A Passage To India

Last autumn I dug up and blipped an old letter sent by family friend Tony Reavley as he travelled around Asia in the mid-Seventies; I thought at the time it was the only surviving epistle from that journey, but today I unearthed a stack of other letters sent by Tony, beginning with this one in November 1973. In it, we hear all about corpse-spotting on the Ganges and cannabis culture in Kathmandu, but really, all Tony wants to know is how Brian Clough and Alf Ramsey are getting on...

Kathmandu, Nepal

30-11-73

Quite pleased to be out of India temporarily. After Srinagar in Kashmir, we headed back to Delhi for a few days. Then down to Agra for a few days to see the fabulous Taj Mahal. After this, Jaipur in the state of Rajasthan, and back to Delhi. We used Delhi as a base for getting out and about but about a fortnight ago we left for good. We took an overnight 3rd class sleeper down to Benares on the sacred River Ganges. Our train was an "express", which was a bit of a joke as the journey of 450 miles took 17 hours which is a 26mph average! The ordinary trains average 20mph and a good cyclist could beat them.

Benares was fascinating. It is the wish of every Hindu to be cremated here when he dies, and all day long, one can watch the bodies being brought down on stretchers and burned on funeral pyres of wood. The ashes are then scattered on the river. Nothing would induce Barry or myself to go in the river; it is a foul-smelling brown colour, full of sewage, with dead pigs, cows, rubbish of all kinds and even human bodies floating by! These are the bodies of beggars who, when they die, are floated down the river on a crudely-made platform of wood branches. They cannot afford to pay to be burnt and it is quite a gruesome sight to see them floating by accompanied by a horde of vultures busy feeding on the flesh. Hope you've finished dinner by now!

Kathmandu is very interesting. After the food in India, we have been living like kings here. A meal costing one pound in England costs about forty pence here. Yesterday I went berserk and had a cheese pizza (enormous) costing ten pence, sweet & sour chicken and rice (also enormous) costing twenty four pence and a fruit salad costing six pence. Forty pence the lot! In India we lost weight and the monstrous diet of boiled eggs, chapatis and rice was driving us saft!

Lots of Europeans and Westerners here. Hash is illegal but everyone smokes it along with grass and opium. You can buy hash cookies from some of the cake shops. These cost twelve pence each and we tried some yesterday. They just send me to sleep but Barry got quite high the other night! Highly recommended for insomnia anyway, but they don't taste as good as the old lemon meringue pie I'm afraid.

Best wishes to everyone,

Tony

P.S. I bet England went into mourning after being knocked out of the World Cup! We hear Clough got the sack. Has Alf had his marching orders yet?