India-isms

India is a mind-blowing, shocking, wonderful place that most travellers tend to both love and hate at times. There are so many things that make India India - here are a few India-isms that we have noticed and thought were interesting.

* About 90% of the men here have mustaches, beards, or both.
* About 90% of the men here will stare at a foreign woman, even if she is modestly dressed and covered from head to toe. But, when it comes time to talk, if the woman is with a male partner, she is pretty much ignored, and all questions and discussions are directed to her "husband".
* The soft drink bottles tell you "this drink contains no fruit".
* About 90% of the plates, cups and bowls have a very strange swirly brown pattern that we've never seen anywhere else.
* About 99% of all interactions with the Indian people are either with men or children. Women rarely speak with foreigners, except perhaps on the trains, when they are with their husbands.
* When Indians discover that Edwin is from New Zealand, immediately the conversation turns to the Cricket World Cup.
* There are delicious sweets called "barfi".
* At the post office, all parcels must be sewn up in cloth and sealed with wax, as this is the only way "to make sure that no one will open your parcel".
* The Indians have a remarkable head wobble gesture which may mean "yes, no, maybe, I don't know", or about a dozen other meanings we haven't quite figured out.
* On the roads, pedestrians outnumber bicycles, which outnumber bicycle-rickshaws, which outnumber auto-rickshaws, which outnumber buses, which outnumber trucks, which outnumber cars. Throw in several cows, a few bullock carts, the occasional camel and that's traffic! And, it seems there are no rules, other than the bigger the vehicle, the more right of way you have, but if you're a cow, you have the ultimate right of way.
* There is absolutely no sense of privacy or personal space. If there is an inch of space in a queue, or on a train seat it will be taken. It's quite common for the owner of an internet cafe to look at your photos and read your emails as you write them.
* We're not sure if Indians think they are being helpful, or just curious, but often the way they speak with us turns into commands - "come, sit, where are you going? what hotel are you staying at? what country are you from? what is your profession? what is your salary?" If you do not answer all these questions, they think you are being rude.
* Indians are still bewildered by freckles - one girl asked me "what happened to your hands?"
* There is a barrage of smells - spices, delicious aromas of food being cooked, incense, mixed with poo and urine.
* There is a barrage of sounds - bus drivers use their horns constantly to communicate with other traffic, the rumbling of buses and Enfield motorcycles mixes with loud Indian music.
* It's quite probable that your rickshaw driver will try to take you to a different hotel than the one you specify to try to collect commission from its owner.
* Queues are not really queues - people come in from all sides, front and back - generally holding out some money will get you service quicker.
* The trucks are painted with signs saying "horn please" and "use dipper at night" (it took me a while to figure out this means low beam).
* Children and beggars seem to see foreigners as walking gift bags - "money, one school pen, one chocolate, one photo, rupees".
* Every second shop seems to be a "STD/ISD/PCO" shop. These mean Subscriber Trunk Dialing, International Subscriber Dialing, and Public Call Office. These are places where people can make phone calls - basically manned phone booths.
* There seems to be a constant battle with dirt - people bath numerous times a day, sweep dirt and rubbish away from their doorsteps, and seem to always be doing their laundry. But the dust is unforgiving, the rubbish piles up, and their laundry is often placed on the dirty steps just outside their home.
* Men pee everywhere. Kids poo everywhere.
* The locals have a wonderful pride about their country and its sights - "have you seen the fort, have you seen the Taj Mahal?"
* India seems to be a living history - people living in ancient forts and havelis, harvesting their crops by hand, using bullock carts as a major form of transport. But at the same time, it's rapidly becoming a software giant.

Location: McLeod Ganj, India

India the Hot - Varanasi to Amritsar

After crossing the border at Sonauli, our first task was to try to not get too ripped off in exchanging our Nepali rupees, and our second was to eat our first genuine Indian lunch (yum). We opted to take a night bus from Sonauli to Varanasi, instead of taking a bus ride to Gorakpur and hoping to catch the train. As we began our scheduled 12-hour journey, we noticed a marked increase in the number of trucks, buses, cows, and people (make that men) on the roads and roadsides. The land was mostly farmland, with wheat crops coming ready for harvest, and the landscape was dotted with ladies in brightly coloured sarees working in the fields. Unfortunately, our bus was a bit fast, and we arrived in Varanasi at 2:00 in the morning. Our welcome to India was quite typical of India in that our rickshaw driver tried to take us to 5 hotels other than the one we had specified, in the hopes of receiving commission from their owners. After yelling at him "you bad man, no rupees for you", he finally took us to the one we had wanted. As luck would have it, there were no rooms available, so another very helpful, friendly man helped us find reasonable accomodation at a reasonable price.

