Mum and I felt we were well prepared for a month travelling India together. I’m 35, lived in four countries for extended periods of time, and I’ve been travelling SE Asia for the last 18 months. My travel legs are sturdy, seasoned by the swampy heat of the Cambodian jungle and the frigid waters of mountain waterfalls. Mum’s also been around the block. At 67, she now lives with my dad in Egypt, a country my friend recently referred to, only half jokingly, as “the poor version of India”.
We felt good coming into this. We had our itinerary pinned down: Varanasi, Agra, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Udaipur, Mumbai. This was pared down from the original 10 we’d planned. But we realised that hopping round 10 cities in 30 days was madness. I was used to staying in towns for at least a week, and most of the time for a month a time. Neither of us had the energy, stamina or desire to hop around India like backpackers in their 20s trying to fit in the entire world in their gap year, yah.
The day was finally on us after months of build-up. I was afraid but also excited as I left my best friend’s apartment in Dubai and headed to the airport. Final destination – Varanasi. For me, that meant flying Dubai to Oman (1 hour), Oman to Mumbai (3 hours), and Mumbai to Varanasi (2 hours). Compared to some of my bus rides through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, this series of flights was going to be a piece of cake, or so I thought. Mum had more of a daunting challenge to begin her adventure. She had four flights, the first two overnight: Hurghada to Cairo (1 hour), Cairo to Oman (5 hours), Oman to Mumbai (3 hours) and Mumbai to Varanasi (2 hours).
We met in Oman airport, the first time we’d seen each other in over two years. It felt unreal, and I didn’t react the way I expected. Instead of feeling intense joy when I first saw her, I felt a mixture of fear and shock. She looked so tired, so pale, so much older than I remembered her. Her skin had a wan translucence that made her seem as fragile as porcelain. She seemed like she’d shatter if dropped. I didn’t like it, and in my already tired state, it made the reunion weirdly strained. Mum was already exhausted from her two flights, emotionally and physically; she’d nearly missed her connection in Cairo. It was a muted affair at best, downbeat at worst. We were trying to be happy and upbeat, trying to act excited for our adventures, but it felt like the effort was already too much.
We arrived in Mumbai without any issues after a smooth flight with Oman Air, who are frankly awesome. Both my mum and I had amazing experiences with their check-in staff and aircrew, and the food was surprisingly decent. When we landed, we had what we thought was a comfortable 3.5 hours to make the connecting flight to Varanasi. All we had to do was get a couple of SIM cards and make our way to the domestic terminal – a 20-minute shuttle bus ride away. Simple.
We passed a WiFi booth when we got into the terminal building off the plane. My travel instincts screamed at me to collect free WiFi vouchers for us. I listened and tried to scan our passports…not working…well, I thought, surely there’ll be some other way of connecting to WiFi in Mumbai airport. I prayed a silent prayer as we made our way to immigration.
I’d been told to expect chaos, but there were no queues, and the official was friendly and efficient. We were through in 10 minutes, and our bags were on the carousel waiting for us on the other side. So far, so good.
SIM cards were next. Now I’d read that getting SIM cards as non-India citizens is a real pain. There are references needed, background checks, high-level government clearances, three rounds of interviews. But Mumbai airport was meant to be different. My Indian friends in Dubai told me that buying SIMs here was as simple as handing over the cash.
When we found the Airtel sales table next to the terminal exit though, my hopes of an easy win lay broken beneath the two signs hung on the wall:
Information required for SIM card:
- Address of reference in India (Maharashtra state)
- Phone number of reference in India
No SIM card sale without this information
OK, I thought. I’d provided my friend’s address in India to apply for my e-visa, but his phone number wouldn’t work. He lived in Dubai most of the time, and he couldn’t receive the OTP (one-time password) that the sales team wanted to confirm my information was good.
I needed Wifi, so I spent the next 30 minutes jog-walking across the terminal in frantic zigzags in search of it. A barman at the Budweiser bar told me to go back through security and use the WiFi voucher dispenser (a different one from the one I’d tried earlier), but the security guard was having none of it. Fair enough. Then a nice guy at the currency exchange counter told me to register for the free airport Wifi using his Indian telephone number. That didn’t work either.
Now massively flustered, I returned to the Airtel counter and begged to use the salesperson’s mobile hotspot. He agreed. I shot off urgent messages to my friend, got his Indian telephone number, flung the information at the Airtel man, and prayed to the travel gods.
Maybe it was because he took pity on us. Maybe the travel gods put a spell on him. Whatever it was, the salesman bypassed the telephone number OTP and gave us our working SIM cards. Amazing! The only problem was that we only had 1 hour and 10 minutes until our flight left for Varanasi and we were in the wrong terminal.
With adrenaline rushing through our shattered bodies, the shuttle bus pulled up to the terminal building with 65 minutes remaining. We asked when it was leaving. 25 minutes. I considered trying to bribe the driver to leave early. I settled on tipping the baggage handler and moaning about how worried we were about missing our flight. I prayed to the travel gods again.
