Passage Through India – Homeward Bound and Top Ten (Part Three)

Four more to go to complete my Top Ten and I suppose that I really have to include the tiger…

At Ranthambore we had a day of Safari looking for a Bengal Tiger.  After an early start four rather tedious hours in the morning yielded nothing at all except the sort of wildlife that we can see at home in Lincolnshire (except the crocodile of course) so after lunch and the threat of another four hours in the afternoon being bounced about on hard, unyielding wooden seats Kim decided against it and opted instead for a much more comfortable afternoon poolside and a spa treatment.

Out in the jungle another four hours passed and still no big cat except that in the final moments of the jeep trial there was some excitement and there a hundred yards away was a female tiger.  Just sitting there digesting her lunch of raw gazelle and turning her back and ignoring the tourists.

Eight hours of uncomfortable searching and eight minutes of a tiger spotting.  Kim wasn’t too disappointed, I offered to take her to the Doncaster Wildlife Park close to where we live when we got home to see a tiger.  It is only £25 admission (senior rate) and you are guaranteed to see one.  Two months on and she is yet to take me up on this fabulous offer.

Fellow traveller Ruth had this to say.  “I really enjoyed the two safaris.  I think it was the fresh air and bouncing about in the back of the truck with the naughty kids was great fun”.  Naughty kids?  You know who you are.

I have to say that if I hadn’t seen a tiger then the Safari would not have made the top ten at all and would be settled down in the bottom three.  The bottom three up later..

Firmly in the Top ten is the Tour Group, it is important to have a group pf people who get on well together and enhance the experience and we certainly had that.

Fellow traveller Jennifer put it like this…

“I have always wanted to see India…  So we booked… The other passengers on the trip were amazing…. I now call them friends.  Everything was as I imagined but better.  Thank you everyone for giving Ian and I a holiday of a lifetime.”

Tour Manager Rahi said… “We definitely made some friendships along the way which will last a long time.  And we now arrive to the final moments of the journey I would like to let you know that it has been a nice group to work with with loads of laughs and experiences”

Next up and I am going back to day one and a Walking tour of Old Delhi.

Here was the real culture shock that I was expecting.  Poverty and destitution, despair and  malnutrition and deformity are all on public view.  In UK we cross the street to avoid a beggar or complain about street homeless sleeping in shop doorways but here it is all part of street life.

All human existence is on show here, a timeline of evolution and development running through the streets and all in vivid contrast.  Grubby corners, dirty beggars and then vibrant streets and coloured saris.  Different religions, trade and commerce, wealth and poverty, success and failure, suffering, destitution and poverty, improvisation, happiness and joy.  The full spectrum here on open street  display.

What an introduction to India this was, a slap in the face, a punch in the gut, this might have been better at the end rather than the beginning of the experience but never mind, all that was required was to walk into a rainbow or help mix colours on an artists palette.  After one day I was in love with India.

So that leaves just one more spot in my Top Ten and I give this to Tour Manager Rahi.  From the moment we arrived at Delhi International Airport everything was seamlessly organised and brilliantly coordinated.

It seems important to me to have a local tour manager (Rahi lived a long way from Delhi in the city of Udaipur but what is a few hundred miles when we have travelled five thousand) a guide who understands the culture, can tell the history and answer most every question thrown at him.  Calm, collected, patient and seemingly unflappable.  Quite simply the perfect Tour Manager.

And a fabulous sense of humour.  At the end he asked   “I hope you enjoyed my company, my explanations and my commentaries”.  How funny, of course we did, he was the main man in making the holiday a success.

I should also mention here local expert tour guides, Jaswinder Singh in Amritsar and Sanjay Jadhar in Shimla who both provided a wonderful day out.  And also coach driver D,P Sharma and his friendly assistant Chandu.

So, that was my Top Ten highlights of the holiday/tour, not everyone might agree with my selection.

I mentioned a bottom three and these are they – Carpet shopping in Jaipur, the Pakistan border crossing pantomime and the Rose garden with no roses in Chandigarh.

Except for the English Roses of course…

Passage through India – Himalayan Queen to Shimla

“It is not about the destination, it is about the journey” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

It was a pleasant evening in Chandigrah, a nice hotel as I recall and another curry.  This morning our luggage was loaded onto two jeeps and after they had driven us to the railway station at Kalka they went on ahead because today we were taking the ‘Toy Train’ to Shimla in the foothills of the Himalayas.

At Kalka station we passed a small group of women labourers with picks and shovels and this brought to mind all of the other women workers that we had seen over this past two weeks.

