The Road to Zagora

by Richard Collins

  There are also the courtyards and terraced gardens to explore. It was here that I found myself being quietly scornful of a fellow tourist making an unnecessary fuss when a bee came near him. A little later I was on my own in the gardens when a huge bee got inside my t-shirt and I panicked. A distinguished Indian couple came around the corner and found an Englishman, naked from the waist up, kneeling on the ground and beating a t-shirt with a sun hat. They turned and walked the other way.

  We stayed eight days in Bundhi, at first in an old guest house of tiny rooms and winding staircases that was run by two softly spoken effeminate brothers who liked to fly paper kites from the roof. Then we tried a place owned by a man called Geeto who was pleased to tell us a little about his circumstances. He was 24 years old and had an English girlfriend of 43 who lived with him for some months of the year. She had bought the house for him. We met him in the street riding the motorbike that she had also bought him and carrying a parcel, a present that she had sent from England. Best of all was the fact that, as he told us, she loved sex. In northern India young unmarried men are generally doomed to celibacy. Geeto considered himself to be the luckiest man in town.

  Then we stayed in a cheap hotel called Kasera Paradise. It was situated below the palace and it overlooked the old town. The rooftop was a great place to watch the morning commute of monkeys coming down from the hill and into town to forage, a place to watch sunset and sunrise, to get away from the cacophony and hullabaloo of Indian streetlife, and to meet interesting fellow travellers. We liked it there very much.

  One day we rented bikes and cycled out into the local countryside. We stopped in for chai in a simple café where a man wearing a hi-vis saffron turban and bizarre wrap-around legwear made fun of me for having no moustache. We cycled further and saw large fields of roses and marigolds grown for decorative and religious use. We saw camels grazing on the scrubby trees and children herding goats. At one point in the ride there was a bump and my bike seemed to be going more slowly. I looked over my shoulder to see a smiling young lad who had jumped on the rack for a free ride.

  One morning a tuk tuk driver casually engaged us in conversation on the street. He said that the real life of India was in the countryside and not the towns. We found ourselves employing him to take us on a village tour on which we met with friendly, colourfully dressed locals who showed us a little of their way of life. We saw corn being ground in a quern and a village potter at work. In these villages people seemed to have a nice mix of traditional and new (mobile phones and TVs, for instance) and a reasonable quality of life. We were to visit much poorer villages in other parts of Rajasthan.

  After Bundhi we stayed in Udaipur, a handsome town and an upmarket tourist destination with a palace on the lake converted into a posh hotel.

  Some snapshots of Udaipur:

  We see tiny donkeys being used as beasts of burden, each wears panniers full of bricks and they struggle along to a building site. And then there’s one who has broken free and running off. Yes, maybe there’s a children’s book in this – The Donkey Who Ran Away.

  And other stories because here is a tuk tuk rounding the corner, only two passengers sitting comfortably in the back – a man and a large billy goat.

  We watch the tuk tuk car chase from the James Bond movie Octopussy (filmed in Udaipur) in a rooftop restaurant. They show it every night.

  We have rented bikes again and on an uncharacteristically quiet stretch of road a car overtakes us and skids sideways to a halt. It goes on, turns, passes us again and does another handbrake skid. We turn around and head back towards town. When the car passes again a pleasant enough looking young man leans out of the window and says take no danger. We translate this as we didn’t mean to scare you, we’re only having fun and carry on with our ride.

  It is on that same bike ride that we pass two puppies in the road – the live one eating the dead one.

  We are watching the sunset over the lake from the rooftop of our cheap hotel. The monkeys on the palace roof nearby sit in a row watching it too.

  In Udaipur airport Flic takes out her sketchbook and makes drawings of the security staff standing nearby. They catch sight of her and come over, smiling, wanting to see their portraits.

  From Udaipur we flew to Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, the land of the many syllabled language of Malayalam, or, as I called it, Malayalamalorum. The distance between Udaipur and Trivandrum (as it’s often more conveniently called) is about the same as that between Stockholm and Madrid. India is a big country and the differences in culture, way of life, language, climate, vegetation, and everything else are even bigger than those between European countries like Sweden and Spain.

