Saturday, February 28, 2004
STAFFORD, the jewel of the north-west Midlands - I've been to a country pub for dinner. It's been a freezing cold and clear February day. Evidently, I've arrived home! To use the slogan of a celebrated restaurant in Agra, things here are the "same, same, but different"; namely, Claire Short still has it in for Tony, Leeds are still bottom of the Premiership - and Peter Andre is popular again! Crikey ...
Before I do the whole reflection thing, I have to talk about our last day in India. We spent most of the day mooching around the Nehru Museum, in his old pad in the south of Delhi. When I say pad, I mean mansion really; it was a place built for a colonial commander-in-chief, and just the sort of residence for the legendary statesman and his family. There was lots of interesting stuff in the museum about the road to independence - rather more complete and balanced than the skewed presentation in the Red Fort! - as well as a chance to see Nehru's rooms preserved as they would have been. I found that the most fascinating part of the museum actually - quirky stuff like the judge's hammer that he kept on his desk and the big ornately-carved elephant's tusk that stood in one of his sitting rooms. And, obviously, just like anywhere, it was wonderful to peer fleetingly through his collection of books. We even saw Indira Gandhi's old bedroom, the boudoir of India's iron lady enough to send a tingle up any spine (!).
Our final rickshaw ride as a posse of three was out to south Delhi to meet our Cambridge PhD friends - surprisingly, the rickshaw had just about enough room for our bags, that were completely stuffed after six weeks of accumulation of all kinds. We eventually found Rachel and Sarah's flat, and spent a bit of time chatting to them, plus Sarah's mum and aunt, who were over visiting from the US. The plan was to go and see the qawali at Nizamuddin mosque, not too far from Humayan's tomb, where we had been the other day. We ricked it in and found the mosque, inside a maze of bazars (James and I bought silly hats), that were crammed utterly with people, all seemingly going in the opposite direction ... Once we had made it inside, we found a spot to sit on the floor and take in our surroundings - a beautifully ornate and very cramped place of worship, with a bloke coming round and randomly fanning people, and a small enclosure of people that, I was informed, had been "taken by the spirit" and were therefore not quite with us. Unfortunately, the qawali wasn't happening, due to an impending religious festival - so we thought we'd go and eat instead.
The Last Supper! (Blurring my religions here ...) And what a supper. The restaurant was a place called Karim's, renowned for its fine Mughlai cuisine; we'd been for lunch at its sister restaurant in Old Delhi right at the beginning of the trip. This meal capped most of the others. When I saw Akbari Murgh Masala on the menu, named after good old Emperor Akbar - the guy who was a supposedly tolerant ruler, open to those from other religions, but still made towers from Hindu heads - I just had to plump for it. Good choice; it was a wonderful meal, as sumptuous as the court of the Moghuls itself - and made all the better by the company. We chatted to Gabriella the Croatian yogi, someone Rachel had recently met: she lived in Munich and had set up a couple of yoga schools with her boyfriend, after turning her back on the world of PR. She was off to Rishikesh to see her guru and was one of the most bubbly happy smiley people you're ever likely to meet!
That was the great thing about this trip (as any trip) - the people that we met along the way. Gabriella, that Croatian yogi; Mani, the Bihari reinsurer; Farid, the Muslim tour guide at Fatephur Sikri; Mathew, the Keralan / Maldivan hotel manager; Jim, the marketing man "to the right of Mussolini"; psycho Thali man at Mount Abu; Richard, the fisherman-cum-handicrafts vendor; that Dutch bloke at Jaipur station; Posy, the intrepid English Lady; above all, Laura and Em, the tough Aussie chicks, and the one and only Jeffrey! Loads of others obviously; and each and every one brings your trip alive and gives the places themselves so much more than the ageing monuments that every tourist finds when they visit.
So, what to take overall from India? Did I find myself, man? Don't know about that - not sure I took enough psychadelic substances. It was an awesome experience to witness so many different cultures, see so many fascinating places and meet all of those interesting people. I tell you what will stay with me. Someone told me that the most important thing about travelling for them is to carry on doing it when you get home - to carry on treating each day as an opportunity to do new / different stuff, discover new places, meet new people, even when you're somewhere really familiar; to not get into the sort of groove in which you shut yourself away from anything fresh and interesting and get wound up in trivialities. It's inspiring to think that travelling could be a state of mind, rather than a state of geography - because, to be honest, since you can get a Coke anywhere you go these days, where you actually are doesn't matter quite so much. It'll certainly be a lot tougher now to forget how phenomenally loaded I am compared to hundreds of millions of people elsewhere in the world who live in squalor - squalor now being a reality for me, and not a concept.
Guess what the first thing I did when I got back yesterday? I had a takeaway curry from one of Stafford's premier curry houses. Akbar never ruled over the proud jewel of the north-west Midlands, the legions of the motherland repelling the hordes of Moghul invaders on numerous occasions. Consequently, we didn't get the benefit of his culinary expertise - not that it was bad, just that it wasn't quite Karim's (aaah, Karim's) ... And it cost nearly a tenner a head, with haggling not an option!
