India - October, 2009

In October of 2009 I made my second trip to India. This time to visit Calcutta, Varanasi and Jaipur.  Three cities that I hadn't visited before.  I flew into Calcutta or should I say Kolkata which is the new official name since 2001.  It was just out of Monsoon season, so the climate in Calcutta was supposed to be more bearable, nevertheless, it was still one hot and steamy place - I was a sweaty and damp individual for most of my stay there.

I was staying at the Lytton Hotel on Sudder Street, a modest but quite adequate hotel.  I got around by walking everywhere and on my first day I visited the Victoria Memorial, St Pauls Cathedral, and the Hooghly River.  

Victoria Memorial

The Victoria Memorial is a splendid building, built to commemorate the Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1901 but not completed until 20 years later.  I did not go inside but walked around the beautiful building in its nice park.  The view of the reflected Memorial in the adjacent lake is quite beautiful.

St Paul' Cathedral

Nearby the Victoria Memorial is another Imperial building, the most impressive St Paul's Cathedral; one of the first cathedrals built outside the UK in the old British Empire.

Calcutta City Streets

The city is indeed a seething mass of humanity.  The streets are bustling with cars, taxis, buses, trams, rickshaws.  And all aspects of human life in a big city are played out right there on the street - people sleeping, people bathing, barbers shaving customers, stalls selling all manner of goods, garbage piling up, scavenging dogs roaming everywhere.  It is certainly a feast for the senses.  The photos to follow show the more typical chaos, congestion and poverty of the city.

Next stop was the Mausoleum of John Charnock, an employee of the East India Company considered by some to be the founder of Calcutta.  Interestingly after his death, a mausoleum was created for him built from a rock that was particularly suited to tombstones and memorials.  Many years later when they were looking to name this particular type of rock it was given the name Charnocktite.  I have vague memories of Charnocktites from my Geology student days. 

The Ferry to Howrah

I then walked over to the river area and watched ferries cross back and forth between Calcutta and Howrah on the other side.  The river here is called the Hooghly.  It is actually the lower section of the Ganges which bifurcates on its way to the ocean with this branch becoming the Hooghly.

By the second day I was feeling a little more comfortable with all the heat, humidity and humanity.  By now I had learned the first lesson about photography in a humid climate - don't expect to use your camera for an hour or so until it has acclimatized to the surroundings. A cold camera in a humid climate is not much good - all the lenses were steamed up.

Marx and Engels

I again did a lot of walking around - interesting streets with all sorts of weird and wonderful things going on. It was nice to see Messrs Marx and Engels honored with a statue and a short distance away, Mr Lenin.  They have not been forgotten or eliminated as they have in much of the Soviet Union.

I took the ferry across the Hooghly (Ganges) in the morning to Howrah (the city on the other side from Calcutta).  I wanted to check out the Howrah Railway Station where I would get my train to Varanasi later on.  The Indian railway system is immense and a wonder to behold and the sheer size of the station was well worth getting to know before I had the pressure of a train to catch.

Train departures at Howrah Station

In the afternoon I walked around the Park Street Cemetery.  This is a wonderfully peaceful cemetery in the middle of the city full of Raj era mausoleums and the most elaborate tombs all succumbing to decay and deterioration and the encroachment of the vegetation. There were so many British men and women buried there.  In those days it would have been a very far off place and who can imagine what it must have been like for them living and dying in India in the late 1700's.

Tombs in Park Street Cemetery

For the remainder of the day I walked the streets marveling at the rich variety of life that is everywhere in this city. 

I left Calcutta on Sunday evening and caught the overnight sleeper train to Varanasi.   Varanasi sits on the banks of the Ganges and is one of the most sacred of cities of the Hindu religion. It is a wonderfully exotic place where you can see all the most intimate rituals of the Hindu religion played out in public on the banks of the river. This might be the bathing ghats where Hindus come to bathe in the mornings and evenings, or the funeral ghats where their bodies are cremated, or the assorted weird and wonderful saddhus (holy men) that roam the streets.  The river itself is so polluted, yet people young and old bathe in it every day and of course the sacred cows cool off in it. 

