Sunday 29 November 2009
थे लास्ट ट्रेन तो डेल्ही
The Last Train to Delhi
It was afternoon in Orchha when we arrived, checked in and took and walk around town. Orchha, like many of the places we have visited is a small town set among the ruins of a much larger, older empire. However, in Orchha the town is very small and the ruins very large. We walked first down into the main square. On one corner was an enormous old and brown Hindu temple, largely abandoned. The base of the temple is square, and on top were four tapering domes, the largest of which dominates the Orchha skyline. On another corner was the old queen’s palace, which has now been painted pink and covered in fairy lights. Today, it is an active temple and Hindu’s believe that Rama himself (an incarnation of one of the big three – Vishnu) lives and breathes here. As such, Orchha is another of the sacred places and has no shortage of incense, piles of bright powders on the footpath and painted, singing old men wandering the streets. Apparently the queen had a separate palace to the king because she did not approve of his daily hunting habits (not his six concubines), and after issuing an ultimatum, moved down the street. It is said that they met only once a year for prayer.
The main square is filled with sweets and fruits shops. The fruits stalls have quite some difficulty fighting off the goats, cows and dogs lurking just a round the corner to steal a banana. The king’s palace is visible just down the street.
After the main square we took a right and walked down to the river Batewa, another holy river in India (I asked about this, there are actually no ‘unholy’ or neutral rivers in India, but the Ganges and Yumna have special status). There is a single-lane stone bridge over the river that barley keeps the tourist coaches and tractors from tipping into the water. As we stood on the bride, the sun was setting behind the cenotaphs (tombs) that we would visit the next day.
For dinner we ate a family-run restaurant. I had absolved dinner ordering responsibilities to Mahindra, with the condition that it be spicy (as Indian cooks tone it down a bit when serving westerners). As a result, I have had some of my best meals in India on this trip. Indian food is spicy, but its not ridiculously so. In no dish, even the ones where I have asked for very spicy, has the chilli been overwhelming or dominating.
At a leisurely hour the next morning we went down to the restaurant for breakfast of fruit, muesli and porridge. From the restaurant the kings’s palace was just over the river, so we started the day’s sightseeing there. The main attraction of the King’s palace is not actually the palace, it is a larger structure behind his palace called the Jahangir Mahal. The Hindu kings that ruled this area fell in and out of favour with Mughals. Most of the Mughal emperors disliked the apparently belligerent and headstrong king, except for one, who received help from the Orchha king to stage a coup. To further ingratiate the Mughal king, the Orchha king built the palace for a single visit by Jahangir. The square fort with dozens of small, domed watchtowers and larger, blue-tiled domes, was apparently used for just one night and is the height of the beautiful, and arrogant wastage reminiscent of these kings. From the top of the fort, we could see over all of Orchha, over the temple in the central square to the river. Perhaps the main attraction was the vultures that perched on top of the domes and in the crevices of the watchtowers.
From the Jahangir we visited the King’s palace, which was in a greater state of disrepair, but still pleasant to walk around with some well-preserved paintings from the 16th and 17th century. We had some lunch at the family-run restaurant, which was again very pleasant, except for the two diseased dongs that hang out the front. After lunch, we returned to the centre square to visit the temple. It was wide and open. The inside of the dome formed a deep ceiling that echoed even the slightest sounds around the hall. I had seen some people walk up and view the city from one of the balconies cut into the temple, but on this occasion there was an entrepreneur inside holding the keys and charging people to go up. We didn’t go up this time, and it turned out to be a good decision, as the upper levels are locked for conservation.
We then walked along the riverside, to the location of the cenotaphs - the tombs of the kings of Orchha. There are many of these tombs sprawled over the countryside, barely peeking from between the corn fields and the unchecked grass, but five have been very well preserved. They are designed like the main temple, on a square base with a large, decorated central triangular spire. With the river flowing right beside them, the cenotaphs are a beautiful place to stroll around. They are impressive, but, as Kate says ‘it’s no Taj Mahal’.
A dirt path leads around the cenotaphs, on the banks of the river, and follows a small canal through the farming villages around town. Further up the path there was another small stone bridge and buffalo wallowing in the mud. All around there are ruined Mughal domes and hindu temples. Apparently there was once over 1000 temples here.
We walked back through the town, and up the hill to our hotel. The walk up the hill was always complemented by a procession of kids asking our names and where we were from, for some pens, or chocolate or money. Further up the hill is the last main attraction on the Orchha itinerary. The laxhmi temple was built on this gentle hill and looks oddly like the Victoria Terminus in Mumbai. In the middle of the triangular shaped building is a tower and a dome, carved a bit like a pineapple. Some very dodgy stone stairs led to the top of the dome, and offered some of the best views of old Orchha – the king’s palace and the huge temple, the river in the background and the cenotaphs to the right. Kate bargained out the front of the Laxhmi temple with a village woman and a man decorated by a crown of fluorescent, plastic flowers playing a wood-pipe. Her secret santa picked up a something in this transaction.
By this stage we were both exhausted of walking up and down cramped sets of stairs made for much shorter people and returned to the hotel to clean up before dinner. I had another spicy dish and Kate and I made for the hotel to watch crappy movies on cable TV.
On our second day in Orchha, we took a rafting trip down the river. It lasted only an hour, but drifting with the current of the river, paddling down the occasion set of rapids and watching the temples and jungle pass by between the boulders was a great way to see the town. The Batewa is reputedly one of the cleanest rivers in India (although the bar is not set that high). I swam twice in the river – once jumping off the boat and once at the end when we stopped for chai on the rocks. It seemed relatively clean, although I did get a weird itching on my bumcheek for the next day.
Lunch was the freshly made mutton I talked about in the last post. Following that, we spent the afternoon shopping and looking around. We packed and prepared for our last train in India – to Delhi.
Our tuk-tuk ride to Jhansi (the train station) was surprisingly entertaining. First the tuk-tuk broke down, in the freezing cold. Then, as we entered Jhansi, there were a series of wedding processions moving down the main street. In these processions, the groom sits on a horse and is surrounded by his family and friends dancing to trance music under fairy lights. The speakers are carried by a bunch of kids walking down the street and it’s ridiculously loud. Everything in India is public – from the people doing their morning business on the side of the railroad tracks, in full view of passengers, to weddings, which must march down the street in bright lights and loud music.
None of us slept well on the train to Delhi. The train was late and trying to catch up time by testing how fast the train could go without derailing. We still arrived in Delhi 2 hours late.
Delhi has become something of a second home. We know the suburb we are staying in quite well, are proficient with the metro and can locate the coffee shop. We did the walk through old Delhi again, visiting the Sikh temple, the Jama Masid and the spice market. In the Sikh temple we sat on the floor and ate lentils and chipatis, and drank chai, all cooked by the volunteers. The goat-sacrificing festival was on, and the Jama Masid was packed, meaning we had to wait quite a while before being able to go in. It is still impressive.
I was deathly tired in the afternoon, but we still managed to go shopping. Kate has bought some Indian-style Levis, we both bought some shoes and, today Kate has just had a haricut and her nails done.
We leave for Sri Lanka tonight, and hopefully, some relaxing and good surf.
Our love to you all,
Kate and Charles.
It was afternoon in Orchha when we arrived, checked in and took and walk around town. Orchha, like many of the places we have visited is a small town set among the ruins of a much larger, older empire. However, in Orchha the town is very small and the ruins very large. We walked first down into the main square. On one corner was an enormous old and brown Hindu temple, largely abandoned. The base of the temple is square, and on top were four tapering domes, the largest of which dominates the Orchha skyline. On another corner was the old queen’s palace, which has now been painted pink and covered in fairy lights. Today, it is an active temple and Hindu’s believe that Rama himself (an incarnation of one of the big three – Vishnu) lives and breathes here. As such, Orchha is another of the sacred places and has no shortage of incense, piles of bright powders on the footpath and painted, singing old men wandering the streets. Apparently the queen had a separate palace to the king because she did not approve of his daily hunting habits (not his six concubines), and after issuing an ultimatum, moved down the street. It is said that they met only once a year for prayer.
The main square is filled with sweets and fruits shops. The fruits stalls have quite some difficulty fighting off the goats, cows and dogs lurking just a round the corner to steal a banana. The king’s palace is visible just down the street.
After the main square we took a right and walked down to the river Batewa, another holy river in India (I asked about this, there are actually no ‘unholy’ or neutral rivers in India, but the Ganges and Yumna have special status). There is a single-lane stone bridge over the river that barley keeps the tourist coaches and tractors from tipping into the water. As we stood on the bride, the sun was setting behind the cenotaphs (tombs) that we would visit the next day.
For dinner we ate a family-run restaurant. I had absolved dinner ordering responsibilities to Mahindra, with the condition that it be spicy (as Indian cooks tone it down a bit when serving westerners). As a result, I have had some of my best meals in India on this trip. Indian food is spicy, but its not ridiculously so. In no dish, even the ones where I have asked for very spicy, has the chilli been overwhelming or dominating.
At a leisurely hour the next morning we went down to the restaurant for breakfast of fruit, muesli and porridge. From the restaurant the kings’s palace was just over the river, so we started the day’s sightseeing there. The main attraction of the King’s palace is not actually the palace, it is a larger structure behind his palace called the Jahangir Mahal. The Hindu kings that ruled this area fell in and out of favour with Mughals. Most of the Mughal emperors disliked the apparently belligerent and headstrong king, except for one, who received help from the Orchha king to stage a coup. To further ingratiate the Mughal king, the Orchha king built the palace for a single visit by Jahangir. The square fort with dozens of small, domed watchtowers and larger, blue-tiled domes, was apparently used for just one night and is the height of the beautiful, and arrogant wastage reminiscent of these kings. From the top of the fort, we could see over all of Orchha, over the temple in the central square to the river. Perhaps the main attraction was the vultures that perched on top of the domes and in the crevices of the watchtowers.
From the Jahangir we visited the King’s palace, which was in a greater state of disrepair, but still pleasant to walk around with some well-preserved paintings from the 16th and 17th century. We had some lunch at the family-run restaurant, which was again very pleasant, except for the two diseased dongs that hang out the front. After lunch, we returned to the centre square to visit the temple. It was wide and open. The inside of the dome formed a deep ceiling that echoed even the slightest sounds around the hall. I had seen some people walk up and view the city from one of the balconies cut into the temple, but on this occasion there was an entrepreneur inside holding the keys and charging people to go up. We didn’t go up this time, and it turned out to be a good decision, as the upper levels are locked for conservation.
We then walked along the riverside, to the location of the cenotaphs - the tombs of the kings of Orchha. There are many of these tombs sprawled over the countryside, barely peeking from between the corn fields and the unchecked grass, but five have been very well preserved. They are designed like the main temple, on a square base with a large, decorated central triangular spire. With the river flowing right beside them, the cenotaphs are a beautiful place to stroll around. They are impressive, but, as Kate says ‘it’s no Taj Mahal’.
A dirt path leads around the cenotaphs, on the banks of the river, and follows a small canal through the farming villages around town. Further up the path there was another small stone bridge and buffalo wallowing in the mud. All around there are ruined Mughal domes and hindu temples. Apparently there was once over 1000 temples here.
We walked back through the town, and up the hill to our hotel. The walk up the hill was always complemented by a procession of kids asking our names and where we were from, for some pens, or chocolate or money. Further up the hill is the last main attraction on the Orchha itinerary. The laxhmi temple was built on this gentle hill and looks oddly like the Victoria Terminus in Mumbai. In the middle of the triangular shaped building is a tower and a dome, carved a bit like a pineapple. Some very dodgy stone stairs led to the top of the dome, and offered some of the best views of old Orchha – the king’s palace and the huge temple, the river in the background and the cenotaphs to the right. Kate bargained out the front of the Laxhmi temple with a village woman and a man decorated by a crown of fluorescent, plastic flowers playing a wood-pipe. Her secret santa picked up a something in this transaction.
By this stage we were both exhausted of walking up and down cramped sets of stairs made for much shorter people and returned to the hotel to clean up before dinner. I had another spicy dish and Kate and I made for the hotel to watch crappy movies on cable TV.
On our second day in Orchha, we took a rafting trip down the river. It lasted only an hour, but drifting with the current of the river, paddling down the occasion set of rapids and watching the temples and jungle pass by between the boulders was a great way to see the town. The Batewa is reputedly one of the cleanest rivers in India (although the bar is not set that high). I swam twice in the river – once jumping off the boat and once at the end when we stopped for chai on the rocks. It seemed relatively clean, although I did get a weird itching on my bumcheek for the next day.
Lunch was the freshly made mutton I talked about in the last post. Following that, we spent the afternoon shopping and looking around. We packed and prepared for our last train in India – to Delhi.
Our tuk-tuk ride to Jhansi (the train station) was surprisingly entertaining. First the tuk-tuk broke down, in the freezing cold. Then, as we entered Jhansi, there were a series of wedding processions moving down the main street. In these processions, the groom sits on a horse and is surrounded by his family and friends dancing to trance music under fairy lights. The speakers are carried by a bunch of kids walking down the street and it’s ridiculously loud. Everything in India is public – from the people doing their morning business on the side of the railroad tracks, in full view of passengers, to weddings, which must march down the street in bright lights and loud music.
None of us slept well on the train to Delhi. The train was late and trying to catch up time by testing how fast the train could go without derailing. We still arrived in Delhi 2 hours late.
Delhi has become something of a second home. We know the suburb we are staying in quite well, are proficient with the metro and can locate the coffee shop. We did the walk through old Delhi again, visiting the Sikh temple, the Jama Masid and the spice market. In the Sikh temple we sat on the floor and ate lentils and chipatis, and drank chai, all cooked by the volunteers. The goat-sacrificing festival was on, and the Jama Masid was packed, meaning we had to wait quite a while before being able to go in. It is still impressive.
I was deathly tired in the afternoon, but we still managed to go shopping. Kate has bought some Indian-style Levis, we both bought some shoes and, today Kate has just had a haricut and her nails done.
We leave for Sri Lanka tonight, and hopefully, some relaxing and good surf.
Our love to you all,
Kate and Charles.
Friday 27 November 2009
Another Day, Another Ruin
Congratulations if you got through the last post. I'll try to be more brief this time.
We are in Orchha and leave for Delhi tonight. The India portion of our trip is more or less over, we leave for Sri Lanka on the 29th. I have just had a lunch of mutton, bought fresh from the market and a genuine, home-cooked Rogan josh sauce. It upsets me to think that I won't have it like this again, probably for a very long time.
But, we were in Mandu when I last wrote, about 5 days ago I think.
For the next few days after Omkareshwar, we had a car and a driver, which, compared to the day trains and local buses, is traveling in comfort. For lunch we stopped at a roadside stall, just out of Omkareshwar for some coffee and Paranthas. The great thing about the coffee is that they serve it in these really small cups, so you can go from one place to the next and sit and have a coffee without overdosing on caffine.
Mandu is on the top of a mountain range, and our drive took us through some remote countryside. The lonely planet guide said Mandu and its surrounds have a 'lost world' feel to them, and this is true. We rode past mud-rendered huts with thatched roofs and luminous green paddy fields where bullocks would pull a plough while husband and wife (with the wife in a sari of course)followed. We rode up the mountainside where apparently there is still a significant leopard population, but we did not see anything. From the top of the mountain you could back over all the checkered fields and think, as we had in Hampi, that little had changed here in hundreds of years.
Mandu is famous becuase the ruins of an entire Mughal city remain here. A Mughal king established a city on the top of this eminently defensible mountain around the 16th century, and it was, once, one of the largest and most prosperous cities in India, with nearly one million inhabitants. These ruins draw the (fairly small it has to be said) tourist crowd.
ON the way to the hotel we stopped at a Shiva temple with more lingums and bought fresh custard apples off the roadside. I had actually never had a custard apple (well not that I can remeber) and, remarkably, they do taste like custard.
We checked into our hotel, which had a garden and a nice view over the valley from the top of the mountain. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived. There is a good place to watch the sun set over the valley, and the skies were clear, so we took a rickshaw there. On the wall of an old Mughal watchtower, we sat and chatted while the sun set. There were a bunch of young boys and our leader tried to convince them we were hollywood stars. This scenario was only briefly interrupted by a rambling tourist from flanders, dressed in a skin-tight singlet and rainbow AFL shorts fulminating at the nearest Indian (which happened to be Mahindra in this case) that Indians were prejudice and racist. I think the irony escaped him.
After taking some 'fancy photos' as the flanders man described them, we returned to the hotel garden for dinner. Dinner was nice but it was genuinely cold. I did not think I would be cold in India. Apparently it was 7 degrees in Delhi yesterday. It was 40 when we left.
The next day we hired bicycles and rode our way around the ruins. There was a tomb, a huge mosque and mini-city called the royal enclave where the emperor and his 1500 wives lived. In the afternoon we rode 12km to visit two palaces on the mountaintop looking over the realm. The ruins are extraordinary, and very well preserved, but the real pleasure of Mandu is riding through the town, again, past all the villagers and their shacks, past the people working and the goats and buffalo and cows, imagining what a city 400 years ago would have been like. Apart from the main tourist sights that visited, all over the mountaintop a tomb, or a sentry tower, or a mosque pokes out from the overgrowth and farmland. Most farmers just cultivate around the ruins. In the afternoon, Kate bought some shawls from the local market. They turned out to be invaluable, even for me, as it was very cold again that night.
The next morning we left in the car for Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh and site of the Unione Carbide disaster in 1984. People are still waiting for compensation - its all over the papers to this day, 25 years later.
It was nearly evening when we arrived. On the road we stopped at the most filthy unhygienic restaurant we have yet experienced. You meal was complemented by a litter of emaciated puppies and a mother dog with an awful, weeping cyst. Remarkably, none of us got sick.
In Bhopal we visited the 3rd largest Mosque in the world, again built by the Mugals (the second biggest is in Delhi and the first in Mecca). Compared to the Delhi mosque, it was a relaxed place to walk around, with boys playing cricket in the courtyard. Bhopal is a lot like Delhi, with a congested, claustrophobic old city. It has the highest proportion of Muslim people in India, and there was a festival coming up where goats are sacrificed and eaten by family and friends. People were auctioning the animals in the old city and there were some very nervous, unsettled goats being dragged through the tuk-tuk traffic in the old city.
