We have just passed our 3 month traveling anniversary and fully appreciate that perhaps we are just feeling a bit tired, but India is hard and feels like it keeps getting harder. Our latest adventure began on our journey from Kochi to Munnar. Kochi is probably the most touristy town in south India and also happens to be the first Indian town we’ve visited that, despite the guidebook’s frequent use of the word, fits my definition of “charming”. It was lovely: cute streets, clean, quiet, perfect. Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay more than two days because the heat was, shall we say, unbearable. We decided to head inward toward the mountains to visit some tea plantations. The climate, we anticipated, would be cooler and a town built by the British for the purpose of tea must be “charming”, right??

One of the things about India that makes me sad is the base level of transportation that it subjects its people to. This is the bus that India thinks is suitable for a 4-8 hour journey – please see picture. If Indians can afford to travel, this is how most of them are doing it and I struggle to understand why it’s necessary to have it be this bare, this difficult. US Prison buses are nicer than this. This bus had hard seats, 3 people to a 2 person bench. The aisle was jam packed with people who stood for our entire 4 hour journey, on top of each other. There was no glass in the windows so our options were to have dust blowing in our face at 40mph or a black shutter that kept all air out. Due to the stifling heat, we chose the former. The twisty-turny mountain roads were not kind to some passengers and when a man a few rows up from me threw up out his window, you guessed it, it came back in through mine. And it stopped like a city bus, frequently, all through the 4 hours. I hoped that it was for people getting off but oh no, it was always for more people to get on. By the time we reached our destination, our asses were so bruised and we both had sharp pains up and down our legs from not ever being able to change sitting position. When we were bombarded by the rick-shaw drivers upon arrival, despite my recent change of heart which I’ve now documented for all the read, I broke down and cried.

This was our state of mind when we checked in to the Poopada Hotel. By now, perhaps you’ve read David’s post about the Poopada and us having to call the police so I won’t bore you with redundancy. I will just say that throughout that incident, my legs were shaking. I was shocked, flabergasted even, by what was happening! And when the two men started pulling on David’s pack and his arm and I saw the look in David’s eyes as he took his pack off to be ready and nimble, I thought, in slow motion, “Oh my God, this is it. Seven years of martial arts and this is how he’ll finally use it. In the middle of India, in the middle of the street, on Easter Day, he’s going to throw down with a slimy hotel manager. ………..Hmm, what kind of arm break would I use right now?!?” It was so surreal!

It took me the entire two hour taxi ride to our next mountain town, Kumily, to calm down from the whole event. The drive between Munnar and Kumily was breathtaking, endless rolling hills covered in tea as far as the eye can see. Here and there, lilac flowers dotted the rich green and sweet little plantation cottages off in the distance provided the finishing touch on the left-over English landscape we were looking for. Before long, we arrived in Kumily, pulled onto a lovely, tree shaded street and stopped in front of our next accommodation. This is when the most beautiful woman in all of India came into our lives. Sujatha was waiting for us on her driveway with the most lovely smile and comforting two-handed handshake. “You must be David and Sarah. Welcome, please come inside.” I felt an instant wave of relief as karma patted us on the head and left us in her capable hands. Advertised as a homestay, this was the first true homestay we’ve managed to find. Most in India feel more like hotels. Sujatha and her husband had converted the upstairs of their house into adorable, simple little rooms – ours had a balcony with a wicker swinging chair which we were nestled in with her homemade Chai before we could blink. David and I just looked at each other and smiled and instantly made the decision to stay longer than we’d planned. We went on to have a truly relaxing 3 days with Sujatha and her family. She was perfect for her job – she loved to talk, had a beaming smile, and something about her manner made it impossible not to relax and feel at home with her.

Kumily is lovely – probably my favorite of the Indian towns with visited. We did a day hike through their sanctuary which kind of looked like what I imagine Kenya looking like. In addition to tea, this part of the country is the center for spice production and the smells were amazing, as you can imagine. Did you now that cinnamon comes from the bark of a cinnamon tree and that nutmeg is the seed of a fruit that looks like a fig? You can use cloves to brush your teeth if you find yourself out in a clove forest without your Colgate. But more than anything, we just enjoyed hanging on our balcony chatting with Sujatha. On our last morning there she invited us to her family dining table to share breakfast with them and as we were leaving we gave each other a big, sincere hug goodbye. She was just what we needed and gave us such a gift by bringing our time in India to such a lovely close.

From there we went on to Varkala, a beach town where I must admit we secluded ourselves in the touristy area and enjoyed the Arabian Sea for the last time, dined on fresh grilled calamari at a cliff-side table in the sand and took deep breaths of appreciation that, after all India had thrown at us, she was sending us such lovely people and places in our last few days.

