India: Hates You

Having finished up our time in India we jumped into a taxi to Chennai airport eager for all the civilization we could handle in Singapore. But alas fate had other things in store for us. We successfully negotiated the armed guards at the door that demand to see your tickets before you are allowed in, then look stunned at the temerity of someone actually using electronic tickets in this day and age, and just ask you again as if you will suddenly have sprouted tickets as part of the natural ageing process.

But we made it inside, checked in, and waited for the emigration queue to wind its way forward. At last we reached the desk and the disaster started to unfold. It turned out that contrary to what the Jordanian Indian Embassy told us, the Visa we had was not valid for three months from date of entry but three months from date of issue so we were about a week overdue having spent only six weeks in India. At this point things still seemed OK but it should have been obvious that this is not the kind of country where you make any kind of mistake. Unlike say a modern open nation like Myanmar where overstaying a tourist Visa is punishable by a 3USD/day slap on the wrist, the Indian government in its infinite wisdom saw to the heart of the matter and decreed that overstayers shall be punished in the most dreadful way imaginable. By not being allowed to leave.

They pulled our bags from the plane and told us to go visit the Visa office in Chennai on Monday. Of course they couldn't even get that right as we had to wait from Saturday night till Tuesday morning for the office to be open. Then it was a matter of completing the Indian bureaucracy scavenger hunt. We had to provide a bank cheque for the hefty fine, because obviously the Indian government would not be able to accept something as ludicrous as Indian cash as a means of payment. We had to provide a letter stating why we had overstayed which makes a small amount of sense in a schoolyard "say you're sorry" kind of way. We had to provide a signed letter on hotel letterhead from our hotel confirming where we were staying, cos if it was the wrong place we definitely couldn't be allowed to cease staying there. And of course new passport photos and photocopies of passports and visas, because that's what all the cool countries ask for, right?

So another day lost to the scavenger hunt, then another day for 'processing' and we had a hopefully unique half page stamp in our passports and there was only the ritual shaking of dust from our feet (well my feet, Jacquie is more forgiving) before we jetted off to Singapore, and let me tell you organised authoritarianism never smelled so sweet.

PS: Luckily I still love India due to every second ad on the telly during our stay in Chennai being paid for by the Indian Ministry of Tourism.

PPS: The Singapore Airlines staff in Chennai are awesome helpful people, who never gave us an ounce of crap though they definitely could of.

India: Ooty to Mahabalipuram

Continuing our ascent we reached Ooty (that's short for Ootacamund which is short for Udhagamandalam). Ooty was one of the hill stations that the British retreated to, when the lowlands got too hot for them. Getting into the mood of things we started splurging immediately and checked into Kings Cliff Hotel way up one of the hill sides. Once I saw it had an actual bona-fide shower cubicle I couldn't walk away. Of course it also had a fireplace in the room and was about three feet away from a great restaurant so we were pretty happy (except for when it was really cold and we tried to actually use the fireplace and we were completely smoked out so that we had to open the windows and let the cold back in (but that was just a blip, honestly)).

We did a government run tour around the near by lake and hills etc. Not only was it cheap but it was also very cheap. Attractions included driving around various hotels for an hour picking up people who weren't ready yet, visiting pungent lake Watapu (not its real name, but terribly descriptive), and trawling around some hills covered in tea and trees and the occasional botanic garden. The last bit was actually really fun, as tea plantations (and hills) are naturally very scenic, and watching all the middle-class Indians on the tour take photos pretending to be borderline poverty stricken tea picking Indians was fairly amusing (apparently 75% of bollywood filmi music videos have at least one scene in a tea plantation).

With the lack of insufferable heat (and occasional genuine cold) we found ourselves doing strange things like walking places (we walked the half hour from our hotel to town just for the fun of it), and being able to buy bag loads of home-made chocolate which they gleefully sell all over town. Of course the second bag made us sick (the Indian kind, not the ohh I just ate two bags of chocolate kind) but it was probably worth it just to get Jacquie a much needed fix.

