INDIA
Jan 26, D-1. LEAVING.
My room emptied; final tricky objects with no obvious function dealt with, floor emptied and all sign of my presence erased. Last goodbye and functional details of what to do with my mail exchanged with Corinne my lovely and now ex landlady.
Walking up Mantle Street for probably the last time, soaking up the view of Wellington and its details. No need to takes photographs; it’s all inside me anyway. Leaving has some poignancy, but it’s a sensation I’ve experienced so many times in my life; at this stage it requires absolutely no angst on my part. Once my home, now I pass into being an observer, now I begin to assume the anonymity that comes with not belonging to places; a funny kind of freedom.
My last taste of my now previous work-life. A free ride on Berry’s Coaches, travelling up to London with Vicky my now ex co-worker driver and Amanda the ticket collector. My last link with familiarity fades with every mile into something new and exciting.
My body floating slightly and my shoulders lightening with the felt realisation that I won’t be going back into work on Monday. Welcome to the never-ending weekend…
Carl Jung had a concept he called Synchronicity, whereby the external surroundings somehow lend particular significance to the internal workings of the mind. Walking along the Thames through the Londonest city in the world I find an unposted letter addressed to Francis and Don in Liverpool, whoever they might happen to be. Then whilst getting slightly lost on the way to Lucy and Lawrie’s house (a friendly crash pad, dinner and goodbye before the plane), I find a fully functioning heavy-duty padlock with keys and a dog poo in the shape of a question mark. These curious objects on my meandering path maybe somehow lend an omen-ous significance to my newly tuned-in relationship with reality. What does it mean?! I suspect that it doesn’t mean shit.
Jan 28 D+1
Muuummmmbaaiiiiiiiii!!!!!
I have a suspicion that some of the horror stories I had previously heard about India may have been propagated by the kinds of people who have never ever been outside their comfort zone. I had been led to believe that I would be besieged by aggressive taxi drivers as soon as I left the airport, that the air in Mumbai is unbreathable, that the streets are full of horrifically dangerous lunatic drivers and so on. Blah blah. Granted this is only my first day but it’s been so much FUN! After regaining my wits sufficiently at Mumbai airport after a 2.30am arrival, I had the choice of staying in the airport all day until my 9.30pm flight to Amritsar or heading into the city for a bit of a look round. Not knowing at all the size or timescale of the city, I decided to bite the bullet. Dumped my pack at left luggage and whilst there hooked up with a young and enthusiastic Slovenian engineering student. Turns out we both have flights out at similar times so I ask if he fancied heading into Mumbai with me.
What has always stopped me from going to India before was not wanting to go there alone, so it was great that after I had already decided that I would go for it alone anyway, someone turns up who is willing to be chaperone for a first-timer. As it turned out I have been so glad of Miha’s company. On my own I am sure I would have been somewhat bewildered by it all, especially as I haven’t yet tuned into understanding quite what people are saying when we asked for directions. We took an auto (rickshaw) AKA tuk-tuk to Andheri Train Station. The traffic was fast moving and many close shaves were had, but really (speaking from some small degree of experience) it was not really very much different from driving in central London. I have always said that in order to grasp crazy city driving that you have to dance with the traffic and move the same way everyone else does. I would usually say to drivers scared of driving in London to just imagine that you are holding a full pint of beer in a crowded dance party, that your ex-girlfriend is dancing with some guy you don’t like and you want to leave the crowded room. The door is on the other side of all the crazy dancing people. If you get all uptight and try to politely move between everyone, the only thing that will happen is that no-one will take any notice, you will spill your pint and get even more upset. The only way through is to just dance round everyone else. So I figure that’s how city driving is. I was impressed by our drivers nerve and concentration. By the time we got to the end of the day I was to be happily jay walking and dodging vehicles along with everyone else. It was quite fun.
Meanwhile Miha and me took the train from Andheri to Mumbai Central. Yes it was crammed, but it was not that different from being on the London Tube in summer.
We walked from there to The Gateway of India (as recommended by an old friend Helen). On the way we see sleeping dogs lying (but we didn’t believe them), one cow (happily eating fresh grass cuttings, and not raking through rubbish piles as I have heard described). I encounter my first crows, which I am supremely happy about. They are more sleek than British crows and have a more song-ful sounding caw.
The sweetest looking children tried to gain our attention, and I completely blanked them. I didn’t like doing it, and maybe it is going to get to me at some point, but I suspect that I too don’t quite know how to handle beggars, so right now I am not going to engage. By adults, we were asked repeatedly if we wanted a city tour, our photo taken, a new shirt… And probably other things that I have forgotten. On the way into the city whilst stopped in the traffic, we did get the gentlest of propositions from a ladyboy, so that was unexpected and curious.
Mumbai is much like other tropical cities I have been to. I love most the colourful chaos of shabby impromptu merchant stalls crammed with all kinds of everything, the shiny aging cracked concrete and faded blue tarpaulins that segment everyone into their own little bits of space. There are people everywhere; there are people who just live in some random corner along the railway somewhere. Any gap is a chance.
So… I liked Mumbai very much, and I could not thank Miha enough for my first introduction to India. I totally get that today was clearly the very tippiest tip of a sometimes rather sweaty iceberg, but for now at least my anxiety has been transformed into confidence. Almost time to board my flight to the Punjab.
Amritsar
Looking out of the arrivals door at the airport, it’s raining an English kind of January drizzle.
I get a free bus to the Golden Temple 14 miles away in the city centre. Before leaving the airport car park, I sit in the bus talking with my driver, a Sikh gentleman with an impressive white beard. He shows me photos on his Samsung smartphone of his holiday in London, Paris and Switzerland on the ski slopes.
Amritsar city is a pokey dirty chaotic throng in an entertaining kind of way. Stuff going on in all directions. Mainly suicidal cycle rickshaws and auto rickshaws vying for non existent road space. I walk in to the temples entrance way, one of four; I am told that its four entrances represent that people of all faiths are welcome.
Its easy to see that the Sikhs come from a proud warrior tradition. There are numerous temple guides there, handsome well groomed chaps very gently ushering people like me when they forget to remove their shoes or put on appropriate headwear; all men must cover their hair. This rule doesn’t apply to the women though, which makes a change.
The elderly gentleman who takes my shoes asks me where I am from. When he hears that I am English he points at me in recognition, a big smile on his face and declares ‘Ah! I went to London one time, I saw you there!’ Pointing back at him I say ‘ Yes! It’s you! Yes I remember!’
Big smiles!
Standing in the vast square space that is filled with the hand-dug ‘Pool of Nectar’, the Amrit Sarovar from which the city derives its name, I am overcome. Years of wanting to come to India, and being too afraid to do it on my own, three days of sleeping in airports and mild jetlag, the crazy traffic getting here, and the beautiful dignified friendliness of the Sikhs both here as guardians and on pilgrimage. I stand in the wide open beauty of this place and the tears roll out, easily, released. A man of about fifty walks past and in his passing softly says ‘Welcome, this is a true house of God.’.
Each side of the pool is about two hundred metres long has a covered cloistered type area which then back onto rooms which cater for the pilgrims; baggage rooms, toilets, places to collect a meal, places to pick up offerings. Unlikely much else of what happens outside, it runs calmly and smoothly. There behind glass are a number of individual Babas (holy men) to whom passing pilgrims are bowing and offering their gratitude
Afterwards I finish by having chai and tasty sweet bread offered by the volunteer run kitchen. It is only by actually standing up and leaving that I can end my cup from being endlessly refilled… Yummy though it is.
Putting my shoes on to leave, I have five people coming to talk to me. I am the only white person there which maybe has something to do with it. One lady is only really interested in separating me from my glasses, and her friendship with me sours easily after I point out to her that no, she cannot have my glasses; how will I read my guide book?
The others by some strange coincidence, when they ask me what I am doing in the Punjab, we are amazed when we discover that we are all doing a vipassana course that starts on February 3rd, but the coincidences end because we are going to different locations. Still pretty amazing though. It is my tenth course, theirs is their first. We have potato talk about. One of the chaps is a medical student, and at the end of it, he finds me an elderly cycle rickshaw driver to take me to the edge of town, where he then passes me to a gruff auto rickshaw driver. I try out my haggling skills. And totally fail when he suggests that if I don’t like his offering price, I can get out and walk.
Mrs. Bhandari’s Guesthouse looks nothing like the summery photos on their website. A friendly enough place, Clean, spacious and populated by various dogs. I spend what was supposed to be my j recovery time talking talking talking to the wives of two Australian diplomats, a very lovely young Punjabi tour guide called Aman and Ralf a globetrotting German in a DIY camper van.
January 30th.
DHAMMA DHAJA, Anandgarh, Hoshiarpur, Punjab.
Three weeks ago, I signed up to some almost randomly picked meditation centre in the most northerly located part of India I could find. Now, I am lying flat on my back at dusk, next to a pagoda, a fantastic work; A building for meditating in, a lotus flower cast from concrete. It’s concrete coloured. It really could do with a paint job. At the entrance way, large piles of broken tiles in several places. I think the idea is to mosaic the outside of the building. It will certainly look better when they actually get round to doing it; at the moment they are working on the building next to it in a similar fashion.
Overhead, looking for all the world like crows coming home to roost, are dozens of large fat silent bats. The soundtrack is two entirely separate Sikh priests calling out to the nearby village over loudspeakers. It’s a kind of sonic chanting battle. A tractor finishes its last line of ploughing for the day, a multitude of dogs bark at each other. Teenagers rev moped engines. I think I’m going to be hiding inside my wonderful sanity-saving earplugs for the next eleven days.
How I got here…
I left Amritsar this morning with Ralf, the professional globe trotter. He’s been travelling in his van for the last eight years. Inspiring chap. Africa, the middle east.
On the guidance of his sat Nav we zoomed down the Amritsar-Delhi highway surprisingly quickly, paying A quid in tolls for the privilege. We stopped twice to pay the tolls, each time the collector trying to charge us double. One failed, the other succeeded.
We made a pitstop at a roadside dhaba (cafe) for roti and dhal. This was very tasty, but the occasion was soured when we were presented with a stupid bill that would have been what we would have paid for it back home. Ralf made a stand, by asking somebody nearby what they paid and then demanding to know why we had been charged more than the local guy. A strange experience, and certainly not something I would have felt comfortable doing. But then he’s been dealing with people attempting to rip him off all the way through Africa for years. As he pointed out, you can only take it lying down for so long. On the other hand, His journey through Dubai, Iran and Pakistan were another experience entirely. He was overwhelmed by their sincere generosity on a daily basis, being taken home, fed, sheltered, introduced to the family, showered with gifts of food to keep him going further down the road.
He is on his way to park up his converted fire truck at a princess’s house in Katmandu, so that he can fly home to be with his wife who currently is recovering from an illness. When she is better, they will resume their lifetime adventure.
Two hours later and the megaphone priests are still at it. It’s half past eight at night. I wish they would shut up. I might go and see if I can find him. First I will have to work out the Hindi for “Would you kindly put a sock in it? Cheers”.
Before leaving England I went into the TSB bank and told them I was going to India. Twice I told them. Today I tried getting money out of an ATM. It wouldn’t give me any money. I tried calling the bank and promptly ran out of credit. Tomorrow I go back into Hoshiarpur to find a phone that I can make an international call on. It’s a good job I have some back up funds otherwise I would have been completely screwed. Well done the Trustees Savings Bank; you are a pain in the arse. and I expect when I go to Japan they will block my card there too, on account of ‘unexpectedness’. A seasoned traveller had told me to use my card when I got to Heathrow and Mumbai airports so that the bank could see my movements. So it’s my own fault really.
This is my first time to do a meditation course anywhere outside the UK. Out of a group of fifty, I am going to be the only non Indian person here, which will interesting I think.
February 3rd.
I went back in to Hoshiarpur to get my bank card sorted out. I’ve tried to leave the meditation centre in a tiny Piaggio van, only to find that it wouldn’t start. After several attempts with us all pushing it down the track, I abandon them and start walking through the village. A young man on a moped offers me a ride to the main road for free, where I then flag down a tuk-tuk into Hoshiarpur, 10 rupees (about 10 pence) for a ten mile ride. The return journey will cost me 100…
I feel pretty comfortable wandering around in the city, nobody hassling me. I eventually find a shop where I can make an international call, and a nice man from Manchester magically unblocks my card. So very very grateful to the nice Sikh gentleman in the shop who makes it all possible by helping me to press the right buttons on his phone. Without him, I would have been totally screwed. The ATM gives me cash… Yes!!!! I change 500 notes at the bank for smaller stall-friendly notes. A young man wants to be my friend the moment I step out of the bank. I stop to watch him see what he does. He stops a little further on. A little concerned, I linger long enough to buy 2 hot fried roti, a samosa and a bunch of bananas, then decide to leave in the nearest tuk-tuk. I was going to have a bit of a wander, but I don’t think that now is the best time.
Two days later, later today the meditation course will begin this evening. Already I have met Akash and Mudesh two young students from Mumbai who have arrived for their first course; I hope it goes well for them! These courses can be something of a challenge, no matter how many times you have done them. Ten days is a long time to sit on your backside, by anyone’s standards I think. Right now, the sun is shining, birds are singing, and I have paths to sweep; so signing off for now.
10 Days…
Morning starts with my slumbering self being gently gonged awake at 4am. I ignore it, because I know there will another one at 4.20. I am thankful for the warning though. Second gong. I have the option of doing my first vipassana sit of the day in the dhamma (Pali spelling of dharma) hall but I choose rather to ablute and return to my warm bed, propping myself up against the wall. I am to spend a further 8 hours sitting in the hall on a blue cushion two foot square, my bottom perched on another cushion to raise me up slightly, all without back support. This actually is very good for my spine, strange as that may seem. Still in my early morning room, most mornings around 5am, at least one or sometimes two of the nearby religious chant-a-thons will commence welcoming in the day whilst utterly obliterating what would otherwise be a sonically delicious dawn chorus of bird song. At this point my trusty earplugs go in. I have blissfully slept in a ditch next to a Californian freeway, thanks to these things. If you ever go travelling, pack wax earplugs. They will save your sanity.
Sit until 6am (note that ‘sit’ is the term generally used to describe the non-act of meditating. It has much fewer letters, is much easier to spell, and sounds much less poncy).
Breakfast gong goes, woodsmoke is rising from the huge rocket stove giving the darkness a certain (admittedly slightly unbreathable) ambience. Crows are coughing. Oh no, they always make that sound.
Note: a rocket stove is a super efficient way of heating water for drinking and washing. Basically the shape of one oil drum on top of another with a flue hole running up the centre. Cold water goes in the bottom, hot water out the top. Raised up to a bricks height and sealed except for the wood feed, a small fire is lit at the bottom with dried grasses etc whilst larger branches are fed into the top. Much flue heat is transferred into the water which is what makes it so efficient.
Anyway. Breakfast. I love love love Indian food. Usually there is either a sweet rice/dhal combination or yoghurt with puffed rice. Fresh papaya. Notable this week was the salty/coriandery sponge cake and the deep-fried salty cornflakes. Wasn’t that keen on the cake, but really liked the slightly greasy cornflakes. Really; you don’t know until you’ve tried. There is tea (not chai) hot milk and sometimes unbuttered jam sandwiches. I have discovered that by dropping my boring jam butties in my hot milk, I get a sort of bread pudding which is very good indeed. I truly am a culinary genius. Shut up you lot in Berry’s drivers room, I can hear you from here.
After breakfast, rest up until 8. By which time hopefully both of the religious chant-a-thons have stopped. I quite like them when they happen one at a time and have some gentleness about them. Generally it’s like hearing two separate horse racing commentaries, all in Punjabi.
Anyway I’m bored of going on about them now.
8am Sit until 11 with two five minute pee breaks at 9 and 10. Instructions come via audio tape. The first four days is geared to learning to focus awareness on the sensation of breath on the upper lip. That’s all. Nothing else. I once came back from a course and a young man of 8 called Tirian asked me where I had been for the previous ten days. When I told him, he said “what just that? That’s really easy!”. When I challenged him to try it, he closed his eyes, scrunched his face up in determined concentration, squirmed about in his chair for 45 seconds and then said ” Woah! That’s really hard! And you did that for ten days!”.
There you go. Out of the mouths of babes and all that. Smug moment! I win-hurrah!
So. Lunch. Rice, dhal, yoghurt. Notice similarity with breakfast. No jam sandwiches. Some fabulous curried potato and cauliflower concoction. Or other veg. Carrots here are red not orange. Not that that has any bearing on anything. Except for colour-blind rabbits maybe.
Rest until 1, then sit until 5pm with more instructions and advice and a couple more pee breaks.
First time students get tea and more nosh. Us oldies get water with lemon juice. At this point, I often look slightly sad.
There is nothing much more lovely than getting up during the breaks and enjoying the sub tropical birds and plants, stretching, and feeling warm. Not bad for an Englishman in February.
There is some overlap in the plant life that is similar to Britain. I wonder whether the chickweed and sow thistle came here stuck to the soles of Victorian English boots. I doubt that’s how the crows got here though. I expect that they made their own arrangements.
