In our late fifties, it might be assumed that we belong in the second category, travelling in a bit of comfort, all mod cons and a flexible budget. In the 1960s, ‘the GAP year’ had not been invented, and travellers were referred to as hippies, a group we did not then aspire to, but we had a yearning to see if we could recapture the spirit of the independent ‘traveller’ experience so widely taken up today by the younger generation.
The opportunity arose for us to join our 23-year-old daughter, now a veteran traveller on the Indian subcontinent, for three weeks or so, travelling to various parts of India, but she made very clear, only on her ‘traveller’ terms.
A certain readjustment of values was called for and started well before our departure. Firstly, what to take: no matching suitcases containing carefully folded smart evening wear, shoes for all occasions, hairdryer, even the laptop. If we could not carry it on our back, or an item was excessively heavy or bulky, it was not going with us. So, we pared the minimum equipment list down to T-shirts, toiletries, medicines and underwear. Then we were encouraged to take on the standard traveller kit: loo-paper, Swiss army knife, torch, sleeping bag, Hotmail address and the most important item by far: a copy of the travellers’ bible, the Lonely Planet. Nothing but nothing was undertaken without reference to the oracle. Its word is gospel, pure gold.
Secondly, accommodation. This required a major reassessment of what we considered to be essential requirements. In essence, the only item we could really count on was the bed, or, occasionally, a mattress on the floor or a Z-bed, bedbugs an optional extra. Other optional items, sometimes present, sometimes not, included bedding, windows, any bedroom furniture – mirror, chairs etc. – ‘western’ loos, loo-paper, soap, towels, hot water, any water, taps that produced water (a common alternative was a bucket and scoop) and a quiet night’s sleep.
All this was important if we were to meet the established traveller criteria: not to exceed the equivalent of $1.50 per person per night (or per 24 hours from the time of arrival), and generally to frequent establishments where there was a strong possibility of meeting up with other owners of the Lonely Planet from whichever country. One of the unexpected bonuses of budget hotels is the entertaining use of creative English, which you just do not find in a Sheraton or Starwood, for example:
Our checkout times is 24 hours’ time to time;
Possession of anything objectionable under law is prohibited), i.e. charas, opium, hashish etc.;
Washing of cloths is prohibited.
Please do not thorough (sic) any waste in the toilet as it bloks flush then the whole drainage system will be disturbed;
Visitors are not allowed after 10 P.M.
and so on
Thirdly, dress code: ideally, we were encouraged to ‘blend in’, which meant nothing too ostentatious, like carrying a camera, or wearing designer gear, but instead local clothing, sandals and no socks, but possibly a beard (I picked one up in Delhi for 75 cents outside the Red Fort), – longish hair, preferably dreadlocks and not too highly coiffured. We did, however, draw the line at body-piercing – nose, tongue etc. – and tattoos. We felt my daughter had made those concessions on both our behalves, added to which she only wore saris, spoke Hindi and was a professed Buddhist.
Food and drink have always been a feature of our vacations, but, here again, a drastic reassessment was called for, driven by the overriding objective of meeting budgetary targets as well as certain local health considerations. With a target of about a dollar per main meal, (though we often came in under budget at 50 cents), breakfast became a relatively expensive option. We readily concurred with our daughter’s advice to become vegetarian while travelling, a decision backed up by the occasional sight of local butchers’ establishments, and force of circumstance made access to alcohol an infrequent treat. So it was that we settled in to a routine of rice, boiled, not fried or otherwise adorned, and the ubiquitous dhal, a kind of split pulse whose colour and consistency bore unfortunate similarities to other substances better not elaborated on under the food heading.
