Nick Lambert Guest Blog

*Here follows my friend Nick's (heavily edited) account of our India trip. Would not recommend reading on the toilet, your legs will fall asleep. Long but good!

"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

For those of us that live in the United States, and have grown accustomed to the regularity of American society, just how chaotic much of the world can be is easily forgotten. So with that, here is an attempt to revisit the trip Mike Delaney and I took to the land where the beauty parlors are filled with sailors and the circus is always in town: India.

Prior to landing in Mumbai, I was somewhat excited to see one of the world's so called mega cities. After about an hour I was convinced I'd seen enough. To say Mumbai is an approachable destination is like saying handing a group of toddlers hammers to finger paint with will end well. While waiting for Delaney to arrive I spent the morning walking around the part of town where the hotel was located. The exotically named Juhu Beach was technically a beach. There was ocean meeting sand. What was left out was the water was 2 parts sewage and the sand was 3 parts garbage combined with dogs, that I hope were sleeping.

Well by noon Delaney popped his head into the hotel and we ventured off to see what Mumbai, the center of Mumbai, had to offer. It being the four year anniversary of the attack on the Taj Mahal Hotel, I thought that might be an interesting place to start the sight-seeing tour. I was wrong. We checked out the historic hotel, saw the Gateway to India, then proceeded to get lost among some pretty shady looking streets. Though since every street was trash-strewn and smelling of sewage, admittedly it was hard to tell the shady streets from the nice ones.

An hour or so of aimless wandering, trying to use a not-at-all-to-scale map taken from the hotel lobby, led us smack in the middle of an Indian Air Force Base, and us trying to explain to some man why we were on said property. After ending the conversation by simply turning around and walking the other way we decided a cab was the best way to solve this problem. We were dropped off in a more "fashionable" neighborhood. One that basically consisted of a park featuring a giant shoe. What was the name of that nursery rhyme? By dusk we admitted defeat and took a succession of cabs back to our hotel to eat and prep for the rest of the trip.

After breakfast the next day we headed to the train station, determined to free ourselves from the trash and smog of Mumbai. Buying a train ticket in India is a a wonder to behold. We were under the impression, given to us by us, that obtaining train tickets would be no problem. That is not the case. It turns out you need these things booked weeks in advance. Well crap. But being the internal optimists we are we trusted in the stars and headed off to the station. I won't bore you with all of the details, but after many confused looks, and a lot of boxing out by Delaney (the concept of a line has yet to hit the subcontinent), we emerged with tickets to Jaipur, though we were at the wrong station.

Making our way to the Mumbai Central Station, and waiting there for a good seven hours (during which a kid seated in front of us, and another behind us, just peed on the floor) we were finally about to board our salvation out of town. One problem: we had "wait list" tickets, not actual tickets. Awesome news to discover at 11pm when the train you've been waiting for all day is 15 minutes from leaving. Delaney, recognizing my skill set, told me to wait by our car and look as pathetic as possible while he went off to figure out how to get us on the train. His plan worked, as I was approached by a wee porter, who asked to see the tickets, then told me we had seats 8 and 9. Ecstatic, I shouted for Delaney and we jumped aboard and found our seats yelling, "So long, stink town!"

The victory was short-lived. About two stops in, the ticket man came by and, per his job description, asked to see our tickets. It was then he told us we had wait list tickets and walked off. Confused, Delaney and I looked at each other, fully expecting a return visit. That visit came a few stops later when the ticket man, after yelling at the two women on the bunks below us (we were in a 4-bunk berth, with Delaney and I occupying the top bunks) proceeded to tell me I didn't have a seat, then walked off again without explaining a thing. Fearing what getting thrown off the train at 2am would mean I jumped down and found the ticket man, who at this point was a car over. While I asked for clarification as to what not having a seat would mean for my fate, I noticed the wee porter who told me to get on the train in the first place. Before I could muster the courage to throw him under the bus (turns out, while he was capable of communicating to us we had seats 8 and 9, it may have been well above his pay-grade to make such a decision) I was told that Seat 9 was ours, and we were to share that for the remaining 12 hours. So we did. For 12 hours we shared, with our bags, what amounted to a twin bed. That snugness was much preferable to the pungency of Mumbai, so we soldiered on.

