The Plan Is No Plan

Moving

2011-08-26T21:51:00.000-07:00

I am moving to Switzerland, so I have a whole flat full of stuff that I want to give to new owners. I am moving out of my place on September 16, so I need to get rid of things before then.

My main concern isn't making money of this stuff, it is getting it off my hands with a minimum of fuss. So, here is the deal: below is a list of all the things that I need to get rid of. If you think see something that you want, you can have it - so long as you come over and pick it up (and if you think that it is worth a bit of money we can come to an arrangement).

Whatever I don't give away in the next week, I will put on Gumtree.

- Volta powerlite vacuum cleaner - as good as new condition

- LG XA-14 micro hi fi - as good as new

- one tatty, but comfortable couch.

- cushions of all sizes

- A really comfy queen size ensemble bed.

- Very nice wool doona

- 4-bar heater (get it for next winter)

- A really nice wooden coffee table

- wireless and network gear, both less than 6 months old

- 1 dlink ADSL2+ model and router (model DSL-526B)

- 1 dlink wireless router (model DIR-615)

- 4 solid wooden chairs

- 2 canvas directors chairs

- A whole kitchen of plates, cups and utensils. Includes some really good plates.

- A whole bunch of books. You don't have to read them, just put them on your book shelf to look smart.

- A monsterous 500L fridge - Kelvinator "impression series".

- clothes racks

- big upright lamp

- a mirror

- bedside drawer set

Daytripping Brisneyland

2010-02-15T14:23:00.000-08:00

Has It Been That Long?

Crickey, last night I realised that I had been back in Brisbane for a month to the day. Time has flown by, and I am still suffering from a Hampi hangover. Well, my work is suffering as I have only just got back into the right frame of mind for that sort of carry-on. I went travelling for more than two months, which I reckon is the sweet spot where you relax completely, so I wasn't ready for the day-to-day of work.

I still miss the crew from Goan Corner, and I am now reduced to living vicariously through videos and photos that they post on Flickr, Facebook and Youtube (more about that below!)

India is Fully Sick

One thing did get me excited just before I left India. I hadn't been sick, except for a few very minor tummy upsets, for my entire Indian holiday. It is common knowlege that it isn't possible to go to India without getting crook, particularly for me with my weak stomach. But I found myself thinking that I was going to get away with seven weeks of fine health. Silly boy.

My last two nights were in the Southern capital city of Trivandurum, and I shouted myself a fairly plush hotel room ($20 a night!) I woke up covered in insect bites on the first morning. I figured that it was mosquitos, but when I woke with even more bites on the second morning I had a terrible feeling that... it might just be... bedbugs. I have never seen bedbugs, but I had a good look inside the bed and saw lots of very well fed little bastards crawling around.

I had to get on a flight first thing that morning, so I spent the entire trip home itching like mad, and had to spend my first day cleaning and boiling everything to kill the critters instead of sleeping. After that it was just a matter of waiting the four or five days that it takes for the sores to stop itching.

But one of the little bites got infected, right on the back of my thigh. In the space of three hours the whole back of my leg wet red, swollen and hard, and I was in a lot of pain. I had to go to hospital where I was put on strong antibiotics and told to report back every second day. Long story short, I developed a doozy of an abscess on the back of my leg that the doctor had a lot of fun squeezing (most painful thing I can remember), and I am still going to the doctor to get it checked every other day.

Good old India, she is a cruel mistress.

Animated Memories

I had lots of fun taking videos on my new camera, and got lots of really good climbers doing some crazy stuff. I have finally finished making a montage of some of the highlights. Actually, I finished a while ago, but there have been various "technical problems" in getting said videos onto YouTube in their HD glory. At least I learnt how to compile codecs by hand and spoon feed them to feed YouTube what it wants (it would seem that I can't help but turn the simplest of activities into technical challenges)

All of my videos will end up on my YouTube channel (subscribe or keep checking back because I will keep adding videos of climbs, explosions, yak jumping and Indian cooking). The movie I made of Hampi was too big, so I have split it into two halves

Part 1:

Part 2:

And, for those who own iPods and iPhones, I have made versions of the videos that will play on them, so you can keep some Hampi highlights in your pocket. Right click and save the following links (they are around 50MB each)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/233337/hampiIPOD1.mp4
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/233337/hampiIPOD2.mp4

If you there are any videos that you remember me shooting that you would like, let me know and I will see what I can do to share them with you.

Heading Home

2010-01-15T20:39:00.000-08:00

As I lay in a very cramped bed on a sleeper bus hurtling (at a maximum speed of 40 km/hr) down the "highway" from Hospet to Goa last night I wondered how it had come to this. You see, I don't do night buses, particularly those which negotiate roads with speed bumps so large that hitting them at 10 km/hr throws you out of bed. Instead of falling asleep I carefully went through all my long distance bus rides in my mind, and realised that I haven't taken a night bus since Palenque-Mexico City ten years ago.

But I found myself on a night bus because there were no tickets available for the train to Goa where I have a train leaving this evening for Trivandrum - the final destination before I fly home on Tuesday. I was feeling pretty low after having to leave Hampi, and all the great friends that I have made. It was hard knowing that it would be a long time before I saw them again, if ever.

Mind you, having a common interest in climbing make it easier to catch up. Conrad and I are making vague plans to go sport climbing in China this time next year, and Pete, Conrad and I have locked in plans for returning to Hampi in two year's time. Both trips will involve fireworks. Shitloads of fireworks. We have pledged to save our spare change over the next couple of years to fund an enormous fireworks war chest.

So, I am now at the beach in Colava, which is about five km down the road from the transport hub of Madgaon. I have to wait until 11pm for my train to Trivandrum. From there I have a flight home on Tuesday, though I think that when I arrive on Wednesday I will be spending all day sleeping... I will see the folk back home on Thursday.

A Hampi Day

On my third-last day in Hampi I woke up at a quarter to seven, which was good because we were meant to meet up at 6:30 to go to Sector E (with so many boulder fields, some of them are bound to get lame names). Pete (he puts the pump in Pete Pump) was looking a bit rough around the edges after a few too many beers with Duncan the night before, but he was there, leading the way with his brush stick (bamboo pole with brushes attached for cleaning hard-to-reach holds). Also in the group were Joana and Camilla from Switzerland and Norway respectively and Dean from Canada. Conrad is soft (don't let his 6'4", 200 pound frame fool you, his mother obviously hugged him too much as a child) so he rode is motorbike. We grabbed idli (steamed rice cakes) and chai for breakfast as we walked.

The first thing that you see at Sector E is the ninety degree arette, a 5 metre high 7a/v6 climb on the intersection of two flat, vertical faces that were formed when a large boulder was split for stone blocks. The climb is up the almost-square edge where the two faces meet, with a few crystals and small crimps on the faces being the only other holds. I had already visited the area twice to try and climb it, and this was my last chance before I left. I spent an hour trying with little success, before a group of Spaniards turned up and showed different approach to climbing it. By then I was tired so I took half an hour off to watch people climb some other things before returning to try the new approach.

On my first attempt I got very close to the top, past the hardest part, when my foot slipped and I fell quite a long way (apparently I made a very funny noise). I had a couple of holes in two fingers that had to hold a sharp hold each time I tried the climb, so I taped them up and finally pulled it together to climb my first 7a... which was a pretty big deal for me because I had been aiming to climb 6a when I arrived in Hampi. In the mean time Conrad had sent Kundalini Rising, v8, with a big flap of skin missing of his finger (I take it back big fella, you are far from soft). Camilla was suitably impressed, because she dropped us and got a ride home on the back of Conrad's bike.

To celebrate I had beer and baked beans for breakfast, and was seen wandering off to have a nap while muttering about sore fingers. When I woke I wandered over to "the lounge" (the hammocks between Conrad's hut and the girls' hut), where we watched a climbing movie (such things exist and would make no sense to anyone who doesn't climb).

Some Australian friends, Alistair and Katherine, who we met in Nepal had arrived in Hampi and were staying at the Goan Corner. So, for the afternoon I went out for some fun and easy climbing with them and Joana. We returned as things were getting dark, which made the crossing of the rice paddies a little treacherous. It was time for a shower then dinner and an early bed time (made earlier for me by a couple of extra celebratory beers), ready for the next day of climbing.

Hampi

2009-12-24T20:10:00.000-08:00

I seem to start half the posts in this blog with comments about the length of time since the last post... and this one is no different. I have been in Hampi, in the southern state of Karnataka, for three weeks. Hampi is a place where the outside world gets forgotten quite easily, and things like writing blog posts don't seem so important. So I hope that people reading this will appreciate the monumental effort that I had to go to to write the post!

Heading South

The trip from Varanasi to Hampi was a long ride. The first leg was a thirty-hour train ride to Hyderabad, which started with the usual confusion over exactly when and from which platform the train would leave. Once on the train I had to argue with the family from the next compartment who had stashed all of their luggage under the seat where my luggage belonged. Then I had to politely refuse the requests from a man who wanted me to swap seats with me; I had the top bunk, which is easily the best spot in a sleeper carriage.

After that I could relax and enjoy the ride. Well, as well as you can relax when every Indian bloke within earshot is using the loudspeaker in his phone to play the latest Bollywood hits. Indian pop music is fun for the first half an hour of your trip, but it tires very quickly when it is coming out of all manner of bad speakers.

I arrived in Hyderabad at 10pm, and had to walk around some very dodgy streets before I found a half-decent hotel room. I had a train leaving at 9 the next evening, so I decided to see a bit of Hyderabad during the day. The guidebook promised impressive Muslim sights, but the reality was poorly maintained sites covered in graffiti. By far more Indian tourists than foreigners visit the historic sites in India , and it would seem that half of them want to carve their name in the walls. The other half try to get involved with photo opportunities with any Western tourists in the area. There are a few photos out there of me with my arm around smiling Indian blokes at Charminar in Hyderabad.

The sites might have been over-hyped, but at least the famous spicy Andaran food lived up to its reputation. I had a perfect chicken Biryani (spicy rice dish) from a eatery that sold only that dish for less than a dollar.

Hampi

Another ten-hour ride on the train, a short rickshaw ride, half an hour on a bus, a short boat trip over a river and a walk through the rice paddies bought got me to the Goan Corner in Hampi. I stayed here for three weeks three years ago. Then I was going to stay for a week, but I met a lot of people who were here for the rock climbing and started to climb. The area was made famous amongst climbers by a climbing movie called Pilgrimage that came out about six years ago. Each year more climbers visit, and it now has a very vibrant scene.

The rock is very similar to the granite boulder fields in Girraween, so it all feels very familiar. Nearly all of the climbing is a style called bouldering, which involves climbing relatively low routes without any ropes. Protection from falls is provided by crash pads (easily carried mattresses designed for the purpose) and people below (called spotters) who make sure that you land on the pads when you fall. Most of the problems are only 3 or 4 meters high and the spotters are not needed much, but some of the routes can be up to 8-10 metres high which requires a good spotter to (a) save your neck if you fall (b) yell encouragement and threats to motivate you to not fall.

By far the biggest cause of injuries is not falls, it is the rock itself. The granite is very rough and sharp, and it wears my skin down very quickly. lots of care has to be taken to file any rough patches of skin down so that they don't catch and open up on the rock, and one becomes an expert at the use of tape to protect very sore finger tips and remove strain from stressed-out tendons. It doesn't help that most of the climbs here involve a lot of crimping (very thin holds that have to be held with finger tips locked into them) and overhanging starts. Most people get a bit freaked out by the difficulty and roughness of the rock when they first arrive.

But, after you have adjusted the climbing here is a lot of fun. There are boulder fields in every direction, far more than could be explored in a lifetime. I am starting to climb fairly well, and am starting to finish some of the problems that were impossible when I first arrived. The feeling of finishing a very high and hard problem a bunch of friends cheering at the bottom is great. And it has a distinctly Indian feel, given by ganja man and cake man, who walk around the rocks selling their wares to climbers.

Hampi also attracts some of the best climbers from all around the world, who are great to climb with and just watch climb. Generally speaking the climbing crowd are very good company, as they are outdoor types who are here for a purpose. The people staying at the Goan Corner are nearly exclusively climbers who are staying here for an extended period of time. So it is possible to make good friends, and have a fun activity to do every day. We generally climb twice a day, with early morning and late afternoon sessions when it is cooler. When the rock heats up you start to sweat and no amount of chalk will stop the holds from becoming greasy.

And on the days when the skin is too thin and climbing is not possible there is a lake to go swimming in. The lake also has vendors who walk around selling snacks and drinks to swimmers. When we went there a few days ago we purchased some chips off one vendor in exchange for getting to watch him jump off an 18 metre high rock into the water. We also learnt not to visit the lake on Sunday, when the area is crawling with Indian men trying to take photos of Western women swimming. They will shamelessly stand in a group of 20, a couple of metres from their victim and snap away, ignoring any pleas to respect the modesty of the girl (they get quite angry when reminded that they would not want to see their sister treated that way). But, though there are some of the usual annoyances such as lecherous men and corrupt cops (the police here are a particularly detestable lot), but here they are not overbearing and only a minor inconvenience.

Badami Run

There is an important historic city called Badami about five hours from Hampi. It is famous for its temples that were caved out of solid stone in cliff faces. It is also starting to become famous amongst climbers for its large sandstone cliffs and boulder fields. A large group of us, sixteen in total, made a short three day trip there between Christmas and the New Year. We had been told that accommodation was plentiful there, but we didn't factor in the Indian School holidays over the festive season. So, we were unable to find a single room in the whole city when we arrived at seven in the evening. Things were looking desperate until we found a hotel manager who was happy for us to sleep on the floor of the conference room for an exorbitant fee.

Badami is particluarly dirty and unpleasant place, with countless pigs on the streets are very persistent children. The children were a bit of a menace, with the low point when a bunch of them throwing stones at us after we had refused their requests for (1) school pens, (2) chocolate, (3) 10 rupees, (4) "one coin our country". Of course, some of the kids were very friendly, and they followed us around from climb to climb. A couple were keen to borrow our gear and try some easy climbs, which was both fun and stressful.

Given that Badami is a hole, it is fortunate that the climbing is so good there. All types of climbing are possible there, with many trad (where climbers place their own protection in cracks), sport climbing (where bolts in the rock are available to clip the rope into), as well as a big selection of boulders. Badami was meant to be a rest for the fingers from the hard rock in Hampi, however we climbed so much that our fingers came back as bad as ever.

New Year With A Bang

I came up with the idea of putting on a fireworks display in a boulder field with Pete, and English climber. Then when Conrad from Idaho hear of our plans his face lit up with childish glee, so he was included along with an Australian guy named Chico who grew up in Bombay as our technical consultant (growing up in India teaches you a lot about fireworks).

We passed the hat around the Goan Corner, and got 8000 rupees ($200) for a fireworks fund. We set off to Hospet, the nearest big town. There we were directed to one of many fireworks shops in town. Fireworks are a big deal in India, and they are nearly completely unregulated (and any regulations can be bypassed with some baksheesh), and are a very Indian way to celebrate an special occasion.

Our fund went a long way. A very long way. We filled up an enormous box full of pyrotechnic goodness that would cost thousands of dollars to put on in Australia, if you were allowed. We had over twenty mortars (the big ones that go really high) as well as rockets, whistlers, fountains, and the very scary bombs that have very short fuses and make a deafening roar when the explode. Conrad is a firefighter from Idaho, and is a big guy. But for the 24 hours leading up to New Year's eve he was a grinning kid.

On the 30th we went up to the rocks to let off a small mortar, just for testing purposes! It went off with a roar, and sent a trail of sparks high into the sky that exploded into a brilliant firework. That made us more excited, because we wanted to know how the big ones would go. On New Years all four of us stayed sober for the show. We were very nervous about the amount of explosives that we were dealing with, as well as with the safety of our drunk audience.

We had carefully choreographed the show, so we spent more time running around and climbing to launching stations than looking up at the show, but I know had the most fun. I now realise that I missed out by not playing with fireworks when I was a child. After it was over, we sat on the rock, drinking beer and watching an eclipse of the full moon (and a blue moon too, all on New Years).

I hope that everyone had a good festive season, and are looking at a good new year!

Varanasi

2009-11-30T23:56:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I found a photo of my parents in India before I was born. It shows them sitting in a boat, with a distinctly Indian city on the shore behind them. For Christmas I framed it for them, and Dad told me that it was from an early-morning boat road that they took on the Ganges at Varanasi. This morning Jamie took a photo of me in a boat, with a similar backdrop (I even have a mustache like Dad did in the shot).

The hassle that Jamie and I had to go through with touts to get the boat is probably more than they had to deal with, but the city has probably changed very little. Indeed, the city has had a continuous history as the city at the centre of Hinduism since at least 600BC, and it has achieved that in part by changing very little, and not getting involved with greater politics.

The city is stretched along the western bank of the Ganges with an endless string of ghats (bathing steps) along the shore. The other bank is completely bare, without a single building or sign of human intervention. While tourists are conspicuous, along with hostels, bakeries and stores advertising to them, the city really has a life of its own and it is very easy to step aside and just watch the city do its thing.

Jamie and I have had a blast the last few days here, though I suppose we haven't actually done much. We have just been wandering around the fiendishly complex network of alleyways behind the ghats, sampling food and watching the rituals of daily life. The food has been a big hilight for us. Street food in Nepal was not too interesting or varied, but in Varanasi there are many little stalls serving all sorts of vegetarian delights to Pilgrims at high speed, so the food is always very fresh and hot.

We have found a very good little place where the guys stand in front of big pots of fresh food, serving it out as fast as physically possible. We also have a very friendly chai man whose chai sells for less than 10 cents a hit, with lots of sugar and a hint of cardamom. And this morning I got a great video of a pro making chapati at a little stall that only serves a three types of curry with chapati. It matters that they get their chapati right! It is great to see the chapati rolled out, then placed on a hot plate for a minute, then put straight on a bed of hot coals where it puffs up instantly, then removed and patted down to make it flat.

On the first day, just after checking in in our hotel after the long and tiring 24 hour bus-rickshaw-jeep-train-rickshaw journey from Pokhara, I went for a wander and found a lassi shop called Blue Lassi. Lassis are made from creamy yogurt that is worked in with sugar until it becomes smooth. Good ones are served with thick lumps of cream and a dash of rosewater infused with saffron on top. Jamie and I have made them a two-a-day ritual, and at 30 cents a pop we can afford to.

The lassi shop is on a narrow lane that leads down to the main ghat where the dead are cremated on wooden pires. Every five minutes a group of men chanting a simple mantra will walk past carrying a body wrapped in a shroud and covered in marigolds towards the ghats. After a while you end up chanting the mantra to yourself while waiting for your lassi (now rated as my "best in world", replacing the Lassi Wallah in Jaipur).

I am getting along a lot better with Indians in general this time, which is probably because I knew what to expect and I have a slightly higher budget! It is nice to not worry so much about getting ripped off, and letting the hotel make rail bookings and such for you instead of having to sort it out myself. There have still been a few exasperated moments, but nothing that a head wobble and patience can't solve.

I have booked my train tickets to Hyderabad tomorrow, and from there I will getting another train and bus to Hampi, where my fingers will hopefully be in good form on the rocks. So the next post should see me very happy and relaxed in Southern India. Of course, this is India, so I am not taking anything for granted!

Water

2009-11-26T20:47:00.000-08:00

Bad Manners

Kirk and I got a local bus from Sundurijal to Kathmandu at the end of our hike. Kirk was lucky enough to have a young lad "practice English" with him. The kid had some strong opinions, particularly on the offence caused to the Nepali people by foreigners who don't learn to speak Nepali and refuse to drink water out of the tap: "Nepalese water is fine, very clean. You are being rude by drinking bottled water instead of tap water."

We had just walked past a village with open sewers that flowed into small streams that then fed a small reservoir that supplied water to Kathmandu. This occurs everwhere, with all sewage flowing directly into water courses, which closes the loop very nicely for guardia. It would seem that a large portion of the population must have the disease; it is certainly very cheap to buy tinedazol, the drug for treating the disease.

Nepalese people do not travel well on buses. The tout has to run back and forward distributing plastic bags for people who are going to be ill, and you have to be careful that vomit from someone throwing up out a window at the front doesn't come back through your window toward the rear (speaking from experience). After taking a bus ride while recovering from a case of gardia and struggling to hold onto my lunch, Kirk and I came up with a new theory that upset stomachs might be behind much of the bus illness problems.

Getting Crook, Spotting Critters

All three of us got gardia around the same time. Kirk and I think we got it from water used to wash our cups and plates the appalling accomodation that we were forced to accept on the last night of our trek. We took the appropriate tablets in Kathmandu, then got a bus to Royal Chitwan National Park the next day. The bus ride got quite hairy towards the end, as the road followed the side of a river in a steep valley. There were many breakdowns, crashes and nutty drivers. One truck loaded up with bamboo had rolled over and was balanced on the cliff beside the road, with two shaken drivers sitting next to it.

No sooner had we made ourselves comfortable in the Tiger Safari Lodge (not to be confused with the inferior accomodation offered by the Safari Tiger Lodge and the Tiger Lodge), than Dave turned up on a noisy Royal Enfield motorbike (India's Harley Davidson). Dave is a loud, hilarious Enlishman (Torquay) who could talk the legs off a chair . We met on the Langtang walk and have bumped into him at each stop of our trip.

When you meet Dave drink. You don't have any option. We have bumped into him three times, and the consequences have always been both hilarious and terrible. Unluckily the timing of our beer and red wine session in Chitwan didn't agree with our stomachs, and Kirk and I spent an uncomfortable night being violently ill (Kirk had it worse).

The next day Jamie and I played with the elephants during washing time at the river. We would climb on the elephant who would stand up and try to throw us in the water, which it always managed to do in the end. That afternoon we went for an elephant ride on a magnificent big elephant with huge tusks. Chitwan has lots of animals, with the biggest drawcard being its population of 400-500 one-horned Asian rhinos.

We spotted lots of deer, and a hilarious monkey that threatened to make my day by almost falling out of it's tree (regular readers in the past will be aware that I don't like monkeys). Unfortunately footprints and dung piles were all that we saw of the rhinos.

The next day Kirk had recovered enough to join us for a half day hike and half day jeep safari in the park. It took us less than half an hour to find a rhino, which we had to view by climbing a tree. It is quite dangerous walking around with such large and unpredictable animals lurking in the long grass. Another walking group who had been in the same canoe as us got chased 80 metres by an angry male rhino, with one of their group lucky to be uninjured after the rhino threw him in the air.

We got a far better view of a rhino during out jeep safari, when a big male walked out onto the road about 10 metres behind our jeep. He had a good look at us, before deciding that we weren't worth the effort of chasing, and wandered off into the bush. Up close such animals look very large, and just a bit intimidating.

Lakeside Living

We are now in Pokhara, a town beside a peaceful lake with great views of the Annarpurna range. We got here a couple of days ago, though one of those days was a bit of a write off because we bumped into Dave and had to put the day towards nursing hangovers.

It is very close to the end of our time in Nepal. Jamie and I are going to take the long trip to the Indian border and onto Varanarsi tomorrow, and we just saw Kirk ride off on a rented motorbike. He is going to attempt to ride along the recently completed Annapurna road to the village of Muktinath where Julian and I once nearly got run out of town (see "This Town Isn't Big Enough" here).

I hope everyone back home is well. The next post will have details of the craziness and culture shock of India. As such it promises to be funnier and more entertaining than these pleasant Nepalese posts.

On The Road Again

2009-11-16T21:59:00.000-08:00

This is the first post for a long time. And, like the first post in this blog, it is being written in Kathmandu. This time around I am travelling with my brother Kirk, and my friend of too-many years/partner in crime Jamie. We are in Nepal for a month to do some trekking, then Jamie and I will be going to India where I plan to do lots of climbing in Hampi and eat a lot of curry (two of my favorite things.)

We flew out of Brisbane on the first at midnight. More often than not, flights involve some sort of cock-up for me, and this one was no different. At least in wasn't my fault. Kirk and I had adjacent seats because we have the same last name, but Jamie was down the front of the plane. When we got off for our stop over in Singapore he wasn't waiting at the gate. We waited half an hour, checked the sick bays and had him paged, because we had to be sure he was OK. It turned out that he had just wandered off to do some shopping without touching base as would be reasonably expected. We didn't see him until just before boarding of our flight four hours later.

You couldn't pick two more different international airports than Singapore and Kathmandu. One has automated everything (there are multicoloured LEDs above each urinal in Singapore that alert the user as the the status of the loo), the other has a chalk boards above the luggage carousels that are meant to have the appropriate flight number for the luggage written on them (the luggage seems to come out at random, with a head wobble the most detailed information that the staff can give you.)

We did quite well getting out of the airport and into a reasonably-priced taxi with a minimum of fuss. We got railroaded into a hotel run by some an annoying bunch of gentlemen by the smooth co-driver of the the tourist taxi. They turned each transaction, such as filling out the check-in forms, into a tag team operation to try and sell us tours, get us trekking permits or ask if we had ever heard of Nepalese "chocolate". But it was a clean room that took no effort to find.

Getting Ready

The next day we left the hotel with a minimum of fuss, and located The Hotel Red Planet which I remembered from my last stay. This was no mean feat, given that Thamel - the travellers' district in Kathmandu - is a rat's nest of twisting lanes, buildings on buildings, and every type of transport jostling and trying to sell you Nepalese chocolate.

Once installed in our more pleasant digs we spent a day organising our trekking permits, which has become slightly more complex than last time I was here. Which is to say, it took a lot of vigorous debate and research just to to determine exactly where we had to go to get the permits. We guessed correctly and got the permits after trekking across town and filling out a bunch of forms and dealing with a few grinning, head-wobbling clerks.

The next challenge was to determine which bus station our bus left from the next morning. Once that was done we celebrated with lots of Everest beer, which gave us hang-overs from hell. They put something in the beer over here, and it isn't healthy.

The bus ride from Kathmandu to Siabhru Besi was long and painful, and took all day. Things started well, with the first part of the 70 kilometre journey going smoothly, but the distance covered started to resemble some logarithmic curve from hell as the road surface deteriorated and the number of treacherous switch backs increased. With an hour left on the eight-hour journey, a young lady lost her curry lunch all over Kirk's pants, which made everyone except us laugh.

A Short Walk In The Langtang Valley

The first of two treks that we were planning was the so-called Langtang walk that starts at the bottom of the Langtang valley which is steep, narrow and formed by a river, and follows the valley up to the top where it is wide and flat-bottomed because it was formed by a glacier.

