Motorcycle Explorer February 2015 Issue 4 | Page 128

W
hat you explain, what you share and what you leave behind for others to know is a
minimum consequence of life that counterbalances the pointlessness of living. You have to toss
away the idea of meaning and realise that the value of your life is in the quality of your
experience, and sometime in my youth that became my only aim. Value overcomes the grief of
trying to find significance when there is none.
It was a distance of 1267 miles from Bombay to Calcutta and every few miles there were bashed
trucks and scattered vehicle parts. I passed the scene of a head-on crash that had occurred so
recently that the survivors were sheltering in the shadows while two sets of dead legs still
wearing their sandals lay not quite covered by a blanket. Every day in India road users are
confronted by death, so poor are the standard of driving and the conditions. As a motorcyclist
it’s impossible to describe what goes through your mind when you experience a near-miss,
seeing the whites of the driver’s eyes the split second before you both turn to avoid a head-on
collision, sometimes closing yours for that split second as you fervently hope it doesn’t happen.
I had set off at three in the morning from Sambalpur, leaving the nicotine-stained walls and the
cockroaches behind to ride the last 100 miles to Calcutta. I felt quite crazed inside yet remained
outwardly calm. I was at one with the bike and the heat and suffered every bump in the road as
they were meant to be felt. It was easy to become like the truck drivers, whoever they were, but
today it was not time to die. It felt odd being constantly a fraction of a second from oblivion, a
heartbeat away from the closure of life somewhere amongst the cheapness that road traffic
accidents enforce on life in India.
In Calcutta I always take lodgings at the Fairlawn Hotel. Located half way up Sudder Street, on
the left with the museum behind, it is across the road from where the Major and his wife ran the
Red Shield Salvation Army Hostel. I took a room there many times until they left to return to
England, after which the Fairlawn took me in. Having arrived in Calcutta I got my first look at
myself in a mirror for some time, and reflected that not undertaking journeys like this would be
like existing in some half-world, clean, not covered in a paste of blue diesel and soot. But it was
nothing more than cosmetic distress. Sometimes as I rode there were spectres in my daydreams
that made me feel as if I had left my body; images as of stained glass images forming in my mind
as I sat on the bike like an avatar – me, but not me. If as a child I had failed to float out of my
body and look down on myself, there was scope for a better instinct for that feeling out here.
Instead of seeing oncoming trucks in the dust, scraping by huts and small buildings, I sometimes
looked down from a promontory overlooking the sea, held back from falling by a tall man in a
long coat. In my mind there was a bridge of iron that reached across the waves. Knowing that to
walk across the bridge would make it turn to air made me think about the narcosis of having too
many thoughts locked away in a motorcycle helmet for too long.
From Calcutta my bike was flown to Bangkok and from there I rode down to Singapore and flew
the bike once again to Perth in Western Australia. Within three days of leaving India I set off up
the Brand Highway to start a 5900 mile journey around Australia that was scheduled to last six
days. A few hours later the vineyards of South Western Australia were far behind and the
roadside became a thin slice of harsh vegetation. There it was possible to cut through outback
sheep stations where just a few families reared animals in an area larger than a small European
country. Beyond the Min-a-Rirchi Aboriginal bushes, the Geraldton wax flowers and the Banksia,
everything you saw either side of the road existed in breathtaking isolation.