May 10-15: Calcutta to Bangkok to Saipan

My train from Bolpur to Calcutta didn't leave until the afternoon of the 10th, so in the morning I took a cycle rickshaw to Shantiniketan.  I walked around the campus a bit, seeing several groups of yellow and white clad students attending classes under the trees.  I had read a newspaper the evening before reporting a special exhibition celebrating Tagore's 151st birthday, so I went to that when it opened at 10:30.  It wasn't much, but it did have some interesting photos and translations of a few of his poems.  It also had some of his paintings, which are quite interesting.  He started painting late in his life, in his 70's, I think.  After that, I walked around the campus a bit more, went to a bookstore, and took a cycle rickshaw back to the hotel about 11:30 in time for a last Bengali fish and rice lunch at the hotel.

My train left soon after 1 and was uncrowded.  It made good time through the flat Bengali countryside, with only two stops and covering the 90 miles to Calcutta in two and a half hours.  We passed lots of rice fields on the way, with a great many of them freshly harvested, and quite a few huts with the typical sloped Bengali grass roofs.  From the huge Howrah train station I walked across the road and caught a ferry across the wide Hooghly River, with views of the massive Howrah Bridge just upriver.  Reaching the east bank, I was right downtown.  I had planned to take a taxi once there, but they wouldn't use their meters or charge a reasonable rate, so I ended up walking to the hotel where I had stayed last November.  It took about 45 minutes, but I enjoyed walking past all the old colonial buildings and seeing all the street activity.  I relaxed and read a newspaper at the hotel before dinner.  It said Calcutta gets about six big rainstorms between early April and the middle of May, which is why West Bengal is so much greener and more humid now than points further west.  It took me a while to get to sleep that night as my room was hot.

The next morning my room still was hot, 88 degrees when I got up.  The day was a little cooler than previous days, though, with a high of only 95, but very high humidity.  After breakfast I walked around the city center, past many of the old colonial buildings as far north as the Writers' Building, former headquarters of the East India Company (the company's clerks were called writers) and now the seat of the West Bengal state government.  There is lots to be seen just walking along the crowded streets:  vendors selling just about anything, people cooking and selling food, barbers shaving customers.  I saw a guy on the street cleaning another guy's eye, scraping the white of the eye with a little metal utensil.

I stopped in at St. Andrew's Church, next to the Writers' Building,  and later at St. John's Church, the latter a few blocks away and completed in 1787.  Arriving at St. John's I was hot, sweaty, and thirsty and sat under ceiling fans in the vast nave drinking a liter of water I had just bought.  I checked out the plaques on the walls in both churches and the graveyard around St. John's before heading to a restaurant near my hotel for a late lunch. At St. John's there is a tombstone for a woman born in 1725, married first in 1738, remarried to a second husband who died of smallpox within a few days of the marriage, married a third time to a man with whom she had four children, and married a fourth time in 1774.  All this is on the tombstone, along with the names and marriages of the three of her children who survived until adulthood.  All her husbands held distinguished positions.  She died at 87 in 1812, the oldest British resident of Bengal, the tombstone said.  In the late afternoon I ventured out to a bookstore, but that was about it.

I left Calcutta, and India, the next day, the 178th of the 180 days allowed by my visa.  A big cricket match was to be played in Calcutta that afternoon, the Kolkata Knight Riders versus the Mumbai Indians, and the newspapers and television were full of news about it.  My flight left about 1 in the afternoon (on Air Asia and booked about ten days before for something less than $150) and arrived in Bangkok just before 5, local time.  I got to my hotel about 6:30.  It is as hot in Bangkok as it was in Calcutta, but after India Bangkok seems so clean and orderly and quiet.

I didn't do much the next day, another hot day, in the high 90's.  After breakfast I read the Bangkok English language newspapers, and spent most of the day reading and relaxing, with a few short walks.  I spent some time in the very nice Buddhist temple located between Khao San Road and my hotel.   Despite the heat, there are still a lot of tourists in Bangkok, though nowhere near as many as when I was last here in November.

