TRAVEL
Village walk
The gentle attributes of the villagers in India that truly inspired me were their simplicity, their generosity, their respect, and their good humour.
by Peter Walker
F
ear churned my stomach as I left my hotel room in central India to walk for just three days to
Ujjain, one of the four holy cities where a sangam, or ‘meeting of rivers’, marked the site of the biggest religious gathering in the world, the Hindu Khumba Mela. What I knew of India was just a spot above nothing after flying into Goa, spending a little time at a backpacker hostel and then travelling by sleeper bus with my new friend Rittam to Maheshwah in central India. I had virtually no local language beyond hello, goodbye and thank you, no idea of custom, no knowledge of the terrain, and a clear warning from Rittam that a white person walking alone would almost certainly face violence, theft, and trickery – and even perhaps lose their life. Not exactly an encouraging
beginning, yet I was determined to walk a good portion of India before I returned to Australia as a part of my Walking Our World pilgrimage. I have a theory that people are essentially good all over the world, so to withdraw from my walk on the basis of a few warnings would completely invalidate my testing of that theory. Risk or not, I was determined to walk. Rather than try to find my way through
byways of the city to the main road, I hailed a motorised rickshaw to navigate the streets and laneways to the temple that marked the start of the Indore- Ujjain road. After about a 15-minute journey under overpasses, alongside busy freeways, between markets and tiny shops, across railways and down narrow laneways that had me thinking I was never going to reach my destination, we popped out onto a main road and
44 MAY 2017
there was the temple, towering above us as the cab skidded to a stop. I climbed out, dragged my backpack
with me, retrieved my walking staff, paid the driver his 250 rupee and an extra 100 (about $2) which was received with great and demonstrated gratitude, then said thank you in my poor Hindi. He drove off with a smile and a wave. I began to take stock of the walking journey ahead of me. Lining the wide, straight road that
stretched to a dusty, smoky horizon were hundreds of market stalls, manned by dark, thin Indian men selling fruit and vegetables, clothing, small hardware items, kitchen and household clutter, and a myriad of trinkets and religious icons. Already the appearance of a Caucasian man was drawing attention and I saw men squinting in the hazy sunlight at me – a tall, bearded, white man in khaki trousers, wielding a big wooden walking staff and a grubby red
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