14 – India October 2007 – January 2008

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We went to Amritsar, Manali, Leh (and Pangong Tso and Nubra Valley) then Srinagar (and Gulmarg) then Pahalgam, Jammu, Chandigarh, Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Lucknow, across the rest of UP and Bihar pretty quickly, then Darjeeling, Sikkim and finished in Calcutta.

First stop after Wagah border was the obligatory Amritsar where we stopped for a day or 2 for Amanda to see the Golden Temple and Jalianwallah Bagh – I had already seen them in early 2001, but you can’t come through Amritsar and not see them. Interesting how the Indian car insurance I was sold covered for Pakistan too (and Nepal and Bangladesh at extra cost) – I wonder how many Indian-registered vehicles actually make it to Pakistan, apart from those Amritsar-Lahore and Srinagar-Muzaffarabad Friendship buses. Certainly I never saw a single vehicle from the other country in either of them and the Indians get mightily worried if they think they see a Pakistani registration!! – http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata-/Islamabad-car-has-cops-on-the-edge/articleshow/5408541.cms

Wagah border to Manali

Well, we did the journey that the trip was planned around – the Manali-Leh highway. The scenery was out of this world, with incredible rock formations, colours and mountains. This highway officially closes for winter at the end of September but can stay open later into October if weather conditions permit. We were enjoying Pakistan, so wanted to prolong our stay there as long as possible. Thus, I was on the phone to Leh Tourist information and private tour companies in Manali (the Manali Tourist Information people were so thick they couldn’t even communicate in Hindi when I got someone to translate for me!) every couple of days checking on the latest weather info….we were given conflicting information at one point about the weather starting to close in but we were able to leave Amritsar on 14 October with assurances that we’d be able to complete the journey.

So we reached Manali on the evening of 14 October – a 450 km drive in 1 day from Amritsar. For Indian roads, this was amazing. We were helped in this by the fact that half of the drive was across Punjab, and that new toll roads have been laid through there that aren’t on the map. The manager of a bar we – or rather I – had drank in in Amritsar had drawn these out on our road atlas and bingo – they were exactly where he’d said they would be. These roads, or at least the toll booths, were clearly operated by private companies and although I normally shy away from toll roads on principle, using the alternative for free would have been far worse!

Interestingly, the new horn I’d had fitted in Amritsar lasted only until just before Hoshiarpur – 100 kms – before the relay blew thanks to my excessive, but normal for India, usage. The air horn had clearly been on the way out for some time and it had finally given up the ghost somewhere in Northern Pakistan. But since then we’d been on the move and I hadn’t been able to get it fixed. The electric horn I was offered in Amritsar I thought wasn’t as powerful as the air horn, but I was wrong! Thus a new relay beckoned in Hosiharpur.

On the way to Manali, after Mandi, we passed through the Kullu Valley, an area famous for Angora rabbit farms. We stopped at one and I was shown a rabbit. Not sure if the farmer was demonstrating its powerful kicking action or the exquisite fur!

Shortly before Manali, we’d stopped to take a picture of some monkeys and a Swiss woman in an Indian car stopped to speak to us. The Landcruiser has its UK registration number, but on a German-style plate, so a number of people have thought we are German – like Gertrude. As with all the other people, we explained that we’d fitted the German-style plate for going through places like Pakistan, thinking that being thought German and not British might have avoided a few problems. Had we gone to Waziristan or any of the other Tribal areas it might have been a different story but, in the parts of Pakistan we were in, people knowing we were British miraculously DIDN’T result in us being paraded on Al-Jazeera in orange jumpsuits and having our heads chopped off, so those German-style plates haven’t earned their keep in the expected way.

Anyway, those plates have justified their GBP 30 cost in other ways as they prompted Gertrude to stop and speak to us, so we ended up staying in Gertrude’s lovely home just outside Manali. Gertrude has lived in Manali for 10 years, describing it as her spritual home (!) and her wooden house was the best-designed I’ve seen in India, with not a single inch of space wasted and delightful nooks and crannies everywhere. The architect was 85, incidentally. Ranshen, her driver, proved to be a mine of information on the Manali-Leh road and used to drive it regularly for work.

We were going to leave the next day and drive 115 kms to Keylong, but we’d got up a bit late and then it started raining as we were filling up with diesel. As luck would have it, the German-style plates attracted a passing Swiss couple who stopped and spoke to us. Lucia and Berny had a Toyota Hi-Ace van with 4WD, which apparently is only sold in the Alps. The Pakistanis had been highly envious of it when they were passing through Pakistan, said Berny, although they couldn’t understand why it was just 2 people using it as a campervan and not 20 using it as a minibus! I put Lucia and Berny in touch with Gertrude and they ended up staying with her. Rain at low altitudes often means snow at higher and we didn’t fancy driving when we couldn’t enjoy any of the scenery, so we stayed an extra night in Manali, although in a hotel and not with Gertrude as her dogs and cat had triggered Amanda’s allergies. Gertrude, Lucia and Berny came and met us for dinner, so the night wasn’t wasted. The Chopsticks restaurant in the main drag of Manali is DELICIOUS, BTW! Again this is a place I have happy memories of from when I was there in 2001 (and 2004) http://kullu.net/chopsticks/index.html

In lots of hotels in India and Pakistan, we have had various problems with wake-up calls not being given or food not being served or television not being available when we were told it was – the list goes on and on and on. We have not talked about most of these experiences because to do so would look rather monotonous after a while and give anyone reading it the impression that we weren’t tolerant of things not going as expected which, in a place like India, is a bit unrealistic. But there is one particular instance that I will mention, which was the hotel we stayed in in Manali. This hotel seemed OK, but at about 3:00 AM there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a waiter standing there with a tray of coffee or tea or something like that. He gestured to me to say, “Did you order this?” And I said no and went back to bed, thinking no more of it – after all, everyone makes mistakes from time to time. But then one hour later, after I had gone back to sleep, there was another knock at the door. Again, I opened it. The same waiter was there (with probably the same drinks) and by now a little annoyed, I sent him away. Again, I went back to sleep and again, he appeared ANOTHER hour later AGAIN! This was too much!

Lucia and Berny travelled with us on Tuesday 16 Oct. Just before Rohtang La (3980 M), we stopped for tea at a group of roadside dhabas. Most of the Indian tourists seemed to go only as far as here for a day trip and then turn back to Manali, and it was entertaining to see them in their 1970s-style fur coats, with snowballs flying and horse rides galore. We parted company with Lucia and Berny at the turn-off for Spiti Valley. They’d wanted to go to Ladakh as well, but didn’t have my drive to see the Manali-Leh road or to carry on to Srinagar.

This is one of the many Indian Army-built metal bridges we clattered across whilst on the Manali-Leh Highway.

We spent the first night in Keylong and left early the next morning. Ranshen’s advice had been to go as far as Sarchu and then stay the night there, and on the way we crossed over Baralacha La (pass). At 4883 metres (16500 ft) this was the highest we and the car had ever been and both of us began to feel distinctly light-headed – AMS had started. I found that every time I got out to take pictures, it took some time for my breathing to slow back down. AMS can also cause poor coordination and irrational behaviour, and I made sure to concentrate very hard on the driving. Amanda was affected worse than me, with quite noticeable breathing problems and a racing heartbeat, and it was a relief to descend to Sarchu (110 kms from Keylong). That morning at Keylong, I’d asked the hotelier about the next day’s journey and he had advised us to stop for the night at Pang (70 kms after Sarchu) as it was equidistant between Keylong and Leh, or to spend the day in Keylong and leave at 5AM the next day so as to get to Leh the same evening. Even to get to Pang would have involved crossing another pass beyond Baralachla – Nakee La (16000 ft / 4600m), while going all the way to Leh entailed crossing TangLang La (17500 ft / 5300M) and I am quite sure we’d either have died of AMS or I’d have crashed the car because of its symptoms had we carried on and not stopped in Sarchu (3500M) to acclimatise.

So we camped at Sarchu. I had recovered from most of my AMS symptoms after descending from Baralacha pass, but Amanda was a little behind me. But even I hadn’t recovered fully, as neither of us could sleep properly that night despite it being warm and cosy in our sleeping bags. The inside of the tent was iced over with frozen condensation, and the thermometer on my phone registered -1 degree c, so the outside must have been more like -5 or -10.

