India: Kinnaur

It was a single meeting, preceded only by a slightly delirious 3 a.m. post-flip-cup chat in which cycle touring was somehow mentioned, a meeting never repeated, common enough in Nairobi, where the world comes together and disperses like animals at a watering hole. Seated in one of the dark wood-paneled booths of Nairobi’s Artcaffe, underneath gentle evening lighting, two scarf-ensconced individuals created images in words – of a solo cyclist camped on a remote slope in the mountains of Central Asia, waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of tiny stones pinging off his tent poles and stakes, hesitantly unzipping the door and scanning the area with his lamp but finding nothing, returning to a fitful sleep, then waking up in the morning to discover a herdsman sitting just outside…of the thick red mud in southern Guinea that packed itself between brake pads and tire rims and brought the bicycle to a sludgy halt…of cycles rigged out in the new trend of bikepacking, free of cumbersome panniers weighing down the wheels and making the steering unwieldy, instead streamlined with custom-designed bags that filled every nook and cranny of the frame and fitted onto handlebars and seatposts to keep the weight in the same plane…of flying down a steep and winding road in the Himalayas by the dim light of a headlamp, trying to reach the next village and a place to sleep…of ourselves as sitting targets in this posh café in an upscale shopping mall, exactly the kind of location that al Shabaab in Somalia was threatening to attack. The stories and memories ebbed and flowed over glasses of whiskey, and then ebbed and receded, and we pulled our scarves closer in the slight shiver of a Nairobi December evening, said good night, and parted ways.

A few weeks later I boarded a plane to Argentina with my bicycle, where in the course of the next four months I would sleep on remote mountain slopes, slog through heavy layers of wet and mushy volcanic dust, meet cyclists who were linked to a legendary bikepacker and who had crafted their own custom bags in the bikepacking style, tumble down rough descents after dusk in hopes of finding a decent campsite on flatter ground, forget completely about al Shabaab, and let the Andes inspire me to make my next destination the Himalayas.

Previous to the conversation in Artcaffe, I had never considered cycling in India. I had thought of New Zealand, and the Alps, and the Andes, but I imagined the Himalayas as a place to trek, not to cycle. However, the stories I heard that night were of legendary routes in northern India, of spectacular scenery and one of the highest roads to cycle in the world. How could I resist the idea of such a challenge? When I came back to Kenya from Argentina and Chile, full of the passion and adventure of cycle touring, I immediately began researching and planning a trip to India.

And so, on 11 August 2013, I landed in the humid Delhi pre-dawn and prepared to make my way by bus to Shimla, a former British hill station at the gateway to the first part of my trip, the Kinnaur and Spiti valleys.

The overnight bus dropped me off in a foggy dawn, and my kindly seat-neighbor helped me organize a porter to carry my bike-in-box up the steep pedestrian-only streets to the YMCA, where I planned to stay for the next few days. In an ingenious system that I saw repeated for other uses throughout the country, the porter created a sort of backpack with a long rope wrapped around my box and looped over his shoulders. This made the 15-minute walk with a 30 kg box at 2000 m elevation possible, but certainly not easy....

Shimla seemed to be enveloped in an almost perpetual haze, but one afternoon the clouds lifted slightly to allow a view of the city spilling over the lush hills and the silhouettes of mountains undulating in distant blue-gray shadows.

Slightly spoiled on Nairobi's comfortable lifestyle -- and on the ubiquitous cafes that I had thoroughly enjoyed while cycling through Turkey prior to arriving in India -- I had forgotten to consider that India is a land of tea, not coffee. Sugar-laden, milky chai in small glass cups bounces on trays through the streets, carried by delivery boys from the multitude of tea shops to the avid tea drinkers in every other shop in the vicinity; it steams in giant vats at every dhaba, next to sizzling pots of oil for samosas and pakora; when you enter someone's home, it appears in front of you while your bare feet are still warm from taking off your shoes and you haven't even arranged your legs comfortably beneath you on the floor. Coffee, other than Nescafe, however, belongs to isolated points in the larger cities, to shopping malls and chains such as Cafe Coffee Day (CCD), whose pages-long selection of frothing frozen sickeningly sweet milky drinks appeals to a palate accustomed to creamy sugary chai. After extensive investigation, I discovered a branch of CCD on the second floor of a building in Shimla, with big glass windows and a view over the crowded town. Amidst the 'Chocoholicas' and 'Cold Sparkles' filling the menu, I unearthed a plain Americano and enjoyed my last sip of a proper brew for the next three and a half weeks.

The first day out of Shimla I wound along the sides of the hills, following smooth paved roads with little traffic, once I left the hectic honking and chaos of the city behind. The road climbed up through a forest, where roadworkers -- the first of countless crews I would see struggling against the brutal onslaught of Himalayan weather -- were erecting concrete barriers along the edge of the road to prevent fatal plunges. Indian drivers are notoriously aggressive, and small, fast cars are none too eager to share the narrow mountain roads with plodding, smoke-puffing lorries.

