Put on the helmet, get on the bike, drive into the honking
traffic, and everything changes. You are no longer an onlooker; you are just
another ant on the huge chaotic hill.
We rented our bike in Jaipur Rajasthan for 250 RS a day ($7)
and rode into the desert. Neither of us had ever ridden a motorcycle and the
busy streets of India required a steep learning curve. From Jaipur we took our
small 135 cc Kinetic Velocity motorcycle and our burlap bags west to city of Ajmer and
then onto Jodhpur dodging ox and praying all the way.
In Jodhpur we climbed the bike up a hill to a huge fort
overlooking the city and were rewarded with a magic-eye type view over looking
the Blue City. From our vantage point all of the roads seemed to be missing.
The streets in Jodhpur are about half the size of our alleys and full of cows, pigs,
rickshaws, kids on bikes, donkeys, garbage, motorcycles, and vendors of every
type. These major two-way streets the size of sidewalks filled with almost
humorous obstacles made for tricky driving for novices. At one point our front
tire slipped out from under us on a pile of donkey shit as we skidded to a stop
shoulder to shoulder with kids on bikes and three wheeled rickshaws. The scenes
we saw would have put any Where’s Waldo drawing to shame. To this day Jodhpur
is still the craziest city I have ever witnessed.
From the
Blue City we got and early start and headed into the desert toward Jaisalmer
and the Pakistani boarder. Mornings were cold and frequent stops for hot cups
of sweet milky chai slowed progress, but when you have nowhere to be it was
never a hard decision. After almost 300km of desert and military caravans we
drove into the city famous for its sand dunes. We spent 5 days in Jaisalmer exploring
and attempting to make it to the Pakistani boarder. We had been told that a few
km past the sand dunes we would be stopped by the military, our passports would
be checked and we would be sent back. Sound just like our cup of tea. We made
it almost 50km past where they said we would and when we finally did run into a
military outpost instead of checking our passports we sat down with two heavily
armed officers and a drug/women smuggling Pakistani that had been arrested and
was working as their cook. The Pakistani made us all hot cups of chai and we
had a nice but broken conversation with the guards. We had made it within 50km
of the Pakistani boarder. On the drive home we gave the smuggler a lift to the
next village a few miles down the road to pick up supplies.
On our return journey we drove through Barmer, Abu Road, and
Udaipur. By the time we were diving back into the city of Ajmer our bike, full
of sand, but grinded its way to within a few 100 meters of a mechanic before
completely dyeing. After getting the bike fixed we finished our six city,
2244km motorcycle adventure. We had driven through towns full of marble dust,
colorful people, unfairly skinny dogs, and overloaded camels equally strange as
some desert planet from Star Wars. We had seen a way of life so vastly
different from our own all we could do was laugh in bewilderment. More than
once we bumped through villages where probably 90% of their population was just
sitting together by the road talking. In most cities we saw huge cows devour
the daily newspapers as if it was the green grass in a Wyoming hay field.
Rajasthan was a place so strange to us we thought we would
never figure it out, but by the end of our 17 day trip we were honking, eating,
and bargaining like pros. After our adventure we took a train up to see the Taj
Majal before making it to our final destination of Delhi. We are here now in
this huge city eating full meals for two for a $1.00 and preparing to both fly
back to different, but both highly sophisticated parts of the world.
The inefficiencies of Indian construction. This man did this for a solid half hour.
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