India Part 8 : Kolkata

Indira Gandhi monument.

One last train in India, again a night train, scheduled to leave Gaya at 9:30 in the evening so plenty of time to walk there and get some dinner.  Except of course, when I get to the station to check on the train, it is running a good two hours late, joy.  Wouldn't be a problem in a civilised country but here?  I find a restaurant, buy some dinner and also a two litre bottle of lemonade which I spend some time drinking, much to the confusion of the waiter.  Seriously what do people do of an evening here?  Well, the railway station at least has something close to a cafe, I drink quite a few coffees as the train gets later and later, finally turning up at 1:30am, yay.  At least I can get some sleep before reaching Kolkata the following day.  Honestly I'm not expecting a lot here, don't know much about the place other than it being the location of the famous 'black hole', so I am prepared for even more rubbish, urine and worse things than usual.  Something of a shock then to find the city is as close as I've found to civilisation in India, there are actual pavements to walk on, I see no cows, and few rickshaws - rather, there are the 40s Morris styled yellow taxis everywhere, and even a tram network.  Even more shockingly, on the way to my hotel I pass a supermarket, the first one I have seen in this country.

The Victoria Memorial Hall.

There are bars here too, and I confess I put the sightseeing on hold for a bit to relax, have a number of beers - and then recover the next day.  Seems that as in Delhi, bars here come with a substantial troupe of entertainers, but here the pretty girls don't just sit by the side of the band, but actually get up and gyrate - fully clothed I hasten to add.  Each has a cloth bag in front of her, and in the busier bars, the customers (all male of course) take turns to hand banknotes to the waiters, who then put them in one or other girl's bag.  One waiter comes up to me and shows me a bunch of 100 Rupee notes, he doesn't really have any English but I think he wants to sell me them?  Ten of them for, er, 100 Rupees?  I guess they are what, forgeries, or maybe old currency from before the demonetisation thing they just did here, though to be honest they look identical to what I have in my wallet.  All a bit too weird for me to be honest which makes the situation a little uncomfortable, but there are other bars to choose from, some of them a bit quieter.

There was a very long queue of sparkly horse drawn carriages.

And yes, there is sightseeing to do here of course.  I walk through a few parks, noticeable that the nicer bits of them all seem to be fenced off from the public, but there's a lot of open green space too, I do spot a few cows, also horses - seems you can come here and rent one for a little gallop about.  There's a lot of British legacy here too, from the many years this was the colonial capital, plenty of churches including a cathedral (St. Pauls believe it or not), and most impressively the Victoria Memorial Hall.  This is a huge structure, set amongst ornamental gardens and ponds, its design is clearly inspired by the Taj Mahal, and while not as gracious in aspect it does manage to be considerably bigger.  Inside, staircases lead up to a gallery suspended around the inside of the dome, the space decorated with a series of scenes from the life of the Queen Empress, while on the ground floor there is a museum, framed, yellowing documents in Bengali contrasting oddly with statues of people such as Clive and Curzon.

St. Pauls.

This is my last city in India, and in all honesty I'll be glad to get away.  There is certainly an awful lot to see here, but the sad truth is that in order to get to a lot of it, you have to spend time in the stinking toilets they call cities in this country.  Well, I can imagine that a trip through more rural parts of the country might be better, and I've heard things aren't so bad in the South, and indeed in Goa which by all accounts has an identity all of its own.  Overall though I would be rather hesitant to recommend this place as a holiday destination, and I'm not sure I'll be in a great hurry to return.  I find myself wondering what combination of history, culture, economics and so forth has led to the state the country finds itself in.  At a guess, it's partly an unfortunate side effect of the attitude these people have to animals - in many ways, it's admirable the way so many of them refuse to harm other creatures, and even feel an obligation to feed them, but there's no getting away from the fact the result is that there is, to put it bluntly, shit everywhere.  So maybe when that is the case, it doesn't seem worth the effort to tidy your own rubbish away?  I don't know... the other thing I notice is how few women, particularly of child bearing age, you see here.  Various reasons for that I guess, but thinking about the mess many men make of their homes without a woman keep them in line, I can sort of see this country as a filthy bachelor flat writ large.  I guess I should be grateful I've managed not to catch anything while I'm here...

India Part 7 : Bodhgaya

The Mahabodhi temple.