Just an observation here but it seems  to me that women get to do all the crappy jobs in India whilst the men sit around and watch.  Nearly sixty-five percent of agricultural labourers are women, at Jaipur we had seen women carrying heavy brick loads on their heads whilst men supervised, along the railway tracks women were digging trenches whilst men waited to drop the cables in, what little street cleaning is done is performed by women whilst others work the refuse sights for pickings.  Women in India do tough jobs without any of the employment protection rights that are enjoyed in the West.  And another thing, it is rare to see a woman driver because less than fifteen percent of drivers in India are women.

So we waited for the ‘Toy Train’ and I was expecting something like one of the little trains of Wales…

… but approaching the platform was a powerful diesel beast about half the size of the express trains that we had become used to with eight carriages.  This was the ‘Himalayan Queen’.  Small yes, but a proper train nevertheless.

We watched enviously as the first class carriages that we wouldn’t be using passed us by  because SAGA had cut a few corners here and only purchased second class tickets.  

My research tells me that there are six trains that use the Kalka to Shimla line and if there was a league table then the ‘Himalayan Queen’ would be at the bottom.  The carriage was small and cramped with hard wooden benches which were not really wide enough to comfortably accommodate two people sitting side by side.  There was a toilet facility but you really wouldn’t want to use it and strict bladder control was going to be not just advisable but absolutely essential.

We departed Kalka station about twenty minutes late and the train meandered through the outskirts of the town before quickly entering the forested foothills of the Himalayas. Immediately the train climbed steadily, the tracks constantly twisting and turning, clinging to the side of the mountains like velcro, with few straight stretches of track even as long as the train.

More twists than Chubby Checker…

The train line had been constructed at the turn of the twentieth century as a means of getting British officials and administrators away for the summer.  They didn’t enjoy the heat of Calcutta or Delhi and so made their way to the town of Shimla high in the mountains where the weather was far more to their liking

The sixty mile long line is two foot six gauge (regular lines are five foot six), has one hundred and two tunnels and eight hundred and sixty-four bridges. The constant curves and grades are very tight which means that trains take around five hours to complete the journey with an average speed of a very sedate fifteen miles an hour.

An advantage of the ‘Himalayan Queen’ second class was that the carriage doors were left open even while the train was moving so it was possible now and again to take the risk and lean out to take pictures.  As we passed slowly through stations vendors jumped on and off the moving train like acrobats and walked through the carriages selling food and snacks.

The train made a couple of stops at the larger stations on route and at about half way pulled into Barog.  Barog is the place where the longest tunnel of the line is situated.   In times past trains used to stop here for a considerable time so that passengers could have their breakfast here and today there were vendors on the platform selling street food (well, platform food) and selling tea and coffee.

I nearly had a bit of bother here.  We were told that we could get off here and stretch our legs and I assumed that this would be for twenty minutes or so and went for a stroll along the platform.  I was at the back of the train when there was a shrill blast of the whistle to announce departure, Kim was shouting at me to tell me the train was leaving already and I had to sprint the length of the train to return to our carriage near the front.  That was a near miss I can tell you.

As we climbed through the clouds and the occasional wisps of mist there were intermittent grand views and I say intermittent because for much of the journey the track side vegetation was thick and impenetrable.  The train persevered through sun-dappled glades at the pace of a woodland walk and the occasional break through the trees into areas of bright green terraces and a village here and there with brightly coloured houses tumbling down the precipitous hillsides.

Despite the discomfort we enjoyed the five hour ride but we were all relieved (some of us needed relief) when the engine brought the train to a stop at Shimla station.

It was much busier than I was anticipating and the traffic was slow and queuing, sometimes not so patiently.  And guess what…

We were reunited with the drivers and the jeeps and then made very slow progress through the cramped and narrow streets until we arrived at our hotel, set in an elevated position overlooking a valley and the brightly coloured city and in the distance we could see the snow capped Himalayas soaring into the sky. 

This was a good spot.  I liked Shimla already.

Passage through 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 through 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 through 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.

Black Forest – Baden-Baden, Final Hours

There was no let up in the heavy snow all the way into Baden-Baden and we were glad to get there because it didn’t seem possible that the road would stay open for very much longer unless a snow plough came along and attend to it.

Even in the city the roads were treacherous and we had to make a couple of circuits of the centre before finding a parking spot at the top of a slippery hill.  It was lunchtime so as it was still snowing heavily we headed for a traditional restaurant that we knew and had our final meal of the holiday and as we watched the snow through the window we started to wonder if this might affect the airport and whether it might be sensible to start making arrangements for an unscheduled overnight stay in Baden-Baden.

