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Published: September 10th 2009
I left Delhi on about a twelve hour sleeper train. These can be a little maddening because they are dirty and hot, and the guys selling tea walk by and yell "Chai!" really loud every minute or so. On the whole they are pretty awesome though because you get to see a ton of countryside, and usually meet interesting people. My next stop was in a famous city called Varanasi, probably the dirtiest place of them all. Its an extremely cool looking city set on the Ganges. You wind through narrow brick alleyways until you find your way to the river, and from there you follow the smoke to the burning ghat. The burning ghat is a place of cremation, where corpses of hindus are brought in around the clock and set atop funeral pyres and burned. There are a lot of bodies around. Seeing these pyres burning all around you, and then looking down the river at the old city, it really looks like you have stepped back into the dark ages.
With the narrow alleyways, old infrastructure, and prevalence of burning bodies, Varanasi is also beyond disgusting when it comes to sanitation. All the trash and waste
usually strewn about a nice wide street is now compacted down into the four foot wide alley way you have to walk through. The moment you hit the street you are surrounded by flies, burning trash, and uh...sewage. For this reason, it wasn't a place that I wanted to stay longer than I had to. By luck, though, Varanasi stood within the narrow band of land from which the total solar eclipse could be seen, so I hung out an extra day to see that. Man, it was an amazing place to view it too, I'm glad I stuck around. The sun was completely blocked out for almost five minutes. On the shore of the Ganges there were funeral pyres burning, hundreds of old wooden boats on the river, and thousands of Indians all around chanting throughout the eclipse, unreal.
I tried to leave Varanasi the evening after the event, but due to train station madness me and half a dozen other tourists missed our train. Many of the stations are ridiculously unorganized. Our train was listed as arriving on platform number 8, but instead came and went on platform number five with no announcement. This was a real
The Barracks
This was my sleeping quarters for six days on the boat.hassle, me and a German guy were desperately running around the station trying to get admitted onto another train. No employee was very helpful, they would all indifferently point us to other offices or counters, who would in turn point us toward different offices and counters, or back the way we came. In the end all of us had to stay in Varanasi an extra day. The poor German guy had somehow run himself out of cash and decided to sleep in the train station. Add this to the fact that the next evening the train was six hours late, and the guy was in the station for about 30 hours straight. These places aren't pleasant...
From Varanasi I went to Kolkata, because it is the jumping off point for the boat to the Andaman Islands. The Andaman's are an archipelago of over 500 tropical islands, 36 of which are inhabited and all of which are awesome. So far they are mostly off the tourist radar, and yet to be destroyed by high traffic tourism and development. The overwhelming majority of travelers just catch a plane to these islands, and show up two hours later none the worse for
On Deck
Often I'd look up from reading a book to see everybody on deck staring at me. I felt like I should be put in a cage with a giant hamster wheel. wear. For some reason I thought it would be cool to take a boat, and a lot cheaper. This boat turned out to be really crazy.
It started right when I got dropped off at the harbor. There were hundreds of Indians waiting in a line outside the gate with their bags, and I joined in. After about twenty minutes their was a crack of thunder, and a heavy rain instantly began to come down. At first everything was okay, and people were finding cover here and there. As soon as the guard at the gate began admitting people though, the Indians went crazy. I found myself in the middle of a mob, with everybody pushing and shoving to get to the front of the 'line'. An Indian line is more of a tightly packed semi-circle. Every time the gate would open to admit someone, a dozen bodies would try to throw themselves through, with the guards having to beat them back with bamboo staffs. The water level was getting to about midcalf when a guard spotted me, and, apparently deciding that I had no business in that mess, he brought me through the gate immediately.
