One Elderly Indian Man + One Pair of Scissors/Clippers = 1 Very Bad Haircut

Hello again all,

Two posts in 2 days aren’t you the lucky ones, I know that I’m certainly not! From the title of the post, you can probably judge what this is going to be about! I went to go and get my hair cut yesterday and there was, shall we say, a small mistranslation between the barber and myself. Mr barber took it on himself not to put the guard on the clippers and cut a section of my hair so short that if I had let him carry on would have made me look like, depending on your preference, A) A leukemia patient or B) A prisoner in a concentration camp. As such I decided not to let him carry on and after much shouting and apologies from Mr ‘I don’t know how the hell to cut hair’, he cut around it attempting not to make it look so bad. Sorry to tell you Mr Barber but you absolutely did not succeed.

You think that is the end of it? Oh no, not happy with making me look like a prat, he decided to make me look like a complete and utter retard. Taking it upon himself to trim the small hairs on the back of my head and around my ears (finally realising what his job title was), he proceeded to shave a curve around the top of each of my ears and at the top of my neck. What’s the problem I hear you say? Well when underneath said hair is skin the color of an albino polar bear then the effect is something that, well the effect is shit.

In other words I have been used and abused by the barber so that my hair with a little more work on it could have looked like something from the topiary competition at the Chelsea Flower Show. There are, of course some pictures for your amusement below.

Ciao xx

Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Udaipur, Jodhpur and Kate!

Hello all!

Plenty has happened since my last post, not sure I am going to be able to get it all in. But i will try and write this the best I can whenever I have time over the next few days. (So far I’ve been trying to do this for about 7 days….)

So Delhi turned out to be much crazier than Mumbai. Pahar Ganj was a heady mixture of sweat, sewage and spices, definitely not a place where you could expect to get any time to yourself! Having said all of that I had no problems at all with anyone, apart from the rickshaw drivers who kept trying to run me over but hey you can’t expect everything right? Did a few monumenty and museumey type things for a couple of days while I adjusted to the pace a little bit and gaged what the city was about.

Kate arrived on the 15th, despite telling me that she would be here on the 14th, so I checked into the hotel that I’d booked, slightly better in class than the 400rps a night place that I was staying in before…..it had a shower! Was actually quite nice to have a real bed with sheets and air con! Picked her up at the airport the next day which all went according to plan. I did think she might have died of shock on the drive back from the airport, traffic in Delhi is not something that you want to mess about with, lord knows how no one hits each other but so far that is exactly what they manage to do There were a few sharp intakes of breath from Kate throughout the journey though.

The first day in Delhi with Kate (well the only day as she turned up a day ‘late) was spent visiting the Ghandi Smitri, place where Ghandi was assassinated. It was as you can probably imagine quite poignant and peaceful. The rooms where he spent his last 100 days were displayed as well as his glasses and sandels, all that kind of thing. There was however, the strangest exhibition upstairs. If you can imagine then it was like the Tate Modern Meets Ghandi. Loads of strange interactive displays and exhibits that quite frankly made me leave after about 10 minutes. After retreating to the air-conditioned oasis that was TGI Fridays….what’s that, curry in India? I’ve never heard such a preposterous idea….we had an early night as there was a 6.15am train the next day to Agra.

We made it to Agra with no problems, except almost being conned into having our ticket ‘checked’ as it was an e-ticket. Not being on the top of my game at that time of the morning (no time for coffee), the guy who had been standing next to the security guards got us as far as the road outside and the various dodgy travel agents before I realised what was going on, but common sense managed to strike me and we went back to the station. Agra, as I am sure you all well know is the home of the Taj Mahal. What it is not home to however is a clean, unpolluted, nice smelling atmosphere. My god the place stinks. Garbage all around the streets, semi-open sewers, cow shit everywhere and the like. Ok, so we were not staying in the nicest part, budget and all that, but even so. The hotel anyway was ok, although it was about 40C and we had no air-con, the room was essentially a hot box, not something that made adjusting to the heat any easier for Kate. It did have stunning views of the Taj from the rooftop though, the best in town so I had heard. Amazing to see the sun go down and the color of the building change, eventually becoming a dark silhouette on the star lit sky. The first day was spent visiting Akbar’s Mausoleum and Agra Fort, both very cool in their own way. Some of the structures that are in this country acting as tombs or symbols of love are just insane when you see them in the flesh, so bloody big! Oh and we popped into the Oberoi hotel for a drink and lunch, I don’t think that opulent is quite the word I am looking for! Stupidly expensive lunch by Indian standards for what was very average food, the way they drowned the salad in dressing reminded me of LS6 in Leeds. The below picture is the view we had from the roof of the hotel:

