There & Back Again

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the biggest fan of Christmas; I loathe the commercialisation and exploitation purely because it’s so tacky. I do, however, hold Christmas day itself very dearly. My annual routine consists of nursing my hangover with a large black coffee, hair of the dog and some sort of grilled pork in vast quantities, after which I proceed to lounge on the couch all day until a gut-busting dinner is served. In between all that presents are exchanged, more alcohol consumed and classic James Bond films watched in front of a roaring fire with the dog curled up beside me. This year, my dearly-held ritual was not to be.

On Friday, after returning to Palampur the previous afternoon, Matt and I were scheduled to ‘volunteer’ at a local primary school. The ‘volunteering’ in reality consisted of nothing more than standing awkwardly at the back of a class of irritable seven year olds in a bare, dank cell of a classroom. I don’t ‘do’ kids, so when invited to help the ’slow’ child at the back I took up the task with about as much enthusiasm as wiping my arse with nettles. Five minutes of remedial cricket with the schoolboys on what can only be described as a quarry (the school ‘field’) was fun, but rapidly descended into tedium after the twentieth time nearly breaking my ankle on the rocks whilst retrieving the ball. Two hours was enough to declare it a failure, after which we declined to return either that afternoon or the following day.

Christmas Eve is a night I usually reserving for testing the boundaries of my alcohol tolerance, and despite the fact that ‘I’m in India, how amazing’, I couldn’t help but feel dejected that I’d be spending one of my favourite evenings of the year without the companionship of my best friends in some crowded local pub in Marple, but in a quiet, bar-less mountain village in the foothills of the Himalayas with a bunch of relative strangers. In an effort to make best of the situation, Matt and I ventured out, whilst Becky and Faye spent the day in Dharamsala, to scout a venue that would dispense alcohol to us for the evening. After a couple of hours of fruitless searching (besides one hotel that reminded us of The Shining) we did find a grotty hotel bar in the centre of the village, which was little more than a tiled, soulless room and a fridge of beer. Giving up, we settled for a drink before returning back to the camp. One became a few; it was awful, potently strong stuff. We hailed a tuk-tuk back, picking up some more beer (which remained unopened) on the way. We tried to initiate a party in our room but within an hour I’d passed out, as if I’d been spiked. In the morning, Christmas morning, I awoke to no presents, no bacon, no coffee, and no walled or iPhone.

My wallet had thankfully been discovered on the driveway by the camp chef, but in my drunkenness my phone was long gone. Only a few days earlier Matt and I had been discussing how awful it would be to lose our iPhones—our vital lifelines; it seems we jinxed ourselves (Matt had lost his walled a couple of days previous). I may sound ungrateful that it was a pretty shitty Christmas Day, when I should be elated at the idea of spending it in such a novel fashion, but truth be told we were all dreadfully sick of Palampur and desperately eager to get to the warmer beaches of Goa. At 3pm on Christmas Day, after phoning the relatives, we hopped into the minibus for the four hour journey to Chakki Bank and from there the overnight train to Delhi. There was no turkey. There was no James Bond.

To break up the arduous journey to the southern beaches we spent another day in the capital, at which I was initially most unimpressed about, desiring to just get to Goa. But the free time did prove a handy opportunity to catch some of the parts of the city that we’d missed in our first, rushed visit. Taking the astonishingly clean, modern and efficient metro from Gurgaon (that we later realised was so because it had only recently been constructed for 2010’s Commonwealth Games) we disembarked in the centre of Connaught Place, which we assumed to be the ‘heart’ of the city, in the Western sense that the ‘heart’ of a city is often where the high-street shops reside.

The Levis, Wrangler, Rolex and Calvin Klein stores took us by surprise, considering the vast poverty we’d encountered; but also served as a reminder of the peculiar Indian contradictory nature. Besides the ragged children begging to re-sole your shoes or even clear out your ears (that’s right), there’s a mass of extremely wealthy, well-educated population that appear to actually live fairly Westernised lifestyles. The contrast was made even more apparent when we wandered north-west from Connaught Place into Old Delhi. Here the sewers ran open, tangled trunks of power cables hung freely just above head height, horse-drawn carts, cows, dogs, bikes and tuk-tuks all battle for space between the crumbling, dilapidated buildings. Smoke, smog and dust hang thick in the air amidst the odours of fried food, spices, incense, piled garbage and underlying sewage. The noise, the noise is almost unbearable—horns, yelling, heckling, radios blaring; it’s the symphony of chaos. Altogether the whole experience completely overwhelms the senses, and somehow this is the everyday norm to many.

We ploughed through (’ploughed’ being rather apt) the markets of the Chawri Bazaar to reach the enormous Jama Masjid mosque. Being white we were immediately hustled by the porters who tried to charge us for taking cameras in, as locals casually strolled in without being accosted. By this point we were all quite highly strung from the trying experience of reaching the mosque, and promptly told them ‘where to go’ in the most vulgar of all British fashions. We battled through the rest of Old city to find a metro station, a portal to freedom—it had taken us most of the afternoon to cover little more than a square kilometer, but we returned to Gurgaon exhausted.

That evening, Boxing Day (which I would usually spend gorging myself on a second Christmas roast at my nans before meeting friends at the pub), we treated ourselves to an extortionately overpriced (by Indian standards) belated Christmas dinner at a ‘Mediterranean’ style restaurant in the nearby mall. Although turkey, stuffing and crispy roast potatoes weren’t on the menu, it was satisfying after three weeks of Dhal and rice to enjoy some Western cuisine.

Yesterday morning we awoke, well-rested, for our final sleep train journey, 26 hours, to Goa. I personally can engross myself in a book and my music for hours, but some of the group, Becky especially, were dreading it. It’s true that we could have easily got a flight and save day, but it’s all about the ‘experience’, of course. The group ended up divided over two carriages—the girls and I ending up trapped with a smelly old woman who took up half the bench and kept burping and farting, and opposite a spoiled little shit of a kid who persisted in wailing and crawling all over the shop.

Time has passed fairly… not fast, but it has indeed passed. Between reading, playing cards, interacting with some of the other passengers and a completely atrocious sleep, the hours have slipped away and with a numb arse, smelly armpits and tired eyes I write this with anticipation as we’ll finally be arriving in Goa within the hour. First things first—I want a cocktail in a coconut!