kolkata taxi fare sealdah-->sudder st?

regrets if this is addressed elsewhere, but my several reconstituted threads came up empty...

i'm wondering if someone could provide a very general, ballpark, figure for how much a taxi should cost from the sealdah rail station in kolkata to the fairlawn hotel, on sudder street. this will be my first opportunity to deal with all the...um..."fun" i've been readng about selecting and securing a taxi in india, and i'd like not to be...er...taken for a ride.

thanks in advance.

I was in Kolkata last month and made that exact trip a few times.

I was with a local once and he bargained it down in animated Bengali to 50 rupees, although we walked away because he insisted it was outrageous to pay more than 40.

On my own, I ended up paying 83 rupees by the meter. It was night and the driver was confused as to where Sudder Street was, so the route was probably not optimal.

Another time, to make sure I made a train and simply not have any hassles I agreed in advance to pay 100 rupees to one of the cabbies from the line permanently waiting on Sudder Street. I knew this was not optimal, but I was just not in the mood for bargaining, 'surprises' en route, etc.

There is also what I believe is a prepaid taxi stand outside Sealdah Station, but the times I was there the line looked immense. For the amount of rupees involved (even with my non-existent bargaining skills) and the more-or-less one time nature of the expense I was usually more anxious to just get home...

Taxis work differently in different cities. In Kolkata, most taxis have working meters. If you try to arrange a price beforehand, and you're obviously not a local, they'll try to get the price as high as they can. If you say, in English, "use your METER," they will, and you'll get the metered price. If they refuse to use the meter, demand that they let you out.

The prepaid is probably the best option when it's your first time in Kolkata. You'll have to wait in line, but unless you're in a major hurry, waiting in line is not really the worst thing that could happen.

I agree with thirdreel - if you're coming from a place with a prepaid taxi stand and have some time, it probably represents for all practical purposes the best fare you could get. When I took the prepaid taxi from the airport to Sudder Street it was 208 rupees, and I never heard in the subsequent weeks (unscientific survey) of anyone who managed to get a cheaper fare on their own.

And for the rest of the city, using a cab's meter is definitely the best idea in general. I found the cab drivers in Kolkata to be basically friendly and unargumentative when one insisted that the meter be used.

Of course there is theory and then there is practice. Last November and early December was my first time in Kolkata, in fact it was really my first time out of the United States at all, so I was in a state of perplexity and uncertainty perhaps similar to yours. You will have the advantage, I assume, of having been in India for a while so you'll already have gotten accustomed to a lot of things.

Regarding the cabs in Kolkata:

Sometimes the meter worked out really well and I was surprised at how little the trip cost. The cab drivers really don't want or need hugs if you're feeling happy this way, but there is a lot of honesty in the city and you'll feel it.

However another time, after I had been there for a couple of weeks and knew my way around Kolkata a bit (from simply having walked over much of it), I could see after five minutes that the cab driver was taking a huge arc to get to the destination -- the equivalent of starting at 3 o'clock and driving clockwise down to 6 then up in order to end up 12 o'clock. His English wasn't any better than my Bengali, but I protested and he shrugged, pointing at the traffic. But he smiled and knew he was pulling a fast one and that, after a fashion, he had been caught. I wasn't pleased, but after grumbling a lot I paid the fare anyway.

Of course there were two almost inescapable problems I had as a first time visitor. First, I didn't know the city well enough to tell him the path he should take as soon as I got into the cab, which is what I might do in a familiar city if I sensed there might be a problem. And second, with only some simple Hindi and no Bengali I was in no position to argue with him in his native language if anything came up. Or even hear his story as to why he actually took the best path. It's the inevitable cost of not being a local and not knowing the language -- you will lose a dollar here and there. Unless one is willing to spend a few years learning to speak Bengali (well enough to argue with a local) and then another month committing the streetmap of Kolkata to memory, you'll have good trips and bad trips. If I got overcharged $10 throughout the time I was there, in the big-picture sense that it represented a better use of my time it was a good deal.

I was also once in a taxi in Kolkata where the meter looked like it was functioning when I got in, but then it proceeded to behave in a flipped out manner -- some of the red LEDs seemed broken, and then the numbers seemed to go backwards then forwards again... In theory you can say "let me out now", but given Murphy's Law it's night time and you're already somewhere you don't recognize and where you probably don't want to get out.

