Going to India! We were prepared for a great adventure, we were eager to see and experience a new culture, really different people, the fantastic geology of the Himalayas. Let me quote for you the brief description of Himalayan Passages, the name of the trip we signed up for with Mountain Travel, a California-based company that conducts "expeditions and outings to remote wilderness areas of the world". From their l983 Asia catalogue, page 16 -
We were prepared with a whole pile of stuff - from woolens for the high passes and snow, to plastic bags, to extra-dark sunglasses for crossing glaciers, and lots of PABA sunscreen. Our personal first aid kit appeared well supplied - Aspirin, Aspirin with Codeine for pain and diarrhea, Donnatal for stomach cramps, Peptobismol and Mylanta for upset stomach, iodine for water purification, Malaria medicine, Actifed and Contac for colds, Diamox for altitude sickness, insect repellent, topical antibiotic and lots of bandaids, Moleskin, foot powder, an Ace bandage - plus of course we had had the required immunizations; typhoid, cholera, hepatitis, tetanus and polio boosters, gamma globulin. Our first aid supplies, plus our passports and international health certificates of course, and our hiking boots (our most irreplaceable items) we carried on the plane with us; Mountain Travel had warned us that luggage may go astray, and items such as these were difficult to replace in India. As we discovered after we arrived in India, just about any well-made item of outdoors gear is impossible to obtain! But since we could hardly have carried our sleeping bags and everything else with us on the plane, it was just as well we didn't know that, and didn't worry.
We had both been running, bicycling and generally trying to get more fit in the U.S. before we left on June 15, and two weeks in Switzerland, climbing around in the Alps, had helped too. We both felt as prepared as we could be for a marvelous time. It was a good thing we could not see into the future; we would both have probably decided never to board that plane in Frankfurt and head for the East. In India we got both a lot more, and a lot less than we bargained for; certainly our adventure was very different from the trip described in the Mountain Travel catalogue!
We left Frankfurt on Thursday, June 30, on a Pan Am flight with one stop scheduled. We took off at 12:40 P.M. Frankfurt time, after traveling all morning to arrive in Frankfurt on time from Zurich. Luckily we were depending on Swiss and German train schedules, and the train arrived in Frankfurt within a minute of its scheduled arrival time. We expected to arrive in Bombay at 2:05 A.M., then depart Bombay on an Indian Airlines flight to Delhi at 6:00 A.M., leaving us nearly four hours in Bombay to deal with customs and to look around. Our flight to Bombay was uneventful, although our stop was interesting - our first look at a really different culture.
When we were told that we would be stopping at Dubai, my knowledge of geography was put to the test. I should have paid more attention in seventh grade! I had no idea where Dubai was (except that it was somewhere in the Middle East), and Rob was no help. On our flight there was a man who worked for Red Adair as an "equipment operator", which meant he did everything from operating tractors to flying helicopters. He was a taciturn fellow, but we gathered that he was on his way to help fight an oil field fire, and as we were approaching Dubai airport we saw a large fire off in the darkness of the desert. We never learned anything more about it, though. We were told we could get off the plane for a brief time if we wished, so we took the opportunity to see the sights, as did many of our fellow passengers, including two Chassidic Jews from, it seemed, New York.
The bus that took us from the plane to the terminal was aggressively air conditioned, but walking to it outdoors we could feel the heavy humidity, and fierce heat radiated up from the pavement, though it was night. Dubai is in the United Arab Emirates, on the Persian Gulf, and the day must have been a scorcher. We figured out where we were when we got inside the terminal and saw the sheiks (or at least they looked like sheiks to me), dressed in their flowing white robes. Military personnel, complete with automatic weapons, were common in the terminal; that was a sight we got used to in Indian airports and cities. But all that firepower looked strange and intimidating when seen for the first time! I was impressed with the bravery of our two Jewish fellow travelers. They were so obviously Jewish! I couldn't help watching them and worrying that they might get into some difficulty. Many unfriendly looks were turned on them, and once a uniformed guard or soldier stopped them from walking down a corridor, with his dislike for them as obvious in his tone and expression as a slap in their faces would have been. But nothing happened, and of course they were probably not the innocents abroad that I imagined them to be at all.
The terminal was new, unfinished on the inside, small, but beautiful and graceful from outside, with lovely plantings. They certainly have the climate for growing big plants! After a half hour we had exhausted the charms of the place, and it was time to return to the plane for takeoff, along with a group of new passengers, mostly young Indian men, almost all carrying big portable radios wrapped in cloth. We learned later that these were Indian guest workers, who took advantage of their good wages and the availability of technology to purchase radios to bring home as status symbols as well as sources of entertainment. I felt more excited than before about seeing India. My appetite for strange and different things had been teased by what I saw in Dubai, and I had begun to have a feeling for how really different things might be, halfway around the world. But nothing could have prepared me for Bombay.
