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Hey
If you find somebody in Delhi to keep your bikes that would be fantastic.
If not, please feel free to ship your bikes to Kanpur. It is roughly 500 km from New Delhi. I have more than enough place to park your bikes for 10 months. It will be parked next to my steel frame Fuji Touring 🙂
And whenever you plan your return to India, it can be shipped to the address, wherever you plan to start your next ride.
The packing of the bicycles and shipping costs will have to be borne by you of course. There’s an excellent bicycle shipping service I enjoyed using, which is run by a cyclist. I got my bikes shipped from Leh to Goa using his services.
Do let me know. You can reach me directly by email on avinash @ cyclingmonks .com
Cheers!
Haha, yes this is what i meant. Some of the backroads are actually paths going through somebody’s fields and backyards 😀
Another useful and less crazy option i recently found is Strava Route Builder. You need a paid Strava subscription to use this feature though.
You can build your own route, by just giving a general direction you want. It will then build a specific route using heatmaps created by cyclists using Strava. The end result is you have a good route, which has surely been ridden by some cyclist or the other. So you never find yourself staring down the barrel of a sentry’s gun!
Have you tried using Maps.Me application on your phone?
It gives some crazy good suggestions for bicycling routes. But one must use discretion, because sometimes it can get a bit too crazy!
Hey
My advice would be to not ride from Delhi to Jaipur. The main road is a 6-lane traffic infested road, which is not worth spending time on.
But if you still to choose to take a back road, then go via Alwar. You will still have to spend some time on the main roads.
Cheers!
Interesting observation of yours about dogs…
I experienced something different while cycling in these and other states of India.
The maximum street dog menace was in places like Goa and other cities. Where people feed street dogs, adopt and abandon them a lot. These dogs tend to be much more territorial and therefore aggressive towards passersby.
While the dogs in rural parts of the country, which are ‘wilder’, and fend for themselves are more reticent. These dogs do not get aggressive until and unless they fell threatened and cornered.
As suggested by Mr Susheel Wadke on Facebook, I am adding a list of items carried in my luggage. Since I travel light, here’s what I carry:
1. Water Bottles x 2
2. Tubes x 2
3. Puncture Repair Kit and Pump x 1
4. Headlight x 1
5. Tail light x 1
6. Electric Tape roll x 1
7. Cycle Computer x 1
8. Allen Key multitool x 1
9. Phone, ID Cards, Cash, Debit Card
10. Slippers x 1
11. Towel x 1
12. Padded Shorts x 2
13. Baggy Shorts x 2
14. Cycling Jerseys x 2
15. Regular tee x 1
16. Socks x 2
17. Rain Jacket x 1
18. Toothbrush and Toothpaste
19. Chain Lube x 1
20. Camera and charger x 1
21. GoPro and mounts and charging cable x 1
22. Laptop and charger x 1
23. Phone charger x 1
24. External Hard Drive x 1As evident, if I removed the electronics, I would be barely carrying anything at all!
Day 19: Chirgaon to Kanpur
The Home Run…
I got lucky with a tailwind from start to end. Even with the accumulated exhaustion of the past few days, I still managed to ride strongly.
By then the aerobars had also become my friend and I could happily munch on biscuits while riding on the aerobars.
The previous few days had been endurance riding. The last day was an endurance race. I had roughly 200 km to ride and I was determined to sleep in my bed that night.
I made good time with minimal stops along the way. Constantly keeping an eye on the clock and my average speed.
The road was fantastic, except a short horrible stretch near Kalpi. It was also Gangetic plains flat. The land which was home to human civilisation for many millennia. In those 200 km, I just climbed 200 metres. You can’t get anything flatter than that!
Thanks to the pandemic the mood of the land was a bit off. Along the way highway cops stopped me and asked me where was I headed to. They were ecstatic on finding out that I had cycled alone all the way from Goa to Kanpur. They even offered me a lift in their jeep!
The last meal of the day was at noon for me. After that I didn’t feel the need to eat. I hit familiar terrain just before sundown and I knew nothing could go wrong after that.
I ran out of water with 40 km to go. I didn’t bother stopping. Water like most things at that point of time was irrelevant. Home, that’s all that mattered.
