Blogs from Puri, Orissa, India, Asia - page 4

Marc and I left Varanasi, heading East towards Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal. I've always associated Calcutta with an overwhelming sense of poverty, an Orwellian layout of broken down buildings and ghettos filled with rubbish and wailing children begging for food. While I didn't find Calcutta overwhelmingly beautiful, I certainly didn't expect a booming Metropolis with a pretty chi-chi area filled with cafes and bistros with a skyline boasting one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. They also have a theme park called Science City, but that's definitely worth a miss, though I did get a mean plate of Chow Mein noodles in the cafeteria. We spent an uneventful Easter morning in Calcutta, when Marc told me he wanted to show me something special -- a surprise. About 20 squelchingly hot blocks ... read more

Rangers We left Calcutta in the back of a madman's tour-bus. It was cold, it was night, it was the impoverished upper-east corner of India. We didn't expect it, but we got it: ten hours of the worst discomfort either Chelly or I had ever imagined. The road was barley-paved and full of holes. Our driver bombed across pits and jumped the speed-bumps, weaving between both lanes of traffic and tearing off blindly to pass. I swear the bus got up on two wheels every time we took a corner. At the end of it, we were sore and tired and rearin' to puke. So we got off the bus in the Hindu pilgrim's town of Puri. Avoiding the hawkers and the beggars and the cows, we jumped in an Auto Rickshaw on the way to ... read more

In an unusual (?) bout of laziness, I decided to ask the hotel travel agent to purchase my train tickets from Chennai to Bangalore, and Bangalore to Hospet. This usually incurs a commission of about Rs 100 per ticket, which is more than 10% of the ticket cost even for a 10 hour journey in 2AC. However it does mean you don't have to pay the auto fares to/from the station reservation office, plus you save the time waiting around there, so taking that into consideration it starts to look like a more reasonable figure. He then asked me how I was getting to Chennai, then enquired as to the cost of my ticket. When I told him $235, he shook his head and tutted, saying it was actually - surprise, surprise - $143. He then ... read more

Leslie's list of "Why's" Why isn't there a better way to process the waste created by over one billion people (and cows)? For a country that sees SO MANY Western tourists, why isn't there more of an interest in our sense of 1. cleanliness 2. sales techniques 3. noise levels 4. personal space? Why do so many Indians make me so annoyed with them? Why is this man giving me walking directions to the station when I'm asking if I can call? Why doesn't anybody EVER have change? I had a really interesting opportunity before dawn on the 24-hour train ride to Bhubaneswar. Turns out, I was sleeping under a woman who grew up here in Orissa but has lived in Albany, NY for the last 20 years. Well, of course I picked her brain about ... read more