As we got on, I told mum to be prepared to miss our flight. This information did not go down well, and the picture of us on the bus belies our anxiety.
When we finally got to the domestic terminal we ran to the counter and were ushered to the front of the queue. Checked-in immediately, we made it through security within minutes of the gate closing. Two grateful but drained hours later, we landed in Varanasi, ready for the day to be over.
Holy(Shit) City
It was dark and foggy and cold in Varanasi. When we got off the plane, we were hit by the smell of bonfires from crop burning. It felt like Guy Fawkes night in England. The air was damp and heavy and smoky, and I breathed it in deep felt immediately nostalgic and refreshed. Mum mistook it for the smell of cremation fires, so she didn’t take the same level of comfort. To be fair to her though, she didn’t realise that the cremation sites were 15km away from where we were standing.
Once through the airport, we were set upon by an absurdly dense pack of drivers, all eagerly showing their car keys and asking us where we were going. I’m sure the ostentatious wiggle of the keys was meant to reassure us. It was meant to say “we’re not here to scam you, look we have a car”. It had the opposite effect. The keys felt like evil charms shaken at unclean spirits.
Mum was clearly struggling at this point. She wasn’t happy, and neither was I. But I was there to save the day. I hadn’t been travelling 18 months and learned nothing. I was prepared. I had the Indian taxi apps, Uber and Ola, installed on my phone and my credit card already activated for payment on both.
Within a couple of minutes I had a booking confirmation. I began fending off the baying drivers, flashing my phone screen and shouting “I have Ola booking”, like a demented tourist in Spain showing off their one word of Spanish by using it in contexts that made absolutely no sense. When the car arrived, we collapsed into the back seats and spent most of the 45-minute drive to our hotel in stunned silence.
The car finally came to a stop. The driver pointed vaguely out his front windshield and gestured to indicate that he couldn’t go any further. I could see the sign of our hotel about 50 metres away: SS Guesthouse. I almost laughed at the name, but didn’t have the energy. I silently hoped it wasn’t going to be like a Gestapo torture cell. Street dogs greeted us as we opened the door, fighting each other at our feet. Peering through the dark, we made it up the stairwell and into the glare of the LED-lit reception area. We’d finally made it.
After the absurdly involved check-in process that is Kafkan in its baffling complexity, we went into our room; our haven for the next 3 nights. It was clean, the bed was big, and there were working lights. Those were the positives.
The first negative was that the bed took up the entire room, so we only had a foot of space on each side and two feet at the end. Then mum went into the bathroom and sighed. What mum? I asked sharply. My patience was so frayed that everything out of my mouth sounded mean.
Oh well, it’s OK, she said, meaning it wasn’t. There was no toilet paper, no soap, no windows in bathroom or bedroom, and the extractor fan allowed the sound of the traffic and the omnipresent blare of horns to leech into the room.
I was used to fairly dingy accommodation travelling solo in SE Asia. It didn’t bother me when it was only me to please. But after such a long and stressful journey? Mum looked ready to cry. I felt like I was one mishap away from breaking down myself. I just wanted to get into bed and let sleep cancel out the day. We were already fed up and ready to give up before we’d even started.
Mum wanted to eat though, and so instead of being completely selfish and insisting I sleep, we ventured out and headed to Phulwari Restaurant that I had pinned to my google maps. It was around 9.30pm, and the streets were heaving with people, motorbikes and tuk-tuks. As we shuffled our way along the alley to the main road, bikes barrelled at us from both directions, screaming their horns. We were forced into single file, with me leading and used to the crazy bustle from Bangkok and Hanoi. Mum seemed rattled. The sounds of the people and the traffic, the smells of spice and earth and burnt wood, the cobbled floor a patchwork of filthy puddles and animal excrement, it was an assault on the senses.
We somehow made it to the restaurant without being run over or falling down. It was set back 20 yards from the main road in a beautiful courtyard and sheltered from the noise. Sitting down gratefully, I convinced mum to order a veg thali with me, the classic personal buffet dish of India. As you can see from the picture, there was enough food for four. At least something was going our way. For the first time that day, I was in bliss. The food was so fresh and complex in its mixture and balance of spices. The tarka daal was rich and creamy, with a beautiful smoky undertone of cumin. The chana daal burst with flavour and the aloo gobi almost melted in the mouth. With the warm and flaky roti and perfectly cooked rice, it was the perfect culinary introduction to India, and for the first time that day we smiled at each other across the table in genuine delight.
We got back to the room feeling too full. Even the delicious food had a negative twist. I got straight into bed, turned off my bedside light and closed my eyes.
You’re going to bed? Mum asked.
Yes I’m shattered mum! I need to sleep. Again mean.
The day had been horrendous, and I could tell mum didn’t want to be there as much as me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be in India. I was just having serious doubts about our ability to spend this month together in anything but anguish. It seemed like we weren’t ready to be thrown together like this in such an intense country. We hadn’t thought it through properly.
Varanasi felt like a dark place. India felt like it didn’t want us there. So we both went to sleep, not saying another word to each other, both lost in our depressive thoughts, too afraid to voice them. It had to get better than this, right?
