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Published: November 19th 2009
Saddhu
HyderabadNothing can prepare you for arrival in India. No matter how many stories you have read or experiences you have heard no preparation can really help for what can await you in this amazingly diverse and huge country.
Our arrival to Bangalore airport was without much hassle and we were surprisingly greeted with a chilly night and cool breeze passing through. In the city centre it was difficult to find much around at night so we settled for the nearest hotel we could find even though it was quite a dump for quite a lot of money.
The first thing to grow accustomed to in this country is the pollution. Here it comes in almost all varieties possible. Firstly, the stench from many of the unclean streets where people are dumping their rubbish which never gets cleaned. Next is the many pissing places that usually are situated around bus and train stations where many people go when in need of using the toilet. The stench I smelt here was probably the worst I have experienced in my whole life..
The next pollution that invades the senses is the noise. Everywhere you look there are people driving rickshaws, trucks
and scooters that make it almost impossible to hear anything by the sides of the main roads. In India, people really enjoy using their horns so even if the sounds of the motors were enough it is difficult to hear them due to the constant horning that besets it.
So if it were enough to be seeing so much dirt and rubbish everywhere and hearing so much incessant noise and altogether feeling quite stressed, many of the restaurants instead of satisfying your hunger could give you a nasty bout of food poisoning. I realised quite fast that this trip would be quite an experience but definitely not a holiday.
We quickly left the noise of Bangalore for a much smaller and quieter destination known as Tirupati. It is a quite a popular spot amongst Hindus as a pilgrimage sight but rarely sees many tourists. We arrived in the early morning and started to look for accommodation around the railway station but were shocked to see the state of some of the rooms on offer made living on the streets seem much more enticing. Many of the rooms were just filthy with so much dirt on the walls it
was hard to tell what colour they actually were. You even had to hold your breath going into the toilets as the stench was similar to that of a morgue. But the owners didn't even see the problem with the rooms always stating that they were clean and very proud that they even offered a television. So after a few hours looking we were ready to give up but in the end found something that seemed liveable at a reasonable rate.
The rate of poverty around the main centre of town was quite shocking. There were a lot of homeless people living by the sides of the streets and living in makeshift shanty towns out of whatever rubbish they could find. They all would bath and toilet by the river which didn't look much like a river any more.
The weather wasn't too bad but during the heat of the day it was difficult to move around too much especially with not much to see and do around the city. The nearby Tirumala hill where the temple complex exists was about an hour away by bus. On arriving however, it was extremely difficult to get a glimpse of
any temples as they were all covered by various structures and to see inside the temples meant waiting in two long queues. First one needed to buy a ticket which seemed like a queue to get into a prison and another long queue which meant about a two hour wait just to get inside. After all this we decided not to even bother and headed back to the hotel in Tirupati.
As the people around had rarely seen many tourists we were the centre of attraction. Most of the time it was quite unpleasant as it meant being stared at constantly with such stern expressions I felt completely uncomfortable. It was even more difficult for Paulina as she had to cover every part of her body even in such hot weather to avoid being harassed and stared at by the locals.
The restaurants around ranged from decent quality to absolutely terrible and it was difficult to tell without ordering what you may receive. By the third day I had already picked up a stomach bug and was visiting the toilet on quite a regular basis. I was starting to wonder what I was thinking in leaving the beautiful
smiles of Bali for this place.
We promptly decided to get the hell out of there as quick as possible and took the first bus out of town to Puttaparthy only about 150km away yet 8 hours by bus.
As we waited at the bus station in the early morning it was hard to maintain focus as the stomach pains were quite intense. Loud and incomprehensible music was being played whilst homeless person after homeless person begged in our faces, some without eyes others with other unknown illnesses. In the surroundings, endless buses were coming in and out and the occasional waft of old urine would remind you about the need for more clean toilet facilities. In the corner a dog lies with flies hanging around it with a constantly twitching leg that made it difficult for him to rest for any long length of time. By the time our super deluxe executive bus came, I was extremely relieved yet shocked as it seemed to have come from a previous mission in the Vietnam war after taking part in some kind of destruction derby.
Only after a short time on the bus it was easy to see
why it was in the state it was in. The driver believed he owned the roads, driving extremely fast over horrible dirt roads with big holes meanwhile dogs, camels and cows all trying to pass and only being spared at the final moment by incessant horning and swerving out of the way. It was impossible to even watch what was happening in front without having a serious heart attack and it was even harder to remain in the seat as we were constantly being thrown in the cabin by the erratic driving. At one point I smashed my head on the ceiling after becoming airborne from flying over a speed bump at an ungodly speed. As the hours ticked by I was wondering if I should write my will as I didn't believe I would even survive the trip. It wasn't just me who was suffering, we were lucky not to get vomit on us after quickly closing the window as the woman in front was utterly nauseous from the insanity. Even when there was little space on the road the bus just rammed on through scraping the side of a car and smashing its side vision mirror. By the
time we arrived we vowed never to take another Super Deluxe Executive bus in India again.
