India part 25d: back in Calcutta

After attempting and failing to go to a Botanical Gardens in a variety of cities, and also managing to not get a decent picture of a butterfly a number of times - the fiends kept flying off - in Calcutta, fresh from our Sundarbans trip, I managed to achieve both.

The gardens also featured the delights of India's biggest Banyan tree. So massive, I couldn't fit it all in.

Banyan trees are a pretty scary idea as it is - this one had spread its 2800-odd offshoots over a ridiculously large area and looked like something out of HR Geiger.

Some of the roots are thick enough to resemble trees in their own right; some are spindly and propped up by wooden crutches, as if Salvador Dali had done a turn as a park ranger. The only drawback of the gardens was that the ticket people confiscated our bottles of mineral water on the way in, which meant we could only stay as long as thirst allowed. As I noted in my diary, this turn of events was startlingly reminiscent of the protagonist's predicament in 127 Hours, which we'd seen at the cinema the previous day. Thankfully no arms were sawn off during our frolicking amongst the foliage.

The other memorable thing about Calcutta was that it was the city in which I finally finished reading Roberto Bolano's monster masterwork 2666. Let us celebrate with one of my favourite quotes from the book:

That night Reiter wasn't tired and the full moon filtered through the fabric of the tent like boiling coffee through a sock.

India part 25c: The Sundarbans

On day two, it was all aboard the boat, which appeared to be named after a blunderbuss-toting red moustache-wearing cartoon character (unless you spoke Spanish, of course).

In summary: no tigers, but plenty of saltwater crocodiles, wild boar, deer, Brahmin kites, Kingfishers, curfews and egrets. I wish we hadn't seen any of the latter, so I could write: "Oh well, no egrets," - but never mind. There were also tons of Indian tourists ignoring the wildlife and instead taking pictures of the three of us, many without asking first, which is rare. Say cheese, guys!

Ajay, Mowgli's young cousin who was looking after us for the day was very disdainful of them. He turned out to be a delightful raconteur, telling us a good anecdote about being ambushed by his family on Holi, and a more worrying one about a British-Gujurati girl who was, to all intents and purposes, stalking him from afar. He did have occasional moments when he seemed sullen, as if Sarah and I were his parents who he has embarrassed to be seen with, but then this impression would vanish and he'd start on another enthusiastic story. Later in the evening we walked a few kilometres with him to a cafe for chai and sweets, getting another bicycle cart back, with the road flickeringly illuminated by the naked flame the driver was using in lieu if a headlight, and the stars seemed brighter than ever.

The next day we wended our way back, via a number of tea shops, before getting a lift to Calcutta with Mowgli, getting to experience his pimped stereo. It cost a sixth of the price of the car itself, he told us proudly. Unfortunately he had a fondness for substandard house music and skipped over any promising-sounding hip hop, presumably in case P was offended by the language. More irony, since when we arrived back in Calcutta, she made a comment about Jews which made me wonder if my verdict on her - "Daily Mail reader" - had been a bit mild. Oh dear.

India part 25b: The Sundarbans

We decided to dip into our wedding gift money and pay for an organised trip to the Sundarbans  - pronounced "underpants" - since it's rather complicated to get to without help from someone who knows what the hell they're doing. Also, if you want a meal in that neck of the woods, you have to go and ask a villager in Bengali.

I vaguely remembered hearing about the Sundarbans from reading Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (my edition had a rather similar cover to the boat's painting above, a coincidence, I'm sure), which had baffled me in parts; I think I must have drifted off during the bit when he explained what a mangrove was. The Sundarbans are a set of ever-changing islands set amid a load of tidal mud deltas. It has lots of mangroves, which, it turns out, are sort of muddy orchards. The thing everyone asks you when you get back from a boat ride through the Sundarbans is "Did you see a tiger?" to which you reply "No" and pretend not to be disappointed, perhaps listing other wildlife you did see.

After a few hours in the car out of Calcutta, we boarded a ferry, which was actually more reminiscent of a wooden longboat with a motor, then, in one of the coolest bits of our whole India trip, had a half-hour ride across the peaceful and remote island of Gosaba on the back of a bicycle-powered cart.

