Today, for a change, I didn't miss a turn and get off route - somebody else did, so I did a nice vigorous 4 km time trial to fetch them back - in 100+ temps.

Once we got back on route, we took a passenger ferry to Bombay - an hour ride across an open mouth to a large bay - with enough smog and haze that Bombay's skyscrapers weren't visible until 45 minutes into the crossing.

It was a 2 deck passenger boat with no life preservers - only 4 flat pieces of orange foam, about 4x8 feet each to hang onto in case of emergency.  Crossing a very busy shipping channel.  The entire navigation system consisted of a compass. Full stop (unless the guy was using Google maps on his cell phone).  And the entire control system consisted of a old style wheel (with the spokes sticking out, and apparently requiring about 4 full revolutions of the wheel to turn the boat 5 degrees), and a throttle.  But, I'm pleased to say, I am now on dry land again for 2 days until we go back the other way.

We went to a strange bar in Bombay tonight where the prices of drinks vary, like the stock market, based on demand - so if a couple people order Margaritas, the price of Margaritas goes up a couple rupees (with a stock exchange type electronic "ticker tape" reporting prices.  It's cute, but plays havoc when you try to figure out (and split) the bill at the end of the evening.  It was a noisy, rowdy place, where we were the only white faces.  It should not allow people over 60 inside - between the noise, and my age and crappy hearing, I understood near nothing of any conversations.  So, I just smiled and nodded.

Bombay is a more recognizable city than any we've seen so fat - at least the tourist area where we are:  British style - with a bit of an Indian flare - stone buildings, trash cans - thus no trash lining the streets, no cows wandering the roads.  Big grassed central park area with several large cricket pitches.  (BTW, India got crushed by Australia last week by 333 runs - what sports do you know where you can lose a match by 333 points?)  Less continuous horn honking, not quite as much of a life threat to walk across the street.  Even some function traffic lights.  Ate lunch at a very nice Italian restaurant and dinner at a "continental cuisine" bistro.  Nice for a break from Indian food.  Though, for dessert we had a cheesecake that had Indian style spices in it and was quite delightfully unlike any cheesecake that I'd ever had before.  Even found an ATM where you could get out more than $15 at a time.

Walked through Bombay's fanciest hotel - not a place that I would ever be in danger of being allowed to stay at.  Quite elegant.

Today's business news was very upbeat over Trump's proposal to initiate a "points" system for immigration and work permits for the US:  a great advantage to highly educated Indians - engineers, doctors, etc. - who would like to come to the US.  

Traffic notes - brakes? Rear view mirrors? Horns!

There are plenty of things that I'll need to "unlearn", and relearn the old ways of doing things when I get back to North America.  I need to look left when I step off the curb into the street (in India, most of the traffic comes from the right - in the left lane - but perhaps a quarter of it is coming from the left).  Yes, I will be able to drink tap water without it being a life threat.  Mosquito bites might be annoying, but aren't generally life threatening with dengue, malaria, etc.  Jean will be able to take a pee out of doors without checking first for cobras (Vikas, our drip doctor, tells me that a majority of cobra bites in India are on the butt).

And, very dramatically, I'll have to unlearn the Indian techniques of crossing though an intersection (even the small minority of them with "stop" signs - which appear to be meaningless):  It didn't take long to learn that for safety and efficiency, you need to keep up a reasonable speed and need a very flexible neck.  Speed allows you to pass through smaller gaps in the cross traffic, to intimidate some of the cross traffic, and to make a sudden turn to go with the traffic when you realize that you won't actually make it through the gap (perhaps staying upright, and if not, decreasing the closing velocity at impact).  The flexible neck is necessary because you'll be getting cross traffic from both directions on both sides of the road.  If you slow, or stop, you need a bigger gap in traffic to give time to accelerate and it may be a long time before you get that gap.  Plus, you'll generate an increasing cacophony of honking behind you and risk getting plowed down from behind.  I'll have to relearn the whole concept of slowing and stopping.

Finally, a couple days of riding that I can actually say I enjoyed.

