Chapter 22

INDIA

This is the account of a trip of a lifetime. I had always wanted to see the Himalayas because of having read so much about climbing so when I saw an advertisement for a tour titled India and the Himalayas in 2017 I thought – that’s for me! I invited my granddaughter Camille to go with me because she had often expressed a desire to visit India and because she had spent time on a Hare Krishna ashram in 2016 and was very interested in Eastern religions, as am I, so this tour sounded ideal and so it proved to be.

One small hitch was that Camille could not get a flight in time to start the tour on October 10 ^th , instead arriving one day later, but this turned out to be an advantage rather than otherwise because it meant that the other tour members (14 of them) had gone off in a tour bus whereas we had our own driver and guide in our own car and those conditions were maintained throughout the tour. The other reason for that was that all the other tour participants had paid an extra $500 per person for a Premium package which included better hotels and all meals paid for but I had not done that as I am happy with basic hotel accommodation and I knew that Camille would be also, and that we could quite easily organise our own meals – apart from breakfast which was always included and which was magnificent in every case – and we always made the most of it!

M y Virgin flight from Hobart was nearly 3 hours late but the good part was that I had packed myself a sandwich to eat in Melbourne as my flight to Bangkok was not due to leave until 12.05 am (5 past midnight) so I ate my snack in Hobart instead. I flew Thai Airways (included in the tour price) and had an aisle seat on the long flight which was fine but not on the short one (Bangkok to Delhi) but that didn’t matter because I was sitting next to a pleasant Indian man who was an executive in a Swedish broadband company and we chatted about broadband technology, travelling, arranged marriages, Indian politics, Muhammad Yunus and Kevin Rudd both of whom he knew, jobs for women etc and this set the tone for the whole trip – because we were not part of the tour group we mixed only with Indian people which made the whole trip very much more interesting than it would otherwise have been.

Immigration took forever but I didn’t care as I read my kindle as we shuffled slowly along, they were fingerprinting all foreigners (us) which took ages because half the time the camera did not work so the person being fingerprinted had to clean their hands with spirit but when my turn at last arrived the officer just checked my passport and stamped my visa and waved me through, I expect I was too old to bother with.

I was met by a man holding up a sign saying John Carr instead of Joan Carr so he was expecting a man but I convinced him that it was me he wanted and off we went. The traffic in Delhi is quite indescribable but my driver was excellent (we had several different drivers and they were all splendid), weaving in and out of the cars, trucks, tuk-tuks (actually called autos over there), rickshaws, pedestrians, motorbikes, scooters, push bikes, cows, dogs, goats and pigs. He took me to the Golden Tulip, a big old 7-storey hotel, shabby but perfectly fine with a very obliging staff, I didn’t have the right electrical plug for India and needed to recharge my kindle so they sent a man up with one and the shower didn’t work so they changed me to another room.

In Melbourne airport I had changed $200 to rupees, for which I got 8,500 rupees and in fact had to spend the last 150 in Delhi airport to get rid of them as nothing was expensive in India. I wanted to get an Indian SIM card for my phone and I’d seen a phone shop on the way from the airport, not that far I thought from the hotel so I decided to walk there. I did in the end find a phone shop but he didn’t have SIM cards and said that I would need to go to the Vodaphone shop and take my passport and an extra passport photo to get a SIM at which point I gave up and made my way back to the Golden Tulip thanking my lucky stars that I was still alive to tell the tale as the traffic obeys no rules such as lights and I escaped death a dozen times.

Camille arrived the next morning about 10.30, seemingly not tired so she had a quick shower and off we went on a tour of the city with our driver and our guide. He took us first to the beautiful Bahai Lotus Temple, something like the Sydney Opera House in style except that it has 27 free-standing marble-clad `petals’ in imitation of a lotus flower arranged in clusters of three to form nine sides, with nine doors opening onto a central hall with height of slightly over 40 metres and a capacity of 2,500 people. We spent some time in there in meditation – shoes off of course as one does before entering any temple or religious building.

We then went to the Lakshmi Temple which is dedicated to Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and good fortune but it was closed until 4 o’clock as many places are – the heat was intense by then and in fact I think every day (except for our 4 days in the mountains) the temperature was 36C+ with the sun beating down from a brilliant blue sky, never even one cloud. I’m not a lover of heat and thought it would bother me but strangely it never did, I wore a hat the first day but never bothered after that and I had been told that doxycycline (the anti-malarial that I was taking) would predispose me to sunburn so I had taken 30+ sunblock with me but I never used it and I never burned.

