I've always wanted to travel to India, ever since I can remember really. On my last round-the-world trip it was high on the list of destinations (probably the highest in fact), but that time myself and Hanno just fell so much in love with Nepal that we didn't have time to go to India at all. This time around, I was determined not to miss out and so it was with some relief that I finally arrived in Calcutta (now called Kolkata).
I must admit to being somewhat apprehensive about it though. Of course I've heard all the horror stories about India, but by now I've learnt to almost completely disregard the 'advice' I hear from others - let's face it, those travellers are almost certainly Epsilons after all. But this time I was hearing endless stories of delays, beggars, general hassle and sickness from probably the most travelled person I know, Mr. Sean Mullins. We'd been travelling with Mullins for 2 weeks before arriving in India, and his regular jokey slurs about the pain of travelling in India, although obviously mostly in jest, began to have the same effect as all repeated propaganda. Eventually you start to really believe it, and like I've said before, nobody is immune to fear and paranoia.
So having said all that, without about 20 minutes of walking out of the airport in Kolkata, all that fear and paranoia did it's usual disappearing act once confronted with reality. In fact I was almost immediately reminded of Nepal, which to-date has been my favorite place in the world, so obviously I relaxed immediately. There's certainly no doubt that India is a mental place (the state of the taxis in the airport were testiment enough to that), but seeing as how we weren't met immediately by horrifically multilated beggars probably did more to dispell the paranoia than anything.
We shared a taxi from the airport (after I sorted out the guy for trying to extort an extra payment for our bags - jeez, taxi drivers the world over...), with a French-Canadian couple (the metro extension to the airport is not yet ready unfortunately), and through the total mayhem that is Indian traffic (the beeping is absolutely incessant, just like Nepal in fact), we arrived at the backpacker enclave of Sudder Street after about an hour. After the routine scouting out we found a lovely place that turned out to be a real gem - it was clean, really quite and cheap. After 2 nights there of a shared bathroom we upgraded to a room with a lovely ensuite.
But still the fear persisted beyond my initial impressions by making me feel just a little nervous about the food. Kolkata has loads of top-notch, fine dining establishments though, and seeing as how food has been a major preoccupation on this entire trip, splashing out on good grub wasn't going to be a problem here.
So the first day we just strolled about the local area, and ate in the fancy Peter's Cat, having a lovely introduction to local Indian food. The next day we explored a little further afield, checking out the impressive Indian Museum at the end of Sudder Street, then the huge Maidan (basically a huge open park with thousands of locals all playing cricket with tennis balls and litter everywhere), and milling about with the hordes in the Victoria Memorial monument (it was a Sunday). It was here I had my first encounter with a tourist being annoyed at having to pay 10 times the price of the locals to get into a cultural attraction - it is a little annoying, but I don't really have a problem with it usually, although today I paid 20 times what a local pays, which I suppose is a tad ridiculous really.
Another day we organised a trip to the Sunderbans tiger reserve with the government tourist office, and then booked our onward train tickets, both of which were completely painless I must say. In neither case did we have any crazy bureaucracy to deal with, just straightforward easy booking procedures like anywhere else. So after the relief of getting all that sorted out we popped into a cool-looking bar/restaurant (the Limelight) on the main square for a bit of a rest, but ended up staying quite a while (after ordering a 'snack' of pakora and expecting to get one, but actually getting six huge pakoras and therefore destroy our appetites).
On the walk home there were millions of trucks filled with people all travelling in the same direction, with everyone singing and dancing. Each truck had a statue of a Hindi goddess (or something), and so when one of the trucks stopped and offered to take us along we promptly lept up and off we went! Everyone was really friendly (although we couldn't really talk to any of them because of the noise and general mayhem), and after about 10 minutes we arrived at a huge festival-type thing on the banks of the river where everyone was carrying their statues to the river and throwing them in. Of course they all wanted their picture taken with us, and the whole thing was completely mental and of course we didn't have a clue what was going on really. A truck then took us back to the city, dropping us off near our street, and we had a short taxi ride back to the hotel. Got some cool photos and video clips though...
So the next morning we were off to spot us a Tigger...
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