The Finale (India, Part 2)

After the cow stampedes and skull popping of Varanasi, we got an overnight train at one of the busiest train stations I’ve ever seen and travelled overnight to the town of Orcha. The trains in India range from being pretty hard-core to reasonably comfortable, and this was one of the latter.

Orcha itself is an interesting place because it used to be the centre of a kingdom and has all the relics, temples and palaces to prove as much, but now exists only as a small village. I liked it here because there were cool things to see and explore, and yet there was still a local culture because the place hasn’t become a tourist attraction yet. One night here we even went into the Hindu temple and watched the proceedings inside. Of all the religions, Hinduism might not be the one you can take the most serious, what with the elephant nosed and monkey faced gods and all, but at least it’s not as dull and dreary as others, and they are even tying in evolution into the whole reincarnation thing which is double plus good in my books.

Here I watched some kids play cricket in the final light of the late afternoon; dust yard as the pitch, bricks as the wickets, a lumpy ball, and a real cricket bat.

Next was Agra, which is maybe the biggest tourist town in India, although most people only spend a few hours here. And why do people from all over the world flock to Agra? The answer is the Taj Mahal, one of the most recognisable and unique buildings in the world. It’s certainly up there on the scale of famous things I’ve seen, right next to Eiffel Tower, Leaning Tower, Great Wall, etc. The building itself is impressive, and it sits up on the high bank of a river, which is cool. The outer surface was a hell of a lot more detailed than I had expected, with versus from the Koran printed all over it.

In the middle of the big building lie two tombs. One for the former King of the Great Mughal (Muslim) civilisation that used to rule here (that faded out after the British started to run things), and the other tomb is that of his lover who he had the building built for. It all sounds pretty romantic. Too bad the guy had a harem of 400 other chicks ready for him whenever he wanted. Otherwise, makes a nice story.

There are thousands of tourists here, and lots of Indians, all who are in their best clothes and brightest sarees to come and see their national treasure. People watching is part of it.

Also in Agra is the impressive Red Fort, also part of the Mughal heritage. This fort has ramparts to defend from invaders and a pretty epic palace inside. The defences included a crocodile filled moat, then a layer around the perimeter filled with hungry tigers, then the entry ramp which was trapped with enormous rolling boulders.

Next was the capital, Delhi, and it’s here that I started to lose it a bit with India. A combination of food poisoning, a cold out of nowhere, the crazy heat, and the intense chaos of the city had me resenting India and all its inhabitants. It’s the only time I’ve ever got really sick of a place and its people, and I found myself saying to people ‘How on earth can this fucked up place thinks it’s going to be the next world superpower?’

Of course, I love India, it’s been a favourite for me, and I know that they are indeed on their way to becoming the next economic superpower, but Jesus Christ, trying to get around the streets when your hot and bothered and not feeling well is just a nightmare.

The traffic is the worst I’ve seen in the world. One day I got a rickshaw from one side of town to the other and our vehicle hit 3 other vehicles along the way, and at one point our driver put his hand outside the vehicle to push a pedestrian out of the way so he could fit through a narrow gap.

In Delhi I saw lots of people (22 million people in this one city), lots of rubbish, some nice areas, and a lot more rundown looking ones. I saw some Muslim, Sikh and Hindu temples - all three of these religious constantly clashing in India. In fact, Bangladesh and Pakistan used to be part of India but bailed out to make their own ‘Islamic States’, free from idol worshippers and infidels. Me and my friends had to put on head covers to visit a Sikh temple, my first, where we saw the industrial kitchens where they serve people food – cooking masala tea and curries in big cauldrons, stirring them with big paddles.

Delhi is the political capital of India, not the economic capital, which is Mumbai. Here I’ll mention that India has the world’s biggest democracy and unbelievably it largely corruption free. After seeing so much corruption around the world it’s good to see a country with so many people and so much potential doing things by the book. India has at least got that part right, and that part counts for a lot (otherwise Russia’s GDP and life expectancy wouldn’t be going backwards).

