I shall begin this travel diary with the flight. The flight! Now that was something – enervating, elevating, energising, ergonomic (I don’t actually know what this means); really, you wouldn’t believe.
So I had this flight booked with Virgin Atlantic at 10pm on the 23rd of June. I started packing, as I always do, on the day of departure. As I was tossing boxer shorts and adapter plugs to the far distant corners of my bedroom, I got a text telling me the flight was cancelled, and that I should call the number provided to arrange another. I did so promptly and, after suffering a tinny rendition of a Motown ‘classic’, I was connected (to use the term as loosely as a Catholic schoolboy’s posterior) with a mentally challenged young man called David Harbour – he gave me his name, the mentally challenged fool – who stated categorically that the only possibility for me was to board another Virgin flight in two days time. I made the appropriate noises, flipping between fiery indignation and whimpering helplessness, but Dave was as firm on the matter as he mentally could be. I then chose, wisely, to phone back – and I spoke to another, mentally sound, man who put me on a Jet Airways flight an hour earlier and told me I was entitled to 600 Euros compensation (still hearing back from the Stalinist bureaucrats at Virgin ‘customer relations’ on that one). So, back of the net; Ben Dunant one, Richard Branson nil; next conquest globalisation.
Jet Airways is India’s best airline by a good many airmiles. Decent food, humane service, an extensive and at times eccentric film selection, and best of all the cute yellow waistcoats the air hostesses are forced to wear. So very, very different from Air India, that conspiracy of miserable sadists I had the misfortune of flying to Kathmandu with last summer. If you only take away one lesson from this blog post, take this: if you are a spirited masochist, or a Presbyterian, and consider bodily discomfort to be the highest human good, don’t hesitate to fly with Air India.
I’m sure you’ve found this flight business fascinating, and I know you crave finer detail. But I prefer to tantalize – and so I shall move on to the landing.
So: I took a taxi from the airport to Majnu ka Tilla, a Tibetan colony in north Delhi, from which buses leave nightly for Dharamsala. The minute I stepped out of the terminal I was enveloped in the familiar film of sweat. It was overcast but muggy; Delhi was a moist grey troll, lurching into the distance in a vista of dismal concrete. The taxi cab was the usual rattling, seatbelt-less rust trap, and the driver an extension of it – a stunted, skinny, unshaven man in grimed blue pyjamas, visibly beaten down by the vicissitudes of Delhi underclass life. The airport is in the south; the ride went, with ample traffic standstills, from one end of the city to the other, a ninety-minute tour that took in the avenues of Lutyen’s Delhi, India Gate and the Red Fort of Old Delhi, among other landmarks glimpsed through the smog.
In Majnu ka Tilla I bought a Dharamsala-bound bust ticket for half six that evening and found a cheap guest house to nap in for a few hours. I sweated gently and felt mosquitoes eat me. Afterwards I explored the place a little, wearily. It was the usual mess of concrete and dangling electrical wire that make up Delhi’s residential areas, only this time interspersed with primary-colour Tibetan Buddhist temples radiating prayer flags down into rubbish-packed gutters, and stalls selling prayer wheels, cashmere shawls and miscellaneous Tibetan tourist tack. Free Tibet flags dotted the sides of buildings and monks, old and young, shuffled past thumbing rosary beads – but otherwise these Tibetan exiles appeared resigned to their cramped Delhi life, a world so far from the cool, high-altitude pastures of their former kingdom. While sat in a café eating beef momos – a species of dumpling; the closest Tibetan food comes to delicacy – a young Tibetan boy sauntered in wearing shorts and Nike trainers, and booted up his metal-grey Apple Mac at his table. A regular Delhi boy, like so many of his fellow second-generation exiles.
I turned up on time, but the bus took an hour to fill – and, as is the case with private bus companies across India, it could only conceivably leave when bursting at the seams. I was the only whitie on the bus; the rest were mostly Tibetan. Majnu ka Tilla and Dharamsala are India’s two premier Tibetan settlements, and this bus journey India’s premier Tibetan thoroughfare. A steady traffic of red robes pass either way each night. Very few in the bus seemed phased by the horror that lay ahead. With an ominous stutter the engine came to life.