Regretfully we had to make our way out of the hills to Kochin for the next leg of our trip. But in a fit of unprecedented oarsomeness the Indian government laid on a steam powered rack rail train down the hill. The cars were old-school (with no internal access), dinky, and packed. So much so the guards reallocated our seats so they could pack another partition with additional (fun-sized) locals. Having been moved we found ourselves sitting opposite another couple of NZers, and proceeded to jam a large amount of kiwi catch up into all the bits of the journey where I wasn't hanging out the window looking at the steam train or trying to take photos of the hilly tree-clad panoramas sweeping past on our right.

But of course all good things come to an end and we had to catch a bus, spend the night in grubby old Coimbatore and then catch another (dull diesel) train to make it to the port city (and old Portugese colony) of Kochi. We found quite a nice hotel in the new town and set off to explore the old town aka Fort Cochin. Getting there we got to take one of the local ferries which puttered us sedately across the harbour in half an hour but gave us a great view of all the various inlets, small islands, and waterfront buildings.

The symbol of Kochi are the numerous 'Chinese' fishing nets lining the waters edge. These large wooden contraptions involve big square nets being pulled in and out of the water flat-wise by long cantilevered poles and a team of half a dozen men. I was tricked into helping them out for a few catches, hauling on the ropes and acting as twice the ballast of any of my co-workers. Apparently they only operate the nets just so tourists like me can give them miserly tips, as there aren't enough fish most of the year to make up for their trouble. After this I needed a little bit of a sit down, so we pulled up a tree root and watched a lively game of cricket contested by some local lads. Jacquie even tried her luck as the international umpire in a contested run out, although I'm not sure they believed that tourists should know anything about cricket.

The other thing Kochi is known for is its Antiques shops. A long way back there were a whole lot of Jews in Kochi and being Jews they did very well for themselves, but with the creation of the state of Israel the vast majority of them packed up shop and headed for the holy land. Only there is only so much shop you can pack, so many house loads of high-grade furniture and artifacts were offloaded onto the local market and continued to be onsold for many years afterwards. Of course all the original items are long gone but the shops remain and were a wonderful source of things that were much too heavy for us to buy, although we did find a few small things. We also got to visit the local synagogue which was the first one we've actually been allowed into throughout the whole trip. And it was worth it as it had a very informative display on the history of the Cochin Jews and the synagogue proper was tiled in very nice hand painted blue-on-white Chinese tiles, which made for quite a cultural contrast.

We had much better tour luck in Kochi and took to the back waters behind Kochi with a random assortment of other foreigns and even another kiwi. We took to the big wide waterways on the perfectly flat water and headed out amongst the islands, not that you could tell what was an island and what was the main land. It was all uniformly flat and palm tree laden. We had to navigate around old men is small boats carefully scraping small shellfish from the river bottom with long dustpan like devices. We soon arrived at our first destination, a combination palm sap farm and lime factory. The aforementioned shellfish are way too small to eat, so they just burn them to lime. The palm sap is entirely more interesting as someone would shimmy up a tree, whack a hole in it, and then set a clay pot underneath to catch the sap. The clay pot is important as if the sap is placed in anything else it starts to ferment and six hours later you have palm toddy (and a little while after that you have yucky palm vinegar). So of course we bought some and immediately lamented that six hours was far too long to wait for my tree blood to become an intoxicant.

Soon we were divied up to two smaller boats and started cruising the the tiny canals that criss cross the area. This was actually quite the wildlife trip as despite motoring past a lot of homes, we saw kingfishes, lesser racquet tailed drongos (according to Jacq), and even an itty bitty water snake. We also got a demonstration of coir rope making. Coir is the hairy husk of a coconut and its the fibre that typifies the brown hairy door mat. The rope is made with a small motor which the rope makers feeds a few strands into and then backs away feeding strands into the end of the growing rope as the motor twists them all together.

The main culinary feat of Kerala as far as I'm concerned is Meen Pollichathu. I discovered it by accident ordering pretty at much random, and it is a fantastic dish of steamed fish flavoured with tamarind cooked in banana leaves which makes it fantastically soft and aromatic. I will definitely be on the lookout for a supplier on my return to Auckland.

Further down the coast is the traveller ghetto of Varkala. Just a collection of hotels, restaurants and used book stores perched on cliffs above the ocean. There is supposedly a good beach here, but the huge surf must have washed it away (as it had part of the promenade). I managed one swim although Jacq didn't make it all the way in, it was like Piha on a biggish day with very shifty sand and no life-guards. So mainly we put our feet up, read, ate, and caught up on our feed readers.

By now we were feeling the full effects of the rubbish buses in South India. It took us the whole day to negotiate the three different super-slow buses to get down to Kanyakumari, the Cape Reinga of India (but all upside down). Unfortunately it lacks the hills, and the mixing oceans, but it does have a 40m statue of a Tamil poet-saint built onto an offshore islet. We got shuttled around between that island and another temple-clad island by a very dodgy old ferry and spent most of the time trying to work out which bits of rock had been out of the sun the longest and were therefore the coolest.

Heading back north again and we had an even worse run with buses with huge waits for buses to just start moving. But we got to Madurai a few hours after nightfall and stumbled our way into a somewhat decent hotel that somehow managed to seem entirely disreputable. It wasn't the accommodation, which was classic Indian two-star, clean, dull, and basic, but all the staff seemed to pause at odd times during conversation, trying to pay for breakfast caused all kinds of confusion, and we never allowed to use the lift by ourselves. We were in Madurai to visit the enormous and of course very old temple with its incredibly detailed brightly painted entrance towers. The towers are 40-50 metres tall, and consist of layer upon layer of various plasterwork Hindu deities, making for quite an eye boggling spectacle. We managed to show up on the day of a major festival so the place was packed and we (as non-Hindus) were barred from quite a large amount of the temple. Although this is quite normal for the larger temples in India where there is usually a more holy enclosure in the centre reserved for the devout, while a larger area surrounding it is open to all and (appropriately dressed) sundry. The outer area in question this time had a music and dance performance stage, bangle shops, and children running all over the place, while others prostrated themselves before, burned incense for, and circumambulated various idols. Oh and there was an Elephant.

Temple Elephants have got to be the very bestest part of all Hindu religion. The deal is basically that you search the temple your in until you find an elephant. It may be hiding behind a pillar or another statue of an elephant (or an elephant shaped deity). You ensure you have correct change, elephants do not give change. You join the back of the queue and shuffle up respectfully (queues in front of elephants are the only ones in all of India that follow the traditional western notion of a slow moving single line of people). Upon reaching the front of the queue you offer your money to the elephant. The elephant takes your money with the tip of its trunk which though circular has a top and bottom (or front and back) that can easily grasp things much like a person wearing mittens. If your offering is a coin it slips the coin backwards slightly into the pile of other coins it is holding in its trunk-hand. If your offering is a note it will surreptitiously hand off the note to its trainer. Then the elephant taps you on the forehead and you are bless-ed. What could be simpler.

Actually it gets better because the elephant is even kid-friendly. If you were to guide a terrified looking two-year old towards the elephant it will lower its trunk to the childs level, and then very gently and slowly accept its coin (with and almost audible "taa") and perform a gentle head tap, and then its back up to speed for the next applicant.

Bla bla bla, monstrous buses, bla bla bla, Thanjavur. Thanjavur was a quick stop to have a look at the old palace grounds which were not very palatial but did have an extensive collection of Chola bronzes and a tower. With a whale in it. The bronzes were, well bronze and they were mostly of a lady with many arms standing in a circle. I understand people who are knowledgeable on such things could probably break it down a lot further but it was hot and Hindu art was starting to run together a little. So we climbed a tower, it was big and square and breezy with tiny little stairways and on the third floor there was a complete whale skeleton. Maybe 20 metres long and looking a little lost.

