The Road to Zagora

by Richard Collins

  He took us up a very crowded street, the air choked us, so full of fumes, there was almost a complete jam of traffic and I thought why are we here, it’s not fun, traffic jams are horrible and we’ve just paid to be in one. The driver reassured us that he would take us to the old bazaar. The street was a bit like hell and we weren’t moving. After a bit we found that he wanted to take us to some shops where he would be paid 20 rupees commission. We decided to pay him the 20r and get out and walk, it felt better.

  Large rolls of cloth and plastic sheeting and tarpaulins were being sold, then great amounts of leather and wooden shoe lasts, some of the leather was cut to shape, there were piles and piles of it spread out on the ground. I smelled honey further on and there was a sweet shop, squares of coloured sweets like Turkish delight, halva and coconut ice in piles on counters. Then the smell of flowers – more marigolds. Dark kites circle overhead among the black power lines and grey sky and crows.

  Then a pile of rubbish being eaten or sorted by cows, pigs, dogs and an old man. Later plastic was being graded and stuffed into big sacks by women. Children paddle in the stinky gutter. I feel a bit sick. Being rich and foreign we can get into a tuk tuk and be driven out of this place.

  And that is how it is; you can dip one toe into a sort of hell and then pull back and go away. It comes back to me now, the foul intensity of street life in that town. There was very little beauty, only from time to time something religious, a temple or a gaudy shrine with a multi-armed and multi-eyed goddess clothed in purple and scarlet. Near the Taj a man took us to a shrine with Krishna, Shiva and a portable television set showing the test match against Sri Lanka.

  It was cold enough in January for us to wear jumpers and coats. Locals tended to wear a blanket around their shoulders rather than a coat, even when riding a motorbike. We saw a goat dressed in a pink jumper, two scarves and a sack across its back against the cold. It also wore anklets on its front legs to enhance its beauty. There was one place on the river bank where we warmed ourselves for a moment:

  We were stopped by a sight of piles of ashes and a crowd of people carrying bodies to be burnt and put in the river. They made bamboo and marigold and tinsel lids to put over the corpses. Dogs lay sleeping on the warmed up stones after the fire’s ashes had been swept away. People were wading out into the river carrying a small bundle, I wondered if it was a child. We warmed our hands over the warm ashes of a corpse. Death is not taboo here.

  Another memory of Agra: we had eaten supper in the garden of our guesthouse (well wrapped up against the cold) and were talking to other travellers. I went into our room to get something. There was, as there often is out there, a power cut and I searched about in the dark for my head-torch. I was having increasing difficulty moving and eventually was unable to do anything other than sink to the floor, where I lay, unable to get up for a while, listening to the conversation and laughter outside.

  I browse through Flic’s journal for this, our third and final of six once-in a-life-time adventures and I can find plenty of Parkinson’s moments: Richard thinks he’s too ill to cope with this; Richard went to lie down feeling ill; after lunch Richard is too ill to go out so I draw and read until he feels better – that sort of thing. And as always there are new, unanticipated symptoms to get used to. For instance one day I found that my tongue had started the habit of moving around my mouth of its own accord, rubbing against my teeth and pushing into my cheek. It’s doing it now as I write and I’m used to it but the first day it started was unpleasant. Sometimes, of course, the symptoms are more than unpleasant – they are scary and I want to go home. Until, an hour later, I feel fine, because that’s how it is with Parkinson’s. It is not a boring illness.

  Flic’s experience of the illness was second hand and she could wait out the tough moments knowing that I would feel better and function better quite soon. Meanwhile she could get out her sketchbook and draw and paint, sometimes attracting a crowd of people wanting to look over her shoulder or be in the picture. There is very little reserve among people in India. If they want to use their few words of English they do. But perhaps I’m talking about the men. The women were quieter. Only when in a big family group at some tourist spot or pilgrimage site they would come and ask to have their picture taken. And one of the fascinating things for Indians visiting such places is the presence of foreigners with their pale skins and ridiculous clothes.

