Trip to Bangalore
Bill writes
This was so much better than Sandra’s 3-day trip with mother and sister from Bombay to Delhi in 1957, or our travel through India in 1971! It was steam engines pulling the trains then. As romantic as that might seem, the soot drifting in the open windows and settling on everything and everyone, the shaking and rattling, and extreme heat became tiring after awhile.
You also had to carry your own water, back then. In addition to our large packs filled with whatever we thought we needed for a year of traveling around the world, we carried a large, 2-gallon, heavy plastic water bag normally used for camping. We would fill it with water and dump in a bunch of halazone tablets to purify it, and lug it along. The advent of bottled water has made travel so much easier!
Now, it is the Shatabdi Express, flashing through the verdant countryside in excess of 100 kilometers an hour. The second-class chair car is well insulated from sound and heat, and the chairs are airplane-style seats, firmer but reclining farther, set in well-spaced rows of three on each side of the isle. The ride is quite smooth, with no more vibration than we remember there being on our trip by train across Canada in 1970.
As the train starts out, stewards hand out a liter of mineral water to each passenger, and a little tray with a packaged biscuit and two little candies. Everyone settles in for the two-hour trip.
The only downside is the windows. They are tinted, double-paned, and somewhat dirty, so it is impossible to take pictures of all the interesting things flashing past. Things such as ruins of a temple complex, terraced rice fields surrounded by coconut palms, woods with a path meandering into it upon which wanders a white bullock. . . Thirty years ago it might have been possible to grab those shots, given the much slower rate of travel and the open windows. The price of convenience and easier travel.
The last few days have been hectic, and it is good to let the motion of the train ease the mental and physical tensions. My mind reviews the events preceding this trip, to meet with Dr. Prakash in Bangalore the next morning.
Tuesday morning, we called the doctor in Bangalore with whom we were to set up an appointment with Dr. Prakash, my first Ayurvedic doctor. We finally reached him and he asked if we could come on the 6th instead of the 9th. Well, we decided we had better, so spent the rest of the morning on the phone talking with a travel agent to get train tickets and finally getting through (I wasn’t dialing the correct prefixes on this crazy Indian phone system) to a hotel in Bangalore to book a room.
The next morning the travel agent arrived with our train tickets. He had made the trip to the train station, waited in line I don’t know how long, and brought them to us for a service charge of 50 rupees, less than 2 bucks. Well worth it!
We left for Bangalore Thursday afternoon on the 2:20 express. . .
I was awakened from my reverie by our arrival, on time, I noticed. It is so nice not having big packs and luggage to contend with. We just slung our small packs on our backs, walked out of the station and were conveyed by auto-rickshaw to our hotel.
I will never complain about Mysore traffic again! They measure near misses in Mysore in centimeters (as opposed to half-meters in Vancouver), but in Bangalore they are measured in millimeters. Clouds of exhaust fumes from 2-stroke auto-rickshaws, scooters and diesel vehicles roll fog-like off the roads. The cacophony of horns, squealing brakes of the tired old buses, and roaring motors is mind numbing. Fortunately, the hotel room was fairly quiet, but “quiet” is a relative word. The traffic noise became a mere muffled roar when we closed the bathroom door, which had an open window that didn’t close.
We did find a good place to eat, though, which I have written up separately as a restaurant review for practice.
The visit with Dr. Prakash was a bit of a let-down. We arrived at the clinic before he did, so we waited, along with a couple of young men. 0ne of them spent most of his time on his cell trying to help a cab find the clinic. The other sat quietly holding a rose.
Dr. Prakash swept in about 20 minutes later with an open laptop, connected by wireless to the internet, in his arms. The second young man rose up, greeted him, handed him the rose and bent down and reverently touched the toe of the doctor’s shoe. Prakash accepted it as his due (we had seen this done before, on our previous trip to India, to meet with him). Dr. Prakash told us later that, five years ago, that young man “was a dead man.” He is obviously doing well today and very appreciative.
It was a brief visit, in which he said I looked great and should continue doing exactly the same thing, meaning the diet and his medicines, for a total of two and a half years. He said if I took any breaks from his medicine, the cancer would come back. Fine. I can see that.
However, when we asked him to check my pulse to see if there was that “cancer feel” to it, he said that was not necessary. He only needed to take the pulse once. Obviously the medicines are working and nothing should be changed. Changes are only made if the situation changes.
