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blancharddb — Sat, 5 Dec 2009 09:49:00 GMT

Well I'm back home. Sorry for not updating at the end--I was running from place to place quickly enough that I didn't really feel like stopping and trying to summarize. Luckily enough, I sent an on-the-fly email to Blair at the end that ended up doing an okay job of it, so I'll just copy and paste the relevant information from that:

I've been to Varanasi, Agra, and Amritsar since getting back, all of which have been amazing, but also difficult to put into words. Varanasi is Hinduism's holiest city, so, needless to say, trying to blog about a place that is some kind of gateway to heaven to a sixth of the world's population is a difficult task. Briefly, it was really kind of a distant experience, at least so far as the religion is concerned, as I had no way of relating, but could only be a spectator (which is weird when you're specta-ting cremations and bathing), but it was still amazing. The spirituality of the place was pervasive, as was the relief that it represents to Hindus (if you die in Varanasi, you are supposed to be freed from the cycle of rebirth--a good thing for Hindus). It's one of the few places where I've seen Indians and tourists alike just relaxing on the ghats (stairs leading down to the water, where people bathe, do their laundry, swim...all in incredibly polluted water--nothing can live in the Ganges that far down, as it's so filthy). It was really a special place.
Agra was great for two reasons--the Taj, which is an amazingly beautiful building, from any angle, in any light. I managed to get there when it opened, and avoided most of the crowds and got to see it change color in the sunrise. It was amazing. But in twenty minutes it was swarmed, so I had to go, figuring I couldn't beat those first moments. The other amazing thing is how CHEAP Agra is, at least, counter-intuitively, around the Taj. This goes for all Indian cities with important monuments--the area immediately around the monument is dirt cheap, whereas all of the ritzy food and hotels are miles away. It maaakes NO sense (in best Eddie Izzard impression). So I was eating amazing Thalis (which is like an Indian food sampler plate that is usually the cheapest thing on the menu and comes with two-three curries/dal plus rice, chapati bread (no naan here usually, oddly--mostly it's roti, which is the dairy free, and therefore cheaper, version of naan), and sometimes yogurt or other place-specific bonuses. In Agra you could get a thali for 15 rupess, or about 30 cents. I was slightly suspicious of these, so I sprung for the 25 rupees, or 50 cents. WHAT?! For a filling dinner, and, frankly, usually the best food around (most of the slightly more expensive backpacker-tailored places SUCK, with bad indian, and terrible attempts at continental food, whereas the Thali places are for locals as much as tourists, meaning better food, and cheaper prices--funny).
Amritsar was also really cool--it's Sikhism's holiest city, with the holiest Sikh place of worship: the Golden Temple, which is was it sounds like. I have pictures that I'll post that show the temple, but it's pretty self-explanatory. The really cool thing about it, besides the beautiful temple, is the lodging and food. Sikhs are all about equality, so in every Sikh temple you can eat and sleep for free--anyone can. (Oh, and Sikhs, though a small percentage of India's population, are commonly the imagined "quintessential Indian" due to their state having the highest number of ex-patriots--they're the stereotypical New York City cabbies with the turbans (the turbans, usually delicately and beautifully wrapped, being the Sikh giveaway).) So there's free lodging specifically for foreigners, and the Indian visitors, being made of hardier stuff, often are just content to sleep on the pavement in the courtyard. And the dining hall--MAN!--is usually feeding 300 people at any one time--about 40,000 in a day--all free, all staffed by volunteers! And the food, again, is some of the best you can find (it's basically a thali). And its open 24 hours a day, though it's just chai at night. You walk by and all you hear (on the outside, it's muffled on the inside by 300 people eating and talking) is the banging and clattering of the metalware plates, bowls and spoons, that the staffers are furiously cleaning and tossing into piles.

And that's that. Thanks for reading--I hope it provided something of interest, or at least comfort in making sure I was still alive and typing away somewhere. Now off to reenter a world of more practical concerns, like where to live and how to find a job in this market with a philosophy BA.