The first couple of days were walking through thick sub-tropical forests in the lower part of the valley, and as we climbed higher the vegetation started to thin out. None of us were very fit, so the constant uphill gradient combined with thinning air as we gained altitude had us working fairly hard. It was considerably harder for Jamie, because he got very bad blisters on his heels that deteriorated each day. By the time we were in Kyangin Gompa at the head of the valley he had been reduced to Teevas.

There were plenty of great views, and friendly people along the way, but the highlight for me was when Kirk accepted my idle dare to jump the largest Yak in Langtang Village (that is yak with a capital Y). Watch this space for video evidence on Youtube.

While Jamie was resting his feet, Kirk and I made a couple of day trips. The first was to walk right up to the end of the valley for a great view from the base of the mountains that extended into Tibet. The second was to climb the 5000 metre high peak of Tserko Ri (well, actually 4984m, but you always round these things up) for a great view of the tops of the same mountains.

We had planned to return back to Syabhru Besi where we started the walk, and then head to the Annapurna region to to the Annapurna Base Camp walk, however we figured that would be pushed for time. Instead, we decided to extend our Langtang walk by crossing the high passes at the holy lake (for Hindus) of Gosankund into the Helambu region.

Jamie's feet were not getting any better, so he finished the walk at Syabhru Besi, and Kirk and I headed for Gosankund. We got laid-up by bad weather in the village Syabhru, which is balanced along a steep ridge. We saw the snow line drop by 1000 metres over the coarse of an hour while we ate our lunch - the clouds descended to cover the tops of the hills, and they left snow behind when they lifted.

The walk up to Gosankund was much easier after our earlier acclimatisation walks, with a beautiful day spent climbing 1700 metres through rhododendron then alpine forests to the high, windy ridge of Laurabina. From there we had uninterrupted views of the Himalaya from the length of the Annapurnas, the Himal Ganesh, into Tibet and to the Langtang peaks.

From Lauribina we had a short climb to the first 4100 metre pass. After the pass the trail was very narrow, carved into a steep slope, with snow on the trail and views over the first lakes below us. Just as we got to the snow line proper, we saw the lake of Gosankund. Hindu mythology holds that the body of Siva can be seen as some stones sticking out of the water where he threw himself for relief after drinking poison. The water was very cold, which would explain why pilgrims come here for ceremonial bathing in the middle of summer. I decided that to wash my face and make a small coin donation to the lake was as far as I was prepared to go.

To get to Helambu we had to cross a second pass of 4600 metres in the snow, which we did in our shorts with big grins after two days of fantastic walking. From there it was a tiring and long descent to Gopte where we were kept awake by a Dutch lady who was a prodigious snorer (thankfully she wasn't as bad as "Our Latvian Friend"). We finished the walk through Helambu to Sundarijal on the outskirts of Kathmandu in a couple of days, with some wonderful views of the Himalaya from the east to the west and changing landscape as high-mountain slopes gave way to well-tended terraces around villages.

We are now back in Kathmandu. We had planned to go to Royal Chitwan National Park for some wildlife spotting, but have postponed that for a day while Jamie recovers from a tummy upset (for once I am not the first to fall!) The bakeries of Kathmand keep us well fed and we import beer for more tolerable hangovers. Life is good.

Cadiz

2008-03-06T03:01:00.000-08:00

Camping

Last week I packed my camping gear and took the four-hour bus ride to Tarifa, on the southern tipof Spain at the mouth of the Mediteranian. I stocked up on supplies in the supermercado (Eroski, my fave cheapo European supermarket), and started walking north along the beach.

There is a long ten kilometer stretch of beach before one gets to the headland at Punta Pampàloma, from there another four kilometers around the coast is El Chorrito, the beach where I spent the summer camping.

This time it was almost deserted, with a small group of people I didn´t know camping near the beach. I had the pick of the camping spots, and plenty of firewood. I chose a well hidden site high above the beach where the police would never find me. There might not have been many people around, but they still had a helicopter going back and forward along the coast, just to make people nervous.

I got to thinking about the summer that I spent on El Chorrito, and remembered that there were lots of stories from that time that I never wrote about in the blog...

Football

One lazy afternoon everybody was lying on the beach, enjoying the cooling of the air as the sun got lower. Bored. Probably stoned. Wondering what to do. Maybe something would come along?

A bright, round object was spotted floating out at sea.
¨probably a buoy¨
¨or a skin diver¨ (they have a bright floater attatched to them so that boats can see where they are and not run over them)

The object got closer, and closer...
¨coño, it´s a football!¨

While one hippy ran hollering into the surf to fetch the prize everybody else scrambled to sort out a pitch on the beach. Sticks marked the goals, and two teams were organised. The result was a no-holds-barred five-aside game of nude football.

Everybody turned out to be quite handy, which isn´t such a surprise in Europe. The girls watched as teams comprised of idle, stoned hippies, backpackers, criminals and musicians enthusiastically threw themselves into the game. It was a sight to see Carlos, a live-and-let-live hippy type sprint ten meters to shove somebody off the ball, then fight tooth and nail to retain it.

In the end everybody jumped into the sea to clean up, and set about cooking dinner.

Close Shave

I had spotted two police cars at the end of the road after the military checkpoint. It was unusual to see them in the area in the afternoon - they always came to raid us at sunup so that they could catch us while we slept. It is very unpleasant being woken by a scowling policeman (advice - pretend not to speak Spanish and act really stupid).

I dashed to the campsites to warn everybody that there might be some trouble on the way. But there was no sign of the police, and after an hour it was assumed that they were in the carpark for some other reason.

Everyone relaxed, and went back to their sites. I put on my pack and walked over to Fred´s site, a little ledge on top of the cliff overlooking the beach. I had my eyes on my feet and my head in dreamland as I wandered along, and I didn´t see the Policewoman talking to Fred until I looked up about ten meters from his site. She was standing side-on to me, and I thought that she would certainly see me out of the corner of her eye. Fred certainly saw me.

After a couple of seconds I started to back away slowly, I turned and walked quickly. I was waiting for the call, but it didn´t come and I ran to the little clearing where most of us were staying. There were eight guys sitting around the fire, with all of their possesions in various stages of unpacked. It took ten seconds after I said ¨Policia! Muy circa!¨, for everything to be packed and for us to be madly scrambling up the slope into the scrub where the police couldn´t find us.

Fred got a fine in the post, but he was asked to sign for it. He refused to sign, so he was never given the ticket, so he never had to pay.

A Surprise

2008-02-27T02:39:00.000-08:00

Autostop

Last time I was leaving San Pedro I got a lift to Campohermoso with a German guy. From Campohermoso I somehow got a ride all the way to Granada, a two-hour ride that saved me many hours mucking around with buses and waiting in Spanish bars. The fog was so thick we could only see ten meters as we climbed from sea level to Granada which lies at around 700 meters altutitude. Then we drove out of the wall of cloud and to our left was the wonderful sight of the snow-capped Sierra to our left, and the cave-town of Guadix up ahead.

Campofeo

Campohermoso is the nearest main-road town to San Pedro, and it is a hell of a misnomer. Campohermoso means beautiful field in Spanish. Nothing could be further from the truth. The area is semi-arid, and may well have once been a beautiful stark landscape had the locals not struck tomato gold. A few years ago somebody realised that tomatoes could be grown all year round under plastic in large, ugly greenhouses that stretch as far as the eye can see.

The dusty mainstreet has a few Mercedes belonging to farmers who suddenly became very rich when they could see their tomatoes at three euros a kilo in Germany during winter. And there are the ugly "marble houses" built with such funds. Apparently in this part of the world many people keep an immaculate living room that nobody is able to use, it was purely for show. Now that some have a lot more money this idea has been scaled up to an entire marble house, with the family living in the garage.

Killing Time

Now I am just whittling time away, waiting for March the 13th when I have a flight from Valencia to England. I am waiting on a refund of my Irish tax money, without which I am not able to go too crazy in the last couple of weeks here.

But at least I will have to tax money for when I get home, though it does feel a little bit wrong to return from a long journey and not be broke. From Valencia I am flying to Stanstead near London, then I will be getting a train to Heathrow (well, actually, a couple of trains). Then on to Singapore, Melbourne and Brisbane. I am not looking forward to the journey, it always tires me out... but I am looking forward to getting home!

I was just going to turn up and surprise everybody, but that was going to be a little tricky to organise -- I can imagine getting home and finding that everybody was off camping, washing their hair or baking. So instead I have put it in my blog, and we will see how long it takes people to find out. Krys reckons 5.6 hours, I think more like three days. First reply gets a jelly frog when I get home.

Update : Jelly frog goes to Briana, my darling sister. My parents had also guessed by reading my mail. My flight QF610 arrives in Brisbane on March 15 at 10:10am. And Cully also gets a frog.

San Pedro

2008-02-07T07:07:00.000-08:00

Waiting For The Bus

We had one of those days the other day. One of those days where you misstime your arrival so that you have to wait the maximum amount of time before catching the next bus.

The objective of the day´s travel was to get from San Pedro to Granada. The walk from San Pedro to Las Negras took about an hour, and we took no time at all to hitch-hike from Las Negras (Litterally ¨The Black Women¨, a fishing village so named after most of the men from the village died at sea sometime around 1900 and all the women in town wore black in mourning) to Campo Hermoso.

From there it all went wrong. A three hour wait for the hour-long bus ride to Almeria. Then it was another two hour wait for a bus to Granada. We then had to waste an hour waiting for the bus to Monachil where Fred lives. In all we were travelling for 11 hours, and I was a bit grumpy by the time that we got home.

Paridise Without Shade

It was all worth it for the four nights that we spent in San Pedro, an abandoned fishing village on the desert coast of Cabo De Gata (Cape Cat). The decline of the village began with the aforementioned boat disaster, when the majority of the population moved to the village of Las Negras which had just been given road access.

By the 1950s the only inhabitants in town were the Garda Civil, Franco´s right-hand police. When the Garda Civil left hippies slowly started to move into town to have a go at building their own little paradise(Garda Civil and hippies are not compatable, not by a long shot).

The coast of Cabo De Gata is the driest place in Europe, and one of the hottest. The village exists due to two fresh water springs that pop up in a little valley the ends in a small beach. They flow all year around, and provide a little oasis in the middle of the dry rolling hills with nothing taller than your hips growing on them.

It was hot enough when we were there, and that was the middle of winter. In summer it must be very difficult to get through some of the days. There is a little bit of shade, but not much. Certainly staying in one´s tent would be impossible any time after sunrise. In fact, I didn´t sleep in the tent, preferring to roll my sleeping mat out on the ground so that I could enjoy the perfect startscape in the desert.

Where Is The Community?

Of course a bunch of hippies building a little town basically translates into a bunch of folk doing their own things with a minimal amount of coordination or communication. One thing I have learnt from living in such places, it is that community can be a euphimism. More like squatter´s rights, and a great place for prison leavers, mental patients and drug addicts to hide from the greater world.

That said, there is always a core group of interesting folk who have a different take on life. Unlike El Chorrito where I spent a month during the summer, the police have very little interest in what goes on in San Pedro. In El Chorrito the police came by every couple of days to kick out anybody who was camping in the forest above the beach. This made it impossible to set up even any semi-permentant dwellings.

In San Pedro people are left to create whatever structures they please, and they also have the skeletons of the original town buildings to work with. As a result there is all manner of dwellings, and also a panaderia (bread shop), and bars serving cold beer (solar panels and generators provide the power).

The most impressive place that I saw was by far the cave house built by a German guy named Tilo. He had lived in San Pedro eight years, and had spent the last two years constructing his cave. It was a three minute scrample up a very steep rocky slope halfway up a cliff overlooking the bay. If the rock face he had carved out a cave using a chisel. He had built terraces, and steps chiseled into the rock lead from one level to another. The crowing touch was a stone BBQ that had probably the best view from a kitchen anywhere in the world. To top it off the house was completely invisible from below and one would only know about it if they were invited up.

Another character named Rubin, had recently left jail, where he had spent the last eight years. He was twenty eight, but he told me when I met him that in fact he was twenty years old as far as he was concerned. Krys and I enjoyed many a cup of coffee in his little hut, and grew to be good friends. Krys is a tattooist by trade, and has an impressive collection of tattoos on herself. Rubin revealed that he was a tattooist in jail, and told us how he made his own tattoo machines from pens and walkman batteries.

Characters like Rubin and Tilo are a highlite of places like San Pedro. But there are also people who keep you on your toes (I have met some jail-leavers and the like in such places that I would run a mile to avoid). Whoever you meet, it is bound to be interesting and educational.

Hola!

2008-02-01T04:44:00.000-08:00

The English - A Definition

Sign spotted on the Chester-Liverpool Merseyrail train

Railway Bye-Laws : FEET ON SEETS

Feedback from our customers shows us that people putting their feet on train seats is a habit they find particularly annoying.

This also includes framework sections between, and either side of, the seat cushions.

Enforcement officers are on the Merseyrail network and may film and interview people who put their feet on seats, and any part of the seat structure, as evidence for prosecution.

Feet on seats falls within Merseyrail Electric 2002 Ltd. Railway Bye-Laws. Failure to comply with these instrucitons may lead to prosecution.

Which sums the English up quite neatly. I spent twenty minutes straining myself to resist an overwhelming urge to put my feet on the framework sections between, and either side of, the seat cushions.

The New Year

I spent New Year´s in Dublin. We had an Argentinian BBQ at my house, with my Argentine flatmate´s Argentian friends and guests. Some latin timing ensured that we were halfway between the house and the city centre when the fireworks went off. I had a quiet one, because I had to catch a ferry to Liverpool the next day.

Confusion

Well, I thought that I was getting the ferry to Liverpool. When I got off the ferry at Hollyhead I noticed that the signs in the terminal were in two languages, and that one of the languages looked particularly odd. I figured that it was an indictation of how many Polish people lived and worked in England these days.

Then I left the building and noticed styleised dragons everywhere. I checked the signs again and noticed the far-too-high ratio of constenants to vowels. Bugger, I was in Wales. Of course, if I hadn´t had to take a two hour train journey to Liverpool I would have missed out on seeing the aforementioned sign, which amused me more than you would reckon.

I was in town to watch Liverpool play at Anfield. To be honest, it was a poor display against Wigan, that ended in a draw and got some boos from the fans at the end of the game. But it was great to be in the stadium and watch the players I have always watched on the telly up close and personal.

Spain, Again

I have returned to Spain for a couple of months familiarising myself with the Spanish ways. My Spanish is improving all the time, but the more I learn the more it seems that I have to learn. Conversations are making more sense, and I don´t have any problems in shops, buses and with public transport. I now have to get the hang of the much subtle art of conversation... and making jokes.

I popped up to Portugal very briefly to see my buddy Krys (a girl´s name), though I can´t really say that I have been to Portugal. She was staying with some Irish friends in The Algarve, which is the Portugese equivilant of the Gold Coast. Lots of tourists, everybody spoke English, the beer was English, her Irish buddies just played pool in the pub all day, the beaches were cleaned daily by machines. Not exactly Portugal, though it was easy to find a half-decent English fry-up for brekkie!

This weekend Krys and I are going camping at Cabo De Gata (Cape Cat), on a beach that is surrounded by dessert. Then next weekend Fred (my buddy in Granada) and I will be going to the carnival in Cadiz, which promises to be over the top.

Busy Times

2007-11-16T08:02:00.000-08:00

Come On, Say Please

Two Irish guys, around 50 years old, were sitting at one of the tables in the bar today. They ask me for a couple of pints of Guinness. I do the first pour on the pints (you pour Guinness in two steps, first pour about four fifths of the pint, wait for it to settle then pour the rest), and went out to get the money while waiting for it to settle.

"That'll be six Euros please"
"Don't we get our pints first?"
"Oh, I promise I will bring them out with the change... and if I don't you know where I work", I smile at my lame joke.
"Oh son, you haven't hear my reputation - I would just shoot you."
I do my best to smile while taking the money.

When I take the pints back out to them the guy decides to make me feel better by teasing me about getting beat by the English in the rugby world cup. I don't make any jokes about getting beat by the English for several hundred years.

Taking it Easy

Work is fairly slow at the moment - the calm before the storm of Christmas, when we are going to be silly busy. That is fine with me, because I have plenty of socialising to do, and that needs time (for the socialising and the hangovers).

There are two big parties over the next two nights, and then my old flatmate Julia from Brisneyland will be visiting on Sunday. We plan to get out of Dublin and have a look around, which will be great. I have been here for a fair while yet, and all I have seen is inner-city Dublin.

Can't Really Complain

2007-11-06T07:07:00.001-08:00

"You see, it isn't actually that cold in winter. Not too hot in summer either. That's the problem isn't it?".
"How's that?"
"Well, the weather is shite, we all agree, but not so bad that you can complain about it."
"Fair enough."
"Fair enough all right, what you going to say? 'Aye! It's fierce mild today!'"
"Not without sounding like a gobshite."
"There you go."

Fair Enough

And the weather hasn't been worth complaining about so far. There has been a little rain, and one needs a jumper, but there has been plenty of sunshine and little wind, and no real bitter cold. Apparently it is going to get a lot wetter and more miserable, but not too cold. But I maintain my right to whinge. I know what good weather looks like, and this is not good weather. Sure, it isn't going to kill me, but that isn't the point.

One German friend said that she hadn't seen so many accidents on icy roads as she does in Ireland. "When the road freezes over the Irish don't know what to do. They should take the bus on such days."

I don't know about that - the buses in Dublin are shite. Slow, late, and paying for your ticket is comic gold. The drivers don't give change. You ask for your ticket, show the driver how much cash you have, then drop it into a chute that collects your coins. I always assumed that the coins were counted by a machine when you put them into the chute. But no, in a truly Irish touch no such thing happens. The driver counts the money as you drop it into the chute, then gives you a paper receipt for the change that you can redeem at the transport office.

My Portugese budy Pedro said "I love the look on the driver's face when you hold up a handful of 1 and 2-cent pieces and he knows he has no idea how much change you are giving him. You can get away with short-changing him 20 cents. Do that every day and you can save enough for a pint at the end of the week."
"Pedro, you need to get a job."

More Than a Roof

I finally have my own room! Well, I will come Friday. I am moving into a house with Pedro the aforementioned Portugese, an Argentinian and a Scot. All boys, with a fifty-fifty split between English and Spanish speakers.

After sleeping so long on couches I am hanging out for that room. My own space. Close the door and be along. Don't wait up until all hours waiting for others to go to bed. Don't get woken up early by others going to real jobs that require early rising. A kitchen of my own! And it has gas burners, not the horrible ceramic-electric stove tops that are all the rage over here (some people try to defend them, but you just have to ask "How many comercial kitchens use anything but gas for cooking?").

Brazilian BBQ

Guilliano held a Brazilian BBQ at his place last Sunday. There were the Brazilian lads, crowded around the BBQ throwing salt, oil and beer at the meat sizzling over the coals.
"The meat in Ireland is shit man."
"Yeah, in Brazil you have twenty different cuts, all quality."
A Basque guy pipes up
"I bring meat back with me whenever I return from home. Good Basque meat."

We stand around drinking German and American beer (Erdinger and Millers respectively), some wearing football jerseys for English teams, talking about surfing in Spain and how hot and crazy Brazilian women are (quite, according to the lads).

Froggy Chef

"Hey Frog, where are my fucking fries?"
"Sure you don't want onion reengs? I have nice creespy onion reengs!"
"Keep your goddam onion rings Frenchy, and fix me fries before I start breaking shit!"
"Hey convict son-of-bitch, why are you so rude to me and my onion reengs?"
"Rudeness is relative, and I am talking to a Frenchman"
"Fair point, the French are too rude. Sure you don't want some onion reengs?"
"Nah, onion rings remind me of disappointment. Many a time I have bitten into one thinking it is calamari only to find disappointing onion. Got any calamari?"
"No, but I have some creespy onion rings. Want some?"

Lost At Night

2007-10-29T13:38:00.000-07:00

I woke up today, looked out the window and noted that the sun had set. Oh well, there is a first time for everything. It took me twenty eight years, but I finally succeeded in sleeping through an entire day. Last night/this morning was manic at work, and topped off a very busy weekend.

Last night was everybody's favourite night - gay night. A particularly special one, as it is a bank holiday today. An ideal chance to let your hair down, darling. I spent five hours chained to my bar, along with Guilliano the friendly Brazilian bartender (and ladies man par excellence), without a chance to scratch my bum with angry patrons squeeling "tsk, I have been waiting the longest". Jesus, we were overwhelmed. Glasses ran out, vodka ran out, Red Bull ran out (this disgusting shit is people's mixer of choice here), my patience ran out (more than one nasty patron copped a bit of articulate bile).

So, remember, when you are in a bar and it is really busy, take the time to look at how hard the bartender is working and realise how impossible it is for him to keep track of exactly who has been waiting the longest, or for him to pour fifty vodka redbulls a minute. Then avoid the following behaviour

Yelling. You will be ignored, or told to shut up then ignored.
Leaning over the bar. You will be told to get back on the right side of the bar, then ignored.
Waving money. You will be laughed at, then ignored. That money isn't going into my pocket, and I assume that everybody who is lining up has money for their drinks.
Touch the bartender to get their attention. He or she will get very angry, then make a point of not serving you.
Do not, under any circumstances, try to walk behind the bar. You won't get served for the rest of the night... and you will probably be ignored next Sunday too.
Don't ask for an Irish coffee, you muppet. And if I make you an Irish coffee on a busy night, I expect a tip.

If you want to get your drinks

Wait patiently, then don't rush when giving your order.
Give a tip, and you will be served first when you come back. We are not about equal opportunity, and we get minimum wage. Money talks.
If you are an attractive woman, go to the bar that Guilliano is working on, he will make sure that you are well looked after, but beware, he might try to liberate you of your phone number (though he is a strapping lad and you might be well tempted to oblige).

Fancy a Drink?

2007-10-25T09:50:00.000-07:00

I was waiting for traffic at the busy intersection on Aston Quay, where the bridge from O'Connell Street Crosses The Liffey. I admired the billboard for Cork Dry Gin on the building over the river, then noticed the 1970s style advert for Ireland's Own Baileys Liqueur above it. I recalled The Heineken Building directly behind me, and as I turned to look at it I noticed that the building next to it had huge letters announcing Irish Liver Assurance. A Guinness truck trundled past.

Show Me The Money

2007-10-17T06:59:00.000-07:00

I got paid for the first time today. Hooray. It is a bit difficult getting that all important first pay in the bank - because before that can happen one has to organise a PPS number (like a TFN, SSN or whatever-your-country-calls-it number) and then get an account from the bank. Before that one needs a permanent address, but to get a permanent address it helps to get paid so that you can afford the rent.

A Roof

Lucky for me Rory, the wonderful Irish chap who "hosted" me on his couch when I first arrived, wrote a letter claiming that I was his new tennant, thus giving me a permanent address. When I first arrived in Spain I stayed on the couch of somebody that I met through the Couchsurfing website. I didn't need to use the site after that in Spain because Kiko and his friends did a wonderful job of accomodating me.

But arriving in Dublin without any local contacts I got back onto couchsurfing to line up some accomodation and open doors in the new city. I got in touch with Rory, AKA DublinGuy, who offered me a couch to sleep on for a couple of days. We got on great-guns, and I ended up staying for over a fortnight.

He is an ex-priest, now studying law and working as a lawyer. He has stacks of people, over four hundred a year, who stay in his place. When one arrives they get a map, as much local knowledge as they can absorb, and a feed. He is a fountain of information, knowing everything about from how to get a PPS number to finding a good live music venue (just don't ask him for any good vegetarian restaurants). We got on very well, and I just ended up staying until I found a place to stay. He was very busy with work and exams, so I started to take over some of his role as welcoming party to Dublin.

Now I am sleeping on another couch - that if Inez, a Swedish girl that I work with. She and her boyfriend have a great little apartment in Christchurch, just down the road from the Guinness brewery. When I first met her I thought that she was Irish - her Irish accent is perfect, and she understands the Irish vernacular far better than I do.

So, still without proper accomodation - but now I have funds with which to pay a deposit and get a room. Getting a room in Dublin is a nightmare, with far more punters looking for a place than there are places. A friend of mine has just found a place, and offered me a room, so we will see what happens. But it might be that I end up crashing from couch to couch until I finish my time in Dublin. That would certainly see me save lots more money.

Where's The Free Beer?

2007-10-04T09:28:00.000-07:00

Versatile Vodka

My second shift at the new job was student night. The school and university year has just kicked off in The Northern Hemisphere after summer holidays, and the city is filled with fresh faced kids starting their higher education. Not that they are too concerned about learning right now; drinking and the opposite sex are getting far more attention than the books.

My workplace has taken it upon itself to fleece the kids of their pocket money by overcharging for horrible vodka (when the back label of a vodka bottle proudly boasts that it is a "versatile vodka" you should be wary). One of my workmates commented that you certainly wouldn't get away with serving that rubbish to the gay crowd on Sunday nights.

But the kids are ignorant. They lap it up. Some of them had that rabbit in headlights look in their eyes as the approached the bar - I had a sneaking suspicion that this was their first bar experience.
"Can we have some free shots?"
I reply with an impassive stare.
"Well?"
"No"
"... how about some 2 euro beer then?"
"No"
"Oh well, it was worth a try."
"No it wasn't."

Some of them are fast learners though, and they figure out that being friendly to bartenders and/or giving small tips gets you much better service (and serves). One might think that they are too poor to give a fifty cent tip, but that tip can guarantee that you get a better-than-50-cent top up next time, ahead of everybody else. And when it is all about getting as much alco-pop for your money as possible that is worth keeping in mind.

Contemporary Cave Living

I met a French guy named Fred on the beach, sometimes labelled Fredo Frog, or Fred the Feelthy Frenchy. A funny guy, who had been living in Granada for the last sixteen years, working as a teacher and organising school trips for children around Andalucia. We struck up a good friendship, and I went to spend the last week-and-a-half at his place in Granada.

He had a place in a little village named Pueblo Monachil, right on the edge of Granada. It is typical of the Moorish Spanish towns that one sees on postcards - whitewashed little houses clinging to either side of a valley with a river tumbling (a colourful verb like tumbling is required) through the middle of town.

Many of the houses, such as Fred's, are extensions of caves that have been dug into the side of the valley. The front of the house is like a normal Spanish house, and the back half is a soundproofed, irregularly shaped and naturally insulated cave dwelling.