At the top of the climb, the forest melted away, the cold drizzle retreated, and I found myself riding on top of the world. I couldn't help but feel a thrill of exhilaration as I stared down into the jagged valleys dropping beneath me on every side.

As if any Indian needed an extra reminder to honk! The lorries have an impressive array of noises that they emit at every possible opportunity, from multi-pitch multi-note tones repeated in ear-splitting shrieks to bits of popular songs squealed over and over again. Most of the drivers were surprisingly friendly to cyclists, usually leaving enough space on the road for me to feel that I was not about to be sent head-over-bicycle-wheels off a cliff or smeared in a paste of metal and flesh across a rugged rock face, but they too often expressed their friendliness with a loooooong pull on the horn....

The Kinnaur valley has a booming apple business, the income from which is rapidly modernizing the area. Multi-story concrete monoliths have largely replaced the traditional wood and slate houses, making their colorful painted marks in the tranquil landscape. In more than one case that I observed, the intense monsoon rains caused the earth to slide out from under the heavy structures and left them collapsed in a pile of cement columns and twisted rebar.

Along the road, apple traders gathered at makeshift collection points where farmers and middlemen brought their lorry loads of boxed apples for sale and distribution throughout the country. The smell of fresh apples made my mouth water, and yet it was next to impossible to find them in the local markets, as every family had a sufficient supply at home.

From Narkanda, at 2700 m, where I struggled to find an available room in a guesthouse because the apple traders had booked out every space for an entire month, the road descended almost 2000 m over less than 40 km to the Sutlej River valley. At the advice of the guesthouse owner, I took a side road through apple orchards and villages instead of the main highway, but the vicious gradients left my brakes burning and squealing, and I had to stop every five minutes to let the discs cool down before I could continue.

Catpower

The valley, at less than 1000 m, took on the more hot and humid feel that one tends to associate with India, and I sweated my way to the dirty town of Rampur, squeezed along the riverbanks and oozing up the sides of the hills. Street vendors hawked airy puris, and I found delicious apples and pears at a fruit stand. I stocked up on fruit to counteract the effects of the ghee-laden vegetable stews and dal that I had been eating in hotel restaurants, but shortly after I stumbled across a sweet shop pouring twists of fresh jalebi batter into hot oil and couldn't resist walking away without a small paper bag of the syrupy deep-fried treats.

The roads in the Himalayas are not for the faint of heart. Most of the time I was very happy to be on my bicycle, with almost complete control over my destiny -- except for when two lorries approached in opposite directions, pushing me to within half a meter of the unprotected road edge -- instead of trapped inside a flimsy metal bus, at the mercy of a driver a bit too eager to arrive at his destination. Another traveler told me a story of a bus that had plunged into a canyon -- 100 people were killed, though the 20 people who had been hanging onto the roof were able to jump off and survived.

In June, as I was cycling through sweltering Turkey, my dad asked me if I had heard about the floods in India. No, I said, and dismissed the question as rather irrelevant to me. First, I couldn't begin to imagine rain when I was surrounded by the semi-arid Turkish landscape. Second, India is a huge country, and just because some floods somewhere made the news didn't mean that where I would be traveling was necessarily affected. And finally, I wasn't planning to go to India until August, so what impact could a flood in June have two months down the road? A lot, actually, I soon discovered.

Early on in my trip, someone had suggested to me that it wasn't particularly safe to be cycling in this area. Why, I asked, assuming the usual responses of people who can't imagine why anyone would want to cycle if they could get into a vehicle instead. Because of the landslides and shooting stones, the person said. Landslides? I asked. And what are shooting stones? I know about shooting stars, but shooting stones?? That's when I got the introduction to Himalayan roads and realized that perhaps I should have done more research than picking up a map in Shimla -- road there, and there, and there? that's all I need to know -- and reading a few blogs -- okay, someone said the roads in Kinnaur and Spiti could be bad during the rains, but that was written a few years ago, and surely the roads had been repaired, and anyway, the rains were mostly finished, so...?

The introduction to Himalayan roads:

1. Landslides

Landslides can come down anywhere, at any moment. They can happen when it is not raining. They can happen when the earth is dry. They can start with one tiny stone slipping down a mountainside. They can come in thundering torrents of boulders and water when a snowmelt stream overflows. They can wipe out entire sections of road and/or block it for days, even weeks. They can come crashing down on top of you, in front of you, and behind you, and if you are on a bicycle, you will be too slow to escape.

2. Shooting stones

Shooting stones are pebbles, stones, or boulders that come loose from their tentative mooring on the mountain above you and whiz through the air or thud down the mountain side, most probably aiming themselves directly at your head. When you are riding, you should always keep one eye on the mountain to make sure that a shooting stone is not premeditating your death. It is possible to escape shooting stones on a bicycle, but you will have to think and act very fast and with exceptional foresight to understand at exactly what point the shooting stone will make contact with the road and make sure that you are not there.