The next day we got up to get to the Taj for 6am, the quietest and coolest part of the day, it was at least 40C in Agra. Despite appearences in photos and what not it really does seem quite ‘small’ in real life (the water in front especially), small but absolutely perfectly formed. It is truly stunning and set in some lovely grounds. Oh I forgot to mention that Kate was ill the day we went, a bit of a reaction to the heat, tiredness and food I think and she managed to be sick ON THE Taj….ok, not quite on the Taj, just outside of it, but still I think I should be allowed a bit of creative license here and there!

We decided that there was no point in staying in Agra for the extra night we had booked, especially in the sauna like room, so we hopped on a bus to Jaipur. Very grateful to Ramu at the bus stop who was a world of knowledge about decent places to stay and about cities in general. He sorted out a hotel for us as our original booking didn’t start until the day after and the place was lovely. Having Kate around is actually working out quite well, all these ‘luxury’ establishments that we are staying in! Well at least they have a shower.

Jaipur is a great place, we were staying just outside the centre, so away from the main hustle and bustle but only a short auto-rickshaw ride away. Beautiful sand stone havelis within the old town and the atmosphere of one big market place. The palace in the city was suitably opulent but perhaps the best thing and certainly the most revealing was the huge outdoor observatory dating from the late 1700s. Massive architectural instruments of astronomy were used to calculate the position of the heavenly bodies, it also boasts what is considered to be the worlds largest sundial that when read accurately, can be used to tell the time to an accuracy of about 2 seconds in local time. Many of the instruments have naturally been refurbished, a process that is still going on. The monkey temple, dedicated to the sun god afforded fantastic views over the city and an interesting walk up thanks to the hundreds of monkeys that were knocking around. All very friendly…except when they realised that you are carrying a bag of peanuts in your pocket and they decide that they would like said peanuts! We also visited the Amber Palace/Fort just outside of the city. An amazing building which for once had an equally good audio tour to explain it all for you. The style in which the rulers of the various parts of India used to live is quality, it makes an old English country house look like something out of Shameless. The use of gold, mirror, jewels, fabric and the like just seem to come together somehow. There was one room covered with thousands of tiny mirrors, that, when dark can be entirely lit by a single candle and the resulting reflections from the mirrors. The driver we had hired for 2 days usually works for businessmen coming over to Jaipur to buy jewels and what not (Jaipur is the centre of the jewel trade in India). He took us to a shop that allowed us to see where they actually cut and polish the rough stones from which the final article is then made, very interesting. It was good dose of reality however when we realised one of the workers must have been no more than 11 years old and was on a shift rotation, the small workshop was running 24 hours a day.

I’m wary of babbling and trying to cram in too much detail, but hopefully this is working out as some kind of outline from which you can imagine what we have been doing!

Oh before we leave Jaipur, we visited potentially the most amazing jewelery shop I have ever seen. No windows, just a security guard and a big door. Once the code had been entered to get in, all the lights came on and all you could see were masses of glittering stones and pieces of gold and silver. Much of the jewelerry of obviously based on Indian taste, much to big and heavy to wear in the UK but some of the detail just blew you away. Not to mention the size of the rubys, emeralds and diamonds that were on display! I quickly removed Kate from the shop and set upon the slightly less exilerating task of finding a shop that would sell me some decent boxer shorts.