In Sarchu, we saw this little puppy we’d seen a few kms back when we stopped for a police checkpoint. He looked and felt like a little toy – I felt like looking to see where to put the batteries in!

The next morning, the car was most unenthusistic about the idea of starting in the cold temperatures, but coughed to life amid clouds of smoke. Amanda was still a little uneasy and for a time we debated about stopping an extra day in Sarchu. But I regularly checked on both of our breathing and heart rates and the acclimatisation night seemed to have done its job, for we made it over Nakee La and TangLang La with even fewer AMS symptoms than the previous day. Snow covered the roads above 4500M, and the going was exceedingly slow. An unsalted road, no armco crash barrier, a sheer drop of anything up to 1000 feet, no mobile reception, no ambulances to speak of within 20 hours of driving time and the realisation that one probably wouldn’t be needed if we skidded off the road, all conspired to keep me driving at not much more than walking pace around corners.

While passing through Gata loops, we came across these deer. Not sure what sort.

After passing through the infamous 19 or 20 hairpin bends of the Gata Loops, the road levelled out a little and continued to climb somewhat more gently towards Lachlung La

Having crossed Tanglang La, the highest point of the Manali-Leh highway (and the world’s second highest motorable road), we began our descent towards Rumtse and Leh. The weather was overcast on the climb up, but abruptly started to rain and snow once we had passed the peak.

Pictures of the Manali-Leh highway

Manali to Leh hwy

We were very fortunate to have arrived in Leh just before the Thikse Festival. This was the last festival of the season and so we didn’t miss the opportunity to go and see it, which was interesting although we didn’t understand what the hell was going on. Apparently it’s something to do with various gods interacting with each other in a Shakespearean kind of storyline, culminating in good triumphing over evil.

Here’s some footage of the Giant Thanka being folded to denote the start of the festivities.

First of 2 videos of the dancing and music at Thikse festival – the 2 couldn’t be stitched together..

Second of 2

Have a look at the stunning pics:-

Thikse Festival

We arrived in Leh at a very curious time. Leh appears to be a place either completely full of tourists and therefore artificial, or completely empty of tourists and also most locals and therefore completely closed up. So it seems to be rather difficult to pick the right time to come to Leh that is not either completely full of people or completely empty – but I think we got somewhere close to it because we were fortunate to arrive at a time when the tourist season was ending. Therefore, Leh was neither completely full nor completely empty – a very good transitional time to be there. But the place was closing down noticeably while we were there and indeed in the two weeks we were there, it went from five restaurants in the locality that were open down to just one. Hotel Yak-Tail in Leh is a good place to stay, with parking and also hot water – which is unusual in a place like Leh. There is also a very good museum in Leh for the Himalayan campaigns fought by the Indian army, which is near the airfield on the outskirts of Leh.

Whilst in Leh, we took 3 side trips. One was up the Nubra Valley, which involved going over Khardung La – the world’s highest motorable road – and then on to Diskit and Hunder. Diskit was a pleasant village to stay in – we stayed at the Olthang Guesthouse and I’ll even tell you where it is. As you go through the village, you see the path up to Diskit Gompa on the left and then the road takes an abrupt turn to the left to go over a bridge; just after the bridge, on the right, is Olthang. I remember asking the guest house people if there were any snow leopards and they told me about the compensation scheme for farmers whose sheep were taken by the snow leopards to encourage them not to kill the cats. We also saw some Bactrian Camels in the river basin between Diskit and Hunder. After that, we went to the other branch of the Nubra Valley but only went as far north as 30 kms before Panamik. Nice, restful places, where I could easily spend a couple of months away from it all.

Leh – Nubra Valley – Leh

We took a walk up to Diskit monastery and spotted these monks, obviously in a hurry to get somewhere.

Just in case we weren’t able to find diesel before getting back to Leh, I filled up as soon as we saw a place in Nubra Valley. Check out the hand operated fuel pump!

On the way back to Leh from the Nubra Valley, we crossed Khardung La from the north. This is the world’s highest motorable road.

A few days later, we headed up to Pangong Tso (Pangong Lake). Considering we did a 300km round trip to see a body of water, it was well worth the drive. I have never seen such a vivid shade of blue in nature, and coming back in the dark had its advantages – we saw a big cat crossing the road in front of us which we later tentatively identified as ‘only’ a Himalayan Lynx. We also saw 2 foxes, 3 rabbits and a mouse!

Leh – Pangong Tso – Leh

Another side trip was for some trekking between Phyang and Temisgam. One of the farmhouses I stayed in had an open fire, fuelled by dried cow dung and it was a novel experience to ask “shall I put some more shit on the fire?” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/8456879.stm

At one point we came across this old man who showed us the path. He certainly had a good pair of lungs….with his leathery skin he could have been as young as 55 or as old as 105!

At a brief bit of tarmaced road, we met a local primary school teacher. He gets Rs 3000 a month (!) I’d heard stories about the low pay for teachers in government schools in India and there might appear to be some truth in this….certainly one can see why they have to take second jobs.

…and here’s the pics of this trek from Phyang to Temisgam

Phyang to Temisgam

At the end of this trek, when we were near the road back to Leh, we tried to hitch a lift from a passing Indian Army jeep. It had stopped and seemed to be an officer’s car, with a jawan driver and an obviously higher ranking officer in the passenger seat, who said he couldn’t give a lift to non-Army people. A little surprised that he had bothered to stop at all in that case, I had glanced towards the woman sitting in the back of the vehicle and said, “Oh, so is she an official Indian army passenger?” The officer replied that she was his wife!
“Oops”, I said – “no problem but thanks for stopping.” And the jeep drove off, but it stopped again about 20 M further down the road – the officer had asked his driver to make some space in the vehicle for us. I’m glad he stopped as he turned out to be a helicopter pilot. I mentioned that we often felt slightly out of breath in Leh, and this sparked a really interesting chat about the oxygen concentrations in places like Ladakh compared to places like Uttaranchal, which has a very similar elevation to Ladakh, but a much higher oxygen concentration because it has trees in a way that Ladakh does not. Therefore, the air density is less affected there than at similar altitudes in Ladakh. Our pilot dropped us at the main road on the way back to Leh – we didn’t have to wait very long to hitch the rest of our ride back to Leh as two men in a little Maruti van stopped to pick us up. We found out afterwards that this Maruti only had two speeds working out of the four in its gearbox. It was very kind of them to give us a lift, but when only second and fourth gears worked in this vehicle, we had to get out a couple of times to let it get up steep hills!

Here are the pictures of Leh and around:-

Leh and around

On our way from Leh to Srinagar, we came across this stuck concrete mixer just near Alchi. Not sure exactly how it had ended up like this, but suspect it went too close to the edge and the road gave way. Must say the rescue operation looked relatively well-organised, though.

….and here are the pictures of the Leh-Srinagar leg.

Leh to Srinagar

As you can see, the scenery from Leh to Kargil was breathtaking and I am told it is at least as good on the Kargil-Srinagar sector, with a few memorials/museums to the Kargil war and other border skirmishes with the dastardly Pakistanis to stop and see as well. BUT – we couldn’t see any of it, because we had to leave Kargil at 3AM to get to Zoji La pass before it closed to westbound traffic at 6AM and started to allow eastbound. If we hadn’t, we’d have been stuck there for the day until it opened again to westbound traffic. Of course we could have just had a good lie-in in Kargil the next morning and made a nice leisurely day of it, but then we’d have had to either do Zoji-La in the dark or stay an uncomfortable night at its base camp and set off just before the road closed in our direction at 6AM the following morning – so we’d have lost a day. Bloody frustrating.

Once en route over Zoji-La, I could certainly see why it was single lane only. The road in places was just a notch cut into a sheer, and I mean sheer, rock face with nothing but a couple of feet between us and dropping hundreds of metres. I wish it had been light enough for us to have been able to take pictures, but here’s a video taken by someone who did this bit by day (this video not taken by me)

There are many horror stories about Srinagar houseboats and we were very lucky with our one. When I had stayed briefly in Srinagar in 2004, I’d gone to the Houseboat Owners association next to the tourist office and picked the MS Paristan, one that was in Dal Lake and quite a distance from the shore. The people were really nice and I was all set to stay there again.

