“Sir…this road…very dangerous at night”, our driver Raj Kumar said in his broken but fully understandable English. We had just turned on to a single lane track that runs along a canal in what felt like truly the middle of nowhere but is actually somewhere in Uttar Pradesh, the Indian state that lies just south and east of New Delhi. For a number of reasons we couldn’t manage a trip this weekend up to Amritsar where the border crossing with Pakistan and the Golden Temple lie, so Tracy put together an overnight trip to a location that isn’t even mentioned in The Lonely Planet guide and which is apparently well known to have serious crime problems including highway bandits. It promised to be an adventure and so far it has been.
We headed out this morning around 8:30 and after an hour-and-a-half of driving finally made it out of Delhi. Our destination was Brijghat, a pilgrimage site located along the Ganges river. It seemed as if with each of the 90 kilometers between Delhi and Brijghat the road got smaller and rougher. I had thought by this point in our stay in India that all the strange things that we could see or experience on the roads probably had occurred, but today when we were driving on the right side of the road with the oncoming traffic to the left of us (the opposite way you are meant to drive here), well I think maybe NOW I have seen it all.
Brifghat was nice, we watched kids jump off a 60 foot bridge into the water below and then took a boat out onto the Ganges with our driver, a pundit (priest) and three crew members. We threw flowers and something I took to be puffed rice into the river, then the pundit asked our names and started to say a prayer but stopped just short and asked, “How much of a donation would 
you like to give”, in a way that made it clear the effectiveness of the prayer would be impacted by my answer.
If you’ve followed this blog long enough to remember our visit to Pushkar you’ll know that I am pretty vulnerable to this whole, priest shakes you down for a donation thing. As I was having a flashback to that disaster, the pundit picked up my deer-in-the-headlights look and suggested 500 Rupees. Tracy, having a powerful aversion to being ripped off by a clergyman and knowing full well that I was in trouble, quickly shot back emphatically, “NO, one hundred”. For reasons that I now consider a result of mind-control on the part of the pundit, I then said, without even any prompting, “Yes, one hundred each”, quickly doubling our donation and triggering a full 360 degree eye-roll with a forward twist from my dear wife. Later we would pay this same pundit another 200 Rupees to be our guide to some temples in the area. Space and time do not allow me to detail any more of the many “tips” I gave out at Brijgat other than to simply mention the 50 Rupees I give to the guy who “guided” us across the bridge over the Ganges who Raj Kumar would inform me later was actually the local drug dealer.
I must have set some new record for unwittingly embarrassing myself as my drug dealer cum guide actually tried to give the money back to Tracy only keeping it at my insistence.
The dangerous road that Raj was talking about was the one that would lead us to our final destination of the day, Fort Unchagaon. We never did run into any bandits on the road, but we did manage to have our driver-side mirror ripped off the car as we clipped a motorcycle speeding in the opposite direction along the narrow path. Driving along the road with mango groves on our left and the muddy canal, about 30 meters across, on our right, we got a look at what is truly rural India. The people living in the mud and leafed huts that nestle into the the trees along the way seem to spend a lot of time tending to their water buffaloes, these being the bovine of choice here. We passed countless wagons filled to overflowing hauling people, goods and agricultural materials all pulled along by these fat creatures that looked to me more like curly-horned hippos than domestic beasts of burden. When they weren’t pulling carts they were loitering almost completely submerged in the canal next to the packs of naked boys playing and jumping in the dirty water. At each bridge over the canal, spaced four to five kilometers apart, there would be an intersection with at least 20 or 30 people, sometimes intermingling with wild monkeys, squatting, talking or just standing about. I noticed these groups were mostly men and assume that, as in Delhi where at construction sites one normally sees men squatting and talking while women in lehenga choli and dupatta haul bricks around on their heads, the women were probably out working in the fields.
I’ve gone well beyond my brother-in-law Trevor’s attention span so I’ll have to wait until some later point to tell you about tonight’s hotel inside a fort and the 20 or so tiger heads mounted on the walls.
