On the road in Central India

It's been a while since I posted anything, because it's been a busy couple of weeks with about 4 cities, train rides, bus rides, camping trips, and beach bumming all jammed in there. Although I'm heading to the Maldives tomorrow, I've got a couple of posts saved up, so you'll probably be seeing them after I've actually left the country (after I've had a chance to go through the many, many photos I've taken), but most of this post comes from the middle of my time in India. I'm happy to say I finally started to feel a lot more comfortable and at home here around the time I was writing this, and the reminder of my time has generally been very pleasant, if a little hectic. I decided it's probably a good time for me to settle down for a while when I was taking a taxi from the bus station to my last hotel and the driver asked me "Where are you coming from?", and I drew a complete blank for about 3 seconds. So 4 weeks in the Maldives should be just the ticket to recharge my drive to explore the next batch of countries.

One recommendation - if you want a much better description of Mumbai life than I could ever give, plus a really good Godfather-style story of prison, crime syndicates, and love affairs, read Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. It was great reading it while I was here because it helped me understand some of the culture, while confirming other things I had seen.
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India has been an interesting experience, and I’m glad I made it part of my trip. It’s tough for me to recommend it as a traditional vacation spot, because for me “vacation” usually implies some level of relaxation, while India has been more challenging and thought-provoking. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it’s a little tiring at times. So if you ever decide to go, just be prepared to work a little harder than the usual vacation and I think you’ll be rewarded for your efforts, but you’ll also probably want to take a couple of days off afterward as a post-vacation vacation. This advice and the following observations, by the way, are coming from someone who’s been mostly traveling to the more developed and laid-back areas of India.

Daulatabad Fort, near Aurangabad. It is the remains of a massive fort last held during the Mughal Dynasty by Aurangzeb, who gave the town it's name, and was also apparently a bit paranoid about defenses

Elephant sculpture from the caves at Ellora. The Ellora sculptures are beautiful, thousands of years old, and contain temples from three major religions; Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism

First off, you can’t drive anywhere in India. And when I say “you can’t”, I mean legally tourists are forbidden to drive, due to the quality of the roads, lack of signage, and local driving customs. So that leaves you with the options of packaged tours, getting yourself a driver, or renting a car, which comes with a local driver. You can also just flag taxis or tuktuks (auto-rickshaws) for trips to a restaurant or the train station, but after more than a couple of a times in a city, you’re better off just getting a driver for the duration. If you find yourself a good driver, they can give you recommendations on food and shopping, they know the city, and since you’re hiring them for a couple of days, they’re more invested in making you happy. Plus, if they know enough English and you get along, you can learn a lot about the local scene. Good drivers, I think like most of the working population in India, will go to ridiculous lengths to keep/please a good customer. For example, my driver in Aurangabad offered to drive me to Goa (about 500 miles away, one way) when I told him that was my next destination, and he told me that in November he was taking a couple to Calcutta, which is literally on the other other side of the country.

Some of the Jain carvings from Ellora

The Ellora caves are cut into a valley side, over a kilometer of carved areas, and the whole thing has a serious Indiana Jones vibe to it

This is one of the Buddhist caves, and while I was there, this family came in and started chanting. The whole scene was incredibly beautiful and peaceful

Don’t get me wrong though, having a good driver does not mean the driving will be any less scary, it just means that eventually you’ll figure out that he knows what he’s doing and tune it out. The actual act of driving the roads in India is accomplished through a complex code of beeps, honks, headlight flashes, and turn signal semaphore. Somehow, all of this is translated by motorists, cyclists (both motor and pedal), tuktuk drivers, pedestrians, teamsters, cows, and dogs into a communications system that allows everyone to know where everyone else intends to go in an accident-free manner. Usually. And yes, I’m aware that India has one of the highest motor vehicle accident rates in the world, but after driving around for a couple of days and watching the dance of vehicles, I can’t help but be impressed that the rate isn't ten times higher. I certainly never got irate that I couldn't drive myself around. However, drivers in India use their horns more than any other country I've been in; it almost seems to be a sort of echo-location that they constantly engage in to have a complete sense of their surroundings. They beep to let people know that they are behind them, they honk to respond that they've heard someone else's beep, they blow their horns to tell others to get out of the way, and I've even heard drivers tooting away on an empty street, apparently just out of habit. The result of all of this is I think I've incurred a slight permanent hearing loss from being constantly surrounded by a symphony of horns.

