Another Irrelevant Blog
To full the internet with useless information and so slow it down so that it spends so much time processing information that it doesn’t have time to evolve it’s own independant intelligence and kill us all. That’s what this site is all about. Saving the world.

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?