Violent, Tempered.

On our next-to-last day in Pondicherry, D and I scored some of the bomb local cheese (made by the space-cadet ashramites of Auroville), a fresh baguette, and a bottle of local vino. We made our way to the botanical gardens, where we planned on reveling in our shared Francophilia and enjoying a little picnic among les belles fleurs. We poured the wine into a Nalgene for discreet public consumption and dumped the bottle, wrapped in the plastic bag from the wine shop, in one of the dustbins at the gardens' entrance. We headed off into the gardens, which were surprisingly overgrown and ill-maintained, in search of a bench we could use for our brief repast. Within thirty seconds of sitting down, we're approached by a gang of young boys who ask us if we're enjoying our wine. We feign ignorance of their broken English in the hopes that they'll leave us alone to enjoy our food, and it works...almost. They move off to congregate around and upon a small boulder maybe fifty feet away, chattering amongst themselves and staring at us. Our first bites of gorgonzola curdling in our stomachs under the scrutiny of the pack, we decide to decamp for the beachside promenade to try again. On our way out of the gardens we pass the same dustbin where we'd dumped the bottle, and there's the empty bag blowing along the path. D is putting this scene together in her head, and I see the realization dawn on her that the boys had plucked the bottle (for a deposit?) and discarded the bag mindlessly at their feet, nevermind the trash can right there. The fire behind her eyes making her ears smoke visibly, she starts sputtering with righteous indignation as I re-trash the bag, put my arm around her, say "Nevermind, nevermind, nevermind..."

Across town and on the sand, we find an available bench shaded by a thatched roof, one of a dozen or so bamboo structures dotting the elevated promenade. Taking in the salty air and the sunshine, we set about preparing our feast for the second time. Because Fate laughs at picnickers and French cheese, within seconds we're being harassed by a staggeringly drunk, disheveled Indian man with an empty large Kingfisher in his hand. He's asking for food or a rupee or who-knows-what, and I've had it. I'm all for sharing with the needy, but this dude stank of beer and had the nerve to ask me to fund his next? Fuck that noise. The teat of human kindness had run dry. I stood up and started waving my hands like Get out of here, go bother someone else, move it along, bro but no dice. I then remember I'm waving my open pocketknife in my hand, and realize I must look like I'm brandishing a weapon at an essentially harmless, drunken beggar. Pissed off even more by the tableau we're staging as I'm telling him to bugger off, I put my knife back with the bread and cheese and return to push the man forcefully on down the beach. I lost my cool, no doubt, but I didn't (and don't) regret shoving a hundred-pound Indian drunk away from my hut.

What got me after the fact was how fast I snapped, how quickly I forgot manners and decorum and went for broke on some poor schmuck. These last few weeks had been wearing on D and I, and it was beginning to show. We were tired of paying too much for rickshaws with "broken" meters and shite food in backpacker haunts and occasionally grimy accommodation. We were tired of the haggle and the hassle and the thousands of propositions we received each day, the conditioned responses of locals seeing white skin, the offers of pot and hash and "sightseeing" tuk-tuk rides and the constant barrage that had followed us in every destination since Kodai. And somehow I couldn't even get Zen about the whole issue with my usual bad-day mantra: "Some people work in coal mines...some people work in coal mines..." Before we knew it we were deep in a sticky funk and checking flights anywhere less Indian. A change of scenery was long overdue.

Ah, Kerala!

We arrived in Trivandrum after the longest haul of our journey thus far, a thirteen-hour monster trek southwest from Pondy that put us in the station near midnight. Having booked a room in advance and caring only about a soft place to crash, we hit the room with high hopes for what daylight would reveal around us.

No disappointments there. Trivandrum, Kerala's capital, manages to bustle without the shoulder-checking press of other Indian cities. It's a laid-back, walkable town with a couple of cool museums and a fascinating palace that once housed the local Maharajas. Besides all that, it was the first place we had seen in too long in which our budget realistically reflected What Things Cost. We stayed in a nice room for under 300 roops, had big cheap breakfasts in the surreal brick spiral of the Indian Coffee House around the corner, managed to enjoy a beer together in a welcoming bar down the street. Nobody hassled us as we walked down the street, and more than a few people (the first in a while) struck up conversations as we passed on the sidewalks. The most contentious exchange we had (trying to trade books we had finished reading for black-market reprints at the local book bazaar) was transacted with smiles and laughter. When one seller's friend came between us and offered to settle our genial dispute at a price fifty rupees lower than the one I named, the whole crowd started in on him at once, mock-strangling him as the word "idiot" broke through the swirl of Malayalam curses. We got a good vibe from the place and stayed longer than we initially planned, as much to heal our wounded spirits as our broken budget.

We moved on to Kollam, where we planned to check out Kerala's world-famous backwaters. These navigable waterways wind through innumerable tiny islands, some small enough to hold no more than a single coconut palm, whose lode, when overripe, splashes into the canals like a fat kid cannonballing. We had planned on renting a houseboat and floating a day and night through these wetlands, but the toll taken on our budget and our sanity by Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry precluded any such idylls. Instead, we settled for a half-day canoe tour of Monroe Island and Ashtamudi Lake. The price was right and the day was perfect, and we saw the two-hut villages and the spice gardens and the coconut-fiber ropes being made--in short, all the stuff we came for without any of the congested, petrol-slicked aquatic lanes surrounding the outboard-houseboat traffic jams out of Alleppey. We shared our canoe with two brothers from Hyderabad, A and S, who joked about our limited knowledge of Hindi during the few moments when their eyes were not glued to their Nikons. When S asked us why we weren't taking many snaps, A chided him on our behalf that we were traveling for a long time and couldn't be bothered to capture every curious calf chasing us along the canals. We had a long talk about our travels on the tempo ride back into Kollam, and A was one of the first Indians we've met who really seemed to understand the point of our trip, which is as basic as it is complicated: To experience life as it is lived beyond our homeland. We wished each other well and retired to our hotels, and the next afternoon we headed up the coast to Cochin.

Now, we should have taken our arrival in Cochin as a sign of things to come. We wound up taking the train to avoid a four-and-a-half hour state bus ride. The promised three hours, though, got us only a fraction of the distance we needed to cover, and the train would stop for forty-five minutes at a stretch for no discernible reason. Add that to the fact that we were sitting on our backpacks in the end of a packed carriage, by the very popular toilets, and our state of general frazzle by the time we arrived can be accurately estimated. Cochin was Godzilla, we were Japan. Off the ferry from the mainland it was a twenty-minute stroll through dark streets to our homestay. The proprietors seemed nice enough, a tiny old man and his wife, but the room was expensive (400 rupees for a bed down the hall from the cramped, shared bathroom). After the train ride and given how deserted the town seemed, we opted to take it and maybe look for a better value the next day.

We never found that better value. The problem with Fort Cochin is geographical: Ernakulam, on the mainland, is a big Indian city of a few million with all the accoutrements (traffic, crowds, air and noise pollution) that entails. The Fort area lies at the end of a narrow peninsula across the water and a world away, a scenic twenty-minute, five-rupee ferry ride or a long, expensive taxi or rick from Ernakulam. It's a retreat from the screaming city with trees lining its quiet streets and a relaxed atmosphere that the guidebooks describe, a bit too generously, as "romantic." As such, it is the destination of choice for Western tourists. And again, as such, the local hospitality industry has taken the fact that they're the only game in town and run with it, charging exorbitant rates for basic, no-frills accommodation and terrible food. Sure, you can find nice rooms and meals around, but you're gonna pay for it. That might be A-okay for short-stay tourists spending pounds and Euros, but for two budget travelers moving for eight months on a tanking dollar, it inspired flashbacks to what we'd come to Kerala in the hopes of escaping.

So we knew we wouldn't stay long, and made our short time in Cochin as cheap as we could. We bought tickets to a performance of kathakali, a stylized Keralan dramatic art form that tells the stories of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana using an elaborate system of eye rolls, hand movements, and posturing. There's a codified system of gestures that express "lust," "anger," "passion," "jealousy," and even "how the bee drinks the nectar from the lotus flower." I think the last one might be a sexual innuendo, but it wasn't entirely clear from the short course given before the performance. The show itself is a little bit pantomime, a little bit interpretive dance, and a whole lot weird. These guys spend hours painting themselves into costume, then spend even longer prancing about the stage without uttering any sound other than the occasional grunt. Bells attached to their legs and ankles highlight their movements while a team of drummers and a wailing singer accompany them and "tell" the story of what's going on before them. It's something to behold, and seeing the show was enough to inspire us to check out more of the local art forms.

