India part 2

We woke up feeling refreshed - if a bit sweaty. The time of year we had visited was the awkward change-over between the humid and wet monsoon and the cooler "winter". We were still in the humid period so had to sleep with the window open and, of course, with a festival going on meant that firecrackers were let off until the early hours. The house certainly hadn't changed in the plumbing department, with the bathing options being a weak dribble of water from a shower head, or a bucket bath. Venturing out into Dadar soon revealed that apart from the flyover that had been built over the circle, nothing much had changed at all. The weird store that seemed to sell everything was still there, the grocery stores were still there. The flower sellers were still there and the beggars were still there. Actually - I'll embellish a bit - the flyover now meant you didn't take your life into your hands (as much) every time you crossed the road. The lack of patience combined with the driving attitude means that if you are half way across a road and the lights turn green, the drivers won't wait for you...



Today was the last day of the Ganpati festival where people took their Ganpatis (idols shaped like Ganesh, the elephant-headed god) and cast them into the sea. This lasted all day with various vans and carts heading towards the sea loaded with clay Ganpatis and whole families. This carried on into the night with bright lights, music and many more firecrackers.



The rest of the week involved getting reacquainted with the city - from the area around the house to downtown. The restaurants, the hanging gardens and Marine Drive and the planetarium (complete with the school tour from hell). Then there was The Club. Every day, my aunt and uncle go to the prestigious Willingdon club where my aunt plays cards and my uncles plays snooker. As a child, we used to go to use the open-air swimming pool. Some years my father actually became a temporary member so we could go more often and children were never allowed in the clubhouse itself. Now I could finally see what all the fuss was about. After a visit to the nearby museum, we arrived for a swim as guests. I haven't swum in years, but it all came back instantly. This time, instead of sitting around the pool afterwards, I was thrilled to finally see the inside of the club. The bar was a modern area with plasma tvs and sweet, sweet air conditioning. Meeting other members of the club reinforces the exclusivity. You may think that a members sports club in a country where many people survive on less than $1 a day would be affordable for a young professional such as myself. I think it's safe to say Emma and I were gob-smacked to find membership cost upwards of £10,000 a year!



One of our tasks for the week was to sort out an excursion. Even though I had been to India many times before, I'd still never been out of the state of Maharashtra. This would change as, combined with the power of the internet and the abundance of low-cost airlines we sorted out a few days in Delhi and Agra.

After experiencing Ryanair, I didn't have high hopes for the Indian variety, but Kingfisher actually puts KLM to shame. New planes, seatback tv screens even on internal flights, good quality food (with metal cutlery) and good crew. Upon arriving in Delhi we were met by our host, my father's nephew Indivar who is an academic at a local university. We piled into his small Tata car and set out across Delhi. After leaving the airport, it immediately became clear that while it was obviously still bonkers, Delhi was a lot less intense and mad than Bombay. The university itself is set in - what to westerners - appears to be a massive amount of wild countryside.



Around Indivar's university-provided accommodation was a family of peacocks, several of which made an appearance. Indivar showed us around the sites, including a Sikh temple and an iron pillar that despite being constructed in 1600-odd years ago hadn't rusted. Sadly, the "magic" reason seems to have been unravelled. We enrolled on an official whistle-stop tour of some sights - including the red fort and Ghandi's tomb that were conducted at break-neck speed.



The trip to Agra would be by train. We had booked first class, but I don't think Emma was ready for what that entailed. As we arrived at the station early in the morning it was already a hive of activity. After finding our platform we discovered it was littered with travellers carrying more baggage that could feasibly fit into the train, hawkers selling their wares and the odd rat running around. As we boarded the train, all thoughts of a western-style first class didn't so much fade from our heads as they were crushed with a mallet. It was like economy on a plane, but without padding on the seats, broken recline mechanisms, tray tables that fell down every five minutes, a lack of A/C and the only entertainment consisted of the sellers that would come through the carriage every so often selling dubious-looking food and drink. After a few hours we arrived in Agra and took a taxi to our hotel for the stay, The Taj hotel. As we entered the hotel, it was like walking into an oasis. Clean white marble, gentle A/C and a good shower. The hotel was called the Taj View and as we reached our room we were happy to discover the hotel lived up to its name.



After an hour or so to enjoy our first decent shower in ten days, we headed back out into the madness and heat to take a rickshaw to the Taj. Rickshaws are awesome fun - it's basically a small moped with a 3-(small) person seat at the back. This means they have the turning circle of a unicycle and combined with the driving discipline meant the we were frequently in danger of falling out as the driver pulled off another ridiculous cornering move.

As we arrived at the drop-off I was amazed that India's best-known tourist attraction and one of the wonders of the modern world can only be accessed by small back streets. We had a few hundred yards to walk through a bazaar full of merchants all of whom didn't seem to want to take no for an answer. As we approached the entrance a new nuisance became evident in the "local tour guides" offering to give us a narrated tour. If you've seen Slumdog Millionaire, this isn't too far from the truth. After paying about 20 times more to enter the grounds than Indians (surely I should have had half off?) we were suddenly in a different world. Yes, there were lots of tourists and their guides, but the oppressiveness of the small streets had given way to a large court yard and as we walked towards the archway the famous view of the gleaming marble shrine came into view. Somehow marble manages to change colour in different lights in a way few other materials can manage. The monument itself seemed to gleam.





