Hitting the Road - 18th March 2006

I decided to head around to the back of Agra today and get a couple of photo’s of the Taj from across the river. I set out at about 10:00am and headed off in the general direction of the bridge. I found the bridge easily enough and it was just a quick case of doing a couple of left turns to actually get onto it. It’s actually a railway bridge with a road underneath to take the horses, cows, ox, tuk tuk’s, cycle rickshaws and any other contraption they can find. It wasn’t built to take two lanes of vehicular traffic.

The traffic on the bridge was at a more or less standstill so I (and other scooter / motorbike) riders started overtaking the stationary traffic. It was all going well and I was making slow progress over the bridge, when suddenly the tuk tuk in front of me decides to pull into my pat. I swerved out of the way and hit the brakes, next thing I know is that I’m sliding down the road heading towards the bridge girder. As I wasn’t going to fast I didn’t hit it too hard, I was just thankful that there was a gap in the traffic coming the other way (which is why I had been overtaking in the first place). Not one bugger thought of stopping to help me up, the just started at me as they drove by. I couldn’t think why I crashed, I wasn’t going fast, I didn’t break too heavily, but when I picked the bike up I looked down on the bridge and there was a oil spill which is what had caused the bike to slide. I picked the bike up fairly easy and luckily it started first kick and I made my way slowly across the rest of the bridge.

When I got to the other side I had a quick look at the damage and there was remarkably little. The two mirrors had been knocked out of position, but they were easy enough to twist back and the brake lever / accelerator had also been twisted around the handle bar. There was no damage done to the body of the bike due to the front and rear crash barriers, glad I paid the couple of quid extra to have them fitted.

So that’s it, my first spill in India (and for a good few years), no doubt they’re be a couple of more along the road, lets hope they’re all as minor as that one.

I didn’t get much further to be honest, as the map didn’t match up with the roads I was riding on and the traffic got hellish. I stopped and got some water and I drew a crowd of six or seven people all looking at me drink water! I really don’t know what the fascination is to see a Westerner drinking water, maybe I’ll react the same when I see a tourist in London having a drink!

I met up with my two friends in the evening and they were feeling a bit dodgy after a recent bout of Delhi Belhi so I suggested that we go and have a pizza in Pizza Hut. We had a medium pizza each and Paul and I could easily eat a large pizza in London, but despite the fact that neither of us had eaten anything that day (it was 17:30 by the time we hit Pizza Hut), neither of us could finish the pizza. Oh the shame of leaving two slices out of a six slice pizza.