14/ 100 Water Pump Dog
On our first trip to India, in 2018, getting clean water was quite an issue for us and our delicate Western stomachs used to fresh chlorinated water straight from the tap. I wouldn’t like to even imagine the circuitous route the water in your typical Indian town or village has taken to reach the tap in your house. One thing is certain – I won’t be drinking it.
On that trip we used water bottles with filters built into them, but then Fiona came home with Giardia hitching a ride back to Scotland so we weren’t completely convinced. The bottles were also small and took forever to drink from because the water was filtered as you squeezed it out of the bottle.
For the next trip we switched to purification tablets. They were much easier to use – you pop them into a litre of water, wait an hour and you’re good to go – but they did have a lingering chlorine taste. The great, great, great, great grandchildren of Fiona’s 2018 Giardia hitchhikers decided to jump on board to come and see their new Scottish family though, so something was definitely amiss with the tablets, or maybe contamination was just unavoidable.
On our last trip, this January, we did bring along tablets (they tasted horrible, despite being marketed as having no aftertaste – shame on you Lifesystems) but they weren’t required so often because there had been a big change since our 2019 visit. Fresh, securely packaged, bottles of water were available everywhere. The people who ran our accommodation all supplied us with as much as we wanted and every little corner shop and hole-in-the-wall had shrink-wrapped clean bottles for sale.
I had written a story as part of my last project about the horrors of witnessing people refilling bottles from an algae-filled pond and sealing on a new lid (read about that if you dare) but I am very confident that the bottles we were buying this trip were much more secure. As the government is perhaps now aware of this scam the bottles themselves even have a picture on the side encouraging you to crush them before throwing them away to, I assume, prevent them being taken and refilled.
The other interesting thing about the bottles was that they seemed to all have a fixed price printed onto them, and it wasn’t expensive at all. We were charged about ₹30 to ₹40 for a 2 litre bottle (about 30p to 40p) and we were never charged more than the printed price.
So, we tried our hardest again to be as safe as we practically could, but it’s an uphill battle. Right at the end of our trip we were sat in a nice place eating a scorching hot uttapam that we had just watched a guy make right there in front of us. The temperature of it was undoubtably more than enough to wipe out any living being so I wasn’t worried. Then another guy came and took our stainless steel plates and cutlery, crouched down, and washed them in a gutter that ran across the floor underneath the seat opposite us.