David and I realize that most of our posts – well perhaps all of them – from India have had a negative slant. We’d like to take this opportunity to clarify for our readers and for our own journals, that we didn’t hate India and we certainly didn’t have a terrible time. We had an amazing time. We saw things we’d never seen before in our lives, we learned an incredible amount about ourselves and were intimately exposed to many sides of this fascinating country. It is true that India is hard. It just is. It is shocking and overwhelming and comes full force, in your face, loudly and full-on and it can suck the energy from even the most well-traveled person and I think that our posts reflect our general fatigue. Though I think we were honest in what we had to say from our own experiences and perspectives, I certainly wouldn’t change a single thing about anything we did. At the end of every karate test, which is meant to take you physically, mentally and emotionally farther than you ever thought you could go, our karate Master always asks, “If you had to get up right now and do it all over again, could you?” and somehow, sincerely, the answer is always yes. But if Ms. Rachael Evans was with us right now asking the same question, I think my answer would have to be no. I need some time. Time to recover and repair but I’ll be back. Oh India, I’ll be back.

We were not happy with the Poopada Hotel in the hill station town of Munnar, Kerala, India for two whole days. A whole series of complaints including dirty towels, no hot water, excessive noise from both management and guests and cold/late food had brought us to a point of frustration. The hotel in question was charging more than any other hotel we had stayed in in India and was forced upon us because every hotel in town was full of Indian tourists due to Easter weekend and the start of the school holidays coinciding. It was the only place in town with rooms for the entire weekend and we were stuck there. The situation escalated and came to a head on our second night when a bus load of Indian students pulled into the parking lot, built a campfire right by the bus and proceeded the start their own Indian rave. By the time 12:30am swung around, the hotel manager was either drunk or stoned and wasn’t making much sense of our complaining. We informed him we’d be expecting a discount but I don’t think our annoyance made it through his bloodshot eyes to his beetle nut addled brain. He then attempted to turn the situation into a bartering opportunity, forcing us to explain his job was to make his customers happy by offering a discount he thought was appropriate; we are talking about a hotel, not a trinket stand at the local market. Besides, he was not serious and any offer we would have made would not have been accepted. He then spent the next 10 minutes trying to tell us that the room rate we had was discounted already and we spent the 10 minutes following those informing him it was not. He grasp of the English language seemed to leave him at the most inopportune moments, especially when arguments turned against him. Once it was clear this was getting us nowhere, we left him to think about his attitude but were sure he couldn’t care less.

The next morning, our taxi out of Munnar arrived at 9am as booked. We attempted to plan an escape by which we would take him up on his offer of naming a price but there would be no negotiation – we would pay him for one night and he would give us the other. We would slap the money down on the counter, climb into the taxi and leave. All went well until the leave part: the taxi driver wouldn’t budge. The manager had yelled something to him which we suspect was to the effect that we hadn’t paid the bill. Taxi driver English is not good enough to understand the subtleties of “some” vs “all” so he just sat there. Our next plan of escape was to grab our bags from the trunk of the car and just walk out of there to find a taxi in town. This was thwarted by the manager and his employee holding us back by our backpack straps. Our 7 years of martial arts’ training had not prepared us for breaking the grip of an adversary whilst carrying 35 lbs and being held from behind by the straps. So, we just stood there in the street, much to the amusement of the neighbors, yelling at each other.

At this point, I realized we had wound this guy up so much there now wasn’t any chance of any discount. He was so upset that I took off my pack and prepared myself for what might come next. I decided to change tactic and shouted “call the police”. This was designed to scare him into negotiation. It is a well-known fact that in India nothing is legal. Everything works on a system called “baksheesh”, which is really just another name for bribery and I was pretty sure the manager wouldn’t want the police sniffing around his hotel and costing him much baksheesh. The plan almost worked. Even though he agreed to call the police it took him another 10 minutes to do so and only after we had turned down a Rs100 discount on a Rs3500 bill. At this point, I knew the money was lost. The police were locals, they would also have selected English, everyone perceives Westerners as being rich so have no sympathy for them when they are overcharged and, most importantly, baksheesh would probably come into play between the manager and the cops to get his money and I certainly wasn’t going to start a baksheesh battle – bribing a police officer is not something I want to contemplate in an Indian jail. My goal now was to provide maximum embarrassment to the hotel. We refused to go inside and insisted whatever business we do be done on the street in front of everyone. The cops arrived, keystone fashion in a rick-shaw, 5 minutes later. Two cops, one an inspector from the local police station and one a member of the tourist police. Just as we suspected, the hotel manager jabbered something to them, they nodded and informed us we had to pay the bill. I stated our case in the most precise terms I could manage and they jabbered back at the manager. They returned and said the manager was prepared to give us Rs180 off the bill to which I asked them if they thought that was fair. I tried to ask them if they thought it was fair to treat tourists this way but selected English came into play and the best they could do was to keep pointing to the room tariff card. In the end, money now not being the point, I paid the agreed upon amount. In the meantime, our taxi driver had reappeared and brought with him a worker from his office to help us out. He told us the manager was a “cheating man” and that they had heard other bad things about him.

