A pleasant interlude 1

India with Margaret and Terry

 

The temple at Srirangapatnam, which we visited on our way

from Bangalore to Mysore

By late 1977, Olwyn was planning to marry Dinesh and the wedding was fixed for early February 1978. She asked me to give her away, and we started to plan a trip to the wedding, and while in that part of the world we wanted to see other countries and other places. We also decided that Terry should come too, and we would include Shillong in our plans so that he could see his birthplace. 

With Terry in Chinatown, Singapore

We took the opportunity to visit Melbourne on the way, and stay a few days with Margaret’s brother John and sister-in-law Stella. They then lived in Mornington, a few kilometres down Port Philip Bay from the city centre. 

We flew out of Flemington Airport and changed planes at Singapore to a flight heading for Calcutta. We had a day or so to look around the island city.  When our plane reached Calcutta, the airport was covered in fog, and we were diverted to Bombay.  This changed our plans, so we decided just to go with the flow and disembarked at Bombay Airport in the middle of the night. 

After half a night’s sleep, we rode a packed suburban train to Victoria terminus, where we booked seats for Bangalore in the south. The same afternoon we left on the express and climbed up the Western Ghats, the hills on that side of southern India, as far as Pune, the traditional army city where the British had established military institutions many years before. We hired a “retiring room’, a sort of backpacker’s room, at the railway station for $1.00 for the night. It was on the first floor, with a view over the square in front of the railway station. 

The square in front of the main station, Pune

In the morning we had a quick look around the city of Pune, and then resumed our journey towards Bangalore.  At one of the stops on the line, we bought a meal of mutton korma and had to pay what seemed like an unusually hefty price.  One of our fellow-travellers, an accountant commuting between two towns, thought we had been overcharged, and was upset to think the railway caterers had treated visitors so badly. (Six months after we reached home, we received a letter from him containing a bank draft for the price we had paid.  He had complained to the railway authorities, who had refunded our money.) 

Ready to explore Pune

Early the next morning we had to climb out of the train and walk the length of a long platform to another train. This was because the gauge of the lines changed at this point from 5 feet three inches (the broad gauge system between main centres) to metre gauge, which covers most of South India. On we went and eventually reached the city of Bangalore. One of our fellow-passengers was a young man travelling back to Bangalore, his home town, from Bombay where he worked in the film industry, since called “Bollywood”. 

We liked Bangalore.  We had a reasonably good hotel, and had a chance to visit one of Margaret’s acquaintances, a missionary, Ruth Warner, whose family lived in New Plymouth. The climate was very comfortable and people were friendly. 

Street scene in Bangalore



View from our hotel window in Bangalore