Winter morning view

Ange came back from Bali last night.  She brought winter with her (and a whole carton of toilet paper, which for some reason you can't buy in the presence of the coronavirus).  This morning it's freezing, but also crystal clear.  Our view still moves me completely, 17 years on.

Winterscape, with a police boat hurrying to warmth through it.  Love the light on the hills to the left.

India - Part 1

It's taken me an age to get this done, and it probably needs an edit.  It's hard to condense an experience like this, in a country of such scale and history and mystique. It's hard to put into squiggles on a screen, how a small group of people have gone from being strangers or met-a-handful-of-times-colleagues to friends you feel a raw and direct love and admiration for, all through the compression of an adventure.  We are all so light on adventures, everything being so safe and secure-seeming.  We run from adventures, from their unfamiliarity.  We should be running (or riding) in the opposite direction.  

The day before, in the office with some of the young professionals who entered the industry through Amit's (my fantastic colleague who I've mentioned to you, on the right) Young Women in Investment program. Also in the picture, our new (super-spirited) CEO, Marg Franklin (who joined the start, on a bike, Mumbai morning traffic), front second from right, and Punita Kumar-Sinha, from the CFA Institute board, front second from left.  

For me this ride was a quietly perspective-changing adventure; I'm feeling its ripples today, and writing this hoping to feel them forever.  The start of this ride however is way before India.  It’s in the eighties and nineties for me, and broadly immersed in what it means to be a man.  

At work I met my divine now friend Iva.  She’s wide-eyed-bright, comfortable expressing her astute perceptions of people, and deeply sincere with a twinkle – it’s a formidable combination.  Her husband Mario, I warm to completely too – both children of a war-torn part of the world – and from it people of the no bullshit zone.  Iva commented to me, having both a son and a daughter, that if you go into a good toy shop, in the blue section, you have trucks and dinosaurs (and no-doubt guns).  In the pink section however, you have a wealth of stuff about girl-power, girl’s adventure, girls getting out there, explicit messages about what it now might mean to be a girl, rightfully breaking out of centuries of narrow imposition and confinement. She was pointing out that while there is (now) a wealth of narrative about what it means to be a woman in the modern world, there is surprisingly very very little about what it means to be a man.   

When I look back on my life and my career, I think I interpreted that – what it means to be a man – much more narrowly than I might have in different circumstances, with different pointers.  I think that publicly (driving, on the trains, in airports) and in the corporate world I’ve ended up being quite an aggressive, conflict welcoming, version of all the things that I might have been (alongside extroversion, friendliness etc).  I don’t think you have particularly seen this side of me – in part because your beauty is sun-like, so I’m so busy looking.  And it is in this regard that I write about India – and my experience of it, which is to say of a ribbon of road and a small group of men.  I mentioned to you, that one of my overriding impressions of the people on this trip was how tough they were.  And I’ve met a lot of tough people in my life.  People who looked tough, people who acted tough, it’s easy to find that sort of thing in a narrow macho world, of which I seem so boundlessly familiar.  But the version of toughness in the people I met and rode with was a much quieter, peaceful thing. Not puffed up and growling – just people who were able to cheerfully absorb hardship, while laughing and being kind and warm and human and decent and generous.  So it’s in that spirit that I write this – out of respect to that version of being a man, and how much it meant to me to be around, and hopefully how much I gained from it.  

Building Big Blue in the hotel room the day before, somehow it seems impossible to make this routine - this time, massively twisted brake and gear lines - like fishing line - its own thing.

So while this is an account of riding in India, its also an account of meeting and becoming: familiar; friends; connected; and of laughter and strange things and explanations and newness; new places, new food, new ways of going about things - and it was very very different to loaded bike solo touring, it was continually and beautifully peopled.

At the start, dawn breaking, luminaries (and huge credit to all of them) and eight people with bikes.

And so we were under way...

India - Part 2

Over the many many years that I've cycled, I've built up a resilience of sort.  It's not a hurried thing, and because I cycle alone I don't really know how fast I go (or more accurately, I don't know how fast others go).  But I do know that I can grind out a 200 if I need to, I know I can climb, I know some tricks of the trade.  I had a giggle when days into the ride, the guy who ran the support-van team (no loaded bike this time) confessed that when we were getting ready to go he and his colleagues were looking at Big Blue (which is basically a dik-wiel with all the trimmings of a working bike, heavy, mudguards etc) they were thinking "I'm not sure about this guy, he's brought a delivery bike, hope he can handle the distance..." - which is funny because I was thinking looking at everyone else's bikes "Jesus, flat handlebars, mountain bike, gel seat ...hope these guys know what 100kms is going to feel like on that ".  What I was not prepared for was the challenge of Mumbai traffic and roads (which, for want of a better short description, is like a bad acid trip with extra pollution and a topping of chaos) - or just the sheer scale of the city.  Mumbai has 20 million people.  That's 40% of the total population of SA.

