A Passage To India, Pt 2

Continuing my Blip transcriptions of the voyages of family friend Tony Reavley - school teacher, marathon runner and adventurer - as he travels around Asia in the mid 1970s. The first chronological instalment, from November 1973, concerned itself with sacred affairs on the Ganges and the wonderful world of Nepalese ganja. In this letter, dated a month later, Tony once again emphasises his high opinion of India, and as always, is on the lookout for a bargain.

Puri, India

29-12-73

As you can see above, I am back in the madhouse again.

We left Kathmandu on 20th December after a four week stay in Nepal. Nepal was a picnic compared to India. The people were more friendly and the food was superb when we had the appetite for it. Hope you received my [last] letter; the Nepalese will steal stamps off the letters if they are posted in the ordinary way and it is necessary to take them in person to the post office and get them franked. The bloody Indians are just the same, so I usually write to England now by aerogramme every time. I can't remember whether I franked the letter I sent to you from Kathmandu as I wasn't wise to the postman's tricks at that time; let me know if you received it.

[Editor's note: as the previous blip in this series demonstrates, our family did indeed receive Tony's letter, proving that there was at least one honest Nepalese postie on the job in the Seventies].

We spent a number of days trekking in the mountains and saw most of the Himalayan giants including Everest and Annapurna. As I wrote before, the food in India is terrible but in Nepal we ate quite well. The restaurants have a wide range of menus and at one, "Aunt Jane's", we got large plates of roast beef, chocolate cake and ice cream! Very welcome after mostly rice and ghastly Indian curries. We had a shock when we weighed ourselves in Kathmandu: Barry lost about a stone and is now under nine stone. Kathmandu is supposedly the filthiest city in the world and I wouldn't argue with this. The old part of the city is made up of a maze of narrow alleys and streets; some houses have balconies, and if you reach out you can almost shake hands with your neighbour opposite. Whenever we walked down these alleys, we always kept to the middle as the people throw all of their rubbish out of the windows and several times we narrowly missed a drenching from a bucket of slops. Waste food and rubbish is thrown directly on to the streets as there is no such thing as sanitation or dustbins. Down at ground level, open sewers run along the edge of the street. Toilets don't exist and people shit everywhere, the same as in India. A lot of the filth is cleared up by animals scavenging below which include stray dogs, pigs, chickens, cows, etc. The whole scene is what I imagine England must have been like in the Middle Ages.

We flew from Kathmandu to Calcutta, India's largest city. Not as bad as we expected. As is usual in big cities, we were pestered by Indians wanting to sell us hash, opium, and souvenirs. We decided to go down the coast for Xmas and on Xmas Eve we arrived in Puri, a coastal town on the Bay of Bengal, 350 miles south of Calcutta. It's very cheap here and we're in the best hotel paying 16 rupees (80 pence) a day. This includes three meals which are filling, but taste awful.

A typical day's meals:

Breakfast - 2 fried eggs on 2 pieces of plain toast (butter is non-existent); one banana; one pot of tea.

Lunch - rice; curried eggs; dal (a sort of nasty yellow pea soup); cold marrow mixed with potato; fishcakes (highly spiced and full of bones); plate of raw onions; for dessert, a bowl of something like yoghurt.

Evening meal - exactly the same.

Pretty depressing. We buy bananas and mandarin oranges, because otherwise we'd die of vitamin deficiency. But apart from this, Puri is a superb place.

Hope you can find time to drop me a line from home. We know little of what's going on as we can only get hold of the occasional English paper when we reach a big city. We know England's in a bad way with the miners on strike and the fuel crisis, etc. If you know the results of the County Championship, let me know.

Best wishes for 1974.