The Ganges....

Mark crossed the mighty river Ganges today. ...The bridge he crossed by was just a few kms north of this view but as it is in an area of low resolution Google Maps imagery, I've used a bit of geographic licence to get a better impression of the river.

It is important to get a sense of scale. The river and its silt banks measure about a mile across. In the monsoon season, from July through until September, which also coincides with the summer melt of snow and glacial ice at the Himalayan source of the river, the river will occupy the whole of its channel and may well spill out onto the floodplain. Whatever the season, it provides an invaluable source of water to support agriculture on the Ganges plain. Since one twelfth of the world's population lives within the Ganges basin, the importance of the river cannot be overemphasised.It is alarming, therefore, when you research the Ganges, to find that much of the new 'literature' on the Internet is speaking of threats to the river from global warming. It seems that the glaciers which are the source of the river are retreating rapidly at present. This is, of course, a story which is being repeated elsewhere in the world with similar implications for populations which depend on glacier fed rivers e.g. in the Andes but nowhere else are the numbers of people so great.

Most sources quote the Himalayan Gangotri glacier at Gaumukh, close to the Tibetan border, as the birthplace of the Ganges and a search on Google Earth produces some nice images...

A 'hotspot' on Google Earth even reveals an image of the glacier 'snout' from which the infant Ganges emerges... It is 1500 miles from here to the Ganges delta on the Bay of Bengal - nothing, of course, compared to the distances which Mark is covering!!

Geography - pure geography!

After a digression into ICT advice a couple of days ago, it's time to get back to the geography of Mark's route....

Mark has made storming progress in the last couple of days and is now in the state of Uttar Pradesh, having crossed from the Indian Punjab into the state of Haryana yesterday and from there into Uttar Pradesh today....

He is now about 50km west of the Ganges. As the relief map of the country shows, the plain of the Ganges dominates the north of India, separating the Deccan plateau to the south from the Himalayas to the north. The combined valleys of the Indus in Pakistan and the Ganges in India are often referred to as the Indo-Gangetic plain. The lowlying watershed between the two basins and across which Mark has been cycling since leaving Pakistan only rises to 300m and is hardly noticeable in the landscape.

The climate in this part of India is a classic monsoon climate as shown by the climate graph on the left which is for New Delhi. (rainfall on the left, temperature on the right and months along the bottom!) As you can see, it is a climate which is dry for most of the year (when winds are blowing south from the cold interior of Asia) and very wet for a few short months (when temperatures in central Asia soar, causing air there to rise and wet winds from the Indian Ocean to be drawn in across India). The hottest time of the year is just before the monsoon breaks. October is probably the ideal time for Mark as temperatures will be dropping slightly just now and humidity levels will also be falling.

This morning Mark was journeying through the farmed landscape of Haryana (the grey line is not a road but a dry river course which presumeably only carries water duing the monsoon season).....

The view from closer in reveals more features of the human landscape of this part of India...

With hardly any land uncultivated, farming is clearly very intensive. According to Wikipedia "despite recent industrial development, Haryana is primarily an agricultural state. About 70% of residents are engaged in agriculture. Wheat and rice are the major crops. Haryana is self-sufficient in food production and the second largest contributor to India's central pool of food grains. About 86% of the area is arable, and of that 96% is cultivated. About 75% of the area is irrigated."

Because temperatures remain high all year round, where there is irrigation, it is possible to grow crops all year. Indian farmers identify two growing seasons - the kharif which coincides with the monsoon and during which rice can be grown and the rabi or dry season when wheat is grown.

The pattern of rural settlement is significantly different from what we are used to in the UK. Here we have dispersed farmsteads while in this part of India, in common with many other parts of the world, settlement is nucleated and farmers will travel daily from their villages to work in the fields.

At one point today Mark passed close to the town of Karnal. A search on Flickr produced a few interesting photos....

Apparently dairy farming is also an essential part of the rural economy in this part of India and the National Dairy Research Institute (being visited here by a group of female dairy farmers!) is located in Karnal. The strangest photo of all, however, is this litter bin in Karnal . Now, why would they make a litter bin look like a penguin....?!

Make the most of Google Earth

A couple of people have been asking me about Google Earth .....

As I understand it, the version on the Artemis web site which is linked into Mark's GPS has the same imagery as Google Maps . It does not, however, have the same functionality as Google Earth . I often locate Mark using the GPS tracker and then switch to Google Earth . The latest version of Google Earth is 4.2 and you may have to download this in order to follow what I am about to show you.......

Mark passed through Amritsar this morning

On Google Earth, the centre of Amritsar has a number of 'hotspots' which, closer up, are concentrated around the Golden Temple..

Zooming in even closer, some of the hotspots give way to camera icons which, when clicked, link to images which have been uploaded to Panoramio...