We stopped for lunch at a restaurant and then toured the city, driving through the diplomatic area, past India Gate, the 42-meter high stone war memorial with the names of all the fallen Indian soldiers on it (looks like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris) and past the palace where the President lives. We were then offered a rickshaw ride but by this time Camille was fast asleep on the back seat having had no sleep the previous night so I declined and it was back to the hotel for dinner – Indian food as always but after each item on the menu it would say Veg or non/Veg and if one said non/Veg they would put a few bits of chicken in the dish. Camille is vegetarian, I am not but I often chose the Veg option. Never beef in India of course, the cow is sacred – always referred to as Our Mother Cow and free ranging in all the streets, one must watch where one walks.

After breakfast we travelled 6 hours by car to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, which is known as The Pink City because the old buildings and some of the new ones have all been washed with a sort of salmon pink – Jaipur along with Delhi and Agra are known as the Golden Triangle as they hold so many of India’s treasures.

After we checked into the hotel Hyphen Ujjwal we were free for the afternoon so we decided to catch a tuk-tuk to the nearest market because Camille needed a pair of sandals. We walked out into the street, held up a hand and got one immediately. What a ride! So much more exciting than being in a car as we tore down main roads and back lanes, in and out of cars, motorbikes, camel carts, elephants, pigs and goats. Camille saw a shoe shop and we got out and she got sandals for 190 rupees which was about $4, then back into a tuk-tuk and all over Delhi. We had a moment of panic as neither of us could remember the name of the hotel but then Camille suggested looking at the name on our room key card and sure enough, there it was. Back to the hotel at last and we had an excellent dinner there.

Next day we did a full day tour of Jaipur which started with a visit to the amazing Amber Fort. When they say `Fort’ in India it doesn’t mean a military style barracks it means a whole village with a palace included – much like castles in England which were entire settlements surrounded by a high wall to keep out the frequent attacks from rivals. This one is on top of a hill and the way to get there is on elephants – I think there were 120 of them and after waiting our turn we had an exciting ride, slowly winding our way up the hill in an elephant procession. The fort itself is built from white marble and red sandstone and has many exquisite details such as the Sheesh Mahal or the Palace of Mirrors, all the glass having been imported from Belgium. Views from the top courtyard of the fort were stunning.

After lunch Camille was still tired from the flight and didn’t feel well so I suggested she stay at the hotel and sleep which she did and was fine when I got back from a trip to the City Palace and the amazing observatory built by Sawai Jai Singh in the 18 ^th century. He had a great interest in mathematics, architecture, astronomy and astrology and actually built 5 observatories. Jantar Mantar, the one we visited, is a collection of nineteen instruments for measuring time, predicting eclipses, tracking location of major stars as the earth orbits around the sun, ascertaining the declinations of planets, and determining the celestial altitudes. It features the world's largest stone sundial which is 27 metres high (on the right), and is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

We left right after breakfast for Agra, again a 6-hour drive, checked in at our hotel and ate lunch there and were then picked up by our guide and driver for our visit to the Taj Mahal, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1630 to enshrine the mortal remains of his wife Mumtaz Mahal who died giving birth to their 14 ^th child. He was so heartbroken by her death that his hair turned white overnight. Construction of the Taj commenced the following year, worked on by 20,000 artisans from India and Central Asia. We had the choice of doing this either at sunrise or sunset and our guide suggested that sunset is the better time to see it and we were glad we did.

The Taj Mahal absolutely took my breath away, I have never seen anything so beautiful and I’ll be very surprised if I ever do again. No words can do it justice. We had an excellent guide for this and we spent a couple of hours there inside and out, admiring every detail of the symmetry, the architecture, the construction, the decoration – all with semi-precious stones in beautiful patterns, the quotations from the Koran in exquisite calligraphy all the way up the outside walls – the characters written using inlaid jasper (on the right) – the forecourt and the Yamuna River behind. The year after it was finished, in 1653, Shah Jahan was overthrown by his son and imprisoned until his death 8 years later.

Every time we tried to leave another group of Indian women would beg to have their photos taken with us – our guide, Gotm, thought they were probably from South India and hadn’t seen many white people before but it happened a lot to us and they were all so friendly and lovely – another advantage of not being with our tour group. Note the bootees in the photo on the right, no shoes on the marble paving.

