The Sights, The Sounds, The Suicidal Bus Drivers – India and Nepal

The Sights, The Sounds, The Suicidal Bus Drivers
India and Nepal

The minute you step off the plane in India it’s mayhem, bedlam, heat and filth. Nothing in the west had prepared me for the surreal, chaotic streets of New Delhi. You had the feeling that all law and order had broken down and survival was the only goal.

Dusk was settling over the trash-strewn roads and people were lighting small fires in the roadside gutters to prepare their evening meal. The smoke from the flames, mixed with vehicle exhaust, created an eerie scene in the fading light.

All around was hustle and noise, and being a westerner I was the target of constant hassle.

“Come to my hotel. I own very fine hotel, cheap, not far.”
“Rickshaw? Where you go?”
“Money change? I make very good rate.”

As I pushed my way out of the airport it was relentless. At six feet tall I stood head and shoulders above most of the locals, which made it difficult to hide in the crowd, especially heaving around a rucksack the size of a bathtub on my back.

Everyone either owned a hotel or had a brother that owned one and would give us “very good rate.”

I’m a British guy who has been living in America for the last 15 years. I’m in my mid/late thirties and suddenly got a wild hair to go traveling. For the previous year two of my sisters had been planning a round the world trip and at the last minute I decided to join them. Kathi and Jaqui left from England and had arrived in India a week ahead of me.

As I looked around in bewilderment I suddenly heard a yell above the cacophony. “Steve!” I turned my head to see two enthusiastic English girls wading through the crowd, waving and shouting at me.

They found a taxi for us, haggled a price, and we were off. I soon found out that you always agree on the fare first and then travel rather than tell the taxi driver where you want to go and when you arrive he decides all by himself what the fare will be.

Jaqui and Kathi had talked my mother into going on the trip with them for at least the first month. Because I had not seen my mother for such a long time, we had decided to surprise her with my presence. It was late by the time we finally arrived at the hotel and so I was smuggled into a room where I crashed, exhausted, until the following day.

I had to walk past her three times the next morning before she finally looked up from reading her book, saw me and then immediately carried on reading. She probably read about two more sentences before her brain quietly told her that her first born, who was supposed to be in America, had just walked past. She then shrieked out loud, dropped the book and leaped to her feet. We were all seriously worried that she might have a heart attack!

Because Mum and the girls had already been in Delhi for a week we immediately left for Nepal, high in the Himalayan Mountains between India and China.

The train stations in India are like being dropped onto a strange new planet and trying to make sense of utter insanity! People are everywhere. Whole families fill almost every inch of floor space. I think it’s where they live.

The ticket office has rows of windows with enormous lines of people in front of them. They look like they have been waiting days to get a ticket, and probably have. We tried to stand in various lines but everyone kept shaking their heads at us and pointing further down the row of windows. It seems that there are different windows for different people. One, for instance was just for women. Ours had a sign saying “Members of Parliament”, “Foreign Tourists” and “Freedom Fighters”. I’m sure everyone kept pointing us to this window because we were obviously foreign tourists, rather than freedom fighters. Although I don’t know that for sure.

We found our platform, made a big pile of rucksacks and waited. A cow slowly ambled down the railway tracks, foraging for what I have no idea. Eventually the train arrived, causing everyone on the platform to start shouting and waving at the cow trying to make it move out of the way. At the very last minute, realizing that something large was barreling down on it, the cow hopped on to the next track.

I tried to picture a cow wandering down the railway tracks at a station in Washington. It’s very unlikely that it would happen, but in India it’s totally normal.

If you plan on going to India and will be using the trains, take a catapult to shoot at the rats on the tracks. I’m not saying this facetiously, I mean it. The train won’t be on time and this will keep you occupied until it arrives. Although now that I think about it, rats are probably sacred or something so it might be best to ask first.

Our train journey was a long one and so we had booked onto what Indians call the sleeper. Carriages with hinged wooden arrangements that serve as back rests during the day and fold down to make bunks at night. There are three to a wall, the top one being perilously far from the floor but a more difficult climb for cockroaches. The reason I consider it to be a bit of a stretch calling the train a “Sleeper” is because you get no sleep at all! All through the night, the train stops at different stations about every 45 minutes and vendors clamber aboard shouting as loud as they can! The most common item for sale is “chai”. A deliciously sweet cup of tea often served in small disposable clay pots. It costs about 3 rupees per cup and because it was available everywhere we went, it was my novice opinion that India was one of the most civilized places on earth.

If you are ever the houseguest of friends that have traveled in India do this: Get quietly out of bed, one night at about 4:30 am, stand just outside their bedroom door and start shouting “CHAI, CHAI, CHAI” as loud as you can. They’ll think it’s funny and thank you for bringing back many happy memories of their Indian travels.

