The sleep on the train to Delhi was surprisingly good. I only woke a few times despite all the
stops. And we are only 20 minutes late
into Delhi. We actually arrive at Old
Delhi station despite the guy who booked the train for us telling us it would
be New Delhi station. As we have 18
hours until our flight, the extra two stops on the Metro doesn’t really bother
us too much, although as it turns out because the Airport Express is actually a
separate service from New Delhi station we have to queue for tickets twice.
When we get to the airport because we are so early we are not let into the Departures area and instead have to go to the Arrivals area. This is a bit confusing but at least we can sit, read, eat and use the computer to while away the day. We had thought about putting the bags in storage and heading back into town for the day, but after our earlier draining experiences in Delhi, we have decided that the airport is our oasis of calm for the day.
Because this is a quiet day in the airport, I have decided today to do a Dorota style entry describing my total experiences in India. India uses the logo “Incredible India” as its tag line in its ads attracting tourists. However while they use incredible to mean amazing, there are also some things which can be defined as shocking. Some are shocking but can’t be helped because after all this is still a poor country and we come from developed countries, but some things here are actually very off-putting yet could be changed if there was a will to change them. Because I have refrained from using any Cowboy and Indian jokes up until now, I will of course call the rest of this section “Incredible India: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”.
The Good
The Sights
I think the sights we have seen have mostly been as impressive as advertised. The Taj Mahal is amazing, I would say justifiably in the New 7 Wonders of the World, and most of the other UNESCO World Heritage sites we visited were equally worthy. The Archaeological Survey of India who look after them all actually do a really good job of maintaining them and the signage is actually just the right size, enough to inform but not too much to overwhelm. The only dodgy sight we saw was CST station in Mumbai, I’m not really sure it qualifies as a World Heritage site, but as a functioning railway station it is a wonder.
Good – Taj Mahal; Bad – CST (Victoria Station); Ugly – Amber Palace
The Food
Despite our bouts of Delhi belly in the final few days, I have to say my overall impression of the food has been quite good. I can’t think of a bad meal we had, maybe one of two of the hotel meals were average, and the thali that got us in Udaipur was just never meant to be eaten by tourists. All of the places set up for tourists, and even a few that were not, prepared great food. If I had to pick I’d say my best was the meal in Panaji, Goa, which was a pretty hot pork sausage curry, a close second was another Goan special, Chicken Xacuti, in Palolem. The Portuguese influence on Goa meant I did have a few meat dishes there, but otherwise we were vegetarian. I didn’t seem to be missing meat for the first 10 days or so but as I am sitting here in the airport typing this I am counting down the hours to a visit to McDonalds.
Good – Goan Specials; Bad – Probably our meal in our hotel in Delhi – nothing wrong, just forgettable; Ugly – The Udaipur thali that made us sick
The Hotels
Again like the food the hotels were generally quite good. Considering we never paid more than £20 per night, we had some really good places. Most hotels were well run and the staff were friendly and helpful. The hotels we stayed in tended not to have quite as good restaurants as others, which was partially reflected in the price, but of course we were able to eat in some of these restaurants so we didn’t miss out. The only bad hotel we had was also our joint cheapest, so you get what you pay for, the hotel in Panaji, Goa, which was just run down and not very well maintained, but it was close to the bus station and suited our needs. One issue with a number of hotels was the state of the bathrooms, they were not always the best with broken fittings. I’m not sure if the fittings break because they are low quality, or because of the abuse they get.
The worst hotel we stayed in was the one in Delhi, where they tried some pressure selling on us, and also because of the noise from the street. However it was the best bathroom we had, so even it had its good points. As for the best, I think our last two in Udaipur and Jodhpur stand out because of the individual décor in the rooms, and the views. If I had to pick our one in Udaipur wins, because it was slightly cheaper and the food was slightly better.
Good – Dream Heaven, Udaipur; Bad – Hotel Republica, Panaji; Ugly – Hotel Amax Inn, Delhi
The Trains
The trains here are as good as they say. They run pretty much to timetable, and although slowish by western standards, they are actually pretty quick compared to the alternatives. They are also very comfortable (at the levels we were paying for, 2nd class our of 5 levels) and the service was quite good (food and drink served to your chair). The Delhi-Agra train stands out because we got two meals served in a two hour train journey. The only bad thing about the trains seems to be that because of their success you now have to book them quite a bit in advance. We were a bit annoyed that we only got 4 of our 5 trips organised with the few day’s notice we gave, but after talking to other travellers we seem to be lucky. The advice seems to be in future organise the trains before getting to India. This gets past the ugly face of Indian trains, trying to get into the ticket booking office. More of this will be mentioned below, but the experience of getting into New Delhi station will live with us for the rest of our lives.
