Kite country

This chapter reports selected highlights from our four weeks of traveling through India. The photographs, mostly by Becky, will follow as soon as we can find a suitable internet connection to post them from, but for now we hope the text will give you a bit of a sense. Here we have seen many incredible things, and of course, but sadly, can share only snippets of them now. It would have been really nice to have you with us — but if you live in Melbourne we shall have you with us again soon enough. Becky has accepted a lectureship in Law at Monash, and we are returning to set up our lives there in early December.

Late on 24 October, Becky and I flew by Cathay Pacific to Delhi, arriving just after 05h00 the following morning. We had arranged a pickup car to take us to our hotel in Majnu-ka-tilla, the Tibetan quarter just north of Old Delhi. After a bit of sleep catchup, there was a lot lot lot to see and do, so we quickly got into the swing of catching autorickshaws.

I solemnly believe the autorickshaw (‘tuk-tuk’) is the most beautiful mode of motorised road transport to be found. For all travel under 60km/h, its versatility, fuel efficiency, and comfort make it an extremely competitive market performer. Coming in two and four-stroke varieties, it is a three-wheeler with a motorcycle front-end and a weather-resistant canopy overhead. Subtly, each autorickshaw is different, so you are advised to pay close attention to the safety features at the start of every ride. Nothing can weave through India's incredible traffic with quite the same elan. It stops dead at any speed and its turning radius at walking speed is considerably shorter than its length.

But back to Delhi. This is not an easy city, it has to be said. The pollution is choking. The traffic is extremely chaotic (but slow, so the inevitable bumps hurt less). The noise is constant. There is a lot lot lot of begging — especially from children, whom we were advised to give nothing directly. The one thing tourists are really good for is money, meaning people are forever trying to overcharge because they know you can afford it — and you mostly can. And unlike China, which is much better than Australia in this respect, the level of leering as Becky walks past and innuendo about 'your beautiful wife' (as though she were not also in the room), is really full-on. And that is not even beginning to think about the bombs, which really did scare a lot more people (both Indians and tourists) than they killed or hurt. In fact, Delhi is a pretty distressing place on almost every front.

And yet, against all the stress and distress, it is an amazing place to visit. Coming from China, the sense of a free speech democracy is palpable everywhere — especially in the incessant political organising of the Tibetans and their honky-Buddhist supporters from Europe in the hotels of Majnu-ka-tilla. The Mughal architecture of the Red Fort is a precursor to the awesome buildings of Agra and Rajasthan. The sense of excitement and bustle on the streets seems to be everywhere and at all times. And as with everywhere we have been in India, the whole country is agog with cricket. 'Madam, do you know Ricky Ponting?' 'Not personally, but I think he bats very well.' Yes madam, I think Australia is the best team for cricket, no?'

Actually, our local interlocuters are selling their country short. Right now, India is the best cricketing country in the world. Some girls and hundreds of millions of boys whack scraps of rubber with their wicker brooms in every alleyway and on every pile of garbage from dawn till dusk. Women's test matches are a sell-out, held at major stadiums. And the Indian men's team has probably eclipsed the playing ability of the Australians by now. Watch out for a new wicketkeeper called Dhoni. He hits the ball like Lance Klusener when he bats, but he stays in and builds big scores like Adam Gilchrist. [A bit of a digression begins here.] I read Beazley's reply to Kevin Andrews' second reading speech for the Workplace Relations Bill the other day. He claimed that this legislation is the beginning of the end for the Howard government. I think he is wrong: the loss of the Ashes was when Howard's cultural system began to fall apart: Australians cannot be relaxed and comfortable now, because India would easily beat an English team on English soil.

There is a lot more to say about Delhi, and lots of it has already been said by William Dalrymple, in his book called The City of Djinns,' which captures the excitement and the bizarreness very well. But there are other places in India I am keener to return to. After three nights there, we set off by train to Agra. This is the home of the rather well known Taj Mahal building, on the banks of the sacred river Jamuna. The Taj was built by Shah Jehan, who moved the Mughal capital from Agra to Delhi around the same time as he built it. When his wife Mumtaz died, giving birth to their 14th child, the Shah was so moved that he built the most gorgeous house in the world to honour her memory. Viewed close up, the marble is incredibly fine, with vividly coloured enamel inlay of flowers and birds running up its columns and over its arabesqued arches. Viewed from a distance, as say from Agra's Red Fort, the marble becomes translucent. The onion domes and gently leaning minarets shimmer and glow with the changing light. Strong-winged kites circle above the main dome in the late afternoon, riding its thermal updraft created as the surrounding air cools.

