Journeying Journals

whistlestop tour down the Yamuna and the Ganges

yaccob1 — Thu, 7 Oct 2010 03:13:00 GMT

Hello everyoney! Well, isn't this nice? I've got a computer with a full set of functioning keys, I've got a swivel chair (okay, my arse is still aching, but that's from the boating yesterday), and I've got a variety of working USB ports to choose from (although the damage wrought by Indian computers on all the stuff I can plug IN to the USB ports has been, I believe, well-documented). What that all means is, we're not in India any more. We're in Nepal, which is the same, but also, at the same, or indeed the different, time, different.

Hmm. Perhaps that wasn't clear.

You'll have to excuse me, I'm a little out of practice. It's been a long time since it's been possible to update much at all, owing to the tortuous nature of internet cafes over the last few weeks, or months. I haven't yet had a chance to thrill you with tales of mudslides and floods and natural disasters in Leh (although my family has received the necessary assurances that I remain at large, largely un-mudslidden); and nor have I talked about Manali, even, which was notable mainly for the nostril-based sensation that one is living in Howard Marks' attic. But I think Jess has been quite assiduous in relaying what I haven't, so for the sake of efficiency (I know how precious your computer time is, peeps!), I'm trying to do what she might not've, in language clearly betraying the fact that I haven't had much recent experience of such. So I'll keep it brief. Basically, we finally covered some bloody distance, after being slightly marooned in the more remote and less roaded corners of the country. In fact, we got all the way to Varanasi, and went to several places on the way...

Chandigarh was ODD. Grid-like. Like a European city but with lots of Indians roaming around in it, insisting on driving and beeping their rickshaws like loons even though the streets are actually wide boulevards, with road markings, premeditated junctions, and no excuse for anyone to be at all non-European about anything. But apart from that it could almost have been a European city. A sticky one, with a business focus that pushes up the price of the accommodation... The room we paid 400rs for was pretty nasty, except apparently if you're any kind of slightly scary creepy-crawly, and the road noise was hellish, despite the impressive expanse of pavement (yes! Pavement! With a kerb!) between us and it. But after so long in the mountains, with the thin air, and the relatively reserved people, and the country ways of life - and so long struggling to not feel a little over-parented by the state turning off the electricity at 10.30 every night - it was curiously refreshing to be back in the sticky bustle of an Indian city, especially one with shops which had real signs and lights on them. There is money in Chandigarh. You can feel it as you're on the way there - it's the capital of Punjab, which is dripping with fertility and lush agricultural land. (It was really exciting to see fields to the horizon from that bus. No mountains at all. And by the evening-time our gazes were plastered to the sky. We hadn't seen the sun go down for a long time. Took us a while to work out what was enrapturing us so, but then we realised it was just the sheer amount of sky we could see. After months in the mountains, you forget it's there, it seems.)

And Chandigarh was so different from probably all the other places we'll see here, I'm glad we saw it. Good to see Indian youths behaving 'normally' (ie with none of what we cannot help but see as 'repression') - y'know, holding hands (with the opposite gender), wearing jeans (yes, girls and boys), and drinking. In bars. Jess and I went to one of these bars with our British friends, who were nice and quite good fun, but one of whom had an allergic reaction to the nuttiness of a Kit-Kat (which wouldn't have been worth the trouble at all - the chocolate is different and wrong here, packed with additives, and way too much sugar, to stop it melting in the tropical heat) - this slowed her down a little, and severely dented her ambitions for the day. Poor sod. But it was different to go to a bar of any kind, let alone one quite this flashy, in a country which so far has shown little sign of being more than fleetingly interested in alcohol. Punjabs are big drinkers, it is said, and there were certainly a lot of booze shops. Chandigarh also provided an interesting day at Nek Chand's Rock Garden, the bizarrely-sculpted denizens of which can be seen squatting or standing sinisterly among my facebook photos, and it provided a stop-off to break the otherwise-24hr journey down to Haridwar.

Haridwar, where the Ganges emerges from the Himalayas, is reckoned to be the holiest place in India. (Look, it's a big country, okay? They're allowed several hundred holiest places.) It's also chaotic, chocka-pilgrimised, and almost entirely Western-tourist-free. Some materialised out of nowhere for the evening flower-floating rituals, but they disappear again soon after. We don't know where they go. In luxury taxis, to out-of-town country hotels with cool jacuzzis, or something, we imagine, with slightly feverish imaginations.

Haridwar was fun, rather confounding our expectations. Not being religiously inclined, we generally find religious ceremony rather fascinating (in fact, we stumbled across real Roman Catholic ceremonies in the Notre Dame last year.. It was INCREDIBLE! There were old men bent double in front of Gothic candles the size of houses, waving portable bonfires and muttering UTTER GIBBERISH! And there were about five hundred people staring like zombies at the source of these incantations, and often, at some pre-arranged signal - or perhaps it was triggered telepathically as part of the whole brain-washing process - the hordes would murmur some kind of mystic response, like zombies... It was one of the most sinister and morbidly fascinating things either of us have ever seen), but because the religious observances here don't seem to be taken that 'seriously' even by adherents to the religion, we didn't expect much about the Ganges to grab our attention.

But in fact, the river itself has enough atmosphere to make Haridwar worthwhile, and the sunset ceremony was intriguing, and quite poignant... Not the photogenic display of lights-on-the-river that we were hoping for - No, despite the neat rows of pilgrims, it was, ultimately, a bit of shambles, and so a lot of the pilgrims sitting down by the edge of the river don't have the patience to wait for the most propitious time, and dispatch their floral offering early, almost, apparently, against their own wills, like a child spoiling his own Christmas surprises. . But very moving... You can see my photo of the woman sitting with a vast grin of anticipation on her wide face, her husband fiddling a bit nervously with his sock-clad feet.. it's really sweet. And Haridwar was back to Real India, for sure, which has an appeal it's difficult to explain. We were enjoying it, which is one reason why it was a bit of a mistake to move on to somewhere we wish had not been so recommended to us...

Nainital was a mistake. It wasn't exactly on the way - it was suposed to be a glorious destination in its own right, a lake ringed by Himalayas, and one of the holiest places in India, incidentally. But even at the bottom of the hill Nainital was at the top of, we were thinking 'er, the weather looks a bit grotty up there, maybe we should get off here, in this place we have no information about whatsoever, are there any affordable hotels here, well, we've kind of missed the chance to get off the bus now anyway, let's hope the clouds clear' - and when we finally got there four hours later, after navigating a couple of mudslides and impromptu rivers, we were thinking 'Hmm. Well maybe it'll clear up by tomorrow'.

But the next day was, in terms of weather, the foulest day I've ever experienced. We couldn't see the lake at all - even from the edge you couldn't see it. There was no electricity, and plenty of generator noise from other hotels. It was dark all day, and it rained more than either of us could understand was possible. Deciding to cut our losses and GET OUT! GET OUT! was easy. Opting to, er, "take a raincheck" on our proposed visit to the delectable Vale of Flowers and the stunning Hem Kund lake, both further up the hills, was also uncomplicated. It didn't even take long to complete our discussions regarding our plan of entering Nepal over the Western border, and travelling the length of the country through rural, undeveloped mountain jungle, on roads which were subject to mudslides and general impassibility at the best of times. We decided not to. We felt our hands were forced rather, but the better-trodden path through territory not subject to natural disasters seemed like the only real option. Time is ticking on now. We need to get out of India because we need to stay out of the country for two months because that's what the stupid new visa laws say so the sooner we leave the sooner we can come back and we only have enough money to last us until February and there's lots of stuff we want to see in India yet if we decide to come back here and not fly somewhere else totally random and different like New Zealand so we need to get out of India As Soon As Possible now. Plus it keeps raining here, which we were warned to expect but which is still not really much of a novelty.