  Flic’s diary sketchbooks are wonderful off and on. There are times when I can’t say it better. Here are some notes from our first days in Kerala:

  Spent all day yesterday travelling – getting to Trivandrum at midnight. Triv seemed too hot to stay in so we headed to the beach. Palm trees galore, I’ve never seen so many and coconuts, husks piled up for fuel, green ones tops chopped off and a straw for coconut and water drink. Watched fishermen in long boats made from tree trunks unloading octopus and fish and where there was a gap in the killer waves we swam in the warm sea. There was a strange tribe of pale people in trunks and bikinis swimming. I realised I was one of them. The beach at 5 o’clock was completely different to what it had been at 10 in the morning. It was much more fun with crowds of brightly dressed Indians. We met a fisherman called Philippe (there are lots of Christians here from the Portuguese) who is going to take us out on his boat tomorrow morning.

  Went for a walk through palm trees and new houses, a bit of beach-urbia? Went to meet our fisherman. The boat was four tree trunks – solid and long and stable. We had snorkels and dived and swam around. The water was a bit murky but we saw some extraordinary weird fish and Richard got threatened by an eel. There are big fishing boats and about 30 men take them out. There is a huge hullabaloo when the boat is dragged out of the sea, so many men pushing and pulling and yelling to each other. The men here wear lungi which is a skirt which they wear rolled up or down.

  Went out for another walk up the coast and had a serious coconut experience. A man first climbed a tree and cut down two large green coconuts. Then he smashed the husk off by pounding it onto a spike so I had a smallish nut inside covered with whitish fibre. Then he cut the top off so I could drink it. Richard had a couple of turns trying to climb the tree and gave up. I didn’t even try.

  Yes, coconut palms, a warm sea, friendly people. But it felt too much like a tourist resort there and we moved on to Varkala. There are two Varkalas: the Indian town of that name and the Varkala where the foreigners stay – a leafy tourist suburb on top of the cliff overlooking a beach. It’s nice there but I was very disappointed. This was not India, it was more like Greece in the 1970s. But we stayed a few days. It was there, in Varkala, that I read the words sorry we trashed your house and we’ll fix the window on my younger son’s facebook page. The boys, desperately missing their parents over the Christmas period (hmmm...) had taken to partying and had achieved a certain level of success. They had begun to talk of us as their distant relatives. We didn’t worry. Kerala at its beachurbian worst was still lovely and a whole lot lovelier than west Wales in January. We were having fun in our own way too. We tried to rent bikes.

  I thought my new year’s resolution would be to be less impatient but then I thought no – it’s impossible. I can’t be. But in India it would help, no-one does anything straight away. Every shop has a sign up claiming to do lots of things but it means that they know, or have a relative who knows, someone who might do these things.

  We see a sign BICYCLES FOR RENT so we ask – can we hire two? The man wobbles his head from side to side and lifts his eyebrows. ‘Bicycles’ I say, pointing to one. ‘Five minutes’ he says. I get irritated, ‘don’t you know if you’ve got them or not?’ ‘Five minutes you wait,’ he says. Another man comes out. ‘Please can we rent some bikes?�
�� ‘Yes, yes,’ he says. ‘Just five/ten minutes.’ ‘Why?’ I think or ask. He says he’ll phone and two bikes will be brought here if we just wait 10 minutes. ‘Well maybe we can walk to where the bikes are – is it far?’ ‘No, no. Not far, five/ten minutes’ walk straight on.’ He points out the direction ‘just before the helipad, he says. ‘Five minutes’ walk.’ ‘OK,’ I say, ‘we’ll go and find the bikes. So we walk but after two minutes the road divides and we’re not sure which way is straight on. We pick the left and walk for half an hour and decide to call this a walk and try again tomorrow.

  We did rent bikes eventually and we cycled to relatively idyllic, moderately unpeopled, coconut-palm-fringed beaches and swam in the Indian Ocean. Then we moved on.