6pm another hour long sit, during which the local gurdwaras like to kick off with another two hour stint of godly yodelling. 7pm is time for the evening discourse; a different one every night. A mix of funny storytelling to illustrate the philosophy behind dharma and some explanation of how to deal with difficulties and so on. 8pm another half hour sit, then questions for the assistant teacher if anyone has any to clarify any confusion. Hopefully by this point, the yodellers have stopped. Sometimes they carry on past 9pm if they’re getting really excited. Maybe this is what you do if you don’t have EastEnders. Actually, I think it may a form of contraception. Hubby comes home from work after a long day of work, has his supper, looks lovingly into his wife’s beautiful eyes and says “Fancy a nice quiet night in?” In a saucy kind of way… Except that the quiet night in never comes.
Actually, twice this week we have had quiet evenings. You would have thought that everyone would be thinking “Cor, this is nice. Let’s have it like this more often.” But clearly they don’t.
Then bed. Lights out 9.30. No reading or phones etc allowed to cause any distraction.
The first three days is observing the breath, and once we are all adequately tuned in to that, the rest of the days are spent learning how observe the sensations all over the body without reacting, even if it really uncomfortable, which sometimes it is. Basically it trains a person to handle themselves and their relationship with the world in such a way that gradually over time a person becomes less reactionary about the passing vicissitudes of life and therefore more stable in themselves. I certainly get upset about much fewer things in life than when I started six years ago.
During the course, I had my usual favourite things going on to distract me; planning imaginary long distance walking or bike trips, trying to re-invent the bicycle (this course I invented the tent-bike which uses the bike as the structure of a tent, and a recumbent pedal catamaran for pedalling up the English canals). And then I wheel off into past shagging glories. I would tell you about those too but I’m pretty certain nobody wants to know about that.
That and a bunch of wordless wibble that even I’m not interested in.
Amongst all that, the occasional insight pops up from nowhere.
Well. I generally don’t talk about the ‘thing’ I do, unless somebody asks me, but this is what I’ve been up to for the last ten days. There, that’s probably about as evangelical as I will ever get.
Other mental gems that arose:
Marrs/A.R.Kane’s ‘Pump Up The Volume’ played by a string quartet with the titular sample changed to ‘Turn Down The Volume’.
And:
Come friendly bombs,
And drop upon Birmingham,
Where people have ‘lifestyles’,
(‘Least that’s what they’re terming ’em)
Where the cats all eat rats,
So there’s no point in worming ’em.
And:
Bilbo Baggins comes back from his big adventure, but gets bored of life in The Shire, so he goes off to America and teams up with Bruce Willis to take out the bad guys. The film is called Old Hobbits Die Hard.
There was more, but thankfully I’ve forgotten it.
Day 10 everything eases off so that we get the chance to resurface into normality. There is much less meditation and we can all talk with each other. Meeting everybody has been lovely. People on courses are usually very sweet people, and it’s been really nice talking and joking with Abhishek (a young law student from nearby Jalandur), a young chap from Tokyo who runs an internet business and is going home tomorrow, some people from Himachal Pradesh further north where the mountains are and getting some useful advice about the area. Apparently all the mountain roads should all be open…
Tomorrow I head for Dharamsala which is where the Dalai Lama hangs out, along with 150,000 Tibetan refugees. And lots of European trekking-Bhuddisty-new age hippy dopehead types. I fully expect to find a McDonalds and a Burger King when I get there, and will want to run gibbering into the loving, sensible arms of the first hillside goat-herder that I encounter.
Feb 15th Day 11.
Courses usually end in something of a flurry. Up at 4.30 to watch a video is bit early for TV for me but there you go. Breakfast, cleaning rooms and the inevitable enthusiastic exchange of email addresses, Facebook connections and that sort of thing all squeezed in so that everyone can make their individual travel connections back to wherever. In this case Shimla, Jalandur, Delhi, Chandigarh, Dharamsala.
Before everyone has left, about 150 primary school kids from the village all rock up, just to add to the mix. In England the centre would take a day to step back and wind down… But this, as the saying goes, is India. I think people here are much more prepared to rub along together than us personal space hugging Brits.
I am asked to sit in the dhamma hall to help oversee the kids so that they behave themselves reasonably, which mostly they do. They have come to learn the breath awareness part that we did on the course at the beginning. They only do it for a day. I hope it works, cos lunchtime was chaos with the kids making a right racket in the undersized echoey dining room.
I am supposed to be leaving at eleven with a lift, but he’s taking ages, I’m exhausted and don’t fancy six hours in a bus to arrive in a strange city in the dark with no sleeping arrangements. I stay for the rest of the day.
Walking out down a straight sandy track at dusk, which is access to the local farming families here. I see one car and numerous ‘Hero’ scooters. An elderly gentleman with a fantastic Victorian mustache nonchalantly zips past, smartphone to his ear, glorious earth-coloured robe flapping with the breeze of his passing. My guess would be that he has worked the land here all his life. If that is so, then I envy him what I imagine to be his simplicity in his lifestyle. Sometimes clichés are hard to avoid, sorry.
Irrigation channels are flowing, now the heat of the day has passed, this is the best time to water your crops, so you don’t lose water to evaporation.
The water smells mineral-rich, a sublime sensuous mix with the gentle breeze of the now-cooling air. Some eucalyptus scent, a group of very young kids laughing and larking on top of a small mountain of clay at a very low-tech brickworks. For all I know, it’s the kids that are making the bricks? I don’t know. Two passing scooters offer me a ride. No thanks, walking is good! A giant fruit bat gets startled out of it’s roost and flaps a wide arc before settling again. A collection of brick huts with lots of laughing children and some mothers making supper on open fires.
I was told I would love India, and the tiny bit I am experiencing I do. All my life I have braced myself against so many ugly absurdities of modern western living and to find myself right here where there are almost no cars, a few overhead cables but no monstrous pylons and everyone geared towards growing food all sits with me most easily. On the surface, it looks like the future England I would love to call home. That’s not going to happen until oil finally gives us up and we all have to start thinking smart.
Behind me a guy pushing a shrine-on-a-bike comprising a painting of a god, a parasol to keep the weather at bay, decorated with pink, orange and yellow garlands and of course a sound system. This one’s got a nice rhythmic harmonium going on that gives the music that kind of Indian reggae lilt that you sometimes hear. Nice happy happy tune too. Rinky Dink Sound system, eat yer heart out!
Trees figure a lot in this area, grown as a fuel and timber supply and mixed in around the plots of wheat, potatoes, onions, mooli- a foot long white radish predominantly just here there are enormously tall polytunnels some way off, dunno what’s in them. A couple of banana plants on the field edge. What I think are coconut trees in the distance. It looks this this part of the world is something of a bread basket. I love the wide mix of tropical and temperate crops. Guava trees too!
I have yet to see a mango tree. Where I’m going next may possibly be all rocks grass and goats. But I bet it isn’t. Travel is full of surprises.
Next morning.
Some people know that the word ‘google’ was invented by a frivolous mathematician to describe the mammoth quantity of 1 followed by a million zeros. That’s a big amount. An amount of anything that you probably could only fit somewhere in deep space. Even bigger than that is a googleplex, which is a google multiplied by another google. That’s an amount that only exists to blow your mind and make you realise that infinity is probably an awful lot bigger than you previously thought. Trying to even roughly think in that direction will only scramble your brain cells.
But I know a number bigger than that; one.
One is humble amount. But having one will make the difference between agony and comfort, deep loneliness and joy, sometimes having one becomes a matter of life and death. The crucial thing about one though is that one of at least one vital thing has the possibility to be available to everybody.
Feb 16th
5am camped out just above McLeod Ganj. The foothills of the Himalaya, pine forest. Not quite vertical, but definitely 45 degree slopes. Perched on a rare flat-enough ledge that I cleared of rocks, making sure not let them roll down and smash into white taxis parked for the night several hundred metres below me.
Quiet night, except for the usual background of barking dogs. A mile away is the Dalai Lama’s residence. Maybe I could pop in for a cup of tea. That would be nice. He might be off away somewhere in the world though, reminding people to be nice to each other. After writing this, I shall sit for an hour, dismantle tentage and go explore. Crikey I’ve only a month before I go to Japan.
Getting here:
A free ten mile ride from the centre to Hoshiarpur on the back of a motorbike past women carrying bowls on their heads, more natural elegance than any Paris cat-walk, men riding to work, to fields, school kids some uniform some not, riding twos-up with dads and Sikhs with supreme beardage flowing in the wind. A tractor with ten kids sitting on it. Now that would definitely get me out of bed and wanting to go to school.
My chauffeur is an occasional tuk-tuk driver in Dubai where he earns a much better wage of about 500 quid a month. He speaks quite good English, which is a relief when I’m feeling a little bit tired and bamboozled anyway.
If ever you happen to find yourself in Hoshiarpur, go to the second roti cook on the right as you go out of the bus terminal, not where the tuk-tuk taxi rank is, but the other one where breakfast happens. Imagine slightly spicy very cheesy pancakes. Oh wow! Someone sees my food-gasmic expression and says ‘ he’s good uh? Best roti in Hoshiarpur!’
Internet cafe above bus station, no WiFi, google security finds my wanting to read my emails suspicious, rendering my messaging attempts utterly hobbled. So it might be while before anyone hears from me. Not feeling inclined to start pandering to interminable digital hoop jumping. I had enough of that in England and after all; this is India. And I would rather be here than hopelessly, tediously distracted.
So now that you’re reading this: don’t worry, I wasn’t dead, and actually having a slightly knackered but very good time.
160 rupees (read1 pound 60 pence) for a six hour bus ride to Dharamsala. Scenic. Monkeys. Nice.
Between the rich agricultural plains of Punjab and the foothills of Dharamsala, the landscape rises in a wildly meandering labyrinth of always steep and ever inclining hills. Immediately north of Hoshiarpur is a range of small ravined hills relatively low but of impossibly steep time-hardened sand. Scrubland fit only for the monkeys who sit by the roadside scratching either their own or their best friends backside, eating presumably fleas and whatever bit of unwanted roti And pickle gets thrown out of a passing window. No wonder some of them look a bit sour.
I don’t use the word labyrinth lightly; how any one ever manages to find the best route through this kind of territory makes me wonder how much trial and error must have gone into bringing the best ‘desire lines'(easiest route) between any particular A and B.
I don’t know the history of the area at all but I imagine that the laying of hard tarmac roads and running railways through these kinds of territories must have made a huge difference for the people living here.
Donald McLeod was the first British governor of the Punjab region in 1846 (or thereabouts) and set up his administrative post at McLeod Ganj. (Adopt broad Scottish accent; ‘Ooh looky here! This place has got my name! I’ll go and sort oot thangs fra m thir!’ Okay put the Scottish accent down now, I don’t want you to hurt yourself)
There’s a place up the road called Dalhousie, and my guess is that is where the fella was from, and if it looks like it does here, then it probably looks like Dalhousie back in Scotland.
This would give further evidence to my theory that in times of mass migration, peoples moving to new lands will often settle in places similar to where they came from. In those days ‘transferable skills’ would have been a matter of life and death. It’s no good being a Scandinavian woodsman and finding yourself in Nebraska. You move to the area that is now Washington state .the Scot’s found themselves (largely against their will through the Highland Clearance of the 1800’s) in what is now called British Columbia or Nova Scotia. It’s a good job of course that the eastern coast of Australia already had a liberal assortment of fish ‘n’ chip and pie ‘n’ mash emporiums during this formative period. Well of course it didn’t, and maybe that’s part of the reason that the Prisoners Of Mother England (or ‘Pommies’ for short) felt so inclined to give the poor unassuming aboriginals such a shit time. Eating pie and mash is damn sight easier than chasing a kangaroo with a loaded stick, which is why the English systematically deforested the area of Sydney (I wonder who that was named after?) Of a tree now called ‘cabbage trees’. basically a palm tree; very tall, no side branches for miles and then a tuft of green stuff that happened to be edible sitting on the top. Remove the ‘cabbage’, try not to break your neck climbing down, boil your dinner and then watch the tree die cos you’ve chopped off its vitals.
Now, if instead of bread-thieving and agriculturally illiterate Londoners making up most of the original POMEs, the new populace had been from outside the city and therefore able to grow things, then I wonder how much different the course of Australian history might have turned. I’m glad I don’t currently know any Australians. they would give my nuts a total roasting. Hey ho.
Travel is best experienced, in my humble opinion, without haste, without glass between yourself and the world, by not planning an ultra-rigid itinery and doing just enough planning to distinguish trusting to luck from sheer stupidity. Luck is where the magic happens, where you get to discover just how kind and helpful total strangers often turn out to be.
Right. Sit now, tent down, then over to the Dalai Lama’s for a cuppa.
Just for the record, I know almost nothing about Tibetan Buddhism, don’t even consider myself a Buddhist. I just do my sit, and do my best to have a nice time. Thank you, over and out.
9.40pm Talara.
I find myself camped in a slightly smelly ditch. My day has gone thus:
Dalai Lama wasn’t in, so I left him a note saying to give me a tinkle.
Actually, in seriousness for a moment the Tibetan Buddhists are in something of an existential squeeze quite outside of their making. Dalai Lamas are hand picked by the one that comes before, and they picked out according to some kind of esoteric auspices. Basically three wise Buddhists come round the house of unsuspecting of a newborn toddler and they say to her ‘We reckon your kid is special. They signs say he’s going to be the new Dalai Lama, can we have him please and train him up. At which I guess mum has to say yes. Must cause some very mixed feelings I expect.
Well in 1986, the current bespectacled Dalai Lama picked out such a kid, and was thus on the brink of becoming the new spiritual leader. Then when he was six, the Chinese government kidnapped him ‘for his own protection’. And nobody but the Chinese government know where he is. He became the youngest political prisoner in the world. And the current Dalai Lama has already passed eighty. This leaves the whole group in a very awkward position.
Hmm. As I don’t have any easy answers to hand, I shall continue with my own personal dribble.
Yesterday I had momos, which seems to be the Tibetan version of large ravioli. Stuffed with feta and real spinach. This morning I also tried ‘atta’ at a Tibetan food stall serving mostly busy taxi drivers. Atta is genius fast food: make your chapatti dough, roll it flat, put a ball of cooked vegetables bound with something like mashed potato or swede in it. Next completely wrap the dough round the veg. Now you’ve effectively got an uncooked spherical vegetable pastie. Next completely flatten the whole lot chapatti thin and fry it.
Happily eating this, I spot down below where I am sitting, a large black bull has his head in large skip and has a mouth dripping with some kind of slimy looking green stuff. Looking up around him I fancy he has look of cow-ish bewildered resignation, like he knows this really isn’t what bulls are designed to do.
We are in a small town perched in steep-sided pine slopes. There’s no pasture here. Did this bull amble randomly all nine kilometres from Dharamsala below? Or did some cow-worshipper drag it up here in an attempt to balance out the Buddhist to Hindu ratio?
I wonder what Hindus in western countries make of our subjugation of cows, on the one hand hobbling them to a dairy production line with no sense that the animal is sacred, and on the other hand imprisoning them in fields full of grass safe from random scooters, tuk tuks and filth. There are cows everywhere I have been so far. It wouldn’t surprise me if I saw one sticking its head out the upstairs window of somebody’s house. Mostly they wander about in the road looking like they feel blissfully safe. And that would be because everyone on the road seems to be very careful not to harm them or even curse them for being there.
Further down the windy road from McLeod Ganj to Dharamsala I spot a plant that looks like the stinging nettles evil big brother; like nettle but bigger leaves and 2mm spikes densely all over them. When I tentatively touch a leaf, it’s a nettle sting but about five times more painful. Urtica Ouchyoubastardious it’s called.
Bus to Pathankot specifically to ride the train back by hopefully spectacular route. Bus there (70 miles) 130 rupees. Train back again 15 rupees. Arriving at Pathankot at 4.30 is a bit rubbish cos if I get the train back now it will all be in the dark which defeats the whole point of going there in the first place. Pathankot looks like a massive shithole so I compromise and buy a ticket to some place next to nice lake for camping upon the recommendation of the tourist information guy at the station. Except when I look on the map after buying the ticket it’s almost at the end of the route anyway. All I had wanted to do was get far away out of the big city to find somewhere quiet to put my tent up.
Boarding the train is straight forwards, no reservation required, just like buying a ticket in England except it literally is about a hundred times cheaper.
As soon as we pull out it starts getting dark. After about half an hour I decide that instead of wasting my trip in darkness, I will get off at the first available stop that looks rural.
No idea at all where I am, I get off in some tiny village (by Indian standards), buy some burfi (Indian nutty sweets) and start walking down the likely looking track I see. My aim is to escape houses, huts, lighting, the inevitable amplified devotional singing (which is nice but I like my peace at night as you’ve probably gathered by now). There’s a thudding party going on somewhere and boys on mopeds have spotted me, this unexplained white guy wandering around their village at night for no apparent reason. I am rapidly coming unstuck. In the west, the land of enormous fields ploughed by one man and his tractor, and public footpaths it’s easy to disappear inconspicuously through a few fields and pitch up where no-ones bothered. It’s totally different here, almost every scrap of land seems to be occupied and it’s hard to know where is public and where isn’t. I walk round the village long enough to arouse way too much curiosity, and then decide to walk down the railway line. Just as it seems I have left the village for a solitary place, another crop of lights arises in the distance. Something tells me I could walk a very long way before I get the spot I actually want, so I cut my losses and pitch up in this shallow spot about six foot from the rails. I am reasonably camouflaged and definitely not encroaching on anyone’s crops so there shouldn’t be any offence caused. Though it does smell a bit. Doing this kind of thing can be bit hit and miss sometimes. Most of the time it will work out fine, often it’s magnificent and occasionally it’s shite. So tonight is shite night. It’s kind of alright apart from the smell of poo. I hope I sleep. G’night.
