orcha and the train

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Well, today has been a bit of a slow day, if you can’t tell from the fact that I’m now writing my second lengthy entry of the day. I spent most of the morning waiting for Rachna to get in so that I could ask her about what I should be doing. Unfortunately at around the same time that she came in, I had already decided to call Masaum and see if he couldn’t take me to go register with the government. So at 2pm he came and we commenced that particularly thrilling journey.

Indian bureaucracy is an interesting thing. It involved making the most number of photocopies known to human existence, and I’m quite sure that each of said copies are never actually filed away, but are indeed documented as being received and then thrown on top of the old documents. I have a theory that if India was to recycle all the duplicate copies of documents it has we could continue to reuse that paper and save the rainforest. I guess that it’s the lack of computerized systems, but dear god, I had to photocopy one form five times and another form twice before handing them all in, each with a passport photo attached to them. The whole process took about forty-five minutes, during which time I had to leave to make more copies because, guess who didn’t bring enough?! (That would be me). Anyway, at the end of all of this, just I was thinking how glad I was to be rid of this particular branch of the government, when I was handed a letter, told to have it signed by the local police and then bring it back for the completion of my file. And guess what? There is more paperwork to follow. Totally and completely absurd, the whole thing.

Anyway, when I came back to the clinic we made plans to go and see the new Harry Potter movie, which Masaum had seen the night before. He confirmed that no, it didn’t have any English subtitles, so we would be watching in Hindi, but I figured that getting it on the big screen in a different language was better than not at all… besides, the movies here will be an adventure, like everything else.

But I digress into the days goings on. Where I should really begin is Saturday, because we went to Orcha, a small town a few hours away from Bhopal. We left Saturday afternoon, right after I came back from the gas/water affected communities, so we were a bit rushed. Masaum, who I sometimes feel has the unfortunate job of babysitting us, took us to the train station to make sure that we were on the right train. As many of you know, I always set my watch a few minutes ahead of the real time, in order to be on time for appointments. Although I know that there is absolutely no point in doing this here in India, old habits die hard, and I was convinced that we were cutting it far too close for the train and that we were certain to get left behind. Casey had also set her watch ahead, so the two of us were tearing ahead of everyone else and dashing to the right car of the train with Masaum. The others caught up a few minutes later wondering why the hell we had been running… at any rate, we made it there just fine. We had to take a train to Jonsi (that is an entirely phonetic spelling), and then a rickshaw to Orcha, because it doesn’t have its own train station. The train station in Jonsi was totally packed with people, and it is obviously some sort of junction because there are a million tracks, but the town is smaller than Bhopal by far (or at least I think it is). But we made it to the rickshaws, and proceeded to have the bumpiest ride of all time down a dirt road before ending up at our hotel in Orcha.

I should mention that we stayed at a place called the Sheesh Mahal, which is an ancient palace that has been partially restored into a fairly shwank (especially by Indian standards) hotel. It actually reminded me a bit of the place we stayed in Havana over Christmas last year, but not quite to that shwank factor yet. It has a bit of faded glory that I think comes with the territory of being a hotel in a developing country. But check out the photos, and you’ll see what I mean, because it is really nice – especially the spectacular view over the whole town. From one direction you look out over miles of forest, and from the other, you can see the entire town of Orcha and all of the other ancient ruins of temples, burial grounds and whatnot. It also had hot water, which we do not have here at the clinic. So you can see why I was impressed. The food was so-so, but we were entertained by live music and dance (who we later decided was a man in drag, but she had a duppta over her face so we couldn’t really tell).

We had an early night of it, and slept in air-conditioned bliss. Although both Casey, who I was sharing a room with, and myself found that we kept waking up in the middle of the night. My theory is that we were just too comfortable on our soft beds and in the cool, non-humid air, to sleep. Hahaha! At any rate, we both woke up early in order to meet two other girls downstairs for breakfast. Completely by coincidence, we had run into two girls traveling around India at our hotel the evening before. It turns out that they both go to Stanford, where Anisha, Joe and Casey all go to school, and Casey actually know both of them by sight if not name! So we had breakfast with them and the rest of our group, and then headed out to check out the rest or the palace. It turned out that only a small portion had been converted into a hotel, and that the vast majority of the palace was still in a state of total disrepair. It seemed that the MP tourist board (who owns the hotel) had gotten as far as repairing things like stairs, so that you could climb around to the different levels of the palace, but that was about it. A lot of it seemed to be gradually crumbling away, despite some rather abandoned looking efforts to preserve it. Joe noted that the entire of India appears to be constantly undergoing some sort or repair at all times, which I think is certainly true.

