BANGKOK, Thailand
We have moved on, we have ventured far and wide.
The last post described, fairly in depth, one and a half days. As those days were witness to several remarkable events, they were remarked upon. Since then, YY (Yeah Yeah, also known as Evan, my traveling companion) and I have traversed much of the length, and only a bit of the breadth of India. We have taken more or less a North-Western route straight up through the country, and it is about these travels that is the concern of this writing.
In short...lets see what the hell we've been up to.
We left the insanity of Goa, and boarded what would be the first of a plethora of long haul buses that would bump, fling, roll and shake us around this strange country. YY wisely booked us a "sleeper" bus, which meant that, theoretically, we would be able to sleep. What I was not informed of, was of the necessary proximity of other sleepers that occurs on these buses that are designed first for squeezing as many people in as possible, followed a distant second by comfort.
Evan and me got close
About 10 hours later, and sympathizing greatly with those balls that get blown around during lottery drawings, we arrived in Mumbai. I had gotten a bit sick in Anjuna (veg-sweet and sour soup of all things) so of course, the first thing that we sought out was a McDonalds so that I could feel confident in the food that I was eating. Sounds stupid, but sometimes you just need the Golden Arches when everything else makes you want to vomit.
We spent a large portion of our day attempting to book train tickets to our next destination, the city of Anjuna. Without lapsing into a fiery tirade against all things bureaucratic and Indian, suffice it to say that after 4 separate cab rides, numerous arguments with officials of varying degrees of power whose attempts to foil our planning usually increased in an inverse proportion to the amount of power they actually had, and finally, a visit to a tiny, backwater, hidden ticket office that is supposedly the source of all tourist train tickets in India, via a subterranean cavern accessed by possessing the key of light and the scepter of power and by combining them to reveal the location of the jade monkey, which led us to our destination. If you are hearing the Indiana Jones theme right now, you should go watch it because those are superb movies. Stomach churning but mission accomplished, we hit Mumbai to see the sights...and promptly sat down to watch an english movie (Syriana by the way...very excellent).
Maybe we should have armed ourselves and gone to this office instead...By the way, why are they lumping together Freedom fighters and Senior Citizens? Puzzle that one for a while...
Then we saw some more things in Mumbai. Lovely city.
This picture is for my dad. What the hell was this car doing here?
Bird flu? I aint heard of no stinkin' bird flu!?!
Moving on.
We boarded our sleeper train for Anjuna and got underway. I slept a bit, but had some difficulty as a 30-some-odd family of Indians had a full meal on the berths below us. On Indian trains, in sleeper class (at least the third class one that we were on) there are 3 bunks ranged over a wall, with a complementary set of three on the other side, perhaps two feet apart. What this affords the traveler is the opportunity to become intimately involved in the affairs of the other passengers. What they look like, who their children are, what they are all eating for dinner. Attendant to these points, you also get to know, quite well, what everyone's individual olfactory signature consists of.
To put it more bluntly, you get the pleasure of smelling absolutely everything about everybody. This is not something that you would, if given a choice, choose to experience. In fact, you would most likely be willing to pay considerable sums of money to avoid such an experience. Instead, I found myself (upset stomach still mind you) wafting in the curry, masala, aloo and various other Indian foods that I had been assiduously avoiding all day for fear of bodily rejection. On top of that, I'm fairly certain that some of the younger occupants of the train carriage may have been in need of a new diaper, and over 10 hours, probably several new diapers. Unfortunately, diaper changing on trains is apparently passe in India, so I just had to learn to love it.
I'm still working on it.
We arrived in Anjuna at about 4:30 in the morning and wandered around aimlessly til YY was able to secure us lodging. We spent the next day or so poking around Anjuna, but our main point in heading there is that it is a gateway town to a place called Ellora.
Ellora is a village, about an hour down the road from Anjuna which boasts some of the holiest and most intricately carved caves in all of India. As with most of the places that are worth traveling to in India, it is a popular pilgrimage spot and we saw many folks there doing their pilgrimage thing, which was lovely.
An enormous temple carved out of a mountain.
Sort of secret caves
We left Anjuna via a 12 hour "sleeper" bus to Bhopal. Theoretically, when you buy a ticket for something to take you somewhere, you would expect that when you exit your transport, you will be in the place that the ticket says that you are going. The problem with thinking like this in India is that you will spend much of your time 1. angry and 2. confused. A better course of action is to plan on arriving somewhere around where the ticket says that you will arrive, and to be happy that you have made it that far. Maybe even tip the driver.
So it was that we found ourselves, 9 hours into a 12 hour trip, pulled over on the side of the road at 4:30AM (many strange things happen in India at around 4 in the morning) being yelled at to get off the bus. "Great" I thought, "we made it earlier than we expected."
Of course we did. We made it to the side of a road in the middle of nowhere way ahead of schedule. The bus had broken down. Okay, no problem, the bus company will just send another one.
(Pause for uproarious laughter, wipe a tear)
So the not-so-friendly driver basically shouted us onto a local bus that was passing through, and already full of people. Seeing as how we were a full coach class bus full of people and luggage, this of course made perfect sense.
We spent the next two hours sleeping while standing upright, and occasionally being violently jostled by the money-collector guy, as regular a fixture on Indian buses as the "roses for the lady?" guy at a bar. An additional similarity between the two is the intense urge to do something very painful to that person at regular intervals.
We arrived in Indore, which wasn't our final stop, then breathed a sigh of relief when we were told that it was "only" another 4 hours to Bhopal. "4 Hours? Hah! I do that on one foot!" Immediately realizing the karmic implications of such a statement, we sat ourselves down (on yet another shoddy bus) and kept our big yaps quiet.
We arrived in Bhopal and settled ourselves in. Our plan was to head off to a place called Sanchi the next day to see some ancient stupas, which are famous religious buddhist structures.
*warning, if you read the following you may learn something*
The shape of the stupa is interesting. If you look at the picture below, you can see that it looks like a dome with a balcony around it and a stick coming out from the top.
A stupa, stupid.
The way that the story goes, the shape came from when one of the Buddha's disciples asked him what shape they should make temples and religious structures in after he died so that they could properly worship him. In response, the Buddha took his cloak from his shoulders and placed it on the ground. On top of this, he put his begging bowl upside down. Finally, he took his fork (spoon/utensil etc.) and put that on top of the whole thing and told the disciple that this is what it should look like. It is at once a humble structure, yet one with very strong religious associations that make it all the more striking in that it is so human. This is in sharp contrast to say, grand cathedrals which are supposed to represent the immensity of the divine and the incomprehensibility of God etc.
*and now back to your regularly schedule schlock*
We were going to leave Bhopal after one day in order to reach the erotic sculptures and temples of Khajuaho in the North, however we ran into a slight snag: The largest Indian holiday of the year, during which everything shuts down for two days was occurring right then. This holiday is called Holi, perhaps you've heard of it? No? Okay then, let me tell you what I know about it.
1. It's loud
2. The night before, people were collecting buckets of water and colored dye's like the apocalypse was upon them and they were going to be textile manufacturers in the next life
3. Every single person is fair game. Especially white people
A victim of "Holi"
What I mean by "fair game" is that the purpose of this holiday, minus the religious part, is to thoroughly soak everyone on the street with your water/dye combinations which are advertised as being permanent. There is also a lot of Indian music relating to the holiday, which, if you would like to record an album, goes like this:
"(loud whiny noises for a while) Holi holi holi holi holi holi (mans voice) holi holi holi...holi (woman's voice) holi holi (mans voice) holi (both together, increased whininess) HOLI!"
It was quite an experience.
We finally caught the bus that we needed to Khajuraho. Another painful ride not worthy of retelling including, but not limited to, indigestion, whining children and a driver who clearly had been taught to drive by a group of elderly asian women...with cataracts and heavy feet.
Scultpure of Gandhi poking a little man with a sitck. Turns out, Gandhi coul dbe a real prick when he wanted to. This statue comemorates that little known fact.
Khajuraho contains some of the worlds most erotic, and therefore, most offensive sculptures on earth. (Ever notice how "erotic" "religion" and "offensive" are nearly always lumped together in conversation and discussion? Think that maybe there might be something to that? Like a weird religious obsession with sex? Hmm...I think that I may be the very first person to ever come up with that link.)
Out of respect for some of my younger readers, the close ups on the erotic sculpture are available by request and Money Order only.
Nice huh?
I swear to God we are really in this picture. I know that it looks like someone photoshopped us in, but we were really there. I mean it. Shut up!
Ultimately, the temples were nice and were almost worth the 500 rupees that were brutally extorted out of us by the conniving temple praetorians.
Yeah Yeah making contact wit the locals. They later ate him with spicy masala. By all accounts he was delicious.
Next: The worst bus ride ever, The holy (and wholly disgusting) City of Varanasi, and we reach a very good place.
1 comment:
That poor goat looks like the end result of a frat prank.
Post a Comment