Mon 17th October, 2005 Once
across the state border, the aspect changed from being a tree lined
road to an agricultural outlook, with quite a variety of crops
in full progress, I guess being just after the monsoons, now is
a good time for crops to be maturing. We recognised a
number of crops, such as corn, barley, sugar cane and peanuts,
but there were quite a few we didn't, especially being a pair of
townies at heart, despite Rita being a farmers daughter. The
first town we rode into (sounds a bit like John Wayne?) we saw a
number of groups of people turning big black drums set into
brick surrounds with fires burning underneath. On closer
inspection they turned out to be drying peanuts in their
shells. I got up close to one of the operations and was
immediately offered a plate full as a sample, I tried a few and
they were fabulous. Not roasted, as I first thought they
might be, but dried to perfection, crisp and tasty. I
noticed nobody else was eating them, but then I figured it must
be a bit like working in the biscuit factory, you must get fed
up with them eventually. (Fed up? maybe that's where the
phrase comes from?) Meanwhile, Rita was being
entertained by a local trader, pushing a cart full of something
known locally as senily(?), a funny looking plant that is
related to the lily and grows in ponds. When you break it
open, it has a white heart, not dissimilar from water
chestnuts. Rita paid 5 Rs for a few and ended up with a
bag full! She tried to give some of them away, but the
crowd that soon gathered didn't seem interested. They
tasted ok but we were a bit worried as to where they might have
been grown, and how they might affect us. Rita managed to
"gift" a few, and we ate a couple between us, but we
had to take the rest with us. Further down
the road, we came across a family group who appeared to tending
a herd of goats. Seemed a bit strange for the whole family
to stood in a tight group watching a dozen goats, but who am I
to argue. Especially as they seemed to be quite dressed up, by
local standards, anyway. Perhaps it was one of the goat's
birthdays? Anyway, Rita managed to palm off the rest of
the senily and they seemed quite pleased, in exchange for a
family photo. Some time later we rolled
up in Najibabad, and just as we reached the crossroads on the
edge of town, our old friends the combine harvesters trundled
into town after us. They all gave us a cheery wave as they
inched past us, then came to a halt as they caused the biggest
traffic jam at the crossroads, them being a little larger than the
average road traffic in these parts. After a
few minutes of patient queuing, Rita spotted a little alleyway
that must lead into the town centre (mustn't it?) so off we
went. At least we were moving, and it was a nice quiet town
back street. Quiet mainly because cars couldn't fit down
it, but there weren't many bikes either. The path was well
maintained and clean, quite a surprise. It led on to some
more busy town streets, and it took us a while to find someone
who knew of a hotel in the town. 15 minutes later we found
the Ghai Hotel, set back from the road with a lovely grassy
courtyard area. A bit expensive at 750Rs for a deluxe
room, but we fancied a bit of deluxe tonight, especially as it
was a lovely big room with two sofas and a marble floor. Or was
it a marble sofa and two floors. I forget
now. After showering and
doing some laundry, we set off on foot to see if there was
anything worth visiting in the area. No. We found a
nice little bar, nice in that it had windows and you could see
the other side of the bar without a torch! The owner was a
bit strange though. We asked for a couple of soft drinks
to quench our thirst, and a beer, also to quench our
thirst. But he wouldn't let us have the beer until we had
finished our lemon soda's, and even then I had to ask him 3
times before the beer turned up. I don't understand what
happens on these occasions with what should be a straightforward
conversion. Me: "Could we have a bottle of beer
please?". Him: "A bottle of beer,
ok". But then he doesn't move. A minute later,
still no movement, stands looking at us, smiling.
Me: "Excuse me, could we have our bottle of beer now,
please?" Him: "You want a beer?". Me:
"Yes please. This continued for a while longer before
he finally realised we wanted a bottle of beer and we would like
it now. Back
to Itinerary Tue 18th October, 2005
Not sure where we will end up today, as
Moradabad is 110km and we're not quite up to that, or are
we. Set off hoping we can make it all the way, but knowing
there are 3 reasonably sized towns on the way, so there should
be somewhere to stay in each of those, surely. The
road was newly resurfaced so we made good progress, traffic was
fairly light as well. At 25km we arrived at Nagina, a bit
disappointing as we thought that was only 15km away. The
road crosses the main railway line to the east here, and the
barriers were down, waiting for a train. This
is one of the most amazingly short sighted habits of Indian
drivers, when they get to a level crossing, instead of waiting
in line, they spot the other side of the road is empty and think
its an ideal opportunity to overtake the vehicles waiting at the
barrier. But of course, they can only go as far as the
barrier, and so there ends up being two, three or sometimes four
lines of traffic butted up against the barrier, completely
blocking the road. This happens on both sides of the
crossing, and by the time you've added in foot passengers,
motorbikes and cyclists, both sides of the crossings are
choc-a-block. To add to the confusion, anybody that can
crawl under the barrier before the train arrives, does so and
ends up on the wrong side of the barrier on the other side,
unable to clamber under that barrier because there is no space
to do so. Now that the two opposing sides are
lines up, the train passes, and the barriers are lifted
(usually, anyway). Then all hell breaks loose. Everybody
advances at the same time and we have an instant traffic jam,
which usually takes 10 minutes to start moving and is always
accompanied by blasting of horns. You've think that after
this has happened to people a few times, they would learn their
lesson. But no. This happens EVERY TIME. The
road surface deteriorated after this, goodbye nice smooth new
tarmac, hello pot-holes and broken surfaces. At 50km we arrived
in Dhampur, a dirty looking town with a lot of traffic. We
were feeling quite weary and decided to look for a hotel or a
decent looking restaurant to have a break and something to
eat. We could find neither. On we go then. There are
normally at least one half-decent restaurants on the outskirts
of towns of any size, but not this one. Things did
not seem to be going our way. Managed to get a couple of
soft drinks and a cup of chai for Rita, hen decided we would go
on to the next town, only 15km away. 10km
later, we stopped in a small village for a short break. We
were approached by a friendly looking guy from a tyre repair
place, near where we stood, and he produced a small notebook and
asked for my autograph. Fame, at last! My first ever
autograph hunter, and I've been practicing for so long.
But who does he think I am? Should I ask? Probably
not. I put my squiggle in the book, making out its
something I do all the time. One good turn deserves
another, so we asked where the next hotel is. In
Moradabad, 50km away! Feeling fairly weary, and not
looking forward to another 50km, we consider our options, and
opt to catch a bus. One appears, as if by magic, within a
couple of minutes. Our bikes are shoved rather
unceremoniously onto the roof, some of our bags go under the
seats and we're squashed into the already fairly crowded
bus. Although, once on the bus, I could see the back seat
was empty, but watching the people in the next row forward
bouncing up and down as the bus progressed, I could see the back
seat could be a very rough ride indeed, so decided to
stand. At least by standing I could face towards the back
of the bus and watch to make sure our bikes didn't bounce right
off the roof! It took the bus an hour and a
half to reach the centre of Moradabad. Rita had been
chatting with a local lad about where to find a hotel in
town. He took it upon himself to not only take us to a
hotel, but also to go and check for vacancies and inspect the
room. We like people being helpful, but this was going too
far, especially with previous similar experiences when people
try to get the hotel to pay them commission for introducing
customers, commission that we end up paying with inflated bill.
When he came back down from checking the first hotel and said
there were no vacancies, Rita said she preferred to go and check
herself, which she did. While she was gone, I explained
that we were grateful for him telling us where to find the
hotels, but we have been traveling for a little while now and
we're quite capable of checking out hotels ourselves. He
got the hump and disappeared. Rita came back and said
there were rooms, available, but not too good. We
tried another two hotels before we found the Rajan Hotel, nice
room but wouldn't negotiate on the price of 700 Rs.
That'll do, and its got a reasonable restaurant and a bar
downstairs as well! Had the usual problem of them
not liking our bikes inside the hotel, but they relented within
2 minutes and put them the luggage room. A
couple of beers and a some reasonable Indian dishes later,
we were well tired and retired to watch a couple of films on
HBO Back
to Itinerary
Wed 19th October, 2005 A
rest day. A lazy rest day at that. Went down for
breakfast in the hotel restaurant at 9am and, except for a
couple of trips back to room for comfort breaks (not sure I
like that phrase) we spent the rest of the day in the
restaurant, reading, eating, drinking, going through our photos
and updating our web site. We did enquire about locals things we
might want to go and see, but were told, basically, there aren't
any! Saved us going out looking for any! Big day tomorrow, 90km
to Bareilly, aiming for an early start. Back
to Itinerary Thu 20th October, 2005
We thought we would try getting up earlier and
setting off in the coolness of the morning. When the alarm
went off at 6am, I almost changed my mind, but Rita persuaded me
otherwise. Checked out of the hotel and riding down the
deserted streets by 7am. I say deserted, relatively
deserted. We still managed to gather a small group of
about 15 admirers (I like to think they're admiring us, they
might be plotting our demise for all we know) while we spent 2
minutes loading our bags onto the bikes. We
are now on one of the main roads from Delhi to the east of the
country, still only one lane each way, and surprisingly quiet,
even for 7am. The road surface was a lot better than the
last road we had cycled on two days ago, just the occasional
rough bit, and even a sort of cycle path down the side for some
of the way. Of course, the buses and trucks felt free to use
this area whenever they felt the need. After
15km we stopped at a nice looking roadside cafe, partly because
it looked quite clean but also because the waiter stood on the
road side and beckoned us in. That seemed to be when he
stopped being friendly. It took several minutes to place
an order of a vegetable sandwich, a cup of chai and a coffee,
then took 15 minutes to deliver it, way above the norm of about
2 minutes flat, if they take their time. Rita got slightly
annoyed by his tardiness, and made a point of not leaving a tip,
even though he hung around after delivering the change,
obviously thinking he deserved something. A
few kilometres down the road, we came across a long line of
trucks, queuing to get passed some unseen obstacle ahead of
them. We overtook on the dirt path on the nearside, and
soon realised this was a long line of trucks, interspersed with
the occasional bus or car. After about a kilometre of
weaving between the trucks, sometimes on the dirt path,
sometimes on the other side of the road when there was nothing
coming the other way, we came across a broken down truck on the
other side. This was obviously causing the tailback, we thought,
especially as there were several policemen controlling the
traffic flow around the stranded vehicle. We passed the
obstacle with no problem, but soon joined another queue of
vehicles. What was this, another broken down truck?
