Introduction, Waiheke and Muriwai Im waiting in the corridor outside the Principals office of my school where disruptive students

sit and Im uncomfortably aware other staff are wondering why Im here. While I wait I ponder a quotation I noticed earlier from Confucius. Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. He calls me in and I tell him I will be leaving at the end of the year to go cycling in South East Asia. The night before Id been talking to a friend who had been cycling in South East Asia the previous year. When she learnt my age she said, 'Why don't you retire? You're old enough and you could get sick.' That made me think. Id been reading cycling books, dreaming about touring and had established that I enjoyed it. Id spent my free periods studying Art and had focused on my bike as the topic for my portfolio. So what was holding me back? Not my class of rowdy fourteen year old students most of whom were not interested in Graphics and Design. Not my children who had their own lives now and not my house which my son had just finished renovating and that we hoped to let. Previously it had been falling down around me as I rattled around in the four bedroom villa. Every school holidays when I wanted to go travelling I heard the childrens cries. But you cant Mum. You need to fix the roof, the kitchen, the bathroom, the garden, the drains It went on and on. I wasnt interested in the house. I could live anywhere. I had moved into a small one bedroom flat above the carport crammed with camping gear, filing cabinets, travel books and my twin obsessions, reading glasses and stationery. Looking back now to my eighth birthday I had asked for a stapler and a lettering book foretelling my interest in Graphics. Not clothes or records. Overnight I considered my friends remarks. I could get a pension. Indeed I could get sick. Some of my friends had. Years earlier Id made a tentative start. Id been reading Dervla Murphys book Full TiltI wondered could I do it and would I enjoy it. It was all very well reading the books and imagining the adventures but what would it really be like? To find out I assembled my camping gear to be loaded on to a friends mountain bike then thought. Where should I go? I was living in suburbia. It had to be an adventure away from people and my comfort zone to simulate a real tour. I thought of Waiheke Island in the Hauraki Gulf off Auckland. It was an island involving a boat trip. It was out of reach of my car or my son who Id be tempted to ring if it were too hard. I left my car near the ferry dock and loaded the bike onto the ferry. I was thinking, this is it, Im really [Link] the ferry pulled away from land I jumped for joy singing under my breath. It was only a short trip but significant. Id not booked a hostel. I would be camping even though I knew it was forbidden. I was going to stealth camp. The first shock was at the tourist office where I picked up a map. There were brochures for hire bikes electric ones due to the killer hills. Id never even heard of the killer hills. It didnt bode well. As I pushed the overloaded bike up the gravelled road which had a high camber I was slipping and sliding on the loose metal. This wasnt how it was meant to be, I thought to myself. Other day touring cyclists passed me. They were from Europe and stopped to encourage me. It was hot, mid-summer. Sweat was running into my eyes and there was no shade anywhere. All around were bare hills some covered with grape vines and down below a long way below was the deep blue , sea shading into aquamarine near the beaches. The coast was indented with bays, beaches and mangroves flats. Where I was though the gravel road ahead lay along rolling hills towards the end of the island where concrete armaments looked out on the gulf. Ruins of cannons stood to repel Japanese invaders during the Second World War. I searched for shelter for a place to camp. Id imagined it would be easy with trees everywhere, but no, it was farm land with grazing sheep and a few isolated houses. Nowhere to hide. That was when I saw the sign. There was a house 100 metres away but I thought if I put the bike down, didnt erect the tent, (the sign said No Tents, not No Sleeping) and crawled under the bush I

