TII – This is India

Today we leave India.
We say goodbye to the food, the cows, some of the nicest people we have come across on our trip, the beaches, the corruption, the chaos, and all of the things that just don’t make sense but what make this country like none other. India.
Our flight left on-time today. This is noteworthy because our 6 other flights and all of our train rides in India over the past month, have either been cancelled or delayed. At the beginning of our time here it was frustrating, but now we’ve completely come to accept it. Basically everything that is done here, is a process. There are 4 times more people doing each job than we have at home,  and yet everything is inefficient and slow.  Chris and I have been noticing other tourists complaining lately about how long it takes to do everything, or wondering why absolutely everything in documented in triplicate with carbon paper. After a couple of weeks here, we stopped even noticing these idiosyncracies of the country. Why? TII. This is India. There doesn’t have to be a reason, it doesn’t matter how long things take, we can’t change it. We have embraced it.
Almost all of the people here (with the exception of store owners who basically want to fleece you for all your worth.  AKA…white-skin tax) want to help you and give you the best service they can. They greet you as you come and leave the hotel, open doors for you in restaurants, talk to you about where your from, where you’ve been, how you like India. It’s so friendly. But the difference between here, and well everywhere, is the execution.

Unfortunately the caste system is alive an well here. It is visible in Northern India much more than in the south. This means when it comes to service no one has been empowered to take charge or get anything done. You can ask one man in a hotel standing next to bottles of water for a bottle, but until he gets the direction from his boss and his bosses boss, to ask the “water person” to bring you a bottle of water to your room, nothing happens. You actually have to go back to your room and wait 20+ minutes for it there. Then once the guy arrives, as I’m sure he was instructed, he barges right past you and puts it in the warm bar fridge! They think they are giving you great service, brining it to your room, keeping it “cold”. But in reality you were just thirsty and wanted the water right then at the front desk.
Indians have a very small personal space. No bubble! Coming from a country with a billion people, I get it. It becomes pretty funny when they are serving you and basically breathing down your neck while you are deciding what to order. The other day when the food got to the table one man stood there and tried to spoon the food onto my plate for me. I’m pretty sure if I had let him he would have spoon fed me himself. One night in Northern India we asked for an extra blanket for bed. As it took about 40 minutes to make it to the room, Chris and I were already in bed. I got up to answer the door and get the blanket and the guy barged right by me, put the blanket on the bed while Chris was still in there and and basically started tucking Chris in. It is all hysterical. We are so grateful for all the nice people wanting to give us such great service, everyone truly is so nice, but we also look forward to our home life again where things happen in a more timely fashion!
The past week we have continued to take it easy. We’ve spent some time on the beach, I did some yoga, and Chris took a meditation course. We also both had ayervadic treatments, something the province of Karala is known for. They basically consists of getting naked and having a stranger rub litres of oil all over your body. You have to lay on a table that reminds me of the chopping block my mother uses for roast beef, with the groves around the outside to catch the drippings. As far as relaxing, well, it has its moments. I did a treatment where I had hot oil poured across my forehead for 30 minutes. I guess it was a interesting sensation, but not sure I’d subject myself to trying to get the oil out of my hair, ears, and off my entire body again. Here are a few pictures from Varkala:

Varkala Cliff and Varkala Beach

Dinner with Louisa and Conrad

Christmas Dinner Night!

Christmas Dinner…probably looks a bit different than yours!

Fire Dancers after dinner

Chris and I also did a backwater canoe ride. It was a really neat experience to see how so many people live on these canals. They grow many spices and herbs down south and it was cool to see how they look before they make it to your pantry.  Here are a few pictures from the backwater adventure:

Chris walking in town to find the place.

Our ride.

It was so hot that Chris had to go buy these bandanas to try to cover our heads.

Our Captain

Sunset in the Backwaters

Now we’re off to Thailand for a brand new adventure. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas with your friends and families. We will be ringing in the New Year in Bangkok. I know we have had so much to be grateful for in 2010. Looking forward to see what 2011 has in store!
Love Ashlyn and Chris

Cows on the beach

Goa

Hello from Varkala, India!  It’s hard to believe that Christmas is just around the corner, especially being in southern India.  (Varkala is on the very southern tip of India, just off to the west side of the point, if you’re looking for it on a map).  You’d really have no idea what season it is here, other than the odd shopkeeper that has dressed up as Santa Claus hoping to win a few more western customers.

We’ve just arrived in Varkala after a great week in Goa.  In Goa we stayed in a town called Palolem, which was a little hippy town at the very southern tip of the state.  Louisa and Conrad met us down in Palolem and we’re spending a couple of weeks with them.  We’ve been having a great time with them (as always), and it was really great to see some familiar faces…especially at this time of year.

