Archives for September 2004
Accommodation
It’s been four years since I last stayed in third world budget accommodation (New Zealand doesn’t count), since when I’ve enjoyed the comforts of Malmaisons, Hotels du Vin, Ian Schraegar New York glamour, Rio’s Hotel Copocobana and camping in Dorset. No surprise that standards here are variable, and that my standards have increased, although guidebooks can be misleading.
Here’s where I’ve been staying these past few nights.
Hotel Regent, Chennai. ‘Recommended’ – Footprint India. ‘Standard’ – Lonely Planet India. ‘Good for one night’ – Rough Guide South India. Thanks for the advice. Lesson here is follow your nose (and avoid the smell). What are those stains on the wall?
Price: 200R (about £2.50) for a night
Oberoi Grand Hotel, Kolkata. ‘Recommended’ – Joel Down. Grand’s the word, with swimming pool, cable TV, wireless internet access and cooked breakfast.
Price: $85 for a night. (I know. But I’m not 18 anymore. This is a holiday, not an Takeshi’s Castle. Give me a break!)
Main (Olde) Hotel, Darjeeling. Foam mattress and gaps in the window frame, on the main drag, but magnificent views and friendly staff. And running hot water.
Price: 400R (about £5) a night
Where next, I wonder. Can’t afford five star luxury every night…
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The Darjeeling Mail
As I write this, the sounds of the out of tune, out of time Darjeeling Police Band seep into my hotel room. Here’s how I got here.
Having arrived at Sealdah station and fought through porters eager to carry my bags, I find that my overnight train is called the Darjeeling Mail. It’s a romantic name that brings to mind Betjeman’s clever rhymes in the Night Mail. But there’s little opportunity for romance on an Indian sleeper train.
One of the most common images of India is the express train, steam powered, with freeriders of the roof and kids on the fenders. It’s the vision made famous in books such as Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar. ‘Is it full of chickens and cows’ asks my sister, half jokingly. Not quite, Laura, but…
In brief, the types of train I’m likely to encounter in India are day expresses and overnight sleepers. On the sleepers there are several classes: first class, second class two-tier, second class three-tier, third class (wooden bunks, no A/C, ouch), and worse besides.
My first overnight journey, from Mumbai to Chennai, was in two tier second class. This means there are two bunks in each compartment. I had a whole wide, comfortable bunk to myself, the other three bunks taken up by a friendly naval architect, his wife and son on their way to a temple near the coast. They explained the systems for me, arranged my dinner and showed me how to prepare my bed.
Only on-board vendors from the ‘pantry car’ were allowed to sell us food, and bedding – two sheets, a pillow and a scratchy blanket – was provided.
‘Do you like curry?’
‘I live in Tooting!’
‘???…um…it’s not too hot for you?’
‘No, it’s fine, although not what I normally have for breakfast…’
Curtains can be drawn across our cubicle, each bunk has its own nightlight, and I get a good night’s sleep. The sensation is odd, rocking from side to side, head to toe. I feel like I’m in a car moving sideways, rather than a train moving forwards.
It’s disappointing that the price of air conditioned comfort is low visibility. Each cubicle has two small (maybe 75cmx50cm) windows, double glazed with dark brown tint and a condensation waterfall. It’s impossible to feel the outside temperature, sense smells or hear the country. India is absent, until we are expelled into the chaos of the terminus.
The trip to New Jalpaiguri, where the Darjeeling Mail (confusingly) terminates, is a rather different experience. There are no two-tier bunks left so I have to travel in a three-tier sleeper. It’s like being in a travelling prison.
Arriving at the station I find the train and my name is once again on the reservation list pasted to the side of the carriage. I’ve an upper berth, giving me a chance (I thought) to decide when I sleep. There are no curtains this time, and finding space for luggage under the bottom bunk is harder. I shove in my rucksack and chain it through one of the steel loops. With less space on the seat to share with others, I’m bashed and nudged as other passengers board.
