We enter India with a very negative attitude. Things can only get better.
15th March 2006

Crossing the border from Nepal to India
First night in India
We expected a more sophisticated city at Varanasi....
Buddha's first sermon
Little washing on the Ghats
Health club in miniature

Good morning India

Crossing the border from Nepal to India confirmed a couple of our preconceptions about India. This is worrying. People have been pretty negative about India, almost all preferring Pakistan and Iran. Nepal is not perfect at all and has its fair share of litter scattered about the place but simply passing the barrier at the border took the street garbage count to a whole new level. We’d like to think that it was simply the street sweeper’s morning off but coincidences like that are rare. No, it was just plain filthy. Coughing, hawking and spitting are par for the course from Istanbul to Hanoi so there was nothing new in that department. I tell a lie. Chewing of Betel nuts is popular in India and this seems to have an unpleasant two-fold effect; increased volume of spittable matter and dying the projectile matter a rather vivid red colour. So, along with the litter, there was a kind of tomato soup spillage to steer your way through.

While Pat did the paperwork stuff I was doing the usual, i.e watching the bike, and looking not particularly pretty. On the Nepal side, a couple of people stood around the bike, looking at it. A rather tall striking fella asked a few pertinent questions, and told me he had been in the British army. A Gurkha. He placed a paternal hand on the bike. He didn’t fiddle, with it, I just felt that with him around no-one would give me or the bike any grief. I was sad to be leaving Nepal, I had truly liked the place and the people. We had heard so much about travel in India that it had become something of our own nemisis.

The other rumour about India is that pretty much anything other than buying a samosa involves copious amounts of meaningless bureaucracy. It is usually a relief when a country accepts the carnet de passage; stamp, date, sign and you’re into the country. Other countries have had extra little bits of paper to fill in and so its not really fair to single out India but it fulfilled the promise of mass paperwork. I was astounded, though, that even though their register of people entering with a carnet had thousands of prior cases (there had been half a dozen only two days before), I had to guide the customs officer on the correct completion of the form. One particularly officious guy, who thought he was important because he had a uniform, insisted on seeing our carnet, to then spend 5 minutes looking at it upside down, to then eventually tell us we had to get it stamped which we knew already. As I stood, waiting I had nothing better to do than watch the officials treatment of others. A coachload of Nepalis, mostly Buddhist monks were being given the 3rd degree by the customs people, who were giving them a thorough searching. I suppose if you were a drug or arms traffiker being dressed as a monk could be the ultimate in disguises, but it did seem that they were giving them an unnecessarily hard time. So I was expecting to have to unload all our gear for inspection. But no... ours is not to reason why.

The defining event that brought home that we had arrived in India was the stationary queue of traffic that had built up either side of a pair of trucks that were nose to nose only 50 metres into the country. Fi has told us of the numerous times that she has had to perform the ‘lady of the raj’ act and organise lines of trucks so they can pass each other on narrow roads. We had assumed that she had been adding a bit of exaggeration to make a nice story out of it. Fi, we apologise for having doubted your reporting.

I find it hard to comprehend the mentality of drivers who drive towards each other when they can see that there is not enough room to get through, rather that waiting 30seconds for the oncoming traffic to pass, to create room. All the truck driver were hand on horn, as if by magic horn use means that a gap is created.

Gorgeous Gorakpur. Not.

All that having been said, once away from the border town there was little of note that would suggest we were in anything other than just another country. The road was good and reasonably clear of traffic, if not excellent, and the road signing unhelpful. So what’s new? Fortunately the route to Ghorakpur was pretty straightforward and no distance at all so our Indian baptism was reasonably mellow.

Maybe we have driven in enough bad traffic around the world that although chaotic, it was drivable. I think what worried me more was the lack of people in the rural areas. This is a country of over a billion people, if the countryside has such a low density of population, I grew fearful of what the ciites must be like.

