India, Pt 1

The wonder of India, the mystery of India, the magic of India. The wonder, for me, is "I wonder how I can get out of India", the mystery of India is "how did they manage to get so many people to want to come to India", the magic is "it must be witchcraft that allows all these cows, pigs and goats to survive on street strewn garbage alone". I wanted so badly to love India, to feel that oft spoken spirituality, to have it inhabit a corner of my heart, mind and soul, and never leave me all my days. Siobhan has happy, happy memories if India, the places, food and people. She has said she's been killing time, waiting to come back to India. Even this trip, she's lost interest in the places we've been, knowing we wil be in blessed India soon. I hate India. I truly hate India. I wish I didn't. I wish that the places could be such an undeniable draw that you couldn't avoid going. I wanted to love the place. I knew it would be filthy. I knew the roads would be chotic, and I knew that I'd be overcharged and lied to about prices and shops and hotels. I'd be told to go buy train tickets over here because the official ticket office is closed today, even though you can see the official ticket window is open and busy. The guy with this helpful information is getting a commision on every ticket bought through this con. Taxi drivers tell you the hotel you want to go has burnt down, but they happen to know a hotel that has rooms, it belongs to his cousin. Of course it does. They all want to know where you're staying, how long, where you're going next, and it all goes to formulate a way of getting more money out of you. Noone talks to you because they are just being friendly. Every word is designed to get you to come shop, come buy, come to the hotel, come to the restaurant, part with your money. Even waiters in restaurants know a guy with a shop. Taxi drivers know lots of guys with shops and will take you to them whether you want to go or not. Hotels have treks and tours and constantly ask you if you want to go on a camel to the desert. The all say that they are not touristy at all, so many say that in fact that the touristy treks must be completely vacant and completely untouristy. They actually get annoyed with you if you don't go on these treks and tours. They say that they are not affiliated with the taxi and autorickshaw drivers congregating outside their front doors, but they know every single one of them, and don't do much to move them along. The first stop on our trip is one night in Paharganj, Delhi, before we go to Amritsar. Paharganj is the backpackery, touristy area, filled with shops, money changers and hotels, restaurants and barber shops. The garbage and filth is unbelieveable. I don't understand how they can live like this, in so much garbage. The streets are full of garbage, and livestock, and livestock eating garbage. Can't they see it anymore? Nothing is clean, every toilet seat has been pissed on, and most have footprints on it, because they are used to squat toilets and haven't figured out that they have to sit on the seat, not just perch up on it like a bird and do your business. They actually have signs telling people not to stand on the seats, not to spit in the drinking fountains, that urinals are for peeing. Every wall outside has at least one guy standing and pissing on it. Some bushes have people crouching down taking a dump. They seem to have made some perverse peace with the filth and effluence, the disease and death. Unbelieveable. If you do need to exchange money, be very sure that the bills you get are in very good shape and are not worn or torn or written on as shops and restaurants won't take them. we found this out the hard way while trying to pay the bill at a restaurant. Fortunately, the restaurant manager sent a waiter with us back to the money changer to get fresh bills, so we didn't have any problem getting better conditioned money. In fact, we had so little trouble, it became very obvious that the sly bugger knew precisely what he'd done and had been caught out. Shapes of things to come. They hotel itself had been refurbished, it had been painted and reworked, new western toilets installed and beds, and bedroom furniture, but another trend emerged that the surface must never be scratched and the products must never be tested, as the spell of clean, shiny, new and functioning will be horribly shattered. Mold in the bathrooms, suspect colours remained on the sheets, an unidentifiable smell, not uncommon on the streets but unwelcome in the rooms. We only had the room for a few hours when we had to leave to catch our overnight train to Amritsar. Foolishly, we asked the folks at the front desk how much they wanted for a taxi to the train station. One comedically extortionate quote later, we are out the door, bags hurriedly thrust on backs and in arms, trying to find a cab at the last minute. I had to get everyone to stand outside a shop and wait while I charge down the road looking for a taxi. Taxis aren't actually marked as taxis, or at least not in any way I would recognise, so I feverishly ask anyone who'd listen about where to find one. Luck is on my side as a man with a van says he'd do it, and for a fair price too. We pile in and inch down the main bazaar road to retrieve the family and luggage. Time is running out. I try to keep optimistic, but it's not easy when they say it's a 25 minute ride and you have 20 minutes to get on that train. Some how, the ride takes 15 minutes. I manage to carry all the luggage I can, leaving Siobhan to handle the boy, a two handed job if there ever was one. With seconds to spare ( I exaggerate, it was about 5 minutes) we get on the train, and we are on our way to the holiest site in the entire Sikh religion, the Golden Temple. The train ride immediately gets off to a rocky start when we find our seats have been filled by an entire Indian family, from grandma to baby. You