Passage to India – Across the Punjab to Chandigarh

After a second night at the hotel in Amritsar and more curry we set off the following morning on a journey of one hundred and fifty miles to the city of Chandigarh.

It was a long drive but I enjoyed it.  Kim slept of course.  It was a motorway but not a motorway as we would understand it, pedestrians wander along the verge, cows stray absentmindedly into the road, vehicles drive in both directions on the same carriageway, there is no lane discipline and the hard shoulder is decorated with broken down vehicles.  I doubt you can call the AA or the RAC for assistance here.

Around about midway we stopped at a service station for a break and we ordered a cup of tea.  In India they brew tea in a different way to us, they boil a kettle with a tea bag or two, milk and sugar added which makes it impossible to drink if like me you like it black.

Then there was an amazing coincidence.  We were talking to some British Indians that were here on holiday and it transpired that the woman came from Leicester and so do I and as we spoke it became clear that she lived very close to where I lived as a young boy.  Then it became bizarre because the man told us that he was from Grimsby, well Immingham close by actually, but not really Immingham but the nearby village of Healing.  Which is where we live! I will say that again. Which is where we live!  Here in the middle of the Punjab, five thousand miles from home we met a man who lives around the corner!

Later as we approached the city we stopped for lunch, there was curry but a few of us were not in the mood for curry so we turned down the opportunity and went to a nearby Burger King instead and sat outside in the sunshine.  There is not a lot of choice at an Indian Burger King it has to be said with the menu restricted mainly to chicken but it made a nice change.  The young girl serving appeared perplexed when I asked if I could take her photograph.  Middle picture top collage,

Chandigarh is a new city and tour guide Rahi warned us that there is not a great deal to see.  No forts, no Palaces, no old town because the city was built in the 1950s when India needed a new capital for Eastern Punjab on account of the partition and the inconvenience that the previous capital of the whole of the Punjab was Lahore which was now in Pakistan.

The city has one of the highest per capita incomes in the country and the territory has one of the highest Human Development Index among Indian states and territories. In a 2015 survey it was ranked as the happiest city in India.  In the same year an article published by the BBC named Chandigarh one of the few master-planned cities in the world to have succeeded in terms of combining monumental architecture, cultural growth, and modernisation.  Its tag line is the “Beautiful City” and it was immediately obvious that it is quite unlike Delhi, Jaipur, Amritsar or anywhere else that we had visited because it was clean and tidy, no beggars, no litter and immaculate gardens.

We were visiting the city rose garden, the Zakir Hussain Rose Garden named after the former Indian President Zakir Hussain which claims to have over fifty thousand rose bushes with more than one thousand, five hundred species and hosts the annual ‘Rose Festival’ in early Spring.

This sounded promising but the only point of visiting a stunning rose garden is if there are any stunning roses and today there were none, I have no idea how they were going to stage a Rose Festival without roses so it was all a bit of a disappointment.

This is how it should have looked…

So we walked around the garden, got back on the coach and went to another bit of parkland surrounding a lake and went for another walk.  It was beginning to become obvious now that this was a filling in sort of day, a transit day to get us from one side of the Punjab to the other before moving on tomorrow to the next big visit – Shimla, close to the Himalayan mountains.  With such big distances to cover a day such as this is inevitable.

We left the city and drove to our overnight hotel and here we said goodbye to driver DP and assistant Chandu because they were leaving us now and returning to Delhi.  The next stage of our journey was into the mountains and the large coach was unsuitable for the narrow roads so we were transferring to smaller mini buses.

It had been a pleasure to be driven by DP he had been an excellent driver and assistant Chandu had been friendly and helpful throughout.

 

Passage to India – Wagah Border Pantomime and Partition

Leaving the Golden Temple we proceeded now to the Wagah India /Pakistan border.

We were going to see the  Beating Retreat Ceremony which has been a daily military event since 1959. The ceremony takes place every evening just before sunset at the border crossing which came into being when the Radcliffe line was drawn, separating India and Pakistan, and dividing the Province of Punjab into eastern and western sections. The eastern part went to India and the western part into Pakistan.

This is the only official road link on what is called the Grand Trunk Road  between the two countries and which crosses what is the political fault line which is the Indian Pakistan border and which passes through a colossal , rather ugly concrete border with heavy metal gates.

So we arrived early, way too early in my opinion and now we had to sit and wait, sit and wait, sit and wait.  In all that time all that happened was that a family was allowed through from the Pakistan side to the Indian side and they stood for a while with their suitcases blinking and looking bewildered wondering what to do next.  Were they being ejected, had their visas been approved?  They didn’t seem to know.   Eventually they realised that the crowds of excited people were not there to welcome them to India and they moved  slowly on.