At this point in the trip, we had Miriam, a Dutch woman, traveling with us. Back in Leh, Miriam and us had hooked up in a kind of symbiosis as we had all needed a permit with at least 3 names on it from the tourist office to visit Nubra and Pangong Tso. Thanks to our unique, one-stop service of company AND transport, Miriam had joined us for the Leh-Srinagar leg as well as Nubra, Pangong Tso and the trek. Miriam hadn’t even heard of Srinagar until I mentioned where we were heading on to after Leh, but had decided to give it a try. But, she was running short on time by this point and so couldn’t spend more than 1 night there. For whatever reason – can’t remember – she had wanted to go to the tourist office and I was dumbfounded when I went to where it was last time and yet couldn’t seem to find it. A chap, who I assumed (rightly) was a tout, was trying to flag us down but because he was a tout, I ignored him. On my second pass of where the office was supposed to be, he practically climbed on the side of the vehicle so I did stop. Bugger me sideways – the reason I couldn’t see the (old wooden) tourist office was because it had burned down!

Anyway, he pointed us towards the new place built next to the site of the old one and Miriam, being less well-versed in the ways of the world than me, wasn’t put off when he followed us in and seemed to be on first name terms with the tourist office people. I wasn’t that keen on staying anywhere he had sent us to, but out of inertia and as I’d mislaid the contact details for the Paristan, decided to give it a try. Am glad we did, for the Dream Days, run by relatives of the tout, was a lovely houseboat. Sorry I keep referring to him as ‘the tout’ but I don’t remember his name. No other reason. Bashir Ahmed and his wife Mobina, and Sanju the lad from Calcutta who does the cooking and housework were all very nice to us. So much so I’ll even put up their address: Gate no-1, Dal Lake, Srinagar-190001 Kashmir. Contact No: 09906516914 or 0194-2452818 or Delhi: +91 9958284878. E-mail: hindia23@hotmail.com and, if anyone reading this stays there, do pass Bashir/Mobina my regards and please behave well. Another advantage of making the choice we did was that the tout had a word with JKTDC and the Army, which appeared to share a car park with JKTDC and for the time we were in Srinagar the car was under 24/7 armed guard in this car park!

Because I’m so good (and clever!) I’ve also managed to find Dream Days on Google Maps – if it works properly, it’ll be right in the centre of this link:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&q=dalgate+srinagar&ie=UTF8&hq=dalgate&hnear=Srinagar,+Jammu+and+Kashmir,+India&ll=34.08652,74.8311&spn=0.00486,0.00825&t=h&z=17

As you can see, it’s lovely and convenient for getting to and from. You don’t need to book a boat ride every time you want to go to or from it, and it’s nice and convenient for Srinagar town centre. Just at the end of the side road to the houseboat, where it joins the main road, is a bakery that does excellent macaroons.

Having wimped out in Pakistan, I demonstrated massive double standards in thinking I would get my danger-fix by going to Kashmir but in Srinagar alcohol is now sold and drunk freely, people are waterskiing on Dal Lake and the machine gun-toting Indian soldiers lining the streets even smile at passers-by. Mind you, not everyone approves of the alcohol – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7318408.stm

Dal Lake has a bit of a pollution problem so the local council had recently entered some sort of PFI-like deal with a Japanese company to get the weeds dealt with and the pollution cleaned up. Odd how on Sunday 15 March 2009, Amanda and me were talking about how the toilet from the Dream Days houseboat emptied directly into the lake – just what you need when you’re sitting there waiting for your breakfast in the morning. Then at work on Monday 16 March – what appears on the BBC website but THIS http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7940087.stm

Unbelievably, I have even met someone here who I know from the UK. In 2004, I was in Spitalfields Market when I saw a shop selling Kashmiri handicrafts (www.zaidacrafts.co.uk). Having visited Kashmir briefly shortly before this, and having in 2004 the germ of a notion that 1 day I might want to consider the idea of going back there as part of an overlanding trip, I got chatting to Maria (from Crossmaglen in Northern Ireland) and her husband Ishaq (from Srinagar). We emailed each other sporadically after that but lost touch. Imagine my surprise when, as I was walking along Dalgate, I spied a white woman sitting in an Indian car, waiting as it turned out for her husband to do some shopping. As one does when spotting one’s brethren in foreign parts, I did a double-take, which swiftly became triple when I thought ‘I know that face’. A quick tap on the car window and the words “excuse me – are you Maria, from Zaidcrafts in London?” brought a recoil and sharp intake of breath from the hapless Maria, but once she recovered her composure an invite to lunch swiftly followed. Maria and Ishaq have been married 10 years and now live permanently in Srinagar in a lovely house they invited us to a couple of times overlooking Dal Lake (if you go to the top floor, stand on one leg and crane your neck over the neighbouring eyesore), having given up the shop and gone over to mail-order/wholesale.

It was also very coincidental how Maria turned out to know the people on our Dream Days houseboat. It transpired that a few years before, when Maria married Ishaq, he had had to leave his job and accommodation in a hurry, and the pair of them had ended up staying on the houseboat with Bashir and his wife for six months. This came up because Maria had asked how much we were paying for our houseboat. We said Rs350 a day PP. They thought that was suspiciously cheap, and Maria related stories about other people being attracted by low rates to stay on houseboats and then finding themselves effectively being kept prisoner or having things stolen when they left the houseboats during the day to go into town. If our houseboat people were like that, I replied, then they were extremely good actors. Maria then asked which houseboat we were staying on. When I replied ‘Dream Days’ Maria asked the name of the people we were staying with and when I told her, she was beside herself and explained about the connection. Immediately, I phoned Bashir from Maria’s house and they had a good chat on the phone!

A few days later, they took us to Gulmarg….the staff in a restaurant found out the hard way that Ishaq was Kashmiri and not an Indian tourist when Amanda ordered a dish and one waiter said in Kashmiri “we haven’t got the right sauce for that dish” and the head waiter answered “just give her some normal gravy – they’re foreigners, they won’t understand”. Cue a furious reaction from Ishaq and even Maria, who speaks enough Kashmiri to know roughly what was going on. Oh well – all very funny.

After Maria had taken us to her house for the wonderful Kashmiri wazwan, we thought we would return the favor. So we went shopping in the markets of Srinagar to buy food to take back to the houseboat for Mobina to cook. I really didn’t enjoy seeing the ducks have their throats cut when we bought them, and can’t understand why they couldn’t hit them on the head like they did with the fish at the fish farm.

In Srinagar, we visited various gardens. In Shalimar Bagh, we spotted this little bird taking a bath in one of the fountains.

Going around Dal Lake in the Landcruiser was entertaining. The perimeter road is OK, but is interspersed with little hump-backed bridges under which flow rivers/tributaries leading into the lake. Going over these at speed is FUN! At one point, accompanied by screams from Mandy, I even turned around for another go under the gaze of bemused soldiers.

The highest point that anyone can visit in Srinagar, that isn’t either an off-limits army base or a fort that you can visit but need a permit, is Shankaracharya Hill. We got questioned by the police the first time we climbed it as they hadn’t seen us coming up via the road to the north. We’d climbed up via the footpath from the southern side, just near UNMOGIP HQ. Well, the bloody path was in the Lonely Planet! Typical Indian efficiency at the security checkpoint for the temple that searched people and stopped them from taking cameras in, but refused to allow them to leave their cameras there. Or rather, said they didn’t, but grudgingly allowed us to leave the camera at the kiosk as if doing us some sort of favour, when it was they who’d stopped us taking it in in the first place. The second time I got wise to this and smuggled the camera in – not happy about leaving it at the kiosk. Soldier greeted me warmly on the way up and his superiors gave us Chai. Then some kid saw me taking pics of Dal Lake and our houseboat and grassed me up to the soldier, who wasn’t happy at all. I could see from his face that he felt betrayed, after greeting me so warmly on the way up. But I wasn’t photographing the temple. And if I wanted pictures of that, I could get them from the internet or watch a DVD of Mission Kashmir.