Good – Delhi-Agra; Bad – Having to book a long way in advance; Ugly – Getting into New Delhi station (see below)
The Bad
The Pollution
There is no question that pollution, in all its forms, noise, litter, smells, smog, does impact the tourist’s impressions of India. However because of the country’s developing status I can’t really say it’s unexpected (and therefore ugly), just bad. I could list a dozen examples of where the litter was bad, but that’s not really the point. We knew it would be like this, and it didn’t really ruin things for us, probably also because we experienced our worst smells on day one when we went to the coast in Bandra. However it could be so much better. There are very few places where there are bins to throw away litter. We walk around with our empty bottles, cans or banana skins looking for them. When we ask the locals where there is a bin they just say drop it on the ground. It’s not right. We have tried to set an example, but even in the Taj Mahal I saw littering, and that was one of the few places that had ample bins.
Good – The Archelogical Survey of India, all of their sites were impeccably maintained; Bad – No bins; Ugly – The smell by the sea in Bandra, Mumbai.
The Crowds
Again there were many places where there were simply too many people. This isn’t surprising, we are in the second most populous country after all, but what really is annoying is the way the crowds behave. There is no concept of giving way to other people, whether this manifests itself in queuing, as mentioned below, or getting in the way of other people’s photos. Whenever we see people lining up a shot we pause, let them take it, and carry on. It’s a small courtesy that costs us a few seconds and makes a memory of a lifetime for the others. This courtesy is not repaid in a lot of cases, although I will say that once we left Delhi and Agra and got to the sights in Rajasthan it got a lot better. The bad point anyway for crowds was the Taj Mahal, but what can you do, so many people want to see it that you can never get the perfect shot.
Good – Patnem and Mandrem beaches – may they stay undiscovered; Bad – The Taj Mahal, busy but what can you do, it’s one of the wonders of the world; Ugly – Commuter trains
The Buses
The buses have been bad, but again my expectations were not high. The buses in Goa actually were OK, just quite crowded, and very old. But they did run on time. And they did have the best bus as well as the worst bus. They had shuttles, non-stop expresses, between the major cities which were brilliant, but they also had the dangerously overcrowded Palolem-Margao bus. However nothing compares to the bus ride we had from Jaipur, just finding the bus was a challenge. Once on it we were OK, but the hour leading up to it aged me a year.
Good – Goa Shuttles; Bad – Palolem-Margao; Ugly – Jaipur-Udaipur
The Communications
The truth is people travelled to India years ago with no mobiles and survived, but that was then and this is now. I am quite annoyed by the fact that for the whole month we have been here my phone has only worked intermittently. If I had known that in advance I wouldn’t have been too worried, but for the last three years in work I’ve been told India is a high tech country, so I’ve no idea why so many of my texts went missing. And it can’t be my phone, because we got a local SIM for Dorota’s iPhone and it lost texts as well. It probably has something to do with all the spam texts we got instead, if the system is struggling they have to regulate the spam. The only good point is that there was more often than not wifi available in the hotels, so once the electricity was working we could at least use email. (I’m ignoring the patchy electricity in this blog entry, although we had power outages at least once every 3 days on average).
Good – Wifi in hotels; Bad – Patchy coverage; Ugly – Spam Texts
The Ugly
The Scams
First, in case anyone doesn’t know, I’ve been to Thailand and Egypt so I know scams. So I’m not having a go specifically at India here, but nonetheless the attempted (and actual) scams that we experienced do sour our memories of India. By far our worst experience was trying to get into New Delhi station to get train tickets. Despite all the warnings from Lonely Planet we still were unprepared by the sheer volume of lies we were told about the location. We could take the tuk-tuk drivers charging us a bit more, but sometimes they would go too high and you almost wanted to say back to them “are you insulting my intelligence”. We are always prepared to pay a tourist price over a local price (note I’ve left the official tourist prices at monuments out of the blog, it’s just a fact of life that we can afford the price tags and most of them cannot), but some of them loose it by being too greedy. On a couple of occasions we even said to people you were too greedy and walked away. The one exception to the tourist price tag was my haircut in Delhi. I asked what the price was and was told 250, which was a local price, but when it finished it had doubled to 500, for no apparent reason other than I was a foreigner. What pissed me off was that when I entered there was only one guy working there, but by the time I finished there were 4, meaning I wasn’t winning any arguments.