Another common item hawked up and down the carriages of trains are short, pencil length twigs. People were handing over money for these things and so I thought they must be of some value, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what.

I later saw a man attacking his teeth and gums with one and I realized they are used instead of toothbrushes. He was really giving it beans and seemed to be quite pleased with the results, giving me a large wide grin displaying his remaining teeth.

One thing that we did not realize until half way through our travels is that when you book a bunk on a train, it is only yours from 9pm until 8am. And so at 8 o’clock in the morning you must fold it up and let others sit down.

We had no idea. I remember waking up the next morning at about 11am. The bunks across the centre aisle from us were folded away and about 13 Indians were sitting on a space that should hold five. They were all just sitting quietly, staring at us while we slept.

Still not knowing that we no longer had any rights to these bunks we slowly woke up, collected all our stuff and by about 1pm folded our beds away. Some of the Indians opposite immediately, and much to our annoyance, switched to our side. All that time they never said a word. I know I would have. At 8am on the dot I’d have been shaking someone shouting “Hey Buddy, you don’t live here you know!”

In Gorakhpur we had to either change trains or catch a bus, but I can’t remember which. Either way I know it’s somewhere I never want to have to go back to. There are some stunningly beautiful places in India and then there are places like Gorakhpur. I don’t mean to hurt the civic pride of the residents of Gorakhpur but it has to be said, the place is a shit hole! Rotting, rat ridden, piles of garbage line the roads, much worse than in other towns we visited. I can’t remember how long we were there or how we left but I knew I didn’t want to go back!

Eventually we left the train and boarded a bus to Sonali on the border of India and Nepal. This was my first experience of an Indian road and, because I wasn’t driving, it seemed OK. Very colourful in fact. We would pass water buffalo shuffling along the road, piled high with green stuff from the fields, and a man out for a ride on a small wobbly scooter, taking along his wife, his two sons, their newborn baby, his mother-in-law and some chickens.

As we neared the border, the low flat fields gradually gave way to higher and steeper inclines, slowly preparing us for our ascent into the highest mountain range in the world.

Visas for India have to be obtained in advance of your travel but to enter Nepal you can arrange them at the border. We did this and then found a bus headed to Kathmandu. Now things really start to climb. Up until this point in my life I hadn’t realized that Kathmandu really existed. It was a kind of mythical place of legend and song and now, here I was on a bus going there! Far Out (as they say).

Sitting on a bus, only inches from a thousand-foot drop and speeding round blind hairpin bends on the wrong side of the road is something I’d never done before. Instead of being completely terrified, as I should have been, it was actually quite exhilarating. Because our mother has a terrible fear of heights, we had to go to great lengths to keep our hands clamped firmly over her eyes, but even she seemed quite calm after a while. She reasoned that these guys do this all day, every day, and that we were safe because they know what they are doing.

It turns out that this logic is hopelessly mistaken and we later learned that busses full of hapless tourists and unfortunate locals regularly plunge off the side of a cliff but we never let her know that!

When I say that drivers go round a blind curve on the wrong side of the road, I’m not just saying that for dramatic effect. They do. At least our drivers did. Every curve they came to. There might be five slow moving trucks crawling up a steep section of road and our guy would just swing out into the oncoming lane and crawl past them. It might take him a while and he would encounter several vehicles coming the other way who have to slam on their brakes and swerve, but he’d do it!

I think the attitude of everyone on the road is either, “I know it’s my lane but there is probably someone around that bend coming straight toward me at high speed, so I must be ready” or “I know I’m in the wrong lane but they can all just GO TO HELL!”

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Nepal

If you plan on going to Nepal someday, here is a tip that will stop you from looking like a complete wanker in front of the locals. To play a little joke on foreigners who come up from India, everyone in Nepal has set their clocks forward 15 minutes. We had been in Nepal for four or five days before we realized this and only then because we were sitting in a bar for about a quarter of an hour waiting patiently for “Happy Hour” to start not realizing that it actually started 13 minutes ago! My sisters were pissed off knowing they will never be able to get back that lost 13 minutes!

Once we arrived in Kathmandu we explored the ancient city on cycle rickshaws. They are great fun to use, but here is an interesting tip. It’s very unlikely that the rickshaw owner will be unable to speak English, but he won’t let you know that. You will therefore tell him where you want to go, haggle a price, and all the time he has no clue what you are saying except rupee prices.

“How much to take me to the Freak Street?” You’ll say. He has no idea where you want to go, only that you want to go somewhere.
“100 Rupees,” he will reply.
You smile at him trying to give your face the expression that conveys you know he is trying to pull a fast one and are having none of it.

“20 Rupees,” you reply.
“Oh no, no, no, no,” he will say, “80 Rupees.”

