Mumbai

In lots of ways, Mumbai is identical to the rest of India. Morbid congestion infests the roads, hawkers harass on the footpaths, the number of people going about their daily lives is too large to comprehend, and the noise never ceases. In other, surprising ways, it is most un-Indian. The architecture has been lifted straight out of olde-England, with lots of big stone, big arches and statues. Red double-decker busses plod about streets with names like Henry Road and past buildings called Victoria Terminus (the busiest train station in Asia, which is really saying something).

Most of the younger women wear western clothes, and some even wear business suits. Men and women hang out (and talk) in restaurants and bars and everyone speaks English, even if they’re in a group made up entirely of locals. And there are comparatively obscene amounts of cash floating around. We saw plenty of people being driven around in expensive cars, and we were forced to pay over forty dollars for a hotel room, an amount that would have kept us bedded for a week in other parts of the country.

Most surprising of all – among the usual handkerchiefs, fake watches and sunglasses that are sold at stalls on the footpath, in Mumbai they sell sex toys, cunningly boxed as ‘massagers’.

Bye Mumbai, Bye India.

Mumbai was out last stop in India, and it put on quite a show for us as we left. Ganesh, everyone’s favourite elephant-headed Hindu deity had his big festival and the streets filled with trumpet-blowing, statue-carrying crowds as we gobbled down our last Indian meal of paneer butter masala (cheese tomato curry), aloo palak (potato and spinach curry) and fresh lemon soda. The food, especially for my vegetarian self, has been amazing in India.


As our taxi banged its way to the airport, we passed dozens of celebrations in the street; throngs of dancing devotees trailing flatbed trucks carrying enormous speaker stacks and technicolour Ganesh statues. Most people, and passing cars, took on a dull burgundy tinge, thanks to all the red powder being flung about in celebration. There was music, colour and movement in copious, very Indian, amounts. It was a fitting final glimpse of a gloriously bizarre country.

Around Agra

Food map

One of the most spectacular architectural wonders of the world is surrounded by some of the most spectacular architectural failures. I'm talking about the hotels that have windowless walls, or teensy windows, facing the main attraction. View form our room (thorough cement grate).

The Taj and surrounds

Rooftop breakfast - Muesli, curd, milk tea and the Taj

Agra street

Behind the Taj is a river, and from there you can see the Taj for free (it costs over $20 to enter the grounds).

Offerings revealed by the low water level

Angie's Varanasi

People unimpressed by my vessel selection on the Ganges

Happy Tears

After buying some jewelery from a woman, we agreed to be taken by her son to his store, where he would show us some of his merchandise. As he led us through the streets, he turned to Angie and said:

‘I was talking to one man, and he said the saw you walking here and crying the other day.’

Angie replied that, yes, that was her, but before she had time to elaborate, he continued, with one of my favourite theories on the effects India can have on tourists.

‘All the time I am in Varanasi I see tourists here and they are crying. I think, maybe, these are happy tears?’

Angie explained that, probably no, they aren’t tears of happiness, and recounted the traumatic details of the particularly infuriating encounter with a travel agent that led to her storming the alleys in tears (a bemusing sight for the locals, which kept them talking for days, apparently.)

* * *

Morning on the ghats

Goat eating a schoolbook

After-school Job

Angie was walking around the streets, being harassed by hawkers, touts and guides, as is usual for any foreigner in Varanasi.

‘Miss, Miss!’ came the familiar call from a pre-adolescent kid.
‘No thankyou’, replied Angie, denying whatever was on offer before it was even proposed (again, usual for the foreigner.)
‘No, no, Miss, I am not a guide, I only wish to talk to you.’
‘Okay, but I don’t want to go to any silk shops or ghats. I only want to walk.’
‘Miss!’ came the melodramatically offended response, ‘I am not a guide! I am a student.’ He then proceeded to make chit-chat, asking all the usual questions about what country Angie was from, which city she was from (‘MCG or SCG?’ is how we sometimes get asked this) what she does in Australia, before getting down to brass tacks:

‘Perhaps you would like to come to my Uncle’s silk shop?’
‘You told me you were not a guide!’ said Angie exclaimed.
‘Oh, Madam!’ he cried indignantly, ‘I told you, I am not a guide! I am a student! In the mornings I go to school, and in the afternoon I work.’
‘And what is your job?’
Innocently, he explained: ‘I round up tourists and take them to the silk shop.’