We arrived at our hotel, which truly had the hardest beds we'd ever experienced - "like sleeping on a table," was Sarah's verdict. In an Indian trope we'd encountered before, the immaculate garden was a thousand times more impressive than the inside, decorated as it was with luscious white, pink and purple Cosmos.

At this stage, my diary says this:

A goat just farted.

In the afternoon, we went for a walk through the village with the other person on the tour, an adventurous older lady from Devon, who I assumed would be called Margaret or Alison, but wasn't, and here will be referred to as P - and our guide, who was nicknamed Mowgli after a run-in a few years ago with a French girl who had dubious levels of political correctness. He seemed quite a serious young man, although he was perhaps disgruntled at P's earlier unsubtle suggestions that his father was a slave-owning pimp (I'm actually serious, though she didn't use those exact words).

After our stroll through the village, which was disrupted by two mad dogs, one of whom got its teeth round my calf, thankfully not tearing the skin or my trousers, we got on a small wooden boat...

...and an iron-armed gondolier rowed us up the silent river.

The waterways here are about three billion percent cleaner than the Ganges at Varanasi, and as we gazed at the birds, the grey swampy riverbanks like sludgy concrete and the passing fishermen, all you could hear was the creak of the boat and the water sloshing gently. Then Mowgli's mobile rang. Though he has the trappings of a city boy - haircut, goatee, souped-up soundsystem in car - when we asked, he professed a love of the countryside. "The more technologies and options, the more puzzle," he said of urban life. Too true, though this prompted P to tell him about the British phenomenon of happy-slapping, calling it "very common"; Mowgli's eyes widened. She then threw an anecdote about a man (black, of course) who stabbed someone after they objected to him throwing chips at them and rounded off with a quick dig at benefit cheats. Littlejohn alert! Ironically, she referred to the happy-slappers as "feral children" - a phrase Mowgli should certainly have recognised given his moniker!

Later that night, we ate at one of the villagers' houses and saw a concert by local Baul musicians. It would've been interesting to find out what they were singing about - "life and culture", according to Mowgli, so it could've been Bengali translations of Coldplay singles for all I know. Between songs, the vocalist, whose voice was hypnotic, and strangely feminine, had the look of a man being stalked by a tiger. During songs, he looked like an Indian Hugh Dennis with bad teeth.

India part 25a: Calcutta

We arrived into Calcutta on the Vibhuti Express, which was lacking in both the vegetable biryani I'd ordered on board and punctual ticket inspectors (the guy turned up in the middle of the night, while everyone was sleeping, and promptly switched the light on). The train made up for these shortcomings in grime and mice, which were in abundance, the latter making cameo appearances dashing between the areas under the seats and the former liberally coating our beds higher up. I cleaned mine by dripping mineral water onto the bed's plastic surface and scrubbing away with already-read pages of Private Eye. These then went out the window, as subcontinental litter rules dictate. While I was trying to sleep, I pictured a villager chancing on the filthy pages while performing his trackside excretions in the morning: figurative dirt on British politicians and literal dirt from the passing Vibhuti Express.

Compulsory Calcutta touristy pictures, then:

Six things that have happened while we've been away

1. Egypt
2. Tuition fees
3. Japan
4. Wikileaks
5. Libya
6. The Only Way Is Essex

India part 24c: Sarnath

This bit is a sort of sideways subsectional branch of Varanasi (it was a day trip, courtesy of a very uncomfortable rickshaw). Sarnath was where Buddhism was invented. 'Nuff said.

Dudes hanging in front of the Dhamekh Stupa near where the
Buddha gave his first sermon. He ain't coming back, boys!

A bit of a Jain temple nearby: gaudy but great.

Nice use of increasing exclamation marks.

Paging Indian Jones.

I'd love to know what this conversation's about.

As my dad remarked: "How many Buddhist monks does it take to..." Here, the gang try
to get a very heavy generator onto a wooden cart amid much mutual hilarity. Some hipster
in East London is in the middle of turning this tableau into a six-part sitcom for BBC Three.

India part 24b: Varanasi

Here they are: the Varanasi highlights. Steps feature heavily (not the band). Drying clothes, too.

India part 24a: Varanasi

Leaving Lucknow (coincidentally, this is also the name of the made-for-TV sequel to Nicolas Cage boozeathon Leaving Las Vegas) was more stressful than it should've been, because I left the train ticket printout at the hotel and made the mistake of asking the railway staff to help me out instead of just dashing to an internet cafe to print another one - which I ended doing anyway. The culmination of the railwaymen's frenzied attempts to help me find out which train we were on and which carriage we were supposed to be in was being marched to the tourist office - despite the fact that we were in danger of missing the train - to sign the visitors' book and record in writing how helpful they'd been.

The journey was peaceful, though, and I made a sizeable dent in Gregory David Roberts' absolute rainforest of a novel, Shantaram, which is required reading for any India travelling cliche - we've encountered it at every turn - alongside Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. It's a page-turner, even if there are 936 of the blighters, but physically painful when he starts banging on about the mysteries of fate or talks about a woman's eyes - "the colour of sunsets peppered with the fragrant yellow pollen that floats past the smiles of innocent children playing in apple orchards, the pupils daubed with the specks that spoke of the grief of the recently bereaved" (NB this is not an actual quote, but you get the picture).

Before my mum and dad arrived in Varanasi - parents in India, I know! - Sarah and I did a huge investigative traipse along the river to see the ghats and, inevitably, ended up at a few overlapping funerals. It's a 24-hour business, and walking through the backstreets of Godaulia, you're bound to have to stand aside to let stretchered corpses past. We saw a couple of bodies covered in shawls; our Australian friends Jacob and Laura, who we'd met in Dharamsala and bumped into along the ghats, said they'd seen a pair of feet sticking out of one of the pyres as it burnt. The feet were unceremoniously shoved back in with a stick by one of the attendants. "It was intense," said Jacob.

In many obvious ways, Varanasi's incredible, as you might expect from a place old people go to die. The similarities with Bournemouth end there - it's also a bit of a Lonely Planet theme park and easy to get a full house on the traveller bingo card: one Englishman getting annoyed by urchins trying to sell him candles, two Westerners chatting to a saddhu and hoping people will notice, three boatmen bidding, five Japanese tourists off in their own world, ten pairs of fishermen's trousers, 20 SLRs, HOUSE! But of course, there's lots of stuff you won't see anywhere else, and you will - pictures to appear in tomorrow's post.

Signs I have seen #365

It's just a baffling place sometimes.

India part 23: Lucknow

Our afternoon stop in Chandigarh was short and sweet. Our journey to Lucknow was long and painful. A bitter wind swept through the carriage and under my ultra-thin sheet, while an unruly bunch of men on our bunks kept striking up conversations in the night, listening to music out loud on their phones, and cracking jokes like they were 12-year-olds at a sleepover. One was even smoking beedis in bed.

Still, Lucknow had its moments. It was here that I realised I had come to love gulab jamun, a sort of Indian sticky toffee pudding with added sweetness, although at the sweetshop/restaurant where we ate, the waiter initially thought I'd ordered soundalike veg chow mein, an entirely different proposition.

After food, we went to see the Shah Najaf Imambara, the tomb of one Ghazi-ud-din-Haidar, who doesn't get a very good write-up in the Rough Guide: "decadent and profligate", apparently. He had a good taste in tombs, though.

In stark contrast, we then tried to go and see The Green Hornet at the cinema, but we'd missed the start, so got a rickshaw back to our hotel. Generally Sarah and I are all about the walking - our stroll in Amritsar led us to a great little tea stand, this place, plus what we thought was a man weaving turbans, but which we later realised were kites. But when your feet can't take it any more, there's nothing like a good autorickshaw ride through a busy city, and our trip back provided a feast for the eyes: two men having a surreptitious conversation by the roadside; a pair of white donkeys sharing a meal of garbage with a dog; a cyclist in a pink shirt and woolly orange tank top; lone women looking stately in the back of cycle rickshaws; fed-up fruit and veg vendors; carts loaded up with freight ten times their realistic capacity... Lists like this could go on for pages, the stolen moments stack up until there are too many for your memory to hold. 'Feast for the eyes' is wrong, actually - it's more like speed-eating tapas.