With 20 km to go, I was on my daily training route. I rode that stretch in the dark, knowing every bump, pothole and curve. Pushing as hard as I could on the pedals, my heart jumping with joy.
Exactly 200 km from my start point, I reached home. My longest ever ride till that date.
A mother’s intuition or telepathy I don’t know. But 30 seconds before I reached home, she walked out to the gate to look for me. And is by plan, there I was…
Finally, it was food, sweet food!
Check out the day’s ride on Strava…
Day 18: Kasba Thana to Chirgaon
The penultimate day of the ride.
Thanks to loud truck drivers at the dhaba I was awake by 4 AM and on the road before 7.
It was the Sunday of the nationwide lockdown. No one had any clue about what was going on or what was going to happen.
The dhaba guys were shutting for the day. I had to leave from there.
I bought 5 packets of ParleG for the curfew and attacked the road!
At the border, a policeman told me that the highway is open and I shouldn’t face any problem. I just won’t get food along the way.
The next village was named Tendua, which means leopard. I presume the warning of the dhaba owner from the previous night was spot on!
Police Station: Leopard, says the signboard!Once I entered Madhya Pradesh things changed rapidly.
Women were more easily visible everywhere. From Rajasthan, a land where women didn’t seem to exist, it was nice to see a more open society again. It is strange that such a normal thing is a novelty after Rajasthan and needs be separately mentioned.
Along the way I filled water from the petrol pumps and many of the dhabas were open for a clandestine meal! The front of the dhaba would be boarded up, while people were entering and exiting from the sides.
The road around Shivpuri was long and lonely. A couple of friends called me up to give me a tongue lashing for riding around during the curfew. But I couldn’t have cared less. I was desperate to get back home, knowing fully well, that bad administration was in the works. There was no way in the world, that I wanted to get stuck in the middle of nowhere.
As I sat at a dhaba for lunch, a bunch of guys started arguing amongst themselves whether I was Indian or not. The argument was conducted in Hindi, oblivious to the fact that I had spoken to them in the same language moments prior.
Finally, I told them that my home was just 250 km away. Then they started arguing about the reason for their initial argument. I immediately felt at home!
As the clock struck 5 PM, I found myself pedalling through Jhansi. People were getting out on their balconies to bang their vessels. I was caught between laughing at their foolishness or crying at the absurdity. The poor people actually believed that the virus was going to magically disappear with clanging of vessels.
Around 30 km after Jhansi I stopped in a small town called Chirgaon. It was the first place during the entire trip that I was charged a whopping 1000 rupees for a room. I immediately felt at home in UP, being ripped off like that. Just to rub in the home feeling, it was also the first time that someone asked me to lock my bicycle. Everywhere else, owners of the establishment would say, ‘don’t worry, your bike is in our custody, nothing will happen’!
You can check out the full day’s route on Strava.
Day 17: Kota to Kasba Thana
A kilometre after starting my ride I caught up with another cyclist. He was riding from Kota and going to his village, Baran, 40 km beyond.
We started chatting and my plans starting heading towards the drain. First stopping for breakfast at dhaba only to eat biscuits. Dhabas in Rajasthan just don’t start with breakfast. You get food much later in the day.
The going was slow as I rode at the pace of this cyclist from Kota. It got even slower, as we pedalled along.
With the Kota cyclistHe was riding on my right, and a motorcycle rear ended him. He was riding next to me and then suddenly he was flying in the air. I waited there for an ambulance to collect the injured and then deposited his cycle at a nearby dhaba before heading on.
I lost a lot of precious time in the bargain and reaching Madhya Pradesh seemed unlikely. But I was just glad that no serious injuries happened in that crash.
The heat, crash and barren landscape started taking a toll on me mentally. I was quite down.
Right then I saw a milestone showing Kanpur. The first one I had seen from the day I started from Aldona. With the scent of home near, I got my first shot of adrenaline.
The first Kanpur signboard…Which was followed by another shot, when a couple of my school friends did a video call on WhatsApp. I chatted with them while cycling, showing off the land I was traversing. The place started looking better already.
Just then I got another call, this time from my cyclist friend who I met on the first day of this trip, Waman. As I chatted with him, I realised the landscape had not just changed because of my improved mental state. But it had physically changed.
The place looked more like the Konkan Maharashtra I had left behind, rather than arid Rajasthan.
