India is exhausting. During my time there I was taking a rest day roughly every fifth day. The rest days had nothing to do with any kind of physical fatigue. Instead they were a break from the constant bombardment with stimuli. The place has so many colours, that western middle aged men die of shame the moment they step off the plane, and realise their lairy tropical vacation shirt now appears drab. Everywhere you go you are greeted with the full spectrum of smells, from the most delicious butter chickens, or chai masala, to the smell of rotting flesh of an unlucky street dog, or the open sewer system, or worse yet: coriander! And by far the most exhausting: the human interactions. Even the most outgoing person will crave the isolation of a private room, a wifi connection, and the option of initiating conversation rather than having it thrust upon them by the one billion natives, who it begin to feels like you encounter individually every day.
The place is so exhausting, that just the act of writing about the first part of my trip in India
(seen here if you missed it) knackered me to such an extent, that I had to change subject and write about Nepal, then take a two month break, before I could tackle the subcontinent again. But I'm rested, refreshed, and thanks to the period of time that has passed, all these stories have been thoroughly 'Caedynised' while running around my head all this time, and so they should be pretty fantastical! Just like my last blog on India, I'm going to cut it down to a series of stories, which should keep the post just under Moby Dick size. (The whale that is. This will be waaaaay longer than the book).
The Time I Began Enjoying Myself, Despite the Australian Cricket Team.
My bus trip from Goa to Hyderabad was probably a low point of my trip. Overnight bus trips in India are actually surprisingly pleasant. As opposed to their European counterparts, Indian overnight buses have beds instead of seats, and they are also equipped with the most reliable air-conditioning outside of Delhi (although I can't stress enough, this is only on 'A/C sleeper' buses, some overnight buses in India are as far from pleasant as humanly possible). On my ride from Mumbai down to Goa, I'd slept like a baby, and was looking forward to another restful slumber on my way to Hyderabad. Unfortunately having a bed for a seat is only effective when the bus travels in straight lines. The combination of a winding hill pass road, my bed being at the front of the bus, and The Indian Stig driving the bus while honking the horn around every corner, meant that I got pretty much no sleep. Once the road did flatten out, I was greeted with another obstacle. Every twenty minutes we encountered a police road block, set up due to the bombings in Hyderabad just a week earlier. This meant police coming through the bus, waking everyone up, and checking identification. For the most part my white skin was all the identification I required, but I was still woken up.
My sole purpose for visiting Hyderabad was to go see Australia play India in the cricket. Hinduism is just a fleeting interest for Indians, whereas their true religion is cricket, and luckily for me, their God, Sachin Tendulkar, was playing. Hyderabad was a pretty big trek off my planned route, but I figured, if Jesus were doing a sermon an overnight bus ride away, I'd make the effort, so I should pay the same respect to Sachin.
I had decided to couchsurf with a fellow cricket tragic while in Hyderabad, mainly due to the fact I had no desire to be the lone Aussie in a stadium full of Indian supporters when Sachin Tendulkar got a bad umpiring decision. I was staying with a guy called CJ, who was hosting another Aussie, James, who was also there for the cricket. Staying with CJ ended up saving my India trip. While there were many reasons I wasn't enjoying myself at this point, the main reason was the bullshit. Whether it be Raki Masters selling religion under the guise of organic food, con men on every corner, or the constant haggling with tuk tuk drivers, merchants, and beggars, I was just over the crap. Luckily I was now in a bullshit free zone.
CJ was a great guy, and the type of couchsurfing host who immediately made you feel at home. On top of that, he gave me a fresh perspective on India, and having traveled, was someone who I could relate to much more easily. I touched on this in my first post on India, but one of the hardest things I found about traveling in India was there's only so many things you could talk about with most locals. That's not an insult, it's just a representation of the divergence between the size, and perspective, of the average Indian's world view compared to a westerner's. With CJ, thanks to his more wealthy upbringing, and his world being so much larger, I was able to get some proper insight into many facets of Indian life, and I hate to say it, but thanks to him being richer than me, I didn't have to worry about being scammed (CJ on the other hand had his liquor cabinet savaged by me and James).
The other couchsurfer, James, was a former investment banker from Perth who had been traveling for about 8 months longer than me. James was about as far removed from the bullshit of India as humanly possible. He was the kind of guy who would call a spade a spade..... then tell the spade it was an idiot. He was brutally honest, but also a great bloke, and the combination of his laconic Aussieness, combined with his borderline alcoholism, made him a great guy to travel with.
