Anywho, back to the land of India. Jensen and I
were hesitant to get our tickets. The day before leaving Jensen enlightened me
that his friend from Auroville was planning on meeting up with us. I'd the guy
and he was really cool, so I didn't really mind, but it kind of built up the
already-slightly-present resistance I had to leaving. I wasn't quite at the
place I would liked to have been in my classes yet and a another week would fix
that. With the parents also urging me to stay, I decided it might be beneficial
in the long run to let Jensen go to Kashmir and meet up with him a week later
in Delhi on the way to Agra. We then planned to continue onto the northeast and
head back to Bangalore on the 5th of June. And so that's how that happened. You
might say wait, it's the 6th of June, you just got back, but hold your horses.
I'm getting there.
That week alone was chillin. I hung out with
some dudes around the complex, played soccer, wrote essays and thought about
home too much haha. I met Jensen in Paharganj in Delhi on the night of the
15th. After a scare of missing my flight due to monsoon traffic, I had a very
nice flight. The dude I sat next to on the plane was actually from Kentucky. I
talked to the guy for all but a half hour of the three hour flight. He was here
with his family and had been for several years, with his company starting here
in Bangalore. A very friendly and nice guy. If you want, check out his website here. He's
just getting his whole idea started, but he's got a good message.
But the plane landed in Delhi after midnight,
right when the subway closes for the night, so I had to find a bus to take me
to the train station from where I could walk to Jensen. This obstacle may have
frustrated me, but for some reason I was in a great mood and couldn't have
cared less. You almost have to expect things like that to happen anyway. I
found Jensen an hour later and barely recognized the guy with his new hair.
Looked nice again ahahahah! ;)
The next day in Delhi we got our train tickets
to Varanasi from Agra, and bought some cool stuff. We ate at the same place we
did on the previous trip with the little deformed man. He is awfully cute. I
know I’ve brought this up before, but I want to reiterate that India has no
trashcans outside. You just through it into a pile on the sidewalk or
something. When we were walking to the train station to drop of our stuff, and
tossed a wrapper onto a pile of garbage. Some drunk guy came up to us yelling
and spitting, all pissed off that we would throw garbage onto a place covered
in garbage. Haha.
Not wanting to carry all our new stuff around
the northeast with us, we left it at a B-E-A-utiful hotel that Dad normally
stays at when he comes to Delhi. That actually happened during a time crunch.
We had to get to that hotel and back incredibly quick in order to catch the
last train to Agra until midnight, which would suck. We made it with a
surprising amount of time to spare. We didn't actually have a ticket for the
train, so we eased our way in and hung out in the nice AC car for a while. We
watched intently for the conductor to come to check our tickets. When he came,
we went and hung out in the bathroom for about 20 minutes. In the train
bathroom, which is not quite lovely. But we avoided getting kicked out of the
car for a few hours. The conductor was sitting in the bed with all our stuff
next to it, and we were laying on a bed right next to him with curtain closed
and he didn't realize it until some guy opened it up a few hours later. We gave
him our train ticket to Varanasi from Agra, and he thought we were just
supposed to be in the sleeper car. hahaha. We were almost there anyway, so we
didn't mind getting kicked.
Finding a place to stay in Agra sucked. It took
over an hour of smoggy searching and the place we finally stayed in won by
default, we just got too tired. We woke up early to get morning pictures of the
Taj Mahal. The smog was disgusting. You couldn't see more than a half
kilometer. Literally. It was like thick fog. But it wasn't fog. The filth was
the worst of any place I'd seen in India. It's fair to say Jensen and I both
fell into awful moods. My tolerance ended when I slipped out of my sandal and
my foot fell into sewage irrigation while walking through a field to get to a
river bed on the backside of the Taj. It put me over the edge. After 5 months
of filth and poop, I think I found my limit in Agra.
I slowly recovered throughout the day. With a
lot of time to kill before we went to enter the Taj later that evening, we went
to one of the nicest hotels in Agra, and walked straight to the pool. We hung
out for a couple hours there in the water. I forgot to mention the heat. Delhi
and Agra were reaching daily highs of 43 degrees Celsius. That's
110 Fahrenheit. 110. I'd never been in heat like that and it was
killer. We also went into a little internet café to escape the heat and
relax. The shop owner next door asked me to come in and smoke some opium with
him. Not too often do I get asked to smoke opium, but it just wasn’t a good day
to start opium, so I had to decline.
The Taj Mahal was cooler than I expected after
that morning. The marble is spectacular. It’s also the only place in India
where there's been an equal number of women and men. Made me realize even more
that there has been a major shortage of honies in the last months. But it was
crazy standing in front of that building. I've been inside the Taj Mahal. Last
year at this time, I never would have imagined this was possible. Life is
crazy.
Pictures make the Taj look cool, but to stand
there in front of it really is like nothing else. It’s just too beautiful.
Leaving the Taj, we counted how many rickshaw
drivers came up to us and asked us if we needed a ride. In the equivalent of
about 2 blocks, 16 dudes asked. They are relentless.
