The Travel Gods Must Be Crazy

by Sudha Mahalingam

  The Hassan II mosque, built at a cost of $800 million to commemorate the monarch’s sixtieth birthday in 1993, is the third largest in the world, while its jade minaret, at 210 metres, is ostentation in marble and granite. In true Casablanca style, the minaret adds a touch of drama when at night it sprays laser beams in the direction of Mecca. There is a steep entry fee of 120 dirhams (Rs 600), but who will grudge it when it comes with an English-speaking guide? You’re overawed by the decor and the staggering expanse of the mosque—its esplanades alone can accommodate 80,000 worshippers. Once you cross its high-tech steel-girder suspended gates operated electronically, another 20,000 can be seated inside. I shut my eyes and visualize the esplanade on Id—all those fez-covered heads bowing in unison.

  This mosque, which looks more like an ornate mall, was designed by the French architect Michel Pinseau and looks suitably French on the outside. It’s only when you step inside that you realize how typically Moroccan the construction is—cedar wood from Middle Atlas, marble from Agadir and granite from Tafraout adorn its floors, walls, arches, columns and ceilings. As many as 6000 skilled craftsmen worked for years to complete this mosque which is more a statement than a place of worship. Naturally, there are more tourists about than worshippers. The mosque itself stands on an erstwhile slum whose residents are reported to have been evacuated without any compensation.

  After a day in Casablanca, we decide to head to Marrakech, the sexy metropolis that midwifed the birth of the mighty World Trade Organization. We ditch our copy of Lonely Planet to heed the advice of a tout who zeroed in on us at the railway station. We check into the ornate Riad Fantasia that looks every bit as promising as its name sounds. It has a fine courtyard with exquisite tiles, swaying palms and a lovely fountain in the middle. The rooms are arranged around the leafy courtyard.

  But external appearances can be deceptive, as we would soon find out. When I try to open the door of the bathroom, it swings violently from a hinge on top and crushes my finger. Not only does this bathroom door hang from the top to be pushed aside like a curtain to enter or exit, the arrangement also leaves a generous 6-inch gap between the wall and the door, offering a voyeuristic glimpse of the goings-on inside, not to mention the potent olfactory assault.

  Soon we are on our way to the souk, the soul of Marrakech. It is where life happens. There is a profusion of merchandise artistically stacked and crying out for your attention and your emaciated wallet. Ubiquitous is the footwear, colourful and embroidered. Then you have the tassels, painted Berber ceramics and charming bric-a-brac, mostly stuff without which you can live your life happily forever!

  Mohammed, the self-proclaimed double of Dr Zhivago, has a million vials of cosmetics in his shop. He proudly waves his cell phone in our face—it has Aishwarya Rai for wallpaper. Neatly arranged colourful jars brim with potions promising everything from eternal youth and beauty to cures for earache and herbs for slimming. With great reluctance, we extricate ourselves from the souk and head for the hammam—the public bath that has been upgraded to a spa, solely to fleece unwary tourists! The attendant speaks flawless English and the rates are commensurate with her linguistic felicity! But we deserve a bit of pampering—after all that shoving and pushing in the souk and getting slammed by a bathroom door dangling from the roof.

  In the evening, we make our way to Jemaa el-Fnaa, the most happening place in Marrakech. The exotic ambience of sizzling street food is embellished by the presence of a colourful cast of characters—raconteurs of enchanting tales, snake charmers, musicians, magicians, masseurs, dancers and drummers—all make your evening memorable. We sip sweet mint tea in one of the many stalls that dot the square.

  We take the ferry back to the Spanish coast. When we go to retrieve our luggage from the locker in Algeciras port, it gobbles up several euro but refuses to yield our luggage. We go in search of an attendant; the one we find speaks no English whatsoever. Wild gesticulations and a volley of abuses in Tamil persuade him to accompany us to the locker rooms where he opens our locker, but charges €20 and gives us a receipt in Spanish. I pull out a paper from my suitcase, write out an elaborate complaint and drop it in what I presume is the suggestion box. I am yet to hear from them.

