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Published: January 23rd 2019
You can't go all the way to India for work and not have an extra few days to look around. The work up in Uttarakhand was great; the few days looking around Madhya Pradesh was typical of travelling in India with occasional glorious bits (temples, palaces, forts, etc) mixed in with horrendous bits (open defecation, ubiquitous odour of urine, trains that inexplicably stop in the middle of nowhere for 3-hours, a lot of rubbish everywhere, constant spitting, appalling Delhi air quality, food-belly collisions, a lot of hassle, shouting at plus once getting physical with tuk-tuk drivers, etc).
Unfortunately, perhaps inevitably, and entirely predictably, this particular blog has ended up being similar in format to my India blog of a few years ago. That one was titled “The Ups and Downs of Travelling in India” and alternated between the highs and lows that are experienced while travelling in the country (see https://www.travelblog.org/Asia/India/Rajasthan/blog-822842.html). This blog will just be one high, work in Uttarakhand, and one low, post work travelling in Delhi and Madhya Pradesh.
The work was part of a research project looking at climate change impacts across the Himalayan region. My bit of the research involves
The view from the study site
The highest mountain is Nanda Devi; the second tallest in India at 7816 m. Those mountains are about 200 km distant.looking at springs in the Lesser Himalaya that are utilised by rural communities for domestic and irrigation water. The springs are drying up. Is that due to climate change? Or is it due to land use change as lots of the native oak forests have been replaced with pine, a tree with greater water demand? Or is it due to the influx of hotels being built for the growing Delhi middle class who like to escape the heat of the Indian plains and head into the Himalayas; these hotels have their own boreholes to abstract groundwater? Or is it due to the new roads being built that cut into the mountainsides disrupting the shallow groundwater flow? Sorry if you’re expecting an answer, the project is ongoing and I’ve got a lot more work to do yet.
The work involved roaming around the Himalayan foothills, following streams up to their sources, scrambling through forests looking for outcrops to get a look at the geology, following locals to their ancient and ornate developed springs to collect water samples, hopping over boulders down river courses finding pipe inlets and pump houses, hiking around steep terraced slopes looking at old irrigation channels, being
invited into villagers’ houses for masala chai, it was bliss. All with the high snowy Himalayas in the distance; actually about 200 km distant but as they are almost 8000 m high they were clear as day.
It was Magdalena’s first visit to India (she is doing the forestry part of the research project), and she wanted to at least visit the Taj Mahal. Because I’ve visited the Taj Mahal before, I thought if we were going to have a few days of travel in addition to the 10 days of work, I’d like to also visit somewhere new. Therefore, following the long taxi drive down the mountains to Kathgodam followed by the all-day train back to Delhi, we boarded an overnight train to Khajuraho.
You’ve probably seen pictures of the Khajuraho Temples. Sometimes known as the Khajuraho Erotic Temples, the intricate carvings depict scenes from the Karma Sutra in addition to some sexually adventurous and extremely agile scenes of threesomes, foursomes and bestiality. It seems India had much more liberal attitudes in 950AD compared to today. While the temples are very much worth seeing, are they worth going to see? Yes, if you
Sunrise behind Mehman Khana
Next to the Taj Mahal in Agra. are passing.
It seems not a huge amount of tourists get this far so you have to tolerate “Selfie please”, “Selfie please”. “One photo please”. “Selfie please. Where is your woman? Get your woman.”. “One snap please. Shout your wife.” “She’s sick (actually she was really ill in Khajuraho – I had to virtually drag her to the temples) she doesn’t want to be in a photo”. “Shout your wife.” At least these people asked first. You get used to not very discrete photos and videos being taken of you; or of Magdalena especially. Some of the “Selfie please” blokes not very subtly twisted there phones so the selfie of the three of us was actually a photo of just them and Magdalena with me out of the frame.
