13 India 2

INDIA 2
Feb 6th 2017
I must confess to feeling almost no excitement about going to india.i have become the faded jaded glazed over long term traveller. Everything is normal. There are no novelties left on this earth save my engaging with life in a more constructive and creative way. I need to DO something; give something back into all this fabulous experience that i have been gobbling up in the last year.
My choice to go to india, born out of a moment of circumstantial confusion rather than directed urge i seem to have lulled myself into a drift mode, something i am not really comfortable with.
Sitting with this, i trust that purpose will show itself at some point once i am in india… all things useful appear sooner or later.
After a ten hour stop over via istanbul ( i couldnt leave the airport but the fly over the city was spectaular) i finally arrive in delhi.
The air at 5am is dark and dense with fog. The captain lands the plane and the mostly indian occupants give the captain a round of applause for landing us safely, which strikes me as a particularly indian thing to do.
Out on the landing strip as we transfer via weird airport buses to the customs and luggage collect, the air smells faintly of morning mist and burning dung fuel patties… the smell of india! Well one of them anyway.
Customs is a non event, baggage on the carousel goes round and round for what seems like a month until my tiny 6kg pack finally appears. No money in any of the airports atms. Good job i have emergency backup funds. I escort a pair of confused first timers from Argentina who have been in airport mode for three days. We arrive at new delhi railway station and the inherent randomness of the place separates us. Purchasing a ticket is super easy, once i have ignored the inevitable touts and found my way to the international foreigners ticket office. No morning train to allahabad so i might as well get the sleeper to gaya my initial destination.
I go for a wander up the nearby streets. Delhis famous traffic chaos ensues as every available bit of road space has every kind of hooting tooting vehicle rammed at some strange angle up the backside of the next. Much noise. Nothing moves. Your average london snarl-up is positively polite by comparison.
One of the things i find endearing about india is that as the traffic descends into an utter mess and moped riders take to the pavements squeezing pedestrians out of the way, snoozing dogs lay curled in random spots about the place, happily oblivious of the human confusion about them. I love that indians seem so willing to co-exist with masterless dogs and cows (and whatever other creature too probably). This is a good measure of humanity.
India smells. Its famous for it. Walk in any kind of line anywhere you will pass; a variety of tantalising curried yum yum aromas, the smell of dung patties burning to cook the food, the sudden stink of stagnant water in a bunged up gutter, the intense nose melting stench of long ancient stale piss in a popular relieving spot or toilet. Heavenly incenses in market places.
Delhi is busy. Its difficult to write anything that hasnt already been written about india so i suppose im going to be onto a loser here…
I suspect that many places in india including most definitely delhi, are so inherently stimulating that there really is no real necessity to go hunting for intrigue. Stand still in more or less any spot for long enough and all manner of colourful unexpectedness will obligingly come rolling past in its own little random circus.
Having now finally arrived into the midst of all this, it comes home to me that in my experience so far, india really is like nowhere else. A big happy laugh wells up and bursts out of me. Hello again India!
Still no sense of purpose but it feels comforting to reconnect with what have felt of india previously. Its food is effortlessly some of the best in the world. Its people are for the most part warm houmoured.
A country still richly diverse (despite some of its murkier political efforts), the level of acceptance i feel is lovely. Yes i am currently sporting a bodged skinhead haircut and a huge beard. I smell terrible due to an ovetly salty diet in georgia, but somehow in amongst all the other cobblednesses around me, I feel most at home and acceptable.
As i walk along i get several calls of ‘Hello baba!’ . From Uzbekistan everyone called me Santa Claus. Now Im a baba (holy man) it would seem.
The 5.30pm train finally turns up at 8pm. Were it not for the help of a young air force trainee wanting to practice his english on me, i would have no idea what was going on with the train. My cheap 5 quid ticket takes me more than a thousand kms eastwards in the general direction of kolkuta. Ive paid for a hard seat ticket, the cheapest and most rubbish travelling experience. Due to a group of indians happily stealing my seat i have ended up with a sleeper bunk all to myself. Perfect. Life is a little random but for now its all good.
