NEPAL, CONTINUED.

Allright, allright, some of our regular readers reckon my last posting was way too venomous. I have been told to relax, chill out & go with the flow etc, etc. Well, its allright for you, you can't smell the place. But seriously, Kathmandu is just an overcrowded, polluted bunfight. Fortunately, we were able to escape for two days up to Pokhara. This is the start point for the numerous treks in the Annapurna Region, & is situated on Lake Fewa. The scenery in this region is supposed to be spectacular. I couldn't see any mountains at all, because of the haze, but there were some very nice photos in the shops, taken in the early fifties, I suspect. There I go again !

Pokhara is about 200km west of Kathmandu, but it is a long drive because of the state of the road, & the traffic. Our driver turned it into a five hour, white knuckle ride each way. An otherwise likeable enough chap named Bardri, once behind the wheel he turned into a terrorist. Call me old fashioned, but I just don't like the odds of passing trucks & buses on blind bends or crests, with nothing more than a toot of the horn to protect me. It doesn't bother Bardri, or anyone else, it seems. We were bounced around all day like a couple of golf balls in a concrete mixer, with only near death experiences every five minutes for entertainment. I swear my life flashed before my eyes at least every 30 minutes. I think Bardri graduated top of his class at the Nepal Institute of Advanced Driving for the Totally Insane. The scary part is we have been observing the traffic here for about a week & a half, & soon we have to get out there & compete with it. Now I know how gladiators felt before a match.

And they are not kidding!!

Pokhara was certainly nicer than Kathmandu, lots of tourists centred on the lakefront area, lots of shops selling hiking gear etc, lots of good restaurants, & it was relaxing. Bardri took us to several of the usual tourist traps, with the usual hustlers, beggars etc in attendance. Here is one of the more unusual ones.

See, it's in Pokhara, & all this time I thought it was in Gotham City

But on the way, we drove through the really old part of the town. We got out & walked around an area where there were lots of jewellery shops cranking out some really good stuff, & no other tousists to be seen. We were offered an impromptu look at some of the artisans at work, & their skill is just staggering. Later, quite by accident, we discovered a museum dedicated to the British Gurkha Regiments. We spent over 2 hours there virtually on our own, & it was fascinating. The Gurkhas are Nepalese soldiers whose units have been attached to the British Army since about 1850, & their tenacity & courage are legendary throughout many conflicts from the Indian Mutiny, the North West Frontier, through both World Wars, to Bosnia & even as UN peacekeepers in East Timor.

All Gurkhas carry the khukri, a traditional Nepalese weapon worn on the left side of the belt. It's got a surprisingly heavy blade, its razor sharp, and it can really do some damage, its a fearsome weapon. Replicas, some quite ornate, are sold at shops & stalls all over the place, but the museum actually sells real ones as souvenirs for about one fifth of the price. Naturally we both had to buy one. I don't know if I can get it back into Oz, but if not, here it is, its the actual service issue, the genuine article.

Handle with care, unless you want to kill someone.

On the way out of the museum, a uniformed gurkha saluted us, & I have to say I felt somewhat embarrassed at this. I felt it should be me who was showing my respect to him, but that's the Nepalese for you. In spite of the crap everywhere, & the chaos on the roads, they just get on with life in their own way without complaint. We have not seen an angry man since we got here. While I wouldnt want to live here, I wouldn't mind having their attitude to life. So there, I've learned something.

On the way back to Kathmandu, we noticed some of the roadside vegetation. So those old rumours really are true!! Bardri reckons it's grown to give to the cattle when they get diarrhoea. I suggested it doesn't neccessarily stop the diarrhoea, it's just that the cows don't care about it any more.

Typical roadside foliage.

WE REACH NEPAL

OOPS THE ABOVE PHOTOS ARE MEANT TO BE IN THE NEXT POSTING

We got away from Bangkok on schedule, noting that the new airport is very impressive. I forgot I had a can of coke in the tankbag, & it was picked up on the xray. I also had a set of Allen keys for the bike, which I had forgotten about, & was quite concerned they would be confiscated. However, they let me keep them, but took the coke!! Evidently it is easier to hijack a plane with a can of coke than with a pointy metal tool. First thing I got on the plane was a can of beer, fully de-fused & rendered safe, no doubt.



