a little excursion to india with john in november 2007

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I’m sitting in the hotel foyer. Its twenty five minutes past twelve. We just vacated our rooms. John is using up his thirty minutes of free internet. I have been giving him my free thirty minutes also as they have Wi-Fi here in the hotel so I can go online in the room. It’s not a bad hotel this one. We also get a free breakfast so the seven hundred and fifty baht price is pretty good value. It’s central to a lot of places also which helps a lot when we want to go to Khao Sarn or China-Town which are both only about twenty minute walking distance away.
Traveling with John is fun. He talks none stop. When you travel with social people it’s very easy to meet people and so we are in a constant chatting mode with everyone around. Generally I just sit back and let motor-mouth take over. In one and a half hours we will be heading for the airport. We are on our way to India.
We found the cheapest airline which means we will have to stop over for an evening in Dhaka. At least the hotel is paid for and hopefully there will be transport provided from the airport. The airline - GMG it’s called - is Bangladesh’s second airline. I didn’t think much of their first airline so I’m not expecting a very enjoyable trip. Hopefully John’s conversation will be so entertaining that I will not even have time to realize I’m on a crappy flight.
Tomorrow we will be in New Delhi. We plan on staying about five days. We can’t stay much longer because we have already lost a few days waiting for the airline seats to New Delhi to come through. After India we plan on being back in Bangkok on about the first of December. We have made a sort of plan to fly with Air Asia to a town in China called Xiamen then take a train up to Yi-Wu then another one onto Sanghai. ___Xiamen is a famous old city. It was one of the ports that were used after the opium wars when Britain forced China to open up their trade to Western powers - I guess that is a colloquial way of saying when Britain occupied China. Yi-Wu is a city that I found out about by watching a documentary about how retail prices have been reduced so much in Britain over the last ten years and how the present day value for money for goods has enabled such a huge consumer boom. China as a manufacturing centre of course which is the leading reason for this boom and so Yi-Wu was highlighted as it has the biggest trade centre building in the world with; I think they said ten thousand small wholesale shops inside.

John is fiddling with the TV. He has tried thirty different channels but has not come up with anything worth while watching. We are into our second night in Uttara. It’s a city on the outskirts of Dhaka. We flew here from Bangkok and expected to stay overnight and then fly onto New Delhi this morning. Then we found out that our plane flight was cancelled. So here we are still, stranded in Bangladesh. We have a transit visa and are not supposed to leave the hotel at all. However we managed to convince the hotel staff to let us out to play. We spent the day tri-shawing around the place with one of the hotel staff as a chaperone. We went to the local mall where I ate the most repulsive fast food concoction of my life and then took a taxi into Dhaka City to see the museum. However our chaperone does not speak English very well, though he is very good at pretending he does, and so we ended up at the local water park. In the end we managed to reach the museum almost an hour after closing time so we took the same taxi all the way back again. We just got some bad news about our flight to New Delhi. When we arrived back at the hotel the guy behind the desk said he was not sure we would be flying tomorrow either. God no! I really don’t want to spend another day cycling around in a tri-shaw with the constant smell of human excreatment in my nostrils.
Well we had a pretty rough night. We ate chicken curry for the fourth time in a row then went back to our room. John had been eaten alive by mosquitoes the night before so this time we plugged in an electric mosquito repellant that we had bought from the mall that day. After about five minutes the room was mosquito free but then I started to wheeze. I was having an asthma attack and I didn’t have my inhaler with me. So we took the mosquito repellant out and John continued being the recipient of a Bangladeshi mosquito feeding frenzy while I wheezed my way through a couple more hours of Bangladesh life. In the end we both managed to have some kind of sleep but by morning and after another cold shower we were resolute. We were not going to spend another night in Uttara and that was it. We went into battle mode. We transformed from mild mannered smiling tourists into an Australian and English version of ‘The Alien’. Creatures perfectly evolved for devouring anything that gets in their way and scaring the shit out of all Bangladeshi airline staff. We gathered all our things and told the hotel staff to tell the manager that we were going to the airport regardless of whether there was a flight or not. When we got downstairs we managed to get the GMG manager on the phone and told him we were coming to the airport. He said, “I am sorry but the flight has been cancelled again and I am afraid you will have to spend another day in Uttara”. We said expect us at the airport, we are coming and we plan to leave one way or another. We must have sounded desperate and a little crazy and I think by this stage Johns tongue started to shoot in and out of his mouth in a lizard like fashion but the transformation worked because we were immediately met on arrival at the airport by someone from GMG who took us to the manager and in less than an hour we were on our way to Kolkata (Calcutta).