Surfacing in the a.m. to a gently rocking train carriage, all is pleasant, which for a cheap ticket on an Indian train is slightly miraculous. I spend the second half of the journey sat in an open doorway watching flat misty farmland go rolling past. My right foot out the door and wind blowing through me its almost as good as being on a motorbike. As is usual, i get into conversation with a young chap who owns two trucks in varanasi and is going home to his parents in Gaya. We talk Big Road Vehicle talk and i learn that out of the two big names in industrial haulage machinery, Tata is way superior to Mahindra. Always useful to know.
Hitting Gaya at 2pm I am met off the train by a wall of about 15 bellowing tuktuk drivers, all shouting at me to ride with them to Bodhgaya, Buddhas place of attaining enlightment.
Being blocked in and subjected to this hideous aural violence is something to be dealt with only by neat sidestepping and barging through, whereupon i am confronted by more of the same and a buzzing honking hive of randomly swirling traffic. Its even more mental than delhi.
My truck-talk companion comes to my aid, and finds me a suitable tuktuk that i can share with others (25 rupees shared, 200 as a private passenger).
Squeezing our way out of gaya seemingly by sheer force of eardrum bursting horn honking we eventually wriggle our way out of the mess and onto the road to bodhgaya. I had wateched a video about the wondergul peaceful serenity of bodhgaya, showing sunny open spaces and the ocassional person wandering about in it. which i concluded must have been filmed at the height of summer at about 3.30am when it was daylight but nobody had actually got up.
The tuktuk, with utter lack of suspension, smacked into every available pothole and bump shaking my innards most thoroughly. To make this as pleasant experience as possible, our thoughtful driver makes the journey as short as possible by driving flat-out.
Its dark when i get to bodhgaya, and my nieve hope of a tranquil pool of cultural bliss is of course a ridiculous idea; its the biggest buddhist pilgrimage site in the world. Of course its not going to be peaceful.
As is the way, a motorbike rider sidles up to me out of nowhere and invites me to try out ‘his’ guesthouse… as a general rule of thumb, my responses to such advances are thus: if i’m feeling full of beans, enthusiasm and attitude the hapless tout will get short shrift as I psychologically snow-plough past them and make my own individual choices.
If beans are in short supply, Im knackered and its dark and the end of a very long day, easyness takes top priority. If the offer doesn’t smell dodgy, i will go with it.
After supper in a nearby restaurant my alledged guesthouse owner returns. He sits opposite me and starts laying me thickly with compliments about what a good person i am, which only succeeds in raising my suspicions. His ‘conversation’ is of the kind that revolves around some weird paranoid spiritual premise that the world is out to get him but he knows that he can trust me to help in his time of need. I feel like i am being set up for something. Then he slips in how he was briefly in prison for battering someone. Great. Now i am starting to feel like i am being hauled along on a string thats about to break. Now some other guy appears. Who the hells this? We are to all ride together on his admittedly very lovely Royal Enfield to go to the guesthouse. Are we going far? I need to know that they arent just going to take me off miles away to somewhere i dont want to be… ‘no, no, we go straight to the centre.’
True to their word, i find myself rocking up at a fairly average hotel. I find myself neither murdered nor robbed though the 400 rupees price i was quoted has now magically become 500. Clearly the difference is these chaps commission.
Negotiating a sea of pilgrims almost entirely of indian and asian origins i find myself in a temple complex with a vast stupa at its centre, next to which is the descendant of the original bodhi tree under which siddharta gotama had his ultimate eureka moment.
Its a weird experience for me. People sometimes feel the need to ask what my religion is, and the most straight forward way out, particularly with non-europeans, is to say that i am a buddhist.
In reality though, thats about as far off the the mark as a Quaker feeling comfortable in a high catholic mass.
