Best to stick to the Indian food
Central Districts cricket captain Will Young is providing a tour diary while in India with the New Zealand A side. In part III he talks about the city where they have been playing.
The first two matches of the tour have been in Vijayawada, a small Indian city with just 1.5 million inhabitants.
We have found it’s best to stick to Indian food because they don’t do western food well at all except for a local thick shake store while we’ve also found somewhere that does a decent omelette for breakfast.
We have witnessed medium rare chicken burgers being served up while a fellow Central Districts Stag player got violent food poisoning from eating spaghetti bolognese.
There is a distinct lack of traffic rules, the only one that I can tell that is widely followed in the rule to stick to the left which is at times still disregarded.
Buses, cars, tuk tuks, motorbikes, scooters, bicycles, cows, stray dogs, pedestrians are tooting and yelling at each other and it’s carnage even in this small city. Crossing a six lane wide road from the hotel to the mall is a serious risk to health.
We travel to the ground each day on the bus which takes about an hour. The scenes out the window are crazy. The buildings all seem to be made out of brick and concrete.
In between the buildings poorer people use anything and everything to build their homes with – corrugated iron, car tyres, bamboo, tarps, mud and string.
It’s amazing how right next to a nice hotel there are people living in slums literally next door.
There is rubbish and a general disregard for hygiene. We have witnessed people defecating on railway tracks and urinating into stormwater drains on the side of the road.
We go through a dark, noisy tunnel on the way to the ground each day. There is half a metre ledge on the side of the tunnel where people line the entire length trying to get some sleep.
These scenes serve as a daily reminder of how lucky we are to be playing the sport we love in the cricket mad country of India.