple thousand years ago. The setting was dramatic, but even at sunset the heat oppressed and this suggested the daytime heat would be unbearable.
Martin took a bus on the next day while I cycled, sharing the road with an Austrian bicycle tour. All of us started at sunrise and it did, as expected, get very hot very quickly. Both sides of the valley consisted of dark rock which soaked up the sunlight, and there was little shade anywhere. We escaped the worst part by ten am. At Raikot Bridge the tour left on a different road for Skardu, while I pushed north towards Gilgit. On the other side of Raikot Bridge I had to mount a giant pile of rock, the remains of an avalanche from over a hundred years ago. This had apparently completely blocked the Indus, making a giant lake until the natural dam had burst years later and destroyed every village for a couple hundred kilometres downriver.
The other side of this scree pile was still hard cycling, with next to no shade and even closer to no water. It did provide a nice view of Nanga Parbat and the sight of all the ice on that 6000 m high wall did help me along. About here I met Tony Brooks, an English cyclist riding to the Bering Straits. He had come up the same way I did but folded the back wheel of his bike around a tree back at the Babusar Pass. This was causing him some difficulty.
Farther north I reached a geologic wonder; the meeting point of the Himalaya, Karakoram and Hindu Kush. The three mountain ranges sat on different tectonic plates which moved against each other, and one could easily see the difference between the different kinds of rock in each. Still, that didn’t compare to the sign I saw farther down the road; “Ambush Site - 200 m.” It made me stop and think but turned out to be just a historical marker. Gilgit was the Pakistani equivalent of Kampala, full of backpackers and tourists, many of them on bicycles. Giardia hit me again here so I took my Flagyl again and again had a break of a few days to look around town. Gilgit sits in a broad flat valley bottom, with a typical mixture of old stone and new concrete buildings. It’s a crossroads town, at the confluence of two branches of the Indus with roads going west, north and south.
After recovering somewhat from this latest illness, I rode up to Hunza and on to Passu and Gulmit. The bottom of the valley there was higher than the top of the Col d’Aubisque, the first pass I had traversed with such a feeling of satisfaction a year earlier in France. The peaks of the Karakoram were higher still, of course, some standing over 7000 m tall. I found it hard to appreciate the scale of them. Next to me were peaks roughly twice as high as the Rocky Mountains. While they certainly looked dramatic, they somehow didn’t seem loftier than any other mountains. One noticeable effect of them was near- constant shade in the valley bottom. It got quite cool there and in several places glaciers reached the road.
Passu didn’t provide much for facilities but it did have enough good food to eat and no end of places to go hiking. Unlike some other parts of Pakistan there was also little chance of wandering into the wrong valley and getting shot by bandits. I stretched my stay there as long as my cash would allow, tramping up hills and cycling off on various roads and paths, crawling like a spider over dubious cable bridges across the river. Heading south again, I stopped in Hunza. Giardia struck me yet again and so I took my Flagyl yet again, but when I got that under control I hiked on one of the numerous trails around town and climbed up over a thousand metres for spectacular views. If you start very early and climb quickly, and don’t lose the trail as I did, it is possible to climb all the way to the top of a local peak and see K2 in the distance, on a good day.
Hunza has cultural attractions as well; Baltit and Altit forts occupied perches high on rock outcroppings. The local people, Ismailis, were friendlier than in many other parts of Pakistan so that it was easy to pass an afternoon just walking around and meeting people. They lived on a vegetarian diet, owing to the difficulty of raising animals for food in that harsh environment, and had developed a characteristic cuisine which was quite tasty even to a carnivore like me.
From Hunza back to Gilgit was a pretty easy day despite signs that my particular strain of giardia was fighting off Flagyl again. In Gilgit I wanted to continue to Chitral but the bicycle trip would take at least 6-8 days and possibly longer allowing time for rest due to illness. That stretched my visa time a little too much so I opted to hire a jeep, shared with an American couple.
