Forence

The sun is shining, the air is cool, they are selling piles of cheap clothes in Piazza Santa Spirito and the tourists are sitting on the steps of the church as usual.

I bought some vegetables to make a salad (something I haven't had for three and a half months) from the contadina in the piazza, who assures me that everything she sells is absolutely exquisite. I just hope she doesn't used pesticides.

The train journey from Roma to Florence was a reminder of just how beautiful the Italian countryside is, even when the trees are bare, at the end of the winter. Gentle wooded hills, rolling green fields, olive groves and cypress trees, ancient hill top towns all passed by the windows of the train, as the sun went down and the clouds turned pink.

Bhimbetka

Ancient cave paintings at Bhimbetka

Passport nightmare

When I arrived at the government hotel on the road to Bimbetka, I discovered that my passport was still in the guest house at Sanchi. I realised that the guest house keeper had taken it to photocopy it, although I protested that I would forget it, and he had not given it back to me. I panicked, and said that I would have to return to Sanchi immediately to retrieve it, though I was not at all sure how I would get there, since it was already dark and it had taken me five hours to get from Sanchi to Bimbetka. The hotel manager said “Don’t worry, we will try to get your passport back,” and phoned to the government hotel in Sanchi, asking them to go to the guest house where I had stayed the night before and see whether they had my passport. Then he phoned the guest house and demanded that they bring my passport to Bimbetka, but they made lots of excuses about the darkness and the difficulty of driving a motorbike at night and the distance. “Do you want to go to the police station?” the manager asked. I did not hesitate. And so I sat on the back of a motor scooter, driven by Tiwari, one of the employees of the hotel, along the dark and dangerous road, oncoming traffic blinding us, lorries blaring their claxons and more than once driving us off the road, through clouds of thick dust, for six kilometres to the police station in Abdulla Ganj.

The local police seemed most disinterested in my plight, so my brave knight in shining armour demanded to speak to the chief of the police for the whole area. I don’t know what he said to him, but he spoke long and emphatically on his mobile phone, with the result that the police chief telephoned the police in Sanchi, who went to the guest house, retrieved my passport and promised to deliver it to the police station in Abdulla Ganj by the first train the next day.

On our return to the hotel in Bimbetka the hotel manager told me that he was on very good terms with the chief of the police, who was prepared to do this for him.

I’m paying £16 for this hotel room, way more than I usually pay, but the staff have been wonderful. Tiwari brought me my passport next day at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, his hair standing on end from the scooter ride to the police station. I gave him 200 rupees for his trouble. He brought me a complimentary drink and said I could stay in the room until five free of charge.

The name of the hotel is MPTDC Highway Treat

Bookings  www.mptourism.com

Bhimbetka

I was alone in a wild and barren landscape of black boulders and contorted, leafless trees as I walked along the road to the famous cave paintings. A few birds were timidly twittering and I could hear the distant rumble of incessant trains. The first paintings I came across had been defaced. I walked on another km or two. There was a barbed wire fence beside the road, presumably to protect the cave paintings. I saw a white number painted onto a rock, found a hole in the fence, went through and climbed through the tangled branches of the bushes and trees, over rocks to the numbered rock underhang, where I found four ochre streaks on the rock, presumably standing men, with no discernible arms or legs. Back on the road I walked another kilometre or so and came to a little hut, where the park guard lives. He gave me a map and pointed to a path leading to some high rock formations, towering behind the trees.

On top of the hill there is a chain of dissected vertical tors of sandstone of the Vindhyan super group, one of the oldest geological formations. Some of the tors, the eroded remnants of a continuous mass, are 20 metres high. There are 750 caves in the tors and 500 of them have paintings in them. The site was inhabited 100,000 years ago and the paintings date from the lower Palaeolithic, 40,000 years ago, until the mediaeval period. Archaeologists have found paintings of humans hunting, riding, dancing and fighting. They were painted with minerals of red, green, ochre and white. Bhimbetka, which rises 600m above sea level and 100m above the surrounding plain, is one of the earliest cradles of cognitive human evolution.