3. Other hazards and conditions

Landslides and shooting stones severely damage the road surface. They tear it up into rocky, potholed chunks. They scrape away the pavement -- if it was ever there -- and leave behind piles of sand and muck. Streams, which occasionally bring landslides with them, erode the already narrow strips of road, gouge enormous holes with their ceaselessly pounding force, and flow over and fill the road so that you have no idea how deep the water is or what is underneath, and you are required to dismount from your bike and wade through the glacial water.

My first landslide. I arrived at the site about an hour or two after it had taken place. Immediately I began to calculate...if I had not had such a long and lazy breakfast, would I have been cycling directly under it when it slid? If I had gotten up as early as I intended, would I have made it past and not had to sit and wait while the bulldozer and backhoe struggled to clear it?

The local people, who deal with landslides on a regular basis, have what appeared to be a fascinatingly comfortable attitude toward them. Travelers who arrived in buses on one side of the blockage scrambled in streams over the loose pile of dirt, ducked under the backhoe as it was working, and hopped into tuktuks or buses waiting for them on the other side.

The backhoe and bulldozer became my favorite friends. If they were at the scene of a landslide, I could always have hope of getting across sooner rather than later.

The Himachal Pradesh Public Works Department has a daunting and dreary job -- to repair the roads again, and again, and again. Amid clouds of dust and mountains of mud, clinging to the edge of cliffs, their workers make it possible for wheeled vehicles to pass through some of the most dramatic landscapes in the world.

One cannot get bored cycling here.

The section of National Highway 22 in the state of Himachal Pradesh, parts of which belong to the old Hindustan-Tibet highway, was constructed as a thoroughfare through a remote landscape, not as an easy access point to every village along the way. Consequently, some of the most beautiful sights, and more often than not even the most necessary guesthouse, can only be reached by a 500 - 1000 m climb up a tertiary road.

The village of Sarahan, home to the famous stone-and-timber Bhimakali temple, lies more than 700 m above the main road. I arrived at the turn-off point in the early afternoon, planning to stop for lunch in the small town of Jeori and then begin the climb. However, none of the dingy food stalls in Jeori particularly appealed to me, and with the faint hope that I would encounter something nicer on the side road, I started up the mountain.

I watched as a high waterfall that I'd craned my neck to look at from the road came closer, and closer, and closer to eye level. The views down the valley and out over another small slate-roofed temple complex were well worth the ride. And I had a good laugh when a group of small boys gathered around my bike and then pushed me up a short steep section.

The Lankara Vir temple in the Bhimakali temple complex, just beneath my window.

Above the entrance to the Bhimakali temple.

Specially versatile Indian toilet. For sitting or squatting.

In small villages in northern India, there are generally two choices of food -- simple Indian and simple Chinese/Tibetan. This means dal, rice, chapati, and vegetables or fried rice, chow mein, momo (steamed dumplings), or thukpa (noodle soup). This quickly developed into a wearisome routine -- a typical day could be paratha (chapati stuffed with potatoes and pan-fried or deep-fried) and dal or vegetables for breakfast, dal and rice and vegetables for lunch, and fried rice for dinner.

Traditional Kinnauri hats.

Gifts to purchase for offering at the temple.

There were plenty of opportunities to ponder what was required to build these roads.

And what could happen to me if I got squeezed onto the edge of the road when two trucks were passing in opposite direction and there was no guardrail (which there rarely was).

And why it was so difficult to maintain the roads in any kind of decent condition.

Himachal Pradesh banned plastic bags in 2003. Consequently market purchases come wrapped in a variety of materials, including geometry textbook pages. 

During the massive cloudbursts that dumped on northern India in June 2013, a mountain stream overflowed and came surging through the village of Tapri, taking most everything in its path along with it.

Indian sweets are an overload of deep-fried dough, oil, and/or milk. Pretty to look at, but with flies buzzing inside the cases and no guarantee whether that beautiful pile of orange balls had been sitting there for a day or a week, I did not find them to have an irresistible appeal.

A magic mix of spices and oil sizzles and spits and emits a powerful aroma as the daily dhaba offerings are prepared.

Apparently when this landslide completely obliterated the road, it was easier to create a new track over the accumulated sand and stone than uncover the original road.

The road, the road, where did it go?

Prayer flags add a splash of vibrance to the landscape. I especially came to appreciate them as I entered the drier and more arid zones.

Traditional Kinnauri structures perched on a cliff above the Sutlej river...

...and the village of Kalpa below the majestic Kinner Kailash. 

Slate roofs and wood-and-stone construction in Kalpa, a sort-of or once-was magical place, that, like too many other Himalayan villages, has been overrun by giant hotels and mediocre guesthouses.

The first of many Buddhist temples with prayer flags snapping in the wind.

The Kinner Kailash offered me a teasing glimpse of snowy Himalayan peaks -- and the imaginative idea that this is what the rest of the ride would look like, except less hidden in the clouds. Oh, was I in for a surprise!

Breakfast with a cloudy view.

The Hotel Shangri-La, where I indulged myself and enjoyed the extensive library while waiting for an inner-line pass so that I could continue on to the next part of the ride --Spiti Valley and a close encounter with the Tibetan border.