As you might know, I have flown to India maybe a week ago and a lot has happened in those few days. It has been an explo­sion of new impres­sions, smells and experiences.

I flew into Trichy on one of the brand new Air Asia con­nec­tions from Kuala Lum­pur. Not hav­ing slept the night before (I had to get a bus to the air­port at 4 am, so I had checked out already the day before), I could hardly keep my eyes open when I arrived at the Indian immig­ra­tion desk. There I was met with the ques­tion, delivered in a thick, hard to under­stand Indian accent, if this was really my pass­port or if it was even a pass­port at all. Gran­ted, it looks a bit rough and bent hav­ing got­ten wet a couple of times, but it was def­in­itely my pass­port. The immig­ra­tion officer got a mate over and they talked for a couple minutes flip­ping incred­u­lous through the pages of my pass­port. Then I got the arrival stamp and was told to get new travel documents.

Out­side the air­port I met Yuta, a Japan­ese back­packer, and we decided to give the auto rick­shaws a miss and get the bus to town, which at first looked like a great cheap option, but soon turned out to be rather dan­ger­ous. Try­ing to squeeze onto a bus with our ruck­sacks when you have a tide of Indi­ans try­ing to get off and an equal amount of Indi­ans try­ing to board the bus at the same time, isn’t my idea of fun. When the bus then takes off without wait­ing for every­body to get on or off it becomes quite chal­len­ging, but in the end we managed.

The next day Yuta and I spent roam­ing the city, vis­it­ing a few temples and a fam­ous fort up on a hill in the oth­er­wise com­pletely flat city. Appar­ently the hill con­sists of some of the old­est rocks in the world, some 3.800 mil­lion years old. At the same time it prob­ably boasts the largest amount of beg­gars ever seen in one place. Those beg­gars only seem to give up when they real­ize that we were faster than them (I never give money to beg­gars, but that is stuff for another post).

It also seems that Indi­ans have a com­puls­ory need to wash their hands at every oppor­tun­ity they get (at least in Trichy), which seems to be at odds with their envir­on­ment­ally chal­len­ging rub­bish beha­viour. Rub­bish it seems gets dis­carded wherever you are as soon as it becomes rub­bish. I have seen a lot of dirty places on my travels, but India tops them all. The sides of roads are covered with wrap­pings, plastic bags and everything else that shouldn’t be thrown out of a car or bus win­dow. The smell of urine keeps fol­low­ing me around. Every once in a while I get a really good sniff of it. At the begin­ning I found this quite dis­gust­ing (and I still do), but it’s always fas­cin­at­ing just how fast you can get used to cer­tain things and then stop think­ing about them.

After Trichy I took a bus to Pon­di­ch­erry and walked from there to Auroville. This appar­ently is an inter­na­tional uto­pian city. I’ve never really felt com­fort­able with any­thing but ideas being uto­pian, but the place itself is pleas­ant enough. You can feel the leg­acy of the french colo­nial times here. Police­man wear red hats that look dis­tinctly french, the streets are more aven­ues than nor­mal roads and there is some fine colo­nial archi­tec­ture around. All in all a nice place to while away a few weeks if not for the pseudo-spiritual atmo­sphere, but that is just me. Many trav­el­lers come here to visit the fam­ous Sri Auro­bindo Ashram to med­it­ate and learn Yoga, but since I’m not a very spir­itual per­son it was time to move on to more rational places.

I decided to go to Goa and maybe stay there for a while. I took a bus up to Chen­nai, stayed the night and took another bus to Ban­galore the fol­low­ing day. Arriv­ing there at around 10 pm I decided to take a night bus straight to Goa. It was around 4 am when our driver fell asleep (that’s my explan­a­tion any­way) and drove us and the bus straight into the back of a slow lorry. Glass exploded every­where and the smell of burn­ing rub­ber was over­power­ing, but the driver got things under con­trol and man­aged to stop the bus. The bus then slowly filled with black acrid smoke from oil burn­ing on the hot engine. Every­body was told to leave their belong­ings and get out of the bus. I was in one of the back rows, so I had time to get my back­pack and waited to leave the bus when sud­denly all the people out­side star­ted to push their way back inside to get their bags out. Appar­ently they thought the bus was on fire, which it wasn’t, but all the con­fu­sion soon turned into full blown panic. If there would have been a fire, my only chance would have been jump­ing through a win­dow I guess. After every­body got off safely we waited for an hour or so until we found another bus to con­tinue our journey.

All in all it took me 36 hours to get from Chen­nai to Goa and we had some more prob­lems on the way, like blown tires, sore backs and stuck buses, but if you’re won­der­ing if this exper­i­ence made me any more spir­itual then the answer is a def­in­ite no.

To sum it all up in just one sen­tence: India so far is charm­ingly fas­cin­at­ing and won­der­fully chaotic and I’m look­ing for­ward to more time here.