The Motorcycle Dairies

I don’t think it’s any news by now that I have a rather unhealthy fascination with motorcycles. And with dairy products. This is the post that acknowledges the merits of both items even though there’s really no connection between the two. I could tell you how fabulous it is to have an ample bite of cheese while riding a motorcycle but I haven’t tried it yet. Now, that I mentioned it…

Anyway…

Yak cheese in the mountains was a big part of my diet. And things didn’t change so much when I arrived back to the dusty civilisation of Kathmandu. If cheese is less available, there will be milk and milky products at every meal, even if the meal consists solely of milk coffee or, sometimes, when my brain fails to consult my culinary tastes, milk tea. There is no dairy-less day in my life.

On the other hand, there are the bikes. Motorbikes, of course. I wouldn’t be caught dead on a bicycle even if it represented my only means of salvation from a city on fire; I would prefer to walk and swelter to the rhythm of my ambulatory legs than to cycle around Nepal on dirt roads and under a baking sun. So I decided that motorbikes are the way to go. And, given that the opportunity arose not necessarily uninvited, I chose to look around Kathmandu for a bike to rent and take out to dinner for the next couple of weeks. I was rather overwhelmed by the multitude of choices for motorbike rentals which gave me quite a hard time deciding which one to pick and I went with the obvious decision: the biggest one available. Which was no bigger than 160cc but big enough for my personal goals.

Presenting the Honda Hero CBZ, currently my best friend

It meant I wouldn’t have to worry about bus stations and timetables, which suited me just fine and, having also received a very inflexible bungee cord to tie my bag with, I triumphantly jumped on and… stopped to look around. I was in the middle of Thamel, with motorcycles, bikes, rickshaws and people going about their business in all directions imaginable and my destination would simply be – with a stroke of luck – out of Kathmandu. So I sheepishly turned around and asked for directions (‘go straight and then turn left and then go until you’re out of the city’) and, having a vague idea about the general direction I had to go to, started driving for the first time in Nepal. The first ‘straight’ proved to be a series of small, tortuous alleys, the ‘turn left’ was a big junction where about three different very big roads went left, and the ‘go until’ was the rest of a city inhabited by about a million people.

It only took me about an hour to get to the outskirts of Kathmandu and only half as much to find a gas station that actually sold some petrol and, when I proudly declared I would like a full tank, the gas station people burst out laughing and told me it’s impossible and I could only get 500 rupees worth of fuel (that’s around 4 litres).

But it was enough to get me started and I pompously (and somewhat panicky) rolled up and down the first mountain and stumbled upon the first bit of Nepali road-engineering technology: half of the so-called Prithvy Highway did, indeed have some tarmac but the other half was just dust, rocks and gravel, strategically placed so that the people on the side (if there were any) would get an incessant vigorous laugh if their eyes were to meet a bouncy person and a springy bag on top of a bike that sprayed some brake fluid on the already sweaty, grimy driver. That would be me. Fortunately, there were no people around, so the only ones that got the best out of my appalling situation were the various truck drivers that curiously peeked out of their windows to get a better view of this intriguing apparition.

Twenty kilometres later, the road morphed into a beautifully winding way along a river and my reservations withdrew to mild anxiety attacks every time a truck, bus or car honked and came too close. I like to think of it as escaping death, let’s say, about 8 times, as vehicles from the opposite direction decided I represented no obstacle for their overtaking anything in their way while I was trying to steer my bike on the same road. So they basically drove me off the motorway and I behaved just like a frightened chicken each time. But it worked and my appointment with the heavenly world has been postponed.