Images of Nirvana

Diu - Good For The Soul, Bad For The Liver

2009-02-08T01:49:00.000-08:00

What, and where is Diu? A tiny island on the southern tip of the Saurashtra peninsula in Gujurat, Diu packs a whole lot of history into a small space. Like Goa, the area was a Portuguese enclave in India right through until the mid-20th century, but now it's more famous as a tropical holiday destination for slightly more alternative Western travellers and really drunken Indian men (Diu is the only place in Gujurat where alcohol is legal).

Before we go any further, let's look at a picture (and specifically, a t-shirt) that summarises my feelings about Diu:

I got down to Diu from Bhuj in a relay stretch of sleeper buses. I meant to spend some time in Rajkot, but it turned out to be just another crowded Indian city with nothing to offer, so I jumped straight onto the overnighter to Diu (although not before getting kissed by a ridiculously stoned local teenager). I arrived at the government bus station at 5:30am, well before sunrise, and cooled my heels there for a good hour or two before getting a rickshaw to my intended accommodation - a converted church on a hill above the main town. The room was expensive for what it was, but the fact that it was a twenty-second walk up the stairs onto a roof with an amazing view sold me. I dropped my pack and settled in.

One of my first actions on the island was to rent a motorbike (albeit a piss-weak 100cc runabout, which was still the most ballsy thing I could find for hire), which gave me a much greater range than normal in India. Thus it was that I was able to roam the island at will, often topping 90kmph on the main roads, equipped with the standard Indian safety gear: a t-shirt, shorts, thongs, and a blatant disregard for the road rules. The following shot was a surprisingly difficult self-portrait to get - the church in the background is my guesthouse(!).

I'd intended to stay in Diu for my birthday, and maybe two or three more days. As it turned out, I stayed for almost two weeks. The place is laid-back, chilled, friendly, reasonably cheap, tropical, and an absolute gravity well for travellers. The people in the rooms on either side of me both stayed for roughly the same period, so basically we turned the guesthouse into a non-stop two-week social event. Think fresh seafood barbeques every second night, parties on the roof, and cheap beer (about $1.30 Australian for 650ml bottles). All in all, Diu is probably the closest thing I've ever seen to a tropical paradise.

On one side of my room, there was Gabe and Liv, from Canada and England respectively, and on the other side, Anders from Denmark. Joining us later were Tori and Elise, both Melbourne girls, one of whom went to college with my little sister. (Who says it's not a small world?) In between long bouts of doing nothing at all, some of us spent our time being creative - Anders and I took photos, Liv played banjo (including a concert one night), and Gabe painted crazy things on pretty much any available surface.

As well as being a playground for Western tourists, Diu is also a popular holiday destination for Indians, particularly Gujurati men who flock there for legal booze, clean beaches, and the opportunity to spend all day looking at Western titties. The latter represented the only seriously negative side of the island: India is horrendously repressed sexually, and most Indian guys (who've seemingly been raised on equal parts of the Bhagavad Gita and Baywatch) have absolutely the wrong idea about Western women. Literally every woman I spoke to under the age of forty had been followed by drunken Indian men, who frequently propositioned them for sex, made suggestive gestures, and generally went to extraordinary lengths to see them in bikinis. It wasn't so much a problem when Western guys were around, since a few threatening gestures and words usually sent them scurrying, but it was definitely a downer hearing the constant stories of inappropriate behaviour.

There were other, less wankerish Indians around: Diu is a favourite place for weddings, and so almost every night I drifted off to sleep listening to the sounds of banging drums and fireworks. Weddings actually form a road hazard - it was a common occurrence to round a corner on my bike and suddenly come face-to-face with maybe a hundred people dancing in the road, throwing money around, and generally acting the fool.

Once you got away from Diu Town and Nagoa Beach, however, it proved easy to find small, tucked-away places to get lost in for a few hours. My favourite was Vanakbara, a fishing village at the far western end of the island, which was always a bustle of activity and a fascinating place to walk around. I spent an afternoon there taking photos, and turned out some nice ones of life on the waterfront:

And now, I must away - off to Ahmedabad again, and there to board a train to Mumbai. I'm not sure what I'm going to find there, but I'm pretty damn sure it's going to be interesting. Until then!

Bhuj - An Antidote To Real Life

2009-01-26T06:05:00.000-08:00

Kutch, and especially the wild-west regional capital Bhuj, may well be my favourite place in India so far. It didn't start off too comfortably - after a few days running on empty, I crashed out so hard on the overnight train west from Ahmedabad that I completely failed to wake up when we arrived, and it wasn't until a policeman came through half an hour later and poked me awake with his lathi stick that I realised where we were. After an hour spent trudging through the early morning streets looking for a hotel (or even someone who spoke enough English to tell me where the hell I was), I found a small place called the City Guest House that seems to be pretty much the only cheap hotel in town. Fortunately, it's a friendly place and the room price didn't take the piss too much.

Bhuj itself is small by Indian standards, with a population somewhere in the area of 150,000. Perched between the Little and Great Ranns of Kutch (or Kachchh, to give it the proper unpronounceable transliteration), it sits in an area of dubious agricultural quality and is prone to natural disasters - in 2001, on 26th January (Indian Republic Day) an earthquake devastated the area, killing a staggering 10% of the city's inhabitants. It recovers, and has recovered quickly, though - apart from comments by the locals, you almost wouldn't know that a catastrophe of such magnitude occurred here. The people are friendly to the point of fierceness, and the local children are absolutely charming; everyone I've met on the street seems genuinely happy to see a foreigner, and I've spent a lot of pleasant time trading a few words of butchered Gujurati for a few words of butchered English.

