It's fun to stay at the...

We arrived in Shimla with loads of Indians who were obviously on holiday. Joanne asked if I knew whether it was a popular holiday destination for Indians but I wasn't sure; I only knew it was a popular honeymoon spot. I spent some time in Shimla last time I was in India, and it's worth a look but we were only planning to spend one night there as I thought that would be enough. Shimla is on a steep hillside and there was already a big queue for the public lift. When we got up to the main street of Shimla, called the Mall, we could see just how busy the place was. Joanne was really fed up and said that she wanted to go somewhere there weren't any Indians. She had thought Shimla would be full of foreign tourists and Tibetans, not Indian tourists. She had really had enough of the country!

The Ridge with Christchurch in the background

After a long and tiring search for a hotel, leaving Joanne in a bar with the bags, I realised the only reasonably priced placed with any vacant rooms was the YMCA. The bar I'd left Joanne in I remembered as being the only bar in Shimla. It had been a really rough place with the worst toilet I'd seen in India (which is obviously saying something) and everyone there so drunk that they were falling over and walking into things. It had seemed that drinking was so unrespectable that people thought they really had to go for it if they were crossing that line. The place had completely changed and it was now actually quite a nice upmarket restaurant and bar. I think attitudes to alcohol in India are changing, although in many places it is still far from acceptable.

The YMCA was a really nice building, if a little institutional, and quite high up the hill with a nice view. We had been told that there was only hot water at certain times, but after two days of travelling we were quite happy with cold water, so we both jumped in the shower as soon as we were checked in. After just a couple of minutes, when we were both covered in soap, the cold water stopped. Apparently it wasn't just the hot water that stopped during the day. We later discovered that there were currently water shortages in Shimla. After our abortive showers we slept. Most of our time in India seemed to be spent not sleeping on overnight transport or catching up - or trying to catch up - on missed sleep. That's one reason you definitely need to take your time in India. That day Joanne was quite ill and I discovered that she had drunk quite a lot of the filtered water I'd rejected in Delhi, which I reckon was probably to blame.

The next day I left her in bed and went out to secure tickets to Manali, our next destination, and top-ups for our Indian mobile phone numbers. When I asked for the top-ups, the man in the shop told me to write down the two numbers. When he looked at them, he realised that they were not local numbers and confirmed that we had got the SIM cards in Mumbai. In that case, he explained, we would need to spend Rs351 “for full talk time”. I didn't know why, but I took his word for it and handed over the Rs702 which was far more than I thought we needed. He started tapping away on his phone, several times asking me to confirm what some number was. Not a very good system and very error-prone I thought idly. One number in particular he asked me about three times: an 8 or a 6? It's a six, I told him. Three times. Before I left the shop I got a text from Joanne thanking me for the credit. I was expecting a message from Vodafone saying that I too had credit, but it didn't come. The shop owner assured me that it had gone through and told me to come back later if there was any problem, so I headed back to the YMCA.

View from the YMCA

Much later than day Joanne was feeling a bit better and my credit had still not registered so we both went into the shop. After a bit of discussion we discovered that he had typed in 8 instead of 6. That's why he'd asked me three times, he said. Yes, I explained, that's why I'd told him 6 three times. He told us that there was nothing he could do because he had no way of contacting the Vodafone centre in Mumbai and local Vodafone would take more than a month to reclaim the credit, and that would only happen if the number he had added it to wasn't in use. I told him I couldn't believe that there was no way, but he insisted that there was nothing at all he could do. What a ridiculous system! I left furious, now certain that India will never truly compete with Western economies; how could they possibly rely on such obviously flawed procedures? The shop owner had kindly given me his card so I could call him the next day in case he was able to contact the recipient of my misplaced credit. If they are a good person they will transfer the credit to you, he assured me.

And that was Shimla. We didn't even visit Jakhu Temple, another Hanuman temple, where the monkeys supposedly frisk you for food or drinks, and for which several shops in Shimla sell “monkey sticks” for hitting them with. The next day we had to hike down the hill to get our bus to Manali because the public lift doesn't open that early in the morning.

written by  The Happy Couple on June 21, 2009 from Shimla, India
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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