INDIA - I'M NEVER DOING IT AGAIN! Well, that was the acronym, but I disagree. I've had a great three weeks here' highlights - Varanasi, the tiger Camp and the caves of Ajanta & Ellora - have been written up separately, but here's a summary.
Kolkata: airport v efficient but the city had just had a wildcat transport strike so there were no airport taxis. Pre-paid taxi man was apologetic & said to come back in 15 mins. I had tea , returned in 15 mins to find a huge queue. First test of my fire & determination - would I meekly go to the back of the queue? No chance. I explained what had happened to a lovely Indian couple at the head of the queue who told off the taxi-man & organised the first taxi for me.And that has been typical of my India experience - incredibly helpful people. Like the travel agent who literally spent hours sorting out my complicated travel arrangements. Everything worked without a hitch and he kept phoning various people (me - mobile phone? - what a joke!) to check that I was OK.I didn't like Kolkata; it was 'big city', crowded, noisy, chaotic - and suffering from a sufeit of Raj. Huge, impressive - but mouldy - buildings were a solid reminder of British colonialism. The Victoria Memorial was a splendid creation: imagine the Albert Memorial but 50x bigger - with excellent displays about Indian history - colonial and post-colonial. But to me, Kolkata was summed up by the South Park Cermetery, the original colonial graveyard, crammed with huge (often 6m high) memorials, in a claustrophobic testament to life's uncertainty, especially when cholera, typhoid or dysentary could wipe out an entire family within days.
Train travel: I was scared about this. I had booked 2nd class sleeper berths for 4 journeys. This involved six-berth apartments which converted to berths when people felt like sleeping. They weren't air-con; there was no glass in the windows so we were wind-cooled. It was cold at night as the shutters didn't fit. But my system worked well - sleeping-bag liner, plus skirt spread over top, wearing hoodie, with rucsac as pillow and inflatable small pillow on top. This provided excellent security, especially as my large rucsac was stored underneath the berth, secured with pacsafe and an impressive selection of padlocks. And people were very friendly. I met a great group of college students, on their way to a teacher-training post, plus families and individuals who were quite fascinated by my 'Teach Yourself Hindi' book (after a month of study I have graduated to Chapter 2...) and gave me impromptu lessons in collquial Hindi and how to write the script. Finding the right train was problematic - the answer is to hire a porter to wait with you. These men know the railway timetable backwards and are total experts on everything to do with rail travel. My favourite porter was at Lucknow station. Smartly dressed in a red uniform, he looked ex-military. I agreed to pay him 40rupees (c80p) plus a 10 rupee tip. While we waited, about 15 minutes, roughly 20 people came and asked him about trains and he knew the answer to everything. I gave him an extra 10 rupee tip; he left the train without counting it, then returned to give me back the money. I had to work hard to persuade him to take the extra.
Lucknow: fascinating place. I thought I'd find it oppressive, with all that I knew about the Mutiny at Lucknow, but it wasn't. The Residency, site of the siege, was much bigger than I thought. Originally, over 40 houses, some belonging to Indians, filled the site. All but 6 were reduced to ruins. Most of the area was like a paintball site - trees, ruins to hide in and rough grass - but this was paintball for real.
The siege lasted for 5 months and by the end, 2/3 of them had been killed. There were many poignant stories told on the gravestones. More people died of disease & starvation than bullets, but surviving buildings were covered with bullet-marks, fire damage & cannon-ball holes. All was set against manicured lawns, palm-trees & the remainders of what must have been a very gracious life-style. But of course there was more to all of this than meets the eye. The British had behaved very badly to the local Nawabs, annexing their land and persuading them into giving huge loans which have never been repaid. To this day, the British govt is paying 3% interest on millions of pounds lent to finance the war against Burma in the early 1800s. But of course it's the buggers at the bottom of the heap who suffer - the ordinary Indian soldiers who had to make impossible choices about loyalty and the Brit soldiers' families who were cooped up for months, never knowing whether they'd survive the day. Another little-known fact - the Mutiny (Brit name) is also called The First Indian War of Independence: fighting continued in Lucknow for 2 years after the siege and involved the British razing much of the city to the ground as it provided too many hiding-places for the fighters. Mark Twain wrote a lovely piece about the small children who survived Lucknow. He said how remarkable it was that people tried to keep their lives as normal as humanly possible. A mother told him that one day, after a particularly vicious bombardment her son came rushing in shouting, "Mummy, mummy, come see. The hen's just laid an egg!"
