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Published: January 7th 2008
Lisa
Trying out some Indian milk sweetsNamaste from...Montreal! India may be becoming a world leader in a lot of areas but their internet connections move at the pace of Montreal snow removal. And with only three weeks to see that fascinating country there was no way I was going to spend a day blogging in one of their cubbyhole net cafes. Here’s my last blog entry, another long one as I can’t seem to curb my urge to write everything…feel free to skim!
The Hindu gods smiled upon my arrival in India; as soon as I cleared customs in Kolkata I found myself side by side with Lisa, an Ontarian and fellow newbie to this intimidating country. India is one of those places that most people want to visit but hold back because of its reputation for being dirty and challenging for solo travel, but this was an auspicious beginning and we felt doubly blessed when we were invited by an Australian India-veteran (who spoke some Hindi!) to share a cab ride to the Tourist Inn where he was staying. As we passed through the streets teeming with people, traffic and livestock it felt about as comfortable as your first hour in India could feel and
I thanked Kali and Vishnu, Ganesh and all the other deities for making it so.
Lisa and I became fast friends and hooked up with the inn's resident cheromant (palm-reader)/receptionist, Rajkumar, for lunch and a truly "non-touristic" tour of downtown Kolkata the following day (one of our stops was his family's apartment); but my travel stint with Lisa was short-lived as she headed north to Darjeeling and I continued west on an overnight train to meet my Japanese friend, Satoko, in Varanasi. Physically the train was comfortable, but there was one problem - I was surrounded by men. I usually have nothing against men, but one of them had something against me. Feeling a bit out of place and not quite knowing where to look, I decided to update my journal with an entry about Kolkata. As soon as I took it out the man next to me started asking loud questions about my writing. At first I thought he was trying to practice his English, but when he asked if I was noting “indiscretions” I had seen in the train car I started to worry. I gave up entirely on the journal entry after he made a grab
Kolkata Bus
An insider's perspective for my book, demanding to see my notes. The man got off the train long before we reached Varanasi but I was wary and sleepless for the rest of the ride and (rather unfairly) imagined myself surrounded by voyeurs, gropers and thieves.
I was relieved to finally meet Satoko at Baba Guest House in Varanasi, a place owned by a Korean-Indian couple where several languages are spoken, including Japanese and English. We spent a few days in Varanasi just getting a feel for India and making plans for the rest of our trip. We also spent a lot of time resting and sitting in cafes as any effort to walk through the crowded, noisy streets of the city was exhausting. With all the cars, hawkers, cows, rickshaws and scummy puddles to avoid, it takes a lot of concentration just to avoid colliding with any or all of the above.
As it was, Varanasi was a pleasant city to spend a few days with its maze of old pedestrian market streets and the line of ghats (piers) along the holy river Ganges where you can spend hours watching every part of daily life unfold from the morning bath to
the laundering of sheets, the washing of livestock and a nightly purification ceremony that fills the air with chanting and drum-beating.
Though full of life, Varanasi is also an important place to die so that you can be cremated on one of the funeral pyres, an auspicious way to make your exit. According to the "Lonely Planet," it is possible to witness a cremation, though photography is prohibited, but Satoko and I felt satisfied just watching the bodies being paraded through the streets on their way to the burning. We were, however, brought face to face with the casual acceptance of death on a sunrise river boat ride. Soon after we set off in a small rowboat for a mystical perspective of the ghats, our boatman pointed nonchalantly at the water and said, "Look, a dead man." Sure enough, floating face down in the water was a dead man, naked and swollen and stiff. I looked at Satoko to gauge her level of shock then looked wide-eyed at the boatman who remained deadpan. No one seemed too concerned with the man in the water; I guess they figured it was as good a place as any to be dead.
We left Varanasi on a midnight train (which was inevitably two hours late) bound for Khajuraho, an ancient city renowned for its temples that are covered with erotic sculptures. Though my first train trip had been terrifying because of all the “scary” men on board, this one was so for entirely different reasons. Satoko and I boarded in a crush of people to find a large family spread out on our bunks. The parents were eventually ordered by a conductor to move themselves and their children onto the two bunks for which they had actually purchased tickets (a move that left the mom and toddler with nowhere to sleep but the floor). As we waited for them to move, Satoko and I watched in horror as a cockroach scuttled its way over one end of the bunk next to us and disappeared under the blanket of the person sleeping there. If we were building a "Top 10 reasons you shouldn't take this train" list, we would be off to a pretty good start; but we took the train and as we hunkered down for a long night's sleep, my stomach showed its first signs of unrest since Laos.
Suddenly I felt very bad about the whole situation - my stomach, the bugs, the woman and baby on the floor beside me, the older man forced to sleep sitting on the floor at the foot of my bunk, the stuffiness of the car and then the cold of night. The one redeeming factor about this journey was the solidarity that formed once we left the first station and people settled down for the long ride. I loaned my sleeping mat to the woman on the floor and her family returned the gesture by putting a warm blanket over me and giving me sympathetic glances when they saw that I wasn't feeling well. It was the same side of humanity I experienced on the hard-seat train from Beijing to Xi'an in China that takes a difficult situation and makes it bearable.
Although it should have been a relief to get off the train, my gut was a mass of pain and we had another four hours to go by bus before we reached Khajuraho. The road from the bus station to Khajuraho was a veritable moonscape with craters that bumped us out of our seats and slammed us down
hard again at regular intervals. This did not soothe my stomach and it was by sheer force of will and compassion for everyone present that I wasn't sick all over a cow standing beneath my window at a rest stop where my seat overlooked a samosa stand and the nauseating smell of fried food wafted in. Needless to say, we booked into the first guest house we saw (a strange place with aggressive staff called Zen Guest House) where I passed out until the next morning. When I was conscious again, Satoko and I made a beeline for an internet cafe where we booked flights for the rest of our trip from Mumbai onwards and a ticket south to Goa for a “vacation.”