A breather in Mumbai, Kaustubh, Shreenivas on the phone, Raj (the irrepressable) Vikash, Gaurav and Hemal.

The first day was short - I think around 80kms, and once out of Mumbai, it was much less hair-on-end stuff.

The important bit

The bike ride itself was an Investor Education drive.  Finance, and in particular mutual funds are relatively new in India, and these are arguably effective long term investing structures (or they have historically been).  In the spaces in-between however, in the developing market environment, there is plenty of blue water for sharks, and an uninformed public is rendered an open water swimmer.  I was impressed with both the methodology and the intention.  It's too easy to say of a population of 1.4bn, why bother starting with a few thousand people?  Fortunately human progress has not been blighted by opinions like this.  Public consciousness is a viral thing; you start, it spreads, and eventually develops its own momentum.  Getting it started however takes a particular sort of leadership; someone to tell a story which inspires and galvanizes people.  That leadership was provided in a number of key figures.  Raj, whose idea this all was, leads Advocacy volunteerism for our CFA Society of India.  Vidhu, our India country head, and Shreenivas, who is a director in our India office were all instrumental.  I don't want to diminish this primary purpose in my focus on the riding and the country - that part served as a curiosity to bring people in the towns and villages that we rode through out to the activation points - "the show" if you like.  There were several of these each day, and one of the support vehicles was a mobile stage, on which a travelling troupe of actors delivered key messages in the form of industrial theatre, and then the cyclists were available to mingle and ask and answer questions of the people who came out for the show.

The DIVINE Gaurav, my sometimes room-mate, bed-mate, and general bringer of cheer and wisdom, at the first activation point.

The players get under way... It was really cool, and a feat of organisational mastery (1400kms, several of these each day, with a bigger evening event each night in one of the local town halls.

By the time we reached Khopoli, I had got over any concerns.  The un-baggaged bike was easy, I was feeling very comfortable on the bike, could have done another 150.  But with all things adventurous, there are always surprises.

With Shreenivas, meeting his mum in Khopoli.  Shreenivas has a challenging job, supports an NGO in Khopoli (his home-town) and is also an organic farmer and advocate.  He is utterly remarkable, capable, kind, warm, funny - and also speaks Japanese (from having lived and worked in Japan).  What it means to be a man.

After the show, with Amit Joshi, on the left, Vikas in front of him, and members of Shreeniva's family and the NGO he supports.

The surprise on leaving Khopoli was a pretty decent climb.  If you cycle in Hong Kong all you do is massive hill work, so it was a nice change of scenery and pace, but it was heavy on some of my team-mates - and I think that is where I started seeing the first splashes of toughness that I would become increasingly familiar with.

If you've not done huge amounts of cycling, pulling 60+km on a mountain bike or  hybrid, with a chunk of those in Mumbai traffic, some activation points along the way can be a bit daunting.  Then to be confronted with a ~20km chunk of proper climbing, and the cruelty of several false summits can lead one to ask what on earth one is doing.  Here there were just smiles between the puff and pant, and oh well, if it gets too hard get the van to come and pick you up, so don't stress...  At the top there were glimpses of the valley that we had come up from, Big Blue looking daisy-fresh.

India - Part 3

Getting ready to leave on the morning of day 2.

Relentlessness

Each day started before sunrise (I can't remember the specific times, they varied) with a session with the physio, Fatima. We had encountered Fatima properly for the first time the night before when she'd given us a tongue-lashing about having a beer in the bar before going to bed.  Amazing how one can just suddenly shed 35 years and feel like a naughty boy again.  I think I found the warm-up more challenging than the riding - and I have to say, I realized that if I was half smart I would be doing this sort of thing when out on touring rides.  We would stop for breakfast and lunch, and the activation points with the show, and then arrive at where we were staying for the night.  I have learned the hard way that the one thing you do with touring cycling is that as soon as you are done on a day, get the kit off, thoroughly shower, dry off properly, Prep on ass to avoid saddle sores, clean cotton only.  Never wear cycling shorts twice.  

