Traveholics

Vagabonder's wanderings
  • Home
  • About
  • Tag: travel writing

    • Kuala Lumpur – First Impressions

      Posted at 5:39 PM by vagabonder
      Oct 27th

      The bus from Melaka dropped me off at Kuala Lumpur’s premier bus station, the Terminal Bersepadu Selatan, an enormous air-conditioned complex of ticket windows, food courts, arrival lounges and shopping centres. I felt like I had landed not at a bus station but in an International Airport. An electronic board announcing arrivals and departures to myriad Malaysian and SE Asian cities only served to enhance the illusion. As I walked around in a giddy daze trying to find my way to the train station to get to the center of the city, a tall, anxious figure walked towards me, stopped and said, “Do you speak English?” I said yeah, I spoke English.

      “Do you know the way to Bukit Bintang? I’ve been trying hard to wrap my head around this map but can’t seem to find a way to the right station”, he said pointing at the indecipherable map on the Lonely Planet guidebook he’d been lugging around. I said I had no idea and that I’d never been to the city before. He apologized. Given the number of “Indian-like” faces he’d seen in the country, he mistook me for a local, he said. His casual racial profiling made me simmer with anger inside but since we were trying to solve the same puzzles, I chose to forgive and forget and we teamed up to find the train station.

      Kuala Lumpur had many metro, railway and monorail lines connecting different parts of the city and many of them were privatized necessitating the need to buy different tickets for different legs of the journey if you didn’t have some kind of interlinking smart card. Neither Steve (the tall American guy) nor I had the card and this somewhat complex web of railway lines was making Steve very angry.

      But having grown up in the chaotic mish-mash of BEST bus routes and the Western, Central and Harbour Lines of Mumbai, I thought it wasn’t too difficult a task to figure this out, especially considering the fact that the maps at the Bandar Tasik Selatan station were practically handholding you through the route and the people manning the counters were immensely helpful in answering any doubts we had. So we took the KLIA Transit to KL Sentral, the gargantuan junction where many of the lines intersected, and the monorail from KL Sentral to Bukit Bintang.

      I hadn’t booked a room or a bed in the city and followed Steve to the hostel he had booked on Jalan Angsoka. The hostel (which, alas, no longer exists) was on the first floor of a building above an odorous Bangladeshi restaurant. It wasn’t exactly a winning first impression but the squeaky clean interiors and good-humored reception staff made me forgive the fishy odours we had to wade through to get there. They had run out of dorm beds and offered me a boxy single room that cost 10 RM more than a dorm bed, an offer that I gladly accepted.

      Steve was hungry and wanted to have Indian food. So we went to the Nagasari Curry House around the corner from the hostel where sumptuous plates of roti cinai, tandoori chicken and rava masala thosai invaded our table. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the prices for the Indian dishes here were cheaper than what you would find in a similar setting in India.

      As we washed the food down with masala chai, Steve told me a bit about himself.  He was from Indiana but had moved to Brooklyn back in 2004. There he worked in a retail store for over 4 years before being kicked out of the job when the recession hit. He had to move out of his house and live as a homeless for another year while working odd jobs. His mother lived in Indiana but he had no money to go see her and he sure as hell didn’t want to live in Indiana. But one day, his mother died and he got her house and a decent amount of money in inheritance. Sick of life in America, he sold the house, withdrew all the money he had and began traveling in Asia. He set up base in Krabi in Thailand where he worked with the ping pong bars to get white people in. There he fell in love with a Thai girl who worked in one of the bars and began building his own house from scratch on a plot of land he was given by a friend from the sleaze industry.

      He had to do a visa run every couple of months to take advantage of a visa loophole that let him live in Thailand indefinitely for as long as he wished. He usually went to Penang but was sick of Penang and since he had to fly to Singapore to meet a “business acquaintance”, he thought KL would serve the purpose better on this journey. “This city sucks”, he said, “It has zero charm or character. It stinks of oil and money. I hope I never have to come back here again.”

      “So why didn’t you get the visa done in Singapore and fly back?”, I asked.

      “They ask too many questions in Singapore. My guy knows everyone in the Malaysian consulates. So if I’m in a pickle, it’s easier to get it resolved in this country. You have no reason to be here though. Get out soon. Come see me in Krabi on the way out. Lovely beaches, good beer and some nice girls waiting for ya.”

      I drank my masala tea to that.