Good – Hotels sending you tuk-tuks to avoid even having to haggle; Bad – My haircut; Ugly – New Delhi train station
The Cows
OK, we expect to see cows wandering the streets in India, so this in itself isn’t a problem, but actually from what I can see in the cities at least they have a miserable existence. The whole point of the cows roaming the street is, as far as this uneducated outsider sees it, is because they are revered as reincarnated good people. However if they are so loved how come they seem left to eat litter all the time. The sight of a cow chewing on a plastic bag is distressing, but the sight of an emaciated cow licking at the shit of another is just heart-breaking (I will admit I only saw this once, and the cow in question may have had some sort of illness – but the rubbish eating is everywhere). If these animals are truly loved they should either be housed in fields out in the countryside, or put down. I don’t see India as a nation of animal lovers from this. Added to this are of course the dogs, goats and pigs roaming the street, also eating rubbish, and then there is the question of the cow shit. In some places they seem to scoop it up and use it as fuel, but in other places it is left lying on the streets. It is no surprise that India is a dirty country, there is no incentive for humans to not litter when the cows can shit where they want. (I understand that this is a cultural issue, and that some people will see me as someone who eats cows as a hypocrite, but it is the way I feel after a month here, so it goes in the blog).
Good – I can’t actually think of a good thing about this situation; Bad – Cow shit everywhere; Ugly – Cows eating rubbish
The Shopping
I hate shopping at the best of times, but I hate haggling more. So naturally I hate shopping here. But to be honest the process of haggling isn’t the worst part, at least at that stage you have decided to buy something. It is when you don’t want to buy that they get annoying. It will be bad luck if you don’t buy anything, etc. are the things they say. For me I just ignore them, but Dorota didn’t like the changes to the way she normally shops. However the worst part is the counterfeit goods and the out of date goods (food) which they try to pass off to the unsuspecting tourists. It happened a few times, once with a lady in a shop to whom we had given good business, but the minute she knew it was the last visit, she slipped in the out of date goods. Still there was good shopping in a few cases. Some places selling local goods were fixed price, no haggling or pressure, and because there is no commission to tuk-tuk drivers (we actually had developed strategies to avoid that type of pressure from the tuk-tuk drivers) the prices are actually reasonable. This way of shopping is how we liked it, and even in some local mini-market type shops it made shopping much easier.
Good – Fixed price shops – you know what you are getting; Bad – Pressure when thy just don’t have things you want; Ugly – Counterfeit and out of date products.
The Rudeness
Probably the most surprising thing about India, and hence it being last here, is the behaviour of the people. Now the touts are a class unto themselves, and therefore their lies won’t be in here, but the general population also seemed rude. As mentioned above this includes intruding into photos and other minor rudeness, but it also extends up to far more serious forms of rudeness. (And a note here, again I understand that rudeness is effectively a cultural issue, but there are certain minimum standards which I think we can expect from any fellow human beings). There are so many categories of rudeness I will have to do them separately.
By the way in the interest of fairness I would also like to say that all of these instances of rudeness are, as far as I can tell, not aimed at us just because we are foreign, they appear to be just general behaviour. In fact sometimes there is rudeness that we don’t even get between Indians, like quite often we have seen the Indian’s ordering food making fun of the waiter after he has gone away (or even in his presence). I also am not really too worried about some of the rudeness of kids, because they haven’t had the role models to learn from. Similarly I don’t consider begging to be rude, it is not something someone has control over. But the rest are cases I think adults should be able to control themselves over.
The British did a lot to India. One thing they didn’t do is install a sense of discipline in them when it comes to queuing. Trying to queue for a train ticket in Mumbai or Delhi is a frustrating business, because there is always someone who thinks that their time is so precious that they don’t need to queue. If they are that important they probably should get a travel card. The queuing issues happen elsewhere, people not waiting their turn to get a photo opportunity at a sight, people in big cars cutting off others, and then of course there is the getting on and off issue.