But the trishaw-men (cycle-powered) wage their own sort of war on unwary tourists. Wherever you say you want to go, they take you somewhere different. Then they charge you double. The first time that this happened, I ended up in a rather beautiful public garden, site of another battle, with a memorial to an Indian woman who had died, A Brit officer had been told to get rid of a sniper who had killed several soldiers from a vantage point in a tree. He hit the fighter then discovered 'he' was 'she'. Mortified, the officer said he would rather have killed himself than kill a woman. Anyway. So I was quite happy with this and took another rickshaw. He went off in totally the wrong direction, taking me somewhere rather obscure. Some very helpful people told him where he had to go, so he had no option but to go there. I really enjoyed the transport method; you hang on grimly as the trishaw wages an impossible route through traffic, going the wrong way and ignoring traffic-lights; I discovered the trick is to hang on with both hands (sadly, it meant that I couldn't video the experienc, but at least I surtvived) AND SIT STAIGHT-BACKED, pretending to be un-moved by the narrow escapes, etc. When we reached my hotel, I gave him 100r - a lot of money. He objected and said he wanted 200! The third time, I went to a road which I knew, with a simple route to my hotel, and made sure that the man knew exactly where I wanted to go. And, of course, he went straight past the turning. After that I decided to go upmarket and use suto-taxis, little 3-wheelers.
Varanasi - what a place, what an experience. Go there! Ive writen separately about it.
Jim Corbett Tiger Camp: If I went again, I would stay inside the park at a place called Bijrani and go on whole-dsay safaris. But it ws lovely to stay in such luxury for a few days.
Ajanta & Ellora caves: see separate account.
Mumbai: hot! Around 34C most days and I am glad of my air-con room. The city is so diverse - it's filled with spoilt noisy rich Indian kids and slum children who have nothing and beg on the streets. I have a superb view of the harbour (I should have - I'm paying enough for it - about $85 a night!). On the street outside, a family sleeps each night; we wave at each other and occasionally I go out and give them a few oranges or another small gift. Their little boy, aged about two, plays happily with his father's flip-flops, or sits with his feet in the gutter and looks around. I wonder what he makes of the tall, ornate horse-drawn carriages that look as if they've been covered with silver foil. The best have artificial flowers, flashing lights and brightly coloured parasols. The horses are also brightly decorated and clop, clop steadily along the sea-front, the carriages full of tourists. How many 10 minute trips in one of these would keep the homeless family for a month? Mumbai is very prosperous with huge, immaculate high-rise apartment blocks. World-class luxury motor yachts float in the harbour; just round the corner, grubby, smelly little fishing boats jostle for space on the mud. One delightful contrast was a small village area in the middle of high-rise mania; it's an enclave of what must have orignally been a Portuguese settlement of wooden-balconied houses in narrow traffic-free and tree-shaded alleyways. It was like returning to a more leisured age; I'm sure that the occupants fight tooth & nail to keep the area from re-development. It was directly opposite a Catholic church (complete with crucified Christ with marigold garlands) and the area was dotted with small Catholic shrines.I have also had my hair cut & coloured (no shame!) at a branch of Toni & Guy's; the colour stylist was a gay who normally lives in Brighton but who had a taste for travel.I've also been to an open-air beach concert involving wow-wow dancers and beat-y music, been to the most expensive hotels in town, developed a taste for kulfi (Indian ice-cream), seen an open-air exhibition by Alliance Francaise of aerial photography of threatened areas of the world, highlighting the need for a more eco-friendly approach to life, walked for miles, decided not to buy another shalwah kameez -instead I bought two mini-speakers - decided not to see 'Twilight' as I couldn't face sitting in a cinema full of spoilt, noisy Indian kids, walked to the view-point & saw an area full of small Hindi temples and a large 'tank', etc, etc. The lovely thing about walking is that, when I get fed up / tired / too hot I can duck into an air-con restaurant / shop / catch a taxi.Tomorrow is my last day in India; I plan to take a ferry out to Elephanta Island, enjoy the breeze & see the caves. Then I shall eat kulfi and pack.