A very early start the following morning and we set off on a safari to Panna National Park. It was freezing. Despite wearing a lot of clothes and having blankets, we didn’t warm up until the sun came out a few hours into the safari. We didn’t see a tiger and unfortunately that’s what our driver and guide were focussed on so we didn’t stop much to
Fieldwork in Uttarakhand
Boulder-hopping down the river was a fun adventure till we saw a recently killed cow in an isolated gorge. "Tiger" said the local chaps we were working with. observe the deer, peacocks, antelopes, birdlife, monkeys, etc, that it would have been nice to watch do their thing. But we did glimpse a leopard. Worth going to? Yes, if you are in Khajuraho anyway.
A horrendous local train journey then took us to Orchha. Horrendous because you cannot reserve a seat so it is a free for all on a small uncomfortable train. Getting on at the first stop meant we got (wooden) seats but at every stop (every 15 minutes or so) a lot of people got on, all with sacks of stuff. The seats were crammed with people, the floor was carpeted in people and the luggage rack was full of people. Every 5 minutes the person adjacent leaned across me to spit luxuriously out of the window. The toilet cannot be described, the ill-fitting door was like a gateway to Hades. Every time we stopped the stench from this evil flooded the carriage. And one of the stops was for three hours. Walking along the platform to figure out what was going on revealed we no longer had a locomotive attached to the train. We were just a few unattached carriages on a
Gwalior Fort
Get off the train, tuk-tuk then walk up to the fort for a quick look, then go back down and get back on the train. platform in the middle of nowhere. A platform where no entrepreneurial locals had yet set up any kind of stall to purchase food or drink. There wasn’t even a chai wallah. A five-hour journey took eight hours and we arrived in the dark.
But then: Orchha. Worth going? Definitely yes! It is on few travel itineraries hence no hassle from touts, guides, tuk-tuk drivers or souvenir sellers. There are forts, palaces, massive mausoleums, temples, ruins, a colourful market, a busy river, friendly people, a famous very sweet coconutty fudge-like sweet; it’s probably the only place we really liked other than where we were working.
Next we went to Gwalior. Great fort on the hill and interesting 1500-year old Jain statues carved into the cliffs on the way up the hill to the fort. The town is unpleasant though. We were followed at one point and had someone hiding behind a wall at an ancient tomb throwing stones at us.
And then Agra. The Taj Mahal is still beautiful. You still have to get there at 5:30am to avoid massive queues and massive crowds (though you still get both). Given the amount
you have to pay to get in you would think they'd pick up the rubbish. Thus you have to carefully position hedges and trees at the bottom of your photographs to hide the litter. Better still, you'd expect at the Taj Mahal that people wouldn't be dropping it.
Getting to the Taj Mahal at sunrise means you are finished there by around 8:30am. Trains had been booked up for months so we splashed out on a taxi to Delhi. It cost about £30, which seems a fortune compared to train costs but as we were on a short trip and didn’t fancy a long bus journey we justified it. The taxi also meant we could leave straight after Taj Mahal and have half a day in Delhi prior to our flight at midnight. Half a day is the maximum I ever really want to spend in Delhi. The air quality had improved somewhat since our arrival two weeks earlier immediately following Diwali. A combination of all the fireworks and burning crops in the surrounding countryside meant daytime was turned to night and just breathing outside gave a noticeable burning sensation in the throat. On our final day
Sambar deer
Panna National Park it wasn’t too bad so we took a trip to Qutb Minar – one of Delhi’s three UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Worth a visit? Yep, if you have time to kill in Delhi – if only to escape the hassle, dust and stench of the streets.
Writing this two months after the trip, it seems I’m being harsh on India. This happened with the previous visits. Each time I have left thinking I don’t want to go back but then I look at the photos and remember the good bits and think it’s a fascinating place. But then I also remember the poverty and squalor while reading articles about £330million being spent on the world’s biggest statue. I’ll probably go back for this current project. I think I’ll stick to the Himalayas.
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
You listed three glorious bits and nine horrendous bits...
sounds about right. I was turned off at 8 years old watching buzzards devour a dead body. My Dad loved the Himalayas, visiting many times, including Nepal and Tibet.