We asked again if he could check for the cancer pulse and he retorted somewhat impatiently that, “there is no cancer pulse.” When we said he had said there was when we first met, he denied having said any such thing, and we were hearing what we wanted to hear. (This reminded us of our first trip to see him, when he had said on the phone that we should come to India and he’d treat me “for free.” Later, he denied that he had ever said such a thing.) Sandra tried to press him with other questions and he went into a ramble about how a little knowledge is dangerous, and it is good that all the self-help quacks have gone to America, and that when his grandfather was an (Ayurvedic) guru and people came to see him, there was no conversation at all, he just told them what to do, and they left and they did it.
I guess arrogance is a disease that can afflict anyone, anywhere. On the other hand, if I was as good at something as he or Dr. Anderson, perhaps I would also be just like them.
Anyhow, we left it more or less like that and departed. I will order more medicines and continue to follow the program for another year and a half, approximately.
We had about 4 hours to kill before our train left at 5 pm, so we decided to find a restaurant that looked interesting in the guidebook. What a fiasco that turned out to be! It seems that the auto-rickshaw drivers really don’t know where anything is in Bangalore. (I remember reading years ago that kids who wanted to be cab drivers in London started riding their bicycles all over that city years before they could even get their driver’s licenses learning every street, alley and cul-de-sac. They had to pass a test which involved writing filling out a map with the names of every one of them. Only then would they be considered as a trainee for cab driver. In Vancouver, however . . .)
We managed to get to the correct district, but couldn’t find the street. The driver finally pointed to a street and said, “Alexandra Street,” the one we were looking for. We paid him off and started down it. We soon realized it couldn’t be the correct one and, when we asked, found it wasn’t. The driver probably dumped us just to be rid of us.
We asked a few people until one thought he knew, and pointed us on our way saying, “Go a little way and ask again. Anyone will be able to tell you.” That was very optimistic.
We stopped in a sweet shop to ask and no one knew where Alexandra Street was, so we proceeded on up the street. A half a block later, a man from the sweet shop, one of the customers, I think, came running after us and gave us directions.
Down a little side street we went, turned right up a very narrow alley, and left at the end for another block, until we came to an intersection. We asked an auto driver sitting at the corner if this was Alexandra Street, but he didn’t know. We asked a vendor selling bananas on the corner opposite and he said it was. We had the address, 23/B, so we started along, looking at building numbers, which are displayed only on every third or fourth one, if you are fortunate.
We finally found 23/A, but no 23/B. It didn’t seem to exist. Nor was there any restaurant there. There was a realty office in 23/A, so we went in to inquire. “Oh,” said the man, “they moved to another location some time ago. I don’t know where.” So much for the latest edition of Lonely Planet.
So, we decided to try to find another one. Almost the same story, except this time the auto-rickshaw driver took such a round- about route that the meter was reading 35 rupees which, according to my map, should have been around 15, when I stopped him and said we would walk from here. It turns out that restaurant didn’t exist either.
We grabbed another auto-rickshaw, and headed for the Rice Bowl, which we knew did exist, having been there the last time we were in Bangalore. We had some pretty good Chinese food, but we had to hurry a bit, as it was getting on toward the time the train was scheduled to leave.
If nothing else, we have definitely seen the streets of Bangalore! There are better ways to explore a city, though, than trying to find places that don’t exist.
We made the train with about 10 minutes to spare, and found we were on the Jaipur/Mysore Express. Bangalore was the last stop it made before Mysore, and most passengers had alighted there, so the train was almost empty. It turned out to be a “sleeper” so we had a compartment with 2 long seats that converted to lower bunks, and two upper bunks all to ourselves. In fact, there were only 5 people in the entire car.
Jaipur is a long way north, in beautiful Rajasthan, but it is intriguing to know we could take a train all the way there. . .
The trip back was a bit slower and took three and a half hours. I have to say I enjoy traveling by train, especially when compared to aircraft. It may be slower, but there is less stress all the way, in my opinion. There is more room to spread out and you can walk up and down the train, if you like. You can strike up conversations with fellow travelers more easily and there is a lot more to see than from an aircraft. I put one of the lower bunks down after it got dark, stretched out, and wrote most of this.
We fell exhausted into bed after midnight, after having had a bite to eat, so we slept in late the next day.
So, we continue to trust God to work everything out, and are proceeding on the assumption that the cancer will not come back. We thank Him for getting us there and back safely, and teaching us tolerance in the process. It is good to be home.
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