After qualifying, I’d worked in Basildon for four years before deciding that there was more to life than staring into people’s mouths. I’d met a girl and we decided that we would give up our jobs, pack a rucksack and get a one way ticket to India. That was the extent of our plans at the time, so we set off in ’88. We travelled around SE Asia and elsewhere and just had some fun over the following year. No different to thousands of others.
After my parents passed away a few years ago, I was going through their stuff and came across loads of letters and cards I had sent home which they had kept. Obviously no mobiles back then, my letters are just news of what we were getting up to and my thoughts at the time. Reading through them, they were of the time, sometimes naive, sometimes rambling and personal.
Here is a random one of many. Hope you find it interesting.
A Letter From India
Dear Mum and Dad. 31-1-89.
Well here we are in Darjeeling. But let’s go back a bit. Caught overnight train to Calcutta. Usual hawking and snoring but we managed to doze for a couple of hours. Arrived at 8-30. Supposedly the rush hour. We should have spent about 1hr in the taxi getting over Howrah Bridge ( 2 million cross it everyday) but it only took 5 mins.
Arrived and managed to book into the Fairlawn (the one on the TV). Exactly as we’d thought it would be. Eccentric British couple running it. Pictures of Charles and Di everywhere. Turbaned, uniformed waiters, loads of big plants in a type of conservatory cafe, flowered curtains and bedspreads. Pelmets and poodles. A gong summoned you for dinner and the waiters treated you with complete indifference. Very strange but great fun. A big bath in the room, 24hr! hot water. Afternoon tea and cakes etc. All meals were included. Breakfast :- porridge, eggs, bacon, chips, tomato, tea, toast and marmalade. Lunch:- about 6 courses of various curried things. Dinner:-Things like roast lamb, roast potatoes, cabbage,gravy, soup.Like Indian English food.
However some American friends (and other people there I presume) who were at the Fairlawn and travelled to there with us, and Catrin and I, really could have done without the ‘extras’ involved in some of the food. These extras were worms. We had been getting the shits and stomach cramps for a few days. Popped a stool into the local doctors. Roundworm diagnosed. Tablets prescribed and now all well. Strange how we eat Indian food for 3 1/2 months then eat ‘English’ food and it has a little surprise in store. We’re on, and were on, a nearly vegetarian diet anyway. Still no cause for concern, all is well. We stayed at the Fairlawn for 5 nights. Quite expensive but talking to other travellers, other accommodation was very scarce and pretty horrendous. VISA paid. A good rest.
Well Calcutta itself. This was India in extremis. Smog hangs perpetually over the city. The crowding is unbelievable as is the noise and in some places the stench. But perhaps the most well known and obvious thing is the appalling poverty. So many people living on the streets. Slums set up on the pavements with families cooking and sitting around stunned. Filth everywhere and all over broken standpipes, water gushing out into the gutters and open sewers, with people sitting in the gutters washing.
Beggars everywhere. The usual lepers, but here, as in a medieval or Biblical setting, shuffling along ringing bells. People dressed in rags and horribly ill and undernourished. Perhaps the worst, for me at least, are the small children (5 yrs), teenagers and 20 – 30 yr olds (none older as presumably they die) with incredible deformities. Such as having their legs going backwards from the hips, sideways from the knees with feet draped over their shoulders, dragging themselves along on weeping pelvises and hands, begging. These ones with strange and exotic disformations are the most pathetic for me, since they are born healthy but are then tied from a very early age with their growing supple bones in strange contortions by their parents or by ‘begging barons’ so that they eventually take on the grotesque shapes which may then attract more sympathetic money.
These deformed beggars are the lucky, or unlucky, ones since an unwanted child may easily have a leg lopped off by a parent or other interested person to obtain an income from the child begging. It’s unbelievable and disgusting, but it happens.
What makes it all the more revolting is hearing of rich families not 1/2 mile away from the worst begging who have nothing better to do with their money than build and maintain an ice-rink in the garden in 100+ degrees!
The transport system is useless with all buses knackered with people fighting to just get a handhold on the roof. The best roads are just a series of potholes connected with concrete. Rubbish piled high everywhere with people sifting through. Power cuts. The sun shines through a layer of smog which makes your eyes sting.

I really like Calcutta. The best city we’ve been to. Alongside all the filth, crap, poverty, noise etc it was a very lively place with some great buildings and a great park, jam packed on the Sunday morning with thousands of people playing cricket. The Victoria Memorial building was huge and impressive, Huge Banyan tree in the botanical gardens and loads to look at everywhere.
We got our Nepal visa in 4 hrs and our Darjeeling permit from a building staffed with hundreds of immobile, non-working staff sitting hidden amongst huge piles of dust gathering ledgers and folders of papers. Bureaucracy gone absolutely bananas.
The strange thing about the place is that you pick up the local paper and it will say with a big headline, ’10 die in rail crash in Australia’ and there’s no mention of the 100 or so who died on the streets or in the slums of malnutrition and preventable disease in the city in the last week. All very strange. But a nice place. I enjoyed it, if not the worms. So we left Calcutta on 26-1. Independence day. A big parade, but we missed it ‘cos we weren’t too well. Another overnight train journey to a place called Siliguri.
When we booked our tickets we were told that the toy train wasn’t running so we were a bit upset. However we took a taxi with an American couple and an English couple from Brentwood (related to someone i play football with, a good friend, small world). This taxi route to Darjeeling is followed exactly by the toy train track and takes 1/3 of the time, so we missed out on nothing and gained a lot in time and comfort. The survival kit raves about the train but we would advise against it. All six of us booked into the Shamrock hotel Run by a very large Tibetan lady who pours out all of her woes. Very comfortable and good nosh. Big stove in the front room where we all eat and chat.
It’s pretty chilly here, about 35F but we’re keeping warm ok. We we’re hoping to do some trekking and still might go to have a look at Everest but it is cloudy most days so might not be worth it. However two days ago at dawn we woke up and from our room window was a view into the Himalayas to a big snow mountain range. Biggest mountain was Kanchenjunga. 8500m Third highest in the world. Bloody amazing sight.We hope for clear days every day but it’s really the wrong time of year. Best in Oct-Nov or Mar-Apr. However we will be in Nepal then and maybe will have better weather. Even if we don’t trek we will stay here another week. The people are totally different from other Indians we have met. No real hassles and relaxing. Just what we need before the bedlam of North India. Many Tibetans and Nepalese here It’s good to meet different people and Buddhist monks. We’ve played snooker in the Planter’s Club watched by ‘servants’ who say ‘Good shot Sir’, ‘Oh bad luck Sir’ etc. Quite amusing. Lots of shops selling nice handicrafts and Nepalese and Tibetan jumpers, but we’ll wait till we arrive in Nepal before we set off on our next buying spree.

Some real wankers from Sweden staying at our hostel have just come in and he’s reading over my shoulder. He’s not anymore. Must read English well.
Next Wednesday we’re going to Kalimpong for a few days, 2 actually and we’ve booked a train to Varanasi on the 9th. We’re there much earlier than anticipated since we heard we may only be able to come back into India for 7 days after Nepal. Due to this we’re going to Agra, Jaipur etc before Nepal and will probably fly from Kathmandu to Bangkok. However don’t worry if you have sent mail to Varanasi since we go back there before we go to Nepal. Hopefully you have got the films we sent with ‘Ollie’ by now. Probably at the developers.
A lot of people we meet travelling, like these Swedes, seem to think they know everything about travelling, and talk about things and look at us as if we are totally stupid if we are having fun without getting a ‘deeper meaning’ or intellectual thing out of it.We just think they are pretentious, and lay it on thick about drinking and enjoying Benny Hill etc. The other English couple we were with were very down to earth and (for want of a better word) were not spouting bollocks all the time. These ‘intellectuals’ would ramble on for about 10 minutes talking ‘Oh did you see that avant-garde film by that’X’ (says name of obscure French or Polish director). Wasn’t the cinematography and lighting exquisite and the real meaning hidden so well? etc.. So we say we like entertainment like James Bond, Star Wars and Death Wish and they look at us as if we’ve just crawled from beneath a stone. As I said, complete wankers.
There was one woman in Calcutta who had gone to do some washing up in a clinic there. She had to let everyone know she had done this and was telling us she couldn’t wait to get home to Canada to tell all her friends she had worked in a Calcutta slum. What are her motives? Ego boost. It makes us sick. I’ll stop this part of the letter before I get too wound up. There’s lots of strange people around.

Lots of Darjeeling tea here to wash our anti-worm pills down. Will try to bring some home but I doubt if it’s possible to carry it around so long. We had a clear out of some stuff in Calcutta which we hadn’t used or won’t use again and managed to get rid of quite a lot of stuff. It’s just given us more room to fill up with new goodies. God, the people in this room are off again. Oh for some nice shallow banal conversation.
Definitely won’t get a lens in India. Import controls prevent them coming in but apparently Kathmandu is awash with Western consumer goods. Is it? I hope so. I’m struggling for interesting news now. Can you tell? So much has happened but it’s not coming into my brain at the moment. They have men with barefeet pulling rickshaws in Calcutta. Hi tech stuff eh?
Well that’s it from me. Hope everyone is well at home and not too many problems at work. Hope you enjoy the pictures Start writing to Kathmandu. Lots of love.
(Catrin writes) Namaste You’ve probably already seen some slides by now so please censor before my mum and dad see them. Hope you weren’t shocked and have not sold any to Page 3.
© Pete Plug 2024