So these were all easy decisions. Executing the first, however, was tough, as we expected. We got up Really Early (I think about six) and after a bit of faffing, playing the ever-diverting Indian Information Game and a lot of waiting, we managed to score a taxi to take us down to the town at the bottom of the hill. Two hours for 550rs, it ended up being. Eight quid. A lot considering our daily budget, but not much considering the fact that it's probably still raining in Nainital now, and we were in a real hurry to get on to the border...

Bareilly was not really a place we wanted to go to. But it's good to go to some places you don't want to go to. That's what travelling is. Otherwise it's just a holiday in a variety of places. We got a bus straight from Haldwani, along with an Indian couple we'd met, who were carried along by our enthusiasm and our appearance of knowing what we're doing (helped, in this case, by the fact that they'd set out from Nainital hours before us, and their journey down the mountain had involved them paying for a taxi to where the road first collapsed, then two guides to carry their massive bags and escort them, hacking and cursing at the undergrowth, down jungly mountainside for a few kilometres, then two more taxis down the road... They felt knackered and rather foolish, while we felt for once that we were as capable as the locals). They were trying to get to Delhi, and Bareilly has the dubious honour of being a transport hub. (Always lovely places, transport hubs. Think about it. Birmingham. Milton Keynes. Didcot Parkway. All gorgeous.) But I digress.

A night in Bareilly was fun, involving keeping the Indians up far later than they wanted while we drank rum and ranted at them. It also included two visits to the railway station. The first was protracted, and we were carrying all our bags and playing the Information Game again, for real this time (the stakes seem much higher at the railway station, the options so multifarious, the system so arcane even the employees can't find anything out). The second, just Jess and I now, was substantially more protracted, partly as a result of us having comprehensively lost The Information Game the previous night. To cut long stories short, we were on Platform One for five hours, not getting on trains to Varanasi, and waiting for a train to Varanasi we believed we had a ticket for. We're finding that, here, you can actually spend five hours trying to find out what train your ticket is for - when it leaves, how to identify it - and still not feel that you have any idea. For the first three hours we couldn't get a single piece of information verified in any way - literally not one datum was repeated by two different sources. Train numbers and times changed all the time. Most of the time, we had to laugh. But time was getting short, and we weren't seeing much of the country from Platform Fucking One anyway. The train we finally got on was a superfast one, which meant that it would only take seven hours! Superb. Except someone on the train told us thirteen. So we knew we'd be getting in at either midnight (which was fine, that's what I'd told the Varanasi hotel on the phone. Organised, huh? Mm. LONGG time on the platform, you see) or at six in the morning, or some time between or after those times. But we managed to get some sleep anyway. Really, this Diazepan stuff is terrific. Mum, you should definitely get some when you have a poorly chest. Seriously, I don't know what it is, but I can't see it ever doing anyone any harm. And at six in the morning on the dot, we arrived in...

Varanasi was India with no traffic, within the crazy confined spaces of the old-town alleyways, and as such was suddenly bearable; plus the place kinda reeks of genuine spirituality, or what counts as spirituality in Hinduism, and has the atmosphere of one of the oldest inhabited settlements on Earth, because that's what it is - a lot of India's excesses can be excused there. Anything else but typical India would just seem inappropriate. We didn't expect to like Varanasi, or even to go there, but Haridwar, a pale imitation of Varanasi, was so interesting we thought we'd give the real thing a crack. And it was on our new route to Nepal, which would go through Sunauli. Go on, check the map, you know you want to. It'll take a minute to bring it up but maps are such good fun once they're loaded, you never regret it, do you?

I don't know what to say about Varanasi. The photos are the only way to convey what the place was like, but some guy in Varanasi sold me a memory card reader which has already malfunctioned, so I can't put the photos up right now, and it seems rude to try to describe it. Narrow spaces, full of people, motorbikes, vast waterbuffalo, cattle butting each other, shitting everywhere, eating the offerings of some shopkeepers as others are whipping and "Hoy!"ing them away - once, shortly after I'd thought 'it really wouldn't be funny if one of these massive animals moved down these alleys at speed for any reason', a massive bull trotting down one of these 3-yd-wide alleyways. Dogs ruling the streets, some dark tunnels down which you fear to tread, full of dark growling shapes and stinking menace; a deep brown river a mile wide, coming straight from Wonka's factory at the speed of Himalayan rapids; temples and holy men everywhere, genuine spirituality hand-in-hand with mercenary money-grabbing and profiteering, holy men trying to sell you hard drugs, Hindu temples where you have to take your shoes off and not cross the line of Ganges water just sprinkled on the floor by that bloke who's now sprawling back on his filthy mattress in the corner and scratching his gonads as he stares at the near-naked Western women on MTV, at top volume as always, and the other guy, is that his son, taking opium in the corner and ignoring his little brother peeing out of the doorway? - shopkeepers occupying tiny spaces with esoteric merchandise and a poster up saying My piCHer CHarg ten RuPPes, and a forty-year-old Korean schoolteacher pointing an SLR at his face from eight inches away; six-year-olds following you around hustling you in rapid English, not a diphthong in sight, rattling rates and tourist-chatter at you incessantly, Where you going? Where you like to go? This burning ghat, this very spess'l p'liss, no money no honey, no worry no curry, this Golden Temple, this very holy, where country you come from? I tink you Israeli, shalom. Shalom. I say 'shalom' because you Israeli, because I tink you Israeli. England nice country! And you very nice muscles, friend, very strong, hey look dis, look dis muscles.. Achaa.. Full power! I tell you you want hash? I take you my shop, you see you like you buy, you no like you no buy, no problem, you like opium? Acid, MA? ("what, you've got a shop?" - our front is finally broken through - "but you're like, six!" Yes, I have shop, you want sari?')

- and then there were the rooftops.

Seeing it from the roof (we had a nice tall hotel - a good tip for Varanasi) was amazing in a different way. Down there, you are instantly lost. Geographically and less tangibly, you're lost in a welter of unnamed streets and images, a mess of Hindi and broken English, up to your ankles and your nostrils in Varanasi. You're accosted every seven seconds (that is a fact; I counted over a period of fifteen minutes and took an average - it's quite normal to have two or three different people trying to guide you at the same time) - it's a whirlwind. But on the roof you get away from it, and you watch the people on their own roofs, and it's a different perspective on the same world, except with monkeys instead of dogs. There's the Ganges, massive, swift, yet opaque and unreadable; there's a smoggy sunset every day, with a gorgeous fat orange orb sinking into the hazy layers of the Varansai skyline; and at 4.30, you hear a wailing. Low, and more tuneful than we've grown to expect. Your ears no sooner identify that 'there's two of them' before four-thirty has finished striking, and you become gradually aware of them all starting, the prayer calls from the hundreds of mosques dotted across the entirety of Varanasi that stretches between you and the horizon on three sides. And - are those birds? Kind of fluttering... But not always going anywhere - that kid's got a kite! So has that one!' And then your eyes tune in and refocus, and the rooftops are full of them, the kite-fliers - men, boys, girls occasionally (women presumably cooking at this time, which is another story - but they probably think the kites are for kids and men anyway) - literally every roof has one or two or three people standing, connected to the sky by a gossamer thread and a sheet of bright plastic, fluttering like an excited butterfly.. And your eyes tune in to the kites at the same rate that your ears tune to the prayer calls - hundreds, thousands, all the way to the horizon, focusing, then re-focusing, until finally you have to disconnect your brain as it persistently tried to focus on these specks or strains, and let your ears and eyes just simply absorb the experience, unable to rationalise the sheer scale and subtlety of these human animal phenomena, taking place against the backdrop of a plump sun sinking into the silty, Gangetic mists.