Incidentally, I read in the paper that 55,000 water buffalo were sacrificed in Nepal only a couple of days ago for a festival.
We visited Bhopal lake, which is still poisonous from the chemical spill. There here hundreds of locals strolling up and down the promenades set up along the banks. A local guy was playing a guitar and singing what sounded like bob marley songs. There was a green-lit mosque in the middle of the lake and ducks overfed on fairy floss and popcorn awkardly moved around the small pier.
I got into the festival spirit and had a mutton dish for dinner (mutton is goat here, not sheep) and afterward we walked across the road to catch the 9pm session of '2012' the latest apocalyptic movie with John cusak in it. I lost 10 rupess on a bet that it would be in English, but it didn't matter, dialog was not its strong suit.
Early the next morning we took a short, but packed, local bus to Sanchi. We were staying in a resort with quite nice, large rooms. Sanchi is home to Bhuddist 'stupas' - big domes with spires on top as old as 200BC. Some of the stupas have Bhuddas relics encased in them, bust you cannot see them (the relics). We visited these stupas not long after lunch and it was a pleasant walk through the parks. There was a good museum too, dedicated to the English archaeologists who stumbled upon the ruins (the oldest preserved structures in India I should add) and made it their work to restore them. Apart from the Stupa's, Sanchi is a one street town from w ild west movie. There are wooden shacks either side of a dusty street where people on either side sit and stare at one another when they are not collectively staring at a passer-by. There is one bank and a man with a shotgun stands guard out the front. I watched star cricket and slept for the rest of the afternoon.
The train to Jhansi was an hour late, so we had a quick look around the local temple, whose entrance is a giant lion's mouth. On the train, kate and I had a side berth, which was very comfortable. We were in sleeper class, so the carriages were attended by a regular stream of vendors and beggars. We played quite a bit of chess and stared out the window for the 4 hour journey. This was our last day train in India.
From Jhansi we had a tuk-tuk to Orchha, about 20 km away. Orchha is a beautiful city set among the ruins of a Hindu kingdom and on the banks of a wide and clear river.
But I am going for a last bike ride through rural India this afternoon, and will have to leave our last couple of days in Orchha for some other time soon.
Our love to you all.
Kate and Charles.
We are in Orchha and leave for Delhi tonight. The India portion of our trip is more or less over, we leave for Sri Lanka on the 29th. I have just had a lunch of mutton, bought fresh from the market and a genuine, home-cooked Rogan josh sauce. It upsets me to think that I won't have it like this again, probably for a very long time.
But, we were in Mandu when I last wrote, about 5 days ago I think.
For the next few days after Omkareshwar, we had a car and a driver, which, compared to the day trains and local buses, is traveling in comfort. For lunch we stopped at a roadside stall, just out of Omkareshwar for some coffee and Paranthas. The great thing about the coffee is that they serve it in these really small cups, so you can go from one place to the next and sit and have a coffee without overdosing on caffine.
Mandu is on the top of a mountain range, and our drive took us through some remote countryside. The lonely planet guide said Mandu and its surrounds have a 'lost world' feel to them, and this is true. We rode past mud-rendered huts with thatched roofs and luminous green paddy fields where bullocks would pull a plough while husband and wife (with the wife in a sari of course)followed. We rode up the mountainside where apparently there is still a significant leopard population, but we did not see anything. From the top of the mountain you could back over all the checkered fields and think, as we had in Hampi, that little had changed here in hundreds of years.
Mandu is famous becuase the ruins of an entire Mughal city remain here. A Mughal king established a city on the top of this eminently defensible mountain around the 16th century, and it was, once, one of the largest and most prosperous cities in India, with nearly one million inhabitants. These ruins draw the (fairly small it has to be said) tourist crowd.
ON the way to the hotel we stopped at a Shiva temple with more lingums and bought fresh custard apples off the roadside. I had actually never had a custard apple (well not that I can remeber) and, remarkably, they do taste like custard.
We checked into our hotel, which had a garden and a nice view over the valley from the top of the mountain. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived. There is a good place to watch the sun set over the valley, and the skies were clear, so we took a rickshaw there. On the wall of an old Mughal watchtower, we sat and chatted while the sun set. There were a bunch of young boys and our leader tried to convince them we were hollywood stars. This scenario was only briefly interrupted by a rambling tourist from flanders, dressed in a skin-tight singlet and rainbow AFL shorts fulminating at the nearest Indian (which happened to be Mahindra in this case) that Indians were prejudice and racist. I think the irony escaped him.
After taking some 'fancy photos' as the flanders man described them, we returned to the hotel garden for dinner. Dinner was nice but it was genuinely cold. I did not think I would be cold in India. Apparently it was 7 degrees in Delhi yesterday. It was 40 when we left.
The next day we hired bicycles and rode our way around the ruins. There was a tomb, a huge mosque and mini-city called the royal enclave where the emperor and his 1500 wives lived. In the afternoon we rode 12km to visit two palaces on the mountaintop looking over the realm. The ruins are extraordinary, and very well preserved, but the real pleasure of Mandu is riding through the town, again, past all the villagers and their shacks, past the people working and the goats and buffalo and cows, imagining what a city 400 years ago would have been like. Apart from the main tourist sights that visited, all over the mountaintop a tomb, or a sentry tower, or a mosque pokes out from the overgrowth and farmland. Most farmers just cultivate around the ruins. In the afternoon, Kate bought some shawls from the local market. They turned out to be invaluable, even for me, as it was very cold again that night.
The next morning we left in the car for Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh and site of the Unione Carbide disaster in 1984. People are still waiting for compensation - its all over the papers to this day, 25 years later.
It was nearly evening when we arrived. On the road we stopped at the most filthy unhygienic restaurant we have yet experienced. You meal was complemented by a litter of emaciated puppies and a mother dog with an awful, weeping cyst. Remarkably, none of us got sick.
In Bhopal we visited the 3rd largest Mosque in the world, again built by the Mugals (the second biggest is in Delhi and the first in Mecca). Compared to the Delhi mosque, it was a relaxed place to walk around, with boys playing cricket in the courtyard. Bhopal is a lot like Delhi, with a congested, claustrophobic old city. It has the highest proportion of Muslim people in India, and there was a festival coming up where goats are sacrificed and eaten by family and friends. People were auctioning the animals in the old city and there were some very nervous, unsettled goats being dragged through the tuk-tuk traffic in the old city.
Incidentally, I read in the paper that 55,000 water buffalo were sacrificed in Nepal only a couple of days ago for a festival.
We visited Bhopal lake, which is still poisonous from the chemical spill. There here hundreds of locals strolling up and down the promenades set up along the banks. A local guy was playing a guitar and singing what sounded like bob marley songs. There was a green-lit mosque in the middle of the lake and ducks overfed on fairy floss and popcorn awkardly moved around the small pier.
I got into the festival spirit and had a mutton dish for dinner (mutton is goat here, not sheep) and afterward we walked across the road to catch the 9pm session of '2012' the latest apocalyptic movie with John cusak in it. I lost 10 rupess on a bet that it would be in English, but it didn't matter, dialog was not its strong suit.
Early the next morning we took a short, but packed, local bus to Sanchi. We were staying in a resort with quite nice, large rooms. Sanchi is home to Bhuddist 'stupas' - big domes with spires on top as old as 200BC. Some of the stupas have Bhuddas relics encased in them, bust you cannot see them (the relics). We visited these stupas not long after lunch and it was a pleasant walk through the parks. There was a good museum too, dedicated to the English archaeologists who stumbled upon the ruins (the oldest preserved structures in India I should add) and made it their work to restore them. Apart from the Stupa's, Sanchi is a one street town from w ild west movie. There are wooden shacks either side of a dusty street where people on either side sit and stare at one another when they are not collectively staring at a passer-by. There is one bank and a man with a shotgun stands guard out the front. I watched star cricket and slept for the rest of the afternoon.
The train to Jhansi was an hour late, so we had a quick look around the local temple, whose entrance is a giant lion's mouth. On the train, kate and I had a side berth, which was very comfortable. We were in sleeper class, so the carriages were attended by a regular stream of vendors and beggars. We played quite a bit of chess and stared out the window for the 4 hour journey. This was our last day train in India.
From Jhansi we had a tuk-tuk to Orchha, about 20 km away. Orchha is a beautiful city set among the ruins of a Hindu kingdom and on the banks of a wide and clear river.
But I am going for a last bike ride through rural India this afternoon, and will have to leave our last couple of days in Orchha for some other time soon.
Our love to you all.
Kate and Charles.
Tuesday 24 November 2009
Mumbai to Omkareshwar
We arrived at Goa train station early and lay on the concrete staring at some leaking water and men trying to haul bags of rocks over the tracks for two and a half hours. From Goa to Mumbai we travelled first class. What is the difference between first and second class? An overzealous attendant barges in with a can of Glade and sprays the cabin and there is some first class sticky tape on the beds. We slept pretty well apart from an entire Indian family (in two beds) who came in at 1am and got off the train again at 3am.
The sun was not quite up when we reached Mumbai. We negotiated an overpriced taxi to the hotel – but he actually found the hotel, so we considered it money well spent. It was ‘impossible’ for us to check in before 12pm, so we walked around town trying to find a place for breakfast.
You’d imagine Mumbai to be one of those all night cities where you can get anything you want at any time. Well, not so. Mumbai does not wake up until 10am, so we did some incidental sightseeing while waiting for the breakfast shops to open.
We were staying in Colaba, in the southern part of Mumbai. Colaba is not far from the Taj hotel, the ‘Gateway to India’ and Leopold’s cafe, where the attacks in November last year were. On sunrise we strolled down to the waterfront of Mumbai harbour and saw the Taj hotel – an enormous colonial edifice with red domes on top, still being repaired at one end from the attacks. Looking out over the water was a large stone arch – the ‘gateway to India’ – reputedly the point where the British landed, and hundreds of years later, where the last official left. There is a wide boulevard in front of the Taj and behind the gateway where the hawkers were preparing for their day’s scamming and hundreds of pigeons were being fed by an old man. A circle of people were practising ‘laughing yoga’, where they all run towards each other laughing at nothing, or perhaps laughing at how silly they looked. I was laughing.
Eventually we had breakfast at a place called Cafe Monde, which had good coffee and we read the paper.
Lonely planet had a suggested walking tour of Mumbai, so we roughly followed its course after breakfast. The walk took us down MG road (every town and city has an MG road, and I have only now worked out that it is Mahatma Ghandi Road) past numerous dominating colonial buildings, Including the Police Headquarters (previously the yacht club), the high court, the museum, and Mumbai university. Some of the buildings were formerly white, but the pollution had taken to them and many parts were stained black. The high court and the university were side by side and very impressive. I know nothing about architecture, but they looked like gothic cathedrals. The man with a machine gun standing behind a bunker of sandbags said we could not go in. We didn’t try to bargain.
Mumbai, or Bombay as it was, (and lots of people still call it Bombay, to my surprise) is a very impressive display of British power, and perhaps that is how they meant it to be. Interestingly, I have heard that Bombay is just a British mispronunciation of Mumbai that caught on. Similarly the British couldn’t quite say Kolkata, and said Calcutta.
There were also some quite different buildings along the way including a baby blue synagogue with a ‘mobile combat team’ vehicle out the front and a massive art deco construction with two women holding longswords carved into the facades. The women must have been 100 feet.
This area of Mumbai is a living relic. Even the unmarked buildings are old British mansions stained from the pollution or crumbling with age. That said, this was clearly a wealthy area. The streets were wide and clean, traffic signals were obeyed, brand stores, ATM’s and coffee shops (with espresso coffee!) were numerous.
The walk also guided us around the central park of Mumbai. It is a huge rectangle, surrounded by markets. There are seven or eight cricket pitches there and the teams were warming up in their whites for Saturday matches. Heaps of kids were playing ad-hoc games with no pads and real cricket balls. We stopped for a while in the shade(away from the flying balls) and watched one old guy smash some boundaries off another old guy.
A few kilometres down a street of local markets (from which Kate bought a pair of denim shorts for Rs 100) was the Victoria Terminus, or the central railway station of Mumbai, where we had got off the train earlier. The building is famous for the attacks last year, and apparently there is a market in Mumbai for ‘terror tourism’ (although I don’t know how you could tell the difference considering most of the attacks were at the most popular tourist destinations), but it is a huge old stone building with a large, spiky, pollution stained dome. With the double –decker buses and yellow taxis whizzing past the roundabout – it is an impressive sight.
By then it was past check-in time so we walked back to the hotel and my secret santa acquired something on the way. On the way, we stopped at a patisserie that sold real croissants. It might not sound like much, but the sight of proper, soft, light, flaky, buttery croissants brought us unspeakable joy.
Our room was more like an apartment. People were living permanently in the surrounding rooms and we had a little balcony that looked over a garden. Not that it mattered, we were barely in the room for a waking hour. The hotel was in a nice area, with banyan trees shading the entire street. I think it was for this reason that all the taxi drivers hung out here.
An island of Mumbai, in the harbour, is the site of some very ancient caves. The island is reachable by boat, so after unpacking we returned to the harbour and paid for a ticket on the ‘deluxe boat’. Once on the ferry, there was additional tax to get onto the top floor of the boat, and I hereby stand as the only person in history who has fallen for that one. We didn’t even get a seat.
Mumbai harbour is very polluted. We ploughed through the soupy air and the slick water for about an hour, passing tankers and battleships and even the occasional surfacing submarine. As we stepped off the boat there was a small train that went only 100 metres along the flats to the base of a hill, where, if you were still feeling lazy, you could be carried on your very own chair by four men to the beginning of the caves. The caves were very old, some as old as 200BC. The first cave was impressive, it was a large hall with some elephants and an huge Shiva head, one of the biggest in India. These caves are monolithic, which means they cut the caves, and all the ornate carvings, from the mountainside with only a hammer and chisel. There were also a number of big lingums, but I will come back to Shiva and his lingums later.
We were both starving by the time we arrived back on land in Mumbai and went to dinner at a restaurant called Indigo. It was expensive, but I can truly say that I had the best burger of my life there. It exceeded even the glory of Ben Bry. It was simply a bun, a big piece of steak and some brie cheese, but as you bit through the bun, there was no resistance upon reaching the steak. In the restaurant, when you ordered a beer they showed it to you first, like it was a bottle of wine. Very posh. The restaurant also had salads and meats and desserts on display, exactly like a Sydney delicatessen. In the end we concluded that it would have been best not to visit Mumbai. The food was so good and we would be venturing back into the land of mixed vegetable curry and three chapattis.
We walked home through the night markets that sell 4-foot polka-dot balloons, gold monacles and telescopes, mens and women’s underwear, tourist t-shirts and multicoulred bangles. Secret Santa acquired another item on this walk.
Overnight there was a huge storm that woke me up.
Theoretically breakfast was included in our room price, but when we found out this consisted of one bread roll and a packet of Nescafe, we went back to Indigos for some porridge and coffee. We checked out at 12 and got ripped off again for a cab to our next hotel (we eventually realised you can get metered ones and they are the way to go), but there was extra pressure to just get inside something because a holy man was walking down our street, naked to the hip, cracking a whip at us and demanding money.
We met our leader for the next tour from Mumbai to Delhi. Mahindra is best descried as jolly. He’s a borderline alcoholic that laughs deeply, is a well of knowledge and specialises in gourmet trips (and looks the part). We are travelling with just one other person, a girl from England – Emma.
With the group, we returned to the Gateway of India and ate some raw onion, coriander and green mango on a crisp from the streetside. Seeing another bollywood movie was on the cards, but having already experienced (and barely understood) one in Jaipur, Kate and I opted to take a taxi to Asia’s biggest laundry. You might have seen it on that ‘History of India’ show. It was a 15 minute drive out of the plush, harbour side area of Mumbai into the poorer areas. The laundry is beside the train tracks and consists of thousands of sweaty, topless men bashing soapy clothes against some smoothed rocks. We decided to go inside and take a look (and got done by the ‘you need to pay us 100 Rs ($2.50) to get in’ scam – but what can you do, they are standing there, you want to go past...). We were guided by a young man who took us through all the pastel shirts and bedsheets. All the workers were more than happy to share their time with us, so it was a good experience. The OHS was questionable. Electrical wires connected to dryers just dangled on the soaking floor and we went into one room where some chemicals were bubbling under a 40 gallon drum, right beside where people were taking a rest.
We returned to the hotel via Chowpatty beach – Mumbai’s answer to Bondi. It was more like a mudflat and there were stockpiles of those jack-shaped concrete things to stop boats landing on the shore. Locals were snuggling each other on the sand and while vendors inquisitively strolled past selling fluro windmills. Kids were riding along the beach in these little multicoloured cars blaring hindi trance. The city is built right along the edge of this stretch of water, and we walked the 2-3km back to the hotel. We had a beer at a restaurant that smelt of urine and had red lights out the front.
For dinner we ate at a local restaurant and had some excellent Indian food. It was the first Indian in a week and tasted good.
The next morning was a 4:30am start, so we packed early and made our way to the Central Mumbai Railway Station for a train to Aurangabad. There is still the odd bullet hole visible in the walls.
Overall, we really enjoyed our time in Mumbai. We did not see the slums and much of the poverty (although they do run ‘tours’ of there, and people have mentioned how a significant number of people living there are white collar workers, how there is electricity, drinking water and most people rent, and how the annual turnover of trade in the slum is US$650 million a year – slightly less than the GDP of the Solomon Islands). We were both struck by how different Mumbai is, how diverse, multicultural and modern it is. It has to be said though, eating some of the finest food we have ever eaten certainly improved our perceptions.
I had a couple of cups of coffee for breakfast before the train left. We were sitting in an AC chair car, which for day trips, is fairly luxurious. A waiter comes around and asks for orders for breakfast and lunch. He had an astonishly clam and gentle demeanour. Payment was a relaxed ‘when you want affair’ and the carriage was full of young professionals, presumably going to work, as the men smelt heavily of cologne. I had two omelettes, the second of which I though the waiter was giving me because I looked hungry, but alas I had to pay. Lunch was vegetable biriyani, basically spicy fried rice.
