Embedded Files
INDIA and NEPAL 1986-7:
Scanned from paper copy by David Liverman; photos either scanned from John's journal but augmented by scanned photos from David's trip undertaken 5 years before.
INDIA
The Journey Out
New Delhi
The Journey to Simla
Simla
From Simla to Kulu
Kulu
Manali
Back at Simla
Return to Delhi
Fatehpur Sikhri
Jaipur and Amber
Jodhpur
Jaisalmer
Ajmer and Pushkar
Udaipur
Udaipur to Bombay
Aurangabad Ellora and Dalautabad
Ajanta Fardapur and Bhusawal
From Bhusawal to Waranasi
Waranasi
Waranasi to Patna Patna
NEPAL
Kathmandu
Pokhara
Nepal Trek
Sukhiet to Khara
Khara to Tirkedunga
Tirkedunga to Ghodopani
Ghodopami to Tatapani
Tatapani
Tatapani to Beni
Beni to Kusma
Kusma to Karkinetta
Karkinetta to Pokhara
Pokhara again
INDIA
Pokhara to Gorakhpur
Gerakhpur
Lucknow
From Lucknow to Corbett Game Park
Corbett Game Park
Delhi again
Bharatpur
Bharatpur to Delhi
Final Days in Delhi.
..THE JOURNEY OUT
The journey begins on a wet November night in 1986, I am sixty-six years old and am planning to travel for three months in India and Nepal, living out of a rucksack. I have with me the Lonely Planet Guide to India which advises me where to go, how to get there, where the cheap hotels are, and how to get by on five pounds a day.
I approach the journey with some trepidation. In recent years most of my travels have been arranged by a secretary, I have been met at airports, and accommodated in luxury hotels. This time it will be different - I shall be on my own so to speak, though in India one is never literally on one's own. I am in good health and reasonably fit from fell-walking in the Lakes; earlier in the year I was in hospital with colitis and needed several pints of blood transfusion, but since then I have done Wainwright's coast-to-coast walk, covering the 200 miles in twelve days. But I expect to be ill; everyone who travels in India becomes ill. When I told the consultant at the Middlesex what I was planning he looked quizzical:
"I expect you'll go whatever I tell you."
"Yes, I expect I shall."
"All right then. But if you have any tummy trouble, head for the nearest hospital unless it clears up quickly."
I readily agreed,
Then again I have never been to Asia, apart from a convalescent leave in Palestine from the Eighth Army. My furthest east is Aden, where our coal-burning troopship refuelled in 1942. So I think it is time to remedy this, and India seems a good country to start in. People tell me that after travelling in India, most other countries in Asia seem easier to cope with. So it was to prove, though on that November night I am not to know that this journey will be the first of many.
My Air France flight to Delhi (booked through Trailfinders for 410 pounds) requires me to check in at 6 a. m. , so I decide to spend the night at Heathrow. I catch a tube from Piccadilly half an hour before midnight and spend a comfortable night sleeping on a bench at Terminal 2, until woken by cleaners at five. We take off on time but there is a delay in Paris, where I have to spend four hours instead of one waiting at Charles de Gaulle Airport for the flight to Delhi. This is fine: it means that we shall arrive at Delhi at dawn instead of 2.30 a. m.
I have a comfortable window seat for the long flight. The Air France food is good and the champagne excellent; not much alcohol for the next three months, I remember. We stop briefly at Karachi and land in Delhi at 5.30. We pass through Immigration and Customs quickly and with no trouble at all. Just outside the air terminal I find the "Ex-servicemen's Bus" which plies between airport and city, There are fifteen prospective passengers waiting here, including a scruffy-looking Englishwoman in her late twenties travelling alone. Jane and I are heading for the same hotel, the Ashok Yuri Nitwas, so we decide to join forces.
.The bus was presumably bought by some Indian ex-servicemen after World War Two. It looks extremely dilapidated to me on my first morning in Asia, though later it would have appeared perfectly normal. A section of the floor is cordoned off, and into this space luggage is lowered by the passengers or hurled by their porters, Just before we are due to leave, half the passengers discover they are on the wrong bus and extricate their luggage from the pile; most of it has gravitated to the bottom, The 45-minute drive to New Delhi takes us through arid country along roads lined with primitive hovels. As we approach the modern city we enter parkland and the roads become broad tree-lined avenues.
NEW DELHI
It is still quite cool, with the sum not long risen, when Jane and I climb off the bus, buckle on our packs, brush aside the rickshaw drivers, and set off on foot for the Ashok Yuri Nitwas. We are followed by some drivers - most of the Delhi rickshaws are three-wheelers powered by motor-cycle engines, but there are some cycle rickshaws also competing for our custom. Armed with our guide-books we stride confidently along the Panchuin Marg in which this large new hotel is located. After quarter of an hour there is still no sign of the hotel, and as we walk further from the central area of Connaught Place, the buildings are progressively degenerating in a discouraging fashion. We enquire from shops, roadside stalls, passers-by, even rickshaw drivers. No-one has ever heard of our hotel.
We begin to grow travel-weary as the sun climbs in a leaden sky. At last we find a rickshaw driver who claims to know the hotel. We get in and he drives furiously back the way we have come, "No" we cried:
"The hotel is in Panchuin Marg. Please take us there." "No, not Panchuin Marg. Hotel is in Ashoka Road. Other side of town. Very good hotel. I take you there."
We recall the warning that rickshaw drivers always take you to a hotel where they get a commission, regardless of where you want to go. We argue unavailingly: the driver is obstinate. As we had failed to find the hotel in the Panchuin Marg, the suspicion grows on us that he may be right. Ten minutes later he pulls up triumphantly in front of a large and exceptionally ugly hotel of thirty concrete stories which is indeed the Ashok Yuri Nitwas in spite of being nowhere near where the guidebook locates it.
The hotel foyer is a scene of frenetic activity. We fight our way to the reception desk, where the clerk tells us politely that there will probably be two single rooms free, but he cannot be sure until checkout time at midday. So we adjourn for a cup of tea in the hotel lounge, queuing up first to place the order and get a ticket and second to exchange the ticket for the tea, I note the advantage of operating as a pair - one to queue and one to guard the seats and luggage.
The morning grows hotter. It seems a bad idea to spend my first hours in India in a shabby hotel lounge (some hotels are built shabby, some achieve shabbiness. . . . ) so I have another chat with the reception clerk.who now thinks rooms might be free at eleven. I notice a sign to the 'Reservation Office", due to open at nine, and try my luck there as soon as it opens. The man in charge is taken aback at my intrusion and tells me he does not take bookings before ten.
"But you open at nine! What happens here between nine and ten?" "Routine business, sir."
I refrain from asking what routine business is done in a Reservation Office besides reservations. In any case when ten o'clock comes there are no vacancies.
On a third visit to the reception desk I strike up a warmer friendship with the clerk by discussing India's cricket eleven and their prospects in the coming series. I hang around not far from the desk, and before long two rooms become available, Jane and I settle into adjacent rooms on the tenth floor - fortunately no higher as the lifts prove to be almost permanently out of order. The rooms are bare, with unadorned concrete floors and walls, but clean. The furniture consists of a bed, and a ledge in the wall for luggage. There is a shower that works, and a lock to the bedroom door, although I am to discover - when I absentmindedly unlock Jane's room that evening - that all the rooms have the same lock, a characteristic of most hotels in India except for the cheaper ones with a hasp on the door to which you affix your own padlock - much more secure.
After a shower I set off at midday to acquire an Indrail pass for three months travel, the second stage in my long love affair with Indian Railways. The first had been back at the Indian Tourist Office in Cork Street London, where I had acquired a rail map and a time-table, having insisted on the 1986 edition although the man at the desk clearly thought that I should be satisfied with that for 1985, of which he had a surplus,
"Can I have the latest edition, please? For 1986?" "I am sorry they are finished."
"But you just gave one to that lady."
"No, finished. Time-table is nearly the same as 1985. Only a few minutes" difference." "But I could miss a train by a few minutes! And have to wait twelve hours for the next!"
"Well, perhaps I find you just one."
And he reluctantly produced one from under the counter. But the rail pass has to be obtained in Delhi. According to the Lonely Planet it should be bought at Baroda House, the headquarters of the Northern Railways. This is a couple of miles away from the hotel, near the India Gate, the vast memorial which commemorates Indian soldiers who died in two world wars. It is a pleasant walk there, along New Delhi's treelined avenues: the afternoon is sunny and as warm as an English summer heat-wave, Baroda House is a huge complex of offices scattered among several buildings. There follows a Kafka-like quest in which I enquire where I can get a rail pass from sixteen people in succession and get sixteen different answers. Eventually I track down the office of the .Commercial Manager, who returns from his lunch half an hour later, only to tell me that rail passes are no longer issued from Baroda House but from New Delhi Railway Station three miles away.
This time I decide to take a rickshaw. I watch the driver start the engine with the aid of a spanner, and a hammer applied to the sparking plug. Once started, we go along merrily, leaving behind us the elegant avenues as we enter Chelmsford Road (named after a former viceroy) where there is a confusion of cows, rickshaws, cars, lorries, pavement markets, and throngs of people hurrying in all directions, with everyone shouting and hooting for all they are worth, My driver stops and points across the road to a very large brick building, New Delhi Railway Station. He plainly has no intention of crossing the road with his vehicle, so I battle my way across as best I can, keeping for safety as close as possible to three Indian women who are also crossing.
I follow signs to the Tourist Office, where tourists are standing in orderly queues in contrast to the confusion outside. Having identified the correct queue, I soon reach the head of it, and for 300 US dollars I acquire an Indrail pass entitling me to unlimited first-class travel for the next three months. Joining a second queue I enquire about trains to Simla from a small neat man with large spectacles, sitting at a desk by himself and answering all questions with the speed of a machine gun. For some tourists he is extemporising complicated journeys of three weeks across the length and breadth of India, advising them how long they should stay in each place and which train they should catch to the next. Later I learn that his designation is Space Controller, Northern Railways. He would, I am sure, have been equally at home at Mission Control, Houston.
On his advice I join a third queue to reserve a sleeper from Delhi to Simla. I have to fill in a form with details including my age and sex. I am not given a ticket for the journey; instead the clerk writes some symbols on my pass, indicating date of travel and train number - all Indian trains have numbers - but saying nothing of the seat or berth I am to occupy. The clerk assures me I need not worry; on the platform at the station I would find my name listed with the coach and berth I now have reserved. This seems improbable, but it was to turn out as he said. This is to be the pattern of booking my journeys for the next three months, at the end of which there will not be a square centimeter of my pass left empty.
At the Ashoka Hotel I was able to book in for only one night, with the unappealing prospect of hanging around again next morning to see whether there would be another vacancy. So I look around for other hotels near Connaught Place, where I hope to establish a more secure base for the three days before I leave Delhi for Simla. With the help of the Lonely Planet I find a small hotel on the outer circle of Connaught Place, clean and with a good washroom attached to my bedroom, luxurious compared with the Ashok, and above my budget at 210 rupees, about 11 pounds. It is called the Hotel 55, the address being number 55 in Block H, and the room has everything I need except for a sink plug, and that is remedied by using the universal plug which I am carrying and which proves to be one of my most useful travelling assets,
In the evening I meet Jane at the Ashok. She has found a room at the YWCA to move into next day. We have a filling supper consisting of a plate of thali and a glass of lassi. Next morning, since my room at Hotel 55 will not be free till midday, I walk a couple of miles to see the Parliament Buildings, a massive pile designed by Lutyens. Back at the Ashok there is a long slow-moving line of people waiting to check out, intermingled with an equally long line of people waiting to check in. When Jane joins me in the queue I suggest that since we have paid in advance for our one night stay we can simply drop the keys on the reception desk and walk out. However, when we try to do this we are apprehended by hotel security guards as soon as we set foot beyond the threshold. Unable to produce a checkout pass, we are suspected of trying to escape with our bills unpaid. We pick up our keys again and return despondently to the back of the queue.
This time we are allowed to leave the Ashok and I transfer with some relief to Hotel 55. Having installed myself there I call at the nearby Tourist Office to ask about tours in and around Delhi. There is one leaving in early afternoon and I book for it. An attractive young woman from Canada is also making enquiries at the Tourist Office and I persuade her to join me. Gwen Klassen, 25, is on her way back to Vancouver after teaching for a year in a primary school in Bhutan where she lived with a local family.
Our tour takes us to the great Jami Masjid mosque and to the Red Fort, where we see Moghul architecture at its most exuberant. The tour bus carries a helpful and well-informed guide who gives us just enough background history and then leaves us to wander round on our own. As soon as we leave the coach we are harried by crowds of people, pressing us to buy photographs, souvenirs, and jewellery, or to employ them as guides. With growing admiration I watch Gwen fending them off with great gentleness and patience until one of the more perststent goads her beyond endurance and she tells him crisply to piss off.
We go on to the Gandhi and Nehru Memorial Gardens, peaceful and well kept, and kept mercifully free from souvenir-sellers and other commerce. The simplicity of the Gandhi memorial - no statue, just a small pool into which visitors cast flowers - is most moving, Finally the coach takes us round the perimeter of Old Delhi, a maze of narrow winding streets lined with tiny shops. I am not tempted to come back on foot to explore the old city, though Gwen plans to do so.
Gwen and I meet for supper at The United Coffee House in Connaught Place, highly recommended by David. We eat a good marsala dosa with vegetable pokhra, and drink really excellent coffee, not easy to come by in the North of India. I escort Gwen back to her basic dormitory accommodation just off Janpath, but am denied entry by a stern female who tells me that males are not admitted. At Hotel 55 I try putting Puritabs - probably quite unnecessarily - in the drinking water. It tastes like a swimming bath, though I am to find that one gets used to it. I feel that my second day in India has gone well - a lot better than the first. I have been warned not to attempt too much in the first few days, until accustomed to the climate, and I am content to abide by that advice.
.Walking around early next morning, I am surprised to find how quiet it is in the streets. Few shops open before ten o'clock. Until then the chief activity is sweeping the pavements. Hundreds of women, bent over short-handled brooms, vigorously sweep the dust from one patch of pavement to the next. It is entirely a matter of redistribution, as no dust seems ever to be removed from the streets, I he sweeping must partly account for the haze that hangs over Delhi for most of the day.
After breakfast I walk a couple of miles down Janpath to the National Museum, a fine new building housing a collection of archaeological finds and mediaeval sculptures. I wish I had done more homework on earlier Indian civilisations and had studied the Hindu pantheon more diligently. I thought I knew the principal gods and goddesses and their various manifestations but here there are statues of a whole lot more with different and usually longer names that sound like Indian leg-break bowlers,
There is also a column of black basalt inscribed with hieroglyphs in neatly ruled lines and squares, setting out the complete code of laws of Hammurabi' s kingdom, There could not have been as much legislation in those days. The museum is well-kept and the exhibits clearly labelled. While I am walking round, it is invaded by 500 well-scrubbed schoolchildren. On the way back, near Connaught Place, I sit down to a lemon tea and a plate of dahl at Kalpani's, a cheap restaurant with good Indian food, Later I meet Gwen for coffee and say good-bye as she is leaving next morning on the Taj Express to Agra where she plans to stay for two days before her return to Canada.
Next morning I take the morning tour in and around Delhi in company with Debbie from New Mexico, a plump young woman in her mid-twenties who has been travelling by herself for eight months through England, Greece, Nepal, Thailand, and India. She tells me that while men lose weight when travelling in Asia, women put it on; I suspect she is generalising from her own experience. The tour starts at the Jantar Mantar, the 16th century stone observatory now surrounded by the modern buildings of New Delhi. We admire the accuracy of the huge sundial, correct to the minute. Our next stop is at the recently completed Hindu temple of Laxmi Naryan, brightly coloured and garish, built by the wealthy industrialists of the Birla family. The coach then drives us out to the India Gate, but we are prevented from approaching too closely by armed soldiers who are preparing security precautions for the visit of the Gorbachev's later in the week.
After a longer drive out of Delhi we stop at the tomb of Humayun, the second Moghul emperor, built in the 15th century by his widow, and foreshadowing in its design the Taj Mahal. We drive past the great fort of Purana Qila, constructed by Sher Shah who fought the Moghuls and was briefly victorious. Ten miles outside Delhi we make a longer stop at Qutab Minar, the 12th century victory tower, and we admire the famous iron column which has been in place for 1500 years without rusting. After the 5-hour tour I take a short rest at the hotel, and sit for a while in the circular park in the middle of Connaught Place where I am accosted by shoe-polishers, ear-cleaners, masseurs and other hopefuls, but decline their services. The massage, which requires the victim to lie flat while being vigorously pummelled, looks particularly gruelling.
.I meet Debbie for supper at United Coffee House and listen to her horror stories about her hotel, which is well down-market from mine, She heard rats scrabbling about all night in the ceiling and once saw some paws sticking through a hole directly above the bed.
The last day of this stay in Delhi is a very idle one. I walk round the Jantar Mantar again at greater leisure, explore the Underground Bazaar near Connaught Place - not very exciting - and drink coffee with a doctor from Ireland. I have to check out of the hotel by midday but my train is not until evening, so I spend the afternoon reading in the air-conditioned luxury of the Janpath Hotel. Towards evening I relax on a park bench in Connaught Place, braving the onslaughts of the masseurs and other enthusiasts. I am joined by a well-dressed middle-aged Indian who tells me "I am most unfortunate fellow" and recounts his life story. He is forty-nine and comes from the Punjab where he had a flourishing business until he was defrauded by his partner. He came to Delhi and set up in business there: again he did well, until struck down by hepatitis and cardiac arrest. Now he has started a third business, which he describes as 'personal services': I do not enquire further. He deplores the high cost of living, which leaves him barely enough to pay for the education of his children, state education being tree but not of a high standard. He fears that India has advanced little since independence, progress being held back by widespread corruption. He worries about the growth of violence: he has read a report in the Hindustan Times about a 'Bachelor Girl' tourist being abducted and raped by a rickshaw driver. I tell him that such things happen in London too, but he is not consoled.
THE JOURNEY TO SIMLA
At eight o'clock in the evening I catch a motor-cycle rickshaw to take me five miles to Old Delhi Railway Station which is the terminal for northward travel. It is a dark and foggy night and it is a terrifying drive through dense traffic, all travelling at top speed and mostly without lights. The driver weaves frantically between pedestrians, cycles, competing rickshaws, cars, and buses, missing them by inches and never slowing down except when a sudden halt is the only way to avert a collision. I am relieved and surprised to reach the railway station without disaster.
The station is bigger than any London terminus, and reminiscent in layout of the Waverley Station in Edinburgh. It is thronged with people, some evidently waiting for trains, others apparently in permanent residence, With cautious pessimism I have arrived two hours before my train is due to leave, and I have no trouble in locating my platform, where indeed there is a board displaying a typed list of reservations, including my name and berth number. The first-class sleeping compartment is roomy, with four upholstered berths but no pillows and blankets. I have a lower berth; two other passengers get in and settle down quietly. I fold up my parka as a pillow and am soon asleep. I awake as we arrive punctually at six in the morning at Kalka, a junction at the foot of the hills: all night we have been travelling through the plains of North India.
The so-called 'toy train' to Simla is waiting at the platform opposite. It consists of a string of box-cars pulled by a small diesel locomotive. I settle into a seat for the six hour journey up the mountainside to Simla. A ticket inspector approves my seat, and then walks off with my Indrail pass - all 300 dollars worth of it! I give chase down the train, luckily a short one, and recover it. In my compartment is an English doctor in his fifties, Geoffrey Warnes, who served in India and Sri Lanka earlier in his career, and now works as a public health consultant in Yorkshire for six months in the year, spending most of the other six months in long-distance travel coupled with serious photography.
The trip from Kalka to Simla must be one of the most spectacular train journeys in the world, climbing to over 6000 feet by bends so sharp that you can often see the engine through your window, apparently going in the apposite direction. There are unfolding views of sharp-edged ridges receding into the distance, but as yet no snow. The road winds uphill following more or less the same route as the rail track, appearing first on one side, then on the other. There are half a dozen halts along the route, at places where the track levels out for fifty yards or so. All the stations are neat and tidy, with clipped hedges and colourful flower beds. One of the stops is at a brewery. The other passengers make sure that the doors of our compartment are kept firmly locked, the 'I'm all right Jack' principle being strictly applied by Indian railway travellers. After five hours Simla comes into view and seems very close, perhaps three or four miles as the crow flies, but there is another hour of twisting and turning before we arrive there, again right on time.
SIMLA
Simla
At Simla station we are greeted by an enthusiastic reception committee of porters offering to carry our baggage to the hotel - that is to the hotel of the porter's choice unless the passenger is exceptionally strong-minded, Whichever hotel you have chosen, the man who accosts you knows one which is better, cheaper, more conveniently situated - and which pays him a commission. The hotel you had chosen is full up, has been closed down, burnt to the ground, or is now called by a different name. Resolutely I shoulder my pack and tell the porters I am going to walk to the Holiday Home Hotel. There is a road outside the station, but it winds back and forth for a couple of miles before reaching the centre of the town, The direct route is along a half-mile extension of the railway track, for the benefit of goods trains, and then up a steep earth slope to the main bus station in Cart Road. After ten minutes I have shaken off all the porters. Geoffrey has succumbed to the persuasions of a fellow-passenger who owns the Woodville Hotel.
The Holiday Home, about a mile and a half from the station, is a newish hotel run by the State Tourist Corporation and situated at the southern foot of the ridge that forms the spine of Simla. The bedrooms are large and well-furnished and look towards the ridge where tiers of houses and shops appear to cling to the steep hillside. The hotel is being extended, the corridors are draughty because they are open at one end, and if you turn the wrong way on the stairs you will fall into space.
.From the hotel it is a tough climb up to the Mall, the main avenue that runs along the spine of the ridge, through a combination of winding streets and narrow stairways. There are not many tourists in Simla at this time of year, except for a few Indian couples and families, but the streets are thronged with a great variety of mountain peoples, generally healthier-looking and livelier than the population of Delhi. Throughout the afternoon and evening the inhabitants of Simla promenade, Italian style, along the Mall and the roads which join it on the ridge. A friendly little man stops me and gives me his card, with his address in Bombay where he manages a construction company. Should my travels take me to that city, he asks me to phone him if I am in any trouble. As I walk along, several other people offer their help and services, but less persistently than in Delhi. I see that the shops are all closed and there are some noisy public meetings. My Bombay friend says that there is a one-day strike in protest against a 20% increase in bus fares.
I soon acquire a favourite restaurant for my few days in Simla. It is in the Mall right at the top of the ridge and it is run by the State Tourist Board. The upper storey is a glass dome overlooking the Mall with panoramic views of the mountains beyond, reaching on a fine day to the distant Himalayas. It is a good place to sit and drink coffee and watch the world go by. Downstairs in a circular basement is a cheaper restaurant which serves excellent vegetarian meals. On my first evening I dine there early as it is dark soon after six and I have left my torch at the hotel. Finding my way cautiously down the ridge as darkness falls, I pass the main bus station where there is a scene of pandemonium. Twenty or thirty long-distance buses are arriving within minutes of each other and are manoeuvring in a confined area where there is scarcely any room to turn or reverse. I end the day with a quiet evening in my hotel room which boasts a TV set: I watch the Indian news showing the Gorbachev's engaged in sightseeing in New Delhi, following closely in my footsteps.
In the morning I plan the next stage of my travels. I have a general plan of campaign for the whole trip, but have nothing booked except my return flight from Delhi to London three months later. So the first task on arriving anywhere is to decide how long I would like to stay there, and to book the next leg of the journey, which might require two or three days' notice, or sometimes longer. My general plan at this stage is to move on to the Kulu valley in the foothills of the Himalayas, do some trekking there, return to Simla, and then move on to Rajasthan. I now go in search of the Himachal Pradesh Tourist Office in the hope of getting information about trekking in the Kulu valley.
The search is frustrating as no-one seems to have heard of the Tourist Office, I see a sign which I follow but the scent soon grows cold. Finally I give up, and decide instead to change some travellers' cheques at Grindlays Bank, This I achieve successfully, though only after laborious procedures with which I was to become familiar, Having found the right queue in the Bank and collected the appropriate forms, I confirm with the counter clerk that all is in order, and he hands me - not my rupees as I expected, but a metal disc to take to the next queue.where I finally reach the cashier, who demands another signature, which he compares with the earlier signature just to be on the safe side.
My next task is to book a bus ticket for Kulu. I decide I shall go there to-morrow as I can have more time in Simla on the way back. There is a booking office on the Mall, where I buy a ticket for the so-called luxury bus since the extra cost is not high and any additional comfort will be welcome on a nine-hour journey, Continuing my walk down the Mall I am befriended by a stoutly built Sikh who introduces himself as B. S. Gill, engine driver on Simla's mountain railway and part-time artist. I accept his invitation to take tea with him and after another mile we turn off abruptly down a rough track to a group of small houses with corrugated iron roofs perched on the steep hillside. It is a modest house with a few mats spread on the concrete floor, and sparsely furnished apart from an impressive steel wardrobe that looks as if it might have started life as a filing cabinet in an office of Indian Railways. The walls are hung with Mr. Gill's paintings: landscapes, a few portraits, and some scenes from the mountain railway, featuring the steam locomotives that the painter would have driven in his youth before diesels took over in 1968,
I am introduced to Mrs. Gill who serves us with tea but takes no further part in the proceedings. I see some movement in what I had taken to be an inanimate heap of clothing on a bed at the other end of the room; a young man pokes his head out and promptly withdraws it like a tortoise. Mr. Gill shows me folders containing his sketches and press cuttings reporting two of his exhibitions, and invites me to make some purchases. When I say that anything I buy will have to travel in my rucksack for the next three months, he offers to post them to England. I am afraid that I disappoint him, but we remain friends. As I take my leave, he gives me directions for finding the former Vice-Regal Residence.