Then we come a slight mistake. Somewhere, personally I blame it on Kate, I had managed to gain a day, i.e. I thought it was the 19th when actually it was the 20th. Now that would not usually be much of a problem except for the fact that I had booked first class overnight tickets on the train from Jaipur to Udaipur for the 19th and had reservations at a 4 bedroom colonial house in the countryside for the 20th and 21st. About 6pm I checked my email and found one from the guys who ran the house asking me why I hadn’t arrived at the train station as their driver had been waiting for 3 hours earlier in the day. Naturally this was all a bit of a shock and upon checking the dates and the train tickets I realised that I had made a slight boo boo. Cutting a long and painfully frustrating process short, I had to cut my losses and buy some rather expensive plane tickets to Udaipur for the next day and hope that the people at Devra would be kind enough to allow us to move the reservation back a day. That they were, with no extra charge and the place was amazing. Again, I won’t bore you with the details (or more of them), but the hosue was brilliant. Placed on a hill overlooking the lake and the lake palace in the distance, the rooms were massive, food great and the whole place had a feeling of calm. It helped that we were the only people there and had the best room as well! Being in somewhere so nice, not to mention someones house, did not stop Kate from putting her foot through one of the wooden sun beds and breaking one of the slights clean in half though….can’t take that girl anywhere.

Udaipur is definitely my favourite place so far in India, maybe favourite is not quite the word as it is much calmer, quieter and less polluted than many places but it really is beautiful. The City Palace is stunning inside and would be even if it wasn’t for the crystal gallery. This gallery contained such items as a crystal bed, crystal tables, crystal chairs, crystal pipes, crystal plates and well, more crystal. It was ordered from England many years ago by one of the rulers, unfortunately he died (at 25) before any of it arrived and it laid packed up in boxes for tens of years before being unpacked and displayed here. The largest collection in the world apparently and you can understand the claim.

The Lake Palace, now a luxury hotel that costs about $600 a night in a room that doesn’t even have a lake view (quite an achievement for a hotel that is situated IN a lake), is suitably pretty. We didn’t get a chance to go over, the only way is either to book for dinner (about 40 quid a head for a buffet) or to have a room, neither of which were within our limited financial reach. We did manage to see the 1934 Rolls Royce that was used in the Bond film Octopussy though, much of the filming was done in Udaipur, so that was quite cool.

From Udaipur we flew to Jodpur and the contrast could not have been more stark. Streets so narrow that some Americans could probably not walk down them, crammed with cows, scooters, auto-rickshaws and market stalls. Not to mention garbage of every type and some very pleasant open sewers. There really is not much to tell about our couple of nights there. We went to see Merengagh (spelling?) fort before we left which was great, but apart from that we spent all our time trying to figure out where to go next as I haven’t really sorted anything out. As such we ended up in Pushkar today, backtracking a bit but a destination in its own right. I will explain all aboyut Pushkar next time as my fingers are hurting and I need to go and check if Kate is awake for dinner yet!

Sorry about the length of time between this and my last post but I’ve been rather busy! I will try better in the following days and weeks.

If you had made it this far, first of all congratulations and second of all you will be pleased to know there are now about 100-150 photos of India now up on Flickr. I haven’t labelled them yet, but they are there! Mumbai, Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Jodpur and Udaipur all present and correct.

Ciao xx

Mumbai and Onwards to Delhi

Hello all,

So I’m in Delhi now, but I guess I should recount a few things that happened in Mumbai.  To be honest there isn’t an awful lot to tell.  I spent a lot of time just walking around and exploring, observing things I guess, rather than actually going to any particular sights.  I managed to get into the Prince of Wales Museum eventually, not that is was completely worth it.  Some fantastic temple rock carvings and incredibly detailed orante ivory tusks but apart from that it wasn’t the most interesting of places.  There are only so many daggers/knives/tea pots that you can look at in one sitting!

