An Idiot Abroad - First Travels in India

So I'm in India. In Calicut, Kerala, to be precise, and the getting here was anything but straightforward. Before I hopped over the ocean from Bangkok to Chennai, fellow traveler folk kept saying the same things about India to me over and over again, focusing on the relative difficulty of travelling in such an outrageously big, unregulated and poorly infrastructured 'country'. It is staggering that a landmass this huge and varied can get by with just one central government and that everybody takes its authority seriously! How can they possibly govern? Small is beautiful, they say, and something this massive is just plain daft, any notions of government fundamentally unfit for purpose.

Anyway, comments from friends and fellow teachers in Bhutan, along with the general banter that you hear 'on the road', made me question whether or not I really wanted to do this - travel in India, a place of caste systems and dowries, of commonplace and 'acceptable' destitution, where the ratio of men to women is 10:1 (I have been told this twice but haven't checked it out), and where the hottest news stories all seem to focus around the rapes that are purportedly commonplace. I'd seen evidence of most of this on forays over the border from Bhutan, but I'd also seen the colour, the vibrancy and felt the buzzy energy that people get hooked on. It was time to have a go, I decided, and besides, one of the Canadian teachers from Bhutan is currently studying Ayervedic massage in Kannur and needs 'models' to practice on. Off I verily went...

Chennai was big and dusty and looked exactly the same as Jaigon, the border town with Bhutan, only bigger. The same mounds of festering rubbish filled the streets, the air was a cloying fug of exhaust fumes and food, everybody seemed to be busy buying or selling something with furrowed brows. But nobody hassled me at all. I took a 3 hour walk around the city and not one person approached me. The next day, it took only 20 minutes of the 45 autorickshaw drive to the bus station for my eyes to start stinging from the pollution. Happy to leave Chennai behind, I boarded an Aircon sleeper bus at 8pm for Kodaikanal, a mountain retreat town where the temperature would be lower and the pollution less!

I had hoped to sleep. I didn't. Every time the bus lurched around a corner I nearly fell out of the narrow bunk, and with my backpack wedged in at the foot of the bed, I couldn't properly stretch out. I ended up watching Amelie on my laptop and then catching a few hours kip before arriving at 5am in the refreshingly cold air of Kodai.

Three days later, I left Kodai for Calicut, but this is where the idiot in me found ascendency. To be fair, regular injections of lies and misinformation by Indians didn't help. Trains are hard to book in India. For one thing, they're always full because there's simply too many people here. For another, you can't book them online if you don't have contact details in India. Thirdly, you have to know where your train came from and where its final destination is in order to book a segment of its route. I decided to put my fate on this first occasion in the hands of a booking agency. They told me the trains were all full, but noted that the third class air con sleeper carriage only had one person on the waiting list.

'What happens if the waiting list doesn't clear?'

'You will be accommodated – 101% sure.'

He told me that a waiting list of 1 would usually clear, and I saw that in other classes, there were waiting lists of up to 50, so it seemed reasonable. He told me that if it didn't clear, then seats are always held back in different classes for emergencies, and that even more seats were held back for idiots abroad. I had 3 chances, hence his 101% surety.

The first stage of the travel was a 3 hour public bus to Pakapal (or similar) at 12pm, followed by a 2 hour bus to Coimbature, where the train to Calicut would be waiting. At 11:30am I was still in the post office waiting (reasons of delay: unknown) to send a parcel of wooden toys for my nephew. Priorities David!!! It was in this post office with the clock ticking that I realised I didn't have the pen drive with my friend's contact details on. I walked briskly back to the internet cafe where the agency was and, lo and behold, it was still there. Phewee – an early reprieve for the idiot. I took a motorbike taxi back, hurled the parcel into the international parcel-shifting leviathon and then jumped onto my bus for a 3 hour bounce down to the plains.

Pakapal. As I disembarked, the bus driver called me back. I'd left my Nalgene water bottle and fancy karabiner on the bus. Thanks!!! Idiot reprieve number 2. I found the connect and had 50mins to wait, so I wedged my big pack in behind some seats on the bus and indulged in a chai in a nearby stall that gave me a good view of the bus and my bag that was sequestered therein. Then the bus started moving. People started piling in. The bus was leaving. I leapt from my chair and bolted out across the tarmac, leaving behind a half-drunk chai... and my Nalgene bottle... AGAIN. Only this time I had no way of getting it back. Idiot abroad; Nalgene bottle lost forever. Irritating misinformation: that was not 50mins at all! It was less than 10.

Coimbature. I had to get across town to the train station and a couple of policemen kindly told me the way. I made my way through the backstreets in the darkening twilight, cursing the bottle of wine and the chocolates I'd brought from Bangkok as a gift to my friend in Calicut. I hate travelling with a big bag, the immobility, the sweatiness and the spectacle of it. It was dark when I reached the train station. I made my way to the information kiosk:

'I have this ticket. Is it okay?'

She checked a computer, smiling. Then she scribbled something on the paper I'd given her and the smile vanished.

