David and Edel

Langur monkey by Umaria station

After all the fun with the bus to get to Agra (..see previous post) the train-journey onwards seemed almost dull it was so organized – our names were on the printed passenger list outside the carriage when it pulled in to the station, the train left on time and then arrived just the same in the tiny town Umaria 13 hours later. From here we hopped on a bus to even smaller Tala 30km away, closer to the Bandhavgarh national park that we wanted to get to. This bus got crazy packed along the way with people hanging out both doors and windows – Edel was sitting only some meter away from me but I couldn’t actually see her through the mass of people. I gave up my seat to an old man with a cane that was led to the bus, though spectacularly someone else tried to nick the seat in the seconds it took the old man to get there!

Male tiger in Bandhavgarh

In Tala we checked in to a pretty basic guesthouse (squat toilet and bucket shower), and slept past midday in the 40-45 degree heat. The room had an interesting cooling system – a big box with a large fan, water and a pump inside, and lots of hay on the sides – as the water is pumped around and evaporates it cools the air (guess all the hay is there to make a bigger surface area to evaporate from). Pretty efficient, though doesn’t quite cool as much as real air-condition, and makes quite a lot of noise. The electricity to actually fire it up came and went very often during the day also. In the afternoon when it was cool enough to function again we went with a jeep into the national park – and saw our first wild tiger! This is becoming an increasingly difficult thing to do – there’s only about 1,000 tigers left in the whole country, down 99% from a century ago (..one million people for each tiger) – they are completely gone from many national parks set up specifically as tiger reserves, and might realistically be extinct in the wild within a decade. In India, like most countries today, natures survives just as tiny pockets, isolated islands in a sea of developed land and people – most of the reserves are only big enough to support a couple dozen of the larger predators, sentencing the species to a few humiliating decades of inbreeding before it is finally gone. In Bandhavgarh the chances are still pretty good to see a tiger though, with about 50 animals it has the highest tiger density of any of the parks, and this is the hottest time of the year so they come out from the forest to the water holes, which is where we saw our first one. And so did plenty others – there were dozens of jeeps there with Indian and foreign tourists – some serious ones with meter-long camera lenses worth more than the jeep they were sitting in. Once the tiger showed up they set up a rotation with the jeeps so that everyone got a chance to see it. We saw plenty other animals as well; spotted deer, sambar deer, wild pigs, langurs, peacocks, eagles and king fishers but the jeep driver mostly just dashed quickly from tiger-spot to tiger-spot. We had a different driver and a more relaxing experience when we went back to the park at 5am the next morning – and this time we had a really good tiger encounter. A big male came walking out from the forest towards the dirt-road we were driving on – the animal ignored us completely and walked only some 20 meters from the jeep and the road for about 5 minutes. I got some very nice photos, but for some of the time I just had to put down the camera and watch – felt real emotional to have this big incredibly beautiful animal walking so close. (I guess I was still happy that it hadn’t appeared half an hour earlier when we had to leave the jeep to fix a flat tire though…)

Lianas in the jungle.

On the same trip we saw a second tiger, a female, sleeping in a cave, and we went back again twice more before leaving, both times seeing a different tiger couple. We had managed to arrive in Tala with almost no money, thinking it would have an ATM and be a bigger place than tiny Umaria, which was wrong by an order of magnitude. A nice english photographer named John who’d been traveling India for a year and had shared the jeep safaris with us gave me a lift on the back of his Enfield though, which saved us from having to wash dishes in Tala for a decade. From Tala we later got a jeep taxi to Khajuraho, which is famous for it’s fantastic temple ruins, and booked a bit nicer hotel to “splash out” after roughing it by the park. I also managed to poison myself with a pizza in the “Italian” restaurant across the road – it is never a good idea to order western dishes, anywhere, ever, they usually arrive looking like they’re been made by someone who’s only once seen a picture of the real thing. I shall stick more religiously to the rice and dahl or thalis from now on..

The temple ruins in Khajuraho are probably the finest we’ve seen anywhere, outside of Angkor. They date from between 1000-1200 AD, well preserved and restored, and are most famous for some spectacular erotic carvings. Some of the positions featured are actually so complicated they need two helper maidens just to support the couple! The British, of course, were extremely upset when they found them.. When discovering the ruins in the jungle in the 1800’s the explorer T.S.Burt complained in his report that “..the sculptor had at times allowed his subject to grow a little warmer than there was any absolute necessity for his doing“! I imagine a carving featuring a man with a horse was among the ones found most upsetting… Apart from the most explicit carvings the decorations do remind quite a bit of Angkor, with beautiful Apsara dancers in stone everywhere. How did the subcontinent go from this to a place where holding hands or showing any kind of affection in public is frowned upon and taboo and you have to wear a murdering amount of clothes in the 45 degree heat? The British, certainly. 🙂

Khajuraho carvings.

