We loved Jodhpur. We loved eating our meals below the massive and beautiful fort or overlooking an ancient step well. We loved wandering the blue-tinged streets and the market with the clock tower, but it was time to go.  We secured the luggage to the bikes. (One rather sweet thing in India is that the hotel staff wait to see us off. In our case, that can take ten minutes of threading and tightening straps and generally ensuring our bags don’t fall off. With Billie2, without a luggage rack, this needed to be quite tight, indeed.) The bags secured, we waved goodbye and set off.

Lunch at the Toorji Step Well
Clock Tower Market.

The departure was nothing like coming in. By now, we knew what to expect. We got quickly onto the road to Udaipur and found ourselves once more on the empty desert roads of Rajasthan. Dalma found the deserts a bit challenging; dry, and unlovely, but I loved them. I’ve always been fascinated by the emptiness of arid places.

The kilometres sped past. Gradually, we noticed the traffic getting fuller. It also got pushier. People seemed to come out from the on-roads with less care. We had a couple of near misses. Then, as I was going through a town, I heard an “oh f**k!” on the cardo, followed by “I’m down”.  I pulled over real fast and ran back.

What had happened was that a man on one of those ubiquitous aged 110cc bikes you see everywhere in India had pulled out into the traffic straight into Dalma’s path.  She braked hard but could not stop in time and hit his rear wheel.  Both went tumbling. Dalma was furious, yelling at him in a mixture of Hungarian and English. By the time I got back, he had jumped on his bike and taken off real fast, leaving a trail of oil and possibly urine in his wake.  Dalma was surrounded by a group of solicitous and kindly Indians trying in vain to calm her down. She was fine. Just shaken. Dropping the bike was her biggest fear, and here she was facing it. I had to run back to my bike and ride it back, and by then, Hiho was at the side of the road. It was fine. The shifter was a bit bent, but it was ridable. Dalma had a bruised leg. Eventually, the bike received the crowd’s approval, and we were permitted to continue. With the bent shifter, we decided that I would ride Dalma’s bike, and she would continue on mine. This had consequences.

We continued to Udaipur. By the time we got there, it was peak hour. And Udaipurites turned out to be very pushy, impatient drivers. We were five kilometres from our hotel and were turning back around a roundabout when a car pushed in front of Dalma, and she dropped Billie2. Again, no damage to the bike, bar a bent brake lever. A policeman came to her help, and she got back on the bike fast to get out of the roundabout, so I waved at her across the intersection and went back to Hiho.

Suddenly, she disappeared from the cardo. I waited, calling out “Dalma?” every few seconds. Nothing. With only Hiho having a quadlock and Billie2, the beeline for navigation, I now had her phone, and she had mine. I called. She didn’t pick up. I looked for the location of my phone on hers and couldn’t see her. I waited and waited. I went back, hoping to see her yellow helmet, but I couldn’t. Finally, I figured she’d try to head to the hotel using my beeline, so I rode there. As she wasn’t there, I checked her phone again and finally saw her a few hundred meters away. Standing still.

So what happened from her point of view was that when she got up from the bike, she didn’t see me wave and took an earlier exit off the roundabout. She ended up going into the old town and stopped when she realised that we’d lost each other. She couldn’t get how the beeline worked. She’d never been able to. She took out my phone and watched my location. She saw me come into the old town and stop and turn around just two streets away. Eventually, with evening closing in fast, she decided to ride to the hotel, which required stopping to check the phone every few hundred metres for directions. On the map, this frequent stopping looked rather odd, so I jumped back on Hiho to find her. Finally, I saw her riding, turned and guided her to the hotel.  She was upset and angry at the traffic and still shaken from dropping the bike. Twice within a day. In Indian traffic. But she was ok.

On the road to Udaipur.

The hotel was an odd one. We checked in. They were unlicensed. Ok, we decided, we needed liquor and a shower. But the hot water, it turned out, was only on in the morning. So we were cross, unwashed, and unliquored. We went out to fix at least one of those. We’d deal with fixing the bikes tomorrow.