It'll take some getting used to, this Britain lark.
Before I do the whole reflection thing, I have to talk about our last day in India. We spent most of the day mooching around the Nehru Museum, in his old pad in the south of Delhi. When I say pad, I mean mansion really; it was a place built for a colonial commander-in-chief, and just the sort of residence for the legendary statesman and his family. There was lots of interesting stuff in the museum about the road to independence - rather more complete and balanced than the skewed presentation in the Red Fort! - as well as a chance to see Nehru's rooms preserved as they would have been. I found that the most fascinating part of the museum actually - quirky stuff like the judge's hammer that he kept on his desk and the big ornately-carved elephant's tusk that stood in one of his sitting rooms. And, obviously, just like anywhere, it was wonderful to peer fleetingly through his collection of books. We even saw Indira Gandhi's old bedroom, the boudoir of India's iron lady enough to send a tingle up any spine (!).
Our final rickshaw ride as a posse of three was out to south Delhi to meet our Cambridge PhD friends - surprisingly, the rickshaw had just about enough room for our bags, that were completely stuffed after six weeks of accumulation of all kinds. We eventually found Rachel and Sarah's flat, and spent a bit of time chatting to them, plus Sarah's mum and aunt, who were over visiting from the US. The plan was to go and see the qawali at Nizamuddin mosque, not too far from Humayan's tomb, where we had been the other day. We ricked it in and found the mosque, inside a maze of bazars (James and I bought silly hats), that were crammed utterly with people, all seemingly going in the opposite direction ... Once we had made it inside, we found a spot to sit on the floor and take in our surroundings - a beautifully ornate and very cramped place of worship, with a bloke coming round and randomly fanning people, and a small enclosure of people that, I was informed, had been "taken by the spirit" and were therefore not quite with us. Unfortunately, the qawali wasn't happening, due to an impending religious festival - so we thought we'd go and eat instead.
The Last Supper! (Blurring my religions here ...) And what a supper. The restaurant was a place called Karim's, renowned for its fine Mughlai cuisine; we'd been for lunch at its sister restaurant in Old Delhi right at the beginning of the trip. This meal capped most of the others. When I saw Akbari Murgh Masala on the menu, named after good old Emperor Akbar - the guy who was a supposedly tolerant ruler, open to those from other religions, but still made towers from Hindu heads - I just had to plump for it. Good choice; it was a wonderful meal, as sumptuous as the court of the Moghuls itself - and made all the better by the company. We chatted to Gabriella the Croatian yogi, someone Rachel had recently met: she lived in Munich and had set up a couple of yoga schools with her boyfriend, after turning her back on the world of PR. She was off to Rishikesh to see her guru and was one of the most bubbly happy smiley people you're ever likely to meet!
That was the great thing about this trip (as any trip) - the people that we met along the way. Gabriella, that Croatian yogi; Mani, the Bihari reinsurer; Farid, the Muslim tour guide at Fatephur Sikri; Mathew, the Keralan / Maldivan hotel manager; Jim, the marketing man "to the right of Mussolini"; psycho Thali man at Mount Abu; Richard, the fisherman-cum-handicrafts vendor; that Dutch bloke at Jaipur station; Posy, the intrepid English Lady; above all, Laura and Em, the tough Aussie chicks, and the one and only Jeffrey! Loads of others obviously; and each and every one brings your trip alive and gives the places themselves so much more than the ageing monuments that every tourist finds when they visit.
So, what to take overall from India? Did I find myself, man? Don't know about that - not sure I took enough psychadelic substances. It was an awesome experience to witness so many different cultures, see so many fascinating places and meet all of those interesting people. I tell you what will stay with me. Someone told me that the most important thing about travelling for them is to carry on doing it when you get home - to carry on treating each day as an opportunity to do new / different stuff, discover new places, meet new people, even when you're somewhere really familiar; to not get into the sort of groove in which you shut yourself away from anything fresh and interesting and get wound up in trivialities. It's inspiring to think that travelling could be a state of mind, rather than a state of geography - because, to be honest, since you can get a Coke anywhere you go these days, where you actually are doesn't matter quite so much. It'll certainly be a lot tougher now to forget how phenomenally loaded I am compared to hundreds of millions of people elsewhere in the world who live in squalor - squalor now being a reality for me, and not a concept.
Guess what the first thing I did when I got back yesterday? I had a takeaway curry from one of Stafford's premier curry houses. Akbar never ruled over the proud jewel of the north-west Midlands, the legions of the motherland repelling the hordes of Moghul invaders on numerous occasions. Consequently, we didn't get the benefit of his culinary expertise - not that it was bad, just that it wasn't quite Karim's (aaah, Karim's) ... And it cost nearly a tenner a head, with haggling not an option!
It'll take some getting used to, this Britain lark.