The most formative night of my life – the night I became a man – was, on reflection, a bus ride in the first few weeks of my virgin trip to India during my gap year: Junagadh to Bhuj in the Kutch region of Gujurat, leaving at 10pm (so much is seared in my memory) and lasting over ten hours. About a couple of hours in my stomach began to turn against me, and without a chest-lurch to warn me it erupted. As fashionable student parlance would put it, I ‘chundered everywah’. Or rather, all over myself. I then made a dexterous clothes-change from my backpack, much to the consternation of the several peasant women looking on. But my stomach would not be quelled and for the remainder of the night I periodically emptied myself out of the nearest window, decorating the glass pane in the process with some fabulously daring modernist pattern-work, reminiscent of either Jackson Pollock or Wassily Kandinsky (depending on the volume, content and trajectory). Eventually the chunder-art ceased and I found sleep just as the sun rose. Peace. I was shaken awake not long after by the bus conductor, who kindly informed me I had missed my stop and that Bhuj lay firmly behind me. It was at that moment – tired, panicked and comprehensively emptied – that I became a man.
There were no fire works on this journey – not one lone, solitary chunder – but it was nonetheless a bitter trial of my human resources. I think I slept for half an hour at some point, before being woken by a service-station stop; its arrival was announced by concentration-tramp floodlights and noxious hindi music streaming from long burnt-out speakers (thankfully I was spared this on the bus itself; now that’s a first).
As the sun rose, all blotchy and orange against the monsoon mist, we left the Punjab for the torturous mountain roads of Himachal Pradesh – which translates quaintly as the ‘snow state’. Then the bus chose to break down, with a few gurgles and minor explosions. ‘Engine finished’ a fellow passenger kindly explained. We got out on the damp roadside – it had been raining heavily – and tried to wave down passing traffic. One bastard bus didn’t even stop for us – though admittedly it was full; but buses in India are never ‘full’. Me and six others eventually managed to pile into a jeep to take us the remaining twenty or so kilometres to Dharamsala.
Opposite me were two Indians. From the mouth of one came ultra-courteous, upper-middle-class Delhi speech; he was a university student heading to McLeod Ganj to ‘study the Tibetan Buddhist culture’. From the mouth of the other came a thick Mancunian accent. ‘I’m on me gap year. Travelling Asia like. Going Leeds university next year.’ To this I was able, vainly, to play the seasoned India-hand, listing off places he should visit and dumps he should miss. ‘Manchester, famous for cotton,’ the Delhi-ite piped in, speaking the fact proudly. A dignified silence followed. Manchester – famous for cotton; there was really nothing more to be said on the matter.
The jeep dropped us off in the crowded bazaar of lower Dharamsala – there was still ten steep kilometres to climb to the hill station of McLeod Ganj at just below two thousand metres (a good five hundred metres higher than Ben Nevis, but still sat at midget-height by himalayan standards; this is only the foothills). The three new companions – the Delhi-ite, the Mancunian and I (a winning title for a buddy comedy movie) – sat by a fork in the road and waited for the bus, which came soon enough and took us upwards with no serious engine complaints.
And so, there I was – after forty eight hours of no sleep, intermittent sweat and non-stop fun, I had reached my destination: McLeod Ganj, former colonial administrative post and the present home of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the Tibetan government in exile and a vast and growing settlement of Tibetan exiles.
The publisher-in-chief of Contact magazine, for whom I would be working for the next two months, had sorted out an apartment for me to rent. Sadly he was unable to tell me the address of said apartment in the many emails we exchanged. And so I arrived clueless. In a spike of initiative I headed to the nearest café with wireless internet – there’s a surprising amount of them here – and called Lobsang Rabsel, for that was his name. He arrived twenty minutes later and after the mandatory small-talk – how was your journey? (crap) how are you feeling? (crap) – he briefed me on the situation with Contact magazine: they once had a staff of five Tibetans, but they had all fled to greener pastures; now it was to be just Lobsang and I. Yes, two people, this writer included, are about to attempt a monthly community magazine. Watch this space for the mad-cap capers that will doubtless ensue.