As with the Tambacounda-Bamako road months before, I wished I’d had the time to cycle here as it was beautiful and the road good, or at least good enough for a mountain bike. The jeep ride still let me admire the scenery, anyway. The rocky hills reminded me quite a bit of my home in southern Alberta.
Halfway along the trip we had a social problem. The American man in our trio had loaned his coat to our driver and later discovered his sunglasses missing from the coat pocket. Immediately he accused the driver of stealing them. The driver responded with indignant queries as to why he would do such a thing, and I tended to side with him, suspecting our American friend had forgotten them in the hotel the night before. If he knew his sunglasses were in the coat pocket that morning, why hadn’t he taken them out? Not wishing to fuel this fire, I ignored it. It was just one more incident where a sprouting bit of cross-culture friendship disappeared at the first possibility for suspicion. 
The last part of the drive was a bit more exciting than we liked as the driver had started guzzling wine along the route, but we arrived safe and sound in Chitral. Before I moved on I went and got some Fasigyn to cure my giardia forever (or so I thought). While it took effect I cycled up the Kalash Valleys, a non-Muslim area on the border with Afghanistan and the setting for Kipling’s story “The Man Who Would Be King.” The valley I visited didn’t match the drama of the story. It was scenic and the people were friendly, but I noticed their overwhelming poverty and lack of facilities most. They lacked clean water, power and basic sanitation. The rooms I stayed in were infested with fleas and bedbugs.
My next day riding south was both one of the most interesting and one of the most demanding I ever rode. It got off to a bad start with a sleepless night due to bedbug attacks, and continued bad with one of my water bottle cages falling apart on the road. I started up the Lowari Pass, a steep climb, but didn’t have the energy to do it so I hitched a ride on a truck. The truck stopped rather too often for me and when I reached the last part of the pass, forty-four switchbacks going straight up the side of a mountain, I got off and started pushing my bike again. On the way up other people offered me rides as well. The police had machine-gun posts every couple kilometres along the road and I got the impression this was not a very safe area. On one side of the pass was Afghanistan and on the other side Kohistan, an area of Pakistan famous for bandits. The police confirmed my impression of unsafety, and strongly recommended I get off the road before dark even if it meant camping with them. On the other side of the pass I found two particularly chatty officers who told me the whole story. Apparently gangs of Afghan “mohajirs,” by which I guessed they meant refugees, had taken to shooting drivers and running off with their cargo. I stayed with those two policemen till sunset, when they found me a ride in a convoy into Dir town.
Dir district was positively schizoid. As I continued my ride south the next day I alternately met people actively hostile to me and very friendly people who warned me to be suspicious of everyone else. In every village boys threw stones (stone-throwing was relatively common in Pakistan, but in Dir it was constant). At one point on the road I passed two boys carrying a big washtub. When a rock whizzed by my ear a few seconds later I knew I had them. Wheeling quickly, I chased them down on my bicycle with the expected response: they dropped their tub and ran off. I picked up the tub, waved it up and down over my head a few times while making a wild Tarzan-like yell, then threw it as far down the hillside as I could.
After this most satisfying bit of revenge I was wary of big brothers coming after me. Indeed, two drivers tried to hit me on the road but I don’t know if there was any connection. By the end of the day I had lost all interest in cycling there, so I happily accepted another ride, on a truckload of potatoes south over the hills, then ended my day with a beautiful moonlight ride into Mardan.
From Mardan back to Islamabad I didn’t have a huge range of choices. There were plenty of roads south but I didn’t want to cycle on them. Going east I could try back roads, which all looked unprofitable, or the Grand Trunk Road. One sight of the latter convinced me not to cycle on it so I had yet another truck ride back to Rawalpindi.
Almost done in Pakistan, I rested up a week and lazed there reading cheap books and eating fast food again. Finally I got up and headed off to Lahore. The most direct way out of town was along the Grand Trunk Road again, which I envisioned as being busier than a salmon run. Still, it would save me quite a bit of time so I planned to ride a bit on it and then turn off. To my surprise that section of the big road was good cycling. The government was converting it to dual carriageway and I often had one whole half of the highway to myself. Other times I could ride on broad shoulders. Under those conditions I rode my second longest day ever, 166 km, then followed it with another 125 km and made Lahore in two days.
