Chapter 16: Our visit to India

A visit to Delhi via stop-overs in Saigon and Bangkok.

This chapter is largely based on a diary I wrote at the time…

OCTOBER 24, 1968:

We left Hong Kong today, reluctantly. Rosemary is already talking about “when we come back”. The weather today was as it had been since we arrived: Cloudless and about 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

Shortly before we left for the airport we made one more shopping sortie -- and “hey presto”, Rosemary found the shoes she’d searched all Hong Kong for. She found them in a little shop right next to the hotel. They cost: $A3.

We left Hong Kong greatly admiring the Chinese people we encountered. They were honest, industrious, obliging, and above all, placid. But they work too hard and too long. Many people in Hong Kong work 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Probably the thing that distressed us most was the plight of the rickshaw boys. The motoring age, and perhaps human sensibilities, has caught up with them. They get hardly any business and sit quietly most of the day beside their empty vehicles. Neither of us could bring ourselves to use a rickshaw. It just didn’t seem right to put a man between shafts and make him behave like a horse. We both felt the Hong Kong Government should abolish them and find them some other work.

Our Air France flight left Hong Kong at about 2.45pm. First stop was Saigon, (then capital of South Vietnam). As we approached the city the aircraft went into a steep circular descent to reduce the chances of being shot down. From the air it was hard to believe there was a war going on below. The green hills and the paddy fields looked so fresh and peaceful.

But what a dramatic change on touching down at the Tan Son Nhut Air Base. Thousands upon thousands of military craft lined the runways, many of them protected by bunkers. The terminal area swarmed with troops, some of them carrying automatic weapons. A jeep with a machine gun mounted on the bonnet guarded the gangway to the terminal. The feeling of war was everywhere.

I madly filmed away, although soldiers kept tapping me on the shoulder and telling me it was forbidden. I think I got some very good footage. I also learnt what was meant by purchasing a “24 hour suit” in Kong Kong: Twenty-four hours to make one and 24 hours for it to start coming apart. As I reached in to the luggage rack above us in Saigon, a sleeve started splitting because the cotton used was extremely poor quality.

We were in Saigon about 45 minutes. It was very hot and humid, with the temperature around 85 degrees, Fahrenheit.

An hour after leaving Saigon, we touched down in Bangkok, capital of Thailand. The temperature there was also about 85 degrees, but it seemed a more pleasant temperature.

We arrived at sunset, and the view from the plane was very pretty. During the 45-minute stop-over, I amused myself by watching jet fighters doing practice take-offs and landings.

Four hours after leaving Bangkok we reached New Delhi. We had to stagger around in near-darkness because the airport terminal was being reconstructed. We waited nearly an hour for the bus into New Delhi, and that time was spent standing in an excavation outside the old terminal.

During the seemingly endless wait, guides and taxi drivers pestered continually, trying to sell their services. They were all very polite, but very insistent. They even followed the bus into the city to see at which hotels passengers were staying.

Our room at the Young Men’s Christian Association tourist hostel was spartan, but air conditioned, and had a roof fan. The bathroom (minus a bath!) had a tiled floor and a shower in the corner, but no shower curtains or partitions. This meant water splashed everywhere. Like Hong Kong, the water was chlorinated. Our bed had a solid base, with a very firm rubber mattress. But it wasn’t too bad to sleep on. The worst thing was the smell. It was a strange and unpleasant odour.

OCTOBER 25, 1968:

This morning we went shopping. We bought very little because the quality generally was poor, but it was fun seeing and going into all the little shops. Most of the shop-keepers sit cross-legged on mattresses. Rosemary bought a pair of fur-lined suede gloves for about $A2.50, and I got a Russian-style fur hat for about $A5. I also had a shoe shine. My shoes never looked better. As with the other countries we’ve stopped in, Coca Cola stands were everywhere. The drink tastes the same wherever you go.

Rosemary was scared out of her wits when a man came running up with a basket to show us his Cobra snake. She skittled off down the street, but I stayed to film his little act at the cost of two rupees. He tried to charge me 10 rupees (more than an Australian dollar).

The currency here is like play money from a toy shop. The basic unit is the rupee (about eight to the Australian dollar), and each rupee is made up of 100 paise. The notes go as small as one rupee, and the coins as small as five paises. Many of the coins are made of nothing more than aluminium. We returned to the hostel for lunch in a scooter-rickshaw. Their three-wheel vehicles are powered by scooter motors and steered like a scooter or motorbike. The ride was pretty rough, but fun.

This afternoon we went sight-seeing. A guide charged $A5 to drive us around New and Old Delhi for about four hours. The tour was very interesting although tiring. Our car was an Ambassador (the only car then made in India and based on the UK’s Morris Oxford). It had poor springs and was not very comfortable. We saw a miniature Taj Mahal, an old palace and fort, a Hindu temple, a Moslem mosque and endless Indian handcraft shops. The mosques are very plain after the temples. The mosque we visited was surrounded by a dreadful slum, and the smell seemed to be coming from a thousand country toilets. Beggars were everywhere.

The traffic in India is chaotic. There appear to be no traffic rules. In fact for a long time we weren’t too sure which side of the road vehicles were supposed to be travelling on. The red-and-blue turbaned policemen operated in a most desultory manner. All the vehicles drove madly about, tooting their horns. The noise was nearly deafening. There was filth and squalor at every turn. There wouldn’t be one person in a thousand clean by our standards.

Tonight I went to All India Radio to edit a radio report I did in Saigon for 3AW. My visit there was a real experience. There were soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets on duty at the entrances. The two male receptionists were sitting back in their seats with their bare feet on the desk. I saw a rat running down the main corridor. No-one could understand what I wanted, but finally after nearly half an hour of shouting and wild gesticulating, I was taken to the master control room. Everything looked as though it was about to fall apart, but somehow we managed to transfer the recording from cassette to 1/4-inch tape.

I later discovered that after all my trouble, the Indian Post Office was so inefficient that I would be better off posting the tape from London. The only way to be sure of the mail in India is to register everything. The trouble apparently is that a lot of the mail is destroyed by mailmen who steal the stamps. The mail is also very slow, with an airmail letter to Australia taking at least 15 days.

There appears to be a fairly large illegal traffic in foreign currency in India. The official exchange rate for an American dollar is 7.45 rupees, but dollars sell for at least 8.50 rupees on the black market.

OCTOBER 26, 1968:

Today we made a trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. The round trip by car of about 260 miles cost $A22, which is not bad considering we were chauffeured everywhere by our guide and driver, Solomon, and could move about at our own pace.

The trip to Agra was terrible. Solomon’s Ambassador car was not in great shape with even the wheels’ outer tyres patched. The roads were very poor and they teemed with every sort of traffic imaginable. We stopped in a couple of villages, and it was hard at times not to throw up. Once again, the filth was everywhere and the smell overpowering. Beggars descended on us at each stop asking for money. If it wasn’t the beggars it was the hawkers.

Most of the villagers lived in mud or straw huts. Few of the children had anything more to wear than a dirty, tattered shirt. The scenes were out of Biblical times. Muslim women walked about, balancing clay or copper pots on their head, oxen were used to pull single plough shares. There were also camels, water buffalo, monkeys, bears, elephants, donkeys and vultures. The land looked very poor, with crops sparse and unhealthy.

We were very glad to reach Agra and a pleasant hotel for a long, cool drink. We were permitted to buy bottled beer because our passports had a stamp allowing us to purchase alcohol while in India.

We found the Taj Mahal even more beautiful and spectacular than we had expected. It was a real oasis. The light reflected by the white marble was almost blinding, even when wearing sun glasses. The Taj, a monument to a 17th century queen, is perfectly symmetrical, with carved marble inlaid with precious and semi-precious stones. It took 22 years to build.

We had lunch and a rest before making the long trip back to Delhi. We reached there about 7.00pm, exhausted. Straight after tea we packed our cases and collapsed into bed, hopefully in good shape next morning to leave India for Moscow.

Next chapter: our time in Russia.