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| TRAVEL WRITING: Thoughts on India |
Goa, western coastal India
Feb. 4, 2009
Dear Ones:
As some of you know, I am currently traveling in India for seven weeks. The following is a bit of verbiage which you are welcome to delete if so inclined.
Suffice it to say that any mere words I can come up with here in the midst of it all do little justice to what travel through the country is actually like. But I will forge ahead with a few surface thoughts.
First, I had no idea India's rich history was still very much a part of the landscape. Ancient forts and palaces are still here amidst the ancient temples, sometimes in a state of abject ruin but sometimes in remarkably good condition. It is a rich country that has been invaded and occupied by many forces over the millennia, each one leaving a legacy of some measure to the melting pot. The Aryans came over the Himalayas, the muslims came from the west, the mongols from the east, and the British by sea. Hindus, Moslems, Christians, Jains, Sihks, and others live side by side, often killing each other but more often just getting along. The caste thing is pretty interesting, and probably will not go away anytime soon, certainly not in the next couple of generations as India gains economic wealth and political power on the world stage. Still, change will come as it always has, in some form, unpredictable.
If you don't like Indian food, you probably won't have a good time here. In certain tourist enclaves you can get western dishes, but most often the local food will be what's available. And it's remarkably cheap. For me, it's a predominantly vegetarian country, which has been a really nice change! I have not gotten really sick on the food yet, and have mostly been eating off of food carts on the street. I must admit that has been getting a little old, though, so at present I am at a beach resort area resting up after 2.5 weeks of hectic travels. I had pancakes for breakfast today; glorious!
Food is mostly stuff I don't recognize, but it's all more or less good. For dinner I often get a "thali," which is a chrome plate with chapati (flat bread), rice, yoghurt, lentil soup, and a few other small veggie dishes (potatoes, califlower, okra, or some other unknown stuff). There are all sorts of other little street items you can get for about 10 cents. A thali may cost 50 cents or a dollar. Did I mention yet that India is incredibly cheap? So far nothing has been overly spicy but I am heading south now, where the air and seasonings are both hotter. So, it's just as well that I'm giving my system a bit of rest now as well. And so far, I don't know that I've eaten anything remarkably weird. Just some unknown fruits and vegetables, some of which were actually tasty.
Travel has been by rattling old bus, nice overnight "sleeper" bus (with bunk beds instead of seats), and various classes of sleeper trains. Sometimes one can sleep, sometimes not. An overnight train or bus might cost $5 or $10. The city bus in Mumbai (Bombay) costs 8 cents. The metro in Delhi costs about 20 cents.
You have seen the packed India trains in the movies but I have not yet experienced one of these. The trains I've ridden are packed in second class seat cars, but second class sleeper cars and all first class cars have reserved seating/bunks. Still, some local trains and buses can get congested, and I finally yesterday found myself in a situation where I had to step out of the crowded minibus I was on because I had my backpack on and I was crushing the poor old ladies who were trying to pack in around me. But usually there is plenty of room.
I have also always felt safe here. Those times when I was not watching my baggage etc like a hawk, no problem. So far I've not lost anything to theft. I have met a few single women traveling who say they also have not had a terrible go of it, although they natually attract a lot more attention to themselves than have I. Many of the trains here has special "women only" cars in the front and back. And back to the subject of trains, it's a harried process at times; first one must fill in a form with one's proposed trip and details recorded. Then wait in a crowded, slow moving line. Slow moving. Then the person behind the window will slowly type in all you details (same, age, sex, address, etc) and a ticket will spit out of a machine. Sometimes this takes an hour, sometimes 20 minutes. The person ahead of you will always have some complicated transaction which takes about 30 minutes to process. That's just how it works.
Lodging has been in wonderfully horrid little block cells, filthy in some cases, always with cracked walls and paint peeling off the walls. These generally cost about $4 to $6 per night. OF course the nicest place I stayed was small but only $3 a night; clean sheets and walls, warm water in the bathroom, etc., a working TV and ceiling fan, etc. Currently I am staying in a bamboo hut on the beach, which has a concrete floor, light and fan, for $5. Price does not usually affect quality, it's more a case of supply and demand. Since I have been mostly in tourist areas, I've been paying more and getting less. The nice place I stayed for $3 was off the tourist trail (although it looked crappy from the outside). I think one place had bedbugs and mosquitoes in Mumbai, so I was quite a mess in the morning.