Apart from the cricket, we didn't get up to much in Hyderabad. Most days consisted of a late lie in, followed by a brief spell of watching the morning session of the Test match over coffee until the power went out (as it did every day at the same time in a controlled rolling black out that swept across the city), at which point we'd briefly venture out, and either go to the cricket ground, or buy booze and food, then head back to CJ's where we'd get gradually drunker, and drunker. At some point CJ would get sufficiently drunk that the night's lecture would commence, and he'd stumble up, and give us a slightly tipsy, yet incredibly vivid and detailed, perspective of India's current state of affairs. Among the presentation topics were:
* Arranged Marriages and You: A guide to India's Caste System
* The Tax Dodgers and Brain Drainers: How India's Elite are Stifling Growth
* Don't Kill That Cow!!: A Guide to Hinduism
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| CJ in lecture position. |
All of his lectures seemed to have the central theme of Indians being 'sentimental fools'. He was definitely of the opinion that Hinduism was more of a hindrance than a help, a point illustrated quite effectively on one of our drives to the cricket, when our highway turned from 4 lanes to 2, then back to 4 again 20 metres later, all because the locals refused to move a small inconsequential shrine which had been erected only a few years before.
I managed to catch two days of the cricket with CJ and James. Cricket in India is quite a spectacle. Test cricket in Australia is officially on my boycott list. Ever since the day I went with a bunch of mates only to be greeted with mid strength beer, overzealous security guards, and ground rules that included the banning of the Mexican wave and beer snakes, I vowed that I would only return to cricket once they allowed all the distractions that made it fun. Despite the absence of any alcohol, as well as any electronic device inside the stadium thanks to the recent bombing, cricket in India is a lot of fun.
For my friends who aren't familiar with cricket, a match can last up to five days. The game has a pace similar to baseball, and is usually enjoyed with an enthusiasm equal to that of reading the Sunday paper. Apart from occasional pockets of action, it's a pretty relaxed affair, and a great sport to watch while chatting with mates. Indian's approach it in a totally different way. As I mentioned earlier, cricket is their religion. All 34,628 Hindu Gods could be simultaneously reincarnated in the middle of Delhi, but if Tendulkar was batting, they'd simply be asked to quit blocking the TV. This means that attending a live game here is a far more intense experience than anywhere else in the world. A perfect example of this is the Mexican wave. A Mexican wave at an Aussie sporting event is lucky to do a lap every 20 seconds, with a good five seconds devoted to booing the members section. In Hyderabad, James and I estimated it took between 4 and 5 seconds for it to circle the ground. In classic Indian style, people were jumping the queue by such a ridiculous margin that people were already standing up when the wave had barely made it to the opposite side of the stadium.
Even better than this was the spectacle that occurred anytime Tendulkar was on the field. When he was fielding, if at any point he glanced at a section of the crowd, that section would immediately become boisterous with cheering, screaming, and general delirium. That's not my usual hyperbole, that's what happened. If he actually waved at a section (even if it was actually to the change rooms for them to bring something onto the field) the ecstasy was even greater. When he was batting it was even more ridiculous. I missed his innings in Hyderabad, but managed to catch him batting when I was in Delhi. Every run he scores is greeted with cheers usually reserved for a century. Every ball is watched with an intensity usually reserved for the final ball of a cliff hanger. And when he gets out.....it's actually quite funny. The sound is quite hard to describe, but it's something similar to the last 30 seconds of 'the Beatles - A day in the life' (
link here) with the piano chords at the end replaced by stunned silence. You get the usual excitement associated with Indian's seeing Sachin, which builds to a crescendo as the ball heads his way, which then crumbles as the crowd realise that somehow their deity has somehow sunk to the depths of a mortal, and then they all just sit there, in a state somewhere between post traumatic stress syndrome and moping like a 6 year old who's been told they have to go to bed.
Aside from the religious experiences, and the supersonic Mexican waves, watching cricket in India is fun for the simple fact that everyone in the ground is passionate, absorbed, and while undeniably biased, extremely knowledgeable about the game. The crowd loudly appreciates many of the games subtleties, and I think it was one of the few places in India where I saw people able to laugh at themselves, when they began cheering for the Australian team to get one of the Indians out so that Sachin could come have a bat, and then collectively burst into laughter at the preposterousness of the situation (or maybe they were just laughing at how terrible Australia were). Luckily for James and I, we were kept thoroughly amused by the crowd, as the Australian team were thoroughly, and embarrassingly, thrashed.
Due to the ground banning any electronics, including cameras, I wasn't able to get any photos of the match, but here are some shots I took of some kids I forced to reenact the entire match so I could have photos for my blog.
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| Indian Captain, Dhoni, flailing the Aussie bowlers. |
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| Pujara on his way to a match winning double century. |
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| Indian spinner, Ashwin, continuing to vex the Aussie batsmen. |
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| Tendulkar, trying to avoid eye contact with the crowd. |
Oh yeh, and I also walked around Hyderabad a bit. It was nice enough. Here are some photos.
