The Southern portion of our trip completed, we’re now off to the North. The plan is to start in Kolkata and slowly work our way across to Gujarat via Mumbai. We’re dedicating a month to this.
The trip from Hyderabad to Kolkata would probably take 2-3 days via train, so we opt for a 2.5 hour flight. In the line for boarding the flight we notice that there are a lot of long haired Americans wearing shades. I got chatting to one of them and it turns out there’re the band Foreigner on tour (“I wanna know what love is”). India keeps throwing up surprises!
We’ve read a lot about Kolkata being pretty intense. It’s home to 14 million people, many of which live in slums. It was the headquarters of the Raj, so there’s lots of old colonial architecture to explore.
Once we arrive at our hotel we’re disappointed to find that we’ve been allocated a room in the ‘new wing’. Alarm bells start ringing immediately. It turns out our room is in the middle of a building site. They agreed to stop the building work at 5PM and start no earlier than 10AM. We end up getting a good rate and agree to stay.
First impressions of Kolkata are good mainly because it has pavements! I’ve taken pavements for granted all my life, but there’re a rarity in India. Also they have yellow ambassador cabs instead of tuktuks; much more comfortable. We start with the Indian Museum; think V&A only in a building that’s crumbling to dust. Much of Kolkata is crumbling to dust which makes it quite photogenic.
They have a section depicting everyday Indian factory life using plastic models. Shejal noticed this lovely scene of workers being checked of they’ve nicked anything before clocking off!
More stuffed animals and skeletons that we’ve ever seen in a museum before!
Next up we went to the Victoria memorial, Kolkata’s prinicipal monument. The memorial was built to mark Queen Victoria’s death. It’s very impressive, described in the guidebook as a cross between the Taj Mahal and Capitol Hill. We spend a good few hours people watching and lazing about in the surrounding gardens. Bliss.
Some chap randomly introduces his baby girl by handing her to me!
We finish an excellent day off with chai in the Maidan.
We spent our second day in Kolkata walking around historic parts of the city. We crossed the famous Howrah Bridge (one of the words busiest) on foot with what seemed like a million other people. We also went to a flower market, which was a slight disappointment as we’d seen something similar and better in Mysore. Kolkata is known for its squalor as well as its Raj era sights. We certainly came face to face with extreme poverty whist being here.
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