Alwar & Jaipur, India

Jaipur is the name of a deliciously citrussy IPA made by Thornbridge Brewery. I've been drinking it for years and I felt it was time to give the city itself a try. It's quite a long train ride from Delhi, so I looked on the timetable for a random place to stop over en route, and that's how I came to spend a couple of days in Alwar first. Both cities are in Rajasthan: it's the first time that this blog has been to a 'stan', if you ignore the slight spelling difference. Plenty to look at here. See pictures.

There has been a slightly grumpy tone in some of my blogs lately, so I should emphasise that I've never had a bad day in India, and more importantly that this is just about the friendliest country of the roughly sixty that I've visited in my life to date. Indians are naturally warm and peaceful people. On these crowded streets, I've only seen two or three unpleasant episodes, all involving traffic disputes, and all settling down rapidly after a brief outburst of raised voices and a little bit of pushing. It's as if, once both parties have saved 'face' by demonstrating their determination not to back down, there's an unspoken agreement that things can go on as they were before. Not like back home in England, where any minor confrontation quickly escalates towards either the police station or the hospital, or both.

It must be admitted that Indian men spit way too much. This is closely associated with their habit of chewing tobacco way too much. Also, you often see men easing their bladders at the roadside. Of course, if they're manning fruit stalls or driving auto-rickshaws, then it's not like they have much choice, and they do at least have the good manners to face the wall while micturating. But with Indian streets, as with Jane Austen's evening dances, one can't help but wonder what the ladies do.  

Anyway, my Indian adventure is now over. From Jaipur I'm taking a short flight back to Mumbai and then going home from there. This is the most time I've ever spent in tropical climes - two months - and it's been fantastic but the heat and the noise and the pollution all start to get a bit overwhelming after a while. Probably it'll be 2026 before this blog kicks into gear again. I hope you all enjoy your own 2025 holidays...in the meantime I'm looking forward to getting back to cool rain and warm sausage rolls. And a can of Jaipur, or two.

City Palace in Alwar

Sagar Lake in Alwar

Jaipur street life seen from the Metro station overhead

Hawa Mahal in Jaipur (1799)
Built specifically to allow royal Indian ladies to watch street events & processions...
...without being seen themselves by the plebs.

Albert Hall Museum (1887) in Jaipur

Jaipur at dusk, seen from the path up to Nahagarh Fort

Gaitor Ki Chhatriyan (royal crematory) in Jaipur

Edd vs Food #162
Just what the doctor orders when it's 32°C at lunchtime on the terrace
(and I'm recovering from a dicky tummy):
Extra spicy Rajasthani chicken curry with roti bread.
At the Rajasthane Kitchen in Jaipur

New Delhi, India

Well, I guess they call it Delhi Belly for a reason.

Ironically it wasn't even something I ate in Delhi. I started to feel queasy on my final day in Agra. It might have been the posh mixed kebab platter (see the last Edd vs Food), or it might have been my home-cooked bean stew, or it might have been some slightly-too-softly-boiled breakfast eggs. Either way I had a couple of days of feeling a bit off, with details that you don't want to know about. No real emergencies though, and I made it through the train journey from Agra to Delhi without any need for Immodium, and I'm fine now. But since then I've been eating very unadventurously, as you'll see below.

Obviously Delhi is a tourist hotspot, by Indian standards, so there are plenty of options for unadventurous eating. But the American chains do have other uses: generally, the only two options for decent coffee in India are a) Starbucks and b) McDonalds. Incidentally it seems the only two options for finding tuna of any kind are a) Subway sandwiches and b) cat food.

Delhi is full of monuments and temples and other interesting sights, of which but a very small selection is featured in my pictures below. Perhaps the most spectacular of all is Swaminarayan Akshardham, an absurdly huge Hindu temple completed only in 2005. But they don't allow photography there - indeed you aren't even allowed to take your phone in with you. I handed mine over on entry, and then when I left, it was given back to me by a bored-looking young Indian lady who belched loudly as she did so. Anyway here's what the temple looks like.

