23 January 2009
India Tale Number 1

Filed under Hero + Soul + That's Living

Apologies. Upon my return there was some corporate upheaval and many personal adjustments… (why is it so quiet and where did all the monkeys go and why can’t my body process all this processed food?) anywho….tale number one, in no particular order…

How we lost all of our luggage

So, shortly into the trip around 26 Dec. we were leaving from Varanasi to Rishikesh by night train. We planned to meet our traveling partners at the corner by “Karki’s Restaurant” and grab some “Tuk Tuks” or auto rickshaws (small 3-wheeled vehicles much akin to the groundskeeper vehicles on a large campus, corporation or estate) to take us to the train station. Our traveling partners proceeded in one vehicle (pre-arranged) and butterfly and me in another (bartered for at the last minute and requiring to be push-started by several passersby’s which seems to be the custom on several levels in India). We were leading of the two vehicles and winding through the twilight-lit, bustling streets of Varanasi, dodging cars, cows, pedestrians, bikes and the occasional _____ (insert odd animal here). Occasionally we would catch sight of our friends in the other tuk tuk, with their scarves over their mouths to prevent the overwhelming ingestion of city traffic fumes, and we would wave and laugh with one another. Until suddenly our tuk tuk turned off the main road and motioned his need for additional fuel. The second driver stopped by briefly, exchanged a few words and hurried on with his fare along the main road to the train station. Butterfly and I threw each other a sideways glance and wondered if we would ever catch up with them again, realizing, in that brief instant, that they held our train tickets and we had no pre-determined meeting location.
Our driver refueled and we continued on our way. As we approached the train station, I wondered how we would ever find them in the maddening crowd (who seem so averse to lines or queues of any kind). No sooner had I registered the thought, than our driver swooped up beside our friends’ tuk tuk and began to ‘negotiate’ over the price of the fare (typically fares are pre-determined by verbal contact and not metered, therefore, they are sometimes “re-negotiated”.)
The drivers required literally a few cents more than we had prearranged, due to entrance/parking fees, and so we paid and moved our luggage from the tuk tuks and handed them to the station porters. The red-shirted porters proceeded to hoist our bags onto their heads (easily 80lbs worth) and quickstepped through the crowds, while we followed behind. D and Butterfly interlinked arms and laughed and chatted, as T and I joked and pointed out the sights, i.e. monkeys in the rafters and on the tracks, food vendors, etc. We were all having a gay ol’ time of things as we marched down to the end of platform. As we reached the end of the platform the crowds diminished and the tracks faded out to black in the darkness of the evening.
Suddenly we realized that the porters were NO WHERE to be seen. We forced our vision out into the blackness to see where they might have gone, we scanned the faces of the people nearby to find some hint of a direction in which they might have fled and we backtracked into the crowd a bit to try to find them. Then as the reality began to sink in we all just stood quietly at the end of the platform and I began to take inventory in my mind:

what do I have (“ok, I have my camera, and my wallet, and my passport, I have the blackberry with all our travel details…), what am I missing (wow, I don’t have my other equipment, the battery chargers, clothes, medicine, toiletries, etc, etc) how could this have happened, oh my gawd I can’t believe this, ok what do we do now, wow this is crazy, I am in the middle of India and I just lost all of my stuff, wow this is kinda cool and weird that I am in the middle of India and I just lost all of my stuff, ok but I do still have all the stuff I need to make this manageable. I can’t believe how classic it was that they just walked away in a crowd and we lost them, wow I never would have believed this was going to happen to me, I’m going to be here for 2 more weeks without my stuff. Dang I’m gonna miss some of that stuff, ok focus, but what should we do now, holy cow what DO we do now…

Pretty much all that and more went racing through my mind in about 10 seconds. Mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else to do I began to walk back down along the platform and into the crowds. Butterfly followed a few yards behind me while T and D regrouped. About a minute into my walk I suddenly saw a whole group of guys in red jackets standing on the platform. I began to walk faster toward them. Suddenly one of them saw me and started waving and pointing at my suitcase on the ground in front of him. My whole face just dropped. I hurried over to him and in THE most inappropriate gesture I threw my arms around him and gave him a hug. All the guys behind him were laughing and laughing and his face beamed as he pointed at the metal tag around his arm signifying that he was an “officially licensed porter”. I was so filled with joy and he was so filled with pride. Man, it was beautiful. The guys continued to laugh and chat while I continued to thank the man and Butterfly went back to get T and D. Apparently, in our mirth we had just walked past our platform loading area, while our porters had stopped precisely where they were supposed to go with our bags.
Soon after, our train arrived and the porters helped us to find our berth and get our bags onto the train. We laughed once more and thanked them again.

I tipped him handsomely.

Not THE guy, but a picture I found on the internet of the tag I’m talking about:

2009-01-23  ::  admin