Before leaving Kathmandu for the last time, I went by bus to Damak, in the east of Nepal, to visit a friend who lives in a Bhutanese refugee camp. The Nepali speaking Bhutanese were removed from the country in order to keep it ethnically coherent, in the view of the ruling monarchy, and a lot of people have lived for almost 20 years in the camps, without a country to call their home. My friend Geeta will move to the US with her mum and sisters, so life is going to change radically for them.
The east seemed very different to me. It was flat and the shroud of early morning mist that caressed the fields and trees gave way to potent midday heat. People seemed subdued, but since bandha were becoming frequent, it was not so easy for people to get around, due to the roadblocks. Nepalis take the dysfunctionality of their country with good-natured stoicism, but get annoyed like anyone else when it gets too much. The journey back to Kathmandu was interrupted 3 times by bandha, the first due to the death of a lorry driver. 3 hours after leaving Damak we halted, along with a train of vehicles 13 kilometres ahead of us. Behind us all the traffic from the east to central Nepal was stationary. It was 17 hours before we moved the following evening, but after a further 3 hours we were stopped again. I slept outside a house and was savaged by mosquitoes then eventually we were again underway. The next day a final 2 hour roadblock ,called to force the police to find the murderer of a man from Hetauda, marked the end of the journey up to the Kathmandu valley and from then on it was plain sailing into town. The bus driver was great, never tiring and handling his fully-laden bus on the road with dexterity and judiciousness day and night, when the roads are especially dangerous. Not to mention when hundreds of vehicles have been delayed for hours, and the drivers' patience worn thin to the extreme. Death is always near when buses overtake one another in Nepal.
At one in the afternoon I was back in the Moon Stay Guest House and met the fire jugglers, whose kindness and warmth (pardon the pun) had cheered me up since I arrived in Freak Street in a state of disillusionment. They told me that Oshan had left two hours before. He had been waiting for me to return from the East to cycle together towards the West and the rainbow gathering in India. Oshan, an extraordinary young man from England, was travelling the same way by means of a newly-purchased one-speed Indian bicycle. I had known him for a couple of weeks, but before our meeting I had seen him wandering around Thamel barefoot, his large, friendly brown eyes and smile open to everyone he passed. I had been struck by that calm and peaceful expression and known it in myself in the past, but it had gone and I felt more closed to people. When we met again some days later, again by chance, we were both surprised to learn that both our mothers were Persian. Oshan left England for India with a guitar, a jacket, his grandfathers checked shirt and a bivvy bag. After surviving in Barcelona by playing guitar and singing on the street, and in Istanbul working in a chai shop, he had reached Iran to meet his family before pushing on to Pakistan and India, and the traveller's hub of Goa. Now he was in Nepal to renew his Indian visa and head overland back to the UK through Iran. Despite his torn clothes and ragged dreadlocks, his disarming manner and sharp wit charmed and entertained all that he met. A clown like me, I thought to myself. But beneath the jovial and tolerant exterior I could sense something deeper, something noble, and something else like the mystery of many generations of people. It was not clear, but meeting Oshan and the fire jugglers was good for me. They were good people and I was really glad.
And so finally after all the delays and frustration, after going to Europe almost a year ago, I brought my stuff down to the street and loaded the bike. Four panniers, a rack bag, roll mat and my chinese violin turned the sleek, silver steed into an ungainly, heavy thing like a cow, but it was time to go and so I set off to cycle back to England, weaving and straining as I pedalled out of Kathmandu. The traffic and air was bad and my frustration almost overwhelming as my chain fouled between cassette and spokes on the way out of the valley. Not even 10 Km and I was stuck. I had to unload everything and adjust the gears properly, before I could continue, while a group of four boys looked on. Then the long downhill out of the Kathmandu valley lifted my spirits, and I was exhiliarated to think that now I had no home, and that everything I needed to live was on the bike. I could go wherever I wished. I wanted to see my friends from Freak Street, so I resolved to get to the rainbow gathering in the mountains of North India. It was a 700km ride to the border which seemed like a long way. The first night I stayed with my friends, a brahmin family selling fruit near the bridge at Malekhu that I met a year before. In the morning I set off and realised the enormity of the task ahead. Not just 700km, but 7000 or more. I felt as if it were too much, to sit on a bike and suffer for thousands of hours or days. And then I rode, it was all I could do.
Riding, riding. Riding fast downhill, very slowly uphill and bit by bit the freedom came to surround me, though I fought it. Fought with the idea that I was going somewhere, anywhere, or nowhere. My mind calmed and my body suffered as I gained fitness day by day. Inside me echoed a thousand doubts a day, each hill climbed was a small victory, each squeak and rattle from the bike, a potential disaster. I rode, stopped to fix things, to eat and talk with people and take water and sleep. The landscape swallowed me, the woods and rivers watched me and I was silent.