F

rom the capital I travelled to the towns of Jaipur and Jodhpur in the desert state of Rajasthan. Why I chose to come to the desert at the height of summer is beyond me but in both these places the temperature reached 40+ every day. It was uncomfortable, to say the least, especially in the shithole rooms I was staying in. Those ceiling fans just didn’t cut the mustard, and it remained so hot that it basically put me out of action between the hours of 11am and 6pm. In Jodhpur it was 43 at 8 at night, not dropping below low thirties overnight.

Safe to say that on this trip I’ve been the hottest I’ve ever been and the coldest I’ve ever been (...the hungriest…the fullest…most exhausted…most excited…most lonely…most welcomed…most disgusted…most impressed…)

Jaipur is known as the pink city because all the buildings have a pink colour, though it’s actually much more like orange. Here, when I wasn’t sweating, vomiting, or having ‘an upset stomach’, I was tramping around town trying to take as much of it as despite my discomfort.

Jaipur also has one of the most famous cinemas in the country, and its where a lot of Bollywood films come to Premiere. One night I went to see one such film at this place. The film was called Bobby Jasoos, and was entirely in Hindi, but I could follow well enough and found the dance pieces that suddenly became part of the movie quite humorous. The cinematography and production was as good as anything in Hollywood, and the crowd got way more into it than they ever would back home. It was an interesting insight into the Bollywood culture.

It was in this cinema that a lot of people came up and asked for a photo of me (I would stand there awkwardly with my popcorn and a thumbs up) or with them (they would drape my arm around their shoulders). This sort of thing had been happening all over India, especially at sights where Indian tourists from far off towns were visiting. Every day a stranger would take a photo of me, some trying to be subtle without me noticing, others asking in broken English, others just walking up and clicking in my face. Having white skin and long blondish hair gave me something of a celeb status. There were lots of stares, lots of photos, and some even came up to have a brief conversation.

At a train station on my way to Jodhpur some guy shook my hand and held it so he could get out his phone and take a photo of my face and a photo of our two hands shaking. Within a few minutes another man came up with his young son and asked me to shake his sons hand. Its possible they hadn’t seen a westerner before. 

In Jodhpur I climbed up to and explored the enormous fort that sits overlooking the town. Up there I wandered through rooms of the old palace, posed for a couple of photos and took in the view of the surrounding desert region. Down in the town itself I wandered around the markets and bought some spices.

These desert cities were really interesting to see, another one of the many flavours of India. But did I enjoy myself? No way. In fact, a combination of wanting to get away from the desert heat and to be on my way home had me counting down the days there.

A final night train and I arrived in Mumbai. Overnight I went from the desert to the tropics and life was bearable once more.

Mumbai was kind of a contrast to the other places in India that I had seen. This is the economical capital of India, and from its bustling people to its high rise buildings, it certainly looks that way. It’s also where the Bollywood Industry is based, in the same was Hollywood is based in LA. And after seeing all the Mughal heritage, it was cool to get down to Mumbai and see the British colonial heritage, which all started when the British East India trading company came and set rule to large areas of India (At first this wasn’t the British government, and the local people were paying a private company tax in a governmental setting). 

Here I saw the Gateway to India, a big archway surrounded by tourists, which was built for a visit by King George, and whereby the last British troops to leave India in ’48 left through. Across the road is the world famous Taj Mahal hotel, made famous by the terrorist in 2008 when 170 people were killed. In fact, Mumbai has a bad history with terrorism – in the two thousands alone there were several attacks that clocked up death tolls in their hundreds each time. 

With only a day remaining I did a tour of the slums in the north part of the city. These are the biggest slums in asia, and as we wandered around what shocked me most was how small an area whole families have to live. More so than the filth, more so than the narrow streets and tunnels that you’d easily get lost in, more so than the ad hock industries of plastic recycling and pottery, the actual space for big families to live – about the size of Jakes room – is what most affected me.

