From London Heathrow Airport

12/11/08 (or was it 11/12/08?)

India got one last jab at my wallet when a guy offered to escort me through the Bangalore airport to show me where to go. He was completely unnecessary as all the signs were in English and the airport is built on a straight line that leads to the check-in counter, but before I realized that he was on me like a fly. Like so many other people I met in the customer service industry of India, he had no idea what he was doing. He seemed to know as little about the airport as me, since he led me the opposite direction of the gate, then stopped and asked a security guard for directions. He escorted me to the security checkpoint, even though I told him he was not needed, and when there he stuck out his hand for a tip. I gave him a 2 rupee piece. He said, "that is very small tip". Then I began to lay into him. Before I could really get into a good grove of insults I noticed people were looking at us -I was making a scene and the guy still had his hand open to me. I gave him my last American dollar, way more than he had been worth, and left the scene. I now understand that when guides talk about the pickpockets of India, they are speaking metaphorically.
Take this adventure for instance: For our final tourist trap Tori and I decided to go to Bangalore Palace, the summer home of the original royal family of the Bangalore region. We paid a foreigner fee of Rs 200 (locals paid Rs 5) for one of the most disappointing and depressing tours I've ever taken. Before the tour I looked along the wall at all the former princes and rulers who had resided at the palace. They all looked regal and magnificent dressed in silk and gold, until I got the the final picture, that of the current prince. He was in a discolored tuxedo with the top button undone so his rolls of extra flesh would have room, his hair was unkempt, his eyes pointed different directions, he was quite clearly and through no fault of his own - autistic. The prince's unconventional decoration tastes were evident throughout the tour. We'd be shown ancient sculptures and ruby studded crowns then, in a glass case, would be a chewed up and chocolate smeared plastic doll. The prince had a thing for tacky concrete golf statues you see in the corner of garden centers, the one where the guy is holding the club in follow-through position with a cartoonish look on his face as if he hit the ball somewhere he ought not have. These statues were everywhere. Every corner, every hallway, underneath ancient tapestries, in lines on top of grand oak tables, on top of taxidermied elephant feet, where ever there wasn't an ancient artifact or symbol of royal grandeur you'd see a golf statue or some other awful piece of junk, the likes of which you could buy off street vendors just outside the palace gates. The palace had a few redeeming features, such as the head of a murderous elephant who sacked a town in the 1800s, but beyond the austistic juxtapositions of relics and crap that made you feel bad for giggling at, there is only a frumpy tourist guide who demands an extra Rs. 50 for taking 15 minutes out of his busy schedule of daytime TV to show you how far the Indian royalty has fallen.
P.s. I wasn't allowed to take pictures because I didn't want to pay the $20 picture fee.
On our way back to the hotel we stopped at the Indian museum of science and industry. A sample of every piece of technology that has passed through India, from Soviet jets to Chinese steam engines, is represented within the industrial warehouse-looking halls. Posters with advanced math equations and jargon-filled explanations that would make a masters student scratch their chin went alongside models of ping-pong balls zooming around a pneumatic tube, symbolizing electron transfer or t-cells in the bloodstream or whatever.
That night, Tori and my last in India together, we rode rickshaws around town and stopped at the best night club in the world: Nasa Bar. Nasa Bar is what an Indian who has grown up watching sci-fi movies thinks the inside of a space shuttle looks like. Black lights, dry ice mist on the ground, lasers, stainless steel tables, trance music, pictures of American astronauts, movie aliens, and other planets. It was the coolest bar of my life. Even the stairway to the entrance was made from one of those stair-trucks you see docked to local airline jets at the airport.
But I should say that every bar in India is awesome. There aren't many since Indians don't typically drink much or go out at night, so most of the bars are aimed at tourists and they are all more elegant than anything I've ever been to in the states. Waiters wear bow-ties and pressed linen uniforms for crying out loud. This policy even extends to fast food joints where wait staff and glass drinking containers are expected.

