Train ing Day

Despite our wait on the Agra platform by the time we reached Delhi we had come to look forward to our train journeys. While the general sleeper and seated classes are the famously chaotic scrums of passengers, baggage, chai wallahs and snack sellers, the air conditioned classes had been cool oases of calm after the bustle and heat of the cities. Unfortunately the trip to our next stop, Amritsar, was to see us experience the other side of the system as we pushed our luck with the waiting lists and were left without reserved seats. With no other options we hauled our ever-growing mountain of luggage to Delhi Central station and threw ourselves on the mercy of an attendant who explained that the only way to get to Amritsar that night would be to cancel our tickets and exchange them for the dreaded sleeper class.

Reluctantly we agreed and headed to the platform where we sat on our bags and waited. For four hours. More seasoned travellers had brought bed rolls and picnics and even late in the evening the platform resembled a huge campsite strewn with sleeping old ladies, crawling toddlers, piles of freight and roving packs of monkeys.

When the train finally arrived just shy of midnight we took a deep breath and fought our way through the sweltering carriage to find our alotted cubicle, designed to sleep 6, already boasting a huge pile of bags, a group of eight friends and an overweight half-naked holy man snoring loudly in Megan's berth. The glassless windows provided plenty of grimy dust but did nothing to cool the carriage so sleep would be almost impossible but, after much comparing of tickets, we did manage to get seated and tried to doze.

We eventually reached Amritsar, the Sikh holy city and site of the famous Golden Temple, the next morning. One of the most endearing qualities of the Sikh faith (and we were to learn there are many) is the hospitality they show to strangers. At the Golden Temple this extends to providing free accommodation to anyone who wants it be they Indian pilgrims or curious backpackers. Sure enough, no sooner had we approached the Golden Temple looking a little lost and dishevelled, than we were cheerfully shepherded towards a hostel and given two beds that were ours for up to three nights completely free of charge! Unfortunately the room was stifling and when we realized the beds were just hard boards with a blanket spread across them we guiltily decided to "give the spaces to someone who really needed them" and, leaving a healthy donation to the temple, retreated to a nearby hotel.

We spent much of the next two days exploring the enormous white marble complex which surrounds the temple and houses a museum, a kitchen, offices and accommodation. With pilgrims arriving every day from all over India and the rest of the world the atmosphere is constantly festive and noisy to the point that it's hard to believe we were not witnessing an important celebration. Magnificently bearded old men wandered around with spears to keep the peace, youngsters bathed in the waters and families took part in complicated offering ceremonies or queued to walk out to the spectacularly ornate temple itself. An important tenet of the Sikh religion is equal treatment regardless of sex, caste or, for that matter, religion. Accordingly almost every aspect of the temple is open to anyone with an interest and it is all free; we ate a delicious meal in the huge communal dining hall, swam in the holy lake, explored the Sikhs' bloody history in the museum, posed for hundreds of family photos and generally had a great time.

The most enjoyable part of our visit however was the clear pride everyone took in explaining their culture to us. Everywhere we were went someone would offer to show us some new aspect of the complex and one particularly enthusiastic gentleman took us on a behind-the-scenes tour of the vast volunteer-run dining halls where we had previously eaten. Even in low season the kitchens make and serve 150,000 meals a day and the enormous chappatti machines and cauldrons of daal were an amazing sight.

On our second evening we crammed ourselves into a tiny van for the drive to Amritsar's other main draw - the Attari border crossing with Pakistan. I've no idea when or why the decision was made to turn the simple daily chore of closing a gate into a spectator sport, but the modest guard huts on both sides are now surrounded by huge grandstands which host a patriotic nightly carnival. The festivities began with groups of children and old ladies from the crowd taking it in turns to run or hobble up the short road to the border and back brandishing the Indian flag. After a while they were replaced by an inpromptu dance party soundtracked by Bollywood music blasting from hidden speakers and whoops of encouragement from the crowd. Throughout all of this we were glad to see (because you have to pick sides at things like this) the Pakistan side of the wall looked comparatively somber and while the two sets of guards shared similarly elaborate costumes the Pakistanis had conveniently chosen the "baddie palette" of black with red piping. After much shouting and frog marching from the guards (and a very quaint final handshake accross the border) the Indians appeared to have things sewn up but then, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, their captain got a little overenthusiastic in his pirouetting turns and ended up flat on his back covered in the flag!

