The airport at Kolkata was a civilised affair. We were flying in and meeting our car that was being shipped from SE Asia. For those who came in late it was necessary to ship our car from SE Asia to India because of some impassable geographical obstacles. In order to get from SE Asia to India you must pass though either Burma or China. The military junta in Burma flatly refuses to allow anyone to drive across their country and china wanted US$12,000 in permits for the privilege combined with the sort of restrictions that Julian Assange might be able to empathise with. The result of which is that we shipped our car from SE Asia to India.

I expected chaos and endless touts and taxis and 'porters' and general chaos but there was none of that. It turns out that you are not allowed in to the airport unless you have a ticket so it was all very business like and clean inside. Then we hoped into a taxi and wholly shit. I am reasonably well travelled but I have never seen a place like this. Kolkata is a place where life is lived on the street in full view of everyone. Like people live in houses that have no walls. It's been a very hard place to try and capture with a camera. There isn't really an touristy sites to point your lens at, you just sort of immerse yourself in Kolkata and try and take it in.

There are some pretty unique sites in kolkata. It is the only city I have ever been too where you can be wandering through the centre of town and see a herd of animals just sort of living there, eating whatever they can find. I found a herd of goats and a drift of pigs on the same day. Homeless dogs just wander around in large numbers, always looking sad and bedraggled. They eat whatever they can find. Occasionally you see a sacred cow but rarely in the city centre.

Of all the things we will remember about Kolkata there are two things that stand out. One is the fiasco of getting our car out of customs, which I will mention below, and the other is the filth and the stench. There are no real bins in Kolkata, the locals treat the city itself like an open bin and the litter is everywhere. They also pee and even worse in the street and the city smells like your standing next to a poorly maintained public convenience. Your nose will definitely help you find a toilet if you need one.

Spitting is also a normal part of everyday life here. Men, and it's only men, spit incessantly. The road is covered in spit like a car parked under a tree is covered in bird terds. Occassionally you see red spit coming from peoples mouths and you wonder how much blood is in it. It's disgusting. The garage we walked past regularly changes oil and just dumps the old oil on the dirt and litter outside his workshop. No attempt to collect it and ensure it was properly disposed off, just left there.

One morning we woke up and there had been heavy rainfall which is to be expected as we are in to the monsoon season and large tracts of the city where knee deep in water. The drainage was clearly very Indian and simply not up to the task. The result of which is that all that pee and spit and shit and everything else floated to the surface and we had few options but to walk in it. Careful tip-toeing through the shallower parts in our Gore-Tex shoes worked until a bus came past and created a wake that flooded our shoes. Kolkata is a filhy place.

There are still some special places though but you have to look to find them. Flury's is a restaurant/cafe that has an interior that seems to encapsulate the vision of the colonial sophistication. The desserts are good but we needed to use our imagination to pretend that the coffee was worthy of it's surrounds. Still a great place to 'escape' from the intensity of Kolkata. We started drinking tea instead.

Kolkata is also famous in India for it's rich intellectual traditions and a visit to the famous Indian Coffee House at the Kolkata university was a treat. There isn't really anything special about the building itself - if it were in Australia you would say the student guild had let the place slide but there is a long tradition of intellectual conversation in the place and the coffee was remarkably good and cheap to boot.

I think I had about five coffees there and it was one of the few places where people didn't stare at us all the time. We took the opportunity to reflect on what we were seeing and began to articulate an theory that had been slowly forming in my mind about why Kolkata is the way it is. I suspect poverty is not the reason. Hopefully I'll get time to write more about this later on.

Vehicles in Kolkata.

I have tried to find some nice architecture to include on the page. This basically means finding things that the British built as the colonial architecture seems to be the only nice buildings in Kolktata. I also found this sculpture. It had sort of been hidden in plain view in the middle of a roundabout. Hidden because the people, pedestrians and motorists, who are negotiating the insanity of the roundabout can't spare their eyes for a second for any non-essential viewing. Thus no one really sees it and it's actually quite beautiful. It also doesn't seem to belong here. It's artistic and clean, airy and happy and just looks foreign in Kolkata. Maybe like a little oasis for you eyes? I enjoyed it anyway. The blue haze isn't my amateur photography, it's just the air quality.

One of the few attractions in Kolkata is the Victoria monument. The poms built it in honour of the queen and it is a slice of England smack in the middle of Kolkata. It's genuinely beautiful and the gardens that surround it look like they have been transplanted from the UK. It's one of the few places in Kolkata that isn't crowded and filthy.

Random shots from around Kolkata.