Visit India, see how it goes
I am hedging a lot!
As I shared here, I'm in India … at the moment. I'm usually hedging when I say where I am. If I were speaking instead of typing, I'd be doing some shifty eye thing. I'm here in India, "currently," "at the moment," "for the time being."
Why am I hedging? The short answer is because Bell and I made the trip over to "visit India and see how it goes." No more and no less than that. What follows is a long reflection on other reasons I find myself currently hedging. And then below that is something a bit more specific, as in, the actual current plan for the trip. It's a short section for reasons that will become apparent.
I think that although bicycle affords a lot of flexibility, in a way it simultaneously makes planning harder. Because you have your transport, food, sleeping equipment with you at all times, you can instantly pivot. The other side of this flexibility is that to get anywhere, you have two choices: you either need your bike and body to be able to get you there, or you need to get your bike and body on alternative transport.
(A little interlude: Once the bicycle is all packed up and I'm riding, it feels easier to just continue cycling, rather than to hitchhike or figure out how to load everything onto a bus, to say nothing of a plane. I think before I started bicycle travelling, it would have seemed like taking motorized transport would always be the easier option because it's faster and takes less exertion. That's not generally how it feels to me. It's something about just having the inertia of carrying on as you have been. I'm not at all a purist about taking rides.)
There's a lot that needs to be going right in order to continue making any forward momentum. It's an incredible thing to wake up and somehow be able-bodied enough to get on a bicycle and ride for a few of several hours. I don't think I had fully internalized this until maybe as recently as this year. Do I constantly remind myself of this incredible good fortune? Absolutely not. Have I cried and yelled in our first few weeks of cycling? Multiple times.
Here is an example to show the two sides of the coin, the flexibility and the planning difficulties. There is a city, Manali, a few days' ride away from where we are now. We have been riding on the "Leh-Manali Highway." Over the last few weeks, we decided we weren't going to go to Manali, then we actually were, then actually we weren't. Sure, anyone travelling by any means might vacillate like this. In our case, here's how the bicycle travel influenced us:
We weren't going to go to Manali because instead we were going to turn east and ride through a nearby region (not relevant to the story, but if you're curious, Spiti and Kinnaur). Then Bell was finding themselves unable to sleep due to a neck problem that had flared up from resuming cycling. As in, sleep for four hours, wake up in varying degrees of intense pain, and then sit in the dark in pain for the rest of the night while I slept until 6 am. As you can imagine this does not make a bicycle trip fun or sustainable. So, we were going to go Manali so that we could order an improved neck brace and pillow online on Amazon or FlipCart and deliver it to an address that either of these companies would accept. Visiting Manali was also convenient for my agenda to enjoy a good coffee. It also seemed like a good place to have a rest. A rest was very needed. The prospect of going back up to altitude in Spiti Valley, back to the cold and dry and breathlessness was not feeling very appealing to me. So we were heading for Manali. Then we reached the village of Keylong, which has about 1,000 people in it. We ended up resting here, and it was blissful. Quiet, friendly people, pakoras, samosas, huge balcony, mountains, comfy bed, flowers, sunshine, green slopes. Something unexpected happened. The small local chemist had a better neck brace. I have been completely unable to find bleach or cinnamon or ground coffee in Keylong, but you can get a pretty good quality cervical collar. I think the chemist might have been bemused at our repeated visits. Got the neck brace, and toothpaste, but we were too picky about probiotics and the type of antacid to buy what he had. He also gave me several little paper bags stamped with Tibetan Buddhist insignia. You can usually find the chemist outside his shop playing cards. He has a beaming smile. Like I said Keylong is a quiet and restful place. Finding the brace gave a big boost to Bell's sleep situation, which was already stabilizing due to the lower altitude, better mattress, relief at having made it this far. So we were both more rested, so trying out riding in Spiti and Kinnaur valleys seemed more do-able. There wasn't an urgent need to go to Manali anymore and it was becoming harder to justify on the grounds of coffee alone. So now it's back to the original plan of bypassing Manali.
This dynamism of plans in response to different factors plays out every day. At times in Ladakh in September it reached levels that could be called absurd. Like, applying and paying for a Protected Area Permit so that we could visit eastern Ladakh, only to decide a few days later that actually it's not going to work to go to said area. Or having conversations about how maybe I will need to go off and do the first chunk of this trip pedalling on my own and Bell will meet me…somewhere. And then I go off and ride a rollercoaster of emotions in my mind, and then it turns out that actually no we'll try starting out together, but only with an explicit goal of taking it one day at a time. Or being on a pass at maybe 4,900 metres above sea level, checking in with each other about whether hitchhiking is in the cards today. And then checking in again at 5,000 metres, and so on.
We are optimizing for several things, like weather, rest, health, preferred routes, safety, etc. Next month onwards, both of us will also be optimizing for working part-time each week. That's a lot to optimize for. You can't also then work around a rigid plan.
Here's just a few other factors I'll mention for completeness.
There's so many things that could end the trip at any point. My heightened awareness of how unlikely and lucky and fragile something like this is maybe has to do with getting older, or has to do with having been on a long bike trip before, and having it end, and grieving and accepting that it won't happen again. And just being more aware of mortality and the shortness of life.
Being LGBTQ+ and on the first trip with this as something to navigate is new and a big thing. It's another reason that it feels appropriate to be more explicit about visiting India and seeing how it goes in this respect. I don't think this caveat is specific to India. And I don't want to paper over the deep complexity and context even though that's kind of what I am doing right now. More like…in the absence of lived experience and knowledge and context, the default stance is a cautious one. That was the agreement that Bell and I made: that we would see how it felt and go with the flow, with all options on the table.
That's why there's hedging and caveats! I'd think on the face of it that hedging like this would help me be more present and take no day for granted. Perhaps there has been some of that. But there's also like a mental bracing that takes place, like I can't let myself fully relax into being here on a day to day basis.
(Today's) plan
Okay so. I thought that just quickly sharing the current plan might help contextualize other posts I might share that relate to being here in India (for now…). No more hedging, you've already been warned.
The intention is to head east across the Indian Himalayas and its foothills. Or as close as we can follow them based on all the things we're trying to optimize for — seasons, health, connectivity for working. After about a month in Ladakh that's now over (disbelief), we will be in Himachal Pradesh for some or all of October. After that, Uttarakhand. From there, the idea would be to hop on a train to get to Sikkim. From there, perhaps onto Arunchal Pradesh and Nagaland. Assuming everything goes to (this) plan, we'll need to leave once our six-month visa is up.
North stars for the trip
This isn't really a "why India?" "why now?" answer. More just a bit about what the trip is oriented around.
Learning a little. So, this takes the form of chance encounters, conversations, ChatGPT conversations, reading, observing, trying new things. And then if these activities are all inhalation, then they would all be metabolized ("exhalation") by talking it out, processing photos, and writing (online and offline).
Find balance among areas of life. So, balancing bike travel with remote work, with taking care of ourselves, nurturing each of our creative pursuits and relationships.
Being north stars, these are aspirational guiding values. I have definitely not figured out them out yet, nor do I live up to them every day!
The image at the top of the post is from the top of Taglang La Pass, which we miraculously made it over earlier this month. The strategy was to go as slow as possible and then slow it down further. Look at how small that big truck looks!