The first of my flights home left the next morning about 11 from Bangkok.  I had booked the flights only a few days earlier, costing me only 15,000 reward miles and a little over $100. The very comfortable Thai Airlines flight to Osaka took about five and a half hours, arriving in Osaka about 6:30 Japan time.  On the way I had some great views of the Vietnamese coast just north of Danang, the southern tip of Taiwan and some of islands between Taiwan and Japan.  It was cloudy over southern Japan, so I saw little of it until just before we landed, when I got some good views of Kobe and Osaka and the mountains behind them before we landed.   My  next flight left Osaka about 9, arriving in Guam after about three hours, at 1 in the morning local time on May 15.  Because of mechanical problems, my flight from Guam to Saipan was delayed about an hour and a half, but we finally took off soon after 4 and arrived in Saipan about 5.  I got home just before 6, just after sunrise.

May 4-9, 2012: Bishnupur, Shantiniketan, Tarapith

It felt cool in Ranchi on the morning of the 4th when I walked over to the train station to buy my ticket to Bishnupur.  I had breakfast at the station and later read a newspaper in the lobby of a nearby hundred year old railroad hotel recently refurbished into a luxury hotel.  The temperature the day before in Ranchi, it reported, had been 97 degrees, a break from the 100 plus degrees weather I'd been having.  About 9:30 I left on the train to Bishnupur, about 150 miles to the east.  My ticket cost me all of 34 rupees, about 65 cents.  The train was all unreserved seating, but was uncrowded.  I sat in the last car and at times had it almost to myself.

The train made many stops as we passed through the scenic hilly and forested area of eastern Jharkhand (a state created only in 2000 out of the southern portion of Bihar), a sparsely populated area.  I enjoyed the trip.  We crossed into West Bengal and the terrain became flatter, but with big stone hills rising over the dry landscape.  A teacher boarded the train at the first stop in West Bengal.  He told me school runs from 6:30 to 11 in the morning in the summer and he was on his way home, in the city of Puruliya.  I talked with him for the hour and a half it took us to reach Puruliya.  He pointed out hills about twelve miles to the north and said there were wild elephants and Maoist Naxalite guerrillas there.  The land flattened as we headed east and became greener, though not as green as when I took a train west through West Bengal last November.  The rains start earlier in West Bengal than further west.  I spotted a few very green rice paddies and even the dry grass had a bit of green in it.  Further west, it had all been brown.  The train filled up a bit here and there, but was never overly crowded.  It clouded up and I saw lots of oil palms dotting the landscape.

We arrived in Bishnupur, at only 220 feet elevation, about 4, only ten minutes late, which is pretty good considering Bishnupur was the 32nd stop from Ranchi.  I took a cycle rickshaw to a hotel about two and a half miles from the station, and enjoyed the ride through the streets of that small city, with a population of around 60,000.  It is much more humid and green here.  I walked around a bit before dark and watched lots of cricket being played by boys in dusty fields.  It gets dark here about 6:30.  That evening there was quite a bit of thunder and lightning, but only a little rain.  I slept well under a fast moving ceiling fan.

The next morning after breakfast at the hotel I hired a cycle rickshaw to take me to the temples around the town.  These temples date from the Malla Dynasty of the 16th to 18th centuries.  My guidebooks don't explain who the Mallas were and how they managed to thrive at a time of Muslim dominance in Bengal.  The temples are made of either brick or laterite, the latter a rough, pockmarked red stone.  The brick temples are covered with terra cotta sculpture while the laterite ones are plastered, although much of the plaster has worn off.  They often have roofs modelled after the sloped straw roofs of Bengali style huts.  I enjoyed moving through Bishnupur's narrow lanes in a cycle rickshaw, with views of small town life everywhere:  men and women washing at water pumps or in small ponds, repair shops, food shops, school kids in uniform. People were very friendly.  There were quite a few hammer and sickle emblems painted on the sides of buildlings.  The Communist Party governed West Bengal from 1977 until just last year, when they were finally ousted in elections. 

Over the morning we must have stopped at between fifteen and twenty of these temples.  Some were covered with spectacular terra cotta tiles depicting scenes from daily life and from stories about Krishna and others.  I think all the temples are Vishnu temples.  Some of the brick temples had hundreds of panels and thousands of figures, and I very much enjoyed picking out all the details, often very fine, though it was hot standing in front of the temples in the midday sun.  At one temple my feet began to sting and I noticed that I had stepped among many very tiny, stinging ants.  We also passed the two remaining gates and the dry remnants of a moat from an old fort.  Flame trees, like those from Africa and Saipan (brought from Africa during the German era), grew around town.