The path I followed leads to just 13 rock shelters, a few of which have paintings. The first paintings I came to along this path were in a high cave, where pigeons cooed and fluttered in and out of holes near the roof. The paintings were in red ochre. Many of the other rock paintings have been spoilt by water infiltration, including the famous painting of a boar which had been obliterated, leaving a red smudge on the rock. But one cave had superb paintings on it. This was the so-called zoo rock, which is covered with a profusion of animals, 252 in total, of many different species. There are ten layers of superimposed figures, mostly from the Chalcolithic and historic periods and in the lower part of the rock there is a royal procession, painted in red ochre, with horsemen and warriors with long hair and head dresses. I was struck by the teeming animal life shown in this rock painting, which contrasts so strongly with the lifeless landscape today, clumps of soft copper coloured dead grass between trees that look as if they cannot find the strength to put forth leaves until the rainy season, not an animal in sight and the few birds brave enough to endure this environment barely uttering a faint twitter.

Sanchi

Journey to  Sanchi

I caught the wonderful Shatabadi express train from Jansi to Bhopal. In the air conditioned carriages waiters serve lunch to all the passengers: tomato soup, followed by rice, dhal, chapattis and pickle. There was also curd, butter and ice cream, which I didn’t eat. The food is included in the price of the ticket (£4 in my case – for a three hour journey without stops. I think I travelled 400km.

The next part of the journey was in complete contrast. I got down into the hot station at Bhopal and went to see whether I could catch a train to Sanchi, 40 km from Bhopal. Yes I could, an official told me, and the booking office was this way. So I queued up and waited, only to be told by the ticket salesman “No ticket to Sanchi”. Luckily a man in the queue came to my rescue. He took me back to another railway official, who told him, in Hindi, that I had to stand in a different queue for tickets for local trains.

When the train stopped the crowd rushed the doors, completely blocking them for the passengers trying to get out. Eventually they left a tiny gap for alighting passengers to squeeze through, but when they had all managed to get off I was pushed, shoved, bruised and carried forward towards the door of the train. As I climbed up the steps with my backpack on my back people tried to squeeze past me on both sides. My back pack stuck in the door, blocked by the people trying  to squeeze past. I could not move. I screamed at the top of my voice until someone moved an inch and I was released, and landed in the train corridor, which was packed. More and more people squeezed in, the last two sitting on the steps leading up to the open doorway. The train started and now, suddenly, all those people, who would have killed me and each other to get in first, became most solicitous, letting me know that Sanchi was the first stop, that the platform was on the left hand side and offering me a seat on half of the Sadhu’s luggage, which was stuffed into the corner behind the toilet. “No thank you” I indicated “I prefer to be near the door, for a quick exit, before my way out is blocked by manic people trying to get in.” All conveyed by signs. At Sanchi they lifted my backpack over their heads to the exit, as I squeezed myself out onto the platform, and cheerily waved me goodbye.

I wanted to walk up the hill to the stupa that evening but my way was blocked by an officious little man, who let all the Indians through but demanded I buy a ticket. The ticket booth was shut. I walked up an alternative road, paved with enormous stones, until I came to a hole in the fence, where some villagers told me to go through. By the time I reached the top it was too dark to see the stupa, but it was peaceful looking down on the dusty plains, lights dotted about in the villages round the hill. I could hear a TV, presumably of the guardian of the stupa. Happy to have avoided staying in the big city of Bhopal  for one night, I went back to my guest house, very tired, and despite the continuous goods trains rushing through the station, blowing their piercing whistles all night, I slept.

Sanchi

The two thousand year old Buddhist stupa at Sanchi, on top of a rounded hill, was built by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who embraced Buddhism as a penance for his misdeeds. He built it in 262 BC to house some relics of the Buddha. In the first century BC four stone gateways were added, built out of beautiful soft golden sandstone. The gateways were carved from top to bottom on all four sides with scenes from the Buddha’s life, scenes from the Jataka tales and the tree of Manushi, which represents the Buddha. This sheds new light on ancient tree worship, which Buddhism incorporated into its earliest form. On one of the gates animals all look up to a Manushi tree, as if worshipping it. On another gate the Buddha  is represented by lotus flowers and on yet another by the wheel of life. Nowhere on these gates is Buddha depicted as human. It was not until seven centuries later that stone statues of Buddha were installed.

In 1818 Captain Johnson opened up the stupa from top to bottom on one side, seeking treasure. The western gateway and part of the enclosed balustrades collapsed. Other British treasure seekers excavated the second and third stupa and found caskets of relics within. They caused an immense amount of damage. Then in 1880 John Marshall, director General of Archeology in India, cleared the jungle that had grown up around the stupas and repaired them.

