A Brave New India

And so it comes down to this... my final post... my final day.


Today, I spent the day in the ominously named 'Sector 18' in Noida. Full of shopping malls, designer shops, cafes, bars and five star hotels. A mecca for consumers, obviously and unsurprisingly the direction that any budding capitalist 'democracy' should taking with fervour! I guess it was a slightly bitter but realistic end to what has been a surreal and amazing adventure... slightly scary to see such a huge place with so much money and momentum peddling such a homogenised future with such power and passion. Maybe it would have been nicer to finish my trip in the dreamlike Varanasi rather than the painfully real Sector 18 but the last week... my last week... has offered me both ends of the spectrum of the country of a million colours. Again, I couldn't have asked for more.

And so I sit here, on my last day in India... about to order my Domino's pizza, watching Ruins (a gory American horror) ... slowly getting myself ready for the return. I've decided to nick my friends Ellen and Duncan's idea of finishing their blog with stats... so as to avoid waxing all lyrical and stuff. It's been a fucking blast!

Days Travelled: 117

Sunny days: 112

Quiet nights of sleep: 12

Total distance travelled by land: 9706km

Total distance travelled by air: 13400km

Town and cities visited: 36

States traversed: 13

Chais consumed: 634

Blog posts written: 34

Photographs taken: 4999 (exactly, that's 42 a day)

Near misses with other vehicles: 253 (more if you include the ones where I was asleep)

Miles driven on the wrong side of the road: 11

Times I literally believed I was about to die on the road: 7

Times ripped off: 43

Times I haggled for 5 minutes over Rs10 (12p): 121

Dogs almost tripped over: 1213

Number of temples visited: Enough to never want to see one again.


Kids talked to: 214

Times left speechless by abject stupidity: Countless

Cows dodged: 76

Fights seen: 2

Fights that made me wet myself at their malcoordinated nature: 2

Pickpocket attempts: 1 (on me, not by me!)

Pairs of sunglasses lost: 2

Hats lost: 1

Days ill: 9

Hours spent on the toilet: 213

Dead cows: 2 (one being eaten by a dog, one at the bottom of a waterfall on its back with its legs in the air... poor hilarious thing!)

Banks I saw which were guarded by octogenarians with elephant guns: 7

MacDonalds visited: 0

Hippie travellers who made me want to commit murder: 132

Ali Baba pants seen: 132

Ratio of ashram/yoga/spiritually enlightened travellers who were also marketing/branding/PR executives: 1:1

Times I had to stop and stare in wonderment: I'll have to spend the next year or so remembering all of those times.
And finally, I've organised some of my favorite photos from the trip into a collection of new sets for you guys.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cosimo-roams/collections/

Thanks so much for reading and looking. I can't wait to see you all.

Much love!

Varanasi

And so it come down to this... my penultimate post. The final leg... and my last new experience of my personal epic. And what better way to punctuate it than with Varanasi: City of Lights, of Gods, of Shiva... a full stop.

I came, as I have done so many times in India, with my preconceptions, expectations, fears... and as usual had them all torpedoed ruthlessly by India's perpetual need to confound and be contrary (my favorite aspect of this place by far... and also my least favorite... which is kind of fitting).

I was expecting filth and hordes of snapping tourists and pickpockets and hassling shopkeepers and money hungry false prophets and stampeding buffalo and the stench of charred flesh. What I found was quite different. Thanks in no small part to two friends I made in Sunil and Amar (see the photo)... two Varanasi locals I bumped into just after arriving who did nothing but do everything to show me an amazing time in Varanasi. They took me to all of the temples... including getting me into the Golden Temple (not usually allowed for foreigners... and if so usually at a very steep cost). This did involve a farcical interview with a room full of armed police officers in which I had been instructed to stick to the story that I was a practicing Hindu... especially painful when they asked me what I knew about Shiva... I won't give my spluttered response or try to describe to you the new shade of red that my cheeks invented. Painful, but worth it. They also took me out on their boat, to get drunk and watch the fire pujas (prayers) to mother Ganga on the Main Ghat, took me to their local hangouts, chai, eateries but also did a fine job of introducing me to all the locals who might otherwise have been hassling me for cash... I felt properly at home by the end of the first afternoon and know more Indians here that probably the rest of India combined. Generally they have been fricking legends and I can't thank them enough, though this post is most definitely dedicated to them and their posing ways!

