Kolkata

Before heading up to the Himalayas to begin my field research, I decided I had enough time to spare to take a detour and finish some unfinished business. Last year I was on my way to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) when I had my injury and had to cut my trip short. So I returned to Kolkata. It's 25 hours by train from Delhi. This time I kept my feet inside the train. In my compartment was a very talkative, friendly man from Bangladesh. He told me all kinds of stories and insisted that he wanted to travel to America as a tourist but that my country wouldn't give him a visa, but if I wrote a letter to the US embassy in Dhaka, they would surely give him a visa. I'm not sure how much sway I hold with the authorities in Dhaka, but I didn't want to let him down. I also met a Japanese backpacker named Asushi. He'd been to Calcutta before, so I followed him to a backpacker guesthouse called Paragon Hotel in the backpacker district, Sudder Street.

It was an interesting place in that practically all the guests there were Asian. Mostly from Japan. Some from South Korea. They were by and large really young - many only 18 or 19, and many of them were volunteering at the Mother Theresa charity in Calcutta. 21 year old Kaoli from Japan was teaching English. 18 year old Bara from South Korea was washing laundry.

My room was cheap and small. I found seven cockroaches over the course of my stay. A ceiling fan is only so helpful in 100 degree-plus heat and humidity such as Calcutta has in the summer. And it just so happens May is the hottest month in India. Ah well.

Calcutta is the only city left to use hand-pulled rickshaws in India...possibly in the world. I didn't dare take one. The whole experience would have been way too colonial for my taste. The rest of the backpackers seemed to have the same idea. The only people I saw using the hand-pulled rickshaws were middle aged Indian ladies.

Much remains of the British colonial capital but it is showing its age. The city is green and old. The riverfront along the River Hooghly is delightful. There are large parks where boys play cricket. Lots of bookshops and colleges as Calcutta is traditionally and still the intellectual capital of India.

A friend I'd met on the internet lives here and we met up and she showed me around the city and some of her favorite spots over two days.

I wandered through a place called Barabazaar, which is kind of like a wholesale market. Here, trucks loaded with produce come in from the farms outside the city, and the local city produce merchants all crowd around bargaining for cartloads of produce. The banana trucks were particularly interesting, tossing big bunches of bananas, hundreds to the stem, to the cart-wallahs all around. The 19th century market hall is full of cats.