Readers, the time has come to regale both of you with a tale of travel and adventure. I've been wanting to post about the trip for a week now, but never seem to make it back to the office after dinner to write due to the lethargic combination of a full stomach, a head cold, and/or bouts of India tummy. Well, now it's Saturday afternoon, and my stomach is full with lovely
Cheese Masala Dosa, but I feel more or less healthy for the first time in a week. So, figurative pen in hand, it's time to assuage your thirst for my travelogue.
I arrived in India after midnight last Friday, slept at my nice Western-style hotel. and went in to work. I was only slightly dazed in the office all day. I'd known before I arrived that all the whiteys in the office and a number of the locals were taking a weekend trip to Hampi, an old ruined fort city. It was an overnight train away. I sure liked the idea of two straight nights in a bed, but I also knew that I'd be lonely in the city on the weekend without any other expats, and that I might miss something great. You're only young once, I suppose, so I went. We hopped on the train about 10 PM, and I had a ticket, but no berth in the sleeping car. Manoj, one of my nine travelling companions and the man who would take care of us during the trip, assured me that everything would be fine, that we'd just bribe the conductor to get me on the train. Which he did, although in the end, I'm not even sure he ended up paying anything. During the weekend, we met or heard about a bunch of Manoj's "uncles", who could get us discounts or tours or plane tickets or anything else. It's good to have a mover and shaker on your side. My mover and shaker had gotten us tickets in Sleeper Class on the Hampi Link Express, a mere 8-hour journey. Mind you, I'd just gotten in from a 30-hour door-to-door Chicago-Bangalore trip the night before, but remember, Only Young Once
TM. Most of my experience on the train was dominated by the latrines: my resolve to avoid them, the way they made the stations smell, the way they made the coaches smell, and, of course, the sticky brown stuff on the floor. The latrines are sort of amazing in the literal sense of the word. There are two in each car, Western Style (with a toilet-shaped apparatus covering the open hole in the floor through which you can see the tracks) and Indian Style (which has places for your feet around an open hole and rails on the wall for you to hold onto as you lean back and dangle your jewels). Man do they make the stations smell awful bad, though, for reasons I'm sure you can gather. Aside from the pissoirs, the appointments on the train were shockingly comfortable. Each compartment, or bogie, in the train car had eight padded benches, stacked three high. We had no sheets of course, but settled in without too much trouble, using tomorrow's sweatshirts as pillows. I had a top berth, which had almost enough vertical space to let me sit up, and which placed mere inches from our set of three enormous black fans that jutted out of the ceiling incongruously. Andy and I spent the first hour so just giggling about being on an overnight train through rural India, crowded into a reeking car with 70 people, and enjoying it.
The train was an "express", but evidently wasn't as express as some other trains, because it stopped often and tarried at each station or spot in the middle of nowhere when it did. At each stop boys would run onto the train selling food or coffee, running back and forth through the cars and yelling "coffeecoffeechaicoffeecoffee" loudly and nasally. I probably slept 4 hours, and woke up refreshed enough. We spent the last couple hours watching the sunrise and looking out on the fields of apparently nothing plowed by skinny men and skinny oxen pulling carts, the occasional rocky peak, and people waking up and brushing teeth and washing clothes. At the very end of the ride, I talked with a man who once was a Java programmer and now sells insurance in Hospet, the town where we disembarked.
We went to the
hotel to clean up and have some dosas. The hotel was spare, but clean enough. Its main eccentricity was the bathroom, which had a shower head peeking out of the wall, and no suggestion of the idea that you might want to segregate shower from throne from sink. (I can't help it -- I think a lot about bathrooms in this country. They can be very important). Our group was some odd mixture of exhausted and quiet and goofy and energetic -- four or five of my co-worker companions seemed like kids even to me, still in my first and only youth, and they helped keep the trip fun by mocking each other or throwing firsbees or demanding ice cream. After a dosa, the ten of us piled into a car and drove the 10 miles to Hampi. Hampi is a World Heritage Site, and I won't eb able to do it justice here, so I won't try. It's an enormous ruined city with a small contemporary village still in it. It has enormous active temples, and miles and miles of ruined markets, temples, palaces, etc. ornately decorated and housing big-ass Shivas and Vishnus and friends. The setting is what makes it so remarkable. It's completely surrounded by five rocky hills entirely made up of big smooth tan boulders. There's a river through the middle, trickiling picturesquely over the same rocks. Look
here for some visuals from my trusty Sony. Each one of the sites, of course, though quiet enough, had some crazy beggar or craftsman or cleaning lady who seemed to live there, and would smile at us or chide us or try to sell us something. Lots of cows with garishly painted and bejewelled horns, too. We had an amazing guide, who told stories I didn't quite catch, but took care of us for two days, taking us to the best sites and restaurants and ladies who hack the tops off of fresh cococuts with machetes and give youi a straw to drink out the juice. The first day we walked around a temple, walked up a mountain to look at and reach another old and magnificent city below, got in these tiny little hemispheric wicker boats and were paddled around the river, rented bikes, shipped them across the same river in the same boats, pedalled for a couple of miles, climbed a mountain to see the aptly named Monkey Temple (there were a lot of monkeys) and climbed, rode, ferried, and walked back. I was toast, I was wet toast, I was wet toast that had been violated by a broken bicycle seat, but it was quite an experience. Dinner, a beer, and then exhausted, extensive sleep followed.
The next day was much of the same, though we rode the car from site to site rather than take the more exhausting forms of transport. I even got to ride on the guide's scooter for a couple of the legs. An ice cream sundae, and then the train back. This time I got a berth well away from the rest of my group, and Readers, if you take anything away from this tale, know this: do not get a berth in a sleeper car in India that's just behind the latrines. The smell, especially when we stopped, was overwhelming. I could taste the urine in the air. I can still taste the urine in the air. So much urine. That, and I learned first hand about a noxious ritual everyone on the train seemed to enjoy as soon as they woke up: a deep, wet, loud throat clear and a nice juicy spit into a "sink" that I couldn't see but could sure hear. Somehow, though, I slept, and slept deeply if not for long. "Coffeecoffeechaicoffeechai".
Back to work the next day, Monday. Back in Bangalore, which felt eerily normal and sane. 72 hours in India, and I was in. No gradual feeling-out period this time. India and I were all over each other.
