They have free internet here. Thousands of shops. Products. Multi-national corporate brands. Free X-Box 360. It feels like a dream.
Vietnam later today.
Ho Chih Minh City.
The adventure continues: part 2; South East Asia.
Sweet.
Time passes as time does. This is it’s most fundamental characteristic, I’ve found. Thus, of course, prompting the human to take a quick dip in the passing river of time and to swim briefly backwards through the waters of the past, in orrder to take full stock of the present.
Presently I am in Kolkatta. Kolkatta is a lot like Culcutta, except spelt correctly, in much the way that Bombay is spelt Mumbai, and Bangalore is spelt Bengaluru. In South Africa we’re changing the names of everything all the time, partly for the new form of national pride, partly because it seems wrong to celebrate the Architects of Apartheid, and partly to confuse everyone, and it seems that during the longer period of post-colonial rule in India, the country has had pretty much the same idea.
I am tired now, after 3 months of running around this particularly insane country, and am especially tired after my last week, which largely consisted of a combination of bus and train rides across the entire breadth of the country.
From Jaisalmer, which is on the periphery of the Great Thar Desert and was once known as the land of Death (cheery,) in the province of Rajhastan, my travel buddy and I decided we were tired, we’d see many very large and impressive forts, which despite their extreme largeness and impressiveness, were pretty much the same damn building. We’d been camel riding and slept in the desert and I had participated in a Turban Tying Competition in the Desert Festival (which I didn’t even rank 3rd in) and were now going to go find the nearest beach and lie on it for a week, giving us five days to cross country to Kolkatta, which is where we’re flying to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam from.
The nearest beach was a place called Diu, which is almost exactly opposite Kolkatta on the breadth of India, in much the same way that Durban and Cape Town reflect each other on opposite coaches. India, however, is a lot fatter then South Africa, and such a massive journey should not be idly ignored in the pursuit of laziness, because, ultimately it is like coming face to face with a ravenous pack of hungry hunting dogs. You might not want it to be so, but there’s just no ignoring it.
Diu gets a massive tick in the Completely Sucky Hole column. A lot of people recommended it for some obscure reason (perhaps much like in a novel, I think perhaps Huckleberry Finn, when these punters convince people to come watch a show and it’s just them running around naked for a few moments, which of course sparks a great deal of anger from the crowd - the punters convince them to rather tell their friends what a good show it was, so as to save face, and this way to get their friends to go as well, so that they can all convince themselves the show was good in the first place) (or perhaps the reason was just pure malevolance, although for what I’m unsure,) but nonetheless we arrived to find a dirty, seemingly abandoned, ghost town of a place, with ugly, shadeless beaches, dirty water, lots of garbage, and absolutely no social scene at all.
Yes, Sam and I get on well, but seriously after nearly 3 months 24/7, we do like to talk to other people.
The only ‘fun’ places in Diu, were the extremely dark, dodgy, smelly, bars, that sold the cheapest beer in all of India (35 rupees a large Kingfisher) and were usually full of very drunk, middle aged Indian men, who liked to leer at us.
So instead of a restful beach holiday to cap off the end of our Indian adventure, we were sent to one of the nine circles of Hell by mistake, a place for those beyond redemption and deserving of punishment and suffering and boredom. Even the locals, who generally speaking, are very friendly, especially after I use my perfected Indian Head Wobble on them, were surly and aggressive.
On our way here, after 12 hours overnight on a seated bus, we arrived in Ahmdebahad, at 4 am, where by the greatest stroke of luck, we ran into an Indian couple who were taking a share car nearly all the way to Diu (another 10 hours.) After dropping them off I sat next to the driver who spoke very poor English, and who ran me through his entire Bollywood music collection. He also told me that it cost 150 rupees per person to get to Diu (which we knew,) but 4000 rupees to hire the same car going the other direction back to Ahmdebahad.
I suppose that should have been the giveaway.