have my sympathies folks, but my family needs to park it too, right here in fact. The issue remains unresolved until the conductor comes along and checks tickets. As it happens, the family all have berths spread out all over the car. My sympathies again, but these are ours, so beat it. They manage to switch enough berths so that they can chat to each other all night long. At top volume. Sigh. At 2am I start getting annoyed, and I ask them to be quiet. No one speaks English. Sigh. They must have understood the meaning, because the volume came down a bit. 3am comes, and the lights go on. Bright lights and loud talking. I am raging. I throw myself over the side of the bunk, which, as I am on the top bunk, in perilous, and with great volume and prodigious swearing, demand to know what the problem is now, and why they can't sort out that everyone is trying to sleep. It's a group of Indian soldiers. Awesome. In for a penny, in for a pound, so I tell them to shut up and turn out the lights. After about half an hour they do. Amritsar comes far too soon, so off the train and into the scrum of porters and taxi drivers. I wasn't sure if they still allowed that in train stations, as there were no porters and drivers inside the airport, so I hoped against hope, and it turns out hope is a bastard. We wade through the masses of people saying "where do you go" and "where you stay" and taxitaxitaxi tuktuktuktutktuktuk, and we try to find a few feet to speak to each other with out being stood on. The Indians in particular do not understand personal space. Perhaps it is because the country is so overcrowded that if you do not claim your space, you'll lose it. There's no such thing as a queue, an idea abhorrent to a Brit. There is a heaving throng all trying to get served next, get on or off first, get their hands on the thing first. It's frustrating and infuriating and all you can do is point out where the line should be and people tend to fall in quickly. Taxi drivers do not. They move back about 6 inches. We settle on a driver with what we think is a fair price and go. When you don't know what a fair price is, it becomes what you're willing to pay until you know what a fair price should be. The other drivers hurl abuse at him for undercutting them, but he gets the fare and they get each other. Knowing we're being taken for a ride literally and figuratively we arrive at what we think is the hotel. It's actually a traffic police road block, allowing in only electrically powered vehicles, due to the proximity to the golden temple. Sigh. The driver in his very broken English gives us very loose directions to the hotel, which we very loosely follow for quite some time. Frustrated at our inability to find the hotel, we stop briefly for breakfast at a McDonald's and discover that it's vegetarian, again because of it's proximity to the temple. So curried veggie patty McMuffins it is. We carry on wandering the streets and lanes and eventually find it tucked away in a little side street. The lane empties out into a major street some 10 feet away, and we realise we have walked right past this hotel about 3 times. Sigh again. We plan on staying for a few days, so we unpack and get settled and almost immediately a hotel staff member just waltzes in the room, then says oops he didn't know we were in here. Naturally we don't think much of it. We go out for lunch to a little place recommended in the travel guides, and the food is pretty good, so satisfied we go to the temple. It's a beautiful big complex made of white marble. Everything is white marble. there is an enormous moat/holy water/bathing site surrounding the Golden Temple itself, which is connected to the complex by a bridge. The marble, while lovely, does not mix well with the water and makes walking a little dangerous. We make a slow trek around the whole complex, then cross the bridge to the temple. It's surprisingly small in size, but there are so many people packed in, praying and receiving the holy water from a trough at one end of the temple, that it might just seem smaller than it is. People are actually drinking the water which comes from the moat, so I get in line, put some on my head and even venture to taste it. Not the worst thing I've had in my mouth, but I wouldn't let more than a drop in. We make another lap of the complex and then leave, feeling pretty pleased that we've managed to see something that many immigrants in my home country of Canada would consider to be a very holy and important thing. Back to the hotel, and find that someone has been in the room. They turned off the AC, which most hotels don't like left on, but that's not the point. Someone has been in and invaded our space. I don't like this and go tell the staff so. An hour later the same staff member who came in before comes in again, this time saying that it's the wrong room and he didn't mean to come in this one. Siobhan tells me he had come in earlier while I was out buying an Indian SIM card. Officially pissed off, I go down to reception and explain that this guy has been coming in, and if we see him again, we are leaving. He spends the rest of the day slinking past us with an accusatory look, like we could cost him his job. His job is not to come in my room, so maybe he needs to retrain. The next day we need a late check out as we've had enough of the filth and chaos of Amritsar. Aside from the temple, there's nothing else to keep us here, so we decide do move on to Jaipur. Siobhan says she hates Jaipur, but there's a few very cool things to see, so we agree to go. They girl at reception tries to charge us a thousand rupees to stay an extra four hours, so we decide to check out then. Our room has been repeatedly invaded, and they can't throw us a bone to say sorry? A call comes from the front desk, this time it's the actual manager saying we can stay for free. That's a little more like it. So to the train station and on to Jaipur.