Oh shit it's India

From the travellin' journals of Ramblin' Ollie Bettany...

Tuesday 14th March 2006
Location: Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India

"Tonight in Nepal you will celebrate leaving India!"

This statement was exclaimed by a grinning official at the border immigration office who thought I was going the other way. When I explained his mistake his face fell and his head dropped and he promptly went about his business, stamping my passport and ushering me over to his colleague who signed the stamp with a flourish. Once they realised I was travelling from Nepal (Never Ending Peace And Love) into India (I'll Never Do It Again) neither of them would look me in the eye. I now appreciate their point of view.

From the moment I stepped off the jam-packed bus when it arrived in Sonauli it felt like I was back in deepest, darkest, dirtiest India - this, despite the fact that I was still on the Nepalese side of the border. Huge techni-colour Tata trucks churned the road up as they powered past, a never-ending convoy with horns constantly blaring, they whipped up clouds of dust around the cycle-rickshaw drivers clamouring for my attention who competed with the hawkers selling water and packets of instant noodles to be consumed dry and the blackmarket moneychangers with their sweaty wads of cash and bad exchange rates. The smell of burning rubbish and manure filled my nostrils and the sun beat mercilessly down on my head as I hoisted my bag onto my shoulder and made for the border, ignoring them all.

The border town of Sonauli - on the Nepalese side - was not how I remembered it at all. When I arrived a month ago in Nepal it had seemed quiet and clean. After spending days in heavenly Pokhara, and before that, the Himalaya mountains - even Kathmandu was tidy and well-ordered to a certain extent - the place seemed like all the other dusty, smelly, polluted Indian towns I recalled from the previous months... however, I was still Nepal. It was just close enough to India to have a mosquito problem rather than a never-ending supply of peace and love. Of course, later, once I crossed the border and had found a bus to take me south to the nearest city of Gorakhpur, I began to appreciate that there would be far worse to endure.

So, I'm back in India. Whoops, I did it again.

The journey from Pokhara to Sonauli was straight-forward... well, as straight-forward as it's possible for a journey spent winding down mountains roads to be anyway. At 6.30am when I arrived at Pokhara's bus stand, the mountains lined up in perfect clarity behind a long row of buses waiting to take the sleepy tourists who were hanging around yawning, drinking chai and smoking cigarettes to their various destinations. Most of them would have been going to Kathmandu in order to beat the Maoist ban on travel that is to be imposed in a couple of days.

After taking a final photograph of the mountains and buying a croissant I stowed my bag and boarded the rickety local bus that would take me to the border. There was a western girl with large, pretty eyes and pale skin sitting there on the bus with a young Nepalese man leaning awkwardly over her. Despite the slight incongruity of the scene I felt a vibe and assumed that the young man was the girl's trekking guide or a porter with whom she had established a close relationship.

The couple embraced and he was gone. A moment later the bus juddered to a start, rumbled out of the stand and was almost immediately brought to a halt at a military checkpoint. As a young Nepalese soldier with a machine gun wandered up and down the bus scrutinising the locals for signs of communism I watched the western girl out of the corner of my eye. She was gently crying. She didn't appear overwhelmed with emotion, it just seemed to me that she was sad that a special time was coming to an end and the affection of the polite and handsome young Nepalese man was somehow bound up in the magic of her experience of Nepal.

I knew how she felt. While there was no polite and handsome young Nepalese men who added magic to my experience, as she sobbed I was going through a process of letting go myself. Nepal was in my heart and I knew if I didn't say goodbye to it properly it was in danger of breaking it.

A few minutes later, when she appeared to have recovered her composure, I engaged her in conversation. Her name was Tatiana. She was a Spanish air hostess living and working on the Canary Islands who was taking a month off to travel in India and Nepal. After quitting a philosophy degree in Madrid she moved to London and lived in relative poverty, struggling to survive as a waitress in an unforgiving city and improving her English all the time. Later, when she returned to Spain she became an air hostess and started studying in the evenings to become an interpreter.

I don't know why I feel compelled to describe Tatiana. Many other people I have met and spent much more time with have not been flattered by the attention I have given to her. I guess at times like these my mind wanders and my pen flows the way that it chooses. Tatiana did impress me though. It wasn't until the end of the journey that we talked about really interesting things - previously we had been sat on opposite sides of the bus and were both happy to while away much of the journey with the company of only our own thoughts and the view of the receding mountains through the window. In the end we were unexpectedly compelled to swap buses and, being the only westerners on a bus packed with locals, we were jammed into a single seat together. It was at this point that her delightfully open attitude became clear to me. She did not talk about yoga and meditation in the pretentious, self-absorbed tone that characterises many western travellers I've met in India, as though they believe they're having a more valid experience of the country than you are - I often get the sense that this lot are missing the point a bit.

Tatiana was not like that at all. She confessed that she knew nothing of such things. She simply expressed ideas quietly and personally and without a trace of ego. She said that because of the wear and tear of modern life she had begun to feel as though she had lost touch with her sense of intuition and that the short time she had spent in Nepal had restored this important connection inside her. Somehow she managed to sum up in a single sentence what has taken me eighteen months to come to terms with.

Women eh? You've gotta love 'em.

During the journey down from Pokhara to the border my mind was able to take in the beauty of the gradually flattening countryside outside the window as the bus powered and then free-wheeled to lower altitudes. After about an hour the mountains were no longer visible behind us, obscured by hills and clouds, and part of me felt like a fool for leaving them behind. It's funny - beauty on such a magnificent scale - you mourn it's loss when it's gone. The part of me that felt a fool never wanted to leave.

One thing marked out this journey as different from the others I'd taken in Nepal. As we proceeded down the mountainside the bus was forced to stop with increasing frequency by crowds of village children singing and dancing in the road. These delays were not met by impatience or frustration on the part of the driver and passengers, but rather with weary amusement. Eventually I concluded that the children were collecting baksheesh from motorists to help celebrate the festival of Holi which is happening over the next couple of days. Holi is a Hindu festival, the most popular aspect of which is the tradition of throwing coloured powder and water at people.

As we descended toward India I began to see more and more men stained from head-to-toe in pink and others in stand-offs weilding jugs of water at each other. In some cases there was an atmosphere of barely contained animosity, of violence threatening at any moment to spill out of all these grinning men - there was something a bit brutish about the whole thing, as though the festival was giving the men an excuse to go crazy.

It's slightly unfortunate that at this moment I don't feel any inclination to head out into the street and join in with the festivities which are happening right now - it's likely that the Indians would take great delight in drenching me in coloured water, which would be fun... however, I'm not yet feeling particularly ready to face India, particularly an India filled with a billion brutish men.

I should put this last comment into context. I am writing this in a hotel room in Gorakhpur. I stayed here last night after turning down an unconfirmed train ticket to Delhi yesterday evening. Deciding to spend the night in this town was the second in a string of mistakes I made yesterday. After the first mistake which I made at the border all the others fell together like dominoes... I had little chance of preventing them.

At the border I changed my Nepalese money and remaining US dollars which left me with about four hundred Indian rupees. I rashly chose not to change any travellers cheques, fearing that the money changers at the border would take advantage of the culture shock in the transition between the two countries to rip me off. Ironically I had earlier come to the conclusion that it would be more practical to change money at the border than in Gorakhpur. However, before I really knew what was happening I was being bundled onto a bus and we were headed out of town. On occasions like this it's usually best to go with the flow. You should always try to keep moving - after all, it's harder to rip off a moving target.

The journey from Sonauli to Gorakhpur was typically Indian - the driver was like a manic at the wheel - engine gunning, horn blaring, he weilded the huge gear-stick like a broadsword. We swept past trucks, jeeps, cyclists, holy cows and roadkill - wild dogs, dead or dying, their stomachs burst open by tires to the baking sun, lurid, fleshy feasts for the flies. The traffic at 5pm when we arrived in the centre of Gorakhpur was like something from an environmentalist's bad dream, stinking petrol fumes and belching smoke, completely gridlocked. The bus somehow managed to squeeze itself down the busy market street in the face of hundreds of oncoming rickshaws and cars, a chaos of exhaust fumes, rusty metal and faded, peeling colour.

I say "the bus somehow managed to squeeze..." but it's no mystery how we did it - the bus is king of the road, everyone else has to get out the way or be crushed to smithereens - everyone apart from the holy cows that is, who, after millenia of reverential treatment, know instinctively that they are the true kings. Actually, their treatment is reverential but somehow also irrereverant - another one of the many contradictions this country has to offer. Cows are holy and are left to do whatever they please - which includes frequently eating plastic bags that have been left in piles of rubbish in the road and consequently dying in agony because of it.

Amazing how it's possible to stay calm in the face of such madness but that's how you survive India - blind faith that there is some order hidden somewhere in the chaos that your tidy, western mind cannot fathom. If you can't accept this then you will likely be compelled to hide in your hotel room, leave the country or be driven mad because it would seem that you find yourself in a life-threatening situation every time you step into the street.

Negotiating the ticket counter at the train station when I eventually arrived was not as difficult as I feared although I pity those arriving in India fresh from Nepal having not been here before and therefore with no idea of the beaurocracy and diplomacy involved in simply buying a train ticket in this country. Even the reality of having to push and shove in order to keep your place in the queue would likely be totally alien to most people who haven't learnt the hard way that it's the only way to get the job done.

After half an hour or so of pushing, shoving, wangling and whining I managed to purchase my confirmed ticket for a train later today. I was left with twenty rupees in my pocket - enough for a rickshaw to the hotel I had selected from Lonely Planet - a hotel which the book claimed would exchange travellers cheques. It turned out that it would not - or at least in my case it would not. Perhaps the hotel manager saw me coming, dusty and fatigued and fresh as I was from Nepal. He shook his head, "No, sir - we are not changing travellers cheques. This is a hotel sir."

In desperation I brandished my Visa card. "That will do nicely sir," he said, taking the card out of my grimy hand and inspecting it closely. The manager - a fat, malodourous, unpleasant, lazy looking man with paan stained teeth - explained that the Visa transaction would require me to take the most expensive room in the hotel for the night, at a cost of 1,200 rupees (plus tax!).

What choice did I have? The fat bastard had me by the balls and he knew it. I had no cash - nothing for food, water or even a rickshaw ride to another hotel. Here, at this only very slightly upmarket hotel I could stick everything on my room service bill, get some much needed R&R in front of ESPN and Star Movies - plus cash for chai and samosas on the overnight train journey to Delhi I'd be embarking on the following day.

So I settled into my room, ordered a can of Coke and a packet of Wills Navy Cut cigarettes and switched on the TV. I mixed the Coke with rum I'd smuggled across the border from Nepal, sat smoking my cigarettes and waited for my chicken massala to arrive. While I waited I flicked distractedly between True Lies, Passenger 57 and Maid In Manhattan waiting for something decent to come on. My food, when it arrived, was top notch. As I relaxed I began to enjoy myself and the sense that I cocked up my return to India began to fade.

I could have made it alone from Pokhara to Delhi in thirty-two hours on 600 rupees and an empty stomach which would have proved me to be a totally hardcore traveller but instead I chose to go the easy way - which as always costs time, money and a little bit of traveller kudos. But as I said to the hotel manager last night as he greasily took my money, "Ce la vie!" I translated for him - "That is life!" I said through gritted teeth and forced smile. What I was actually thinking was, "You're a horrible bastard, aren't you?", an opinion which was in some way justified the following day when I saw him engaged in malevolent discussion with the local chief of police in the hotel's reception. A dark deal, I believe, was in the process of being struck.

One last thing before I switch on the TV and order some chana massala - just a brief aside really, but one that might prove helpful when attempting to describe to people the strange nature of experiencing strange places. Last night, as I lounged on my bed, smoking cigarettes and waiting to see what late movies were going to be on, I thought I'd quite like to see Lost In Translation again. At the time I didn't consider why this particular movie popped into my head at that moment. When, by coincidence, it came on half an hour later, I quickly made the connection.

Bill Murray sits on the edge of a hotel bed after a long journey - forlorn, exhausted, totally, soulfully alone in a strange place he doesn't want to be. Skarlett Johannsen mopes around the same impersonal hotel trying to make sense of who she is and what's she's doing here, totally disconnected from everything - including herself.

Lost In Translation is, of course, a movie about what you do when you find yourself in a foreign country - and also about what you do when you find yourself in a foreign country. The way in which the two characters interact with each other and with their environments and the people around them has a great resonance thanks to Sofia Coppola's sensitive direction.

Skarlett Johannsen's character in particular, as she explores Tokyo, seems to be having some experiences which are similar to my own at times; that sense of fear, loneliness and incomprehension - a dark, emotional cloud which occasionally lifts as you unexpectedly experience something positive. For a moment you forget yourself, you are filled with joy and wonder and a sense of all the great and unanticipated beauty there is in the world. Then the moment passes, the shroud descends again and you find yourself tired and apathetic, unwilling or unable to venture outside your hotel room in order to seek out more similarly positive experiences.

These experiences, in themselves, are not so extra-ordinary. Skarlett stares up in senseless awe at lurid animated billboards, observes with amusement teenagers in a noisy arcade, and bored, rich housewives flower arranging while their husbands conference. For my part, witnessing those groups of children singing in the road, or the tenderness shown by a young Nepalese man towards his western girlfriend, or the desperation of an alcoholic beggar taking my hand and kissing it, or the open smile of an ancient, withered grand-father directed at his grand-daughter dancing in a mountain meadow... these are all ordinary extra-ordinary things - the kind of things you can experience a hundred times a day - at home and abroad - if you are open to them.