Landing at the airport in Kathmandu was where the culture shock started. Unlike the earlier countries, where impressive efforts were being made to match the pace of the rest of the world, the airport is like Adelaide, 1956, with the lights out. We had left the developed world. I suspected from that point on, it would be rough, & I was right. In the taxi to the hotel, the first sight is rubbish strewn all over the streets, cows wandering amongst the traffic & grazing on the garbage, really old, beaten-up cars, & the usual total lack of any road rules. Great. And they reckon everyone is glad to get here after India. I can hardly wait!

mmmmmmm...................garbage!!!

The next move was to collect the bikes, which were supposed to follow within 1-2 days. We recieved an email from the freight company in Thailand, telling us that the bikes would now not be sent for another 6 days, & they had already had them for 5 days. We suspect the bastards had been aware of this all along, but waited till we were out of the country before telling us. So, we made a revision to the schedule, & will go to Pokhara by car & come back to get the bikes, then go down to Chitwan & straight into India, about 3 days early. To compound the problem, there is a fuel shortage in Nepal, & waits in long queues of over an hour are common.





Walking around the streets of Thamel, the old section of Kathmandu where the action was in the 70's, was interesting. I am convinced that not only are cows sacred here, but so are the flies. No one seems to make any attempt to kill them. But they dont bother you much, there is so much else to keep them occupied, like piles of rotting garbage, sewage running in the street, all kinds of shit, not to mention the meat adorning the chopping blocks of the butcher shops. And another thing. This is the phlegm & mucous capital of the world, so far at least. There is a continuous chorus of people hocking up their lungs, then gobbing the results onto the road or footpaths, or clearing their nostrils in either direction without the use of any other modern aid, like handkerchiefs. Some even do this from open windows, well above the street. To say you need to watch where you put your foot in this town is the understatement of the century. Then we got to the river. I have never seen anything like it (but we havent been to India yet!!). It was like any typical garbage dump (mental image required at this point) but with the addition of raw sewage, dead animals & God knows what else. We also visited the Monkey Temple, perched on a hilltop with a view over the Kathmandu Valley. It was so polluted, we could hardly see anything. But while we did see a couple of mangy looking monkeys, they were heavily outnumbered by the mangy dogs. They should consider a name change, to perhaps Dogshit Temple. At about this point, my sympathy for these people evaporated. Anyone prepared to tolerate this extent of pollution & regard it as normal, without making any effort to clean up their own mess, gets what they deserve & deserves what they get.

View? What View?

I'll just run out & grab some goat for the barbie



And Johnny, grab a bucket of sewage in case anyone wants a drink


Yes Mum.

The next day, we were to witness something even worse. At several places along the river there are cremation ghats, where bodies are burned on huge piles of wood. When the fire is burned out, they push whats left into the river. At this point there are people in the river dredging it for coins or jewelry placed on the bodies before burning, & downstream there are kids swimming in this toxic mess !! And on the way to everywhere are touts trying to sell stuff that nobody wants or needs, and beggars with their hands out, some who have lost all hope, & some who are just kids of 5 or6., learning the family business. This really is very confronting , and quite upsetting. To be able to get back to the hotel for a shower & a beer is a God given gift, but the images persist. Somehow we need to learn to shut all this stuff out or we will never get through India & Pakistan. The locals don't seem to worry about it. If its not their problem, whose problem is it, that's what I want to know.

Now just take out the rubbish.

OK Mum.

Now for the inevitable bad news. We dined at the hotel restaurant last night. I awoke this am with something best described as Delhi Belly, & we haven't even been to Delhi yet!! Perhaps I should say it was Kathmandu Colon? The only thing fast about the food here is the speed at which it gets from the north end of the body to points south, no need to explain further.