After I’d finished breakfast he led me up a pot-holed track, Tipa Road, to the place I’d be sleeping in for the next couple of months. A family home, it turned out, lorded over by a stout old Tibetan lady who spoke no English, of which the top four rooms were rented out routinely. My room was much as I expected: ultra-simple, spartan even, with a hard bed, cupboard-like loo-cum-shower, a wooden cabinet sheltering framed photos of the Dalai Lama beside iconographic thangka paintings, and a dusty floor that quickly turned bare feet grey – but it opened onto a shared balcony with a sweeping view of the steep valley, where the odd tall building poked out from clusters of pine trees and a bird of prey soared puppet-like overhead. It was exactly what I wanted, and I couldn’t argue with the price – equivalent to ₤16 a week, which is frankly rather awesome, wouldn’t you agree?
But the lurking menace of the place showed its face quickly – monkeys, the damn monkeys. Large grey types, many of them mothers with small furry children dangling from their bellies. As I took my first piss into the ceramic toilet bowl, staking my claim on this virgin territory, one monkey made a stab at an opportunist theft: reaching stealthily through the monkey-proof window bars, he grabbed my wash bag by its handle and inched it along the windowsill towards him. I only just stopped pissing in time to scare the gangly fucker off. A close shave, and a lesson learnt: never leave stuff on windowsills. I sighed and took comfort from the himalayan view.
Well that’s all I can be arsed with for now. I have written a bloody essay and I thank you kindly for reading this far. This is my sixth day in McLeod Ganj and my days have been busy; I have a bounty of things to tell you about, really I do. I am having a wonderful time and I miss most of you at least some of the time. I look forward to updating you all on my doings and thoughts – at least once a week. My future blog posts will (probably) be briefer, pithier, have less bus and airplane stuff in them, and will contain a lot more swearing, cultural stereotypes and balls-to-the-wall action. Prepare yourselves.
So I had this flight booked with Virgin Atlantic at 10pm on the 23rd of June. I started packing, as I always do, on the day of departure. As I was tossing boxer shorts and adapter plugs to the far distant corners of my bedroom, I got a text telling me the flight was cancelled, and that I should call the number provided to arrange another. I did so promptly and, after suffering a tinny rendition of a Motown ‘classic’, I was connected (to use the term as loosely as a Catholic schoolboy’s posterior) with a mentally challenged young man called David Harbour – he gave me his name, the mentally challenged fool – who stated categorically that the only possibility for me was to board another Virgin flight in two days time. I made the appropriate noises, flipping between fiery indignation and whimpering helplessness, but Dave was as firm on the matter as he mentally could be. I then chose, wisely, to phone back – and I spoke to another, mentally sound, man who put me on a Jet Airways flight an hour earlier and told me I was entitled to 600 Euros compensation (still hearing back from the Stalinist bureaucrats at Virgin ‘customer relations’ on that one). So, back of the net; Ben Dunant one, Richard Branson nil; next conquest globalisation.
Jet Airways is India’s best airline by a good many airmiles. Decent food, humane service, an extensive and at times eccentric film selection, and best of all the cute yellow waistcoats the air hostesses are forced to wear. So very, very different from Air India, that conspiracy of miserable sadists I had the misfortune of flying to Kathmandu with last summer. If you only take away one lesson from this blog post, take this: if you are a spirited masochist, or a Presbyterian, and consider bodily discomfort to be the highest human good, don’t hesitate to fly with Air India.
I’m sure you’ve found this flight business fascinating, and I know you crave finer detail. But I prefer to tantalize – and so I shall move on to the landing.
So: I took a taxi from the airport to Majnu ka Tilla, a Tibetan colony in north Delhi, from which buses leave nightly for Dharamsala. The minute I stepped out of the terminal I was enveloped in the familiar film of sweat. It was overcast but muggy; Delhi was a moist grey troll, lurching into the distance in a vista of dismal concrete. The taxi cab was the usual rattling, seatbelt-less rust trap, and the driver an extension of it – a stunted, skinny, unshaven man in grimed blue pyjamas, visibly beaten down by the vicissitudes of Delhi underclass life. The airport is in the south; the ride went, with ample traffic standstills, from one end of the city to the other, a ninety-minute tour that took in the avenues of Lutyen’s Delhi, India Gate and the Red Fort of Old Delhi, among other landmarks glimpsed through the smog.