In 2 weeks I passed like a snail through over half the length of Nepal and arrived in India at the Western border. There were more Bandha and the roads were for the most part deserted. A few lorries and buses were allowed to pass, some with armed police escorts, but for hours I would ride alone. After waking and packing up my camp site I set off while the air was still cool. The landscape scrolls as hills creep slowly past and I approach and draw away from rivers, villages and tracts of flat, forested land. Exhausted, I stop in silent places where people rarely sit. I feel alone and in various states of discomfort and mental focus. During each day my being modulates between tension and relaxation, mood changing, character and personality shifting. I come to know myself in a different way. Disconnected from group and society, I drift through peoples lives, their mornings and evenings. It becomes difficult to be so isolated and my temper wears thin. After the first hundred bicycles that draw level to assault me with a barrage of questions while almost tangling with my bike and bringing us to the ground, I become more silent, feeling almost violated to be simply asked where I come from, what my parents names are and how much money I earn. It is of course absurd, to be so sensitive, but day after day and hour after hour with nowhere to hide, it becomes irritating. Especially when one is down, body and mind tired, stomach empty, legs weak and the road to India long and unridden. Other days I give my attention and love and share my music and conversation, strange and exotic gifts from an alien on two wheels, and then I experience the beauty of being in the world with no walls to divide me from anyone.
One day I rode out of a brahmin village near Bardia national park, just as it was getting dark. I had some popped rice and milk powder and was looking forward to eating rice krispies in the tent. Crossing a bridge I saw a dense forest and rode into it and down, over a dry river bed and into a beautiful grove of tall trees. The mosquitoes flocked to me, but soon I had the tent up and was locking my bike to it when a group of people approached from the village deeper in the forest. Returning home with firewood, they urged me to come with them, since the tigers would come in the night. I expressed my scepticism; after all we were near a main road and it was only old or infirm tigers that took people. At least I thought so. In any case I decided to ignore their advice and try to see the forest as a friendly place, that could do me no harm. They left and then came back again after an hour to try to persuade me once more, but I wouldn't listen. I settled down, listened to the world service on my short-wave radio, and ate the popped rice. It was hot, but eventually I slept. Then in the night I awoke with a start, in a night terror. I felt as though something was crushing the tent from outside and that I would perish, but as my senses came to me I realised that I was panicking for no reason at all, wailing 'Oh!' at the top of my voice. A small, kind, old truck driver happened to be in the vicinity and he rushed to my aid, perhaps thinking that a tiger was mauling someone in the forest, but I was able to reassure him that I had only dreamed of tigers and that I was quite alright. Whatever the fear was, I had it in Tibet in the tent, and a great deal in my childhood. The next day the villagers thought it was really funny.
After 2 weeks I was strong and on the final day before I reached the village near the rainbow gathering, I powered up a thousand metres from Kathgodam to Nainital. I was hardly tired when I reached the top and the descent that followed was fantastic. Leaning the loaded bike as I sped round the mountains' folds and bends in the road, I overtook cars and then checked myself, lest I overstep the line and crash. Having counted down the 700km to the border with India, the last ten were the hardest, a strained 8km up to the small village, from where it would be an hours walk through the forest and up into a fold high above. I rested and chatted to people who were leaving the gathering after two weeks living there and then, as if on cue, a jeep arrived from the village down by the river. It was Oshan, returning from a shopping trip down the mountain. After 2 weeks I was again with a friend after the loneliness of the road. I had lived and breathed the road, slept in temples and woods, and by a beautiful river where the insects sang haunting music during the night. Exhiliaration, desperation, silence and the screaming tempests of the mind had shaken me. I had fasted from a world I knew and that comforted me, I had cleansed my self and embraced the unknown. But in a matter of hours everything was to change.
