Your Most Frightening experience in India?

Ikuru

Hey whats Your Most Frightening expirience in India? Or weird or strange?

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seventies'hippy

Being busted in Manali & spending a couple of weeks in Kulu jail in 1973, I probably would have been there longer but another english guy who was rounded up at the same time paid my 900rp fine when we went to court.
It wasn't really a terrible experience in fact once we'd got settled into kulu it was Ummm, ok, plenty of charas to smoke, which was all that seemed to matter anyway in those days. There was about ten of us foreigners all in the same room, all for being either busted or for overstaying their visa. Quite a camoraderie developed between us and was often reminised about months/years later when we bumped into each other again in pushkar or goa or someplace,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
I guess looking back that It was just a semi official baksheesh collection to boost the local coffers.
The visa violators, where always taken to the pakistan border & deported,
everyone else eventually paid their fines & walked away with nothing in our passports to say what had happened.

vistet

Jammed for hours at 5000+ altitude on the Manali-Leh road, fellow passenger slipping in to unconsciousness after ataxia & vomiting, 18 months old baby who stops crying, Indian officers laughing at the spectacle of angrezis & Indian civilians struggling to clear the road... and not feeling too well myself.

Well, we all made it to Pang alive , eventually.

Bryan

Seems to be a lot of threads just now focussing on your worst experience in that this or the other
Wierd how overtime you see trends in the threads ..IM trully is an ever changing evolving beast ...Quite fascinating

Sorry completly off subject ...I think I'll refrain from sharing on this one ...
70s nice story by the way ...

Bryan

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For a' that, an a' that,
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Ikuru

I would say my worst expirience was on my first trip, ended up renting a house in goa with some guys who eventually turned out beeeing some full on junkies, allmost killing eachother over some "bown suggar" spilled on the floor... I left them and the house behind and went to bombay...

Later on I went back and found out one of them had been on a motorbike really stoned, he hadsmashed in to a jeep and cracked hes head open, lost one eye... another "friend" from thoes times I found out later on had hung himself down there...

I think you attract this things. On my last trip I had nothing of the sort... But for sure there are WEIRD people living in Goa... plenty of scarry and weird stuff there....

Ikuru

I guess one of the most scary things happening to anyone traveling in asia is getting in trouble with people scaming you or with the Law...

Dr Funkenstein

Waking up on a Delhi bathroom floor after blacking out due to dysentery-induced dehydration. I was travelling on my own so if I hadn't come around no-one would've found me for days.

Fortunately the thought of this gave me the adrenaline jolt I needed to get myself the medical attention I desperately needed. Not just one of the scariest things to happen to me in India but one of the scariest moments of my life.

I'm a bit more careful about where I eat these days ...

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RastaAdmi

Taking a lesiurely ride in a boat on GangaMa, Varanasi with a middle aged Indian lady who promptly shed her sari to try and entice me get jiggy with it all of 300m from Dasashwamad Ghat (spelling?) at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Stretch marks and all........I didn't by the way.

shpatel

I was backpacking with a group of people somewhere in between the road from Sangla to Tabo when all of a sudden I start feeling these tiny pebbles hitting my head. I looked up and froze at the sight of boulders sliding down toward us. One of the group members yelled "RUN!!!!!!". After a quick prayer to Krishna I started running with my 40 lb pack as fast as I could. All the while I could hear the rocks sliding down the mountain side. I finally made it to a clearing but a colleague of mine wasn't so lucky and had gotten the skin on is hand split wide open when a rock hit him.

Luckily we were a medical team and could attend to him immediately. I honestly thought I was going to die that day. Scariest moment in my life

vinayverma

I had to travel from Hubli(karnataka) to Goa( Vasco) on a dreaded day in December 92. I had no clue that due to communal roits, it was declared a curfew in Hubli and I left my University hostel to travel to Goa to meet my friends from England in Goa as I was going to be their guide.
I reached the bus stand and there was no bus to & from Goa...I wasted 1 hour and then went over to the ticket booth to know that in next 15mins there will be a curfew and then threre will be no buses atall.
I went to a restaurant nearby at 8.00PM and had one dosa while I speak to the owner about making it to Goa. He said there is a press jeep that leaves for Goa at 12 midnight from bus stand and the driver takes passengers. But How am I going to stay awake and avoid the curfew till 12?
anyway by 9.00PM police forced a closedown on the restaurant. the waiters warned me not to venture out but I had to make it to Goa so I was on street with nowhere to go. I befriended some police guys who were from Bengal (I know bengali) and I was standing next to them. they even escorted me if I had to go to pee/loo.
Till 11.00PM it was all fine, when we suddenly hear loud noise and see a group of 300 people with fire torches and all sort of clubs, knifes and others walking into the bus stand with intention of burning it down. I find my fellow police guys getting into an act and preparing for teargas and cordoning of the areas, but they were more in number and high on passion.
The police had no choice but to immediately move to water canon and then to firing in air. I was there all the time as a mute spectator calculating my next move or finding the next alley I'm going to run through.
However, things were brought under control but not before the earth lost 4 lives in front of my eyes. I felt as bad the police guys who shot them felt.
finnaly the press jeep turned up and I was escorted to the jeep by the police guys and I made it to Vasco by 4AM to meet my friends in time. But I was speachless when they asked me how I made it to Goa with curfew in Hubli.
but then thats India.

