India 10 – A day in Kolkata (Calcutta)

Today Vijay flies home to Delhi at 3pm so before he left he played tour guide and took me to see where Mother Teresa lived, worked and died.

She is entombed at Mother Teresa House, it is a place anyone can visit. There are nuns doing their chores, a small museum dedicated to her, you get to view the room she lived and died in, and her tomb.

From there we went for a tram ride back towards the Hotel and also caught the underground train to close to the Hotel where we paid a man to pull us in his man powered rickshaw. They are likely to be banned soon and Vijay and I certainly felt guilty as we sat there being pulled along by an old man in bare feet. We wanted to get out and walk out of pity for him, but in the end decided to give him the work followed by a whopping payment of NZ$4 for his 400 meter walk. I also ran up to my room and bought him back an old smelly tee shirt and a New Zealand cap which he was super happy with.  To put our payment into context it probably equates to an average days income for most working class people.

Once back at the Hotel we finished packing and headed to the Airport, Vijay to fly to Delhi, and me to book into a Hotel (Ethnotel again) closer to the Airport for a 10am flight tomorrow back to Bangladesh. The journey took just over an hour and cost us 350 rupees instead of yesterdays 650 rupee “looting”!! It was another Morris Oxford (called Ambassadors here)

I said goodbye to Vijay at the airport.

Vijay and I had been together 9 nights and got on perfectly. We enjoyed each others company absolutely and created some magical memories of our time in Nagaland, Manipur and Kolkata. Nagaland and Manipur are rarely visited by outsiders, and I was lucky to travel with someone who was happy to share my desire to go to the middle of nowhere and do strange things. Vijay did a lot of things he had never done before, I am not an orthodox traveler, but he embraced everything I thrust at him and enjoyed the experience. We traveled by plane, train, bus, auto, van (inside and hanging off the back), human pulled rickshaw, tram and hitching a ride with a complete stranger in his Honda. Everything we did we did with laughter and good spirits. A perfect companion.

From there I headed back to the Hotel and have stayed in all afternoon literally chilling, it is now 9.15pm and it will be lights out in 15 minutes.

Alarm set for 6.45am – look out Bangladesh – I am coming back!!