I may have mentioned earlier about the visa application process which was quite difficult and asked several times about any connections relating to Pakistan and as I watched them step  tentatively  from one side to the next it all suddenly seemed to make some belated sense.

Eventually after something about twice as as long as the last Ice Age the show got started.

The ceremony started with a lot of singing and dancing and grand theatre and then a storming parade by the security forces from both the sides with a lot of bravado and strutting about. It reminded me of Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks, soldiers pretending to be Can’Can dancers at the Moulin Rouge and it ended in a contrived coordinated lowering of the two nations’ flags. One soldier stands at attention on each side of the gate.

As the sun sets, the iron gates at the border were opened and the two flags are lowered simultaneously. The flags are folded and the ceremony ended with a retreat that involved a rather reluctant and seemingly difficult handshake between soldiers from either side followed by the theatrical closing of the gates once again.

All rather odd.  India hates Pakistan, Pakistan hates India.  India loves Pakistan, Pakistan loves India.  In under eighty years there have been four wars/spats between the two, 1947/8, 1965, 1971 and most recently 1999. It is like two people who live together but can’t get on and live together,  How can a foreign visitor make any sense of that I wonder?

The tension spills over into sport.  India and Pakistan are two of the greatest cricket teams in the World but they don’t play each other except at neutral venues.  Since Partition only one Hindu has ever represented Pakistan and only seventeen Muslims have represented India despite the fact that India has the third highest Muslim population in the World.  Pakistan cricketers are excluded from the Indian Premier League for political and religious reasons.  How absurd is that?

It was all a complete pantomime.  Ridiculous really but to be fair I didn’t understand the relevance of it.  A bit of trivia for you,  the word ‘pak’ means pure in Persian and ”istan’ means land of so Pakistan is literally ‘land of purity’.  That is a very bold claim.

I asked Tour Guide Rahi about it and he was certain that Partition was entirely the fault of the British, their policy of divide and rule that set Muslim against Hindu and led to the events of 1947 which must surely go down as one of the major humanitarian tragedies of the twentieth century when hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and slaughtered for not even a very good reason.

India and Pakistan were separated in 1947 as the British withdrew from India.  It suits to blame the British and their admittedly clueless, clumsy and uninformed division of the sub-continent but surely others were equally complicit in a defiant statement of intent firmly set against compromise.  Viceroy Mountbatten gave up the attempt, referred it back to London and it all ended up going tits up.

I personally didn’t enjoy it, I thought the visit a complete waste of time, I had known about the tension between India and Pakistan but I would have preferred to have visited the Partition Museum but that seemed to get quietly dropped from the itinerary.  I would have preferred to return to the Golden Temple at Sunset but that too seemed to get quietly dropped from the itinerary so had to stick instead with the pantomime ceremony right through to the end.

I would most especially liked to go and see a cricket match between India and Pakistan.  No chance of that of course.

What happened to these main players?  Ghandi of course was assassinated in 1948,  Earl Mountbatten suffered the same fate in 1979, blown up by an IRA bomb, Jinnah was a chain smoker (fifty a day, or one every fifteen minutes based on a twelve hour day because you can’t smoke when you are asleep because you will set fire to the bed) and died of lung disease in 1948, Nehru lived until 1964 and died of a heart attack.

Cyril Radcliffe who drew the line which became the border was so saddened by the violence and death that his line had caused that he refused to draw his salary (£3,000 in 1947 or about £145,000 in 2024 values) and returned to England where he was created a Lord.  Some things never change and reward for failure is one of them.  He lived a long life until 1977.

When it was all over (thank goodness) we returned to the hotel, relaxed for a while before going to the dining room for another curry.  I had now had more curry in one week than I had had in the last ten years, maybe twenty years.

Tomorrow there was a long coach journey ahead across the Punjab from Amritsar to Chandrigarh but on the plus side there was a later start.

Passage to India – Barefoot in Turbans

“A poor, hungry person knows no religion; to him, the person who offers him food is the real God.”― Raj Kiran Atagaraha

Our visit began at the site of what is called the Amritsar massacre.

The more correctly called Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place on 13th April 1919. After several days of civil disturbance a large, mainly peaceful crowd had gathered during a public holiday to protest in support of Indian independence.  In response Brigadier General, Reginald Dyer, surrounded the people and after blocking the exit with his troops either lost self control or in a lust for blood  ordered them to shoot at the crowd, continuing to fire even as the protesters tried to flee. The troops kept on firing until their ammunition was exhausted.  He boasted later that not a single bullet was wasted.