Emma and I left my parents to their guide (you have to give in to them else they will follow you round the whole thing - it's easier just to give them 50p and take their narration). After slowly walking around and through the Taj Mahal the sun had shifted and the monument took on a golden appearance as we headed out. The incredible thing about the Taj Mahal is that it is situated in the middle of an industrial city. In fact, from the Taj View, the Taj appears nestled among towers, chimneys and factories, but when you in the boundaries of the Taj you simply can't see any of that - it's as if the Taj Mahal grounds are surrounded by trees. The view across the river is to the proposed site of the black Taj Mahal that was planned as the mausoleum of Shah Jahan - the man who built the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum to his wife. Unfortunately he was deposed and imprisoned in the nearby Agra Fort by his son. Our trip took us on to the Fort and then back to the hotel for an awesome world-cuisine buffet.

India part 1

Right, let's try and get this blog back on track. The first big update from just over a year ago(!) was the trip Emma and I took with my family to India. I used to go for 3 or 4 weeks every year until I was 14. This means it had been 14 years since the last visit. My parents had been a couple of times in recent times and I had been reliably informed that everything had changed in Bombay (sorry - I don't call it Mumbai, much like it's residents) and it had become much more Westernised. Thus I approached it with an open mind whilst recollecting the madness I remembered and Emma had no idea what was coming. My parents flew out a week before us (and it rained every day that week), so our trip began at 5am on a Saturday morning when our taxi arrived to take us to Birmingham airport. The "Eurohub" looks a bit sorry for itself these days and BA have fully abandoned Birmingham. We were soon on the KLM flight to Amrsterdam which was even quicker than from Newcastle, although Emma was developing a reaction to her new contact lenses rendering her partially blind for the day. This did facilitate hiding the madness later on. Our flight on to Bombay was with KLM's partner NWA (which always makes me laugh) and before we were allowed on the plane, everyone was taken to a table with their party and asked further security questions - talk about paranoia - the plane wasn't even going anywhere near the US. The flight passed fairly quickly (~9 hours) and we were soon descending over the sea towards Bombay. If the city had modernised, then they still hadn't cleared the slums from the airport perimeter. It still seems very surprising that we were really scrutinised before being allowed anywhere near a plane, yet there is a shanty town that could house anyone and anything is right up to the airport perimeter fence. As predicted, despite pleas to remain seated until the plane had come to a standstill at the terminal, most of the Indian contingent of the flight was up out of their seats trying to unload their baggage from the overhead bins almost as soon as the plane was off the runway. As we left the plane that nostalgically familiar heat wave hit me straight in the face. As we got to the terminal, nothing much seemed to have changed - they still seemed to be rebuilding the terminal and there was the familiar feeling that absolute chaos was only seconds away. Baggage collection led to at least a couple of people learning why you shouldn't stand close to the luggage belt unless you're retrieving bags as one traveller strugled to remove a case just large enough to hold a full-grown elephant, the momentum of the belt took it straight into a couple of unsuspecting punters standing nearby - the first of which got it straight in the crotch. Whilst I tried to keep a straight face, I saw out bags and we were away. My parents had arrived with a driver to take us back to the house in Dadar and even though it was just about midnight, there was a hot and heavy atmosphere (and a LOT of people milling around). We were led to the large car that would take us back and as we piled in, the rain began. We had inadvertently arrived at the end of the Ganpati festival and the roads were strewn with fairy lights and people on the streets. Emma was still suffering from a lack of long distance vision, so she was eased into the bonkers visuals. The main problem in Bombay is that there are far too many people. This is evidenced by the scores of people milling into the roads as there is no room on the pavements. Within minutes the first "change" revealed itself - the roads which were washed away in the recent floods had been "temporarily" rebuilt with bricks rather than tarmac. I suspect they're going to be in place until they too are washed away. The first beneficial change I noticed was the construction of flyovers on the highway which negated the need for traffic lights every few hundred metres.

It's remarkable how much more things seem complicated as you grow up. When I was younger I used to just sit in the cars and look at the sites. Now I am a qualified driver I sat open mouthed at the standard of driving which I will attempt to describe. There are (or, were) lane markings that are completely ignored - if a car fits into a space, it will. Red traffic lights seem to be considered as optional - which is something I don't remember from before. The cars are an eclectic mix of the old (Fiats and Ambassadors), old-ish (Suzuki Marutis) and modern Tata and East Asian cars. The majority of them don't have wing mirrors. For the older cars, this was a design "feature", for newer cars, they likely didn't survive the drive home from the garage. Given the tight packing that drivers seem to favour, there is a matter of centimetres between vehicles. That lack of spacial awareness is compensated for by the horn. If you approach a vehicle from behind - you blow your horn to let the driver know you are there. As you overtake a vehicle, you blow your horn to make sure the driver doesn't pull into you. If the driver is slightly slow at pulling away from a traffic light, you blow your horn. If the day of the week has an "a" in it, you blow your horn. And for added amusement, sounding your horn is illegal. If you very go to India and consider hiring a car, just don't. Someone who actually learned to drive using mirrors wouldn't survive 10 minutes.
Anyway, we arrived in Dadar after about 30 minutes and I met my Aunt and Uncle who I hadn't seen since 1996. The house was built by my Grandfather and is a 3-storey building. My memories of it were that my uncle's parents lived on the bottom floor, my aunt and uncle (and us when we were there) lived on the first floor and my grandparents lived on the top floor. The house was in need of refurbishing back in the 80s and I remember sitting on the stairs peeling paint off the walls (something that was sooooo satisfying to do when you got a big piece off) and it hasn't been touched up since. Due to deaths it's now just my aunt and uncle there now along with the servants. The crazy thing with the servants is how they live. They sleep on the floor in the kitchen (even though they must be in at least their 40s and there are several unoccupied beds), they have an outhouse toilet (even though there are 3 toilets in the house), they hand-scrub the washing (even though there is a washing machine) and they are expected to do the shopping and cook all the food. One of the servants actually left to go and work in a textile mill, but came back because his life was better as a servant.

Anyway, I've typed for a long time and still only described up to the first night. I'll try to be more concise in the next parts.