  Our next stop was Fatehpur Sikri, a typically fantastical small town with a full complement of extraordinary historical buildings and colourful street life. It’s somehow off any major tourist route and it’s a relaxed, friendly place. The high street has an amazing number of small shops and tiny stalls. Walking along the street are a mixture of men in dull Western clothes and men and women in more traditional dress, the guys with turbans and the women in traditional hi-vis day-glow saris and shawls. They carry bags of vegetables and suitcases and heaven knows what else on their heads. I have a photo of a group of women in front of me that I took in Fatehpur high street and they are dressed in: lime green and blue; lemon yellow with white patterns; blue and orange; saffron and pink; blue, lime green and yellow; and, finally blue with yellow spots. They wear, as Flic describes it: jewellery dangling from ears, noses, necks, and toe rings and have painted soles of their feet.

  And then there are the vehicles: strange, seemingly home-made trucks, the cabs open to the weather and the engine likewise; tractors and trailers, bicycles; lots of motorbikes with two or three or four or, in one case, five passengers; bullock carts; horse-drawn carts; push carts and tuk tuks. There are no ordinary cars. And there are the usual animals on the street: cows, pigs (including a sow with piglets) dogs and more.

  We bought chai from a little stall where the owner sat cross-legged and we watched the street life for a while. Then we walked along and things got busier and then more colourful. Busier because in a narrow part of the street the traffic, mostly people on foot, reached gridlock. More colourful because we were called over to see a Hindu ceremony.

  It was a small scale affair with the atmosphere of a village fete. There was a stage with a band of musicians and something like a pulpit, the whole thing vibrant in orange, yellow and pink draperies and festooned with marigold garlands and framed ultra-kitsch pictures of Hindu gods. There were only twenty or thirty people attending and most of them were old ladies and children but the man who had called us over was young and earnest, a pleasant born-again Hindu I guess. I wanted to take photographs but wasn’t sure if it was alright so I handed him my camera and he went around snapping for me. We were sat down and given tea in disposable clay pots and the guru came and tried to speak to us. It seemed that his only word of English was purification. Then he spread out his long hair and put dark glasses on like a rock star. I was chosen to go forward and pass him a marigold garland and then he sang and chanted and preached. I like the way Hindus encourage you to join in. It’s a daft (to me) but joyful religion.

  Fatehpur Sikri has a huge mosque, an uninhabited palace and an abandoned ruined city on the hill above the town. They were built by a Mughal Emperor in the sixteenth century but only used for a few years because of lack of available water.

  And it has a railway station: At four o’clock we walked out to the station – completely empty apart from a cow, a peacock and three peahens. Nice to get some space and quiet, only the mooing of the cow.

  And a tourist office with a sign that reads How can you visit Fatehpur Sikri. As Flic observed in her journal: There is a lot of trouble with syntax.

  While we’re on the subject of use of language I’m going to quote from my blog:

  DoorMatry or VIPRoom cum Toilet.

  We have just arrived in Phalodi and found something like a hotel. Some English written up outside but no-one who speaks English around yet. So here I am, next door at a printers/computer place while Flic waits for the manager. We have a choice of rooms ranging from DoorMatry (yes, that’s what it says) to VIPRoom cum Toilet. We might be VIPs at five pounds
for the night. Enough now. I’ll see how Flic’s getting on.

  Blogging was a new traveller’s pastime for me, something that was to continue over the next journeys. I don’t function well in internet cafés so my posts most often were short. All the same it became a preoccupation for me; as I wandered around various countries on a number of different continents I would compose amusing (I hoped) titles, a sample of which will be coming your way.