I hope the manager thinks badly of western tourists. So badly that he refuses to host them in his hotel. This is the only way I can think of to protect others from an incident such as this. We have now learned that unlike eating where the locals do, one should avoid sleeping where the locals do. We have heard from other hotel managers that the worst tourists are the domestic tourists and, ironically, the westerners who constantly struggle with the differences in accommodation between India and their own countries are preferable guests. During the taxi ride to our next town, we worked hard to not let egos or money spoil what would ultimately end up being a really good story.

Dave says:

Mysore is home to sandalwood, silk and incense. It’s also, despite what the guidebooks say, a bit of a shithole (excuse my Hindi). It also has the strangest scam artists in the whole of India thus far. We met about four of them and, to our own amazement, were caught in the same scam twice.

Our first scamming came whilst looking for an internet cafe. Out of the blue over ran this kid of about 18 who somehow read our minds and not only pointed us to one but came with us, took us up the stairs, passed the dog who he knew, talked to the woman working there and secured us a computer. He then left us alone. How strange, we thought, but then realized he probably worked there and was sent out to find customers. He hung around for an hour whilst we did our work, even fetching us pen and paper when we needed it. When we were finished, he asked us all sorts of questions about our travels and our guidebook and, ironically, gave us some pretty good tips about how not to get scammed in this town. He then told us about an incense market that is only open for three months a year because the flowers for pressing are only available seasonally. This was the last day and he would take us there if we wanted, he was going that way anyway to meet a friend from Scotland. It closed in 30 minutes so we should be quick. So off we went and as we walked our host impressed us with his knowledge of Bruce Springsteen, even singing the whole of “Dancing in the Dark”. First he said he would take us to a vegetable market and then on to the incense. Well, the vegetable market turned out to be a fly-ridden pit of a place which we quickly exited. As we started to near the incense market nothing was smelling right and our wariness level increased. Our travel noses did not deceive us – the incense market turned out not to be a market at all but a small shop that sold incense and oils. As soon as we saw this, we realized we’d been scammed and walked all the way there to get the hard sell from which the kid would get a kick-back. We made our excuses and left. The kid also made his excuses and left us, too. Nothing wasted but an hour of our time but the most amazing thing was that the kid had spent nearly two hours with us and, even if we had bought something, it would have been hard to spend more than a few hundred rupees. That’s a long sales cycle for a tiny cut of a small sale.

We spent the next day being constantly approached by similar aged boys, all very pleasant, good English and full of useful tourist information. But this time with superiority induced by our new scam-proof veneer, we used them for the information and said goodbye. Nobody mentioned incense or money and it was all very congenial.

On our last morning, over breakfast, we met a new friend of ours, Niall from Scotland, and he told us about this amazing scam where some kid had spent hours with him the day before to take him to an incense market. We laughed at our mutual naiveté and decided this was basis enough to be pals for a day and go sightseeing together.

That day, everywhere was closed due to an ad hoc strike over some civil unrest from the night before and we were having a hard time finding somewhere to get out of the heat for a beer. A passer-by stopped and pointed us in the direction of the only bar or restaurant in town that was open. Of we went, glad of the help. We had been in the bar about an hour when in walked the passer-by and, in the most fluent English, asked if he could join us. His name was Phillip, an English name given to him in boarding school in England. He was an orphan rescued by the church and sent overseas for his education. Now he has returned to India and works in the local orphanage. For about two hours he told us stories of how bad the situation is in India and all the work he does for kids as payment for his own salvation. Stories of abandoned babies they pull out of dumpsters and a hospital in Bangalore that operates on his kids for free. We were expecting to be hit up for money at every story but it never came. Gradually, we relaxed a little and had one of the most insightful conversations we’d had with a local to date. And then the word incense came up. The three of us gave each other the wink. The game was up. We called him on it. We told him about the scam with the kids and told him we were not interested at all. He was visibly upset by the actions of the kids and gave us some advice on how not to get scammed in this town (yet more irony and I know what you’re thinking). He worked in an incense factory that was government run so nobody got kick-backs. In fact, he was late for “bloody work” and we should come with him just to see. For some unexplained, Kingfisher beer inspired reason, we got up off our sweaty but shaded bums and head out into the hot sun. As soon as he took us through that exact same fly-ridden market, we realized we had been had again. And when his place of work turned out to be an incense shop just two doors down from the one we had visited yesterday, it just confirmed our own stupidity. Nevertheless, safety in numbers and just because, we went inside to be greeted by the “doctor” who immediately started his perfumed-oil sales pitch until I smelled either like a cheap whore or a gullible tourist. He knew that we knew that Phillip knew that we knew we’d been scammed and so the sales pitch was half-hearted and a little awkward for all concerned. Then I looked on the wall and noticed a picture of a young man winning a body building competition and to get the subject off oils, I asked who it was. Turns out, the “doctor” was Mr. India 1984 and once we started chatting about that all hopes of a sale disappeared and the guy was really quite pleasant. A few minutes later, we made our excuses and left. Phillip was outside looking a little sheepish – for a man of obvious intelligence he must feel pretty bad for having to scam people this way. Again, though, he invested three hours in us and would have earned himself very little even if we had bought something.

