The Motorbike Ride to Chandor

The bike was huge - far bigger than anything i had ever ridden before.
I will quite happily admit in hindsight, that the fact that i survived the journey entirely unscathed, with Indian roads being what they are, no previous experience on anything even remotely resembling this machine, no mechanical knowledge whatsoever, no map, and with no protective clothing other than a helmet, is not just a minor, but a major miracle.
At the time, i did think that if Euan MacGregor and his freeloading friend Charlie Boorman can do this, then there is actually no reason that i shouldn't be able to.
Of course, i was without the trucks of producers, camerapeople and support-team stationed at strategic points along my route, or the knowledge and experience of riding a big motorbike, but i didn't see that as a reason for me not to at least give it a go.
I figured that i'd ride around in the area round my hotel for half an hour or so, and if i wasn't truly comfortable on the bike in that time, then i'd just call it a day and head off to the beach to read my book or something. At least then, i could still say that i'd tried.

The young guy whose bike it was eyed me suspiciously as i got on. I was paying him the equivalent of about 6 pounds to take it for the day.
This thing was massive and looked a little like a dark red Harley.

"You have a license?" He asked, reasonably.
"Yeah, yeah, of course." I said. I did, after all, have a license. His question was not specific enough to catch me in a lie.
"So, er... How does this thing work then?"
He showed me where the brakes were (the back one is under your right foot, the front you grip with your right hand), the clutch (like the front brake but on the left handle), the throttle (the twisty thing on your right handle), the gears (under your left foot), the kickstand and the hole where the keys went.
Alright. I thought. This is piss-easy. Just like one of those mopeds but louder.
I twisted the key and kicked it into life.
It jumped forward half a foot and stalled immediately.
He looked at me the way that i remember being looked at by teachers at school - an almost withering "I don't know why i bother" look and explained that i had to start it in neutral and then use the clutch if i wanted to change gears.
I stalled it a few more times.

The difficulty, i felt, was that it was difficult to know exactly what gear you were actually in, making not stalling upon ignition, actually quite problematic.
I told him i thought this was a major design floor with this particular model and that in my experience i had never come across it before. Other bikes I had ridden didn't work like this.
He looked a little insulted but patiently took me through the process again.
This time I got it to work, and the engine roared into life. Man, was this thing powerful.
A little gas, a gear shift and a little fiddle with the clutch and I was off. He ran behind me for a bit shouting something, but i couldn't quite hear what it was he was saying - it couldn't have been that important - so i shifted up into second and sped off.
Riding the bike was surprisingly easy, actually.
Starting and stopping remained quite a problem for me throughout the day, but once i was moving, the thing behaved pretty intuitively. I found very quickly that at speed, cows and potholes were difficult to avoid - the bike did not steer that easily, so delicately navigating round things had to be done at low speed and preferably in second gear.

The ride to Chandor took me just over 2 hours.
I think it was about 60km, but rugged, twisty roads all the way and i had no real idea of where i was going. India is not famous for its signposting.
When I arrived, I parked the bike next to a store and looked around, suddenly wondering why exactly i had chosen this particular town - which appeared to have nothing but a crossroad, a store and a church - as my destination.
I pulled out the Lonely Planet.
Oh yeah, apparently there's some building here that's supposed to be quite interesting.
I'd driven here, risking my life in the process, to look at a building.
I cursed the life-long effects of having architects as parents.

The building was, in fact, worth the journey, although perhaps not the risk.
Built as a mansion in the 17th century for a rich Portuguese family, Braganza House had been passed down over 9 generations. The family, fabulously wealthy traders, had become victims of the local communist government's wealth-redistribution policies in the 1960s and, although they'd managed to hold on to the house, had lost everything else.
From the outside, it looked very grand, but was obviously falling apart a little.
The door was open, and there seemed to be no-one about, so I walked in to the central courtyard. A section of wall had been engulfed by ivy and parts of the red-tiled roof looked like they'd fallen in. The place was deserted and silent.
Up the stairs I entered a grand hallway lined with huge tapestries and cracking framed paintings. Mirrors stained with mildew and ragged curtains hung from discoloured walls.
I could hear the sound of children laughing.
I looked around, thinking that this was just all a bit too Kubrick, and took in the scene.
The place was amazing. Ancient and expensive-looking furniture sat on teak-tiled floors, chandeliers hung from the damp, sagging ceilings and gold-leaf detailed, moldy paper peeled from the walls.
I continued to wander round, finding each room to be more impressive than the last.
It was as if time had stopped here and just slowly crumbled. Cutlery lay laid out on a vast mahogany dining table and books lined the shelves as if the place were still lived in.
This was, as i was to discover, not for from the truth.

In its heyday, it would have been truly breathtaking. As it was, there was something a little sad about it. Like a young genius reduced to senility in old age, this once grand and imposing structure with its rich and exotic interiors was slowly deteriorating through nothing more than lack of funds to maintain it properly. Ming vases stood gathering dust next to Italian amber pots and an old London-made grandfather clock stood motionless and grey, an eternity at five-past-eight, as windows made with oyster-shells clattered softly, breaking the silence where there should have been ticking.
It reminded me of a scene from Apocalypse Now, edited out of the original cut, but reinserted into the Redux version. The Martin Sheen character stumbles across a house of French colonialists still living it up in a state of denial and fantasy in the Cambodian jungle. They're so isolated from the outside world and therefore reality, that everything about their lifestyles just seems surreal and dislocated.
Braganza House was all laid out meticulously with exquisite attention to detail but with an inherent ghostly museum-like emptiness that enveloped everything. It was a home without a soul - it too had left through a hole in the roof when the money ran out and the family left.
But the family, as i was to discover, had not entirely left.