Golden Harvest…Near a place called Shahbad, the road descended for 4 km. A proper green ghat section. It was an oasis in the middle of the desert.
The road was fun to ride on. Traffic was light, the downside of which was almost zero dhabas.
The ghat section…No people to stop and eat, means no people to sell.
As I neared the MP border, I recalled all the warnings of dacoits I had heard of that area. The darkness of the night enveloped the land as I rode through worried.
Out of that inky blackness two big black snarling dogs came charging at me. Fortunately, this wasn’t the first time in my cycling life that dogs tried to intimidate me. I got off my bike, rested it on the ground and ran towards the dogs yelling. Confused, the dogs tucked their tails between their legs and went scurrying back to the tiny temple from whence they had come.
No pahad in sight!The dogs were the last bit of humanity I saw for quite a distance. Eventually finding a dhaba for dinner. The dhaba owner refused to let me ride ahead. He wasn’t afraid of dacoits attacking me on that lonely highway, but leopards.
Just 10 km before the Madhya Pradesh border I stopped for the night. Scared of leopards and non-existent dacoits…
But even scarier than the leopard was the movie being played at the dhaba. A Bollywood flick starring, Akshay Kumar and Sunil Shetty. Such a horrendous movie is difficult to make, but Bollywood manages to outdo itself every single time!
It was SUN day!You can see the full route on Strava…
Day 16: Katoda to Kota
In my attempt to get some free speed on my ride, I overfilled the tyres ever so slightly. I thought the reduced rolling resistance will help. Bad idea!
When you are on a cycle, people are almost always nice to you. But every once in a while, you meet idiots. One such idiot was the owner of a dhaba. He was fiddling with my parked bike and I first told him nicely to back off. But he persisted and I eventually had to tick him off rudely in front of his staff.
He of course got his revenge by charging exorbitant prices for the food. Only when you meet idiots, do you realise how nice everyone else is.
100 metres after I left the dhaba, my tyre went phssssss. My first thought was that the dhaba guys must have messed around. I topped up air and rode ahead, only to have it go phssss again.
Fortunately, there was a tyre shop right there and I got my tyre repaired in the midst of an increasingly curious crowd.
The tyre shop guy refused to take money from me. He said, you’re riding on a cycle, what money can you afford to give!
Luckily the puncture was at that point, because there was nothing for the next 20 km. It was barren land.
Eventually I hit Kota and crossed a fancy new suspended bridge on the outskirts of the city. I didn’t stop for a single picture, because I was hungry and my bottles were nearly empty in the desert heat.
I waited for the city. Unsuccessfully. I had gotten onto a recently built bypass. It didn’t have a single shop along its entirety. For 30 km I rode without food and water in that oppressive heat.
It was so hot, that I had to invent games to distract myself. One such game was to pee down a drain on a flyover and count the seconds it took to reach the bottom. It never did. It was so hot, that it all evaporated within seconds, right in front of my eyes!
Straight roads of Rajasthan…But that wasn’t the end of my adventures for the day.
After what felt like a millennium, I found a dhaba. Curious people asked a bazillion questions of my whereabouts and I proudly said that I was cycling from Goa to Kanpur. Pride as they say, comes before fall.
In my case, quite literally. As I was leaving the dhaba, I fell at 0 kmph. I couldn’t unclip my shoes from the pedals in time and bam I hit the floor. Much to the amusement of my audience to whom I had been telling great tales of my cycling valour!
With enough adventures for the day, I stopped at a dhaba for the night as soon as it started getting dark. I didn’t want to push my luck.
I got a room behind the dhaba in someone’s house.
What could possibly happen in a room in someone’s house? For starters I found two rabbits under the bed. After the rabbits were taken away, I was given dinner.
Dinner which comprised of ‘mirch ki sabzi’ floating in a bowl of oil. I didn’t know whether it was vegetable or pickle!
One thing which struck me during the ride was the number of cow carcasses strewn by the side of the highway. On enquiring from the dhaba owner, he told me. That the farmers had started abandoning old cattle in the middle of nowhere. The cattle would eventually starve to death there. No one was now willing to buy or transport cattle anymore. The holy cow had become untouchable after it stopped making economic sense.
View the full day’s ride on Strava.