Read the full story Here…

Black Forest, Badische Schwarzwaldbahn

Over breakfast we agreed that this was probably not a good day to be driving around the Black Forest on snow bound roads even with winter tyres so we decided to take a train journey instead.  The car took some clearing and de-icing and then we left the residential streets of Rammersweier and headed towards the city centre and the train station.

Read the full story Here…

Black Forest – An Incident with a Cuckoo Clock

After stopping for important wine supplies at a discount supermarket in downtown Offenberg we arrived back at the hotel where the car park was coned off for no obvious reason.  Thirty minutes later we discovered why when a coach party from the Netherlands arrived and swarms of guests on a Black Forest tour bus took over most of the hotel.

This meant that the restaurant was especially busy tonight and we had to share a table with a friendly German couple from Friedrichshafen in a side room just off the main dining area.  Because they were so busy the restaurant service was slow which meant that we drank more wine than usual and after the German couple had retired to their room and left us to ourselves I started to poke around the bric-a-brac and the ornaments and then foolishly started to fiddle with an impressive large cuckoo clock hanging on the wall behind the table which was frozen in time, not ticking, not tocking and not cuckooing.

I remembered that my Dad had a cuckoo clock and to set it in motion he used to make adjustments to the chains and weights so I thought that I would be helpful and set it going.

This is the clock…

Immediately I wished I hadn’t touched those cone things that drive the mechanism because it unexpectedly whirred into life and out popped the cuckoo which unfortunately turned out to be a rather loud cuckoo.  And then as the chain headed non stop towards the floor it popped out several more times, each time announcing itself with its little song that just seemed to get louder and louder with every appearance.  The doors were banging, the chains were rattling, the hands were whizzing like helicopter blades  and I wondered if to stop it I might have to throttle it.

Nearby Triberg (above) is the cuckoo clock capital of the forest and the main street is full on both sides of tourist shops selling Black Forest souvenirs and traditional crafts including the famous clocks.

Although the idea of placing a bird in a decorated wooden box did not originate in the Black Forest the cuckoo clock as we know it today comes from this region located in south-west Germany whose tradition of clock making started in the late seventeenth century.

The people of the Black Forest developed the cuckoo clock industry and still come up with new designs and technical improvements which have made it a valued work of art all over the world.  The clock is a symbol of the Black Forest and is probably the favourite souvenir of visitors to Germany, Austria and Switzerland and the centre of production is right here in the middle of the forest in the area of Schonach and Titisee-Neustadt.

We spotted this one in one of the souvenir shops.  Notice the hands.  The header picture is from Porto but it nicely illustrates my point.

If you go into a jewellers or anywhere selling clocks and watches the hands are always in the same position.  The reason for this is that clocks and watches advertised for sale are almost always set at ten minutes past ten for two reasons.  Firstly advertisers think that this is the most aesthetically pleasing position and easy on the eye and secondly this position cradles the maker or the brand and makes it stand out boldly.

Anyway, back to the story.  This impromptu and unscheduled entertainment seemed to amuse the people on the bus tour who were giggling and laughing and I just wanted the thing to get back in its box and shut the front door.  There was no such luck and the clock went through twenty-four movements in under two minutes and believe me that is an awful lot of cuckoos.  Then just as I was giving up all hope the thing  thankfully finally exhausted itself and it stopped and with me red faced with embarrassment we slipped out of the restaurant and went back to our room before I could get up to any more mischief.

I woke early in the morning and now that the effects of the wine had almost completely worn away immediately recalled the incident with the cuckoo clock and I worried that I might have broken it and would be presented with a hefty repair bill when we checked out.

Today we were planning a train ride into the forest…

Black Forest , Over the Mountains to Triberg

We hadn’t made any firm plans because we were waiting to see what the weather would bring and this morning it was dull and overcast so we decided to drive into the forest and visit some traditional towns and villages.  We drove out of Offenburg through a string of places all squeezed into the narrow strip of flat land of the Rhine Valley on the German side of the river.  We were right on the edge of the forest and to our left thickly wooded hills with a sprinkling of snow rose up dramatically towards the mountains beyond.

Read the full story Here…

 

A Look Back – Haugesund in Norway

 

Not much happening in February, nothing new to post about so I am looking back over some old posts and giving them a refresh.

In January 2011 we took a very cheap Ryanair flight to Haugesund in Norway.

Read the full story Here…