kumily to pondicherry

after a few days of peace and quiet in kumily, it was time to move along and the girls that i was with headed to a different hill station, the guy that i was with headed to bangalore and i decided to make the long overnight trip to pondicherry. the only bus that was going from kumily to pondi stopped in a place called cumbum where i waited for a few hours for the second bus to arrive. the second bus was a "sleeper" bus, which meant that instead of having seats it had small beds hung from the sides of the bus. this seemed like it would be a pretty nice way to travel at first glance, but having fairly extensive experience with the way in which buses are piloted around in this country, i knew that i was in for a long fourteen hours.

laying down in the "bed" to which i was assigned was a chore in and of itself and as soon as the bus began to ramble down the road it took quite a bit of concentration to hold on to the small rail that was meant to be keeping me from falling off of the thing. this is all on top of the basic chaotic nature of travel in india, with people screaming at each other, cars and scooters dodging cows in the road and there always seems to be one person who has to cycle through every one of the ringtones on his or her phone until one is deemed suitable. this could take anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours. either way, its not particularly pleasant.

arriving in pondi in the early hours of the morning was also not pleasant as i was the only foreigner on the bus, which meant that the rickshaw drivers would be especially hard to deal with. i guess you could say that i was a bit lucky that these were the fiestiest of rickshaw drivers, including three who decided to have a shoving match during which a few punches were thrown to decide amongst themselves who would be taking me to a guesthouse. i sat on the curb for about a half an hour while this unfolded and finally one gentleman emerged victorious. he took me to a few places which were full and in the end i wound up about ten kilometers out of town in a homestay which was cheap and decent enough for my purposes.

after taking a nap, it was time to secure transportation. i asked the man who was running the homestay if i could rent a bike from him and he called a friend who quickly appeared with a real deal motorcycle, not a scooter or moped or anything, a motorcycle. i have gotten to be very good at driving the scooters in traffic in asia, but was a bit intimidated by having to shift gears on a much more powerful bike. i jumped on it and took off into traffic and ever since have been in love with motorcycles.

it was an especially great way to get the lay of the land in pondi, which is an old french colony that still retains a great deal of its french history. combined with modern india, it makes for quite the interesting place and is easily navigable due to its simple grid layout. north and south of the city are nice, clean beaches which at times are empty. riding the indian-made bajaj motorcycle to discover new places to swim in the bay of bengal was an excellent way to spend a few days until my friends met me in pondi. we took the trip to auroville on one afternoon which is a sort of cult-like city that is meant to be based in no way on politics, cultures, religions or anything of that nature. the few thousand inhabitants of auroville only are there to devote their lives to discovering what was referred to as the "ultimate truth." there is a very large spherical structure in the center of the town that looks like a giant gold golf ball, inside of which is a crystal ball that is supposed to have some sort of truth discovering power. it was definitely an entertaining place to visit.

i think the most interesting experience that i had in pondi was on a ride out of town towards the homestay where i spent my first week here. people had been setting off fireworks for days and none of us could figure out why until i came upon a procession of people setting them off and throwing flowers on the road. they were also pulling behind them a cart with a dead body on it, which was neatly dressed in traditional indian clothing. obviously, it was a funeral procession on the busiest street in town during the busiest time of day which made the traffic that much more outrageous. on top of that, the flowers that were being thrown around had also attracted a large number of the local wandering livestock. amidst the fireworks, dead bodies, traffic, screams of mourning and the general chaos that is india, were dozens of cows, buffaloes and goats that had emerged to eat the flowers that were being thrown. it made for quite the scene, especially since there were three such processions occuring one after the other.

on top of all of this, the absolute insanity of the situation had forced to buses to collide and all of the passengers had disembarked to scream at the opposing bus driver. if you have read shantaram then you have an idea of what this might look like. it seemed as if there were two tribes of people getting ready to go to war with each other as soon as one group or the other acted first. this is all happening on a two lane road, which is used by hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis, around five in the evening which was the beginning of the local rush hour.

i was on my way out of town to check out of the homestay where i was an move into town to hang out with my friends. i gathered my things, returned the bike and keys and then jumped in a rickshaw that came to life with a sound i had never heard before and then dozens of people rushing towards the little three-wheeled device screaming at the top of their lungs. they began to pull the driver out of the seat and one man was furiously attempting to detach a chain from the rickshaw while the group of people were screaming at the driver. the man working the chain got it free and then pulled his small dog out from under the wheel of the cart. the dog was alive and had a few scratches, but was very happy to have been removed from the situation.

