The Solo Run Home: Namakkal to Gorakhpur | K2K Part 6

From Namakkal on, it was just me. The others had peeled off to Bangalore to send their bikes home by truck, and the trip I had started in company I would finish alone. What lay ahead was the longest stretch of the whole ride, more than three thousand kilometres back up the length of the country to Gorakhpur, ten days of mostly empty highway, rain, and a chain that was about to give out at the worst possible moment.

This is the run home.

Eight hundred and seventy kilometres to Hyderabad

I had slept only a few hours, but alone I could leave at five, and the early start meant I might cover four or five hundred kilometres before the day was done. A few kilometres of highway, a quick breakfast and a drink, and I settled into the riding. It took four hours to reach Bangalore, which was only 250 km away, and rather than fight the city traffic I took the bypass, which turned out to be a mistake, since it was under construction. Google found me alternatives, but it was two and a half hours of unknown, rain-soaked road before I was clear of it. Over lunch I settled on Anantapur as the night’s stop and called ahead to a hotel.

By evening the chain was loose and dry, and somewhere along the way I found a dhaba with an Andhra thali I was too pressed for time to enjoy. Hyderabad was three hundred kilometres on from there, and something in me decided that was the new destination, so I opened the throttle and rode hard, reaching the city by half past eight. And then the chain twisted and locked, and the bike would not move. I was stuck on a road in a strange city where I did not speak the language, and at that hour no repair shop was open. But there was one across the road, and I dragged the bike over to it.

The boy who ran it normally shut by six or seven, but a customer’s bike had broken down that evening, so the shutter was still up. He straightened my chain and told me to ride slow. His name was Venkatesh, and it was the first day of Saawan, and I am fairly sure something was watching over me that night. The chain had locked just after I left the highway, at low speed; a little earlier, at speed, it would have been a serious accident. After all of that I finally reached my friend Pradeep’s house, ate at half past nine, backed up my work, and slept.

Two days in Hyderabad

Everything was fine the next morning except the bike, which still needed a new chain set. Once Pradeep had gone to his classes I took it to the nearest service centre, where the people were arrogant and cash-only and told me to come back in the evening. I worked through the day until the others returned, ate, and slept an hour. When I went to collect the bike they had not even put it on the bay, and when I said something the answer was to take it back if I was in a hurry. After a short argument they got to work, and two hours later the chain was finally sorted for good.

I woke late the next day to find some children pulling the tank pad off the bike, which was a poor start. Pradeep and I made a city day of it instead. At Birla Mandir we left our phones and cameras outside and went up one at a time because of the queue, and while I waited my turn I looked at the views and the flowers. The temple was genuinely beautiful, and the best of it was the 360-degree view of Hyderabad from what is the highest point in the city. After lunch and some work we went to Charminar in the evening, all three of us, and found a proper mess of markets and traffic and rubbish, though the Lakshmi Mata mandir nearby lifted the mood.

Through the rain to Nagpur

Leaving Hyderabad meant another five hundred kilometres in the rain, and an hour just to get clear of the city. I ate badly on the move, an energy drink and chips, and somewhere out there a family in an Innova gave me a thumbs up for riding alone, which is a small thing that means a lot on a long day. Near the Maharashtra and Telangana border a sign pointed to a waterfall three kilometres off, and on impulse I turned for it down a bad, muddy, slippery track and walked the last few minutes to Pochera Waterfall, which turned out to be a local favourite. I talked with a few people there and turned back for Nagpur.

The rain only got heavier. Riding fast through it, I hit a pothole that threw the bike off balance, and I caught it just short of what would have been a bad fall. I stopped for a moment to breathe before pushing on through the wet to Nagpur and my friend Taj’s office, which I reached around five with soaked shoes. We rested, ate, and tried to look around town before the rain drove us back.

Nagpur gave me a slower day. Taj came over in the morning, and once I had cleared the previous day’s work and got ahead on the new, we had the afternoon together: lunch, then bowling in the evening, which I tried for the first time and somehow did well at, then a few more games and something to eat. He took me to Mominpura and Putala Lake before we ate out, had something sweet, and were back by nine, both of us with work to do and another five-hundred-kilometre day to Indore waiting.

Indore, and the last easy days

The ride to Indore was another wet five hundred kilometres, and I was making for it because my friend Vibhyanshu lived there and it broke up the long haul home. I was running early, around four in the afternoon, so I stopped where a single line of trees ran down both sides of the road and called ahead. He would not be back until half past five or six, so I waited it out over snacks and tea, then rode the last bit and reached just as he got home from the office. I met his family and his landlord’s son Karan, and since it was a weekday with plenty of work waiting, I stayed in, cleared it, ate around nine or ten, and slept.

We spent the next day at Jam Gate, twenty or thirty kilometres out. The monsoon had turned everything green and wet, and the place itself was something I had not seen before, a cliff opening onto a wide field, worth the corn and momos and the ride back before sunset. That evening we found a street-food market where I had a Sitafal shake and met a friend of Vibhyanshu’s from his office, who was visibly thrown to hear I was riding Kashmir to Kanyakumari and back and had stopped in just to see him. It was a good day. It also reminded me the bike was due a service I had forgotten about, with a thousand kilometres still to go, so I added one more day.

That extra day went on the service. It took two or three hours, and on the way to a temple afterwards the clutch felt wrong, the engine racing as if it were already engaged, so I went back and had them correct their mistake before riding on to the Khajrana Ganesh Mandir. By five I was back, and Vibhyanshu and I went out for food and another Sitafal shake, since I did not know when I would pass this way again. It was a relaxing day that took some of the ache of all those hours in the saddle out of me, and it was the last of its kind.

The road home

I left early and fresh the next morning, around five, for Jhansi, with nowhere to stop and nothing to do but ride through the rain. Near the UP and MP border I passed a stretch where the road runs between water on both sides, a place called Amola Bridge. I crossed into UP and stayed at a place right on the highway, so I could leave early and be home before dark. I picked up something to eat and drink from the market, ordered food, worked until I did not remember falling asleep, and packed so I could go at first light.

On the final morning I felt low and excited at once, low that it was ending and desperate to be home after fifty-three days. I left early into more rain, stopped near Kanpur to have lunch with my friend Rahul, whom I had not seen in years, and rode the last stretch with two hundred kilometres to go and the rain still coming. I ate once more near Barabanki, and then it came, the moment, around five in the evening, when I reached home. That was the end of it. I was glad and a little sad, and I did not know when the next ride or trip would be, and I still do not. End of the road. Home, after 53 days.

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