The next morning, our last in Cochin, we were rudely awakened at eight AM by the owners of our lodge knocking to inform us that their girl had arrived to clean our room. Groggy and not sure if they were telling me what I thought they were, I said we didn't need our room cleaned and we'd be checking out that morning by the appointed time of noon. Thirty minutes later, there's another knock, and this time I'm less groggy and more angry. It's the owner's wife, again telling me that her girl is here to clean our room, adding that she has another reservation for our room and that the party has arrived. I point to the sign above the desk outside our room, which clearly states "CHECKOUT TIME 12 NOON," telling her that we were getting up anyway and would be ready after taking a shower and packing our bags, but letting her know that we would not be hurried out the door because of their poor planning. We had sketched out a lazy morning exit and a late seafood lunch to get the most time out of our budget before seeing an exhibition of kalarippayat, the local martial art, at four that afternoon. So we get cleaned up and we're half-naked and half-packed when another knock comes. I scream "WHAT?!" as I head to the door, belt undone and hair still wet, and this time it's owner and wife, telling me again that they need us out to clean the room. I point again to the sign by the desk, tell him again that it's not my problem, and shut the door. We finish what we're doing and store our bags in the spare room under the stairs, and I tell the owner I'll pay him when we collect our bags later that afternoon.

After a walk through town, we head out to the local fishmongers to haggle for Indian salmon and huge, gorgeous tiger prawns, and take our fish to a seafront shack where they butter and garlic it to perfection for a nominal fee. We luxuriate in the fresh seafood (we bought the fish still breathing) and go for French-press coffee and cake at this chic little art gallery-cum-cafe on one of the nearby backstreets. Having splurged on our meal for the day we go for the kalarippayat exhibition, which was sadly truncated due to the stitches and splints required of half the troupe after the previous night's show. Such injuries are pretty common, apparently, as--besides the flying kicks and swinging staffs and swords--one of the weapons demonstrated is the urumi, a weapon with a handle at the base of four flexible five-meter blades, worn as a belt by women and whirled through the air fast enough to make ribbons of any number of potential attackers on dark country lanes. Fearsome stuff, and the finale of the show.

All smiles after salvaging a great afternoon from the shambles of our morning, we walk back to the guesthouse to secure our packs and set off for the mainland, where we would stay the night before an early train to Kannur. Upon arriving, I go upstairs to find the owner and pay our balance. He asks me why we're leaving, if we don't want to stay another night, and I can't believe my ears. This, after waking us from blissful morning slumber to shuffle us out the door to make way for the next suckers! I tell him there's no way I'd stay there another night, that I don't like the way he does business, and try to pay the 300-rupee balance with a 500-rupee note. Of course, as is so common in every business of any kind in this country, he doesn't have change. He tells me I should go back out, get change, and come back to pay him. I tell him he can go out for the change himself, that I'm ready to leave and I've had enough of his shit for one lifetime, and he insists again that I can get change down the road, in the opposite direction of our ferry. I give up and go downstairs to find D, tell her to shoulder her pack, that we're leaving. We're out the door when the owner calls down from his balcony, obviously concerned, asking where we're going. "To get change," I tell him. "Put your pants on and come with us if you want it." He does just that, comes down the side stairway pulling a face and tells me again we need to go the wrong way for the ferry to get change. I tell him he can come with us to the ferry and get change along the way, but that we won't be walking the other direction. He accuses us of trying to skip out on the bill, and I assent to the walk because now I want to beat a discount out of him for the early wake-up call and the shitshow that our dealings with him have been. We're raising our voices at each other on the walk, I'm telling him again that I don't appreciate being expected to pay the full amount for being kicked out early, and now he's telling me that he's already giving me a discount for not charging me 100 rupees extra to stash our packs for the day. "Is after five o'clock!" he says repeatedly, like our bags were occupying prime real estate in his closet and should be charged by the hour. Of course I know that any reputable lodging will allow for left luggage at no charge for paying customers, and I say as much as colorfully as I know how. "You're the fool," he tells me, at which point we've already cursed each other up and down the empty street after getting the change. I tell him to go to hell and go fuck himself, and regret not giving him specifics on the order in which he might go about such. As it was, I turned on my heel to avoid hitting the son of a bitch, and we walked down the way to the ferry steaming, steaming.

That night in Ernakulam was a relief, as we booked into a proper hotel with posted rates, no haggling, no bullshit, with attached bath and in close proximity to the train station. Having done a load of wash and strung it out to dry, D and I sat under our mosquito net reading for a bit, neither of us saying what we were both thinking, each of us trying again to make lemonade of the day's shitty citrus. We wound up talking through the day, focusing on a bomb plate of seafood and a cool knife show and not the circus of bad business that was the Ham Dale Inn. Agreeing to agree on what we'd take from the day, and knowing what we were going for on the next leg of our journey, we decided to go for a drink at a hotel bar that was reportedly alright for mixed company.

The joint was weird to say the least, with full-wall action portraits of sports heroes like some white skier chick and that Walton kid that played b-ball for Arizona. And the service was what it needed to be, a smile and a plate of roasted chickpeas with every round. I had whisky, D had Kingfisher, and--because I've been brushing my teeth with it and showering in it and occasionally even washing down a Mefloc with it--I put two cubes of the local ice into each of my whisky sevens. We talked over the day again, rehashed our reservations and applause about South India as a whole, and walked back to our room through the silent, dusty backroads of the city.

It only took three hours before I woke in a cold sweat, burning up and freezing all at once, mentally preparing myself for what I knew would be coming: the puking, the shitting, the general and I-need-not-specify-further unpleasantness of dysentery. D woke up a couple of hours later to find me burning up and shaking, asked me what was wrong. I told her and she was up most of the rest of the night holding me when I was cold, soothing me when I was hot, and when the first light shone through the paneless windows she asked me if I was fit to travel. I said roll out, we packed and caught a rick to the station, and I put on a brave (if pallid) face for the six-hour train to Kannur. We were sitting second class seated with a benchful of sari-clad women, none of whom batted an eye at the sick white boy trying to focus on his bootleg copy of Snow while simultaneously fighting off the urge to bumrush the line at the rolling latrine. Kind people, them.

But I digress: After all the trash we'd dealt with in Cochin, we decided to go off the trail in Kannur to find the local ritual of theyyam. Rumor has it this particular Keralan art/ceremony predates Hinduism and owes more to the animist cults that worshipped in the coconut groves before Sri Shiva took hold of the subcontinent some three thousand years ago. Our first taste of Kannur was tinged with the green filter of my discomfort, as we walked for close to two hours before finding a suitable place to hole up for a day or so before testing our (read: "my") mettle for the journey that would be a theyyam hunt. J at the train station's tourist info desk was unusually helpful, pointing us in the direction of one accessible rite being conducted that afternoon (my bowels nixed it) and giving us the name of a temple twenty clicks out of town where they performed it daily at sixish in the PM. He also tipped us off to a kalarippayat show going down at the town square that evening (late enough to be okay), which wound up being the highlight of our Indian Excursion thus far.

We showed up to the Square at the prescribed hour, which was 5:30 PM Indian Stretchable Time. Just like at a good show in New Orleans, they were still setting up the lights and mikes when we arrived. Nevertheless, we decided to sit for a minute and give it thirty more to get moving as the sun set over the western side of the amphitheater. Sitting and wondering what would happen next, we were besieged by a gaggle of highschoolers on a camping conference with the local tourism agency, the DTPC, among whom was J, the helpful gent from the tourist desk at the railway station. S was the first to talk to us, asking us the usual Whatisyourgoodname and Whichisyourcountry? We answered, using our Indian aliases for simplicity, and from there it was a constant backchatter behind the opening act, three women from the paddy fields in Cannanore district singing the local equivalent of Negro spirituals. While S explained the significance of what our foreign ears were hearing, I explained that people in my part of the world would do the same thing, singing to make their hearts smile while performing backbreaking labor for little or no remuneration. S found this corrolary interesting and asked me to sing a verse from one of our tunes. I blanked and looked at D, and the best we could come up with was "Swing low, sweet chariuh-hut, comin' for to carry me hoooome..." The kids ate it up, this off-key rendition of a sad, sad tune, and I listened to their laughter and the keening of the women onstage and hoped that we had struck a common chord and that I hadn't merely been the latest white man to appropriate black music in the name of plying a global audience.

But for these kids, singing a line from a song from our homeland was an important thing. They asked D and I if we'd seen any Malayalam movies, who our favorite heroes and heroines (read: "movie stars") were, whether we might sing another line from another tune for their rolling digital voice recorders. Answering in the negative and drawing blanks and staring into the open, speckled maw of a recording device (in order), I was struck by the soulful strains of "Camptown Races," a song my grandmother used to sing to me when I'd stay at her place in Lexington and needed to go to sleep, all of five years old, thrilled to be in the company of that glorious, mysterious old woman with the mellifluous voice and perfect recall of her youth's songbook.

Doo-dah, doo-dah.

We continued talking with S and his friends, the girls eventually drawing D to their side of the scrum, and J eventually came back with a friend of his televising the cultural festival for a big local network. He asked me if I'd be willing to say a few words about the women singing and the boys swinging flaming coconut husks from steel chains (an altogether enlightening side of kalarippayat we hadn't seen in Cochin). One of S's girls asked me to point them out during the interview to make sure that they'd be famous TV stars, too. I did as they asked and was relieved when the cameraman panned left on my mention of "my friends here telling me about the singing women of the paddy fields..." We sat after the TV crew left and discussed politics ("I hate Bush!" "That's okay, S, we hate him, too.") and religion ("What is your religion?" "I have no religion." "That is good. Hindu, Muslim, Christian, we are all human beings.") and interpersonal relations ("Do you marry for love in USA?" "We marry for whatever reason we like in the States, and not always for the right one."). As the kalarippayat show drew to a close, through the big, fiery finale, S turned to me and said some of the most heartrendingly beautiful things I've ever heard from a 17-year-old Indian boy:

"I am sad, Bob."

"Why're you sad?"

"I am sad because in a short time you will leave, and I will leave, and we will say goodbye, and you will never see me again."

"Sure, but we'll always have Kannur," I said with a grin, visions of Bogart and Bergman making me smile for their sheer incongruity.

"But we will return to our homes in our villages, and you will return to your home in Am'rica, and I have very much liked speaking with you about life."

And I was at a loss. There were no words to express my lack of words for S's surplus. I'm sure I said something trite, something to put him at ease, to assure him that he needn't have asked D and I repeatedly if his conversation "brought distress" to our enjoyment of the performances. I know I don't remember those words, the same as I remember his, but we parted with a handshake and a hug and with best wishes for the future.

The next day we found a theyyam at the temple J pointed us to, and it was a loud, strange display of yellow-painted men with elaborate paunches running around in circles with swords in their hands. The theyyam festival we found the day after was in a lull when we arrived, and we spent the better part of two hours smiling and joking and answering the simple, belabored questions of the young girls who came to greet us while the painted, headdressed men in the temple forecourt were fanned and mobbed, alternately, by their devotees. All told, our stay in Kannur cost us less per day than a seafood smorgasbord in Cochi. And it was worth a thousand times that for the spiritual rejuvenation granted us by a handful of boisterous, inquisitive, beautiful children who expressed so openly and honestly an innocent curiousity about (and concern for) another's ways of life.

And that quickly, in just a few hours of a few days, between bouts of anger and sickness and confusion, we found ourselves rid of the albatross we had been cursing intermittently for the past month. I'd be a schmuck if I pulled out the Whitney Houston, said "I believe that children are the future," but I don't know if I can put it any better right now. It's late, and there are too many words before these. All I know is that we came through a dark time and arrived on the other side smiling, cheerful, and full of hope--not only for ourselves, but for every one of us.

Teach them well and let them lead the way.

G-g-g-g-gelato!

So if you're in the mood for a laugh, check out this video of D and I barely able to contain ourselves over cold-stone gelato in Chennai. The backstory: We met up with A our first morning in town at his boy P's place, a restaurant where they're introducing the cold-stone concept to India. You know cold-stone, right? Where they flip your scoop on the marble countertop with Reese's Pieces and Heath bar crumbles and granola and such? Well, as luck would have it the folks from ChennaiLive, a do-see-hear website keeping Madrasers abreast of all the hip happenings in their burg, were in the house to shoot video for a short feature on P's joint. Since cold-stone is as American as microwaveable individually wrapped low-carb apple pie, and we were the only Americans in the building, they figured they could ply us with free gelato in exchange for a few raves about the product ("The banana really tastes like banana! OMGee-lato!"). Luckily they figured right. We're such whores...but sexyfine and camera-ready (no hair and makeup for these two divas) after an overnight bus and less than forty winks. Enjoy, and please post any and all snide comments in the space provided. Peace.

Lost And Foundering

Shortly before we left our jobs to travel, D took a funny phone call at the Indian gig. Given the likelihood that answering the phone there would mean listening to someone start rattling away in a tongue other than English, just hearing the phone ring made my skin crawl in apprehension. Too many years spent working in loud music clubs have damaged my hearing in certain situations, and I'd always have to ask the caller to repeat himself six or seven times. It didn't help, either, that so many South Asians have telephone voices that register about three decibels quieter than a sparrow fart. But D, she's got young ears and excellent phone etiquette, she answers with the name of the joint and her name, then "How may I help you?"

"Hello, Doobie," responds the thick Indian accent on the other end of the line, "walla walla dinnah boo-fay?"

Not even fazed by the misunderstood name or the utter incomprehensibility of the entire exchange, she sussed that the guy's wondering if our lunch buffet might also be available in the evenings. No, she tells him, the dinner menu is a la carte. Thank yous are traded and the call is over. By the time I arrive for my shift later that evening, D and K have adopted the man's strange query as a punchline, infectious as much for the mysteries contained in its nonsense syllables as for the lilting, musical, heavily accented soprano required of its delivery. I still smile when I hear it, and sometimes we bust it out just to crack each other up, lighten a mood. It's become a shorthand for our experience of walking around a foreign land in which we speak but one of the 300 languages in daily use, that of the erstwhile colonizers.

And many times that's not a problem. English is the lingua franca for so many exchanges over here, a common language more common than Hindi in South India, where Tamil, Telugu, Cannada, and Malayalam speakers have resisted efforts at uniting under a common tongue. Team Yahoo!, bright young minds from all over India, spoke English at work and play, and I'd need all the fingers on Shiva's dozen arms to count the times we've watched a beach-cafe table populated by Israelis, Germans, Russians, French kids, and the odd Japanese traveler communicate with their Indian waiter in 31 luscious flavors of English.

This week, however, our functional illiteracy and ignorance of the local tongue have combined to make Sisyphean tasks of even the most mundane interactions. In Chennai, the cosmopolitan burg where we met up with our old boss from Cambridge, A, we were offered numerous suggestions for meals and sights around town. There was this one American-style diner where A recommended the cheeseburger, a hankering I didn't know existed in me until I heard the word ("Mmmmmm, cheeeeeseburger..."). We knew the neighborhood and we knew the name of the joint, we even knew the street it was on, and it still took us two rickshaws, forty-five minutes, and several stops while our drivers asked for directions. The problem, you see, is that many streets in Chennai are known by two names: one given by the English, one reflecting the postcolonial efforts to re-Tamil-ize Tamil Nadu. We've run into this all over India, where the trains stop in Mumbai (Marathi name), not Bombay (English corruption), at VT (Victoria Terminus, as in Queen) and not Chatrapati Shivaji (Marathi king and popular tongue-twister) Terminus. What you call your hometown depends on when you were born there, before or after the new names came in. Most people older than twenty will eschew their native tongues and the current maps and the larger political overtones of reclaiming a land from centuries of colonial rule, referring out of habit to the Anglicized names of cities and streets.

So confusion reigned supreme as we searched out a burger and fries in the land of the Holy Cow. We kept telling the second driver "Spurtank Road," to which he would respond "You wan' go what bank?" And I'd name the road again, slower and louder, all too conscious that I was in danger of being that guy who shouts words from a foreign tongue in the futile, idiotic hope that increased volume might spark recognition in the eyes of a person who does not understand them. We've all seen that guy, whether he's talking to hired help in the States or a tuk-tuk driver in Chennai. He ain't pretty. I didn't want to be him, but I also didn't want to spend any more time than was absolutely necessary sucking blue fumes while being driven in circles. Our progress literally described a squared circle as we left Egmore station, turning south east north west in a diminishing spiral, stopping for directions at a handful of roadside stores until bang in front of us was the diner, checkerboard wall tiles and all. We were three blocks due south of the station, to the best of my reckoning.

Alas, that was one tasty hamburger.

The next day we found ourselves on a similar fool's errand. The Theosophical Society has a large park in Adyar, southeast of the city center, where there's a library with arcane religious texts on display and a 400-year-old banyan tree on the grounds that can shade upwards of 3000 people. Sounds impressive, right? We agreed. We set out from Anna Salai, the center's main drag, on one of the buses our books said would take us to the gates of the park. Just spitballing the issue while waiting for the bus, I tried to get a rate for a rickshaw to the Theosophical Society. Those nine syllables were getting me nowhere, no matter how loud or how slow, so I tried "Adyar Library," an alternate name in our LP. "Adyar?" came the response. "Which hotel you going?"

So close, and yet...