Sharing my quarters are: a silent middle aged man with thick glasses, natty hat and a toe ring who will go to sleep late but then lie in well past ‘bunk-up’ time, leaving is with nowhere to sit; a sikh woman whose husband and two pretty daughters, mobiles in hand, all board to wish her goodbye; and three members of a Sikkim family travelling to the hills of Darjeeling for some rest and relaxation. The grandfather’s Rockport shoes suggest a life lived beyond Gangtok. His seven year old grandson gives them magazines for their journey. Outlook (an Indian Newsweek) for grandad, Stardust (a Bollywood magazine) for grandma and Gladrags (the She of India?) for mum.
Vendors pass through offering crisps, biscuits, ‘nescafe’, chai, calcualtors and reading glasses. Nothing I enjoy more on an overnight train journey than trying to spell naughty words using upside down solar powered casio knock-off. An excellent purchase. The hawkers will continue to pass through all night, showing no respect for the meaning of ’sleeper’.
We depart. Bedding is distributed, but nobody comes to take my breakfast curry order. It’s time for bunks down, and we all try and make our beds within the confined cabin. It’s particularly hard when your bed is 2.5m off the ground. Getting in is even harder. With only a metre of headroom and a big leap from the narrow rungs, it’s a challenge to crawl in without falling off again.
There’s no nightlight back here in three-tier, so reading is hard – at least once the glaring fluorescent tube is turned off. Just like prison. The warders practice sensory deprivation throughout the night, with an air conditioning fan as loud as an auto-rickshaw inches from my head and the turning on of lights halfway through the night so they can hvae their snacks and chat in the empty bunk on the opposite side of the corridor.
Still, the rocking motion soon sends me to sleep, although with my head stuck in the curved edge of the roof and a bunk no wider than my shoulders, there’s an unanticipated edginess to the experience.
When I awake next morning, surprisingly refreshed, many bunks are already packed up and we’ve stopped. I’m worried that I’ve missed the station and jump down, only to find we’re delayed at a country halt. I hop down to the tracks and welcome the clear, cool dry air. The landscape is green and the sky is cloudy.
I’ve escaped the torrid plains.
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Kolkata
[For my foreign readers (I know there are two of you): the English always refer to Calcutta, now known as Kolkata, as 'the black hole' after 146 British residents were captured by Siraj-ud-Daula in 1756. They were imprisoned for a night in a small guard room or cellar about 6m by 5m - the infamous 'Black Hole of Calcutta'. Many suffocated]
Trying to escape the heat of the south, I headed north to Kolkata. I cheated. Rather than take another 24 hour train journey, I doubled my expenditure to date and got a flight.
Indian Airways has a reputation for dodgy service and tired aircraft, so it’s good news that private carriers have launched in recent years to fill a gap in the market. Less good is that more airlines does not mean more competition and fares are the same give or take a few $.
India Fact 3: India flirted with communism for many years and until the early 1990s had a semi-planned economy. I didn’t realise that. An article in yesterday’s The Statesman emphasised the dramatic growth of middle class aspirations in recent years: ‘the family holiday is now a trip abroad rather than a visit to the grandparents… the refrigerator has moved from pride of place in the lounge to the corner of the kitchen.’
I cheated again and checked into a good hotel.
Despite a degree in geography I hadn’t worked out that Kolkata is on the nothern plains and as prone to summer heat as elsewhere. Indeed, when I arrived it was 34 degrees and 88% humidity. Luckily (’cos I’ve got the money and I like a bit of style) I’d looked at accommodation on the internet and spotted a special offer for the Oberoi Grand five star hotel. £50 for a night including breakfast. I’d been away for less than a week but already felt I’d deserved it. More about that in the next post.
How did Kolata live up to its reputation as a black hole? Pretty well, I think, but not so different to other Indian cities that I’ve seen so far. Although there are three things that make it unique.
Firstly, as I said, the heat and humidity.
Secondly, the traffic. The congestion is incredible, likie London without the lane discipline. Trucks, buses, auto-rickshaws, motorbikes all compete for roadspace with pedestrians downtrodden and ignored. There’s more traffic than the street can handle, leading to jams at every junction. With non-catalysed diesel fumes belching from every vehicle, the pollution is visible and tangible. I feel it sticking on my skin as I wait in the taxi. When stopped all vehicles turn off their engines, although I doubt this is for environmental reasons, rather to save fuel.