Back to Palolem, Goa…the town was a little paradise and if we didn’t have a hotel booking in Varkala, we might have stayed there forever!  All of the restaurants were located right on the beach and most of them were made from palm trees and big blue tarps with a bit of thatch thrown on for effect.  Their basic business strategy was to put a bunch of lounge-chairs and umbrellas out on the beach and wait for the customers to ask how much it cost to rent them for the day.  The deal was that you could use them all day if you ate lunch at their restaurant and drank their water, beer, and Tom Collins during the day.  So, for about $25 per day, all four of us could sit on the beach drinking beer and water all day and eating huge lunches that were delicious.  Not a bad deal, for $6.25 each!  We spent a week laying in the sun, relaxing on the beach, playing paddle ball (157!!), telling people on the beach that we weren’t interested in buying their crap, and taking dips in the ocean to cool off.  It may not sound like it, but the week flew by faster than any week we’ve had on the trip so far.  Here are some pictures from our time at the beach:

At night the town was a bit sleepy, other than the ‘Silent Noise’ night, which was a total blast!  There had been some bars on the beach that were getting shut down because of noise complaints, so someone came up with an idea of having huge dance parties that were 100% noise free.  So they bring in hundreds and hundreds of headphones that are hooked up to 3 live Djs that are playing and everyone dances around to the music in their headphones, which you could flip between 3 different channels of music.  We thought we’d go because it sounded fun, and it would be a good way to stay up past 10PM, which was the latest we’ve gone to bed in months.  Easily the best part of the night was taking off your headphones and watching all these drunk people hop around in silence, stumbling around and singing along to the music in their heads…it made for a pretty good show.  Going to the Silent Noise party was good, being four of those drunk party go-ers was great, staying up past 10PM was outstanding, having a full day of travel in India the next morning was poor.  Here are some pictures from the Silent Noise party:

So that pretty much covers our stay in Goa. We would highly reccomend it to anyone! talk to you all on Christmas!

The rest of Northern India…finally!

Happy Holidays!  Well, after a couple of weeks with little to no internet access, we’re happy to be back.  We’ve made our way down to Goa, India following our tour up north and it couldn’t have come at a better time.  It’s hard to believe that Goa is actually in India.  We’re surrounded by beautiful beaches, palm trees, friendly local people, beach-side resturaunts and warm weather.  This is a far cry from northern India, which was beginning to take it’s toll on us!  We’ll update with more pictures on Goa shortly.

We’re pretty backlogged on updates from the past couple of weeks, so we’ll go through them pretty quickly (partly because we already forget some of the stops).

Ranakpur:  We stopped in Ranakpur one afternoon to check out a really old Jain Temple.  After a visit at the temples we went to stay at an Indian resort.  They had a pretty nice set-up at the resort, but somehow forgot to include any heating for the buildings.  It was a chilly night!!

 

Udaipur:  The next stop was in Udaipur, which is a really nice city that is on the banks of a big lake (you’ll have to google some pictures of the lake because somehow we forgot to take any pictures of it…whoops!).  We spent two days in the city checking out some temples and the main palace in town.  Ashlyn and I went to an Indian cooking class in the evening and pretended we knew how to cook!

 

Jojawar:  This was a stop in a sleeply little Indian village.  We still aren’t exactly sure why we spent the night in this little town, but we managed to fill up some time playing cricket with the locals, then a group of about 10 of us spent 2 hours playing hide-and-go-seek.  Yeah.  We were bored.  It was pretty funny to watch a bunch of 20-40 year olds run around like they were 10 years old.

These were some of the kids in town who ran around and begged everyone to take their picture.

Pushkar:  We had another 2 nights at Pushkar which is a very holy city (which means no beer is allowed, but it sure smelled like pot was allowed).  We checked out the holy lake there, then woke up early so that we could hike to the top of a mountian for sunrise.

Bengal shopping in Pushkar

The holy lake in Pushkar

Jaipur:  I’m not exactly sure what happened in Jaipur, so Ashlyn will have to edit this and include some details.  I caught ‘Delhi Belly’ at this stop, so spent 48 hours in bed with a high fever, and setting up semi-permanent camp on the toilet.

Hi! It’s Ashlyn. Ok, here’s my take on Jaipur. Although Chris missed out on the best Fort we saw in India, it was actually a great place for him to get sick. Jaipur is all about shopping! After a visit to the fort (which is pretty much a combination of all of the other forts and palaces we had already visited), I spent the day shopping for jewlery! The shops here are amazing. I went into bangle shops 2 stories high that had more sparkly bangles and bracelets than I even knew exsisted! It was almost as jaw dropping as the Taj Mahal. I couldn’t get enough! But Chris assures me I did get enough. Just a few keepsakes!

The Fort in Jaipur

The largest sundial in the world at a palace in Jaipur

Agra:  The final stop on the tour was Agra, and man did they ever save the best for last.  We didn’t have overly high expectations for how the Taj Mahal would be, only because we’ve seen a bunch of pictures and thought we knew what to expect.  We were blown away by the Taj Mahal, and both of us would say that so far on the trip, it was definitely the most impressive sight we’ve seen.

Delhi and Jodhpur

After arriving at the hotel in Delhi we slept for a few hours, found a decent grocery store and met up with our new tour at dinner time.  We have a good group again for India and have a wide range of people on the trip…definitely more diverse than the Egypt/Jordan tour.