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Rob_The_Pom

I have two. I think I've mentioned both before on here.
One, nearly being killed in avalanche in the Sangla Valley. The picture in my gallery shows it quite graphically how lucky my friends and I were. It was utterly terrifying.

Two, I had a Bhang Lassi in Pushkar - as well as bhang, it contained ketamine and probably some LSD (I didn't know this - I'm not interested in class A chemicals at all). I tripped for hours, in a really vivid and disturbing way - lots of nasty hallucinations.
It was very nasty and I thought I was going to die. I haven't touched any narcotic since and nor will I again.

Cheers

RTP

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Judi

Sorry - but this is going to be a long one ....

I thought my first visit to India was going to be my last trip anywhere when my husband and I were caught up in crowds trying to cross the bridge from Platform 12 to Platform 1 on New Delhi station in January last year!

We were due to take the Rajdhani Express down to Mumbai and took an autorickshaw from our hotel to the station. He dropped us as Platform 12 - the opposite side of the station from the Reservations Office, notice boards etc. So we decided to cross the bridge to get to the main part of the station. However, as we tried to cross the bridge we became stuck in a tide ( a very, very slow moving tide, I might add) of humanity - all intent on getting to different platforms and moving in different directions. These hundreds of people were then joined by more hundreds coming up at either side from all the other platforms. The crush was truly horrendous. Those Brits amongst us might remember the Hillsborough football disaster in Sheffield when all those people were killed in the crush? That's what I honestly thought would happen to us.

It was strangely quiet considering there were so many people caught up in an uncomfortable and frightening situation. Sure, people were talking, but the only people who seemd to be shouting were Ian (said husband) who had lost sight of me and was frantic that I would lose my footing and fall, and me - losing it with everyone about me, I'm afraid. Sure enough, I did slip. on a piece of plastic, but the young guy behind me (closer than even some of my most intimate acquaintances have ever been ) just pushed me upright, grabbed hold of my bag, and supported both me and my luggage until the crowd thinned slightly and Ian dragged me to the side of the bridge and safety.

There was a curious absence of coolies on the bridge, and also, when we got to the other side we saw railway officials with two-way radios co-ordinating the whole thing, so it seemed that it might be an everyday occurance. Later, we discovered two things: the f*****g train left from Platform 12 , and the coolies never bothered to use the bridge - or at least not in the normal way - they simply walked across the tin roof!

Btw - we didn't go back across the bridge to get to the correct platform - we took another autorickshaw round the town!

skell

Last December, we were hiking up to a Toda Village near Ooty when I started to feel sick. We spent the night there in rather primitive circumstances. The bathroom was the forest on the other side of the cow pasture. It was below freezing after the sun went down. I spent most of the night running across that pasture trying to get to the trees in time, stepping in whatever...... There was no running water to clean up with. All-in-all, a truly miserable (though not life-threatening) experience!

But - that was one night out of 7 1/2 wonderful weeks!

sticky

Isnt it funny that sometimes the seemingly most horrific or difficult experiences can teach you the most, end up being the most rewarding, or give you the greatest sense of achievement.

A girlfriend and I got followed for more than 2 days, accros several towns by a guy in Morocco. He really freaked us out, so we jumped off the bus in a random town and jumped on another random bus to a different random town. Stuck in the middle of nowhere in a town with no realy tourist infrastructure (1 buss a day, no guest houses etc). The local coffee shop owner looked after us, introduced us to the vilage elders, gave us a place to stay etc. one of the best experiences of my life.

Picked up a hitch hiker in Morocco in dodgy circumstances, ended up being invited to spend the night before ramadan feast (that night) with his family.

Got stuck in the jade dragon mountains in southern china, getting very dark, very cold and very hungry. The minibus we had aranged to pick us up at the end of our hike failed to turn up. No where to stay, and unable to communicate to expalin our trouble. A local vilager took us to a local english teachers house (amazing to think that a small vilage of about 150 people had one!), she took us in, rang up to arange transport, fed us and gave us tea, we met here family and had a great time.

I cant wait to get to India do it all there.

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nedhopkins

I was feeding a group of cows the last of a bag of peanuts that I'd bought just outside Jaipur's Monkey Temple. Their bull sauntered over, edged his way between the cows, and -- so fast I didn't have time to react -- bowed his head and gored me. I fell to the ground; the bull was about to come at me again when my autorickshaw driver chased him away with a stick.

Thanks to the heavy clothing I was wearing and to the fact the bull hadn't had space enough to charge me, he didn't break my skin. But what I thought at first was only a bruise turned into a huge haematoma. I was treated for it -- world-class treatment, in fact -- at the Apollo Hospital in Chennai a few days later.