  We didn’t stay in the VIPRoom cum Toilet in Phalodi. We went to Ossian. We were on a bus going somewhere else, I don’t remember where, when it stopped by a small town in the desert with, at its centre, a hilltop temple. It looked interesting and we hurried to get off the bus. There, awaiting us, was a young man who wanted to take us to a guest house. He told us pretty soon that he was of the Brahmin caste (as Brahmins generally do – though no-one else in India tells you their caste) and, although he was poorly dressed he had a certain dignity and grace in his movements. He led us through scrubby trees and palms with much rubbish and with pigs scrambling about into sandy back streets and to a handsome large, though single storey, house. It turned out to be a marvellous place to stay.

  The house was owned by a Mr Singh who just rented out two rooms on a fairly informal basis. Mr Singh was well educated and both he and the house gave the impression of faded grandeur, of having come down in the world but having still maintained one’s dignity. He told us that the house was three hundred years old. It was built of stone and stretched around two courtyards: a small more private one that was the scene of domestic tasks (the women’s area) and a larger courtyard surrounded by stables and with big gates opening onto the street (the men’s courtyard). Opposite the gates was a raised and covered verandah with a bedroom and bathroom at either end. It was grand but it was very cheap and the beds were a little bit small for two so we took a room each.

  The verandah was a fine place to be, the stone pillars that held up the roof were ornately carved with leaves and flowers, the walls decorated with sculpted plaster and framed photographs of illustrious family members. We would come from our private rooms and sit overlooking the courtyard. There were curiously high feed troughs (meant for camels) and the rooftops around were regularly visited not by monkeys as is usual in India but by peacocks. The Brahmin turned out to be our cook. He would bring food to the veranda and he and Mr Singh would sit disconcertingly close to watch us as we ate. I wrote on my blog:

  It is very quiet in the night here. The quietest place we have been in India. But at 5 a m there are Hindu hymns broadcast over loud-speakers for half an hour, then quiet, then the Muslim call to prayer at 6, then drums and trumpets that maybe come from the Jain temple. The proprietor of our ‘guest-house’ is not Hindu or Moslem or Jain but a Sikh. He prays at home. ‘Wealth or poverty, good fortune or bad,’ he says, ‘it is God’s doing. What else can there be?’

  Flic gave her own account of the day beginning. In her sketchbook she drew and watercoloured a patch of red sandstone wall, a scrubby tree with a peacock roosting, and in the background the many domes of the Jain temple. She wrote: I woke up early and watched the dawn and in a tree dark shapes became peacocks that woke up slowly and eventually flew down to the ground. As the sun came up I heard a man give a great shout. Earlier there were other noises, calls to prayer and a puja bell ringing.

  We visited the Jain temple complex with its extraordinary architecture and stone carvings of voluptuous figures and animals. It is a place of pilgrimage and related business opportunities: rows of bright stalls outside the temple but nothing for us, all is to offer to the gods at the many shrines: coloured string, sweets, incense, marigolds, coconuts, bangles, tinsel, fairy lights, photos of gods in flashing gold frames.

  Our young Brahmin friend was dismissive of Jainism as it was a young religion like Buddhism, barely 2,500 years old. His religion, Hinduism, is recorded to have been around 4,000 years ago with its origins going back further still. He was proud of his high caste destiny and the limits it placed on him: no drugs, no alcohol, no meat, no eggs and no marrying until you’re twenty-five.

  Ossian is a handsome town but very small and there’s not much to do or see there. We rambled about a while, took a short camel ride into the desert, and moved on.

  We went to another desert town, Jaisalmer, the most westerly of all the towns we stayed in while in India. Of all the Rajasthan towns Jaisalmer seemed to us the one most dominated by tourism. The old town situated inside the castle wall had become a tourist shopping mall. We did the tourist thing and took a trip out to villages and into the desert to spend the night under the stars. I remember that while Flic spoke to a village woman I counted twenty-five bracelets on one of her arms. I remember sleeping and mostly not sleeping on the hard sand and how very cold it was in the night. And I recorded in my blog the words that came to me as I woke from a curious dream: I felt it touch my face with its whiskers.

