62/ 100 Two Rickshaws and a Taxi

The stories from day 36 to day 42 were all about the perils of leaving the wonderful town of Varanasi and taking a train to Agra on our first trip to India in 2018. On that journey our problems were because of the not-so-express Marudhar Express train. On our second trip, in 2019, we decided to leave Varanasi by airplane instead, in the vain hope that it would be a bit faster and more reliable. Unsurprisingly though, it was also a journey fraught with problems which I will break down into bitesized chunks for the next few stories.

Our 2019 trip coincided with one of the biggest religious gatherings in the world – the Kumbh Mela, held that year further up the Ganges river at Prayagraj (also called Allahabad). It actually wasn’t even the full Mela, this was the semi-Mela held at the halfway intervals between the 12 year full-Mela cycle.

Whilst we didn’t visit it ourselves we were definitely noticing the effects of the presence of 120 million Hindu devotees just a few miles away. We discovered that a great many of them would do their religious duties at the Mela before travelling to Varanasi to repeat the process all over again. This made the area we were staying in very busy indeed, and we already knew that public transport was struggling under the mass of all the pilgrims.

We spoke to our ever helpful host Sonu to figure out the best way of getting to the airport from our apartment in the back streets of Varanasi and he assured us that he could arrange a taxi for us. As someone who takes a good deal of comfort from planning a trip I carefully calculated all our timings to allow plenty of spare time to get to get airport and check in. I slept soundly that night, woken only a few times by the usual monkey fight on the rooftop opposite, and began the new day looking forward to a leisurely passage to Udaipur.

With our rucksacks all packed and ready to go, we soon discovered that Sonu had done the thing that so many of our Indian friends liked to do. To protect us from worrying too much he’d neglected to mention that because of the Mela the police had shut down most of the roads in the centre of town and moved all motorised transport to an outer circle of streets a couple of miles from our apartment. Varanasi was basically inaccessible to anything other than a pair of feet (or four feet if you were an animal, although a few of those only had three, and we did see a cow with five). This was not what I wanted to hear.

Ever resourceful, and probably well used to this kind of chaos, Sonu assured us that he had a complex plan in place that would ensure our timely arrival at the airport. First, we shouldered our rucksacks and followed him on foot through the narrow lanes and busy streets for the first half mile or so. Sonu then rendezvoused with a friend of his who walked us further still to a couple of waiting cycle rickshaws at the checkpoint where the police would now at least allow motorbikes and cycles. The rickshaws are basically simple tricycles with space for a couple of people at the back and a driver who, it would usually seem, must be at least 90 years of age, which was about the same age as the bike itself. We secured our bags into one of the rickshaws and jumped into the passenger seat of the other.

Our driver set off. Very slowly with close to 200kg of tourists on his trusty steed. Mercifully the road was flat and momentum was his ally. He was stopping for nobody. Ringing his bell he nudged his way through hundreds of pedestrians and scooters as we made our way slowly up the road for a good mile or so. He was standing on the pedals the whole way and never even broke a sweat in the hot sun – he was amazing. Eventually we arrived at a waiting taxi that had been pre-arranged. We paid the two smiling rickshaw drivers their ridiculously low fee . I can’t remember the exact cost but it was only a few pence. We jumped into the taxi (that had a proper engine), agreed the fee with the driver and we were off to the airport, back on track, or so we thought.