On a walk around Srinagar Old Town one day, we stopped at a shoe shop. As we waited outside for our companions, a puppy appeared from a drain – then another, and another – until there were 13 of them!

When in Srinagar, met some interesting people and some of the tales I’ve been hearing here are enough to make the hair stand on end…..Arundhati Roy is right in saying that the militants and the security forces have become each other over time. Amanda had needed to see a doctor and so we had met Dr Mir. He had studied in Liverpool, so didn’t even charge full consultation fee as a favour for guests from ‘the old country’. He had come back to Srinagar after his time in the UK, and stayed on after the troubles started. It had got so bad that a few times he and the patient he was seeing had literally had to dive to the floor in mid-consultation when stray bullets came though the window from shoot-outs between the army and militants. They kept forgetting to take their fingers off the triggers!

In a bar – pretty much the only proper bar in town, at the back of the Hotel Broadway – I got chatting to an Anglo-Kashmiri called Imtiaz, who worked for the local council and appeared to have something to do with the waterways that went around the old city of Srinagar carrying refuse from the houses into the lake. These waterways are supposed somehow to flow in a continuous circuit and he was explaining how they had been damaged and blocked by unauthorized structures, which was blocking the flow of the water. He also told me some terrible stories about the Indian army in Kashmir. Eg, some local army bases would take an innocent person in for questioning and keep him there for a couple of days and then the family, desperate, would come along and offer to pay baksheesh to get him out of custody. The soldiers who, in reality, had nothing on this man at all would take the baksheesh and release him. They would keep a record of all this in their book and then, a couple of years later, re-arrest the same man on trumped-up suspicion of something else and collect baksheesh all over again.

Maria had told me something about this at a different time – some relatives of her husband lived in a village that was suspected of harbouring or supporting militants, and the Indian army had gone through this village and practically destroyed it. Whether this was to flush out the militants or to take revenge against the village for supporting them was decidedly fuzzy. Not only that, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act means that the Army or police is immune from any legal proceedings arising out of any acts in pursuit of terrorism. Result? You can have your house blown up or burnt to the ground by the Army or police if there are terrorists in there (or if they think there are) and they won’t have to pay a penny in compensation. Hearts And Minds it aint. However, the problem is that the villagers don’t always have much choice. If the Indian army is there when the militants come (in which case they wouldn’t), then they can do something about it, but usually the militants only come when the army isn’t around and it is only when the army finds out afterwards that the militants have been that they will come to the village, by which time it is too late. The militants will demand that the villagers give them their young unemployed men or give them eight lakhs of rupees and, for this reason, many Kashmiri families send their young men away to other parts of India rather than leave them in Kashmir at the mercy of the militants.

One day whilst waiting to see Dr Mir, we fell into conversation with a chap from I think Jordan or Lebanon – definitely somewhere in the Middle East – who’d come to live here as he was married to a Kashmiri woman. His brother had followed him over and, one day, the Indian Army had come to his house in search of militants and thought his brother was one, whereupon he was dragged out and shot dead. Not sure I’d want to stay living there after something like that.

There was also quite a boom in property prices happening in Kashmir. This is partly because of the Kashmir economy recovering, but also because of the laundering of dirty money that has been going on in Kashmir. Just as with Northern Ireland, over time the terrorists have found that terrorism pays. They started out very pure and principled but, as time has gone by, have found that there is money to be made from protection rackets and selling drugs and weapons and so on. This money has to go somewhere and, although they can’t buy property themselves, they buy it through front people. One of the main hotels in Srinagar, for eg, is owned by a relative of the leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front

Another character was Shafiq, who was from Kashmir, but had been a refugee and had obtained Italian citizenship. He had a child in Italy, but was divorced. Shafiq was actually quite lucky, because it turned out he owned two houseboats on the Jhelum River in Srinagar. He also told me a very interesting story about how, a few years before, he was in his shop in Delhi one day when a white person came in and asked him if he had Tibetan thankas. Shafiq said “Yes, I have Tibetan thankas.” The white man said, “If you show me any Kashmiri thankas and try to tell me that they’re Tibetan, I’ll hit you.” Shafiq said, “No, no, these are real Tibetan thankas.” Shafiq got his Tibetan thankas out. The white man took one look at them and hugged Shafiq. It turned out that he was the film director, about to start shooting Seven Years in Tibet. He had been going round and round the markets of Delhi trying to find some authentic Tibetan thankas to use as props, and was at his wits’ end trying to find any. On the spot, he engaged Shafiq as the supplier of props and later, before filming started, the Indian government withdrew permission for shooting it in Ladakh. The film was then shot in Patagonia in Argentina and Shafiq was even offered an Indian passport in order to come and help with shooting it there, but he didn’t want to go(!) Personally, I’d have done! We only got talking to Shafiq because I asked him to help us with translation when we were trying to find out what sort of fish a little restaurants was serving in Srinagar – I am instinctively less wary of people that I have chosen, as opposed to people who choose me. Shafiq was a happy-go-lucky sort, to whom things happened, but every time we did anything with him, it always worked out one way or the other. For eg, he took us to an excellent fish farm in Harwan, on the outskirts of Srinagar, which did delicious rainbow trout. We had a bit of fun finding it, but this fish farm was so good we went there a few times again for more fish. He also had us around to his family home, which was really kind of him. Really strange to see an Indian cable TV channel with local news scrolling across the bottom……from Manchester (!)

Sat reading the paper one day, looking out across Dal Lake. Houseboats are a good place to sit and chill for a while and watch the world go by, and there are about 10,000 people who live on Dal Lake. People on Dal Lake get around on canoes or shikaras ie a bed in a broad-bottomed canoe with a sort of roof and a shikara-wallah doing the hard work at the back. It’s a highly civilized way to pass a couple of hours in the afternoon or evening to go on a restful trip around Dal Lake in one of these and we partook a number of times:-

Every day a canoe-wallah would come by with groceries (or was it a grocery-wallah in a canoe?) He very quickly got my number, and started bringing both kinds of Kingfisher beer – normal and high strength. Trouble was, the quality control was a bit patchy and sometimes the normal seemed to be the same strength as the high, with attendant hangover the next day.

One day I’d bought a copy from him of The Excelsior, the Kashmiri local newspaper. There was an interesting article about Kashmiri-specific illnesses such as cancer from burns from the little Kashmiri charcoal burners people carried, which were getting less and less as time went by because people were dressing up warmer, and about cervical cancer rates being lower in Kashmir thanks to men being circumcised. Those little charcoal burners BTW are known as kangris – they’re a wonderful invention. Like a sort of hot water bottle under the poncho that most people wear in Kashmir.

Pictures of Srinagar (and a little side-trip we did to Gulmarg)

India – Srinagar

After bidding Srinagar a fond farewell, we headed south towards Jammu via Pahalgam and the Lidder Valley. En route just before Pahalgam, we happened across what can only be described as a ‘puppy pile,’ blissfully asleep right in the middle of the road. I am more of a cat than a dog- lover but even so the thought of these poor sweet pooches dying a rubbery death under the wheels of a speeding Tata was too much so I stopped and ushered them off the road. In doing this I held up traffic in both directions and yet all I got was patience and smiling faces on all sides, without a single horn blast.

With the time of year as it was, we didn’t do any long treks as we might have hoped, but we did manage a pleasant walk around Pahalgam.

Srinagar – Jammu

Jammu is quite an underrated place. The tourist office gave us a leaflet for a self-guided tour you can do of the various temples and other sites around it and it’s worth spending a day or 2 on this. Curiously, there was also a revolving restaurant with excellent food atop one hotel….I say curiously as, although I have just plugged Jammu, I certainly wouldn’t rate the town centre from aloft as pretty enough to justify a revolving restaurant!

Jammu Monkeys – self-explanatory!

More Jammu monkeys – doing what monkeys do often!

