Our adventures in India

India, the mysterious. India, the unpredictable.

India had been in my dreams ever since I watched “The Jungle Book” movie when I was a child. The jungle, the panthers, Shere Khan; all of them waiting for me to go and see them! The mystical journeys of the Buddha, the temples and traditions, I wanted to see it all.

We should start by saying that you should forget the documentaries and movies you have seen, the music you have heard, the Indian food you have tried; nothing can prepare you for what you will find once you arrive. Brace yourself for constant noise and horn honking. As a foreigner (especially as a woman), be ready to be stared upon in ways you have never been stared upon before anywhere else in the world and to understand that “personal space” is a concept that does not exist in India. Smells, fumes and trash mixed with humidity and heat, which will make your attempts to see Indian cities shorter than you had anticipated. Get ready for bargaining your way through every single thing you want to obtain. Be prepared to accept that most people around you, especially in the big cities or the tourist areas, are not reliable and/or are working on commission for somebody else, so they will try to make money from you. Every single tuk-tuk, taxi, car, bus ride you take (for which the price has been previously agreed) can be re-negotiated on arrival if the driver feels like it. Be ready to speak to 10 different people in different offices until you finally understand what you need to do and reconfirm that the prices you have been given are correct. Be very aware that as a woman, your opinion counts for nothing and all men (and many times women) in India will address your husband and not you. As a matter of fact, as a woman, most people will not even greet or acknowledge you.

Our journey in India started on April 28th 2016 in New Delhi, which we reached after 24 hours of flying from Durban, almost losing our flight connection in Johannesburg, and then on to Paris until we finally reached India late in the night. We stayed close to the airport, which turned out to be the place where we ended up spending ten days because the room was good, quiet, had good food and we could rest well after sixty some days driving a car around Southern Africa.

In Delhi, we did day trips “into” New Delhi center (which was one and a half hour in metro from where we stayed) and managed to visit Lal Qila (Red Fort), Jama Masjid (the Mosque) and Gurudwara Sisganj Sahib (a Sikh temple) in the Old Delhi area called Chandni Chowk. Other days we went to the Akshardham (Hindu temple), Connaught Place, the Gandhi Memorial (which is not impressive at all), Khan Market and spent some hours traveling back and forth to get vaccines and buy train tickets at the Central Station. Besides the long distances you need to travel, Delhi (and northern India in general) is not an easy place to “move around”. Bureaucracy is one of India’s most notorious problems. When you are trying to get things done in Chile, people many times send you back and forth to different offices; but in India this seems to be the standard operating procedure for everything you need to do and on every little thing you want to achieve. It gets tiring to say the least.

It’s funny the things that surprise you most as a foreigner when you visit a different country. To me it was very interesting how women in India always wear sarees (not saris, as we say in Spanish). By always, I mean always. Women in India work in construction sites, carrying bricks on their heads (while the men build), plowing the fields in the country side, breaking rocks along the highways, etc. Always dressed in a saree. It’s important to say, that just like in any country, India has modern cities and rich areas where people dress in western style, sip coffee from Starbucks and play with their iPhones just like we do. I’m just making a comment on the things that struck me as different from our culture because you see it more often than you would in our countries. We seem to always be dressed alike.

Another obvious cultural shock for us, was the morning rituals of people that live in the poor areas, which were very visible for us from the trains. Let’s just say we all need to relief our bodies in the morning and we do it in our bathrooms. Indians do it outside in the open while they stare at the trains passing by. Since you never see a toilet paper roll near these people, we decided it was better to avoid any kind of street food all together during our time in India. It was a wise decision.

Looking at Indian people, talking to them (or “trying to talk to them”), makes you realize how different their culture is from ours. We in America are a mix of races. We learned from the original inhabitants but also from the immigrants. India seems not to have mix of races. It seems like they all come from an ancient race that has not changed much over the years. There have never been large scale migrations into India as we had in America. The past is part of the present and the future much more than it is in other countries I have visited. Most importantly, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and other religions seem to live together in relative harmony (with the obvious exceptions of the border areas such as Kashmir). This cannot have been achieved easily. After all Nehru said the hardest thing he did in his life was to create a “secular state in a religious country. Modern India must remain neutral in matters of religion”.

