It’s been more than 2 months now since I left. April is coming to an end, so I suppose it’s getting warmer and sunnier back home… how I love spring in Belgium. It’s funny, when I’m thinking of Belgium, I still picture it the way I left it, snowed in and with 1000km of traffic jams. By the way, I just got back from an 8 day trek in the mountains, so I was completely isolated from the rest of the world. On my way back I was wondering what had happened in the world during my absence, and then a German tourist told me Europe was covered by ashes from an Icelandic volcano, making air traffic impossible…Mother Nature vs. Europe 2010, 2-0!
I really got into traveling mode now, meaning I miss home less than before. On the other hand, I’m starting to meet more and more family and friends in my dreams. I’m thinking about my past and future in Europe quite a lot. I guess the “zoom out” effect I hoped to achieve wasn’t an illusion; it’s really easier to think about your life when you step out of it for a while. I just realized I’ve been really traveling for almost one month, so I have loads of things to tell.
My last weekend trip with my friends from Delhi was Agra, home of the Taj Mahal.After that, I would make my way east to Kolkata, and then south, to reach Cuddalore, on the southeast coast, by the 15th of April, to work on a project around HIV/AIDS awareness there. It’s a big cliché, but here we go: although I expected to be disappointed by the Taj Mahal –it can’t but be overrated, I thought – I was most certainly not. The minute I stepped in there, I was completely transfixed. How can a building be so perfect? I must have stood there smiling for two full minutes, completely ignoring the I-must-get-the-perfect-picture-with-the-Taj hysteria that was going on around me. I don’t think I was ever so touched by a human made object. After two days in Agra, I said goodbye to my Delhi friends, with a heavy heart. I was going to miss them, and I was all alone now; suddenly I didn’t feel quite ready to face India on my own.
Some people plan their entire trip in advance, day by day. I didn’t. Part of it is laziness; the main reason is probably that I would feel like a prisoner of my own plans. The only thing I had planned was to be in Cuddalore before the end of April. Like many backpackers, I like to follow serendipity (–noun1.an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident. 2.good fortune; luck, according to dictionary.com) instead. As you will see, it has advantages and disadvantages. My first stop after Agra was Khajuraho, which houses famous Jain temples with beautiful erotic sculptures. To go there, I had to take a train to the much less interesting town Jhansi, from where I could take a bus. On the train to Jhansi, I met two Indian guys, a textile engineer and an MBA student. I asked them to teach me the rules of cricket; I would play a couple of songs on my guitar in return (I brought the crappy baby guitar I bought in Delhi with the idea I would get rid of it as soon as it would bother me; I still have it with me). One of the guys convinced me to take a later bus so that he could take me on his motorbike and show me Jhansi fort the next morning. It was a lot of fun, and he brought me to the bus station afterwards. Serendipity vs. planning: 1-0.
Khajuraho was quite nice, the carvings are beautiful, and it’s funny to see big groups of traditionally dressed Indian women, with saris and veils, giggle in front of the erotic, or dare I say frankly pornographic, effigies.
To take the train to Varanasi, my next stop, I had to take yet another bus to a small town called Mahoba. When arrived there, I was pushed in shared autorickshaw to the railway station. An auto is usually meant for one driver in the front and three people in the back. In this case, three men shared the driver’s seat, and I was clamped between a couple with a young boy and a baby of a couple of months on the left, and a young woman with what looked like a newborn baby on the right. The road was so bumpy I was afraid the baby would be thrown out of is mother’s ams; the fumes mustn’t have been all too good for the development of his little lungs; and to make things worse, the driver had huge speakers at the back of his vehicle, through which he found desirable to play ear-blasting Bollywood music, accompanied by the flickering neon lights in the front of his rickshaw. But the most amazing thing of all, to me, was that it took me five minutes to realize how absurd and unusual the situation was. I guess one gets used to everything. I reached the train station at 8pm, and my train was scheduled at 1.30am (in the end, it left at 2.30). I managed to hang around in a small restaurant until 10.30, but then they were closing and I had to leave. Like every railway station in India, this one too was converted in a giant dormitory at night, so I laid out my self-inflatable Decathlon mattress on the platform, and was soon fast asleep… only to be woken up by the police:
-Hello
-…
-Hello
-Hello, how do you do?
