Burning Bodies and Police Brutality in Filthy India

I've been in India for the last week, and despite an unpleasant first impression, I've begun to see what fascinates people with India and keeps them coming back. I was on a boat on the Ganges river at sunset, here in Varanasi. If you don't know the name of this city, you've definitely seen it on TV. It's the place where the Ganges is holy and millions of India pilgrims come each year to bathe on the steps in the polluted water and wash away their sins. The Hindus believe that if you die here, you avoid having to be reincarnated and therefore achieve eternal peace.

On the boat ride I saw a dead body in the water and funeral pyres burning on the river's edge - my boatman in his broken English called them "body burn fire". Near me was a boat containing a group of orange-robed, shaven-head buddhist monks using digital cameras and video cameras. Loud and colourful religious ceremonies took place on the river bank, people were washing in the water and - yep - even drinking the holy water. Monkeys ran up the walls of temples, while 30 or 40 women in another passing boat performed a call-and-response chant. Burning candles floated around the boats. Kids on boats with their fathers flew kites. I finally started to find something intensely remarkable and enjoyable about India. Until...

...until I got off the boat and the boatman demanded twice the amount we had agreed upon beforehand. He followed me, telling me why he deserved more, until finally I stuffed the agreed amount in his hands, raised my voice and told him "finito, fertig, finished, over. go away". I think this embarrassed him in front of the people nearby and he slinked away.

India assaults all the senses. The streets are filled with stinking, rotten garbage and with holy cow dung from the holy cows that freely wander the streets. Especially in Delhi, the smell is sometimes so bad I have to hold my breath or start gagging. There is noise, always noise in India. I suspect there is a law that says drivers are compelled to use their horns at least once every minute. This traffic noise goes all day and most of the night and when it stops the stray dogs start barking. I haven't had a good night's sleep since I've been here. The thick smog sticks to the sweat on my skin, deadening my sense of touch. The delicious spicy food is even better than I expected and it has burnt out my tastebuds. And the sights I've seen in India are definitely colourful.

Yesterday was a festival called Holi. It celebrates a time when the God Vishnu caused an evil queen to be burned alive. For some reason this is celebrated by throwing coloured powder at people and water too. Before too long all the people in the street had multi-coloured faces, then multi-coloured hair, and eventually even multi-coloured clothes. Tourists are popular targets, and people who ventured out from my hotel soon returned needing a shower and a change of clothes. I chose to watch most of it from the hotel's rooftop terrace.

From the terrace I also was witness to some police brutality. A couple of police cars came up the street, stopped suddenly and with long bamboo rods the policemen started beating a guy around the head and legs. When he hit the ground they kicked him for a bit, then threw him in the back of their car. The police then started beating another guy with their bamboo rods but he pleaded with them and they let him go. It was shocking to see this firsthand.

No case of Delhi Belly so far...

Germany, Portugal, South of France, Turkey

Being in Germany for the soccer World Cup was a great experience. For the first couple of weeks it was like a non-stop carnival in the streets of the cities. Strangely the German culture seemed to change a bit during the world cup, with people doing typically un-German things, being more laid-back, starting conversations with
strangers, celebrating even when they lost, the police not pulling me over when
I rode my bike through red lights right in front of them. It was a much nicer
country!

I did manage to make a couple of short trips during the European summer. First
I caught up with an Australian friend, Rob, in Portugal for a week. The most
memorable event in Portugal was when we accidentally spent an hour or so in a gay bar. Despite the overly-well dressed male customers and the music that got more camp with each track, neither of realised what type of an establishment it was until I spilt my drink on my crotch and attracted a bit of unwanted attention as I tried to
clean up the mess.

The second trip was a disillusioning long weekend spent driving along the almost mythical "South of France", visiting Marseilles, Nice, Cannes, and Monaco . The south of France turned out to consist of over-priced, over-crowded coastal cities. In Nice, for 25 euros you were allowed to sit on a little spot on the stony beach for the day, where you could admire the other people who also paid 25 euros to be wedged in shoulder-to-shoulder on a patch of gravel. Monaco was especially ugly, with
more bland concrete apartment blocks than I would have thought possible crammed
into a mountainous coastal bay. Having said that, between the towns the stark
rock formations that made up the landscape was magnificent and the water was a
remarkable azure blue.

The third and last trip I made over summer was 10 days in Turkey, I looked at old Greek and Roman ruins in biblical ex-cities, I trundled around the Gallipoli battlefields for a day with busloads of tourists from Australia and New Zealand, and I finished up in Istanbul. Istanbul is one of the most fascinating cities I've seen. There must be at least 6 cathedral-sized mosques in the city, each consisting of domes upon domes and ringed with minarets, the towers that call people to prayer five times a day. The city is half in Asia, half in Europe, with ferries constantly travelling along the coasts and backwards and forwards across the great waterway. There are a few old wooden palaces that remain from the times of the Ottoman empire, and every second street contains an old broken Ottoman-era fountain. The eating was
excellent, with some of the best vegetarian cooking I've tasted. It was the
month of Ramadan while I was there, which is when Muslims eat and drink nothing
at all during daylight, then have a big feast at night the moment the imams
officially declare that the sun has set. This created a festival atmosphere
every night. Istanbul is high on my lists of places to visit again.

2006: Year in Review

A Swiss friend wrote an e-mail to me last week, saying that because she hasn't
heard from me for a while, she assumes I haven't been doing much travelling. I have managed to add a few new countries to my list this year. At the beginning of the year I hitch-hiked across the Sahara, which is just about the stupidest way to spend a month's holiday. Afterwards I recuperated in Colombia, which is just about the best way to spend a month's holiday. I got tear-gassed in Ecuador, en route to
Peru.

Compared with that the rest of the year has been rather mundane. Since May I've been working again in Frankfurt as an IT consultant. It's pretty dreary stuff,
wearing a suit everyday, working on mind-numbingly dull projects for
statisticians and economists. Not to say that all statisticians and economists
are mind-numbingly dull - one of the two good things about the job is I get to
work with interesting people from all over Europe. (The other good thing is they pay me on a regular basis).

A couple of brief and belated updates will follow soon.

Venezuela, Colombia, Peru: Photos

Take a look at the photos I took this year in Venezuela, Colombia and Peru.

The Road to Timbuktu: Photos

See the best of my photos from my trip to Timbuktu via Morocco, Mauritania and Mali.

Peru: Whale in the Desert

I spent the last two weeks in Peru, where I saw a whale in the desert, spotted condors flying over a canyon 3 kilometres deep with ancient terraced slopes, and visited a village situated on man-made islands that float around Lake Titicaca.

The whale in the desert was one of the Nasca Lines, ancient carvings each about 100 metres long, that can't be identified from the earth. When seen from an airplane you easily spot carvings of animals, birds, and people. Why these figures were carved hundreds of years before the technology to view them existed is one of those mysteries which nutcases love. Some claim the figures were made by or for aliens.

I took a 30 minute flight to see the Nasca Lines in an airplane that has room for only 5 passengers. The first 2 minutes were fun. Then as the first figure came into sight, the pilot banked sharply so the passengers on the left could see the figure. Then he banked the other way, which allowed the other passengers to see the figure, and allowed my recently-eaten breakfast to try to escape my stomach prematurely. With each new figure came two more violent turns by the pilot, and more opportunities for my stomach to knot and twist and attempt to release its contents. I fidgeted with the white paper bag supplied for each passenger, and counted down the minutes until landing. 25 minutes left...20 minutes left...15 minutes (that's halfway!)...14 minutes (less than halfway)... 13 minutes (I hope this flight lands on time)...12 minutes (maybe it lands early)... 11 minutes (I should have stayed on the ground and watched the BBC documentary about the lines)... 10 minutes (I'm never flying again - hey, only a third to go!) and so on. When I got off the plane I involuntarily imitated the pope, kneeling and kissing the ground. I then spent the near couple of hours in my hotel room, letting my intestines unknot. By some miracle my breakfast left my stomach the normal way at the normal time.

