7/10/08 Today was quite quiet - we had to check out of our hotel at 10, so we went to the restaurant at Hotel Sheela and stayed there all afternoon until it was time for our taxi to leave for Tundla. We made a sortie out to stock up on drinks and snacks for the train as well. The station at Tundla was even more crowded than at Delhi and Agra, with hundreds of beggars and families sleeping on rugs on the platforms. I've never felt more stared at in all my life! Once on the train, we took it in turns to sleep, but what with the jolting of the train and hardness of the sleeping berths, I didn't get a wink of sleep all night. Dave managed to get some though.

8/10/08 There were a lot more beggars this time, who were quite persistant, and again, practically every time I looked up I'd catch someone shamelessly staring at me. The temperature was fine overnight, but for the last few hours in the afternoon of Wednesday it was drippingly hot. By the time we arrived at Howrah Station in Calcutta we were covered in a film of sweat and grime. We took the advice of the guidebook and went straight to the pre-paid taxi booth, ignoring all the taxi touts. Our hostel was even cheaper than in Agra, the equivalent of two pounds fifty per night, but our room and bathroom were bigger. The moment we got in, we both had long cold showers - it's never been so welcome! Our trousers and t-shirts were literally saturated with sweat. It was the evening by then, and we were both exhausted, so after our showers and clean clothes we went into a cheap nearby restaurant for dinner before going back to the hostel to bed.

9/10/08 After lunch we set off to go to the Indian Museum round the corner, only to find out that it was closed due to it being a public holiday. It turns out it was the last day of a 4 day Hindu festival called Durga Puja, which is celebrated with particular vigour in Calcutta. We carried on up the road to Victoria Memorial, passing entire families of beggars living, cooking, sleeping and eating in the street, some under homemade broken down shacks or covers and some without any cover at all. The scale of this was something we hadn't seen so much in Delhi or Agra. The Victoria Memorial is in the middle of a huge park called the Maidan, with a couple of roads bisecting it. We walked up one of these roads round to the entrance to the memorial and its gardens - there were lots of stalls on each side selling sweets, icecream, crisps, toys, limes/lime juice etc., and we noticed lots of horses and ponies tied up by the side of the road or being ridden on the grass. One was being shoed in the middle of the pavement. In contrast to Delhi and Agra, we didn't see any cows at all, surprisingly. However, at this point we noticed that there was an absolutely massive queue to get into the memorial, so we decided to go the next day instead, when it wasn't a public holiday anymore.

We walked back down the road to find the statue of Mahatma Ghandi (having already been past the one of Indira Ghandi.) We had some trouble finding it using the map in our guidebook, and as we made a detour through part of the Maidan a man started talking to us. We asked where the statue was, but instead of just telling us the way, he told us and then carried on walking with us. We starting getting suspicious of him, that he wasn't just being friendly but was expecting us to give him money or drinks in return for his help - we tried walking faster and then slower, but although walking a little distance away at times, we noticed he always kept fairly close to us. I was feeling a bit uncomfortable, and felt like telling him to go away, but I was too polite to do so! Eventually we arrived at the statue (surrounded by a few trees/bushes and some railings), and when we went inside he just stood outside waiting for us to come back out! We took a couple of photos, and then Dave noticed a gap in the railings on the other side of the statue which was (we thought) out of sight of the entrance, so under pretence of taking photos from that side, we slipped though the gap and legged it! We walked as fast as we could, across a busy road and though market stalls on the other side, hoping we had thrown him off. Eventually we sat down and looked at the map in the guidebook again - and who do you think turned up at our side, but our old friend! He wasn't aggressive, but just stood to the side of us. We ignored him, but he carried on standing there, before coming forward to show us something on the map. We knew our way back to our road now, so we stood up, Dave said 'Thanks!' loudly, and we turned round and walked away purposefully. Luckily, he didn't follow us this time! Due to the heat (it was just as searingly hot as in Delhi and Agra), we had cold showers as soon as we got back, and rested for a bit before having dinner at a cafe down the road.

10/10/08 we went to the Indian Museum in the morning - it's the oldest and largest museum in India. It had lots of different sections; archaeology, bronze, geology, physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, paintings, Egyptian, birds, reptiles and fish, and mammals. Dave liked the geology section best (there was a massive collection of rocks and minerals from other countries as well as India), and my favourite was the cultural anthropology (though I also liked the Egyptian, Indian paintings and the animals sections.) The cultural anthropology section was full of artefacts from the various different tribes from India, and information about how they live(d) - spears, daggers, bows, rings and bangles for noses, hands, ears and feet, household objects etc. I noticed that the population figures were based on the census of 1961, however, and there were no photographs from after the 1960s, so it was quite out of date - there was nothing to indicate how many from each tribe exist now, and if they exist at all, if their traditional way of life still persists. There was no section in the museum about modern Indian history; it turned out later that this is contained in the Victoria Memorial. In the mammals section (skeletons and stuffed animals), there were some jars with baby goats with 8 legs preserved in them - and we were surprised to see two jars with well developed human foetuses in them; one normal, and one deformed! That's something you wouldn't see in Britain. I wanted to see the decorative artwork section that appeared on the museum map, but when we got to it we found the door was chained up with no explanation.

After this, we had some lunch and then got a rickshaw up to the Victoria Memorial. This is pulled along by a man walking in front; something we didn't see in Delhi or Agra, where the rickshaws are cyle or auto. He asked for Rs100, but I haggled down to Rs 60 (I knew from the guidebook that it should only have been about Rs50.) He agreed to this before we got on, but when we arrived, he asked for Rs 100! He carried on insisting it despite us arguing that we had agreed on Rs 60 before we had got on, and he had agreed to it! In the end Dave got quite annoyed and raised his voice, and the man took Rs 70 - we had decided to give him 70 rather than the original 60 on the way, because it was so hot we felt a bit sorry for him. The Memorial was really good. There were lots of different galleries within it, and everyone was kept going round them clockwise by policemen with whistles! One section had photographs of Delhi from the 1940s to the late 1970s, one was about the history of Calcutta, one had documents relating to the Indian Independence, and there were cases of different sorts of swords, sabres, daggers and antique guns around as well.

We went into St Paul's Cathedral after this. It said on the noticeboard outside that they had services in English, Hindi, Bengali, Malay and (I think) Chinese. The cathedral looks like it's made entirely out of concrete, and is in need of a good clean. It was interesting looking inside, because it had lots and lots of plaques for important people who died since the early 19th century. When we got back we went on the internet for a while downloading photos and trying to update the blog, but the connection was so bad it wouldn't let us update without freezing. After dinner we tried again and the same thing happened, so we gave up and started packing for our flight to Bangkok the next day.