Five minutes in India
Dreams of India modified but not quite shattered
I used to think India was somewhere I would one day run away to, a place to escape western materialism and 21st century living. Once there, I would hang out all day on an ashram and live the hippy lifestyle I missed out on by a decade.
Instead, I went there as just another dime-a-dozen tourist, ‘doing India’ on what some would call a five-minute trip.
Nearly two months after the experience most people would have decided whether or not they had a fabulous holiday, and for someone who has had no problem admitting to ‘fabulous’ holidays in Larnaca, remaining undecided about India of all places, is probably indefensible.
India is a beautiful country. The people are friendly and hospitable, living and getting around is beyond cheap, and the country is rich with both a worldly and spiritual history probably unmatched anywhere else. My three co-travellers were great company, and everything went more or less according to plan, although the four bottles of zivania did not last as long as expected.
It wasn’t the backpacking or travelling rough either. I’ve slept in worse places than an Indian train. And truly there is nothing more enjoyable than sitting on the ground in a station with nothing to do except guess when the train will arrive, watch the rat family two feet away and chuckle at the sign saying: “Clean Train Station: Because we care”.
In fact India was full of amusing and uplifting signs. “Say no to plastic” was rampant, especially in north India. Shopkeepers told us they could be fined 10,000 rupees (around £100) if they were caught using plastic bags.
The waiters on our train certainly said ‘no to plastic’, by simply opening the train door and throwing the used plastic plates on to the tracks.
Other novel signs peppered the highways. “It’s nice to be important but it’s more important to be nice”, read one. “This is a highway, not a runway,” said another. “Do not be rash and end in crash”, and “Hospital ceilings are boring to look at”.
But road tripping in India is not fun for more reasons than I care to mention, having spent a total of 30-40 hours in a car on the second-leg of our journey.
Trains are really the only way to get around. Our first trip was from Delhi to Dharamsala, seat of the Dalai Lama, where we had to make do with the zen of shopping after failing to secure front-row seats for His Holiness.
The 15-hour train trip was memorable thanks to the Buddha-like (big) ear lobes of one of our companions. They attracted a lot of attention.
“I can’t believe what I’ve just done,” he pronounced at 3am, after we had left him having a smoke with an Indian man tortured over his extra marital affairs. The man apparently mistook said companion for a guru. “I gave him absolution,” our very own holy man added, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
We told him to lay off the zivania and ragged him over his guru-like qualities – read big ears – for the rest of the trip.
The journey back from Dharamsala took us to Rishikesh, a scenic town on the Ganges where the Beatles had spent some time on one of the many ashrams. There was little to do in Rishikesh but that was really the whole point. Holy men, snake charmers and dodgy monkeys formed part of the landscape in a town where meat and booze were banned. But I got a great cough syrup. No, it wasn’t desperation. I was sick.
Two days later we headed off to do the touristy part of the trip and returned to Delhi by day-time train, and from there by road to Agra.
Yes, the Taj Mahal was worth seeing, but as the Lonely Planet guide warns: “Traders in Agra will do all they can to part you from your cash”. By the time we’d left there I would have given anything to hear those Buddhist chants again, even at 6am.
Jaipur was the next stop. Again I found it too touristy, crowded, noisy and dusty, but our hotel made the trip worth it and was leagues better than the first one in Delhi, where – taking on board all the scary travel advice – we were determined not to touch anything, even kicking open the bathroom door when we needed to go in.
My roommate wrapped herself tightly in mosquito net we had bought from the Super Home Centre, but we decided it was made either to keep out only giant mosquitoes or to contain the bride of Frankenstein.
Much like the diversity of the hotels where we stayed, India is a country of extremes. Watch television and you see the same advertisements and day-time soaps, music videos and movies as those in the West, only with glamorous Indian models, actors and actresses.
Go out on the streets and see another world, disturbing and chaotic in ways that make you want to scream and run way. It’s true what they say. You don’t ‘do India’. It ‘does you’.
Accosted by a Sikh fortune teller on our last day in Delhi, he asked me would I return to India. I showed him my ‘not-on-your-nelly’ face.
“You’ll be back in 2009 with a man,” he shouted after me.
In a way India is like life itself, unpredictable, often frustrating, and heedless to what you might want to do.
And like life, what’s most memorable is not the places we visited, but the journeys we took to get there, the people we met, and the things we learned along the way.
How we missed the Dalai Lama
By Michele Kambas
By the time we managed to sort out our train tickets we had missed the opening morning session of the five-day teachings at the Buddhist temple in McLeod Ganj, a hill station hugging the rim of a mountain ledge on the outer Himalayas.
Someone forgot to tell us that was the only session open to media. We had to opt for regular passes in an ever-growing queue outside a nondescript office off the main McLeod Ganj square, a tiny opening crammed with auto rickshaws, cows and brightly decorated buses.
After a thirty minute wait behind an Israeli tourist with what appeared to be multiple passes, our turn came.
The man in the sparsely-furnished office pointedly showed me his watch. It was 5.00p.m. “We are closed,” he said tersely. “You should have come earlier.”
The man was resolute. The fallback option was getting partial access to the Main Temple the next morning, but we had to get up at dawn.
At that point our group split up. Half decided to opt for enlightenment in the English beer and wine shop in McLeod Ganj’s square.
Studiously up at six, the sound of Tibetan chants wafting over the Mcleod Ganj ledge, we excitedly mingled with Tibetan women in their brightly dressed “chubas” in the courtyard of the Main Temple, a three storey construction which is the largest outside of Tibet.
A man with yellow and red robes shuffled by, surrounded by minders. “Sit down, sit down!” a man instructed as we fell to our knees. The Dalai Lama, half bowed and walking slowly in his yellow and scarlet robes, turned and smiled at the crowd before moving up stairs to his lectern.
The Dalai Lama took a sip of tea, said something in Tibetan and chuckled. People around us smiled. Could we share the joke? The FM receiver for English was not transmitting on 101.1 FM, or on any frequency we or other tourists could find, for that matter.
After a good hour of fiddling around unsuccessfully with tiny radios, we resolved to get a proper pass for the following morning, so trundled back up the road to the permit office. It was shut.
“He may be back at two,” someone called out. A queue grew ever longer behind us.
An hour stretched into two. Door remained shut.
“It’s Ghandi’s birthday, maybe he has decided to take the day off,” someone in the queue surmised. We were later informed the timekeeper was too busy to issue permi
ts.
We decided to give it one last chance. Again up at the crack of dawn the next morning, I lay in bed trying to muster the energy to get up. I shook my friend awake. Staring at the ceiling she said. “Can we be bothered?” No. She rolled over back to sleep.
So after seven hours on an aircraft, fifteen hours on a train, and five hours in a jeep with a mind of its own on hairpin bends in the Himalayas, we even didn’t get to see the Dalai Lama, properly at least.
How we got there
Not wanting the luxury tour, we just booked ourselves plane tickets with Royal Jordanian through Amman for around £400.
Arriving in Delhi early in the morning we headed for a hotel recommended by a fellow passenger.
We then did exactly what we said we wouldn’t, and picked up pretty much the first cab that came along and paid over the odds to arrive at our hotel.
One lesson we quickly learned was that time was short, and we needed help to firm up our basic plan. Luckily, one of our group had the knack of talking to strangers, and we soon hooked up with our more than helpful Indian travel agent, Ashok from United Travel and Tours.
Ashok arranged our entire holiday for less than £200 each. That included all train tickets, the hotels, and our driver, Al Pacino, who took us from Delhi to Agra, Jaipur and back to Delhi, and on our last day shopping expedition.
In this way we did the entire trip for £600, half what we would have normally paid from Cyprus. This excluded food, which was mind-boggingly cheap and tasty.
One thing we did do was lug a bag of snacks around for the long trips, and they were all pretty long. It included a stash of Nescafe and a battery-operated whisk, sardines, tinned vine leaves, crisps, gum and crackers. We didn’t regret it.
