Ending Up in India on a Cruise

A funny thing happened on our way to the Panama Canal. We wound up in India.

My wife and I had been planning a voyage through the canal with a side trip to Costa Rica. During the planning a folder arrived in the mail detailing a 20-day “Empires of Asia” trip to India, part by land and part by sea.

We’d visited China, Southeast Asia, Siberia and Mongolia and lived four years in Japan, where we were married. But India had always eluded us.

The folder, from Royal Cruise Line, offered India with a week in Delhi, Agra and Bombay and including shore tours in the former Portuguese colony of Goa, plus Madras, Mahabalipuram and Port Blair, a beautiful island in the Sea of Bengal.

Also, we would see Colombo and Kandy, Sri Lanka; Phuket, Thailand; Penang (the “pearl of the Orient”), Malaysia and Singapore.

We flew to Delhi via Frankfurt, West Germany, and discovered a city of 7 million people with weather similar to that of Los Angeles. A week later we boarded the Golden Odyssey in Bombay.

As in many Third World countries, it is not easy to travel in India. Roads are dusty; plumbing, where available, is far from what Americans are accustomed to, and drinking water is always a concern. So it was convenient to return each evening from various ports to the ship’s air-conditioned comfort, excellent food and thirst quenchers.

Snake for Your Neck

So why India? It’s where snake charmers offer to put a python around your neck while a cobra stares, head raised and ready to strike. Cattle, honored by an old religion, lie and stand in the road. Elephants are for hire outside country hotels. Camel rides are given on the beach.

Prostrate men and women pray before colorful shrines. Turbaned Sikh bus drivers wear daggers at their waists. Bullocks pull carts filled with families of 8 to 12 people and calmly make their way between trucks, bicycles and motorized rickshaws.

Bazaars are filled with handicrafts from throughout India, Nepal and Tibet at prices so low that you’re ashamed to bargain (but do it anyway).

We found two cities at Delhi. The Old Delhi, which flourished 1,000 years before Christ, is filled with tiny alleys, narrow bazaars and communities of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. Dominating Old Delhi is the monumental Red Fort, a city within a city, and across from it sits Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India.

In British-designed New Delhi, immense red sandstone government ministries, luxury hotels and parks face tree-lined boulevards. At one end of Rajpath, the processional avenue, stands the blue-domed presidential palace. At the other end towers India Gate, a memorial to 90,000 Indian soldiers who died in World War I.

At Agra, a five-hour bus ride from Delhi that every tourist makes to see the Taj Mahal, we also visited its immense fort. Built by the Mogul (Indian Muslim) Emperor Akbar 400 years ago, it is rimmed by a moat on three sides and the Yamuna River on the last.

Insects Sacred Too

On our return to Delhi we flew to Bombay where we were greeted by our guide, Damayanti, who whisked us through this commercial metropolis of 9 million to the marble Jain temple, where adherents hold that all life sacred--from insects to humans.

En route we saw the white-domed Haji Ali Mosque in the sea, isolated at high tide but reached by a walkway during low tide.

We were fascinated by an acre of outdoor commercial washing ghats where clothes are soaked, scrubbed and pounded in concrete tubs.

We visited the Gandhi Memorial Museum and Bombay’s Hanging Gardens.

From the Gateway of India, the nation’s Arch of Triumph that British soldiers passed under marking the end of Britain’s domination, we drove to Chowpatty Beach, Bombay’s “Hyde Park,” famed for its political speakers.

After speeding along scenic Marine Drive, Bombay’s “Queen’s Necklace,” we headed for our sea-going hotel, the Golden Odyssey.

We made port on the southwest coast at Goa, ruled by the Portuguese for 450 years before being taken by India. We drove to New Goa, now called Panaji, with its charming red-roofed homes, sunny squares and gardens of bougainvillea and frangipani.

We stopped in Old Goa, a city that is primarily two Catholic churches surrounded by ruins. Long ago the city was described by a Portuguese poet as “The Great Lady of All the East.”

Leaving India for a day, we crossed to southern Sri Lanka (Ceylon), settled by colonists from India in 500 BC.

Madras of Textile Fame

We cruised north along India’s east coast to Madras, the nation’s fabrics center and fourth-largest city (with a population of 4 million), where for three months it’s hot and the other nine months it’s hotter.

Dominated by George Town and Ft. St. George, with its 20-foot-high walls that resisted Mogul and Mahratta attacks, Madrassis also take pride in their magnificent marina and flower-decked esplanade.

Turbaned fishermen push their boats into the sea, dyers stretch their cloth to dry and Tamil girls with frangipani tucked in their hair paddle in the warm waves.

Saint Thomas, who was martyred south of Madras in AD 68, is believed to have been buried at San Thome Cathedral here. Thirty-six miles down the coast we visited Mahabalipuram, “City of the Seven Pagodas,” once the naval base of the Pallava Empire, now guarded only by a life-size stone elephant and lion.

After a full day’s sail across the Bay of Bengal off southern Thailand, we were received by a military band at Port Blair in the Andaman Sea. An Indian naval base being converted into a resort, Port Blair is beginning to open to tourists. Since World War II it has been trying to live down its past as a penal colony, but the three remaining wings of its one-time seven-winged mammoth cellular jail are still an unusual attraction.

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The sea/land/air journey, Empires of Asia, costs $3,398 to $6,298 depending on the room, plus $1,390 air fare via Pan Am and Singapore Airlines from Los Angeles. For more information, contact Royal Cruise Line, 1 Maritime Plaza, San Francisco 94111, toll-free (800) 622-0538.

The Hyatt Regency in New Delhi, where four nights were part of the overall cruise fare, costs $110 and up for a single or double, in case you wish to spend more time in the colorful Delhi-Agra-Jaipur region.