I'm (almost) off!

Tomorrow morning I’ll leave the house, get in a car, go shopping with my mom, and 2 days, 4 planes, and countless magazines later, I’ll be delivering a Twix to Lara in Burma. It’s so fantastic, in the sense of strange, magical, and completely unreal. Who would have thought? Anyway, from all I’ve read, Burma doesn’t really have internet, or at least internet that connects you to any websites you might want to visit, so . . . . don’t expect any emails or posts from me for awhile. (Damn military junta!)

Culture Clash

So I'm on a train (another one) and I was looking for a trash can to throw away the magazines I had been reading. Having no luck, I asked someone and he said that you just throw them out the door. I couldn't do it! 

Tigers!

Sunday was my birthday and I spent it at a really nice lodge outsiide of the park. It is supposed to be modeled on African safari lodges. The room itself (actually its own little bungalow) was gorgeous, and the service and food were fantastic.

There were only 4 other guests. Carolyn and Martin from Vienna. They were on the plane from Mumbai, and I suspected that we were going to the same place, but I didn't see them at the train station in Bhopal. Carolyn is a "TV presenter" and she had been traveling by herself in India for 5 weeks. Her boyfriend Martin is a cinematographer, and he had joined her for the last week of her trip. Ornella from Torino.  She had been on several safaris in Africa and came to India specifically to see the tigers. Paul from London joined us the second night.

The food:   For breakfast, chapati rolls, which are sort of Indian breakfast burritos. Made with a flat bread somewhere between a tortilla and naan, and stuffed with sauted peppers and onions and some sort of mashed potato mixture. For lunch on Sunday, excellent tomato soup, green salad, and chicken kabobs with grilled bananas and vanilla ice cream for dessert. On Monday, my favorite palak paneer (spinach with cheese) and fish curry and a bean salad. Also, a pretty gross buttermilk based drink that is supposed to good for your digestion. Rice pudding for dessert. For dinner on Sunday, fish and chicken cooked in the tandoor oven; yellow dal; many different kinds of bread. For dinner on Monday, chicken soup, a thali with four different dishes (lamb, spinach, some kind of dumplings in a yogurt sauce, and potatoes).

Always on hand:  awesome shortbread-like cookies flavored with either coconut or sesame seeds.

It was nice to be able to eat uncooked fruit and vegetables -- which I had been avoiding -- without having to worry about whether they had been washed in clean water.

The tigers:  in the mornings and afternoons, we went out to the park in 4-wheel drive vehicles. The park has the highest density of tigers in the world, and I saw at least one tiger on every trip. (Although just a leg the first time.)  It was really exciting. The whole forest was on alert for the tigers. Our naturalist taught us to recognize the "alarm calls" of the monkeys and the deer that the tigers eat. When the tigers moved, all of the animals were on alert trying to avoid them and all of the humans were on alert trying to find them. I could sort of see the appeal of hunting, except the killing part.

We couldn't go off road, so in the mornings, the park rangers tracked the tigers and we could ride elephants to get closer to them. This was awesome. Elephants are so cool because the underbrush is nothing to them. They just grab it with their trunks and break it off.

A brief word about my naturalist, Herendra. I had a huge crush on him. We would be driving down the road at 30 kph and he would hear a bird call and say "that's the yellow-wattled lapwing" or "the green bee eater."  I found this very impressive. Unfortunately, he's 22.

Saving the best part for last:  when we got back from the park at night we were filthy with dust from the dirt roads. But we returned to a nice hot bubble bath, already drawn. And a gin and tonic by the tub. All in all, a pretty good birthday.

Night Train

After Mumbai, I headed east to Bandahvgarh National Park in Mahdya Pradesh, where I hoped to see a tiger. My original plan, until December, had been to go to Rajasthan, but I really wanted to go to Varanasi too, and I couldn't figure out an itinerary to do both without being too rushed. So I scrapped Rajasthan and substituted Bandahvgarh and Khajuraho.

To get to Bandahvgarh, I had to fly to Bhopal and then take a train overnight to a town called Katni. I was a little worried about navigating the train system. These woories were not allayed upon arrival at the train station when I saw that all of the signs were in Hindi, which I do not speak. Or read.

I had about 3 hours to kill in Bhopal, so I found the cloak room, where I locked up my bags and wandered out into the streets around the train station to try to find a place to eat. It was dark and there was a haze of dust from the dirt roads. Which is a little unsettling in a town known as the site of a deadly poison gas leak.