  The Impossible Trail of Nikitin

  The babushka grumpily serves a bowl of buckwheat porridge accompanied by a naked teabag. This has been our breakfast for the past ten days. We are in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan in the Russian heartland. This is only the fifth stop on our six-week-long road trip through six countries. It could only get progressively worse as we proceed through the neglected wastelands of the Russian steppe farther south.

  We were on a grandiloquently named road trip called the Nikitin Expedition—ostensibly retracing Afanasy Nikitin’s footsteps. As to who was Nikitin and why we were retracing his footsteps, I will come in a moment. The trip was a bungle from the word go. First of all, we set out in the wrong season when Russia was already heavily quilted in metre-thick snow. It was not meant to be so. We were to leave in July and return to India by August, but what with six visas for fourteen persons to be wangled free of cost out of sceptical diplomats, it got pushed to mid-November. Undeterred, we set out, a motley group of Indian scholars fluent in Russian and Persian, a renowned photographer (who wisely turned back from Moscow itself), a doctor, an attractive Kathak dancer, three film crew, one of them a sprightly young woman, a woman journalist and I. That made for four women in a group of fourteen. Mahindra had agreed to provide its SUVs to test them on Russian terrain. There were two drivers under the watchful eye of SK, their man on the trip. And all of us were shepherded by a retired bureaucrat—a glad-eyed and ‘redoubtable’ team leader who’d organized the trip.

  Little did we realize that the only decent meals we would get on this historic journey were the in-flight fare dished out by the Aeroflot flight from Delhi to Moscow. Occasionally, we could get our teeth on bread and salt, offered by our hosts in frontier towns as a mark of traditional welcome. For the rest, it was largely cabbage salad and vodka for the two vegetarians on the trip.

  The flight was teeming with fellow Indians, the lot that sends remittances to keep our foreign reserves afloat. I asked the thirty-something next to me where he was going. He had no clue. He was from Dubai, like the rest of the 140 on board, and they were being taken to another oil installation somewhere. He pulled out his ticket to show me. From Moscow, he would have to fly another eight to nine hours and cross several time zones to reach Sakhalin where temperatures must be plumbing the Arctic depths. They had no idea where they were going or what to expect except that they had been assured higher wages by their contractor. Coming from Dubai, they did not even have woollens to deal with the Delhi winter, leave alone Siberia. What was I complaining about, starting our expedition in winter?

  Just before leaving Delhi, I was curious to find out who Nikitin was. It turned out he was a small-time Russian trader from the boondocks who decided to seek his fortune farther south, gliding his way down the Volga, trudging across the deserts of Iran and sailing east down the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea to land somewhere near Mangalore. He took eighteen months to reach India, and along the way, he was robbed, roughed up and ridiculed. He lived three years in western India and left copious, unflattering notes about the country and its denizens. Yet, Bollywood found him so irresistible that it roped in Balraj Sahni and Nargis to do a biopic on him, called Pardesi. It was then that I realized that it helps to have a theme, even Nikitin, when you go about raising funds for a venture like this.

  We cooled our heels in a seedy hotel in St Petersburg for five days until the cars shipped by Mahindra reached the Baltic shores.

  Mahindra SUVs lined up outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, ready to launch forth on the Nikitin expedition

  We set off in three Scorpios, strikingly emblazoned with dozens of sponsors’ logos, to reach a nondescript town called Tver, between St Petersburg and Moscow. Afanasy Nikitin is Tver’s sole claim to fame. Surprisingly, some
700 Indians came out to greet us in Tver, all of them students at the local medical college. A Malayali was running a canteen for them on campus.

  Later, we encountered similar crowds of students in virtually every Russian town we passed through. Medical education in Russia is cheap and non-discriminating. Our compatriots in most of these towns seemed ill-equipped to deal with the extreme snow they had to brave to earn a doubtful degree recognized by neither Russia nor India. Russians do not trust their own patients with these doctors and the Medical Council of India insists they prove their medical proficiency all over again if they want to practise in India.

