Travelling The Globe

February 6, 2004 1:47 pm General

This week has me in Bangalore visiting the Wipro folks. It’s good to be here, and the trip has been full of wonderfully vivid sights and sounds. The journey didn’t drag as much as I expected [Christchurch > Auckland > Sydney > Singapore > Bangalore], although I’ll admit it was nice to be able to split up the journey with a night over in Singapore.

Singapore didn’t really live up to my expectations, although I was only there for about 24 hours. The heat, humidity and crowds were overwhelming and I probably didn’t catch the best parts of the place. I’ll head back there for about 16 hours on the way back, so it will be a good opportunity to change my mind.

By contrast, Bangalore has been amazing so far, even if I haven’t stepped much outside the hotel since I arrived. I stepped off the plane to a pretty quiet badly lit airport with very little concern over security. It was a refreshing change. Outside the building, things changed rapidly and I was confronted with a huge whirlwind of sights, sounds and smells – a gallery of taxi drivers all waiting on their passengers, people brushing the dust off the pavements, a woman begging, children playing, rickshaws dodging pedestrians with a constant blur of various horns. The traffic is insane here – it seems like there is some sort of spatial tetris game being played, while respecting the fact that some vehicles are bigger than others.

Tommorrow is an early start at about 6am to go down to Mysore for the day – looking forward to meeting old and new faces.

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