I'm actually hoping my train from Varanasi will run late, not an unreasonable expectation here, but no, it is pretty much on time, arriving at Gaya Junction around 6:30am.  Not feeling terribly rested, I walk through the rubbish strewn streets of Gaya and out into more or less open country, my destination being Bodhgaya, something like eight miles away.  Not a terribly long walk for all that I'm a little sleepy, only problem turns out to be my stomach is feeling a little rough, the food here does have consequences sometimes.  I grit my teeth and get almost the whole way, but succumb to the offer of a motorcycle ride for the last couple of miles - in this case, it is just a guy being friendly, so hard to tell them apart from the ones who want to sell you something.

Bodhgaya then.  My tour of India's spiritual highlights continues, after the Hindu sacred river, now we have the Buddhist holy of holies, this is where, according to the scripture, the Buddha meditated under a fig tree and obtained enlightenment - so, the birthplace of the religion pretty much.  Seems to be kind of the Buddhist equivalent of Jerusalem, there are monks and pilgrims here from all over the world, and it seems every country with a substantial Buddhist community has built a temple, monastery, or both here, each in their unique architectural style.  Makes for a lot of sightseeing, and also a hell of a lot of tourists, some of them just sightseeing, many seem to be relatives of monks paying a visit, and many more are on some kind of spiritual journey.  Indeed, there seem to be more than a few westerners who have pretty much gone native, more than once I stop for a coffee and listen to an American voice prattling on about 'prana' or whatever.  At least here I can stop for a coffee, the number of tourists mean that small though this place is it has a more international air than much of India, there are cafes, and even a 7-11, the first I have seen in the country.  Restaurants cater for many tastes, I enjoy Tibetan, Chinese and Japanese food over the course of my stay, though I don't get to have a beer with any of it - seems that not just this town, but the entire state of Bihar is an alcohol free zone, ah well I can cope.

One of the many other temples - in this case, Cambodian.

Centrepiece of town is the Mahabodhi temple, located on the site of the legendary fig tree, or Bodhi tree as it is known.  It towers over the area, surrounded by gardens, the nearest parts filled with chanting monks in robes of various colours.  Interesting to see that this whole institution, the nearby satellite temples and monasteries, have grown up over the last hundred years or so - before that, the Mahabodhi was a ruin, following centuries of neglect by Muslim and then Hindu authorities.  The temple was restored by the British, and then more recently a Buddhist council was given control of the area, turning into the place of pilgrimage it is now.  The massive stone base of the temple is slowly being covered by gold leaf by the hordes of pilgrims, and there is still a Bodhi tree here - again, planted in Victorian times, and claimed to be a descendant of the original.

In the Buddha cave.

To be honest though, for me the best part of Bodhgaya is that it is small enough that I can in pretty short order simply walk out of it into the countryside.  The town lies on the banks of what, on the map, is one of two river forks, each of them at least a hundred metres wide.  I walk across one on a road bridge, but don't see much water, rather a broad expanse of sand, and the other fork is the same, I simply walk across, finding an inch deep trickle to wade through near the centre.  In the distance I can see a small ridge, poking up from the otherwise flat landscape - a lot of India seems to be flat, as best as I can tell.  Heading towards it, I don't exactly get away from people, regularly passing through small villages of rough shacks, each with one substantial building - schools, all of them.  There are a lot of children here - the ones in the villages call out 'hello' to me, if I meet some on the road however they tend to follow along saying 'money, money'.  Good luck kids.  Up into the hills, and I find a small cave where, allegedly, the Buddha spent six years before the whole tree enlightenment thing.  Again there are a lot of tourists, and attracted by them, the path up the hill here has beggars at every turn.  There is at least a good view from the top... back to the river for some brief snatches of peace, and taking a slightly different route I find an impressive banyan tree, big enough that there is space to stand within the trunk.  A much closer experience to that of the Buddha, all those centuries ago than the temple in town I suspect, though I am not struck by any great enlightenment I'm afraid, other than that it would really be nice to get to some place where people hassle me a bit less.  Maybe at my next stop in Kolkata eh...

Underneath the Banyan tree...

Photos to go with this post can be found here.

India Part 6 : Varanasi

Me, with various Ghats behind.

I struggle a bit to find my train out of Lucknow - maybe the evening in a bar didn't help, but also it turns out there are two stations right next to each other and mine is not easy to find - I guess no different to London's King's Cross and St. Pancras really.  Still, my train is waiting for me, and though it takes a very long time to reach its destination, it's a night train so I sleep for much of it, back in one of the higher classes too so relative luxury.  I am in fact quite rested on reaching Varanasi, the holy city by the Ganges - I don't suppose, by any chance, the holiness of the place encourages the people here to keep the place clean?  Well no, not really... I do find a road running between my hotel and the train station that seems not to have much in the way of housing, shops, or random people with stalls selling stuff on the street, this makes for fast moving traffic but fewer people so generally good.  The rest of the city streets are the usual rubbish strewn toilet though... on the plus side, the main attraction of this place, the Ganges itself, lies many metres below street level, and the several miles of it that border the city are accessed via a series of steps and terraces.  This makes for a substantial amount of terrain that is not accessible to wheeled vehicles, making it considerably more pleasant to walk along than the roads, I could get to quite like it here.