      I didn’t find KL to be as terrible as people had been telling me. For one, there was the free bus service called GoKL which linked some of the central districts. As a perennial pennypincher, I used it frequently to get around. Unlike bargain basement services in other cities, the GoKL buses were maintained as immaculately as the more premium bus services and were comfortable to travel in. It also helped that the route maps were clearly laid out making it incredibly easy to navigate the central parts of the city like Chinatown and the Petronas area.

      KL wasn’t obsessively clean but it was shiny enough. The Chinatown area of Jalan Petaling was typically old-fashioned with some sanitized chaos and hubbub revolving around its old shophouses and squares. It had a gallery of legendary food stalls and cafés to choose from serving all manner of wicked Cantonese and Hainanese dishes from watan mee to char siew to roast duck to char kuay teow to the most adventurous of offal ranging from pig intestines to chicken hearts. The street not only had a wide range of food I’d never seen or tasted before, it was also ridiculously cheap.

      And that’s one of the reasons I spent a longer time in the city than I had planned to. It had the comforts, the glitz and the metropolitan air of an expensive megapolis without threatening to burn a hole in my wallet. For the price of a dorm bed in the Singaporean suburbs, I could get a small private room in a hotel in a central district of KL, eat a ton of delicious food and have money left over for commutes. Yes, it was a bit rough around the edges and not exactly as sanitised, ordered and convenient as Singapore was, but it offered a far better value for my money.

      Posted in Kuala Lumpur, Uncategorized | Tagged budget travel, city, food, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, metropolis, solo travel, story, travel diary, travel story, travel writing, travelogue, urban
    • Dwali-Phurkiya

      Posted at 4:27 PM by vagabonder
      Sep 1st

      4954_107569596962_3499106_n

      The hike from Khati to Dwali is one of the most languid and social hikes I’ve ever done. Every few minutes, our progress would be hindered by some acquaintance of D trudging along the path entertaining him with gossip and conversation. There were friends, guides, horsemen, pandits, old people, so diverse were the people we came across that it was hard to believe there was anyone left in the world who didn’t know D.

      Two women, distant aunts of D, provided the most enjoyable company. They were on their way back from the forest with big baskets of wood on their backs. When they saw us, they took a break and began making tea with hot water from a big flask and tea powder. Both women had a lot of fun at D’s expense, dredging up the silly things he did as a kid – stealing chicken from the neighbours farm, wrecking giant cobwebs in the house and putting the spiders inside his mouth, annoying other girls his age by pulling their hair etc.

      D soon had enough of this teasing and said we had to get moving quickly or our legs would get swollen up with all the rest. The women mocked him saying that was the randomest excuse they had ever heard and asked me not to worry because even the slowest of walkers walked to Dwali in under 3 hours. So we had more cups of tea and more conversation.

      I told them that Khati was the most beautiful village I had ever seen and that nothing appears to have changed in a hundred years. The women shook their heads in disagreement. It wasn’t the village it was, they said. Back in the 70s when they grew up, only the hardiest of mainland Indians or foreigners ever made it to the village and when they showed up, it felt as if they had come from another world. But now, so many came every day that the surprise and the shock of seeing people from other cultures had dwindled to nothing. Even the language barrier didn’t exist anymore because most people had learnt to speak Hindi. People were more content back then, they said. Hardly anybody had money and while life was hard, they had everything they needed to survive. But now, thanks to tourism and easier access, everybody worked for money and no amount of money was ever enough. I could have talked to the women all day long, probing deeper into their history but we had to get moving if we wished to reach Dwali soon and I bid them a sad goodbye.

      The most pleasurable section of the walk to Dwali was by the bright green grassy banks of the Pindari river. It was an ethereal faeriland with butterflies of myriad colors flitting by and scarlet minivets adding a touch of bright red to the landscape. Much to D’s annoyance, I took inordinately long breaks here to just sit by the river and watch it flow. On one of these breaks, D confessed that he had once fallen in love with a Gujarati girl from a group that had hired him for the trek. Even though he was a married man, he thought about her every single day, he said. He wrote long letters to her to stay in touch and was enormously happy when she replied to a few of them. It was a bittersweet happiness as it also made him feel guilty and sinful for loving another woman more than his wife. Having married at the age of 18, he felt trapped at having to lead a life he hadn’t chosen. He couldn’t run away from his village and his family because they were the only tangible things in the world that he had and without them, he would feel painfully lost.