There a few rules of the road:-
1. Drivers only look forward, anything that resembles a mirror is there purely for decoration and squeezing spots.
2. Pedestrians, rickshaw riders, cows, goats, truck and bus drivers appear to be blind to what they see. They will not register your presence unless you use the horn. Hence everyone uses their horn.
3. A gentle beep of the horn, is just a reminder that you are there. If the person/animal fails to notice you, you honk longer and harder. You use your horn gently to inform people you are overtaking them, and loudly and continuously if you intend to overtake regardless of the oncoming traffic having to leave the road.
4. Size matters in India. The bigger vehicle you have the more right you have to the road. We as a large motorcycle, come somewhere in the pecking order between a normal local bike and a hatchback. Bigger vehicles will in many cases bully smaller ones off the road.
5. Vehicles just pull straight onto the road, without looking for a safe time to pull out, and then annoyingly stop in the middle of the road like a frightened rabbit. Maybe somewhere in their driving experience someone told them that you must stop at junctions, so they obediently do so, in the middle of the carriageway. Part of it is that many of the road are built on embankments (against flooding in the monsoon I assume) so vehicles don’t like to stop and do a hill start they just ride or drive straight up onto the road.
6. Cows......cows in India seem to be deaf, dumb and blind. They can sit in the middle of road completely oblivious to the traffic noise and vehicles moving within cms of them. At a random point they may decide to saunter to another piece of road. Under no cicumstances must you hit a cow.
7. In theory you drive on the left, but this seems to optional. If there is a physical barrier dividing the 2 sides of the road and it is a shorter distance to drive down the right hand side than this is what you do.
8. Indicators, like mirrors, are for decoration only.

Ghorakpur itself was hard work. The lack of signing meant that th only option was to ask the way. Jan had given us excellent advice in this department; Indians understand English perfectly but one has to affect a comedy Indian accent, wobble the head and say everything twice. Thus, to ask the way to the Hotel Viveck, one should get in role by concentrating on an image of the chap wearing a turban in ‘It ain’t Half Hot, Mum’ and say “Hotul, hotul, bibeck, bibeck”. This somewhat goes against the grain, for decades in England I understood it was offensive to British Indians for people to mimic their accent, now I find that if I don’t speak like something out of ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ people look at me blankly. What I found weird was that English is an offical language here, but people find us more difficult to understand and others understand us, than we had in Nepal. Had Ghorakpur been a town that had had even the smallest element of planning at its conception, we would have been there in no time. Unfortunately it had the twists and turns that one would expect from the average old English town. There is quite a lot of give and take between the vehicles so long as you observe the pecking order. The horn is used freely. The incessant use of horns, though, has led to selective deafness in the motorvehicle warning device register and so louder and more exotic warnings blare out. I’m not sure if I am comitting a dreadful faut pas when I blow my horn at the random cows. In fact, I’m not sure why I bother anyway for there is nothing so hard to get a reaction from as an Indian cow. Perhaps the perception of them being holy comes from the observation that they are clearly in their own little world.

So we found the Hotel Viveck exactly as described; “Opposite the Central Bank of India”. Like a pair of silly sausages we’d been looking of a building opposite the bank with the appropriate name affixed. In fact there was a narrow lane with a hard to spot wrought iron arch sporting a small sign. It was like entering Wonderland as the dust disappeared to be replaced with a verdant lawn surrounded by full blooming dahlias. The sound altered, too, from the cacophony of horns, engines and brakes to a gentle rumble of traffic over which the bird song trilled as if composed to counterpoint the diesel powered bass line. The hottle itself may not be old but is at least olde worlde having been constructed in whitewashed, columned, colonial style back in the 50’s. Now suffering from not really having been maintained, the once beautiful marble floors and woodwork are a little chipped and battered. Shame, this could have been one of those perfect enduring colonial Indian hotels that would have lifted our opinions of India after a day of being uninspired. It was a good sign though of the little gems that must be out there. All we have to do is find them.

We took to the streets to find some supper. What strikes you most is the complete contrast between the dust, plastic bags, rotting fruit, cows and cowshit and the most stunningly elegant ladies in wonderful flowing saris, decorated with the exotic tikka marks of their foreheads and subtle yet eyecatching nose and ear jewlery. Lonely Planet’s recommendation either became a half completed shopping mall about 5 years ago or is located opposite a different President’s Hotel. We resorted to chomps in the Pres itself.

The other thing that rather concerns me, is what the cows live on. My impression of cows generally, is that they eat grass, and my memories of cows is that they tend to eat pretty much all day long. OK so there was a little vegetable matter lying in the piles of litter, but hardly enough to sustain the number of bovine creatures we had seen. I know Hindus are meant to worship cows, but it didn’t look that way to me. Give them something green to eat and field to tromp around in, then you might be respecting them.

Varanasty

We got an early start, hoping to avoid the majority of the city street chaos. The most remarkable transformation had occured. There was no litter and no sign of the cows. It quite occupied my mind for the day trying to think where the cows go at night. What was more concerning was that I had assumed that there was so much litter in the streets because there was simply no litter collection, but to know that that amount of rubbish had accumulated in one day was obscene.

