Bicycling to Oxford, part 2

My most surreal / memorable travel experiences: #7 See full map

There are a few moments in life when you realize that you're really in over your head. Lying on the M40 in the middle of nowhere sometime after midnight was one of those. I had been riding for so long in unbroken silence that the muffled, awkward sound of my breath being knocked out reverberated in my ears.

I reached out and found my glasses and picked myself off the road to assess the damage. I remember being more concerned with the fate of the bicycle - cuts and bruises I could deal with, but if my bike was busted up I would really be out of luck, since not only I would stuck in some unknown place, I'd have no good way to get out of there. The bike was in the foliage on the side of the road and appeared to be fine. I didn't want to see how badly I was hurt, and because it was a dark night I couldn't if I wanted to.

Riding on further was out of the question. I walked my bike to the nearest highway exit, still in the dark, and trudged through the high grass on the side of the road until I found a gas station. I was lost, it was starting to rain, and the gas station was closed. Thus commenced one of the more memorable nights of my life, as I sat approximating the fetal position under the canopy of the gas pumps in a random part of England, tried to stay warm and wished for the day.

When the station opened for business I popped in and checked one of the local maps. As it turns out, I was still reasonably on track for Oxford, one unfortunate highway excursion aside. I picked out a route that would get me to Oxford on country roads, and after some meandering managed to get going shortly after daybreak. With the help of daylight it turned out I had only most minor scrapes from the fall.

At this point sheer will took over, as I was too tired to rationalize anymore. At one point I felt sure I was close, whereupon I saw a sign indicating that Oxford was 22 miles away. Nothing to be done about it, I pedaled onwards. After clearing final a jumbled intersection not designed for pedestrians (or cycles) I entered the old university town at 11 am, 14 hours after my departure from Notting Hill.

I explored the city by bike, and then on foot, but not for long. About four hours after arriving, I was headed back to London - on a bus this time, with the bike neatly stowed in the purpose-built compartment in the back. Utterly exhausted, I caught up on a missing night's sleep during the ride back.

Rash decisions don't always lead to the best outcomes, but they're definitely memorable. In the middle of the ride I remember thinking that however it all turned out, I'd at least get a great story out of it.

The bicycle hire on the south bank of the Thames - 8 years later

Bicycling to Oxford, part 1

My most surreal / memorable travel experiences: #7 See full map

I was spending part of a summer in London, and towards the end of my stay had yet to explore much beyond the city itself. I knew Oxford and Cambridge were reasonably close to London, so either would make a suitable destination. I had begun riding a bicycle again, and the idea of cycling the English countryside seemed like a fine way get to one of these towns. With one final weekend left in England I had to act. That evening around six o'clock I made my way down to a bicycle hire on the banks of the Thames, picked up a sturdy yellow bike and paid for a day's rental.

After dallying for a few hours and taking care of odds and ends, it was nearly nine at night before I set out for Oxford. One of the travel guides in the hostel indicated that Oxford was 65 miles northwest of London along the M40 highway. With no more directional guidance than that, I pointed my bicycle roughly northwest and set out from Notting Hill. I carried a backpack containing a t-shirt and (of all things) a McDonald's cheeseburger - no helmet, no lights, no map. I've had better plans.

After several miles of pedaling I saw signs indicating the way to boroughs in northwest London, which I had assumed were already long behind me. This was not a good sign. Nevertheless I pressed on, through increasingly derelict areas of the suburbs ringing the city. I remember cycling past farms, seeing the surreal sight of horses rearing up and sparring gently in the moonlight.

At one point I was coasting down a deserted village street when an ambulance pulled up beside me. The paramedic looked at me through the open window: "Are you looking for a ride in an ambulance?" he yelled. "Because you're going about it the right way! Dressed in black with no **** lights on!" With that he sped off into the night. Duly chastened, I took the white t-shirt from my pack and tied it on my back, hoping that the fluttering cloth would at least provide some margin of safety.

As I was trying to parallel the M40 I followed a lane marking that appeared to take me in the right direction, but I soon realized I had accidentally strayed onto the highway itself. Imagine a cyclist on the shoulder of I-95 in the US or the German autobahn. Suddenly this lark of a trip took a very serious turn. I became extremely wary of vehicles on the road next to me - after all, these were highway speeds. At the merest sign of headlights behind me I would pull onto the shoulder and wait in the grass until the car was safely past. This meant I was continually looking backwards, while simultaneously speeding downhill in the night.