We arrived in Kolkata at about ten thirty am... Now it’s almost three p.m. and our flight out to New Delhi is scheduled for five p.m. We are just kicking back and relaxing. I am wondering if it’s possible that the name change to Kolkata has anything to do with an Indian bureaucrat with a broken ‘see’ button on his computer and if this could be some kind of epidemic while John was merrily writing post cards.
We still do not have a return date. There is no open GMG office here and I am afraid we will have the same problem when we reach New Delhi tonight. There is a big debate in process now between John and me. I would prefer to get the return seats booked as soon as possible and in the meanwhile pay an extra fee of thirty Euros and get the emergency ‘issued in one day’ Chinese visa and cut our time in New Delhi down to about three days, while John wants to get our Chinese visa in New Delhi the normal way. This would mean us staying a week in India and would cost us a lot of time that we could be spending in China. Anyway when we get to New Delhi we will have a better idea of what’s going on.
It's now a quarter past eight. I’m writing this on the battery at about ten thousand meters. We just made it onto the Indian Airlines flight by the skin of our backsides. After waiting five hours at Kolkata airport the time finally arrived for us to check in at the counter. When we got there the man serving us said that we were not on the system - panic and fear swept through us at the possibility of being stranded again! The problem was that we were supposed to go to the Indian Airlines desk as soon as we arrived there to book our seats. I think the guy from GMG mentioned something about that when we were rushed through Dhaka airport but it had totally slipped out of my head. I don’t think it even entered John’s head as he was busy at the time talking to someone about the new planes that GMG were going to acquire in the next few months. So anyway we were told we would have to wait at the standby counter until the gate was closed before we would be issued with seats on the flight. We managed to be first in the line and everything was going ok until the system went down. After that there was a period of pandemonium when everyone started worrying about losing their flights. We almost gave up on getting on as there were so many people trying to do the same as us. But the guy we were dealing with came through and for the second time that day we were rushed through the airport towards the plane. Everything looked ok until we reached the last bloody security check before entering the plane and they discovered that we had a bottle of whiskey in one of the bags. ‘You can’t take that on a domestic flight”, the security man informed us. I thought we were going to lose the bottle but the man who took us up to the plane rushed me downstairs again so I could give them the offending bag to be put through into the hold. I had a screaming argument with one of the flight attendants who told me how stupid I was to which I replied, “How was I to know that I could not take bottles on domestic flights”? Now it seems that the bag will be arriving on a later flight so we will have to wait at New Delhi airport for it. That’s the latest. I think we are descending now. Its five thirty a.m. and at the moment I’m lying in a nice warm bed in New Delhi. John is sort of half consciously slumbering away next to me. We share a hotel room together but managed to get separate beds - we have three actually. That’s pretty strange for me as I have not shared a hotel room with a male traveling friend in a lot of years but so far everything is going well. John tends to stay up latter then I do and he has really bad hearing so he was cranking up the TV but since I asked him to keep it turned to a reasonable level I, not to mention the rest of the hotel, can manage to sleep. I have a cold that I picked up on the first night here so I think he is probably wondering if it was a smart idea to share a room with me at the moment. I got the cold because it’s really cold here in the night time. They gave us a blanket but only one sheet over the mattress and I didn’t want the blanket to touch my body without a second sheet in-between. So I slept for a lot of the first night with just a sarung over me. Since then I bought a sleeping bag for about six Euros’ but the cold is already firmly entrenched and I am spending a fair bit of time sneezing and wheezing. After the Kolkata flight we arrived in New Delhi airport and picked up all of our bags and got a taxi to the centre without much fuss. We are staying at the same hotel I stayed in about fifteen years ago called hotel Vivek. It’s a dump but it has improved a bit on how it was. We do have hot water and a TV with fifty channels on it. The area we are staying in is called Pahar Ganj. The hotel is on very manic market street that is popular with the back packers. The place looks exactly the same as it did fifteen years ago. It’s crowded with people and whenever you walk down the road you have to really pay attention not to step in a pile of fresh cow shit - which is what I did yesterday - or get run down by a bike, car, auto rickshaw, trishaw, or motor-bike. They all come screaming down the road constantly blowing their horns.