Kolkata: airport v efficient but the city had just had a wildcat transport strike so there were no airport taxis. Pre-paid taxi man was apologetic & said to come back in 15 mins. I had tea , returned in 15 mins to find a huge queue. First test of my fire & determination - would I meekly go to the back of the queue? No chance. I explained what had happened to a lovely Indian couple at the head of the queue who told off the taxi-man & organised the first taxi for me.And that has been typical of my India experience - incredibly helpful people. Like the travel agent who literally spent hours sorting out my complicated travel arrangements. Everything worked without a hitch and he kept phoning various people (me - mobile phone? - what a joke!) to check that I was OK.I didn't like Kolkata; it was 'big city', crowded, noisy, chaotic - and suffering from a sufeit of Raj. Huge, impressive - but mouldy - buildings were a solid reminder of British colonialism. The Victoria Memorial was a splendid creation: imagine the Albert Memorial but 50x bigger - with excellent displays about Indian history - colonial and post-colonial. But to me, Kolkata was summed up by the South Park Cermetery, the original colonial graveyard, crammed with huge (often 6m high) memorials, in a claustrophobic testament to life's uncertainty, especially when cholera, typhoid or dysentary could wipe out an entire family within days.
Train travel: I was scared about this. I had booked 2nd class sleeper berths for 4 journeys. This involved six-berth apartments which converted to berths when people felt like sleeping. They weren't air-con; there was no glass in the windows so we were wind-cooled. It was cold at night as the shutters didn't fit. But my system worked well - sleeping-bag liner, plus skirt spread over top, wearing hoodie, with rucsac as pillow and inflatable small pillow on top. This provided excellent security, especially as my large rucsac was stored underneath the berth, secured with pacsafe and an impressive selection of padlocks. And people were very friendly. I met a great group of college students, on their way to a teacher-training post, plus families and individuals who were quite fascinated by my 'Teach Yourself Hindi' book (after a month of study I have graduated to Chapter 2...) and gave me impromptu lessons in collquial Hindi and how to write the script. Finding the right train was problematic - the answer is to hire a porter to wait with you. These men know the railway timetable backwards and are total experts on everything to do with rail travel. My favourite porter was at Lucknow station. Smartly dressed in a red uniform, he looked ex-military. I agreed to pay him 40rupees (c80p) plus a 10 rupee tip. While we waited, about 15 minutes, roughly 20 people came and asked him about trains and he knew the answer to everything. I gave him an extra 10 rupee tip; he left the train without counting it, then returned to give me back the money. I had to work hard to persuade him to take the extra.
Lucknow: fascinating place. I thought I'd find it oppressive, with all that I knew about the Mutiny at Lucknow, but it wasn't. The Residency, site of the siege, was much bigger than I thought. Originally, over 40 houses, some belonging to Indians, filled the site. All but 6 were reduced to ruins. Most of the area was like a paintball site - trees, ruins to hide in and rough grass - but this was paintball for real.