The first night we all went out for dinner and had the most delicious Indian meal of our lives.  We’re not sure if it tasted so good because of the food itself, or the fact that it wasn’t a kabob like every meal for the previous 17 days.  The streets of Delhi are amazing to walk through at night.  There are countless shops and stands with people cooking salty and spicy food and the aroma is delicious! There are people everywhere coming and going, rickshaws, tuk tuks, cars, dogs, cows, and us, all fighting for a piece of the road! And everywhere you look there are neon signs and twinkle lights advertising for anything from the newest silks to plastic surgery. It was a sensory overload, to say the least!

The following morning we woke-up early and went on a walking tour of Old Delhi, visited a Sikh temple, a mosque and had some lunch.  Here are some pictures from Delhi:

Giant statue of Lord Shiva (God of strength).

Chris walking through the ‘holy water’ to clean his sins (and his feet) before walking into the Sikh Temple.   I guess we didn’t need to wear those shower shoes for the past 60 days.

Ashlyn making bread in the Sikh community kitchen.

A shopping street in Delhi.  Just be glad that they haven’t found a way to post smells yet.

The Delhi power lines.  Everywhere.

After Delhi we took an overnight sleep train to Jodhpur where we stayed for day.  They had an amazing Fort that overlooked the blue city. In the afternoon we decided to take a tour into the rural area and saw some more of what India had to offer.

Here are some pictures from Jodhpur:

The Fort at Jodhpur.

The view into the ‘Blue City’.

Ashlyn practicing her pottery skills at a local shop.

A tribal person smoking.  The stand in front of him is for distilling opium to drink their traditional opium tea.  We opted out.

The same guy showing us how to tie a turban.  We had no idea there was so much material!  8 meters of fabric in the average turban.

India or Bust

Namaste from India.

We arrived on the 28th after our surprise stop in Dubai, but the actual Indian adventure started before we even left the airport in Dubai.  Indian people have a slightly different way of doing things.  All things.  Including how they board aircrafts.  Everyone was sitting around waiting for the airplane to board, and all it took was one person walking to the check-in counter to ask a question to ignite the stampede.  Within seconds, every single passenger (other than us) stormed the gate fearing that the plane would leave without them.  And not an orderly storming of the gates like you’d expect back home…it was a massive ball of chaos that resembled a bee-hive that was preparing to defend.  Ashlyn and I immediately broke into laughter and didn’t stop until we were crying.  What were we getting ourselves into?!?  We soon found out that this chaos wasn’t even to get on the plane, but merely to move from one waiting room to another.  wow.

The excitement didn’t end on the plane either.  Before all the passengers were even sitting in their seats there was a line for the bathroom 6 people long.  Ashlyn decided that being one of about 5 women on the plane she would not be using the facilities during the flight.  After a few minutes the crew finally managed to get all of the passengers onto the plane, but didn’t bother letting them actually get to their seats before pulling out of the gate and taxing toward the runway.  Once up in the air, the line up to the bathroom resumed and the flight attendants went into action serving the food and the drinks.  Serving drinks was something special.  It was all about Whiskey for the masses.  They have more than the regular 2 beverage carts working the isles on theses flights.  They had about 4 carts and each one just moved back and fourth again and again between about 6 rows and poured whiskey faster than any nightclub you’ve ever seen.  These guys can drink!  Each Indian man (which was basically the entire airplane other than Ashlyn and I and a couple other Indian women) had 4 or 5 GLASSES of  strait Whiskey.  Then immediately fell asleep/passed out for the remainder of the flight.

As we started to make our decent into New Delhi, the captain came on and told everyone to buckle up.  On a normal flight you might hear one or two buckles click at this point…most people keep their seatbelts fastened for the flight.  Not on Indian Airlines.  At the moment the seatbelt sign came on, EVERY buckle (other than ours) clicked shut in unison.  It was magical and sounded like it had been well rehearsed for months.  Again we looked at each other, broke into laughter and were terrified what we were about to experience on the ground.

As the plane landed, passengers took it as their signal to stand up and remove their carry on items, despite the fact that the plane was still decelerating from the landing.  Once at the gate we were able to push our way out of the plane in a good amount of time.  (That’s how line ups work in India…who ever is the best pusher, gets there first).  Then we climbed down the stairs from the plane and hoped onto the bus that drives you to the terminal.  It was dark, and the bus had no lights inside of it, but we could still see (and feel) the 100 pairs of eyes staring at us.  Apparently staring wasn’t enough so they started to talk in Hindi about us and laugh.  It seemed like a fair trade, we did a good deal of laughing earlier.

On the drive to the terminal we prepared ourselves for the worst after hearing horror stories of scams, beggars, dirt, chaos, stench, humidity, corruption, you name it.  The bus finally pulled up to the terminal and we stepped into the most beautiful airport we’ve ever been in, no crowds, helpful people and smiling faces.  Even the cab stand gave a discount from the fixed rate because we didn’t have the right change.

Great start in India.

Here are a couple of pics:

Ashlyn getting ready for the flight to India while waiting in Dubai.  That’s a Sani-wipe on her face.

The arrivals area of the New Delhi airport.