Away Awhile Journal Entry 14

Journal Entry 14

January 20th, 2003

"India By Storm"

So...

My voyage to India: an all-night, 12-hr bus from Kathmandu to the border in a seat made for a midget with short legs, followed by a 4 km walk in the fog, then Nepali and Indian border formalities, then a 3-hr bus ride to Gorakphur, where I hopped on a Delhi-bound local train minutes after that bus ride. I slept on the floor, in a section that looked relatively piss- and spit-free, on a bed of peanut shells. Then I arrived in Delhi at 4 am, 34 hrs after I left Kathmandu and only $10 poorer.

There, I continued doing nothing, something I mastered quite well in Kathmandu, until my brother's arrival on the night of Christmas. My Christmas? Well, I got up early, around 1 am. Out of excitement, and to wait for Santa? Nope. Out of feeling-like-hell, and to empty my insides from every available orifice. I woke up Christmas morn, feeling a little bit better, and attended a Christmas mass. It was okay, but there's something a bit unnerving about hearing all the old church Christmas songs out of key and kind of half-assed. Try 'Away in a Manger' at twice the normal speed and with a heavy auto drumbeat from a synthesizer in the background.

For Christmas, I treated myself to a box of Kellogg's Cornflakes (called 'Frosties' here) and, while I sat on a bench in a park reading a book, I let an Indian clean out my ears with a metal probe and a dirty q-tip. He claims they're good and clean for 2-3 years now, but since then, I've had other ear cleaners look at my ears and say they need cleaning. Someone's lying.

My brother Kevin arrived roughly on time that evening and we hit town. Christmas dinner was at a grubby Indian place near the train station that I'd been frequenting: masala dosa (ultra-thin pancake thing with stuff in the middle that I still haven't figured out and some sauces to dip it in), lemon soda, and curd (similar to yogurt)--we ate for under $1. Kevin's introduction to the world of open urination (and streets that smell like it), wandering cows, constant harassment, and shit everywhere went quite well as we wandered back to the hotel in the waning hours of Christmas Day.

I had a great time opening presents from friends back home, and savoring the care package my mom had sent with Kevin at my request: lots of homemade caramels, a batch of homemade fudge, a few dozen chocolate chip cookies, two loaves of banana bread, and the grand finale.....what I believe to be the world's first 4-flight, intercontinental shipment of a half-gallon carton of egg nog in a checked bag. It didn't leak, and it didn't spoil. I was pleased.

Our first day together, we rented bikes and rode all over hell on dirt streets, busy highways, and suicidal roundabouts. We later learned that Delhi is the road-death capital of the world. I believe it, and there are a few sets of skidmarks on Delhi's streets--each marking a spot where I could've become one with the pavement. One of those things that in hindsight maybe wasn't such a good plan. But anyway, we saw some old tombs and ruins and stuff. Impressive, especially Humayun's Tomb, kind of like the Taj Mahal, but smaller and a different color.

Next day, to Jaipur, in the state of Rajasthan on the western border with Pakistan. Didn't see much there. Kevin got Delhi-belly there and spent two days in bed. Bummer. For him anyway. I sat listened to music and read in our hotel's grassy courtyard, occasionally checking up on him...a relaxing two days for me. Then he was feeling better, so we hopped aboard an overnighter train to Jaisalmer, a little outpost of a town on the edge of the desert. It comes complete with a towering hilltop fort and old sand-colored mansions. Pretty close to Pakistan. Cool place. We booked a camel safari and spent New Year's Eve in the desert around a campfire under clear skies, listening to Indian dudes playing music and stuff.

Camel-riding is fun but it kinda sucks, too. I rode the two-hump variety back in Mongolia, but here in India, they only carry the one-humpers. It's fun because you're up so high, like riding in a big truck as opposed to a car. But they force your legs to split further apart than they should be, which gets to be a bit disagreeable after several hours, combined with a slow but steady bouncing up and down. Sitting on a running camel is also a bit disconcerting.

The terrain was desert--not too sandy, but scrubby and a slightly rocky. At times, reminiscent of Tatooine. I kept an eye open for Jawas, and thought I saw some on neighboring hilltops, but most only turned out to be stunted trees or bushes when I got closer.

Finished up the camel-riding bit, and headed for Jodhpur. It has a huge fort up on a hill (a big theme over in the western state of Rajasthan) that, according to the admission ticket, Jackie Kennedy acclaimed as "the eighth wonder of the world" or something like that. Kevin and I decided that Jackie Kennedy didn't get around much, but the fort was nice. The best part? Some old ruling dude from a coupla hundred years ago told everyone to paint their house a bluish-purple color. So the views of the city from the ramparts of the fort is quite striking as you see hordes of these old pastel-blue buildings in the town below. Also in Jodhpur, we visited a zoo. Mostly empty cages, but they did have a couple of birds and some rabbits, I think.