I went over to Elephanta Island for a couple of hours, 9km off the cost of Mumbai.  How long do you think that should take by boat?  15/20 minutes maybe?  Nope, an hour!  I don’t think I have ever been on a slower boat, and it wasn’t exactly small either.  You could run 9km in less time than it took us to get there.  Elephanta is basically a series of cave temples, not very big, built into the basalt rock of a relatively small island.  Rather than lots of detailed carvings, most of the sculptures were big representations of Shiva and the like.  Many of the caves didn’t actually have anything in them though, in fact it was really only the first cave with the large Shiva that was worth the trek to see, but you don’t know these things until you get there I suppose!  Got my first taste of the higher prices that foreigners pay out here as well, 20 rps for Indian nationals and 250rps for everyone else, the cheek!

Had a good couple of nights with a couple of English guys, some Dutch girls and some guys from Holland.  When you get a big group of people like that, you could be in a bar anywhere in the world, makes a nice ‘escape’ actually from the dusty, polluted world outside!

I left Mumbai to go to Delhi on Friday morning.  Got to the airport alright and then managed to miss my flight thanks to them not changing the status on the departures board to anything that resembled an indication that the flight was about to leave.  Oh and when I did realise, with a fair bit of time remaining until the flight left, security held me up for about 25 minutes trying to find something that didn’t exist in my bag.  They x-rayed my books individually for christs sake!  Who x-rays a book?!  Impossible to argue with them though, security in Indian aiports is crazy.  Even with the representative from the airline there they wouldn’t budge.   So I missed the flight.  Managed to get another one for a couple of hours later (for 65 quid, grrrrr) and got into Delhi yesterday afternoon.

I’m staying in the Paharganj area of the city, not far from the centre.  What a difference to Mumbai!  Crowded, noisy, dirty, numerous cows and other animals just wandering the streets and a plethora of very cheap rooms!  If you want to then you can go as low as about 120-150rps a night (1.50-2 pounds), it is however pretty basic!  I couldn’t find the place I was meant to be staying so just walked into a random place of the street, but pretty decent.  350rps a night, but it is clean(ish) and has a decent rooftop restaurant.

Haven’t gone around too much yet, just about to head down to Connaught Place to explore for a bit and try and find the hotel that Kate and I are staying in from Monday.

Health wise, I’m alright.  Getting used to the constant fumes, pollution, dush and other assorted smells (there are many) takes a while, I’m still not there yet.  A couple of dodgy days that I can’t decide whether they were due to the food I ate (veg lasagne last night…pretty good) or the local beer, only Kingfisher but it has all kinds of assorted additives and chemicals in it over here apparently.  I will carry on experimenting and try to isolate the cause….on second thoughts I might just go to the chemist and stock up on Loperamide!

I still haven’t found anywhere that has computers modern enough to allow me to upload my photos, I’ll keep trying but I’m not as hopeful as I once was!  Will try and find a mall or something.

Hope everyone is well, oh my new indian number is up but it is being a bit dodgy so I am alternating between that and my english number for now until I get it sorted.

Ciao

xx

Malaysia > India

Hello again all,

So as you can see from the title, I am no longer in Malaysia!  Before anyone asks what I did for the 4 days that I had in KL before flying over to Delhi, I will point out that I didn’t do an awful lot apart from getting my hair cut and milling around (it rained a fair bit, actually that is an understatement, it rained A LOT).  I did however spend a bit too much money on nice food, sushi and steak in one day is a little bit excessive I think!  So on Friday I made my way to KLIA (nice airport but a bit sterile) for my flight to New Delhi.

Flying internationally with Malaysian Airlines is like a blast from the past, guys in green suits and bow ties walking around with glasses of beer or whisky and water.  Shame that the entertainment was pretty poor but on the other hand I didn’t manage to ‘borrow’ a blanket and pillow that would come in very useful for my overnight stay in Delhi airport!  The flight did however run on time, which considering my recent past with airplane flights is pretty good!  Getting through Delhi airport wasn’t too bad, immigration took about an hour and the bags came through fairly quick, arrivals is very shabby though, it looks as though they are refurbing it.  Coming out of the airport was not as bad as I expected, plenty of people asking you if you wanted a taxi or a hotel but I thought that the onslaught was going to be much worse.  Managed to get a cab to the domestic terminal, well not so much a cab as a carriage of death.  My god, indian taxi drivers make thailand, malaysia and in some cases Loughborough seem like a driving school.  Absolutely crazy, you will have a 2 lane road that they will manage to get 4 ‘lanes’ of traffic through, every car/bike/cow/pedestrian for themselves seems to be the name of the game. 