It's about six thirty a.m. on Friday morning on the last day of November. John is sort of sleeping. We have two totally different sleep patterns. John seems to be wide awake late at night and spends time surfing though all the TV channels while I gradually become more and more comatose. I think I passed out at about ten thirty last night and slept right through till now while John eventually crashed out hours latter and even then sleeps fitfully through the night. In the morning he is a little bit like how I feel late at night. “Her, what, aye?” ___Yesterday we got our Chinese visas, though there was a little drama right up till the end when the lady at the pickup counter told us we could not pay with cash and instead needed a bank draft so we tore off in a ‘motorized rickshaw’ to find a bank that would do that for us. After that we headed for Connaught Place, which is in the central part of New Delhi and not too far from Pahar Ganj. When we got there we found a famous bakery called ‘Wenger’ - a ‘must’ for all Arsenal fans - and treated ourselves to a selection of ‘the best cakes in New Delhi’. It looked like any cake shop anywhere in the world full of the same old excited overweight women, except on this particular morning there were also a couple of overweight men inside - us. We managed to survive the feeding frenzy then latter I bought a few Indian movies on DVD.
We spent the afternoon in a small shop ordering stuff for my business. It took a few tough hours. Doing business here is nothing like doing business in Thailand or Indonesia. I had to fight hard for the best price of every single article. Normally if I thought I had to do that in any other country I would just walk out but here in India I know that when I walk into the next shop I will have the same problem. It’s something I really don’t look forward to when I’m doing business here and even though I am a pretty tough bargainer when I want to be when I’m buying for my business I want to keep focused on what I am buying and don’t want to keep going back to bargaining for every single bloody product with a smiling joking Indian man that is looking for anyway he can to make a profit if he sees the chance. I can imagine it would be fun to watch the Israelis do business in India - not. It would be a little like Godzilla versus King Kong except that instead of fighting each other it would be a ‘death match’ of who could be more tricky and advanced in mental arithmetic than who.

___We are still having a good time and if anything the whole bungling disorganized disaster ridden process that is a part of traveling spontaneously on the cheap has kept us pretty much entertained. Hopefully I can get all the business stuff finished today and then tomorrow we can be tourists for a change. Delhi is a lot less smelly that Dhaka was and also far more interesting. The only real problem we have is walking down this ‘Main Bazaar’ area of Pahar Ganj because there is a constant stream of vehicles honking their horns madly behind us. It keeps you in a permanent state of agitation and every now and then you can hear a tourist ‘lose it’ and scream indiscriminately at the offending person. We have a plan on checking out a club tomorrow night if I can stay awake past eleven o’clock. They are supposed to be pretty expensive here but it would be good to see what Delhi night life is like. Perhaps we might see some Bollywood stars or at the very least some star look-a-likes.

Its fun flicking through the station here. The TV in India is very dynamic. It seems to represent modern India very well. Because John and I seem to be sleeping at different times we each get a chance to channel surf. He comes up with more Hollywood movies and I like to watch the Indian dance shows and there are heaps of those to choose from.