I could not have been more conspicuous if I had two heads. Literally everyone was staring at me. I found a small place with samosas cooking out front, and went in and was offered a table upstairs. I could hear them downstairs talking about the "American." They sent a succession of people upstairs to ask me what I wanted, and it took a few tries to communicate that I wanted a coke and a samosa.

After that, I decided to go in search of an internet cafe and ran across a guy who spoke pretty good english and offered to take me to one on his motorcycle. I declined, so he walked with me, and then sat with me while I checked my emal, and then walked me back to the train station and showed me the first class waiting room. Which was nice, but also a little irritating.

So, the train came and I found my cabin by pure luck. I was sharing with an accountant from Jabalpur. And then I started worrying about how I would know when to get off the train. So I didn't sleep that well, although it was relatively comfortable. I woke up early and the porter let me know when we got to Katni. But I still haven't figured out the mysterious system by which people know when to get off the train. Which worries me because I'm on a train right now.

Mumbai

I'm on a train bound for Agra, and so I thought I'd take some time to catch up on the last week.

Mumbai ended up being a bit of a disappointment because the real city is pretty inaccessible to tourists. I mean, I love cities and Mumbai is one of the biggest cities in the world, but I felt like I could only glimpse it through the window of my taxi going to and from the airport. This was true of both the sort of Upper East side looking neighborhoods on the west side of town and the vast, vast shanty towns along the railroad tracks. (Although I did see some places offering "slum tours," which I passed on.)

Anyway, here are the highlights:

*The Prince of Wales Museum, featuring Indian art and sculpture. I don't typically like that kind of flat-looking, highly embellished painting, but this was really beautiful. And Hinduism offers such an extensive array of stories to depict.

*Excellent food, including really good chicken kabobs at an Iranian cafe. (Where I was the only woman and only westerner there.) I have been trying to follow the practice of not using my left hand to eat, but was puzzling over how to tear the bread with just one hand. It appears that there's an exception for bread-tearing. I also had Thai food at a swanky pan-asian place, that was inexplicably playing obscure American country music. (And not good obscure. Deservedly obscure.)

*I saw Babel, which I liked more than I expected to. Brad Pitt was sort of haggard-looking and it suited him. And I love Gael Garcia Bernal, but his storyline didn't make much sense.

*I met a couple of Indian guys (Shail and Sanche) at the Gateway of India and we went and had tea and discussed our mutual dislike of George Bush. Also, I showed them my iPod and Blackberry, and they told me about a serial killer in Mumbai who lures his victims by offering them free Kingfisher. I could not tell if they were serious.

*I found a gym and went for a run. Which was actually pretty pathetic, although it seems like you're going faster and farther when they're measuring in kilometers.

Annoyances:

*Just walking around can be hard.  First, you often have to walk in the streets, which are packed. Second, I felt like I had to study every intersection just to figure out how to cross the street without getting killed. This is complicated by the fact that the traffic seems to operate as some sort of hive mind that will suddenly decide to go against the lights.

*There is inexplicable rubble everywhere. Just piles of dirt and rocks and stones. I have no idea why. Maybe there's nowhere else to put it.

*On Friday, I tried to get train tickets and airline tickets that I hadn't been able to get in the states. Oh my god, what I wouldn't give for the Indian version of my beloved Kayak. First I had to find the reservations office at the train station, which is actually in a differnt building across the street. When I finally found it, I wasn't really sure which line to stand in, and when none of them had moved after 15 minutes, I gave up and went to Thomas Cook. They couldn't sell me train tickets, but informed me that there were no trains between Varanasi and Agra. Which is not true. (I am currently on just such a train -- there are at least 2 every day.)  But then they also said there were no flights to Varanasi. Which isn't true either. In sum, Thomas Cook sucks. In the end, I just went straight to the airline to book my ticket and went back to the train station on Saturday morning, when the lines were a lot shorter. Still, something you could do in the states in about 10 minutes on the internet took several hours here.

As an aside, this sort of echoed my feelings when I was at the Indian embassy before my trip getting my visa. It took more than an hour and a half just to drop off the application. And looking around the room, I had the sense that while the westerners were sort of baffled and anxious about what was taking so long, the Indians were totally resigned to waiting. And this made me a little worried. I know that this is such an American attitude, but I just can't imagine living somewhere where simple tasks take forever. For no apparent reason!

