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whathoI'm having a degree of difficulty in working out where best to start my India diary. You're not getting my motivation for going, because that goes back years and has a lot to do with getting the song 'Mandalay' stuck in my head and other similarly irrevelant things, and that song's about Burma anyway. I'd quite like to start with the night before I flew out, which was spent alone in a tiny hotel room in Paddington watching Stephen Fry doing really well on Celebrity Mastermind, but then I'd have to go through all the hanging around at Heathrow and last minute panicking and walking in deranged circles around the airport in Abu Dhabi, and I don't want to do that.
For a prologue, let it be known that I'd never been away from home before, that I'd spent the preceding few years reading Lonely Planet guides but the preceding few months more or less paralysed with fear, and I was going to spend the next 9 weeks in India: 3 touring Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, 1 waiting in Delhi, 4 doing voluntary work in the Himalayas.
I'm starting in Muscat.
3rd January, 2004. Morning.
I'm in three different time-zones. My watch is set to Indian Standard Time, which is something along the lines of 6.30am. My body clock is running more or less on GMT, which is one in the morning. Local time is probably around four-ish. Local time is Oman time. I'm in Oman because Delhi, as is fairly usual in the middle of its winter, is covered in yellowish fog and the 'plane can't land until it's cleared. The flight is now two hours behind schedule and I don't know if the chap who's supposed to be meeting me in Delhi is going to have the patience to wait it out. I'm trying to sleep on a plastic bench in Muscat airport, which is essentially a dump of staggering proportions. I can't sleep because the sound system is playing a load of Beatles tunes rendered on pan pipes.
The pilot chirps chirpily through the waiting room and says there's still a fair bit of fog around the place so we'll be hanging about a while longer yet. I notice that he's Irish and think it amusingly incongruous on Gulf Air, which is silly really. I note that I am capable of again of some feeling other than sheer panic. Surreal is healthy.
The 'plane leaves Oman about three hours late. My plan on arriving in Delhi, assuming the chap who's meeting me has indeed biffed off, is not so much to sensibly track down the pre-paid taxi booth and get myself ferried along to the Jukaso Inn as it is to curl up in a corner of the airport and look studiously insane until someone notices me, realises that I oughtn't to be out on my own and puts me on the next padded flight back to London. In the meantime, I look out of the window.
Oman is fairly dark. What settlements we fly over seem to be blocks of bright orange streetlights, and the roads between them are also marked out by double rows of bright orange. It all looks oddly science fictional and mundanely unfamiliar. Like those weird pylons they have in Belguim. The ones with the ears. I glance at the in-flight magazine, which is pimping the Bahrain Grand Prix like crazy (new this year, and Gulf Air are the unnecessarily proud sponsors). I poke the buttons on the screen embedded into the seat in front of me and decline to watch something with Steve Martin in it. I fill in a disembarkation card and give my pen to the man beside me.
We fly over the Arabian sea and the sun rises.
For some time, there are clouds and very little else, but they part, with a developed sense of drama, over the Hindu Kush, which is bare and grey and mountainous and entirely stunning. I breath on the window and am fairly impressively distracted. The people in the seats in front are sleeping, which I think is a fairly offensive thing to do in the presence of the Hindu Kush. The clouds come back and a quick scene change goes on underneath. When they part again, we're over the Great Thar Desert, which looks like the sea and through which I'm supposed to be riding camels in about four days' time. Then the clouds return again and this time they stay, and go yellow, and turn into the more than moderately disgusting soup of fumes and solid air that lives above Delhi. There's going to be nothing more to see until we're about fifty feet off the ground. I sit back again. I have five unread Wodehouse books in my bag and I down a chapter because I can't think of anything more calming. And then I start to pack up, because the 'plane is falling. In the way 'plane's are meant to. It's not all bad.
We drop very suddenly through the smog and pass over a parched school playing field full of boys playing cricket. I marvel that real people live in Delhi in the same way I do about the fact that real people live in Swindon and various other places that I don't live. The boys make me feel strangely unconcerned. Then I'm obliged to get off the 'plane.
The guidebooks tell you you're pretty much going to hate Delhi. It's going to be crowded and noisy and breathless and mostly pretty deranged. People are going to play scams on you, you're probably going to freak out at the traffic, and the poverty, however aware of it you thought you were beforehand, is going to crawl in front of you and grab you by the wrist and you're going to shake it off because you're scared of getting swamped and you think you're justified because the same guidebooks say that's okay, and then you're going to hate yourself, and everyone will stare at you, and men are going to grope you and there's no such thing as personal space. And you're going to get dysentary.
The chap had waited, even as I dragged my absurdly heavy bag (tip of the century: don't take 17 books to India) off the carousel and changed a handful of money (you can't get rupees outside India), picking another couple of Jukaso Inn bound tourists en route. I walk out the terminal building and follow him to his taxi. Ten feet into the car park, two small children, one lacking a leg, come to my elbow. I say to the woman alongside me 'I knew - I was ready'. I have no idea what I mean by it, and to the two boys I say nothing. I think they're still there as we get into the car five minutes later, but I don't know for sure, because I'm not looking.
The car, an Ambassador taxi, has no seatbelts, which I also knew beforehand. I get in the back. We turn into a main road.
Yellow and green autorickshaws, mostly. No respect for any rules of the road. Quieter than I'd expected, its being a Sunday. A bullock cart drags twenty people along the central lane. I hear nothing but car horns. A man cycles past, his bike covered in at least four dozen multicoloured balloons.
I don't hate it yet.
For a prologue, let it be known that I'd never been away from home before, that I'd spent the preceding few years reading Lonely Planet guides but the preceding few months more or less paralysed with fear, and I was going to spend the next 9 weeks in India: 3 touring Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, 1 waiting in Delhi, 4 doing voluntary work in the Himalayas.
I'm starting in Muscat.
3rd January, 2004. Morning.
I'm in three different time-zones. My watch is set to Indian Standard Time, which is something along the lines of 6.30am. My body clock is running more or less on GMT, which is one in the morning. Local time is probably around four-ish. Local time is Oman time. I'm in Oman because Delhi, as is fairly usual in the middle of its winter, is covered in yellowish fog and the 'plane can't land until it's cleared. The flight is now two hours behind schedule and I don't know if the chap who's supposed to be meeting me in Delhi is going to have the patience to wait it out. I'm trying to sleep on a plastic bench in Muscat airport, which is essentially a dump of staggering proportions. I can't sleep because the sound system is playing a load of Beatles tunes rendered on pan pipes.
The pilot chirps chirpily through the waiting room and says there's still a fair bit of fog around the place so we'll be hanging about a while longer yet. I notice that he's Irish and think it amusingly incongruous on Gulf Air, which is silly really. I note that I am capable of again of some feeling other than sheer panic. Surreal is healthy.
The 'plane leaves Oman about three hours late. My plan on arriving in Delhi, assuming the chap who's meeting me has indeed biffed off, is not so much to sensibly track down the pre-paid taxi booth and get myself ferried along to the Jukaso Inn as it is to curl up in a corner of the airport and look studiously insane until someone notices me, realises that I oughtn't to be out on my own and puts me on the next padded flight back to London. In the meantime, I look out of the window.
Oman is fairly dark. What settlements we fly over seem to be blocks of bright orange streetlights, and the roads between them are also marked out by double rows of bright orange. It all looks oddly science fictional and mundanely unfamiliar. Like those weird pylons they have in Belguim. The ones with the ears. I glance at the in-flight magazine, which is pimping the Bahrain Grand Prix like crazy (new this year, and Gulf Air are the unnecessarily proud sponsors). I poke the buttons on the screen embedded into the seat in front of me and decline to watch something with Steve Martin in it. I fill in a disembarkation card and give my pen to the man beside me.
We fly over the Arabian sea and the sun rises.
For some time, there are clouds and very little else, but they part, with a developed sense of drama, over the Hindu Kush, which is bare and grey and mountainous and entirely stunning. I breath on the window and am fairly impressively distracted. The people in the seats in front are sleeping, which I think is a fairly offensive thing to do in the presence of the Hindu Kush. The clouds come back and a quick scene change goes on underneath. When they part again, we're over the Great Thar Desert, which looks like the sea and through which I'm supposed to be riding camels in about four days' time. Then the clouds return again and this time they stay, and go yellow, and turn into the more than moderately disgusting soup of fumes and solid air that lives above Delhi. There's going to be nothing more to see until we're about fifty feet off the ground. I sit back again. I have five unread Wodehouse books in my bag and I down a chapter because I can't think of anything more calming. And then I start to pack up, because the 'plane is falling. In the way 'plane's are meant to. It's not all bad.
We drop very suddenly through the smog and pass over a parched school playing field full of boys playing cricket. I marvel that real people live in Delhi in the same way I do about the fact that real people live in Swindon and various other places that I don't live. The boys make me feel strangely unconcerned. Then I'm obliged to get off the 'plane.
The guidebooks tell you you're pretty much going to hate Delhi. It's going to be crowded and noisy and breathless and mostly pretty deranged. People are going to play scams on you, you're probably going to freak out at the traffic, and the poverty, however aware of it you thought you were beforehand, is going to crawl in front of you and grab you by the wrist and you're going to shake it off because you're scared of getting swamped and you think you're justified because the same guidebooks say that's okay, and then you're going to hate yourself, and everyone will stare at you, and men are going to grope you and there's no such thing as personal space. And you're going to get dysentary.
The chap had waited, even as I dragged my absurdly heavy bag (tip of the century: don't take 17 books to India) off the carousel and changed a handful of money (you can't get rupees outside India), picking another couple of Jukaso Inn bound tourists en route. I walk out the terminal building and follow him to his taxi. Ten feet into the car park, two small children, one lacking a leg, come to my elbow. I say to the woman alongside me 'I knew - I was ready'. I have no idea what I mean by it, and to the two boys I say nothing. I think they're still there as we get into the car five minutes later, but I don't know for sure, because I'm not looking.
The car, an Ambassador taxi, has no seatbelts, which I also knew beforehand. I get in the back. We turn into a main road.
Yellow and green autorickshaws, mostly. No respect for any rules of the road. Quieter than I'd expected, its being a Sunday. A bullock cart drags twenty people along the central lane. I hear nothing but car horns. A man cycles past, his bike covered in at least four dozen multicoloured balloons.
I don't hate it yet.