A last note on travel in India:
India is big on getting as many people employed as possible. The bus, for instance, has a driver, a ticket taker, a back watchman to catch people sneaking on, and sometimes a guard. Each person has a whistle to alert the driver of whats going on using some sort of code.
Traffic is chaos and operates under the same mentality as a crowded high school hallway. People usually stick to one side of the street to go forward, but not always. People driving too recklessly might get yelled at by the authorities, but usually get away. And the biggest most aggressive drivers have the right of way.
The most common traffic jam occurs at bridges where only one large vehicle can pas at a time. Two big trucks might be at a face off on either side of the bridge. Motorcycles and scooters will fill every in in between and writhe their way through like maggots. If one of the trucks backs up a car might try to squeeze in. Once we were at a standoff like this for six hours, but they can go on for days.
Appointments in India are never for exact times because it is impossible to gauge how long it will take to get around. Even the trains don't have a perfectly exact schedule, though they try.

On the airplane home I woke up in a stupor brought on from flight exhaustion and free liquor courtesy of British Air. I compiled this list of ways air travel could be improved.
1. All seats should fully recline for better sleeping
2. It should be federal regulation that airplanes serve free booze
3. Planes should occasionally fly low so I can feel the speed and experience the scenery better
4. Aerobatics are acceptable
5. People of similar ages and interests should be seated together
6. Turbulence is a fact of life and flight paths should never change to avoid it

Gun and Tourist Trap Hill

My skin is very sweet, like marmalade on a bun or Fruit Rollups. I was born this way and although it makes me popular with women who have a sweet tooth, I attract bugs like a living 5'11", three dimensional fly paper without the stickiness, allowing bugs to swoop in for multiple bites. Cuts and scrapes are quick to infect and slow to heal in the high altitudes so the swollen red bug bites I've been scratching are starting to look cystic. Otherwise today is looking promising, we plan to go to something called Gun Hill and see what trouble we can get into. 11/9/2008 @ 10:00am, after about 13 hours sleep in the high mountain air.

At 6989 feet, higher than any peak east of the Rockies, Gun Hill is the tallest land mass in the area that can be reached by normal pasty tourists. There is a cable car, or "rope ride" that yanks people from the shopping mall below up to the top. The cable car was built in the 1970s and like so many other things in India it looks like it hasn't been serviced since. Miniature models of Gun Hill made of spent grease adorn the ground where the pulley and the cable meet. The engine putts, bangs, and shutters like it's missing a spark plug. Everybody inside the cable car held their loved one tightly as it swayed on its tether a thousand feet above the ground, the cable car of love, it was tragically cute.
Gun Hill is named as such because in the Colonial days there was a cannon up there that used to blow off a shot at noon so people could adjust their watches. The cannon has since been melted to make cheap little bells and miniature Vishnus to sell to tourist or something and what exists in its place is what I call the Tallest Tourist Trap on Earth. Lining the plateau was a host of cheap carnival amusements like the one where you throw a dart at an under-inflated balloon and it bounces back and hits your eye (I had a bad experience once at the Iowa Stare Fair). In the middle a bunch of cheap crap shanties were set up to sell little bells and Vishnu dolls. I bought a bell to give to my aunt which broke the second I put it in my suitcase. It was smelted on site and had air bubbles in the metal, probably a hazard of high altitude metal work. I found a guide who had trained telescopes on certain points on interest such as the Doon Valley road that brought us to Mussoorie. Even at my great height I could make out the terror in the faces of passengers on the busses and the deranged excitement of the driver. Another telescope was pointed at a mountain called Srikantha. At 21,000 feet it is the biggest thing I've ever seen. Even from Gun Hill, over three hundred miles away it stood out like the downtown Chicago skyscrapers viewed from O'hare. The curvature of the Earth, which blocks anything at eye-level over 5 miles away, could only cover the the bottom half of Srikantha. If I ever come back to India I plan on spending the whole time in the Himilayas.
Meanwhile, my deathly ill friend Luther rented a scooter and rode it, sniffling and delirious, for a week into the heart of the Himilayas. He got so high that plants ceased to grow and his scooter hadn't enough air to run properly. He says he doesn't really remember getting back to the scooter rental but his pictures of desolate mountain roads and up-close shots of the very peaks I saw through the Gun Hill telescopes made me resolve to come back to the mountains some day.