The boat
turned out to really be a trip. Not exactly what I had in mind, but an adventure for sure. I had never been on a boat before, so I guess I was a little naive. Beforehand I had an image of myself laying in the sun on deck all day while I dropped a fishing line off the stern, and maybe finding some well-to-do young british heiress to court in my spare time. Very sadly, this was not the case. When everybody was finally admitted it became official that I was the only foreigner on the boat, accompanied by 1,500 Indian farmers. The trip was supposed to take three days, I still figured it would go by pretty quick. After a couple of hours on board the boat, without it moving though, everybody got a little restless. The day passed into night and we had not moved, so I figured I would go to sleep and wake up on the open ocean the next morning. Well, when I woke up and looked out the window, the boat still hadn't moved. All the Indians seemed a little angry. We continued to way through another tedious day, but once again it was
getting dark and the boat hadn't budged. Again I went to sleep with high hopes, and woke up to the familiar view of Kolkata on shore.. Everybody was really pissed now, because there was no good reason for the delay and nobody was allowed to leave the boat. Everybody wanted their money back and off the boat; two things the crew wouldn't allow. We hadn't even left yet and the toilets were overflowing. I was in a bunk room with about 100 Indians and the place was very stuffy and uncomfortable.
By the afternoon of the third day passengers had once again become riotous, this time I was tempted to join in myself. They charged the captains cabin, and I think would have pummeled him badly had they been able to get their hands on him. The captain came over the loudspeaker in a panicked voice (I couldn't see anything but I pictured him hiding beneath his desk), and announced over the cacophony of shouting that we would be leaving in 30 minutes. He then added that all passengers need to remain 'peaceful and harmonious'. He sounded scared shitless. The riot got the job done though, and we finally
took off.
The boat was quite a wreck, and there was nothing at all to pass the time except read. I read a lot. Whenever I would wander around on deck, everybody's eyes followed. Most of the old guys had a pretty angry looking stare, the younger people were more just curious and hoping for some interaction. Amidst this I had somehow acquired my own Indian family. One guy spoke English, and his family really took me in right off the bat wanting nothing in return. The mom would insist on retrieving my meals for me so that I didn't have to wait in the huge line. She would hand me my food, then pat me on the shoulder maternally and give a warm smile, she had the mom stuff down! They would also do little things like watch my luggage whenever I wasn't around, and they generally helped me out a ton, and became good friends.
Once we hit the open ocean I had a whole new set of problems. For living on the islands, all of these Indians seemed to get very sea sick. I couldn't go down to my bunk hardly at all because their
Kid
This kid climbed all over me and wouldn't stop moving for the first five hours of the ferry, then passed out like this for the last two. were people puking everywhere, and they weren't particularly careful where they made a mess. This lasted for days, all I could do was stay topside and try to wait it out. I would read, play cards, play with kids, anything to burn time. I had to go back to the bunkroom to sleep though, and that was not cool at all. These were the worst sanitation conditions I'll ever see. These people wouldn't have had it so bad if we had left on time, but with no janitorial services and the extended strain things began to back up. The fresh water supply was inconsistent, the kitchen was disgusting. The people in charge just don't care, it takes a riot for poor people to get any rights. I had been living pretty shabby, but this was too much. Well, it was a journey, and I will never eat dal and rice again.
Damn was I glad to get off of that boat though! It took a tedious six days in all, and then I was dropped in the tropical paradise that was the Andaman islands. A friend from Finland I had met in Delhi had decided to meet me out
there, so luckily I had a familiar face to greet me.
We took ferries to a couple of different islands, and spent a good eight or nine days on one called Havelock. I was splitting a hut with the Finnish girl and another crazy polish girl, so lodging was crazy cheap. On a typical day I would go biking around the island, and do a jungle hike in the morning. One hike lead to a place called Elephant beach which was fantastic snorkeling, so I did that quite a bit. In the afternoon or evening I would head back and hang out on the beach with some of the other travelers, and then we'd go get some fresh fish for dinner. It was a damn good routine. By the end of the day I would lay down on the thatch floor of the hut and fall asleep immediately.
