Food rations
Trip Start
Jul 07, 2008
1
81
215
Trip End
May 27, 2010
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Ootacamund,
Tamil Nadu,
India
Friday, January 9, 2009
Very warm indeed
Stayed put
I woke up this morning with my head in a vice, well, that's what it felt like anyway, so we decided to stay put for today. Mettupalayam ain't such a bad place to be for an extra day, in fact it has everything you could need to be comfortable. The hotel is fine, in fact we think we are the only people here, and when the electricity goes off (which happens often) it has its own generator (as most of the larger hotels do). Across the road are a couple of supermarkets where you can buy all kinds of things, more of that later as well as a couple of internet cafes (electricity permitting of course). Talking of electricity, the reason there are so many power cuts is because there simply isn't enough electricity to go round, so they have something called 'load sharing'. Everyone gets electricity every day for SOME of the day, but not all of it. You could be really lucky and only lose power for an hour at 11am, but in many of the places we have been it is often 2/3 hours at 7pm, when the sun has gone and you can't see a damn thing. Come to think of it, we haven't yet been somewhere where there hasn't been a power cut.
Back to yesterday and the Nilgiri Mountain Railway. We were at the railway station at 0530 for the opening of the booking office, as without reservations we thought there might be a bit of a scrum for the unreserved tickets. Turns out the train has only 4 carriages, one half of one carriage is given over to first class the rest is second. However, only 2 carriages can be reserved in advance leaving 2 carriages (100 seats) to be sold on the day. We saw people turning up 10 minutes before the train left and still get a seat, so our dreadfully early start was not absolutely necessary.
Once on the train we shared our carriage with a lovely couple (who I think were on honeymoon) and several young men. The train itself was simple but with huge viewing windows, most of which opened allowing uninterrupted views of the scenery, and, when we went through a long tunnel the smoke to come billowing into the carriage. Given that we had already cycled down (definitely the best bit) was it worth taking the train? I don't know, it was a lovely thing to do, although at 5.5 hrs it was a very long haul. We had lunch in Ooty and then hopped on a bus which took two hours to get down the mountain.
We romanticise about steam trains ( know I do) but there's nothing romantic about working on one of those engines. It is dirty, hot, backbreaking work and it's definitely a young man's game. My dad was a fireman on the old steam trains (working out of Euston in the 50s and 60s) and I can remember my mum cutting carbuncles out of his neck, leaving a hole the size of the tip of your little finger. The heat and dirt would get under his shirt collar and rub, he also used to get huge boils in the places where his trouser braces (like hats, everyone wore braces then) touched. The reason my mum had to sort these out is because he couldn't afford to take time off work to go to the doctor to get them seen to.
So, there they were, the 3 guys working the engine, plus, at least 2 people at the station where we stopped. The engine compartment was really quite small and the floor was covered in coal which was being fed down from bags on the roof. We stopped several times to take on water, which one of the guys had to stand and guide into the engine's tank, while one of the other guys pulled the red hot embers from underneath the engine onto the tracks. The engine, inside and out, was sooty black. The next time you go to your air conditioned office and sit at your squeaky clean, ergonomically assessed desk, think about the meaning of the word 'work'. By the way, it costs 9rps (approx 12pence) for the 5.5 hr journey,
The carriages, on the other hand, were squeaky clean and with blue and cream livery. Amazing to think they have survived in such great condition since 1899.
Back to today, well last night actually. Last night I got to that breaking point (again, I had it a few weeks ago) with regards to food, where I just feel like I need crunchy fruit and veg. The food in South India is great, BUT, there is a distinct lack of fresh fruit and veg in restaurants. We can get freshly squeezed juices (as long as the leccy hasn't gone off) and we can get vegetarian food, but sometimes that's not enough. There is plenty of fresh fruit and veg available, but, buying 1 cucumber and 3 tomatoes is often a challenge, that's where the supermarkets come in handy. So this morning we went to the supermarket and bought the following:
5 bananas
1 pineapple
3 lemons (very small)
1 papaya
1 cantaloupe melon
1 cucumber
1 carrot
1 red cabbage
4 tomatoes
1 curd
1 small pot of honey
Total cost 95rps (approx Ģ1.20). I mention this for 2 reasons; 1 because Claire wants to know and 2 because I'm about to tell you about food rationing for the local population.
As we got back to our hotel crowds of people were waiting outside the building opposite, on the wall outside the building were chalk boards with prices of things written in Hindi. So I asked the proprietor of the hotel what was going on. She told us they were queuing for basic food rations from the government, rice, flour, milk etc because they were too poor to afford them. Our shopping list above is one day's fruit & veg ration for us, the honey will last us 4/5 days, and we will probably have a 'snack' in a cafe later this evening. We bought our shopping at a supermarket where we estimate prices to be about 20/25% higher than the markets (if you want to haggle for everything) but even at those prices the people queuing probably couldn't afford to buy them.
In the news today - India has run out of oil and one of the CEOs of a major company (Satayam) has admitted fraud over a 7/8 year period.
Oil production and delivery workers have been on strike for the past few days and now India is in crisis. We saw on the news this morning that major cities like Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Madras etc are suffering most with up to 80/90% of petrol pumps closed. The Best bus company in Bombay has filled up its buses today, but doesn't have enough to fill up tomorrow. The minute the press started reporting the situation there was panic buying, so it's not really clear how much people have. Now, they are saying, that it's going to start affecting gas and electricity supplies.
Price Waterhouse are the auditors in the firing line as far as Satayam are concerned, but we've seen it all before with KPMG and Andersens. Now all the usual questions are being asked but there are no straight answers. 'Heads will roll' the government are saying, mmmm, we'll see.
Laters
Reading: Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro (still)
To date:
The Last Grain Race - Eric Newby
Cancer Ward - Alexander Solzenhitsyn
Utterly Monkey - Nick Laird
Atonement - Ian McEwan
The Tesseract - Alex Garland
Mr Vertigo - Paul Auster