Arrival in Mumbai

My flight to Bombay was about two hours late, so I landed at about 5:30 instead of 3:30. The drive from the airport (about 20 miles) took more than an hour. Bombay is vast. I kept thinking that we were almost there because surely this is downtown. But no.

Rough Guides has led me somewhat astray on the hotel, which it describes as a "smart, international standard hotel."  I have a hard time squaring that with the actual hotel. Sure, it had a western style sit down toilet. But is that all that "international standard" means?  Maybe it is a veiled reference to the fact that every other guest is an Arab?  Which would also explain the two separate channels carrying Al Jazeera (or is it Al Arabiya?  Whichever one has the sort of flame-looking logo.). But "smart" does not compute.

It's perfectly adequate, without being remotely inviting.

Travel Day

On Wednesday, I was driven back to Cochin and got totally car sick because of the winding, bumpy roads. That wasn't fun. Particularly because I was worried that it might be the start of something more serious. But that doesn't appear to have been the case.

At the airport in Cochin, I saw a lot of the pilgrims still in their black dhotis. None of them were wearing shoes.



On the plane I watched Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" for Viet Nam, which looked awesome. I wish we had more time there. But we are limited by the Tet holiday.

Kumily

To be perfectly honest, Kumily was sort of frustrating. The plan was to continue on the relaxation/acclimitization front in a slightly less isolated location. The problems were 3-fold.

1. It turns out that more than 3 days of doing pretty much nothing gets sort of boring unless you're at home or someplace incredibly luxurious.
2. This hotel, while perfectly nice, was not home and suffered in comparison to the previous one luxury-wise.
3. The town was sufficiently small and touristy that it was almost impossible to walk around without someone trying to sell you something.

Still, the food was incredibly good (as you would expect in an area called the spice hills), I read two more books, I saw a baby elephant, and then later I saw a herd of wild elephants.

But after six days of relaxation, I was looking forward to Bombay.

Into the Spice Hills

On Sunday, I left the backwaters and headed east into the hills where they grow spices. The road was incredibly scenic, passing first through rubber, and then through pineapple, tapioca, coffee, tea, and spice plantations. The tea plantations in particular were stunning. The tea bushes were all trimmed flat and looked like green mosaic tiles covering the hills.

The towns themselves were ugly. Densely packed storefronts cluttered with signs, and littered with, well, litter. But outside the towns, the houses were quite nice. They seemed to be made of cement covered with stucco and had red tile roofs.

Although I knew that Kerala was religiously diverse, I was surprised at how many christian churches, schools, convents, hospitals, and shrines we passed. Dozens in a three hour drive. There were also a handful of mosques, but hardly any Hindu temples.

About halfway there, we went through a town that served as a staging point for a pilgrimage to the Hindu shrine of Sabarimala. The shrine is only open two months a year, and Sunday was the festival of Makara Sankranti, the high point of the pilgrimage. Only men and women not of child-bearing age (defined -- generously -- as 10 to 55) can go the shrine. We saw only men, dressed in black dhotis (ankle length wrap-around skirts, that can be folded in half to become knee length skirts.)  I don't know how many we saw, but a lot. Including cars and trucks with people literally hanging out of windows and doors. (Sign # 673 that they have different notions of traffic safety than we do.)

Paradise

So Cochin (Kochi) was just a way station on the way to my hotel on the backwaters. It is supposed to have a beautiful old fort and an old section of town called "Jew Town." I had hoped to get over there but a combination of exhaustion and eagerness to get to the hotel prevented me from doing so.

I hit the road at noon for a one hour drive to the boat landing to get to the hotel. This was my first daytime experience of Indian roads. Organized chaos would be an apt description.
Mostly the result of the vast array of vehicles -- bikes, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, cars, trucks, buses -- sharing the two-lane road, all going at different speeds. Plus, people walking, dogs, cats, and the occasional cow. Complete with a system of honking that seemed pretty effective in preventing crashes. It was not particularly scenic, but we eventually turned onto a back road and drove past some coir plantations and finally arrive at Lake Vembanad, where a boat took me over to the hotel.