Thursday, February 26, 2004
DELHI - Amritsar was sensational. The Golden Temple seemed to float in the middle of a great tank of water, in which Sikhs bathe for its spiritual properties. Without pause, the Adi Granth was being sung and read by a team of holy men and relayed throughout the whole complex over loudspeakers, which made for a quite magical atmosphere, as hundreds of Sikh pilgrims wandered around the tank clockwise, heading for the temple itself. Some were less traditional Sikhs or simply tourists - though very few were obviously western - sporting only the head covering and bare feet stipulated by temple rules. (We looked a bit like we'd just wandered off the set of Pirates of the Caribbean.) A great many were proudly wearing all five of the five K's - the sword, turban, comb, special trousers and bracelet that the Sikh religion espouses for the faithful. Some were from specific sects of the religion: I saw one old bloke all in deep blue (indicating some warrior group within Sikhism), with a voluminous white beard and huge sword, about to totter towards the pool for his holy ablutions.
We got to the centre of the complex, the Golden Temple itself, and filed in with all the other pilgrims. We found the musicians playing and the source of the readings and song that were being broadcast to allcomers, set in a chamber of the most magnificent opulence. Many people were sat against the walls, either letting the whole experience wash over them, or taking active part and following the text in little pocket-books, presumably extracts from the Adi Granth. As familiar or favourite bits popped up, you could hear people briefly join in sotto voce, singing along with the very impressive professionals that were belting it out inside, to the accompaniment of tabla and harmoniums.
It was awesome. Afterwards, we went down the road to Jallianwalla Bagh, site of perhaps one of the more inglorious incidents in the history of the Great British Empire. In 1919, to quell unrest provoked by the Rowlatt Acts, and other local incidents, good old General Dyer decided to open fire without warning on an unarmed public meeting, in a garden space with only two extremely narrow exits. A couple of thousand died, and today there is a landscaped memorial to the "martyrs", the outrage at their death seen as giving rise to the movement that eventually lead to Indian independence 28 years later.
We met some Cambridge postgrad students the other day who are doing some PhD fieldwork in Delhi, so we're off to theirs for dinner tonight, preceded by a qawali, which, apparently, is some kind of devotional Urdu song-performance that can be pretty spectacular.
And then, at some ridiculous hour, we're flying home. HOME! Doesn't seem like six weeks at all. Bye bye India! It's going to be a long long night ...
We got to the centre of the complex, the Golden Temple itself, and filed in with all the other pilgrims. We found the musicians playing and the source of the readings and song that were being broadcast to allcomers, set in a chamber of the most magnificent opulence. Many people were sat against the walls, either letting the whole experience wash over them, or taking active part and following the text in little pocket-books, presumably extracts from the Adi Granth. As familiar or favourite bits popped up, you could hear people briefly join in sotto voce, singing along with the very impressive professionals that were belting it out inside, to the accompaniment of tabla and harmoniums.
It was awesome. Afterwards, we went down the road to Jallianwalla Bagh, site of perhaps one of the more inglorious incidents in the history of the Great British Empire. In 1919, to quell unrest provoked by the Rowlatt Acts, and other local incidents, good old General Dyer decided to open fire without warning on an unarmed public meeting, in a garden space with only two extremely narrow exits. A couple of thousand died, and today there is a landscaped memorial to the "martyrs", the outrage at their death seen as giving rise to the movement that eventually lead to Indian independence 28 years later.
We met some Cambridge postgrad students the other day who are doing some PhD fieldwork in Delhi, so we're off to theirs for dinner tonight, preceded by a qawali, which, apparently, is some kind of devotional Urdu song-performance that can be pretty spectacular.
And then, at some ridiculous hour, we're flying home. HOME! Doesn't seem like six weeks at all. Bye bye India! It's going to be a long long night ...
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
AMRITSAR, Punjab - It's been a long day of ... just sitting on a bus! Woohoo! We had a taste of things to come when we get home as we got up at 6am in Shimla and felt bloody freezing for the first time in 5 weeks. I don't actually think it was that cold, but Goa must've softened us up a bit. Mind you, I still only put two layers on; Jamesy went for four (including the pink shirt of legend that he purchased in Delhi), but he is from Sussex.
We twisted and turned down the mountain roads of Himachal Pradesh (thankfully our stomachs were stronger that some unfortunate fellow passengers), before passing through Le Corbusier's planned city of Chandigarh, built in the 1950s as a capital for Indian Punjab, Lahore having fallen on the Pakistani side at Partition. If Ahmedabad is the Manchester of India, then Chandigarh is certainly the Milton Keynes, judging by the grid of roads, big roundabouts ... and not a lot else.
Anyway, ten hours later we arrived in Amritsar, very obviously predominantly Sikh. A jolly turbaned rickshaw-wallah took us on an entertaining detour off-road on the way to the hotel, to avoid the traffic; especially entertaining as I was doing my usual trick of wedging myself in the front cuddling up to the driver so as to keep away from the tarmac - and associated buses and motorbikes - a few feet away.
Unfortunately, we arrived too late to make it to the Wagha Crossing, the border point with Pakistan (30km away) where there is a hilarious ceremony of pompous military theatricals each evening, with puff-chested troops lowering the flags and closing the border. Never mind - tomorrow, there is the resplendent Golden Temple to look forward to, which is apparently stunning ... It's about our last place before we start to head home (booo...), so it'd be nice if it was!
