So, initial decision – whether to laugh or cry. Deciding on laughing (albeit slightly hysterically) my mind wandered over all my travel plans that had gone awry over the previous month. Was I simply unlucky, or was this all part of the Indian experience? Here follows a brief summary of travelling stresses:
1. Floods in Ladakh damaging 80% of the main city’s infrastructure and the runway, two days before we were supposed to fly there.
2. Power cut at 4 pm on Friday afternoon, lasting the whole evening, just as I was trying to book bus tickets and hotel for a hurriedly re-planned holiday on-line (before flying to Delhi early Saturday morning).
3. When we did manage to get bus tickets from Delhi to Dharamsala (in the foothills of the Himalayas) my friend, who I was travelling with, and I were surprised to find that the bus didn’t leave from central New Delhi. This would have been (relatively) easy to find. No. Rather our bus tickets were from, I quote, a 'petrol pump' on a random road the other side of the city. There is no way we could have found it by ourselves, but luckily we had a very nice taxi driver who not only found the correct petrol pump, but also waited around with us during torrential rain, asked around to see whether we were in the correct place, found that we weren’t, and drove us a further 15 minutes up the road to a narrow and bumpy side street, at the bottom of which were a few coaches. He then asked around to find out which was our coach, and so we finally managed to collapse into our seats, fairly sure that we were heading to Dharamsala and not Manali, Simla or any other place in India (nothing would have surprised me by that point).
4. The overnight bus journey to Dharamsala was actually OK and I even slept a bit. This was not the case on the return journey. Unfortunately I pretty quickly started feeling sick due to the steep and winding mountain roads. Then unfortunately, I somehow managed to start hyperventilating (or something) and ended up being completely unable to move my hands or arms, which was really scary. I panicked and demanded that the whole coach stop, it’s funny that when you are feeling so ill you want to die all self-consciousness flies out of the window.
5. So, when we arrived in Delhi the next morning neither my friend nor I were at our best. We had train tickets from New Delhi to Jaipur for that afternoon. However, key lesson I had learned: don’t take anything or granted, and triple check everything. On triple checking the tickets, then, I found that the train didn’t actually leave from New Delhi station, which is what the ticket implied, but actually Old Delhi station, which was a lot further away. I also received a text stating that the time of the train had changed, but not saying to what time. It was then we realised we hadn’t left enough time to get to Old Delhi station given torrential rain, consequent lack of taxis and major traffic jams. So we gave up, and decided to enjoy the delights that Delhi had to offer instead.
6. I managed to fly back from Delhi to Kolkata without any problems.
I realise the above may have given the impression that I didn’t enjoy my holiday, which actually wasn’t the case. When we did manage to get to Dharamsala, it was very beautiful and peaceful (particularly compared to Kolkata).
Unfortunately it was the monsoon season, so it was fairly cloudy and rainy, but we managed to do some cooking lessons, plenty of shopping, and a hike up to 3000m (which, given my complete lack of exercise for the previous six months, I felt was quite impressive). 
We stayed in McLeod Ganj, which is also known as Upper Dharamsala, and where the Dalai Lama and the exiled Tibetan community live. It was interesting, if shocking, talking to Tibetans and hearing their stories. Many had escaped Tibet over high mountain passes, some suffering from snow blindness or frostbite, and now cut off and unable to return to their families. There were many Buddhist monks, and we visited a few monasteries where monks were busy debating the intricacies of Buddhist philosophy: when they feel they make a sound point they stamp their feet and clap their hands.
McLeod Ganj is very much on the tourist trail, and was a very different experience both to living in Kolkata and to visiting the mountains in Pakistan. It was clearly set up to receive a high number of tourists – there were many coffee shops, and it was even possible to get mozzarella cheese (incredible – it’s almost impossible to get even in the huge metropolis of Kolkata!). The hotels, even the budget ones, were nice, with hot showers and comfortable beds. While I enjoyed the experience, it isn’t one I would really like to repeat. Many tourists like to talk about experiencing the ‘real’ India. While I don’t think this is a tenable concept, given a country of 1.2 billion people and 72 languages, the hotels and restaurants of the tourist centres set up to cater for the needs of rich westerners are about as far away from the experiences of 90% of Indians as is possible to get. It seemed to me many tourists expect western standards of comfort and luxury with a little bit of exotic culture thrown in. I even felt I was treated differently as compared to living in Kolkata: particularly in Delhi whenever I stepped out into the street I felt like I had a big notice pinned to my back: ‘tourist is ‘ere: please scam or rip me off’. There were redeeming features of Delhi though – the Jama Masjid was beautiful, as was the Red Fort.
So, my advice for an unwary British traveller in India: travel with an Indian who knows about the intricacies of the Indian transport system and can deal with scams!
And as for my trip home, well I was able to alter my plane ticket from Kolkata to Delhi to fly out a day early, so I spent a day in Delhi before flying home. While Kolkata was absolutely bought to a standstill by the strike (80 flights out of the airport were cancelled), Delhi was hardly affected. So it ended happily (for me) after all.
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