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| Every single one of those tuk tuk drivers asked me if I needed a ride. |
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| This photo encapsulates everything I saw in Hyderabad. Military stationed everywhere, locals looking at the white guys, and labourers with zero regard for their personal safety. |
29 Hours
I can't remember who told me about this, but I once heard about this game show (I'm guessing Japanese) which was quite extreme. The challenges got worse and worse until there were only two left. The final challenge was as genius as it was psychopathic. The two contestants were put in separate mechanical boxes, which were lined with spiked walls, making them quite uncomfortable to sit in. The contest was for who could last the longest in the box before demanding to be let out, and the real psychological strainer was, you wouldn't be told if the other contestant came out before you. You'd only find out once you'd given in. Then, just because it wasn't extreme enough, the walls were moved in closer and closer every hour. The reason I bring up a torture where you had to sit in an ever shrinking, uncomfortable space, with no knowledge of when you would, or should get out, is to give you an idea of what it's like to travel by train in India. Except that the walls also have body odor.
CJ had informed James and I that there was a huge religious festival in Allahabad, about 24 hours train journey north of Hyderabad, and from his reports it sounded too amazing to miss. So James and I both ditched our previous plans and decided to head north. Train travel in India is quite brilliant, so long as you plan ahead. The air-conditioned sleeper carriages are comfortable, cool, clean, and relatively cheap. The only problem is you need to book them a few weeks in advance, or if you're heading to the biggest annual holy pilgrimage in a nation of over a billion people, more than 8 hours before you board. James and I booked 8 hours before were to board, and as a result went on a futile wait list for tickets.
Luckily, on any Indian train, you can purchase a 'general class' ticket at any time. For Indians this means getting into the general class cabins, a sardine tin like place where it's standing room only. However, CJ had told us about a loophole. You purchase a general ticket, get onto one of the air conditioned 2nd class cabins, and when the ticket inspectors come around, give them a bribe and they'll find you a bed. CJ was right about this, as both James and I utilised this technique later in our trips, but this train was literally full. Knowing we had a trip of at least 26 hours ahead of us, and 4 bags containing everything we owned to watch over, we stubbornly bargained with the ticket officers. Upon realising that James and I weren't going to move out of the cabin we were currently located in without a fight, and after we played the '
but we're white!' card, we came to an agreement that James and I could stay in the location between the trash bags and the toilets. Reading that back again makes me realise that it's funny what can seem like a win at the time.
What really helped us was that we'd made a couple of friends on the platform, a girl who was back home after doing Uni in the Netherlands, and another University aged Indian guy. They both let us stow our bags under their beds, which left us with only our carry on bags to worry about, not our behemoth backpacks. Once we were free to just sit and enjoy the journey, life was a lot better, and it was actually quite an enjoyable trip so long as the train was moving. When it stopped it meant we were either getting further behind schedule thanks to some unforeseen problem, or we were stopped at a station. Being stopped at the station was actually the worse of the two. Being stopped in the middle of nowhere wasn't actually that bad, although it was pretty crazy that even in the middle of the countryside, after only a few minutes of our train's unscheduled stop, there were about 20 vendors pacing by the side of the train with drinks and food. If it wasn't for the knowledge that our time bound to this big metallic beast was getting ever longer it would've almost been enjoyable walking around on the tracks.
Being stuck at the station on the other hand was terrible. Not only did the breeze that made cruising along so enjoyable completely disappear, turning the train into a sweat box, but you were confronted with vendors, beggars, people getting on and off (we were stuck sitting next to an entrance), and worst of all was the smell. Indian train toilets are long drops. You're waste just goes onto the track. There are signs everywhere telling people not to use the toilets at the stations, but a combination of illiteracy, trains being extensively delayed from leaving the platform, and Indian people just not giving a fuck, means that the tracks at the stations are open sewers. To give you an idea of just how much of a problem this is, they have massive hoses installed on each track specifically designed to hose down after trains depart.
Our fight to stay out of general class met with one final resistance, when at 10pm the divider between the general and A/C class was to be pulled down, preventing any rapscallion from the poorer section sneaking in and making off with all the rich people's diamond necklaces and ivory rimmed monocles while they slept. James and I had well and truly settled into the two nooks next to the doors, and were preparing to get some sleep, when we were greeted with a ticketing officer telling us to move out for the night. With our biggest puppy dog eyes on, we inferred as gently as possible that given our extraordinary whiteness, we'd probably die before the sun rose, and could we pretty please stay here. After taking into consideration our pitiful states, and the 200 rupess that were now lining his pocket, he let us stay. To celebrate, we cracked open the bottle of Gin we'd brought for the trip, I gave James one of my sleeping pills, he gave me one of his Valiums, and we chained our bags to our bodies (literally, with a metal chain), and against all odds we got some sleep.
We did get rudely awoken at 6am, when the guards changed, and an angry little man with Napoleon syndrome made us move back into general class for half an hour, but we resumed our stubborn game of sneaking back into the space and relatively fresh air of our spot next to the second class toilets, and after a mere 29 hours we made it to the holy city of Varanasi, in need of physical, spiritual, and pretty much every other possible form of cleansing.
