Trains, Taxis and Sex Temples

There is truly nothing like spending the night in an India train station. Of course, looking back on it, it was "exciting" and "fascinating" and "adventurous", however, at the time...IT SUCKED. We arrived at the train station full of vigor and optimism, after having an amazing time along the waters of the Ganges. We had planned our travel perfectly to save money by taking an overnight train to Satna and then hopping a 5 hour bus to Khajaraho (the Erotic Temples). In a perfect world we would arrive at about noon in Khajaraho and then have three full days to explore the temples before we needed to head north to meet my parents in Agra. Of course, we had no such luck.

At the train station we were informed that our train would be 90 minutes late. No problem...to be expected...trains are always late. We planted ourself down on the platform floor and waited. I decided to have Leslie watch my bags as I headed back into the station to confirm the time and platform number...bad idea. Within 2 minutes of being gone, four guys surrounded Leslie (as she sat guarding both our bags) and starting making lewd faces at her and kicking our bags as if to indicate they were about to run off with them. No one around the station watching this did anything to help her! In any other circumstance Leslie would have grabbed her bag and walked away, however, because she was also guarding my bag, she couldn't possibly carry both. Luckily, I arrived back on the platform before they grabbed the bags. I stood there trying to look as mean as I could (putting on my mean Amir Khan face) until they left. Not a great way to start the night in the station. From that point on we practically chained our bags to our bodies and gave anyone that looked at us a evil stare!

With this lovely demeanor, we waited, and waited, and waited, and waited for our train to arrive. Every two hours at just about the time our train was "scheduled" to appear, there would be another anouncement stating that the train was another 2 hours late. This continued until about 8am (almost 9 hours late) when to our surprise, our train actually arrived! During the night we met two Swiss girls who were going the same direction as us and coincidentally were booked in the same sleeper compartment. We boarded the train and slept for the entire 7 hours. Since we had already missed the bus, we decided that the four of us would try to rent a car & driver to take us from Satna to Khajaraho. We got off the train and immediately had 10 screaming drivers vying for our business. We negiociated a little, chose a driver and were off to the Sex Temples!

By this point in our trip we have discovered that there is a hierarchy to the different vehicles on an India roadway. At the top is the "Goods Carrier", which is basically a truck that is incredibly overloaded with anything and everything you could possible imagine. It is clear by the way these guys drive that they are the Kings of the Road. They never slow down or move to avoid anything. Of course, as a courtesy they will honk at you so that you know that they are about to hit you! Next in line are the buses, of which there are many and they are usually blaring crazy Indian music that sounds like "The Chipmunk's Play Sitar - Hindu Favorites Sung By Rodents". Next in line are the taxis. There cars look like they stepped right out of the late 1940's and because they are small and can weave around traffic, they charge full speed ahead weaving around the trucks and buses without hesitation. The remainder of the food chain consists of auto-rickshaws (golfcart-like motorcyles), cycle-rickshaws (power by a bike), bicycles and lastly PEDESTRIANS in that order. The lower you are in the food chain, the more it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to avoid those above you. In a collective decision among us four westerners, deciding would like to arrive in Khajaraho ALIVE, we thought it would be a good idea to offer our driver FREE CHAI in exchange for driving safely...bad idea. Once the driver heard the word FREE, he decided that every 10 minutes of driving should be rewarded with a chai break. By the 15th stop, we didn't even bother getting out of the car and instead just handed the driver rs 5 and told him to be back soon. Our 4 hour drive quickly turned to 6 hours. AND the gesture didn't even help his driving! In probably the most frightening experience of our trip, our driver speeding through a village road, swerved to BARELY miss a young boy who had run across the street without looking. It was truly the boy's fault for not looking before he ran, but a little speed control by out driver could have avoided the whole incident without the terrifying near miss.

To make matters worse, hot on our tails was a group of 12 Koreans that we had seen in the train station. Apparently, they were headed in the same direction as us and had rented three indentical taxis which followed close behind us. It was our goal to beat them to Khajaraho so that we would have a better pick of hotel rooms since we were getting in later than expected because of our chai delays. Luckily for us, the Koreans stopped everytime we did and instead of waiting in the car, they all got out, drank chai and took 20 pictures each of god knows what.

To our delight we arrived in time to score a nice room and head off to a great dinner in a treehouse over looking the Western Temples. The next morning we had our usually Indian breakfast of Uttappam and a Dosai and spent the day exploring the Erotic Temples of Khajaraho. It's really hard to explain these temples as they are really something to be seen and not described. You can think of it as ancient porn. The sculptures are about as graphic as it gets with everything from acrobatic positions to animal intimacy. There are various therioes as to "why all the sex" but no real conscensious that we could discern. Instead, what is most surprising to us was that these temples are in India. On the outside by American/European standards, India appears to be an incredibly sexually repressed country. Marriages are almost all arranged and genders are kept separate at functions such as weddings. Public displays of affection (such as holding hands or kissing) are very rare and you are more likely to see two guys arm-in-arm walking down the street than a man and a woman "hanging out" in public, even among married couples.

Alas, this is the paradox of India. The same cultural history that upholds these restrictive customs, is also the creator of the Kama Sutra. In a way, this is what makes India so magical. Nothing is what it appears to be on the surface nor can it easily be stuffed into categories or definitions. With our "logical" little western minds, we stuggle to understand and accept these paradoxes, while they make perfect sense to the typical Indian. Before we left, a good friend of ours gave us advice on traveling to India. "Throw logic out the window", she said. I can't agree more and I would add to that my advice to "spend less time thinking and more time laughing." Things just somehow work here. I don't know how or why, but they do. I really hope westernization doesn't change the "logic" of India too much. We need a place in the world where we can throw "rationale" out the window and celebrate the bizarre as commonplace.

We loved Khajaraho and spent our second day on rented bikes riding around the surrounding country-side through beautiful msutard fields and meeting an array of random locals along the way. We laughed a lot. On our last night we decided that we were going to try an experiment and go into every single shop that someone tried to lure us into to look at their merchandise. We went one by one following every shopkeeper into their store and let them show us all their best wares for about 20 minutes. Surprisingly, we didn't get suckered into buying too much, and made all the shoppkeepers happy. Generally, these guys stand around all day competing for the tourist business. Since they all sell the same thing (and there are what seems like hundreds of shops), many of them don't get any customers all day. The fact that we took them time to listen to them and look at some of there stuff was enough to make many of them happy and thank us as we walked out the door without buying a thing! It was a fun little experiment in surrender...although utimately almost just as exhausting as avoiding these guys all day!

Off to the Taj,

Kevin & Leslie