With both scammers, we had really good conversations and spent a long time with them so it makes us wonder why they do it. Sure it’s for the money but I also feel they just love talking to people. Yes, we feel stupid and yes, we will be more vigilant in the future and yes, we had one of the best afternoons since arriving here. Sounds strange but things here are really bizarre so this fits in quite nicely.

Dave says:

One of the pleasures of traveling and, in my opinion, one of the benchmarks by which to measure the visited culture is to eat and drink like a local. This subject has been well documented in other reports from other countries and now it’s India’s turn to step up to the gastrometer for the great global food weigh-in.

But first a word or two about the word “gourmet”. Several viewers have written in imagining that their international favorites such as phad thai from Thailand or chicken vindaloo from India must be amazing once tasted in their native environment. The producers of the show would like to emphasize that we’re trying to ascertain the base level of culinary achievement in these countries and, although we have had wonderful meals everywhere, generally speaking it all comes down to the quality of ingredients. Poor people often cannot afford the best ingredients so often the meals do not reach their maximum potential. For example, every part of the chicken is used, legs, feet, the lot. Vegetables have sometimes seen better days and the jungle-destroying, cheap and low quality palm oil is used in heart clogging quantities everywhere. Therefore, a $1 plate of genuine street fare phad thai tastes great for $1 but doesn’t taste quite as good as an $8 plate from any restaurant in Seattle. We can, and have, walked into the swanky restaurants in town and paid $5 for phad thai and it’s been better than we can get at home but then our only dining companions are other tourists and any local would think us mad to spend so much money on food. So, in general, we try to eat as the locals do and use this to measure how good the food really is.

India is proving to be the exception to the “poor people/poor ingredients” rule. Just about everything we eat is really good. The quality of ingredients seems to be really high and their ability to take a spicy dish and maintain the separation of its distinguishing flavors is amazing. It is this kind of craft we expect to find in top-end eateries around the world but we seem to find it here in nearly every $1 dish we eat.

Indian restaurants are broken into 2 categories: veg and non-veg. Veg places are, of course, vegetarian and don’t always serve beer. Whereas, non-veg will serve veg and meat dishes, beer and inexplicably Chinese and pasta. Every place looks exactly the same, a little grubby, hard seats, formica tables and sometimes will have both AC and non-AC sections. Service is a little slow but generally good and water is provided for free. I believe this is to torture the Americans. We have missed the never-ending water glass found at home and now we have it but can’t drink it. Fortunately, bottled water is a standard Rs15 ($0.40) everywhere and, although it pains us to keep generating empty plastic, it’s over 40 degrees and our pee is bright yellow as it is.

Ordering food is really simple. Just like at home, the dish names tell you exactly what it is. For example, Aloo Gobi is Aloo (potato) and Gobi (cauliflower). The other catch all words are curry, dry, fry and masala. So, Aloo Gobi Fry is exactly what its name suggests. And that’s where the simplicity ends. Just like every place name in India seems to have two spellings so does food. Sometimes gobi is gopi and sometimes, although chapati, roti, naan, paratha are all meant to be different kinds of bread, one region’s paratha may taste the same as another’s naan but they are all on the same menu at the same time. Just like the rest of Asia, menus are only a suggestion of what the restaurant may serve if they actually had the ingredients to make it. Often they don’t so the word “finished” comes up a lot although I suspect it never really “started”. Equally frustrating is the random nature of when dishes can be served. Often they are only available for breakfast even though they clearly appear under the dinner section of the menu. Sometimes the waitstaff will tell you your selection is “not appropriate” meaning you ordered rice for a dish that is much better served with bread. Helpful if a little terse.