Feb ??
Talara 6.50am
After a night of devotional and Indian disco sounds that stopped about 1am, I roused again back into early morning at 5am by the Jaginder Nagar to Pathankot train rolling upcountry just so it can roll back again.
Thinking that possibly it will only take an hour or so to do the turnaround, and preferring to decamp to the train station a mile away, I start making moves.
Sanity saved by earplugs and a liberal dose of eucalyptus oil and lemon oil rubbed into where some sort of mustache should be, I am feeling quite alright.
Whilst I am deciding about whether to get myself together and pack my tent, I hear feet scuffing along the very nearby rail path, a trannie radio quietly blaring away to itself. Not feeling inclined to attempt to field the inevitable curiosity as light grows and people will begin to surface, I pack.
In the dark, head torch on, carefully noting not to step in the culprit of my nasal niff. Everything packed, once away from camp and walking in the dark along the rails all is immediately lovely. Bright stars fill the vivid darkness in this rare moment of almost stillness. Lights begin to come on in homes, devotional alarm clocks begin, though here it’s very sedate thankfully.
Things scurry into the undergrowth as I hoof my boots along the gritty dust. As I approach the station vivid darkness slowly fades into morning.
People cough and hawk into awareness along with one or two cockadoodling chickens and one lone dog announces its pleasure to meet the world again for another day of whatever it is that dogs must do. Today it’s all one lovely ambience, but I think I get why in some parts of the world people are quite happy to eat dogs. When was the last time a cow ever drove you nuts?
Whilst the station is mostly empty, I attempt to wash, in public, using the tap and trough marked ‘drinking water’. After furtling around various smelly parts, the water mysteriously stops as I turn the tap on again to wash my hands. Then it occurs to me that I have randomly turned up where no tourist has probably ever stopped ever, wandered around randomly in the dark, and now I’m inadvertently trying to poison the water supply with my scuzz. Crap. Now my hands are all covered in soap. I go and wipe my hands in a blanket of chickweed on the other side of the rails. I am now feeling somewhat ashamed of my ignorance. Oops. I apologise to a chap working at the station but he doesn’t seem bothered. Maybe the water is only switched on for a limited time. It wasn’t working when I tried to use it last night either after I got off the train.
Station filling with people. Time to go buy a ticket and do my day.
The train arrives. A nine foot wide diesel beast with six carriages all perched carefully on a roughly three foot wide narrow gauge. It looks like it would topple over without too much persuasion going round a bend, which I am about to discover, is very precisely the reason why today we will be moving at a maximum speed of about 30 mph, and only on the straight bits. Of which there are very few of course because it’s foothills country.
I spend the six hours of the day devotedly soaking up every detail we pass, as I do on any train journey. I think people who fiddle with their phones and watch TV whilst on trains are commuting an act of brain-deadening sacrilege. Our landscapes are fascinating! Bloody well engage with them!
The train weaves its trundling way through low cuttings, deep cuts, over one or two river gorges that look like the kind places you might expect to see live dinosaurs. Through endless jumbled sprawling village life, past aimless cows, sneaky monkeys, heat-zonked dogs, men in tatty working clothes, farming women in bright colours crouched down weeding or cropping by hand, teenage boys going places on scooters, banana plants, random vines, hay stacks, irrigation channels, fields of young green wheat, dhabas with old men sitting outside, smoking beedis (small Indian cigarettes) looking bored, sitting in groups playing cards together, dhabas with crisps and bananas hanging like curtains, small piles of oranges, children going to school, children coming back again, half-built houses, endless wobbly stacks of bricks, cement structures in profusion, broken cement structures in need of repair or removal but with nowhere to remove them to, litter, vast swathes of litter, shrines, statues, posters of serene gods, adverts for Jaypee Cement, Ambuja Cement, mobile phone networks, some them painted by hand, bamboo, flying saucer- shaped patties of mixed cow dung and wheat chaff drying in the sun to become fuel for cooking dinner (adds a great flavour to chapattis and to hot milk), goats, spectacularly brightly coloured cement houses, garish mansions with over-the-top building bling; snazzy tiles, expensive railings, even more litter, crows, dry river beds, dry river beds used as litter bins, a vast broad lake that looks the sea, long grass waving in the breeze, distant tractors ploughing, people in bender-style encampments in unused scraps of land, people working, people waiting, and sometimes space.
My interest begins to wane after very many very similar looking villages, containing pretty much same things. My interest is perked up again by some routing through some magnificent gigantic river gorges which then gives way to what becomes an ever-present backdrop, magically rendering everywhere absolutely fascinating again:
I can well imagine how the mountains of the Himalayas might come to be regarded as gods(and goddesses). An unending wall, a fortress in the sky stretching along the entire northern side of the landscape. The particularly curious thing is that because of the distance the mountains are away, the air in between means that the mountains are exactly the same colour as the sky, is, invisible. Except for where there is snow. The effect is that of a line of gigantically imposing line of mysteriously floating peaks, that rather than having risen up from the ground, have somehow dropped from somewhere way above in the heavens.
That’s not me being starry-eyed; it really does seem that way.
Halfway through the journey we pull into a curious station where on the right hand side is a platform, munchies and newspaper vendor is a normal looking station, whilst the left hand side is some sort of homestead and workshop with a troop of about twenty monkeys monkeying about as you might expect them to do; blagging bits of food from the passengers mostly. The big man of the clan struts about looking tough, trying to tough his way to thrown morsels first (which doesn’t always work). Little ones scamper about behind, sometimes tripping over their exuberance. Several goats come to join the blagging fest and even the inevitable cow.
The train is slow, and at one point slows down about three mph, crawling tentatively round a bend that has had a reconstruction after some kind of subsidence. As our carriage rolls over the tricky spot, the carriage tips slightly left in the direction of downhill. I would imagine that repeating this manoeuvre is only likely to make it worse. Must be nerve-racking for the driver.
At some unnameable station we stop for45 minutes whilst they rearrange engines and carriages. A helpful young student explains to me what’s going on after everyone gets off en masse unexpectedly. We move off again, and a man of about 50 appears from nowhere (well the station platform is most likely) and gives me a small paper cup full of very sweet milky tea, which just the ticket now that I’m flagging a bit. In the interest of practicing his English, he engages me in conversation, and we discuss the usual stuff; families (and why am I not married), work, England, India and so on. He works as a subcontractor to Himachel Pradesh local government and supplies works with electrical water and gas fittings, travelling all over the state by train and bus to meet his clients. He doesn’t drive cos his back doesn’t like it. His wife is a teacher, he sees her and his young son once every four days. Why am I telling you this? I dunno, because I can? Anyway the conversation sort of suits me as it’s getting dark anyway.
The train eventually gets into Joginder Nagar at 8pm. It’s another big city, but this time sprawling and very spread out through the hills. On the way in, I check the landscape for possible camp sites before getting off the train: disembarking, I promptly start walking back up the train track for about a mile where I had spotted a parallel irrigation channel. In a suitably dark enough and this time shit-free spot, I up-tent, strip down and wash my disgusting feet and then everything else in the channel (it looks like clean mountain water), re-robe, write this, pee and now bed, hurrah! G’night!
Feb 18th Badgran
Well it’s about time I found myself somewhere a little more salubrious to camp. I find myself not in a place that’s riddled with human influences for once. I had bought a bus ticket for Manali but realised it was going to be another one of those hit or miss jobs of hoping I could find somewhere adequate to camp without having to waste money on some dingey room slap bang in the middle of noisy peopleness. So not wanting to actually go to Manali in the end, I bailed out at a quiet little spot next to a lovely river that’s roaring over big boulders, lots of trees, in the Himalayas now, no people and a beautiful moon that’s three quarters to full; (that’ll be a gibbous moon then.)
Didn’t have a clue where I was excepting that I knew Manali couldn’t be very much further. It’s only when I look on the map that I discover it’s called ‘Badgran’. Nearby, I also discover, is place called ‘Soil’, and further away, a place called ‘Poo’.
Today’s bus journeys have come as a welcome change to the train journey from Talara to Joginder Nagar, which started out as interesting but ended up as laboriously slow.
Well at least there’s this: Life may be cheap in India, but the trains are even cheaper.
After what is becoming my routine breakfast of chapatti and pickle and/or bananas, I got the bus for Mandi, which is to prove to be relatively pretty and totally different in character from anywhere I have encountered yet.
As soon as we rolled out Joginder, we passed by a sign declaring that we were now in the Himalayas World Heritage National Park; and the change in landscape was quite dramatically different. Immediately we were in a vast array of terrace farmed mountainous country.
Now the terraces are green with young wheat sown in December. It will be harvested in may, just before rainy season starts in June, and then the bare ground will sown with ‘bedi’: rice. This in turn will get cropped in November, a month after the rains have ended. You would kind of want it to all go to plan really wouldn’t you?
There is practically no litter, almost everyone seems to be living in slightly more spacious brick farmhouses. No roaming packs of dogs, all the cows we see are cared for properly, not wandering aimlessly. There’s much more of a sense of things being cared for properly and of prosperity.
There’s a sense of lovely vastness being in the mountains now.
Even though there’s not a single stretch of straight road at all along the 70 mile route to Mandi, it feels good to feel like I’m making proper progress again. I realise that I’m on one of those famous/notorious Himalayan twisty supposedly scary bus journeys that people like to be horrified by. Yes we Are close to huge drops, no there are no barriers, yes we frequently pass buses and trucks coming the other way through seemingly impossible gaps, yes there’s numpty car drivers trying to race past us on blind bends. All of that. As a driver myself I am impressed by our drivers skill and I feel totally safe with him. One thing I have noticed is how remarkably dent-free the average Indian bus is.
Out of Mandi, the road out bears north up the fastest straightest road yet. We are running alongside the River Beas, which after a few miles out is dammed. From there on in we are running a couple of hundred metres above a wonderfully green loch/fjord/lake however you prefer to think of it, with yellow rock faces scaling almost vertically to the sky, way, way up. At various points, the road cuts into the mountainside such that we are actually under the rock face. We pass through a completely unlit tunnel that must have been about six seven miles long.
The river is vividly green, and this is because it is glacial meltwater. Glaciers when forming trap algae in them. Because of the way ice crystals diffract light, (healthy) glaciers generally appear white, though sometimes they will look an ethereal blueish.. Anyway they melt; their rivers are green.
Camped up next to a huge boulder on one of the few patches of grass on the river bank where I can get tent pegs in. I love my little tent and my Thermarest inflatable mattress: comfort can be so easily achieved in all sorts of places.
Time to sit, g’night.
Feb19th Camped north of Shimla; Bagaun. Tiny tiny place.
I had a lovely warm sleep, nestled in my tent tucked into the underside of a boulder as big as a car, and in a Cannabis Indica patch. I am eyed by a curious crow out on an early morning fly by.
Sit. Can’t decide whether to go all the way to Leh in Ladakh. It’s a thousand mile round trip and would take a week. Then again, it would be like visiting another country. It used to be it’s own kingdom, a Buddhist area more like Tibet than anywhere else.
I pack, walk up the busy road a little. Stop to watch a family of monkeys descend down through the bushes, maybe they are off to favourite roadside food blagging spots? Or maybe they do something more exciting?
Flagging down a passing bus, I head to Menali. I am slightly amazed to see that has a main shopping street that is pedestrianized pavement. The first one I’ve seen in India. There is a coach yard on the way in full of swanky looking Volvo and Mercedes Benz coaches. Clearly tourism has put significant money in people’s pockets.
When I enquire at the bus station information and about getting a bus to Gramphoo (on the way north to Ladakh) the five men there all laugh like I’ve told a joke: the road is closed and won’t be open again for a couple of months. Snow.
Oh. Well that settles that little dilemma then. No problem. I’ll just head straight for Shimla then.
Menali is quite an appealing looking town with traffic chaos kept at bay, and none of usual random piles of semi-built construction works, huge gutters, cows, rubbish etc.
Its all glass windowed shops or otherwise very orderly. I go buy a Cadbury’s ‘Cashew Delight’ chocolate bar (as made in Mumbai), two gulabs (deep fried milk powder balls in rosewater syrup) and then a new hat for 80 rupees to replace the one I left on the bus yesterday. This morning I had made a very successful blue turban out of my silk sleeping bag liner, but there’s nu way I’m going to walk around in public wearing it and wondering what people are thinking…
Coming out of the hat shop, enthusiastic tic chap who I 98 percent can’t understand, grabs my hand and jabbering away excitedly drags me off, I think, to drink chai.. Taking me up a side alley I’m not too comfortable about this, but as long as it doesn’t start getting seedy or too weird I’ll go along with it. I get the impression the guy in the chai shop knows him and seems decidedly stand-off-ish. The chap still excitedly jabbering away buys the chai which surprised me as I was half expecting him to ask me to pay. Then he tries to give his hat in exchange for mine. Which I try on, but it doesn’t cover my ears. His hat is clearly superior quality, but I would rather he kept his own hat. Three Hindu ladies sitting next to us watch to see what happens. Using my hands to mime mouths I say to them ‘he talks and goes blah blah blah, the strange Englishman talks and goes blah blah blah and nobody has got any idea at all what’s being said!’ At which they all laughed.
The excited chap takes out of the chai shop and I think he wants me to go to his house and smoke, probably dope. I don’t want to so he writes me his phone number and tells me to call him, via hand gestures mostly. Quite what kind of conversation he imagines we might have by phone I’m not sure. I take the scrap of card with his number on it and try to leave, at which point he gives me a sad look of desperation and looks like he’s about to burst into tears. After what preceded I suspect them to be of the crocodile variety. I’m not buying it and I walk away. He follows me to the bus station so I swiftly about turn and walk off again. Fortunately that’s the last I see of him,
The journey back to Mandi is much like the journey up, except in reverse (funny that) and is pleasantly uneventful, and the road to where I am now camped seems to be one great long construction project. Road-widening and motels by the looks of it. The landscape is ever-changing there are more areas of broad plains of wheat fields and fewer terraces. Back to lots of rubbish though.
I like India very much so far with all it’s diversity and peculiarities. The only thing I really don’t like is their inability or willingness to deal with their litter. Pretty much every town and village is just an open rubbish dump. I did spot a poster on a wall on the way here today that declared that the area had a plan for recycling its waste and using some of it to make fuel. I also pass a couple of municipal rubbish collection points with some degree of recycling. The bus stations all have bins and are kept clean. What needs to happen is for them to find a way for rubbish collection to pay for itself, then it might be more likely to happen. I think from the little I know, is that India has good track record for initiating programs that deal with improving the general health and productivity of its people. Now it just needs to get its collective head around the issue of rubbish. Right, enough of that.
I’m starting to get the hang of how to get a free nights kip. It’s worked the last five nights anyway. So far, I seem to be travelling about 250 miles a day by bus which cost me about 300 rupees. Food is costing me about 200. Getting a room for the night would cost me anywhere from probably 500 to 1000, more if I’m unlucky. I know India is cheap anyway, but I don’t see why I should more than double my expenditure for no good reason (except yes to help fund recycling projects).
I have realised that at no point do I wish to end each day in the place named on my bus ticket. These nodal points are invariably enormous towns that are going to be nigh on impossible to camp in. I think Joginder Nagar was a lucky fluke as it had an unusual layout. I have figured that I need to sit in an aisle seat near the door so that I can get off the bus as soon as it passes a likely looking camping spot. I have learned that the buses will pick up and drop off pretty much anywhere, so that’s really handy.
I jumped off the bus this evening just it was getting dark. Trying to find camping spots in the dark is harder. You sort of have to feel your way into spots rather than being able to judge them visibly from a distance whilst it is light. The advantage of finding places at dusk of dark is that you are also less conspicuous.
I had spotted a couple of pathways off the main road that looked like they didn’t belong to housing, so I jumped off when somebody else got off a minute later, affording me the time to extricate my pack from under my seat. Off the bus, and striding purposefully back up the busy and now dark highway, I only have to walk about a half a mile back up along a series of blind bends until I hit the jackpot. There’s an wide opening off the road which at first I think belongs to house with it lights on high up the slope. Actually where I have arrived looks like some sort of road works depot or something, and the best thing is; is that it’s totally empty. There are three small unroofed buildings and it all looks completely new. I put my tent up in one of the smaller ones, and use a rock at each end to keep the guy strings taut.
Right bedtime.