Then to Udaipur. Awesome city. It's where part of James Bond's 'Octopussy' was filmed. Watch it. There's two island palaces in the movie, and also a riverside palace, and a hilltop palace. Now I'll warn you that the movie really pulls your chain. The hilltop palace turned out to be a run-down-and-abandoned-but-still-cool-looking place, not a glamorous casino for high rollers. The riverside palace is a hotel, but I was unable to confirm if it's as nice as in the movie as they wouldn't let me in without paying a couple hundred bucks to stay there. And the island palaces? We took a boat ride out to one. And can you believe this? It wasn't inhabited solely by beautiful women like in the movie. I looked.

Other than that, the movie shows some Indian street scenes and an auto-rickshaw ride that are close to the real thing (aside from the rickshaw that can pop a wheelie). Beautiful buildings and winding alleys (reminiscent of Venice in a demented sort of way).

Well, we hated to leave, but we had to get to the beach. Took a bus to Mumbai (formerly Bombay), spent a day there wandering around and eating from street vendors (both of us sufficiently recovered from recent illnesses to start taking risks all over again). Then a second-straight overnight bus got us to Goa. Well, eventually. Broke down many times and arrived 8 hrs late. Several stops in the middle of the night, during which a band of Indians took shit apart, looked at it, and put it back together, and stared open-mouthed as it still didn't work right. Repeat.

Once we got there, Goa was paradise. It's a former Porteguese colony on the Arabian Sea. We chose to stay in the small village of Vagator. The beach was straight out of a postcard: nice sand bracketed by rocky sections of shoreline, with a palmtree-lined hill as a backdrop. The only slightly strange thing was that we shared the beach with wandering groups of dogs and cows. You could walk barefoot...if you watched out for cow pies. But it was still very beautiful.

We planned to stay for 4-5 days and to hit about 3 beaches. We stayed for 4-5 days, and never really left a 100-foot stretch of the single beach near our guesthouse. Our routine: wake up, walk to beach, sit in one spot all day. Occasionally take a dip in the Arabian Sea. A simple wave of the hand brought a waiter who could provide drinks and food. Kevin saved one of our receipts from a day on the beach:

1 pineapple lassi (yogurt drink), 2 banana shakes, 1 bowl of cornflakes with milk, 1 fruit pancake, 1 banana porridge, 1 butter toast, 1 watermelon juice, 2 jam toasts, 1 kingprawns platter with salad and fries, 2 bottles of Fanta, 1 seafood spaghetti, 1 grape lassi, 1 grape shake, 2 fruit salads with curd and muesli, 1 melt-in-your-mouth calamari platter with salad and fries. Not bad, huh? Our tab for that whole day's meals came to 437 rupees, about $9!

My brother is a gambling connoisseur, so when he found out that India's only casino is nearby, it was a matter of when we go, not if we go. It's an offshore casino on a small cruise ship. They had a deal where you get on for free if you buy 4200 rupees' worth of non-cash-able chips, about $85 each--a lot of money in India! Kevin was sure he could make most of it back, so we took this route. Onboard, we gorged ourselves at the big buffet three times over the course of the evening, and got looped on free drinks. I didn't gamble much, but Kevin was still going strong at 3am, when the casino closed. Thanks in large part to a $150 gain on a single spin of the roulette wheel (#19), we left there stuffed, drunk, and in the green. Got back to the guesthouse at 5am and slept on the beach.

We were sad to leave Goa, but didn't have much choice. We overnighted back to Mumbai, killed a day there, then hopped aboard a 30-hr train to Varanasi, a really important city for Hindus. Stayed at a place on the Ganges River. 30 sewers empty into the Ganges around there. Add that to the several hundred bodies burned there every day (many not completely to ashes--we saw of chunk of a charred midsection that smelled like barbeque get tossed in the river a few feet from us) and all the "holy" bodies (pregnant women, monks, single people, babies, people killed by smallpox, and people killed by a viper bite) that are not burned--they are sunk in the middle of the river via a rock tied to a leg--and you get a river that's not all that clean.

I read that for safe swimming, there should be less than 500 particles of fecal matter per 100 mL of fluid (about 1/4 of a can of soda). Samples from the Ganges in this area have about 1.5 million particles. That's shitty (pun intended). Regardless, Hindu pilgrims come down to the river's edge to bathe all the time. So we saw bathers, people washing clothes, and people burning bodies on wooden pyres all day long. In addition, we were there during a kite festival. So the skies were filled with kites being flown from roofs of buildings. Filled. I enjoyed seeing all the tragedies--kites floating in the Ganges and hung up on power lines.