      By the time we crossed the wonky suspension bridge to reach the Dwali Tourist Rest House, it was 4 pm. I was delighted to be at the end of a beautiful day of hiking and looked forward to spending the rest of the evening with umpteen cups of tea staring at the mountains in front of me. But these alluring thoughts would prove to be delusional. The Dwali TRH was swarmed with a mighty group of kids from an International school in Pune. They had taken up all the accommodation and the place was so small and beds were in such short supply that there weren’t enough of them to accommodate the gargantuan support staff of guides, teachers, porters, rescue specialists, horsemen and random hangabouts.

      The manager stormed out and admonished D for taking such a long time to get there. He was terribly angry and advised me to cut his fees for the day because it was his duty to get there early and book a place for his client. If we had gotten there merely two hours earlier, he might have found a corner for me to sleep in. But now it was too late. What took us so long anyway?, he asked, arms flailing about. It was such a short, easy hike! I told him, smiling sheepishly, about the many breaks we took on the way to enjoy the bounty of mother nature. He replied scornfully saying, “That’s good then. It’s good that you like nature because there’s a lot more nature ahead of you on the way to the rest house in Phurkiya. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it,” and stormed back in to entertain the army of children.

      The hike to Phurkiya was everything the walk to Dwali wasn’t. The terrain was relentlessly uphill and steep. Because it was late in the evening, many of the icy stretches on the higher slopes were melting resulting in stretches that were seriously slippery. The hike was made even more treacherous as we had to hurry up to make it to the TRH at Phurkiya before it got dark. After a point, the jungles, the trees, the meadows, anything green that grew, disappeared from the landscape leaving us a barren rocky wilderness punctuated by the hardiest of shrubs that thrived in this inhospitable climate. Little clumps of high altitude wildflowers were just beginning to sprout. D said I should come back a few months later when the entire hillside turned into a bed of color after the flowers bloomed in the monsoon.

      As we neared Phurkiya, the oxygen in the atmosphere gradually thinned, the air became colder and my head felt lighter. There were stretches where the snow was so deep that when my foot hit the surface, it sank to the knee. The last rays of the sun were angling across the jagged peaks in the distance and as the light grew dimmer, the mountains wallowed in a deep blue. It was mesmerizing to watch but I had no time to take in the landscapes at leisure as we had to hurry up and get to Phurkiya before it became completely dark.

      When I reached the TRH in Phurkiya in April 2009, it was the remotest outpost I had ever been to. At the time I felt it was astonishing that it even existed. A lone structure looking over a mountainous wilderness close to one of the edges of the Himalayas. There were cascading trickles of meltwater falling down the mountains on the opposite slope and the whole area was desolate save for myself, D, the caretaker and AR, a solo trekker who would be my companion for over a week from here on.

      It got dark and cold very quickly and all of us huddled together in the kitchen shed to take refuge by the fire. The caretaker delivered us a simple yet sumptuous meal of dal, roti, vegetables and bottomless cups of chai as we made conversation. AR had quit his job to travel and had been trekking alone for the past few days. As two people who had momentarily given up a secure life to wander aimlessly, we connected immediately.

      But kitchen fires don’t burn forever and we had to get out of the warm confines of the shed and venture out in the sub zero cold to our rooms to catch some sleep before another long hike the next morning. AR and I were given two mattresses and a mountain of quilts to sleep inside a dark and dank little room. The night was so cold that even though I had all my clothes on and about three heavy quilts over, I was still shivering to the bone. I looked at the time. Five minutes short of 10 pm. It was going to be a long night.

      Posted in Pindari, Uttarakhand | Tagged himalayas, india, mountains, Pindari, solo travel, travel, travel writing, trekking
    • Khati

      Posted at 3:40 PM by vagabonder
      Aug 25th

      4954_107553486962_4688403_n

      I had slumped into such a deep slumber owing to the exertions of the 10 hour hike the previous day that D had to bang the creaky wooden door down to its breaking point to wake me up. It had been a cold, uncomfortable night beneath a mountain of blankets and all my interlocking dreams had my bones shivering in an Arctic weather and the shivering continued seamlessly to the time I had woken up in the middle of the night wondering if the scenes of me riding a dog sled on thin ice was real or dreamt. But the exhaustions of the day had given me at least a few hours of deep, sound sleep.