I spent a day looking around the city, taking in the old (and now earthquake-ruined) Aina Mahal and Prag Mahal. These half-palace-half-mansion residences are eerie as all get up, with cracked, broken chandeliers dangling from the ceiling and unsteady gilt-skirted statues leaning out from the walls. The buildings have a kind of Italianate architecture, which is unusual in India (to say the least).

The day after, I had a day off - unintentionally, since although I'd booked an autorickshaw to tour around the countryside, a message got lost in the pipeline and no-one turned up. This was for the best - I lay around in the sun, went for a walk, read a book, at lunch, did some laundry, and basically chilled out. The next day, I sorted out the mess with the rickshaw, and proceeded to take a tiki-tour around some small villages near Bhuj (I would have liked to go further, but it seemed like the rickshaw was one of the dodgy ones with a top speed around 25kmph).

The villages proved to be a photographic goldmine. I got some local kids on my side, who hauled me around the small villages of Dhori and Kotay, persuading all and sundry to get in front of my lens. I've put together a set on Flickr called Village Faces, of which here are some of my favourites:

And now, I must continue moving - this time to Diu, an old Portuguese enclave in the south of the state. Photos of beaches and beers to come soon!

Ahmedabad To Worse

2009-01-24T07:17:00.000-08:00

Actually, that's an unkind title. Ahmedabad, the bustling capital city of Gujurat, is relatively pleasant compared to many of the massive urban sprawls I've passed through. Still, whenever you cram four million-odd people together into a small area on the banks of a river, you're going to have problems, and for some reason I found it difficult to look past those of Ahmedabad during the twenty-four stopover hours I spent in the city.

First off, the traffic is horrendous, snarling through the city like animate tendrils of metal. Crossing any road, or even walking along one, requires stainless steel nerves and a certain disregard for both the safety of oneself and (especially!) other people. Even the traffic in Delhi, fabled for its insanity, seemed mild compared to this.

Secondly, and most importantly, is the poverty evident throughout the city. Ahmedabad is a city that has fought its way through numerous economic down-times, and there are many people visible who have fallen along the wayside. Slum areas squat wretchedly next to the river, hemmed in by polluted water on one side and ugly concrete office blocks on the other. Most street corners are populated by beggars, and street kids are everywhere.

I normally avoid taking photos of people living in poverty, but as I walked down the street in the middle of the day, I ran across a scene that has burnt itself into my mind. Two ragged street kids lay sprawled on a concrete island amidst the manic traffic, occasionally raising themselves to stretch out filthy hands on stick-thin arms to the cars that drove pass. I watched them for a while, and not once did I see anyone in a vehicle give them anything, or even acknowledge their existence. Eventually I walked them off the middle of the road, and gave them the change from my pocket for food - although it's likely to be stolen by a bigger child or appropriated by one of the so-called "beggar pimps", I couldn't just walk away without doing something, and I couldn't see anywhere around to even buy them food (by far my preferred form of charity, since it is so much more direct than giving money).

The worst thing is that this is not at all unusual - I have seen similar things all across India and Nepal, and I fully expect to see worse in Mumbai. As a human being from a wealthy country, the poverty in India is something I struggle with everyday; the worst thing is that I can't even come up with a fraction of a bad solution, let alone a good one.

But Ahmedabad did leave me with a couple of better memories, and some less heartbreaking photos. At sunset, I went to the local Jama Masjid, a beautiful courtyarded area amidst the downtown chaos, and found an island of peace. As I walked around enjoying the afternoon sunlight, Muslim men began filing in and crowding around a pool in the middle of the courtyard, washing in preparation from prayer. As the azan sounded, no-one paid me any mind, content to let me sit quietly and watch (an unusual event in Islamic India - generally, non-Muslims are kicked out as soon as the muezzin opens his mouth). Although I don't like Islam as a moral (and especially legal) framework, I find the rituals and sounds of the religion deeply moving, and it was a great pleasure to enjoy it without feeling like I was intruding.

As the sun finished setting, I walked back to my cheap hotel room near the station, fingering the ticket in my pocket. Another overnight train, second class sleeper of course, to Bhuj, the regional capital of Kutch. I didn't even really know why I was going there, but I was ready to escape the touristy bustle of the big city. As it turns out, Kutch may well be my favourite area of India so far - stay tuned for the next post to find out why.

Rajasthan (Part The Second)

2009-01-22T07:48:00.000-08:00

After Jaisalmer, I trained it to Jodhpur, home of riding breeches, open sewers, and one of the biggest damn castles I've seen yet in India. Mehrangarh Fort is a massive, imposing monument to the Rajput warriors, and it broods over Jodhpur like an angry grandparent. Unfortunately, the clouds brooded over Jodhpur as well, for the whole period of my visit, so the photographic opportunities were limited.

I stayed in a very friendly guest house just below the fort, and spent a couple of days doing absolutely nothing: lying on the roof, drinking chai, and watching the world go by. Finally I summoned up the energy to climb to the fort, and was rewarded with a staggering view from the ramparts.

After achieving very little in Jodhpur, I boarded a bus to Udaipur, which I found quite disappointing. All through my trip, I'd heard Udaipur referred to as a fairytale city, and more than a couple of travellers told me it had been one of their favourite experiences. I didn't really get either vibe.

For one thing, Udaipur is really, really touristy. After Rajasthan, you'd think I'd be used to that, but I wasn't. I think it might have been the type of tourism; Udaipur is aimed at rich Westerners rather than backpackers. The all-bells-and-whistles ticket for the City Palace was 800 rupees, a ridiculous figure by anyone's measure, especially when one considers that the Taj freaking Mahal costs 750 (and is in much better condition).

It's also not, on the face of it, all that pretty. The drought-stricken lake is full of green slime, and the haze was prohibitive - to the point that you almost can't even see the city from the infamous Monsoon Palace (look at the pictures above to see what I mean). But, when the sun sets, almost anywhere can look decent, and Udaipur is no exception.

Anyway, I definitely didn't have a bad time in Udaipur, but it wasn't stunningly good. So, there wasn't much regret when I boarded a metre-gauge stopping-all-stations train down through the Rajasthan trible area into Gujurat (a beautiful journey that, like almost everything in India, would be even better if you could see the sky).

Rajasthan (Part 1)

2009-01-20T06:33:00.001-08:00

And so I realise that I have completely failed to write on this blog for almost three weeks. What a poor effort! I have no excuses, but I do have a reason: Rajasthan.

Rajasthan is the most touristed state in India, and appropriately so. Desert for the most part, it's an absolute riot of colours, smells, and experiences. This is the India you see in the tourism posters, and although the hordes of bumbag-wearing middle-aged rich Westerners (where I use "rich" to mean "those who can afford to eat more than twice a day") got wearisome quickly, it proved relatively easy to escape them and get lost in the place.

I woke up on New Year's Day, kicked open the train carriage door for some fresh air, and was greeted by a clear blue sky, desert green fields, and hills with rocks in them. After a dodgy experience in Chandigarh, this was soothing, to say the least. My impression of the state only improved from there, helped along by (relatively) friendly locals, fascinating desert scenery, and conditions that were much more amenable to photography. So, rather than try and do full justice to each of the places I've been to, I will do my best to summarise them in a few words and my favourite photos. Let's start with Jaipur.

Jaipur: the last in the unholy trinity of the Golden Triangle (Agra, Delhi, Jaipur - the India-in-ten-days trail), Jaipur swarms with tourists, touts, more touts, scammers, beggars, and thieves - and manages to remain a pretty cool place despite them. The City Palace is beautiful, the Royal Observatory (Jantar Mantar) fascinating, and Amber Fort stunningly imposing. Colours, colours, and more colours.

Next, we move (via overnight metre-gauge train) to Bikaner. Lying at the northern edge of the Great Thar Desert, this thriving frontier town can be summed up in three words: fun with camels. My first couple of days here saw me leaving on a camel safari through the dunes and some outlying settlements, and returning with serious saddlesores but great memories.

The day after, I managed to scam myself press access to the 2009 Bikaner Camel Festival. This meant three days of various camel-related activities: camel dancing, camel dressing, camel racing, even camel milking(!). Additionally, the local beauty/masculinity competitions provided plenty of lens fodder: beautiful Rajasthani girls and imposing, turbaned men with some of the biggest moustaches I have seen anywhere. Actually, I'm lying - they were the biggest moustaches I have seen anywhere.

After another overnight train ride, this time made in a hideously drunken state, I wound up in Jaisalmer. One of the big tourist favourites, Jaisalmer is a sandstone fort rising stolidly from the dunes. It's charming, beautiful (especially at the sunset), and alive - the fort is still entirely inhabited and heavily populated, a situation that is causing slow decay among the foundations due to inadequate water infrastructure. Unfortunately, Jaisalmer is one of the most unpleasantly tout-ridden places I've yet encountered in India. That's not necessarily a problem, since most of them don't have the hard-sell chutzpah to harass you more than once, but it became a problem when a disagreement with a camel-safari tout led to me being unceremoniously ejected from my hotel.

It's still a lot of fun, though. Noisy fun - relations between India and Pakistan being what they are, it's a rare half-hour when at least one IAF jet doesn't scream up or down the border, only a few kilometres away.

Now, in the interest of not destroying everyone's download quota all at once, I'm going to pause and go and pack my bags. I'm in Udaipur currently, ready for a morning train to Ahmadabad, in Gujurat. More Rajasthani photos will follow soon.

Down And Out In Chandigarh

2009-01-06T00:38:00.000-08:00

As I trudged out of the Chandigarh train station into another foggy North Indian night, I was struck by an array of bizarre sculptures erected outside. Long, stick-like limbs and understated faces, they were obviously the creation of Nek Chand, the man responsible for Chandigarh's most famous attraction, the Rock Garden. Clutching an address, I started doing the rounds of the autorickshaws, trying to find one who seemed to offer a reasonable chance of getting me where I wanted to be.

An hour later, life seemed much more difficult. I had travelled well into the suburbs of Chandigarh, but the guy whose couch I had arranged to surf on was nowhere to be found - his apartment was locked tight and no-one seemed to know where he was. After trying in vain to contact him, I wandered around looking for an autorickshaw or a taxi, wondering where I might be able to get a hotel for the night. The answer turned out to be, Almost nowhere. I spent well over an hour tooling around in the fog, getting increasingly concerned as each successive hotel told me, "Sorry sir, fully booked." The idea of spending a night curled up in a corner on the street seemed more and more inevitable. Eventually, well after midnight, I found a small, rat-infested room in Sector-45, and shelled out over a thousand rupees for the privilege. Although I was in a bad mood, I resolved to give Chandigarh another chance in the daytime.

It didn't score too well then, either. First, some background about the city. Chandigarh is in a so-called Union Territory, and is both the capital city of the Punjab and Haryana at once. It is a totally planned city, (re)constructed from the ground up after Indian independence to fit the schemes of a mad Frenchman known as Le Corbusier. The roads and suburbs are laid out in neat geometric patterns, areas are carefully designated for purpose, and the overall impression is one of deliberate design rather than the chaotic evolution that seems to have shaped all the other Indian cities.