Lahore had lots of sights and lots of good food but was too crowded and polluted for me, and I ran into a lot of people I didn’t like. I left for the border on a canal road. As I wandered out of town, the traffic volume dropped off sharply. I found myself on a tree-lined country lane, and after a couple sharp turns arrived at a quiet little border post. The Indian side sat on the other side of a small clearing, and sported a much bigger and more officious immigration hall. The greedy and corrupt officials there were a bit annoying, but I managed to get througn them quickly with a bit of stubborn persistence at the right times (for example, refusing to sit down in a corner when they asked me). I was lucky in this as well; while I was waiting a much bigger fish arrived, a German man in a caravan. I heard later they kept him all day while searching his vehicle and checking every possible opening for problems and bribe opportunities.
From the border, the road went straight as an arrow to Amritsar, lined with occasional trees on each side. Amritsar was smaller than Lahore, and different in some insubstantial way. It seemed to bustle more, with more neon signs and noisy traffic, and looked slightly newer. A busy highway slanted through one side of the city, running north to Kashmir and south to Delhi. Greenery within the city seemed hard to find. Amritsar’s point of fame is the Golden temple of the Sikhs, which occupied a huge site with a deceptively small front door at the end of a trail of windy lanes. I went through the rituals upon entering, then followed the crowds around the temple. The central sanctuary was being renovated at the time I visited, so bamboo scaffolding obscured much of the famous gold work.
It was an interesting sight, but I wanted to get back up in the hills. After a day or two, I got on my bike and rode off again, heading north. I quickly abandoned the busy and narrow main highway for a quite enjoyable canal path, emerging at a small junction town named Pathankot, which offered a cheap and uncomfortable concrete room in a hotel. From there I began the climb up into the hills. The environment improved immediately, becoming quieter and more green. I wandered over hills which grew gradually higher and steeper, finally working my way up to the lower reaches of Dharamsala.
I had intended to stay a few days in Dharamsala but actually stayed over two weeks. First, I had giardia again and determined to stamp out all my parasite problems once and for all. In order I used the last of my Flagyl, then bought and took a full course of Fasigyn on top of that, and for good measure de-wormed myself as well. That took a week. Then I spent another week people-watching and doing a bit of hill walking. McCleod Ganj, the upper part of Dharamsala, had collected a fascinating group of people; a mix of Indians, Tibetans (the most famous of which was Dalai Lama), foreign tourists and foreigners on exotic spiritual quests. This meant that I could always find somebody interesting to listen to or talk to. There I met again the old Spanish man who had spent his days weeping and wailing in my Beijing dormitory in 1992, and numerous new acquaintances.

There were also monkeys running wild over the rooftops, fighting and stealing. The Tibetans pelted them with rocks while the Indians tolerated them. I came to agree with the Tibetans, after having to fight off the monkeys a few times myself. From a distance the monkeys were great fun to watch, but up close many species of them were less pleasant. They seemed to share some of the worst characteristics of humans, including greed and the capability for senseless violence against each other.
When I finally left Dharamsala I was sorry to do so and found little reason to change my mind later in India. The ride to Shimla took a couple pleasant days through canyons and hill country. One night I stopped along the way in a little roadside hotel deep in a canyon. The place was busy with businessmen coming and going. Two of them offered to buy me a drink. I accepted, expecting a beer, but instead they poured me three fingers of Scotch. It was good stuff and made my cold shower that night more bearable. The road was generally enjoyable, until the actual climb to Shimla at the end of it. This was my most dangerous ride ever, a one-lane winding mountain road with heavy traffic in both directions. I opted not to ride and got on a bus, which was marginally safer (a few days after I left India, a bus on the same route rolled over the side of that road killing many people). Shimla itself didn’t compare to Dharamsala. It was pleasant enough and had a few left-over glories of the Raj, but was too built-up and busy for my taste. On a hill above town stood a temple of Hanuman, the monkey god, and the monkeys near it had grown quite arrogant. Two of them mugged me on my way up the hill, grabbing the paper bag I carried and running off with it. I enjoyed the look on their faces when they discovered the bag held firecrackers instead of peanuts.