We arrived in at Aurangabad at around 1:30pm. Aurangabad takes its name from the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, who ruled from here between 1653 to 1707. Aurangzeb is famous firstly for being the son of Shah Jehan who locked his father in the Red Fort in Agra in a chamber overlooking the Taj Mahal, which Jehan built. He is famous secondly for being a paranoid psychotic who had an incestuous relationship with his sister and oversaw the demise of Mughal rule in India.
Our first hotel room was fine except for the smell and the big hole near the roof of the bathroom through which workman only a few metres away could see. We changed rooms to one where the same hole was patched up.
After checking in we jumped back in the cab and took the ride out to the Ellora caves. The caves are 20km out of Aurangabad. Again, these were monolithic caves, so they were cut out of an existing mountain. Ellora’s caves are remarkable because three different religions plied their trade here – Buddhists, Hindus and Jains. The Buddhist caves were the oldest, but the Hindu caves were the more impressive. The main Hindu cave was constructed over 150 years, involving six generations of craftsmen and was dedicated to Shiva and his lingums.
Shiva is a multi-limbed, dope smoking, deamon smoting, destroyer god. As such there are many images carved into the caves of Shiva decapitating daemons with one hand, while fondling the breasts of his wife with another. The Shiva lingum, is basically a half-egg shaped stone that sticks out from the ground. Lingums represent the unity of the penis and the vagina and are believed to be imbued with considerable power (especially over fertility) if consecrated with the right prayers. Lingums are everywhere, often covered in garlands of flowers. Some lingums are huge and some are very small. People have lingums in their houses and restaurants.
The highlight, however, was when our guide chanted a Buddhist mantra in a cave with ribs cut into the roof to amplify the sound.
Kate was not feeling well that night, so we both had an early night.
The next morning we hired a car and driver to do some sightseeing. We drove out, back in the direction of the Ellora caves to Dalutabad. It had been raining quite steadily all morning and the hills and mountains were barely visible in the cloud. Thesemountains around Aurangabad are like readymade forts. They have sheer sides and flat tops. From there it is really just a case of add a wall and a citadel and presto, you have an impregnable fort. One such mountain in Dalutabad has been popular for fort-building for nearly 1000 years. Dalutabad fort was the first stop on our sightseeing tour.
Archaeologists are currently excavating a Medieval village on and around the mountain where Dalutabad fort now sits. Dalutabad really shot to fame, hoever, when another psychotic Mughal emperor, Tulaq, marched the entire population of Delhi 1100km to establish a new capital here. Most died upon the way, and those who didn’t made the return journey less than 12 months later.
Many years later a second Mugal emperor, Aurangzeb, also moved his capital here and the fort that stands atop the hill now is mostly his conception. Because this fort was built by a maniac, it is far more interesting. The red fort in Agra was like a well-proportioned body – large limbs for defence but an equally large brain, in the form of spaces for public gathering and politicking. Daultabad fort has massive limbs and no brain.
The outer walls remain and are spectacular among the overgrowth and moss. In the courtyards there is a beautiful orange Minar, (a large, thin mughal tower) second only to the Qutb Minar in Delhi. These outer areas at the foot of the mountain are open and peaceful with abundant gardens, temples and mosques. Move up the hill towards the citdel, however, and the paranoia grows. First, there are two steep moats with tiny drawbridges and two enormous brass-cast cannons. If you manage to get past here, you walk into a deep and winding cave cut into the mountain itself. It is called the ‘dark passage’, and inside there is no light but for carefully placed tunnels letting in just a glint of light. Enemy soldiers, in their claustrophobia and madnesss (apparently soldiers used to kill each other in the tunnel) would run towards these lights only to plummet into the moat below. Channels were also cut into the tunnel, so, unseen by enemy solders, boiling oil could be poured on them. The doors either side could be closed and if you did make it thorough, you would have to fight your way, single file, out of the doorway.
We needed a man with a flame torch to guide us through the tunnels, and if they weren’t claustrophobic enough, the smell of bat poo was almost overwhelming. Kate enlisted the guiding hand of a local woman to get through the passage.
The story goes that the fort has only been twice breached, and on both occasions the guards were bribed.
After the tunnel there is a very long set of stairs the curls around the mountain. I puffed up these and reached the summit. The views of the surrounding mountains and khaki forests were breaktaking, but the citadel was just a lonely hall and a massive cannon.
After the fort we visited another ‘Baby Taj’ – which was just that, a miniature, pollution stained and version of the Taj. Apparently the designer of this Tomb was more into finanacial austerity than the Shah Jehan – the architect of the Taj in Agra.
We finally convinced our driver to take us for lunch, which was at a nice restaurant called Kalish. After lunch we visited a water wheel, which is apparently a feat of Medieval engineering, but looked to me like a pool with a huge banyan tree.
In the evening we visited the Pathan market, which takes its name from the Afgahns that ruled here. Now there is a green-lit mosque with a spire like a lantern and local fabric and clothes shops on either side of the street. There were no tourists here and very little bargaining. First we visited a Sari shop, which had striking assortment of colourful silk fabrics, many just strewn over the floor. We also visited a jewellery shop, and Kate bought the marriage necklace she had been looking for the whole trip – for a very reasonable price – from a friendly man with green eyes. Just walking down the street was a great experience, the people were incredibly friendly and curious, but without the aggression (and commensurate defensiveness) of some other places we have visited. It was just interesting to see local people shopping as they would normally.
Aurangabad is not much to look at. It is like many other Indian, cities – it is dusty, polluted, crowded, cows stop traffic and a roundabout is not a roundabout without a statue of a freedom fighter on it. It does not have the charm of Jaislamer or the energy or the bright lights of Mumbai, but we had a fantastic stay. Tourist places are touristy because there is something very impressive there, and they are definitely worth seeing. Aurangabad was a different experience though because it is off the trail a little bit. You walk down the street and know that all the hellos will not be followed by a sales pitch.
We had dinner at a Tandoor restaurant. I ordered chicken which Kate ate most of.
We took a car the next day from Aurangabad to Jalgoan. For breakfast we stopped at a vendor on the street and ate fired rice cakes and chai tea, in public, as everyone else does.
On the way to Jalgoan are the Ajanta caves. These caves were much like the Ellora caves, but are entirely Buddhist and cut into mountains overlooking a river and waterfall. They are also famous because they have some of the best preserved cave paintings in India. Historians have theorised that the caves are so well-preserved state because nearly 1500 years ago, the Buddhist dynasty here collapsed very quickly and people fled the caves. From then they were forgotten, until a British official stumbled across them during a tiger hunt.
To get into the caves you must first run a tight gauntlet of hawkers offering you ‘gifts’ of crystals. I am quite weak, so had one thrust into my hand. In the caves we shared a guide with some European tourists who were very unhappy about something to do with the price (which was, in perspective, $2.50 each).
After making our way through the caves and admiring the painting and some incredible, deep monasteries with arched roofs and what looked like a rib cage cut into it, we crossed the river and walked to the top of a nearby hill for a view from a distance. For some reason my guard was down and I accepted another gift from a ‘farmer’, who led me around, pointing out the waterfall and trying to convince me that he was not a salesperson while trying to sell me crystals. The view of the waterfall set against caves in the background was impressive.
We arrived in Jagaon late in the afternoon. Jalgoan is mostly a stop for people visiting the Ellora and Ajanta caves. As we arrived, however, Kate had noticed that one of the tassles on her marriage necklace was broken. We knew there was another outlet of this jewellery store in Jagoan, so we got a tuk-tuk there and tried to sort it out. At first they simply tried to weld it together and paint over it with sparkly gold paint. It looked atrocious and we settled for an exchange (although the pendant was slightly different). In the evening we took a stroll around the street near our hotel. We stopped in at a cotton shop with a very friendly owner (and fixed prices, again) and Kate bought some fabric. My secret Santa acquired a little something on this walk.
We had dinner in a bar with dimmed lights. The lights are dimmed so people hand make under the table deals... apparently.
Our hotel in Jagoan was only 2 minutes from the train station. So, after another 4:30am start, we hopped the train to Omkareshwar. We were in sleeper carriages this time, so the train was chockers with people getting on and off to go to work, chai wallahs wailing down the aisle and people coming past selling what looked like sticks, but are actually portable toothbrushes. The toothbrushes come from the neem tree. People just break off the stick, shave off the outer layer of bark and expose the coarse bristles underneath. We had another conversation about Ricky Ponting, this time with some men working for a pharmecutical company somewhere on the train route. People are generally very friendly, but I will not miss day trains in sleeper class.
From the train station it was another hour’s drive to Omkareshwar. Just as we left the station there was a procession of people in the main street. At the head of the procession was the body of a young woman. She was on a wooden platform, wrapped in cloth but for her face, which, while surrounded in lace, was visible.
The drive to Omkareshwar took us past many cotton and chilli plantations. Piles of chilli lie on the roadside drying in the sun. In many of the fields there are the small tents of nomads with little more than their yellow tarpoulians, their pots and their goats. Almost as common as the cars are wooden carts being pulled by cows with painted horns and pom-poms between their eyes. In the towns that we pass through, there are many more dead dogs than we have seen elsewhere.
On the way we stopped at roadside stall for paranthas (stuffed, fried bread) and saw a buffalo with its head tied to its front, left leg as punishment for being naughtly. We arrived in Omkareshwar by mid-afternoon.
Omkareshwar is a dirt-poor, flyblown place with rake-like holy men and Shiva Lingums everywhere. The air is as thick with superstition and religion as it is with hashish and incencse here.
Omkareshwar is an island at the meeting point of two holy rivers. The island is shaped like an ‘Om’, or a backward “3”. There is an emourmous dam at one end of the river. Our hotel was on the other side of the river, and after checking in we took a walk across the bridge to the central part of Omkareshwar, past a cow painted as a tiger and beggars on either side. Omkareshwar is a very small place, and the central area is a Shiva temple and a collection of yellow tarpaulins, under which vendors sell flowers and chai to pilgrims. The air is very thick under the tarpaulins with incense and the holy-men and their white-painted faces just appear from the incense smoke and disappear again. There were steps leading down to the river, and people bathing there. We stopped for chai with the flies under one of the tarpaulins.
After getting our bearings we crossed back over the river and had afternoon tea at ‘Ganesh rest’ house, run my some very friendly Nepalese. Ganesh rest-house is under siege from monkeys. The owners keep a little jack-russel and an armoury of slingshots to hold back the tide. Occasionally a monkey slips through, races into the kitchen and steals a banana, then sits in a nearby tree and eats it slowly, in full view of guests and staff. I had nutella toast and coffee. Nutella must grow here because I recieved almost a full jar lumped on my plate.
Kate and I spent most of that afternoon relaxing and watching TV. Kate discovered that the laptop had games on it, so that is why this blog-post is so delayed.
The next morning we returned to Ganesh rest house for breakfast, I ventured the museli and Kate did the porridge. We both survived and it were the better for the fruit and fibre. Omkareshwar is so small and isolated, and in many ways so dirty, that we thought if there was ever a place we were going to get sick, this would be it. Thankfully, that never eventuated.
The plan for the day was to walk the 8km circuit around the om-shaped island. After breakfast we crossed the bridge, said hello to the tiger cow and began our stroll, clockwise, around the island. Two minutes in we were stopped for a series of photos by some school girls. We continued along the banks of the river. Pilgrims make this walk quite regularly, so the pathway was well maintained. It wound through numerous straw huts, under which naked holy men would sit cross-legged in a cloud of marijuana smoke and distribute big, toothless smiles. Scatted along the path are little temples and idols covered in flowers or honey and milk. Some idols are little more than a rock painted red with two goggly eyes stuck on. Every house or stall along the way (and there are hundreds) had a lingum or lingums, like blobby rock gardens. Many families take this walk around the island, paying their respects and giving their offerings of flowers to the various gods they encounter on the way.
The river below was flowing fast. We could see numerous areas where the wide water would funnel into a set of rapids. The water looked relatively clean, and as we reached one point of the island, two fast-flowing rivers collided and created big, shallow rapids that the boats struggled to climb their way up.
On the point at the confluence of these two rivers was a little temple with another red, multilimbed god, from which some kids were pilfering the offerings. We went and sat by the waterside. There were odd rockpiles everywhere (like from blair witch project!) and clothes (and rubbish) strewn over the pebbles and boulders leading to the water. People who have experienced hard times or suffering come to the banks of this river, take off their clothes and bathe in it. They then leave put new clothes on and leave the old, tainted life behind.
The path then led up the spine of the mountain, through some abandoned mud-shacks and bangle-stores and small temples. Halfway up, black-faced monkeys started appearing. They were lining either side of the path waiting for someone to give them food. One monkey looked particularly impatient and agitated. I walked past, then Kate walked past, then, as Emma was walking past, the monkey grabbed her pants and would not let go. Kate clapped and advanced towards the monkey, but it hissed and bared it teeth, letting go of Emma and grabbing onto Kate’s leg. I then hissed at the monkey and stomped at it, but this just aggravated it more and it reared its sharp teeth towards me. There was a local family walking up, so, not knowing what else to do, I yelled at a teenage boy to do something about it. Calmly, he did something that I don’t remember in the fuss and the monkey was gone. We all are now terrified of these black-faced monkeys.
Anyway, much good came out of the attack, because this family escorted us through the monkey zone, and once we reached the top of the hill, we all stopped for a chai and exchanged photos and the little hindi/English that we knew. We walked further up the hill with them, to an 80ft Shiva statue painted in full colour. Here they stopped to eat at a place where the food was free for pilgrims, so we said our goodbyes. The path moved past some more ruins of a Hindu Kingdom, to the opposite end of the island, for a view of the dam, and down to the banks of the river, past some 11 or 12 year old girls labouring in their Saris, to the bridge with the tiger cow.
In the afternoon we took a boat tour of the island. Most of the boats are colourfully adorned with tassels and a painted hull. Ours was, aesthetically, the worst boat in the river. It had cloth for a roof, and ageing wooden hull with water sloshing inside. What it lacked in looks, however, it made up for in strength. Along the way there were five or six sets of rapids that the boat had navigate. On one side of the island we would go down with the rapids, on the other we had to go up them. So we bumped down the one side of the island and bashed our way up the other. At one point I though the river had the better of us, as we had attempted to ascend a steep looking rapid to find ourselves up against the rocks and going backwards. Only the intervention of both boys at the front of the boat and a big stick did we make it to the other side.
Upon returning to land we stopped for a chai with flies and a bull chased a kid up the street, we think because he threw a water bomb at him. In the final hours of the day, Kate perused the bangle shops and made some purchases. My Secret Santa acquired two possessions on this sojourn.
We walked back up the hill to our hotel as the sun set. Kids were running up and down beside us, rolling a bike tyre with a stick as they went. Their sisters were in a nearby house, labouring away at the washing. A whole busload of kids pulled over just to run out and shake our hands.
That evening we had dinner at the restaurant and were given a lecture on the trials of the holy men. One category of holy man (they seem to be exclusively men) called Nagus, pledge themselves to chastity. In order to ensure that they do not break this vow, when they graduate from holy man school (there is the equivalent of primary secondary and tertiary education) these men pierce their foreskin and place a ring through it. To the ring they attach a bell.
Omkareshwar is all that is strange and foreign about India squeezed onto a tiny island. It is almost ridiculous to think that Mumbai and this place are on the same planet, let alone the same country. Nowhere so far have I felt so far from home. Apart from Nutella, nothing is familiar. Not the mantras that echo over the river each night at exactly 8pm, not the gak blobs on the side of road that people worship, not the bizarre characters and stories that people follow as their religion, not the rationale behind why people would starve themselves and put a rod though their penis, not the blind 90 year old on the bridge with no hands, not the air raid siren that goes off each morning at 7, not why you would paint a cow as a tiger, and not even the flies.
We left Omkareswar a few days ago for Mandu, and Mandu for Bhopal. Tomorrow we leave Bhopal for Sanchi. I always say it, but I will try to get these more recent places up soon.
Our love to you all.
Kate and Charles.
The sun was not quite up when we reached Mumbai. We negotiated an overpriced taxi to the hotel – but he actually found the hotel, so we considered it money well spent. It was ‘impossible’ for us to check in before 12pm, so we walked around town trying to find a place for breakfast.
You’d imagine Mumbai to be one of those all night cities where you can get anything you want at any time. Well, not so. Mumbai does not wake up until 10am, so we did some incidental sightseeing while waiting for the breakfast shops to open.
We were staying in Colaba, in the southern part of Mumbai. Colaba is not far from the Taj hotel, the ‘Gateway to India’ and Leopold’s cafe, where the attacks in November last year were. On sunrise we strolled down to the waterfront of Mumbai harbour and saw the Taj hotel – an enormous colonial edifice with red domes on top, still being repaired at one end from the attacks. Looking out over the water was a large stone arch – the ‘gateway to India’ – reputedly the point where the British landed, and hundreds of years later, where the last official left. There is a wide boulevard in front of the Taj and behind the gateway where the hawkers were preparing for their day’s scamming and hundreds of pigeons were being fed by an old man. A circle of people were practising ‘laughing yoga’, where they all run towards each other laughing at nothing, or perhaps laughing at how silly they looked. I was laughing.
Eventually we had breakfast at a place called Cafe Monde, which had good coffee and we read the paper.
Lonely planet had a suggested walking tour of Mumbai, so we roughly followed its course after breakfast. The walk took us down MG road (every town and city has an MG road, and I have only now worked out that it is Mahatma Ghandi Road) past numerous dominating colonial buildings, Including the Police Headquarters (previously the yacht club), the high court, the museum, and Mumbai university. Some of the buildings were formerly white, but the pollution had taken to them and many parts were stained black. The high court and the university were side by side and very impressive. I know nothing about architecture, but they looked like gothic cathedrals. The man with a machine gun standing behind a bunker of sandbags said we could not go in. We didn’t try to bargain.
Mumbai, or Bombay as it was, (and lots of people still call it Bombay, to my surprise) is a very impressive display of British power, and perhaps that is how they meant it to be. Interestingly, I have heard that Bombay is just a British mispronunciation of Mumbai that caught on. Similarly the British couldn’t quite say Kolkata, and said Calcutta.