Estimates of those killed vary from 400 to 1,500.  The story is told as an act of British Army violence and an example of imperial tyranny but the British Army as an organisation was not directly involved in the massacre, the British Indian Army was a separate organisation and this was a regiment of Gurkha and Sikh infantry.  It is said that Dyer selected troops for the operation who were especially loyal to the British in India.  There was a prevailing fear of insurrection and civil violence.  There is always a flip-side to a story.  Just saying.

It is a dark stain on British imperial rule for sure and I am neither wishing to be controversial or to be an apologist but it is that time and forgiveness thing again that I spoke about in an earlier post.  Going back a few days to our time in  Delhi tour guide Rahi told the story of a Mongol invasion and massacre and it was told as though it was just a part of Indian history without passion or emotion.  Something that just happened.

In 1241 an invading Mongol army advanced and the ancient city of Lahore (now Pakistan) was invaded by an army of thirty-thousand blood-thirsty warriors from the north. The Mongols defeated the local army, massacred the entire population, cut off their heads and stuck them on poles to warn others not to stand in their way and the city was completely destroyed.   Rather like modern day Gaza.  Rather like the destruction of Warsaw in 1944.  And many more.  I have said this before that if there is one lesson from history it is that we learn nothing and history sadly and inevitably repeats itself. 

The massacre at Lahore is not told as a dreadful act of brutality in the same way as the Amritsar massacre.  Time dulls the senses, centuries pass, the tide washes the sands and history is whitewashed.  There is a lot of forgetting and forgiving over a thousand years.  Rather like the Norman Conquest in England.  Eventually we forget.

For the sake of balance at the siege of Cawnpore in 1857 over four hundred (estimate) British men, women and children were murdered at what is remembered as the Bibighar massacre which seems to have been an especially brutal affair.  No one mentions that of course.

We moved on now to the main event – a visit to the Golden Temple of Amritsar. For this visit we had to remove our shoes and socks and wear a bright orange turban.  It didn’t need to be orange I guess but the trader outside was selling orange.  I would have preferred blue for Leicester City but had to settle, like everyone else for Luton Town orange,

If almost everyone is aware of the Taj Mahal then they will know about the Golden Temple as well.  Not as grand, not as architecturally stunning but almost equally important.  I liked it immediately and there was a difference; Taj Mahal is a tourist attraction, Golden Temple is a religious site and it was possible to connect with that immediately.  To absorb it, to feel it, another impact site but for a different reason.  Spiritual, uplifting, calm, pure and I am fairly certain that all in the group responded immediately.

A serene lake, a line of pilgrims ignoring the rabble  of tourists and a floating golden temple like a golden galleon on the high seas.  There is something very special about this place for certain, shoeless people shuffle in silence around the lake, hundreds wait patiently in line to enter the temple and view the holy scriptures.  We didn’t have two hours to wait in line so we skipped that and went to the kitchens instead.

The kitchens and the dining hall were really something special.  Here the temple feeds one hundred thousand people a day, twenty four hours a day and it is all for free, anyone can turn up pick up a plate and enjoy a hearty meal.  This is the very essence of Sikhism.

I was inspired by this, I thought that maybe when I got home I would do something based on the Sikh lesson.  I am not going to grow a beard and wear a turban or have people round to my house for food everyday but maybe something a little less dramatic. Sadly I haven’t got around to it yet but it remains on my agenda.

I enjoyed this day above all others.  Nothing eclipses the Talj Mahal of course but  the Golden Temple was something special, mystical, spiritual, emotional and whilst the Taj Mahal remains in the memory the Golden Temple remains in the soul.  I will never forget it.  If time had allowed then I could happily have walked around that lake for a second time.

At the end of the day in Amritsar we said goodbye to our guide for the day Jaswinder Singh and I was sorry to see him go.  He had given us an informative and entertaining day.

I liked him so much that I have included his picture in the post twice.

On Christmas Day 2021  Jaswant Singh Chail entered the grounds of Windsor Castle, where Queen Elizabeth II was living, intending to assassinate her with a crossbow. He posted online “This is revenge for those who have died in the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre”. He was arrested before entering the castle, and in February 2023, admitted three counts of treason, the last person to be charged and convicted of treason in the UK.

Passage to India – An Introduction to Sikhism

“One cannot attain salvation only by showing devotion towards God day and night, that’s not the purpose of life at all. Salvation is attained by performing one’s true duty, by helping those in need, by loving all, by embracing God and all his creations.”― Raj Kiran Atagaraha,

A later start today and we were glad about that, it meant a leisurely breakfast at the hotel before setting off into the city of Amritsar.

As we joined the coach we were introduced to our guide for the day Jaswinder Singh, a Sikh of course with a broad smile and an untidy beard under a daffodil yellow turban.

