Joe travels to India

A trip to India...

Mumbai airport was my entry point and stands out as they are upgrading the airport. However, for current travellers (and certainly for passengers for the next couple years) it is like picking your way through a mine field... It is great to have wheels on your suitcase but mine did not survive being dragged over chunks of concrete, the smallest being the size of your fist (and that was inside the terminal). Third failed suitcase this year!Bangalore was where I spent the most time in a car as the property I was visiting was way out of town. I timed my arrival exactly at the right moment to experience when thousands (no exaggeration) of trucks are allowed to enter the city (banned from entering the city 6am-9pm, to help solve the already impossible road congestion). I hit the roads from the airport at preciously 905pm. Imagine thousands of dark, smelly, angry, woolly mammoths lumbering to life and taking over every lane, shoulder with total disregard to direction of flow... Imagine the smells that a huge beast that has been sleeping for a 1000 years would give off (internal and external) spewing and blackening already polluted skies... Not one with head nor taillights, no side or rear-view mirrors and every one of them painted with the words "OK to Honk", on the back. The one rule everyone follows, ALL THE TIME! "NO FEAR" best describes my driver who got us through it all, amazingly unscathed but weary after 3 hours of dodging huge over loaded semi's, oh, and did I mention the cows (literally the kind that moo! a sacred beast in India) are wandering aimlessly through the maze of broken down and diagonally parked trucks and randomly crossing the road at every street-light-less curve? The drive back to the airport the next day was no less memorable...

Chennai presented me with a 900am appointment. To which I am happy to report I was 15 minutes early for! Dressed in a crisp white shirt, my "power red" tie and freshly pressed suit even if I do say myself, I was looking like something out of GQ! I headed to the elevators to find them 'under repair'. All four and the signs looked like they had been there a long time... The office was on the 12th floor, easily do-able in an air-conditioned building... (I think you know where this is going), did I mention it was 94 degrees with 98 % humidity and then there were the resort catalogues I was toting along with computer etc etc... By the time I arrived I looked like the poster boy for The World's Dirtiest Jobs'. The only crease left on me was where my shoulder strap had sunk in well below normal shoulder skin level... Calcutta was memorable on so many levels... Most of which (traffic, heat, smells etc.) I have already mentioned so won't repeat myself... Add to it flooding from monsoon rains, a huge impoverished, highly illiterate population headed by government officials who say things like (no joke, this is a real quote) "we need to stop hydro-electricity from entering our state because it will take all the electricity out of the water and we will be powerless"! Need I say more... But to leave on a positive note and show my glass over-floweth... I am not going to even mention the diarrhoea or fever that kicked in midweek.. I will say India is the best place in the world to be a driver (bus, truck, private car etc). Where else can you climb behind the wheel of a vehicle with no prior experience, no licence, no tests, no rules, no right of way... NO FEAR! Its back to Vietnam next week I am sure to have something to report...