There were also some quite different buildings along the way including a baby blue synagogue with a ‘mobile combat team’ vehicle out the front and a massive art deco construction with two women holding longswords carved into the facades. The women must have been 100 feet.
This area of Mumbai is a living relic. Even the unmarked buildings are old British mansions stained from the pollution or crumbling with age. That said, this was clearly a wealthy area. The streets were wide and clean, traffic signals were obeyed, brand stores, ATM’s and coffee shops (with espresso coffee!) were numerous.
The walk also guided us around the central park of Mumbai. It is a huge rectangle, surrounded by markets. There are seven or eight cricket pitches there and the teams were warming up in their whites for Saturday matches. Heaps of kids were playing ad-hoc games with no pads and real cricket balls. We stopped for a while in the shade(away from the flying balls) and watched one old guy smash some boundaries off another old guy.
A few kilometres down a street of local markets (from which Kate bought a pair of denim shorts for Rs 100) was the Victoria Terminus, or the central railway station of Mumbai, where we had got off the train earlier. The building is famous for the attacks last year, and apparently there is a market in Mumbai for ‘terror tourism’ (although I don’t know how you could tell the difference considering most of the attacks were at the most popular tourist destinations), but it is a huge old stone building with a large, spiky, pollution stained dome. With the double –decker buses and yellow taxis whizzing past the roundabout – it is an impressive sight.
By then it was past check-in time so we walked back to the hotel and my secret santa acquired something on the way. On the way, we stopped at a patisserie that sold real croissants. It might not sound like much, but the sight of proper, soft, light, flaky, buttery croissants brought us unspeakable joy.
Our room was more like an apartment. People were living permanently in the surrounding rooms and we had a little balcony that looked over a garden. Not that it mattered, we were barely in the room for a waking hour. The hotel was in a nice area, with banyan trees shading the entire street. I think it was for this reason that all the taxi drivers hung out here.
An island of Mumbai, in the harbour, is the site of some very ancient caves. The island is reachable by boat, so after unpacking we returned to the harbour and paid for a ticket on the ‘deluxe boat’. Once on the ferry, there was additional tax to get onto the top floor of the boat, and I hereby stand as the only person in history who has fallen for that one. We didn’t even get a seat.
Mumbai harbour is very polluted. We ploughed through the soupy air and the slick water for about an hour, passing tankers and battleships and even the occasional surfacing submarine. As we stepped off the boat there was a small train that went only 100 metres along the flats to the base of a hill, where, if you were still feeling lazy, you could be carried on your very own chair by four men to the beginning of the caves. The caves were very old, some as old as 200BC. The first cave was impressive, it was a large hall with some elephants and an huge Shiva head, one of the biggest in India. These caves are monolithic, which means they cut the caves, and all the ornate carvings, from the mountainside with only a hammer and chisel. There were also a number of big lingums, but I will come back to Shiva and his lingums later.
We were both starving by the time we arrived back on land in Mumbai and went to dinner at a restaurant called Indigo. It was expensive, but I can truly say that I had the best burger of my life there. It exceeded even the glory of Ben Bry. It was simply a bun, a big piece of steak and some brie cheese, but as you bit through the bun, there was no resistance upon reaching the steak. In the restaurant, when you ordered a beer they showed it to you first, like it was a bottle of wine. Very posh. The restaurant also had salads and meats and desserts on display, exactly like a Sydney delicatessen. In the end we concluded that it would have been best not to visit Mumbai. The food was so good and we would be venturing back into the land of mixed vegetable curry and three chapattis.
We walked home through the night markets that sell 4-foot polka-dot balloons, gold monacles and telescopes, mens and women’s underwear, tourist t-shirts and multicoulred bangles. Secret Santa acquired another item on this walk.
Overnight there was a huge storm that woke me up.
Theoretically breakfast was included in our room price, but when we found out this consisted of one bread roll and a packet of Nescafe, we went back to Indigos for some porridge and coffee. We checked out at 12 and got ripped off again for a cab to our next hotel (we eventually realised you can get metered ones and they are the way to go), but there was extra pressure to just get inside something because a holy man was walking down our street, naked to the hip, cracking a whip at us and demanding money.
We met our leader for the next tour from Mumbai to Delhi. Mahindra is best descried as jolly. He’s a borderline alcoholic that laughs deeply, is a well of knowledge and specialises in gourmet trips (and looks the part). We are travelling with just one other person, a girl from England – Emma.
With the group, we returned to the Gateway of India and ate some raw onion, coriander and green mango on a crisp from the streetside. Seeing another bollywood movie was on the cards, but having already experienced (and barely understood) one in Jaipur, Kate and I opted to take a taxi to Asia’s biggest laundry. You might have seen it on that ‘History of India’ show. It was a 15 minute drive out of the plush, harbour side area of Mumbai into the poorer areas. The laundry is beside the train tracks and consists of thousands of sweaty, topless men bashing soapy clothes against some smoothed rocks. We decided to go inside and take a look (and got done by the ‘you need to pay us 100 Rs ($2.50) to get in’ scam – but what can you do, they are standing there, you want to go past...). We were guided by a young man who took us through all the pastel shirts and bedsheets. All the workers were more than happy to share their time with us, so it was a good experience. The OHS was questionable. Electrical wires connected to dryers just dangled on the soaking floor and we went into one room where some chemicals were bubbling under a 40 gallon drum, right beside where people were taking a rest.
We returned to the hotel via Chowpatty beach – Mumbai’s answer to Bondi. It was more like a mudflat and there were stockpiles of those jack-shaped concrete things to stop boats landing on the shore. Locals were snuggling each other on the sand and while vendors inquisitively strolled past selling fluro windmills. Kids were riding along the beach in these little multicoloured cars blaring hindi trance. The city is built right along the edge of this stretch of water, and we walked the 2-3km back to the hotel. We had a beer at a restaurant that smelt of urine and had red lights out the front.
For dinner we ate at a local restaurant and had some excellent Indian food. It was the first Indian in a week and tasted good.
The next morning was a 4:30am start, so we packed early and made our way to the Central Mumbai Railway Station for a train to Aurangabad. There is still the odd bullet hole visible in the walls.
Overall, we really enjoyed our time in Mumbai. We did not see the slums and much of the poverty (although they do run ‘tours’ of there, and people have mentioned how a significant number of people living there are white collar workers, how there is electricity, drinking water and most people rent, and how the annual turnover of trade in the slum is US$650 million a year – slightly less than the GDP of the Solomon Islands). We were both struck by how different Mumbai is, how diverse, multicultural and modern it is. It has to be said though, eating some of the finest food we have ever eaten certainly improved our perceptions.
I had a couple of cups of coffee for breakfast before the train left. We were sitting in an AC chair car, which for day trips, is fairly luxurious. A waiter comes around and asks for orders for breakfast and lunch. He had an astonishly clam and gentle demeanour. Payment was a relaxed ‘when you want affair’ and the carriage was full of young professionals, presumably going to work, as the men smelt heavily of cologne. I had two omelettes, the second of which I though the waiter was giving me because I looked hungry, but alas I had to pay. Lunch was vegetable biriyani, basically spicy fried rice.
We arrived in at Aurangabad at around 1:30pm. Aurangabad takes its name from the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, who ruled from here between 1653 to 1707. Aurangzeb is famous firstly for being the son of Shah Jehan who locked his father in the Red Fort in Agra in a chamber overlooking the Taj Mahal, which Jehan built. He is famous secondly for being a paranoid psychotic who had an incestuous relationship with his sister and oversaw the demise of Mughal rule in India.
Our first hotel room was fine except for the smell and the big hole near the roof of the bathroom through which workman only a few metres away could see. We changed rooms to one where the same hole was patched up.
After checking in we jumped back in the cab and took the ride out to the Ellora caves. The caves are 20km out of Aurangabad. Again, these were monolithic caves, so they were cut out of an existing mountain. Ellora’s caves are remarkable because three different religions plied their trade here – Buddhists, Hindus and Jains. The Buddhist caves were the oldest, but the Hindu caves were the more impressive. The main Hindu cave was constructed over 150 years, involving six generations of craftsmen and was dedicated to Shiva and his lingums.
Shiva is a multi-limbed, dope smoking, deamon smoting, destroyer god. As such there are many images carved into the caves of Shiva decapitating daemons with one hand, while fondling the breasts of his wife with another. The Shiva lingum, is basically a half-egg shaped stone that sticks out from the ground. Lingums represent the unity of the penis and the vagina and are believed to be imbued with considerable power (especially over fertility) if consecrated with the right prayers. Lingums are everywhere, often covered in garlands of flowers. Some lingums are huge and some are very small. People have lingums in their houses and restaurants.
The highlight, however, was when our guide chanted a Buddhist mantra in a cave with ribs cut into the roof to amplify the sound.
Kate was not feeling well that night, so we both had an early night.
The next morning we hired a car and driver to do some sightseeing. We drove out, back in the direction of the Ellora caves to Dalutabad. It had been raining quite steadily all morning and the hills and mountains were barely visible in the cloud. Thesemountains around Aurangabad are like readymade forts. They have sheer sides and flat tops. From there it is really just a case of add a wall and a citadel and presto, you have an impregnable fort. One such mountain in Dalutabad has been popular for fort-building for nearly 1000 years. Dalutabad fort was the first stop on our sightseeing tour.
Archaeologists are currently excavating a Medieval village on and around the mountain where Dalutabad fort now sits. Dalutabad really shot to fame, hoever, when another psychotic Mughal emperor, Tulaq, marched the entire population of Delhi 1100km to establish a new capital here. Most died upon the way, and those who didn’t made the return journey less than 12 months later.
Many years later a second Mugal emperor, Aurangzeb, also moved his capital here and the fort that stands atop the hill now is mostly his conception. Because this fort was built by a maniac, it is far more interesting. The red fort in Agra was like a well-proportioned body – large limbs for defence but an equally large brain, in the form of spaces for public gathering and politicking. Daultabad fort has massive limbs and no brain.
The outer walls remain and are spectacular among the overgrowth and moss. In the courtyards there is a beautiful orange Minar, (a large, thin mughal tower) second only to the Qutb Minar in Delhi. These outer areas at the foot of the mountain are open and peaceful with abundant gardens, temples and mosques. Move up the hill towards the citdel, however, and the paranoia grows. First, there are two steep moats with tiny drawbridges and two enormous brass-cast cannons. If you manage to get past here, you walk into a deep and winding cave cut into the mountain itself. It is called the ‘dark passage’, and inside there is no light but for carefully placed tunnels letting in just a glint of light. Enemy soldiers, in their claustrophobia and madnesss (apparently soldiers used to kill each other in the tunnel) would run towards these lights only to plummet into the moat below. Channels were also cut into the tunnel, so, unseen by enemy solders, boiling oil could be poured on them. The doors either side could be closed and if you did make it thorough, you would have to fight your way, single file, out of the doorway.
We needed a man with a flame torch to guide us through the tunnels, and if they weren’t claustrophobic enough, the smell of bat poo was almost overwhelming. Kate enlisted the guiding hand of a local woman to get through the passage.
The story goes that the fort has only been twice breached, and on both occasions the guards were bribed.
After the tunnel there is a very long set of stairs the curls around the mountain. I puffed up these and reached the summit. The views of the surrounding mountains and khaki forests were breaktaking, but the citadel was just a lonely hall and a massive cannon.
After the fort we visited another ‘Baby Taj’ – which was just that, a miniature, pollution stained and version of the Taj. Apparently the designer of this Tomb was more into finanacial austerity than the Shah Jehan – the architect of the Taj in Agra.
We finally convinced our driver to take us for lunch, which was at a nice restaurant called Kalish. After lunch we visited a water wheel, which is apparently a feat of Medieval engineering, but looked to me like a pool with a huge banyan tree.
In the evening we visited the Pathan market, which takes its name from the Afgahns that ruled here. Now there is a green-lit mosque with a spire like a lantern and local fabric and clothes shops on either side of the street. There were no tourists here and very little bargaining. First we visited a Sari shop, which had striking assortment of colourful silk fabrics, many just strewn over the floor. We also visited a jewellery shop, and Kate bought the marriage necklace she had been looking for the whole trip – for a very reasonable price – from a friendly man with green eyes. Just walking down the street was a great experience, the people were incredibly friendly and curious, but without the aggression (and commensurate defensiveness) of some other places we have visited. It was just interesting to see local people shopping as they would normally.
Aurangabad is not much to look at. It is like many other Indian, cities – it is dusty, polluted, crowded, cows stop traffic and a roundabout is not a roundabout without a statue of a freedom fighter on it. It does not have the charm of Jaislamer or the energy or the bright lights of Mumbai, but we had a fantastic stay. Tourist places are touristy because there is something very impressive there, and they are definitely worth seeing. Aurangabad was a different experience though because it is off the trail a little bit. You walk down the street and know that all the hellos will not be followed by a sales pitch.
We had dinner at a Tandoor restaurant. I ordered chicken which Kate ate most of.
We took a car the next day from Aurangabad to Jalgoan. For breakfast we stopped at a vendor on the street and ate fired rice cakes and chai tea, in public, as everyone else does.
On the way to Jalgoan are the Ajanta caves. These caves were much like the Ellora caves, but are entirely Buddhist and cut into mountains overlooking a river and waterfall. They are also famous because they have some of the best preserved cave paintings in India. Historians have theorised that the caves are so well-preserved state because nearly 1500 years ago, the Buddhist dynasty here collapsed very quickly and people fled the caves. From then they were forgotten, until a British official stumbled across them during a tiger hunt.
To get into the caves you must first run a tight gauntlet of hawkers offering you ‘gifts’ of crystals. I am quite weak, so had one thrust into my hand. In the caves we shared a guide with some European tourists who were very unhappy about something to do with the price (which was, in perspective, $2.50 each).
After making our way through the caves and admiring the painting and some incredible, deep monasteries with arched roofs and what looked like a rib cage cut into it, we crossed the river and walked to the top of a nearby hill for a view from a distance. For some reason my guard was down and I accepted another gift from a ‘farmer’, who led me around, pointing out the waterfall and trying to convince me that he was not a salesperson while trying to sell me crystals. The view of the waterfall set against caves in the background was impressive.
We arrived in Jagaon late in the afternoon. Jalgoan is mostly a stop for people visiting the Ellora and Ajanta caves. As we arrived, however, Kate had noticed that one of the tassles on her marriage necklace was broken. We knew there was another outlet of this jewellery store in Jagoan, so we got a tuk-tuk there and tried to sort it out. At first they simply tried to weld it together and paint over it with sparkly gold paint. It looked atrocious and we settled for an exchange (although the pendant was slightly different). In the evening we took a stroll around the street near our hotel. We stopped in at a cotton shop with a very friendly owner (and fixed prices, again) and Kate bought some fabric. My secret Santa acquired a little something on this walk.
We had dinner in a bar with dimmed lights. The lights are dimmed so people hand make under the table deals... apparently.
Our hotel in Jagoan was only 2 minutes from the train station. So, after another 4:30am start, we hopped the train to Omkareshwar. We were in sleeper carriages this time, so the train was chockers with people getting on and off to go to work, chai wallahs wailing down the aisle and people coming past selling what looked like sticks, but are actually portable toothbrushes. The toothbrushes come from the neem tree. People just break off the stick, shave off the outer layer of bark and expose the coarse bristles underneath. We had another conversation about Ricky Ponting, this time with some men working for a pharmecutical company somewhere on the train route. People are generally very friendly, but I will not miss day trains in sleeper class.
From the train station it was another hour’s drive to Omkareshwar. Just as we left the station there was a procession of people in the main street. At the head of the procession was the body of a young woman. She was on a wooden platform, wrapped in cloth but for her face, which, while surrounded in lace, was visible.
The drive to Omkareshwar took us past many cotton and chilli plantations. Piles of chilli lie on the roadside drying in the sun. In many of the fields there are the small tents of nomads with little more than their yellow tarpoulians, their pots and their goats. Almost as common as the cars are wooden carts being pulled by cows with painted horns and pom-poms between their eyes. In the towns that we pass through, there are many more dead dogs than we have seen elsewhere.
On the way we stopped at roadside stall for paranthas (stuffed, fried bread) and saw a buffalo with its head tied to its front, left leg as punishment for being naughtly. We arrived in Omkareshwar by mid-afternoon.
Omkareshwar is a dirt-poor, flyblown place with rake-like holy men and Shiva Lingums everywhere. The air is as thick with superstition and religion as it is with hashish and incencse here.
Omkareshwar is an island at the meeting point of two holy rivers. The island is shaped like an ‘Om’, or a backward “3”. There is an emourmous dam at one end of the river. Our hotel was on the other side of the river, and after checking in we took a walk across the bridge to the central part of Omkareshwar, past a cow painted as a tiger and beggars on either side. Omkareshwar is a very small place, and the central area is a Shiva temple and a collection of yellow tarpaulins, under which vendors sell flowers and chai to pilgrims. The air is very thick under the tarpaulins with incense and the holy-men and their white-painted faces just appear from the incense smoke and disappear again. There were steps leading down to the river, and people bathing there. We stopped for chai with the flies under one of the tarpaulins.
After getting our bearings we crossed back over the river and had afternoon tea at ‘Ganesh rest’ house, run my some very friendly Nepalese. Ganesh rest-house is under siege from monkeys. The owners keep a little jack-russel and an armoury of slingshots to hold back the tide. Occasionally a monkey slips through, races into the kitchen and steals a banana, then sits in a nearby tree and eats it slowly, in full view of guests and staff. I had nutella toast and coffee. Nutella must grow here because I recieved almost a full jar lumped on my plate.
Kate and I spent most of that afternoon relaxing and watching TV. Kate discovered that the laptop had games on it, so that is why this blog-post is so delayed.
The next morning we returned to Ganesh rest house for breakfast, I ventured the museli and Kate did the porridge. We both survived and it were the better for the fruit and fibre. Omkareshwar is so small and isolated, and in many ways so dirty, that we thought if there was ever a place we were going to get sick, this would be it. Thankfully, that never eventuated.