Breakfast is always a challenge on the road and anywhere there are tourists in Asia, the breakfast is either cornflakes, bad muesli or banana pancakes and all sport a higher than necessary price tag. Due to the law of supply and demand, we have often succumbed to this brief glimpse of home. In India, however, we have been more than happy to eat Indian breakfasts and, surprisingly, spicy food is a pretty good way to start the day. Our favorites so far have been Uppma (steamed semolina,spices and a curry sauce), Sheera (steamed semolina, fruit, nuts), dahl (lentils in a spicy gravy served with a chappati), masala dosa (veg curry served with a thick pancake) and iddly (a steamed rice cake served with spicy sauces). Breakfast, more than any other meal, suffers from different spellings and different words in every restaurant. I have seen iddly spelled about 8 different ways and we once asked for sheera and another dish called kesri bath and when they arrived both dishes were exactly the same.

To drink? Masala tea, of course. Masala tea and chai tea are another one of those interchangeable food stuffs. Sometimes masala is spiced with milk and no sugar and sometimes it’s with sugar. Either way, sugar is on the table. Chai is almost always sweet. Tea is about Rs5 ($0.12) and is often so good, multiple cups are required. It is available everywhere and never fails to please. Beer is not always available but is “always” available. Different states have different laws and taxes on beer. In Goa it’s everywhere and only about $1 for 660ml. In Kerala it’s either illegal or very highly taxed but the backsheesh system insures tourists can find it for about $2 as long as they are happy to drink it from a tea mug and hide the bottle under the table.

In previous posts we have highlighted the challenges of this vast country and, indeed, it is a challenge and it is always hard work. One of the things that keeps us going when we’re at a low point is the knowledge that we will always find something to eat and, despite outward appearances, it will end up being delicious, nourishing and always a little unexpected. I suspect my theory that a culture is reflected in its food will be proven when those same adjectives end up describing our entire stay in India.

Dave says

If there is one thing the British left behind that the Indians are in no hurry to rid themselves of, then it must be the railway system. It is the lifeline of the country and the only piece of infrastructure that actually works as advertised, well most of the time at least. For clarity, but not necessarily brevity, I will divide the actualities of this not-so-modern marvel into 3 categories.

1. How the government would like you to see it.

2. How it is.

3. What nobody likes to mention.

So, here’s the governmental trainspotting facts: it is the 2nd largest rail network in the world with over 42,000 miles of track and it is also the largest employer on the planet with over 1.6 million employees – although many of them appear to stand around doing nothing. Fourteen thousand locomotives grace its tracks with black smoke-filled regularity to transport 12 million people a day. Although the fact that every year over 800 people die in train accidents might at first appear to belong in my 3rd category, I have decided to include it here because compared to the government’s other transportation infrastructure, the roads, it’s really very safe. Even though the rail system is the most dangerous in the world, over 85,000 people die each year on the pot-holed, hair-pinned roads so as our principle means of transportation, that factoid makes us feel a little better.

So, how it is. Basically, inefficient, dirty, cheap and the only way to get around. If it were not cheap, we would feel cheated but then you get what you pay for. A sense of properness pervades the system as if Winston Churchill still presides over its daily operations. There are 7 classes of train travel ranging from 1st class “Indian luxury” down to 2nd class hard wooden benches, no windows, cattle-car economy. We have taken the following in descending luxurious order: AC2 (bunks that convert into day seats, divided by curtains, 6 people to a cube and air-conditioning), AC3 (same thing as AC2 except 8 people to a cube and no curtains) and Sleeper (same as AC3 but open windows and no air-con). Quite frankly, they all suck but AC2 is the way to travel, one becomes used to it and may actually sleep for a few hours. The stations also reflect the class structure with waiting rooms of appropriate griminess for the appropriate class. Those in 2nd class or without reservations wait on the platform – literally, they lay out a piece of cardboard and go to sleep right there in the booking office, on the platform, on the steps – thousands of train refugees waiting for a train, I guess, but it’s really hard to know. The ticket collectors are of the old-fashioned variety, too. They all dress smartly, sport a mustache and sign your ticket. It is wise to never cross a ticket collector, they love their jobs and the system and would love nothing more than to throw you from the train. When the passport number I gave for my booking did not match the passport I presented, I was given a very stern lecture on the privilege that it was to book online and therefore, I assume, how privileged I was to be riding this gentleman’s train. He informed me I was falsifying information to a government office and I seriously thought our trip was going to end right there and then.

It appears to us that to reach the stated factoid of 12 million passengers a day, they must all be squeezed, packed and pushed onto one single train. There is often over 20 coaches of which most are unreserved 2nd class (wooden seats, no windows) and because they’re unreserved as many get in the carriage as can get in the carriage or hang out the windows or ride on the steps or grope tenuously to doors and there they stay for the whole 12 hour journey. The other classes are reserved and are often reserved days in advance which makes it tricky for us because we usually have to book our departure as soon as we arrive else we could be stranded in a dump of a town for a week. It’s a real pioneering wild-west railroad spirit even though the reservation system is computer based and works with quite amazing efficiency.

