9th – 12th Nov 2010
I had calmed down a lot and had almost recovered from my Delhi beating by the time we got to Agra but our train was late getting in.
I say late, as it was only 10pm and most of the town already seemed asleep in bed, an impression confirmed by our arrival at the wrong hotel. Many (tourist) businesses in India seem to name themselves after an existing establishment, likely due to some odd grasp of marketing but in this case it’s due to being owned by the same people.
We turned up at the Sheela Inn and woke the staff up, who was camped down in the lobby, but we actually needed to be at the Hotel Sheela down the road.
The Gods magnified our mistake by closing the road between the two and making us drag our sorry behinds half a mile more on our own, our driver unable to take us further. Tiptoeing through the gates of our final destination we were jovially admonished by the staff who said they had stayed up for us. It was beginning to sink in that a lot of India goes to bed very early when compared to people back home and me in particular. Even in Delhi, the capital of an Asian superpower, we often felt the pressure to bugger off back to the hotel at around 9pm-10pm.
Agra is the home of the Taj Mahal, a monument to love and suffering; others can tell the full story.
A Wonder of the World, it is the most visited site in India only above, bizarrely, a recycling sculpture project.
The Sheela is, to be fair, a good place to stay if a little pricey. Put aside that the staff have so much paan in their chops that they can be hardly understood when they speak and are visibly wired on such a mild narcotic.
The Sheela has pretty gardens and is isolated from the road by tall trees so we awoke only to birdsong and the praising of Allah. A good start, we thought, following the Delhi carnage. The calls to prayer which float above the town are to be expected in such a Muslim-dominated area and are very atmospheric if polyphonic due to the large number of mosques locally.
So we thought we’d landed on our feet with a bit of comfort and culture….but when we left the compound the next morning we quickly wished we were back in Delhi…
The touts/hawkers here are mental; they give no quarter, they know your news back home and can work it into their patter, they use base emotional blackmail, they will walk with you almost to the end of town. If you even give the slightest hint you’ll consider even looking at their shop/wares, they’ll remember you and give you merry hell in the street the next day for letting them down.
In short, if pure brute force were enough to make a salesman there would be an Agran winning The Apprentice every season and ‘Lord’ Sugar would be a real billionaire. You cannot know the reality until you get there.
It’s no wonder that the majority of Taj Mahal-ers get bussed in just for the day from Delhi but they themselves bring agony for the average grumpy traveller like me…
Let’s do the monument shall we?
Get up at 5am for the apparently must-see sunrise. Get hassled into taking a cycle rickshaw to the ticket office half a mile in the opposite direction. Be mortified as the chap at the helm gets off to push you for most of the way because it’s uphill. Feel like the piggy westerner you are as he tries to up his chances of a tip by pouring sweat and muttered protestations.
Get to the ticket office and fight your way through the mooing crowd to be confronted with two queues, one for you and the other for Indians. Fight down rage as Indians routinely jump to the front of your queue through its porous sides and bully the ticket chaps into giving them theirs ahead of everyone else.
Try not to hurt anyone, not least yourself, as you realise that the foreigner tax here means you pay 2500% over your Indians counterparts (Rs 40 Indians, Rs 750 everyone else).
Collect your ‘special’ pack with plastic over-booties (to protect the monument from your daisies) and a water bottle in a bag with accompanying literature that’s clearly been salvaged from the bins of the local hotels.
Get to the queue outside the compound. Separate into male and female lines (it is a Muslim monument) but get rudely jostled and thrown to the back by the bussed-in-for-the-day middle-aged and over-excited French and Americans. Be actively ignored by all of these cos you just don’t seem like their type, daarling.
Get through security with bruises on your nuts or having your boobs properly felt up. Or both.
Enter the compound but be almost trampled by the rush to get in front of the building and have the first photos taken with one hand ‘on the top of the dome’. If you are one of this type, take no notice that there’s sod-all chance of the photo coming out as you want it to but pay the guy and give him your address to post it on anyway. Photoshop is a blessing, after all.