Oh yeah... they also lived right next to the burning ghats and over the past few days I have spent a lot of time with them drinking chai and watching the pyres. Two hundred bodies a day... twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year burn on a small area on the banks of the River Ganges. It can be pretty gruesome to watch... sometimes a little too much. But it was also strangely beautiful... it seemed to make so much sense after all of the things I have seen in India... it seemed to fit so well. Even in death there is so much vibrancy and colour and tradition and smell (of sandal wood and spice not hair and flesh) and stoic virtue (the family are not supposed to show any emotion as they watched their loved ones turn to ash) and Indian-ness on the banks of yet another epic... the Ganges. It just seemed to ring with the same sound that I've been hearing but not really noticing all the way through my journey around India... it seemed to be bound by that same invisible thread that people say holds this country together.

I don't know, as ever I am unable to express in words what I felt as I watched... just that it made sense, which isn't a sense that this country seems to offer too freely.

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A minor aside about the photo below: This lady spends her time living by the burning ghats, I met her briefly in one of the chai shops that Sunil and Amar frequent. Years ago she was brought here by her family to die (quite common as it is a great honour to die in Varanasi) ... she didn't die and so her family left her here... alone. She was quite well off and was left with a lot of gold and jewellery but she was conned out of it all by ne'er do wells and is now destitute and lives on the streets off the kindness of strangers like Sunil and Amar. Apparently her nephew came up a year or two ago to take her home but she refused, she said she would stay in her home, Varanasi, and wait to die. I thought it was a pretty cool story.

Fear and Loathing in Bhaktapur

New Photos Up of Bhaktapur, Kathmandu and Sikkim (Finally): http://www.flickr.com/photos/cosimo-roams/sets/ (Unfortunately none of the night photos from Bhaktapur came out too well.. funny videos though!)

I've spent the last few days in Bhaktapur, a beautiful town just outside Kathmandu where almost every single house is a hand carved wooden masterpiece. It's been really nice to chill out for a few days here having given up on Mt Everest due to abject laziness. It's also Nepali New Year, 2067!!! This means the following. Everyone gets really, really, really drunk... for like a whole week solid.

It's so funny being here, having been in India for so long. I mean, Indians drink. And when they drink they get wasted (in exact proportion to the number of seconds it takes them to neck their litre of whiskey.), but it always seemed pretty good natured, with laughing and singing and falling and joking.

Here seems very different and I don't know if this is just a Bhaktapurian thing or a Nepali New Year thing. They are properly agro (that's aggressive)... the men (and it's only the men) strut around, chests out...preening like peacocks, hammered and proud as if it is some ancient birthright (which it most likely is) knocking into people (me) staring people out (also me) generally acting like twats. There are men in colourful hats who are the worst, I think they are the town elders as; a)They sit around doing nothing, b)They're all obnoxious, c)They are the most drunk and the kids who for the most-part imitate as kids do. I've been observing amused the last few days, taking a break from being sociable or interacting with anyone beyond restaurant transactions, as I watch the men of this town descend ever deeper into drunken debauchery... as the nights get louder and the men more prickishly aggressive and drunk and stupid.

There is a tradition of pulling a huge temple on wheels up a hill which I watched the other night. It was ridiculous... apparently people die every year as they fall under the massive wooden wheels. I saw nothing of the sort, only a hilarious display of widespread drunken ineptitude as a hundred men screamed and tugged and snatched at the ropes for two hours only to move it approximately not-an-inch... I haven't laughed so much in months... (I was not alone in the this... the women it seems do see the funny side in all this).

Hilarious. But they do have strong stomachs. I saw two goats and three chickens having their heads removed by hungover men this morning. Having their heads removed by hungover men with rusty knives and their blood drenched over the many statues of gods that are dotted around this town. Headless animals running and kicking and bleeding their frantic asses around the squares was enough to turn my stomach... not it seems, theirs.