But, yes, anyway. See the photos. I said I wasn't going to try to put it in words, and then I did anyway, and now I've made a fool of myself. And we have to leave this wretched Internet cafe - it's late here and it's bedtime. We left Varanasi after a week, and now we're in Nepal, and we're On Holiday. So I should have time to come and explain whether Nepal is different or not quite soon..

* * * * *

As an interesting postscript for those of you aware of the many deaths in the heatwave while we were in Rajasthan, and of the appalling weather that followed us up into the mountains for months, and of the cloudburst and mudslides and subsequent loss of life in Leh, and of the fact that by going to Leh and causing the Indus to be flooded we were indirectly responsible for the displacement of eight million in Pakistan, it's worth pointing out that two days after we left Punjab the Yamuna burst its banks about a hundred km downriver from where we stayed; that Nainital's roads were all totally closed by the time we got there, and six people had drowned by the time we left; and that Bareilly suffered from floods across half the county and sixty people are still missing, presumed dead. In short, our mere presence is enough to cause bizarre weather extremes and massive loss of life, almost everywhere we go.

So those of you who are actively missing us, you might want to re-think that. We'll soon be setting up what I think will be a very profitable website, telling people where we're planning to go next, called avoidthefilth.com. More on that soon. Until then, I leave you comforted with the thought that Pokhara is extremely nice indeed; I had my first ever steak the other day, and had my third yesterday, and some buffalo for lunch; and I'm starting to look more like my normal beefy self. I'm sure everyone is heartily relieved ;-)

I have no idea what's going on in the UK at the moment. Some of your athletes seem to have bravely decided to come over to these parts, risking Delhi (that sentence was a lot longer, but then I took out a lot and just put 'Delhi'). My girlfriend's father has replaced his 'normal' facebook face with that of Margaret Thatcher. Anna is living in Brighton with The Mountain Firework Company. Nick has just casually announced that he and Eli are not only having another baby, but that they're having another baby in a couple of months, and he was just waiting for the right moment to tell me in person. (Congratulations Nick'n'Eli! Let us know the name when you've got one! Any child-rearing advice required, ask willatschool, I understand he's having plenty of experience of it all at the moment) James, who Jess used to go out with, has reportedly been working for Quantum, an obscure and frankly horrific sales agency in Reading where, unbelievably, I also worked, eleven years ago. "They like people who can chat shit", was James' accurate-enough interpretation of the co-incidence. ("Honey", I said, "if you have a type, you really do not want it to be the Quantum type...") Rachel is said to be considering leaving normal office life and regaining the 'life' side of the work-life balance with a bit of tefling, which I don't want to encourage too much because I already get a bit dull with all my evangelising. None of my younger siblings are, as far as I can establish, really doing anything at all, but they seem to be getting away with it. I think Jonathan has left the Hamilton's sofa now, so they must have literally no available surfaces left to make him paint - I'm not sure where he's living now (Chris? Dan? Any ideas?) Emily is going to the Deep South with Mr Tim, fulfilling a life-long dream of going to the place on Earth she will hate more than anywhere else. Lou and Jur seem to be getting a bit fed up of Oxford (so many crucial departures recently...) - even the typically-mild-mannered Eagle has been heard getting a bit short of temper... but I'm sure it's a passing phase, and will last only as long as British summers are short and a bit pointless. Minno is in Sweden again, ours not to reason why. (Can I say 'his university's to reason why?' Hmm...) How are Flora and Maxine getting along? How is Chrismann's crazy high-flying (or low-swimming) job progressing? Does Alice still want us to buy her lots of Indianesque produce for her market stall, or was that a mere caprice? Has Kate had a visit from the MirMobile yet? What about Dan? He's a bit quiet... And have Jay and Woody and Chrismann all found each other on facebook and swapped their lunatic musics yet? Because they really ought to. And Ady should play too, if he promises not to be too sniffy (you alright old chap?) Sam, I've been looking for that Scrabble thing on facebook but I don't understand it. Am I utterly thick? And Erika is probably getting excited about coming over here to see us! You'll love it here, Erik. There's boats and a big lake! :-) Actually, now I feel bad for Phil. He'd have some 'improvements' to make to these simple offerings, that's for sure.

Hope you're all sound and well, anyway. It's been six months away from the UK for me now, which is, you'll all be trivially fascinated to hear, a personal record.

Man, am I going to drink a lot of Adnams when I get back. (I did start that idea by intending to talk about how much I miss everyone, but then the more concrete thought of real ale distracted me. But I miss people, as well)

lots and lots of love from Nepal
Jakex

(which is my new, space-comic-villain name. "Jakex". Cool, huh?)

JAKE 'XENOPHOBIC' SHOCK!! -full debate

yaccob1 — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:14:00 GMT

Hello all! First of all, thank you! I now know there is an 'all' to address, because the ting has a little ting saying how many people have read the blog, and it's more than the paltry 'six' I was expecting. (SO why is no-one posting any comments? I deal with them really gently, honest I do)

I'm in Manali now. And for reasons I shall leave to your imagination, I have nothing to report. (Actually, that's not true, I have this to report; it's a bit cloudy and everywhere stinks of ganja. Now, I have nothing to report.) So instead, I have something different with which to tickle your literacy. Several of my readers (aw that was WICKED calling them 'my readers' then! I've ALWAYS wanted to do that!) - several of my readers have been clamouring (and for once, unusually, I use no hyperbole) to hear the substance of my emailed discussion with the mysterious 'ex-acquaintance', who was disconcerted by the apparent Complete Lack Of Mindless Enthusiasm in my epistles. Seeing as it's that or I describe my tummy bug and the consistency of my stools over the last week or so, I reckon that's a good idea. Here it is, or they are, all the messages copied and pasted faithfully, so you can make up your own minds as to the eternal question; Bigoted? Snide? Or just really fucking negative?

_{this was the original comment - not discreetly sent as an email, not discreetly posted on my private facebook page, but left right there on my blog for weeks before I noticed it}
STEVEN
It might be just me, mate, but I prefer to read about people writing about how they had good times than xenophobic sneering.

_{I found him on facebook, partly to work out who he was, then sent him this}
JAKE
Oh, Steven. Would I spend my entire working day each day with foreign people if I was xenophobic? Would I spend years abroad in Italy, Spain, South America and South-East Asia if I was xenophobic?

More to the point, if I don't like Brussel sprouts, does that mean I dislike food? No.

If I marvel at the way that someone can sell ten rupees bottles of water for fifteen hours a day and still not know that a hundred-rupee note is going to require ninety rupees change in exchange for a bottle of water, does that mean I am afraid of foreign things? I don't think so. I'm quite capable of sneering at someone being stupid (as I am doing now) without it indicating any degree of prejudice whatsoever.

It's also worth pointing out that I write for a specific audience - people I know have the intelligence to distinguish 'fact' from 'opinion' and 'entertainment'; who know me and who know what to expect, who read it to be entertained. I'm not sure why you're reading it. Do I know you? Did we, like, play football together once at school or something?!

This is on my blog now if you want to post an answer there ;-)

STEVEN
Whether you are or not (xenophobic) has no real bearing on how your writing comes across. That's the beauty of literary control.

No I never did know you very well, and perhaps it was wrong of me to assume anything of you, but I found your perspective of India suprisingly lacking and worryingly close to '"But how awful, there's nowhere to plug my hair-dryer in."

Still not as bad as the Europeans you meet in India who spend hours talking about Karma and Shaman before finally revealing they work in a bank. Spiritual indeed.

I had it in my head that you would be less affected by the environment than you seem. Mostly I'm just jealous that I'm not there again, but I'll soon be in Colombia where there are some delightful imperfections to be appreciated also.

Anyway, I'll leave your blog be. No offence intended and I take the point that I might 'miss the joke'. Enjoy the rest of your journey.

STEVEN
Just as a side-note. Xenophobia can be the hatred, as well as fear of foreigners and a phobia can indeed apply singularly. Someone who hates Germans (or Indians) but likes all other nationalities is still Xenophobic by definition. I happen to know a few living in foreign countries.

And I'm sure they know full well that you are supposed to get 10 rupees change despite being hideously undereducated. Perhaps they just hoped a relatively rich westerner could spare 7p? The intensity of India does make it hard at times though.

Where did you go in South America? I love the continent and am planning to move there permanently.

JAKE
Oh come on, please... I'm going to do this in the wrong order, but I'm definitely going to do it, and more comprehensively than last time.

Firstly

I've been a teacher for quite a few years now. If I marvel at someone's extraordinary inability to add multiples of ten despite the evidence which suggests that they do nothing else fourteen hours a day, then it's because they genuinely can't, not because they would prefer not to give me change. I don't need to explain that to people that know me, because they know I'm not a complete idiot. Just as I don't need to explain repeatedly that 'I'm having a great time', because people that know me already know that, the same way they know that Jess and I have been planning this trip for three years, or in my case since I came back from South America seven years ago. They also know that I hope to do some volunteering at some point here; and they know that I I do, of course, spread my money around judiciously, including plenty to charity, beggars, and urchins who look cute enough to augment my photo essays. So why would I labour the point? It's not funny. It's self-aggrandising. Far better to parody myself as the slightly stuffy, demanding, supercilious, miserable Englishman Abroad that I know I could be if I wasn't more self-aware, and didn't drive myself out of the country and the comfort zone as regularly as possible.

(Just as a little test to see if you're learning - sorry for being didactic, it's a job and a hobby - did you spot the point at which the previous paragraph briefly sacrificed banal truth for entertaining parody? If so, we're making progress. Doesn't seem so bad once you know who I'm mocking, eh?)

***

The issue we've had is perhaps one of misunderstanding. As I said, I'm writing to people I know. There are only about twenty-five people who I've advertised that page to. You're the only one reading it who I've not invited to, as far as I know, and as a matter of fact. They start life as emails originally, and only get posted to the blog page because I find the attached map gizmo quite handy. If you'd seen all that in an email (which you'd be unlikely to, because I wouldn't expect anyone who DOESN'T know me to find it at all interesting or entertaining - it is, after all, a record of MY experiences of India), you would, I genuinely hope, have treated it with the courtesy of a personal communication from someone you know. Seeing it on a more commercial-looking website, with glossy presentation and impersonal graphics, puts it in a different context - the context of something published, and therefore in the public domain.

This is how I'm going to square with myself the idea of my not hating you. I also console myself with the thought that it was late, and that you may have drinking, and that you may have just posted comments on the blogs of, say, Tory child-abusers or evangelical morons, the venting of your ill-considered spleen upon which I would heartily approve of, and which may have conceivably, and worthily, got you all fired up. In the meantime, I apologise for my part in the misunderstanding as well; I will try to make myself qualify and restrict my graffiti-scrawled generalisations in future, even if the wall I am desecrating is only my own - other people may be able to see it.

(What you must be realising by now is that I write for the fun of the construction, and exaggerate for the thrill of the hyperbole. Look at the pictures, as all the blog readers are supposed to do - they make it clear how much I love it all. If I went on about it in prose as well that would be like laying it on too thick. And personally, and maybe this is an issue of mine alone - personally, I don't want to hear someone gushing inanely about how wonderful everything is. If I'm stuck in England, I'm unlikely to persistently make myself feel slightly sick with jealousy reading how someone else is having a great time.)

***

Secondly

Xenophobia frequently, in modern usage, incorporates hatred, I'm fully aware; but the best proof of my point is your own false argument. Someone who hates Germans isn't xenophobic. He's Germanophobic. A xenophobe is someone who hates foreigners indiscriminately. Rightly or wrongly, I do nothing indiscriminately. (I hate the idea. It smacks of inaccuracy and reductionism. I can't even hear someone say something as innocent as 'I love the continent' without something in me shuddering and muttering "how inane. How annoying. What empty, meaningless words. How much of 'the continent' has he seen?")

More importantly, the implication is, moreover, that a xenophobe DOESN'T hate things which are NOT strange or foreign. More importantly than anything else, those that know me know that I am as critical of myself, and the country and cretins around me, as I am of anything elsewhere. Then again, most of them also know better than to argue semantics with language teachers. But still).

The problem in Rajasthan, as you must surely have encountered if you have been there, goes beyond lack of education. I've not only met but TAUGHT hundreds of people without education, or with one of the wide array of educations that the world can offer, and I've never encountered such a high proportion of people so almost apparently retarded as I did in Rajasthan. The only comparison I can offer is South Mexico, where only the women make eye-contact; the men have nothing to offer except vacant stares. I won't be going back there either, because, although it's not their fault, I prefer to spend time around people I can interact with in a way I can understand and enjoy. Should I keep this a secret? Will anyone suffer as a result of my discussing my experiences? or will they suffer more if I treat the subject with a light-heartedness it probably doesn't deserve? It seems unlikely.

But, to hell with it, I'm taking the chance. Abuse me if you like, but you asked about South America, and here come some generalisations based on personal experience. I don't recommend South Mexico. But that's technically off your continent anyway...
Rio was very difficult to leave because I was always hung over- quite pricy but great fun. Gorgeous natural setting which never wears off, but a bit theme-parky after a while. The Amazon was quite a laugh. Capybara are globally under-rated, and baby armadillos don't get enough publicity either. Argentina was a fortnight of rain, but I think that was bad luck. Buenos Aires was still fantastic, my favourite city of the trip, I reckon. Not so aesthetically spectacular as Rio, but more real, a self-consciously arty feel, plenty of lovely Argentinians who seemed to offer more, over time, than Brazilians, who are very friendly but often not given to looking beneath the surface of things; the South American USA, almost. Chileans are, in my experience, clear-thinking, open-minded and interesting, as are Argentinians. Peruvians I know little about - I have taught very few of them over the years - but the ones I met there I loved; peasants and farmers of surpassing friendliness, responsiveness and simplicity, city-dwellers not so warm but also with an unusual dignity to accompany the noble features inherited from the indigenous tribes. Bolivia has a great reputation, but it was too easy to compare it to Peru, and the people seemed less giving, and the place as a whole seemed dirtier. Guatemala kinda sucked except for Tikal which was the best place I've ever been to - but that's out of your remit again. Colombia I never visited (bit dodgy at the time) but, with the exception of the Venezuelans, the many, many students I've had have been about my favourites. Only the Thais and the Vietnamese are friendlier than Venezuelans and Colombians. They're just great. Don't think I've ever met one I didn't like. Supposed to be a nice place too...

But this is getting out of hand. You've been a good sport, Steve, and I have, eventually, enjoyed this vitriolic correspondence, although I don't mind telling you that I was pretty fucked off by the inception of it. I hope I come out of this with your opinion of me (formed God-knows how long ago) more-or-less intact, while for my part I can assure you that I can tell from here, as it were, that you're not dull at all. And I feel that's about the nicest thing I can say to anyone. Y espero que tienes unos meses bienes en 'Locombia' - si encuentras alguien qui tue clases en oxford, pregunta si cognesce un profe que se llama

"Jake"

STEVEN

Haha. Good man. Now THAT is what I call writing. I fear, through greater insight, that you may indeed be a man after my own heart. I must confess that despite my previous sobriety, I am quite unqualified to say the same now, so I will keep my response brief.

Like I said, I didn't intend any offense, and I could, if I cared, take issues with some of what you say. But then I would be venturing into the realms of perspicacity - if I haven't already.

Anyway, zooming out from the discourse that has already taken place - my initial questioning of you was clearly derived from an expectation which I must confess you have more than fulfilled. That, I think, you can take as a compliment.

Admittedly there might have been a better way to insight conversation with you - if that was what I unknowingly intended - but nevertheless I'm glad of your correspondence.

Ferrers can't have been that bad after all. If I haven't rubbed you up too much in the wrong way already I'd quite like to communicate with you again as you are obviously as smart as I imagined you to be (my mum telling me that you had the nerve to say 'No, It didn't say Mr Terret has a small prick, it said he IS a small prick' sticks in my mind as comical/arrogant genius).

I'm not retracting my initial remarks - your committed application of rebuttal as much as proves their worth - and I think we might ultimately still be in disagreement. But I think in a world where so many views differ so massively from my own, certain things ought to be overlooked in favor of building more productive bridges between minds which concur more than not.

All intellectual garble aside, I think we might share a sharpness of mind and tongue.

What have you been teaching? And good luck in the rest of your travels.

Steve

JAKE

English.

In Other Responses - how the hell did your mum know about THAT?!?!? (the sergeant found it funny. My mum didn't)

"my committed application of rebuttal as much as proves their worth" - such a good phrase i hardly have the heart to disagree. Let's agree the mistake was mine for writing as if to people I know, rather than agree that I'm an ignorant racist, though, eh?

Jake

STEVEN

Cool. I'm planning on teaching English in South America at the moment.

I'm not sure how my mum knew that but I remember her telling me at the time and thinking it was pretty sharp.

I never did think you were racist (I think there were 6 non-racists who went to Ferrers in total). I get now that it doesn't reflect your true sentiments, so apologies for being so pushy and argumentative. I really should mind my own business but I'm afraid it seems not to be in my nature!

STEVEN
Cool. I'm planning on teaching English in South America at the moment.

I'm not sure how my mum knew that but I remember her telling me at the time and thinking it was pretty sharp.

I never did think you were racist (I think there were 6 non-racists who went to Ferrers in total). I get now that it doesn't reflect your true sentiments, so apologies for being so pushy and argumentative. I really should mind my own business but I'm afraid it seems not to be in my nature!

****************

I think that's it.

I see next to me Jess is squirreling away (not beavering away. Distinctly not beavering) at her own, rather more conventional update. So I will leave you in her capable hands. Just to say, learning from my mistakes, I have sifted through the email list to make sure I don't invite people who don't understand me to read my blog and pass arbitrary judgements upon me afterwards. If you're still being invited to read this and you're getting offended, or indeed never finding it amusing, it's a mistake. I'm sorry. Please feel really, really free to go away and not read it again, in the same way that Daily Mail readers who write in to Ofcom are presumably free to change their channel, or even not watch the TV at all. Thank you SO much.

(Sorry getting hungry got to go love you all)

er...lists?

yaccob1 — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:45:00 GMT

Well, hello, and welcome to a slightly different edition of My Egotistical Drivel. You've missed (probably) a bit of excitement here - an acquaintance from my distant past found my last entry in particular a source of some misunderstanding, and my energies have been briefly diverted to pursuing his field of enquiry, which was fun! Fun mostly because he was actually replying to me, therefore simulating the idea of 'society' a bit better than this blog thing. Basically, he was nonplussed by my negativity - not having had anything to do with me since I was young, and presumably less realistic (in fact, that would be when I still thought people who went out with each other were doing so as a precursor to marriage, and that I would one day be Prime Minister), he didn't realise just how fair and unbiased my view of humanity is, and interpreted it as xenophobia. (Since then I've thought of a better word - anthrophobia. Far more accurate, and not politically incorrect at all, if the extant word 'cynical' doesn't already fit the bill.) If anyone is interested please let me know, as I did transfer the discussion to more neutral, less public ground. I like to keep my blog clean.

I haven't done anything anyway, I'm afraid. Jess and I have sat in this place called Dharamkot for weeks now... Eating falafel (soon I'll put a lovely photo of Jess enjoying her daily falafel plate on facebook. Something to look forward to there!), playing chess, trying to avoid the militant hippies that the place is teeming with (we did actually hear an American lady telling her humous-quaffing companions that she had 'been so close to really achieving enlightenment at Hum Meditation that morning'), occasionally going for a clamber. Again, clambering is more fully lauded on facebook. I know, it's stupid, but although it is EVIL it has got photo uploading worked out pretty well.

The upshot of our inertia is that I've had little to write about, and have felt, moreover, a bit too dull in the head. The pressure of the increasingly 'head-in-a-bag' climate, combined with the medicine we've been taking to cure us of Having Motivation, makes sitting in really slow internet cafes much less attractive. But now we're waiting for a ten-hour bus to Manali, a journey which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful in the world. (The bus, however, leaves at 9pm and arrives at 7am, therefore carefully eliminating daylight from its modus operandi. There was no other option. I'm sure there will be still be some views available when we get there.) I've been thinking about what people really need to know, what I'D want to know in your position, and I've come up with the following glittering ideas of rare perception;

what are jess and jake WEARING every day?

We posted our jeans back after five days in Rajasthan, when it was impossible to imagine how anyone could possibly wear denim on this planet. Then we got here and it got dark and we got cold and all the cool young Tibetan kids are wearing jeans and we missed our jeans. But we're managing without. I have had to buy a cheap, sweaty, rubberised waterproof smock which comes down to my knees but only down to my elbows (I look like a large duck with its legs coming out the sides), but apart from that and a pair of rather attractive stripey trousers, which the locals would certainly class as 'pajamas' but which still look like M&S chinos compared to what the other travellers are wearing - apart from these limited excursions into the world of Himalayan handicrafts, all the experimentation has been Jess's. (She has this habit of doing really remarkably selfless things - going on missions to the ATM, spoiling me rotten for a while, suggesting that I have another beer, and then waiting for me to compensate by 'letting her' buy herself something. (That's how she does it, honestly - I never stop her doing anything, but Jess seems to need to personalise her common sense and notion of responsibility.) So Jess has stopped wearing the Real Indian clothes she bought - it's less conservative up here than on the plains - and now wears soft baggy trousers, or her gorgeous Kashmir cotton skirt, and one or several of the ubiquitous long-sleeved tops she's managed to locate in every single country she's ever been to. I have started to wear more utilitarian clothes (grey active-type trousers, a rather highly-specified NorthFace fleece I've had to buy as a replacement), because we've had to come back to town, among the traffic and the filth, in order to go to hospital with my little jar of unhygienic offering, my sacrifice to the Tibetan Tummy Laboratory.

do Jake and Jess ever go anywhere at the moment?

Ooh, yeah, we did something then. We went all the way up to Triun, which is nearly at the snow line, and we stayed in proper shack-like rusticity for a night. Still slept surrounded by young drunk Punjabis throwing rum around and shouting and playing several different musics on several different tinny-bastard phones at the same time, but we're getting used to our extraordinary luck - apart from the people in the ONLY OTHER HUT ON THE WHOLE GODDAMN MOUNTAIN, it was truly remote, and it was truly lovely. And then I woke up the next day doubled up in agony, knew pretty fast that I was horribly ill, and gradually came to terms with the fact that I had no option but to stagger, cramping and vomiting, all the way down the mountain. So that was a bit rubbish for both of us, especially since when we were up there the clouds only parted for a minute or two. But I did it though. Amazing what you do when you have to.

So we also went to the hospital. And it was Tibetan and clean and nice, with views of green valleys, and the doctor was better in all terms than any doctor I've had in the UK for as long as I can remember. This leads me nicely to my next list.

what drugs are Jess and Jake taking at the moment?

Well, this has just got a lot more exciting. Back in Udaipur I mentioned to a guy from whom Jess was buying loo-roll that I was having problems sleeping, preparatory to inquiring whether ear-plugs exist in India. He gave me something called 'diazepam' which we established in imperfect English was a bit like Horlicks. I found it very helpful, in that I could then sleep well and feel fine the next day, and had no need for the Valium which all the other travellers are getting excited about (yeah, I know, it's strange, I always thought it had quite the opposite effect!) No other pharmacy would give me any - and they wouldnt' give me any Valium either. I have been slightly embarrassed to find out, courtesy of (who else?) Minno, that diazepam IS valium, and that probably the reason nobody would give me any of this stuff under the counter was because when I was talking to these pharmacists I didn't sound like I had any idea what I was talking about.

My Tibetan friend at the hospital gave me some though. He also gave me thirty huge yellow antibiotic pills to take, in recognition of my heroic faecal sacrifice and my telling him that I have been farting excessively and symphonically ("like an orchestra", I explained to him helpfully) for about three weeks. It cost, in total, eighty p. Now I have lots of pills. Jess and I also take something called Acidopholus. It's like yoghurt in tablet form. I think. Each one can make five million good bacteria cities in your tummy. I think. It's to stop us getting the bugs we've got. (Jess has them too; they'll wait til she's a bit run-down then POUNCE! Pounce on her colon.)

I only used one Nicotine patch when we got here, because I quickly discovered that they are as addictive than breathing and twice as easy. Jess only used her weird little inhaler thing once, I think basically because no matter how hard she sucked it didn't provide her with any smoke whatsoever. Jess has some of her own pills to take (but that's her story), plus we sometimes have to eat painkillers to reward our brains for tolerating the isobars, plus of course we're cooking up ketamine and heroin from the dodgy pharmacies and injecting each other in the roof of the mouth every morning after breakfast. (Jess says I shouldn't mention that, but I think it'll be okay. I think everyone has probably learned by now that they shouldn't trust a word I say and that I consider nonsense a lot more interesting than bare information.)

Now I really have to go, though. Jess is capable of spending an utterly darling amount of time on the laborious inscription of postcards with tiny, beautiful script, but I think I might be stretching my allowance rather - she's got the bags so she ain't going anywhere, and it's probably my turn to go and bag-sit now.

Mentally wish us luck for the journey tonight (at ten hours, it's not the longest, but it's the first one in the dark, along a road that bus drivers plunge off as a regional pastime), just as we mentally curse all those of you in the UK for getting the first proper spell of hot weather since 2006, while we, on 'holiday', get thoroughly drenched on a daily basis.

Next time, I intend to list 'things I like about India' and 'things I don't like about India'. It's going to be AWESOME!

Yearning for yall tragically,

Dharmkot (DA rum kott)

yaccob1 — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:54:00 GMT

Well, in answer to your comments and questions; I write this to entertain, and I personally am far more entertained, in the reading and writing, by stories of people being alienated and critical, than I am by stories of people 'having a great time! Everything's so cool here! My energies are really aligned with the chakras of this country, and I never want to leave - and the clothes are so cool, you MUST see these yak-fur slippers I bought for less than the price of a coffee in Starbucks...'

We chose India because it's huge and thoroughly different from what we are used to (I'm familiar with much of Europe and most of Latin America, but have never gone East); yet we did know that it can offer us cracking vegetarian fare at prices that meant we could afford to stay away for a really long time. I'm afraid if we were wrong about anything, it was about how long it take us to get used to it here - we researched so thoroughly, and spoke to so many people who had been here, and then we talked about it for a year or more before we came (didn't we, darling?) so that there was really nothing in the way of novelty about any of it. It was like moving in with someone you already know as a friend - sometimes it's better to know nothing whatsoever of a housemate before you start spending your life together.

So instead of it taking a month or more to get used to it here, and not really liking it until then, I just liked it immediately, and then, er, well, kind of got bored of it really. What we expected to see as challenges quickly became irritations; what we expected to be eye-opening has mostly just been a nuisance. That's not to say we don't like it - it's a huge place and there's lots to offer, it's all different, we've hardly scraped the surface of the geography yet - but I've been to quite a few places, and I work in an environment full of people from nearly every country in the world, and the people we encountered in our first month or so here were mostly a bit disappointing.

We had a significant conversation with a French guy and his Taiwanese girlfriend, who are travelling around the entirety of Asia over a couple of years (pro photo journalists), and at some point we said 'so was Cambodia nice?' and she said 'Well, it's always just nice to get out India. It's just not that so annoying in Cambodia' and this baffled us completely. We were only three weeks into our quest, and still being very tolerant and accepting of this new society. We said' Er, how do you mean, annoying?' We thought she was being funny. And she said, 'they don't stare that so rude - I mean, they still interested, you still exciting new sight, but they not horrible about it. And the cars don't just all hooting, the all time. And the people in the hotels, they clean sometime.' And we laughed and identified with her, and commiserated, and didn't take her too seriously, and then picked our way back through the litter-strewn, excrement-covered streets, trying to ignore the constant hooting and unbelievably foul smoke of the autos, fended off horrible oily little men treating Jess as though we are all still tree-dwelling primates, failed to get any water, hot or cold, out of our filthy hotel bathroom, and lay awake trying to convince ourselves that if this was our country we'd be the same - that it probably just wasn't possible to keep things clean or provide proper services for more than a couple of hours a day, that they probably just have too many people to organise any refuse collection method beyond 'not running over cows if they're eating rubbish'.

And then we went to Delhi. Which was the epitome of hideousness in every way. (Woody's great-uncle, who designed much of it, would be spinning in his grave, except if he's buried there he's probably been ungratefully disinterred to make space for another massive hole in the ground.) Except that we stayed just outside Delhi. Where the Tibetans have set up Majnu Ka Tilla, their home.

And their home is clean, with no open sewers, no litter, no rubbish, no cows in the street, and therefore a less rich, less fetid smell. The women and girls are allowed to wear T-shirts without being treated like imported sex slaves, because all the men there are Tibetan, and they're not so rude. There is no hooting because it is closed to traffic, and it backs onto a river, with tiny patchwork fields bordering it, littered with nothing but poor agricultural children picking crops, who, despite clearly not being at all wealthy, are happy and clean with lively eyes. And our hotel was spotless, with friendly staff, and when we asked people questions they gave us information which was fundamentally correct. And best of all, we were seen as people, not as white-skinned ATMs which, approached in the right way, might just start spewing rupees out onto the street. Which, without wanting to labour the point, was nice, after a month in Rajahstan.

And although I'd like to imply that this was exceptional in terms of clarity, we are now up near Dharmsala, after a few days in Shimla ('India's favourite hill station' populated by the cream of Indian society, wealthy Indians on holiday, parading up and down the main pedestrian drag like Italians on a Sunday afternoon (not quite going to Italian lengths of Armanifying and accessorising their children and, God forbid, their fucking DOGS, but still certainly faring la vasca) in their nicest shirts. Still staring. And in Mandi (anyone got any Mandi? Probably not, if our impressions of the town were correct), which was a nondescript little town where Jess had already had to shout at someone to make him leave her alone before she even took her bag off. And even when we got to McLeodganj, which is infinitely more chilled than Dharmsala, which is already more peaceful and civilised than down on the baking dusty plains, it was relaxing (because it's where the Tibetans all live, along with the exiled Dalai Lama government), but it was still a bit popular with Indian tourists, and all the taxi drivers are Indian, which means that the cute, narrow little streets are jammed with hooting traffic all day long. So we left.

And now, I'm sorry; this will be a bit dull. Because I love where we are now. We have a hostel half-way up a mountain for 200 rupees a night, no hot water, no furniture, and barely any mattress (we had to move next door because our first room was rather comprehensively furnished with budbugs, which weren't great for storage but which saved Jess the need to consider henna or any other form of personal body decoration. TWO HUNDRED BITES, she had when we stopped counting. Poor itchy little sweetie went all weird with all the crawliness of it. She'll listen to me next time, when I say, 'I think we've got bedbugs' and suggest sleeping with rather more clothes on) - but we both love it. We've been here eight days already, and we are officially On Holiday. Eating four meals a day, popping down to the village for occasional ninety-p bottles of rum, sitting around in virtually-free little humus-cafes with hippies playing chess and cards and watching the world cup, enjoying the various benefits of the local foliage, planning our walks to waterfalls and round mountains to try and avoid the four or five thunderstorms a day, and going days without seeing a wheel of any description let alone a car, - this is what we came to India for. Not for the Indians, but for the India. We are finding the people in the mountains to be far more pleasant to be with - less rude, more considerate, and simply less totally incompetent. Some of them can add up, even. We've also made some friends, Ed and Liona, who are so similar to us in some ways it's a bit spooky. We're going to go up to Triund, rent a tent, stay up there for a night and go and find the snow line the day after. That's going to be some proper trekking, and it's going to be great.

Not so much fun to read about though, eh?!

When I come back to the machines, I'll talk about Agra. That'll be far more interesting. It was flippin GRIM there. But now I'm going to have to log off to try and upload some photos. It's nice being away from the traffic in this semi-village, but the general level of rusticity is such that it's not the best place to accomplish things on the internet...

Missing everybody (expecially Rich Chard, who looks a bit like Ed, and who we are therefore reminded of frequently, and Chrismann, because Ed has just left himself with a seventies Mexican' tash which Chris would greatly appreciate). Cheers for staying in touch, especially Steve and Ingrid (hello Ingrid! Hope to meet you when we get back, and show you that in real life I'm not actually cynical at all) and Jur and Minno, and nice photo Richking. You didn't have to wear all the clothes at the same time, you know, but I'm flattered!

All the best (thunder! Lightning!) and 'Good Luck England's No-Hopers' in the game tomorrow,

Jake xxx

Fourth Entry - yeah, i know, there's two missing. I'm on holiday, gimme a break

yaccob1 — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:32:00 GMT

BUNDI / JAIPUR

We're in Jaipur now. Supposed to be pink, but that's overstating the case slightly; there are some buildings which are salmony in some lights, and a nice gate or two. Other than that, it's just another foreign city, smellier than some but less smelly than others. Novelty of Rajastan starting to wear off a bit now. The cost of the aircon we need to get any sleep is starting to feel a bit expensive, we've been in the provinces lately (boars joining the cows and goats wandering the streets) and Jess was getting some unwelcome attention. Some staring is understandable, lewd propositions from disgusting little men, in any language, ("You want have sex-sex?") are less so. 'Snot dangerous, they all act like children, and Jess herself could probably physically master them without issue, but it's wearing a bit thin for her now, and it does make me feel a bit fighty. They just run away as soon as I invite them to repeat themselves, unfortunately. But we're looking forward to the mountains, and she's looking forward to not having to cover herself up in fifty-degree temperatures - record-breaking heat all over India, no water in the whole state, yada yada yada. Still haven';t been to "the bloody Taj Mahal", as we've started calling it... It really is NOT on the way, and it means we've had to come here to this city and go to Delhi afterwards - which we'd been trying like hell to avoid (or trying to avoid like hell) - and it'd better be bloody good.

But apparently it is. I mean, absolutely everyone agrees. So we kind of have to go there. Tomorrow, maybe. Or we might go to some honey-coloured fort in a little village called Amber. It's nice not knowing.

The journeys place-to-place have been fairly uneventful, if you can count five hours' worth of constant near-misses uneventful. The buses are the most powerful vehicles on the roads, occupying top place in a hierarchy that includes ninety-year-old men pushing melon-laden hand-carts, auto-rickshaws, mopeds, motorbikes, trucks, hilariously over-encumbered lorries, and very occasional cars which make dad's old 'Nipper' look like a Lamborghini. As such, their mode d'emploi is to hurtle down the middle of the road, hooting derangedly (the vehicles all have hoots that get louder and more complex according to their engine size, and subsequent place in the hierarchy. Ours sounded a bit like the chorus from 'Here Come The Girls' - doop-doop-dooba-doopa-doop-doop), and hoping that other road users are sensible enough to get out of the way. Unfortunately, they're all doing the same thing to the vehicles beneath them in the hierarchy, so it does feel a bit Fucking Terrifying.

Compared to that last bus journey, the train was pretty relaxing. (Lonely Planet quote; "With literally thousands of deaths per year, the Indian railway is by some distance the most dangerous rail network on Earth. However, it is still immeasurably safer than the buses.") Considering our train never got above thirty miles an hour, and must have, if you include stopping times, averaged about the speed of a leisurely jog, it's difficult to see how any train could have a serious accident. Unless one of the buses assaulted it. No, the issue with the train was the staring...

Usually, on the street, you're going somewhere, even if your stalker is intent on following you. You don't get stared at by the same person or people for that long. The group of lads treating us like zoo animals, pointing when one of us moved, nudging each other when we stood up, and continuously pointing mobile phone cameras at us did get a little bit shouted-at after a couple of hours... That was on the way to Bundi, the most rural place we've seen yet, and the first time our patience was tested. In Bundi it got worse, as I've implied, but all it has taken so far is a stern or slightly authoritative word and hassle has simply melted away.

And Bundi was nice, apart from all the attention, normally shared out between a hundred or more tourists, but this time shared out only between us and a guy from Surrey called Jordan, because we're the only people bonkers enough to be in Rajastan in this weather. I'll try and sort some photos of Bundi out later. Cracking palace. Lots of little blue lanes. Boars and lizards and a snake and stacks of bats. And macaques that get proper arsy. Oh, and we were made honourary members of a random little family as well. Invited us into their gorgeous little home for chai after we made friends with their little girl and did well to keep us entertained with wedding photos and little Anjali's school notebooks for two hours, with a shared vocabulary of about twenty words (five Hindi, fifteen English). They were HILARIOUS. The smiliest, tiniest people I've ever been hosted by. When Jess called me a monkey, and I called her a naughty girlfriend (three of the words we'd heard them use already), I thought one of them might actually die laughing, and we quietly resolved to be less witty for a little while.

