One Crazy Ride - Gaurav Jani's new film

Gaurav Jani does what most of us just dream about, he decides to ride to the top of the world by way of the most remote deserts on the Indo-China border. By himself. Not on a KTM, not on a BMW, he rode what I can best describe as a humble but sturdy bike where there are no roads. And because many of us wouldn't believe his story, he filmed it. By himself. He won many awards for his first film, Riding Solo to the Top of the World.

For his most recent adventure, One Crazy Ride, he found four equally unfettered souls to ride with him. The film is about these five individuals who fulfill their dream of charting a route which most people think is impossible. It's a story about friendship and community. For this group of riders, their community is their motorcycle club - 60kph. Like most communities where people have come together to share a passion, theirs has transformed into a family. The five of them are riding Royal Enfield motorcycles, three have 350cc bikes, two have 500cc bikes.

Nicolitta Pereira is one of the five riders. She's a bridal-wear designer when not riding with the 60kph motorcycle travel club, an (east) Indian adventure / cross-country riding group. More on her in a later post.

Check out the trailer for this movie - the "cliff hanger" scene takes the form a fully loaded bike poised and revving at the end of a suspended bridge, preparing to cross it. The bridge is suspended, but we're not talking about steel cables here - more like chicken wire. And the flimsy "planks" that make the footpath for the crossing are loose. If the rider loses his/her balance, it will be a long fall into the river. I might be able to crawl across that bridge on my hands and knees but ride across it? Nah.

Gaurav Jani must be Helge Pedersen's long-lost brother - the more crazy the idea (no one has crossed the Darien gap on a motorbike? sure...) the more attractive it appears to be. For One Crazy Ride Jani and friends traveled uncharted roads across the Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh, situated in North-east India. The trailer shows breath-taking scenery. And of course there shots of bikes riding where only goats normally travel - in some cases the riding gods are kind, sometimes not so kind. There's a high-definition (MP4) version of the trailer for those of you who aren't watching over a VPN.

If your DVD collection includes the Long Way 'Round, you might want to pre-order One Crazy Ride, which will ship in February 2009.

Heard on the street: 2009 Female Mechanics calendar may be a collector's item

If you like this picture and want a piece of history, order your 2009 Female Mechanics calendar soon because there is a possibility that Sarah will be in grad school next year, not on the road photographing and interviewing the next few hundred cracks in the grease ceiling.

I am promoting Sarah and her work with fervor because I believe that in the future she will be compared to Margaret Bourke-White (photo journalist whose photo was on the cover of the first issue of Life Magazine in 1936) for her recording of this first generation of female mechanics. I hope this will be the last time in a modern country when discovering your mechanic is a woman makes you smile because she an anomaly. When I was a kid (that phrase is coming off my fingers altogether too often!) female doctors and female news anchors were anomalous; now they are taken for granted.

I have a copy of the first issue of Ms. Magazine. I hid it under my bed because I didn't want my parents to know I had bought it. Now that issue lives in a fire-proof box along with other important papers - including the 2007 and 2008 Female Mechanics calendar, to be joined by the 2009 Female Mechanics calendar at the end of next year.

Motorcycles: Aging, Vision and Somatic Awareness

After the somewhat demoralizing experience at Rawhyde Aventure camp – that is, realizing that I have a lot more work to do to get back to “healthy”, the GS has seemed heavier than ever before and other than using it as a commute vehicle, I have not be riding much. Little by little my friends are joining me on the “other side” of the 50th year milestone. I rode to my friend Amanda’s house near Berkeley for her birthday celebration – about an hour’s ride on highways. The ride gave me a new focus.

I was four-eyed as a child, acquiring a tenacious and impetuous astigmatism in my teenage years. As the technology in lens crafting has improved, the “line” bi-focals went to the back of the drawer in favor of “no line” bi-focals. I skipped the “no line” trifocals and went directly into progressive addition lenses. Progressive lenses offer a continuous, gradual change in prescription strength from the lower (reading correction) to the upper (distance correction) portion of the eyeglass lens; progressive lenses offer correction for all distances whether you look up to see a road sign in the far distance, look ahead in the intermediate zone to read your bike’s gas gauge, car’s dashboard, computer monitor, or aircraft's instrument panel, or look down to read a book or newspaper. Progressive lens give you a smooth transition in visual range, you shouldn't have a sensation of jumps between the zones of the lenses.

