Stage 3 · Srinagar – Almora
At the foothills of Tibet
The next morning I set off again. The road keeps getting worse, the scenery keeps getting more beautiful. And it keeps getting colder. I keep watching the river flowing below me, fringed here and there by long white beaches, almost Caribbean. I’d like to touch the sand, feel its texture, gauge the size of each grain. But I’m travelling too fast. Too fast. The stages were planned back in Italy; here things are quite different. To keep to schedule I force myself to cover 240 kilometres in one day. On roads like these that was a serious mistake. The stage is exhausting. I ride the last stretch in the dark, guided by round white paint marks daubed on the mountainside near the road — the Indian version of reflectors. Guessing at the potholes, with the sentence ‘I absolutely do not intend to ride at night…’ echoing in my head. Then. Then, I slowed down. In every sense. And, like when a record is by mistake started at the wrong speed and then set right at 33 rpm, everything began to make sense.
I spend two days in Almora resting and revisiting the stages ahead. The hotel room has no hot water and isn’t heated. At night the temperature drops below zero and I have to sleep in every jumper I own. I reconsider the cold and the kilometres. I cross Amritsar off the itinerary — very close to the border with northern Pakistan, where I’d wanted to see the Golden Temple. Too far, too cold. I decide to head straight for the desert, hoping to warm up.
I relax wandering the bazaar and enrich my luggage with 50 limes. I’ll have all the lemon tea I could want. Why 50? A language misunderstanding. English isn’t spoken by the poorer population, and often, especially away from tourist spots, I struggled to explain what I wanted to buy — fruit especially. After a few interactions I’d realized that the main way street fruit and biscuit vendors reasoned was in money or weight — say, 50 rupees’ worth of bananas, or an amount equal in weight to a lead marker inscribed in Sanskrit-derived Hindi (Arabic, as far as I was concerned), whose exact value in grams still completely escapes me. So ‘50 rupees’ worth of…’ had by now become my standard approach. I was after lemons, almost impossible to find in India, and finally I spot some limes on a fruit stall in the Almora bazaar (the coldest place in the Himalaya I’d been to, and where I turned the bike toward the desert). I try to strike a deal with the vendor, but the conversation, even garnished with broad smiles, gets nowhere. I fall back on numbers, and we finally exchange the essential piece of information: ‘fifty.’ No engineer has ever been more satisfied. The power of numbers. I relax, and after a moment he starts counting out the limes. Fifty limes, one after another. I don’t have the heart to interrupt him, and wait patiently for him to finish counting, then pay, laughing. I brought a considerable number of them back to Italy.
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