"A guy walks into a bar..."

...but not for a beer. He's looking for a piece of pie. It's been a long night, he's had enough beer for the week, and all he wants is a good piece of pie. There's a sandwichboard outside the establishment listing the edible fare, and at the bottom of the blackboard is a crude triangular drawing of a slice of steaming pie, chalk squiggles off the top denoting the steam from chalk hashes advertising a latticed crust. He sits down at a table in the dark, brickwalled room, waiting for the lone waitress in the joint to register his presence. There is one other customer at the only other table, a swarthy, bearded man in a filthy brown caftan and torn cutoffs, hunched over the beer he's nursing in a solitary corner across the empty room. After a minute or two of Tom Waits singing of a bad night in Copenhagen, the jukebox clicks and shuffles to the next record. Only then does the waitress open her eyes, revived from her reverie. She extinguishes her cigarette, burnt to the filter and no longer smoking, and walks our boy's way.

"One slice of pie, please."

"What kindja want? We got bloobry, strawbry, apple and chess."

"Blueberry, please. Thanks."

The waitress registers his order without expression, turns on her flat heel, heads to the kitchen from whence comes the violent sound of shouting in languages known to no natives of the region. She returns a moment later, one male voice still grumbling in the kitchen, one slice of steaming blueberry pie on a cracked plate held between her nicotine-stained fingers. She places it in front of our boy and he closes his eyes, fork in hand, savoring for a brief moment the tang of steaming berry coming from his plate, the homey smell of fresh crust made with lard, the welcome, oppressive smolder of the sugar burnt atop the bluechecked lattice.

When our boy opens his eyes, the swarthy man has left his beer across the room and is sitting across the table, an appraising look on his face. "So you've come for the pie, y'have." Our boy doesn't know if this is a question or the end result of the appraising look on the man's face. He nods assent, but before he can reply in the affirmative the swarthy man cuts him off: "They've a good bloobry pie here, lad, but there's far better where I've been."

The smells of pie have colonized our boy's stomach by this point, encouraging the rebel glands at the core of his being to begin digesting naked aroma in anticipation of the real thing. Still he waits, intrigued by the stranger across his table. "And where is this better pie," he asks.

"Not just pie, lad. Bloobry pie, mind. And it's a far way from here, a far way and a dangerous journey." There is a pause, another appraising glare, and only after a disconcerting stare directly into our boy's eyes does the swarthy man continue. "But you don't look the sort who cares for a better pie. Nah," he says with a squint, "you've the look of a dilettante about yeh."

Vaguely offended, still hungry, our boy ignores his fast-cooling pie and bites instead at the line offered him. "I don't know what I've the look of, sir, but I enjoy a slice of blueberry pie as much as the next guy."

The wiresparks from a tram passing outside light the swarthy man's face with a flicker of yellow-white light that delineates a host of scars about his eyes, one milky, dead, the other glistening with beer or intent. "That may be, son, but do you love a slice of bloobry pie more than the next man, or more than the next hundred, thousand, million souls who've gone in search of it? And failed?" A thunderclap provides punctuation for the stranger's next words, "And died?"

Just as curiousity can lead a man to try any sort of offal on a menu, so can it lead a man to forget the beautiful food in front of him as he eyes the scarred stranger who only now breaks into a smile, showing two pink rows of gum where his teeth once lived, upon a time, long ago. "Yeah," says our boy. "I love blueberry pie. Where should I go that's not this heap?"

"Well, lad, allow me to tell you..."

Forty minutes later our boy emerges back into the sodium glare of the streetlamps, raises his collar against the cold, stuffs his hands in his empty coat pockets, looks both ways up and down the empty cobbled street, and begins walking east. In the bar, at his table, a swarthy, half-blind stranger cackles over a cold slice of blueberry pie, taking another bite and laughing open-mouthed, his head thrown back, his naked gums painted purple with fruit.

Two days later our boy is aboard a cargo plane, in the hold, hanging onto the buckle at the end of a canvas strap and trying desperately not to vomit. His face white with exertion and green with the effects of the storm raging outside at 30,000 feet, he calms himself with the image of perfect serenity that is the Perfect Slice Of Blueberry Pie. Suddenly the pilot, parachute already on his back, lurches out of the cockpit into the juddering fuselage, shouts an inaudible farewell and opens the hatch leading outside, jumping into the blackness. Every piece of paper, every hair on our boy's head, indeed the very legs on which he stands, rush toward the open door. The engines whine and fail, the deafening suck of the vacuum wrapping our boy in its velvety omnipresence as the plane begins its nosedive, falling from the sky just as quickly as one would expect of an overloaded cargo plane, but with the silent grace--when viewed from a distance--of a ski jumper returning to earth along his ballistic path.

Swimming clear of the flaming, sizzling wreckage, having miraculously survived, our boy paddles the entire night, treading water, thrashing against the bumping, nibbling jaws of unseen fish stirred from the deep by the crashing plane. As dawn breaks redhot and orangebright over the horizon, he spies the twin smokestacks of an ocean liner puffing closer into view, until the entire horizon is that ship and the men a hundred feet above him are shouting excitedly and pointing in his direction. He blacks out finally, exhausted, as he is pulled to the deck, closing his eyes against the blinding sunlight reflected off his life preserver, whiter than white.

He comes to hours? days? weeks? later to the sound of a klaxon blaring in his tiny metal room. By the only light in the room, a flashing red strobe, he clambers into his pants and through the small metal door, where a stream of small, brown sailors is rushing past him in one direction. He falls in at the end of this line as he feels the boat list to port, finding a new sense of purpose in his legs after he peels himself off the whitewashed wall of the narrow hallway. Arriving on deck, he sees the entire bow engulfed in flames, a company of the small brown sailors attempting to combat the blaze before it reaches the barrels of fuel oil stored just meters away. He is blown clear of the deck when the barrels go off, landing far enough away to watch the boat quickly sinking beneath the midocean swells, the flames onboard extinguished by the onrushing seawater. Finding a man-sized slab of buoyant wreckage nearby, he crawls aboard and promptly returns to the nothingness he had inhabited until only minutes earlier.

Morning. Sand. Sand and ocean. One way our boy looks there's nothing but blue, blue sea. The other, nothing but fiery sand melting into the horizon in great ripples of heat. He thinks for a moment that he might be standing square on the border of heaven and hell, until he notices the bright sky overhead, dotted with birds of prey circling against the sun. Squinting once more toward the horizon, he sees the faint, shimmering outline of a mountain in the far distance. This must be it, he tells himself. And even if it's not, it's somewhere else and I'm still here... He starts to walk inland.

He finds shelter where he can: in the scrawny shadow of a twisted, dead tree; behind a single, house-sized boulder that seems more lost, in all that sand, than he is. Days pass and he finds himself on a vast, dry mudflat, the ground cracked as if it were made of paving stones. The heat is taking its toll. His lips are as parched and cracked as his surroundings, but the mountain is closer than it was yesterday, closer still than the day before, a wavy line of green hills standing between him and salvation. At the end of the next day, delirious with heatstroke, he imagines he's stepping from the cracked flat into a field of waist-high grass. This is it, he tells himself, but hell was back there, so it could be worse... He sinks to slumber in the tall grass, the sky swirling to black overhead.

He awakens to rain pouring down, flattening the grass, wetting his lips and replenishing his spirits. Turning his face to the sky, he opens his mouth and laughs between choking gurgles of pure, fresh rain. Drenched but happy, he charges off at the mountain before him at full speed, guided by the occasional crack of lightning.

Near 2000 meters, the rain turns to snow. The day had broken hours before, but it brought only grey skies, no sun. Advancing upward against the puffy flakes, our boy continues climbing--3000, 4000, 5000--over rocks and crevasses, through snowfield and up jagged ice walls, his destination finally in reach after such a journey, after so many scrapes with death. His feet numb, his teeth chattering, barefoot and half-naked, he stumbles to the threshold of the hut the old stranger had told him about so many weeks ago. Opening the door, he is preceded by a kamikaze windburst of snow rushing toward its death inside the cozy, warm room. A coal fire rages against the cold outside. The wind howls, inflating and deflating the greased-hide windows set into small frames high in the walls. A small, hunched figure steps out from the kitchen, trailing steam and the most inviting aromas our boy has ever experienced. He has a start as he recognizes something in her face, in the way the deep lines in her face converge to highlight one dead, milky eye. But it passes when she smiles, smiles with her whole browned face, the sweetest, only smile he's seen in how long?

"Whatchoo wan'?" she asks our boy, laying her stout, wrinkled hand on his and patting, patting.

"I've t-traveled a long way, ma'am, on the word of a f-friend who told me I might find the best b-blueberry pie in the world right here." He pauses, waiting to see if his words register. "Do you have b-blueberry pie?"

The woman's face maintains its beatific smile as she informs him, "No bloobry. Only goat blood. You wan'?"

"Well," our boy responds. "In that case, just a coffee."

Have Gun, Will Travel.

I teach the truth to the youth. I say 'Hey youth! Here's the truth:
Better start wearin' bulletproof.' --Ol' Dirty Bastard (RIP)

PART ONE: Yojimbo

Olympos is not a city, not a town, barely a speck on the map, just a bunch of Greek ruins on a pebbly beach. The bus stop is at the top of the mountain road seven clicks up from the valley floor, and you gotta wait for the shuttle van unless you want to hoof it all that way lugging your gear. Once the road flattens out at sea level you drive past dozens of treehouse compounds, guesthouses where the owners, once upon a time, exploited a loophole in the national parks laws that "allowed" them to build structures as long as they weren't anchored directly to terra firma. We piled out of the shuttle and into the closest and busiest of these establishments, already rocking on a Saturday afternoon with a truckload of university students augmenting the sparse traffic before the season here really gets underway. Scoring a room and a few drinks, we ate dinner and talked until late with a couple of professors from the fisheries department at a university in nearby Antalya and bedded down blessedly away from the noise still coming from the party out front.

The next morning was an early rise, the ever-present call to prayer replaced by the cries of the camp's resident peacock and a dozen crowing roosters and barking dogs rolling their respective calls off the high granite canyon walls. We grabbed breakfast and then I lay down for some more shut-eye while D read on the balcony. I rolled over around eleven to shouting from the front and D telling me there was some kind of kerfuffle afoot, that the workmen from the rooming blocks under construction were heading out with 2x4's and lengths of chain, that she was going to check it out. I said "Great, let me know who wins," assuming the uni students were still pissed-up and brawling over who got who's girl the night before. I rolled back over and closed my eyes.