At this stage I was just floating in a pink mist with a ringing sound in my ears, ready to savage the first person who made the mistake of addressing me for any reason. It was pretty early.
We got to the base of the building and started to let it sink in, free of many of the pillocks who generally head straight in. In a pink, dusky and foggy dawn it is a beautiful place with nicely kept grounds and it all has a way of capturing the light well but were we only let in quite a time past dawn so the best had already gone.
Giving our shoes to the free shoe-minder we ignored his implied threats of peril to our footwear without giving him money.
We circled the base of the building, then climbed and circled the next level. We tried to ignore the guys with American accents (but clearly Afghani style and dress) talking very loudly indeed on how it would be ‘awesome’ to have white slaves of their very own. Still had to pay Rs 750 though didn’t ya bub?
Going inside we then had to try and ignore the newly-acquainted Aussies who were loudly discussing the train to Varanasi. In a mausoleum. A monument to love. Their conversation, public as it was, continued on this and related subjects until they left the building.
In my humble opinion, a crass crime is being committed on this site, 6 days a week. This beautiful building and its visitors are exploited mercilessly and the evidence stuck by those visitors into photo albums with little pause for thought for the back story or anywhere near a feeling of being somewhere that’s supposedly special; more that they are on their own experience of a lifetime and to hell with anyone else.
Luckily the acoustics, the shadows and the atmosphere inside effected me greatly so that I was able to tune all the rubbish out and let the rolling hubbub melt into a short feeling of disconnection that was almost euphoric. Those few moments of wonder in a beautiful building made up for the rest of the madness.
Then we were back outside with the idiots and the piss-poor, irrelevant information boardings that my 2500% have been spent on in the spirit, if not the execution, of informatics.
I was starting to feel very ambivalent about India. Especially as Agra itself is truly filthy, the air is choking and if you want to go out and eat the rancid food that’s on offer then you have to run the tout gauntlet once again.
Another trip out was to the Red Fort. Reading the map slightly wrong, we made our way down a major dual carriageway (on the pavement mind you) which leads to it. Very odd slogans about Agra’s history, India’s potential and environmental rallying points are carved into slabs in the wall at around 300 meter intervals. They get weirder as you approach the end of this road.
Getting to the Fort reasonably early, we could see that the entrance was tout territory but they seemed not as aggressive as they were in town.
Once in, we saw that the huge and interesting complex has been left in a good state of repair and a lot of the info panels are well done, if over-wordy; a few bitter undertones against the conduct of Imperial Britain here. Which is to be expected – in a lot of respects, our British ancestors in India were brutal from time to time and civil servant.
We spent a happy day mooing about, exploring corners of the fort, trying to get hold of the nearly tame chipmunks, marvelling at the size and form of one of Asia’s greatest ruins.
Heading outside again, we could see that we had indeed arrived early and the main crowd was now either trying to get inside in time to see as much as they could before dark or were trying to battle their way out through the now-reinforced tout brigade. “Chess-board?”, “marble something?”, “cheapest price!”, “go somewhere?”.
Through all this, a rickshaw chap – an older lad of around 60 – followed us around forlornly in the hope we really would change our minds. The last bit of advice he had for us was not to go over the road to the strip of eateries there because “the food is no good”. In retrospect I think he was just trying to look out for us, becoming yet another victim of mine in the Indian battle of knowing who to trust and when.
He was right. As soon as we crossed the road, an explosion of eatery touts stirred into action and started to compete for our business. They only got to the stage of boggling their eyeballs and using threatening body language to convince us, but once we sat down in one of them and waited for our dosas & chai, the same touts started trading physical blows with one another when an Indian family approached. Another prospective customer was seen to be beating himself round the head because he couldn’t deal with the row around him.
We walked back the way we should have came, via a garden that’s currently undergoing renovations and extensive works. As far as I could see, most of the money was being wasted. I’m not a qualified builder but I’ve worked casually in the trade, was taught by my business-owning Grandfather and have done a fair bit of work on my own home. Concrete washes away quickly if it’s not mixed properly in the first place and slabs which weigh a hundredweight or more (ask Grampa, kids) will not stay level when they only have half a bed. The very large works we walked through will be finished this year (2011) but I confidently predict disaster and lawsuits for this place within 2 monsoons.