A sight for sore asses

Whatever it takes to achieve this you do.  The Prep thing had been told to me in the early nineties.  It burns a bit, but it works a whole lot.  I'd run out of Prep in Hong Kong, so had to track some down on Amazon, and it came from Italy.  This surprised me (its actually a shaving cream, sunburn treatment - weird stuff).  Turns out that it came to SA with Italian prisoners of war, and subsequently was manufactured there under license.  I swear it is miracle stuff.  My Indian colleagues were initially skeptical.  Amit Joshi was the exception - he had his own ass lotion and had been applying it - he and I had a good laugh about it.  It's not something that you somehow discuss.  "Hey bro, what are you putting on your ass?"  But if you've done this before (and Amit has done it plenty), you also know that you HAVE TO put stuff on your ass if you are going to survive big hour, multi-day rides.  It's not optional.  Without it, you simply can't ride after a few days.   So each day started at 5am, and once you'd done with the day you needed to go to a warm down with Fatima (avoided these when I worked out how - man that was a bridge too far for me, and she had hands of steel) shower, do the whole Prep thing, wash clothes, get into a collared shirt and trousers, and then go to the evening event.  After that, dinner, a good laugh, and bed at 11ish; then you'd get up the next day and repeat.  

Climbing a pass that popped out of nowhere - we were doing better than some
of the trucks that had succumbed to it.  In front of me Amit Joshi;
serious runner, serious cyclist, iron man, CIO - just a regular bloke 

Fatima was a smart idea - and it's changed my thinking about stretching and whatnot.  Part of the impeccable planning included making sure the cyclists kept going, and didn't get daggers in the knee, or a miserable back. That being said, I know Gaurav was having some knee issues which predated the adventure - no big deal - knee brace and keep grinding it out with a smile and a whole lot of kindness (including teaching me how to swear at crazy drivers in Hindi - which you can do to entertain yourself, because that part of India is not looking like changing any time soon).  A particular Indian driving vice is to drive in the wrong direction on a road.  Any road.  A dual carriage way for example, no problem.  In fact on a dual carriage way you can drive fast.  I have this image burned in my mind of Raj (who is normal height and slim, and definitely in his 50s, though he looks 30 something - he happened to mention that he'd been in Germany before the ride to run the Berlin marathon - as you do) stopping his bike on a highway with a dump-truck barreling down the road towards him, going in the wrong direction.  He just decided to make a point with this one, so he stopped, stood his ground, and made the truck stop, and then detour around him off the road.

Monster Masala Dosa for breakfast - Raj in front of me, Vikas and Hemal focused on the important stuff.

India - Part 4 - The cyclists

From left: Amit Joshi, calm force (just the sort of person you want managing your money) Iron Man, with a beautiful, low cadence, s-shape inducing, never stop style.  Raj, marathon man, person of light, and the engine room of the whole project. Fatima, indefatigable physio, tell off anyone who needs it, and full of laughter otherwise.  [Yours truly]. Gaurav - words can't describe just how cool and fabulous this person is; the top benchmark for decent human being. Vikas, supercool, soak up any degree of suffering, but keep on grinding it out with a smile.  Just the best possible people to go on a ride with; actually the best possible people to do anything with.  Humbling.  A constant reminder of what decency looks like.

I LOVE this photo: lost in some town that's name now escapes me.  The others?  Gone. And such a perfect illustration of the general reaction to problems by very cool people :-)

Gaurav.  If you walked into a school classroom and saw that smile, you'd know exactly who you should be moving to the front of the class to keep an eye on.  And it would be futile.  Infectious joy.  His boundless sense of humour leads to the sorts of photos below - he has a phone that you can add highlighting to photos with - and then you WhatsApp them to the subject of your eagle-eye of wit:

For example, the Gaurav "wtf with your lazy dress code?" photo

Or the Gaurav "wtf with the South African parking?" photo.  Relentless humour; divine.

Shreenivas - the king of decency - benchmark of whether you are contributing to humankind.  Here he is finishing his first ever ton.  100 clicks on a bicycle on Indian roads is no sneezing feat.  When he's not uplifting humanity, he runs the odd marathon... as you do (and is the guy who casually laid down 100 push-ups ... in a row).

Hemal.  It's no coincidence that his name is one letter off "Heaven" in Afrikaans.  What an utterly fantastic human being. And clearly it runs in his family; his mum made a whole cake tin of date and pistachio slice things - seriously, the ultimate bicycle fuel, which he shared relentlessly until they were gone.  His quiet enthusiasm for the whole adventure was infectious.  Here he is finishing his first ton, doffing his helmet for a photo that I  love completely.  If you had to go to war, this is the person that you'd be wanting to take with you: an unequaled capacity to soak up suffering, remain focused on the purpose, whilst remaining calm and cheerful.  One of the great delights for me was watching the bicycle bug biting him.  I'm not sure how far Hemal had ridden a bicycle in one go before this tour, but by the end of it he would have taken on ANYTHING.  I notice, for example, on our WhatsApp chat group that he's subsequently knocked out a 160 as a Saturday ride.  You have to be (the sort of) crazy (that I love) to do that.

