Since arriving in Goa, I think I have become the world's sweatiest man. I have sweated with similar intensity in other parts of the world, for example when walking the city walls of Dubrovnik or scaling Sigiriya in Sri Lanka. But nowhere other than Goa has the sweating gone on for so long - the heat and humidity are pretty high during the day, and don't even seem to drop much overnight! Don't get the wrong impression though... after three weeks of travelling in northern India I'm very much appreciating the respite that I'm getting from my 'holiday within a holiday' in Goa.
After an overnight pit stop in Delhi, and rendezvous-ing with Hannah and Pam before they headed north to Amritsar for Diwali, on Saturday I flew down to Goa with another Indian budget airline, the slightly less daftly named 'Indigo' (less daft than Spicejet, that is). After a hair-raising 50km ride with a young and enthusiastic taxi driver I arrived in Anjuna, and started settling into a lifestyle of drinking cheap G&Ts at beach-side bars while watching the sun go down...
Of all the beach-side towns and villages in Goa, I'd chosen Anjuna on the basis of recommendations from various people that I'd met on my travels. You generally choose to go either north or south from the airport or main train station, and I chose north. Basically Anjuna is the first coastal community north of the twin resorts of Calangute and Baga, both overrun with package tourists and annoying touts; something like an Indian Costa del Sol, without the towering hotel blocks, and with a very Indian air of generally random development, dusty roads and traffic.
Goa is unlike probably anywhere else in India: it was completely separate from the rest of India until 1961 when the Portuguese, wh had ruled Goa since the 1500s, were politely asked to bugger off. The legacy of centuries of evangelising (and sometimes brutal) Christian missionary activity has left its mark on the people and the culture - although most of the people look just as Indian as in other states, many are Catholic and have Portuguese surnames. You can find pork and beef on restaurant menus here, and alcohol is both cheap and readily available.
I guess the innate friendliness of the Goan people and their westward-facing outlook is what attracted many of the hippies here in the 60s and 70s, so inadvertently starting the tourist trade. And some of those original hippies are still here! There are more than a few very old westerners in Anjuna and other places, sporting enormous beards and wearing faded fisherman's trousers, openly smoking dope at the bars and restaurants.
It was amongst the later arrivals, nevertheless clearly long-stayers, that I found what I thought to be the real Goan hippy cliche. This guy reminded me a little of Roger, the Canadian backpacking cliche we met in Argentina, although he was younger. My suspicions were aroused when, as I sat at a beachside bar drinking a morning's cup of tea, a bedraggled 40-something acid casualty of a woman asked the wait staff in hurried tones if 'ping pong' had been in. The staff were a bit confused so the woman sat down to wait for 'ping pong'. A 40-something white guy, with ponytailed hair and an unidentifiable accent then showed up wearing the most lurid multi-coloured baggy trousers I've ever seen, accompanied by a shirt in similarly multi-coloured stripes that somehow managed to clash completely with the trousers. The multi-coloured hat had a similar effect. I assumed this must be the aforementioned 'ping pong'.
Anyway, back to the sweating. Walking more than about 50m had the effect of reducing both me and my clothes to a sodden mess, so after a day of wandering around Anjuna on foot I hired one of my guest house's mopeds and headed out to explore. No-one else wore a helmet but I wasn't so bothered about not looking cool that I was willing to risk a head injury if I happened to fall off a bike I didn't know on roads I didn't know. I know... I'll never make it as a hippy!
Using the moped I was able to get as far north as the beautifully deserted Keri beach, in the far north of the state, where for an afternoon all that accompanied the few beach shacks set up for the season were me and a couple of Indian families.
