Monday, April 18, 2022

From ‘Riding Towards Me. A thousand-day journey from Chicago to Delhi’ by Jay Kannaiyan

 

 

… riding through Mexico, I realized I was being taken for a Mexican whenever I spoke Spanish.

 

America is a place where your origin isn't as important as what you are capable of doing and who you are as an individual.

 

… the well known beauty of Medellin women became apparent to me….. they all possessed a glowing, inherent grace and beauty. I later learned that plastic surgery is very popular in Colombia and neighboring Venezuela. Regardless, the wide smiles and pronounced cheekbones brought out the natural beauty in these women. Their features were in sharp contrast to the men, who were comparatively average-looking. One can easily pass time over a beer pondering Columbia’s evident gender ‘imbalance’; a fate shared only by a few nations. That evening, I mused on stories about travelers who had reached Columbia and not ventured further because they had been trapped by the beauty of the women.

 

Being brown, I felt like I could mingle with the indigenous population of Peru…..I was intrigued by the fact that chillies had actually originated in Peru but are hardly used in their local cuisine nowadays.

 

My reason for leaving Chicago in the cold of March was so that I could cross the Amazon in August, the driest month of the year in the rainforest and the safest time to make the crossing solo.

 

Eudaimonia, found at the intersection of what's true, good and beautiful, is an oft-forgotten philosophy from Socrates’s time.

 

I had seen people bathing in public by leaving their underwear on and found it strange……….. it was perfectly normal, at least in rural parts of South America, to strip naked if it was to bathe yourself. This whole continent is quite conservative since Roman Catholicism is the major line of faith, Primarily in the urban areas. In rural areas, privacy is a luxury that not many can afford, and people go about their business without putting much thought into coming across as prudish.

 

Each positive experience in Brazil was helping me build a very friendly impression of the country…… the development of the roads with proper tarmac and regularly spaced distance boards confirmed that Brazil is much more advanced than Bolivia…….. the road…..the legendary TransAmazonica….. this road is mythical in the adventure riding community and as I later found out, even amongst the locals. it was built in the 1970s by the then military government of Brazil to bring development from the Atlantic Coast deep into the vast Amazon region. The construction was treacherous as a rain forest is no easy place to clear a path and then keep it clear. The initial plan was to pave the whole stretch from West to east, but thankfully to adventurers, it is yet to be done…… the utmost difficulty in traversing this route. it is an unpaved road through not just any rainforest, but the Amazon rainforest, which means the road surface is primarily clay…… it rains eleven months of the year in the Amazon, being the heaviest around the beginning of the year. Of course, it was quite intense during the other months as well since it was a rainforest…… I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Amazon was not a flat plain, as one might imagine while seeing satellite pictures, but it is instead quite hilly………. My admiration for good-natured Brazilians was only increasing with each interaction…. There was something about the openness among Brazilians I had come across so far that I found very comforting.

 

Maybe Brazilians have an understanding of how important a bath is at the end of the day since it is always so humid and hot. This was my kind of place. …. We walked back to his little hut as I wondered why he had sat there looking at me while I bathed. But I knew that Brazil was more open than most cultures and nudity was really nothing special.

 

At the end of the tour, Mauricio, in a spontaneous act I had come to love and expect in South America, invited us to a street party in the evening.

 

The blinding white salt surface of the Salar de Uyuni raced ahead of me all the way to the horizon….. This is a 10,582 sq km…. flat, dry salt lake at 3,656 m (11,955 ft) that doesn't vary by more than a meter across its whole surface. Due to its near uniform geological flatness and high reflectivity (being white), the Salar has been used for many decades to calibrate the altimeters of earth-observing satellites. It's also an easy place to get lost…… The brine is a solution containing large amounts of different salts ranging from sodium, potassium, lithium and magnesium. Of those, lithium has the most economic value. Bolivia harbors about 50 per cent of the known reserves on this planet and most of these are under the Salar de Uyuni. This rare substance already in very high demand because lithium batteries power almost all electronic devices today………. The flatness has been attributed to its annual flooding, which levels out any changes in the malleable topography.

 

….. I knew from other travelers that Argentina was a safe country with an established damping culture….. Argentines are very friendly people…..

 

To avoid paying for a doctor, most cargo ships around the world have welcome no more than twelve passengers on their voyages across the sea. It's a niche travel sector known as freighter cruises.

 

Feeling very much at home across South America, I wondered if my skin color had played a part in that. I have been surprised, time and time again, at how curious people were about India.

 

….’ Oh, I'm sorry, you are too late, come again on Monday.’ ‘But Sir, the boat is leaving on Monday!’ I pleaded as I thrust my clutch of documents towards him. He saw the Ashoka emblem on the cover of my passport and exclaimed, ‘Oh, you’re from India? Amitabh Bachchan is great! I'll help you out, one second.’ The reference to one of India's Bollywood greats momentarily stumped me, and I stared at the officer for a second with the papers held out in my hand before he took them and swept into action. My Indian passport had worked in my favor…….

 

Even while Sudan happened to be in the world’s consciousness for all the wrong reasons, such as the conflicts in Darfur and Abyei and for it's authoritarian president, other travelers had informed me that the people of Sudan were one of the most genuine they had encountered in all of Africa………… Just like Egypt, it [Sudan] was expensive to enter, but once inside, travel was cheap….. I asked him about his time in India and he said that he loved it, besides the occasional racial slur that is strangely common against black people in India

 

Zambia are being one of the few African countries never to have had a coup or military dictator….. Unlike Indian migrants who went to South Africa or other parts of the continent, Indians who came to Zambia (or Northern Rhodesia as it was known before independence) were not indentured laborers, but artisans and business people. Contrary to the uneasy relations between Indians and locals in other African countries, such as Uganda in the 70s, Zambia has been good to its Indian community, which is maybe why so many stayed and prospered

 

…… The popularity of Indian food in South Africa….. it was intriguing to witness how Indian food had spread into the local cuisine. Chapati and samosas were very much a part of the staple in a lot of areas…

 

….. The Hoba meteorite site….. A massive boulder that didn't look like any rock I had ever seen before. Squat, square, shiny and most certainly, other-worldly. It had excavated a shallow crater as it crashed into earth 80,000 years ago…… What remains is the largest known meteorite and lump of naturally-occurring iron on earth.

 

The only word of caution they gave me was to remain in the campgrounds. The risk of snakes and other animals was just too high in Namibia………. The Namib desert is considered the world's oldest desert. It formed around fifty-five million years ago and has been arid ever since. In comparison the Sahara is only around seven years old

 

Surrounding Deadvlei were the largest sand dunes I had ever seen. Bid Daddy at the far end of the vlei, soaring almost 325 m (1067 ft) above, is one of the largest sand dunes in the world. It is an enormous wall of rust orange sand rising from the desert floor….. This was one of the strangest places in the world.

 

in all my travels, I have seen a greater sense of civility in rural areas then in urban areas…….. unlike the aggression that is so typical of the plains, people in the hills are a lot friendlier and more amiable, almost certainly a result of the climate.

 

……. like most places in India, pollution came with the passage of people. Alas, it is something I have found be far more pronounced in India than in most other countries I have visited. The mindlessness with which I would see people throw empty bottles, candy bar wrappers and plastic bags, regardless of the national beauty they were in the midst of, remains an Incomprehensible affront to our country. This bothered me even more because I know that Indians don't behave the same way abroad. Lamentably it is getting steadily worse amongst the younger travelers whose lack of shame was all too evident……. India's attitude towards its environment has become a national shame

 

Manali-Leh highway is one of the most incredible rides on the planet and its popularity is well deserved.

No comments: