Walking A Road Other Men (and women) Have Gone Down

April 13
Haridwar, India
Kumbh Mela

The Kumbh Mela is a massive Hindu festival that happens at auspicious places every twelve years. This year's festival started in January and is taking place in Haridwar, some 200 KM north of Delhi, the town where the foothills to the Indian Himalayan range begin, on the banks of the holy Ganges. Haridwar, a spiritual town even when there is not a mass pilgrimage taking place, is 20 KM from Rishikesh, India's premier center for yogis and ashrams. It's a pretty groovy part of the country. That is, probably just about any time except when the world's single largest gathering of humans hasn't descended upon it.

I'll be honest – I had dreaded this since before I left New York. It sounded like an interesting idea, but I was never really sure it would materialize. Train tickets from Delhi had been sold out months before hand and the local bus option was rather unsavory. Some friends who live and have traveled extensively in India told us not to go. As I've said before, I get claustrophobic in elevators, so this probably was not the best destination for me. I was hoping to find a nice spot in Delhi to stay while my friends took off for the Mela. Well, my first Delhi experience was not so good so my choices were to navigate its ugly, shady streets by myself or go along for the ride to Haridwar and hope for the best. Unwisely, I chose the latter.

Our journey to hell began at 6AM sharp on April 13th. Our driver Arun (who I nominate for Indian beatification. There are something like 30 thousand gods here, what's one more?) met us in his sweet, giant air conditioned Toyota SUV and we hit the road. We learned that Kurt had been sick all night with some kind of food poisoning, so I hoped that our ride was swift and we could get him to a hotel quickly. Arun, who had been to Haridwar countless times but never to the Kumbh Mela, estimated that our ride would take approximately 4-5 hours, 6 max with traffic. Sounded good to me. We were cruising in style, with the A/C blasting and Arun's favorite, R. Kelly bumpin' on the stereo. An hour in and things seemed to be going OK. Then we had to stop so Kurt could puke. He wasn't doing so well. Strike one.

We got to probably within 15 (maybe 20?) KM of Haridwar with relative ease. We knew that all auto traffic had been banned from the city and that we'd have to take an auto or bicycle rickshaw to our hotel from the parking area. What we did not know is that the main road to Haridwar was closed. Strike two. We were routed on a detour, and there's where the nightmare began. At around 10:30 in the morning, we hit some serious traffic. I'm talking 1010WINS red alert, “stay home, 12 tractor trailer pile up” style traffic. At first I assumed that it was just because of the detour, and that the multiple buses were causing problems, not being able to pass other vehicles. We took our detour and came to a solid stand still. Arun got out and talked to some other drivers. “8 hours traffic,” he said, laughing. I couldn't tell if he was serious or not. It was only about 12 KM to town. As the midday sun scorched us (had to be 110 degrees; India is experiencing the hottest April in 53 years), we realized this was no joke. This was the beginning of a horror movie.

I can only imagine that Woodstock was something like this, with people abandoning their vehicles on the Thruway and walking miles to the festival. Except it was nothing like Woodstock, save for the wild marijuana plants lining both sides of the road. I didn't really detect a “hell, yeah, I'm going to see Jimi Hendrix, want some acid, man,” vibe. It was a bit more serious. Lots of people were abandoning their rides and walking, Arun even suggested we do the same. Had this been America, people would have been beating the shit out of each other. A two lane highway was converted into 4, with drivers just deciding to create a second and third lane, thus blocking the oncoming traffic entirely. There were no rest stops. There was no water (and we were dangerously low on our supply, having expected to stay on the main road and hit a restaurant), no toilets and little relief from the sun. After awhile, we had to turn the car off to conserve fuel and prevent overheating. Kurt was pale and feverish and was worrying all of us. If there was a way to turn around, we would have. I was contemplating draining my bank account to charter a helicopter. But where would it land? There was no way out. We were completely stuck, trapped between two gigantic fields of palm sugar. People who had been crammed into buses were running into the fields and hacking down stalks of palm sugar, breaking them over their shins and handing them out. Hard to eat, but at least they provided a small amount of sugar and hydration. We had to pee on some farmer's property with little cover in broad daylight, and mid-stream he came running over chasing us away. I'm sure three thousand people saw my ass. I wanted to turn around immediately, and was hoping that Arun would throw caution to the wind, turn on his 4WD, and plow through the crops to get us out. That did not happen.