The plan for the day was to walk the 8km circuit around the om-shaped island. After breakfast we crossed the bridge, said hello to the tiger cow and began our stroll, clockwise, around the island. Two minutes in we were stopped for a series of photos by some school girls. We continued along the banks of the river. Pilgrims make this walk quite regularly, so the pathway was well maintained. It wound through numerous straw huts, under which naked holy men would sit cross-legged in a cloud of marijuana smoke and distribute big, toothless smiles. Scatted along the path are little temples and idols covered in flowers or honey and milk. Some idols are little more than a rock painted red with two goggly eyes stuck on. Every house or stall along the way (and there are hundreds) had a lingum or lingums, like blobby rock gardens. Many families take this walk around the island, paying their respects and giving their offerings of flowers to the various gods they encounter on the way.
The river below was flowing fast. We could see numerous areas where the wide water would funnel into a set of rapids. The water looked relatively clean, and as we reached one point of the island, two fast-flowing rivers collided and created big, shallow rapids that the boats struggled to climb their way up.
On the point at the confluence of these two rivers was a little temple with another red, multilimbed god, from which some kids were pilfering the offerings. We went and sat by the waterside. There were odd rockpiles everywhere (like from blair witch project!) and clothes (and rubbish) strewn over the pebbles and boulders leading to the water. People who have experienced hard times or suffering come to the banks of this river, take off their clothes and bathe in it. They then leave put new clothes on and leave the old, tainted life behind.
The path then led up the spine of the mountain, through some abandoned mud-shacks and bangle-stores and small temples. Halfway up, black-faced monkeys started appearing. They were lining either side of the path waiting for someone to give them food. One monkey looked particularly impatient and agitated. I walked past, then Kate walked past, then, as Emma was walking past, the monkey grabbed her pants and would not let go. Kate clapped and advanced towards the monkey, but it hissed and bared it teeth, letting go of Emma and grabbing onto Kate’s leg. I then hissed at the monkey and stomped at it, but this just aggravated it more and it reared its sharp teeth towards me. There was a local family walking up, so, not knowing what else to do, I yelled at a teenage boy to do something about it. Calmly, he did something that I don’t remember in the fuss and the monkey was gone. We all are now terrified of these black-faced monkeys.
Anyway, much good came out of the attack, because this family escorted us through the monkey zone, and once we reached the top of the hill, we all stopped for a chai and exchanged photos and the little hindi/English that we knew. We walked further up the hill with them, to an 80ft Shiva statue painted in full colour. Here they stopped to eat at a place where the food was free for pilgrims, so we said our goodbyes. The path moved past some more ruins of a Hindu Kingdom, to the opposite end of the island, for a view of the dam, and down to the banks of the river, past some 11 or 12 year old girls labouring in their Saris, to the bridge with the tiger cow.
In the afternoon we took a boat tour of the island. Most of the boats are colourfully adorned with tassels and a painted hull. Ours was, aesthetically, the worst boat in the river. It had cloth for a roof, and ageing wooden hull with water sloshing inside. What it lacked in looks, however, it made up for in strength. Along the way there were five or six sets of rapids that the boat had navigate. On one side of the island we would go down with the rapids, on the other we had to go up them. So we bumped down the one side of the island and bashed our way up the other. At one point I though the river had the better of us, as we had attempted to ascend a steep looking rapid to find ourselves up against the rocks and going backwards. Only the intervention of both boys at the front of the boat and a big stick did we make it to the other side.
Upon returning to land we stopped for a chai with flies and a bull chased a kid up the street, we think because he threw a water bomb at him. In the final hours of the day, Kate perused the bangle shops and made some purchases. My Secret Santa acquired two possessions on this sojourn.
We walked back up the hill to our hotel as the sun set. Kids were running up and down beside us, rolling a bike tyre with a stick as they went. Their sisters were in a nearby house, labouring away at the washing. A whole busload of kids pulled over just to run out and shake our hands.
That evening we had dinner at the restaurant and were given a lecture on the trials of the holy men. One category of holy man (they seem to be exclusively men) called Nagus, pledge themselves to chastity. In order to ensure that they do not break this vow, when they graduate from holy man school (there is the equivalent of primary secondary and tertiary education) these men pierce their foreskin and place a ring through it. To the ring they attach a bell.
Omkareshwar is all that is strange and foreign about India squeezed onto a tiny island. It is almost ridiculous to think that Mumbai and this place are on the same planet, let alone the same country. Nowhere so far have I felt so far from home. Apart from Nutella, nothing is familiar. Not the mantras that echo over the river each night at exactly 8pm, not the gak blobs on the side of road that people worship, not the bizarre characters and stories that people follow as their religion, not the rationale behind why people would starve themselves and put a rod though their penis, not the blind 90 year old on the bridge with no hands, not the air raid siren that goes off each morning at 7, not why you would paint a cow as a tiger, and not even the flies.
We left Omkareswar a few days ago for Mandu, and Mandu for Bhopal. Tomorrow we leave Bhopal for Sanchi. I always say it, but I will try to get these more recent places up soon.
Our love to you all.
Kate and Charles.
Friday 13 November 2009
Thursday 12 November 2009
Hampi, Goa, How to be in India without being in India (sort of)
Hampi is north of Mysore, but still inland. The most distinctive natural features are the granite boulders littering the landscape, some resting in impossible positions atop one another. The boulders clump in places to form mountains and from a distance they look like piles made with pebbles. There is a brown river, the Tungabhadra, that runs through the centre of town, and a single ‘ferry’ (tinny) that moves between the two banks when required. The Government tried to build a stone bridge over the river some years ago, but only got halfway before interests intervened. Unfinished, the stone bridge remains above the river like an ancient ruin. Down the slopes of the granite piles and on the banks of the river are banana plantations and rice paddies. The colours in Hampi are sharp – the green of the plantations the ochre of the boulders and the brown of the river.
During our stay we were situated on the north side of the river. Most of the atrractions are on the south bank. The tinny was the only way across. It packed 15 people for 15 Rs each into its leaking hull (it had to be bailed out at the end of each journey) and trundled across the river. We would share the boat with French and Isareli travellers on most trips, and on one occasion a stoned Hindi grandfather making wings with his doti (wrap skirt) just back from a session at the monkey (Hanuman) temple.
Our room was a small round hut with a thatched roof of palm fronds and straw. There was a small porch out the front and a swinging bed hanging from the rafters from where we watched the farmer churn a spent rice field in his tractor with some very impressive burn-outs and skids. From time to time, women came with their goats and scythes and bundled the dry and harvested rice into mounds of straw only metres from our porch. It was very quiet, except for a family of sparrows that had made a nest in our roof and the croaking geckos.
We could have spent the next two days in the swing but the schedule was tight and the idea that you might “miss out” on a sight or activity has dictated no ruin, fort, palace or temple will go un-seen.
The room and the view and the quiet were all a welcome surprise after another overnight train. We had only two nights, but I would come back to Hampi and wish we stayed here longer. On the morning we arrived, Kate took the ferry into town to have a dress made, and I updated the last blog post before this one.
In the afternoon we planned to swim in the nearby lake. The swollen lake is positioned above the town and fields, contained only by a stout, leaking wall. The lake is ‘let down’ into the town when it gets too high with a minimum 5 hours notice. Despite a sign suggesting otherwise, we were assured there were no crocodiles. The lake was among the granite piles and the water came right to the rocks without a beach. Some old and young men from Bangalore joined our group down to the waterside to watch the girls swim, which meant that they did not swim. One was quite open about the fact that they were ‘not swimming, just looking’ (and he promptly threw his cigarette butt into the lake). Some other local men shooed them off and went swimming. Me and a couple of the other guys in the group did go swimming (in a fenced off area, don’t worry mum). It was a freshwater lake and water was cool, but not cold. Aside from the occasional cigarette butt bobbing in the water, it was clean.
From the lake we travelled 15 minutes or so to the Hanuman (monkey king) Temple . The whitewashed temple was unassuming and on top of one of the granite mountains. The impending storm added an exciting backdrop to our climb to the top along a set of stairs, past rows of staring, black-faced monkeys on the handrails and some giant millipedes. From the top, we had a panoramic view of the river twisting between the boulders and plantations. Nestled into the boulders and just peeking from the plantation canopies were the ruins of a 15th century South Indian empire. From this view, one feels as though very little has changed. Apart from the tuk-tuks and trucks, there is little sign of modern civilisation. At the foot of the hill a family was tending goats from their thatched roof hut and the dominant man-made structure is a yellowing temple-obelisk in the distance. It is like looking out over the realm as you might have done 400 years ago.
We watched the sunset from our swinging chair and remarked how we would not change a thing about where we were.
We left at 9 the next morning for the ruins we had seen the previous evening. Hampi is basically a 16th century capital city that has been preserved, with a few shops and hotels. The Vijayanagar Empire was one of the largest in India, and the population of Hampi stood at 500,000 – 1 million at one point.
The tour began at the yellow, obelisk temple we had seen from the hill the previous evening. It was actually 50-60 feet high and, as is normal, covered in sculptures of Hindu gods, mostly Shiva in this case. Out the front of the temple, a cow tried to steal my bananas and followed me all the way up a hill licking my elbow and contorting its tongue into my pocket. From the temple we made our way to a massive, bulging statue of Ganesh (the elephant god) whose belly had been amputated by Mughal raiders on the chance that precious gems were stored there.
Hampi was a centre for trade in diamonds and other stones. After Ganesh we walked up a hill, through some ashrams, balancing boulders and coral-like cactus, to the central bazzar, where these gems were traded. The bazzars are two lanes of stone pillars with stone roofs, separated into hundreds of little stalls, on either side of a central plaza. Some of the pillars had been excavated and re-constructed. Most of the central plaza had been excavated, revealing the paved floor. Up a set of stairs there was a much larger hall, looking out over the bazzar. I presume the king used to sit there.
Historical Hampi is divided into two parts – the sacred sites and the royal quarters. We had just visited the sacred areas (there are many temples with idols of bulls and multithreaded gods in various states of decay and dominance by the overgrowth) and it was either 12km drive to the royal quarters or a 1km ride down the river on a boat that looked like a belly-up, overgrown coconut shell.
The canoe ride took us down the river, between the giant boulders and some more temples carved into them, to the royal quarters. The first stop was the royal temple, with frangipanis in the courtyard, and five, delicately carved granite halls, some with the musical pillars. From there we visited the queen’s bath (which was really swimming pool), the kings bath (which was bigger than an Olympic swimming pool), the Lotus Mahal (complete with an ancient air-conditioning system) and the elephant stables. The latter two monuments were extremely well maintained with pristine gardens and surrounds that allowed you to immerse yourself in the scene. In Hampi you truly are walking around the ruins of an old city. For every one of the sites we visited, there are hundreds of houses, or palaces, aqueducts and temples that we did not visit.
We ate lunch/dinner at a restaurant called mango-tree, where to enter you have to walk under the canopy of a banana plantation and they serve all the meals on banana leaves. On the way out, I bought something for my secret Santa from a young entrepreneur on the street.
By the time we arrived back to the room, it was raining and the frogs and mozzies were out. The ‘bushman’s’, 80% deet mozzie repellent is working, although at the expense of a few layers of skin each application.
Kate had been looking for these bonds-like tops that construction workers and rickshaw drivers wear. She had seen them nowhere in India, but a tiny stall on the way back to our hotel sold them. She bought eight for around $2 each.
Hospet is the nearest train station, and we woke at 4:30am the next morning to catch the train to Goa. Hospet was about an hour-and a half away. Theoretically, the road has two lanes, but in practice the potholes and cows make it a single-lane obstacle course. The logic behind the placement of speedbumps (or ‘rumbles’ as they are labelled)also escaped me. We were both tired, and felt for the women who were, out in the dark, on the roadside sweeping the front of their houses. The train was running late (not surprising, it had come all the way from Kolkata) and we used the time to try and buy some breakfast. Unfortunately some cheeky kids tried to steal my, and another guy’s, wallet, to no avail. Nevertheless, as the train came closer to arriving, the platform flooded with chai and coffee vendors which satisfied for breakfast. A dog with a prolapsed rectum also strolled past, apparently oblivious to its predicament.
The train journey was long and sweaty. We played many games of Uno and talked, occasionally to someone on the way to or from the toilet about the cricket. Australia had just won the ODI series here, and everyone was keen to talk about it, although they were sad that Brett Lee was not playing – he is number 2 to Sachin Tendulkar. I ate just about anything that came past, including somosas, pooris in curry dahl, and a combo meal of a bread-roll, small bread dumplings and fried, salted green chillis.
As we approached Goa from the west, we travelled through the western Ghats, a long mountain range in Southern India. Some of the tunnels opened to gorges and waterfalls cascading into the jungle. In Goa itself, the train travelled along the coastline for a bit, which kept us entertained.
We were staying at Calangute beach, which is another 2 hour bus ride from Vasco-de-Gama railway station. We were sweaty and tired, and anticipating a sojourn to the beach, although entertained on the bus journey by the passing billboards advertising performances by ‘Kyle Minouge’, ‘Dustin Timberlake’ and ‘Jimmy Henriques’.
Calangute beach is the neon, heavy drinking part of town. Stores advertising 'genuine fakes' and 'original replicas' are as common as the many restuarants and bars. Kate and I walked to the beach, only 2 minutes from the hotel to find it crammed with people – local men swimming in their y-fronts, leaving little to the imagination, and local women swimming fully dressed, trying to leave as much as possible to it. There were tourists everywhere – the abundant eurotogs betray the origin of the majority. Jetskis roared only meters from the shore and the swimmers and vendors proliferated selling coca-cola and glow in the dark whirly whirlys.
Among the chaos there was a serene sunset and Kate took some great photos. I went for a swim, but it was only brief.
Dinner that night was at a restaurant on Calangute beach, but cordoned off from the whirly-whirly vendors that would send their neon helicopters into the air from time to time for the trepid shopper. I ventured the seafood platter (for $15) and survived. Aside from the coating of garlic (at first I wondered what the coating was intended to cover) the crab, fish, prawns (including an enormous one), oysters (I was not brave enough to have them raw, and the cooked ones had nothing on your lime and chilli ones kel) and calamari, were tasty and I survived to tell the tale.
The theory thus far has been to stock up on breakfast, have little or no lunch and a big dinner. So the next morning we had another substantial breakfast of museli, eggs, fruit and coffee at a local joint alongside two English couples starting the morning with hearty, large, kingfisher beer.
Kate and I were keen for a day at the beach, but not at Calangute. So we took a taxi down the same stretch of sand to a place called Candolin and hired one of the banana beds with an umbrella for the day. It was hot and the wind was warm and offshore. There were a few little waves that might have been rideable. Somehow I left my boardshorts at home and, before swimming, had to walk back into town and purchase a pair of ‘billabong’ shorts. Really they were a tailored plastic tablecloth, but they did they job.
For most of the day we swam, or were entertained by the passing parade – quite literally. At first it was just the crisping, speedo-clad Russians either side of us (there are Russians everywhere in Goa, some restaurants even advertise in Russian) and the women selling colourful fabrics, t-shirts, hats and dolphin tours. But then a mother and her two children set up a frame on the sand in front of us and attached a tightrope to it. The young daughter then tip-toed along the rope with a pile of bowls on her head and a salad bowl on one of her feet. Sometime later two brothers set up in front of us – one clanging a pan as a drum and the other donning a head-to-toe brown feather costume and dancing.
We both got our fair share of the sun. Dinner was again at a beachside restaurant, and, again, I ventured the seafood platter. This one was half the price and probably half as good. Kate ordered a kingfish fillet and salad, which she enjoyed. It was our last night with the group, so we said our goodbyes to a couple of people leaving early the next morning after walking home along the beachfront.
We said goodbye to most other people at breakfast the next morning. A couple of girls were heading south to Paolem beach, not far from where we are. We shared a taxi at around midday.
The south of Goa is more what you associate with he word ‘Goa’. Greenery everywhere, rushing rivers, hills covered in jungle and the all-important palm-lined beaches. It is much quieter down here. Patnem, the beachside town nearest to us, is little more than a single street with a laundry, a restaurant and some shops selling ‘Goa’ t-shits and silverware. On the beach, there are more sunbaking cows than people.
We checked in at the Intercontinental at around 2pm. Our room is enormous with a flatsceen TV, a complimentary bottle of port, and a phone beside the toilet. We are the only non-Russian guests, and many of the signs, including pool safety signs are in russian. The resort is a massive, gated complex with at least five different, connected pools (one with a bridge), a golf course, tennis courts, squash courts, ping-pong and a beach right out the front. It is obseen (and, to be honest, realxing), and its the place to go in India if you don't want to be in India... sort of.
You can bring the resort to India, but you can’t keep India out of the resort. On our first night, Bridgestone was holding a corporate party. The 6th hole fo the golf course hosted a red stage with a dragon on it pumping out techno and hindi chartbusters through the evening. Down on the beach was a cricket game, complete with a boundary, a commentator, dancing girls, and triumphant music ('Singh is King!')every time a wicket was taken or a six was hit by the big Indian corporates waddling around. All the while their wives hung around the pool in full Saris. Very strange.
In the afternoon we went for a walk along the beach to Patnem, which is a tiny beach with some canoes and plam trees bending towards the sea, fishing nets, nonplussed cows, territorial dogs, and a Russian restaurant. We were going to continue walking into Paolem for supplies (everything is very expensive in-house, as you would expect) but met the girls we shared taxi with on the way. They were in a tuk-tuk getting a tour of the beaches, and we tagged along into Paolem where we bought some water, chocolate and drinks. That evening we returned to Paoelm for dinner at a restaurant called ‘Cuba’, and caught up with Kristine, a friend we met on our trip into the mountains.
We did very little the next day. The weather has been overcast with some periods of very heavy rain. There was cyclone that made landfall this morning much further north, but the system has been hanging around Goa for the past few days. We watched some poor movies on cable TV and ate breakfast at the hotel (which wasn’t bad value really, it suffices for breakfast and lunch). We played volleyball in the pool and a game of chess on one of those oversized boards, before retiring with a beef burger for dinner.
