A Round-the-World Journey to Find a New Home #21

Back to India

The last remnants of amber golden tinge, the colour of a gold foil top on a bottle full cream milk; sunrise over the outskirts of Kolkata as seen from the 2703 express out of Howrah station. Unfortunately, the view is spoiled by the decaying buildings, makeshift homes and the daily morning ritual of so many Indians of squatting in full view while undertaking their constitutional. It doesn’t conjure up the most romantic thoughts but does bring back fond memories of India, albeit in a rather abstract way.

Having taken a lengthy sabbatical from writing I now have found the renewed inspiration to put pen to paper and then fingers to keyboard to resume my diary. Dear Travelogue, how I have missed you, blah blah blah… Having spent a considerable time in Thailand and feeling constantly unfulfilled, we decided to up and off to pastures new, or rather pasture’s old to be revisited. Whatever I may have said in the past, India still does hold certain magic and remains probably my favorite country I have ever visited. So here we are, on route via Nepal to Africa, in a constant quest for our goal, that is; a new home and somewhere to settle, and start a business of some sort! Although this has been faded somewhat by our stay in Thailand.

After completing my Divemaster in the Gili’s just off the North-West corner of Lombok earlier this year, we returned to Thailand where I got a job as a Divemaster with a company on Koh Lanta to start with the season in November. On arrival on Lanta pre-season, there was not much to do and we dropped into a drinking-because-bored scenario whilst waiting for the season to come upon us. We should have realized at that point that Lanta was not the place for us, and in retrospect neither was Thailand. We have been in Thailand for over a year only taking periodic times away. Now I have nothing against Thailand, however too much of a good thing etc… The diving was good, money was enough to substantially reduce our delving into money at home, covering the majority of living expenses and the motorbike hire, but our lives seemed a little static. Neither of us fancied Thailand as a permanent home, yet here we were living as if it was.

After a Christmas of memory failure, we firmly decided that that was the last straw and staying on till New Year would be foolish. (As it happened a diving colleague dove after a serious drinking session at New Year and ended up in Phuket receiving treatment for decompression sickness at the hyperbaric chamber!!!) WE decided it was time to leave to get back in our traveling shoes and leave Thailand. We spent New Years in Bangkok which was fantastic with a huge firework display and a beer festival outside the World Trade Center, all in sardine-like conditions. It actually reminded me of New Years at home at Trafalgar Square, although a lot less drunken due to the slightly straighter style of the Thais as compared to the out-of-control-drinking of the British! So we flew to where we felt the calling, back to India.

Kolkata (used to be Calcutta but they changed the name, why to a name so similar to the original is beyond me) and it’s sooooo cold here, only a mere 20�C (which I suppose is quite reasonable for other places, England included when we would be out in shorts on a summers day with that degree of heat!) But it’s freezing compared to what we are used to, days of 30�C+ in the southern compartments of S.E. Asia. Despite the apparent coolness, we had many deja vous, as we took a walk through the streets and alley of this town, we kept finding ourselves pointing out places we’d been to previously and restaurants we had enjoyed food at.

“Ooooh look there, that’s where we found we could buy marmite,” and “Didn’t they do excellent chicken tikka masala in there?” and so on…

In the evening the food sellers and their stalls seemingly mystically appeared from nowhere, concentrating around New Market and Sudder Street, all shouting in a cacophony of voices advertising their morsels with great gusto to anyone within hearing distance and who was listening. Crowds thronged around, tasting the delectable delicacies available, the atmosphere buzzes; the food tantalizes the taste buds, even more so than the Thai food that had always been a strong favorite of mine (boredom?). The crowds and constant noise and activity of India seem infinitely more absorbing, the colours of the spices and fruits, the smells (and stenches) all bring about a powerful feeling within, of expectation and intrepidation, of exhilaration and infatuation for what is about to happen. Ah, this is India, it welcomes you into its embrace of culture, tradition; where the hassle is constant and bureaucracy is second to none, but we love it. But by God, it’s cold!

We are given a water heating element, an enlarged version of what’s inside your electric kettle at home, it gives you a hefty shock if you try to test the water temperature when it’s still plugged in. At 04:30am we get up to heat the bucket of water for the morning shower, it takes ages and we haven’t got time so we share a lukewarm bucket between us. An hour later we are on the train to Bhubaneswar in Orissa State, woefully underdressed for the morning temperatures. Layers of summer clothing just don’t cut the mustard, what we need is a Polartech Himalayan thickness warmy! (Warmy is what we fondly call a fleece type thing; warmy is a Jake and Eddie type thing…) So there we were, traveling second b***dy freezing class having vetoed the A/C carriage that we used to swear by, sipping many a sweet cup of chai in a vague attempt to warm us up. Every time the vendor comes by we purchased yet another one, and the cold is playing havoc with my bladder! Outside a haze lies over the mixed flat landscape of crop fields and industrial plants, nay, tiz be not haze, but mist godzads, where fore art the warmth of the sun, me thinks?

We trundled on through the West Bengali countryside, rattling over iron girder bridges that reverberate, past small, minor stations that only the slowest of slow local trains bother to stop at, with their passengers waiting with foreboding, “oh no, the train’s late again” looks. Wrapped in blankets and headscarves, stamping their feet and huddling in small groups. Through fields and small towns, smaller villages still, on and on. The sights of that outside world holding my gaze, cows sifting through rubbish, goats eating cardboard wrappers of sweet packets, kids sucking on a fistful of fingers…

A beggar with an impossible looking configuration of spindly thin legs, knees around his chin, pulls himself across the floor with plastic bag hands. As he works his way down the corridor he has a captive audience, or rather an audience that are in captivity. They can’t walk off, so they eventually give a few rupees. Neat trick I think, the only way to get the man to move on, and so he does, he shuffles off to the next poor victim (as he is himself I might add) in his raggy checked shirt and scarf firmly wrapped around his head to keep out the cold. Five or six minutes later, his twin brother emerges, looking slightly younger it has to be said but with an almost identical configuration of limbs, this time with flip flop sandals on his hands… Double dastardly sneaky, me thinks!

The air warms as the day went on, layers of clothes were discarded and even the window opened, the socks that we wore with our sandals have now been discarded too, thank God. It is seriously not a good look, but needs must eh? The scenery has changed, the mist has definitely turned into haze, and the land is as flat as a frog that’s been run over several times and baked in the sun. Almost dry riverbeds that now have just a shallow but wide trickle break the monotony where people bathe and wash multi-coloured sheets of cloth, and kids play naked in the water. In about an hour or so we will arrive in Bhubaneswar.

(A few days later…)

Well now, what a stimulating few days we spent in Orissa. It seems a very poor state, in a poor state. The people are extremely friendly, however, like best friends at reunions, especially a rickshaw driver to whom we donated a ¼ bottle of Indian Whiskey to because it tasted like something you didn’t really want to be drinking, unless you were a desperate wino about to kick the bucket from an excruciatingly painful affliction. He seemed to enjoy it though, and had all the right effects; he turned up at our door thanking us profusely in a slurred manner and gave us a packet of cigarettes in return.

We spent a day wandering the temples of Bhubaneswar which were interesting but same-same, and the only one we particularly wanted in at was charging non-Indians 2000% more than Indians, which we thought was a bit steep. So we didn’t go in on a principle thing, and it broke our budget, and we wouldn’t be able to eat for a week at least! In Puri, a morning walking around looking for temples we found we weren’t allowed into! Oh and a government garden that was a dry, barren area of wasteland which looked as if had been abandoned an eon ago, or they were onto a new way of horticulture. A 50 km trip to Chilka that managed to take over three hours to complete was undertaken only to find Chilka was not worth visiting (unless you are a very keen bird watcher, apparently) and promptly got out of there on the next available bus after, it has to be said, a particularly fine vegetable curry was consumed.

The food, however, was as good as ever, although we are finding that the supposedly cheap and cheerful are not very cheerful, and more expensive than the better places as they tend to see a foreigner and rip them off! So, lesson learnt, and they are currently losing out on our business. Tough titties is what I say!

We have managed to locate a purveyor of the gold nectar that is Godfather Beer. Definitely better than the other possibly the best beer in the world brand, it’s a strong delicious concoction that tickles the palate and caresses the bodily parts that other beers just miss altogether. It’s a brew that we favored on our last trip and it is like revisiting an old friend. There is a silver lining to every cloud.

Konark and it’s renowned Sun Temple was a place that we decided not to stay at but to visit on our way back to Bhubaneswar from Puri (thank God). Again, a seriously inflated price of (only) 1000%, but of a higher starting cost persuaded us not to purchase a ticket for that monument. We were though, able to afford a particularly good view from the wall surrounding the place – free, in fact, and to me largely a better option. The temple is on an Indian tourist day-trip route it appears, and was crawling with said day-trippers within the walls we stood upon. The swarms of Indians were screeching and milling around the monuments rather like ants around a discarded piece of chicken tikka I thought, except ants don’t screech, but if they did, this it what it would be like.

The grounds were in a beautiful garden setting, but someone had left the hose pipe on and had flooded them, although the locals on a day rip thought this was great fun too, sloshing around making the lovely gardens a mud bath. To cap it all, the main temple was enshrouded with a thick layer of scaffolding so visually impenetrable that you couldn’t make out a single, intricately carved figure. Thankfully, the museum was very affordable, only 5 Rs, and had a fine display of original relics from the monument which were very easy to view without the impediment of a cloak of steel piping.

Back in Bhubaneswar, we attempted one last time at going to look at something that was tagged a “tourist attraction” – the caves just a few kilometers north of the town were reputed to be worth a look-see. Another 2000% hike of entrance fees for the poor, unassuming non-Indian, so we left them out altogether and opted to climb a hill on the opposite side of the road to find that not only did it give us an almost perfect view of the “paying caves” (which actually confirmed that it was the right decision not to cough up the dosh to enter, as it seemed that the day trip bus stopped here too, and the caves looked a little uninspiring), but also that the hill we were on had caves very similar to the ones across the road to ponder at, incredulously… half an hour and 50grams of very tasty roasted ground nuts later, we were on our merry way back to our hotel.

This trip is fast becoming less of a sightseeing venture, and more of a culinary expedition into the gastric delights of Indian cuisine, for everywhere we go, even if we don’t see anything, we do engage ourselves in some pretty amazing food, and I am not complaining. The food can be so cheap that you can eat like a king for a whole day and spend a fraction of the cost of getting into a major monument. It does seem that so far, wherever we go we are finding the price-tag of the sights cost prohibitive and settle for some local dishes at an appropriate vendor of tasty local morsels. A truly stomach pleasing affair.

Anyway, to continue with food, the final evening was spent at a fine little eatery outside the Padma Hotel where we were staying. The people here were extremely nice, where we gorged on a juicy slab of tandoori chicken, a lush salad the size of a meteor crater, chapati’s and mixed fried rice for a smidgen under a quid. It was quite the tastiest meal we have had for a while.

Here ends our time in Orissa, and this travelogue. I will be feverishly onto the next one tomorrow as I have got a huge backlog of notes to transfer to PC. So ta ta for now.

Next stop Hampi.