After a lunch break from about 1 to 3, we headed to seven laterite temples just north of town and explored those until about 4:30.  The laterite temples are not as well decorated as the brick and terra cotta temples. The sculpture is carved into the rough laterite blocks and then plastered.  In the late afternoon I walked back to some of the finest temples and watched boys playing cricket in the nearby dusty open spaces.  The townspeople were friendly and curious.  It was sunny all day, with no clouds.  Hot and humid, but not unbearable, and really not bad at all in the shade.

The next morning I walked to the Shyamarai Temple, dating from 1643 and the finest of the lot, with hundreds of panels.  I watched a lizard crawl along the panels and just generally enjoyed the site in the morning sun.  It was hot in the sun, but pleasant in the shade.  In the sun I photographed a dung beetle rolling a ball of dung perhaps thrice his size and soon noticed I was dripping with sweat.  The morning's newspaper had said the high was only 93 the day before, but humidity about 85%.  

I had lunch at the hotel and caught a bus at 1 heading north, then west, then north again to Durgapur.  The bus was slow, with lots of stops, but passed through a scenic area of small villages and bounteous rice fields.  Some of the golden rice was being harvested.  The bus became much more crowded and the countryside much drier as we approached Durgapur, which we reached a little before 4.  I hopped on another bus, this one heading to Bolpur, which left at 4.  This was another small bus, which eventually got very crowded.  Fortunately, I had a window seat so no standees were leaning against me.  The aisles were packed, like the bus I took from Umaria to Tala.  I did have a mother and her screaming child seated next to me for a while.  The mother appeared to think that screaming back at the child might stop her. 

Durgapur seems to be a city of big factories and I remember seeing them before as I  passed through the city by train headed west last November.  Our bus headed east, then north, then east again to Bolpur, arriving at 6:30, at dark. The road was wet from rain in places and we passed through a forested area, in flat terrain, for a few miles, a surprise to me in densely populated Bengal.  Bolpur is only a little more than 50 miles from Bishnupur, but with the slow buses and indirect route, it took me five and a half hours to get there.  I took a cycle rickshaw to a hotel, with a few drops of rain and some impressive lightning on the way.  The hotel turned out to be a good one and I had a very good dinner at the hotel of Bengali style fish (a river fish; Bengalis are famous for their fish dishes), vegetables and rice.

The next morning I walked up the road about a mile north to Shantiniketan, the location of a university founded by Rabindranath Tagore, India's Nobel Prize winning (in 1913) poet.  His father, Debendranath Tagore, considered a great maharishi of a 19th century reformist Hindu sect, bought a farmhouse here in the 1860's, soon after Rabindranath (his fourteenth child) was born in 1861.  Rabindranath spent a lot of time here and moved here from Calcutta in 1901 to start a school, with five pupils taught under the trees.  It became a university in 1921.  Indira Gandhi (then Indira Nehru), among other notables, attended.  I visited several buildings, including the farmhouse expanded into a two story mansion and some other interesting smaller houses where Tagore lived off and on until his death at 80 in 1941.  The houses have some of the original furnishings and lots of photos.  Gandhi visited several times, as early as 1915 and as late as 1940.  There are photos of him and Tagore:  Tagore tall, dressed in a long white robe, with a flowing long white beard and hair and Gandhi, small, his head shaved, wearing only a white dhoti not falling below his knees.  There is also a museum, but I was told it is closed for renovation.

I walked through the campus, mercifully under shady trees, including some huge banyan trees, and saw some of the students walking around and attending classes under the trees.  Under one tree surrounded by students seated on the ground stood a blackboard permanently fixed onto the ground.  The students wear very stylish yellow and white uniforms:  the boys in white trousers with almost knee-length yellow shirts; the girls in white trousers and yellow blouses with white scarfs or else yellow saris with white top garments.  There were quite a few tourists and I met an architect from Bangladesh and walked around with him for a while.  The sky clouded up around 2 and that made it seem cooler.  I got back to the hotel about 3:30 and spent most of the rest of the afternoon there.

