Adventures of Proboscus

My plan for India was perhaps a bit ambitious for three weeks: check out a couple of cities in the north, fly from Khajuraho to Aurangabad and check out the cave temples of Ellora and Ajanta, then fly south to the Kerala backwaters and chill on a houseboat before heading to Chennai for our flight onward to Bangkok.

Well, given how difficult it is to get ANYWHERE in India, this was clearly not realistic. And given how frustrated I would become after just a few days of trying to navigate the bewildering, maddening, and startlingly inefficient transportation network around Delhi, it was clearly not realistic to stay in India for three weeks.

I apologize for the negative nature of this report, but I have hated it here. I started really hating it at the Taj Mahal. We had timed our visit to get us there during the beautiful late afternoon light, then waited in line for an hour to go through security. Finally at the front of the line, I was told that my bag was too big and that I must check it. Out of line, into the line for the bag check. Half an hour later, we cut to the front of our respective men's and women's queue's and finally made it through. As I waited for Drew to make his way through his security check, and with angry, frustrated tears rolling down my cheeks, I started glaring and shouting at staring children. Definitely a low point of the last few months.

My photos of India are entirely unrepresentative of what we saw...most of the time I was too afraid/ashamed to bring my camera out of its bag as we passed the most dire poverty we've seen yet. Nonetheless, here are some pics. First...a couple of shots of the Taj Mahal. The first one reminds me of a National Geographic photo, but with a tourist (me) inserted. In actuality it was supposed to be a pic of me, but a lady decided to poke her head in.

I decided to take myself out.

The next one is just a nice shot of some of the other, less photographed parts of the Taj. Or it might be the Red Fort. My memory is foggy at this point.

Here is a more representative pic of Agra. The Taj Mahal in the distance, some nasty burning garbage and air pollution and a disgusting river in the foreground. Also some vagrants loitering in the river area.

I guess I should consider myself lucky, however; that same day a tourist bus in the same town was pummeled by stones thrown by anti-American protestors angry about the execution of Saddam Hussein. Although only 100 meteres from the nearest police station, it took 15 minutes for them to respond.

I don't really feel like cataloguing the various other mishaps that have characterized our time in India. Some of them will make it into the top fives. Suffice it to say that on day four we decided to leave early. Unfortunately, as previously noted, it is not so easy to get around here. So we are finally leaving tomorrow, January 10. I know I got a very small picture of what life is like in this country, and this blog entry is extremely biased and based on an extremely small sample. So take it all with a grain of salt, and my apologies.

So the top fives:

The good:

1. The food. It is pretty good...generally not that much better than it is in the US, but at least it is pretty consistently flavorful and tasty.
2. The Taj Mahal...again, pretty good, once you get inside. But again, it wasn't really that awesome. Given the dearth of good things here, though, it makes the number two spot.
3. I hereby transfer my remaining allotment to the bad list.

The bad:

1. Buying domestic plane tickets. We dropped by the Jet Airways office and bought tickets from Khajuraho to Delhi (the only flight not bookable online, for some reason). We paid with a credit card. The lady said we could book the rest online to get better rates. We then got online and got to the "confirm" part of the booking, then were told that we can't book online with a foreign credit card. So we call the ticket office and tell them what we want, and then they say, okay, that is available, now I'll connect you to the person who can actually take your order, but you'll have to tell them everything you just told me. Then, at the end, they tell us we have e-tickets and ask if we want to print them ourselves or pick them up on the day of travel. We choose the latter. They tell us that this option is not available from our departure airport so we have to print ourselves. Talking time to book one flight: 30 minutes.

2. The disgusting streets and towns. I have never seen such filth and reckless disregard for the disposal of garbage. I have also never seen cows eating garbage. Especially when said garbage is burning.

This cow isn't eating garbage, but it is sitting in the median strip in a busy stret. Poor cow.

1. The unbelievable poverty, far exceeding anything we saw in North Africa. People in the eco-movement frequently express concern about how a billion people in India are upwardly mobile and will soon need energy to power their air conditioners and private cars, adding to the stress on the ecosystem. Have they actually seen the living conditions here? It is going to be a long time before most of these people can afford electricity, let alone air conditioning.

2. Pollution. If India's economy does improve to the point that people can afford such luxuries, I find it hard to believe that their air quality problems will get worse. On our hellish domestic air travel day (see below) we flew over miles of rural farmlands, and even there the smog was thicker than anywhere in Los Angeles. It has not helped in our continuing attemtps to get over the towel-man's cold.

3. Indian Air. We were supposed to have a three hour layover in Delhi...plenty of time, even given our assumption that our plane would be late because of general incompetence and inefficiency, something we have come to expect. Well, they really suprised us here. They decided that our plane would make an unscheduled stop in a town half an hour away in the wrong direction, then spend forty minutes on the ground loading and unloading baggage and passengers. Due to this unfortunate schedule change, (unannounced until we checked in) and due to the (anticipated) general lateness, our plane would arrive in Delhi two hours later than expected. As we were changing airlines in Delhi, we made the connection only by the skin of our teeth.

4. Electricity. We lost electricity almost everywhere we went, including the airport. If that weren't bad enough, the electricity they have lacks a proper ground, so if I sit here typing on my laptop while it is plugged in, I get a consistent low level shock. It is really starting to annoy me.

5. Visibility. We arrived in Delhi in the foggiest conditions in which I have ever seen a plane land. To my amazement, the fog extended into the airport. Looking across the baggage claim, the walls on the far side were hard to make out. This continued into our hotel in Delhi. We asked the lady at reception if what we were seeing was normal, and she insisted that there was no fog in the building.

6. Stupid security rules. The Taj Mahal was an obvious freakshow of security. Even more offensive was getting sprayed with some kind of chemical in the airplane as we approached Delhi from Dubai. The flight attendants apologized for any inconvenience. Apparently this is standard procedure for all planes entering India. Finally, it appears that during the checked baggage screening for domestic flights, someone was alarmed by the dangerous appearance of my camera's battery charger and decided to break it open. Thanks.

The smelly

This is a tough call...how to choose?

1. General rancidness. Walking the streets of Agra (this was before we learned not to go outside) was like wading through a cesspool. It smelled like human and animal waste and rotting garbage. I think that is exactly what we were walking though, actually. It wasn't just an Agra phenomenon.
2. Burning garbage everywhere.
3. Hotel rooms in cities (including upmarket hotels) are all infested with mildew. One of the hotels sent up a guy with a can of air freshener, who then expected a tip.
4. Some of the food smells (and tastes) pretty good
5. Moth balls: a lot of bathrooms have mothballs sitting in their drains, presumably to keep out bugs. The smell was sometimes overwhelming.

Just because they are kind of interesting, here are some pics from Khajuraho.

And this one...um...