Caption(Flight Route, Dubai to Delhi)
We arrived in Bombay about one hour late. We felt the delay was just as well, as we would have less time to kill at the airport. Rob hates standing in lines, so we waited until the crush of people had exited before we stood, stretched, retrieved our packs from the overhead bins and left the airplane. We knew that we would have to show our passports and health certificates and we had them at the ready. Sure enough, there was a line ahead of us; not a long line, and it moved quickly, as a bored-looking uniformed man gave the briefest possible glance at our papers and waved us through. I think that first line is a bogey, set up to lull unwary travelers into a false sense of normality, trapping them in the bowels of Bombay Airport before they realize what is happening. As we proceeded down the corridor another line loomed ahead, or rather several lines; "Indian Citizens", "United Kingdom and Canada", and "Other" (that's us!). Of course we were at the end of the line! The wise traveler bites and kicks to get out of the plane first, to be at the head of the line. That line was our real introduction to India; by the time we had passed through it, about three hours later, we were considerably less naive.
The line we were in was a passport and entrance visa check. There were perhaps twenty people in line ahead of us. Each passport had to be perused, each visa stamped, each traveler questioned extensively, and of course the fellows doing the questioning and stamping found it heavy going, so coffee (or tea) breaks were a necessity for the poor guys to help keep their strength up. The only relief for the trapped traveler standing and sweating in the line is conversation with fellow sufferers, so we met a few people. George McRobie is the chairman of Intermediate Technology, a London-based company that works in places like India to introduce non energy intensive improvements such as solar power and methane generators. He was an interesting fellow who warned us that lines were an Indian way of life. Everyone there certainly seemed to accept the situation with good grace. The "Indian" line, complete with all those young men and their colorfully wrapped radios, seemed to be moving even slower than our line did. Certainly it was a lot longer! It didn't take long for the suspicion to take root in our minds that our projected nice long wait in the airport was going to turn into a mad rush, and we would be fortunate indeed to make our connecting flight to Delhi.
Eventually the longest wait passes. We left the line with almost no time remaining until our next flight, no idea where to go to get our luggage, and no one official-looking around to help. The main part of the airport was a solid mass of people. It resembled a Rolling Stones concert; but concert goers don't usually carry suitcases. Our luggage was surprisingly easy to obtain, but then we faced the nightmare of Customs! Our case seemed hopeless. We approached a man standing at an official-looking kiosk who told us that we would have no trouble making our flight - just get into the "green line" - five minutes, and we'd be out. Great! One small problem - there were several "green lines" (for persons with nothing to declare). No real lines were evident; it seemed to be a sea of people, with islands of their possessions scattered everywhere. We were contributing our part to the crowding, with two packs, two duffle bags (large), a suitcase and a garment bag. With time pressure lending us the courage of desperation we seized our stuff and began leaping and shoving our way over to the general area of the closest appropriate line. We got in line as best we could, and began to wait again. Five minutes, my foot! This looked like another three-hour line to us, with customs agents opening and searching every piece of luggage. Slowly. With coffee breaks.
We struck up conversations with more of our fellow sufferers. Indians got the concept of the queue from the British, but it is a transplanted custom that hasn't really taken hold in the heart of every Indian; Indians seem incredibly cheerful and patient about the interminable waiting they do everywhere in their country, but many also watch like hawks for a chance to break into another line in a better position. So a little band of us organized our section of the line to prevent queue-smashing. One prosperous-looking gentleman was of Indian birth, but had been living in Germany for twenty years. He seemed to view the inefficiency all around us with a sort of paternalistic fondness (he only had to deal with it occasionally, on visits). Another man was returning to India from the United States. He had been on sabbatical and had been teaching history at a Midwestern university. He had his family with him, though they were not much in evidence as he struggled with a truly incredible volume of family baggage. He was a slight man and resembled a sparrow wrestling with a pile of sausages. We helped him as best we could.
George McRobie had told us that the Indian customs officials were instructed to make things as easy as possible on Western tourists (Western dollars, you know!), but things certainly didn't seem to be particularly "eased" to me! We had missed our flight, but we were beginning to feel a little numb about the whole thing and were dumbly grateful that at least our line was moving - slowly, but perceptibly - when the customs man saw us standing there, only about three people away from him and deliverance. "Get out of this line!" He motioned to us angrily. He shouted something incomprehensible, took a step towards us and made another menacing-seeming gesture. "Over there! That line!" What had we done? After all this time, to be banished from our precious spot, to have to start over in a new line, with new people...our newly made friends were sympathetic, but they could do nothing, and it was with feelings of real despair that we struggled over piles of stuff with our burden of luggage, to reach the new line.