Varanasi is truly a magical place - one of the oldest cities in the world, sitting on the banks of the Ganges River, a pilgrimage site for Hindus, and the holiest place for them to die and be cremated, as it offers the hope of liberation from the cycle of birth and death. Mark Twain said of Varanasi "It is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and it looks twice as old as all of them put together." We arose at sunrise one morning to take a 2-hour boat ride up and down the ghats, watching the pilgrims and sadhus bathing, praying, and doing their laundry; cows negotiating stairs; kids playing cricket; and the recently deceased being cremated. We wandered the warrens that form the old city, getting lost and then finding our way back towards the river. A walk like this involves watching for cows (and their poo), dogs (and their poo), and people (and occasionally their poo) all along the paths; talking with the kids and shopkeepers; and answering the question "what country?" about a million times. We noticed that there seemed to be very few people along the ghats during the day, especially compared to when we were both here last (4 years ago, but in the months of January and February) - as one local man told us, the summer had arrived one month early, and temperatures soared to around 40 degrees during the day.

From Varanasi, we took a night train to Delhi, where we trimmed down our backpacks as much as possible for the rest of our time in India, leaving a large bag with our hotel, to which we will return at the beginning of May. We did a day trip to Agra, and visited the amazing Taj Mahal. From a distance, the symmetry and lines of it are breathtaking, and up close, the inlaid marble is gorgeous. Completed in 1653, it is a remarkable monument to love, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his second wife Mumtaz Mahal who died giving birth to their 14th child.

Another night train put us in Jodhpur, the "blue city" with the magnificent fort, the Mehrangarh, and the place which gave name to the baggy-tight riding trousers. We stayed at a very nice guesthouse here, Shivam Paying Guesthouse, and spent our mornings seeing the sights, and our afternoons napping under the fan in our room, trying to escape the heat which had now risen to 42 degrees. The walls of the majority of the buildings inside the old part of Jodhpur are painted a lovely indigo blue colour. Originally the colour was to indicate the homes of Brahmins, but nowadays anyone can paint their home in blue, as it is thought to keep the heat and the mosquitos at bay. At the fort, we took in the audio tour (which is actually very good), which highlights the history of the fort, the day-to-day life of the former Maharajas, and the role of the current Maharaja. One of the most interesting but tragic sights within the fort is the mural showing small handprints painted in red. These represent the handprints of the Maharaja's many wives who commited the act of sati - immolating themselves on their husband's funeral pyre after he had died in battle.

**Photos for Jaisalmer and Bikaner unfortunately have a little virus and are resting on our USB memory stick. We now have a program that can fix the files, but it is very slow, so we will have to wait for our return to Canada to fix the problem.**

We arrived in Jaisalmer, the "golden city" on April 13th, after a long, hot bus journey from Jodhpur through the Thar desert. As seemed to be our pattern, we rested in the afternoons and saw the fort and the Maharaja's palace early in the morning. Jaisalmer is the only fort in India in which people (about 300 families) actually live inside the walls. Unfortunately, the lack of proper water and sewage systems for these inhabitants and the dozens of hotels also inside the fort have led to quite a bit of decay and crumbling fort bastions. Still, it was great to climb to the top of the palace to take in the 360 degree views of the sandstone buildings within the fort, the city beyond its walls, and the expanse of desert that stretched as far as the eye could see.

We left Jaisalmer on an early morning bus bound for Bikaner. When we arrived in Bikaner we headed straight for the train station and after a bit of a wait, found out the good news that the train tickets that we had been on a waiting list for had been confirmed and we had berths for our journey to Amritsar. We then had time to go to see the infamous Karni Mata Temple (Rat Temple) just south of town. Karni Mata is an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga, and the rats are believed to contain the souls of her followers. As at all temples, shoes are left outside, and we tried not to think about the little crusty bits that we walked over on our way into the temple. I didn't last inside as long as Edwin did (I kind of have a phobia about rats), but we watched the rats scampering about and feeding at the bowls of sweets and sweet milk that are left out for them. The temple is home to about 20,000 rats, of which four or five are the very lucky white rats. We should have quite a bit of good luck, as two rats actually scampered over Edwin's feet, and we also saw a white rat at one of the feeding bowls. There were many pilgrims at the temple, praying and making offerings of sweets for the rats, and their solemness made us realize this was a temple, and not the weird spectacle it seemed to us. On the way back to Bikaner, we rode on top of the bus, enjoying the sunset over the desert, and watching kids flying and fighting their kites from the rooftops. We saw boys dashing down the street - kiterunners chasing the cut kites.

We booked a room close to the train station in Bikaner until our departure at 1:45 that morning, and tried to sleep, but it was too hot and the single cot too small. The train departed about one hour late, and it was our most tiring journey yet. So far, the trains have been great, but this one was very overbooked. In our compartment, with 6 bunks, there were 11 people. We had to kick people out of our assigned bunks, which was kind of tough to do at nearly 3:00 in the morning. The journey lasted until 4:30 the following afternoon, and it was very hot and crowded. Then we boarded a second train, which had 10 people in a compartment for 6, for the last 3 hours to Amritsar. Needless to say, we were very tired when we arrived that night.