The first gunshot came two minutes later, as D's footsteps clanged back up the metal stairs leading to our room. She opened the door, said "I think somebody's shooting," and stood dumbfounded in the middle of the room, the door unlocked behind her. I finished throwing on my shorts, told her to sit behind the big wooden dresser, locked the door and ran to the window to see what was going on. By this point there had been perhaps four shots spaced irregularly, and with the rocks all around us it was impossible to tell where they were coming from. There were people milling along the walkway leading from the front bar/dining area directly to our building, one guy with a shirt tied around his upper arm, blood dripping from his fingers onto the flagstone path, one girl sobbing hysterically and being led by the shoulders toward the back of the compound. All at once everybody scattered and I could see a man across the rocky riverbed shoulder his weapon, look down the barrel, and fire right at me.

We both felt the concussion of the shot and couldn't tell if our building had been hit, couldn't tell who this guy was aiming for, didn't know what was happening and had no way of finding out. I joined D behind the dresser, crawling on my knees after making sure I had locked the door. At that point we were both in shock, possible scenarios running through our heads. Security footage from Columbine played back before my eyes, dark figures stalking hallways on grainy quarter-inch tape. D and I sat in silence, waiting for the flurry of shots from a different weapon to tell us this siege was over. It never came. The next several shots clarified our situation, that this guy was still working and we needed to get into a room with no windows. "Get in the fucking bathroom," I said to D, "and lock the door." She complied hesitantly, in shock same as myself, and I sat there for a moment, terrified, thinking the most American thought I've had in months:

Why doesn't anyone else here have a gun?

Time passed, don't know how much. About ten shots had been fired, and maybe a minute had passed since the last one before I thought it was safe to peek an eye around the drapes and scout the scene. There was no crazed gunman this time, only the first few people coming out of their hiding places and wandering slowly, cautiously toward the front of the complex. More time passed without a shot, and D came out of the bathroom to join me at the window, kneeling on the spare bed, with two inches or more of wooden paneling between us any any further volleys. The reception girls were running back and forth, with their identical black bobs and blue jeans, tears streaking their heavy makeup. After a moment's silent consensus, we opened the door to look over the balcony, both of us crouching and the door open behind us. As one of the reception girls ran past again, I asked her what was happening. "Nothing nothing--stay in your room," she replied, and then I knew I was going downstairs. I grabbed my camera and a shirt and we slowly marched down the stairs, looking around us for signs of trouble until we joined the pack in front of the main office off the dining area. We saw U, the German tour organizer we'd spoken with the previous afternoon, and she gave us the skinny:

PART TWO: Rashomon

Apparently the next treehouses down the way are owned by relatives of the family that owns the joint where we were staying, and every so often they make like Hatfields and McCoys. The McCoys next door were riled by the full house at our place and things got tetchy between sets of cousins. Punches were thrown, car windows were broken, and eventually some poor dumb crazy son of a bitch picked up his pappy's shotgun and came after Old Man Hatfield. Got him in the shoulder with a load of birdshot, then started working his way down the riverbed, indiscriminately shooting up the buildings, scattering the staff and patrons and generally scaring the piss out of all of us. The shot I saw him take put out the window at reception and lodged in the wooden door, which was open enough to block the direct line between the barrel of his shotgun and our room. He was arrested without incident by the Jandarma who arrived on the scene with bigger guns. Four people were wounded, none killed. Everybody got lucky.

As the story was repeated five or six times for the benefit of late arrivals to the mayhem now coming back from the beach, a little Hatfield girl walked among us with a tray of tiny plastic cups full of cool water. I drank mine in a gulp and watched her ponytail bob through the gathering crowd, and I suddenly felt relief surge up from my feet like hot wind up a subway grate. We were safe, people were starting to crack jokes, and the line at check-out was getting longer. Reasoning that we were never safer than we would be that night, we stayed on and joked about a survivor's discount. Then we hit the beach, soaked up some sun, intermittently muttering "goddamn!" and rehashing the story for each other's benefit, the telling getting easier with each iteration but no less surreal.

That night at dinner we shared our table with P, an Englishman who had arrived in Turkey from Syria and Egypt. He was witness to the recent bread riots in the latter and figured Olympos would be the last place he'd be in danger, but he was standing up front when the gunman next door opened for business. Like D, he had gone out to check the initial fisticuffs, a very human reaction that D likened--only half-jokingly--to that of the dodo bird.* We talked for a while, comparing our versions of events and trying to synthesize a chronology and a coherent whole from all the stories we'd heard. The three of us agreed that the first shot takes you by surprise. You stand there thinking Nawwww... By the second you know it's gunfire and every moment really does stretch to an infinity, only to shrink in recollection as your reactions exist out of time, out of any sense of objective truth. What you're left with are pieces of a whole that, when played again before the mind's eye at 24 frames per second, tell an incomplete story and finish in five.

In the end nobody could agree on how many shots were fired: ten? twelve? twenty? By the time I went back for another bowl of salad the glazers were already at work repairing the hash made of the windows fronting the riverbed road. By morning you'd have to know where to look for the pockmarks in the wooden buildings to tell the place had been shot up. Even the blood on the stone path had dried to an unremarkable cinnamon brown as a new wave of tourists filed in from the shuttle we took back to the road, back to civilization, leaving the Wild West Show in the rising grey dust but taking its telling with us. One story, many versions, all of them true. Peace.



*: The dodo became extinct because of its misguided impulse to run toward the sound of another dodo in distress. Pin one down, let 'er howl, and the rest come running to be exterminated at your leisure. Delicious (while supplies last).

What Do Backpackers Do All Day?

William Sutcliffe posed this question in his comic novel Are You Experienced?, a singularly uncharitable, snarky, and (in the end, dammit) uplifting tale of a callow English youth embarking on a three month odyssey of India. He goes because he wants to get into his best friend's girlfriend's pants, which is, I suppose, more than enough reason to suffer through the pains of subcontinental travel. The answer, to paraphrase, is "You know, kind of sit around drinking, talking, smoking." Of course he learns something about himself and his fellow man, but the sentiment is an honest assessment of most days on the road for the budget traveler.

But we also read. A lot. I just finished Bill Bryson's Made In America, in which he discourses on the rambling route American English has taken over the last five hundred years. It's a great read for a lot of reasons, not least among them the following gem that answers (in part) some questions raised by the intro to the last post in these pages. To wit:

A not unreasonable question is how a native American bird came to be named for a country four thousand miles away. The answer is that when turkeys first appeared in England, some eighty years before the Mayflower set sail, they were mistakenly supposed to have come from Turkey. They had in fact come from Spain, brought there from Mexico by Hernan Cortés's expedition of 1519. Many other European nations made a similar geographical error in naming the bird. The French thought they came from India and thus called them chickens 'd'Inde,' from which comes the modern French dindon. The Germans, Dutch, and Swedes were even more specifically inaccurate in their presumptions, tracing the bird to the Indian city of Calicut and thus gave it the respective names Kalekuttisch Hün, kalkoen and kalkon. By the 1620s, the turkey was so well known in Europe, and its provenance had so long been assumed to be the Near East, that the Pilgrims were astounded to find them in abundance in their new-found land.

Bryson doesn't comment on what turkeys are called here in Turkey, but clearly the hindi is further evidence of the geographical error made by the French, Germans, Dutch, and Swedes. In any case, they're delicious roasted or deep-fried and go well with American football and cranberry jelly, and that's the last I'll write of them. Promise.

So yeah: What do backpackers do all day? We improve ourselves, bitches. Recognize.

Aside from that, we gripe a lot about how we're priced out of certain areas of the Turkish Riviera by pasty, cankled oldsters in white linen capris (the dudes too) spending pounds and euros. The last few stops on our trek around the southwestern coasts of Turkey have shown us that even before the beginning of the tourist season (Anzac Day on 25 April) the local tour and travel agencies have moved their quotes for kayaking, sailing, and other such leisure activities as one might expect in a land edged by crystal blue water from the Turkish lira (YTL) to the aforementioned currencies, which all go a fair bit further than the same amount of dollars. We've spent the last two days in Kaş sitting in cafés, reading, sipping Turkish çay and walking through one of the most beautiful seaside towns I've ever come across. The mountains behind the town slope into the sea and are terraced up their first halves with vacation villas and hotels for the well-heeled Europeans who flock here in the summertime. It feels a bit like housesitting for a wealthy relative, as most of the hotels aren't open, the cafés are largely empty but for the backgammon-playing Turks who call Kaş home, and we have the run of the place...

...so long as we don't actually want to do anything.

Turkey is not India, as I mentioned last time. Our daily budget in India would just cover most of our accomodation options here, and then there's food and tea and beer and such to consider. We have found a number of affordable options for all the above here, however, as this town of 6000 doesn't eat all its meals at home. Not so in Pamukkale, where we spend two days last week walking past places offering döner kebabs at 7 YTL (normally 2-4, and the high side in İstanbul). Pamukkale is mostly served these days by day-trip tours from nearby cities to the magnificent calcium hot springs and the natural travertines (cascade pools) that flank the hundred-meter mountainside at the top of town. Faced with the daily influx of short-stay visitors who spend two weeks in Turkey without venturing ten meters on their own outside their air-conditioned buses, many of the locals have gotten ambitious in their pricing.

Hit 'em fast, hit 'em hard, and know you'll never see 'em again.

But we scored a good room at our asking price, and there were nooks hidden among the village's winding streets where you could find an honest meal at an honest price. There was one great little joint at the foot of town near our pension that sported a prominent rotisserie oven with whole chickens and sheep's heads rolling over the fire all day, each basting in the other's juices. The guy in charge whipped up a mean kokoreç (a hash of intestine and liver meat with peppers, onions, and garlic) for 1.25 YTL (almost exactly US$1) on half a loaf of crusty white bread. Alas, we didn't get to try the sheep's head, which apparently wound up in a similar hash of brain and cheek.

(Eyeballs optional, bring your own toothpicks.)

So, cheap room and food secured, we felt we could splurge our first night on a small bottle of rakı, the national aniseed liquor, which tastes a bit like Greek ouzo.* We took the hooch back to our place, sat at a table by the empty pool and browsed the new Lonely Planet Turkey, which goes into much more depth than our Europe on a Shoestring. After a short time and a drink or two we found ourselves talking with T&T, two Czech backpackers who came to Turkey for two months of mountain climbing, and A, a Moroccan kid who bought a stake in the pension last summer. Over glasses of local wine we introduced each other to games of risk and daring: we brought out the Jenga Junior set we bought in Ahmedabad, A taught us the burning cigarette/paper napkin/coin-in-the-wine-glass game, and T&T tried to teach us a Czech card game that played like Hearts and that nobody (save the Czechs) understood. By now we were in our cups, it was late, and the Kiwi mum staying downstairs came out to ask all of us very politely to please keep it down. We weren't aware that we were being loud, but apparently--as is true of all language barriers-- by shouting the rules for Czech card games you can overcome the lack of understanding caused by three different native tongues and a couple bottles of Pamukkale Red. Suddenly aware of the time, our collective state of inebriation, and the unacceptable possibility of retiring quietly to our chambers (the Czechs to their tent) for the sleep of the dead, A decided it was time for a defining moment:

"Why don't we take some more wine and climb the mountain?"