In the morning we walked up to the rainbow gathering. In a tiny, wooded valley with a small stream, were living over a hundred people from all over the world. Sleeping in tents and under tarpaulins and the forest canopy and stars, the murmuring stream and rude frog calls lulling all into their dreams. Eating together in a food circle, people live as brothers and sisters, sharing everything, their time, their food and their skills. From Korea, Chile, Italy, Brazil, India, Canada, from all countries, people came to the mountains in India to share what is common to all people and also what is not. Jugglers, musicians, artists, IT specialists, earth-wandering travellers, roaming by foot, by bicycle, with horses and trains and cars. In the blink of an eye I was suddenly immersed in a river of loving, kind people, wise people, practised masters of their lives. Young and old. And after the trials of the journey and the solitude, life brought me this sweet gift, a place where loving kindness would catch you if you fell. And after the difficulties of exactly a year, this gift could not have been more timely. The freedom to express oneself, and be heard with compassion was afforded to all, and all the sadness I had carried, the cynicism born out of pain, flowed out of me as I and dozens of others spoke and listened to one another. I will never forget the moment when after speaking of this human suffering, I broke down and wept, but instead of a deserted and windblown river bed of rounded stones as an audience, with birds and insects and a thousand years of tears flowing in an eternal cycle, there were rainbow brothers and sisters who took me in their arms, each taking a little part of the pain, until I felt as though I had been healed. The agony after loved ones turned away was transformed into love for them and for all, pure and simple. And so I worked as hard as I could for my family, to be there to help the weak, to give energy and inspiration to the tired, to carry the burden that we all must bear, the same weight. Eszter and peter, Gerry and Marta, Alex and Janaki, Oleg and Hanna, Anna and Alessio, Rotem and Tim, Chile brother, Wood brother, Chai brother, Swiss and French brothers and sisters and all the deeply beautiful souls of light, I love you with all my heart. For a couple of weeks this was life, this community.
The rainbow gathering started 40 years ago in the US when a group of hippies decided to start gathering in nature, with an ethic of tolerance and inclusiveness with some basic ways inspired by native american traditions. Anyone is welcome to come and live in the gathering, which costs nothing more than what a person can give of him or herself. A model, perhaps, of how life could be if we would all share. It is an education in how to live in the forest, how to minimise one's impact on the environment while doing so; an education in yoga and meditation, languages and customs, psychology and physical health, spirituality, music, and various arts and crafts; in forgiving oneself and others, in accepting reality, in finding a glimpse of the eternal, the great oneness of which we all are part, perhaps. Namaste, rainbow brothers and sisters everywhere!
After we left, Oshan and I cycled towards Rishikesh, where the Ganges, or Ganga as it is called here, winds its way out of the mountains onto the roasting plains. It was a tough cycle, since we had lost weight in the forest, and when we were faced with a long climb, Oshan with only one gear at his disposal, we decided to go back to Ramnagar and over to Haridwar, one of the seven sacred cities of the Hindus. We slept behind a petrol station in a nice garden and the next day cycled to Rishikesh. To our delight, most of the people from the gathering were there, many of whom I had expected perhaps not to see for a while. It was a nice surprise.
236km away from Rishikesh is the source of the Ganga, at Gangotri. Thirty years or so ago the river was crystal clear, but since the population upstream has grown and the Tehri dam built to provide hydroelectric power, it has taken on a pea-greeny brown hue. But it is clean enough to swim in. Rishikesh is the Ganga and the Ganga, Rishikesh. This I realised soon after I arrived and swam for the first time in the cool, sweet water. And for these 3 weeks I swam daily, washing away my past. At sunset the light dances on the currents and whorls on the surface, and people sit entranced, just staring at the water as if it was fire or television. Indeed the river has a presence that is not easy to explain. It seems as if a silent noise emanates from its depths, a vibration that seduces the mind from its many twists and turns to align it in a simple plane, that of the timeless flow of water from mountain to sea. To sit on the banks and touch the cloudy water than will one day reach Bangladesh, is awesome. And yet I keep telling myself that it is only a river. It looks, sounds and feels like a river. But no river I have ever seen holds so many millions of people in its grip. Their devotion seems to have infused it with lifetimes of energy. But that energy is also deadly, and every year a handful of hapless bathers are sucked in and killed in the Ganga at Rishikesh. It is treacherous for those who cannot swim, fast-flowing and deep. As if to push the point home, one day while we were at breakfast overlooking the river, a body floated past. It was a young man who had been lost some days before, stuck in the river bed. He popped up and came past that morning and it was a great shock to watch while struggling inside oneself, not knowing if he was recently dead or not, if he might have been saved. I was disturbed, but after we found out that he had been dead for 3 days, it was easier to accept.
And so here we live, in a reddish coloured, crumbling guest house that was once an ashram. Travellers come and go and talk about leaving, but rarely do so. I should leave soon and get moving towards Pakistan, but India seems to be trying to tell me something, and I am still not sure what it is. Sometimes I think it must be music that is calling me, to stay and learn to play violin with tabla and sitar. Perhaps live near the holy mountains. I am not sure. For now it is enough to take each day and make something beautiful from it, while learning as I do so. I practised a little yoga, at least the physical aspect of it, and spent time trying to understand what is going on here from the perspective of the thousands of pilgrims who visit. 'Hinduism', if I may call it that, is not easy to understand, but I am trying. I am currently working out what a lingam really is. In a couple of days we will ride towards Manali and Dharamsala, up into the mountains to escape the heat. And then I would like to cycle from Manali to Leh.
More from me in a while!
Namaste.