According to the vipassana teachings of s.n. goenka whom via video recordings dating from the 1980s i learned the meditation technique i use, he claims that buddha said that rituals didn’t achieve anything, that buddha really really really did not want to be worshipped as a god or a saviour; that too is missing the point and also doesnt get a person anywhere.
A person must be their own saviour. The act of meditation upon ones own body processes is the only form of ‘puja’ necessecary. ( a puja is a ritual of offering of appeasement to the alledged gods).
I am interested in some aspects of dharma teaching, about good ways of behaving in life; how a person conducts their outer life goes hand in hand with any meditation progress like two wheels on a cart moving forward together.
Monks stroll past chanting as they go. Numerous people are doing repeated prostrations upon body length wooden boards, repeatedly moving between standing up and kneeling arms fully forward on the ground in an act of obescience. It looks suspiciously like a spiritualised body workout to me.
I feel no compulsion to offer garlands of pretty but dead flowers to stone effigies of buddha.
The idea that rotating a drum with a prayer written on it is a spiritually wprthwile thing to do just strikes me as sheer laziness. How is it likely that rotating a drum is going to offer any insight or change in a persons life?
It does make me wonder about the role of religion in both enabling indians to handle the apparent chaos they have to live in at the same time as holding them back from moving on out of it. This is where i feel some kind of communist sympathy i suppose.
Next to a large square pond of green water i do my vipassana sit for an hour or so. Aftwerwards i leave the complex, out past the inevitable thronging market complete with ‘budhha hairdressers’ and suchlike. If the photo on the advert is to believed, the great man was a proponent of 1990s footballer’s trims…
‘AND IT’S SIDDHARTA GOTOMA COMING UP ON THE INSIDE! UP PAST THE HINDU PRIESTS! JUST LOOK HIM GO! MY WORD! AND HE’S GOING FOR THE GOAL! HE’S GOING FOR THE GOAL! IS HE GOING TO MAKE IT?! JUST LOOK AT THAT MAN GO… AND IT’S A GOOOOOOOOAAAAALL!!!!! MY WORD WHAT FANTASTIC EFFORT THERE BY BUDDHA!’
Away from the hubbub i seek out the Indosan Nipponji Japanese buddhist temple, a place i have wanted to visit for a while.
As a rule, temples dont interest me much (you can tell cant you?) But i had been intrigued as to what a japanese temple crossing over into india might be like.
The other majority buddhist countrys have similarly erected temples in their own national style here in bodhgaya too; the Bhutanese, the cambodians, the vietnamese and so on.
For me, as much as anything else, its nice to have a little revisit taste of japan again, seeing as how it was probably my favourite country to visit.
The japanese temple most notably is the only temple to have a childrens nursery attached to it offering local kids a leg up in life. Actually considering the japanese over-zealous attitude to education back home, i suppose this exactly what anyone would reasonably expect them to do. The kids look happy though and a couple of little’uns wave a slightly shy and giggly hello from behind a nearby stone pillar.
Seeing no further need to be in bodhgaya, i tuktuk back to gaya and after ricocchetting between three different train station ticket desks, i finally find my self with a cheapy ‘unreserved’ ticket to kolkuta. 140 rupees to go 500kms on the overnight train.
After something like ten thousand kilometres of asian train travel, i have come to dread the cheap seats.
As a reasonably polite european i dont see why i should be obliged to shout and push like a hungry goat in order to get on the train and find a place to sit. As a consequence many times i find myself being forced to stand in the aisle or sit on the floor next to the usually reeking latrines at either end of the carriage. This time i find myself lying on the floor next to one of the four latrines. Its a bit sniffy but you get used to it. Sort of. Either the train has a wobbly wheel or much of the track between gaya and kolkuta needs relaying; for almost the entire journey the train sways violently from side to side. Imagine someone trying to physically shake you awake in the morning, except that they are doing it non-stop for almost the entirety of the night. Somewhere along the line i must have managed at least a small amount of sleep. I am thinking this because in the morning i dont feel insane.