Puttaparthy is a little village town in the middle of nowhere and is famous for the ashram of Sai Baba, a renowned mystic and sage that performs strange miracles. He has a huge cult following around the world and especially India where he is though to be the reincarnation of Sai Baba of Shirdi a saint from the late 19th century. The town itself was a lot more clean than Tirupati and was quite well developed as the money raised from the ashram has gone to build a hospital, university and many schools throughout the town. The people in the ashram itself seemed quite strange and after seeing all the huge placards of the portrait of Sai Baba on every wall and in every shop in town it kinda of felt a bit too weird for us so we decided to keep on moving towards the north of India and in particular Varanasi.
Even though Varanasi didn't seem that far on the map of India we had, after buying the train tickets it ended up being a 30 hour journey with stops
in Hyderabad and Nagpur. The trains in India are great for long journeys as they are not mad like the buses and usually have a sleeping berth to pass the time more quickly. Even so after such a long ride, by the time we arrived in Varanasi we needed a whole day just to recover from the trip.
Varanasi is a city noted for being one of the oldest cities in the world. It is famous now for its historical ghats by the riverside that host funeral pyres even to this day. Hindus from around the country come here to die as they believe they will attain instant Moksha ( Liberation from future incarnations ).
We arrived in the heat of the day and being so far north the weather was much more unbearable than down south. We found a decent little hotel room in amongst the old town where there are tiny little maze like alleyways with shops selling cigarettes, pan ( chewable tobacco ) and various jewellery and incense products that to a typical westerner looked extremely cheap and tacky. But the city is more renowned for its more religious history and it is easy to
People in Awe
Solar Eclipse, Varanasi see by the various temples strewn across the mighty Ganges river sacred to all Hindus and believed to wash away all sins of past lives. Further up stream the funeral pyres were constantly burning bodies and it was quite a macabre scene. Some bodies depending if they are children, pregnant woman, Saddhus or killed by a snake bite are spared a cremation and just dumped straight into the Ganges. All I guess for the pleasure of the bathing Indians only slightly downstream.
By some strange fortune we arrived in Varanasi just before a total solar eclipse that only occurs every 20 odd years. It was interesting to see a lot tourists come in just for the spectacle, many from a scientific background and spent the last two years of their lives preparing and calculating which exact longitude and latitude would be a good place to see the eclipse.
By the morning of the eclipse, we were not ready for the onslaught of people that awaited us down by the riverside. It was only 6 am and there were already packed full on all the ghats and there was little room anywhere around. Everything seemed as in chaos with
people trying to go in every direction and pushing and shoving I felt I couldn't every breath. There were stick men around that would scream and smash people that were causing trouble. Eventually I found a place that felt peaceful enough and as the eclipse began it was as if someone had just switched off all the lights. Everything went almost pitch black and the anxious and mad crowd suddenly became quiet and serene shouting various chants and prostrating themselves on their knees and praying. It felt as if I had been transported back in time two thousand years in the middle of some ancient ritual. The ambience around was surreal and the 3 minutes the whole event lasted felt like forever.
But the for all the holiness the city was boasted it definitely had a much darker side. The sellers and rickshaw drivers were relentless in their constant touting and hounding. Many would follow you around asking you to take a tour or boat even after constantly saying no. Others would curse you if you didn't buy from them and the rest would rip you off up to five times the value of the goods you were buying.
The majority of the people we met were extremely self centred and greedy, constantly talking about themselves and about the constant problems they have with 'cheater' next door. It was hard to believe anyone as everyone would accuse the other for cheating and robbing the others.
It was also very difficult to find many good places to eat. The Indian food was just destroying my stomach and any western alternative was either terrible or wasn't western. We just wanted to find a bit of natural solace such as tree or a park to relax in but all we found was the constant battering heat of the concrete jungle, the dirty small streets with cows stuck in the middle with nowhere to go. The blowing horns and the incessant hounding by rickshaws and silk sellers. We were only in India three weeks yet I was ready to escape and when Paulina saw a dog carrying a childs leg out of the river we had had enough. Completely debilitated by the experience we promptly packed our bags and headed for the first train to Nepal.
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non-member comment
Great article!
I like this article, I was traveling in India too, but have not been in Varanasi. Ladakh is highly recommendable!