India 1: initiation day for the Bullet

^{If the journey from Mysore to Ooty was Christening Day for the Bullet, with a gentle run up those 36 snaking Nilgiri  bends, the ride from Ooty to Palakkad was more like our initiation, with a longer, harder run over the back of the Nilgiri Hills and eventually down to what I think of as The Plain (Hot).} 

This is a rubbish photo of what was a lovely view, through the heat haze.

^{The first section was a dream, with lots of gently sweeping bends through lovely scenery and on good quality roads. It was so good that I went back up to do some of it again. I took some great little videos with my phone dangling round my neck but managed to film only my teeshirt. Five times.} 

^{Slightly further on I encountered a sign warning me that there were 43 hairpin bends ahead. It was a deserted back road, so I took off my helmet and coasted down with the engine off…just the buzz of the disk brake sounding quite like a cricket.  It was lovely but, almost inevitably, as as I crossed over into Kerala (just by the Canada hydroelectric station), there was a police block in the middle of nowhere. I should have expected this. It happened before in north Wales and again on Bodmin moor: whenever I take off my helmet in some utterly remote spot, a policeman appears as if by magic and ticks me off!! To be honest, they were pleasant enough and just wanted to write down my driving licence details and to chat about life (memories of Montenegro), although in theory they were there to check I wasn’t a Maoist terrorist…really! They had a poster of maoist mugshots, none of which I closely resembled.  Oh, and put the helmet back on sonny.} 

^{The descent to that point had taken at least three hours in blazing sun and I still had the bulk of the journey ahead of me. Unfortunately the roads deteriorated as soon as I hit Kerala which slowed me down even more as I followed a river for an hour or so, passing through dozens of little villages where coconuts seem to be the main crop. Eventually I hauled into Palakkad about 5.00pm and was too tired to search further for a bed than the soul-less shiny Book Inn outside which was a fully-laden touring Royal Enfield, sporting flags, spare petrol tanks, bungees etc etc that put mine to shame. I had barely travelled more than 150km but it felt much more!}

Palakkad had a lot of jewellery adverts, even where, let's face it, potential buyers would not be too thick on the ground.  

^{The journey next day to Fort Cochin was about five hours of dual carriageway riding at a steady running-in speed of 60kph, though much of the road was still being created and there were plenty of interesting opportunities to swerve round steamrollers and trucks, practise my off-road technique and marvel at the nerve of other riders who were going down the other side of the dual carriageway against the flow of traffic!} 

^{Unfortunately Kochi is a big and busy city with a long approach hinterland where the driving was terrible. I made contact with the locals at last, or, at least, one of them made contact with me as he cut across me and scraped something off the side of his, already dented, car against my crash bar. He then stopped, got out and was profusely apologetic and humble - the complete opposite of the way he was driving! Then a few km down the road I saw another incident of car cutting up bike but this time at much higher speed, i.e. much more dangerous!}

^{I was trying to hold to the centre of the carriageway but several times found a car right up against my back wheel, trying to force me to move over. After an hour or so of this I was pretty anxious about my chances of getting another sideswipe, so I stopped for a quick juice and cool down.} 

After 500km, it was time for a first service at a dealership in Kochi which has an unusually positive view of Redditch. 

^{Eventually I started crossing some of the many backwaters and rivers that characterise this area and found myself on ‘the island’ where I battled up to the Fort Cochin area and stopped at the first cafe I found. It was a good choice, partly because a met a young English couple who were staying in a boutique ecovillage for only 4000 R a night (which made my current cost of 800R much more bearable) and partly because they didn’t have any change for a 2000 bill so I have an excuse to go back and settle up later.}

The biker's reward!