The next morning I took a cycle rickshaw to Santiniketan about 7:30, reaching the small glass-walled temple near the mansion just after a prayer service commemorating Tagore's 151st birthday had ended.  He was born on May 7, 1861, but this year his birthday under the Bengali calendar falls on May 8.  I walked to the Uttarayan complex, with all the small houses where he lived, and sat under an awning in front of one of the houses to await a birthday ceremony.  It was hot, though ocassionally a very welcome cool breeze blew. 

The program started at 8:30, with songs by choirs and individuals, interspersed with readings from Tagore's poetry.  It was all very nice.  Of course, I didn't understand the Bengali poetry, but it sounded lovely when read by the various readers.  One of the poems recited was in English and quite beautiful.  I think the songs also were Tagore poems set to music.  There was quite a crowd for the ceremony, with many men in traditional Indian dress and many women in beautiful saris.  I seemed to be the only westerner.  The ceremony ended after an hour and I hung around watching the colorful crowd disperse and talking to the Bangladeshi architect and others.  I walked back through campus, bought a ticket from the small Shantiniketan train ticket office for Calcutta in two days' time, and in the hot sun took a cycle rickshaw back to my hotel about 11.

I spent the afternoon trying to avoid the heat at an internet cafe and in the air conditioned lobby of my hotel.  Hilary Clinton had visited Calcutta the previous day and I found a Bengali newspaper with seven or eight photos of her, mostly with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.  It didn't seem to cool down much after dark.  Sunset is just after 6 and it gets dark about 6:30.  Sunrise is very early, about 5.  India is one big time zone, despite the country covering almost 28 degrees of longitude from west to east.  Time zones ordinarily cover about 15 degrees of longitude.

It was hot and very humid when I woke up the next morning.  My thermometer registered 88 degrees in my room.  The morning newspaper said it had reached between 98 and 99 degrees the day before in Calcutta, with a low between 81 and 82.  A little before 10 I boarded a crowded train heading north to Rampurhat, about 35 miles away.  I had to stand in the crowded aisle, but the train was an express, making only two stops and reaching Rampurhat in about an hour.  I stood near the open door and enjoyed watching the scenery go by.  Rice was growing in places and being reaped by sickle here and there.  Other rice paddies were still fallow, to be planted in the coming monsoon, I guess.  A Baul singer, one of Bengal's traditional wandering minstrels, came through the car singing and beating his small drum.

Alighting at the station in Rampurhat, I hopped on a shared, large-size autorickshaw that took me about five miles south to Tarapith, a small town with a tantric Hindu temple honoring Tara, one of the many avatars of Shiva's consort Parvati/Uma/Durga/Kali.  A guy from Calcutta named Rahul had been on the train and autorickshaw and he showed me around.  It was hot and humid as we walked to the temple through a pedestrian lane full of shops catering to pilgrims.  There were some spectacularly beautiful garlands on sale.  The red hibiscus ones, he told me, were Tara's favorite, but there were also ones of yellow flowers, blue flowers, small white flowers, and giant lavender lotuses.  The temple wasn't much, but the pilgrims were interesting.  It was relatively uncrowded.  Rahul, who told me he comes here every three months or so, said it is packed on weekends.  I didn't join the line to enter the temple, but I could pick out the central idol from the outside.  I looked around while Rahul was praying and with him after he finished.  Small stones are tied with red and yellow string to a fence near the main temple.  Rahul told me you leave one when you have a prayer for Tara to grant, and if she does you come back and remove one of the hanging stones.  There were also many bells, of different sizes, hanging near the stones, donated by persons whose prayers had been granted.  Rahul showed me the spot where goats are sacrificed to Tara.  He told me a small goat costs about $100.

We next walked to the cremation area along the river near the temple.  A body on a pyre was burning, with men beating it with bamboo poles.  Rahul told me that is done to break the legs, so the body doesn't sit up while burning.  Another group had just brought the body of an old woman, with long gray hair, to the area.  Unlike at Varanasi, where the bodies are covered in cloth, this dead woman was clad only in a piece of cloth reaching from her waist to her knees.  She was rather unceremoniously lifted off the stretcher and dropped face down onto a small pile of wood, which was quickly set on fire without any of the ceremony seen at Varanasi.  Rahul told me these were poor people who couldn't afford the quantity of wood necessary for a full cremation.  He said they would be only partially burned, with the remnants buried nearby.  He pointed to the many dirt mounds nearby.  I asked if the body remnants might be washed away when the rains come, but he said they are buried six feet and more down.

