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Published: February 5th 2006
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Botanical Gardens
Bits of the banyan tree When I woke up this morning, I was filled with a sudden urge to see the world's biggest banyan tree, which fortunately exists in the Botanical Gardens in Calcutta. What should have been a simple cab ride there turned into a journey via several modes of transport. To start the adventure, my cab driver and I had a grand total of zero languages in common. I should have simply found another cab, but the guy showed willingness to use the meter so I thought I'd cut him some slack. We spent several minutes cruising around trying to find a random person on the street who could translate "Botanical Gardens" into Hindi. When we found such a person, it turned out that it's the same in Hindi as it is in English - unfortunately my driver still didn't know where it was, but he was given directions and off we trundled.
Half an hour later, we were apparently in the vicinity of where he'd been told the gardens were, so we asked several more people who gave inconsistent stories, and eventually we stopped on a side street. A decent-sized crowd gathered to pool their collective English together to inform me that
Botanical Gardens
The world's biggest banyan tree I needed to catch a ferry to the gardens. I inferred from this that my driver had gone to completely the wrong place, but if catching the ferry was going to salvage the situation, then catch it I would.
After crossing a river (no idea what it was, though probably some tributary of the Hooghly), I then took a rickshaw and was finally deposited in front of one of the entrances to the Botanical Gardens. The grounds were excellent, and had representation of flora from all parts of India as well as many parts of the world. Though most of the paths were in shade, large stretches were still in the intense sunshine, and I became so enervated that I ended up buying a lollipop to give my parched mouth some relief - my first one in years.
The banyan tree looked more like its own forest, with the prop trunks that it produces appearing to be individual trees rather than all part of one entity. In fact the main trunk of the thing had been cut out a long time ago when it was damaged, but the rest had thrived since then. It was impressive, but to
describe it (as the RG does) as having a circumference of 420 metres was a little misleading - at least, to those of us hoping to see a single trunk that large.
After a taxi ride back to the hotel, and a much-needed siesta, I paid a visit to the Kalighat Temple, from which Calcutta apparently gets its name. This involved getting the Metro, for which I had to queue up and buy a ticket at a counter as they don't appear to have ticket machines. There wasn't any aircon in the train, but I was only on for 5 stops, and the draught blowing through the open windows was refreshing enough.
On exiting the Metro, I was given several not-quite-accurate sets of directions to the temple, and eventually tracked it down when I stumbled across Mother Teresa's mission, which I knew was on the same site. The Kalighat Temple itself was fairly grotty at street level - if you wanted to enter the temple you had to remove your footwear, but one look at the filth on the ground and I'd decided neither my feet nor even my socks were going to have contact with it.
Top of the Kalighat Temple
From which Calcutta gets its name As is the custom, one of the wardens insisted on taking me on a guided tour. He showed me the place where they sacrifice goats (regularly) and buffalo (infrequently), which were swarming with flies, plus a tree to which childless wives tie a thread in order to improve their chances of conceiving. At the end, he whipped out a ledger in which previous tourists had written their name, country, and donation amount. The donations were all in the thousands, which struck me as the most unsubtle bit of forgery I've seen in a while. My own donation was slightly less than a thousand, which seemed to cause him some consternation until I reminded him of the consequences to his karma of ripping off tourists.
As a final comment, I appear to have picked up a dose of the runs again, perhaps courtesy of my venture into Bengali cuisine yesterday. The pounds are just melting off me ...
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