  We stayed in Kollam, where we saw: a large modern church with open sides and Indian Christians just as fervent and devout as any Indian Hindu; buses with no glass in the windows; and a puppy dog being attacked by kites. Then we took to the backwaters.

  The backwaters are a series of lagoons, lakes, rivers and canals stretching parallel to the coast for much of the length of Kerala. They were formed naturally but have been improved on to make hundreds of miles of navigable waterways passing through a countryside of paddy fields, coconut palms, yams, banana trees and so forth. There are all sorts of exotically-shaped, brightly-coloured fishing boats and ferries and canoes on the water as well as exotically-shaped brightly-coloured birds in the sky above. From Kollam we went out in a boat to be shown how coconut husks are made into coir matting. And then we went to Alappuzha (Allepey).

  What we saw. Kollam > Allepey ferry trip. 400 rupees, 8 hours:

  like Surrey on one side

  palm trees on other

  piles of rubbish plus scavenging birds

  bright painted fishing boats

  Chinese cantilevered nets

  men in dugout canoes with paddles and nets

  giant sexy statue of liberty, Indian style

  more fishing nets on bamboo cranes

  silver flying fish

  Brahminy kites

  coconuts being harvested

  concrete bridges

  kingfishers

  pale pink temples

  women in saris with black umbrellas

  children waving

  cormorants on posts

  cashew nut flowers

  billowing clouds

  waving village people and builders

  washing lines

  the sea

  We also passed some huge pink apartment blocks which turned out to be the ashram of Ammachi, a big-hearted all-loving all-hugging woman guru with a great international following. Flic wrote: she hugs people for hours on end, which could be misinterpreted. Ammachi actually hugs individuals quite briefly but she hugs a lot of people, sometimes dealing it out for three or four hours non-stop.

  In Allepey we stayed in a guesthouse run by two giggly young men. There was a Jain temple on the other side of the street and one of the guys tried to explain a little of their religious practices. He said that the Jain people were all vegetables and wore a cloth over their mouths to stop the insects coming out. I believe he meant to say that they were vegetarians and wore a cloth to stop the insects inadvertently going into their mouths.

  We ate one evening in a dark café that served large quantities of meat, some of it beef. We had chicken and chapattis and icecream for thirty pence per head and ate, as the other customers did, with our fingers, cleaning up afterwards at the wash basins in the corner. We noticed that the women diners were segregated into a room at the back. I guess it was a Muslim establishment.

  On the beaches at Allepey we saw dolphins in the sea and spider crabs on the sand. In the morning the town beach was decorated with shallow scrapes containing human excrement. We didn’t swim there.

  Kerala really was so different to Rajasthan. Men went bare headed and wore rather smart newly washed and ironed shirts. Below the waist they would wear a lungi, a skirt which could be let down to ankle length in the cool of the morning and doubled up to knee length in the day. They were forever fiddling with their lungis. People were much more amiable down here, waving happily at passing tourists and not hassling. The vegetation was tropical and lush. And it was hot, far too hot for us really. That’s why we took to the hills, Kerala’s Western Ghats.

  We stayed in Kumili where there’s a wildlife reserve in the centre of which is a lake. We took a boat trip out on the lake and it turned out to be an unforgettable experience. We arrived before seven in the morning at the gates of the reserve in order to be among the first in the queue for the boats. We bought our tickets and waited in a tuk tuk for the gates to open. Then the fun began. Engines roared, the gates were pulled back and the jeeps, cars and tuk tuks rushed into the park, everybody racing to get to the boats first. There were signs saying drive slowly. We drove fast. There were signs saying no overtaking on bends. We overtook and were overtaken on bends. It reminded me of Whacky Races. We arrived at the lake and, after queuing again, made it on board a double decker tourist boat. There were signs (written again in English because visitors from the north can’t speak Malayalam or Tamil and the locals don’t know much Hindi) saying: Quiet please, No Singing and Dancing, No mobile phone music, and suchlike. As you might imagine there was mobile phone music, and shouted conversation, and laughter, and some singing and dancing, punctuated by cries of shhhusssss, you will scare away the animals. Which was right; we did see the occasional wild deer disappearing into the bushes or over the horizon. I guess you could say that we did see wildlife but not as we anticipated. Indian people on holiday are noisy and joyful and fun-loving. And they are always noisier than we are. It was in Kerala that I first saw bicycle rickshaws with bells fixed to the forks of their bikes and strikers on the spokes of the wheels so that the bells ring continuously as they ride.