A rotating restaurant that has broken down is just an oddly shaped regular restaurant. Tori and I ate lunch in the regular dinning hall of the Himilaya's only stationary rotary eatery and I cried CRIED over how spicy the food was. My chicken tikka masala left chemical burns on my fingers and when I took a drink of my Haywards 5000 Heavy Beer I could hear the phiiiish of steam blowing out of my ears. The waiters were having a grand time watching their poison cook me from the inside. The cooking staff came out at one point to watch me sit, panting, tongue hanging out, gasping for water. Tori got some good pictures.

For most of our travels in Mussoorie we used bikeshaws powered by feeble old men who were barely up to the task of hauling 300 pounds of combined American meat up cliffs. We tipped well but the final bikeshaw made off especially well. He only had to take us down hill from our hotel to the bus station, but midway he stopped for a white cab who said he'd take us straight to the main bus/train terminal in Darha Dun. We payed the bikeshaw guy for his trouble and he got an extra throwback from the cabbie, garnering him about 300 rupees, or a full day's pay for about 15 minutes of downhill work.

The Cabbie drove through the night and the next day we appeared at a bus station that would take Tori and I back to Bangalore where we would spend our final night together until she returned to the states in late December. But before that we had to wait 3 hours, Three Freaking Hours at a one lane bridge. The problem with these one-lane situations in a country without driving rules is that people don't take turns. Everybody on the road charges the bridge from both directions and honks in a gridlock face-off while motorcycles and scooters fill every available foot of room. If a major congestant, like a bus, decides to back down and let somebody through, a thousand motorcycles zoom in to take its spot. The only way these situations get resolved is all the motorcycles wiggle though and pass, then all the small cars, then the trucks, and finally the busses and semis, but this can take hours and the resulting traffic jam can go on for a dozen miles in either direction. From this I've learned that when a travel agent says it will take this long to get somewhere, it is truely an estimate in the broadest sense of the word, nothing is guaranteed in the world of Indian Travel.

Tori bid me a tear filled goodbye at 4AM when I got into the Kia Sorrento shuttle car and headed for the airport. We traveled on the new National 6-lane Expressway at 120kmph (75mph) setting an Indian ground speed record. This may not sound like much, considering American drivers hit 70+ every time they get on the interstate, but in India -where trains are capped at 55mph but rarely get up that high and most city traffic never gets past 30mph, and even the highway has speed bumps and pedestrian crossings- 75 is dangerously quick.

In my next post -the last of my India series- I'll go over my adventures in Bangalore airport and my overall impressions of India.

Austin Part II

I went back to Austin in June of 2009 to visit some friends and got to go hiking and biking on the Greenbelt trail in Texas Hill Country. With 3 drivers on rotating shifts it took us 16 hours to drive from Iowa City to Austin, stopping only to refuel and buy fireworks. Highlight of the trip was when my friend Andy showed up to a Texas bro pool in a extra skimpy speedo. He got some looks, and a sunburn on the side of his butt.
The motorcycle photo came from a Texas size biker rally in downtown Austin. In a parade of bad-ass biker dudes on snorting Harleys there was this one bespectacled guy on a red scooter wearing sandals and carrying a pomeranian who rode right in formation with the 1%ers then parked his scooter with them.

Our Hotel in the Himmys

Nice thing about Mussorrie is that a lot of the local buildings say, "Property not for sale" over the doors. Good to see that the locals aren't selling out to big business. Our hotel is a 100 year old English Cottage. We pay about $10 or Rs. 500 a night. Our room is quiet and faces the valley. The shower is freezing cold but the bathroom is private and westernized. After the debacle in Delhi and the annoyances of Hadiwar we almost gave up on the Himilayas, but I'm glad we didn't. -November 9th, 2008

