The day started reasonably enough as we managed to cover good ground for a few hours, with the only ominous sign being my first explosive toilet visit.
Then it started.
Driving down a humble rural road, we were flagged down by two policemen, who demanded - for the first time in our trip - vehicle docs, passports and licences. Irritated, we dragged out the ritual until they capitulated into just glancing at our passports. Then it got weirder. They demanded we sit with them in their office, without any explanation why. This was followed by a language-barrier stunted monologue on how many years he’d served, his rank, and how many girlfriends he had, etc. During this time, we were left to wonder why we weren’t allowed to leave; and what was being ‘arranged’ for us.
And what was it? A send out for vast quantities of soft drink (which became very sickly, very quickly), more colleagues, and delicious traditional Indian breakfasts. In retrospect, a delightful gesture; if only we had had a choice in the matter!
Moving swiftly forward, and after a driver switch, a gamely pressed the engine up towards 70 (after a previous ‘limit’ of 60) until the noises it emitted suggested maybe, just maybe, that was pushing our luck.
First it stuttered, then on the newly found inclines it flat-out stalled. And from there on in, it just got worse.
We tried letting it cool down, which bought us barely 2 more minutes of driving. So then we tried starting blankly at the engine, while sucking air through our teeth - as we’ve seen mechanics do - and yet still nothing.
Flummoxed, and somewhat unwilling to push our suddenly very heavy tuktuk up any more hill, Ben pressed on up the road to look for civilisation (in hindsight, unlikely as we were in very rural Himalaya); briefly pausing to catch the eye of an alpha male monkey. A very angry, very large, alpha male monkey.
In his absence, the newly-enraged monkey consoled itself by sitting on a tree stump and slapping its backside, poised for Ben’s return.
As Ben innocently ambled back down the hill, the monkey leapt to block his path, hissing, baring teeth, and tightly coiled for attack. Inexperienced in the ways of the monkey fight, Ben simply mimicked the monkey with hissing and arm gestures; throwing in a few extra shadow kicks for good measure. What followed was a tense back & forth war dance while I tried to regain enough composure (being paralysed with laughter is admittedly not a good survival mechanism) to point our now defunct tuktuk back down the hill and push it up to enough speed so Ben could sprint from angry monkey and roll to safer pastures. To my ever lasting regret, my camera battery had died only moments before.
Post monkey, in a remote Himalayan valley with a dead engine, we were very much trapped. Of the few people around (as there always are, everywhere, in India), none were of much use.
Mercifully, after much collusion, a 4×4 carrying 10 Sikhs agreed to tow us 17km to a mechanic. Fairly straightforward… except they did not have a towrope. No, they had a turban. Dumbfounded, we watched as they wound a turban, and then tied it to the front of the tuktuk and the back of their jeep. By the time the journey was complete, I had been demoted from honorary tuktuk driver (accused – falsely I might add - of braking, thus snapping turban #1), and we had been gamely quizzed on everything from the number of girlfriends we possessed to the nature of our sex lives. It transpired the driver, at 28, had already accumulated 6 children. With one girlfriend between us, no children and little more than a lump of metal on the end of a turban to our name; we were clearly going to be their dinner party anecdote for a very long time.
They dropped us in front of some greasy looking fellow who we were told was a mechanic - or at least a man with tools - who called up more greasy men with tools to follow him on his mission to strip our engine of every last working component until it was utterly, completely, dead.
By this stage, 300km from the finish, we were seriously contemplating everything from a new tuktuk to a donkey to actually reach the finish line.
Three hours later, at a cost of just three pounds, and by some unknown miracle - (along with much mirth from the ‘mechanics’), our desolate faces were lifted… the engine first roared into life, then purred harmoniously. Lotus couldn’t have done a better job than these guys. We were back!
With the entire day gone; we settled at the first hotel we found - a surprisingly upmarket place in a very ramshackle village - which lacked a hot shower, but more than made up for it with a hot swimming pool (and bizarrely, gin but no tonic, “gin & fanta?” was the offered compromise…).