The tower to the left is part of the city's water intake system.  Shudder.

There are even cafes along the river, catering for the many tourists that are here, it's nice to be able to sit down and watch the riverside action in peace for a while.  I get some more peace and quiet, and an even better view of the riverside, by taking a boat up and down for an hour or so, just me and an old guy rowing.  I do offer to take a turn with the oars, but he of course does not speak English.  Well, means I can concentrate on the various 'Ghats' we pass - I believe this refers to the stairs leading down to the river, in each case there is a more or less ornate temple at the top as well.  At the waterside there are people washing all manner of things - themselves, clothes, buffalo - can't help but doubt whether things washed in the river come out much cleaner than they went in, that said I do see a small boy catch a fish with a stick and some string, so I guess it can't be all that polluted.  Really don't know if I'd want to eat that fish mind you given what must be washing into the river - including, as my oarsman says when we reach our turnaround point, 'dead people'.  Sure enough, there are number of fires going on the bank here, as various bodies are cremated, and I can see a huge pile of logs, and a couple of guys with a hose sluicing ashes into the water.  From later research I gather that these cremations go on here twenty four hours a day, and as well as the ashes being washed into the river, the bodies are ceremonially washed in it beforehand as well...

Looking downstream as my boat heads for home.

An interesting place this then.  Another thing I notice is that the many little shrines here - some of them built in place, others on little trolleys - have music coming from them.  And not tinkly temple music either, or even the Bollywood love songs they play in the bars here, but rather some kind of Indian electronic dance music, loud and bass heavy.  This really ramps up in the evening, when the mobile shrines are pushed around the street, music blaring, led lights flashing and a gang of people milling along.  Is this some sort of funerary rite I wonder?  Makes for a bit of ambience as I walk from my hotel to a bar and back anyway - only one I could find is a good mile from my hotel, towards the station, worth it though, not that I am a terrible alcoholic, but more that the rare bars are the only places I find where you can spend time off the streets in the evening, barring lurking in my hotel.  Cafes don't seem to really exist in this country, if you want a cup of tea apparently you buy it in the street, drink it there, and of course dump the container there too.  And while I'd be happy to eat a restaurant meal and then drink coffee or whatever, any place that doesn't serve beer seems to bring the bill before I've finished eating even, most odd.  Mind you, it often takes long enough to eat the food - they don't seem set up to serve just one person, ordering a curry plus rice generally means a meal big enough for two, still somehow I manage to get it down - and still no serious ill effects!

Speakers blaring out dance music.  And why not.

Photos to go with this post can be found here.

India Part 5 : Lucknow

Cannonball hole inside the British Residency.

Perhaps predictably, I don't manage to catch the 5:50am train from Agra... but in fact, not down to any failing of my own but rather because it is cancelled.  OK, this is not great, I have a hotel booked and paid for in Lucknow, and I know that pretty much every train in India seems to sell out at least a week or so before departure.  Still, I ask at enquiries anyway, the guy there says a train will go from Agra Fort at 7am, and he thinks I will be able to get a ticket.  OK, a quick tuktuk over there, best not to get too annoyed over this, or the way my moving to a crummy hotel near the main station, 'Agra Cantonment', was completely pointless.  But I confess, when the guy at Agra Fort enquiries tells me there is no train I get a little upset.  Fortunately after a few minutes of me wondering what the hell to do, he comes out of the office to tell me that yes, there is a train at 8:30.  OK... off to the ticket office, the guy there denies knowledge of any train... he starts telling me how I can get a fifteen kilometre tuktuk ride to a bus station, then a bus that will take eight hours, but then remembers that in fact, yes there is a train.  The ticket costs a hundred and ten rupees.  Of course, it is a little over an hour late, so really my getting up at the crack of dawn was entirely unnecessary, but it does arrive, and depart with me on it.  Not sure what class these carriages are, I sure don't have a reserved seat, there are four people crammed on each bench, and more are sitting or lying in the luggage racks, though none on the roof that I'm aware of.  Still room for me to stand in a corner, it's only two hundred miles or so to Lucknow, how long can it take?

Substantial ruins of the main residency building.