See you soon,

Dave

Back from Annapurna Base Camp

blancharddb — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:06:00 GMT

Just a quick update to let everyone know that we got back safe and sound from our trek to the Annapurna Base Camp in the Himalayas. We weren't quite sure what trek we'd be able to pull off, getting a later start than we intended and having visa deadlines to get out of the country, so we decided to scrap our plans to do the three week Annapurna Circuit, in favor of the shorter Annapurna Sanctuary, which ended up being a nice eight day jaunt.

The trek was amazing, the highlight likely being the sunrise at 13,500 ft at base camp, where we were surrounded by raw and jagged white peaks, lit up at their summits in impossible pink. The hiking was brutal, as the trails in this area were originally made to connect villages, not to get you to the base camp efficiently, meaning there's plenty of steep ups to get to hilltop villages, and steep downs to cross the valley below--making our 10,000 ft elevation gain closer to 15,000 ft. By the end our legs were aching and burning like mad. But the views were awesome, the company was great (many a dinner was spent playing cribbage and sharing half-remembered Simpsons episodes), the food was indulgent (a regular dish on the menu which tastes INCREDIBLE after hours of trekking is a pile of fried potatoes with cheese and two fried eggs on top, complemented nicely with ketchup), and the overall experience was unmatchable.

Now we're back in Pokhara, trying to figure out our further plans. Hope fall is treating everyone well. We mysteriously saw what looked identical to cherry trees in bloom on the trail, and very few yellowed leaves, making it hard to realize it's really November.

Two of Us

blancharddb — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:49:00 GMT

Okay, so a quick Kathmandu update. We all arrived in the city last Friday, and Monica was really sick with a stomach problem that had hit on her and James' trek. James and I hung out with her for a couple of days while Wyatt and Todd (James' friends whom we were meeting for the trek) headed out to start, in order to keep to their tight schedule and avoid a Maoist strike starting in the city today, stalling all traffic in and out of the city. Mon toughed it out for a few days, but we were unsure just what was the matter, and she certainly wasn't getting better, so, after a sad farewell here, she's headed back home early to get diagnosed and recover in a safe place.

James and I are now trying to get going on the original plan, hopefully meeting up with Wyatt and Todd at some point along the trail, and we were planning on heading out to the trekking jumping off point in Pokara, Nepal today, but the above mentioned Maoist strike, which had seemed to be just rumor by many accounts, turned out to be very real, meaning our bus was very really parked for the day. So hopefully we head out tomorrow.

So no real travel updates, but anyone in the Seattle area, make sure you give Mon two huge hugs from James and me when you see her, and wish her a quick recovery. She was a real trooper, keeping up a smile and a strong composure in spite of what was obviously massive pain. We miss her a ton, and can't wait to see her back in the Northwest when our tickets allow. We'll do our best without her.

Good health to everyone,

Dave

Back in Delhi

blancharddb — Wed, 4 Nov 2009 15:46:00 GMT

Okay, so I've moved around a bit since the last post, and at this point I'm in Delhi waiting to head out to Kathmandu on Friday, and checking in with (Whitman friend) Melissa Rhodes, studying abroad here in Delhi.

The quick recap of the last week:

I made it to Pushkar for the Camel Fair, which was actually pretty underwhelming. However, Pushkar tends to be a kind of vortex in which travelers find themselves unable to leave for weeks and months at a time, so I did get to see again many of the same people I had met at the guest house the first time through. They all seemed slightly confused to find themselves still in this odd little town, waiting for a fair that never seemed to begin--the residents kept assuring them that it would REALLY get going the next day, but after about a week, these assurances seemed to falter. Not caring to wait around for it to start, I stayed for a day, saw some "Camel dancing"--which consisted of a guy leading a camel around in a circle, occasionally changing directions, and, the, er, highlight, getting the camel to walk around on its front knees, and some other odd, mostly unimpressive events, then headed to the desert.