And we met other cyclists on the road.  Fledgling sport it may be in India - but I promise you that with this kind of approach its just a matter of time before their cyclists are going to be like their cricket team - dishing out hidings to any people who fancy one.  So let me explain.  This is a small temple in the middle of nowhere.  We met this cyclist who had taken a working bike, stripped it down (disc brakes?  Nah brother, why be slowing down), spot welded a water-bottle cage onto the down-tube (he'd be needing it).  Respectfully, he has earned the title of Randonneur.  How do you become one.  You sign up (it's a global thing - please click here for more - you cant see it clearly, but just below his left hand there is a number on a small white card) and you have to complete a number of Brevets - which are 200km rides in a single day.  He was busy knocking out his fifth such.  On a single speed, modified, back-pedal brake, working bike.  That is the real deal, plain and simple.

On the stage at one of the evening events, no flip-flops this time.

India - Part 5 - The road

Ultimately, touring cycling is about the road.  However big or small, slick or potholed, paved or not, the road frames your choices, and once made, populates your day with the vistas and people that you interpret and interact with.

Sunrise, somewhere near Pune, sparsely vehicled, morning cooking fires smudging details that clarify as you close.  There's something so special about the start of a day; all its sights and promises and challenges, so sequentially arranged, along the road.  Breathe light; low, gentle cadence, warming you slowly, to the marrow of your muscles, potential energy waiting to be unleashed into the deep meditative rhythm that all long distance bikers seek - the zone - melting the kilometers away, bringing the experiences rushing.  Oh to be alive!

The strangest things about being on a supported tour, especially with people building a media account is that suddenly you are a subject, rather than the centre of the universe from which everything is perceived.  So the photos below I have Govind to thank for.

In the zone in the countryside, pushing the big gears, cadence up in the 80's, hammering it out in the 30s. 

Cranking a pass pass, Hong Kong hills and loaded bikes have made me the king of the climb. Looking for the screaming descent.

Masked up, roads are a shared thing, many and varied vehicles mean passing is a regular thing.

Passes mean trucks; following Raj as we take a grinding sooty on the inside.

In the zone, hammering the flats past a beautiful lake, vineyards on the other side of the road.

Cresting a climb in Gujarat - still love that feeling of riding over the top, and blowing the sweat off on the way down

The road is full of colour, help and joy.  Hanging onto the back of a vehicle is cheating.  Drafting in the slipstream is totally allowed (though requires hyper-alert break fingers one yard off at 45kmh.  There were plenty of vehicles, on long flat stretches, inviting this practice.  This is a hand-held phone shot of my favourite slipstream of the tour.  It produced a fantastic drafting pocket, and was so delightfully colourful.  

 The road is also defined by what's immediately along it, and in India there is plenty to cheer the weary traveler.  If, for example, you have a truck, what better way to brighten the grind than some cheerful decorations?  In the world that I come from, truck driving is about as macho as it gets; grizzled men, usually armed, confronting the elements to get their loads home.  In India, I'm sure its the same, but why be so dour about it when you can go in colourful style?  You could do a whole series on the beauty of Indian trucks, and vendors along the road support this with mobile stalls featuring a rainbow of possibilities.  Of course the road is also hungry business, and in India, fear not.  There's no waiting for the next Ultra-city.  The road is dotted with dhabas, food stalls with chairs and tables; tasty food and fantastic chai.

Masked up, stopping with Shreenivas to take a picture of a truck decorator's mobile stall.

This dhaba is one of the best places I've ever stopped on a bicycle ride.  The photo is only of the delightful rows of chips.  What you cant see is that it had a host of tables, some shared platforms for a kip if you needed one, and fabulous food.  The owner had also installed rows of containers along the edge of the roof for sparrows to make their nests in.  And the sparrows were entirely obliging, filling the space with chirping music, and acting as constantly vigilant vacuum cleaners, instantly swooping down on the smallest morsel of food dropped on the gravel ground.  Brilliant.

A driver wrests himself from the welcoming arms of  a dhaba.

Big Blue, joining automotive friends as their owners chug back the chai.  On the subject, no-one can drink more chai than I.

