Paul in India

Sent to the Devil on a Bus

It’s now term time in Manipal, and the once empty campus is thronged with people. It’s much more interesting, and there is a nice buzz around the place. It is my first experience of interacting with young Indian people regularly, and the students here are so polite and good natured in general. The other side of this coin is that Manipal is a college for wealthy people, and there are a lot of rich kids here. They pack the bars getting hammered, then drink drive home in their expensive cars. This happens everywhere I know, but it is less impressive in a country with poverty like Indias. Some of them have very slappable faces. A lot of people have told me that Manipal is not a true reflecion of India. I think this is what they mean.

I met Tags and Catherine on Friday night, and we spent the weekend in Goa. We went back to Colva beach, which was much changed in the month since I had been there at the end of the hot season. I much preferred it in the monsoon. There were far less people, and being on the beach in warm rain and lightening is amazing. On Saturday night, we had some beers at the edge of the beach in a shack and were buffeted by hot wind. The sea was whipped up into a frenzy, and bizarrely, an elderly couple walked hand in hand knee deep through the water. The sky seemed to change every few seconds, from clear, to overcast, to clear again. Strange tall monsoon clouds arranged themselves in a row, then just disappeared. The view was spoiled only when a stray dog came and took a massive dump on the beach in front of us.

One thing I have learned is that you wouldn’t want to be in a hurry in India. There is no concept of time here. On Saturday it took me a full hour to buy train tickets from Goa to Hampi. Sixty minutes. The clerks chatted amoungst themselves whilst I sat in the dingy office waiting. There were three windows, one of which was closed, and one contained a man with his head buried in his hands for most of the time I was there. In the background, there were about six people milling around, just having the craic really.  When it was finally my turn, I asked for three tickets to Hampi. The clerk looked away and chatted to his friends before muttering in my direction ‘Not possible’. I craned my neck down to the speech hole at waist height to ask what he was on about. I had been waiting an hour, and had been planning this trip to Hampi for months. There had to be some way to get there. ‘Not possible’ he said again. It turned out that he was only referring to first class, but he was in no hurry to explain this. He was happy to let me believe for a minute that the last train in India had just burst into flames and fallen off a bridge.

We then went for lunch in a lovely restaurant, but with painfully slow service. The waiter was being trained, and watched, and insisted on resetting the table every time one of us swallowed some food. I have never seen straighter forks. He poured our pepsi into our glasses with the utmost care, so as it wouldn’t fizz unpleasantly, and when he brought out my bottle of water, he presented it to me like a newborn child. We almost had to wrestle our forks off him to feed ourselves, he was so determined to do everything for us, and to do it slowly. My throat was so dry from saying thank you over and over again I had to buy another bottle of water.

Checking into a hotel here takes forever. When we arrived at Colva, we only had maybe one or two hours of daylight left, and we were very keen to get to the beach. The woman brought out the requisite massive Indian hotel book, which asks you to fill in all the details of your life. Where you have been, where you are going, passport and visa no, what’s in your suitcase. I may just write out a small personal statement and cary photocopies to speed things up in future. Favourite colour, hopes for children, views on global warming. She then went to get photocopies of our passports, and I swear I have never seen someone move so slowly. All my internal organs ground to a halt as I watched her shuffle across the floor like she’d just woken from a coma. I looked outside and the sun was inching closer to the horizon qucker than she was crossing the small tiled foyer. You just have to never be in a rush, and don’t plan too much, because an hour lost seems to cost nothing in India. People here are naturally patient, and waiting doesn’t seem to be a problem for anyone. On the trains people sit peacefully, and no one reads. Nobody minds being in the company of their thoughts.

We reached Hampi on Sunday afternoon, and it is a breathtaking place. It was once ‘Vijayanagar’, the capital of a huge Hindu empire, until it was sacked by the Deccan Sultans in the early 16th century. At its height, it was the size of ancient Rome, with a world famous market, and gold plated temples. It was staggering. The site is spread over a large area, and there are remains of temples, markets, and ancient elephant stables. The sandstone and granite has worn, but you can still see the remarkable detail. The main temple is beautiful and creepy, and the sheer scale of the site is overwhelming. The landscape is made up of boulders perched impossibly on hills, and the whole place looks like a bad star trek episode. Monkeys were everywhere. The temples and ruins were beautiful, the weather was lovely, and we rented bikes to see the 20sqkm site. The food was great too, we found an amazing restaurant called the Mango Tree ( I ‘found’ it in my lonely planet), which was outdoors in a banana plantation and bult around a massive tree trunk. I think we saw Jeff Bridges, but Tags says it wasn’t him. All I can say is that if I was Jeff Bridges, that is the kind of place I would be. At night, we went to a roof cafe with a view of the main temple. We lay on duvet covers, and were served Masala tea by a man in a Gerrard top. It doesn’t get much better than that. Hampi is the most beautiful and extraordinary place I have seen in India.

