delhi love

people talk mad shit about delhi: it's hot, crazy crowded, the nastiest dirtiest place on earth, where your streetside chicken stall is flecked with piss from the urinals next door, where your flipflops are destined to become hopelessly encrusted with human excrement, where street children will dogpile on you in enthusiastic desperation, where countless throngs of touts will clamor every second to suck the blood from your wallet and the goodwill from your heart.  this perspective made a little more sense when i finally checked out pahaganj (below), the tourist ghetto right next to the train station where reside nearly all the lonely planet recommended-guesthouses and, yes, there's lots of dirt and trash, etc. 

but i say delhi rocks.  i felt like my eyes were permanently peeled open, visions sticking to them like hairs on wet cucumber, my jaw permanently a little open, a little gawp! at the seething amazingness everywhere.  so much history.  inexplicable vegetables.  really cool monuments and temples.  stores selling stuff i sort of want, stores selling stuff i don't want.  a lot like the rest of india, really, only more. so yeah, there's dirt.  but dirt is everywhere, right?  and yeah, it's crowded.  chadni chowk, the main shopping street in old delhi, was more packed with folk and their cars and snack shops and plastic watergun shops and rickshaws and etc than most places.  but there's a rhythm to it ... float like a butterfly, step to the side when you want to slip out of the people stream.  even more crowded were the crooked back streets leading (sort of) to the sufi shrine of nizamuddin auliya dargah, crammed with glowing silk fabrics and pools of rose-offerings, the marble foyer around the shrine crammed with misery and hope in equal proportions.  a throng gathered to worship at the evening devotional qawwali music; a throng gathered around the worshippers, an outer circle missing limbs, eyes, futures ... seeking a more practical blessing. 

here, the jama masjiid mosque, just after friday afternoon prayers.  those cloths on the ground are the only thing keeping the soles of my feet from erupting in flames -- we're barefoot, and the flaming ball of fire that i used to simply call "the sun" and think about pretty casually has been blazing for hours hours hours.  tom is wearing shorts under that dhoti.  and me?  the mosque guards barely gave me a glance before insisting that i don the beautiful hot pink cape.  if they had, they would have noticed that i was very modestly dressed, covering shoulders and knees and head, even, despite the 42-degree heat.  seriously, guards, did i look like a hooker before you put that thing on me? 

tourists of both western and indian persuasions flock to the gate of india at twilight.  i think my favorite tourist attractions are the ones that attract same-country tourists too ... it's a comfortable feeling, to stroll around a random sight, licking the same ice cream as everyone else, taking the same pictures, eyeing the same bhel puri stands.

humayun's tomb.  spectacular architecture, no?   

the baha'i lotus temple, pretty far outside of the main city.  the craziest thing about this place -- besides its sydney opera house/alien spaceship architecture -- was the silence.  all the visitors lined up outside the temple (an actual line!  this was crazy enough.  but wait ...) and the docents explained that once they let us in to the inner sanctum there was to be actual silence inside the temple.  and ... there was.  

really, guy?  really?  a door?  on the freeway? 

but honestly, what made delhi for me was the hospitality.  a wonderful friend in san francisco set us up with her family (her cousin's husband and mom), who live a little outside the main delhi area.  i can't even begin to try to start describing how generous, how welcoming, how overwhelmingly gracious sandeep and aunty (and their maid, baby) were to us.  here's tom and sandeep (and sandeep's brother, hiding in the background) enjoying a cricket match and some orange juice.  what you can't see is aunty and baby in the kitchen -- i think they spent the majority of the day in there! -- preparing delicious morsel after morsel: dal makhani (the absolute best i've ever tasted), laddoos, green beans and paneer curry, fresh puris and chapattis (it did take a little getting-used-to to hear aunty yell out from her elegant seat at the table "baby, chapatti!" at regular intervals), sweet sooji halwah, and piping hot chai.  i kept on trying to pay for things, and the family kept on thwarting me and paying for things themselves ... it turned into a little bit of a game, i think, especially when i snuck out with baby and tried to pay for the barbeque she picked up for our last night's meal, and we had a little pantomine scuffle over it (baby = no english; me = no hindi), and the barbeque guy refused to take my money, and baby called sandeep and informed on me.  baby did my nails for me, too, but she wouldn't let me do hers ... i couldn't quite figure out whether it was because she didn't think my skills were up to it or what.  i cried a little when we left (and also at dinner, and at breakfast, but that was because the food was so good).  i have never been so well taken-care-of except by my very own mom.  someday i hope i have the chance to take care of someone so well -- this visit redefined for me what it means to be an honored guest, and what it means to enjoy having an honored guest ... and i look forward to extending my own hospitality! 

