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GCIRC Day 12: Kolkata, and the art of passive travel
Writing this on the Coromandal Express, a 26 hour ride from Howrah to Chennai.
We had about six hours to kill in Kolkata aka Calcutta to most westerners. I had decided straight away that I was going to be the completely passive traveler today, as there were lots of potential ideas for what to try to see, where we could go, etc. My only rule for myself was that I would go for whatever plan got me to see the most things that would also not inconvenience the group.
I lean towards passive travel in general, and it’s something that drives my wife understandably nuts. In a group of two, there is plenty of room for differing opinions and discussion on where to go, what to see. Every time I shrug when my wife asks where I want to go, I can see how that is incredibly frustrating. There are many passive travelers on this trip, and in a group of this many, it works in a way that it can’t work for Christine and I. With 16 people, there will be three or four people who have clear ideas for how to proceed. The first passive choice to make was:
Head across the river to Howrah and get a hotel and take a shower, or, stay in Calcutta and go see places related to Mother Theresa.
That one was easy. See things over not seeing things. Slightly more of us chose this option. We jumped in cabs headed for Sudder St and the backpacker area to fine our own hotel to stash our bags.
During the cab ride I discovered the intensity of Kolkata, a city very much like smoggy Bangkok with some good old fashioned colonialism thrown in. This was more city than I was mentally prepared for. Happily, a benefit to passive travel is the ability to compartmentalize your experience at times like these. You, the passive traveler, are not the decision maker, and are thus exempt from responsibility if things go wrong. Somehow, that knowledge helps in otherwise tense situations, like negotiating hard on renting one hotel room for nine people for only five hours.
We head to where Mother Theresa worked with those about to die. I wasn’t fully aware of this when Troy asked, “Are you ready for this?”
Ready for what?
“The people at this place, they all came here to die.”
Wait… This is a tourist attraction? That’s incredibly morbid. I wasn’t keen to go in at this point, and thankfully they were closed for repairs, the patients moved to another facility.
But this is the thing about the passive traveler. Our Golden Rule, as it were:
If you are going to be the passive traveler, you do not get to complain about where you travel.
I am not always good at following this rule, as my wife will tell you. I whined just a bit about the dying people but by god, if it had been open, I would have gone in. Instead, it was back in cabs and off to Mother Theresa’s tomb and museum, a trip I was much happier to make.
Once that was wrapped up, we found ourselves with more time on our hands, and a new choice was presented: Go to the Victoria Monument, or head back to the hotel and shower up and/or drink some beers.
I really wanted a beer.
In order to even out the group, I decided to do whatever the fewest number of people wanted to do, which meant I ended up going to the monument with Bella and Usha. Going with the others would have forced that group to get two cabs instead of one, plus this fell into my earlier rule of “seeing things vs not seeing things”.
The monument was beautiful, and I was happy I decided to go there. I think the others may have expected just a statue rather than the palatial looking museum that we encountered.
Being a passive traveler can sometimes bite you in the ass, but as I have already stated, you don’t have a lot of say either way, and if you play it passively, you aren’t allowed to complain. Today happened to pay off for me, and I was thankful for that.
We headed back to the hotel, rounded up the now mildly intoxicated rest of the group (bastards!) and piled into two cabs headed to Howrah station for a 26 hour ride to Chennai, a train we nearly missed, running in a panic down the impossibly long length of the train with only a couple of minutes to departure. Everyone did make it though, and now we ride, further and further south, where the temperature already has us back in our shorts.
Next up, a quick stop in Chennai, so quick, it makes the fourth largest city in India barely worth mentioning.
GCIRC Days 9-11: Darjeeling – Welcome to Gorkhaland
We have reached the half way point of our little jaunt around India, and with two days in Darjeeling, everyone is meant to rest up and recharge their batteries. Whether or not that worked out as planned, you would have to ask the others, but from my point of view, everyone seems to have lost a bit of that early pep that we had at the beginning of this trip.
Entry to Darjeeling involved a harrowing (I’m running out of adjectives for crappy car rides, clearly) three hour drive up, up, endlessly up a mountain, driven by a man who was seemingly dead set on winning the award for most hit potholes in a three hour period. We also had to bypass an angry woman standing in the middle of the street, threatening to hurl rocks at people, and occasionally dragging her rock along the sides of the vehicles passing by. She was collecting donations, naturally.