I heard footsteps and an old man appeared around a corner. He had a large scab on his nose - from the removal of a melanoma, i suspected - and shuffled as if it were difficult for him to lift his feet more than a few centimetres.
This was the caretaker.
He happily took me round the place, retreading a lot of my steps but informing me of the age, origin and style of the different articles we passed. We went through the rooms and he told me a little of the family history and the architectural features of the building.
It was difficult, however, to understand everything that he was saying, as his accent was quite strong, his English broken, and a tracheoctomy he'd had made everything he said sound like it was being regurgitated.
We stopped in the middle of a grand dining room. He made a gesture and waved his arms all around us.
"...And this," he gurgled, "was the dining room for entertaining visiting dignitaries."
I looked around. Very impressive indeed. Venetian candelabra lit up Belgian tiles and the room was one of the few which had electricity, so he lit the chandeliers and everything glowed.
"...And this," he continued as he gestured back down to a side table, "is our donations box."
It was a small, unremarkable wooden box.
He opened it unceremoniously and looked at me hungrily.
It was totally empty except for a book of matches.
If this had been a cartoon, one solitary moth might have flown out, coughing slightly and gasping for breath.
He eyed my pocket.
I reached in and found my clutch of notes, hoping that blindly i would not pull out anything of too high a denomination. I pulled out 100 rupees and placed it in the box.
He reached in, picked it up, flattened it, folded it in to quarters and slipped it into his shirt pocket, closing the box as he turned and led me out of the room.
"Thank you." He sputtered.

We came to a door.
"And would you like to meet the lady of the house?" he burbled, and as the question rose at the end, so did the frequency of his phlegmy timbre. I wondered if he ever had to wipe drool from his neck.
The lady of the house?
I was half expecting him to open the door and reveal some sort of vampyric, zombie-like femme-fatale, backlit with a windmachine blowing her hair dramatically towards the ceiling.
Without waiting for a response, he knocked.
There was a pause and a shuffling noise and the door creaked open.
A tiny old woman appeared, looking a little like Morgan Freeman would have done if you'd shrunk him down and made him dress up like the Queen Mother.
She ushered me into another hallway, where she lived, and the only remaining private wing of the building.
She was 92, and the children that i had heard earlier were her great-grandchildren, visiting with their parents from Delhi.
She told me more about the house, how her incredibly rich family had been left practically destitute by the communist takeover, and how the building now survived purely on the goodwill of donators like myself. The contents were undoubtedly worth a few pennies, but she couldn't bear to auction any of it off, prefering to keep it all togther as a permanent, slowly-dissolving collection rather than see it split up and distributed round the worlds' museums.
She showed me grand oil paintings of her ancestors, crystal-cut goblets, chinese silver jewelry and turkish carpets.
We paused by a dining table surrounded by red-cushioned seats.
"Do you recognise these?" She asked, waving her hands at the chairs.
I said I didn't.
She narrowed her eyes and pulled out a photograph from a nearby drawer.
"See?" she jabbed her finger at the picture of another grand dining room.
"These chairs used to belong to Queen Elizabeth II. My father bought them at auction in London when she decided to redecorate at Buckingham."
From the photo, they certainly looked like the same chairs.
"...And this," she waved dramatically round the room. Her hands settled over a small wooden box.
"...is our donations box."
I repeated the procedure, hoping that i didn't pull out anything higher than 100 rupees. I imagined her and the caretaker comparing notes on me after i'd left, commenting on my generosity or lack of it.
I pulled out 100rupees again and placed it in her box.
She closed it and thanked me.
I told her i thought her home was stunning and that i wished her well for the future and maintaining its upkeep.
She ushered me out, telling me that it was time for her to serve her great-grandchildren tea.
I left feeling a little sad about the place. It obviously had the significance of a world heritage site, but was barely even on the map, achieving only a paragraph in the Lonely Planet.
If they sold off a fraction of the stuff in there, they'd be able to afford to really clean the place up and renovate the parts of the building that were crumbling. They could even print a brochure or two, stick up a signpost, build a cafe and turn it into an attraction that might draw tourists from the nearby coastal resorts of Goa. They would easily be able to get a steady stream of visitors that would consequently assist in the financial upkeep of the place, but it was as if the thought simply hadn't occured to them.
It was going to continue crumbling until it became dust or Madame Braganza died and one of her slightly more business-minded sons decided to just cut his losses and sell the money pit.
I don't think any of them had the slightest idea how much some of these heirlooms would be worth had they gone under the hammer at an auctionhouse like Sotherby's in London. They were literally sitting on millions, and it was slowly disappearing beneath them.

I returned to my bike and spent 30 minutes trying to kickstart the thing.
It suddenly occured to me that my lack of mechanical knowledge, might, in this case be somewhat of a hindrance. If i couldn't get it started, i genuinely had no idea what i would do. I was miles from anywhere, and it didn't look like there was a mechanic in this one-street-town.
I was getting pretty tired by the time i discovered the choke, and it immediately came to life.
As i drove out of town back to Palolem, a small cheer erupted from the locals sitting outside the store who'd been watching me with interest as I wrestled with my trusty steed.
They had all gathered with cups of tea to take in the spectacle of the idiot tourist try and start his motorbike in 4th gear.