Sounds familiar? Basically, Chandigarh is the Indian version of Canberra. This sounded interesting on paper, but in reality I found it to be deeply depressing. The roads are straight and wide, and the areas neatly divided, but it doesn't manage to escape the standard Indian realities of poverty, pollution, and overpopulation. Everything is resolutely constructed from concrete, augmented frequently by small lean-tos. I didn't take any photos because the fog was so thick (which, admittedly, may have contributed to my opinion of the place), but imagine a third-world version of Canberra and you have a pretty close analogue. The final straw was the names - Chandigarh is divided into numbered sectors, so an address might be given as: Hotel Green, Sector-17, Chandigarh. The overall impression is that of an Eastern Bloc city before the fall, and I didn't like it one bit.

It's important to understand that this was on New Year's Eve. Although I considered finding another hotel and maybe a party, I stumbled across a cheap train ticket overnight to Jaipur, and made the executive decision to get the hell out before the city sucked out all my will for travelling, even if it meant ringing in the New Year in a sleeper carriage. So, to pass time before I left, I went to check out the aforementioned Rock Garden.

I have to say, this place almost restored Chandigarh in my eyes. It's amazing - twelve acres of gullies and tunnels, all filled with the surreal sculptures of Nek Chand. The man was working as a labourer during the construction of Chandigarh, and appalled by the waste, started assembling small collections of roughly-made sculptures in the woods behind the city. When his by-then huge assortment was discovered some fifteen years later(!), it was recognised as the work of eccentric genius that it was, and was converted into a national monument (and monumental tourist attraction, if the number of screaming Indian sightseers is anything to go by).

Before leaving, I visited the other Famous Thing in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier's massive Open Hand statue. Although this appears in every tourist brochure for the city, it is remarkably difficult to access. I had to deal with two different sets of armed guards, and eventually located the sculpture sprouting from a pit behind some deserted soccer fields.

Apparently the sculpture is symbolic (of what, I'm not entirely sure). I thought, well, two can play at that game, so I took a symbolic piss at the base of the sculpture, went back for my bag, and bailed for the train station. After watching an apparently suicidal kid hauled off the tracks by his shouting friends, I boarded my train and settled in for the trip. The following is a direct extract from my diary, as written that evening:

The Chandigarh-Jaipur Special

31st December 2008, 10:10PM IST

The khaana- and chai-wallahs are traversing the train. We've pulled into Ambala Cantt. Junction, after a quick journey south from Chandigarh.

I'm sitting writing this in an upper berth, two compartments into the carriage, pausing to take the occasional nip from a small bottle of McDowell's Celebration No. 1 XXX Rum. Two shawl-wrapped labourers are playing cards and smoking beedies below me, and a pair of young, poor-looking guys are sandwiched into two of the three berths across the aisle.

This train is reasonably well-maintained, and the carriage is clean (at least, by 2nd Class Sleeper standards). I haven't seen a single cockroach yet, and only evidence of mice. It's full to the brim, too, but that won't be a problem until after the lights-out consensus is reached. My guess is ten to fifteen adenoidal snorers in this half of the carriage alone.

The whistle sounds somewhere up ahead of me, and the atmosphere suddenly changes. The wallahs scramble to complete their transactions and get back onto the platform, colliding with the latecomers who are sprinting down the platform and jumping frantically for the footboards. Within a few moments the turbulence subsides, and we sway onwards into the night.

The blue vinyl of the seats glares beneath the harsh fluorescent lights. Somewhere, a mobile phone shrills loudly. I close my eyes and wonder where my friends are, so many miles away and so much nearer the dawn. I take another swig of the rum; it is spicy, sickly sweet, and brazenly potent. It tastes like adventure; it tastes like loneliness. It tastes like India.

I clamber down and gently ease my sleeping bag from under the head of one of the young men. He grunts and curls up against the wall, pulling his shawl tighter against the cold. I lay the bag out in the berth, and lock my daypack to the steel mesh separating me from the next compartment. It's awkward to sleep curled around it, but it would be more awkward to have it disappear into the night.

I curl up in the bag as the train slows for another station. I mime a lights-out? to one of the labourers. He grins at me, showing teeth stained red by paan, and says something like "One more game, brother," in rapid-fire Hindi. I don't mind; the lights will go out soon enough. The rum I've drunk guarantees that I'll have no problems sleeping, even though the snoring has already begun. In ten hours, on the other side of darkness, I'll be in Jaipur.

The Punjab - Go North, My Son!

2009-01-02T09:21:00.000-08:00

At 4am, Main Bazaar in Paharganj is almost entirely deserted. The street, a hive of activity during the daylight, becomes a ghost-town of overhanging buildings, darkened neon signs, and haphazardly-parked autorickshaws (with shawl-wrapped drivers snoring in the back seat). I walked slowly down towards the train station, my footprints sinking deeper in the mud due to the 30kgs of luggage hanging from my body. Without warning, a pair of rangy stray dogs burst out from an alleyway and started circling me, snarling. I swung my tripod threateningly and backed away slowly. The dogs followed me, growling and barking, until I reached the main road, at which point they decided I wasn't a threat and vanished back into the murky gloom. I checked to make sure that I hadn't shat myself (I hadn't, but it was a near thing), and found the platform for my train. It was now 4:15am.

Some twelve hours later, I was standing on another train platform, this time in Amritsar, a medium-sized city in the west of Punjab that is the focal point of the Sikh religion. I packed into an autorickshaw along with nine or ten laughing Sikh teenagers I'd met on the train, and we made our bumpy, slow way off towards the Golden Temple. I had intended to stay in one of the free dormitories available to all, Sikhs and non-Sikhs alike, but it soon became apparent that I didn't stand a chance - the holiday season was in full swing, and the city was jam-packed with tourists (almost universally Indian). After being turned away with a regretful smile from the Golden Temple dormitories, I wandered around the old city until I found a relatively cheap room. I dumped my pack and went out for an icecream.

The next day, I woke up to find the city smothered in fog. And I mean fog - the kind of pea-souper shit that limits your visibility to tens of metres. I switched on the television to find that Indira Gandhi Airport in Delhi had been completely shut down, with multiple flights cancelled and many more diverted to Mumbai. (Apparently this happens on a regular basis at this time of the year.)

After eating a few parathas for breakfast in a friendly Punjabi restaurant, I wrapped my head in a gaudy orange scarf and strode off towards the Golden Temple. After removing my shoes and washing my feet in thoughtfully warmed water, I walked inside. The temple is essentially a rectangular complex, dominated by the waters of the Amrit Sarovar (Pool of Nectar, from which the city takes it's name). The golden gurdwara itself rests like an ingot of, well, gold on an island in the middle of the pool, reached by a narrow causeway from the parkarma, the stone walkway that rings the pool. Pilgrims, tourists, and religious authorities stroll side by side around the parkarma, stopping to chat, bathe, and take innumerable photos. The only people without smiles on their faces are the scowling, spear-carrying guardsmen. I have to say, it is a stunning place, although the ever-present haze combined with the undissipating fog made photography extremely difficult.

I browsed through the Sikh museum, which had a collection of the most gruesome and unsettling paintings I have yet to see outside a Hieronymous Bosch exhibition. (One particularly visceral one showed a Sikh being martyred in Delhi by being sawn in half - lengthways.) I ate a quick lunch in the communal dining hall. This is a feature of every Sikh temple, a gesture of openness and unity towards people of all (and none, in my case) faiths. Let me describe the experience: you join a line, and are given a metal tray. You then proceed inside a massive hall, where you sit cross-legged, side by side with people you wouldn't know from a bar of soap. Sikh volunteers stride up and down the rows dispensing dhal and rice from buckets the size of a small child, and flinging chapattis about like frisbees. Once your row has finished, you stand up and file out again, giving the tray to another group of volunteers (where it will be washed with a pressure hose), and pause to make a completely voluntary donation if you are so inclined.

After my food had settled, I went in search of another famous landmark of Amritsar, the Jallianwala Bagh. Here, in 1917, soldiers of the waning British Raj, under the command of one General Dyer, massacred hundreds of peaceful demonstrators protesting the introduction of "emergency anti-sedition legislation" allowing for indefinite detention without trial (sound familiar?). I finally found it - a park ringed on all sides by buildings, it can only be reached through a narrow alleyway off one of the main streets. The mood here was bizarre: laughing, chattering Indian tourists pose for photos besides eternal flame monuments, and children play chase past the so-called Martyr's Well, where over a hundred and twenty people drowned trying to escape the carnage above. The neatly categorised bullet holes in the wall are a mute testimony that this is a country that is no stranger to tragedy and undeserved violence.

To shake my gloomy mood, I went off to the newer portion of the city, walking through the old bazaars to get there. I found a "tandoori chicken emporium", and ate platefuls of the most delicious tandoori chicken I have ever encountered. I got an autorickshaw back through the chill night to my hotel, and on a whim decided to visit the Golden Temple again. I walked reverentially through the gurdhara itself, listening to the chanting of the priests, and finally managed to take a decent photo that shows off the temple in all it's magnificence:

The next day I got up at 4am (again!), and headed for the station (again!), this time avoiding the attention of any stray dogs. Ten odd hours of commuting left me in Chandigarh - stay tuned for the next installment!

Delhi - Contradiction City

2008-12-26T08:22:00.000-08:00

Consisting of eleven million people (officially, that is; I suspect many, many more) crammed into a sprawling metropolis on the banks of the Yamuna River, Delhi defies words. Any statement that is made about the city immediately contradicts itself. Wealthy? Opulently so, and yet once one leaves the glossy city centre, the air becomes a miasma of overwhelming poverty. Cultured? The city is awash with museums, galleries, bookshops and cinemas, but I doubt that any are frequented by the poor, ragged people who inhabit the slums amidst the three-metre high piles of rubbish at the suburban train stations. Progressive? Definitely, if the number of skyscrapers going up is any indication, but then again, this is a city where the sight of an ox cart in the middle of a busy road barely warrants a second glance.

I like it, though. Once again, the traveller grapevine has a lot to answer for. The conventional wisdom amongst backpackers is that Delhi is worth visiting for as little time as possible - see the main sights, and get on the next train out of the place. I can categorically say that this is not true. The correct approach (for me, at least) was to relax, and consume the city at a slower pace. I've spent just on a week here, and I haven't even seen all the major sights; instead, I have spent my time in bookshops, coffee houses, bars and parks, and I've had an absolute ball.

My camera hasn't had much of a workout, either. I had to get the CCD professionally cleaned after I tried to do so myself - kids, they're not joking when they tell you that touching the CCD is a bad idea - and so I haven't even had the use of it for much of the time here. But I have taken a couple of interesting shots. We'll begin with a couple from the Jama Masjid mosque, which is apparently the largest mosque in the Asia-Pacific region; the courtyard has room for over 25,000 of the faithful. Access is a problem: as with most Islamic buildings, you have to time your visit around prayers, and standing still for more than a few moments tends to attract attention and calls of "Move on! Move on!" That said, the facade is beautiful, and the view from the minaret is absolutely unreal. (I had no serious appreciation of Delhi until I saw it.)

I never actually got inside the famous Red Fort - I ran out of sightseeing time, and decided that the Jama Masjid took priority. But I did spend a fascinating afternoon at the Bahá'í House of Worship, aka the Lotus Temple. The Bahá'í are much, much more welcoming than the Muslims, at least as far as temples go, and sitting in on a Bahá'í prayer service is one of the aural highlights of the trip thus far. The Lotus Temple itself is a fascinating feat of modern architecture, but it is hard to get past the feeling that the Sydney Opera House has been rotated and translated and plonked down in the suburbs of New Delhi.

And, of course, I spent Christmas in Delhi. Predictably, I wound up getting horrendously drunk in a dive bar in Paharganj (the backpacker ghetto) on Christmas Eve, complete with an extremely unsettling Santa. (Santa must be white, of course, so what could the locals do but get the closest thing to a white person they could find?)

And on that note I must conclude - the coffee shop whose wireless I am shameless abusing is closing, and I need to go back to my hotel room and pack for a very long train ride to Amritsar! Unfortunately it's leaving at 4:40am...

Artsy Stuff

2008-12-21T21:45:00.000-08:00

A quick interlude from the travel writing for some pure showing-off. I took one of my photos from the Taj (next blog entry down), tonemapped it, processed it hard, and wound up with:

I'm pretty happy with it.

Agra - bah!

2008-12-21T07:05:00.000-08:00

It's inarguably the most famous building in India. It swarms with tourists, both Indian and foreign. The entry price is, by Indian standards, extortionate at 750 Rs., and the queues to get in can be horrendous. The standard vista of it constitutes one of the most cliche travel photos in the world. It has inspired countless amounts of poetry, some good (such as Tagore's line about a "teardrop... on the face of eternity"), but much more bad, and after even a couple of hours in Agra, you get sick of seeing the same familiar outline everywhere you look.

And yet, it is still quite possibly the most beautiful building I have ever seen. Ladies and gentlemen, the Taj Mahal.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about Agra. It's a shame, really, because although the Taj is stunning, the city of Agra (which surrounds it) is, for the most part, fucking horrible. There are a couple of interesting monuments scattered amongst a nasty, dirty industrial sprawl, and the locals (at least those who I dealt with) are generally poor, jaded, and out for the tourist rupee in any possible way. The hotels are dingy, the food is bad, and if it wasn't for the Taj, there would be almost no reason to even get off the train.

I say "almost", because there are some gems. Agra Fort, built by the Mughal emperors some time before the turn of the century, is almost as impressive as the Taj. Huge red sandstone walls surround lush green courtyards, and the architecture of the buildings is sublime. The overall effect is (as with the Taj) distinctly Islamic, and it took a distinct effort of will before I could bring myself to abandon the peace behind the walls and return to the chaos that it Agra's streets.

The day after I visited the Taj, I decided to take a day trip to the abandoned city of Fatehpur Sikri, some 40kms out of town and the third on the list of Agra's "must see" sights. I negotiated the traffic to the local bus stand, where I proceeded to wait for a bus. "When will the bus get here?", I asked at midday. "Oh, thirty minutes," replied the disinterested wallah in the information booth. I asked him again an hour later. "Oh," he said, and looked at his watch. "Thirty minutes."

Having decided that the odds of the bus turning up within a reasonable timescale were slim to none, I rounded up three other Westerners who were obviously in the same jam, and went looking for a taxi. After agreeing on 500 Rs. total to get us all there and back, the driver spouted off some rapid Hindi to some passers-by, then said "Same trip, auto-rickshaw, 400!" Considering that the 25 rupees we each stood to save was enough for a lassi, the choice was obvious.

The auto-rickshaw, or tuk-tuk, is a ubiquitous form of transport in India. They're maybe the length of a large motorcycle, with three wheels, a handlebar, a backseat capable of fitting three people if you don't mind a bit of intimacy, and a canvas canopy. They're cheaper than taxis, more expensive than cycle rickshaws (but morally less questionable), and generally a good way to get around a city.

What they're NOT good for, it turns out, is medium- or long-distance highway travel. Spending over an hour crunched into a tiny seat while we tootled along at 35kph, continually being passed by just about every kind of vehicle with wheels (and even some without), choking on dust and smog since my entire upper body was hanging out of the cab, was not a particularly enjoyable experience. When we got to Fatehpur Sikri, my mood only got shabbier, since the touts turned out to be far worse than anything else I've encountered in India (one of them actually grabbed me with two hands, which resulted in him going sprawling in the gutter, and me enjoying a little bit of catharsis).

Once we'd got past the ticket booth though, everything got better. Like Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri is an oasis of calm, not to mention a beautiful architectural masterpiece. It was built from scratch by one of the Mughal Emperors as a capital, and a home for the arts, poetry, and all things beautiful. Apparently it worked pretty well for a couple of months, until it became apparent that the nearby water sources were simply insufficient for the city to survive. After trying desperately to rectify the situation, the city was slowly abandoned to the elements. Now, resting quietly on a rise in the Gangetic Plains, it feels less a ghost town than a peaceful place of meditation that was perhaps a little before its time.

Once again, it was hard to leave, especially since the auto ride back was just an unpleasant as it had been the first time. Then it was time for me to leave Agra, on the first train possible. On that note, let me conclude with an image that I feel does a good job of summing up Indian train stations:

Lucknow And Then

2008-12-15T22:53:00.000-08:00

Combine three parts Islamic architecture, one part decaying remnants of the British Raj, and two parts of modern cosmopolitanism. Mix with a careful dash of air pollution, some over-the-top traffic chaos, and serve on a flat river plain. Garnish with liberal amounts of old-world gentility and friendliness, and enjoy!

That's the best way I can think of to describe Lucknow, the bustling capital city of Uttar Pradesh. After Varanasi, this city is a delight. It's not particularly touristy, and seems to be avoided by most of the backpacker circuit, but I am definitely glad I gave the place a chance. I've spent a few nights staying in a small homestay near the train tracks, eating delicious home-cooked food and enjoying good company, venturing out every now and again to explore.

