Previous Entry | Next Entry

2003-08-29 - Amora - Nanital (Day 136)

With the Amora hotel being a disaster, I was up and out early to make the short trip to Nanital. The morning was overcast and little past halfway I started riding through fog thick enough that I was down to a crawl but it was a pleasant ride none the less I wish I'd been able to see the views.

Nanital is the second time I had been expecting a Lake from the Lonely Planet description only to find that the place was an overgrown puddle. Looking at it I couldn't help but laugh that an Englishman had brought his "yacht" to the place around the turn of the century and there is a Nanital Boat Club (members only!) A proper sailboat would take about 10 minutes to go from one end to the other so a "yacht" seems to finally defined the term "OTT" - over the top for me.

However, that was not my concern at that point, which was finding a place to stay. As I came into the town proper the monsoon rains started coming down again, it was time to find a hotel and quick.

Nanital is layer upon layer of buildings up steep slopes reminiscent of San Francisco, which led me into a nasty little situation on my search for a hotel. The rain was coming down hard enough that I could only see a few feet ahead and seeing a driveway up to what appeared to be a nice hotel, I started up the drive, which was on a very steep slope. The driveway itself was about 10 feet wide and when I made it to the top I find that it had a locked fence and moss that had covered the top of the drive. So here, I am on a heavy bike in hard rain on a steep slope facing a locked gate - this was not going to lead to a good result.

The drive was too narrow to turn around in and even before I reached the top, I had already started slipping backwards, both brakes not being enough to hold me on the road and any engine power just spinning the wheel. The bike started to pick up speed - backwards - and I could tell I had gotten me into yet another pickle that was going to lead to scrapes. I laid the bike down but it continued to slide down the drive with me under it. It eventually slid to a stop and I climbed out from underneath. Yet again, I had gotten off the ground with barely a scrape though I was still in a pickle about getting the bike up. The angle of the hill kept the bike sliding, even in gear if I tried to pick it up. A soldier passing on the road below came up and helped pull me out of this situation and between the two of us we manhandled the bike around and I roll-started it on the hill since if I kicked it, the bike would slide before it started. Moreover, this was all before 10 am!

I did find a hotel not long after and spent the rest of the day being a couch potato as I had HBO and Star Movies again for the first time since Amritsar. Where Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses, it seems clear our drug addiction has changed since the 50's and been replaced by HBO.

There is little else to report today as I sat back with my fix of HBO and pots of lemon tea letting the day go by in a fog little better then one caused by harder drugs.

Previous Entry | Next Entry