davethegrinch.net

Sarah says:

In our experience so far in SE Asia and India, when you arrive in a town that has any ounce of a tourist population, you will be barraged at the train station, bus station or airport by taxi and tuk-tuk drivers all wanting to take you where you want to go.  It’s a slightly manageable scene at the airport since we, the tourists with money, can safely view from inside the baggage claim area what is awaiting us once we take our first steps outside the airport door so we can take a few deep breaths and prepare. Train and bus stations, however, can seem almost riotous. I have seen taxi drivers actually board moving trains, I’ve seen them charge onto buses before any passengers can get off, all to hopefully land the job of taking you and your bags to your final destination and if it’s really their lucky day, they’ll convince you that the hotel you want to go to is full or they charge too much for what you get and you should really take their advice and go to this other hotel. If they use just the right, “I’m not trying to scam you, mate, I’m really just trying to help” tone of voice, they may just convince your naive ass and, at the end of the day, they’ll score a juice kick-back from the hotel.

In some towns, at this juncture, the extreme budget traveler may be able to hop a local bus to the hotel district and lug their bags around on foot looking for a place to sleep. Local buses in Asia and India doing what they do: they don’t leave until they are completely and 150% full, with no AC and with everyone hot and sitting on top of each other and we have inevitably just traveled over-night or at least 10 hours, I can count on 2 fingers the number of times we’ve taken this option and in most towns it’s not even an option so let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that you can’t avoid the tuk-tuk driver. At some point you have to play the game. David, being the much calmer soul than I, is happy to begin negotiations right there and then in the chaos of swarming, “sir, tuk-tuk???? where you go? sir??? How much can I overcharge you?” They don’t really say this last part. I, on the other hand, tend to feel overwhelmed and at least need to see the exit and get some space before I can launch into a business transaction. Here is where Ragu enters my story:

We arrived in a shithole town called Hospet in south central India for the purposes of visiting Hampi, a town about 30kms away. Hampi can be likened to Cambodia’s Angkor Wat: they have spectacular ruins and temples set in magnificent natural surroundings that will just blow your mind. Anyway, I am first in line to disembark the train which hasn’t quite finished moving and already there is a sea of rick-shaw drivers on the the platform, running with the train, all shouting at me, “madam, you go to Hampi?? You need rick-shaw??” As the train stops, they crowd the door so that I have to give my “back off” hand motion combined with my most irritated facial expression so that I can step down. There were probably 4-5 drivers crowded around me but one was the tallest, loudest and closest so he got my hand-flip in his face that meant, “please get away from me” in the most polite way of course. His skin was thick, however, and he turned to David with continued persistence. Â We had an idea how much the ride should cost and, of course, this guy’s quote was twice as high, which we are all-too familiar with and is why we always feel like we’re being hustled and screwed and this trip has done nothing at all to improve my over-all worldwide disdain for taxi drivers. This guy was OK, though, and it didn’t take much to get him down to our price so we made our way to his rick-shaw.

I had a bad taste in my mouth, though, and was determined not to make any nice conversation with him but he began engaging David in light and actually kind of pleasant and laid back banter while I looked the other way. As expected, he offered to be our driver the next day around the ruins. This was a service we were actually interested in and his quote was pretty reasonable so we agreed. We’d pay him about $10 to drive us around all the ruins from 9:30am-7pm, he’d tell us the few stories he’d managed to pick up from real guides over his 10 years of driving a rick-shaw and we’d get some intermittent shad from the 45C degree heat (you don’t even want to know what that is in F).

His name was Ragu and he was exactly on time the next morning. He took us to the cheapest place in town to get bottled water and off we went. It’s going on off-season now so we virtually had the ruins all to ourselves all day. Unlike in Angkor Wat, most of these ruins had no entry fee so Ragu could and often times would go with us and tell us stories and just kind of hang out with us. Eventually, the conversation began to relax and we all slowly began to joke around and insert personal anecdotes into what had been just a question-answer session on our surroundings. Over lunch, Ragu told us a little bit about what it was like to be a rick-shaw driver, what he did and didn’t like about the town he lived in, how his wife’s family hadn’t sent her to school as a child and now she’s really sad about it. She could go to night school now as an adult but the schools in their town were so bad that they didn’t think it worth it so he supported them both. Coincidentally, we had just read an article in Time Magazine about how the education system in India is so bad that on any given day, 1 out of 4 teachers is absent, sending the classroom full of kids out onto the street. The 3 teachers who do show up for work are usually not doing their jobs. Once you’re hired as a teacher in India you have tenure for life and are accountable to no-one so hearing Ragu’s story put a real personal face on an what would have otherwise been just another sad magazine article I felt no connection to. Over the course of our conversation, Ragu turned from our “driver” to just a regular guy, about our age, pretty laid back, he let his guard down and we did too. We became 3 people born on 3 different continents, 2 of us had the same way of life and one was completely different. Part of the reason we were willing to spend the money on a driver instead of doing something insane like touring the area on foot or bicycle was for this kind of interaction and we ended the day very satisfied customers. We asked if he was free the next evening to take us back to the train station but when he greeted us the next day we were treated to a small luxury we hadn’t realized how much we missed: the friendly smile and wave of someone familiar. David and I were struck, when he dropped us off and shook our hands, by how world’s apart our opinion of Ragu was then from our first meeting.

As we watched Ragu drive away, I began to notice that there were perhaps 100 parked rick-shaws in the parking lot. Each one represented a driver currently in the station seeking work. We’ve met so many men on our journey through these depressed countries who, for whatever reason, despite clear intelligence and English language skill, see being a rick-shaw or taxi driver as their most viable source of income and since I have no idea what it’s like to grow up in a country like India, I really can’t pass any judgment. All I can do is try to look at things from Ragu’s perspective. He gets up each morning to drive to this very train station to face the site of these 100 other rick-shaws already parked, his competition for a day’s wage. He has to then swallow any pride he may have as a regular guy like you and me with a wife and friends, to go grovel to tourists day in, day out for 100 stinking rupees (about $2.50). I’m sure mine wasn’t the first hand flip in his face, I’m sure he’s had to deal with a lot worse, but he has to keep at it every day because he doesn’t see any other option for bringing home money for his family.

No wonder….no wonder it’s not good enough to wait outside the train station - you need to actually go onto the train platform. And no wonder it’s not good enough to politely line up on the platform and wait for a tourist to come to you - you need to be the first one they see, you need to be taller, louder, nicer but more persistent than any of the other drivers who offer the same exact service for the same fare. You have no differentiator. None. Nothing to sell your service except you. And you have to do it all day long, every day, in a town, city, state, country, entire hemisphere of the globe where there are more rick-shaws than tourists to go in them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 3:01 am and is filed under Global Travels, India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.