Above our heads, a second floor balcony looked out over the madhouse we were a part of. It was walled off with wire fencing, and hundreds of people clung to the fence, looking down at us on the floor. It seemed to be a real scene from a nightmare, and I had visions of being trapped in Bombay Airport forever, like in the Twilight Zone, shoving my way from one line to another for eternity. But our fortunes took a definite turn for the better. The new line, also green, was the line we should have been in all along. This was the fabled Special Treatment line. Without a glance at our luggage, and with barely a glance at us and our passports, the man in charge did the necessary paperwork magic, and a miracle occurred! We were free to go!
Lest we get too excited by our new-found freedom, another obstacle was immediately placed in our path. We were in one part of Bombay Airport. Our flight (now long gone) left from another part, accessible only by bus. Public bus. We needed Indian money (my God! Not another Line!!). The money line was short. Rob got some rupees at the going exchange rate of about ten rupees to the dollar, while I watched our possessions. A man with a dirty bandage covering part of his head attempted to cut into line ahead of Rob, claiming that he was too sick to stand. A man from England, in the line with Rob, told us that the injury was probably faked, and no one would let the bandaged one in. Our acquaintance warned us not to pay too much for our bus tickets. Didn't they have a price? Yes, eight rupees or so...at least that was the printed price on the ticket. We got ours for twenty rupees and were glad to have them.
Walking outside to the bus, we were hit by the heat of a summer morning in Bombay. Crowds of people waited outside on the sidewalk, offering to carry our luggage or act as guides, anything at all. I gleaned a few comments from the crowd as I struggled along with my half of our luggage. "Nice looking woman!" "Strong, too!" Hummmpf. But as everyone was smiling and no one seemed malicious, it was impossible to resent their cheerful interest. The bus had a luggage rack atop, but our luggage was voted small enough to fit inside, and we crammed it into the bus with us. People kept shoving in until all the space was absolutely full, and off we went. That was our first sight of India really, and I suppose we saw more squalor during that bus ride than anywhere else on our trip. Sacred cows were walking around, people were living in metal and canvas hovels, filth was amazing and everywhere. I especially noticed the smells - not one particular bad smell, but lots and lots of smells together, making for a peculiar richness in the air that I found exciting, rather than unpleasant. The smell of Bombay.
The other part of the airport was smaller and cleaner than the first part. Rob went to see about rebooking our flight to Delhi, while I piled up our possessions and sat on them. For about an hour I watched cockroaches scuttling about, people dressing and undressing in the terminal, and people putting down blankets and taking a nap, until Rob returned. We were saved! We were booked on a flight to Delhi with only about an hour to wait in the terminal.
I had to use the toilet, so I left Rob resting with the luggage and visited the Ladies Room. Public toilet facilities in India were truly a great adventure! The variety was seemingly endless, and it was always fun to guess, before going in, just what the conditions would be...but this one was my first. No toilet seat. Just a hole in the floor, with two little pedestals on each side, places for my feet. Well, when in Rome...toilet paper? That was a major problem. The bathroom was provided with a box of kleenex for some obscure reason, so I nabbed a few, and got some really nasty looks and nasty-sounding comments from the Indian women gathered around the kleenex box. Maybe I transgressed some local custom, but I was beginning to feel pretty aggressive after so many lines and so little sleep and so much tension, so I muttered something unfriendly like "tough" and took some kleenex.
Indian airports are concerned about security and inspect travelers to prevent weapons being brought onto the plane, but the process is not mechanized. In the West we walk under arches complete with metal-detecting apparatus. In India we walked into little booths, one for each sex, and were frisked by a guard of the same sex. I went through this procedure several times while in India; in every case the women were nice. Some seemed terminally bored, but others were friendly and curious. In Bombay there was automatic equipment for inspection of carry-on baggage, though in many places this too is done by hand.
A word of wisdom to all you potential travelers to India - signs admonishing "Only one piece of carry-on baggage allowed" are very serious. I saw the signs, decided to take them at their word since I was in a strange place and didn't know what I could get away with, and stuffed my purse into my groaning pack. I was right to do so! The only exception to the rule seems to be umbrellas. They rarely fit comfortably into anything else, and can be carried on separately without any trouble. Another important thing to remember - never carry a knife in your carry-on baggage or on your person. It will most always be confiscated, and though the unlucky owner gets a receipt for the item, we are told that the knives are rarely seen again. We both had our precious Swiss Army knives with us in our packs. Fortunately for us, they were overlooked by the inspectors. It is important to realize that not only might a Swiss Army knife cost more than an airport employee makes in a month, but also it is just about unobtainable in India except by lucky chance (like a naive traveler trying to carry one through a baggage check...).
