The leafy park-like setting of New Delhi belies the fact that it's an ecological disaster area. "Air you can chew" is what we decided Delhi's motto should be. We rode through the murky stuff accompanied by Matthew, the Australian cyclist we met on the plane from Bangkok, away from his homeland for the first time (so we were stunned to learn later over lunch later in the day). Pedaling south through the colonial remnant that is New Delhi was a piece of cake, pleasant even. It wasn't until we hit the sprawling suburbs beyond the British city that we tasted the real flavor of the Indian road.
"Chaos" is too generous a word to describe the noisy, smelly colorful mess, a miasma of jewels and muck, of beautifully dressed women tramping barefoot through buffalo shit. At kilometer 17 we were mercifully provided with a break from the bedlam, in the form of Qutab Minar. An old Afghan mosque complex and current tourist attraction, its most impressive feature is a tall ornate tower built some eight centuries ago, resembling nothing so much as an over-the-top Victorian smokestack. The three of us wandered around the nearby ruined mosque, toting our helmets and other valuables, occasionally posing for photos with groups of visiting schoolchildren.
The place had atmosphere to spare; I could easily have spent hours there, but the road beckoned. We had barely left the Delhi administrative area when we met our first camel carts. Slow and lumbering, they were comically overburdened, a serious impediment to any traffic in a hurry. When we stopped to take a photo, the camel drivers stopped too, to look at us. I guessed that of the two spectacles, we were by far the more novel. Matthew had some rack trouble here and we paused for roadside samosas --a mistake? At Gurgaon we joined National Highway 8 for awhile and I was relieved to discover how civilized it was.
It's the main highway from Delhi to Mumbai and though it's no bucolic delight, it appears bikeable enough. The road to Sohna was another story --poorly maintained, bumpy and narrow and choked with fume-spewing, horn-blaring suicidal trucks. When we'd reached the outskirts of Sohna it was beginning to feel like lunchtime, though none of the roadside places (called "dhabas") looked overly appealing. We did stop at one such place for cold drinks, along with a couple hundred soldiers with "SSB" emblazoned on their shoulders. "Special Securuity Bureau" explained one of them when I asked him what it stood for. It was here that we noticed a billboard indicating "Sohna Tourist Complex"
and we decided to check it out. If it was decent we could always spend the night here. And it was decent. After traversing the muddy hell of Sohna --which Fred officially proclaimed a "doomp"---and pumping up a dusty cliff, we found ourselves in a lush, well-tended park with big clean motel-like rooms and a fantastically accommodating staff. While checking in I had my first encounter with upper-class Indians, who seem to model themselves on Americans: affable, casually-dressed and perpetually enthusiastic. The couple I met were visiting from Delhi, "the south part, of course" and recommended the sulfur baths in the town below.
"You can ride your bikes there," said the young woman with a brother in Tempe, Arizona, "or you can go trekking by the path." At lunch we were surprised to see another white boy. His name was Scott and he was in town for the day to set up an Indian-Canadian cultural exchange program. It quickly became established that he knew our friend Ashok in Bombay and was m.o.t. --a member of our tribe. We went back into town following the "trekking" route --basically a gravel track liberally sprinkled with various shapes of feces. A bunch of feral Indian dudes showed us where the baths were, in a compound incorporating several colorful temples, another (shabbier) motel and a number of grayish pools filled with skinny Indians furiously attending to their ablutions.
It really felt like we had arrived in India. Fred quite understandably chose to remain dry while Matt and I took the plunge. The water coming from the spring was scalding and it did seem to have an invigorating quality. A walk around the labyrinthine alleys of Sohna revealed the town to possess far more charm than we'd previously thought. Merchants sat cross-legged in their tiny colorful shops; old men played cards in tree-shaded courtyards; forlorn cows rooted among the garbage for edible paper products. People approached us to practice the only words they knew in English --"tourist complex?"---thus giving me one.
All three of us were astonished by the number of pigs around. I tried to think of an Indian dish involving pork and could think of none. "Who eats them?" I asked out loud. The question was answered several hours later (after a great yoga session, a shower and an amble around the grounds) by Mr. Singh, the somewhat haughty manager of the tourist complex. He said that the outcasts, the *dalits* (formerly known as "untouchables") ate the pigs. He explained that he himself was "100% vegetarian," patting his ample belly before continuing: "See, I'm well-fed. But if I were to eat meat it would be a chicken or a lamb, not a pig or a cow."
Matthew appeared delighted to be in a place where vegetarians aren't considered freaks. And I wonder if this had influenced his decision to come to India for his first international voyage. Intense India is certainly not the country I'd recommend for a first foray into the developing world. "Try Mexico, try Thailand first," I'd have said, "then maybe you should brave India."