Cobra Trail

 We have a few rest days now between the groups and its time to sit out in the sunshine outside our abode in the Queen’s Pantry. Misty Mountain, Kuttikanam and enjoy a bit with the MTB Kerala family.

 Outside we have Sheffield Mike running around in his Katcha’s (underpants) sweating away the pounds to make way for a few Kingfisher’s tonight. Pankaj the facebook kid is absorbed in his phone, chuckling away as usual as events unfold in facebook world. Kerala’s best and richest mountain biker (£1250 for 2^nd prize in a 4-cross event) Jibin Joy is out on the bike with Rakesh (a name familiar to all loyal readers of this blog) working out a few new trails to link together for our next tour.  All will be back tonight for a game of cricket on the tennis courts so it is indeed happy times for all here.

 For me its time to put down a few highlights of the past month or so.

 Wildlife. We have had Tigers, Macaques, Elephants, Cobra’s, Malabar Hornbills and barking deer in abundance this year. The tiger on the Singalila Ridge tour was the probably the most exciting spot followed by a never to be forgotten frantic adrenalin fuelled pedal for your life 5 minute section of trail with Pankaj a bit too far out off the back for comfort.

 Loads of elephants in December which is always a humbling and mesmerizing experience. We were witness to a family of elephants on the banks of Maddupatty Dam followed by a sighting of an solitary elephant near Aryanakkal Dam which was more than likely the same elephant that was responsible for trampling to death  of a tea worker the previous month. Local newspapers also reported sightings of a rogue Tiger which seemed to be on a sight seeing trip of Munnar district leaving a trail of dead dogs and mauled goats in its wake.

 The strange incident of the Cobra that sprung out of  the wall is about as close as we would ever like to be to “nature” on our tours we managed to catch it on video so have a look at the link below.

 Misty Mountain life is as good as ever. The manager Sumesh has been on great form recently. For the past week every meal time has featured a tomato on my plate. When I take my meal Sumesh comes in to chat and watch and ensure that I eat the tomato. I questioned him on the new meal with tomato policy and he said the reason was that he really enjoyed watching me eat tomatos.

 Yesterday whilst engrossed in computer work in the Misty Mountain office I found myself subjected to a barrage of assaults by paper. Sumesh stuffed bits of paper down the back of my t-shirt whilst tickling my neck. I was also made a dunces hat, which was crowned upon my head as I sat in the office chair trying to maintain a business minded composure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLpQSKpwG8Y&list=UUrJK-uF14ZAJq88g1DHfgOQ&index=1

King Of The Good Times

  3 days into the 1st Kerala tour of the year and it has been a cracker. Just completed a crossing of the western ghats mountains on the bikes. A route pioneered by myself and Sheffield Mike with help from Rakesh of Nepal and Lord Welington who it is claimed was the 1st to cross the mountains here on foot. Views and riding incredible. 2000m descent, 3
hours down with  about 30 minutes of unrideable stuff in there which is too overgrown or too tech. Pankaj riding well today, he has a look of a Erryl Flynn about him at present with his dashing moustache. He thinks he looks better without it but its immovashavable at this stage as it is covering up a nasty cut and a puffed split lip the result of a head 1st over the bars into a tea bush. Didn't/couldn't speak for two days and looked decidedly miserable. More astute observers of
this blog willl notice there is no mention of beer in it so won't mention it then which will upset the official sponsors of Mountain Bike Kerala, the worlds premium not above 5% beer;  Kingfisher the King of Good Times...

Rush Job

It always amazes me how little I can do in a day here but always feel busy.  I always wake up with grandiose ideas for the day, usually a ride which will find the new ultimate trail, a website refurb, massive push on marketing and learning another 10 words of Malayalam. Reality reads somewhat different, a quick ride, wash a few clothes forget my lines in Malayalam and then its time for a beer and to take a few notes on what needs to be done. A trip to the bank is a months work in itself, the bank trip today involved a 8 hour round trip  The bank trip  was suppposed to have been done in Delhi but got  2000km delayed to Calcutta were the banks were happily having a bank holiday. The trip then got extended another 3000km to Kerala and a week later I am at the bank. When the groups come out it is a different story. Ride all day then a beer, nothing else.  Too busy...

Staff Trip

 4.30 a.m. The sun is an hour away from lighting the sky and in this country of early risers we are surprised to be the first on the road. We cycle in silence, three mountain bikers climbing gently in the cool pre dawn air to the village of Song and the trails to Kaphne and Pindari Glacier. With work commitments and late snowfalls delaying the start date we are full of enthusiasm (even at 4.30 a.m) hoping that recent sunshine will clear the trails and let us make the first ever descent from Kaphne Glacier.

