[Assam] Rustic tourism in India

[Ram Sarangapani]

Netters,

Many of us have had the opportunity to either live in any one of the idyllic
villages in India. Many of us grew up in rural settings. Being very much a
'townia' , I often envy those of who have had the experience of having spent
a part of their lives in rural Assam.

While at college, a friend of mine & I stayed for about a month at a small
village called 'Pokua' near Nalbari.  It was a 2-mile walk to Pokua from a
non-descript Line-bus stop. It was one of the most memorable, educational,
and down-to-earth experiences I've had.

Lights were out (whether you liked it or not) at dusk (except for the
kerosene sakis (lamps), and mornings meant arising at sunrise. Very much
like this tourist here, I too had the oportunity to wade through knee-length
paddy fields - and always scared if a 'pheti xaap' (cobra) would get to you.
My friend's ancestral home, was a typical Assamese rural home. It had its
own pond - where you could fish, and of course lots of trees, hay stacks,
spinning wheels, and a barn - complete with a few cows and goats.  Right in
the middle of the home was a courtyard. As expected, everyone knew everyone
else, and news (even from nearby villages travelled fast), and there was
a steady stream of visitors. I remember these visitors would just stop by,
probably to take some rest, get out from the sun, and most certainly to get
some hot tea & paan tamul.

I hope Pakua has remained the same, and I hope it has kept it's innocence.
These days, whenever we get a chance, we visit relatives at Uttar Guwahati -
that is as close as we get to a taste of rural life.

Assam has some great villages, and maybe some Assam villlages can open their
homes, hearts and hearths to tourists across the globe.

--Ram


http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/travel/08journey.html?scp=5&sq=India&st=cse



 Journeys
Villagers in India Open Their Homes  Brian Sokol for The New York Times

The village of Samthar, in West Bengal, offers homestays.

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 By JONATHAN ALLEN
Published: March 8, 2009
 Skip to next paragraph<http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/travel/08journey.html?scp=5&sq=India&st=cse#secondParagraph>
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Staying
in the Real India<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/03/08/travel/0308-india_index.html>

THE jeep had disappeared around the bend, and all the villagers who had
disembarked with me had shuffled off to their homes. Night was falling, the
cicada buzz was rising, and I began to get that panicky feeling that the
city-coddled might experience upon finding themselves suddenly alone on the
roadside in a remote village in the lower Himalayas of West Bengal with no
idea where to go.

Before my panic escalated, a young woman wearing a black jacket over a
fluorescent-yellow salwar kameez appeared. She said her name was Pushpa, and
told me to follow her on what turned out to be an ankle-jarring trek down
the steep, stony tracks that make up the byways of Samthar village. We
lurched downwards for 10 minutes or more, passing the occasional blue
barnlike house, my apprehensions lulled by the slow pendulum sweep of her
plait against the back of her jacket.

We passed through a high corridor of maize and arrived at a stone building
with a pitched roof of corrugated aluminum. This simple structure was the
reason I had ended up here rather than any of the other 638,364 or so
villages in India<http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/asia/india/overview.html?inline=nyt-geo>:
Samthar is one of a small but growing number of Indian villages offering
homestays to tourists.

Waiting outside in the cooling dusk was Pushpa’s father, Krishna Kumar
Bhujel, wearing two button-down shirts, a tweed jacket and a woolly hat with
a bobble that wobbled with a short delay after the rest of him. His face was
crinkled with old smiles. Pawitra, his wife, came over and daubed a greeting
of sticky purple rice to my forehead, beamed and wandered off.

Then, along with a couple of Pushpa’s eight siblings, we creaked up the
wooden staircase and sat on the veranda, which overlooked sweeping stairways
of golden rice terraces edged with balustrades of bamboo and banana trees.
In the distance, should ever the clouds dissolve, was the snow line.

We chatted about our families in a pidgin of English, Hindi and Nepali as
Pushpa brought up a tray of biscuits with tea plucked from the nearby
Darjeeling<http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/asia/india/darjeeling/overview.html?inline=nyt-geo>hills.
Pushpa and her family belong to the tenth of humanity who live in
India’s villages. The other nine-tenths hardly ever visit. Good excuses are
getting harder to come by, as cheap guestrooms have opened up in dozens of
villages, almost all with the help of local charitable agencies or, more
recently, the Indian government and the United Nations Development Program.

“The look and feel of these places is very different from a five-star
hotel,” Leena Nandan, an official in the tourism ministry, told me after my
trip, a delicate way of saying that guests wanting a shower will often find
themselves presented with a bucket of hot water. “Once that understanding
and appreciation is there, I think visitors like going under and getting to
know the people. People are at the heart of this.”

The journey to Samthar from the nearest town is a five-hour drive along
winding, jungly mountain tracks packed into a shared jeep in a
thighs-kissing squash with your new neighbors. After we had pulled into
Samthar, a man remained in the back of the jeep looking dazed and sad as
blood gelled his hair in a spreading sticky patch, secreted from a wound
punched in by a particularly vicious bump in the road. Another passenger — a
local nurse named Mary — made her diagnosis: “He’s drunk,” she said in
English, scrunching her face in disapproval. “Chang!” she sighed, which
sounded like it could be idiomatic Nepali for “Ah, c’est la vie”.

Chang, it turned out, was actually the region’s homebrewed millet beer:
sweet on the tongue, but it sometimes sours village relations.

Krishna and I had a couple of pints amicably enough on my first night, each
sucking on a bamboo straw slotted through the lid of a heavy metal tankard,
playing cards with a pack so softened with age it was beyond shuffling.