You cannot imagine how grateful we felt to be on our airplane at last. Air conditioning! Never mind the humidity condensing on the overhead racks and dripping on us...the plane was a nice new Airbus A-300, with male and female flight attendants. The women were dressed in beautiful saris, which gave the flight an excitingly exotic appearance to us. Unfortunately, their standards of cleanliness left something to be desired. Poor Rob (having missed his chance in Bombay Airport) had to use the bathroom on the airplane. It was filthy. I'll spare you the graphic details, but Rob was upset and complained to a steward, who responded with something like "What's the big deal about a little water?", and gave Rob the impression that he was being difficult about a very minor matter.
Smoking is another problem on Indian airplanes. Indians seem to smoke more than Americans do, and they interpret "No Smoking" very loosely, indeed! Complaints about smokers lighting up in a smoke free section may or may not be greeted with politeness; often, nothing is done. Rob tried to tell one man to put out his cigarette. The fellow smiled, then shrugged, as if to say, "What can I do? I just lit it up. You wouldn't want me to waste it, would you?". Sometimes you just have to give in, grit your teeth and bear it.
Mountain Travel's contact company in Delhi, Mercury Travel, was to have provided one of their representatives to meet us at the Delhi Airport and help us with arrangements there - collecting luggage, and getting to our hotel. Of course they were expecting us to arrive on our originally scheduled flight, which we missed. We couldn't call them from Bombay, since it was too early for their office to be open, and we couldn't Telex them either, because the nearest Telex office to the Bombay airport was in Bombay, some 20 kilometers away. So we arrived in Delhi to find no one waiting. I took care of getting our baggage and fending off ubiquitous offers of help (for a price) while Rob went off to telephone Mercury Travel. Yes, phones in India work, though not real reliably. He found a telephone, though the whole process took a while, and I collected our baggage and found him while he was still on the telephone. The conversation was pretty funny. Mercury had our names, knew we were arriving that day, and we assumed they must have figured out that we missed our flight - so all we had to do was to call and tell them the situation. Not so simple. Rob was trying desperately to identify himself, shouting into the telephone - "R. R as in Robert. R. Then O. O. B as in Boy. No, not S, B. B as in Bombay." Loudly. For at least five minutes. Eventually they got the message, and told us to take a taxi to our hotel - their representative would meet us there and pay the taxi.
Was there a charge for the phone? That wasn't clear. "Pay what you like," said the official behind the desk, with a smile. Well, why pay more when you can pay less? Rob took out a one rupee note and laid it on the desk. It was scornfully returned - so we walked away with our luggage. So much for our first experience with baksheesh, the substance that greases the wheels of Indian commerce, without which I am convinced the whole country would grind to a halt. Scot, our trip leader, told us later that baksheesh is never inappropriate; it is impossible to get in trouble in India for offering baksheesh. Not really a bribe, sort of a tip, for services everywhere baksheesh is an expected extra expense that is part of most transactions.
Taxis were lined up outside, just as at airports everywhere, and with little trouble (and not too much baksheesh) we obtained one to take us to Claridges. There were two men in front, one to drive, one (I supposed) to give advice. Driving in India is an interesting experience. Indians drive on the opposite side of the road from us, a habit they got from the British. Turn signals are never used; horns are blown instead. The lines in the road are a suggestion only, an indication of where perhaps the car ought to be at least some of the time. The imagination of Indian drivers is incredible, and they scorn being restrained by those puny little lines. Horses and carts share the road with public buses and trucks (invariably decorated with all sorts of colorfully painted designs and slogans) and taxis and private cars, all very small, as well as some interesting three-wheeled vehicles.
We were driving down a boulevard, tooting and passing and having a great time, when the car began to exhibit signs of distress and we pulled over to the side. Flat tire! And no surprise, either. The tires were almost solid patch, and the baldest things I have ever seen, Yul Brynner included. Yes, the driver providentially possessed a jack, exactly like my own truck jack, in fact. But he couldn't get it to work. Now the function of the second man became clear; he was a Mechanical Consultant. He sat down in the road with the stubborn jack and began to study it and work on it industriously. I felt as though the whole process had a hope of being resolved successfully, but not a great hope.
