Day 11, Pune [Friday 14th December 2007]
Previous day: Day 10, Matheran [Thursday 13th December 2007]
Next day: Day 12, Pune [Saturday 15th December 2007]
Get the train at 7am from Materan to Pune. No one seems to agree on the correct way to say it - Poonay or Poonah. We somehow arrive, via a couple of connections, at Pune station. Kate upgraded our 2nd class tickets to 2AC, so we could sit in the chair carriage instead of standing up between carriages for an hour. The train was chock-a-block with chaiwallahs and a dozen other men walking up and down with food on trays or in boxes, yelling "chai tea, vegetable cutlets, veg sandwich, pani bottle."
At Pune we walk straight over the road from the station to the National Hotel, an old colonial house with a big verandah all the way around, and a row of chalets in the grounds at the back. We take a chalet with a little porch, as the rooms in the main house seem a bit damp. Once you're inside it's hard to beleive you're only 50 metres from the madness of the train station - it's very quiet, and the garden smells lovely.
We have a MASSIVE thali meal at Shree Krishna Veg Restaurant, which is really busy. It has a "family section" too. Kate has a Punjabi special, which means she gets tomato soup with hers. I go for the Deluxe Special, which means I get tapioca. Otherwise the thalis are identical - veg curry, chana masala, dal, poppadom, rotis and rice, wada dahi, pickles, chutney, plus a mashed banana desert and yoghurt. By the end we're both STUFFED.
After that we take a long walk through the Old Town of Pune. There's a huge vegetable market where sellers of different foodstuffs group together - there's Onion Alley, Potato Pathway, and a section for anyone selling leafy green herbs. People take great pride and care in displaying their goods, piling fruit up in delicate pyramids, or topping off a mountain of runner beans with a solitary cauliflower. Outside the market there are sections of town dedicated to selling particular items - one alley sells steel pots, piled up in towers of ever decreasing size, another sells only hosepipes. And undercover area is where to get your bangles. There's even a small row of shops selling Christmas decorations.
Eventually we wander into an area that looks markedly tattier and poorer. The girls lining the sides of the alleys and peering out of windows are wearing a lot more makeup, and much fewer clothes, than we've been seeing. Short skirts, singlets, lipstick. The houses they're loitering in front of look dark and grim, and it's obvious we've come to the red light district. There's an uneasy feeling in the air, so we grab a rickshaw and head to Shaniwar Wada, and old palace built by the guy who ran Pune. It's got a pleasant, if unremarkable, garden fillign its centre, and there's a walkway around the high perimeter wall which gives good views of the surroundings.
We make the terrible decision to walk back to the hotel - we end up trudging for far too long beside a busy dual carriageway, in the evening gloom, motorbikes screaming past and the gutters stinking of piss. At a junction we stop to ask a woman the way to the station. She points us in the right direction, but halfway across the road a guy with a full length kurta and equally long beard rushes over to check we know where we're going. He welcomes us to his "beautiful city of Pune", saying he must "welcome all men!". What a cool bloke - he went out of his way on an unbelievably hectic stretch of road, just to make sure we understood someone's directions. It made me feel all warm inside.
At the station we finally get our hands on "Trains At A Glance". We glance at it. It's very nearly incomprehensible. It's got fold out maps, schedules for every train in India, including the tiny "toy trains" that run up to the hill stations, the menu you can expect for journeys with a kitchen carriage, and a baffling description of the types of tickets and reservations you can make.
Dinner is a couple of vadapavs each and a pile of pakoras wrapped up in newspaper, from the stall frying them outside the gate to our hotel. We follow that up with the last of the chikki from Matheran. In the local paper it says Ravi Shankar and his daughter Anoushka are playing here in Pune tomorrow, so we decide to try and get tickets tomorrow morning. At an internet cafe we look up the addresses of the two schools featured in the BBC series Indian School, so we might go and see one of them too.
Next day: Day 12, Pune [Saturday 15th December 2007]
Previous day: Day 10, Matheran [Thursday 13th December 2007]