While we were there, an uncovered body of a man was brought on a stretcher to be cremated, again on a small pile of wood.  Unlike at Varanasi, you are allowed to take photos and I saw some Indians taking photos with their cell phones.  People at the temple and cremation ground were quite friendly, even the sadhus.  Nobody seemed to mind having his or her photo taken, and some requested it.  I don't think they get many westerners at this place.

We found a small, hot restaurant and had a small lunch before I took an autorickshaw back to Rampurhat and caught a train back to Bolpur about 2.  I easily found a seat for the hour trip back on another express.  It was overcast and humid and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the hotel.

April 29 - May 3, 2012: Bilaspur, Raipur, Sambalpur, Rourkela, Ranchi

I was up at 5 on the morning of the 29th as we were hoping to make another safari into the Tala Zone of Bandhavgarh National Park.  We were told that we would know by 5:30, but not until 6:30 were we finally informed that we couldn't get entry.  We had breakfast at the hotel and a little before 9 the five of us, rather than chance the crowded buses, hired a jeep to take us to Umaria.  It took us a little less than an hour to get there, a much more pleasant trip than my arrival on the bus from Umaria to Tala.  When we arrived, a train for Katni was at the station about to depart and Zafer and Karen (headed for Nepal) and the two Danish women (headed for Khajuraho) jumped on it.  I was headed in the opposite direction, with a train scheduled to pass through at 10:45.  I sat and waited, talking to some of the friendly people curious about me, including a guy who bought me tea.  I expected the train to be late.  It had left Indore the previous evening at 5 or so and Umaria was its 45th scheduled stop.  The train arrived just before noon and was packed.  I jumped on and had to stand for the first half hour, until our second stop, where I got a portion of a crowded seat.  Still, when very crowded, the relatively spacious trains are much better than the cramped buses.

My seat mates were friendly and I fielded the usual questions and one unusual one, whether I liked boxing.  The young woman who asked me that had earlier asked me what my job was, and later said, "Well, you must like boxing with words," which I thought was pretty clever.  It was hot, but not unbearably so, as we headed southeast through the mostly flat, though sometimes rolling, dry countryside.  There were lots of trees.  I had thought of getting off at a station called Pendra Road and taking a bus about 25 miles up into the hills to Amarkantak, a temple city at the source of the holy Narmada River.  But I had been told that April and May are months when Indians do a lot of travel, as the schools are out.  I didn't want to face another crowded bus and in fact a lot of people got off the train at Pendra Road.  Rather than go to the relatively cool hills and the source of the holy Narmada, I decided to remain on the train to its destination, Bilaspur, a city one of my guide books says is noted for its cement factories.

Amarkantak is in the hills, which we could see from the train, that separate Madhya Pradesh from the newly formed state of Chhattisgarh, part of Madhya Pradesh until 2000.  Chhattisgarh (which means "36 Forts") is 40% forested.  About 30 % of its people are tribal, mostly in the far north and south.  We had risen to over 2000 feet elevation around Pendra Road (the hills along the border rise to over 3500 feet) and soon after descended through hills covered with beautiful forest, including sal trees.  We passed through one long tunnel but mostly had some great views of the forest out the windows.  The number of passengers on the train had thinned out and I enjoyed the scenery.  The landscape became flatter and the elevation lower further south.  The sun set into the haze above the horizon about 6:20 and maybe twenty minutes later, just as it got dark, we arrived in Bilaspur, a city of 300,000 at about 1000 feet elevation.  I took an autorickshaw to what turned out to be a very nice hotel and got a room with a cooler for 500 rupees, about $10.  I was very hungry and had a very good dinner (chicken tandoori, nan and two lassis) at the hotel's restaurant and then washed my incredibly dusty and dirty clothes and day pack before going to bed soon after 10.

