Taking foreign tourists for a ride

Two of the three women were French, who had come for a yoga retreat in Mysore

It was two months ago that we were in a B&B in Chennai. When we came to the breakfast table there were already three women occupants. As we sat at the other end of the long table we overheard their conversation. Two of the women were French, who had come for a yoga retreat in Mysore and the other woman was Dutch, who was on a four-month biking tour of India.

My ears naturally perked up as she elaborated on her plans. She would start from the South and travel north up to Sikkim and then take the road to Ladakh through Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir. She had been on a conducted bike tour of Ladakh years ago but that was “with cars following with luggage and food”. 

She had promised herself then that she needed to be alone carrying her own baggage when she rode in India again. So she negotiated with the tour operator to ship her an Enfield Bullet to Chennai the next time she could take off from her work in Netherlands to ride through India. 

When I heard her route details I told her that on her way to Sikkim from Kolkata she could make Santiniketan her first halt and she was welcome to bunk with us for the night. We exchanged phone numbers and left.

We soon left Chennai and of course I forgot all about this breakfast encounter. Till last week when I got an SMS from her asking me whether my invitation was still open. She was in Kolkata and would like to spend the next night in Santiniketan. I sent her our address and she appeared the next afternoon guided by her GPS.

Knowing that she was coming we had invited Bullet enthusiasts in Santiniketan to come and meet her and hear her travel stories. They came, they examined her bike, were curious about the J&K number plate and asked many technical questions.  They asked what she did if she had a breakdown. All that Janneke said was that she just rode and hardly had a clue about much else. Whenever there was a problem in India she had always found a friendly mechanic. Bullet enthusiast can read her experiences on www.ontheroad2om.nl

Starting out from Chennai she had gone to Puducherry, then driven through to Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha to get to Kolkata. While most of her stays in other states in hotels and home stays had been pleasant, she was in for a surprise when she entered West Bengal. From Bhubaneswar when she was going to drive to Kolkata she had chosen to break journey at Digha (a beachfront in the East Midnapore district of West Bengal).

As a single traveller she always booked her accommodation in advance and arrived at the Digha hotel by 4.30 pm. But she was told that the hotel could not accommodate single women travellers. She was surprised at this new rule, which she had not encountered in the rest of India. She then tried many other hotels to be told the same thing. Till some hotel informed her that she might be accommodated if she got police permission.

A little alarmed by the fact that it was nearly six in the evening and she still had no accommodation she went to the police station. Where suddenly two men arrived and the police told her that she could go to one of their hotels. She did. It was far more expensive than the one she had booked and even her naïve foreign brain could figure that some money had exchanged hands. In fact, when she checked in she met an Australian tourist, who had the same fate.

We, the residents of Mamata Banerjee’s West Bengal could only hang our heads in collective shame.