  One of my best wildlife moments ever was in Kumili. Just as we were leaving our hotel overlooking the jungle I glimpsed what I thought to be a large number of birds passing overhead. We quickly went up onto the roof for a better view. The sun had set and the sky was tinged green. We looked out over the small town in one direction, the jungle in the other, and wild hills all around. Above us flew hundreds of bats the size of crows, not whizzing around catching insects but all flying steadily in the same direction. They were on their evening commute from feeding grounds to roosting place. We watched for maybe fifteen minutes, wave after wave of them silently beating their way through the still air.

  We went on to Munnar and made friends with a couple called Mark and Claire. We talked with them in a café one evening and arranged to share a taxi ride with them the next day. We were going to see wild elephants. Now a curious thing about Parkinson’s is that I lose the sense of where the right hand side of my body is and what it’s doing. I was riding in the middle of the back seat with Flic on my left and Mark on my right when I looked down to see that my right hand was resting comfortably on Mark’s thigh. I laughed and took it away. Someone said what are you laughing at? and I explained. Oh, I didn’t notice, Mark said. Claire turned around from her place in the front seat. I think he liked it, she said. We’ve been friends with them ever since.

  After watching elephants through Mark’s binoculars and visiting some tea plantations we travelled on with Mark and Claire to a town called Kodai Kanal. We stayed in a hostel perched on the edge of a great steep scarp and with views over, as Flic put it, mountains and clouds and mountains poking through the clouds. Kodai was high enough to be very cold at night. On the edge of town were big houses set in woodlands with names like Loch End and Roseneath Cottage. It looked more like Surrey than India. And what had been a hill station set up by missionaries was now popular with Indian tourists. That’s more fun, of course, but for us there is one drawback: at the most wonderful viewpoints, at least those that are easily reachable, are stupendous amounts of rubbish, most of it plastic containers and wrappings from take away meals.

  Now we were running out of time. We had to
get to Mumbai for our flight home. We bussed overnight to the handsome port of Kochi, watched the boats coming in and out, looked at the cantilevered fishing nets, bussed to a nearby beach and swam, saw crows gathering around in distress as a dog tried to eat one of their compatriots and saw sixteen neatly dressed schoolgirls get into one tuk tuk. It felt too hot but still, after fourteen weeks away, the days felt rich in new experiences and we were almost but not quite ready to go home.

  Then, early one morning, we set off by taxi to the airport and a flight to Mumbai followed by a night flight back to the UK. Our last day in India was spent in one of the most populous urban areas in the world, a city of twenty million souls.

  It was only a few days earlier when we had been with Mark and Claire that we had a typical Indian taxi driver experience. We were travelling along a road that dropped off a plateau into a valley side with fantastic views. Can we stop here for a minute, please, someone said. No answer from the driver, we carry on full belt, losing height, losing view as we go. We want to stop, please. Stop here. Can we stop here? STOP, and other variations on a theme made no impression at all. He turned and smiled briefly and we hurtled along.

  If you want things to be like home, then stay at home could be the motto of the experienced traveller, or, more simply, they do things differently. And so it was that we sat in silence in the taxi that wouldn’t stop and waited patiently for one of the best views in the Western Ghats to pass away into memory. Then we stopped. It was a marvellous spot with a splendid view and a little place to buy tea and something to eat. It seems now, on reflection, to be likely that the little café was owned by the taxi driver’s best friend’s brother-in-law and that the driver earned a little commission for taking us there. There is often a brother-in-law. And taxi drivers don’t always take you where you want to go.

  When we arrived at Mumbai airport we had much of the day to fill before we catch our evening flight. The last few hours of our never-to-be-repeated, trip-of-a-lifetime journey around India and Nepal. We asked a taxi driver to take us on a tour of the city.