The mountains of the Sierra Nevarda - the tallest mountain range in peninsular Spain - tower over the town. It is around thirty kilometers from Fred's house to the top of Los Tres Miles - a line of mountains all over three thousand meters high. I know exactly how far away they are because I had to walk all of the way back from them to Fred's house due to the unwillingness of Spanish people to assist hitch-hikers.

Getting High

on my back and started up the road from Fred's house to spend a couple of nights in the mountains - the first time in some real hills since my adventures in Nepal. I spent the first hour working hard to climb the hill, cursing every car that wouldn't give me a lift, and stopping under every fig tree to gorge myself on fresh figs. I finally got a lift from and English guy who had just bought land in the area. We had a good chat, and he took me to the top of the first rise, from where I could make my way to the main road up the mountain.

Once on the main road I found it easy to get a ride from a jovial German fellow (note that none of my rides were from Spaniards) who was test driving for Volkswagen. The road to the top of the sierra is the highest road in Europe, and as used by all of the European car manufacturers for testing their new engines. I lost count of the number of prototypes that I saw driving up and down the mountain. The prototypes were covered in big blag bags so that one couldn't see what make or design the car was, and they looked fairly sinister racing up and down the twisting mountain roads.

The road cut out at 2500 meters, and from then on I had to start climbing on foot. Last time I was at that altitude I had worked my way up to that altitude slowly on foot and had been in much better shape. This time I got a ride to the top, and wasn't much chop after some months of fairly epic idleness on the beach and in England. My body, and in particular my lungs, let me know what a silly idea that was. Still, I managed to get myself to the top of the ridge that runs along the range, and setup camp near some beautiful high-altitude lakes.

There is something very special for me about high mountains. Once I started to get up into the barren landscape with clouds rolling around and below me I had a big smile on my face and a great sensation of freedom. Unfortunately the altitude was affecting me quite strongly, and I wasn't able to sleep very well that night.

Disaster struck that evening when I went to cook on my camping gas stove. I had packed two lighters in separate parts of my bag to ensure that I would not forget them, but somehow I had managed to unpack both of them before leaving. There were some neatly chopped onions and garlic, tins of tomato and packets of pasta ready to go and no fire to warm them up. I was reduced to trying to get sparks by hitting rocks together. My attempts at bushtuckermanning (not a real verb kids) were unsuccessful, then I had the genius idea of using my knife with a rock to make sparks.

Thirty seconds the blade of my knife had been broken in to several pieces and I was mighty pissed off. That knife had travelled around the world with me, cooked countless meals, cleaned fingernails, opened tins, impressed chicks, sliced fruit, made flutes and carved my name into trees. I had lost, then refound, it countless times. But I put it behind me and ate raw onion with sausage and bread.

The next day I rose early and struggled my way up Mulhacen, the tallest mountain in Spain. It was a struggle, and the top was covered with clouds for the length of my ascent and descent, but the feeling of height and solitude was still overwhelming.

I decided that a second night at high altitude was not very desireable, so I put in a long hike to get back to the ski resort. From their I planned to hitch a ride back down to Fred's, but as I stood beside the road with the light failing and bad weather rolling in the Spanish drivers were true to form and wouldn't give me a ride.

As it started raining I found a flat bit of grass just out of sight of the road and pitched my tent in record time. I got a great nights sleep, back down at a more sensible altitude of 2400 meters. When I emerged from my tent at sunrise the next day I was rewarded by crystal clear skies and perfect views of the Tres Miles. I started to walk down the national trail that followed the same ridge as the road, and since it was such a nice day I walked all the way back home, also avoiding any further hitch-hiking-rejection embarresment.

Is That a Sausage In Your Pocket?

If you were living in a hippy community in Australia you would expect the majority of people, particularly the women, to be vegetarians. But sit around a campfire a group of peace-loving Spanish folk and get out a chorizo (spicy spanish sausage pronounced choritho) and nobody will refuse to eat a bit, particularly the women. God bless 'em.

My Sister Isn't Gay

I was working on the top bar in the club on Sunday, gay night. A girl and boy walked up to the bar, and the boy asked in an effimanate accent
"I have to ask, are you gay?"
"I'm afraid not"
"Oh well, hmph."
He looks to the girl at his side who smiles and he says,
"Well, my sister isn't either"
She picks up the converstion
"So, where are you from?..."

From A Couch In Dublin

2007-10-03T02:47:00.000-07:00

It is grey outside, rain falls intermittently and the cars have their lights on. Dublin in Autumn. But the pubs are open, warm and cheery. Of course they are, that is Dublin at any time of the year.

I met a friend yesterday afternoon and we decided to go do something.
"We could go and look at a museum"
"Hmmm, they will be closed in half an hours time."
"Any sites of interest we could check out?"
"They are all grey."
"We could go to the pub?"
"I know a good one in the Temple Bar."
....
"I'll have a Guinness."
"Make mine a Heineken."

Reality Bights

I arrived in Dublin from Madrid, via a hit-and-run visit to my old friends Annamarieke and Marlene in Holland. I was woefully unprepared - though I had organised a couch to sleep on via the couchsurfing website. With a couple of hundred euros in my back pocket I had to organise work and accommodation.

It didn't take long to find work - bartender and waiter in a restaurant and bar in the Temple Bar. Accommodation has proven to be harder to come by. There are more people than beds in Dublin, and competition is fierce for every free room. Prices reflect this - one pays silly money to be crammed into a shoebox.

But, on a positive note, there is a lot of money in Dublin. Stacks and stacks of the stuff, and I plan to get me some of it. I am bartending for the meantime, but I intend to find some more lucrative employment that gives me free nights.

The Post That Wouldn't

I have tried to write a post in this blog over the last couple of months since the last post. Each one has been half-finished and discarded for various reasons. Now the adventures are far too many and funny stories to numerous for me to tell all - if I tried I would not finish and this would become another discarded post. So, here is a collection of stories and ancedotes that by no means cover all of my comings and goings over the last couple of months.

Fresh Off The Boat

My first night working in my new job was a steep learning curve. I started on the floor at six for the Sunday evening dinner crowd. Simple table service, and I was comfortable with most of my assigned tasks after half an hour. The bar was serving drinks to the people sat along it, and the floor staff took food and drink orders from the people on tables around the bar. There was a folksy guitar player bashing out tunes in the corner - easy stuff.

At nine food service stopped, the dinner crowd left and we started preparing for the night ahead. The two floors above the ground floor where the main bar is are devoted to a tacky 90s night-club setup, which are opened up at eleven. Sunday night is gay night, so around ten stacks of men and a trickle of women descended on the bar. The folksy music was replaced by nasty 80s and 90s pop that gay men apparently like (I don't think that we give them enough credit for taste in music). My job got a lot harder - try taking drinks orders for drinks you haven't heard of from men who speak with an effeminate Irish accent over the sound of very loud pop music. At least the tips were good! Whenever I made a mistake I would just wink and say "sorry, I am fresh off the boat".

The Little Things

On the whole I didn't enjoy Morocco - I would go so far as to say that it is a bit of a shithole. Of course plenty of people will say that I didn't find the real Morocco or the real Moroccans, - "because you know man, it is a state of mind and you need to get off the beaten path". Well, we were robbed, with Jamie losing his passport and me my camera. One gets harassed all the time, it was too hot, and I just didn't have much fun.

You can tell a lot about a people from the little things - such as how they stamp your passport. Look at each page in your passport, it is divided into 4 equally-sized spaces that are perfectly sized to fit one exit/entry stamp. When I was leaving Holland the woman who stamped my passport started on the first page and carefully flicked through it until she found a free space and neatly placed the stamp inside the allocated space. In Morroco they went to the back page and placed entry stamp right in the middle of the page at a funny angle, wasting a whole page. On exiting the same was done for the second to back page of my passport.

It might seem that I am making a mountain out of a mole-hill, but these little things reflect the attitude of many Moroccans in general. And this sort of thoughtlessness gets on my tits, big time. I will not mention Morocco again.

Private Village

Word got around that heavy rain was on its way to the beach for the weekend. People were moving their campsites to more sheltered locations in the forest, or making alternative plans. Gory, a crazy little Andalucian guy, who I could hardly understand despite my best attempts at learning Spanish, was heading to an abandoned village. I took up an invitation to check it out with him.

The village was at the end of a dirt track through the forest, next to a small hydroelectric powerplant. Originally the village had been for workers in the plant, which generated electricity from a waterfall. But now the powerplant was automated, and it had not been occupied for the last fifteen years.

Three days prior to our arrival it had been used as a set for a film, so everything had been cleaned and repaired. There was running water in the houses, plentiful firewood chopped and stacked up and fruit trees (figs, grapes and oranges) loaded with ripe fruit. The surrounding forest was full of old cork oaks and rhododendrons. We wandered around muttering "no falta nada", which means "not missing nothing" (in Spanish one uses double negatives all the time, which gives many English speakers guilty pleasure).

On our first night we sat at our fire, cooking food, trying to comprehend what the other was saying, and looking at the stars when we heard a car approaching. This was a problem, because the only road to the village was protected by a gate that needed a key, so we assumed that this must have been some sort of security patrol. We extinguished the fire, and spent the next half an hour sneaking around in the dark, avoiding the two guards who were inspecting each of the houses with lashlights.

We eventually decided that we should go and have a talk with the guards when it became apparent that they were going to be staying for a long time to keep an eye on the place. We approached them, and what followed was an amicable conversation between the guards and Gori in thick Andalucian Spanish that I couldn't understand a single word of.

One guard kept looking at me as though I was suspicious, due to my quietness and the silly "me-no-understand" smile that I had painted on my face. Then he asked Gori if I had a football team, and Gori replied that I supported Liverpool. All of a sudden he was pumping my hand and singing the praises of said football team. Obviously I wasn't such a bad chap after all.

We were given unofficial permission to camp in the village, and got regular visits from the guard over the next couple of days to chat and check up on us.

Till Next Time

Now I have to run and look for accomodation with a friend. More stuff will follow... sometime... I promise...

Le Maroc

2007-08-01T03:39:00.000-07:00

A couple of nights ago I had one of those moments that one has every now and again when travelling. I was lying on my sleeping mat on the floor of a Morrocan hotel room that I had paid too much to stay in. The room was boiling hot with the walls retaining the heat from the desert day, and my mat was slick with sweat. I wondered what the hell I was doing there, longing to be home where I have a comfortable bed.

Of course there are plenty of times when one lies in their comfortable bed at home and longs to be anywhere more exotic than their comfortable house. And there was the second largest market in Africa just down the road (though the market is remarkably uninteresting like most markets that target tourists... globalisation and mass production leading to five hundred stalls selling exactly the same rip-off Nikes.)

Six Out Of Seven

Ahoy from Africa! Last week Jamie, Rosemary (Jamie's sister) and I got the ferry from Tarifa in Southern Spain to Tangier in Northern Morocco. It was a short ride, with the coast of each country clearly visable from the other. On the ride over I realised that when I got off the boat I would have seen six of the seven continents, with only Antarctica left on the list.

Younger, and Fitter

My last post was from Barcelona where I was wondering if the luck of our over 30s hippy football team was going to change. Well it did - we won a game 6-1 with me scoring a neat hat-trick. We were fantastic, showing much younger and fitter players a thing or two. Some might say that the fact they were a team of girls lessens the value of our victory, but I won't listen to such sexist twaddle.

Hit The Road

Kiko and I drove south from Barcelona in a small hatchback rental, with three years of Kiko's accumulated possesions and his dog Acha. We caught a few hours of sleep beside some country road on our sleeping mats, and arrived at his parents' holiday house in Analucia twenty hours after leaving Barcelona. There I was well fed by Kiko's lovely parents, and we slept like rocks.

Andalucia is a state covering the southern end of Spain. The locals speak a fast and heavily accented Spanish (think of a Cockney version of Spanish) that leaves me cold a lot of the time. They eat good simple food, like the beach, and smoke far more hash than they should (which is a function of the distance from Morocco.)

Kiko took me to a set of beaches that near a town called Bolonia. The beaches take quite a bit of hiking to reach, and are part of a Paraque Nacionale (which means that camping in the forest next to them is illegal.) I set my tent up in the forest, and spent a few days swimming, doing yoga, cooking over a campfire, climbing trees and so forth.

One morning I found an Italian guy camping near me in the forest. We pooled our resources - his music player and speakers and my batteries - and started our day listening to Italian Reggae while making our coffee over the fire (my coffee, his sugar). He spoke no English, but luckily my Spanish was starting to get good enough for a bit of conversation to flow. The rest of the day was spent alternating between the shade in the limbs of an enormous sprawling gum tree that offered great views of the coast and the scorching sun on the beach. This was a typical day on the beach.

Jim

I left the beach to meet Jamie in Granada, a historic little city near the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Andalucia. We camped for a couple of nights in a camping ground near the bus station. I have got a lot of use out of my tent so far in Spain, which is a relief after I carried it around India for six months and only used it for a week. We had a good look around town, checking out the sights during the day and performing random quality sampling on the Mojitos at night.

Jamie very quickly started appreciating some of the things that make the Spanish so civilised, such as taking a siesta to escape the afternoon heat, and getting free tapas with every round of drinks bought at a bar. Jamie was also a bit distressed by the suntans and hot-weather-wear being sported by the Spanish girls - the poor lad had spent too long in the pasty UK.

Back to the Beach

From Granada we made straight for the beach. A long day of travelling that saw us take three buses, buy a stack of groceries and struggle for over an hour along the beach while the sun was setting. It was hard work, but the view and being alone on the beach as night started was fantastic. We got to our campsite just after dark and set up a fire and cooked up a tasty dinner.

The weather was fine so we decided to sleep in the open on our sleeping mats, which was just as well because we were busted by a local policeman the next morning. I explained in broken Spanish that we had been hiking along the beach yesterday and had got stuck out here when the sun had set. He was happy with our excuse, and let us go with a simple explanation that we were not allowed to camp here.

The next morning the same policeman found me sleeping under a gum tree, and was not so kind. I pretended not to speak a word of Spanish, and got off with a more sever warning. Jim and I packed up our possesions, made some coffee on the beach and made the hot return journey to the bus station where we got a bus to Tarifa.

Morocco

We met Rosemary in Tarifa, and after taking a day for Jamie to recover from some food poisoning we got the ferry to Tangier in Morocco. Some observations about Morocco.

Cafe Culture

Moroccans are particularly civilised when it comes to tea and coffee. Every square is ringed by tea houses, or salons de the as the locals call them. Each salon has as many chairs as possible lined up along the sidewalk for the (entirely male) patrons to view the street life while they sip their mint tea and coffee. They know how to make a good coffee here. Which is very important. Order a milk coffee and a waite dressed in black slacks, white shirt and black vest will bing out a perfect shot of espreso and pour in hot milk to until you say merci. Order tea and you get a strong tea with stacks of mint leaves squashed into the glass filled with sugar to the solubility saturation point.

Quiere una Propina

Moroccans are very good at finding your money. Sure, you have paid for your bus ticket, but there will be some asshole with the key for the locker under the bus who wants you to pay extra for your luggage. Maybe you payed your "luggage fee" when you bought the ticket, but that doesn't matte to the guy with the key. After a bit of yelling and pushing one can get the fee down, but it is still wise to pay the luggage guy something to ensure that your bag is looked after.

After haggling with one such chap, and getting a little violent and flustered in the process, at the bus station in Marakesh I got on the bus to find some street kids from whom we had purchased overpriced chewing gum had reserved some seats for us. We then spent fifteen minutes in the schorching heat on a stationary bus with children scrambling all over us trying to negotiate a seat-saving fee while selling us more tissues and gum. I found my patience and tollerance severely tested.

How Much?

I am used to be overcharged when travelling in less developed countries, it comes with the territory. As a result I have developed a policy for transactions - I am prepared to pay a bit of tourist tax, but I won't even try to bargain with anybody who takes the piss with the prices they charge. This means that I have a lot of trouble with vendors in Morocco, who sometimes ask for up to twice the cost that one would pay in Spain. It wasn't so bad in the first couple of cities we visited where there were few tourists, but in Marakesh and Essoera it is outrageous. The problem with Arab guys is that if they tell you a price, they expect that a deal will be reached, and they can get very unpleasant when you don't agree to purchase. This makes shopping rather difficult.

Che Calor

The dessert is hot. Really fucking hot. Don't go there in summer if you don't have a good reason to.

Hamams Are Hot Too

Hamams are the local equivilent to a turkish bath house. We found one in Larache, and payed three euros each for entry, massage and wash. The Hamam was three long tiled rooms joined by single doors, with each room being progressively warmer than the previous one. There is a fire under the floor in the last room, so one can create a sauna by throwing hot water on the floor.

We were instructed to wash ourselves with the provided soap, then I had water dumped on me by a strong little Moroccan man. He then dragged me into the next room, got me to lie down and went to town on me with a "scrubbing glove" to remove all of the dead skin (and some perfectly functional living skin too) from my body. After this I had some more buckets of hot water tipped on me, before I was roughly adjusted into various complex and painful positions. The room was filled with the sounds of our groans and our vertebrae and joints cracking under the strain.

We then tried to escape to the waiting room out the front of the hamam, only to be ordered back inside by our torturers to get doused in cold water. All in all a very rewarding experience.

Mr Fix-it

There are chaps everywhere who are what I like to call facilatators of fixers. They make money by helping foreigners who want to purchase large amounts of hash, or perform other high value transactions such as "meeting" Moroccan women. These guys make friends with you, then help you find a cheap restaraunt, a good hamam, a good-value black market money changer, a bookshop with local maps and so forth. They are faily honest in these transactions so that they can develop trust with you for any lucrative deals that you might have in mind. I don't want to buy a kilo of hashish or meet any loose local woment, but I am interested in their other services. We have found out some good local information in exchange for a tip or the purchase of a small quantity of hash (where they rip you off badly, but the rip off is worth it for the info that one gets out of them).

Ardios

I am probably going to spend another week or so in Morocco, heading north to the Rif Mountains for more tranquil surrounds. Then I want to return to Spain to spend a bit more time bumming around, camping and meeting the locals before trying to get some work in Barcelona. I don't have the relevant papers, but apparently it is possible to find such work, and the idea of extending my stay in Spain instead of returning to Ireland is an appealing one to me.

2007-07-11T05:44:00.000-07:00

Wally Lewis´ Match Preparation

My muscles are a bit sore today - I played my first "competative football" in a long time yesterday, and my body wants to know what happened to the vacation. One of Kiko´s housemates, Loki, was playing in a 5-a-side competition yesterday afternoon, and he invited me along.

Our team was a bit of an old-man team, with an average age of around 30, and it didn´t help that during our break between games we had a couple of beers in a bar near the pitch. Some players lit up cigarettes at half time. The other teams we played against were drinking coke and waiting for their voices to break. We got beaten in both games but gave a good account of ourselves, and there a few flashes of genius and past glories. Today we are going to do it all again, and hopefully come out on top in one of our games.

La Casa De Placido

After the game I got a lift to Placido´s place. Placido is a friend of Kiko´s who lives in Barcelona, and he was cooking dinner when I arrived. I was treated to dinner, cheese, bread, fruit and beer. I was one gratefull guest, particularly seeing as how I don´t know Placido besides a brief introduction from Kiko.

I have been in Spain for a week and a half now, and I have not had to pay for a hotel room yet (well, I did pay to put my tent up for one night, but I like camping so i won´t count it). I have received the best hospitality from the Spanish folks that I have met. They have been very big on "mi casa es su casa", so much so that I feel a little bit embaressed to be treated so well. I have to keep reminding myself of the good times that I have shown guests in Australia.

Kiko finishes work this week, and we will be driving down to Andaluccia in the south on Friday. I am going to be staying at Placido´s place until then so that I can have a good look around Barcelona.

Hablas Espanol?

One of the dinner guests last night worked for Nokia in Finland, and hence had very good English. It took me a while to start talking to him, even though we had so many nerdy programming interests in common, because I have become very good at listening and not saying much.

Kiko speaks decent English, but all of his friends have English that is on the same level as, or slightly better than my Spanish. Hence I have had to make a real effort to start learning Spanish, which is a good thing, though it can be very frustrating. It is terrible when you think of a good joke, or an interesting point, and cannot even begin to express it to the people around you.

I am starting to get by now, expanding my vocab and learning the different tenses (the hardest thing about Spanish is learning to conjugate all of the different tenses, it is a bit of a mess). Give me another couple of weeks and I will be much more comfortable. By then I will have been joined by Jamie, so I will be able to chatter away in English again... which may or may not be a good thing.

Camping

Last weekend we went camping in the mountains, near the Pirenese, with some rock-climbing buddies of Kiko. It was my first camping in ages... and it was fantastic to be out in nature again. It was also my first time sport climbing - that is climbing with ropes and put gear into bolts that have been strategically placed in the rock. Some of the climbs were fairly high, but I hardly noticed as I was concentrating too hard on not falling, and on my burning forearms. There is going to be plenty more where that came from over the next month or so, and I can´t wait.

Hola

2007-07-02T03:56:00.001-07:00

The Wrong Foot

I sat down on the Air Ryan flight from Dublin to Madrid, and started to take my boots off. I was interrupted by the elderly Spanish gentleman next to me, who was clearly very distressed. He was pointing and waving at my shoes, yelling for the steward, and firing rapid Spanish at me.

But sir, I don´t have a bomb in my shoes, and I would appreciate if you spoke more slowly please, my Spanish is not very good. After plenty of arm waving, a distressed steward, and some assistance from the embarresed Spanish girl on the other side of the isle, it was determined that it wasn´t a bomb in my shoes that worried him, but their potential to smell. Now, I don´t have the best smelling feet at times, but I had fresh socks on, clean feet and I hadn´t worn these boots for three months, so they weren´t likely to be stinky. I kept them on though, in the interests of Australian-Spanish relations.

Madrid

When my flight arrived I made my way across the airport to the Metro (underground) station. I took my dictionary up to a ticket vending machine, and found what I thought would be a ticket to my destination in central Madrid. But something was wrong, it was far too cheap, only two euros.
"Excuse me, is that the price for the train to town?"
"It is, I am sorry. Because you are at the airport it is expensive, normally at ticket anywhere in Madrid is one euro."

Crickey mate, where I have just been this is a bargain.

Slack Bugger

So, not been the best blog poster of late have I? Pleny of ground to cover, literally and metaphorically in this post. I will do this quickly and painlessly...

A Sweet End

My much hoped for Irish visa materialised when I was in Liverpool, but I decided to stay a bit longer in Godalming so that I could save enough money to go to Spain without having to find further work in Ireland. Work was, as usual, the same old thing. Get up late, bolt brekky, start round midday, finish sometime around midnight and finish of a couple of beers, then bed.

Of course it wouldn´t be me to make it a simple exit. I had a bit of a crush on one of the girls at work, and I thought the feeling was reciprocated. I wasn´t going to do anything about it though, she was my boss. She was leaving too, and her last day was also my last day, and I think that threw the rule book out the window.

So for the last week there was an enjoyable affair and a juicy secret to keep from our workmates.Nobody figured it out, except for Ty, the general manager, who discovered it when he was reviewing the security camera footage one night... but he though it was hilarious. It all came out on Sunday night, which was our going away party.

Rachel was the deputy manager, and most of the staff were a little bit scared of her, particularly the poor Eastern European lads who found her an affront to their misogynistic views. I, on the other hand didn´t find her scary at all - intellegent, funny, good at hi-5s and very attractive. But, the irony is that we were both leaving, so we could start something, and then needed to finish. There was some feeling there, and I have been missing Rachel. Such is the nature of meeting folk when you are a transient wanderer. For once I had a plan, because I had to get to Ireland to sort my visa out and get to Spain to catch my budy Kiko in Barcelona.

Ireland

I spent a night in London, staying with Chops, a Kiwi buddy I met in New Zealand eighteen months ago. Then I got a flight to Dublin, capital of Ireland. I was a wee bit nervous going through immigration - I had put a lot of planning and effort into getting this work visa and there were some holes in my story if they wanted to question me about them. But I was waived through, and told to present myself to the Guiarda National (police) to get my permit. I used my best smile and the good ol´ blue eyes on the girl behind the counter, and my permit was granted without any questions asked.

Setting up a bank account was not so simple. I had payed the same company that organised my visa to set up bank account and a Tax File Number for me... but it turns out that the service consited of giving me copies of all the forms and teaching me how to use a pen to fill out my personal details. So I still don´t have a bank account in Europe, which means that I am carrying all of my savings from England around in an envelope. And English money is fat, if you have 1000 pounds in cash you know about it, unlike 1000 US dollars which looks like enough money for a sandwich and coffee.

I didn´t get up to an awful lot in Dublin. I was saving my funds for Spain, and doing all of the organisation I should have done a month ago. I did make a couple of observations, of course.

The Irish do one of the best drunk-on-the-street routines. One frequently spots shabby characters with a bottle of something in one hand, and a cup for yer change in the other. If you are lucky he sings.
Irish girls are pretty, and with that accent they are very dangerous.
They are a very approachable and friendly folk, just like the Liverpudlians. And their accent is fantastic, I found myself asking people to repeat themselves - not because I didn´t understand, I just wanted to hear them repeat themselves.
The weather is shite.
The food is shite.
Guinnes is good, but it stands to reason - all the young Irish men I asked told me that the only thing to do in one´s spare time was go to the pub you realise that they wouldn´t want to spend all of their spare time drinking shite.

Paint The Tiles Greeen

I was in Ireland for four nights, and I managed to avoid going out until the last night. Earlier that day I did the tourist thing in Dublin, which included going on the very interesting Guiness factory tour. Not much of one for tours, but this one was "self-guided" (read, no dickhead tour guide and ghee-whizzing Americans) and had a complimentary pint at the end. Over my pint I met a couple of young American girls, and organised to meet up with them at a live music place.

They never turned up, so I had to head in on my own. I ended up meeting half of Ireland and having a wonderful time. I received a half-hour sermon on how to order a pint of Guiness, got tutored on the Irish language, and got propositioned by half a dozen girls (the hair and accent I reckon). As I walked home that night I thought to myself, "I might be able to have a bit of fun when I come back here to work".

Spain

But fun in the sun was calling. I got me a cheap flight on one of those budget airlines that Europe does so well, the ones that are increasing the size of the ozone hole. I went to Madrid, as it was far cheaper to buy the ticket on short notice.

For accomodation in Madrid I decided to give Couchsurfers a go. Coushsurfers is a website where you can organise to stay on people´s spare beds and couches. All you have to do is set up a profile that makes you look like a better guest than you actually are, and ask for some couch space.

