1/3/02 Arambol, India

[This is a repost of my journal - my first experience in India circa November 1st]


India. Whoa.

So the four hour flight arrived around midnight and I get the cab into town, 17km away. Even changed money at a good exchange rate. Cool. Things going smooth. Hotel has places. Great room, has a balcony looking over a mosque (more on that later) and two wicker chairs and a desk and a little table. Fabulous. Got a beer, Kingfisher, pretty good stuff, and unwound at 2am on the balcony. Pretty edgy. Edgy because I just arrived in this new, wild, super place and want to check it out. As it was, I just saw it from the back seat of the taxi, closed shops. Dirty roads. Signs in English and Hindi. Dark. Lights. Looked like Mexico at night. Hell, any place looks good at night. The darkness hides a lot. And just makes me more curious. But it was deserted too, no one was out. Lots of puddles - I guess Monsoon had just hit with a vengance. Two days before - it was really difficult to get from the airport to town. So all the delay in Malaysia....maybe a blessing in disguise (hmm....I'd have prefered to have avoided).

Ok, so I finish my beer and turn off the little portable speakers that were playing music, and shut the windows and its bed time and my mind is still flying. But I finally fall asleep.

Only to awaken to HOOO-HUMMM-MAH-HUM-MAAAAAAH-HUM. Over and over. The mosque. Yeah, its the Morning Call To Prayer from your friendly neighborhood extrovered religious establishment. Whew. Scared the hell out of me. And dawn is quite early in India, don;t know how early but its early.

So back to sleep and then I wake up and open the doors and look outside and the little boy pops in and I get a thermos of tea and relax and read and drink tea. Finally I get dressed and get ready to venture outside. And I leave the hotel.

And that's when culture shock hit. I don't know what was more of a shock - the culture shock or having a culture shock. Because I haven't really had one before. I've had reverse culture shock. And maybe I had culture shock in Mexico but it was a gradual thing. And Egypt was amazing but more stimulating than shocking. And Africa was cool but after Egypt and all that it wasn't shocking, although still quite insane. And blah blah.

I walked out of the hotel, into the street that eight hours before had been totally void of any people. Last night. No one. The only soul - me. Taxi driver. Hotel dude.

Now, different story.

It was a side street.

And it was totally full of people. Madness. Take the mall at Christmas. Like that. People everywhere.

I'd scoped the map - the goal was to buy a train ticket. Off I went. Down to the main street where anarchy reigned. If I thought the street in front of the hotel was packed, well, here was some real chaos. Picture a sold out stadium emptying. People everywhere. Cars. Not many cars. But bikes. And auto-rickshaws, a cross between a motorcycle and a subcompact car. And motorcycles and scooters and PEOPLE. The road was mad. Madness. As I looked at the road and where I had to go, I was scared. My first thought was, "Ok, enough of this, lets get the next plane ticket out of here." My second thought was, "Oh, that's nonsense," and my third thought was, "Hm, maybe nonsense, but a damn good idea."

Anyway, it was mad. Traffic like I've never seen. How I didn't get run over, well, I don't know. And it won't be a car or a rickshaw that kills me. It'll be a bicycle. I swear. Silent but deadly. Vroom. There they are, there they go. No noise.

So that was the culture shock. I don't know where it came from - and I'm still trying to decide if this is worse than Mexico or Guatemala or Kenya, or is it the same and I'm just not used to it after being in calm places. It was also a pre-holiday, shoppers going mad and the like before the big festival two days hence, so the Mall At Xmas analogy wasn't too bad. And i came to grips with India over the next day and have decided its mad. Insane. Crazy. Wild. Nutty. But its great and I like it. The two days I spent in it.

