Woke at 7am and couldn't wait to get out of town. cold showered and checked out then headed for the train station which tankfully was only three minutes away. turned out we missed the 7:20 train! booked the next one out at 12:50 and walked to the most reasonable looking restaurant. there was a busy local on the corner of a busy junction not too far from the station where we settled down to eat. we were the only white faces in the place and people did what they do best...stared and stared and stared and stared. oh you should have seen the tea - thick like bovril and to be on the safe side i picked samosas to be sure any unwanted extras would be zapped. anyway we hung around for as long as we could since we had five hours to kill.
it was actually lovely to be there and watch the city wake up and the street fill with the variety of life only India has to offer. the Dalits, (formally known as the untouchables) swept the streets...this town was so dusty it was very hard to breath and not possible to be outside for too long. motorbike is the preferred transport and hundreds if not thousands of motorbikes passed carrying wedges of goods for sale; entire families moving from a to b, one actually carried four children and two adults; children walking or cycling to school; hundreds of black and yellow taxis, oxen carrying massive, i mean massive loads. Goods carriers (trucks, very decorative and colourful, lovely to see) with between twenty and thrity people on top; government cars (getting priority on the streets) and hundreds of people walking with purpose to a destination, or rambling like the holy men in gentle meditation. you rarely see women alone, or gathered outside anywhere and when you do see a woman she's either sweeping the street, begging or living on the street or she's in the company of a man. this was a wonderous place to be.
over at the station we secured a space on a bench and stayed there for the duration, regularly hassled by someone asking for rupies or men sitting beside us or standing in front of us just staring. one man did what most of the men did only sat right next to me (there seems to be no sense of personal space) and just stared and stared. he tried to talk to me but i wasn't interested and ignored him but he insisted so i turned around and asked him to go away with Aine's magic word: chelo. crikey you should have seen the look on his face, his eyes plummeted into his very soul, i knew i had hurt him. he said something to his friend and his friend got angry and stood in front of me and spoke in Hindi. somehow i understood that his friend was just trying to help us and offer some guidance. the only gesture i could offer was to hold my hands as in prayer and offer Nameste which seemed to appease him and off they went.
train stations are great places and awful places. here you see the begger children - very young and mostly male; the crippled from polio and other genetic diseases; those ravaged by lepracy with limps eaten away and faces devoured and distorted; the 'bride burning' victims (the many unfortunate women whose husband finds himself unhappy with her dowry and inflicts pain, disfigurement or death on his bride by dowsing her with fuel and setting her alight or scalding her with boiling water - of course done to look like an accident or suicide); and the older women, and i've only seen older women, who are absolutely filty and accompanied only by flies and flees, who have gone completely insane and hold the most interesting conversations with themselves and scream and shout at the forms who torment them, forms only they can hear and see before them. the train stations are a heartbreaking and soul wrenching experience.
then there is the melee when a train is due or a train is eliminating the masses from it's cold metal frame. each carriage emits a variety of life which reflects perfectly the caste system...the Brahmin (traditionally priests and subject to strict dietary laws, strictly vegetarian, no garlic or chilli and strict dress rules for every occasion); Kshatriya (warriors); Vaishya (merchants) and Shudra (peasants). The Brahmins were said to have emerged from the mouth of Lord Brahma at the moment of creation, Kshatriyas were said to have come from his arms, Vaishyas from his thighs and Shudras from his feet.
you don't see the Dalits (lower caste) disembark from the trains but instead enter only after everyone has left to do the most menial tasks of sweeping and cleaning the toilets and we watched as two Dalits washed down the railway tracks which were full of s**t, these people are forced to eek out a living on the fringes of society.
people's dress and bodies give not only an indication of their position in society but their religious leanings. in HInduism there are millions of minor gods and goddesses but at the heart of the religion is the trinity of Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver) and Shiva (the destroyer, not in a negative way because without him growth and rebirth cannot take place). myself and Cathy are partial to Ganesh: the remover of obstacles, he's chubby and elephant headed - lord of new beginnings and guardian of entrances! it's coming up to Diwali and Lakshmi the goddess of wealth is the current hip deity. Diwali is a festival of lights where people light oil lamps to show Rama the way home from exile. sweets are given and fireworks let off all over the city - it looks like christmas and sounds like halloween.
of course there is the Muslim community who are currently fasting from dawn to dusk for Ramadan and are fast approaching the end which will culminate in three days of festivities.