What did happen was sitting in the car for twelve hours. We left Delhi at 6AM. We finally pulled into the parking area at about 6:30 PM, just as the sun was setting. It was total and utter chaos. We had phoned the hotel, and they could not get to us. We didn't even know where we were. How could they know where we were and moreover, if they were able to send someone on foot, how would we know him/he know us? Strike three. It was getting dark and seemingly all of India was walking, a veritable tidal wave of humanity rushing the town. Entire villages of pilgrims, probably many of them traveling for days, having never before left their homelands, were arriving en masse. It's said that 5000 people are lost and never heard from again at each Kumbh Mela. I was starting to see why.

Trying very hard to contain my building panic, I strapped my mega heavy backpack onto my back, then strapped my other only slightly less heavy daypack onto my front side and we set off on foot with the crowd, no idea where we were going or how far it would be. We had heard rumors that it would be possible after crossing a bridge and walking 1 or 2 KM to get a bicycle rickshaw to at least transport our luggage. Maybe that was true on any normal day at the Kumbh Mela. But we were getting there for the specially auspicious April 14th bathing date, where a dip in the Ganga is even more purifying, and so was everybody else. I had not packed nor planned to carry my bags for more than a block or so, so pain and misery were setting in. I was close to toppling over, not having had any food and little water since about 8AM. Stacy had a bag on wheels, which does not fare so well over terrains of pebbles, sand, cow shit, toes and other detritus. Kurt (who somehow pulled it together enough to navigate the crowds) and Mio had smartly left some of their stuff in Delhi, so their packs were lighter, but I'm sure they were both very unhappy as well.

Picture an entire football stadium exiting through one entrance in the dark with no signs, few lights, no place to sleep (most pilgrims came and just set up camp on the street) and not a lot of ways to communicate (India has 22 official languages and over 300 dialects). It was chaos. There was not enough police presence, and the police that were there were useless. NOBODY, not one single person that we asked, could direct us to our hotel. We knew it was near the train station – a location one might think the cops directing the flow of millions would know about – but we could not get there. There were road blocks everywhere, so we took a total of 4 bicycle rickshaws, some rides only a few hundred meters, just to take a load off. One person would say that the train station was 5 or 6 km that way, another would tell us it was 3 km in a different direction. Nobody knew what the fuck was going on and I was starting to lose it. At 10:30, after approximately three and a half hours of wandering around on foot in a sea of madness, we got to our hotel.

As luck would not have it, our rooms that had been booked online a month earlier at a “new” hotel, were not quite ready. Translate: the goddam hotel was not even finished being constructed! There were piles of debris and construction material on the banister-less staircase, open patches of drywall exposing rebar, broken fans, scraps of tile lining the hallways. None of the door or window frames were sealed. Of course one of the reserved air con rooms would not be possible on this first night, because apparently there were problems connecting the power, or the actual A/C unit couldn't get there or some other such bullshit. The guys running the hotel were total creeps. One of us would have to suffer, and since Kurt was sick, and he and Mio had spent two sleepless nights in fan only rooms, Stacy and I took the room with the fan. When saw it, I recoiled in disbelief. It was an 8 X 8 windowless hole that looked like a cement mixer had thrown up all over it. There was one double bed, a fan, and that's about it. The filth, some of it real dirt, some of it construction mess, was unspeakable. The bathroom, which we later learned had no hot water, was missing a shower head. Just a pipe in the wall that did not spout water. The journey had left us all covered in a thin film of dust and god knows what else, and all I wanted was a hot shower and a clean place to sleep. My shower experience was a cold spout of water about knee high. It was possibly the worst night of my life and for the first time in longer than I can remember,I sobbed myself to sleep, hoping that somehow we would find a way out of this mess.