On To Bangkok

We had a good run once we left Phuket, following the west coast of Thailand, alongside the Andaman Sea, then along the Burmese border. When I say good, the road was good, lots of nice twisty bends, & only two near fatal head on collisions. The first was a guy on a scooter coming straight at me on the wrong side of the road, the second was a car also on my side, causing me to use maximum braking & dive for the shoulder. I knew those ABS brakes would come in handy! We crossed over to the east coast, the Gulf of Thailand side, then headed for Bangkok. The traffic started to build up about 120km outside the capital & just got heavier, & it was boiling hot & very humid. We knew this was going to be tough, but it exceeded even our expectations. On the way in we went past what we are sure was a fatal accident, which had only just happened. A car travelling at approx 100-120kph had hit a scooter crossing the road. Gulp!

Bangkok is huge, a true megacity, & very hard to navigate in. If you leave a gap of any more than about a foot, someone else will barge in, I'm not kidding. A big, heavily loaded bike like the BM needs some space to work in, but we are just another scooter to everyone else. There were still a few marauding bands of people in utes & on the roadside who were still celebrating Songkran, & dumping water on passers by, which actually turned out to be a relief from the heat. There is a good system of motorways, but motorcycles are not allowed on them ( figure that one out!). We picked a hotel which was (supposed to be) close to the new airport, figuring that the airport would be well signposted. Not so. After becoming hopelessly lost, we hired a taxi, told him to go to the hotel, while we followed on the bikes. Two hours later, after the taxi became lost several times, we finally reached the hotel, just as smoke started to billow out from under the taxi. It had burned out its clutch! We paid the fare & said bad luck about wrecking your car, & bolted for the hotel.

Next day, we decided to clean the bikes. A simple request for a bucket was misinterpreted, & instead we ended up with five uniformed cleaning ladies from the hotel out in the car park cleaning the bikes!! Who were we to argue?

Our next task was to arrange to air freight the bikes to Nepal. We had to visit our chosen freight forwarder to sort the paperwork. Thailand does not use the Carnet system to control foreign vehicle entry, so we had to register the bikes as temporary imports, & the freight company wanted to set up some kind of dummy corporation to re-export them. Seems like a lot of buggerising around for something which should be easy, but we are getting used to this kind of beaurocracy. No wonder people aren't queuing up to do trips like this!!!

On the way up from Phuket, my bike was getting hard to start when hot, then spluttering & belching black smoke, so this was also the last opportunity to get it checked before we get to Tehran. So, we had to find the BMW dealership. We used the taxi trick again, & each time, the drivers got lost again! Anyway, they ran a diagnostic on the bike & it checked out ok. We think there was a problem in the fuel injection system, which was flooding it on startup & causing it to run rich, but it appears to have resolved itself, I very much hope!! Then we had to get the bikes out to the freight depot, where they had to be inspected by a Dangerous Goods certifier & made safe for the flight. (Tank empty, battery disconnected, terminals & leads taped up, etc.) before having timber crates made. At least we didn't have to take the front wheels off, since we were being charged on weight, not volume. So, we won't see the bikes again until Kathmandu. All this stuffing around ate into our itinerary, & we decided to cancel the trip to Cambodia, & instead, we moved to a hotel closer to the city, & became tourists for a few days. We really needed to relax, because it had all been hard graft up till now. We went to book a city tour by mini bus, but got a better deal thru the hotel. For $80 we got a uniformed chauffer & a Mercedes, so why not? So, here are some of the tourist photos I am prepared to post.

The Royal Palace, Bangkok

One of the Royal Barges


The Reclining Buddah

The Wat Arun (Temple of the Dawn)

Malaysia to Thailand

The above pair of photos are not supposed to be here, so ignore them.

We were both fairly wrecked when we finally reached the island of Ko Phuket, but gained some consolation from the fact that some of the Malaysian blokes were knackered as well. We were able to get a room at their hotel that night, but changed hotels the following day, as we had already prebooked accomodation over the net,& we were a day early. We relocated to one of the best places in Patong Beach,the 24 storey Royal Paradise Hotel, & when we checked in, we were told that because we booked so early we had been upgraded to a Suite---EACH!! We decided not to tell the Malaysian guys in case they thought we were pretentious knobs, but it certainly was nice.


