Written by
Marged Richards, freelance adventure travel writer
My introduction to a nine day tour of North India felt like having my face held at the mouth of an exhaust pipe. Everything about Delhi is a shock to the system. The dirt, the noise the traffic – combined they make London seem a Suffolk village in comparison. This is a city that never sleeps. And when it does, much of its 14 million population seems to do so on the side of the rickshaw-lined roads.
But once my disquiet subsides, I begin to sense the soul of the place. There is so much life on display here – wherever you turn there are rickshaw drivers, young boys hawking trinkets, bodies asleep in the shade, women walking proud balancing a parcel on their head, babies wrapped close to their mother's chest, a cow swishing its tail. Always, everywhere, someone.
And because I'm Western, they look at me. Not with a cold stare but with a brown-eyed gaze, followed by a smile as sunny as the day. From village roadsides beautiful children wave at the group as our car passes by. What a people. What warmth.
From atop a minarette of Jami Masjid, the country's largest mosque, I follow a kite's eyes across the city's enchanting hazy sprawl. Soon we're back on ground level making our way through the colourful throng, catching what we can of Old Delhi and its time-warped spice markets before boarding the Shatabdi Express for Haridwar, home of our amiable guide, Sanjeev Mehta, and one of the most revered pilgrimage towns in India.
As the light fades we join hundreds of families, pilgrims and holy men gathered close on the banks of the Ganges: the twice-daily Ganga Aarti or river worship ceremony is about to begin. The horn-blowing, shouts and clapping get louder as the drum banging becomes frenzied and then bam! Priests holding oil lamps leaping fire appear and step down to the water's edge. The ceremony begins. All around us are twinkling lights, arms raised in praise, smiling faces and flashing cameras.
When it's over, I set my own lamp or diya – a saal leaf filled with fresh rose and marigold petals surrounding a small deepak candle – free on the Ganges. As instructed, I make a wish, then splash the holy water on my face. In the midst of so many natives on their tangibly special occasion I smile at the privilege.
What moves me most is the pervasive peace unimaginable amongst a Western crowd. I realise calm can be a national trait. How? "We're an innately religious and tolerant people; fatalists who accept our lot," explains Sanjeev.
Not far up the river is Rishikesh, the place for ashrams, cheap massages, yoga and Western food and faces, where the views of the gleaming Ganges, whether from the top floor of a café or one of the silver-sand beaches, induce a state of perfect wellbeing. Stand and stare.
Cutest of all the tame animals I'd stroked is Yogi, an 18-month-old orphaned elephant calf adopted by Sanjeev, who hopes to return him to the wild. He'd been abandoned when the villagers scared away his herd feeding in their sugarcane fields in Rajaji National Park. The £10 donated by Make A Difference Adventures from the trip fee directly funds the expert care that make Yogi's chances of survival high. There's certainly nothing wrong with his appetite, judging by the persistence of his slow-twirling trunk amongst our legs. One morning we rise at 6am specially to feed him a breakfast of brown gloop cakes. Like babies everywhere, come to the end of the feed he's still hungry.
Leopards, monkeys, kingfishers, deer, mongoose, … North India is a wildlife lover's heaven. It's on the sixth day on safari in Corbett National Park – home to the second highest density of tigers in the world – in the foothills of the Himalayas that I stare in awe at my first wild elephant. Even then, motoring along the roads and paths in a jeep isn't half as pleasurable as tramping the forest high up on the back of Laxmi, the park's three-ton living safari vehicle. Langur monkeys and samba deers are reliable sentinels, but the best tiger alarm is an elephant.
If Laxmi suddenly halts it mean's she's afraid, we're told. The lower the sun falls the higher we hold our twigs, making pathetic pre-emptive strikes in the air around trees trying to stop the cobwebs and attached giant spiders from reaching us. Lulled by the rhythm of our carrier's walk my mind is wandering amongst the saal trees and up to the gently gathering stars when the bulk beneath me stops. Tiger?! we whisper excitedly. We wait, breath baited. But all Laxmi could hear was a trio of villagers making their way home.
The best place to spend time with a playful elephant, I discover, is in water. We join Laxmi for her daily wash in the Kosi river running directly in front of our lodge. I say wash, but she insisted on plunging head first under the water most of the time, playing and wiggling her colossal feet with what seems disobedient glee. A few hundred feet away in the forest stretching away from the opposite bank, manhunters roam.
The conservation of the park's wildlife isn't the Corbett Trust Foundation's only priority. Ten per cent of each trip fee sustains its Gujjar Villager Land Project which aims to buy land inside the park's protected zone, ensuring the preservation of their unique culture. Forest-dwelling nomads, the Gujjars of Corbett are in trouble for the same reason that the tigers are: India's forests are shrinking. In the 1950s half the country was forest. Today it is less than 20%. Since the Gujjars are now mainly sedentary, the Foundation plans to drill water holes to help make their land more fertile. There are approximately 200 Gujjar villages in Corbett Park's buffer zone. Meeting the Gujjars, sharing supper on the floor of their communal moonlit hut is a profound experience; an honour.
On the way back south the thick night air filling the carriage soon sends me to sleep on my bright blue bunk-bed. I wake just as the train is dragging itself through Delhi's seemingly endless suburbs. Four rupees less rich, I sip the sweetness of a steaming chae. Through the bars a woman crouches in the dirt patting cow dung into a three-inch thick disc and adds it to the others. Later she'll sell them as fuel.
On our final day the group gathers for a luxurious breakfast at The Imperial, Delhi's first five-star hotel. Its padded seats and cleanliness are welcome comforts, but none of us can forget that just behind the trimmed hedges enclosing the manicured lawn a baby and its young mother, hand upturned, stand at a car window.
I've travelled by virtually every mode of transport in India, slept in different accommodation eight nights in a row, and spent 19 hours making my back home to London, yet I'm exhilarated. Not only have I made a small difference to a worthy cause, but I hold the answers to questions I didn't know I'd been asking.
Marged can be contacted on:
margedrichards@yahoo.com
