India

Supper with the teacher

I have held back writing this blog to give us time to acclimatise more to India.  Nothing can prepare you for the onslaught on your senses this country throws at you.  We had heard about how crowded it is, especially the cities, and the smell is legendary, the one you are not prepared for is the noise.

We arrived in Delhi early in the morning and had to wait for the Metro to open; when it did we caught the link into the city to change lines to go to the area where our couch surf host lives.  The equivalent underground station in London would be Kings Cross, if you think of the crowds there and multiply by 10 then add in no automatic ticket purchase, then throw in a security check for every person and every bag, the security line for women was 10m long the one for men was two lines about 100m long, all this a cross between an English queue and 250 a side rugby match!

Delhi street scene

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ghandi's last journey

It is fair to say that we have both struggled with India, the mixed smell of traffic and industrial pollution with humanity living on the streets is one thing, plus the incessant noise of vehicle horns, train whistles and the sea of people everywhere makes you very weary.

On the flip side of this are the individual people who in general are very friendly and happy to see you in their country, engage you in conversation and tell you where to visit.  Our first couch host, Gurvinder was very nice and he introduced us to his sister-in-law who runs a free school for children whose parents cannot afford to send them (It costs more to send a boy to school than a girl, encouraging girls to be educated.).  Whilst there we ate supper with them and learned a little about the Sikh religion, played cards with their son (old maid) and were given wrist bangles to protect us on our travels.  All this whilst we lived with Gurvinder in a slum area.  His home was clean and welcoming, but clearly he did not have much money, his family lives in Shimlah, up in the hills, where we British once had our summer homes. 

Pigment for sale - mark your forehead

Baskets for sale

Charm a photographer - IR10/-

So where have we been and what have we seen?  From Delhi we travelled west to Jaipur, the ‘Pink City’, where we stayed in a very nice hotel and teamed up with Wasim an auto rickshaw driver/tour guide, he was very nice and for a day, cost RS 350 (£4.66) to tour around in his vehicle.  We saw some of the sights including the Jaipur observatory (too complex to explain, google it) and the Amber Fort outside the city.

We walked through the old city or the ‘Pink City’ visited the City Palace and looked in some of the shops (it felt like all them to me).

Then to Chittorgarh, just to see the famous fort, from there to Udaipur, which was smaller and less frantic. Some of the James Bond film Octopussy was filmed there on the lake and in the streets, the residents are still proud and in some local rooftop restaurants they show the film every night.

Wasim and his Putput

Running repairs

Take an elephant to the top

That just about brings us up to date, we are currently in Ahmedabad, and I am wondering how I’m going to publish this blog as our current hosts do have internet at the moment – perhaps an internet café might be the answer.  We see India so far as a country of polarisations, it is either, very clean or very dirty, very quiet or very noisy, the people are helpful or ripping you off, the list goes on.  I read in the Times of India a report by a UN agency that states that 52% of India’s population is very poor, living on less than a dollar a day, so when you go onto the streets and see the teeming masses and the people being born and living beside the roads and railway lines, it makes you think very hard indeed.

Sacred cow crossing