The third sign that Kolkata is unique, in my experience, are the rickshaws. I’ve seen cycle rickshaws in Indonesia and Vietnam, but never human-pulled vehicles. With a fat lady or merchant with cases of produce on board, anorexic sweating rickshaw-wallahs battle through the city traffic. More environmentally friendly but less humane, it’s this caste (or as Disney would would say, cast member) that makes the city appear as a throwback to the nineteenth century.
Kolkata is robust yet decaying. Look to the left and a colonial building is under renovation; to the right, a overcrowded and decrepit bus belches fumes over street food stalls. Walk ahead, and enter a station for India’s only metro; turn around and trip over a man drawing water from a street pump. The city wants to be the next hi-tech centre of India, but it has neither the cosmopolitation atmosphere of Mumbai nor the multiplier effect of Bangalore, the country’s silicon valley.
Scratch the surface and Kolkata doesn’t bleed, it oozes black bile. I don’t have the energy to look deeper right now. I need to relax, cool down and stop moving, so like my imperial forebears I’m heading for the hills.
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About
A couple of days ago I explained the an American the meaning of ‘incisive’. A friend of his had called his emails incisive and he wasn’t sure it it was a compliment or criticism. It’s not a matter of nationality, just education.
I think these posts are rambling rather than incisive, but that’s partly what this site is for and who it’s aimed at. To explain more and give credit where it’s due, I’ve updated the About page.
Also had to tell him how to say ‘magistrate’. I fear for our future.
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Chennai
Thinking back to the menu of the Chuckuptari curry shop in Tooting, Madras always means the hot ones. Three chillis. Having visited Chennai, the city formerly known as Madras, I can believe that. It says something that the only pictures I have from here were taken from the doorway of my hotel room.
I’m beginning to work out that this is not peak tourist season. I’m about two months too early, or six months too late. This would explain (i) why I’ve not seen anyone other tourists (backpackers, travellers, trustifarians, call them what you will) and (ii) why it’s so hot. Did I say it was hot? Mid thirties and humid? Yuck.
The train journey was fine. I arrived just 27 hours after leaving Mumbai, argued down the auto-rickshaw fare from interplanetary to sub-orbital, and arrived at the £2 a night ‘lodge’ recommended in the Footprint guide. If I get the chance to meet those authors I will gladly push their faces into the big muddy puddle I had to walk through to get to the hotel entrance, if I don’t slip on the stairs beforehand.
I’m meant to be having a good time on holiday but right now I’m risking overheating. I called a crisis meeting with myself and decided to head for the hopefully cooler North of the country, abandoning plans for the south for now. And avoiding Sri Lanka too, which is further south and therefore even hotter. Sorry to do this but it will still be there if I decide to return later.
Trotted off to the 24 hour travel agency (now there’s a good invention) and booked a flight to Kolkata. This all felt a bit odd as I’m used to spending at least seven hours checking between different websites to find the the ‘best’ price – indeed, I spent more time finding the flight to India than I did buying my flat – now I had to rely on broken English communications and trust some bloke high on chai to find me the lowest price. Did I get it? Of course not, in India all non-residents are fleeced and forced to pay a squillion dollars when an Indian maharaja will pay about fifteen rupees. That’s international aid.
On Monday morning I sweated fifteen pints on the 250m walk to the local train station before heading on a suburban train to the airport. I immediately learnt that boarding a tube train in rush hour is a doddle compared with Indian local transport. At least on the tube you can actually get on the train, and the doors close, and nobody hangs off the outside. There was no way I could get onboard, and I had no idea when the next train would be. In a slight panic I ran down the side of the moving train and saw empty doors – aargh, women’s carriage! – and kept running before finding the calm of first class. Sod it, I only paid for second class but I can afford the fine. I jumped aboard as the train accelerated, very exciting, and made it to the airport on time. Phew.
India Fact 2: The price of a one way ticket on the Heathrow Express would pay for 180 trips to Chennai airport.
Goodbye south, hello north.
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Mumbai
“We are reporting perceptions, not reality; but for respondents, perceptions are reality” – old researchers’ saying.
Finally I was off. After a reasonable flight (very quiet, so my jubilation at getting an exit row seat was tempered when I found eight empty ones next to me) I landed in Mumbai at midnight. Clearing immigration and customs was much quicker than I expected, so I was soon fleeced by the prepaid taxi counter clerk who correctly assumed I couldn’t work out whether 900 Rupees was a good deal or a bad deal. It was a bad deal I realised when I walked past the other counters around the corner.