I flew into Delhi, a city with a long history of being splendidly built then completely destroyed, either by invaders or crazy kings. I have not really been in any one place long enough to create an informed opinion, but no where I have been has been horrible (my own accommodations notwithstanding). From Delhi I took a day bus to Rajasthan, to the west on the border with Pakistan. There I visited the old maharaja forts and palaces in four different royal cities. Jodhpur, the blue city, was a lovely place with laidback people and blue houses, overlooked by a towering hilltop fortress as impressive as any fortress I've seen anywhere in the world. Udaipur has a palace on an island on a lake, where you can stay for I think about $1000 a night, and up. They filmed a James Bond movie there.
From there I dropped down to Gujarat, a state from which many Indians migrate to the US. I visited a national park with the last population of wild Asian lions (there is such a thing) but did not see them; did see a leopard, antelope and deer, mongoose, and some birds and crocodiles.
Thence on to the east to two amazing cave/temple complexes, Ajanta and Ellora, constructed from 200 BC to 600+ AD. Basically the builders just dug into the caves or escarpments and, in the same way one whittles wood or sculpts stone, left a series of temples. It's quite remarkable and something that can't be easily described in a few words on a hot day in a cramped little room on a plastic stool. But I have photos.
I took my first night train then to Mumbai, or Bombay, which is all the rage at present because of the Slumdog movie. I saw the train station used as a background, but I found myself rather lethargic there and did not explore as much as I'd wanted. I slept a lot. But I should say the city was really a nice surprise, full of old Victorian era architecture and middle class Indians. The poor parts are well out of the center of town, where the tourists hang out. I did take a local train for a short while and got out of the tourist enclave and just found myself in an average (probably) section of town, with concrete buildings and enless rows of shops and scooters.
Oh, crossing the road here is an adventure sport. Basically you just wade through traffic and hope you don't get hit. At first I thought there was some sort of karma that prevented accidents; it just seemed that everything magically worked out and no one got runover. Then I saw a series of accidents and such, and realized people probably get whacked all the time. In any case, one simply wades into oncoming traffic and tries to scoot through between the scooters, bikes and tri shaws. Never wade out when a bus or truck is coming, or a large car.
In Mumbai I headed south on a night train. I was waffling between Hampi, a town with a sprawling Hindu ruin, and Goa, a tourist mecca of beaches and palms. In the end I chose Goa and am glad I did. It will give me a chance to eat some recognizable food, give my body a rest, and get ready for the next leg of the journey. On Friday I go inland to visit said ruins, then south to Mysore (palaces) and Kerala state, at the southern tip of India, a very green place said to be rather non-Indian (like Goa, I guess, which is a former Portugese enclave).
Then I start up the east side, quickly, and hope to spend some time way up north near the Himalayas after Calcutta. Then it's back west for various highlights and the flight back from Delhi in March.
I guess I will stop now. I have been taking lots of video and photos, although nothing truly compelling yet. The Indians in general don't mind being photoed but if you go up and ask someone for a photo they'll likely ask for a fee. The beggars have not been too bad yet, less than I had anticipated, and the same for the poverty. One sees poverty and homelessness every day but one does not see hopelessness in the eyes of the afflicted. Most folks are not nasty if you don't give them any money. But it's still early in the trip.
May 10, 2009
Dear family, friends and significant others:
In January you may have received a message from me traveling in India. This is a very belated follow up message to let you know I am in fact back home and have, finally, posted a bunch of pictures from the trip on my website. The direct URL is
http://www.terryredding.com/travel/pics/india/index.html.
I have now had some time to reflect on the voyage, but on the other hand some of the immediate impressions have faded and perhaps I am going to wax nostalgically as time smooths over some of the rougher memories. That said, all in all it was a great trip to a fascinating place, which is really several cultures merged into the borders of one country.
If you ever get a chance, the experience is worth it. The pollution, heat, poverty, deformities, dirt and other forces are balanced by the colors, exuberance, sounds, surprises, and exotic features in general; it is a vast pool of swirling humanity supported by historic cities and architecture, and even some lovely countryside. And there is a tourist infrastructure; you don't have to travel the masochist budget route as I did. Of course it also incredibly cheap; an overnight sleeper car on the train costs a few dollars, meals are under $1, and hotels, well, a hotel you'd enjoy sleeping in is probably $10 or $20. I never spent that much, so I really don't know.
