I don’t know whether you caught John Sergeant’s TV programme about Indian railways; I only flicked over to it accidentally late one night, but somewhere between Sergeant’s red, sweating face and the lush green hills behind him, I was entranced. So six weeks later , with a Lonely Planet in my hand and without malaria tablets, rabies injections or pretty much any plan of what we were going to do, two friends and I touched down in Delhi to start our journey through ‘God’s own country’.
India is gloriously diverse, from its smorgasbord of religions to snow-capped mountains bordering steamy tea plantations, sun-kissed beaches and bustling cosmopolitan cities. Travelling from north to south, you feel as if you’ve visited ten different countries. The contrast just in Delhi is incredible; standing next to men peddling fresh fruit, fabrics, baskets and inflatable rubber rings at the side of the road are gigantic, air-conditioned malls of which Delhi abounds. With the Commonwealth Games beginning in October, Delhi is littered with the shells of half-built high-rise flats while money and labour are diverted to the equally barren sites of the new metro stations. Yet framed at one end by the formidable Red Fort is Chandni Chowk, one of Delhi’s main streets, full of the chatter of owners hustling you into their shops and prayers from the Sikh temple. The air is heavy with the sweet and spicy scent of chats cooked down the rabbit warren of alleys leading into the Old Town, and thick with fumes from the traffic jams of motorbikes with whole families squashed on the back, auto-rickshaws, un-roadworthy cars, vans with men hanging off the back and sides, and beautifully painted work trucks. One of the things you notice most as a tourist in India is how much people stare. Everywhere we went people looked and took photos. We appeared to become the star attraction at the Lotus temple with men lining up to have their photos taken with us, which seemed so inappropriate next to a beautiful Baha’i place of worship. It almost makes you feel like a celebrity until you’re lying on the beach and you look up to see a coconut tree full of men staring down at you. That was just a bit off-putting, and God knows where the photos end up.
We continued our journey south following the ‘golden triangle’ of Jaipur and Agra. At Jaipur, we went to see the beautiful Amber fort, driving back to the Pink city as the sun set over the water palace, Jal Mahal. And while my friends explored the old city, only four days into the trip, I got a real taste of the India ‘experience’ as I spent a day on an IV drip at a clinic getting antibiotics and rehydrated. The ordeal of getting a large needle pierced into each hip muscle was improved only by a gorgeous Frenchman called Remy who was suffering similarly. In Agra, we watched the sun rise over the Taj Mahal, and I even succumbed to some sickeningly touristy photos of me ‘holding’ the Taj. Sadly my mother’s annual Christmas newsletter will be missing these much-relished photos after I managed to drop my camera down the Indian loo of a train on our final leg. Gone are the photos of the camel ride on Shah Rukh Khan, our canoeing trip down the Keralan backwaters, our day at Mysore Zoo, many indistinguishable pictures of pillars and one of my friend in a towel doing something naughty during a blackout. To whomsoever found that camera on the train tracks, enjoy.
I spent my 19th birthday in Mumbai. Quick tip, don’t let your friend with the guide book organise your birthday – we spent the morning looking at the High Court and the outside of the University buildings. At least in the evening we ate Behlpuri on the beach, went bollywood-star spotting at a rooftop bar and were taught how to blow smoke rings in a shisha bar by a man who was a bit too concerned with our throat action. We were shown the gorgeous ruins of Hampi by a friend where we watched a festival of fireworks and dancing led by the temple elephant, Lakshmi, who early the next morning I fed bananas to and was blessed by her trunk. When we travelled to Bangalore we were lucky to get shown the sights by a local, including shisha at a completely empty Egyptian themed bar where we put some newly learnt dance moves and smoke rings into actions in front of the bemused barmen who outnumbered us. From here, our train journey led us down into the luscious green state of Kerala, to Kovalam beach, and my favourite day which was spent lazily floating down the palm-fringed Alleppey backwaters on a gorgeous bamboo houseboat. I even got my first ride on a motorbike when we were taken home one night by friends of the owner of our guesthouse after a barbeque on beach. They took one of my friends and I to another guesthouse for a late night drink of coconut water, and while my admirer tried to convince me I was the girl of his dreams, all hopes of him being ‘The One’ were dashed when I discovered he used the same lines on another friend.
I could hardly believe that just kilometres from these cities, bulging with a population they can’t contain, there are the most beautiful sites I have ever seen. Yet it isn’t the historical sites that will remain in my memory long after I left India- I had a camera for that- it’s the sights and sounds, the food and above all the people. You can’t experience a country through a guide book or being hurried inside a monument by a tour guide for fear you might experience the ‘real’ India. Nothing we saw compared to the kindness of the people we met walking around. We’d been warned that everyone was a conman out to rip you off in some way, but I met some of the most genuinely lovely people. When we visited Krishna’s birth place, we were invited to worship with some Hare Krishna, playing drums while they sang. Drenched from head to toe at New Delhi railway station, we relied on the help of other passengers to find the elusive tourist bureau. In the villages around the backwaters of Alleppey, men, women and children run up to you just to say hello and shake your hand. We chatted with the lead singer of an Indian band filming a music video on the harbour of Fort Cochin. In fact, some people were overly helpful – a rather buoyant hotel owner offered us a free yoga lesson (or massage, we weren’t quite sure) and despite our polite refusal, we were still greeted with his enthusiastic face at 9am ready to bend into positions I can only imagine. On our train to Mumbai, we spent the night chatting to a family, sharing their delicious homemade food and even had a debate about Pascal’s wager with them while their three-year-old daughter tried to destroy my copy of ‘From Nicaea to Chalcedon’.
We’d heard horror stories about the trains in India, but after three overnight journeys, including a 17 hour one in the lowest class with a more than dubious smell wafting from the blocked toilet next to our beds and a man with a consumption-like cough next to me, it turns out that the Indian trains were actually the only reliable way to travel. The driver who took us from Delhi to Jaipur and Agra would often mysteriously do a U-turn in the road and travel for kilometres in the direction we had just come, only to turn round again. We took a dying Jeep on a three hour journey from Guntakal to Hampi, with its doors held shut by string and a driver who looked indescribably relieved when he managed to get us across a flooded river with the water skimming just shy of our toes (we also narrowly avoided our bags being lost when the back door swung over as he forced the car over a gaping pothole). One of our friends in India had a particularly lax attitude towards drinking and driving, while the final part of our journey ended with 14 hours on the airport floor because of a national transport strike.
So there it was: four weeks, sixty-one hours on trains, eleven towns and cities, and we only scratched the surface of one of the world’s most beautiful countries. John Sergeant, I hope we did you proud.