The following day we went back into Paolem for breakfast with Kristine. The idea was to walk to Patnem, put our laundry in, then hire a bike and cycle to Paloem (which is about 4km away). Unfortunately I got us lost and we sweated the 4km walk on foot. Breakfast was at a quaint organic restaurant near the beach. We checked out Kristine’s beachside shack, which was just one room and a bed behind some thatched palm fronds and a tarpulian. The beach was very messy and windy, although there were still plenty of tourists laying and drinking beer.
In the afternoon we played a game of squash (where we made up the rules) and had dinner in bed.
Today we have organised some photos and had a swim at the pool. It is much clearer today and quite hot.
We leave tomorrow evening for Mumbai on the overnight train.
Our love to you all.
Love Kate and Charles.
During our stay we were situated on the north side of the river. Most of the atrractions are on the south bank. The tinny was the only way across. It packed 15 people for 15 Rs each into its leaking hull (it had to be bailed out at the end of each journey) and trundled across the river. We would share the boat with French and Isareli travellers on most trips, and on one occasion a stoned Hindi grandfather making wings with his doti (wrap skirt) just back from a session at the monkey (Hanuman) temple.
Our room was a small round hut with a thatched roof of palm fronds and straw. There was a small porch out the front and a swinging bed hanging from the rafters from where we watched the farmer churn a spent rice field in his tractor with some very impressive burn-outs and skids. From time to time, women came with their goats and scythes and bundled the dry and harvested rice into mounds of straw only metres from our porch. It was very quiet, except for a family of sparrows that had made a nest in our roof and the croaking geckos.
We could have spent the next two days in the swing but the schedule was tight and the idea that you might “miss out” on a sight or activity has dictated no ruin, fort, palace or temple will go un-seen.
The room and the view and the quiet were all a welcome surprise after another overnight train. We had only two nights, but I would come back to Hampi and wish we stayed here longer. On the morning we arrived, Kate took the ferry into town to have a dress made, and I updated the last blog post before this one.
In the afternoon we planned to swim in the nearby lake. The swollen lake is positioned above the town and fields, contained only by a stout, leaking wall. The lake is ‘let down’ into the town when it gets too high with a minimum 5 hours notice. Despite a sign suggesting otherwise, we were assured there were no crocodiles. The lake was among the granite piles and the water came right to the rocks without a beach. Some old and young men from Bangalore joined our group down to the waterside to watch the girls swim, which meant that they did not swim. One was quite open about the fact that they were ‘not swimming, just looking’ (and he promptly threw his cigarette butt into the lake). Some other local men shooed them off and went swimming. Me and a couple of the other guys in the group did go swimming (in a fenced off area, don’t worry mum). It was a freshwater lake and water was cool, but not cold. Aside from the occasional cigarette butt bobbing in the water, it was clean.
From the lake we travelled 15 minutes or so to the Hanuman (monkey king) Temple . The whitewashed temple was unassuming and on top of one of the granite mountains. The impending storm added an exciting backdrop to our climb to the top along a set of stairs, past rows of staring, black-faced monkeys on the handrails and some giant millipedes. From the top, we had a panoramic view of the river twisting between the boulders and plantations. Nestled into the boulders and just peeking from the plantation canopies were the ruins of a 15th century South Indian empire. From this view, one feels as though very little has changed. Apart from the tuk-tuks and trucks, there is little sign of modern civilisation. At the foot of the hill a family was tending goats from their thatched roof hut and the dominant man-made structure is a yellowing temple-obelisk in the distance. It is like looking out over the realm as you might have done 400 years ago.
We watched the sunset from our swinging chair and remarked how we would not change a thing about where we were.
We left at 9 the next morning for the ruins we had seen the previous evening. Hampi is basically a 16th century capital city that has been preserved, with a few shops and hotels. The Vijayanagar Empire was one of the largest in India, and the population of Hampi stood at 500,000 – 1 million at one point.
The tour began at the yellow, obelisk temple we had seen from the hill the previous evening. It was actually 50-60 feet high and, as is normal, covered in sculptures of Hindu gods, mostly Shiva in this case. Out the front of the temple, a cow tried to steal my bananas and followed me all the way up a hill licking my elbow and contorting its tongue into my pocket. From the temple we made our way to a massive, bulging statue of Ganesh (the elephant god) whose belly had been amputated by Mughal raiders on the chance that precious gems were stored there.
Hampi was a centre for trade in diamonds and other stones. After Ganesh we walked up a hill, through some ashrams, balancing boulders and coral-like cactus, to the central bazzar, where these gems were traded. The bazzars are two lanes of stone pillars with stone roofs, separated into hundreds of little stalls, on either side of a central plaza. Some of the pillars had been excavated and re-constructed. Most of the central plaza had been excavated, revealing the paved floor. Up a set of stairs there was a much larger hall, looking out over the bazzar. I presume the king used to sit there.
Historical Hampi is divided into two parts – the sacred sites and the royal quarters. We had just visited the sacred areas (there are many temples with idols of bulls and multithreaded gods in various states of decay and dominance by the overgrowth) and it was either 12km drive to the royal quarters or a 1km ride down the river on a boat that looked like a belly-up, overgrown coconut shell.
The canoe ride took us down the river, between the giant boulders and some more temples carved into them, to the royal quarters. The first stop was the royal temple, with frangipanis in the courtyard, and five, delicately carved granite halls, some with the musical pillars. From there we visited the queen’s bath (which was really swimming pool), the kings bath (which was bigger than an Olympic swimming pool), the Lotus Mahal (complete with an ancient air-conditioning system) and the elephant stables. The latter two monuments were extremely well maintained with pristine gardens and surrounds that allowed you to immerse yourself in the scene. In Hampi you truly are walking around the ruins of an old city. For every one of the sites we visited, there are hundreds of houses, or palaces, aqueducts and temples that we did not visit.
We ate lunch/dinner at a restaurant called mango-tree, where to enter you have to walk under the canopy of a banana plantation and they serve all the meals on banana leaves. On the way out, I bought something for my secret Santa from a young entrepreneur on the street.
By the time we arrived back to the room, it was raining and the frogs and mozzies were out. The ‘bushman’s’, 80% deet mozzie repellent is working, although at the expense of a few layers of skin each application.
Kate had been looking for these bonds-like tops that construction workers and rickshaw drivers wear. She had seen them nowhere in India, but a tiny stall on the way back to our hotel sold them. She bought eight for around $2 each.
Hospet is the nearest train station, and we woke at 4:30am the next morning to catch the train to Goa. Hospet was about an hour-and a half away. Theoretically, the road has two lanes, but in practice the potholes and cows make it a single-lane obstacle course. The logic behind the placement of speedbumps (or ‘rumbles’ as they are labelled)also escaped me. We were both tired, and felt for the women who were, out in the dark, on the roadside sweeping the front of their houses. The train was running late (not surprising, it had come all the way from Kolkata) and we used the time to try and buy some breakfast. Unfortunately some cheeky kids tried to steal my, and another guy’s, wallet, to no avail. Nevertheless, as the train came closer to arriving, the platform flooded with chai and coffee vendors which satisfied for breakfast. A dog with a prolapsed rectum also strolled past, apparently oblivious to its predicament.
The train journey was long and sweaty. We played many games of Uno and talked, occasionally to someone on the way to or from the toilet about the cricket. Australia had just won the ODI series here, and everyone was keen to talk about it, although they were sad that Brett Lee was not playing – he is number 2 to Sachin Tendulkar. I ate just about anything that came past, including somosas, pooris in curry dahl, and a combo meal of a bread-roll, small bread dumplings and fried, salted green chillis.
As we approached Goa from the west, we travelled through the western Ghats, a long mountain range in Southern India. Some of the tunnels opened to gorges and waterfalls cascading into the jungle. In Goa itself, the train travelled along the coastline for a bit, which kept us entertained.
We were staying at Calangute beach, which is another 2 hour bus ride from Vasco-de-Gama railway station. We were sweaty and tired, and anticipating a sojourn to the beach, although entertained on the bus journey by the passing billboards advertising performances by ‘Kyle Minouge’, ‘Dustin Timberlake’ and ‘Jimmy Henriques’.
Calangute beach is the neon, heavy drinking part of town. Stores advertising 'genuine fakes' and 'original replicas' are as common as the many restuarants and bars. Kate and I walked to the beach, only 2 minutes from the hotel to find it crammed with people – local men swimming in their y-fronts, leaving little to the imagination, and local women swimming fully dressed, trying to leave as much as possible to it. There were tourists everywhere – the abundant eurotogs betray the origin of the majority. Jetskis roared only meters from the shore and the swimmers and vendors proliferated selling coca-cola and glow in the dark whirly whirlys.
Among the chaos there was a serene sunset and Kate took some great photos. I went for a swim, but it was only brief.
Dinner that night was at a restaurant on Calangute beach, but cordoned off from the whirly-whirly vendors that would send their neon helicopters into the air from time to time for the trepid shopper. I ventured the seafood platter (for $15) and survived. Aside from the coating of garlic (at first I wondered what the coating was intended to cover) the crab, fish, prawns (including an enormous one), oysters (I was not brave enough to have them raw, and the cooked ones had nothing on your lime and chilli ones kel) and calamari, were tasty and I survived to tell the tale.
The theory thus far has been to stock up on breakfast, have little or no lunch and a big dinner. So the next morning we had another substantial breakfast of museli, eggs, fruit and coffee at a local joint alongside two English couples starting the morning with hearty, large, kingfisher beer.
Kate and I were keen for a day at the beach, but not at Calangute. So we took a taxi down the same stretch of sand to a place called Candolin and hired one of the banana beds with an umbrella for the day. It was hot and the wind was warm and offshore. There were a few little waves that might have been rideable. Somehow I left my boardshorts at home and, before swimming, had to walk back into town and purchase a pair of ‘billabong’ shorts. Really they were a tailored plastic tablecloth, but they did they job.
For most of the day we swam, or were entertained by the passing parade – quite literally. At first it was just the crisping, speedo-clad Russians either side of us (there are Russians everywhere in Goa, some restaurants even advertise in Russian) and the women selling colourful fabrics, t-shirts, hats and dolphin tours. But then a mother and her two children set up a frame on the sand in front of us and attached a tightrope to it. The young daughter then tip-toed along the rope with a pile of bowls on her head and a salad bowl on one of her feet. Sometime later two brothers set up in front of us – one clanging a pan as a drum and the other donning a head-to-toe brown feather costume and dancing.
We both got our fair share of the sun. Dinner was again at a beachside restaurant, and, again, I ventured the seafood platter. This one was half the price and probably half as good. Kate ordered a kingfish fillet and salad, which she enjoyed. It was our last night with the group, so we said our goodbyes to a couple of people leaving early the next morning after walking home along the beachfront.
We said goodbye to most other people at breakfast the next morning. A couple of girls were heading south to Paolem beach, not far from where we are. We shared a taxi at around midday.
The south of Goa is more what you associate with he word ‘Goa’. Greenery everywhere, rushing rivers, hills covered in jungle and the all-important palm-lined beaches. It is much quieter down here. Patnem, the beachside town nearest to us, is little more than a single street with a laundry, a restaurant and some shops selling ‘Goa’ t-shits and silverware. On the beach, there are more sunbaking cows than people.
We checked in at the Intercontinental at around 2pm. Our room is enormous with a flatsceen TV, a complimentary bottle of port, and a phone beside the toilet. We are the only non-Russian guests, and many of the signs, including pool safety signs are in russian. The resort is a massive, gated complex with at least five different, connected pools (one with a bridge), a golf course, tennis courts, squash courts, ping-pong and a beach right out the front. It is obseen (and, to be honest, realxing), and its the place to go in India if you don't want to be in India... sort of.
You can bring the resort to India, but you can’t keep India out of the resort. On our first night, Bridgestone was holding a corporate party. The 6th hole fo the golf course hosted a red stage with a dragon on it pumping out techno and hindi chartbusters through the evening. Down on the beach was a cricket game, complete with a boundary, a commentator, dancing girls, and triumphant music ('Singh is King!')every time a wicket was taken or a six was hit by the big Indian corporates waddling around. All the while their wives hung around the pool in full Saris. Very strange.
In the afternoon we went for a walk along the beach to Patnem, which is a tiny beach with some canoes and plam trees bending towards the sea, fishing nets, nonplussed cows, territorial dogs, and a Russian restaurant. We were going to continue walking into Paolem for supplies (everything is very expensive in-house, as you would expect) but met the girls we shared taxi with on the way. They were in a tuk-tuk getting a tour of the beaches, and we tagged along into Paolem where we bought some water, chocolate and drinks. That evening we returned to Paoelm for dinner at a restaurant called ‘Cuba’, and caught up with Kristine, a friend we met on our trip into the mountains.
We did very little the next day. The weather has been overcast with some periods of very heavy rain. There was cyclone that made landfall this morning much further north, but the system has been hanging around Goa for the past few days. We watched some poor movies on cable TV and ate breakfast at the hotel (which wasn’t bad value really, it suffices for breakfast and lunch). We played volleyball in the pool and a game of chess on one of those oversized boards, before retiring with a beef burger for dinner.
The following day we went back into Paolem for breakfast with Kristine. The idea was to walk to Patnem, put our laundry in, then hire a bike and cycle to Paloem (which is about 4km away). Unfortunately I got us lost and we sweated the 4km walk on foot. Breakfast was at a quaint organic restaurant near the beach. We checked out Kristine’s beachside shack, which was just one room and a bed behind some thatched palm fronds and a tarpulian. The beach was very messy and windy, although there were still plenty of tourists laying and drinking beer.
In the afternoon we played a game of squash (where we made up the rules) and had dinner in bed.
Today we have organised some photos and had a swim at the pool. It is much clearer today and quite hot.
We leave tomorrow evening for Mumbai on the overnight train.
Our love to you all.
Love Kate and Charles.
Thursday 5 November 2009
Tubes in India!
Tubes in India!
Madurai is inland, roughly parallel with the northern tip of Sri Lanka. The train came in with the evening and our orientation walk oriented us mostly with the foods on offer. Few of the orientation walks actually orientate you, mostly they just confuse. On the map, the city is a small, navigable dot. Walking through the streets for an hour is dizzying.
I wasn’t watching where I was going anyway, because there were all sorts of foods hanging and sizzling on the corner. Just around from our hotel was a local coffee shop where to mix the sugar (everything has sugar) into the coffee they pour the coffee and milk from a bowl to the cup back to the bowl again in long streams. People in the south appear to drink coffee more than chai and I have successfully re-kindled my addiction. Most of the coffee is just Nescafe, but they do a damned good job with it. I think they make it with hot milk rather than water, so its more creamy than Nescafe at home.
Then there are the most golden yellow bananas you have ever seen. And they are everywhere. Fruit stalls are packed with them sitting besides apples and guavas, but the coffee shop, the plastic toy man, even the shoe shiner will have a bunch ready for sale. All bananas are as sweet as lady fingers at home. Fruits stalls also sell red bananas, which taste just like yellow ones, maybe a little sweeter.
Men with cast iron pans, maybe a metre in diameter, fry eggs and paranthas and serve them on banana leaves. We didn’t have one of these – it was after dinner and I could fit in no more.
People just chop the top of green coconuts and drink the water from them.
All this goes on in the usual ramshackle environment of half-finished buildings with rusted reinforcing bending out of the foundations, cracking paint, tangled electrical wires, missing pavement stones, rubbish, the honk of tuk-tuks and the ring of bicycles.
Madurai is our leader’s (Charles) home town. Charles is a protestant, who used to be one of the street side entrepreneurs, selling his mum’s hand-woven silk bags. He does truly love the intrepid job and its good to hear some of the stories behind the ubiquitous and often invisible entrepreurs.
Before breakfast the next morning, we rose to visit the main temple of Madurai. The temple consists of five gates, each symbolic of some part of the body (arms, legs and the head). The gates are enormous, multicoloured obelisks covered in the painted sculptures of Hindu gods. Inside were half-naked men in orange pants praying, and an elephant that took money and ‘blessed’ people by dribbling on their head with its trunk (I think the dribbling was incidental). The elephant looked to be treated quite well (and you can see it have a bath, although we missed that), but an elephant lumbering through the dark stone pillars of a temple, rather than in the wild, is still incongruous. The inner sanctum of the temple was very old, nearly 100 years, but non-hindus were not allowed inside so we could not see it.
A guide took us through the complex (it is a complex, with at least five different areas and a garden and pool inside) pointing out different features of the design, including some pillars that played musical notes when you tapped on them. These pillars (which do not look dramatically different to the non-musical ones) were actually used as instruments.
Ancient statues of gods (there are so many of them, there are three main ones, but each has a son, daughter, cousin, brother, sister, uncle, and at least ten different incarnations so there is plenty of source material) abounded in the hall of 1000 pillars (it actually has 984 pillars) which served as a temple and a museum in one.
We visited another colourful, but smaller temple after the big one. Kate ate a very sour gooseberry on the way back to the hotel.
It was in Madurai that Ghandi decided to eschew other forms of clothing for the loincloth. As such, there is a Ghandi museum about 4km out of town and we visited. The centrepiece is the loincloth that Ghandi wore when he was assassinated in Delhi (in 1948 I think...).Browned bloodstains are still visible on the garment.
There was much more to the museum. The first section was an account of India’s path to independence, from the first European contact to 1947. The plaques placed emphasis on different (and very disparate) groups that fought battles, conducted insurgencies and suffered (and participated in) massacres during the period of European rule. What I found interesting was that, in Rajasthan, there was much less emphasis on this in museums. Perhaps I did not go to the right ones, but perhaps it was also because many of the Maharajas allied with the British to settle their own scores and increase their power.
The final plaque was surprising. Although the preceding plaques, about 20 of them, had detailed a litany of violence, atrocity and racism, the final plaque read that England had left India gracefully and as friends. It made me think that India had largely lived up to this statement. Indians I have spoken to (mostly middle class) deeply resent British rule and as a continuing blight on national pride. I asked one person whether they thought anything good came out of British rule, to be answered with a flat ‘no’ (but I do wonder if there isn’t a little bit of ‘what good did the Romans ever do for us?’ about it). The old man in Mandi (in the mountains) was quite romantic about what he could remember of British rule, although he did receive a pension from them.