Pondicherry next. An old French colony it promised access to middle quality baked goods and a certain sea-side charm. It got there on the baked goods but the sea-side was pretty barren, and no french charm was in evidence. In fact we had another odd hotel experience, after trying hard to choose one of the few that was not associated with the nearby Auroville commune we indeed wound up at a lovely boutique hotel with the least friendly manageress ever. If in fact I cared what a hotel manager thought of me, I would have been quite offended by the disdainful looks and the look of disappointment when we announced that we were quite happy to stay in a non-smoking, non-drinking establishment and would even promise to take off our shoes at the door. OK I was actually a little offended, but I stayed there and paid for it just to spite her (and yes I am sure that was an effective retaliation).

Mahabalipuram is actually quite nice, even if it is largely unpronounceable. Its claim to fame is having been a stone-carving mecca for many hundreds of years. The town is tiny, about eight streets in a grid but has all kinds of stone monuments scattered about allegedly as advertising for the work of the previous occupants as the town is not at all sacred. So we had a good time, paid our 500 rupees a piece to see the famous shore temple, and then had a good time looking at all the stuff that is in the local park.

India: Goa to Madumalai

Crikey. We went to India. Again. For quite some time.

It started with the flight into Mumbai and procuring some onward tickets to Goa from the airport. I'd never bought tickets from an airport before, who knew people that weren't criminals or travel show contestants did that sort of thing. The prospect of dealing with the swirling maelstrom of Mumbai had overwhelmed us and we decided that what we were much keener on relaxation than fighting for train tickets or worse yet succumbing to the windy overnight bus trip. So pretty soon we arrived in the mostly military airport at Dabolim and headed out to our old stomping ground at Benaulim beach.

We had arrived during the tail end of monsoon season and our taxi driver had to make several calls before we established that none of the hotels at the north end of the beach were open yet. On a whim we ducked into the Royal Palms resort for some comparative pricing and were offered an apartment for a mere 1000 rupees a night. (~30NZD). Little did we know we weren't actually staying at the resort but in an unoccupied privately owned apartment, but once we got through the confusion and the language barrier, it seemed that as long as we didn't bug the pool boy for towels we'd be fine.

There are many fine beaches to stay at in Goa, each catering to a different set, there are big five star resorts and beach shacks with the menus printed in Cyrillic. There are hippy markets and villages notorious for their chemically amplified British revellers. But Benaulim is pretty sleepy tucked in the middle of it all, and during monsoon it is even sleepier (and quite a lot wetter). Half the restaurants weren't open so we ended up at the same places repeatedly tucking into the fresh fresh and feeling my way around the Indian classics I'd forgotten about. Jacquie of course was lamenting both her inability to tolerate spicy food and Indian chefs inability to implement simple "No Chilli please" instructions, but with food so cheap most of the time we could get more than enough to please both of us.

I'd picked up an all in one copy of Lord of the Rings at Mumbai airport and this was a great aid to our initial relaxation. As was the good sized pool where we both practised our swimming to the point of sore shoulders (not particularly hard to achieve for me). The only hindrance was the complete lack of tolerable internet, the computers were from the 90s, and the shops only opened for a few unusual hours each day. But pretty soon we accomplished our goal of doing absolutely nothing for several days and even joined the dinner circuit making friends with an Indian-American and his English wife who we ate with several times.

Soon though it was time to start moving a little and we hired a couple of scooters and took to the streets. Not only did this give us access to some more restaurants up the beach but we explored nearby Madgoan town (busy and dull), raided the local used bookshop (a lot emptier when we left) and generally tooled around the tiny lanes between palm trees and decaying Portuguese cathedrals.

Of course all this zipping around could only lead to the inevitable monsoon downpour montage. We had driven about half an hour from home when the sky's opened with a ferocity, we sheltered for a bit but the rain really had set in for the afternoon so we proceeded to drive back to the resort through the rain. It was slow, and it was very very wet, wet to your undies wet, there is no distinguishing you from someone who just walked into the swimming pool fully clothed wet. But for obvious reasons Indian money is waterproof, and the camera was looked after, the only casualty of the incident was Jacquie's 20 year old pocket alarm clock which now tells time much more cryptically than before with only about 75% of its liquid crystals, umm crystallizing.

After our vacation we headed off for our adventure into the real India. A long train ride with a fantastic view of the waterfalls in Eastern Goa took us up to Hospet, the town near the Hampi ruins. The various temples and things that make up the Hampi site are spread over a large area and while we walked a lot we ended up taking several rickshaws around the place. Some of the temples are very well preserved and/or restored but they all seem to have that great blight of archaeological sights everywhere: the jigsaw puzzle section. This is the area located suitably out of camera shot where all the random bits of intricately carved stone that the archaeologists can't stick back together reside. In Hampi the areas were extensive but were much loved by the local population of squirrels and lizards. All the regular indistinguishable greyish-brownish lizards were there but we were also treated to to seeing a couple of glossy black topped red undersided foot longs which looked very poisonous but probably weren't.

As for the rest of the site there were atmospheric sunken and half-flooded temples, kilometre long boulevards of pillars, holy cisterns of scary green water, elephant stables and the occasional tiny palace-lets for hanging out on the lawn without touching the lawn.

Unfortunately on our first day at Hampi we discovered that our battery charger had burnt out due to the continual power cuts in Goa and none of our 3 batteries actually held any significant number of electrons. So we were forced to merely enjoy the sights with our eyes.

While we really enjoyed Hampi, Hospet the town where we were staying was that 'Real India' I mentioned before. The night we arrived it had rained and the streets were slick with a layer of cow-poo-mud, a very special mud made from the poo of cows that survive on a diet of rotten vegetables and concert posters (seriously all the poster covered walls have the posters ripped off to cow head height). There were no footpaths to mention, and the road space was crammed with cantankerous trucks, downright dangerous buses, cows, rickshaws, wild dogs, cars, and a whole lot of people. Needless to say I had a fairly good bout  of culture shock and needed to go hide in our hotel for a bit. Luckily on this trip to India we have roughly tripled our accommodation budget and we were staying in a fairly decent $40 a night humourless business hotel complete with glorious working A/C.

It wasn't until we arrived in Bijapur that I could address the problem of the busted battery charger. The town is pretty weird for somewhere the size of Hamilton it seems to be built along one long dirty road lined with all manner of small shops. Luckily fairly early on I found a shanty electrician. Tucked into a corrugated iron shed about 2 metres square a couple of small Indian blokes ran a shop re-winding starter motors, repairing VCR's and generating huge amounts of unclassifiable spare parts. I was a little worried that he had any idea what I was asking him to do through the language gap but once he whipped out his prized multimeter I thought I was on to a winner. Then when I returned that afternoon he showed me very clearly that the heart of my old charger had actually physically cracked in two with a teeny-tiny crater in the middle, it was fairly obvious why I hadn't had charged batteries for a while. He then explained that he had gone down to the market to try and find a replacement part but they were unavailable, and he had bought me an entirely new charger.

At this point all my conman warning bells went off, I was gearing up to listen to speech about how hard it was to get such western luxuries in India and how his services were in high demand etc. etc. and wondering how little money I was going to be left with by the end of the day. But instead I was presented with the enormous contradiction that is India. In a country where you have to crack heads to get checked into a hotel, and can't walk anywhere without a hundred people trying to sell you stuff you don't want, this guy wanted me to repay him the $5 dollars he had spent on the charger at the market several kilometres down the road and then leave him to winding his starter motors. Of course he wouldn't accept the (somewhat larger) tip I tried to give him either without some serious coaxing, but that seems to be par for the course too.