Just south of Keri was Arambol: a backpackers' town not dissimilar to Anjuna but with a beach that seemed a little more crowded and so, to my eye at least, a little less appealing: Anjuna and neighbouring Vagator have plenty of beach to go around, if you can avoid the ever-persistent sarong sellers (top tip: hide out in one of the bars!). Plus Arambol has only one road down to the beach: crowded on either side by throngs of cheap sarong / jewellery / T-shirt stalls and others offering 'rasta dreads', meaning you run this gauntlet every time you move from one part of the village to another. I hung about long enough one afternoon to have a swim in the fresh-water lagoon that collects behind one of the beaches, and long enough another morning to watch a pod of dolphins swim by whilst drinking a big steaming cup of chai. And cows wandered along the beach.
I had lunch one day in the pretty Fontainhas district of Panjim, Goa's capital and biggest town. This and the neighbouring district of San Thome contain the most intact remnants of houses and other buildings from the Portuguese colonial era. The street names even appear on the side of buildings as glazed tiles, although I suspect this may in part be a recent act by the tourism authorities. Very few other roads in Goa, or India for that matter, appear to have names!
Inland from Panjim along the Mandovi river lies Old Goa, which is essentially a ghost town, having been abandoned for Panjim about 300 years ago. What is striking about Old Goa is the amount of religious architecture that has survived, in the form of the Basilica de Bom Jesus, the Se Cathedral, and numerous other small yet beautiful churches, chapels and convents. The remains of St. Francis Xavier lie in the Basilica and the Se cathedral is said to be the biggest church in Asia, and so both are still important, if you're into that sort of thing. I'm not of course, but I couldn't fail to be impressed; however by the time I'd finished my wanderings I was absolutely exhausted by the heat and so said a few things that were probably ruder than was strictly necessary to the umpteenth person trying to sell me a chess set as I struggled back to the bike!
The weekly 'flea market' happens in Anjuna on Wednesdays, and I went along with the intention of doing all my Christmas shopping in one hit. I don't think I exactly achieved this, but I did manage to buy quite a lot of stuff... some of it I even wanted to buy, surprisingly! To be honest I was a little disappointed with the market: it has a big reputation, and pulls in tourists from all over Goa, so I was expecting lots of variety. While there was some variety, a lot of the stalls sold basically the same thing: cheap printed saris or cheap jewellery. Typically these were the stalls whose proprietors also best possessed the skill of the 'hard sell'. I couldn't help thinking that if they only tried selling stuff that people actually want to buy, they might not have to resort to the 'hard sell'. Interestingly, the very very many stalls selling identical Goa Trance CDs had no kind of 'hard sell'. Presumably their proprietors were too stoned to bother. Or just overawed by the view over the beach.
Back to Delhi now (I'm writing this on the plane) for another quick pit stop before flying to London early on Sunday. Moving back into the flat and then back to work on Monday, cripes. I just hope the box of clothes I posted home from Sydney arrived OK, or I'm going to look a bit of a scruff next week...
Robin
Knowing that the trip from Rishikesh to Mussoorie involved not just my first real taste of Indian public buses, but also a change of bus in a town I'd not yet visited, I set off from my guest house at about 10:30. Not too late, but not too early either. It was only about 45km to Dehra Dun, and then another 35km or so to Mussoorie. I knew the latter part of the journey was supposed to take 1¾ hours, which seemed reasonable as the bus has to climb over 1400m along a series of hair pin bends. So how long could the first part of the trip, on the flat, possibly be? Answer: nearly three hours! This was mostly because of a nasty snarl-up at a village near Dehra Dun: roads too narrow, with too many buses and trucks trying to squeeze past each other. In typical Indian fashion, no-one was giving an inch, resulting in gridlock. I bit my tongue so my fellow passengers wouldn't hear what I thought of their compatriots' driving skills.
After having to wait an hour and a half for my connecting bus, I finally arrived in Mussoorie at about 5:30pm, just half an hour before dark! At this point I congratulated myself at having decided to treat myself to slightly more upmarket lodgings than I'd had in Haridwar and Rishikesh. At over 2000m above sea level, it gets cold in Mussoorie, and my room at my hotel was not only large and comfortable, it was warm despite a lack of any visible heating system: the thick stone walls of this former colonial home retained the heat of the sun accumulated during the day. There is a sizeable Tibetan community in the hill country: dinner that night consisted of tibetan momos and noodle soup. Plus beer. Hooray, finally free of religious constraints I could have a beer. Not that any of the 'bars' (if you can call them that) in Mussoorie had any atmosphere to speak of. At this point I wasn't too bothered.