New Day Himalayan Happy Time

Most Indian beds are designed for a man no larger than 5'10". I am 5'11".
Should I ever go back to India I'm going to make sure the Himalayas are my primary destination. The town we're in is basically built on the side of a cliff, with hotel balconies hanging over the edge. Mussorrie is the town's name. It was built by the Brits 150 years ago as a refuge from the summer heat. It is so temperate here that people are wearing down jackets and mittens. Though because I have just come from Iowa in November, I am wearing shorts and am quite pleased about it. The bus trip was insane. Switchbacks so tight, taken at such speed that you could spit, come around the switchback, and have it hit you. On almost every turn our three-ton fully loaded city bus tripoded when a wheel lifted off the ground with the lean of the bus. Opposing traffic came within inches of our bus and judging from the scars on the side panels there have been a few side-swipes; a scary thought considering there are no guard rails on this pot-holed, two meter wide car trail on the edge of a mile high cliff.
The town before Mussorrie, at the foot of the Himilayas, was called Haridwar, or Hadiwar, or Hadwar, or however you want to spell it, each of the previous examples was taken from a local sign. It is the Holiest village in India due to its proximity to both the Ganges and the train lines. Tori and I ducked down an alley and touched the Ganges, garnering us some dirty looks from the locals. Hadiwar is an unfriendly, noisy, expensive town with two redeeming features: nobody on the street bothered me or tried to sell me shit, and our hotel room was the "honeymoon suite" complete with framed baby pictures on the walls. Man alive, you should see the size of the rats around here. They shake the walls when they run by. Hasn't anybody ever heard of a cat?

Delhi Kidnapping Scam

I've pretty much put off this story for a year. It made me mad just thinking about it. But I'm over it now and think it's kinda funny. We begin during the night of the previous day then abruptly switch to the next. There's lots of time travel in this blog, you'll get used to it.

Today I was to organize a day-adventure of Delhi. We met two dudes in a Cafe Coffee Day who suggested a travel agent who hooked us up with an english speaking tour guide and a car.
...a few hours later
Right now, we just bought a vacation in Kashmir for the low low price of $200, including airfare, from the travel agent who helped organize our Delhi adventure. Tori is busing herself reading horror stories about the area. Apparently Clinton named Kashmir the most dangerous place for Americans in 1994. This should be fun. I am a little worried about the way we met our travel agent. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but perhaps the guys we met in the coffee shop were planted there to lure tourists. Seems unlikely though.
...The next day...
Not unlikely. Turns out the Kashmir thing was a big scam. Next morn Tori and I wake up at 7AM and checked out the Embassy and they said it was probably cool, but who knows (lot of help our government is). Tori went back to the travel agent and pressed him for more info. By the time I got there he had given up on trying to sell us to Kashmir, and hadn't given any further info. He tried booking us to other places, but we just wanted to leave. I saw that we weren't getting out of this situation for free so I suggested to Tori that we take leave to the Cafe Coffee Day and roll over some things. While there, the travel agent sent his lackeys to spy on us from the window. I told Tori my plan to let the dude keep $40 in exchange for a refund of the rest of our $200 each. When we got back to the travel office, located in a urine-river back alley where young hoodlums parked there mopeds and got in fights, the travel agent had all his posse waiting in the office. There were about 8 men, two of which being the guys who initially met us at the coffee shop, and they all said they were part of the agent's family. So, with the utmost care and tact, using our sweetest, most sickening midwestern manners, Tori and I negotiated a $308 refund out of our combined $400. You better believe we ran for the hills after we got our credit card receipts. Tori went as far as to cancel her cards.
...An hour later...
We went to the Gov't travel office, directly below our hotel it turns out, and they told us how the scam works: somebody makes contact with us at some neutral location like a bar or coffee shop who most likely gets a little side cash. They lead the unwitting foreigner to the office where a slew of workers make offers, some of which really are amazing deals, in order to soften the victim up to purchase one of these big Kashmir vacations. Once the vacation is bought the foreigners are wisked away to Kashmir where they become totally at mercy to whatever town they get stuck in. The town places the victim in a houseboat where the only transport is by taxi boat. All excursions to land are planned and require constant payment. There are few doctors and lots of guys with guns. And there are no American embassies or means of escape until the town has bled you dry and your plane comes to take you back to Delhi.
Guess we should have known better when the travel agent didn't ask for our passports or emergency contacts or even our names. Close one, eh?

Long time, No write

Here's a picture from the bike shop I work at in Iowa Citay, World of Bikes. I break chains like that all day. I am kick-ass.

My Diary

I kept a journal for the first 10 days of my Indian adventure but lost it on the overnight bus ride between Panji and Mumbai. The following is taken more or less verbatim from the replacement journal that Tori bought me.