In the evening of the first day we went to see a “sound and light show” by the temples that told the story of their creation, both the mythological and the historical version, though the latter only slightly less made up as there were no slaves and everyone was delighted to work for the king on his glorious project. It was pretty good though, with some Indian classical music thrown in, and not quite as tacky as it sounds. Next day we went to see the western group of temples close to town, and in the evening got a tuktuk to the further away eastern and southern groups. Entrance to the far away ones is unfortunately free, which means many more people by the ruins hassling you to buy things or starting to explain the temples and show you around as your guide without you really having a choice…had run out of 10 rupee bills before we got to the last of the temples.. The tuktuk driver, Trilok, was very nice and invited us to his house afterwards for homemade crisps and chai with milk straight from the cow.

From Khajuraho we set course for the holy city of Varanasi before leaving India for Nepal.

The Paharganj street in Delhi.

After flying back from Port Blair on the Andaman islands we spent a few days in Delhi sorting out our Chinese visas, then set our course east to try and see wild tigers in the Bandhavgarh national park. On the way we wanted to tick Agra and the Taj Mahal off the list (you can’t really go to India without seeing it)..though preferably without having to spend too much time there as it’s tout/hassle/scam heaven – precisely because all tourists go there and no-one stays very long meaning they’re all “fresh”. We booked a nice aircon tourist bus to Agra that would apparently include the tour, so that we could catch the 13-hour train out to Umaria 4pm the same day and get out of Agra. We had wanted to get the train the whole way but the guy in the hotel where we bought the bus tickets said it was sold out for the first stretch. He seemed ok, and gave us good instructions for how to buy the onward train tickets at the railway station; “go to foreign tourist office on 2nd floor, and don’t trust anyone anywhere else who says they can help you“.. The Agra bus was meant to leave at 6am so we showed up at 5:45 as instructed – half an hour later a kid with almost no english shows up to lead us to the bus – he takes us on a long walk through narrow streets dodging stray dogs and cow dung on the way, then leaves us standing by a bigger road then disappears. When he comes back some 15 min later he and another Delhi business-man in his teens stick us on a bus without a single other person where we sit and wait roughly 45 minutes..before they come back and tell us “this bus cancel“. We’re moved to a different bus – neither of the two actually has aircon, unless if you count that the new one is missing the back part of the bus due to a crash. This bus is full and the driver, an angry man in his 40’s, wants us to share a single seat at the very back – the worst bumpiest place to sit. After I explain about six times that what he’s pointing at is not two seats he eventually shuffles people around a little but a short while into the trip we’re back to seven people on five seats. That would usually have been ok if we’d bought public bus tickets but here we’d probably paid for about 10 seats, not the 1.5.. I’ve actually fallen for the good old sell-luxury-ticket-dump-on-public-bus trick once before, in Thailand with my brother Mikael a few years back. That time I think I’d even paid twice the amount of the other scammed tourists onboard!

Bus to Agra.

There were no other tourists on this bus though. The crash-injured bus eventually limped out of Delhi around 8am and when nearing 2pm we still weren’t there. The trip was supposed to take 4-5 hours which with the 6am start would have given us time to see Taj Mahal before the 4pm train..now we were sitting in the bus and calculating the odds if we tried to pull off taking a tuktuk to the train station to store the bags in a locker, another tuktuk to Taj, running in to take two photos, catching another tuktuk back to the train station all within 2 hours…we were starting to give up. Then this guy hops on the bus and walks down to us saying he’s organizing the tour that we’d paid for and puzzled we explain our dilemma. He insists that “please, you are my guests now” and he has a tuktuk and driver waiting that can take us to Taj then drop us at the station in time for the train. He even has a hostel where we can store the backpacks, and everything is free of charge. This all seems a bit too good to be true..no-one else is getting off the bus here.. Edel asks which tour company he’s with and he says “same one” pointing at the bus that’s taking off “the..um..” – mumbles something that sounds like “Asia tours” – the one we booked with was Unlimited tours. What to do? We went along with it for the moment for lack of options, expecting alarm bells to ring at some point. The driver takes us to the hostel to drop the bags (we take down the name in case) then as close as he can to Taj Mahal (there’s a 500 meter exclusion zone as the thing is crumbling away in the smog). At the Taj Mahal there’s bag inspection and a completely random list of forbidden items such as: writing paper, playing cards, books (except guidebooks), mp3-player and other electronics (except camera). We leave one of our bags with all the forbidden items in the free (except backsheesh) locker outside. To get close to the monument itself you need to take your shoes off, and walking barefoot on the polished stone surfaces in the 40 something degree heat is the cruelest torture India has thrown our way yet. They did have a plastic mat put in for some parts of the walks, however for the mat they had chosen the colour black…

..hot..hot..hot..