I spent the first day there walking around the narrow streets and along the various ghats along the banks of the Ganges.  The cremation ghats were, of course, quite interesting in a macabre sort of way.  The cremations were a male affair with no women in attendance and nothing seemed very reverent about the process.  It often looked quite chaotic.

Cremation Ghats, Varanasi

The remaining ghats were also quite fascinating as they facilitated various other activities like bathing and boating.  The whole river bank area was full of amazing sights - the saddhus, the cows,  the temples, the brightly colored wooden boats - all human life was there.

Saddhu

A subsiding temple

The next day I went on an early morning boat trip down the river (it's the thing to do when in Varanasi).  In the early morning people are just starting their daily rituals of bathing in the river (pujas) and it is a great place to observe these activities while being rowed slowly up and down the river.  

Early morning bathing in the Ganges

One group of people were practicing Laughter Yoga which was new to me but it does exist and it was quite entertaining to watch and listen to.  Of course right next to where people were washing themselves in the river there were herds of cattle in the water.  Further along a corpse came floating along - bloated and discolored as it bobbed its way down river. No one took much notice, everything was taken in its stride and it all seemed quite normal in Varanasi.

The view from the River

As we returned our way backdown the river the burning ghats were starting their daily operations and I learned they can process a few hundred bodies a day.  That is quite remarkable as it does take some time to consume a body and it requires a fair amount of wood.  The fires have not gone out for thousands of years.

Varanasi Street Scene

After my boat ride I walked around the old town some more and then went further south to the Durga Temple and beyond that to a pontoon bridge across the Ganges.  The bridge is a temporary structure dismantled during the monsoon rains and re-erected after the river subsides.

On Wednesday I departed Varanasi for Jaipur.  I arrived in there in the evening, after a very long day of travel by train by way of Delhi. Jaipur is in Rajasthan to the west of Delhi and the north of Bombay.  It is known as the "Pink City". For the most part, it is not so much pink as a muddy brownish red, but that's probably for the better - pink's not my color.

Jaipur was the last city of this three city tour of India and, while interesting, it did not match the weirdness and wonderfully exotic flavor of Varanasi or the big city chaos of Calcutta.  However, it was a little cooler and a lot less humid, so that was most welcome. 

Jaipur City Gate

In Jaipur, I took my first rides on bicycle rickshaws. In Calcutta and Varanasi, I needed the speed of a taxi or a tuk-tuk (auto-rickshaw) just to get a little bit of cooling air flow, but in Jaipur the heat was not so much of a problem and the bicycle rickshaw made for a wonderful leisurely open air ride around town. (Leisurely may not be the right word considering the cacophony of horns and the chaotic unstructured traffic flow but it was certainly a slower paced mode of transport). However, I did feel a bit guilty sitting in the back of the rickshaw while some poor guy pedaled away, and I felt even more guilty when he had to get off and push the rickshaw (with me in it) up a hill. Still it beat walking and I had done a lot of walking in the past few days, and, in some small way, I felt I was providing someone with some form of income.

City Palace

The Albert Hall Museum

As usual I did a walking tour of the city. Starting at one of the city gates and moving through the various bazaars to the City Palace and the most elaborate Albert Hall Museum.  

Nahargarh Fort

I then walked up the hill to the Nahargarh Fort that overlooks the city.  There are more spectacular forts in Rajasthan but they are further afield, this one is just on the outskirts of Jaipur and is accessible by a footpath up the side of the hill.  It was a bit of a hike up the hill in the heat of the day but it was well worth it.  The fort, built by a maharajah in the 1730's, was one of three protective forts for Jaipur and its vicinity.  The interior of the fort though a little worn and in need of repair was quite decorative.  

Hawah Mahal

One of the more impressive sight in Jaipur is the Hawah Mahal, known as the Palace of the Winds.  It is a five story building with a most beautiful pinkish facade.  It dates from 1799 so it must have been quite the construction project in its day.

Camel transportation

It was also interesting to find camels in Jaipur.  They are used as a mode of transportation there.

This brought my India trip to an end.  I caught the train back to Delhi and the next day flew back home.  My visit was short and I certainly crammed a lot into those few days but there is a lot more to see in this fabulously exotic country.  Hopefully on another trip in the not too distant future.