I digress here for just a moment with a story (maybe true, maybe not) about the Tulip flower.  The name was first applied to the plant by a man called Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq who was a Dutch ambassador in Turkey in the sixteenth century and was also a great floral enthusiast. 

One day he was talking to a sultan and he noticed that he was wearing an attractive flower in his headgear.  When I say talking what I mean is that they were communicating with each other in the way that people do when they can’t speak each others language with lots of funny faces and wild gesticulations.  Busbecq was curious about the flower and pointed to it and enquired its name.  In Turkey the name of the flower was a Lale but the Sultan thought he meant what is the name of his hat so he told him it was a Tulipan (or turban) and Busbeqc, who completely misunderstood, acquired some bulbs and sent them back to Europe with the information that they were called Tulipa.

Anyway, back to India.  It was no surprise that Jaswinder was called Jaswinder Singh because all Sikh men have the name Singh.   Sikhism is a relatively modern religion that sought to reject Muslim and Hindu traditions  of hierarchy and caste  so  all male Sikhs carry the surname Singh which means lion, while all females are named Kaur which means princess. It is a radical expression of unity. Sikhs want to show they belong to a single family by rejecting their family names and sharing the same surnames.  It is a sort of socialism and being a socialist I immediately approved.

The identity of a Lion is not only seen in the Sikh name but in their appearance as well. It is represented through the Five Ks:

(1) Kesh — Sikh men do not cut their body hair. They have long beards, and they tie their hair into a turban. This represents discipline

(2) Kangha — a small comb worn in the hair

(3) Kirpan — every Sikh man has a small dagger or a sword, to protect the weak and fight for justice against tyrants and oppressors. It is forbidden to use it for anything else

(4) Kacchera — a special form of underwear that represents sexual restraint

(5) Kara — a steel bangle representing the infinity of God

As we drove to the city Jaswinder told us a little about Sikhism, it is very complicated as you might imagine but basically it boils down to kindness, family,  looking after others and community service.  Not something that the people of the World are generally any good at.

The core beliefs of Sikhism, articulated in the Guru Granth Sahib, include faith and meditation in the name of the one creator, divine unity and equality of all humankind, engaging in seva (selfless service),striving for justice for the benefit and prosperity of all and honest conduct and livelihood while living a householder’s life. Following this standard, Sikhism rejects claims that any particular religious tradition has a monopoly on absolute truth.

If all of that is true then these people should immediately put in charge of running the World.

I was reminded that Kim and I once worked with a Sikh man called Navtej Singh and he was probably the nicest, kindest person that we have ever worked with.

Passage to India – Delhi to Amritsar

 

“India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.”  American historian Will Durant

In a hectic first week we had travelled south and west of Delhi and enjoyed the Golden Triangle through Jaipur and Agra and now for week two we were heading north towards the Himalayas.

This inevitably meant another early pre-dawn start, we were catching the express train to Amritsar, a scheduled seven hour journey.

We were booked and ticketed on the Shatabdi Express, excellent fast air-conditioned daytime trains running at up to ninety miles an hour for some parts of the journey.  Shatabdi is Hindi for century as the first of these trains  were introduced in 1988 to mark the centenary of Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth.  The first Prime Minister of independent, post colonial  India.

We were moving two hundred and eighty miles north on a train of twenty passenger coaches.  The longest train in India is twenty-two coaches and requires a platform length of a third of a mile.  A little bit of trivia for you now – the only platform in the UK that can accommodate a twenty-two coach train without it hanging over both ends is in the city of Gloucester.  

As it happens, in a list of longest railway station platforms in the World, India has nine out of the top ten, the longest is Hubali Junction Railway Station in Kamataka in Southern India which is close on to a mile long.

Standard UK trains are a maximum of twelve coaches.  The longest passenger train ever was ‘The Ghan’ in Australia, which ran from Adelaide to Darwin and had had forty-four coaches.  If you are in the wrong place when that beast pulls in to the station then you are going to need running shoes, that platform would also need to be almost a mile long!

The Shatabdi Express includes food and drink and there is a regular supply of water, tea and biscuits and airline style food.  A lot of people turned down the food, wary of dreaded Delhi Belly but I tucked in and enjoyed it, especially the lamb curry and had no bother at all.  It was a great deal better than Virgin Airlines on board catering I can tell you.  India Railways move seventy million passengers a day and Virgin airlines only twelve thousand so you would think that they could do better.

The railway directly employs 1.2 million people but I suspect that it supports a much larger employment economy than that.  Station porters compete for business. Platform vendors and countless others making a living off the railway even those who pick through track-side litter.

