The roads didn’t get any clearer and the driving got considerably worse. I passed a tuk-tuk with about ten people in it, another with people on the roof. Swinging into the outside lane to pass a couple of bikes I was almost mown down by a huge great truck coming the wrong way. I just about avoided him and he barrelled on down our fast lane without slowing and without looking back.
It was dark when we got to Agra; we’d missed the Taj Mahal at sunset but if we were up early enough we might catch it at sunrise. Finally we made it to the hotel. By this time Mungo was pretty sore: he was pretty down too and I felt for the poor guy. There’s nothing worse than being injured on an expedition; you feel like shit because you’re in pain but you feel worse because you think you’re letting your mates down. By the time he sat down in a chair he was really pissed off and the pain was excruciating. I knew then he’d need some kind of surgery. That meant I had to start thinking about alternatives: there was Anne, maybe, a really good freelance camerawoman from Denmark. If Mungo was out of action perhaps she could fly to Kathmandu.
We met up with Russ eventually at the hotel; he came bounding into the lobby with a grin on his face. ‘That was an amazing ride,’ he said, ‘fast and a bit scary, but amazing.’
‘You should’ve waited,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘I had an oil leak on my bike. We had to get it fixed.’
‘I got behind an ambulance that had its alarm bell going; it was clearing all the traffic so I just stayed with it. I thought that you were bound to get caught up so there was no point stopping because I’d have to wait for half an hour at least. I figured the best thing to do would be to just get there.’
I looked at him a little sourly. ‘So you didn’t think something might’ve happened?’
‘Where?’
‘Well, behind you.’
He shrugged. ‘You were all there to deal with it. I’d only have been waiting for you. If anything had happened you wouldn’t turn up and . . .’
‘You should’ve waited,’ I said. ‘We should stick together.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll make that our plan in future.’
Mungo’s injury was the real issue, however. We decided to go to the Taj Mahal at dawn and leave him resting in bed. If there was no improvement by midday we’d have to find a doctor.
It had been a long day, and when we got up at six the next morning, the news wasn’t any better. Instead of easing off, Mungo’s knee seemed to have seized up completely and the poor guy was devastated. There he was on the adventure of a lifetime and he was really worried now that he wouldn’t be able to finish it. We asked Rina if she would try to set something up with a doctor as soon as one was available, while Russ and I rode out to the Taj Mahal. The thought of losing him now made me feel nervous - I’d woken up with butterflies in my stomach and I wasn’t feeling any better now. I tried to remain hopeful, but it was hard.
I really felt for Mungo, he was having a very hard time. Back when we were with the ambulance in Mumbai he found out that his grandfather had died. He was an old man and he’d had a good life but it hit Mungo hard. His grandfather had been a World War Two Spitfire pilot, and throughout Mungo’s life he’d been something of a mentor. The poor guy had to deal with that and now his knee had given out on him.
Strangely enough the city was almost deserted. It was probably the only time of day when you could ride a motorbike without your heart jammed permanently in your mouth. I loved it - just a few bicycles and rickshaws, horses and carts; a handful of people walking. Riding through the empty streets of Agra, I tried to chill out a little. Regardless of how things panned out with Mungo we had a big day ahead of us - we needed to cover another three hundred kilometres today to rendezvous with a truck that would take us to Varanasi.
Agra was full of old, weather-beaten pink buildings. Some of them looked as though they’d been painted that way; others were built from the same sandstone we’d seen at the fort in Delhi. We rode for half an hour, weaving around the few vehicles before turning into the car park for the Taj Mahal. This was as far as we could ride. The buildings are beginning to crumble and there is a pollution exclusion zone around them: the only way you can get close is by taking one of the electric tuk-tuks. However, one of the locals told us if we crossed the river we could view the Taj from the far side.
We both fancied riding a bit further, so back on the Bullets we headed towards the water. This was the same Yamuna River that flowed past the Red Fort in Delhi, and I was reminded of my dad’s description of the Avonmore flowing through our property. India is one of those countries that really gets under your skin and funnily enough I’d spoken to Dad about it only last night: he’d spent a lot of time here and always knew I’d love it.
