Our passage through India

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Apologies for the world record-breaking delay since the last blog; it isn't our fault, honest. The internet connection here in Kathmandu is so painfully slow and unreliable that it could make your backside bleed. As a result, this is a disappointingly picture-free entry; you'll have to give your imagination a work-out, I'm afraid. Plus we've been entertaining the family, of which more anon, and thus too busy to write. But above all, we've been in India, the craziest, busiest, noisiest, dirtiest, friendliest, hardest, smelliest, weirdest, most intense destination of our travels, for which ten months on the road did not feel like adequate preparation. To paraphrase the Premiership prince of darkness, Sir Alex Ferguson, 'India: bloody hell.'

Old India hands we'd met en route had warned us we would feel like this. We ignored them, naturally - right up until our arrival in Delhi at 3am on a Sunday morning after a day-long journey from Thailand, during which the in-flight entertainment consisted of us panicking about how we should deal with the discovery in Bangkok airport that we'd lost our last emergency cash-card (don't ask - but we now thoroughly endorse Western Union Money Transfer and all its related enterprises).

This was head-spinning enough in itself, but nothing compared to what Delhi's main market area, Paharganj, was like when we were thrust, blinking and not quite un-jetlagged, into the following morning's glaring sunlight. We couldn't move for street vendors, rickshaw merchants, free-range cows (which wander the streets being fed chapati by locals), beggars, monkeys and bewildered tourists, all shouting, pushing, shoving, hawking and in a couple of cases, spitting and urinating too. All life was here - human and inhuman too - flung together without enough money to go round. We lasted about 20 minutes before the cacophony of people trying to make you enter their shop, feed their kid, get on their bike, buy their bullwhip or talk to you about your beard (usually aimed at me rather than Adele) drove us into the nearest cafe, where we cowered and hoped they would all go away.

With hindsight, a baptism of fire in the maddest bit of Delhi probably wasn't a bad idea, because it helped us come to terms with local life pretty quickly. The men dress like extras from Boogie Nights and seem to think that it's okay to hold hands with one another. The women, all jewels and gorgeous saris, glide effortlessly through the craziness and filth. But the weirdest thing is that everybody insists on staring at you, even in the capital. It's all innocent and well-meaning enough, but after a while you feel like charging admission. Perhaps as a result, you constantly find yourself surfing emotional highs and lows: joy when you sit down to eat incredible food for about 50p and meet cheerful, open, assuming teenagers who exhibit far more intelligence and savvy than you do in your mid-30s; despair at the dirt and misery around you, in the midst of which every other shopkeeper tries to shortchange you and argue the toss.

We didn't want to hang around in Delhi any longer than we needed to, and after a couple of days we were on an overnight train to Madhya Pradesh, a state nine hours down the road from the capital (or 12 if you were unlucky enough to be on our train) that's about the size of Belgium and allegedy less frenetic than most. Not that you could tell in our first stop-off, Bhopal - an ugly, dirty, get-me-out-of-here kind of town that's still recovering from the tragic Union Carbide chemical leak of 20 years ago. Just down the road, however, is Sanchi, a sweet village that hosts some of India's oldest and most spectacular temples.

Our day-trip there was like our time here in a microcosm. We established that we could catch a train from Bhopal at 9am which would have us at Sanchi in 25 minutes. Of course, by the time the train actually left it was 11.30am and the journey took twice as long. At least our fellow passengers were pleased, because it allowed them even longer to make their bid for the World Staring Championships. It wasn't such good news for the pregnant woman who attempted to sit next to us, only to be halted by a stand-up row during which at least five people refused to give up their seats for her. Sweet Jesus. Reason eventually prevailed, but not before everybody had bought a dodgy samosa and flung their rubbish out of the window.

We finally arrived at Sanchi - essentially two crossroads and a bizarre bazaar - and negotiated sundry monkeys, goats, freelance cattle and stray dogs to find the temples, which were unsignposted on a hilltop outside of town. News of our arrival soon spread, and we found ourselves posing for photographs with strangers, signing autographs (we kid you not), accepting business cards and even being invited to stay at one bloke's house if ever we found ourselves in Dhaka. It was like being in bloody Heat!