So blow that for a lark we decided, or at least that’s the toned down phrasing, because I know my parents read this blog, and we booked an overnight bus out, which bumped and bruised us for 12 hours, to arrive back in Ahdebahad, where we caught a 20 hour train to Delhi, where we caught a 14 hour train to Gaya, which is near to a place called Bodhgaya.
Bodhgaya is the town which has the most religious significance in the world to Buddhists, because there, under a Bodhi tree, Buddha found enlightenment.
Why someone left it under a tree I’ll never know. (Ha, ha.)
The temple complex where the spot is, was pretty cool, and the exact spot is marked with an elevated stone and grows under the grandsire of the original Bodhi tree. (The original was hacked down, but some monk dude took a cutting to Sri Lanka, and then some other dude brought a cutting of that tree back and re-planted it in the same spot for a nice wheel-has-come-full-circle sort of thing.)
After a night in Bodhgaya we took another train for 10 hours to Kolkatta. We got on in the wrong compartment, which normally isn’t an issue because you can walk through the compartments to find your own one, but in this case, the real-poor-bastards-who can’t-afford-to-pay-anything-really’s carriages were between the last sleeper carriage (ours) and all the rest.
They really cram them in in those carriages, and the one time we took one it involved me standing, hugging my backpack near the foul smelling toilets in a crowd of people for 3 hours. Anyway, they lock the doors to prevent the poor people from harrassing the not so poor people. If you go down the other carriage you get to the air-conditioned section, which is also locked to prevent the not so poor people (including me) from interacting with the getting out of the poor bracket people, who are also seperated from the not doing too badly people in first class.
The rich people of course, just catch a plane.
Now we’re in Kolkatta and Sam has to give a stool sample to some Indian doctor because she’s developed a lovely case of extreme diarrhea, and I’m too wiped out to bother wandering about the streets of another large Indian city, and so here we are three days to go, with nothing to do, and nowhere nice to sit down and have a think about nothing.
My face is furry and I haven’t shaved in nearly two weeks. Actually I haven’t shaved in three months. This, I reflect, has been my favourite thing about India: the experience of shaving. There’s been the living God, the cool beaches, the ruins of Hampi, swimming in the Ganges, riding camels in the desert, awesome people, burning corpses, the Taj Mahol, all of that Indian Jazz, but ultimately my favourite thing about the place is the shaving.
Everywhere, from the most remote to the most industrious places, have little hole in the wall establishments where barbers still ply their trade, cutting hair and shaving people with sharp blades. So every week or two I’ll go in, make sure I’m paying just 15 rupees - 3 Rand - (or plus another 20 if I feel like the accompanying face massage) and I get my face lathered up with one of those brushes, surreptiously make certain that they’re putting a fresh blade into the cut-throat razor, and lean back and have someone else deal with the genetic curse of being a Pillemer. (Too much hair.) The first time I did it, it was pretty scary, after all there’s something a bit worrying about having a man put a sharp blade to your throat. (Then it was worrying the time a 12 year old boy shaved me, but all the locals seemed to think it was normal, so fine.)
And so after this I’m going to go and get clean shaven, making it clear that I want my moustache shaved off as well, which is a popular fashion statement here in India. (Having one, I mean. It’s amazing the ‘tashes in this place.)
I might need to find a barber in South Africa.
Oh crap, what am I going to do in South East Asia, the locals don’t belong to the most hairy of race groups.
Oh and I should go see Mother Theresa’s grave or tomb or whatever. She didn’t promote safe sex, just washed leppers or some shit like that. What does that say about her in a country with an AIDs problem like SA?
Two nights ago we left Rishikesh, the Western Enclave where Hippies Go to Die in India, with it’s white Gurus and it’s white Disciples, and it’s yoga and ayuverdic massages and Ganges river vibe. One trains out from Haridwar, which is the Indian version of Rishikesh, and we were taking an overnighter at 9:40 pm, so we arrived a bit earlier and went down to the Ganges to see the evening Puja, where things are burnt, prayers are said, and candles and flowers are set adrift into the swift flowing river Ganges to take the long route down to Varanassi.
We were promptly pounced on by a priest, who dragged us to the river’s edge, made us stick our barefeet into the freezing water, made us toss a flower into the water, followed by a floating candles, poked us in the forehead with a painted finger to leave behind a bindhi, and then demanded between 300 to 1000 rupees for the help.
Sam gave them 300, I gave them 40 and a scowl.
After that we had dinner and then caught the train, which was late as per usual and was missing several compartments, which were later found and stuck on.
Typical over night train business, waking up in the freezing morning to try and figure out which of the five minute stops are yours, so you can quickly rush off, and then we rushed off caught a rikshaw to the Golden Temple where we were meant to be meeting a friend, met her, tried to stay at the Golden Temple, got bored of waiting around to see if there was space, and booked into a hostel.
Later met some other friends, and then caught a shared taxi off to the India Pakistan border. There we piled into grandstands set up to view the gate that meets the border and to watch the bizarre daily ritual that occurs when the gates to the border are closed for the evening.
Pakistanis full up the grandstands on the far side of the gate, in another country, just a few hundred metres away, Indians full up the grandstands on the Indian side, and some dude starts chanting war crys from a microhpone: “Hindustan!” “Go big or go home!” “One time!” “One love!” they scream and chant, and across the border these same cries come back, except with Pakistan instead of Hindistan being yelled.
I might be wrong and they were maybe saying something in Hindi, or Punjabi, or Arabic and not actually saying “go big or go home”, or “one time”, or “one love”, but that’s what it sounded like to me and that’s what I shouted proudly supporting India.
Then the soldiers come out dressed with massive rooster hats - and by that I mean some kind of hat extension that looked like a bright red, extended peacock feather - who goostestepped with such speed and alacrity that they looked like they were moving at the speed that things move at in old black and white movies when it looks like someone’s just hit the fast forward button, but they haven’t actually.
The stands howled and yelled as the soldiers from opposing sides of the borders stamped and stared and stepped at each other.
This went on for a while.
And then they both pulled down their flags to the wild screams of the fans.
Then everyone went home, or in our case back to Amritser, where we had some supper (an aloo gohbi with a butter naan for me) and then went to the Golden Temple to see the Ritual of Putting the Big Book Away at the End of the Evening.
Surrounded by white marble walls one steps through to find a massive man made lake and in the middle of the lake stands a temple plated in gold.
People pray in there, and they’re Sikhs, and Sikhs are cool because they don’t cut their hair or beards, wear turbins and carry knives.
Then I went to sleep.
Varanassi - tick.
Ganges, holy place, bodies being burnt on the river side.
Corpses splitting open cooked innards.
Alleys full of poo and people.
Sam gets sick.
26 hours by train to Rishikesh.
Nice mountain town.
The Ganges flows here too and is fat and wide.
Yoga.
Ashrams that look like fairy tale castles rising up either side of the ravine.
Went to see a Guru speak.
An American woman.
She shouted at her disciples for being too needy.
It was weird.
Once again, after re-reading my blog once it’s been posted, I am horrified to note all the grammar, tense, and spelling errors. However even though I am apologetic, I am also too lazy to fix them. But I am aware of them.
I balance on the knife’s edge.
We arrived in Bengaluru today, which is what Bangalore is now called. It has shops and McDonalds and electronic stores and things like that. We’re even thinking of going to a bar tonight. Below our hostel is a coffee shop called Coffee Day, which we think might be the Starbucks of India.
At Coffee Day were two religious American Christians boring the hell out of a Hindi guy who was trying to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee in peace. They were highly irritating, and even though I didn’t, I wanted to tell them that there was no way they were going to convert this guy with their talk of their long dead God Jesus, and if they wanted to know why, they should catch a bus to Tiruphati, about 4 to 6 hours away, depending on how crazy your bus driver is, and then catch another bus to Tirumala, about another 20 to 45 minutes away, depending on how crazy your bus driver is, because there in a city filled to the brim with thousands and thousands of Hindu pilgrims, one can do a darshan, or deity viewing, or to really spell it out, go and check out a real life living avatar of the God Vishnu.
