The way celebrity couples have conjoined names, Yuka Yokozawa and Sunil Kaushik have named themselves Sushi And Sambar. And it’s the name of their website too, which extrapolates their journey from Bangkok to Portugal on bicycle. South Indian Sunil and Japanese Yuka met in a share-auto in Ladakh; it’s a meet they consider “kismet.” Yuka instinctively knew Sunil was a keeper and the two maintained a long distance relationship until they got married shortly after. “We’d already talked about the cycling journey but it was Sunil’s idea and initially I said, ‘great, go for it, have fun!’ which was before we decided to have a relationship,” laughs Yuka, who fell in love with India years ago.
Their initial plan was to do Africa, from Cape Town to Cairo, but then at the last minute, the Boko Haram conflict broke out and they withdrew their plans for the sake of safety. And so they decided upon the silk route, acquiring the right road permits, tickets, visas... and even sponsors; London-based Brompton, the famous folding bike company, gave them two bicycles. “We’d been practising for a year on our larger bicycles for a year before Brompton sponsored us,” Sunil describes, “We received the bicycles through a friend a day before our trip! We also knew some friends who’d used folding bicycles for a trip they did so we knew they were easy to deal with. We also asked a lungi company to sponsor our visas; I wound up wearing their lungis in different countries while Yuka wore her kimono.”
Yuka Yokozawa and Sunil Kaushik in traditional attire with their Brompton bikes | Credit: Sushi and Sambar
The trip started in January of 2012 in Thailand progressing to Laos. After a couple of stops, they moved to Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. They stopped twice in Iran and then Armenia and Georgia then Turkey before exploring western Europe.
A journey of chaos
Like anyone would expect, it wasn’t all smooth sailing — or smooth cycling , rather. Yuka and Sunil explain they laid out some ground rules, the main one being, no cycling after 4pm. Their accommodation ranged from couch-surfing to knocking on people’s doors to let them pitch their tents in their backyards and in exchange, Sunil and Yuka would cook for them.
Yuka points out that in Europe they had to camp because of budget constraints, with her knocking on the doors because Sunil was often looked upon with hostility or scepticism with his grown out hair and scruffiness. “Friends from home often pleaded with Sunil to shave,” Yuka says, “but he wanted to do that only at the end of the trip.”
They found Iran to be the safest country and with the anti-refugee and anti-immigration sentiments across Europe, it wasn’t the joyride they had in mind.
In Kyrgyzstan, Sunil and Yuka found huge fans of Raj Kapoor and Mithun Chakraborty and at one point an immigration officer even asked him to sing and dance like him in exchange for entry into the country. During the Soviet rule, Bollywood was all the rage.
Yuka Yokozawa and Sunil Kaushik in mig-leap with their Brompton bikes | Credit: Sushi and Sambar
Two particularly harrowing times were during their stop in Turkey, a country they are both in love with. A bomb blast in Istanbul during their stop in the Cappadocia region caused the entire country to shut down. The second instance was during a coup, when Sunil and Yuka stayed with two religious young women. They had to help the girls hide their religious memorabilia such as the Quran to keep the army from finding out their alignment, so the couple extended their stay.
A stand out incident was in Machka in Turkey when Sunil and Yuka got separated with no means of communication while the town was overrun with army tanks and killings of policemen in streets. Sunil, who was taking client calls through the trip, had to go to to a hotel with Wi-Fi while Yuka had to walk back to the hotel. At some point Sunil saw an army tank ramble past and he instantly feared Yuka was captured... but when he found her, she was eating baklava in a nearby café, unharmed. The two even lost each other in a desert in the middle of the night for a prolonged amount of time. With no light, they had to ‘marco polo’ to keep tabs on each other.
But when they happened across a forked road, they got separated. It was thanks to help from passing locals that the two found each other again. In spite of all this, Yuka and Sunil urge people to try such a trip for themselves because the world isn’t what is seems in mainstream media. In fact, they have another in the works!