India Moving On

Diu Beach

I am writing this blog while we are still in India and wondering when we will be able to post it.  We are moving to Australia via three flights and one train journey, the first flight from here, Diu, to Mumbai and this evening, Mumbai to Kuala Lumpur, from there we catch a train to Singapore and stay the night (30^th Nov) and the next day fly to Perth.

We have been in India for a month and for the most part struggled with the squalor, although we are more acclimatised now than at the start of the stay.  The last 13 days here in Diu have been a welcome seaside respite.

Working Donkeys

Peacock

Looking back at the places, the things we have seen and people we have met, I hardly know where to begin.   So I will just talk about the worst; the poverty, you never get away from it, we couch surfed with a couple from Denmark who lived, even by our standards, in relative luxury and from their living room window on the tenth floor you can see a family living on some waste ground in a shelter, no services, water from communal taps, squatting at the side of the road to go to the toilet, cooking on an open fire.  People live on the pavements, not just a few here and there, whole communities.  As you pull into and out of the stations on the trains there are hovels in and amongst the endless rubbish heaps.  Since leaving the UK I have concluded that the greatest sin heaped on this world by ‘civilisation’ is the plastic bag.  There are 1 billion people in India, if every day one and only one bag is given away to for each person and half of those are used to dispose of rubbish imagine the result.  Megan and I don’t need to imagine we have seen it.  The worst of it is that a high proportion of those have organic waste in them, which is consumed by the 1 billion animals, including the sacred cow, that live on the streets, but first they have to open the bag or eat the bag as well.  This is balanced by the seemingly endless capacity these people have for the joy of being alive, they all have a smile for you and a hello, want to know where you are from and welcome you to their country of which they are very proud.

Megan the Beach Bum

Wetlands

Sketching

Kite Strings for the festival

Couch Surfing here has taken us across the social scale, from Guvinder in Delhi who I told you about in the last blog, the Mehta family in Ahmedabad and Henrik and Barbara from Denmark.  The Mehta family are three generations living under one roof, mother father, three children all over 20, and the grandmother.  They gave us one of the two bedrooms and at least one meal a day, a very delicious one cooked by the grandmother, for the four days we were there; you could say they were fortunate in comparison to many. 

The Road to Diu

TYrain Travel Indian Style

On the continuing sandal saga: the story so far; I purchased a very superior pair of Merrill’s in Ellis Brigham’s, Manchester.  These lasted 2 weeks on Crete!  However, after some long range discussion they refunded the cost and I bought a pair of standard cheap ones that lasted till we left Turkey, when they were then binned.  I then, after much searching, bought a pair of ‘Woodland’ (India’s finest) in Jaipur.  These lasted 10 minutes when the plastic buckle broke.  Good enough, they repaired them so you couldn’t tell and we set off again.  In India, and other places, it is polite to leave your shoes outside when entering a home.  When staying with the Mehta family in Ahmedabad I left them outside in the shoe rack on Friday night.  In the morning it was discovered that a dog had eaten them!  Hey, great news, this was ok as a dog eating your shoes on a Saturday negates all your bad luck – apparently!

O'Coqueiro

So to Diu, an escape from the cities, a small island just off the coast of Gujarat, sun, sea and sand and a rest.  We had been packing and moving every three days or so from the middle of September, seen more ruins, churches, temples and hotels you can shake a stick at and it was very tiring.

Diu Fishermen

Australia here we come, a few days with my brother in Perth and then Helpx volunteering on the Blackwood River on a homestead till after Christmas.