Oct 2007

If there are more TATA trucks and tuk-tuks than Indians, then there are more motorbikes in Hanoi than there are people (and there are about three million of the latter). As we head into Vietnam's capital to find our hotel, we're struck with how clean the streets are relative to India, and then with the sheer volume of motorbikes weaving their way around cars and dodging pedestrians.

A completely, frighteningly typical scene in the Old Quarter. Pavements are filled with street vendors and parked motorcycles, which means that pedestrians have to compete for space in the road itself.

The Invisible Man is alive and well in Hanoi! Many Vietnamese bike-riders protect their lungs - and/or their skin - with scarves, hats and sun-glasses.

Accidents inevitably happen. This is one of the local bike hospitals.

We quickly fall in love with Hanoi. Our first interactions with Vietnamese are friendly and genuinely warm, and we fight off our fatigue to explore the Old Quarter immediately after our arrival. But as soon as we walk out of the hotel, we have about three near-death experiences with motorbikes, and quickly decide that a cycle is the way to find our bearings.

Lloyd after our hour-long cyclo ride. Note the cyclist is behind the passengers, so you travel feet first. Half way through our tour, our driver stopped for a drink and a smoke out of a very long and wide tube! Answers on a postcard, please....

On Sunday, we brave the motorbikes again for a fuller day of exploration, starting with a three hour long walking tour of the Old Quarter. If the locals aren't riding motorbikes, they're enjoying street food from literally hundreds of vendors. While the sights and smells are excrutiatingly tempting, we have a singular lunch goal in mind, and head to a highly recommended pizzeria for the best pizza we've had since we left the US. Hey, we're in Vietnam for almost a month so we have plenty of time to sample the local cuisine. We can't resist the local sugar cane drink, however, prepared by crushing sugar cane and then mixing the result with freshly squeezed lime juice and crushed ice.

Two piccies: a happy Lloyd with his sugarcane drink, and the happiest mannequin we've ever seen. You figure out which is which!

After lunch, we opt for the 'world-renowned' water puppet show. Rather than descending from above, the puppets rise from the water, controlled by puppeteers more than knee deep in water and concealed by a bamboo screen. While the show was entirely in Vietnamese (incicentally for an entirely western audience), we enjoyed the puppets' playfulness and the humour displayed. Hardly a "must-see" in our opinion, but a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon and allow the stomachs to adjust to the shock of food in any volume.

Puppets with a sense of humour, in any language!

One tip if you do go to the puppet theatre - don't be sold the "first class" seats over the "second class". The theatre also sells photo tickets, so wherever you sit, you WILL have some inconsiderate tourist in front of you sticking their camera in the air and taking an improbably long time to snap a shot. We'd have preferred to be at the very back of the theatre - firmly in second class - where we could have stood up to get the odd shot or two.

We'd originally planned to make the journey from Jaisalmer to Delhi in one day, but it turned out that this piece of planning (to be fair, executed many months ago sitting in front of a laptop in California) was not terribly practical, not least because the distance between the two is about 800 kilometres! And so we took the advice of our driver, stopping overnight on Thursday at Bikaner, a little under halfway between the two.

We chanced upon Lalgarh Palace Hotel which was built a little over a hundred years ago for Maharaja Ganga Singh (a signatory of the Versailles Treaty, no less!). The Maharaja's stately home combines both European grandeur with more local design features such as wooden and sandston carvings. Our room, one of maybe twelve set around an open-air courtyard, had a four poster bed so high that steps were provided to get onto it! Many of the hotel's features, from our room's ceiling to the dining room, billiards room and bar are original and, although not terribly well maintained, it was a real treat to spend our last night in India here.

We finally reached the parking lot that is Delhi on Friday evening, in plenty of time for our 11pm flight to Kuala Lumpur where we would pick up a connecting flight to Hanoi. Actually, with a few hours to spare, we headed into town to give Lloyd a drive-by of India Gate where, happily, there was a celebration of India's Territorial Army! Even though we arrived after dark, the mood was light with hundreds of Indian families enjoying the park. Vendors strolled by with colourful balloons, toys, candy floss and food.

Unfortunately, we didn't have time to wait around for the band to actually start playing their bag-pipes! If you look closely, you can see Lloyd featured in the big screen......

The traffic didn't allow us anymore time for sight-seeing, so we headed to the airport and checked in for our Malaysian Airlines flight. After ten days of - well - not much to eat at all, the 'Subway' sign after security was too much of a temptation for us. Apparently the diet of lentils and chipati had failed to satisfy more than just the two of us; as we turned the corner into the store, we saw about twenty caucasians busily ramming sandwiches down their throats as fast as they could. Within a few minutes, we were racing through a turkey salad sandwich, and - yes - we did rejoin the line to order a second sandwich....

Next stop - Vietnam! But first, a few tips if you're planning a trip to India:

1) Partly due to fewer language barriers and in large part due to a strong rail and (relatively speaking) road infrastructure, India is one of the easiest places to get around, so FTG*. This is absolutely a place to travel independently, and we loved the freedom we had during this leg of our trip.

Fewer language challenges, sure, but it's far from a sure thing. It took us a while to realize that this sign was for CHILLED beer...

2) Travel on an Indian Train at least once. Even though many of the long-distance trains are overnight (limiting what you can see of the countryside), there's something unique about Indian trains versus the (many) others we've been on. Don't miss it.