We cut through a poor residential area where dogs were running in the road and the houses were little more than hovels. I could hear people laughing, and saw young kids sitting in bowls of water while their parents poured more water over their heads.
We carried on between the buildings seemingly going nowhere, then took a right and a left and came out on a narrow, two-tiered bridge. It was a lumpy old ride over pitted tarmac, and the wonderful chaos had returned - rickshaws, horse carts, tuk-tuks . . . and every time a vehicle passed we were forced right to the side.
We came off the bridge, hit a road of white cobbles and there at last was the Taj Mahal rising from the mist in front of me. It just appeared like a mirage, marking the horizon with its magnificent white domes and minarets. It was more beautiful than I ever thought it would be.
We got as close as we could then parked the bikes in a run-off overlooking the flat, dusty banks of the Yamuna River. I couldn’t believe it; from my home town of Annamoe all the way to the Taj Mahal, early morning mist bathing the walls, no sound except the distant voices of children down by the water. It’s a Mughal tomb, the burial place of Shahjahan and his favourite wife Mumtaz Mughal, built on a plinth with a maze of basement chambers underneath. A local man explained that these were built on hardwood pilings over the water, which sounded like the buildings in Venice. He said that the architect designed it that way so that if an earthquake hit the region the water would move rather than the earth, thus keeping the building from collapsing.
Built between 1631 and 1653, it took twenty thousand men working day and night to complete. The buildings are inlaid with precious and semi-precious stones, and at varying times of the day the ambience is completely different. At night the place glows red in the moonlight. In the early morning it’s a sort of sky blue, and in perfect sunshine it is milky white. Legend has it that when it was finished Shahjahan decided to cut the thumbs off his workers, all twenty thousand of them, so they could never build another Taj Mahal. That’s gratitude for you.
While very conscious of pollution, we were keen to get as close as possible on the bikes: Ewan and I rode right to the great pyramids and that had been a fantastic experience. The closest we could get here was an old brick road where a group of policemen were gathered. When we explained what we were doing they let us take the bikes almost as far as the water. The view was amazing; the road fenced with spiked railings on one side and a canopy of trees on the other and between them, across the low-lying Yamuna River, one of the great wonders of the world.
It was just such a pity that Mungo wasn’t there: we’d come so far together on so many different forms of transport and it was one of the iconic moments of the expedition. But I suppose that’s life. Some injuries happen so unexpectedly - just standing up from a kneeling position and that’s it, you’re out of the game. As we stood there the clouds began to gather. We could hear thunder rumbling in the distance.
Russ came alongside me. ‘The bullocks are lying down in the fields,’ he said. ‘That means the monsoon rains are coming.’
Below us a woman in a long skirt drove half a dozen cows across the muddy river.
Back on the bikes we headed for the hotel. The main road was heaving again and we were bimbling along between the tuk-tuks and taxis when we saw an elephant on the far pavement. It was just standing there with its keeper, salivating over a stack of fresh watermelons that another man was selling by the side of the road.
It had to be done: all this way and all these forms of transport, this might be my only chance. Parking the bikes further up the road we walked back to the young guy and his elephant.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘My name’s Charley and I’d like to ride your elephant.’
He just looked at me.
‘We don’t have to go very far.’ Russ pointed back to where we’d parked the Enfields.‘Just from here to there by those motorbikes. Is that all right?’
The young guy held out his hand. ‘Five hundred rupees,’ he said.
He showed me how to grab the elephant by the ears and climb onto his trunk. Then the elephant lifted me up and I clambered over his head to a bunch of blankets strapped together as a sort of harness.
With the keeper leading and Russ looking on I rode about thirty yards to where we’d parked the bikes. Not the longest journey I’ve ever taken but definitely the most exotic. I would have liked to have carried on, but we had to get Mungo to the doctor so, journey completed, I climbed down again using the elephant’s raised foreleg as a step.
As we pulled up at the hotel Mungo came hobbling out on a crutch. Rina had found an orthopaedic surgeon so we grabbed a cab. Mungo sat in the front, his face grey with pain.