Oh ho! But it’s not over yet. Our supposedly 4 hour train back to Delhi was a wopping 10 hours late and consequently had to give way to every other train on the way back. Our day was spent in the station lobby watching mothers smack naughty children, beggar teams work the room like pros and rats do their bit (or not) for railway cleanliness. Also, we nearly didn’t leave at all because one of the evil kitchens we ate from had given Lucy a violent and unpredictable case of gut-rot. We arrived in Delhi at 4am the next day.
So let’s recap; Lucy and I had left the gastronomically fine, hospitable bosom of Goa & Karnataka, travelled a lot of miles and had our faith in tourism smashed for 5 minutes of wonder in a Wonder of the World and some chipmunk chasing in an albeit interesting place where Blighty was beastly long ago.
We also felt that taps had been installed in our wallets but we had no right to complain about it because we were not Indian…
Geographically we had to head back to Delhi in order to start heading for the mountains. You can be sure that I will not write ‘Delhi Part 2′ because we stayed gibbering and sick in our Parharganj hotel room (Hotel Downtown) for the 2 days we stopped over. Neither the restaurant service nor the hassle had improved any while we had been away.
Delhi & Agra, you can keep them both. Unless I’m given contractual guarantees of seeing and doing reasonably nice things, next time I’m getting bussed in and straight back out again and sharpening my elbows…
After a week in Anjuna we decided (through fate and desire in equal measure) to head out of Goa for 4 nights last week, Hampi our destination.
In the next state along to the east, Karnataka, Hampi lies in an unreal setting of fractured boulders. This is OLD country, the remnants of a granite up-welling, rock fans, that occurred around 2.5 billion years ago. The granite came veined with crystalline seams which weathered in the millennia that have passed, splitting the rock into boulders and lots of them. Said to be some of the best climbing territory in India, a lot of these are humongous and they teeter and balance in impossible piles.
But it’s what people have done, and are still doing with this area of the Deccan plateau which makes the magic.
We rocked up on the train, this time taking a non-AC sleeper. Having rode la-de-da in AC Chair from Mumbai to Goa and having mellowed to India (hopefully She to us also), we were looking forward to seeing another angle on the mighty India railways.
Chai, samosi and the mad mixture of rice, nibbles and sauce we have neither tried nor worked out the formula for, flowed as usual.
We didn’t get the constant although slightly niffy comfort of AC but we did get all the smells of the passing country as it moved from deep jungle green to the reds and browns of the earth beneath, moving inland. The sleeper benches were harder than AC chairs and the company was less well-heeled but we found it well. The benches come down to form beds at night, kept in place with chains, like such carriages everywhere but you could see that the old girl had seen some human traffic; it looked more than 30 years older than the 2007 date of manufacture stamped on the window.
Once free of the train we were bum-rushed outside the main entrance by an army of rickshaw drivers, many of whom swore blind that we shouldn’t go with the guy the hostel had sent to pick us up but with them instead. Sorry chums but the man with my name on a card in his hands wins every time, in a strange town.
We were in Hospet, around 30 min rickshaw ride from Hampi and we darted through a diluted version of Mumbai traffic.
On arriving in Hampi we were taxed 10 Rs to enter as tourists, an act so swift and by-the-by that it feels fraudulent but is actually official.
We’d seen boulders and henge-like structures grow in size on the way but suddenly we were in the main Bazaar or market area, nipping through narrow alleys between hostels, shops and restaurants. We stayed at the Gopi guest-house, one of the more prominent outfits, in their second site across the way from the main building which houses a roof-top restaurant.
Our room was nice and clean and fairly large, with a roof-top area of our own but we couldn’t use this as the staff were almost permanently camped out in it to do washing, make food or even sleep at night. As ever, we spent the first evening crashed out to recover.
On waking, we began to explore. For me this meant getting my first Indian haircut. I hate having my hair cut for many reasons and the fringe I was left with only compounded my distress but I’ve now settled down into my usual handsome self.