3) But bear in mind that if you go 2AC class (2 tier bunks, air-conditioned), you'll at best have yellow tinted windows that don't open. At worse - like us - you'll have yellow tinted, cracked windows that don't open. Again, it just restricts your ability to see anything.

4) Train experience aside, hire a car and driver to take you around. Shop around online and you'll probably get a better deal than we did just showing up. That said, you don't want to scrimp too much. Indian roads are - absolutely - the most dangerous we've seen and you want to be sure both the vehicle and driver can deal with it. We insisted on seat-belts (hey, it made us feel better) and you'll probably want AC too.

5) Don't miss Varanasi. This was my second trip to India and I have to say that Varanasi continues to top my list of favourites (at least of the India I've seen so far!). It's the spiritual heart of India, and reveals a side of India that you don't see if you are otherwise sticking to the Golden Triangle and Rajastan as we did.

6) One night in Agra is enough! We wouldn't have missed our stay at the Oberoi Amarvilas because of the once-in-a-lifetime view of the Taj (we got the best rate we could online through the hotel's website), and also because this kind of hotel offers important insight into India's history. We can't tolerate this kind of deferent service for too long, but it's something that should be experienced once. And one night is enough. There's NOTHING in Agra but the Taj Mahal and the Fort. Get in, get out, and don't waste any more previous time than you have to. If you're staying at the Amarvilas, the bank manager will also be happier.

7) Special tip for the tea drinkers out there. I'm one of those travellers who takes her own teabags and expects the simple pleasure of a good cuppa in the morning. Even with your own teabags, India isn't the kind of place where you will get a good cup of tea. By ordering hot water rather than coffee or tea, I had the unfortunate 'benefit' of seeing exactly what was in the water, and I'm afraid - even though no doubt perfectly safe in nearly every case - it was enough to put me off drinking at all. If I was to do this again, I would take my own mini-travel kettle and boil my own bottled water. Lloyd really wished I had ;o) - with my routine caffeine fix, I might have been more pleasant to be around.

On this lucky morning it only took three attempts to get the perfect cuppa

8) Ladies: if you're going anywhere on a camel, wear a sports bra! I had no idea camels could trot, but when they do.... ouch!

9) Don't miss Jodphur's Mehrangarh Fort.

We may add some more as we have more time to reflect on our time in India. Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you have questions on any of our comments!

A creative street vendor's advert in Jaisalmer.

*FTG = "F-the-Group" (i.e. "Forget"-the-Group, or "Forego"-the-Group, or ...).

You need to be in India for about three minutes to reach the decision NOT to drive here. If there is order to the chaos, we have yet to find it. The only guideline is that the bigger you are, the more aggressively you can ‘go for it’. Honking, of course, helps and is so frequently deployed that it must offer indemnity from responsibility; ‘yes, I did hit the cow/sheep/bicycle/tourist, but I honked to let them know the impact was imminent’. Our driver put it far more eloquently, explaining that driving in India isn’t lane-based, but space-based. Even on the rather attractive, new six-lane highway that links Jaipur and Jodhpur, much of the traffic ignores the clearly partitioned lanes. Government signs urge that ‘lane-driving is safe-driving’ but no-one’s listening.

About 300 people die each day on India's roads. Experts say that enforcing seatbelts isn't the answer because only around 5% of road users are in cars: the rest are on bikes, animal, or foot!

We covered 1400 kilometres in four days on the road (in a country where 300 kilometres is a very, very full day's drive). The bulk of our route was windy, two lane roads shared with animals, bicycles, tuk-tuks, pedestrians and the infamous brightly coloured TATA trucks with their ridiculous horns. Back home in California I spend a lot of time driving – maybe two-and-a-half hours a day to and from work, and I’ll call Lloyd maybe two times a year, trying to catch my breath as I share with him how I just about died because some idiot pulled into the fast lane without looking at his blind spot, or how some road-raged maniac just about forced me off the road.

There are more than four million TATA vehicles in India - they tend to be brightly decorated, both with paint as well as flowers and other offerings intended to protect the driver from harm.

But on Indian roads, near-death occur multiple times an hour. Overtaking on blind bends is absolutely the norm. Dozens of time, we'd pull out to overtake in clear sight of an oncoming TATA truck heavily laden with uncut marble. In the US, I’d never attempt the maneouvre. Hell, Lloyd wouldn’t even attempt these maneouvres in the beemer. In fifth gear at 30mph, the driver presses the accelerator but doesn’t seem to know that a lower gear would help. The TATA driver flashes his lights, making sure we know he’s there. It’s about this time that our driver decides to pass another vehicle. The TATA driver sets off his horn that will likely only be mid-ridiciulous-sequence by the time we get hit, head-on.

And then – somehow – it happens. When it becomes clear that we don’t have the space to pass the second vehicle, a space miraculously opens up for us, and we swerve to safety. Lloyd and I look at each other, eyebrows raised, but honestly our hearts don’t even skip a beat anymore. In California, you’d be considered a buffoon for even attempting the manrouve and the drivers would punish you by trapping you, fully exposed to oncoming traffic. In India, however, the traffic just somehow deals with it and everyone is – well – nice to everyone else. What goes around comes around, and Indians just want the good stuff!

Just the good stuff! Which reminds us of our driver’s adage for successful driving in India: good horn, good eyes, good brakes and good luck. Fortunately for us, our driver Suri seems to have the latter in spades.