First few days, we rode down the urban corridor from Delhi to Agra along the Yamuna River (whichforms the suddern edge of the plain of the Ganges and eventually runs into the Ganges).  The plain of the Ganges is formed where a deep trench is created by the Indian tectonic plate diving under the Asian plate (with the Himalayas being pushed up as the Asian plate gets wrinkled).  The trench then fills with sediment washed down into and filling up the trench.  It's wet and fertile and one of the most fertile and densely populated regions of the world.  (I can attest to the density of both people, trash, cows, and Tuk-Tuks, as well as the loudest horns.)  The Delhi-Agra corridor is not something that I would ever recommend someone visiting or bicycling through.

At Agra we turned west up out of the plain (never getting more than 300 meters in elevation) and escaped some of the congestion, though the cities still were dense, chaotic, and frightening for cycling.  Although the area is part of the monsoon pattern, the wet season isn't very wet (well under 20 inches of precip per year) and soon we are in the Thar desert.  Still dense population, for a desert, but gave some areas of riding that could be pleasant.  But, so flat that some days the net elevation change was only about 10 meters.

The rock beneath the surface soil was limestone (reminded me of west Texas, but without the small valleys that cut into the limestone there), so there were lots of mines and cement factories.  The modern factories looked like the towers near Lyons, CO.  But there were primitive facilities with lines of human labor carrying pans of rock up a long incline to be dumped into a tower with heat and smoke coming out of it.

Days of riding the flats finally brought us to the Aravelli mountains - a long range which runs from SW to NE and ends at Delhi.  There were substantial stretches of decent pavement, tolerable traffic and rolling hills with one substantial climb of 7 km at 5% av grade, with pitches up to 10-11%.  There were 10 priors on Strava and I would have grabbed the KOM, but it looked like one guy must have taken a sag wagon and forgotten to turn off his Garmin (VAM near 1300 and estimated power output around 500 watts for 15 minutes).  I felt crushed.  The canyon was a bit reminiscent of Rist Canyon (but with cows, monkeys, dogs, pigs on the road which was only 1 1/2 lanes wide with trucks coming around the blind curves and leaving you only a foot or two of space).

They are definitely desert mountains - grass, shrub, few trees.

I had to buy some amoxicillin in a pharmacy here - about one dollar for a weeks worth.  Better than King Sooper - if you don't think about quality control.

Internet is agonizingly slow, so no pictures for now.

Devices at dinner:

We often make fun of other tables in restaurants where all or nearly all of the people are staring at their devices.  In the last week, I've had the opportunity to sit at some of those tables (the "nearly all") of device users.  I hadn't known this before, but when the people actually look up and vocalize, it is almost always in response to something on the screen, not to something someone else has said.  Person A may say something, and shortly after, person B says something - not in reply to, or on the same subject as, Person A's comment, but as a response to what he was looking at.  So sad.

Update for the last week or so:

Between poor or no internet connection, and assorted chores, and just plain old inertia, I haven’t posted much.

And, I’ve been a bit short on stuff that I really wanted to write about:  The Taj Mahal was pretty, the national park had birds – lots of birds, big birds, little birds, many colors of birds.  The fort was big – really, really big.  The historical stuff has been a challenge for me – I know little or nothing of Indian history, so stuff like the fort doesn’t fit into a framework like the European historical sites do.

Lots of friendly kids, and adults that wave and shout “good morning”.  Surprisingly, if you stop and talk to them, despite the “good morning”, few speak English.  And, despite the friendly waves from most, the proportion of obscene gestures, aggressive moves with cars and trucks, occasional swings of a stick seem higher than other places I’ve been.

Then, there is the strangenesses:  Driving here is done by audio, not sight.  The traffic chaos is such that you don’t dare look anywhere but ahead.  A glance in a mirror would be a huge challenge with all that is happening in front of you.  So, everybody honks and honks and honks, and I’ve gradually learned that when I can’t look back, or to the side, the beeps are how I tell where everybody else is.  Unfortunately, I still haven’t learned to differentiate the honks:  Hi, I’m here, don’t swerve.  Or, I’d like to pass.  Or, get the hell out of my way, you’re too slow and I want to get by.  Or, nobody is moving in this traffic scrum, and I’m just pissed at the world, so I’ll lean on my horn.  (The trucks all have big signs on the back:  “Blow Horn” or “Horn, please.”)  And, the behaviors learned in the city are taken out into the countryside and people blow their horns when there is only one other vehicle within 10 miles.  I kinda wish I was totally deaf.

I’m getting in some interesting training for criterium racing:  high speeds with small gaps appearing and disappearing, squeezing through between a bus, a truck, and a couple motos – well, I’ll never fear going head to head in a bunch sprint again.

Fortunately, with all this traffic chaos (and danger), we’ve only had one guy run over by a truck so far.  Unfortunately, injured bad enough to have to go home.

The last few days have been dead flat riding, and I’m looking forward to getting a little climbing in tomorrow.

It’s disheartening to see the environmental destruction by trash that gets thrown everywhere.  The advent of bottled water might have had some virtue in making clean water available (especially for paranoid tourists), but plastic bottles and bags are everywhere.  Along with the more traditional garbage – at least the organic stuff feeds the dogs, cows, and pigs that are everywhere.  Although, judging by the ribs showing, there isn’t enough edible garbage to go around.

We’re in the desert now, and finally have left much of the smog and thick air behind for the present, but it’s getting progressively hotter.

There are some smooth roads, but they are a minority.  100 km on a mix of bumpy, broken asphalt, sand, bumpy rocky dirt roads – that makes a long day.

The whole noise, smoke, smog, chaotic traffic, garbage, feral animals, insane electric wiring, people who are living barely on the edge of survival – it presents a very depressing and dystopian picture.  The question that I have is:  Is this the undeveloped past, with potential for economic advancement that will gradually pull even the poor of India into a cleaner, less polluted, and more livable future.  Or, is this the dystopian future (think Mad Max) where wider and wider wealth inequality drives more and more humans into an existence where there is neither the means nor the will to do something as simple as cleaning the trash off the roads, or smoothing the roads, and so society spirals down into the 1% living well, and the 99% living in squalor and with no survival  option but to be pushy and nasty and brutish.

Have a happy day.

Who knew? Delhi is Hindi for "air thicker thansoup,"

Here we are:  Delhi.  Very nice hotel,  but 40 km from the hotel where we should be, so a little shuffling around the next morning.

Incredulous questioning by customs officer (and later by our taxi driver): You're from the US?  What were you people thinking?  Who could possibly vote for that man?  The customs guy let us into India anyway.

Delhi archaeological history goes back about 6000 years, and has been continuously occupied for 2600 years.  The streets have been continuously horn honking since the advent of the automobile.  It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the local cows to evolve to being deaf so that they don't have to listen.

It's the dry season and it averages here only 1 day of rain per month, about a tenth of an inch.  Rather unusually today, thunderstorms lasted from midnight until late afternoon and flooded the streets - our taxi driver thought it was more like monsoon season, but just for one day.

Today was "Republic Day" - a national holiday celebrating the new Indian constitution, effective this day in 1950 - just over 2 years after India's independence from Britain in August of 1947 - now celebrated by India's national Independence Day holiday on August 15.  Independence was part of the partition of the British Indian empire into India and Pakistan, which involved up to 2 million dead, and 14 million people displaced in "the greatest mass migration in human history" according to Wikipedia.  Given the day long downpour, we didn't go into the city for the big Republic Day parade.

Both of our hotels were fancier than anything that I would normally stay at in the US, and the breakfast buffet made my usual breakfast buffet at the Scottsbluff Hampton Inn look pretty lame.  There were separate sections for North Indian food, South Indian food, and other stuff.  Delicious, if unrecognizable to me.

And this afternoon, the hotel bakery provided us with a superb, if not quite traditional Indian fare, Tiramisu.

Our (second of the day) hotel looks out on the "Radha Swami Satang Beas"  which appears to be a picnic area - maybe an acre in size - with open air covered picnic tables:  reminds me of the Elks club in north Boulder.

Hartford was cold, wet, and muddy so we thought we's try something warm

Early January, raced cyclocross national championships in Hartford.  It was cold, wet, muddy, and slippery - so muddy that I had to run around carrying my bike most of the time.

So, thought a bit of a change of pace might be nice.  So, off to India.  Trade mud for air pollution.  Delhi is fighting with Beijing for the worst pollution in the world title.  Can't wait.

So, the 24th we head off to India by way of Munich (only airport I've ever been in that has a sex toy store right next to the little quick nap cubicles - what a business plan).

Will travel from Delhi through Agra and Mumbai to Goa over the next 6 weeks.  Watch this page for more.