Old World Wandering: A Travelogue > London to Shanghai, by land

Hyderabad, slash Cyberabad

Claire van den Heever — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 06:34:00 +0000

I awoke to the muffled beeping of my mobile phone’s alarm, heard through airline issue earplugs and the metal of the train clattering on its tracks. Fumbling through my handbag, I found the phone and switched the alarm off. The faded sari fabric of my bag, seen through sleepy eyes, comforted me; I had awoken [...]

Cochin, Kerala

Claire van den Heever — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:42:15 +0000

The train rattled along, inducing in me the sluggish fatigue of rock-rocking train travel and blanketing heat. I sat atop a wooden luggage rack in third class, legs crossed, ankles pressed into the hard wood, to prevent my mosquito bitten feet from dangling in the faces of the people below. The man beside me sat [...]

Mysore

Iain Manley — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:16:56 +0000

The typical Indian bus resembles scrap. It is made of metal sheets, generously dented, perhaps a metre wide. The sheets are joined one to another by rivets, and this leaves a visible seam – covered and reinforced, in places, by a dull-silver strip. It has rectangular openings positioned along its sides. The openings resemble windows, [...]

Village Homestay, Karnataka

Iain Manley — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 07:27:28 +0000

A cock crowed, and crowed and crowed. I straightened, flopped my legs from the end of our just-bigger-than-single bed, and stood. I picked through a pile beside my bag, found a towel, toothbrush, toothpaste and the plastic tub containing our soap. I left Claire to sleep. A sun-blackened man had slept in the next room. [...]

Goa

Claire van den Heever — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 14:12:30 +0000

Vagator, one of Goa’s coastal tourist towns, was said by our guidebook to have “long been the hot location for the outdoor rave parties that made the Goa party scene famous.” But on the day that we arrived, with only a week till Christmas, and accommodation supposedly jam-packed, it was deserted. The restaurants were all empty, [...]

Matheran

Claire van den Heever — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 16:15:31 +0000

The miniature train, royal blue with shiny red trimmings, known fondly as the ‘toy train’, waited patiently on its narrow tracks at Neral Junction. We boarded, and began the slow, winding 800 metre ascent to Matheran, a small town set amidst mountains and forest – its name means ‘jungle topped’. We sat opposite two Indian women: [...]

Mumbai

Iain Manley — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 14:32:59 +0000

“An individual-to-individual callousness… is still so strong in the country that it is the greatest danger for a foreigner living in India, for it is a frighteningly easy thing to find it creeping into one’s soul.” A. M. Rosenthal, The Future in Retrospective I stepped, not looking, and slid; swayed backwards, snapped forward, and stopped. A smear [...]

A Passage to India (with apologies to E.M. Forster)

Iain Manley — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:09:05 +0000

“The brown skins, the bare feet, the nose-rings, the humped bullocks – all these things were foreseeable, seemed obvious and familiar from the moment of landing. The really odd, unexpected thing about Bombay was its birds. There are more birds in the streets of this million-peopled city than in an English woodland.” Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: [...]

Jerusalem

Claire van den Heever — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 20:05:07 +0000

A predawn haze lit the kilometre of road before us. We trudged along it, still groggy from the half hearted slumber of our bus ride from Cairo. Through a small strip ‘of no man’s land’ we entered Israel, and left Egypt behind us. The immigration office was small, with gleaming white tiles on the floor [...]

Tout Like an Egyptian

Claire van den Heever — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 13:18:19 +0000

A train deposited Iain and I in Aswan four hours behind schedule. A crowd of soldiers in combat uniforms guarded the platform, torso sized shields in their fists. A large group of convicts had been transported in the train that had taken us overnight from Cairo. “We must hurry now,” said Omar, who strode through the [...]