The bus put us out a click and a half from Elliots Beach, which abuts the park on the latter's eastern border. That much we knew. We found the wall surrounding the grounds, but no gate. The gate's address was listed as Blavatsky Avenue, and every road sign (surprisingly there they were, and even in English!) only named numbered cross streets. First Main Road's Second Cross Street, and suchlike. We asked at the sidewalk bubble tea spot that didn't serve bubble tea, and they didn't know what we were asking. We asked the guy at the smokes'n'paan stall outside the no-bubble-tea spot, and he didn't know either. We asked a rickshaw driver who was waiting while his fare conducted business inside one of the homes or shops on one of the cross streets, and our smiling faces were met with the next in a long line of blank stares. Here we were, within sight of the wall surrounding 240 acres of private park containing a tree big enough to toilet paper half of India, and nobody knows how to get inside. Not only did nobody know how to get where we were going, they didn't even seem to know that such a place existed. We may as well have been asking for the directions to the Octopus's Garden, the Black Gate of Mordor, some acid fantasy inhabited by the irretrievably bent. They stared at us like we had frogs in our hair. By the time our last hope extinguished in the unknowing eyes of those we'd asked for help, the park's gates were set to close in minutes. Par for the course, we decided, packing it in and heading back to A's place, heads hanging and brains aching from the effort, leaving Chennai the next morning without having seen anything to justify our trouble.

But some days it's like that. Central Mumbai is a very walkable city, easy to navigate and fun besides. Chennai, not so much. Our maps were not granular enough to be of any assistance beyond figuring which part of town we might be in. Even then, Chennai's a booming city and our maps, granular or not, were at least two years old. Them's the breaks. They can't all be winners, kid.

From the disappointment of Chennai we headed south to Mamallapuram, a stone-carving beachside town that was tiny and easily navigable and presented a perfect chance to clean the frogshit out of our hair. We're now in Pondicherry, a city independent of Tamil Nadu that was held by France until the late 1950's. Here we have encountered the pleasant surprise that is hearing the Parisian tongue spoken by Indian mouths. Yet another curiousity in this land of contradictions, our guesthouse is owned by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the main draw for foreigners in Pondy. There's a utopian village on the outskirts of town, funded by the ashram and home to almost 2000 "citizens of the world." D and I are a little creeped out by the whole issue, which is a bit too Heaven's Gate for our tastes. Get this: there's a picture over our bed of the movement's late matriarch, known simply as "The Mother." I've had to fight the impulse to turn it facing the wall, but I think they might be watching and we like the room.

So Mom will watch over our restful slumber for another two nights, we'll rise for croissants in the morning and sip espresso in the afternoon, and Thursday we hop a 13-hour train to Trivandrum, in Kerala. They call it "God's Own Country" in all the Tourism Department literature. Given the Babel trip we've been on these last ten days, it won't surprise me to arrive and find a big grey-haired Jerry-Garcia-lookin' dude smiling down from the sky, shouting in God's Own Language, speaking louder when we don't understand.

Cluck'n'gobble

If you're reading this back home, we hope you're having a happy Thanksgiving. To everyone else on the planet, happy Thursday. We're here on the shores of the Bay of Bengal dreaming of pumpkin pies and turkey sandwiches, but there's fresh seafood down the street that should make up for what we're missing. So while you're gathering around the table and celebrating everything and everyone you have to be thankful for, know that we're doing the same and including all of you. Best wishes, and may your day be better than your turkey's.

Oh, and one more thing:

I shot my feathered (and de-feathered) friends here at Kodai's Sunday market, where they were on sale for a poultry sum. If you want to see more, we've got chickens and monkeys and holy freakin' cows in glorious full-screen color over there on Webshots. D is arranging the digital shots every week or ten days, so check back often to see what's for dinner. For easy navigating in the future, you'll also find the link on the sidebar menu at left. Peace.

You Shall Know Our Velocity!

I woke up this morning already sticky from the steam boiling off the teeming streets of Chennai. In the interim between my wristwatch beeping at 6 and my lazy ass rolling out of bed, I had one of those half-sleeping, half-waking dreams that bubbles up fully realized despite its brevity. In the dream I was flying to Paris for breakfast, looking to score nothing more than a chocolate croissant and a demitasse of espresso before my return flight. Knowing my stay would last no longer than it took to secure a morning snack, my dream-self browsed my dream-closet in search of the single shirt that would get me through the trip.* The armchair psychologist in me figures two things: 1) that I'm hungry for something beyond the idli-dosa, and B) that our whirlwind tour of India is less cool breeze than cyclone-force gale.

Here's the post-Bangalore breakdown, with a handy timeline for those of you keeping score:

SAT 3 NOV-TUE 6 NOV: Mysore

We took the afternoon train from Bangles to Mysore, a beautiful route through acres and acres of canefields in full flower, their pink-white tassles rolling in the afternoon breeze. Mysore is a hub for the production of sandalwood and incense, and the Devaraja Market in the town center is a speed-metal concert for the senses. Every other stall features piles of multicolored tikka powder and every other hawker is looking to rub his collection of essential oils on your wrist and forearm. Floral aromas of every olfactory shade perfume the air with such intensity that passing bumblebees explode in midair, unable to process the embarrassment of riches. D left the market after our first trip with ten different scents cloaking her arms, nine of which were so vivid and cloying that she spent twenty minutes at the sink afterward trying to smell like people again. Satisfactorily scrubbed, we ambled toward the Maharaja's Palace for their Sunday night lightshow (pictured). For one hour each week the Palace is illuminated by enough lightbulbs to explain blackouts in Bangladesh. The good folks in charge waive the entrance fee for that one hour, during which a carnival atmosphere and thousands of people descend upon the grounds. Smiles still on our faces and the syrupy scents from the vendors outside the gate firing our appetites, we headed to the nearest sweets shop to sample a half-dozen variations on the four food groups: ghee, gram flour, rosewater and jaggery.**

TUE 6 NOV-WED 7 NOV: Ooty

We'd been flirting with the Western Ghats, the mountain range just inland from the Arabian Sea, for our entire southward crawl from Mumbai. This far south they comprise the Nilgiri (or "Blue Mountain") range, and are dotted with hill stations established by the British Raj. Tea bushes and This White Guy flourish in the cool climate, but the drive (pictured) to Ooty (the universally-preferred alternative to Udaghamandalam) is so much nicer than the reality of the town itself. D said it best, remarking with her characteristic wit that "This place would be cute about twenty years ago, when it was cute." Indeed. Today Ooty is a dusty, smoggy, traffic-choked sprawl that's not even in the same fucking zip code as Cute. In a nutshell, for those who like it nutty: the town's lake, called (I shit you not) Reflections Lake, is a popular pedalboating destination for flocks of Indian tourists. It's also the collection point for like half the town's raw sewage. Cheery, nah? We stayed the night and rolled out on the first bus for

WED 7 NOV-WED 14 NOV: Kodaikanal

After the psychout that was Ooty, we were a little apprehensive on the eight-hour-plus ride to Kodai. As if to allay our fears, the switchbacked road into the mountains, which we ascended in our DVD Coach (playing the original Spiderman in subtitled English), kept climbing and twisting to offer us a better view of the sunset burning over the lakes stretched below the foothills that receded ever further behind us the evening's mist. We pulled into town after dark, tucking into a quick bite before bed and hopeful dreams of a mountain paradise.

Any possibility of disappointment disappeared with the sunrise. Our first daylight glimpse of Kodai revealed a beautiful town tentacled over and between a handful of peaks and valleys around 7000 feet. Gone were the rickshaws of Ooty and their sickening fumes, replaced by the kind of clean, thin, mountain air that induces euphoria rather than chemical lightheadedness. We walked the town, from the Tibetan restaurants and Western-style health-food store on the market road to the long promenade around the town's sewage-free lake to the southern route out of town that seemed perpetually ringed by clouds that stretched out beneath the sun like Shiva's down comforter. Sitting on the balcony of our room and looking out over those milky clouds, we knew that we'd be staying in Kodai for a while.

And good thing, too. We met a handful of people who reinforced our initial impression of the place, people who smiled with an unforced honesty that seemed to radiate from the town's very core, oozing into the groundwater and onto the faces of those lucky enough to call it home. Among them were I, the proprietor of Manna Bake Restaurant, who serves a world-famous apple crumble with custard accompanied by his warm alto and the Indian Christian music playing on the cassette deck. You can read two decades of his guests' handwritten hosannas in the volumes he places before you while you wait for your meal, which he prepares in the open kitchen of his own home, at his four-burner stove, ten paces from your seat at one of two communal tables in his main room. Then there was M (above right, with D), our guide on a grueling trek through the misty mountains (above left). He would stop occasionally to crumble a handful of leaves plucked from a trailside plant before offering them to us to smell and identify, or to point out the place where, only a few months ago, he and a couple of his Canadian charges encountered a ten-foot long king cobra that was none too happy with the uninvited company. All of 4'11" and 80 pounds, he led us for eight hours over rock and mud and along cliff faces dropping off into abyssal cloudcover beneath our feet, wearing his beaten blue flip-flops and a broad smile, never once breaking stride or sweat. As we passed a small, gaudy temple late in the afternoon, he summed up the entirety of Indian spirituality with one remarkably succinct utterance in his broken English:

"See temple? Many temples in India. Many temples, many stories." Then, finishing his thought, pointing at a cast-off chunk of cement beside our path, "You see, looks like stone on ground, but even stone on ground has story in India."