Now we are at the airport again. The GMG flight is delayed……… again. It’s a bloody joke. We were supposed to fly at 1.25 p.m. and now it’s delayed till at least 5.30 p.m. and god knows when it will really be leaving - if ever. I bought another bottle of duty free whiskey but if we eventually get re-routed through Kolkata again it means I can’t take the bottle on the plane with me because of this law that forbids taking bottle on domestic flights. In that case I guess we will have to just drink it before we fly. John didn’t want to go halvies in this bottle. He actually didn’t want to go halvies in the last bottle either but eventually did a good job of single handedly polishing it off. He worked at it on a nightly basis, for ‘medicinal purposes’. There is a dribble left in that bottle but we loaded it into our main baggage that’s will go into the hold.
___I bought a couple of hand guns in New Delhi. One was a metal one which I sent with all my parcels by post and now come to think of it perhaps that was a mistake. I was thinking that the parcels would go by sea but actually they are going by sea and air. So perhaps they will X-ray it and then for sure if they do the very distinct outline of a hand gun will come up on the x-ray machine. It’s actually a little BB gun and quite lethal to small rodents. I bought it with the fantasy filled idea that I could shoot at load and obnoxious drunk people from my attic window late at night in Amsterdam. It was just an idea I have had for a while to increase my entertainment potential in that city. It gets pretty boring there sometimes and those drunks outside my window get pretty annoying so I thought I could sort of kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. It was only a fantasy because in actuality I could never do it because it could blind someone if I shot them in the eye by mistake.
We had a very well organized but perhaps, looking back in hindsight, not to well researched, plan to go out clubbing on Saturday night. We got the addresses of a few of the more popular places to go to from an Indian couple we met in a restaurant. Meeting people has been a constant theme so far on this trip. John will talk to anyone and often does. I swear there was a few times when I have seen him talking to mannequins in shop windows though I doubt if he would verify that claim himself. Anyway one very nice couple that he managed to get into a corner gave us the addresses of a couple of places. So duly invigorated with a few of - or perhaps more than a few of Mr. J Walker’s medicinal elixir we put on our best duds and hit the street. John was opting for the more expensive form of transport by taxi but in the end all we could find free at the time was a motorized Rickshaw (that’s what they call Tuk-Tuk’s here). I was in agreement with him about the taxi as I thought perhaps arriving at one of Delhi’s top clubs in a auto-rickshaw was probably not cool but we really had no choice. But in the end just arriving at all became our main concern. The auto-rickshaw driver started off very positively and reacted well to my chants of, ‘Motorized Rickshaw number one, everyone else can kiss our bum’. We were actually flying through the traffic the only problem we had was that the driver had no idea where we were supposed to be going. However after about one hour, and forty five minutes longer than the trip should have taken, we managed to reach the Asoka Hotel. Amazingly enough it happened to be in almost the opposite direction to the Asoka Road which is where the driver we wanted to go and right over the other side of the city. But all was forgiven and our driver was suitable rewarded for his enthusiasm. After arriving at the Hotel we marched gleefully up to the club door and signified our intentions of entering only to find that there was one small and lesser known though relevant detail regarding entry into Indian clubs that we were not informed of. Being that they would not let us in as we were not a couple and indeed even worse still, we were both male. So after all the repertory drinking and dressing and the wild ride through New Delhi we had to leave after only seeing the entrance. So away we walked, I silently and John amidst a barrage of backward fire claiming that we were the victims of sexism, Indian style. After that we took another Auto-rickshaw back to our hotel and I fell asleep, joined a while latter by John after completing his nightly swig of medicine.
We went to Connaught Place again last night to watch the SAARC concert. I know now what it stands for. I decided I better learn what it means because after last night’s concert a couple of guys with a large movie camera and an even larger microphone came up to us and interviewed us. The interview went something like. Them: “Where are you from?”
Me: “Um Australia”.
Them: “Do you like the concert?”
Me: “Yes very much”.
Them:” Do you know much about what it is for and who is organizing it?”
Me: “Um, no, not really”.
Luckily they decided at that point to turn the microphone on John and he quickly sent them back peddling with a relentless barrage of adjectives that he deftly used to embellished a general concept of ‘Peace, Love and Harmony’ which he saw as the general theme of the festival.