Then things got hairy. Varanasi is not close to Delhi, and we were still there two days before Kevin's scheduled flight out of Delhi. Our quest? Get to Agra, see the Taj Mahal, and then get to Delhi in time for his flight. 48 hrs to go. Our resulting journey was the Indian equivalent of Steve Martin's trip in 'Planes, Trains, and Automobiles'--everything that could go wrong did, but it had a happy ending.

So...we had an overnight train ticket to Agra (Taj Mahal), and from there it's only a few hours to Delhi. No problem, right? Wrong. We got to the station only minutes before the train's departure, but it didn't matter as our train was cancelled. Cancelled? Didn't realize that was a possibility! I raced through the train schedule and found that we could get to Agra by hopping on a Delhi-bound train, stopping off in Allahabad, and then cross our fingers that a different train was running late, which could drop us off in Tundla, 20 miles from Agra, from where we could catch a bus/taxi to Agra. Sounds complicated, but there wasn't another way, really.

Well, the Delhi-bound train was an hour late and lost another hour en route. Thankfully the connecting train in Allahabad was more late than ours had been, so we didn't miss it. But it was really late. Scheduled to leave at 10:30pm, delayed until 1am, then 2:30am, then 3:30am. Then they didn't bother updating the schedule anymore, and it arrived at 5am. Meanwhile, we sat outdoors on the platform and froze our asses off. The train, when it did arrive, lost another few hours en route and got us to the town near Agra a mere ten hours late. Got to Agra via a taxi with a leaky radiator that had stop to be filled with water four times over the course of 20 miles.

Anyway, saw the Taj Mahal. It's big and nice. Then raced back to get on a train to Delhi. Again, hasted in vain, as the train was three hours late, and got to Delhi at 4am, five and a half hours behind schedule. But we got there, which was what mattered.

Last day in Delhi was hectic. Packing. Shopping. Trying to confirm Kevin's flight (heavy fog had forced flight cancellations every day for the past week). Raced to the airport when we found his flight was overbooked and we hadn't reconfirmed the ticket. His baggage was over the weight-limit and they wanted $300, so he fought through security to give it to me to send via post. Since they don't let non-passengers in the airport and I was freezing outside, I went back to town, and didn't know if his plane left or not. The next day, I tried calling the airport and airline many times, but either got no answer, a busy signal, or got hung up on. And I couldn't call the States, because the whole international phone service in Delhi was bungled that day. Anyway, I guess he made it, or so my other brother told me in a recent email.

Whew...

Being back in Delhi was like coming home...the overpowering stench, the bearded, cloudy-eyed old Indian with a turban that follows you and offers "hashish, Manali green, marijuana" through slightly clenched teeth, everyone smiling and saying "Hello friend!" which actually means "I want to screw you out of some cash, but you don't know how I plan to do it yet".

Really, though, it's been nice back here. Not doing much. Don't know where I'm going next, but I got spoiled by the warmth of Goa, so it'll probably be south. Delhi's cold.

Random bits:
* There's been a recent cold spell. Temperatures down to -gasp- 1 deg C (34 deg F). Hundreds have died. Seriously. I positively believe that a single night with Minnesota-like temperatures, say -5 deg F (-20 deg C) and you'd knock off 30% of India's population, at least. That's over 300,000,000, more than the population of the U.S.

* Indian food isn't that good.

* Don't book a train ticket with your credit card. When I found you could do this, I congratulated India on its modernization and tried it out. This was the train that was cancelled. Getting a refund on a ticket booked with a credit card is not easy. I talked to five people in two cities and three different buildings. Then I had to write a letter to a guy stating what I wanted to do, while I was standing and talking to him. Then he turns a circular crank on what looks like an old telephone. Then he writes a bunch of stuff on a receipt-looking thing, gives one copy to me, and folds up the other copy and sticks it behind the desk. Finished. I ask when I'll get my refund and he says "maybe three months". If I had paid cash, it would've been instant.

* Random cows wander around city streets everywhere I've been in India. They appear harmless, and indeed I used to think they were. But Kevin got butted by one as he walked by in Jodhpur. I thought this was quite amusing. He didn't. Two days later, in Udaipur, I got nailed from behind by a big bull. Not cool. I wanted to give him a solid left uppercut, but wasn't sure how the Hindus would take that. And he had big horns so probably not a good idea anyway.

That's it for now.

'For the first time, I kind of wished that I'd done more travelling. I'd never been jealous of the older travellers before, because most of them were such transparent social failures. The people in their thirties who were still trudging around India had so obviously cocked up their entire lives that there wasn't much to be jealous of. And most travellers seemed to be either my age [18-19] or of the sad, beardy basket-case generation. It was when you occasionally bumped into the mid-to-late twenties crowd that things got a bit scary. There was something about them that always made me envious.' (-William Sutcliffe, 'Are You Experienced?')

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