In  travel vendors pass unsuccessfully several times through the coaches, I doubt that they are directly employed, my guess is that they are licenced operators who have paid for the privilege of a concession.  They return every few minutes in the hope that someone has turned down the meal and will have a Snickers Bar instead or maybe hoping that they have just changed their mind and turn a no thank you into a yes please.

It is billed as an express train but the average speed across the journey is only forty miles an hour, it stops six times and speed in and out of cities and towns is soporific. It took even longer today as it was delayed by a farmers protest blocking the line ahead.  Indian farmers demand higher prices for their products and less environmental demands.  They have copied French farmer tactics to make their point.

Kim used the time to make a new friend…

So, we arrived in Amritsar a few minutes late, gave our uneaten breakfast boxes away to the sleeping beggars, met the coach driver and his assistant and drove to the hotel.  A nice hotel Kim reminds me but I remember little about it, I was ready for a Kingfisher beer so I obtained directions to a nearby liquor store and made the appropriate purchases.

Another good day.  I had enjoyed it.  We had enjoyed it.  More curry for dinner.

Passage to India – The Taj Mahal

“There are two types of people in the World; those who have seen the Taj Mahal and love it and those who haven’t seen the Taj Mahal and love it” – Bill Clinton

The visit to Taj Mahal was highly anticipated, there was an excitement, a  certain expectation that it would be a highlight of the tour so it was a little disappointing that when we woke and looked out of the window the weather was gloomy and overcast and there was a slight threat of rain.

The Taj Mahal is an ivory marble mausoleum on the bank of the River Yamuna in Agra.  Second most polluted river in India by the way after the Ganges; you really wouldn’t want to paddle in it.

It was commissioned by the fifth Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to house the tomb of his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, perhaps the greatest love story/memorial of all time and also houses the tomb of Shah Jahan himself. The tomb is the centrepiece of a massive complex, which includes a mosque and a guest house and is set in elaborate formal gardens.  It cost a fortune at the time, thirty-two million rupees (at today’s prices thirty-five billion or four-hundred million UK pounds) much of it raised through increased taxation.  It was so expensive that it bankrupted the Empire and led to the overthrow of Shah Jahan by his son.

The Taj Mahal was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983 for being “the jewel of Islamic art in India and one of the universally admired masterpieces of the world’s heritage”.  It is regarded by many as the finest example of Mughal architecture and a symbol of India’s rich history. It attracts around eight million visitors a year and in 2007 it was declared a winner of the New Seven Wonders of the World.

At the entrance there is a rugby scrum and everyone wants that first impatient, first important photo opportunity…

Taj Mahal gets twenty-thousand visitors every day and it looked to me that they all seem to arrive at the same time.  It was a tight squeeze for sure.

Poet Rabindranath Tagore described the Taj Mahal as ‘a teardrop on the cheek of eternity’, Rudyard Kipling as ‘the embodiment of all things pure’ while its creator, Emperor Shah Jahan, said it made ‘the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes’.

I imagine everyone knows the Taj Mahal, it is most likely the most famous building in the World (along with the Leaning Tower of Pisa perhaps) but to be there and see it is really something special. It is huge, much bigger than I imagined that it would be and the dome is magnificent.  It is ephemeral, it seems to float as it merges seamlessly into the sky.  I was disappointed that the sky was overcast and obscure but in retrospect that seemed to add to the experience as it dissolved perfectly into the clouds.

This is what I would call an impact building, even though I have a good idea of what I will see the actual moment leaves me speechless.  I have tried to think of other buildings that I have visited that have had the same impact and have come up with a shortlist.   Sagrada Familia in Barcelona,  Mont St Michel in Northern France, St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow and the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy.

Rudyard Kipling was also taken aback and on visiting he wrote “The Taj Mahal took a hundred new shapes; each perfect and each beyond description. It was the Ivory Gate through which all good dreams come.”

We walked the gardens, joined a line of visitors inside the mausoleum, marvelled at the magnificence of the building and then it was all over.  Two hours in possibly the most famous building in the World and then we were back on the streets avoiding the vendors.

Not very successfully as it happened because Kim insisted on buying a paperweight from one especially persistent trader.  Five hundred Rupees (Five English pounds) Five English Pounds!  I was stunned!

Next up more shopping.  Shah Jahan was apparently renowned for his exquisite taste and for being a major patron of the arts.  He was fascinated with gemology (the science of studying, cutting, and valuing precious stones) and supported the work of court sculptures  and artists who became famous  for their elaborate decoration of the Taj Mahal. Now we were visiting a gem workshop to see a demonstration of traditional inlay art.

It was just like the carpet shop, ten minutes of demonstration followed by a lot of hard sell and I am quite unable to adequately explain what happened next.