Plastic bottles (ed: not anymore) of drinking water were also standard kit for the traveller at all times when on the move. The packaging is diligently scrutinised before purchase to ensure that is not an old bottle refilled with tap water of dubious origin. Indeed, some or the newer brands sport elaborately sealed bottle tops designed to allay the fears of the wary prospective purchaser. It is, therefore, a traveller’s duty to damage an empty plastic bottle beyond repair to protect future unsuspecting travellers from this risk. It can then be safely tossed into the street to join an assortment of waste products, of vegetable, human or animal origin for the benefit of passing cows, dogs or goats to rummage in. This is recycling in action. Inevitably, the subject of food is connected, in many people’s mind, with the matter of hygiene and how to deal with the problem. Of course, even discussing this subject is frowned upon as a ‘Tourist’ obsession, and not a subject worthy of much discussion.
This touched upon one of the fundamental differences between the attitudes of time-rich, cash poor traveller on the one hand, and the time-poor, cash-richer tourist on the other: if you are laid up with stomach cramps, vomiting etc. for three days as a traveller who is spending months at a time on the road with a flexible schedule, the loss of three days activity is neither here nor there; for those with a week or two, three days inactivity is a high price to pay. Much preliminary research on our part resulted in an almost trouble-free trip, despite the well-established reputation in this part of the world for stomach upsets, and, bearing in mind the amount of travel and the manner in which such travel was undertaken, we were most grateful not to have succumbed.
Which brings me on to the subject of getting from one place to another, under the general heading of transport.
Naturally, expensive internal flights were out of the question, which left rail and road as the two options available to us. Each had certain limitations from our perspective, but for the ardent traveller, these were the only ways to meet local people, and indeed this did turn out to be the case, in spades.
With relatively large distances involved, and the normal condition of the roads often limiting progress to 15/20 miles per hour, the train became the main contender. Here again, the time versus budget came into play. Actually, acquiring a ticket in the first place was always a time-consuming activity.
Furthermore, the average delay (arrival delay was often greater than the delay on departure) seemed to be about three hours.
However, the real experience only really starts once the train arrives. You become aware that the train is imminent as the various merchants suddenly arise out of their torpor and make ready to capitalise on the few minutes available to them while the train is in the station. The scene is always frenetic; even the odd bullock who has been loitering on the platform looking for discarded banana skins joins the throng of merchants passing along the carriages promoting their wares: Chai! Chai… (sweet milky tea), freshly made omelettes, fried rice in sealed disposable containers, fruit sellers, toy sellers, purveyors of the ubiquitous rice and dhal on a tray. And there are a number of additional services provided by young boys, mainly involving sweeping up the accumulated detritus from the carriage floor, which oblige passengers to continually reach for some small change, an item very difficult to find and hold on to in India.
If you are actually attempting to find a reserved seat, usually in the middle of the night, then all this activity can make the task significantly more difficult; I do not think we ever managed to identify the coach we were looking for from any external markings or listings pasted on the outside. This required the trial and error method of boarding a carriage and fighting one’s way through the packed corridors. The benefit of having one’s possessions on one’s back at this point became manifest, especially during the major Durga festival being celebrated while we were there.
The reservation we held for three ninth class (or was it tenth?) couchettes counted for nothing, as our space had already been taken over by sleeping bodies who had boarded at previous stops. Corridors were seething masses of bodies and possessions, most standing shoulder to shoulder. Our space for three became occupied by ten or more people, who would jostle to claim any free space created as each person changed or adjusted his or her position. This was indeed ‘meeting the locals’ at close quarters.
In response to the question about our country of origin, we were duly advised that the name of our capital city was London, in case we might have forgotten, and this was usually followed by questions concerning the marital status of our daughter. Most rail journeys seemed to consist of the same three components: crawling along at 5mph, travelling at high speed for short periods and then long periods of idleness. This afforded ample opportunity for passengers to alight onto the tracks for a saunter and casually re-board as the train eventually began to pick up speed again.
And then, there is road transport.
