Kolkata - show & tell

I've been lucky enough to get out and explore the city over the last couple of days so i'll share with you a little of what i've seen and learn't about the place...

Capital of West Bengal and considered by many the cultural capital of India, Kolkata played a key role in the British empire, acting primarily as its administrative centre.

If you read the English history books they will tell you the city was formed in 1698 when 3 villages were signed over to the British East India Company and merged to create a miniature London with wide boulevards, grand buildings, churches and museums. An Indian court has since ruled that the city in fact existed before the Brits arrived and so the Indian history books tell a somewhat more accurate story.

In 1756 an uprising of the poorer Indian classes recaptured the city and threw scores of the local aristocracy into a cramped, dark underground room below Fort William. Come morning 40 of them were dead, but the numbers in the news reports sent back to England seriously exaggerated the death toll and in usual UK tabloid manner the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' was born. Since then western media has continued to propagate the image with the 'Black hole' and Mother Theresa's struggle against filth and poverty being what most of us know of Kolkata today.

Serbian born, Mother Theresa dedicated her life to 'giving wholeheartedly to the poorest of the poor' and created a new order, Missionaries of Charity, in 1937 when she first arrived in India. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 she has been critised widely for accepting donations from corrupt businessmen and dictators, as well as for not addressing the root causes of poverty. For the most part, and certainly in Kolkata she is highly praised and loved.

The British left India and Kolkata many years ago but their influence remains in the architecture of the buildings and the city itself. Spread out along the great grey-green greasy banks of the Hoogley river the 2 halves of the city are connected by the impressive Howrah Bridge, which spans the river in a giant 450m single span and carrying more that 100,000 vehicles a day is probably one of the busiest bridges in the world.

Kolkata is also home to India's oldest and largest museum. Founded in 1841 and aptly named the Indian Museum the huge colonial building contains an impressively well organised collection of Indian art, sculpture, geological finds, anthropological exhibits and some rather gruesome aged stuffed beasts in the zoological department. Unfortunately photography within the museum is forbidden so you'll have to use your imagination.

I hadn't come to Kolkata with any preconceived ideas of the place but its vivacity, culture and energy is beyond what I could have imagined. Sure it has its downsides; filth, poverty, pollution (just like many other Asia and Western cities) but i'm pleased to have seen it with my own eyes and have something other than the image the media projects to attribute to the place.

After crossing many mountains, many rivers...



my pack has finally joined me in Kolkata!

Given that its hovering around 30c with frequent heavy rainstorms the contents (90% of which is thermal underwear and a down sleeping bag) are of little use to me, but after more than 7 years of travels on 5 different continents i've become quite attached to it.



Actually being reunited with my pack was an adventure in itself... Indian Airlines called to say it would be arriving on a cargo flight from Delhi at 7pm, however due to a taxi strike (thought i'd left all that behind me in Paris...) I had to wait until the next morning before getting back out to the airport. To cut a very long story short I spent more than 5 hours bouncing between various offices and bureaucracies filling in countless forms before my pack was finally handed over to me (looking like it'd made the journey strapped to a donkey's arse).



It does however contain a few of the bare essentials that without which life has been tough the last couple of days; tongs (flip-flops) which are essential in shared bathrooms; tiger balm, the only stuff that really works on bug bites; a headtorch to deal with the frequent blackouts; and a sarong that doubles, or even triples, as a wrap, bedsheet and a towel.



Finally with my pack back I've changed hostels, changed clothes and can recommence my travels, starting with the overnight train to Darjeeling tonight.

Greetings...
from the black hole formerly known as Calcutta!

Like everything in life the last couple of days have been a mixture of the sweet and the sour.

The Air France strike left me waiting for 6-hours on a standby list at Charles de Gaulle, only at the last minute to be handed a business class boarding pass and told to sprint for the plane. I make a bit of a habit of leaving boarding until the very last minute but this is the first time i've actually had to knock on the door of a 747 and ask them to open up.
I slipped back into the luxury of my flatbed seat safe in the knowledge that there was little hope of my bag having made it on to the same flight, and woke up 7 hours later in Dehli to find my suspicions confirmed.

Having filled in multiple 'wheres my luggage..?' forms at Delhi and randomly picked a hostel in Kolkata as a forwarding address for my pack I jumped on a Jet Airways flight and landed here bright and early Tuesday morning. Finding a taxi was a breeze, the ride into town was the usual scramble of bikes and buses, all accompanied by the clamour of horns, and I quickly felt like i'd slipped back into the India groove and was on vacation.

The Lonely Planet describes the hostel I randomly chose as 'cosy'. I'd describe it as a bug ridden flea pit, complete with wildlife in the form of roaches and a mice.

Heres what they left my right arm looking like. If you flip the image 180' you get a picture of my left arm... lets hope they don't scar.

Waking up with the call to prayer this morning I was aware of not having had a very good nights sleep, the reason possibly being the 60+ bug bites smattered all over my body and face. The owners promptly exploded a bug bomb in the room, rendering it a chemical war zone for the next week and upgraded me to a bigger room downstairs, again with the complimentary in room mouse. I'd happily have upped and moved off to a new hostel if this place wasn't the only link between me and my luggage.

Despite all this, today has been a good day. Its lashed with rain so i've sat in a cafe and, for the first time in a long time, had time to read the Economist from cover to cover.




I met a group of volunteers working at Mother Theresa's home for the poor and spent lunch learning about how the charity works and how they're involved. I've also scrambled around a few shops to pick up toothpaste, deodorant, a clean t-shirt etc etc and just a few minutes ago the hostel received a call saying my packs arriving on an Air India flight tomorrow morning! I wonder if its had as much fun as me in the last 3 days...

x