People getting on and off buses and trains make it almost impossible to use them in some places. The people getting on are already trying to get on before the bus stops, and before anyone can get off (although they are probably trying to get off before it stops as well). The ensuing chaos actually delays the bus (although not the trains which run to timetables but stop long enough to let an orderly queue work).
Probably the worst instances of rudeness in my opinion are personal behaviours such as spitting, peeing and even shitting in the street. We only encountered the latter a couple of times, but it is a couple of times too much. The peeing in the street or on the side of the road or on the train tracks is a major problem, being a health hazard and so on. It is so common it is unreal. It’s not as if the public toilets are much better though, but really it shouldn’t be acceptable. And as for the spitting, this in some ways is even worse, not because of the health issues, which are as bad, or the disgusting mess it makes on the ground, but because of the sound of it. Indian men (and some women) seem to be able to make the loudest possible sounds when spitting. It can actually be so bad as to put you off your food.
The final issue in rudeness for me is the sexism that has been shown towards Dorota on our trip. As I said before it is no worse than to other women, and in fact it’s probably a lot better. The fact that the Metro has to have a women’s only carriage says a lot (I have always said that any country that needs women only carriages, and that includes Japan, is not a properly functioning society). But it was everywhere, the most prevalent was in restaurants where I would be the only one asked to order. A few places, evidently well trained to deal with western tourists, did ask separately but it was few and far between.
It should be noted that the levels of this perceived rudeness (and I am admitting it is a perception, it may not actually be intended to be rude) did differ from place to place. It was at its worst in Delhi, and was actually not as bad in Goa or Rajasthan. In fact on our first day in Jaipur, we were shocked when we actually got a polite excuse me from people trying to get past us.
Good – Getting an excuse me from someone; Bad – Sexism; Ugly – Spitting (by the way this is not a personal thing, there are actually ads on TV telling people not to spit, or litter, because it gives the wrong impression to tourists).
Because of the order this has been written in I do feel that a reader will come away thinking that we didn’t enjoy ourselves in India. Far from it, it was a great place to visit, as a holiday destination it has a lot to recommend it, but there still remain a few difficulties that make it hard for the independent traveller, and a few things which it could be so much better with a little thought.
Anyway next stop Vietnam, and tomorrow I’ll tell of the trip that gets us there, even though it actually started 20 minutes before midnight today.
When we get to the airport because we are so early we are not let into the Departures area and instead have to go to the Arrivals area. This is a bit confusing but at least we can sit, read, eat and use the computer to while away the day. We had thought about putting the bags in storage and heading back into town for the day, but after our earlier draining experiences in Delhi, we have decided that the airport is our oasis of calm for the day.
Because this is a quiet day in the airport, I have decided today to do a Dorota style entry describing my total experiences in India. India uses the logo “Incredible India” as its tag line in its ads attracting tourists. However while they use incredible to mean amazing, there are also some things which can be defined as shocking. Some are shocking but can’t be helped because after all this is still a poor country and we come from developed countries, but some things here are actually very off-putting yet could be changed if there was a will to change them. Because I have refrained from using any Cowboy and Indian jokes up until now, I will of course call the rest of this section “Incredible India: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”.
The Good
The Sights
I think the sights we have seen have mostly been as impressive as advertised. The Taj Mahal is amazing, I would say justifiably in the New 7 Wonders of the World, and most of the other UNESCO World Heritage sites we visited were equally worthy. The Archaeological Survey of India who look after them all actually do a really good job of maintaining them and the signage is actually just the right size, enough to inform but not too much to overwhelm. The only dodgy sight we saw was CST station in Mumbai, I’m not really sure it qualifies as a World Heritage site, but as a functioning railway station it is a wonder.
Good – Taj Mahal; Bad – CST (Victoria Station); Ugly – Amber Palace
The Food
Despite our bouts of Delhi belly in the final few days, I have to say my overall impression of the food has been quite good. I can’t think of a bad meal we had, maybe one of two of the hotel meals were average, and the thali that got us in Udaipur was just never meant to be eaten by tourists. All of the places set up for tourists, and even a few that were not, prepared great food. If I had to pick I’d say my best was the meal in Panaji, Goa, which was a pretty hot pork sausage curry, a close second was another Goan special, Chicken Xacuti, in Palolem. The Portuguese influence on Goa meant I did have a few meat dishes there, but otherwise we were vegetarian. I didn’t seem to be missing meat for the first 10 days or so but as I am sitting here in the airport typing this I am counting down the hours to a visit to McDonalds.