Buddhists are beakons of light wih shiny eyes and flat round faces, refugees from Tibet wearing two shades of red and a little orange and have a very lovely magnetic draw to them.
Then there's the Parsi community (from Persia) who hold fire, earth and water as sacred so they don't cremate or burry their dead. The corpse is laid out in 'Towers of Silence' to be picked clean by vultures. Aine told us there was a Tower of Silence close to where we stayed in Kemps Corner which was still in use and that for some time, due to the heavy population of Mumbai, Vultures were becoming more and more rare but then thanks to the continued Parsi tradition the population of Vultures has increased! oh, dear! these Towers of Silence are understandably off limits to sightseers and it is a very big no no to photograph it from any angle.
now the Jains are a fascinating group whose concept is ahimsa - nonviolence. they are a tall people, elegant and wear mouth masks to keep them pure and have a whole heap of traditions which i don't know enough about now but will surely investigate.
myself and Cathy found ourselves suddenly pestered by an endless array of flies only to discover the homeless woman stooped beside us combing her mangeld hair and talking to herself, i decided to take a walk to the other side of the station only to find a group of children spot me and charge accross the track shouting excitedly at me. i fled them not because i was fearful of them but because i was fearful for their safety.
there are porters in the station and you know there are a few things i couldn't get my head around... people asked others to carry bags they could easily pick up themselves, in restaruants men asked waiters to serve them their food and others gave a look and something was done for them...it seems this is what they are used to, others doing for them.
anyway our train pulled in and i asked a young man to confirm our positioning on the station for the correct carriage. myself and cathy settled into a sleeper carriage (three bunks, Aine's preference when traveling) and found clean seats. the inspector came round and asked for extra rupies and we were happy to pay.
i'm loving the train journeys. the landscape is very lush with tea plantations, sugar-cane, mango and coconut fields and speckled all over them are the tiny bodies of the workers in the fields. every now and then you'd see a bike then an individual bent over in labour or you'd pass a big tree in the middle of a massive field and one person lying down in the shade of the branches or a group of people sitting in conversation and rest.
the best snaps were to be had on entering and leaving a train station. shantys were on both sides and communities were vibrant and active, people washed, cooked, shit and cleaned and children played and waved to the train.
in each field at least one person waved to the train, particularly the young, young girls with older women and i wondered if they ever did or ever would get an opportunity to switch places and find themselves waving *from* the train. it was curious too because they absolutely beamed when they spotted us waving at them.
the young man from the station was in the next seating area and came round to chat with us he said his name but i've forgotten it. he was very giddy and interesting and told us he was studying cardiology. he talked of his travells abroad and spoke with pride of India.
we arrived in Hospet at 3:30 and immediately planned our journey to Mysore in two days time - a night train to Bangalore :) after hagglling we took a rickshaw to Hampi and couldn't believe we had actually made it. myself and Cathy agree rickshaw is the best way to travel! you're that little bit closer to the people in a rickshaw.
of course we paid for our haggle by being brought accommodation recommended by the very energetic driver. after Hubli we kept to our plan of: one doubt and we're out! and insisted he bring us then to our Lonely Planet recommendation of Rama Guest House. my turn to check it out and the fact it was spotless and relatively new we decided to go for it. it was very cheap, the cheapest yet at Rs 250 per night. the bed was mad it had a round yellow mosquitoe net, reminded me of my 6yr old niece's pink princess net over her bed.
settled in then went strolling. later we sat down to a meal which was surprisingly tasteless, or maybe we were just exhausted. anyway someone got their fill that night - the mosquitoe's ate us up.
Cathy's Log: i'm afraid Cathy was eaten the most :(
back at our promising abode we found a nearly straight line of ants covering practically the entire wall, a couple of cockroaches, mosquitoes and the freakiest spider i've ever seen. we got rid of the net and pulled the bed from the wall - not access for the ants, i'm afraid i killed the mosquitoes, put the cockroaches outside the door and hoped the spider had bedded down for the night. we sprayed our liners (i have to write to Lonely Planet about me Darling's fantastic idea of brining our sleeping bag liners, these we could spray with insect repellent and stay off the sheets provided, only thing was we were mumified) and jumped into bed. you know it's very hard not being able to be affectionate with Cathy in the day time (warned against being demonstrative) but the night time too is just a little too much.
Nameste xxDee&Cathy