I thought that spending 9 hours in Delhi airport would be a horrific experiance but once again I was wrong.  The domestic terminal was full of people (despite my cab driver telling me it would be closed and I should go to a nearby hotel).  Utilising the very comfortable pillow and blanket that I appropriated off the plane I managed to get a couple of hours sleep before flying onto Mumbai (or Bombay for those of you who still yearn for the days of the white Raj….fozzy).

So then Mumbai!  To say that there were a few contradictions on the cab ride from the airport to Colaba where I am staying is an understatement.  There is a slum in the middle of the airport, the runways seem to have just been built around it. After passing by a Rolls Royce and Porsche garage we were then straight back into a poorer neighbourhood.  Mumbai has a population of about 15 million people, around 22000 people per km2.  Is the home of Bollywood (producing 800 movies a year!) has around 40000 sex workers and about 55% of its population live in slums.  In short, whilst it is a hugely cosmopolitan centre for the arts, home to the Indian National Stock Exchange and the biggest single city in India, it also houses some of its poorest people.

I spent Saturday just walking around Colaba,  after only having 3 hours sleep in 36 hours, I wasn’t feeling too hot.  It must be said that I was in a bit of a daze at first, there are a lot of people around but for me anyway not so many as to be clostraphobic.   I crashed out at about 9pm and slept for the next 12 hours.

Sunday was a bit better! Feeling re-energised I walked up to the Gateway to India, built to commemorate the arrival of King George V in India.  Pretty damn impressive, although as seems to be the case with me and monuments recently the gate had one side covered in scaffolding for renovation (as did the mosque in Brunei, temple in Penang and a couple of others).  I managed to shake of the woman who wanted me to buy milk for her kid (a well known scam) and walked up to the Victoria Terminus, the main train station of Mumbai.  Now to say that this place is big is an insult to the word big, it is absolutely bloody huge, truely impressive.  According to the bible (i.e. lonely planet) about 2.5 million people transfer through the station a day.  A couple of beers and samosas later, I met a Dutch couple who were working with an NGO in the slums with AIDS infected children.  Some seriously harrowing stories.  People living on around 1000rps or less (just over a tenner), less than what we paid for drinks over a couple of hours.

Today I managed to sleep in, not what I planned but it just kind of happened.  It turned out that the big museum I was going to is closed on  Monday, so I wandered around the Fort area of the city, Victorian architecture in Mumbei realy is impressive.  Weaving in and out of alleyways and just following the crowd gets you into some very random places!  All the people I have encountered though have been nothing but lovely, apart from the guy I bought sunglasses off who pretended that my haggling was going to put him out of business (I still overpaid).  Just got back from Oval Maiden, a huge park in the middle of the business district that was rammed with people playing cricket.  There must have been at least 30 games going on at the same time.  Not 30 seconds would go by without the cry of ‘ball ball ball’, everyone seemed to know to which game each ball belonged!  Not to blow my own trumpet but I did get huge cheer when I jumped to my right with one hand to pluck out of the air a ball that was travelling pretty damn quick.  I obviously took the applause in a manner befitting my modesty (not by throwing it straight back in the air and shouting gotcha at the batsmen in question……….).  It is quite hard to understand just how much of an obsession cricket is over here.  Yesterday when I was walking around the city, you would turn a corner and there would be a game going on in the middle of the road, not just a couple of kids either but 10-12 adults! 

The food has been great, sugarcane juice off the street, dosas wrapped around spicy potatoes, fresh samosas, last night I had some tandoori chicken and I’m not yet ill so hopefully my judgement is just about right!

I’m trying to cover quite a lot in this post and after reading through it I don’t think I have done a great job of it so I will stop now and be a bit more concise next time!  I have got quite a few photos but I can’t upload them in this place as the computer is too old, I’ll try and find somewhere a bit more modern in the next couple of days.