-You not sleep here.
-What do you mean? I was sleeping great.
-You not sleep here. Not allowed.
I looked around. I was surrounded by dozens of sleeping Indians.
-Only for me not allowed?
-Dangerous.
-Dangerous? I feel safe, I’m surrounded by people.
-You not sleep here. Dangerous. You go police station.
-(sigh)
-Hello
-Yes, hello. I’m still here.
-You go police station. Not sleep here.
-But why not? Why can they sleep here and I can’t?
-They Indians.
-Oh really? I thought Chinese.
-You foreigner. Not allowed.
…
He brought me to a dark bench in a corner. I told him I really didn’t feel safer than on the platform. In the end, he put me under a bright neon light, next to a fat snoring man, with insects falling from the ceiling. I couldn’t get back to sleep. Thanks a lot, Indian police.
Varanasi was interesting (this is the place where corpses are burnt on the banks of the holy Ganges) but touristic, dirty, and full of cheaters. I was told beforehand that everybody got ill in Varanasi. As a proof, I met two British guys who were there to test new patches against diarrhea. They were sent to Varanasi because statistics show that 90% of Englishmen get “the shits” there. After Varanasi, I would go to Bodhgaya, the place where prince Siddharta Gautama reached enlightenment by meditating under a tree, to become the Buddha. The only problem was getting there. When I finally got to the railway station (after a lot of haggling with the driver), I had spent half an hour looking for the right platform, when someone informed me that the train was canceled. At the tourist information center (thank god for those) I met a French guy who told me he had been trying to take that same train for 3 days, and it got canceled every time. After asking approx. 100 people, we found out that we could catch a train at a smaller railway station, at around 10km from there. We managed to get the train, and the French guy was meeting with a Swiss who was in a great hotel, in the middle of the village side of town. Serendipity vs. planning: 2-0 (to be honest, I must say that I met some people who had gone to Orccha, near Jhansi, and they told me it was beautiful, as says my guidebook, which brings the score to 2-1). Bodhgaya was nice and laidback compared to Varanasi, but the other guys had quite a different pace than me (they had met on a meditation course in Nepal), so I didn’t stay there for too long. I was impatient to go to that big city I had heard so many good things about: Kolkata. In the meantime, many people had told me it wasn’t a good idea to go south, because it was really getting too hot. In general, many of the people I met were on their way back from the south, telling me great things, but at the same time warning me for the upcoming heat. I definitely came the wrong season to go to the beautiful south (2-2!). This is why one of my main objectives for Kolkata was finding people to go north, to Darjeeling. More than one Indian had recommended me to go there. The first day, I met a French girl who was going to Assam, a not too touristic place in the northeast, with a beautiful natural reserve where I wanted to go on an elephant safari. In the meantime, many people had told me Darjeeling was foggy (the main attraction is the beautiful view on the nearby Himalayas), so I thought I might join her instead. However, she was leaving the next day, and I wanted to stick around in Kolkata for a little longer. I decided to wait and see if I could meet people that left later. After a couple of days, not having met anyone else going northeast, met a Danish girl who was going to Sikkim. This is another region in the northeast, a beautiful and hilly area that requires a permit (free and easy to get, but still a good filter for mass tourism). A couple of hours after deciding to go to Sikkim instead of Assam, I read an email from the French girl, kindly informing me that the early monsoon made Assam rainy and unpleasant. Serendipity! Kolkata, by the way, was a very fun experience. It’s hard to explain how and why, but Kolkata is a much more pleasant city than Delhi. Dare I say it’s more “European”? My greatest moment was when we woke up at 5 to go practice yoga by a lake in a park, as many Kolkatans do. Still, inevitably, the nice things are only a façade that hides way less romantic aspects of the city. Many people live on the streets; even on Sudder St., the center of backpackersville, you can see dozens “showering” outside every morning. Right around the corner from my hostel, literally at 10m from the entrance, people sit on the side of the street, injecting drugs. And a few blocks away, the top floors of a building burnt down the day before my arrival. They were still digging up bodies when I left but around 50 people got killed. Even though the fire station is five minutes away, the firemen needed 15 minutes to get there, and nearly an hour before they started putting out the fire, so I’ve been told; apparently, the fire exits were blocked as well. Moreover, according to the newspaper, the two top floors were built illegally, and the actual owner is… the government.