The hawkers and touts here are more persistent and impertinent here than elsewhere. Nonetheless Delhi gets my vote because it has lots of nice open spaces to stroll around in, for example Kartavya Path and Connaught Place (see pictures below). The Metro is excellent too. And I'm reliably informed that the food here is better than anywhere else in India, which makes me regret my slight digestive indisposition all the more.

But India is getting a bit hot for me. I don't mean that the police have got wind of my browsing history. No, I mean that it's literally too hot. You might have seen on the news that summer has started earlier than usual here (please don't google 'India Summer' if you're at work) and I can vouch for this first-hand. Between dawn and dusk, I'm having to hole up under the aircon and the ceiling fan. This is no country for old men, and no country for white ginger men either. Now that I've ticked Delhi Belly off my bucket list, it'll soon be time to head home and mess my guts up with cask ales and kebabs instead. One more blog to go.

Central Government Office at the west end of Kartavya Path

India Gate (Lutyens 1921-1931) at the east end of Kartavya Path

Central Park in Connaught Place

Humayun's Tomb

Gurdwara Bangla Sahib

In the concourse at sunset in Sarai Rohilla train station

Red Fort

Edd vs Food #161
Peri peri chicken burrito at California Burrito
(surprisingly good domestic Indian burrito chain)

Kanpur & Agra, India

Kanpur, formerly Cawnpore, saw some of the worst episodes of the Indian rebellion in 1857. That's all behind us now though. And it's another foreigner-free place. On the way back to the train station, I caught my Uber driver sneakily showing me off to his friend via a video call. I didn't raise a middle finger but I did stare back at the lens with a distinct absence of friendly smile.

Agra was a very different kettle of fish, due to the presence of an Official World Wonder. There are seven Wonders and the Taj Mahal is my fourth to date. See pictures below. It was genuinely the first time since Mumbai that I'd seen more than two or three white people in one place. Most of these tourists fly into Delhi and then take a chartered coach trip down to Agra before going back to the airport and flying home and telling everyone that they've "done India". I shall always look down on these people from a very great height.

Having been in India for nearly two months now, here are my main tips for anyone contemplating a visit:

1. Get your e-Visa early, before booking your flights. It's not expensive. Carry a printed copy while in India.

2. Don't bother with roaming deals or e-SIMs for your phone. Just go to the AirTel stall at Mumbai airport when you arrive. For about seven quid you get a 28-day SIM with unlimited calls & texts and 1.5Gb of data per day. You can dual-SIM it with your own.

3. Always carry cash. The message "INTERNATIONAL CARD NOT ACCEPTED" has a habit of appearing at inopportune moments. You can't buy rupees outside of India but there are some Indian ATMs that don't charge for withdrawals, eg those run by Bank Of Baroda and Yes Bank. Get a foreign currency card that doesn't charge fees (I use Caxton). 

4. Work hard on maintaining a stock of small denomination notes: most people don't want to accept 500-rupee notes, but the ATMs generally won't give you anything else.

5. Ignore traffic signals. Because that's what the traffic itself usually does. Always assume that vehicles will be coming at you from both directions, on both carriageways, at all times.

6. You can use Uber not just for taxis but also auto rickshaws and rear-seat moped rides. It takes all the uncertainty out of both your destination and your fare.

7. When speaking English to locals, do so with a mild Indian accent. I'm quite serious here. You don't have to go full 'Goodness Gracious Me' but it definitely helps if you pronounce the words roughly the same way they do. It's like how, in the USA, you need to pronounce 'tuna' as 'toon-ah' rather than 'choon-er' if you want to be understood (something I learned to my cost on the very first day of Edd's Travels back in 2008).

If I acquire any more priceless pearls of Indian wisdom during the rest of my trip then I'll be sure to pass them on. But time is starting to run out on that score.

Taj Mahal (obviously) seen from the south

Main gateway to the Taj

Taj again from the south-west corner

Agra Fort

JK Temple in Kanpur

"Freight train, each car looks the same
And no-one knows the gypsy's name..."
'Melissa', The Allman Brothers, 1972

Edd vs Food #159
I like my spicy curries but the default in India is usually biryani.
Of which, here is a posher-than-average example from the Punjab Grill in Kanpur.

