Calcutta, City of Joy
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Calcutta, City of Joy |
| Calcutta |
| Arriving by car at 8 pm in a
city of more than 12 million people is not a good idea. After our long
drive from Darjeeling, we had decided to go straight to a "top
end" hotel in order to have a good rest as well as to be assured we
could safely park our car. We headed for the Fairlawn Hotel which is
described by our Lonely Planet guidebook as being "a place in
Calcutta where the Raj still lives albeit in a decidedly eccentric manner.
Edmund Smith and his Armenian wife Violet still run the hotel more than 50
years after Independence. The hotel is crammed with memorabilia, chintz
and prewar furnishings". This sounded good. At US$ 40 a night in
Calcutta, it should have been. Unfortunately the hotel was also crammed
with little white and blue KLM houses, signed pictures of the world's
worst writers and an amount of prewar dust and dirt that made us think we
should leave as soon as possible.
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| Our first visit that morning
was one to the FRRO Foreigners' Registration Office to try to have our
Indian visas extended. This gave us our first daylight sights of Calcutta
as well as a taste of driving (or should we say horning) in a yellow
Ambassador in the small streets around our hotel. In the larger streets,
we would be competing for space with diesel belching busses (picture
above).
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| Besides the image that we
might have of it in the West and the real poverty we saw, Calcutta is also
a very friendly city where a smile will nearly always be returned.
Calcutta has always been acknowledged as the cultural capital of India. It
is full of old British era buildings, some of which in a very poor state
(especially the crumbling one topped with "Life Insurance"
advert). We were impressed to walk passed the Writer's building where East
India Company employees have now been replaced by West Bengal state
employees specialising in "quintuplicate forms, carbon copies and red
ink." We have never seen a larger number of cars belonging to one
administration or the other than in West Bengal.
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The beautiful but very poorly maintained Indian Museum in Calcutta.
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Calcutta's fleet of West Bengal Government cars : Ambassadors and drivers waiting to pick up their bosses.
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We are doing well !
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| Calcutta to Jaipur | Back to Trip page | KM 125,417 |