But I learned that things often end badly after a night of chang drinking.
One afternoon, I accidentally made an appearance at a meeting of the village
council, which was cooling a chang-fired dispute. Moments before I barreled
into the council hall, the sarpanch, the village’s elected leader, had ruled
on a row between two families who sat sternly facing each other across the
room, scythes at their feet.

Pranay, a local government official, filled me in. He explained that this
was a routine case: the accused was ordered to hand over 51 rupees, about
$1, to the complainant’s family for saying, while drunk, things he should
not have said.

“Sometimes there’s a killing out in the fields and the murderer runs away,
but this is once in a blue moon,” Pranay said. “How long are you staying in
the village for?”

“Just a few days,” I said. “Why, is there a blue moon coming up?”

“Only a few days?” he said, appalled. “You have to stay at least two or
three months to enjoy this place, to even begin to understand it. What are
you going to learn in three days?”

The principal activity for guests at village homestays is observing and
joining in the humdrum rhythms of village life. For instance, I helped
Krishna harvest rice: he gave me his sickle and I amateurishly cut down
three kindling-dry bunches. Nearby, one of his sons was spreading cow dung
on the ground using both his hands. He beckoned me to join in. I didn’t.

I soon neglected my chores. It was far more fun to be shown around the
village by Pushpa. Between house calls, I got stuck in traffic jams with
goats and their herders coming in the opposite direction on narrow sloping
tracks. Technicolor butterflies lollopped by as big as dolled-up bats. I
sometimes stopped to inspect giant spiders, bodies the size of blackened
plums, as they floated in midair against vast Himalayan backdrops, but never
for too long, figuring that if they could string up a web between trees more
than five yards apart they could just as easily pounce on my face.

We visited a friend of Pushpa who lives in Samthar’s Christian enclave in a
home decorated with pictures of the pope, where we discussed our young
host’s crush on Prashant Tamang, a Darjeeling native who won “Indian Idol.”
After that we sat around an anvil with a blacksmith, who said he mostly
makes sickles, but, because everyone in this village of farmers already had
a set of sickles, business was slow.

Later, I met Pushpa’s uncle on a track that he himself had helped scratch
out of the mountainside. He described the equation of village life: “The
weather’s better here, the air is cleaner, the people here are the best,” he
said in Hindi. “But there’s less money to be made here. Much less.” For the
Bhujels, at least, things are changing. Back home, Deo, Pushpa’s teenage
cousin, said he wanted to be a grass cutter when he grows up, even though
grass cutting is already part of his morning chores. Pushpa, who is in her
early 20s, hesitantly said she wanted to be a doctor.

But later, while cooking dinner, Pushpa, whose mother married at 16, spoke
with more conviction. “I will have my own success first, and only after that
get married,” she said in English with a husky laugh. Her smile never fully
fading, she served the rice and vegetables to me and her father at the
table; then she served seconds; and only then, once the men’s plates were
cleared, in keeping with the traditional rules of womanhood here, did she
eat, sitting on the floor by the stove.

*VISITOR INFORMATION*

*HOW TO GET THERE*

>From New Delhi<http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/asia/india/new-delhi/overview.html?inline=nyt-geo>,
Jet Airways (www.jetairways.com), Indian Airlines (indian-airlines.nic.in)
and Kingfisher Air (www.flyairdeccan.net) fly to Bagdogra Airport near
Siliguri, starting at about $200. The airport is about four or five hours in
a taxi from Kalimpong, the nearest town to Samthar.

*Gurudongma Tours* (91-3552-255204; www.gurudongma.com) runs the homestay,
and can also arrange overnight stays in Kalimpong and onward transport to
Samthar; contact Catherine Pradhan Lobo at (91) 94340-62100 or Jimmy Singh
at (91) 94340-47273. Two families in Samthar and a third family in a nearby
village now offer homestays, costing 2,250 rupees (about $42 at 53 rupees to
the dollar) per person per night, including fresh home-cooked meals and
water that has been boiled and filtered.

*OTHER HOMESTAYS*

*Himalayan Homestays* (91-1982-250953; www.himalayan-homestays.com) puts
guests up with families in the sun-flooded stone cottages of Ladakh, one of
the Himalayas’ more spectacular corners. Rates start at about $12 per
person.

The *Indian tourism ministry’s* village homestay project is the most
ambitious. Its Web site (www.exploreruralindia.org) lists 28 villages from
the high Himalayas to the humid rice paddies of
Kerala<http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/asia/india/kerala/overview.html?inline=nyt-geo>,
all offering varying degrees of austerity. Be prepared to encounter
confusing development jargon (“hardware” loosely translates as buildings,
“software” means people) when speaking with the nongovernmental
organizations that arrange your trip.

*PRACTICALITIES*

Leena Nandan, joint secretary at the tourism ministry, recommends that
guests stick to bottled water, which is usually available to buy onsite.
Cooks have been trained in food hygiene at government-run sites and told to
go easy on the spices unless otherwise asked; meals tend to be fresh-cooked
local produce, and are often
vegetarian<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/v/vegetarianism/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.


The guestrooms in Samthar have electricity, en-suite bathrooms with
Western-style toilets and sinks with running water, unlike most homes in the
village, and buckets of hot water are lugged up to your room for bathing;
some other sites may be more basic, with kerosene lamps, indoor squat
toilets and jugs of water in place of the toilet paper that strikes many
Indians as a frivolous Western habit.

Your doctor will advise you on vaccinations and malaria prophylaxis; Odomos
is an effective and cheap mosquito repellent cream easily available in
India<http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/asia/india/overview.html?inline=nyt-geo>.