Chandigarh was something of an oasis after further north. It’s quite unlike other cities in India…..think Stevenage and Milton Keynes with added Indianness. It is nice to see traffic lights and eat pizza after Kashmir but typical India it aint. But it was intended to be the future of India and its originator was pleased with it. Speaking to a group of architects at the Indian Institute of Engineers in 1959, Nehru said: “Now I have welcomed very greatly, one experiment – Chandigarh. Many people argue about it, some like it, some dislike it. It is totally immaterial whether you like it or not. It is the biggest thing in Indian of this kind. That is why I welcome it. It is the biggest thing because it hits you on the head and makes you think. You may squirm at the impact but it makes you think and imbibe new ideas, and the one thing that India requires in so many fields is to be hit on the head so that you may think.”
Unless you’re into town planning there’s a limit though on places to actually photograph – except the Nek Chand Rock Garden. One day 40 or so years ago, Nek Chand, a humble transport official, began to clear a little patch deep in the jungle to make himself a small garden area. He set stones around the little clearing and before long had sculpted a few figures recycled from materials he found at hand, such as discarded electrical fittings or bits of furniture. Gradually Nek Chand’s creation developed and grew; before long it covered several acres and comprised of hundreds of sculptures set in a series of interlinking courtyards.
Chand worked at night and after his normal working day, in total secrecy for fear of being discovered by the authorities. When they did discover Chand’s garden, local government officials were thrown into turmoil. The creation was completely illegal – a development in a forbidden area which by rights should be demolished. The outcome, however, was the enlightened decision to give Nek Chand a salary so that he could concentrate full-time on his work, plus a workforce of fifty labourers. Nek Chand’s great work received immediate recognition and was inaugurated as The Rock Garden of Chandigarh.
Now over twenty five acres of several thousand sculptures set in large mosaic courtyards linked by walled paths and deep gorges, Nek Chand’s creation also combines huge buildings with a series of interlinking waterfalls:-

Chandigarh

It’s pretty hard to avoid Delhi being next after Chandigarh. I have been to India 5 times before this, and 4 out of those have involved an entry, or exit, or both, via Delhi. And yet I have always treated the place as a gateway, as one to pass through on the way into, or out of, India. This time, we lingered longer and I am not sorry in the slightest. When we reached there, I was quite worried about the prospect of driving around Delhi there although, in actual fact, it didn’t turn out to be half as bad as I expected – just like other places such as Cairo or Teheran. However, I didn’t know this at the time, so when we approached it from the north, we – or rather I – thought it would be sensible to stop somewhere on the outskirts of Delhi and rely on public transport to get around. So we chose Manju Ka Tilla, an enclave of Tibetan refugees. I had visited there, although hadn’t stayed, when I came to India in 2001 and it had struck me as a nice place to stay, away from the hustle and bustle of somewhere like Paharganj. Of course, in 2001, there was no metro in Delhi, but now there is – and the northern terminal station of this Delhi metro is very, very close to Manju Ka Tilla. So I can strongly recommend staying in Manju Ka Tilla and using the excellent metro to get into the centre of Delhi and further afield quickly, comfortably and cheaply. The food in Manju Ka Tilla, if you like Tibetan momos, is also excellent and our hotel, although cheap, looked right out across the Yamuna River which was quite a magical sight in the early-morning mists.

As luck would have it, Wangial, from Leh was also in Manju Ka Tilla when we were there. Wangial was a friend of Bobo from the Hotel Yak-Tail in Leh. Bobo and Wangial had been very, very helpful when I was getting the welding done on my land cruiser and also the new battery which I needed when the old battery finally gave up the ghost in Leh. Now Wangial had come down to Delhi, although I had also met him a couple of weeks before in Srinagar. We met for an evening and had a lovely drink and a chat. He told me a good story about some criminals from Kashmir who had gone to Mumbai and stolen a Ferrari from the mafia in Mumbai. Because they were from as far away as Kashmir, and because the Ferrari was stolen in the first place, the gangsters in Mumbai could neither report the theft of the Ferrari to the police nor do anything to get it back because Kashmir was too far away from Mumbai! But, the criminals in Kashmir had then found that they couldn’t sell the car or even drive it, because the ground clearance underneath was too low! I don’t know if it’s true or not because certainly some of the roads around Srinagar were good enough for a Ferrari to be driven on. But it’s a funny story anyway.

Delhi, should you choose to linger there, has a plethora of things to see. At or near the top of the list has to be Gandhi Smriti – a museum built around the place where he was murdered, with a deeply moving series of glass footprints set into the ground showing his last footsteps. There’s also the Red Fort, Humayun’s Tomb, Purana Qila, and many others. We also did a coach tour to places further afield and saw Birla Mandir, Qutb Minar, the Lotus Temple, Jantar Mantar (a sun observatory very similar to the one in Jaipur but better condition) and Raj Ghat, where India’s Prime Ministers and presidents were cremated, although Sanjay Gandhi also seems to have sneaked in there. At one point on this trip, some street kids shattered one of the windows on the bus with a stone. Just the way to encourage those inside to give some baksheesh. And there were still more that we wanted to see but didn’t, like the Toilet Museum (!) and the National Rail Museum. Must go back!

I used to wonder what on earth Mark Tully was talking about when he waxed lyrical about the smells of flowers and plants in Delhi. It’s a polluted city in India, for Christ’s sake! Each time I have flown into or out of Delhi there has been that familiar musty-cum-burning smelling miasma hanging over the city that seeps into the nostrils as soon as you get below 2000 feet, or disappears as soon as you climb above 2000 on ascent. Every day spent there is the equivalent of smoking about 30 or 40 cigarettes, although it’s got a little less bad over the last 15 years or so. But this time I could see what he meant when we went to Hauz Khas, an oasis-like little village set in the middle of woodland, with overpowering scents of vegetation. Think of a miniature Hampstead village, with added art galleries, in the middle of Hampstead Heath, and you might get somewhere close. Not the noisy, smelly, dirty, cow-infested and full of beggars Delhi you think of at all – it must be remembered that there is no ‘Delhi’ as a whole, but in fact at least 5 different cities, built by different people, at different times and each with their own distinctive flavour.

And now, you could even say there is a sixth Delhi and this is places like rural Haryana that are metamorphosing into Noida and becoming part of its urban sprawl. Here’s an interesting article about farmers in Haryana splurging on helicopter weddings, having been made rich overnight from selling farm land to make way for posh townships and shopping malls and factories:- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7126459.stm. AND another eg of this was the myriad gleaming new shopping centres that seem to be springing up everywhere there…..a funny hyphen between the old India and the new, with the well-dressed middle-class customers walking in carefree and chattering on mobile phones while their drivers and rickshaw-wallahs wait patiently on the other side of the barrier outside, policed by watchful lathi-wielding security guards. Try reading Aravind Adiga’s ‘White Tiger’ for a similar insight into modern India, that touches on this – absolutely top book.

Delhi

Whilst in Delhi, mainly at my instigation as I’ve already been on Indian trains and seen Agra and Jaipur but felt Amanda would be missing out if she didn’t, we found a place to park the car for a few days and did the touristy Golden Triangle circuit by train ie Delhi-Agra-Jaipur-Delhi. I’d seen the Taj in 1995 and, as the entry fee for it had been put up to US$20 for foreigners, bid Mandy au revoir at the entrance and spent the afternoon in the internet café. Actually, I was glad to go back to Agra as this time we got to see Fatehpur Sikri before the Taj, which I hadn’t see when there before. Some of the buildings looked like they’d been abandoned 3 years ago, not 300.

India Golden Triangle

Rajasthan is India at its colourful and exotic best and undoubtedly it was a shame for Amanda that we didn’t get to see more of it than just Jaipur. But we were on a time limit ie Darjeeling by Christmas or bust. Just recently, the BBC did this lovely audio slideshow about Jaisalmer:- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7910843.stm

One day in Jaipur in particular – 11 December – stands out as a day of fights! First one was when we were on the way to the Temple Of The Sun God on a cycle rickshaw. Some street kids begged while we were stuck in traffic and, when we said no, thought it would be a good idea to throw stones at us, one of which hit Amanda. So off I chased after them and, thanks to a sympathetic passer-by who grabbed him, was able to catch up with one of the little shits and give him a good kick.