Morning is nicer. The train still hasnt stopped its endless wobbling but my claimed spot affords me the pleasure of sitting once more with my legs hanging out of the open door watching the early dawn mist of west bengals rural loveliness go rolling past. Most beneficial after a comprehensively uncomfortable night.
Im off to meet alex and lenka! My czech buddies i had met briefly in both kyrgyzstan and tajikistan had flown in two days before i got to kolkuta myself.
For some reason i have decided that i like kolkuta even before setying foot in the place. The lonely planet paints a glowing picture of slightly faded colonial wonder with reedy river riverside golden sunsets…. i dont bother with lonely planet anymore; they write such a fanciful load of bollocks.
Despite this, i have met several kolkutans who rate the city highly, and i am happy to take their word for it.
Leaving the main train station with a long stride to my step, using maps.me i have already identified where the nearby bus station is and more-or-less the the area i need to get off a bus at to find alex and lenka. 30 minutes after getting off the train, i am 15 minutes walk from my destination. It dawns on me that i managed to achieve this pretty much effortlessly. This time last year i would have been worrying my nuts off about the whole procedure…
Alex has turned into some sort of beard monster but apart from that things are still as we last left things. Okay ive turned into a beard monster too.
We spend three days trucking around the city. It seems almost every available space on the pavement has somebody either selling fruit and vegetables, cooking meals or selling clothes and STUFF. Most notably for a city, Kolkuta has a few small convenience store sized supermarkets but nothing larger. No shopping malls and no department stores. (Maybe it does have them but i never saw any). Kolkuta then is an endless marketplace with fast-moving ever-honking traffic running through the middle of it. This is alex and lenka’s initiation into india…
I am staying at a separate hostel because its cheaper.
The proprietor of the West Bengal Tiger Hotel is a kolkutan who cheerily introduces himself as ‘Mike’ (though i suspect his real name might be Syeed). Mike is clearly very happy to greet an Englishman as he himself had run restaurants in Clapham Common London, Bridgend, Swansea, Cardiff and Llantwit Major in South Wales over a period of twenty two years. After talking to him i was left wondering why he finally decided to come back to kolkuta. Maybe sometimes its best not to ask.
I did indeed like kolkuta, though for absolutely none of the reasons the lonely planet guide book would have me believe. Probably all the things they say are there really are, but actually im not all that adventurous (no, really). Having said that, lenka and alex had clearly been doing their homework properly and we found ourselves alongside the bank of Hoogily River in the midst of a flower market. The market was filled with orange and yellow marigold garlands, sheaves of gladiolas in all colours, necklaces of white harebells and all sorts. Porters tottered between with vast tarpaulins full of flower heads inside. bicycle rickshaws huffed and puffed their way through the whole lot.
Kolkuta deemed largely ‘done’ (as per the irritating backpacker verb) we took a train to Puri a seaside resort some 500kms south.
Alex had put in some sterling legwork, trekking across the city to aquire train tickets for us all. I was quietly amused listening to him complain afterwards about how unexpectedly complicated the whole process was for him… welcome to India Alex!
Also Lenka couldnt grasp what possible reason would there be in getting to the train station a whole hour before its alledged departure. When we got to the station amongst the sea of waiting people it seemed difficult to ascertain even which platform we needed to be waiting beside, whether the train was on time or not or where we needed to be standing in order to a avoid a last minute panic of trying to rush through a crowd of a thousand other rushing people complete with their luggages…
In the event though, it wasnt quite so hard. A ticket office advised us to wait at platform 22. At platform 22 a passing porter then advised us that the platform we actually needed was platform 23… it is increasingly becoming my experience that the porters seem to have a comprehensive timetable memorised and are thus genuinely helpful. The neat trick is knowing how to spot a porter who will be indistinguishable from anyone else…
I employ my sometimes successful ttactic of approaching a well-dressed businessman type on the basis that he will be the most likely person to speak good english, and thus we are guided to the correct spot to wait for our carriage.
I sleep wonderfully on a top bunk of the three teir bunks we have been allocated. In the morning everything is drowned in dense mist. Oh so thats what Orissa looks like then.