Also for the meters in Kolkata, there are (I remember reading somewhere) 2 different kinds, old and new, and for each kind there are different methods of calculating the final fare. I only saw the red LED kind, so perhaps in practice there's just one kind now. Anyway, from my experience, what one sees on the meter and what one actually pays are 2 inscrutably different things. There's a lower meter that, say, starts off at 10 rupees and increases slowly, and an upper meter that starts off at 0 rupees but goes up quickly with distance. When the trip ends the driver turns around tells you a number that seems to have nothing to do with the numbers on the meter.

Whether I was sometimes being ripped off, or at other times just couldn't figure the math (do you double the top and add the bottom? or do you multiply the whole thing by 1.4? or is it the square root of the top plus the cosine of the bottom?) who knows. Most of the time it was just fine and the drivers seemed honest and the amount seemed reasonable. In fact sometimes I got the impression that the cab drivers were more afraid of me and (perhaps) my ability to make their life hard by complaining than I was of them. Jobs are hard to come by in Kolkata, and I was told that a lot of the drivers are from Bihar, poorly educated, often having never driven a car before, and sometimes with less knowledge of Kolkata than I had. One driver had to get out and ask directions 3 or 4 times to find the Botanical Gardens across the river.

Also, I never figured out what the tipping rules were, and my practical+impractical conclusion as a visitor was that it didn't really matter. Life is short, these are real humans, some of them are obviously really nice, and if 20 rupees makes some guy's day, or I get ripped off a bit, big deal. I didn't go to India to fight or generate bargains. I made a loose tally, over the course of my month in India, of my potential inefficiencies, times I was overcharged, donations to beggars that some people would have advised me to skip, etc. Then I got home to the States I ended up spending that amount in a single day in completely forgettable fashion.

It's easy when you're in India to think in terms of rupees and not euros or dollars, and to get one's Irish up about things like not getting ripped off by cabs -- I certainly did. And no one's made of money -- it's always a good idea to have a handle on the typical prices and not be a fool about things. But there's a perspective to keep in mind too.

In the example of getting from Sealdah to the Fairlawn, as I mentioned earlier, in my experience, it ranges from 40 rupees if you've lived in Kolkata your whole life and you speak excellent street Bengali and are ready to shout, to 100 rupees if you're a tired American with no bargaining skills, little knowledge of the city, and no desire for confrontation. The meter, if it's working and you take a semi-reasonable route, will put you somewhere in the middle of those two numbers. I say if it's anywhere in that vicinity don't worry about it, unpack your stuff, and enjoy Kolkata!

If you take a minicab in London, you will discover back routes and ways around the traffic that you never knew existed even though you are a native.

Somehow it doesn't seem to work like this in Chennai: the drivers have their favourite main-road routes and they stick to them. They really don't like being told to go some other way --- and even refuse!

Auto drivers are different. They just want to get you there at minimum cost in time and petrol to themselves. I've even been driven through a private car park as a short cut! The only exceptions are if they have quoted a really silly price to a stranger and need to justify it, or they are out of their area and lost themselves!

thanks for the replies, all of which are very helpful. i suspect i'm just going to want to get to my hotel as quickly as possible, so will try my hand, fortitude, and constitution at getting a taxi myself.

cathal, an extraordinarily helpful post that truly resonates my own thinking. no one wants to waste money, be taken advantage of, or serve as fodder for a cab driver's evening yarns about the foolish tourist from whom he extracted sextuple his usual fare, but when i consider $10 NYC cab rides, $12 glasses of wine or other equally forgettable expenditures, well, i just can't worry too much. as you so beautifully reflected on the issue:

(emphasis supplied)

thank you again very much, cathal. may i PM you?

Of course -- I'd be happy if I could be of any help. My month was divided between Kolkata, a few days in the Sunderbans, and Darjeeling; and the thread which tied them together was that at any given moment I had absolutely no idea of what was going to happen in the next half hour. So if unexperienced experience is of any use, I'd be glad to share!

i was in india long enough that i eventually started thinking in rupees rather than dollars. the harder part is when you come home and you have to spend x amount of money for a glass of wine or whatever but you are still thinking in rupees.

it's the best kind, charles! i'll PM you. btw, i'll be dividing my time between sikkim, darjeeling, jaldhapara and kolkata, so you may have some helpful experience to share on darjeeling as well. a tres bientot...thanks again.