So, beginning yesterday, we separated from the group and embarked on a 15 hour bus, jet, taxi ride to Delhi. The Bus was miserable because I was on the tail end of my sickness and coughed the demons out all night. I also had to pee and the bus had no bathroom nor did it stop much but kept a pace of about 25 miles an hour, the highest speed traffic ever gets up to in India. I did get to see a good Bollywood movie about some Douche and his nerdy friend. The douche, Farah Khan, seduced a secret agent and tried to get his friend laid. Then there was some dancing and a few songs and somehow things got resolved. The best part was when the douche's wife found out he was flirting with a secret agent. She threw a big fit and slapped him then he apologized and all was forgiven. The movie sucked, actually.
We stayed in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) for only a few hours, much to Tori's regret. Mumbai is the fashion capitol of India and she was dissapointed that she missed the glamour. What I saw of Mumbai leads me to believe it is the dirtiest and most polluted of Indian cities and I was glad to leave it (this all takes place a month before the terrorist attacks).
From the bus I got into a taxi and sputtered to the airport. I tried bargaining my bottle of Smirnoff for the ride, figuring they wouldn't allow it on the plane, but the airport security told me I could bring it so long as I didn't drink any on the plane. I paid the taxi and gave the security guy a firework.
The plane we flew on was owned by an airline called SpiceJet. What a stupid name, "SpiceJet." I sounds like a novelty, like a toy investment for some rich kid or a marketing group fresh out of American business school. The other major airline, Kingfisher, is owned by a beer company. I'm not sure if I would have preferred to fly with them or not.
The interior of the SpiceJet was new, but cheap. The seats looked and felt like padded lawn chairs screwed into the floor. Though they could recline, the passanger behind would have their legs squished, and the food trays extended all the way to my stomach. The exterior of the plane was covered in dirt, as if it recently landed on a gravel runway.
My introduction to Delhi was nice. Tori and I toured the city (the cleanest and best maintained in all of India) and found a room in the Janpath Guest House, an expensive mosquito breeding ground. After a nap we explored a Bazaar where I bought a couple hookahs. As we were leaving we set off the metal detectors but the guards didn't investigate us. They did bother the each and every Indian that entered the bazaar, even if they didn't set off the metal detectors.
My biggest learning adventure happened the next day, keep reading.

Angel Island/Could We Get a Boat that's a little less Sinky?

Break from India for a sec. Angel Island is like the Staton Island of San Francisco. My sister Jane and I took the S.S. Gash, a ferry with a five foot long stab wound in the side, on a day trip down to the island -a magical journey into the affluent California sea scape. As the first people on the boat, we got a killer spot next to a window. We avoided the outdoors because my microfiber hiking shirt, above-the-knee cargo shorts, and fanny pack were too flimsy to bear the harsh sea wind. A Note, I was not embarrased in my hiking outfit. On the contrary, I blended in nicely with all the yuppies in their Colombia pullovers, camelpacks, and Smartwool socks. Jane just wore jeans and a sweater; we looked down on her.
There was a sailboat race going on that day and we got the chance to see these magnificent eight-man racing yachts tacking through the wind while the crews raced from one side to the other for counter balance, boats nearly capsizing as our ferry and 3-man crew cruised past.
The Island was pretty typical for and island. We hiked, saw nature, got tired. There was a cool tree that looked like it was bleeding. I think it was magical. Or maybe it is all of nature that is magical. Just kidding, nature sucks. We tried to have a picknick at the summit but all these damn bees kept getting in out business. By the way, although the summit of Angel Island is one of the highest peaks in the area, at 1000 feet it is still about 2oo feet lower than my parents house in Des Moines.
On our descent we saw these goofy twig trees with giant pinecones, that and a hiking path that ran along a cliff. If we were severely intoxicated we could have stumbled to our dooms.
Speaking of which, on our way back to port the captain made a stop in a well-to-do Marin County sea town. There was a seaside bar that the captain presumably went to where these middle age ladies did milf dances (hands in the air, a-rythmic gyrating, awkward spins) in full view of our ferry. Since we were all bored on the boat, waiting for the captain to drink his fill, the lot of us sat and watched, critiqueing, imitating, enjoying.
When we finally got going again the captain drove us within throwing range of Alcatraz (and some smaller sea vessels) then crashed into the dock, more or less, which helped explain where the gash on the side of the ship came from.