Feb 20th
I was awoken in the night by the rumble and crack of thunder and lightning. Considering I had my tent parked on a completely flat concrete surface this was a bit worrying. Was this going to turn into one of those nights where the tent gets flooded and I have to somehow rescue myself without everything getting soaked? Luckily there was no flooding, but packing away in the morning was a little tricky; especially as it was still raining on and off. I didn’t want anything wet ruining clothes, books, electronic gizmos. By the wonders of plastic bags, all was kept safe. Stinky pants washed in soap and collected rainwater, which were then wrung until the stitching almost gave way, and then dangled out of the window of the bus to Bashipur. Himachel Pradesh is certainly good value for money scenery-wise. We wind round the sides of mountains with stripy terraces everywhere and brightly painted houses far down below and way up away in the most inaccessible looking of places. Himachel people look different from the plains people. Somehow mountain people always look leaner, shinier and more rugged. It’s the weather and the extra effort required simply to live that does it.
The road is on an almost continuous downward descent, as it has been since Manali.. Tip for lazy cyclists; buy a bike in Manali and freewheel probably to Chandigarh. That’s probably about 500 miles. You will quickly burn out your brake blocks. Try not to die along the way.
Bashipur has an enormous long lake with proper white sandy beaches and is very pretty indeed. No litter, wow.
At a dhaba by the bus station I ask for chapattis and get given a thali which is chapattis with three types of dhal. I try eating it without using the spoon that came with it, and miracle of miracles I manage to eat the whole lot totally successfully and without making a mess of it. To achieve this, you break of bits of the chapatti one at a time and use it with thumb and first two fingers to scoop up whatever you want to eat. Try it at an Indian restaurant, freak out your friends that aren’t in the know, and impress the restaurant owner. But only if you don’t get it everywhere.
By the roadside on the way to where I am now (between Bashipur and Shimla) a low tarpaulined roofed structure is stood over a dead cow, with some small offerings placed in front of it. Presumably it gets left for the local wildlife to pick over.
Well I’ve been on several Himalayan bus journeys now, and I am generally very impressed by the skills of the drivers. Today’s driver though, I can categorically state was a maniac, driving at full tilt wherever conceivably possible and overtaking everything pretty much everywhere, blind bends a speciality. We all went ariel at one point as we smacked into a bump in the road, halted abruptly one of twice so as not to smash windscreens and other vehicles. A loud bang as we hit something, I don’t know what, probably a boulder. We just carried on anyway. I figure the gods will come for me when they want me… Give the man his due, there was a traffic jam that consisted of probably a couple of hundred goods trucks all barely crawling along, and he managed to get us past all of them, pretty incredible considering the generally slightly impossible width of some the roads anyway.
In the area of Arki, we pull in at a layby dhaba on a pine-filled ridge of road with fantastic views either side. I hoist my pack out and abandon the rest of the journey. It looks peaceful here. I’m feeling like I’ve spent enough time being on the move for now, and so wander off down the road for a little bit of the old perambulation. Three smiley middle-aged chaps fixing a truck say hello, and confirm that yes it is okay to walk in the forest for camping.
Peace at last. Ish. When the road above is quiet, I can hear the wind blowing the through the cedars long needles, it is a beautiful soft And gentle whoooosh sound. A bird that sounds as merry as a blackbird but probably isn’t. Another bird call that is familiar but at first I can’t place… Peacock?! Are they native here? Or is somebody keeping one? Ah, probably a buzzardy thing more likely.
Tomorrow I go to Shimla and will be sleeping under a roof this time. I have batteries that need charging up, and it will be nice to taste a bit of modern convenience. Cost of YMCA probably 600 rupees (6 quid). Cost of 92 kilometre train ride down through the remaining foothills with 102 tunnels and 988 bridges: 65 rupees.
After that I’m still not exactly sure where I’m going. Nepal probably, via a fast overnight train to Gorakhpur.
Tent pitched unavoidably on very slight slope. I hope I don’t wake up to find all of me squashed at the bottom end of the tent.
Time for Zebedee’s, G’night.
Feb 21 same spot.
I slept beautifully. I dreamed that I was flying. I have had dreams that I could fly on and off all my life, usually when I have been going through some sort of tricky life transition. The earliest I can remember was from when I was about five, dreaming that I was falling forwards endlessly through space. With each dream over the years I have gained more and more skill at controlling the flying. Last night I could zip wherever I wanted just by using my hands like rudders. I like flying dreams very much.
I woke up, marvelling at a tranquil view. Looking through the young straight cedars I can see the brightly coloured farmhouses way down the valley and climbing up the surrounding mountainsides. Now I saw homes where in the night, specklings of home lights had shone like mirrors to the stars.
I really don’t feel motivated to move. Last night I was feeling flat and had no appetite for any more bus riding. I felt bad about it because everything seemed pointless.
This morning it occurs to me that if I don’t feel like moving on then don’t. I sit, and then just do nothing the whole sunny morning, just admiring the birds and the view and the general nothing happeningness.
Its only after I have let go of everything, the route-planning, the apparent need to be ‘making the most of my time’ by constantly being on the move that I realise that (including the meditation course, which is an intense experience) I haven’t had a rest for about two months. Every day since I decided to quit being a bus driver, I have been planning and preparing for this trip, quitting my job, saying goodbye to my fellow drivers, moving out of my flat, getting health jabs, starting another job cutting hedges to earn extra cash before I go. I haven’t stopped.
Shimla will be my goodbye to Himachel Pradesh, which is an astonishingly varied and beautiful landscape. Shimla will be a big town with things I need to do there like sending emails and sorting out money.
This feels like the end of the first chapter, and better to end it here with day of recharging, so that might be ready for whatever comes next.
I am starting to get the hang of being in this new land; what began as a very high level of novelty and uncertainty I can feel dissolving into a little more familiarity and ease.
I spend most of the afternoon sewing up some burst bulges in my pack, reading some Japanese phrases, a little bit of moving pictures (terry Pratchett) for some English/disc world otherness, and some of Josie Dew’s cycling in the neon sun (about cycling round Japan) all on my very handy Kobo mini eBook reader.
At dusk, the chap who directed me off the road to this camping spot comes and says hello. I am relieved that he actually speaks pretty reasonable English, which means that I can have my first real conversation since I left the meditation retreat.
We exchange hellos and names, Khamchand asks me how long I am staying for and where am I going next? He tells me there are panthers in the forest but they don’t come close to people. He says many people are frightened of them and won’t come into the forest after dark, but really the panthers are more scared of people. This last bit I am glad about. He tells me there are peacocks roosting in the treetops too at night as well as monkeys about the place. I can imagine the monkeys could be a bit of a problem, but I’ve not seen or heard anything that sounds like monkeys so far.
He asks me if I would like to come to his workshop at the top of the hill for a cup of tea. When I tell him that I don’t want to leave my tent and my stuff unattended, he says okay, he will come back in an hour with some tea; first he has some work he needs to finish.
True to his word he returns at 7.30pm. He has brought five other chaps with him, which feels fine. They come bouncing willy-nilly down from the roadside a couple of hundred metres above, wending their way through the pines, torch lights bobbing about and them all chattering.
We sit squatting in a circle outside my tent, and introductions are made. Two are mechanics and the others are truck drivers, and duly we all compare notes on what driving in England is like compared to India.
Do you drive private or government buses? Private, but with government contracts.
Do you drive double deck or single storey bus? Both.
How many seats your single storey bus have? 53 or sometimes 70, but that’s only for school children.
You drive left-hand steering or right side? Same as India. Same steering, same side of road.
Same! Oh! That is interesting!
You have wife? Children’s? Nope.
No?! Why you not have wife? Er. Dunno. When I get back to England then hopefully that will change.
Free man! One of them says.
Does England have mountains? Yes but not as big as yours.
Do you smoke? Do you drink? Do you smoke charris? Nope, nope and nope. Got any women?
How much you earn in one month? Do you have house? Do you have land?
The guy I am talking to Khamchand, tells me that he often works until 1,2,3am to keep up with his workload repairing trucks. He works to support his wife, two children and his mother and father. He has a very big plot of land (a couple of hundred acres of mountainside from what I can work out)
I tell him that he might not earn much, but to have that much land in England he would be considered very wealthy indeed.
How much does house cost in England. They are shocked when I tell them.
You have house in England? I will never have a house in England.
I tell them how I lived in the woods for a year, they are very interested in my relatively high tech tent, examining the very thin material between thumbs and forefingers and are impressed by the small bag that it all fits into.
My main man tells me that he can never go to England, but that I must come back here again when I next come to India. I tell that I have seen very many beautiful mountains and places in Himachel Pradesh, but most beautiful is sitting here with his friends, drinking very good tea and talking.
One of them tells me that he needs to go home to say goodnight to his young child before sleeping, and I tell him with all sincerity that I may have been to many lands and seen all kinds of things, but he knows more about having family than I ever have. One man sees I have a tear in my eye, and so they stay for another five minutes before they all troop off back up the hill, chattering and bright dots of torchlight bobbing.
I call out goodbye as they near the top and all call out goodbye in return.
Looking out through the crowns of the pines shines a very full moon, a glow of perfect round light.
I look out over the silhouette of the mountain ridge against the night sky, and I feel warm in my heart.
Goodnight.
Feb 23
My morning sit is interrupted by the ‘Hellooo!’ Of Lekhram, Khamchands brother coming down the hill to introduce me to his two children Joginder (boy) and Kiran (girl) before they go off to school. He has come to see that I haven’t been eaten by any of the wildlife I think. Off he goes again, and so I pack away, intending to take up his offer of breakfast at his dhaba.
When I eventually get to the building at the top nobody is there, except a man who turns up and waits. I think he works here too. We exchange mutual silences, sometimes that’s much simpler. He picks up today’s Hindustan Times that is laying on the ground between the road and the building, carefully folded and sealed with a string. He reads the paper and I get bored of waiting. Maybe I misunderstood the offer, so I go the few hundred yards back up the road to the dhaba I originally got off the bus at and ordered breakfast. One chapatti and dhal and tiny paper cup of very sweet tea later and my demanding Englishman’s belly is not quite fully satisfied, so I purchase what I understand to be two vegetable pakora (vegetables in deep fried spicy batter made with chickpea flour). When I bite into the first one it turns out to be bread pakora. Its tell-tale triangular sandwich shape should have given it away. Not the most exciting food in the world, but it fills a gap.
I have in passing seen a couple of places offering ‘bread omlet’ which I can imagine being somewhat similar in a boring food kind of way.
After a brief chat with a young man studying economics in Shimla University who expects upon completion of his course that he will probably go to work in Chandigarh or Delhi, I walk back to Khamchand and Lekhram’s place where they both now are. I have more tea with them and we say our goodbyes, which is good to do; they are such decent people. Khamchand shows me his workshop. I breathe in deeply ‘Ah! Good smell!’ I like the smell of an oily workshop. A good strong man smell, and certainly it smells more wholesome than I do who is going to have a proper clean up as soon as I get to Shimla I hope.
Khamchand’s workshop is small, about twelve feet square, and remembering what Khamchand had told me about his working hours, I made a mental note to myself to send him a proper head torch so that he can see better whilst working.
He asks how big my workshop is, and I tell him the company I work for has sixty coaches I have to admit that our workshop is rather bigger.
After taking his address (I don’t say anything about the head torch in case I forget about it later) I board the next bus that comes.
Mountains. Mountains mountains mountains mountains mountains mountains.
Mountains mountains? Mountains, mountains-mountains. Mountains, mountains, mountains… Mountains.
Its a good job that I really like mountains.
The road into Shimla is more of the same but ever-changing undulations. Most notable just before Shimla is a ridge of mountain about half a mile long that has had its top cut off and levelled flat. If you thought some of the roads were a bit mad, try landing a plane. Get that wrong, and you just slip off the end into an exploding in the forested valley bottom kind of way.
Getting off the bus after mistakenly thinking that I was in the middle of town, where bus stations usually are, I wander off only to discover that it’s easier to pay the 7 rupees to get another bus three kilometres into the centre. When we get there I see why we initially only stopped at the edge. The old bus station where I get off properly is crammed with people, most probably tourists from Delhi and the surrounding north. Barely room to swing a cat let alone a bus. This and the fact that Shimla lies on a steep, sheer slope. That Shimla exists here in its current form is a neat trick (well it is and it isn’t).
Immediately I am repeatedly asked by the same man, (i.e. pestered) ‘You want room?’
No thank you, I already have arrangements (I don’t, but I have a place in mind)
‘You want room?’
No.
‘Very nice room sir’,
NO!
He’s given up now and immediately the cram intensifies as me and hundreds of other people squeeze our way through a non-sop wall of brightly coloured market stalls of shoes, jumpers, shoes, shoes, mobile phones, vegetables, shoes, saris, trousers, mobile phones, electrical hardware, jumpers, vegetables, mobile phones, shoes…
You get the idea.
I am already feeling slightly weird through having eaten bread pakora for breakfast on top of an entire day of eating nothing the day before. The high altitude added to heaving my 23kilo pack up the very steep and crammed and narrow walkways that meander with no clue as to my bearings except for up and down is slightly overwhelming, but doable. If reading that last sentence left you slightly out of breath from being too long, then you might get the idea of what it was like. A little bit.
I stride past unfit city-types carrying nothing at all, me moving twice as quick as them. I see a couple of porters stopping to get their breath. So it’s not just me then. One has a two foot high gas bottle strapped to his back. The other is attempting to move a standard 4 foot by 8 foot half inch thick sheet of plywood on his back. You would have to be leaning forwards in order to not have the bottom dragging on the ground even on the flat. A rare scenario where carrying something awkward and heavy might be easier going up rather than down. And he’s heading downhill. Good luck brave sir.
After a few hundred yards of having no idea where I was in the town, I surface on ‘The Mall’. It’s like coming up above water after being under it too long. There is wide space and clean pavement. A row of glass-fronted shops with the remains of the English-style Victorian-era upstairs dwellings, rather like you find on most British high streets.
They are inevitably a little on the crumbly side: very hot summers and cold winters and time do that to buildings, especially ones built in a sort of Victorian but mock Tudor sort of way.
I make a point of going to find a head torch, find one and attempt to post it along with some batteries at the post office down this end of the street.
I go to the counter. ‘Please come this side’ followed by vague hand gesture.
I step to the counter on the right. ‘Please come to this counter” a similarly vague hand wave.
I step to next counter down. ‘No please go to this counter here’ off I go back to the previous counter. It’s a good job there are no distances involved. Well done post offices for always being so conveniently compact.
Counter number two lady is looking every so slightly peeved now. ‘No no, please come to here, go to door at the end.’
I go to the door at the end and find myself and my bulky pack ushered through an office each with a computer (all running windows XP) and then into where counter man number one is sitting. I now find myself on the other side of the counter. This is the bit where I whip out my Kalashnikov and rob the post office of all its undelivered tourist postcards to Delhi.
Quite why I am sitting in here I don’t know, but I sit patiently admiring the rather curious view for about fifteen minutes. Maybe they are waiting for somebody who speaks the best English to come and deal with me or something. Maybe he’s on his lunch break. This could take ages.
It doesn’t, and slightly grumpy lady two (I think this just her demeanour rather than anything personal) with the aid of an assistant comes and wraps my torch in a nice box and makes a grand job of it. I pay my 70 rupees delivery charge and wander off back up The Mall.
I spy a Dominos pizza shop. Not a fake wobbly-hand-painted approximation, but the real thing, with real Domino Pizzas advertising boards. I scrutinise them more closely to see if they are all spicy Indian topped concoctions, but no, there is a broad reflection of international tastes on offer.
One advertising board offers me the chance to ‘Come and join our cheesey family!’. Which I think is a recruitment poster. I think.
I have enjoyed a variety of slightly peculiar adverts deriving from slightly mis-plonked English.
My favourite is a handsome man clutching a bottle of Meglow Premium Fairness Cream. I like the thought of smearing it all over our politicians and suddenly magically having a government that works together nicely. I think rather that it is a skin bleaching agent. Ouch. The things people are prepared to do to themselves. Funny really considering the number of pasty-faced white people who try to make themselves brown (or orange). But like Michael Jackson said ‘It doesn’t matter if your black or white’. And he should know.
In a lot of small towns you will see ‘Photostat laminations’ offered, except in one place where they were offering, most unfortunately, ‘Photostat lamentations’. Clearly their paper plasticising machine must be up the duff.
The creme de la creme of wince-worthy branding though comes from a popular duvet company whose name, emblazoned along with the picture of an obliviously-cheerfully smiling young lady on the box is ‘Shital Pride’ . I hope I never need to do that. Conjures horrific images that one. Good job they make duvets rather than toilets.
Next to the torch shop I venture upstairs to wake and bake cafe and eat wonderful food and do internet emaily money type bizz.
Then, up The Ridge through a happy mass of Indian tourists, probably many from the plains up to admire the mountains, past children being led around on horseback (just like an English seaside) past a real English church then to the YMCA. No junkie dive this, as I happily discover. Formerly Birdwood Lodge, distinctly colonial in style with its bright red corrugated roof and real Victorian woodwork interior, it feels unexpectedly and gloriously familiar; really a taste of home.
You have to wonder what it must have been like for all those bastions of the empire, attempting to recreate little pockets of England in whichever sweaty part of the empire they found themselves. Wanting to be home, but at the same time wanting a prestigious life-style that being far overseas afforded them. Must have been a bit mind-bending for some of them I suspect.
Expecting a price of 600 or upwards, it’s only 400. I book in for two nights. There’s a sign on the lobby desk which says ‘No washing of clothes allowed’ which I make a note of not seeing.
