Along our journey, we have been reading a lot of books to pass the time on long bus/train rides. A friend passed along to us Adventures of a Continental Drifter, the journal of Elliott Hester who also traveled around the world. As we read it we related to so many of his stories but we were both belly laughing when we read his entry about New Delhi - it was our experience to a T, and we feel inclined to share some of his excerpts (we made some slight modifications so you get the full effect):
"With more than a billion inhabitants speaking eighteen major languages and a thousand minor languages and dialects, India, the birthplace of Hinduism, is as fascinating as it is complex. Consider the fact that 83 percent of the population is Hindu and that, even today, most Hindu marriages are arranged. Or that the social structure is built upon a complex caste system that in many ways predetermines a person's destiny. Or that the population increases every year by a staggering 18 million souls - 1 million shy of the population of Australia. But during our first morning in Delhi, as Hindu prayer music blasted from the temple across the street from our three-star hotel, the thing that captured our imagination was not language or population statistics or even another ear-piercing sitar riff from the temple loudspeaker. We were mesmerized, instead, by urban cows.
"Looking through the dusty third floor window of our room at the Hotel Grand Goodwin, we saw three weary cows ambling down the dusty street. The sluggish mini-herd blocked the flow of motorbikes and sputtering cars, creating a traffic jam that somehow failed to evoke even a single case of road rage. Imagine what would happen if three cows blocked traffic on Second Avenue in Manhattan. Cows are sacred here.
"The dusty, partially paved streets are paved with hostels that provide basic accommodation for as little as five dollars. Sandwiched between the hostels are an array of tumbledown enterprises: old wooden shops, mobile food vendors, shoeshine stands, rickety convenience stores. At regular intervals along the street, we saw crowded STD offices. Delhi must be flooded with patients suffering from sexually transmitted diseases. Or so we deduced after seeing so many STD offices. But we soon learned that STD stands for Subscribers Trunk Dialing. The 'patients' were actually patrons making long-distance telephone calls.
"Our driver turned onto a major thoroughfare and was promptly overwhelmed by traffic. Vehicles came at us from a dozen different directions. Horns screeched, breaks squealed, engines revved and spewed big black exhaust clouds into the sky. Like a rugby player slamming into the scrum, our driver wedged our car into the swarm of vehicles. He manipulated the gear shift with his left hand, inching into an open space, moving past a bicycle-rickshaw driver who possessed niether the quickness nor the dexterity to commandeer a good angle. We pushed past wobbling ox-driven carts that could have rolled off the set of Braveheart. We moved past massive trucks that belched clouds of exhaust. Emblazoned across the side of several trucks were the words PLEASE HONK! Everyone did. We bobbed through a sea of rickshaws, past thrill-seeking pedestrians darting through the narrow gaps between vehicles. The honking horns laid a soundtrack to this vicious traffic game. Cows were off-limits, of course. But there was no limit to the number of people who might be killed.
"The midafternoon temperature hovered around 95 degrees. Heat and auto exhaust combined to brew an oily broth that splashed onto our skin. Every few minutes the driver would hawk up a big gob of spit and let it fly (but as we would learn in a few weeks time, nothing compared to the lugees the Chinese would hawk up). Sound effects were as important to our driver as the size and trajectory of the globule being spat. As we inched through traffic, he made deep, resonating, gurgling sounds that were always followed by a thoroughly decisive hawk.
"After one particularly impressive discharge, we found ourselves behind a big black cow that moved through the street in slow motion. Vehicles skirted around the revered animal as if an invisible force field protected it. But no matter how hard our driver tried, he could not navigate around the cow. Automobiles and rickshaws had us hemmed in on both sides and from the rear. We sputtered along, a few respectful inches behind the blessed bovine, waiting for an opportunity to pass. We sat there sweating, our bare thighs sticking to the vinyl seat that had been split by a billion butts.
"Suddenly, the car angled left and stopped. From this precarious position, the cow's enormous posterior was mere inches from our faces. That's when unthinkable happened. The creature stopped in its tracks. Its tail rose high in the air. Nature took its course. It was like watching childbirth without the blood on the child."
We really could not have said it better ourselves. Thank God for the plate of glass separating us and the cow's posterior. But we are still to this day haunted by that image that will never leave my memory. Thank you Elliott Hester for that brilliant excerpt.
But seriously moving onto India, thanks to Sarah's friend, Amit, we set up a wonderful 18 day tour of Rajasthan. We started in New Delhi and our first stop was Laxrni Naravin, a beautiful temple with bold and colorful designs and decorations covering the walls. We loved how bright and lively the temples were inside, and all the women dressed in bright saris that were just gorgeous. We also visited the India Arc and drove all through the city. Amit was generous enough to invite us to lunch at his house and we had our first authentic Indian meal which was delicious. We also met his wife and 2 week old daughter, Myra, who was beautiful. It was really special for us to spend time with Amit and his family in his home and we spoke about the other cities we'd be seeing along the tour. We were very excited to get started on our India excursion...
"With more than a billion inhabitants speaking eighteen major languages and a thousand minor languages and dialects, India, the birthplace of Hinduism, is as fascinating as it is complex. Consider the fact that 83 percent of the population is Hindu and that, even today, most Hindu marriages are arranged. Or that the social structure is built upon a complex caste system that in many ways predetermines a person's destiny. Or that the population increases every year by a staggering 18 million souls - 1 million shy of the population of Australia. But during our first morning in Delhi, as Hindu prayer music blasted from the temple across the street from our three-star hotel, the thing that captured our imagination was not language or population statistics or even another ear-piercing sitar riff from the temple loudspeaker. We were mesmerized, instead, by urban cows.
"Looking through the dusty third floor window of our room at the Hotel Grand Goodwin, we saw three weary cows ambling down the dusty street. The sluggish mini-herd blocked the flow of motorbikes and sputtering cars, creating a traffic jam that somehow failed to evoke even a single case of road rage. Imagine what would happen if three cows blocked traffic on Second Avenue in Manhattan. Cows are sacred here.
"The dusty, partially paved streets are paved with hostels that provide basic accommodation for as little as five dollars. Sandwiched between the hostels are an array of tumbledown enterprises: old wooden shops, mobile food vendors, shoeshine stands, rickety convenience stores. At regular intervals along the street, we saw crowded STD offices. Delhi must be flooded with patients suffering from sexually transmitted diseases. Or so we deduced after seeing so many STD offices. But we soon learned that STD stands for Subscribers Trunk Dialing. The 'patients' were actually patrons making long-distance telephone calls.
"Our driver turned onto a major thoroughfare and was promptly overwhelmed by traffic. Vehicles came at us from a dozen different directions. Horns screeched, breaks squealed, engines revved and spewed big black exhaust clouds into the sky. Like a rugby player slamming into the scrum, our driver wedged our car into the swarm of vehicles. He manipulated the gear shift with his left hand, inching into an open space, moving past a bicycle-rickshaw driver who possessed niether the quickness nor the dexterity to commandeer a good angle. We pushed past wobbling ox-driven carts that could have rolled off the set of Braveheart. We moved past massive trucks that belched clouds of exhaust. Emblazoned across the side of several trucks were the words PLEASE HONK! Everyone did. We bobbed through a sea of rickshaws, past thrill-seeking pedestrians darting through the narrow gaps between vehicles. The honking horns laid a soundtrack to this vicious traffic game. Cows were off-limits, of course. But there was no limit to the number of people who might be killed.
"The midafternoon temperature hovered around 95 degrees. Heat and auto exhaust combined to brew an oily broth that splashed onto our skin. Every few minutes the driver would hawk up a big gob of spit and let it fly (but as we would learn in a few weeks time, nothing compared to the lugees the Chinese would hawk up). Sound effects were as important to our driver as the size and trajectory of the globule being spat. As we inched through traffic, he made deep, resonating, gurgling sounds that were always followed by a thoroughly decisive hawk.
"After one particularly impressive discharge, we found ourselves behind a big black cow that moved through the street in slow motion. Vehicles skirted around the revered animal as if an invisible force field protected it. But no matter how hard our driver tried, he could not navigate around the cow. Automobiles and rickshaws had us hemmed in on both sides and from the rear. We sputtered along, a few respectful inches behind the blessed bovine, waiting for an opportunity to pass. We sat there sweating, our bare thighs sticking to the vinyl seat that had been split by a billion butts.
"Suddenly, the car angled left and stopped. From this precarious position, the cow's enormous posterior was mere inches from our faces. That's when unthinkable happened. The creature stopped in its tracks. Its tail rose high in the air. Nature took its course. It was like watching childbirth without the blood on the child."
We really could not have said it better ourselves. Thank God for the plate of glass separating us and the cow's posterior. But we are still to this day haunted by that image that will never leave my memory. Thank you Elliott Hester for that brilliant excerpt.
But seriously moving onto India, thanks to Sarah's friend, Amit, we set up a wonderful 18 day tour of Rajasthan. We started in New Delhi and our first stop was Laxrni Naravin, a beautiful temple with bold and colorful designs and decorations covering the walls. We loved how bright and lively the temples were inside, and all the women dressed in bright saris that were just gorgeous. We also visited the India Arc and drove all through the city. Amit was generous enough to invite us to lunch at his house and we had our first authentic Indian meal which was delicious. We also met his wife and 2 week old daughter, Myra, who was beautiful. It was really special for us to spend time with Amit and his family in his home and we spoke about the other cities we'd be seeing along the tour. We were very excited to get started on our India excursion...
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