A quick note on efficiency before I move on to what nobody talks about. Trains that go long distances and make few stops are called Express trains. Actually, they have cute names like The Konklan Express that conjure up romantic images of transcontinental rail travel but, they are more express by desire than by execution. Each train ticket has your distance printed on it so out of 3 or 4 express journeys of greater than 400km each I have calculated the average speed to be about 52kmh which is about 33mph – not much of an express.

Now on to what nobody talks about. Firstly, the good stuff. This system is exactly what the people need. It is cheap, reliable and connects every small to midsize town to city in the country. This means that most everyone gets to travel. It is the lifeline, it brings goods in and out and makes the remotest places part of India. People wave when the train goes by and it presents the population with hope that they, too, can move. Whereas some cultures have the church, pub or town hall, India has the railway station to bring together the community. It is an ecosystem, from the stray dogs on the platform through the beggars to the employees and up to the tourists. However, ever ecosystem has its parasites and this is no exception. The level of poverty in the country is apparent when traveling by train, you can see it out the window and then, unfortunately, it taps you on the shoulder. There appears to be no policy for not allowing beggars on the train perhaps because this is the part nobody likes to talk about. Little boys of 6 years of age crawl on their hands and knees on the dirty coach floor with a rag. They make feable attempts to clean beneath your feet and then will beg with grunts for either your food or money. Old men with missing limbs tap your shoulder constantly asking for a hand-out and mothers work the trains with their diaperless, filthy babies. They all look and smell terrible but they’re not always genuine. We’ve heard stories of fathers cutting fingers from their children to make them more sorrowful for begging purposes. We’ve heard of kids putting Vaseline around their eyes to fain weeing. It’s always the kids, child after child looking up at you with practiced and obviously needy eyes. They are all present on the streets, too, but in a train you have no escape. Many a conversation has been had concerning what, if any, to give these people. Begging can be profitable, certainly more profitable than doing nothing, and probably more profitable than the worst jobs imaginable such as road sweeping or latrine cleaning. But should we, as tourists or even as residents, be expected to employ the beggars? Shouldn’t part of our ticket price be a respite from the poverty that surrounds us 24 hours a day? We’re not sure – it’s a complex issue but this is the ecosystem that exists and we as visitors need to remember that we will soon be back to our comfortable standards and when our memories of this experience need to be prompted by this report, this will still be the existence of 12 million people a day over 42,000 miles of track bound together by those concrete ties.

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.

There is, in the center of a 500 year old temle, which sits in the center of a small village called Hampi, which in turn is in the center of the state Karnataka, which itself is virtually in the center of India, an elephant. Her name is Lakshmi and every day she greets pilgrims to this quite centrally located temple. For one rupee she will grant you a blessing. She is probably the most pampered elephant in India, bathes twice a day and wanders the village in her off time. She looks happy. Deep in her dark eyes lies the soul of an elephant who realizes she could be doing a lot worse.

As other posts have told you, traveling in India is hard. Hard on the body, mind and spirit. Sarah and I had spent quite a few of the proceeding hours feeling somewhat glum as the riggors of traveling this great country were starting to take its toll. Trains that were constantly crowded, rarely with a/c, open windows through dust bowls, trips of eight hours on hard seats and the constant presence of beggers throughout the carriages were wearing us down. As we stood and watched Lakshmi give blessings our skepticism stopped us wanting to believe that perhaps faith on our part might produce something special – or perhaps it wouldn’t but nobody’s going to miss one rupee.

On a whim we took a rupee in hand and in turn gave it to the elephant. She moved her trunk over to us, accepted the coin in her upturned snout and deftly delivered the money to her handler. She swung that mighty trunk back around to us and with surprising gentleness, yet with great authority, tapped us on our heads. That was it, one rupee for an elephant trick. We moved on no more enlightened than we were 30 seconds previously.

Later than night we had to catch another night train – the 8.20pm overnight express arriving in Bangalore at 6am. This was not a prospect we were looking forward to. After the usual commotion on the platform and, again, constant begging we climbed aboard the train and made our way to our bunks. Expecting the hoards of Indians in our carriage, we were amazed that there was only one; Indian that is, not hoard. The steward informed us that the whole carriage was empty, we could bunk where we liked. It was clean, the a/c worked and, best of all, not one person even entered the coach once the train started moving. No vendors, no passengers and no beggers. At last, a little haven in the madness and all because Lakshmi, in her infinite elephant wisdom, decided it was time to bless us with a little calm in the maelstrom of subcontinental travel.

If you had to seek emergency medical attention in a foreign country, which country would you choose? India?? Probably not at the top of your list and it wasn’t at the top of mine either but all things considered I’m a very lucky girl and I’m grateful to several people for being able to say that my emergency could not have gone smoother.

