India Part 1

(Update from November 24, 2011)

It’s hard to believe that Marco and I have only been in India for a month, because so much has happened and we’ve seen so many things that it seems much longer. I’ve been tapping this email out as we go, and it’s already reached such a length that I think I’d better send it off now instead of waiting until leave India, because if I do that it’ll be truly monolithic!

So. INDIA. It is such a huge and varied place that I almost don’t know where to begin. I’ll start with a little bit about the people. India is full of kind, friendly, vivacious people who are genuinely interested in talking to tourists and want to help them as much as possible. It is also full of thieving, conniving swindlers who view foreigners as walking ATM machines and want to exploit them every step of the way. The ongoing problem is figuring out which people fall into which category. It’s very difficult, and you’re never entirely certain whether you got it right. We found that we were constantly, constantly being told different things by different people, and we never knew who to believe. Something as simple as buying a bus ticket often became a major ordeal. Some people would tell us it was imperative to buy the tickets the day before because they always sell out, other people would tell us that getting tickets half an hour before the bus left would be no problem at all, and still other people would tell us that actually, that bus doesn’t run at all anymore and we’d have to take the train. Every Indian has their own slice of the ‘Tourist Pie’ to collect in terms of commission or cuts, and they want you to take the course of action that will mean the most money for them. Whether it is a rickshaw driver collecting commission from a hostel or a restaurant for taking you there, or a taxi driver deliberately dropping you off a long way from your destination so that you have to pay his waiting friend to act as your porter/guide, the examples are infinite and endless.

Making friends with one of the many cows on the ghats at Varanasi

Having said that, many of the Indian people are also truly interested in chatting to foreigners and will sincerely try and help wherever they can, asking us questions about our home country and giving advice about scams and traps to watch out for. We usually get a fairly positive reception when people discover we are from Australia – though it took us a while to figure out why. The Indians tend to speak very quickly and often with a strong accent, and the first time we told someone we were from Australia he got very excited, and with much head-waggling and gesticulating began talking excitedly about “tricky bunting”. We were very confused and looked it, and the poor chap couldn’t understand why we weren’t following him, getting more and more agitated talking about “tricky bunting”. Eventually we made the connection and realised that tricky bunting was in fact ‘Ricky Ponting’ pronounced through a thick Indian accent! The Indians absolutely loooooove cricket, and when people discover we’re Australian we often get congratulated for being compatriots of Ricky Ponting, or as I’ll forever think of him now, Tricky Bunting!

But I’m rambling so will shut up and get on with it! We had a fairly forceful introduction to India, throwing ourselves right in the deep end by heading straight for Varanasi. To get there we had a fairly exhausting 12 hour bus trip from Kathmandu, which was so bumpy I was forced to stick my head out the window and be spectacularly sick TWICE (once after breakfast, once after lunch). This bus ride took us to the Indian city of Ghorakpur. There, after being assured there were no train tickets to Varanasi available for at least 2 days, we managed to buy two tickets for the train leaving that night from a convenience store owner who was lying on the ground of his shop watching “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. We still don’t know what the story was or how this guy was able to sell tickets for a supposedly full train – our guess is that he must have been a scalper, and he probably made a huge profit out of selling them onto us at a premium… but all that matters is that we got them, were on the train that night, and woke up at Varanasi station in the morning!

Varanasi, I think, is the most intense city we’ve visited on our journey to date. It’s certainly the most crowded, and Marco intensely disliked it. It’s one of the most sacred cities in the world, and to Hindus it’s quite literally the centre of their universe – they believe it was created by the god Shiva, and is a holy ‘crossing place’ where deities can come to earth, and pilgrims can ascend to the heavens. Hindus also believe that if they are lucky enough to die in Varanasi, they will escape the cycle of reincarnation and rebirth and attain instant enlightenment. What this means is that thousands of ill and elderly people come to Varanasi to wait to die.  Once they do die, they are wrapped in bright orange shrouds and carried through the streets down to the banks of the river Ganges, where they are laid out on huge funeral pyres and burned right there out in the open by the water. These funeral pyres burn continuously, and watching them we could quite clearly see the blackened heads, feet and elbows of the bodies sticking out of the flames. They are left there for some hours to burn up completely, and when they are more or less gone the remaining fragments of bone (usually the densest, strongest bones – the hips and sternums) and ashes are collected and flung into the river, thus completing the Hindu cycle of life. It was quite confronting to see death at such close quarters, and also the casual way the cremators went about poking and stirring up the bodies as they burned. Interestingly, the people who have the job of working on the funeral pyres are all Indians from the very lowest caste, most of whom were born to the job and whose families have been cremators for generations beyond reckoning. 