Good – Goan Specials; Bad – Probably our meal in our hotel in Delhi – nothing wrong, just forgettable; Ugly – The Udaipur thali that made us sick
The Hotels
Again like the food the hotels were generally quite good. Considering we never paid more than £20 per night, we had some really good places. Most hotels were well run and the staff were friendly and helpful. The hotels we stayed in tended not to have quite as good restaurants as others, which was partially reflected in the price, but of course we were able to eat in some of these restaurants so we didn’t miss out. The only bad hotel we had was also our joint cheapest, so you get what you pay for, the hotel in Panaji, Goa, which was just run down and not very well maintained, but it was close to the bus station and suited our needs. One issue with a number of hotels was the state of the bathrooms, they were not always the best with broken fittings. I’m not sure if the fittings break because they are low quality, or because of the abuse they get.
The worst hotel we stayed in was the one in Delhi, where they tried some pressure selling on us, and also because of the noise from the street. However it was the best bathroom we had, so even it had its good points. As for the best, I think our last two in Udaipur and Jodhpur stand out because of the individual décor in the rooms, and the views. If I had to pick our one in Udaipur wins, because it was slightly cheaper and the food was slightly better.
Good – Dream Heaven, Udaipur; Bad – Hotel Republica, Panaji; Ugly – Hotel Amax Inn, Delhi
The Trains
The trains here are as good as they say. They run pretty much to timetable, and although slowish by western standards, they are actually pretty quick compared to the alternatives. They are also very comfortable (at the levels we were paying for, 2nd class our of 5 levels) and the service was quite good (food and drink served to your chair). The Delhi-Agra train stands out because we got two meals served in a two hour train journey. The only bad thing about the trains seems to be that because of their success you now have to book them quite a bit in advance. We were a bit annoyed that we only got 4 of our 5 trips organised with the few day’s notice we gave, but after talking to other travellers we seem to be lucky. The advice seems to be in future organise the trains before getting to India. This gets past the ugly face of Indian trains, trying to get into the ticket booking office. More of this will be mentioned below, but the experience of getting into New Delhi station will live with us for the rest of our lives.
Good – Delhi-Agra; Bad – Having to book a long way in advance; Ugly – Getting into New Delhi station (see below)
The Bad
The Pollution
There is no question that pollution, in all its forms, noise, litter, smells, smog, does impact the tourist’s impressions of India. However because of the country’s developing status I can’t really say it’s unexpected (and therefore ugly), just bad. I could list a dozen examples of where the litter was bad, but that’s not really the point. We knew it would be like this, and it didn’t really ruin things for us, probably also because we experienced our worst smells on day one when we went to the coast in Bandra. However it could be so much better. There are very few places where there are bins to throw away litter. We walk around with our empty bottles, cans or banana skins looking for them. When we ask the locals where there is a bin they just say drop it on the ground. It’s not right. We have tried to set an example, but even in the Taj Mahal I saw littering, and that was one of the few places that had ample bins.
Good – The Archelogical Survey of India, all of their sites were impeccably maintained; Bad – No bins; Ugly – The smell by the sea in Bandra, Mumbai.
The Crowds
Again there were many places where there were simply too many people. This isn’t surprising, we are in the second most populous country after all, but what really is annoying is the way the crowds behave. There is no concept of giving way to other people, whether this manifests itself in queuing, as mentioned below, or getting in the way of other people’s photos. Whenever we see people lining up a shot we pause, let them take it, and carry on. It’s a small courtesy that costs us a few seconds and makes a memory of a lifetime for the others. This courtesy is not repaid in a lot of cases, although I will say that once we left Delhi and Agra and got to the sights in Rajasthan it got a lot better. The bad point anyway for crowds was the Taj Mahal, but what can you do, so many people want to see it that you can never get the perfect shot.