With two of India’s best young riders with me, one from the Hindi speaking north and one from the Malayalam speaking southern state of Kerala we speak in the only language we all understand, English, about what lies ahead. Climbing. Kaphne and its neighbour Pindari Glacier lie in the remote Indian Himalayan state of Uttaranchal over 400km northeast of the capital Delhi. The state is the home of India’s highest mountains the near 8000m giants peaks of Nanda Devi, Trishul and Maktoli. We need to reach half that height.

The trail starts in Song with a tough 6 km climb gaining over 600 meters in height to the trekking huts in Loharkhet. From here the path becomes narrow, steep and rocky as we ascend through forests of Rhodedendrum. The carry is a tough, sweaty and breathless affair punctuated by a few tea shops that serve the donkey caravans that come this way.  Everyone in the tea shops and on the trail are more used to trekkers carrying backpacks than mountain bikers carrying mountain bikes. Everyone including the seen it all before donkeys think we are mad.

  We climb and climb until we reach a stone carved memorial to a trekker who died on this spot of a heart attack. We pause, reflect on our own mortality and conclude that if you had to die anywhere it’s a good spot to breathe your last.  One km on and we reach the Dhakuri Pass at 3000 meters, an 1800 meter height gain for the day. In the distance we can see the snow capped peaks whilst below us the path winds its way down through the forests. It is steep and super tech with rock after rock and super tight switchbacks. It is brutal. We batter our way down the near 1000m drop descent   to the almost indescribably beautiful village of Khatti. Bodies and minds numb but elated after nine hours on the bikes.

In Khatti we settle round the fire. The talk is about our failure to bring some booze to make a night of it and the record snow falls over the winter, which will make for some testing riding conditions on the trails above 3400m. The few trekkers who have made it so far this year have found things eventful. We meet an American trekker who had slipped off the path catching his head on a rock resulting in a nasty gash. Another walker appears with an iodine smeared broken nose, a result of a fall in an earthquake the previous day.  No one else sat round the fire had felt the tremor and a conflicting account emerges, the man, they say, smashed his nose after demolishing 3 bottles of rum the previous night. Another man we encountered was covered in dirt and mud which he said was a result of coming face to face with a Himalayan black bear on the trail, a tale, I would not have believed had I not seen one myself a few months before and almost fallen off my bike in a manic escape effort.

From Khatti we ride high above the Pindari river along a path straight out of Tolkien novel. Branches of huge towering trees overhang the thin ribbon of trail that hugs the side of the valley. The Himalayan peaks appear then disappear as the track drops down to the glacial water and then up and up through to the tiny settlement of Malyador and on to Dwali at 2700 meters in height.

 From Dwali the trail splits. The right track climbs 14 km to Kaphne Glacier whilst the well worn trail to the left leads to Pindari. With the Kaphne valley being more exposed to the sunshine we head right hoping that the extra day would be enough to melt a bit more of the snow that remained on the Pindari trail. We climb towards Kaphne, riding the smoother sections and pushing up the tech bits which gives us a chance to weigh up the lines for the return ride. 4 hours of stunning scenery follow and we reach a ridge of rocks that give us a view of the glacier and the huge snowbound peaks.  We pause for a while to watch a small avalanche then ready ourselves for what promises to be an hour of magical descending.  The top section is all flowing singletrack carving through the grassy meadows with the odd patch of recalcitrant snow keeping us hovering over the brakes. We start to descend more steeply and the switchbacks, tech sections and rock gardens build up as we drop over 1200 and 14km of breathless trail to Dwali. Riding trail amongst massive peaks at near 4000-meter altitude is a surreal experience. Your oxygen starved brain makes you feel fluid and loose like having had a couple of pints, great, but your lungs feel like its had the accompanying 20 cigarettes, you are breathless, pushing your bodies limits, another part of your mind is politely asking you to stop and just take in the view.

 To make sure we had great fun on the descents we traveled light with just a small day bag each. Our luggage was transfered by donkeys and porters, which were in short supply as most of the areas men folk had headed to the Bugyals, the high altitude meadows, some near 5000m in height to collect Lawa a caterpillar fungus worth some  £6000 a kilo. The month long Lawa season is a dangerous and painstakingly slow work, involving crawling on the ground for hours on end hoping to sight the dirt encrusted little finger sized fungus. Each one, worth near £3 is collected and then  sold on to middle men on the Indo-Chinese border before making its way to Tibet and on to China were it is used as an aphrodisiac. Not only do the pickers risk their lives on the remote and exposed slopes but the trade is more lucrative if government officials are by passed but in doing this arrests are common with pickers facing prison sentences and massive fines. The absence of porters was a boon for government employed trail builders, tea boys and anyone else who was heading in our direction. Each day our bags where packed early, men came and men went, weighing the bags in their hands before deciding it was worth the effort and cash reward to cart them to the next village.

From Dwali it is 7km to Phukiya at around 3200m and a further 6 km to Pindari making it the best place to overnight for an early start to reach the Glacier. The climb up is quite gentle but demanding on legs and lungs as the altitude kicks in. The trail is breathtaking, the peaks of Maktoli, Trishul and Nainda Devi are all visible. Waterfalls cascade down into the valley as the sun melts the snow that sits like a blanket on the higher ground. Phukiya itself is best described as an ice-cold hut in the shadow of a 7200-meter peak. We move to the soot-black walled kitchen a result of the smoke of countless wood fires. The caretaker screws up his eyes up as he rolls out mountains of chapattis before toasting them on the fire in preparation for an evening meal of vegetable curry.

From Phukiya the 6 km early morning ride is beautiful, patches of snow and ice pack the gullies and riverbeds.  We crest ridge after ridge before the valley opens up onto a vast Bugyal with the trail leading to a stone temple that houses both a cave and the holy man Pindari Baba who is famed for his hospitality. With the holy man away on a pilgrimage we ride the last km of the trail up to Zero Point without the benefit of a cup of tea inside us.   We take a few pics then descend what could be 25km of the best trail on earth. 1600 meters of vert and seemingly endless singletrack to play with. An hour of continuous descent and we are back in Dwali insanely giggly and euphoric from endorphins and oxygenated air and a simply cracking trail.

  In Dwali we meet some lawa pickers who are on their way back to their village after a month away in the high meadows they are both carrying infections and fevers and ask us if we have any medicines. Another foreigner is here so we ask him for a second opinion and to pool our 1^st aid kits. The imposing 6-foot plus trekker looks studious and grave as we show him our medicines and the ill man. The crowd swells as we wait on the prognosis of the white haired trekker, a man who appears to hold the gravitas of a learned doctor more and more. After a pregnant pause he speaks, he has not traveled with a 1^st aid kit for 15 years he says and furthermore he is against all conventional medicine claiming they are “cancer pills”. He recommends month long detox programmes as the way to avoid getting ill which seems a perfectly legitimate view point to hold if you had a month to spare and no pre-existing illnesses. We dish out our pills and thank him for his advice without bothering to translate his ideas to the “patient”.

  We wind our way down through the forests and meet a small party of government trail builders escorting a black goat to what looks like inevitable death. We are invited to breakfast. We arrive at a newly constructed wooden bridge where it is explained to that it is auspicious to slaughter a goat to bring fortune and good luck for the bridge and those who built it. We are presented with goats testicles for starters then plates of mutton curry which provide for an unusual but tasty mountain bikers breakfast that sets us up for the stunning 12km of trail through the valley to Khatti. From Khatti we head away from the mountains into warmer, richer air past a village where the donkey caravans start and the road finishes. It gets busier here a jeep, and then a sign by the road that reads “impatient on road, patient in hospital”, we all laugh and peddle on slowly and patiently reflecting on the past weeks riding.

Trails From Uttarakhand

Welcome back reader. It has been a long time so I am going to warm up gently. 

 We are still in India which is probably no surprise to you. We left Kerala and the comforts of the Queen’s Pantry in Misery Mountains Plantation. which serves as he headquarters of Mountain Bike Kerala’s winter operations.  We are now 3500km north in Nainital in the foothills of the Himalaya on the trails leading to  the Pindari Glacier. 

Its been lunatic busy here since last September riding in great company on trails panning across the Indian Himalaya from the north east to  the north west, to Kerala in the tropical south and a few excursions into India’s rural, timeless state of Tamil Nadu. We have crossed the biggest mountains in  the Indian peninsular; the western ghats; by bike and by foot. Sheffield Mike  and I walked 7 hours through the highest tea plantation in the world climbing1200 metres and descending 2000 meters on a path that no on has ever done before (we made the path up as we went) just to get a few super strong beers down  in the famous Tamil Tapas bars of Thenni. (It was a dry day in Kerala) We have suffered all sorts of mechanical failures, come face to face with bears, been leaped over by deer, brutally assaulted by bar managers, ridden the most dangerous ride in “the world the death trail”; doors have been opened when all looked lost and doors closed when all look to be going great. In short a thousand stories to tell so will get on to it these next few days. In the meantime have a look at the new short MTB film we have put together. Some have complained about the camera work being a bit shaky, that’s the least of its failings, me thinks.  Let us know what you think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=733X7FuK3fg

Fast Until Death

Kerala is in a panic at present over fears that the Mulliperiyar Dam, built in the high ranges might collapse. The dam, situated in Kerala is over 100 years old and holds water for the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu and comes under their jurisdiction. If the dam fails its water will spill down through Kerala with varied apocalyptic predictions of how much damage that might cause. Tamil Nadu stands to loose its water only.