The one event that was a total blast was the "Spiritual Walk," which started at 7am, and I assumed was merely a quiet walk around the lake. It's taken a while, but this event was the final catalyst, I think, to get me to stop associating "spiritual" in India, with "quiet" or "reserved," as I tend to in America. Spiritual here often means to do things as big and as loud, as you can. The "spiritual walk" was an enormous parade, working its way through the narrow, packed streets of Pushkar, chock full of indian marching bands, reed flautists, drummers, and other music makers, trucks full of marigolds and rose petals, which people aboard tossed out onto the crowd (marigold flowers, you might know, are not the most delicate or lightest flowers to throw at people from a height, and after the fortieth or fiftieth volley, we all had marigold welts on our backs and faces, but it was all part of the wild fun of it), dancers, floats, costumes, and, of course, a ton of camels, all decked out and bejeweled in colorful, tacky decoration. By the end it was so packed that you basically were confined to one spot, and held there by the mass of people surrounding you, all equally unable to move, as the trucks and camels tried to work their way through. It was exactly what I was hoping for in going back to Pushkar for the fair, so, with that in my pocket, and growing really short on time before Nepal, I headed on to the next stop.

Jaisalmer is a town just on the edge of the Great Thar desert, and about 50km from Pakistan. It is home to a beautiful golden fort and several equally stunning, and intricately carved Jain temples. However, being rather tired of Rajasthani cities at this point, where shopkeepers on every road you walk are persistently calling at you to buy from them (hundreds of calls per day, from any and every shop you walk by), I decided largely to forgo the city, and head out on a camel safari instead--for an easy $10. The camels are bumpy, and the desert is hot, but it was a perfect excursion, the highlight being the night spent on the dunes under the nearly full moon, lighting up the desert with its pale shine for miles around. Our guides were great--an 11 year old boy and a 24 year old man from local rural villages--and the company, a friendly Ecuadorian couple who spoke fluent English, was splendid. We spent the night around a fire, and it was wonderful to see how all of us looked at it with the same eyes, regardless of our vastly different cultural backgrounds--and it doesn't get much more different than a rural Indian camel herder and myself. The mystery and captivation of a log campfire is universal.

As enjoyable as the trip was, two days of trotting along on camels wrecks havoc on a body not used to it, so by the time we finished, I was more than ready--my butt aching, and my spine feeling as if it had been so compressed that I was standing an inch or two shorter than my usual height. I got back to Jaisalmer, and caught the train to Delhi the next day--a twenty-five hour trip which starts in the desert where sand blows in the windows and accumulates in the compartments, and is then circulated by the overhead fans the rest of the way, making the inside of the train hazy, cloudy, and sand/dust-choked--a really hellish travel experience(particularly in the upper sleeper berth, which puts you about 2 feet from the top of the car, where the fans, and most of the sand is). So it's a surprise that, after Pushkar's dust kicked up by thousands of camels and tourists, and Jaisalmer's sandy air, and the train back, I arrive in Delhi and find the air quality to be one of the big perks.

That's the sum of things for now. I'm ready to head to the slightly less hectic Nepal, to embark on the next stage of this trip, away from the touts and traffic and breakneck travel of this part.

Dave

Udaipur

blancharddb — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:14:00 GMT

I keep worrying about leaving one place to go to the next--feeling there's no way it can compare with where I currently am. But I have to move at a fast clip to complete my survey of Rajasthan--it's part of the just-barely-keeping-my-hands-on-the-reins joy of this part of the trip--and India keeps surprising me. Now I'm in spectacular Udaipur, where the two constant descriptions heard are "fairy tale" and "James Bond," and it actually manages to straddle the gap between fairly well. Slightly more sedate and relaxed than 007 (there were never so many septuagenarians in the camera's line in Bond), and a touch more classy and sophisticated than a child's tale, it's a wonderful, romantic, and picturesque town with an old palace in the middle of the lake (now a pricey hotel).

I arrived after a bumpy, restless night on a sleeper bus, figuring I'd nap most of the day, but didn't feel my eyelids' weight once until I my head hit the pillow at 11 that night. They had no interest in closing, with so much to see. Temples dot the town, with one in the center of town being one of the most intricate, well carved, and largest Hindu temples I've yet seen. Music is everywhere, and mostly percussion-based. My path yesterday was guided, in part, by where the drumming was emanated from. The most pleasant surprise was stumbling upon a wedding celebration held the day before the marraige, where the wife and groom each conduct prayers at a temple, asking for a blessed marraige and children. The prayers ain't catholic mass, though. They are backed by furious drums (the drums here are mostly double-sided, with differences in pitch determined either by different sized heads, or different sized sticks) and accompanied by women family and friends joyfully enacting a traditional Rajasthani circular dance, moving counter-clockwise, and waving their arms gracefully about.

Another epitaph applied to this city is "Venice of the East," and it does have a more European flair than any other city I've been to in India, most delightfully noticeable in the Epicurean pleasures in which I've whole-heartedly indulged myself. Many restaurants are rooftop-based, with amazing views of the lake palace, the royal palace, and the delicate white stone buildings dotting the opposite side of the channel running through the center of town. Yesterday I had dinner at sunset atop a rooftop that I had eyed from my own hotel's roof, but had over- or under-shot several times, finding out when I summited the restaurant I arrived at that now the desired terrace was just NORTH of me, or just WEST of me. The sun sets over a beautiful series of hills far beyond the town, and a gorgeous golden eagle or hawk of some kind was soaring right around my terrace. As dusk falls, lights come on on the walls of the buildings on the water. For the most part, I really enjoy traveling alone--you end up spending much more time talking to and finding out about locals and fellow travelers and their cultures, and can keep to your own pace if you want to leave the town you just arrived in the next day, or spend the whole afternoon reading in a cafe. And there are some beauties that are better experienced alone. But that sunset was just too much beauty for one pair of eyes to do justice to--and I tried my damndest, not blinking for an hour and a half. It was a sight than only two or more people together could fully take in. It made me reflect on the wonderful sights and sounds I've experienced with you all, my friends and family. Wheatfields, sunsets, parks, waterfalls, and junkyards in Walla Walla. Listening and dancing to orchestras, rock bands, and old fogies in concert halls, clubs, amphitheaers, cars, dorms, and kitchens. Rafting, hiking, snowboarding, skiiing, snowshoing, digging for crystals in every single state or province in the West, and a few in the midwest and east. Wandering cities, going to museums and bars. Camping on canyons edges, in canyon valleys, on sides of mountains, tops of mountains, in bedrooms, on golf courses, and, of course, one amazing old mining town in the Cascades. Conversations in coffee shops, classrooms, living rooms, bedrooms. Beef quesadillas in a fluorescently-lit kitchen, and Indian food in the U-district. And countless other incomparable experiences. It was a damn fine sunset, and made me think of everyone of you, and just how lucky I am. So cheers to you all.

Afterward, I hit up a traditional Rajasthani dance performance, which included dances with pots of burning fire on women's heads, an amazing sitting dance where the women had small cymbals placed on various parts of their body, and, with coordination to make Joe Dimaggio blush, quickly, and accurately, struck them by swinging the cymbal tied to about a foot-long string in their right hand just like a sling, or a mini tetherball around their fingers, at the various other cymbals, increasing in tempo to be striking the little cympals at about 180 strikes per minute. I'm not sure if that's clear. It's hard to describe, but it was mind-blowing, and hard to believe even as I sat there watching it. There was a hilarious puppet show of a libidous woman, whose sound effects were provided by some kind of instrument in the puppeteer's mouth that made a noise akin to the most beserk pigeon imaginable--a high pitched, trilling noise, variable in pitch, but giving the impression that this woman had been driven crazy by her loins and was now catapulting and cavorting around the stage in feverish lust. And the finale was a water jug bearing dance by a stout woman who by the end was carrying nine jugs atop her head, at least seven feet tall, if not eight, and, as they were added, managed to lie down flat next to a vase with a scarf on it, grab the scarf in her teeth, and stand up again, revealing the flowers in the vase, do a tap dance on a plate with her feet on the inch-tall rim, and do a tender little dance on broken glass.

Okay that's probably enough. Off to Pushkar tonight to haggle for some camels for David Hennings.

Thinking of you,

Dave

Bundi Bundi Bundi

blancharddb — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:48:00 GMT

It's pronounced "Boon-dee," which is fun to say three times in a row.

It's a town a little off the beaten path in Rajasthan (where the beaten path is flogged near to death). I'm here, and my internet cafe is about to close, so I don't have time for much of an update other than to say I'm safe, and having a ball. I moved on to Pushkar from Jaipur, which is a crowded little town filled with tourists and religious pilgrims for the over 300 temples around the lake (well, actually, lake bed, given the dry season, and weak monsoons). It was a fun stop, but not nearly as fun as it will be in a couple of days, when the Camel Fair starts, which brings thousands of Camels and tens of thousands of visitors to this tiny little town of 15,000. I'm going to try to stop by again when it's in full swing. Bundi is southwest of Pushkar, and it's biggest claim to fame is that Rudyard Kipling wrote Kim here. In addition it is one of the most charming and beautiful towns I've been to. My room is located on the roof of my guest house, and I step out to a view of the palace, and a nearby artificial, rectangular lake, with a temple in the middle. They light the palace and the temple at night, and the view is breathtaking. The food is amazing--I had an amazing spinach paneer dish atop a roof in town, and watched the kids in the houses nearby fly kites from their roofs. It was delightful. At sunset I took a walk up to the now-overgrown fort, where tourists and monkeys squared off for prime sunset real-estate. It was a veritable simian city up there, so the tourists all scrounged up the areas not taken over, and were treated to a beautiful sunset--no rain, and bad smog make for the most brilliant, red orb you've ever seen. In fact it never even reaches the horizon because it disappears behind the thick haze a degree or two before it goes down.

Sorry, that's it. I'll try to make a fuller post sooner than I have been doing so recently. Tomorrow I rent a bike and scope out the surrounding area on a pair of wheels.

Much love,

Dave

Jaipur

blancharddb — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Well sorry for the break. We've been trying to update, but have focused mainly on getting our pictures up, which is maddening and inevitably unsuccessful, and takes up enough time that we don't feel like writing any update. The system seems to be working great here, though, so I went WILD!

First update, I suppose is that that "we" is no longer "we," but just "I." Mon left to Kathmandu to join up with James and get some Everest-area trekking in, so if you're looking for updates on that front, she's moved back to her old blog. Of course, it is Everest-area, so I don't imagine updates will be too frequent.

As for me, I'm in Jaipur, Rajasthan--a place I was mostly familiar with as J-Var's study abroad location (Whitman friend and roomie, for those who don't know). I was kind of expecting Delhi II, but arrived to find a much more easy-going, clean, and all-around less chaotic destination--a welcome change. Most of the city's draw seems to lie in its plentiful bazaars, each with a specific focus--textiles, perfumes, bangles, gold and silver smithing, etc. However, not being much of a shopper, I've spent my time with the less commercial touristy sights: palaces, gardens, restaraunts, and the like. So far the highlight is the incredibly bizarre and beautiful astronomer's garden of Jantar Mantar. See the photos if you're interested. It's basically the playground of a brilliant Jaipur-ian astronomer/ologer, replete with astounding, enormous instruments for measuring and tracing the movement of the heavenly bodies. Everything is made of unusual angles and curves, but given their purpose of mirroring the planets and suns, they also come out surprisingly natural. It was a delight to walk around such a surreal landscape and hear about the different purposes of the instruments.

The other recent highlight (since with over a week missing, highlights are the only update I can give) was the Thiksey Gompa (monastery), in Ladakh, which Mon and I were lucky enough to stumble upon. It is a monastery complex situated on a hillside (as they all are in Ladakh--see the pictures to get an idea, but we don't have any actual pictures of Thiksey available to upload--this blog doesn't like the size of pictures of Mon's camera, which was the only one we brought). Temples, a dining hall, a school, and all of the monk's living quarters (at high season there are over 100 monks) are perched on the hill, painted in lovely blues, reds, and yellows, and visible from great distances. We wandered around the place in the afternoon when we got there, and ran into a delightful monk named Taiga who invited us to puja (morning prayer) the next day. We accepted and awoke the next morning attempting to put ourselves in a very quiet, introspective mood, appropriate to meditation. When we arrived in the temple, the sun was just rising over the mountains into the clear blue sky, and not a whisper was spoke by the few monks and visitors then gathered in the prayer hall. Soon the bell was rang for the rest of the monks to come, and they began to gather outside the hall, some contemplatively looking out towards the mountains, some coming inside. However, this gompa houses a school for young monks, and of about 35 monks presently at the gompa, about 20 or so are between the ages of 8 and 12, I'd say. And when these monks began to gather, they started horsing around a bit--pushing each other and laughing. I assumed this was just letting off a little steam before having to sit and concentrate, but was further surprised when they began their morning shout/chant--a wonderful, cheerful collective yell that they continued as everyone entered the prayer hall.

Here, the elder monks sat--and were largely immobile the whole time, other than swaying and eating--and began a low, steady chant, not at all in sync with another--each went at his own tempo--but nevertheless a collective mantra. The boys, on the other hand sat, only to keep up their pushing and shoving, and every so often would get up and rush around the temple. Rather than being distracting, though, it was perfectly in keeping with the ecstatic style of the meditation. During the puja, eager, swift young monks served breakfast (bread and salt-butter tea--the most repulsive drink I have ever had: basically exactly what it sounds like: salt and melted butter), and elder monks would occasionally start to play music with english-horn-like double reeded instruments, low brass horns, large drums suspended between ceiling and ground, and tambourines. It was not melodic, merely rhythmic to accompany the chant. This chaos was not at all like what we expected--and just about the opposite of my previous monastery experience at a Zen monastery on Whidbey Island for a week. But it was also at its heart a very simple practice--celebratory, clarifying, and communal. I can't truly convey the joy and power of it on this blog--writing about it is not an easy task, particularly in the proof-less, quick-entry manner of this blog, but, as I say, it's not really so complex a event. It was a pure kind of ecstasy, that we were honored to have been present for, and it is something we'll keep with us forever.

Not sure where to next (somewhere in Rajasthan--which is my territory for the next three weeks before meeting back up with Mon and the gang for the Annapurna Circuit), but I'll update when I can.

Dave

Quick update

blancharddb — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:19:00 GMT

We just ducked into an internet cafe to check the weather so we can get our tickets back to Delhi before being snowed in for the winter, but they serve such nice milk tea here that we decided it'd be worth a blog update to stay and finish.

We just took an amazing trip to a lake (Pangong Tso) on the boarder with Tibet, during which we crossed over the third highest motorable pass in the world (~17,500 feet!!). We got out and were breathless before we had walked ten feet. And to think we'll be hiking the Annapurna (and Mon and James the Gokyo) trek at 18,000, with packs, and for long streches. Yikes! It's a more gradual ascent, so we should be fine.

The road itself was worth the journey alone. Along steep mountain walls, with little farming villages thousands of feet below, in a rear-wheel drive SUV with no snow tires or chains in the snow, passing military trucks on a narrow little road. Our driver was amazing, and handled it all with apparent ease. The terrain was beautiful on the other side of the pass: gentle valleys with the rugged peaks of the Himalayas peaking out behind. The lake itself was a short but memorable stop (the drive was 8 hours round trip, and we got a late start and wanted to beat the sun back). A delicious Dal and Omlette lunch made by a beautiful old Tibetan woman, and the views toward Tibet over the strikingly blue brackish lake were highlights of the trip so far.

That'll have to do for now. Tea's finished, and we're off to enjoy the beautiful Ladakhi fall day. The poplars are turning yellow and losing their leaves, and the days have grown noticeably colder since we got here. We thought we would miss Fall, but we're being treated to a delightful one here.

Dave and Mon

Gallery: India

blancharddb — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Leh

blancharddb — Fri, 9 Oct 2009 14:24:00 GMT

Sorry for the lack of updates, but, frankly, there has been very little to bring you all up to date. We've been in Leh, by which I largely mean our small hotel room, for the past few days, battling altitude sickness. Today, however, we're both feeling great, but woke to find it snowing outside, clouds obscuring the views of the valley we've been dying to climb up to. Hopefully it will clear up later today.

A brief recap of the past few days:

Mon got in to Delhi, which was a great relief and a joy to see her walking through the arrivals gate, and we spent the next day wandering the town by rickshaw, getting scammed, and overwhelmed by the shear volume of people in the town. Tuesday morning we boarded an early morning flight to Leh, a small town in the far north of India in the Himalayas, and got to see the sun rise over the awesome, jagged, raw peaks of the Himalayas, spreading outward to the horizon on both sides of the planes. It was an amazing flight.