In terms of the effort and hassle of getting there, I'm not sure I would recommend a visit to Khajuraho. The temples were pretty but the surrounding area was heavily landscaped giving them a theme park feel; and the number of touts (guys hired to get you to stay at a hotel or buy souvenirs at a particular shop in return for a large commission from the owner, paid by you in the form of a
higher price) was excessively large for such a small town. The only positive thing I can say about touts is that they are smart people, shrewd in matters of money and able to learn anything that will help business - the ones in Khajuraho spoke fluent English and Japanese to rival my own.
A much nicer city was little Orccha, a place unknown even to some Indians. With one main street and the ruins of a medieval castle and temples that can be explored at leisure and mostly for free, it was a good place to decompress and mingle with the locals. We did so unwittingly one night as we (Satoko, me and two guys we’d met on the bus from Khajuraho) followed a procession of drums and dancing people leaving a temple. Down the street we went, swept up in the atmosphere, winding up at a cluster of houses. Then the crowd turned and informed us that this was a wedding. We extended our congratulations and expected them to leave us outside but instead they invited us in. And then they made us dance. Gone were the bride and groom; we, the foreigners, were surrounded and watched and
filmed on video-camera as they played their drums and urged us on. When we finally put our feet down for the last time they invited us to join them for the wedding feast where we were served chapatis and a delicious assortment of dal, rice and curries. Again, we were watched as we broke every rule in the etiquette book. I spent the next day in bed save for a short trip to the town doctor for a course of antibiotics to fix my stomach, which still wasn’t well, but it was worth the pain for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of the night before!
When we had soaked up enough of the Orccha atmosphere we hopped on our last train to Mumbai, this time opting for air-conditioned-second-class (2 AC) tickets. Though the aircon was completely unnecessary in the chill winter night, we had been assured that this car wouldn't be overbooked and that it would also be vermin-free. I did see one little cockroach scurry by but otherwise it was acceptable.
Until this point I had felt much less culture shock than I expected. Kolkata, the "City of Joy" which I had built up in my mind as one
Henna On My Hand
My name in Hindi is pronounced "imli" which means tamarind of the most daunting places in the world to visit was generally nice with just enough squalor visible to make you realize you're in a developing country; but Mumbai shook me up a little. Of course, Colaba, the tourist area, was nice with its colonial architecture, cricket maidans (playing fields) and well-to-do university students milling around. I also felt a particular connection to the city as I was wrapped up in the book "Shantaram," Gregory David Roberts' rose-coloured account of the eight years he spent there after escaping from an Australian prison. It was as we left the city, driving alongside four lanes of motorcycles and SUVs, past pavement dwellings and slums on our way to the airport that I realized how many people live with so little in India. I've seen poverty in every country I have visited and no matter where you are there is nothing quite as devastating as urban poverty, but in India it is the sheer number of poor people - the kilometers of slums and sidewalk shelters built out of cardboard - that shocks.
We escaped to the relatively wealthy southern paradise of Goa where we cruised around the Portuguese colonial town of
Sadu on the Ghats
A holy man in Varanasi Panajim before crashing out on the beach at Anjuna for a few days. Tanned and rejuvenated, we flew north to Delhi - I call the second part of our trip "India Lite" because we took great pains to avoid any hardship or inconvenience - our base for visiting the Taj Mahal and our departure point. At first Satoko and I stayed in a budget hotel with kind owners but icy (it was almost cold enough to see your breath), noisy rooms in the frenetic backpacker neighbourhood called Praharganj. After two sleepless nights we decided to upgrade to a clean and quiet one-star hotel (Hotel Fifty-Five) for our last night. I don't really believe in fate but this one brought me close: I was walking through the lobby towards the front doors to set my backpack down before checking out and as a man walking by looked in through the window we both did a double take - it was Marko, the Calgary friend I was supposed to meet at the beginning of my trip in India but whom I’d missed when I forgot to get my visa! Though short-lived, it was a happy reunion and we shared a round of
The Oarsman
After pointing out the dead man in the water chai tea before Satoko and I made our way to Agra to glimpse the Taj.
The next day, Satoko and I flew home, she to Japan and I to Montreal, within hours of each other. I had been warned about all the culture shock I would feel upon my arrival home, and you would be hard-pressed to find two countries that were more different. I’m not sure what dictates who will experience reverse culture shock or to what extent, but I had spent the last two months fantasizing about seeing my family, friends, parents' homes and even about all the stores I could remember on Monkland Avenue; and it was every bit as good as I imagined to be back. Besides, this was just another different city and I knew how to adjust - I'd been doing it for the last five months.
Even though I had officially been away from Montreal for eighteen months, the number of things that were still the same made it feel like mere weeks. No one looked much older or fatter than they had when I left (as Mom suggested they would) and all of the old Montreal establishments are still here.
I laughed inwardly at times about how strange it was for this to feel so normal. Of course when you pierce the surface of normality you see the small things that do change - deaths of loved ones and the fading of old friendships. These are the hardest things to come to terms with when you return after such a long time; but the goodness of seeing familiar faces, eating favourite foods and understanding everything overshadowed any feelings of sadness.
I won’t stay put for long; I’ve already booked a flight out to Calgary where I plan to work for a few months before setting out on a long-planned trip to Egypt with my dad and Caitie; but I know that when I come back to Montreal again it will be just as if I never left. You can go to outer space, but it takes a whole lot more to become an alien.
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Dana
non-member comment
welcome back :-)))