Anyway, despite the appalling indiscretions, Indians treat English with respect. In fact it is probably safer to say you are English than Australian at the moment. I think it is very admirable (the English bit).
The museum then went through a book-length account, divided into more plaques, of Ghandi’s life, complemented by many of his personal artefacts, including the distinctive round glasses he wore. I was interested to read that Ghandi was initially attracted to and tried to integrate with English high society, to eventually be rejected, and himself reject, it. There was also a letter that Ghandi had written to Hitler on the eve of World War two imploring him that he was the only person that could avert a catastrophe.
In all, I was moved by the museum.
We left that night in an overnight train for Varkala. This train had no Air Conditioning. A/C carriages do not just mean they are cooler, but that they are quieter, less people get on and off, you get sheets and a blanket and the door connecting the toilet to the carriage closes.
The journey goes into the ‘experience’ category. The floor smelt like tangy urine. Everytime someone would get on or off, or they chai man would come, they would bring the stench of festering toilet mess with them. Kate and I were sleeping in separate booths. I hardly slept. When I did, I was woken first by a smell like someone had defecated beside my bed and second by a smell like someone had vomited beside my bed. I saw a rat near the toilet. Unfortunately we think it was this train journey that made Kate sick.
Varkala is tropical. It was raining when we arrived, but slowly, as if it were straining through the hot, still air. Everything is damp and the atmosphere is constantly on the verge of bursting. In minutes my shirt was completely soiled with sweat. Palm trees and banana fronds are everywhere and moss grows over all the houses.
Varkala is a postcard, beachside, town away from the chaos of India, and we stayed about 2 minutes from the beach. Red cliffs overlook the beach and the ridge is well populated by hotels, restaurants, t-shirt entrepreneurs and men walking around with bongo drums. I think this is another of those places where people come to find themselves or hide from something else.
Kate’s first day was not good. After breakfast she was not feeling well and we returned to the hotel. She had a bout of diahorrea and vomiting and slept. Around midnight that night she had another bout. She was okay, but weak, by the next morning.
When Kate was sleeping I went out. There is surf in Varkala, but only 2 surfboards and one had already been rented for the week. I needed the board and the beachside entrepreneur knew it. He dutifully followed the laws of supply and demand, and I payed a rather overpriced $25AUD to rent the board for a day and half. In perspective its not a bad price, but for India, that is expensive.
To look at, the board was a piece of junk. Yellowed, dinged and with a nose that looked like it had been shaped by a child with paper mache, at home it would go straight to the tip. To me, it was the most valuable possession in India. In its better days, this would have been a very nice board. It was 6’4, which was a handy size considering I hadn’t surfed in 6 weeks and where the paper-mache hadn’t got to it, was a very nice shape.
I surfed twice that afternoon at a left-hand point break further down from the main beach. There were some decent waves, 3ft on the sets and the north-east monsoon meant the winds were light and offshore. The ride was only short but fun.
At first, it was a little scary. I was not in great surfing condition, there was no-one out, I had no idea about the currents, or local wildlife. The water was brown, but whether it was silt or sewerage I could not tell. But it looked pretty safe and people do surf there. After an easy paddle out and fluffing the first couple of waves I got some nice gentle lefts. My arms were like spaghetti after twenty minutes, but I hung on for an utterly exhausting hour-long surf.
I went back to check on Kate and fell asleep myself. When I woke I developed a new appreciation for how taxing on the body surfing is. Everything hurt. Even my face.
In the afternoon I surfed with an Australian guy who had been here for a month. He was friendly, if seedy, Tasmanian who worked in the mines when he could and travelled when he couldn’t. He was quite forthcoming with the fact that if he cannot satisfy all his carnal needs in conservative India he would jet off to Bangkok.
I got some really nice waves that afternoon, it was a touch bigger and I was feeling fitter, and we surfed until dark.
Kate was feeling a little better when I got back, so I went out to get takeaway and we watched ‘enchanted’ while lying bed. Unfortunately Kate had another rough night, but she was feeling between by morning. We woke late, and the Australian guy said that the waves were clean and overhead in the morning. By the time we were up, and had eaten breakfast, the wind was onshore.
Kate and I hired an umbrella and deckchair on the beach and swam and lazed on the sand. Umbrellas were a necessity as the heat outside was unbearable.
I surfed for 30 minutes or so at the main beach but it was ugly (both my surfing and the waves, that were bumpy and riddled with backwash).
I surfed again that evening, after Kate and I had perused the shops along the cliff front for a ‘kingfisher’ t-shirt and a little pressie for Harry. The wind died off only a little with the sunset, so it was still onshore when I took to the water. I surfed further up the point again, and there were some nice lefts coming through. I surfed until about sunset, when I had to return the board. It was an amazing surprise to surf in India. I had held out faint hopes for Goa, but I think Varkala will be as good as it gets until Sri Lanka.
Tuna, blue-ish prawns the size of your forearm and butter fish were the evening’s trawlings at the restaurant we visited for dinner. My crumbed Tuna steak with chips and salad was tasty and plain (i.e not saturated in Indian spices). It went down very well after a day of surf. Kate had some vegetable noodles which were also well received and gentle on the stomach.
We rose early to have some breakfast (consisting of coffee, eggs, toast, porridge and fruit salad, all for about $4) at a restaurant on the cliff we had taken a liking to. Looking out over the water, long offshore lines were rolling in. Some were breaking and barrelling much further up the beach in sets that looked as although they were lining up (in reality they didn’t). It looked a touch bigger than the previous day too. It would have been very nice around the corner.
We were both sad to leave Varkala. Two nights was good, but nowhere near enough, and before we’d had time to shift into a relaxation gear (especially for Kate, who had been sick), we were on the road again – this time to Apelly, on the Keralan Backwaters. Our train rode past many palm-lined inland lakes with milky blue water. There were no eunuchs.
Upon disembarking the train, our tuk-tuk driver did his best to remind us of our mortality, and we hopped on a ferry to the guesthouse we were staying at. The Keralan Backwaters are reportedly one of the ten things to see before you die. I don’t know what the other nine are, so I can’t really assess the claim, but they are impressive. Kerala’s backwaters are like a flooded swamp that everyone decided to inhabit. The area sits 2.5m below sea level. Hundreds of small islands are linked by a maze of canals. Some of the canals lead into much larger inland lakes. Houses line the water’s edge, shying behind the coconut trees, banana palms and overgrowth. On the small steps people wash and do their laundry. The canals take a steady traffic of canoes overloaded with rice crop and luxurious houseboats like floating grass huts.
The ferry ride took about an hour. We arrived at around 3pm at the home of the people we were staying with – Phillip and Maria and their daughters. We were immediately ushered into the dining room for a lunch of spicy chicken, locally grown rice (that has very large, fluffy, brown grains), and a coconut based potato curry. The food rivalled our previous homestay, and was, at worst, the second best food we have had in India.
The people we were staying with were quite wealthy. The house could accommodate twelve, with a large, modern kitchen, and a flat-screen TV.
Farmers here grow a unique form of rice, which they apparently do not export from Kerala. After the harvest, they open the gates regulating the water flow and flood the acres of paddy fields. After lunch we walked out into these paddy-fields that are very open and stretch to horizon, interrupted only by the palm groves demarcating each field. It was harvest time and green machines roved the fields, displacing the water birds, and despotising their crop on the sides of the fields, from where the farmers would pile them on blue tarpaulins. Women were burning the crops before the machine harvested them and a wall of smoke and flame clouded the view to one side.
It started raining. They expect some rain this time of year. Twenty minute showers are common in the afternoons. It is the north-east monsoon. But this was very unusual rain according to Phillip. The clouds were so black and so low they looked to be touching the palm trees. There was no lead up to rain, it just started coming down in fat drops and did not stop. Lighting started to flash around the fields and we huddled in some random farmer’s house while umbrellas magically appeared from the surrounds. It didn’t matter though, we made the 20 minute walk back to the house through the dashing rain and past the riverside, and most abandoned their useless umbrellas, accepting the saturating. Its not unpleasant walking through a tropical storm like this. The air was still warm and it was fun.
Our camera was miraculously okay. Its a hardy piece. I dropped it in the desert and it survived that too.
We showered and went back downstairs for a dinner of parottas (like chipatis but flimsier, oilier and tastier), a curry and a coconut pesto.
Unfortunately we could not go canoeing on the river because of the weather. We left on the ferry again the next morning, but after a traditional breakfast of green pea curry, rice noodles and deep-fried bananas. From the wharf we took a local bus to Cochin. The bus was uncrowded. With a nice breeze from the window, we sat and watched the parade of houses, cows in the middle of the road (although there are less in the south, presumably because they eat them) churches, bullock-draw wooden carts ridiculously overloaded with straw, women in saris sitting side saddle, no hands, on motorbikes, exhausted looking buses with hands waving wildly out the window, and extravagantly painted trucks with ‘I love India’, or ‘Horn please’ or ‘Jesus loves you’ or ‘Laxshmi (the god of money)’ or ‘National Permit’ brandished in silver lettering across their windscreens. Red communist party and vodaphone insignia are everywhere.
Cochin is another maze of islands and rivers but they are much larger and link with the ocean. Cochin is also a port. Shipyards share the banks with 5-star hotels and naval bases, while little ferrys, tankers and warships cruise around.
The main island is called ‘fort cochin’. There is no fort there now, but there was once, before the Dutch destroyed it. Cochin was an important trading town throughout its history, including its pre-colonial history, and has Dutch, Portuguese, Jewish and English influences. The fort was a 20-30 minute ferry ride from the hotel. We arrived in mid-afternoon, but there were some mix-ups and a very long queue for the ferry tickets which meant we did not arrive on the island until 4:30. Men and women queue separately for their ferry tickets, although there is only one person manning the counter. Tickets are only sold when the ferry docks, resulting in nervous lull before a free-for all when the ferry arrives. To queue in India you have to stand, breathing down the back of the person in front of you to get anywhere. Leave a centimetre and it will be occupied.
We walked through the dutch palace, which now serves as a museum of Keralan royalty. The oldest synagogue in the commonwealth (an odd accolade, considering Judaism shares only a peripheral connection to the commonwealth) and its accompanying Jewish town are nearby, but we did not get a chance to visit. We had dinner at seafood place. Kate and I both had tandoori fish.
The night-ferry home had me questioning the freshness of the fish as by bowels turned just as I was stepping on the ferry. The rumbling motor seemed just at the right frequency to make it worse. I got back to the hotel just in time (you always make it back ‘just’ in time don’t you) for some explosive loo action, but it did not hang around and I was fine by morning.
Our mornings excursion suggested that it may not have been the fish. We took the 7:15am ferry back over to fort Cochin and visited the Chinese fishing nets. These nets are lined on the shore of the island and act like huge wooden hands, reaching into the water and scooping the fish out. On the end nearest to the land, five or six large rocks hang and the same number of men pull them to raise the net. They dip in once every couple of minutes. In times past, these nets would not doubt have pulled in nets pulsating with fish, but now they only pull in one or two small, wriggling baitfish, and are used primarily to show tourists. Nevertheless, it is an extraordinary sight.
Just behind the nets though, were four or five fish-mongers serving from corrugated iron huts. Yellowfin tuna, snapper, mackerel, kingfish and prawns were haphazardly displayed on the frontage. Some of them were still alive.
We visited a basilica after breakfast. It had two white spires and the usual edifice of white arches. Inside, the church was wildly colourful. The ceiling was painted with murals from bible stories and the front part of the chapel, where the minister would stand was painted in bright pink and blue, with more colourful murals. The pulpit was bright blue and adorned with a sparkling golden star. Photo-realisitc pictures of a savvy looking Jesus in his mid-twenties decoracted the pillars of the hall. You’d think Christianity was born in the 1980s and Jesus was an underwear model. It was exactly like one of the crazy hindu temples in the north. The pastor was friendly and the church felt quite vibrant. Religion in India is kitsch, with sparkles and fairy lights and fluro-colours.
We walked to Ghandi beach, which was a measly patch of sand between two stone groins with rubbish and weed on the shore and abandoned buildings behind.
We visited the protestant church where, Vasco-de-gama, the explorer, was buried. It was a more Spartan church than the basilica and preparations were being made for a marriage. There were some very old Latin inscriptions embedded in the walls.
The heat was unbearable by this stage so we had tea at a local gallery/cafe that had some fairly raunchy paintings in the foyer. Morning tea turned into lunch as other group members arrived. We left again at one-ish to find a shop with contemporary Indian fashion that Kate had seen in the cafe. It was quite a walk. The main road runs parallel to the shore and we walked out of the touristy part, past a putrid river emptying into the harbour, into an area of abandoned houses, overgrowth and shops stacked to the ceiling with hessian sacks brimming with onions, chilli and potatoes. We had a look at the clothes. They were very nice, but not practical at the moment.
The ferry back to the hotel struggled through some weed and the attendant flitted nervously between the engine and the room the driver was in, but we got there. A ferry ride costs 2 Rs and 50 Pasie, or around 6 cents.
An overnight train took us to Bangalore, and then we took a 4 hour bus to Mysore. The train was pleasantly gentle on all the senses. As is customary, many of the middle aged men tried to sneak pictures of the girls in the group. Some we have encountered haven’t even tried to be discreet about it. Some just film right in their face. Many people want to come up and take pictures with you (and many ask), and it is great and fun, but some men use it as an opportunity for a grope. With women and families it is a nice exchange, but sometimes we’re not sure with the men. I don’t know if it is curiosity or what, but some men will just walk up and stare (leer?) at the girls. They will stand there for ten minutes if no-one moves them on. My instinct says it note pure curiosity as they never come up and stare at me.
It was much cooler in Mysore (its really about 23-24 degrees). Locals walk around with camo ear-muffs and brightly coloured bonnets on. Mysore is inland and further north than Cochin. Considering we had to catch another 4 hour bus back to Bangalore the next day, it was an odd stop. The main attraction, however, is spectacular. The maharaja’s palace is in the middle of town and it is by far the most impressive palace we have seen in India. It is well preserved (keeping in mind it was only built in 1912, I think) and every part a manifestation of power. We visited it that afternoon. There were elephants in the expansive, enclosed gardens.
On our walk back to the hotel we detoured through the market. In dense alleys we wandered through the spellbinding array of colours on offer. First there were fruits. Yellow bananas, red bananas, guavas, green mandarins, golden pineapples, yellow coconut, green coconut, brown coconut, red apples, tomatoes, orange papaya. Then there were the pigments for ceremonies. All the spectrum of colours were on display in piles of powder, but in fluro. Next were the vegetables and finally were the flowers. Each vendor sits behind a pile of flower garlands like you would roll a hose. There is jasmine and some bright orange flower I didn’t know and roses still dripping with water. We stopped on the way home to try the local sweet, which was an orange and green ball of sugar.
Dinner was at a restaurant that advertised, among other positives, that they would ‘provide vomit bags upon request for the convenience of all customers’.
Early the next morning we walked up the 1000 step Chamundi hill. Chamundi is the personal god and protector of the Maharaja, and also an incarnation of Shiva the destroyer. Chamundi won a battle against a deamon-horde a long time ago and is thus worshipped here. One thing I don’t understand is why the deamons bother invading anywhere when they always lose. Why not just settle down and form an evil society?
Chamundi hill actually has 1101 steps. The temple at the top was quite impressive , with delicate silverwork inside. A cow tried to steal my bananas and then a monkey followed me around trying to steal the rest. I eventually gave the monkey a banana which it peeled and shoved down its throat. I tried do the same with my other bananas so it wouldn’t steal them too. Monkeys are cute but aggressive and they might have rabies.
In the afternoon we left again for Bangalore, then another overnight train for Hampi. The train was comfortable and both Kate and I slept well. Hampi is an extraordinary place and we are staying in huts, right beside a rice farming village.
But Hampi will have to wait, I have rattled on too long.
Our love to you all. We will call properly when we get to Goa.
Love Charles and Kate.
Madurai is inland, roughly parallel with the northern tip of Sri Lanka. The train came in with the evening and our orientation walk oriented us mostly with the foods on offer. Few of the orientation walks actually orientate you, mostly they just confuse. On the map, the city is a small, navigable dot. Walking through the streets for an hour is dizzying.
I wasn’t watching where I was going anyway, because there were all sorts of foods hanging and sizzling on the corner. Just around from our hotel was a local coffee shop where to mix the sugar (everything has sugar) into the coffee they pour the coffee and milk from a bowl to the cup back to the bowl again in long streams. People in the south appear to drink coffee more than chai and I have successfully re-kindled my addiction. Most of the coffee is just Nescafe, but they do a damned good job with it. I think they make it with hot milk rather than water, so its more creamy than Nescafe at home.
Then there are the most golden yellow bananas you have ever seen. And they are everywhere. Fruit stalls are packed with them sitting besides apples and guavas, but the coffee shop, the plastic toy man, even the shoe shiner will have a bunch ready for sale. All bananas are as sweet as lady fingers at home. Fruits stalls also sell red bananas, which taste just like yellow ones, maybe a little sweeter.
Men with cast iron pans, maybe a metre in diameter, fry eggs and paranthas and serve them on banana leaves. We didn’t have one of these – it was after dinner and I could fit in no more.
People just chop the top of green coconuts and drink the water from them.
All this goes on in the usual ramshackle environment of half-finished buildings with rusted reinforcing bending out of the foundations, cracking paint, tangled electrical wires, missing pavement stones, rubbish, the honk of tuk-tuks and the ring of bicycles.
Madurai is our leader’s (Charles) home town. Charles is a protestant, who used to be one of the street side entrepreneurs, selling his mum’s hand-woven silk bags. He does truly love the intrepid job and its good to hear some of the stories behind the ubiquitous and often invisible entrepreurs.