Well we take our time getting out of Agra... the train keeps stopping, often for fifteen or twenty
minutes, and when it does move it often seems to be little better than walking pace.  My position by the door is not ideal, a bit too close to the toilet, and also people keep wanting to get through the door, despite us not being at a station - hawkers, wanting to sell their chai, samosae or whatever.  I am beckoned to squeeze onto one of the benches, well fair enough, I hug my bag to me and worry about losing my wallet or phone but what can you do.  Everybody seems friendly enough, for all that they have about one word of English ('slow'), between them.  I watch the scenery go past... slowly, endless vistas of fields, small towns, the occasional concrete flyover crossing the railway.  I check my watch, three hours have passed and we've moved, hum, judging from the GPS on my phone, around fifty miles.  Well, my fellow passengers don't seem at all peturbed by this... they pass the time sleeping, chatting, eating peanuts - one passes a few handfuls to me which I happily consume, that and the samosae I had earlier should keep me going.  I can't bring myself just to drop the shells on the floor the way they want me to, they go out the window in the end.  There seems to be some sort of drug ritual going on too, various plastic sachets, bags and cartons are opened to reveal what looks like tobacco, dried mushrooms maybe, a white soapy looking thing, some green leaves, all sorts of stuff, it all gets wadded up and chewed.  I pass, no idea how long this journey is going to take and I'd rather not take any chances.  We do speed up, a little, and the train actually rattles along for fifty more miles in less than two hours, but then we hit the area around Kanpur and it's back to long periods stopped, and the rest of the time trundling along at maybe five miles per hour.  Seems every time another train comes near, going either way, we have to stop - maybe there isn't enough capacity in the overhead electric cables to run more than one engine?  It is excruciating anyway, the hours go by with very little progress, darkness falls and there's no longer even scenery to look at, I wonder if I will ever leave this train.  But it has to end eventually of course... I think I actually fall asleep for a while which helps, and at last, after a journey taking some twelve hours, we arrive at Lucknow - an average speed of less than seventeen miles per hour then.  I can cycle faster than that.  My hotel is of course nowhere near where the map supplied by the booking agency claims, nobody here speaks any English, but I find it somehow - and even a bar...

Tilewali Masjid.

Lucknow then... booking.com says about the place, 'reasons to visit : cleanliness' - well, yes, there are a few hundred square metres in the historic centre where it isn't too bad, there's an amphitheatre, looks like the bottom can be flooded in the style of the Colosseum, next to it an impressive clock tower, it is all quite grand and spacious, and ringed by an array of minarets and onion domes belonging to various temple complexes.  I sit and enjoy a chai, poured into a freshly handmade porcelain cup, it's all rather relaxing, I even seem to have escaped people trying to sell me things, guide me, or just beg from me for the time being.  The rest of the city though?  Yeah, like everywhere else in India I have been, the ground is a morass of rotting garbage and bodily waste, over which throngs of people shuffle along while a chaos of bikes, rickshaws and tuktuks swirl around them, somehow managing to avoid hitting the pedestrians, or indeed the cows that stand here and there, nuzzling through the heaps of detritus.  So, anything else worth seeing here?  Sure - I make my way over to the British Residency complex for a bit of colonial history.  This was once a substantial set of palatial houses, walled off from the city on a small hill by the river, where various British and European military officers, traders and so forth lived back in the day, as the Empire consolidated its control over this part of the world.  Then the residency was attacked and besieged during the mutiny of 1857 - or the First War of Independence as the modern signs have it, many buildings were destroyed and all badly damaged, and nowadays it is preserved as a kind of archaeological park.  Fascinating to walk around the ruins, the marks of bullets and cannonballs still visible on many of the walls.  I'm picturing a Carry On style party of aristocrats keeping their upper lips stiff while the cannons roar, but a visit to the more or less levelled church and its cemetery brings home the grim reality.  Seems quite small, but many of the monuments are very substantial, then I read a few inscriptions and realise each marks the grave of a few officers and several hundred men, apparently the dead came so fast they had time only to dig pits and throw them in.  Goodness knows how many of the 'mutineers' were killed.  Being here, and being a Brit, I can't help but think about the history my country shares with this part of the world.  Did my forbears make things worse, or better?  Honestly, I find myself imagining the feted British Raj as something like a bird, perched on one of the elephants they have here - on top for a while perhaps, but hardly affecting the course of the juggernaut below...

A selection of Lucknow landmarks.

Photos to go with this post can be found here.

India Part 4 - Agra

Sweet, unobstructed pavement.