India is one of the countries about which we have the richest range of perceptions and expectations, many of them negative. Was I going to be challenged, or would my perceptions prove to be real?
Hot. I was right about this. When we landed the temperature was a mild 27 degrees C – in the middle of the night. Leaving my hotel next day I was hit by the heat and humidity, despite being on the seafront where I’d expect a cooling breeze. It doesn’t let up all day, with an airconditioned trip to the cinema or a shopping mall a welcome respite.I knew India was going to be hot, but I didn’t expect this level of humidity.
Smoggy. Cough, yes, cough, pass me a wet wipe, there is a pollution problem. Smoking taxis and rickshaws crowd the streets and the sky is thick with pollution in the afternoon, as the picture at the top shows. However I hear there is worse to come elsewhere.
Spicy. Not really. Curry for breakfast is an unusual experience for most (although one friend of mine loves cold congealed King Prawn leftovers first thing in the morning), but the smell of spices is not as pervasive as I expected. I imagined Mumbai would smell like walking past the extractor fan of a Tooting Indian restaurant. It’s not. It’s more like sitting in a car with a hosepipe from the exhaust sticking through the window.
Dirty. Dusty, yes, polluted, yes, but not incredibly dirty. Get away from the centre of the city and there are piles of waste. Walk over a bridge and reel from the stench of sewage and frown about the plastic flotsam (or should that be land-based jetsam? I think jetsam). Don’t go in the sea, whatever you do. Yet the streets are relatively clean and swept, pedestrians being more likely to trip over a homeless person sleeping on the pavement than sliding on a plastic bottle.
Busy. Of course it’s busy. Traffic behaves in the same ill-disciplined way as in most third world cities, the pavements are clogged with people, the air fills with the sounds of horns and music, and in some parts of town touts constantly hassle. Let’s not forget more than a billion people live in India, more than 18 million on the Mumbai peninsula if I remember correctly. Come midnight, however, and the downtown is almost quiet. Where do all the people go?
Invasive. I don’t mean this in the rushing to the toilet way, although that will doubtless come. This is one of the more developed cities of India, and I didn’t get far from the centre. Yet the swarm of beggars has not appeared. I’m not pestered on every street corner. The porters at the station will leave me alone if I ignore them for long enough and beat their hands from my luggage with a stick. Although as Sarah MacDonald explains in here excellent book Holy Cow many Indians seem not to understand the word ‘No’ and one must sacrifice a great deal of personal space and privacy to get by in India.
At first glance it seems that just two in six of my perceptions were correct. Am I the weakest link? Ask me again at the end of my trip, my reality may have changed.
India Fact 1: Bombay Mix is not sold in Bombay. Locals would probably think you were referring to a compilation CD of Bollywood hit songs.
Looking for a soft landing from the comforts of London life, I’d booked into a ‘mid range’ property, the Sea Green Hotel, on Marine Parade. This is a fifteen minute walk from the Gateway of India, and my balcony looks out onto the Back Bay. It should be called the Sea Brown Hotel, a better description of the colour of the water and the standard of the furnishings. This Marine Parade is rather different from Wellington’s Marine Drive, although it sees a lot more action come sunset.
Mumbai shows clear influences of colonialism on its architecture. My hotel is a charming if run down art deco building, as is the entire strip, which if cared for could match Miami’s South Beach. It backs right onto the Mumbai cricket ground, beyond which is the Oval Maidan. This stretch of grass is one of the only green areas in the city and a popular place for cricket, providing a relatively restful place away from the busy streets. I would love to think this is where the term ‘maiden over’ came from, but I know that’s not true.
Opposite the art deco blocks on the west of the Maidan is a series of crazed colonial gothic buildings including the High Court and University library. Take Pugin’s Palace of Westminster, mix it with Indian sculpture and then decay for a century and you’d come up with a style like this. I don’t know what it’s called, Indian Gothic I suppose. Does that also mean there are Indian goths?