should be OK. So I did. Next morning I was awake early, birds were singing and there was a creek nearby. I stripped off and jumped in. This was the life! I was tingling all over partly from the cold swim and partly from the satisfaction of having done something different. Sitting on the bank sipping coffee, eating muesli, drying in the sun and smelling the herbs hidden in the grass I marvelled at being alive. Then reality struck. The sun was burning. The bike was heavy. I was unfit having done no exercise for years. The gravel was just as slippery and the hills just as steep as the day before. I struggled along mostly pushing, not riding with frequent stops to calm my pulse. Id run out of water and it didnt seem like there was any nearby. I thought of Dervla and marvelled at her mostly the physical act of riding the bike across mountain passes and all sorts of terrain. Hours later after innumerable rests I reluctantly decided cycle touring was beyond me. I was disappointed as I made my way back to the ferry and to my car in Devonport. I stopped reading cycle touring books. Thankfully not a permanent decision. Actually that wasnt the first time I tried cycle touring. The first time was with my children in the May School Holidays about five years earlier. It was the worst day of my life said Martha as I urged her to help me carry her bike over the fence and into the pine forest at Muriwai Beach. There was really no alternative. It was a wet windy day and the three children, Martha 11, John 10 and Jane 6 had cycled with me from Greenhithe two days earlier. Wed camped on a farm at Waimauku the previous night. Id had this idea for an adventure for some weeks. We didnt own bikes but Id advertised for some old cheap three speed ones. We had a variety of tents and camping gear so I loaded it all up mostly on my bike, but the children carried their sleeping bags and a change of clothes. Id recently come back from Outward Bound where wed had to get into wet clothes in the morning to keep the dry ones for sleeping in so I instituted this regime with the children. As we left home Jane fell off her bike into a puddle. I wouldnt turn back to face Lexs ridicule; hed been against the whole idea refusing to have anything to do with it so we carried on. Just past Herald Island I saw a sign for an eel factory. I thought it would be interesting for the children to see. And so it was. I emerged with a smoked eel strapped to the top bar of my bike. Our next stop was the tree now known as the Magic Apple Tree. It stood in the corner of a bare paddock on Brigham Creek Road and was laden with ripe juicy apples. We took as many as we could carry. Our progress resembled a slow bicycle race. John led, then Martha who kept throwing herself into the ditch beside the road, then Jane and lastly me. Many times I nearly ran into Jane who was on the stony shoulder going at a snails pace. Our destination was Muriwai. Id stupidly asked permission to camp in the forest and had been denied. The campground was closed. So we had to hide. We lifted our bikes over the fence and quite a way into the forest between the pines. Youve chosen the worst weather for months to do this. Lex later commented. It was still raining and very windy as we erected the two small pup tents which at a squeeze would hold two people each. For bedding we dug down into drifts of pine needles to find armfuls of dry ones to take back to the tent for mattresses. I shared with Martha since she was so distressed by the dark, gloomy, scary atmosphere. I dared not use my stove or make a fire so we ate a cold dinner, got into dry clothes and retired. All night we could hear the trees moving above us and then an earthshattering thump of a falling tree. It fell only ten feet away from the tent Martha and I were in. Next day the rain had stopped. We went to the beach to make a fire to get warm and have some hot food. Wind was hurling the foam off the wave tops sending it way up the beach on which were coils of bull kelp torn from the rocks. John remarked it was like being shot at as the foam blew up off the beach and on to us. The bull kelp was so extensive we used it for long skipping ropes. Ive

never seen Muriwai Beach so strewn with seaweed since. Its a holiday we have never forgotten and I still look out for the magic apple tree. After I retired I did cycle around South East Asia and Europe but now a few years later I see pictures of my trips coming up on my screensaver and I yearn to be alone again on Pegasus in the countryside of some exotic place having an adventure. I want to go to India, but Im not sure where, or for how long. I've backpacked extensively, and love the friendliness of the people, the food, the markets, the sights, the smells and the feeling that you are time travelling. Out of the cities things haven't changed for thousands of years. But I havent cycled there. So, why not now? One of my earliest memories is lying in bed gazing across my bedroom to the large rectangular map of the world stretching across nearly the entire wall opposite. Most of it is red showing The British Empire, on which the sun never sets, comments my mother who is proud to be from British stock and regards England as Home though she has never been there. Books had influenced me too. Rudyard Kiplings Kim and the Jungle Stories. To my childish mind India was a land of exotic temples filled with elephants, tigers, monkeys, snake charmers and mystical supernatural sadhus who could levitate and whose bodies defied death after being buried alive. I itched to see it. As I grew older I read accounts of Ian Stevensons research into children with memories of past lives and how the Indian culture was more receptive to such stores than the Western culture. Everything about India fascinated me. Id been to India on three earlier occasions. The first was in 1995 when Id visited my daughter Martha, who was living in the hills near Rishikesh. We toured Delhi, Agra and Pushgar. The second time was with my other daughter Jane and we visited Jaipur, Darjeeling, Sikkim, Varanasi and Orissa. The next trip was a solo backpacking loop from Mumbai to the south and up the east coast to Chennai. As a backpacker most of my experiences were on buses, trains and in cities where people besieged me to travel in their taxis, buy their goods or stay at their hotels. It was exhausting. I wanted to get out into the countryside where I could meet the real people working as they had for centuries on their land or at their trades. I wanted to be a traveller eating local food on the roadside and I knew this would happen just by travelling on a bicycle. Mr Pumpy, a cycling enthusiast writing on the web, has influenced me too. Hes described a cycling route from Chennai around the coast to Mumbai as being relatively safe and easy with no mountain passes. He points out the different treatment afforded to someone cycling as against someone on a bus. Another important reason to choose India is the food and the coconuts. I was brought up without soft drinks and have never developed a taste for them. When I am hot a drink of cold coconut water is superb and scooping out the jelly-like flesh to eat is even better. What really endears me to India though is their philosophy of fixing things when they break rather than chucking them. They dont waste. I love the way you can come across men working in gutter or pavement workshops yet doing intricate work all with rudimentary often hand-made tools as they have for centuries. It is like time travelling. Much of my life has been building or making things. First the boat which my husband and I spent seven years building never paying for outside labour, doing it all ourselves. Then I started a handcraft business making leather sandals, watchstraps, belts and bags working at first in a garden shed, then in a carcase and finally in a factory unit. My business evolved into pottery and in time when New Zealand was importing pots cheaper than I could make them I became a Technology teacher at a secondary school teaching a variety of craft and design skills like woodwork, metal work, pottery, stained glass, bone carving and jewellery. For me India is the ideal destination. English is widely spoken, it feels safe, there is so much to see