Two White Guys (and 5 million Indians) in the Ganges
The festival we had braved the train ride from hell for, was the once every twelve years pilgrimage of Kumbh Mela. I won't go into too much detail about the spiritual side of the festival, mainly because I didn't really learn too much about it. Like all other religions, it just sounded like a bunch of allegories that people take waaaay too seriously, and,
spoiler alert, I didn't find myself in India. But from what I could ascertain, the Kumbh Mela is where a bunch (a bunch is 100 million right?) of Hindus come to Allahabad, where the Ganges, the Yamuna, and some mythical river called the Sarasvati converge, and jump into the Ganges to purify themselves. You may scoff at the idea of 'purifying' yourself in water which is literally not safe enough to even be used for agriculture, but it makes about as much sense as Jews not being able to have bacon cheeseburgers, so just go with it.
Rather than going for any spiritual meaning, James and I had come for the anthropological spectacle. Over 100 million people attend Allahabad for the two month long festival, and that's the sort of volume of people that you really have to witness to be able to comprehend. Before seeing the craziness of the Kumbh, we decided to head to neighbouring Varanasi for a night. Varanasi is Hinduism's holiest place, and as a result is full of temples, colour, and also open crematoriums. I'm sure most of you have heard about Hindu's having their bodies cremated and then dumped into the Ganges, well this is the main place for that. But burning bodies and putrid water aside, the city of Varanasi was beautiful, and one of my favourite places in India.
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| '....burning bodies and putrid water water aside'. I should go into real estate. Oh, and those fires, openly burning bodies. But enough about that, how about that sunset.... |
Thanks to the enormous throughput of people visiting Varanasi, it's a very dusty and dirty city, but once you get past this it is spectacularly colourful, exciting, and vibrant. We were only there for one night, but we managed to take in most of the centre of town, witness a queue for a temple that had to number in the tens of thousands which stretched throughout the city, take a very romantic boat ride down the Ganges (James insists it wasn't, but I could tell he felt the magic as much as I did), and witness a river side extravaganza involving holy guys twirling fire. Say what you will about religion, but I am way more likely to believe a fable if you tell it to me while you're encircled with flames.
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| The colourful shore of the Ganges, and some kids swimming in faeces. |
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| Some little punks hard at work. |
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| The evening spiritual dance extravaganza from afar. |
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| What Tony Abbot has nightmares about.....I mean, this boat was only about twice the size of the boat James and I were on by ourselves. |
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| Christians, Jews, Catholics, and Muslims take note. People want fire with their devotion! (This is taken from the boat by the way. The fire dudes are right next to the shore. It was quite a spectacle). |
After our boat ride and the fire dancing, James and I got to watch the spectacle of 'the touching of the Babas'. Babas are Hindu holy men; allegedly. As far as I can tell, Babas are a bunch of stoners who managed to gain a following. I'll let you be the judge. Are the following people stoned goof balls, or the human incarnation of higher beings:
A dude who put his arm in the air one day, and decided to never take it down.
A guy who sits around naked all day, and will mumble incomprehensible advice to people, and as they go to leave, will sheepishly ask them for money.
A man who had enough free time to discover that he can wrap his foreskin around a stick and then go all Silence of the Lambs 'Goodbye Horses' on us by trapping the stick behind his buttocks and giving himself a mangina.
This guy:
I'm not really a fan of anyone who attains celebrity through proclaiming holiness. But the Baba's fall just behind Cardinal Pell as the worst possible people you could ever idolise as men of God. Not all of them smoke weed, but a lot of them do, and at least the Rock n Roll Baba in the picture above has an excuse for the vacant look in his eye.
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| In this Baba's defense, he might actually have been Weekend-at-Bernied, and is being propped up by his handlers after dying weeks ago. |
Almost without exception, they walk around in a vague daze, eyes focused on something no one else can see, mouths open, looking perplexed, like they've just watch Inception and The Sixth Sense simultaneously and their minds are too busy catching up to be bothered with the real world just yet. But I guess it makes sense. In a nation with the worlds most visible population of incompetent middle aged males with power, this is the obvious idol. Male, old, and with absolutely zero detectable intelligence, yet held in the highest esteem and from what I saw that night, paid pretty well too.
After the fire twirling stopped, everyone mobbed the Babas, and tried to touch them. The Babas would murmur something occasionally, but that was about it. What made an extremely un-spiritual event even less spiritual, was that the attempts to touch the Baba were being done India style, with every pushing, jostling, and flinging old ladies out of the way, just to get some Baba odor on their hand. Not that the Baba cared. He just stood there thinking of how Bruce Willis' wife never actually directly talked to him, while right in front of him grown men wrestled with each other. I think it's safe to say it was one of the dumbest and most pointless spectacles I witnessed on my trip, and you'd have to be slightly mentally damaged to want to get involved.