It all started over a month ago when, on our Malaysian paradise island, we thought I got sand or something in my right eye resulting in a FREAK amount of unbelievable pain that had me unable to open or close my eye without stabbing pains running through my body. You may wonder, if one can’t open or close one’s eye, how does one avoid the pain? How does one sleep? How does one live without going mad? All excellent questiosn to which I have no answers except to say that after 3 days in bed, miraculously sleeping from the exhaustion of pain, it seemed to just go away and I was able to enjoy 2 days of beach and snorkeling and we thought the whole bizarre episode was behind me forever.

More…Until the overnight train from Bombay to Goa. This pain, how can I describe it?? It’s like *intense* dry eye combined with stinging combined with the feeling of being stabbed in your eye combined with the feeling that something is stuck on the underside of your eye lid. It makes your eye tear constantly (which, by the way, makes your nose run constantly, most inconvenient) and because my right eye would not stay open, my left eye I guess out of sympathy wanted to close as well. So we had to negotiate getting off an Indian Railway train after not having slept all night, through hoards of rick-shaw drivers smothering us for business, to negotiating a ride to the small town we were headed to (bizarre coincidence, another beach town), all with David having to lead me by the hand cause I couldn’t see and was in terrible pain. It was an all too familiar sensation and I as upset that it was happening again, however, since it had gone away the last time I thought perhaps I could just sleep it off that afternon and all would be better in the morning.

Have you ever had someone stab you in the eye over and over? I tell you, it will drive you mad. I felt like a mad woman trying to bite my own cheek when David came back from buying me eye drops the next morning to find me tearing at the bed sheets in a fetal position. I don’t mean to sound dramatic – this really happened. See, while he was gone I’d come to the mildly scary conclusion that I really needed to see a doctor. The prospect of finding a qualified physician in our tiny dust-filled chaotic beach town or in the larger dust-filled, chaotic town 10kms away was just as scary as whatever the heck was going on with my eye.

Here is where the magic begins: The owner of our little hotel was a lovely woman who spoke excellent English and happened, most unpredicably, to have her own eye specialist in Margao, the larger town. She picked up the phone straight away to call and notify the doctor that a foreign guest of hers needed urgent care, she was sending me immediately and she implored that I “please be attended to”. She then called a rick-shaw driver she knew personally who was at the front gate almost immediately and we were being whisked away.

I could hear the frenzy around me as Patrick drove his little rick-shaw as fast it would go through the manic scene that is Margao. Pot-holed, dusty, dirty streets over-flowing with every imaginable auto, rick-shaw, bicycle, pedestrian and livestock, a seemingly lawless road system, a mad cacophony of sounds. He stopped in front of a building that David and I took to be condemned but it turned out to be their city hospital. He led us through a back alley of garbage and rubble, constantly having to urge us along as we stopped time and again in disbelief. We followed Patrick up an unlit and grimey stairwell, down a dark, narrow hallway and through what looked to be a closet door into the office of Dr. O. Moraes de Souza, Eye Specialist and Micro-Surgeon.

The waiting room was a marginally better lit, dark wood panelled box of a room lined with plastic lawn chairs, all of them occupied with waiting patients save for the 3 that David, Patrick and I took. Most of the patients were elderly, some barefoot and all of them – including me – were wearing sunglasses.  That was all there was to the room – no sign-in desk, no receptionist, not even a deli-style number dispenser – only a large wooden door that caused great commotion and disorder amongst the waiting patients whenever it opened. Just as I was wondering how one goes about letting the doctor know you’re there, David said, “our guy is really working hard for us.” Turns out, Patrick had barged right through the wooden door directly into the doctor’s examining room to notify her of my arrival and great “paining”.  A moment later a very young girl, perhaps the doc’s neice or something, was standing in front of me asking “which eye”. In went drops without so much as a word. I hoped they were numbing drops and then knew them to be numbing drops when some ran into my mouth and numbed my tongue. It was like a shot of morphine and instantly nothing was “paining” anymore.

I still have no idea how their waiting room system works because a moment later I think they mercifully bumped me to the front of the queue and I was being beconed through the mysterious wooden door. Inside we met the doctor – a warm and welcoming woman who had me sit in front of the only peice of equipment she had: one of those 1970’s desk-top, bright-light things that you rest your chin on. Without asking me a single question, without having me fill out any forms or health history or without even asking me my name, she got straight to work, shined her light in my eye and said, “oh dear. your eye is in very bad shape. This is much worse than you thought.” I have no idea what she thought I thought due to the aforementioned lack of form filling out, however, the important thing is the very next thing out of her mouth was a diagnosis. I had something called SPK, a very rare virus that she hardly ever sees that kind of forms pits or pot-holes on your cornea.