Cathal...I appreciated your attitude and your flair for expressing your very useful perspective! Since the original question mentioned the Sealdah train station...and I will be departing from there after one night in Kolkata...is there a good hotel (3-4 star) for a single woman in the vicinity of Sealdah? I haven't been able to figure out what part of town it is in.

We paid 70 rupees, with very little bargaining back in March.

Hi Gaorsk,

Thanks...

I'm not personally aware of any hotels in the direct vicinity of Sealdah Station. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of there there. It's brightly lit on the outside, like a stadium on game night, and quite crowded in the immediate blocks, but it seems to drop off instantly into somewhat featureless neighborhoods from the viewpoint of a tourist. Even though it would involve cabs to and from, it might be easiest to just go to Sudder Street where there are more hotel options and restaurants where one can talk to fellow travelers.

As the crow flies it's not particularly far from Sudder Street. If you're standing at Sudder Street and imagine it as the center of a clock, looking north, Sealdah Station would be on the rim at about 2:30, a couple of miles away. Nonetheless I remember it as being a 20 or 30 minute cab ride -- traffic is usually crazy and there are always a bunch of improvised detours weaving through narrow side streets. The general rule is that a cab is not allowed in an alley unless that alley is exactly the width of the cab.

If you go to Sudder Street you will be well within the endless bits of advice and discussion on this board as far as hotels go. I stayed for the most part at the Fairlawn and it was nice enough, but it's expensive by Kolkata standards and I mostly did it because I could reserve it in advance over the Internet, and having made that reservation it was the arbitrary catalyst for arranging all the other details of the trip.

Once I got there I was curious as to what other places were like and as part of the universal bonhomie of travelers, newfound friends and acquaintances are usually happy to let you see their current digs, or even more interestingly, provide moral support for them as they'd go up and down the street looking for a vacancy.

I was amazed at how much of a difference there was, generally speaking, in the rooms as you go in rupees from 200 to 400 to 800... In just reading Lonely Planet I never really got a sense that there was much of a difference-- everything seemed uniformly "clean" or "cozy" or "simple".

But a 200 rupee room, if everything in the hotel is full and especially if the man at the front desk gives brief, knowing glances at the houseboy before giving him the key, can be a shock. Once I found myself at 8am stepping over some locals still stretched asleep in the dark hallway by some arrangement with the management. Another room was up a rusty spiral staircase so narrow the railings were scarcely wider than my hips, and the room at the end of this journey was half-height, windowless, with a buzzing fluorescent light and a lonely gray fan -- sort of like Harry Potter's cupboard meets Midnight Express. I think the management itself would have been surprised if anyone took it.

For 400 rupees things improve perceptibly, although you might still be in camping mode using a bucket of hot water to wash up in the morning.

When you get to 800 rupees there are of course are no guarantees -- it could still be a dump, so you have to check everything out -- but the rooms tend to have some semblance to places even a typical tourist would call a hotel room. For example at that price range there's a place on Sudder Street called the Super Guest House which I never stayed at but I popped my head in a couple of times. And I thought "Wow, this is pretty decent. I could stay here." It's a narrow slice of a building with a pinkish faux marble entrance room and dark wood for the front desk and the doors to the rooms. The rooms seemed clean (and "cozy" and "simple"!) even if it's certainly not the Plaza. It's more like one of those efficient and anonymous places one finds within a block or two of Penn Station for businessmen and traveling salesmen. However it seemed pretty luxurious after being in Kolkata a bit!

The difference between 200 rupees (~$4.50) and 800 rupees (~$17.50) is a lot as far as budgeting strategies for a trip go, I know. I was just struck by what a difference spending $13 extra could make if one were so inclined.

To answer your question about lodging for a night, a place like the Super Guest House would be a place I'd feel comfortable steering my sisters to if they were going to be passing through Kolkata. I tried to stay there myself, but they never answered my email from Darjeeling! (fyi: super_guesthouse@hotmail.com ) -- but you might have better luck. I just ended up staying at a place a block further down on Kyd Street based on a recommendation I got on the train, but it wasn't much of a place.

I would think if you go with the mid-range places listed in LP for Sudder Street you'll feel comfortable, but as I said there's a world of advice here on the board regarding that, so I'll step out of the way...

that, cathal, was a lovely and engaging read! i could not have gotten more from it even if i'd needed accommodations advice!

Cathal...I agree with Janice...you are a remarkable writer! Thank you so much for your information. I will be your sister and contact the Super Guest House! It also helps to have your suggested alternative to look around Sudder Street. Thank you!