After ten days, we decided to travel east and visit Agra to see the Taj Mahal. We stayed two days there so we could visit the Taj early in the morning. It was a good idea and we enjoyed it a lot. The area and the monument are beautiful, the surroundings are quiet and though there are a lot of visitors, it’s worth paying a visit. Agra is another story.

From Agra we started a trip through Rajasthan and we visited Jaipur, Ranthambore National Park, Udaipur and Pushkar, returning thereafter to Delhi to get our second vaccine shot. Rajasthan is dry and like places in other countries we have visited on this trip, it’s been undergoing a serious drought for the last 10 years. Pushkar for example, used to be an agricultural area. Today they had to reconvert to tourism and other activities because they have tried drilling 400 meters deep in search of water and they still haven’t found much; so the agricultural prospects are not there anymore.

Ranthambore was by far the highlight of our Rajasthan trip and we managed to see four different tigers in three days; one of them eating a deer it had caught the night before. We had obviously never seen tigers in the wild before, so this was very impressive for us. But it was also interesting to learn that the tour guides are local people who used to live in villages inside the park poaching animals. Now, instead of poaching the animals to sell their body parts, they get their income from guiding tourists, so all tours inside Ranthambore are paid to and controlled by the government. This is also necessary in a country where people are not known for being quiet or respectful of animals in general, so while the level of hassle to the animals is much higher than it is in African parks; it is lower than it could be if access for private cars was allowed. We reached Ranthambore by taxi, a 3-hour drive from Jaipur. Three scary hours where we learned that while in our countries you can fit 2 cars in a two-way street, in India you can fit 3 cars and 2 motorbikes at the same time….

After Ranthambore we went to Udaipur and it was a funny city to visit. It was the location of James Bond’s “Octopussy” movie and the movie keeps being shown in many restaurants and at least once a day on the TV.

We travelled in Rajasthan for almost three weeks and by the time we were done, we decided we had enough of big cities, desert, trash piles, noise, pollution and “six-legged” cows, so we wanted to see the mountains. Yes…six-legged cows…., you can see the strangest things in India. Cows are sacred animals, so if one is born with six legs instead of four, it’s better…You can drag it around Pushkar and beg for money from the tourists…. We don’t know if it is because of their Hindu religion or because the access to public health system is limited, that you can find people with so many birth defects in India. Elephant (like) faces, missing limbs, etc. All of them begging for money on the streets of course.

Anyways, getting back to our story, we decided to head towards Darjeeling (in the northeast) on a long trip with a stop of two nights in Varanasi. On the train we talked to the Indian family sleeping next to us and the father said “Hmmmmm, Varanasi is not beautiful, it’s a place you must see with your soul, not with your eyes”….. I must admit, that comment gave us an uncomfortable feeling, much like “Oh, no; not this again” kind of thing, but what we found was very different.

Varanasi is India’s holiest city for the Hindus. This is where, as a Hindu, you want to be cremated because if your ashes are scattered in the Ganges here, your soul can achieve the Moshka, which means that you will break the cycle of re-incarnation and avoid returning to earth as a dog, a cricket or a Koch Bacillus in your next life. Interesting beliefs surround this cremation, such as “you don’t have to be cremated if you were bitten by a snake, because snakes are sacred animals”, or “Children under 5 years of age don’t need to be cremated because they are still pure”, “pregnant women don’t need to be cremated because the child in their womb purifies them”, etc. Instead this group of people get a heavy stone tied around their feet and are then thrown into the holy river.

We made a good choice of staying in a hotel in the area of Dashashwamegh Ghat (the ghats are the stairs that lead to the river), which allowed us a front view of the river away from the noisy and dirty center of the city.

Varanasi, much as all cities in India for that matter, has small temples and offerings everywhere. They are attended by someone every day and thus always have flowers, gifts and presents of some kind to worship the gods.

We could see the cremation ghat from the boat and it’s strange to see how life and death interact in a way that is so natural. While family members transport the body to the river, to dip it in the water for the last time before being cremated, you can see cows and dogs in the area doing what cows and dogs do, while another family throws unburned bones of their loved ones into the river (three hours in the fire are not enough to incinerate all bones), while people talk normally close by, others swim, drink from or wash their clothes in river (we were hoping it was not our clothes….), and the whole situation seems so natural as having a picnic. I obviously remembered my own mother’s cremation, but the memories came back in a happy way. Death is a part of life and like the Indians, my dad, my siblings and I were there with my mom on the day of her cremation too.

Everyday Varanasi holds the “Mother Ganga” ceremony, to thank the river Ganges for all its blessings. It’s interesting and colorful to see, we enjoyed it a lot and after taking a stroll at 5:00 AM to see the city wake up, we prepared to continue our journey towards the mountains.

Many of you probably read our posts on Facebook about that journey, so I will not repeat it here. Let’s just say we missed the train to New Jalpaiguri (the station before Darjeeling) because they changed the platform without informing people, so we spent 9 hours in the Mughal Sarai train station, which is not a place where you want to spend more than 9 minutes altogether. Let’s just say, that if there that night had been an international airport, which we could have reached by taxi, we would have gone there and gotten the hell out of India. Luckily we did not and we managed to get a new train ticket. So after nine hours in the station, eighteen hours on the train (very low quality train, with people throwing trash and spitting on the floor, etc.) and three hours in a jeep we made it to Darjeeling, where we spent four days looking around in the city, while getting permits in order to travel to Pelling in the area of Sikkim. You need special permits to travel to Sikkim since it’s on the border with Bhutan, Nepal and China (Tibet).

Smiles were huge in our faces when we walked around Darjeeling the morning after our arrival. The green mountains, the cold air, the nicer people, everything was great for us. We spent two weeks in Pelling, which can be reached after six hours in a jeep from Darjeeling and we did nothing but chill, enjoy the views, have Nepalese food (instead of Indian curry) and visit some temples near-by. After kicking back in Pelling for a few weeks we were ready to take our last leg in Kolkata, which again took long hours in jeep and train to reach.

Kolkata was much nicer than we had anticipated. It is very clear that this was once the (British) capital of India and Delhi is just a relatively new (and chaotic) capital. We visited some places including Mother Teresa’s house and it was very interesting to see it. I have a friend who is a doctor, who does not agree with Mother Teresa’s work, because she received a lot of international support and funds for her work, yet she did not focus on curing the people, “she just pocketed the money and let them die” he once said. I thought he had raised an interesting point, but after having been in India for almost two months, I think we understand better what this was all about.

Poor people in India are not like our poor. They are not only discriminated for being poor, but simply due to fact that they exist. Most of them belong to the cast of the "untouchables", a cast that “can contaminate you if you touch them”, or “can contaminate you if you step on their shadow”. They are ignored and discriminated from the moment they are born. This level of rejection, discrimination and abandonment they live through every day is unknown to us. One of the untouchables who was about to die in one of the Missionaries of Charity hospices once said: “I lived like an animal on the streets but now I will die like an angel”. Sadly, for many people, this is their reality; this is the best they can hope for in life and Mother Teresa had the guts to help and touch these people when nobody else wanted to even acknowledge them.

All in all, we left India with a lot of memories. Some good, some not so good, some funny, some unforgettable. But one of the things we will never forget, was our visit to one of the Sikh temples in Delhi and our introduction to the Sikh philosophy by Singh, one of the people in charge. Sikh is a modern monotheistic religion that comes from Hindu principles but has different beliefs. They accept equal rights for men and women, unlike other religions in India. When we asked if they believed in re-incarnation, his reply was memorable: “No, we don’t believe in such nonsense. We believe there is only one life and you come to it to be good and do good to others. There is no time to waste.”

That is exactly how we are trying to live our lives.

Big hugs to everybody,

Claudia & Carsten