Holiday in India & Bhutan (14): back to Kolkata
On Tuesday, we started the return home by leaving Bhutan for India, so it was another early start as we left our hotel at 7 am.
In all my years of travel, I’ve never experienced an airport which is so calm and so beautifully decorated and so gloriously located as Paro in Bhutan. It was such a peaceful way to leave such a beautiful country.
Very soon after take-off, those of us on the starboard side (which included me) could see the Himalayas including Mount Everest (but I did not have a window seat and did not manage to take photographs).
We flew with Bhutan Airlines on a short flight of one hour. Then we were back in Kolkata with its heat and hustle and honking. The festival of Durga Puja was over, but now the entire city was consumed with excitement over the festival of Kali Puja.
We were back in the same hotel as the start of our trip, the Taj Bengal, but very quickly we were collected by our city guide from last time, Malini, for some more sightseeing in Kolkata.
We started with South Park Street Cemetery, formerly known as as ‘the Great Christian Burial Ground’. This is one of the earliest non-church cemeteries in the world (1767-1790) and houses numerous graves – often quite ostentatious – of British Empire soldiers, administrators and their families. Death often came early in those days because of diseases.
Next we visited St John’s Church which was founded in 1787. This was the second Anglian church in India. Today it hosts in its grounds a memorial to the British victims of ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’ in 1756.
Finally we walked around the centre of colonial Calcutta.
This was originally known as Tank Square (so called because the city’s main water tank was there), then called Dalhousie Square (named after the Governor General of India from 1847-1956), and now renamed as Binoy-Badal-Dinesh Bagh (named after three young independence activists who in 1830 assassinated the Inspector General of Prisons) but always shortened to BBD Bagh.
We saw the former Governor’s Mansion, the old Post Office and the Writers’ Building. These days, the square houses all three branches of the Government of West Bengal.
We were supposed to have gone on to see a Jain Temple, but our guides were fearful of the traffic building up for the Kali festival, so this visit was abandoned (I saw Jain temples in Khajuraho in 2003).
The journey back to our hotel would normally take no more than half an hour, but there was so much traffic, so much police redirection, and a demonstration about the rape of a female health worker that we mostly edged our way forward, frequently were halted for lengthy intervals, and sent by police to parts of the city unknown to our driver, so that it was three hours before we reached the hotel and a bladder-pressured six hours since we had originally left the hotel.
That evening, the group celebrated the 47th wedding anniversary of a Indian couple in the group. Interestingly, it was an arranged marriage.
Wednesday saw our return to London in the afternoon, so we had a free morning. Jenny and I were keen to use the time to visit a new location and chose to go the the Indian Museum. We hired a hotel-provided car which had us at the museum in a mere 10 minutes and picked us up exactly as planned two and a half hours later.
The museum was founded in 1814 and it is the oldest and largest museum in the country. On two floors of a grand building, there are a dozen or so sections covering a wide range of subjects. We chose to explore the sections on evolution, painting and archaeology.. Everything is labelled in three languages (Hindi, Bengali & English) and the exhibits are genuinely fascinating and impressive, but the cafe and shop are very poor.
Before we left for the airport, our tour manager for the whole holiday, the wonderful Tracey Richards, gave us final information and I gave a short speech of thanks to her on behalf of the group. I called her “the divine goddess” and praised her attention to every detail and ability to flex the programme when necessary.