Indian summer

"We have now landed in Delhi. The local time is 3.45am and the temperature outside is 30 degrees celsius." If I hadn't already known what climactic conditions to expect in northern India in April, that announcement from the pilot of my flight in from Amman would have given me a bit of a clue. It's more or less impossible to do a substantial round-the-world trip and get favourable weather everywhere along the way - you just have to accept that and go with your plans anyway. However daytime temperatures consistently up around 42C, with sweltering humidity which diminishes only partially and very slowly in the evenings, have been a bit of a challenge. (October to February, or possibly March at a push, is the more hospitable time of year to go.) As if India wasn't a challenging enough travel destination to start with...

It's difficult to know where to start really writing about India. Even though this was my second fortnight-long visit (the first was early last year, with my partner at the time Matt, to Mumbai, a rural wedding outside Mumbai and then Goa) I'm still not sure I'm in a position to write any very coherent reflections or narrative about this extraordinary country, so this is likely to be more of a random brain-dump. I wrote some reflections on Facebook after my first visit and I won't attempt to cover all of the same ground this time, so if you are interested enough please read the two pieces in conjunction with one another.

The organised group tour I've been on with Intrepid Travel, titled "Classic Rajasthan", taking in Delhi, Agra and an assortment of destinations in the tourist hotspot state of Rajasthan, was definitely a very different way of travelling compared to the independent solo backpacking I'm doing everywhere else. Frankly I didn't realise how much I was valuing the independence and freedom of my travels until I temporarily lost much of it (this trip was always going to involve learning about myself as well as the world); but on the flipside I've experienced a number of memorable things (see below) which I couldn't have hoped to access on my own, generally been looked after and organised by our decidedly efficient local tour guide Lucky, and enjoyed the fellowship, camaraderie and banter of a lovely and diverse bunch of fellow travellers (6 other English, 2 Americans, 2 Australians and 1 New Zealander, ranging in ages from mid-twenties to fifties). From the time with the group I'll particularly remember the musical sing-alongs, strongly worded letters and silent cheers (probably best not to ask!), together with the wind-ups by Lucky - I was the sucker late one dark night getting slightly nervous at the insinuations that my room in the historic Castle Bijaipur was notoriously haunted, while a certain other group member was slowly but definitely persuaded that in India diamonds grow on trees! The other 11 group members included five couples; as the one other single traveller was female, Intrepid could only allocate me a single room throughout, which was a substantial bonus (especially when I was ill) as the trip is supposed to be based on everyone sharing twin or double rooms.

The tour started and ended in Delhi. Alongside the utter traffic chaos, the first thing that strikes you about this sprawling metropolis of a mere 12 million people is the woeful air quality; even in the middle of the night the polluted haze was immediately obvious to the eyes, the nose and the lungs. While as I wrote last year I really took a liking to Mumbai, I'm afraid it's difficult to say the same about Delhi, and I can't really recommend spending more than maybe one day here. I'd been sceptical about the warnings I'd received that Delhi is much more chaotic and stressful than Mumbai, as I doubted that was possible, but regrettably it's true. There are a handful of remarkable sights, topped by the truly beautiful Humayun's Tomb, a large and majestic 16th Century Mughal red-and-white construction set in stunning grounds, with Jama Masjid, India's largest mosque, and the India Gate, commemorating the 90,000 Indian soldiers who perished in World War I, not far behind. Immensely claustrophobic though it is, the streets of Old Delhi are also fascinating, fun and full of surprises.

The stunning Humayun's Tomb

Back street in Old Delhi

However, unlike Mumbai, these sights are pretty scattered amongst a mostly undistinguished and fairly illegible, unliveable (to my eyes and senses) and filthy sprawl, and the hassle quotient from hawkers and scammers pushes towards intolerable (to be fair, mixed with some local people who just genuinely seem to want to help and/or say hello - but if you can reliably tell the one from the other, you're doing a lot better than me). It doesn't help that the city centre, Connaught Place, is a building site at present to an extraordinary degree (without anything like cordons or alternative road crossings to help keep you safe), partially in connection with the forthcoming Commonwealth Games and extensions of the (remarkably and incongruously shiny and impressive) city metro. In a few years' time the area could conceivably be impressive and almost pleasant, but I wouldn't hold your breath.

Welcome to Delhi, the world's largest building site

Without a doubt the most optimistic slogan I've ever seen anywhere...

After Delhi came Agra, home to the Taj Mahal. This is one attraction which really does live up to the hype, despite the inevitable crowds - it is just incredible, incomparable and a real take-your-breath-away moment. It isn't just the utterly extraordinary building itself but the beautiful, perfect grounds which generate the whole unforgettable experience. It says a lot about the potential power of the human emotions of love and grief that one man was inspired to commission something like it solely for his dead wife. I believe it is regularly voted the best building in the world, and really I would take a lot of persuading that it doesn't fully deserve this accolade; I am pretty sure it was my best sightseeing experience ever. If you ever get a chance to go, you really must.