  Our expedition was flagged off by a senior Indian diplomat in a blinding blizzard in Tver town square even as some expedition members swept the snow off Nikitin’s statue for the photo op. In the freezing weather, we shook almost as much as the banners that were being unfurled, and took regulation photos. We were grateful to get back into the vehicles with frosted windows and blowers on. The Scorpios were our comfort zone for the next six weeks, for reasons even other than the weather.

  We were to drive along the Volga for most of the time, until we parted company with it after Volgograd. The Volga has been the nerve centre of the Russian heartland—virtually all important Russian towns are perched on its banks. The roads we were now driving through must have seen tsars and tsarinas riding their grand white steeds, to be replaced by Lenin and Stalin’s soldiers, marching on to change the course of world history. Napoleon and Hitler found a formidable adversary in the Russian winter, marching their troops along the Volga to meet their most humiliating defeat on its banks. Yet, our intrepid SUVs took on the same roads without the slightest trepidation and successfully completed the trip without a single breakdown, truly a testament as much to modern technology as to the manufacturer’s attention to perfection.

  The Volga, the silent sentinel who watched over the making and unmaking of Russia, sparkled in her white blanket. Completely frozen, it was a white ribbon of meandering snow alongside the road, its banks lined with poplars and pines whose needles had turned to icicles. Every town in Russia has its own kremlin, even if a bit diminutive compared to Moscow’s. Their fortresses and the steeples of the many churches beckoned from the banks like fairy-tale castles in faraway lands.

  The drive would take us from Tver to Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Muslim Kazan, Samara, Saratov, Volgograd, Kalmykia (a Buddhist Republic within the Russian Federation), Kropotkin (home of the Cossacks), Astrakhan on the Caspian and Sochi on the Black Sea.

  Along the route, the Soviet-era hotels in which we stayed got seedier by the day. Invariably, our rooms would be on the fourth or higher floors, with dysfunctional elevators. The only breakfast we would get was kasha and tea. Many days, our team leader insisted on driving through without stopping for lunch on the pretext we were already late. Probably he was trying to keep expenses in check, but I would give him the benefit of the doubt since we were also tardy. He balked at the suggestion that we should get snow tyres—we skidded several times on metre-deep snow. Eventually, we prevailed upon him to prise open his purse strings for snow tyres, leaving him sulking all the way.

  Tyre swallowed tarmac as we rolled through town after town, day after day. It was a surprise to spot exquisitely decorated gingerbread-style churches in the midst of the expansive and isolated landscape. The drive offered 360-degree horizons lit up by brilliant sunsets, bulrushes resonating with birdsong in some stretches, dreary wastelands and quaint villages.

  Days were getting shorter as we rolled through the desolate steppes, reaching our destination for the day well after sunset. Often, we would spy a lone vehicle and a handful of locals in traditional costumes waiting for us in the middle of the highway as we rolled in three to four hours after the scheduled time. We would be whisked off to hour-long speeches by local dignitaries followed by never-ending cultural programmes showcasing local talent. There were dances in exquisite ceremonial costumes, lilting ballads, skits and sporting events, exchange of gifts and sashes—all executed with fitting gravitas and organized exclusively for our benefit. We would have enjoyed and appreciated them better had we not been exhausted and famished. Past midnight, we would troop back to our rooms and swig vodka to lull ourselves to sleep.

  Eventually, all of us four women gravitated to the vehicle driven by SK, leaving our expedition leader fuming. SK was a miracle man who could balance with elan a movie camera in his right hand which would also somehow manage to steer, while his left would make tea with water from a thermos to keep himself awake during these long and monotonous drives. For us women, the solace lay in bottles of vodka which we quaffed in copious quantities to silence our rumbling stomachs.

  The trip was not devoid of distractions though. In Kazan, whose population is 60 per cent Muslim, local girls in Kanchipuram saris twirled and twisted to offer us their version of Kalakshetra against the stark backdrop of the Russian steppe; elsewhere, Russian and Ukrainian beauties in sheer nylon sequinned saris gyrated to Bollywood ditties. In Saratov, we feasted on a bountiful collection of Nicholas Roerich’s priceless Himalayan peaks. In Ulyanov, we marvelled at Lenin’s simple home and gaped at his sepia-tinted ancestors. In Volgograd, a prosperous industrial town of the Soviet era, the factories had fallen silent and the chimney stacks of steel mills no longer sent up plumes of curling smoke. We were told unemployment is rife in this once flourishing town of historic importance. In Kalmykia, one of the two Buddhist republics in the Russian Federation, we chatted in Hindi with monks trained in Dharamshala. In Kropotkin, we pounced on the feast laid out by the hospitable Cossacks who were seeing Indians for the first time in their town. In Sochi, we planted saplings for Indo-Russian friendship.