We followed the same procedure as before, using the clearest and
smoothest bit of road we could to pass all the stationary
vehicles, and I was using by bell most of the way just to annoy
the truck drivers. See how they like it when the shoes on
the other foot, they always blare their horns right in our ears
as they approach and pass us. It probably didn't annoy
them in the least, in fact they probably didn't even notice, or
thought I was being friendly. 10km from where
the queue had started, having crossed several bridges, passed
two villages and met a couple more broken down vehicles, we
reached the front of the traffic jam, another broken down truck
that was just in the process of being towed away. The
next town we reached was Milack, a small roadside place that
seemed to specialise in processing chillies. We passed several
large groups of mostly women, sat sorting and de-stalking dried
red chillies. We asked if we could take some photos of the
first group, but most of the women got up and walked away once
we produced our cameras. We had more success at the
second, larger group. I think we took them a bit by
surprise, but they warmed to us fairly quickly. Soon, many
of the workers had jumped up and surrounded Rita, wanting their
photo taken, joined by the usual crowd of young boys and men
that seem to appear from nowhere in these parts whenever we stop
anywhere for longer than 30 seconds. I managed to stay in
the background, watching the bikes, and taking a couple of
photos of the people that had continued with their
work. As we were leaving, we both started coughing,
and I sneezed a couple of times. It took us a little while to
realise what was causing it, dust from the dried chillies.
How did these people put up with this all day long, they didn't
where any kind of mask, and it must get in their eyes as
well. How painful. I guess its only a seasonal job,
but, still! We stopped at a few roadside
Dhabas, eating houses, which were painted in big blue Pepsi
adverts, only to find they had no soft drinks for sale. My
sarcastic remarks and pointing at the Pepsi signs fell on deaf
ears, or at least ears that didn't understand my subtle
wit. We've noticed a lot of places have crates of empty
drinks bottles outside but dont have any to sell. Perhaps
there's a shortage, or perhaps we just happen to be there on the
day prior to delivery day. At 83 kilometres
from Moradabad, we reached a huge industrial estate on the
outskirts of Bareilly that spread for 5km along the road.