Crowds at Varanasi

In spite of the constant proximity of death, the Ganges is simultaneously a place of very dynamic life. The concrete steps that lead down to the water’s edge (known as ghats) are covered with Indians bathing in the river, lathering themselves up in soap and shampoo, washing their clothes, and generally having a good old chinwag while they’re at it. I cannot understand how they can happily brush their teeth and drink the water when they know that just a short distance upstream the ashes of countless bodies are dumped into the river, but they do. Neither do they seem concerned by the fact that factories regularly dump toxic waste and chemicals into the water. To Hindus, the river water remains sacred with healing and cleansing properties, and most families in India keep ­a supply of Ganges water in their home in case of unexpected illness or injury.

Varanasi city itself is incredibly crowded – the streets were utterly filthy (we learned very quickly not to wear thongs) and it was quite literally impossible to walk for more than a single step or two without having to change directions or halt to dodge the hordes of people, motorbikes, rickshaws and horse-and-carts. It was like being in a constant mosh pit, except that half the people in it weren’t people but cows, bulls, dogs, cats and goats, who also indiscriminately crap all over the pavements. Though, to be fair, quite a lot of the people in Varanasi do that too, because the homeless are everywhere and (I mean this in the most literal sense) beggars can’t be choosers.

And beggars there were, too. In every shape, size and colour imaginable. There was a different beggar sitting on every single step leading down to the river, all side by side with their bowls out in front of them competing for alms. They were very distressing to look at because they all had some sort of deformity or crippling abnormality, and as we walked by they would wave their missing limbs or leprosy-ridden hands at us, so it was like constantly being at the apex of some terrible Mexican Wave of disfigurement. As well as the beggars, the streets were chock-a-block with Sadhus and Hindu holy men who wander around in orange robes with filthy shaggy dreadlocks, white paint smeared on their foreheads and usually no shoes. With all this contrasted against the beautiful, wealthy Indian women who swan about in jewelled sandals and richly ornamented saris, Varanasi really does seem to show humanity both at its loveliest and its ugliest.

After a couple of days we were more than ready to escape the chaos and crowds, and gladly climbed aboard a night train to the much smaller town of Khajuraho. If you’ll forgive a brief diversion I’ll take this opportunity to describe to you the actual process of physically getting around in India. We’ve spent such a lot of time on trains and buses here that you’d think the journeys would all blur into one… but oh no no! Every trip has something that makes it bizarre and memorable, or appalling as the case may be. The trains are like rolling marketplaces, with passengers wedged into every possible seat, corner and crevice of space available, and merchants wandering up and down selling chai, samosas and everything else under the sun. After having ridden both the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian railways we’re fairly experienced when it comes to long distance rail travel, but we’ve never experienced anything like this. No nice white sheets or pillows here! The ‘sleepers’ were simply triple-decker plastic bunks that looked as though they’d never been wiped down in their lives, and were covered with smears of hair oil, dandruff flakes, suspicious sticky patches and a generous smattering of fruit peelings and food scraps. Not at all pleasant to lie down on. Though there are so many people milling around that it’s usually impossible to get much sleep anyway. There always seem to be more passengers than there are sleepers, so we often drift off to sleep (using our backpacks as pillows to keep them safe) and then wake up to find an Indian (or several) curled up at the other end of our bunk. I spent a whole night with a small kid sharing my bunk while her mother slept on the floor, and her father sat on the end of Marco’s bunk. It all just seems to be totally acceptable, because this is a culture where personal space is an unknown concept. At least we were sharing with people though – one train we were on there was a lady in the next carriage with a baby goat on her lap! The buses are even worse than the trains, because they have bloody awful Bollywood jangly pop music blaring at top volume for the entire journey, often slightly off the station so that it crackles with static and white noise. We never travel without earplugs, but they can only do so much!

Some of the erotic carvings at Khajuraho

But back to Khajuraho! Khajuraho itself doesn’t really have much to recommend it… it’s a collection of fairly non-descript, dusty village streets. However, just outside the town centre are a collection of millennia-old Hindu temples that are world-renowned for being covered in sensual erotic carvings. The temples are all made of pink sandstone that looks absolutely beautiful in the afternoon sunlight, and the walls and elongated rooves of the temples are all covered with phenomenally intricate carvings of well-endowed men performing lewd acts on bendy and bosomy women. Without going into too much detail (let’s keep this PG!) the level of detail was astonishing… after 1000+ years you could still see the manicured fingernails and individual tresses of hair of even the tiniest statues.

From Khajuraho we climbed aboard a bus that took us in the general direction of Agra, which was our first real experience with lengthy road travel in India (rather than rail), and we learned something interesting about driving in India. Indian men seem to believe that honking their horns makes their muscles bigger and their penises longer. I’m sure that’s the case – it’s the only explanation I can come up with for their undying, fanatical obsession with horns. We rode buses where the driver sometimes didn’t take his finger off the button for a good minute at a time, just honking continuously. And we’re not talking normal horns here either… because everyone honks so much an ordinary horn would be immediately drowned in the din. So, to try and make themselves stand out, they all have special, deafening, multi-toned fog-horns specially rigged up to their bus, rickshaw or car, and blast it at top volume. Not only in the busy city streets, either. If they’re driving along a road and a single, lonely motorbike materialises in the distance, even if it’s right over on the other side of the road with oodles of space to spare, the driver will still honk and honk until they pass. It’s unbearable, and we quickly learned not to take any kind of road transport without our earplugs safely in our pockets.

Anyway, we climbed off that first bus at the small town of Orchha. We really only stopped there because it was on our way to Agra, but I’m so glad we did because it was a lovely, peaceful place, and very interesting. It used to be the medieval capital of the Bundela dynasty, and today’s town beetles about in the shadows of the spectacular ruins of royal pavilions, palaces and concubine harems. It must have been a pretty prosperous dynasty in its day, because the palaces and buildings were all very impressive. The royal pavilions were built around a big courtyard with loads of imposing stone carvings (pillars in the shape of elephants holding the roof up by their trunks etc) and had the archetypal Indian minarets on each corner. There were a few turquoise mural tiles still stuck onto the walls here and there, so it must have been dazzling in its day, but now time has stolen the colour and most of it is an earthy red.

Ruins at Orcha

From Orchha we travelled to what is undoubtedly the most touristy city in India – Agra. Agra sits in the central northern region of the country, and is in itself a fairly dusty, noisy and unremarkable city, full to bursting with gimmicky tourist restaurants, cafes and tacky souvenir stores. But it doesn’t matter, because it is home to the Taj Mahal! I was very excited about seeing the Taj, but we’d heard some horror stories about nightmare queues and crowds bristling with pickpockets, so to try and minimise this we went bright and early at 6am, as soon as the gates opened. The guidebooks here claim that the Taj Mahal is the most recognised building in the world. Whether or not they’re right is up for debate, but in any case I’m sure you’ve seen countless photographs of it so I won’t go into great detail here, except to say that up close it is much, much more intricate and elaborate. Every surface is ornamented with relief carvings of flowers and trees, and has beautiful semi-precious stones like lapis-lazuli, jade, amethyst and malachite painstakingly inlaid to create more flowers, leaves, vines and complex geometric pattersn. The brightness of the stones against the translucency of the white marble is very pretty, and some of the individual inlaid flowers are so intricate that they are made of up to 50 individual gemstones, all meticulously mosaicked into the marble. The doorways and pointed arches are adorned with Arabic verses from the Koran, and the whole building was designed to mirror the Islamic representation of Paradise. Primarily, though, it is a mausoleum, built to honour the memory and remains of the favourite wife of the Mughal ruler of the time, and so it manages to maintain the awwww factor of being a lasting monument to romantic love.

Taj Mahal.... corny tourist shot!

Unfortunately Marco was suffering from a bit of a tummy upset on the day we visited the Taj, so after seeing it he retreated to the (relative) comfort of our hostel and I bravely ventured out on my own to see India’s most significant fortification – Agra Fort. A monolith of a structure, built mostly of deep red sandstone with plenty of carved marble ceilings, scalloped doorways, narrow winding halls and dainty balconies jutting out over Agra, providing sensational views of the Taj Mahal. I also explored the absolutely enormous city mosque – a mammoth, 3 domed building that had a prayer hall the size of a football pitch – and spent a happy few hours in the local bazaar, watching the Indian women buy saris and jewelled sandals.

Tummy bugs, I’m sorry to report, have hit each of us quite hard on multiple occasions – indeed much of this update has been tapped out while trapped within our hostel, unable to venture too far from the toilet because of truly torrential diarrhoea. Having travelled through multiple third-world countries, including South America, we’re no strangers to tummy upsets but we both agree India definitely wins the prize for the most consistently dodgy food, and we’ve each spent our fair share of time pale-faced, sweaty and shaky. I must add too that the majority of bathrooms in India have filthy squat toilets, so waking up in the middle of the night in a new and unfamiliar hostel with an urgent need for the bathroom is made infinitely more stressful by having to remember where the light switch is, locate shoes (going barefoot in squat toilets is out of the question), locate toilet paper, and then locate the bathroom itself. On top of that, trying to cope with the gut-wrenching explosion without getting your feet dirty or having a shoelace or the draw-string of your pyjama pants slip in is quite the ordeal. I’m sorry – I know that’s probably too much information. But it’s been such a constant and ongoing part of our Indian experience that I wouldn’t be doing our journey justice if I didn’t at least make mention of it, so I hope you can forgive me!

On this occasion anyway, I’m happy to say that Marco’s tummy bug was reasonably short lived, and that from Agra we headed still further West into Rajasthan. We visited the three major cities of Rajasthan – Jodhpur, Jaisalmer (right by the Pakistani border) and Udaipur. All three of these cities had their own impressive fortresses and palaces, but my favourite was Udaipur. Although it didn’t feel quite as ancient as the other two, it was built around a shimmering lake and the architecture was nearly all white, with turreted buildings and plenty of minarets rising up from the water’s edge. At night time these were all lit up with fairy lights so the whole effect was very pretty. The Udaipur fort was also somewhat more delicate than the ones in Jodhpur and Jaisalmer – instead of red sandstone, as most of the Indian forts tend to be, it was white, with finely carved marble lattice work and fancy mirrored murals of flowers, peacocks and scenes of tiger hunts.

Beautiful Rajasthani Forts

From Rajasthan we embarked on an epic 30 hour bus ride down the Western coast of India, taking us to the city of Jalgaon which had absolutely nothing to recommend it except that we could use it as a jumping off point to visit the Ajanta and Ellora caves, which were each sensational in their own way. They are ancient Buddhist monasteries consisting of immense caves and caverns carved directly out of a sheer rock face. Each cave has a spectacular system of pillars, and ornate relief carvings of giant elephants and other Indian animals, and lots of different representations of the Lord Buddha himself – reclining, meditating, teaching etc. Because it’s so dark and dim inside the caverns the artwork has been preserved remarkably well, and it’s still possible to see the colourful paintings that covered every inch of the walls, pillars and ceilings of the Ajanta caves –astonishing when you consider that they are over 2000 years old. The Ellora caves didn’t have paintings, but were generally deeper and more complex in terms of the decorative carving. I had to keep reminding myself that the caves were all created before the time of dynamite, and that all that rock was removed by some guy with a hammer, a chisel, and maybe some wedges of wood soaked in water. Incredible!

A small segment of one of the Ellora Caves

We’ve since arrived in Goa and are enjoying the much more relaxed atmosphere in South India, lying on the beaches and gorging ourselves on delicious seafood each day. But I will leave the south of India for my next update, as this one has already (as always) defied my best efforts and stretched out to a ridiculous length. If you’ve got any further energy, though, below are just some more of my haphazard thoughts and reflections on India as a country in general, because it is such a vibrant, baffling and ever-changing place. So if you’re game, read on! If not, call it quits here and you won’t be missing much!

India really is a country of contradictions. Take, for example, the humble cow. It is a sacred animal in India, and they roam the city streets at will, wandering unconcernedly through the blaring traffic and marketplaces, nosing through the piles of rubbish and chewing contentedly on garbage. Oftentimes they have garlands of bright orange marigolds strung about their necks, or their horns are painted bright colours and adorned with tinsel. Hindus allow them free run of the marketplaces and town centres, and would never dream of hurting them. And yet, neither do they stop them from eating plastic bags and drinking from obviously foul and diseased water, which is ultimately going to cause the cow a much slower and more painful death in the long run. So many of the cows that we see are in a truly terrible state, dying long and protracted deaths. It’s really quite baffling that the Hindus manage to both respect and neglect them to such a huge degree simultaneously.

On a similar note, many of the people who will fondly pat a cow’s rump as it meanders past their market stall will bellow aggressively at a beggar who comes to ask for food, and we often see animals being treated with more consideration than human beings. Officially it is now illegal for Indians to discriminate against one other on the basis of caste, but it’s clearly still an issue that is prevalent in much of their society – particularly the smaller, remoter communities. The lower castes, considered to be ‘unclean’ by birth, are often forced into doing the lowest and most degrading jobs for little or no pay, and usually end up begging to survive. It seems very sad to me, because according to the Indians we’ve spoken to there is absolutely no way of escaping your caste, no matter how hard you word or struggle to advance your lot in life. In fact, until relatively recently many schools would refuse to accept children from lower castes. It’s clearly a very complicated issue, and something that is difficult for foreigners to comprehend, but I guess it takes a lot of time to change something that has been deeply ingrained in a culture for generations beyond reckoning.

Above all else, though, India is a country that is full of surprises. There are constantly surreal moments – for example, riding in the back of a rickshaw through an ancient city with a medieval fort on one side, an elaborate palace on the other side, and suddenly seeing a caravan of camels stringing their way through the streets. Or a wedding procession with the groom being carried along on the back of an elephant, or a group of almost naked Sadhus on pilgrimage. It can be tear-jerkingly frustrating at times, and both of us have had moments when we’re so irritated and annoyed by the constant chaos that we feel like slapping someone, but it never fails to be interesting. And the beauty – both of its natural landscapes, its monuments, and its brightly dressed people, is continually breathtaking. 

Trying to stay afloat in the crowded streets of Indian cities

Well, that’s it for now! Sending hugs to you all back home – we really do miss you all lots and think of our friends and family all the time.