Evil Northern Goa is a bad place

If ever you are planning a vacation to North Goa, don't. We were lured there by the promise of crazy Isreali party beaches that we later learned were made illegal because people kept getting raped.
We took the ten mile, hour and a half long journey at the height of my sickness, when my head was stuck in a vice that made my nose leak and my balance faulty. Add to that Goa is very hot, around 90 degrees plus humidity. There're more trees and fewer roads in South Goa so I didn't notice the heat as much, but in the north it's unbearable. Of course nothing has air conditioning.
The driver who was bringing us to the north said he'd cut us a deal if we visited a couple stores. I sat outside for the first store but the second I checked out because I saw a running air conditioning unit taped and nailed to the outside. Here is where I learned that Indians don't understand air currents. The A/C unit was on the bottom floor, next to the entrance, pointed at a wall. Maybe it's because of my spoiled American upbringing but I think if you're going to spend all that money powering and maintaining an A/C unit you should put it somewhere useful. Instead we were stuck in a sweltering top-floor showroom looking at fine silk carpets that sold for around $900 U.S. dollars. After hanging around for a respectful half hour and listening to the store owner's sales pitch we politely declined to buy anything.
Geckos really are man's best friends, not dogs. Geckos are small, eat bugs, live on the ceiling and walls, and stay out of my way; dogs do the opposite. I tried explaining this to Tori at the thatch-roofed hut we were staying at in the peasant town of Anjuna, but she couldn't get past the sound of scurrying above her as she tried to sleep.
The next day at 4 am we woke up and went for a walk to the beach. Some kids and I found volcanic looking rocks with nifty tidal pools by the sea. I tried to catch some creatures but they were too fast, then we walked to a beach where cows were lying around and dropping grenades in the sand. Back at the hut, Tori rented a moped, i think. I was feverish and a little delirious. She disappeared for the day and came back with cold medication while I sat in a hammock and hung on to consciousness by reading comic books. At some point in the day Luther, Tauti, and Evan stopped by and talked to me. Later that night we moved to an air conditioned beach side hotel.
My main problem with North Goa is that it's almost impossible to leave the house. As soon as I stepped out the door fifty people would surround me and try to snake my money. Constantly, everywhere I went, people just wouldn't leave me alone. At one point I was sitting on the beach, trying to enjoy the tide's ebbing, when a gang of gypsies pounced on me. I lost my temper and threatened the lot with torture and ruin, but they just didn't get the point.
Eventually I figured out that I had to store my stuff at a restaurant and buy something, then their staff would chase the gypsies, beggars, and crap toters away.
Swimming was an option too, but barely. There were nazi life guards posted every 20 yards on the beach an in the water. We weren't allowed to go deeper than our waists and we had to avoid "rip tide" zones. It was crowded too and creepy Indian men kept trying to touch Tori.
One of the saddest things I saw was the cruelty of higher caste people to lower castes. There was one kid making sand castles while two higher caste kids ran around him playing soccer with their dad. Every once in a while the high caste kids would intentially run through the castle or kick the ball at the kid. The dad not only didn't care that his kids were total shits, but he stepped through the castle once too. The sand castle kid's dad was nearby too, but he couldn't do anything because he was a lower caste. I wanted to get in the soccer dad's face, tell him to clean up his act, but Tori advised me not to. Guy probably didn't speak English anyway.
That isn't to say that Goa is all bad. As whiteys my crew and I were invited to exclusive clubs that played Euro trance with laser shows while transvestite looking ladies danced on the balcony. When not partying we could sit on the beach side, smoke hookah, and get drunk on weak martinis.
The oldest and biggest eastern churches are located in the town of Old Goa. Composed of one room big enough to fit a blue whale, intricately decorated and painted with at least 5 different colors per square foot, all hand painted, and sitting on the verge of collapse, the churches of Old Goa were really nifty. They also have a cool museum devoted to 500-year-old paintings of explorers and magistrates. Some of the paintings had disturbing depictions of Christians being dismembered by natives and it made me wonder how these burnable paintings survived so long.
We saw some army guys at a local restaurant. They had soviet looking assault rifles sporting patches of bare metal where the black paint flaked off and stood a foot taller than most other Indians. When they came in the whole staff stopped what they were doing to wait on them. I don't think they paid either. I was surprised by how old they were too. they all had gray hairs and lines on their faces.
After 5 days it was nice to leave Goa, the beach bum life was wearing on me. Little did I know the greatest trial was yet to come when we made for Delhi.