After another short day in the saddle, we arrived in good time in Varanasi. This was good news as, once again the lack of meaningful road signs meant that we arrived in the centre before we knew we’d even got to the outskirts. While concentrating on looking for our waypoint of the railway, we had already passed our hotel because we were actually on a completely different road. There are some cities that stand out as having been very poorly mapped; Bangkok and Varanasi are clear examples. There seems to be little in the way of middle ground in Indian hotels. There does not seem to be a market for clean, well maintained, simple rooms. Everywhere that costs over a couple of quid must have a TV (the the one in Borakpur had been the first time I had watched cable TV on a black and white portable) but, as like as not, the paint will be peeling and the plumbing less than convincing. This can happen in hotels that, when built, must have cost a pretty penny with lovely marble floors and nicely tiled and fitted bathrooms. The Surya in Varanasi was an exception. Flanked by two of the swankiest places in town, the rooms go for 6 quid and face onto a lovely garden courtyard. There’s an exquisitely fitted out restaurant with a swimming pool to the rear. Quite a little piece of paradise, which is a good thing as Varanasi is generally pretty grotty.

The tipping culture was definitely invented in India and then abused in the US. Wages are very low, and generally it seems well to do Indians, like to be served. This means that everyone wants to do something for you, for a remuneration of course. We arrive as we always soiled by the vagaries of the road, and we get a trail of helpers who want to carry our gear. They are in smart uniforms and thought of them picking up our grimy bags seemed wholly inappropriate. We were after all already covered in the same filth as the bags. But they still looked bothered that an opportunity for tip earning had been lost. I find the tipping thing fraught with complications, how much is fair (neither insulting nor too much), When to give it? How to give it?

Varanasi is perhaps the most holy city for the Hindus. Returning to Benares (as it was formerly known) to die and have ones remains torched on the banks of the Ganges is still considered a pretty cool way to pass off the mortal coil. Strangely, bathing in the Ganges in close proximity to these funeral pyres is also considered auspicious. The burnt remains of your relatives being tossed into your bath water is not really the greatest concern as I see it. Studies of the water of the Ganges at drier times of the year have shown that there is 3000 times as much faecal matter in the river than is considered safe on a European beach. OK so European standards are often a bit overprotective but this is a hugely significant figure that I felt I needed to see. More of this later.

Dining in hotels is not ever a good deal (years ago, Hippy and I even took the odd option of not having our wedding breakfast in a hotel for this very reason) and so while Hips lay in bed feeling a bit grotty, I set out in search of Burger King. (and maybe a beer shop for me) No, we haven’t succumbed to the fast food chain culture, some enterprising chap has opened a restaurant of that name serving mostly ... curry of course. There are burgers on the menu but we haven’t reached a level of boredom with India’s national dish that we have to eat rubbish just to get variety. All that makes it sound as if I was successful in my quest to find it. After 9 p.m. the town seemed to be sleeping and all I could find open was a corner shop whose sole contents seemed to be washing powder and biscuits. As the proprietor was clearly Islamic, I didn’t even broach the subject of beer. We really have been struggling to find good value in India. We’ve been assured by folks that India is cheap as chips. That’s as may be but it does seem that to get this amazing value you really have to take a drop in standards. In most ‘cheap’ countries a good meal in a cleanish simple restaurant will set you back a dollar. So far we haven’t really come across eats at that price apart from in rather suspect gaffs. Hotel rooms as I’ve said don’t really fit with what we expect either. We don’t really want to start upgrading our hotel level given that gasoline is relatively pricey, too.

Buddha stop

Close to Varanasi is Sarnath which is a hugely important site to the Buddhists, the spot where he gave his first sermon. We paid a visit to ensure a 50 percent hit rate on the pivotal Buddhist spots (we missed out the place where he died and where he gained enlightenment but of course went to his birthplace). Just as at the other foci of Buddhism, groups from around the world have set up monasteries and meditation centres in their national styles. Buddha’s funerary stupa looks rather dull compared to some of the other temples round about which also include Jain and Hindu creations. It seems everyone wants the Varanasi region for its religious focus.

There is a bit of a zoo tucked away round the back that is described as a deer park. The deer didn’t really look happy and maybe it was having to survive on carrots handed out by spectators that did it. I’ve heard that scientists are retro-engineering carrots to return them to their more original colours of deep red and purple. I don’t know why they bothered, these carrots are all naturally (? we suppose) that colour. Their enclosure wasn’t really very grand, either. The large birds fared rather better. High cages had a range of living perches for them to settle on and there was even a bit of a puddle for their comfort. Worst catered for was the solo monkey who stretched out, rather bored, on his 10 foot by 6 allotment of concrete. The cage was about 3 feet high which gave him little chance of capering around monkey fashion.
A whizz round the museum, gave us a taster of the quality of work that was being produced in India, over 2 millennia ago. The carving was intricate and exquisite. I was impressed, work easily comparable with the Greek and Roman ruins of the same era.