For india virgins alex and lenka, kolkuta has been like a slap in the face with a brick. In anticipation of a peaceful seaside town, of course Puri is nothing of the sort. The usual familar repetoire of non-stop screeching honking traffic by day, the dissonance of dogs and disco by night. Lenka is going slightly nuts. Ah well… they’ll get the hang of it.
Puri has the biggest beach i have ever seen. An inpromptu fishing village of a couple of hundred lives in one part; forty-odd red banana fishing boats and a record-breaking seventeen people emptying theirs bowels directly onto the beach at the same time. Clearly a busy business. Tip-toeing delicately between the fishy-pooey menagerie i find my way out northwards to an empty stretch of beach. Note to self; don’t even think about eating fish here… further up, the people have gone. Crows are pecking at something on the sea line, along with three dogs. The something is a dead loggerhead turtle about two feet in length, flipped onto its back, its carapace acting as its own serving dish. There are the dried out hushs of several more along the way. Probably death by poo. I read in the paper that puri has a polluted water system problem. Same as everywhere else then. The next day we all walk southwards from the hotel. We had been warned by a pink and ginger scotsman of a ‘two kilometre long solid mass of indians’ blocking up the beach… why do people like to exaggerate so? Walking through lots of families (certainly not the claustaphobic experience he seemed to have had), was the best people watching ever… whole familes sat together fully dressed as the waves came rolling in over then about a foot high. Old beardy men in turbans alongside frollicking kids and couples, a world of colours dancing in the waves… lots of laughing! Brilliant! To top it all off, rides along the beach on camels wreathed in flowers… i love india.
We get a bus to a world heritage stamped temply thing called xxxxx** i’m not much of a temples fan but this one is quite interesting. I take up the persistent offer of a walk round guide. A sixty year old chap who specialises in pointing out to me all of the umpteen dozen mini statues of chaps with enormous willys having fun with young ladies with enormous jubblies. Yes, they are quite sexy, but what am i supposed to say to an aging man who seems to be getting himself rather worked up as we circumnavigate the temples artworks?
He has been doing this job every day since he was ten. I hope he gets on with his wife…
Next we head down on the overnight train to Chennai…
A strange place is chennai; positively laid back in comparison to everywhere else i have been so far… there are empty gaps in the traffic… nobody is honking madly… how lovely.
Next we head to …. m-longnameplace…Mahabalipuram. gotcha.
A two hour bus ride south down the coast brings us to this little village thats been re-made specifically as a tourist resort. All the shops sell brightly coloured pretty but largely non-functional items that tourists apparently like to buy. All the roads are completely sealed… theres no dirt tracks and no broken concrete anywhere… its all a little artificial and a bit odd but its relaxed. Ive gone into a slightly distant mode with alex and lenka. Right now i need space to think. If i am going to leave india on my original return ticket, i need to decide now. Of late, my mind has been filled with the politics of america and europe rather than any great enthusiasm for temple-trekking. My mind is starting to look towards what happens after my travel trip. If i stay and extend my time india even for a month its going to cost me an extra 300 quid. Stay any longer than a month and i will arriving in western europe later than i would prefer. Leave next week and i still have late summer to fit in the santiago de compostella walk… i think i have made up my mind but i need to sleep on it, just to be certain….
Next day.
Having decided this morning to choose a highly-curtailed exploration of india in exchange for saving 300 quid and having an early start back to europe, i feel a sometimes familiar sense of the sad leaving. My stomach feels like i have swallowed a brick, my arms and legs feel like they dont really belong to me. My mind is full of resistence. Maybe not quite so full as on previous ocassions, but i feel like i dont make sense… rollercoastering again.
Having already met and left them twice before already, saying goodbye to alex and lenka feels like a comparatively simple process. Feels like we will meet again (some other sunny day). We have met and parted twice before, so we have had some practice at it. I still feel barely able to have a goodbye lunch with them.