The locals certainly show an interest whenever we stop to refuel. Such service!!

Phuket Bike Week is really something. The streets were packed 24/7 with bikes & bikers of all types from far & wide. But what really made the place tick was the Songkran Festival. This celebrates the Thai New Year, and once it starts, its total mayhem. For about 3 days,the whole country just goes off, and the principal manifestation of this is that you can dump as much water on anyone else as you like, for no other reason than its Songkran. I wondered why all the shops were selling huge water pistols, super soakers, etc. These were soon superseded by hoses & buckets,and no one on the streets was spared. All good clean fun, (I mean in Palestine they use real guns, so it can always be worse!). Here is the catch. We had finally arranged to get a BM mechanic to change the immobiliser on the bike, but I had to take the bike over to Phuket Town a few kilometers away. At the servo to fuel up,it wouldn't restart. After a 3 hour wait at the servo, we got a truck to take it to the dealers,by which time it was too late to work on it. The mechanic agreed to come in & work on it the next day, a public holiday. When it was ready to collect Songkran was in fullswing, and we had no option but to go get it. I went pillion on Chris's bike, thru bumper to bumper traffic all the way & when we got there we were of course soaking wet, & some bastard had covered my bare leg with a red dye, & dumped talc powder all over us. Then we both had to ride back & cop even more all over again. No chance of saying we dont want to play! This was actually quite nerve wracking, because by this stage, they were using rubbish bins full of ice water, as if it wasn't hard enough riding in suicidal traffic & not getting lost. WE arrived back at the hotel looking like shipwreck survivors. With as much dignity as we could muster, we squelched our way thru the hotel lobby leaving a trail of liquid debris, much to the amusement of the reception girls, while someone hastily followed us with a mop. We later heard that there had been at least two bike accidents, & one bloke was hospitalised. I'm surprised there was not more carnage, but I am very relieved we survived.

Anyway, we thought Phuket itself was a pretty sleazy sort of place, & were glad of the diversions.

After leaving Brinchang, we headed for the road to take us back to the E1, the main north south highway. Enroute, we found what must be one of the best bike roads in Malaysia, or anywhere else, & we virtually had it to ourselves. Apart from never knowing what sort of traffic idiocy awaited us around the next bend, it was just superb. We were having too much fun to even stop for photos, sorry. As we approached Georgetown on the island of Penang, the traffic started to really build up. There is the choice of a very long bridge or a ferry to the island, & we opted for the bridge. We soon found the traffic to be even worse than Melaka, people just carve you up from all angles, plus it was stinking hot, & we had no idea where we were going. But enough whingeing. We finally found the Sunway Hotel, which was one of the better choices away from the Millionaires Row along the nicest part of the city. As we rode up, the security guard greeted us with a curt "Can I help you, Sir", no doubt thinking these two scrubbers are lost. After we informed him that we were in fact intent on staying at the hotel, he barked a few orders to his minions, & escorted us to the front desk while another guy stood watch over the bikes.



When we got to the room, the door would not open because someone had somehow allowed the security latch to be set from the inside. Back to the desk, & we were invited to have a drink in the lobby lounge while we waited for this to be sorted. Having such sweaty , malodorous thugs sitting in the lobby soon attracted the attention of the Assistant Manager, Pauline Chua, who came over to ask what the hell we were doing in her hotel. As it turned out, this delightful young lady was intrigued by the whole journey thing, and could not have been more helpful. One word from her & things really started to happen big time. People flew in all directions, we were given a new room, and the car park attendant pulled up a deck chair next to the bikes, & settled in for a long wait. The deck chair was manned day & night until we left.

Later that night, I broke a tooth while eating tea. (Note to Don Wilson: not your fault, mate)

Pauline organised an appointment for me at her own dentist, & next day, I had the tooth filled. Total cost, $28Aust. Just the excess on my health insurance is $100. (Note to Don Wilson: $28!!!)