We thought that sounded positively brilliant.

Two further bottles stuffed into his waistband (even though it ain't thievin' if he owns the joint), A led our motley crew through the silent streets of Pamukkale, up through the town square to the public park at the base of the travertines. We tiptoed past the sleeping watchman and began the long slog through warm pools of glassy water, marveling at the starry clear night and the lights of Denizli twinkling in the distance. The half moon overhead lit the calcium pools, so white in daylight, a luminescent ice blue as we picked our way through the moonlit, watery dark to the top of the hill, where the ruins of Hierapolis loomed out of the darkness. A short climb further and we were atop a 2000-year-old amphitheater, in the nosebleeds, and A was cracking the wine. Electric footlights still lit the ancient stage below us, adorned by massive columns, statues, and sections of bas-relief marble, cordoned off by a ring of wooden security fencing from the accessible upper reaches of the theater. Warmed by the spring-fed pools we traversed on the way up and the wine, which tasted better and better, we all sat in awe of the ruins--remarkable in daylight, the night made them positively extraordinary, so white against the inky night above. Our conversation roamed and rambled along separate lubricated trains of thought until A hushed us abruptly and we turned to see two security guards, cigarettes burning, the reflective stripes on their uniforms digesting and spitting back the stage lights far below.

"Aw, snap!" thought I, or something similarly urbane. "It's da po-po!" Visions of Midnight Express flashed across my brainpan, of teary showers and burly men named Mustafa and breasts pressed against visiting-room windows, but A was cool. He spoke to the guards in his accented Turkish, they smiled and sat down to finish their smokes a respectful distance behind our party, and we continued drinking and talking under the white flag of truce, easily won.

After a few minutes, I started to wonder. These guys seemed cool enough, weren't asking us for tickets (which we did not possess), so my natural instinct was to see how far I could push our luck. Against the advice of AT&T, and over D's acquiescent shrug that said to the rest He's gonna do it regardless, just get ready to run, I walked over to the guards with a shiteater splitting my face and a very fine vintage enlivening my breath.

"Merhaba," I began, and that was the limit of my Turkish as I spun some thin bullshit about my wife over there, how it's our honeymoon and it'd be great if we could go down to the stage for just one minute. While I gesticulated semi-controlledly in her direction, D waved and smiled as AT&T cautiously observed the scene, corking the wine and preparing to make like trees, quick-like. "Bir minute, ji," I pleaded good-naturedly with the guards, using the Turkish for "one," some English in the middle, and calling them both "sir" in Hindi in case, you know, they spoke that.

So I've got one guard on my side, he's smiling as my unintelligible request draws to its conclusion, and I reflect his smile over to his buddy, who's a little more stone-faced about the proposed dereliction of duty. They confer for the briefest of seconds as I stand there, then a nod comes from Hard Sell and Good Cop holds up his hand, fingers splayed.

"Five minute," he tells me. "Beş, beş."

I thank them in their language, mine, and one or two others for good measure and assemble the gang, we saunter down the huge stone steps, eel through the security fencing, make our way onto the stage. The enormity of the structure became so much clearer from that vantage point; looking up in the direction of the guards to wave another thank you, I couldn't pick them out of the surrounding darkness above. Turning to the gang I set it down: "We've got five minutes down here, it's cooler than shit, and I say we make the most of it. Pick a favorite tune in your native tongue and belt it out for the cheap seats." T&T discuss for a moment before launching into a Czech mountain folksong in wavering duet. I follow suit, let roar my deepest, most operatic baritone rendition of "Camptown Races," which seems to be the only song I can remember on command these days (that and "Stairway to Heaven"--it's been too long since I had access to good music and god it hurts so bad). Paralytic with laughter, D opts out, but it seems A knows at least the "Doo dah, doo dah" from singalongs with his adopted American father, so he joins the tuneless fray.

Our Turkish Idol karaoke exhibition drawn to a merciful close, we set about exploring the stage and taking some quick pictures, including a group shot I set up and ran to join as the camera tilted at about 15 degrees before the shutter tripped, but we were all leaning a bit by that point anyway. A clucking sound from the darkness above summoned us off the stage and we bowed, dutifully clambered back up the stone decks, took last pulls of the wine, thanked the guards and rolled on out.

So I guess I've only explained what backpackers do all night, before they trip home with burning sides to the first round of rooster calls and the faintest whispers of sunlight in the east. I apologize. Maybe I'll fill in the other details some other time. Right now there's a good book**, a cup of tea, and some meat rotating on a spit somewhere that are as close to free as anything in this life. As a wise man*** once wrote: "We make our own fun. Everything else is just entertainment."

Peace.



*: The Turks enjoy their rakı with salty cheese, olives, and fish, much as the Greeks drink their ouzo. Known euphemistically as aslan sütu ("lion's milk"), rakı is clear in the bottle but becomes cloudy with the addition of water. It's a colloid like Sambuca, but not as thick and cloying. Incidentally, the "ı" in Turkish is pronounced "uh," whereas "i" is pronounced "ee". Hence "İstanbul" while "rakı" sounds more like what a Boston grandparent sits in than a North American mountain range.
**: Money, by Martin Amis.
***: David Mamet, in his film State and Main.

A Handy Guide to Asian Fowl

FUN FACTS ABOUT BIRDS:

1. The word for "turkey" in Turkish is hindi. There's no word in Hindi, but it'll give you dysentery anyway.

2. Storks communicate by clacking their beaks together like castanet players on the meth. They throw their heads back upside-down along their spines and rattle away, sometimes in unison with every stork for miles.

How do I know about storks, you might ask? We've got four couples outside our hostel window building nests perched atop the ruins of a Roman-era aqueduct. They're big birds, white bodies with black wingtips and vivid pink beaks and legs. These are the first storks I've ever seen, and they've come to Selçuk as part of their yearly migration to make their homes amid the crumbling columns of ancient Ephesus. And, yes, they look like they might be large enough to fly with babies in their beaks.

We've come to Selçuk as part of our own migration out of India and back to The World. That migration began with a 4 AM flight last week from Delhi to İstanbul, during which I realized that my final Indian meal had given me another beautiful case of dysentery. After one day of rest and five more exploring the nooks and crannies of a city of 16 million (Bombayesque but not as thickly settled) that straddles the border of Europe and Asia, we moved south to begin in earnest the Turkish leg of this world tour.

The people of Turkey have been the warmest, kindest, most welcoming folks we've met in some time. Our first meal in İstanbul was at a joint down the road from our hostel where we were welcomed with a "Hey, bro, you want kebap and beer?" T, our waiter and entertainer, explained that his command of American street slang came from working with the good soldiers of the US air base near his hometown in Turkey's southeast. He was celebrating his 22nd birthday and practicing his Spanish with us while we ate, showing us pictures of his family and telling us about his English "fiancee" who would be visiting him again soon. He even brought us steaming cups of apple tea (elma çay) and explained that they were "in the house."

Coming from a poor country where we scarcely had a single conversation that wasn't motivated by a sales pitch or a request for money, the little extras offered as appreciation for our patronage have been the most welcome evidence that we are in a different place, a different world. And maybe it's petty to count something like that as a plus for Turkey, or to hold the lack of free shit and "buybacks" against India. But since we've arrived there has been no gawking or scheming, no blatant, bald-faced lies, no deceit, no highway robbery. Nobody's told us our guesthouse has burned down, that his "brother's" hotel is the only alternative in the area and at five times the price. We're treated like people and not walking ATMs, and (goddamn this bourgeois tirade) it's been nice to let our guard down and relax, have a chat and a cup of tea, and not worry about what trap is being laid around the corner.

India was work, even in Goa. Turkey is easy. It's a nice change. The next few weeks we'll bounce around this country on Mercedes buses rolling over paved roads, making a loop and winding up back in İstanbul to stay with some new friends before moving on to Bulgaria, Romania, and the rest of southeast Europe. They might even have storks there, too. I'll keep you posted. Peace.

And I Feel Like A Disco Ball

A while back I got an email from T, an old friend from Tulane, in which he told me of his own Indian sojourn as a doctor with a humanitarian mission. He wrote of riding the Manali-Leh highway, the highest motorable road in the world, and of other experiences traveling India's northwest that will elude me until we make it back here in the proper season for such altitudes. His closing thoughts included some sage advice, ready for Poor Richard's Almanack:

"Never look down the hole of a north Indian shithouse...you'll never forget the dead dog on which you just dropped a watery load."

Whew, yeah. That's about right. Some days in India are very, very good. Some days are soupy shit on a dead dog, and no telling which one's you.

So T's words have been with me this week as we pack our things and depart this fine, strange country. As I write this, one day before our departure for places more Turkish, we have been in India for six months, two weeks, three days, and a 29th of February. We have logged at least a full fifty days in transit--probably even more, but I prefer not to think of them all at once. We have seen ruins thousands of years old and some dating from the last monsoon. There have been ups and downs and in-betweens too numerous to mention. And it's been a fucking blast.

But how does one sum up such an experience?

Our last morning in Arambol, D and I rose early for a final swim before the two overnights between us and Delhi. We strolled without speaking through the coconut grove separating Girkarwaddo from the beach, soaking in the salty air, heavy with three days of rain and clouds and a distinct feeling of finality. On the beach we walked south past the fishing boats to our favorite spot, where we saw from a distance a crowd gathered in the lapping surf. Thirty or forty people, Indians and gora, radiated around something lying on the sand. While we walked warily closer to the group, five men emerged from its center carrying the dripping greengrey body of an Indian boy maybe twenty years old, dressed for swimming in only his skivvies, lifeless as a sack of grain. They toted him out of the surf and laid him on the hard sand from the night's high tide, where a young traveler, his backpack still strapped on both shoulders, resumed performing CPR. Shocked, we stared at this scene as it played out over the following five minutes. Every couple series of compressions was followed by the men turning the boy on his side, a sickly white foam rolling out of his mouth, as the leader briskly rubbed his midsection to disgorge the fluid he had taken in. From our vantage point I could see two youths in their swimwear kneeling just behind the ring of people circling their friend, the knot of legs and bodies open on their side as if to let them watch. One rocked back and forth and craned his head to face the heavens, his mouth open in a wail that never found voice, before leaning over to punch divots in the hard sand with both fists. The other knelt stockstill, his face void of expression as he stared miles through the scene unfolding before him.

