India

Jan 1978.  New Delhi

Stayed in Delhi for around four days before Nicole arrived from France, again with my Turkish friend, again smoking, eating steaks, making coffee, moving maybe as far as the Red Fort. The hotel was nice and clean, but Delhi is like all the others cities: big, noisy, dirty, overcrowded, etc. 

Nicole arrived with her hair curled  - I didn’t even recognize her the first second or two. I just love curly hair on her. So good to be with her again.  We hung around Delhi for a while, getting our Nepalese visas and reading all the mail which had accumulated for us over the last few months. Christmas cards from Terry, the Fowles, the Febvres - cards from Eric, Pat Faust; fat check from Dad, and note from his trip to Moscow, Leningrad, Rome, San Moritz.  All kinds of goodies, in fact. Everything and everybody seems so remote - news from some distant planet, that entertains, but certainly does not affect me in any direct way. 

We looked up Nicole's Indian lady friend, who turned out to be less wise and more dogmatically pro-East then Nicole had  imagined - a very difficult woman to do anything with except listen: could it be because she is an authority figure at the girls school where she teaches?

We left 2nd class on the Lucknow Mail, arriving the next morning with the realization that Nicole had a cold. I looked around the city for a day (huge 19th century Pasha's palaces and English military quarters).  Took a tour which included every old saw, from eyes in a painting that miraculously followed you to a maze of passages in a palace “so complex you will never find your way out", then returned with Nicole by rickshaw for a quick rerun. 

Horrible hotel, though brand new, with kids so eager to serve they knock on the door every 15 minutes to ask if you need anything. The manager was just as bad. And of course, people in the kitchen, screaming at each other, rooms with doors open and Indian pop music blaring “transistors “. 

The train to Gorakhpur was narrowed and slow, but at least a traveled in the daytime. We had been freaked by the countless horror stories about second class Indian sleepers, but managed the night before Lucknow actually quite well, despite six to a small compartment open to the corridor, everyone else male. Still, daylight is the time to travel, and the trip to Gorakhpur was memorable for the incredible density of people and other living things -  we never seem to be out of huge centers of population, and every square inch of land was put to use. Surprising number of birds spotted, including egrets, rollers, drongos, crows, kingfisher. 

Gorakhpur was pure horror, a horrible hotel on the grungy main street, our room's window open to a major loudspeaker ensemble, blasting incredibly distorted Indian blather until very late at night. Back to the train station in the morning, and onto Naugarh , a horrible small town with a guard post and bus to near the border. The last several kilometers into Lumbini we managed by rickshaw on a road so bad our driver had to walk us a good part of the way. Nicole by now really out of it. Night on straw mats on the floor of a guest room at the Buddhist monastery in Lumbini, checked out Guatama Buddha‘s birthplace and Ashoka‘s column the next morning. From here, a real bone crunching all day bus ride into Pokhara on the Siddhartha Raj Marg, a horrible, two nights in a hotel on the main street, and another bone cruncher ride to Kathmandu where we stumbled blindly (and, it turns out quite fortunately) into room 306 of the Himalayan View Hotel, on its second floor (American usage), the balcony and big windows on the south and east. We’ve been here ever since.

Some impressions of India after 10 years: I see no changes yet. Train stations and trains just the same, just as strong and usually unpleasant an experience. 1st day coach for me from now on, baby. I’ve forgotten how noisy  the place was - I’m much more sensitive to noise now, and the loudspeakers, radios, and loud voices really got to me after a while (Kathmandu seems very peaceful in comparison).  Good food at the stations, overly-helpful people, money grubbing, insistent, salesmen, trishaws, high prices (!), low resale value on Western items, no black market, dope more illegal, but still widely available. We’re both nervous about returning, after the calm of Kathmandu.