Meanwhile, in my tiny hotel room I didn’t feel much better about my situation. The room was one of the worst I have stayed in; crumbling paint and stained walls, I was the only white person in the whole building; I had to walk down a dark corridor to use a filthy squat toilet, and had a tap and a bucket to wash with. Oh, and there were those dam mice. I have come to terms with cockroaches, but not mice. I had reached the bottom, for sure.

But things could always be worse…

On my final after noon as a free world traveller I walked along Marine Avenue, along the waterfront. There were lots of people out, some asking for photos with me, others just staring, others seeing me as a walking dollar sign and coming up to try and sell me stuff. Walking along I noticed how filthy the sea water was; maybe the most polluted water I’ve ever seen. It was disgusting, and it was giving the city cleaners the hard task of cleaning up all the rubbish that the waves were pushing up over the insufficient break wall, making what could be the nicest road of town look like a dump.

Around the bend further, floating in all this crap, was a woman who had just drowned. There was a crowd looking at her naked and fat body as it floated around in the choppy water. That image, the indignity of fresh corpse in a pile of floating rubbish while a bunch of people looked on or took photos, was somewhat symbolic of India. And as I said in my last post, where else in the world would you see such a sight?

The thing about India is it’s a world in its own. Its food, its cinema, its religions, its music, its history – these many aspects of its culture are distinct and so unique that coming to India is like going into a whole other universe.

India shocked me more than anywhere else I’ve been, and it pissed me off more than anywhere. It was the perfect place to end my travels. It played the part well as the grand finale to my trip, and also made me as excited as ever to finally get home.

And with that, the last few days of my time in India drew to a close. The end of India, and the end of my whole trip was upon me.

It was time to go home.




 

On the Ganges (India, Part 1)

 

In a past life, every day when I got to work I would flip over to a new picture in my every-day-of-the-year calendar of India that Aunty San had got me for Christmas. Back then I so desperately wanted to get away, break free and roam – not be tied to a desk – and India seemed like a whole other world. The calendar was a daily reminder that there was a big wide world out there to see. Therefore, it’s somewhat fitting that the final leg of my trip takes place in the strange land that was part of the inspiration to travel so far and long. I saw pictures of India every day and wished I was there, and now, at the end of my world travels, I am.

The first thing I see as we enter the country is a guy with a straw broom sweeping all the rubbish on the dirty street into a fire that is burning in the middle of a road.

We drive most of the day through the flat and dusty Ganges floodplains regions, people everywhere even in small towns, road conditions and driving behaviour as dangerous as you’d expect.

Our first destination is Varanasi. I remember studying Varanasi in high school, and being able to spend time here has been one of the highlights of my whole trip. Varanasi is one of the world’s most ancient cities (along with Delhi and Jerusalem) and is considered the holiest place on earth. It’s also the world capital of chaos and filth.

The Ganges runs along the face of city, where temples and old building look over the world’s holiest river, and where concrete steps lead Hindu pilgrims down to the filthy waters of mother Ganges. Hindus from all over India come to bath in the Ganges at least once in their lives, and many people are sent to Varanasi to be cremated by the river side.

Apart from all the Hindu religion stuff, the place just looks really cool and has a great feel to it. It’s an intense city, and is really unlike anywhere else I’ve been.

The water front area with the temples and the steps descending into the water are called the ghats, and my favourite thing to do is Varanasi was walk along the Ghats from where we were staying all the way along (1/2 hour walk) to the old part of town. In the morning people would be bathing, washing themselves with mud, meditating on the steps, sitting listening to their guru talk, or eating the cheap brekkie street food. People would be also be washing clothes, including some really vibrant sarees and gowns, and then laying them out to dry on the steps. The water being dirty and polluted, and with every inch of public space in this city being so filthy, it made me wonder how much cleaner they could have been getting their clothes.