You both know that you will end up paying 50 Rupees, but there is a certain song and dance that you both have to perform to get there.
“30 Rupees,” you say, pulling your pockets inside out to show him you have no money. You do this completely ignoring the enormous backpack hanging from your shoulders that is probably stuffed with cash.

He will shake his head vigorously, smiling all the while, and say, “60 Rupees.”
“50 Rupees and that’s my final offer.”
“Ah, yes,” he’ll say wiggling his head in many directions as he motion’s toward the seat for you to climb aboard.

Remember he has no clue as to where he is taking you, but it doesn’t matter, because wherever it is, he is charging you at least twice what he would charge a local. As soon as you sit down he will start pedaling in the direction he was facing before you arrived, searching for someone wearing a tie. It is probable that a man wearing a tie in India or Nepal will be able to speak English.

I presumed each time he stopped and spoke in Hindi to someone, it was a friend of his and he was asking how he or she were doing. After pedaling for about a quarter of a mile and two brief conversations with passersby, he would say something to someone who would then turn to me and ask.

“Where you want to go”?

I would happily tell him, presuming that he was just making conversation with me. He would address the rickshaw guy who would then invariably turn around and pedal back the way we had come. This is all done so cleverly that for the longest time I had no idea they could not understand me. I would even make conversation as we traveled and they were able to answer me in such a way that made me think they were following along.

One of the tricks up their sleeves is the head wiggle. Nepalese and Indians often answer a question with a strange wobbling of the head that looks like both a shake and a nod at the same time. In this way they are able to correctly answer any question you ask of them.

The two types of rickshaw are the pedal type, which is a bench mounted behind a single cyclist, and the motorized kind, a small three-wheeled machine that tips over going round corners. The pedal type is really for two people but you can, if you really try, get three large westerners and all their luggage on one. At slight inclines one of you will have to get off and push. Timing it just right to climb back on before going down hill can be tricky but fun. To be fair though, tip the guy well, it can’t be an easy job. Every time you travel in a motorized rickshaw you’ll think it’s going to tip over on corners, but I actually saw it happen only once.

Here is an example of why you should do things yourself rather than buying a packaged tour. We went riding on the back of elephants, rhino spotting in Chitwan national park, and my sisters and mum were on one elephant and I was on another with three strangers. One of the other members of my group was an Australian guy who had heard from someone else that they only paid $200 US dollars for the same trip from Kathmandu and he was upset because he had paid $250. He asked the person behind me how much they had paid and got really annoyed when he found out that it was only $185. I’m glad he didn’t ask me because we had done everything ourselves. We had taken a rickshaw to the bus station in Kathmandu, bought our own tickets to Chitwan. Found our own rooms, paid for our own meals and drinks and went in search of an elephant owner on our own. Adding in the cost of a return bus ride to Katmandu we paid about $27 US dollars each!

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After about a month in the mountain kingdom we started heading downhill to rejoin the rest of the flatlanders and spend Christmas in Goa, a small state on the west coast of India.

I am a total idiot it must be said.

Kathi and Jaqui had been talking about spending Christmas in Goa ever since we started upon our journey and all the time I thought that Goa was a town, not realizing that it was a state covering some 3,702 square kilometers. It seemed that every westerner we met was heading to Goa for the yuletide season and I was getting really worried thinking that if we didn’t get a move on, all the hotels would be full. Very similar to the birth of Jesus story except that none of us were virgins.

Being a tourist, you are a very desirable passenger to any rickshaw driver as they will be able to fleece you something wicked. Because of this, every time you leave an airport, bus terminal or railway station you will be besieged with rickshaw drivers offering “very good rate”. It’s annoying to know you are being greatly overcharged, but remember that they will be overcharging you the equivalent of pack of gum back home.

The main problem is simply being hassled. The girls and I got so sick of it, along with the hellish ordeal of buying a train ticket, that we decided to buy motorcycles and travel under our own steam. It turns out that there is a Factory in Madras that makes old English Royal Enfield motorbikes. They now simply call them Enfields but the only difference between them today and back in 1958 is that they now have electric indicators.

The decision to ride bikes was made after fighting my way out of a railway station in Lucknow and seeing one of these bikes in the parking lot. It looked like something a fifties greaser had just parked to go into a milk bar somewhere. I had to have one.

Luckily both Kathi and Jaqui were up for the idea, and so we went in search of a dealer. Our hopes were somewhat dashed when the dealer at Swastika Automobiles informed us that there was a three-month waiting list for a new bike. We would have to buy second hand machines. As luck would have it we met a couple of westerners on Enfields who told us “Na, the best place to buy Enfields is in Karol Bagh in New Delhi. You can get new ones straight away there.”

We were off.

The New Bikes

I bought a new 500cc bike out of the showroom and my sisters each bought a used 350cc bike. We had them fitted with panniers and racks for all our luggage and had the long bench seats replaced with single sport seats, they just look cooler.