'WL3'

Which meant – Waiting List: 3. There had only been 1 there when I bought it! But no, she told me, there had been 5. It was there clearly enough on the ticket if you knew where to look and could understand the code: WL5. In the time it had taken the booking agent in Kodai to march across town and book the ticket, 4 more people had jumped the queue ahead of me, a fact that the booking agent had made no reference to whatsoever. I wonder how this would have affected his 101% surety? It didn't escape my notice that 5 going down to 3 was the same as 2 going down to zero – that I would have been on the train had the waiting list information I'd booked with been correct. The information woman directed me to the booking kiosks. Off I trundled.

When I finally reached the front of the line, sweaty and heavy, I handed my ticket over and asked the same question:

'I have this ticket. Is it okay?'

He asked for 60 Rupee. I gave it to him. Best not to quibble.

'This ticket... It's okay?'

'Yes.'

'It is valid?'

'Yes.'

Irritating misinformation. Outright lie.

On the platform I asked around and two security guards told me to stick with them, that they'd help me. When the train came they ushered me onto the 3^rd class AC and told me to wait until the ticket man came – he would accommodate me. But the ticket man was a busy individual, and, to my chagrin, the grumpiest man I've thus far met abroad. After waiting for nearly 15 mins I pushed gently through a small crowd of refuge seeking kow-towers and proffered my ticket.

After a summary glance:

'No chance.'

'What?'

'No chance. No vacancy.'

'Well, what do I do?'

'No vacancy. Go away.'

So I did. With no where else to go, I sat by a bin/sink combo at the end of the carriage and read some of Rupert Sheldrake's book about the failings of science to see through its own axiomatic dogma and take itself seriously. It's a credit to Rupert that I was so easily distracted from stink of the bin and the dollop of curry 3 inches from my feet that seemed to move when you didn't look at it, freeze when you did.

All of a sudden the security guards were looming over me with expressions of confusion. At the precise moment I looked up, the ticket man came through the other door, and there we all were, players in a dumb farce all staring at each other.

'I have no idea where to go or what to do.' I said. Honesty seemed the best policy.

'You can't stay here. You must go.' The grumpy ticket man replied.

The chief security guard laid his hand on the ticket man's arm, but there was no shifting him.

'You must go to general class.'

'Where is it?'

'All the way down. Just keep going.'

General class. It sounded ominous. I picked up my stupidly big bag and started walking the length of the train. For anyone who has never seen the trains of India, they stretch from one end of the galaxy to the other at least, if not further. Some scientists, unable to measure them using the tools available at the time, mistakenly ascribed to them the quality of being infinite. And like everywhere else in India, they are rammed with people, with corridors narrow enough to permit the movement of one person at a time. I donned my finest and most polite Englishman-abroad voice and I do beg your pardoned myself all the way down the train. Everybody was very nice to me.

Pushing through a throng of people I came to a dead end. Where is general class? I was told that it was sectioned off, that you can only get there by getting off the train and walking down the platform. My fears about general class were compounded; it was isolated from the rest of the train.

In the little crannie where the door would have been to the next compartment, I spied a space, the only one I'd seen that was big enough to accommodate me and my bags. I pushed my way through and put my big bag up against one wall. Against the other, I put my small bag, and then, with ass on big bag and feet on small, I wedged myself in and closed my eyes. The air was full of filth. I was sitting next to two toilets. Every time a door opened, a cloud of human waste gas came spilling out to surround me. Why? I thought to myself. Why do people do this?

At the next station I jumped off and walked down the platform, but where General Class was supposed to be, I found what could well be described as a Final Solution transport carriage, except it had windows. People were crammed in standing, as packed as a tube in King's Cross at rush hour, spilling out. There was no way I'd be able to get myself and my bags on. My only other option was the toilet-jam, or finding somewhere else illegal to be on the train, with the likelihood of being shifted again or booted off. Just then a chap I recognised from the throng by the toilet doors approached me and told me he was taking a bus, that he hadn't got a ticket at all and was thus being booted ashore. His destination was the same as mine.

'How long will it take?'

'3 hours.'

Irritating misinformation. It would take 6 hours. I didn't know this. I decided to trust him and off we went on an autorickshaw across town to a bus stand. I still do not even know the name of the place. Thus began an unexpected 6 hour ordeal through the night. It was 11pm. I'd left at 12 noon. I wouldn't arrive at Calicut until 4am, but there my worries would not end. As soon as I boarded this bus I dug out the pen drive to get my friend's phone number, and it was then that I realised the biggest mistake had been kept from me until the end... she wasn't even in Calicut. She lived in a town called Kannur, another hour's bus journey from Calicut. The scale of my idiocy was immense. I finally knocked on her door at 5:30 am, exhausted and desperate for good sleep.

My first two journeys in India were both, in their own ways, pretty rubbish. I made enough mistakes along the way to be held responsible but I was also continually led astray by this strange culture of giving advice when the giver has none to give, or of giving wrong information for reasons I can't quite fathom.

Kannur is a good reward and a great place to recover for such a strange journey. The people here are laid back and the massages are free and plentiful. I get unctions shoved up my nostrils that burn down to my neck and make me cough up 'kapha'. I swim beneath a full moon in the Arabian Sea. There's still rubbish strewn everywhere, along the beach, piled up beneath cliffs, as if living in paradise is just too much for people to bear and they feel compelled to spoil it by soiling it. Oh, and the beach is longer than an Indian train.