Before breakfast the next morning, we rose to visit the main temple of Madurai. The temple consists of five gates, each symbolic of some part of the body (arms, legs and the head). The gates are enormous, multicoloured obelisks covered in the painted sculptures of Hindu gods. Inside were half-naked men in orange pants praying, and an elephant that took money and ‘blessed’ people by dribbling on their head with its trunk (I think the dribbling was incidental). The elephant looked to be treated quite well (and you can see it have a bath, although we missed that), but an elephant lumbering through the dark stone pillars of a temple, rather than in the wild, is still incongruous. The inner sanctum of the temple was very old, nearly 100 years, but non-hindus were not allowed inside so we could not see it.
A guide took us through the complex (it is a complex, with at least five different areas and a garden and pool inside) pointing out different features of the design, including some pillars that played musical notes when you tapped on them. These pillars (which do not look dramatically different to the non-musical ones) were actually used as instruments.
Ancient statues of gods (there are so many of them, there are three main ones, but each has a son, daughter, cousin, brother, sister, uncle, and at least ten different incarnations so there is plenty of source material) abounded in the hall of 1000 pillars (it actually has 984 pillars) which served as a temple and a museum in one.
We visited another colourful, but smaller temple after the big one. Kate ate a very sour gooseberry on the way back to the hotel.
It was in Madurai that Ghandi decided to eschew other forms of clothing for the loincloth. As such, there is a Ghandi museum about 4km out of town and we visited. The centrepiece is the loincloth that Ghandi wore when he was assassinated in Delhi (in 1948 I think...).Browned bloodstains are still visible on the garment.
There was much more to the museum. The first section was an account of India’s path to independence, from the first European contact to 1947. The plaques placed emphasis on different (and very disparate) groups that fought battles, conducted insurgencies and suffered (and participated in) massacres during the period of European rule. What I found interesting was that, in Rajasthan, there was much less emphasis on this in museums. Perhaps I did not go to the right ones, but perhaps it was also because many of the Maharajas allied with the British to settle their own scores and increase their power.
The final plaque was surprising. Although the preceding plaques, about 20 of them, had detailed a litany of violence, atrocity and racism, the final plaque read that England had left India gracefully and as friends. It made me think that India had largely lived up to this statement. Indians I have spoken to (mostly middle class) deeply resent British rule and as a continuing blight on national pride. I asked one person whether they thought anything good came out of British rule, to be answered with a flat ‘no’ (but I do wonder if there isn’t a little bit of ‘what good did the Romans ever do for us?’ about it). The old man in Mandi (in the mountains) was quite romantic about what he could remember of British rule, although he did receive a pension from them.
Anyway, despite the appalling indiscretions, Indians treat English with respect. In fact it is probably safer to say you are English than Australian at the moment. I think it is very admirable (the English bit).
The museum then went through a book-length account, divided into more plaques, of Ghandi’s life, complemented by many of his personal artefacts, including the distinctive round glasses he wore. I was interested to read that Ghandi was initially attracted to and tried to integrate with English high society, to eventually be rejected, and himself reject, it. There was also a letter that Ghandi had written to Hitler on the eve of World War two imploring him that he was the only person that could avert a catastrophe.
In all, I was moved by the museum.
We left that night in an overnight train for Varkala. This train had no Air Conditioning. A/C carriages do not just mean they are cooler, but that they are quieter, less people get on and off, you get sheets and a blanket and the door connecting the toilet to the carriage closes.
The journey goes into the ‘experience’ category. The floor smelt like tangy urine. Everytime someone would get on or off, or they chai man would come, they would bring the stench of festering toilet mess with them. Kate and I were sleeping in separate booths. I hardly slept. When I did, I was woken first by a smell like someone had defecated beside my bed and second by a smell like someone had vomited beside my bed. I saw a rat near the toilet. Unfortunately we think it was this train journey that made Kate sick.
Varkala is tropical. It was raining when we arrived, but slowly, as if it were straining through the hot, still air. Everything is damp and the atmosphere is constantly on the verge of bursting. In minutes my shirt was completely soiled with sweat. Palm trees and banana fronds are everywhere and moss grows over all the houses.
Varkala is a postcard, beachside, town away from the chaos of India, and we stayed about 2 minutes from the beach. Red cliffs overlook the beach and the ridge is well populated by hotels, restaurants, t-shirt entrepreneurs and men walking around with bongo drums. I think this is another of those places where people come to find themselves or hide from something else.
Kate’s first day was not good. After breakfast she was not feeling well and we returned to the hotel. She had a bout of diahorrea and vomiting and slept. Around midnight that night she had another bout. She was okay, but weak, by the next morning.
When Kate was sleeping I went out. There is surf in Varkala, but only 2 surfboards and one had already been rented for the week. I needed the board and the beachside entrepreneur knew it. He dutifully followed the laws of supply and demand, and I payed a rather overpriced $25AUD to rent the board for a day and half. In perspective its not a bad price, but for India, that is expensive.
To look at, the board was a piece of junk. Yellowed, dinged and with a nose that looked like it had been shaped by a child with paper mache, at home it would go straight to the tip. To me, it was the most valuable possession in India. In its better days, this would have been a very nice board. It was 6’4, which was a handy size considering I hadn’t surfed in 6 weeks and where the paper-mache hadn’t got to it, was a very nice shape.
I surfed twice that afternoon at a left-hand point break further down from the main beach. There were some decent waves, 3ft on the sets and the north-east monsoon meant the winds were light and offshore. The ride was only short but fun.
At first, it was a little scary. I was not in great surfing condition, there was no-one out, I had no idea about the currents, or local wildlife. The water was brown, but whether it was silt or sewerage I could not tell. But it looked pretty safe and people do surf there. After an easy paddle out and fluffing the first couple of waves I got some nice gentle lefts. My arms were like spaghetti after twenty minutes, but I hung on for an utterly exhausting hour-long surf.
I went back to check on Kate and fell asleep myself. When I woke I developed a new appreciation for how taxing on the body surfing is. Everything hurt. Even my face.
In the afternoon I surfed with an Australian guy who had been here for a month. He was friendly, if seedy, Tasmanian who worked in the mines when he could and travelled when he couldn’t. He was quite forthcoming with the fact that if he cannot satisfy all his carnal needs in conservative India he would jet off to Bangkok.
I got some really nice waves that afternoon, it was a touch bigger and I was feeling fitter, and we surfed until dark.
Kate was feeling a little better when I got back, so I went out to get takeaway and we watched ‘enchanted’ while lying bed. Unfortunately Kate had another rough night, but she was feeling between by morning. We woke late, and the Australian guy said that the waves were clean and overhead in the morning. By the time we were up, and had eaten breakfast, the wind was onshore.
Kate and I hired an umbrella and deckchair on the beach and swam and lazed on the sand. Umbrellas were a necessity as the heat outside was unbearable.
I surfed for 30 minutes or so at the main beach but it was ugly (both my surfing and the waves, that were bumpy and riddled with backwash).
I surfed again that evening, after Kate and I had perused the shops along the cliff front for a ‘kingfisher’ t-shirt and a little pressie for Harry. The wind died off only a little with the sunset, so it was still onshore when I took to the water. I surfed further up the point again, and there were some nice lefts coming through. I surfed until about sunset, when I had to return the board. It was an amazing surprise to surf in India. I had held out faint hopes for Goa, but I think Varkala will be as good as it gets until Sri Lanka.
Tuna, blue-ish prawns the size of your forearm and butter fish were the evening’s trawlings at the restaurant we visited for dinner. My crumbed Tuna steak with chips and salad was tasty and plain (i.e not saturated in Indian spices). It went down very well after a day of surf. Kate had some vegetable noodles which were also well received and gentle on the stomach.
We rose early to have some breakfast (consisting of coffee, eggs, toast, porridge and fruit salad, all for about $4) at a restaurant on the cliff we had taken a liking to. Looking out over the water, long offshore lines were rolling in. Some were breaking and barrelling much further up the beach in sets that looked as although they were lining up (in reality they didn’t). It looked a touch bigger than the previous day too. It would have been very nice around the corner.
We were both sad to leave Varkala. Two nights was good, but nowhere near enough, and before we’d had time to shift into a relaxation gear (especially for Kate, who had been sick), we were on the road again – this time to Apelly, on the Keralan Backwaters. Our train rode past many palm-lined inland lakes with milky blue water. There were no eunuchs.
Upon disembarking the train, our tuk-tuk driver did his best to remind us of our mortality, and we hopped on a ferry to the guesthouse we were staying at. The Keralan Backwaters are reportedly one of the ten things to see before you die. I don’t know what the other nine are, so I can’t really assess the claim, but they are impressive. Kerala’s backwaters are like a flooded swamp that everyone decided to inhabit. The area sits 2.5m below sea level. Hundreds of small islands are linked by a maze of canals. Some of the canals lead into much larger inland lakes. Houses line the water’s edge, shying behind the coconut trees, banana palms and overgrowth. On the small steps people wash and do their laundry. The canals take a steady traffic of canoes overloaded with rice crop and luxurious houseboats like floating grass huts.
The ferry ride took about an hour. We arrived at around 3pm at the home of the people we were staying with – Phillip and Maria and their daughters. We were immediately ushered into the dining room for a lunch of spicy chicken, locally grown rice (that has very large, fluffy, brown grains), and a coconut based potato curry. The food rivalled our previous homestay, and was, at worst, the second best food we have had in India.
The people we were staying with were quite wealthy. The house could accommodate twelve, with a large, modern kitchen, and a flat-screen TV.
Farmers here grow a unique form of rice, which they apparently do not export from Kerala. After the harvest, they open the gates regulating the water flow and flood the acres of paddy fields. After lunch we walked out into these paddy-fields that are very open and stretch to horizon, interrupted only by the palm groves demarcating each field. It was harvest time and green machines roved the fields, displacing the water birds, and despotising their crop on the sides of the fields, from where the farmers would pile them on blue tarpaulins. Women were burning the crops before the machine harvested them and a wall of smoke and flame clouded the view to one side.
It started raining. They expect some rain this time of year. Twenty minute showers are common in the afternoons. It is the north-east monsoon. But this was very unusual rain according to Phillip. The clouds were so black and so low they looked to be touching the palm trees. There was no lead up to rain, it just started coming down in fat drops and did not stop. Lighting started to flash around the fields and we huddled in some random farmer’s house while umbrellas magically appeared from the surrounds. It didn’t matter though, we made the 20 minute walk back to the house through the dashing rain and past the riverside, and most abandoned their useless umbrellas, accepting the saturating. Its not unpleasant walking through a tropical storm like this. The air was still warm and it was fun.
Our camera was miraculously okay. Its a hardy piece. I dropped it in the desert and it survived that too.
We showered and went back downstairs for a dinner of parottas (like chipatis but flimsier, oilier and tastier), a curry and a coconut pesto.
Unfortunately we could not go canoeing on the river because of the weather. We left on the ferry again the next morning, but after a traditional breakfast of green pea curry, rice noodles and deep-fried bananas. From the wharf we took a local bus to Cochin. The bus was uncrowded. With a nice breeze from the window, we sat and watched the parade of houses, cows in the middle of the road (although there are less in the south, presumably because they eat them) churches, bullock-draw wooden carts ridiculously overloaded with straw, women in saris sitting side saddle, no hands, on motorbikes, exhausted looking buses with hands waving wildly out the window, and extravagantly painted trucks with ‘I love India’, or ‘Horn please’ or ‘Jesus loves you’ or ‘Laxshmi (the god of money)’ or ‘National Permit’ brandished in silver lettering across their windscreens. Red communist party and vodaphone insignia are everywhere.
Cochin is another maze of islands and rivers but they are much larger and link with the ocean. Cochin is also a port. Shipyards share the banks with 5-star hotels and naval bases, while little ferrys, tankers and warships cruise around.
The main island is called ‘fort cochin’. There is no fort there now, but there was once, before the Dutch destroyed it. Cochin was an important trading town throughout its history, including its pre-colonial history, and has Dutch, Portuguese, Jewish and English influences. The fort was a 20-30 minute ferry ride from the hotel. We arrived in mid-afternoon, but there were some mix-ups and a very long queue for the ferry tickets which meant we did not arrive on the island until 4:30. Men and women queue separately for their ferry tickets, although there is only one person manning the counter. Tickets are only sold when the ferry docks, resulting in nervous lull before a free-for all when the ferry arrives. To queue in India you have to stand, breathing down the back of the person in front of you to get anywhere. Leave a centimetre and it will be occupied.
We walked through the dutch palace, which now serves as a museum of Keralan royalty. The oldest synagogue in the commonwealth (an odd accolade, considering Judaism shares only a peripheral connection to the commonwealth) and its accompanying Jewish town are nearby, but we did not get a chance to visit. We had dinner at seafood place. Kate and I both had tandoori fish.
The night-ferry home had me questioning the freshness of the fish as by bowels turned just as I was stepping on the ferry. The rumbling motor seemed just at the right frequency to make it worse. I got back to the hotel just in time (you always make it back ‘just’ in time don’t you) for some explosive loo action, but it did not hang around and I was fine by morning.
Our mornings excursion suggested that it may not have been the fish. We took the 7:15am ferry back over to fort Cochin and visited the Chinese fishing nets. These nets are lined on the shore of the island and act like huge wooden hands, reaching into the water and scooping the fish out. On the end nearest to the land, five or six large rocks hang and the same number of men pull them to raise the net. They dip in once every couple of minutes. In times past, these nets would not doubt have pulled in nets pulsating with fish, but now they only pull in one or two small, wriggling baitfish, and are used primarily to show tourists. Nevertheless, it is an extraordinary sight.
Just behind the nets though, were four or five fish-mongers serving from corrugated iron huts. Yellowfin tuna, snapper, mackerel, kingfish and prawns were haphazardly displayed on the frontage. Some of them were still alive.
We visited a basilica after breakfast. It had two white spires and the usual edifice of white arches. Inside, the church was wildly colourful. The ceiling was painted with murals from bible stories and the front part of the chapel, where the minister would stand was painted in bright pink and blue, with more colourful murals. The pulpit was bright blue and adorned with a sparkling golden star. Photo-realisitc pictures of a savvy looking Jesus in his mid-twenties decoracted the pillars of the hall. You’d think Christianity was born in the 1980s and Jesus was an underwear model. It was exactly like one of the crazy hindu temples in the north. The pastor was friendly and the church felt quite vibrant. Religion in India is kitsch, with sparkles and fairy lights and fluro-colours.
We walked to Ghandi beach, which was a measly patch of sand between two stone groins with rubbish and weed on the shore and abandoned buildings behind.
We visited the protestant church where, Vasco-de-gama, the explorer, was buried. It was a more Spartan church than the basilica and preparations were being made for a marriage. There were some very old Latin inscriptions embedded in the walls.
The heat was unbearable by this stage so we had tea at a local gallery/cafe that had some fairly raunchy paintings in the foyer. Morning tea turned into lunch as other group members arrived. We left again at one-ish to find a shop with contemporary Indian fashion that Kate had seen in the cafe. It was quite a walk. The main road runs parallel to the shore and we walked out of the touristy part, past a putrid river emptying into the harbour, into an area of abandoned houses, overgrowth and shops stacked to the ceiling with hessian sacks brimming with onions, chilli and potatoes. We had a look at the clothes. They were very nice, but not practical at the moment.
The ferry back to the hotel struggled through some weed and the attendant flitted nervously between the engine and the room the driver was in, but we got there. A ferry ride costs 2 Rs and 50 Pasie, or around 6 cents.
An overnight train took us to Bangalore, and then we took a 4 hour bus to Mysore. The train was pleasantly gentle on all the senses. As is customary, many of the middle aged men tried to sneak pictures of the girls in the group. Some we have encountered haven’t even tried to be discreet about it. Some just film right in their face. Many people want to come up and take pictures with you (and many ask), and it is great and fun, but some men use it as an opportunity for a grope. With women and families it is a nice exchange, but sometimes we’re not sure with the men. I don’t know if it is curiosity or what, but some men will just walk up and stare (leer?) at the girls. They will stand there for ten minutes if no-one moves them on. My instinct says it note pure curiosity as they never come up and stare at me.
It was much cooler in Mysore (its really about 23-24 degrees). Locals walk around with camo ear-muffs and brightly coloured bonnets on. Mysore is inland and further north than Cochin. Considering we had to catch another 4 hour bus back to Bangalore the next day, it was an odd stop. The main attraction, however, is spectacular. The maharaja’s palace is in the middle of town and it is by far the most impressive palace we have seen in India. It is well preserved (keeping in mind it was only built in 1912, I think) and every part a manifestation of power. We visited it that afternoon. There were elephants in the expansive, enclosed gardens.
On our walk back to the hotel we detoured through the market. In dense alleys we wandered through the spellbinding array of colours on offer. First there were fruits. Yellow bananas, red bananas, guavas, green mandarins, golden pineapples, yellow coconut, green coconut, brown coconut, red apples, tomatoes, orange papaya. Then there were the pigments for ceremonies. All the spectrum of colours were on display in piles of powder, but in fluro. Next were the vegetables and finally were the flowers. Each vendor sits behind a pile of flower garlands like you would roll a hose. There is jasmine and some bright orange flower I didn’t know and roses still dripping with water. We stopped on the way home to try the local sweet, which was an orange and green ball of sugar.
Dinner was at a restaurant that advertised, among other positives, that they would ‘provide vomit bags upon request for the convenience of all customers’.
Early the next morning we walked up the 1000 step Chamundi hill. Chamundi is the personal god and protector of the Maharaja, and also an incarnation of Shiva the destroyer. Chamundi won a battle against a deamon-horde a long time ago and is thus worshipped here. One thing I don’t understand is why the deamons bother invading anywhere when they always lose. Why not just settle down and form an evil society?
Chamundi hill actually has 1101 steps. The temple at the top was quite impressive , with delicate silverwork inside. A cow tried to steal my bananas and then a monkey followed me around trying to steal the rest. I eventually gave the monkey a banana which it peeled and shoved down its throat. I tried do the same with my other bananas so it wouldn’t steal them too. Monkeys are cute but aggressive and they might have rabies.
In the afternoon we left again for Bangalore, then another overnight train for Hampi. The train was comfortable and both Kate and I slept well. Hampi is an extraordinary place and we are staying in huts, right beside a rice farming village.
But Hampi will have to wait, I have rattled on too long.
Our love to you all. We will call properly when we get to Goa.
Love Charles and Kate.
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