A shadow selfie, out on a beautiful rural highway, Amit in the lane up ahead.

India - Part 6 - The countryside

India is an Agricultural power-house.  It has 10 million farmers, and the agricultural sector accounts for 52% of employment (that's a pretty striking figure in terms of the absolute number of agri workers - particularly if you consider that the official unemployment number is 2.55% - 37m people "only").  According to the department of agriculture:

"India is among the top producers of several crops such as wheat, rice, pulses, sugarcane and cotton. It is the highest producer of milk and second highest producer of fruits and vegetables.  In 2013, India contributed 25% to the world’s pulses production, the highest for any one country, 22% to the rice production and 13% to the wheat production.  It also accounted for about 25% of the total quantity of cotton produced, besides being the second highest exporter of cotton for the past several years."

Interesting pic, in terms of the numbers above - (in the distance in white) people planting by hand, plenty of water, and India's beautiful and varied landscape.

Pilgrims in the landscape.  Every time I go out of the cities in India, I encounter people on pilgrimages.

Trucks stopped overnight, in the early morning landscape.

Herdsmen on the road, Amit up ahead.

Heading down into the Grand Canyon of  India, entry road cut through the granite hills - had to put the phone away because the speed was picking up significantly; time to tuck up, get all the bits and pieces in, and fly.

India - Part 7 - The urban edges

Bicycles are drawn to small towns and the periphery of the large.  Being in the middle of nowhere for days on end is emotionally challenging, and of course the heart of a city (in all the ones I've lived) is just downright hostile. The urban edges are hard places however.  The indifference of humans to one another, and the real meaning of privilege, swirl somehow together to ensure that those with least have to spend most getting from where they live, to where they might work. So the urban edges are mostly gritty, dusty, decorated with informal living, and mass transport hubs.  They are seldom pretty, but always real. Like people. 

The grit and grind of the urban edge.

Our stage after the show, at a bus depot, the Indian equivalent of a Transkei Missile rolling in.

I absolutely LOVED this town, an altiplano delight - climbed out of a long valley, snaking up (after a fantastic descent) into this little jewel with its bustle and market.

Somewhere in Gujarat - bright clothes, jewels in the dust.

The urban edges are also like city-gates of old, a kind note, implicit invitations back.

And then those carve-outs for the well heeled too, country clubs, things that need space.  The Malpani rooms had seen better days, but the pool was ocean-like.  I think mal-pani really translates to bad water - mal from latin, pani from Hindi.

India - Part 8 - The people

I'm lost in the labyrinth of how to talk about 1.4 billion people in some sort of generalized way - so I won't try - but there are some comments worth making.  Firstly, the parallels.  The people who came to the activation points are by and large indebted. It's depressing that the poor and those falling into that dust from the bottom of the middle class in India and Africa have that in common.  From a finance perspective, how depressing that debt is the common experience.  So, a learning from the tour as a whole, is that investment literacy is secondary to debt awareness.  Indebtedness is the modern spiked neck-ring of semi-slavery, and the masters of the trade both the silver tongue of loan shark, spurred by the unquenchable and infinite need of the many.

One of the halls for an evening event, captured by the panorama phone function, in this instance India's middle class.

Hemal and Amit in action on the edges of one of the activation stops - this time a tuk-tuk stand on the town outskirts.

Again, what it means to be a man; this boy, I think damaged in some sort of an accident, was not all there.  But such is the allure of a bicycle, that he was fascinated, and open in his curiosity, couldn't keep his hands off them as they leaned against the back of the stage truck.  The gear levers; the brakes; the lights; they all held great fascination.  The reaction was interesting; back home I'd have expected a harsh reaction, perhaps a sharp klap even.  But the men of India, either let him go for it, or very gently reached out to him, tactile, and ever so gently suggested that he not explore too fully.  Enough violence and short straw for one lifetime.

At one of the activation points, people engaging Shreenivas.

 People making a living, doing things for others.  Hemal spotted a guy cooking in a round pot fired by several large, dry cow-pats, and pulled off saying that this particular dish made primarily of sweet potatoes was an absolute must.  The pot was duly fetched off the smoking pile, and opened, and the stew of goodies inside carefully removed, served onto a paper plate on an old needle and spring scale.  I have to fight myself, despite totally trusting my colleagues (and I mean that in a deep way, trust in their love and kindness), some part of me still says, how kosher an idea is this?  But African manners thankfully still defeat fear and of course it was totally rewarding - they were fantastic and delicious and fiery and wonderful.