I spent the next couple of days happily just wandering around and taking in the amazing views to be had all around. Mussoorie is perched on a ridge high above the city of Dehra Dun below. Although the two are 35km apart by road, you can clearly see Mussoorie from Dehra Dun. And at night, the city lights illuminate the valley floor, providing a fantastic view from Mussoorie that you can't appreciate during the day because of the direction of the sun and all the smoke and haze that accompanies any Indian city.
On my last day I took a bus tour out to the village of Dhanolti and the mountain-top temple of Sukhnanda Devi. The latter sits atop another high peak, at over 3000m above sea level. Getting to it involved a steep walk up a good path, ascending probably 300m or so. Now I know I'm not amazingly fit but I found this climb incredibly hard work. Hopefully this was due to the altitude rather than the state of my health! At the top, ceremonial bells hung from gateways leading into the temple complex. I felt like I'd earned the loud ringing I gave them as I staggered to the summit!
From the top, the views were even better than those I'd appreciated in Mussoorie, or from the window of the bus as it careened around hair pin bend after hair pin bend, causing at least one of the Indian tourists aboard to be sick out of the window (classy). I could even see snow covering distant Himalayan peaks to the north.
After Mussoorie I had to stay a night in Dehra Dun to catch the 6am 'express' train back to Delhi (on which I am killing time by writing this post!). I have decided to rename this city 'Dehra Dump' as it seems to be terminally choked with traffic and completely bereft of redeeming features, apart from buses and taxis to Mussoorie, and buses and trains to Delhi.
Changing the subject completely, I've decided to spend most of my last week in India in Goa. I fly there tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon from Delhi. It should be a bit of a change of scene from North India, and it will be the last chance I get to get some beach action before the summer I guess... the cold climate of Mussoorie and around provided a nice break from the heat of the plains, but I'll have all the cold weather I want once I'm back in the UK...!
Robin
On Saturday afternoon I left Delhi by train for the holy city of Haridwar: like Varanasi, sitting on the bank of the Ganges. Arriving after dark and having eaten a curry on the train, I checked into my hotel and hit the streets for a bit of a wander and to see what 'action' there was to be had in a town which, like Varanasi, serves no alcohol or meat.
To my great surprise, I did find some 'action'... there was some kind of parade going along the main street. It was clearly some kind of Hindu puja but I never found out to what or whom this particular puja was dedicated. There was another one the following night; I didn't find out what that was about either. I did try asking the locals, the upshot being that they either didn't know or didn't want to tell me!
The parade was a mish-mash of decorated animals and various brightly-lit floats pulled and pushed by hand or by tractors. The power for the lights came from generators pulled by hand, with long cables trailing to the floats behind, held up from the street by men with poles. On some of the floats men in heavy make-up depicted scenes from Hindu mythology.
Other floats were basically just sound systems, with nationalistic names and slogans like 'Bharat' (official name for India) and 'Ashok' (emperor from the 3rd century BC). These were also brightly lit and extremely loud! Sometimes these attracted a crowd of madly-dancing youths, sometimes some older guys would dance around a trumpet in front of them.
Lastly I have to mention the brass bands that accompanied the sound systems - they play along with the music pumping out of the speakers, and wear the most amazingly bright uniforms. And none of them seemed to mind me struggling to get decent photos of them!
I was genuinely surprised by Haridwar, as it turned out to be such a colourful place. There wasn't really a heck of a lot to DO there, short of joining an ashram and becoming a yogi, but just wandering around was very rewarding. Just crossing the river in the morning, I was surprised to see guys panning for gold in the Ganges. I later found out that they also look for old coins and jewellery, the latter often coming from the remains of cremations. Nice.