I thought it would be a good idea to head into the centre of the big V on the way back from Buddhaville to check out the lie of the land for an early morning visit to the river the next day. Suffice to say that our top tip for Varanasi is to leave your vehicle on the outskirts and take rickshaws around town. I resolved to take the tour from the hotel the next morning.

Back at the hotel I was instructed rather rudely to park my bike in a different place. I’d parked where I was under instruction from the car park attendant the day before. Seems that telling you to move your vehicle for no apparent reason is very common in India - other people have remarked on it. I think its one of those jobs where people feel more important if they assert they authority. On top of the annoyance of actually having to do it (better to do it yourself than have another experience of someone underestimating Berthette’s weight and tipping her over), what really grates is the mode of instruction. I believe there is no ‘please and thankyou’ culture here. It will take a bit of getting used to, as much me learning not to be polite to others as to accept it from them. Actually I’m pretty good at being blunt. Ask Hippy!

I had been suffering with the sniffles and a sore throats since the end of Laos. The cold that had been threatening took full force. I felt awful, I felt like someone had pulled the plug on my energy meter, my throat felt like sandpaper and my nose was in constant flow.

All quiet on the water front

I went of to see these famous ghats while Hippy did her best to shed her lethargy. 5:30 starts are a bit much when your feeling off colour. There was little craic in the group. We were six; two Israeli girls, an Italian couple, Peter from Oz and myself. We were whisked from the hotel through deserted streets to the old downtown zone where a warren of streets leads down to the Ganges and it’s ghats (stone/concrete terraces leading down to the river). A boatman was waited for us and before you could say polution we were out on the river and being subjected to our first hard sell; a random youth boarded the boat and handed out floating candles to place on the holy river for good luck. For 10 Rupees I thought it not too bad value to offer a little prayer for Hippy’s improved health.

Rather than the swarming crowds that you see in the guide books and postcards, there were only a scattering of folk bathing or washing clothes down by the river. The flotilla of row-boats filled with grockles outnumbered the bathing devotees by at least 3 to 1. Enterprising folk rowed through the tourists selling some of the most unlikely products. One boat had a telly up on the foredeck and a DVD player somewhere below with a load of batteries. They were selling all the latest Bollywood releases. Given the ethnic make up of the visitors, I would have thought bootleg Hollywood would sell in greater volumes.

There were a couple of pyres smoking away with what could well have been corpses on them but our oarsman kept such a respectable distance so it is possible they were just setting up for a barbq. I was a bit confused at this point because I had imagined funeral boats with pyres floating off down the river. I think that must have been the Norse chappies. There are in fact two ghats where burning takes place - one is reserved for top-caste types and only young boys and men at that. Lesser beings can arrange their cremation on the other ghat. There is quite a lot to consider for a correct result. Having chosen the type of wood (there are auspicious aromatic woods - sandalwood for instance), the body is weighed and a calculation performed as to the amount of fuel needed. Apparently there is an electrically powered crematorium on one ghat but I can’t really see how this works, perhaps an oven that is so hot the body simply spontaneously combusts.

The old palaces standing up above the ghats were splendid and probably should have been visited in their own right but with Hippy and I being a bit run down they got shelved and put on our ever increasing to-do list. The dobi whallas were all blokes. Very strange. Our oarsman laughed when I pointed out to him that in the majority of the rest of the world washing clothes is considered ‘women’s work’. I tried to press him as to why there were no ladies beating the clothes on rocks but our language interface broke down. I actually saw someone put water from the river in their mouth, just one chap who was brushing his teeth. I’m sure he spat it out, but, really! At a 30,000 percent faecal matter content I wouldn’t even wash in it.

Also included on our tour were a series of visits to Hindu temples. The first was the Shiva temple in the university. The Hindu University of Benares is pretty huge and beautifully laid out in a series of concentric semi-circles. It all seemed very organised and it was confirmed by our guide that it was laid out by the British. I’m sure the colour scheme was chosen by the British for some good reason (a surplus of certain colours of paint in a colonial warehouse that needed a buyer, no doubt). Whatever the reason, every building on this huge campus is still painted in the same dull bi-chrome of creamy-yellow and muddy-ochre. Rather dull. More by planning than by luck (I had been wondering why we had been pushed along so fast by our guide) we arrived at the Shiva temple just as the lingam was having one of its thrice daily decorations and the faithful were having their puja (offerings) turned into prasad (blessed bits and pieces). I found it all rather odd as the pandit smeared water and then pollen over what is, let’s face it, a large stone penis. Garlands were then draped around it and other flowers placed around the base and in the channel where the water flowed away from the willy. All this went on to the accompaniment of drums and bells. Now, this being the University and all, simply having drummers and bell ringers would be a bit low tech. Instead, in the corner was a unit driven by an electric motor that was a simple array of cams and spring-loaded strikers that beat out a monotonous and rather discordant rhythm. I wouldn’t give much credence to someone with a degree in mechanical engineering from Benares Hindu University. While on the point of academic qualification, I need input on professorship. I always thought that each university department would have one prof. In the event of needing to recognise the achievement of an academic where there was no professorship available you create a subtle new discipline, say Professor of Hydrology in the Civil Engineering department. So how do you end up with 2000 professors in one university unless they’re just handing them out?

If you go to a Shiva temple, you also have to visit a Hanuman temple and a Durga
temple. Ideally, if you have time, you should call in at a Ganesh, Vishnu, Parbati etc, etc. The Hanuman temple celebrates the monkey god who is god of something and king of the monkeys, naturally. In the grounds of the temple are loads of monkeys which got me to thinking; does one regularly see a troop of monkeys and consider this a sign that a Hanuman temple should be built here or is it that if you build a Hanuman temple you then have to import a bunch of chimps and encourage them to stay by handing out peanuts and bananas to them. Durga is the god of something else which is to do with destruction and stuff - our guide rather vaguely offered, “God of power?” Powerless gods are no use to me! Durga is an incarnation of Devi (mother and fierce destroyer) and has a temple that is painted red. Not only the temple, but the beautiful marble patio around the outside which has healthy splatters of red paint. Par for the course.

All these gods seem a bit mad to me. Moslems tend to have a downer on Hindus as they consider them polytheistic. Now Hindus get all uppity at this and point out that these gods are all apsects of the one and only god/creator/destroyer/whatever thingy. I think maybe this is one of the great concepts that Britain got from India. How else could we have ended up with the Austin Cambridge/Morris Oxford/Vanden Plas/...... which were simply different embodiments of the same car.

Out of the filing cabinet, into the shower

Meanwhile back at the ranch, I am trying to sleep off my lurgy. That evening in attempt to kill or cure, I opted to splash out on a steam bath. Yes this hotel had all mod cons, facials, massages and the like. The steam bath was a galvinised cupboard akin to a filing cabinet, attached to an autoclave. It looked all somewhat industrial, but it worked. Pat and I sat in the cupboard and stuff came out of our skin. I am not sure if it managed to purge the viri but I certainly felt cleaner. What was more peculariar was that the autoclave cupboard was in the massage area, so if you nipped out for an intermittent shower you bumped into a bunch of bemused people having massages who understandably surprised by people emerging from the filing cabinet.

It was Pat’s turned to take up the illness baton. He had his first installment of Delhi belly (or in this case, Benares bowel). Whilst I was completely off food, he had committed two cardinal errors, a) eating at the hotel, b) eating meat. I had about 2 spoonsful of his chicken biryani to show willing which was enough to give me empathetic bowel. We were a sad, sad pair. I on the recovery phase of the cold, had also come out in an alarming chest rash, we were on relay trips to the toilet, and my period started. These forces conspired to force us onto a day of peelable fruit and water, and typing the website.

We were generally not functioning overly well, our senses are fuzzy and slowed by viri. So the noise of the pigeon scarer hardly warranted a shuffle in bed. Pat reckoned it was fireworks. OK, it was a bomb ,we later discover about 500m from our hotel, but to add to the confusion there were also fireworks going off at the hotel next door, at a party. Whether it was our British stiff upper lip, feeling too ill to get upset, or us being generally blasé about such things, but I failed to feel in the slightest bit in danger. I was however more concerned that there may be a serge of violent retaliation.

The attack on a temple and the train station, were already a retaliation by a group of Muslims who had had one of their mosques bombed in Southern India. Don’t get this tit for tat business, who gains when a bunch more civilians die. We decided that, recovered or not, we would leave early the next day because; a)the traffic would be more rational in town and we had a long way to go, b) on the off chance mass vengeance was in the offing.

Our fears about the people of Varanasi were unfounded, they were sadenned but calm, and it seemed it did more to consolidate all religious groups, than to divide them, thankfully. But it had been wise to leave early, the roads were blissfully free of traffic. Aaaah......