My room is an enormous fifteen feet square, has a red carpeted floor, an English Victorian fireplace, a mirror, a table and chair and an enormous double bed that is wonderfully non saggy and firm. All for me. Hurrah! Apart from Mumbai and Delhi airports, it is largest continuously flat space I have had the pleasure of calling home since I arrived in India
I proceed to clean teeth, shower and very definitely not to wash nearly all my clothes. There is hot water. Even more hurrah!
Saturday Jan 24 Shimla YMCA
I am woken by the clattering of tiny feet. Two Rhesus Maquaques gambolling across the plastic corrugations of the sun lounge below. Mum on the deck, advising her small baby who is currently dangling from the gutter above how best to break into my room. It has flung the window open and is giving me a very serious look like it isn’t sure what to do next. Thankfully there are bars on the window for just such occasions and me shouting ‘Fuck!’ In surprise to help give the little fella a few clues as to what to do next. Not stealing my jumper which is hanging on the bars to dry, he promptly jumps over to his mum for further instructions. The jumper would have been too big for him anyway.
Feb 24 still hanging out in Shimla
Last night a late night watching a video about Japan then half of American Beauty a film in must have watched about 16 times now, I love it. Abandon it to sleep about 3am.
Rise about 8am, today will be a noodle-doodly day with nothing especially important or striving happening. After a pretty impressive approximation of spaghetti bolognese for breakfast, I aim to find the Viceroyal’s Lodge some way out of town. Passing through the network of twisty turny sometimes parallel paths and roads I only realise I am lost when I find myself walking towards the enormous bright orange Hanuman statue high up on one the hills. I am supposed to be walking in totally the opposite direction. I re-orient myself and start heading in more-or-less the correct way. Not a single road or street has a name sign except for the mall and the ridge.
I buy three chockos?, fruit that look like kiwi. I have never tried them before so I just want a couple, which seems to majorly piss off the guy selling them to me who wants me to spend twenty rupees on about twelve of them. I don’t want twelve I want two, and hard luck if you don’t like it.
No sooner have I made my purchase than about three seconds later a waist height monkey appears out of nowhere all snarling teeth leaps onto my leg grabbing hold of my thigh with one hand and makes a vicious swipe at my paper bag of fruit. My instant reaction is to kick the thing off me, my boot to its groin, and it goes flying backwards through the air and lands upside down several feet away it screeching and me swearing at it and my chockos rolling off in their three separate directions. In the fairly busy street, people turn to see what the fuss is. The monkey scarpers and I retrieve two of the fruit and carry on my way.
Lots of people see this happen, and I briefly wonder what they think of the white tourist coming to blows with one of Hanuman the monkey gods earthly representatives…. I soon come to understand that monkeys are widely regarded as something of a menace. Earlier in the trip, I had seen a man walking through a troop of monkeys and when he bent down to pick up a stone they all automatically became very wary of him. Today I saw a middle-aged Indian woman carrying two heavy bags of food shopping and when she was obliged to cross paths with two monkeys (she had no other available route) she bent to pick up a stone. She didn’t throw it, just picked it up. It seems that some degree of self defence is required, especially when some are the size of an five year child and can appear from anywhere up above.
A well-turned out chap in sunglasses sidles over to me and tells me kindly not to eat fruit when there are monkeys around. Better to just put it in your pocket. I later discovered that even that isn’t a safe option really. My glasses may also be vulnerable to attack. Better to get about town on a monkey-proof armoured bicycle I think.
Wandering round Shimla is very pleasant. It is free of many of the usual town-related obstacles up on the upper ridges of the town. Nobody has felt the need to drag any unsuspecting cows up here, presumably because of the lack of Tibetan Buddhists. Or maybe the monkeys ate them. Many dogs may be found all lying on their sides asleep right in the middle of a wide pavement. I counted nine in one spot yesterday. They all seem healthy and contented. I previously had them down as being something of a nuisance, but I find their presence distinctly cheering compared to the occasionally threatening monkeys.
Apart from monkeys, I spend the next two days ambling about with a very decent American chap called Bryan, who is about to become a !medical graduate and has done various bits of proper aid work in Uganda and elsewhere.
Wow it is such a relief to have proper proper conversation with someone! To be able to talk beyond the very basic stuff; where are from, do you have family, how long are you in India.. It’s my own fault for not spending six months learning Hindi before I came here of course.
Just wait til I get to Japan. Oh boy.
Bryan is recovering from Delhi belly and it suits me to be on go slow in his amiable company..
This morning, my little holiday within my trip comes to an end and I’m feeling rather more ready for whatever comes next. Back north for crazy mountains and Tibetan types, then back here again for the toy train down to the plains.
Yesterday Bryan informed me that part of the reason that he was stuck in Shimla was because a group of upset Punjabi’s were feeling oppressed about being squeezed out of their caste-privileged juicy employment positions and had laid Siege to Delhi by blowing up all the railway tracks that lead into Delhi. What a pain.
So. Time to leave this wondrous haven of comfort, and back to the dust and the unknown wonders to come.
Feb 26 Rampur
After my morning breakfast of cheese paratha and chai with the nice smiley man who runs the dhaba near the YMCA, walking out along the ridge two porters are resting on a bench. These guys are basically urban Sherpas, carrying sometimes bulks twice the size of their own body mass. One asks me if I need my pack carrying, but I don’t so I decline. I find myself squinting at his friend… Hey! Don’t I recognise you? The first porter grins and says yes maybe you do on his behalf. Did I see your friend on an English television program about the railways? The first porters grin widens as he nods his head. Wow I never expected to meet someone off the telly in Shimla. I’m even sure which program I saw him on. I think it was one of the Michael Portillo railway documentary’s which featured Shimla’s station master and this particular silent porter sitting next to porter A.
The bus to Rampur winds up further through the seemingly endless Himalayas, again the character changes, the mountains seem to be higher, the valleys broader. It occurs to me that what seems so spectacular very often is not so much the actual mountains but the vast areas of space that they define, further accentuated by the tiny pinpricks of distant houses in unlikely locations, bare threads of road connecting some but not others. Do people just scramble up and down these crazy slopes if they want to go to the shops?
My journey is spent squashed into the back of the bus with my pack on my lap. A middle-aged Rampur woman in traditional dress is directly in front of me and spends almost the entire journey trying to be sick out of the window (which we later discover has been landing all over the door by which everyone is entering the bus, obliging everyone entering to grasp the wind dried sticky handle).
Next to me is another Abhishek, a young skinny civil engineering student studying at the state university in Shimla. He is going home to have the brace on his teeth sorted out. Abhishek speaks pretty good English, and he tells me about how in the last sixty years this part of Himachel has redefined itself as a major apple growing area for India; indeed where used to be pine forest is now filled with terraced orchards full of thousands of as yet bare apple trees. I see one tree that has started early dressed in magnificent pink blooms. The mountainsides must look fabulous come late spring.
Abhishek offers to point out a good camping spot just before we reach Rampur and after getting off the bus I surprised just how warm it still is even though it seven pm and totally dark. I do my usual twenty minute poke about in the dark with my head-torch on eyeing up potential spots for pitching up . I am between the main road and the river below. What is in between is a couple of hundred metres of inevitably steep slope. I find what seems like a quarry road and eventually pitch up on the crest of one of a series of piles of small broken stones. This is the flattest spot I can find and a bit bumpy with a few sticky out stones. I am also about four inches from a very long steep gravelly slope.
By some small miracle I manage to get my tent pegs to go in a sufficient distance to be useful.
I have every faith that my trusty Thermarest will shoulder most of what would otherwise be an impossible surface to sleep on….
I sit, I sleep; very soundly as it turns out.
Feb 26 Reokong Peo
In the morning I get a five rupee bus into nearby Rampur, and swap onto another bus going further north. At the bus station three cows seem to be trying to board one of the buses. Presumably they have had their fill of eating the rubbish round here and fancy their chances somewhere else. You know what they say; “the rubbish is always greener on the other side…”
On the next bus at our first stop, a cow is successfully eating the remains of a cardboard box. Quick, jump on board whilst the door is open.
Previously, between Manali and Mandi I had declared that these supposedly crazy mountain roads were a piece of cake.
Moving out of the region of Shimla and into Kinnaur was marked by a noticeable shift in the surroundings. The road follows the course of the Sutlej river upon which we passed six hydro electric dam projects, the output of which supplies electricity to the rest of India. The mountains became arid, losing much of their pine and apple tree coverage. The road in many places was hugely bumpy, with enormous boulders of rock strewn across the edges of the road. Great plumes of dust were kicked up by every vehicle of which thankfully there were far fewer than on any other Himachel road I have been on so far.
Most of today we travelled rarely any faster than twenty miles an hour mostly because of the bumpiness of the road. And yes there were moments when the bus was mere inches from dropping directly downwards into a flaming and deeply scrunched oblivion.
I’ve got to take my proverbial hat off to the guys that drive these buses. Their concentration must be total. In moments of tricky reversing, the ticket collector either gets out or hangs his heads out of the rear door and issues instructions to the driver using a loud whistle to indicate ‘go back further’ using three short bursts, and ‘stop’ using one long burst. The next bit is for bus nerds. The buses I have been on so far are all 59 seaters, two seats nearside and three together offside and five across the back. The buses have shorter wheel bases with the front wheels right up to the windscreen but with the same sort of rear overhang as a British bus or coach. They looked a bit strange when I first saw them but they are very well suited to the very high degree of maneuverability they need. You wouldn’t get a British coach or bus down many of the routes in Himachel, not without a regular dose of difficulties.
In McLeod Ganj I had found a number of playing cards that all bore the ace of spades. Our driver today is a fairly pale-skinned chap with dark sunglasses and a massive handlebar mustache. All he needs is a massive wart on his cheek and a cowboy hat and really pass for being Lemmy Kilminster from Motorhead.
One chap on the bus gets talking to me, and turns bout that he is a big sports fan and has been to Taunton to watch the cricket at the county ground.(the town where the coach company I used to work for is based and where I used to live). How’s that for a coincidence?
After a change of buses, I finally get out at Reokong Peo where I shall have to get a permit if I am to go any further. I believe that the permit is required because the road goes very close to the Chinese border and the Indians are a little bit sensitive about their proximity. The fact that the area of China that borders India here is stubbornly still regarded as Tibet may have something to do with it.
Whilst in town I am approached by a cheery traffic policeman who after asking me all the standard traveller and family questions that everyone asks, asks me for driving tips. When he discovers that I am a coach driver, he tells me that after 35 years as a traffic policeman, he learned to drive only last year, and so he wanted me to remind him of the best way to do a hill start as well compare notes as to whereabouts of the clutch, brake pedal gear-stick, handbrake and what he calls the ‘exhilarator’. We conclude that generally speaking, Indian and British vehicles have them in the same places. Well that’s always good to know, I think. Sitting now in his little traffic officers booth with two other equally enthusiastic officers, we discuss the menace of drunk drivers and people who drive whilst using mobile phones. Somehow the subject veers to discussing the particular handsomeness of Emelay one of two officers, and how he has three houses and three wives. From what I can understand he has ‘one for chicken, one for mutton, and one for fucking’ at which we all laugh uproariously.
I need to leave in order to find a camp spot before it gets dark, so I say my goodbyes, promising to see them again in the morning.
Camped in a nice flat place right on the edge of town, in a scrappy looking bit of forest. The horizon is to the south about 150 degrees of enormously tall snow-covered peaks that dominate the whole town.
I feel very dusty, the inside of my nose feels dry, and I bet I’m filthy. In the valley bottom, the local hydroelectric project is grinding its engines in some activity I know nothing of. Generating power for Delhi probably.
Earplugs in, and all my usual stuff.
Feb27
Well I tried to go all the way, but I came too soon.
Right that’s the smut out of the way. Rising from my little flat platform where someone was thinking to build a house, but hadn’t quite got round to it yet. There’s a lot of that in Himachel it seems; signs of a burgeoning population that occasional get as gar it thought would go. Seems I’m not the only one then. What am I talking about? I’ll tell you.
In order for me to be able to travel any further north up country, I am required be to issued with a permit. At first it seems to me to merely be an excuse to arbitrarily squeeze some cash out of tourists, but it soon becomes apparent that the local police really do have tourists best interests at heart. The Himalayas are literally not for the fainthearted. As I walk a few hundred yards up and down the quiet towns high street, I find myself feeling exhausted and a little dizzy. Inking that maybe this was down to my slightly imbalanced diet that largely revolves around parata and chapattis, when I head up the mountainside to visit the village of nearby but very definitely uphill Kappa, I find myself very breathless and even more easily spun out.
Clearly anyone who fancies a bit of impromptu mountain trekking had better know what they are doing. It really is far too easy to get yourself into serious trouble. Twice in my life I have looked up at a mountain and thought ‘That looks nice up there. I’ll take a couple of sandwiches, go for a bit of a climb and be back in time for tea’.
It’s way too easy for the inexperienced to over estimate their abilities. Screwing up on a mountain or getting lost in a Canadian wilderness is truly frightening. this I know for a fact. Add to that the dizzying and debilitating effects that altitude has on those who have not spent a week acclimatizing, it’s an inadvisable holiday thrill.
Take into account also that the roads north from here deteriorate further, and are as my bus driver described them, ‘Very very dangerous’. If anyone is fit to judge the state of a road, it’s a bus driver.
So, my mission this morning is to have a go at obtaining an ‘Inner Line Permit’ that would enable me to travel north for the pure frivolity of seeing what being close to the Tibetan/Chinese border looks like.
In stereotypical Indian bureaucratic style, my attempt involved asking the man at the tourist office Chendal Johan, who it soon transpires seems to know absolutely everybody as he leads me from office to office he is kept busy ‘Namaste’-ing and handshaking his way about the place. We go to slightly grumpy office number one who says I need to see the man in grumpy office number two. Grumpy office number two tells me I need to get an application form from grumpy office number one. Grumpy office number one then tells me that I need to get the required form from Chendal Mohan. At this point, I tick an as yet unticked little box in my mind labelled ‘absurd encounters with Indian beaurocrats’, and have a wry little smile to myself.
I fill the required form in Chendal’s office on the far side of the car park, at which point he explains to me that legally, they are not supposed to let people into the restricted zone alone. If I was with at least one other person it would be fine. But I’m not. Considering all the dangers I have listed above, this makes total sense. We go back to grumpy office number two, and he flatly refuses me a permit on the grounds that I am only one person.
Now, of course, you might well wonder why all three of these people allowed me to run round in circles a few times when each of them could clearly observe that I was all along right from the start an illegal singularity. Maybe there is always an outside chance that grumpy office man number two had, like our handsome friend Emelay up the road in his traffic police booth, had had a good night with his own equivalent of wife number three, and might possibly be feeling happy and lenient.
Actually I don’t mind how it’s turned out. As I explain to Chendal, something at some point was going to oblige me to turn back south again, be it legal obstacles, broken roads or acts of dire weather. If not, I would probably end up on the northern coast of Russia.
I have no great investment in where I go really, so I’m fine with circumstances making my. choice for me this time.
The camera on my phone has had some sort of digital meltdown which is tedious. I rolled all the way up from Shimla merrily clicking away only to find the pictures I took don’t seem to exist. I try and fail to get it sorted. Things aren’t helped by the fact that the town is having one of its regular but random power cuts. Now you tell me why a town that has no less than six major hydroelectric power stations on its doorstep should have power cuts?
Either way, things are beyond my control, so I visit Kalpa zigzagging up seven kilometres of rigorous hairpin bends, passing through pine forest at first and then apple orchards above. Kappa feels like an outpost too far for me; a tiny place where I am the only tourist. Lots of people look at me but nobody says hello. I sit by the Tibetan stupa at the top and flake out. I might as well do my sit, so I do, to the sounds of player flags fluttering in the hill top wind, snowy peaks on the other side of the valley, only a few hundred metres higher than where the village sits. I say a cheery hello to two young girls on the way out of the village, and that seems to make things better.
Walking back down, I wash my sticky smelly socks in a rushing culvert and proceed downhill admiring the lovely orchard gardens and simple stone houses people live in here.
Jumping on a passing bus halfway down, I get off again at the top of town. Three dogs are standing in a rubbish skip, chewing. An old dog and a cow look on in interest.
Nearing the town centre, I go into a electrical goods and phone shop where slightly clutching at straws I explain that my phone has gone slightly AWOL. Half expecting that I am going to have to buy a new phone, the young man miraculously makes mine work again. I am so grateful! I cheerily explain how I had come from all the way from boring old England and come all this way to the beautiful Himalayas and I couldn’t take any photos of them to take home with me and now I can! The guys behind the counter refuse to take any payment and tell me that I should go to the Hollywood. When I ask why, they tell me because I am just like the Jim Carrey actor. I feign deep sadness at being likened to Jim Carrey and then give them a very cheery goodbye. My camera works! Hooraaaay!!!!!
I take some test shots of town… How is it that Himachel towns manage to be thoroughly shabby and completely photogenic both at the same time? I guess it’s because there is STUFF everywhere you look; colourful knick-knacks, mess, adverts, interesting looking people. Always interesting looking people.
A studenty-looking kid comes up to me and says ‘Hello sir, how are you?’