I got up the next morning soon after 6 and relaxed most of the morning, with a good breakfast at the hotel and a trip to an internet cafe to check train schedules.  I decided to forego inquiring about opportunities to visit Bilaspur's cement factories and about noon caught a train south to Raipur, Chhattigarh's capital.  The train was relatively uncrowded and I got a seat.  The train made no stops as it sped south through the flat, dry countryside.  A lot of cropland was in view, all fallow in this the hot season.  It did look very hot outside.  It took only a little more than an hour and a half to get to Raipur, a city of over 700,000 people, where I checked into an okay hotel and had a late lunch before checking bus schedules and spending most of the rest of the afternoon at an internet cafe.  Not much of touristic interest in Raipur, noted for the huge steel mill built by the Soviets in Bhilai, east of Raipur.

I was up early the next morning and bought my bus ticket for Sambalpur, to the east.  I had wanted to leave on a morning bus, but almost all the buses left at night and the earliest bus I could find left at 1 in the afternoon.  (I could have taken a direct overnight train to Calcutta from Raipur, or from Bilaspur or Umaria for that matter, but I wanted to travel in the day time and see the scenery on the way.)  I spent most of the morning in my hotel room (the morning newspaper reported that the high the day before was 105 and it was already hot in the morning), except for breakfast, and at 1 left on a big pink bus for Sambalpur.  It was a fairly comfortable, though well-worn, bus, with reclining seats and plenty of leg room.  However, it was not air conditioned and very hot.  I had a window seat with a window that wouldn't open fully, but I noticed almost every window was closed to prevent the blasts of hot air from coming in.  Mine was stuck partially open and I could feel the very hot air rushing in from outside on the back of my neck.

The bus initially made good time through the mostly flat, dry countryside, though there were, to my surprise, a few green rice paddies.  We did go through a hilly, rocky, forested area.  About 4:30 we reached the small  town of Sarai Pali, more than half way to Sambalpur.  We made a half hour stop there and thereafter made much slower time.  The bus had filled up with lots of people in the aisles and began to make lots of stops for people to get on and off.  We crossed the Chhattisgarh-Odisha (formerly Orissa, until just last year) state line, with lots of trucks lined up waiting to cross, and reached the city of Bargarh just before 7 as it was getting dark.  After another half hour stop there, we drove in the dark to Sambalpur, arriving after 9.  I found a hotel and a Chinese restaurant run by an actual ethnic Chinese guy and got to bed after 11.  It was warm in Sambalpur, at about 500 feet elevation, but I had a room with a cooler.

I had thought I might do some sightseeing around Sambalpur, but the sites, mostly temples, didn't seem that worthwhile and getting to them entailed a bus trip in the heat.  I spent most of the morning in the lobby of a nicer hotel than mine, and a little after 1 left on an uncrowded train heading to Rourkela to the northeast.  One of my guidebooks had said that the route from Sambalpur to Rourkela was particularly scenic, but it must have been talking about some route other than the one I took.  The train route passed through mostly dry, flat countryside, with some rice paddies.  We passed a huge factory near the city of Jharsuguda.  The factory had four of those huge cement cooling towers that you see at nuclear plants, plus two even taller smokestacks and a big squarish building.  As we passed, I noticed almost naked men fishing with nets in a dirty little pond in the foreground of the factory.  We passed through a somewhat more scenic hilly area just before arriving at Rourkela a little before 4.  I saw a few oil palms, maybe the first I've seen in India, as we neared the city.  I got a hotel and took a short walk before sunset.  Rourkela is a steel and mining city, at about 700 feet elevation.  Just north of the train station is a long brown hill with a temple about two thirds of the way up.  I asked the hotel manager if there was anything of touristic interest in town and he said no.

I again spent most of the next morning in my hotel room and after 11 left on another uncrowded train heading north to Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand state.  I was hoping this would be a scenic route as Jharkhand is quite a hilly state, and the scenery was fairly nice in places, especially just after we entered Jharkhand, with forested hills and one rocky river bed.  However, most of the terrain was dry, fallow farmland, with some hills here and there.  It seemed a very sparsely populated area.  The train was actually heading all the way to Jammu and a guy I was sitting near was going to Delhi.  He said the train would fill up in Ranchi and it did.  It arrived in Ranchi about 3:30 and I got off and got a hotel.  Ranchi is at about 2100 feet elevation and was noticeably cooler, especially at night, than the places I'd stayed in the previous days.  Not much of touristic interest in Ranchi, though.