After 5 days of Kolkata, I was on my way to Sikkim, with a stop in Darjeeling for a couple of days first. We had to take a bus to Darjeeling because the trains were full; we left at 6pm and it would take approximately 12 hours. After 13 painful and uncomfortable hours, the bus stopped. A strike, we were told. I couldn’t quite figure out why, though. I walked to the road block, that consisted of a simple wooden bench. On the other side of the road, people were gathered around a big plastic sheet on the ground. After closer inspection, I noticed a human-shaped bulge, and a blue sandal lying next to it. Apparently, someone got killed by a truck, and the villagers were protesting against the traffic that rages by their humble houses. The last piece to Darjeeling, done by shared Jeep, I started noticing the people. The looked so different! Though still with Indian features, people from that area have yellowish skin and Nepalese eyes.
Darjeeling is a nice hill town, favorite destination of West-Bengali tourists. From the moment I arrived in Darjeeling till the moment I left Sikkim, the world seemed to revolve around mountKangchenjunga (still took me more than a week to memorize the name, though). Kangchenjunga is the 3rd biggest mountain in the world, with an elevation of 8586m. When the weather is clear, Darjeeling is dominated by its magnificent white peak. The main attraction is to go up Tiger Hill in Jeep in the early morning to watch the sunrise. Since it’s holiday season in India, Darjeeling was especially packed. The way up to Tiger Hill was a continuous snake of Jeeps. We were brought to a kind of a balcony with dozens, maybe hundreds of Indian tourists struggling to get a good spot. The sun came up in the mist, but when it was finally visible, people rushed to one side of the balcony to take pictures. Not exactly what we were expecting. The only nice moment was when the mountain rose from the clouds, showing its orange colored flanks. Apart from that, we did beautiful walks in the tea plantations, and to the Buddhist monastery on top of a hill, where the strong winds rushed through thousands of Tibetan prayer flags.
After two days of Darjeeling, we were off to Sikkim. This small stub of land is squeezed in between West-Bengal (south), Nepal (west), Tibet (north and east) and Bhutan (southeast), so you can imagine it’s something special. It’s a small paradise, with beautiful green hills, rivers, waterfalls, and white peaks (Kangchenjunga is on the border between Sikkim and Nepal). It’s not easy to get around there; only shared Jeeps can get you from one village to another, and they are quite scarce. Unfortunately, everywhere we went, people were building roads, bridges and tunnels; probably the beginning of the end for the authenticity of the region. Just as in Darjeeling, beautiful views of The Mountain were hidden by fog. We were starting to think the pictures on postcards were made with Photoshop. Luckily, nice monasteries and lakes offered us a relaxing time. From the small village Yuksom (no ATM’s and only one computer with internet) we did a one day trek through the beautiful green landscapes. I was nice and relaxing to be there, without having planned anything in advance; 3-2 for serendipity. On our way back to Yuksom after the trek I was thinking about what to do next, since the Danish girl was leaving to Varanasi the next day. I walked into the hotel, and a guy asks: “Do you guys want to go trekking?” Yuksom is the starting point for treks towards the Himalaya, with breathtaking views on the snowy peaks. Three Israeli guys were about to leave for a 6 day trek and were looking for more people, to get the price down. I had only 10 minutes to decide… Most people leave for 8 days, but my permit was only valid for 7 more days, so a 6 day trip was perfect…I was going to do it. 4-2? We planned to leave the next day at 8.30. We lost some time because one of the guys, who needed a horse because he has ruined one of his knees in the army, was insisting on having a good saddle. When we finally got to the starting point, the horseman told us it was impossible for the horse to go downhill with someone on his back. The organizer had lied, the guy with the bad knee couldn’t go, so the trip got canceled. Completely lost, I followed them to the hotel where they had stayed before, and checked into a dormroom. Some nice people were there, packing their bags to leave on a 8 day trek the next day. By that time I had really gotten caught up with the idea of going trekking. Luckily, I could still join them, and the organizer could extend the permit for me. 4-2!
(I didn’t have the time to write about the trekking yet, so I’ll do that in a later post…but it was awesome! Right now I'm on my way to Cuddalore, where I will work for Blessing Kids.)