When I tell him that I am fine actually, thank you for asking, how are you? I think I am going to go and have food in that shop over there’ the poor lad raises his eyebrows in alarm and runs off as he realises that linguistically speaking, he’s bitten off more than he can chew, while his mates are all laughing at him. Well he did ask….
I celebrate my camera success further by having supper again at Little Chef’s, which is far superior to its British namesake, however much you Hester Blumenthal them. There seems to be a party going on. Actually it is the retirement meal for a teacher who has been at the local school for the last 59 years. It is a perfect opportunity for me to take a photo of lots of Kinnauris wearing their little felt pill box hats with the curious folded upwards flap of green that goes halfway round. Everyone wears them with the green flap either to the left side of the head or sometimes to the right. I have seen three old fellas with the green flap forwards above the forehead. Perhaps it signifies status? I shall have to find out. Many of the ladies look lovely in their patterned shawls. Red is the predominant colour, followed by green, and then purple. The ladies wear light baggy cloth trousers and usually grey woolen waistcoats or sometime grey tweed-style jackets. It’s a look I have seen before in the 1980’s, sometimes worn by female hippy travellers. The light baggy trousers are brilliant at keeping a layer of body temperature air between you and both extremes of heat and cold.
Supper over, I go and tent up, same spot as last night.
Feb 28
I spend a considerable part of my morning breathing through my underpants.
The road between Reokong Peo and Shimla city is divided more or less between the district of Kinnaur and Shimla, and the contrast between the two districts is fairly clear. Shimla is the far greener of the two, which has considerably more farming and forest, whilst much of Kinnaur, being at a higher altitude, is much more sparse and arid. The mountains are much more inclined to sheer almost bare rock faces, and people doggedly attach themselves to any halfway horizontal surface, regardless of how high up the mountainside and inaccessible it might seem.
Kinnaur, having reinvented itself as an apple-growing region soon after India’s independence, is now undergoing a further transformation on its journey to industrialization.
Along with its six hydroelectric power generation schemes, pretty much the entirety of national route 22 as it passes precariously alongside what remains of the flow of the Sutlej River, is being widened or having cables laid in it. The result is that the road is almost continuously strewn with boulders, piles of rock, piles of sand, and dust everywhere.
Kinnaur is already arid; it’s not what I imagined the Himalayas to be like. The valley is warm and dry. I even saw a lizard stuck on a wall at one point. Perhaps the industrial redirecting of water is what is creating this situation. The riverbed often appears almost stagnant in one or two places, and somebody on the bus told me that at one place the water was sent thirty miles further down the valley underground.
There are a couple of places on the road where either the road has subsided and has had a temporary rebuild of dust and rock with no metalling on top. At one point the bus dutifully lurches down to the riverbed and up the other side where a massive landslide has buried both the road and the river, and we need to divert round an enormous half-cone of dust, gravel and boulders. We drive up onto the other valley side where we bump like rodeo cowboys at fifteen mph across the worst road surface ever.
I am foolish enough to be sitting at the back of the bus whilst people sitting towards the front sit happily with windows open whilst the bus fills with dust. I have my newly washed underpants in my trouser pocket slowly drying out and they become a makeshift dust mask. It’s not often that sniffing my crotch should be infinitely preferable to breathing the air around me.
All along the roadside small gangs of mostly teenage lads and young women dig and shovel trenches and piles of rock by hand. Women load themselves up with rocks to dump them somewhere else. Some of the women have babies and young children strapped to their backs for lack of available childcare. Clearly, nobody is enjoying the work. A new petrol station is being constructed, around the new pumps one young man is breaking up old concrete with a pneumatic drill, a second young man is shovelling the broken prices into a large wok-shaped container that an old man who looks about seventy stoops down and lifts to his head and carries away to dump somewhere else. It’s all happening at an incredibly slow rate. You would think that with the government ‘investing’ in projects like this, they could at least afford to give them wheelbarrows? And India has the capacity to build a nuclear bomb? I don’t understand.
The ticket collector on the bus told me a couple days ago, after asking me how much I got paid to be a bus driver, that the man driving the bus (the one who looks like Lemmy from Motorhead) earns in one month less than what I was paid for one day;6000 rupees. To put that into perspective, I tried to imagine what it would be like if I met a bus driver who earned 1400 pounds a day. He would be earning 42,000 pounds a month.
Thinking of our Indian drivers wages, him doing a reasonably skilled job on 200 rupees a day, I could only wonder at what these roadside workers were being paid. Many of them were camped under plastic tarpaulin sheets with the most basic of conditions.
At the bus station at Rampur two women, one about 19, the other about 60, both beautifully dressed. One unfolds a shabby worn plastic tarpaulin sheet onto the ground whilst the older woman upturns a halved oil drum, emptying dust, dirt crisp packets and unnameable sodden goo onto the sheet. Using two squares of wooden board, the younger woman scrapes up any other bits of detritus, whereupon they drag the sheet away to be dumped elsewhere.
Apart from the social injustices going on here, there is also a very weird irony.
People here are building shelters, tiny houses and sometimes ingenious dwellings that are invariably very simple. Sometimes, judging by the unlikely spots they have settled in, they are probably squatting on bits of no-mans land, and all because they are in a state of near dire poverty.
On the other hand, there is a growing movement of people in the west wanting to live in just such types of dwellings and in just such types of surroundings. Invariably they can’t, because it’s illegal, and it doesn’t matter how much money you earn, even if the land you want to live on belongs to you, bought and paid for. We are obliged to play at ‘being normal’.
Climbing a long long windy way up through a forest, I wake myself up out of a doze, and reconsider my sleeping arrangements. So far, I had planned on staying at the Shimla YMCA for another couple of nights, but then I suddenly felt the urge to get off the bus, near the top of the mountain but still in the forest. I think I managed to completely confuse the ticket collector. He gets the bus to stop, I say thank you and get off, then he gets off too, thinking that I am having some sort of problem. ‘No, I’m going to camp in my tent!’ . I don’t think he really gets it, but I assure him that everything is fine. He jumps back on the bus, and then the bus is gone.
I find myself about six feet from the roadside and on the edge of another steep slope (as per usual).
After the toy train from Shimla, I am at a loss to know what to do next, I think the prospect of having to figure out my sleeping arrangements whilst travelling by train is one of the things that is bothering me. Anyway; sleep.
Feb29,1 March?
The next morning is a bit of a slow mover. It was cold in the night, so getting myself from bed to bus takes longer than usual. At least I don’t need to walk to a bus stop anywhere; I just stand where I am and a bus comes along and on I get. I once acquired a girlfriend that lasted for three months without even having to get out of bed in order to have our first meeting. But that’s another story.
On the way to Shimla we stop to change a wheel cos the bus has got a flat. The drive in is unremarkable except to say the closer we got to Shimla city, the more aggressive and dangerous our driver became.
In Shimla, I head straight up to the YMCA and have another two days of fiddling with computer gizmos, doing some much needed washing and hanging out. Stop prevaricating over whether to go south or east.
I looked up ‘elephant rides’ in the lonely planet guide. It suggested one in Jaipur which it said abused its animals, and another that is nice to its animals and goes for treks into the jungle. So I’m going to go there. Coincidentally it’s very close to where Mr. Buddha gained enlightenment at Bodhgaya, and also close to the George Orwell museum. That all sounds like a very broad mix. That’s just east of Varanasi. I had decided that I didn’t want to go to Varanasi but maybe I will just because it’s there. Have I lost my sense of direction? Yes.
Tomorrow it’s Toy Train time.
Now it’s bedtime.
March 2 ? Ginnaur halfway between Chandigarh and Delhi.
Up at 6, walked to the train station, dodging the early morning monkeys out to pick up late night edible discards. Dogs having breakfast in a skipful of rubbish looking perky and refreshed after another long night of earnest barking, gearing themselves up for a day of laying on their sides inert in random public places.
Some teenage lads are playing marbles on The Ridge. At 7am? Why?!
First in the queue I pay the astonishingly low price of 25 rupees for my ticket.
I talk to four IT guys from Bangalore who have come up here on a reunion holiday, and a young man from Kolkata who works for the railway and is travelling up and down this line and others in the district making sure that electronic signalling devices are working correctly. He tells me that the British engineer who designed the railway was unable to work out how to get the line up through the hills, and was only able to do it because he was forced to take the genius advice of a psychotic rambling Indian. Afterwards when the railway was completed, the British engineer hung himself under one of the bridges. Whether this is true or a piece of anti-British propaganda, I’m not currently able to verify.
The advertised five hour journey takes six as we wait at stations for three upward bound trains to pass us; apart from the stations, there is only a single line.
The railway certainly is a feat of engineering genius, whoever is really responsible for the design. In one particularly remarkable bit of track laying, the line steps a foothill via the equivalent of two hairpin bends, and is only able to manage one of them by first working its way into the hillside via a circular tunnel that slopes at the same time in order to maintain the continuous gradient. I’m not a railways junkie, hut it truly is a total wonder how anyone was able to work out a route. Truly remarkable.
What is odd is how we are able to continuously drop through about two or three thousand metres, and the hills still look just as enormous, and the train still manages to skirt its way round at still two thirds of the way up pretty much all the way. Eventually though, the hills run out into plains and we reach Kalka with its enormous station with six platforms.
My 250 mile journey costs the princely sum of 90 rupees. An onboard full meal in a plastic tray supplied by the railway company costs 80. Very nutritious it is too. Now what do I do with the tray though?
Sign spotted at one the stations we pass through: ‘EMU STOP’.
The mind boggles.
How about ‘Maggie vegetables’ then? That’ll be Michael Heseltine, Leon Brittan, Geoffrey Howe and Norman Tebbit dunked in spicy fried batter.
Not sure whether to find somewhere to stay here (its 4pm) or to get the 5.10pm to Delhi. Finding somewhere to stay in Delhi at 21.30 doesn’t seem appealing, so I buy a ticket for the town before it on my map, Sonipat.
Using the map on my phone, I am able to find a much smaller town and work out a camping escape route in advance. With the help of three people on the train (the stations often only have one sign announcing the name of the stop; if you don’t spot it you’re screwed), I get off at Ginnaur, a little nowhere place.
Well if nature abhors a vacuum, then it must love India.
There is some crazy drumming going on which as I walk out of town becomes a deafeningly loud techno-beats party that my earplugs can’t block out, so I am writing this now at 11.30pm because I can’t sleep anyway.
Once out of the hills, there is litter everywhere and a lot of stagnant water that’s stinks of methane and other unidentifiable smells. I don’t really fancy heading south into the heat if it’s going to be like it is here.
Indian people are genuinely really friendly people and I like talking with people here. But today I can’t stand the filth. I completely don’t get why they choose to treat their own otherwise beautiful land like a total rubbish dump. It’s truly disgusting. They have a thousand and one spiritual leaders gurus and gods, and it seems that not a single one of them is able to compel them to respect the ground that feeds them.
I would go to sleep, but the mid-week late night techno bunnies are still at it. And now a load of dogs have started.
At least my camp spot by the railway is nice.
March 3? Ginnaur; between Chandigarh and Delhi
In the morning, walking up the mile long country road back to the train station softens my hard edges of yesterday. Being close up to natural things and slow… Maybe I should just walk to the airport through fields for the next three weeks.
There’s ibis and amazingly, oystercatchers, and weird stork-like birds with long hooked black beaks. I was busy admiring a cluster of huts made entirely from reeds in a field with two electric pylons there too, when I spotted two peacocks roosting in one of them. A mother rook feeds her juvenile with peckings from a de-furred dead cat in the roadside. Gory but curious nonetheless.
Very many tiny cone shaped objects scattered on the ground which turn out to be the covers over eucalyptus flowers before they burst forth. Weird clumps of cobwebs with holes in them.
Best of all is the way the dung-straw fire fuel patties are stacked into Gothic arch profiled cones then sealed all over with more dung to protect them from the weather. One of the cones has had all the patties removed leaving just a hollow shell that is practically a shelter.
On the edge of town on the level crossing four horse and traps, each pulling an unlikely looking amount of bricks each pulling maybe a ton. One of them has shed its load in the road and the cart has tipped upwards. The horses look in a reasonable state from what I can see.
At the station I am informed that there is no train to Delhi until 6pm because there has been some troubles with people messing with the lines. This is despite me being on a train that was definitely going all the way to Delhi last night, and I have seen many many trains go past since I got off and camped. A crowd gathers as one with the best English explains that I need to get a tuk-tuk then a bus to Delhi.
A young lad offers to take me to the bus stand so I jump on the back of his motorbike.
‘You have breakfast? First I take you to my house and we have breakfast’
So okay, we go to his house and he gets his slightly disconcerted mother to make me breakfast; four chapattis, lassi, Indian sweets, chai. It’s rather a lot and more than I would usually have for breakfast.
My new friend Gautaj is 18 and is in the territorial army, based in a Delhi regiment and following in his Father’s footsteps. After a slightly stilted conversation, we say goodbye to his mother and he takes me slightly down the road to his best friends house where I become the source of entertainment for the next hour or so. I am offered breakfast all over again but I am very full already, so I just about manage a banana and a sweet made from pumpkin soaked in sugar that is very like crystalized ginger. I meet the family including an eight month old toddler called Ishuora, I meet dad, a retired office accounts man sporting a diddy ponytail and relaxing in his pyjamas. A young lady comes visiting, a houri, who is happy to offer her services for five dollars. The entire family seem quite happy about this and are laughing about it… I decline though, very nice of her to offer…
Amongst the usual questions about me being in India, my family and job etcetera, one of them asks me if people in England have sex in the streets in public. I can easily see how Indians might get that idea if you look at the way we advertise cars, coffee and many other things that are actually in real life entirely unrelated to semi-naked ladies.
We all sit taking photos of each other and then it’s time to leave, and I hop onto the back of my new friends motorbike once more, squeezing down the narrow alleys past mothers washing clothes and another woman inspecting a cows fur for intruders.
Gautaj offers to show me his school and special historical sights in Ginnaur, but I decline his offer explaining that I want to get to Agra today and not end up stuck in Delhi.
Weaving up the street in and out of everything is fun and soon enough we are the other end of town at the bus stand.
Instantly, a bus arrives and hastily I say goodbye and thank you to him.
I was really quite touched that a total stranger could show so much kindness by inviting me into his home and introducing me to his friends, and wanting to show me his town too. It’s something English people won’t do, though some Americans will.
There’s some things English people are generally just plain rubbish at and being open to new people tends to be one of them.
The bus to Delhi cost 30ruipees and takes an hour. The cab that I get ushered into as soon as I step off the bus takes me 15 minutes down the road and costs 500. Something in me just goes completely useless as soon as my sweat glands have gone limp through overuse. I don’t do heat very well. I just go into ‘whatever’ mode.
At the bus stand the second I find the bus for Agra, a decidedly ropey looking vessel, and wait on it for an hour until it time to go. During my wait, a young woman tries to get my attention by addressing me, clapping her hands and then poking me several times to try to get me to stop ignoring her. She fails. There I go being totally English and not open to new people. In general, I very rarely enjoy unsolicited advances of strangers when I am in public. I am mostly a solitary kind of person, and tend to dislike people wanting me to give them my attention or whatever else they probably want. Yes I’m a hypocrite.
When the departure time comes, the bus gets as far the exit and after trying to get more fares (I am his only customer) he gives up and turns his engine off. I have to get another bus. Oookay… How long am I going to be stuck in this decidedly unlovely bus station? A matter of seconds as it turns out. Practically the first bus I see, a much more handsome carriage, declares itself ‘Agra-Agra-Agraaa!’ bound, I hop on and the bus soon fills and off we go.
Yes, Delhi is chaos. More chaos than anywhere else I have been to in India. It is more chaotic than anywhere else I have ever been ever at all times ten. There really are people everywhere.
The bus station is next to a brand spanking new flyover, of which Delhi is constructing many miles of giant ariel concrete spaghetti. Imagine the flyover bit of the M4 at roughly junction 3 between Hounslow and Chiswick in London. It looks rather like that.
There various little areas of pavement-like no-man’s land that serve no purpose. On each of these there are people sitting. At first I think they are waiting for buses, but when I see the kinds of things that they have about them it becomes apparent that this is where they have chosen to live. Two young women, one old woman and two toddlers sit on a six foot square blanket about three feet away from roaring high speed traffic on the corner of the road junction as it passes under the flyover. I couldn’t think of anything much more desperate. If I had seen this before the woman at the bus stand came poking at me, perhaps I might not have ignored her in quite such a defiant manner.
The bus takes a long long time to escape the traffic black hole that is Delhi. It’s slow. And massive. And long. And tedious, traffic-wise. All the roadside carnival mess of people and stalls and shops keeps me engaged. There’s an overhead metro railway system being extended alongside the road about thirty metres up that stretches for several miles until it reaches current point of construction.
So much of the modern western concrete world I have dreaded all my life, but looking at the new industrialisation and construction happening all around, I can’t help but think that perhaps by building infrastructure, Indians might stand a chance of having a lifeline out of their chaoses.
Delhi actually seems to be much freer of rubbish than anywhere else I have been. No dogs or wandering cows either. There is so much traffic anyway, any random animals would just totally bung up the works.