In Majnu ka Tilla I bought a Dharamsala-bound bust ticket for half six that evening and found a cheap guest house to nap in for a few hours. I sweated gently and felt mosquitoes eat me. Afterwards I explored the place a little, wearily. It was the usual mess of concrete and dangling electrical wire that make up Delhi’s residential areas, only this time interspersed with primary-colour Tibetan Buddhist temples radiating prayer flags down into rubbish-packed gutters, and stalls selling prayer wheels, cashmere shawls and miscellaneous Tibetan tourist tack. Free Tibet flags dotted the sides of buildings and monks, old and young, shuffled past thumbing rosary beads – but otherwise these Tibetan exiles appeared resigned to their cramped Delhi life, a world so far from the cool, high-altitude pastures of their former kingdom. While sat in a café eating beef momos – a species of dumpling; the closest Tibetan food comes to delicacy – a young Tibetan boy sauntered in wearing shorts and Nike trainers, and booted up his metal-grey Apple Mac at his table. A regular Delhi boy, like so many of his fellow second-generation exiles.
I turned up on time, but the bus took an hour to fill – and, as is the case with private bus companies across India, it could only conceivably leave when bursting at the seams. I was the only whitie on the bus; the rest were mostly Tibetan. Majnu ka Tilla and Dharamsala are India’s two premier Tibetan settlements, and this bus journey India’s premier Tibetan thoroughfare. A steady traffic of red robes pass either way each night. Very few in the bus seemed phased by the horror that lay ahead. With an ominous stutter the engine came to life.
The most formative night of my life – the night I became a man – was, on reflection, a bus ride in the first few weeks of my virgin trip to India during my gap year: Junagadh to Bhuj in the Kutch region of Gujurat, leaving at 10pm (so much is seared in my memory) and lasting over ten hours. About a couple of hours in my stomach began to turn against me, and without a chest-lurch to warn me it erupted. As fashionable student parlance would put it, I ‘chundered everywah’. Or rather, all over myself. I then made a dexterous clothes-change from my backpack, much to the consternation of the several peasant women looking on. But my stomach would not be quelled and for the remainder of the night I periodically emptied myself out of the nearest window, decorating the glass pane in the process with some fabulously daring modernist pattern-work, reminiscent of either Jackson Pollock or Wassily Kandinsky (depending on the volume, content and trajectory). Eventually the chunder-art ceased and I found sleep just as the sun rose. Peace. I was shaken awake not long after by the bus conductor, who kindly informed me I had missed my stop and that Bhuj lay firmly behind me. It was at that moment – tired, panicked and comprehensively emptied – that I became a man.
There were no fire works on this journey – not one lone, solitary chunder – but it was nonetheless a bitter trial of my human resources. I think I slept for half an hour at some point, before being woken by a service-station stop; its arrival was announced by concentration-tramp floodlights and noxious hindi music streaming from long burnt-out speakers (thankfully I was spared this on the bus itself; now that’s a first).
As the sun rose, all blotchy and orange against the monsoon mist, we left the Punjab for the torturous mountain roads of Himachal Pradesh – which translates quaintly as the ‘snow state’. Then the bus chose to break down, with a few gurgles and minor explosions. ‘Engine finished’ a fellow passenger kindly explained. We got out on the damp roadside – it had been raining heavily – and tried to wave down passing traffic. One bastard bus didn’t even stop for us – though admittedly it was full; but buses in India are never ‘full’. Me and six others eventually managed to pile into a jeep to take us the remaining twenty or so kilometres to Dharamsala.
Opposite me were two Indians. From the mouth of one came ultra-courteous, upper-middle-class Delhi speech; he was a university student heading to McLeod Ganj to ‘study the Tibetan Buddhist culture’. From the mouth of the other came a thick Mancunian accent. ‘I’m on me gap year. Travelling Asia like. Going Leeds university next year.’ To this I was able, vainly, to play the seasoned India-hand, listing off places he should visit and dumps he should miss. ‘Manchester, famous for cotton,’ the Delhi-ite piped in, speaking the fact proudly. A dignified silence followed. Manchester – famous for cotton; there was really nothing more to be said on the matter.
The jeep dropped us off in the crowded bazaar of lower Dharamsala – there was still ten steep kilometres to climb to the hill station of McLeod Ganj at just below two thousand metres (a good five hundred metres higher than Ben Nevis, but still sat at midget-height by himalayan standards; this is only the foothills). The three new companions – the Delhi-ite, the Mancunian and I (a winning title for a buddy comedy movie) – sat by a fork in the road and waited for the bus, which came soon enough and took us upwards with no serious engine complaints.