The Residence, further along the Mail, is difficult to miss, impressive in sheer size and Scottish Baronial in style, but lacking any distinction except for its site at the highest point of the ridge, with gardens looking out over deep valleys towards the Himalayan foothills. The building now houses the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies and is not open to the public except by special arrangement. The buildings and gardens are in reasonable repair, but the approach drive is riddled with potholes: like much of Simla, it has seen better days.
Not far away is the State Museum. It is a long, steep, climb from a gateway that lists the daily opening times but omits to say that the Museum is closed for lunch between 1, 30 and 2. 30. The attendant is reluctant to admit me when I arrive at 1. 25. I hope that once I am inside I may be allowed to stay, but at 1, 30 the lights are turned out and so am I.
As I continue my tour of Simla I pass hundreds of mountain people, dressed in blankets and wearing fur pillbox hats. They climb up the steep paths and stairways, carrying enormous loads on their backs, supported by headbands around their foreheads, they are carrying sacks of grain, blocks of concrete, armchairs, heavy gauge hose pipe, and every household object you could think of, including the kitchen sink. There
.are also hordes of small boys, who come up to me to practise their English and acquire a pen-friend. On a back street which - for Simla - is relatively flat, with a gradient of less than one in three, a group of boys play cricket with a rolled up paper ball and a rather good bat.
Only three roads up to the ridge are negotiable by vehicles, and these have hairpin bends so sharp that they require three-point turns to get round them. Most of the routes up and down are by long steep stairways: sometimes the stairs would lead to the upper levels of one of the three roads, sometimes they lead into someone's back yard and you have to retrace your steps - there is no way of telling which is which, Street maps of Simla exist but are virtually useless as they do not indicate ups and downs, and navigation here is vertical rather than horizontal.
Feeling hungry I buy some vegetable pakhoras - miscellaneous vegetables fried in batter - and some sweet doughnuts from a street stall. The cooking takes place in a large iron cauldron simmering away on a wood fire and stirred by a cross-legged boy. Next door there is a tailor's shop, with one man sitting on the floor at his sewing machine, and two others sitting on shelves with theirs. Next are dozens more little shops, each no more than ten feet wide: more tailors, jewellers, fruit sellers, bookshops, electrical goods, and - unaccountably - Chinese shoe shops. Monkeys are clambering up drainpipes and over the rooftops,
Towards evening a cold east wind blows up, bringing a light shower. Groups of men huddle round little fires by the roadside, sometimes cooking, sometimes just smoking and trying to keep warm, I call into a South Indian Coffee House for an egg dosa and some rather poor coffee in bare and uninviting surroundings, As I walk down afterwards to the lower part of the town, I turn to look back to ring upon ring of lights rising high up the ridge.
Back in my hotel I run into Geoffrey who has abandoned the hotel to which he was lured by the man he met on the train. He said the Woodville was very grand and surrounded by spacious gardens, but inconveniently far out of town. Some of the scenes from The Jewel in the Crown had been shot there. The walls were hung with autographed photos of well-known people who had stayed there years ago, but Geoffrey was the only living guest, surrounded by ghosts from the past. So he decided to join me in the Holiday Home, and we talk together in the large empty dining-room while he eats his evening meal. We put down the lack of tourists to the season, Simla after all being the one-time summer capital of India, where the governing classes came to escape from the heat of the plains, and summer is still the 'right time' to come to Simla, though we found it quite agreeable in mid-winter.
FROM SIMLA T0 KULU
In the morning I walk a brisk mile to report to the bus station at 8, 15 as instructed. I am to collect my ticket at office number 5 which I locate among several small grilles beseiged by hopeful passengers. Here I present my reservation papers, hoping to be directed to whichever of the hundred buses that are milling around will be going to Kulu. The clerk behind the grille inspects my papers and tells me that the luxury
.bus on which I have booked is out of order - I assume there were not enough bookings to justify sending it to Kulu. He assures me that I will have a seat on the ordinary bus leaving at 8.40 and that I will be refunded the difference in fare. He turns his attention to a pile of printed forms on which he writes careful entries until interrupted by a telephone call which occupies him for ten minutes. By this time there is a long and restive queue behind me. It is already 8, 40 and bus after bus, including probably mine, are revving up and disappearing in clouds of dust. 'Can I have my ticket now, please ?', I ask, Patiently he replies that he is indeed making out my ticket. He returns to his form filling, which he completes triumphantly five minutes later, giving me my ticket, 35 rupees refund, and the registration number of my bus.
Although it is now well past departure time, the bus is in no hurry to leave. The driver insists on putting my pack on the roof. An Indian fellow passenger says he hopes I have nothing of importance in it: since it contains all my belongings for three months' travel I hope he is joking. The bus fills up and leaves half an hour late, chugging slowly down the steep winding road with much reversing and manoeuvring when we meet buses and lorries coming in the opposite direction. The drivers display great skill in judging their distance to the inch in order to avoid collision or the alternative of lurching down a deep ravine. For about three hours we drive through steep hills and sharp bends, mostly going downhill, with bigger mountains all around but only intermittently visible through the mist.
At mid-morning the bus passes a bright new temple on a hill-top. Soon after there is a sudden screaming, like an animal in pain, that appears to come from the rear of the bus. Looking round, I see a young Indian woman, perhaps in her early twenties, thrashing violently back and forth, eyes closed, long hair covering her face when she leans forward, while a terrible howling seems to come from the depths of her being. At any moment she might injure herself badly by striking her head against the seats. The driver slows down and pulls to a halt while two other passengers - she is travelling alone - try unavailingly to soothe her. She seems totally unaware of their presence. Eventually she exhausts herself and they lead her, gasping for breath, back down the road. Half an hour later she returns with them, calm and at peace, and resumes her seat as though nothing has happened. My neighbour explains that she was possessed by a divine spirit: she was carried to the temple where she lay until the spirit departed. The bus driver lights a candle of incense and hands round some sweet white powder which we all eat as a purification rite. No-one behaves as if anything unusual has occurred - I am the only foreigner on the bus - and we are soon on our way again.
We make several halts at small villages for cups of chai - tea boiled up with milk and sugar - and to relieve ourselves discreetly, usually by walking a couple of hundred yards beyond the village and irrigating the roadside , The bus pulls in for a longer halt at Bilaspur, near a sizeable lake famous for its fish, while the surrounding fields are renowned for growing high quality ginger. From here the route winds up northwards through a landscape that grows more and more dramatic. The road hugs the side of awesome gorges, with improbably cultivated terraces with bright green crops of turmeric, ginger, and young maize.
.The bus overtakes several baggage trains of twenty or thirty small horses, not much bigger than Shetland ponies. At local halts there is a lot of coming and going, some people just travelling to the next village, so the bus is at times half empty and at times very full indeed. We stop for half an hour at the town of Mandi where the main street is bordered by lines of trees. The road then climbs up a long steep slope and follows the course of the river Beas several hundred feet above the gorge. In places where half the road has been washed away, the wheels of the bus are a few inches from a sheer drop. The day grows cold and wet as evening approaches. lhe last two hours of the approach to Kulu are dismal, with everything shrouded in darkness and heavy rain.
KULU
Kulu is a small town at the entrance to a narrowing valley that leads to the popular resort of Manali and ultimately to a pass by which Kashmir
can be reached in the summer. I have chosen a cheap hotel, the Byleshwar, said by the Lonely Planet to be run by a friendly proprietor and near the first stop on entering Kulu. In the darkness, rain, and general confusion, I do not realise that we have reached Kulu until two miles further on when we draw into the second stop which is in the centre of the town, I enlist the help of a friendly inhabitant to get my pack down from the roof of the bus, a task requiring more agility than I have at my disposal after nine hours cramped in a bus seat. The Byleshwar Hotel, according to the replies given to my questions, is anything from one to four kilometers away, and I am getting soaked. So I head for the nearest resting-place available, known optimistically as the Central Hotel.
The Central Hotel is at the top of a stone staircase above some shops, and consists of a number of cells leading off a murky corridor. After ten minutes in the corridor, someone arrives to conduct me to my cell. Promptly the power fails and the lights go off. Quarter of an hour later, two men of sinister appearance come in with a candle, the hotel register, and a form for me to fill in, I do this, inventing my visa number which is invisible in the dim light. When the register and form are completed to their satisfaction, my two attendants disappear into the murk, and no hotel staff are visible until I come to pay my bill in the morning.
Later in the evening, power is restored. I find a restaurant of sorts down the road, and order a chicken curry. This turns out to be a leg of chicken adorned with some rather sad curry sauce and nothing else. A cup of chai warms me up slightly but the night grows colder and wetter and when I return to the hotel I keep all my clothes on under a thin blanket.
In the morning it is still pouring with rain. I hire a local taxi to take me to the Byleshwar at the other end of town. It looks a much more attractive place than the Central - not difficult - and I see two familiar faces, an Australian couple I had noticed in Simla. Danny and Julie are packed up and ready to leave: they say they found the.Byleshwar rather bleak, with no rugs on the concrete floor, and are going to look round for another place. The three of us have a chat with the proprietor, a very friendly middle-aged advocate who runs the hotel as a sideline. He apologises for the discomfort, explaining that some of the rooms are being redecorated while others are occupied by permanent residents,.He kindly gives us dispassionate advice about other nearby hotels in Kulu, and offers to keep a room for me if I cannot find one elsewhere.
Before starting our reconnaissance we breakfast together in the State Tourist restaurant, Danny and Julie hail from Queensland and have been travelling continuously for a year and a half, first exploring Australia, and then touring Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Danny is an enthusiastic surfer who visited an Indonesian island, famed for the quality of its surf, for that sole purpose. He is a cabinet maker but willing to try his hand at anything. Julie is small and frail in appearance and has not been well lately; she looks pale and wan but is very tough and determined. They plan to travel in Asia for several months yet, through South India and Sri Lanka, arriving in England in late spring and hoping to earn some money there to finance travel in Europe.
Together we look round three hotels recommended by our friend from the Byleshwar. They are all situated at the side of the maidan, a large flat open space where cricket is played and the annual festival held. The hotels are all on the basic side of average, with bare rooms and no running water, Julie leads the inspection with an experienced air, and puts each hotel manager through his paces, Do we get hot water in buckets? Both morning and evening? Is there an extra charge for it? And so on. Finally we settle on the Sa Bo Guest House, where we book two rooms and order morning bucket water.
The rain now clears and the sun shines. It is still cold and we now see that the mountains on either side of the valley before us are covered in snow. Kulu is indeed an attractive town, preferred by knowledgeable travellers to the more popular Manali further up the valley. Small boys are bowling iron hoops down the main street. Transistors blaring from every shop relay the commentary from the cricket tournament in Sharjah, Greenidge has just reached his century for the West Indies with a vicious square cut, At the Tourist Office we enquire from a helpful official about buses travelling up the valley. The road to Manali is closed for the day, after heavy rain and snow, but should be open tomorrow. We decide that if the road is open then we will catch a bus along the other side of the river to Naggar, half-way to Manali.
Next day it is still fine. At the Kulu Tourist Office we are able to book two rooms at the Naggar Guesthouse where we know accommodation is strictly limited. A local bus takes us across the river over a rickety bridge. The road on the far side is narrow, ending in a small area for the Manali bus to turn round at the end of its journey. During this manoeuvre the driver reverses to within an inch or two of the cliff edge, and the more cautious passengers, including myself, wait for the driver to complete his turn before we climb aboard.
Kulu Valley
NAGGAR
It is a rough ride up the valley along a dirt road. We drive through small villages and orchards, with the snowline just above us. There are dry-stone walls and some stoutly built stone houses with slate roofs. The Kulu valley owes its prosperity to the annual fruit crop, being the best apple growing area in India. The crop has not long been harvested and there are still leaves on the trees. The valley here is no more than a couple of miles wide and narrows further as we approach the village of Naggar. We are glad to stretch our legs after being shaken around violently on the bus for an hour and a half, We sit outside a small restaurant and eat dahl and chappatis in the morning sunshine, We are joined by an athletic couple of about thirty, Alain from Switzerland and Valerie from France, another pair of ambitious world travellers now in their second year in Asia. They too are staying at Naggar, and together we climb the steep road to the resthouse built 200 years ago as a fortress and castle for the ruler of the Kulu valley, constructed of huge stones and timbers and perched on the edge of a sheer precipice overlooking the village and commanding the valley.
We are welcomed and booked in by the 'Resident', a warm genial figure dressed in a bright blue parka and resembling a brown-skinned Michelin Man. He was born in Naggar and has looked after the castle for five years. Having brought us up-to-date with the cricket scores at Sharjah, he shows us into our enormous and comfortable bedrooms with thick-pile wall-to-wall carpets and separate shower for each room. The rooms open on to a balcony looking straight across the valley to the snowy skyline on the other side , with long views up the valley and over pine-forested slopes towards Manali. It looks very like the lower Alps in Switzerland, as Alain and Valerie confirm.
In the evening there is more rain, turning to snow as the temperature descends to zero. There are fireplaces in the other bedrooms but not in mine. Alain and Danny each buy, from a woodseller just up the road, 25 kilograms of what turns out to be very wet wood, and Danny soon coaxes a fire into life. The rooms are far too big to be warmed through, but we cluster close round the fire till supper - a tasty pillau served in the unheated dining-room - and then reform our fireside group until bedtime.
After a bitter night the morning is crystal clear. The early sun catches the mountain tops while the valley is still in deep shadow. Gradually the sun chases the shadow line across the valley and reaches the castle by ten o'clock. When the castle courtyard is bathed in slanting sunlight, the five of us take a leisurely breakfast, our circulation returning slowly as the sun climbs higher. We decide to walk up the hill behind the castle and set off along a muddy track, often stepping aside to make way for cows, trains of ioaded horses, or villagers carrying colossal beams. Tall green plants grow alongside the track: Julie tells me they are marijuana. Higher up there are brambles, reminding me that the most vigorous blackberry in cultivation is the variety Himalayan Giant. The going at first is over slippery melting snow, but when we have climbed a few hundred feet the snow is crisp and firm.
.On the ridge we reach a small village where an old woman is making baskets, others are making rope sandals, and the boys are playing marbles. No-one speaks English, but Julie soon makes friends with the womenfolk, while the boys and girls are keen to be photographed. At the far end of the village is a small Hindu temple, which the villagers signal is out-of-bounds to us.
On the way back down the hill we make a detour to visit a well-built house described as the Roerich Art Gallery. Nicholas Roerich was a Russian painter who spent many years in the Kulu valley where he died in 1947. An elderly woman who is the guardian of the gallery tells us that the painter's son, who was married to an Indian wife and had a house in Bangalore, lived at Naggar every year from April to June. The house is set in gardens with rose-bushes. Most of the paintings on display are water colours of Himalayan mountains, rather stylised in the manner associated with Heaton Cooper. It is another very cold evening and we are glad to get back and start a fire again with our damp wood.
MANALI
Next morning is bright and cold, the first of December. Danny and I discuss walking to Manali, but there is still a lot of snow underfoot and we do not know if the weather will hold. So we all walk down the hill to Naggar village and take the bus to Manali. It is a better road north than it was to the south, following a route that is sometimes just below the snowline, sometimes above. Manali is a busy little town: the valley is now so narrow and the mountains so high that the winter days are short, the sun vanishing behind the western ridge at half past three in December. Being a popular tourist resort, Manali boasts several hotels: I decide to move up-market even if this means parting company from my low-budget friends. On the advice of the local Tourist Office I book in at the Hotel Cedar, a clean and comfortable establishment in the main street. The manager is watching Sri Lanka v. Pakistan on the telly.
Later I meet Alain and Valerie who have found a cheaper hotel not far away, while Danny and Julie are making so thorough a reconnaissance of the Manali hotels that it is dusk before they settle in. I have an electric heater in my room, but before it warms up there is a power cut and we are reduced to candles. The electricity is restored soon after seven, and Danny and Julie enjoy a warm-up in front of my heater until we go out to the Mona Lisa restaurant which is heated by a bowl of glowing coals in the middle of the floor. There are several inches of snow in the streets and a bitterly cold wind.
In the morning I take breakfast in an open-air cafe in the middle of the town, but not until the sun has risen clear of the mountains and begun to warm the air. There is plenty of activity in the main street. A religious procession is heralded by the town band of pipes, drums, and trombones, followed by a brightly clothed Kulu god, removed from the temple for the day and borne on long poles supported by attendants fore and aft. The procession stops at several points where the god blesses the crowds, and the shops and their contents, while collectors go round for contributions. It seems to be an occasion for rejoicing rather than western-style reverence, as most people go about their normal business and the traffic hoots and dodges its way past.
.It is not the weather for any serious trekking, local advice being that the snow has started one month early this year. However, Danny, Julie and I decide to walk up to the village of old Manali through the piled up snow. About a mile out of the new town we come across a modern western style clubhouse, opened in 1985 according to the foundation stone, in a spectacular setting looking out to the pine forests and to the mountains beyond. It houses a badminton court, billiard rooms, and a bar where the drinks are too expensive. Further up the hill we come to the Hadimba Temple, dating from 1553, built of enormous beams decorated with intricate wood carvings, set in a grove of tall pines. We do not go in, but from the doorway we see a group or worshippers crouched under a big stone in the centre of the temple, addressing their prayers to a small figure illuminated by a candle. A party of Indians arrive by car and take off their shoes, Led by a very old lady bent almost double, they climb barefoot up the snowy path and through icy puddles into the temple.
On our return to the outskirts of town we see a sign "TRISH AND PETE - HOME BAKERY". Trish operates in a small room with an oven at one end and with bread, tarts, cakes, and home-made jam lining the shelves. She is in her mid-thirties, a fair-haired English county type one would expect to be more at home in Cheltenham than in the back streets of a remote town in the Himalayan foothills. Two delightful brown children play outside in the snow. Pete, her Indian husband and several years her senior, comes in and tries to sell us some jewellery that he makes, From what Trish told me, and gossip from others, it seems that she came out to Asia as a teenage hippie. Manali was at one time a well-known haven for hippies, with drugs readily available, and after some years of travel she settled here eleven years ago and married Pete. By all accounts, Pete gives her a hard time. The bread and cakes are delicious.
That evening the power fails again, so we look around for a well-heated restaurant where we can spend the evening, We find the Ardash, a roomy place in the main street with a big wood stove in the middle of the floor. Alain and Valerie, also in search of warmth, join us. They are accompanied by a fierce-looking Cretan with a great mop of curly hair, a bandit's moustache, and a wild beard, Alain and Valerie have sampled the local hot springs and recommend them, During our meal Valerie suddenly realises that she is without the wallet containing passport and money that she wears round her neck, and dashes back to her hotel, ten minutes later she comes back smiling with relief and we enjoy a cheerful meal together before going our separate ways on the morrow - Julie and Danny to Dharamsala, Alain and Valerie to Rajasthan,
On the day of my departure I get up and pack in the dark - no electricity again. Although the Manali black-outs caused me some inconvenience, I was to find three years later that they did someone a good turn, providing the occasion for Clare (whom I met in Java) to be rescued by the young Tibetan who later became her husband and now shares her life in Islington. I pay my bill, protest unavailingly about being charged for the electric heater when there was hardly ever any power supply, and cross the road to the bus station.
.At eight o'clock the sun has not reached into the valley and it is very cold. At the small dilapidated shed that serves as a booking office, the clerk confirms that the luxury bus will leave for Simla in due course, but tickets canot be bought before 8. 30. Meanwhile the bus station is a scene of great activity, Groups of travellers and Manali local people cluster round little fires, burning wooden boxes or anything else that comes to hand. The locals wear headscarves under Balaclava helmets, three grey donkeys and one brown one chew contentedly at a bag full of hay. The first donkey to be satisfied walks off, leaving a steaming pile of dung just outside the booking office. The other donkeys vary their diet with fruit and vegetable debris they find lying around, and with discarded green bus tickets, which they presumably take to be vegetables, ignoring tickets of any other colour. Schoolchildren pass through the square carrying their exercise books. At 8, 30 I buy my ticket, noting that the man at the desk enters the transaction in duplicate in a ledger headed 'Booking Clerk's Waybill'. The Raj has a lot to answer for.
I buy some oranges for the journey and climb into the 'luxury' bus. It proves to be quite comfortable and not too full so I can gain peace of mind by keeping my pack by me. The "ordinary' bus alongside is much more crowded and its roof is packed tight with sacks and bedding rolls, on top of which some ungainly birds are hopping, When we leave punctually at nine Manali is still in shadow though on either side of the valley the white tops of the mountains are glittering in the sun.
We take the road to Kulu along the right bank of the Beas, It is a better road than the one through Naggar by which we came up. We have continuous views over the swift river as it plunges over rocks, splits into separate streams divided by islands of huge boulders sprouting tall trees, and comes together again. Every hundred yards there are waterfalls, every two or three miles a flimsy wooden bridge for pedestrians. Below Kulu the road still follows the river as it grows wider, calmer, greener. In places along the river bank, there are stone quays projecting into the water, probably for handling timber and other cargoes when the river is higher.
As the valley broadens, orchards line the river, and at one point there is a surprising greenhouse. After three hours along the river bank, the road winds away from it, passing the Kulu airstrip and a number of villages. The Indian road warning sign for a school shows a plump little boy running for his life, which seems closer to reality than its British counterpart of two children walking sedately hand in hand. As we near Mandi the road climbs high above the deep river gorge with almost sheer sides clothed with pines and other trees that have somehow secured a foothold. There are frequent road repairs where there have been landslides and the outlook from the bus window is no sight for the faint- hearted. After we pass a large hydro-electric scheme, the river is tamed and is never the same again. It meanders blandly through a plain about five miles across, Nine hours after we left Manali we see Simla outlined against a brilliant sunset.
.BACK AT SIMLA
The bus terminus is over a mile from the town centre, at the point where the Mall forks off to the left. We are encircled by porters. Shaking them off with some difficulty - one obstinate fellow stuck to me for the best part of a mile - I walk back to the Holiday Home and the height of luxury, or so it seems after the more spartan experience of the Kulu valley. And it is a whole lot warmer.
Next morning is clear - clearer than at any time on my earlier stay. The views from the ridge now extend beyond the near range of hills, over to more distant ranges and to the high Himalayas, My first task is to book a sleeper for my return to Delhi, through which I must pass before going on to Agra and Rajasthan. The first vacancy is three days ahead. This settled, I walk up to the Jakhu Temple above the city, a long climb up steep lanes. The temple is an unexciting modern brick structure but it stands on a commanding site and is surrounded by high pine trees. Through the trees are distant views of snowy peaks far to the north.
The area is infested with inquisitive monkeys. I share a banana with one of them. He takes his half and sits down to eat it ten yards away. To return I take a short cut that leads through a ravine below the road. It would have been a pleasant walk except that the ravine has been used from time immemorial as a refuse dump by all the residents of the houses on the upper road. Back in Simla I book a tour for to-morrow,
The tour starts from the Rivoli bus station to the north of the ridge not far from a skating rink. Here there is the usual chaos, with crowds of people, several buses hooting and reversing in clouds of black smoke, and no indication whatever of which bus is going where. I see a group of smartly-dressed Indians, and assume - correctly - that they will be my companions, so I attach myself to them. Atter hali an hour of uncertainty our 'Luxury coach' drives up and we climb in, all the other passengers being Indian.
It isn't a great tour but we go through some splendid mountain scenery. Narrow roads twist and turn alongside precipices: skeletons of overturned lorries adorn the landscape below. As the road climbs higher, ice and snow increase the hazard. I note with relief that the driver treats icy hairpin bends with proper respect. After half an hour we come to our first halt , Wildflower Hall, the summer residence of Kitchener when he was Commander-in-Chief, India. The Residence itself has been demolished and replaced by a 'Tourist Complex', We pause for a drink at the Goldstein Bar, where a notice board explains that the Goldsteins were the original owners of Wildflower Hall.
A short drive takes us to Kufri where Indira Gandhi had a holiday home, and where the local ski resort is sited - a pretty miserable single ski run. Further on we stop at Fagu, over 8000 feet high, for lunch in a restaurant with magnificent views to Himalayan peaks of over 20000 feet about forty miles away. The next stop is at Craignand, described as an attractive picnic spot discovered or popularised by an Italian gentleman. We toil up a steep hillside expecting to see fantastic views .but we are shut in by trees that have presumably grown up since Signor Craignano had his picnic.
To rejoin the bus which we left at the foot of the hill, we walk through the grounds of the Fruit Research Station where over a hundred varieties of apple are flourishing, most of them of English origin. This would have been worth while if anyone had been around to explain things, but nothing has been arranged. Wherever we cross any rough ground, or any patches of snow or ice, the Indian women of our party display extraordinarily cautious footwork, They seem quite unaccustomed to rough ground, though I would have thought that the streets and pavements of most Indian towns would have provided adequate training. Many of them have probably never seen snow or ice before,
Our party includes four honeymoon couples. One young bridegroom asks me to photograph him standing under a tree while cradling his bride in his arms. He explains that he is having photographs taken of the two of them in a variety of poses: I wonder if it is the influence of the Kama Sutra. Our final halt is at Maldera to see a nine hole golf course laid out by Curzon and meticulously maintained. My arrival back at the hotel is in time for me to watch on the TV the closing overs of a match at Sharjah in which Pakistan beat India by three wickets. England finishes the tournament as runner up to the West Indies winners.