Seeing the Nasca Lines from the sky definitely was not worth it.

Tears of Pain and Joy on the Pan American Highway

Yesterday I met Anna from England, one of the most interesting travellers I've ever encountered. She was born in Austria because her parents worked there briefly, she spent five years in Saudi Arabia, is currently living in Colombia, and soon she begins a three-year stint in Ukraine. She once cruised down the Amazon River where her father had his fingertip bitten off by a piranha, recently visited New Zealand (which she loved) and when I met her, she was travelling by train through Peru's Sacred Valley of the Incas, about to walk the ancient Inca Trail through the Andes. I got talking to her when we both started gazing at the chocolate-coloured rapids flowing beside the train. She eloquently told me how she did a white-water rafting expedition on such a river a few days ago. She writes detailed accounts of all her journeys, which she illustrates with drawings of what she sees. She also speaks fluent Spanish. But what is most remarkable about Anna is that she is only 8 years old.

Of course, her adventurous parents accompany her on all these voyages!

Last time I wrote, I was stuck in Ecuador, trying to get to Quito to catch a plane but unable to, due to marauding hordes who were blockading the major roads. The day of my flight, I turned on the television in my hotel room to find that the government had declared a state of emergency and had sent in the army to clear the roads. I went to the bus station with hope, sure I could still make my flight. The bus people told me that a direct bus to Quito would leave at 1pm, just in time for my flight. However when 1pm came around, the roads were still blocked, due to a combination of the army being instructed not to hurt anyone, and the determined protesters' new tactic of throwing dynamite around.

The next morning I joined forces with Victor, a 78-year-old Swiss man, who lives in Ecuador with his child bride, an Ecuadorean woman only 40 years old. Together Victor and I decided we would get to Quito no matter what it took - me to catch my plane, and him to be with his lovesick wife. We got a bus to take us 20 kilometres, before a police blockade cut our progress short. Getting out of the bus, we befriended a couple of Ecuadorean girls for company and protection, and together the four of us walked around the blockade and began walking along the car-less Pan American Highway, through Andean villages, with a background of mountain lakes and extinct volcanoes. Many people were also walking in an attempt to get to Quito for work or study, and in numbers we resembled a refugee group fleeing a war zone. I had to carry my backpack, and as my shoulders became numb with pain, I wish I hadn't been carrying those optional extras, such as 5 novels, a guide book, sleeping bag, mosquito net, and clean underwear. I walked for a painful couple of hours, always going around the protesters' blockades, whose numbers were now dwindling. We hitched a short ride with a police transport truck, then another ride with an empty army transport truck, before reaching the final blockade.

The army was trying to get a convoy of supply vehicles through the final blockade and were using tear gas to clear protesters from the road and the nearby fields. The tear gas was effective, but with a strong wind, the tear gas blew over to us, and I learnt why tear gas is called as such. First my nose developed a burning sensation, soon followed by my mouth. Then the gas got stronger and my eyes also burned and I wept like a baby. It was extremely unpleasant and there was nothing I could do expect keep walking, weeping, and hoping to get to some cleaner air.

Some 15 more minutes of walking, I found myself within range of operating buses. I can't adequately describe the relief I felt when I realised I wouldn't need to walk any more. It was like the time when for hours you've had a desperate need to go to the toilet, but can't, and then finally get the chance to go. Nothing could be sweeter. I almost shed more tears than I did with the tear gas.

Amazingly, despite the setbacks I got to Quito in time for my rescheduled flight to Lima, Peru, arriving only 24 hours late. To cover the 100 kilometres or so, I had taken 2 taxis, 4 buses, hitched 3 rides, and walked for 2 hours.

I've spent the last two weeks in Peru, where I saw a whale in the desert, spotted condors flying over a canyon 3 kilometres deep, and visited a village situated on man-made islands that float around Lake Titicaca. If I get inspired, I'll write a detailed update in the next day or two.