We then came into Leh, in its powerful surrounding territory of mostly bare rocky hills, peaked by gompas and temples, with (we imagine, and hope to confirm soon) amazing views of the valley, and backed by snow capped mountains in the distance. The town itself, however, is anything but barren. Anywhere there is water, beautiful tall poplars (Monica conjectures) have grown up to blow in the wind, and our hostel has irrigated some water for a wonderful flower garden. The town center is charming, with very few hecklers, and a nicely relaxed atmoshpere (so, the exact opposite of Delhi), and a strong emphasis on sustainability--composting toilets, purified water refil stations, water conservation practices, and a women's center are in the town.

Overall there's too much to report on the tiny bit of Leh we have seen, and hopefully we'll have more to report on the grander aspects of the area soon. We joined a group heading out tomorrow to a Lake that boarders Tibet off to the East, and one of the members is a Kiwi who has been to Leh many times, seems to speak the language with fair fluency, and is all too eager to recommend where to go. Today we hike up to the beautiful palace overlooking the town, and the buddhist gompa perilously perched on the steep hill above that. We'll try to get some pictures up soon.

Dave and Mon

Delhi

blancharddb — Sun, 4 Oct 2009 10:55:00 GMT

Woah...

I mean...woah...

I've only been in Delhi for about five hours now, but Ive already forgot half the things that I've done/have happened to me. This is partly from sleep deprivation on an attenuated night from Paris to Delhi, arriving at 4am, but mostly due to the bewildering intensity, pace, and volume of everything going on in this city.

I was going to do a quick blog from Paris, but got frustrated with the French keyboard and gave up. I now regret this, since that city seems ages ago at this point. Needless to say I had a good time, and it was about as inappropriate a prelude to this trip as possible. Clean, mild-mannered (despite it's reputation, and certainly in contrast to Delhi), and rather slow-paced. My best souvenirs are my battered and torn maps of the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay, and my battered and torn feet. I logged many hours staring at paintings and sculptures, a similar amount walking the neighborhoods (all of which that I went to, rather strangely, look as though they were built at the same time, by the same architect: white, three or four stories tall, with beautiful wrought-iron balconies). The Musee Rodin, with its pleasant landscape and powerful sculptures was an unexpected highlight, though there was rarely an hour that I wasn't enjoying myself. I do wish I spoke the language, however, not just to have been able to communicate, but almost moreso to be able to eavesdrop at the cafes. Next time, I suppose...

Delhi will take some digesting. It's certainly unlike any place I've ever been. After wandering the airport looking for a working ATM (all I found were broken ones and staff disinterested in my plight), I finally got a taxi to drive me to our hostel, generously accepting the meagre two euros I had. I remembered in the cab I had some US dollars, so I could pay him fully, but when he found this out, he wanted more than was reasonable. I said I had no more money, then he asked if I had anything else: "Chocolate?" he queried.

"No," I replied, but then I remembered my last remaining Cliff Bar. Wanting to shake him off, I offered it, but he was confused by it. "It's an energy bar," I explained.

"Oh!" his eyes lit up, "For sex?"

"Sure."

He then let me off a couple blocks away from my hotel, located down a difficult-to-navigate street. I stepped out of the taxi, not sure where I was going and not seeing any street signs for help (I still haven't seen a street sign, after a LOT of walking and rick-shawing), I wandered off a dim dawn-lit street full of wandering cows, dogs running wild (keeping their distance from humans, don't worry, Mom), trash burning in piles all over, and many, many people (it only grows more crowded as the day goes on). It's crowded, cramped, dirty, and utterly fascinating; full of many helpful (and many too-helpful) people--I was generously treated to chai in the first half-hour I was here by a complete (but genuine) stranger--and impossible to figure out.

Off I go to try my best. Two days hardly seems like enough, but I'm sure arriving in Ladakh (A mountainous, comparatively sparsely populated Buddhist community) will feel like a welcome relief after only 48 hours. And I'll have more chances to take a stab at this city in the coming months.

Hope you're all well--I'm thinking of you all while I'm here,

Dave

Introduction

blancharddb — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This will be my blog for the next three or so months. It is intended to give a brief summary of my impressions during my travels beyond just, "Hey! This isn't what it's like at Taste of India/in that Wes Anderson movie/in that Decemberists song/in that class I took for distribution requirements!" Odds are the posts will be short and infrequent, but enough to let you know I'm safe and sound in some internet cafe somewhere on the Subcontinent.