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Published: December 6th 2006
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Al Qaeda have contaminated London's water supply with high grade Speed and coined the phrase "Honk your horn if you are off your head!". Everyone is on the streets, shouting, jostling for position and generally acting like lunatics. Not to be outdone, the British farmers decide to get in on the act and release their cattle and other live stock into the bedlam, in protest against poor farming subsidies. You stand bewildered in the middle of the pandemonium, surrounded by the maddening crowd, cows, honking horns and kamikaze rickshaw drivers...... Well welcome to India!!!
The Indian tourist board advertise India as "Incredible India".... I think this is the perfect adjective as it can mean anything: There are incredible smells (both good and bad), incredible scenery, incredible people, incredible food, incredible poverty and wealth, incredible noise, incredible hassle and incredible sights, but above all incredible chaos. India is truly a place that leaves you befuddled.
My experience of India started in Mumbai. I met up with Malc at the airport and we made our way into the city, holding on for dear life as our Autorickshaw careered through the throng of traffic, people sleeping on the street and a selection
of sacred animals.
Mumbai is very busy and polluted and not a great place to spend a lot of time, so we decided to leave quickly, booking ourselves on a flight down to Kochi in the communist state of Kerala. We enjoyed a couple of very tranquil days in the sleepy fishing town. We ate really well at banana leaf restaurants, visited spice markets and watched in wonderment as the locals operated huge Chinese fishing nets…
It was then on to Allappuzha, where we jumped on a boat and headed into the Kerala backwaters bound for Kollam. The backwaters are a group of canals crisscrossing the whole of the state and by travelling along them you can get a great insight into everyday Keralan life. Women wash cloths on the river banks, while the men operate their Chinese fishing nets and kids attend floating schools. We were informed that there is a one hundred percent literacy rate within the state, which is very impressive when compared to the rest of India…
Our next stop was hippie Varkala, a great beach town perched on a cliff top overlooking the ocean. It is by no means as commercial as
Goa or Kovalam and as a result you can really chill out and enjoy the surroundings. The days were spent playing in the strong sea swell and soaking up the sun. A really special time.
After a five hour train journey we arrived at the southern most point of India; Kanyakumari, in the state of Tamil Nadu. The cape town was a little disappointing, we wondered around a very dirty Hindu temple, walked down to the grotty waterfront and held our noses as we passed by a fishing marina. The main problem seems to be rubbish, it just gets left on the street and beach to rot, so that everywhere is filthy, smelling worse than you can possibly imagine. This is not confined to Kanyakumari, but unfortunately the norm for the majority of India.
From the cape we boarded a sleeper strain and had a surprisingly good rest, before arriving at Pondicherry in the early hours of the morning. The town was ruled by the French up until the early 1960s and retains a lot of its Gallic charms. The old town is a treat to walk around and you can find great coffee shops and patisseries to
relax in. Close to Pondicherry is the international community of Auroville, which is a communal town based on human unity. It was an interesting place to visit and proved that there are other ways to go than Capitalism and Communism. Not for me though as it seemed a little too twee and insular.
Our final port of call in Tamil Nadu was Chennai (Medras). It claims the unfortunate honour of being the most polluted city in India and is a place that I do not envisage myself visiting again. I try and live by the rule, that if you have nothing good to say about something/someone you should not say anything at all, so I’m going to shut up about Chennai now…
Luckily after Chennai we had the opportunity to have a wonderful weekend in Bangalore to sooth our soles. We stayed with Dinesh, his wonderful wife Sangita and their adorable toddler Sakshat. I cannot remember a time I have eaten so well and so much. The days were spent catching up with Dinesh and Nisch and playing with Sakshat - I normally do not get on with Toddlers, but this little fella was completely different to normal
babies and a real joy to be around. It was fantastic to see my old friends again in their own environment, doing so well for themselves and looking very happy.
Following Bangalore we had a few days in Puttaparti. Not much to note other than the unfortunate time when we were travelling in an open-sided autorickshaw and passed a oncoming bus at the precise moment that a passenger decided to throw up out of the window. Ten out of ten for accuracy, as projectile vomit hit us head on - two out of ten for consistency...! Malc and the driver took the brunt of the force and I luckily escaped with a few grains of yellowed rice on the jumper and shorts. All in all not a great experience!
It was time to head up north… We spent a few days in Calcutta exploring the town and then another couple of days in Varanasi. The main attraction here are the numerous ghats on the river Ganges. It really is another world - you have people bathing in the rancid waters, cattle and other livestock wondering about, bodies being burnt in large cremation pyres and hawkers selling anything and
everything. Again bewildering!
We had a few moments of peace and tranquility in the Buddhist havens of Sarnath and Bodgaya. The latter being where the Buddha gained enlightenment under a Bodhi tree and the former the location of his first talk after enlightenment. As nice as these towns were, I think at this point we were both longing to get into the crisp, clean mountains of Nepal… After a night in a putrid guesthouse in Rauxhal, a town that reminded me of Beirut during the bombing, we escaped into Nepal and the world became sane again!
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