Kathi had never even sat on a motorcycle before, let alone tried to ride one and yet she bought one and spent an afternoon learning how by driving round and round the very busy roundabout of Connaught Place right in the middle of New Delhi!

One incident that I’m particularly proud of happened on the train from New Delhi to Bombay. We had decided that with Kathi’s inexperience on a motorcycle it would be best to avoid the very busy roads of the capital city and leave Delhi by train. So after an enormous amount of hassle, pleading and swearing, we finally had the bikes drained, wrapped and loaded, along with us, on the sleeper train to Bombay. As dusk fell and it started getting darker and darker I was having a hard time reading. When we went round a bend I could see that all the other carriages had their lights on but not ours. I fought my way to the end of our carriage to where a large crowd was gathered. It seems that the knob for the light switch had broken off and the conductor and a few others were trying to twist the remaining piece of metal with their fingers. Just before leaving America I had bought a few things from an outdoor shop, and a penknife that was also a pair of pliers had caught my eye. I couldn’t imagine when I might need such a thing, but being a guy was all the reason I needed and so I bought it. Here was my great moment. I found the penknife and reached between the throng, gripped the metal stub of the switch. With one easy turn all the lights in the carriage snapped on. I think at that moment I justified every guy and his love of gadgets.

I was the hero of our carriage and the group of men that had been struggling with the switch all wanted to see my knife so that they could marvel. The conductor then did a strange thing. He opened one of the blades, a serrated one that was as sharp as could be, and to test its sharpness he cut into his thumb. I don’t think he expected it to do much and so was quite startled when it cut deep! Instantly I expected the worst, and was sure he would start shouting at me and have the three of us thrown from the moving train. But instead he started showing his thumb around as people went “Ooooh and aahhh.”

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Goa

Sunbathing on the beach in Goa can rather be exciting. You’ll be lying there with your eyes closed softly, baking in the hot sun, when a shadow falls across your face. You’ll slowly open your eyes to see a bull the size of a Chevy less than a foot away, horns like bayonets. You’ll quietly gather your towel and lotion and move further down the beach, not so much out of fear (although that does play a part), but more because you don’t want to be shit on! Having a bull shit on you while sunbathing would make you look about as silly as is possible. Amongst all the other foreigners you would then become known as “the guy who got shit on,” which would make it much harder to pick up girls.

Bulls, like cows, are sacred in India and so they pretty much do as they please. Every Wednesday in Anjuna, there was a flea market. It was held down by the beach. The makeshift stalls covered about an acre and left walkways between the rows of vendors just wide enough for two people to squeeze by. Bulls would often wander down the narrow isles and everyone just moved out of their way. One of the Wednesdays that I didn’t go, two huge Bulls got into a nasty argument over a female. It was like a rodeo, apparently with the two bulls charging each other, locking horns and leaping and smashing over everything. When it was over the Indian stall owners just dusted off their wares and carried on as though it was normal.

Christmas in Goa was fantastic but one can only take so much frolicking and so during the second or third week of January we loaded up the Enfields, lashed down the extra fuel container and headed south.

We continued our India trip through Udupi, Mysore, Bangalore and on to Chennai (Madras) where we had two of the bikes shipped back to the west. After India, we flew to Sri Lanka then on to Thailand, then overland to Malaysia and Singapore. I left the girls then and flew to Australia for a month and then back to America.

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Crap

You need to be told that on any trip to India, excreta, in all its various forms, will play a major part. There’ll be your own panic when you have your first case of “Delhi Belly”. You’ll enter into denial when someone informs you that what you just ate was cooked using cow shit, and you’ll gasp in utter shock the first time someone has a crap on a street corner next to you. To anyone from the west it is a most sacred and understood right that we enter alone, into a small room built solely for the purpose of hiding us while performing the most basic of all natures functions.

Not in India.

Whereas in the west, one would be mortified if the bathroom door accidentally opened, it doesn’t seem to faze Indians one bit that 600 people on a passing train all know that they had corn for dinner. Maybe we should learn to lighten up a bit!

Indians have no need for toilet paper, preferring to simply use their left hand instead and so it is only sold where tourists can be found. Buy three or four rolls at a time and always, always, always carry a roll in your day bag!

I don’t think that the smiling storeowners who sell the strange round rolls of paper have any idea what we do with it. And I think it’s best that we don’t tell them. They do not use utensils when eating and because of this only eat with their right hand.

One thing that I didn’t think of until after my return to the west was that because of this, they therefore consider their left hand as “dirty.” So, I am presuming that all the cooks, in all the restaurants in which I ate, prepared my food by cleverly only using their right hand. I mean after all, if they will not use their own left hand to eat I’m sure they wouldn’t use it to make my sandwich!