      D asked me to get ready quickly because we were getting late for school. This was a bizarre thing to hear for someone in his late 20s first thing in the morning and I pinched myself to check if the dream cycle was still on. It wasn’t and I grumbled my way to the big tub of water in the corner to brush my teeth. It was one of the more unpleasant tooth-brushings up to that point in my life.  There was no wash basin and I had to make use of the murky water in the big tub to rinse the mouth near the grimy squat toilet.

      The government school in the village was housed in a small wood and stone structure. We went to the school because D wanted to introduce me to his kids. The school appeared to have fairly lax discipline because the kids were allowed to saunter out of class for something as unimportant as this. Like all encounters I’ve ever had with kids, this was predictably awkward. D told them who I was and they stared at me for 10 seconds waiting for the stranger to break the ice or do something funny. I asked their names. They told me. Then they just sort of looked at each other sheepishly perhaps exchanging funny impressions of the stranger telepathically. D tried to ease the tension by asking them to ask me what my name was. They asked. I told them. Then he asked them to ask me where I came from. At this point, they glumly told him they didn’t have the time for this shit and would like to go back to class. D laughed and let them run away. I was relieved.

      We then went to his house to get some breakfast. Like most of the houses in Khati, it was made of traditional wood-and-stone Garhwali architecture with bright blue doors and windows decorated with crude ornamental carvings. A bare-chested man with a chest full of hair sprawled in a corner. D introduced him to me as his uncle. I dutifully smiled and greeted the man but the uncle was far less diplomatic. He wasn’t happy to see a stranger enter his house at that hour of the morning and grumbled at D in a drooly slur asking why he kept bringing strangers into the house. D asked me to ignore him and brought a cup of chai, a plate of boiled spinach leaves and a few dry rotis.

      The army of houseflies buzzing around us seemed keener on feasting on this meal than I was. D observed that I was tentatively prodding at the rotis instead of eating them and said, “Foreigners pay thousands of rupees for this experience. You’re getting it for free. So just eat.” So I ate. It wasn’t the most delicious meal in the world but it was nutritious enough and would provide nourishment for the many hours of strenuous walk ahead.

      I took out my Panasonic LS70, the cheapest camera money could buy in 2009, to get some shots of the village before leaving. It was a 7.2 megapixel camera that ran on AA batteries and I realised to my dismay that the batteries inside were on their last legs and I hadn’t had the presence of mind to buy some when I was shopping for trekking clothes in Kapkote. This was a serious downer because the best landscapes were arguably ahead of us and while I appreciated old-fashioned perspectives on enjoying moments purely without worrying about capturing them, I wanted to take at least a few pictures to remind me of this journey when I looked back at it years later.

      When I frantically ran up to D to ask if he knew a shop that sold batteries, he gave me that world-weary look that he had a habit of giving people when they said something stupid or disagreeable. Did I know we were in a village with no road access or electricity?, he said, angrily. There was only one shop that served the entire village and we had to go to the house of the man who owned it to get him to open it up for us. He had no AA batteries, he said, but he had some that were meant for torchlights but would also fit the camera. I bought a dozen of those when I saw that the first two gave out within the four pictures I took to test them out and hoped fervently that the rest would at the least allow me to take half a dozen pictures for keepsakes.

      Khati is one of the last old-world villages left in the Indian Himalayas. It’s at the edge of the wilderness, the last inhabited place before the mountains take over. Even in 2019, there’s no direct road access as the nearest road-head is at a village called Khirkiya, a 5 km walk over the hills. It’s setting is absolutely mesmerizing, with high, steep, thickly forested mountains surrounding it on all sides and the high peaks of Kalanag and the Nanda Devi range looming above on clear days. It’s a village one would love not just to visit but linger.

      So one of the regrets I have when I think about the time I did the trek in 2009 is that I hadn’t allowed myself even a cursory look at the village. I was so caught up with buying batteries, catching up on sleep, chilling at D’s house and prepping for the day’s trek that there was no time left to take even a casual stroll. Someday they’ll finish the road to Khati which will be a boon to the people who live there. But for a romantic like myself, who has seen places crumble to ugly and unchecked development, it will be a sad day when the regret of not fully experiencing a place when it was pristine and untouched only grows stronger.