Further upstream at the main Ghat, locals and visitors alike cooled off from the heat of the day by taking a dip in the holy waters of the Ganges, making for another colourful scene.
Having been told a tale or two about the presence of elephants, leopards, and tigers in the National Park that surrounds Haridwar, I keenly signed up for a 'jungle safari' in the afternoon. Unfortunately I didn't see any of the big three mentioned above (this is not unusual apparently) but it was nice to get out into the countryside and we did see a lot of interesting birdlife, like flocks of parakeets that dart past you like fighter jets. As it got dark we saw a few big mammals too, like deer and wild boar.
An unexpected highlight of this trip was visiting a tribal village. The guy who ran our tour (of just four tourists) has been involved with bringing government assistance to these people, who have only recently abandoned their nomadic lifestyle and started using cash instead of the barter system. Hailing originally from Afghanistan, they speak a mixture of Afghan languages, Punjabi, Urdu and Hindi. I couldn't believe that people could still be living like this, so close to the city. They let us into their homes, made of a mix of mud, straw, and buffalo dung, and made us tea, using fresh milk from their herd of buffalo. Yum.
Next was Rishikesh, about 30km north of Haridwar, or an hour and a half of bone-shaking in the back of a three-wheeler! Rishikesh is famous as the place where the Beatles got spiritual with the Maharishi (man). Today it still attracts a sizeable crowd of westerners who want to get spiritual at the many ashrams and yoga halls, most of which sprang up only after the Beatles got disillusioned and buggered off to carry on selling records.
Funnily enough, your average Indian is generally bemused by the swarms of westerners who come to places like Rishikesh to learn yoga. You see, it's just not that, well, cool. According to the 'good book', the sight of westerners coming to Rishikesh to learn yoga is to an Indian what an Englishman might think of Indians coming to somewhere like Devon to learn something like Morris dancing.
Rishikesh is strung out along the banks of the Ganges, with the main centre lying some distance away from the more attractive and interesting areas upstream - this is where the ashrams, yoga halls, and most of the westerners are to be found. Oh and lots of monkeys stalking the two pedestrian suspension bridges, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting tourists - one went for my bag! Also to be found, despite the ban on alcohol and meat also in force in Rishikesh, are restaurants and cafes that don't just sell curry or poor imitations of western food - lack of variety in Haridwar became a pain after a while, and this coming from someone who loves Indian food - try as I might, I just can't eat two curries a day!
The 'good book' says that Rishikesh is the kind of place that you either shoot straight through or stay for weeks. I stayed just one night - I managed to walk pretty much everywhere in town on my first day, and the rafting trip that I wanted to go on on the second day was cancelled. Pah. Rafting on the Ganges would have been fun, particularly as I failed to go rafting in both Argentina and New Zealand, for various reasons. Anyway I didn't fancy joining an ashram, and I was keen to push on to Mussoorie before I had to get back to Delhi, so off I set. Little did I know it would take almost all day to travel the 80km or so to Mussoorie... more on that in the next post!
Robin
I just re-read my last post (on Agra) and realised it didn't sound terribly positive! To be honest I think I was becoming a little tired of simply being a tourist (and of course, with my pasty white skin, it's SO obvious to all and sundry that that's what I am). A little respite was in order. And that's more or less what I got in Delhi - staying with Hannah i.e. someone who is not primarily a tourist here, allowed me to see some different sides of today's India.
That's not to say I didn't do any sightseeing. But not before a day of chilling out in the relatively upscale environs of South Delhi. Hannah's flat is actually inside a gated community, which sounds ridiculous until you realise that that is how most of the middle classes live. Hannah and her flatmates are not the only westerners present in their 'enclave' but I would say that their neighbours are probably about 99% Indian. The word 'gated' is probably overstating things a bit too: there are gates, but people pretty much come and go as they please. There is a bevy of security guards, who seem to mostly spend the night hours blowing their whistles at each other. I'm not sure how effective a method this is for preventing crime but hey what do I know.
