The Flip Side of the Coin

Namaste! We’re now in the spectacular desert town of Jaisalmer in the far west of Rajasthan. We’ve found a few hours and an Internet Café and so can now update you on our travels since Christmas. Here goes.

Early in the morning of the 28th December, we touched down in Delhi after a truly awful night flight from Addis Ababa. Full to the brim with chain-smoking Chinese engineers en route to Beijing (cheap contractors brought in by the government to rebuild the country’s roads), sleep quickly proved out of the question. After six months of hard graft on dusty mountain passes, our oriental friends were flying home for the holiday season, and were in the mood to party.

Thankfully, the airport pickup we’d arranged with our guesthouse actually turned up, and in no time we were checked in to our hotel and crashed out on our beds. Later on, we emerged bleary-eyed onto the chaotic streets of a startlingly new continent. What follows are a few first impressions…

Many people visiting India refer to themselves as “travellers” rather than “tourists” or “backpackers”. Often they will tell you they are in India to “discover themselves” or to “feel the spirituality of India” etc. But after a year in Uganda, without access to Western shops, and a month in Ethiopia without access to an ATM, I was more interested in rediscovering my Visa debit card and going shopping. Karma & chakra would have to wait.

One problem with living out of a backpack is that you are compelled to wear the same four or five outfits day-in, day-out. In Ethiopia I’d been reading excitedly in my guidebook about the designer clothes shops in Delhi. However, I was quickly disappointed – prices were no better than back home, the range was limited and the service was attentive to the point of terrifying. Indian fashion is also a world away from what I’d hoped for. I should perhaps have realized this – the Indian man on the street is often dressed like an extra in a 1970s sit-com. An example: a pair of tight-fitting, flared grey trousers complemented by black brogues and a pea-green shirt with Harry Hill collar. And only in India is the sparkly-brown woolen tanktop still worn without irony.

Fashion aside, India is without doubt a full-scale assault on the senses – all of them. The first and most brutal wave in this assault in on the ears – Indians use car-horns like a typist uses the space bar. ( A l l   t h e   t i m e . ) At first we thought the taxi driver picking us up from the airport might have a malfunctioning horn, then we feared he might have a mental illness, only later did we realize that every Indian driver uses his car-horn in this way. So everywhere you go and at all times your ears will be struck by cars, rickshaws, scooters and motorcycles all screaming at you LOOK OUT! GET OUT OF MY WAY! This has caused frustration, tension and more than a few headaches, but after a week or so our ears have finally succeeded in blocking out these intrusions. We now walk down Indian streets blissfully unaware of the clamor surrounding us.

The second wave in the Indian assault is on the eyes. Color is everywhere, the brighter the better. In clothes and food especially, explosions of highly-contrasting slabs of color grab your attention. Saleem Sinai called this India’s “Rainbow riot”. But it’s not just color that captures you – every available surface of everything you see, from adverts to architecture, is covered completely with the most ornate and intricate of decoration.

The third wave is directed squarely at the visitor’s nose. I’d like to say that this is only due to the aromas of delicious foods and pungent spices that fill most streets, but also detectable in the airwaves is the stench of a thousand decomposing cow pats. Cows, you see, are sacred here, and even in cities it is considered auspicious to own a cow. So on each street several prize specimins wander up and down contributing to the mix their own particular aroma. Often they are fed leftovers by their owners, but it seems the holy cow’s main sustenace comes from pilfering produce from fruit & veg stalls. It’s amazing that these lumbering menaces are so tolerated – any unattened stall is fair game to the bovine bandits.

The forth and final wave is of course on the taste buds. Indians have long been famous for their love of spicy foods, but far more incredible is the way in which they add such spice to EVERYTHING that can be consumed. At first this came as a shock, but now we’re taking chilli with everything, breakfast-lunch-dinner, just like a local.

Since arriving in Delhi we’ve been taking in the sights of old Mughal empire – Agra Fort, the Taj Mahal, Akbar’s Mausoleum, the Red Fort & Jama Masjid amongst many others. All incredibly spectacular and worth far more time than we’ve been able to give them as we fly through Rajasthan.

There have certainly been a few up and downs getting used to India (rapacious touts, spicy food, etc.) but now we’ve found the right wavelength we’re looking forward to a fantastic month exploring the rest of Rajasthan. Then from Udaipur we will take the night train to Ahmedabad and on into Gujurat, down to Mumbai and perhaps down as far south as Goa. Who knows? The world is our oyster… but an oyster with chilli naturally!