After a stressful year culminating in university exams, and unsure which direction I wanted my life to go after my degree, I left London for two months and headed to India with my friend Max, in search of some mental and spiritual clarity. Our first stop in India is an ashram in Rishikesh for two weeks, doing yoga and meditation on a vegan diet, and getting up at 6.45am every day. The most valuable lesson I learnt there was that I could never be a vegan, and that meditating and practicing yoga twice daily was really not what was going to enrich my life and make me feel whole again. But needless to say, the experience was an interesting one, and I had no regrets.
After a harrowing train journey which
totalled thirty hours, including a five hour delay, we finally arrived in
Varanasi, leaving ashram life behind us - supposedly one of the holiest places
in India. The train journey was an
experience in itself - I have never seen so many people and dogs sleeping on
train platforms. Or sacred cows for that
matter. There were more train stops than
I care to remember, staying up to an hour stationed in one place. I cannot put into words how overjoyed we were
to get to Varanasi - we thought we would never get there. Every time we asked people how long we had
left on the train, they gave us a different time, each one later than the last,
making us feel pretty despondent!
Varanasi is the kind of place you come
just to spend a few days in, taking the compulsory boat trip on the Ganges,
watching the cremation of dead bodies in the holy waters, and chilling out
after sampling the bhang lassies (a local milkshake laced with strong marijuana
- a definite must after our very intense two weeks in an ashram and the long
train journey). The experience of the night
ride along the Ganges was magical.
However, Varanasi was not the kind of place you’d want to make a habit
of venturing out at night, with it’s dark, winding streets and alleyways. In fact, when we got lost one evening, the
manager of our hotel found us wandering aimlessly and gave us a lecture for
being out at 1am. In an instant I felt
like a child again, and it reminded me of the strict rules that had to be
maintained in the ashram – the rebel in me did not revel in this!
Quite how we managed to stay in Puri
(Orissa) for 6 days will always remain something of a mystery to me, as it was
just a ghost town which had a really eerie feel about it, and it rained all but
one day we were there. The place was
full of huge, semi-derelict houses which the English had built in colonial
times. We stayed in a hotel with a huge
roof terrace, which was a massive bonus for us (open space is always nice when
you are a nomad), but it hardly compensated for the mosquito net which was too
small to cover the bed, the damp floor, the peeling paint, the ants, the rats'
droppings, and a door which did not lock - only in India would that kind of
thing happen! To top that, there was a
primitive tribe living below us, who liked to bellow out music all night. They all used to openly shit on the beach,
which I never understood, as even the poorest of people in other cultures will
usually have a communal hole in the ground.
That aside, the place was full of middle aged drug addicts who would
come there to use and abuse at their leisure, with no restrictions.
From Puri we travelled further south, and
after a twenty hour train journey, we hit Goa, in Kerala. It was a lot less developed as I had imagined
it would be, with a limited music scene that rarely stretched beyond trance, and
was played both night and day, which when you're trying to nurse a hangover the
morning after is not the best medicine.
We managed to book our train to Delhi on
the same day as our flight. I do not
know how we cocked it up so badly, but we did not realise this until a few
hours before our train. We were
misdirected by an Indian guy, and ended up on a train to Bombay instead of
Delhi. After spending a couple of hours waiting
on the platform with our rucksacks, we finally boarded the 7am train to
Delhi. Once on board, we had the police
threatening to throw us off the train for not having a ticket; luckily the
language barrier and us losing our tempers (the Indian men are not used to
independent foreign women putting up a fight - they find it incredibly
intimidating and hard to handle) meant we were eventually only issued a penalty
ticket.
When we got to the airport in Delhi, we
were told we had to fly to Amman, and only there would we know if we could get
a flight home. We spent a night in Amman
and got on a flight the next day. No
questions were asked as to why we had missed our flight, and no penalty was
charged. I would love to say that this
made it all ok, but to be honest, after those hair-raising two days travelling,
we just wanted to get home ASAP, minus the hotel. Why they never questioned anything is a
mystery, and really summarises the essence of India and all of my experiences
and misadventures there - you have to experience it all for yourself, it is
like no other country I have ever visited, and I doubt any other could match it
in terms of its mystique.
© Copyright Vanessa Sicre
© Copyright Vanessa Sicre
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