Things looked grim as they sweated and consulted over the jack. It was interesting watching the traffic, and being courted by empty taxis who saw an opportunity and drove by with enticing slowness in their functional vehicles, tempting us to desert our faithful two. But we stuck by our original drivers. After a while, when the novelty of being slowly broiled to well-done under a Delhi sun was beginning to pall, a military-looking gentleman stepped up and said something potent to our drivers. Somehow the jack got fixed! The tire was changed! And we were again on our way, sending up sincere prayers for the health of the tires bearing us to Claridges.
Everything went smoothly for once, and we arrived at a large and elegant establishment to be whisked inside immediately by a solicitous man from Mercury Travel who took care of our taxi and our bags and offered us all sorts of help and services. We were sweaty, filthy, overburdened with luggage and totally exhausted. I hate to speculate on what we looked like, to the elegantly attired staff of Claridges and the nicely dressed guests, as we stood there on their beautiful red carpet and contemplated the sweeping curved staircase that led to the upper regions of the hotel and - I had been fantasizing about this for hours - a bed! A bath! A regular toilet! Sure enough, after a few registration formalities, we were led away to our very own room.
Claridges is one of the nicer hotels in Delhi. Their ideal of good service appears to be patterned after English standards. My impression is that in many instances "nice" in India means "English-like". Wages in India are very low, but the better hotels charge room and food prices comparable to Western hotels, so as a result they can afford to hire a large staff. Despite a few fugitive cockroaches, peculiar banging noises in the bathroom at night and problems with the hot water, Claridges was an enjoyable place to stay. It certainly served as a buffer between the Western tourist and the realities of Indian life in the city. The hotel is located in one of the nicest sections of Delhi, near many parks, embassies and ambassadorial residences. Our room was attractive, large with extremely high ceilings, and most important of all, boiled and filtered drinking water was provided and could be drunk without fear of adverse consequences.
After all the rigors of our trip, we were exhausted, and spent most of our first day in Delhi asleep. The next day we set out to see a bit of the city. We had a primitive sort of map, and decided to walk downtown to Connaught Circle, a big shopping area. The weather was warm but not impossibly so, and aside from fending off taxis eager to serve us, we had a pleasant walk. Connaught Circle is quite a place. It is impossible for me to adequately describe the way it is laid out; circular, but made of more than one circle, with inner and outer regions of shops in each circular section. Hundreds of tradesmen have shops there, and sell all kinds of wares, from auto and bicycle parts to gems, carpets and brass. Everything is very shoddy and down-at-heel. The streets are filthy, with excrement as well as mud and discarded food. Flies swarm over the edibles sold by vendors. We saw few Westerners there.
One interesting thing about stores that we saw in India, is that they were never large. With the exception of one establishment in Srinagar, every store was about the size that one person could keep a wary eye on, to prevent shoplifting. I don't know if that is the reason for the universally small stores; perhaps it is just custom or some other reason I haven't thought of, but Rob came up with the shoplifting idea, and it makes as much sense as anything else.
We spent hours walking around the Circle and feeling amazed at all the strange sights. I guess we were too overwhelmed to buy anything. As we were about to head away from the area, we made an interesting discovery - an underground shopping mall, the Palika Bazaar. It was getting hotter, and it seemed like a good idea to head underground.
The Bazaar was a strange place, a real warren of little shops, crowded with people, full of strange smells. The shops were similar to the ones aboveground, but minus the auto parts stores; most sold "luxury" items, clothing, brass, stonework, jewelry. There was even a shop with video games, and enthusiastic players. We seemed to be the only Westerners down there. Shop owners certainly tried to encourage buyers by inviting them into shops, but it seemed to me that the people were far less pushy than shop owners I have seen in Mexico. We looked at a seemingly endless stream of beautiful brass objects, but we couldn't make up our minds to buy anything, so we surfaced again and headed back to Claridges, surfeited with strangeness for a while.
Eating at Claridges was usually interesting. I find, as I think back on India, that a really large portion of my time was spent in contemplation of some portion of my digestive system; there always seemed to be problems with either input or output. But in those first days the output difficulties had not yet begun.
The first meal we ate at Claridges was something of an accident. I read the hotel's promotional literature about itself left in our room, and decided that the bar sounded interesting, and we must go have a drink there before dinner. When we walked through the doors I thought the place didn't look much like its description, and quickly realized that I had got my directions confused, and we were in the coffee shop. We got up to leave, and the manager came over to see what was wrong. I explained that we were in the wrong place; he assured me that the coffee shop served liquor, too. I explained that we would simply prefer to have a drink in the bar; he explained that it was a Moslem Holy Day and bars were closed (implying, I suppose, that liquor could only be legally served in coffee shops?), and his insistence wore us down, I guess, because although I didn't believe him, we decided to have a drink there. We were pretty tired. After the drink we got up to leave; we had thought to have dinner in the Jade Garden, the Chinese restaurant in Claridges. The manager approached. We certainly didn't want to have dinner in the Jade Garden, he assured us. The food there was terrible! We ate in the coffee shop.