Following is an overview from the last 4 weeks or so (Feb and early March). You don't have to read it but do look at the photos linked above; some actually turned out pretty good.
After Goa, the Indian beach area, I took an uncharacteristically uncrowded train inland through winding mountains and even a waterfall. I had a bench seat in front of a large opened window, so it was like being carried through the forest in the fresh air.
The next stop was Vijayanagar, an ancient Hindu empire city that was destroyed by a northern coalition of sultans in 1565. The remains of the city are spread through several square miles of a wide valley littered with huge granite boulders, and some of the ornately carved temples and buildings have been restored somewhat. I rented a bike and pedaled through the area, a most impressive day.
Then I ventured on southward for my second day of hitchhiking, and spent the day riding in very slow-moving cargo trucks along the main cross country highway between Mumbai (northwest coast ) and Chennai (southeast coast). It's often a two lane tarmac, congested at times with cows, goats, and lots of trucks. But the truckers were an interesting lot, like truckers in most other parts of the world, and it usually took very little waiting times to get a ride. The passage was excruciatingly slow, averaging maybe 30 MPH most of the day. Which is probably good, given all the traffic accidents that occur in the country.
I stopped in Bangalore overnight, a city much in our news but one I found little to like about. I didn't see the high tech boom much in evidence; it just looked like any other sprawling chaotic city in India.
From there I took a night train on down to the southwest tip of India, to Kerala state. The highlight there was renting a houseboat for an overnight trip on the back canals. The boats are converted rice barges, now used to haul tourists around. Some of them are massive, hauling 100-200 ppl. Mine was designed for two people. I had my best meal in India on the boat, and all in all it was very relaxing and one of my favorite experiences. It is definitely a place to go to get some down time from the rigors of Indian travel.
Thence by crowded buses back to the east to Tamil Nadu state. There I visited a huge Hindu temple and observed the faithful going about their various rituals. There are thousands of Hindu gods in their pantheon, and around the temple are various statues, paintings, shrines, etc. I took a lot of photos.
Another day on buses and I reached an orphanage run by a priest whom my brother met a while back in North Carolina (he was here raising funds or something). He was an interesting character, and over the years has built an orphanage and school, colleges for teachers of English and teachers in general, and a few other private schools. Naturally I had a very good time talking to all the young coeds and practicing English with them, being one of the few native-speakers who ever drops by. Of course the priest kept a watchful eye over us and I was there for too brief a time for any mischief to ensue.
Yet another bus took me on to Chennai (Madras) on the southeast coast. Buses in India range from rattling old local buses that stop anytime someone wants to get out or whenever someone along the road flags them down. They have the features and comfort level of a 1967 US school bus, on a good day. Other buses are larger, with aircraft-type seats that actually have a level of comfort, and go directly between major points without stops. Of course they run far less frequently and I rarely had the right timing to catch one. At the top of the heap are huge Mercedes or Volvo luxury air conditioned buses, twice as nice as anything that Greyhound runs. These are mostly for tourist charters, and plenty of times nice, freshly scrubbed white faces looked out the windows at me as I stood hitching in the dust along the highways. To each his own, I guess.
Chennai was another big city, another mass of humanity without much redeeming value to the tourist, so I got on a 40-hour train (about $12) all the way up the east coast to Kolkata (Calcutta). A train had wrecked on the same line a few days before, but I was playing the odds. When we came past a wreck at the mid-point of the trip, I asked someone why it was taking so long to get the mess cleared up. "Oh, it's not the same one; that is the train wreck from last night," was the reply. Fortunately it was a cargo train and not for passengers. Forty hours on a train was actually not as bad as I thought it would be. There were stops to stretch out, and I had my own bunk, so a lot of sleeping and reading was involved. I was a little disappointed in not meeting an interesting cast of characters but so it goes. Since I was traveling on the commoners section of the train, there were lots of families and groups who all had their own needs to attend to.
Kolkata was actually much less horrific than I thought, although I mostly stayed in the old colonial center. A bad head cold prevented me from exploring much, but there was some nice old British architecture and the Bengali people were reasonably friendly. Kolkata is a center of arts and writing, or at least the locals all fancy themselves as such and it has a notorious reputation as the kind of place where nothing ever gets done. I boarded a day train from there up through the gangetic plain, a flat, fertile region of rice fields paddies and croplands, to the foot of the Himalayas. It was surprising to see such open, uncrowded stretched of fertile farm land in a country that is nearing the population of China (about 1.3 billion, give or take).