WED 14 NOV-THU 15 NOV: Madurai

M's words still ringing in my ears (and not only for the altitude), we rolled out of Kodai to the temple town of Madurai. Our hotel in the old quarter overlooked the several gopurams marking the massive Meenakshmi temple complex. It was a dizzying view from the roof of the joint (pictured), where we went after nightfall to watch someone a few blocks away set off the remainder of his Diwali fireworks. But the heat and press of the city, naked under the sun that scorches Tamil Nadu's plains even in winter, proved too much for us after idyllic Kodai. So on to

THU 15 NOV-SAT 17 NOV: Trichy

We had heard conflicting reports about Tiruchirappali. The English couple we met along the trail with M recommended it as a fun stop with lots to do, but A in Chennai emailed us that "Trichy is boring." Had A added "crowded around the holidays," we would have known to head straight for the big city. We got off the bus from Madurai and tried to score rooms in at least a dozen hotels and guest houses around the bus stand, exhausting our guidebooks' suggestions and those of every desk clerk insisting that there would be available doubles in the joint next door. We finally threw ourselves at the mercy of Fate, in the form of a rickshaw driver who asked several helpful passersby where there might be a room to be had. We wound up at the front door of the only joint in the area we didn't check about thirty seconds (and thirty rupees) after getting in the rickshaw around the corner. We took the last room in the place, a super-luxe AC room on the top floor with a distant view of the town's puzzlingly famous Rock Fort (pictured), a long climb up a small mountain to two tiny temples. The room was by far the nicest we've stayed in, but with a price tag to match. A single night exceeded our daily budget by almost 50%, but the comfort after so long in questionable digs convinced us to stay two nights in Trichy for no reason other than to enjoy our room.

There followed an overnight bus to Chennai late Saturday, meeting up with A for lunch after a nap Sunday morning, and here we are, typing through a rainy Monday and ready to move on again tomorrow. No wonder I'm dreaming the caviar dreams of the Jet Set. We'll surely stop to smell the jasmine at some point along the road, but the moment-to-moment thrill of seeing new places, faces, and landscapes is too appealing to relent just yet. And just south of here, in the former French colony of Pondicherry, there's a croissant au chocolat that's screaming my name in at least three different languages.

*: I've been in India long enough to absorb some of the local standards of modesty, as I rolled out of bed in this dream already wearing pants.
**: For the uninitiated, that's clarified butter, pulverized chickpea, floral distillate, and raw cane sugar.

Curiouser And Curiouser

The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, through barriers of time, into its own future. I liked it.

--from Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram

From the moment I read this passage, in which Roberts' narrator recounts his first impressions of Bombay, it lodged in my consciousness like a burr in my slippers. That penultimate sentence perfectly encapsulates our experience of India thus far, where the old and the new dance together, whirling and entwining and making love on the bustling sidewalk between the glass high-rise and the open sewer, begetting a child, India, with her feet in the muddy primeval and her eyes ever turned toward the sunrise.

And nowhere has that enduring dichotomy rung more true than in Bangalore, the capital of India's high-tech industry and foster child of our global economy. We arrived early, getting down from a bus that had traveled through the night over dusty, unpaved roads that were jagged mountain ranges, with peaks and valleys shaking bouncing rollicking us from stolen minutes of fitful slumber. Just outside the city the single dirt lane changed to a crowded modern highway, sardined with the morning's commuters honking and jockeying for position in the crawl toward the 9-to-5. A rickshaw found us and accepted our haggled rate to get to MG (Mahatma Gandhi) Road, the center of town, where we found one of the ubiquitous chain coffeehouses and tucked into large, steaming cups of The Real Thing. We spent an hour or so chatting with an Australian traveler who had arrived in India through Pakistan and China, sharing stories and comparing notes on our experiences thus far. Happily caffeinated and a little jittery after our long night and the shock of brewed black coffee, we parted ways and went in search of food.

We had time to kill, as our Couchsurfing host, P, would not be arriving in Bangles* until late in the afternoon. And we trod the city sidewalks fully laden, as no hotelier could be convinced to keep our packs for a few hours at any price. Strange days, my friends, when not even the baksheesh can get you access to a left-luggage room. South of MG Road, the streets are lined with Western chain stores and restaurants, the signage above your head touting the wares of European and American corporations. You can buy your Levi's next door to the nightclub selling Heineken, get a new pair of Skechers across from the "First International Donut Chain in India." We had read about this proliferation of chain eateries around the MG Road area, and I was in the midst of a full-on Mac Attack by the time we saw the Golden Arches.

Let me explain: We had been restricted to South Indian idli-dosa breakfasts in Gokarna town and the small number of beach shacks dishing out mediocre-to-bad multicuisine fare after the early sunsets made the rocky headlands between the beaches no-travel zones for safety reasons. This had been our enforced diet for a week on Kudle Beach, and while the banoffee pie at Ganga was extraordinary (and dearer by ten rupees than a room for the night), we were roundly unimpressed by the Indian food we had been able to obtain apart from the aforementioned breakfasts. A few nights of lousy curries and strangely palatable pizzas, and I figured we might as well push our tolerances for shite food to the very corners of that greasy envelope.

So I had the Chicken Maharaja Mac** (fries and Coke), and D got the Paneer Salsa Wrap (ditto). And, oddly, they were far from terrible. But we were hungry, so...

A phone check with P gave us an approximate arrival time, so we figured that the best way to kill a couple more hours was to catch a flick. There was a glossy new mega-mall just east of the McDonald's, so we clomped down the road and through the metal detectors in front (the guards laughed when they saw our packs and waved us through with but a cursory pass of their wands). Up the escalators and through the jungle of consumerism, the Inox multiplex had no showtimes that matched our schedule. So, after noting the number of shoe stores (my right Teva blew out in Palolem and was on its last, er, legs?) and the timings of English-language flicks, we set off back toward McD's to another twin-screen cinema and sat down for our first Hindi picture in India.

The typical Bollywood movie is an extravagant affair, its palette every color of a candied kaleidescope, its musical numbers advancing the story as much as (if not more than) the dialogue that marks time between songs. That said, No Smoking is not your typical Bollywood movie. We could make neither heads nor tails of the plot, a dark existential comedy (or was it?) following the travails of a wealthy Mumbaiker who can't seem to kick the habit. It begins with a dream sequence (or was it?) against a snowy backdrop with goosestepping Russian soldiers and a faraway bathtub at the top of a steep hill. Thought balloons emanating from the main character's temples read in English, before switching to Hindi script. This is the sense it made from the first five minutes, and it was all downhill from there. One of P's friends (P2) later told us that it was a really interesting flick examining the courses a life can take following a single decision (or something?), how one's future can change or not, depending upon the choices made or decided against. I'm hip to the idea, and I'd like to check out a subtitled DVD at a later date, but all we got at the time was a really slick light show (with only one musical number) in a dark, air-conditioned room. For that, it was worth the rupees.

After No Smoking, we decided that the coffee from earlier was wearing off to a point that our senses, still not so keen after the long night and the longer morning/afternoon, should be treated to a few glasses of cold draft beer. And then maybe a few more. So we wandered into Guzzler's Inn, which is not nearly as shady as it sounds. In fact, it was refreshing to see an actual bar (gasp!) behind the darkened glass doors, and not the typical dim, dingy, depressing boozing parlour we had learned thus far to avoid. There were even women sitting and drinking and smoking and talking about whatever with their male colleagues and boyfriends. The crowd was young and vital, and guys strolled in with motorcycle helmets in one hand and pool-cue cases in the other, heading for the billiards tables upstairs. We ordered a pitcher of Kingfisher and sat while the surreal scene around us unfolded to the biggest Billboard hits of the 80's and 90's.

A glass or so into our relaxation, it hit me just how fucking foreign Bangalore seemed--for all its familiarity--after our last many weeks in India. The only constant element of our travels has been the fluidity of what it means to be In India. Here we were, sitting across a well-lit table from each other, mixed company among mixed company, listening to American tunes and to our fellow patrons speaking in English***. Hours before, we had eaten American-style fast food and cruised the mall like teenagers in every suburbia anywhere, staring in the windows at the portable advertisements of Western consumer culture**** up for sale at fixed prices, no haggling.

And the kinda sad, embarrassing, pitiable part of it is that it's exactly why we came to Bangalore. The sights and architecture and temples that have been our reasons for other destinations were not in evidence in Bangalore, which boasts a few nice old buildings and a botanical garden amidst the commercialized sprawl that the IT industry and its money have ushered in. I needed a new pair of sandals (which I found the next day after trying on 4400-rupee Nike flip-flops, the new new shit according to the young, punky-haired salesman) and we wanted to catch a flick (we saw one more the next day, this time in English) and eat some really good, expensive food (we had great North Indian and Thai meals at Sikander and Shiok, respectively). In short, we wanted to be American tourists in India's America. We were not disappointed.