Edd vs Food #160
Mixed kebab platter: lamb (front), chicken (right), paneer (left), fish (back), yoghurt (middle)
At Kebab-e-que, in the Agra Hilton

Lucknow, India

I must confess that I've very quickly grown tired of the constant stares and catcalls and requests for selfies. So much so that I'm generally giving a brisk "no thanks" to the selfie requests. It's not that I think there's anything wrong with it, or that I resent the people asking; it's just that I can't be bothered doing it every five minutes, and I don't feel guilty about that. 

Younger males often shout out "wassup bro'?!" as I pass. I tell them that it's not an appropriate greeting for English people, but they should use it everywhere if they go to the USA, especially in Harlem or the Bronx.

Also I get a lot of unsolicited handshake requests and this is more significantly problematic in a country where, frankly, a lot of people still wipe their backsides with their hands. Just saying.

While I'm being grumpy, I'll add that India is The Land That Beer Forgot. Setting aside the total prohibition in Bihar (see previous blog), in most places it's a struggle to get even the halfway decent imported stuff like Budweiser or Heineken. Indian beer drinkers mostly go for the kind of low-budget extra-strong 8% ABV domestic lagers that make Special Brew taste like Chateau Rothschild, but are still pretty expensive, due to a baffling tax system that incentivises people to drink cheap spirits instead.

Might as well get all the grumpitude out in one blog. The other thing about India that bugs me is the over-attentive service culture. As a foreigner, you can't walk into a shop without an assistant running over to you and more or less putting his nose on your shoulder. In McDonalds, when you're using the self-service screens, they'll sidle up and start reaching over and pressing buttons that you didn't want to press. When you check into a hotel, any hotel, the bellboy will rush ahead of you into the room and begin a commentary of utter pointlessness ("here we have the bed where Sir will be sleeping, and also a television for viewing of the required programmes..." And this commentary continues without limit:"...that is the ceiling, this is the floor..." until you give them a 100-rupee tip and bundle them out of the door. I've taken to executing the tipping & bundling manouevre as soon as they put the bag down, before they get the chance to start talking.

Rant over. Lucknow is spectacular and everyone's friendly. See pictures below.

Lucknow Picture Museum

Chota Imambara

Rumi Darwaza. Note camel at left.

Bada Imambara
An Imambara is not quite the same as a mosque.
Here non-Muslims can go inside, but there are pictures of both the Iranian Ayatollahs displayed on the outside walls...
...so I opted to give it a miss.

Aasifi Masjid

Twilight of the Raj:
The Residency, badly damaged during the Uprising in 1857 and never repaired.

Musa Bagh

Ambedkar Memorial
There are 124 life-size concrete elephants in this park. Bonkers.

Edd vs Food #158
Chicken samosas at the street stall.
Spicy, succulent, sublime. 10p each, sauce dip included.

Madhupur / Patna / Benares, India

I was going to say something about being "off the beaten track", but in fact this track is the most beaten of any track in human history. You'll probably have seen the Kumbh Mela and other Hindu pilgrimages in the news. Literally hundreds of millions of people are on the move.

I myself am completely indifferent to all religions, but still it's quite touching to see the lengths, physical and financial, that people go to in order to fulfil what they perceive as their spiritual duty. That said, bathing in the Ganges is one thing, but the tradition of dunking yourself in it, and indeed drinking from it, is deeply problematic. Partly because the Ganges is full of sewage, and partly because the Ganges is full of corpses. I suppose people can risk their own lives if they really want to. But encouraging your children to do the same is downright criminal.

Also there has been some awful loss of life in stampedes and crushes. Rest assured I'm staying safe. The problems arise when people are rushing for unreserved seating in second class trains, which is not how I roll, or at the actual ghats (riverfront steps) themselves, which I haven't been able to get near because the streets start to get blocked off before you're within a mile. Hence the total absence of impressive pilgrimage photos below.