The day before 200 Sri Lankan pilgrims visited the stupa and completely filled the Sri Lankan Pilgrim Hostel, where I would have stayed if it had not been full. But on the day I visited it, it was peaceful and I had only a few Indian tourists and chirruping birds for company.

The stupa is impressive because it is so old, but the stone gateways, a thousand years older than the temples at Khajuraho, are so intricately and beautifully carved and so well preserved that I am left gazing at them in wonder.

I sit on each of the benches under the thick, shady trees, in turn, to marvel at the carved gateways. Behind the stupa are the ruins of a Buddhist monastery that looks down on the golden wheat fields, dotted with dark green trees, on the plains below, the hills in the distance showing vaguely through the dust. Did the monks enjoy the sweet perfume of the frangipani tree, like the one standing by the monastery wall today?

the internet connection here is so rubbish that it won't let me upload any more pictures!!!

Orchha

Train from Khajuraho to Orchha

I caught the express train to Jhansi, travelling in an almost empty air conditioned carriage, where I met an Indian tour guide, who took groups of Germans round Rajasthan, staying in palaces and five star hotels. “This is not a job you can do forever” he said. “Ten years is about the limit.” The train was not supposed to stop at Orchha station, but the signal was down, so we drifted slowly through the station, coming to a stop outside it. I grabbed my luggage and climbed down onto the sharp stones beside the track and walked under the beating sun, along the side of the track until I came to the road, where I jumped into a shared rickshaw, heading towards Orchha. I was so happy that I didn’t have to make my way back from Jhansi.

Orchha, enchanted town with its palaces and temples, its conical pointed towers pointing skywards, its clean streets and colourful markets lies, like Varanasi, on the banks of one side of the river Betwa. But unlike Varanasi, it is small, clean and relatively uncrowded. Founded in the sixteenth century by the Bundela Rajput chieftain, Rudra Pratap, subsequent Bundela leaders built its fabulous palaces and temples.  On the other side of the wide river, across an old stone bridge, is the entrance to one of India’s national parks, a dusty forest, from where you have a fabulous view of the spires of Orchha and the steep steps leading down to the river.

The Bundelas were Hindu local chieftains, serving under the great Mughal Muslim rule. The Mughals were inclined, at that time, to knock down the palaces and temples of the local chieftains, so the canny Bundelas built a palace within their fort to give as a gift to their Mughal ruler. He graciously came to stay for one night, never to return. But the Bundelas of Orchha were, from that day, left in peace and allowed to rule their little kingdom with complete autonomy. There was, however, one occasion when a Mughal ruler made an unreasonable demand. He sent for the paramour of Raja Indramani, the beautiful poetess and musician, Rai Praveen Mahal, just because he had seen her and desired her. She was taken to him, but so impressed him with the purity of her love for Indramani that he sent her back to him. Her palace is a small, two storied brick building, surrounded by a garden with trees and flowerbeds. It was looking a little the worse for wear when I looked down on it from the fort, the flower beds dried up and bare, half the trees no longer there and the fountains no longer flowing.

A road lined with brilliant fuchsia, golden and scarlet bougainvillea and shady trees leads to a group of cenotaphs, with their conical pointed spires, in a formal garden by the river. Another road leading out of town to the west leads to the Laxmani palace, now used as a temple. Beautiful paintings on the ceilings in natural colours show scenes from the Hindu scriptures and floral designs reminiscent of Mughal paintings.

Khadjuraho

                                                                                                           

The Chandelas rose to power in early tenth century and built 85 temples at Khajuraho, some of them round a lake. In the fifteenth century they were abandoned, many destroyed by the Muslims and of those that remained many of the sculptures were defaced. Trees grew up and soon all the temples were hidden under a thick blanket of vegetation, until the eighteenth century, when an English man, out hunting, discovered the ruins of the remaining temples. The jungle was cleared away and the temples restored painstakingly. Plain sandstone was used to replace carved sandstone, where it was missing and every inch of the outside of the old parts of the temples are now being scrubbed with toothbrushes.