Afterwards we discovered that Friday is indeed a Holy Day, which means only that bars cannot serve beer. (I don't know the reason for that particular prohibition.) And the Jade Garden had pretty good food, although the music was terrible - many Indians seem to like a style of Western music that I can only describe as very bad, Muzak-type quasi- Rock & Roll. Played at full blast, such music can really wreak havoc with a hearing person's digestion.
We did return to the Palika Bazaar before we left Delhi, and bought several items there. We also found another shopping center near our hotel, called Khan Market. It was smaller and much less flamboyant than Connaught Circle, down some side streets and patronized exclusively (at the times we were there) by local people. We needed to purchase a respectable quantity of toilet paper before leaving on the trek, and a hotel employee assured us that the Khan Market was just the place to go. We had our seedy map, and the best directions the hotel staff could provide us with, which were terrible. It seems that map-making is not a skill in general use among the population. Or map-reading, for that matter. More than once in Delhi we tried to get directions, and found it almost impossible; people just couldn't seem to read our maps to figure out where we were in relation to where we wanted to go. To complicate things many streets seem to have more than one name, and the spelling of the names is open to widely differing interpretations. But we thought we could get to Khan Market.
Along the way we met up with a most helpful and friendly young man. As it turned out we would have arrived at the Market with the directions we had, but he insisted on accompanying us all the way just to be sure we didn't lose ourselves. He was from Kathmandu (Nepal), he explained. He asked us a lot of questions, and when we arrived at the Market he offered to sell us a few things; pottery, flowers, hashish...we declined with thanks, and went on our way. I am a suspicious person. All this friendliness out of the blue just didn't seem real to me. I figured he wanted money. Rob is a much more trusting and forthright soul than I am, and felt that the guy was just being friendly.
Because it was Sunday, many of the shops were closed, but we enjoyed looking around and buying our toilet paper. We also enjoyed reading the political posters on walls, supporting the Afghan rebels, castigating the United States for selling arms to Pakistan. Eventually we had seen all there was to see, and headed back for the hotel. Along the way, what a surprise! Our friend from Kathmandu again, just checking to see that we were O.K., not lost, not suddenly in need of something he had for sale. We were fine, almost in sight of Claridges. He suggested that instead of going right back to the hotel, we might like to see the most beautiful gardens, just down the street and around the corner...I was really beginning to grow weary of this person, and it had been perfectly obvious to me for a while what he was after, but I was determined not to give in. However I was in the company of a much nicer person than myself, so ten rupees changed hands, and we were finally free to proceed uninterrupted.
We thought that the gardens sounded like a good idea, and we found them without trouble, but by the time we got there the sky was looking black (this was the beginning of the monsoon season and hard rain was falling daily) so we decided to return to the hotel. Easier said than done! Rob felt that we could get there quicker by taking a shortcut. Untried shortcuts are a big mistake in Delhi. As the rain began to fall in earnest, we became more and more lost. I pride myself on having a good sense of direction, and Rob is no slouch, but it took about two hours and a thorough drenching before we stumbled on Claridges again.
That afternoon we met the first of the people we would be spending the next month with. Scot, our trip leader, had just arrived in town from Nepal. Also in Delhi were Ann and Mary, daughter and mother from Iowa City. They had been in India for several days, and would not stay in Delhi to meet with the rest of the group on Monday, but intended to travel immediately to Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir, the first stop on our trek. The rest of us would be joining them and a third group member, Nat, there in a few days. Scot took the four of us out to dinner on Sunday night and we sized one another up.
Scot was fifty-ish, with grizzled beard and very short hair, gruff, outspoken, friendly, built like an oak tree, and comfortably at home in that part of the world. Ann was in her early twenties, slender, dark and pretty, a medical student at Iowa State University. She had done some mountain climbing and was in good physical shape, but seemed less enthusiastic about the upcoming adventure than her mother Mary. Mary was probably somewhere in her forties, also very attractive, a moderately experienced mountaineer, brimming with enthusiasm and good cheer. She taught nursing at Iowa State. So already, though we hadn't yet met our trip doctor, we felt sure of having plenty of medical expertise along!