Continuing south to Uttar Pradesh, the road continued on through the Himalayan foothills. Near Shimla, one entire hilltop had been flattened and used to build an airport runway. A bit farther down the road, I saw a small brush fire on a hillside. Ordinary motorists stopped their cars and ran up the hill to put it out. The road tossed up numerous small hillside restaurants and hotels to eat at, and that night I passed Diwali in one such hotel in a small town. Local people celebrated with lots of fireworks and a fair bit of alcohol. At Dehra Dun I stopped a couple nights and made a side-trip to Delhi to collect mail. Dehra Dun was less than pleasant, topping the list of noisy, crowded and dusty cities I had stayed in so far. Delhi itself seemed quite calm and orderly in comparison. On the bus ride back a pervert sat down next to me and kept trying to stick his hand in my crotch all night.
From Dehra Dun, I ascended hills again and cycled up to Mussoorie. Although not as nice as Dharamsala, this was a big improvement over Shimla. Mussoorie stretched along the line of a high ridge, wandering off a bit over connected hills and down to valleys. I enjoyed it enough to stay a week, catching up on mail and making further travel arrangements. However, it was November and winter was coming, and finally the cold forced me down the hill again.
Next I settled in Rishikesh, an easy one-day cycle ride from Mussoorie. I also enjoyed this town, despite its filth. The area around Rishikesh is a top Hindu pilgrimage site, so an endless stream of people passed through. These included not only Indians but foreigners as well. To obey religious rules, the diet there was strictly vegetarian. They managed to vary it quite a bit anyway, enough to interest food tourists like me. Sacred cows wandered the streets freely, drinking from the public fountains when it suited them. They seemed to be welcome almost anywhere, although I did see one man shooing a cow that tried to walk into his house. Rishikesh had considerable natural attractions as well, sitting at the base of the Himalayan foothills with roads running off in all direction through scenic hill country. There was considerable wildlife, including monkeys. The forests housed both mild-mannered Langurs and the aggressive Rhesus monkeys which had mugged me in Shimla and harassed me everywhere.

’d enjoyed the Indian hill country, and knew there were lots of other interesting places to visit farther south, but I wasn’t looking forward to getting there. Nevertheless, after a couple weeks in Rishikesh I worked up the enthusiasm to ride across the plains to Rajasthan, on the other side of Delhi. This doesn’t, however, mean I actually did it. The road was busy and accidents were frequent but my backup plan of riding on canal paths didn’t work because there were none I could easily ride on. When I reached Meerut, I thought of staying there and ducking in to Delhi for business again but it seemed impractical so I cycled right into Delhi. This last ride was so harrowing that once I had arrived I decided I would rather leave India than cycle out of Delhi again. Thus, for a week or two I saw some of the sights of Delhi, none of which impressed me, and ate my fill of good food. Then, just before Christmas, I flew out to Kuala Lumpur.
I had ideas about visiting some places in Malaysia and Indonesia but quickly abandoned them. It was the height of the rainy season when I arrived, making all but the west coast of Malaysia bad for cycling, and the west coast I knew already. There were other possibilities, but nothing inspired much enthusiasm in me. At that point I admitted I simply didn’t want to travel on any more. Even early on in India I had, in my mind, finished my “survey”: I had a good enough idea of what all these parts of Africa and Asia were like, and without trying I had made the mental leap of moving on to more concrete plans. I wanted to set myself up permanently living and working overseas, and after a short holiday goofing off in Malaysia, I came back to Hong Kong to do that.