By Tandem into the Himalayas

When Mr. B. Khanna, cloth merchant of Shimla, got up this Wednesday morning, he came on an impulse for breakfast at the Indian Coffee House in the Mall. On another impulse he walked through the main dining room where Shimla's public servants congregate, to sit in the window room near some Europeans; and for no particular reason he now engages them in conversation.

"Today Indians grasp everything, we take everything, it is materialism and we are not happy, it is in our blood. But money cannot bring us comfort," says Mr. Khanna. “The greatest curse in life,” he says, “is when you are not contented. So switch off the TV, go for the morning walk and be one with nature! If you are one with nature, then not in this life but in some future life you will be one with Him, for God is inside you and to the left and to the right. If I have love for you, my prayers are heard in heaven. And if we pray for the generality of humans, we also will receive peace. Whatever comes from God is a gift, accept it. Prayer is thanksgiving for what you already have in your life. Our karma determines what happens to us in this life and others.”

After an hour of conversation Mr. Khanna says “That I came here and sat with you and that we have had this talk, was predetermined, I did not make it happen." He looks at his watch, wipes his fingers and hurries off to open his shop.

We move our lodgings, despite only partial qualification, to the hostel of the Young Womens' Christian Association, where there is mesh to keep the monkeys out. The staff are friendly and the water runs (because the YWCA is on the highest of Shimla's vaporous ridges) just four hours a day; and the view, if we could see it for mist, would be of snowy Himalayas.

Shimla cascades down its misty, forested hillsides like the tiers of a dis-organised wedding cake. It's a blend of decaying British mock-Tudor and Asian bazaar which, remarkably, fails to seem incongruous. Pedestrians, monkeys and dogs rule the vehicle-free Mall, where stooping Indians once carried pianos for the aristocracy of the Raj, and a policeman with a wonderfully crested hat stands under a gazebo at Scandal Point with nothing to do.

We reduce Apollo's load by mailing 3.5 kg of mountain food in a cloth bag to the postmaster at Manali and prune our Lonely Planet to a hundred pages of Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir. Then we pedal out through Lakkar Bazaar.

Our journey has begun. Apollo carries us through the sky, on a contouring road on slopes that fall away, spilling with houses and fields, a thousand feet. Truck exhausts blast hot on our legs, and brown faces in cab windows shout encouragement. We climb through cedar forest past men leading gaily saddle-blanketed ponies, then follow ridges of terraced farm and forest to Fagu, a winter ski resort. In Peach Blossom Hotel we drink lemon tea and rejoice in this first 22 kilometres, a tiny beginning to a crossing of the Himalaya.

Next morning the road sidles more hazy ridges, from one chai-shopped saddle to the next, past terraces with cabbages, corn, apple trees and potatoes. Outcrops of mica schist gleam in the sun. In busy Theog, children stand to attention for morning assembly in their tiny hillside schoolyard while trucks roar above. Later we pause outside Montessori school in the village of Nanni, where voices are raised in "Jingle Bells.” At 12.30 pm (it is Saturday) the kids, in dusty white uniforms, come out and parents collect them.

A long climb brings us to Narkanda, at 2700m, its main street clogged with trucks. Mist creeps up through the forest to Hotel Hatu while we watch the Athens Olympics, and eat chicken chow mein because the Indian food is too spicy.

Snowy mountains stand far in the north under a rain-cleared sky. Our road makes a long bumping descent to the Sutlej, one of Asia's great rivers, on a three metre strip of uneven tarmac, losing 2000 metres of the height gained by the Himalayan Queen and reversing the tree-sequence from cedars to pines to broad-leafs, and then to terraced cultivation.

The day becomes hotter, and near the valley floor rising pressure blows Apollo's front tyre off the rim, destroying the tube. Three hours of downhill brings us to a steel bridge over the Sutlej at tumbledown Luhri (tumbledown? - all India is tumbledown, more or less), where teacher Karnlish Sharma ("I would come with you but my village is on the other road") stops his motor-bike to buy us chai and practise English.

It rains, and we ride on beside the brown Sutlej till the road turns up a side ravine to climb a steep 450m to Ani. The valley opens to admit emerald terraces of rice, and corn and potatoes and concrete shoe-box houses with satellite dishes and parked Suzukis and Hyundais. We rest opposite the house of Mahar Chand, who invites us for chai with his family, whom we show photos of New Zealand and take photos of them to post back.