In the middle of the day the Ghats were empty, the sun too hot even for the most devout pilgrims, save for the farmers who brought their buffalo down to bath, and the bodies burning on the funeral pyres.

You can’t come to Varanasi without seeing a few corpses.

People bring their deceased family members down to the shore, build a wood pile, place the body on top, cover with more wood and kindling and set it all alight. The family members stand around talking while the body burns. One corpse I saw had burned all the way through save for the feet which stuck out the end of the pyre, unburnt, and the head, which was taking its time. The ritual is finally over when a loud pop that marks the explosion of the skull is heard.

I saw many corpses burning, and many being carried through the streets on the way to the Ghats (covered of course), and can remember looking into a fire one morning and the only thing I could make out was a burnt, clenched, skeletal hand.

In the evenings everyone is back out on the ghats, street food galore, nice views over the river, boats full of people paddling about, the prayer ceremony at old town in full swing, and games of cricket being played left right and centre.

While in the holy city I will mention that cricket is a religion in India. The people are obsessed, and from the street games I watched they seem to be pretty good at it (although a couple of those bowls were throws). They and know all the Aussie players (whenever I said I was from Australia they would smile and say ‘Ricky Ponting’), and they consider Sachin Tendulker a living god. India and Australia are two entirely different worlds. It’s interesting that a sport we both got from the British is our most solid common ground.

India in general, but Varanasi especially, is home to the holy cow. These are cows that roam the busy streets of the city. They act like they own the place, laying out on busy roads to the traffic has to squeeze around them, going in and resting inside shops (considered a good luck omen for the business), wandering around chewing on the garbage that lays around the city in abundance. They are sacred in Hinduism so go around town doing as they please. It’s just bizarre.

One night when I was walking home after a great curry I was walking up a street when there came a stamped of cows down the road. People were running, darting into side alleys, ducking being tuk-tuks, standing flat up against walls. A bull had tried to mount a heifer at the back of the pack and got them all scared. The cows rushed past without trampling anybody and in an instant the street returned to its busting self.

From Varanasi we drove a couple of hours to another point on the Ganges where we would spend a couple of days sailing/ rowing back downstream to Varanasi. Those boats were small, only four of us and two boatmen per boat, making three passenger boats in total, plus one kitchen boat.

I felt a little uneasy about laying back on cushions while the skinny Indian men rowed like the slaves, but was glad not to be working in such heat (though I did row for a while on both days).

We paddled down the Ganges and passed villages with temples and little stepped ghats of their own, waved at kids who ran to the shore to look at us, and enjoyed being on the river. One of the boats even saw the pink Ganges dolphin.

The food they cooked for us, which we would pull over to the shore to eat, was among the best I’ve had in India. Dhal, Chapatti, Palak Paneer (Cheese Sag), and Spiced Potatoes, among other things, were all prepared on that fourth little boat of the fleet.  

At night we set up tents on a sandy bank and it was the sweatiest night of my life. I woke up every twenty minutes or so feeling like I’d just had water poured on me. Nobody slept well, but we were all happy to be there, happy for the adventure of it.

In the morning we explored the bank of the Ganges and found some human and animal bones, even a couple of skulls. Lots of people are brought to the Ganges and just dumped, especially if the family is too poor to buy the wood for the fire. Along the way we saw a couple of dead animals in the river, and even saw a pack of dogs chewing at what remained of a corpse on an upturned funeral stretcher.

We arrived back into Varanasi to see people shitting on the banks a couple of hundred metres upstream from where people were swimming. The fecal coliform bacteria levels are 35 times higher than the permissible levels for swimming (deficiently not drinking, which I saw many people doing). Yep, crapping in public is pretty common here, and in the cities you cannot turn your head without seeing another guys peeing against a wall.