the driver rushed to the man and began to bow and prostrate himself on the ground, touching the dog owner's feet and asking for forgiveness. the owner touched him on the head and he stood up, continuing to apologize. he then shoved me back in the rickshaw and took off down the road, waving to friends in passing as if nothing had happened, asking the two standard questions that all rickshaw drivers ask young travelers, "where country are from," followed by, "want smoke marijuana." why in the hell that guy had tied his dog to a parked vehicle is still a mystery to me, but it certainly was interesting.

in the span of an hour i had seen quite a bit of things that really are impossible to accurately depict in words.

kochi to kumily

after having made friends with a few traveling brits in fort kochi, it was decided to head east into the mountains to visit the periyar wildlife reserve outside of kumily in kerala. the trip consisted of about six hours of being thrown around on a classic indian bus, with hard seats and instead of having glass for windows, only a few metal bars were in place to keep all appendages inside the vehicle. these sort of trips were much more stressful traveling solo and having a group of friends with which to enjoy the ride made it a much more fulfilling experience.

the most interesting part of the journey was that none of the indian men who boarded the bus would sit next to the english girls with whom i was traveling. the men would rather stand or sit three to a seat than sit next to them. at one point when there were no more sitting or standing options, a man pulled me by the arm to the seat across the aisle where one of the girls was sitting and told me that i should be sitting with my people. this came as quite a surprise but everyone took it in stride and it turned into a bit of a joke. regardless, the social taboo that is sitting near a western woman for an indian man became quite apparent. it could very well work the opposite way, that western men should not sit next to indian women, but i haven't had the chance to test this theory as of yet.

the periyar wildlife reserve is quite a beautiful place and we trekked to the top of a peak about one thousand meters high, which allowed for a really incredible view of the western ghats on one side and the deccan plateau into tamil nadu on the other. there were a few issues with leeches but all in all it was a very nice way to spend an afternoon. no animals were spotted, however, which was not surprising, especially for one of the guides who had been working in the area for decades and had only once seen a tiger.

animals or not, it was quite nice to get into the mountains for some fresh air and a much more relaxed atmosphere in general.

mysore to kochi

i elected to get on another overnight bus from mysore to reach kochi, which is in kerala, the southernmost province of india's west coast - self proclaimed to be "gods own country." the twelve-hour adventure south was relatively uneventful, except for crossing the provincial border from karnataka into kerala, which is also a wildlife reserve. a few small trees had been knocked over across the road and there were buses and trucks and all sorts of conveyance gathered around the trees. it was the middle of the night at apparently, a couple of elephants had gotten adventurous and decided to knock the trees into the road. they were youngsters, most likely elephant teenagers, so this made sense to me. the two elephants stood on the side of the road observing their handiwork and the chaos that it had created.

the most interesting thing about taking the overnight buses is that you arrive in the towns just as they are waking up and you get to see what goes on in the early morning in all of the different places. what goes on in the early morning is very similar to what goes on during the rest of the day - not very much. a lot of standing around and spitting, which seems to be the favorite past time for all men in india.

the bus arrived in ernakulam and i took the short ferry to kochi where i was accosted by autorickshaw drivers and hotel owners at the dock. i now refuse to give people who hassle me my business so i walked away from them and into the little town which is wonderful. it is very relaxed and full of friendly people, though i came to find that the hotel i booked into lacked hot water.

kochi is famous as a portuguese, dutch and chinese fishing and trading village from the 1500's . there are still giant chinese fishing nets on the shore at fort cochin, which the fishermen still use today. they are run on cantilevers and only used at high tide when the current is going the right way, but they are remarkably interesting contraptions that are made of teak wood and have been standing for centuries.

all in all, it was well worth the trip to kochi to get away from the chaos of the rest of india.

mumbai to mysore

i escaped my sort of prison that was shunde, china to hong kong a few weeks ago. i spent a week in hong kong waiting for my visa to india to be processed and then made my way to the airport to jump on a flight to mumbai. my experience in china was so unfair, even by the standards of my employers, that they offered to purchase a plane ticket for me to wherever i wanted to go. of course, when i said i wanted to go to india, they retracted the offer and only after me really screaming at them did they stand by their word. it is amazing how many times on a daily basis people in asia, and from what i have heard from other friends, people in the developing world as a whole, will try to do whatever sort of dishonest thing that they can to get out of spending money.

