The Blog of Gord

On Sunday I went for what turned out to be a five-hour walk. It was about time, since I’ve been in Bangalore two weeks and still didn’t have a clear idea where I was in the city, or which direction to go to get anywhere. Usually when I go to a new place, the first thing I do to orient myself is to get lost, then figure out how to get un-lost. Being driven around doesn’t help; I have to do the navigating myself before I get a good picture in my head. Since my only maps were the high-level maps from my “Lonely Planet South India” and “Rough Guide to South India” guide books, and since I always come home in the dark, I had only a vague idea of where I was relative to the few landmarks I’d been to. It was time to fix that!

So, after breakfast I packed my camera and water bottle, took a last look at the guide book maps, and struck out in the direction I thought was toward the main tourist shopping area, around Mahatma Gandhi Road (MG Road) and Brigade Road. After fifteen or twenty minutes of walking, though, I happened to look back and saw a sign indicating MG Road was in the exact opposite direction. I suppose if I’m going to be wrong, I might as well be dead wrong.

You might think that now that I had a road sign in sight, it would be relatively straightforward to get there by following directions. That would be true, except for three factors:

1) Road names are generally not marked, and if they are, there are often two different names for the same road, and even then the marker (if there is one) is often merely a painted stone sitting out of sight on the sidewalk at one corner. About the only way to tell the street name is to walk along and hope that some business puts their address on display (and not the address of their head office!).

2) Direction signs are rare, and usually serve only to confirm that this is the right general direction, not useful to figure out what course corrections might be needed. Roads tend to meander anyway, so a given road may or may not continue in the direction it’s currently going. If you like driving in Boston, you’ll love Bangalore.

3) Even on a Sunday, the roads here are busy, and without the benefit of traffic lights or any traffic rules whatsoever, it can be quite a chore crossing a road. What might be a four-lane, easily crossed road at home, in Bangalore is a river of weaving, dodging, speeding motorbikes, auto-rickshaws (three-wheeled taxis), cars, buses, trucks, and farm tractors, all blasting their horns to warn others to get out of the way. Only the ox-carts and the cows are easy to avoid. That means crossing a road sometimes involves quite a long detour down unnamed, wandering streets to find a place where a crossing might be possible without first writing up a suicide note.

One such detour down a meandering street actually deposited me at the west end of MG Road, much to my surprise, because I had thought I had a much longer walk ahead of me.

Getting utterly lost, by the way, was never a concern. There was always an auto-rickshaw nearby, hoping for a fare from that wealthy-looking westerner. In fact, some were quite persistent, following me down the street insisting that for Rs 10 (about 25 cents) they’d take me anywhere I wanted for an hour. By their standards I suppose I was crazy, walking when I could ride, but I wanted to walk!

Many businesses here are closed on Sunday, but one of the larger bookstores, Higginbothams (mentioned in my guidebooks) was open, so I went in to buy a map and see what else they had. They seemed to have some of everything, much of it in English. Most of the books, even western books, were very cheap, perhaps up to 10% of what they’d cost in Canada, though of course marked for sale only in India. Only major western bestsellers were expensive, perhaps 50% of what they’d cost at home.

Further down was Brigade Road. This is the area you read about when you hear about how westernized Bangalore is. Actually, it reminded me mainly of Tokyo, with less neon. The sidewalks were packed with people, and there was lots of noise (besides the ubiquitous traffic noise, of course). Unlike Tokyo, though, very aggressive sidewalk vendors everywhere. Several people selling watches, with a dozen on each arm, some selling maps, some sunglasses, some toys, some who knows what.

One fellow decided I must be a chess fanatic, and tried hard to sell me a carved wooden travel chess set, even showing me the “Made in India” sticker to verify its authenticity. Actually he thought my brother must be a chess nut, because he kept explaining what a great gift it would make for him (actually he’s more of a Go player). As we walked, the price progressively dropped, but even at the final price before I finally convinced him I wasn’t buying, it was still too much. At one point, he had to compete for my attention with a particularly enterprising auto-rickshaw driver who was drumming up business by convincing potential customers to go for a flat-rate sight-seeing trip while walking with them.

Finally I got rid of them, and ended up in a handicraft shop with a nice selection of statues, silk, and wool items. I wasn’t buying anything, but the prices weren’t bad, and came down the longer I stayed. I don’t have much experience with haggling, so not wanting to buy anything seemed to be good practice for learning how to feign disinterest.

After that, I went for a long walk around the perimeter of Cubbon Park. I can’t find any online maps of Bangalore to show you, but it’s a good hike. A lot of government buildings are around there, so eventually I stumbled across the Vidhana Soudha (the Karnataka state legislature) and the High Court again, which I’d seen the day before, after dark (see previous blog entry).

Vidhana Soudha:

High Court:

At this point, a few minutes of light rain fell. The sky had been overcast for the past few days, the tail-end of the monsoon hammering Mumbai, but no rain here so far, so I thought my luck had run out. Fortunately, it cleared up, because I’d left my umbrella at home.

I continued walking, and eventually convinced myself that I had no idea where I was headed, so I got directions from a couple of traffic cops. It turned out I was already pointed back where I wanted to be (MG Road).

Back on MG Road, I suddenly had a new companion, a well-dressed fellow in his 60’s apparently out looking for people to practice his English on while he took his Sunday walk. We walked for 10 minutes or so, and had a pleasant conversation before he turned off to cross the street. Next came a deaf/dumb highschool-aged kid, also well-dressed; I never did figure out what he was after. Then a beggar with two small children tried to get me to stop, and required some effort to avoid. I had stayed on the “park” side of the street to avoid the crowd on the “shopping” side, but maybe the crowd and sunglasses salesmen would have been easier to deal with.

By this time, I needed some lunch, so went into a Subway in a mall on Brigade Road for my first western-style food in two weeks. It was just like home, including the price: about 70% of the same sub in Canada, in other words very expensive by Indian standards.

After another 15 or 20 minutes of walking, plus a short detour to walk past the office, I was home. It turns out I’m staying in a very convenient location, close to work, and also to all those pubs I’d heard about before I came. I’m sure there will be a blog entry about that at some point…

This entry was posted on Monday, July 3rd, 2006 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.