We twisted and turned down the mountain roads of Himachal Pradesh (thankfully our stomachs were stronger that some unfortunate fellow passengers), before passing through Le Corbusier's planned city of Chandigarh, built in the 1950s as a capital for Indian Punjab, Lahore having fallen on the Pakistani side at Partition. If Ahmedabad is the Manchester of India, then Chandigarh is certainly the Milton Keynes, judging by the grid of roads, big roundabouts ... and not a lot else.
Anyway, ten hours later we arrived in Amritsar, very obviously predominantly Sikh. A jolly turbaned rickshaw-wallah took us on an entertaining detour off-road on the way to the hotel, to avoid the traffic; especially entertaining as I was doing my usual trick of wedging myself in the front cuddling up to the driver so as to keep away from the tarmac - and associated buses and motorbikes - a few feet away.
Unfortunately, we arrived too late to make it to the Wagha Crossing, the border point with Pakistan (30km away) where there is a hilarious ceremony of pompous military theatricals each evening, with puff-chested troops lowering the flags and closing the border. Never mind - tomorrow, there is the resplendent Golden Temple to look forward to, which is apparently stunning ... It's about our last place before we start to head home (booo...), so it'd be nice if it was!
Monday, February 23, 2004
SHIMLA, Himachal Pradesh - I'm in the foothills of the Himalayas, I kid you not. This place is not exactly crampon country though: in fact, it's a bit reminiscent of Stratford-upon-Avon, but on some really big hills. The British used to use it as their summer capital when the heat in Calcutta or Delhi became far too much. To this end, they built loads of mock-Tudor buildings, and a church that could grace the square of any quaint middle England town. We're yet to find a cream tea, but I bet there's one not too far away - with doilies and everything, I'm sure.
We went to the Viceroy's old place earlier on, which is a huge Scottish baronial pile, with views out to snow-capped peaks in the distance. Although we're at 7000ft here, they are HUGE in comparison. On our guided tour round the building, which is now a centre for post-doctoral research - what an awesome place to study! - we saw such things as the very table on which the Partition of India was settled in 1947 and a classic photo of Edwina Mountbatten flirting with Nehru, with her Viceregal hubby looking none too chuffed.
We spent all morning on the little "toy train" through the hills to get here, which was wonderful in itself. I kept expecting a Sikh version of the Fat Controller to bound out of a signal box and give us a hearty wave. I could wax lyrical about it, but I might sound like I'm turning into a trainspotter. I'm not - but it was lovely to wind along ridges, over viaducts, through tunnels and bursting into yet another spectacular valley with spectacular views ...
Bit of a crazy whistlestop (oh, there I go, trains on the brain ...) end to our trip this. We're on a bus in the morning to Amritsar to catch the Golden Temple!
We went to the Viceroy's old place earlier on, which is a huge Scottish baronial pile, with views out to snow-capped peaks in the distance. Although we're at 7000ft here, they are HUGE in comparison. On our guided tour round the building, which is now a centre for post-doctoral research - what an awesome place to study! - we saw such things as the very table on which the Partition of India was settled in 1947 and a classic photo of Edwina Mountbatten flirting with Nehru, with her Viceregal hubby looking none too chuffed.
We spent all morning on the little "toy train" through the hills to get here, which was wonderful in itself. I kept expecting a Sikh version of the Fat Controller to bound out of a signal box and give us a hearty wave. I could wax lyrical about it, but I might sound like I'm turning into a trainspotter. I'm not - but it was lovely to wind along ridges, over viaducts, through tunnels and bursting into yet another spectacular valley with spectacular views ...
Bit of a crazy whistlestop (oh, there I go, trains on the brain ...) end to our trip this. We're on a bus in the morning to Amritsar to catch the Golden Temple!
Saturday, February 21, 2004
DELHI - Goa seems such a long time ago, such a long way away! Er, I suppose it is ... We've spent a total of 29 hours on trains in the last few days and travelled over 2000km, back up to the capital, which is just as, um, delightful as I remember it from when we initially arrived here.
We had a good wander around Panjim, Goa's capital, on Tuesday, to buy gifts, the obvious bottle-of-the-local-liquor (which'll probably taste rank when it gets home!), that sort of thing. We had a good mooch and potter, soaking up the laid-back Goan way of life for the last time really, knowing that as soon as we left, we'd be back in crazy India proper! There's a traditional Portguese Goan restaurant called Viva Panjim that we popped into for a late lunch, meeting the Melbourne massive there for a final time - suffice it to say, it was G&T o'clock, for at least a couple of us. We made the most of our diminishing chances to eat scrummy seafood and me, Laura and Em demolished some plates of prawns etc, which were good, but nowhere as good as our efforts the previous week. For our last Goan supper, we went across the road from our house to Cidade de Goa, the top-notch five-star resort we had been passing for a couple of weeks, but hadn't yet been in ... We found the buffet restaurant and treated ourselves to a bottle of the finest Goan vino, toasting a brilliant fortnight of beaches and coconut trees!
It was a case of sorting the house out in the morning - and then the trains began! A mere 12 hours overnight landed us back in Bombay at 5.55 in the morning. We wandered around to find a hotel - the one we had thought about had daft procedure about having to check out after 24 hours, if you only paid for one night. Since we didn't want to leave at half six the next morning, we ended up going back to the hotel we had stayed in a couple of weeks before. It's not that we didn't like the place - it's just a bit odd. The staff were a tad Rocky Horror: the brooding, open-necked, soave manager and the cross-eyed hunchbacked night porter were quite a double act. And then there was the moustachioed guy who just sat around smiling insanely, plus an unknown number of others who just, well, hung out. What did they all do all day?
It was brill to be back in buzzing Bombay. And our return gave us the chance to do something that we criminally omitted last time through. Synonymous with this vibrant city is the industry they call Bollywood - and we couldn't come here without catching at least one movie! Bollywood is the biggest film industry in the world; they churn out easily more movies a year than anyone else, even the Americans. And India is rapt by every twist and turn in the careers and lives of the megastars of the screen. Newspapers devote whole supplements to gossip about the stars ("has Sanjay finally found love with Raveena?!") You can't walk down a street without running into an image of Amitabh Bachchan endorsing some product or other (usually very chic suits, actually - he's an older actor in the Sean Connery mould, perhaps, and is wont to make the ladies go weak at the knees).
But how to choose a film to see from this galaxy of stars and their hits - especially when the films are all in Hindi? Well, we were assured by various people that the language barrier wouldn't be much of a problem; we'd be able to work out the storyline, especially through the medium of ensemble dance, which happens pretty regularly. The songs are so important to the films that soundtracks are released before the films themselves, to get the public hooked on the music, so they HAVE to see the film. We had thought of going to see "Maqbool", which is a new Bollywood version of Macbeth! However, one film is on everyone's lips more than any other at the moment: "Kal Ho Naa Ho", now in its 13th week. It's a film that features a Bollywood rendition of Roy Orbison's classic "Pretty Woman" and a song called "It's the Time to Disco" which could well be passed off as a Latvian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest. It stars Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta, two of Bollywood's super-hottest properties. It's a story of love and friendship (aren't they all!) amongst Indians in New York and was an absolutely stunning three hours of entertainment: big and brash, genius music (I bought the soundtrack), completely unsubtle - but, hey, who needs subtlety when you've got funky moves, bouncy hair and the cheekiest of cheeky smiles? It was a hell of a heart wrencher at the end, it brought a tear to my eye ...
Needed a stiff drink after all that. We started with a cup of Golden Orange Pekoe at a tea emporium on Veer Nariman Road, but then our friend Jim turned up (the Bombay businessman we had met previously), told us not to be so soft, and whisked us off to a flashy bar for cocktails. Good man. We had a pleasant hour or so in there, quite an oasis from the hustle-and-bustle outside, gathering advice from Jim on such things as where the best place was to buy Peaberry Coffee Beans in Bombay (they're India's finest). And it was just round the corner that we ate Vietnamese and Thai food cooked by a Nepalese chef - indicative of Bombay's cosmopolitan feel! In fact, the chef actually came out in the restaurant, in his big white hat, and theatrically cooked Andrew's beef in front of him, on a barbecue.
First thing on Wednesday, we were on a boat out to Elephanta Island. Boats leave from the Gateway of India, the first monument that passengers arriving on the ships of yesteryear would see in Bombay, India's major port. Our little vessel took about an hour to reach the island, which has loads of ancient carvings of Shiva and various other deities, hugely imposing and quite eerie, lurking in the shadows. There were also some lovely preening monkeys, picking lice off each other, lounging around outside, when we'd had enough of the monuments! Time was running short now in Bombay, so we whizzed back to the city to meet up with Jeffrey, our Goan guardian, and have a last lunch with him. It was brill to see him again, and really interesting to hear about the evangelist gathering that he'd been to since we'd seen him, where 1.7 million people thronged just outside the city. He helped us out doing a couple more things round the city - including getting hold of that coffee - before chaperoning us to Bombay Central station. We made it in plenty of time, though there was one funny incident where Jeffrey broke the taxi door while swapping seats mid-journey; it had to be fixed in the middle of traffic by two kind bikers who hopped off their Enfield Bullet and rammed the thing back into its housing!
We were now on the train, our home for the next 17 hours. This was luxury travel, though: the Rajdhani Express is the speedy rail connection between the two major cities, and you are provided with food, chai and a constant feed of piped muzak. Not sure whether the latter is a good thing, but you feel like you're getting something for your slightly elevated fare. It's weird: it felt like all we did was read the paper, do a crossword, sleep, have breakfast ... and then we'd arrived in Delhi. Four hour train journeys seem interminable at home - perhaps India has made me more tolerant to such things!
So, here we are - back in Paharganj, back at Hotel Namaskar, back in the less-than-tropical north of India. Not much in the way of Fish Curry Rice up here ... But, there are the Himalayas, and we're going to be amongst their foothills in the next couple of days, which I'm really excited about!
We had a good wander around Panjim, Goa's capital, on Tuesday, to buy gifts, the obvious bottle-of-the-local-liquor (which'll probably taste rank when it gets home!), that sort of thing. We had a good mooch and potter, soaking up the laid-back Goan way of life for the last time really, knowing that as soon as we left, we'd be back in crazy India proper! There's a traditional Portguese Goan restaurant called Viva Panjim that we popped into for a late lunch, meeting the Melbourne massive there for a final time - suffice it to say, it was G&T o'clock, for at least a couple of us. We made the most of our diminishing chances to eat scrummy seafood and me, Laura and Em demolished some plates of prawns etc, which were good, but nowhere as good as our efforts the previous week. For our last Goan supper, we went across the road from our house to Cidade de Goa, the top-notch five-star resort we had been passing for a couple of weeks, but hadn't yet been in ... We found the buffet restaurant and treated ourselves to a bottle of the finest Goan vino, toasting a brilliant fortnight of beaches and coconut trees!
It was a case of sorting the house out in the morning - and then the trains began! A mere 12 hours overnight landed us back in Bombay at 5.55 in the morning. We wandered around to find a hotel - the one we had thought about had daft procedure about having to check out after 24 hours, if you only paid for one night. Since we didn't want to leave at half six the next morning, we ended up going back to the hotel we had stayed in a couple of weeks before. It's not that we didn't like the place - it's just a bit odd. The staff were a tad Rocky Horror: the brooding, open-necked, soave manager and the cross-eyed hunchbacked night porter were quite a double act. And then there was the moustachioed guy who just sat around smiling insanely, plus an unknown number of others who just, well, hung out. What did they all do all day?
It was brill to be back in buzzing Bombay. And our return gave us the chance to do something that we criminally omitted last time through. Synonymous with this vibrant city is the industry they call Bollywood - and we couldn't come here without catching at least one movie! Bollywood is the biggest film industry in the world; they churn out easily more movies a year than anyone else, even the Americans. And India is rapt by every twist and turn in the careers and lives of the megastars of the screen. Newspapers devote whole supplements to gossip about the stars ("has Sanjay finally found love with Raveena?!") You can't walk down a street without running into an image of Amitabh Bachchan endorsing some product or other (usually very chic suits, actually - he's an older actor in the Sean Connery mould, perhaps, and is wont to make the ladies go weak at the knees).
But how to choose a film to see from this galaxy of stars and their hits - especially when the films are all in Hindi? Well, we were assured by various people that the language barrier wouldn't be much of a problem; we'd be able to work out the storyline, especially through the medium of ensemble dance, which happens pretty regularly. The songs are so important to the films that soundtracks are released before the films themselves, to get the public hooked on the music, so they HAVE to see the film. We had thought of going to see "Maqbool", which is a new Bollywood version of Macbeth! However, one film is on everyone's lips more than any other at the moment: "Kal Ho Naa Ho", now in its 13th week. It's a film that features a Bollywood rendition of Roy Orbison's classic "Pretty Woman" and a song called "It's the Time to Disco" which could well be passed off as a Latvian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest. It stars Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta, two of Bollywood's super-hottest properties. It's a story of love and friendship (aren't they all!) amongst Indians in New York and was an absolutely stunning three hours of entertainment: big and brash, genius music (I bought the soundtrack), completely unsubtle - but, hey, who needs subtlety when you've got funky moves, bouncy hair and the cheekiest of cheeky smiles? It was a hell of a heart wrencher at the end, it brought a tear to my eye ...
Needed a stiff drink after all that. We started with a cup of Golden Orange Pekoe at a tea emporium on Veer Nariman Road, but then our friend Jim turned up (the Bombay businessman we had met previously), told us not to be so soft, and whisked us off to a flashy bar for cocktails. Good man. We had a pleasant hour or so in there, quite an oasis from the hustle-and-bustle outside, gathering advice from Jim on such things as where the best place was to buy Peaberry Coffee Beans in Bombay (they're India's finest). And it was just round the corner that we ate Vietnamese and Thai food cooked by a Nepalese chef - indicative of Bombay's cosmopolitan feel! In fact, the chef actually came out in the restaurant, in his big white hat, and theatrically cooked Andrew's beef in front of him, on a barbecue.
First thing on Wednesday, we were on a boat out to Elephanta Island. Boats leave from the Gateway of India, the first monument that passengers arriving on the ships of yesteryear would see in Bombay, India's major port. Our little vessel took about an hour to reach the island, which has loads of ancient carvings of Shiva and various other deities, hugely imposing and quite eerie, lurking in the shadows. There were also some lovely preening monkeys, picking lice off each other, lounging around outside, when we'd had enough of the monuments! Time was running short now in Bombay, so we whizzed back to the city to meet up with Jeffrey, our Goan guardian, and have a last lunch with him. It was brill to see him again, and really interesting to hear about the evangelist gathering that he'd been to since we'd seen him, where 1.7 million people thronged just outside the city. He helped us out doing a couple more things round the city - including getting hold of that coffee - before chaperoning us to Bombay Central station. We made it in plenty of time, though there was one funny incident where Jeffrey broke the taxi door while swapping seats mid-journey; it had to be fixed in the middle of traffic by two kind bikers who hopped off their Enfield Bullet and rammed the thing back into its housing!
