Baggage - Travel Light

   The essence of India is the rejection of material encumbrances so get with the program! On a less metaphysical level, heavy luggage will be a real pain in the butt. With a load of twenty or thirty kilos, you would have a dredful time getting on and off boats, walking up hills, hiking moderate distances and hotel hunting. At train stations you will be at the mercy of porters who will at best rip you off, at worst, run off with your luggage. Taxi drivers will use your bags as an excuse to charge you more, and may even refuse to retrieve them from a locked boot unless you cough up. Moreover, the fewer luggage items you have, the lesser the challenge of guarding against thieves.

  India has a vibrant Capitalist economy and there are shops everywhere, so you don’t need to buy everything at home. Our problem is mainly psychological. We all tell ourselves we need so many items, when in truth we could quite happily do without them. Aside from certain objects discussed below, in essence, you only need three or four changes of clothing, with a week’s worth of socks and underwear. If one day you run out of clean clothing, then pick up a cheap hippy-dippy item at a local market. It will probably fade and fall apart after a month - but who cares. You can get cool, comfortable clothing tailor made there for very small cost and have a bit of fun choosing your own designs and fabrics. Silk is often fake (more about that later), but Indian cotton is satisfactory and inexpensive. If you are very tall or "plus size" you won't find much in the way of readymade clothing and you will have to seek out a tailor. These are plentiful and usually use antique-looking peddle operated machines, which save on electricity bills and power cut stoppages.   

   Even if you like reading, do not worry too much about packing books. Pack one juicy title as a back up, but if you take more, all of a sudden you will be carrying an extra kilo. There are many second hand bookshops in India and you will be amazed at the wonderful smudged and creased tomes travellers have left behind over the years. There is also a vibrant English language book publishing industry within India. It churns out everything from racy novels to politically incorrect reprints from the Raj era. The trick then, is, to buy books as you go, and after that, recycle by selling, gifting or abandoning.  

  Newspapers and the likes of India Today (their vesion of Newsweek) are really dirt-cheap. As India is a fairly democratic open society, many articles are remarkably honest and hard hitting. The most astonishing news articles are often the tiny one or two paragraph affairs buried amongst the inner pages: tales of bizarre village life and suburban mayhem, which rarely make it onto the internet. A few months of reading these, will tell you more about modern India than any book.

Torch

  Up to half the nation’s output of electricity is stolen through illegal hook-ups. Slum dwellers just find the nearest overhead power cable, sling a metal hook over it, then run a wire from the hook to the home. Sometimes inspectors arrive to disconnect these, in which case people simply wait for a few hours until the inspectors have gone then throw over another hook. Up until 2003, this was not even a criminal offence. In some areas, politicians refuse to allow the disconnection of certain villages - even though nobody has paid a Rupee for power in years - simply because the villagers vote for his party.

  You may well ask what all this has to do with you, well the short answer is that all this free electricity for the underprivileged has bankrupted the Indian electricity industry and they cannot afford to keep up with demand. So, more than just a few times, you are likely to be plunged into darkness by a local power-cut.

  These power-cuts are often referred to as ‘load shedding’ - which happens when demand exceeds supply. In the major cities and the Goan costal strip, power supply is pretty good, but elsewhere there might be two or three power cuts a day – in most states. A power outage might last five minutes or five hours. They tend to happen most when you are watching a good TV movie and are just ten minutes short of the ending, or when you are walking through a dodgy area at night. 

   In a nutshell, you will need a torch, but don’t go all cheap on yourself and buy something Made in China for a couple of dollars. The second you drop it onto a concrete floor – it’s history. Neither should you go to the other extreme and bring something like a big metal Maglite: a torch should not be a cumbersome part of your gear. A reliable bright and robust product, which fits in the palm of your hand, such as a MityLite Magnum, will do. For optimum reliability, go for flashlights that use LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) instead of conventional incandescent bulbs. The LED light is also white, not yellowish like filament bulbs. Use only alkaline or lithium batteries for flashlights; never use old-fashioned zinc-carbon batteries.

Keep copies of important documents

Goa

Make two photocopies of valuables such as your tickets, passport, visas and travellers' cheques. Leave one copy with someone at home and keep another copy with you in a separate place to the originals. For extra safety, scan all your credit cards, immunization records, travellers cheques, passport etc., and put an electronic copy in your email. Bring some extra passport-size photos just in case you need to extend your visa.

  I kept my passport and money on my person all the time in a pouch underneath my clothes. It can sometimes feel a little awkward but it’s worth the peace of mind. If your passport is stolen or lost, an exit visa is required to depart from India. Exit visas can be obtained by presenting a police report to the Foreigners Registration Office (New Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta).

What Not To Take

Meghalaya

  Once in Vijayawada (Andhra Pradesh) I decided to shed some of my baggage. For three months, I had been carrying around two ridiculously heavy sports bags and now one of them had to go. I resolved to fill one of the bags with my surplus items and unload the unwanted goods upon some grateful beggar. Strangely enough, on that particular morning I had difficulty finding a beggar, I must have been the only foreigner on the subcontinent wanting to be begged from – yet for hours none were forthcoming. When I actually encountered one, her hand extended in heartfelt supplication, she became strangely annoyed as I handed over my entire bag. I then turned my back and fled.

  My weighty predicament had, in part, been caused by bogus advice from a supposedly authoritative guidebook. It had instructed me to take such things as a spare sheet and a mosquito net – even a sink plug.

  Mosquito nets should have been fazed-out in the early 20^th century, along with wind-up gramophones and Penny Farthing bicycles. In one hundred Indian hotel rooms, from Goa to Guwahati, I rarely found anything to hook the thing on to, and when I did, I found that it obstructed the much-needed cool breeze from the ceiling fan, creating an uncomfortable pocket of warm air. I have visited over a dozen Indian states, and have never encountered mosquitoes in such numbers that they would interrupt my sleep (unlike my experiences in South America) and as for malaria prevention – there are better ways! Mosquito coils however, cost a pittance and are available everywhere. They can sometimes leave dryness in your mouth upon waking, but it is a small price to pay. Do not buy the fancy plug-in electric repellents from home they do not work during power cuts.  

 A small minority of Indian hotels lack sheets and just provide mattress coverings. On the plains and coastal regions during most of the year, it is usually so hot that sheets are unnecessary anyway. Whilst in the hills and mountains, you don’t need sheets – you need blankets or sleeping bags: but warm bedding is invariably provided.

  As for the lesser matter of a one-size-fits-all sink and bath plug - it’s equally pointless. People don’t take baths in a tub in India so, customarily, your hotel room will not be equipped with such a decadent foreign item. As for the sink, if there’s no plug – so what! It’s unlikely you will get a hot water tap (sometimes even if you pay for running hot water, you may not get it), so just let the cold water run. If that’s not good water conservation, blame it on the hotel.

  Aside from the unnecessary weight of these items, you must also consider the cost. In your home country, they could quite easily set you back the equivalent of five thousand rupees: a senseless sacrifice of good beer money.

  Do not take an expensive or treasured lighter to India. They are not allowed on board Indian planes (unless in your suitcase) and Indian customs officials usually confiscate them - and probably do a handy profitable sideline in foreign lighters. If the customs officers don’t get them, a petty thief will, or you will accidentally leave it in a bar or hotel room. One way or another, India will be the last place your good lighter ever goes. Buy local disposable ones instead, but don’t throw cheap Indian lighters around, as they can explode on impact. I found this out in Goa when a Scottish friend in Goa threw one at a house gecko.

  Invest in suncream but do not bring large or even medium sized bottles of shampoo and conditioner. Indian products are fine and can be purchased in sachets from most Indian kiosks. Good perfumes or colognes are also a waste of space, as you tend to sweat more in the tropics, which means that fragrances do not have a real chance of permeating into the skin.

  An inflatable pillow is an exquisitely useless item. If you travel by train, you will receive pillows in the AC classes. On aeroplanes, you get pillows. If you use one on the beach, you will look like an idiot. In hotels, yes, they have got pillows as well, if they prove too hard, or small, just roll up a towel and use that. If it is an unpleasantly dirty hotel pillow, you should simply wrap it with a clean lungi or dhoti. So, just where are you going to use an inflatable pillow? OK – buses, but it’s unlikely that you will travel far by bus – and if you do, then stop it! It’s more comfortable and safer to go long distances by train or plane. 

  Beach ball – another inflatable piece of garbage. You cannot play soccer with it - one strong gust of wind, and suddenly it’s half a mile away.  Even a slight breeze will skew any lengthy shot or pass. For a bit of fun on the beach take a Frisbee – at least this can double as plastic plate when reversed.