My second experience of Indian Railways doesn't go quite so well, the train seems to spend quite a long time stopped, and is ninety minutes late when we finally get to Agra, not ideal given this means it is now past 11pm.  Well, still plenty of tuktuks about, in fact I splash out on a taxi, does mean my plan of finding a bar is out though.  In fact this was a doomed plan, Agra does not really have any bars... lots of sweet shops mind you, I think that being the location of the country's number one historic Islamic site means the muslim influence is strong on whatever passes for the licensing authority around here.  Well, my hotel is willing to sell me cans to drink in my room, a little galling to pay two hundred rupees - two pounds fifty or so - for what is basically a can of special brew but what can you do.  On the plus side, Agra has quite a few streets that aren't in fact that bad to walk along, there are actual pavements, it is bliss.  I do get a little blasé and step in some of the ever present poo, maybe from a monkey, ah well.  Wonder if there is anything to see here then?  Oh yes, the aforementioned Islamic heritage site... well first of all I take a detour into the 'nature walk', well worth a hundred rupees, I stroll through the trees, birds sing, there are peacocks wandering about and here and there a view of that... heritage site... rising above the forest.  I feel the stress of the last week or so, the slow ratcheting of tension with every blaring horn, every motorbike wooshing past me as it rides on the wrong side of the road, every guy trying to sell me stuff... slowly slipping away, for a time at least.

OK, not the most original photo I have ever taken.

So, the Taj Mahal then.  Yes, it is pretty awesome... as a foreigner, I do have to pay some twenty times as much as the locals to get in, it does at least let me jump the queues, and there is much to see.  As well as the mausoleum you see in pictures on the wall of Indian restaurants worldwide, there are huge walls, gardens, a mosque, and a couple of buildings which a sign assures me are not 'Naubat Khanas', that is 'drum houses', but full scale replicas built as part of the complex.  Just getting up close to the mausoleum itself is worth the entry fee, it is an amazing thing, a vast jewel of white marble, totally out of scale with mere human beings.  We do get to go inside, it isn't very exciting to be honest, a dark, vaulted space, and despite signs telling us to be quiet and not to photograph anything, the place is full of a cacophony of whistles and shouts, and most of the illumination comes from mobile phones, all running camera apps as far as I can see.  I reserve my photography for outside, just a pity one of the minarets is covered in scaffolding... it occurs to me that if I could get the other side of the river I'd have a very nice view of it, that minaret would be hidden, and there'd be no crowds either, so off I walk.  Turns out you can walk across the railway bridge from Agra Fort station which helps, then I get down to the riverside, dodging the community there who seem to have a thriving business washing clothes in the river, I guess they probably come out a bit cleaner at least.  I walk past some groups of men playing cards, through banks of sand with sparkling grains of quartz in them, would be pretty were it not for the ever present rubbish strewn around, and am just getting opposite the Taj when a middle aged lady with a stick says to me 'go back, please'.  Hmm, is she planning to bathe?  I slowly get the feeling she's in fact saying, 'go back, police', and sure enough a chap in... brown clothes turns up.  Doesn't look much like a police uniform but I'm not going to argue, he leads me straight away from the river and sure enough there is extensive barbed wire and even a couple of watch towers, go on then.  They probably need to work on the way this can all be completely bypassed by walking along the river...

I think these posts mark the boundary of the bit I wasn't meant to go into.

My train away from Agra departs at a less than ideal 6am, so I check out of my hotel near the Taj, and head off to one near the station... the only one I could find on the internet anywhere near, it had, um, mixed reviews.  Sure enough I get into my room, and note that somebody has dumped a condom and its wrapper in the toilet, and the sheets don't seem to have been cleaned, ew.  Well, after some nagging they change them, and on the plus side here in the low rent district I can get a can of Kingfisher Strong - 'the king of good times' - for a mere one hundred and twenty rupees, bargain.  After checking in (so much filling in of forms), I have time to head to the other main attraction of Agra, yes it's another fort, just like the one in Delhi known as the Red Fort, and indeed it is of similar design, unsurprising as I gather both were built at around the same time under orders from the same Mughal Emperor.  It is very splendid anyway, with great views along the river to the Taj... I notice that here, the buildings built by the British have been removed, the only evidence I spot is a sign explaining how once there was a lot more construction here from Mughal times, but much of it was demolished by the East India company to make room for barracks, oops.  Well then, time to get back to the hotel, I drink some of that beer and grab some paneer masala with interesting layered bread from a nearby street eatery - they have the cricket on I see, Indian TV is odd, takes me a while to figure out it is in fact Indian since much of it is in English, and also the people on the screen with their pale skin and anglo features look nothing like the faces I see around me, weird.  And then, an early night, hopefully I can succeed in catching that train tomorrow...

Inside the fort.

Photos to go with this post can be found here.