Panting like a tank engine on a steep hill, I got back to the rickshaw and on we went to the Temple Of The Sun God, AKA the Monkey Temple. These monkeys are mightily bold, treating the giving of food by visitors as a right and not a privilege. So much so that when one of them saw the bag of nuts in my hand, it decided to launch itself right at me, trying to jump onto my leg and climb up. I wasn’t going to let it do that and then have to get a rabies jab, so met this monkey in mid-air with my foot. It flew right back where it had just come from and another visitor to the temple started speaking to me – was all set to tell him to f##k off if he was going to tell me off for kicking the monkey, but he was saying “don’t do it – it’ll make them more aggressive.” Fair enuff, but what else can you do?!

Later that evening we went to the Raj Mandir, a sort of wedding cake-themed Art Deco cinema. It’s the sort of place you go to just to see the lovely building, irrespective of the film. Outside after the film we approached the auto-rickshaws waiting in a line in the road at the front. This stretch of road wasn’t quite 2 lanes, but was plenty wide enough for other traffic to get past these rickshaws and it was doing so quite happily. But that wasn’t good enough for 1 middle-aged man, in his chauffeur-driven Toyota Qualis, who decided to have a go at the rickshaw driver we were in the middle of negotiating a price with, for blocking the road. This he did by stopping alongside the rickshaw (how could he have got alongside if it was blocking the road?) and leaned out of the side window to give it a shake and rock it from side to side. So I shouted “Choop, Moti Chod” at him (“shut up, fat fucker”) and the rickshaw-wallah started laughing. I thought there was going to be a fight – or at least an attempt to start one – as the man then promptly started to open his door, then obviously thought better of it and the Qualis drove away, delivering him safely back to his textile factory or import-export business.

Also saw the first example of one of Reliance’s ‘Sainsburys Local’-like chain store grocery shops that is supposedly striking fear into the hearts of all India’s independent grocery/general stores. They needn’t worry for a year or 2 – this Reliance didn’t even stock bottled water (!)

In Lucknow, we stayed a couple of days. It’s quite a pleasant city, and not only that we stayed in a government-owned hotel and actually enjoyed it. The sweet manager is a keen numismatist, so was interested in my collection of commemorative 50p pieces.

http://www.indiamike.com/india-hotels/hotel-gomti-lucknow-h2360/

While ambling along in Lucknow one day, at the junction of Ashok Marg and MG Road, we came across a recently-opened Ghost House on the first floor of a disused building. It may not be there any more, but it was actually quite good. We had gone to it on impulse and because it wasn’t very expensive, and for an intended laugh at the sheer corniness of it which can sometimes provide the entertainment value all by itself albeit unintended. But all this Ghost House needed was a little train going around it and they’d have had a winner to rival the Ghost Train at any English funfair. Respect.

UP tourism does a good half-day tour starting from the Gomti. We got taken to the Bara Imambara, a beautifully designed tomb with an intriguing maze of passageways in the upper floors, then the Hussainabad Imambara, with a clocktower that looks as if it was modelled on the Croydon one. At the Residency, the epicentre of the 1857 Mutiny (AKA India’s First War Of Independence), I saw a granite memorial obelisk to the Cornish soldiers who had been stationed there. Can you imagine my amazement when I saw the plaque saying it was sourced from Bosahan Quarry in Cornwall?! I googled Bosahan Quarry and ended up emailing this website; far from no response or ‘yes, we knew about this’ I had a reply in 30 minutes flat along the lines of ‘this is interesting – we didn’t know about this – mind if we use your pics?’ and so now I am on it – http://constantinecornwall.com/history/granite.php

Pics of Uttar Pradesh (including Lucknow) and Bihar

Uttar Pradesh and Bihar

Driving in India at night is a decidedly overrated pastime. If I can inventify a new word, namely getthereitis, the times I have done this have been borne out of frustration in not covering more ground during the day. Lumbering cattle, trucks, motorbikes and farm traffic of every description leap out from the darkness, made even worse by oncoming trucks who don’t bother to use their dip beams. I ended up redirecting the beams of the driving lights slightly upwards and to the right so as to get my own back on these dazzling idiots.

The mentality of the average Indian truck (and, even more so, bus driver) seems akin to the the ‘Hogs Of the Road’ sequence in Clockwork Orange ie drive like a maniac and everything else gets out of your way or gets mown down.

If that video doesn’t work, copy this one and paste it into your browser – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zmE4o2bnsg

After one particularly stressful evening of this, we ended up in Gorakhpur. Hoping to stay the night there and having the names of a couple of hotels but not a street map, we wasted nearly an hour driving around running the gauntlet of false directions and unnamed streets. By the end of this, I had well and truly had enough and what happened next is ironic in that I vented my annoyance on probably one of the least deserving of victims. On a wide section of road, I suddenly found we were behind a lumbering bullock cart, who was doing nothing wrong beyond blocking the road whilst the driver went around a parked truck at the left side of the road. Feeling at that moment an overwhelming desire to get this intrusion out of my life, I leaned on the horn button with all the venom I could muster, surprising even the most hardened Indians looking on, while the gap between my front bumper and this bullock cart was slightly smaller than the width of the average credit card. Then, simultaneously the cart passed the truck and turned to the left to move back to the side of the road, while I tried to pass the cart. BUT – the back end of the cart of course swung to the right as the front end went to the left and, as I was too close, the shaft got caught in the bar on the front of the car. Result? As I tried to pass this cart, I saw the bullocks suddenly lumbering sideways and ended up shunting the cart into another one parked by the side of the road, which promptly tipped over and shed its load of cement. Needless to say, I didn’t think any good would have come of me sticking around after that – so I didn’t!

Partly because of what we’d heard about Bihar and partly because the clock was ticking, we didn’t linger that long crossing Bihar. Also we crossed to the north of the Ganges, whereas the tourist sites that there are in Bihar are largely to the south of it. Can’t remember whether we spent 1 night or 2 crossing there but the 1 place I can remember was a town called Begusarai. Even though Bihar was somewhere I wouldn’t have minded paying a bit more for a hotel with secure parking, Begusarai genuinely didn’t seem to have anything other than cheap places with the usual unpaved patch of compacted earth between the front and the road. So we succumbed, but I slipped the security-wallah a few notes to keep a good eye on the vehicle. Dunno if this helped, but the hotel people were really nice and the car was still there in 1 piece the next morning. I remember telling people in Calcutta that we’d stayed there and they were aghast at the risk we’d taken, going through such bandit country!

Christmas was spent in Darjeeling….I can’t think of a better place in India to spend Christmas. Going there was Amanda’s idea, but I can see why. We also decided to splash out and stay at the Viceroy Hotel and again I was glad we did. Highly recommended, but with a weird lift arrangement! You had to go up the stairs to the 1st floor to get the lift…..apparently this was because they’d ordered the lift when they thought they would only get planning permission for 5 floors, then found out they could get 6, by which time the lift had already been ordered and couldn’t be extended. One would have thought it would have made more sense to have the lift starting on the ground floor and have people using the stairs only on the top floor. But this is a mere and amusing trifle – http://www.viceroyhoteldrj.com/

The Viceroy hadn’t actually been our first choice in Darjeeling, purely because it was too new to be in the LP and we didn’t know if its existence until stumbling across it once there. One of the places that was in the LP was one we’d tried to book a few days before called the Fortune Resort Central which was 4 stars (allegedly as it turned out) and actually more expensive, but when I got through to the call centre in Calcutta, they said the person I needed to talk to wasn’t there. “OK”, said I – “can I leave my number and then they can call me back”.
“No no”, said this epitome of Indian customer service, “we don’t take messages”.
Me – “What the hell kind of a luxury hotel chain are you, if you can’t be bothered to take a message for me to give you my business?” End of call.

I thought no more of it, but then one night the Viceroy shifted us to another hotel as they were double-booked. Guess which one it was….? And sure enough, the hotel itself was little better than its call centre, although the small and crap room did have a picture of Mousehole on the wall (!) We saw an Australian couple being refused a bowl of porridge at breakfast and despite all the notices everywhere about water conservation, there was one of its staff merrily using a hosepipe to spray water all over the road outside!