Andreas answered my call, and gave me a spot on his floor to setup my sleeping mat, right near the centre of Madrid. He was an experienced host, and pulled out a tourist map and explained all the sights I needed to see, gave me the lowdown on the Metro, explained how to buy hash from the Morrocans in the plaza... all the important things that one needs to know.

I only spent one full day in Madrid, checking out the sights and going to the modern art museum (Museo Sophia). There was some wonderful stuff in the museum, including a whole exhibition where artists had used mathematics based visual tricks and had set up enormous machines that created standing waves in different media. There was also a heap of stuff that left me cold, as one would expect in a modern art gallery, and lots of Picasso and Dali works. I have to say that Picasso is great, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Dali was a bit shit.

On my second night Andreas took me to a tapas bar, then we polished off the best part of a bottle of whiskey, talked codshit and played cards till the wee hours. But that was OK, because in Spain the wee hours are when people seem to kick their nights off. When they are closing the bars and kicking the drunks out in Australia, the bars of Madrid are opening their doors. Apparently the trick is to have a sleep in the early evening. What a difference having an institutionalised afternoon nap (siesta) programmed into your culture makes to the nightlife.

Barcelona

I called Kiko, a very friendly Spanish character that I met climbing in Hampi, and he encouraged me to come to Barcelona and stay. I was on a bus the next day. I had a horrible run getting the buses, and ended up an hour late - which is very unlike me. Luckily being late in Spain isn´t such a big deal.

In Barcelona entered my third subway system in the space of a week (London and Madrid being the others). Scanned the map, then headed for the appropriate platform. I love taking the underground. They have great maps, the best of which is the London Tube map which is one of the best pieces of design I have ever seen. Those tunnels under the ground that move huge amounts of people around very efficiently. People of all shapes and sizes, buskers, people minding their own business, people sizing one-another up, a mess of different languages, colour coded lines, little graphic designs that display what happens to people who don´t stand behind the yellow lines (Brisbane trains have the best, little cartoon characters who get attacked by trains and closing train doors).

I finally met Kiko sometime around midnight, and we drove to the farm he is living on in the hills on the eastern edge of Barcelona. I have been here for the last couple of days, going for a walk down to the nearest town which is on the beach, and wandering up into the mountains to climb some hills and get some views. Today is Friday, so after Kiko finishes work we are going to jump in the car and head off to the mountains. We have some climbing to do.

Plans

Kiko finishes his job on Wednesday next week, then he will be driving to Cadiz in the south, where the summer fun will begin proper. I will be sitting in the passenger seat, enjoying the views with the window down. I am looking forward to this summer. Before then I will spend a couple of days in Barcelona with some friends of Kiko (I don´t plan to stay in any hotels in Spain, that way I can get to know the people and have to improve my Spanish quickly).

Oxford

2007-06-05T04:04:00.000-07:00

Recently I wrote about football, and about my obsession-inspired road trip to Liverpool. Another of my great interests is maths, and my next road trip was to Oxford - a place of significance to mathematicians.

Last Thursday I set off early in the morning to get the train, tube and bus combo to Oxford to visit my old buddy Derek Tan (El Dezzo). Dez and I did maths together at uni - which means we drank a shitload of coffee, listened to music, played pool and solved the odd differential equation, time permitting. He is now studying his PhD (or D Phil as they call it at Oxford) in mathematical biology. Something about pattern formation.

A Friendly Bus Driver

Bus drivers in London have a very bad reputation. My two Australian friends Jamie and Derrek are reduced to seething wrecks when they describe their interactions with the drivers. Luckily I had not taken a single bus 'round London up until the Oxford trip - but I had been warned. I cautiously approached the driver for the Victoria Station-Oxford bus journey, and asked politely for a return ticket. To my surprise he didn't bite my head off. Instead I had a good chat with him, getting a history lesson on Oxford and talked about his time working for the Airforce in Australia. This is just buttering me up for sure, so that my first "proper" London driver can upset me utterly

And On Our Left...

Derek has a mind like a steel trap - telephone numbers, dates and arbitrary facts get lodged inside his head. He could still remember my old phone number from Australia. He took me on a tour of Oxford, pointing out interesting facts about every other building. This architect did this or that, this shop was started in 1653 by a returning merchant named Lord so-and-so, this street has the largest number of architecture styles of any high-street in the UK... and so on. Dez was a goldmine of info about the long history of the place, all very interesting for a country boy who thinks that a church built in the thirties is ancient (that is the 1930s, not the 1530s).

It was good to drink coffee and talk about nerdy topics after ten months away from anything related to academia. Hell, one of my workmates is amazed when I can add up the cost of two pints and a G&T in my head (nine pounds!). Dez has also gotten into photography in a big way, so we had some fun running around with his shiny new digital SLR and collection of lenses, taking about 40 photos of a CCTV camera hidden on the bottom of a street lamp.

Back to Work

I stayed the night in Oxford, then caught the bus-tube-train combo back to Godalming in time for my lunch shift at the Inn. Back to the old routine. I am getting a little sick of the place, particularly as the bar is quite poorly managed, and the rostering is a bit of a mess. On Sunday I did from four in the afternoon until midnight without any breaks at all, constantly working because we were understaffed by one person (I was on my own from eight onwards) on a busy day.

I can't complain though. I origionally took the job so that I wouldn't spend any money and to kill time before I got my Irish visa. I have ended up saving a whole stack of cash, and am going to keep at it a couple more weeks, even though I have now got my Irish visa. With the money that I save I will be able to go straight to Spain and enjoy a summer of fun in the sun, before going to Ireland to get some savings for the next leg of my trip.

I have got back into my yoga the last week. My left hamstring is finally feeling good, though it is still at about 80 percent. The difference that yoga makes to my energy levels, both physical and mental is amazing. My body just won't let me get away without practicing for too long!

Painting The Town Red

2007-05-30T07:09:00.000-07:00

Priorities

Those of you who know me know that I am a fairly relaxed bloke, but that there are some things that I take quite seriously. These include the efficient solution of partial differential equations, cooking good curry and football.

I allow myself to get over-excited by football, and in particular, the exploits of the one-and-only Liverpool Football Club. So, when The Reds got to the final of the Champions League last week I decided that it was time to leave my nest in Godalming, and head north to Liverpool to enjoy the game with some of the best football fans in the world. This presented no problems with my employer, as I had made it clear when I started working there that they could work me on any day at any hour they wanted - except for days when Liverpool were playing in Europe. One has to prioritise.

To The North

I bought a train ticket a week before the match, but was unable to get any accomodation - all the hotels had been booked out a month in advance for this night-of-nights. No bother, I didn't plan to get much sleep in, and I figured that half of Liverpool had similar designs.

Four hours after leaving Godalming I had travelled the length of England to the old port city. Four hours of the green English countryside in the sun. Crickey, it takes me the same amount of time to get from Brisbane to Ballandean, and the distance between those two is a speck on the map of Australia.

Liverudlians and their city cop a lot of slack from the rest of England, especially from Southerners and Mancs. But all of that carry-on about tracksuits, trainers and a lack of culture was quickley dispelled within minutes of leaving the train station (though I did clock one girl in a rather fetching velour number). But more importantly, Liverpudlians have an over-abundance of friendliness and approachability - something that their southern compatriots lack. If only I could understand what they hell they are saying. I had a talk with one guy in the bus stop that left me very confused, clearly I have a lot to learn about the English language.

Killing Time

I got into town around 11 in the morning, and had plenty of time to kill before the 8 o'clock kick-off. I walked around the Albert Docks, then got a bus out to Anfield, Liverpool's famous stadium. Unfortunately the museum was closed, but I was still able to see the famous Shankly Gates (which have the words "You'll Never Walk Alone" across the top, in reference to the Jerry and The Pacemakers song that is the club's anthem) and the Hillsborough Memorial.

What struck me the most was how the stadium blended into the surrounding suburb. This was no purpose-built public entertainment venue with well organised public transport links, facilities and amenities. It is a stadium that looks as if it was dropped into the surrounding rows of terrace houses in a completely arbitrary manner. The houses on two sides back right up to the stadum, and the roads that run along the other two sides could hardly be described as main roads. It is just there, part of the furniture in this very poor suburb (many houses were boarded up).

But what this football team means to the city cannot be understated. Every second person was dressed in red, and everywhere people were singing You'll Never Walk Alone, and Johny Cash's Burning Ring Of Fire. Impromptu games of football were breaking out on the street, and every person dressed in red was trading smiles with every other person dressed in red. It was damn exciting. The football team is part of the fabric of the city, and the type of devotion it receives from the locals is quite humbling to this long-distance fan.

Game On

An hour before the game I made my way towards the pubs - only to find that they were all full of singing fans. Every single pub in Liverpool was full-up, with queues around the corner full of fans anxious to get inside. Shit! I tagged along with three likely characters who said they knew a spot, and sure enough they found a little pub that wasn't quite full to bursting.... yet.

Inside the pub it was easy to see why I made the trip. Everybody was on their feet and singing. Not just lip synching, but really singing and chanting at the top of their voices. Even when the team went behind in the game, everybody just sung louder. And, after a game that Liverpool was desperately unlucky to lose, the fans kept singing. It was unthinkable to pack up and go home quietly. Instead the streets were full of people singing about the club

We Love you Liverpool we do.

Oh Liverpool we love you!

about the players

Steve Gerrard Gerrard

He'll pass the ball 40 yards

He's big and He's fucking hard

Steve Gerrard Gerrard

(sung to the tune of Que sera sera)

He's big

He's red

His feet stick out the bed

Peter Crouch

Peter Crouch!

and You'll Never Walk Alone, of course.

I can only imagine what the party would have been like if we had won.

New Friends

I found myself with a cup of beer, sitting in a square in the middle of Liverpool's nightclub district, surrounded by the subdued party after the loss. I was wondering what to do - being in a foreign city with a daypack and nowhere to sleep the night. Just then a girl wandered up and asked "you're Australian, aren't you?"
"Yeah, how the hell didya figure that one out?" (she had an Australian accent so I put it on)
"you look Australian"
"you reckon?"...

Her name was Shannon, and she introduced me to her boyfrind and other assorted friends, all of them locals. Nice one, they had been out watching the game and were heading off to find somewhere for some drinks and revelry. First Shannon took us to the top of the building she used to live in to show us the night view over the city, and then we went to some place-or-other that served beer.

I had a great time, making friends with plenty of locals. Shannon, a very gregarious character, made it her mission to introduce me to some locals, for which I am very thankfull. Everybody was heading back to Shannon's boyfriend's house, and I was offered a couch to sleep on. Perfect. I never had it so easy meeting people in any other city!

A Gentle Reminder

But on the way home I was reminded that England does have a harder edge than a country boy like myself is accustomed to. I was waiting outside an off-license for some of my new-found friends to buy some beer for when we got home, when somebody started pulling hard on my dreadlocks. I turned around and informed the middle-aged guy that was pulling my hair that it was real hair and it hurt when it got pulled - just like real hair. He then said "come on, give us one of you locks". I turned him down, and watched him go into the offie.

I have noticed some guys who come in to drink at the bar, and on the street, who you want to "keep an eye on". This character was one of them, people who have a potential for violence. Not young punks, or skinheads, but "geezers", older guys who wear slick clothes and drive nice cars. I watched him leave the offie and get into his car. I was drunk and got distracted by someone or something, and the next thing I knew I felt him pulling on my dreads again. I instictively put my hand up to stop him, and the next thing I saw was a knife and him snarling "give me one of your fucking dreads". He was trying to cut one of my dreads off. Then he saw the cut he had put in my hand, and the group of my new-found friends squaring up and thankfully made for his car.

The cut wasn't big, but it bled like crazy. I was partly shocked, and annoyed at myself for not keeping my eye on a character that had triggered my suspicions - being able to pick a dangerous person is useless if you don't act on it. My friends were shocked, and embaressed, that this had happened, and everybody in and around the offie was trying very hard to make sure I didn't get the wrong impression of the locals - they are very proud of their friendliness and openness in those parts.

Nae Bother Pal

My shock passed quickly and I enjoyed the rest of my evening, and an impromptue bandage of toilet paper and sticky tape that Shannon knocked up had my thumb sorted. I got a good (well, as good as could be expected) night's sleep on the couch.

The next morning I rose, along with the rest of the town, with a hangover and thoughts of what could/should have been. Though we didn't win, I had a wonderful time, and was impressed by the friendliness and fun of the people of Liverpool.

YNWA

2007-05-23T09:29:00.000-07:00

When you walk through a storm
hold your head up high,
and don't be afraid of the dark.
At the end of the storm
is a golden sky
and the sweet, silver song of the lark.

Walk on through the wind,
walk on through the rain,
though your dreams be tossed and blown.
Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,
and you'll never walk alone.
You'll never walk alone.

Going Going... Staying

2007-05-04T06:25:00.000-07:00

Close Call

This morning I wrote up my two week notice that I intended to move on from my current employer. I had had enough of Alex, and it was apparent that nobody was in a rush to move either Alex or Jamie and myself - despite our frequent requests. It had been made clear that I was going to hand in my notice... and just as I was about to do so I was informed that Alex was going to be moved today and we were going to get a new room mate.

Bloody hell, it is a pity that I had to hold a gun to their head (they are desperately shorstaffed and they can't really afford to lose any full time staff) to get myself some tolerable living conditions. It is all good though, I can now look forward to some good sleep.

Photos!

More importantly.... photos! Yep, I have got a bunch of film back from the lab, and have posted a few shots. The scanning of the film is only OK, and I haven't got access to photoshop to polish the images... but you get the idea. Only a couple of shots right now, but I will endevour to add more when I can.

Working Man

2007-05-03T05:24:00.000-07:00

The Service Industry

Right now I am tired. Dog tired. I am an early to bed, early to rise kind of boy, which makes me incompatable with the "hospitality" lifestyle that I am currently leading. There is a big shortage of full-time bar staff at The Inn, which means that I am doing 60-70 hours a week. We usually finish close down of the bar at around midnight, then all the staff sit around the bar and have a chat and unwind after the days work... so I get to bed around 1 every morning. The sun is up and the birds are singing by the time I open my eyes and remove my earplugs in the morning.

That combined with having to share a room with Alex has lead to my rather sleepy state right now. He is simply impossible for any reasonable person to live with. Jamie and I put our foot down last week and demanded that Alex be moved from our room, and despite being promised that he would be gone within a week, he is still there. We do get some small, petty comfort from the fact that Alex seems to enjoy living with us as much as we enjoy his company.

"you know the film Aliens? Those two are like that, they keep the room so cold, it is killing me."
That might have something to do with the fuse that we removed from the heater so that he couldn't close the windows, turn the heater onto max and turn the room into a smouldering dutch oven by smoking half a pack of cigarettes.
"Hey Alex, you were complaining about the cold, so I showed you how to turn the heater on, but if you really must smoke in the room, you have to keep the windows open."

English Countryside

The weather has been absolutely fantastic ever since I got to Godalming. Every day the sun is shining, and the air has crisp freshness about it that reminds me of spring days in Stanthorpe. In the last couple of weeks I have watched the woods go from dormant brown and grey to all shades of green as the trees come out of their winter hibernation.

The English countryside is completely different to what I am used to in Australia. Here it feels "lived in". The rivers have been dug out, had their banks straigteened and their levels controlled by lochs. There is always the touch of human hand present in the landscape, and people talk about "untouched forest" with reverence. Back home one quickly finds themselves battling with the bush, insects and heat the moment they leave the beaten path... if there was a beaten path in the first place. Here the countryside feels like and extention of the living room. While I miss the wildness and isolation of the Australian bush, I am enjoying the comfort of the English equivilent.

The country is criss-crossed with public footpaths that lead through private properties and along waterways. I can happily get myself lost for hours on end meandering along randomly chosen paths. I was lent a book, 50 walks in Surrey, by a girl at work. Jamie and I picked one walk, from Guildford to Godalming for one of our days off. It was around 8 kilometers long, and followed the side of a "river" that runs between the two towns. We stopped along the way to sit on top of an old pillbox from the second world war.... and at a couple of the numerous pubs that littered the side of the path. Yesterday I went for a picnic with Tina, a German bartender from work, and we had cheese and bread with a bottle of Australian chardonnay on top of the same pillbox.

Athens Ahoy

I have been enjoying being able to watch my football games at reasonable hours of the day. It still feels odd going to the pub at three in the afternoon to catch a live game. And the pubs are full of other fans who are well into their game. I was watching Chelsea-Liverpool the other day when the room with all of the Liverpool fans spontaniously burst into song. Great.

Jamie and I got the night off for the second leg of the Champions Leage semi-final between Liverpool and Chelsea on Tuesday. The game was played at Anfield, and the sound coming from the crowd was amazing, even though we were just getting the TV version. Liverpool went on to win a very tense and exciting game on penalties. I went on to get spectacularly drunk. I had just been commenting on the fact that I have not been really drunk for a couple of years. The next morning I realised that not getting that drunk is a very good idea.

Happy Snaps

I had a chat with the propieter of the local Happy Snaps photolab, and got a good bulk deal on development of my holiday photos. They have been dropped off this morning, and I will have them tomorrow. Tina has photoshop on her laptop, so we should start to see some holiday photos within the next couple of weeks.

Working Man

2007-04-19T05:47:00.000-07:00

Sunny Godalming

Godalming? Never heard of it. A village somewhere south of London, on the train line. Probably around 5000 residents with one pub for every family.

I have found myself some work in one of those pubs - The Inn On The Lake. Actually, it is a bit more than a pub, with a large restaraunt, terrace, garden and accomodation. The place is big, with staff accomodation in some old hotel rooms at the back of the pub.

The weather has been fantastic for the last couple of weeks, with the vast majority of the days beeing sunny and pleasant. There are few people in the world who go crazy for a bit of sunshine like the Brits... apparently the weather over here if shite most of the time. Poor buggers. I have found the locals to be a very friendly and sociable bunch, but that might just be the weather.

English Countryside

I am doing lots of walking in my spare time. The English countryside is full of rights-of-way, which are public paths that lead through forests, farms and private properties. I can spend hours getting lost on random little paths that I bump into.

It is spring now, so all of the trees are starting to sprout leaves, and daffodils, jonquils, bluebells, hyacinth, tulips and all manner of other bulbs and plants are flowering. My walks make for very refreshing breaks from work and The Alex (see below).

The Crew

The pub is well understaffed at the moment, so I am doing some very long hours behind the bar - working from 12 'till 12 for 6 out of 7 days. This comes as a bit of a shock after spending the last seven-odd months doing very little that resembled work. As a result I don't get much time for anything other than work, sleep, the odd bit of yoga and socialising with my assorted workmates.

Assorted? Yep, like a box of chocolates. The number of English people who work there... erm, two, I think. The rest of the workforce is split between Australian/Canadians on one side, and Eastern Europeans on the other. In a remarkable coup, the managers and the head chef are all pleasant people who ask nicely and understand that mistakes happen... which is remarkable in my experience of the hospitality industry, particularly in an establishment that is part of a larger company.

Ty, the Australian manager, is a jolly friendly chap... and he won't hesitate to boot out any customers that he sees clicking their fingers at the waiters (apparently there is a bit of a problem with snobs in this part of the world.... snobs and pikies).

Mario, the Italian head chef, is another freindly chap, "ciao Ben", who likes it when the barstaff make him double espressos, and doesn't yell at you when you make a mistake on an order... remarkable.

In fact, it could be said that there is a "good crew" at work.

Our Latvian Friend

Well, everybody except Alex from Latvia. Just when I thought that my levels of tolerance were sky high, and that I could get along with just about anybody, Alex arrived.

Alex is, well, he is special. How to do justice to this appalling individiual with my poor writing skills? How to convey the distress that he causes all who meet his sullen gaze? One has to resort to swearing, I think. It would be an undestatement to say that Alex shits me to tears, and is every bit as annoying as "The Chef" from our Nepalese adventures. He is a creep of the first order.

It doesn't help that he shares a room with Jamie and I. He moved into the room on the same day that I arrived. I got back from wandering around the forests behind the pub to find a chain-smoking fifty-year-old man sitting on what had been the spare bed. The room already smelt like stale cigarettes and poor personal hygene. He started to talk. Well, he started to moan. After an hour I had said nothing, but he had said a lot, none of it pleasant.

Many times I have had to leave the room before I said something foolish like "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all". He told me how terrible the last two jobs that he had worked were, and how he was going to hate this job too. He told me how bad the new head chef was, even though he hadn't met him yet. He told me how horrible the English, and the Italians were. He ignored my suggestion that if he wanted to smoke he could at least open the window and sit next to it...

"oooooh, no, that would not do, I have a cold and the draught would only make it worse"

Did I mention that he snores? Like a train, like a chainsaw, but with far less rhythm. The man's snoring is a work of art. He never settles into a predictable pattern, and inserts moans, groans and yells at random intervals to make sure that anybody who is listening has no chance of blocking out or ignoring the sound.

"Nooooooo, I never snore, it must be because of my cold. You should not open the window, the draught will only make it worse. I need hot drinks, tea and coffee, yes yes, that would make me better. But they are so unfair, they do not give us even a kettle."
"Maybe you could cut back on the smoking, and besides, it is because of the smoking that I insist that the window is open."
"But smoking is not bad for cold"
.....

Jamie and I have gone through a couple of brands of ear plugs until we have found some that are almost capable of cutting out his syncopated nose-and-throat music. We have trained him to smoke at the window, but we are still greeted by the "amusing if it wasn't so annoying" sight of a fifty year old man dashing to the window with a lit cigarette when we walk into the room, just like a guilty schoolboy.

We are wondering how to toilet train him. The sight of his post-mix-syrup wee on the toilet seat each morning is just a bit too much. He still gets upset when we throw out the chicken and roast beef that he steals from the kitchen and leaves on the table next to the heater for two days... "you threw it out? I thought you had eaten it."

He calls me "Our Indian Philosopher", because I have been to India and did mathematics. If I mention that I have been for a walk in the forest, he will lear at me and say "aaaaaaah, your time in India has changed you, hasn't iiiiit?".
"well, ahm, I have always liked going for walks and being on my own... goodbye"

He doesn't like me. I get too upset when he turns the light on at 1 in the morning and then shakes me awake to say "sorry for turning the light on, but I must use my phone for sending the text message". I am clearly an unreasonable person.

I could go on, but instead I will relate a little story that sums the gentleman up.

The pub is a non-smoking establishment (the English are yet to ban smoking in pubs and hotels). For a few mornings in a row I swore that I could smell some smoke when I was having breakfast in the restaraunt. I mentioned it to Natalja, one of the waitresses, and she said that she thought that Alex hid in the corner of the lounge and smoked with his morning coffee. Problem was that she was having trouble catching him.

Sure enough, 15 minutes later I smelt smoke and found him in the corner smoking.
"Hey Alex, it is non-smoking in here mate, you should put that out before you get caught"
"hmph, the waitress said I could"
"really?"
"yes, it is true"

I found Natalja in the kitchen

"Hey Natalja, did you say Alex could smoke?"
"of course not! He never asked me"

I saw Agi, the Hungarian cleaning lady

"Agi, did you say Alex could smoke?"
"Yes, problem?"
"It isn't allowed in here, tell people to stop if you see them"

"Hey Alex, I am afraid that Agi doesn't know the rules. You have to put that cigarette out."
"she said I could"
"Why didn't you ask a manager, or a waiter? I think you know that you shouldn't be smoking"
"Ty said I could smoke"
"really?"
"He saw me smoking the other day and didn't say anything"

I decided not to press the point, this was only going to get worse if I continued... so I wandered off to another corner of the lounge where I spotted some early customers....

"Hey Alex, there are some customers around the corner, you really should stop smoking!"
"Hey, doooo yooooou speeeeeek the English Ben? I just told you Ty said I could smoke"
"I heard you mate, but there are customers over there, and they are not allowed to smoke, so it would be very bad of you to smoke near them"
"Do I look like a customer? I am staff!"
"Aaaaaaah, that isn't the point"
"Go away, you are not special, you cannot tell me what to do!"

Oh dear.

Limited Communications

Unfortunately there is only one spot in Godalming where one can access the internet - and that is the library. The library has been closed since last week for renovation, hence the lack of communication on my part. All of those people who are writing, I apologise for not replying, and hope you keep writing... I enjoy your emails!

Plan Is a Four-Letter Word

2007-03-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

From Indore

I left Indore after staying one night in a comfortable hotel, a little treat for myself whenever transiting through unpleasant cities. I got a ticket on a bus that was leaving for Bhopal in thirty minutes time. One and a half hours later the bus left the depot. Thirty minutes is not measured in the usual metric of time, but the number of empty seats on a bus - and, as it happens, thirty minutes is however long it takes to fill the remaining seats on the bus.

The name of Bhopal might ring a bell for some - it was the site of the Union Carbide industrial disaster 20-odd years ago. One of the worst industrial disasters of all time - a very real reminder of the evils of modern capitalism for the sake of capitalism. One night tonnes of poisonous gas spilt from a Union Carbide factory, smothering the city, killing thousands and causing terrible health problems to this day. The responsible company, Union Carbide, did their callous best to avoid their responsibility, and to this day they still haven't fully paid the compensation that they were ordered to.

The bus ride there was longer than expected, but reasonably comfortable compared to others that I had taken recently. There were a couple of well timed stops for sickly sweet chai and spicy samosas whenever I felt my endurance being tested. Despite the chai, I was knackered when I arrived in Bhopal at six. In desperate need of a shower I set about finding a hotel. I was also in a rush because my team was playing on the TV at six-thirty (oh Ben, you travel to India and you still follow that silly game... well damn straight, if it is on the tellie and I might be able to catch a game, why not?)

I checked out a couple of hotels, which were either full, or had appalling rooms for the price being asked... and all had surly, unpleasant staff (though, I must admit, I had started to take pleasure in the Indian surliness). I checked out one final place, and found a hotel manager who was smiling ear to ear, with happy staff who made me feel instantly at home. I looked at a room - well lit, clean and a comfortable bed... and the footie on the box. Great. I took my shoes off and went to fill out the C-Forms.

A Small Missunderstanding

C-Forms? Whenever you check into an Indian hotel you have to fill these out. Indian hotels are required to keep precise records of all their guests. The details that one has to fill out vary from state to state (yep, in some places I had to give my father's name), but they always take down the details from one's passport and visa. As the manager filled out my details, joking about the Indian and Australian cricket teams at the same time, he declared that I had a problem. My visa had expired.