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| James getting involved. |
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| If you ask me they were trying to touch the wrong side of the Baba. The guy must do pilates! |
The next morning we headed via local bus to Allahabad, just an hours trip away. This whole trip had been done on a whim, and so we had no accommodation. We checked our big bags at the train station, grabbed our backpacks with a night's worth of provisions, and set off to the river bank. It was evening time by the time we made it, and most people were settling down for bed. A few souls were braving the evening cool and bathing in the Ganges, but apart from that the riverbank had an uneasy calm, as if the atmosphere still hadn't forgotten the millions of people who had been there only a few hours before, and was taking a few deep breaths before it was bombarded with the next morning's stampede. The whole area was carpeted with straw, with floodlights set up at regular intervals which lit up the dust filled air, to give the whole area a beautiful but eerie quality.
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| It's funny looking back on these photos. The way I remember it, it was really empty, yet there were obviously lots of people around. It's just that relative to what I had been surrounded by the last few days, this 'few' people felt like a ghost town. |
It was around this time James and I were beginning to wonder just where we'd sleep that night. It's easy being flippant about sleeping outside, but there really were very few places that weren't dust paths or muddy riverside where we could bunk down.
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| All these people were sitting in the place they would sleep that night. It was that full. |
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| The not uncommon sleeping upright option. |
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| Our last resort: The slums under the bridge. |
It was at this time that we met Dinkar. Dinkar was up here with his brother and Uncle. All three of them had braved the general class carriage on a trip of over 30 hours to get here. That's 30 hours of standing, torturous enough for young fit blokes like Dinkar and his brother, but incomprehensible for his uncle, who must have been around 60. We chatted to Dinkar, and he explained to us exactly what the festival meant to him and his family. He and his brother were there to help their uncle, who was at his first ever Kumbh. The fact his uncle was willing to make that train trip was enough evidence to understand how big a deal this was for them.
We chatted to Dinkar for a while and he invited us back to have dinner with his family. They'd booked a spot under a huge tarpaulin tent, where people were wedged in together like tetris blocks, but we mananged to find a few spots, and sat down for our meal. Despite our best efforts, Dinkar outright refused for us to pay for dinner, and we all chowed down and learnt more from Dinkar and his brother. Already having been a more than gracious host, Dinkar then found us a place to sleep for the night. It was under a massive event tent, where a stage had been set up for people to conduct public prayers. With the stage now out of use, we were able to jump up there and find a warm and comfortable place for the night. Like an idiot, I'd forgotten a jumper, forgetting that India still gets cold at night, and had to buy a make do blanket: an uncut sheet of Smirnoff alcopops labels.
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| Which must've had a little alcopop spilled on it, as it really attracted the flies. |
Unfortunately this was a short lived bedding arrangement, as about 10 minutes later we were moved on by angry, middle aged, moron, male, police with sticks. I have no idea what the kerfuffle was about, but all I know was the chief who was in charge of moving us on enjoyed yelling, and his chest really puffed out after he had kicked everyone out, so it was probably just that he was feeling a little down and needed a pick me up. Hearing the to-do, Dinkar came over, and insisted we join him under his tent. I don't know where we found room, it was all a bit of a sleeping pill induced blur at this stage, but James and I got a spot, and while not the best sleep I've ever had (I was on a ridge), we were warm and safe. Dinkar even found me a sheet to replace my fly covered alcopop goon-bag.
The next morning, we woke at sunrise, and grabbed breakfast. Once again, Dinkar paid and refused to hear otherwise, as he proudly presented us with all the best that India had to offer for breakfast.
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| And so much Chai. |
There were already people streaming in, and by the time we were ready to go down to the river edge, the crowd by the river was already stretching a few hundred metres inland, with the river swarming with bathers. After buying some offerings with Dinkar, we headed down to our date with destiny. Despite all logic telling us otherwise, James and I had made the executive decision the night before to swim. There was no way our heads would go under the water, but since we were here, we had to at least get our feet wet.
Once we actually got in, the whole idea of not getting our heads wet also went out the window. When you're the only white guy in the Ganges, and you're surrounded by a few million locals, you
will get noticed. You'll then have about 100 different baptisers who will want to be the one to help you do the triple plunge under the water, the act which supposedly cleanses you (2000 faecal units per litre of cleansing power). There was no point being a party pooper, so we figured, in for a penny, in for a pound, and plunged away.