Good – Patnem and Mandrem beaches – may they stay undiscovered; Bad – The Taj Mahal, busy but what can you do, it’s one of the wonders of the world; Ugly – Commuter trains
The Buses
The buses have been bad, but again my expectations were not high. The buses in Goa actually were OK, just quite crowded, and very old. But they did run on time. And they did have the best bus as well as the worst bus. They had shuttles, non-stop expresses, between the major cities which were brilliant, but they also had the dangerously overcrowded Palolem-Margao bus. However nothing compares to the bus ride we had from Jaipur, just finding the bus was a challenge. Once on it we were OK, but the hour leading up to it aged me a year.
Good – Goa Shuttles; Bad – Palolem-Margao; Ugly – Jaipur-Udaipur
The Communications
The truth is people travelled to India years ago with no mobiles and survived, but that was then and this is now. I am quite annoyed by the fact that for the whole month we have been here my phone has only worked intermittently. If I had known that in advance I wouldn’t have been too worried, but for the last three years in work I’ve been told India is a high tech country, so I’ve no idea why so many of my texts went missing. And it can’t be my phone, because we got a local SIM for Dorota’s iPhone and it lost texts as well. It probably has something to do with all the spam texts we got instead, if the system is struggling they have to regulate the spam. The only good point is that there was more often than not wifi available in the hotels, so once the electricity was working we could at least use email. (I’m ignoring the patchy electricity in this blog entry, although we had power outages at least once every 3 days on average).
Good – Wifi in hotels; Bad – Patchy coverage; Ugly – Spam Texts
The Ugly
The Scams
First, in case anyone doesn’t know, I’ve been to Thailand and Egypt so I know scams. So I’m not having a go specifically at India here, but nonetheless the attempted (and actual) scams that we experienced do sour our memories of India. By far our worst experience was trying to get into New Delhi station to get train tickets. Despite all the warnings from Lonely Planet we still were unprepared by the sheer volume of lies we were told about the location. We could take the tuk-tuk drivers charging us a bit more, but sometimes they would go too high and you almost wanted to say back to them “are you insulting my intelligence”. We are always prepared to pay a tourist price over a local price (note I’ve left the official tourist prices at monuments out of the blog, it’s just a fact of life that we can afford the price tags and most of them cannot), but some of them loose it by being too greedy. On a couple of occasions we even said to people you were too greedy and walked away. The one exception to the tourist price tag was my haircut in Delhi. I asked what the price was and was told 250, which was a local price, but when it finished it had doubled to 500, for no apparent reason other than I was a foreigner. What pissed me off was that when I entered there was only one guy working there, but by the time I finished there were 4, meaning I wasn’t winning any arguments.
Good – Hotels sending you tuk-tuks to avoid even having to haggle; Bad – My haircut; Ugly – New Delhi train station
The Cows
OK, we expect to see cows wandering the streets in India, so this in itself isn’t a problem, but actually from what I can see in the cities at least they have a miserable existence. The whole point of the cows roaming the street is, as far as this uneducated outsider sees it, is because they are revered as reincarnated good people. However if they are so loved how come they seem left to eat litter all the time. The sight of a cow chewing on a plastic bag is distressing, but the sight of an emaciated cow licking at the shit of another is just heart-breaking (I will admit I only saw this once, and the cow in question may have had some sort of illness – but the rubbish eating is everywhere). If these animals are truly loved they should either be housed in fields out in the countryside, or put down. I don’t see India as a nation of animal lovers from this. Added to this are of course the dogs, goats and pigs roaming the street, also eating rubbish, and then there is the question of the cow shit. In some places they seem to scoop it up and use it as fuel, but in other places it is left lying on the streets. It is no surprise that India is a dirty country, there is no incentive for humans to not litter when the cows can shit where they want. (I understand that this is a cultural issue, and that some people will see me as someone who eats cows as a hypocrite, but it is the way I feel after a month here, so it goes in the blog).
Good – I can’t actually think of a good thing about this situation; Bad – Cow shit everywhere; Ugly – Cows eating rubbish
The Shopping
I hate shopping at the best of times, but I hate haggling more. So naturally I hate shopping here. But to be honest the process of haggling isn’t the worst part, at least at that stage you have decided to buy something. It is when you don’t want to buy that they get annoying. It will be bad luck if you don’t buy anything, etc. are the things they say. For me I just ignore them, but Dorota didn’t like the changes to the way she normally shops. However the worst part is the counterfeit goods and the out of date goods (food) which they try to pass off to the unsuspecting tourists. It happened a few times, once with a lady in a shop to whom we had given good business, but the minute she knew it was the last visit, she slipped in the out of date goods. Still there was good shopping in a few cases. Some places selling local goods were fixed price, no haggling or pressure, and because there is no commission to tuk-tuk drivers (we actually had developed strategies to avoid that type of pressure from the tuk-tuk drivers) the prices are actually reasonable. This way of shopping is how we liked it, and even in some local mini-market type shops it made shopping much easier.