And so, there I was – after forty eight hours of no sleep, intermittent sweat and non-stop fun, I had reached my destination: McLeod Ganj, former colonial administrative post and the present home of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the Tibetan government in exile and a vast and growing settlement of Tibetan exiles.
The publisher-in-chief of Contact magazine, for whom I would be working for the next two months, had sorted out an apartment for me to rent. Sadly he was unable to tell me the address of said apartment in the many emails we exchanged. And so I arrived clueless. In a spike of initiative I headed to the nearest café with wireless internet – there’s a surprising amount of them here – and called Lobsang Rabsel, for that was his name. He arrived twenty minutes later and after the mandatory small-talk – how was your journey? (crap) how are you feeling? (crap) – he briefed me on the situation with Contact magazine: they once had a staff of five Tibetans, but they had all fled to greener pastures; now it was to be just Lobsang and I. Yes, two people, this writer included, are about to attempt a monthly community magazine. Watch this space for the mad-cap capers that will doubtless ensue.
After I’d finished breakfast he led me up a pot-holed track, Tipa Road, to the place I’d be sleeping in for the next couple of months. A family home, it turned out, lorded over by a stout old Tibetan lady who spoke no English, of which the top four rooms were rented out routinely. My room was much as I expected: ultra-simple, spartan even, with a hard bed, cupboard-like loo-cum-shower, a wooden cabinet sheltering framed photos of the Dalai Lama beside iconographic thangka paintings, and a dusty floor that quickly turned bare feet grey – but it opened onto a shared balcony with a sweeping view of the steep valley, where the odd tall building poked out from clusters of pine trees and a bird of prey soared puppet-like overhead. It was exactly what I wanted, and I couldn’t argue with the price – equivalent to ₤16 a week, which is frankly rather awesome, wouldn’t you agree?
But the lurking menace of the place showed its face quickly – monkeys, the damn monkeys. Large grey types, many of them mothers with small furry children dangling from their bellies. As I took my first piss into the ceramic toilet bowl, staking my claim on this virgin territory, one monkey made a stab at an opportunist theft: reaching stealthily through the monkey-proof window bars, he grabbed my wash bag by its handle and inched it along the windowsill towards him. I only just stopped pissing in time to scare the gangly fucker off. A close shave, and a lesson learnt: never leave stuff on windowsills. I sighed and took comfort from the himalayan view.
Well that’s all I can be arsed with for now. I have written a bloody essay and I thank you kindly for reading this far. This is my sixth day in McLeod Ganj and my days have been busy; I have a bounty of things to tell you about, really I do. I am having a wonderful time and I miss most of you at least some of the time. I look forward to updating you all on my doings and thoughts – at least once a week. My future blog posts will (probably) be briefer, pithier, have less bus and airplane stuff in them, and will contain a lot more swearing, cultural stereotypes and balls-to-the-wall action. Prepare yourselves.
Very entertaining, very picaresque. I would like a picture of your monkeys, perhaps several. Pictures, that is.
ReplyDeleteI looked up chunder, this very now word. It isn't in the OED, but on further investigation by my nearest and dearest, it is discovered to be a nautical term. Feeling the heave of the ocean wave, you open the porthole to deliver forth with a shout of 'watchunder!'.
However, I do wish to share with you what I did find on the C page of the OED. 'Chuck-will's-widow' 1828 (From it's cry) U.S. A species of Goat-sucker (Caprimulgus carolinensis).
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteVery entertaining, very picaresque. I would like see a photo of the monkeys. Several in fact. Photographs, I mean.
ReplyDeleteI looked up 'chunder' in the OED. Not there. I appealed to my nearest and dearest, who went to work and discovered that its origin is nautical. Feeling a heave of the ocean, and not liking it, you go to the side, or open a porthole, or whatever it is you do on board and yell 'watchunder' before you deliver.
However, I would like to share with you a discovery I made on the C page of the OED. 'Chuck-will's-widow' 1828 (From it's cry) U.S. A species of Goat-sucker (Caprimulgus carolinensis.
Sorry if countless comments almost the same appear. It kept telling me my comment was unsuccessful, or something like that, so I kept going. Don't mean to bore. Sorry.
ReplyDelete