"Come on," I told D. "I don't need to watch some poor fuck die this morning." We walked on down the beach, turning our heads at intervals to check on the situation. While we swam at a short remove from the thinning scrum of people ten minutes or so later, the men again carried the boy, head lolling, fingers dragging in the sand, up the dune and into the coconut grove. This time they didn't stop for CPR. All urgency had evaporated from their movements and demeanors. I couldn't see the two other boys.

So we swam for a while longer as the beach returned to normal, the hawkers toting piles of vivid bedsheets on their heads, the Hello Coconut guy wheeling past on his bike, the couples ambling up from Mandrem for a bite on Glastonbury Street. As the unpromising clouds allowed fewer and fewer random shafts of light to hit the beach, we decided to call it quits, get cracking and packing, take care of a few last-minute details. My feet were in my sandals and I had already turned homeward when D asked, "Are those fins out there?" I spun back around and, sure enough, there were three dorsal fins breaking the water about 75 meters from shore: Dolphins porpoising north. I had heard this was the wrong season for dolphins, but they supposedly abound in the waters off north Goa. We looked at each other, each of us knowing we were going back in, and I kicked my shoes behind me and trotted off into the waves.

I swam out as fast as I could through the surf, bouncing above the swells to spot the fins and adjust my angle. One of them had trailed off southward, but the other two were still breaking the surface on a direct path perpendicular to my approach. Swimming further without seeing any sign of them, I was afraid I might have scared them off when one porpoised fifteen meters off my one o'clock, the other just after that, further off my eleven. They were close enough to watch their dark grey skin throw back the limited midmorning sunlight, dappling a brilliant silver and blue in concert with the glassy still water. I turned and D was smiling and pointing, nodding that Yes, she'd seen it, too. We treaded water for another ten minutes watching them recede, never getting any closer, until they were just shy of the headland at the north end of Arambol beach. Then we got out, dried off, scanned the water all the way back up the beach. Just in case.

So that's India. She'll throw you a dead guy and dolphins in the same morning, just to say Goodbye. Oh well. It's namaste, my dear, you intractable whore, you beautiful tease, adieu. We may meet again sometime. I'll be older, you'll stay the same age. Be well. Take care, and mind the children. Peace.

Everybody's Goan Crazy!

Love is in the air here in Goa.

There's a brace of baby chicks in the courtyard downstairs from our guesthouse. At the end of the day all the little downy ones are assembled into a wicker basket that seems, in the night, to cheep! of its own accord.

All the well-fed beach dogs of Arambol have hatched the puppies they were working on when we were here in September. A local fisherman down the beach takes his litter one by one into the surf, tosses them lovingly, paternally into the waves and splashes them as they swim back to dry land and their mother, who barks encouragingly from midway up the sand.

And the population of the town has changed from the Israeli dread-n-spliff scene it was in September to a crop of young mulleted Russian couples with very young, very blond toddlers. Everyone here seems to have their kids in tow, in fact, Russian or not. I spent days wondering what the twin-rutted trails in the sand could be, watched the coconut bicycles and the fishing boats going in and out for clues before recognizing stroller tracks for what they were.

But not everyone seems to have their children's safety in mind. There's this Spanish chick who was staying down the road from us with one youngster less blond than the Russian ones, who stared from the inside of a blind turn near the general store in Girkarwaddo as her child negotiated boarding her toy bike (with training wheels) in the middle of the road, on the other side of said blind turn from the vroom-ing scooter-and-Enfield traffic coming towards her. We watched a handful of separate scooters zig and zag to miss this kid in the two minutes between noticing the scene and passing, jaws agape, while Mami lazily instructed the child to put her feet on the pedals and push.

Later the same day there was a new pair of couples checking out rooms in our compound*, where there's a prominent open well at least forty feet deep with an unscreened top. D and I watched from our balcony as one of the couples, lost in haggling over room rates, didn't notice their kid stumbling over to the well to peer over its edge and see just how far down it went. The two feet of cement were just enough to keep the kid from seeing over the lip without climbing on the bricks, so of course he climbed up the bricks to have a better look. He was flat on his belly, legs dangling on the safe side and staring into the abyss when his parents noticed him, clucked him down from the ledge, never moving from their stance across the way. He reluctantly and with difficulty slid himself back to solid ground and toddled back to their side.

So maybe I've suffered from growing up in a litigious and overcautious society, one where Stranger Danger is taught to every kid old enough to talk and where that well would never be left uncapped--except in Texas and Pennsylvania, where they have the Cutest Baby Down A Well Pageants and young contestants vie for bragging rights and parental affection. Maybe I don't understand the degree of freedom you have to provide a child in order to, on the one hand, ensure its successful maturation without, on the other, allowing a weak and stupid child to pollute your name and gene pool.

But maybe these fucking parents are the crazy ones. Hear me out:

Goa has long been a haven for free thinkers and free lovers and those who like their holiday costs as close to free as their thinking and their loving. Since the dawn of time (or at least the 1960's) Goa has been the Indian destination of choice for those wishing to open their minds and expand their horizons and maybe smoke some dope and have naked dance parties on the beach during full moons and other, not-so-full moons.** Or broad daylight, depending on the season. Booze is cheap, hash is everywhere, and people generally wander the beach bronzing and swimming and occasionally passing out for a few hours under the shade of a fishing boat.

Along with the general laissez-faire attitude, there's a cottage industry here in Enlightenment, a broad term I'll use broadly in its capitalized italics. You can get your aura palpated, your chi scrubbed, your chakras opened, your asanas put all in a line. There are workshops for firewalking and kundalini yoga during successive hours in the same venue, and most nights you can join in the big-bamboo-stick-fitness-deal down the beach toward Mandrem (just past the last boat) and improve your flexibility while making yourself impervious to attack by other, less Enlightened souls wielding big bamboo sticks. Then, after a short skinny dip to cool off, you can stroll past every other hippie paying homage (in his/her own way) to the Sun God/dess and catch the fire twirlers when they're blazed enough to make their flowing skirts match their stone.*** Everywhere you go there are fliers posted by tourists looking to share their Enlightenment with you, sort the aforementioned chakras and such, scrub your chi and teach you the Extended Wallet Asana. Need a picture drawn?

This is from a flier touting the services and talents of one Emanuel Lev, whose 30-hour "ThetaHealing" workshop we missed by a blasted six weeks. Shit. Had we made it, we could "Come and experience what your soul already knows through a healing method that has already changed the lives of thousands of people throughout the world." Mr. Lev, you see, is a "Certified Instructor and Practitioner of the Basic DNA1&2 and Advanced ThetaHealing courses, and of the ThetaHealing Abundance and Manifestation workshop," whatsoever those might be. He "Conducts workshops in Israel and around the world [as a] Primal Feelings Therapy Instructor, Reiki Master, Therapist of Bio-Energy, Yoga, Tantra and other techniques... Married to Ruth and father of Zohar Lev." Usually the capital letters in one's credentials are enough for me to know he's qualified to lead my ThetaHealing, but it's nice to know that E's good people and a family man.

Since he kindly left his flier in the restaurant where I take my muesli-fruit-curd breakfasts, well within the line of sight from my favorite table, I will continue to share with you Mr. Lev's plans for total wellness and healing. To wit:

"The Basic ThetaHealing course lasts three days. During this time, from a place of unconditional love, kindness and absolute connection with the creator we will learn how to connect to Theta waves in our brain and to communicate with the power that creates reality. We will learn how to remember the deepest knowledge inside our souls and in the universe... [T]he process is so simple and takes place in an atmosphere of complete happiness and love. During the course we learn together how to open the intuitive centers of sight, hearing and feeling and how to awaken the dormant aspects of our DNA."

I'm sold, but for those of you out there who want more from your ThetaHealing dollar, there's a rundown of the key talking points: "Topics included in the course: easy reach to the theta brain wave, intuitive readings, connecting with the creator, working on belief systems, the seven plans of existence, spontaneous healing, activating your youth gene, working on our DNA to create changes on a genetic level..." (now wait for it, wait for it!) "...and much more..."

I just wish he'd capitalized "creator" in that first bit. His whole seminar seems a little too pagan for my tastes, now that I think about it. I'll go elsewhere to awaken the dormant aspects of my DNA, maybe get that prehensile tail I so envy in our monkey cousins. Or X-ray vision, so's I can get to palpating my own aura more intensively.

Goofing aside, everything's fun and games until someone misplaces her daughter. And now we come to the serious part of today's lecture.

A fifteen-year-old British girl named Scarlett was drugged, beaten, raped, and left in the surf last month in Anjuna, about twelve clicks down the shore from Arambol. Her body washed up the next day and the local cops chalked up the death to drowning. But how did such a young girl go missing after hours from a beach bar in one of the most trafficked towns in Goa? Scarlett was in the care of "a friend" after her mother, mom's boyfriend, and six younger children (!) went, in the words of the BBC report, "further afield." Two Goan men have been arrested and charged with drugging and raping Scarlett, but her mother claims to have no faith in the Goa police or their prospects for closing the case to her satisfaction. "The administration tried its best to hush up the death as a simple case of drowning," she bleats while assuring the world "I think I was probably naive and too trusting of the people around her that claimed to be her friends, but that was probably the worst thing I have done." [Emphasis mine.]

Mom's probably right. She didn't drop the kid down a well or let her be tire-tracked in two by a runaway Honda. That'd be irresponsible. No, she left her fifteen-year-old in the care of seasonal beach shack employees whose only responsibilities are to slowly walk legal intoxicants to tables and proffer (upon demand) all the illegal ones a kid's heart could desire. She let that flower grow and flourish only to leave her, in words almost too apt to write, in water over her head.

In other news, beach life is great. We wake in the morning for a papaya and a swim, then occasionally bounce down to Panaji to catch a flick at the local cineplex. We take care not to run over babies in the middle of the road, and we assiduously remove the bones from every bite of chicken we feed to Supdog. Our consciences--if not our ThetaWaves--are spotless, unsullied, and we're brown like li'l mixed-race babies. May the sunshine in your corners of the world be so bright. Peace.


