Goodbye Nagaland (our struggles and real struggles)
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Words by - Johnny Bang
India |
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We had a fantastic breakfast courtesy of our new friends from Nagaland and had the whole apartment block as spectators as we packed the bikes. I offered Kevi a ride of my bike but he said the bike was too tall. He took a ride of Shaun’s bike instead. Dan and I filled him in that the Kawasaki was a girls bike (A long running joke that has stopped being funny, especially to Shaun, but we are persisting in the hope it comes full circle and becomes funny again, as some jokes do). Kevi said that if the Kawasaki was a girl’s bike then his scooter must be for babies. I’m sure it was a nervous 10 minutes for Shaun while he waited for his baby to come back.
We were safely escorted out of town by Kevi and Johnny, pulling up at the outskirts for goodbyes and swapping facebookers.
The road was pretty good, though unmaintained and intermittently degraded into potholes that could swallow a VW beetle. It was a bit deceptive in how quickly and randomly these potholes would appear, so we were always on our toes. The TTR ran awesome, though the shake-down inspection revealed an oil leak from the barrel. It can only be fixed with the real gasket, which we don’t have, and cannot get. Hopefully the leak doesn’t get any worse....
We stopped for lunch, we were all keen to have a textbook Indian meal, butter chicken or the like - we tried to order naan but menu was confused, no one spoke English so we ended up with a chicken with rice meal, which was okay. What Kevi had told me last night made a bit more sense – something along the lines of we aren’t really in India, the people and culture here are more aligned with the Mongol people, and are more Asian than Indian. This was obvious in the way people looked on the first day we came in but I was beginning to get it. On top of that this was a part of the country that was technically struggling with a civil war, and a cease fire that expired a week before we crossed the border. I read in the paper that 14 soldiers were killed a few days ago in Nagaland, which explained the heavy military presence.
We are navigating with google maps, which can sometimes be fickle as it doesn’t really know which roads are highways and which roads are backstreets. We couldn’t find big road and spent the afternoon stuck on small tight windy road through beautiful green Indian rural landscape. Which was nice, but we would rather be doing 90km/h than 40km/h.
On one of the slower roads we stopped to get our bearings and where swamped by a 40-person insta-crowd. We legged-it down the road and only got 800m before a police checkpoint stopped us and the insta-crowd re-appeared. We asked what was happening, but no one spoke English. We eventually kind of just smiled and gave the thumbs up and no one objected to us riding away (the old smile and ride away slowly test and see if anyone yells or points a gun at you – if they don’t you keep riding).
We eventually found dual carriage way, and the clicks came a bit easier. We rode into the night and could not find a hotel. I don’t like driving at night with the helmet I have, it is scratched and difficult to see, imagine riding drunk on a motorbike looking through one of those kids Spirograph things – that is what my helmet is becoming. We pulled over and had a team meeting, I was considering sleeping at another servo but Dan thinks he saw some good deserted spots at some adjacent roadworks a click back.
We rode our bikes up a half finished bridge and sat down between some machinery. We opened a few bags of chips and started the 'half hour test' - where we stop somewhere for half an hour and see if we get hassled, and if we don’t, we sleep.
A few Indians turned up and poked around but nobody moved us on. I was just sleeping in my jacket with a backpack as a pillow until about 2am - me and Dan both woke up to lightening and a fresh breeze that said 'I’m gonna rain on all your shit'. We had to find a new spot. We had a quick discussion about whether we should wake Shaun, or sneak away and let him wake up in the rain alone on a deserted roadworks bridge in an unknown Indian town. Of course we did the honourable thing (he woke up when we were packing our bikes).
Luckily Dan came good again with a second spot – he remembered seeing an underpass a few clicks back so we headed for that. The floor was wet but we found just enough dry concrete to lie down. Me and Dan where sleeping on the ground in full riding gear. I figured out my helmet makes a good pillow (by wearing it) and Shaun had somehow figured out a way to sleep on his bike.
Overall not the ideal night’s sleep but at least it was easy to get back on the road when the sun came up at 5.
We were safely escorted out of town by Kevi and Johnny, pulling up at the outskirts for goodbyes and swapping facebookers.
The road was pretty good, though unmaintained and intermittently degraded into potholes that could swallow a VW beetle. It was a bit deceptive in how quickly and randomly these potholes would appear, so we were always on our toes. The TTR ran awesome, though the shake-down inspection revealed an oil leak from the barrel. It can only be fixed with the real gasket, which we don’t have, and cannot get. Hopefully the leak doesn’t get any worse....
We stopped for lunch, we were all keen to have a textbook Indian meal, butter chicken or the like - we tried to order naan but menu was confused, no one spoke English so we ended up with a chicken with rice meal, which was okay. What Kevi had told me last night made a bit more sense – something along the lines of we aren’t really in India, the people and culture here are more aligned with the Mongol people, and are more Asian than Indian. This was obvious in the way people looked on the first day we came in but I was beginning to get it. On top of that this was a part of the country that was technically struggling with a civil war, and a cease fire that expired a week before we crossed the border. I read in the paper that 14 soldiers were killed a few days ago in Nagaland, which explained the heavy military presence.
We are navigating with google maps, which can sometimes be fickle as it doesn’t really know which roads are highways and which roads are backstreets. We couldn’t find big road and spent the afternoon stuck on small tight windy road through beautiful green Indian rural landscape. Which was nice, but we would rather be doing 90km/h than 40km/h.
On one of the slower roads we stopped to get our bearings and where swamped by a 40-person insta-crowd. We legged-it down the road and only got 800m before a police checkpoint stopped us and the insta-crowd re-appeared. We asked what was happening, but no one spoke English. We eventually kind of just smiled and gave the thumbs up and no one objected to us riding away (the old smile and ride away slowly test and see if anyone yells or points a gun at you – if they don’t you keep riding).
We eventually found dual carriage way, and the clicks came a bit easier. We rode into the night and could not find a hotel. I don’t like driving at night with the helmet I have, it is scratched and difficult to see, imagine riding drunk on a motorbike looking through one of those kids Spirograph things – that is what my helmet is becoming. We pulled over and had a team meeting, I was considering sleeping at another servo but Dan thinks he saw some good deserted spots at some adjacent roadworks a click back.
We rode our bikes up a half finished bridge and sat down between some machinery. We opened a few bags of chips and started the 'half hour test' - where we stop somewhere for half an hour and see if we get hassled, and if we don’t, we sleep.
A few Indians turned up and poked around but nobody moved us on. I was just sleeping in my jacket with a backpack as a pillow until about 2am - me and Dan both woke up to lightening and a fresh breeze that said 'I’m gonna rain on all your shit'. We had to find a new spot. We had a quick discussion about whether we should wake Shaun, or sneak away and let him wake up in the rain alone on a deserted roadworks bridge in an unknown Indian town. Of course we did the honourable thing (he woke up when we were packing our bikes).
Luckily Dan came good again with a second spot – he remembered seeing an underpass a few clicks back so we headed for that. The floor was wet but we found just enough dry concrete to lie down. Me and Dan where sleeping on the ground in full riding gear. I figured out my helmet makes a good pillow (by wearing it) and Shaun had somehow figured out a way to sleep on his bike.
Overall not the ideal night’s sleep but at least it was easy to get back on the road when the sun came up at 5.
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