The monument itself is I guess pretty nice, though we cover it as quickly as someone walking on burning coal. Outside the driver is waiting – he’d mentioned on the way that there was something else he was going to show us and now he explains – there’s a couple shops he needs to take us to or otherwise the bus company won’t let him work with them. He seems pretty apologetic about this and we don’t need to buy anything, just please spend 5-6 minutes looking in each one. For the third final shop he explains he gets 50 rupees just for bringing us there so please look for 10 minutes. We joke at how funny it is that he told us, and feel more relaxed now that we know why someone bothered to pick us off the bus and drive us around for the whole afternoon. After buying some Darjeeling tea in the shop the driver takes us to pick up our backpacks that are still safe and to have a quick lunch before dropping us at the correct train station (there are six of them in Agra). We give him a good tip for being honest with us about what’s going on, though I would have absolutely loved to have the complete details of this setup… Do these guys have any connection at all to the ones we booked with, or do they just pick tourists randomly off the buses? Does the tuktuk driver get paid, or does he actually have to pay the first guy to get the tourists and then make money only from the shop commissions? We wouldn’t have managed to see the Taj Mahal without them anyway! (..though I’m slightly less happy with the miserable wreck of a bus that we’d royally overpaid for to begin with).

Final note on the Taj Mahal; Said to be the ultimate monument to romantic love, built by Shah Jahan for his favourite wife in 1631 (..who’d just died giving birth to her 14th child) – the Shah is said to have lived out his final years inconsolable and ‘gazing wistfully at the Taj Mahal’. The Rough Guide, which I love for it’s detailed history sections, tells that in reality he partied on quite energetically with the rest of his harem and when he finally died at 74 it was from a massive overdose of opium and aphrodisiacs!

Nothing is ever what is seems in India…

Dive boat on Havelock.

We’re getting to the Andaman’s out of season as usual.. The month of May here brings with it the monsoon and the possibility of violent cyclones…but it’s also the best season to have a chance to see manta rays when scuba-diving which I think should be an easy trade-off for anyone in their right mind! 🙂

The Andaman Islands lie far from India, closer to Burma or Sumatra if close to anything at all. They also lie a bit out of time..still on the Indian time-zone but much further east so the sun rises at 4am and sets at 5pm. We spent one night first in Port Blair – despite having been used as a penal colony for 150 years it’s not too bad a place, nice waterfront one end of town, and it’s definitely the cleanest town we’ve been in in India.

North Sentinel - last place on earth.

Andaman islands is also famous for it’s indigenous population, closer to African bushmen than Asians or Aryans it’s still a bit of a mystery how they got here. Marco Polo, who’s most redeeming quality is that he brought us ice-cream, described them as “All the men of Angamanian have heads like dogs, they are the most cruel generation and eat everybody they catch“. Once the islands were colonized this “cruel generation” (who weren’t cannibals and had been getting on just fine) finally got some “help” and in exchange for the islands natural resources they were generously given the usual western blessings of disease, deforestation, alcohol-addiction and missionaries. Today they make up just 0.5% of the island’s population, some tribes went extinct altogether and some like the Jarawa still have their reserve sliced in half by a road the Indian Supreme Court ordered closed in 2002. Just one tribe – the Sentinelese – still manage to live in total isolation on the small North Sentinel island to the west – any attempts to visit are met by a hail of arrows. There’s one really iconic photo taken after the 2004 tsunami when the Indian government sent a helicopter to check up on them from the air – they came back with a photo of a single man on the beach aiming his bow and arrow at the helicopter.. “we’ll ride out any storm, just leave us alone”. The plane from Chennai that we came in with actually flies close enough to North Sentinel that it is possible to spot it in the distance, nice to just look down and know that below the canopy there lives perhaps the worlds most isolated people still undisturbed.

Havelock beach.