 

And on that note I’ll sum up by saying that the holiest place on earth well and truly blew my mind, especially because of how shit stained it was, and especially because of the corpses and body parts, and especially because here you run the risk of being stampeded by holy cows in the middle of the city.

Where else in the world?

On Buffalo Meat and Buddhism (Nepal)

 

From Canada it was a 30+ hour journey all the way around the world to Nepal, via Finland and India. The final of the three flights was an Air India flight with about 12 people on board. It had the world’s most disinterested flight attendants and a safety video that looked like it had been filmed in the 70’s. I was pretty exhausted/ insanely bored by this time but as we flew into Nepal I saw out my window the Himalayas rising up out of the clouds. For a while we seemed to be flying parallel to them.

Arriving in Kathmandu with bloodshot eyes and a serious sleep debt my airport pick up was nowhere to be seen so I was subject to the usual rip off taxi ride into town.

At first Kathmandu was confronting, especially in contrast to Canada. Lots of people, lots of poverty, crazy traffic, strange smells, strange sights (all the exciting stuff). But it didn’t take me too long to get comfortable and confirm that Asia is truly my home away from home.

I was interested to learn that international aid is a big part of this country’s economy, and at the airport our plane rolled up and parked next to a UN plane. Nepal is a much poorer country than I had thought.

This means things are cheap, like my $5.50 per night guesthouse room, which came complete with a cockroach infestation that had me up at regular intervals of the first few nights doing ‘sweeps’ of the room (I eventually came to terms with them crawling over me as I slept). I was the only guest for the first 5 nights, and there were rolling black outs throughout the whole duration of my stay.

I had to bunker down in Kathmandu in order to sort out an Indian Visa. It took me lots of paperwork, 50 bucks, three visits to the consulate, and 8 days to get it sorted.

Kathmandu is a cool place. It feels like a small city despite having a couple of million people. The area I stayed, Thamil, is a major backpacker and hippy hangout, with maybe more dreadlocks, second hand book stores, and tie die clothes per capita than anywhere else in the world.

This cities appeal is the fact it is a stronghold of Tibetan Buddhism, and it was once thought to be something of a fabled and inaccessible Shangri La.

Exploring the city I found stupas in small public squares, prayer flags flying high in the air, watched cows wander about the streets like they owned them, noticed everyone from school kids to the elderly stop in and pray at the Buddhist or Hindu temples that are scattered throughout the city, and expected to be clipped by a passing motorbike or car as I walked on the road (no footpaths).

I spent most evenings sitting up the top of one of the Pagodas in Durber Square, watching the people go about their business, watching motorbikes weave amongst the pedestrians, watching the women sitting on the concrete selling vegetables, watching orphans beg and poor children sell water and fairy floss, and watching all the other people sitting around, hanging out. This was the heart of the city.

Almost every day that I came here I was approached by a local. I would be reading or listening to my ipod or just staring down at the vegetable sellers when they would come up to me and ask me where I was from. I’m not sure if it was because they wanted to practice their English (which is most cases was pretty bad, and having a conversation took a lot of concentration from the both of us), or whether they were just friendly and curious, but I met and spoke with some nice people, learning all sorts of things about Nepal and the Nepalese.

I’ve said this before but this time it is for certain; Kathmandu is the best food town in all my travels, ever. The food in Nepal is a great mix of unique dishes (Momo dumplings, Thali set including dal fry, curry, pickles, curd, papad, rice) and stuff that has wafted across from over its borders with China to the North and India to the south. Its curry, noodle, rice and spice galore! And interestingly, Buffalo is the most common meat here. I had it every day either in a curry, a momo, as sausage, in a chilli sauce or in dried out jerky form.

And it’s all so dirt cheap. I would have fried noodles for breakfast – 50 cents, then Momo for lunch  -  $1.50, then a Thali Set for dinner - $2.20. All in all I was living off 10 – 15 dollars per day.

From Kathmandu I took a bus to a town called Pokhara. The 201 km trip ended up taking 9.5 hours, in what I can say is a perfect example of how Nepal doesn’t have its shit together whatsoever.