Namaste xx

 

The ‘Personal Post’

So apparently some people want a few more personal details rather than just me sprouting off on how much fun I am having!  Seeing as the rain is bouncing down outside, I guess now would be as good a time as any to get it done!

Dad, just so the answers to a couple of your questions don’t get lost (i.e. I remember to answer them) i’ll do a couple of them now.  The grey skies thing has been a feature over the last couple of weeks.  The rainy season in Sarawak should really have been over by now, but it didn’t start until late and seems as though it wants to run its course.  Having said that it is an area covered with rainforest so you do expect the odd shower!  The temperature has been a pretty constant 30C +/- a couple of degrees with the humidity hovering at around 70%.  Many of the photos make it look like there hasn’t been any sun at all, that isn’t the case what-so-ever, but it does seem that everytime I go out with the intention of taking a load of photos that the clouds decide to come in and screw it up. Monday in KL was bright blue skies all day, really hot, Tuesday was characterised by a huge storm and the loudest thunder that I have ever heard (maybe because I was cowering under a bus shelter for protection!) so it really is a mixed bag as regards to the weather.  Something that will probably carry on for the rest of the trip.  India seems to be a couple of C higher with a bit less humidity at the moment, so hopefully shouldn’t be too much change.  Although I’m guessing the dust and pollution is going to be worse so it will feel hotter than it actually is.

Thanks for the travel writing comment, although I did have to look up what Conde Naste was, so I can’t be that with it!  Although their website seems suitably flash….hmmm maybe I should work for them when I get back?

After 2 1/2 months things have settled down nicely it must be said.  I was thinking about it the other day when walking around a random area in Miri and stumbled upon an outdoor meat market.  Those kinds of things just dont suprise me anymore, where as before when I got to a new place I would notice the differences between there and home/other palces I have been to, now I notice the similarities.  I guess maybe because I have been in Malaysia quite a while now and many of Malaysia’s towns (certainly within Borneo) are quite similar.  That isn’t to say that I am bored, far from it, but I am really looking forward to getting somewhere else (i.e. India).  A change of food will be good as well!  Although I did go to a Chilli’s yesterday for some buffalo wings, best meal i’ve had in ages haha! The thought of India is one that feels me with excitement and a good dgree of trepidation as well.  I can’t wait to get there but just thinking about the amount of people is enough to make you think about how the hell you are going to get around!  I’m not sure about plans so far, have to sort a few things out first.  I have just about sorted out what I am going to be doing around Kolkata and have a vague idea of a route I want to take, but I think with India more than other countries having a fixed plan is just liable to either go wrong or make you miss out on something.  I guess in 3 days I will know how I will feel about it!  Just about to book myself into a proper hotel for the night I arrive in Delhi, trying to find a hostel/guesthouse at midnight doesn’t seem like the best of ideas and I think a bit of peace will do the world of good for the first day. 

A couple of months without meat doesn’t worry me too much, especially in India, a country renowned for it’s vegetarian food.  I will however be having the biggest steak I can find in KL on Thursday night in preparation!  I don’t know, I think I will play a lot of it by ear, just as I have over here. 

In short, I’m feeling good.  Think I might have a bit of an eye infection, it has been itchy and red the last couple of days, so am going to head over to the chemist when I have finished here.  It is probably just a reaction to coming back into a polluted city however.  Oh an interesting fact I read the other day, around 25% of people get some kind of respriatory infection whilst they are tgravelling around thanks to the pollution and dust!  Here is to hoping that I can pick up my luck again!  The shaved head has grown on me, definitely keeps me a bit cooler!  Actually i’m going to have another trim before I head off to India.  I picked up my Nepal visa yesterday, so that is all sorted.  Hopefully the airline has no reason to throw me off of the plane on Friday!

 Ah the rain has just stopped, I’m going to go to the chemist and potentially go and buy a new pair of glasses (dirt cheap over here and mine are falling to bits).  Will talk to you all soon.

x