The 'G' icon links into Gigapan panoramas ...

.... and if you click on the 'fly into this panorama', you won't be disappointed!Once 'here', you can drag your mouse left or right on the image to pan.

There is now a huge amount of information embedded in Google Earth just waiting to be explored. You can only imagine what a revolution Google Earth has been in Geography classrooms across the globe !

India - phew!

After the adventures of the last couple of weeks, the title says it all really and here was Mark earlier today, about to approach the border crossing between Pakistan and India.....So, it's 'goodbye Pakistan' and 'hello India'. Mark now has 6000+ miles and 12 countries behind him and ?just 12,000 miles and 8 countries to go! Ahead of him in the next couple of weeks lie 1300 miles across the north of India from Amritsar in the Punjab , bypassing Delhi and down onto the vast Ganges plain before arriving in Calcutta and celebrating the end of the leg 2.

The Indian Punjab, where Mark is now, is geographically and economically very similar to the Pakistani Punjab which he has just left. Just as the Punjab is known as Pakistan's 'bread basket' so the Indian Punjab is referred to as 'the granary of India'. It produces 60% of India's wheat, and 40% of India's rice. In worldwide terms, this represents 2% of its wheat and 1% of the world's rice. Excluding agriculture, other major industries include the manufacture of scientific instruments, electrical goods, machine tools, textiles, tourism, sewing machines, sports goods, starch, fertilizers, bicycles, and the processing of pine oil and sugar. According to Wikipedia Punjab is considered to have the best infrastructure in India. This includes road, rail, air and river transport links that are extensive throughout the region. Punjab also has the lowest poverty rate in India at 6.16% .

Culturally, there are huge differences between the Pakistan and Indian Punjab. The Indian state of Punjab was created in 1947, when the Partition of India split the former Raj province of Punjab between India and Pakistan . The mostly Muslim western part of the province became Pakistan's Punjab Province; the mostly Sikh and Hindu eastern part became India's Punjab state.Sikhism the main religion of Indian Punjab and is practiced by about 60% of the population . Hinduism is the main minority religion. The holiest of Sikh shrines, the Golden Temple, is in the city of Amritsar which Mark cycled through this morning (more of which in next posting!)

?Leisurely Lahore

While I have been away doing fieldwork in Dorset, Mark has reached Lahore, the capital of the Punjab and is now having a couple of days at 'leisure'.....He is now only a short distance from the Indian border, shown by the solid white line on the map. If you follow the line north, however, you will see how the Indian border suddenly becomes less distinct as it enters the disputed territory of Kashmir which is currently administered by Pakistan, India and China (via Tibet). If you are interested in the politics of the region, there is an excellent resource on the BBC website which gives a very clear explanation of the history of the region and the possible future scenarios which might be played out there.

Mark is of course also tantalisingly close to the western end of the Himalayas - just 200 miles from those towering 7000m peaks and some wonderful glaciers ( have a look at them on Google Earth for some really good close ups!) Even at the scale of the aerial map above, you get an impression of the great 'wrinkles' which mark the foothills of the Himalayas where the Indian sub-continent is pushing inexorably into Asia.

But I digress......Mark reached Lahore (seen here straddling one of the five rivers which feed the Indus) on Sunday. With a population of about 10 million, it is Pakistan's second largest city and it equates roughly with London in terms of population size. It is, however, much smaller in area. If you put both cities into Google Maps , and then select the 'my maps ' tab, there is an easy to use distance measurement tool which shows the built up area of London to be approximately twice that of Lahore. Conclusion.... Lahore is much more densely populated and congested than London. You might have guessed that but now you can prove it!

Compared to the parts of Pakistan which Mark has travelled through so far, Lahore is almost a different world. It has to be remembered that in Pakistan, in common with all less economically developed countries , there is a very marked difference between rural and urban life. While the urban populations of the UK is around 93%, in Pakistan the figure is about 40% with most of those living in its three largest cities. However, although a minority of the population are urban dwellers, most of the country's wealth and infrastructure is focused in the cities. This accounts for much of the disparity between life in the cities and life in the countryside. Of course, there are many urban dwellers who have migrated to Lahore and find themselves living in shanty towns on the 'edge' of urban life but like the urban poor in most developing countries, they live in a city of huge contrasts of fortune. Areas of Lahore will certainly be indistinguishable from London and with buildings and services owned and run by multinationals, they will be indistinguishable from many cities in more economically developed countries.

OK.... Geography lesson over but I suggest that you have a read of the Lahore city portal to get one flavour of the city. On which subject, Lahore is apparently famed for its food and has a huge number of very high class restaurants which hopefully Mark is currently making good use if! And then there is the fact that Lahore is home to Pakistan's test cricket as you can see below. If you have the latest version of Google Earth, you can zoom right in on the cricket ground and then click on the little blue icons to get photos.

