DAY 169 - Calcutta, India

Ah, India. What is it about India that initially makes me want to run screaming to the airport and get on the next flight home? We've booked our flight back to London now for 6th January, so i'll have to grit my teeth and get on with it.

 

Kathmandu wasn't that bad in the end. Yes the power cuts were a pain, and the restaurants were very expensive, but the hotel had a generator, we ate from the supermarket most of the time and there was lots to see. It was definitely more chaotic than China and the roads were terrible. We walked everywhere as usual although there was rarely a footpath to walk on. The sights were mainly temples and stupas and the like, with one pleasant riverside temple where they burned corpses into the river. Most of the city itself was made up of narrow, busy alley ways lined with shops and small roadside shrines (usually to the Hindu god Ganesh). Great just to wander around and get hopelessly lost in.

 

We flew to Calcutta (or Kolkata as the local ruling communists have renamed it) on Thursday. It was a short flight but we arrived after dark so had booked a hotel in advance. It was a horrid place and the metal grill around the door made it feel more like a prison, so we found another hotel. This one was a bit more expensive (at 25 quid one of the most expensive on this leg to the trip), but it looked ok. How wrong could we be. The noise was terrible. First there was the nightclub on the ground floor pumping loud music throughout the building until midnight. We complained so they moved us to a different room. Above this room they were doing building work from 8 in the morning until 1 the next morning. It was maddening. I'm so glad we've checked out of there, but we'll have to be move careful in future. Problem is, this is the first time on the holiday when we're travelling at the local peak season, so everything is expensive and availability is low. We're sort of hoping that the recession and recent unfortunate events in Mumbai will make things quieter.

 

Calcutta isn't a bad city, but there's not a lot to do here. It's a typical Indian city; grubby, rubbish everywhere, overcrowded, but the food is great and there are some fantastic open spaces to loose yourself in. The Indian Museum isn't up to much though. It's not been dusted since 1950, the labels in the anthropological section still refer to the 1961 census and the fossil and natural history sections are just endless cases of rocks and piles of bones respectively (a picture of the animal the bones came from wouldn't cost much but would enhance the experience no end). That said, the full-term human embryo (pickled) and baby cat with one head and two bodies (pickled) more than made up for it. There's also the Victoria Monument, a fantastic building left over from the Raj that looks like the Taj Mahal crossed with St Paul's.

 

We've booked most of our Indian train tickets now. These will get us to Delhi on New Year's Eve, stopping at Varanasi, Lucknow and Amritsar on the way. The first train journey is tonight which means Christmas in Varanasi. Should be interesting...

 

Merry Christmas to everyone out there. When you're stuffing turkey down on Christmas Day and watching Doctor Who, think of us...