"No it hasn't, I have until April 18"
"Excuse me sir, but your visa expired on Febuary 28, it says it here..."
"Ahem, that was the date that I had to enter India by, right? I get six months from the date of entry."
"No you don't. Hear, I will call immigration"
"Thankyou"

After a brief phone conversation in Hindi he informed me that my visa had indeed expired - I got my six months from the date of issue, not from my date of entry. I made a mental note to inform the travel agent who organised these things for me of this little detail, then asked what I ought to do.

He said that I had to go to the Foreigners Registration Office in town, and sort out an extention. After a crazy rickshaw ride I ended up at said office, at six-thirty on a Sunday evening. Of course there was only one person there, who informed that there was nothing he could do for me on account of it being a Sunday. I didn't ask him why he had asked me to come to the office in the first place. He informed me that I had to go to Delhi or Mumbai and get the relevent extention. As I left he said "Don't let the police get you - you are now illegal and they will give you big problems". It comes as no surprise that I didn't ask him why he wasn't getting in contact with the police on my behalf.

From Bhopal In A Hurry

This presented me with a small problem - hotels cannot accept guests whose paperwork is out of order, no matter how nice and helpful the hotel owner is. After some very gentle pleading, I resigned myself to the fact that there was going to be no shower, no relaxed meal, and no football that evening. Not that I missed much, apparently the game was a very dull 0-0 draw.

I had to get to Mumbai quickly, but I first fired off some emails to my parents to let them know that I was in a little bit of strife, and grabbed a bite to eat, before heading to the bedlam of the station. Bhopal train station is a big one, one the junction of East-West and North-South lines. Lots and lots of people, platforms and trains. I dashed to the ticket counter and purchased a super-fast ticket. A super fast ticket is a cattle-class ticket that lets you jump on any train going between the specified stops.

As I was purchasing it a drunk guy started trying to talk to me, and I gently told him that I would rather be alone right now. Maybe he sensed my distress, and started to harrass me, making a loud scene. Though the Indians around me were repulsed by his behaviour, they were also interested in the scene because it involved a foreigner. The police also found it most interesting, and refused to make the man leave me alone. I was a bit strung out, but I bit my tongue and walked away, jumping on the Delhi-Mangalore express that was going to stop in Mumbai.

Toilet Seat

I had made a very similar journey four months earlier along the same line, from Kandwar to Goa. Similarly to that infamous journey, I had to find a place on the floor at the end of a carriage next to the toilets - one of the most unpleasant places in the world to make an overnight trip. I was not the only person in such a position, as I was joined by a friendly young man from Mangalore with whom I shared our little floor space. I spread out my sleeping mat for us to share - and from then on we shared smiles, chai, food and paan during the night.

In the morning, after getting no sleep, I got off the train on the outskirts of Mumbai. Bidding a head-wobbling goodbye to my travel budy I caught another train to the Victoria Terminus in the heart of Mumbai.

Mumbai

I had been looking forward to Mumbai. It is the second largest city in the world - an enormous sprawl of slums and wealth placed side-by-side on the coast. Many people hate it, in fact most people hate it, but I also met a few people who loved the place. One Dutch woman described it as the greatest city in the world. Either way my interest was aroused - it was such a pity that I had to visit the place under such rushed and stressful circumstances.

Before I could think about looking around I had to make my way to the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) to get an exit permit. I spent an hour wandering around central Mumbai trying to find the FRRO, getting lost thanks to the horrible Lonely Planet map. I am going to take the time out to gripe about LP maps. I reckon I have a good sense of direction, and usually have no problems using maps, but the maps in the India LP got me lost and confused so many times - even though I carry a compas. From now on I am trialling other guide books, because maps are important to me - I like them.

The Mumbai residents were very helpful in giving me directions. One bunch of Muslim men approached and asked what I was looking for. After a couple of minutes deliberation they declared that they did not know the location of the road I was looking for, much to my delight. Delight? Why delight? Because it is a fairly universal truth that if somebody doesn't know the directions in India they will just make them up and send you on a wild goose chase. These men's honesty was a treat.

But, if I thought that was surprising, the next man I asked for directions (another Muslim chap) gave me very precise directions that involved major landmarks... which beat the usual flick-of-the-wrist. Indians will flick their wrist to give you a direction - with the initial direction of the flick showing which direction you should start to head in, and any twists and pertebations in the flick are the little left-right details that will get you to the final destination. Such nuances as one-two-or-three blocks are at best implied in such actions and can cause much confusion.

When I finally got to the street a friendly shop owner directed me to to FRRO, which was closed for a public holiday. Damn. What was I going to do? No visa meant no hotel. I was exhausted after my long journey, lack of sleep and traipsing around stinking hot Mumbai with my full pack. I considered finding somewhere to sleep at the train station, then thought better of it and got a cab to Colaba. To make sure that I didn't get an entirely rosey impression of Mumbai and its residents, the cab driver made it clear that he had no idea where he was going when we were halfway to where ever the hell he was going and I had to get out. He asked for 100 rupees - I gave him 20 and a wobble, and he drove off without complaint. Luckily the first person I saw -a tour guide - gave me precise instructions to the road in Colaba district where most of the hotels lie.

Now I had to find a hotel, but I knew that the C-Forms are taken very seriously in Mumbai (the only reason I got away with having a two week expired visa was that I was in Madhya Pradesh where hotels are fairly slack). I checked out a couple of hotels, but the people running them seemed too nice or honest. Finally I found one where the owner gave me a slightly uncomfortable feeling. Perfect. When I checked in he noticed that my visa had expired, and made a show of wanting me out of his hotel. A head wobble and 400 rupees later I had a room, and my name was not on the C-Form.

Relax

It was a temporary relief to have a room - some space for myself in which to clean up and relax after the claustrophibic travel and worry of the last 36 hours. I had a shower, washed my hair, and went for a little wander around Mumbai, before retiring for an early night.

The next morning I woke at six, did some yoga, went for a walk in the cool Mumbai morning. The previous evening I had been accosted by touts selling everything from hash to handbags to giant novelty balloons and had been forced to flee by their incrediable persistance. I even met a Bangladeshi businessman who had been robbed and need ten dollars to get back home - he would mail me the money once he was safe. Oh dear. But in the early morning the city was quiet, and the only people on the seaside were joggers, dog walkers, people doing laughing therapy, and a lone chai seller.

I composed my thoughts, and came up with plans for the different situations that might arrise at the FRRO. The hotel owner had suggested that I might want to pay the police there some backsheesh to get the visa extention - which had made me cautious. If the police there were that corrupt I might have to pay more than a bit of backsheesh when they realised how desperate I was: a two week out-of-date visa can get you in a lot of strife.

Catch-22

As it turned out I had no reason to be afraid, the office was run by civil servants whose respect for the rules was unbendable by a lowely traveller such as myself. After waiting in line, I was informed that I would have to show a confirmed flight for the next couple of days before I would be given an extention, and I only had a couple of hours to organise it because the office did not "entertain" visa applications after 2pm.

I didn't have enough time to bring my ticket forward, so I tore off to the American Express travel agency listed in the Lonely Planet. As it turned out there was an American Express office of some sorts at the specified adress - on the second floor behind a couple of layers of security personel. Once inside I was informed that this was not a travel agency, and that I should go to the agency on this card. They were clearly well prepared for dealing with the many tourists that LP erronously sent their way.

I ran down the street with my pack to the Thomas Cook travel agency. Luckily they were actually an agency, with large airconditioned offices like those back home. My friendly travel advisor listened to my story with a lot of sympathy, and found a very cheap flight for me the next day. I ordered it and handed over my credit card. She vanished for a while, then returned and asked me to wait a little longer. I waited for half an hour, my alarm increasing all the while as I watched the clock ticking over. She returned to inform me that she would be unable to issue the ticket because I didn't have a valid visa.

Oh, bloody hell! I explained that I needed the ticket to get the visa, and was in a very tight spot in terms of time. She was very nice, and went for another extended talk with her supervisor. She managed to win him over, and issued me my ticket with one and a half hours to spare.

My cab was caught in traffic, and the driver was quite ok with this. I asked him if he could speed things up, and he said "traffic traffic". I gave him a sad look and said "big trouble, big hurry". He grinned and sat one hand on the horn and wove, pushed and bullied his way through the Mumbai traffic - smilling over his shoulder at me all the way. It was then that I decided I really like the people of Mumbai.

Back to the office, I got through the first queue, and with my confirmed ticket I was ushered into the more comfortable air conditioned second queue. From then on it was a very simple process of filling out the correct forms and paying my fine. No questions were asked, and I even flirted a little bit with the girl, Ms Mkwanda, who processed my visa. I was stamped and ticketed, and ejected into the heat of Mumbai with ten minutes to spare. I sat down for a soft drink at the shop of the man who helped me find my way on the first day, and who had been sharing my story each time I went to the FRRO.

Salvation

That night I got a room at the Salvation Army Hostel, a cheap place offering overcrowded dorms at the only half-reasonable prices for a room in Mumbai. There I met some other travellers, relaxed, and even went out for some beer on my last night in India (I hadn't had a drink in seven months).

The next morning I woke up a little hung-over and grabbed a taxi to the airport. The young driver and I chatted about the cricket for a while, covering both the in-progress world cup and his own glorious cricket career. Like all Indians he was both a batter and bowler. I was always entertained when I asked "are you a batsman?" and got a yes, then was informed that "I am also bowler".

A Reminder

Then he told me his story. Stories like his are everywhere in India, particularly in cities like Mumbai. During my stay in India I came to realise that there are two sides to every coin, and that the behaviour of the people I met could not be measured the same as my own. The fact that Indians are by-and-large so warm and friendly when they struggle through what we would consider great adversity speaks volumes.

He was origionally from Varanarsi, on the other side of the country. He had been attending college, but then his father went to prison. His father was an alcoholic, and had murdered another man - I was given a graphic account of the crime in true Indian style. He had been forced to leave college, and come to Mumbai to drive a taxi. He didn't own the cab, but worked for the owner. The owner did the day shift and he did the night shift - sleeping on the pavement when he was not at work. All of his money was being sent back to his mother in Varanarsi to pay for his sisters dowry.

The story was honest, and he wasn't asking me for money. He was just telling me his story. I told him my own, paying special attention to the details of my own mother and sister (topics dear to Indian men). He had a go at listening to my iPod - though he found it amazing that I should have so much music, and none of it Hindi movie music. At the end of the one hour ride I gave him decent tip, and wished him good luck.

There is a lot of warmth in the Indians, but they don't necessarily show it to the average foreigner. I certainly had my guard up when I first came to India, and had a fairly hard time with the Indians for a long time - regular readers will remember my frustrations. My ego took a bit of a battering, but eventually I opened up a bit and started to get some reward from them. Mind you, I am still a long way from being really comfortable in India, and there isn't a day that goes by without somebody doing something that drives you up the wall with irritation/frustration/anger/exasperation. For a while there I said I would never return, but now I say I might go back... after exploring some other interesting parts of the world that I haven't seen yet.

The UK

My exit stamp and associated paperwork caused me no further drama, receiving only cursory glances from the Indian and English passport controls. I was amazed at the amount of space that I had on my economy class seat, and the sheer luxury of TV and meal services. This was a sharp contrast to the claustrophobia that I usually feel on planes, and testiment to the cramped and uncomfortable travels that I had endured in India.

I arrived at Heathrow with no idea what my next move would be, as I had no chance to form a plan due to my hasty exit from India. I called my budy, schoolmate and one-time flatmate Jamie, but he was in Scotland. That wasn't much help, so I got a train to Paddington (the 10 minute ride cost as much as an overnight first-class train ticket in India) and made my way to a cheap hostel. Well, cheap by London standards.

The next morning I went for a walk at 6. The sun was rising when I entered Hyde Park, and the watery sunshine made no difference to the sub-zero chill in the air. But it was beautifull, even when the sun rose into the clouds and it started to snow. I wandered around the park watching happy dogs getting their morning walks, marvelling at the gothic architecture and statues sprinkled around that park, and the well-ordered nature of life in a London park. It was all such a strong contrast to the sweltering heat and chaos-that-somehow-worked that I had left behind.

The next day Jamie came down to London from Edinborough, and we went to the pub to chat and swap stories. James has been in the UK for the last twenty months, so we have a lot of catching up to do. London was very expensive and, though museums and galleries such as the amazing British Museum are free, I had to leave.

I am now in Brighton, where I have been biding my time for the last week. I haven't got any sort of working visa at the moment, so I have to be careful with my funds until I can get something organised. I have decided to get an Irish working holiday visa, as it appears to be the only option that is even remotely certain to succeed. I am currently sorting out the paperwork required for my application. They want copies of my qualifications and work references among other things... it defeats me why they want these things, but I suppose they have to make it tricky somehow - apparently visas aren't meant to be easy.

Jamie has lined up a job for me, cash-in-hand with accomodation and food included in the deal. I think that it is some sort of cafe-bar work, and it will do nicely for the mean time.

No More Indore

2007-03-17T01:55:00.000-07:00

Chelo Pakistan, Bus Driver

I just got off a four hour bus ride, from Mandu to Indore over a shitty road that I never want to see again. Ever. There weren't many people on the bus, so the driver spent ages lingering at each stop, hoping to pick up more passengers. Mind you, my seat, and the seats around me were full to busting point, because I was interesting. So I sat squashed up, wobbling and smiling at the people around me who kept staring, and who spoke no English at all. For four hours.

Siva's Town

Since last contact, I made my way from Belgaum to Kandhwar, around 1200km, in the relative luxury of 2 tier air-conditioned train coach. Basically, I got more room, clean sheets, and the chai and coffee sellers didn't bother me in the early morning. From Kandhwar I took my first bus ride over shitty Madhyar Pradesh roads to Omkareshwar.

I have visited Omkareshwar before, four months ago when I was heading south. But that time was only for a couple of days, and I wanted to spend longer there. This time I stayed on "the island" (the town is divided between and island in the river and the mainland), in a little guest house run by a lovely local bloke named Manu. The guesthouse was high-up on a hill, so we had excellent views of all the many Siva temples.

Siva, as I am sure I have explained somewhere else, is one of the more popular Hindu gods. He is the dude, usually with blue skin, who has big ol' dreadlocks coiled up on his head, a tigerskin loin cloth, and generally looks stoned and at peace with his surroundings. By all accounts he is a pretty accomplished chap: he is great in a fight, is an awesome dancer and is the prototypical yogi. A friend of mine in Mysore hurt her back doing yoga, then one night she had a dream that she was doing yoga with Siva, and woke up in pain after her dream yoga workout. "Well, you can't fuck around when you are doing yoga with Siva, I really wanted to impress him!"

Siva also inspires some of the tackiest religious memorabilia going. I picked up a great framed picture of him, with a full beard that includes the naffest mustache known to man. I visited the Joti Lingum, one of 12 special phalic stones in India that represent Siva, and had the Brahmins (upper Hindu cast who perform, among other occupations, priestly roles) in the temple perform a tourist puja (prayer) for me. I never let Brahmin's perform pujas for me, because I am not a Hindu and I really don't like the way some folks mix up money and religion. But I relented, but I think that I annoyed them when I could do lotus position when they couldn't and I left a donation that was only double what the locals were leaving. They tried to bring in some more Brahmins, to increase the "puja power" and get some more money out of me, at which point a fled and swore to never pay for a prayer again.

Monkey Business

Food at Manus' House was excellent. When travelling, one eats in lots of cheap eateries, and at places aimed towards travellers. Such places rarely do good Indian food, let alone really good stuff. I have decided that I am going to spend some money in Mumbai and go to some good Indian restaraunts. But at Manu's we ate the same meals that his wife cooked for the family each night. It was always something different, and it was always well cooked. The vegetables were not over cooked, the flavours balanced and hot but not too-hot. I was a very happy boy.

We also ate a lot of fruit. The monkeys noticed this. We would notice a monkey looking at our fruit from one side of the balcony. The monkey would run away after we threatened it with a "bamboo massage" from our special monkey sticks. But a couple of minutes later the monkey would be spying from the other side, then from below, then from above... and when it figured that nobody was looking it would dash through and grab whatever fruit it was keen on. There are few things funnier than watching a monkey try to pick up and run away with a 2 kg water melon... that look in its eyes when it realises that it has come so far, yet is so far away from being able to drag the melon away from the hostile group of bamboo swinging hippies who own the melon, is priceless.

Baba Chilm

I went for a walk to the end of the island where the babas, or sadus tend to hang about. Sadus are Hindus who have renounced worldly possessions and taken to wandering in search of spiritual fulfillment. There are lots of different types/sects, and there are plenty of genuine sadus who are on a mission for enlightenment. There are also lots of sadus who are sadus because it is a socially acceptable way to get really stoned all day, every day.

I met a couple such characters on my walk. They offered me a chilm, and I couldn't really decline, could I? After having a bit of a chat about where I am from, and discussing the various yogic pursuits that they used, I was ushered into the temporary abode of a third sadu. He seemed to be quite serious about being a sadu. He talked some good philosophy, and his actions were very harmonious. He shared his lunch with me, and with whichever animals came strolling into the hut. He also shared chilm with me, lots of it.

There was a hilarious moment when my otherwise very laid back baba got into a very loud argument about the quality of the chilm that had been provided for our use by another baba, while a third baba laughed at the whole show in the background. For those who don't know (I was one of you until this incident), a chilm is a long conical pipe. To pack it, one places a small stone in, then packs the rest of the chilm with whatever they want to smoke, and the stone stops to contents from falling into the mouth of the smoker. As it turned out, the stone that had been placed in said chilm was disrespectful, and he let everybody know about it. As a guest I couldn't really complain.

After my lunch I met another couple of Babas as I wondered home. I made a dreadlock in the hair of one of them. He was delighted, and insisted that I shared a chilm with him. How could I say no? I was in no fit state to walk by the time I got home. I had left my hotel to go for a walk, and returned home out of my tree through no fault of my own, just because I had to accept the hospitality of obviously very wise and learned men.

On The Road

After a week in Omkareshwar, I hit the bumpy roads for Maheshwar, another historic town on the river. The temples there were in fantastic shape, with some really detailed carvings. But the most memorable thing about Maheshwar was my hotel room. As I tried to get to sleep that night I went over a mental list of all the hotel rooms I have stayed in on this trip, then I remembered all of the rooms that I had ever stayed in all over the world. In the end I decided that my Maheshwar room was certainly the worst room I had ever stayed in.

When I checked in at 3 in the afternoon, the sleazy owner informed me that the room was going to be available in one hour, as the couple in there had not checked out. I glanced at the sign that said check-out was at 10. Despite my suspicions, I left my bag and went for a wander, as this was the only hotel in town that was remotely cheap to stay in.

When I returned an Indian couple were leaving the room, and heading in opposite directions. The fact that they didn't act like husband-and-wife, and they had no luggage confirmed my suspicions. This kind of thing is bound to happen in the only cheap hotel in town. So I insisted on new sheets, and slept in my sleeping bag liner anyway. That night I was kept awake by the hilarious and disturbing sounds of Indian couples coming and going in the room next to mine. My suspicions about the owner were also confirmed by a Canadian girl who caught him using a spy hole into said room.

To Mandu

It should be no surprise that I only stayed one night in Maheshwar, and headed straight (well, as straight as the roads/buses permitted me) to Mandu. There are lots of ruins in Mandu, and pleasantly cool nights. I spent a day wandering around the ruins, admiring the spectacular views from the plateau on which Mandu lies.

Not many exciting stories since then, although I met a very funny security guard. Well, I don't think he had much of a sense of humour, but I found him funny. He spotted me as I was wandering through the ruins, and started making a beeline for me from about 100 meters away. I decided to have some fun, so I pretended not to see him, and looked for some stairs or a maze that I could use to make it hard work for him to get to me. Unfortunately my escape was blocked, so I pretended to look at the roof while he approached. He was a strapping lad, with an enormous and well maintained moustache, and a very tight camo uniform. That is, he was the personification of macho camp, which is what Indian men do when they want to look cool. After inspecting my ticket he reached into his undies and extracted some ancient coins that he would sell to me for "good price"... then he offered me a guided tour. Bloody hell, everybody is always trying something out here.

And Next...

That was yesterday. Now I am in a surprisingly efficient and pleasant internet cafe. Surprising because it is so bloody chaotic and unpleasant outside on the streets of Indore. The moment I arrived here I had a strong desire to leave as soon as possible. I don't know where I am going to go yet, I am going to decide on that after I have finished my internet session. Still no plans!

I have received a few emails complaining about my lack of correspondence. Please, be patient! I am only getting web access every week or so, and then I have lots of things to do over a usually poor internet connection. I am thinking about all you guys, and I do care! So, seeing as how you all have far better access to the web than I do, keep in touch and keep telling me stories!

A Wobble From India

2007-02-26T22:57:00.000-08:00

Hampi Days

The internet connection is very slow here, so slow that it would take too long for me to load and read my last post, so there is going to be a bit of overlap. Time is limited, so this is going to be a fairly clinical recounting of events....

I spent three weeks in Hampi. I got sick at the beginning, and my body was slow to recover, taking around 9 days before I felt close to normal. But since then I have only been off-colour for one morning, which is a very good run (pun not intended) by Indian standards. Maybe my guts are developing a bit of immunity. Famous last words.

Most days in Hampi involved more than one of, but not necesarily all of, the following activites : climbing, or bouldering to be exact; swimming in the lake; eating lots of good food; exploring ruins and temples; and hammock time.

The climbing was a big hilight. I made good friends with some very good climbers, and learnt a lot. On my last day in Hampi I went climbing with Tom, another beginner climber, and we had lots of fun climbing lots of problems (climber talk for things to climb) that had been impossible when I started. Climbing on the granite was very tiring, both for the muscles, and for the skin on our fingers. In fact, people's fingers were the limiting factor for all of the climbers. My hands look like a bit of a mess right now.

Some Personalities

The other main hilight was the people I met; the majority of them were Poms. There were Joey and Saska from Brighton. Joey was a very funny guy, who works as a photographer for car magazines and car advertisments; he had lots of great tracking-and-panning shots of rickshaws. His first words of the morning were usually something like "spliff?". Saska seemed to be a calming influence, and we were all very glad for that.

Andy was from Liverpool, and is one inch short of a Peter Crouch (around 6 foot 5 for people who don't know how long a Peter Crouch is). Another big personality, but a complete woose who had to be encouraged, teased and threatened for ages before he would jump off the big rock at the lake ("c'mon Andy, it is only 2 Crouches and an Owen high"). He was always up for a big night, which we thankfully managed to avoid. He is also a fan of a certain football club, and one of his uncles has seven season tickets... and I have been invited to a game. But I like Andy for who he is, of course.

There were lots of Spaniards, so now I have plenty of spots to stay in Spain, and people who are very keen to show me their fave climbing spots/beaches/cities in Spain. These people's invitations will be taken up.

On The Road

After three weeks in Hampi I got the feeling that it was time to move on.... to somewhere else. I hit the road with another of the Hampi personalities, Tom from London. Tom is remarkable, because he is so similar to me. We share the same opinions on most of the important things (life, spirituality, curry, football, the exemption of mosquitos from nonviolence), the same sayings, and so on.

Change of Plans

We headed East to Hubli, where he was going to head South and I North. When we got to Hubli and went to book train tickets at the station, there were no seats available at any cost for the next 8 days. Neither of us felt like making long bus journeys to our respective destinations, so we made a group decision to "fuck it, split the difference, and go to the beach instead".

We got a hotel room with satelite TV, so that we could watch the Saturday football games live from England, then got a relatively short and simple four-hour bus ride West to Gokarna the next morning. That was a couple of days ago. We have a cheap hut on Om Beach. Om has the usual ingredients for an Indian beach : sand, puny waves, slightly murky water, Westerners in very small bikinis, day tripping Indian men who come to openly ogle the bikini girls, drum sellers, pushy cows, ratty dogs, lots of dharbas selling hilarious interpretations of Western food (American chop-suey springs to mind), and a big rock where the locals can be spotted going to shit in the sea (maybe it isn't the food that makes people sick on the beach).

I have been getting back into my practice, and have been pleasantly surprised by how good it is (mentally that is, my left leg is still buggered and will take quite a while to heal I think). I have been practicing on the beach, with the sun rising in front of me. A couple of other people who practice Astanga approached me after the first day and now we all practice together. Nice.

So now I am in another of these "backpacker hangouts" for a little while. I have booked a train ticket north on the 7th, so until then I will probably stay here. These places are fairly insulated from the "real India" (which is some vague place which is always somewhere else, but you should be experiencing, you know what I mean, man?). When I leave I will be heading to Madhya Pradesh, which is a much less developed state, where I will move around until it is time to head to Europe.

I don't have much in the way of plans for Europe, just a list of things I would like to do. The main problem will be getting work, as countries like making it hard to get work visas once you are on the road. At least India has been cheaper than I expected, and money will not be too big of an issue for me to worry about when I first get to London.

I have a bag full of funny little stories, and Ben-centric observations, but I don't get to the internet nearly often enough when I am not in the cities... so you will have to put up with the linear "how Ben got from A to C" narrative. And I am not planning to be anywhere with decent internet for a while, so rest easy knowing that Ben is well, doing an OK job of keeping out of harm's way, and learning to get along better with the locals.

Wobbling Along

Speaking of getting along with the locals, I have made some significant progress of late. In a word, wobbling. I have learnt the head wobble, and have developed some skill at deploying it. A smile and a wobble makes everybody your friend. Often one finds oneself in a situation where you are going to get harrased if you say anything, but you feel awkward about stonewalling the person who is trying to get your attention... in such cases just wobble. When the hundredth school child asks you for a school pen, just wobble. When the rickshaw driver demands a wholly undeserved tip, just wobble and walk away. When the wrong meal is bought out to you by the waiter who refused to write down your order, insisting that he could remember it, just wobble and eat what you got.

So, with a wobble I finish this post. I hope that all is well with everyone.

A Post

2007-02-12T22:36:00.000-08:00

Been A While, Eh?

It has been a bit under a month since I last wrote. What happened Ben? Well, I did have an enormous post that I was working on in Mysore. It was a detailed study into the fine art of making sure that one has enough spare change, always a challenge in India. I have developed quite a body of theory in this field, that I wanted to share. It also had a short opinion piece on rickshaw drivers, quote -- once a rickshaw driver asked me
"Hey, don't you like Indians?"
"Well mate, seeing as how rickshaw drivers are one of my main points of contact with Indians it is surprising that I don't, eh?"

Anyways, to cut a long story short, that work in progress got destroyed in a bizarre computing accident and was replaced with the manual for the computer game Grand Theft Auto. Otherwise, I have been too bored or to lazy to write much.