The main pilgrimage destination is Prayagraj, which is vaguely like the Hindu version of Santiago de Compostela. But India's 'spiritual capital' is Benares (otherwise known as Banaras or Varanasi) and I spent a couple of nights there. I think I was the first-ever foreigner in that AirBnB apartment. Not only was there no TP, there wasn't even the upside-down shower hose option. Just a plastic jug, and a tap.  Fortunately I always carry my own stash of TP.

Madhupur isn't on the pilgrim trail. It's a small town of only about 50,000 people. For me it was just a place to break up the long train journey. There my status was elevated from 'Minor Celebrity' to 'Actual ET The Extra-Terrestrial'. I stayed in a posh hotel on the edge of town and when I went for a brief walk along some country lanes, a car stopped and a guy hopped out just to ask for a selfie with me. The car in question was in fact a fairly plush SUV. I suspect he was a local political bigwig, with all the indirect earning potential that entails. And no doubt by now there's a Facebook page where that joint selfie is captioned "Constructive Meeting With British Ambassador!!!". 

In Patna I took the posh hotel option a step further and had a couple of nights in the Taj. One can't rough it all the time, can one? But the downside of Patna is that it's in the state of Bihar, which has a) an area roughly equal to Portugal, b) a population roughly equal to Mexico, and c) an availability of legal alcohol exactly equal to zero. Yes, you read that right. No booze at all. Not even in five-star hotels. So it's time for a pilgrimage of my own, a spiritual quest to the nearest bar, which means getting back on the train.

Taj hotel

"Amateur cricket at dusk" is going to be a recurring pictorial theme in this blog.
This is in Patna, on the Maidan, a 62-acre city-centre park for public sports & recreation.
There's a cafe at the top of the building in the background: see Edd vs Food below.

Ganges beachfront in Patna

From the house of WHAT now?
I asked the head waiter for clarification but he had no idea.
I'm hopeful that it's just an autocorrect thing. 

Posh country hotel in Madhupur

Rural peace outside Madhupur

Pilgrims heading home. Benares railway station at 5am.

Edd vs Food #157
Murg Kohlapuri chicken curry with potato/onion/paneer kulcha bread
At the Lighthouse Cafe in Patna, on the 17th floor.
In the background is the Maidan (see cricket picture above).

Calcutta, India

After my 1,000 mile train odyssey from Mumbai to Chennai, I decided to take a quick break from the railways with a 2-hour flight up India's east coast to Calcutta. Chennai wasn't really my cup of tea but I will concede that Chennai Airport is wonderful, principally because it's a quiet airport. There is no piped music and there are no tannoy announcements. (I'm reliably informed that visually-impaired people are assisted appropriately.) You just sit there in peace and wait for your flight. The world needs a lot more of this, and not just in airports.

And so to Calcutta. In recent years I've despatched blogs from places like Vienna, Bucharest, Seville, and Mexico City. I didn't see any need to call them Wien or București or Sevilla or Ciudad de Mexico. Similarly, I've never once thought to take issue with the many native Spanish speakers who've enthused to me about their visits to Londres or Edimburgo. And if I ever met anyone who thought it was a problem for us to be called Le Royaume-Uni when we're embarrasing ourselves at Eurovision, I'd give them very short shrift indeed. For all these reasons and more, yes, I'm calling it Calcutta and not Kolkata. If anybody else wants to be more respectful and call it what the locals call it, then go right ahead. It's কলকাতা.

Calcutta is the capital of West Bengal, just a day's bike ride from what used to be East Bengal and is now Bangladesh. It's comfortably my favourite place so far in India. This is partly because it's more liveable than the other big Indian cities I've visited - in some places, there are even functioning pavements - but mainly because it's so redolent of the Raj. It's one of those places where the history still seems to live and breathe, where you can imagine yourself being transported back in time. Admittedly this is helped by the fairly decrepit state of much of urban India. You see buildings and facades and playparks that clearly haven't been used or repaired or developed in many decades. Like in those post-apocalyptic / zombie movies.