And so tonight is apparently the night of fights, where everyone throws stones and punches and kicks their fellow man through the squares of Bhaktapur. Again, apparently an ancient yearly tradition with its roots firmly in the brain-oxygen repressing nature of beer and whiskey. I'd love to stay for this but I'm trying to relax and strangely don't want to be hit in the face by a rock. Back to Kathmandu for me.

Photos

Hey there: New photos are up... will hopefully have the Yumthang, Thangu and Kathmandu ones up in a little while too.

New Sets: Darjeeling, Varkala and Kayakumari (the southern tip of India):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cosimo-roams/sets/

Kathmandon't

Hey all, apologies for the delay since the last post! (and sorry for the lack of photos, internet connections really suck out here) I guess I was waiting for something as special as Yumthang and Thangu to write about and unsurprisingly have been left wanting...

I have learnt/learned (which one? which one?) a few things in the last few days since I last put fingers to keys:

Firstly, I learnt/learned that moving from the clear air of the mountains to the stifling pollution of an Indian border town is quite a shock for my newly-smoke-free and slightly gloating lungs... seriously though, you really notice the pollution as you come down from the mountains!

Secondly, I learnt/learned that if you are feeling ill you shouldn't even think about getting on an overnight, 20-hour cramped coach ride from the border of Nepal to Kathmandu... you shouldn't think about it and you most definitely (unless you are as big a fool as I) shouldn't actually do it!

Thirdly, I learnt/learned that if you do, as I did, decide to get on a 20-hour cramped coach ride from the border of Nepal to Kathmandu you should not expect to arrive feeling too healthy. You should not expect to recover quickly.

And so it was I spent the first of my days in Kathmandu feeling like absolute shite, a combination of tiredness from having travelled around 3000k in 10 days or so, descended around 16,000ft in 2 days, having had my air degrade in quality by a factor I never want to know and having travelled for 20-hours in serious (if drugged to the eye-balls) discomfort. Boo-hoo... poor old me.

Anyways... I did manage to find my way (courtesy of my two lovely new friends Henry and Juanell) to a lovely hotel in a quiet part of Thamel (the tourist area) and from here I have been able to make the odd darting and sometimes even meandering missions into the heart of Kathmandu, before being forced back to my hotel for reasons neither you nor I really want me to go into.

Kathmandu is a cool city, it seems, I am sad that I have been feeling so low on the energy front as it seems to be the sort of town that could absorb the energies of the most annoyingly enthusiastic traveller. Thamel itself is packed to the rafters with shops selling all sorts of goods, some nice, some tacky. It was kind of funny how many hippy, eco travellers you'd see walking around... the sort who wouldn't dream of buying Nestle or saying a nice word about Shell but thought nothing of buying loads of child-laboured jumpers and necklaces, crystals ripped from pristine mountains by unrepresented peasant workers and flying them half way round the world to adorn themselves and their like-minded friends in self-congratulatory splendour... I have to say that I too was among the purchasers, a few gifts for some of my readers perhaps... but then my favorite chocolate bar is the Kit-Kat after all.

Anyhows, fellow travellers aside (a lot of the ones out here do look a little odd... slightly murderous looks in their eyes...) Kathmandu has been lovely, kind of like Delhi's shorter sibling. I've visited the Monkey Temple, Durba Square, Indra Chowk and got lost a number of times in the side streets in between. I've gorged on momos and veg thukpas... I also did something very silly last night, which was to stand on the roof of my five story hotel during a huge thunderstorm. It was pretty exhilarating and the first thunderstorm of my adventure... just what I needed to get me back on my feet. And so I go, to Bhaktapur and then Nagarkot before returning to India for that most crazy of Indian towns... Varanasi!

Sikkim is Kinda Cool

I have recently made the rash decision to miss out West Sikkim and go straight to Nepal instead. It's a hard life.

And so... my last few days have been nothing short of incredible. I left Darjeeling for Gangtok in East Sikkim a few days ago with the express intention of visiting the northern valley of Yumthang, a place I stumbled across during my 'researching' of this trip (that basically means googling 'things to see in India' while I was supposed to be working out my notice at CAF!)... I saw one photo of this place and knew that I had to see it and to be honest have been more excited about seeing this place than any other place so in India... the Himalayas dude!!!

So, I managed to find myself a spot on a tour with a cool bunch of Canadians, a Norwegian and a Australian guy (who literally was Dali). Permits at the ready, guide in the front seat, off we went in our jeep. The roads in Sikkim are pretty fricking awful. Carved, rather hacked, out of the mountain side we skidded and bounced our way along, inches from the crumbling edge, for nine exhilarating hours... through canyons and tree lined valleys... the occasional glimpse of the majestic snow-topped Himalayas through closer mountains giving us just the briefest rush of excitement as to what lay ahead. So what lay ahead then?

I would let the picture speak for itself but I need to get this off my chest:

I have literally never in my life seen anything as stunning as what I saw that day. Not Yumthang, that was waiting for us the next morning. The Thunga Valley, above the tree line at 16,000 feet, flanked my snow covered mountains to the West and jagged rocky peaks to the East it was like no place I have ever been but exactly the place I had been yearning to see. It was so wild, windswept, freezing, epic, isolated, beautiful... blah blah blah... I loved it, I coined a realisation about myself there and then as I thought about all the different places I'd seen in India, all of which seem to have been put into perspective against this cold Himalayan backdrop.


My head definitely lies in Cities, my heart on the Beach and my soul in the Mountains.












It was so wonderfully peaceful in an aggressive and utterly unfriendly way... so different from the rest of my experience of India; the cities, the beaches, the green countryside this was not. And so we trekked down the centre of the valley, over frozen mountain streams, across boulders and marshland for half the day before, exhausted and shell-shocked, retiring to our hostel for the best night's sleep I have had in longer that I can remember.

And so the next day to Yumthang, this time perhaps I will let the picture do the talking as what I have said above goes for this beautiful valley also. The only difference being that Yumthang was far gentler... the sort of place you could imagine walking through barefoot, striking up polite conversations with the local flora and fauna all of whom's sole intention in life was to make your life as comfortable as possible... it was so picturesque, rhododendrons in full bloom, moss covering the floor, prayer flags fluttering in the chill breeze... the Yang to Thangu's Ying.











And so now I write this, rushing to go to Nepal because I cannot for a second imagine that anything in Sikkim could beat the two places I have been so fortunate to visit. I hope the photos give you a sense. Now I only have to go and find a good view of Everest!

From the City to the Mountain

So the trains came and went... three nights, 2300 kilometers from Varkala to Calcutta, approximately 215 cups of chai and very little food. It was actually far more painless than I was expecting, almost enjoyable... probably due to the fact that it was the first time I had been in an air conditioned environment since my train down to Goa. In fact that's definately why I enjoyed it.

Calcutta was amazing. Without question my favorite city so far. It just felt so comfortable, so easy to walk around, the people so easy to chat to and the hassle so easy to deflect. I'm not sure whether I am just getting a bit more used to things but it just seemed far easier, as if the city was a bit more coherent, a bit more together with itself, less disjointed and aggressive and desperate... as other cities have seemed. I spent approximately ten of the thirty-six hours I spent in Calcutta aimlessly walking around, something I haven't been tempted to do so much in other places mainly due to the traffic and filth and the hassle and the confusion... not so much in Calcutta. The street food stalls were amazing, and all more inviting and more relaxed than elsewhere I have been. So far it's been the only city (and this includes small towns) where I've been able to sit outside on the street and drink tea and coffee without getting hassled which felt great. To cut a short story shorter, I loved it and if you go to India and enjoy cities you have to visit it... great food, great people (probably the most good looking too, not that I'm superficial or anything)... just pretty darned cool.

And now I am in the mountains... an overnight train and a hairy shared jeep ride and I suddenly find myself in another India... Darjeeling. Two thousand metres up, I feel a million miles away from the last three months. The faces, the landscape, the climate, the attitudes... all so different here... it feels like I imagine Nepal will be and Tibet might be. And the Himalayas... I am in them but I can't see them... the weather is very cloudy right now as I sit writing this from an internet cafe literally in the middle of quite a loud storm cloud. I caught a glimpse of Kanchenjunga this morning, the third highest peak in the world... it sent a chill down my spine... I am so excited about seeing more of the Himalayas I can't begin to describe...

...well I can, but that will have to wait till the next post which I will write in Sikkim - home to beautiful mountains and the Yumthang Valley which I have been waiting the whole trip to see...