Into the Foothills

After 300 km from Delhi, I finally get to the foothills and even the foothills are steep. This makes the roads very narrow and very twisted. 3 miles of road for every 1 mile forward. At the start of the foothills the roads are about 1 and a half lanes wide. Within about 70 km they are down to single lanes. Fortunately, the farther into the mountains you go, the less traffic there is.

  

Due to the steepness of the slopes as well as the deforestation, landslides are not just common but universal. This is typical of a small landslide that ripped out the road, so they dug further into the hillside to fill in the slide area until the next monsoon.

Coming down off a ridge I reached the first river. I was stunned to see the high water line about 30’ above the current level. It would be a fascinating research project to see if there are any British Raj era flow records from back in the early 1800’s before much of the old growth forest was cut, to see if this is natural or man-made.

The bike manual went on for a few pages regarding proper loading and weight limits. After some calculations I found that even with all my luggage strapped to the back I was still only 1/3 of the weight limit. It is not uncommon at all to see a family of 4 with parcels driving along on a motorcycle, or carrying 500 lbs of LP tanks, or hay or whatever. This makes me feel not so excessive.

This is the typical new growth deodar forest. It is a fire tolerant species with thick bark, nearly identical to Ponderosa. It appears from the bark that these areas are burned regularly to provide forage for grazing livestock.

Dengue City

Getting the motor bike registered was taking much longer than I had hoped, so I am still in Delhi waiting for the paperwork to get completed. In the papers are articles about the Dengue outbreak in Delhi. It seems it is worse than usual this year. A very famous film director died of it the previous day so there was a big uproar. Gurgaon, a Delhi suburb and the location of more than 1/3 of all the India based call centers that we all call into on a fairly regular basis, has over 1,000 cases just in the last week. 

It was not until I pulled up the CDC’s Dengue map http://www.cdc.gov/dengue/travelOutbreaks/index.html that I saw the southern US has Dengue too.

On Wednesday after being told all would be ready I wait at the office for a few hours to be told ‘oops the printer broke… come back tomorrow’.

I come back the next day at the indicated time and still nothing. But finally around 5:30 everything is finished and I drive off along with my new little TomTom GPS mapping unit and find my way back to my room with only one wrong turn.

I am setting off for the Himalayas in the morning

High Contrast

I had occasion to go to a fancy restaurant in one of the many new malls scattered around Delhi. The mall was as fancy as anything in New York, Paris or Los Angeles. In front of the mall there was a large garden, sculpture and performance area. The cars pulling into the mall were Audis, Mercedes and other show off cars. After a delicious lunch, I walked out through the perfectly manicured garden area in order to cross the road and look for an old bicycle inner tune and a 2 liter bottle to hold some extra petrol. On the other side of the road there was a little area with no buildings. Within that ¼ acre there were probably 100 people living under tarps. Family goats wandered about eating rubbish. I had to step over a number of infants lying on the sidewalk. The latrine was an area between the sidewalk and the tarps.

The contrast on the two sides of the street could not have been more stark.

Just past this open area I found a bicycle repairman but he was having lunch and I didn’t see any old inner tubes lying about. Further down the road toward the Metro station I did find a used motor oil container that would work fine to hold petrol.