‘How are you feeling, mate?’ Russ said.
Mungo made a face. ‘Not too good to be honest. The knee’s no better. I feel like a dead weight. I’m bitterly disappointed. I hope it’s something that can be sorted quickly. I don’t care what it is: I just want to get on with it.’
We looked at him.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘if you’re on an expedition and you get dead weight you have to cut the rope: kind of how I feel at the moment.’
We got to the clinic and helped him out of the car. There was a short flight of steps up to the doors of the LIC Medical Examiner, a dirty white building in the middle of Agra with a guard carrying a double-barrelled shotgun.
There were a few people in the waiting room, a handful of women who looked a little suspiciously at us, together with a bunch of kids clearly intrigued by three Englishmen with a camera. The receptionist ushered us up the narrow corridor to Dr Arun Kapoor’s office. The door was open but he wasn’t there. Mungo perched on the examining table.
‘This looks all right,’ I said, pointing to a display of plastic bones. ‘He’s got lots of knee joints and stuff.’
Mungo was in no mood for jokes but someone had to lighten the atmosphere.
‘I think the best thing to do would be to chop it off,’ I went on. ‘I’ll use the Leatherman, which is always a good tool. It’s got a saw and I can cut through the tendons.’
‘You’d be better blowing it off,’ Russ suggested. ‘Dynamite.’
I shook my head. ‘No, that would be too messy.’
Fortunately the real doctor came in at this point. Mungo explained what he’d done and the doctor examined the knee, working it this way and that and asking Mungo what hurt. Side to side was OK, but trying to press the knee flat and straighten the leg was agony.
‘I think you’ve twisted the patella,’ the doctor said. ‘But we had better take an X-ray to make sure.’
That sounded quite positive, a twisted knee wasn’t so bad, surely? We accompanied Mungo along the corridor to the X-ray room, where he was laid on the table and his knee twisted round so the radiographer could see it properly. A few minutes later we were back in Dr Kapoor’s office looking at the pictures.
The tendons on each side of the knee seemed to be all right and nothing was cracked or broken, but Dr Kapoor couldn’t see the ligaments.
‘The X-ray won’t show them,’ he explained. ‘The only way to see the ligament is with an MRI.’
‘Can we do it here?’ Russ asked him.
‘Not here. You have to go about three . . .’ I thought he said ‘hours’ down the road and my heart hit the floor. But he’d actually said three kilometres. Thank God. He marked the referral ‘urgent’ and told us we could get the scan done right away.
Russ was trying to encourage Mungo, who was looking even more deflated by this inconclusive result. ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ he said. ‘There’s still a whisper it could be bruising.’
Back in the taxi we discussed our options. ‘Depending on what it is, you and I could ride on today if we wanted,’ Russ said to me. ‘If it’s just bruising, Mungo could follow later.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t want to do that. I think we should keep the group together no matter what now. Especially after what happened when you went racing ahead yesterday.’ I wagged my head at him. ‘What if you’d been in an accident, eh?’
He shrugged. ‘I’d have been fine. I was behind an ambulance. No, you’re right,’ he added more seriously. ‘We should stick together.’
It felt like the right decision for another reason - by the time we left it would be getting late and it would take us hours to get to the rendezvous. Most of it would be on crap roads in darkness and that was just dangerous. We were due to meet a truck tomorrow morning at three a.m. and the driver would take us to Varanasi. If we couldn’t ride there, we’d just have to figure out another way of getting there. More long-term we had to think about what we were going to do about filming if it turned out that Mungo was going to be out of action. Russ had already been on the phone to London trying to find another shooter to join us further on. He could take over himself in the meantime if necessary; we’d made a documentary together called
Missing Face
where Russ filmed the whole thing.
Mungo had his MRI scan, which took thirty-five minutes and was interrupted by a power cut. Russ and I waited for him in a room full of bandaged people. We had to pay 3,500 rupees - about £38. Once it was done we had an hour or so to wait for the results and then it was back to Dr Kapoor so he could interpret them for us.