PORT TOWNSEND — Two North Olympic Peninsula residents will share photographs and tales from a 760-mile bicycle trip through the Himalayas at a presentation tonight.
“We have tons of pictures and have sorted them down to about 100 that we will show,” said David McCulloch, who with Jon Muellner made the five-week trip in September and October.
“It’s an interesting territory,” he said. “We will show slides from some of the places we visited.”
The free presentation will begin at 7 p.m. at Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 2333 San Juan Ave.
“I can’t guarantee brevity,” Muellner said of the presentation. “But we’ll try to be informative and moderately amusing.”
McCulloch, 63, is a co-owner of Elevated Ice Cream in Port Townsend with his wife, Julie.
Muellner, 55, is a Web designer who owns and operates www.PTguide.com, a calendar website.
Muellner recently moved to Port Angeles after 20 years in Port Townsend “because I wanted to be closer to the mountains and the rivers.”
Their journey began Sept. 1 and ended Nov. 11, with the bicycling portion beginning in Shimla on Sept. 14 and looping north, east and south before ending up in Dhariwal on Oct. 18.
Prior to the bike portion, the two stayed in Amsterdam for a week.
After the bike adventure, they toured India and visited some of McCulloch’s old friends.
Living peaceably
“I was amazed at all the different cultures that were all living together rather peaceably,” Muellner said of those he met along the way.
“They are all proud people, incredibly tolerant, who have amazing resources and know how to work their way around adversity.”
McCulloch, whose parents were educators, was born and raised in northern India and visits the region frequently.
This was Muellner’s first trip to Asia.
McCulloch speaks Hindi, so there was no language barrier.
McCulloch said Dhariwal was much the same as when he lived there.
“It hasn’t expanded and exploded like other places in the area. It’s still a very small town,” he said.
Since leaving Dhariwal in the 1960s, McCulloch has returned several times and maintained a connection with the people and the locale.
“I keep going back because of the tremendous beauty and undiscovered wild places,” he said.
“I also got a chance to visit my ‘Indian family,’ including the man who worked as a gardener for my family. I wanted to go back and see him before too much time had passed.”
Mountain bikes
Muellner and McCulloch brought mountain bikes configured to be collapsible along with plenty of spare bike parts such as tubes and wrenches.
Although prepared, they needed no major repairs during the trip, Muellner said.
“We were pretty lucky. We had no flat tires and were able to fix any problems with a wrench,” he said.
There was no itinerary. The pair knew they were to begin in Shimla and end in Dhariwal, where McCulloch lived as a child, but they stayed flexible as to how much ground to cover in a single day.
They traveled on the region’s only road. It was built by the military and was not open to Westerners before the 1990s, something that motivated McCulloch to visit this particular area.
The road generally followed a river, McCulloch said, and in parts was just about 6 miles from the Chinese border.
They didn’t take any camping gear, staying in hotels where available and in private homes.
They each carried a digital camera. Muellner brought a Canon that used AA batteries to avoid the necessity of charging, while McCulloch brought a Lumix with internal batteries he charged with a small generator mounted on his bicycle wheel.
Throughout the trip, they stayed in places where there was no electricity at night and had little to no Internet available, something Muellner found liberating.
No laptop
“This is the first time in 18 years that I’ve traveled without a laptop,” he said.
The bicycle trip ended too soon for Muellner.
“As we sat in our windowless hotel room in Amritsar, I fell asleep dreaming of being back on the bike,” he wrote in an Oct. 18 blog entry.
“We still had three weeks in India remaining, but they would be as normal tourists, taking in the sights and visiting people David knew.
“While some of it was enjoyable, nothing could come close to our six weeks riding through the Himalayas of Himachal Pradesh. I will be back!”
To view Muellner’s blog in its entirety, go to http://tinyurl.com/PDN-tour.
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Jefferson County Editor Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or cbermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