Eventually we escape Delhi and the 150 mile long road to Agra is almost entirely lined with buildings and tons that just run one into the other, with only a few but largeish agricultural reprieves.
As the sun goes down, the dung fires start burning, along with the various occasional piles of plastic litter. The air is thick. with smog that truly is eye-watering.
At Agra I jump into a tuk-tuk which ferries me miles across the city, doesn’t know the address I want to go to (he does now), and eventually brings me to the Big Brother Hostel, which is charging 99 rupees a night, although the proprietor possibly did some sleight-of-hand move on me by changing a 500 rupee note for five 100 notes and then telling me at I had to give him the 500 note when I am sure I already did. I drop my passport and credit and identity cards all over the floor. I am very tired and more than a little grumpy. He tells me to stay cool, and check again my money in the morning. I apologise for being tired and grumpy. I go to wash my face and my face gets covered in blue stickiness that I have enormous difficulty getting off. I think the air pollution is so bad that my soap won’t get it off. Now my entire face and head feels greasy and sticky. I have never encountered anything like it. I got most of it off by using the Dettol that is by the wash basin, presumably because soap doesn’t work. I scrubbed with a flannel but I still feel kind of sticky and greasy.
Its half past one in the morning, and tomorrow I am going to see the Taj Mahal and have a nice day.
March 4, 5
I discover that it’s not pollution that’s the problem but the high salinity of the water that renders it impossible to wash with soap. I remember we had this difficulty when I was sailing with the floating neutrinos in the Gulf of Mexico. We just went crusty. With salt mostly from washing with just sea water. You kind of go greasy and salty. You could almost cook with it. But only if you’re gross.
Today is Friday and ‘The Taj’ as it is casualty known is closed; the mausoleum was built by a Moghul (Muslim) and as such the monument has a mosque incorporated into the building to its left, so the whole place is only open for Muslims between 12 and 2pm for prayer.
I have a slow day taking a rickshaw ride with chap called ‘Lucky’ who wants to give me a ride to a carpet salesman. Despite being emphatic about only wanting to make me happy (with his hand on his heart) he refuses to stick with my simple request to go to the west gate of the Taj. I didn’t even want a ride in the first place, I was quite intent on walking, but he hooked me in with some story… Eventually I gave him the 200 rupees I had promised him (he had told me that he rents the rickshaw for 200 rupees a day, and he had had no business, it being a Friday). I told him ‘no’ repeatedly to his wanting to take me to the carpet shop and managed to get me rather pissed off with his sincere desire to only make me happy, which of course was utter bollocks.
I got out, he followed me, so I about turned in the narrow busy street, which he couldn’t do and I effectively lost him immediately. Coincidentally I was next to a park entrance and spent an hour watching the interaction between rooks and squirrels all trying to eat the same bowl of crumbs that someone had scattered at the base of a young banyan tree.
This was the loveliest time I had had so far apart from the two times that somebody (different person each time) would seemingly see my quiet time watching the animals and decide to come and sit in between. As soon as they sat down, I got up and walked off then came back. The second time I gave up and left.
I saw a real live camel. It reminded me a lot of a moose. Something lumpy looking that looks like it’s made of random body parts Frankensteined together, but actually moves with incredible grace. I once decided that if I were to form any sort of co-operative, I would call it ‘Camel Co-op’ because as everyone knows, a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
So the camel was good, though walking back through the narrow streets and the twenty or so ‘Hallo sir!’s and ‘Excuse me mister, from where is your country?’s was starting to feel a bit old right now. At one point some poor lad, only after some desperate sale of something I didn’t even engage with, when he asked where I was from, my terse reply was ‘Mars’. He was probably merely confused by this but as I walked further on I decided to myself that this was not the way to get through either the street or my day and that I should reassess the quality of my grip on things.
I spent the evening in the hostel meeting five very nice Czech Kung Fu experts and took them the same way I had been to the park and back, which was something of an adventure; the now-nighttime narrow unlit streets jammed with tuk-tuks rickshaws motorbikes and people all going in largely random directions.
We had a fabulous meal laid on by the hostel and chatted with Daisy a well travelled young woman who seemed to have three elbows on account of some iffy surgery in Mexico paid for by a tequila company after she fell down a large hole that they happened to own… She showed us her wonky arm. It was like when grinning young boys bend their fingers backwards just to gross you out, but on a much larger scale.
And a splendid Catalan cyclist who had been to Japan and cycled through south east Asia in a couple of months, and à young Nepali chap who, wanting to sign up to an Indian run computer course based at home in Nepal, had come to India purely so that he could fill in the online application form as it was impossible to do it from outside India! Completely bloody stupid, and very similar to the impossibility I had in trying to pre-book an Indian train from the UK. I would have thought that it doesn’t bode well for the quality of the education he might be about to receive, but I suspect that he probably doesn’t have a huge number of options available to him.
The Nepali chap introduced us to a band called 1974ad, who make really nice easy to listen to rock music. Go YouTube.
Went to bed late, woke at three, went to buy a ticket for ‘The Taj’ … First in the queue at 5.30am chatted to two middle aged Irish sisters (biological, not the nunny kind) and made my way the 5 minute walk to the entrance gate. I haven’t seen this many white people since I left England. What a funny flabby poorly postured rabble we can sometimes be!
After dutifully taking about a billion photos, firstly of ‘The Taj’ and then I took photos of people taking photos. You could do a photo book, purely of people from all over the world doing that pose in front of ‘The Taj’ where they very amusingly create the impression that they are either picking ‘The Taj’ up by the stalky bit on top with their fingertips, or that they are holding it in the palm of their hand. I spent all day there, and out of the thousands of people walking round I would estimate about one third of them had happily but uselessly tried to pick up ‘The Taj’ by their fingertips.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that ‘The Taj’ was the most photographed building in the world. All the wealthy people with cameras are clicking away relentlessly in all directions, but mostly at ‘The Taj’, usually with family or friends standing in front claiming their tourist safari hunting trophy.
I have a rather weird day. On the one hand, I am not very good with crowds of people, and part of me just wants to talk to people from my own culture because I haven’t done so very much. I see lovely English ladies, and everyone is in their own group doing their own thing and I can’t help but feel a bit lonely. Having only had about four hours sleep certainly doesn’t help me to not feel a bit rubbish internally.
On the other hand, this is an amazing place to people watch. All kinds of Indians, people from south east Asia, some Japanese and varieties of Europeans ranging from the sweaty-just-got-off-the-plane types who look a bit lobstered and bewildered to those who have been here long enough to have adopted Indian dress and India’s heart into theirs.
I notice that people from a certain part of Asia (don’t know where) have the biggest hat brims in the world, that would put your average Texan baseball cap brim in the shade. One very happy lady (I have some unsubstantiated idea that might be from Vietnam) has unfeasibly massive curly black hair and a green sunshade embedded into it that sticks forwards about a foot. Not exactly all round vision. Still, she seems to like it.
I exchange grins with a sheepish looking Buddhist monk, shaved head and in red robes. I can’t quite decide whether his sheepish look is one of alarm at suddenly finding himself surrounded by this much worldliness all in one go or whether he maybe feels a little bit naughty for being there. He looks about twenty and seems to be with his parents. Maybe dad has said to him ‘All right then son, it’s nice to see you enjoying yourself at that nice monastery place, but come and let yer hair down for a bit. Oh you haven’t got any. Well you know what I mean any road.’
Puts fatherly arm round his sheepish son’s shoulder. ‘Tell you what, we’ll go to that ‘Taj Mahal’ you’ve always said you wanted to go to see that and yer mother quite likes it too, and I’ll tell you what, how’s about we all go for a pint after, let yer hair down for a bit. Oh no, you haven’t got any.’
Tomorrow, I think I am getting a train to Gaya, for the nearby town of Bodhgaya where famously (well, in Buddhist circles anyway) old Mr. Buddha had his eureka! moment.
March ???
After no less than five nights at the Big Brother hippy hostel meeting nice European kids and the excellent Arpen and his lovely fellows running the hostel, I prevaricate over my choice of destination until I end up heading not to Bodhgaya but in entirely the opposite direction to Rajasthan with Vicky, Hanya and Tomash. Virginian eternally hobo English teacher, Polish-American English teacher and a graphics software chap.
We escaped the gravitational field of the hostel finally and took the sleeper train to Rathanbhore, arriving at 2am. Which is all very well except that we got off one station too early. Indian trains make no announcements, and the stations themselves will usually have only one station sign in English, making getting off at the right place a bit of an art form. We basically have to keep asking people.
We sleep on the platform, and with a regular stream of freight trains half a mile long clattering deafeningly past, I manage minimal sleep, but I do get to cuddle up to two of the stations dogs, one a small black and white puppy and the other his pleased dad, a sort of short haired lurcher.
The night staff on the station ignore us, but when morning begins I am interrupted from my sit with the offer of chai. The town were intending to get to is big place, and where we are now is the quietest most litter-free rural spot I have been to in India so far.
I am loving the morning view, and head off for a wander into the fields investigating the wheat and mustard crops. Afterwards, I am offered Chai again from the stations Chai wallah and we have an interesting time discussing plants, me showing him the plants that are here that also grow in England, and him showing me one or two edible wild plants.
At ten we get the train again to the next version of Rathanbhore (both have almost the same name) and spend the day on a wildlife safari featuring langue monkeys, one languid tiger and a host of ok fabulous tree fire magpies which apart from loving being photographed, have a curious globally to called head bobbing dance that sounds beautiful and is mesmerising to watch.
Tomash has organised the itinery, Vicky is organising all the trains and accommodation, and I don’t need to think about anything at all if I don’t feel like it. I don’t even really know what the plan is. This is all rather odd for me;
DOT DOT DOT
March 13 Udaipur.
Its my 48th birthday. I am constipated rather.
As of Rathambhore, I ate some leftover rice and spinach I had stashed, unrefrigerated, in a tin can, ate it the next day and spent the entire following night regretting it. My human Catherine wheel only lasted the night, but there’s nothing like travelling with other people and having a permanent knot in my stomach to disincline me to write anything.
I wish I was completely unlergified. I am not, possibly because of a slight inability to digest pancake type foods or pretty much anything that isn’t fruit or ice cream…
Its my birthday today, and I find myself fantasising about sitting on a doorstep overlooking an English early summer landscape whilst watching distant thunderous grey skies, with the opening splats of a rainstorm landing on the ground near where I might be. Waiting eagerly for a good drenching and new cool air. There’s something about going away that adds an extra angle to remembering just how beautiful England can be.
After Rathambhore, we got a train to Bhundi which had blue houses and a very nice fort, stayed in a nice hostel, then we went to Chittaurgarh; the others went and looked at yet another fort miles away up a hill whilst I had a tootle round the town holding onto my stomach and sitting watching the world go by, which consisted of an enormous quantity of motorbikes (all various models of Honda heroes, no Enfield’s at all) and of admiring the always gorgeous dress sense of Indian women.
The Hotel Meera hosted our backpacks and lunched us during the day. From what I could establish, Mother Meera, an Indian female guru/saint popular with some westerners has her ashram up on the hill where the fort is, but there was not enough English spoken for me to be certain.
Its starting to feel more like desert country, more how I imagine the middle east to be.
Taking an evening train to Udaipur, trying not to throw up. Tried forcing it to get it over and done with, but nothing doing.
Udaipur begins to roll past the window and in the dark of the evening continues to do so for whole minutes. Oh shit we’ve come to some metropolis. My favourite, not.
Chittaurgarh train station was a noxious roller coaster for my nose and guts.
Udaipur station smells of incense.
Outside Muslim tuk-tuk drivers in their elegant long shirts and funky skull caps try to convince us that we must have two tuk-tuks for the four of us as it is illegal for four people to travel in one, which is a new one on us. Not buying it and after some small conflagration, we all jam ourselves into one tuk-tuk and the non-existent issue is resolved.
Travelling with others is very much a mixed blessing for me, but the Americans pull out their innate negotiating skills and sort the whole thing out. They know how to drive a hard bargain and are always keen to make sure they get one. Me personally, haggling feels too much like confrontation for my average Englishness and anyway my natural socialism figures that the prices that drivers demand maybe outrageous for an Indian to pay, but indeed I am not an Indian and amounts that people can argue over don’t feel significant. Back home I earn in one day what a bus driver earns in a month.
I have had the strange fortune to have met a significant number of western tourists that get upset that they are expected to pay ten times more than a local to see a tourist attraction. Why should we be treated any differently? We are being ripped off! They argue.
So presumably, by their logic, corporate giants should pay the same tax as the rest of us?
Don’t object to being made to pay more and then complain about the lack of public facilities.
Udaipur is clean! There is almost no litter, it doesn’t smell weird and only on the edges of town are there a few random dogs. I haven’t seen a single cow.
Another hostel, more European kids. My companions spend the day on a shopping mission for gifts to send back home. I hire a slightly lethal sub-mountain bike thing from the hostel and cycle round the edge of the larger of the two main lakes that make up Udaipur’s water based character. Everywhere is clean, and there are interesting sculptures along the way.
Clearly, India has the capacity to enjoy a degree of comfortable civilised comfort should it happen to have the money and legitimate governors both at the same time. It makes me wonder which it is that leaves so much of India swimming in its own mess.
Today I think will be my last day tagged onto someone else’s tour, so I need to get my brain in gear and start planning my next Richard Terry-shaped move. I think it’s going to be Bodhgaya, primarily based on the fact that nowhere else has suggested itself.
Udaipur is situated on lakes and is rather like Venice. Some scenes from Octopussy were shot here. With its beautiful buildings and gently lapping waters, I have never liked a city so much.
A couple who I first encountered in Bundi I pass again for a third, fourth and fifth time. He looks rather like someone I know from home that is a very old friend, so it is easy to spot him. I wonder if there must be many people on this tourist trail that I am encountering repeatedly without realising it.
On a gently arching stone footbridge a man is playing a small gourd based instrument with a bow. It has a drone string and nine resonator strings and sounds wonderful. The man, Krishna, is a Rajasthani gypsy who works all the Rajasthan festivals. His wife sitting next to him selling jewelry is his singing companion. Mesmerized by his playing, I sit with him, have a go and after an hour of talking to anyone that comes past, finally buy one.
The morning has drifted away, I stop at a smoothie stall. The power is being wonky so the stall owner fixes me the best fruit salad I have ever had, topped with roasted sesame, dried mint, yoghurt, Smokey honey and finally finely chopped beetroot (at my request) and pomegranate seeds.
The stall owner used to be a miner. Rajasthan has a variety of mineral mines and he tells me tales of his former life underground and the several times he cheated death. He says he loved the work but finally coming to the surface and chatting to his customers has proved to be even more satisfying.
Miraculously, I head directly to where I am to meet the others and we all arrive within a couple of minutes of each other. We head to a cafe and I am given a big gooey chocolate birthday cake happily proclaiming me to be 18 again and a lovely clean tee shirt with a huge red om sign on it. Now the hippy tourist look is complete…
They had arranged a sunset boat trip, but I am leaving early to get a train 26 hours east to Bodhgaya.
Goodbyes are often weird for me, and this one is too, a little.
Its only after getting on the train that I feel like maybe I should have stayed with them. I have had no plan really for India south of the Himalayas, and I have ended up pretty direction less.
I went with them in the first place because I fancied Hanya one of the women, but being in a group and both of us I think being a bit socially inept(her admission) we barely even spoke to each other. What with me finding being around phone absorbed backpackers rather irritating (I reluctantly got used to it) and me being ill and not wanting to go on as many sight seeing things as them I ended up on my own a lot. And then I do what I usually do when I find a woman attractive… I just don’t talk to her hardly at all because I don’t want to seem over bearing. I am indeed a twit.
I sit for eight hours in general class with bodies strewn throughout the totally over filled carriage I am in for the entire journey. It wasn’t absolutely the worst experience ever, but it does incline me to make more effort to go second class.
I somehow have paid for a ticket to Delhi but I get out some way before at Bharatpur next to Agra., arriving at 2.45am.
As if to compensate for everything, I find a beautiful huge area of clean unlittered wasteland to camp in. In the morning I can see that I am camped next a coconut tree with what I at first took to be particularly dangly coconuts but are actually twelve weaver bird nests.
Right now I have just discovered that I am right in the middle of some goat pasture as some smiley Indian lady has just told me.
My still undecided mind translates itself into self frustration and irritation. Having already read in the lonely planet brick that Bharatpur is not an especially travellers friendly town (whatever that is supposed to mean) I arrive at the train station led by some teenage boys who offer to take me to the post office so I can offload some redundant stuff back to England. The post office is shut, I jump in a tuk-tuk that takes me across town to the main post office. No, I can’t package my junk there, I have to do it in the market place. Somewhere.
Across all of India, probably half a billion people know how to ask what country I am from and whether I am married, but right now not a single person can fathom my desire to wrap objects in cardboard and sellotape.
My narkiness levels sky rocketing for no rational reason, I abandon the mission, return to precisely where I had started twenty minutes earlier having achieved nothing but having donated two hundred rupees to the bank of tuk-tuk.
I further fail to buy fruit of any kind and am obliged to settle with potato chips. Really not what I want. Bemused and annoyed at the station, an elderly man in white silently holds out his hands to me, cupped. I give him a hundred rupees and suddenly I feel like crying. What the hell have I got to be so upset about? My worries are nothing, not really.