Anyway, the sights. The modern Lotus Temple was the first 'sight' seen. Built in the 1980s it bears a passing resemblance to Sydney Opera House - the 'shells' of the roof were built the same way (post-tensioned concrete, fact fans... it is my job to know this sort of stuff!). The temple serves the Baha'i faith (look it up on Wikipedia) and as such is open to anyone of any religious persuasion. It was very peaceful inside, a real haven from the madness of the streets outside.
I paid the obligatory visit to India Gate and walked down Rajpath, the broad grassy avenue that leads to the parliament. It was so stinking hot that I was grateful for the shade provided by the trees, and twice stopped to sit down for a bit! Walking on the grass had the added benefit of putting myself slightly beyond the reach of the dodgy auto-rickshaw drivers who ply the streets of central Delhi. Typically there's never an auto around when you want one, and when you don't, there are hundreds!
The tomb complex of Humayun - one of the islamic Mughal emperors of India, was worth a visit. In the evening we had dinner at Karim's in the nearby quarter of Nizamuddin which is a very islamic affair: meaning that after lots of vegetarian meals meat was very much back on the menu! Mmmm, afghani-style barbecued chicken...
The Red Fort was OK; beautiful ancient pavilions inside, but the rest of the complex is falling to bits. And much of it is inaccessible.
The National Museum, with its air-con, provided a respite from the afternoon heat, and was interesting in a 'should really be more impressive' kind of way. To be fair there is a lot of renovation going on there, so they should be able to lift their game a bit. Outside I saw a troop of monkeys clamber over some of the exhibits. That was a nice reminder that I really was in India!
So what about the other sides of today's India? Although Hannah's current job pays poverty wages she showed me how the upwardly-mobile residents of South Delhi shop and 'pass-time': at places like 'M-block' market and Khan Market. At both of these there was a curious mix of the old and the new: spotless stores for western brands like Adidas and Puma, while just outside there might be a guy cutting keys on the street with just a metal file and good eyesight. Sometimes the mix works, other times it works less well. I saw this sign at 'M-block' market, and I'm still not sure what to think!
At Khan market I got myself measured up for a suit. The quality of Indian tailoring is very high and the cost of it is very low, so you can get a decent suit made up in almost any style you want for only a little more than the cost of the fabric. Fabric-wise you can spend whatever you like; I plumped for a very fine English wool. Not the cheapest but who cares. I'm due back for a fitting on Friday.
I also became far more skilled at bargaining with auto-rickshaw drivers, after Hannah tried to teach me some basic Hindi. I can now get them to go left, right, or straight on (after my painful ride from New Delhi station, I took to carrying a city map around with me!).
I can also say that I want to go somewhere and ask 'how much?'. Unfortunately I don't understand the reply if its in Hindi, but English is often used for numbers so this isn't too difficult. The international language of a cross face or a thumbs up works well, although I haven't mastered the odd Indian side-to-side head nod yet!
I also got a bit braver with the food, even digging in to a lunch with my fingers, using roti to capture the dhal and paneer curries that we'd ordered. Hannah showed me the way... it's not too difficult but it is messy... make sure hands are clean and don't hold your food with the left hand even if it is clean - this is considered bad manners, and if you don't know why I'm not going to tell you!
Ultimately it was good just to take some time to chill out in South Delhi; as it's not a tourist area I got zero hassle - so when I was out I felt like I could let my guard drop a bit and be more inquisitive, so I might actually learn something. In the more touristy places showing an interest can lead to all kinds of scams, which is unfortunate. I can't help thinking that more tourists would come to India, and would probably spend more money, if there weren't so many shysters about...
So now I have about two weeks left in India, and to escape the heat of the plains I'm heading up to the temple towns and hill stations at the edge of the Himalayas. First Haridwar, then see what happens! I'll be back in Delhi on Friday for the suit fitting, and then I'm thinking about flying to Goa for my last week... it's not that it's convenient for Delhi (I have to return to Delhi for my flight back to London) but I think this might be my last chance to get some beach action before the northern hemisphere summer...!
Robin
