India

India

Can anything really prepare you for India?  Well nothing I have seen yet anyway.  You redefine your definition of crazy.  Elephants, camels, goats, cows, pigs and dogs roaming the streets isn't crazy.  Kids running barefoot over piles of plastic, glass, metal and raw sewage to play with their friends isn't crazy.  Dead bodies being burned on bonfires in public isn't crazy.  10,000 Indians bathing and drinking the same river that the sewage, rubbish, dead bodies and cattle float in isn't crazy either.  It is all just India.

The kids' playground.

No one here things these things strange, crazy.  Their definition of crazy would likely be sitting in an office pushing paper for 8 hours a day, the practice of swallowing pills when you are sad, sick, sore or otherwise, or even simply not knowing what is in, or where the food that you eat has come from.

Indian Oil - Delivery Service.

That being said, I have not turned the corner, jumped from the western bandwagon, or become a god damned hippie.  But its just that you learn to appreciate certain things a little better after spending time in India, while at the same time wondering why it is that we do some of the things that we do.  But enough talking, its time for a few stories from the sub continent.

Good a place as any for a sleep

Mumbai Madness

12 hours after standing on the streets of London I find myself standing on the streets of Mumbai.  It is 25 degrees warmer, a feed now costs me 50pence and I am about to find out what the term Mumbai Madness means.  I jump into a cab.  Driving the streets of Mumbai you don't just get to see the city.  You will invariably also smell, taste and hear it too.  Some countries are quite lax on their road rules, India simply doesn't have any.  I could reach out the open cab window and touch the car next to me, and in that gap a motorcyclist would shoot through, sitting on his horn, driving the wrong way.

It is common to see a family of 5 on a Hero Honda 125cc bike, or anywhere up to 12 people packed into, or hanging off an auto rickshaw.  And it was fittingly on the back of a motorcycle, with my new couchsurfing mate Vinit, that I was to experience life in Mumbai over the next couple of days.  Vinit is a true Mumbai local who can drive on the wrong side of the road with the best of them.  He took me to places so far removed from anything I had seen in the past 9 months that it is actually quite hard to describe them in their full detail.  We saw some of the best and the worst of Mumbai, ate on the streets, got to know the locals, talked cricket and learned the Indian head waggle.

 Street food - delicious sweet milk, 5rupees, 15 nz cents

But one story from Mumbai really sums up much of India for me.  The first night I found myself in one of the slum areas after dark.  To my mind the place looked as sketchy as anything I had seen this year.  Shacks illegally strung together on either side of the road, fires burning in the unsealed streets, animals sifting through piles of rubbish and plenty of noise.  Not totally comfortable in the midst of things, I took some photos from a distance.  A guy on the other side of the road spotted me doing so and shouted at me.  The group he was standing with became interested too, and approached me.  I was thinking just play it cool.  They all group around me.  One of them points to my camera.  Know knowing what to do, I show them the pictures I had just taken.  They start to laugh when they see themselves on camera.  They invite me over their side of the road and ask me to take some more.  While we walk, one asks what country I am from.  NZ I answer.  North or South Island another one says.  Another guy ducks round behind his produce stall, grabs a bag, fills it with tomatos, carrots, cucumbers and gives them to me as a gift.  We talk, laugh, I have a bunch of new mates, and feel like I am getting to know India a bit betters

 Outskirts of Mumbai

That story carries on basically for the next three weeks.  I quickly drop most of my knee jerk defences, as you realise that your average Indian man on the streets (excluding auto rickshaw drivers, or anyone looking to make a buck from you) could not be more genuine or kind, although their insatiable curiosity can overwhelm you sometimes.  It is almost a necessary response to the utter chaos of life in India that internally you must become a very calm person to survive there.

Camel Riding

For me, the thought of riding a camel through a desert far from civilisation, and sleeping in the sand dunes under the stars, had a certain amount of romanticism attached to it.  As our camels galloped into view just out of Jaislamer city, I was still blissfully unaware of the non existent levels of comfort found while riding a camel.  I was introduced to my beast, one Mr. Magoo, a 10 year desert veteran who was halfway through his 20 year service.  

