Two Wheels in the Dust & The Ramayana

So here's a serendipitous tale... when rushing to pick up The Essentials of Hinduism, which I had reserved at our local library, my eye caught a glance of Two Wheels in the Dust by Anne Mustoe, which the library staff had miraculously set up on a special display. The fact that Two Wheels, a travel essay of India and Nepal, was randomly put in my path just a few weeks before our own trip to the region gives further evidence that there is a higher power at work.

Even more convincing is that this is a really amazing book, one of my favorite reads for the last several months. It's a travel essay by a British woman, who retired from her job as a governess in her fifties (a governess! Can she be more British?), only to begin a new career, bicycling around the world and writing wonderful travel essays. She continued her cycling/writing career through several books, multiple trips around the world, and past the age of 75 before dying (becoming ill while cycling through Syria) in 2009.

Mustoe is all-British, which I love in a travel writer. She injects her stoic British-isms and quirky observations into the most foreign settings that any westerner can experience.

The most unique aspect of the book, however, is that she writes it in parallel with the famous Hindu epic The Ramayana. I've read of The Ramayana several times before, but this was my first reading of the story itself, as Mustoe paraphrases the epic over the course of the book. Her cycling journey roughly follows the path of The Ramayana too, and she visits dozens of critical temples, historic sites and settings from the narrative. She pays particular attention to Hanuman, the monkey-god that plays such an important role in Hinduism (and The Ramayana). Hanuman is pretty cool, I'll admit, and I'm sure I will be looking for him over the course of our trip.

As I've written before, I love it when similarities are found between seemingly incongruous cultures and religions. The Ramayana is just one example, which draws some very strong parallels with Homer's Iliad. There are countless similarities between the two, not the least of which are the plots that revolve around the abduction of a beautiful princess, large scale wars to retrieve her, and the strong indoctrination of each epic within their respective cultures.

Mustoe is amazing. She spends months cycling, much of it alone, through the barren wilds of India, rolling through each little hamlet and village, navigating the ridiculous and the extreme, and always making the best of every given situation. And she does it well into her sixties, with constant grace. She points out that bicycling allows her to permeate the local culture in a way no mechanized travel would permit.

Two Wheels was great preparation for next week's trip to India and Nepal. We're not traveling by bicycle, thankfully, but now we can appreciate the experience all the more.