So from the Guzzler's Inn to P's home east of the city center. We scarfed street-food dosas over introductions before retiring to some much-needed slumber. The next day was spent wandering the streets and the mall before meeting up with P (pictured left, with D and Me) and Team Yahoo! (pictured above, during pub power outage) at a bar with very mod framed graphic art of Zappa, Bowie, and Clapton. Enjoying the pub culture in the last (read: "only") place we thought we'd find it, we ate spicy Indian pub cuisine and quaffed pitcher upon pitcher until the management signaled that the pumpkin hour was approaching. We whiled away the wee hours after closing time in P2's apartment bitching about the lack of public transpo in Bangles and other notable towns and cities, and P provided the solo guitar accompaniment for a rollicking and horribly off-key round-robin of karaoke. We made dinner plans for the following night, which meant cooking up an Indianized batch of my patented shrimp etouffee after two extended and amazing excursions into the local supermarkets. The cajun drew raves (I'm proud to say) from a crowd of Indian kids making their way in Bangalore's modern marketplace. Sitting and talking with everyone made us feel like the world really is smaller than we let ourselves believe.

For better or worse? I'll leave such speculation to the professionals.

*: An unofficial nickname, one that I like (and will continue to use) as much for its flippancy as for its evoking the favored adornments of Indian women of every caste and class.
**: No beef in the burger joint, natch.
***: Given the 300 languages spoken throughout the country, the young IT set in Bangalore converse in English, a lingua franca more accessible to both North and South Indians than even Hindi.
****: There's a ubiquitous television commercial here for Zeiss spectacle lenses in which a cubicle dweller shows off his name-brand watch and name-brand shoes to his coworkers. Peering over the wall between them, his female colleague sees his generic glasses and exclaims, her nose wrinkled in disgust, "What's on your eyes, man?" Over giggles from the rest of the office, the voiceover intones "Brand nahi toh style nahi," which translates roughly as "Ain't got a brand, it ain't got style." It's one of the most disgusting examples of how pervasive consumer culture is getting over here, and one for which I want to cut the American right out of me. Not that I feel any different about such status-baiting back home.

All The Freaky People

R was a very large black man, a porter at Bar 625 when I worked there several years ago. He was a simple dude, none too bright, but a nice guy who had the ingenuous enthusiasm of the completely guileless. We invited him to join our pool team, and he hung out with us occasionally when we'd gallivant about the Quarter. He also loved to play frisbee golf after we took him out to LaFreniere the first time. So one morning I finish a graveyard shift a little after eight and we all pile into S's Jeep and drive on out to throw a round of frolf, S, J, R, and me. Well I've been up about 24 hours at this point, and it's the sticky wet guts of summer in New Orleans, and we're not five minutes out of the open-air ride before I'm sweating like the proverbial whore in church. A few holes later and it's just pouring off my forehead, running in thick rivulets over my chest and belly and soaking my shorts. R espies me in my fit of schvitz and, with a note of genuine amazement, informs me that "Gollee, Nate, but you sweatin' like a brotha!"

His observation has been on my mind this week, as I've not ceased my Wringing Human Sponge routine since we arrived in Gokarna. Greetings from the other side of the world, folks. It's humid.

But we know all that, right? Here's the crux of my previous aside: I wanna talk about people.

We left Goa a couple of weeks ago, rode inland aboard a train to Hampi, site of Vijayanagar ruins and amazing, megalithic boulders strewn about like they spilled from a Titan's marble pouch. Gorgeous place. We arrived just prior to the tourist season there, which begins in earnest during a cultural and music festival held in early November. The people were eagerly anticipating the influx of tourists and rupees, polishing their spiels and giving the hard sell on every transaction. Every rickshaw you passed on the street would offer a ride, regardless of the fact that you turned down the last ten offers along the row of parked vehicles (or that you and your girlfriend are riding bikes at the time). Every child in town had a stack of postcards or a map of the area to sell you, often running in packs, each vying to be the first to thrust the same map in your face that you didn't buy the first time. When I stopped one morning for a shave on the way into town, the barber offered me a dozen other services and when I declined and asked how much for the shave, he refused to name a price but instead asked me to pay him an amount of my own choosing commensurate with my approval of the job he'd done. I paid too much, even for a good shave.

But a few rupees here or there ain't no shenanigans. The people of Hampi know their market: tourists taking a break from the scene in Goa, short-stay travellers looking for cheap souvenirs to carry home. Everything and anything was for sale, from fine Gujarati rugs to hand-carved marble figurines to coffee-table books and tailored clothing.* And the salespeople were irrepressible. It was a chore to even price an item, because "We're just looking" was taken universally to mean "We are actively haggling at the moment." "Best prices" were reduced 60 and 75 percent, sometimes to the point of hostile assertions that no profit could possibly be made on a number we didn't even throw out, for an item we didn't even want. The bazaar vibe was hectic, and everybody knows that the foreigners--whether they're looking for ruins to scope or souvenirs to buy or a dry change from the muggy coast--are essentially only there to spend rupees. That's at the bottom of every interaction. Here's a little story:

We were staying the last four nights across the river from Hampi proper, in Vipapuragaddi. This narrow dirt lane between the river and acres of paddy had eight or ten places with huts and bungalows for rent at rates cheaper than the guesthouses in town. To get across the river, one had to take a motorboat across the narrow river, as the nearest bridge was 45 kilometers away. This meant lugging all one's belongings into the boat--not a problem if you're travelling as light as we are, but remember that Hampi has boulders. There was this Swiss dude, wiry and dreadlocked and carrying a backpack and two bouldering crashpads, who boarded the last boat across with us one evening. He had enlisted the help of a local kid to carry the larger of the two pads, still a sizeable burden, for a small sum. Upon arrival at the boat, the boy told him that he wouldn't be taking the boat across, but that they could square their debt and one of the kid's friends would meet him on the other side to carry the pad up the bank and to wherever the guy was staying, for a nominal extra fee. Swiss lightheartedly objects, saying he could carry the weight and that the kid needn't bother, but then the kid tells him, without missing a beat, "No worry about money. Money not important, life is important." The way these words of wisdom rolled off his tongue had us all in guffaws. He continued, saying that it was "good business" for him, "good business" for the dreadlocked Swiss boulderer, "good business" for his buddy across the water. This idea of "good business" was all over Hampi, the point being that a few rupees don't make no nevermind to a tourist benefitting from a bitchin' exchange rate, but can make a world of difference to the families touched by the outlay of even the paltriest sums.

So from Hampi we took a long-ass state bus trip up to Bijapur, which couldn't have been further removed from the traveller-friendly (if commercialized) atmosphere we had gotten used to. We were the only foreigners and we sat at the back of the bus, and with every stop along the seven-hour journey we saw more faces and fewer backs-of-heads. It was clear that we were getting off the beaten path, and I liked it. We smiled at the children and nodded at the adults and, more often than not, got big smiles in return. Between the friendly, curious folks and the beauty of rural Karnataka, I had a really good feeling about the place we were headed. We got down in Bijapur just after dark, walked through the smoggy city to a hotel recommended in the Lonely Planet as "basic, but comfortable." The room was okay, but homeslice manning the desk at Hotel Tourist** acted like he'd either never met one (a tourist, that is) or never liked any of the ones he had met. He was curt and standoffish and seemed utterly offended that we'd want to patronize his establishment. But the price was right and we were tired and hungry and we unslung our packs and went in search of a cold beer and a hot meal.

That was our first mistake. Nowhere in the books did it warn us that a restaurant serving booze in that part of the state would likely be a dingy drinking den, an all-male crowd of boozers gathering in really seedy surrounds for guy talk, bro time, manly shit like cricket and such. But neither did the folks running the joint seem too perturbed that a woman (gasp!) would want to have a seat and sip some suds. It was a weird atmosphere, but it was okay enough and the beer was cold.

So on around our third beer, by which time we've established with our server that--regardless of what it says on the decades-old unbound English fare card--no food is currently being served, (and probably hasn't been since Gandhi was in short pants) the power goes out. It's a fairly common occurrence throughout India, we've found, and we paid it no mind. The staff brought out candles and we were just leaving anyway. But after I've put the notes in the dish for our server to return to the cashier, something hits D in the shoulder. She thinks it's a bug, and is even more eager to leave. Then something else hits me on the back. I reach down the back of my chair and find a peanut. Then another hits the table on a trajectory that says it ain't just falling out the sky. Now we're both furious that somebody would take the opportunity, with the lights out, to act like a chickenshit and throw food at the visitors. And we're even more angry that we can't tell, in the dark, who's doing it. So we walk out scowling, scanning tables for the telltale snack dish, ready to berate the perpetrators in all the colour and flourish that English has to offer, with maybe some Kitchen Spanish thrown in for good measure and its colorful variations on hijo de puta and chinga tu madre en su culo. We get back to street level and collect our wits, just wanting a bite before we retire for the evening, and we get bum steers from everyone--including homeslice at Hotel Tourist--when we enquire about any open restaurants. The lights are still out, so we don't know that the restaurant at the hotel (!) is still open, but we chance it after walking up and down the main drag and not finding anyone still serving. Sure enough, it's open and delicious and all the fuckstain behind the counter would have had to do, in reply to our query, was point one bony, dirty finger across the lobby.