We met her again on the way down, but she had traded her rock in for a big stick.
At this time of year, Darjeeling is very cold, especially at night. There wasn’t room at the posh hotel that several of the early entrants on this journey booked, so Troy, Emily, Steve and KS and I made our way to an uber-cheap hotel closer to the main area of town. Troy and I shared a room, and I was thankful for three great thick blankets that kept us from being forced into a reluctant late night spooning session.
There was no hot water to shower with, but they were happy to bring up a large bucket of intensely hot water, which was glorious to bathe with, but the aftermath of the hot bucket bath was the quick reminder of just how cold it was as you dried yourself off.
Travel Fatigue
Traveling at this pace takes it’s toil on me, and I’ve gotten reasonably good at this by now, so I’m betting that everyone is a bit worn out.
With the group split into two hotels it was hard to organize anything, and when we finally did get a group together I could feel the scattered attention of everyone, their fatigue, it was the same way I felt too. At one point we agreed to split up, and I started going in the direction we had all been walking, after a minute I stopped to see who else was still around.
No one.
And it was sort of fantastic. I continued walking on my own for awhile, not needing to go fast enough to keep up with anyone, not having to stop to look back to make sure we didn’t lose anyone. I wasn’t used to this freedom, and I knew it wouldn’t last very long, so I made a point to take a couple of hours the next day just for myself. It was the best decision I have made in this trip. It’s easy for me to get “peopled out”. I tend to be pretty sensitive to the moods of those around me, so getting to be alone for even two hours was a perfect reset button for me. I hope that everyone who is on this trip got to push their own reset button, wether that meant a long walk on their own or digging in with a bottle of booze. To each his or her own. I’m all for whatever works.
Emily and Bella both left Darjeeling sick, I heard that Steve also was ill for a bit. It might have been the cold, but it may have been the food served to us by a staff of what looked like young teenagers.
The people of Darjeeling were often as cold as the town itself. This does not feel like an Indian town to me, it’s people look, talk, dress and behave differently than any other place I have been thus far. They also feel this difference from the rest of their countrymen, which is why you will find “Gorkhaland” on the majority of business signs. The largely Nepali-Indian hill people in this area want to be recognized as their own state rather than continue to be part of Western Bengal.
There was a real risk of being unable to leave Darjeeling, if a spontaneous workers strike had been called, it would halt all transport up or down the mountain. Three hours before we were set to depart, I heard masses of people chanting. Looking down the hill I could make out dozens of red shirts.
“This does not look good.”
The red shirts turned out to be the red uniforms of a couple thousand high school age girls, rather than the communist unionizers I was dreading. These girls, along with maybe 250 boys coming up behind them, were also calling for Gorkhaland, and had a sign protesting the killing of innocents, something to do with political corruption. I would like to say I took a sharp interest in this, sadly I was merely breathing a sigh of relief that I would be able to get off the mountain in time.
All in all, I would say Darjeeling is a town worth seeing if it is convenient to do so. I enjoyed my time here, seeing unusually gothic architecture, monkeys and dogs fight, watching a monkey nearly attack Troy, seeing thousands of prayer flags at a Hindu Temple, and trying Tibetan bread for the first time (spoiler alert: OM NOM NOM), but my litmus test for wether a place is a must-see is when I consider wether or not I would bring Christine back here so we can share it together. I might be judging it unfairly since it’s currently off season, and truly, there is absolutely nothing like Darjeeling in India from what I have seen, so take my words with a hearty grain of salt; Darjeeling, to me, is for India completists and people who like walking vertically rather than horizontally to get from place to place. I thought it was lovely but don’t feel the burn to return.
Oh, and cow haters. There were no cows to be seen on the mountain. They have the good sense to keep their lives horizontal.
Gcirc Day 8: I hate Assam. I love Assam.
Writing this on the Rajdhani Express again, this time on my way out of Assam, headed towards Darjeeling where we will spend two nights.