In the morning we visited the Agra Fort, also called the Red Fort and said to be one of the finest Mughal forts in India, it’s constructed of red sandstone, is on the banks of the Yamuna River and was started by Emperor Akbar (Shah Jahan’s grandfather) in 1565 and it is really a city within a city. The 94-acre fort has a semicircular plan and its walls are seventy feet high. The site is important in terms of architectural history, there were originally 500 buildings in the fort but some of them were demolished by Shah Jahan to make way for his white marble palaces (one of which he died in, imprisoned there by his son). Most of the others were destroyed by the British between 1803 and 1862 for building barracks. We still had our very knowledgeable guide, Gotm, who explained all the methods of defence (eg the grooved entrance road across which oil would be poured to make the horses slip and fall and the crocodile infested moat which is now dry) then another 6 hour drive back to Delhi and back to our original hotel, the good old Golden Tulip.

We were driven to Delhi airport for our flight to Bagdogra which is principally an army town; in this part of the country the army is very visible, all ready for an attack by the Chinese. We were met at the airport and driven to Darjeeling (6812 ft above sea level) which is one of the hill resorts so enjoyed by the British when they were in India because being so high it is cooler than the rest of India and has wonderful views of the Himalayas which were what I particularly wanted to see – and I was not disappointed!

We climbed steadily on the three-hour drive to Darjeeling, the narrow road twisted through dense jungle and climbed unbelievably steep gradients and it was amazing, hairpin bends one after another with very steep drops from the edge and the road in parts is very narrow and not in good condition, it was easy to imagine the edge crumbling away and sending us to the bottom!

We stopped for tea at one point in a delightful tea house obviously built by the Brits, dark panelling and wooden floorboards, large windows with spectacular views of the surrounding hills all clad in dense forest and very easy to imagine the wealthy British taking their holidays up there. The road wound through villages where houses seem to dangle on the edge of precipitous mountains and every here and there people would be selling vegetables. When I asked the guide where they would be growing (because there seemed not to be a flat spot on the mountains) he said that behind the houses the land would be terraced for market gardens and in fact the produce looked beautiful. We reached our hotel in Darjeeling at last with terraced tea plantations on the left, after enjoying the drive through this very beautiful little town, 6,700 ft above sea level and with stunning views of the mountains, the tallest visible from Darjeeling being Kanchenjunga.

We had been told to be ready for pickup at 4.30 and we were, still pitch dark of course and we had worn everything we could find but it was still freezing cold as we drove up the very steep Tiger Hill to the parking area as close as our driver could get to the summit, then it was get out and walk, still dark and a steep and rocky path but we eventually reached the top and were rewarded after a while by stunning views of the sun climbing above the horizon preceded by the first glow of pink as the sun’s rays hit the highest peak in that area, Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the Himalayas. An absolutely magical sight and well worth the climb and the icy wind, it was just freezing up there (Brrr!) but worth the cold just to see those mountains. I felt I could die happy!

Back to the hotel for breakfast and then we were picked up again for a tour of the zoo where the animals are in rather nice free enclosures, bears, many different kinds of deer, red pandas, Himalayan wolves and some very fetching langur monkeys. Then to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute where there is an excellent relief map of the mountains which gives a really good idea of where the different peaks – so many of them! – are in relation to each other. After that we went to a tea plantation and were shown round the factory and the process explained to us and then we had a tea tasting and Camille bought tea for her father who is an aficionado but I am not as I rarely drink any tea other than peppermint so didn’t buy anything.

The afternoon was free so we walked round the town in which there is not a flat street and some are incredibly steep but it’s all charming and round every corner there is another stunning view of the snow-covered mountains (right). I noticed myself puffing as I climbed some of the steep streets and realised that was due to the altitude.

After breakfast we were picked up by our driver Hasam and our guide Prebin (again, both excellent guides) and driven to Gangtok, another 6-hour drive. Gangtok is the capital of Sikkim, the second smallest state in India and is 1647 meters about sea level. It’s famous for its many important Buddhist monasteries and for the views of the Himalayas which dominate the skyline and it’s another of the important hill stations which were so loved by the British. The army presence is very visible here because Sikkim is almost completely surrounded by China, Nepal and Bhutan. The Indians fear that China will try to take it over so we had to get visas to enter Sikkim, just as though it was a different country. Not that they would have much to gain other than a bit of tourism, it’s too steep to farm and there appear to be no minerals.