That night ended much better than the morning
had started. We picked up our stuff from the hotel and caught our 16 hour train
to Varanasi. This train was in the non-AC sleeper car. We were both incredibly
tired from waking up at 6 and luckily for me, I didn't have trouble sleeping. I
woke up in the middle of the night with mosquito bites on my hand and on my
face- youch! At soon as the sun came up, it started getting real hot. By
9:00 it was already well over 90. It was the sweatiest night and day of my
existence. It wasn’t all too miserable somehow, just hot and sweaty. Haha!
We got off the train a little too early at
Varanasi because we kind of got scared we would miss it, so we had to walk a
little ways to the city. On the way, little ganja plants grew like weeds on the
sidewalk. They weren’t budding or anything, but it was pretty crazy to be
surrounded by ganja plants. It was so hot on the walk to the city, and we
hadn’t showered the night before, so we hoped for some kind of bath to get
clean and refreshed. A little ways down the road, there were two big water
tanks suspended about 30 feet in the air, with big holes in the sides. They
made for a perfect shower- it was delightful. The people around thought it was
a pretty good idea, I guess, and right as we left a guy walked under it for a
bath. It’s random things like that that happen when you’re on the road that are
just such pleasant surprises that you never get when you’re not out and about.
I guess it’s what makes traveling fun.
We caught a rickshaw at the train station, to
find a guest house. On the way, he offered for me to drive, so I sat up front
with him and drove the rick. After finding a room and getting breakfast at like
2:30, we set out towards the Ganges. This is the same river that flows right
through Rishikesh. The only difference is that Rishikesh is in the foothills of
the Himalayas and therefore has relatively slightly decent water to swim in. By
the time it gets to Varanasi, it has been through several more towns and
villages, that all use it to clean their clothes and bodies, and to carry away
all their sewage. At Varanasi, the Ganjes loses all sense of cleanliness or
clarity it never had. Here, it not only gains a whole heap more sewage, but it
also dissolves the ashes of hundreds of burned bodies every day, plus the corpses
dead of animals. Here, at the holiest place in the Hindu religion, thousands of
people bathe and swim in the flowing muck that was once a beautiful river.
Along the river, the banks are covered in poop.
We asked a guy that had started walking with us if it was human poop. “Yes,” he
says. When asked why, he says “because it’s India.” We asked him if he poops
there. “Yes,” he answers. And that basically sums it up. I’ll link a few
pictures here just because it’s hard to imagine the place. This water buffalo
rolling in garbage and sewage, this family with their dead relative gives a
slight understanding of what’s going on. We walked from one burning ground to
the distant other, and got stopped for massages and many pictures on the way.
At the big cremation site, they don’t allow
pictures. Originally, they say it’s because if you take a picture of the
burning body, that the soul will be captured inside and they will not be able
to achieve nirvana. However, if you pay 750 rupees, then that doesn’t matter.
So basically, it’s all for money. They say the money goes to the poor families
who can’t afford to pay the 300 rupees a kilo for wood to burn the bodies.
Turns out the wood costs only 5 rupees a kilo. I get really sick of people trying
to get money from you. In fact, it may be what I hate most about traveling.
Anyway, since we’d been taking photos the whole
while walking along the river, when we got to the cremation place, we had our
cameras out. We weren’t taking pictures, and respected that they didn’t want us
to, but they would not leave us alone about how we couldn’t take pictures. They
were ridiculous. And would not go away or shut up. So after a little while we
left.
There are boats all along the river, where you
pay a man and he’ll take you out on his boat and row around until you’ve gotten
enough pictures and everyone is happy. From the boats, out front the cremation
spot, you can take all the pictures you want and it doesn’t matter. I figure
it’s because the people can’t walk out there and hassle you into paying them.
We took a boat out a little later and took
pictures for about 20 minutes, but it got too dark so we went back in. No
problem. We took pictures of the burning, and it didn’t matter. We were allowed
to. Our boat driver, who lived in Varanasi his whole life, said that when they
don’t allow pictures, they are in fact only wanting money, and that it doesn’t
matter. After dinner, we walked back to the guest house (which was pretty far)
and went to sleep early in anticipation of getting up early to go on a long
boat ride in the morning.
We found a boat real easy, a 17 year old kid
took us all the way down and back again. At the other side, at the cremation
spot, in the daylight, we took a few pictures from our boat. It was ok. There
were several other boats full of people right next to us taking tons of
pictures. We were the only ones on our boat besides the kid. Some little idiot
on the shore saw us and realized he could potentially make some money off of
us. He rowed out with a few other guys and got on our boat and demanded we pay
him, or the family of the body would beat us up and break our cameras. We knew
the guy just wanted money, and we told him to get off the boat. He was an
incredibly persistent, and even more annoying little bastard, and ultimately
got off threatening to come hit me with a big bamboo stick. All the little episodes
you have with people like this take a stressful toll.
Before getting off the boat back where we
started, we rowed out to the middle of the river and jumped in. It is
considered very holy and an honor to be able to bathe in the Ganges, so we had
to. It was unnaturally warm. So gnarly hahaha.