Because I had Saturday and Sunday and half of Monday before the BIG TRAIN. 39 hours. Chennai-Varanasi. Quite the experience. Stuck in a compartment with some crazy Sri Lankan woman who sounded, and this is no lie, like a drunk incomprehensible Yoda. "Yes, you must come Sreee LAaanka. Yes. Visit me you must." At first she was just irritating. Curious in me. Hard to understand her because the train was loud. But over the next 39 hours I came to understand that she was one of those annoying people you don't want to have to spend much time talking to. One of those people that seem to not leave you alone. She was disappointed that I was not travelling to Varanasi and then on to Delhi and to Agra like her so, I presume, I could travel with her. Ha! And she wants me to visit Sri Lanka. I think she wants to marry me. Ha! Marry Yoda? Her teeth, well, actually now that I think about it, not much different than Yoda. So the second day, I read with my headphones on. On the top bunk. After a time I tried talking to her again, not try really, but sitting near her entailed conversation and Yoda was back.

Also had a Muslim woman, young, age unknown with quite small baby. Actualy pretty quiet for a quite small baby. With who I hope was her father. Muslim guy, beard like Osama. Grey. Old. Her father meaning the mother's father. But who knows. She didn't speak much english so I don't know her story. But the baby would cry sometimes, at night sometimes, and the 4-5 other kids in the car with us, naturally, would cry as well. Typical. Kids.

The train was pretty nice. Sleeper. Three bunks. Middle bunk folds down to make chair with first bunk. Sleeping was good. Top bunk good for escaping and reading. Finished a strange book. Going Native. Got good reviews on the cover, but I think it was riding a Pulp Fiction'ish popular tide, which has ebbed, leaving a weird book.

Also met some engineering students and struggled with Indian English. Very hard to understand. Irritating so. Like, I know I speak good english and they seemed to understand me better than I them. I wanted to get paper and pens and just "chat". Like internet chat, but just pass the paper.

Maybe I'll be a pro with it soon.

So hit Varanasi and got on a bus to Nepal straightaway. Supposed to be 9-10 hours. Well, sure. No way. Some festival was up Wednesday. And we had to pass all these parades. Slowed us down until Gorkapur. Where it stopped us. it was about 4pm and they just shut down the road, until 9pm or something. Took me an hour to figure this out, so at 5pm, emboldened by words in the book that buses to the border leave from the north part of town, I strapped on the pack and headed off to walk the 1.5km's from the bus station to the train station where said buses left.

Hm.

Turns out we weren't at the bus station. But right after where we were - a bridge, packed with cars fiull of these floats with these hindu statues that they throw in the river and managed to get across the bridge and some guy was also hiking iwth his suitcase to catch a train, so I tagged with him and we walked and walked and walked and finally caught a cycle-rickshaw (think threewheeledbiketaxithing) and bikd and biked and biked and paid this guy 12 rupees, 25 cents for what was a lifesaving 3-4km ride (I was quite far from this station apparently - the town was bigger than I thought) and got the bus at 6:15 to the border which was supposed to be 2 hrs and I thought I had an off chance of catching the 8:30 bus on the other side of the border to Pokhara so saving me finding a hotel by sleeping on the bus and arriving where I wanted to be in record time. And it looked good - we passed all manner of parades again and cruised and we hit a big town and I though it was it and it wsan't and this repeated over and over and how this ride could ever be 2 hours is beyond me, because while we did not go the fastest ever, it didn't seem like we stopped a whole lot and arrived, oh, four hours later. Grabbed a grimy hotel in the typically dirty and seedy border town and called it a night.

Got the bus in the morning to Pokhara and 10 painful hours of bouncing around on awful Nepalese roads and honking horns and adrenaline instilling passing and gorgeous views and more honking and bouncing around, finally got to Pokhara at 6pm. Thursday. Almost exactly 72 hours of travel. To Nepal. And, frankly, I did a pretty damn good job of it. I'm proud. Lot of distance to cover.

So I'm here to trek. Pokhara is on a gorgeous lake, a great place, the Annapurna mountains standing quite proud in the background, tall. The 4th tallest mountain in the world or something. And I'm heading towards it.

The trek is 16-21 days. Hike from little town to little town and stay in little hotels called tea houses and eat and hike all day and see gorgeous scenery. Today's friday and I will leave Sunday because there is some general strike Mon/T/Wed and no transport to the mountains and everyone seems to agree that the best place to be during this strike is trekking. Which means lots of people trekking, but tourism here has been hit pretty hard by domestic problems.

So ya won't hear from me for awhile. They have internet along the way, I hear, at prices that I certainly can't affford.