Mysore

The rest of my time in Mysore was fairly dull. That is, there wasn't much worth putting in the blogs. My health followed the usual two days healthy, three days crook pattern. My left hamstring started giving me a lot of bother, and the whole left leg has seized up as a result, so now I can hardly touch my toes. This makes getting any kind of rhythm in practice very difficult. So I am taking it easy on the yoga until I can get that to heal a bit.

I wrote after my first month that I was really starting to enjoy yoga. Since then I have had a constant procession of health problems that have made practice very difficult. That time feels like it is a long time ago, and I am back to square one. Only one thing that I can do about it, keep eating healthy, keep early to bed, keep practicing, keep on keeping on... right?

Rocks, Everywhere.

So, my time in Mysore was not very productive. I thought that a move to the country and a change of scene might improve my health, and recharge things. I have been in the little village of Hampi for the last 10 days or so (sorry Smell and Snot, I got my wires crossed and didn't organise to meet). Lovely place, with stacks of granite boulders everywhere (just like home in Ballandean), and lots of rice paddies and ancient ruins in between (unlike home).

Hampi is a bit of a mecca for the rock-climbing crowd, with lots of people coming to play on the numerous granite boulders. My lovely little hotel/huts has a box full of second hand climbing shoes, and crash pads for bouldering, so I spent my first three days climbing rocks, jumping off rocks into a lake (where one can also jump into a very deep and very fast flowing irrigation canal and float for ages through a mini canyon... yes Dad, it is bloody dangerous, but you would have done it when you were my age).

Then, I got sick. A cold and really bad stomach problem at the same time. Spent the first day lying in a hammock with a fever, when I wasn't pulling cramp faces on the loo. Six days later and my stomach is still giving me grief. Bloody hell, I might actually enjoy some of my time in India if it wasn't for my health. But, as I said earlier, not much else I can do except live healthy and watch my hygiene... the rest is up to luck and my rather week constitution.

A Short Post

This is a relatively short post I suppose. There are some funny stories to relate, but they will have to wait... wait until I feel that telling funny stories would accurately reflect my mood. Also, there is a cartel operation going on with the internet places in Hampi, which they use to keep the internet price higher than what one pays in Australia, so long posts are expensive!

Better... Again!

2007-01-19T20:34:00.000-08:00

Ill... Again!

What a difference a couple of days makes! In my last post I wrote that I was healthy and loving my yoga. Since then I have practiced once, because I got sick again! And this time it was a bit more serious, requiring three days of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. It was a stomach problem, but with fevers, dizzy spells and insomnia. I have had worse... but it was still no fun.

This morning was my first practice in 4 days. I took it very easy, and all went well. It has been very frustrating at times having continual health problems in India. Hopefully they will settle down over time. Right now I am very keen to get back into practice, and make the most of my remaining time in Mysore.

The Plan?

I am getting asked what my plans are by a lot of people. Some of them concerned (hello Mum and Dad), and others curious. Well, there are no plans! After Mysore I won't have very long left in India. I would like to check out Hampi, in the north of Karnataka, before heading up to Risikesh, in the north of the country.

What happens after I leave India is still up in the air. I don't think that I will stay away from Australia for as long as I had origionally thought. But the return is still some way off yet! I would like to visit a couple of spots in Europe, and do some more "exotic" travel too. To do that will require bolstering my financial resources, so I will probably seek work in Europe somewhere. But the countries invovled, timescales and order-of-visit are still very open...

Football Tonight

One of the benefits of settling somewhere for a while is that you find out a spot where you can watch the football matches. Sean is living in a spiffy new place... with cable TV. So I am going to his place to watch the big game tonight. Of course, you already knew that the big game was Liverpool hosting Chelsea in the leage. Come on the Reds!

Mysore Suburb Living

2007-01-12T20:43:00.000-08:00

Wobble Zone

Indians communicate with head "wobbles". They don't nod yes, and shake no. They wobble the head vertically and horizontally at the same time. Subtle permutations of this gesture mean "yes", "no", "maybe", "I don't know", "go away", "left", "right", and so on. It is impossible for the newcomer to differentiate between one head wobble and another, which can lead to confusion, laughter or frustration.

I never realised just how much information can be contained in a head wobble until an event I saw last week. A policeman was standing in the middle of a busy intersection, controlling streams of bikes, motorbikes, rickshaws, cars and trucks with hand signals. Then, at one moment, as though time was standing still, he dropped his hands and began to shake his head. He turned on the spot, wobbling away with what appeared to be complete communication with the traffic. I would have loved to have seen a Westerner drive into the intersection and stuff it all up by confusing the "maybe left" head wobble with a "straight straight" head wobble. (and yes, "maybe left" and "straight straight" are valid directions over here.)

Yoga Buddies

January is high season in Mysore for yoga heads. The number of students has spiked, particularly in the suburb of Gokolum where Patabi Jois, "the original astanga guru to the west", has his shala. The stories about the folk that are seen in Gokolum are pretty funny, and sometimes a bit disturbing. But the crew that has found its way to Mr Iyengar's shala is refreshingly down to earth. I would say that over half of the students there are new to astanga, along with some very experienced practitioners. With this crowd and Iyengar's influence nobody takes themselves too seriously, and we help each other out in our practices.

After practice a bunch of us go to our favourite little chai stall. Originally it was just Sean and I who had our couple of chais each day while discussing yoga, football, India, and so on, but now the crowd has grown. Sean is an acupuncturist who moved visited some friends in Mysore last year, and decided to try some yoga with Mr Iyengar. He now lives here for months on an end, living over the road from Patabi Jois' shala, and sticking pins in the "elite of the astanga world". He says that he sees more eating disorders, neurosis, and insomniacs than he does back in England.

Another regular is Fred, from France, who is "crazee with ze football", in fact both Sean and I are silly about football too, so that gets discussed to great lengths. Fred is new to Astanga, and teaches Iyengar yoga to rich housewifes in France for 50 euros and hour, and used to be a professional golfer. A very funny guy, who says "hello mr" in a goofy French accent to cows that we have to swerve around on his scooter.

There is Patricia from Poland. She and her husband Peter are my new neighbors. She is a yoga teacher back home, is about to start a PhD in yoga education, and is just about to finish the second series with Iyengar. The rest of the class usually hangs around after they finish to watch Mr Iyengar put her through her paces on some very difficult asanas, while explaining the philosophy and benefits of each asana. Peter is about to start his PhD in philosophy, and you guessed it, he specialises in Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. I often go to their place, or they come to mine, for meals, tea and entertaining conversation.

Of course, this means that they group of people towards whom chai dog has to show her light-hearted disdain has grown, much to the growing amusement of the locals who witness our chai time every morning. Well, sometimes when we have a few girls in the group, "witness" might be a euphemism for "loitering with the intent of copping an eyefull".

Feeling Good

My stomach, cold, and lice problems are behind me for the time being. I have been healthy for a week now, and I am really enjoying myself. For the first time in my life I am really enjoying yoga. Until now, yoga was something that I was compelled to do. Initially it was a means to fix my back. Over time I became aware that it could be a great source of happiness and contentedness (please mind my "wordiness" here), but again this was a future benefit that I was aiming for. Occasionally I would get moments of "something else" in my practice, but these were very few and far between. Instead I would get up at 5am, or drag my tired body to class after work to do something that was often far from fun. Luckily I had a great teacher whose lessons opened my sceptical mind to the practice and philosophy of yoga.

Thankfully the compulsion to continue was strong! The last couple of weeks I have started to enjoy the benefits of yoga during and immediately after yoga. It is difficult to describe, but it feels good. I feel content performing the asanas, and am interested in "experiencing" them, instead of "enduring" them. And for the rest of the day I have extra energy, and enthusiasm. Now I don't have to force myself to go to practice, I have to force myself to take rest and let my body recover before restarting the adventure.

On Lice

One final note -- it would appear that the lice are gone. I have just moved into a new place, and hopefully the infestation hasn't followed. I have spent the last two and a half weeks dousing my hair in vinegar/alcohol for hours on end, and applying an unsavory neem, coconut and DEET combo several times a day... as well as regular and systematic cleansing of my room to try and remove eggs.

But if they have followed, I am going to graciously admit defeat to the little critters... then kill the bastards by shaving my dreads off. I will have the last laugh either way, but it might be a bittersweet one.

Of Lice And Ben

2006-12-27T20:16:00.000-08:00

A Worrying Discovery

Three nights ago I had an itchy scalp, which was conspiring with my unhappy stomach to stop me from sleeping. No worries, this happens with dreadlocks, particularly if I have been sweating away in yoga practice. I got up and washed my hair (this involved asking my neighbour for a bucket of water, remember that I don't mention the steps involved in what should be simple exercises), which always fixes the problem.

But I woke up in the early hours with the itching as strong as ever, and was that the sensation of something crawling in my hair? Just ignore it until the morning, and pray it isn't you know what... In the morning I captured a bug in my hair. And unfortunately it wasn't a flea (fleas are easy to get rid of, and don't like human hair that much anyway, just hide a flea collar in your headband for a day and they are gone).

Wikipedia confirmed that the critter in my hair was a louse. Lice, nits, whatever you call them, I cannot remember having to think about them since I was a little kid. They are the worst thing to get in your dreads, because one cannot comb out the eggs, so stopping an infestation from reoccuring can be very difficult, and most people cut their dreads off.

A bit more hunting around on the web and it became clear that one has to work hard to get them out of dreadlocks, and go to fairly extreme measures. I found one particular recipe for lice elimination from dreads in several places, so I set out to perform it. Vinegar and hot chilli powder were purchased and mixed into a vile mixture, which was applied liberaly to my hair, then my hair was covered tightly with a black plastic bag and I waited an hour. Goddamn, that stuff stings when it gets in your eyes. I then washed my hair and put lots of coconut oil to drive any survivors away.

This didn't really work, with the itching starting up again a couple of hours after the washing. Luckily for me I met an Israeli guy who had dreadlocks, and having travelled through India for many years and being a bit of a bum he had lice stories to tell. He said "vinegar? You will have to wash your hair with it every day for 2 or 3 weeks to get rid of them all.". Instead he suggested using medicinal alcohol, and using neem oil in my hair to drive out any stragglers and new ticks that hatch from eggs. As it happened, he had a spare bottle of the vile substance that is neem oil that I could have.

Not Big Enough For Ticks and Dreads

That night the itching was worse than the previous night, and I decided that if I could not improve my condition by the next night I would shave my head. So, the next day I went on an adventure to get some rubbing alcohol. After visiting 6 chemists I found out that they call it spirits, and if you ask for alcohol you get blank stares, this is because to run a pharmacy in India you don't need to know anything about the products you sell. After I had convinced the man at the pharmacy that I did not intend to drink the spirits, I went home and made a spirits-vinegar-chilli cocktail for my hair. If you ever do this, make sure you are in a well ventilated room, and whatever you do, keep the mixture out of your eyes!

This time the mixture stayed in for two hours, and it was so powerful that I decided that any lice that survived would get certificates. I made a special oil, comprised of coconut, neem and some DEET. No living creature, let alone lice, would want to live in hair full of that stuff.

Ben 1 - Lice 1

To my relief I woke up this morning after a fantastic sleep, and there is only the odd itch here or there. For the second half, one more application of the cocktail in 4 days time, and daily application of my repelant for the next couple of weeks should defeat them. They have a short 7-10 day reproductive cycle which I have to interrupt. Now begins the laborious task of quarenteening and de lousing my clothes, bedding, yoga mat, and other infected things in my room.

A Few Smiles

I had just recovered from a cold, when I came down with a stomach problem on Christmas Eve. This combined with the lice put me into a poor mood, and I was not inclined to shower as much attention on the locals as they usually like. But when the Israeli guy gave me the neem oil, and let me know that it was possible to keep my dreads I was in a slightly improved mood. I went to get some dinner, stopping at the little store where I buy my paper each day to get my copy of The Hindu (local English language paper). I normally get it from him each morning, and he hands me a copy straight away without me having to ask now. I hadn't been to collect it that morning, so he broke out into a smile and looked my in the eye when I turned up at 7:30 in the evening. This was a development, as he, like most other Indian shopkeepers, usually avoided eye contact during the transaction.

I then crossed the road to the little Indian place where I go for meals about once a day, and the guy who usually serves me impassively smiled when he saw me. I also got a smile when I payed, where usually I met a pair of eyes that had found something interesting in the middle distance over my shoulder. On the way home the kids on my street, and there are a lot of them, were certainly friendlier and only one of them had the cheek to ask me for a pen or Australian coin. I had a good chat with one little boy about the sheep that were tied out the front of his house (they were being fattened up for eating on New Year's Day).

This new trend in my relationship with the locals was probably due to a combination of my good mood and becoming a bit of a local myself. Now that I have been in the same spot for a fortnight, and I am getting some regularity in my dealings with the locals they have started to cut out some of the crap that they deal out to foreigners. Indeed, life is starting to settle down. I have some good friends among the other foreigners and I have found the shops and restaraunts that are staffed by pleasant people.

Chai Dog

Well, the chai dog hasn't settled down, but I don't think that she ever will. Chai dog lives on my street, and seems to take an exception to me. Initially our relationship got off to a smooth start, but that changed when she saw me with Sean. Sean and I were going for our daily chai after yoga, and we were discussing the local dogs. Sean is not a dog person, and dogs pick up on it and love to bark at him. He informed me that there was one dog that went particularly mental when it saw him. As we were having chai a female dog, with drooping teets walked past, and Sean whispered "Here she is, just wait till she sees me"... and the moment she saw him she jumped back 3 steps, began wagging her tail and barking like her life depended on it. She backed off around the corner and barked half way up the street, leaving Sean and I laughing. Since then I have been tarred with the same brush.

Chai dog is harmless, she barks a lot, but her body language, in particular the wagging tail, tells us that she doesn't really mean it. Every morning she walks past the chai stand oblivious to our presence, before we greet here with a "hello darling", or a "good morning sunshine", and she delights in barking at us, which amuses the locals no end.

Charming Old Bloke

"Mayurasana is the peacock posture, but that looks more like a chamelion!"
"perfection is important, there are 400 asanas, but if I show you them all today you will not have perfection and you sill stay in bed tomorrow"
"hey, right foot first, whose side are you on, the devil or God's? I am watching you always"
"try as much as you can. Perfection!"

Being in class with Mr Iyengar each morning is a lot of fun. Unlike other teachers in Mysore, who by all accounts take a lot of fun out of practice, he is always coming up with funny things to say and is very friendly. Of course, he is very serious, but doesn't take himself too seriously, and he also has the habit of punctuating practice with little lectures on the philosophy behind what we are doing. Yesterday Sean told me after class, "when he looked at me and said 'slow breathing, try as much as you can', and started walking over I started breathing quickly!" Sean isn't so flexible as the others in class, and as a result he gets some more "assistance" from Mr Iyengar. I have learnt not to make any complaining noises when he is adjusting me, because he just makes fun of them. This might sound a bit rough, but in reality he has an awful lot of experience, and knows what he is doing.

It is amazing that very few people come to learn from him. We have always got 4-7 people in the morning for each asana class, and in the afternoon my Polish freind and I have him to ourselves for 2 hours when he teaches us philosophy and mudras. One simply does not get the same level of intimacy with other teachers in Mysore (there are 200 people at one of the other schools), and no other teachers are willing or able to teach yoga, pranayama and mudras like he does. The stories that I have heard about dodgy things that happen different yoga schools, particularly that of Patabi Jois who is considered by many to be the grand old master, will have to wait for another post. One guy who has been here a long time told me that he would go to Iyengar if he wanted to learn yoga, because he is the only teacher that he hasn't heard a bad story about. I am glad that he doesn't advertise at all, and deliberately makes himself hard to contact so that only a small number of interested students make the effort to come and learn from him.

D-Day

My practice is coming along very well, and I am now doing the whole of the primary series. It was only three days ago that I got myself into Marichyasana D on both sides (harder than it looks!), which is quite an acheivement for me. In traditional teaching of Astanga yoga, the student only learns a new asana in the series after they can do each of the asanas they have been shown. Marichyasana D requires flexiblity in both ankles, knees and hips, along with a good spinal twist so many people get stuck trying to complete it due to problems in one of those areas.Of course, some of my attempts at the asanas need a lot of work, but over the next few months I will get a lot stronger.

I am also doing classes in teacher training (yoga philosophy) and in mudras (muscle contractions with particular breathing patterns, and nothing to do with hand positions). Mr Iyengar is a real mine of information, and his philosophy lectures in particular are a lot of fun, though it can be quite frustrating to try and get a straight answere out of him when I want to clarify a point that he has made. By the time I have left Mysore I will have plenty to practice and work on before I visit him again to learn the second series... maybe!

Indian Moments

2006-12-17T22:32:00.000-08:00

India has a habit of surprising and providing moments of hilarity.

Indglish

The Hindu, a national English speaking newspaper in India, recently had an obituary for a journalist on the front page. After briefly outlining the details of his early and working life, the last paragraph began

At the fag-end of his life he worked as an editor for the...

What part of his life? Indians like to tell you that their middle and upper classes speak the best English in the world, but reading their newspapers one is always delighted by such turns of phrase, thesaurus-inspired vocab and editorial slip-ups.

Got Change?

Getting change when making purchases, particulary off small vendors, can be a problem. But everybody works together to solve the problem. At a bus station recently I was purchasing an iceblock for 2 rupees from a guy carrying an esky (chilly-bin for you Kiwis) while a begger was trying to get some money off me. The seller had no change for my 5 rupee coin (about 15 cents), and without any apparent communication the begger extracted the correct change from his takings for the day. I don't give to beggers usually, but I left this one a couple of rupees.

For Your Own Safety

Recently a law was passed in Mysore making it illegal to ride motorbikes and scooters without helmets. In the leadup to the law coming into effect the police were running around town with loudspeakers reminding motorists of the looming deadline. The law only applied to the person driving the vehicle, not to any passengers. It is not uncommon to see an entire Indian family, Mum Dad and two kids, on one bike. Of course Dad drives, and of course only Dad wore a helmet, with the wife and kids getting the wind in their hair. Tourist passengers who wore helmets were openly laughed at as they rode along.

You might notice that I talk about the wearing of helmets in the past tense, because three days after the implementation of the law everybody stopped wearing helmets and that was that.

Don't Feed The Animals

Out the front of the zoo in Mysore there was a street vendor selling peanuts, with the sales cry, "buy some peanuts for the monkeys". I remembered thinking that was odd, because normally a zoo would not allow the visitors to feed the animals. As it turned out there were plenty of signs inside warning visitors not the feed animals, for their own safety, for the animals' sake and to avoid paying a fine. Nobody seemed to be making any efforts to stop the vendor out the front from encouraging this sort of behavior, though he was standing next to the ticket counter and secturity guards.

What a Difference a Day Makes

2006-12-17T04:18:00.000-08:00

The last post was written at the end of a few days of Indian silliness. Of course I don't feel that way all of the time, but India has a habit of amplifying one's emotions! I can be having a good day, when all of a sudden something quite unexpected will throw me off-balance. And Indians seem to sense an off-balance foreigner like dogs smell fear, and they seem to all start playing up at once. Of course nothing has changed, I have just allowed their usual behavior get to me.

It is like doing a tricky balancing posture in yoga. You will be calmly balancing, when you think, "Hey, I am doing well on this asana today", and all of a sudden you start to wobble and fall over. You only start to wobble and fall over with the Indians when you start thinking too much about it... it is like some days I go looking for trouble.

Today was a much better day. I woke before my 5am alarm to go to yoga. My head was clear from my cold for the first time in a few days. The over-enthusiastic dogs that have been chasing me on the way to the shala decided that I wasn't worth the effort, due in part to some well aimed rocks at their leader yesterday.

I enjoyed the practice, with the postures coming a lot easier this morning as I didn't have to struggle for breath and I had enough energy to keep the vinyasa going between postures. I am starting to take a real liking to Mr Iyengar, he is a strict, but funny and understanding. When he was putting me into a tricky posture the other day I let out an unnecesary groan, and he mockingly groaned in return. This might offend some, but it was clear that there was no need for me to moan like that. His adjustments are strong, but he seems to know what my limits are, which is the result of knowing what he is doing and 50-odd years of teaching. His catch-cry is "all will be revealed!", and if you ask him a question about anything a torrent of information and funny stories is unleased.

My usual after-class, chai-drinking buddy Sean was not in class today, so I walked to the chai stall on my own. The guy who runs the chai stall is one of the good Indians, always ready with a smile and a well made chai. For 6 cents one gets a couple of short, sweet chais to start the day.

On the walk down my street to home, the kids were well mannered and in high spirits. They were happy to play and chat, without asking for pens or coins... and the little rascal who threw fruit at me when I didn't give him anything was absent.

For breakfast I made myself cardamom coffee arabic style, and banana porridge with cloves, cardamom and cinamon. It is full power cooking with my new stove.

Then the guy who lives in the flat next to mine, a nice-enough Malaysian bloke who is also studying yoga, and I went to the Mysore Zoo. The zoo was well kept and organised by Indian standards, with lots of different animals (including my fave, the hippo). That said, some of the animals' enclosures were not that well kept, and a lot of the mammals were showing signs of stress. The big cats and bears in particular looked very agitated.

It cost one dollar to get in with my camera. I took a few photos for the first time in a while. I only took one shot of the animals, instead I took photos of Indian tourists taking photos of animals, Indian tourists taking photos of one-another (which is funnier than it sounds), the tacky signs, some well-designed rubbish bins and other little things that make an Indian zoo a unique experience. This Martin-Parr style of photography is a lot of fun in India. And if you don't know who Martin Parr is, I recommend doing a google search for him.

Then a vegetarian fixed meal, called a thali in these parts, was had for 50 cents. That entails rice, some fried breads, 2 types of curry, 2 types of spicy soup, set yoghurt and a dessert. And free top-ups on the curry and soup. Delish, healthy and affordable.

So, not a bad day. Now that I am over my cold and feeling well it is harder for the locals to rock my boat, and easier for me to get along with them. I might not end up "enjoying" many of my Indian experiences, but I certainly am learning a lot from them.

The Natives

2006-12-15T02:18:00.000-08:00

Today I am a bit annoyed. It might have something to do with the cold I came down with a couple of days ago, which is making my yoga practice each morning very tiring. It might be the natives. It might be a combination of the two. Whatever the cause, I am going to indulge in a little bit of Indian bashing in this post...

The Landlord

I have never had a dodgy landlord. Sure, I have come in contact with some overzealous real estate agents in my days as a renter, but they only have to be dealt with every 3-6 months during inspections. However, the flat that I am renting now is attached to the house of the owner, aka the landlord. I am developing a dislike for my landlord.

He is an old man who spends all day at home, sharing his wisdom with everybody who comes within earshot. Men have been digging a trench out the front of the property the last couple of days, and he has spent all that time out there telling them how to dig said trench. When I knocked on my neighbour's door yesterday, he hurried over and showed me how to knock properly. He almost tripped me over this afternoon as I left the front gate, "helping" me to avoid a puddle left by the trench diggers.

Yesterday he was hosing down the concrete in front of my room, and started hosing down my new leather sandles. I jumped out of my room and grabbed them before they got to wet. "Hey, it is ok, no problem" he yelled. I quickly shut my door so that he would not see the look on my face that said "I don't care what you do to your leather shoes, but show some respect for my things please, you silly old man". That would have been taking it personally, and one should not do that at any costs.

The Gas Stove

When I first moved in the landlord was showing me around the flat, showing me how to use the light switches, operate the taps, use a key etc etc. We got to the stove, a simple contraption : a screw on burner on top of a gas bottle. We turned it on and a small blue flame was seen,
"Look, fire for cooking"
"very good, how high does it go?"
"this is max-i-mum"
"ah, it is not very strong, are you sure?"
"yes yes, look"
"this is not very strong, maybe the bottle is empty", I pick up the bottle and shake it, is indeed empty.
"No bos, full full"
"then the burner must be broken, I cannot cook with such a small flame, look I can put my hand in it", I wave my hand in the flame,
"NO BOSS, you burn yourself, very hot flame!"
"but look, no burning!"
"look boss, good stove, you cook fine"

The next morning I went to make some porridge, and the flame spluttered and died... the bottle was indeed empty. I point this out to the landlord and he says "yes, it is empty, I will fill today". The next day I get the full bottle back. He then tried to charge me for filling the bottle, but I informed him that gas and electricity were included in the rent. He protested that both were seperate bills, and that I should take the matter up with the Yoga Mandala through whom I had organised the flat. The Mandala confirmed that he was, indeed, being cheeky, and promised to have a word with him.

As he was leaving he said "I am old man, and now I am full tired from making table for you yesterday and filling the gas bottle." He waited for my reply, expecting some baksheesh for doing something he should have done before I moved in. I reply, "Then I won't bother you any more, go and take some rest". They never stop trying!

The kitchen table is another story, I had asked for a table in the kitchen, and he had hired a carpenter to remove the table from my bedroom (which I had told him to leave where it was) and put a new top on it. His involvment in fixing the table had been to stand next to the carpenter all day instructing him on the proper use of a hammer.

Be that as it may, that was all water under the bridge, because I had a stove now! Great, I put a couple of centimeters of water in the bottom of a pan, added some fresh spices and put it on to boil so that I could make some chai. Twenty minutes later the two centimeters of water had not boiled, and my fears about the stove not working "full power" were confirmed. I asked the landlord, and he told me that it was not his problem. Well, it was his problem, but I figured that I would have more success dealing with the Mandala.

Half an hour later I found myself at the establishment of a man who repairs stoves, electric mixers and other such kitchen appliances. He informed the helpful yound man from the Mandala and I that he did not have the proper spare part, but it would be ready by midday the next day.

When I returned the next day he smiled and handed me the stove... "It is fixed?"
"yes, new jet installed"
"good, can I see it working please?"
"ok ok"
The repair man then got out a spanner and began dismantling the burner and trying to clean the jet, which clearly had not be replaced. He put it back together, attached it to a cylinder and managed to extract a puny flame from the burner.
"my friend, you have not fixed anything!"
"problem with the jet boss"
"I know, you told me that you were going to replace it yesterday"
"but I need to replace it, look it is broken"
"I can see that it is broken, why did you try and give it back to me without fixing it?"
"Look, this is a new burner, you have for 160 rupees?"
"what about fixing my old burner?"
"but I need to get a new part"
"My friend, you are behaving very badly, I shall be back"

Far out. I returned to the Mandala and informed them of this new develpment, and that I was not happy at all to have a kitchen full of fresh ingredients and having to keep buying my meals. They promised to look into it, and that I would have it by the next morning. That was yesterday and I still haven't got my burner, even after another visit to the Mandala. But Ben, don't get upset, don't get impatient, this is how Indians are. Well OK, I will not get overly excited by these events, but I won't pretend to enjoy them either.