The next day, Monday, was the beginning of the official Mountain Travel trip package that we had all paid for. Included in the package, besides all arrangements (food, porters, mules etc.) for the trek itself, were hotel accommodations and food in towns, and the rental of vehicles for travel when it was necessary to use them. Mercury Travel picked us up at Claridges and transported us and our baggage to another hotel, the Oberoi Intercontinental, where Mountain Travel had arranged for our lodging for two nights before we were to depart from Delhi and head into the unknown.
The Oberoi is one of the most expensive hotels in Delhi, and it prides itself on elegance, fine service, and pictures of famous former guests, including political leaders, film stars, and sports figures from all over the world. The lobby was most impressive, the uniformed staff (including the elegant and traditionally attired Sikh doorman) impeccable in appearance, and the elevators (my favorite part!) were all brass and very beautiful. The Oberoi boasted a bar, five restaurants, numerous shops, a complete health spa and Olympic sized pool; so far, so good. But our room looked like it belonged in the Holiday Inn; all right, but totally lacking the high-ceilinged, spacious charm of our room at Claridges.
We found that the food at the Oberoi could be, at times, barely edible. At lunch on Tuesday Rob ordered a banana split, and I ordered Welsh Rarebit. My rarebit, when it materialized after 25 minutes, consisted of toast topped with a few tomato slices and a thin piece of anemic American cheese half-melted atop; Rob's ice cream appeared to have experienced quite a wait to enable it to accompany my rarebit to the table, and was mostly melted. The waiter was surly, and refused to wipe off the crumbs on the table left by previous diners. But, to be fair, Rob's complaint produced a veritable deluge of concerned management with complaint forms to be filled out. I suppose I would have to conclude that the Oberoi's vaunted fine service was not exactly nonexistent, but certainly sporadic.
Well, what the heck! We hadn't traveled all that way to stay in a hotel, we were there to trek. More important to us than our accommodations were our fellow trekkers, and that evening we met most of the rest of them. Colleen, a teacher from Moose Jaw, Canada, was a quiet, unassuming woman with an almost unbelievable amount of world travel under her belt. At the age of 32, on a teacher's salary, she had been just about everywhere in the world but India and China. She had taken trucks across Africa, crossed South America in flood season, seen Russia, Australia, New Zealand, exotic islands in the South Pacific, Japan, Europe - it boggled the mind! She had mostly traveled with Overland groups however; her travel agent had convinced her to try trekking, but she was having second thoughts about the strenuous exertion and amount of walking that our trek would entail. Overland tours go places in giant Bedford trucks (made in England) that carry the travelers, food, equipment, and everything from gas and spare tires to spare engine parts and axles. From what I can gather, pulling Bedfords across flooding South American rivers with winches and digging them out of deep mud in Africa is a whole lot more work than walking in the Himalayas! But Colleen was unused to hiking and nervous about it.
Jim, Wall Street Lawyer, was another of our companions. I had some doubts about Jim when I met him; he seemed too thin and quiet. Perhaps his handshake wasn't firm enough. Somehow he seemed weak to me. We quickly discovered though that he had been on a Mountain Travel trip in the same part of India a year before, and enjoyed it immensely; he was in India again because his previous trip hadn't entailed enough hiking, and because he hadn't seen hidden Zanskar. I figured when I found that out, that he must be tougher than he appeared to be. As it turned out, he certainly was tough enough, and a wonderful, good-natured, funny companion too. So much for first impressions!
Our other two new companions were The Doctors from California, Fred and Gerry. Again, first impressions proved misleading for both Rob and me. They were quite a pair; forty-ish, confident, cheerful, friendly, lighthearted, but in a way that struck me wrong. Perhaps they reminded me a bit of professional politicians. Maybe they were too aggressively Californian. I felt depressed at the thought of spending the next weeks with them; my opinion of them would change. Rob, on the other hand, thought they seemed like good guys. His opinion would also undergo a reversal. In any case, they were part of our group.
Fred was our official trip doctor. He seemed to have a background that would prepare him well for practising medicine in such a remote area; he had spent some years in rural Africa as a doctor for the Peace Corps, and he later told us that the poverty and misery he saw in Africa far surpassed anything we saw in India. Gerry was not a practising physician. He owned a chain of ambulances and I suppose was occupied with administration and spending money. They were not experienced hikers, but were in great shape from tennis, swimming and jogging.
To my chagrin, everyone seemed to be in much better shape than I was, or much more experienced, and I felt quite insecure about my ability to keep up. I decided that I would be happy to be mediocre in that regard; I didn't feel the need to be the first one to charge up every high pass, but I sure would hate to be the last one every time! But there wasn't much I could do about it at that point. I suppose we each felt some insecurity about being able to keep up with the others.