We were now on the train, our home for the next 17 hours. This was luxury travel, though: the Rajdhani Express is the speedy rail connection between the two major cities, and you are provided with food, chai and a constant feed of piped muzak. Not sure whether the latter is a good thing, but you feel like you're getting something for your slightly elevated fare. It's weird: it felt like all we did was read the paper, do a crossword, sleep, have breakfast ... and then we'd arrived in Delhi. Four hour train journeys seem interminable at home - perhaps India has made me more tolerant to such things!
So, here we are - back in Paharganj, back at Hotel Namaskar, back in the less-than-tropical north of India. Not much in the way of Fish Curry Rice up here ... But, there are the Himalayas, and we're going to be amongst their foothills in the next couple of days, which I'm really excited about!
Monday, February 16, 2004
MIRAMAR, Goa! - ...
(Ben pauses to pop his arm back into his shoulder socket)
Yoga was great! At 8.30am this morning, I sat down cross-legged on a straw mat in front of a mystically bearded and fabulously elastic man called Virdu, who proceeded to take us serenely through some quite remarkable postures. To see me and Jamesy attempt "The Crab", "The Lion" and "The Tortoise" must have been quite a sight, next to the languid lagoon and amidst the towering coconut trees. I discovered tendons that I never knew I had! There was one special moment when I was having difficulty in working out exactly where to put my flailing limbs; Virdu approached, and with the air of a boy scout on marijuana, he deftly tied me into a knot that gathered together the loose ends of my dharma. Or something. It was a great experience; it made me realise that I'm frankly as supple as a brick and that people who bend deserve vast respect. It also reminded me that "repulsing the monkey" (see last installment) is - duh - a move in Tai Chi. Perhaps that's the next phase in my exploration of the inner self.
Worryingly, I had a bowl of muesli with fruit and curd for breakfast just afterwards. And a big salad for lunch - yikes! Don't worry, folks. Some beers await me at home and big lard beckons for the evening's entertainment. I'm still the Ben you know! Actually, I could murder an ommmmmmm-lette ...
(Ben pauses to pop his arm back into his shoulder socket)
Yoga was great! At 8.30am this morning, I sat down cross-legged on a straw mat in front of a mystically bearded and fabulously elastic man called Virdu, who proceeded to take us serenely through some quite remarkable postures. To see me and Jamesy attempt "The Crab", "The Lion" and "The Tortoise" must have been quite a sight, next to the languid lagoon and amidst the towering coconut trees. I discovered tendons that I never knew I had! There was one special moment when I was having difficulty in working out exactly where to put my flailing limbs; Virdu approached, and with the air of a boy scout on marijuana, he deftly tied me into a knot that gathered together the loose ends of my dharma. Or something. It was a great experience; it made me realise that I'm frankly as supple as a brick and that people who bend deserve vast respect. It also reminded me that "repulsing the monkey" (see last installment) is - duh - a move in Tai Chi. Perhaps that's the next phase in my exploration of the inner self.
Worryingly, I had a bowl of muesli with fruit and curd for breakfast just afterwards. And a big salad for lunch - yikes! Don't worry, folks. Some beers await me at home and big lard beckons for the evening's entertainment. I'm still the Ben you know! Actually, I could murder an ommmmmmm-lette ...
Sunday, February 15, 2004
PALOLEM, Goa! - This is perfect. We've moved down to south Goa for a couple of days. We're staying in a "coco-hut" next to a lagoon, one minute's walk from the beach, surrounded by palm trees and beach shacks playing chill-out tunes ...
We turned up yesterday after a comedy bus ride in which the very full bus seemed to absorb more people than was physically possible. Luckily, me and Laura (one of the "tough Aussie chicks", who would like to point out to everyone that they're not that tough really; only when they have to be) managed to end up in the 'cockpit' with the horn-insane driver and all of our luggage. While we were in club class, watching our in-flight movie and sipping champagne (if only - though the coffee sweets flowed, as we both pined for espresso), the others were like sardines on military drill, standing squashed into the armpits of all and sundry. I felt for them, I really did.
We got to Palolem and hit the beach. It is truly idyllic, with fishing boats punctuating the sands. Development goes as far as these coconut-built beach shacks, in which there are cafes, restaurants and accommodation. It was interesting that the girls thought it was pretty developed; compared to vast empty beaches in Oz, I guess it is. But, for the Eurocentric amongst us, used to the sizzling concrete-fringed meat markets of the Costa Brava and the crammed insanity of, say, Brighton on a vaguely sunny day in August - or even crumbling Rhyl on a less than mediocre day in March - there is relatively nothing here. There are a pleasant amount of people here, including loads of Israelis who, it seems, are fresh from serving their time in the army. All the development tastefully melts into the forest behind the beach - no high rises. It's lovely.
