Advertisement
Brake seizure.
Check the skid mark. Heart was going about 200 beats per minute when I finally stopped. Fantastic mountain highway leading out of Shimla: great surface, no traffic, no straight lines in the road. Curve after curve after curve, left, right, left right. Absolute heaven for bikers. Some 30 kilometres later, at Solan, I turned off onto a smaller highway that was still quite good. Later this would turn out to be a mistake.
Outside of a small town called Rajgarh as I was coming down a hill my rear wheel locked up and the bike screeched, laying down a trail of rubber. I thought I was going to fall, but kept it upright until it stopped. I was near the bottom of a valley, in farming country, and saw people ahead of me. A young guy named Yimit came along to help. We took a look at the back brake, which I believe had overheated, although it may have been the piston that overheated and seized inside the cylinder. As the bike cooled it became a bit more mobile again and we rolled it to his family home nearby to tinker a little. After more cooling it seemed okay. They gave me a very nice home-cooked meal and I left.
Through the bottom of the
Help along the way.
I was waiting for the bus to come by when these these two came along. Good Samaritans also live in India. In fact, many Indians are of the greatest help when you really need it. One man told me it was his "moral duty" to help others. valley ran a river and on the other side of a bridge the road became bumpy and full of potholes. Later, it became awful. The scenery was extraordinary, as if to compensate for the bad riding conditions, with steep slopes plunging away far below me. The road now was little more than a stony track high on the mountain, linking one village to another. People up here mostly farm minuscule plots of terraced land. They’re irregular in shape and look like some lava flows where the lava has flowed and cooled, followed by another shorter flow that’s cooled, followed by another yet shorter one, and so on. They’re green, wheat-coloured, or earth-brown and very pleasant to look at.
But I had little time or mind for enjoying this. The bike began to labour and I stopped once to let the overheating engine and rear axle cool. Finally, at a tiny place called Panyali, I stopped for good. Panyali is not even a village. It is three or four buildings on the side of the mountain with a small waterfall and a big, shady tree and I was grateful for both. The water was clear, cold and good to drink so I scooped up handful after handful. It refreshed me, cooling my dry throat while the leafy green tree shaded me well from the hot sun.
Saved by the cell
Presently some kids came along and talked with me for while, the usual curiosity about foreigners and the standard questions about origins, civil status, etc. Then a couple of guys who are engineering students showed up. They’re cousins, grandchildren of the man who’d planted the tree at the waterfall and they had mobile phones. Clearly the bike wasn’t coming off the mountain by its own power, so they called someone from a nearby village and arranged for a truck to come and carry the bike to Nahan, about 50 kilometres away.
When it came, we loaded the bike into the back, tied it down with a long rope and set off. The road continued to be awful for another six kilometres, then improved to the state of potholes and bumps again. The truck averaged 25 km per hour over this execrable surface until we neared Nahan, when it improved, allowing us to roll along quickly.
I wondered why people would live up here, so isolated and decided it must be the tradition of generations coupled with little or no opportunity to choose otherwise, poverty being such a heartless dictator. These communities looked so forlorn to me and life must be hard, wrenching a living from stony soil on steep slopes. The engineering students told me their grandfather and others like him were farmers and goatherds but they don’t want to stay here. Universal education and a bit of determination can be great liberators.
They just never give it a rest
As the sun went down we found a mechanic in Nahan and a hotel. I checked in, had a shower and then went for a meal that included a much-needed, very cold beer. Later I went to see the mechanic. He’d fixed the brake, but told me the clutch plates were old and no good, the gears needed fixing (I knew this) and the piston had a problem. I’d watched the mechanic in McLeod Ganj put in the new clutch plates that I’d been carrying since Goa, so I knew that wasn’t true, and that led me to doubt his statement about the piston. Work so far came to 1,200 rupees. We agreed to fix the gears and pay a total of 2,000 rupees and I left for the night.
The next day the bike was ready and he tried to give me a bill for 3,000. I refused, handed him the 2,000 and rode away. I left unhappy people behind, but I think he was trying to take advantage of me. 1,200 rupees for the first part of the job was already too much.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.195s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 12; qc: 48; dbt: 0.0929s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb