Our Northern India Tour:

We just returned from our trip to Northern India. When we arrived in August, it was too hot and humid to do much travelling, so we decided to visit North India later in the year. The itinerary for the trip was: IIT Delhi - IIT Kanpur - Khajuraho - Agra. The plan was to fly from Bangalore to Delhi, take the train to Kanpur, a Taxi to Khajuraho, fly to Agra, Train to Delhi, and then fly back to Bangalore. Making the travel arrangements required many trips downtown, and the arrangements for the professional visits were complicated by email breaking for a few weeks. The details are not particularly interesting, so I will skip most of them - the one that stands out in my mind is that I had to pay for the plane tickets in cash, so I arrived at the travel agent with about 22,500 rupees in 50 rupee notes. (The bank provides these in stapled bundles of 100 notes each). The equivalent in the US would be to go to the airline office with a stack of one dollar bills to pay for a family's coast-to-coast tickets. [I might have been able to pay for the tickets with credit cards or travellers checks, but that would have required buying tickets on the dollar tariff which is about 33% more than the rupee tariff.]

We flew from Bangalore to Delhi. The first minor glitch was that we couldn't get a car from the Institute to the Airport, so had to go by auto. One of the men from the faculty guest house was arranging transport and found us a "good" auto. He pointed out that he had got us an auto with the engine in the back, as opposed to between the passenger and the driver, and he was right - it did give a very smooth ride (for an autorickshaw). Up until then I hadn't realized there was a difference. We flew on Modiluft as opposed to Indian Airlines. Modiluft is one of the new private airlines, which is a joint venture with Lufthansa. My theory is that Modiluft was set up as a dumping ground for Lufthansa's old airplanes.

Welcome New Delhi After being in Bangalore for several months, I was forgetting what Delhi was like - I would classify Bangalore as "softcore India", while Delhi definitely qualifies as "hardcore". It is possible to get a prepaid taxi, where one pays in the airport according to a fixed rate as opposed to negotiating with a driver. This requires standing in line (while a set of independent drivers try to pull you away, or to guide you to another window), and eventually getting a slip of paper which is given to the driver. Although the theory is that this is just a fixed fare paid up front, I was shortchanged at the window by a modest amount, had to pay out a few rupees to a tout who guided us the 10 meters to the taxi, and then was hit up for an utterly bogus night charge when we arrived at the destination. When we arrived in the guest house there was no water, which isn't unusual - however in the morning we still didn't have water, so we were given a key to another room so we could go get buckets of water.

The second arrival into Delhi (when we were returning from Agra by train) was substantially more chaotic. We arrived at about 10:30 at night, and got off the train into the crowded New Delhi station. An Afgan businessman had offered us accomodation at his house, but we declined and were proceeding to a downtown hotel where we probably had reservations. Our luggage was on top of a porter's head, and we were accosted by a taxi driver. Although he at first didn't know where the hotel was, he then claimed he had been there an hour ago, and it was all full up - this was a standard ploy used where the driver would then take to tourist to another hotel and then rake off a huge commission. We were insistent on going to our hotel, so after we dismissed his absolutely ludicrous fare, he left, and we were picked up by another tout. My shrewd negotiating skill reduced the fare from 100 rupees down to 90 rupees (the same skill that allowed me to reduce the price of some Kashmiri trinkets in Bangalore from four times market rate down to three times market rate.) Very shortly after we left the station, the taxi got a flat tire and we pulled over, and there didn't seem to be much prospect of the tire being fixed quickly. The area was relatively desolate, with a few people sleeping on the sidewalk. The drivers assistant took off and said something about us being on our way in a couple of minutes (legitimate taxi's usually just have a driver, the crooked ones carry an assistant.) The assistant reappeared shortly with another taxi, we transfered our luggage, and were told to pay the other taxi driver the 90 rupees. I had noticed the new driver paying some money to the other taxi, so I asked him how much, and he guiltily admitted that he had paid them 80 rupees!

IIT Delhi and Kanpur The professional aspect of the visit was to give talks at IIT Delhi and IIT Kanpur. The timing was very bad for visiting Delhi, with the quarter ending, and the faculty very busy. I gave a very mediocre talk - the audience was lost fairly early, and I just blundered on to fill the time slot. IIT Kanpur was much more successful. My host was Asish Mukhopadhyay, a computational geometer who does absolutely first class work. IIT Kanpur has a young and very dynamic faculty, and I had very good discussions with people. IIT Kanpur was set up in 1962 as a gift from Kennedy to Nehru, and maintained a strong American connection for many years. It is unclear why Kanpur was chosen as a site for the IIT - Kanpur is an unpleasant industrial city and the climate in Kanpur is awful. I can understand the placement of the other IITs: Bombay, Madras, and Delhi in major cities, and Kharagpur had an already developed site (a British internment camp). The IIT Kanpur campus is very nice, and the guest house is perhaps the nicest University guest house we have stayed in - it had large, clean rooms around a large courtyard for Casey to play in. The temperature was very pleasant while we visited - it was difficult to believe that the place is hotter than hell in the summer. We met an American family who was staying for two years, with two young children, in a place far more isolated than Bangalore - they made our sabbatical look rather tame. One minor detail about IIT Kanpur, the security guards are armed with long metal tipped spears, in contrast to IIT Kharagpur, where security guards carry a bow and arrow.

Everyone I have talked to has said that Kanpur is an awful city, especially people from Kanpur. Just before we left Bangalore, the paper had front page stories saying that Kanpur was under curfew, and the police were rioting. We were also arriving on the day of the state elections. However, IIT Kanpur is outside of town, and Ashish assured me there was no problem - regardless of what goes on inside of Kanpur, the Grand Trunk Road (which goes from the railway to IIT) remains open. We arrived in the station relatively late at night, and were met by Ashish - the station perfectly fits into the stereotype of an Indian railway station - gloomy, crowded, smokey, . . .

Delhi We had a couple of days for sightseeing in Delhi. The major hassle was transport - almost every auto was a major argument (except for one, where the driver spoke no English, and after a considerable distance, I realized he had no idea where we were going, so after stopping several pedestrians, he turned around, and went back the other way.) One of the auto drivers let Casey do the driving - he had Casey on his lap while he drove. Of course, Casey did not want to go back to his parents when he was done. We went to a couple of historical monuments - Haus Khas, a ruined Moslem university, which is out of the way and has virtually no tourists, and the Red Fort, which is in old Delhi, and is a major tourist destination. The Red Fort was interesting to visit, partly just because of the number of tourists (the majority of them Indian). At one point I was walking with Casey, and he saw a group of Sikhs sitting on the ground and shouted "look - Taxis!" (Casey calls Sikhs "Taxis", since initially in Delhi, all of the Taxi drivers we had were Sikhs), and ran over to them. Nancy was a ways away from us, and was suddenly engulfed by a school group. I could not see what was going on, she was just at the center of this group - apparently they wanted to practice their English and were asking her a set of questions. The Red Fort has the best collection of snake charmers that I have seen.

We moved to a downtown hotel, and I hate to admit that what was really great about the hotel was having a TV with high quality shows such as Hooperman, American Gladiators, and Saturday morning cartoons (in English). The only other cartoons Casey had seen recently were some Disney cartoons dubbed in Hindi. After going to the Redfort, we went to meet an ex-Reedie at the American Embassy compound - she suggested meeting there since it had a very good playground for Casey. We spent the afternoon eating Hamburgers and drinking soft drinks imported from the US. The embassy compound strives to be more American than America is - it was awfully bizarre. The main concern of the foreign service types seemed to be an endless series of parties - that evening's gala was a cross-dressing party, and several people stopped by our table to discuss their costumes. I also spent a long time talking to someone about the tribulations of owning an Oldsmobile station wagon in Delhi.

Khajuraho

We went to Khajuraho after two nights in Kanpur. We hired a car for the journey (250km) since there was no direct train, and bus travel would have been slow and crowded. The drive was pleasant - we saw a little bit of Kanpur (which lived down to its reputation), and quite a bit of the countryside. The roads were fairly lightly travelled, so it was not that nerveracking (although the car did have to pull off the road for oncoming busses and trucks). I was glad that I did not see how bald the tires were until after we arrived. Our luggage was searched when we crossed the state border (from UP into MP). I guess they assumed that we would be smuggling in weapons to disrupt the MP elections. (The state elections were staggered, so that the security forces could be moved from one state to another, so we managed to be in town for both UP and MP elections).

We arrived in Khajuraho, and checked into a very nice $6 per night hotel - with a friendly staff and a garden. I noticed small furry creatures running out of some rooms and into the garden - these turned out to be mongooses - so we didn't need to worry about cobras. Casey was immediately befriended by some of the staff members and they took him out and showed him around - he managed to con some of them into giving him motor-scooter rides. Several people took Casey out to their houses and bought him candy. One evening, someone insisted that we go to his son's first birthday party. The house was clean, but very cramped, and it was interesting to see how people lived. I am not sure if we were invited so that we would send them photos (they insisted on us bringing a camera), or a birthday gift (10 rupees), or if it was just friendliness.

Khajuraho is famous for its temples. It has a large number of temples that were built in the 11th century (why Khajuraho? which has always been the middle of nowhere, no one knows). The temples are famous for their elaborate carving, including many erotic sculptures. The upper portions of the temples had erotic sculptures, while lower down some of the sculptures were out-and-out dirty (or to put it differently - up top: gods and goddesses, below: soldiers and horses). Independent of the subject matter, the workmanship is remarkable.

Khajuraho is a relatively small town, with a large number of tourists. There are a number of expensive hotels which cater to tour groups - these tourists are bussed to the sites, and have a relatively small impact on the town. There are also quite a few small, cheap hotels, which cater primarily to European, budget travellers. The main town area surrounding the temples consists of handicrafts stores - far more handicraft stores than tourists. Each store had several touts, begging and cajolling people to come inside. Everytime we walked by we would have to fight off a swarm of people promissing the best prices in town. In the end, we bought a few trinkets which involved a lot of arguing.

With Casey, we were certainly the highest profile tourists in town. On one walk, Casey was (under the influence of jack and the bean stalk), was chanting "fee fi fo fum . . .", and quickly was joined by a large number of village children who began chanting with him, and we could hear them chanting this long after we had left them. Doing things like going on elephant rides did not diminish our profile. There was an old guy, dressed in orange robes and carrying a trident who would wonder through the town with his elephant. He came by our hotel, and Nancy encouraged me to go with Casey on the elephant ride. The owner was able to tell the elephant to kneel down, but it was still not very easy to climb on the elephant. The two things I realized when we were on top of the elephant were how tall the elephant was, and how low the electrical wires were. The elephant wandered about town for a while, and crowds formed along the sides of the street to watch us. When the ride finished, the fare negotiation started - someone had told me the fare would be 10 rupees, and so I planned on 20 rupees to include the standard "Tourist tax". However, he demanded 100 and then 50 - I was willing to go up to 30. A standard gambit in haggling is to walk away from the deal when an impasse is reached - so he said "Okay - I don't want your money" and took his elephant and went home - we still haven't agreed on the fare.

We planned to fly from Khajuraho to Agra, and when we checked out of the hotel, the manager said (with some glee) the flight had been cancelled. After several phone calls, we confirmed that there was no flight, so we took off to the bus station. We wisely chickened out of the bus-train option which would have been a 7 hour bus ride, followed by a 4 hour train ride, arriving in Agra in the middle of the night. We then went to the airline office to check out our options - there was a scheduled flight the next day, and they said they might add a morning flight. When we got back to the hotel, they called us, and said that there would be no morning flight, the afternoon flight was already full, and wouldn't we rather go by taxi instead - so they arranged for an 8 hour taxi ride (400km) for the next day in exchange for our flight coupons. The Khajuraho flight is very heavily booked, and is prone to cancellation. The plane flies Delhi->Agra->Khajuraho->Varanasi->Katmandu in the morning, changes crew and reverses the route in the afternoon. Since the crew is limited to four landings per shift, if anything goes wrong, the schedule falls apart. In general, the India tranisit system is not very fault tolerant. In our case, the plane could not go to Katmandu, so it just returned to Delhi from Varanasi. Indian Airlines has improved substantially in the last year, but still requires patience, and is not for the faint hearted. A recent flight from Madras ended up in a rice paddy, reducing the number of Airbusses in the flight by one (however, no one was seriously hurt). A few weeks ago, one of the planes lost a wheel shortly after takeoff. The newpaper article talked about how important it was to find the wheel for them to figure out what went wrong. The article went on to describe how one of the passengers saw it fall off, and went up to complain to the pilot who did not believe him. The passenger and the pilot had a midair bet on whether or not there was a missing wheel. I haven't heard of any recent incidents that compare with last an incident last year. India had rented Uzbek airlines during the Indian Airlines strike. One plane flipped over when landing at Delhi airport, and it took forty five minutes to find the plane. The passengers just got out of the plane and waited until finally a jeep showed up.

Back to our trip

The taxi ride was uneventful, but long. Again, it was interesting to spend a day watching the countryside go by. There was one stretch of road where there were quite a few wrecked trucks off the side of the road, and the remnants of a massive train wreck. The train wreck had happened the previous night, and there were freight cars piled one on top of the other. The most striking thing about the wreck was the number of people that were working on the wreck and the tracks, attempting to get it cleaned up. Even after being in India for almost four months, there are many sights that are exotic. At a gas station, someone appeared with a dancing bear. We also saw a number of camels, elephants, and monkeys along the way.

Agra

We visited Agra for a chance to see the Taj Mahal. We lost one day because of the cancelled flight and taxi ride, so we had to drop a few sights off of our list. Agra is not a particularly pleasant place - it is difficult to walk on the street because of the number of auto and cycle rickshaws, the people generally seem very aggressive, and air is very dusty and smokey. However, the Agra Fort and the Taj Mahal are absolutely spectacular. The Taj Mahal has a curious policy on photography, there is one region where video is permitted, (after which your camera is locked away), and another region where cameras may be used, and then a region where photography is not permitted. When Nancy asked about this, she was given the answer that if tourists were permitted to take videos of the Taj, then people would be able to see these videos, and would not have to come to India to see the Taj in person. The Taj Mahal definitely is worth seeing - even if you have seen a picture or video of it - it is spectacular both from a distance and up close. The one downside of the Taj was that it was an incredibly scary place to have a two yearold running around. For example, one of the courtyards had an open well protected by a wall that was less than a foot high and the outer wall of the Taj was also about one foot high, with a forty foot drop on the other side. Much to our relief, we all survived the outing.