We wrestled free for long enough to soak up the serene majesty of the Sanchi monuments, which nobody else seemed to be bothering with, before being whizzed around the tiny museum by a charming curator who took our shameful ignorance of ancient religions in his stride, and heading back to the station with 'only' a two-hour delay before we caught the ball-achingly slow train back to Bhopal. After that, there was just enough time to eat an amazing curry before collapsing into bed. And of the scores of people who attempted to flog us stuff that day ('Sir, please buy a clockwork helicopter,' was my favourite), not one of them was selling the only thing we actually needed: bog roll. Instead, they laughed in our faces like we were asking for a chocolate fireguard. Welcome to India.

When things go well here, you feel like you could stay here forever - so warm is the welcome, so rewarding your good times. On a bad day, by contrast, you feel like catching the next plane home to your mum. The people you meet are intelligent, multilingual, streetwise, hard-working, but also hopelessly inefficient and sometimes downright idiotic - often all in the space of a couple of minutes. They multi-task madly, never knowingly finishing one job before starting on about three others. If the markets seem chaotic, the roads are downright anarchic: imagine every vehicle (and animal) you can think of locked in a deadly game of Gran Turismo, in which the only rule is that you must give ground to something or someone bigger than you. And as with so much else in India, everything kind of works out okay for everybody in the end, but not before you're foaming at the mouth.

If this blog sounds increasingly like a ill-conceived rant, as I suspect it might, it's because coming here is such an overwhelming, all-consuming experience that merely listing where we've been and what we've seen feels rather insignificant compared to the intensity of the overall experience of being here. But I'll give it a go, because you've all got homes to go to. After Sanchi we headed south via bus, cycle-rickshaw and criminally over-laden Land Rover (see 'Question of the Week') to a place called Pachmarhi, a hill-station town where the officer classes took their ease in the days of the Raj. It's blissful, with incongrous church spires, Victorian cottages and manicured gardens all bathed in soothing mountain air. We hired bicycles - bum-breaking '50s bone-shakers - and spent a very chilled-out weekend pedalling ourselves around the glorious countryside, pausing occasionally to be photographed by locals on their camera-phones. (Don't worry, this made no sense to us, either.)

Staying in this oasis of calm gave us the impetus to tackle Travel Hell, or the two-day cross-state schlepp to our next destination, the ruins at Khajuraho and Orchha. We quickly wished we hadn't. After further adventures in jeeps that didn't leave town when they said they were going to, we conspired to miss The Only Train That's Ever Been On Time In India Ever. This was easily rectified by leaping on board the next one (quite literally) and splashing the cash (about five quid), but after ending up on the Wrong Bus - an asthmatic prison cell of a vehicle - that deposited us eight miles from where they said it would, we were fit to be tied. This, in turn, left us at the mercy of cut-throat taxi-wallahs desperate to part us from our cash who wouldn't take 'just sod off' for an answer. And all in 40-degree midday heat. Remember, we're doing this stuff so you don't have to.

Thankfully Khajuaraho and Orchha were worth all the aggro. The former is an ancient temple complex festooned with erotic statues carved by extremely skillful (and downright rude) medieval stonemasons, while Orchha is home to an amazing collection of deserted Moghul ruins that you can clamber all over at your leisure for the princely sum of 50p with barely another soul in sight. Windsor Castle it ain't.

After that, it was back to Delhi again (only four hours late this time) for our long-awaited rendezvous with Brigitte and Rachel, Adele's mum and sis. We hired a retro-cool Hindustan Ambassador (like an old Morris Oxford) and the world's least charismatic man (Bruce Forsyth he was not) to drive it, and embarked on a 10-day tour of India's tourist highspots in Agra and Rajasthan. After two weeks on public transport, you'd think that being driven around would feel like the height of luxury and relaxation, wouldn't you? Not at this time of the year it isn't. The heat gets up to the mid-40s pretty quickly and makes you feel as if you're travelling in a microwave, and the Ambassador is proof of how much car design has moved on since the 1950s. But no matter: this was still an epic road trip, primarily because India's highspots are like nothing else in the world.