* * *

Naptime at the Nepali Temple

Cow with a sense of humour

Follow That Corpse! A Visit to the Burning Ghats.

‘Yes please what you want? Rickshaw? Silk shop? Boat? …Hashish?’ (In hushed conspiratorial tones for that last one) ‘Where you going? Hotel? Main ghat? Burning ghat?’

These questions, and variations on them, form a constant soundtrack to any tourist wandering around Varanasi. It’s how seemingly millions of young men make their living; either by acting as a guide or by earning commissions from businesses after they’ve rounded up some rich westerners willing to part with wads of rupees. They’re incredibly persistent, and notoriously greedy when it comes time to pay for whatever service they have provided. They really can make a walk around the streets unpleasant, and are best avoided.

So when it came time to visit the burning (cremation) ghat, we didn’t take up any offers to guide us there, instead attempting to navigate the tangled alleys that sprawl between the buildings crowding the riverside. There aren’t any useful maps of the alleyways; they’re a cartographic nightmare and any sane mapmaker would just stick to producing purposely-inaccurate maps of the Indian countryside (apparently designed to confuse potential invaders.) The alleys dogleg about as they dodge the buildings, which are so tall that you can’t see any distant landmarks. There aren’t any street signs, and I’m pretty sure the roads don’t have names anyway. Plus it’s noisy, with motorbikes honking and weaving at incredible speeds. And of course it stinks, with all the cows and dogs about.

Unnavigable

In the heat of midday we wandered for a sweaty hour or so in what we thought was the vicinity of the cremation ghat. Outside of monsoon season, it would have been a simple case of walking along the water’s edge to our goal, but the high level of the river meant that the riverside pathways were metres underwater. It became obvious that we were never going to find the ghat, and we decided to return to the main road, which feeds pedestrians and bikes into the unnavigable concrete maze we were now lost in.

Back on the main road, in desperation, we looked at a map. While Angie was tracing her finger pointlessly around the page, six men trotted past us, a bamboo stretcher on their shoulders. On the stretcher, wrapped up like an extremely morbid Christmas gift was what was obviously a corpse. It was covered with shimmering fabric, with bright garlands and fluttering tinsel wrapped around the outline of a body. There was only one place this package was going, and we set off after it, our colourful, yet inanimate guide to the ghat.

Back in the tangle, we soon lost our guide. The many bends, corners and anonymous forks of the streetscape, along with the crowd, meant keeping up was impossible. We sat and had a drink, wondering what to do. Soon enough, another gaily festooned cadaver bounced past, and we were on our way again. Sure enough, we soon lost it, but we had the hang of it now. We’d follow the stretcher for as long as we could, then wait patiently until another passed us, when we would begin moving again. In this fashion we soon made it to the ghat. As we neared it, we could tell it was close thanks to the smoke and ash that floated thick in the air.

Sometimes they don't get burnt

Following a crowd, we neared the water’s edge, where a pyre had been built and the wrapped form of a corpse freshly dipped in the Ganges sat atop it. We watched as a man walked around the pile of wood, lighting the straw underneath with a pile of coals held in a handful of hay. The fire was slow to start, and various family members poured ghee (clarified butter) on the now unwrapped body, threw offerings of cigarettes into the fire and took photos. It seemed to be a mostly male affair, and it was all very casual. People weren’t dressed up, and a crowd of onlookers were free to watch. As the fire really got going, we saw some of the rather gruesome things that extreme heat does to skin and flesh.

Apparently this operation runs twenty-four hours a day. This ghat is the most auspicious place a Hindu can be cremated, which explains the high volume of bodies being run through the streets. Awash in smoke and ash from the fire we watched for a while, then left, a little disturbed, but glad to have seen another facet of this unique river.