Just to bring the point home: we were in a ramshackle doctor’s office in the middle of India (OK, in the southcentral coast of India) that didn’t even have an eye chart on the wall much less any fancy equipment and through some devine intervention I’m being seen by not just an eye specialist but a micro-surgeon at that who is instantly able to diagnose a very rare eye condition. Her only form of consultation was to tell me not to worry, everything would be fine and she proceeded to write me out a prescription which was nothing more than a note on her stationary addressed: To Sarah. No last names required.

She handed the note to Patrick along with directions to the nearest and best pharmacy. That was it. I was ushered out of the room, paid the young girl a grand total of RS 150 (about $3.50) and we were off.  I don’t know if it’s because I was a foreigner or if there was actually a method to the madness but I what I anticipated would be a nightmare experience turned out to take much less time and seemed much more efficient than what I probably would have had to deal with at home. And I only ever had to give my first name.

Patrick rushed us to the pharmacy that David says was a rediculous amount of go this counter and then to another counter and then back to the first counter and finally to a third counter but out he came with my magic eye drops and 10 Vitamin C chewable all for about $2. Patrick then asked, “home?” and I was back in my bed away from home before I knew it.  We developed a cute little routine of David doing my eye drops every two hours for the next 5 days and all was back to normal.

In the very next town we were in, our hotel was grimy, no one spoke English, I’m sure they’d never been to a regular doctor much less an eye doctor and the nearest town was about 40 minutes away instead of 10.   As I said, if it had to happen, it really could not have gone smoother.

Bombay, India provides the brain with more stimulus than it can possibly handle. So, in an attempt to ease my cranial meltdown, I have decided to tackle the impossible: boil this sensory bombardment down to its essence, take it to one concept, something as simple as say, one single, solitary word.

I’m a lost cause before I even start. Not even the city name itself can be just one word. In 1996, as part of India’s re-indianization, Bombay was renamed Mumbai. Both names are used interchangeably and provide the inspiration for my word of the day: “elasticity”. Bombay (or Mumbay as I have started to call it) is a spralling mass of humanity, a city of infinate wealth and of absurd poverty. It is the New York, Los Angeles and Miami of India. It is home to the largest number of billionaires in the whole of Asia, its movie industry grosses more money each year than Hollywood yet the slums of Bombay are as extensive as those in Sao Paulo or South Africa. 16 million people call this city home, ironically many of them don’t have a structure to actually call home.

You can see elasticity everywhere on both the micro and macro scale. 16 million people moving around a geographically constrained city and rarely do people bump into each other and when they do, nobody pays it any mind. Imagine the chaos of Xmas shopping at Bellevue Square or Oxford Street, multiply it by 100 and now picture no visable annoyances when someone’s personal space is invaded. That’s what parts of Bombay are like every single day of every single year. However, unlike a major western city during rush hour when everyone is heading in almost the same direction, there is no flow here. People walk, drive, ride and take their oxen in any direction they please at any time they please. The crowd just convexes like a rubber balloon, absorbs the bulge and returns to its previous shape.

Traffic is, of course, insane and our taxi was involved in a minor scrape with another car. The resultant sound was that usual horrible metal on metal crunch but when we looked out the window elasticity has already occurred and we couldn’t see any damage. Both drivers gave a thumbs up and moved on.

The architecture in Bombay is wonderful. When the British arrived with all that Victorian pomp and circumstance, it never occurred to them they should do anything to reflect the local culture in their new buildings – nope, they basically rebuilt London but with wider streets and bigger round-abouts. The buildings are huge, massive domed libaries, train stations, town halls and museums built in finest sandstone and granite. The leafy side streets contain lovely Victorian town houses with room for servants and personal transportation. But these buildings are all in decay now – they sit there waiting for elasticity to return them to their former glory.

The young, rich Bombay-ites don’t appear to be interested in the buildings that their British counterparts would, in a heartbeat, turn into London apartments worth millions of dollars; they’re more interested in building up. Upwards from the dirt and the grime, upwards to a better life. Malabar Hill, overlooking the fascinating but grotty Chowpatty Beach, is turning into a high-rise comdominium conundrum. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of world class living and world class deprivation. Some would say this is urban renewal, the new Mumbai making its way into the developed world. I call it elasticity. When something stretches it doesn’t become something new, it is just an elongated and strained version of its former self. The upper class of Bombay are no better than the colonial British that came before them. In fact, they could be worse: at least the British were interested in building infrastructure. When elasticity strikes, when all that potential energy is released, Bombay is going to snap back hard. However, unlike the British, the Indians appear to be the masters of elasticity so I’m sure they’ll roll with it, give each other a thumbs up and move on.