Also make sure to do the trip to see the sunrise from Tiger Hill, taking in Kangchengdzonga, Everest and indeed a 250KM stretch of Himalayan Horizon, BUT don’t make the mistake I made which is to forget to charge your camera batteries fully and then find they pack up on you in the cold. If the local chap who sympathised with my predicament and lent me some is reading this, many thanks!

Pics of Darjeeling

Darjeeling

We rode on the obligatory Toy Train

…and went to Darjeeling Zoo, which was quite pleasant, compared to some of the sordid ones that can be found in places like India.

Then, 3 days in Sikkim,

Sikkim

then down to Calcutta for Amanda to fly home on 4 January, stopping off on the way for a highly enjoyable bit of white-water rafting between Teesta Bazaar and Kalimpong. If anyone reading this is interested in rafting, try Mr D.K. Ra on +91 9434862561.
After this things went a bit haywire – it took a long time to get the car shipped from Calcutta! I had to do this because I wanted to get to SE Asia and the only way from India apart from shipping is through China (prohibitively expensive) or Myanmar (impossible – or so I thought – see below!)

Getting the car shipped proved to be a total nightmare, and at the conclusion of the whole sorry saga I had ended up spending 4 weeks in Calcutta, although in reality the shipping saga dragged on for 3 as I didn’t approach shipping agents immediately when I arrived which was hardly their fault. Quite possibly I made a mistake in telling the first shipping people I approached I was prepared to get the car shipped from either here or Chennai, and a further one in telling them truthfully how much I’d been quoted by a Chennai company to get the car from there across to SE Asia. Cunningly, but perhaps sadly predictably, the first Kolkata shipping people came up with a higher price that suspiciously closely reflected the cost of how much it would cost me to drive down to Chennai and then get the vehicle shipped from there. The last agents I spoke to were LCL – I didn’t mention Chennai and ended up paying pretty much what it would have cost from there.

Am afraid this part of the blog is going to read a bit like Harry P’s ‘both barrels.’ What did I do with all that time in Calcutta, you may ask? Did an Oscar Wilde and wrote ‘The Ballad Of Calcutta Gaol?’ On paper, I had ample time to get plenty of diary-writing and other things done but I wasn’t really in the mood. As can be imagined, I’d mentally moved on from India and it was incredibly frustrating to be effectively stuck here, with attendant post-Amanda departure depression to boot. I felt so self-conscious walking in the street alone for the first time in 9 months, and if anything the hassle-wallahs give you more aggravation when you’re on your own.

There was just one delay, bureaucratic hurdle and problem after another and yet, at every stage of the process, it always seemed as if abandoning getting the car shipped from there and driving south to Chennai would see me repeating the same process there which would only have delayed things further. The situation just seemed to keep unfolding but if I had known at the outset that it would drag on for 3 weeks then I’d have been mentally prepared for it….I’d either have driven down to Chennai right from the outset or I’d have been better able to arrange things to do in and around Calcutta – even gone to Bangladesh for a week or 2.

But all along even the shipping agents didn’t know themselves – the first problem was that the ship that was supposed to sail for Port Kelang on the 17th (perfectly reasonable given that it wasn’t till the 9th that I approached the agents) dropped Port Kelang from its itinerary and instead headed straight for Singapore and a dry dock for repairs. Then I was booked onto a ship that was supposed to sail on the 22nd (meaning that I could get the car into the container 4 days prior as soon as the port opened for this ship, seal the container and go) but then this ship kept getting delayed and delayed owing to congestion at the port and every day for nearly a week the arrival date of this ship kept receding into the distance by a further day. Meanwhile, Customs kept raising problems with the paperwork and the shipping agents were stuck as piggy in the middle between an irate me and the delayed ship. The problem for me was that owing to Customs formalities I HAD to stick around WITH the car until it was put in the container, so it wasn’t just a case of me on the phone to the shipping agents every day asking where my shipment was – I was the delayed shipment myself!

Pics of Calcutta

Calcutta

One article, followed by a letter, in the Telegraph in Calcutta prompted me to put finger to keyboard and write the editor a letter of my own:-

‘Dear Sir

I write in response to Abhijit Das’s letter in The Telegraph edition of 13 January 2008, regarding call centre staff suffering abuse from ‘foulmouth’ English customers. Mr Das’s letter appears to have been written in response to this article:-

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080107/jsp/frontpage/story_8752128.jsp

I am a British tourist currently in Kolkata and feel the need to put across an alternative view. Having visited India 6 times and spent a total of 8 months here, I do not believe it to be too much of a generalisation to say that India doesn’t have the same customer service mentality as that which is expected in Britain. Although a tourist coming here could be held to have accepted this, most people in Britain haven’t chosen to be put through to India when they call their bank.

While not condoning an opening remark consisting of “Oh, I’m through to India am I? Put me through to someone who can understand English, you f****** cow” (although as the recent incident at the India-Australia cricket match showed, India perhaps has its own issues regarding racism), everyone in Britain who has ever dealt with an Indian call centre will have a negative experience of one sort or another to recount. Typically this would be being kept on hold for ages waiting to get through to someone, being given wrong information, getting cut off in mid call, promises to take follow-up action not being kept or staff on the other end who can’t understand the caller. The hapless customer often has to call back a few days later to find out why the problem he called up about initially hasn’t been fixed, only to find that there’s no record of the original call on his account, before demanding to speak to a supervisor and getting told that one isn’t available, followed by having to start all over again in an attempt to get the problem fixed.

So yes – working in a call centre may be frustrating, but spare a thought for the poor callers on the other end of the line!

Yours etc’
Curiously, in the interests of balanced reporting, they didn’t publish this letter.

There is a rather irritating variety of excessively politically correct Western tourist, that India seems to attract more than its fair share of, that I call the ‘right-on’, ‘down-with-the–locals’ type. The sort who thinks any foreigner getting into any kind of dispute abroad is automatically the one in the wrong, or who would blame themselves for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, rather than the robber, if they were to be mugged in the street. I was unfortunate enough to meet one in an internet cafe – when I came to pay at the end, the banknote had a small rip in one corner. The stupid troll on the cash desk wouldn’t accept it and, as if to add insult to injury, some patronising middle-class French woman at another computer started wading in uninvited on his side, telling me I wasn’t in my own country….twice I had to snap at her, telling her I hadn’t asked for her opinion. I felt like asking her whether she’d still be on the side of the locals if she’d got eve-teased, given that she wasn’t in her own country either and that lots of men in India think women – especially foreign ones – are fair game.

I was slightly consoled to discover a Pink Floyd tribute band that played in the bar of the (very modern and up-market) Park Hotel and this took up a few nostalgic nights. I was a bit naughty on my last night there, near to my last night in Calcutta. The bar charged about Rs200 for a bottle of beer that cost a quarter or a third of that elsewhere. Fair enough – you pay for the ambience – but anyway it had a ‘pay your bill when you’ve finished drinking’ policy and that night it was very crowded. So, after 5 or 6 bottles and after making my last trip to the toilet which you had to go out of the bar and across the lobby to reach, instead of going back to the bar to settle up guess what I did? UMMMMMM!

An unfortunate colony of rats also bore the brunt of my frustration at being stuck in Calcutta. There was a delicious fast food place called Kusum that did kebab or giro-like things in parathas. Just down the alley from here it opened out into a square. All along 1 side of this square was a rubbish tip, teeming with rats, and at the entrance to this square was a pile of building rubble. It was sadistic entertainment at night to come along and chuck bits of it at the rats.

It’s so unfortunate that the best people I met were so close to the end of my sojourn there. After going off on the Sundarbans trip, I had changed to a cheaper hotel as the manager of the Sunflower Guest House where I’d stayed for 3 weeks since coming to Calcutta was so mean he wouldn’t even let me leave the car there for one night while I was away. And no it wasn’t because he was concerned about the car being unattended, but because I wanted to check out and then check back in again 1 night later after getting back from Sundarbans. Near to the cheaper place was the Rambo Bar, a rather divey pub. The first night I was there I saw a mouse running across the floor and pointed it out to the staff. Cue a beaming smile and “yes, we have mice too”. I spent a lot of time here, but it did attract some interesting characters. For example, there was Sanjay Garg, who worked for GEM Forgings, who I got to know and had some very nice conversations with about technical stuff. There was also a middle-aged chap called Ambar Batra, who I got talking to when he came to the bar “to look at the strange people who come here” and a few days later sent his chauffeur one night to take me back to his expensive apartment for whisky and then a lovely, lovely meal in the Calcutta Hotel. He had been to Eton and lived on income from family property in Rajasthan, I think. Old money.