Next day I stroll up to the ridge for a leisurely breakfast at my favourite restaurant, savouring the clear view to the Himalayas. I try the State Museum again, taking care in view of my earlier misfortunes to arrive well before lunchtime. There are some fine bronzes, some from Kulu, but the exhibits are badly displayed and poorly labelled. On the lawn outside is a dignified but anonymous bust, perched on a wooden box with peeling paint - perhaps the founder or benefactor of the museum. His present function is to serve as a wicket for some Indian children playing rounders, the bases being a number of well-sited antique sculptures.
In the afternoon I come across a young bearded Indian who had greeted me yesterday. He invites me to tea at his house. He is twenty-seven and 'in advertising', though he complains that there is little to advertise in Himachal Pradesh except for fruit and tourism. He speaks of his brothers, all of whom are doctors or lawyers in America. I suspect that in this status-ridden society all oversea relatives are upgraded for better effect: probably no-one here believes Isle when I say that my daughter is a professor in the United States, My friend's house is well-built and well-furnished, not far from the Mall. His late father was a health officer in English time'. His ancient mother smiles at me, and a disabled sister knits away at pullovers, allegedly turning out one every second day.
My friend is a Protestant, and seems rather puritanical, being against not only corruption and smoking, but drinking as well. He wishes to have something from England so I give him my paperback Canterbury Tales which I have just finished, and he gives me Ford Madox Ford's Impressions in exchange, a book which I was to enjoy greatly later on. He then hands me a disintegrating copy of Moorhouse's Calcutta, and when I begin to thank him he surprises me by asking for twenty rupees. When I make it clear that I am not interested in buying it, he gives it to me . I find the episode most embarrassing.
Over my evening vegetarian meal. I meet Carrie and her Indian young man, I remember seeing them at Manali. She is twenty-seven, fair and rosycheeked, a primary teacher from Stroud in Gloucestershire. She has been trekking in Kashmir, up to 15000 feet, and has toured Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. She plans to return ultimately by TransSiberian railway. Her friend Khan has little English and I have the impression that they made friends somewhere along the route, They stayed in Manali for a few weeks while Carrie taught at the Mission School.
My last two days in Simla are lazy. I have grown to like the relaxed atmosphere of the place and am happy just to saunter around, though Simla is not looking its best as a major pipelaying project is in progress to improve the water supply. Trenches are being excavated in the Mall and the other roads by pick and shovel. Each shovel is worked by two men, one using the handle while the other pulls a rope attached to the blade in order to remove a shovelful of debris. The excavations do not deter or deflect the continuous stream of porters with huge loads as they wind up and down the steep lanes and stairways. Notices at the foot of the hill list 'Coolies: official rates',
On the Mall the old men sit facing the sun, their backs to the Himalayas. At its head the Mall broadens out into a square by the church. Around it are tiered wooden seats, perhaps originally designed for watching military or ceremonial parades. In the afternoon when the seats filled up I expected something to happen, but nothing ever did except cricket practice by small boys.
RETURN TO DELHI
In late afternoon I walk the mile and a half to Simla Railway Station, carrying my pack on my back and assuring incredulous porters by the wayside that I had no need of their services, The mountain train starts its downhill journey as darkness falls. There is only the dimmest of lights in the compartment: I try to read but my eyes soon tire and I doze for most of the six hours to Kalka where the connection is waiting, It is a long train that will travel right across India through Delhi to Calcutta, Once more my name is up on the platform board: I settle into my berth, blow up my air cushion for a pillow, and sleep soundly.
Outside Old Delhi Station at 6.45 a, m, there is a cold, thick, mist. I ask a rickshaw driver to take me to the Plaza Cinema in New Delhi, which is near Hotel 55, but I do not mention the name of the hotel so as to avoid the inevitable advice about a better one. He stops twice on the way to pursue enquiries with me but I refuse to be drawn and I get off at the cinema. He follows me mournfully along the street until I disappear into Hotel 55 when he shakes his head reprovingly: I am not playing the game according to the rules.
.At the hotel they greet me like an old friend and give me a room I can use straight away to shower. I go on to collect mail from American Express and look round for some breakfast. My favourite United Coffee House does not open till noon. I try the Wimpey Bar in Janpath. The coffee is appalling but the young Indian behind the counter invites me to have a nice day.
I take the now familiar walk to New Delhi Station to book a seat for my next stopping-place, Agra. The city is slow to come to life, and very quiet up to ten o'clock. However, there is already a long queue at the Tourist Office in the station, and when I reach the head of it. I am told that the only train to Agra with reserved seats is the Taj Express leaving at 7 a. m. This is a good train for those wishing to travel from Delhi and back in the day, but of no benefit to me. On appeal to the Space Controller I manage to book a seat on the 11:15 train for the day after to-morrow.
I idle away the next two days, lounging around New Delhi and achieving nothing more noteworthy than a haircut, I disappoint the barber by declining a head massage and other refinements, One hot afternoon I spend reading in the air-conditioned lounge of the Janpath Hotel. While I am reading, three American residents at the hotel sit nearby and chat. They apologise for talking, hoping that it does not disturb me. I find it agreeable to call into a luxury hotel occasionally. If you look reasonably clean and walk in as though you own the place, you will probably get a smart salute from the doorman, and no-one will question your right to be there. Later in my tour when I was more travel-stained I would be more hesitant.
AGRA
I walk the half mile to New Delhi Station, locate the platform for Agra and look for my name on the reservation board, I find it well down the 'waiting list" although I thought I had made a definite reservation. I cannot find anyone in authority but it doesn't seem to matter as there are plenty of trains to Agra. I find one that is filling up quickly and am assured by an Indian Major in the Engineers that it will stop at Agra; he will be travelling on to meet his wife in Puna before leaving for a posting in Srinagar. By the time we depart the train is full to overflowing and passengers are sitting on the upper berths. The Major is friendly and communicative and gives me his copy of the Indian Railways 'Trains at a Glance' which lists most of the long-distance services. I find that the Major's copy also has a telephone number for Rita written on the back: I never have occasion to contact her, but the time-tables prove very useful and normally more accurate than information obtained at railway enquiry offices.
The Major, short and slightly built, could have been taken for a Nepali. In fact he comes from Nanithal, a hill station near the border. His enthusiasms are for mountaineering, sailing, and rowing - as a cox. The Army granted him leave to coach the Indian rowing teams for the Asian Games in Seoul. The three and a half hours to Agra pass quickly in the Major's company, The countryside between Delhi and Agra is completely flat and mostly under cultivation. There are fields of yellow-flowered oilseed, and newly sown wheat and maize. The fields are dotted with medium sized trees - Kika trees, the Major tells me - but there are no hedges,
At Agra Station I am persuaded into a motor-cycle rickshaw by a driver who says he works at the Grand Hotel and will take me there free. As this is the hotel I have chosen, this seems a satisfactory arrangement. The hotel is not exactly grand, but quite up-market by my standards. It is run by a large cheerful man from the Levant who shows me to my room, The bed is so large that I comment it would accommodate five people. The manager assures me that suitable partners can be arranged. I think he is joking but do not put it to the test.
The rickshaw driver is waiting for me outside, but naturally there are no more free rides. I agree 20 rupees (rather above the market rate I discover later) for a trip to the Taj Mahal and then around Agra. The Taj is simply marvellous - few are ever disappointed - unbelievably light and graceful. It is as perfect as its photographs, except that at present there is no water in the gardens to provide the famous reflections. There is also bamboo scaffolding - it is always of bamboo in India - around one of the corner towers which is being repaired. The touts are numerous and persistent - guides, and sellers of trinkets and mementoes, including little alabaster models of the Taj. The guides include a young English couple trying to earn a few rupees.
My driver is waiting patiently outside, eager to take me on a tour of the city. I agree to this, in spite of all the warnings in all the guide-books ever written. Sure enough, we head straight for a jewellery factory and showroom. I deny firmly any intention to buy, but am shown round courteously, At the next stop, an inlaid marble factory where craftsmen are at work with small hand-drills, the owner is more insistent. I explain that I have no wish to carry around a slab of marble, even a small one, packed in my rucksack for the next three months: I am assured that it can be stored for me, packed, sent to England without charge, and so on. Still unencumbered by any purchases, we drive on to a carpet store, where I decline an offer of coffee, but take a seat while the dealer unrolls carpet after carpet with a magnificent flourish. He runs a sort of multiple cottage industry, two or three hundred villagers making carpets to his design. He is very disappointed at my failure even to enquire the price of his wares, and when we leave he upbraids the rickshaw driver at some length and with some ferocity, presumably for wasting his time with unprofitable and miserly tourists.
Next door there is a cricket bat factory, but it is not on our itinerary as the driver has no connection with it, and probably not many tourists buy cricket bats in Agra. I ask him to take me round the city, but no more shops please. He finds this difficult to understand, I just want to get my bearings, I explain. His puzzlement redoubles. 'Bearings?" he repeats doubtfully. Then his eyes light up, and I ask hastily to be returned to the Grand Hotel before he takes me round the engineering.workshops of Agra in search of the bearings which this eccentric tourist wishes to buy instead of jewellery and carpets.
At the Grand, preparations are in hand for a Hindu wedding reception in a marquee erected in the hotel grounds. During the evening, a procession of guests flows in, followed by the local band, and eventually the bridegroom on a white horse, looking embarrassed as well he might, being garlanded with marigolds and festooned with what appear to be banknotes, probably as a sign of prosperity to come. The horse is remarkably well-behaved considering the noise and the people. Crowds overflow into the hotel gardens. Groups of guests, joined by passers-by and hotel guests, start to jive, A good time is had by all, continuing far into the night.
In the morning I go by rickshaw to Agra Fort Railway Station to book a train seat for the next leg of my journey. I plan to travel west into Rajasthan as far as I can go, starting with Jaipur. The booking is quickly done - few people and no queues at the station. I cross the road to the towering walls of the Red Fort: it is still early and there are scarcely any tourists. The Fort covers a vast area, filled with gardens, mosques, and palaces. Jehangir's Palace and the Pearl Mosque are of breath-taking beauty. Some of the buildings are well-preserved, others in a depressing state of decay. Some desultory restoration is in progress, but not many people are working on it, whereas there are legions of gardeners performing the unskilled tasks of grubbing up weeds and keeping the lawns tidy.
After two hours at the Red Fort I walk back to the hotel, assuring numbers of disappointed rickshaw drivers that I liked walking and it was good exercise. As it is midday and the sun is vertically overhead, no doubt I am identified as an Englishman. Stopping at a restaurant for lunch, I meet Lesley Pollock, an agreeable young woman from Los Angeles, who is bound tor Jaipur to-morrow, and is planning a camel trek from Jaisalmer before going on to Thailand to meet a friend.
We agree to meet again for dinner, and I spend the afternoon walking round in Agra for several miles. The Lonely Planet advises that Agra is so spread out that a rickshaw is required for travelling around: this view is fully shared by the rickshaw drivers, However, I find it a pleasant city to stroll in, with tree-lined avenues alternating with congested market streets, thronged with horse and bullock carts as well as motor traffic of all varieties and the usual free-range cows.
From a roadside stall I buy two oranges. The seller weighs them meticulously in hand-held scales and charges me one rupee seventy-five, As change for my two rupees, he invites me to accept a banana which I gladly do, I find there is always a shortage of small change and one might be offered low value stamps, or occasionally sweets, After a short rest at the Grand Hotel, I walk back into the town centre to meet Lesley. We enjoy a good vegetable thali together before I return to the hotel by rickshaw, bearing in mind that the street lighting peters out half way,
FATEHPUR SIKRI
Next day I take a public bus to Fatehpur Sikri. It takes an hour from Agra, and the journey is comfortable, though the bus looks as if it will disintegrate at any moment and is indescribably filthy, Fatehpur Sikri, the capital of Akbar's Moghul empire for a brief fifteen years, and deserted for the last four hundred, stands frozen in time on a hill above the present-day village. It is a half-ruined city of sheer beauty, full of unexpected delights. Some of the buildings, such as the five-storied Panch Mahal, are of a surprising delicacy, The few visitors are outnumbered by hopeful guides, whose services I decline. I prefer to explore the place myself, though I am joined by Walter, a young Swiss graduate enjoying a three-week holiday in India. The place has a magical atmosphere, enhanced by the mystery of its abandonment so soon after construction, The most popular theory is that the new capital ran out of water supplies.
AGRA TO JAIPUR
One more day remains to me in Agra before I leave for Rajasthan where I hope to tour for three or four weeks. I spend this day walking emergetically through the streets of Agra, at first to the evident disapproval of the rickshaw drivers. Later, the word gets around, and drivers I have never seen before accost me:
"Rickshaw, sir?"
"No thank you. I prefer to walk. "
"Ah, walking. Exercise!" And they cycle off, shaking their heads at such deplorable eccentricity.
My departure from the Grand Hotel co-incides with a sharp rainstorm. It is two miles to Agra Fort Station and I will get very wet if I walk. The driver of the motor-cycle rickshaw outside the hotel quotes me a price that fully reflects the market economics of a heavily laden tourist leaving in a downpour to catch a train. I start walking. The rain comes down harder. On the way I see a dilapidated cycle rickshaw whose driver asks a more reasonable price and we do a deal. He puts up a decrepit canopy to protect me but I am wet through by this time. I arrive at the station in good time, and I am pleased to find that my Rohan outfit dries out completely in half an hour. On the station I meet a 27-year old English journalist who is also going in the direction of Jaipur. He is travelling second class: I do not see any first class compartments when our train arrives, so I am glad to stay with Simon and at the same time broaden my Indian railway experience.
After reading politics at Warwick, Simon worked as a reporter on local papers. Recently he has been appointed editor of a motor-racing weekly run by the owner of Brands Hatch speedway. We board a compartment with wooden benches designed to seat six passengers on either side. At least double that number are crammed into the seats, while the number of passengers standing in the narrow aisle between the benches increases at each of the frequent stops - after the train at last leaves Agra an hour and a half late. When all the available space inside is full, fresh passengers boarding the train stand on the outside, clinging to the.window rails. Conversation passes effortlessly between inside and outside passengers, flowing across Simon and myself. We are the objects of persistent but good-humoured curiosity. Our Indian companions have very little English, but what they have they are determined to practise on us. Where do we come from? What are our names: How much did our watches cost, our rucksacks, our shirts, our shoes.? I find the conversation heavy going, but Simon establishes an enviable rapport with our interrogators.
I had planned to leave the train at Bharatpur, stay a day or two at the famous bird sanctuary, and then board the same train later in the week to continue my journey. It is clear, however, that this train could not be joined at Bharatpur except by clinging to the windows trom the outside, so I decide to stay on until Jaipur. The landscape begins to change towards desert, quite flat apart from big outcrops of pink rock. Some of the outcrops are crowned with forts. Camels wander by occasionally, and groups of peacocks, the national bird of Rajasthan, The railway track crosses wide dried-up nullahs bridged by viaducts,
The journey from Agra to Jaipur lasts ten hours. We buy peanuts and bananas at wayside halts to keep us going. As we near Jaipur in the evening, the train begins to empty. Simon hopes he will have a berth to himself for the night journey onward to Jodhpur.
JAIPUR AND AMBER
On arrival I take a cycle rickshaw to the Hotel Bissau on the outskirts, chosen as usual from the Lonely Planet. It used to be the palace of one of the Jaipur princes, a fairly junior prince judging from its modest scale. I am allotted a comfortable room in an Annex which has been added after the period of princely occupation. In front of the hotel is an imposing driveway, dominated by a pair of substantial cannon. Behind the hotel is a swimming-pool, now drained for the winter except for a few inches of water that provide an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. The main building houses half a dozen bedrooms and a lounge with parquet flooring and lifesize portraits of princes in ceremonial dress. The setting is completed by collections of swords, and a library reflecting the tastes of a nineteenth century English country gentleman,
In the morning I walk down the wide streets or modern Jaipur to the Circuit House, noted for its bargain breakfasts. I book a local tour for to-morrow, and a train for Jodhpur for the day after. The weather is ideal for walking, sunny with a cool breeze, typical of the days I am to enjoy throughout my stay in Rajasthan. The wind is usually strong and steady enough to support a fair population of kites, mostly simple contraptions of sticks and cloth or paper.
As everyone knows, the old walled city of Jaipur is entirely pink. The pink has a slightly orange shade rather than reddish: it is a most attractive colour. This is the colour of the original stone from which the oldest buildings were constructed. Later buildings of stone or brick have been dyed the same pink by order of the Maharajah. The total effect is undeniably pleasing and gives the whole place an air of unity,
.The streets are crowded with people, camels, horses, pigs, oxcarts, monkeys stealing fruit from the market stalls, and cows strolling around oblivious of the traffic or lying down in the most inconvenient places. There is a herd of thirty to forty healthy looking black cows who spend most of the day at a road junction near the Hotel Bissau. They are taken for a regular daily walk, but I do not discover whether this leads them to a field of grass or whether they just go on hoovering the vegetable and other street refuse.
I have lunch in a thali restaurant where the owner has no English but regularly refills the compartments in my dish with rice, lentils, and a sort of cabbage. Eventually I have to discourage him. To the south of the city I find a well-kept park, and in the middle of it the 'Albert Hall', built in the 1880's by a British Colonel of Engineers, a fantasy of Victorian Hindu ornamentation, This houses a museum, a strange collection of everything under the sun - copies of Grecian friezes, dolls, snakes in bottles, all higgledy-piggledy with no system and little explanation, Typical, I am to find, of most of the smaller Indian museums. However, there are some good miniature Moghul paintings, and life-size displays of dancing figures dressed in colourful clothes and participating in the seasonal festivals of Rajasthan.
The great Rambagh Palace is my next target, but the first palace I find has become a newspaper office, one of many Jaipur palaces that has come down in the world, The Rambagh, when I do find it, is unmistakably very grand indeed, surrounded by magnificent lawns and gardens. It was the home of the last ruling Maharajah, who astutely turned it into a luxury hotel when his rule was ended.
My tour next morning starts with a drive to Amber, a few miles outside Jaipur along a road where we keep overtaking elephants. Amber was the ancient capital of Jaipur State. It is a stupendous fort and palace on a spectacular site. From the entrance over the moat, a steep road winds up to the fort high above, not a difficult walk, though the tourists are encouraged to take an elephant ride up. I prefer to walk. Within the fort is a great courtyard where the unwary tourist is beset by souvenir sellers and by the Amber monkeys which are extraordinarily agile, and very quick on the draw. On the surrounding hills an outer ring of fortifications follow the ridges for eleven miles. After viewing the Maharajah's luxurious apartments we are driven back towards Jaipur, and stop at a lake surrounding a summer palace which is to be converted to a hotel.
The tour takes us back to the centre of the city where we are shown round the City Palace. This is built of a golden yellow stone, and stands out as the only building in Jaipur which is not pink. From the roof we have a view of the whole city, with two large mirrors so arranged as to help the visitor admire the panorama. Finally we call at the Palace of the Winds, the romantic ornamented facade always featuring in brochures about Jaipur, but it is an anti-climax being in a main street and not as remarkable as the posters suggest. The photographers must take their pictures from an ingenious angle to achieve so striking an effect.
.In the evening at the Bissau, I meet Chris from Adelaide, a quiet and thoughtful teacher in his mid-thirties. Next morning we walk together up a steep hill to Tiger Fort immediately overlooking Jaipur. It is a short distance to walk, though hard work: the route for vehicles or rickshaws requires a detour of several miles, almost to Amber and back. In consequence, Tiger Fort is singularly free of tourists, guides, or souvenir sellers. The only other visitor we see is my old friend from Simla, Geoffrey Warnes, who has set up his tripod in an inner courtyard and is busy with his photography,
JODHPUR
Continuing my journey westward towards the extremity of Rajasthan and the Pakistan border, I catch a 2 p.m. train to Jodhpur. There are few other passengers, and my only companion in the compartment is a middle aged Belgian who works for a publishing firm in Paris. As we travel west, the landscape takes on even more of a desert character: isolated mountains rise to two thousand feet or more above the sandy plain. Between extensive stretches of desert are cultivated fields divided by banks into small plots like graves in a cemetery. The fields themselves are enclosed by bunds planted with coarse grasses, presumably to conserve water. Disdainful camels loom into view occasionally, but few people are to be seen in the fields or in the village settlements. As usual in India, there are no hedges: there are a lot of trees about twenty feet high scattered around. The new season's growth has been roughly hacked from the trees and is being dried in the sun for use as cattle food. This crude pruning, I am told, also encourages the trees to bear fruit - sangri, which is cooked, and eaten as a vegetable.
At Makhara Junction the train passes huge marble quarries, the source of the stone for the Taj Mahal. A fierce-looking railway attendant wishes to serve me an omelette, but I settle for a pot of tea. Towards dusk the train passes a long iine of cattle winding slowly over the plain, and irresistibly calling to mind Gray's Elegy, though there is no country churchyard within thousands of miles.
The train arrives at Jodhpur exactly on time at 21:15. In the sidings we pass the smartly painted and crested coaches of the Palace on Wheels luxury train. I settle into the Adarsh Niwas Hotel opposite the station, as usual following advice from the Lonely Planet. I sign in after a rather flamboyant Dutch lady of thirty-six - the hotel register keeps no secrets - to whom the proprietor is paying unwelcome attention, I enjoy a good meal in the hotel restaurant, which is one of the better eating-places in Jodhpur.
After breakfasting with an agreeably relaxed couple from the USA, Mark and Sarah, I walk through the old city and up to the Fort, one of the great forts of Rajasthan. Within the colossal ramparts the Maharajah's palace has become a museum, housing fine collections of miniatures, swords, ceremonial dress, howdahs, cradles for the royal babies, and much else besides, Official guides in immaculate military uniform escort you through innumerable palace suites, throne rooms, jewelled bedrooms, and the Conference Chamber where the ruling Maharajah sat.presiding over his advisers until his rule ended in 1947. He still owns the tort which was founded by one of his ancestors in 1459. The fortifications were not just for decoration: the ramparts display a fine collection of artillery, the piece de resistance being a 4.5 inch howitzer from 1918.
In the afternoon I plan the next stage of my journey, from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer and back by train and then by bus to Ajmer. The bus terminus is a mile and a half from the railway station, beyond a pleasant park where I sit for a while. A couple of passers-by engage me in a conversation from which it appears that they want to sell me something, so I move to another seat. No sooner do I sit down again than an Indian youth of about twenty rides up on a shining new bicycle and asks if I would mind chatting to him. His conversational objective is academic rather than commercial, relating to the study of tourism which he is undertaking at the local college.
"Why do you come to India? Do you wish to see ancient and historic sites? Or you admire the landscape? Do you come to meet different peoples? Or are you here for religious reasons?" "No, not religious reasons, All the other reasons," "Good, 54% of tourists come to visit ancient and historic sites. We have more tourists trom France than from any other country."
This seems unlikely to me, but I do not challenge his hard-won knowledge.
"Do you think Indian arrangements for tourists could be improved? You have suggestions?" "Well, your tourist information offices could me more helpful. Some are very good, others do not try very hard. And if your towns had better street signs it would be easier to find the way."
He thanks me warmly and writes down my suggestions. Many others occur to me in the next two months, but I have not made a note of my young friend's address.
In the 1940's the Maharajah of Jodhpur moved from his palace-fortress to a new palace outside the city, probably the last to be built by a ruling prince in India. It was designed by a British architect, and sited three miles to the south of the old city. It is a pleasant walk to this very grand palace, now in part a luxury hotel, in part a museum, and in part the present residence of to-day's maharajah. The museum is more extensive than that in the fort, and has more up-to-date exhibits including an electrically-operated cradle to rock baby princes to sleep. Fine tableware and washstand equipment is exhibited in cabinets, including monogrammed chamberpots complete with lids, presumably for safer transport through the long corridors of the palace.
On the way back I take a walk through the old town. My street map is little help here: the narrow lanes wind round, turn back on themselves, and sometimes peter out, It is difficult to maintain any sense of direction. Many of the lanes go through street markets, but some lead.to quiet residential backwaters where people keep their cows and rickshaw drivers wash down their vehicles. In any alley wide enough for the purpose, small boys are playing cricket.
In the evening I reach the station in good time to catch the night train for Jaisalmer. I check the platform for departure, and locate a train standing at the very long Platform Two to which I have been directed. I can find no-one who speaks English or can understand my question whether the train goes to Jaisalmer. I settle down comfortably to read in an empty compartment, Suddenly I realise that the departure time has arrived: there is no sign of activity and no-one else is about. Fearing the worst I rush out on to the platform and find a helpful Indian who tells me that the train in which I have been sitting for the last halfhour is due to go to Bikaner later in the night, and the train for Jaisalmer has just drawn in to the other end of the long platform. Together we rush along the platform just in time to see the Jaisalmer train pulling out of the station. "Shit!" exclaims my helper in impeccable English. I agree with his comment, go back to my hotel for the night, and prepare to catch the morning train to Jaisalmer next day and to return by night after my stay there, reversing my original plan.
Travelling by the morning train brings me new friends, Philippa and Johnny from Oxford. They enliven the eight hour journey through the desert, which would otherwise have been rather tedious,
JAISALMER
Arrival at Jaisalmer in darkness is an alarming experience, We are beseiged by jeep drivers - the jeep taxi being the only means of transport around the sands of Jaisalmer. Each driver fights to get us to his jeep and conduct us to the hotel of his choice. The three of us are resolved to stay at the Fort View, highly recommended by the Lonely Planet, but it is impossible to see where we are from the packed rear compartment of a jeep bumping over rough ground - there are roads of a sort in Jaisalmer but the drivers often keep off them to avoid police checks. When we stop outside a primitive square building alleged to be the Fort View I ask Johnny to reconnoitre before we all jump down. He reports that indeed it appears to be the Fort View, but in the event it falls far short of the Guide's description.