The Taj Mahal must have interfered with my bio-rhythms, my usually reliable financial self-controls because I was talked into buying a black onyx elephant with so called inlaid semi precious stones. Five thousand Rupees (Fifty English Pounds)  Fifty English Pounds!

What must I have been thinking?  Kim was stunned.

Here it is…

After a disappointing lunch in the same restaurant as the previous day’s excellent lunch we were back on the coach for a long five hour drive back to Delhi.  Kim slept and I tried to forget about the elephant and the five thousand rupees and enjoyed the scenery of the vast Indian plains and occasionally pestered Tour Guide Rahi with a question or two or three for my notes.

As it happened five hours passed surprisingly quickly as we drove along a motorway that carved  its way through arable fields stretching for miles in every direction, the occasional labourers, mostly women and brick kilns, hundreds of them.  An uninvited rain squall hit the motorway and slowed progress to a crawl and this continued as we entered the suburbs of the city.  A city of contrasts it seems as we drove through an affluent business area with swanky high rise apartment towers and then very nearby a shanty town where people live under plastic sheets for shelter.

Some visitors at the Taj Mahal…

It had been another very good day, The Taj Mahal had been everything that I expected and more but on the downside I was £50 light in the wallet.  I have never spent £50 all in one go like that ever before. I was worried that I may not sleep.  I hoped that it was all a dream.

Thanks to all in the tour group for making the holiday really special…

Some elephants…

Thursday Doors – Jaipur in India

Passage to India – An Early Start in Agra

Another early start from Ranthambore and we leave for a six mile taxi ride over the rutted track and the horribly pot holed road to the railway station as the sun begins to rise over the forest.  Our luggage has gone on ahead with D P Sharma and the coach. Early because we have to catch the morning express train to Agra.

Sawai Madhopur Railway Station was surprisingly calm, quite unlike the madness of Delhi and Jaipur, a lot more relaxed and laid-back, it doesn’t resemble a refugee camp, passengers waiting for trains are very casual, we are the ones showing unnecessary impatience as we wait for the approaching train and listen for the hoot of the horn that sounds like a roaring tiger and which announces its arrival from a mile or so away.

Soon it is here, it seems to limp into the station, a little late but we have our allocated seats and settle in for the ride.  A proper carriage this time.  Only a shortish journey again today, just two hours or so, so no travel catering but there is a constant flow of vendors.  In the UK there is a drinks trolley on wheels but in India they carry baskets on their heads, news vendors, tea sellers, water sellers, English snickers sellers, snack sellers and after them the rubbish collectors.  It should be chaotic but it all seems to run very smoothly.

Indian Railways, under the ownership of the Ministry of Railways operates the national railway system. It manages the World’s  fourth largest national railway system with a running track length of sixty-five thousand miles.  With more than 1.2 million employees, it is the world’s largest railway employer.  It operates nearly fourteen thousand trains a day, carries eight and a half billion passengers a year and achieves 95% punctuality.

I wish these guys could run the hopelessly inefficient Trans-Pennine railway line in the UK.

Except for the on-board lavatories that is which are well worth avoiding at all costs.  I was never able to work out just what might require an emergency flush.  Best not to think about it I guess.

On account of the early start we arrived mid-morning in Agra.  D P and Chandu were there to meet us, get us onto the coach and straight off for a visit.  The Red Fort of Agra and another inevitable UNESCO World Heritage Site.

There is an interesting entry system in many of these places in India.  An overseas tourist pays about ten times more than a visitor from India but the compensation is that they get to use a fast lane system which is about ten times quicker to get through the gate so that seems very fair.

Agra fort was completed in 1573 and served as the main residence of the rulers of the Mughal dynasty until 1638, when the capital was shifted from Agra to Delhi.  More than a fort, a walled city once full of magnificent palaces and fine buildings but later demolished by the British when it became an army garrison.  When a place like this gets used as an army garrison there is inevitably a lot of looting and damage and Red Fort is no exception.

During WW2 a lot of stately homes were requisitioned by the UK government for use by the Allied armies and suffered vandalism and damage.

Sadly this is a familiar story about misbehaving troops in requisitioned big houses and country estates and many suffered the same fate. No need for the Luftwaffe to get involved. just leave it to the army and the GI’s.  Apparently owners in general didn’t mind their properties being borrowed for schools or hospitals but dreaded the armed forces being moved in because this guaranteed damage and huge expense.

We liked the Red Fort, especially the top with views over the Taj Mahal, some refused to look because they didn’t want to take away from the actual visit tomorrow but I didn’t think that it would especially spoil anything so looked regardless.  It was rather misty so not a great view anyway.