The Ajanta caves, also near Aurangabad. These contain only Buddhist monasteries and temples, but also thousands of years old. In some of the caves, there are paintings still visible that are 500+ years old

One difficult facet of visiting India for me was that there is no such thing as a set price, with the exception of restaurants and supermarkets. I’m horrible at negotiating and I hate to haggle, so every purchase gets a little stressful. I know I’m going to get gouged, it’s just a question of by how much, and I very quickly had to get over worrying that one taxi ride cost this much here, but double there (or triple, or quadruple). In Mumbai, for example, prices are almost American equivalent for a lot of stuff, which means dinner there might cost as a much as a decent hotel room for the night in the countryside. But a taxi ride negotiated by a friendly hotel staffer in Mumbai might only be half as much as one I flag down myself from the train station in the countryside. So I've been practicing my “walk away” bargaining technique after hearing a quote, and hoping I can bargain down to only twice as much as a good haggler would pay. It also doesn't hurt to remember once in a while that I’m usually arguing over the equivalent of 50 cents or a dollar, which always feels faintly ridiculous.

Sunset in Goa

The Archaeological Museum in Old Goa, housed in the old Church of St. Francis of Assisi and built by the Portuguese in the 16th century 

Here are some example costs I've paid in the last couple of weeks, to give you an example of the wide ranges in prices:

• 1 hour public bus ride = 50 rupees ($.80)
• 6 hour public bus ride = 140 rupees ($2.30)
• 14 hour train ride (sleeper class, no AC) = 365 rupees ($6)
• 15 minute taxi ride = 35 - 250 rupees ($.65 - $4)
• 1 liter of bottled water = 20 rupees ($.35)
• Average dinner (veg curry, bread, rice, lassi drink) = 250 rupees ($4)
• Dinner at a pizza place in Mumbai = 1500 rupees ($25)
• Driver for an 8 hour touring day = 1500 - 2500 rupees ($25 - $40)
• One way, 2 hour flight in country = 8000 rupees ($120)
• One night in a hostel = 600 - 1000 rupees ($10 - $16)
• One night in a budget hotel = 1000 - 1500 rupees ($16 - $24)
• One night in a western hotel chain = 8000 - 12000 rupees ($120 - $180)
• A glass of chai tea = 10 rupees ($.15)
• A cappuccino = 120 rupees ($2)
• A fresh coconut from a stand, cut for drinking the juice and eating the meat = 25 rupees ($.40)
• A public ferry ride = 4 - 30 rupees ($0.07 - $0.60)

You can see that for most daily expenses, this is a pretty cheap country to visit. In fact, I've had several discussions with the locals on how bad the rupee is right now versus the dollar or Euro, which is great for tourists (and tourism), but bad for the country as a whole. The economy is still generally chugging along, but it seems that the more the Western nations pull themselves out of the recession, the worse India's economy seems to get. For a tourist on the other hand, the biggest problem is that the ATM usually gives out 500 rupee notes, which isn't much use for buying a chai or a bottle of water.

The inside of the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa

Shrine to Francis Xavier, the Jesuit missionary who traveled through much of Asia in the 16th century

Prices are a good example of the general schizophrenic vibe of the country. From my first impression, India seems less like a nation than an outgoing explosion of cultures, languages, and motion. Imagine if every American state had it’s own language and traditions, and somehow there was still an idea of what it meant to be American holding it together, and that’s not a bad comparison for India. There are times where two natives of India can only communicate with each other in English, a language imposed by an outside colonial nation, because only one, or neither, of them speak the Hindi, the other official national language of India (the individual states can set official state languages too). On top of all those different histories and regional differences, it feels as though India is trying so hard to urbanize and increase the standard of living (but at an individual level, mostly through making more money) so fast that the entire broader nation appears to be danger of giving way at the seams. The inequities between social strata, urban and rural areas, and gender are enormous, but even within these categories there are tensions between those trying to hold on to more traditional elements of daily life, and those pushing the boundaries of acceptability.

Xavier's mausoleum, which contains most of his remains (one of his toes was bitten off by an overly enthusiastic relic-seeker). Gaudy, no? The body is brought down to ground level for a huge festival every 10 years

The analogy I keep coming back to over and over again is New York City just before the turn of the 20th century, except on a continental scale. It’s a mix of cultures and classes with little organization or common direction, except to build something better for their families and communities. Sometimes canceling each other’s work out, sometimes at odds, but always creating a fierce dynamic energy. Everything seems to be building up and tearing down at the same breakneck speed, so you have new office buildings surrounded by piles of rubble, and 4 star hotels next door to slums, and all it containing points of four thousand years of history. Taking the analogy of NYC forward, it will be very interesting to see what happens in India in the next 20 or 30 years. So much of the science fiction I read growing up had China and India battling it out for global dominance during the last half of the 21st century, and I think that's a pretty likely scenario after seeing bits of both counties in the last year. There is a phenomenal drive here that really brings to mind what I've read about Manhattan, and to some extent the rest of the US, at the end of the 19th century. It's not often pretty, but it is energetic in a way I don't think you see in the States anymore.