The village of Hampi nestles in the heart of the remains, and it is a charming place on its own. However, it wasn’t free of hawkers and ne’er-do-wells. Usually when you get off a train, you are surrounded by taxi men or salesmen. As we pulled into Hospet, a little creep with an ear ring jumped on to the still moving train as I was trying to get off and cried ‘Welcome to Hospet!‘ His friend, a tall goon with an orange shirt was waiting on the platform trying to get us into a taxi. This pair of wrong’uns followed us for two days, and kept popping up in the most unlikely places. The fact that there were two of them made them a little comic, and less annoying, but they were still very annoying. I did feel sorry for them- there was no suggestion that they were going to con us, they were possibly just honest teenage business men trying to get some trade in the the quiet season. I don’t think we gave them any business at all over the two days, but they never gave up on us. Right until we were leaving Hampi, people were asking if we wanted a tour. We’re on our way to the train station with our bags lads. It’s over. Let it go.

We did find a stall where it was quiet enough to buy something. Ravi said he was a gypsy, and set his stall up high above the village underneath a crumbling arch. He said he wanted to get away from the masses, and didn’t mind if this meant there was less business for him. He subscribed to some strange beliefs for a salesman- he said that the more he earned, the more greedy he became, and this was the problem with salesmen in tourist areas. For this reason he charged very low prices, or else he would just waste his money on food and ganja. His prices were remarkable. I felt compelled to haggle, but he was selling stone carvings that must have taken hours for less than a pound. Even by Indias standards it was really cheap, and it was a breath of fresh air to be able to browse in peace. He said he had eaten some bad fish, and kept excusing himself to go behind a rock to fart.

We met a Scottish couple on the train to Hampi whose stories of adventure made me feel like I hadn’t been in India at all for five weeks. Ross had nearly been in a knife fight in Dehli, had shared a bus roof with a goat in the Himalayas, and had trekked across the desert with a guide called ‘Mr Desert’.  He didn’t mince his words on some of his worse experiences. On Nepalese peope: ‘I always assumed people from Nepal would be very noble and dignified, but they’re they same grubby little bastards you find everywhere else’. Pretty deep. Some of his experiences with Indian administration rang true with me. Indian office workers work long hours he said, six days a week, but they seem spend a lot of their time just chatting. He reckoned they would have to work a lot less if they just worked a bit more.

This is not true of the farmer or peasant classes, who seem to work constantly. On the trains I have passed through hundreds of fields since being here. They are all lit up by a pin prick of colour in the middle as someone in traditional dress toils away, even in heavy rain. They work until it is dark, seemingly every day. Ross explained to me that office jobs are still handed out based on class. If there are 200 jobs, then 100 will be awarded based on merit. The other 100 will be given out based on ‘caste’, with the Brahmin, the highest caste, being given first preference.

I was a little jealous of all their tales, and I had hoped for a little mini disaster to occur, so as to have a story to tell. Step up the overnight bus from Hospet to Udupi, for here was a genuine nightmare. On the bright side, I learned what shock absorbers do, and I will always be grateful for them, as some unfathomable bastard had removed them from my bus and placed them in a box far away. The first of infinite speed bumps caught me off guard, and nearly broke my neck. So began the longest night of my life. Even on straight, flat roads, the bus jerked violenty up and down, and there weren’t many straight or flat roads. The seats reclined way back, but this made the vibrations even worse. I spent the trip trying to sleep sitting bolt upright and counting my vertebrae. I tried to read, but it was impossible. Pressing the pages of the book directly onto my brain would have been less nauseating. After half an hour I was at my wits end. The eleven hour journey was broken cleverly by the one and only stop,  an hour and fifteen minutes in. Two hours in, I was praying to the bus gods and crying quietly. A few times I was thrown out of my seat a few inches into the air as I began to snatch a puddle of thirty seconds’ sleep. I felt terrible, because Tags gets travel sick, and I had assured him the bus journey would be fine. If I’m ever on a plane in bad turbulence, I always imagine I’m on a bumpy bus, to relax. This was the first time I have ever been on a bus and tried to relax by imagining I was on a flaming jet plunging into the sea. I don’t like exaggerating, but this was the worst journey anyone has ever had to make anywhere.

I arrived in Manipal at eight am and went straight to work. Tags and Catherine came to stay, and we had a great night. We went to a ceremony in the temple in Udupi, and I drank water from a sacred ladel. As soon as I swallowed, I was sure I had imbibed sacred amoebic dysentry. I have become a bit lax in my practices of staying alive here, I shouldn’t take my eye off the ball with only two weeks to go. Two of my French friends are in Hospital with Malaria, caught here, in a low risk area. They weren’t taking any medication, which I am, so I will be ok, but it was a scary reminder to take my pills. I have one week left here, and then I travel south for a week with Pete, who I’m meeting next Thursday. We will rent a house boat for a couple of days, and the monsoon is less severe south in Kerala. That is something to look forward to.