The main temple complex is in a big park, in the small town, which seems to consist mainly of hotels, restaurants and internet places.  Between the temples are expanses of carefully watered lawns and big old trees. It is strictly forbidden to walk on the lawns. The rest of the temples are dotted around the countryside amongst villages of mud brick houses with tiled roofs, hump backed hills and rock forms, trees, buffaloes and wild boar that snuffle in the dust. Hoards of children and young men pester the tourists in the countryside but not in the park.

I met a delightful couple from Calcutta. He was a web designer and she an English teacher, well travelled, erudite and cultured, old school Indian middle class, quiet and decent, unlike the modern brash middle classes of today. We talked of Bengali film, poetry and literature and they told me that the golden age of Bengali culture was a little tarnished now.

Every inch of the tall, pointed sandstone temples was originally carved, with sculptures of leaves and vegetation, men and women, warriors, elephants, horses, acrobats, dancers, nymphs and, of course, the famous erotic sculptures. But there are erotic sculptures on temples all over India. I have photographed many of them in Karnataka, where no one took any notice of them at all. It seems that the tourist industry has chosen to focus on Khajuraho, where young Indian men like to sidle up to tourist women and point out the many ‘different positions.’

Khajuraho is very dusty. The roads are narrow and when two vehicles meet, each one has to put two wheels on the dirt track on either side of the paved road, stirring up clouds of dust. In the villages there are only beaten tracks and the fine, soft Indian dust is constantly lifted up by passing traffic taking the tourists to see the outlying temples.  

Varanasi

Ancient crumbling city of narrow, winding streets, covered with strata of cow dung, older dung dried out and squashed flat by passing traffic, fresh cow pats lying wetly, waiting for you to put your foot  in them. Piles of rubbish line the streets, piled into corners, sometimes heaped up in the middle of the street. Trees grow out of some of the old, abandoned houses, roots dangling down to the street.

There are two burning ghats by the river, one strictly for Hindus and one for anyone who can pay. A man standing near the burning ghat-for-anyone-who-can-pay tells me that I must move away because only men can attend the burning ceremony. This, he tells me is because women are emotionally weak and they cry, and it is important that the dead person should not be disturbed by crying, because this might interfere with their journey to Nirvana. The second reason why women are not allowed to attend the cremations is because if they did they might throw themselves on their husband’s burning pyre. The burning pyres didn’t look big enough to me for anyone to throw themselves onto and in any case the wood was carefully stacked in a neat pile and it would collapse if a woman threw herself on top of it. I asked how old the man was who died. “Old” he said “very old. About 60 or 70.”

Boats loaded with pilgrims, the women dressed in brightly coloured saris, pass by on their way up and down the river, some stopping opposite the burning ghat. The man talking to me told me that this was his family’s burning ghat and that when the burning was finished if any parts of the body had not been consumed by the fire they were thrown in the river for the fishes to eat, thus keeping  the circle of reincarnation intact. The ashes from each cremation were piled in a huge heap and early each morning he and his father sifted them to look for gold jewellery, which they sold. He said that they used this money to pay for the wood needed to cremate people who were too poor to pay for the wood themselves. He also pointed out the electric crematorium, where poor people could be cremated for a fraction of the cost of a proper cremation in the burning ghat. (so why would he need to finance a burning ghat cremation for poor people if he could just pay for them to go to the crematorium?) Anyway the crematorium had broken down. Sadhus, lepers and children are not cremated because they do not need to be purified by fire. They are pure enough already. So they are lashed to a large stone and dropped into the deepest part of the river.

After this introduction to how he was gaining good karma by helping the poor (sounded to me  as if his family were onto a winner owning a burning ghat) he told me that there was a silk factory near by, the profits of which went to help the poor pay (yes you've guessed it) for wood f or the poor to cremate their dead. He took me there and told me that I must buy presents for my daughter. I did buy some shawls, but only because they were made from banana tree fibre and I have never seen this before.

That was the first scam. Many more were to follow. Some people have a carefully prepared story, like this, others just poke you in the ribs and say 'give me money grandmother.' The most unnexpected was a boat  trip, together with an Indian pilgrim and his daughter. I thought the boat was going along the river and agreed to pay 50 rupees. But the boat just went to the other side of the river, where my fellow passengers climbed onto the backs of horses, took photos of each other, walked a little way, then caught the boat back to the other side of the river. The boat man took 50 rupees off me, but let the Indian pilgrims go scott free. I discovered that the fare was 20 rupees and I had paid for all three of us!

In the evening people gather at the biggest ghat, sitting in rows on the ground in front of a series of altars decked with flowers. Musicians sing and play a hypnotic chant. Boatloads of pilgrims glide back and forth along the black velvet river. Lit candles float on the water like glow worms. A constant procession of pilgrims, post card sellers, sadhus, beggars, candle and flower sellers stream past, while a skinny man preaches in English, although no one is listening to him. People begin to clap in time to the music. Slim young men dressed in white satin tunics and white satin trousers step out in front of the altars, facing the Ganges and blow a long note on conch shells. They ring bells and wave incense with synchronised movements. A man walks by with whitened face and garlands of marigolds round his neck. Smoke from the incense billows out in clouds, blowing downstream, following the flowing river. The young men now take flaming candelabra, lit like Christmas trees and raising them begin to swngi them round their heads in a circular motion. The bells continue to clang, the musicians to play, the incense to blow and the boats to glide up and down the river.

I am sitting next to a Danish photographer who has been commissioned to photograph beggars. We decide to take a rikshaw back to our hotels together, but the rikshaw drivers start to ask us for ridiculous amounts of money. He bargains with them. I pust decide to walk back and so I set off, along the ghats, which are well lit, past Western hippies playing music to a curious crowd of Indians, past a fat Hindu priest, naked from the waist up, performing a ceremony to a crackly sound track, turned up so loud that it is distorted, past the burning ghat, where five fires now glow red in the night and the pile of ash if a huge pyramid. I climb up the steep steps from the ghat to the narrow streets that should lead to my guest house, but it's dark and I don't recognise anything. I ask the way and people point. I arrive at a guest house which is not my guest house but has the same name. The doorman wants money from me to phone the other guest house. I persuade him to just tell me where it is and set off. I am mobbed by a gang of children, who all put their dirty hands on me, touching, poking, shrieking with laughter. I'm starting to get hysterical. Eventually some men chase the children away and I find my guest house.

Just as I am getting out of the shower, the Japanese man who travelled with me on the train knocks on my door. He tells me that he has had diahroea all night and all day and got lost and hasn't eaten anything since yesterday. I realise that he wants me to go out with him to get something to eat. He is 20 years old, travelling alone for the first time, in India and sick. He has been to the chemist and bought medicine. We go out to eat.

Next day I knock on his door. He doesn't answer. I am concerned. I tell the hotel receptionist that he is sick and I think he should go to hospital. The receptionist assures me that he will look after him. I leave.

Train to Delhi

I travelled in a slow train full of Sikh pilgrims, fresh from the golden temple, who didn't speak English. The train stopped at numerous stations, where vendors of food and other merchandise, beggars, tall lady boys in fancy saris and loads of make up, got on and got off. At one point some men loaded some huge packages onto the train, piled them into the toilet and left. Chai wallas (tea vendors), hot soup vendors, vendors of samosas, puris and dhal, biscuits, water, coffee, popcorn, oranges, spinning tops, locks and keys, plastic flowers and comics pushed through the crowded corridors shouting their wares. A group of young men got on, borrowed one of the large packages from the toilet, upended it in the corridor, blocking access to the wash basin and one of the exit doors and played a noisy game of cards, standing in the corridor.

I offer some dates to my fellow travellers. They give me an orange and some cake. I buy some samosas that taste as though they were cooked yesterday. Half way through the second one my fellow travellers indicate by gestures that I should throw it out of the window, so I do. At another point I buy an omlette and the vendor sells me a sandwich that I didn't want. My fellow passengers remonstrate with him and make him take back his sandwich and give me back my money. I feel warm and cared for.

In Delhi I tried to find a decent, cheap room but actually ended up in a room where the bottom of the bathroom door had been eaten away by rot and mould, there was no window and a large bucket in the toilet had been put so near to the toilet that I could only sit sideways on it (on the toilet, not on the bucket). 300 rupees seemed a bit overpriced but I was tired and not going to go any further.

In the morning I went to the wonderful Delhi international booking office and booked train tickets from Delhi to Varanasi, from Varanasi to Khjuraho, from Khajuraho to Jhansi, from Jhansi to Bhopal and from Bhopal to Delhi. Very extravagantly I booked berths in three tiered air conditioned carriages, spending a total of twenty pounds. So I leave tonight to Varanasi.