We wait a long time in a draughty hall before we are served with a filling meal, after which we retire to extremely basic bedrooms. At dawn I do a reconnaissance myself, and discover the true Fort View a few hundred yards further on, We have spent the night at the New Fort View, so named in order to mislead and ensnare the unwary traveller. We move out promptly to the real Fort View, which is simple and clean and a lot more comfortable. The bedrooms all boast a recess in the wall, so you don't have to keep your rucksack on the floor.
The staff, consisting of the delightful and voluble Mr. Wyas and his family, are a great deal more friendly than their rivals, though I am reproved by the Vyas grandson, who complains that I spurned his jeep last night in spite of his Fort View card. i explain that I could hardly be expected to identify him in the confusion outside the station..Mr. Vyas agrees. He was pressing the Rajasthan Tourist Authority to set up an office at the railway station and man it on the two occasions each day when trains arrived. They should organize an orderly system of transport to the Jaisalmer hotels and prevent the sort of fraud we had encountered.
We sit down to a tasty breakfast on the hotel roof, looking across to the huge fortress on the opposite hill: its stone walls slowly light up with a golden glow as the sun rises. The old city within the fortress walls is a delight, full of surprises, and I spend most of my stay in Jaisalmer exploring the mediaeval streets with their intricately carved buildings. Some of them are crumbling into ruins, some are perfectly preserved, with lattice work in honey coloured stone. All the habitable buildings are put to practical use; one, with a marvellously decorated interior, houses a primary school. At every corner there is a glimpse to yet another narrow street that seems to belong more to the Middle East than to India, dating from Jaisalmer's ascendancy seven or eight hundred years ago as an important staging post on the old caravan routes across Asia.
In empty squares among the ruins, boys are playing enthusiastic cricket. When I climb around the ramparts I find myself walking through rooms where people sleep, eat, and hang their washing, oblivious of the spectacular views over the city from their window spaces.
Mr. Vyas owns camels and encourages his guests to go on guided treks or various durations on them. I think this is his main source of income, enabling him to keep his hotel charges down to the equivalent of a couple of pounds a day. Having sampled camel rides at the London Zoo in my childhood, and having lived in the desert longer than most westerners, I decide against a camel trek, but accept the offer of a tour by jeep out to the Sam sand dunes forty miles west of Jaisalmer. My party includes Philippa and Johnny and their friend Anne Willcocks, a young Principal in the Civil Service (daughter of the famous Cambridge musician, and recently married to an Indian philosophy graduate from Oxford).
On the way out we halt at a remote desert village which I walk round with Anne. She is a relaxed traveller and establishes a good relationship with the villagers, though we have to discourage the children from following us around and asking for baksheesh. The area has suffered severely from drought: there has been virtually no rain for five years. Soon after, the district was to be visited by Ravjit Gandhi, who promised government aid and a piped water supply (no doubt richly deserved, but I understand that one of the main problems of the civil servants in Delhi is to reconcile with the national budget the promises made by the Prime Minister whenever he goes on tour). There is not a lot going on in the village but we hear a humming noise and follow it to its source. It is a diesel generator in a stone hut driving a flour grinder. Outside we see villagers at work on ropemaking: one man stands at a focal point while three others stand at the corners of a triangle about twenty yards from the centre.
.The jeep next stops at the sand dunes where camera-conscious camels pose superciliously against the sunset. Returning to the jeep, we have an anxious half hour waiting for our driver who seems to be having some trouble with the police. Whatever it is, it is resolved to everyone's satisfaction, though we are disconcerted when two armed soldiers join us in the back of the jeep. However, they demand nothing more than a lift back to town. Other travellers, I learn later, had a much worse experience, being stranded for several hours in their jeep while the desert night grew colder, until they forked out two or three hundred rupees which the driver insisted was needed to fix trouble with the police,
Next day I continue my exploration of Jaisalmer, treating myself to a 15 rupee lunch from the cheaper end of the menu of the expensive restaurant recommended by Anja, the Dutch woman first met at Jodhpur and re-encountered yesterday on the fort ramparts. By this time I am adjusted to living comfortably on about 75 rupees a day, three to four pounds. After lunch I sit on the hotel roof writing letters until Wyas junior invites me to his room to watch cricket on TV. India are building up a huge score, increased next day to 676, on an easy wicket at Kanpur against Sri Lanka, Gaveskar hitting a masterful century.
Philippa, Johnny, and Anne return at evening from their camel trek. It had been cold at night, close to freezing, Philippa complains she was mounted on an inexperienced camel which felt the need to follow close behind a more senior animal, so that her view throughout the trek was dominated by the hindquarters of the beast in front. Anne joins me for supper at the friendly Monica Restaurant, where we meet a young Swiss traveller and an English couple I last sighted in Delhi. He is a biscuit manufacturer who is re-visiting India after a first trip fifteen years ago.
I catch the night train to Jodhpur, this time without mishap; it would be difficult to catch the wrong train at Jaisalmer as it is at the end of the line, I chat to the Sikh in the berth below me, who works in the military airport - there is no civil airfield at Jaisalmer, but a strong military presence as there is nothing here but miles of desert between us and the Pakistan border. My Sikh friend is being seen off by his venerable parents, his white-bearded father proving to be an exact contemporary of mine, whom he introduces as his Daddy and Mummy. We settle down to a cold journey through the night. Sand creeps through every crevice and under my thin blanket. The berth opposite is occupied by a heavy snorer.
AJMER AND PUSHKAR
At Jodhpur I remember there was a rather good Tourist Bungalow near the bus station, although I didn't stay there. I walk along there with Anne for a badly needed wash and breakfast. It was a mile away, rather a pleasant walk I thought, but Anne told me some years later that she thought we might have taken a rickshaw - 'You would be more comfortable, John, if you allowed yourself six pounds a day instead of five'). Anne then takes a bus to the airport for a plane to Delhi: she is then going to fly to South India to rejoin her husband and meet some of his family.
I catch the 'luxury bus', indeed a very comfortable one, to Ajmer. The first half of the five hour journey is through desert. We stop for refreshment at the Halfway House, an incongruously smart venture by the State Tourist Board, situated nowhere in particular. The second half of the journey takes us through more varied country, through valleys studded with rocks, between mountains three thousand feet high, As we approach Ajmer we see some cultivated fields but the countryside is still very dry. We arrive in mid-afternoon, very dusty, I book into the Tourist Bungalow, and look forward to a good shower. However, Ajmer is in the grip of a severe drought, and the water supply is switched on only between seven and eight in the evening. So now I look forward to a shower in the evening, only to find that the water heater in my room is not working.
My domestic life in Ajmer turns out to be dominated by unavailing attempts to get hot water. I would be quite content with a bucketful: this I request and am regularly promised night and morning, but it never materialises. Eventually I attach myself in desperation to the man detailed by the manager to bring me the hot water and threaten that I will never leave his side until he produces it, What elaborate preparations would be needed, what problems had defeated the management for three days, I cannot imagine, and am resolved to discover. The man I am following begins to look worried, but after a while he picks up a bucket, walks down the stairs with it, and fills it from a tap at the bottom end of a very large boiler. After a good wash I keep the bucket, and for what little time remains of my stay, I fill the bucket myself without the skilled assistance of the staff. I never find out why the task was regarded as so difficult: I suspect a lack of commitment.
Other frustrations dog my first morning in Ajmer, I plan to walk around the city, to find the railway station and book the next stage of my
journey, and to change travellers' cheques at a bank, I use a local street map, but few roads are named so I navigate largely by orientation, the sun being always visible. For once I find myself totally baffled and waste a lot of time and energy before I realise that the map, in spite of displaying an arrow pointing north, is in fact 90 degrees out. Life becomes simpler after this discovery: I find the railway station, and eventually the State Bank of India where I am told I can change my cheques, as in most Indian cities, However, in Ajmer the State Bank does not change American Express cheques, which are handled by the Bank of Baroda at the other end of town. I arrive there just after two o'clock, which happens to be the closing time for the Bank of Baroda to change travellers' cheques.
At the Tourist Bungalow I meet John Baggeley, headmaster of a school near Wakefield, and his wife. They are taking a five week holiday in India, visiting several friends en route. They booked all their travel and accommodation in advance, but found their expensive hotel in Ajmer so unsatisfactory that they moved into the Tourist Bungalow. They are about to move on to Udaipur and then to Bombay as I shall.
Ajmer is a big industrial and commercial city, not particularly attractive. I have come here because there are a number of places of interest - architectural and historic sites as my friend from Jodhpur.might say - and it is on my way through the south of Rajasthan to Bombay. Also it is near Pushkar, a favourite stopping place for travellers.
One quite extraordinary place I visit is a huge Jain temple, Ajmer being the headquarters of the Jain religion. Within the temple is an enormous hall which houses a model about a hundred feet across, displaying the universe according to Jain legend, with concentric worlds of fantastic construction, ladders leading from one level of reality to another, and other complex and mysterious structures. The hall also contains dozens of models, each ten to fifteen feet high, of every Jain temple in India, with all their extravagant detail meticulously reproduced. A young man who volunteers to show me round tells me that all the models are made of solid gold, It looks like gilt to me, and I feel that the security would be rather tighter if there was all that gold about. The young man is himself a Jain, but not an official guide. He invites me to visit his shop when we complete the tour of the temple, and is disappointed when I plead another engagement.
After the Jain temple I find my way, having now correctly oriented my map, to Akhbar's Fort, where Sir T. Roe presented his credentials from James the First to the Emperor Jahangir in one of the earliest episodes in the history of the British in India. It is a strictly functional fort with no superfluous decoration: it houses a down at heel museum poorly displayed. Later I wander through the back streets to the lake at the edge of the city, attracting on the way the attention of a group of small boys who demand money and throw stones at me when I refuse. The lake is the source of Ajmer's water supply, and also appears to cope with the entire laundry of the city. The water level is exceptionally low because of the drought but the lake is still a mile wide. At one end I find some well cared for public gardens and a plant nursery with twenty-three varieties of bougainvillea for sale.
I breakfast next morning with two young German women, on a five week holiday from a publishing firm in Munich. They are rather the worse for wear, one suffering from tummy trouble, the other from flu. In Jaipur, a centre for precious and semi-precious stones, they were sold ruby and emerald jewels for 6000 rupees. They soon found out that they had bought coloured glass. Luckily they had paid by credit card, sped hotfoot to Delhi, and recovered their money with the aid of American Express.
After breakfast I catch the local bus to Pushkar, just half an hour's journey over the Snake Mountain Pass and down to the holy lake around which Pushkar is built. As I get off the bus, I meet Alain and Valerie starting off on their morning walk. It seems a long time since we were together in Manali and we embrace warmly. They take me back to their hotel, simple but clean and overlooking the lake, where their fellow guests are sunbathing on the roof. There is no glass in the bedroom windows and any fruit or small articles of any description that are left around are promptly pilfered by the Pushkar monkeys. Earlier that morning Valerie had been enjoying a lie-in when she was shaken awake. She told Alain to ieave her alone before she discovered that it was not Alain but a large and sociable monkey.
We go down to a pleasant restaurant, the 'Sunset', by the lakeside and enjoy our lassis together, I hear that 'Bhang lassi", reflecting Pushkar's reputation as a hippie haven, is a local delicacy, but we prefer to stick to banana flavour. We stroll around the town which has considerable charm. Admittedly there is a tourist air about the place, the lakeside being lined with restaurants as well as with temples and bathing ghats. And the children tend to ask tor money, while other characters shuffle alongside with offers to change money or sell hash. But the natural setting is superb, the calm lake surrounded by a rim of hills, with higher mountains in the distance beyond. There is a pervading sense of relaxation, perhaps surviving from the age of the hippies who are no longer to be seen.
In early afternoon we climb a small hill, a few hundred feet high, and later go on a much stiffer expedition to a temple up hundreds of stone steps to enjoy a ravishing sunset view over Pushkar. The surrounding landscape is desert for the most part, but there are several villages scattered in green patches against the sandy background. I leave my friends after dusk to return to Ajmer, with a tentative understanding that we shall meet to-morrow.
Next morning is Christmas Day but there is nothing in Ajmer to indicate that it is anything other than a normal working day. I walk through the narrow streets of the old city to the Dargan Mosque where there is a Saint's tomb. The Mosque is part of a vast complex of courtyards and shops, a curious mixture of holiness and commercial activity. To enter the building where the Saint is buried, you leave your shoes outside and cover your head. As you go in, a holy man touches your face with a soft brush. The courtyard outside is thronged with beggars: official notices enjoin you to give alms only to 'authorised persons', including 'Destitutes in Q', but I cannot see any queuing destitutes. Beyond the Durgah, at the edge of the city, are the magnificent remains of a twelfth century mosque with elaborately decorated red stonework.
At midday I board a very crowded bus for Pushkar. On arrival, I see fifty or sixty people waiting for the bus for the trip back to Ajmer. The bus has only one combined entrance and exit, centrally placed so that passengers converge from each end of the bus to disembark. They meet head-on an incoming stream of enthusiastic travellers who have no intention whatever of letting passengers off the bus first, I he predictable result is ten minutes of solid jamming with no movement at all except for the more agile travellers who are able to climb in and out of the bus windows.
When at last I can emerge from the bus, I make my way to the Sunset, where Alain and Valerie are sitting. During our lunch I am stung by a small bee, Alain removing the sting with no difficulty, We walk right round the lake, skirting the bathing ghats. Pushkar is small enough to make sure that you meet anyone you know who may be staying there, and we soon run across Philippa and Johnny from Jaisalmer. When I go to the bus stop to return to Ajmer, the same crowd scene is enacted as in the morning, but this time a very large man wishing to descend the steps picks up a very small man who is trying to get in, and deposits him back at.ground level. This facilitates the exit of the arrivals, and so many passengers are disgorged that I wonder if it is a stage army in constant procession: in fact they must all have been travelling in the bus, difficult though it is to visualize. Despite the crowds, it is a lovely journey back across Snake Pass, with the wild bougainvillea almost fluorescent in the evening light. At the top of the pass is a shrine, housing a resident holy man, who comes aboard the bus, gives us all his blessing, and collects contributions.
From Ajmer I catch an evening train to Udaipur, sharing a compartment with a friendly public health doctor, whose realm covers the whole of Rajasthan and some other areas beside, He is locked after by a companion from the second-class area who combines the duties of clerk and general servant, checking through the official papers with the doctor as well as bringing him tea and food, making his bed, and looking after his luggage, it is a slow train, stopping frequently through the night. Noisy conversation in the small hours suggests that there are fifteen to twenty talkative passengers in the next compartment. There is great activity at one stop, probably Chittagaurh, where I hoped originally to visit the Fort and Victory Tower, but the train times were even more inconvenient than usual, and I assume (incorrectly as it turns out) that I will be able to take a day trip there from Udaipur.
UDAIPUR
My last stay in Rajasthan is to be at Udaipur, city of lakes and palaces. The train arrives punctually at eight on the morning of Boxing Day, and I take a rickshaw to a rather up-market hotel, the Anand Bhavan, recommended by Geoffrey Warnes. They claim to be full up, though the way the reception clerk looks at me suggests that they simply regard me as an unsuitable guest. However, they helpfully direct me to the nearby Hilltop Hotel, which at the very reasonable price of 100 rupees proves to be the most clean and comfortable hotel I encounter in the entire trip, as well as offering a lovely view over one of the lakes.
At breakfast I meet again Anja de Jongh, who tells me that all trains to Bombay, my next destination, are fully booked for several days ahead; she is therefore abandoning her visit there and flying straight on to Bangkok. Later I find that the first train I can book is for the night of December 31st, so I settle down to enjoy five days rest at Udaipur. The railway station is on the far side of the old city. I find I can get a seat on a day train to Ahmedabad on 31st December, and the reservation officer will telex Ahmedabad to book a sleeper from there to Bombay. There will be no problems, I am told. As I walk back alongside a mile of railway embankment, I see families living in shacks made of sacking supported by wooden poles. The dwellings, if primitive, are roomy and well-spaced out: inside are few possessions except for pots and pans. Surprisingly, the families look clean, well-fed, and cheerful. On the other side of the road, I step over a dead rat.
As David had told me, Udaipur is a most pleasant place in which to relax. Half surrounded by a string of lakes ringed with parks, gardens and hills (and marred only by the occasional open sewage outfall into.the lakes) it is the most attractive city on my itinerary. I enjoy simply walking around, climbing some of the hills, and generally covering five or six miles a day. There are places of historic interest too, the mosque and old town being a couple of miles from the hotel, while nearer at hand is a newer quarter with shops and restaurants.
One day I come across a festive procession led by elephants, followed by horses, bands, drums, boy scouts, and men and women contingents in a variety of uniforms. There must be several hundred in the procession, and they make a great din, enhanced by alarming explosions of firecrackers. Triumphal arches of wood and bamboo have been erected along the route, decorated with fruit and flowers. At the head of the procession is an old man seated on an elephant: he is a holy man venerated in this area, and to-day is his seventy-fifth birthday. After the procession has passed through, small boys swarm up the flimsy supporting poles of the triumphal arches, and throw down the fruit from a height of fifteen feet to their companions, while the whole structure sways dangerously and seems about to collapse, Ail this is plainly regarded as part of the fun.
In the old town, facing one of the lakes, is the city palace, an extensive complex of courtyards and museums. The art gallery houses some delightful paintings of ceremonial processions and hunting scenes. They are painted in a style that takes no account of perspective; all the figures look as if they are cut out and stuck on. Another gallery displays faded photographs of British military commanders and governors from the time of Colonel Lawrence to the 1940's. Another photo shows the Maharajah of Udaipur with Edward Prince of Wales.
In the afternoon I join a local coach tour and meet a young English couple, Richard and Gloria, who are on holiday trom Hong Kong where they work, he as an architect, she as a lawyer, the rest of the party are all Indian. The tour is not brilliant, in fact it is excessively boring at times because the explanations of the guide are directed, naturally, at the Indian members of the group, and translation for the three English is at best perfunctory. We drive first to Haldighetti, a famous battlefield where the people of Udaipur retained their independence in a successful fight against 16th century invaders. We are shown complicated diagrams of the battlefield displayed on the walls, the crucial fight having taken place in a narrow defile; and a memorial to a particularly gallant horse which, though severely injured, carried the wounded Udaipur leader to safety.
The next stop is at Nathdawar, a busy town with a 16th century temple to Wishnu. The temple is of especial sanctity, and no unbelievers are allowed to cross the threshold. It is a mile or two from where the coach stops, and tourists are expected to support the local economy by completing their journey in a horse-drawn carriage at an exorbitant price. Richard, Gloria, and I decide to walk, to the annoyance of our tour guide who probably has an arrangement with the horse drivers. During the walk I get into conversation with a gentleman from Ahmedabad who makes the 300 mile trip to Nathdawar once every month to worship at the temple, though he avoids the full moon when the place becomes very crowded.
.We travel from place to place on roads little wider than the bus, bordered on either side by loose earth or sand, When raced by an oncoming car, our driver keeps straight on at full speed until with seconds to spare the car swerves off the road to avoid a collision, the battle of wills being decided in favour of the larger vehicle. It is dark by the time we reach the 8th century ruins of Eklinga and the nearby Shiva temple. Here the guide is paying no attention at all to the English speakers, so I insist on our minority rights and grasp him firmly by the arm while he goes round the temple and explains its history and significance. The Indian members of the party do not require his services here as they are all busy at their devotions, this again being a particularly holy shrine. When we return late to Udaipur, we eat at the Green Lagoon restaurant near the Hilltop Hotel.
Another day I visit the famous Lake Palace with Anja, It is now a luxury hotel that occupies the whole of an island on the main lake, and I am told that it featured in a James Bond film. We go over in a small boat and walk into the interior courtyards, containing fine gardens with massed bougainvillea in flower, but no views outward over the lake. The tourist trip to the Lake Palace includes tea at the hotel, but the visitors are carefully segregated from the residents in line with India's traditional caste system, However, I spot John and Sarah Baggeley among the residents, and we defeat the caste system by taking tea with them in the residents' lounge. They are leaving to-night for Bombay where they will stay at the Taj Hotel (at that time said to be the most expensive in India) this being a silver wedding present from their daughter.
Anja is proving to be a tiresome companion. I confess to being easily irritated by people who constantly complain or grumble, and Anja is inclined to go on about dirty lavatories and Indian standards of hygiene in general, though she has travelled extensively elsewhere in Asia. It is much easier to ignore these things if you are not accompanied by someone who is constantly drawing attention to them, and if you're that squeamish, then why for Heaven's sake come to India!
We try to arrange to stay at the Lake Palace for dinner, but find that we should have booked in advance. Instead, we watch a display of Rajasthan folk dancing on the hotel terrace. The programme includes a 'Peacock Dance' and various turns with a young woman balancing up to six bowls on her head. The costumes are brilliantly coloured, the dance movements are delicate and graceful. Several of the dances enact traditional stories, difficult to follow without any explanation. Anja is complaining as usual - not the genuine article, she says - but an American couple on my other side are more appreciative.
Next morning I have trouble with the hot water in my bedroom. Nothing unusual about that, you might think - except that this time it is a question of too much rather than too little or none at all. The tap somehow unscrews itself and very hot water spurts all over the bathroom. I try to staunch the flow and turn it off with my thumb and forefinger and get scalded and blistered before I find a stopcock under the sink and bring everything under control again.
.At breakfast I meet two Danish young women, Anja having mercifully departed for Delhi and Bangkok. The Danes look remarkably alike though they are not related, and are confusingly named Susan Jensen and Suzanne Jansen. They are each twenty years old and on holiday from the new university near Copenhagen where all marks and degrees are awarded to groups and not to individuals. Over Christmas they were stranded in Goa where the language riots brought all transport to a stop and they had to walk eight miles with their packs before they could catch a bus to the airport.
My morning walk takes in the Nehru Park on the northernmost Fateh Saga Lake and a visit to the equestrian statue of Pratap on a hill overlooking Udaipur. He was a 16th century local hero who defeated the Moghuls. In the evening I go with the two Susans to the Green Lagoon and help them to order pulao, kotta, aller mutter and so on since they seem to know little about Indian food. However they do not like the look of it and eat only rice so I finish up with an enormous meal for myself. My companions are going on later to Thailand, Indonesia, and Canada, returning to their studies after a year on holiday.
On my last day in Udaipur I take a longer walk, climbing to the hilltop temple overlooking Lake Fateh Saga, up 568 steps, I continue right round the lake, about six miles, and am befriended and accompanied by two Indian boys of sixteen riding the same bicycle and hoping to practise their rudimentary English. We exchange addresses and I take their photograph, being solemnly enjoined to post it to them, but unhappily this was one of my films that was washed out. I enjoy a quiet evening in the company of the two Susans.
UDAIPUR TO BOMBAY
On the morning of 31st December I arrive at the station in very good time, as usual, but there is no need for this as the train arrives almost empty in Udaipur and I have a compartment to myself for most of the twelve hours to Ahmedabad. We are pulled by a slow steam locomotive of some antiquity, belching out clouds of steam and coal dust, and puffing up hills with the greatest difficulty, often pausing near the top to gather its resources for a final effort. The other passengers know what to expect, and climb down at these unscheduled halts to stretch their legs or for other purposes, remounting in leisurely fashion as the engine slowly gets under way again.
There are also many official stops at small neat villages set in a landscape that grows softer and greener as we move southward, and becomes undulating in a fashion remarkably similar to the Lake District. There are even dry stone walls, though only three or four feet high. Some of the mountains seem to reproduce familiar Cumbrian landmarks: I recognize twins of Bowfell and Crinkle Crags.
We arrive at Ahmedabad at 9. 15 p.m. The Gujerat Express is due to leave for Bombay at 10:30. The reservation lists are displayed on the platform: my name is not on them despite the efforts of the booking clerk at Udaipur. A kindly Indian, observing my anxiety, leads me to the Ahmedabad reservation clerk, He has never heard of me and regrets.that there are no vacancies unless some cancellations come through at the last moment. Slowly he shuffles through long lists of names, l begin to form a distinct impression that cancellations might be facilitated by some form of financial inducement. I am damned if I am going to play that game, and am prepared to spend a night at Ahmedabad and continue to Bombay in the morning, so I sit in his office while the minutes tick by. Ten minutes before the Express is due to depart, by some mysterious means the clerk divines that there is indeed a vacancy, and I find my coach and berth just before the train leaves, there are at least half a dozen vacant berths in the long compartment.
The Gujurat Express is a splendidly appointed train, of which any railway service in the world could be proud. The compartments are built on a generous scale: in the second class there are two tiers of seats one above the other - a double-decker. In the first-class sleepers, a corridor runs the length of the compartment. On one side there are curtained cubicles each with four berths, on the other there are pairs of berths one above the other along the line of the train and open to the corridor. My reservation is for an upper berth in one of these pairs, but no ladder or step is visible and I can see no obvious means of climbing up. I notice a young Indian woman further down the corridor apparently about to retire to an upper berth, and think I might do well to study and emulate her technique. She seems poised to vault skyward when she senses that she is being observed, and shoots a disapproving glance at me. My natural delicacy obliges me to avert my gaze, and the next time I look in her direction she is asleep in the upper berth. However, since no-one has taken my lower berth, the simpler course is to abandon the gymnastics and settle into it myself. I do so and am not disturbed.
Soon after I have settled down, an attendant comes down the corridor, bearing piles of blankets, pillows and spotless linen. It is a warm night and I am quite content to sleep in my clothes with no covering except for an anorak that I pull round my shoulders in the small hours.
