Singapore - Netherlands 1 (1969).

he start was easy, 2000 miles from Singapore to Bangkok through a tropical paradise, good roads and plenty of cold drinks to fill up the gallons of lost moisture from cycling in the steaming heat. Clean little Chinese hotels were the place to spend the night, colourful markets offered plenty of small eating stalls. New Year came and we celebrated together with the Thai-people their advanced year 2512 A.B. (i.e. Anno Buddha), because the Buddhist year is quite a few years ahead of ours.
The next country, Burma was closed to all foreigners, so the Burmese Airlines flew us over their country with a marvellous stop-over in the capital Rangoon and dropped us and our bicycles just on the other side of the border in East-Pakistan.
The troubles from which the new country Bangla Desh arose, had already started. When we, after days of cycling through quiet countryside, reached the capital Dacca with its fabulous 600 mosques, we only saw the walls of our hotelroom, because of a curfew. However we had to arrange our visa for Nepal, so we decided to cycle to their consulate.
Nobody was in the street, except armed soldiers. We had passed some barricades, but nobody bothered us until we met a jeep, a real general in it, who stopped us and sent us back to the hotel after promising us, however, to send a police escort. This delivered us to the consulate and we got our visa from the consul in person; an army truck took us back to the hotel. When the curfew was lifted for a few hours, to enable people to do shopping, we cycled fast out of the capital as people had told us that in the countryside was no curfew and there were no problems.
To the people we were very curious beings and when we stopped in a little teahouse, the whole village came to see us; filling up the little hut, crowding the street in front of it and watching every movement of us with their brown, wondering eyes. The teashop owner couldn't reach us, so a little note was handed from person to person to us, saying: "Dear guest, do you want something more?"
In India the scene didn't change much. It was difficult to cycle through a town or city to find your way amongst oxcarts, camels, donkeys, elephants, sedan chairs, horsecarts, rikshaws, cycles and pedestrians. No use to ring our bells as every cyclist did so already.
"Where do you come from, where do you go to?" was always asked, so Henny wrote on one side of his topee (tropical helmet): "from Singapore" and on the other: "to Holland". Cycling through the narrow streets we heard the people whispering on the corresponding sides: "Singapore, Singapore, Singapore ...." or "Holland, Holland, ........"
On the day of the Holifestival - a festivity, when no castes exist and everybody becomes brothers, embraces and throws coloured water at each other, we could not escape our share in the narrow streets of a happily coloured town. Buckets full of paint were gushed out, most of it missing us, as they misjudged our speed. In the evening after exchanging more dots of colour with our hosts, we were offered the traditional sweets and had to clean up ourselves near the village well.
As usually when we approach a border, we want to finish our coin money. We went into a teahouse, had a lot of pancakes and tea, wanted to pay, only to hear from the shopkeeper. "No, you are my guest!" That was the Indian hospitality, which we enjoyed very often.

n West-Pakistan we had to cross the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, and to cycle over the historical trail, where once Alexander the Great and his army came to conquer. We were told it was very dangerous, because the Pathans living here, are a fierce and trigger happy race, never without a gun. Some cars, we heard of, reached the other side of the pass with bullet holes. The pass was closed at night, so we had to climb up and go down in one day. We had a flat tyre and while fixing it, a strong gunman came to us ..... for a very nice chat and with admiration for our bikes.