Lucknow has a distinguished history. For centuries it was the capital of an Islamic state, and the city is packed to the brim with Muslim architecture, Muslim food, and one of India's strongest Muslim populations (who would have guessed?). The jewel in the crown is the Bara Imambara, a massive tomb for one of the Nawabs, but it seems like everywhere you go you turn up small mosques, imambaras, etc. Just to top it all off, the kebabs in the old city are melt-in-your-mouth delicious.

The other main tourist thing-to-do in Lucknow is the Residency, a crumbling ruin of a garrison that was besieged for 87 horrific days during the Mutiny of 1857. Bizarrely (but perhaps inevitably), the manicured lawns and palm-shaded pathways seem to have become the hot spot for a date: everywhere you go, odds are pretty good that you'll run across a young Indian couple canoodling in a corner.

But the best thing about Lucknow to me is simply the friendliness. Lucknow has a reputation throughout India for it's pehle aap (after you!) gentility, and this is on show throughout the city. Whether it's as overt as the frequent random acts of kindness (such as the gentleman who offered me a lift across town on his motorbike "[b]ecause I like to help visitors enjoy our beautiful city!"), or as simple as the friendly smiles and greetings from almost everyone you walk past in the street, Lucknow presents itself well.

There are other hidden treasures here as well. I was a little staggered to learn that Walter Burley Griffin, the architect best known for designing Canberra, is buried in a small local cemetery. Apparently he succumbed to peritonitis while visiting and died not long after. The cemetery is beautiful, leafy, full of eucalypts (the smell of home!), and small kids flying kites.

Unfortunately, one of the few downsides is the lack of anything resembling a solid internet cafe. Thus, I was unable to get my train e-ticket printed, and missed the red-eye to Agra last night. So now I must haul ass over to the railway station, in the hope that I can find a tourist quota ticket for not too much money. But hey, the worst that happens is that I spend another day or two here. I can live with that.

Varanasi - City of Divine Light (and Touts)

2008-12-11T21:41:00.000-08:00

I like Varanasi.

I didn't, at first. Other travellers had told me to expect two things about Varanasi: beautiful scenery, and the most aggressive touts outside Agra and Delhi. Unfortunately, I quickly found myself experiencing the latter, leaving little patience to investigate the former. Within minutes of disembarking my train, I found myself somewhere in Godaulia, trying to explain to an autorickshaw driver that I really did not want to stay in his friend's hotel, and would quite like to go where I asked to go, thank you very much. After he pointed me in the direction of the river, it turned out that I was some four kilometres from where I wanted to be. What followed was a long walk in the middle of the day carrying a heavy backpack, and some serious bad vibes from me.

Which was a pity really, because Varanasi is an incredible city. Packed to the gunwales with tourists, touts, and pilgrims, it swarms with life, spirituality, colour, and death. My hotel is a five minute walk from Manikarnika Ghat, the most important cremation site in Hinduism. Five minutes in the other direction puts me firmly in the Muslim Quarter. Ten minutes walking leaves me at Dasaswamedh Ghat, home to the slightly tacky but still impressive Ganga Aarti ceremony, and after a few more minutes walk I can be in the middle of the Benares University campus.

You get used to the touts, too. There are several approaches to dealing with them, all interesting. Mostly you can ignore them and they'll stop following you after a couple of hundred metres. Alternatively, you can fuck with them - I have had several conversations about the quality of the camel polo players in Timbuktu (the obvious answer to "Hey my friend, what country you from?!"). But the most rewarding is to simply try and get past the hard sell to the human being underneath. After we'd established that I wasn't interested in purchasing silk, no matter what the price, one of the touts and I had a long and fascinating conversation over cups of chai about the economic difficulties involved in doing business in Varanasi, and the necessity of approaching tourists with such insistency.

The architecture and the ghats are stunning. The city feels ancient (which, of course, it is), and the air is one of cultured decay propped up by constant rebuilding. The Ganga (Ganges) is hideously polluted, and the Hindus manage to both revere and abuse it in equal amounts. A boat ride along the river at dawn, although touristy as hell, was still one of the most fascinating things I've done for quite a while.

That said, despite the beauty of the city, photography here is extremely difficult. The air pollution is prohibitive - visibility rarely gets beyond more than a couple of hundred metres, and the glare from the sky is frequently insurmountable. Many fantastic shots simply proved impossible - hundreds of kites flitting above the sunset skyline, for example, or the colours that run riot along the ghats as the pilgrims go down to bathe.

Now, my laptop battery is about to expire, and I must go pack for my trip to Lucknow. Until then!

Annapurna Circuit

2008-12-04T02:08:00.000-08:00

And so it was that I found myself in Besi Sahar, staring up at the start of the Annapurna Circuit. I'll try to condense this, but seventeen-odd days of adventure and tomfoolery won't compress too easily.

First off, mountains. It took a couple of days for us to wend our way up the Marsyangdi Khola to the point where I first saw snow-capped peaks. It's worth mentioning that the hills along the way were still stunning, far bigger than anything available in Australia. The general scale of the Himalayas is hard to describe; even the foothills rise so high that the sun sets around about 3:30pm, and the mountains can almost completely fill your field of view. The rivers foam and churn through valleys that are hundreds of metres deep, as trekkers stride over precarious suspension bridges bolted into sheer cliffs.

The most impressive thing is how densely the hills are populated, relatively speaking of course. It was unusual to walk for more than fifteen or twenty minutes without seeing evidence of human civilisation - random Buddhist stupas, Maoist slogans daubed on rock faces, or just another friendly tea-house.

Finally we reached the mountains proper. They begin by hiding at the top of valleys and peeking over the passes, but within a couple of days walking they surround you completely. Being in the midst of such massive natural structures gives one a sense of impermanence, but also security. It was an awe-inspiring feeling to walk out the door every morning and suddenly realise, Hey, I'm in the highest mountain range on Earth.