BOMBAY
When the Gujerat Express arrives in Bombay at seven on New Year's morning, the air is warm and humid, I am much further south now than at any other stage of my travels. In Bombay rickshaws of all kinds are forbidden. I take a taxi to the waterfront where several modestly priced hotels are listed in the Lonely Planet within a short distance of the luxurious Taj. At the second attempt I find one that has vacancies though it has obviously seen better days. I have been travelling for a long time since Udaipur and am glad to settle into a room. The hotel enjoys a splendid position facing the harbour, is equipped with a primitive air-conditioning which seems to work after a fashion, albeit with a lot of fuss and noise, and hot water is available in buckets. The paint is peeling from the walls, the fabric of the building is crumbling away in places, and there is a pervasive smell of drains, but there is nothing seriously wrong. Hotels being relatively expensive in Bombay, I feel I have done well to find somewhere tolerable for under ten pounds a might in a good central area.
.There are some good inexpensive restaurants nearby, Bombay apparently being a cheap place for eating though costly for hotels. Several small bars in the area of my hotel are selling ice cream and fruit juice, and I find a friendly place serving excellent mango juice.
I plan to spend only two or three days in Bombay, which seems a very westernized city - not the real India, I feel. I begin my first day with a comprehensive personal wash and clothes laundering, everything being covered with black dust from the ancient steam train that took me from Udaipur to Ahmedabad, The romance of steam, I think wryly. I follow it with a good breakfast at a restaurant a couple of hundred yards back from the waterfront, and a successful collection of mail at the Post Office. The city is crossed by wide thoroughfares with orderly traffic, pedestrian crossings, and the usual paraphernalia of western civilisation. Many buildings are of Victorian substance and dignity, paramount among them being the railway station which out-pancrasses St. Pancras, I spend much of the morning in queues, patronising four in the Post Office before finding the right counter, and three in the railway station before securing my reservation. My booking is for a train arriving in Aurangabad at 4 a.m., an unpromising hour.
On a hut, sultry, afternoon, I set out to visit Elephanta Island, so called by the Portuguese, to see its ancient rock-carvings. For this purpose I join another queue, this one on the waterfront near the Gateway to india. This is a slightly larger version of London's Marble Arch, and being similarly dwarfed by later and larger buildings, it now seems much too small. Considering the size of India, one would expect a bigger gateway,
Here are two queues, one for the luxury tour to the island, one for the ordinary. There being little difference in the price, I opt for the luxury, and in consequence have to wait much longer for a boat. The ordinary tourists board a regular flow of smaller craft every fifteen minutes, while the luxury queue waits an hour and a half. Several times a craft appears in the harbour apparently heading straight for us, but after much shouting and waving it invariably turns and heads for another landing point. At last one boat, after great confusion, is induced to pick us up, though by now rumours are going the rounds that by the time we reach Elephanta the tide will be too low, or too high, to land there.
The boat takes about a hundred passengers, and the pleasantly cool journey to our destination lasts over an hour. We arrive at quarter to five and transfer to small flat-bottomed boats in order to reach a landing quay where the water is little more than eighteen inches deep. After more shouting we are told that we will have to be quick, and return within half an hour, or there will not be enough water to embark in the small boats and we will have to spend the night on the island without electricity and other comforts. As no-one has come prepared to spend the night away from home, the prospect is unattractive: there is also talk of giant and ravenous mosquitoes.
Our party is in the charge of an attractive young woman from Bombay, who is married and works part-time as a guide. I protest to her at the way we are being rushed, but of course she has no authority over the boatmen, still less over the tide, and has no option but to carry out her duties as guide as best she can, and to shepherd us back to the boats in time to embark. She concedes, however that the boatmen are probably exaggerating.
We climb up a hill to the caves, where our guide gives us a swift but competent commentary on the ancient carvings, discovered by the Portuguese and partly destroyed by them on grounds of public morality and of inconsistency with the true Catholic faith which had no place for the portrayal of the Hindu Pantheon. Since the daylight is now beginning to fall, it is difficult to make out the detail in some of the darker caves, but the figures are beautifully executed, carved out of the solid rock. One of the caves leads to a stone lingam, delicately described by our guide as the symbol of the renewal of life. It would have been good to have spent longer looking round, but our guide urges us to retrace our steps to the waiting boats, just in time to float off before being grounded for the night. We have a choppy passage back to the harbour which is silhouetted against a colourful sunset, while the wind blows up, spray comes over the side, and the thinnest sliver of a new moon appears in the sky.
In the evening I tuck into a generous thali, joining two young women, one English and one Canadian, in a nearby restaurant, They are travelling on to Goa to-morrow, the English girl wishing to move further south after a bout of bronchitis in Kashmir. Next day I walk for miles exploring Bombay, again being struck by its western ambience, and the almost complete absence of the animal life which throngs every other Indian city, the only exceptions being the occasional smart horse and buggy. For much of the day I feel that I might just as well have been walking around in Brussels between skyscrapers and ponderous nineteenth century buildings.
I call in at the Prince of Wales Museum, better set out than must, where there are fine antiquities as well as modern ivory carvings and jewel boxes. In the afternoon I sit in the cool comfort of the vast square lounge of the Taj Hotel, in company I am sure with many others who have no right to be there, savouring the air-conditioning, writing my letters, and reading Smiley's People. By evening, the city is cool enough for me to walk across the peninsula to the magnificent sweep of Marine Drive where I watch the sun setting over the Indian Ocean. I pass through the fishing area of the beach, where fishing families and others live in primitive shacks, the surroundings are squalid, but - as with similar dwellings in Udaipur - everyone seems to be cheerful: gangs of youths are playing ball games with great noise and energy. I am told of other communities who have established their homes in large concrete pipes stored for use in a sewage scheme, but I do not see them.
On my last day in Bombay, I am obliged to check out of my hotel by half past seven in the morning, and since my train does not leave until evening, I spend a quiet day, including another session in the lounge of the Taj, instead of rushing around and getting hot and bothered. The.temperature continues to hover around 90 degrees while the humidity is uncomfortably high. My train leaves the Victoria Terminus at seven: as usual i arrive at the station in good time. and I find my reserved seat in a comfortable and not overfull 'chair coach', Here I meet John Menzo from Guelph, Ontario, who is also heading for Aurangabad and Ajanta. He is a teacher of thirty-five who has taught in the remote Canadian North, the West Indies, and East Africa, and is currently at a school in Kuala Lumpur. Although he has travelled widely in Africa he seems ill prepared for Indian journeys, carrying his luggage in four separate bags which are going to give him trouble on crowded trains and buses, Yesterday, his first day in India, he left his baggage at his hotel, with no locks on any of it, and is surprised that his expensive camera was stolen.
AURANGABAD
I am going to Aurangabad because it is a good jumping off point for the paintings at Ajanta and the carvings at Ellora. Halfway there, at midnight, we change trains at Manmad Junction, Chaos reigns there; no-one has any knowledge of the reservations we made in Bombay. However, we are able to make new reservations on the spot, and climb straightway into our sleeper berths. The two other passengers in our compartment are conducting a noisy conversation, in Hindi I think, until John asks them politely to desist, after which we get in some useful sleeping hours before we reach Aurangabad at four in the morning.
The night is pitch black. A few passengers leave the train with us and vanish into the night, presumably spirited away in the motor-cycle rickshaws that awaited the train, John and I board one and ask to be taken to a hotel named in the Lonely Planet Guide. The hotel is dark and silent, the only sign of life coming from a surly night-watchman who tells us there are no rooms. I try to persuade him, with the aid of a couple of rupees, to let us sleep in the corridor until the hotel staff arrive, but in vain. We move on to our second choice from the Guide, with exactly the same result, I now ask our driver to take us to the Youth Hostel, and after ten or fifteen minutes' drive we reach a long low building which he says is the Hostel. We dismount, only to find that it is some kind or military rest-house. By this time we have paid off the driver; I give him a generous ten rupees to take account of unsocial hours, and despite my protests John adds another ten because of the long drive to the Youth Hostel, After daybreak I find that not only are we in the wrong place, but the long journey was a circular tour that deposited us two hundred yards from its start.
We let ourselves into a room at the rest-house and disturb a sleeping figure who speaks no English but indicates he has no objection to our sharing his quarters. The room contains a few chairs, and a sofa which I invite John to occupy. Rather to my surprise, he being thirty years the younger, he accepts the invitation, and I doss down on the floor. It is only for an hour and a half, as it is growing light by six; leaving John asleep on his sofa, I reconnoitre the surroundings and locate both the Youth Hostel and our original hotel within a couple of hundred yards, The Hostel is the first to come to life: it is clean, and efficiently run by a friendly young woman from Goa, We tuck into a.welcome breakfast there before booking into the hotel where we share a room.
Aurangabad is a pleasant city, the area around the hotel being well laid-out with wide tree-lined streets. Half a mile up the main road is the main bus station, bustling with activity, where we eventually find the right place to book a tour to Ellora for to-morrow. This all takes time, of course, and John seems to find the procedure rather frustrating, though by this stage of my travels it seems perfectly normal to me. In the afternoon he retires to the hotel to make up for lost sleep while I take a long walk around the city. We go round to the Youth Hostel again for dinner, and chat to a young Israeli couple who tell us they linked up in Bombay with the Jewish community there who originated from Baghdad, Among Indian Jews, apparently, the armed services offer a popular career, and several of the senior officers in the Indian Army are of Jewish origin.
ELLORA AND DALAUTABAD
We board our bus soon after ten. I find I have mislaid my ticket. I am prepared to pay for a new one, but the tour guide suggests I may have left it in my hotel room, puts me in a rickshaw, and tells the driver to drive as fast as he can to my hotel. I come back in record time with the missing ticket and apologise to my fellow passengers - unnecessarily since for reasons unspecified we do not leave for another half hour. We break the journey at Dalautabad, one of the most remarkable and best defended ancient forts of India, built on a hill overlooking an immense area of plain, and fortified to an incredible degree. The central fortress is approached through seven concentric walls, and the inner defences are protected by huge doors with projecting iron spikes to deter charging elephants. The innermost citadel is on the summit of a sheer rock: the only access to it is via a narrow spiral staircase carved within the rock. We are taken into the darkness of this inner staircase, lit only by a flickering candle held aloft for our benefit, and wind our way to near the top. Once the leading wave of attackers, having penetrated the seven walls and crossed the moat, reached this point, we learn, their retreat is cut off by lowering a large boulder as a portcullis, and boiling oil is poured down from the top, It is a relief for us to get out again into the sunlight, Had the fort ever been taken? Yes, but by treachery.
At Ellora we first visit the great temple, and are then conducted round the best preserved of the caves. Carved put of the solid rock between 1500 and 2000 years ago, they are extraordinarily impressive. The thirty-four caves are hewn out of a sloping hill: the earlier are relatively simple Buddhist shrines, the later take the form of Hindu temples of great beauty and intricacy, with wonderfully sculpted figures. The largest carved out cave is 150 feet long, 100 feet wide, and 100 feet high. The creators must have been remarkable technologists as well as superb artists, and must have had a clear and complete vision of the finished product before they started to plan and execute the work in minute detail, working downwards from the rock surface,
.After two or three hours at Ellora, we go on to Aurangzeb's tomb, a smaller version of the Taj Mahal, and finally an ancient watermill on the outskirts of Aurangabad, I dine with John at the excellent restaurant attached to the hotel where we despatch a hearty meal including a four foot long pepper dosa. To keep him company, I drink a pint of Kingfisher beer, the first time I have tried Indian beer, and very good it is.
Next day we part company, as John is on his way to Goa, while I am planning another day in Aurangabad, a visit to Ajanta, and a journey onwards to Waranasi. At seven I go along with John to the bus station to help him aboard with his four pieces of luggage. This time, instead of the usual hassle to board the bus, my problem is to get off again before it leaves. It starts as soon as I have settled John in his seat with his luggage, and my line of retreat is cut off by other passengers climbing on at the last moment. I follow the local custom of banging on the roof to attract the driver's attention, and I manage to jump off just before the bus leaves the station. After that I spend an entirely disproportionate amount of the morning trying to book a room at the so called Holiday Camp at Fardapur, where I plan to stay for my visit to the Ajanta caves, I try to arrange this through the Tourist Coffice in Aurangabad, but I meet much frustration until by happy accident I run across the Fardapur manager on his weekly visit, Later I call on the Indian Airline office and book an amazingly cheap ticket - about 11 pounds - from Patna to Kathmandu, saving myself the tedious road trip into Nepal which I previously had in mind to follow my stay in Waranasi.
AJANTA
Next day I take the early tour bus for Ajanta, intending to stay on at Fardapur instead of returning with the tour to Aurangabad. The bus is very crowded, all seats being occupied and an equal number of passengers standing in the aisle. As there is no space anywhere for luggage. I put my pack on the floor in front of me, and wind my legs around it as far as the narrow space between seats permits. It is an uncomfortably iong two and a half hours to Ajanta.
The Ajanta caves were created between 1500 and 2000 years ago, but were lost under rubble and undergrowth until rediscovered by a British Army Officer early in the 19th century, The wall paintings are beautiful where they can be seen, some resembling Japanese art, others more like Italian primitives - one bearing an uncanny similarity to the Pollaiuolo with the heraldic lances in the National Gallery. All are of Buddhist origin. But many are badly damaged 'owing to natural disaster' as our guide explains. They are dimly lit, and each cave is far too crowded with tour parties. The rules permit only one party at a time in each cave, but in fact there are several parties in every cave, their guides competing to be heard, while their shouts mingle with the cries of small Indian children, brought along by their parents - mistakenly, I feel - for a jolly family outing. The general chaos does not add to enjoyment of the paintings. It is a very hot, humid, day: it is noon: the caves are hollowed out of the rock in a semi-circle facing due south. A lot of stairs have to be climbed between caves at different levels. Pleasure and wonder are severely qualified by the conditions.
.FARDAPUR
The local bus to Fardapur is due in an hour. A friendly official at the Ajanta bus station invites me to sit in his little shack and share it with him - and with a horde of mosquitoes. The bus takes me four miles to Fardapur. The Holiday Camp is a long low bungalow, divided into separate rooms, each with a mosquito net over the bed, and there is a restaurant at one end. However, no food is available there as the cook is on his week's holiday, It serves as a spare bedroom where four Germans spread their sleeping bags on the floor.
Fardapur would not be in the top ten in a competition for India's best kept village. It has little to offer the traveller except its proximity to Ajanta. A few shacks, including a couple of fly-blown eating places, line the main road. Away from the road is a scattering of dwelling huts alongside an open sewer. I find also a high-walled enclosure about two hundred feet square, now used - whatever its original purpose - to confine the local herds of cattle. As I walk down the muddy streets, I am hailed with enthusiastic hallos and good-byes by the local children who must have little enough opportunity to practise their English.
Originally I planned to return next morning to Ajanta as soon as the caves opened, so as to get a better look at the paintings before they are overwhelmed by tourists. But the experience had been so exhausting that I decide to save my energy for the long train journey to Waranasi. So I will head straight for Bhusawal Junction where I can pick up the train from Bombay, instead of returning to Bombay and adding several hours each way to my travelling time.
BHUSAWAL
The bus is almost empty and the going is comfortable. Apart from being an important railway junction, Bhusawal is a sizeable town of half a million people. There is some heavy industry on the outskirts: apart from that it is just like an overgrown village, There seems to be nowhere to eat except in the railway station, where I sit in a despondent restaurant until a waiter tells me with satisfaction that it closes at two'clock. It is just two, but as I have been waiting for quarter of an hour, I prevail on the manager to allow me to eat, and I am served with a plateful of cold, glutinous rice. In the afternoon I walk for hours through a featureless sprawl of nondescript buildings without finding anything faintly resembling a hotel. There is a clear case for trying the railway retiring rooms, under the charge of the DSS (the Deputy Station Superintendent). He is most helpful and will be pleased to accommodate me, although unfortunately no room will become free for two hours. An attendant allows me to leave my pack in the room to be vacated and I set out on another unrewarding walk around Bhusawal until the specified hour when I return to claim my room and enjoy, I hope, a well-earned shower and rest. I should have known better. The DSS is profuse in his apologies; the occupant of the room has decided to catch a later train; the room will be free, without fail, at seven. Feeling no compelling urge to explore Bhusawal any further, i settle myself down in the DSS's office, like a petitioner determined to secure justice even if he has to wait for months.
.I settle down in the railway office to read a paperback edition of Silas Marner, with an introduction for Indian students of English literature. Eventually the DSS tires of my brooding presence in his office and finds me a room. Thankfully I move into a large bedroom with its own shower and lavatory.
There follows the noisiest might I can remember since the set-piece battles for the Normandy break-out. Bhusawai Junction boasts over twenty platforms - the Clapham Junction of the east - and the retiring rooms are in the dead centre of the station. Every few minutes throughout the night a steam train clanks, chugs, and hoots its way through the station. Whistlings and shuntings add to the general clamour. Even the cistern in the lavatory, instead of totally refusing to flush in accordance with the normal conventions of the country, flushes loudly and spontaneously at two minute intervals from dusk to dawn.
FROM BHUSAWAL TO WARANASI
From the railway retiring rooms I am well placed to start enquiries about the train to Waranasi. The clerk in the enquiry office tells me with confidence that the train will leave at nine. He agrees eventually that it might well depart at eight as the railway time-table suggests. Doubt also overshadows the choice of platform. Three successive answers from different railway officials give numbers three, four, and six. The train duly arrives at platform five. It is very long, and I am fortunate to find a compartment with my name outside on a reservation list. I also locate my seat, which is heavily occupied by an Indian gentleman who presumably boarded the train in Bombay.
The occupant of my seat assures me that he has arranged an exchange of seats through the conductor, I am disinclined to accept this assurance, unsupported by any evidence, especially as it will be twenty hours before we are due in Waranasi: I apply a degree of moral and physical pressure until I gently dislodge him, Negotiating now from a position of strength, I offer to exchange seats later if the conductor approves and ensures that I have another berth. When the conductor arrives two hours later, the exchange is duly accomplished and I move to an upper berth, The lower berths are now occupied by my new friend and a lady who might be his wife or his mother: she is unwell, and wails plaintively through the day and the next night.
From my upper berth I can see little of the landscape as we cross India from west to east. It seems to be flat and unexciting. After the first sixteen hours I begin to feel cramped and stiff. It is a relief when the train draws into Varanasi at four in the morning,
WARANASI
I recall the problems of arriving at Ahmedabad two hours before dawn. Remaining on the platform at Waranasi station is not the most exciting prospect, but it is better than being taken for a ride by a rickshaw driver in pitch darkness. There is a waiting room for first-class.passengers, but not one square foot of it is unoccupied by people or their luggage. I join the throng sitting on the platform and try to read a few more pages of Silas Marner by a very poor light.
At six, there are signs of dawn breaking, I take a rickshaw and drive off into a cold grey mist. I have chosen the up-market Hotel de Paris at the equivalent of 7 pounds a night, two or three miles outside the city, in preference to the cheaper and more central lodging houses. I book a room there without any difficulty, except that there is nothing available at the cheapest price displayed at the reception desk; this, mysteriously, seems often to be the case, even when a hotel is almost empty. The Hotel de Paris is very grand: spacious rooms with marble baths, and extensive grounds approached by a wide circular drive surrounding a well-kept lawn. It is excellent value provided you do not eat and drink at the Hotel, the charges for any form of refreshment being excessive. I locate a good Tourist Bungalow, with a pleasant garden, within five minutes' walk, and take most of my meals there during my four days in Waranasi.
The Hotel has formerly been a rest-house for army officers. During the day it is eerily empty, since most of the visitors come in coach parties for an overnight stop well away from the noise and bustle of Waranasi itself. A dozen drivers of cycle rickshaws cluster permanently around the gates, ready to besiege any unwary tourist who ventures forth on foot. The peace and quiet of the hotel and its ground suits me very well since I am slightly under the weather with a temperature of 100 degrees, but no other symptoms, so I am less energetic than usual.
Apart from the magnificent waterfront, which can be seen only from the Ganges, Waranasi is an unattractive city. From the main part of the town the river is invisible except for brief glimpses through narrow lanes. For a place so much visited by tourists, there is little provision for the traveller - scarcely any eating or drinking places where you could sit and watch life go by. During my stay the weather is overcast and drizzly, and quite chilly at times. One afternoon when the sun did shine through, and the temperature rose sharply, I am tramping the streets and looking for a place to sit and relax when I find myself in the metal-bashing quarter of the city in a medley or small workshops. Despite reference to my street map, it takes me some time to escape from the din. I am reminded that Waranasi is a big engineering centre as well as being a holy city, and famed for its silk.
One morning I start off at six to join the early morning tour to the Ganges. We go down to the river at Ram Ghat, where we board one of the small boats that ply up and down. On the Varanasi side of the river is a succession of ghats where pilgrims walk down long flights of steps to bathe in the river. Some of the ghats are put to more utilitarian purposes such as accommodating the family washing. Dignified buildings, many of them old palaces, line the banks between the ghats. Some ghats are littered with large umbrellas, each sheltering a holy man engaged in his prayers, The umbrellas have a dual role: they provide shelter against the Waranasi weather, and they symbolise the wheel of life.
.We row upstream for an hour through a misty sunrise. Other boats are outlined against the far bank, where a green plain stretches out to infinity, The Ganges is a clear green, adorned with candles and garlands floated out by pilgrims.
We pass close to the burning ghats where corpses are being committed to the flames. The fires do not burn fiercely: they seem to be built up with some difficulty from branches and driftwood, They are not very efficient at consuming the bodies. A man in charge of the incineration pulls back a leg escaping from the flames and restores it to the glowing embers. Two French women tourists, short, plump, and fortyish, point their cameras in that direction, but lower them when the boatman reminds us that it is forbidden to photograph the ceremonies. Minutes later they take their pictures just the same. The boatman must have noticed, but refrains from comment: his manners are a great deal better than theirs.
As the sun rises, a few more pilgrims come down the steps and immerse themselves in the Ganges, but I see no sign of the massed crowds featured on every photograph of the holy river. When I point this out to the boatman, he explains that the crowds appear only on festival days: there will, of course, be one to-morrow.
After our party disembarks, a guide leads us through wet muddy lanes to see various temples. One lane is lined with sellers of marigolds. The Frenchwomen pick up a garland and admire it, prompting the flower-seller to say, in impeccable English: "The flowers are for the God, not for you." Soon after this, I detach myself from the tour, which is becoming a bore, or at any rate I am feeling tired of it - perhaps because my temperature has risen to 102 degrees as I find when I get back to the hotel. On the way back I pick up mail at the Post Office, buy some bananas, and return to the Hotel de Paris by rickshaw. As I read my letters en route, I fail to keep an eye on the bananas, which have disappeared when I reach the gates of the hotel, I reflect that if I lose nothing more than a bunch of bananas during three months in Asia - and this proves to be so - I shall have little cause for complaint.
On another day I take the afternoon tour to Sarnath, seven miles out of Waranasi, one of the significant staging points in the Buddha's journey towards enlightenment. Here there is a huge Stupa and extensive ruins of earlier temples, A more austere modern temple is decorated with scenes from the Buddha's life that could have been painted by Stanley Spencer. Among the tourists going round the temple is a disgusting young German eating an orange. Nearby a newly built museum is almost entirely given over to statues of the Buddha from the fifth and sixth centuries. Many visitors to the museum are Buddhists, and touch the statues or pray to them,
After Sarnath the tour bus takes us to Fort Ramchand on the other side of the Ganges. We drive across a long bridge spanning the great river, our transit of the bridge coinciding with the height of Varanasi's rush hour. A steam-roller has broken down while apparently carrying out a three point turn in the middle of the bridge. For over half an hour we.are completely immobile in the traffic. We arrive at Ramchand just as the place is about to close - the Lonely Planet Guide explains that this is the normal practice. We are allowed to make a quick tour of the fort and palace, neither being of great interest or beauty. In Rajasthan, one would not cross the road to see such a place.
During my stay in Waranasi I meet fewer budget travellers than elsewhere in my journey. Among those I do meet are two young women from Seattle, just arrived in India from Nepal. They tell me it is now warm and wet around Pokhara, with no snow, One of them, in Kathmandu, had bumped into her 79-year old grandmother, holidaying with her new boy-friend, I meet also a beautiful Romanian woman staying at my hotel: she speaks perfect English. She is now a German citizen with a home in Frankfurt, while she studies theatre costume and design in Venice. She is travelling with her mother who speaks no English, but smiles contentedly throughout my conversations with her daughter. I learn that Venice should be visited in September when the main rush of summer visitors is gone and before the cold damp winter sets in: and visited soon as the city is fast sinking below the waves, and the millions of lire subscribed for its rescue have disappeared without trace.
I chat with two Nepali students I meet in the streets, who are in Waranasi for an engineering course. They are pleasant young men who make no attempt to sell me anything. I am left with a favourable impression of the people of Nepal which I shall have no reason to revise on closer acquaintance,
WARANASI TO PATNA
The next leg of my journey is by rail to Patna, an eight hour trip which I expect to be undemanding after my recent railway marathons, and so indeed it proves. I breakfast at the Tourist Bungalow, eating a bowl of cereal intimidatingly described on the menu as Corn Flex. I follow this with a haircut on the hotel verandah in the best imperial tradition. My rickshaw driver to the station asks where I will be going to, and offers to drive me to Kathmandu himself. He seems neither surprised nor offended when I prefer to continue via Indian Railways and Indian Airlines.