Pokhara is a nice town right on a lake with views of the Himalayas rising above the surrounding landscape. Here is spent a few days wandering around, eating, and talking to locals who would approach me to practice their English. One guy, 17 he said he was, asked me the following three things;

1) Do I know Bradley (which would take me a while to interpret as Brett Lee)?

2) Can I take him back to Australia with me (and if so, give him a job), and

3) Have I ever touched my girlfriend’s breast?

Back to Kathmandu for a few days, sit at the pagodas, see some stupa’s, meet up with some of the guys I had previously met, meet new people I would be travelling along with, and say goodbye to a city that fed me well.

From there we travelled along a sketchy mountain road to the town of Sauraha. It didn’t take me long at the start of the trip to realise that my biggest risk is a road accident - way more likely than a terrorist attack or street violence. It’s the way a lot of people die in these parts of the world. And the road that day had my heart beating – we were so close to the edge of the cliff and still our driver insisted on overtaking on the single lane. We saw below that a couple of trucks had fallen off the road.

In Sauraha we took bikes to go and explore the small villages and rice fields. We passed many villagers who waved from the front of their mud brick homes, saw buffalo grazing on grass and rubbish (one day to become a thousand momo’s), and watch the locals fish with little nets and pick river grass out of the small streams. The rickety bridges, the way the children called out hello and chased our bikes, the waterlogged and squared rice patties – it all reminded me of cycling around different towns and villages of Asia back when I was a teenager.

Nepal is a tiny country surrounded by two behemoths, but it manages to squeeze the world’s highest mountain range in not too far away from filled sub-tropical jungle.

We left Sauraha by long boat, and paddled off into the Chitwan National Park, an expanse of area that stretches over the Indian border and is home to some of the world’s coolest animals, such as the Tiger. We spent the day cruising down the river, passing big clumps of water orchids caught in the stream, and roaming the jungle on the back of a safari jeep. Of course, we didn’t see a tiger, but we did see lots of crocodiles (narrow nosed but very big), lots of huge birds (including the ‘purple stork’), some spotted deer and wild boars, and most interestingly, Rhino.

The first Rhino we saw was cooling off in the river and we got very close. I knew these were big animals but I was shocked at how huge they were. Our guide was nervous because these beasts can move fast in shallow water and a ranger had been killed by a Rhino just a few months back, so (without saying anything at the time) we took the only course we could, and paddled down the river past the Rhino without making any noise.

We saw another two later that day as we drove around the trails in the elephant grass plains.

As for elephants, we didn’t see any wild ones, but saw some being ridden around by villagers, and being bathed in the river in the morning.

That night we stayed in some basic lodging at the edge of the park, and in the mud brick house with no electricity for most of the night, in the intense summer heat and jungle humidity, I had one of the most uncomfortable and sweat drenched nights of my life.

The final stop in Nepal was Lumbini, which is a pilgrimage place for Buddhist all over the world because it was the birth place of Buddha. We saw the exact place at which Buddha was born, walked around a garden filled with monks and prayer flags, and saw the many monasteries the different Buddhist associations of Korea, Japan, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, etc. have built to house for free any nationals that pass on the pilgrimage route.

It is interesting to note that while Buddha was born in Nepal and spent most of his life roaming India, Buddhism in a minor religion in both these countries, and is much more popular in east Asia. (though it’s also interesting to note that Buddha was granted status as one of the 33 million Hindu gods). Buddhism is the biggest cultural export of this part of the world,

In Nepal I spent a lot of time thinking about the end of my trip, and how the thing that had consumed my thoughts and plans for the last 2 years + would soon be behind me. Some days I wished I was at home more than ever, others I was terrified of the prospect of going back to a routine and static life.
 

And so my time in Nepal came to a close. I ate my last momo’s and prepared for what would be my final land border crossing...