We began by visiting the incomparable Taj Mahal, which lives up to every last bit of the hype (even in our cack-handed pictures). In terms of sensory overload, it's only eclipsed by the unremitting grimness of Agra, the town that surrounds it, which is easily one of the worst places we've visited. Our perceptions were coloured, it has to be said, by meeting the world's biggest tosser while we were there: a local bank manager who refused to entertain the idea of helping us out after his company's ATM 'stole' 200 quids' worth of our cash. For obnoxiousness, rudeness, uselessless and sheer mendacity, this bloke takes the gold-plated biscuit. His name is Mr Ganej, and if you're ever in Agra, do look him up - preferably with a Molotov cocktail in hand.

Anyway. After spending a wonderful day wallowing in the Taj's magnificence, we hot-footed it out of Agra and into the sticks to the Ranthambore Wildlife Park. The big draw here is the local Bengal tiger population, although we weren't optimistic about seeing many of them bearing in mind that our 'safari' there consisted of rumbling around with 20 other people in the back of a lorry. Then, just as the evening was drawing in and we'd pretty much given up hope, the antelopes started squarking with anxiety - a noise that sounds curiously like a car alarm - and a huge female tiger came loping out of the forest right in front of our truck and padded down to a nearby lake, where she spent 20 minutes bathing and ignoring the couple of hundred tourists frantically taking pictures of her (ours were the best, but you'll have to take my word for it). When she was done, she calmly picked her way between the lorries and back into the forest where her cubs were, resisting the temptation to put the wind up everybody watching with a brisk roar. Amazing.

After Ranthambore, we spent a hot, sweaty and wonderful week visiting the ancient Rajput cities of Jaipur, Jodhpur and Pushkar, all epic in their scale, ambition and sheer nuttiness. I could go on in the usual tedious detail... but frankly, if this internet connection goes down once more I'm going do something that will lead to me being sent to prison for a very long time. The edited highlights were: our three-hour camel ride through the desert near Pushkar, which I'm still reminded of pretty much every time I sit down; the beautiful fort and indigo-blue city of Jodhpur; and the fact that Brigitte and Rachel are still speaking to us after being allowed into our crazy world for two weeks. If I were them, I would have been climbing the walls to get out.

And so to Nepal. Compared to Delhi, Kathmandu feels like a massive breath of fresh air: it's laid-back, cool and has a pleasing 'frontier town' atmosphere from all the walkers and climbers who use it as a jumping-off point into the Himalaya. Talking of which, that's where we're going next, to do as much of the 20-day Annapurna Circuit trek as our dodgy limbs allow. If we live to tell the tale, you'll hear all about it next time. Perhaps even - gasp - with pictures. You just can't get the staff these days, you know.

Take care,
Rob and Adele x

Quote of the week
'Well, Mr Ganej: you stink, your company stinks and sometimes your country stinks too.'
Rob fails his Diplomatic Corps entrance exams during a 'quiet word' with the bank manager in Agra

Question of the week
Q: How many people can you fit into a Land Rover for a 30-mile journey?
A: 19 (that's NINETEEN), including one sleeping toddler, a loincloth-clad octoganarian guru and a record-breaking five people across the two front seats. And the total doesn't even include the two teenagers hanging onto the spare wheel out back. Seatbelts - who needs 'em?

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Comments

[John Parsons]

No change there then
Hi guys, Last time I was in India the Hindustan Ambassador was a new design (I was quite young then!), but from your description nothing much seems to have changed about India since then. Beats me how you manage to get around, catch (or miss) trains, get money, get cool, get on-line, get any sleep, or keep up the enthusiasm. If it is any consolation many of us love reading your stuff with or without the pics, and wish you well with the next stage. Brightens our dull lives here anyway. Do you actually plan to come back at all? Just love to be a fly on the wall when UK Customs ask you where you have been...Take care you two. Love John and Pat