no matter where i have gone, there have always been people trying to run some sort of scam. i arrived in india in the early hours of the morning and had made a reservation at a hotel near the airport. when i showed the address to a cab driver, he, of course, told me that the address doesn't exist and that he would take me to a cheap hotel, the entire time showing me some sort of identification card that should have been a dead giveaway that i was in for it. it was 3 am and i just wanted a bed to sleep in, i didn't really care at that point.

so the cab driver takes me to a hotel, which looks decent enough and i am immediately escorted into a room where the quick talking boss sits me down and asks for six thousand rupees for the bed for the night, two beers, breakfast and a bus ticket to goa. i was planning on going to goa anyway, so i figured this was pretty sweet and handed him the money, drank my beer and went to bed. i got up around noon the next day, had my breakfast and went to the "bus stop" which consisted of two plastic stools with a tarp over the top of them. the operator of this bus stop told me my bus would be there in a half an hour. a half an hour later, it would be there in another hour. i wound up sitting at the bus stop for over five hours waiting, during which time i did the math on my room for the previous night. i had spent about 150USD on something that i could have gotten for around 30. i also realized that the hotel was in the dead center of a slum so if i had been smart and left the place, i would have had nowhere to go.

a 17-hour busride dropped me in mapusa, goa, where i went to anjuna. anjuna is a really nice little beach town perched on top of a cliff that drops into the water. i was very pleased about this and even more pleased about the accomidation that i found. a hotel run by an elderly couple for 250 rupees a night. perfect! it was a ten minute walk on the beach to the ever popular "shore bar" and i spent a week there before traveling south to margao to catch a train to mangalore.

margao is pretty basic, not much to report on it. i got my train ticket and spent a night in a place that had a tv in it - i realized i hadn't seen sportscenter since feburary and it was excellent. the train ride the next day however, was not. 10 hours to mangalore in 3AC class, which means there are six cots hung from the ceiling of the train, three on each side of the berth. these trains and horrifyingly filthy, cockroaches everywhere, people spitting and throwing food, screaming babies and there was even a domestic dispute in the adjacent berth. needless to say i didn't get any rest, but it certainly was an experience.

mangalore is just as non-descript as margao, even though i did find an electrical outlet converter so i could finally recharge my ipod. i had to spent a few extra days in mangalore because i was too sick to travel anywhere else - enough said about that.

i then got on another ten-hour busride southeast over the western ghats and up onto the deccan plateau to mysore, which is a very crazy place. the maharaja's palace is in mysore along with the devashara market and a few other fun things to see. the con artists here are also first rate because marijuana is legal in this province. one guy started chatting me up about some music festival and next thing i knew i was sitting in a house operated by a man who claimed to be a national bodybuilding champion from the 1970s where they make incense and essential oils. i was pretty much forced to purchase something so i got this oil that keeps mosquitoes away - it actually works!

the guy that originally started the scam then took me to a bar where he and his two friends ordered drinks, which were obviously on me, and started smoking weed. one of them claimed to be some sort of palm reader and said that he would read my palm if i bought him a small bottle of whiskey. i bought it because it cost nothing. the guy started chugging the whiskey and smoking weed simultaneously - he had taken notes from bill murray and chevy chase in caddyshack. he then was far too messed up to read my palm so i left, highly entertained.

by this time i am pretty fed up with this guy following me around and spending my money for me, so i tell him i am going to get something to eat and then go back to my hotel. he takes me to a restaurant and orders something for me, then holds out his hand and asks for money for showing me around. it is more of an insult to give these people a small amount of money than no money at all so i gave him 10 rupees and told him to go away.

as soon as he left, i realized everyone in the place was looking at me with a very disappointed countenance. one of the waiters came to my table and said, "your friend is a very very bad man." obviously he hadn't seen the seinfeld where babu baht says this to jerry, but it sounded exactly the same. i had to laugh because of all this.

at least the con artist is not a respected member of society in india.