This ranges from non-motorised rickshaws, motor rickshaws, horse and cart, and an assortment of dilapidated taxis or jeeps. Our daughter, against her better judgement, allowed us to include the last category, though the preferred traveller mode of transport seemed to be the non-motorised rickshaw as the cheapest form of propulsion. Much hard bargaining nevertheless always ensued ’in order not to encourage prices to be raised for future generations of travellers. The question of providing adequate recompense to the service provider did not seem to enter the equation.
The selection of a taxi usually then resulted in a top up of the radiator, which never seemed to have a radiator cap. On hilly terrain, this process would be repeated creating clouds of steam as water was thrown haphazardly in the direction of the cap-less radiator. There would then be an early stop for adding a litre of fuel into the almost empty tank, based presumably on the imminent expectation of the wherewithal to pay for it (despite the fact that, in many cases, a down payment had been requested up-front to activate the transaction. Sometimes, even minor servicing was undertaken (additional advance payment), shortly after the journey had commenced, for a gasket change or equivalent.
On one occasion, the taxi in which we were travelling at unusually high speed – 40 mph – suddenly developed a loud banging noise like a machine gun coming from the offside front wheel. Upon inspection by the driver, it transpired that there was a strip of rubber six inches long, an inch deep hanging like a tongue from the tyre. A request was made for my Swiss army knife in order to sever it from the tyre, so the journey could be continued. This understandably gave us some concern for the rest of the trip, but then any inspection of tyres on any vehicle gave us concern. It is a very tough life for a tyre on Indian roads.
We were, however, spared the prospect of local bus travel, also a staple of traveller transportation. There is no need in India for government exhortation to use public transport; everything is always full to bursting or beyond. By beyond, I mean the roof generally, a favourite for the intrepid traveller. This is despite the way that drivers cheerfully point out the locations of past bus disasters, especially on precipitous mountain roads such as those close to Sikkim and Bhutan in the Himalayas.
The amazing thing about traffic in the conurbations is that the whole thing seems to work, based on an accepted hierarchy and the principle of automatically overtaking whatever happens to be immediately in front, driving to within an inch of anything else on the highway, vehicle, pedestrian or livestock, and a more or less constant use of the horn to warn all and sundry. Non-motorised ultimately gave way to motorised rickshaws, motorised rickshaws to saloon taxis, saloon taxis to jeeps, jeeps to buses, and everyone to nomadic cattle.
Almost without exception, we found contact with local people to be a delightful experience, with an overwhelming interest in their visitors, and a desire to start a conversation or have their picture taken with us. Almost everyone had something to sell, a single cigarette, a string of postcards, a fake beard or a slice of coconut or whatever, but without exception, took rejection in good humour and without unpleasantness. There never seemed to be any sense of anxiety about safety of person or valuables, nor even of any excessive scams or rip-offs, at least not as we would define them. My daughter took a somewhat different view, however, and took great exception to being charged ‘tourist’ rates for rickshaws, i.e. 40 cents for a 45-minute journey instead of 30 cents. This hardly seemed to qualify as extortion in my book.
After a week, we began to realise that we hardly ever came across any tourists in the streets, apart from an occasional traveller. It was therefore a shock early one morning while taking a boat out onto the river Ganges in Varanasi to suddenly be confronted by large groups of tourists who had been bussed down to the river and back to the hotel in so-called ‘tourist buses’, hermetically sealed from the intense range of human activity, mostly fascinating, some unspeakable, being conducted on every street at every hour.
It was also necessary to redefine our understanding of what constitutes entertainment, particularly in the evenings. No question of downing a few pints in a local hostelry, nor witnessing packaged ethnic dance routines in tourist hotels, nor any other such indulgences. No, evening entertainment comprised of playing cards or travel backgammon or just exchanging travel tips with fellow travellers over a cup of instant coffee on the roof of the hotel. Other substances also appeared to be freely available on the streets if that is your bag.
Life is lived at a slower pace in the travellers’ world, as the pressure to meet schedule deadlines is an unknown concept. Tomorrow is another day, next month is another month.