Ani fills the steep valley and plasters itself over its sides. The road winds up through the bazaar, where a bookshop has school maths and physics texts, and Dickens and Jane Austen, to the Government rest house, (foreigners Rs1000). Outside in the mild night the river cascades down past the lit windows of the town, and black beetles struggle upside-down on the concrete in the light.

We lie awake calculating the rate of climb to the Jalori Pass: 200m per hour or 3.3 vertical metres per minute if we can cover the 2000 metres in ten hours. Then, with colds from riding in yesterday's rain, we climb into the mist and cedars, past stone-roofed houses reached by tiny paths, and concrete-box dwellings with reinforcing steel jutting rustily skyward as if to say, “One day we'll afford another storey.”

Every hour and a half we stop for bananas and biscuits beside the strip of scabby tar-seal with its piles of laboriously hand-chipped aggregate. At an active landslide the roadmen shout “fast, fast!” as we wheel Apollo through the mud. Among the trees and clouds grow forget-me-nots, self-heal, foxglove and sorrel; and smiling women walk past with pots of ghee. A crawling seven hours and 24 kilometres brings us to a night's halt in Khanag, still below the pass.

Then we push Apollo on up through the dripping cedars, from one longed-for kilometre stone to the next, rising one metre for every seven metres of road.

We drink chai in a dhaba on Jalori La at 3050m. This is our first pass, and we celebrate it; but we wonder how we shall drag ourselves and Apollo over four more, the highest 5360m. And then we wheel the tandem down, because it's too steep to ride, and stop in Shoja after five kilometres, making eleven for the day. At this rate we shall reach Leh in three months.

It is beginning to seem that crossing the Indian Himalaya by bicycle is not such a very good idea.

From Shoja the road descends through the cedars and tumbling streams so precipitously that the water we spray on Apollo's overheated hub brake sizzles. A long downhill day takes us to Aut, by the Beas River in Kullu. While we watch, the restaurateur across the street from Aut's Shalimar Guest House crosses out the menu prices so he can overcharge the two strangers on the “double saikal.” We breakfast on omelettes and toast and across the street the Shalimar's proprietor lifts the roller shutter of his shop and gives the pavement outside a desultory flick with a hand broom, ignoring the deposits of the cow which spent the night there. He settles with a cigarette to watch the world go by and sell a few walnuts and perhaps register another guest for the classiest hotel in town (Rs 200 double), where some of the plumbing works and you can have a chair in your room if you ask, and perhaps a toilet seat that is not broken.

The “double saikal” rolls north through the Kullu valley, where the Beas River flows down from Manali. The sun shines and the road is smooth. At every turn are shops with shawls of pashmina and angora in a sort of goat-and-rabbit ribbon development, in such abundance that the very word “pashmina” develops a magic from which no woman with 2,000 rupees is immune.

People offer us fresh-picked apples, and a man stops his car to say “What should be your age?” We tell him. “Enthusiasm is there too! – God bless you!” The big trucks are off the road because of a strike; and we think, perhaps if it is flat like this all the way we might yet cross the Himalaya.

But tonight's destination, Naggar, is up the valley side. We labour a thousand feet of baking uphill, to sleep in Rajah Sidh Singh's 500-year old castle of stone and carved wood, now a hotel, whose verandah looks down on the fertile valley. On a morning excursion after shawl-buying, Apollo takes us through the cedars to Nashala village and another morning assembly of chanting children, and more apple harvesting and neat fields on a terrace high above the Beas, which we are learning to pronounce “Be-ass.” Kullu with its shawls and apples and sunflowers and purple and yellow mountains seems a land of plenty.

Purple and yellow (and blue and pink) - because at Naggar is the gallery and one-time home of Nikolai Roerich, who painted the Himalaya in vivid surrealism and journeyed far into Central Asia. He became a towering figure in art, exploration, Tibetology and orientalism. Svetoslav's 1936 painting of Naggar could be Naggar today, if you were to add electric wires and satellite dishes. www.roerich.org/wwp

We travel on up the granite-bouldered Beas to Manali, a tourist town hemmed among cedars with glimpses of high alpine pasture and layered rock, like a John Rundle painting. Apollo is heavy with luggage, and it has taken eight struggling days to get here. We wonder about going further.

However, in Naggar we bought a postcard of Leh, in Ladakh.