  Hotel Primorskaya, our last Russian hotel overlooking the Black Sea, had miles and miles of corridors with frayed and smelly carpets, chipped enamel fittings in toilets and a decadently decorated conference hall. All of the above was no surprise, except, this hotel was full of Russian devotees of Ma Anandamayi, her smiling visage beaming at us from every pillar and wall. The gathering was entirely Russian, the crowd solemn and serious—an incongruous sight in a largely secular post-Soviet Russia.

  The Russian leg over, we set sail down the Black Sea in MV Apollonia to Turkey. Over a bottle of evil-smelling absinthe, the sufficiently sloshed captain informed us his passengers on this route were mostly ‘Natashas’ seeking their fortune in markets farther south. We realized he was talking about attractive Russian girls headed to brothels in Turkey and elsewhere. From Trabzon in Turkey, we climbed up the Caucasus to Georgia and just zipped through Tbilisi without stopping, to waste two hours listening to Azeri poetry in the dead of night at the tomb of a Persian poet called Nizami Ganjavi, shivering in blinding snow somewhere in the wildernesses of the Caucasus just because R, the only Persian speaker in our group, was too polite to tell our hosts we were getting late. Georgia, the land of the golden fleece in the Bible, is a beautifully mountainous country with its own unique architectural style. Georgian wines have taken over shelves all over the supermarkets of the West, although we didn’t get to taste any.

  Nearly a month after we had set out from St Petersburg, we entered Iran through the border check post of Astara, after an excruciating wait of three hours. All of us women had to don a hijab, preferably a burqa, but we made do with scarves. Of course we looked nothing like the Iranian women advertising their style by the cut and size of their manteaus. We looked woebegone by the travails of the journey thus far, but our spirits were up. Iran is a treasure trove waiting to be discovered and we were raring to go.

  It was already evening by the time we reached our guest house which looked more like a student hostel. The lobby had a huge portrait of Iranian politician and marja Ayatollah Khomeini under which we all plonked ourselves and opened our vodka bottles smuggled all the way from Russia. Two of our women team members smoked an entire packet of cigarettes until the smoke curled up and clouded Khomeini’s portrait. Our pictures taken under his frowning visage, w
e now looked forward to a warm and rewarding drive through Iran’s gorgeous towns—Tabriz, Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz.

  But our team leader had other plans. Frustrated by what he thought were the wilful and recalcitrant women he had mistakenly roped into this road trip, he decided to teach us a lesson. He called off—yes, called off—the expedition in the middle of the highway from Astara, citing financial difficulties. He and some of the men in the team, including the three drivers, would proceed to complete the trip in the three Scorpios, while we four women were left high and dry in the middle of the Iranian desert to fend for ourselves. As a concession, R, the Persian speaker, was let go, so that he could steer us home by whatever means of transport.

  Little did our insensitive and callous team leader realize it would take more than that to faze the four of us. We hired a taxi from Tehran and whizzed alongside the expedition cars all the way to Isfahan and Shiraz, visited all the interesting mosques and mausoleums, maqbaras and madrasas, and flew back to Delhi, nearly seven weeks after we had set out. It was a strange experience to spot the expedition vehicles wherever we went, and yet be disconnected in every sense.

  The epilogue is not to be missed. Months afterwards, long after the cars shipped from Bander Abbas arrived in Mumbai, the team leader had the gall to invite us women to participate in the last Indian leg of the expedition along the Konkan coast just so that he could complete his film for his sponsors. All of us gleefully declined. And with that, hopefully restored the peace of the traumatized Afanasy Nikitin kept awake in his grave by our botched-up expedition.