taj mahal

you always hear about how the taj mahal is so beautiful.  and you think, well, i'm sure it's nice and all, but is it really that extraordinary?  

yes.

yes, it is that beautiful.  there is a physical impact, a little whispering boom in the heart, the moment you first set eyes on it.  but the really extraordinary thing is the pure serenity it radiates, unaffected, even, by the yelping, chattering crowds.  which, if you've ever been in a crowded place in india, is really saying something.

just to give you some idea of what we're eating these days

kerala

kerala deserves better than this hasty description, and even that is damning it with faint praise.  it is a stunning place -- definitely it's the most chilled-out place that i've been in india (gokarna excepted, of course, but then again everyone appears to be high in gokarna); lushly green; with insanely delicious, mostly coconut-based food, quite a bit different from karnataka or tamil nadu food; and man, keralans can extract the maximum amount of usefulness from a coconut palm.  it is impressive.  we spent a few days in the keralan backwaters by alleppey, where folk get from place to place mostly by rickety canoe and/or bicycle and, until the rice harvest starts, there's not too much to do except watch the river slip by.

a hyacinth-choked canal in the keralan backwaters.  the hyacinths are gorgeous, and the british thought so too, which is why they brought the plants over from africa.  except, shocker, the non-native plants have taken over the place, changing the oxygen content of the water and hurting native wildlife.  the backwaters are all under sea level -- they were created, i think i recall, several hundred years ago, by hand, by a caste of people called, appropriately enough, mud-diggers, on the suggestion of some smart syrian christians who realized that riverbed silt is wonderfully fertile -- so once a year the ocean is allowed in, and the salt water kills the hyacinths, while the hardier fish have learned to migrate upstream and spawn until the salinity returns to normal levels.  a good way to wait out a bad situation. 

what you (hopefully) can't see here is that i am soaking wet because its about 34 degrees and 93% humidity, and i'm on the tail end of an accidental 9-mile walk around the island.  in about an hour, i'm going to sit down to one of the best lunches of my life: cabbage and coconut curry with mustard seeds, coconut chapattis, and a simply gorgeous cardamom and banana lassi made with fresh homemade yogurt, fresher and sharper and more saliva-inducing than lesser yogurts.  i am salivating now just writing about it.   

after the backwaters, we moved up north to kochi, a set of islands and peninsulas with two cities facing each other across the bay: fort cochin and ernakulam, sort of like san francisco and oakland.  ernakulam is way more hectic, fort cochin is mellow, just a jumble of sleepy walking streets with crumbling old dutch and syrian and portuguese houses leaning against each other like drunk old friends. here's tom in front of the chinese fishing nets of fort cochin, poised like enormous spiders over the waterfront.  you can buy fish right here, and have the guys grill 'em up for you if you like.

and this is kathakali, or at least the tourist version of it.  kathakali translates into "story-play" in malayalam, and in its natural form it's a 6-8 hour storytelling extravaganza by elaborately made-up and extensively trained men, told exclusively through music, facial expressions, and gestures.  the make-up is all natural, plants and minerals blended with coconut oil, like indigo for blue, and special keralan rocks rubbed together for yellow and red and black.  it was so, so so cool.

madurai

the main temple in madurai is pretty breathtaking, huh?

there are, i think i recall, four of these massive towers, and every inch is literally like festooned with all this amazing stuff. 

ceilings, too.

the mall inside the temple -- any excuse for shopping is joyfully accepted by indian pilgrims.   

if you give the temple elephant some rupees, she blesses you with her trunk ... consider me blessed!   

sai ram!