At Waranasi station I am befriended by a high school teacher who wishes to explain Hinduism to me. He reassures me that we all believe in the same God, though in the West we also revere Jesus as his prophet. He takes pride in India's role as the birthplace of Buddhism, and in his country's tolerance of all religions. An admiring audience gathers to listen to his exposition, while a large white cow strolls up and down the platform. Warming to his theme, he declares that India wishes all countries to love one another, and to 'subside unpeace', a turn of phrase that would have delighted George Orwell. From the message of goodwill to all men, however, it appears that Pakistan is excluded, as the people of that country - encouraged by the Americans - carry out many evil acts, including disguising themselves as Sikhs and making trouble in the Punjab, For the English he has nothing but praise: they brought to India both railways and light (I think he means electricity),
.The train to Patna is fairly empty. We pass through a green landscape of rice growing in irrigated fields. At this stage of the crop cycle there are few people to be seen, Those who are visible are working with very primitive equipment - a hand operated scoop transfers water from a pond to channels in a field, where the water is helped an its way by an old man paddling a shovel. After dark, we arrive on time in Patna.
PATNA
I take a rickshaw at Patna station and insist on being driven to the Tourist Bungalow, although the driver protests that it is now closed, As an experienced traveller, accustomed to the stratagems of rickshaw drivers, I disregard this evident fabrication. Dutifully he takes me to the Tourist Bungalow - which is indeed closed. I settle for the comfortable and respectable Hotel Republic.
Patna is a city of considerable size but no particular character that I could discern. It is much hotter than Waranasi, I am still not feeling quite at my best, and for two days I do not do very much except stroll around gently, watch some cricket on the maidan, and read on the hotel balcony. I re-read the first three volumes of Dance to the Music of Time, wondering as I do so how so much pleasure can be derived from so long a story with so little action and so leisurely and mannered a style.
The taxi ride to the airport passes through Patna's leafy outskirts and arrives at a small group of buildings resembling a wayside railway station. The airport handles seven or eight flights a day, the only international departures being the twice-weekly trip to Kathmandu. Within the airport there is no organization whatever; prospective passengers mill around through customs and immigration and back again. Baggage is piled up discouragingly in dejected heaps. At last there are signs of concerted movement and we are subjected to a laborious search process. The security man insists that I should take a photograph with my camera to demonstrate that it is not booby-trapped. Then he closely examines the contents of my small haversack, omitting however to notice the small zip pocket containing my hand torch which could easily have harboured an explosive device.
NEPAL
KATHMANDU
The flight to Kathmandu takes only half an hour. After the first twenty minutes the Himalayas leap suddenly and majestically into view. At the airport there is the minimum of fuss on entry: money can instantly be changed at the airport bank, while customs and immigration are quickly dealt with. An efficient tourist desk has a list of hotels and prices. Inaccurately recalling some earlier advice, I select the Annapurna Hotel under the impression that a single room casts 59 Nepali rupees (about three pounds). Discovering in time that the price is 59 US dollars, I hastily switch my choice to the Hotel Snowlion at a fraction of the cost. It turns out to be a clean and triendly place in a quiet street near the centre of the city.
.I stay four nights in Kathmandu. It is a strange city with its beautiful and exotic temples forming a spectacular group in the centre, while others are scattered around in unlikely places so that you suddenly come upon them in an undistinguished street. In the old city, narrow lanes are lined with ancient houses with carved wooden balconies. Hotels, restaurants, souvenir sellers, cater for all sorts of tourists. The street markets overflow with fruit and vegetables that would win prizes at any agricultural show. The royal palace and grounds shelter behind high walls. The local people are attractive in appearance, with thick black hair and strong features. Their manner is friendly: they seem to walk and move more purposefully than their neighbours in India, and are less inclined to detain the passing tourist with unsolicited advice - except for a few hopeful money-changers and drug traffickers lurking in the shadows ready to ply their trade. The streets are better paved and look a lot cleaner than in Indian cities, but near parks and open spaces there is a pervasive smell of human excrement.
The weather was misty and often wet during my stay, and cold at nights, In mid-afternoon the sun would often break through and reveal snowcovered mountains at unexpected angles. I made no friends in Kathmandu: other visitors seemed a mixed lot, those on their own often more than a little odd, Young couples passing by were often lost in one another's company. There were plenty of richer and older tourists, and many with families and young children, probably drawn largely from the diplomatic community or the international agencies. lhe city was full of incongruities, like the market stalls and playing children that clustered round the base of the ancient temples, reminiscent of the daily contemporary activity in the ruins of Diocletian's palace in Split.
I made two expeditions to temples and holy places. On the first I walk put three miles to the old town of Patan, I cross the holy river, reduced in the dry season to a number of separate streams and muddy pools. Somewhere I miss my way and arrive unintentionally at the zoo, From there I am able to find my way into Patan, a dramatic approach through streets of centuries-old temples, pillars, and ceremonial lions. There are few tourists. In a narrow muddy lane is a procession led by a small noisy band. The centre piece is a little old woman, quite expressionless, being pulled along on a low wooden box on wheels, canopied with coloured cloths. I never find out what this is all about.
My second excursion takes me two miles in the opposite direction to Swambayana, the famous Buddhist temple on a hill overlooking Kathmandu. You enter the precincts through ceremonial gates, pass three huge statues of the Buddha, and walk up interminable flights of steep steps past fierce sculpted lions that suggest you will have to surmount seven ordeals before you reach the inner sanctum. In fact the chief ordeal is provided by hordes of monkeys who will snatch from you any object that is not firmly attached to you or which you tail to grip tightly. At the top of the final flight of steps is a fantastic chaos of temples, stupas, Buddhas, prayer wheels, peacocks, holy stones, and resident families with their animals. A small boy tries to sell me a live duck he carries under his arm.
.My plan for Nepal is to go to Pokhara for a few days' trekking in the Annapurma area, to return to Kathmandu, and to travel by bus across Nepal's frontier with India towards Darjeeling. I heard that a permit is required for the passage or this frontier, and is not always granted. In Delhi I learned that my best course was to apply to the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu. A polite official there tells me that no permits can at present be issued: apparently there is unrest among the Gurkhas in the Darjeeling area, and some pressure for autonomy. I decide to take Darjeeling out of my itinerary, and to leave Nepal after my trek by taking a bus from Pokhara into India.
Another disappointing quest is an attempt to collect mail from the Post Office. I find later that several letters were addressed to me at Poste Restante Kathmandu, but they failed to arrive - though my letters were reaching England from Nepal in tour or five days. Other travellers had the same experience.
Eating places in the Nepal capital offer great variety of choice. For breakfast and lunch I usually patronise an unpretentious cafe near the British Council library, run by a friendly Chinese. For evening meals I indulge myself at more luxurious restaurants, sometimes paying as much as three or four pounds for a meal, and savouring distinctly un-Nepali cuisine. The 'Old Vienna", efficiently run by an Austrian who settled in Kathmandu ten years ago, skilfully reproduces Viennese decor, music (taped), and food. After an acceptable but monotonous diet for two months, I succumb to the temptation to go there on two evenings, despite a guilty feeling that one should not really go to Kathmandu in order to enjoy Austrian food.
The day before leaving for Pokhara, I book my bus ticket and reconnoitre the pick-up point, a wise precaution as it is tucked away in back streets and the bus will leave before dawn, On the morning of departure there is a thick fog at six o'clock when I walk past figures looming out of the darkness. Many of them are running, and I wonder at the popularity of early morning jogging in Nepal. Then I realise that they are men on the way to work, running through the chill mist simply to keep warm.
When I find the bus it is no more than half full, but a young Frenchman is making a quite unreasonable fuss about his numbered seat being occupied by a Nepali. The numbering of bus seats in Nepal, as in India, is governed by unpredictable rules: bus tickets usually have seat numbers written on them, which are sometimes punctiliously matched to the numbers on the seats and sometimes completely disregarded. An added source of confusion is that the numbers on the seats are often in the local script: any resemblance to our own numerals is likely to mislead, anything that looks vaguely like a three being almost certainly a four. After some excitement the Frenchman wins his point. In the bus my neighbours are two girls from Manchester on their way to visit a friend who is teaching in Pokhara for a year. They are great screamers and gigglers and give the impression that they have not hitherto ventured beyond Blackpool.
.POKHARA
We set off at half past six. The mist begins to clear after a couple of hours, revealing stupendous Himalayan panoramas, For much of the journey the road, with a good metalled surface apart from occasional potholes and landslips, follows the course of a river, winding through steep cultivated terraces. In late morning the mist comes down again, and then clears as we approach Pokhara at three in the afternoon. To the north we see Machapuchre, the fishtail mountain, and the whole Annapurna range, sparkling in brilliant sunshine.
The main hotel area in Pokhara is near the lake, three miles from the bus station. Brushing aside eager porters and taxi-drivers, I walk on, taking the short cut across the airfield, which handles only two or three planes a day. I make tor the Hotel Mountain View where David stayed a few years ago, and I settle in there for my first night, However, since David's stay two new hotels have been built to obstruct the mountain view, so next day I move two hotels along to an establishment which is in fact more comfortable, though the price is the same - about four pounds a night - and which enables me to see the sunrise over Annapurna without getting out of bed.
The original town of Pokhara has little distinction, though it is the second or third largest city in Nepal. New Pokhara, three miles to the south, is a place of singular charm and beauty, Clustering around the shores of Lake Phewa are settlements of newer houses, forty or fifty hotels and restaurants, mostly small and unpretentious, bookshops, Tibetan and other craft shops, and stalls with bicycles for hire, Across the foot of the lake lies Fishtail Lodge, a larger and more expensive hotel where the rooms are grouped into wooden one-storey lodges, surrounded by gardens well-stocked with poinsettias and flowering shrubs, and with views over the lake to Machapuchre.
The whole area of lakeside Pokhara has been developed to serve the burgeoning tourist trade. You might expect it to appear artificial and out of harmony with its surroundings, but it is not so - on the contrary, the whole scene blends well together. Perhaps this is because nearly every tourist who comes to Pokhara is at the start or the finish of a trek in the high mountains: they are not very rich, and most of them are looking for accommodation in modest style. There is nothing grand or out of scale: even Fishtail Lodge is tucked away on the other side of the lake, and keeps - literally - a low profile. And then the setting is unsurpassable. Throughout my stay, Macapuchre and the Annapurna range parade their snowy panorama across half the sky.
In Pokhara I make several new friends, and I meet again the Manchester girls who are now with their teacher friend. We take our morning lassi together in an open-air restaurant, but their excitement and giggles cause me acute embarrassment, observed with quiet amusement by an attractive woman at the next table, I get to know Kim later, and her husband Gary: journalist and psychiatrist respectively, they are taking a year off from their work in Massachusetts, they have travelled widely in Thailand, and are now planning a trek, more ambitious than mine, through Tatapani and on to Jomosom.
NEPAL TREK - OUTWARD TO TATAPANI
My plan is to trek for nine or ten days at the end of January, walking north over the Ghodopani Pass to the village of Tatapani, resting there for a day, and returning by a different route through the small town of Beni. I buy some provisions for the journey - hard bread, cheese and biscuits - and I apply to the Immigration Office for a trekking permit which is issued at a small charge and with the minimum of bureaucracy. I decide to do it the easy way, travelling light myself with a small pack while a porter carries the main load - which includes plenty of warm clothing for cold nights at up to ten thousand feet.
I make some enquiries about portering from trekking agencies, of which there are several in Pokhara, but their rates seem excessive, and they want to be paid in advance. Tales from other trekkers suggest that I will do better if I find my own porter, which I do through the hotel proprietor. The day before I set off, he arranges for me to meet Dhan, a local lad of twenty-one. He has done some portering before, but now appears to spend most of his time as a member of a group lounging around outside the hotel. They do this gracefully and with a sense of purpose, even of vocation.
Dhan is five foot three tall, slight of build, with bright eyes and an engaging smile. He views my rucksack with some relief; it weighs only ten kilos, a very light load for a Nepali porter. We agree a fee of 45 rupees a day, about 1 pound 50, payable on return from the trek, plus the food en route which will be to my account. The food turns out to cost about thirty rupees a day, far more than a Nepali would normally spend on food, probably including a concealed addition to the daily fee. I see no reason to complain of this, especially as Dhan is doing all the hard work.
We agree to set off at 7:30 to-morrow. I warn him that our progress will be slow as I am an old man of sixty-six. He is clearly impressed by my great age. He is to prove a cheerful and competent porter, and a useful guide at those few points on the trek where there is any doubt about the route. He is well kitted-out with good walking boots, medium weight trousers, and an anorak with zip pockets: his luggage consists of little more than a light bedroll which he straps to the top of my pack. I notice later that he wears the same outfit throughout all the day's variations in temperature, while I am peeling off layers of clothing as the sun climbs, and putting them back in the evening. He sweats liberally climbing at mid-day and in early afternoon, but no more than I do in shirt-sleeves. His English is rudimentary, enough for the limited purposes of the journey, but I would have liked to enjoy more conversation with him. He too wished he could speak more English, as this would bring him more work as a porter.
On the morning of our start it is fine and clear, as it is to remain throughout the trek. I am expecting to walk three miles along the road to upper Pokhara before starting on the trek proper, but Dhan has thoughtfully ordered a taxi for both of us at my expense. I do not object, as this will save a boring hour of road walking, and help us to be well on our way before the sun climbs high. The taxi takes us to.Shining Hospital (a group of huts), where we can continue by jeep along the trek to Phedi, but I think we should walk. As we do so we are overtaken by a couple of jeeps, but they are rocking along at not much more than a fast walking pace, they are piled high with goods of all sorts, and the passengers are hanging on precariously.
We pass a small hydro-electric project built by the Chinese, and climb a gradual slope. Two miles further on we pass a settlement or modern one-storey houses occupied by Tibetans, Originally a refugee camp, it has become a permanent community with the former refugees from Chinese occupation now settled in surroundings not very different from those in their native land. Nearby is the Nepali village of Hyanja. We then walk for three miles across flat ricefields, fairly dry at this time of year, and easy walking though the day is starting to heat up.
The track is busy with local people, Our progress is briefly enlivened by four players of Nepali musical instruments who twang away while they follow us until they are persuaded that we are not going to contribute to their welfare. Here we have the first of many encounters with mule convoys; the leading mules wear plumes and loudly tinkling bells, while the followers wear smaller bells that give out a continuous hum at lower pitch. At this point in the trek, we and the mules can give one another a wide berth, so we do not suffer the hold-ups that are inevitable later when the trail is steeper and narrower.
The walk through the ricefields brings us to the village of Sukhiet. We stop for a late breakfast, a pancake accompanied by the invariable cup
of sweet tea, At my invitation, Dhan also enjoys a pancake, though reproved by the owner of the tea-house who explains to me that Nepalis eat 'dahl baat' - rice and lentils - and implies that Dhan is breakfasting above his proper station in life. While taking our meal we are joined by three other trekkers, all Australians. One is Geoff, who chatted to me in Pokhara the other day. He is a tall, handsome man, something of a loner, ready to try his hand at anything. His last job in Australia was in Darwin; since then he has travelled for several months in Asia and Europe, earned some money by working in London, and he hopes to go on travelling for a few months yet. He hopes eventually to acquire a plot of land in Australia, become largely self-supporting in fact, work no more than is necessary to provide for basic needs, and leave time for leisure and travel. We talk together often in the next few days when we more or less keep pace (Geoff suffering badly from blisters caused by his hired boots) and I find him an admirable character, while he is free with support and congratulation for what he regards as a creditable trekking performance for a man of my years.
Geoff is bound for Jomosom while the other two are heading for Tatapani and a return via Beni as I am. Lothar and Rhonda are about thirty: he has a bald patch, a straggly beard, and a generally moth-eaten air; she is sturdily built for stamina rather than grace, and is a teacher enjoying a sabbatical year. She is always the first to make a move after a halt on the trail. Lothar's family emigrated from East Germany when he was a baby. He has resigned his last job in order to go on a world tour with Rhonda. His hobby is hang-gliding, which he thinks should be introduced into Nepal.
.SUKHIET TO KHARA
From Sukhiet we move on together up a path climbing through forest, and developing into a long series of rough stone steps, the trail and scenery at this stage being reminiscent of the Lake District. We have now lost the spectacular mountain views that could be enjoyed from the comfort of Pokhara; for much or the trek we are to be deprived of them, though there are some dramatic exceptions. I had expected that as we moved steadily nearer to the high Himalayas we would be in continual sight of them, forgetting that the trail would switchback up and down the lower hills and often descend into deep gorges.
After more than an hour's climb we ascend a ridge to reach the sizeable village of Naudanda where I had thought we might stop for the night. It is well provided with lodges, but as it is only half past one we all decide to push on for a couple of hours to reach Khara, where Dhan assures us there will be places to stay: we will then have less far to go to reach good stopping-places in the next two days when the going will be harder. Fairly easy walking along gradients that are gentle by local standards takes us to Khara, a smaller village on a pass, where there are a few modest lodges. There doesn't seem to be much to choose between them, so we spread ourselves among three, Dhan and I taking the first, Geoff the second, and Lothar and Rhonda the third.
The lodges, here and further along the trail, followed a broadly similar pattern, though naturally they tended to be more primitive in the smaller villages. In the front was a covered verandah, open by day and closed by shutters at night, Within would be the main kitchen and living-room. The food would be cooked and the water heated on an open wood fire, either here or on the verandah, and we would eat round the fire. The room would get very smokey at night as there was usually no chimney. Lighting would be by oil-lamp or candle with rare exceptions where there was an electricity supply. Bedrooms would usually lead directly off the living room - at Khara there were several cubicles - and others would be upstairs, approached by ladder or rickety staircase, and sometimes entered through other bedrooms arranged in series. Each bedroom would have one, or more commonly two or three, rough beds with a pillow and blanket and no other furnishings. Windows would be rectangular holes in the wall, sometimes equipped with shutters.
From the cocoon of my sleeping bag I found the beds always comfortable: it was usually too dark inside the rooms to form any opinion about their cleanliness, or whether one was sharing the comforts with other forms of life, I think the rooms were regularly swept, and I never had any trouble with fleas or bugs, while it was too cold at night for mosquitoes.
The sanitary and washing facilities were generally to be found, if they existed at all, in huts to the rear of the lodge. The loo would consist of a hole in the ground, the bathroom would comprise a tap, a bucket, and sometimes a shower - that is an overhead pipe conveying cold water from the mountainside. In a few places, hot water could be brought in a bucket on request, usually at a small charge and alter some delay as the water was heated on the wood fire where cooking had priority. At Khara, as at two or three later stops, there is no running water at the lodge, and the wash place is a continually running tap for communal use in the middle of the village. I have to wait in the queue while a villager washes out the head and neck of a recently slaughtered goat. A more gory scene is enacted in the morning: when I pay my dawn visit to the 100 at the back, I have to step round a small group busily skinning and eviscerating a sheep with their kukris.
The practice at the lodge is to charge a nominal sum for the night's bed - two or three rupees - and you are expected to eat there to provide their main income. Life goes on all round you as you eat, a very small baby being bathed and rubbed with oil in the lodge at Khara. During the evening I stroll up to the neighbouring lodges and chat to my Australian companions. In my own place I communicate with some or the local people who speak English, including a talkative immigrant from Tibet, and amuse them by my attempts to reproduce Nepali words from my phrase-book, I am prevailed upon to drink some raksi, the local wine, lt is poured out of a kettle into a glass: it is warm and wet but not much else. The evening is cold - we are at 5700 feet - and I wear practically all my clothes in five or six layers, I am ready for bed at eight, and am
soon asleep, despite a party with music and dancing next door which continues late into the night by Khara standards, not quietening down until after nine. I need to get up once in the night to relieve myself; to my alarm the torch battery begins to fail, but I manage to climb the ladder back to bed while it still gives a flicker of light, and in the morning I replace the battery with my spare.
KHARA TO TIRKEDUNGA
Dhan and I are up at 6:30 and on the trail an hour later, leaving the Australians to enjoy a more substantial breakfast before their departure. By this time we are all armed with stout bamboo staves, acquired for a couple of rupees back at Naudaanda. I find mine a great help up and down the steeper gradients, and even more of an aid as a third point of balance on the innumerable crossings of small rivers by stepping stanes or narrow planks. I am feeling in tip-top condition except for the loss of one tooth filling which leaves some sharp edges but no other inconvenience, For the first hour and a half it is easy going, on the level or gently downhill, but we have no mountain views. Mule trains pass us going in the opposite direction about every fifteen minutes, most of them returning empty atter delivering their loads further up the trail.
The country is lightly wooded, with terraced cultivation to either side, We pass through the village of Lumia where there is a forestry and agricultural project organized by British helpers, and reach the large village of Chandrakot at half past nine, Here Dhan and I pause for a cup of tea, and a nicely cooked pancake, I speak to some trekkers returning from Ghadapani atter the Gandrung circuit, which they describe as very icy and quite tricky though it does not go above ten thousand feet. Chandrakot is just over 5000 teet, but it is hot breakfasting in the sun, even in shirtsleeves.
.As the trail leaves Chandrakot there are breath-taking views of Machapuchre and the Annapurna range, The next stage of the trek follows the course of the Modi Khola, a rushing river that is impressive even now in the dry season, and must be overwhelming in the monsoon. The trail climbs to several hundred feet above the river, with views almost vertically downwards to its blue curling line; then descends to meet and cross it by a bridge suspended by cables a hundred feet above the water. We walk across planks on a framework attached to the cables. Some of the planks are a long way past their best. Where there are large holes or gaps in the woodwork, the Nepalis have covered them up with large stones. A few yards on to the bridge and it develops a curious swaying motion which it keeps up until we are almost within reach of the far bank.
The bridge takes us into Birethanti, a delightful village only 3600 feet up, where the trail to the Annapurna Sanctuary branches off. Here I meet a small Swiss group I remember from Pokhara, including an elderly gentleman trekking with his daughter. At sixty-one he is five years my junior, but a vigorous crop of whiskers sprouting from all parts of his face gives him a fierce and patriarchal appearance, He is not a particularly ambitious trekker, being prepared to call it a day at Birethanti before the trail becomes steeper and steeper.
As we have made good pragress, Dhan and I take a leisurely iunch at an attractively sited lodge overlooking the river. We sit outside in the sunshine, and wave to Geoff, closely followed by Lothar and Rhonda, as they cross the swaying bridge, and join us for the mid-day halt, Pushing on together after lunch, we climb gently for two hours up forested slopes alongside the river, passing the sizeable village of Hille, and soon afterwards we reach Tirkedunga, our destination for the night. We all settle into the same lodge, where we are joined by a young couple from Paris who have flown into Nepal for a trekking holiday. Although we are now just over 5000 feet, the evening is not too cold. We sit round a wood fire after a tasty meal of vegetable egg noodle, Geoff plays a lively game of backgammon with the Frenchwoman. I am in bed by half past eight and enjoy a peaceful night, though in the morning Rhonda tells us she has had a bar of chocolate nibbled, presumably by rats.
TIRKEDUNGA T0 GHODOPANI
The third day of the trek looks like being the toughest, with a long, very steep, climb up to the Ghodopani Pass at ten thousand feet. The Nepal Trekking Guide records 3767 steps up to Ullere, and that is less than half way up. So I rise at 6.30 and leave with Dhan at 7. 15 so as to climb as high as possible before the sun gets top hot for comfort. The ascent is certainly hard work: the stone steps cut in the rock are not difficult to negotiate but they are virtually continuous. There are hardly any flat stretches to break the climb and ease the muscles, Successive mule trains stumbling down the steps impose a number of compulsory halts to allow the mules to pass. When quarter of an hour elapses without any mule trains, I take a voluntary rest, deliberately taking things easy so as not to tire before reaching the top.
.The three Australians overtake us, going strongly and rather faster than the pace I have set for myself. By half past nine we reach a ridge with a couple of houses on it and I realize with amazement that this is the beginning of Ullere village at 6800 feet: I thought I wasn't much more than half way there. I join the Aussies for a breakfast halt and a plate of porridge. At half past ten we go on together in good heart, believing correctly that the worst of the climbing is over. The trail now winds through lush forests which give cool shade. We gain height steadily, keeping up a good pace on the now less steep gradient. A strong, sweet, scent pervades the forest, coming from daphne bushes with small white flowers carpeting the ground below the forest canopy. Higher up there are rhododendrons in bud, ready to come into flower a month later. Here there are some welcome flat sections of the trail, and several descents to cross tributary gorges by makeshift bridges of tree branches which require caution but are never really hazardous.
On the way to Ghodopani, still climbing, we pass two villages, Banthanti ('place in the forest") at 7775 feet, and Nayathanti ("new place') at 8550. By now it is clear that I can easily reach the pass to-night, although at the start I had wondered about an intermediate overnight halt. So we all take a rest and some food at Nayathanti where I enjoy an omelette and a cup of tea in the knowledge that the hardest part of the whole trek, not just the day's march, is behind me. Then we go on through forest up steep stone steps with some flat intervals, passing patches of snow at 9000 feet, and taking care as we cross occasional boulders covered with a thin film of ice. At 3.15 we reach Ghodopami, a rather unattractive village, where Dhan advises that we should continue to the summit of the pass where there are better overnight lodges.
Near the top we settle into a comfortable lodge. The views extend from the huge massif of Dhaulagiri to the north west, across to the Annapurna range in its full glory filling the quadrant from north to east. To the left of the trail, a steep track leads to the summit of Poon Hill at ten thousand feet, from which the view is even more extensive, particularly towards Dhaulagiri. Halfway up Poon Hill are two lodges: the Australians elect to stay at one of these, and climb to the top of the hill before sunset. I choose to leave my ascent until to-morrow. I
have had enough climbing for one day, and the view is said to be better at dawn when Dhaulagiri catches the first morning sun, Also, it is growing very cold this evening. It does not occur to me that it will be a great deal colder at dawn.