  After Jaiselmer we travelled to Jodhpur on a super, deluxe tourist bus which stopped every mile or two along the road to take on more and more village people who squeezed up against us and beside us and pretty much on top of us. Jodhpur had the usual (marvellous) forts and palaces and a lot of tourists and also the extraordinary day to day life of an Indian city that you can experience just by walking down the street and looking around you. We had some interesting encounters.

  One morning we went out by tuk tuk to the edge of the town and walked in a barren, rocky piece of countryside for an hour or so. We came across some builders doing some renovation work on a temple and the foreman, I guess he was the owner of the firm, wanted to talk to us. He was a self-educated man with a great passion for knowledge and an interest in the world. He was very keen on the internet and travel and was saving up to visit London. His English was good but his pronunciation was pretty rough. Still we managed to talk about nano-technology, stem cell research and reincarnation. He was a Hindu, of course, and a believer in the God Shiva and managed to explain that the symbolism of his religion included references to the atom and the whole universe. For him the contemporary scientific explanation of the world and a belief in the existence of supernatural beings fitted together without any problem.

  And one late afternoon we set off on foot to visit a little temple perched on a pinnacle of rock that we could see from our hotel rooftop. We had trouble finding it but had a good view of ordinary Jodhpur life on the way. In most parts of the world people don’t sit indoors in the evening watching TV like we do; they’re out on the streets socialising. So we saw lots of activity including a few cricket games. People are poor in the north of India but here, in Jodhpur, the feeling wasn’t of desperation. They were struggling but they quite enjoyed the struggle. Only a small proportion of the population are hopelessly poor. For most there is a good chance of making some sort of living and finding some sort of fulfilment in life. Of course they deserve better things; better access to clean drinking water and healthcare and education and opportunities. But India is not a country full of miserable people suffering abject poverty. There is, amongst over things, a joyful energy about the place.

  That’s how it felt to us that evening in Jodhpur. And, as we were in an area where tourists never go, people were interested in us and friendly. My heading for the day’s blog was Shaken. The fact was that I have never shaken so many hands in a short period of time.

  We reached the temple on the rock a little before sunset and two young lads, ten or eleven years old, took us in and led us past candle lit shrines and up the series of metal ladders that went to the top. We had climbed up maybe 100ft above the little houses at this end of town. It was, some might say, only just the right side of scary. I took a photo of the boys smiling big smiles into the camera, their arms around Flic as if she was a special auntie or big sister. And then we watched the sun set beside Jodhpur palace and the light fade over the chaotic mass of streets and houses that make up the blue city.

  P is for Paris (France)

  We were in Paris for a few days on our way back from
Morocco at the end of our last big trip abroad. It had been raining and the River Seine was full of swiftly flowing grey water. There were tourist boats and commercial barges making their way up and down stream, their bow waves spreading and slapping against the concrete river banks. We walked from our accommodation near the Botanical Garden down to the Île de la Cité and back a few times and I was aware of the strange miracle of constantly flowing water. For in Northern Europe the rivers run every day of the year whether it has been raining or not. Perhaps it has been fine and dry for three weeks across northern France during a hot summer spell. The river still flows. How weird is that?

  Pretty weird if you are an immigrant from north Africa. In Morocco we had seen dried up water courses fill after rain and then empty to nothing a day later. In so many of the drier places we have visited rivers are seasonal or occasional things. Our rivers must seem beyond explanation to someone from those countries. What we have is groundwater. It flows out of the rocks into our rivers and streams along their entire length every day of the year. We can drink it, swim in it, transport ourselves and our goods on it, and write songs and paint pictures about it. Groundwater makes our landscapes, developed our economies, and enriches our culture. I’ve never thought about it before.

  17

  Meetings with Remarkable People

  Back to 2010. We travelled from Jodhpur by train to Delhi, by air to Varanasi, and by bus to Pokhara. I’m going to say a little more about Delhi and Varanasi in a later chapter. You’ll see why. This chapter is about Pokhara and our trek to ABC, Annapurna Base Camp. But there’s a place we stopped on the way that deserves a mention: Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha.