marinegirl

Last week I came across some old National Geographics at the Salvation Army for the bargain price of 50 cents each. National Geographic is the only magazine I subscribe to; I’ve got more than four years of issues at home, and one day I hope to have a whole bookshelf full of yellow! I continually look back through old issues… the writing is timeless, and the photos are amazing inspiration. In a more perfect world, I would be a National Geographic staff photographer… or maybe an ‘Explorer in Residence’ - I’ve always throught that’s an amazing job title!The feature story from June 1984 issue is ‘By Rail Across the Indian Subcontinent‘, written by Paul Theroux, and photographed by Steve McCurry (one of my all-time photography heroes). I made a beeline for this issue because India is top of my wanderlust list of places to travel to at the moment (as reflected my recent reading list no doubt!).Theroux talks of monsoon rains and misty hill stations, tiffin boxes and tin trunks, sacred cows and hanuman monkeys roaming the stations. Despite the delays and burocracy and grime, he makes me want to grab a copy of The Great Railway Bazaar and jump on the next plane to the subcontinent!

This is an aspect of train travel that must not be overlooked: the unexplained stop in the middle of nowhere; and the unexplained delay - hours during which only a dog barks, and someone shuts off a radio, and a child emerges from the tall grass beside the track to sell tea in disposable clay cups. You don’t know whether you will leave in two minutes or two days, so it is unwise to stray very far from the train. The sun moves higher in the sky. A child begins to weep. Then an unexplained whistle sounds, and a few seconds later the train moves, and five hundred Indians run beside, trying to board.

I can’t think of a better way to see India than by train. I fell in love with long-distance train travel in China. I immensley enjoyed waking up in my bunk and looking out the window to discover you were somewhere completely different to where you were when you fell asleep. For hours and hours the landscape would look the same as far as the eye could see, then suddenly you’d find yourself in another world. You catch glimpses of places that you would never dream of visiting, if you even knew they existed.We ate hot corn on the cob, that were skillfully thrown in through the windows when the train stopped by boys who would then scamper down onto the tracks to collect their money. Sometimes I was brave enough to jump off to buy watermelons or ice cream wrapped in newspaper… always keeping within a quick dash of the train should it decide to depart unannounced! Whilst airplanes are the preserve of the wealthy and touristy, all walks of life can be found on the train. Children stare and giggle at you, mothers offer you sweets and cured chicken feet, students practice their English on you and old men beat you at chess. Sharing a carriage lets you interact with people in a way you never would just travelling through.It’s easy to forget that Theroux is writing from the year after I was born - he talks about refugees fleeing from the Afghanistan war into Pakistan. He says, “[the trains are] an old fashioned solution, but India has old-fashioned problems.’ I wonder how much of what he experienced would be the same today, or what may have changed?