The lodge has a central area warmed by a wood fire, with cubicles leading off in three directions, the fourth leading to the kitchen. On the table are some fine roses, standing in a Coca-Cola bottle. Our illumination is a kerosene wick in a rum bottle, The only other trekker here is Penny from Australia, who is taking five weeks' holiday in Nepal before starting a course in Canberra. We each put away a good plateful of dahl baat, and stay as close as possible to the fire until we settle into our sleeping bags at half past eight. I do not look forward to crawling out of my sleeping bag at six o'clock next morning. The view had better be a good one.
.On Dhan's advice we start up Poon Hill at 6:20 with the aim of reaching the top by sunrise at seven, lhe temperature is well below freezing, there are treacherous icy patches on the path, and the air is thin and raw. I have no gloves and soon lose all feeling in my hands.
Breathing, which usually comes naturally to me, is unexpectedly laborious, and before long I am panting heavily and some nasty rasping sounds are emerging from my lungs, Dhan waits patiently as I halt every few yards to lean on my stave, and the ascent takes much longer than I expected.
We reach the summit at ten past seven. I here is an observation tower in the middle of a fairly flat area, but I see no point in climbing it since I can visualize no way in which the view can be improved or extended. The unparallelled panorama from Dhaulagiri across the entire Annapurna range is displayed in its full glory. lhe rays of the sun have just caught the highest peaks and bathed them in silver and gold; the valleys and foothil is are still in deep purple shadow which gradually lifts during the next half hour. At first my hands are too numb even to take my camera from its case, but after a tew minutes of gentle massage by Dhan the circulation returns and I take a few photos before a careful descent back to the lodge and a welcome plate of porridge at half past eight.
Ghodopani to Tatopani
Dham and I set off soon after half past mine, secure in the knowledge that from Ghodopani there is no way tor the trail to go except downhill. As the day's destination is Tatapani at 4000 feet, there is going to be a lot of downhill, nearly 5000 teet of it. The descent begins down steep stone steps, many of them coated with ice. Naturally there is more snow and ice to the north of the pass than there was on the approach from the south. However, after an hour or so there is no more snow and ice and we have an agreeable downhill walk in the cool of the morning through rhododendron and oak forest. We halt at the village of Chitre at 7600 teet tor a mid-morning break.
For much of the descent the view is dominated by the south face of Dhaulagiri, apparently almost vertical rack. Beyond Chitre the trail continues sharply downhill and it is increasingly clear that several hours of walking down steep stone steps is going to put a severe strain
on the knees. Mercifully, there is soon some variation, with rough stone paths connecting flights of steps, and several diversions which cross tributary gorges and climb up the other side. The main gorge, containing the gushing waters or the Ghar Khola, is to the right of the trail and a few hundred feet below. As we approach Sikhra at 6500 feet, and for some distance beyond, we come across several landslides from the eroded hills. The trail here, steep and slippery, winds across scree slopes that scar the devastated landscape. Some patches of newly planted saplings reflect efforts at re-afforestation to arrest the erosion.
A number of mule trains are moving south towards Ghodopani. Most of them are returning unladen trom the north, but one is carrying.sheepskins. On this section of the trail I meet a number of trekkers, Australians as usual being in the majority, some going north, others returning from Tatapani or points turther along the trail such as Jomosom.
Passing through the village of Ghara at 5500 feet, the trail descends to the south bank of the Ghar Khola, where a wooden bridge crosses the blue torrent. A short walk upstream brings us to a suspension bridge across the main river, the Kali Gandaki, said to be the deepest gorge in the world. We are stopped at a police check point where our trekking permits are inspected. Orange trees loaded with ripe fruit now line the route. At half past three we waik down the main street of Tatapani, with the snowy pinnacle of Nilgiri straight ahead.
TATAPANI
The street is lined with good-looking lodges displaying attractive menus. On Dhan's advice I choose the Kamala Lodge, which includes hot water among its advertised attractions. This comes through a tap into the shower room, lukewarm rather than hot, but more inviting than the usual flow of icy water from mountain streams. A notice instructs users to be sparing in their consumption of water and to share a shower with a friend.
Tatapani means 'hot springs": there are two hot bathing places, one on either side of the river. The village has about twenty lodges, offering to trekkers food and comfort to a degree that is astounding in a remote village with a population of a few hundred. The sleeping arrangements are slightly above the usual basic standard, but the food on offer includes Chinese, Italian, and Mexican dishes, as well as treshly baked bread and cakes. Several of the lodges have electric lighting either from their own generators or from a small hydro-electric plant on the river. All this has grown up in the last few years with the increased popularity of trekking from Pokhara, with Tatapani lying astride the routes. For the less ambitious trekker, Tatapani is a good destination for a four-day trek, and walkers rest there for a day or more before starting their return journey. Those on longer treks often rest here for a day before continuing to Jomosom, the Annapurna Sanctuary, or other destinations. Two trekkers are resting here now in the hope of recovering from severe strains, one to an ankle, one to a knee, but in the event both have to be carried back to Pokhara in baskets on the back of porters, a rather bumpy journey of three or four days, the only alternative being the expensive luxury of evacuation by helicopter.
In the evening I choose moussaka and apple crumble from a varied and attractive menu: both are excellent. There is also very good lemon tea, as in most places along the trek. I find this a first-class thirst quencher and often drink a large pot - five or six cups - by myself at the end of a day's trek. I find several friends, old and new, in my lodge and its neighbours. I meet Janice from Edmonton, Alberta, who has led a nomadic life for a few years, and I renew acquaintance with a tall Swiss who had flown from Patna to Kathmandu with me. He is planning an ambitious trek, but his girl friend Ricola from Paris is going to return to Pokhara via Beni, as I am, I readily agree when my Swiss friend asks me if I would escort her, but in the event Ricola stays on at latapani for a day longer.
The lodge is run by a handsome and intelligent Nepali woman in her thirties who speaks good English - and no doubt several other languages - and is very much in charge. We have our own electricity generator, and she offers 'video show' to her residents and others staying in Tatapani. "Gandhi" is one of the films on offer, but everyone else has already seen it, and we don't have a film show this evening as we cannot field what our hostess regards as a quorum.
Among other friends I make this evening are Brenda and Bob from Vancouver, Bob, who is probably half Inuit, tells me of his experiences on tree planting contract work in British Columbia, where he had to plant thousands of seedlings every day, rigorously controlled in their spacing. I meet also thirty- year told Patrick Joyce from Chicago, an articulate IBM executive who is thinking of trying his hand at management consultancy when he returns from his travels, Sharon from Glasgow is his current companion, a relationship which appears to have developed during trekking. (Three years later I am to call on Patrick in Chicago, where he is working an eighty hour week as a partner in a software firm: in another eighteen months he hoped to have saved enough money to travel the world again for three years, )
Now for a luxurious rest day, Apart from eating a lot of good food, strolling around Tatapani - which doesn't take long - and chatting to fellow trekkers, 1 do very little. However, I do change some travellers' cheques at Tatapani's Bank, with a lot less fuss than doing the same operation in a major Indian city, and I sample the local hot springs. With Patrick and Sharon I patronise the less formal spring on the far side of the river. We cross the river about a mile north of the village, then come back south along a stony track, arriving at a pool among the rocks. There is no sign of a spring; the water is very hot, but there is nothing to indicate the source of the heat. We put on bathing slips out of deference to Nepali susceptibilities and lower ourselves gently into eighteen inches of water. It is just possible to relax on the sandy bottom with only head and neck above water level, and to gaze at the 20, 000 toot peaks ahead. It is a delightful experience.
About four o'clock the air begins to cool. We get dressed, and go back to the lodge. Another good meal, and then for the video show. Again, there are not enough volunteers for 'Gandhi', so our hostess screens 'Cocoons', an American film that Patrick assures me is a good one, but to me it seems pretty awful nonsense about people from another planet visiting the Earth.
TATAPANI TO BENI
Our return journey via Beni will be slightly longer but a good deal flatter than the outward route. We retrace our steps to the suspension bridge and cross to the east bank of the Kali Gandaki. We walk across the wooden bridge over the Ghar Khola, and follow the east bank of the Kali Gandaki for several miles of easy walking down gentle slopes or on the level. For the whole morning we are on the edge of a spectacular gorge, sometimes down near the river bed, sometimes high above it, Looking ahead it is difficult to imagine how the path can find a way between sheer cliffs. Then we see that tor a mile or more the trail has been cut into the side of the cliff, so we walk below overhanging rocks just above our heads. From time to time I have to stoop to get through: it would be an uncomfortable route for a taller man, Always in the background we can hear the roar of the river.
Picnicking by the trail, I share my bread and cheese with Dhan. We are overtaken by Andy from Switzerland whom I met last night, Before starting on a long tour, including Thailand, Tibet, and China, Andy had worked as a tax inspector, but decided that was not the life for him. He hopes now for a career as a ski instructor, possibly combined with work as a mountain guide in the summer. Continuing together, we pass through several small villages along the river, each with a thriving population of plump chickens. For the rest of the morning we enjoy a cool and not particularly strenuous walk in the shade of the cliffs. The afternoon is overcast so the temperature remains comfortable as the gorge broadens out.
As the valley becomes wider, we pass a variety of crops in a narrow flat strip alongside the river: oats, cabbage, and potato. At four we arrive in Beni, an umattractive village by the river bank, and find a p1easant lodge for the night. Here I spend the evening with Andy and Janice, and with Jennifer and her young brother from Vancouver, Jennifer tells us that travelling in China was pretty grim, and it was a hard fight to board buses or trains, with no quarter given to women or children. Andy speaks of life in Switzerland with an unemployment rate of only 1.5%. He has already completed his military training of seventeen weeks, which will be followed by an annual call-up for a month of reserve training. He tells us that when a Swiss site was suggested for the 1992 winter Olympics, all the local people demonstrated against it as they objected to the disturbance it would cause.
BENI TO KUSMA
We leave Beni at eight to continue gently down the gorge. Soon it widens further into a cultivated valley. Villages are thicker on the ground than we have seen before, and between them there is a constant stream of people carrying wood, pots and pans, and anything else you can think of . By the side of the trail are hedgerows of small-leaved cactus with bright scarlet flowers. The path often descends to the river bed, to ground that would be under water in the monsoon. At first I think it will be easy walking on the level ground, but it proves to be rough going. Large boulders and stones of uneven size make it impossible to get into any sort of rhythm. It is also hard on the ankles in walking shoes, without the support that boots would have given.
This section of the trail is rich with brilliant butterflies, including a Camberwell Beauty or something very like it, Dhan and I stop for lunch at a small village called Khaningayah, where Andy catches us up after a later start. I suggest he should go on ahead after lunch, without waiting for us, as there is a stiff climb to negotiate.
.We must have descended to quite a low altitude, because to reach Kusma at 3000 feet we have to climb steeply up a trail of steps and boulders. Near the small villages that we pass there is a lot of tree felling: big logs and heavy baskets of firewood are being carried away, almost certainly unauthorised felling. After the climb I am relieved to arrive at Kusma, a fair-sized straggling village, where we find an agreeable lodge with two nests of swallows with young in the dining-room roof.
At the lodge, there is a young man, probably in his mid-twenties, who has been passing and re-passing us for the past two days, ignoring other trekkers but speaking fluent Nepali to the local people, including Dhan who is greatly intrigued. He turns out to be a Peace Corps volunteer from Maine, who has been teaching for two years in a village school near the approach to Everest, now closed for two months because of the winter cold, Originally he volunteered to work in Africa, but having been posted to Nepal he developed a love-hate relationship with the country and its people, and he tells me much about the land and its problems. He is furious about the tree-felling we have just seen: he is sure it is illicit and that the requisite forestry inspectors are either nonexistent or have been bribed. He is angry too about the ill-treatment and neglect of the mules we have met en route. They are owned by rich men in the towns: the muleteers are simply paid for their journeys and have no interest in the health or well-being of the mules. One beast with a broken leg had the two fragments tied together with no attempt to set the bone. It was in great pain, but when my friend told the muleteer that the animal should be destroyed, the reply was that the owner would be very angry.
My Peace Corps friend speaks highly of aid programmes and the work of international agencies. Unfortunately the Nepal Government is too inert to carry through any programmes of its own or to maintain the developments initiated by other countries and agencies. Corruption is rife in high quarters, including the Royal Family, and throughout the administration. Drug smuggling is connived at: marijuana and heroin are produced mainly for export. Apart from internal Nepali problems, the good work of the Peace Corps, and of UNESCO who financed an effective literacy programme, is being undermined now by cuts enforced by the Reagan administration. And some of the development is irrelevant to Nepali needs - on a visit to East Germany the King had been induced to buy a television transmitter, but there were not enough technicians to keep the station running and anyway reception was limited to a small area of Kathmandu. Owners of television sets spend hours fiddling with their aerials in the vain hope of improving reception.
KUSMA TO KARKINETTA
My early morning visit to the loo again involves stepping over a recently slaughtered sheep now being skinned by three Nepalis with their kukris. After leaving Kusma at eight, we descend to the river and them climb a steep zig-zag path. I am glad of the occasional pauses to allow mule trains to pass, Iwo to three hundred mules go by within half an hour, We reach a plateau cultivated with oats and other crops, and.peopled with a succession of small villages. We follow a stream uphill for three or four miles, stepping over uneven boulders in the face of a hot sun. Since starting the return via Beni we have met few trekkers coming the other way, but now we encounter an organized trekking party of sixteen Bavarians, varying in age from the mid-twenties to the forties, some of them distinctly overweight and not looking very happy. I exchange greetings with them: Dhan asks whether Gruss Gott is the same as Namaste, which indeed it is, precisely so.
We know the day will end with a long climb so we take a good break at eleven and enjoy our dahl baat in a house in a small settlement. The long, steep, ascent to Karkinetta is broken by a few gentler slopes, The afternoon grows quite cold under an overcast sky as we reach the crest at 5350 feet. The town offers only rather primitive lodges, but we settle into one of the less unpromising where civilisation has made its mark in the form of a vase of plastic flowers on the table. There are chickens everywhere - healthy-looking birds advertising the advantages of a free-range outdoor life. I wash at the village tap, waiting several minutes in the queue behind local women filling their pitchers and other receptacles.
Later in the evening Andy calls round from the next lodge. During the day he has suffered a severe stomach upset and has had to engage the help of a wayside porter, or he would never have reached Karkinetta. He is shame-faced about this, having told me earlier that he never had any health troubles in Asia though he took no precautions with food or water - it was all in the mind. Now he is not so sure. The evening is very cold and the lighting restricted to candles: I climb into my sleeping bag at half past seven and sleep till six next morning.
KARKINETTA TO POKHARA
The day dawns clear with marvellous views back over the mountains which yesterday were in heavy cloud. We start early with a long continuous descent of 2000 feet, through terraces cultivated with potatoes and other vegetables. We reach the river bed: hard going over rocks and boulders. I am walking strongly with the end of the trek in my sights, but at 10.45 Dhan stops abruptly in the middle of a village and announces we are going to have our dahl baat - so we do. As this is to be our last halt I take note of the house where we sit. It has stone walls on three sides plastered over with mud, A thatched roof is supported by three bamboo staves about six inches in diameter. The
front of the house is open by day, closed at night by shutters. Two Nepali lads sit in front of the wood fire, blowing through bamboo stems to encourage the embers to flare up. A two year old is toddling around within easy reach of the fire and the cooking pots that balance precariously upon it. In one corner of the room is a stack of firewood, and along one side are neatly made shelves and cupboards with an assortment of pots and pans.
The final stage demands a longer walk than I expect - Dhan's estimates of time are unreliable. the afternnon is tedious as we go through crowded villages. A final slog takes us to the bazaar town of Nandanga; the track goes still uphill to the first road I have seen for nine days.
.After a few minutes the bus to Pokhara arrives. Visions of an early shower and a tasty meal! Alas, the bus is too full, even by Asian standards, to admit any more passengers. Twenty minutes later a second bus drives up, also very full, but it is just possible to squeeze into it. I have a centre berth in the back seat, with the passengers standing in the centre aisle pressing hard against me. It is an uncomfortable journey lasting an hour and a half, probably through dramatic mountain scenery if the glimpses I catch between tightly-packed bodies are any guide. We arrive at Pokhara at half past three: I take leave of Dhan, paying him his wages which he has not wanted before the end of the trek, and I write him a warm testimonial in a notebook which he produces for the purpose. Then back to my comfortable room at the Hotel Peaceful, a hot shower, bliss. . . .
After cleaning up I go along to the K. C. Restaurant by the lake for an early supper. Lothar and Rhonda walk in looking tired, as well they might, having covered the distance from Kusma in one day with the help of a porter they engaged to carry both their packs.
POKHARA AGAIN
With two weeks left before my return flight I look forward to a few days resting in Pokhara while I work out how best to spend my remaining time. First thing in the morning I wash out the remainder of my dirty - very dirty - clothes, stroll down the road to the restaurant, sit on the roof enjoying a banana lassi, and watch Annapurna emerging from the mist. Soon the whole range, and its reflection in Lake Phewa, become sharp and clear. There seems to be a lot of fresh snow up there, particularly on the steeper slopes of Machapuchre which have hitherto appeared as bare rock.
For a later breakfast at nine I meet Andy at the Pumpernickel Bakery, further along the lake shore, as we arranged in Karkinetta. Andy is quite recovered and we eat our muesli and croissants with relish. We are joined by Janice for a while. After breakfast 1 hire a bicycle, negotiating a price of fifteen rupees for two days in place of the standard daily charge of ten, and cycle the three miles past the airfield to the Post Office to send off letters to my well-wishers assuring them of my safe return. Writing more letters, I sunbathe on the roof of the Hotel Peaceful until the clouds move south from the mountains and build up overhead. In the afternoon I cycle along the lakeshore and reconnoitre several of the Tibetan shops to decide where to buy small gifts to take home.
It would be tempting to linger for several days in Pokhara, enjoying the views and the good food, especially the delicious cakes, but I decide to make arrangements to push on, if only to avoid putting back the half a stone which I lost on the trek, Having flown in, I elect to go back to India by one of the land routes, and book a seat on the early bus to Gorakhpur for the day after to-morrow. The transaction has a casual air about it: the booking office near the hotel directs me to their manager who is playing cards with three friends on the hotel lawn. He starts writing out my tickets - there is a change of bus at the frontier - but.breaks off to play his hand, It takes three rounds to complete my documentation. The card game goes on smoothly despite the inconvenience of my interruption, and is still in progress two hours later.
I dine with Rhonda and Lothar while a thunderstorm rolls down from the mountains. It rains in Pokhara for an hour. In the evening I finish reading W. S. Naipaul's Area of Darkness: his Indian origin gives him freedom to be more critical of the country's inefficiency and poor hygiene than a European writer. He seems to be unduly squeamish - not a good travelling companion, I should think.
Next morning dawns clear and sunny. The mountains appear even more thickly covered with fresh snow, I cycle to the Pumpernickel again for breakfast: the clientele are mostly young German trekkers. Fruit muesli and croissants once more, and I feel good as the sun begins to warm the morning air. I cycle down to the edge of the lake, resist offers to hire a boat for the day, and take the raft over to Fishtail Lodge. It moves along wires rather like the Windermere Ferry, and is pulled across by an elderly Nepali - presumably on the staff of the Hotel - free of charge. Beyond Fishtail Lodge I hoped to walk along the far shore of the lake, but it proves impossible of access except by boat, the banks being steep and thickly wooded. I take some photos, recross the lake, and cycle back to Pokhara to change some travellers' cheques and post some letters.
In the afternoon I buy presents in the Tibetan craft shop of my choice. I decide to spend all my Nepali currency except what I need for the next twenty-four hours, and I try to negotiate a handsome discount for a bulk purchase, However, the Tibetan woman in charge of the stall is a tough bargainer, and uses the language of stallholders the world over - at that price I'd have no profit, my husband would kill me if I sold it any cheaper, and so on. In the end I am reasonably satisfied with my collection of small purchases, though as always when shopping abroad I have the uneasy feeling that I would do better if 1 bought the stuff in London.
At dinner I share a table with a young English couple, Brendan and Clare, whom I met in Pokhara before the trek. Since then their achievement has been on an altogether grander scale than mine, encompassing the Annapurna Circuit which they completed just before the storms began and the weather closed in. The snow was deep in places, but trodden hard so that walking was not too difficult for most of the way. In the remoter areas they found some of the lodges and shelters closed for the winter: others were left open and unattended for trekkers to occupy if they wished. The couple are taking a holiday of several months before Brendan goes back to take charge of a new shop to be added to his father's business of fish and chips which already has thriving establishments in Petersfield and Tenterden,
I leave Pokhara with regret. I was to return four years later tor a more ambitious trek that would take me far beyond Tatapani in my seventy-first year.
.BACK TO INDIA: POKHARA TO GORAKHPUR
I am up at 4.45 in good time for the 5. 30 bus to the border at Sunauli. Lothar and Rhonda loom out of the dark: together we locate our bus. It leaves punctually with our luggage stored on the roof. As I shall be confined to buses all day I take a couple of Lomotil tablets as a precaution. In consequence I feel rather dopey and soon doze off on the bus. I am vaguely conscious that for about six hours we are travelling up and down mountains and then enter the flatter country of the Terai in southern Nepal.
At half past two in the afternoon we arrive at Sunauli, Lothar and Rhonda decide to spend the night in this uninviting village so as to split the long journey into two: I am resolved to push on to Gorakhpur before nightfall and perhaps board a train there. Sunauli is a typical frontier village, straggly and untidy, tull of rickshaw drivers, small boys, and helpers of all sorts offering to change money or provide other services. Emigration through the Nepal border post is a formality with no passport or baggage check, immigration on the Indian side is almost as simple, though the officer in charge pedantically counts up the number of unexpired days left on my Indian visa and tells me how long I can stay.
The bus to Gorakhpur is reputed to be leaving in two hours. On a hot sticky afternoon I am tempted to buy a bottle of what purports to be Cola. The bottle is authentic but the contents are unspeakably revolting. I give it back and refuse to pay; this occasions neither surprise nor indignation. Now I find that I should have collected a bus document on the Nepali side of the frontier, so I walk over and back again without entering the border posts, giving a cheery wave to the officials. I have been told to board a bus with a registration number 4887 but there is no sign of such a bus and the general set-up here does not inspire confidence. So I find another bus waiting to go to Gorakhpur and due to leave at 3.30. It is very full, but the other passengers kindly move along to provide me with a seat, or at any rate part of a seat.
The drive to Gorakhpur is not a pleasant experience. The bus gets more and more crowded, the road gets much worse so that when two vehicles meet one has to get off the road, the noise is overwhelming as Indian pop music blares forth from the bus loudspeakers at top volume and with maximum distortion.
GORAKHPUR
The landscape is quite flat, dotted with palm trees between big banana plantations. We arrive at our destination just thirteen and a half hours after boarding the early morning bus at Pokhara. It seems a lot longer, Gorakhpur has little attraction for the tourist but I feel I can't face any more travelling to-day and abandon any intention to catch a train to Lucknow. The only place that bears any resemblance to a hotel is the Gupta Guest House opposite the station. Accommodation is pretty basic, but reasonably priced at 25 rupees. My bedroom is unattractive but it is a relief to lie flat, and after a short rest I eat a tolerable meal in the Guest House in the company of a couple from Yorkshire, John is a technical instructor on his way home after a three year contract in Papua New Guinea. The day finishes with a thunderstorm and torrential rain. It has been a long day and I am not at my brightest and best.
I wake up feeling a whole lot better. I have a clear head and the morning is bright. In the corridor outside my room is a pile of blankets that has apparently slipped of a shelf, I go to shove it aside and find there is a body underneath - sleeping, I hope. At seven I walk over to the railway station. It is a busy junction with half a dozen platforms crossed by a high bridge. On the bridge, silhouetted against the morning sky, is an unending procession of Indian men, women and children, most of them carrying loads on their heads. Inside the station I buy tea and a roll and ask about the morning train to Lucknow. The clerk at the enquiry office efficiently directs me to the correct platform. The station is quiet and I settle down comfortably in an almost empty train, pulled by an impressive old steam engine.
An attendant asks me if I wish to order lunch. I do so, and enjoy a substantial thali at eleven. For much of the journey I have the compartment to myself, and sit back watching the green landscape, freshened by overnight rain, roll steadily past, Young crops in flat fields stretch out to a distant horizon. Trees resembling oak and ash stand singly or in clumps in the fields, and the view is not unlike that from British Rail on a journey through the Midlands - except that there is no grass for grazing, the fields are smaller, and the sporadic palm tree or banana plantation would be out of place in Warwickshire.
LUCKNOW
After my early lunch I doze off until we arrive in Lucknow at four in the afternoon, I decide to improve on the Gorakhpur accommodation, and I take a rickshaw to the Kh-I-Noor Hotel in the upper bracket: t turns out to be even more expensive (300 rupees) than the Lonely Planet suggests, and in accordance with local custom all the cheaper rooms are said to be full up, and I have to take a de luxe room - hence the high price. The difference between the de luxe and the ordinary room turns out, on enquiry, to be a television set, which of course I do not want. However it is a large and comfortable room, and I look forward to a hot shower, having had nothing more than a perfunctory wash in cold water since I left Pokhara, which - now I come to think of it - is rather a long time ago.
The water runs cold, I am promised it will be hot in half an hour: of course it is not. In view of the price I am paying for the room, I make a considerable fuss, and tell the manager I will move to another hotel - the last thing I feel like doing - unless the hot water materialises, This precipitates action: soon my room is full of hotel staff - the manager, a Sikh engineer, and three technical assistants. The manager tells me his brother works at Harrods' in London, while the Sikh wants to talk about his life as a seaman in Liverpool. There is much play with hammers and spanners: joyful shouts greet boiling water from the shower.
