His back hurts, his palms are sore, his skin is calloused and pimples have erupted on his behind. Not surprising, for this 77-year-old writer from Herefordshire in the UK has been on the road for four months on a motorcycle. Simon Gandolfi, crime writer-turned-travel writer, is still raring to go and will be on the Indian roads for another two months.
The grandfather of six took 11 months to travel from Mexico to the tip of South America, covering 66,000 km in a Honda 125, after his wife apparently got tired of having him hanging around the house.
“I never argue with her, and so I went from Mexico to the tip of South America,” says Gandolfi. The book An Old Man on a Bike came out of the trip.
In India he started from Kanyakumari, with stopovers at Kodaikanal, Goa, Calcutta and some northeast cities.
In Hispanic America, Gandolfi could speak to an old shepherdess or a multimillionaire Mexican with equal ease because he was fluent in Spanish. But that’s not happening in India. “Language is a barrier here,” says the author who had been to India 40 years ago. “I had done the India-Pakistan-Afganisthan route. Forty years ago, you would find one old man in a remote village who could still speak English because he had worked for the Raj. Today, you are restricted to a narrow band of English- speaking affluent people. I can’t talk to the poor,” the author regrets.