The reason we were in Bijapur was to look at their big dome. Gol Gumbaz is the tomb of one of the old shahs, and its about as minimalist as it comes. In the middle of an enormous large dome there are some some graves. There are doors and some towers you can climb to the gallery at the top of the dome. That is all.

We were blessed with a terribly moody sky for our other archaeological stop in town. I don't know its name. It's just those ruins behind the market as far as I'm concerned. But once again NZ shows its deficit by the fact we were easily amused for a half an hour wandering around the broken arches, occasionally spotting a crow or a squirrel.

We arranged an overnight sleeper bus to Bangalore, and were whisked away in what passed for quite a high level of comfort. The bus was divided into two levels of beds, singles on the left, doubles on the right. Air conditioned well and with decent curtains blocking out the lights we both slept pretty well all the way to Bangalore where suddenly you have to wake up at 6 in the morning and try and work out where you are and where your desired hotel is. Not surprisingly this is a very good time of day for taxi drivers.

We didn't actually end up doing much in Bangalore other than eating at fine western chains stores such as Pizza Hut, Cafe Coffee Day, and The Donut Baker. But we did visit the Lal Bagh botanical gardens with its Crystal Palace-esque glass house.

Mysore is famous for its sandalwood product and its "Bob Marley" cafes if you beleive the shady young men who made a havit of introducing themsleves to us as we wandered the streets. We visited the huge Palace in the centre of town, with its colonial era relics, fantastic stained glass and beautifully painted walls (a whole room was taken up with paintings of different elements of the royal Dasara celebration procession).

We intrepidly took an actual public bus out of town to the old fort at Srirangapatna. Notable for being the place where Tipu Sultan was finally overwhelmed by the Britsih in 1799. The old fort, built on an island in the river, still contains several temples, a lot of walls, a mosque and the old summer palace. The palace was very shabby-chic set in large half maintained grounds and with its paint peeling badly on the outside. But inside it was all historic murals of battles, and portraits of dignitaries and was well worht a wander.

Not far from the fort is Rangantittu Bird Sanctuary on the same river. We paid our officially inflated foreigners prices and waited for our row boat to fill up and then we were whisked out amongst the birds by yet another tireless 40 something kilo Indian. As far as birds went there were a whole lot of black faced ibises perched smongst the trees of the wee islands, and not a whole lot else. But hiding carefully in place sight were four marsh crocodiles sunning themselves on the rocks. All though they didn't appear harmless in the slightest, our boat-wallah certainly treated them as such and rowed nice and close so we could all get some good photos.

Heading into the hills we stopped for the night in Madumalai National Park. Famous for its elephants we saw one right by the road into the village from our extremely shoddy local bus. Further transport and several hours 'netted' us only one more elephant but a whole lot of monkeys, spotted deer, and some bison. Far better than all that driving around was feeding time at the local elephant camp. Home to about a dozen working class elephants we first got greeted by a thorough snuffling from the three year old. At about 5 and a half foot it was far too big to hide behind its trainer, but it still tried in-between bouts of sniffing and fondling people with its trunk. The true baby that had recently been found in the bush was kept a little bit away from people but it too seemed very interested in us, resting its head on its window sill and sniffing at us with its disproportionately short trunk.

The big boys (and ladies) didn't disappoint either. They all lined up for dinner behind a spindly railing and shuffled around looking bored and hungry till their trainers bought them two or three footballs worth of sticky rice with extra elephant nutrients. Each ball made only a mouthful but apparently they also browse most of the night in the forest by themselves.

We couldn't really stay in the government run hostel more than night, as though we had paid for a room with a private bathroom, all the water was sourced directly from the river and was much much browner than I was. So we got another infinitely slow public bus and bounced our way up to Ooty.