"sai ram!" says a voice, urgently, from somewhere near my right thigh.  "sai ram!" the voice insists, now accompanied by the thwack-thwack of tiny beads against an equally tiny drumhead.  i am still 45k away from puttaparthy, but this busstop toddler can already tell that there is only one reason why this western lady is trying to buy crackers in the redgray, rockstrewn furnace that is southeast andhra pradesh: sai baba.

sri sethya sai baba, so the legend goes, is the reincarnation of a well-known sage and a living avatar of god on earth.  after showing uncommon precocity and compassion as a child, he announced Himself to the world at age 14, and in the intervening years he has spread an inspiring message centered around love, service, and the divine presence.  physically, baba is about five feet tall with a dark corona of fluffy hair. he's often clad entirely in sunny orange and, these days, appears in a wheeled red velveteen chair (he's past 80).  corporocratically, his ashram is a funky place.  it's massive, to begin: a self-contained complex with blocks upon blocks of segregated male and female dorms, three canteens (western, north indian and south indian, also segregated by sex), various snack setups, a shopping mall (women only in the morning, men only in the evening, except on sundays when the order is reversed and women can't buy anything from saturday at 11:00 am until sunday at 3:00 pm), innumerable administrative buildings of unknown function, a library, a museum, a meditation nook, temples to various hindu deities, and of course the giant chandeliered darshan pavilion.  and probably other stuff that i never managed to locate. 

"sai ram!"  i walk in through the pedestrian gate and submit to bag-and body-search, and luckily produce my dupatta when asked -- dress code for women is basically to cover yourself from neck to ankle including a scarf as large as possible worn as smotheringly as possible.  inside, the courtyard teems with folk, most of the men in white shirt and trousers, most of the women in richly colored saris and salwar kameez; mostly indian everyone, but with a healthy dose of westerners (russian, usually) and japanese folk thrown in.  most are toting cushions.  the line at the accommodation window is typically indian, more cluster than string, but i notice the ladies' Q and elbow aside some menfolk, to learn that foreigners' accommodation is handled in block N8, which is "over there" meaning somewhere in the next mile to my right.

"sai ram!" says the kindly-looking old dude in block N8.  two dull red tufts of hair wave softly from his ears like antennae.  he hands me a form, i fill it out, he sends me to room N8A10.  "sai ram!" says the greybeard behind the glass window of A10.  a faint trickle of cool air seeps out from behind his barricade and caresses my hand.  ah.  no wonder he's so cheerful: his side is airconditioned.  "you are alone?" he inquires doubtfully.  yes.  after a few what-is-she-thinking shakes of the head, he assigns me to a bed in dorm A.  his companiondoes a little throat clearing, "sssrrmmm.  aren't those russians with the sores all over their arms in dorm A?"  "hrm," replies greybeard, and assigns me to dorm B. 

dorm B is also full of russians, although (i check, surreptitiously) none have visible skin lesions.  "sai ram!" says a sprawling, pantsless blond, eyeing me curiously.  her corner of the dorm is set up like a long-term fiefdom, with laundry drying from a string, a fluffy pink disney comforter, a library of baba books.  she is visibly shocked when i tell her i am only here for one night. 

"sai ram!" says the lady at the entrance to the women's south indian food canteen, looking at my hand to make sure i have food coupons before entering.  food is incredibly cheap at the south indian canteen (a chai is two rupees, approximately three cents), but none of it can be had without coupons, which are sold a few blocks away.  "sai ram!"  snarls a bespectacled matron at the chai station.  "sai ram!  line!  line!" and she pushes a clump of thirsty newcomers backwards until something like a string forms by the chai.  it is the first time i have seen anyone enforce an orderly queue in india, and it works until the snarly lady gets her own chai and leaves. 

"sai ram!" says the girl at the entrance to the darshan hall, nodding at my person, earrings jingling.  i wonder what item of contraband i could be accidentally carrying into the hall.  my shoes are communing with the shoes of the rest of the world in a vast and dirty orgy next to the wall; my electronic items are semi-safely stowed in my daypack in dorm B, trusting that the good deeds of baba's lady followers include renouncing theft; my water bottle stands guard over my pillow.  "sai ram," says the girl again, and reaches for my midriff to pat me down.  i'm clean: no wires, no flowers, no notebook, no pen, no food. 

"sai ram!" a harsh whisper from one of the skinny girls apparently in charge of security arrangments keeps the walking pathways clear.  the floor of the darshan hall is an ocean of women, their black braids like sea serpents twitching this way and that as they turn from neighbor to neighbor, chattering.  older ladies are in white plastic chairs at the sides of the hall, a few foresightful ladies camped out in order to snag backrest seats in front of various columns, and i am at the way back wall with the breeze on my neck and some elevation.  smooth vedic chanting rolls out of the sound system, so precise they don't even seem to breathe; baba appears, and we are all blessed.  i am transfixed.

