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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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