So Mumbai was not as I expected. I didn’t get to see the modern side of Bollywood, the acres of shopping and renowned nightclubs, although it certainly exists; the jazz bar cum pizza place next to my hotel hosts a corporate karaoke challenge, whose compere’s trademark song is Wonderwall. That’s my karaoke trademark too. Wish I’d seen his performance.
My original plan was to head south towards Kerala’s backwaters and beaches. But the heat and difficulty make direct connections prompted a change of plan. I was heading by 27 hour train journey to Chennai on the east coast and the nearby beaches, where hopefully things would be cooler and more relaxing.
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I knew I was wrong
Leaving my job and my London life for a few months, two newspaper articles showed me I’d got it all wrong in the past few years.
Julian Borger writing in Wednesday’s Guardian, explaining variations in US presidential election polling, explained that “some experts have pointed to differences in height, race, and gender, but argue vehmently against weighting by party identification, saying that it is subject to change”. Height? And I’d been using age as a key indicator for the past seven years.
In the Times of India,a columnist – apparantly a TV presenter reporting on the Champions Cup – updates on her thrilling time in London.
“Yates at Leicester Square has become a regular hangout for the entire team and as the evening set in, we descended on this place with great music and even better food.”
A couple of days after I first wrote this, there was even more:
“We decided to ditch Yates for once in favour of the remarkable ‘All Bar One’.” Quite. Remarkable.
See, I should have been using a tape measure and drinking in Leicester Square like a market researching Euan Blair. Clearly it was time for me to leave.
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Let’s go fly a kite
After a hectic end of my MORI career on Thursday and Alex and Chris’s wedding in Bath on Friday, I’d planned a gentle trip to Cornwall to go and see Laura before heading off for a couple of months. Nic was going to come down too as he was taking time out from work.
But the best ideas are generally scuppered, voluntarily in this case as I’d been offered a few days of freelance work which would support me until Christmas. Nevertheless I’d scored a flight back to London on Sunday afternoon, so there was still time to hit the beach and top up the tan.
The wide sandy strip running from Rock to Polzeath is the perfect place for kite flying with plenty of open space reducing the risk of chopping off the head of an innocent holiday maker. Having pitched tent in a field above St Minver, Nic and I parked up in Daymer Bay and chose our kiting spot. With the tide receding the beach was still wet but we knew we’d have no trouble keeping the kite off the ground and stopping it getting weighed down with damp sand.
It looked so simple: lay out the kite, run out the lines, give it a tug and we’re flying. Pull a bit here, a bit there and it will stay up all day. Oh, how I was wrong. With minimal wind, it was really difficult to keep my little kite up. Right turns were fine, and the kite moved beautifully, but pull to the left and seven in ten times it hit the ground. With every crash the kite got wetter and heavier, and Nic had the opportunity to burn off a few more calories. I seemed to make two mistakes at the same time, not only taking too few turns to keep the kite flying, but also pulling my arms too wide and losing control. Despite recognising these errors I found it difficult to correct them, leading to inevitable disaster.
With Laura’s Flexifoil it was even more difficult. I’d had visions of jumping and hollering, but all I did was swear. Nic did a much better job of keeping it flying, even getting an occasional tug; Laura had trouble as well, which I suppose was encouraging given it was her kite. Indeed, Nic’s skills were good enough to knock me off my feet.
After a big Blue Tomato Cafe breakfast and a goodbye to L, we headed to Watergate Bay (home of the ridiculously named ‘X Academy‘) for a forty five minute kite flying session before I checked in at Newquay airport. Perked up by the perky and attention-seeking topless bathing by the steps and a strong wind running along the shore, we laid out the Flexifoil on a wide stretch of windy sand and prepared for some high flying action. Except the kite came out in an unexplained tangle, made only worse by our butter-fingered attempts to untie the knots. I’m ashamed to say that forty minutes later we packed up the bundle of cords in the rucksack, having achieved nothing.
Even more annoying, the smaller kite tucked down the back of my trousers happily unfurled itself and was itching to fly.
The weekend was far too short but it was good to see the sea and spend even a little time with my sister. Having left the beach at 2pm and being back in my London flat exactly four hours later, there was an air of jetset glamour to the whole weekend. Well, apart from the tent and greasy pizza.
Lessons learnt: stick to the box kite. And get a friend to fly it for you.
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