Let’s get the “I hate Assam” part taken care of first, as it’s shorter. Haven’t heard from me in awhile? Blame Assam. Their policy, for whatever reason I have not learned yet (presumably some security thing), is to disable the use of pre-paid mobile plans throughout the state, something I was unaware of as I sent my wife a “good night, dear” email.
When I woke up in the morning, nothing. For anyone on the train. And with a ton of travel happening throughout Assam, no way to remedy the problem, or even get an email sent. That is the sole reason I hate Assam. Pretty much everything else, I loved.
I love Assam. Have I said that already? I love that it took what I expected of it and flipped it upside down. I had visions of a chilly, rocky place that might fit better in Nepal, but clearly I need some geography lessons, because Assam is downright tropical, full of palm and banana trees. Being so close to Myanmar/Burma, it’s basically a slightly cooler version of what you would expect there. If you had told me we were in Thailand, only the people there would make me question how truthful you were being.
Foreigners are a rarity in Assam. There was at least one station stop where foreigners are literally not allowed to get off. Of course, we got off for a small group photo (which you will have to ask Troy for, it’s on his camera, dammit.) We are used to stares from locals at this point anywhere we go in India, but in Assam they become particularly intense, in a curious way rather than a dangerous one. Many times we were approached with simply a “Hello, how are you?” and whatever answer we gave was not as important as the fact that the man asking was happy to have us there, happy that he knew enough english to ask that question, and now had a story to go tell his friends about.
We took a motorized rickshaw to see one of the last working steam engines in the world. When it turned out to be in the shop being worked on, we didn’t fuss, took what snapshots we were able to, but then the men working there went to a great deal of trouble to pull out the engine in front of it, then haul the steam engine out of the shop so we could get proper pictures. Mark had made a nominal donation to their organization beforehand, but this was above and beyond nice of them to do for us. I don’t consider myself a trainspotter by any remote degree, but I did become slightly more nerdy after that visit.
From there it was a brutal rickshaw ride (I am finding most rides in cars at this point are characterized by being brutal, or just generally kicking my ass) to the Eco Lodge for dinner and my first beer of the trip, a He-Man 9000, which by this point was well deserved.
Photo by Troy
We headed off in the evening for our train out of Assam and into Darjeeling, and while I did love my time in beautiful Assam, I was happy to get back on another train and get the hell out, to somewhere I might actually be able to contact my wife.
If I am lucky.
GCIRC Day 7 – I love this train
Writing this on the New Delhi – Dibrugarh Rajdhani, or The Rajdhani Express- my favorite train of the trip so far.
As soon as the train pulled out of the station, we were immediately given lunch. Just given, not sold. Veg or non-veg? Then again after the meal was over, veg or non-veg?
Wait… What? Again… You mean dinner?
“Yes”
And between dinner? Snacks. These snacks include *ahem* The Greatest Tasting Cracker I Have Ever Put Into My Appropriate Face-Hole.
After dinner? Ice cream, naturally. There are also bread sticks, tomato soup, and tea on demand. My Delhi Belly diet was working wonders on my waist, but by the end of what has become a 38 hour ride, I will be back to my pudgier self.
This leg of the trip has actually flown by very quickly. It started after 2PM yesterday, and will end around 4AM tomorrow morning. I woke up this morning in Assam, which apparently also means I woke up with no Internet. No one did, in fact, and with no stops longer than an hour today, there hasn’t been a remote possibility of solving it. It seems as though you, dear reader, will be reading this around the time I am in Darjeeling, safely out of the scarily signal-less Assam.
This leg of the trip will take is nearly to Myanmar/Burma. A very long border run, if you will. I fully expected any existing tensions to rise by this point, but everyone seems to be fully settled into this routine and quite comfortable.
Tomorrow brings us to Ledo, in Assam, where westerners are extremely rare, and I regularly wonder if I am still in India.
GCIRC Day 6 – New Delhi: not so scary after all
Writing this on the New Delhi – Dibrugarh Rajdhani, a nearly 40 hour train ride that should take us nearly to Myanmar/Burma.
Gear check:
I decided my three shirts were getting too funky, and had decided to ditch two of them and pick up two new ones. Troy convinced me to hold onto the old ones and try to get them cleaned during our two days in Darjeeling. I am humoring him, but now my bag is a bit overstuffed.