After awhile me and a french backpacker, Etienne, hatched a plan to do some more substantial exploring. We spent the next week on buses and ferries going around to more remote parts of the island chain. It was a really cool experience being the only travelers on most of the
--
In a gigantic red oil palm plantation we hiked around in one day, we found some elephants and stuff. villages and islands we visited. The downside was that there was very little information on the areas we visited and nobody spoke english, so we had to spend a lot of time figuring things out and acquiring an aggravating number of permits for the different activities we did. The Indians aren't particularly suited to a laid back tropical way of life. We thought we would be living off of mangoes and snapper the whole time, but in most of these places there were only local eateries where the only thing they served was the standard dal and rice. Both me and Etienne found this inedible at this point in our respective journeys, so our diets were very limited. Mostly we lived off of bananas. The only food we could find that we genuinely enjoyed was cake, so each day we'd hit a bakery and gorge on sugar to satisfy our tastebuds, then get by on snacks the rest of the time. Our conversation started drifting toward food more and more frequently as we discussed what we would eat when we returned to civilization. I started craving french food that I had never even seen before, but that Etienne described in
Life is Tough
Etienne is jammed between a bunch of bags in the hallway, and sitting on the gangway for the whole 6 hour ferry ride. such great detail it sounded fantastic compared to whatever we were trying to force ourselves to eat at the time.
In one area we were able to hire a boat to take us out to a little uninhabited island. It took us half the day to get the permit, and then the boat broke down in the middle of the water for 2 1/2 hours, but when we finally got out there it was really cool. It was two islands actually, connected by a long sandbar at low tide. The interiors were filled with jurassic park looking jungle, and were surrounded by awesome beaches with crystal clear warm water. The boat was an hour and a half late in picking us up, so I got to see it in the dark. If you really want to see a good night sky, go to an uninhabited island in the middle of the Bay of Bengal.
On another Island called Little Andaman, we found some absolutely amazing beaches. This isn't the type of place where you can go sip a Mai Tai and lay out under an umbrella. There are no resorts or bars, nowhere can you purchase a boogie
Red oil palm processing plant
Eventually we found the processing plant, empty of all life. board, comfy reclining beach chairs don't even exist here. There are a few small villages where the transplanted people have shown little interest in adapting their ways to suit the tropical paradise around them. Some of the beaches we found would have been postcard-perfect had they not been covered in trash, with herds of cows grazing through. Others just about were perfect, all of them were deserted.
We did a lot more jungle hiking and saw cool stuff, but I think we were both pretty malnourished from the banana, cake, and rice diet. So, after three weeks in Andaman I returned to mainland India to visit my family in a city called Hyderabad. This place is a big outsourcing capital, with business centers for companies like amazon and google. I couldn't believe how big my aunt and uncle's house was, about thirty times bigger than the huts I was used to! Also, they had all the american food I had been craving. Apparently my body was more used to Indian at this point though, because after a day of bacon and eggs and stuff, I got sick and threw up the first night. Reverse culture shock.
Anyway, my India adventure had come to an end. I highly recommend you visit the place. I can't say it is some wonderful country, or all the people are fantastic or something. In fact I think the government runs the country embarrassingly poorly, and I am thankful to be from a developed place with more opportunity. But the place is an amazing experience, and even when the worst hassles were happening I usually found I had a smile on my face, because these things don't happen anywhere else.
Now I'm on to Bangkok, Thailand. There are three 7-11's on my block alone, and anything you could possibly want is within a ten minute walk, it's fantastic. Also, the food is awesome.
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Daeng
non-member comment
good stuff...
What a great adventure so far. I couldn't stop reading! It definitely takes me back. It's unfortunate that trash is such a problem. You'll notice that Thailand is much cleaner. Laos is pretty clean too (but not as clean as Thailand but not as dirty as India..) As you've probably already discovered, the trains and buses in Thailand are fairly on time. It's nice compared to a 2-3 day wait (which sounded awful). The food...oh I'm salivating just thinking about it. The food is amazing. I hope you get a chance to make it to Malaysia too. The food there is pretty dang good. Especially the beef rendang. I love Thailand. The people are super friendly and the 7-11's are always in sight just in case you need a cold bottle of water or a steam bun in the morning.