A gora (westerner) getting a haircut seems to be hilarious for Indians and several people stopped to watch. One came with good conversation and we trooped off afterwards to discuss business, karma and the festival which was happening that night. He did invite us to eat celebratory sweets that evening with his family but he failed to materialise at the rendezvous later, more’s the pity.
I’m not sure I’ll ever get a full grip on Hinduism and its plethora of gods, festivals and regional variations thereof so please forgive and correct any of the crass errors that are bound to arise in the following.
We had arrived in time for Dasara (remover of bad fate), which in the south is the 10th day of the 9 day festival of Navratri (9 nights). Navratri is celebrated 4 times and year and is all about the mother goddess Shakti, where 9 of her forms are worshipped.
This was Sharana Navratri, the most important of the 4, during the day several bands played all day in the streets with varying degrees of talent but equal enthusiasm. The evening culminated in an elephant procession with an idol, going down the bazaar into a specially prepared area where the elephant dished out blessings with her trunk while the best of the bands let rip.
This area was then all but destroyed by military quantities of firecrackers. The remains of this arsenal was then harvested by children who did their best to maim each other with them in excellent humour. Good times!
We headed out on our first excursion the next day. Hampi bazaar is the only ‘living’ part of a huge ruined area which was once the capital of Vijayanagara, (City of Victory), a once mighty Hindu empire founded in the 12th century and sacked by Deccan Muslims in 1565.
Hampi consists mainly of a wide, kilometre long bazaar that has stone pavilions down each side, leading up to the towering Virupaksha temple to Shiva. At the temple end, shops dominate (mainly travel, food and communications) but these peeter out as you go down into local accommodation. The money obviously sticks to the temple end and all of the hostels can be found at its right hand side as you look at it.
We went down to the other end, on foot towards and over Mantanga Hill. There’s a Nandi statue of a bull at the bottom of the hill and a shrine to Hanuman at the top, where we got a blessing of ochre on our foreheads, for a modest fee of course.
Over the other side is the stunning Achyutaraya Temple and Sule Bazaar, now deserted except for monkeys and locals who use it just to hang out in peace. It really gives an impression of how Hampi might have looked in days gone by as it is more complete. A lot of Hampi stone has been re-appropriated for the modern business of tourism and local lodgings, sparking a preservation battle.
We went on from there to the main attraction, the 16th century Vittala Temple, dedicated to an aspect of Vishnu.
We took advantage of an offer from a guide, without whom we would never have had the insight he gave to the various gems hidden in the architecture such as carvings with 5 different aspects and musical pillars tuned to mimic actual instruments when struck. Friezes also tell the trading story of the area; Portuguese, Chinese and Arab visitors drove bargains for diamonds and horses. A great place.
After this, we succumbed to the standard rickshaw tour which takes in a museum (great statues, artefacts and a scale model of the whole area), the former Royal Enclosure, the Queen’s Baths and Elephant stables (sadly sans pachyderms). We headed back culturally sated but hungry.
There are unfair, guidebook-based rumours circulated about the poor cuisine in Hampi. These are unfair in the main but I would recommend Gopi for breakfast and Vikky’s roof terrace and Prince’s for dinner. These same rumours laud the Mango Tree which can be found outside the main site, down by the ghats on the river. Yes, the food is amazing but be prepared to be eaten alive yourself as you chow down.
The next day we went hiking. Taking a coracle across the seething Tungabhadra river (after much haggling and inflation of the effort involved to get across) we set out for the Hanuman Temple atop one of the tallest hills. This was well worth the trek and the braving of weightlifting-class monkeys who prowl the 570 steps. At the top is a shrine to Hanuman and his mother and we received more blessings there. Hanuman is Lucy’s favourite Hindu deity while mine is Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who is lord of obstacles and writing.
As an atheist, I have to express the genuine spring in the step which blessings have given us, even aside being a few rupees lighter each time.