      Posted in Pindari, Uttarakhand | Tagged himalayas, india, mountains, solo travel, travel, travel stories, travel writing, trekking, Uttarakhand
    • Bhavnagar – Curious salesmen, Takhteshwar, CCD, Pav Gathiya

      Posted at 2:16 PM by vagabonder
      Aug 19th

      20181120_154049

      “Sir, if you don’t mind, can you tell me what you’re doing in Bhavnagar?”, squeaked a figure sitting on a sofa opposite to the reception desk as soon as I had waltzed into the hotel after walking in the sweltering heat for hours.

      “Why? Why do you want to know?”, I asked, without any effort to mask my annoyance.

      “Just like that, sir”, he said, with a nervous laugh, “You keep coming and going during the day. I was only wondering if you were also into sales like the other guests here. I can help you make contacts.”

      “What? No. I’m not a salesman. And I’m not in Bhavnagar for work.”

      “Sir, then what are you doing here? What is your job?”

      “I’m sorry but that’s none of your business”, I said and began walking towards my room.

      “Do you work for the CBI?”, he asked in a tone that sounded suspiciously suspicious.

      “If I did, why would I tell you?”, I said, “No, I’m not working for the CBI.”

      “Then why can’t you tell me what you do?”

      I sighed and thought it’s better to get this over with than prolong this conversation in a never-ending question loop.

      “I’m a photographer. I’m here to shoot the old architecture of Bhavnagar”, I said.

      “Oh”, he said, visibly perking up, “So where do you go tomorrow?”

      “I might head to Palitana or Velavadar”, I said, “or maybe spend another day here. I don’t know.”

      “I’m very happy to meet you,” he said, “It can get very boring talking to salesmen all the time. Yes, Palitana and Velavadar are amazing. But if you’re here one more day, you should also go to Takhteshwar Temple. It’s only 1 kilometer from here and if you climb up, the views are amazing. You can see all the way to the Gulf of Khambat from the top. Don’t miss it. ”

      I felt bad about being snappy and rude earlier and I told him that. I took his advice and extended my stay in Bhavnagar for another day.

      Takhteshwar Temple was located on a small hillock in a quiet neighbourhood in the city. This part of Bhavnagar was a stark contrast to the bustle of the market streets of the old town, with row houses, clean streets and gardens. I climbed up the short flight of stairs that led to the temple on top of the hill. The landscapes visible from here were certainly panoramic if not spectacular. Over the low rises around the hillock, the industries surrounding the city could be seen in the distance and bits of the Gulf of Cambay shone through the haze.

      The temple was built in the late 19th century AD by Maharaj Takhatsinhji and is a small, yet clean structure with 18 marble pillars and a shikara. It was undoubtedly an important place of worship but the day I went, people were using the temple as a handy place to catch a siesta or to lounge about on a hot afternoon. A group of school children were playing in the area outside and an old caretaker was sitting on the patio under the shade of tree, gazing into the distance. As it always happens, as soon as I took my camera out to take some pictures, all eyes turned towards me momentarily. The siesta people went back to sleep while the children began pestering me to show them my camera and take their pictures.

      I ran away from the kids and went up to the old man to talk to him but I don’t know if he had taken a vow of silence or simply found me too weird because as soon as I opened my mouth to break the ice he smiled awkwardly and walked away in a hurry. This was disappointing because I had hoped to spend a few hours at the temple to catch the sunset. But with no one to talk to and nothing particularly interesting to look at, I walked back down to the road in a dreary drudge.

      It’s a testament to my lack of imagination that the first thing that popped into my head when I thought of an alternative plan was “coffee”. I google mapped for the nearest Café Coffee Day (when you’re in the interiors of India, you can’t be too choosy) and was gladdened to see that there was one about a couple of kilometres away near Ghogha Circle. Google Maps showed me a short cut that cut through a large ground and so I happily trod in that direction but when I reached the ground, I found that a tented market had blocked the access to the path that the app advised me to take.

      It was 2 pm and it was hot. The sale was comprised of mostly textiles and woollens sold by Tibetans and Nepalis. I wondered who would want to buy those in such a hot, arid place. With Google Maps rendered useless, I reverted to more old-fashioned methods to seek my directions and asked a panipuriwala who had opportunistically placed his stall outside the grounds if there was a way through. He had stuffed a mountain of pan inside his mouth and just flailed his hands about. I asked the people inside the tent if they knew and they didn’t. So finally, the budget traveller in me admitted defeat and hailed an auto rickshaw to Ghogha Circle for 30 Rs.