Later, when the brutal and eccentric Shah Jehan was overthrown by his brutal and embittered youngest son Aurangzeb, he was imprisoned in that same Red Fort, bound to spend the last 8 years of his life looking out over the beautiful mounment he had built. In death, he was buried there alongside Mumtaz.

From Agra, we caught a train to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan. The old city is completely painted pink, as a sign of welcome to the British troops who arrived in the 19th century bringing prospects of wealth and power to the local Maharajah. Somehow, over the last 150 years or so, that ethos has developed so that Jaipur now seems to house the most rip-off merchants per head of population of any city in the world. If so, one explanation might be that it has the most rampant out-of-control poverty that we have encountered. Unlike Kerala, where many decades of communist state government have lead to high rates of literacy and almost no begging, Rajasthan's neo-feudal culture means a huge army of streetdwellers, mountains of garbage, thousands of sick and wounded animals wandering and even working the streets, and piles of human and other shit on most ground-level surfaces. If religion is the opiate of the masses, sectarian religious politics are the laxative of same.

In Jaipur, we stayed in a very nice hotel, the Pearl Palace, which we recommend highly. We looked at a number of buildings from the Mughal golden age in the 17th century, including the city palace, the Amber Fort, and the very very impressive royal observatory. Photographs capture the splendour of these places, but it is not fair (or fun) to photograph the terrible squalour of the streets surrounding them. When we saw one homeless man squatting to shit in the gutter on one of the main streets, several others nearby were visibly upset that we foreigners were witnessing this happening in their country, their city. As much as the price-gouging of tourists wears you down, like the street-children begging, or the frequent smack of ammonia that tells you not to walk in sandals down that alleyway, sensing the poverty that drives it all is really really melancholy.

After Jaipur, we caught a train overnight to Jaisalmer in the Thar desert, an 850 year old fortress town near the Pakistan border. A much smaller city (90,000 people) than Jaipur (almost a million), Jaisalmer is correspondingly quieter, less hasselsome, and less crushed by homelessness. It is also a stunningly beautiful place. Every home and shop is constructed out of sandstone, with intricately carved stone balconies and lattice windows on most of them. The dust of the desert coats all motor vehicles, animals, and unwashed clothes in the same colour of grey-orange as the buildings. Thus, apart from the brilliantly dressed women, whose saris could be used as beacons to land jumbos in a sandstorm, it is a landscape entirely of sand and sandstone.

The fort itself, at the heart of the city, is simply a bigger and more elaborately carved mountain of sandstone than anything else. From the top, the view in every direction stretches many cannons' range. Viewed from below, or walking through its alleyways and Jain temples, it is a fairytale citadel. Hard to believe that you are awake and not dreaming or reading about it. It would be possible to stay there for a long time without tiring of the spectacle, I am sure.

And yet, after 3 more nights, we were on another train, bound for Jodhpur at the eastern edge of the Thar. Where all the buildings of Jaipur's old city are painted pink, Jodhpur's are almost entirely a bright blue. As well as making a hot place feel much cooler, apparently this repels the insects — although our hotel room had its fair share until we went the tonk with mozzie coils. Jodhpur is famous for equestrian trousers that tend to make Westerners look like pompous buffoons. But the city is very beautiful. Its fort is another fairytale structure of stone, incredibly imposing at the top of its hill, and never breached in over 500 years. Jodhpur is also the place where we discovered makhani lassi, flavoured with saffron and cardamom. Apart from the mozzies, our hotel (Singhvi's Haveli) was Becky’s clear favourite in India and we can both recommend it highly.

