Adultery after sixteen years

It is Saturday 14th of October 2006. In our summer clothes we get on our bicycles; the last time we did this was a couple of months ago. From Dolalghat an eleven-kilometre pass road starts that after a short descent is followed by a seventeen-kilometre climb to Dhulikel pass. Cycling on the asphalt, with a normal oxygen pressure and in a delightful temperature is a party. Effortlessly we pedal the heavy load up, sometimes it seems like we are skipping some metres. The only thing that affects me now is the temperature; the conduction of heat in my body works differently to Peter’s. I feel hot far earlier than he does and can’t always drain this heat easily. Even in the cold of Tibet I often cycled wearing only two thermo shirts, whilst Peter went around wearing two sweaters. After the cold of the past weeks my body has to switch back to higher temperatures, but that doesn’t happen in a day: I get a headache and have to stop now and then to cool my head and neck in a rivulet or waterfall alongside the road.
October is the time of the rice-harvest: the farm-lands around us are coloured red by the traditional clothing of the women who work the fertile grounds. Entire families work at processing the Nepalese staple food; women and men cut the rice-blades at the ground; afterwards children turn the rice mill to strip the blades of their grains that get scooped into a jute bag. Elsewhere men and women tie the harvest into big bundles that they carry on their backs to the road.

In the descents we have to be very careful. An almost forgotten phenomenon looms at the last moment: speed humps. Like in most countries the humps are almost invisible to the traffic: no lines painted on them, no different colour and no warning signs. We suspect that hundreds of Departments of Traffic conspire in a plot and deliberately try to hide the humps from view as much as possible, in order to teach the fast and in this case unsuspecting traffic participants a hard lesson.
Almost four years ago, in Turkey, Peter was launched by one of those humps. We rode from Istanbul into the Asian part of the country. Our journey was just three months young, everything had gone according to our wishes so far and therefore our enthusiasm couldn’t be tempered. The north-eastern part of Asian Turkey is hilly, with short, steep climbs and descents. Cycling on asphalt had been grand the whole day and we hadn’t run in to a single speed hump at that point. Unsuspectingly we swished down a steep hill at full speed with Peter upfront, when he suddenly felt a big bang and started flying. He still insists that it felt like he was in the air for several minutes having a nice view of the forests and some lovely Turkish villages, but I maintain it had just been a second or two. With an even harder bang he returned to earth. His panniers flew from the bicycle and he barely managed to stay upright. I saw the whole thing happening with fear in my heart and found my breaks in time.
Speed humps are meant to reduce the speed of the traffic, but they are also excellent springboards.

Over ten-thousand kilometres without a single puncture. This is delight for a cyclist, because a puncture is always an unexpected and nasty interruption to the great, or heavy, cycling. Irritating, an annoyance, a hindrance, a torment and a plague. We had the majority of punctures in central Africa, where the thorns of the acacia tree now and then formed insurmountable obstacles for our strongly reinforced tyres. But the ten to twenty-centimetre-long thorns that were as hard as a steel nail also plagued the trucks.
Today, after having survived the two-thousand kilometres bouncy rock road of Tibet in a grandiose way, the time has come. On the quite smooth asphalt of Bhaktapur, fifteen kilometres from the finish line, a hard bang sounds that rings from Peter’s back tyre. We stop alongside the road and assess the damage.
“Hey, you got a flat tyre!”
A small boy comes running towards us pointing at the back tyre that is as flat as a pancake.
“Thank you, I didn’t notice.”
“You need a patch?”
“No thanks, I think I will have to put on a new tyre. You want to have the old one?”
“Yes, please, sir!”
A small drought crack has given the inner tube the opportunity to check out the daylight and most of the time this is over very fast. In the presence of a large audience of about ten men and overgrown boys we put a new inner tube and tyre around the rim and pump them up hard. I give the tyre and tube that are no use to us anymore to the boy, who is overjoyed when he walks away with them. In most poor countries, also in Nepal, things we would throw out in the garbage get reused again and again.

It is getting busier and busier on and alongside the road and suddenly Tibet is very far away. Minibuses and taxis try to push us off the road in their attempts to pick up passengers; motorcycles roar right next to us looking for a gap in the traffic; effortlessly we overtake cycle rickshaws with heavy loads; we pass military checkpoints without having to stop; we climb another bit, descend again; greet the harvesting people in the fields; have to give way for two cows that cross the road; almost crash into a barking and running dog; are stared and shouted at by men who play cards and end up in a traffic jam for the first time in six months.

Kathmandu.

We get lost by lack of a city map, are unexpectedly and kindly invited to stay at the house of Jan de Groot and Brieke Steenhof, two Dutch people who live and work in Kathmandu; we follow a Danish cyclist to Thamel, the Tourist Ghetto of the city, and slalom alongside the thousands of people, motorcycles, rickshaws, vegetable stalls and clothes salesmen to the tranquillity. In Hotel Ganesh Himal we have a warm reunion with Frank and Martine, who take us to the best pizzeria in town. We drink beer and wine, eat the best meal of the last forty-five years, toast, laugh and cry. We couldn’t have wished for a better homecoming in a strange and new country.

It’s late at night; in Tibet we would have been asleep for a long time already. Now we lie in a luxurious double bed. The bicycles are in the storage of the hotel, a big pile of dirty laundry lies in a smelly corner of the room, the dusty panniers in another corner; we are clean and smell of fragrant soap. We are also a bit tipsy and feel great.
For months we slept in our clothes because of the cold; tired and longing for new energy for the following day. Tomorrow we don’t have to do anything. Tomorrow we are lazy and free. Tomorrow we will do what we feel like. Tomorrow doesn’t exist.

We are naked in bed.

It is all a long time ago. Clumsy and prudish my hands wander to the one next to me. My wife, friend, cycling buddy, confidante, my everything. I have known her my whole life; there are no secrets, nothing eludes me, I am on safe grounds; I feel her like I feel myself.
But the body next to me is unfamiliar, the voluptuous curves are missing, the breasts are smaller, the back is tight, the skin thin. I feel bones and hard places where two months ago everything was still soft; she is weightless; I can turn her around with my hands without effort, she floats in the air. She smells differently, like rosemary mixed with the scent of freshly mowed grass, I don’t know where I am anymore.
Tonight I commit adultery, with my own wife.