A word here about the backwaters. Samantha asked why I chose to come here. Mostly because I wanted to start somewhere sort of resorty to get over my jet lag and acclimate myself to India. The backwaters are a series of interconnected lakes, rivers, and canals, along which are a bunch of small farming and fishing villages. The big thing to do there is to stay on a houseboat and just cruise around. I didn't do that, because the prospect of a three-to-one staff to guest ratio made me sort of uncomfortable.

Instead, I stayed at a really nice hotel in my own little bungalow complete with its own pool and a hammock overlooking the lake. (To give you a sense of how nice it is, Paul McCartney had stayed in my room.) The hotel was on an island so there really wasn't much to do except go on the occasional boat ride to see some of the villages, and go to the ayurveda center for massages etc, and eat. That was perfect for me, as I mostly just read (4 books in 3 days) and slept at odd hours.

It really was beautiful, with lush tropical vegetation and so many birds that it got loud at times.

Welcome to India

We arrived in Bombay at 10:30 pm, which was noon at home. (Eighteen hours after I had left.)  Going through immigration and customs was routine, but then I was supposed to catch a flight to Cochin at 1:45, which turned out to be a little more complicated than I would have liked.

First, apparently Indian Airlines and Air India are two different things. Luckily, while I was waiting at one place with the sneaking suspicion that it had all gone too smoothly, a guy who was walking around selling drinks set me straight, directing me outside and upstairs to domestic departures.

That's where the problems started in earnest. The air outside could charitably be described as sultry (uncharitably, hot and muggy). On top of that, there were dozens of men offering to help me take my bags to the departure area. I declined, only to be follwoed by a young guy, who said it was his job to help and grabbed the cart. Tired of arguing, I gave in. About 50 yards later, he remarked that it would be "nice" if I gave him $20 US for this service. I scoffed, giving him $3, and he left. Then someone else tried to do the same thing. Really annoying. I'm tempted to chalk it up to cultural differences, but really it's just obnoxious.

I finally got to the right place. (Note:  there were no signs at any point telling people wher to go.). And then stood in three lines:  first to have my checked baggage x-rayed; second to check in; and third for security. The second and third lines were the kind that seemed to follow the ordinary rules of lines, and then other people would inexplicably be allowed to cut to the front. Interestingly, there was a separate security line for women.

I landed in Cochin at 3:30 in the morning, and headed to a hotel downtown where I was to stay only until noon when I could get a ride to my hotel on the backwaters.

I was pretty miserable at this point -- dead tired, but even more just disoriented as to time. The hotel was nice, but had that quality of hotels in hot, humid places:  too cold, but still sort of damp, so the sheets were cold and clammy. Then, I couldn't figure out how to turn off the lights. Like I said, pretty miserable. But eventually I figured it out and went right to sleep.

Leaving Home

I have been terribly lax in posting to this blog, and I will try now to get up to date.

I left Washington on Tuesday night. Todd and the boys drove me to the airport. The first leg of my trip was an 8-hour flight to Zurich. The flight was full, but I was lucky to be able to switch from a middle seat to an aisle. (The benefits of arriving early!). It was a strange mix of people -- Europeans going home, and Americans going all over. The woman sitting next to me in the gate area was going to Ethiopia. The woman sitting next to me on the plane was going to Bombay. And the older couple sitting across the aisle were dressed sort of like pilgrims (the woman was wearing a long skirt and a white sort of bonnet). They were going to Kenya to visit their son who was on some kind of religious mission.

The flight was uneventful. I watched The Last King of Scotland, which I had meant to see before I left, and was served the first two of five airplane meals I would get in the next 24 hours.

We landed in Zurich at 8 in the morning. I had a short layover -- just enough time to get through security and once again get switched to an aisle seat. Maybe I'm just unusually attuned to religious people, but there seemed to be a lot of them in the Zurich airport. First, there was a large group of Orthodox Jews praying at one gate, complete with the ear curls and tiny black boxes strapped to their heads. (I later learned that these are called tefillin.). Second, a lot of nuns, especially on my flight to Bombay.

The flight to Bombay was only half full. I mostly slept.

You've Gotta Start Somewhere

This blog is looking pretty forlorn with no posts, so I'm breaking the ice.

So, I'm leaving next Tuesday to head to India for three weeks. I'll meet up with Corina in Bangkok on Feburary 1, and we'll spend the next 5 weeks traveling around southeast Asia. The purpose of this blog is to keep people informed about where we are, and to post pictures, etc.

Stay tuned . . .