china likes to rock the party

during the past week, i have been to a few parties, which have been most interesting. the first was the birthday party for the young girl whom i am teaching, her 13th. all of her classmates from her school were in attendance, singing karaoke, playing games and generally having fun. there are a few western fast food joints in shunde, pizza hut, kfc and mcdonalds, all of which comprised the menu for the affair. pizza hut in china is an especially interesting place as it is a full-service sit-down restaurant where people go for a fancy night out. it is relatively very expensive and is almost treated as a gourmet establishment. similarly, the upper middle class people of this city are also under the impression that the fords that they drive are quite luxurious.

the people that i work for are very wealthy and have a brand new seven series bmw, but all of the things that make a luxury car a luxury car are in english, so they are of no use to them. it is awfully contradictory for a people obsessed with industriousness and maintaining economies of scale to have things that are completely useless. i guess that this family is rich enough to not care about being able to read the gps screen in their new bmw.

the birthday party was quite entertaining and i was very popular as all of the kids got a chance to practice the english that they had been learning at school. one little guy was especially funny. he asked me if i liked living in china. i told him that it was really cool. he had a very confused look on his face and asked me why. when i responded with the standard, diplomatic answer of, “the people are all really nice,” he looked even more confused and said, “what people have you been talking to?” i found this to be extremely funny and came clean with him, that it wasn’t an ideal place to be. he appreciated my honesty.

a few days after the birthday party, i was invited to attend a housewarming party for one of the extended family members of the people for whom i am working. when people here move into a new house, they throw huge blowouts and this one was in a giant room of a posh restaurant. before things got underway, everyone was chatting, smoking and not letting a single toothpick go unused, per usual. all of the guests sat down and all of a sudden the lights turned off and disco balls began shining, smoke machines were going full-blast, lasers projected designs of happy faces and stars on the walls and of all things, the theme song from the magnificent seven began to play. as quickly as it started, it ended, and no one in the room seemed to be impressed by this. it seemed as if this is something that happens at every gathering. maybe it is.

a man jumped onto a stage at one end of the room and began yelling into the microphone. chinese people love microphones. they have some sort of obsession with them that, like most things here, i can’t quite wrap my head around. everyone applauded at intervals of the man’s speech and then the food was served. it is easy for me to eat at these kinds of places because the head of whatever animal is being presented is always on the plate. i had never eaten piglet before. well, maybe i had. i guess i never would have known it without the head of the animal being displayed.

they do a great job with doing different things with shrimp here and all of the shrimp dishes are always fantastic. the shrimp that were served at this meal were served whole in their shells as usual, but this time, everyone was eating the entire thing, head and all. i tried this but found that it was not worth the trouble that came after eating one whole, which included spending ten minutes picking the shell and legs out of your teeth. this could be part of the appeal, as these people love picking their teeth almost as much as they love screaming into microphones. i decided it was more effective to peel the shell off of the damn thing and just eat the meat. it certainly tasted better.

the night after the party, i walked around the corner to the market near my apartment to get some drinks and a snack. while i was on my way, i noticed a very large and very dead rat in the street. it was the first one i had seen in over a month here, which is why it attracted my attention. dead rats and lizards and things of that nature are extremely common in cambodia and people there are way more hungry than they are here. i bought a bottle of iced tea and a bag of cookies and headed home. as i turned the corner, i noticed that a person was holding the rat that had been in the street and that person then turned and took the rat back into his house. if my cantonese were any better,

i would have taken the time to explain to the man that i had just seen something on the news about the prices for pig products dropping below the price of corn, forcing the government to put a floor in place – surely he could spring for at least a trotter. maybe he knows something the who doesn’t know, that you can get swine flu from eating pork. or maybe its just that dead rats are in season this time of year.

now i know why i haven’t seen many dead rats around town.

a few hygiene issues

i haven't been sleeping very much (or at all, really) since i have been in china because i can't seem to adjust to the sheet of plywood that i have for a bed. its not literally a sheet of plywood, but it might just as well be one. i took these pictures last week from the balcony of my apartment. the one on the left was taken at 7 a.m. and the one on the right at 7 p.m. shunde is a city of a little over one million people and it is astonishing how dirty it is, even after having been to other drastically underdeveloped places around asia and also to massive cities. this place makes bangkok look like something about which al gore could only hope to dream.

this place, however, is quite developed. in fact, it seems to be drastically overdeveloped. there are highrise apartment complexes all over the place. these places just can't be full because there is nowhere for all of these people to work in this city, unless they are driving an hour each way to guangzhou. they could be, but it seems unlikely given the way in which these people operate.