But he didn't, and we went to sleep that night dreading the next day. We had paid two nights in advance (a bad idea, it seemed then) and felt okay about skipping out early and calling the 165 rupees an asshole tax. But we woke up and decided to see what we came for (the Islamic architecture) and just get off the street before dark. It was a good decision. In fact, that would be an understatement. Bijapur (pictured above left) during daylight hours was like another city, full of friendly hellos and warm smiles and genial curiosity as to our provenance and how we are finding their beloved India. Children ran up to us on the street with open amazement, shouting Hello! like it's their mother's name, and older kids practiced their few nice-to-meet-you-what-is-your-good-name English phrases. We said "America" more times that day than I ever had in my life, as everyone was wondering where the foreigners had come from, so far off the tourist trail. Parents handed us their babies so we could pose for photographs, and families asked to snap our picture to show to their loved ones back home. It was a bit like being a movie star, but for our utter anonymity***.

That curiosity and the warm welcomes given us by the locals extended to our next stop, Badami (pictured above right), where we were less of a novelty. Even so, changing buses in Bagalkot en route I was swarmed by fifty or more boys and girls up to 17 or 18 years old while waiting for D to find a ladies' room. I introduced myself to one kid with the fuzzy beginnings of what will surely one day be a great Indian moustache, and he asked me to autograph his school notebook. He showed me the last page, where a traveller from Belgium had signed a simple message of greeting, and I did the same. He thanked me and the crowd was smiling and staring and nobody was saying anything. Overcome for a moment, I just started laughing. I must have looked like a madman, the sweaty white dude in the Indian threads and wraparound shades, laughing with his whole body until his eyes misted, because the kids started laughing in return. We fed on each other's amusement for what was probably only a handful of seconds, but it was a strange and foreign and beautiful exchange that I will remember for the rest of my days. D found me behind the throng of giggly onlookers and signed below my autograph for Fuzzstash and we waved goodbye and boarded our next bus, which didn't leave for another five minutes, and the kids outside were still standing and staring and whispering outside our window until the bus pulled out of the station.

So from Badami to Gokarna, back to the beach, where I'm sweating like a turkey at the end of November. We're staying 2 kilometers over a rocky headland from the main town beach, and it's like another world. Gokarna proper is a pilgrimage site, where Hindu devotees come to worship before one of the most famous shivalinga in all India, after cleansing themselves by shaving their heads and bathing in the sea. Kudle Beach, our home base for the moment, is populated almost exclusively by dreadlocked, painfully skinny stoners from Israel and England and Continental Europe, all refugees from the high-season tariffs up north in Goa. Om Beach (pictured), the next beach south from Kudle, is the new home of a luxe resort served by the only road south of town. This being a prime holiday spot during what is apparently a (just ending) holiday season for Indians, Om has been swarmed by roving bands of single men who wear matching "Goa Es Haven" shit-shop gear and stare at every inch of exposed white female flesh. There's even a sign on the steps leading down to Om politely requesting that Indians not photograph the tourists sunbathing, with or without their permission. It addresses the issue as a matter of upholding India's character in the eyes of foreign tourists, and it hasn't been entirely effective. The Indian Olympic Gawking Teams still cruise the beach in their matching getups until it's time to take a dip in their tighty-whiteys and sidle up alongside the women who have taken to the water to avoid their terrestrial prowling. Chalk it up to curiosity or horniness or just plain poor manners, but the stares are exponentially more unnerving than those from the kids in Bijapur and Bagalkot and Badami. The men have the vacant look of the terminally unlaid, and might as well be wearing t-shirts that read "I'd Rather Be Masturbating--Seriously, I Would. You Don't Even Know. Whew." It's almost enough to spoil the good vibe we got from all the eyes on us everywhere else, but I guess there's assholes wherever you hang your hat. Some folks just don't know how to behave themselves when there's company over. Oh well.

There it is, the nutshell reduction of the lives we've walked through in the past couple of weeks. Next stop, Bangalore. We leave after a couple more days on the beach for our first Couchsurfing experience in India. Looking forward to it, and to seeing what an IT boomtown in a developing nation looks like. More to follow.

*: We did avail ourselves of this last luxury, outfitting ourselves with custom-fitted travelling gear that wears better in the heat and humidity than our Western gear. Total expenditure for handmade clothes (2 men's shirts, 1 pair pants, 1 camise): $23.75
**: --for fuck's sake!--
***: Nobody here can pronounce the sounds in my name, so to prevent confusion and promote easier exchanges, I'm "Bob" in India. D bounces between "Jane" and "Frieda."

Nobody Rides For Free

It's been a couple of weeks since my last entry, and let me explain the delay: I've become a Beach Person. I've never been much for the sun and sand, as that usually means (in the US at least) a corresponding presence of shit shops and traffic and overpriced Mai Tais and hi-rise condominium complexes that if you lived in you'd be home now. There's also the fact that I burn salmonpink in bright sunshine, usually in strange patterns (hand-shaped patches on my sides and back, raccoon circles round the eyes) due to insufficient training in sunscreen application. It's not that I don't like sand--I dig on the desert, baby, and no mistake--or water--gimme a cascade and a camera and I'm good for the day. Just that the two in combination invite all kind of unattractive consumerist idiocy.

D has been a Beach Person since forever, so she was psyched to move south for a little while (time becomes quickly meaningless there, compressing and expanding like the tides), first in Arambol (pictured above) and then in Palolem, with bounces in between to break up the excruciating bus rides necessary to cover even the smallest distances (more on that later). We arrived in Arambol as the monsoon was hacking its last rattle against the palmy dunes, and after one overnight storm into our first full day we were blessed with an uninterrupted week of sunny sunshine. After an initial sizzle in near-equatorial rays, we commenced to darken like the natives (or not so much). And during that time spent swimming and relaxing and washing off the stench of Mumbai and my illness in Pune, when our only needs were met by walking the half a click up the beach for late breakfasts and lazy sunset dinners, I converted wholeheartedly to the cult of the Sun God. Count me in, brother, and save me a seat up front. Arambol was everything I've never been lucky enough to experience on any shore of any ocean; it was as peaceful and quiet as any place I've ever been. Shit, man, it was serene.

When was the last time you got to use that word? Been a pretty minute for this soul, I can assure you.

We went from that not-your-average walk on the beach in Goa's far north to another in the remote south in Palolem (pictured below).* The latter is a picture postcard, a tourism department brochure, only the prototypical sun-washed crescent of sand and swaying palm trees. The sun sets every night in a notch made by the northwest headland and the island you can walk to at low tide. We watched the entire village (fisherfolk all) pulling their nets from the cove on our last evening there, all chanting a chorus of heave-ho's local equivalent. Dogs and crows and fish eagles caught a whiff of the goings-on and hovered in their own ways, scoping out their choice of the fish that skipped across the surf in frantic attempts to escape the nets and the baskets and the eventual tandoor ovens. Made hungry by the spectacle, we went out for a seafood dinner and dined heartily on the afternoon's catch for something like $12, a real splurge considering the cost of things here and our budget for this excursion.

But I shall stop painting this particular picture, for if I were the one reading this account instead of the one writing it, I'd be ready to kick the author's ass up the block and around the corner. Don't be hatin', though. Let me tell you a story:

Our last morning in Palolem, we shouldered our packs and caught a lassi near the bus stand so we could wait in the shade for the bus that would take us the 4 km to Chaudi (Canacona). That bumpy road traversed, we waited another 30 minutes in the terminal for the bus to Margao, from whence our train to Hampi (east, in neighboring Karnataka, where I am writing this missive) would leave the next morning. Margao's bus and train stations are the clearing houses for southern Goa, and the city itself is not worth telling you it's not worth writing about. We had planned to make it in time to catch a movie and an early bedtime, but the Fates were against us.

So yeah: we're waiting in Chaudi like 30 minutes and milling in a shuffling queue for the eventual bumrush that is boarding buses here, and the bus pulls in--the same bus, we realize, that we rode to get to Palolem a few days prior. That trip was worthy of mention for being the closest I've been to physical carsickness since I was a wee tyke puking in the backseat of the family station wagon. But I digress... We're at a disadvantage for the boarding scrum because of our backpacks and wind up considering ourselves lucky to occupy the "Ladies Only" seats at the front of the bus. Being a Southern gentleman this wasn't my choice of seats, but did I mention the hellish ride that we had on the way in? Besides, there's a sign painted in the same color as the "Ladies Only" that says the bus will only carry "11 Standing," and I'd heed any fool estimating at eleven baker's dozens the number of standing riders on any one bus plying the backroads of Goa.

