It's taken a while but we have finally got around to putting up a travel diary... Actually I wrote this in two stages about a week ago (see if you can spot the join - not hard) but we have been faffing around being perfectionists. I'm going to stop, post and then start another entry.
Two and a bit weeks in and so far we have been to: Delhi - Shimla - Mcleodganj (wacky Scots-Indian name) - Amritsar - Bikaner - Jaisalmer. Jaisalmer is in the Rajasthan desert not far from the Pakistan border. It is very very hot.
We got out of Delhi pretty fast, the thinking being that it should in theory get cooler towards the end of this month, and took the overnight train to Shimla, the old summer hill-station capital of the British Raj. The last section of the journey is up through the hills on a narrow-gauge line. Glorious views every metre of the way and cool fresh mountain air.
Shimla - based partly on Guildford and partly on Pitlochry but indescribably shambolic in a uniquely Indian way - was great. The place is infested with monkeys and we were woken every morning at dawn with the thud thud of a troop of monkeys leaping out of the trees and bouncing like maniacs on the corrugated tin roofs of the houses below us for an hour or so. Paul's view of the monkeys was that they were the simian equivalent of pigeons but whilst I wouldn't want to get up close and personal with one I could sit and watch them for hours.
From Shimla we took a ten hour bus trip across the hills to Dharamshala, the home of the Tibetan government in exile. (Shimla, by the way is at 2,200 metres - it's still only in the foothills). The main tourist centre is just up the hill at Mcleodganj, superficially pretty unattractive with a stinking fetid main street and knee-deep in hippies. Things improved when we found a hotel room on the edge of town with an amazing view over the valley.
Next stop Amritsar. Poor, disasterously polluted, choked with traffic, charmless. Didn't help that the bus driver improvised the route and we arrived a couple of hours late. Mobbed by rickshaw drivers. Found a hotel - ludicrously over priced. Paul set off on what turned out to be an hour long mission to find an alternative whilst I crossed my legs and fantasised about a cold shower and air con.
Finally found a hotel. Turned out it hadn't been completed - by this I don't mean it needed a coat of paint, I mean once inside it became clear that a central section including the lift shaft, a set of stairs, several walkways and a couple of stories were still under construction. Threaded our way through the construction site in uncertain light and found the room. Air-con and cold water. Fine. Enough. Went downstairs to check in. Electricity went off. When it returned Paul sent me upstairs to start in on the shower whilst he completed the forms. Returned to room. Air-con short-circuited, no longer worked. OK, cold shower, then deal with air-con. Undress. Discover shower has three jets of water coming from the nozzle. So desperate to cool down attempt to shower anyway. Paul returns with an employee as guide (hotel is unlit rabbit-warren and since the central structure is missing makes no logical sense). I - clad only in an inadequate Indian hotel-issue towel - point out that neither the air con nor the shower head work. Hotel employee traipses across floor in flip-flops leaving a trail of filthy footprints and fiddles ineffectually with the taps.
I lose the plot along the lines of: get someone with a brain! Fix the shower! Fix the air-con! And clean up that mess!
Someone with a brain arrives trailing a down-trodden waif towing an indescribably dirty rag draped over a mop. Brain man fixes shower, fixes air con. Waif dabs ineffectually at the floor with the mop. We thank her profusely. Brain man seems keen to stay for a chat and demonstrate the hot water feature.
I DO NOT WANT A HOT SHOWER! Get OUT! OK. Get in shower. Now cooled to a rational temperature. Freshish clothes. Air-con working. Go and get some food. Back to hotel room. Praise the lord - air-con still working. Go to bed. Drifting off to sleep.
Loud knock at the door. Ignore it. Loud knock persists. Perhaps the lift shaft has collapsed causing major structural damage. Paul answers the door - testily. Turns out the paperwork has been incompletely filled out. Paul responds - ballistically. Employee stands his ground: it is imperative this must be fixed now. I hear them go off, Paul shouting (very uncharacteristic).
Time passes. I wonder if someone - hopefully not Paul - has been chucked off an unfinished balcony.
Paul returns. The missing link is my signature. He has flatly refused to let them drag me out of bed and through a building site to provide it. He has promised - lord only knows what ransom they exacted from him - I will not leave the building without signing my name.
Back in bed I say: "What kind of a hotel wakes up it's guests in the middle of the night for a bureaucratic emergency?"
Gloomy chorus: "An Indian hotel."
Electricity goes off...
It would not surprise me to discover that in the basement of that decrepit wreck of a hotel, with it's pitiful plumbing and scarcely existent electricty sits a corps of clerks working day and night to ensure that whatever else happens at least the paperwork is in order.
Anyway, got up at 6am to see the Golden Temple, which made the whole thing worthwhile. Almost.
The temple consists of an enormous square of marble buildings enclosing a huge courtyard, with a marble walkway inside the perimeter, and in the centre of which is a tank (bathing pool) where Sikhs have to immerse themselves. In the centre of the tank, joined to the mainland by a causeway lies the golden temple itself.
The first lap, I couldn't concentrate. I had been sick before we came out and I was consumed with fear that I might vomit over the Sikh's holiest place. After a while it began to rain - not much, but big tropical globules - and I recovered. It is an astonishing place, with haunting music: pictures do not do it justice.
The temple visit turned out to have the quality of a dream for soon we were out in the smog of Amritsar. Our next destination was Bikaner in Rajasthan, a long way away on the map, and enough off the tourist trail that we had no idea of how to get there, except there was no train. We were not in the mood for another bus trip but the smog was so bad we seriously feared for our health (read my lungs) if we stayed.
From that moment on things went swimmingly. Took a rickshaw to the bus station where after protracted negotiations via an English translator we discovered it was possible to get a bus to a town two hours away and then a train (1pm to 1am) to Bikaner. At the train station, we were adopted by a young man who showed us how to fill in the form to purchase a ticket (really), which queue to get in, and then when we were able only to buy a 2nd class sleeper how to befriend the ticket inspector to get an upgrade. But since it was raining 2nd class was fine, as the only benefits to 1st class are a/c, bedding (unnecessary) and better toilet hygiene (wouldn't mind that). Actually 2nd class was a lot of fun. We were the stars of the carriage - What are YOU doing HERE? - and soon found seats with a team of cricketers from Gujurat who had been competing in an all-India competition. In long train journeys the carriage becomes a sort of village. Paul was drawn into a chess tournament (the whole village watched, hanging from bunkbeds and crowding the corridor) which of course became India vs Ireland (series draw) and our friends the cricketers generally found us spare beds, looked after our luggage and woke us up when we reached Bikaner. The capacity that Indians have for good, clean innocent fun is unsurpassable. And because Indian English parted company from UK English in 1947 English has a curiously dated feel here - people use words like Britishers and balderdash. India is perhaps the last place on Earth still inhabiting the 1950s.
The point about all this is to illustrate how travel here is both impossibly difficult and simultaneously astonishingly easy. One moment you are wondering through gritted teeth why you are martyring yourself and then you get in a cold shower and it's the best shower you have ever had and then you find an impossible journey turns into an enjoyable day trip because everyone is just so kind. Mood-swing wise, it is like being a teenager again.
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