The debate has raged for years but has come to a head recently after a series of earthquakes up to 3.4 of the Richter scale that some say have weakened the Dam’s structure. Kerala wish to build a new dam whilst lowering the water in the existing structure to make it safer until a new dam is built. Tamil Nadu believe the water level is already too low and the dam can take more water and is sufficiently strong to withhold whatever forces of nature throw at it. Lowering the level further would compromise their agricultural heartlands. Protests have come in the form of strikes, human chains and hunger strikes and fasts until death. At this stage little progress appears to be being made to come to some form of compromise between the two states that, until recently, have had excellent relations. A small point here on the nature of hunger strikes and fast until death and a few other terms.

Words. In India there are a few words that stretch the very definition to make them almost meaningless.

Hunger strike. A tactic used by many politicians and those with a cause. Used properly it can be an effective tool to attract attention to an issue and mobilise public opinion. A hunger strike suggests not eating for a sufficient amount of time to threaten ones health. In many cases in India it means a fast from breakfast to dinner or in some cases a chain hunger strike were people swap round to pop out for something to eat. A fast until death might mean skipping an evening meal as well.

The word pint commonly used as a measure of about 550ml. Many bars in Delhi for example have a drinks card with the word pint written on it. You order a pint and you get a 330ml bottle of beer. In the Kerala liquor shops the same redefinition is in place with all and sundry lined up asking for the mandatory “brandy pint” and walking away happily with their 330ml bottle wrapped up in newspaper or secreted inside a lungi to be demolished in two swigs at the first opportunity.

Before running a marathon in India it is best to ask how long the race is. Marathons come in all distances here 5km, 10km, 20km, two laps round a paddy field, half marathon sized marathons and occasionally even marathon distance marathons.

Resort. A resort suggests a beautiful beach or a secluded 5 star luxury retreat. A quick look round the hill tea-towns of Kerala and every run down, shambolic, half demolished, half built 3^rd rate hotel claims to be a resort (hotel itself is a food establishment, walk into a place with the word hotel asking for a room and you are likely to be asked to sit down and be served a milky tea and an egg curry) Usually taking ludicrous names like Whispering Pine Woods, Mist Filled Farm House Resorts, Lovedale Cottages etc etc.

Deluxe The word deluxe has lost all meaning, anything can be deluxe usually a byword for rubbish. Hence luxury-bus usually means a death trap on wheels. A super-deluxe bus is now synonymous with a bus made by Volvo. So Volvo bus can mean a you have actually booked a ticket on a Volvo bus but more likely any old bus with a Volvo sticker on the front sometimes spelt Volva or Vulvo or worse.

Yesterday I then ran a marathon then drunk a pint of brandy. In the evening I fasted until death before taking a luxury bus to my resort. Discuss…

Compensation For Camels

Another magic mountain bike tour up to the Pindari Glacier is over now its back down to the heat of Delhi and the most difficult job shifting all the bikes on to the next destination for the Himalaya Singalila Ridge Tour.

Delhi railway station and its time to book the bikes on to the train. We have 4 bikes to transfer the near 2000km to Darjeeling. There are two of us here, so with the help of a porter we manage to relay the bikes through the Diwali season festival rush, by-pass the airport style security set up with a friendly wave and make it on to platform 16 and the luggage booking compound. Boxes, motorbikes, cartons, crate of ever size and descriptions are piled high seemingly at random to be dispatched to all corners of India. I stand patiently at the back of the paper waving, shouting scrummage that is the booking window and I am rewarded with my papers being snatched away by an official who carries them through to the office. I am ushered forward through the crowd who appear quite content for me to be given preferential treatment. Smiles greet me from all sides. I pay up at the counter managing to get past the previously unheard of “one cycle one man” Indian Railways Rule by informing them that the bikes are in bags and we have 4 bags rather than 4 cycles. “That will be fine sir” I then pass back through the cheerful parting crowd that waits till I am at a safe distance then resumes its well-rehearsed scrummage.

Intrigued by the one man one cycle rule I read the small print on the back of the luggage receipt and come across some other little known rules. For example the maximum compensation claimable for damage or loss is limited to 150Rs per kilo so that values the bikes at less then £40 each. Furthermore loss of donkeys, mules and horses are valued at 1500Rs, if the Indian Railways manage to loose your Camel in transit then their liability is limited to a paltry 3500Rs. If your Elephant disappears from the luggage van of the Malabar Express then expect the railways to pay out no more than 7000 Rupees. All there in black and white on the back of the ticket.

The train arrives in New Jailpugari 5 hours late on what must be the worst, filthiest rolling stock belonging to Indian Railways. Second Class Sleeper. (NOTE TO POTENTIAL CUSTOMER. I promise we won’t put you though this it’s 1st Class only for you). I arrive on the neon light lit platform looking and feeling like a miner who has just escaped from a month long entombment in a pit. Bikes are here, papers are signed, more papers are signed, and we are off into the sweltering dark and our hotel for a beer or two and a good scrub up.