Since travel in India really is not much of a vacation, I spent three days relaxing in the tea plantation town of Darjeeling. The city is at some elevation, in the foothills of the Himalayas, and served as a summer refuge for the colonial overlords escaping from the notorious Indian heat. I never did see the Himalayan mountain ranges, although a huge, persistent cloudbank on the horizon marked where they stood. Being mostly Nepali and Tibetan, the people were much more laid back and friendly up there than down below in the 'real' India. Darjeeling is in a little spit of India pushed up against Nepal and Bhutan. I saw several Tibetan temples and monasteries, including a fascinating ceremony at one, and later passed by a Hindu temple where they put a 'tikka' on my forehead as part of their celebrations.
I hitched down from Darjeeling and back to the west, an interesting day of various truck rides culminating in being dropped in a town that did not accept westerners at the hotels. I finally found a tourist hotel with an unwanted porter who would not leave my room until I gave him the proper amount of backsheesh (tip; I think 25 cents finally got him to leave the room), and the next day it seemed that the town's buses did not go anywhere I actually wanted to go. The highlight of that day was finally reaching a train station late in the day where the police had to stand guard with me on the train platform to keep the crowds at bay; some places in India a white person can gather a crowd simply by showing up. It's a bit unnerving but not dangerous.
At some point in the ensuing couple of days I reached Varanasi (formerly Banares), the ancient and sacred Hindu city on the Ganges. The belief is if you die there, you will be released from the karmic cycle of death and rebirth and go straight to heaven, so old and infirm Hindus are brought there by their families to die. They are then cremated in one of two spots along the river; needless to say these locations are very popular with gawking tourists.
I hitched for the final time out of Varanasi towards Agra, the city hosting the Taj Mahal, but by late afternoon had only managed a ride on a bicycle rickshaw and a motorized scooter contraption. I wound up getting sick from the lunch so I arrived the next day to Agra on a night train, rather wiped out.
The Taj Mahal, however, really is striking, a sight with which we are all familiar and yet one that is breathtaking up close. It is covered in a translucent skin of white marble, which glows and shifts colors through the day with the color of the sun.
From there it was a short train ride back to Delhi and my flight home. I had a 6-hour layover in Amsterdam, so I got the commuter train into the city and spent a few hours pedaling around on a rental bike. It brought back an unanticipated flood of memories about how easy and fun it is to travel in Europe, especially in light of the hardships of travel in India. It was my first time in Europe in 25 years.
I do not want to sound unduly harsh about travels in India; it is a fabulous and stimulating place to visit, and one can never ever be bored there. But it is a land of extremes, and most tourists either really love it or really hate it.
The people are generally pleasant and the crowds were actually a lot less oppresive than I'd imagined. There is also a level of comfort available for travel, so my tales of packed trains and grubby buses would not necessarily reflect what your travels might involved. Many westerners hire a car and driver to shuttle them around the countryside, a comfortable way to go about it all. The food is varied and not nearly as spicy as I had thought it would be, and I ate lots of tasty stuff.
Actually, the only real constant pains in the neck are the rickshaw drivers. These are either 3-wheeled bicycle rickshaws, with the driver in front and a bench seat in back, or a motorized version. I had them following me all over all the time (for an hour once in one town) trying to get me to hop in for a ride to their favorite hotel. No amount of ignoring them or cursing them or whatever seems to deter them. Of course the 25 cents they get from you that day might be their only income, but it still is a pain. Prices also are higher for tourists, but usually this is a matter of paying 50 cents instead of 40 cents like the locals, so it does not break the bank.
That is enough jabbering. If you have read this far you now know perhaps more than you ever cared to about travel in India, but I have only scratched the surface. I do hope to go back to the north some day, a vast swath I missed the first time. If you go, plan your 'down time' in a nice place like Goa or Kerala, take a Hindi dictionary, and bring a sense of adventure. You won't need much money but patience is called for. The smiles and spirit of the people, even those of the lowests castes and in the most abject poverty, will make you appreciate your own life and admire their perseverance.
Thanks for reading and happy trails,
terry
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