It took three weeks to get our car out of customs. As we where late leaving SE Asia I was hoping to get in and out of India in about two weeks. That included seeing the things we wanted to see and crossing the country. It took three weeks just to get the car out of customs and for that time we were stuck in Calcutta. To say Calcutta is far from Paris is true both geographically and metaphorically. I avoided writing this for a while because I was so angry after it had finished that I didn't want to relive the experience. I am not going to try and document the entire passage of three frustrating weeks but hopefully you will get some inkling into the Indian bureaucratic mind and the magnitude of our frustration. We wasted no time on arrival into Calcutta and sought a freight forwarder on the same day, keen for a quick result. It normally takes a few hours or a day to clear a car that is already on the docks through customs in most countries. Sadly, through a recommendation, we where sent to the India First Freight Forwarding Company. A few days later it was the weekend and the lying terd informed us that it would take a few days after the weekend because Indian customs were very slow. We decided to go to Darjeeling for a few days by train rather than spend them in Calcutta.

When we got back, aside from being asked to sign blank pieces of paper (we'll fill the details out later they said), we where promised we could get our car tomorrow. Tomorrow we where promised tomorrow so we went to the Indian Customs house intending to do the work ourselves as best we could. This is where we discovered that the fucking freight forwarder hadn't even started. We had, inadvertently gone to a high ranking person in customs and our pathetic little freight forwarder, a Mr Pranjeet, came scurrying into the senior customs mans office to explain that he had been too busy to start on our job. So for a week and a half we had just been waiting. I was so furious. Sadly it wasn't easy to swap freight forwards or I would have done so there and then. We had to sit in the Indian Customs House for the rest of the day to ensure that progress was being made. It took a few more days but at last we were off to the port to get the car.

We travelled there and waited beside the port for our freight forwarders man to bring out our car. We waited until the end of the day but sadly it wasn't ready to be released by the end of the day. Customs are supposed to work ten till six but they only get to work at twelve and knock off at five and don't do much in between. Apparenty we would get our car tomorrow. We came back the next day and waited for a full six hours sitting on some rocks. There are all these older men there who just sat around that area all day. We would spend almost a week of waiting for an almost released car at this location and every day these old men would be there. We have white skins and are tall so they stared at us all day. They evidently had nothing better to do.

We went back and forth from the waiting area outside the port to the Indian Customs House to give our Freight forwarder a kick in the arse more times than I can remember. He needed it every time you wanted anything done. This has proven to be true for all of India. If you want something done you need to be there in person and make it happen. Even as I type this I am in a hotel in Mumbai where I am organising shipping our of India. I rang and emailed a week before hand but predictably got no reply, I went in and got promised a quote the following day, it never came even though I rang to confirm it would be coming. I must go in there everyday to ensure progress.

Our waiting place beside the port. We probably spent about thirty hours of our lives sitting here waiting, pushing things along. We had to be present to keep prodding or nothing happened.

We read lots of novels and drank some of the sweet tea from the street to help pass the time. The building we were waiting in front of is the 'Kolkata computerised collection centre' which is pictured on the right. There is that much carbon paper on the floor inside that it is falling out of the door and collecting in the gutter outside. There is so much symbolism in this picture, I really like it. Then we had a small complication that was partly our fault. One thing that Indians excel at is bureaucratic detail and they found a fault in our paper work. Customs noticed that the last four digits of our engine number didn't match the engine number on our paperwork. Clearly a previous owner had swapped the engine with another one of the same type. No other country had even bothered to look at the engine number. This was a massive problem for them. We would not be able to import the car. Eventually we had to get a letter from the AAA in Australia saying it was an oversight and then take that to the East India Motor Club and have them endorse it.

When we did finally get the car out of customs it had just enough fuel to drive about 500m before it died. Perhaps the port staff syphoned fuel out of it. Don't know. I was still damned happy to see it even konked out on the side of the road. We had some difficulty getting in restarted and predictably a crowd gathered. These ones where at least trying to help, offering with charades and explanations in Hindi various techniques they thought might work which were all the standard techniques for starting a carburetted car. I don't think they had had any exposure to fuel injection.

The amount of pettiness that we had to put up with and the numerous trips forward and backwards to Customs House and the port was really wearing us down. Once we went in with a form that had been stamped with rubber stamp and signed in two places on the one piece of paper. They wanted three stamps. So we have to catch a taxi right across town and then back again just to get a third stamp on the same piece of paper. The irony of it is that of course this is one those places in the world where Mad Max props could be driven on the street. All sorts of unroad worthy vehicles are driven around here. There were no practical concerns to importing our car, just bureaucratic ones.

Every cloud has a silver lining and there has been an unexpected benefit to this debacle. We aren't driving to Paris just to get to Paris but to learn about the countries we travel through. We learnt more about India in this three weeks than we ever would have from a million pictures of the Taj Mahal. This was true contemporary India. Pity it was so ugly.