The only interesting thing we saw in the estate was a number of
young lads who were stretching long lines of fine string between
two trees, may 30 metres apart. It looked like they were
going to do some sort of weaving, but when we asked, the only
thing we could understand from their gestures was it was
something to do with kite flying. Not sure what, but kite
flying is a big hobby in India, so we'll keep our eyes peeled
and see if we can spot the purpose of this exercise at a later
date. With only a couple of km to go before
the centre of town, we spied a couple of reasonable looking
hotels, plumped for the Hotel Sehgal, the cheaper looking one
and Rita negotiated a 20% discount for an okay room at 450
Rs. After a lovely refreshing shower we were both feeling
pretty good, but rather hungry. We'd had 3 apples and a
small packet of a corn snack between us all day, as well as a
couple of colas, so we felt as though we deserved a great
meal. So, with hindsight, we should have gone somewhere
other than the hotel's restaurant. Rita had a veggie
jalfrazy with roti, I opted for Chinese garlic chicken and veg
chow mein. Not that they were bad, just felt we could have
done better. Never mind, at least we were fed, unlike some
people not a million miles from here. After
our late afternoon meal, we thought we would chill out in the
hotel reception area, instead of in our room with no
windows. Apart from us and the staff, a fair amount of
fauna turned up as well. There were a lot of flies and mosquitoes,
a small mouse, various other insects crawling around the floor
and a rather strange shape rat. At least I think it was a
rat, but its legs seemed too short. It strolled around the
lobby for half an hour, even though I pointed it out to the staff
a few times, they didn't seem at all interested. Perhaps
it was an undercover member of staff?. After
an hour of perusing our photos and reading the paper, it got too
crowded for us so we retired to our room. We'd lit a
mosquito coil earlier, but debated whether we needed the
mosquito net as well. Rita had been carrying it since we'd
left England, and we hadn't used it once, yet. We decided
against putting it up, partly because there was nothing
convenient to hang it from, but there were only a couple of
mosquitoes we could see, so we should be ok under our silk
sheet. Only time will tell! Back
to Itinerary Fri
21st October, 2005 Up at the crack
of dawn, or just before it, actually. This wasn't too difficult
thanks to the help of one of the busiest and most important
railway lines that ran alongside the road in front of the hotel,
and the train drivers liked to show off their prowess on the
horn as they passed through the town. They had kept Rita
awake for half the night. The mosquitoes hadn't helped
either, we were both quite badly munched upon. Knew we should
have put the net up! We checked out just
after 6am, total bill of 720 Rs, that's for the room, food and
drink. It would have been a lot more, of course, if they
had sold beer, so we saved a few rupees last night. The
road out of town towards Lucknow was not as straightforward as
we thought it should be, we asked directions frequently and at
one point we ended up in a bus station, they obviously thought
we didn't want to cycle that far! Once out of the town though,
the road became a little quieter. It was a lot cooler (as
in not so hot, not hey dude, am I cool or what?) starting out
this early as well, and there were even a few clouds in the sky,
something we haven't seen for a week or two. Actually,
I haven't mentioned the weather very much recently, mainly
because its been fairly consistent, around 32 to 35C (that's
about 90 - 95F in old English - remember, C to F is divide by 5,
multiply by 9 and add 32) for the last couple of week, since we
came down from the Himalayas. We did see on the news last night
that it was supposed to be turning a little cooler.
Hopefully it will last for a couple of days, give us a
break. In winter around here, the daily average is about
25C, and they say it gets quite cold at night, cold enough to
put your "woolens" on, as they seem to like to say. I
think that means it gets down to a low of about 12C Every
time we stop on the roadside for whatever reason now, we seem to
gather an ever increasing number of onlookers within minutes of
stopping. On one such occasion, one guy, who spoke a
few words of English, was asking the usual range of questions,
"What is the name of your country?", "Where are
you going", "Where have you come from?", from he
came out with an unusual question after I had said we were going
to Shahjahanpur, "Why? There is nothing there". I'm
guessing, but I think he meant there is nothing for a tourist to
see, not that there is physically nothing there, although the
possibility that there is no accommodation in the town we are
headed for is something that frequently dwells at back of
our minds. Why are we going to Shahjahanpur? That's a good
question. Because its on the way to Lucknow, and its about
as far as we want to cycle in a day, is the best answer I could
come up with. I think the real problem was that he
couldn't understand why a couple of wealthy (all foreigner are
wealthy!) foreigners were cycling at all. Why didn't we take a
taxi, or a train, or even a bus! Another
onlooker came to our rescue, he explained that we were doing it
for the experience, we wanted to see what was between the towns
as much as what was in them, and we weren't cycling because we
couldn't afford any other means of transport, it was because we
wanted to! He took the words right out of our mouths! It
turns out he is the headmaster at a small private school, just
across the fields from where we stood, and he asked us to pay a
short visit to the school to say hello to the children, as this
could be their only opportunity in their lives of meeting a
foreigner. A bit strong, I thought, but after saying we
couldn't stay long as we had to get on to Shahjahanpur before
the midday sun got too hot, we agreed to drop in for a few
minutes. The children were quite overawed by
our presence, and I think the teachers were too. It was
clear we were not going to get out of here quickly, especially
when the headmaster said he had phoned for a photographer to
come and take some shots. We were introduced to four
different classes, ranging in age from 5 year olds to maybe 10,
mostly boys. The school house was still in the process of
being built, so one of the classes, for the youngest, was
squeezed into a long narrow outhouse. We almost made
our escape by taking some photos with our digital cameras, and
saying we would send them on by email, but just as we were about
to leave, the photographer turned up on his bike, so we had to
wait while he got his camera out, set up his flash (flash? in
this light?) and the class full of children trooped out and
lined up. We stood behind them, wearing our friendliest
smiles, and the photos were duly taken. That's it, we
thought. But no, the kids went away, and all the teachers lined
up next to us. Ah, a teacher/visitor group photo.