Nothing Personal

As I have said before, Indians also treat one another in a similar way, and one should not take things personally. You are allowed to raise your voice, shake your fist and make a scene, the Indian whom you are abusing will not take it personally. Thirty seconds later he is you best friend. Likewise you should not take any of his actions personally.

So I don't take it personally. I ignore the kids on my street, because every time I lower my guard and start chatting with them they stick their hands out and ask for "school pens" and "coins". Every time I make friends with someone my age, they end up asking for money directly or indirectly. I don't get upset when every time I buy a handicraft, or appliance from an Indian it breaks and they pretend to be surprised. Every time you give an Indian a chance they dissapoint, and this makes one suspect every friendly advance.

And there are people everywhere, one billion of them stuffed into a relatively small area. Everywhere one goes they will be approached by an Indian, so they are an integral part of the landscape, they are an unescapable aspect of the "Indian experience".

For this reason, if it wasn't for the yoga in Mysore and the friendly Westeners I am meeting, I would leave this country as soon as possible, and probably not return. I am capable of tolerating the Indians, not acknowleging them when they approach me on the street, staying detached from them, but I do not enjoy it. The vast majority of Indians one meets end up doing something that can offend and upset. I don't want to stop being open with people, I don't want to expect the worst from them in case they dissapoint me.

Happy Homemaking

2006-12-11T23:45:00.000-08:00

Thanks for your comments folks, it would appear that my Mum isn't the only reader. I will keep posting, though I now have a new challenge -- writing interesting posts when I spend a long period of time in the one place.

I arrived in Mysore on Sunday, after a very-pleasant-by-Indian-standards bus journey. That is to say, I had a seat to myself the whole way, I was able to stash my bag under a seat where I did not have to worry about it and the climate inside the bus was tolerable. The climate outside wasn't so flash at times, I had my elbow hanging out the window for around an hour, until I noticed that all the surfaces of my arm that faced the wind were coloured black from the smog in the air.

A New Home

"Hey Rasta, how you going?"
no reply
"Hey man, why you no wanna talk?"
"because you are going to try and sell me some marijuana"
"you don't want marijuana? OK, you want opium?"
smile and keep walking.

Mysore sees more than its fair shair of tourists, this type of conversation only happens in tourist towns.

I was a bit nervous entering Mysore, because I was worried that the city in which I wanted to spend some months might be too noisy, dirty and hot (these things are relative, it is an Indian city so I was expecting it to be noisy, dirty and hot). To my releif it is the most pleasant Indian city that I have visited so far.

The city is centred around the Maharaja's Palace, which is one hell of an impressive complex. I haven't visited it yet, but it looks amazing from the outside. The streets are clean by Indian standards, with raised gutters (impressive) and police making sure that pedestrians and vehicles get along at the major intersections (appreciated). The climate is tolerable too, being far cooler than the coastal areas that I have just left. The winter here is cooler than the summer in Brisbane (one has to remember that we are close to the equator here), so no great discomfort there.

The people are also far less intrusive than those in the North. There are a few young guys who try to sell you drugs at Ghandi Square, but otherwise people keep their distance. Rickshaw drivers rarely hassle the pedestrian foreigner (in the North they don't beleive that we should be allowed to walk more than a block), and they use the meter, though I did have demonstrate with one driver who tried to take me the long way (I always have a compass and a map for the first couple of days, after which I can find my way around easily).

It was very easy to get myself established in Mysore, with only one day needed to find myself some long term accomodation and organise to start yoga classes. I have an appartment, with bedroom, bathroom and kitchen in a quiet part of the suburb Laxmipuram. Today I am going to do some shopping for a few cooking items, and then get some raw ingredients. It has been driving me mad walking through the amazing produce markets and spice stalls without being able to take some goodies home and have a cook-up.

Yoga Classes

Yesterday I went to pay BNS Iyengar a visit at his yoga shala. This is certainly not a fancy yoga studio with wood floors, natural light and inspirational posters on the wall. The concrete floor is covered with large rugs, on which one places their yoga mat to practice. The ceiling is high, and the rooms are dark, with the Indian men practicing in the main room, and the foreigners and Indian women tucked away in small, dark, stuffy rooms.

Mr Iyengar himself is a very likeable character. After waiting a couple of minutes he entered the room and yelled, "what information do you want?". I explained my interest in studying yoga, and he asked "how long do you want to study for?", I told him 3 months, he smiled and said "then I can help you". He explained the routine, "this is an institution, you practice every day except for days of the new and full moon".

Unlike other teachers in Mysore, he believes in teaching students philosophy from the beginning. So the first part of the course was an hour long talk on the basic philosphy behind Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga (The yoga practice taught by Iyengar). "Hey, are you taking notes point-by-point? OK, good. Because you won't get told this anywhere else." He need not have worried, I took my notes home and wrote out a full description of everything he had told me and hilighted the points that needed clarification.

He then showed me the first postures, the suriya namaskar or sun salutes that are performed at the beginning of each practice. I found it very different from my practice in Brisbane, with BNS counting out the breaths very quickly, forcing me concentrate hard on smooth fast movement. After they were finished he smiled and told me to sit
"now stretch your legs, NO NO not that way, full lotus!"
I begin to fold my left leg into lotus
"NO NO, always right foot first"
oh shit, my bad side. It is much more difficult for me to get into full lotus with my right leg first, but I oblige him. He smiles again.
"now 20 Ujaiyi breaths, make them strong"
he leaves the room and comes back 20 seconds later
"ok, you finished?"
I shake my head
"ok, now hands above head. NO NO, palms up, now bend forward, 10 breaths"
my right leg is hurting like hell.... then I relax it and find that I am very comfortable.
"ok, finished, come tomorrow at 6:30"
and off he walks, with me saying thankyou to his back. He doesn't stand on ceremony at all.

This morning I turned up and met a Polish couple who have been studying with Iyengar for 3 weeks. They gave me a quick run-down on what to expect before he arrived and started the class. He started with the opening chant, which nobody tried to follow. I had spent some time last night remembering it because it was different from the one that I am used to... so I just lip synched... until he skipped the last few lines and started counting us straight through our sun salutes.

Then we started with teaching me the standing sequence. I was familiar with all of the postures except for one. The main difference was that he expected full postures with no adjustments. This caused problems for me in some spots, for example I lose my form completely if I have to grab my toe in the triangle posture (U.trikonasana A). The pace is fast and, the postures strong and the sweat flows. He stopped me when the rest of the class moved on to the primary series, "we introduce other assanas each day", and got me to lie down and rest. I heard one funny comment "Hey, try to do the B position, yes try, you can do it..."
a couple of seconds pass then Iyengar laughs
"Oh, you cannot do it!"
and everyone laughs, but in a good natured way.

I promise not to talk too much about the specifics of my yoga practice here. There are plenty of other blogs out there with people writing daily commentries on their physical exploits in Mysore, and they are about as interesting as watching paint dry.

Now, it is time for me to go get some lunch then do some happy homemaking. I had some funny things that I had found in the local paper that I was going to write about, but they can wait until next time.

Mangalore

2006-12-09T00:56:00.000-08:00

Mangalore is a cool name for a city. Last night I was making a list of cool sounding places that I have visited, and it was up there with Chichicastinango, Kathmandu and Managua.

I would call it sunny Mangalore, if only the smog would part and let some rays in. The first indication that I was entering a city on the bus yesterday was the sharp increase in dust and smog levels. According to the Lonely Planet this is a university city, as well as one of India's technology hubs. Well, there certainly are lots of "student types" running around, along with an increase in the number of jeans being worn. Every third shop here is selling mobile phones and computers, and at damn low prices too.

Is Anybody Out There?

One little point of administration before the post proper. I have a sneaking suspicion that my mother might be the only person who reads my blog (G'day Mum!). So, is there anybody else reading this? Feel free to comment on this post, or write me an email letting me know if it is worth my while continuing to write these posts. I like writing them, but they are time consuming.

A New Pair of Jeans

As I left the changing room the salesman asked "Hey Boss, they fit you?".
"Have you got any real Levis?" I ask. He thinks about lying, then decides not to.
"No boss. They no good, here, maybe some Wranglers, here try these"
"But these are boot cut, remember I want flair"
"oh boss, same same"
"but different, eh?"
"yes, different, but same, you try?"
"ok"
... I try the jeans and they are not too bad...
"you like boss?"
"hmmmm, not bad, but 1300 rupees is very expensive, no?"
"yes, try these, only 400 rupees"
I smile, and play along, "but they are a different brand, not same same."
"look boss, made by same company, look at labels."
"I see, maybe I come back, see you later"
A look of dissapointment, then a smile, "ok boss".

My old pair of Levis had a blow out on the bum; it was time to get some new jeans. Mangalore seems like a good place for this kind of thing. One has to be careful buying clothes over here, little things like using quality zips, buttons that don't break and dyes that don't run in the wash can ruin your day. I had decided to bight the bullet and get a genuine pair of Levis, to save me having to buy a replacement pair in one months time. Now the challenge was to find a "genuine" pair of Levis.

I had already tried on something that looked like a good approximation to a real pair of Levis. All good until I tried them on and the zip didn't line up. I had then gone to another "emporium" where the exchange went something like
"Hello, have you got Levis?"
"No, but we have Diesil"
"OK, well, I want a 32 waist in dark blue, no bleaching, and flair cut"
"Here try these"
"These are boot cut"
"same same, very good jeans"
"ok. I try."
... I go to the change room, trying to figure out where they have put the spy hole (it is almost guarenteed that they have one), and I emerge 30 senconds later...
"hey boss, you like?"
"The button is not very good quality"
"buttons is first class"
"but look, it fell off when I was putting them on"
"oh, must be a bad pair"
"yeah, must be, goodbye"

Normally I hate shopping for clothes, but I was starting to enjoy my exchanges with the salesmen. Finally I went into a shop and asked to see their Levis. These looked like the real thing, I tried a pair on, and they fit. The perfect size 32, the denim is that flash stuff that is a bit stretchy, and the fly sits straight up and down with no wrinkles. These might just be the real thing. It is also a good sign that there is to be no negotiation over the price (fake stuff is sold at a higher profit margin, and hence one can always find some wriggle room on the price). So now I have some new jeans. Nice.

Paradise Lost

My last post was from Pardise Beach, south of Gokarna. I only stayed for a week, for a few different reasons.

First was the swelling number of Israelis. Now I have to be careful what I say here. All of the Israelis were easy going and good types. But on the last night the little private beach in front of my hut was covered with 12 Israelis and one Belgian. All the other huts in my "hotel" were filled with very stoned Israelis. You have to hand it to them, for a country of 7 million people (when I mentioned this to an Israeli I was corrected... 6 million jews and 1 million arabs, I am sure there is a reason for pointing that out) they manage to get a lot of their young folk out and travelling. They are good types, but they tend to turn the places that they visit into monocultures of smoking pot, drinking and bashing on drums/strumming guitars.

The second reason was the Aaron the Israeli yogi, who was the first person I met on the beach. Aaron is a special guy, that is for sure. He is 50 years old, and when I turned up he proudly declared that he had been a yogi for 30 years. He then did some postures that would impress a layman, but he didn't look that comfortable to me. He smoked a lot of cigarettes, and had the annoying habit of muttering "Om Shiva something-or-other" every time he walked into a room, saw anybody eating, saw a fire alight, and whenever somebody rolled a joint he would grab it off them and bless it. This seemed to be the only continuous form of yoga practice in his life. He then explained that Amelie, the pretty 24 year old French girl sitting next to him was his student. She smiled innocently. Oh dear. I wondered if there were any better huts somewhere else on the beach.

As it turned out there weren't, so I took the hut next to them. The next morning I woke up to find Aaron giving a yoga lesson in front of our huts. I did my own practice, then went to have breakfast and write a diary entry. When I returned he had them in very awkward looking headstands. Some were complete beginners, and he had them practicing for well over 3 hours. He had one girl in a headstand, with her neck and shoulders well out of position, while he stared absent-mindedly out to sea. When he let her down I said that it would be better if she tucked her chin in, or better still did a preparation posture. "Come on Ben, I am just trying to give them confindence". Indeed, and scare her away from doing yoga ever again. I saw the looks on the girls faces, and they were more than exhausted from having to try some very difficult postures without proper technique.

It all went pear shaped for Aaron when he made unwelcome sexual advances on Amelie, and informed everybody that they were not good students, in fact "they were not in his league". This was good, all his "students" stopped practicing with him and Amelie came to her senses and left the beach. But, the next moring he had another couple of girls (always female students) practicing in front of my hut, and later that day I saw that he had one of them drawn to the side all the time and he was talking and working on her. I decided that I didn't want to be around this sort of behavior.

It is ironic that yoga tries to free one from ego, but so many people seem to find their ego swell out of control in the yoga world. It reminds me how lucky I was to get honest and genuine teachers in Brisbane.

Still, paradise beach was an ideal beach, and Danesh, the Indian guy who owned our huts and ran the chai shop next door was super friendly, honest and a good cook. I went swimming all through the day, practiced lots of yoga and drank far too much chai.

Speaking of Yoga

I have been slowly working my way south with Mysore as my target, and tomorrow I will get a bus there. I plan to study yoga with BNS Iyengar (the little Iyengar, that is, not the famous IKS Iyengar who teaches in Pune), although there are no plans fixed in stone. I haven't really mentioned yoga in my blog, but I have kept up a regular practice, though not quite daily. When we were hiking in Nepal I practiced twice a day, before and after each days walk and got amazing results. Since then I have practiced at least once every two days. Now that I am not sitting at a computer all day the improvement in my practice is tremendous, both in terms of flexibility, strength and intensity. It is exciting to wonder what a few months of practice in one place with a master like Iyengar will do for me.

Paradise Beach

2006-12-01T00:41:00.000-08:00

Pretty tacky name for a post eh? Well, it is a tacky name for a beach, but that is the name of the beach that I have found for mystelf, just south of Gokarna in Karnataka state. The beach is the fourth in a series south of Gokarna, and takes about one and a half hours of walking to reach. It is small and perfect. Clear water, clean sand and hardly anybody on the beach. These are all vast improvements over Goa, which was overcrowded, dirty and full of hassle.

I have myself a little beach hut. There are some simple places to eat, and a village 10 minutes walk away where fruit and veg can be purchased. So now is a time to relax; swimming, yoga and simple life are the orders of the day. And yeah, it has overpriced internet!

I am no longer travelling with my German travel budy Marco. He got an application for an Australian working visa accepted, and is on his way to Mumbai to get a flight. Some of you back home might be meeting him sometime soon...

Arambol was nice enough. I lived a lazy life, read a lot of books and started my skin started from its usual white to a yellow/pink combo (my days of getting red trying to get a tan are behind me, now I just hide in the shade). But the beach was nothing special, and one could not walk around without getting the usual hassle from the locals. The party scene was also beginning to heat up for Christmas and New Years. All of this is of little interest to me, so I have headed south for something a bit quieter.

The Natives

I often mention the local people in these posts, and the comments probably come over largely negative. Readers might think that I am being unfair, but Indians are really something else. I shall write a post on the subject another day, when my opinions are better formed.

But I shall say one thing. It is beleived that Indians are a spiritual people. This is horseshit.

At first sight, one sees only spirituality -- temples everywhere; shrines, statues and holy sites dot the streets; and people of all walks of life can be seen performing puja (prayers, offerings and other rituals) everywhere. Each door has a statue of picture of Ganesh (the elephant headed god of luck, among other things) above each door, and there is some kind of religious way of doing everything (only make love with your left hand, for example).

But after a while one realises that Indians are masters of blind faith. They perform their religious rituals by rote, and do not stop to consider the reasons why these rituals might be performed. As an example, They think that they are clean because they use the correct hand for unclean practices such as going to the toilet; if they thought about what they were doing they would not go to the toilet on the street in front of their house. It is for this reason that they believe westerners to be dirtier than they, because we do not follow the ritual (though we are very concious of hygene and sanitation).

But toilet practices are not a good reason to get upset about the local population. Indians are cheaters, scammers and liars of the highest order. It seems that for the vast majority, one's religious responsibilities end once one has finished performing puja. They will make a prayer for peace, understanding, honesty and make an offering. But they do not make the connection between their religious responsibilities and their day to day life. This ability to divorce spirituality (which I define as living properly) from day to day actions bu using ritual makes Indians a very tricky mob to deal with on good days, and when they get you on a bad day...

So, I have found that they greatest spiritual lesson that one can learn in India is not taught by the locals. It is learning to live happily and harmomoniously in the face of the sometimes very offensive, annoying and sculdugerous treatment that one gets from them.

Meditation, Mad Transport, Om Island and the Beach

2006-11-23T03:30:00.000-08:00

Where was I? Pushkar, right? Well, it has been such a long time since I last posted. I have received some correspondance wondering, and some worrying (sorry Mum), about my whereabouts. Still alive, healthy and in good spirits.

Now my diary is open in front of me, so let's see if it can jog my memory... I stayed in Pushkar until November 5, the full moon and final day of the Pushkar Mela (festival). That morning was a surreal experience. I walked around the ghats at 5am with an Israeli guy, where it was standing room only. People jostled to get into the water and wash their year of sins and indiscretions away. It must be nice to have such easy-clean karma. The little town was packed right to the edges with pilgrims, with the police using batons and fists in some cases to make sure that the pilgrims found the lake.

I was leaving town because I had to be in Jaipur for a 10 day vipassana meditation course on the 6th. For company I had a German guy, Marco, who I met in Pushkar. An interesting guy. He had hitch-hiked from Germany to India, via countries such as Hungary, Turkey and Iran on a whim. He has only got a tiny leather shoulder bag with a change of clothes and some toiletries.

Together we pushed and jostled our way out of town to do a double bus run to Jaipur. In Jaipur we me Bobby (one of the Indian boys I met in Jaipur) for dinner. Babba had been meant to meet us too, but other plans had been made for him. His parents had found a nice girl for him to marry, so an appointment had been made for him to meet her family (and not the girl hirself) that evening. We found out the next morning that he hadn't turned up, and had instead gone off to get drunk. This is not the first time that he has done this, so I would say that the idea of marriage doesn't appeal to him. It isn't that surprising -- he has met plenty of travellers, some of whom he has had relationships with. The confusion that trying to combine these two lifestyles causes is clear when you hear these guys talk about their plans for the future.

The vipassana centre was a half-hour walk from the edge of town, through the beautiful monkey temple (with three bathing pools, one for women, one for men and one for monkeys... though the monkeys use whichever pool they feel like). Some of you will be wondering what vipassana is? It is the type of meditation taught by The Buddha, Sidharta Gottama. The actual method and teachings are non-sectarian, with the whole organised buddhist religion clouding things up later on.

For 10 days one does not speak, and in fact avoids communication of all kinds. Meditaton is for 10 hours a day, rising at 4am and going to bed at 9pm. Food is healthy (and tasty in my opnion, though some people thought there was too much porridge) and plentiful. Everything is looked after so that one can devote themselves entirely to the task of meditating. The whole experience was a challenge, but I never had the urge to leave like a lot of people said they did. Some very strange things entered my mind while meditating, some good and some very unpleasant. At the end I came out a lot more relaxed both mentally and physically.

Doing vipassana in India also presented some unique challenges, from the usual source of challenges in India: the locals, who made up the bulk of the people attending the course. Indians are flatulant, and they obviously believe that letting off tremendous burps (I have only known one Westener who could match these people, Matthew Collett take a bow) is not counted in the "total silence" rule. The chap next to me would let a series of belches out every 15 minutes -- once I spied him do it, and he threw his whole body into it. I succesfully managed to overcome these distractions, which helped my meditation in the long run. I was also tested the moment our vow of silence was lifted. I was approached by a middle aged Indian who reproached me "you have such a handsome face, why do this ugly thing to your hair, to me it looks very bad". Having a conversation after 10 days of silence is strange, and to hear this after 10 days of learning to be happy and love all beings was a bit rich... I smiled and asked if he felt that he had learned anything from the course (Indians create irony with everything they do, but are completely oblivious to it).

The noise and hassle of Jaipur was amplified, but still somehow more tolerable, after our silence, so we caught an evening train to Indore. Now, you have to be aware of something when you read my blog. If I say that I caught an evening train, and nothing else it means that I choose not to tell you all of the shit that occured doing so. The getting to the station 5 hours early to get a ticket, then spending 5 hours going from one spot to another to get a ticket due to computer crashes and arbitary red tape (Indians love red-tape and rules, the more absurd the better). I don't mention the chanting crowds of Indians demanding tickets and bull rushing the ticket counter, behind which indifferent ticket sellers ignore everybody. I don't mention going around the back to get behind the ticket counter and begging to get a ticket 5 minutes before our train leaves. Rest assured, every day involves some little challenge.

We got our train, and made our way to the pilgrmage town of Omkareshwar when we got off the train on the next morning. Omkareshwar is on the confluence of two rivers, with the town split between the mainland and an island in the middle of the conflence. Apparently the Island is shaped like an Om symbol, though the architects of this idea used the same logic that people use to associate constelations with scorpions, crabs and fish. The place was much nicer than Pushkar, in part due to the lack of tourists and the institutionalised practices that the locals adopt for tourists, and also due to the beautiful location. We were high on a hill, overlooking the temples and ghats on both sides of the river.

On our third evening it was decided that we would make a spontanious run South to Goa. Get to the beach immediately. Bags were packed, bus and train timetables consulted and the 9pm bus to kandwar taken. What followed was 36 hours of discomfort and madness. I won't go into much detail, but it involved sleeping on rail platforms, catching the wrong train, sitting next to the toilets between carriages due to unreserved tickets, 3 bus rides and another nasty case of giardia. We arrived to Arambol beach yesterday, tired but happy, and in my case stomach-cramped. Our first sight-off and swim-in the Arabian sea was had and sleep was easy and deep.

Now Marco has gone to hang a hammock in a banyan tree with a bunch of... well, let's call them "spiritual aspirants" in the forest. I have a cheap dorm room. Today has been a day of yoga, healthy food and reading. I will stay here for a few more days, getting myself strong and healthy again after the crazy travels, poor diet and illness of the last couple of days. This place isn't so nice, with lots of tourist shops and a so-so beach, so I will lighten my load (you were right Dad, I don't want to carry a tent around India) and start walking down the coast... stopping where I find nice spots and seeing what adventures I find. Marco will eventually catch up with me and we might head off to Mysore to study some yogs. Or maybe not.

Camels and Pilgrims, Everywhere.

2006-10-29T01:12:00.000-08:00

How Much is That Camel in The Window?

Now in a little town called Pushkar, a place that is undergoing a metamorpasis of sorts. Every year a 10 day camel market is held in this little lakeside town, with an important Hindu festival falling on the last day. So, not only does every man and his camel come to town, but thousands of pilgrims arrive to bath in the holy lake. The markets start tomorrow, and the town is swelling and bulging with tourists and camel lovers.

Hotel prices shoot up as well, but I have my tent set up at the back of a nice place on the quiet side of the lake, so I am insulated from the tourists (and all the touts that follow them) and from the prices.

The town is nice and quiet, which is a very welcome change after the noisy chaos that is Delhi and Jaipur. I think I will stay here a while. The lake is surrounded on all sides by ghats (steps on which people bath) and temples to all manner of deities. On the edge of town is a crowd of camels, horses and persons involved in the markets. The town lies in the middle of the desert, so it is plenty dusy and hot.

Jaipur

The rest of my time in Jaipur was... very Indian. That is, a combination of fun, annoyance, and surprise. I had enjoyed Eid (the day after fasting) with some Muslim guys and their hindu friends. Going to houses to eat rice pudding and curries. That night I had dinner on a roof top with my new-found friends. One of the guys, Bobby, cooked up a fantastic Rajasthani lamb korma (recipe below) that we all ate sitting cross legged on the floor with big stacks of chapati.

Of course, there was a hitch. Their boss, who runs a jewelry business (yeah, I know), tried to offer me work as a jewel courier to Europe. This pissed me off, as this is a well known scam -- there is always a catch where the foreigner looses money. The difficulty is that I met this guy through a couple of his employees who were fun to hang out with, and were embarresed about his offer. Well, after that we didn't meet anywhere near their office, and got on fine without mentioning jewels again. There seems to be catches involved with befriending anyone over here, so you have to weigh up the pros and cons of each friendship. These guys were fun, and showed me a lot of things that I otherwise wouldn't have seen or understood, and their boss got no money off me -- so I came out ahead.

Spicy Food

I am loving food over here, though I have been forced to cut back on the number of fried and sweet goodies that I buy from street vendors. Deep fried delights have included spicy samosas, potatoe cakes stuffed with dahl, and my fave, big green chilies that are stuffed with dahl and covered in pastry before being deep fried (these treats go for around 10-15 cents a pop). One can sit down to a plate of chapati, dahl curry and pickle with free top-ups for around 35 cents.

I have only eaten meat twice, and both times were great. I ordered a lamb rogan josh, and when I insisted that the sauce be "full hot" the waiters all laughed. They were all my friend after they saw that I clearly enjoyed a nice spicy curry... most tourists must be very soft!

The other time was for a genuine home-made lamb korma, with a thick rich gravy. The recipe is as follows. I don't give much in the way of quantities for the spices, use your intuition/a recipe book to guide you.

Ingredients

- 2kg lamb
- 500g ghee (yes, that much)
- finely chopped red onion (about 5 of them)
- ginger paste
- garlic paste
- tumeric powder
- chili powder
- korma masala (spice mix, look up a few recipes and settle on an a combo)
- salt

Cooking

- heat all of the ghee in a large caserole dish/pan.
- add the onions and cook over high heat for 15-20 minutes until they are caremalised
- add the mutton and stir regularly for 20-30 minutes until the gravy begins to form.
- add tumeric, stir, then add the garlic and masala mix. Add some water, bring to simmer and stir regularly for around an hour, till the lamb is tender. Add more water if needed.
- when the meat is cooked, add the ginger (important to add this near the end), chili and salt to taste. Simmer for another 15-20 minutes till it tastes good.

The sauce should be nice and thick, perfect for scooping up with chapati.

Right that is enough for now. I must go back to lie under a tree and read a book.