We tromped back along back roads through paddy fields that have gushing irrigation channels. The sight of us brought much grinning and head waggling from locals in SUVs and rickshaws. We began to think we must be mad to be hiking in the land of the rickshaw. At one point an SUV screeched to a halt next to us and kids, as bewildered as we were, were pushed through the windows by their parents by use of their ankles to shake our hands and say hello. As quickly as they came, they were off again, tooting the horn until out of sight.
We cut by a ruined bridge into Virupapur Gaddi, a small settlement across from Hampi. This is a peaceful haven for yoga and climbers but is cut off from Hampi after the last river crossings at about 6pm.
We spent most of the next day there waiting for our sleeper bus back to Goa in the evening. Sleeper buses are no such thing but I’ll expand on this in a future post on Goa.
So that’s Hampi; full of smiling children, friendly dogs and cows (in various states of health I’m afraid; we saw some terrible sights of animal neglect but never cruelty), gods, chalk art in the doorways and ruins.
I sincerely hope that the clearly advertised educational and environment charities/NGOs there succeed in making the area sustainable and keeping it beautiful. We want to return.
We survived Mumbai.
As I expected, it’s hard to sum up the largest city I’ve ever visited. We stayed in Andheri, a large slum in the north that is currently experiencing incredible change. But that’s India all over by what I can see, read and what the few people we’ve had chance to speak to so far tell me.
The problem for us was that the area is far away from the main tourist traps and when I say far, I mean it. Fortunately, we only had three nights (two of those taken up by adjusting body clocks and getting rid of what felt like nitro-narcosis from the flight) and so didn’t feel we missed out on much because we simply didn’t have the time.
We were picked up at the airport and seamlessly taxied out to our hostel through traffic that has its own rules. If you don’t let go and abandon yourself to it immediately you’re just going to up end up as a scarf, wrapped around your driver’s head and screaming, which will get you killed. They know what they’re doing.
There is no right of way, lights mean nothing unless there’s a traffic cop and even that’s optional because they very often turn up on each other’s patches and start competing for domination, negating any directing effect either might have had.
The smell was the first thing that struck me (after the heat of course, which was fierce at 34C) – I thought it was dusty, smoggy and initially lemony but the citrus undertone was one end of a spectrum, the other being unadulterated sewerage.
We stayed about 2 kilometres from the airport, at a tiny hostel called the Anjali Inn, nestled down a side street between a wire extrusion shop and a grill bar. This was typical of the way space is used across much of the city; little units recycling bearings or cardboards right next to showrooms packed with HD 3D LCD TVs. If the means are available to them, Indians love their technology.
Our room was clean, if a little rickety, and we had satellite TV and intermittent, but fast, wireless net access. I was very glad to discover that the Radio 4 portion of the BBC iplayer was accessible and duly caught up on the latest episode of The Unbelievable Truth.
Our hosts were friendly, helpful and full of advice on what to do and at the cheapest prices.
The cost of most things we bought was comparable to the UK, except street stall food such as chai (sweet, milky and spicy tea that alleviated both of our raging caffeine-withdrawal headaches) and dosas (nommy little pancakes packed with things like cheese and veg, served on a steel tray with three types of sauces). We held out on diving into such stuff until we found a stall that was surrounded by Indians; heed this advice.
We ventured out on two major reccies. The first was on our first night to find a hotel for a beer. This was a major culture shock. Within 2 minutes we were picking our way down a major avenue through piles of rubbish, open sewers, prostrate dogs, browsing goats and subsiding pavements. A gent walked past us and shouted over the endless car horns – “welcome to India!” – and laughed his arse off.
After 10 minutes I had seen more rats than in my entire life, including stomping hard right on top of one by accident. By its yelp, I thought I’d broken its back but it kept on trucking.
We ate at one hotel restaurant, vegetable kebabs. Tasty as but the lesson was, the blander the veg the more fiery the spice. Approach cauliflower with asbestos gloves and silvered welding mask.