After that we went into the town and found the gigantic temple, which was equally as high as the palace/hotel. The funny thing about the temple was that once you climbed about a million stairs up to the top and you were inside this absolutely massive dome thing, the actually part where you go to pray was about a ten by ten space carved out of the wall! I almost couldn’t believe it! This huge building, and then the spot to worship was so tiny. Anyway, the inside of the temple was a little underwhelming, so after watching a bunch of swallows swoop in and out chasing each other for a while, we went back outside. It was already starting to get really hot out, and it was only about 11am. We went back to the hotel to check out, and then I decided that I needed to just hang out for a little while. So I found a cool spot in one of the old palace buildings and waited with Genevieve and Juliet for the others to finish exploring. While we waiting we attracted the attention of the friendliest street mutt I have yet to encounter (which despite my protestations, Juliet let lick her hand), a small Indian girl who may or may not have been begging, and a group of three or four leering young men who stared so hard at us that you would think that their eyes might pop out of their heads. I wished that I could remember the phrase that Mel used that means "Do you stare at your mother like that?"...

When we finally left I gave the men a nasty look, which was completely ignored on their part, and then walked along the river to another temple thingie. In the photos, this is the one with the vultures living in it. I’ll have to get Dan so send me Photoshop though, because you can barely see them with my weak zoom lens, but they were huge birds and they kept swooping around all over the place, and at first we thought that they were some sort of hawk.

After that the heat of the day really got to me and I just went into a shop for about half an hour and looked at a bunch of different things. I ended up getting this little wall covering thing with two elephants embroidered onto it. After that everyone who had split up regrouped for dinner at a local place, which was better than the hotel for food, but not spectacular. After that we decided to wait in the hotel lobby until it was time for our ten o’clock train. It was really hot out the entire day, so the hotel was about the coolest place we could find to sit, even thought it wasn’t AC, but at least they had a bunch of fans.

We made the bumpy ride back to the train station with time to spare, because we were worried about how long the drive would take after dark (the answer to that is actually less time, not more because there’s no traffic on the roads). So we were stuck waiting at the train station for about an hour. That hour got me more than comfortably acquainted with India’s rail system. It became obvious why there are so many different classes of tickets that you can buy, because there are noticeable differences in the way the cars are set up. The cheapest ticket you can buy does not guarantee you a seat. There are some wooden benches on the inside of the cars, and the windows are just metal slats, which, at stations, people stick their arms out of so that they can have their water bottles filled by these huge hoses that are set up next to the track. Some of the more crowded cars just had people hanging off of the doors to stay on. To be quite honest, a childhood of holocaust books made the whole scene uncomfortable in an acute way, since these cars looked just a bit too much like cattle cars. The station itself brought a whole new meaning to the word "dirt". There were people, entire families, everywhere just sleeping on the platform, who set up cam outside the station and were cooking and snoring away. Rats fought over the piles of garbage that people throw out of the windows of the train, and stray dogs and cows rummaged around on the tracks for things to eat. The entire station absolutely reeked of urine.

When our own train finally did arrive, it was about half an hour late and about thirty cars long. We had to run past all of the other cars to get to ours, which was three-tier sleeper AC. I was worried that the train was going to take off while we were running down the platform, but we finally found the right car and hopped on…only to discover that there were no free bunks, save a few which we were told were taken by the two men sitting up in them. We found someone who worked on the train, who promptly told us that we were on the waiting list, and that we didn’t have seats. Ack! Panic!! There was NO WAY I was going to spend the night in the hot, crowded, filthy train station in Jansi, so I decided that no matter what, we would just refuse to get off the train, and pay whatever bribes were necessary… We were told by the rail employee to go and sit in two-tier sleeper AC (actually a step up in price and comfort), to wait for the ticket collector to sort us out. We were worried that they were going to throw us all off the train despite the fact that we had all paid in full for our seats. When the conductor came by, he told us that two of us were not on the waiting list, and had seats in three-tier, and that the other three were on the waiting list. So the three on the waiting list would have to pay and extra Rs. 200 in order t stay in the nicer car. Whether this was a bribe or not, I can’t say, I’m just glad that we didn’t get stuck in Jansi!!! Casey and I went back to the empty bunks that the men had claimed were theirs (and were actually ours) and had a fairly restful trip. It’s actually quite nice to be able to lie down on the train and sleep on and off.

We arrived back in Bhopal at about 3am, and took rickshaws down the deserted streets back to Sambhavna. I’ve never (and probably never will again) seen the streets in Bhopal so deserted. The shops are open ‘till about ten here, so there are always people out and about, long after things are quiet in North America (with the exception of bars that is, because there are none here). It was a funny feeling of relief at being back at Sambhavna though, because it really did feel like getting back home after a long day. So I think that is good… at any rate, its now 8:30pm, and I’d like to post this before dinner.