      The Café Coffee Day at Ghogha Circle was like a lot of other Café Coffee Days; glass-fronted, monotonous and soulless with expensive coffee. They wanted to charge me extra for making the cappuccino a bit stronger. Since I refused to pay more money for the additional shot, I had to make do with a cup of coffee that tasted like hot milk with more cinnamon than espresso. The AC was a relief though and I tried to make as good a deal of it as I could by lounging about for a couple of hours in the cool air and surfing the internet on my phone until the staff had enough of me sitting around and shoved a menu card in my face to order or get out. I looked around and the place was absolutely empty but I didn’t want to get into a stupid argument and left.

      Ghogha Circle was bustling with street food vendors and just looking at all the food was making me hungry. I didn’t want to have Mumbai chaat having come all the way to Bhavnagar, so I googled standing next to a chaat stall to see what unique varieties of cholesterolic street food Bhavnagar had to offer. Some person on quora believed that it was a sacrilege to go to Bhavnagar and not have pav gathiya. So I asked the people around where I could get some pav gathiya. Fingers pointed in all directions because apparently pav gathiya was available everywhere.

      Pav Gathiya is essentially deep fried chunks of besan (gram flour) mixed with an assortment of sauces (many of them extremely spicy) and served with pav (bread). I chose the cleanest looking establishment in the circle, a place called Surendranagar Samosa, and confidently ordered a plateful. A part of me wishes I hadn’t because it was so hot that my digestive system spent the next two days growling for help. Eight months on, I think there are parts of it still trying to come to terms with it.

      Posted in Bhavnagar, gujarat | Tagged budget travel, food, india, solo travel, travel, travel stories, travel writing
    • Agartala-Melaghar

      Posted at 3:51 PM by vagabonder
      Aug 12th

      46620987865_e41e395851_z

      While Agartala wasn’t quite the culinary hotspot, it had a few places where I enjoyed wasting my afternoons. The cheapest of them all was a restaurant called Aamantran in the main market area which had perhaps the best North Indian thalis in the city that you could have without breaking the bank or your gastric lining. Because the place was both popular and small, I had to inevitably share a table with cantankerous families, bickering couples, salespeople taking a break from working the markets, kids bunking college, old men talking about communism and art, old men working for the communist party, young men working for the communist party, bureaucrats working under the communist government cribbing about the communist party. If I had ever entertained thoughts of joining the communist party, the time I spent at this restaurant might have been enough to convince me to swing right.

      The other place I liked to hang out was a coffeeshop called Café Frespresso which was always empty when I walked in. The people running it were exceptionally friendly and when I complained once about the coffee being too light, they happily added another shot of espresso at no extra charge. It was a gesture that made me wish there was a Frespresso in every town in India so I didn’t have to depend on a miserly Café Coffee Day or Starbucks for my laptop-coffee loungings. The only time it got weird was when there was a birthday party on where everybody in the house joined in the celebrations while I wallowed all alone in a corner working away at my laptop like a solitary grouch.

      When I wasn’t eating at Aamantran or having coffee at the Frespresso, I walked around, took pictures of people doing stuff on the streets, wandered about the markets, took evening walks along the lakeside promenade, had numerous cups of 4 Rs. chai at the various grungy corners of the markets and spent hours lounging at the Ujjayanta Palace where the evening sun painted its whitewashed facades a deep orange as it went down.

      A few days into this routine, I got somewhat bored and decided to get out and look at the other pleasures that Tripura had to offer. My first stop was the village of Melaghar, about 50 kms by a dusty road from Agartala. Most people wisely do this journey as a day trip but since I had to live up to my credentials as a “slow traveller”, I had booked a room at the Sagarmahal Tourist Lodge run by the Tripura Government on the banks of the Rudrasagar Lake.

      The bus dropped me off at the main market area and I already felt refreshed while walking to the lodge through a quiet, traffic-free, bird-song filled street and thought how wonderful it was to get out of a noisy, urban setting like Agartala to this beautifully bucolic village. My mind was racing at the speed of light thinking of the possibilities here. I could perhaps spend a week or a month, quietly sitting by the lake, walking muddy trails, filling my lungs with oxygen and getting some writing done.

