Back In India

We've been back in India for about ten days. For this being my third visit, I'm flabbergasted by how tough it is to get accustomed to being here yet again. The stenches are impossible to ignore. I keep finding myself getting angry about open sewers or curbs that reek of urine. The Indians have had years...decades, if not centuries now to deal with the filth. But it doesn't seem to change. I can only speak from the experience of my past visits - the first just over fourteen years ago. It has not gotten any better. As other countries "progress" economically, they build better things. For better or worse, China scraps out old, barely functional neighborhoods or roads or buildings and they replace them with cleaner, more comfortable, higher capacity upgrades. As the Indian economy grows, they just build more and more of the same ill conceived junk. Yes...the odd corporation builds a modern, high-tech campus on a remote greenfield site; the few wealthy families build extravagant, walled villas on farmland outside the cities or they stuff more and more brand new, big SUV's . . . on the same crumbling and constricted roads. Otherwise, the whole place is just as annoying and difficult to negotiate as ever. Either they don't want day to day life to get any easier or they just don't know that it can be better. It certainly is hard to believe anyone would choose to live this way.

Last night, we moved into a guest house and the sheets were so dirty we washed them ourselves. (Not the first time.) That was a perfect capper to our day-long odyssey from Chidambarum. Our departure from there began with the obese, toothless, domineering manager screaming at me to wait until his irritating boy flunky inspected our grimy, mosquito-ridden room to see of we'd harmed anything. Yeah, right....

His controlling pushiness was in keeping with his behavior when we checked in the prior afternoon. Then, he asked if I had any pens like the one he'd given me to sign the register with. It wasn't enough that he'd pointed to one of our small bags, was told it contained food then allowed his flunky to hector us mercilessly for part of our lunch. Now he wanted pens from me? He and the boy were so spookily persistent that Tami and I went to unprecedented lengths to try to protect our belongings while we were away from the room. In two (+) years on the road, I don't remember taking such measures to make theft difficult for potential pilferers. I lifted the backpacks onto a high concrete ledge on one side of the room then tied them in a web of cord. Before we left, we took a photo with a digicam as a reference to see if they had been tampered with. Traveling with peace of mind, eh?

So, as I tossed the room key on his counter and turned to walk down the stairs, his protestations grew from his customary bark to a literal scream. I thought, "what the hell???" Yeah...we scratched paint on his precious, rickety chair or left (yet one more) stain on his sickening walls. "Bye, bye loser." Moments such as this can constitute the occasional satisfying triumph of traveling in India. He and his staff had done plenty to bully us and, for whatever reason, he felt he had to push us around one last time before we left. (Yes, we could have not checked in at all but the psycho behavior didn't start until after we handed over our cash.) Situations like this are exactly what is meant when people say traveling in India is tough. Being here can feel like a never-ending battle not to get screwed or belittled.

All the way to the train station I kept glancing over my shoulder to see if any of his minions were following in pursuit. We submerged into the hubbub of the bus station and I celebrated with a tea. Several buses a day supposedly run the 70 kilometers (42mi) from Chidambarum to Pondicherry so we thought our transit was simply a matter of getting on, turning on our IPods and enjoying the ride. Not hardly.

Although there were many buses, almost none had their destinations written in English. (Tamil script looks like elf writing to our eyes.) We had to ask repeatedly, "Pondicherry?" This being India, whenever a bus pulled into the lot, its doors were immediately mobbed with scores of riders fighting to board. With our 50(+) lb. packs, we never stood a chance. Even more disheartening, the couple times we were able to get on a bus we thought was going our way, the driver or conducter would shoo us back off - ostensibly either because the bus was not in fact going to Pondicherry or because it wasn't leaving for a long time - both lies. One time I asked a driver if the bus was going to Madurai. He said, "No, Pondicherry." I told him that was great, we were going to Pondi. He immediately backtracked and said I couldn't board because the bus wasn't leaving until 12:30 and waved me off to find a different one. A short while later I noticed people boarding the same bus and taking seats. We got on but the conductor this time blocked the way and said the bus wasn't going until 1:00. I said I didn't care but he still wouldn't let us on. The real reason for that was our big backpacks. Every single bus gets absolutely stuffed with humans and our packs represent one more headache for workers whose jobs, from all appearances, offer litter more than an unmitigated stream of headaches.

That's their problem, though. Our problem was to get the hell out of Chidambarum. After a solid hour and a half and scores of buses coming and going, we were finally guided onto a coach by two students. Before the conductor saw us, we wedged our packs and ourselves into a back bench (there are no luggage areas on these buses). As we paid (for three seats) we were informed that the bus was turning west 20km short of Pondi in the junction town of Cuddalore. We'd have to undertake this process again there. Awesome.

Luckily, Cuddalore has many more buses continuing to Pondi so the crush of humanity was more manageable. We quickly found a bus and seats ... then we waited for the bus to fill. For a good 45 minutes in the midday heat we waited until every square inch of standing room was packed. You can learn new meanings to words like thirst and claustrophobia traveling in India.

Without any further complications, we arrived in Pondicherry and prepared to exit the bus....or so we supposed. Because we had our packs, we thought it was best to wait until the other passengers fought their ways out the doors. Our hesitation backfired, though. Before we could step down, the throngs below were heaving to get on so they could get a seat. It was ridiculous. Even though it was obvious that we needed to get off, no one would stop pushing us. I had no choice but to push back...and gravity was on my side. I'm describing human interaction that is void of all courtesy - just a notch below being dangerous. It was like this during my first visit to India and it's still like that today.

If that wasn't bad enough, the next instant gifted us with another of India's charms. I heard Tami yell and turned in time to see her whack a man with one of her small bags. I didn't have to guess why. As soon as she told me he groped her, I gave him a solid stiff-arm in the back. That, or nothing I yelled could get him to turn around. He obviously knew exactly what he did and was too embarrassed to face confrontation in front of dozens of Indian men and women.

With our adrenaline high, we set out looking for a room. It's festival (holiday) time in the state of Tamil Nadu right now and rooms can be hard to come by. At the best of times getting a passable room in India can be frustrating but right now it can make your hair a shade grayer. We dropped the packs in front of a restaurant and Tami waited while I went looking. Out of fifteen guest houses I saw two rooms that would make a prisoner of war cringe and one that just might have been preferable to sleeping on the filthy sidewalk. Everything else was full. We finally gave up and took a rickshaw into the center of town to search there. After a few more strikeouts we found the place where we are now. It ain't great but at least the sheets are clean.

More later.