Naturally the Victoria Memorial is the highlight. See picture below. Nearby is the racecourse - the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, to be precise - outside of which clouds of dust are kicked up by herds of goats, as well as the occasional white charger being taken for an informal gallop outside the wall. Sadly the museum on the site of the original Black Hole of Calcutta wasn't open when I was there. Not that I particularly wanted to give it a try.

All of this nostalgia is of course tinged with a certain moral ambiguity. There were good and bad things about the Raj. But nostalgia doesn't necessarily imply approval: after all, when Cockneys get misty-eyed about the Blitz Spirit, it doesn't mean they want to go back to being bombed every night. Anyway, I still haven't met a single Indian who's shown any sign of resentment about the past. The conversation always goes straight to cricket.

I've been out here over a month now and in that time I haven't seen a drop of rain, or felt a breath of wind, or worn anything heavier than a T-shirt. The food is wonderful but the beers are awful. The people are fantastic but the streets are a nightmare. The stray dogs are friendly but the insects continue to bite. Overall the balance is still firmly positive. I should have come to India much sooner. 

Tipu Sultan mosque on Central Avenue

All the Calcutta taxis are this cute model

St John's Church

Lions Safari Park at dawn

Victoria Memorial

Amateur cricket at dusk, with the Victoria Memorial in the distance

Vidyasagar Setu bridge over the Hooghly river, seen from the ghats

Edd vs Food #156
A naan bread pizza, or "naanzza" if you will.
Honestly, that's the name of the restaurant.

Chennai, India

Chennai's colonial history goes all the way back. Formerly known as Madras, it was the site of the first British imperial outpost in India, and was in fact uninhabited before then. Over the years, from Kipling's poetry through the novels of EM Forster to Sir Salman Rushdie (himself born in what was then called Bombay), India has been a fertile source of cultural inspiration for our finest brains and pens. 

Whereas for me, the deeply personal link to this city is that, after going to the football and drinking a gallon of lager, my favourite curry is lamb Madras.

In fact 'Madras' curries, like tikka masala curries, aren't really Indian at all. They're very much creations of 20th century Anglo-Indian cuisine. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. But you won't find Madras curries on menus here, just like you won't find spaghetti bolognese anywhere in Bologna.

More importantly, when I went for a walk on Marina Beach and allowed the Bay of Bengal to swirl around my toes, that concluded the first part of this trip: a coast-to-coast journey across central India from Mumbai, where it was the Arabian Sea doing the swirling. I've taken trains the whole way, about 1,000 miles in all. It was a 7-hour daytime ride here from Vijayawada in a first-class compartment where I and three others had individual bunks. 

There are many different classes of ticket but the main thing is to be in an air-conditioned carriage. The cheapest seats in 2nd class are just overcrowded wooden benches, and without AC those metal carriages are natural heat traps. You can see that even the locals find them a strain. If I was to try travelling that way then in all seriousness I'd probably end up having some kind of medical episode.

Chennai itself hasn't left much of an impression on me. I don't have anything bad to say about it, but I can't think of much that's particularly good either. Probably one to miss out if any of you are thinking of "doing India". Anyway the second part of this trip begins now, so stay tuned. 

Shoppers on Ranganathan St

Chennai Central: the busiest railway station in South India

Fort St George: the first English outpost in India.
(English, not British, because that was before the Act of Union with Scotland.)

There's a bit too much of this in India.
Every tin-pot local bigwig seems to get a gold statue and a big memorial park.
Politicans, now more than ever, would do well to remember that they are our servants and not our masters.

Horse rides on Marina Beach

There are many reasons not to go swimming off Indian beaches and here is just one of them

Brief interval of fresh air, along Patinapakkam Beach

Edd vs Food #155
I finally got round to having an Indian meal that isn't a curry!
Chicken Almondine Sizzler at the Copper Kitchen.
Chicken fried in breadcrumbs, stuffed with mincemeat & almonds.
Plus rice & veg, and pepper sauce on top.

At the same restaurant: the £125 Full Goat Biryani.
Maybe next time, if I'm here with friends (presumably about 20 of them).