We walked in the afternoon and everywhere we saw preparations for Diwali which would take place the following day. Known as the Festival of Lights, Diwali is celebrated by the lighting of little lamps in clay pots (left), elaborate decorations painted on the floors and fireworks which are now rather frowned on for reasons of danger but which are still sold and were let off all through the night.

Next day, we were driven up very high to Tsomgo Lake in the morning, 35 km from Gangtok and 12,000 feet above sea level and regarded as a very sacred lake by the Sikkimese. We were offered yak rides and both agreed enthusiastically as this might be the only chance to experience yak rides so we each mounted our yak and off we went, led by a native handler. Mine seemed to have little control over his charge who constantly stepped in holes and occasionally broke into a trot so it was a bumpy ride but great fun and as I said unlikely to be repeated any time soon.

In the afternoon we visited the Do Drul Chorten and the Enchey Monastery which houses about 100 monks and many visitors as well. The monks enter as young as 5 – some looked even younger – and at 18 they can choose whether to stay in or go out into the world. Being Diwali groups of girls went round singing, a group came to our hotel and sang beautifully, then the next night it would be the turn of the boys to go out singing – much like carol singing at Christmas actually.

After breakfast we left to return to Bagdogra airport for our flight to Varanasi (on the left) which is situated on the west bank of the Ganges in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. It was called Benares by the British and is an important pilgrimage centre for the Hindus – much like Mecca for Moslems or Jerusalem for Christians. Hindus hope to go to Varanasi to die, be cremated at one of the many Ghats and have their ashes sprinkled in the river. Mark Twain once wrote `Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and looks twice as old as all of them put together.’ Right from ancient times Varanasi has stood as a symbol of Hindu renaissance and has preserved the rituals and traditions of Hindu philosophy, bathing in the river (on the right) is a very special ritual. But it is also a very sacred area for Buddhists because Buddha came to Sarnath, about 10 km away, to preach his first sermon in 500 BC.

Another 4.30am pick up in order to go on the sunrise boat cruise on the Ganges. We could only drive part way before coming to a solid mass of people walking towards the river so we got out of the car and joined them. We eventually reached the river and went down a number of big steps to get into a rowboat, one of about a hundred boats all rowed by strong young men (our oarsmen on the right). We rowed out on the river, saw the sun rise, passed numerous Ghats each with a huge pile of sawn logs ready for the day’s cremations. Sunrise on the Ganges on the left. Back to the hotel for breakfast and then we were picked up again for a tour of the city which took us through the enormous Benaras Hindu University, (over 12,000 students residing in campus, it is the largest residential university in Asia) all the buildings beautifully set in lawns and gardens with several temples.

After lunch we went to Sarnath which is a highly revered Buddhist centre because it is believed that it was there that Buddha, after getting enlightenment, preached his first sermon. We visited the Great Stupa which is where Buddha is said to have met his 5 disciples and the tree that was grown from a sapling of the original Bodhi Tree under which Buddha sat. We then visited the Archaeological site where the Buddhist Sangha or community was founded and where there is the pillar which was established by the Emperor Ashoka in 273BC to mark this very special place.

At night we went back to the river to take part in the evening prayers with at least 5000 other people, a really amazing experience and I thought our guide was brave to take us there because in the crush of walking people it was a constant challenge for the three of us to stay together, however we managed it and it was a truly wonderful spiritual experience and a fitting end to a really remarkable day.

Our guide located seats for us on a sort of balcony but Camille insisted on going down to sit with the crowds and two very kind Indian women shared their food with her. There she is in the back row in black being fed by her friends.

After breakfast we were picked up and driven back to Varanasi airport where we farewelled our driver and our guide and caught our plane back to Delhi for our flight home the following day but only I flew back the following day as Camille was leaving a day later and I didn’t leave until the evening anyway so we had a free day in Delhi.

We decided to go to the Oxford Bookshop in Connaught Place in central Delhi as books are amazingly cheap in India and we are both book collectors. So it was out to the street, hop in a tuk-tuk and off we went through all the mad early morning traffic, a good 45-minute ride and a magnificent bookshop at the end of it where they seemed to have every book ever published and all remarkably cheap. We bought 12 books between us, paying about $60 so were happy with our day, had lunch at a local café and then caught a tuk-tuk back to the hotel.

The driver didn’t know where the Golden Tulip was and had to ask for directions several times but we eventually got back and I even had time for a quick shower before leaving for Delhi airport and the long flights home after one of the most amazing and wonderful holiday of my life.