"sai ram, dog!" at the front entrance to the western canteen at dinnertime, a lady coos and throws scraps to a cute stray retriever lurking around the building for just this type of handout.  its a slimy sort of lasagne, definitely not anything i can eat, but judging by the lushness of this guy's coat, he's seen this oily friend before and it will suit him fine.  this despite many, many signs, including signs/rules specifically set forth by baba, requesting devotees to refrain from feeding stray dogs.  the same signs request that devotees refrain from feeding beggars,or giving money or handouts of any kind; these types of signs are pretty scrupulously followed by devotees, but not by beggars or kids:  "sai ram..." a soft, wheedling voice from somewhere near my left thigh materializes as i stand in line for a fresh young coconut, nature's gatorade.  "ten rupee?  coco-nut?"  this little boy has huge liquid eyes and very soft fingers on my forearm.  "... sai ram ..." he breathes. even softer.  breakin' the rules, breakin' the rules.  a massive shooting star flares its part-parabola over the palm trees.

"sai ram!" a russian whisper in the dark as i creep back to dorm B.  i'm only here for one night, and traveling super-light, so the plan is to sleep in my clothes, dupatta scarf for a pillow.  which sounds, now, incredibly icky sticky, but then again so does touching skin to the bare mattress pad.  "sai ram ..." the whisper again, and it is one of my dorm-mates, gesturing towards me and shaking a white sheet.  definitely blessed.  i touch hand to heart, believing, and sleep.

2010 southeast asian land chicken championships

ah, varkala.  land of easy, convenient touristy things (parcel post, cheap cotton pants, diet coke, salads, bread products, tibetan items [e.g., "i love tibet more than ever" handbag], internet, etc) ... land of wild warm salty waves ... land of fixed-price beach umbrellas (150 Rs, but you can get them down to 100 with a lot of work) ... land of rusty, rose-red cliffs, bleeding romance and trash into the sunset ... land of men in diapers performing public beach yoga ... land of the all-devouring yellow ant invasion ... land of the forceful fruitseller ("pineapple or mango.  ok, mango.  yes? pineapple.  MANGO.") ... land of the 2010 southeast asian land chicken championships.

land chicken is pretty simple.  you draw a circle in the sand, in which two opponents face off.  each must hold one of his feet, shin roughly parallel to the ground, his only available form of locomation a pitiful type of hop.  the object: to knock down his opponent, to knock him out of the circle, or to force him to let go of his foot.  no kamikaze allowed. 

in this corner, tom represents denver and bands with the name "mouse" in them.

lindsey, his oddly distorted opponent, represents perth, the eagles (not the band -- please contact linds directly for a thorough explanation of aussie rules football) and the massively bearded.

competition was fierce -- multiple strategies, multiple piles of furry man-limbs soaking up sand, and one sneaky (and successful) knee to the gut.  but ultimately thomas "curry" emerged victorious and will hang the banner for this title next to his 2005 zanzibar land chicken championship flag. 

not to be outdone, the ladies match up next.  at left (snarling): yours truly.  at right (snickering/baring teeth, claw, fist): catie.  catie is valiant, but ultimately falls prey to distraction, as crowds of curious men begin to slink around the edges of our circle, hooting and (no doubt) fantasizing. 

as an added bonus, trav and tisha (not their real names) demonstrated a new type of ridiculous battle royale known, i believe, as butt-bumpers or maybe bumper butts.  i still need permission to youtube this one, so stay tuned. 

the boots saga

ok. see these boots?  they're more than boots.  let me tell you a story ...

back in january, tom and i were in palolem.  and man, my bag was heavy, and i was sick of people being like "o, big bag!" every time they saw my bag; it made me feel like a high-maintenance princess even though there wasn't really all that much stuff in there.  i started obsessing about ways to make the bag smaller.  i was a bag-anorexic.  and i don't want to talk smack, but tom's bag was sort of large too.  so gleefully we packed up some extraneous items and sent them to denver, including tom's hiking boots. and there was much patting of backs over cleverness in dropping some weight. 

flash forward to february.  so tom and i parted ways for a bit, me to vipassana and he to coorg.  at honey valley, tom met up with an american lawyer guy, i think named mike, who had been trekking in nepal and loved, loved it.  meanwhile, at the last day of vipassana (the day you're allowed to start talking at like 10:00 a.m.), i started chatting with the lovely spirit marina, who also had been trekking in nepal and (surprise) loved it.  who doesn't love nepal?  so when tom and i meet up again, we go (back, in his case) to honey valley, where we meet the aussies, who also have been trekking in nepal and (do you see a theme here?) loved it.  they said that: the thing about the annapurna circuit is that its what they call a teahouse trek, meaning that basically you can show up almost entirely unprepared for a serious hike and it will still work out for you.  you can buy everything you need in kathmandu (e.g., sleeping bags, parkas); you can store all of your extraneous items like high-heeled shoes and laptop computers in kathmandu; you can hire porters to carry your stuff; you can hire guides to show you where to go and where not to ... and you don't need to carry food or a tent, because teahouses dot the trail, happy to provide beds and snacks of increasing price corresponding to increasing altitude.  all of which sounded great, right, because i deliberately did not pack enough stuff to be prepared for trekking in the himalayas.  so we get all pumped on trekking, go back to mysore and locate a "trekking in the himalayas" lonely planet to plan our trip and spend almost all our free time talking about how to work in the trip to the busy schedule and do-we-do-this-circuit? and when-should-we-fly-to-bangkok? and how-should-we-get-to-kathmandu-from-varanasi?  and then tom's like, "crap" because of course he can't wear new balance in the himalaya and he sent his fully broken-in hiking boots to denver.  hm, hm, what to do, should tom's dad send his boots back to us?  should he buy boots in bangalore/delhi/kathmandu?  should he just wing it in the new balance, super-rough-it? 

we shop in mysore.  hilarious indian-made hiking boots, like the size of bigfoot king of the monster trucks, are tried on and found to be wanting.  tom spends hours online looking for likely sporting-goods shops in southern india and maybe delhi.  finally, one weekend break from yoga, tom takes a train into bangalore and rickshaws around the city in search of some decent boots.  (i go to puttaparthy, more on that later.)  and yes!!!  italian made boots, not cheap but otherwise excellent.

but.  as it turns out, (1) a direct flight from kathmandu to bangkok is prohibitively expensive and (2) a connecting flight through delhi is impossible because (a) there is no such thing as being "checked through" delhi; you've got to go through customs which is in itself horrifying because (i) have you heard about indian lines?  they are everything and more that you've heard and (ii) remember the story about the fateful pill?  yeah, tom really wants to go through indian customs again plus (b) its impossible to come back into indian immigration unless you've been out of the country for at least two months, per the new visa rules in effect as of january 2010, which of course we wouldn't be.  the details of (b) are confirmed by a travel agency, who actually goes so far as to call the government immigration office to make sure.  so nepal is bagged, about two days after tom bought the boots. 

and i'm still bag-anorexic.  so, from mysore, another chunk of stuff is sent back to the states, this time to my mom.  sending stuff internationally from india is sort of a process because you've got to get it wrapped in cardboard and then sewn up in a linen bag and then you have to sign all this stuff attesting that its all kosher, etc and then you have to stand in line at the post office to send it.  literally like an hour after the second batch of stuff is sent tom remembers that he has no reason to keep carrying the italian boots, which incidentally are big enough to make it sort of hard for him to close his bag.  there is anger.

from mysore, we go to madurai, where it is insanely hot.  like crazy hot.  and we're both kind of not feeling so good.  but one day i'm feeling worse and tom lights off for the post office.  two hours later, i call to see if he's ok.  he's still in line.  an hour later he comes back and throws a box into a corner of the room:  after waiting in line #1, tom is told that in face he should be in line #2.  and at the end of line #2, the post office official for no particular reason insisted on talking to the guy who had sewn up the bag. but the dude was nowhere to be found.  and the postal lady was like, "well now i've got to see in it" which of course was impossible because then you'd just have to sew it all up again, right, and get out of line, etc etc. 

a couple days later we got to varkala, home of easily-accessible tourist needs (like postal services), and tom and the boots parted ways.  but it was a fun ride while it lasted.  and that is the story of the boots.