      But this tranquility was short-lived. Distant sounds of Bollywood disco beats began to drown out the whispers of mother nature and I was alarmed to find that the closer I got to the lodge, the louder the sounds became. 15 minutes later, when I reached the lodge, I stared, shocked out of my senses, at the gaudily decorated gate of the Sagarmahal Tourist Lodge inside which pandals in the ugliest shades of secondary colors had been put up. Here, women dressed in excessively ornate costumes were giddily chirping at each other and uncles were drunkenly dancing to the deafening sounds of Bengali EDM. In my unwashed t-shirt, torn shorts and a dusty rucksack, I felt ridiculously out of place.

      I walked over to the reception where everyone stared at me like I was some undesirable creature that had sauntered into an aristocratic party. The receptionist checked me out from top to bottom, frowned disapprovingly and said, “Sorry, no rooms.”

      “That’s okay. I only need one room”, I said, not without a hint of anger and frustration while brandishing the email confirmation, “The room I have booked and paid for at your website.”

      The receptionist looked flummoxed and said, “How did you get the booking?”

      I shrugged.

      He made a phone call and looked sad when it was over. Then he pored over his register like he was doing some complex math. After he was done with his calculations, he yelled at somebody to carry my luggage over to a room.

      “There’s a wedding going on,” he said, “You’re lucky to find a room today.”

      “I’m not sure I’m so lucky”, I said, in half a mind to get a refund and go back to Agartala.

      The room was grubby on the edges but perfectly satisfactory for the 550 Rs. I had paid for it. The only problem, of course, was the noise from the wedding below which was already giving me a headache. But I was also hungry for lunch and went down to the restaurant to see if they could rustle up something quick. The eating area was full of wedding guests, some of whom felt they had seen me somewhere. One woman came up to me to wonder if I was the brother of so-and-so. Another gentleman wished to know how my children were doing. It was all fairly bizarre and made me realise how easy it was to gate crash weddings.

      When I enquired about the “menu”, the man at the kitchen counter rolled his eyes, took me aside and told me to grab a seat and pretend I was part of the wedding. That was the only way I was going to get any food, he said. So I pulled up a chair on a long table surrounded by the chirping aunties and the drunk uncles and tried to be as inconspicuous as I could. It was a decidedly modest wedding meal, with dal, rice, some vegetables, chicken and fish curries, an assortment of condiments and a heap of rosogollas to go with.

      After the meal, I popped in a paracetamol to take care of the throbbing headache I had incurred due to the loud music and went on a stroll to the lakeside. The farther I got away from the noise, the more ethereal the place became. Neermahal, the lake palace, gleamed glamorously in all its snow-white splendor, fishermen rowed their boats in its shadow and scooped out the fish trapped in the mighty fishing nets spread around the lake, tourist boats painted in bright colors ferried people who’d come to see the palace. In the distance, smoke gushed out of chimneys that reared their heads up over the villages, the farms and the jungles. These scenes might have done a better job at curing my headache than that 500 mg of paracetamol and I again began to entertain thoughts of spending an inordinately long time in this pastoral setting.

      Posted in Agartala, Melaghar, Tripura | Tagged Agartala, budget travel, food, india, solo travel, travel, travel writing, Tripura
    ← Older posts
    Newer posts →
    • Follow Traveholics on WordPress.com
    • Recent Posts

      • Photologue #58
      • Kuala Lumpur – Vicky and the Russians
      • Pindari
      • Palitana – Not getting there
      • Things I learnt after living alone for 6 months at home without a regular job or a social life after 10 years of travel
    • Categories

    • Archives

      • December 2019
      • November 2019
      • October 2019
      • September 2019
      • August 2019
      • July 2019
      • June 2019
      • May 2019
      • April 2019
      • March 2019
      • February 2019
      • January 2019
      • December 2018
      • November 2018
      • October 2018
      • September 2018
      • August 2018
      • July 2018
      • May 2018
      • April 2018
      • March 2018
      • February 2018
      • January 2018
      • December 2017
      • May 2017
      • April 2017
      • January 2017
      • December 2016
      • November 2016
      • October 2016
      • April 2016
      • March 2016
      • September 2015
      • August 2015
      • July 2015
      • May 2015
      • December 2014
      • November 2014
      • October 2014
      • September 2014
      • August 2014
      • July 2014
      • June 2014
      • May 2014
      • April 2014
    • Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

      Join 405 other followers

    • Subscribe

      RSS Feed RSS - Posts

  • Follow Traveholics on WordPress.com

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy