We went to Mandu on a Saturday without booking a room. When we got there, there wasn’t a single hotel room available. We had two options:
a) Drive to a town 40 kilometers away in the wrong direction from our next destination
b) Stay at the dorm rooms attached to the local Hindu temple.
We elected to do the latter and stayed in a room that was decked out in the latest in 19th century Turkish prison chic.
The next day we drove to Udaipur, easily one of the most romantic places in India. To celebrate, we checked into the Jagat Niwas Palace Hotel. It’s a converted haveli (mansion); one of the most beautiful hotels I’ve ever stayed at.
Here’s the view from our room:
This sunset greeted us from our room on the first night:
Candles floating amongst flower petals greeted us outside the room:
After two consecutive days of 10 hour drives, you have no idea how good this felt!
2.
The highlight of Udaipur is the City Palace. It looms over the city:
It has some of the most beautiful carved stone windows I’ve ever seen. Every room seems to be designed in a unique geometric pattern, some with stained glass:
Sometime’s it can seem like a bit much. This room kind of felt like being in a bad 70′s disco:
3.
The Maharaja of Udaipur wanted an elephant, but had to settle for a horse:
This caused nothing but problems for his official portraiteurs who were unsure of how to render the princely battle beast:
I’m just kidding about him wanting an elephant; he had lots. It was never explained why he put a trunk on his horse (he wanted a helephant to give the enemies hell? Sorry for the bad joke); I can’t think that riding into battle on a crippled horse made out to look like a baby elephant would be that intimidating to your opponents.
4.
There’s an interesting mathematical construct called a Menger Sponge. It’s a fractal that you create by doing the following:
a) Start with a cube
b) Remove the middle third of the cube
c) Repeat to infinity
The result is a structure that has infinite surface area and no volume. It’s just a mesh of incredibly finely connected points.
It’s the sort of thing you’d end up with if you told an engineer to carve you something and you’d pay her based on the amount of dust she brought you.
If you were a Jain and told a craftsman to build you something and you’d pay by the dust, you’d end up with something like the temples at Delwara just outside Mt. Abu.
The temples are pure marble carved into the most intricate patterns. Lotus flowers burst out of lotus flowers which are surrounded by elephants and monkeys and ducks and gods and too much to even imagine.
Alas, you can’t take any photos there, so you’ll have to settle from some metaphotos. Here are some photos of photos of the temple (this is getting as recursive as the process of carving the temples):
5.
Mt. Abu is a curious place. It’s like a Niagara Falls or Atlantic City for Gujaratis. They swarm here to hang out on the weekends and it’s still busy during the week. There are overflowing family restaurants and arcades. Vendors hawk peanuts and candy floss. The hotels even have names like the ones in Niagara Falls:
Hordes of people trek out to Sunset Point to watch the eponymous event:
In the rush to get there, some folks sacrifice their dignity and take a push cart rickshaw:
But the sunset isn’t the only thing to see here. Wendy’s a pretty entertaining site as well. All these boys wanted their photo taken with her:
We’ve both had our photos taken with countless people and shaken innumerable hands. The oddest experience was when a police officer walked up to me, gave me his phone number and insisted that I call him when I get to Canada. He actually wanted my phone number to call me, but since I technically don’t have one right now, I had an easy out.
Another great little moment came when we walked up a hill to Toad Rock (which looks nothing like a toad). We passed a miniature temple and the priest insisted I take a photo of him in front of it. Check out that beard:
He also insisted that we have a drink of holy water, slapped a dot on our head and gave us a ceremonial mint. It was a little surreal.
6.
To get to Mt. Abu from Udaipur you need to take the highway. It’s a magnificent highway cut out of rock, set against the rolling hills that intermittently appear in Rajasthan. It’s also weird as rocks have fallen off the cliffs and onto the highway and simply been left there. Some rockfall has been there for so long that there are now plants growing on them. As you can guess, the highway isn’t too heavily trafficked.
The other cultural difference on the highway is the tendency of some Indians to wail in tunnels. I think a few people on our bus had never been in a tunnel before and they began ululating when we got inside. There were a lot of tunnels and a lot of wailing…
7.
I had a new dish called a nargis kofta at Arbuda restaurant. It’s a boiled egg wrapped in vegetables. Served on a kashmiri pulao (rice with candied fruit and cashews) it made a delicious – if sweet – meal:
I also had an interesting treat called a kutchi dabeli at Cafe Coffee Time. It’s a puff pastry containing curried potato, peanuts and pomegranate seeds. Delicious.
Traveling in India, like so much of this country, is able to simultaneously embody both the best and worst of the world.
For example, India is one of the last places on Earth where flying is truly enjoyable. The (private) airlines here are ruthlessly efficient with almost obsequiously polite staff. New world-class airports are going up faster than they can be filled with passengers. The security is a little heavy handed, but this is a country where terrorism is all too common and, thankfully, the zealotry of the security staff is currently greater than that of the terrorists.
If you fly during the tail end of the monsoon season – as we did – you can catch some stunning sunset views:
The only problem with the whole system is that it is hub-and-spoke and there are only a few hubs. There are a lot of places that you simply cannot easily fly to.
And that leaves you can with the bus or the railway.
We haven’t taken the train yet as the convoluted system of booking (you reserve, you then get a ticket, then you find it’s overbooked, then the trains cancelled, then…) has been off-putting and we’ve been traveling to places better served by bus.
However, the bus, for the most part, is a complete zoo. You head to a station or an unmarked stop on the road and ask every single bus that comes by if it’s going to your destination. Occasionally, a friendly Indian will tell you which bus to get on (a few kind souls have saved us more than once) and then you’re off. The bus may or may not have a door; for the locals it will only come to a rolling stop and no matter how long the journey, they’ll keep filling it up as long as there’s space to fit one more person:
It’s cheap, but very slow. With all the stops, plus the fact that the bus is twenty-going-on-fifty years old, you’re going to top out at 40km/h.
There’s another option available that straddles both: a private driver. For two people this is a nice way to travel to out of the way places at a somewhat reasonable cost. What would be two days via two or more buses or impossible by flight can be condensed down into about nine hours in a cramped Tata Indigo (the seats have not been optimized for North American stature).
Even with your private driver, you shouldn’t expect to go too fast. In fact, there’s likely to be an order of magnitude difference in speeds during your journey. Some of the tracks (I can’t call them ‘roads’ as that would be unfair to real roads) you’ll follow in various towns will be so badly paved that you’ll top out at just under 10km/h. And these are the major routes: you’ll be sharing the track with any number of trucks (or, as they are quaintly called here, lorries).
The most random reason we lost speed was because young entrepreneurs in one village had strewn logs across the road and started collecting their own tolls.
Also, heaven forfend that you need to stop at a railway crossing to wait for a train. This country is massively overpopulated and everyone has to fight for temselves; personal space in non-existent. That’s why you see everyone clustered on the bus above. It’s why people play crappy Hindi pop from their cellphone speaker while taking the bus; headphones be damned. It’s why a mob forms to board said bus. It’s why everyone elbows you in the free-for-all that is a ticket counter anywhere (the British habit of queuing did not survive Independence). And it’s why traffic fills up each lane at a railway crossing.
This has the obvious consequence that when the guard railing rises, you’re left with three rows of traffic each facing each other separated by about eight feet. Both sides move forward, testing who will blink first. Nobody moves for a good 10 minutes while honking, screaming and hand-waving erupts. Somehow cars contort themselves in different directions and traffic begins to flow again after a wait that could easily have been avoided had everyone simply stayed in their respective lanes.
Sometimes India makes the simple very complex.
Between towns a fairly robust network of divided four lane highways is sprouting (there’s an impressive network of private highways). They’re relatively car-free right now (at one point I timed 3:45 between two cars; on average, a car came by about every 1:00-1:20), but are swamped with all sorts of trucks.
Some of these trucks are almost too big to even consider driving:
Others are simply ridiculously overloaded:
Our driver assured us that many of these overloaded lorries “weren’t heavy”; I’m sure that will be consoling to some poor bastard who finds his legs sticking out from underneath them after it takes a corner too fast. You’ll see frequent accidents. (These trucks are also an environmental mess, spewing nasty diesel fumes; your snot will turn black)
Curiously, in an unforeseen outcome of globalization, some of the tarps on these trucks are old cloth billboards from America. So far I’ve seen a Verizon ad plus another for the classified section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Overloaded trucks driven by new-to-driving drivers aren’t the only issues to contend with on highways. Social norms are a little different here, so you frequently see people driving the wrong way down a divided highway. They don’t want to have to backtrack to get to a location, so they take the fastest route by switching to oncoming traffic once they near their destination.
Many of the previously mentioned trucks don’t consider it important to give way and amble along in the passing lane; you have to honk to warn them that your passing. If you’re expecting anyone to signal a lane change, you’re kidding yourself. In fact, it’s amazing how much surface area the horn occupies on an Indian car’s steering wheel – easily three times the amount of space as a North American car; honking is effortless.
Similarly, many towns are simply built onto the highways and appear with a sudden alacrity as you round a bend. Some older towns were so close to the highway that the government tore down rooms that were nearest to the road but kept the rest of the structure intact; you can look into some people’s houses as you drive by.
Old men think nothing of walking across the road with the full expectation that you should get out of their way. Interestingly, we also passed a massive quarry built a mere 10 feet from the highway and without a single protective wall.
The biggest risk though are the herders. These new highways represent the fastest route through the countryside and this has not been lost on wily goat, cow and sheep herders. They frequently herd their animals along the highways and you have to slow down/stop to avoid the random movements of their flocks.
Awkwardly, their animals – and more often one of the millions of stray dogs here – are sometimes run over. The carcasses are then simply left to bloat and bake in the heat of the middle of the road; no one ever comes along to remove them.
These forces all conspire to keep you moving at an average of 60-70 km/h.
It’s just not easy to travel around India.
2.
But travel you must, as there’s much to see and some places are simply off the beaten track. The most obscure place we’ve visited so far is Mandu, which is perched on a 23km square hilltop that towers over a verdant farmed plain.
If Mandu was in England, it would have been overrun with Romantic poets who would have sat there crafting love stories set amongst court intrigue and the movement of empires, for it’s that kind of place. As you drive up, you pass though one medieval Mughal (the former muslim rulers of India) gate after another while cenotaphs and crumbling defensive walls are scattered in neighbouring fields. All this is given more character as this is one of the few places in India where Baobab trees grow.
On the plateau proper are a few mosques and ancient palaces which glow in the evening and morning light:
The sense of romance is increased by the water features installed by previous sultans. One built a series of pleasure pools for his harem and many of the palaces are built right onto overgrown water tanks:
In addition to be the most romantic place in India, it also has some of the cutest kids who are all precocious enough to insist that they have their photo taken:
These kids are also learning English, although in a manner that occasionally confuses English with Hindi. In Hindi, namaste is a greeting used both upon arrival and departure. As a result, many of these kids confusingly say “bye-bye” when they meet you for the first time.
3.
The story of India is one of the world’s great epics, full of some of history’s most colourful characters. One of the more interesting footnotes in this story took place in Daulatabad where Mohammed Tughlaq created his capital in 1328 and marched the entire population of Delhi 1,100 km to populate it. Despite meaning “City of Fortune”, it turned out to be anything but. It left the north undefended and after a few years he marched everyone back.
Today, the fort is in ruins and over 5km of run down walls surround it while macaques are its only inhabitants.
The main doors have spikes on them to prevent elephant attacks.
It’s a 45 minute walk to the citadel at the top and to get there you need to go through a series of fortifications. Gates with doglegs, a moat that needs to be crossed and the unique andheri. This is literally a ‘dark passage’: it’s an unlit corridor full of twist and turns, dead ends, steps of different sizes and numerous bats. Back in the day, defenders could pour boiling oil down the passageway or direct invaders around a corner where they would suddenly tumble to their death in a hidden pit.
Bring a flashlight.
4.
When I lived in Calgary, Wen and I went out to Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump to see Western Canada’s glorious UNESCO World Heritage Site. Natives dressed as wolves used to lure bison to their death by cunningly running them over a cliff. The beasts had bad eyesight and by the time the rear of a herd realized what was going on, they had already pushed the front of the herd over the cliff.
I was anticipating a huge 500 foot cliff with a pile of bleached bones at the bottom; the reality was a lot more banal: a slight grassy escarpment.
When your human history consists of primarily nomadic societies, your cultural relics are few and far between.
Nothing could be more different with India’s World Heritage monuments. In Ellora, the ur-Indians spent about 500 years carving one of their escarpments into a series of over 30 competing Jain, Buddhist and Hindu caves.
Giant buddhas have been hewn out of rock:
Life-size elephants stand guard at a Jain cave…
…while the Hindus went wild and spent up to 150 years carving the ultimate cave in a tribute to Shiva and his mountain abode of Mt. Kailasa:
The entire cave used to be plastered and painted. And, yes, those are parrots on the right; as if that wasn’t enough, there are also monkeys.
What is mind-blowing about all of these, is that they are carved from a single face of rock, from the top down. You have to keep pinching yourself to remind yourself of what an undertaking this must have been.
Oh yeah, and as it that wasn’t enough, there’s another site nearby (Ajanta) where there are another 30 buddhist caves that date back to 200 BC or so. Besides massive buddhas and stupas, they also include several paintings that are still intact over 1500 years later (and well lit; all these photos were taken without a flash):
Again, all carved from the top on down…
5.
As with elsewhere in India, the food here has been delicious. I have a new favourite dish in vegetable kofta (ironically, ‘kofta’ means spiced meatball). The photo below comes from Prashant in Aurangabad; the kofta is in the upper left:
If you go to Mandu, be sure to try the kofta at Shivani (which shouldn’t be hard, as it’s one of three restaurants in the town).
6.
We’re slowly learning different Hindi words. One of the most versatile words in ghat. It has three meanings and in one day you can actually experience all of them. A ghat can be a chain of mountains as well as the road you take through that mountain. And then, at your destination, you may find a temple with stairs that lead into a river. Yup, those stairs are also known as ghats.
7.
For some reason, cheesy songs keep following us around Southeast Asia and India. We are being stalked by The Carpenters’ “Every little shalala” and Craig David’s “Seven Days”. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this but please Buddha/Krishna/Adinth, make it stop!
Whenever traveling gets really bad, I like to pretend I’m describing the situation to a friend. I think how, once this is all over, I’ll look back and laugh at what’s going on and realize that it wasn’t so bad. It also helps me imagine just how bad it could get and realize what’s likely/unlikely to happen. And that’s what I thought to myself on the tuk tuk on the way to Fort Kochi.
We’d arrived in Mumbai the night before at around 1a.m., a little later than expected, but not too delayed. We waited in customs for a while and then when we finally got to the front of the line I was sent to the back as I’d apparently used the wrong coloured ink; alas the permitted colours are common knowledge to only Indian bureaucrats. This was only a temporary setback as we soon got our bags and were on our way to the hotel…
…it was then about 2:30 – or 4:00am Bangkok time; India is an awkward 90 minute time zone difference. As we got into the room we looked down at the bed and it was swimming in bugs. We were so exhausted that we prayed they wouldn’t bite and just slept on top of everything; we were up five hours later to find the room choked with diesel fumes and us looking for a flight.
We checked out and asked the motley assortment of people who may or may not have been hotel employees at the front desk if they’d get us a cab to the airport (a mere two kilometers away, but in the chaos of Mumbai it might as well be on another planet). This started a flurry of discussion whereupon the bellman asked the front desk clerk who called out to a man who was dressed like a retired military officer who chased down three guys in t-shirts who went out looking for a cab.
We were told to wait five minutes and ten minutes later the scouts returned to the general to debrief him. The whole process ran in reverse and the bellman finally informed us that a taxi could not be procured as there was apparently a national strike. He had a bizarre way of making it feel like if we’d only been 30 seconds earlier, we would have missed the strike – which was, of course, ridiculous.
At this moment, a man who had been quietly sitting in the corner reading the Hindu Times told us that our flight was probably cancelled and we shouldn’t worry about leaving Mumbai that day. A quick call to the airport proved it otherwise so he surprisingly offered his car to get to there. It turned out that he was going to a training session (he was in the merchant marine) and we could have his driver take us to the airport after he was dropped off at the training center.
Perfect! We all piled into an undersized and equally underpowered Tata just as the monsoon rains began to erupt. It being Mumbai, the streets were clogged with traffic (albeit oddly devoid of cabs) and we gazed jealously at the speed made by the throngs of pedestrians found everywhere in the city.
We finally began to move but we were left with the impression of going nowhere in circles. At one point we found ourselves in Bollywood, being shown where all the different studios were (I just want the airport!). At another time we were driving through a stable of cows, waiting for them to find some garbage tasty enough to motivate them to leave the road (Airport, please!). All the while the rain painted the city black.
After two hours in the car – and maybe 10 km of driving – we made it to the airport exactly as our flight was taking off. Since this sort of thing happens all the time in India, it wasn’t a problem to change our ticket to a later flight to a nearby town (Kochi instead of Trivandrum) – and heck, Kochi was actually a more convenient place for us to go to. A little frazzled, but calming down, we hung out in one of the Mumbai airports many cafes (ironically, the domestic airport is the most relaxing place in the city; only ticketed passengers are allowed inside).
Getting to the flight was interesting as, depending on which sign we looked at, we were either going to Kochi or Cochin (damn you India, pick the British or Indian name, but not both!), but we managed to get on the bus to our flight and there we got to see this walking cliche:
Two hours later we were on the ground in Kochi and our bags came within seconds! We got a cab to the city after confirming with the dispatchers that we’d be able to catch the ferry there to Fort Kochi (the heritage district is on a nearby island).
When we got to the ferry terminal – a dirty patch of grass with a concrete bunker at the end – the cab peeled away and it was eerily quiet. As we walked to the terminal, a man came up and told us the terminal was closed. There was a nearby tourist office where the attendant told us we were out of luck as it seemed the strike was national, not just Mumbai cabbies, and there was no possible way on earth to get to Fort Kochi and we should go to a nearby hotel – and then he literally went back to sleep.
Except that this wasn’t true. Fort Kochi is connected to the city (Ernakalum) by a bridge and you can almost see the bloody thing from the tourist office. Unfortunately, our cab had left and, due to the strike, there weren’t any around. So, we eyeballed our scale-free tourist map and started walking in the 30 degree heat. (At this point you may be wondering why the folks at the airport didn’t tell us to take the cab there due to the strike; I’m still wondering why)
As we walked, we got quite a few stares. I don’t think anyone could believe that we were walking there but we had no desire in spending a night in a crummy hotel on the mainland where there would be literally nothing to do. After an hour of walking and almost no sleep in the previous 24 hours, we were starting to fade. And at that moment, the greatest entrepreneur in India, a man with a tuk tuk who had said “damn the strike, I’m going to make some money!” came by and offered us a ride. I could have cried; he quoted us a price he probably thought usurious but he had severely underestimated us and we folded like wet paper bags. Soon we were in the back and rocketing towards Fort Kochi with the wind in our hair and dust in our eyes.
And that’s when he very seriously asked us if we had our booking. Panic struck my sleep-deprived brain. Is this a polite way of saying “you guys are idiots for going there as there are no rooms available” or is he just trying to get us to book at a friend’s house? This is going to be like Mt. Bromo where we arrive and can’t find anything and end up in a home stay where the room and accoutrements haven’t been washed this century. And that’s when I decided I’d start telling this story to myself.
We looked around and realized that we hadn’t seen another westerner yet (there were only two on our otherwise 3/4 full flight) so there had to be rooms available. Yes: there would be a beautiful room with a fresh, comfortable bed and a hot shower and we’d nap and get a meal and sleep again and laugh it off the next day. Which, is actually exactly what happened.
2.
Kerala is the spice market to the world. One of the highlights of Fort Kochi is walking around and observing the chaos that is the spice trade. The stores of Market Drive are lined with spice wholesalers who show off their wares:
Outside their shops, workers move more spices and 55kg bags of rice than you can imagine; pigeons greedily eye the spillings:
When you head inland (up to Munnar), you reach the Western Ghats where every square inch of arable land seems to grow tea or eucalyptus or cardamom or any of a variety of other herbs and spices:
Traffic stalls as buses randomly stop to let their passengers alight and gaze at ladies cutting tea leaves.
Every town has multiple spice farms where you can go and taste the various goods; you leave with a curious concoction of flavours in your mouth. Here’s a sample of some of what we saw.
Mace covering nutmeg, as demonstrated by hand model Wendy:
Hibiscus; the leaves are used to create shampoo (next time you see one, tear a leaf apart to feel the gooey sap):
Tumeric:
The hottest peppers you’ll ever try. Spice appears to be inversely proportional to size:
And cardamom (turns black when ready to harvest):
There seems to be a special place in Keralites’ hearts for cardamom. In addition to acres upon acres of the stuff alongside the roads, there’s a research center into it, numerous hotels and restaurants are named after it (only “tiger” seems to be a more common hotel descriptor) and there are delicious cardamom cookies too:
3.
Fort Kochi is a great place to start a visit to India and it also shows you just how complex the history is here.
The original Hindus arrived from the north thousands of years ago and then shortly after JC’s crucifixion, Christianity appeared here; India had Christianity before Europe. Over time, many cultures have come and gone and left traces of themselves.
The port contains massive Chinese fishing nets, indicating there must have been trade with them at one point:
Vasco de Gama came here in 1498 and was briefly (14 years) interred at St. Francis’ Church before having his remains returned to Portugal:
The Dutch came next and left their gravestones inside the fort and the emblem of their trading company (VOC for the Dutch East Indies Company) nearby:
Most recently it’s been the Brits, who have left the area with some beautifully decaying colonial buildings:
And it’s not just these folks. The muslims came to Kerala shortly after the establishment of Islam and a sizable chunk of the population has converted. There were a lot of Jews too (now mostly emigrated to Israel) who lived in the beautiful part of town that’s now literally called “Jewtown”:
3.
One of the highlights of our trip so far has been taking a backwaters houseboat tour in Kerala. The coast of Kerala is separated from the mainland by a series of waterway and dykes. You can rent a houseboat and lazily amble through these backwaters. Life moves like molasses there and time seems almost as still as the water.
/p>
The people here almost live on the water. They build their houses on the narrow ledges between the rice paddies and the waterways. Their kids take the local school boat instead of school bus. And going anywhere requires a punt.
LIfe here is bucolic; at night the sounds of families singing together echoes across the otherwise still landscape. Fireflies come out and blink in the sky. You get a sense of why Gandhi was obsessed with building an India that was centered around the village.
The area also gives you a few insights into other aspects of India. For instance, there are many Christians in Kerala and sometimes they are accused of proselytizing, raising frictions with the Hindu supermajority (80% of Indians are Hindu vs. about 2% Christian). The Christians haven’t done much to help their cause by creating some unique-to-Indian-Christianity traditions. Such as the flagpole that they have outside all their churches; it looks conveniently like the flagpoles Hindus use for their ceremonies:
Another insight on India. This house is far and away the largest house we saw. In fact, there are actually two houses: the main house (shown below) is the owner’s; the second house is for his wife’s family. That’s his boat outside.
So who is this rich person, this role model for all, this beacon of the future of India?
None other than the local federal politician. Hmmm…
5.
I received a lot of advice on where to go in India, and unsurprisingly some of the best advice came from my Indian friends. One insisted that our trip would not be complete without a visit to Periyar Tiger Reserve.
The reserve is based around a series of lakes, formed from by a dam in 1895 (the park itself was declared by the Maharaja in 1935):
You can take a bamboo raft along one of the lakes (it’s closed to boats, so you’ll have it to yourself) and you’ll almost certainly see gaur (Indian bison) and lots of boar along its banks:
Alternatively, you can climb the hills and roam around, possibly scaring one of the afore-mentioned bison:
Irrespective of which you choose, you’ll be surrounded by wildlife. This is a birder’s paradise, with cormorants, egrets and kingfishers hanging out in the lake while eagles and parrots fly overhead. Hornbills belligerently bray from the underbrush; they’re rarely seen but the sound of their wings disturbing the air can be heard as they fly.
Black butterflies with iridescent blue tinges chaotically whirligig through the jungle while white and black monkeys (local terms, not mine) jump from tree to tree. Giant malabar squirrels scurry from place to place. Touch-me-nots recoil from you and giant bats can be seen in bamboo groves.
This all takes place under the hidden eye of the tiger (you almost certainly won’t see one; our hotel owner worked in the park for 13 years and saw two; we had to satisfy ourselves with a footprint) and reminders (dung and footprints) of the wild elephants nearby.
In fact, if you spend a few days in the park, you’ll almost certainly see some elephants.
We saw two different sets. The first was in some hills half way through the boat ride. The trip had been a little slow up until then so we were taking random photos of the flowers when all of a sudden…
…a few elephants trundled out of the bush partway down the hill, their young in tow. They pulled at some bamboo and then noticed us. One trumpeted at us and our guide told us that it as time to go as they thought we threatened them – even though we were probably 1,000 feet away.
The second set of elephants were seen on the hike out after the ride. We came to a clearing and some elephants were walking along. They never even saw us and were eventually swallowed up in the aptly named elephant grass.
Afterwards our guides mentioned that they could hear the elephants talking to one another (alas, the frequency was too low for my loud concert-ravaged ears to pick up).
Now, a word on the danger involved. Because Periyar is the greatest and most successful and <insert superlative here> park in the world, as any Indian will tell you, and tigers are so dangerous (even though you won’t see one), you need to be armed. But since you would melt in fear at the sight of a tiger or a charging gaur, you need a strong local man to protect you. And the Indian army has stepped into the fold.
Here’s our guard. Thanks to him, all members of our party made it back alive.
We had a great time in Periyar (square inch for square inch, it could be one of the best parks in the world), although there was definitely a little bit of a culture clash going on, mostly due to this man below:
Yup, we were out in this beautiful still lake, surrounded by nothing but the chirping of birds and braying of beasts, when he started talking on his cellphone. Repeatedly.
We (Wen, I and the two Germans on the rafts with us) were put off by this, but chalked it up to cultural differences. However, later in the day, we snapped.
We were coming back and the guy had given his cellphone to his young child. The kid started using it to play some Shakira song from the World Cup. I politely asked him if he’d turn it off; none of us had come into one of the few truly wild places in India to listen to crappy pop music on an even crappier speaker.
Alas, this was misunderstood by the kid and his family who thought that I was really impressed by the fact that the cellphone could play music. One of the Germans went nuts and in a truly Teutonic way began screaming about how we’d come for silence and turn off the damn cellphone, etc.
The cellphone was turned off and we rode awkwardly in silence for a few minutes but then it was forgotten.
6.
Our last stop in Southern India was our only stop in Tamil Nadu: Madurai. People come here for the massive Minakshi Sundareshvara Hindu temple.
This stunning place was originally built in the 7th-10th centuries and greatly expanded between the 14th and 18th centuries. In the past 60 years they’ve started painting the 50m tall gopuras (the gates to the temple; arranged along the cardinal axes) multiple colours:
Inside, Hindus from across the country pray and light lanterns. The smell of spices and cloves from burning oils and incense wafts through the air. A band plays traditional prayer music. And colour explodes around the Thousand-Pillared Hall:
It’s one of the most incredible places of prayer I’ve been to anywhere.
7.
Oh, the Indian food. It is some of the best food I’ve ever had. Check out this cashew curry (from Ginger Restaurant in Fort Kochi):
It came with a Kerala specialty: appam. It’s a mix of ground rice and fried coconut and is served instead of a chapatti.
At Shala in Fort Kochi we had one of the best vegetable curries ever (on right). It also came a delicious side: just a mix of shallots, fried coconut and molasses.
They also served us puttu as a side: steamed wheat flour (kind of like couscous) instead of rice:
In Madurai we went into the oddly named Manorama for a vegetarian meal. It turned out to be one of the most unique culinary experiences I’ve ever had. We were whisked to our seats and suddenly two banana leaves appeared before us. A man holding three metal tins came by and started ladling out various curries. Then bowl after bowl of different sauces began arriving (sweet, yogurt-based, curry-based, etc.). Rice appeared, as did some pappudoms. Mercifully, spoons arrived specially for us (eager readers will recall the last time – Yogyakarta – that I tried to eat with my hands).
We were instructed to mix it all together; since none of the staff spoke English, this was through a series of entertaining hand gestures. We also had to learn hand gestures for “stop, I don’t need any more food!” as the service was so great they almost wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Here’s Wendy getting ready to enjoy the meal:
If you look closely at the photo above, you might notice a few black dried peppers on the right middle of the leaf. The meal came with an accompanying set of dried and salted peppers (some hot, some just flavourful). I’d never tried these before and am writing this as an addict in withdrawal; I need to find them again.
Our last meal in the south was a breakfast dosa in the Chennai airport. I hadn’t found one yet (they’re don’t seem to have been popular in Kerala) so I was glad to finally taste the real thing:
And finally, the Indians have a national sweet tooth (which suits me perfectly). Here are some of the sugary sweets you can buy in one of the local bakeries (just don’t look for bread there; it’s just sweets and pastries):
Numbers one and four are particularly good – kind of like Maple sugar and marzipan respectively. Number two is a cashew cookie and it’s neighbour – laddu – has a clove in the middle. The one on the right is like a ginger-based version of a rum ball.
8.
In keeping with the traditions of this trip, another country and another fruit. This time it’s musumbi, which is like a tart orange. It makes a mean juice:
9.
And a few random closing thoughts:
On September 10th, I reached a special club. In fact, it’s a club that as far as I know only included my buddy Tom. It’s the club for people who have eaten curry for all meals in one day (okay, maybe it’s really for Westerners as there are about a billion Indians who are standing members of this club). On the 10th, I started the morning with a vegetarian curry followed by a chicken curry for lunch and another vegetable curry at dinner. Curry trifecta!
Internet upload speeds here are faster than New York, providing further evidence of the continued failure of Time Warner and the need for the feds to do something to force an upgrade of the system. Alas, the power grid is much more robust in New York than here; those upload speeds were useless when the power went out
When driving through fog, Indians put on their four way flashers, not their headlights. Thought it was an interesting way to deal with it
After this, my third trip to Bangkok, I feel like I am finally getting a sense for the city. I’d like to think that it’s because I’ve experienced enough of the place that I am one with it; it’s more likely due to the fact that this time I travelled with a map. And Bangkok is one of those cities where you definitely need a map.
A few hundred years ago the royal family built a palace in an oxbow on the eastern bank of the Chao Praya river. Two arcing, narrow canals were soon built and they technically turned the oxbow into an island, although you could never tell that from the ground.
This is old Bangkok, the realm of the mandarin, minister, monk and monarch. The government offices are located here, as is the royal palace. The oldest, most spectacular temples are found here: the temple of dawn that is Wat Arun, the leaning buddha of Wat Pho, the towering lucky buddha and the Golden Mount.
Backpacker scum wander Khao San road while outside the administrative districts it’s easy to get lost in the many alleyways. [This is particularly due to the curious nature of how Bangkok seems to name its streets: thanon are streets; soi are alleyways. Sometimes the soi have their own names; other times they are numbered but named based on the main road (sukhumvit soi 10 would be off thanon sukhumvit).]
On the western bank is the forgotten side of the city, a dormitory community. To the east of old Bangkok is another ancient neighborhood, Chinatown. Each street seems to be a collection of like shops all tangentially related to a nearby block. Sort of a car repair district gives way to a series of car tire shops gives way to shops selling industrial tires as tall as you kind of vibe.
As it grew, Bangkok became crowded and unlivable and the king built a set of new canals for commerce and a series of massive roads that radiate out easterly from old Bangkok. These canals no longer transport anything and instead their foul waters rot in the blinding sun (you always know when one is nearby). The roads have become the arteries of the city (their colourful taxis the blood cells?) and a massive infrastructure campaign means that skytrains and elevated highways live on top of roads beneath which crawls the subway.
Skyscrapers have exploded around these nodes and if you could somehow place Bangkok on a balance, the entire eastern side would fall below the horizon as it is just so much more developed than the rest of the city. Moreover, more than half of these skyscrapers have been built in the past 10 years. When I visited the first time there were only a few and the partially finished concrete skeleton of the skytrain was a daily reminder of the long term effects of the 1997 currency crisis.
2.
I need to be clear that only after this visit can I say that I finally have a good line on how the city is laid out. Because I sure picked the wrong area for our hotel.
We got a really good deal on our hotel and like all good deals, it came as part of Faustian bargain. We thought it was cheap because of the Red Shirts. Instead, it was cheap because the hotel was on the main strip in Patpong.
On a rainy Friday night, getting from the skytrain to the hotel meant running a gauntlet of depravity and moral bankruptcy that would send a mormon screaming back to Utah.
From the Sala Daeng platform you can see dancers (hookers?) leaning out of a fifth floor window, smoking and depressingly waiting for work to being. At the bottom of the platform’s stairs you’re accosted to buy DVD that you can’t legally get anywhere; a man who speaks no English comes up to you and shoves into your face a laminated page that screams “pussy, pussy, pussy” and advertises an anatomically revolting girlie show.
Thanon Thaniya offers a brief respite. The street is lined with buildings where the bars are stacked six stories tall. The entrance to each property is lined with that bar’s girls, each of whom has too much makeup and long ago lost their original hair color. So that you don’t confuse them, each establishment requires the staff to wear a slightly different revealing outfit. Fortunately, their marks are Japanese men, so you can pass unfettered.
As you turn left on Thanon Surawong you’re back in it. Anonymous-looking forty-something Thai men walk up to you and ask “ping pong show?” or “live show?” despite having your wife by your side. When I firmly declined one tout, he had the nerve to ask me “why?”; another actually pulled on my arm and I had to resist the temptation to lay him out on the street (my most hated sensation: being touched by strangers).
In addition to the sex show touts, every shop front seems to be a restaurant, massage parlour or tailor. The proprietor of each is out front and emphatically offering their wares. Dodgy older white men sit drinking by themselves or slowly casting an eye at the young Thai men coming out of an alley of gay clubs. The other alleys are lined with a different type of massage parlour than the legit ones found on Surawong. On top of this, the sidewalk narrows as it’s covered by food carts and spillover stalls from the bustling nearby night market.
The funny thing is, this is not a bad neighbourhood. Some of the best hotels in town (like the Meridien) are here and our place was perfectly safe. There are also a couple of nice cafes (even a Starbucks) and the locals all walk around as though nothing is happening.
3.
I’m going to go out on a limb and call Bangkok the new Tokyo. While very different cities, the similarity between the two is striking. Both cities are temples to massive infrastructure projects and dotted with skyscrapers that seem to be randomly placed to anyone who is not a local. People are incredibly polite and the subways are almost entirely silent; every square inch of space on them has also been turned into marketable space.
Both cities have wooden houses interspersed around them (Bangkok many more so since it was never firebombed; Bangkok’s are also remarkably close to skyscrapers).
Both have a red light district (Kakbuki Cho and Patpong respectively) – and parts of Patpong look like v1.0 of Shinjuku transplants.
Tokyo has it’s famous Akhibara electronic district; in Bangkok’s Chinatown there’s an outdoor electronics market; on the weekend you can buy T1 cables and resistors in the streets. Each also worships the convenience store: 7 Eleven and Family Mart abound. (In fact, I think the best development index in Asia is the both the density of convenience stores and the range of goods offered; they are literally the street level beacons of progress here)
Of course, there are a lot of differences too. Thai society is too conservative to permit the chaos of Hirojuku to walk down its streets (although the ads here are a lot more provocative than when I first visited 10 years ago). And while both nations have monarchs, you won’t see pictures of the emperor plastered everywhere like pictures of the king in Bangkok.
4.
And about those pictures of the king. The Thai love their regent and while he’s just a constitutional monarch, he holds strong sway over the populace. This is important because of Thailand’s recent political troubles. Since an army coup in 2006, the legislative branch just hasn’t been the same and two prime ministers have been booted from office: one for conflict of interest – he was also a tv personality – and one due to alleged electoral fraud. The ‘alleged’ in this ‘alleged electoral fraud’ is significant as it has led to the Red Shirt protests and now a grenade a week explodes here, armed soldiers guard both government buildings and the skytrain and you must pass a metal detector to get on the subway (where they also check for bombs before you can get on at the end of the line).
Trouble is, the king is ailing. And he’s got one son (plus three daughters) who most people think is a ponce (and just by writing this I’m breaking Thai law – that’s how revered the king is – and so I’ll be posting this from India) thus creating a succession issue at the worst possible time (and you thought Queen Elizabeth II had issues…).
The net result of this is that you now see photos of the queen everywhere. When I was last here in 2006 there wasn’t a single photo of her anywhere – just the king – and now you might think she’s the head of state. I’m going to call it right now: when he passes she’s going to claim the throne and try to change the hereditary rules to permit one of her daughters to be regent.
The Thais live in interesting times.
5.
A few obligatory comments on the excellent food in Thailand.
a) Make sure to eat some of the ubiquitous street food:
If you go to the Old Siam Market, you can browse many stalls that sell all types of great food like mieng khum (lemongrass, dried shrimp, peanut, ginger, deep-fried coconut, chili, shallots and sauce wrapped in wild betel leaves) and spiced sausage. Take it to the nearby park for a picnic:
b) For Thai appetizers that I’ve never seen on another menu anywhere, try Taling Pling. In addition to Mieng Khum, they also have Chaw Mung (steamed mince chicken and onion wrapped in dough), Kratong Thong (minced chicken and corn served in waffle cups), Tung Thong (deep-fried chicken and black mushroom in flour dumplings) and Kha Nom Jeeb (Thai-style dim sum where steamed minced chicken is wrapped in rice).
These guys also have the best massaman curry on the face of the planet (and I know that within a certain set those are fighting words).
c) The best Gaeng Ga Hree Gai curry ever – like a spicier version of a massaman curry – is found at Thanying.
6.
Another city, another fruit I’ve never had before. If anyone knows what this is, please add a comment (I think it’s a langsart).
You pop the fruit out of the pod; it’s sweet and has a similar texture to a lychee but less consistency. There are about five slices to the fruit; one slice has a nut in it and the rest you can eat without consequence.
7.
And to close, a random selection of Bangkok photos and an amateur movie!