We got a couple of huts, by the aforementioned lagoon, around the corner from the beach. And here we have stayed, having a swim here, a ridiculously scrummy chocolate-filled-pancake and pint of juice there ... Last night, we started out at a cafe that was hosting a Jamaican dub session, and though we resisted the lure of jerk chicken, the beers and rum-n-cokes were consumed with gusto. We ate just along the beach - waited for ages, but it didn't really matter by that stage. I ended up lying in the sand, getting expert tutorial from the Aussies in their finely honed talent of imitating farmyard noises, which I think shocked some fellow beached revellers. Later, we all climbed, SAS-style, into the disco-bar next door to our lagoon, raising the odd eyebrows.
But it does take a lot to really raise eyebrows round here - not even northern European blokes in really tiny pants, or octogenarian hippy ravers dancing insanely under a palm tree cause much of a flutter. Jamesy was perusing the menu at a cafe yesterday and was intrigued as to what a "Queen Lassi" was, being deeply loyal to QE2. A couple of unfamilar words were fired in our innocent direction by the amused waiter; we finally realised that the Queen is generously seasoned with hashish (I always knew she had too much Charlie) ... Jamesy had a pineapple juice instead.
Assuming I cope with tonight's festivities, I may well join in our camp's 8.30am yoga session tomorrow, which Em and Laura are well into. Repulsing the monkey sounds a health-giving exercise and I'm keen to tap into some of this subcontinental spiritualism ... Yeah, I know me and the attribute "supple" don't normally mix. But you've got to start somewhere. By the time I'm back home, I'll really be your Flexible Friend - putting the Ben into bendy ...
(This installment was typed with my toes, the backs of my knees resting on my shoulders, my entire body balanced on my left thumb while my right hand played a tourist-souvenir mini-sitar. Ommmmm.)
We turned up yesterday after a comedy bus ride in which the very full bus seemed to absorb more people than was physically possible. Luckily, me and Laura (one of the "tough Aussie chicks", who would like to point out to everyone that they're not that tough really; only when they have to be) managed to end up in the 'cockpit' with the horn-insane driver and all of our luggage. While we were in club class, watching our in-flight movie and sipping champagne (if only - though the coffee sweets flowed, as we both pined for espresso), the others were like sardines on military drill, standing squashed into the armpits of all and sundry. I felt for them, I really did.
We got to Palolem and hit the beach. It is truly idyllic, with fishing boats punctuating the sands. Development goes as far as these coconut-built beach shacks, in which there are cafes, restaurants and accommodation. It was interesting that the girls thought it was pretty developed; compared to vast empty beaches in Oz, I guess it is. But, for the Eurocentric amongst us, used to the sizzling concrete-fringed meat markets of the Costa Brava and the crammed insanity of, say, Brighton on a vaguely sunny day in August - or even crumbling Rhyl on a less than mediocre day in March - there is relatively nothing here. There are a pleasant amount of people here, including loads of Israelis who, it seems, are fresh from serving their time in the army. All the development tastefully melts into the forest behind the beach - no high rises. It's lovely.
We got a couple of huts, by the aforementioned lagoon, around the corner from the beach. And here we have stayed, having a swim here, a ridiculously scrummy chocolate-filled-pancake and pint of juice there ... Last night, we started out at a cafe that was hosting a Jamaican dub session, and though we resisted the lure of jerk chicken, the beers and rum-n-cokes were consumed with gusto. We ate just along the beach - waited for ages, but it didn't really matter by that stage. I ended up lying in the sand, getting expert tutorial from the Aussies in their finely honed talent of imitating farmyard noises, which I think shocked some fellow beached revellers. Later, we all climbed, SAS-style, into the disco-bar next door to our lagoon, raising the odd eyebrows.
But it does take a lot to really raise eyebrows round here - not even northern European blokes in really tiny pants, or octogenarian hippy ravers dancing insanely under a palm tree cause much of a flutter. Jamesy was perusing the menu at a cafe yesterday and was intrigued as to what a "Queen Lassi" was, being deeply loyal to QE2. A couple of unfamilar words were fired in our innocent direction by the amused waiter; we finally realised that the Queen is generously seasoned with hashish (I always knew she had too much Charlie) ... Jamesy had a pineapple juice instead.
Assuming I cope with tonight's festivities, I may well join in our camp's 8.30am yoga session tomorrow, which Em and Laura are well into. Repulsing the monkey sounds a health-giving exercise and I'm keen to tap into some of this subcontinental spiritualism ... Yeah, I know me and the attribute "supple" don't normally mix. But you've got to start somewhere. By the time I'm back home, I'll really be your Flexible Friend - putting the Ben into bendy ...
(This installment was typed with my toes, the backs of my knees resting on my shoulders, my entire body balanced on my left thumb while my right hand played a tourist-souvenir mini-sitar. Ommmmm.)