Tuesday was really the beginning of the activities planned for us by Mountain Travel. We were all to be treated to a half day of sightseeing in New and Old Delhi. Great opportunity for pictures! Alas, this day saw the beginning, for Rob and me, of the Great Digestive System Wars (between our digestive systems and, seemingly, most anything we ate in India). Rob had had a few mild bouts with diarrhea already, beginning when we were staying at Claridges, but nothing serious. I tended to ascribe the blame to excitement, or perhaps spicy food (though Rob can consume the most ferocious Szechuan cuisine in perfect comfort). But Monday night, after a tasty and interesting dinner at a vegetarian restaurant, Rob began to suffer from the trots again, and he was awake and feeling poorly most of the night. Somehow I had a sinking feeling that his problem was a more serious one than excitement. Moreover, since we ate everything together and sampled one another's food, I felt pretty sure that whatever was afflicting Rob would probably get me, too. Oh well. I went to breakfast with Fred and Gerry, our doctors, and told them that Rob was not going on the sightseeing jaunt, nor was I.
Fred had told Rob to start taking antibiotics to knock out whatever was troubling him, and after I returned to our room, I soon found cause to begin the same course of treatment myself. We didn't really have enough antibiotics with us to treat two month-long cases of whatever-it-was (we were anticipating the worst case), and we didn't know at the time that Fred could have given us more from his medical kit, so we took the opportunity to visit the drug store in the hotel, and bought an additional supply. Many drugs that require prescriptions in the U.S. can be purchased over the counter in India. I began to feel nervous about our toilet paper supply at this point however, and I snitched some additional rolls from the hotel before we left.
Because we had spent a few weeks in Switzerland before coming to India, and because Scot tends to do things at the last minute because he is so busy, we never received a letter he sent to all the trek members about additional supplies we might need. It was the rainy season in Kashmir. Our gear would be carried on mules, and by porters, and would be exposed to the elements. The ideal was to have the duffels covered with tough plastic sheets, and so they started out each morning, but winds, or trees and brush scraping the mules' sides, often pulled the plastic from its moorings. The "pony men", as the mule drivers were called, failed to see the importance of keeping the plastic on. In addition, when the duffels were unloaded, they were often tossed down just anywhere. A mule might slip and fall in a stream. It was needful for us to protect our gear with more than just a waterproof duffel, and Scot had suggested we all bring giant trash bags for lining the entire interior of our duffels; in addition, he told us to enclose all stuff sacks, and our sleeping bags, separately in smaller plastic bags. Rob and I had brought plastic bags with us of course, but not enough, and not large enough to accommodate this increased need. Plastic bags are just not to be had in Delhi! We had enough garbage bags to cover our stuff sacks and sleeping bags (double bagged), and perforce had to hope for the best.
My brand new duffel proved to be extraordinarily waterproof, and I had little trouble. Little trouble with water, I should say. Unfortunately mule urine proved more penetrating than mere water; my duffel must have landed in a suspicious puddle on more than one occasion, because most of the contents of my duffel acquired a distinctive odor by the end of the trek, an odor that caused me some passing embarrassment later, when we arrived in Great Britain. Rob's duffel, borrowed from his sister Louise, was older and not waterproof at all. Scot was kind enough to give Rob one of his large plastic bags.
At last, the long-awaited day arrived. Wednesday morning was our flight to Srinagar. We packed up all the things we were not taking on trek, to leave at the Oberoi, where we would be returning before leaving India. Scot had a portable hand-held scale, and our baggage was safely under the airline limit of 20 kg apiece. It was a very excited group that gathered in the hotel lobby, ready for departure. Because of our recent experiences in Bombay, I felt some apprehension about having to pass through another Indian airport. I needn't have worried. Mountain Travel had been paid to take care of us and show us a good time in India, and that's just what they did.
Our duffels and backpacks were loaded into taxis for us, after being checked and checked again by a suddenly tense and abrupt Scot ("Is this your duffel? Whose duffel is this? Do you have your pack? Where is your duffel? We only have five packs here, I only count five, where is the other pack?"). Well, for him it was a time of assuming responsibility for us. If we didn't have all our stuff with us now, we would soon be in places where it would be impossible for us to get more of most everything, and we'd be, at best, uncomfortable; at worst, in real difficulty. But it seemed that the counts were right after all, and we piled into our taxis for the hot drive to the airport.
My biggest worry as we left the Oberoi was my digestive system. I had eaten nothing, and felt as prepared as possible to be out of touch with a bathroom for a few hours, but surprises can always crop up in these situations. I crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best! Rob was likewise empty and medicated - and crossing his fingers too, I suspect.