Its five p.m. now. We have moved a little further forward. We are now in the departure lounge and sitting in front of our gate. Everyone is revved up and all we need now is an airplane. I think it’s presently somewhere between here and Dhaka. There are a lot of people who we can share GMG battle stories with. It seems all of us can roll up our sleeves and present some kind of ‘scar’ related to a previous encounter with GMG airlines. John just leaned over and told me that, “A guy just said that the plane has arrived……….and hopefully it’s in one piece”.
I’m watching an English language show on Chinese TV. John found the station while I was in the shower. I would have preferred a Chinese speaking station myself. Then I can see the picks without all the dumb talking. George Orwell described the end result of ‘Newspeak’ - the language that was being developed in his fictional futuristic world - as being a language that sounds very similar to quacking like a duck. The idea was that you would have the emotional feeling of the language without the content because all content would become irrelevant. He anticipated modern television! We have found a pretty nice hotel in the city we are in at the moment, which is called Xiamen - pronounced Ssssszzzhiamen. They actually have some pretty interesting thing on the TV now about tigers. We found this hotel by asking a couple of Chinese girls that were in the same predicament as us when we were in Bangkok airport. It was a pretty bad situation for a while. I’ll get back to that latter. Actually things have been going very weirdly every time we go near an airport and I’m starting to think going overland and suffering forty hour train journeys might not be such a bad alternative.
I mentioned last time that we were about to take the flight from New Delhi airport? Well the time finally arrived to leave and by then we were about five and a half hours later than the original schedule. I always like to wait until the rush is over to get onto planes. Even though we were over five hours late most of the people were lining up and hustling and bustling to be first onto the plane. That always seemed pretty weird to me because the plane isn’t going anywhere until the last person gets on and we all have pre-arranged seats so I never could understand why people fight so hard to be first on a plane. But then it came to be our time to board and I started to see reasons why people can get so nervous. The security guy that checked our bags before we left the terminal said that my bag did not have a little cabin bag tag on it and that I had to go all the way back through the airport to get a little tag otherwise I could not get on the plane. John came with me as we rushed back to the beginning and asked for the correct little tag to be put on. Then we rushed back towards the plane again and jumped into the now empty airport bus and sped along the tarmac to the plane. The stairs had already been taken away but after a little mad gesticulating between the ground staff and the pilot it was replaced and we were allowed to board. And for the third plane flight in a row I entered the plane with a whole load of people looking at me thinking, “This prat has kept us here for an extra fifteen minutes”. And that was the truth. For three times in a row something had happened to stop me from entering the plane until the last second.

Anyway I will go back to where I left off before. Our flight to Dhaka was pretty uneventful. I was sitting next to a doctor who worked for the biggest ‘Botox’ company in India. It was an American company - of course - and he flew all over the sub-continent doing his Botox thing. He was in charge of the medical side so he was also Botoxing a lot of the more important clients. He said that eighty percent of Indian Bollywood stars had had some kind of Botox treatment and I think he had done most of them himself. I asked him if he did Ashaywarya Ray but he said she had had her eyebrows done, ‘out of the country’, by which I presume he meant in Southern California - artificial capital of the world. Like everyone else on the plane - by this stage we had become a merry complaining group - he said he would never fly with GMG again. We found out that the airline had only three planes but one of them was out of action so the one we flew on was moving constantly from city to city to fill the schedule.
When we finally arrived at Dhaka airport it was ten p.m. We ended up staying two hours hanging around the airport waiting from the guy there to organize out hotel accommodation. We were not looking forward to being back in Bangladesh again in any form what-so-ever and definitely not hanging around at the terrible airport there. By this time we were tired and fed up and extremely sleepy. John was feeling a bit sick and was already crashed out on a row of smelly chairs. The only time I get really fierce is when I’m tired and I can’t sleep. It is my weakness. So in the end I became so fierce that when I went hunting for and finally came across the GMG guy in charge of taking care of us he must have realized he better sort out our accommodation otherwise I might kill him. So eventually we were sped through immigration where we were issued with our transit visa then taken to a hotel for the night. For the first time in a while we had two separate rooms so the next morning we both just lay in bed till twelve. I was half expecting another cancellation but luckily we got a phone call that we had to get ready because we were going to the airport. Fantastic, only one night in Dhaka!