Wen and I were originally going to visit Nepal and then India but due to poor weather in Nepal (and poorer planning on our part), we’re only going to India for a now massive five weeks.
I love India, havingbeentheretwicein2006. While the second trip was purely a vacation, the first one was a visit to a technology conference and highlighted their seemingly inexorable rise to a leading power in the 21st century.
In preparation for this trip, I’ve been doing a bit of reading on the country. If you want to get a sense of just what India’s rise could mean and a sense of the staggering challenges they’re going to face to realize their full potential, I highly recommend In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce. They book is about four years old now and it’s remarkable how prescient many of his predictions/comments have been.
As a tease, here are a couple of gems from the book.
On the organization of India’s economy:
Less than 10 percent of India’s dauntingly large labor force is employed in the formal economy [i.e., not farming], which Indians call the “organized sector.” That means that fewer than 40 million people, out of a total of 470 million workers, have job security in any meaningful sense. It means that only 35 million Indians pay any kind of income tax.
…
Of the roughly 35 million Indians with formal sector jobs … 21 million are direct employees of the government. These are the civil servants, the teachers, the postal workers, the tea makers and sweepers, the oil sector workers, the soldiers, the coal miners, and the ticket collectors of the Indian government’s lumbering network of offices, railways stations, factories, and schools.
…
Fewer than 1 million – that is, less than a quarter of 1 percent of India’s total pool of labor – are employed in information technology, software, back-office processing and call centers.
I found this fascinating. Despite all the wealth created by India’s massive software companies it’s a drop in the bucket in terms of employment. Moreover, there are only 7 million people employed in manufacturing in India vs. more than 100 million in China. It will be interesting to see if India can turn themselves into a private sector job machine.
Another theme in the book is how the political process is breaking down as people elect people from their caste to ensure more public sector jobs for their caste members (as you literally cannot fire a public sector worker even if they do no work). This is compounded by reputed criminals seeking election as a way of making themselves legally untouchable. The net result is widespread corruption in both the political and bureaucratic sector.
Here’s a snippet of one revealing interview with a politician:
A few months after election I visited Reddy in his office at the state secretariat in Hyderabad. I asked him what he was doing to provide irrigation to the poor farmers. A large man with an equally large mustache, Reddy was every inch the local satrap. The rooms and corridors outside his office resembled a bustling railway station with dozens of local supplicants awaiting the chance to ask a favor of their chief minister. “Every detail is being taken care of,” he replied to my question. And what are the details? I asked. “Everything is possible,” he said. What was possible? “Every little detail.” Can you provide me with some? “In time, we will fix everything,” he said. And so on. At one stage during this singularly uninformative interview, Reddy started scrambling around for a bit of paper. His secretary handed him something. “Yes,” he said, reading it. “Sir Arthur Cotton built lots of irrigation for the farmers in this area. He was British. You are British.” But what are you doing? “We are doing everything possible to ensure irrigation gets to the farmers.”
The book is full of examples like this – and, in fairness, also inspiring interviews with some remarkable officials who are building a great future for Indians (check out the section on New Delhi’s now-former mayor).
Two other interesting areas that the book explores: gender discrimination and the spending habits of New India.
Here are some stats on gender discrimination:
In large tracts of northern and western India, the so-called “gender gap” between boys and girls has sharply increased. The average ratio of births of girls to boys for India was 945 to 1,000 in 1991. By 2001 it had fallen to 927. … Gujarat has fewer than 900 girls to 1,000 boys. Punjab has below 800.
Put another way, over time, 3-4% of the Indian population may never be able to marry because there simply won’t be enough girls to marry. Given India’s size this will mean millions of sex-starved men. Moreover, the traditional solutions to this problem never really worked and are already fading. China’s got this problem too; India’s going to have to learn from it.
The spending habits are interesting as India is its own juggernaut and is going to have to decide what values it wants to promote. Will it adopt Western consumerism or create something uniquely Indian?
Alok [a successful entrepreneur] said his employees, most of whom are dressed such that they would blend in with their counterparts in San Francisco, never talk about money in cash terms. The measure their pay in EMIs, or equal monthly installments. These are monthly deductions from your bank account that continue for years, enabling you to pay off the car, motorbike, microwave, freezer, air-conditioning units, and flats you have not earned. You can even take an EMI holiday. … “Saving is the last thing on these guys’ [his employess] minds,” Alok said.
I can’t wait to go back to India. I recommend that everyone go there as it’s fascinating – and read In Spite of the Gods before you go to have a better sense of what is happening behind the scenes.
When we visited Laos, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was so (relatively) poor due to its status as a landlocked country.
So I put together the following graphs comparing PPP Adjusted GDP per Capita (IMF or CIA number if IMF not available) for all countries that are not islands (my hypothesis is that they develop differently than continental countries-different political/environmental pressures, etc.) and at least 1,000 sq kilometer in size. I’ve coloured the graphs based on whether the countries are landlocked or not. I’ve skipped North America as there are no landlocked countries.
The results are pretty clear; on average, you’re worse off economically if you’re from a landlocked country.
Africa
5 of the 10 poorest countries are landlocked; 11 of the poorest 20. Only 1 of the richest 10 and 2 of the richest 20 are landlocked.
Asia & Middle East
5 of the 10 poorest and none of the 10 richest.
Europe
The most even of the bunch. Only 3 of the 10 poorest and 3 of the 10 richest. However, you could argue that Austria wasn’t landlocked for most of its existence (due to the Holy Roman Empire) and than Luxembourg is a statistical outlier due to its small size.
South America
It’s left as an exercise to the reader to interpret the chart below.
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