Incredible India

Incredible India! According to various unverified sources, India is, together with China , one of the emerging industrial nations in the world. Easy to believe when you see New Delhi, airports or the nice parts of other big cities, more difficult to believe in the slums of Delhi where people are left to die in the streets, alone, or where street children cry of hunger. India certainly is a place everyone should visit, to discover life in is purest and often cruelest form and learn to relativise. You become strong when you travel in India, and I understand better now why people told me that in India you find the best and the worst of human beings.

Remember I told you about Kathi that I met in Russia, well we are going to travel together for two weeks here in India and I’m really glad about that, as India is not so easy by yourself.

Delhi

We arrive in Delhi for Diwali, the festival of lights and veneration of the goddess of money, Lakshmi. Our host in Delhi lives in an amazing house that looks more like an art gallery, in a private residence. We stay in the penthouse, with a king size bed and private bathroom. The Lotus Temple is a ten minutes walk from his place and is indeed the reproduction of a gigantic Lotus flower. It is the house of worship of Bahai, all religions are welcome in this temple. On our way back we pay a visit to the Krishna Temple where Diwali festivities are being carried out. Look at the beautiful light on the praying flowers…India is that for me, colours, and more colours, smells, you can get drunk with the different smells there. I have never experienced a country so extreme with beauty and so full of misery. 

photos Delhi

Agra

You shouldn’t try to visit The Taj on a Friday, it is closed. All the guidebooks say it, the travelers write it on forums and blogs, but we still show up at six in the morning to watch the sunrise over the Taj… What to do? We take a local bus to Fatepur Sihkri, an abandoned town 40 km from Agra to spend the day; beautiful temples, buildings witnessing a period of prosperity gone. Nobody knows why this city was left to die. Water shortage is mentioned, but there is a river nearby so the reasons remain a mystery.

6 AM on the next day we show up again at the gates of the Taj Mahal. They didn’t lie, it is indeed the most beautiful building in the world. Actually it is perfect. Constructed by a husband to his wife as a proof of the love he felt for her, it is said he chopped off the hands of the builders so that they would never be able to reproduce anything as beautiful. Unfortunately for him, the wife died and the creator was put in jail shortly after the Taj was finished and thus spent the rest of his life watching it from his cell... Look at the trompe l’oeil on the column, the shine of gold on the gems encrusted in the marble. The weather is misty this morning, because of the pollution mainly, and the Taj emerges from it, majestic and symbol of eternal love and beauty.

photos Agra

Jaipur

Jaipur, the pink city, home to elephants and Amber Fort, only ten minutes’ walk from our couchsurfer, Shubham’s house. His grandmother has cows in her backyard and from her courtyard we see the fort and the Jaipur version of the Chinese great wall. Shubham brings us to a cricket game with his brother and cousins and after we take a ride on an elephant in the elephant village nearby. In the evening his family invites us to celebrate the auntie’s wedding anniversary. Everyone in the jeep, we have to push start it! After eating in a nice restaurant, some family members are still hungry so we stop to have some more in a street kitchen…Is this strange? No, this is India!

photos Jaipur

Pushkar

Home to the annual camel fair, once a year Pushkar fills up with thousands of camels, horses and other tradable animals; salesmen from all over India travel a long way to come here to make business. Tourists also fill up the streets, the hotels, the restaurants… Can you guess the price of one camel? There is a special atmosphere in the camel camp, especially at sunset. I never knew camels were such sweet animals. In the center of Pushkar there is a holy lake. We take off our shoes to walk around it, observing the purification rituals performed by locals. I love the monkeys here, so different from the “red-faced” ones seen before. They are even polite J

photos Pushkar

Varanasi

The mother of rivers, sacred and pure… considered the most polluted water on earth, containing almost no oxygen, to devotees it can even be drunk because the water of the holy mother cannot be filthy. Difficult to understand for us, it seems logical once you are there. All life (and death) in Varanasi is concentrated around the Ganges. People wash themselves, their clothes in the water, their dead are burned and the rests are thrown in the water. Some people cannot be burned, as children or pregnant women, so their bodies are weighted down with rocks and thrown directly it the mother’s bosom. Children at a very young age start drinking the water and it is also used for cooking, Fascinating is the only word I can use to describe what happens in Varanasi. Good Karma, Bad Karma.; words that are on everybody’s lips. I don’t dare to put even a fingertip in the water. Banana, our boat driver, invites Kathi and me into his home. We spend some hours with his family, talking, his daughter even paints us with henna.  I think the tea we drank was cooked on holy water...This is true Indian hospitality!

photos Varanasi

Kolkata

Only one and a half day in Kolkata, the city of joy. Arindam and his mother welcome me with open arms. Arindam celebrates his 26^th birthday with delicious food prepared by his mother. I consider kidnapping her as my stomach seems very satisfied with her cooking skills. We go to the cinema. If you have the chance to see this film: LIFE OF PI in 3D you definitely should! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454876/

I go to the nicer parts of Kolkata on Arindam’s advice. After paying a visit to the market where someone tries to sell me… a table! I pay a visit to Queen Victoria memorial before heading to the airport with Arindam.

photos Kolkata

What more is there to say? This is India, anything can and will happen.