Mordechai and Jo Cohen were a couple I got to know after meeting Mordechai by chance when I was having my car fixed – or at least attempting to – and he stopped to say hello. Going around to their house and seeing them was a pleasant experience and we had some excellent conversations about everything. Mordechai had even been the newscaster for Pakistan television in Bangladesh when it was still East Pakistan in the 1960s, and this although he was Jewish!

I also had yet another experience of Indian customer service in Calcutta, after the hotel one above. Having replaced the first battery on the Landcruiser in Leh a couple of months ago, I then thought it would be a good idea to replace the second battery as a precautionary measure before leaving India and while it was still relatively cheap. I had gone to a garage – the one where I met Mordechai – and had had a number of servicing-type things done to the vehicle and then we came to the issue of the battery. The Landcruiser needed 2 x 80 amp/hour (A/H) batteries, thanks to its 12/24v electrical system. These were what it came with, and the first battery that had been replaced was the same 80 A/H. Replacing the other with one of a lower rating would have caused imbalance between the batteries and consequent problems, which I explained very, very clearly to the garage manager. When I bought the first battery, they had had some trouble getting hold of an 80 A/H one as these are rare in India. The same thing happened here. The idiot who ran the garage tried a number of different places to get an 80 A/H battery and eventually said he had found one. When this battery turned up, it did not say anywhere on it what the rating was, but it did have a model number which began with 70. Because the rating in A/H had formed part of the model numbers of other batteries I had seen, I assumed this model number meant this was a 70 A/H battery. The garage manager insisted it was an 80 A/H battery but when I pointed to the price list, the model number on the side of my other 80 A/H battery and then to the model number on the side of this 70 A/H one, the idiot decided to have a tantrum and took the battery out of the car saying, “I don’t want my customers to give me trouble; I want my customers just to pay their bill and not ask questions!” What a twat – and so stupid he didn’t even understand the one rupee tip I left him at the end was meant as an insult!

But to be honest, I wish I had made more use of my stay in Calcutta, and could have done if I had been there under more favourable circumstances, if I had known at the outset how long I was going to be there, and if I was not also feeling upset after Amanda had left India and gone back to the UK. I would very happily go back there under different circumstances and know I would enjoy it much more. It had some lovely restaurants, art galleries and cultural things to do and is very convenient for traveling on to Bangladesh. Thanks to circumstance, I had an attitude problem whilst there which wasn’t the fault of Calcutta, although admittedly not totally my fault either – I was misled into believing that something was about to happen at a particular point. This partly accounted for why I was so disinclined to explore more of Calcutta or indeed to do the 3 and not the 2 day trip to Sundarbans – if I had ever been told to go away and come back in a week or 2 weeks then I could have done this, but I never was – I was always told to come back tomorrow or come back the day after tomorrow and so on.

My time in Calcutta wasn’t totally wasted, admittedly. I did a short, but highly civilised trip to the Sundarbans Nature Reserve just south of there. A swooningly-relaxing meander through the Kerala backwaters-like waterways and mangrove forests. This I would highly recommend, and if possible, make sure to go for the three- rather than the two-day trip which I would have done if I hadn’t been told to get back early for the car shipping – GRRRRR! The excursions are run by West Bengal Tourism.

Being stuck this way in Calcutta even caused a knock-on effect AFTER I’d left there. I wanted to go to Burma after Calcutta before going to KL to rejoin the car and there is a Burmese Consulate in Calcutta, so it seemed to make so much more sense to get the visa there, then fly straight to Yangon from there rather than the Myanmar government-imposed zigzag across SE Asia that transpired. However, when I went there just after starting my attempts at shipping the car it transpired the rules had just changed and the previous 3 days or so to get a Burmese visa from this consulate had become a two week minimum turnaround. Of course, if I had known then what I know now I would have gone ahead with the application and it would have been no problem because I ended up being in Calcutta for at least two weeks. But, because I didn’t know, the very day the Landy was shipped from Calcutta, I couldn’t go straight to Yangon but had to fly straight to Bangkok to get the Burmese visa and then dogleg back. But, determined until the end to use my time productively this time, I did at least arrange it so I put the application in for the Burma visa and then went off to Koh Samet, a little island just south of Bangkok, for a few days while this visa was being processed.

Luckily another knock-on effect didn’t happen – I had bought my ticket to Bangkok with a Bangladesh airline called GMG Airlines – apparently it is also a brewery in Bangladesh! I had to keep changing my ticket as the date kept getting pushed back and the Ts&Cs said this would incur a charge. However, even though I changed it 4 times, they never actually charged me – probably they didn’t spot it. Sometimes Indian doziness can work in your favour!

However I did have some time to watch TV, and some Indian TV ads were quite pleasant.

Like the one for Madhya Pradesh Tourism (actually done by an Italian agency)

Or this hilarious one for Vodafone…..just LOOK at the body language when the woman shouts at the man!

Or this rather sweet one, also by Vodafone

This Airtel one created a lot of positive comment in the press

Whereas other ads, like these obnoxious ones, offered a less positive insight into the Indian psyche

and even caught the attention of the BBC

The website for one of the manufacturers just sums it up – http://www.fairandhandsome.net/yourface.jsp

Finally, of special relevance to Calcutta is this one, as it’s where Ambassadors are made. Curiously, none of the people I showed this to in Calcutta were aware of it

Not knowing exactly how long I was going to stay in Calcutta caused me many problems and one was that I had asked Hindustan Motors for a tour of their Ambassador factory. They had said no, as the factory was shut on the day I said I wanted to visit, but reading between the lines they would probably have said yes if I had known how long I was going to be there for and specified a later date when the factory was open. But here’s a virtual tour anyway.

http://www.hmambassador.com/

Finally, on Monday 28 January the agents decided to attack the problem head on and I spent the whole day with them going first to Customs and then to the port to personally supervise the loading of the car into the container. They can’t have made any money out of me, for I paid them 43,000 rupees (GBP 540) for the whole job but they had to pay out 15,000 rupees in bribes to get the whole thing put to bed.

Even at the end, when we had to go to the customs department in person, they demanded a bribe when they signed the documentation for the car at the port, because they said they couldn’t sign the documentation without seeing the car actually in the shipping container – anything to extract baksheesh!

The drive to the shipping port at the end of my time in Calcutta, and in even more detail the drive back from the shipping port once the car had been successfully loaded into the container, will stick in my mind for a long time. It was cathartic. To celebrate when the vehicle was finally put to bed, Amit and the other shipping agents took me to a club for beer and sandwiches.

I should also point out it was not the fault of any shippers in Calcutta that I did not think to arrange shipping before I actually got there. It was also apparent that LCL Shipping had a clearer idea of how to get around the Customs and other formalities after shipping my car than before. The situation did get a bit strained between me and LCL, but equally I was blaming them for delays caused by others eg congestion at the port. LCL could very easily have walked away from the whole dog’s breakfast and left me in the lurch – but they didn’t. I formed a good relationship in the end with Amit Bhaduri (the LCL person dealing with my shipment) and, provided you make contact with LCL well before you reach Calcutta and get yourself in the queue sooner than I did, you shouldn’t have anything like the same hassles I had. Amit and I joked about our friendship “forged in the heat of battle” and has talked favourably about me sending other overlanders his way more recently, so I don’t think the whole thing upset him unduly.

Should I have driven to Chennai? Probably yes, in retrospect. The shipping agents reckoned Chennai wasn’t any better for congestion, but 3 other overlanders I have spoken to SINCE this sorry affair took just 2 or 3 days to get their cars shipped from there. Chennai is a much bigger port and if a ship is delayed or cancelled, there are plenty more alternatives than there are in Calcutta.