India

We had to walk across no man land that seemed to me miles long as I sweltered under the sun with two rucksacks containing illegal Indian money. At last we reached India and entered the customs post, we were ushered into an office with custom officer with lots of gold, feet on his desk, he appeared half asleep but seemed happy to see us he ordered one of his men to fetch ice cold drinks for George and me. “Why do you come to India, it is too hot.” We told him we were on our way to Australia he was very interested and ordered hot tea for us. After awhile we were ready to leave. “Where are you going” he inquired? “Delhi” we said “how will you get to Delhi? He asked “We will get a train” said George. “That is good” said he “but you will need to take a taxi to the station, it is too far to walk, and how will you pay the taxi fare?” George said “We met an American and gave us some rupees we hope it is enough for the taxi.” The officer laughed out loud OK. OK I will not look in your baggage.


We took the train to Delhi, this was in the days before electrification, some Indians sat on the roof of the carriage they would travel for free, and inside the train it was solid with people. There were three classes of carriages first, second and third we were travelling third. The difference between second and third class was the second had bars on the window to stop people climbing through the open window when the train stopped at a station. Yet vendors with buckets of ice and cold drinks, others with urns with boiling tea or coffee carried on their head or shoulders would fight their way through the crowd. One boy was taking orders for varies curries, he would take your order and at the next station stop, the orders would telephoned ahead to the following station and your order wrapped in newspaper somehow got back to you. The only problem was trying to eat within the throng of people surrounding you.

Eventually we arrived in Delhi, and it was hot! The sweat was running down our bodies. We found the YHA it was a school. The schools close in the summer and become YHA’s. Inside the school was like being inside an oven. We needed a cold shower so we headed for the shower room. However, the water was warm, even the effort of drying ourselves with a towel caused us to sweat. We found out we could sleep on the school roof as it was flat, this was a bit of a relief. After a few days we took the train to Agra to see the Taj Mhal. This train was for tourists so it was clean and spacious inside, it had a restaurant car were I had the hottest curry ever. The Taj Mhal is truly outstanding and well worth a visit. After seeing the wonders of the Taj we returned to Delhi.

We have found out to get a visa into Malaya you have to possess a ticket out of Malaya. Now at this time in India there was a thriving black market for foreign currency that was double the bank rate. However, we had to exchange money legally to purchase our ticket out of Malaya. So we went into a bank to change money only to be told by the bank clerk “but sir this is a bank please wait” he said, he came round to the public side of the bank and asked us to step outside, when outside the bank he asked how much do you want to change? We told him we needed evidence that we changed money legally, O’ come inside and we got our legal money and got our tickets for a ship sailing from Singapore to Australia and a visa for Malaya.

We had hoped to cross north India then into Burma but Burma had closed its borders to foreigners so we flew from Delhi to Bangkok , Thailand’s Exciting capital city.