 Waiting for the camels.

A few minutes after our introduction, and without so much as a 'this is how you drive a camel' lesson, we were off.  For those that have never ridden a camel, riding a camel is like having ropes tied to your ankles, which are being pulled violently outwards every two seconds by a bunch of strong men, while being simultaneously punched up the arse.  Any romantic notions quickly dissipated.

We had decided to take the camels to an area of the desert not on the tourist trails.  True to the description, or companions over the next day and a half were solitary farmers heading trips of goats through the vast emptiness, a few sporadic villages, and desert kids. The desert kids seemed to appear from no where, were quite fascinated simply squatting 10 paces away from us and observing us eating lunch for an hour.  Unlike the kids in the cities, they were incredibly shy, but we did manage to find some common ground.  They enjoyed eating bananas, and jumping for the camera.

Desert Kids.  I love this photo.

During the night on the dunes, our Indian guides were quite animated.  We found out the reason in the morning.  We were one camel down, and I guess short straws were drawn in the night to determine who would chase down the rouge camel on the loose.  I have no Idea how you find a black camel, in the night, in the desert, with no moon, but our man had done it, and we were re-united with the wandering camel and tired guide 15km down the road the next day.  We were secretly cheering on the camel though, as it would be a pretty tough life as a beast of burden in the Indian desert.

Both the camels and our guides drank from the oasis.

Trains.

There are far too many stories to share really, so I hope the following pictures do justice to some of them that I have not been able to tell here.  But I will leave you with one story which I find quite funny, as I still have no idea what actually happened.  

I love travelling rough.  Whether by bus, bike, boat or back of a truck, I find the most memorable travel experiences corrolate inversely to the level of luxury you experience during the journey.  In India the trains were right up y alley.  The longer the ride, the more chaos, the better.  To get to the bathroom on the trains (if you can call a hole in the train floor a bathroom), you literally have to step your way over Idians sleeping in the isles, underneath seats, or anywhere they can squeeze into.  

Waiting.  One of my favourites.

On my first train ride, I was standing in the space between the carriages.  To the left and the right are big metal doors on each side.  It was an hour into the journey, and the train wasn't totally packed.  I still didn't really know how things on the train worked either.  The train came to a stop just before getting into the station.  All of a sudden the doors burst open, and several men wearing hankerchiefs over their faces stormed onto the train.  I almost shat myself.  Being the only westerner on the carriage I thought I was going to be an easy target.  I wasn't going to let myself be an easy target though, so I started running.  I stormed through the carriage to the other side without looking back.  I found the toilet, jumped inside, locked the door and started calculating.  How many indians were there, how much time will I have till they find me here, I started stuffing my passport, money, memory cards down my underwear, all of the while there were shouts and yelling outside the toilet door.  I was contemplating any further escape routes but there were none.  

 The Trains.

After what seemed an age, their was quiet on the train.  Two circumstances were playing in my head, either the bandits had emptied the train, or the passengers had rallied together and ejected them.  I peeked out the hole in the door, it looked calm, I gingerly stepped out of the toilet, shaking.  The bandits weren't there any more.  I tried to ask some people what had happened, with little success.  It happens they told me.  As I said at the beginning, I still don't know what happened.  They could have been just out to secure seats without tickets, they could have been opportunists looking to snatch some gear and run.  But all I knew was that I had just had the best train experience I have had so far.  The next 31 hours on the train seemed rather mundaine.  

The rest, heavily abbreviated, in pictures.

Markets in Jodhpur

On the daily walk through the city, Mathura.

The kids are awesome, apart from the ones that are not, this not being one of those that are not though.

They love packing as many people as they can into anything.

Varanassi before dawn.

 Varanassi after dawn.

India, it really has to be seen to be believed.  And even looking back at some of the photos, I still don't believe some of what happened.