Finally, here's a bit of video which gives its own impressions of the city. Stick with it as despite appearances at the beginning, it is a rickshaw drive in the city with very well chosen music!..


There is a whole geography lesson in that clip starting with "why are there three guys using typewriters at the side of the road?"

Pedalling in the Punjab....

It's amazing to think that Mark has gone from this.....

to this......in just five days!

It is a graphic reminder, if a reminder were needed, of the distances Mark is covering.

Mark is now well into the part of Pakistan referred to as the Punjab. The Punjab (literally 'land of the five rivers' which are tributaries of the Indus) straddles the border between India and Pakistan. However, aproximately 80% of the Punjab lies within Pakistan's borders. As mentioned yesterday, the area receives a very low annual rainfall but is watered by irrigation from the Indus and this supports the 86 million people who live in the Pakistani Punjab.

The Pakistani Punjab is considered to be one of the most fertile regions on Earth. It produces about 70% of the country's agricultural output which includes wheat, rice, cotton, sugar cane, fruit and vegetables. A Flickr search produced these images of rural life in the Punjab. As over 50% 0f the population still live and work in the countryside, they are hopefully representative of the type of human landscape through which Mark is currently travelling.

Greening the desert....

I have just read what I posted yesterday and I am concerned that I may have given the impression that the Indus valley is some sort of Shangri La with a completely different climatic regime to the Balochistan plateau from which Mark has recently descended. Apart from the temperature differences which are related to altitude, the rainfall regime is little different - perhaps a little wetter but not a lot! The annual rainfall totals for towns in the middle Indus valley still fall well below 250mm and are therefore technically desert figures. To the south and east of the Indus is the Thar desert which extends into north west India. Therefore, like the Nile in Egypt, the Indus crosses a desert and it is only due to massive engineering and irrigation works along its course that the area can be 'green'.

Coincidentally, today Mark crossed the Indus at Sukkur - the location of a huge irrigation barrage shown by the white line on the river below......It was built during the British Raj from 1923 to 1932 as the Lloyd Barrage to help alleviate famines caused by lack of rain. The barrage enables water to flow through what was originally a 6166 mile long network of canals, feeding the largest irrigation system in the world, with more than 5 million acres (20,000 km²) of irrigated land. Huge canals leading north and south from the up-stream side of the barrage can be seen on the image above. Below a view of the barrage from downstream (not Mark's bike!)Mark crossed the Indus today a few miles upstream of the barrage and would probably have crossed via the roadbridge between Sukkur and Rohri (the one on the right below)A search on Flicker produced a good ground level view of the two bridges and some nice images of the river at this point.

What a difference a day makes!

It's amazing that one day's cycling can take you from a desert plateau to a well watered flood plain but that is precisely what Mark's efforts in the last 24 hours have achieved as revealed by his GPS tracher....Mark is now well into the valley of the mighty river Indus which, although it flows through present day Pakistan, gave India its name. There is a very good entry on the River Indus in Wikipedia and a NASA image which reveals the importance of this river system to the country as a whole. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Indus is the lifeblood of Pakistan.
From its source in the glaciers of Tibet in the north to its delta on the Arabian Sea coast, the river covers a distance of 2000 miles and supports most of Pakistan's agriculture and industry. Compared to the aridity of the Balochistan plateau, the landscape which Mark is now cycling through could not be more different as shown by this photo taken along the road between Jacobabad and Sukkur ('borrowed' from the highly entertaining blog http://www.cyclingtoindia.com/ )

Seeing green - at last!

After many days of desert travel with only tiny patches of vegetation, there is more green on the horizon for Mark this evening. He spent last night, according to his GPS tracker, in Quetta which, with a population of 750,000, is the capital of Balochistan and the largest city in the region. The following photo comes courtesy of Wikipedia and give some sense of the scale and beauty of the city which nestles in a basin surrounded by mountains rising to over 7000ft..
And a couple more which a search on Google threw up......and even a slide show from http://www.quetta-city.blogspot.com/ which has clearly been compiled by someone with an artisic rather than a geographical eye! The raindrops must be wishful thinking!

But to get back to this evening...... the GPS tracker and Google aerial views don't always give an easy impression of relief and you really have to look at an atlas to appreciate that today Mark will have descended about 2000 metres through the Bolan Pass from Quetta to Sibi which is on the edge of the Indus valley. If you look carefully, you should be able to make out both the pass and the Bolan River on the map.On the excellent http://www.cyclingtoindia.blogspot.com/ I found this good image taken in the Bolan Pass - it shows very clearly the nature of the stream beds of those seasonal torrents in the desert which carry large amounts of sediment from the mountains..... And this is Sibi - gateway to a whole new environment....... ...but that, as they say is a story for another day!