Wednesday 14th November:

Wednesday 14th November:

Start:                09.30 on 21,234

Finish:    17.30 on 21,563

Distance:         (229 km)

Average: 28km/hr

Route:     Ratnagari to Vascoe de Gama

Hotel:               HQ Hotel

Today:

Long ride

Over the hills with challenging roads similar to the Pyrenees, but with the added focus on potholes, ridges, broken tarmac etc ….. oh yes & the traffic is something else

Short stretches of open road (well sort of) before there is another village or town.

The inconsistency just continues …. Some towns traffic hurtles through only giving any consideration to speed humps or rumble strips. Other times (especially in larger places) the traffic can be grid-locked as trucks load & unload (as a right) with complete disregard for any obstruction.

To make this type of journey in four wheels would be impossible

On the road, it is necessary to take every opportunity to pass when you can, cos if you are not riding quicker than the mainstream of traffic, ‘you’ will be compromised by someone else trying to get past, either inside, outside or over the top (if they are bigger). In driver training scenarios, it would loosely be described as ‘losing control of the situation around you’ !

As said earlier, it is reminiscent of the Pyrenees events … only, this is constant, all day, every day.

Survival (and it is a bit like this) is reliant on riding just below & just above the level of ‘reckless’. When considering all the different variables that continually present themselves ……. it is a world apart from driving as we know it in the western world.

However and this is a big, however, their sense of speed, judgment, space awareness, flexibility, stopping distances, (yours and theirs) is outstanding. But the inconstancy just continues to challenge the senses….their impatience is akin to a racetrack, but their ability to get out of the way to let someone through is amazing. No fuss, no aggression, just move out of the way …. and by the way, they expect the same of you!

Just because your side of the road has space and you are pottering along thinking about the views, your space can very quickly become ‘their space’, if there is an opportunity for an oncoming car, bus or truck to overtake. (this is why we are into day 3 and there has been no mention of the scenery…maybe this will come later ?)

So survival is simple….. you become like them and sometimes you need to be more resolute than them. There can be the perception, that cos you are a foreigner, then possibly we (the locals) can take an advantage, but it is uncanny how they (mostly) recognize ‘the guailo’s are not for turning’!

Amongst all this, there are one group of drivers that cannot be trusted. I believe bus drivers either belong to a different union, a different sect, are protected by Allah, or are just stupid, dangerous arseholes. They will run you off the road if it means getting an overtake completed.

The result of all this is by the end of the day you are knackered. To drive so hard and only average between 20 – 50km/hr is a scant reward, other than in a very perverse way ….. it was a good ride and we did well the achieve what we did.

Eventually, we arrived at where we thought was the main city in Goa …. Vascoe de Gama ….. it was a dirty, smelly port and industrial area. A quick drive round and found the HQ….. it was a pretty basic hotel, but it had a room

There was not much enthusiasm to venture outside, so a shower and a meal with a couple of beers seemed pretty good.

It was an austere place that unusually looked better from the outside than the inside.

An interesting observation at dinner was studying the menu to they had copied this onto the back of a guest list of 2 days before … nothing unusual, other than on the 15 guests listed, 9 were from the Indian Navy & 4 from a Russian Navel department…..(me thinks a job for Johnny English) !!

It appeared there is pretty strong interaction between India & Russia