After that, there came the photos of the two of us with each of
the teachers. 7 more photos in all. We're not famous, you
know? I was tempted to say. After almost an hour, we waived our
goodbyes as we cycled down the rough track back to the main
road. They've got our email and web site address, so I
hope they keep in touch. We plodded along for
the rest of the way to Shahjahanpur with frequent stops in
search of cold soft drinks, a commodity hard to find in these
parts. We were told at one place with a big Pepsi sign,
but no cold drinks, that it was because they couldn't afford to
keep them cold! We did manage to find some not-so-cold
soft drinks at a fairly clean looking place next to a petrol
station. The owner kept on trying to push the cold orange
drink on to us, which neither of us fancied. It took a
couple of minutes of frequent asking to get him to give us a
couple of bottles of Mountain Dew, not chilled but they were
cold enough. We gathered quite a crowd at his place, again
I dont know where they all come from, just seem to appear by
magic. Conversation was extremely limited though, none of
them spoke English except the usual pleasantries. Rita
offered to buy them all a cup of chai, which we think they
seemed to grasp, but the owner, who did speak some English,
basically told us no. Something to do with them being only
villagers, not worth it, I think he meant. We persisted,
but to no avail. Finally, we asked for the bill, and I
nearly fell off my chair laughing when he said 200 rupees.
To justify the price, he said the packet of crisps we'd had was
60 rupees, but Rita pointed out that it had "Only 20
Rupees" printed in large letters on the packet.
"There's a local tax" he countered, but seemed to be
wavering. We agreed on 60 rupees in the end, still a
little inflated for two packets of crisps and two bottles of
soft drink. Our last stop of the day was at a
small outdoor sugar cane processing plant. We had passed several
over the last few days, with their strong sweet smell, similar
to the smell of a brewery/distillery. I should know!
We asked with gestures if we could have a look around, which
they seemed quite happy for us to do. It was a little
scarey though, aside from the obvious health and safety at work
issues, such as open pits of boiling liquid and a large crushing
machine, death traps to a hapless visitor, the colour of the
liquid coming from the oily crushing machine was of most
concern. On our travels, we've tried a few drinks of
freshly crushed sugar cane, normally a pale greenish colour. So
the scary part was that the produce of this was a rather dark
grey colour! The juice from the crushing poured down a
small gulley into the first of three boiling pits, then somehow
progressed through the three pits until it was finally
transferred into a large, rectangular metal tray, obviously for
cooling. Nobody spoke enough English to explain how the
progression was made, and our Hindi was certainly not up to the
job, but I'm sure the bees that swarmed around the place were
not supposed to be part of the recipe, but they certainly got
included at various stages of the process. The end product
of the process is a toffee like substance, extremely sweet,
which we were given a small sample of, thoughtfully presented on
a nice dusty leaf plucked from a nearby tree. I tried not
to think that the little black bits were probably the arms and
legs (do they have arms?) of the bees that had perished in the
manufacturing process, but after a couple of nibbles, I couldn't
take it any more, and said it was too sweet for me. What a get
out, eh? The sugar certainly boosted our
progress, for a short while anyway, and after 78km for the day,
we arrived on the outskirts of Shahjahanpur. We found a basic
hotel in the industrial estate on the edge of town, but at 400
Rs it seemed a trifle expensive for what it was. Perhaps
we'll see if there are any other options before we commit to
this one. A couple of km later, we crossed a bridge over
the Gomati river and spotted an interesting looking hotel on the
opposite bank with a large herd of water buffalo wallowing in
the river. The Rahi Tourist Bungalow turned out to be a
state run establishment, it didn't seem to have anybody else
staying there but they wouldn't negotiate on the price, 400 Rs
for a double room, en-suite but no air-con and hot water by the
bucket only It was an interesting building in a good
location on the river bank, so we stayed. The electricity
was off when we arrived, actually it was off until 6pm, so we
had a few drinks in the bar restaurant and a snack. Before
dusk, the water buffalo were herded back out of the river and
driven through the streets in groups of 10 to 15 to their
overnight quarters, elsewhere in the town. We tried to work out
how the herdsmen knew which buffalos were theirs, there were no
visible markings but they somehow managed to extract particular
ones from the big herd before taking them back home.
Perhaps they just recognised their faces, or maybe the buffalo
answered to a name? Who knows. There
were a lot of insects around the hotel, especially of the flying
variety. There were a few of the large bees we had seen at the
sugar cane place, and also some large yellow horse-fly like
creatures that flew with their legs dangling below them like
enormous mosquitoes. Apparently they have a nasty sting,
so must try not to upset them. Standard issue mosquitoes
were also much in evidence, so got our mosquito net out for the
first time since we left home, and managed to suspend it from a
conveniently placed electric cable access plate screwed to the
wall above the bed. That is one reason we dont use
the net as often as we would like, there is rarely anywhere to
suspend it from. Most ceilings and walls are concrete, so
we can't screw in one of the cup hooks we carry especially for
the purpose, and often there the fan is directly above the bed
anyway. After a nice dinner in
the hotel restaurant and a couple of beers, we retired to the
safe haven of our mosquito net. Back
to Itinerary Sat
22nd October, 2005 Opted for a rest day
today. We still had 160km to reach Lucknow, two days
cycling, but we might catch a bus instead. Up
very early due to the noise and commotion going on outside,
mainly due to the buffaloes returning, but also from
various other miscreants larking about. We went to the
restaurant for breakfast on the dot of 7am, which, luckily, is
its opening time. But one look at the waiter/chef on duty
and we started to lose our appetite. Not sure what it was,
he just didn't look clean, and he had a runny nose which he kept
sniffing loudly, so to be on the safe side, we just
ordered tea and coffee. I say "just ordered"
like it is a simple and straightforward process, but oh
no. The ordering process went something like this: 'We'd
like two cups of coffee, please"
"Coffee?"
"Yes please, two cups of coffee"
"One or two?"
'We'd like two cups of coffee, please"
At this point he points at Coffee on the menu. "You
want pot of coffee?"
I look at the menu and see the pot of coffee is 25 Rs, as
opposed to 10 Rs for a cup. "Ok, we'll have two pots
of coffee".
"Pot of coffee is 25 rupees!" he says, like its a
fortune.
"Yes, we know, it says on the menu. Two pots
please"
He disappears into the kitchen. A couple of minutes later
he emerges and goes to the toilet next door. A minute
later he comes out of the toilet and goes back into the kitchen,
failing to stop and wash his hands at the washbasin between
toilet and kitchen. Now we're glad we didn't order any
food.
Five minutes later, he emerges carrying a tray with cups,
saucers and two pots.
"One pot of coffee, one pot of tea" he
announces. Tea? Where did that come from?
"Ok, I'll have tea then" says Rita. This
is not an infrequent occurrence, in fact I would say it is
almost the norm. We have particular problems with numbers,
especially if we each want a different item from the menu, they
always assume we want two of each. I wonder if, when a
group of Indians go to a restaurant, they always have the same
thing. So the first person orders a masala dosa, so the waiter
then says ah, 5 masala dosas then! Its the little
things that get to you, but its all part of the great experience
known as India! We'll find something to eat
in town then, its a big town, there must be loads of places to
eat. How wrong could we be. We walked around the
town for two hours without seeing one restaurant, except for a
grotty little shack that I wouldn't describe as one. We
saw lots of shops selling car parts, books, shoes, and even a
shop selling paint (a rare sight), but no food except crisps,
apples and bananas. We did find, however, an
internet cafe, or at least a place purporting to provide
internet access. I wont even begin to try and describe the
language problems we had in there, suffice to say that the axiom
"two people divided by a common language" is most
fitting. The guy running the place liked to think he spoke
English, and I like to think I can speak it as well, but could
we understand each other? We spent an hour and a half in
there, and because the connection was very slow and kept
dropping, we got about 10 minutes work done. I was trying
to upload some pages for our website, but only managed to upload
a couple of photos. That's why our website is behind! Not
because we're lazy! Returned to the hotel for
the afternoon to sit in the garden and read, until the flies got
too much and I had to go and sit in the restaurant. For
dinner we stuck to vegetarian options, the breakfast guy wasn't
about, but who knows what he'd been up to in the kitchen.
A very nice aloo jeera, with dhal fry and
chapattis. Back
to Itinerary Sun
23rd October, 2005 We're off to Lucknow
today. The grubby breakfast guy comes to our room at 7am
while we are packing. "You want pot of tea and pot of
coffee?". "Whatever!" I'm tempted to say. He
brings the tea and coffee, then hangs around dropping little
comments like "Very fine service here". I think he's
after a tip. How about wash your hands after going to the
toilet, that's a good tip! Settled our bill, 860 Rs for
the room last night and yesterdays food and drink. Not too
bad, £5 each, or thereabouts, and I had a few beers in that. We'd
been told we could flag down a bus to Lucknow outside the
hotel. We gathered quite a crowd of onlookers as we waited
the 10 minutes for the next bus to come, so much so that I
thought we wouldn't be seen by the bus driver. But a
friendly old man helped us get the drivers attention and made
sure the bus was Lucknow bound. I climbed on top of the
bus and Rita passed our bikes and bags up to me, I wanted to
make sure they were secured to roof rack this time. Then
we clambered onto the bus and were off. Then
we realised we hadn't agreed a price, something we planned to do
before we put our bikes on. 600 rupees, is what they were
now asking for. 600? You must be joking, you can fly for
that price. Well, not quite, but we had been told last night
that it was 80 rupees each to Lucknow on the bus, we thought
300 rupees was all it should cost for us and the bikes.
The whole bus was discussing how much it should be, but we could
tell from the laughter that they all thought it was too much.
After ten minutes we arrived at the bus station, but the
conductor would not go below 500 Rs, so we said sod you then,
we'll catch another bus. Unloaded our bikes and looked for
another bus. there were no other buses going at this
time. Ok, we'll go for a train, the station's just up the
road, and a friendly fellow tells us there's a train to Lucknow
in 15 minutes. As we set off the driver of the bus says he
will accept 300 Rs. No, you had your chance, we're going
for the train now! Fifteen minutes is not very
long to buy a ticket for a train in India, especially as we may
have to get our bikes checked in at the parcel office, a process
in itself which involves numerous forms and signatures, passport
number, visa number, shoe size, etc. There wasn't too much
of a queue at the ticket office, but long enough. The
first class window had no queue, so I asked how much it was to
Lucknow. It took quite some time to illicit an answer,
which left me a little confused. I could buy a first class
ticket for 218 rupees from this counter, or a coach class ticket
for 68rupees from the other window with the long queue.
The problem was that there was no first class coaches on the
train, so I would have to get the ticket converted on the
train. With no time to argue, I bought the first class
tickets, but did find out that if we folded our bikes in half,
we could just carry them onto the train without going to the
parcel office. Great. The train arrived
a little late at 9am, giving us another chance to be surrounded
by another large crown of admiring onlookers. We got onto
the First Class Air Con Sleeper carriage, it seemed the least
crowded. Our ticket was looked at by at least three
guards, and then we were shown into a nice cabin with one other
passenger already in it. The train left Shahjahanpur and we
were on our way. Then the train conductor arrived and said
we would have to pay an extra 1100 rupees to upgrade our ticket
for the cabin we were in! That's extortionate! The
option was to move down the train with our luggage and bikes
into one of the cheaper carriages, so we decided to
pay. Its only another £13 after all!. I dont
think we'll be traveling First Class Air Con Sleeper again, it
must cost a fortune if you travel overnight! Arrived
in Lucknow at 11:30am, an hour late, but still ahead of the
bus. Well, hopefully. Teach those money grabbing
bar-stewards. I wonder if we will see the bus arriving, probably
take longer than the train. Looks like an
interesting city, from the station anyway. Found the Hotel
Deep Avadh on Aminabad Road, 5 minutes cycle from the station,
if you go straight there, that is, and not go a kilometre up the
wrong road on route like we did. We tried several other
hotels before the Deep Avadh, but had been told they were all
full. I think it was more like they couldn't be bothered
with the extra paperwork involved in registering foreigners. No
matter. Rita again negotiated a 20% discount, so we got a
nice room for Rs600. Hot water tank was a bit dubious, but
we had a sat-tv with some English language news channels,
something we haven't seen for a week or so. Nice to catch
up on the current news, especially hurricane Wilma attacking
Yucatan peninsula. The rest of the day was
spent updating our diaries and doing some laundry, hot water a
bit erratic, but room service is excellent and
frequent! Back
to Itinerary 24th
to 31st October, 2005 When we arrived in
Lucknow, we weren't sure how long we were going to stay.
We have a number of things to sort out, for me, I want to get a
new mobile phone that I can use to connect my laptop to the
internet. I've been using my BT mobile to dial up an Indian
based ISP, but I wasn't sure how much it was costing for the
call. Turns out BT have been charging me up to a pound a
minute! Daylight robbery! Especially as if I used an
Indian mobile phone it would only cost a maximum of Rs5 a
minute. Around our hotel there are a lot of
small shops and street traders, but mostly only selling 'daily
needs' as they like to call them. There is a broadband
internet around the corner, but the guy running it was
particularly unhelpful and wouldn't let me connect my
laptop. The city centre isn't
much more appealing, although at least there are a number of
eating establishments. We even tried a Pizza Hut, a most
unusual choice for us. I had a small pizza which was ok, even
though I'm not big on pizzas, but Rita was very disappointed in
her Caesar salad. The picture in the menu looked quite
appetising, but what was delivered was not! Needless to
say, Rita did not pay for it. Lucknow is
famous for being one of the centres of the Indian Mutiny, which
kicked off in 1857 in various parts of India. In India its known
as the start of the war of
independence. The Residency in Lucknow is an area of the
town where the Brits hung out (if they did that in those days)
and where they were besieged for 3 months by the mutineers, in
British parlance, or the Freedom Fighters, in Indian.
After the Relief of Lucknow in September 1857, the Residency
buildings were left exactly as they were at the end of the
siege, or so they say. We spent a few hours wandering
around the ruined building and in the peaceful garden. (Entrance
fee: Rs100 for foreigners, Rs5 for Indians) There's a
museum there as well, entrance fee Rs5, but it wasn't worth that
much. After three days of negotiations, 3
different mobile accounts opened and 2 closed and 2 new mobile
phones, I finally managed to get a mobile account and phone I
can connect to the internet with my laptop. The main
problem was that, being a foreigner with no fixed abode in
India, I couldn't open a post-pay account, and getting online
using a pre-pay account turned out to be nigh on
impossible. But Reliance India Mobile turned out to be the
ideal solution, well, a little temperamental at times but I can
now get online for half a rupee a minute, That's considerably
cheaper than BT. Take note. We only
tried a few restaurants in the town, mainly because that's all
we could find. One fine looking place we tried was very
clean and modern looking, but half an hour after ordering and
with no sign of food or drink, we left. It seemed an especially
long time to wait as there were no other customers in the place
and it normally only takes a maximum of five minutes to be
served. We also tried a posh hotel, which turned out not
too much better. At least we got some food, even if the
three items we ordered turned up separately. It was the person
cleaning the floor about us that we could have done without,
washing the floor on his hands was not too bad, it was the bit
where he created a dust cloud with his brush that we most
objected too. Funny, isn't it, we complain endlessly about
everything being so dirty, then when somebody does some
cleaning, we complain as well. I guess some people just
can't be pleased! The poshest (Rita
says most posh) is the Taj, about 5km east of our hotel and on
the edge of town. so after many bland and disappointing
meals in our hotel, we went to the Taj for lunch. They had
a fabulous buffet, with a dozen different dishes for the main
courses, several different interesting salad dishes, and a
number of deserts. All for a very reasonable Rs400,
especially in a luxury hotel! It is described in our guide
book as the only quiet place in town, and it certainly
was! Talking about food and our hotel,
the restaurant is a dark and dingy, and we never saw anybody
else eating there, so we avoided it as well. The bar next
door was not quite as dark but just as dingy. So we had
most of our meals as room service. A common problem with
room service in Indian hotels (as well as a number of other
Asian countries) is that the waiters tend to think that they can
come and go as they please, and some of them like to have a good
gawk around the room while they're there. I've tried
heading them off at the door, but they are usually quite
determined. But when in Rome...! But we're not in Rome,
we're in Lucknow. Having sorted out my mobile
phone, we could plan our escape from Lucknow, turned out not to
be quite as easy as we had hoped, mainly due to the upcoming
Diwali celebrations. The first train we could get seats on
was the night train to New Jaipalguri on 31st, the night before
Diwali. This gave us a couple of more days to enjoy the
delights of the Deep Avadh hotel. On
our last day in Lucknow, we had 6 hours to wait from when
we checked out of the hotel until our train at 6pm. Manage to
entertain ourselves in an internet cafe and found a little bar
on the way to the station for a final beer in Lucknow. The place
was dark and hot, but they were friendly and welcoming, and even
turned on another light, most unusual. They were watching
India v Sri Lanka play cricket in a one day match, India had a
lot to do to win. Suitably refreshed and
prepared for our 21hour train journey, we arrived at the station
an hour early, always pays to, incase you cant find the right
platform. We were sent to a number of different places by
some porters, who were probably trying to be helpful, but ended
up having to be on platform one, the main platform in front of
the main station building. Never mind, at least we had a
good idea of the layout of the entire station now. The
train arrived at 6pm, we found our carriage quite easily, all by
ourselves! See, we can do some things on our own without helpful
advice! We hadn't booked our bikes in as luggage,
hoping we could fold them up and put them under our chairs.
Unfortunately, we two beds that ran lengthways down the side of
the carriage next to the corridor, which meant we only had a
small space under our seats. We managed to squeeze the
bikes mostly under the seats with only about 6 inches
protruding. The train guard sitting in the cubicle
opposite our seats did not seem too impressed but didn't say
anything. Our bikes under our
chairs meant we couldn't use the lower bed as two chairs like
you are supposed to, so we ended up going to bed a lot earlier
than normal. Not that we could get to sleep, with all the
noise from our neighbours, but we could at least read.
People were getting on and off at irregular times throughout the
night, so we were woken frequently even after we had managed to
finally get to sleep. The quietist time came at around 5am
when one particularly noisy group got off.. That's
all part of the joy of train travel in India! We were now
over half way to our destination, and somewhere in the middle of
Bihar State. Soon be in Silliguri, where we plan an
overnight stop before going on to Darjeeling.
. Back
to Itinerary
Continued on our West
Bengal pages
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