We hug our goodbyes and i walk off in the direction of the bus stand. No turning back for long drawn out goodbyes. Five minutes later and i am back in familiar solitary mode. I have made a solid choice and i have made a plan for my last seven days in india… taking control of my life again, this is the starting point of the next phase of travel; not at a country border but over the hurdle of directionlessness and towards the dutchbfinishing line on my bike. Thats still six months or so away, but i am happy enough to know which way i am going.
By the oftentimes rather wonky miracle of hotel wifi, i have established a tight but doable schedule for the time leading up my flight out of delhi; my bus takes me back to chennai just in time to take an overnight sleeper to cochin (ernakulam), then to mumbai, a giant vipassana pagoda, dhamma giri a vipassana centre just outside mumbai and then another one and a half day train ride to delhi. Its all a bit of a mad run around but i get to experience a little of three aspects of india i would like to experience… that only leaves riding on an elephant and riding either an enfield or a tuktuk across india and back to europe…. maybe next time. Maybe never. Maybe i have seen enough now. Maybe its time to do something useful and somehow have a family. When a thousand grown men spread all round asia question why i dont have a wife and kids, inevitably i start to think that they might actually have a point.
Early morning train, running through jungly kerala. Villages in dense forests of coconuts, palms and all sorts. Very nice. Check.
A day at the coastal town of Ernakulam. Sweating without even moving. Most helpful hotel staff ever. Brilliant fruit and veg market of Jew Street. Buy two kilos of tamarind. Check.
Note to self. Do not ever tamarind like its sweets. Major laxative disaster.
Morning train sweeping through lush varied hill country all the way up to mumbai. The most beautiful part of india i have ever seen. Check.
4pm traversal of crowded mumbai with aid of spontanious asstistance of generous friendly locals. Grand shlep gets me to booked hotel 30kms away near Global Vipassana Pagoda.
Next morning very early start take tuktuk to nearby aforementioned pagoda.
Two hours later, they are open for business. I am the first person there I do my morning sit right in the middle of the dome structure. It is the largest pagoda in the world. I am the only person in the building. Its beautiful. Check.
Discover quickest way to get back into mumbai for either 1.45pm or 3.15pm train to Igatpuri which is on the way to Delhi. Miss first train by a gnats nadger. Doesnt matter. Get next one.
Igatpuri is home to the most significant vipassana dhamma centre of india. Its like its HQ. Sort of. Spontaniously turn up and ask if i can help out for a day. Really the protocol is that i should have asked before just turning up randomly. They are very happy to accomodate me anyway.
My allocated accomodation and dhamma hall (meditation room) is also home to the ‘Vipassana Research Institute’ which does scholarly stuff. Outside the building hang about eleven enormous bee nests that hang like great dangling globs. They are totally smothered with very busy black bees. Seems fitting for the location.
Dhamma Giri, and its famous crows… i used to help run a small meditation centre in suffolk and we used to play the same instruction tapes every week. In the background could ocassionaly be heard trains hooting and birds whooping and crows cawing lazily… now i am here and i hear this soundtrack for real. I have never been here before, but it all feels utterly familiar. Check.
Sun 9pm, full of too much ‘rasgulli’ ice cream and in time for the nearly two day train hike to delhi. Sleep beautifully by night, by day hang my legs out the train door some more. In the evening get accosted by three amiable and very drunk delhi lads. One insists that i listen to justin beiber on his phone. ‘What do think of justin beiber? Do you like him?’
What can i tell him, apart from ‘No’ and ‘He’s a racist’? I decide to tell him both. Makes no decernible dent in our temporary friendship, which is a good thing. Even if he does like Justin Beiber. Get into delhi three hours late. The metro has run its last tube an hour ago. I get a taxi instead. No problem.
By the time i get there, i have an hour to find my bearings and check in. I arrived at the airport at 1.15am. The plane to istanbul flies at 6.50am. Somehow i kip for two hours. How did passing through check in and departures take 5 and a half hours? Mindwarped timewarp.
Goodbye again india my old friend…