Three nights in Jodhpur, we then caught an afternoon/night train to Ahmedabad (Amdavad). Although this is a major railway junction, although it is the epicentre of the textile trade in western India, and although it is the city were Gandhi founded his Ashram, and from which he commenced the salt march that started India's push for full independence, Amdavad is not a heavily touristised city. Becky and I were pleasantly surprised to find tuk-tuk drivers asking what we thought was the fair price first up. Shopkeepers did not try to hassle us into stopping in their stores. The sudden absence of trickery and hustle was very very pleasant. As well as visiting Gandhi's ashram, we spent a few hours in the city museum, which has a most extraordinary collection of letters that were sent to Gandhi by ethnic Indians in South Africa, upon learning the news that he intended to leave them ad return to India. All written in English, so you are immediately struck by the ardour of their sorrow and affection, with the most beautiful calligraphy, illustrations, and background patterns, all done by hand.

We did a bit of shopping for textiles, and Becky's backpack in particular is near the point of explosion as I write this. We also tasted the best Indian food we have yet had, as the vegetarian Thali originated in Gujarat, and is far superior there to Rajasthan or Delhi. Not to mention outrageously cheap, but you become oblivious to that after a few weeks in this country.

From Amdavad we set off southwest for the beachside fishing town of Diu. This is a former Portugese colony on the tip of the Saurashtra peninsula. We chose it because there just was not enough time to travel to Goa, but in retrospect I think we were lucky. Diu has a population of just over 20,000. The railway does not quite reach here, meaning it is less easily accessible, and so there is less of a tourism industry here. The religious mix (Christian, Muslim, and Hindu) and ethnic mix (Hindi, 'Goan' with Portugese ancestry, and tourist) are relaxed. There is not that sense of danger for a woman walking outside at night that most of India throws up. Nor is there any cultural problem with enjoying a beer in public. And so we relaxed, swam, read our books, enjoyed long breakfasts and even longer seafood dinners, chatted with locals and tourists, and half-bothered towander around looking at a few of the sights. Our hotel in Diu was the caretaker's quarters for the old church of St Thomas (Sao Thome), where we had a most romantic room, beautiful view, and the 17th century church below us. The church is an extremely impresive acoustic space, actully, and I cannot recommend it highly enough as a venue for Hingley's 'City Council of Birds' for solo flute.

Being a bit more comfortable and relaxed, after five days we set off for Mumbai by bus to Ahmedabad, then the Shatabdi Express train to Mumbai Central. It was a day on which we ripped off twice by drivers — once in Ahmedabad and once (big-time) in Mumbai — the only times we were caught out on the whole bloody trip. (Just shows what happens when you get yourself all comfortable and relaxed! But thanks all the same, Johnny WH, you've been just great for the country and we look forward to visiting lots of happy smiling Australians again really soon.)

Mumbai is, er, big. It has a population of about 17 million. Its CBD boasts the most expensive real estate prices in the world. And it is very cosmopolitan. Becky and I chanced upon a Sufi & Mystic music festival one day, but felt a bit too tired to drop in on the Mumbai Scandinavian jazz festival the next. Here we went to Sabbath prayers at the Knesseth Eliyahod Synagogue — a beautiful blue-washed 1880s building built with money from the incredible Sassoon family, similar in its internal layout to New York's Central Synagogue. We also visited the Gandhi museum near Chowpatty beach, for a bit more of a sense of that guy. He looks good as a miniature figurine in dioramas, for mine, but I get the impression he was kind of important too.

Mumbai was one of the few places we have stayed where I would actively recommend against the hotel we used. Hotel Volga II is situated directly upstairs from a nightclub, which plays something worse than doof music all night long. It is noisy. Lonely Planet does not mention this significant feature of an otherwise medium priced low value grimy windowless hotel, so we do here for what it is worth. On a rather brighter and more attractive note, in Mumbai, Becky contracted a tailor to make her two pairs of pants and one skirt (to a design she had drawn up). Results tres satisfactory. If anyone wishes to know about this good Mumbai tailor, we can supply further information.

So, India, eh? Terribly early on 21 September we endured the intrusive and rather sleazy airport security police to catch a 05h05 flight to Bangkok. There we met my mother, Ali, before flying on to Siem Reap in Cambodia. Another story for a time when we have got the photographs closer to ready. CU all soon!
Posted by Tom in Phnom Penh