*: I have given few recommendations in these pages, but let these be my first two: Arambol is the bomb, and God's Gift Guest House is the place to stay. It's a fifteen-minute walk south from Arambol central and Glastonbury Street along a beautiful beach strewn with traditional fishing boats and the occasional naked Russian. The proprietors, Baptiste and Baptiste's brother (whose name I can never remember and so will be known as G) welcomed our tired, sweaty white asses in September and opened up a room for us at an amazing rate. We stayed six days and would have stayed longer, but our feets was itchin'. So when we got down off the bus from Mapusa this time, we knew where we were heading. We'd called ahead to make sure they weren't booked and explained that we had stayed there at the end of the last monsoon and would love to repeat the scene. They said come on by, and when we walked down the path we were greeted with smiles of recognition and amazement that we'd made it back to their neck of the palm grove. A few lingering handshakes later and we'd secured a great room at a good price, considering the season, and we've been there since. We've even adopted one of their dogs, which we've named "Supdog" regardless of his actual appelation. We bring him bits of tandoori chicken dinners and haven't grown tired of saying "Supdog" each time we see him. He never answers "Not much, man, 'sup wit' you?" but he probably speaks Konkani. Whaddyado?
**: Because naked dance parties don't have laws, man.
***: Seriously. We watched the tail end of a spontaneous fire-twirling show the other night and the final performer set his lunghi on fire, took it off, and cast it aside into the surf without missing so much as a single twirl. I mock, but I got nothin' but love for that playa.

"It's OK. I'm With The Bandh."

This was supposed to be an entry about how funny it was to find a sandstone Kama Sutra ringing a Hindu temple* in a land that forbids even touching in public one's besmitted, beloved, or betrothed. Still funny to see a sandstone dude railing a sandstone horse** while his sandstone friend punches his sandstone bishop, watching and (could it be? really!) cheering him on. But now there's a real story to tell, not just a story about bestiality and how many handmaidens it takes to hold their mistress on her head so's she can get the business upside-down. Anyhoo:

We arrived in Darjeeling on Monday after a night train from Kolkata and a rick to the Sumo stand in Siliguri for a winding ride up the cloud-forest foothills of the Himalaya. We opted against the Toy Train, thinking it was actually our choice to take a shared Tata SUV instead of the more scenic, UNESCO World Heritage rail route. Didn't see a train for the whole length of the narrow-gauge rail, which abutted the road for much of the ride into town. Thought it might be early in the season, might be down for repairs, might just be a holiday for the railworkers. Not so, not so...

A long climb from the jeep stop in Darjeeling to Chowrasta, the main square at the top of town, gave us a room for the nights we planned to spend, one with a fireplace to ward off the wintry chill at 2500 meters in February. Walking the town, we found an overdue meal and Darjeeling tea and pastries and an aimless ramble about before the town's early closing time. That first night we stopped for momos in a Clubside Tibetan joint and ran into G, who stayed at the same hotel as us in Agra. He's not an easy dude to mistake, a 350-pound Washingtonian with a piratical gold hoop through his left ear and a thunderous voice that sounded very odd indeed supporting John McCain between slurps of thukpa. He starts the convo (politics aside) after introductions and recognition by asking us if we're going to Nepal, if we'd like his Lonely Planet. We say yes and we've got one, respectively, and he's surprised to hear we're still going.

"There's a general strike in Nepal through the elections next month," he tells us in his basso profundo. "The whole country's shut down."

This is news to us. We knew Nepal might be sketchy, knew that a walk in the woods might mean an extortion stop by the local Maoist insurgents, but 5000 Nepali rupees should have done the trick and the Maoists (gotta love 'em!) issue receipts and pose for pictures. Guns and red bandannas and all. We were okay with a hundred-dollar photo op with rebels and Kalashnikovs, but news of a strike entirely changed the complexion of our proposed visit.

In the West, a strike means your garbage stinks in the streets for a couple of weeks, that you walk to work instead of taking the subway, that the Golden Globes are canceled but the Oscars roll as promised. Not so over here, Jack. A general strike, known in these parts as a bandh, means that every shop in town--every restaurant, every provisions store, every travel agent, every internet joint, every everybody--is closed. It means buses, Sumos, taxis, and horsecarts are not allowed on the streets, and there are roadblocks to enforce such. It means a disruption of daily life, nominally voluntary but often enforced with pressure tactics that can mean violence for business owners and drivers and the like who disobey the bandh.

It means we weren't going to Nepal. Fuck a duck, spit in its ear. But it gets better:

G: "You know, the Nepalese in Darjeeling district have been in a limited strike since before I got here. The Toy Train's not running, the Himalayan Mountain Institute is closed, the Zoo is closed, et cetera, et cetera." He continued, but we had heard what we needed to hear.

Huh, we thought. So sooner back down the mountain, and still no Toy Train.

The next day we spent figuring out plans to replace Nepal in our itinerary. Should we bounce back to Kolkata and west through Varanasi, pick up some spots in north India we hadn't seen? Nah, we decided. The north has been more expensive, more of a hassle, and generally less inviting than the south. No Nepal meant we might as well get back into a neighborhood we enjoyed the first time through. Southside, beachside, Goa-side. A little digging online found us two cheap tickets leaving Kolkata and landing in Goa a mere five hours later--a trip across a subcontinent in less time that it's taken us to travel one hundred kilometers on surface roads. Amazing stuff, progress. Travel plans solidified, compromise reached that's amenable to both of us, we set off in search of a beer before dinner. Falling asleep that night to a spitting fire (wood wet from the hour-long hailstorm that afternoon), we figured we'd use our last two days in Darjeeling wisely, check out what sights we could, walk the town and its surrounds, visit a monastery or two, and enjoy the crisp mountain air.

Waking up Wednesday morning, it was cold and grey and misty like it had been the last two days. Kanchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world and a stone's throw (in Himalayan terms) from Darjeeling, was still invisible behind the ring of clouds that had enveloped the town since our arrival. So we scrubbed brushed dressed and D, looking down from our hotel room, pointed out that all the stores on the street seemed to still be shuttered at 10 AM. Oh well, we thought. Surely there's a restaurant open down the way. Downstairs, we see that it's not only the shitshops beneath our window, but every door on the Mall is locked. Oh well, we thought. It's early, maybe Wednesday's like Sunday here. Walking down the Mall, the prospect of an open restaurant gets less and less promising. The idea disappears from our minds entirely when we hear the chants coming up the hillside beneath the Planter's Club.

"We want Gorkhaland! We want Gorkhaland!"***

Looking down over the sidewalk's railing, we saw a long procession of locals marching uphill toward us, arms waving, signs unfurled, shovels and brooms and wheelbarrows being brandished and waved and pushed.

Guess what, kids? Limited strike went general that morning. We were the last suckers to find out.

Double-timing back up the hill to Chowrasta and our hotel ahead of the marchers, we wondered why nobody had mentioned anything about this inhospitable turn of events. Not a word from our hotel guys, no signs plastered to shopfronts, no mention of "Stock up on food today" when we left the general store on Tuesday with a disposable razor and a pack of batteries and the assumption we could shop for self-catering goods the next morning. Nothing. Arriving back at the hotel, one of the roomboys stood on the ramp to the main entrance with us, silently watching the parade of protesters snake its way past us to the top of Chowrasta.

"Many problem in Darjeeling," he informed us with an out-of-place smile. "Too many people angry."

Minds where our mouths would like to be, we asked the important question though we already knew the answer: "So this strike, no restaurant? No food? No eating?"

He just laughed like he didn't understand the question. Or he did, and simply didn't want to disappoint us by confirming our fears.

We managed to wrangle eggs and toast (and tea, natch) from the hotel's back supply while the head man assured us that the strike would only last the one day. Placated, we watched the chanting and shovel-waving and flag-flying on the square below our picture windows before the protest turned suddenly, unexpectedly janitorial. The assembled ring of marchers broke up into groups of five and six and methodically swept every inch of Chowrasta, from the statues to the benches, Fiesta to New Dish Chinese. Wheelbarrows followed shovels followed brooms and there was nary a stray paan masala pouch to be found afterwards. It was the oddest ending to any protest I've ever heard of:

"Hell no, we won't go!

"Without sweeping!

"Thoroughly!"

We spent the rest of the day shuttered in our room, watching the rain fall intermittently and napping through the afternoon. As darkness drew in around the mountain we walked between the five-star hotels at the top of the Mall in search of a restaurant that might be open--after all, there must be somebody on the hill spending dollars or euros and unable to leave on such short notice. The folks at the Windamere hooked us up with 600-roop-a-plate dinners with Western and Indian menus, and we were enjoying our steamed string beans and looking forward to the pear and ginger crumble when the English gent at the head of the room piped up, fork tinking on his wineglass.

"So sorry," he began, addressing his group of thirty or so package tourists dining with two ragged backpackers, "but it appears we will not be visiting Kalimpong as planned. As it stands, the police have granted us a permit to leave the city tomorrow afternoon, so our flights to Delhi will not be disrupted." A smattering of sighs and relieved chuckles. "Do try to understand that there is no getting around this inconvenience, that we are in the hands of a political situation and at the mercies of the local authorities. Does anyone have any questions about the new shed-jewel?"

As hands went up around the room and questions were asked and answered, D and I felt our stomachs drop and tighten around the swank food at the mention of "permit to leave." What was happening around us? We asked at our hotel and they informed us that the one-day strike had indeed been extended indefinitely, that the town would continue to be in lockdown except for pharmacies and the local (very British) boarding schools. So how do we get out of town? It's Wednesday night, we've got a flight from Kolkata on Saturday morning and that's thirteen hours by bus or train from Siliguri, which is four hours down a mountain studded with roadblocks like warts on a toad.

Our boy tells us there's another guest who's arranged a Sumo to make the Siliguri run under cover of darkness, he's leaving at 2 AM, he's got the whole jeep booked for himself at the cost of 2000 roops, roughly 50 dollars. For a moment we think we'll pack and run until he continues the story, that the jeep doesn't have permission from the political party that's arranged the bandh and that they're banking against getting stopped by its supporters, which will require a hefty additional baksheesh, or bribe, if they let them pass at all.

Sounds like just about the worst possible scenario, we think. Running lights-out in the inky Himalayan dark down 77 clicks of switchbacked, single-lane road, paved only in stretches, asphalt Band-Aids connecting a lacework of potholes and washouts. And without permission, to boot. We pass and spend a sleepless night wondering just how the shit we're gonna get out of Darjeeling.

Up early, we march down to the police station to ask how we go about securing a permit. Worst case, we're planning to throw ourselves on the mercy of the package-tour Brits staying at the Windamere, see if they can't smuggle us out on the roof of their permitted vehicles. Arriving at the old bus stand, site of the new cop stop, we see a rank of foreigners and Indians with suitcases and expectant faces, tourists awaiting transport out of the deepening political muck in the region. Speaking with the curt, distracted supervising officer, who greets me with "Any problem?" like I'd just asked him directions to the loo and returned in less time than it takes to piss, I find out that the assembled throng is waiting for a bus that will arrive at 9 AM. It's 9:20 and I ask if there's only one bus, if we've got time to get our backpacks and get back before the bus rolls, and he responds simply, "Hurry."

Cursing our lack of preparedness and thanking the gods for Indian Stretchable Time, we hustle back to Chowrasta, throw our bags together, and convince our boy at the hotel to take US twenties as more-than-sufficient payment for our stay (the bandh meant no ATMs, no moneychangers, no way for us to supplement the dwindling supply of rupees we hadn't been warned wouldn't be enough to get us through a strike). Booking it back down the hill and huffingpuffing in the thin mountain air, we arrive to see the same crowd, only bigger, waiting for the same bus. We drop our packs and find a modicum of relief from seeing the same faces as before eyeing us with the wolflike scorn one reserves for competitors at the food dish--"We might look like brothers, but motherfucker I will kill yo' ass if you're between me and that sliding door." We wait.

After thirty minutes or so, a Chevy SUV rolls to a stop just past our bags and a pack of kids speaking French barrels past us with their luggage, including an upright bass in a zippered nylon case. We wait on the situation's periphery, bags shouldered, jockeying for position with the others and watching a bunch of musicians with creative hair secure their instruments and luggage on the roofrack. Four guys, four girls, all speaking French and choosing seats, and then one of the girls says that the driver has told her there's room for two more. New arrival apparently, unaware that Indian private transport can fit a minimum of twenty schoolchildren or ten broad white Western asses. Without hesitation I hoist my bag up to Dreadlock on the roof and grab D's to do the same. The tying-down continues and we all pile in for the wait, watching flatbeds roll in through the police checkpoint with Gorkhalanders arriving for the day's protest (and window-washing?) who don't stop chanting even while they're being frisked.

After thirty minutes or so another dozen jeeps have pulled in behind us, each packing up with tourist-refugees and their belongings. Our procession assembled, a West Bengal police jeep pulls up in front of our lead car and it's Chello, let's go. Barely a click down the road our convoy pulls over for the police to top their tank, and one of the guys in the back of our ride points to the five peaks of Kanchenjunga over the right side of the road, so close you could scoop snowcones from its white tips. We tumble out of the vehicle, oohingahhing, all having arrived recently enough that this is our first glimpse of the mountain, awash in golden late-morning light and fading into mist where the sun hadn't yet ventured. Dreadlock points to another, more distant mountain, a triangle of white barely visible behind the floodlit Kanchenjunga, with a one-word question for our driver: "Everest?" Driver nods his assent and we stand there on the side of the road marveling at how close it seems, yet knowing how many miles and political movements lie in the gulf between.

Back on the road, our Quebecois jeepmates break out everything that's not an upright bass and serenade our group with American bluegrass on mandolin and two guitars. Turns out they've been traveling through southeast Asia busking for their morning chai with hopes of hitting Kathmandu and playing for the backpackers and expats in Thamel. One song, improvised and in French but for the refrain, earned a call-and-response from the whole car:

"We want Gorkhaland! We want Gorkhaland!"

"We want whis-key! We want whis-key!"

Repeat.

So down the mountain we sped, our police escort rotating in each hillside village, our driver laughing at D's comment that it was a "tag-team" operation the WB police were running. In one nameless encampment of a dozen homes and a few hundred demonstrators, our jeep was stopped and the cops ahead of us squealed to a halt and poured out the back of their transport, rifles leveled, lathis poised. Just in case. They let us pass, but there lurked a possibility of a repeat in every one of a dozen or more assembled citizenries around each successive roadblock.

The ride down was alternatingly tense and lighthearted, the protesters outside our windows running to the first extreme; our traveling band, the other. Four hours later we were a short distance from Siliguri and I breathed a sigh of relief seeing storefronts proudly displaying their Technicolor assortments of chips sodas sweets, suddenly aware that the eeriest thing about Darjeeling shutting down was the absence of the rainbow of goods for sale. Having traded that riot of color on every street for the monochrome of steel shutters and padlocks, the little tea town at the top of the hill seemed the least inviting place on earth. "Gorkhaland for Gorkhas," they say. They can have Gorkhaland. It was nice being back in India.

And just as quickly as we arrived "back in India" we left again for Goa, that parallel universe on the Arabian Sea. Writing these words, we've been on the beach in Arambol for a week and will stay here for the remainder of our time in India, barring a few days in Delhi before our flight to Istanbul. It's a brief respite from traveling every day, a chance to chill out away from the problems that plagued our last few stops, to unpack and collect ourselves, to enjoy each other's company. As D said in Darjeeling, "Fuck this shit. I'm goin' to Goa." Eloquent and succinct, it's our mantra of late. This stop is also an opportunity to catch up on the entries I've been meaning to write, stories I haven't yet shared about places not yet mentioned here. Later. Now it's back to the beach. Still a few hours before sunset, you know? Peace.



*: At a place called Khajuraho which, phonetically, sounds a lot like "Cause you're a ho."
**: Incidentally, this is exactly how they got Mr. Ed to talk.
***: The history of the Gorkha (and I defer to the local spelling in this piece instead of the British "Gurkha" or "Ghurka") independence movement is a long one. They've been fighting in Darjeeling district to have their own state carved from West Bengal for almost thirty years, and it was a violent battle for many of those. The beheadings and shootings have abated in the years since an understanding was reached between the Gorkha party chiefs and the Indian government, but the tensions are still high in the region and bandhs in WB number in the ballpark of 50 per annum. For a detailed BBC account of our little fiasco, click here. For more information and history that I can possibly provide, look online and follow links about Nepal's Maoist insurgency to further illuminate the shadowy intricacies of the region's politics. There's also a great book touching on the Gorkha statehood movement by Kiran Desai called The Inheritance of Loss which, coincidentally, D just finished and I'm now reading.

The Lightning Round

Finding internet joints in India is not difficult. It's no double-axel-triple-lutz, no Mormon whorehouse. It's finding a reliable connection in a land of unexplained power cuts that has proven to be the challenge. Here's to blogging from the developing world.

That being understood, I've an acre or two of ground to cover to get myself to this present day, and presently the sun's sinking slowly Stateside. So with an economy heretofore unknown in these pages, I will endeavor to play catch-up with the last three weeks of perpetual motion. Here goes:

From Diu and horrible illness to Ahmedabad for the Uttarayan Kite Festival. Met up with D's girl R, who's here with IndiCorps for a year working with a community center in one of the city's thekro (slums). D showed a remarkable facility with kites, cutting the strings of two competitors flying their paper birds from the surrounding corrugated rooftops. I needed help floating anything but swear words, which flowed freely each time my kite sank sewerward.

Took the train from Ahmedabad to Jodhpur, in Rajasthan. The old city's all pastel-blue block houses under the massive, imposing Mehrangarh Fort. Saw a great drumline parade on an amble back from the fort through the narrow lanes of the city before downing a makhania lassi, a local specialty that made me reconsider my disbelief of any god who'd lead a people to put saffron, butter, and yogurt in the same glass. The bomb.

From Jodhpur to Jaisalmer, about which the less said the better. Before we'd even arrived there were touts boarding the bus to extol the virtues of their "brother's" guesthouse in town. We'd heard horror stories about folks taking rooms at dirt cheap rates only to be kicked out in the wee hours for not booking a camel safari (the main racket in town) through their place of lodging. Our eventual home for 100 roops a night, The Peacock, was an oasis from the monkeyshit going down everywhere else. The fort was less impressive than Jodhpur's, but it had the dubious distinction of being the only centuries-old sandstone fortification I've walked through to have private bus schedules painted on its aged rock walls. Such was the tacky, tacky scene.

Six hours by bus to Bikaner, where we caught the local camel festival (above left). Rajasthani guys with the aforementioned bitchin' 'staches rode their mounts in from the dunes to compete in pageants showing off their camel-shaving and -festooning abilities. Some truly amazing work on both counts. Our last morning there we made the short bounce out to the Karni Mata Temple in Deshnok, where thousands of sacred rats have the run of the joint. We brought disposable socks for our circumambulations. It's considered auspicious to have a rat scurry over your feet (check check check in the first five minutes) or to spot the lone albino of the bunch, which is seriously good luck we won't be having. Alack.

Skipped Jaipur, Pushkar, Amber and Udaipur for the hassles said to await us there. We'd had it with Rajasthan, which is a cesspool of harrassment and extortion you have to spend your way above.

So Bikaner to Delhi, where we caught a train to Amritsar in Punjab. Home to the Golden Temple, ground zero of the Sikh religion, Amritsar was a pungasm waiting to happen. To wit: D got Sikh our first day there behind a questionable Punjabi thali. Might be the last time she can ever enjoy daal makhani. After a day of convalescence and bland Western food, we caught the Indo-Pak border closing ceremony at Attari-Wagah. Serious high-stepping pomp and circumstance on both sides, with cheering and dancing and absurdly tall soldiers in fan-topped turbans and this one old lady sitting next to us who kept repeating "I am proud Indian, proud Indian." We rode out with three Aussies who had just arrived in India, two dudes and a chick. Chick got Sikh from the bleachers during the ceremony, walked past us dollargreen and visibly unwell. Then her brother got Sikh on the ride back to Amritsar, had to have our Tata Sumo pull over so's he could scoot off into a field to rock the Technicolor yawn. Soon as he's back in the ride and apologizing for the delay, something stinks. Up go the windows and the stench should have gone with the breeze, but it turns out dude stepped in a big sloshy cow puddle on his way back from the yack and all eleven of us were about to get Sikh from the smell. I laughed so hard I snorted, and the Kashmiri women sitting in front of me turned around to make sure I wasn't going to be Sikh all over them. Good times with Indian food and water. We laugh because we know the feeling.

Amritsar to Chandigarh, a planned city and easily the strangest, least Indian place in India. Le Corbusier laid out perfectly rectangular Sectors with sidewalks (!) and clean parkland ribboning through them, a modernist capital complex, and did it all with enough concrete to pave seven inches over Texas. It took one of the new city's code inspectors, though, to put it on the map. Nek Chand (no relation to the city's root) took a bunch of really vivid childhood dreams and truckloads of disused pottery shards, electrical housings, and stray bangles and built himself a fantasyland he dubbed his Rock Garden. They say it's the second-most-visited site in India, but who's counting? Even if they're fudging the numbers, walking around his Xanadu was some of the most fun we've had for ten rupees.

Back through Delhi to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. It's enormous, it's magnificent, it's a wonder of the world and the headliner of every tourist brochure India prints. But here's something you gotta visit to find out: The whole place smells like foot. You can take that to the bank, put it in your pipe and smoke it, amaze and amuse the next time you're stuck for conversation at a boring dinner party. The Taj Mahal smells like gym class in junior high. Discuss.

A short jump from Agra took us yesterday to the ghost town of Fatehpur Sikri. It's a red sandstone city built by the Mughal emperor Akbar on a site without a water supply. In India. Where it gets, like, hot. Akbar had a 3000-woman harem, something that would tell even the virginal observer he might need a source of hydration late of an evening. Eventually the whole site was abandoned for more hospitable surrounds. The harem went with.

[Whew.]

So now we're in Gwalior. It's dark out. We're seeing another big fort tomorrow, then on to Orchha and the Kama Sutra carvings on the temples of Khajuraho. Moving fast, kids, and now we're working with a deadline. Last week in Delhi we booked an April 1 departure from the capital, arriving in Istanbul for the next leg of this Asian Experiment. Between now and then we've got the Indian Himalayas (east, then west) to catch, with a two-week jaunt through Nepal to link the two sides. It's the lightning round, where the scores can really change. Try to keep up, and I'll do the same.


Oh, and a Call For Submissions:

Given my penchant for rambling digression, you might be left after reading this entry and others with one or more unanswered questions. Plot points hang in the breeze, main characters disappear abruptly and without further mention, "India" might occasionally seem shot through a lens slathered with Vaseline--sorta like reading Shantaram, but without the prison bits.

So I'm interested in what you might want to know. It'll be an exercise in clarification for me, a chance to expound upon the whys and wherefores of our excursion. Ask me (or D) anything, whether you're wondering how long you can wear one pair of boxer-briefs, what's the meter conversion for rickshaws in Pune, or just what the shit a "dhaba-wallah" might be.* Fire away. My email's on the profile page linkable at left. Everything's fair game, and if I don't know the answer I'll make one up. Every question gets a response, and the fun ones I'll compile for a future blog. Until then, cheers. Peace.


*: Three months sixteen days, but they'll change funny colors; meter times six plus two; the wallah who runs the dhaba. Respectively.

Program Music

OVERTURE: In Which Bob And Jane Move North, The Wheels On The Bus Going 'Round And 'Round

It's been some time since last we caught wind of our heroes' mis/adventures as they cruise the Subcontinent. Wending their way through paddy and grove, town and village, hypermetropolis and whistlestop, they went from verdant Kerala into the alternating bustle and rustle of Karnataka. Returning to a state they loved and vowing to see more of it, they found themselves rolling from Kannur to Mangalore to Madikeri, deep in the heart of Kodagu, a region of hills and mountains and earthy bumps of various sizes in between. Kodagu is coffee country, tea country, and Madikeri is its capital. The market smells of fresh ground joe and sings with the alarms of a thousand knockoff Timexes. And this is where our symphony begins, as Bob and Jane disembark their state bus and leave their watch behind in

MOVEMENT I: The Land That Forgot Time (or, The Agony of Da Feet)

We didn't realize we'd forgotten the watch until we'd checked into a room and wondered what time folks might start serving the regional pork specialties. By then it was too late, our watch and its carabiner still holding back the curtain on a semi-deluxe KSRTC bus bound for Mysore. I miss the carabiner. We bought another watch for eighty rupees in one of the score of stalls in the main bazaar and carried it with us, strapped to the outside of our daypack, on the two-day trek we arranged. The first day was brilliant, a long walk along ridges and switchbacks through coffee, tea and spice plantations with S, our guide. S pointed out every different plant and nut and spore along the way while he shared with us his life story and plans for opening his own guide outfit in Kodagu. He was a wonderful storyteller and a very funny cat, openly curious about life in our United States and ready to laugh at a white boy who thinks every hissing irrigation line might be a king cobra. We stopped around two for lunch with a local Tulu-speaking family, four generations under the same roof, where grandma plied us with home cooking (daal and fresh greens with rice and chai) and great-granny ground betel nuts for paan and great-granddaughter showed us her gimme-a-cavity cute litter of puppies. After seventeen long clicks through the misty green mountains we found ourselves at our campsite near the bottom of the valley outside Madikeri. A small assembly of huts collected around a cave shower and a campfire ring, we roughed it in a mudblock structure equipped with one thirty-foot bed of stretched thatch and bamboo. Our meal that night was served in a tiny home down the dirt road from the hut compound, a simple meal of rice and cabbagey daal with hot chapatis eaten by the light of a flask candle. Returning, I lit a hard-won campfire from scavenged paper scraps and half-dry wood and we warmed ourselves before retiring to our cot for the night.

That first day of the trek was the first time we had worn shoes in almost two months, as sandals are the order of every day here. Consequently, I wore holes in both of my heels that I feared might have revealed bone. Also, while ducking to pass beneath one of many fallen trees, I lost the watch that I'd fastened to a strap on our backpack. So we awakened the second morning with pained feet and no idea of the time. Reporting for breakfast down the road, we found that our internal clocks were roughly accurate. Our new guide, however, had no such guiding sense of punctuality. He was more than an hour late, time we killed playing cricket with our hostess' son among the cow pies and strutting chickens on their tiny acreage. Between our wounded soles and our late start and the distance we had to cover to summit Tadayindemol, the tallest peak in Kodagu, the day was shaping up to be a bear. The trail began easily enough on a paved path with paddy on the downhill, coffee on the up. Where the asphalt ended, though, the going got tough. Steep and rocky where it wasn't steep and knotted with tangling roots, the trail wore on our already tender feet, which in turn took its toll on our knees as we adjusted our stride to compensate for four barking dogs. Over the first seven kilometers up the mountain, we smiled through the pain as every turn brought us more sweeping, verdant vistas of the region. With less than a click to go, though, and all of it in one fifty-degree scramble through the swirl and swell of every gust for 100 miles, D and I had hit our limits. It didn't help that our guide, younger and less experienced than S, spent the climb alternately lagging to SMS his peeps and bounding ahead of us, able to provide no guidance or reassurance or even a reasonable, steady pace. Yesterday's monkeys were weighing heavily on our backs, and my feet felt like two fluffy kittens being devoured by scorpions. Looking up into the sun and realizing we'd had it, we abandoned our quest for the summit, gazing wistfully, defeatedly up at what looked for all the world like fucking Everest.

MOVEMENT II: Don't Just Stand There, Bus A Move!

Our trekking finished (for better or worse), we began a series of bus rides that would bring us to Karnataka's far northeast, to the tiny town of Bidar. Getting there from Madikeri, in the southwesternmost corner of the state, would prove to be a challenge. I've written before about the roads in Karnataka, how their peaks and craters rival anything we climbed in Kodagu, but this leg of our sojourn deserves mention. As the crow flies, Madikeri to Bidar is less than 600 kilometers. It's Boston to NYC. This being India, however, we had to break that trip into four legs, the last being the only day shorter than 10 hours. From Madikeri we rode to Shimoga and stayed the night by the bus stand, leaving for Hospet the next morning. We broke up the journey in Hampi (left), a quaint little burg we loved in October, staying two nights before moving as far as Gulbarga, a twelve-hour gauntlet that put us four hours from Bidar--a joyride by comparison. By the time we arrived we had spent nearly 48 hours on buses as we passed through innumerable villages and bus stands big and small.

And that was why we looked at the trip like a blessing, rather than a curse. For a number of reasons, D and I have felt more at home in the sticks than in the cities. And we've enjoyed daytime bus trips more than the marginally faster trains. You can see more of life as it's lived when it's rolling past your open, rattling window at 25 kilometers an hour than you can when it's whizzing by the barred portals of a rail-prison. You have time to spot the elephants in the forest outside Madikeri, lumbering through the undergrowth twenty meters off the road. Getting down from the bus to Gulbarga and badly needing a piss, you can be followed to the open urinals by a pack of boys asking questions of you, perhaps the only white man to pass through those parts in years, as stage fright blocks your impending flow and you answer, stammering with effort, "America...I am fine...my name is Bob...I gotta piss, how are you?" Those are the moments that make the state buses worth the trouble. They're amazingly cheap (and you get what you pay for), but the slice-of-life value is worth its weight in funky gold noserings.

MOVEMENT III: "Nobody Goes To Bidar..."

--"and it's not clear why." This line is our Lonely Planet's introduction to the marvels of that town. It points out the abundance of Muslim architecture in the area and the ruined fort (left) that encircles empty hills and fields of kids playing cricket. But our guidebook is two years old, and when we arrived in Bidar it looked like a rogue, inland tsunami had washed the fronts off of every building in the old town. The front few meters of stores and offices and family homes had been shorn from the back of the structures, so that walking down the street was like looking in the back of a dollhouse. A dollhouse fronted, mind you, by open sewers bridged by planks that led into open rooms still sporting paintings and calendars on their truncated walls. They're widening the streets in Bidar, kids. And not widening them one-by-one, but all at once. And, this being India, all the work is being done by hand. If you pass through Bidar in ten years, they might still be at it.

We came to Bidar for the local damascene metalwork, bidri. The artisan casts silver into a shape, be it a vase or an elephant or a paan box, then covers it with a flat black amalgam of metals and chisels at it to release the glowing metal beneath. It's really neat stuff, and the best work winds up in museums and palaces across India and the world. The street in Bidar that had been the bidri bazaar, though, was in the heart of the widening venture. As a result of the ongoing improvements only a handful of shops were still tapping away, and the selection and prices were limited and high due to the short supply. Amazed by our effort to come all the way to the heart of the venture, so to speak, several locals pointed us in the direction of the working shops and advised us to haggle, and haggle hard. Keeping their words in mind as we strode purposefully down the street and up to the first and largest shop, I got turned around by a couple of girls asking D her name and nation. So did D, apparently, as with her next step she came down hard on my newly-scabbed right heel with the sole of her Teva. I shouted and spun in pain, scaring two poor children senseless as I clenched my fists and felt my face redden in a snarl, adrenaline rushing to the end of every hair on my body. It hurt so bad it gave me goosebumps. Horrified, D tried to console me and I shrugged her off, figuring we'd just get in the shop and get out again so I could sanitize and cover my wound as quickly as possible. Stepping over the shitmoat and into the workshop to climb the stairs to the newly open-air showroom on the first floor, the men assembled before their pieces started yelling and pointing at my foot, which was bleeding into a pool in the back of my sandals. The helpful salesman (the head artist's son) walked across the street with us to find a bandage as I hobbled and dabbed at the running wound with my bandanna.

That unpleasantness behind us, we were in no position to bargain. When it comes to buying items at fluid prices, you have to start negotiations from a point of strength. Never walk in weak, or with blood puddling around your heels. Picking several pieces from the trove upstairs, we named our price and our boy shot it down, suggesting that maybe we take an item or two out to make the order fit our budget. Standing firm as we could, we thanked them for their time and walked out down the rubblestrewn street to talk over our options. Along the way we passed a small store, open in front like every other building in town but still moving crisps and paan and rupee sweets. A young man called to us in English from the storefront and we stopped to chat, as we weren't really going anywhere anyway. R was home visiting Bidar over the holidays on a break from his work with an avionics firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. His mother, the shopmistress, brought us plates of namkeen and sweet chapatis as we sat in the back of the store and made introductions. R told us how strange it was to see foreigners in Bidar, his words echoing our LP verbatim. We talked about our travels and about life in Little Rock, parting as R's friends rolled up to take him for dinner.

The sun was heading towards a set and we would be rolling the following day (25 Dec 2007) for Aurangabad (500 km, 14 hours), so we cruised back by the bidri shop, where our items were still arranged on a low table upstairs. Our boy smiled his paan-stained smile when I took out two of the pieces and asked him for a new total, which we paid without protest as one of his colleagues polished the silver filigree and wrapped our order in newspaper, tied it in twine, handed it over with both hands.

MOVEMENT IV: A'bad, Xmas, Ellora, Et cetera...

So Christmas was spent on a long, long, long bus ride out of Karnataka and back into Maharashtra. We arrived early for the 9 AM bus, and the folks at the station were extra helpful with our functional illiteracy. Our conductor was the closest thing we had to Santa Claus this year; as we were the only kids riding the whole stretch from Bidar on Christmas and the only blanquitos for miles, he was all smiles every time he passed down the aisle to collect fares. He asked us the usual questions, polishing his limited English, and dragged me by the hand off the bus at a roadside dhaba early in the evening to make D and I try the poha the dhaba-wallah was whipping up. I guess he was worried that the gora (foreigners) might starve to death before the bus pulled in, and he showed a joking brand of concern as he ordered for us and showed us two seats off to the side of the stand where we could sip our chai in peace.

Finally arriving in Aurangabad with an hour of Christmas left on the clock, we checked into our overpriced ('tis the season...) hotel and bounced upstairs for some much-needed grub and a cold mug of cheer. Our turkey was butter chicken; our stuffing, paneer kofta. And as we settled our brains for a short winter's snooze, visions of cave temples danced behind our eyes, whirling us through the snows to the top of Mount Kailasa.

I remember seeing photos of the caves at Ellora in a National Geographic when I was a wee tyke. Don't remember how old or anything, but they were the first site I wanted to visit upon our arrival four months ago. We were warned off by the tail-end of the monsoon and the culture shock and headed south from Mumbai to Goa instead of north onto the Deccan plateau, and my expectations for the caves had grown ever greater in the interim. So when our bus arrived at the gates to the caves, set into a ridge a couple of clicks long and housing 32 different Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain temples, and the Kailasa temple loomed ahead of us like something from a dream, I dropped my shades and my jaw and barged straight ahead.

Pictures are great for a lot of things. Blackmail snaps from the office party, naked babies at bathtime, Uncle Walter and his "disappearing teeth" trick--all well and good inside a 3-inch by 5-inch frame. But even the whizkids at NG couldn't get the wonder of the Kailasa temple at Ellora onto their glossy pages. It just wouldn't fit. Seems it took 150 years for like 10,000 laborers to cut this behemoth from solid rock, a monolithic structure that staggers from every angle. We wandered the grounds with our eyes up, jaws down. Every surface of the main temple is covered by carved elephants, lions, and dancing figures from the great Hindu epics. Stairways and hand-hewn passages allow for circumambulations on three different tiers around the temple proper, and paths lead up the hill behind the site for aerial views that show the attention paid every detail on the top of the buildings, every budding lotus, every crouching lion. I can say, secure in my masculinity, that I got a little misty walking around the joint. It was one of those holy-shit-INDIA! moments that we have every once in a while, something to shake us from the complacency of ass-numbing bus rides and the same petty hassles and haggles we encounter almost everywhere. Ellora was an eyeful and a bag of chips.

So when we got to Ajanta the next day, a longer ride out from A'bad, we were a little awed by the difference. Ellora is renowned for the mastery of its sculpture and remarkable for the fact that three religious traditions added temples at different times over the course of a millenium. The caves at Ajanta are all Buddhist, and were forgotten to history after Indian Buddhism moved north to the Himalaya. Astoundingly plain in their architecture, their fame derives from the incredibly well-preserved original murals (not really frescoes, but close) decking the walls. The paintings were cool, the site was dramatic (a horseshoe ravine with temples about midway between a dry riverbed and the crest of 200-meter cliffs), but the approach was a little too Disney. You arrive at the Ajanta T-junction, 4 clicks from the ravine, where the bus lets you down and you pay a 7-rupee "amenities charge." Then you walk through a gamut of hawkers, vendors, shit shops and chai stalls to get to the buses that roll to the caves (another 7 rupees per head). Then it's up the hill from the bus stand through the outstretched arms of postcard and picturebook salesmen and around the dholi-wallahs who carry the feeble, old, and lazy wealthy around the site on sedan chairs. Finally seeing the curve of the ravine before you, it's then a stop at the ticket counter where you pay your Archaeological Survey of India tiered admission charge (25 rupees for Indians, 250 rupees or US$5 for foreign nationals). Then and only then can you pass through the main gate (and nonfunctioning metal detector) and wait in line at cave after cave to be allowed inside in groups not exceeding 40 people for a time not exceeding 15 minutes. I was half expecting "It's A Small World" to be piped in through speakers once inside the temples, a little animatronic Siddhartha om-ing in time to the rhythm under a smiling, tinselstrewn bodhi tree.

MOVEMENT V: The Five-Star Treatment

From Aurangabad we went back to Pune, where A's folks were kind enough to receive us again. We picked up a care package (mosquito repellent, US coins, wetnaps and two fresh pairs of Ex Officio skivvies--more on them another time) from Florida and had a couple of bomb home-cooked meals before rolling into the big city, big ballers in a pimped-out rickshaw, checking into the Taj Blue Diamond for New Year's Eve. The night before we'd spent picking up some fresh threads at the local department store (cover band knocking off Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69" on the ground floor, housewares on 3), so we were looking oh-so-very after some room service and a hot bath (!). Stylin' and profilin' and such, we cruised up to the library lounge overlooking Koregaon Road for some complimentary cocktails (always comp the whales, daddy, and give 'em the Rain Man Suite) before slinking back to the room, where our fine Indian (Sula, baby, nothing but the best) sparkling wine was chilling in a proper bucket, flutes alongside. The digs were plush (and we couldn't get reservations for any of the real parties in town) so we stayed in and watched the festivities kicking off 2K8 across India on our 42-inch plasma TV while waiting for room service to deliver our pizza (another perk of membership, boss, and if you don't get it then I won't explain, dig?).

The first morning of the year, heads splitting, we headed downstairs for our (comped, natch) killer breakfast buffet, gorged on fresh fruit and cheese and pastries and other such goodies as one won't find everyday here, before booking the massages that are yet another privilege afforded high-rollers such as ourselves. Kneaded and steamed and showered clean, we luxuriated for the rest of the day and night in the sort of accomodation we find (read: "can afford") only once in the bluest of Indian moons. And when we paid the bill (AmEx, yo, for the mad miles) the softest landing we've had in India set us back a little over two bills a night. Not bad for a couple of kids who spend at least an hour a week dickering over ten rupees with sheisty rickshaw-wallahs.

MOVEMENT VI: Conquering The Summit (or, Here Comes The Hotsteppah)

A long day on trains got us from Pune to Mumbai to Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, the first leg of our foray into the north. Finished with the south ("Catch you next time, Orissa! Later on, Andhra Pradesh!") and ready for a different flavor, we spent the night in Ahmedabad (we'd return later, in another installment) before catching a bus to Palitana, little more than a busy, dusty road leading from the bus stand to a hill, Shatrunjaya, topped by 900 Jain temples. We set off for the hilltop after a hearty breakfast around the corner from our hotel, steeling ourselves for the trek ahead.

Among the preparations necessary for such an adventure: Jains revere animals more than most, so no leather. Off with the belt and shoes, thanks. And that wallet, too, mister. Don't make me ask twice. Also, as part of climbing 3572 steps over four clicks of rocky hill is that it's done as a test of austerity, why'n'cha leave that bottled water in the room. We'll sell you cups of water at stops along the two-hour climb. There. So no food in the bag, no water, no leather...no problem, right?

Did I mention the matter of 3572 steps? All the way up the hill we passed ashen Indians raccooned with exhaustion, looking very much the worse for wear. Dholi-wallahs with buns of steel waited along the route to help the fallen, but we shrugged off their advances, determined to master this climb after the shuddering defeat of Tadayindemol. And master it we did. The path wound over foothills, switchbacking and levelling off at times before revealing the templed summit of Shatrunjaya beyond the haze blanketing the Saurashtran plains. I've seen Neuschwanstein, Crazy Ludwig's architectural fairytale in Bavaria that served as the model for the Magic Kingdom's castle. I played back that reveal, coming around the mountain trail and glimpsing it through the Black Forest, as we came upon Shatrunjaya. I'm not sure which was more impressive, but I was dehydrating rapidly by that point and the white marble temples might have seemed more glittery than they really are. We spent a couple of hours scouting the best vistas among the temple complexes and the narrow alleyways separating them, bribing the occasional security guard to let us up the ladders topping many of the twisting, ornately carved spires. Some of the temples are still active sites of worship, and there was a congregation of white-clad Jains wrapping around one of the main temples, waiting for their turn at the inner sanctum. We could only get as far as the marble gate inside, but hearing the chants and seeing the strain of devotion writing lines on the faces of those assembled was something to behold.

CODA: In Which Our Heroes Reprise Past Episodes Of Intestinal Distress

So D fell ill again in Bidar, something I neglected to mention in that passage of this symphony. A little stomach bug, some crampage, a day in bed and all was well. I don't know what felled me in Palitana, but I awoke in the night after Shatrunjaya and before a long bus to Diu with my stomach knotting like two Rajput warriors, their moustaches tied together, trying to lead camel charges in opposite directions.* Eight hours on the bus, sans facilities, only made the situation more desperate. I spent the next five days more or less in bed with the revenge of whatever grabbed me in Cochin, watching bad TV and shitting water until my lips chapped.** It's still following me (thankfully from a slight remove) as I write these words, some three weeks later. D says I should see a doctor, but I'm holding out for the symptoms to fade further or until we hit Delhi, whichever comes first. Whatever happens I'll keep smilin' through the pain, though the strains of my straining might well be the theme music playing behind the rest of our time in India. Until next time, then. Gotta run...


*: It's a stretch, but we're in Rajasthan and these guys have seriously great moustaches and I just thought I'd work that in. The camels are funny, too.
**: You're welcome.