Around to the local BMW dealer to get a new headlight bulb, and we soon found out that there was a bunch of local BM riders going up to Phuket, Thailand, for Bike Week, & we were invited to tag along, by the head bike honcho at Auto Bavaria, Lim Bak Kau. A quick revision to the itinerary, & we fronted up. We were going there anyhow, but had planned to do the trip over 3 days. These guys were doing it in 1. We knew it would be fast, & we were not wrong!! About 800km, with a border crossing, made it a very big day,and we were pushing it hard through heavy traffic. To make matters worse, the bike just refused to start after one of the fuel stops. Lim had a service vehicle accompanying the group (I mean, how good is that!), & the technician got it going, but it was only a temporary reprieve. It turns out that the ignition immobiliser has an electronic problem & will need replacement. Lim is organising a replacement from the BM dealer in Bangkok, who is also coming here for Bike Week. So, while I am less than impressed with the fact that my 8 month old bike has incurred a serious reliability issue, I reckon I'm bloody lucky it happened when & where it did, & not in India or Pakistan,where thereare no BM dealers at all.

HERE WE GO

Arrived in Singapore at the appointed time, got to the hotel, & immediately found out why it was so cheap. It is located in the absolute epicentre of the red light district, & the room was so small I had to go outside just to change my mind. The streets are jam packed with hookers, & business is booming.Wandered off down the street looking for something I recognised to eat. Gave the pigs liver, bullfrog porridge & fish head curry a wide berth, but generally the food is cheap & plentiful. The weather is very oppressive, & you cant move without breaking out into a serious sweat.The traffic is manic, & the stench from the piles of garbage & the open drains does not help. This part of town is well off the package tour radar. Nevertheless, as confronting as it might sound, I was pleased with the way it worked out, as the most popular parts of town are so sanitised it seems like Disney World.

Now to collect the bikes. It took a full day & a half & umpteen taxi fares to various agencies to get the papework sorted out, & this was very inefficient & frustrating. This is what we had heard, but we thought we had it well covered. The best advice I can give anyone planning a similar trip is do yourself a big favour & DO NOT ship to Singapore, its just not worth the hassle. The experience with the carnets was interesting. Everyone seemes so focused on filling in the forms, that no one actually checked the bikes or the luggage. We could have been driving the Batmobile with the boot full of heroin. Anyhow, we got it sorted, & not without some trepidation, finally left for the border. About ten minutes later, we reached the border. A whole lot of buggerising around for a lousy few k's on the Singapore road network. Over the bridge, & into Malaysia, easy as that. Nobody checked the bikes on either side of the border here either.

The first impression of Malaysia is very good. The freeway system is first class, its easy to use & well maintained. We got a good few kilometers under the belt, then turned off onto some trunk roads heading for Melaka. At this point, things changed. Oncoming traffic frequently intrudes onto the wrong side of the road, people pass you on the inside, the hundreds of little scooters don't mind driving alongside you in the same lane, and every blind corner is a complete lucky dip!!

In Melaka, as far as I can make out, there are no road rules whatsoever. Traffic coming straight at you when you are in a one way street takes some getting used to. Melaka is a very historic city, & our hotel was quite handy to all the historic buildings, museums etc, including the Museum of Malaysian Independence, shown below.

When it rains here, its a serious business. Fortunately we were able to watch this cloudburst from the comfort of a very good bar.

From Melaka, we headed up to the Cameron Highlands. The road into this area is all curves, which would normally be a bonus on the bike. However, this turned out to be even more nerve wracking than driving in Melaka. Linemarking is interpreted as a rough guide, double lines have no meaning at all, there was loose rubbish on the road surface, & it started to rain.

However, it is a lot coooler up here, & the outlook is fairly spectacular, lots of tea plantations & rain forest. This is somewhat spoiled by the amounts of litter, especially plastic, around the roads & creeks.

We are staying at the Equatorial Hotel , & they have allowed us to park the bikes at the front door, which is handy.

The food in the nearest town of Brinchang is remarkably inexpensive sofar, although I can't help thinking I'm one meal away from disaster when I look at the food handling techniques, & the ever popular open drains & piles of garbage. The hotel is a much safer bet.

Tomorrow morning (Monday 7April) we leave for Georgetown, Penang.