North Sentinel is of course closed to tourists, and so are quite a lot of the other islands – the Andaman permit we got on arrival lists the permitted ones. In Port Blair we got a rickshaw to the forestry department to find out about a special second permit we would have needed if we wanted to go to Interview island to the north, but it looked a bit complicated (they were surprised we wanted to go there when we didn’t have our own yacht..) – we would also probably have needed to take the infamous Andaman Trunk Road through the Jarawa reserve so we decided to head straight for Havelock island instead to dive. The final major event in Port Blair was I had something killed for my plate for the first time in well over a month! It’s very easy to be vegetarian in India; we hadn’t even really meant to try – half the places serve only veg.food and it might also be safer and less gone-off than meat so we had stuck with it most of the time. Anyhow, it was time! I wanted to make it special so I made it a lobster and named him; Hubert. After all that time Hubert was actually a bit of a disappointment though, and for all I know he might actually be the reason I went down with my second round of amoebic dysentery on Havelock a few days later…

Edel on Havelock.

On Havelock island we moved in to one of those postcards-from-paradise with white-sand beaches, palm trees and turquise water. We slept in a small bamboo hut where you can’t lock the door, and I didn’t wear shoes for 5 days. In the evenings we’d wade out into the warm shallow water to watch the sunset together. The huts are built a little in from the beach under the trees so the island still looks green and beautiful from the water. It really was this great, except of course the amoebas that struck me down with a fever on day 3. I had felt that I had had all the fun you can have with amoebas back in Manali, but there you go. We had stocked up on some extra medicine the last time luckily though so I recovered in a couple days.

Edel on beach #7.

The first dive on our second day was interesting – strongest current we ever dove in. As we descended down the anchor line it was stretched like a violin string or as Edel put it we were like prayer flags in the wind holding on to it. At the bottom we had to hold on to rocks and work our way around the fairly small dive site this way before finally letting go and flying back towards the anchor line making sure not to miss it. The second dive was more relaxing – still some current but a much bigger site so we could just drift-dive. If diving is being weight-less drift-diving is actually flying! We just hung in the water and watched the amazing fields of hard-coral and big table corals pass by just below. We saw many big Napoleon wrasse which is nice – they’re fished out completely from many places for the Hong-Kong market – I think only the lips are eaten as they’re supposed to be a delicacy.. This huge fish is also the only thing that eats COT-starfish, which can kill whole coral-reefs when there’s an outbreak of them. We didn’t see a single shark in our 12 dives though – they’ve collapsed by over 90% over the last couple decades for the horrible shark-fin fishing which again use just a tiny bit of the animal.. On the fourth day of diving we saw the mantas! 🙂 The dive-site was called Dixons pinnacles – starting at 18-20m depth it consists of two peaks rising up the deeper bottom around, the bigger of the pinnacles with a flat top maybe 10m across and the two peaks separated just a little further than your eyes can see underwater. As we descended at first we saw a juvenile manta ray, 3-4 meter wingspan, just swimming away. I was so excited and busy signaling to Edel, who had already spotted it, that I only got about a second long look before it disappeared.. Luckily it came back, hovering and gently moving the huge wings just above the top of the pinnacle where dozens of small cleaner wrasse worked on it. We held on to the rock just a meter or two away and just watched. Then a second manta, an adult with around a 5 meter wing span, came gliding by above and then dove down and disappeared into the depth behind us. We spent most of the hour-long dive with the first manta, on pinnacle #1 where it circled around, then moved to pinnacle #2 and then back to #1 where it was joined again by the bigger manta. On some of the glide-by’s they came so close I could’ve touched..maybe 20cm away. We decided to do the second dive of the day at the same site hoping they’d still be there, and waited an hour and a half in the boat above for the safety surface interval. The pinnacles were empty when we went down again, but after 5 minutes the smaller manta came back and we spent most of the dive swimming with it. I hovered in the water to meet the big alien-looking fish come swimming towards me, and swam along with it underneath looking up as it passed by just above me. Swimming next to it on eye-level it curled up the one of the two horns on it’s head next to me..didn’t know they were so flexible..wonder if they use it to communicate? The second manta came back again just as we went up, and we waved good-bye to them from the 5m/3min safety stop. It felt incredibly lucky to spend almost a full two hours with these giants, so alien-looking and moving the big wings to gently flying slowly through the water. This was probably the best dives we’ve done anywhere, but we had one interesting wreck dive left the next day before we left. The wreck, almost two hours away in the dive boat, is from a 70m long Chinese ship that sank in 1956. The ship has plenty of “ghost-nets” lost by two generations of fishermen stuck high up in the wreck and moving in the current, looking like sails moving in the wind and giving it a great “Flying Dutchman” feel. It looked so broken and cursed I half expected Tom Waits music to be playing down there in the depth..

Sunset on beach #7.