Photographers Pilgrimage in India

Tah Mahal. Greatest monument ever build for Love

I tried to get as much information as possible when I started preparing for my India trip. The advice varied a lot as you could imagine. A good friend said to me that nothing can prepare you for India, it’s just sensory overload and boy was that an understatement.

My main concern was the food and getting Delhi Belly. I couldn’t afford to spend a week in bed with all the work we had planned. I got really good advice not to buy food off the street vendors and only eat in restaurants at the hotels. This still turned out to be very cheap with an average meal costing about twenty rand. We didn’t have any serious troubles at the end of the day, except at a Mc Donald’s where two members of the team got a little bit of Belly Delhi. Fortunately they recovered very quickly. The diet was very challenging, you had to eat Roti’s three times a day and the worst was the no MEAT. I phoned my wife every day and asked her to stock up on meat for when I got back home.

It turned out that my main concern was the least of our troubles. TRAFFIC was the worst. On the way to the hotel from the airport we were involved in four fender bender accidents. It is just plain bizarre, they manage to squeeze six lanes into a four way lane freeway. Among all the chaos you will get a guy on a bicycle travelling against the flow of traffic. Buses, Tuc Tuc’s, Trucks, Rickshaws, Cows and Elephants just stop where ever they want to, our  South African MinibusTaxi’s felt like heaven when I got back home. I think words can’t describe the experience. Fortunately Top Gear has put a short version on Youtube for us, with all the stats of how crazy these roads are, just click on the link and enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ8SxeL2CmA

We were going to work in two of the holiest cities in India where Hindu and Sikh people go on their pilgrimages. There are just no words to describe the amount of people that live in India. You understand that a billion people live in India and you understand that a billion people is a lot. Wrong, there is no space to move, it feels like when you exit a big event at a stadium. You are squashed the whole time. Where ever you go, it’s hot, sweaty and you have no room to move or even to think. The funny thing is that you kind of feel safe in all this chaos.  I will elaborate more on this in the next post.

Golden temple located in Amritsar Punjab, is the famous pilgrimage place for Sikhs in India.

Another big problem for us was the heat, we experienced temperatures of up to 50°C for days on end. The heat was really tough but it was not our worst problem. We would keep all our camera gear in an air-conditioned room. When we took the gear out on a shoot, all our lenses would mist up due to the huge temperature difference. Eventually we had to go through a process of heating our camera gear up slowly, by leaving them in a non air-conditioned room and then under a tree before we could start shooting. This took about 40 minutes every day. But at the end of the day we got amazing photos.