After trekking up the Marsyangdi for six or seven days, we started to get into the serious altitudes. After spending an extra night in Manang (3600m) to acclimatise, we progressed slowly up the valleys towards the Thorung La. As we walked, the climate turned cold, always falling well below freezing and night and often not much hotter during the day. Mountains were everywhere, and the landscape was cold, dry, and arid - inhospitable and beautiful.

Crossing the Thorung La itself was a challenge, well and truly. At just under 5500m, the air pressure on top of the pass provides very little oxygen, and every step is a struggle. Moving too fast leaves you winded, and your body goes into overdrive to compensate - my resting pulse rate was 124bpm, and my respiration rate not much slower. We left the high camp at 4.30am, and although it was hard to roll out of bed so early, there were things that made it worthwhile; not least the beautiful views of the sun rising to the east of Thorung Peak and the hard-packed snow fields. Finally, around about 7.00am, I stood on top of my own little world.

The trek down from the other side of the pass took us through the Kali Gandaki valley, which is essentially a high-altitude desert. Instead of snow-capped mountains, I was enveloped in wind, dust, and vast river plains. We travelled past the holy temple at Muktinath, through Marpha (apple brandy country!), and onwards towards the thriving town of Jomsom.

We concluded the trek off easily, passing through Kalopani, Tatopani (home of the best hot springs this side of Rotorua), and Ghorapani. I made the traditional early morning pilgrimage to Poon Hill to take in the gorgeous sunrise view of the Annapurna massif, before a solid day trekking downhill towards Birethanti and Naya Pul, from whence a taxi carried me to Pokhara. All in all, I walked something like 200km in seventeen days, with a sum altitude change around about 12000m. Good times.

Up till now, most of the photos I've posted have been landscapes. But the trek was really made by the people I shared it with. I had two fantastic guides in Dawanuri Sherpa and Hari (whose last name I never quite discovered), and met many other fascinating characters, like Salt Lake City Tom, and Andy and Alice, a honeymooning couple from Brisbane. Good times were had.

And finally, let's not forget the wildlife!

Thus endeth a really stupidly long blog post. As always, all photos are links, and there's many more shots up on my Flickr page - please explore them! Until next time...

First Light

2008-11-13T09:47:00.000-08:00

First, some shots from yesterday. First up is a shot from a rooftop near the Kasthamandap temple:

Then, we have a stupa near Durgar Square:

Finally, a shot from inside a small multi-level Buddhist temple, somewhere in Kathmandu (I think it was in Asan Tole, but I was jetlagged as all hell and my memory fails me):

Anyway. Another day, more sightseeing. My guide Krishna and I began with the famous (and World Heritage listed) Buddhist temples and stupa at Bodhnath. This place is amazing, and manages to transcend the hordes of tourists thronging around its base:

We then followed the tourist trail to Pashupati, home to the holiest Hindu temple in Nepal (Pashupatinath) and a well-known funeral ground. I didn't even take my camera out at the cremation until my guide suggested it to me, and although I felt more than a little ghoulish and insensitive, I'm glad I got a record of an incredibly haunting scene:

The sightseeing day was concluded at Patan, a small village outside Kathmandu that absolutely swarms with fat, bus-riding tourists. The main Durgar Square ("Durgar" meaning "palace" - thus, there are at least three Durgar Squares in the Kathmandu valley) was very interesting but hard to photograph, and I didn't feel like I got anything worthwhile until we walked a little further away to some much less touristed temples.

This evening has consisted of formalising trekking arrangements and eating/drinking with the trekking guides. I finished up the evening at a local Nepali "nightclub" - unquestionably "authentic" since I was the only non-Nepali in the place. Eventually I got shortlisted for what seems to be a local custom: get up and dance with your friends while the singers play a call-and-response game with you. Since I can't speak a word of Nepali, I couldn't respond to the calls, and I can only imagine what they were saying about me. Apparently it was in good humour, but I was standing there imagining things like, "Hey! Look at this rich foreigner! Let's get him drunk and then take his wallet!" and "What a tosser. He thinks he's being all cultural while we're having a laugh at his expense!" Good fun.

(All of these photos are links. I encourage you to click on them, see them at full size and quality, and explore the rest of my Flickr site. All of my photos, including the majority that haven't been posted here, are available in a set called Nepal 2008.)

Touchdown

2008-11-13T03:37:00.001-08:00

The clock on my laptop still reads AEDST time. Apparently it is 3:27 in the afternoon, 12th November. That means that roughly 24 hours ago I finished the last of my overpriced cappuccino and strode confidently through a pair of obstinate automatic doors into the customs section of Sydney Airport. Time is a strange beast.

As I stood in the arrivals area at Tribhuvan International Airport (possible slogan: Proudly made out of brick since 1975), waiting for my backpack and hoping that I wouldn't require the services of the "Missing Baggage Complaining Desk", it finally sunk in. After five months of planning, hoping and financial navel-gazing, I was on the ground in Nepal.

I had known for a few hours that I was no longer in a part of the world with the edges blunted off, though. Picture this: I had just made it through customs at Delhi International Airport. I was tired, cranky, and not entirely sure how to even get to the departures area to transit to my flight to Kathmandu. I pushed my little airport trolley out the doors, ignoring the incredibly persistent touts, hoping to see DEPARTURES writ large on a nearby building. I had stepped no more than twenty metres from the exit when I turned into a dead-end alley by mistake. The rough concrete of the alley floor was scattered with lumpy piles of tattered cloth, and it wasn't until one of them rolled over to face me and hack up something obscenely biological that I realised they were people sleeping rough. Welcome to India; have a nice day.

Today has been spent sightseeing around Kathmandu - pictures will go up as soon as I get a reliable upload to Flickr. Until then!