A large part of what Intrepid Travel seek to offer with their tours is authentic grass-roots local experiences, and I can only give them full credit for fully succeeding. These included: 

• Seeing a working high-end carpet factory in Agra where virtually everything is done, painstakingly and incredibly repetitively, by hand, with beautiful results;
• Staying in a rural fort and then in a converted palace, with traditional Indian music and hospitality.
• Seeing several of the forts and palaces for which Rajasthan is most famous - the best of these was Udaipur City Palace, apparently the setting for the James Bond movie Octopussy (really not my thing I'm afraid so I wouldn't know). The scale, opulence and attention to detail (seen in ways such as the engravings, interior decoraton and sometimes incredible miniature paintings) instituted by the different royal families in the region is certainly impressive, and if this is really your thing you could probably base a whole holiday around touring the many such sites.
• Going on safari in Ranthambore National Park - the chief attraction is tigers which unfortunately we didn't see (only pawprints) despite lengthy waiting around, but we did see deer, lots of monkeys and a couple of crocodiles, all in a beautiful setting.
• Seeing genuine rural Indian life including family homes - fascinating, humbling and possibly a little bit perspective-changing for good. Seeing families living in one room (complete with mini-temple and grain store), collecting water from a communal pump and bringing it home in pots on their heads, sorting through grain, and just chewing the fat and watching the world go by with the strength of family and community ties self-evident, somehow makes the ridiculous 'pressures' of modern Western life (domestic, financial, career etc) seem a little bit less essential and all-consuming.
• Seeing a traditional Indian show of music, dancing and puppetry, with the by-now familiar panache, skill and riot of colour - including what came surprisingly close to a gender-bending and camp element, and the incredible sight of a woman performing tricks as she balanced water pots on her head, starting with one pot but building up to a scarcely believable and breathtaking ten pots.
• Going camel riding in the desert - particularly good fun once you get over the initial moment or two of terror, and not quite as uncomfortable as you might think. I would have preferred that my guide hadn't randomly decided to get the camel jogging for several hundred metres without bothering to consult me first, but I didn't come as close as all that to falling off. I found camels strangely lovable despite the dubious noises they're inclined to make and the quantity of poo they randomly produce.
• Eating home-cooked dinner on the rooftop of a local family home, off big silver plates while sitting only on mats.

A partially unintentional (I suspect) local experience came when we travelled by train in what I think was third class without reserved seating. Firstly my tour guide had to have strong words with a local guy who was unwilling to uncurl himself from sleeping across a row of three seats so that I could sit in one of them; a little later he came back and unceremoniously shifted my rucksack across to the other luggage rack to clear the one above me so he could curl up and sleep there instead! When we got off the train, the stop was so short that several of our group hadn't disembarked when the train started moving again; everyone just about scrambled off but our tour guide was visibly annoyed. It took me a few moments to clock that he was annoyed not with the train driver for pulling away so quickly, but with members of the group for not grasping the seriousness of his warning that we really needed to be ready to all get off the moment the train stopped!

I can't really tell you anything about the city of Jaipur, because our time there coincided with a very unpleasant burst of 'Delhi belly'; I was out of action for around 48 hours, including 24 where I couldn't hold in any fluids - the ensuing dehydration was not fun in the ferocious heat. A doctor came to see me and two similarly affected other members of the group, and the treatment comprised of a cocktail of pills and an injection in the bum - nice. But maybe the total detox did me some good somehow.

As well as the ferocious heat and humidity limiting how much sightseeing you can do in a day without contracting heatstroke, a couple of our destinations, Udaipur (supposedly Rajasthan's most romantic city) and Pushkar (a major pilgrimage site due to its Brahma temple, one of only a few in the world, although really nothing to write home about from a tourist point of view) were not looking their best because their famous lakes have mostly dried up - the monsoon is due in a couple of months and it was poor last year. A bit of imagination does wonders - but there may well be a message here for anyone reading this about choosing your time of year carefully for visiting India.

I've mentioned how trying it becomes when you are constantly hassled by local people wanting your money in some way or other. Predictably the best way to get away from this and to encounter (somewhat) reliably genuine warmth from Indian people is to get off the beaten tourist track. We did this at times; walking through the small town of Bundi was especially genuinely pleasant because people only wanted to say a genuine hello and to find out where I was from. While being driven in jeeps or a minibus through the countryside many, many people (often but not always children), clearly not used to seeing white people, waved at us enthusiastically and warmly. (By the way, the genuine warmth and delight in the faces of these many dozens of children totally exposes the insinuations of any moronic bigots that there is anything natural or innate about racism or xenophobia...)

As I've mentioned before, constant financially motivated hassle in any given place inevitably leaves you less open to anybody offering a genuine welcome - one of my sadder experiences was being greeted on the street by a local guy in Jaipur who simply asked me balefully (with no ulterior motive I could discern) why European travellers were so closed off against approaches on the street by local people. I did my best to explain tactfully and I think he sort of got it, reluctantly. Also I can only assume that Only Fools and Horses is popular on Indian TV, because my answer of London to the frequent "Where are you from?" questions frequently elicited a smiling response of "Lovely jubbly!" 

The huge polarisation of Indian society hits you frequently, particularly in cities, where you see the likes of adverts for exciting financial investment opportunities one moment, and shocking destitution and poverty the next. (I wrote about the poverty last time; although it's difficult to know what new there is to say about it, it doesn't stop affecting you deeply.) Even in the countryside we were shown a community which for historical reasons of religion and culture eke out a rudimentary, traveller-style living outside and very separate from the relatively well-to-do village itself. And although it's less visible to foreign tourists, you don't have to read or listen much to be reminded that the effects of the Hindu caste system are still alive and well.

It's fair to say that I'm ready to move on now (there's an obvious but rather true joke that after travelling in India you need a holiday), but as I've hopefully started to document here the experiences and memories count for my two weeks here has been very considerable. I have an overnight flight tonight from Delhi to Hong Kong, which one way and another I expect to be a pretty different proposition...