The siege lasted for 5 months and by the end, 2/3 of them had been killed. There were many poignant stories told on the gravestones. More people died of disease & starvation than bullets, but surviving buildings were covered with bullet-marks, fire damage & cannon-ball holes. All was set against manicured lawns, palm-trees & the remainders of what must have been a very gracious life-style. But of course there was more to all of this than meets the eye. The British had behaved very badly to the local Nawabs, annexing their land and persuading them into giving huge loans which have never been repaid. To this day, the British govt is paying 3% interest on millions of pounds lent to finance the war against Burma in the early 1800s. But of course it's the buggers at the bottom of the heap who suffer - the ordinary Indian soldiers who had to make impossible choices about loyalty and the Brit soldiers' families who were cooped up for months, never knowing whether they'd survive the day. Another little-known fact - the Mutiny (Brit name) is also called The First Indian War of Independence: fighting continued in Lucknow for 2 years after the siege and involved the British razing much of the city to the ground as it provided too many hiding-places for the fighters. Mark Twain wrote a lovely piece about the small children who survived Lucknow. He said how remarkable it was that people tried to keep their lives as normal as humanly possible. A mother told him that one day, after a particularly vicious bombardment her son came rushing in shouting, "Mummy, mummy, come see. The hen's just laid an egg!"But the trishaw-men (cycle-powered) wage their own sort of war on unwary tourists. Wherever you say you want to go, they take you somewhere different. Then they charge you double. The first time that this happened, I ended up in a rather beautiful public garden, site of another battle, with a memorial to an Indian woman who had died, A Brit officer had been told to get rid of a sniper who had killed several soldiers from a vantage point in a tree. He hit the fighter then discovered 'he' was 'she'. Mortified, the officer said he would rather have killed himself than kill a woman. Anyway. So I was quite happy with this and took another rickshaw. He went off in totally the wrong direction, taking me somewhere rather obscure. Some very helpful people told him where he had to go, so he had no option but to go there. I really enjoyed the transport method; you hang on grimly as the trishaw wages an impossible route through traffic, going the wrong way and ignoring traffic-lights; I discovered the trick is to hang on with both hands (sadly, it meant that I couldn't video the experienc, but at least I surtvived) AND SIT STAIGHT-BACKED, pretending to be un-moved by the narrow escapes, etc. When we reached my hotel, I gave him 100r - a lot of money. He objected and said he wanted 200! The third time, I went to a road which I knew, with a simple route to my hotel, and made sure that the man knew exactly where I wanted to go. And, of course, he went straight past the turning. After that I decided to go upmarket and use suto-taxis, little 3-wheelers.
Varanasi - what a place, what an experience. Go there! Ive writen separately about it.
Jim Corbett Tiger Camp: If I went again, I would stay inside the park at a place called Bijrani and go on whole-dsay safaris. But it ws lovely to stay in such luxury for a few days.
Ajanta & Ellora caves: see separate account.
Mumbai: hot! Around 34C most days and I am glad of my air-con room. The city is so diverse - it's filled with spoilt noisy rich Indian kids and slum children who have nothing and beg on the streets. I have a superb view of the harbour (I should have - I'm paying enough for it - about $85 a night!). On the street outside, a family sleeps each night; we wave at each other and occasionally I go out and give them a few oranges or another small gift. Their little boy, aged about two, plays happily with his father's flip-flops, or sits with his feet in the gutter and looks around. I wonder what he makes of the tall, ornate horse-drawn carriages that look as if they've been covered with silver foil. The best have artificial flowers, flashing lights and brightly coloured parasols. The horses are also brightly decorated and clop, clop steadily along the sea-front, the carriages full of tourists. How many 10 minute trips in one of these would keep the homeless family for a month? Mumbai is very prosperous with huge, immaculate high-rise apartment blocks. World-class luxury motor yachts float in the harbour; just round the corner, grubby, smelly little fishing boats jostle for space on the mud. One delightful contrast was a small village area in the middle of high-rise mania; it's an enclave of what must have orignally been a Portuguese settlement of wooden-balconied houses in narrow traffic-free and tree-shaded alleyways. It was like returning to a more leisured age; I'm sure that the occupants fight tooth & nail to keep the area from re-development. It was directly opposite a Catholic church (complete with crucified Christ with marigold garlands) and the area was dotted with small Catholic shrines.I have also had my hair cut & coloured (no shame!) at a branch of Toni & Guy's; the colour stylist was a gay who normally lives in Brighton but who had a taste for travel.I've also been to an open-air beach concert involving wow-wow dancers and beat-y music, been to the most expensive hotels in town, developed a taste for kulfi (Indian ice-cream), seen an open-air exhibition by Alliance Francaise of aerial photography of threatened areas of the world, highlighting the need for a more eco-friendly approach to life, walked for miles, decided not to buy another shalwah kameez -instead I bought two mini-speakers - decided not to see 'Twilight' as I couldn't face sitting in a cinema full of spoilt, noisy Indian kids, walked to the view-point & saw an area full of small Hindi temples and a large 'tank', etc, etc. The lovely thing about walking is that, when I get fed up / tired / too hot I can duck into an air-con restaurant / shop / catch a taxi.Tomorrow is my last day in India; I plan to take a ferry out to Elephanta Island, enjoy the breeze & see the caves. Then I shall eat kulfi and pack.
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