Ahmedabad? Ahmedadreadful more like. 'In at the deep end!' was the idea when we decided to start our year in India here, and it worked beautifully. Nothing's going to shock us after this - and to give us our dues, we weren't even shocked by this place. Totally took it in our stride. Left the hotel on the first morning and walked into town armed just with a fairly inaccurate map - and went the right way for ages! After an hour or more walking in the sun, we encountered a couple of seriously bonkers road junctions - that's more like it, we thought. YES, I thought, I could get culture-shocked here - and Jess started to look a bit pink on the head. 'You will tell me if you're fading, love, won't you?', I said, and to my utter astonishment, she said immediately 'I'm fading a bit, yes', without any argument whatsoever! So we got in an auto-rickshaw.
A word on these for the uninitiated, because they do feature quite significantly in this country. They are NOT rickshaws. That's important. In fact, I'll call them autos, just in case there are real rickshaws later on. They're little moped things with a shell somehow attached to them, and space in the back of the shell for two small people or one large one, or for an Indian family and a couple of friends and their goat, depending on your priorities. The drivers range from penniless (barefoot vagabond-types resident in the same auto they spend their working day in) to pretty fly (denim-clad, drug-selling, tourist-swindling masters of street trade), and the autos themselves can vary accordingly. Ahmedabad's were all representative of the same grinding, grey, brutal poverty of the other bits of the city we saw, but they generally tried to take us where we wanted to go, as there is no familiarity with tourism in this city (as there wouldn't be in, say, Corby, or Stockton-Upon-Tees) and therefore no system for ripping off tourists yet.
False fact number one, from the friendly belching woman from Reading on the plane, and from the helpful man from Leicester-just-up-the-road-from-Bobbys we met in Ahmedabad itself; "everybody here speaks English". No-one in Ahmedabad speaks English. In fact, hardly anyone in the entire state speaks English. People do in the rest of India, but this is one of the most the the most deprived, undeveloped bits of it there is, where gender inequality remains undimmed by the encroachment of reform, and literacy levels for women are still around thirty per cent. With no English, no literacy, no idea how to read a map, and no street names, the autos' success rate in transferring us to our destinations was not perfect.
But we navigated our way to town, changed some money, found a big lake to sit near and revel in the relative space and cleanliness it afforded, then navigated our next auto back to our incredibly expensive rathole of a hotel - generally mastered this huge, foul city in twenty-four hours, just to show that we could. And it was fun, the auto-rickshaws especially. You have to set fear aside, obviously, and treat it like dodgems. But if you do that it's quite exciting, and it was Definitely India, straight away, even though we'd only just landed.
It was foul though. The myriad stenches, the lack of any means to identify the nature of the dubious businesses by the side of the road, the lack of anything we'd recognise as a 'building', or a 'shop', let alone a 'restaurant', the absence of anywhere to pedestrate (yeah, well, it should be a word), the human excrement, the cows, the goats, the occasional camel, the pollution (Indians not generally too fussed about smells, I don't think, but in Ahmedabad most drivers wore cloths over their noses and mouths, which is indicative) - all of it was as you'd expect. But this city didn't have the colour, didn't have the joy in life, didn't feel as vibrant as India should. It was a bit grim. We even passed a couple of corpses, under blankets weighed down with stones, the only little oases of space on the congested, mad streets, given a wide berth by everyone and everything except the dogs. On your first day in India, and after virtually no sleep and food, even that's exciting! Still, we got out of there as quick as possible. Managed to buy a bus ticket on the first day, and were on a large white Gujerati Travel bus leaving Ahmedabad at 7.30 the next day. Considering that we had ben told to look for a bus which was yellow, with Punjab Travel printed unmistakeably on the side, which was leaving at 6.45, this was quite an achievement, and we were both close to weeping with relief as one of the most hellish two hours of our lives, spent next to Ahmedabad's busiest road trying to find anyone who had ever even heard of buses, was brought to a close. It was genius. We could easily have taken days to escape from that town.
You'll notice I haven't mentioned the heat yet... It's because everyone here, all the people that live in India, keep banging on about it so much that we're already bored of talking about it. Suffice to say, after waking up that first morning, we'd gone to book tickets to Mt Abu, the only hill station rising out of the baing Rajastani desert. We stayed there nearly a week. Even Corby would have been nice after Ahmedabad.