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| 'Exhale, exhale, don't swallow, oh crap, some went up my nose' |
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| 'Oh god, what have I done?' |
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| James getting pink-eye. |
After our initial swim, we realised that neither of us had died, and became a little more relaxed. We ended up swimming around for a while with Dinkar, and a few thousand new friends. We even tried to get out to where the two (three if you count imaginary ones) rivers met, but this was guarded by angry men with sticks. While trying to make a dash for this part of the river we got another taste of white person magic. Dozens of young guys were trying to run through the four or five guys with sticks (the river was shallow enough to run through), but the guys with sticks were just hitting them as hard as they could and forcing most of the kids back. It wasn't exactly behaviour befitting of a supposedly holy event. A few of the locals then told us to come with them as they tried to get through. We made a break for it, and the guys in front of us got whacked and fell out of the way, leading to James and I being the front line. I'll never forget the look of vengeful anger in that middle aged Indian guys face, and how quickly it turned to sheepish apologetic shame as he began bowing and saying sorry before requesting very nicely that I go back, as all the Indian kids laughed their asses off at him. I didn't know whether the situation was funny or just plain messed up, but I joined the kids and turned back towards shore.
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| The line where the two rivers meet is where the mid river party is happening. |
Upon returning to shore, James was singled out to get interviewed by a television crew (out of 5 million people they chose the white guy....what are the odds?). After watching Dinkar and his family's stuff while they had a swim, trying and failing to capture the scope of this crazy scene with a photo, and having our photo taken by every single person there, we decided we'd fully Kumbhed the Mela, and decided it was time to join the migration out of town, although not before Dinkar bought us one last present. This time he bought us an ornamental sash which is worn for important Indian events. At this point James and I managed to trick him, and bought him an ice cream, which he reluctantly accepted, as the smallest possible token of our appreciation.
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| This was the most sensational photobombing I've ever witnessed. This guy just walked in front of the photo, and like a deer stuck in the headlights, didn't move until the camera had clicked. |
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| The white guy celebrities. |
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| Our man Dinkar, and me looking pretty sharp with my sash. |
After that we bid Dinkar and his family farewell. I've always taken religion as a way of finding meaning in life, and giving us a reason to seek ways to be humane rather than become animals, even when it may be the harder path to take. Dinkar was my spiritual experience from Kumbh Mela. Pure beings don't walk around naked and covered in white, advertising how spiritual they are, they help people unconditionally and want nothing in return. A feat all the more impressive when they have to deviate from the norm by so much to transcend what they're surrounded by. I don't want to represent Dinkar as poor, but he and his family members had stood for 30+ hours to get to an event that was clearly a one off, at least for his uncle. Compare this to James and I, who have both not worked for over a year while we go explore the world, bribing our way into better carriages on Indian trains with amounts 5 times the price of Dinkar's ticket, and going to an event like Kumbh Mela on a whim. And yet it was Dinkar making a big deal about us being there, treating us as his guest, showing us hospitality above and beyond what we could have dreamed of. The Baba's made me cringe, the Ganges gave James gastro about two hours later, but Dinkar gave the whole event meaning with his effortless generosity and his ability to stretch the meaning of community further than I've ever experienced.
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| A good deed I repay by putting a picture of him in his y fronts on the internet....God I suck. |
Our journey out of Allahabad was almost as eventful as our time in the city. James got violent gastro from both end approximately two hours after our swim in the Ganges. I ended up guarding our bags for a bit over an hour waiting for him to come back, surrounded by a few hundred thousand people on the platform at the station. I despised every second I was forced to spend while urinating at the train station toilets, and I was able to hold my breath for most of that experience. I can't imagine the horrors James must've endured during that hour, but it's safe to say my laughter when he returned wasn't appreciated. James then headed off for a bus back to Varanasi, his first stop towards Calcutta. I was headed east, to a town called Khajuraho. Despite being only 250km away, it would take me 29 hours to get there. It exhausts me just thinking about it, and would be just about the dullest read imaginable, so in the interest of brevity, here are how those 29 hours panned out in point form:
*Ask a nice man at train station how to get to Khajuraho. Head to bus station as per his advice.
*Get on bicycle taxi. Bike taxi rider gets hit by a stick by a traffic cop. Traffic cop looks sheepish when he realises the fare was a white guy.
*Get to bus station, tip bike taxi.
*Informed I've been taken to wrong bus station. Regret tipping taxi. With I had a stick of my own.
*Get another bike taxi to correct station.
*No more buses until tomorrow.
*Bike taxi back to train station.
*Fight way through crowds outside train station, and bluff way past riot police forming perimeter around station by showing big scared puppy eyes, and white skin. (People queue for up to 2 days just to get let into the station).
*Line up for ticket.
*After 1 hour queuing (not hyperbole) get sent to a different counter.
*Line up for ticket.
*Ask man behind me to uninsert himself from me and take a step back.
*Ask man behind me to uninsert himself from me and take a step back.
*Ask man behind me to uninsert himself from me and take a step back.
*Snap (see previous India blog for details).
*Continue to line up, now with all people's eyes on me.
*Get told I'm in the wrong queue.
*Snap.
*Nice guy helps me out, gets me into ticket office through back entrance.
*Get ticket for overnight train leaving at 10pm.
*Train delayed by 3 hours.