Our arrival in Jaipur seemed to coincide with some sort of tuk-tuk hustlers convention, because not two steps off the train we found ourselves fighting off a few different people who all seemed to know where the best hotel in town was located and were determined to give us a ride there. Doing our best to maintain patience, that was already stretched uber thin because of the previous night's accommodations, we consulted the guide book and insisted the persistent tuk-tuk drivers take us to a hotel of OUR choosing. They put in a lot of work for a fare that amounted to $.72.

Jaipur, being the size of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area, is small by Indian standards, but has quite a few attractions to behold. Also known as the Pink City, Jaipur is a far more Middle Eastern city than we expected. Shortly after we arrived we hustled down to the Old City's Gates and wandered around the various markets. The next two days were filled with visiting various palaces, temples and forts, with the highlight clearly being the Amber Fort outside of town. While we passed on riding an elephant through the main gates, this was the practice of visiting dignitaries -- which we certainly are, the walk up to the palace allowed Delaney the chance to sit with the snake charmer and play that flutey thing while a cobra popped out of a basket. That happened.

There was also the visit to the Monkey Temple. This trip consisted of our tuk-tuk driver pulling onto a dead-end street that would have given Alonzo Harris pause. Fearing not, we ventured to the top of the hill, with our 11-year-old "monkey protector" in tow to visit the wonders of The Monkey Temple, which was less a temple and more a dude who was sitting on a bench with some friends outside of his house. Yeah, you put an "altar" in your house and called it a temple, sure. Also, my guess: the monkeys are here because moronic tourists feed them peanuts, not because of any spiritual reason.

Our monkey protector has quite the hustle going. He ended up needing 300 rupees, which like a sap I gave him, because he needed new books for school. I am sure I was the first person to hear that. You think for that kind of money he would have been able to get the monkey to jump on the cow's back so we could feed it, but I guess his skills are relegated solely to yelling, "GIT!" at over zealous primates.

After Jaipur we decided to follow the proverbial track a little farther down the line. The desert fort town of Jaisalmer sounded nice, so we booked an overnight bus in hopes that a city located so near Pakistan would not have too much turrer. Now while we were in fact on a bus, it was less a bus ride and more a Rajasthani interpretation of that scene in Apollo 13 where Tom Hanks, et al. re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. There truly wasn't a moment where we were spared from jostling.

Somehow I managed to fall asleep, and then fell victim to some sneak thief who decided to have a little disagreement with me while I slept. You see I thought I should keep my camera, and the memory card with nearly 600 photos on it, he thought otherwise. All in the game. So to my surprise, I awoke sometime later and reached down to my backpack, where my camera bag was stored, in hopes of taking a photo of a liquor store in one of the desert "towns" with an unfortunate misspelling. Instead of "chilled beer," they decided to go with "child beer." Who knows, maybe it wasn't a typo. Anyway to my astonishment someone had lifted the whole of my camera bag, out of my backpack, that had my sleeping leg through the shoulder strap. Nice work. I guess at the end of the day it is a better way to lose a camera than having some Buenos Aires street toughs shoving a broken bottle to you chest. I blame Delaney for not keeping watch. With a slightly lighter load we arrived in Jaisalmer.

Jaisalmer is a lovely, again by Indian standards, old desert fort town about 50 miles from the Pakistani border. This leg of the trip would require a premium of tactical CIA scarves. Spent a day touring the old fort town and researching which guide would lead us on our overnight camel safari. Eschewing Mr. Desert, we decided to trust in our hotel proprietor and use his guides. This turned out to be a great call, as we would be joined by a German couple, Karen and Dennis, we had befriended the night before. This was the first time I had ever been on a camel. It is awesome. The speed with which they stand up provides quite a rush.

When asked by American reporter Jackson Bentley what attracted him to the desert, T.E. Lawrence replied simply, "It's clean." Truer words. While we were able to escape the garbage, India doesn't let you win that easily. While sitting on the dunes, watching the sunset, we noticed this figure walking towards us. This man, walking by himself in the middle of the desert, was of course heading our way to sell us something. Luckily it was beer. Unluckily none of us thought we would be buying anything in the desert, so no one brought money. However, we all respected the effort of the guy who makes a rupee by schlepping beer to the middle of nowhere.

We spent the night sleeping under the stars surrounded by camels. It was very timeless.