Anyway, we're in the reserved seats and feeling lucky when I start to wonder why the bus isn't pulling out. Worse yet, the driver and his whistle boy are beside the truck banging on what might be the engine or the tire or (for all we know) the team of 96 squirrels whose combined legpower fuels each bus over here. They look perplexed (the driver & co., not the squirrels) and they're wiping off what must have been a vital piece of bus at some point, and they're drawing a crowd. Some of the men in attendance wear the khaki uniform of bus employees, some are in street clothes, curious passengers who have gotten down to see what's the hubbub. There's intense conversation outside our window and the minutes pass and they're all smiling and laughing that futile laugh that says in any language "We're not going anywhere soon, boys" and we're still on board, sweating our respective tits off because we're not gonna give up these seats, goddammit. Eventually we've been on for maybe 30 minutes, because the next bus to Margao has rolled in heavy and the rest of our fellow passengers are cramming into its remaining available pockets of breathable air. Having none of such foolishness, we get down and opt to wait for the next ride.

For those of you keeping count, that will have been 90 minutes or so waiting to get on a bus that runs our route every half hour for a two-hour trip. It's now high noon and heating up, and we decide that D will carry on our daypack when we board the next bus and I'll wait behind to stow the heavy packs and hopefully find a seat saved for me whenever I can board. The bus finally rolls in and the plan works and we're on the winding mountain road leading north.

But not for long--oho! Not for long. Because not two minutes after noting the proximity of the passing traffic on our starboard side, our bus winds up at the rear end of a traffic stoppage stretching for half a mile up the backside of the mountains. Opting not to wait it out, our driver decides to turn around with a busload of the travellers from the other side of the jam and head back to Chaudi. We persevere, our refund secured and our packs re-shouldered, and walk down the line of stopped cars and trucks and buses to try to do the same as the marooned pilgrims now riding our bus. Down we go, and the situation resolves itself into a degree of clarity. Here's what happened: gasoline truck marked "INFLAMMABLE" in about five languages on its side has lost a squeeze play with the dump truck that tried, inconveniently, to cross a bridge too narrow for the both of them. The driver's side of the gas truck is peeled back like the ragged rind of an orange. No sign of either driver, but there's an Indian crowd around the accident just milling about and collectively biding time, while we're wondering what and where and how to get there. I see gas trucks in accidents and tend to hightail it the other direction, but the calm blanketing the scene was enough to make me chill even in the heat of the day. There was an Italian couple in front of us riding a motorscooter and trying to convince the locals to help them lift it (there wasn't room on the bridge to drive around the wreck) up on the guardrail to walk/roll it past the collision. We watch this scene with a degree of incredulity--hell, everybody's watching with a smile or other expression asking Will they make it?

Yeah, they make it the length of the bridge and bring the scooter down and ride off, and we follow the crowd past the wreck and eventually find a bus heading back to Margao. Easy-peasy, right?

Except that our new driver is apparently pissed at the refund of half his take for the interrupted trip, and he's tearing down the road like a man possessed. I've been accused of driving recklessly from time to time, I love a fast drive on a winding road, but I have seriously never been so scared in a motor vehicle. The bus was tilting around the corners an easy thirty degrees, and even the other native passengers were looking around like WHAT the FUCK?! We've got an hour or so left on this bus and the driver's moving like his next fix is too many miles down the road, and I'm envisioning scenes of carnage and wondering how many Indians I can lift when the time comes and I have the David Banner/Incredible Hulk moment. Even with the whistle boy collecting the fare like it's another day at the office, my adrenaline is still ratcheted way past F and hovering well in the red. I'm watching towns pass in successive blinks of the eye and mentally drawing a map of the road to Margao and trying to place these towns on it, telling myself it's okay, there's only maybe thirty minutes to go, twenty, ten. Then there's Margao and one last hellbent turn around a flyover into town and we get down and brush ourselves off and hide our piss stains and move on with the day as the sun sets, albeit on shaky legs and aching knuckles.

So let this go to show you, kids: Even a day at the beach isn't necessarily a day at the beach. It's hard work kicking this far back, but it's a good gig if you can get it. The punchline? 60-odd kilometers from Palolem to Margao, and this was our day. Until next time.

*: Of the two days we spent in Calangute and Baga breaking up the journey, let me only say that the food was good and we got a nice room at a cut rate. Those two destinations, huge on the package-tour circuit and just now coming into season, are hellholes on a scale rivaled by your Myrtle Beaches and Panama Cities. Yick.

Don't Think About Pink Elephants

Wow. India. Yeah. It's so...um...Indian here. Where to begin, where to begin...

So I've been dreading writing this entry. I've felt like a duck in a dishwasher over the entire issue. These last ten days have seemed like a month or more, there's been so much new information to assimilate and interpret. I could start with a standby, tell you about the weather: it's fucking hot. Like India hot. Hot and wet. And writing about the weather might lead me to relate how two Americans travelling on a shoestring are smelling these days, how stewing in the heat and sweating out the local cuisine have let us incorporate into our personal aromas the cardomom, the curry, the cumin, the what-have-you that define the food here. And writing about how we smell, I could tell you how everything else we've smelled thus far has been tinged with exhaust fumes. A guy can't write about a billion people without writing about the resultant traffic, the ancient Premier taxis and autorickshaws and motorbikes moving in orchestral anarchy, a postmodern symphony in CO major for millions of two-stroke engines. Or that, trying to beat the crush of vehicular traffic on the crazyhouse streets, you can get crushed (literally, as people do every year) trying to board Mumbai's suburban rail (official motto: "There's always room for one more!").

Hell, maybe I'll just write a full paragraph about what it's like to discover your own asshole at the age of 29. Such are the joys of a land without toilet paper, after all. Until two weeks ago, my anus was kind of like Uranus: the evidence said it's out there, but I ain't had to think about it on the day-to-day. But when it comes to brass tacks, a real man dives in and does what's necessary. And uses hand sanitizer afterward. After all, you'll never see anything in this world if you're not prepared to deal with a little shit. Better your own than anyone else's.

So yeah. Boundaries have been pushed, horizons broadened. I'm writing this entry from Pune, our first stop after Mumbai, and in a few hours we board a bus for the sunny beaches of Goa. The festival honoring Ganesh, the elephant-headed son of Shiva and Parvati, ended last night (or this morning, depending upon your vantage point), and with it goes the incessant banging of drums and cymbals over endless shouts of "Ganapati bappa...morya!" For the unititiated, that loosely translates as "Elephant-headed son of Shiva and Parvati bappa...morya!" No matter what you've heard, enlightenment is thin on the ground over here. I'm as in the dark about the Hindu traditions we've wandered into as I am about the game of cricket. Put the two together, as happened Monday night when India beat Pakistan to win the Twenty20 tournament in South Africa (thanks to Ganesh's intervention, they say), and I'm utterly fucking clueless.

Luckily, though, I got some good advice on our third day here. Invited to a friend's family's place for lunch, we were lucky enough to participate in a prayer chant honoring Ganesh. It was an honor and a privilege, not to mention a complete surprise. It turns out Big G loves the sound of clanging metal, so while all the (Hindu) adults chant, the kids (and us godless white folk) get to bang on handchimes and ring bells. So that we weren't bashing them aimlessly, A's cousin N shared these sage words, words that I decided will be my personal mantra while on this journey:

"Catch the rhythm, then play accordingly."

Indeed. Here's to that.

Farewell and Welcome

I'll make this brief, as I'm catching a flight in a few short hours. So I've been silent lo these many months. Let it be known: there was good reason. Nay, reasons. Ain't much to write about when you're slaving away for the Man fifty-plus hours a week, and not much to do but slave thusly for the man when you're saving for a year-long jaunt through South Asia. D. and I have been hatching this plan for months now, reading and planning and stashing our rupees in the metaphorical mattress. Our tongues have been tied by dizzying foreign names, our imaginations stoked by pictures and dreams and stories and such. And now the day is upon us. Whoa. Wow. Whoosh. Bags packed eyes open facing east. We'll be landing in Bombay on Friday. One-way tickets and no reservations, nothing in stone. Moving fast and lightish, going where the day takes us. Along the way I'll be posting from the road, letting everyone know what we're getting into on the other side of the world.

So this blog is now a travel blog. About time. Too long too stagnant. Time for some fresh air and new ideas, and you'll notice the first at the top of the page. Until we return, welcome to Naked Baby Asian Mice. Many happy returns. Namaste.