*Train delayed by 5 hours.
*Train delayed by 8 hours.
*Check my large bag, tuck small bag into the bottom of my sleeping bag, and fall asleep on the platform.
*Wake up around 8am.
*Train delayed by 15 hours.
*Swear loudly.
*Bike taxi to bus station.
*Get told bus to Khajuraho takes 14 hours, despite only being 250km trip.
*Tell ticket person 'NO. KAR JOOR RA HO!'
*Ticket person says 'Yes sir, 14 hours'
*Tell ticket person 'NO. KAR JOOR RA HO!'
*Show ticket person Khajuraho on my google maps on my phone.
*Ticket person shows me Khajuraho on an actual map.
*Start crying.
*Tuck into bus full of locals, complete with bags full of grain, produce, though thankfully no live animals, although unthankfully lots of smelly farmers.
*Remember what CJ told me about how farmers wipe their bottoms after going to the toilet.
*Shift away from the farmer next to me.
*Moved to the front.
*Happy to be at the front with a bit of leg room.
*See bus crash on side of the road where bus had rammed into tree. Impact was exactly where I was sitting. My seat was now in the 3rd row.
*See a second bus crash. Once again my seat was the location of impact. These buses sure do crumple.
*Third bus crash. Not so smug about my leg room anymore.
*Bus stops, thankfully, as I really needed to pee. Toilet is more of a wall, right in the middle of the town.
*After some performance anxiety, finally get a flow going and put on a good show for pretty much every person in town, who have all stopped to watch me.
*Informed I have to get off the bus and catch a train.
*Train journey actually quick and easy.
*Hotel has brand new immaculate rooms, and hot shower.
*Sleep.
It all sounds like a hellish experience, and admittedly it was, but while I would never voluntarily do it again, it was one of my favourite experiences of my whole trip thanks to one incident. When I was moved to the front of the bus, it involved a bit more than just walking to the front.
First of all, we pulled over to let a few more passengers onto an already crammed bus. Then everyone began pointing and gesturing excitedly to me to get up. I started saying 'Not my stop, not my stop' but no one spoke any English, and they began to get more and more animated. My bag was then grabbed from next to me, and crowdsurfed to the front. Naturally I followed my bag, and was surprised to find it had been placed up the front, next to a seat with ample leg room, and a great view out the front. When I tried to say, 'No, I'm ok being crammed with everyone else', and tried to offer my seat to an old guy standing up, they all gestured for me to sit, and then one guy said 'You are not Indian, you shouldn't have to deal with this, it's only for us, not you.'. It was just a classic India moment. I had been more pissed off, more uncomfortable, and stressed beyond all measure that day, but the kindness and generosity that can come out of nowhere in this country, is just amazing. To add to this, the guy who spoke a bit of English bought me a chai on one of our stops, and we had a nice chat about his business. Maybe I give more weight to the kindness Indian people can show because it's so much less expected, and because when you benefit from it you usually really need it. India is a lot like being in a terrible relationship where the sex is really good. You go through the day and it's just arguing, confrontation, and unhappy times, but then you get that one thing that brings you out of that funk, shows you how good humanity can be, and it steels you, so you can endure the crap until the next glimpse of happiness.
Towelie and The Temple of Porn
The sole reason I came to Khajuraho was to see the temple of porn. OK, it's not
actually called that, and I may have gotten in trouble a few times for calling a holy place by that name, but come on:
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| 'Son, we found the temples you've been hiding under your mattress'. |
The temples were actually spectacular, and beautifully maintained. In a first for me in my time in India, they were surrounded by a lush green lawn, which was both well maintained, and litter free. It was also quiet, relaxed, and the perfect post Kumbh Mela destination. It would've also made a great honeymoon destination, now that I think about it. Who needs Venice and it's schmaltzy canals and gondolas, when you can walk around the karma sutra temples getting inspired!
I'll let the photos do the talking, but I will share my favourite thing I learnt while listening to the audio guide. The site is quite old, and despite the temples being held together only by gravity, they survived until the British colonised India. The temple of porn was then discovered by a Victorian era English gent, who was absolutely appalled by the horrendous and bestial acts on display. I love the idea of his monocle dropping down, and his pith helmet falling back off his head, after seeing depictions of sexual acts so extreme they required spotters!!
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| It's always interesting what a little polishing can reveal. |
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| Indian Deliverance. |
I ended up staying in Khajuraho for a few days, partly because I was knackered from my various odysseys the past few days, but also because I met a nice local guy named Rakesh. I met Rakesh on my way into a restaurant after my first long relaxing day walking around the temples, and at first I was skeptical. Generally when you 'coincidentally' meet locals while walking along the street in India, it's because they've sprinted around the block to happen across your path, and within minutes you're exposed to a sales pitch. But I had dinner with Rakesh, and afterwards he offered to take me around the countryside, and around his town - Old Khajuraho - and to have dinner with his family. To avoid confusion later I double checked that this would be 'as friends, not as a guide', and he assured me he just wanted petrol money.
