Since I will be leaving Goa in about a week and don’t know when I will return I have been trying to make the most of the time I have here. One of the things that I have enjoyed the most this year has been to rediscover the thrill of cycling and do it on a regular basis like I have never done before.

I’ve been cycling at least 50 K a day and on many days as much as 120 K or so during a couple of trips to Sawantwadi in Maharashtra and many trips to the Maharashtra border check-post.

The rains though put a major damper on my habit and after a few weeks of cycling in a downpour everyday and coming home like a drenched rat I tired of it and the cycling got sporadic. A week back though the monsoon disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived in Goa. I woke up one morning with the sun shining brightly at me through the window and not a cloud in the sky so I decided to do my early morning cycling trip to the lighthouse at Fort Aguada. This is a 48 K or so trek I was doing every morning for the first few months in Goa but the monsoons threw a spanner into the works of my well maintained habit.

It was the morning after I had booked tickets to Mumbai and then to Delhi so I decided I ought to get back in the saddle regularly and make the best of the few weeks left. So here’s a description of my daily ride from this morning. This may only be interesting to other cyclists at best and will surely be thoroughly boring for pretty much everyone else but I’m writing it as much to put down the memory to savour later for myself as for anyone else to read. So here goes…

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Music, Random aguada fort, calangute, candolim, Cycling, Firefox, Goa, mapusa, Moira, Moira Church, Nachinola, parra, pirazona, Shimano, sinquerim, St. Jerome’s Church

I can’t explain why I go out cycling every morning.

For the first fifteen minutes or so my knees are always sore and my hamstrings cramped up from the previous day. For the next few kilometres, after I am warmed up, I feel good but then about 10 km. or so into the ride my back starts to hurt. The grips on the handlebars rip up my palms and they are now covered with thick, ugly calluses from being rubbed raw for hours everyday. A few fingers on my left hand are often completely numb or tingly. 

If it’s sunny it’s so hot that I’m dripping wet with sweat about half an hour into the ride. If it’s raining, I am soaked to my skin within minutes of leaving the house and bitterly cold and uncomfortable for the rest of the ride. Each day I return so tired that my vision is blurry. 

Motorists think I don’t exist. Whether it’s at a crossing where I’m trying to switch down gears fast enough to keep going and a truck decides to cut across me anyway or on a wide road, a bus overtakes me only to brake hard, just a few metres ahead of me or some scrawny Goan mother-fucker on a scooter, who threatens to kick me over because I didn’t let him pass quickly enough.

Today, an auto-rickshaw side-swiped me and my pedal got stuck in the auto. I was dragged along for a few metres. He didn’t brake, he didn’t slow down. I finally got thrown to the side of the road and my foot got caught between the spokes of the front wheel of my bike and the front fork. Considering the violence of the crash I got off pretty lightly: one badly mangled foot, one destroyed shoe, one really sore ass and one scraped up elbow. The rear dérailleur on the bike is shot. Also the the front wheel is bent but I did that, while yelling in agony, trying to free my trapped foot. I got no apology and little help.   

So, I ask myself, why do I do it? Why do I go out every fucking morning, whether it’s in the pissing rain or the blazing sun to push pedals for kilometre after kilometre, torturing myself and pushing a cycle to the point that it is constantly falling apart? Why do I want to be out on the road at the mercy of the elements and of feckless motorists sending text messages from their cellphones while driving SUV’s? 

Maybe it’s because once in a while, not everyday, often when I least expect it, when I’m close to passing out, soaked with sweat, my lungs and my legs on fire after cycling up a steep hill, I go over the top of the hill and start cycling down the other side, free-wheeling down the slope, fast as the wind, with just the right song playing on my iPod and blasting into my head… and for just a few minutes I experience the closest thing to ecstasy that I can ever imagine.

Random, Rants Cycling, douchebag, Goa, militant cyclist, militantcyclist

I couldn’t go for my daily bike ride this morning because the rains are finally here and it’s coming down like nobody’s business. Actually, the monsoon hit Goa yesterday but I was like “Meh! It’s just a little precipitation!” and went out anyway.

After about an hour or so of cycling in the drizzle and feeling like a drenched rat on a bicycle I realised why all the locals generally stay in during the rains if they can help it.

So this morning I am wisely staying indoors, drinking coffee, watching the rain and listening to a playlist of songs about rain. (Yes, I am that lame)

One of those songs is “It’s Coming Down” by CAKE from what is probably their best ever album, Fashion Nugget.

You can steal the MP3 from the internets here.

Be good, watch out for assholes.

Music, Random bicycle, Cake, Cycling, Fashion Nugget, Goa, It's Coming Down, monsoon, rain in goa

So, (I have to stop starting posting posts with that word) on a recent vacation in Goa that lasted nearly a month, I cycled around pretty little villages in North Goa like crazy (I also decided I would “Go For A Run” but that just ended with my thighs screaming “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO US?!“ at me and having to heave myself off the toilet the next morning by pulling my body up using the door handle because I was pretty much paralyzed from the waist down, but I digress…)

One of the  many joys of cycling around was being able to listen to music with earphones in and be reasonably confident that I wouldn’t get run over by a bus or an SUV tearing around a blind corner in the opposite direction. Other joys included blasting down a hillside, free-wheeling at 45 or so, silently whooshing past little old ladies on Honda Activas, while resisting the urge to yell “Outta my way Jesus Lover! Comin’ through!”

Ahhh Goa!

I also managed to borrow a reasonably decent camera from the same charitable people who lent me their house and took a few photographs which are on ‘the flickr’ here. Mostly old houses, abandoned and gone to seed, being slowly reclaimed by the undergrowth and some churches.

So, the song. Besides a ton of Goldfrapp and Tosca, this song by Groove Armada was playing in my ears a lot of the time and boy did it fit the setting. Its called At the River and is from the album Vertigo. If you want to hear Groove Armada’s best album though, SoundBoy Rock would be a better bet. Please ignore the video, which is a mash up of some footage including an Nvidia graphics demo from a few years back, when we would actually go out and buy a new graphics card and slot it into a desktop PC and then run the demo and ooh and ahhh (at the rendering not the chick, okay maybe a little bit at the chick)

Anyways, vacation over. Back to the mines. Same shit, different day. Repeat. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum .

Music, Random At the River, Corjuem, Cycling, Flickr, Goa, Goldfrapp, Groove Armada, Moira, Nachinola, Nvidia, Soundboy Rock, Tosca, Vertigo