Yes, a real life living human incarnation of a god.
That’s right, that’s what I said.
He wears golden armour and sits on a golden throne.
Yes, made of gold.
So here’s the story.
Several things have happened since last I blogged. In summary they are:
After leaving Mangalore we caught a 3rd class train to Kunnar, which was a mistake, because we had to stand, huddle and hug our backpacks in the cramped train by the toilets which smelt like piss for over 3 hours.
Kunnar is a hole and we went there to go watch a Theyyam, which required phoning a lot of people who didn’t speak English, who got us to phone other people who didn’t speak English, to eventually arrange a taxi at 3 am to drive for 40 minutes into nowhere to a small village where through ritual dances locals channel the divine spirits of various gods, and then the villagers come (not to watch the dance, but only after) to ask them questions and get advice from the channeled gods.
Also weird.
We caught a sleeper train to Kochi, where we went to Jew Town (a suburb there) and got generally bored, and did a cooking class in Keralan food and went to watch an intimate Sittar performance.
Then we went crusing the Keralan backwaters which are palm-lined and very pretty and ended up being on a tour with 12 Indian doctors from Pubjabi, who got angry with the guide who took us to a local village and explained the medicinal effect of certain plants.
We left to the hill village of Munnar, where Sam fell in a river and we go and watch the most boring piece of theatre I have ever seen, which was a traditional form of dancing, which involved someone doing nothing but moving their hands in intricate movements, and after an hour we snuck out.
I nearly got left behind by a bus when I rushed to go to the toilet, and Sam had to run up and down the aisle screaming to stop the bus from going.
We make an error and go to Ooty another hill town, which is a hole, and then end up in Thiruphati, after almost four days of doing 6 to 14 hours a day on a bus, which is also a hole, and we arrive at 5 am and the streets of full of rats and Sam gets scared.
The next day we go to Thirumali, which is full of thousands of pilgrims. We go to the Joint Executors Officer’s office to get permission to go to the temple of Verkanshwan. (That’s not actually the right name, I don’t have the Lonely Planet on me and so can’t remember exactly.) This is the temple where the God lives.
After hours of waiting in queues to cloak room our backpack we enter the special VIP entrance (because you can get a VIP fast ticket for 100 rupees, an express ticket for 50, or go in for free for the super long wait.)
Before you get into the temple you go through reams of security and walk through a building that reminds me of an old sort of official government or school building, except the corridors are divided into lanes with prison like bars.
The lanes slowly blend into each other, going from three, to two, to one, by the time you get into the quite beautiful temple complex, but this only happens after you get sardined into an almost infinite amount of Hindu pilgrims, many of them dressed in very traditional garb, many of them chanting weird things, and almost all of them pushing as much as they can.
After about three to four hours of this you wind through the labyrinthine temple, still trapped in a massive mob, pushing and excitedly chanting, until you enter the official viewing room. In this room (silver and red everywhere) you can see into the inner sanctum.
The inner sanctum is dramatically lit from the sides, with pillars lining the way inwards to the living God, who sits in his golden armour on his golden chair.
At this point you’re meant to make a wish in your head, which apparently he will then grant.
Amy, who we saw at Ooty, asked if we’d make a wish for her, that being she’d like to never have to get a bikini wax again.
There are official pushers, who grab people and hurl them from the viewing room, so as to keep the infinite queue moving.
And then you have to make your way through the queue for another 45 minutes or so to get out.
All in all quite a weird experience, made all the weirder by the fact that everyone there believes it.
There’s a God in there.
Me and Sam, and one guy from New York who we saw wondering about earlier in the day, were the only 3 Westerners to be seen and there were thousands upon thousands of people there.
According to the Lonely Planet (which we’ve found to be a bit rubbish at times) this place gets more pilgrims annually then Jerusalem, Rome or Mecca.
It was weird.