The next day he picked me up, then we went to his house and had breakfast. For those who read my post about
Sex in India, this was the house where I encountered the downtrodden life of the Indian housewife. To summarise, her life revolved around serving her husband, and as far as I could tell she spent most of her day in one room, with the occasional trip to the roof to do washing. The weirdest thing was Rakesh wasn't in any way a bad or even domineering husband, and he was quite proud of his wife, it's just the role of women in the poorer circles of Indian society.
After a delicious meal, we set off for a ride through the countryside to visit some villages. Well we set off, but then Rakesh stopped off at his friend's place to get high. From this point onwards I'll refer to him as Towelie, because that's essentially what he became; the pot smoking genetically modified towel from South Park. Before we did anything, he'd ask 'Maybe we smoke first?'. Despite me not once saying yes, we prepared for pretty much every activity by him going to one of his numerous stoner friend's places, and then I sat around awkwardly while he and his friends smoked. One thing I will say about Indian people, they have some serious lungs on them. During my time there I saw some people devour entire cigarettes in one drag, and puff through incredible quantities of cigarettes. I guess when your air quality is as bad as it is in India, then you build up a resistance, and sucking down whole packs of fags in one sitting becomes easy.
Once towelie had gotten high, we headed off to a few of the villages around Khajuraho. I know I'm an awful person, but one thing I can't stand is hearing people go on about the 'awesome experiences' they had when they went to some small village in the developing world and met a bunch of kids. 'Oh they're so pure and innocent', 'Oh I just loved them', 'It was so humbling', 'I really felt a connection'. BLEGHH! Spare us the details Mother Theresa. You're probably the fifth tourist through that week. The moment you leave the kids get together, pool the money you gave them for textbooks, and buy a bottle of rum, then bitch about what a cheapskate you were compared to the Americans that came through last month.
But luckily for me I had a real, genuine, experience with a bunch of kids in the town I went to with Towelie, and it was so cool!! The joy on their faces when I handed out candy to them, candy which they called chocolates, because they were so poor they didn't actually know what chocolate was, OMG, sooooo precious, and then I took photos and they all freaked out, but then when I showed them the photos they were all like MORE PHOTOS, and then I had to stop because I'd run out of memory, and then when it was time to leave, they were sad, and I was sad, and they ran after the bike, and we took a wrong turn, and had to come back through, and we went through it all again... Just the best.
And completely different to that stuff I was talking about before.
Anyway, here's some pictures of the little munchkins.
We went back to Towelie's home for dinner (after he had another smoke), and I got to meet his nieces and nephews, a bunch of really cute kids, two of whom looked like little emo Jack Sparrows:
Apparently the eyeliner is to ward off bad spirits by making the kids eyes wider, meaning they can see all the bad things that may come their way. I was pretty sure it was to make them more attractive so they could cash in when the next Hollywood celebrity comes through town looking for a kid to adopt, because you know Brangelina don't mess with no mingin kids!
After a lovely dinner, and another smoke, I was of the impression that we'd done all there was around Khajuraho, but somehow I let Towelie convince me that there was more to see, and he enticed me with the promise of a couple of impressive waterfalls. Given his increasing frequency of marijuana intake, and the number of stories he was beginning to tell me about foreigners who'd bought him things, I really should've gone with my gut and said no, but he ended up convincing me to go around with him the next day. That turned out to be a mistake.
A increasingly withdrawn, and frequently high Towelie took me to two 'waterfalls' the next day. It wasn't exactly as advertised:
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| Well, the 'water' part was accurate. Coulda used more 'fall' |
After that, the day turned into Towelie getting gradually less subtle about how much stuff some Swiss guy had bought him after Towelie had shown him around. By the time we said our goodbyes, he had gone past subtlety, and asked straight up 'Can I have money?'. It was a pretty sad way to end our time together, with me telling him no, especially considering he had organised my driver for my trip to the next town. Things ended on a particularly sour note when he then told the driver that I would be tipping him 400 rupees at the end of the trip, something I definitely wasn't going to be doing, and something that caused the night to end with me locking the driver out of my hotel room, and the driver yelling at my through the door as the hotel manager trying to calm him down and get him to leave.
But I'm not one to hold grudges, and it was a really fun first day, and even the second day, riding around the countryside seeing zero waterfalls, was a great experience seeing how isolated you can still feel in a country of a billion people. So here's a picture of my mate from Khajuraho, Mr Rakesh Towelie:
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| Wait, maybe he told me NOT to post this photo, of him smoking pot, on the internet....ah well. Too late now. |
OK, that's about 10,000 words, so I'll call it there, so that I can spend adequate time describing the intricate details of the Taj Mahal in the next post. All that and more in part 3, (out soonish). I can already sense your excitement!