The joy of going to bed early is we were all awake, cup of chai in hand, to watch the sunrise. After breakfast we loaded on our camels again and headed back. Along the way we encountered a cobra. Delaney neglected to bring along his flute, so we had to rely on our guide to handle the situation. After taking a poll in which we decided to not kill it, he went about shooing it away with cries of, "Cobra, Pakistan, Go!" That is one way to build foreign relations.

That night we had train tickets, actual tickets, to Delhi. So 16 hours after boarding another Indian train we found ourselves in Delhi. Expecting Mumbai part two, we were more than pleasantly surprised at how approachable and "clean" Delhi was. The metro was the cleanest metro I have ever been on, though the token buying process is fundamentally Indian. What drew us to Delhi was its proximity to Agra, and the Taj Mahal.

The "tour" we booked had us up at 4:30am to board the bus south for what we thought was going to be a 3 hour ride. Well what wasn't made clear was the numerous detours we would be taken on prior to seeing the Taj. First was breakfast, the 50 minute detour off the first western-style freeway we had seen, seemed a bit much for tea and white bread.

Then was the sojourn to Krishna's birthplace. You know the Dave Chappelle bit about being taken to the ghetto without knowing you're going to be taken there? Well that same logic can apply to religious sites. Knowing we were being taken to this holy site would have been useful, as respectful decorum was something we could only guess at. Take a flower? Sip some water? I don't know, so I'll just hang in the back of the group and hope no one notices me. Also: no electronics of any kind are allowed on the temple grounds. Great. But maybe also don't allow all the hawkers peddling cheap religious paintings too? Just a thought.

Then we were allowed 15 minutes to tour the Red Fort of Agra. Its highlight is clearly the area where Shah Jahan (the man who is responsible for building the Taj Mahal) was placed under house arrest after he was disposed by his son. The part of the fort he was confined to allowed him a rather spectacular view of his life's masterpiece.

We assumed that the next stop would be the Taj. Again, we underestimated India. After the Red Fort we were taken to lunch, followed by a visit to a market that sold all sorts of trinkets, scarves, and shoes. Thinking that a purchase might allow our guide to finally take us to the Taj, Delaney and I both acquiesced and bought some scarves. It took an hour milling about that market, but eventually we found ourselves on the way to the Taj which of course the bus driver got lost driving to.

Nearly 10 hours after we left Delhi, we finally found ourselves walking through the gates of the Taj Mahal. We were allowed, by our guide, 45 minutes to see this wonder. For the record we were given over an hour at the market. Awesome priorities.

We got there. And this site lived up to expectations. This screed is getting way too long as is, so I'll have Delaney insert some visual aids to describe the Taj and not my lazy metaphors. It is the most beautiful building in the world.

That night allowed us some time to sit in a bar, have a beer, and think back on what we saw that day. This was also the first time Delaney and I found ourselves in a bar, and we were 10 days into our trip. For the record 10 days of Delaney and Nick hanging together bar-less is a record not seen since we were freshmen living in Oliver Hall.

Our last full day in India had us buying last minute gifts. What is with every tuk-tuk driver taking us to some textile market before the destination we asked for?

Noon the next day the cab came to take us to the airport, Delaney heading south to Goa, and me starting my Delhi-Mumbai-London-Toronto-Home journey. Two things: everyone in India seems to pack for a trip like they are fleeing their homeland. Yes 17 bags and 12 large cardboard boxes is appropriate luggage for a Delhi to Mumbai flight. And in one last "India Always Wins" moment, the Mumbai Airport doesn't let you inside until 3 hours prior to your flight. I landed there around 6pm for a 2am flight to London. After deplaning I was shuffled outside, where for a good 4 hours I was told to wait on a curbside next to an endless line of exhaust belching cabs. Proving misery loves company, I wasn't the only tourist on the curb. To me it seems having us sit inside patronizing the airport's restaurants and bars may have been a better idea, but I guess that is my American capitalism talking.

40 hours after departing from Delhi, I landed back home, back to the regularity of American society.

Unlike the play-by-play of our trip I'll keep my closing thoughts brief. India, while chaotic and frustrating at all times, is an experience. It takes you out of your comfort zone and really puts your problem-solving skills and patience to the test. I am grateful and happy I went. And beyond glad I got to take it all in with Delaney.

I hope this hasn't turned Mike Delaney into a travel blogging Wally Pipp.