We hung out back at the hotel for quite a while.
We took our time eating breakfast on the rooftop, and packing up our stuff in
our room. Our phones the night before had lost the correct time, so the only
clock we had was on my ipod and the nook. Neither of which we paid much
attention to until the owner of the guesthouse alerted us that the drive to the
airport took an hour, and we had about 2 hours til the plane left. So we got
kind of scared and had to leave quickly. The guy tried to charge us for an
extra day because we didn’t check out at the right time. Not only did he never
tell us, but we were also hanging around in his guesthouse all day. The
confrontations never stop.
We had decided to cut the trip short based on a
few key points. The destinations we had in mind would take over 30 hours of
travel (bus and train) to get to. The noise and dirtiness were really getting
to us. And if we went back to Bangalore, we could join the parents on their
trip to Coorg. So a few days before we got a plane back to Bangalore. Had to
make sure I brought that up haha.
Anywho, the rickshaw we were in was a guy that
the guesthouse had called to take us. We didn’t completely trust him after we
got in an argument with the guy who had called him, but we figured he would
still get us to the airport. He knew we were in a real hurry, but stopped and
got out to talk on his phone on the way there. Sketched out, we got out and
found a different guy. We got to the airport just in time and were sitting
fine. During the layover in Delhi, I took a cab to the hotel we left our stuff
at and got back before the plane left. Even though we cut it short and overall
weren’t in the best moods, in that week alone I saw some of the coolest things
India has to offer. The idea of standing in front of the Taj Mahal always
seemed soo distant. It still is so hard for me to comprehend how far this trip
has taken me from the normal life.
Being back in my own bed in Bangalore was nice,
especially combined with air wonderful air conditioning. Not wasting any time
hanging around, I chose to join Steele, Mom, and Paps on their trip to Coorg. A
friend that dad met playing squash here in Bangalore had invited us long ago to
come stay on his coffee plantation. His cousin was getting married that
weekend, so he invited us to that ass well. Jensen wasn’t excited about it and
decided to stay behind.
We left super early in the morning. Murti drove
us four the whole way and with plentyy of stops in between. With a five-hour
drive, we figured if it took us eight hours to get there, that meant we enjoyed
plenty on the way. We stopped several times for the most massive of coconuts,
and went to a surprisingly impressive bird sanctuary. We took a boat out on the
water. Across the river, on an island, was a popular rest stop for migrating
birds, apparently. The trees were filled with giant sleeping bats, hanging from
the branches. The big herons and pelicans and other birds were quite a
spectacle. It was also my first time seeing crocodiles, which was pretty crazy.
We got there in the evening. There was a get
together that night for the people that traveled to Coorg for the wedding.
Mostly older folks and all people I didn’t know, it was hard to completely love
it. The free drinks may have helped Steve however. The next morning Jensen
decided to join us and took a bus down to meet up with us right after the
actual ceremony. I say ceremony, but there is never a passing of vows, “I do,”
“I do” type thing. All they do is sit next to each other, and all the guests
line up with their cards ad walk up, pick up rice, drop it on the persons head,
hand them their card, and go enjoy some more food. After everyone is done, they
are married. They then separate for the rest of that day. The guests leave and
come back later in the evening right before the bride shows up for her taxing
ritual. She gets there and is given a bucket of water. She has to hold that on
her head while members of the groom’s family dance in front of her for hours,
not letting her move. And she just stands there. And they dance. And after a
few hours, they stop and she walks in the hall, and then the night is over and
everybody leaves. A strange ceremony by American wedding standards.
The next day we packed up and drove to our new
stay, which was Dad’s friend’s parents’ home stay on their coffee plantation.
It was a very nice little house and with great surroundings. We took a tour of
the grand parents’ plantation and learned about how they harvest coffee,
mangoes, peppers, ginger, peaches, grapefruit, jackfruit, papayas and other
plants. The next day we went to a really cool hotel for lunch. Each little
bungalow at this hotel had its own pool. We then went for an hour and half
drive through the jungle to this canopy walk in the trees. The drive was
spectacular, the trees and overall landscape was breathtaking. Coolest drive
I’d ever been on (Until the drive from Italy to Switzerland, which now takes
the cake). At the rope course,
after that long drive, none of the Indian guys even wanted to go on it. They
were too scared. The guide that took us along was drunk hahaha.
We drove home the next day, a very long drive.
We got out towards the end to climb some massive rock formation at the top of a
hill.
We had about two weeks left in India by the time
we got back from Coorg. I spent the majority of this time working on my
classes. I played soccer every night on the roof. It was strange leaving, it
felt like it wasn’t really possible.
When we first landed in Heathrow, I think the
culture shock really hit me. It was the first time in six months that I stood
in a room full of people and wasn’t being stared at by at least half of them.
Crazy feeling.
And there it is. The journey is over. Hope you
enjoyed reading, thanks for taking an interest. I hope you ask me questions if
you want to know anything else.
