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.

You just finished reading India — First Experiences And Impressions on Travel-Junkie.
Please consider leaving a comment!

All of us went back to my guest house, where the owner of my bike tried to sort out the whole mess. He thought the damage to his bike will cost about 350.000 Rp (about 30 EUR or 35 USD) to repair. There was another foreigner present, who suggested that I pay for the damage, since I can afford it, whereas the parents of the kid will most likely have a hard time coming up with that kind of cash, it being almost a month’s salary. Now, I know that’s a lot of money for an indonesian family, but I think if I would have paid it would give everybody a totally wrong picture. He’s a tourist with lot’s of money, so never mind my own responsibility.

I didn’t like the way this guy was talking to me and personally, I think he’s a wanker, to put it bluntly. He got me thinking though, and I was wondering what other travelers out there think. Is it alright as a traveler to pay for damage you did not cause, but were involved in, so that a local family in a third world country does not have an additional burden on their wallet?

You just finished reading Moral Dilemma!? on Travel-Junkie.
Please consider leaving a comment!