Arriving in India was exciting and roughly how I imagined it – absolute chaos. Rajasthan is calling my name, but first a planned trekking detour in Nepal... Traveling overland from Delhi to Kathmandu begins with a 14-hr sleeper train from New Delhi Station to Gorakhpur, so we booked the first place we found in the Main Bazaar outside New Delhi Station for $7 – the only drain in the bathroom was the squat toilet itself. We wandered into a random curry joint around the corner; Steve orders vegetable fried rice and naan. The waiter promptly comes back with a look of bewilderment: “you order vegetable fry rice, with naan, and no curry?! How can you eat naan with no curry??” (He was genuinely confused and wanted an explanation.) Steve replies that he did it the other day and he’d figure it out. We joked that surely the waiter thought at least one of us was mentally retarded.
man exercising his pigeons in New DelhiFrom Gorakhpur we skipped the local bus and shared a taxi with a German couple also headed for the Nepal border. After the usual quibbling over fifty cents in pricing, the most hair-raising auto ride I’ve ever experienced began to unfold. Steve observed that nearly every car on the road had rear-view mirrors either smashed or folded in. At one point we rear-ended a cow, clipping and injuring its hind leg. Just as I started to feel sorry for the cow, watching it limp off the road, its owner took a full swing with a baseball bat into the spine of the cow’s back. This way he added insult to injury, but I’m still trying to understand the sacred role that cows play in Indian culture.