And if you’re Hindu probably a really good reason to tell the annoying American evangelists to piss off and to stop bothering them about their dead God, they have a live one just a bus trip away.
The next bit of linear action worth mentioning is the crazy adrenalin rush of sitting in the front and watching how an Indian bus driver drives.
After a few more days at Om, we decided against going to the Trance Party. The real plus was that a friend of mine lied about being a DJ to get free entry, and had sort of put a set together, and I was going to stand on the stage and bob my head behind him and pretend to hand him stuff.
Wasn’t really worth 2000 rupees, and Sam was not interested at all. Well maybe a little. But we’re on a budget, dammit! And a schedule.
We booked a ticket to Delhi from Bangalore on the 19th, so our time in the South is limited.
Anyway we caught two local busses to get to Udupi, the home of the Masala Dosa, which is a really crap kind of Indian food, and then nearly missed the third local bus.
By this time it was evening and we caught a bus to Mangalore. The bus was quite fill so we sat by our backpacks near the driver as the sun set.
Now I’ve done some scary, adrenalin boosting things in my time. I’ve spun fire around my head, I’ve swum in Clifton water, I’ve asked completely random strangers on dates, I’ve gone to townships to pick up beer, I’ve eaten haggis, I’ve abseiled, I’ve done that bus ride up the windy hills to Pai, which everyone bitches about, hell, I’ve even fed hyaenas with my goddamn teeth, (yes I have photos) but nothing was quite as terrifying as watching this bus drive at night time, down this busted broken unlit road, overtaking cars around blind corners, straight into oncoming traffic, as busses are attempting the same maneuvre in the opposite direction, and everyone’s dodging the byciclists and motor cycle maniacs, all in the pitch black, all with their brights on, all on one of the most bumpy unmaintained roads I’ve ever had the misfortune of bouncing along upon (keeping in mind that I have been to Ethiopia, and infrastructure isn’t really a key part of that experience) and well, just, bloody hell, it was like being inside Grand Theft Auto, which is a console game in which you drive like a maniac and destroy cars and run over people and gets points for doing so.
But we survived and no one else seemed to think anything unusual was going on.
Then in Mangalore, for 720 rupees (divided by two), we stayed in the International Mangalore hotel, wherein we got beds with real matresses, hot water, television, the option of room service, and tons of obsequious staff following us around, opening doors, pushing elevator buttons and that sort of thing.
I then watched Kill Bill 2 and Sam fell asleep.
So several things have happened since New Years, but out of respect for the linear nature of the universe, I’ll begin with the first event of noteworthy proportion, which was New Years, and how Sam killed the hippy vibe.
There were two options available to us on Om Beach. The first was to go over to the nearby beach on the right, Kudlee, where some trance party organisers who were organising a big party from the 5th to the 7th were going to blast some electronic tunes from the backpackers they were staying at, and the second was to go to the hippy beach of Paradise, where neither Sam nor I had been.
I was veering towards Kudlee, but whilst having a nap, the other 7 or so South Africans that happened to be in Om at the same time as us, who we were chilling with for that period, came to the consensus that Paradise was the way of the future, and so I woke up from the concrete slab that was under the paper thin mattress, that we so lovingly call a bed, to Sam telling me to get the hell up or else we’ll miss the last boat.
The last boat goes just before sunset and there is no escaping from Paradise until the morning.
Paradise beach is small, barely a couple of hundred metres wide, and all the hippies there dress up like hippies, complete with hairflowers, strange face painting, and annoyingly technophobic attitudes.
There are a couple of shack style restaurants, and verdant palm trees creating a large shaded area just before the beach begins. Our group threw down cirongs and blankets in the corner of the shaded area and proceeded to drink vodka (after dinner of course.)
Aside from us, there was a horde of hippies cloistered in a tight group around a circle of drummers, who were very reluctant to let me get involved, surrounded by another group of people who were taking dancing to the drumming very seriously.
This was fun for a while.
This got boring by 10:30.