while i was on my way to hong kong and macau a few weeks ago, i met a dutch man who was very funny and the first person i had met in shunde who spoke fluent english since i came here. he was, of course, leaving. we were joking about the swine flu outbreak and as i write i am remembering that we were going through hong kong border checkpoints joking about it on may 1st, the day that the first case was confirmed in hong kong. anyway, he was talking about a previous business trip to china, which was before the sars outbreak in 2003. he recalled seeing a sign in an elevator that read, "no spitting."

before coming to this part of the world, i was under the impression that people in asia were obsessed with cleanliness, that it was something over which they took great pride. i found this to be the case in cambodia, where people would sweep the dirt off of their floors made of dirt until their brooms were worn all the way down. they did the best with the cards they were dealt. people in thailand are of a similar mindset. but the people in china, at least in this city, really are not concerned with cleanliness, hygiene or generally just doing things that are in the best interest of one's health. i tried to find dental floss the other day to no avail. the concept of a daily shower is lost.

these people don't have the same viable excuse as the rest of seriously impoverished asia, or even the rest of seriously impoverished china - they all have running water, electricity, cars, etc. both of the apartments i have lived in here have given me nightmares. i couldn't sleep in the first one most nights because it was so disgusting. i am still cleaning up after the previous tenants of my second place.

instead of taking their garbage from their apartments to the garbage bin on the ground floor of the building, people just let it pile up in front of their doors until someone else handles the situation. certainly it saves them the trip, but it also attracts massive amounts of massive cockroaches, rats and other critters. it doesn't seem to me to be overly difficult to take out the trash with you when you leave the building. it is what i do each day to keep bugs out of my apartment, but all of my neighbors keep so much waste around that there is nothing more i can do to combat the bugs than keep a full arsenal of various anti-bug weaponry on me at all times.

i guess these people are used to having filthy, disease ridden insects and rodents in their general vicinity, but there is no reason for that kind of thing. there is no reason to spit in an elevator or anywhere else for that matter. there is no reason to use the horn on your car when you are turning instead of your blinker. since nobody pays attention to horns being honked any longer, i asked one of the people that i work with what they do to get someone's attention when there is an actual traffic emergency. this question was met with utter confusion and is a perfect example of the disparity in methods of logical reasoning between the east and west.

a welcome break

after spending almost four consecutive weeks without having a real conversation in english with another person or being able to successfully order and consume food, the expiration of my chinese visa was the most welcome pain in the neck i could have come up with. this meant that i had to leave the country for a period of time to have the visa renewed and now here i sit in a swanky hotel in hong kong enjoying my break from the monotony of shunde. monotony is an understatement of the highest degree.

hong kong is what you would get if you put new york and london in a blender and then poured out the mix onto a series of islands in asia. it is a truly wonderful city, architecturally reminiscent of vancouver. i guess i should now reword that thought and say that vancouver is architecturally reminiscent of hong kong. the throngs of people are everywhere, in crosswalks, on the mtr, in restaurants, and for the first time in my experiences in big cities, i truly enjoyed it. there is something very different about this city that is quite difficult to verbalize. whatever that x-factor is, it certainly is a great one.

i made my way around the city today to the best of my abilities. traveling via mtr to all of the must see markets and massive edifices, photographic opportunities were ample and duly observed. regretfully my lack of unadulterated internet access prevents me from putting them online at present. the street in which nothing is sold except live fish is quite the treat, especially when the people kill, scale and clean the fish on the spot before they are wrapped and dispensed to the patrons. the first few instances of this aren't exactly pleasant, but once the initial issues with fish that are still moving while they are being cleaned are overcome, the workmanship with which the fish peddlers operate is quite impressive. omnipresent on this street were the feral cats for obvious reasons.

also made it through a massive outdoor market of any sort of "engrish" t-shirt you could find. things with slogans such as "death is egzalent" abound and it seems that those who purchase the shirts either don't know what they say or are trying to make some attempt at irony, as almost everyone in hong kong speaks english fairly well. it was quite interesting for me to observe all of these traditional markets stuck in between the alleys of one of the major financial centers in the world. in the shadow of the aig, bank of america and hsbc buildings, you can get a fish scaled and gutted for 35 hong kong dollars.

i think i could live here for some time.