“So what does all this have to do with riding,” you may be wondering. I’m getting there.

The surface of highway 101 south in South San Francisco has become corrugated for long stretches. Last night trying to watch the road brought to mind a childhood memory of the jerky images that you would see when the film strip came out of the tracking sprockets on the old reel-to-reel movie projectors. Sometimes the image would smooth out when the film strip would settle back in to place. Sometimes image on the screen would become bright then fade to grey and you would hear the slap, slap, slap sound of the torn film strip tail flapping around the front reel.

Sitting on the bike, my body jerked up and down with every bump of the road surface. My glasses bounced up and down on my nose, but not bouncing in synch with the rest of my body. The image of the road became a chaotic stream of horizontally shifting layers that made it impossible to judge relative distances. On most highways, it isn’t unusual to lose a bit of visual acuity now and then, but this loss was prolonged and a real safety problem compounded by traffic and speed of travel. Pressing the glasses to sit more firmly on the bridge of my nose reduced the bouncing fun-house effect only temporarily. Corrugated surfaces, corrugated surfaces, what do I know about riding on corrugated surfaces – yes of course, get your butt off the bike! The folks at Mystery School and at Rawhyde Adventures would be smacking me on the head if they were close enough to do so.

In Pilates there is a long box exercise called "horse-back riding". You sit astride a leather-covered box, your hands are holding spring-loaded straps that offer resistance to moving your arms forward. You shift your weight forward so that your butt is off the box. You balance by gripping the box with your thighs while extending your legs fully towards the floor. Arms are bent, elbows at your ribs, hands open. Each time you shuttle your arms forward, the springs pull you back. The challenge is to shuttle yourself forward while maintaining your balance for five-to-ten repetitions, rest, and repeat. This exercise works your core strength and balance.



Here’s a picture of Herbert Schwartz and Ramona Eichorn and riding on the desert. The the Touratech site has more pictures. Ramona is on the right - look at her riding position.

I didn’t need to stand up fully to reduce the effect of riding on corrugated highway, I just needed to get my butt a few inches off the bike. It takes core strength and quadriceps control to hold this position, and it takes some balance to not pitch forward as the front wheel is taking the bumps.

With my butt off the bike, the visual horizon smoothed out, restoring my distance perception. I was a bit disappointed when the highway surface smoothed out and there was no longer a reason to remain standing on the pegs – it’s kinda neat to ride that way, but it makes car drivers nervous.

So, I did take more away from Rawhyde Adventure school besides a health check, and, while my stamina needs work, my core strength, coordination and balance are improving immensely due to Pilates and yoga.

Earlier this year when I rode solo to Seattle, I was immensely happy that after 12 hours of riding, I had no lower back problems – I attribute that to the Pilates training. Instead of using the muscles in my extremities (arms and legs) I’m consciously trying to initiate from and draw on the muscles in area of the belly. The more strong the belly muscles are, the more you can ask of the muscles in the mid and lower back, and then recruit the hips, the shoulders and the neck.

I used to rely on my gas-permeable (hard) contacts to gave me distance and reading abilities, but in the last two years my eyes are more dry - I can’t tolerate the hard contacts. The bi-focal soft contacts allow more oxygen to reach the eyeballs, and they are more convenient -
no glasses to fall off your face in downward dog - but they are only good for distance - I can read the highway signs but I can’t read the speedometer (not such a problem) or the gas gauge (a problem). Once you are used to progressive lens glasses it is hard to think about going back to carrying three pairs of glasses with you all the time, but here are a couple of reasons to think twice. If you have deal with motion that you can't compensate for, and, if you need a lot of peripheral vision, progressive lenses may not be the best choice. I’m counting on continuing advances technology to address my vision needs.



As for the dirt-riding skill needs, I never would have thought that I would draw so heavily on my background and continuing training in somatic arts (dance, gymnastics, Aikido, yoga) to learn to ride motorcycles.

We measure our achievements by what we had to give up and how hard we had work to complete the goal. I'm making slow progress toward my dream of riding from Istanbul, Turkey to Xian, China - the phrase “once in a lifetime” is taking on new meaning.

[Pictures from Ramona's recent East Africa Trip]