The Siggz: 'Buns of Steel' Tour 2007

Update 1 of 2
Time: early December
Location: Central North-India

Namaste (North-Indian/Nepalese greeting)!
The title of this post refers to the numerous butt-numbing journeys we have had on various buses, trains, trucks and whatnot. A selection of such vehicles have most recently brought us to Pokhara, at the foothills of the mighty Nepali Himalayas (even the name has a majestic ring to it, doesn't it?), from where we have ventured on foot. However, as the crossing of the Nepali border in my mind marks the entry into a new phase of our travels, I choose to split this update into two blog posts, chronologically.

Thus, I begin where I last left of: Mumbai. On our last day we did a guided slum tour, hoping to gain some insight into how the vast majority of the city's sixteen to twenty-something million (no one really knows) inhabitants live their lives. It was a fascinating and educational experience, inspiring feelings of despair and pity, but also of optimism. The conditions under which so many people are living are truly miserable. The slums are so cramped and so filthy that they are hardly habitable at all, certainly not for so many. Yet there is cause for hope. The sense of communality and tolerance displayed by the slum-dwellers is incredible, as is the intensity and ingenuity with which they strive for a better life. Examples of business entreprises we visited included a keyboard recycling shop and a cardboard box repair shop. As the Mumbai slums is a world beyond my grasp, I borrow the words of author and bombayite Suketu Mehta as he observes:

Why do people still live in Bombay? Every day is an assault on the individual's senses [...] Why would you want to leave your brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the east to come here? So that some day [...] your eldest son can buy two rooms on Mira Road. And the younger one can move beyond that, to New Jersey. Your discomfort is an investment. Like insect colonies, people here will sacrifice their individual pleasures for the greater progress of the family.


The next stop on our journey was Jaipur, also known as 'The Pink City' as it is mandatory for the owners of buildings in Old Town to paint them in the same colour (a tradition dating back to the visit of some royal character centuries ago). Truth be told, the 'pink' was rather an ordinary reddish-brown colour, and if I hadn't known about the uniformity in advance I don't think I would've noticed. Jaipur's most characteristic features were dust, noise and some of the most annoying people I have ever encountered. The beggars were tenacios, the touts more obnoxious than usual, and the rickshaw drivers were impossible. At some point a kid threw rocks at Sigurd S. Even the dogs would, without exeption, bark at us. We did a nice hike around the city fort, though, and had some of the best north Indian food so far.

One curious highlight was the most elaborate and pleasant attempt on a scam I've ever been subjected to. It started out with this kid, fifteen or so, striking up a conversation on the street 'to improve his english'. He was polite and friendly enough, so we didn't mind him tagging along as we strolled the streets of Old Town. He told us about the number one leisure activity in Jaipur, kite-fighting (the Jaipur sky is littered with small kites, the string attached to each of them greased with some substance containing glass. This enables the pilot of the kite to cut the cords of other kites, thereby winning the kitefight), and invited us to try our hands at this sport on the roof of his house. 'Why not', we thought, and went along. Kitefighting was a lot of fun, though we didn't really get the hang of it, and the roof top view of Jaipur was as good as it gets. We had a great time. Still, we sensed that something was afoot when we were invited to have coffee with the kid's big brother, manager of the family's jewellery business. Sure enough, after some friendly small talk (through which he cunningly presented himself as the hard-working and successful entrepreneur victimised by the unreasonable taxes imposed by a corrupt government), the proposal was set forth: We were to transport a large amount of jewellery to Norway on our 'tourist quota', where we would be met by the company's Oslo representative and be richly rewarded for our efforts. All we needed to do was to pay a small amount of money (by visa) as a sign of good faith, since they were entrusting us with highly valuable merchendise. Without doubt, the 'Oslo representative' would never have showed up, the jewellery would have turned out to be fake, and our bank accounts would have been emptied. Needless to say, we firmly but politely declined the offer, and the meeting was adjourned without any drama or hard feelings on either side. On the whole it was an amusing and rather pleasant experience.

Our next destination was Delhi, capital of India. It was a fairly nice city, where one can easily move from the chaotic and cramped Old Delhi to the spacious and western'ish New Delhi. We crashed into a pedestrian while we were in an autorickshaw, but he wasn't badly injured. Beyond that, there isn't much to say about Delhi.
While in Delhi, we did a one-day detour up north to the Corbett Tiger reserve, home of some four hundred tigers. We didn't have the good fortune to spot one (seeing how the driver of the large truck we were in drove like a madman, I think the only way we could've spotted a tiger was if we ran over one). Nevertheless, it was refreshing to spend a day in clear mountain air and the laid-back villages in rural north-India.

From Delhi we completed our tour of the 'golden triangle' as we travelled to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. A mausoleum over the wife of the mogul Shah Raha, the Taj was described on a t-shirt I saw as 'the largest erection over a woman ever'. The monument was both large and magnificent, worthy of its spot as one of the seven wonders. Originally, Shah Raha intended to build an identical mausoleum for himself. Unfortunately he was imprisoned by his son, possibly because the latter found his father's fascination with building massive marble structures to be a bit over the top. Can't really blame him, as the Taj took decades to complete and cost vast sums of money, and I'd say one is surely enough for most purposes. After seeing the Taj and the Agra Fort, we had dinner with Sara and Gaute before catching a train to Varanasi.

Varanasi, home of Shiva, is one of the holiest cities in India. It is situated on the banks of the Ganges, where thousands of people come to wash away their sins and hundreds are cremated every day. Personally, we decided to givethe bathing a miss, upon learning that the Ganges has three thousand times the level of faecal bacteria that is acceptable for humans to swim in. We did go on a rowing boat trip though, which was a peaceful and scenic experience spiced up by the occasional observation of floating human corpses, feasted on by crows and seagulls. As the price of firewood is steep, burners use as little as possible in order to incinerate a human body. Due to this, the funeral pyres are not the large wooden structures one might imagine, but rather medium-sized bonfires, head and feet of the corpse sticking out. Another consequense of the high prices, the expense of burning a body might be too high altogether, in which case the family of the deceased will, evidently, toss the body straight into the river. Varanasi is truly a fascinating place: spiritual, chaotic, holy and utterly mental.

Nevertheless, saturated with the hustle, bustle and hassle (not to mention the immense pollution) of the north-Indian metropolises, it was with a light heart we headed north towards the kingdom of Nepal.


(to be continued)


Sigurd B


The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.

- Henry David Thoreau