I’ve also bought another package of baby wipes. The first batch suited me well, so I will continue with those.
The tiffin experiment was a dismal failure, yet I continue to haul the thing around, the last person to do so. We simply never put anything in it, so it remains an unused US$2 experiment. Again Troy has insisted that we will fill it with food and give it to a beggar at some point. A noble idea, if we get around to doing it…
Oh, socks. I bought two cheap pair for under 50 cents US. I have no idea just how cold Darjeeling might be. I hear it’s, you know, quite.
New Delhi
Some time after 6AM we arrived in New Delhi, the location I was dreading the most in the whole itinerary. I only had a brief brush with Delhi before this, when the family and I had to spend a night there in between flights on our way to Goa. Admittedly, the airport is well outside of Delhi proper, but my assumption was that however hectic it was outside of the airport, actual New Delhi would be an amplified version of that experience.
Basically, I expected Mumbai X 8 or so.
We had 6 hours to kill in between trains, so it was off to a twisting alleyway walk to a nearby hotel for people to drop their bags off, wash up, or catch up on emails. The day was wide open, with all of us attendants fending for ourselves until 1PM, when we needed to be back at the hotel for a group return to the station.
Not much time to get to know Delhi, by any means. Troy and I opted to grab a motorized rickshaw to go check out the only sight seeing we were told we had any reasonable amount of time to see – Red Fort.
Nice joint. You know, if you’re into World Heritage historic sites that have fantastic architecture and all that. I was into it. Apparently the Indian army only turned it over to the tourism board in 2003. There are still parts that look like they are being restored, but the place is enormous to the point that we may have barely covered half of it.
Foreigners expect to pay 250 rupee, about US$6. Locals get in for either 10 or 60 rupee, I’m actually not sure. I read 60 somewhere, Troy thought he read 10. it doesn’t make a difference to me though, I think it’s great that the locals should actually be able to afford entry to a place on their soil with so much history, and they do brisk business with the locals here.
When it was time to get back, we decided to go via a proper rickshaw, a first for both of us.
I’ve never seen someone do so much work for such low fares. It cost half of what the moto rickshaw had cost, and scared the living crap out of me for about 70% of it. If I’m going to that scared during a ride, the person giving it to me shouldn’t have to do more than pull a lever or something, seriously. Troy tipped him well afterwards, and we were agreed: that job has to suck.
We stopped for something to eat between the station and the hotel. This is backpacker haven, full of cheap hotels and shopping. From my cafe view, it was easy to spot the new travelers among the crowd. Want to guarantee the attention of every street beggar and hawker? Wear a giant backpack! Also mixed in were foreigners who had clearly checked into India years ago and have been in Delhi just a bit too long. Vacant, uninterested stares, uneven, thrown together lack of fashion sense, generally a bit grimier from head to toe than any other westerners you might see.
Back at the hotel there was a chaotic mess awaiting us, confusion in payment, missing people, generalized anxiety. Our train was in an hour. I decided to breathe a bit, and reflected on how un-daunted I was throughout the day. Where was my anxiety? Even this group of nervous people surrounding me weren’t getting my blood pressure up. I was fine. We were going to make the train. No problem. Delhi, or at least the bits around the train station and Red Fort, was not at all overwhelming to me today. I not only handled it, I was able to enjoy it as it was happening, which I understand sounds silly, but it’s rare for me to enjoy something until after the dust settles and I am able to check to make sure I have all my limbs. Clearly I am improving as a traveler.
The missing people arrived.
“Okay, everybody breathe. It’s all going to be OKAY.”
Mick laughed.
We made it to the train station in groups of two or three at at a time. Troy and I went with the newly familiar bicycle rickshaw, as did several others. Somehow through the least organized trek so far, we all made it to the station on time, minus Tim, a photographer who left us in Ahmedabad, had not fully recovered from a previous food poisoning, so was not joining back up with us.
There might be hope for this group after all. We’re getting good at this.
Next: 38 hours on a the Rajdhani Express.
Lifestream
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Shared Taken with instagram.