It was one of these backward looks that caused it. The darkness, the speed, the incline - I was vaguely aware that I was breaching the white shoulder line, reflexively grabbing the brakes - and the rest happened almost instantly. I flipped over the handlebars, flew through the air and slammed squarely on my chest with enough force to expel the air from my lungs and knock the eyeglasses from my face, which I heard clattering on the asphalt in the dark somewhere in front of me.

Moonlight Mafia, Khetri Fort, October 2009: part 2

My most surreal / memorable travel experiences: #8 See full map

Pilani and its surroundings are scorchingly hot during the day, but the desert quickly gives back its heat when the sun goes down. The night was becoming quite cool. Wearing a borrowed hooded sweatshirt cinched tight around my head, I laid flat on my back on the cold stone roof, watching the sky. The lateness of the hour and unfamiliar surroundings amplified the weirdness of it all. I could hear students milling around me talking, and eventually sufficient momentum built up for - of all things - a game of mafia. As cultural experiences go, I wasn't quite sure how this late-night staple of school retreats would translate.

And it was exactly as you would expect the game to be, anywhere in America. (Those with loftier sociological aspirations can comment on how globalization is standardizing even the games of the world's youth.) This was classic mafia, replete with reckless gambits, ludicrous strategizing, impassioned pleas, endless post-mortems. I was suddenly quite awake, watching the students with their easy rapport as we fell into stereotypical roles - the intense, silent observers, the shrinking novices who always get railroaded, the guy who doesn't quite understand the rules or the implications of what he says and consequently makes utterly inexplicable moves - it was all there.

After a few iterations the game died down, and students wandered off in various groups, the fort once again falling quiet. Some dozed, others hunkered down against the cold and waited for the sun. In the pre-dawn hours we roamed the fort languidly, eating what remained of the food, with people on various levels above and below silhouetted against a lightening sky. When morning broke we made our way down, watched disinterestedly by several monkeys that were perched high up on the walls of the fort.

When traveling, I've found it often pays to say yes in implausible situations. In a countdown of travel experiences this is surely one of the more unique ones - playing intense games of mafia at three in the morning on the roof of an abandoned 300-year old Rajasthani palace with a group of near-total strangers under a beautiful, star-dusted sky: check.

The view from the fort as dawn breaks

Standing on the roof

Next: a midnight ride to Oxford

Moonlight Mafia, Khetri Fort, October 2009: part 1

My most surreal / memorable travel experiences: #8 See full map

I was in Delhi, close enough to a friend's university that I could finally take up his invitation to address a student group there. I headed off to BITS-Pilani, located in the eponymous village in an extremely rural part of the state. My non-existent Hindi coupled with the minivan driver's similarly advanced English made for a rather silent ride through the increasing bare landscape of Rajasthan (save for the driver's Hindu devotional music, which may have been playing on repeat).

The talk itself was thoroughly enjoyable; the night to come would be memorable in a very different way. Now Indian engineering schools are known for their intense cultures - overwhelmingly male, highly technical, brutally competitive (at least at the entry phase) - and BITS was no exception. In this hermetic environment, a walled-off enclave in the desert, the students had developed their own lingo, with highly specialized slang and shorthand requiring frequent translation for bemused outsiders like myself.

That evening, word got to me that a group of students were planning to slip out of the campus close to midnight to head to a fort in the hills. (Some universities in India haven't abandoned in loco parentis, so unexplained late night excursions would be frowned upon - hence the need for discretion.) After getting past the wall that encircled the campus we rendezvoused a short distance away in the market area of the town, where two standard-issue Mahindra vehicles were waiting for us.

And that was how I found myself at midnight with a group of 13 Indian students - all but one of whom were perfect strangers to me - jammed into the backseats of two jeeps bouncing their way in the pitch darkness to a place that I had never heard of before. I didn't know what this place was, or what exactly we would do when we got there.

After a ride of roughly an hour spent trying not to knock my head on the metal roof crossbar while the jeep jostled up and down, we got out and started to hike up. By this time it was deep night, and the lights of villages were visible down in the distance. We eventually reached the ruins of Khetri Fort, an abandoned palace that had been left to the elements and vandals (and inquisitive students) for untold years. Rajasthan is dotted with ancient forts, so within the region Khetri is unremarkable. There were no barriers or guards, so we wandered in through the overgrown entrance, wound our way through darkened stone passageways and eventually popped up on the solid stone roof of the fort, under the stars.