I buy a ticket for Jodhpur. That’s it. I’ve made a choice now. Maybe I will catch up with Hanna and ??? Again. Maybe I won’t. Feeling like I don’t really like being on my own, and maybe I shouldn’t have voluntarily abandoned them.
On the train I sit in the doorless carriage entrance, legs dangling in the wind. Racing through pristine Rajasthani farmland I am soon absorbed, and somehow Bharatpur disappears, my worries along with it.
I spend half the journey talking to a friendly eighteen year old man on leave from his army base in Chennai, going home to Jodhpur to see his mum for a month, his army mates with him. Another man in his forties joins us and we talk about English literature and Shakespeare. Their knowledge of such things leaves me far behind.
Jodhpur station arrives in the early evening, and I decide not to get off. My new friend leaves and the train rolls on ever westwards.
The landscape is largely flattish with occasional ridges of high hill on the skyline. Men and women are out cutting and carrying wheatstalks, stacking them in small stools and larger stacks, great bundles on their heads not a tractor or a wheelbarrow in sight. threshing machines separate wheat from chaff snowing great piles of the stuff in piles twenty feet long and four feet deep. The chaff will become goat fodder and part of the mix for dung patty fire fuel.
Elegant swaying squares of ripening wheat gives way to scrubland with rain-worn gouges in the landscape, bare rocks begin to speckle the ground and life starts to take on a tougher hue.
At some point I must have blinked, because suddenly the train is thundering its way into the early dusk across great broad flats stained with great white blotches and delineated with long mounded bunds about a foot high. Are these salt flats?
Five minutes later, the flats have ended and are replaced by small scale industrial yards tractors shovelling around great mounds of stark whiteness and bagging it all up. Interspersed between housing areas, I can’t imagine what it must be like to have your life so thoroughly pervaded by salt. Awful probably.
The ticket collector comes and asks for the ticket that I don’t have. I frankly admit that I don’t have one, saying that I had asked for a ticket to Jaipur and been given one to Jodhpur. I am baldly told that I need to pay a ticket fine. Gritting my teeth and expecting something horrendous, he asks me to pay 210 rupees as my fine. Which is probably the cost of the ticket if I had actually bought one.
A man travelling with his three year old son spend the journey absorbed in silently watching the world roll past them through the window.
Arriving in Jaipur in darkness, it is the first railway station I have been to that has rats and cockroaches. There is à famous rat temple near Jaipur, but the roaches I have no explanation for beyond that the station must have hit some kind of filth threshold. Looks alright to me in an Indian kind of way.
I bunked trains, and now am committed to the all night train to Jaisalmer, a town way out in the Thar Desert region.
Earplugs in, an entire three person bench to myself, I am set for the journey. My place was found for me by a tout who wants me to stay in his hostel in Jaisalmer and probably go on his camel safari too. I tell him I’ll think about it when I get there.
Rattling and clattering, the windows won’t stay shut and it get actually a little bit cold. All my extra clothes on, the train grumbles to a final standstill at 5.30am in Jaisalmer Station.
Getting off I stand there sleep deprived and plan-less (again). My tout approaches me again and fortunately abandons me more or less immediately when I show no interest in doing what he wants. A tuk-tuk driver tries to get me to go on his safari. I am pestered by flies. I just want to sit down and get my head together if it’s all the same to you. I attempt to do so and a policeman/soldier not sure which tells me that I can’t sit on the platform. Err excuse me? What about all the other people here doing precisely just that? Clearly I mist be starting to look like lowlife scum. I tell him that will leave as soon as I have a plan that doesn’t involve getting harassed into confusion by blasted tuk-tuk drivers. Which seems to him reasonable, thankfully.
I have chai with a random Frenchman for five minutes then jump in a tuk-tuk and ask to be taken to Dylan’s guesthouse in town. Whatever else I might think of the lonely planet brick that takes up half my rucksack, it is definitely useful for enabling me to outwit tuk-tuk drivers.
Apart from seeing that Jaisalmer is one of the westernmost points in India and that it has lots of camel safaris, I know absolutely nothing whatsoever about the place.
I jump out the tuk-tuk in the middle of what seems to be a cow hang-out before any of the shops have opened. Going for a pre-hostel wander, I blunder up empty super narrow streets with barely anybody but for a few elegant cows wandering about and a ropey old dog baying away like it has a stomach problem, which it probably does.
The entire town is built of yellow sandstone and very many of the buildings have fabulously intricate stonework that looks brand new. Clearly this desert town is largely untouched by the griming and rotting affects of pollution. The quality of the workmanship is wonderful, and these are not palaces or temples; just ordinary shops and houses.
One dhaba is open, and I go inside for my first parata for ages. I am made breakfast by an amusing chap who explains to me how the chap sitting grinning happily next to me in his ‘Splendda in the Mudd’ baseball cap is trying to kop off with the young Indian lady sitting opposite and that he already has over thirty girlfriends in different towns. He then further explains to me that every time ‘Splendda in the Mudd’ gets himself a woman in his shop, he locks up the shop for an hour and leaves them to it until he comes back.
Lots of happy looking cows here. I stop and give a few a welcome chin scratch and a cuddle.
Eventually finding Dylan’s guesthouse in the tangle of unnamed streets, I book in and sign up for their camel safari without too much examination. It seems cheap, that’s good enough for me.
I crash out and recuperate from two days of extenuous train travel.
The following morning I breakfast on the roof with an American couple the male of the two, Dan, is telling me all about Indian spirituality and All sorts of philosophy which is slightly too much over breakfast. He is what some friends of mine would call a ‘bliss-ninny’ and seems to be laying on his aura of enlightened peace a little thickly. I can see his wife rolling her eyes in a heard-it-all-before kind of way.
Our safari participants are called together and we all bundle into two jeeps. Twenty minutes out of town, we stop to meet villagers for a look at ordinary Thar deserter villager life. We all go with it, but bliss ninny starts ranting and stamping his feet like a spoilt five year old going ‘We want camels! We want camels! This isn’t what we signed up for! These people don’t want this! Stop wasting our time! We didn’t pay for this! We want camels!’.
This is the same man who only thirty minutes earlier had been telling me how important it was to find the god inside ourselves.
We get back in the jeep, a young British Indian woman in the front seat and me in the back with ranting bliss-ninny and his suffering wife between me and him. He carries on, claiming to speak for all of us. He is really pissing me off now and I have to tell him ‘Excuse me sir, but you do not speak for me’.
He shuts up finally and I get to talk to the organiser about what we can see around us. We stop at an abandoned village and bliss ninny comes up to me and says ‘Well done kid for distracting that tour guide and getting him off my back’.
I am getting closer and closer to giving this moron a good hearty kick up the base chakra.
My two days and nights in the desert are going to be filled with this guy? Help!
At our desert start proper we are introduced to our camels; Blackie, Johnny Walker, Michael Jackson, And my allocated steed ‘Julian’.
What kind of a name is that for a camel? Makes me think of Kenneth Williams’ ‘Hello I’m Julian and this is my friend Sandy’ from Round the Horne (sixties British radio comedy show).
When we stop at lunchtime, our legs hurt from sitting frog-legged for two hours. We sit on blankets whilst our three drivers prepare lunch for us. The camels are hobbled and they shuffle about awkwardly looking for bushes to graze. One of them looks like it is moon-walking. Have a guess which one.
Our good friend Mr. bliss ninny has now decided to have a tantrum over not believing our hosts when he demands to know if the food is vegetarian. When I suggest he reads the labels on packets to check for egg content he snaps at me ‘I was a vegetarian before you were born son! Don’t you tell me what to do!’
Ooh this is going to be so much fun I can tell!
Fortunately the other six people are all nice easily-pleased lets-not-make-a-fuss English youngsters and I sit and have a nice chat with them whilst we all ignore the Americans.
We have a lovely lunch of very definitely vegetarian curry and chapattis whilst bliss-ninny has a single solitary orange and is clearly nursing a major sulk.
We set off again after a long lunch break and when his camel sidles up to mine, bliss-ninny hisses conspiratorially ‘This isn’t a real camel safari!’.
What I want to say to him is ‘Look around you. You’re in a desert. These are real people. This isn’t fucking Disneyland.’
Instead I can’t even be bothered to furnish him with a response. From now I shall ignore him unless he shows some kind of remorse.
We stop at another village in the middle of what looks like unproductive nothing.
The ground is baked hard, there are large chunks of square stone strewn all around. They have one single crop of watermelons a year when the rains come. For the last seven years there has been no rain. I can only hope that the men of the villages are all camel drivers because I can’t see how else they would make a living. Surviving here must require substantial degrees of faith and genius.
We are invited in to take photographs of a mother and her baby. We all feel very awkward. The mother has a non comprehending look when none of us take up her invitation to come in and drink chai. An older woman has a pleading look in her eyes. I feel wretched and I doubt I am the only one. Our privileged playing with camels is brought home to some other stark reality and I don’t respond. I don’t bridge the gap between me and them. I feel very quiet and sad for my failure. A young boy of about four rescues me and gets me to play with his toy tractor and trailer, loading it with small stones and tipping them out somewhere else. His younger sister watches us with a serious look with a deeply furrowed brow as if she really not sure about having these random westerners in her garden. Eventually she graces me with half a smile.
We Leave after about forty minutes and the group is noticeably subdued. The complaining American leaves the village with a group of children trailing him, so maybe he must have done something right after all.
Nobody says anything for a while.
Another hour or so of passing through largely inedible scrublands, weaving through empty ploughed fields waiting for the one big event of the year, barren rises and dead flat pans of nothing but gravel and dung beetle tracks.
Herds of shaggy black and white longhaired goats drift through and around looking terminally pleased. Cattle occasionally. I have no idea what they do eat, but at least it isn’t plastic bags.
Hooded crows, coal tits scatter themselves about us especially at mealtimes. A flock of nonchalant peacocks ignore us. In the morning we are greeted by that quintessential sound of an English country morning; the mellow coo-cooing of wood pigeons.
We pitch camp on the edge of a real live desert sand dune for the night. Other safaris have similar plans and faraway we hear distant frantic drumming and music. That’s what people come to the desert for obviously. Personally I find pretty much every kind of drumming to be over-rated. I’ll just stick with the sound of crickets if it’s all the same thanks.
The English kids are yacking in a teenagey sleepover kind of way. They are all very sweet and I am glad that I am with them especially as they are all from only one town away from home so we literally have lots of common ground. I camp up on top of the dune away from everyone. In the morning the one Australian in our group tells me that was kept awake half the night by the American guy arguing with his wife about who actually owns the bag that they both had their stuff in.
We breakfast on boiled eggs and toast and jam, and American guy looks very rueful when I say hello to him.
I have made an idiot of myself lots of times and felt enormously stupid/embarrassed/apologetic at my sometimes social uselessness. I kind of feel for him. I hope he makes whatever breakthrough he needs to make and starts having a more beautiful life.
After breakfast we saddle up and lose half our group. Two English guys had only signed up for one day and now it seems the Americans are turning back too. Can’t say I’m not relieved.
The three English young school leavers from Exeter; all female, James a quietly spoken graduate from Perth and Suban, Ali and ? Our camel drivers and myself travel the morning quietly, I think the others have all got headphones on most of the time. I wonder if I am the only western person in the world that likes and can cope with quiet?
I am surprised that the detail of our circular trek through this landscape could hold such variety. Every hour our landscape changes shape. Wannabe field patterns change, trees form savanna vistas in some places but not in others. Dung beetles mice snakes and lizards leave wriggly nocturnal etchings in the sand. A lone vulture eyes us from a stone shelter in a cemetery. Egyptian geese honk high above in a circular spiralling drift to and from destinations unknown. A single deer hides in a deep baked earth furrow hoping not to be spotted. Other camel safaris break onto the horizon and spoil our game of seclusion, but I don’t mind.
All around in the distance giant wind turbines owned by the English, the French, the Swiss, the Germans. Stealing Rajasthani wind and selling it to Pakistan as electricity. I ask what compensation these companies have given the Rajasthanis. ‘None’ is of the course the predictable answer.
Our second and last night of camping is again on dunes, this time quieter and genuinely secluded. The wind blows in the night after a glorious sunset and I have to cover my face to sleep. When I wake, my bedding is full of sand as is what remains of my hair.
The wind makes the many turbines softly roar. A dung beetle tries to push a camel turd up my trouser leg. A slightly late birthday present.
Some people complain that they ‘don’t get anything’ on their camel safaris. Ours was pretty darn basic and I was the happier for it. We had identical breakfasts both days, potato and cabbage curry food each meal with chapattis. No singing, no dancing, no music. No ’boutique camping’ only a blanket on top and a blanket underneath. Simple. As it should be.
Our trek ends after lunch and back at the hostel I scrape a very thick layer of dried sweat and sand off of my head and wash. Heading out for a succession of ice creams, I talk to a fantastically nice and happy American chap called Dan from Montana, a 52 year old ex computer programmer who ‘escaped’ from the dread routine of normality to pursue novelty fun and differentness. He is probably the nicest person I have met so far in India, effusing a natural bubbly enthusiasm for life. A wiry chap in a baseball cap and glasses, he quit his job and swapped it for an RV to tour the States for a year, then when he got offered a job as a cleaner in Alaska, he went for it. That turned into being the shuttle driver for a tour company in a national park, and that turned into teaching conversational English to Nepali kids in Katmandu. He reminds me of the outlook I used to have when I was in my twenties, that it doesn’t matter if you are ‘only’ cleaning toilets if you can still see the world you find yourself in as new and interesting. Really, the world is always new and interesting if I choose to see things that way. Sometimes I forget, so thanks Dan for the reminder.
Walking round Jaisalmer in the evening the streets are a little emptier. More cows congregate in the half lit sodium streets. Young and old men gather at the only vendors open. A young guy is frying up something in a huge iron pan. Several tuk-tuks are on their permanent weave through town, dodging cows, potholes, each other, skanky dogs sitting having a scratch.
I’m leaving tonight at midnight. At other times I might not take in quite so fully my surroundings, but possibly I might never be somewhere like here again. India’s beauty is a fuzzy one, where what happens seems marked out less by rules and regulations and more by ancient habits and inclinations. How many places in the world could you walk up an unlit alley in a city and make friends with three cows by scratching them under the chin and giving them sweets?
Beauty is too a product of necessary functionality and of make do and mend. Poverty is hard for many in India and lives without much means of mass production means almost no tractors, no great prairie fields. Farming looks laborious, intensive and with its people still with their connectedness to land and food directly and intimately bonded. No-one is afraid to sit in the dirt, because the dirt feeds them. Dried cow shit patties sit piled in miniature house-shapes ready to cook delicious chapattis of home grown wheat flour and water. Homes are built from whatever there is. Wooden poles, plastic tarpaulin, thatch, brick, concrete, mud walls in all possible variations, in splendour, dignity, decrepitude all mixed. In the endless warmth, home is home.
Some wish to leave; they see what life looks like on TV and when they meet travellers and tourists and they want more money, more stuff. Even more so they want more opportunity.
Young men from the backwaters if they are lucky find a good enough education at home, leave for Delhi to train as engineers, in IT, and maybe they will return home after their studies, maybe they will stay in the ever-burgeoning sprawl of the city, or maybe they might leave India altogether.
My train journey from Jaisalmer to Delhi is 976kms long and is scheduled to take 20 hours. This time, I am determined to sit in comfort, especially as the journey is my longest yet. I have booked a two tier sleeper ticket and boy is it worth the twenty quid it’s cost me.
There’s no crowding in, no crying babies, no phones blaring out music at stupid o clock in the morning. The floors are mopped and cleaned no less than three times during the course of the journey, the toilets smell fresh; that’s a first for me in India…
I sleep, perfectly. In the morning I sit. I look out the window watching Rajasthan roll by in its endless variation of wheat fields scrub and backdrop mountainous hills. I practice my Japanese.
En route today I have beaten my own personal best for ‘Most Chapattis Consumed In One Day’. My new record now stands at seven. They were 10rupees each. I could have stuffed in more. That and the sweets and the two ice creams that I have also eaten leaves me feeling slightly queasy by the time Delhi arrives.
To make my way to the airport, I need to get on the metro subway which on the orange line is its second from last stop. I have got off at the wrong train station; Delhi instead of new Delhi, but it doesn’t really matter. It just means that I get to see slightly more of the metro. Right next to the train station is Vhandni Chowk metro station. After paying my 8 rupees I pass through a baggage security check and then into the bowels of Delhi. Delhi’s Belly even.
The station is clean and tidy and the tube train is totally packed. It’s by now 23.30. I wouldn’t want to be down here at rush hour. Finding my way is slightly baffling, and three times I find myself wondering which way I should be going only to be given helpful directions by passers by, unasked.
So now I find myself in a world of shiny faux marble tiles, an entirely litter-free and voluminous space. Surprisingly peaceful I indulge that habit that Indians carry off with panache; laying down comfortably and having a good old kip whilst waiting for the transportation to arrive.
Right now, a day of airport doodling. Japanese, writing, researching Japan a little. Breakfast. Hmmm…. Breakfast.
Richard Terry 