KHAO TAO, Thailand
15 hours, 11 minutes, 17 seconds.
On this:
Boy was this fun!
Our kindly, wizened old bus driver. I was of the mind that maybe he should be sitting quietly somewhere reading a book, and not driving on absurdly difficult roads for 15 hours straight...but what do I know?
I realize that so far, I have complained to a fairly significant extent about the transportation that we have been forced to undertake since I began traveling in general, and in India specifically.
I can say now absolutely, that I have had the worst bus ride in existence. There may have been other rides as bad, but never has there been one worse.
It was a "local" bus, and we were fortunate enough to get the very front seats. This afforded us not only the views that went by at, at different times, murderously slow and then terrifyingly fast speeds, but also the opportunity to be the most badly injured patrons on the bus should we hit anything. On Indian local buses, the driver is separated from the peasants in the back by a sort of steel mesh cage. Since there is nothing to hang on to etc., if you stop short, you're going into it face first.
YY (Yeah Yeah or Evan, my traveling compadre) had eaten a bad samoza or ten along the way and wasn't feeling his dandiest. Exacerbating his condition were the jarring stops every 10 to 15 minutes along the way to pick up more people, the fact that we were driving on roads that looked as if some gravel from a truck had fallen out and people decided that rather than build a real road, they would just use this found one, and the constant arrival of people on the bus who wanted to squeeze into the seat next to us.
Let me try, if I can, to explain something about things built for people from "Western" countries vs. everywhere else. In most Western countries, you will find yourself somewhat cramped for space if, as Evan and myself are, you stand over 5 foot 10. If you happen to stand anywhere over 6 feet tall, you will usually find yourself even more cramped, but at least able to fit. Something that people fail to appreciate though, is that most of those seats are designed to be wide enough for anyone to sit in comfortably. In non-Western type countries, there is no such luxury given. A row of three seats is expected to be filled by no less than 4 people. When two of those people are demonstrably bigger than anyone else practically in the country, that expectation becomes a very serious problem. So we found ourselves, shoulders intricately interlocked with one over the other, giving varying version of the "don't f*#k with me" face to anyone who tried to sit down next to us.
Apparently, that face doesn't translate well, because we became the favored seating place of what seemed like pretty much every person who got on. Sigh.
YY is not a small person. In fact, YY, in some places, could probably be considered livestock. I am not particularly wide, but I make up for it with legs and arms that would not seem out of place on a very big monkey. We took up all three of the seats simply by sitting down, but the Indians were not to be deterred. To give an idea of the amount of time that 15 hours, 11 minutes and 17 seconds is, I read the entirety of Kavalier and Clay, a 600 some odd page book and still had time at the end to start another.
That is a VERY long ride.
Click on the picture to find out why we had trouble getting down alleys in Varanasi
Our destination, one that we went to all of this trouble for, was the very holy city of Varanasi. The reason that it is so holy is because of the Ganges (Ganga) river that flows right past it. Leading down to the river are dozens of ghats which are essentially huge stone steps that you head down to get into the water. The Ganges river is the holiest in India and is considered to have magic and healing properties. I suppose that that would probably be the case if by "magic" they meant "the most polluted water on earth with 30,000 times the acceptable amount of human waste and heavy chemicals", and if by "healing properties" they meant "will in all likelihood kill you if you should so much as come in contact with it."
The Ganges river in Varanasi. Care for a dip?
These two pictures ARE different
Once again, my poor faculties of translation went unappreciated. Thus, after seeing a child use the river as a bathroom, and then seeing a group of men further downstream using it as a shower, and even further down a woman doing her laundry, we decided that swimming may have to wait for another time.
Nightly ceremony praying to the Ganges
To stay on this point for just a moment: the water in India is of course, undrinkable, everyone knows this. But in Varanasi, even the Indians don't drink the water. The only people who do are those Indians who were born and raised there. I met a fellow who was born and grew up there, but had been away at school for a few years. When I asked him about drinking the water, he looked at me like I was crazy and said "No. No of course not. I left for a year, now it would make me very ill. " It's so dirty that after one year, 17 years of immunity is worthless. We were advised not to shower, but that if we did shower, we should keep our heads bent down and seal our lips.
Holy water indeed.
Varanasi was, if possible, the most congested, busiest and liveliest town that we'd been to yet. The streets felt more packed, the cows were more prevalent and people seemed louder. Everything was a bit more in Varanasi.
Guy on the right is wearing a Minnesota Gophers hat. Crazy.
I got a mini-walking tour of the city from the same gentleman who I had asked about the water and as he was of the Brahman caste, he actually walked me into a number of places where apparently I was not supposed to be. He largely did this by shrugging off the 10 or so people who would object to my presence and yell at them for a little while in Hindi, which usually did the trick. His name is Rohit and he was one of the only people in India to offer me something without asking for anything in return.
Street market in Varanasi
Wherever you are, thanks Rohit.
At this point in our travels, YY and I felt that we had earned a little break. We had braved buses and trains not fit for cattle much less humans, eaten things which would only be identifiable in a crime lab and smelled smells that would wake the dead and then re-kill them.
So we bought a flight to Delhi.
I know, I know. It's cheating. It's against the ideals of true travel blah blah blah...go write for Lonely Planet. Every once in a while, you've gotta just get somewhere without it becoming an epic. I ended up being very glad that we decided to fly, because it was at the airport that we found what we hadn't even realized we had been without for a long time: other travelers. During the two and a half weeks that we had spent shooting up the solar plexus of India, I could count with just fingers how many other "Western" or "White" people we had seen. Now we knew where they all were. The airports. It was amazing going from near constant travel with all Indians to a plane full of people who could understand what I said the first time and also needed suntan lotion. Being there, talking with some Brits, I realized that I was glad to have the contrast, and to see that while all of these people were allowing India to pass under their wings, touching down here and there to get blasts of "India" where they could find it and then lifting off again, we were experiencing India as a slow burn, moving over the country like the Indians do, and feeling what it must be like, if only a little bit, to live there.
Next: The Himalayas, hitchhiking on tractors, and his Holiness the Dalai Lama
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