After the Red Fort it was lunch-time and we dined in a splendid restaurant and enjoyed a thali, which is a sort of taster plate with ten or so varieties of food to sample and the really good thing that there were seconds available of those we liked the best.  My favourite was the lamb curry as it almost always was.  And the naan bread because as everywhere it was fabulous, so fabulous that it will be sometime before I can buy a packaged naan bread in a supermarket in the UK again.  Even in UK restaurants I swear that I have never tasted naan like in India,

I am happy to declare it the best lunchtime meal in the whole two weeks…

After lunch we moved on to the ‘Mini Taj’, a Mughul mausoleum,  the Tomb of I’timad-Ud-Daulah and considered a masterpiece of the domeless style of Mughal tombs.  It was the first building finished in white marble and marks the transitional phase from red stone to marble.  The Mughals had got to spend all that money on something I guess.  It was worth a visit I suppose but everyone was waiting for the visit to Taj Mahal but that would have to wait until tomorrow.

Tonight we stayed in a very nice hotel close to the city centre and we found a liquor store only a hundred yards away so stocked up with reasonably priced wine.  It was on a busy main road and for some bizarre reason Kim decided to cross.  What absolute madness but somehow she made it across two manic carriageways.  I got stuck half way and Kim got stranded on the other side.  Eventually a local man noticed her predicament, took her arm and guided her across safely.

A local is always useful in these situations, advice in Italy for example is to find nuns crossing a road and join them because whilst Italian drivers will happily run down pedestrians they draw the line at nuns.

Passage to India – Ranthambore and a Tiger Safari

“Tiger Tiger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;” – William Blake

There was another early start this morning because we were out looking for tigers and the best time to see one is apparently in the morning when they are starting to think about breakfast so at six o’clock we assembled and set off in our jungle vehicles.

Tour guide Rahi was most insistent that we take passports because without them we not be allowed to enter the national park.  I thought that seemed a bit unnecessary but as it turns out they are required because if you are unfortunate enough to be mauled to death by a tiger identification of the remains can be quite difficult but it is unlikely to eat the passport, it gives it indigestion, so finding it should help the authorities.

Seventy years ago I wasn’t afraid of tigers…

I was rather surprised by the jungle because I was expecting lush green undergrowth, vines and creepers but this wasn’t one of those sorts of jungles because this turned out to be a dry deciduous forest with a distinct lack of vegetation, stick black lifeless trees as though there had been a forest fire.  I was assured by the ranger guide that they were alive and were simply waiting for the monsoon rains.

The ranger was immediately on the look out for the cats but after an hour or so all that we had seen were peacocks and parrots, monkeys and a basking crocodile.  There were lots of deer and antelope all available for tiger breakfast but still no sign.  The ranger does his best to maintain interest and create excitement  “look at that deer, he is very alert, he senses danger”.  It could quite likely smell a tiger but it was five miles away.

We were out for four hours and never did see a tiger so we were quite happy to leave the park and return to the hotel for breakfast.  We would be going out again later for another four hours but Kim declared straight away that she wouldn’t be joining us and booked herself a spa treatment instead.

I offered to take her to see tigers at the Yorkshire Wildlife Park at Doncaster when we got home but she wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about that either.

I was reminded now about Brooke Bond tea card collections.

The first series was introduced on 23rd October 1954 and featured British birds but the first set that I have and can remember was from 1958 – ‘British Wild Life’.

I was only four years old and it was my dad who collected them really and I can remember sitting at the kitchen table while he used a bottle of gloy glue to stick them into place.  Later I used to collect them for myself and paste them into the books (which used to cost 6d) but I never made such a good job of it as him.

Collecting the cards was exciting, I can recall the moment when my mum would buy a new packet of tea and I would open it to get to the card, down the side of the packet and covered in tea dust (these were tea leaves and not tea bags).  At the beginning of a new series the collection would build quickly but after twenty of thirty cards it was always disappointing to get a duplicate and this meant having to go through the negotiation process at school to do swaps.

There always seemed to be a couple of cards that were difficult to get (rather like seeing a tiger in the wild) and sometimes this meant sending off to Brooke Bond to buy them which sort of defeated the object of collecting them and felt a bit like cheating.

We spent the afternoon in the hotel gardens but then rain clouds bullied their way past the sun and there was a massive thunderstorm.  Secretly I hoped that this might force an abandonment of the second safari but over lunch it passed as quickly as it had arrived and so I had no excuse.

So we returned to the jungle and spent another four hours in fruitless pursuit.  More deer wander around without a care in the world, a sure sign that there wasn’t a tiger close by.  I was certain by now that no one would need my passport for identification purposes.

The guide had all but given up hope and we were heading for the exit when there was an outbreak of excitement and the driver joined a line of traffic all going in the same direction,  Someone had spotted a tiger and sure enough after eight hours of discomfort in the final five minutes we finally had our big cat.