Good – Fixed price shops – you know what you are getting; Bad – Pressure when thy just don’t have things you want; Ugly – Counterfeit and out of date products.
The Rudeness
Probably the most surprising thing about India, and hence it being last here, is the behaviour of the people. Now the touts are a class unto themselves, and therefore their lies won’t be in here, but the general population also seemed rude. As mentioned above this includes intruding into photos and other minor rudeness, but it also extends up to far more serious forms of rudeness. (And a note here, again I understand that rudeness is effectively a cultural issue, but there are certain minimum standards which I think we can expect from any fellow human beings). There are so many categories of rudeness I will have to do them separately.
By the way in the interest of fairness I would also like to say that all of these instances of rudeness are, as far as I can tell, not aimed at us just because we are foreign, they appear to be just general behaviour. In fact sometimes there is rudeness that we don’t even get between Indians, like quite often we have seen the Indian’s ordering food making fun of the waiter after he has gone away (or even in his presence). I also am not really too worried about some of the rudeness of kids, because they haven’t had the role models to learn from. Similarly I don’t consider begging to be rude, it is not something someone has control over. But the rest are cases I think adults should be able to control themselves over.
The British did a lot to India. One thing they didn’t do is install a sense of discipline in them when it comes to queuing. Trying to queue for a train ticket in Mumbai or Delhi is a frustrating business, because there is always someone who thinks that their time is so precious that they don’t need to queue. If they are that important they probably should get a travel card. The queuing issues happen elsewhere, people not waiting their turn to get a photo opportunity at a sight, people in big cars cutting off others, and then of course there is the getting on and off issue.
People getting on and off buses and trains make it almost impossible to use them in some places. The people getting on are already trying to get on before the bus stops, and before anyone can get off (although they are probably trying to get off before it stops as well). The ensuing chaos actually delays the bus (although not the trains which run to timetables but stop long enough to let an orderly queue work).
Probably the worst instances of rudeness in my opinion are personal behaviours such as spitting, peeing and even shitting in the street. We only encountered the latter a couple of times, but it is a couple of times too much. The peeing in the street or on the side of the road or on the train tracks is a major problem, being a health hazard and so on. It is so common it is unreal. It’s not as if the public toilets are much better though, but really it shouldn’t be acceptable. And as for the spitting, this in some ways is even worse, not because of the health issues, which are as bad, or the disgusting mess it makes on the ground, but because of the sound of it. Indian men (and some women) seem to be able to make the loudest possible sounds when spitting. It can actually be so bad as to put you off your food.
The final issue in rudeness for me is the sexism that has been shown towards Dorota on our trip. As I said before it is no worse than to other women, and in fact it’s probably a lot better. The fact that the Metro has to have a women’s only carriage says a lot (I have always said that any country that needs women only carriages, and that includes Japan, is not a properly functioning society). But it was everywhere, the most prevalent was in restaurants where I would be the only one asked to order. A few places, evidently well trained to deal with western tourists, did ask separately but it was few and far between.
It should be noted that the levels of this perceived rudeness (and I am admitting it is a perception, it may not actually be intended to be rude) did differ from place to place. It was at its worst in Delhi, and was actually not as bad in Goa or Rajasthan. In fact on our first day in Jaipur, we were shocked when we actually got a polite excuse me from people trying to get past us.
Good – Getting an excuse me from someone; Bad – Sexism; Ugly – Spitting (by the way this is not a personal thing, there are actually ads on TV telling people not to spit, or litter, because it gives the wrong impression to tourists).
Because of the order this has been written in I do feel that a reader will come away thinking that we didn’t enjoy ourselves in India. Far from it, it was a great place to visit, as a holiday destination it has a lot to recommend it, but there still remain a few difficulties that make it hard for the independent traveller, and a few things which it could be so much better with a little thought.
Anyway next stop Vietnam, and tomorrow I’ll tell of the trip that gets us there, even though it actually started 20 minutes before midnight today.
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