Fortunately, Amritsar was a bit cooler, and we had a good sleep before waking at 5:30 for sunrise at the Golden Temple. The Temple is the holiest site for Sikh people, and the Temple complex provides inexpensive (free dormitory) accomodation and meals for all who visit. We stayed at a hotel just outside the complex, but partook in a few meals, sitting on the floor with about 400 other pilgrims on this one of two levels, as dozens of volunteers served up chapatis, dal, rice, and a sweet dessert at lunch time. Before entering the complex, we left our shoes in a locker room, donned head coverings which were provided, and washed our feet by walking through a pool with flowing water. The Temple is absolutely beautiful, with the sun's rays shining off the golden dome, surrounded by a pool of water, and marble buildings and walkways. The dome is said to be guilded with 750 kgs of pure gold and represents an inverted lotus flower, which is a symbol of Sikhs' aim to live a pure life. We found The Sikh people are very nice and friendly, and there's very little (if any) hassle. When we told one of the men who wanted to chat that I was from Canada, he said "ah, Little Punjab".

In the afternoon, we took a shared taxi to the India/Pakistan border near Attari. Every night, when they close the border, there is a special 30 minute "closing the border" ceremony. Thousands of people attend the ceremony every day, and the atmosphere is one of a festival, with music and dancing, and people waving the flag of their favoured country. As the ceremony begins, the double set of gates which separate the two countries are flung open, trumpets sound from the guardrooms, soldiers bellow (hopefully longer than their counterpart on the other side), and then the most hilarious marching show begins. Five very tall (very handsome) soldiers from either side do the strangest, fastest march we've ever seen from the guardroom up to the border, staring and scowling at the other side, with puffed up chests and clenched fists. They wheel to face their flags, and after they have returned one by one to the guardhouse, the flags are lowered, very slowly so neither side is higher than the other. All the while, the crowds are singing, cheering and chanting for their side. It was a wonderful spectacle to see (and hear).

During our 2 weeks in the lowlands of India, the heat has really been a factor in how, when and where we travelled. We did what we wanted to do, but much of our time was spent trying to avoid the heat of the afternoons, and we moved from place to place with no real rest days. So what does 42 degrees feel like? Well, we were sweating pretty much full time from about noon to about 6:00. We drank litres and litres of water, trying to rehydrate. The water in our water bottles would feel like we could make tea in them, and our rooms got so warm that the floors and the bed would radiate heat. We would have the fan on constantly, but it would feel like a furnace blowing hot air on us. At night, we took to dousing the floor with water to try to cool the room, I slept in a wet t-shirt (not to excite Edwin), as it helped me keep cool. As this is the beginning of summer, we don't know how the local people cope when the temperatures reach 50 degrees.

We are happy to now be in the cool of McLeod Ganj, in the state of Himachel Pradesh, very near the Himalayas. We will spend the he next two weeks in this state before returning to Delhi and our flight to London.

Location: McLeod Ganj, India

Rhino Spotting in Chitwan National Park

We left Kathmandu on April 2 to head for Chitwan National Park in the hopes of spotting some one-horned rhinos, crocodiles, and perhaps, if we were very lucky - tigers. As we approached the park on the bus, we found it interesting that on many of the signs the word "Royal" (as in Royal Chitwan National Park) had been scratched out or painted over. The King relinquished his power in April 2006, a year after he had dismissed the entire government and seized full executive powers. In speaking with the local people, there seems to be a cautious optimism about the cease fire, the provisional government that is now in place, which includes Maoist Ministers, and the upcoming elections to be held in July(ish). Very few people remain loyal to the King. It has been so unstable for so long in Nepal, we just hope the people here finally have some peace.

As always when we arrive in a new place, we were bombarded by touts as we got off the bus. Edwin managed to choose one fellow to go with, and negotiated a great deal for 2 days of sightseeing around the park. On our first evening, we went to the Elephant Breeding Centre, which breeds elephants in captivity to work in the park, either with the tourists, or to patrol the perimeters of the park, on the lookout for poachers. The baby elephants are cute, but it's kind of sad seeing that most of the elephants are chained to posts and don't have too much room to move. We took in a local cultural performance that night which was great - local drummers and dancers performed traditional stick dances.

Our second day began very early in the morning with a 4-hour jungle walk with our guide Ram. We spotted 2 big crocodiles, a couple of deer, birds and monkeys, but no rhinos on our walk winding through the jungle and grasslands. Later that afternoon, along with two Nepali tourists we boarded the howdah perched on the top of our elephant for our "elephant safari". The mahout (driver) knew exactly where to go, and at one watering hole, we saw a pair of rhinos bathing, and at a second watering hole, there was a family of five.

We left Chitwan the following day, bound for India. Our journey to Varanasi involved 4 buses to get to the border, and one to reach Varanasi. As most tourists were heading north to the cool of Nepal, we knew we were heading for the very hot lowlands of India.

Location: McLeod Ganj, India