A bit blurred I’m afraid but it was quite a long way off…

So ended the safari stage of our journey through India.  Was it worth it, well if you want to see a tiger just lying there doing nothing then I suppose so but I have to say that it will struggle to get into my top ten highlights of the holiday, we shall have to wait and see.

Kim enjoyed her spa treatment.

Anyone remember this?

 

Passage to India – Jaipur to Ranthambore

“We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discoveries could have been made.” – Albert Einstein.

We were sad to be leaving Jaipur, it had been a good two days but there was a new adventure ahead – a tiger safari in the Ranthambore National Park.

To get there involved another train journey and we arrived at the station in good time but the platform information board kept knocking back the arrival/departure time in regular ten minute intervals.

This wasn’t such an inconvenience and it gave fellow passengers plenty of opportunity to have their picture taken with Kim.  All rather curious and we put it down to the white hair.  Tour guide Rahi told us that although India resents the period of British rule that they have no animosity towards English people and that was everywhere in evidence here on the railway platform as we waited for the train to arrive from Jodphur.

A different train this one, not an express but an overnight sleeper train with the sleeper carriages converted to daytime travel, only a two and a half hour journey this time so no on board catering included but vendors passed through regularly offering “English Snickers, English Snickers“.  I rather like Snickers but I still insist on calling them Marathon.

All Aboard…

As the train left Jaipur and made soporific progress through the suburbs we were in familiar surroundings, shanty towns, open landfill sites, poverty, destitution and begging but never it seemed despair and always a smile.  People waved as the train passed by as they most likely do to all trains that pass by and we waved  back.

In a response to a previous post my blogging pal Jude raised the issue of Indian state expenditure on space exploration when there is so much poverty.  I have heard this raised before.  As it happened, some time later I asked Rahi this very same question and he told me that India plans to be a world superpower and when the economy has grown then that will lead to social reforms.  He was certain that space exploration helps in this ambition.

“How do you eat an elephant?  –  Answer – “One bite at a time”

We should not forget that the modern state of India is less than eighty years old.

It was a good observation and a relevant question to ask and I thought long and hard about it and I came to this conclusion.  Putting things into perspective the UK Tory government of the last fifteen years has wasted billions of pounds on a vanity project railway line that goes nowhere, no one needs, no one wants and then stand by while privatised water companies (thanks Margaret Thatcher) gleefully pump raw sewage into our rivers and seas whilst paying millions of pounds to  shareholders and executive bonuses.  The River Ganges is the most polluted river in the World but in the UK Thames Water has plans to quickly catch up.

We have limited social housing (thanks Margaret Thatcher).  The privatised railways are completely hopeless (thanks Margaret Thatcher).  The  beloved National Health Service slowly collapses into a pit of  creeping privatisation (thanks Margaret Thatcher)  and it abjectly fails to tackle poverty and destitution in our own country.

And it has a space exploration programme.

India has successfully sent a mission two hundred and forty thousand miles to the moon, the UK high speed train project can’t even get one hundred miles from London to Birmingham.

We are the country with the social and economic problems that will inevitably lead to collapse.  At least the Indian government appear to have a plan.  They are going through a political, social, economic and technological revolution.  I don’t think that we are in any position to judge others.

A nice ride, a gentle ride, a very sociable ride where we got to know better those that we hadn’t really  got to know properly previously and before we knew it we were in Ranthambore, a railway station dedicated to the legend of the tigers.

Spot the odd one out…

The train arrived just after midday, a small station in comparison to Delhi and Jaipur and there to meet us was our ever reliable driver D P Sharma and his cheerful helper Chandu who as ever dispensed hand cleanser with a permanent smile and gave a helping hand up the steps.

D P was an excellent driver who drove the vehicle through the chaotic streets with the precision of a Harley Street surgeon performing open heart surgery.  As though it was a Rolex watch.  He knew every fraction of an inch of his coach and could guide it through impossibly small gaps but when it became extraordinarily tight or especially difficult it was Chandu’s job to give him assistance.  I would not have wanted that responsibility I can tell you.

Lunch was served at Jungle Villas and then there was a welcome afternoon of leisure at the hotel swimming pool which was very much appreciated.  The sun was shining, the water was cool but not desperately cold and most of us took a refreshing dip.  Roger did a thousand lengths.

And in the evening there was jolly entertainment in the garden, a travelling band of local musicians who entertained while tea and tasty samosas were served.  When they had finished they moved on to the hotel next door, it was close by  and we could hear them all over again.

It had been a very good day.

Later it rained quite hard and we became concerned about the next day when we were joining a jungle safari in search of tigers and it was going to be another early start.