Sunny Rajisthan

2006-10-25T04:54:00.000-07:00

I am now in Jaipur, Rajisthan, having swapped one mega-city for a big-city. Delhi was crazy. I got there on my birthday (the 21st), which also turned out to be the equivilent of Hindu Christmas. Besides giving gifts and eating lots of sweets, the kids go nuts with all sorts of fireworks at night. So, after J had got his flight, I wandered the streets and alleyways being entertained by the stupid things that kids will do with fireworks when their parents aren't looking... and the parents were getting in on the act with much larger fireworks. People must get injured, which wouold explain the "Say no to Crackers!" banners that I saw around the place. Thankfully nobody paid them any attention.

I spent just one full day in Delhi, long enough to see the Red Fort and wander the markets of the Old Delhi. I stumbled across the spice markets and had a ball... you can buy any kind of spice, many of them unknown to me, in any kind of quantity. You can even buy lichen, to put in some kind of tea masala that I saw a woman making. I also gained an education in being scammed. Over here you don't worry too much about being robbed, instead people just try to weedle undeserved rupees from you wallet. On particularly evil rickshaw driver drove me from one side of New Delhi railway station to the other (a long way), and managed to convince me that he had delivered me to Old Delhi station (my proper destination). This almost caused me to miss my train to Jaipur. I then had the fun of urging a rickshaw driver to "go faster man!"... which is not something that sane people do in Delhi.

Jaipur is in the middle of the desert. Hot and dusty, home to 5 million crazy people. I spent a day yesterday wandering around, looking at the sites and soaking up the crazy energy. Here one is always getting approached, particularly by young men who want to show you around. Most are on the scam, but some are genuinly friendly it seems. The challenge is in judging characters instantly. I have met one bunch of guys, who I have been hanging around with. They are a mixed combo of Muslims and Hindus (I have only seen positive relationships between the two groups so far). Today is the end of the Muslim month of fasting, so I have spent the morning going to people's places with them, eating food and well wishing. Tonight there is going to be a big cookup on a rooftop. Good show.

Well, there is lots more to say, but I want to be out there instead of in here on a computer, so it will have to wait...

General Class to Delhi

2006-10-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

Today we crossed the border from Nepal to India. After waiting an extra day in Pokhara for a small refund on our trip we were finally able to leave. Pokhara was lovely, in a quiet, green lakeside sort of way. The main part of town was a pretty horrible tourist strip where you could buy anything from tacky souveneers to fresh bakery delights (the Nepalese have got their cinamon scrolls, choc crossaunts and apple strudle down pat... if only Australian bakeries did these things so well.) But it is still really quiet, and the 4 star place that we had at Raju's expense was very nice. We spent most of our time there, resting our tired bodies which have now made full recoveries.

The border crossing was easy, even if the combined bus rides from Pokhara to Gorokhpur on the Indian side took 12 hours in total. Crossing land borders is always interesting, for the instant change that is usually evident. This was no different, with the Indian side beeing much much busier, with many many more people thronging around.

As we crossed the border we had a taxi driver try to sell us a story that a bridge was broken, and the only way was in his expensive taxi. Sure budy. We smiled sweetly and said no thankyou. We got the bus... and in a poetic twist, the bridge was actually broken. Of course, the bus people had hired a jeep to negotiate that part of the trip and we arrived in stinky Gorokhpur on time.

At the train station we found that the only train to Delhi leaves at 11:30 tonight, and all of the seats offering some kind of comfort have been taken. Seeing as how J has to get to Delhi for his flight tomorrow -- and I WILL NOT wake up in this hole tomorrow on my birthday -- we have got ourselves cattle class for the 14 hour journey. That's right, we are mad.

Wish us luck, and try to send some comfortable thought waves our way... and also wish me happy birthday!

A Month In The Hills

2006-10-17T22:58:00.000-07:00

It has been a while. It has been 24 days in the wilderness to be exact. And there have been adventures (many of them misadventures). The walk has been one long series of spectacular mountain views and disasters... so read on.

How to write down so many days of stuff without boring everyone? This will be hard, so be patient. And the spelling mistakes are many, after typing this I have not got the energy to proofread it, so be kind.

Easy Start

We left Kathmandu on a "Silver Service" coach. Well, I suppose it was silver service for the goat that stood in the aisle for a while -- he is used to riding in the back of pickups. For the rest of us it was a long, uncomfortable 5 hours. The views were nice (I am going to have to find a good abreviation for the views were nice). Fertile vallyes, raging rivers and Nepalis going about their lives.

We caught the bus all the way to the end of the line, and settled down at a village ot the trailhead. For the first couple of days it was raining, as we had caught the end of the rain season. The start of the trail is at a lowly 400m altitude, and is full of rice paddies and other intensive agriculture. So lots of trying not to get our boots muddy while Danzing -- our super-shurper porter -- waltzed through them in his sandles.

By the end of day 3 we had made it to the village of... I forget the name, after having paid some nasty little Maoists (actually they were quite nice, but they are thieves, taking money off us so that we couldn't spend it in the villages) to enter what is apparently an autonimous republic. They wanted to charge us 100 rupees ($2) per person per day, which would have added up to over $100 for our origional itenary... so we tore our "official itenary" in half and saved ourselves $50.

Several things were becoming apparent by this stage. You have to stay at "lodges", which have very simple (but always clean) room containing rough cots for sleeping. There was always a restaraunt attached, which you were expected to eat at -- this got us into trouble later on, but I will say nothing of that for now. The menu in every place was exactly the same: cooking of every type, from curries to noodles to pizza to... anything you fancy! These menus are jacks of all trades, masters of none -- J and I didn't eat a single decent curry on our whole treck.

The lodges were usually hermetically sealed from the villages. They were attached to the town to extract money from people who travelled the trail, just like the fields sit on the edge of town to provide food. I know that I am a cynic, and we did stay in some great places and meet some lovely locals... but we were glad to leave once we had a our fill of the amazing landscapes and culture in Mustang.

But wait, I am letting my cynicism aquired due to subsequent events colour the story. Reading my diary kept at the time shows that I was loving all of this!

Sunshin'!

On the fourth day the sun was shining, and the weather was perfect for the rest of our time. We had started at just the right time -- close enough to monsoon to minimise the number of people on the trail, but with crystal clear air for great vies once we got into the higher parts of the trail.
The valley rose sharply, with the river going down an enormous waterfall. At one point we saw the tip of a snow-capped mountain for the first time and hi-5s were exchanged. By the time reached the top of our first pass on the walk the clouds had moved in and obscured further mountain views.

The next village was the first of real Tibetan Buddhist flavour. One walked under a chorten at the entrance, with mahne walls (walls painted in red-white-black with collections of flat rocks with mantras carved into them) to walk on the left hand side of, prayer wheels to spin with the left hand... and prayer flags fluttering everywhere.
The vegetation had changed from the sub-tropical rainforest and rice paddies to pine forests and wheat/corn crops. The changes were welcome -- we were glad to be leaving rain behind and entering high-mountain country.

Day five - Wednesday 27th October - started with clear skys and some enormous snow capped peaks revealing themselves to me while I did my yopa at 5 am on a wooden platform overlooking the river. We spent most of the day climbing through pine forests to the town of Chaime at 2700m altitude.

There was lots of pot growing alongside the trail -- I exclaimed "crickey Julian, they call this a crop where I come from!". We had been offered some hash by a little boy who stuck his head into our hotel room. After I politely asked him to leave I found him in the dining room. The old couple who ran the place, along with Denzing and some random donkey drivers who had dropped in for some tea were passing his hash around passing judgement on it. No big deal.

A new road is being constructed along large parts of the trail. It has started a few kilometers after the pass on day 4, and it is wide enough for 4-wheel drives. It makes the walk far easier than following the old trail, so we were making fast progress. We made it to the major town of Manang with two more days of walking, one long and one very short.

Accidental Mountaineers

We were scheduled to have two full days in Manang. Manang is at an altitude of over 3300m (500m higher than the highest point in Australia), perfect for acclimitisation. The first day was going to be for a walk to a higher point, and the second for rest.

We picked our walk, a stroll up a hill on one side of the Gangapurna Glacier to a stupa at 5070m. We got up early, and picked the hard way to start climbing. We struggled for footholds and breath as we scrambled up a steep slope as the air thinned. on top of the first section of the climb we came to alpine meadows and pine trees. The views of the glacier and Gangapurna/Annapurna peaks towering over the top were something else.

After lunch we began our assult on the final slope where the tree line ended. We huffed and we puffed, aiming for a set of prayer flags, then the next. J eventually had enough and called it quits. I felt OK, and kept on moving up. I had got a second wind, and I could see the top. "Come on, we have to climb a 5400m pass in a few days time", I told myself. After another 30 minutes I was at the top... but wait, it is just a false summit!... another 500 meters... up I went, finally making it to the prayer flags at the top (to prove that they are a crazy folk, the locals had dragged big wooden poles to the top for the purpose of displaying the flags). The views were even more spectacular from up there, and Manang looked so tiny!

By the time I got down J had returned and I found him watching Denzing and the other porters playing cards -- a fateful game that would result in Denzing losing all his money, forcing us to leave without our day's rest -- and waiting to go for lunch. We had discovered a place in Manang that would sell us our fave snack: samosas! We love samosas.

That evening I looked at our map again, and realised that we had picked the wrong "hill". I had in fact climbed a 5800m peak! Hell, that makes me a mountaineer, or at least a litle crazy. The only reason I got to the top is because I didn't realise how high I was!

No Flip Flops This Time

The next day we walked the Cherri Lettar at 4200m. Without the rest day and with our packs the walk up hill was slow and steady. When the trail was flat or downhill things were fine, but the moment we started up any sort of slope our legs started questioning us. Why? What was wrong with Manang? You never make us do this back home, why now?

We arrived at before lunch, and spent the rest of the day sitting in the howling afternoon wind. I didn't want to do a similar short walk the next day to high camp on the Thorong La pass (5400m), and have to wait in the afternoon wind. The lodges in this part of the world also had captive audiences and charged like a wounded bull... $6 for a simple rice and potato meal and over 50cents for a cup of tea? In Nepal these are highly inflated prices that we simply could not afford. I consulted our map, and decided that we might be able to do the whole walk to high camp then get over the pass to the pilgrimage town of Muktinath on the other side in one day.

People thought we were a bit crazy to try, but Denzing was happy with the idea, so we left at 6 the next morning. The walk to the base of the climb wasn't too bad, and we made it in a couple of hours. The, about 300 meters up the slope J declared that we must be half way. J showed a remarkable ability to underestimate things -- from the length of walks to the durability of the cash in our kitty -- during the trip. We finally got to the top midday, after what until that point had been the hardest climb of my entire life. The last half an hour was murder, with continuous false summits and the altitude slowing us to a crawl. Denzing, who had smoked a cigarette before the days walk, didn't seem in the slightest concerned.

I must now tip my hat to my Mum, who 30-odd years ago climbed this pass in a pair of thongs (Australian for rubber flip-flops, nothing to do with skimpy undies). Well done Mum!

On top we found a bunch of Belgian mountaineers who had climbed the peak Chilaou West the day before. They had a matress out and were smoking hash with their porters. One porter they had nicknamed "Space Sherpa" due to his smoking habits. It didn't hurt his performance -- we later saw him charging straight down a steep, steep slope, completely ignoring the much more sensible option of following the switch-back path.

This Town Isn't Big Enough

Aha, Muktinath. Pilgrimage site for bothy Hindus and Buddhists, and where we were due to meet our crew for our hike into the Upper Mustang in two days time. A chance for rest, recreation and maybe some decent food. Oh, how we were dissapointed. Muktinath turned out to have a crappy selection of very overpriced food. Our hotel, the oddly named but quite pleasant Bob Marley Hotel (see Mum, times have changed!), was far too expensive for our limited budget. We ate in a couple of other places, but still we were charged silly prices for very simple food.

Things fell apart when we tried to rectify this. We went to a shop and bought some raw ingredients : rice, lentils, onions, tomatoes and garlic. We were going to cook a couple of simple cheap meals on our camping stove. Little did we know that this was not the Annarpurna way. No sir, you eat in the overpriced establishments or else! When we returned to our hotel the hotel owner jumped at me and started accusing me of being a very bad man for ruining his business. I am not one to make big public scenes, but I felt the need to correct this man-of-bad-manners on a couple of points. I tried to be reasonable, offering to pay more for our room to offset the losses that we were inflicting on him. I even bit my tongue when he insisted that his high prices were because he offered gourmet food. It was very hard.

But we could not win, he wanted us to leave... odd seeing as how is place was not full. We obliged, settled our bill and walked down the hill looking for the next place to stay. Now we realised why he wanted us out, he was about to teach us boat-rockers a lesson. No hotel in town would take us -- he had phoned ahead. We had opposed the village accomadation cartel system, and this is what happens. We ended up leaning on the owner of the place that had sold us the ingredients that had caused such a fuss, and we payed well over the odds for a crappy little room.

Well, at least our paid-for crew was arriving the next day to provide us with food and shelter. Little did we know that this was the first in a series of fuck-ups and mini-disasters that would plague the rest of our time in the mountains.

A Change of Plans

The crew had not arrived by mid afternoon the next day, when we got word that we were in fact starting from Kagbeni, a couple of hours walk downhill from our location. This was news to us, because we had planed a rarely taken route from Muktinath into the Upper Mustang valley. But it was hard to tell what was going on from D's broken English, and we obliged by walking to Kagbeni.

In Kagbeni we found our crew -- guide, cook and two more porters -- in the Hotel Nilgiri View. The place had hot water and carpet in the room. No complaints. The guide was an odd character, that alerted our "dodgy person" radars early on. He asked us for $40 because it had been a lot of effort for him to change our plans for us during a public holiday. Ahem, we didn't want our plans changed... and we had already payed for all of these things. He then insisted that we should pick up the hotel bill for the night, and was trying to determine if he could get us to pay the hotel bill for our crew.

We called Raju (the bloke in Kathmandu through whom we had organised things) the next morning with some polite questions. He was damn upset at the guide's behavior, and insisted that the guide and cook call him before we left that day. J and I sat the shifty bugger down in front of the crew and let him know the score. He was forgiven and his hand shaken, and everyone had seen that we were fair, but didn't like people who played silly buggers.

Denzing had come along as our personal porter, but he was expected to carry an enormous load as well. He was clearly upset at the weight, but after our stuff had been put on the cook's back he obliged and we were off. The Mustang valley is very different from the rest of the Annapurna trail in terms of geography. Big wide ravines with rounded red and yellow mountains composed of sedimentary rocks. The walk was easy -- straight up the kilometer wide dried river bed. This didn't help the porters too much, weighed down with their too heavy loads. And our guide had to have a rest every couple of hundred meters. We were stuck at a snail's pace, with unhappy crew laboring along. We eventually completed the walk and had a late lunch cooked up in the village in Chikksang. It was great to have lots of food after our budget-constrained diet thus far. And things got better when the guide informed us that he was sick and could go no further with us. He was going to pay for another porter and leave. Good riddance, and another pair of legs to help with the carrying was welcome. Cook, porters and trekkers were all smiles.

Thing is, he never payed for another porter and the cook was left in charge. What is wrong with the cook you ask? J and I both agree that he is the most annoying person we have ever met. A moron and a psychopath. At this point we didn't know this, but we pretty soon would...

A Long Walk

The next day was an 8 hour walk according to the cook, so we had a packed lunch. J and I took extra weight on our backs to save the porters, and they did not complain. For an organised tour where we pay $US100 a day, this is unheard of. We saw other groups of two/three people who had twice as many porters, along with teams of donkeys for carrying their stuff. This turned out to be one of the best days of walking that I have ever done. That is to say, the walk was great for me, but the rest of the shit that went down was far from good. The walk started with a very long, hard climb where we gained 1000m to get onto a ridge. I have no idea how the porters got their loads up. On top J and I were in high spirits. The views were like nothing we had ever seen, if one stopped and listened they could not hear a thing other than their hearts, and we really were alone in this isolated place. The cook failed to convey what was in store for us with his broken English. The climb had just been the start. We then proceeded to climb up and down, up and down, up and down, along the top of an enormous ridge. I had found my mountain legs with the rest in Muktinath and the new diet. But Julian, who was carrying more weight than me, along with the porters, feeling the height. He started acting erratically: speeding up, slowing down, muttering that we were lost. We also ran out of water, because we had given let the porters drink from our water bottles. Thing is, we were in a dessert and it took us 7 hours to get to a tiny trickle of a stream. We had been taken up this ridge by the cook with no water, and he didn't seem to care.

I was fine with the walk, but worried about Julian. He can be a stubborn bastard, and he wouldn't let me carry any of his load. This was also due to the altitude making him cranky. After 8 hours we finally got to the pass at the end of the ridge, and looked down a long ascent, then aong a river bed to see our target town. The cook tore off down the trail, leaving us with the porters and no map, or instructions. Great. We didn't manage to get to town until after the sun had set. THe walk down and along the river was very difficult. Danzing was complaining of altitude sickness from to much load and not enough fod. Denzing later said this was harder on him that anything he had ever done on Everest (he has done Everest twice).
Well, we were furious with the cook when we finally got home. We also bought beer for our porters. What could we do? The next day was meant to be an easy one, and we were under the impression that another porter was on the way.

Oh dear, so much to write and not enough time or space. I should mention that the town was charming. We stayed in a real Tibetan family's house. The labels on things had changed to chinese. Everything revolved around the people's religion. The kids were lovely, even though some of them had learnt the "hello pen" mantra and the "begging budda" hand mudra. But no, the story of our woe is being told here.

The next day was awful. Everyone was shattered after the previous day's exertions, and the cook changed our plans and dragged us up a god forsaken climb that had our porters threatening mutiny, Julian stumbling and mumbling, the cook looking serene and me pulling my hair out in frustration because nobody would let me carry any of their loads (I felt fine!).

That night something had to be done. I was going to call Raju, and organise another couple of porters, porters we should have had from the start. We couldn't reach Raju. So it was agreed that we should leave most of our stuff is Tserang (the town we were camping in), and pick it up on our way back. It had been part of our plans to do a circuit of the valley. But things had been fucked up (bad language I know, but very descriptive) too much, and now we were on the easy road to the capital Lo Manthang, and the porters made it clear that they would not be leaving it on the way back. I cannot blame them. Other groups we met were having a great time with their English speaking guides and they were not even aware how many porters and donkeys they had -- all they knew is that their stuff was moved around without fuss.

Again, I am telling stories of woe. But don't worry, we were having fun still. Mustang is an amazing spot. The isolation and the spectacular landscape are just the start. The villages are so much nicer than on the circuit. The people are nicer and tourism has had very little visible impact. And there are cute little tales, like the nice girl at the place in Tserang who sectretly opened a hotel door next to our tent so that we could sneak inside and sleep comfortably that night. She liked playing with my dreadlocks. We had these experiences too.

To Lo!

The next day it was off to the forbidden city: Lo Manthang. The Upper Mustang was only opened to outsiders in 1992, and the number of visitors is limited to 1000 per year. The trecking permit also costs $US700 for 10 days. So this is a pretty special place. Everyone got their in good moods, with their lighter loads. Mind you, the cook was starting to really get up our noses. J wanted to kill him, and I spent a fair bit of my energy keeping them apart and being nice to avoid the walk descending into farce. He was constantly asking us to write a good reference for him, hung over us while we ate, and we could not understand what the hell he was talking about.

One hilarious incident occured when he gave us coco-pops for breakfast. I said that I would rather some of the muesli that was sitting on the shelf next to where he was standing. He didn't understand so I said "muesli, granola, I want" (break things down to a noun and a verb usually works).... then kept repeating the word muesli while pointing at the muesli and making eating motions. He kept repeating, "yes thankyou please" then left the room. The porters (who didn't speak any English but got the gist of what I wanted) laughed and I got up and fetched the muesli myself.

Lo was great, thought there were a surprising number of people trying to sell us antiques and very agressive kids wanting pens and candy. One little girl in particular needed some drastic disciplining. When we were spotted with candy she would run over yelling "mine mine give" and grabbing at your leg. Once this prompted J to start shoving a chocolate bar into his face right in front of her. The look of horror on her face was priceless... so many people was give her candy. J and I have a strictly no giving to children policy (these kids aren't needy, just looking to get something for nothing, a habit that most Nepalis find offensive too).

We found a guy who spoke good English and gave us a tour of the city's gompas (monastries). He was a great guide, and after he took us to his antique shop! Mind you, the pieces that he had from going around the villages in Mustang were amazing. And J and I did get a couple of very nice souveneers from him. We sat there talking with him for an hour, getting the low down on the uses of all the antiques, along with the significance of the gods and pictures drawn on them. Some French tourists came in looking for trinkets, and after bargaining hard with him for half an hour left with their "pretty" goods. We then asked him about prices on the things we had chosen. He said "no bargaining price" and gave us prices a long way under the best that the Frogs had got after all their bargaining.

The gompas had the best quality paiting on the walls that we had seen anywhere. Incrediably fine detail in gold and paint on plaster. Walls covered in mandalas and buddas showing hundreds of different hand mudras. For six months of the year, the same Italian restorers who worked on the Cisteen Chapel work in Lo Manthang's gompas to restore the art. It was damn impressive.
The next day we walked north (something that one is not permitted to do), and saw the monks doing their morning pujas (prayers) at the Nasgal Gompa (complete with 3 meter trumpets and a monk making a sand mandala on the floor through the whole process). This was a little bit of Tibet preserved from the Chinese. We then walked further north to to the town of Chhesang, which is half caves/half houses. Cool.

After our two days in Lo it was back down the valley. There were other adventures, but I am tiring of typing as we were by then. I it was such a chore getting the team from A to B while tolerating the deteoriating behavior of the cook made us keen to complete the walk. Of course, we saw and did great things, and had fun in between. But the over-riding emotion of the walk back to Kagbeni was of tiredness and irritation. We both got colds on the way back -- not a fun thing when you are walking between 3500-4000 meters altitude all day (we spent 8 days in this height range... now the air in Pokhara feels like soup).

On the second last day I lost patience with the chef, and we decided to keep going to the end on that day. I told Denzing that there would be no more chef (he understood, nobody likes a moron psychopath).... and we made a very hard 3 hour walk into the strongest, dustiest wind I have ever seen to get to Kagbeni. We were shattered, and we shouted ourselves a snickers bar at the end to celebrate no more cook. We both agree that walk was the furtherest we had ever gone to avoid anybody!

Again, 3 days walk, 3 jeep rides and painful 3 hour taxi ride with the only sane (read that he drove too slowly) taxi driver in the entire sub continent was a tale of two boys wanting to get home. I also got giardia (spelling) on the second last day. giardia is no fun at all: a parasite that gives you the runs, makes your tummy swell with gas... lots of bad wind and burps that tast like eggs. Luckily I am a veteran of hiking with giardia and I know the formula

Immodium + Fasigen + Codien = walking.

The End

We are back in Pokhara tomorrow, enjoying a nice hotel paid for by Raju, and resting our weary bodies after 24 days of walking. Tomorrow we are off to India, and I will probably have my birthday in Dehli. Should be fun....
Those of you who have made it this far, well done. I don't know if I would have read all that, but somehow I have managed to write it! I will write more regularly, limit my misadventures and have more good luck.... should be enough to make the posts a bit shorter.

Kathmandu

2006-09-19T21:09:00.000-07:00

Monday was supposed to be a relaxed start to the trip. Have coffee with Bri and Becky, get some toiletries, buy a hat, have lunch, go home and finalise the packing before catching a train to the airport for my 5:20 PM flight. It was all going to plan until I checked the time on my ticket at 2:20.... Shit, 15:20, not 5:20. Frantic call to taxi, frantic throwing of random unpacked stuff onto the footpath out the front and some frantic driving from my very eager cabbie while I packed on the back seat.

Shouldn't have bothered, I was 15 minutes late and I could feel the eyes of the people at the counter accusing me of being an idiot. So much for numeric literacy. The next flight wasn't till Wednesday, but yes, there was a flight at 9:30 that night leaving from Sydney. So I got my flight changed to leave from Sydney at no extra cost, dashed downstairs and got a Virgin Blue flight to Sydney on the internet. The flight from Sydney was via Melbourne, and I was going to get to Thailand in time for my connecting flight to Kathmandu. The rest of the journey was the usual cattle class/transit lounge tedium.

I got to Kathmandu yesterday around midday. The land is very flat coming from the south, then 20 minutes before landing Mountains appear everywhere and you fly into Kathmadu. Over the top of fields and farms, then getting closer one sees the vehicles going everywhere on the streets, people everywhere, coloured signs stacked on top of everything and buildings half built/half falling apart. These things rushed into sight before the exciting feeling of landing at the start of the adventure.

Raju, our guide for Mustang Valley, picked me up at the airport. He is a very quiet guy, who is really helpful. It was nice having someone to help me deal with taxis and touts in my sleep deprived state. Julian was at the Hotel Red Planet, where he had said he would be, so everything fell into place after my chaotic start in Brisbane.

Walking down the street for the first time to get some lunch, the smell of rotting vegetables, chooks, exhaust and a hint of kerosene greeted me. A familiar smell from South America, and not as unpleasant as it sounds.

This morning I got up at 4 due to a yet-to-be-calibrated body clock and did some early morning yoga. Others were up in the area, chanting and even doing some laughing sessions as the sun came up; not a bad environment in which to do a practice.

For breakfast we wandered around, sampling various bakeries. Good bread. We had 2 cups of tea, 1 cup of chai and a cup of decent coffee before 10, and bought some spices, tea and a teapot in the markets. It is worth walking for 10 minutes to get away from the tourist area, where things are three times cheaper... and three times spicier!

Julian and I have had a chat with Raju about what to do in the two weeks before we go to The Mustang Valley. We are going to do 11 days of the Ananpurna trail from Pokhara to Jomsom, from where we will do the 10 days in Mustang, and then continue on the Anapurna trail back to Pokhara. In all about one month's worth of trecking. This also means that we won't be taking the Pokhara-Jomson flights, so the money saved pays for our porter and park permits. We will have a porter for the Anapurna Trail, the same guy who will be our porter in The Mustang Valley. We leave on Saturday, so there won't be any posts for a good month, but when I get back I will make sure that there is a post full of superlatives.

Go

2006-09-07T23:24:00.000-07:00

I have a one-way ticket to Europe via Nepal and India; a backpack, camping gear, clothes, a camera, some money, and very few possesions left behind. There is a hike booked in Nepal, and some vague ideas about doing yoga in India. I might want to do a PhD sometime. There isn't much else that is known about the rest of my life.

So, the plan is no plan. As this little adventure unfolds I will write the odd detail here. Sounds simple, it probably won't be. How exciting.