.After my shower I decide that one day's sightseeing will be enough for Lucknow, so I book an overnight train for to-morrow on the metric gauge train to Lalkua on the way to Ramnagur and the Corbett Wildlife Park. This evening, and again in the morning, I enquire about the day coach tour of Lucknow which is reputed to stop at the hotel to pick up passengers. Different members of the hotel staff give me confident and conflicting advice; the tour will start at eight and end at four; it will start at 7:30; it will start at 9.30 - a leaflet says it will call at the hotel at 9. 35. Yes the coach will call at the hotel: no, it will stop on the other side of the road; I had better watch out for it and wave it down. I start waiting at 9.30 and give up after half an hour. The hotel office ring up the coach people and are told that the coach left at nine, but didn't call at the hotel because it was full up. I do not believe a word of this and decide to hire my own rickshaw which will be cheaper and will leave the day's travels under my control, I agree a price (25 rupees) with a villainous-looking rickshaw driver who assures me that he knows all the places to visit. We call at the Post Office to despatch my last letters from India.
Our first sightseeing visit is to the Shah Najif Imamban, the tomb of a local ruler who died in 1827. It was the scene of furious fighting during the mutiny, It is an attractive building in Moghul style, but in poor repair: the interior is shoddy with tawdry chandeliers and tatty models of other tombs and mosques. I surprise my driver by asking to go to the nearby Botanical Gardens, which are not on his approved list of 'sights'. They are nicely laid out and on an extensive scale, planned by an Indian horticulturalist who had been head of the Indian section at Kew for many years and is commemorated by a statue. There is not--much-colour at this time of year except for beds of cannas, but there are pleasant lawns and trees.
The driver resumes his normal tour and takes me to the Residency, besieged for eighty seven days before its relief in September 1857 and then besieged again for a desperate two months before the final liberation of the thousand survivors: two thousand men, women, and children had perished. The remains of the Residency are preserved as they were at the time of the final relief, except that the scattered groups of battle-scarred buildings are now surrounded by neatly kept lawns and gardens.
Within the main structure is a sad museum with relics of the siege, sketches and photographs, and a large sand-table model of the fortifications and battle positions, now neglected and mouldering into dust: the legends are scarcely legible. Below ground level is the cellar where the women and children sheltered during bombardments. A tablet in the wall commemorates the death of a 19-year old girl, killed by a cannon ball. Within the buildings and the grounds are many monuments and inscriptions put up on the initiative of particular families or groups of survivors. The exception to these informal records is the fully official column inscribed with Victorian formality to the memory of Sir Henry Lawrence who commanded the garrison until he fell in the first siege. There are several memorials and tributes to the loyalty of the Indian troops who fought with the Garrison, erected usually by the survivors of individual regiments. Representing the opposing viewpoint is a monument built in 1957 and dedicated to the martyrs of Indian independence a century earlier. In the gardens, the rusty iron gate to the cemetery leans from one broken hinge. I am the only tourist: Indian families play and picnic in the grounds.
Sightseeing is all very well but I am getting hungry and I suggest it is time for lunch. My driver grumbles that we should finish the tour first: we are five kilometers (or so he says) from any restaurant. I tell him we will finish our tour after lunch. Reluctantly he cycles on, only to pull up ten minutes later outside the vast portals of the Great Imambara where he waits for me to dismount. 'Lunch.' I say firmly, and suggest three restaurants from the guide book trom which he might choose, He rejects all on grounds of their unreasonable remoteness.
Any restaurant, I concede, the nearest Indian eating-place will do fine. Even this modest objective takes another half hour of reluctant cycling, though I get down and walk whenever the road goes uphill: we must be in an area of singular gastronomic poverty, At last he halts, perhaps maliciously, at a very run-down local cafe where 1 enjoy a good plate of dahl baat and he stands on his dignity and rejects my invitation to join me. No-one in the cafe speaks English except for a helpful student from the local technical college whose subject is 'European Sanitary Fittings', He proudly shows me his text-books with illustrations of western lavatory systems.
Resuming our tour I am struck by the spaciousness of Lucknow with its wide streets and many parks. There are two more Imambaras to visit: that of Husainabad, dazzling white and flanked by smaller versions of the Taj Mahal, and the Great Bara built in 1784 for grain storage against famine. This has a huge vaulted hall, impressive in scale, but the structure is decaying, The interior decor with its chandeliers and mirrors suggest that the successors to Asuf-ud-Aula must have developed a distressing taste for Victorian bric-a-brac (unless the Victorians had taken the building over from the later Moghuls). In contrast to the dilapidation of the buildings, the surrounding gardens are beautifully kept and resplendent with sweet peas, phlox drumondii, and the inevitable marigolds, It is easier, of course, to recruit gardeners than skilled restorers of historic buildings.
Back in the hotel with three hours to wait before my overnight train, I eat a light supper and read Henry VI from my collected Shakespearean historical plays. My notes summarise the plot: "Rogues. Blood and gore. Weak king'. At half past eight I walk the mile to the metergauge station adjoining the main junction. The reservation system seems to have worked to perfection - name up on board, number of coach listed, etc - but when I reach my coach right at the far end of the platform I find it is locked. A friendly fellow-traveller advises that I can get in through 'backside entrance', but since this involves crawling under the couplings I wait for the guard to unlock the compartment. I settle down into my berth, and three Indian companions into theirs. The night is cold enough to require a sleeping bag, and having climbed into mine I sleep soundly. We are heading for the small town of Lalkua where I am to change trains in the morning.
.FROM LUCKNOW TO CORBETT GAME PARK
Soon after dawn the train pulls in to the small town of Lalkua, where 1 am to change trains. Not much English is spoken here, but I find others bound for Ramnagur who assure me that we should take the second train from the opposite platform. After half an hour our steam train arrives and we cross the tracks to board it, Lalkua station not being equipped with a bridge. There is no first class on this train, so the journey to Ramnagur is more sociable than usual, but not overcrowded, We pass through timber country: big stacks of logs of all sizes are piled alongside the railway track.
We arrive at Ramnagur in the noonday heat. It is a half-mile walk to the centre of this straggling town, where there is a bus terminus of sorts, but no visible indication of where or when buses might travel, and no apparent organization of any kind, Miscellaneous antique buses are arrayed not only in the terminus, but parked along the main road and in side streets, pointing in all directions. My destination is Dikhala, fifty kilometers to the north, and it seems that I have just missed a bus that went there. There will be another in two hours, or possibly three, so I call in at a restaurant for lunch.
I now learn that I need a permit for Corbett Park, and there is a Reception Office here at which accommodation in the Park can be reserved, The reception officer tells me that there is only one bed available, a dormitory berth at twelve rupees, and that is free for only one night. Once I am there, however, perhaps I can arrange something, says the officer optimistically.
Back at the restaurant, a tour party is alighting from their coach for a lunch-time halt. There are about sixteen of them, covering all ages, and half of them Indian while half are visitors to the country. They are on a tour from Delhi and will spend two nights in the Game Park, Their coach is the height of luxury compared with the local buses, and will leave for Dikhala in about an hour. I confirm with the Guide that there is room on the coach, check that there will be no objection to my joining it, and pay the Guide the ten rupees I would have spent on the bus fare.
CORBETT GAME PARK
We soon drive into dense rain forest, crossing the Park boundary. The road is in poor condition and does not appear to go anywhere except to Dikhala, and a couple of small villages on the way to it. It is a slow two hour journey with many ups and downs as we cross river beds, and several halts where the guide draws our attention to some not very exciting deer. We saw also some agreeable monkeys and a most unattractive wild boar.
Dikhala is situated in the middle of the Park in a clearing by a wide river. Visitors are put up in a compound where there are some comfortable modern houses, a tew tents with two beds in each, and a couple of log huts with dormitory berths in three tiers, I dump my pack.on a middle berth, the tour party meanwhile settling into houses that have been reserved for them. In the compound I meet two very relaxed American youths who are not bothering with such things as permits and are proposing to spend the night on the platform of a nearby observation tower. In the log hut I meet Mark, an English graduate just out of university, and two lively American career women in their thirties, Louise and Caroline from Indiana. All three have been in the Park for a few days, , and have been told that after to-night all places will be taken by a visiting group.
Together we enjoy a really good thali, tasty and filling, in the communal dining room. Nowhere is there any information about the animals in the Park, nor about the arrangements for seeing them, though there are notices warning us on no account to venture on foot outside the compound, The old hands tell me that the only arrangements' are daily tours either by elephant or by jeep, the former giving the better chance of sighting any animals.
The dormitory huts are filling up now with a group of cheerful Indian youths. We assume that they might be a noisy lot and may take some time to settle down for the night. Louise and Caroline persuade me that it will be quieter and less crowded in one of the tents that seems to be unoccupied, After dark we creep out surreptitiously to install ourselves there. I am speculating how we will fit three persons into two beds when Louise volunteers to sleep on the ground. After a nominal protest I accept this solution. The night is cool and we all sleep well.
In the morning I elect to take the elephant ride, It is misty, with visibility of no more than a hundred yards. We do not leave until 8, 30, which sems very late for viewing any activity. Half a dozen elephants are being loaded in turn via a ladder and a platform. On the top of my elephant is a howdah seating six people which I share with an Indian family that includes two small and noisy children, We set off into the mist with little hope on my part that we shall see multitudes of wild beasts. We lumber along, first across open fields, then through thick jungle where the elephant brushes aside or tramples down some fair-sized trees and we lurch over banks and ditches.
There is about as much wild life to be seen as in the average suburban garden. Three or four wild elephants, or so our guide describes them, heave into sight and out again, but there is nothing to distinguish them from tame elephants except that they don't have people on their backs. We move out again into open country where the mist is lifting as the sun climbs, and we see a few deer in the distance. That is all.
This disappointing expedition is typical of the experience of visitors to the Corbett National Park, There are said to be thirty or forty tigers, but they are spread over hundreds of square miles, and they probably know exactly when tourists come by on their elephants so they can keep well clear, With luck you might meet a man who spoke to someone last week who heard a tiger growl: the two relaxed Americans claimed to have heard growling nearby during their night on the observation tower, and to have seen claw-marks, but they may just have wanted to keep the tower to themselves and discourage others.
.We have been told by the warden that we must leave during the day because of the imminent arrival or a large party who had booked all the accommodation. He insisted that every bed would then be occupied. For our part, we think we will be able to find somewhere to sleep, if necessary on the Watch tower provided the growling is not too loud. Louise devised the tactic that we should lie low during the atternoon and keep out of the warden's way, and make a close reconnaissance just before dark. At five o'clock we congratulate ourselves that no-one else has arrived, and we start to make up our beds in the huts. Then suddenly two buses turm up with a hundred or more smartly dressed little Indian schoolchildren. The warden appears, greatly agitated, and reproves us for not heeding his warnings.
We apologise to the warden, tell him we'll be happy to doss down anywhere in the compound to-night, and promise to leave to-morrow. After he has directed the newcomers to their quarters, he finds a hut for the illegal immigrants - as he clearly regards us - and eight of us sleep the night on the concrete floor of the bare hut. Or part of the night in my case: my sleeping bag provides little in the way of cushioning for the hips, and it is some time before I think of relieving the pressure on the bone by sliding my anorak under the hip.
Next morning I take an early walk with a young woman from Washington State who belongs to the tour party from Delhi. She has been working for two years in Riyadh as a medical secretary. At her house in the Park compound, the guide showed her into a double room, and announced that he would occupy the other bed. When she protested, he agreed to find a place elsewhere if she paid him the thirty-five rupees he claimed it would cost. In the event she enjoyed a night's sleep by herself and had not paid over any rupees; I hope she never did. Later I sit down by the river with Mark, next to a couple of elephants munching grass, and discuss courses at Business Schools which he might take after his law degree.
Together with most of the other outlaws, I decide to join the tour bus back to Delhi after suitable payment to the guide, who is enjoying a profitable trip. The bus drives slowly through the jungle and out of the Park, It is a comfortable though tedious journey for the next ten hours. The tedium is relieved somewhat by Caroline who interviews me on her tape recorder about my travels. She plans to use the interview in an article for a magazine about adventurous holidays for the elderly.
DELHI AGAIN
At half past eight in the evening the coach deposits us on the main highway of Janpath outside the Imperial Hotel. We brush aside the usual onrush of willing helpers and start walking towards Connaught Place. Five minutes later I recognize two familiar figures approaching in the darkness - Lothar and Rhonda, last seen at Sunauli on the Nepal border. They followed me on to Lucknow, have been in Delhi for two days, and are off to Jaipur to-morrow. We agree to meet for breakfast. Mark, Louise, and Caroline look for dormitory beds at Ringo's Guest House, while I go on to Hotel 55 where I am greeted as an old friend - quite a touching welcome.
.After checking in at Hotel 55 I walk round to my favourite haunt at the United Coffee House for a good strong coffee and a mango ice cream, Back at the hotel I wash through some unbelievably filthy clothes and relax under a long hot shower. I work out how to spend my last week in India, and decide to fit in a few days at the Bharatpur bird sanctuary which I failed to call at when travelling trom Agra to Jaipur.
For breakfast I meet Louise, Caroline, Lothar, Rhonda, and Mark at the Chinese restaurant next to Ringo's, which rejoices in the name 'Don't Pass Me By". I call at American Express for mail but am disappointed - for some reason a number of letters addressed to me there failed to reach me. Next for the familiar walk up Chelmsford Road to New Delhi Railway Station, thronged as usual, to join a long hot queue in the Tourist Reservation Office. After an hour's wait I reserve a seat in the romantically named Frontier Mail at 8.45 to-morrow morning, Allowing two or three days for Bharatpur I will have three or tour left in Delhi. By this stage of the trip I have lost my appetite for sightseeing: I shall spend my remaining days in the capital as a boulevardier, visiting the more congenial of the cheaper cafes and restaurants, and idling away the hours in the Delhi sunshine which is noticeably warmer in February than it was in early December.
I put this philosophy into practice by lunching at El Arab, then basking in hazy afternoon sunshine on my hotel balcony overlooking the busy Outer Circle of Connaught Place, and taking a first look at the Government Cottage Emporium where I hope to buy a few more small gifts.
I meet Mark for a Chinese meal at the "Don't Pass Me By". His funds are low and he looks hungry even after our meal, so I take him to the United Coffee House and treat him to apple-pie and ice cream - the only occasion on which I have indulged myself by treating an impecunious companion, as I assume it would often cause embarrassment.
BHARATPUR
I leave Hotel 55 early, leaving my pack there with most of my gear, and reserving my room again for Thursday and Friday. On Delhi station I chat up two attractive Danish girls, under twenty I should guess, but unchivalrously abandon them to their second-class seats when the train arrives. I find my reserved seat without trouble, and travel with Susan McGrath from Western Australia. She is going on to Kota, further down the line, where she has heard that the annual religious festival is in full swing, Susan, in her thirties, is an environmental planner who has been working in British Columbia, advising on the impact of industrialisation on Inuit communities. She is an intelligent and lively talker, with a copious flow of words that suggests she may not have enjoyed much conversation for a while.
From Bharatpur Station I take a cycle rickshaw for five miles to the Tourist Bungalow about two miles from the entrance of the Bird Sanctuary, I am back in Rajasthan now, where the tourist bungalows are pleasant and spacious, but this one is surrounded by piles of bricks and concrete as a new drive is being built. There is a superior residence further on, but though within the sanctuary, it is outside my budget.
.At lunch in the Tourist Bungalow I meet a friendly young Indian who has been studying computers in Sydney. He hopes to start his own software company either in Australia, where there would be better prospects, or in Bombay which is his family home from which he would be sad to be parted. His stylish trousers are smeared with grease: he warns me against hiring the local bicycles which are in rickety condition. One of his pedals dropped off when he was in the Bird Sanctuary and five miles from the Bungalow.
However, since we are two miles from the entrance to the Sanctuary, which itself covers a huge area, I approach the local cycle merchant in company with a new friend, Gilliam Dawson. Gillian is an attractive 32 year old archaeologist (she looks younger) who graduated from King's in Cambridge and has several digs to her credit in East Africa, Norway, and elsewhere. At present she is a curator at one of Bristol's museums. We inspect a selection of decrepit bicycles and I try out a couple. I refuse to take one unless at least one of the brakes is working, the proprietor considers this an unreasonable attitude as I am going into the bird sanctuary, not into town where he concedes that brakes would be an advantage. I prevail on him to fix the brakes, after a fashion. He waves his spanner triumphantly, saying "Brakes fixed. Accident, puncture, your problem!". On that understanding I hand over my ten rupees and cycle off with Gillian.
The sanctuary is criss-crossed with narrow roads, suitable for bicycles or cycle-rickshaws. They are elevated a few feet above the fields on either side, which would be under water for most of the year. This winter has been exceptionally dry, so there are only narrow strips of water and a few small lakes, dotted with scattered woodland. Bharatpur has much more to offer than Corbett; for a start it is liberally endowed with herons - six different types. There are plenty of kingfishers, and bee-eaters that shoot past out of the trees like brilliant green arrows. Some of the kingfishers are vividly coloured and sport the familiar bright blue flash: others are or more sober hue, but perform spectacular dives (usually unsuccessful) from a hovering position fifty teet above their target fish.
A few visitors are cycling as we are, but most are on specially designed rickshaws at higher elevation than usual to give a better view, conducted by qualified Indian guides who help to spot and identify the bird life. There is also a group of twenty Americans who are staying at the luxurious Forest lodge within the sanctuary: some seem to have no special interest in the birds, but others are keen ornithologists, as are a young Dutch couple we meet later on their bicycles.
At supper in the Tourist Bungalow we share a table with an Australian couple who I recall seeing in the tour party at Corbett. They are near my own age: Tony Cansdale, a slight and frail figure, was a British naval officer in the war, and met his wife Lena in Haifa where she was a refugee. They are enthusiastic travellers, this being their sixth visit
to India, They are friends of Tony Wheeler, author of Lonely Planet Guides, who acknowledged their help in the first edition of his guide to India. Other guests at the Tourist Bungalow include an eccentric.Frenchwoman with lank blond hair who carries on long conversations with herself and is said to sleep on the verandah.
I join Gillian at breakfast. After prolonged speculation the staff have concluded that she is my daughter. She is going to stay one day more in Bharatpur before going on to Jaipur, and is hiring a cycle again to-day. I feel the need of a day's walking, but we expect to meet somewhere in the sanctuary: indeed we do, and spend most of the morning together. We are able to approach quite near to the Siberian cranes, Bharatpur's rarest visitors, they are large and timid birds; some of the pairs have a single offspring with them. At midday, when the temperature is way up in the eighties we walk to Python Point where some large pythons were seen yesterday, but they have gone to ground.
We part company for the afternoon, and I walk on, covering nine or ten miles on foot in the day. One startling feature to find in the bird sanctuary is a huge stone memorial commemorating the annual shoots conducted there in the days before conservation. Inscriptions recorded the Viceroy or Maharajah in whose honour the shoot was organized, the number of participating guns, and the total of birds slaughtered on each occasion. The most successful massacre accounted tur over three thousand.
BHARATPUR TO DELHI
Thursday February 12th and the early days of Friday the thirteenth are not to be my lucky days. I take a rickshaw to Bharatpur station in good time to catch the 8:20 express that is due to arrive in Delhi at midday, only to find from the assistant stationmaster that this train has been cancelled for the past month. Not relishing a seven and a half hour wait for the next express, I press my enquiries, and find there is a slow passenger train, with no first-class, leaving at 9:45 and arriving an hour later at Mathura, where I am assured - there will be frequent trains to Delhi. I take this on trust, having by now discarded my invaluable 'Trains at a Glance' (and Rita's telephone number inscribed by the Major). On the platform, waiting for the Jaipur train, is an English couple I had noticed in the Bungalow: they turn out to be mother and son, an unusual travelling combination in India, touring the country for a month , after the son had cut short his first visit last year following an attack of amoebic dysentery.
The Mathura train arrives a few minutes late and I climb into a crowded second class compartment, finding a place to stand near the open window. The seats are fully occupied to say the least, most of the benches made for four brimming over with eight passengers. Across the corridor are some single seats, and one occupant invites me to share his seat. When I decline, preferring to stand in relative comfort, the half seat on offer is immediately occupied by two other passengers.
At an intermediate station a lot of people get off and I have a seat to myself. As is usual in the second class, everyone is friendly and talkative. Not many women are travelling. A man is playing cards with his three children, a passenger in the upper berth takes advantage of a fan that is not working, takes off his shoes, and rests them on the fan.
.The train stops often between stations for no apparent reason, and is an hour late when we arrive at Mathura. The frequent trains trom Mathura to Delhi turn out to be a figment of the imagination of the Assistant Stationmaster at Bharatpur. The first train to leave will be an exceptionally slow one in four hours' time, followed by the Frontier Mail which will overtake it before it reaches Delhi. The Frontier Mail is the train I would have caught if I had spent the day waiting tor the next train at Bharatpur. Now I have to spend the afternoon at Mathura, an ancient city with famous mosques and monuments, I walk out of the station, which seems to be miles from the town centre, and am immediately assailed from all directions by hopeful rickshaw drivers. I have plenty of time to hire a rickshaw tor the afternoon, visit all the right mosques, and return to the station in good time to catch the Frontier Mail. Alas, I do not measure up to the challenge. I decide instead to settle down for a good read in Mathura's first-class waiting room, comfortably furnished and quite empty. The station bookstall displays novels by Jackie Collins, the complete works of Enid Blyton, and a few others from which I choose a thriller by Alastair Maclean.
My troubles are far from over, The Frontier mail is reported to be running an hour and a half late. A most helpful Indian civil engineer, anxious to reach Delhi in time to catch the overnight connection to Bikaner, recommends the Punjab Mail which should now arrive first, We board it together and embark on a long discussion about the condition of India. He thinks that the people of India do not work hard enough because it is too easy to satisfy the basic needs of life. In countries like England we have to work harder in order to survive a harsher climate. He is delighted when I tell him that his theory was first formulated by Arnold Toynbee who called it 'Challenge and Response". Like many Indians he is proud of his country's achievement of agricultural self-sufficiency, against all expert predictions at the date of independence.
India's economic growth, he suggests, must be geared to the rate of social development: for each country there is an optimum growth rate, which is low for India because of the sluggish pace of social change, The education system churns out plenty of highly qualified people - though many seek employment abroad (we call it the brain drain, he
explains): but primary education covers effectively only a small fraction of the population. He asks me what part in daily life in Britain is played by religion - not much, I venture - and what is the constitutional role of the Queen; he is disappointed to learn that she has no political power at all. On world problems he is eloquent about the danger from nuclear weapons. We cover an extensive canvas in time for me to take a short nap before the train arrives at New Delhi at eight in the evening.
FINAL DAYS IN DELHI
It has been a long and frustrating day. I climb the familiar stairs of Hotel 55 with relief, immediately dissipated as an apologetic manager tells me that my room is unfortunately occupied. The man who took it.during my absence was due to leave earlier in the day, but missed his plane and is not now leaving the hotel until 1:30 a. m. Meanwhile he would make me up a bed in the office. The best course is clearly to go out for the evening, but I badly want a shower first. The hot water hadn't been working at Bharatpur. The courteous Sikh who now occupies my room offers me the use or his shower which 1 gratefully accept. I stroll around Connaught Place and down Janpath to the Don't Pass Me By, Over a meal I meet Antony Cotton from New Zealand, a teacher in his late twenties who has spent several weeks in China after two treks in Nepal, He had also visited the Chitwan Game Park in Nepal: it sounded much better value than the Corbett - at least he had seen some rhinos. We go on to the United Coffee House and stay till midnight when I walk back to Hotel 55 to finish my Alastair Maclean thriller.
At one-thirty when my friend the Sikh should be leaving for the airport, there is no sign of life or movement, The hote] staff assure me the room will be free by two, but accumulated frustration is making me very angry. I take up my pack and sit obstinately in the corridor outside the room in which, by rights, I should now be comfortably asleep. Within I can hear two voices, one reluctant and complaining, to my urging, a hotel clerk goes into the room to negotiate. The Sikh looks out of the door, sees me camping in the corridor, and cries out 'Oh, my God!' in dismay. He invites me into the room, where his companion is half asleep on the bed, but I politely decline, saying I will await his departure which I had expected at one-thirty, Soon after two the occupants move out and I move in. I wash out all my clothes, fall into bed at three, and then find it difficult to sleep after all the frustration and resentment of the day.
Next day I negotiate some compensation with the manager, settling for half a night's charge for the half night or less I spent in bed, and securing permission to use the room up to nine on Saturday evening so I could stay until I am due to go to the airport instead of checking out at midday. Feeling better about things now, I give myself an easy time for the rest of Friday and Saturday, buying some small gifts from the Cottage Emporium, and acquiring 'Enderby and the Dark Lady' by Antony Burgess which I found an entertaining conceit.
The final stage of my trip is uneventful. The airport bus from Janpath is punctual and not overfull. The Air France flight is delayed for an hour. I still have fifty rupees which I am not allowed to take out of India. I had thought I could spend it at the airport, but there is nowhere to do this except at the canteen, and that has a limited menu.
Undaunted, I run down my balance to zero by ordering successively ice cream, apple-pie, chicken sandwiches, more ice-cream, and finally another chicken sandwich. My performance is watched with amazement by a young American who has abandoned his planned three month holiday in India after only three weeks because of a violent attack of dysentery - singularly ill-timed to coincide with his sea voyage from Bombay to Goa.
I think back to these last days in Delhi and how much quieter and more relaxed it was than before. I realise that it is not Delhi that had changed, but I. Newcomers show uncertainty, politeness, compassion, seized on at once - qualities, alas, that decline with experience.
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