Later, we went on to another hotel that had a bar the like of which I wouldn’t get into if I were delivering napkins to it back in Blighty. Watched India woop up Australia in the first cricket test and chatted to some import/export guys who explained about the massive investment currently going on in Mumbai. The road we had just picked our way down is overshadowed by a vaulted superhighway being built along its middle. This is happening in a lot of places and I worry about the life down at ground level when these are finished. It’s bloody tough now for working classes/castes but when the money is flowing seamlessly 50 feet above them, what then? In 5 years, they said, it will be a different city. Of that there’s no doubt.
Our second sojourn was into the main city the next day. We took a terrifying taxi ride from Andheri to the Hanging Gardens, some 30 clicks away. I’m sure our driver Dinesh did it just for larks but I shall now never forget his traffic jam aversion skills. This amiable nutter saw a blockage, stopped and reversed the wrong way down a 3 lane dual carriageway. Soon after he nipped over the central reservation and drove 200m the wrong way down the other side, into traffic going at least 40mph. I was very glad then that no right of way exists.
The Hanging Gardens sit on a rock above the city, just up from Chowpatty beach. They’re pretty basic, plant-wise, but have shade and crows and dragonflies by the truckload. I do wonder about British dragonflies, which seem to keel over at the slightest environmental touch. The double-hard Mumbai versions thrive on the air which by now was strafing my throat and making my teeth taste funny. Couples (chaperoned and not) mingle here with bunches of students and families, lazing around and chatting in the shade. A tout came up to us and tried to ply postcards, which as soon as he found out we were British quickly turned into abridged versions of the Kama Sutra. Go here to escape the madness for sure.
We then ambled, via a nosh stall, through a park for kids on the other side of the road and down the hill to Chowpatty beach for sunset. This was good, seeing Mumbai families relaxed and eating sweetcorn, paddling in the sea (do not do this, we’re told – very toxic with city run-off) and harassing French travellers to speak to their kids in their native tongue.
From there we went down Marine Drive and witnessed a change. Elsewhere the people have the minimum of body fat but here it was mostly middle class and mostly portly people exercising with pedigree dogs, which as far as we could tell involves donning trainers and walking slightly faster than the average.
I saw a sleepy-looking street dog and set myself up for a point of view camera shot as he slumbered between his outstretched front paws. This enraged the beast and he chased me with the loudest, most primal sounds I’d ever heard a dog make, much to everyone’s amusement.
Marine Drive is long and well-lit along the sea front and leads into a massive commercial area with skyscrapers and the promise of a future India. We treated ourselves to pizza at a place recommended by Lonely Planet and decided, stupidly, to take a walk. This is where it got a bit scary. We got totally lost within 5 minutes.
It got hotter by the step and darker by the turn. In the end we were starting to panic, realising how far we were from home. Flagging down taxi drivers firstly resulted in vile looks and refusal or demands of 1000 rupees (c.£14) to take us back. Not much you might think, but seeing as we got there for 450 Rs, it was taking the piss. In the end we got a driver to agree to take us to the airport for 450 then got a motorised tuktuk from there back to the hostel for 30 Rs. We got back a bit shaken but we’d won and quite cheaply.
The next night we were gladly off, our friend Ed’s advice not to stay in Mumbai ringing in our ears because we were tired, hot and soaked with sweat. The smell of the Mumbai slums sticks to you too.
Our mate Dinesh picked us up at 3:30am the next morning to get the reserved express train to Anjuna in Goa, our next stop and from where I gladly write to you now. Driving through Mumbai in the dead of night was an experience – the place does kind of sleep between 1am and 4am, with only massive trucks dropping off industrial quantities of marigolds and coriander as the main activity.
We had an air-conditioned carriage that bore our names (and everyone else’s) on a piece of paper on its side. The chai and tomato soup flowed all day, with breakfast and lunch too. Spoilt children fought over their parent’s laptops and we devoured books, slept and got annoyed, in the end, by all of this and the 2 hour delay.
We’re now in an edgy paradise, staying in a friendly Goan family’s complex of guesthouses with AC, good wifi and a more nature than you can chuck citronella at. I’ve spotted 3 types of ant and spider so far with butterflies as big as your hand, as standard.
Life, so far, is good.
