Incredible India. These are the posters we kept seeing all over India promoting it as an incredible place to visit. We of course in our two week visit only saw a sliver of what India has to offer, but boy was it a lot to handle. Incredible wasn't quite the word that came to mind as we boarded our plane last night bound for Bangkok. Here is what we found it to be both the good and the bad...
Having come off a trek that involved 16 days of not showering, neither of us have ever felt more dirty than after a day of walking around the streets of India in whatever city we happened to be visiting. We were constantly dodging cows, dogs, pigs, goats, donkeys, people and cars and their respective poo (aside from the cars of course). We each experienced that horrible feeling at night of just having felt the "squish" (i.e. we just walked through a pile of poo and lord help us that it wasn't a persons because somehow that just seemed worse).
And then there was the dust...the horrendous pollution contributed to our feeling of disgust and dirtiness; from a mere 500 meters away the Taj Mahal was blurred by a cloud of smog. We both bought scarves to wear to cover faces when we walked to help with our still persisting coughs that have been with us all the way since the second week, and to reduce the amount of black coming out of our noses. It truly was incredible just how much dirt could be wiped off our skin at the end of a day but alas that was not what they showed in their posters. The pollution did make for some incredible sunsets with the sun turning a fiery red, but we never saw blue sky or stars, just yellow nastyness.
Both of us being campers and hikers, we are fans and quite proficient pee-ers in the woods and do not scoff at using nature as a facility. However, the Indians have taken this yet again to a new level. EVERYWHERE we went on the streets, sidewalks, and world heritage sites alike we were confronted with the male population of India relieving themselves in far from discrete places. Our rules of where and how to walk were growing: no walking at night without light to avoid the squish, and no walking in anything wet. It was either pee, spit, or water someone had dumped to wipe themselves (yes, this too was witnessed on a few "incredible" occasions).
Since we are in the potty talk realm, why not bring up the issue of toilet paper. The Indian custom is to eat with your right hand and wipe with your left. Having only two weeks in India we did not fully emerge ourselves and thus embraced neither of these customs. We were staying in fairly western places and thought that toilet paper would not be hard to come by. Wrong! Travis actually took a picture of a "full" roll of toilet paper so that you all wouldn't think we were kidding. In a country where 70-90% of all Westerners (this is a credible fact from our trusty Lonely Planet guide book) get sick in some way or another, the typical roll wrapped a maximum of 5 times around the cardboard seemed a bit cruel. The number of times we had to flip a coin to see who got to ask the person at the desk for the roll this time were countless and every time we were met with a glare. On the rare occasion that napkins were available we stalked up, but they were more often than not the quality of fine tissue paper but beggars can't be choosers.
The stares, hoots, constant demands to shake our hands (which we politely declined knowing where they had been), take our picture, etc. were all a challenge each day, but there were certainly some rewards that will hopefully as time passes become stronger memories than the hassles. The Forts they built were remarkable, extensive, and in hard to get to places (like a mile up a hill for example) making them even more incredible givien the dates they were built in. The Taj Mahal lived up to its reputation and then some. It is a spectacle that one can sit and stare at for hours with the thousands of other Indians and foreigners. The markets, food, lassis, desserts, and Delhi Airport were also among the highlights and things that they should put on their Incredible India posters.
Other sights that caught our eye were on several of our well lit nightly walks when we came across some impressive Indian weddings and the parades that lead them. The groom rides in on a white horse with a band playing around him holding lights powered by a loud generator they towed down the road. The fancy reception that was often in a large empty lot took hours for the parade to get to was for 500+ people. The night we flew into Delhi, our host Prem said that it was a very good auspicious day for marriage and there were rumors of over 20,000 weddings in Delhi alone! Can you imagine how far in advance you would have to book your caterer? It makes the wedding we are planning seem like a small birthday party! One we poked our heads into had a buffet line that stretched for 1/4 mile. Incredible!
Our favorite India trait that we discovered in Nepal is their head bobble. Yup, picture one of those bobble head dolls going left to right quickly and that is just about right. Some might mistake it for a nervous tick but once it was pointed out to us we fell in love with the bobble.
Finally, the incredible trains. The LP (Lonely Planet for laymen) says that over 14 million people travel by train in India PER DAY! We took trains on our trip, both about 4 hours long and ended up being just fine but we were scared pink before boarding the first one not knowing what lay ahead. Another American couple shepherded us through the process and we were very glad we splurged for one of the nicer class-levels as parts of the train looked like a mosh-pit. Last night when we got off the train and were trying to walk off the platform, there was such a bottleneck just trying to get up a flight of stairs it felt like we were steers at a cattle auction being moved around. MOOOOOOOVE.
And so, we are able to smirk about our incredible experience in India now that we are sipping passion fruit mojitos in Bangkok and not worried about stepping in the Hershey Squirts!
Over and out, we will hope to get more pictures online as we are staying in an area with more computers than people it seems.
T&V