from its centuries old civilisation and from my earlier trips I knew I would be treated with friendship and respect as an older woman. Now it is November 2010 and I am off to India in a month. But alone, is it possible? Can you ever be alone in India? Pegasus was made for me by friends in England and has been to Western Europe, Iceland, Morocco, Vietnam and Cambodia. I'm a 72 year old New Zealander and despite the number of kilometres under my wheels it doesn't stop me from feeling excited and anxious. What will I wear? I have to wear padded lycra knicks, but over them what? The culture demands more, so long shorts, pedal-pushers, trousers or a skirt? I don't want to take malaria pills, consequently I have to be covered up especially at dusk. So, trousers or maybe tights; I've some merino ones. Could the mossies bite through? Maybe a salwar kameeze over all. Or maybe a long skirt to wear off the bike and masses of dimp. I've been to India before and the beds in the cheap hotels are very hard. Also, if accommodation is full, I plan to ask to sleep on the roof, or in the garden, in my Long Road mosquito-proof bed tent. So, do I take my ultra-thin three-quarter length thermorest? The overriding concern is weight. Qantas only allows 23 kg of checked baggage and have removed the sporting allowance. The bike in its box weighs 19 kg Anything over costs NZ $35 per kilo. I am determined not to pay excess baggage charges. Now, what about the panniers? Over the years I have been cycling my luggage as well as my bike has evolved. On my first long trip before I retired from full time teaching I had been given a Giant mountain bike and lent panniers, two for the back and two for the front. The rest of the gear I had from numerous back-packing trips. For India I think two Ortlieb ones will be enough since I do not expect to be camping and I will take the Ortlieb handlebar bag. I'm worried about getting run down by a truck as five cyclists have been killed in five days here in New Zealand, though I think in India it will not be so dangerous, as they are skilled at avoiding sacred cows, who wander all over the roads. Nevertheless I'm taking a bamboo stick with a flag to be held in a tube tied to my rack behind my saddle. I have a ticket from Auckland to Mumbai return and now realise its impossible to get over to Chennai to start my trip the way Mr Pumpy suggests since planes and trains are booked solidly before Christmas. I decide to reverse it, cycle down the Konkan coast to the bottom of India then up the east coast to Chennai and catch a train back to Mumbai at the end of my trip. On reading Bill Weir's accounts of his trips in South India I decide that catching a ferry to Mandwa will get me out of the chaos of Mumbai and I can then travel on small back roads as he did. All week I keep jotting down items to consider. Phil, from Hedgehog Bikes lends me a dog dazer but eventually I decide not to take it. My experience of another one, was that the growling dog took no notice. Hopefully, the dogs will be sleeping and there's always the water bottle to squirt them if they come too close. I have been trying out the panniers on the bike, and struggling to get a pedal off. The left one is jammed on, and even my muscular son can't undo it with the tool I'll be carrying. I get a longer spanner but still no luck. I start to wonder if I am turning it the right way, towards the rear and have to ring a bike shop to check. I am doing it right. I always remember that if I want to go forward; that is to pedal, I need to turn the spanner in the direction of the handle bars, and if I want to stop, to put the bike on a plane or bus, I have to turn the spanner towards the rear. The next day I am still wrangling with the pedal and determine I need a bike shop. I ring one, but it's

closed. A Vodafone shop is open though, so I take my cheap phone bought in Vietnam, to see if it does roaming. It does, but I am shocked at the charges. 80 cents NZ to send a text and nearly $4 a minute to ring home. Still, I need it, in case I am lying in a ditch with a broken leg. In India, I will use the corner STD/ISD booths. Finally, my neighbour has success with the pedal and I breathe a sigh of relief. Little do I know the consequences of this. 3181