We had to go back the next night for chapatis, and we had some misgivings about whether we could sustain it for two consecutive evenings, but they'd been so cheerful and funny... Then we went back the next night and felt totally out of place - some of them weren't there, the ones that were there were unrecognisable, stressed and weeping like Italian mourners, trying to explain what had happened. We never did get to the bottom of it, in fact we weren't even sure of the relationship between the different family members that we met (all women, and somewhere between two and seven generations of them - one of them we thought was a pile of rags until she hauled herself up and out of the house like something out of a horror film more terrifying than any we've ever seen) - but we gathered that the husband of what must have been about the middle generation had got angry and slapped his twenty-something kids about, and they'd left, and the wife was terrified they'd never come back. We gave them some money to call around and find out where they'd gone, then left before the husband came back, feeling that he might not be as charming as the ones we'd met.

Apart from the rather jekyll-and-hyde family, Bundi offered a hostel with affordable aircon and a manager of extraordinary lecherousness and laziness (which we chose to stay in) and a hostel with literally the best curries we've ever eaten. The magic thing about these curries was that they didn't curry us out - our insides remained fresh and lavender-smelling, rather than bloated and a little noxious, which can happen after a few weeks of eating just curry. Had some pasta the other night, and followed it up with pasta the following lunch, and then just went marching around Jaipur like a fit and healthy individual, rather than acting like an especially viscous oil slick and hardly being able to get up stairs without feeling gross. It was good, although a bit worrying. There's still a lot of months of mainly curry to go, and it doesn't how many eggs and nuts I eat, I'm still losing weight fast. Looking more and more Indian by the day, as regards body-tummy ratio. So we were so grateful for these nice curries - we ate there every night, without shame. Lordy, it was good - that on the last night I touched the matriarch's feet (typical Hindi respect-to-parent salutation) - and I called her my 'Indian mother'. Gosh she liked that. They were crying when we walked out the gate, four days after meeting them. The friendly ones, the ones that decide they like you, they really like you. It's really moving.

We decided we liked Jordan pretty fast as well. Never met such an interesting nineteen-year-old. He's just spent three months volunteering at a Kolkata mental asylum. (That'd make you quite interesting even if you weren't before...) He had to work around the same corruption and shambolic weirdness that India's got going on everywhere (the anti-alcohol matron turning up blind drunk every day, the guards accepting bribes to look the other way while the drugs that made the inmates mad in the first place get sold to them, the charity who employed him taking money from rich families just to take inconvenient offspring off their hands and keep them incarcerated for the rest of the their days), and he had to put up with the same food (chapati, rice, watery dal) three meals a day every day including weekends for three months, and he had to live in one of the cells that the inmates occupy, and he had to pay for all this privilege, but he said it was 'just the screaming that took a little while to get used to'. Nice fella. Likes his Elvis Costello, can't be too bad. We met some Geordie girls too, Ruth and Zara. Zara has a mad little afro, so she's great to travel around with - we hardly even got glanced at when she was with us... The youths on the bus were all too busy pulling on her hair and laughing and saying 'Carpet! Carpet!' to pay any attention to us.

Anyway. Sorry for unstructured nature of this tangential digressional - might be more interesting as a result. Chronological narratives kind of suck. In Other News, I am apparently a property owner now (the crowd goes wild) and Miranda, for those of you following this particular saga, has not only installed herself comfortably in said property, but has won her disability living allowance appeal and been belatedly gifted all the money her immobility should have left her with long ago. All good on the home front. Except I believe David Cameron, the first human condom ever to wear a toupe, is in charge now. How's that going for you then?

First Spate of Drivel - Ahmedabad

yaccob1 — Fri, 7 May 2010 22:53:00 GMT

Ahmedabad? Ahmedadreadful more like. 'In at the deep end!' was the idea when we decided to start our year in India here, and it worked beautifully. Nothing's going to shock us after this - and to give us our dues, we weren't even shocked by this place. Totally took it in our stride. Left the hotel on the first morning and walked into town armed just with a fairly inaccurate map - and went the right way for ages! After an hour or more walking in the sun, we encountered a couple of seriously bonkers road junctions - that's more like it, we thought. YES, I thought, I could get culture-shocked here - and Jess started to look a bit pink on the head. 'You will tell me if you're fading, love, won't you?', I said, and to my utter astonishment, she said immediately 'I'm fading a bit, yes', without any argument whatsoever! So we got in an auto-rickshaw.

A word on these for the uninitiated, because they do feature quite significantly in this country. They are NOT rickshaws. That's important. In fact, I'll call them autos, just in case there are real rickshaws later on. They're little moped things with a shell somehow attached to them, and space in the back of the shell for two small people or one large one, or for an Indian family and a couple of friends and their goat, depending on your priorities. The drivers range from penniless (barefoot vagabond-types resident in the same auto they spend their working day in) to pretty fly (denim-clad, drug-selling, tourist-swindling masters of street trade), and the autos themselves can vary accordingly. Ahmedabad's were all representative of the same grinding, grey, brutal poverty of the other bits of the city we saw, but they generally tried to take us where we wanted to go, as there is no familiarity with tourism in this city (as there wouldn't be in, say, Corby, or Stockton-Upon-Tees) and therefore no system for ripping off tourists yet.

False fact number one, from the friendly belching woman from Reading on the plane, and from the helpful man from Leicester-just-up-the-road-from-Bobbys we met in Ahmedabad itself; "everybody here speaks English". No-one in Ahmedabad speaks English. In fact, hardly anyone in the entire state speaks English. People do in the rest of India, but this is one of the most the the most deprived, undeveloped bits of it there is, where gender inequality remains undimmed by the encroachment of reform, and literacy levels for women are still around thirty per cent. With no English, no literacy, no idea how to read a map, and no street names, the autos' success rate in transferring us to our destinations was not perfect.

But we navigated our way to town, changed some money, found a big lake to sit near and revel in the relative space and cleanliness it afforded, then navigated our next auto back to our incredibly expensive rathole of a hotel - generally mastered this huge, foul city in twenty-four hours, just to show that we could. And it was fun, the auto-rickshaws especially. You have to set fear aside, obviously, and treat it like dodgems. But if you do that it's quite exciting, and it was Definitely India, straight away, even though we'd only just landed.

It was foul though. The myriad stenches, the lack of any means to identify the nature of the dubious businesses by the side of the road, the lack of anything we'd recognise as a 'building', or a 'shop', let alone a 'restaurant', the absence of anywhere to pedestrate (yeah, well, it should be a word), the human excrement, the cows, the goats, the occasional camel, the pollution (Indians not generally too fussed about smells, I don't think, but in Ahmedabad most drivers wore cloths over their noses and mouths, which is indicative) - all of it was as you'd expect. But this city didn't have the colour, didn't have the joy in life, didn't feel as vibrant as India should. It was a bit grim. We even passed a couple of corpses, under blankets weighed down with stones, the only little oases of space on the congested, mad streets, given a wide berth by everyone and everything except the dogs. On your first day in India, and after virtually no sleep and food, even that's exciting! Still, we got out of there as quick as possible. Managed to buy a bus ticket on the first day, and were on a large white Gujerati Travel bus leaving Ahmedabad at 7.30 the next day. Considering that we had ben told to look for a bus which was yellow, with Punjab Travel printed unmistakeably on the side, which was leaving at 6.45, this was quite an achievement, and we were both close to weeping with relief as one of the most hellish two hours of our lives, spent next to Ahmedabad's busiest road trying to find anyone who had ever even heard of buses, was brought to a close. It was genius. We could easily have taken days to escape from that town.

You'll notice I haven't mentioned the heat yet... It's because everyone here, all the people that live in India, keep banging on about it so much that we're already bored of talking about it. Suffice to say, after waking up that first morning, we'd gone to book tickets to Mt Abu, the only hill station rising out of the baing Rajastani desert. We stayed there nearly a week. Even Corby would have been nice after Ahmedabad.