I must say one thing though. India is a hard country to travel in. It suits people with the toughest of constitutions. But if you are rough enough and tough enough it is a fabulous place. I think it is by far the most rewarding place in the world to see. It’s so huge and incredibly complex. It is just a shame that about ninety nine percent of tourists are too afraid to go there as the place deserves to be the top destination for travel in the world. I also like Indians very much. Sometime, about twenty five odd years ago I think, I started labeling them the most civilized people in the world. And anyone who knows me knows that my idea of civilization has nothing to do with how clean a place is or how fast the water comes out of the tap or how many expensive cars there are on the road. My idea of civilization has nothing to do with materialism. The reason why I see India in this way is not even because of their spiritualization, though they are of course very developed in that way. I don’t believe in God myself and to me all religions basically carry the same message anyway. It’s just more the way they behave themselves as individuals. They have incredibly complex issues they must deal with. India is a huge country with a culture that is more diverse than the entire area of Europe and America put together but still, somehow they make it work. And not only that, but they can do it with a kind of ironical comic attitude as if to say, “well this is what we have, so let’s just make the best of it”. I like the place a lot and I’m hoping they can keep their unique perspective on live and at the same time develop economically to such an extent that they can have a very positive influence on the rest of the world. I also hope that one day eventually, they will put a ban on horns because they terrorized us for a week with those bloody things. After a little hysterical laughter and impromptu dancing around Bangkok airport we jumped into a taxi and headed for our hotel. When we got there we found the place was almost full because it was the night before the Kings eightieth birthday. We did manage to get a twin room though. Shit I almost broke my nose. I tried to adjust my feet in the bed and the computer fell forward and bashed against my nose. Owwwww. I quite like to share rooms with John. Like I said before he is so easy going. The only thing is that he stays up about two hours later than I do. Though if he keeps the TV volume low and the lights down I can manage to sleep. And of course I prefer it if we have two beds instead of one. That’s starting to get a little too close for comfort. So anyway when we checked into the hotel the lady behind the desk told us that there was going to be fireworks to celebrate the Kings birthday and that we could watch it from the roof. When we got up there we found that there was already about fifty people there. It was the perfect spot. We were on about the sixth floor and very close to the stadium where the fireworks were launched. There were thousands of people on the streets below us who has probably come from a long way away to see it. The firework display was the best I had ever seen. It was really incredible. They had fireworks that had the shape of fish and others that were ‘smilies’ and after everyone the whole crowd went ‘ooooooh’ and ‘arrrrrrr’. It was a little like a re-enactment of the scene in ‘Lord Of the Rings’ when Gandalf let of his fireworks on Bilbo’s one hundred and eleventh birthday.
We had one full day in Bangkok. We spent the morning going to Eva Air as John wanted to put back his flight departure date on his return trip to London but eventually we found out that everything was closed because it was the Kings birthday. We already sort of knew this anyway but somehow didn’t manage to digest the implications. Holiday equals closed offices. Pretty hard stuff for brains that had atrophied from too much relaxation. So we spent the rest of the day shopping for our daughters. Virtually the entire city was decked out in yellow shirts in respect for the King. He is a great figure and much loved by the people here. He has no power anymore but I think it would not be such a bad idea if he was actually running the country. He would do a much more honest and sincere job than many of the politicians. And I don’t mean just in Thailand. He would be a much better alternative than a lot of other democratically elected leaders from around the world. Of course the trouble with democracy is that any idiot can vote, and so they do, and so you can see what we get lumped with.
We decided to open our newest acquisition from the cellars of Mr. J Walkers Scottish fens; yes I’m talking about my duty free whiskey from New Delhi airport. All we did was have a little tot in appreciation of a bloody good King but in so doing we had broken the seal of the bottle which, as you will presently see, is a mistake in these dark days of airport fascism.

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