After New Years had come and gone, the drumming was still going but only halfheartedly, and Sam decided to ask the nearest shack-restaurant if she could attach her i-pod to the speakers, and I went to sit on the steps to keep her company.
As her pop hit indie rock (crap) blared from the crackling speakers, the hippies, slowly at first, and then in droves, fled from the false sanctity of the palm trees in all directions, as, in equal proportions, extremely drunk Indian locals appeared from nowhere to have their idea of a good time. This idea seemed to consist of being a part of a large group of men aged 16 to 25, and dancing suggestively with each other, and screaming at the top of their lungs incoherently.
This was not ideal.
Eventually the entire area was deserted of hippies, and ultimately someone came up to Sam, tapped her on the shoulder, and explained this isn’t really the vibe.
Once the music stopped, the locals happily screamed nothings into the sky for the next few hours until they got tired, and the hippies slowly returned to make a big fire on the beach, where they all looked like rejects from the set of Pirates of the Carribeans.
Sam later received a lecture from a hippy explaining that technology is bad, and that only natural music is good. I suspect he was a ketamine addict. Apparently you can buy ketamine over the counter in India, and lots of people come specifically to paradise beach to take horse tranquilizers and do nothing for a while.
We didn’t totally buy the hippies there, especially not the American ones. It’s hard to take a hippy seriously if they have an American accent. I don’t know why that is.
Everyone fell asleep on the beach except for me, and I stood with my feet in the sea until the sun rose, thought about hopping the first boat which appeared from the twilight darkness, decided against it, thought about hopping the second one, and then kicked people awake for the third one, where we hastily made our departure.
Don’t get me wrong I like hippies. Just not the hardcore right wing extremist ones, although listening to the drummers (”sure man, in a second, we’ll lend you a drum in a second,” whatever) and watching the rather average firespinners (”sorry don’t have enough fuel man, don’t have enough fuel,”) I felt a great deal of satisfaction knowing I could out-hippy any of these guys with one arm tied behind my back and still listen to my i-pod, catch buses, and use computers.
I wonder how they got into the country.
Maybe they caught a pony.
Day 1: Giant spiders that I have to get rid of. Sam nearly has heart attack.
Day 2: Big frog and a dog living under the bed.
Day 3 (morning): Dog fight in our shack. 7 am.
Day 3 (afternoon): Move into new room.
Still on Om beach, we’ll be here at least until New Years.
After departing Hampi we travelled to the southernmost beach in Goa, known as Palolem, which was dreadfully boring.
Well not really, but Sam was starting to read all the time, and I was starting to walk from one end of the beach to the other, up and down up and down, until I slipped on a slippery rock and had to plaster two of my toes.
After that I sat and read as well. Finished the Odyssey and finished Sam’s book, Turning Thirty, and found one place that was open after 10 which was called Cafe del Mar, and was pretty much the same as the other twenty beach restaraunts except it had a small glass box room, much like smoking areas in airports, if those still exist, which had flashing green lights and was sound proofed.
One beach down, about a 2km walk, was called Patnem, and a bunch of South Africans we knew were living there, and they threw a party one night, that was meant to end at ten. But the owners of the backpackers bribed the cops to stay away and they did until 3am, when they arrived to shut it down and look threatening.
So the one outdoor party we went to on our entire time in Goa, was underground, illegal and ultimately ended by the intrusion of the, not to sound overly 60’s here, but by the pigs.
We then left and went further south into Karnataka via train, where Sam nearly had a massive rage attack after being pushed about on the train, and nearly getting stuck on board once it started moving again.
She was fuming.
Then we headed down to Om Beach which is really in the middle of nowhere, and about 8 kms from the nearest town, called Gokarna, which doesn’t really have any tarred roads, and everything is covered in a fine red dust.
This place is very chilled out and almost like a small Israeli town.
We might stay here until New Years and then head into Kerala to maybe rent a houseboat and cruise down some rivers for a few days.
Yeah.
Merry Christmas to all the Christians and Happy New Years to all those who follow the Julian Calender. (Or is it the Gregorian. I can’t remember anymore.)
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