All our rail tribulations to date threatened to pale into insignificance in the face of our next trip which needed to take us all the way back from Amritsar in the North to Aurangabad level with Mumbai. In other words 32 scheduled hours on a train. Thankfully there is little more to say about the trip as the surprisingly drab scenery lulled us into a stupor and the time passed relatively quickly. I'm not sure how much longer we could have stomached deep fried bread and mango juice but we're still healthy after three weeks so have no complaints.

We decided to make Aurangabad our penultimate stop primarily to explore the famous caves at Ajanta and Ellora. Constructed over a 900 year period beginning around 200 B.C. the two enormous complexes comprise temples, monasteries, meeting rooms and walkways and were all carved from the solid rock of two cliff faces by groups of travelling monks. They trace the whole history of Indian religious thought from Buddhism through Hinduism and Jainism and most are covered in spectacular carvings or paintings despicting the many gods and goddesses of those religions.

Probably the highlight of our two trips was the Kaisala complex or "cave 16" at Ellora. This astonishing temple was constructed by removing 3 million cubic feet of rock from the hillside to create a huge pit around an enormous block of rock. This was then carved into the world's largest monolithic structure - the temple itself. The amount of work that must have gone into the construction was awe inspiring and the legend is that it took ten generations of monks to complete the plans.

As we had a little time in Aurangabad and there was very little to do in the town itself we took advantage of the cooler post-monsoon afternoons to visit the area's only two other points of interest; the "mini Taj" and the Daulatabad fort. The mini-Taj, which our guidebook had described as "demonstrating the decline in Moghul architecture," was fascinating in how closely but completely it missed the mark when compared to the original in Agra. Awkwardly tall and lacking the symmetry of the real thing the whole effect is a little sad and you can only imagine that the queen in whose memory this was built would not have been best pleased - especially when they ran out of marble 4 feet of the ground and were forced to finish the rest in plaster!

The fort was much better and in contrast to the other forts we've visited which were really palace compounds, this felt like a proper medieval stronghold built on a vertiginous hillside and surrounded by defensive ramparts and moats. By far the biggest deterrent from Megan's point of view was climbing through several bat filled caves but we made it to the top and were rewarded with spectacular views of the area and the swirling monsoon clouds.

From here we head back to Mumbai for our flight to Hong Kong. We've been looking forward to returning to Mumbai for a while due in no small part to the fantastic book "Shantaram" which we're both working our way through. It's set in many of the places we visited last time but the author, a former armed robber and sometime member of Bombay's mafia has certainly given us a new way to look at them. Accordingly this is likely to be my last post from India and while there are certain things I won't be sorry to take a break from (curry and incessant requests for "one photosnap with me please?" being two that spring immediately to mind), there are many things which I will miss and more which we haven't even touched on this trip. For example we really haven't had the time to wrap our arms around the enormous economic changes that are transforming India even though evidence of the speed of this change is everywhere. In the US every second advert seems to be for car or life insurance but here they are all for broadband internet, mobile phones or higher education institutions - most including the promise of study or employment abroad. Whenever we have spoken with young middle class Indians they have invariably asked "how many days a week do you work?" or "how much do you earn?" with honest curiosity.

As much as it may be changing the country's history is also visible everywhere you look. The temples, forts and buildings from the Raj-era are of course very visible but there are less obvious legacies too. The local news and conversations with taxi drivers reveal that what at first glance would seem to be the happy secular melting pot intended by the retreating British is still understrung with religious tensions while the country's politics seems split between truly national parties and regional forces representing specific ethnic groups. On a lighter note the other British legacy, the English language, is still spoken everywhere though often in a comically formal way which would be more familiar to Victorians than it is to us. Signs in every station admonish passengers not to spit on the station "because it is a very bad habit" while drivers in Delhi are asked not to run red lights on pain of "suffering ambarassment"!

Even if we don't manage to spend three weeks again here for a while I am certain this will not be our last visit to this fascinating country.