India - From Chaos to Tranquility

This is the second instalment of my India to Germany overland backpacking travelogue. If you missed the first instalment, you can read it here.

All photos in this article are taken by me, with my phone because I was too lazy to use my real camera.

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With “Lisa” safely on her plane to London, I head back into Hyderabad to find a place to stay for the night and plan my next move. Later on in my journey, I will meet some former Hyderabad residents who will sing the praises of the city and stoke my desire to return here someday, but considering the less than ideal circumstances upon which I arrived here, I'm pretty keen to just get out of the place and move on for now.

I pinpoint Hampi, a UNESCO World Heritage site, as my next point of call. A mystical pilgrimage site featuring hundreds of Hindu temples and apparently leopards, I figure that should be a pretty interesting next stop. I'll need to get to Kacheguda railway station, so I ask a bus driver at the airport how to get there. He directs me to the correct bus, which will get me within 5 kilometres of it, and then I'll need to use a taxi. The bus costs me something like 25 rupees – a whole lot better than the 1200 I paid for a taxi last night!

After jumping off the bus at a busy intersection, I try to hail a rickshaw when a young man comes up to me and asks me where I'm going. When I tell him Kacheguda railway station, he takes me by the hand and we play Frogger with the traffic. Men holding hands is a common sight in India, Pakistan and parts of Iran, and is a symbol of friendship, nothing more.

The kind stranger leads me to a share taxi, which is a tiny van (seriously tiny) with its doors ripped off and bench seats placed back to back to cram 12 passengers into the tiniest space possible. I sit next to two guys called Shahid and Sharjah, who are very interested in hearing about my travel plans. At one point, Sharjah puts his arm around my shoulder, looks me in the eye and says “eyes are looking good, bro.” I can do nothing but thank him and laugh awkwardly.

The share taxi drops me another kilometre or so from the train station and I walk the rest of the way. The timetable tells me that my train leaves at 9.30pm every day. It's 10.30pm and the ticket office is closed, so I wander about and find somewhere to stay for the night. Given I have almost a full day tomorrow before taking the train, I will spend the day wandering and getting a feel for the city.

A barber in Hyderabad

I quickly realise that the Hyderabadis are quite pleasant and helpful people. I seem to be the only white guy in town, which I'm very okay with, and I turn a lot of heads. I don't imagine red haired, blue eyed people are a very common sight here. Some of the motorcyclists share a good natured laugh with me (they never wear helmets) after my awkward attempts to cross roads, and a few even give me high fives while riding past, asking what country I'm from and then starting conversations about cricket when I say Australia – in fact one guy even jumps off the back of a bike to walk with me and talk about Shane Warne!

The city itself seems to run on a mixture of chaos and serendipity. Urban planning appears nonexistent; in fact the entire city just seems like the same 10 hastily constructed shops over and over again. Construction scaffolds are usually made from thin, roughly hewn branches tied together. Powerlines often run just above head height, sometimes draped across street signs, sometimes through tree branches. It seems safer to walk along the road dodging motorbikes than along the footpath and risk straying into a powerline. There are thousands of stray dogs, although they're harmless, and I see plenty of cows in the backstreets (backstreets that still carry more traffic than the typical main road in a western city).

A typical scene in Hyderabad

My first experience with India's famous train network doesn't start too well. I head to the station about half an hour before departure time, and I am promptly fined for smoking on Indian Railways property. I think I am doing the right thing; standing outside in the carpark and squashing my cigarette butt and putting it in the bin. The police officer doesn't agree with me. He stares me down with a look of pure contempt, and leads me into an office inside the station, tapping his four foot long wooden baton on the ground as he walks, as if to remind me just how bloody massive the thing is.

I am served a fine for 200 rupees and have my cigarettes and lighter confiscated. I had noted previously that very few Indian people smoke in public; now I know why!

Kacheguda railway station

Despite the hiccup, I just about make my train on time; but much like the rest of Hyderabad, the platform is mayhem - and the train is looooooong. My ticket says carriage SV1, but after walking along about 15 carriages without finding it, I panic a little and jump on a carriage called S1 just as the guard blows his whistle. About 30 minutes after departure, a ticket inspector comes along and duly informs me that I am in the wrong carriage; mine is at the very far end of the train and I'd do well to go there, as the train will be splitting into two during the night.

After a mission which involves jumping off the train and sprinting down a platform, I finally make it to the correct seat. I am in Sleeper Class, the second lowest of the 5 classes available. My carriage smells like a bank of portable toilets on the third day of a music festival, but the seats are comfortable enough and they fold into a 3 tiered bunk system. Being an overnight train means I save on 1 night's accommodation.

I wake at 6.30am to the train pulling into a platform and a man running along yelling "Chai-chai-chai-chai! Chai-chai-chai-chai!" I pass 10 rupees out the window, and he passes me back a very hot, very sweet paper cup of chai. My stop is at Hosapete, about 2 hours further down the line. Hosapete isn't particularly interesting; just a functional town with people and roads and buildings and not much else. I grab a cheap meal (not sure exactly what it is) and then jump on a bus to Hampi.

Hampi is a spectacular oasis with its dozens of ancient Hindu temples and a landscape that looks like it's straight out of a video game. There are huge stacks of boulders - everywhere. And they're massive; like small mountains. Throw in the temples, lots of palm trees, a few banana plantations, and the obligatory cows, and it makes for a very surreal scene. I could only dream of being able to take a photo that fully conveys the spectacular weirdness of it all.

Banana trees and a temple - this is Hampi

Moo

The village is super cute; a grid of mud roads lined with simple huts with thatched roofs. I find a guest house where having 24 hour electricity is one of their selling points. A mother and baby monkey hang outside my bedroom window, and next door is a restaurant called Chill Out with a spectacular view and a painting of magic mushrooms on the wall. They run their business on industrial sized batteries. I wonder how well the village handles India's intense monsoon season. My best guess is: not very.

Restaurants seat their guests on cushions on the floor, and they all serve the most unreal curries I've ever eaten. I begin making a list of all the fabulous cuisines I try in India, in the idealistic (and probably misguided) belief that I will one day learn how to cook some of them.

The place has clearly been Lonely Planet-ised quite a lot. There are a few restaurants serving laughable facsimiles of Italian, British and Israeli cuisine, and shops selling the same mass produced tat you can buy at any flea market anywhere in the world. The guest houses that are lucky enough to have been featured in the famous guidebook proudly proclaim “Recommended by Lonely Planet!” in hand-painted signs on their walls.

And lots of cool murals

I'm tripped up by typical tourist traps twice. First, I buy myself a cheap pair of shorts from a small shop, but they tear apart within about 3 hours of putting them on. The same day, I meet a man on the streets who wants to sell me magic mushrooms. Eating a few mushies and absorbing this crazy landscape seems like a pretty fun idea to me, so after haggling him down from 2000 rupees to 1000, he passes me a handful of mushrooms wrapped in newspaper. Alas, when I return to the guest house and open up my bag of goodies, the mushrooms are full of maggots.

But the vast majority of the tourists are Indians who come here to worship, which means a lot of women in pretty dresses and some really cool music as well. I soon learn about the Indian fascination with selfies. (I actually first noticed it in Hyderabad, with huge billboards for smartphone brands Oppo and Vivo, proudly proclaiming the abilities of their products' powerful inward facing cameras.) I feel like a celebrity, as Indian boys ranging in age from 5 to 25 approach me and ask me for a selfie. It seems the locals truly do get excited at the sight of white people. I guess this bodes well for when I go to Mumbai to pursue my dream of becoming a Bollywood star and meeting Sunny Leone!

But first...

After a week that has taken me through Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Sydney, Melbourne and Hyderabad, getting out into the wilderness is a much needed breath of fresh air. (Pardon the pun!) Dawdling around looking at temples during the day and then doing absolutely nothing after dark does a great job of clearing my head, and gives me a little taste of the India I've been hoping to see. I feel recharged and properly excited now for the journey ahead. My next stop will be Goa. Stay tuned to find out about my experiences there!

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