The ghat at night

Varanasi

High density living

Varanasi is a super-holy city in the North of India. Varanasi is like a teeming, concentrated, museum version of India; it’s less diluted by the human need for personal space and etiquette, which is pretty thinly spread in India to begin with. Everything is more intense. The streets are narrower, the rickshaw drivers are more conniving, the swarming touts are more aggressive, the smell of sun-baked cow dung and open-air urinal runoff is more potent. The sun pounds heat down into the tarp-covered alleys, creating a slowbake oven full of sweating shopkeepers, who are usually comatose on their cushioned shopfloors by lunchtime. Bikes and scooters careen through the narrow passages, and huge bulls lazing on in shady spots block off thoroughfares, forcing pedestrians to find an alternate path through the concrete maze. People carry offerings of flowers, curd, food, water and line up to be let into the high-security, Hindu-only confines of the Golden Temple. Dead bodies are carried through the streets down the Ganges, where they are cremated or just tossed in whole, while people bathe, wash clothes and drink the water just metres away.

In Varanasi, the most remarkable thing to see is just the way people relentlessly get along with their lives amidst all the noise, heat, hassle, death and concrete. It’s plain to see that there’s too many people there, too much stuff going on, but it all works somehow, and makes Varanasi one of the most invigorating, spirited cities I’ve ever been to.

Kite fliers

Happy bull

According to a magazine I was reading, 40% of Indians suffer from hypertension. It's roundabouts like these that cause it.

Leaning Shiva temple in the swolen Ganges

Kite flying is a popular afternoon pastime in Varanasi. Every day near sunset, the sky would fill with hundreds of small, paper kites.

A storm front rumbles in, dropping the temperature an arctic to the mid-thirties.

Rishikesh to Gorakhpur. Urgh.

Motorcycle movie stars

As far as travel days go, this thirty-hour odyssey across Northern India ranks up there with other favourites such us our entry into Guatemala or the boat crash of Panama thing. It started off pleasantly enough, with a slow taxi ride along the highway. The snail pace of the Indian open road meant there was plenty of opportunity to muck around with other road users. Jeff, our co-passenger in the taxi got involved in a sing-off with a rock-star motorcyclist. His flawless a cappella rendition of Bjork’s All the Modern Things, performed with half his body out the window, won him the competition and respect of the passing motorists.

At the train station, a dense picnic was underway on the platform, as hundreds of Indian travellers waited for their rides. Our train arrived, and after a panicked search we found our bunks and rattled off into the night.

Haridwar train platform

Bedtime

We awoke in Lucknow, where we were planning on catching a bus for the next leg of the journey. At the bus station, it all went to pieces. Misinformation piled upon lies and guesses from information desk and ticket counter staff as we desperately tried to escape Lucknow, a city with little in the way of charm but abundant in funky smells. This apology from one ticket seller, who had given Angie some erroneous information, summed up the day that was now only just beginning:

‘I’m sorry ma’am for giving you the wrong information. You see, I am Indian and we only say things to help’

After four frustrating hours and twenty conflicting stories about where the bus was, it became clear that we weren’t going to be bussing it anywhere today. A friendly tourist police officer put us on another bus back to the train station, and arranged for a colleague of his to meet us there, where he directed us to the mysterious arena of the ticket counter.

Lucknow platform

I bought a ticket and our trouble only deepened. The time of the train hadn’t been printed on the ticket, and when I asked around, I was given three wildly different answers as to when the train would be leaving. The apology given by the guy at the bus terminal echoed in my head as I bounced from counter to counter in the station, trying to find two different people who might give the same answer to the same question, but it could not be done. After a few hours of this, progress only came when Angie burst into the ticket office and then burst into tears, much to the puzzlement of the men working there. ‘Why you cry?’ they asked.‘Because I’ve been in Lucknow for seven hours now and all I want to do is get to Gorakhpur and nobody can tell me if I’m going to be able to do that and there’s no busses and I don’t understand this ticket and…’ more in the same hysterical, foot stamping vein.

It worked though, because a guard took pity on this strange frantic westerner in the ‘staff only’ area. He took the ticket, performed some obscure interactions with various other ticket counter staff and produced a ticket for us to Gorakphur, complete with departure time and seat numbers.It took hours of running around and a breakdown by Angie, but we got what we needed. However, we still don’t really understand what happened, and what we need to do in the future to avoid it happening again. This is Indiarail.

Air con

The train pulled out and we left Lucknow, eight hours after we had hoped to have gone. For all our work, we were rewarded with a visit to Gorakhpur, a muddy sewer of a town completely lacking any redeeming features. And another two days of travel to follow.

Happy busker

Lovely Gorakhpur