Day 6: discovery road

This cycling challenge is not a strange and sudden event in my life. At school and through college I was a long distance runner. It happened by chance my discovery of this talent which I am generally quite modest about. What I loved was not just running but running into the wild unexplored hills behind my school. I would go for long runs just to escape from all the pressures my young brittle mind had to cope with. Pressures like Principal Fernandes, chemistry lessons and Mrs. Rao's homework. It was exhilarating stuff and I would run into the hills every lunch break with friends to catch tadpoles in the monsoons and dirty dark insects in the summer. Nature in a way does bring me in tune with myself and has opened me to the beautiful enormity in which I live in. As a schoolboy and later too, I always marvelled at nature's precise exact mechanisms so much so that a human being, the tadpoles, and those dirty dark insects, have all lived in co existence for so many thousands of years. Nature has given us the chance to survive well, with the exact humidity and air density, the perfect atmospheric pressure and gravitational force, the purest soil and the brightest sun and even the right size of pebbles. And we call ourselves intelligent!
Anyways, later when I started training, I realised I had more energy than I could admit and this developed into what my coach said was talent and hence put me through a terrible grind which he called practice and I called torture. I stopped training as the years went by but the curiosity of the unexplored remained.
Day 6 was exactly that. Kilometers and kilometers of unexplored land. I use the word unexplored because for about 5 hours that morning it was just one long road interspersed with small indiscript villages each with about 10 houses and a few shops. The road was straight and one could see it disappear into barren mountains lining the horizon. Between these villages there were miles and miles of smooth road and nothing else. No homes or villages lining the tarmac, no fields being ploughed away by strong farmers with their oxen, not even a group of lonesome cows we were so used to seeing graze away. The settlements that did pop up seemed so distant from our modern cities, like from a different age – purity so rare to witness in this progressive industrial world.

Untouched is a spiritual experience and I was in the middle of it. The sun was playing tricks with the low lying hills. The bright patches of sunlight moving over the bald heads of the hills, the shadows chasing every curve of gentle slopes, and a few lonely clouds playing hide and seek, together displayed a very delightful performance. Short trees were scattered around the plains reaching to the hills. Cacti, which we sighted for the first time, were far apart and few but ominously present. A tractor full of Mexican Indians rolled by trailing off shouts of Olla! This was quite a phenomenon during the journey. Right throughout the journey, Mexicans would shout out loud ‘Ollas’ (hello) as we pedaled along. Mothers walking their kids to the shop, little children immaculately dressed in school uniforms, old men walking towards distant destinations with their handsomely dressed mules; all of them would respond or shout their ‘Ollas’. Our Spanish was really limited so it was about the only word we could shout out confidently to stranger or friend.

These scenic trails led to a large mountain uphill, which were now coming as regular as McDonald outlets do in London. And so the morning passed in heat, hills and height. Lunch was on the top of one such hill, a picturesque location which yet again looked unexplored.

Refreshed with a hearty lunch, I whistled my way down about 14 kilometers not having to push a pedal the whole way! Pleasure though, was to come only in limited quantities. Because even the mountains have certain laws they govern themselves by. Laws such as ‘He who tries to climb my back will break his’ were ones that affected us. The one that affected us the most however was this - ‘For every slope downwards, there is an unequal, steeper and longer slope upwards’. And so it was. The last part of the journey was by far the toughest climb we had done after day 3. We stopped at a village called Sola de Vega which was at the foothill and were warned of the difficulty of climbing the next 18-20 kilometers. I thought I was ready to take on the challenge but a kilometer into it I was grunting like a hungry wild pig. It was never-ending and combined with the heat and the dryness in the air, was both bone-tiring and energy sapping. The road, as Inigo told me, was called ‘landslide road’ and I could see why. For major part of the journey up, I had cliff on one side diving away into deep forest and on the other, a dirty brown wall of loose stones just waiting to slide down onto hapless innocent cyclists.

I knew that the top of the hill was a big TV tower station and after every bend I would crane my neck out to try and locate the station, just so that I could see the end. On rides such as these it is best not to know your destination because it becomes an obsession that is very hard to break. Even when I finally did manage to locate the tower, it took me an hour to actually get there. For some strange reason, roads uphill snake their way through to the top and are never straight. I’m quite sure architects and engineers who design and build these roads don’t understand the pain of cycling up and that afternoon I hated them all from the bottom of my heart.

We finally reached the top and after a small slope down were at campsite. Campsite was a very strange one as it was just a small clearing in just by the road, the first one so close to the road. Close enough to be woken up a few times in the night by screaming trucks rambling their way past.

It was hard, day 6. If I thought it was all going to be easy after day 3, I was wrong. We had climbed from 2200 to 8500 feet that day. It was going to be a struggle and that was the theme of the trip. It was never going to be easy. There was a reason why they marked it as ‘Extreme’ in front of the difficulty level on Asthma UK’s website. There was a reason why all 12 people there had trained hard for the challenge. There was reason why by the end of it all we could actually pat our backs knowing that it wasn’t a walk in the clouds but a struggle we lived through.

As for me, I was ecstatic as I crawled into my side of the tent that night. Not because I had done well so far but because of what I was passing through. My office was the wild and untamed in a strange country, my job to explore my office and my work time 24 hours. I guess I knew now what drives explorers like Ranulph Fiennes and Mike Horn today. And all the other adventurers out there exploring the wild and themselves. And although their greatness is beyond reach for simple men like me, I know somewhere that I have in some small way, in those 8 days, been able to relive and experience a tiny part of their adventures and maybe even their lives. And it isnt just the struggles, the discoveries or the triumphs I'm talking about. It is more importantly a much larger and deeper connectedness with nature which I don't think I can ever explain.