Well, taking the track of many a modern film, I’ll flash back to the beginning.
I’ve taken a 10 day break from the Delhi city life and headed off to the Northeast of the country. Why? It’s a region that’s almost a different country in every sense of the term. A region where due to the proximity with both Burma and Tibet’s borders look visually more related to far East Asians than the majority of their sub-continent kin. The three main areas that I planned to visit were Calcutta (Kolkata by its new spelling); Assam (home of Kaziranga national park, which is itself home to the world’s largest population of rhinos); and Meghalaya, home of great trekking and very strange Lord-of-the-Rings root bridges.
To get to Kolkata I took an overnight train from Delhi. Easy enough, reached there the next morning, and then started off with some excitement. I came into Howrah train station which is on one side of the Hooghy river. Kolkata proper is on the other side of the river. This is a big river with a very big bridge going over it, think GW bridge going into NYC or Delaware Memorial Bridge into Jersery. So, I get off a 16 hour train, and want to stretch my legs. Sure there are some taxis waiting, but there’s also about 2000 people at least (no joke) walking over the bridge carrying everything imaginable-literally. So I join them. It was kind of like being in a car race. I lined up with a few hundred people at the intersection with the main road that goes over the bridge. Two policemen held a rope—their equivalent of a stop light. When they decided it prudent, they stopped both side of traffic and dropped the rope. And off we went, onto the pedestrian lane of the bridge, and over the bridge. Oh the sites I did see…
The rest of my stay—all 24 hours of it, in Kolkata was fairly tame by comparison. I went and visited the must-sees: the Victoria Memorial:
No, this photo is not to illustrate my horrible photographic skills or the effects of degrading a picture’s resolution for web browsing, but rather the very cool reflecting ponds they have surrounding the monument (yes that photo is upside down).
The other main stop on my voyage through Kolkata was the very strange and grossly captivating Indian Museum (that’s what it’s called, basically like the Smithsonian). Indian museums have their own very strange ambiance. It’s kind of hard to describe, and I don’t want to generalize, except that in the various museums I’ve been to, they’ve all been like this, so here’s a generalization.
Cavernous rooms, old wooden pull- out massive drawer shelves. Rooms are categorized thematically, as one might expect. But many of the exhibits are just different from what one would find in the Smithsonian. For example, in the Botanical wing, which had the architectural dimensions of an airplane hanger, the permanent “exhibit” was plants of agricultural usage. It was amazing, they quite possibly could have had every plant, seed, root or stem used by humans in a jar, under old glass, or tacked to a board. It all had a very strange and beautiful aesthetic to it, especially the rolls of strange dusty jars filled with seeds….home decorating tip! Anyway, the exhibits, were some of the strangest things you could imagine. Well, not always. But in the “Mammals” room at this museum, they had an eight legged goat fetus in a jar, a goat with one eye in the middle of its head in a jar, and several human fetuses. Don’t ask me. They like their jars. And so do I.Here's a few photos I grabbed from Google Images, sorry, no mutant goat ones online, at least not in the sites that google images surveys!
Well, that pretty much wraps up my KolKata leg, with the exception of paying kudos to the great Botique B&B that I stayed at, this one a Buddhist art gallery. After a long train ride it was wonderful, another veryifcation of a lesson I learned about the value of having a nice place to stay when one gets in from long travels.
And that brings us back to the train tracks….. but that we’ll save for next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment