bangkok makes swift recovery from ravages of civil war

bangkok! flew there on kingfisher airlines, one of the best in the world. if you're ever heading to/from india. you may recall that downtown bangkok had a little bit of a civil war ragin' very recently - mere days before i got there in fact. i would have never guessed from being there though. well, except for the centrally located, massive burned out carcass of centralworld - what was the biggest mall in south asia. and a few other malls around it. but thankfully there are hundreds of undamaged malls still left in bangkok! i am absolutely amazing at the level of consumerism that exists there, and how nice everything is. bangkok would be one of the nicest and glitziest cities in america. there is always at least one well-stocked 7-11 within sight at all times. and they stock milk! i haven't had some good milk for 5 months! and a pretty amazing fermented milk product too. i went to this one mall - the siam paragon - and it just has to be the nicest mall in the world. it might be the first time in my life where i just wandered around for 4 hours: dazed, and completely in awe. and i was amazed at the relative lack of disparity in bangkok (although its a very different story in rural thailand). even the people doing the most menial jobs are doing it while listening to their brand new ipods and while wearing their designer fashions. impressive, especially after the squalor of india. in between the mall wandering, i went to some famous buddhist temples - one with a huge gold reclining buddha and also the biggest and most famous one in thailand, as well as the grand palace of thailand (tourist trap, but it was still cool). i stayed on khao san road - southeast asia's traveller's mecca - which was supposed to be dirty, sketchy and cheap - but was one of the nicest streets i've ever seen.

i also took a day trip down to pattaya, a beach town 2 hours south of bangkok (on really nice air conditioned busses and an elevated, 10 lane toll expressway). it also happens to be the self proclaimed sex tourism capital of the world. (but don't worry, i went there solely for the beach). wow though, there were an unbelievable number of prostitutes. and surprisingly to me a lot of them were ageing thai women (with kids trailing along even), sipping their favorite sugary iced coffee drink bought for them at one of the starbucks that populate every corner of town by a old, fat, ugly, or all of the above caucasian male, before he took them back to his $400/night luxury hotel room. not really how i would have (if hypothetically i would have) imagined thai sex tourism. just a sad situation all around though. pattaya also had a flippin amazing new mall, right on the beach, one of the nicest in asia. it was here that i went to one of those all you can eat sushi places with the conveyor belt of raw meat coming by! well, i learned that the raw meat on the belt was to be cooked in a little soup bowl, and the sushi was over in the corner. but this was after i had sat down and eaten about 5 plates of raw beef, chicken, and who knows what else. tasty though. also, as has become the custom, i found my way onto the premises of a luxury property - pattaya's hard rock resort, where once inside i was treated as a guest. so all in all, my 4 days in thailand were pretty funtastic!

it can't be normal to have had diarrhea for this long

kolkata! its the new indian name for calcutta. the city of poverty. its true, there are a lot of desperately poor people here. it doesn't help that every year during the monsoon the entire city has to swim through 5 feet of water. i've been doing things like being mauled after giving homeless kids under overpasses 1 rupee coins. and getting attacked by a deranged crow that attacked me from behind, drawing blood. so if i come down with some rabies-like schitzo bird flu in the near future y'all know where it came from. and trying to avoid being suckered in to buying powered milk for "needy" mother's "starving" babies - they sell it back to the shopowners as soon as we leave. as if i'm the first person to wrestle with the issue - its really tough to know how to deal with the poverty as a mere passer-through without just perpetuating it by breeding dependance.

kolkata surprised us, though. although there are way too many millions of the world's bottom billion here, there are also millions living well above the poverty line. kolkata is the cultural capital of india. there are more well-versed english speakers, expensive coffee and confectionary shops, and well-stocked bookstores here than anywhere else in india. yes, you read that right!

we are staying at the couple-hundred-years old calcutta ywca - because our friends are staying there and also because they have an atrium with a dirt tennis court. we've had some pretty intense games. we've also been eating some amazing food. if north indian food is savory and spicy (actually most of the time its pretty bland), then bengali food is sweet and tangyyyy. i have embraced eating with the right hand (that is - exclusively the hand). i'm going to miss that part about india. i won't miss the stuff necessity sometimes forces you to do here with your left hand.

yesterday we went to mother theresa's house/grave. there are now thousands of nuns following in her footsteps all around the world. devin is going to volunteer at the missionaries of charity home for the dying - really wish i could too but unfortunately i leave tommorow so there isn't enough time. did some soul searching while reading about her life in a little museum - while right above us a bunch of nuns were making vows committing the rest of their lives to the service of the poor.

cold!, tea at every turn, running through clouds, political martyrdom

darjeeling! the place has it going on. it might be the most beautiful locale i have ever seen. perched along the crest of a hill just in front of the himalayas, it reminds me of a swiss town high in the alps, except with a lot more tibetan and bhutanese people, poverty, $7 hotel rooms, and monastaries. although it still has its fair share of cathedrals too! and because its in india, its culturally appropriate and even encouraged to throw your garbage on the ground instead of finding somewhere else to put it! and also to urinate wherever and whenever in public, in whatever direction you feel led! not that i would ever do these things, except of course as a gracious attempt to be culturally sensitive. the best tea in the world is grown here, and you can sip it while sitting in wicker chairs at colonial establishments that have been here since the british era. even though its the warmest time of the year here, it always stays below room temperature. the town is cloaked in clouds - apparently if they were to disappear it is possible to view mt. everest from just down the road, but it doesn't look like the clouds are going anywhere soon. we took a jeep up here, but its possible to take an 8 hour toy train ride up from the sweltering lowlands that chugs (with steam) along a tiny narrow gauge train track. we've been eating meals with but 3 of devin's unlimited supply of female friends. they happened to be in darjeeling and later kolkata at the same time as us.

although darjeeling is technically in the indian state of west bengal, on the street it is part of independant gorkhaland. there is an intense independance movement that basically controls everything, including whether businesses are allowed to be open, which they frequently aren't because of political strikes. proposed gorkhaland would occupy a strip of northern northeast india. this is one of the biggest and established movements of its kind in india, although there are numerous others as well. like every problem the developing world has ever known, why don't we blame this one on the british. they created the awkwardly shaped state of west bengal that grouped a few mountain dwelling nepalis in darjeeling with tens of millions of bengalis living in kolkata. by the way, there used to be an east bengal too, but now its bangledesh. speaking of the british, check out last week's economist for great post-election analysis!

now that i've successfully lost your attention, i'll get to the juicy news! on our last day in darjeeling an opposition gorkha leader was brutally hacked to death with a traditional nepali knife at a political rally just down the street from where we were staying. the front page of the local papers had a huge picture of him bleeding out on the ground. no sensitivity from the press here. so the entire town went into lockdown mode. we went to visit the girls at this ywam house they were staying at, and we had to stay there for the rest of the day because apparently it was too dangerous to be on the streets. although later that night we wandered the streets for adrenaline's sake and it was fine. the next day we managed to find a jeep out of town although it was tough to do because all the jeeps were parked - their owners presumably inside their houses mourning. we had purchased a train ticket, but of course we were to pick it up the day everything shut down, so we couldn't. so when we got to the bottom of the hill (after a little too much reverse stomach and esophogeal paristalsis [if you're catching my drift] from one of the guys stuffed into the back of the jeep with us) and found our way to the train station everything was sold out for the next 3 days. so we ended up taking a night and the next day too "sleeper" bus to kolkata. i'll just skip describing that journey so i can avoid reliving it.

kathmandu!

we had a super duper time in kathmandu! my good nepali friend and apartment-mate from school, prajjwal, grew up there, so we stayed with his family. i had no idea that his father was a gordon-conwell educated pastor who started from scratch what is now a massive church there that has planted 60 other churches. he is also the country director for about every agency doing good things in nepal, as well as a university architecture professor. they have a really nice house with mosquito nets over the beds (which saved our lives), and we got amazing home-cooked american breakfasts (cooked just for us - apparently nepalis don't eat breakfast) and nepali dinners along with lots of good discussions in the evenings. as if that wasn't enough, prajj's brother ujjwal and some of his friends took us on a tour of kathmandu on sunday. all the tourist sites were rather expensive, but they insisted on paying for everything. wow. we went to a couple durbar squares - groups of ancient temples. also went to a museum devoted to a late king (since recently there is no longer a monarchy in nepal), and a "monkey" temple complex on top of a big hill with a great view of kathmandu. its an interesting city (although what city isn't) - all the houses are 3 to 8 stories tall, and very distinctively nepali. the streets are all very narrow, except for one big ring road. during the recent maoist strikes tens of thousands of maoists joined hands on the ring road - completely excircling the city so no one could get in or leave unless they were desperate enough to run people over. after our tour i got to go on a long run around prajjwal's house! it was the best feeling ever! in india it has been too hot to even think about running, so i've really missed it.

the next day, we got to deal with some more of the stupid, arbitrary bureauracy of the indian government. they just decided to implement this rule that if you leave the country, even though you have a multiple entry visa, you can't come back for 2 months. unless you get a special stamp that costs a lot of money and, as we found out, takes a full day of waiting to get. and the rules go on, but this is already probably boring you. you would think that they would understand that making tourists jump through randomly placed hoops of stress will only translate into less tourists; money. i haven't even finished college yet and i can figure that out. anyways, this caused us to miss our bus to the far eastern end of nepal but luckily there was another one later. we took it, arriving 17 hours later in kakhadvitta, nepal, from where we walked across a river into india and caught a bus to silguri, from where we caught a crowded jeep to take us up an infinitey switchbacking road way up into the himalayan hills to an epic best-tea-in-the-world-growing/british hill station/remarkably exotic town called darjeeling!

himalayan adventures

we are in nepal now, and it is wonderful. people actually have a concept of personal space here! and we need blankets to sleep at night - its that cool! we didn't think we'd even be able to come, as there was a week long, rather intense maoist (d*** communists) strike that shut down the entire country. the maoists were out in the streets to beat any shop owner or taxi driver who was working. so the whole country was brought to a complete standstill. thankfully they called it off, because they realized that the people actually cared more about survival than communst ideology (who would have guessed?). as soon as we heard it was over we headed in.

we took the bumpiest all day ride possible from varanasi to the nepali border at sunauli - a ride that got started moderately late by indian standards because they were under the bus hitting something with a piece of rock for 2 hours. the bus had this cute horn that played a little song every time it was engaged - about every 5 seconds for 14 hours. next day we took another all day bus from the border to the town of pokhara. we got to stay with an uber cool nepali guy named neeraj, who is a friend of some of my cousins. the first night we had a delicious nepali dinner with him and his parents and family members. his father is the director of the international nepali fellowship - one of the biggest christian ngos in nepal! they have some sort of rule that foreign ngos can't do anything here, so that basically means that we had dinner with a very important man. and they gave us a room that was the nicest i have slept in for many a month.

pokhara is right on the edge of the annapurna range in the himalayas, probably one of the most famous trekking areas in the world. on the first day we headed out for a 2 day trek. haha, it sounds a lot more intense than it was. the first day involved a 2 hour hike up to a little village called dhampus at neeraj's suggestion. it was just outside the annapurna conservation area - so we didn't have to pay the large permit fee. the village was idyllic, and we didn't do anything for the rest of the day, except for eat some more nepali food and watch the odd cow go by. basically the place was deserted. we got up the next morning at 5 am and there was the huge annapurna mountain range right outside our window! (during the day the mountains are shrouded in clouds.) very beautiful. we then climbed another 2 hours (after a while on the wrong path) to a village called pothana where the views were even better. had breakfast, and then came all the way down. that night we had a fine dining experience in pokhara. the place is amazing. we had to search for a place we could afford. its like a tourist town in north america. rather impressive.

the next day was today. it was a truly epic day, soiled by only one little thing. actually, when i write the word soiled, more than one thing, but i won't get into that whole issue this time. when we got up after sleeping in, neeraj cooked us a satiating breakfast of buffalo burgers complete with fresh lettuce washed with clean water and coca cola to wash it all down. we then checked into a hotel because neeraj is heading up to dhampus himself for a romantic weekend. we then rented scooters!!!! $3.50 for the day! didn't realize gas was going to be so expensive though.... anyways, on these scooters we had more fun than one knew was imaginable. we found a waterfall and a cave with a river and a temple in it. then we went out into the countryside to a river with rapids that we swam in. but then it started to rain.

as we were grabbing our stuff, my "friend" devin dropped my camera onto a rock, from which it bounced into the river, ruining it. i miss it already. the last parts of my trip will be pictureless. but i forgave him, because he's my friend, and thats what friends do. even if he wasn't my friend, as per the words of Christ. plus it was in no way his fault. even if it would have been he more than made up for it by being the best scooter partner. after that, it started raining very heavily, so we went swimming more because it was warmer in the water than out. it started hailing huge half inch hail balls. when, after at least an hour, that finally ended, we headed back, but the rain/hail started again, along with intense wind that threatened to blow our bikes off the road and was rather painfull when combined with the hail on our tender, north american skin. it was exhilerating. tonight we cruised around pokhara in the dark on our scooters. the only thing better than unexpectedly hitting a speedbump on a scooter during the day is hitting one in the dark! we got lost, which added to the fun. tommorow we're heading for kathmandu....

veg thali and varanasi

varanasi is the holiest city in hinduism. rumor has it that if your body is cremated here and the ashes deposited in the ganges river your soul goes straight to nirvana. (that means no chance of being a tapeworm in the next life!). we are staying in a really great guesthouse right above the main burning ghat, where this cremation happens on big pyres of wood. there's a funeral procession through the narrow, winding streets down to the river every few minutes. dead people are flown here from all over india and around the world. most of the time the bodies are wrapped up elaborately, but sometimes they're not - which is pretty gnarly when they burn the person right there in front of you. the people doing this work are the dalit, or the "untouchables" - but its lucrative so some of them have become the richest people in town. there's a list of kinds of people who can't be burned - they are tied to rocks and deposited in the ganges. of course, this being india, most of the time the rope breaks. so there's all kinds of dead bodies floating in the river and washing up on the shores. along with all the feces from the city. and thousands of cows and buffaloes trying to escape the heat (aside - there are people who spend all day in the water scrubbing down the cows, perhaps for karma). all this in the water that everyone here seems to love to drink.

the first day we were here we fell for a scam about a hospice for dying people right beside the burning ghat. we went up to this "hospice" with a guy, and of course it wasn't one and they demanded money. then some young guys started physically accosting me and i may have almost lost my temper again. moral of the story: stay away from the burning ghat. varanasi has dozens of ghats though (these are stairs leading down to the river). they are quite nice to walk along, and brilliantly photogenic. behind these is an intense old city with kilometer after kilometer of narrow streets filled with cows, their excrement, flies, temples and people selling stuff. on some of the ghats there are fire pujas every night, which are ceremonies performed by elaborately dressed young brahmins (the highest caste) involving lots of fire, flowers, what seems like some sort of interpretive dance and continuous noise (some of it provided by automated machines that power mallets that bang cymbals, drums and bells). after one little one of these they handed out this delicious pudding desert that may have been the only free thing i've ever recieved in india. oh, except for some partial body massages. the massagers come up to you and start massaging you without your permission - and you've got to literally beat them off before they have a chance to get their possy to surround you to ensure you pay for your massage. but we'd always let it go for at least a little while, because they sure did feel good!

on our second day here devin, lauren and i found a shopping mall and indulged ourselves in american style buttery corn and ice cream. then we went to a hindi bollywood movie at the cinema, in large part because it was air conditioned. it could not have been more entertaining. it was a romantic comedy that had about 10 different basically unrelated storylines. wonderful. we also went on a couple boat rides on the ganges - one at night when people set afloat little floaties with flowers and a candle on it, and one very early in the morning when everyone in the city and their dirty laundry come down to the ganges for their bath and their swimming/yoga lessons.

today we went to a "christian ashram". it was quite interesting. a typical ashram is a hindu communal retreat center that focusses on attainment of spiritual enlightenment through the teachings of a guru. so i don't really know what we were expecting from a christian ashram - i suppose some sort of fushion of hindu practice and faith in Christ. basically we were curious. well, turns out the place was less of an ashram and more of a chill hangout with christian hippies. we had a communal meal, and then, being hippies, they passed a guitar around the circle for any of the 10 people there to play. and a guy put in a good effort trying to play an indian flute thing that he is in india long term to apparently become proficient at playing. there is a soft spoken aussie guy with a head full of dreads and a rather sparse beard and his - you guessed it - musically inclined, artsy, and even more soft spoken wife and their child that have established this place to show Jesus to all the backpackers coming through seeking spiritual enlightenment. we had some interesting light-hearted discussions about such things as spiritual contextualization and different ways of interpreting the great commission: it was good. i appreciated them because you could tell that their hippyness was extraneous to their genuine desire to be missionaries without calling themselves or even necessarily considering themselves said, which in a way was rather refreshing. its all about the love man, not about the colonialism. don't worry though mom - i'm holding off on the dreads. and by the way, happy mother's day!!

the taj with devin!

sorry, i've gotten a little behind on the blogging, let me try to catch up a little! went to the airport and met my friend devin. he finally came out a little over 2 hours after his flight landed.... indian immigration. we hung out in delhi for 2 days - one day in old delhi which is a walled maze of little chaotic shopping streets. went to a very golden sikh temple where they give out free food and sing beautiful sounding sikh songs. also more hindu temples and a jain temple that had a bird "hospital" - more like a couple thousand birds being held in a cage. tried to get into the jama masjid - the largest mosque in india - but even though it was supposed to be free they wouldn't let us in unless we payed a lot of rupees. may have almost lost my temper. but i'll stop writing about it now because its a bit of a sore spot. the second day we walked around new delhi - refused about a million determined salesmen beneath the shadow of the india arch, decided not to go into the indian national museum because of the exorbinant admission fee, and saw the president's house. a punjabi chap named mr. singh gave us a ride in his rickshaw. that's also the prime minister's name - what a coincidence. the smog in delhi is so bad that the sun never directly shines - i can't imagine hot it would be if it did. then we hung out around connought place, the main shopping circle in delhi, before catching an evening train to agra.

agra is the home of the taj mahal. it truly is beautiful. there were thousands of indian tourists there. rather unexpectedly, almost every single one of them wanted to get their pictures taken with us. so all morning we posed in pictures. definitely the most popular i have or ever will be in my life. some don't even ask - they just put their arm around you while their friend takes the photo. and oddly its not cool for an indian to smile in a picture. it was outrageous and, needless to say, got a little old after a while. so we sat on a spatially isolated ledge under one of the minarets for a good while where only one indian tourist could gain access to talk to us at a time. later devin got violently ill, which was rather unfortunate. we then took the night/most of the next day too train to varanasi. we met a girl named lauren from new york where we were staying in agra, with whom we've been hanging out with ever since. varanasi is a remarkable place, but i think that will have to wait for the next post because i'm getting tired and we have to get up realllllly early tomorrow.....

it was inevitable, i guess

i got really, really, really sick. basically i had every symptom in the book, short of hair loss. i thought i might die. ok, i didn't really think i would, but it was scary. maybe it was the "aquafina" water that definitely tasted like it had come straight out of the ganges, or worse yet, the yamuna river. who knows. i prayed a lot and took some miracle drug, ciprofloxacin. thankfully now i'm doing much better, although i'm still nowhere near 100%. i was staying at this place in jaipur that was 20 degrees hotter than it was outside during the day, which was already pretty darn hot. so i foolishly decided to take a rickshaw to this fort nearby in amber. it was a climb and a half to get to the fort, and at the top i was basically delusional and completely messed up. i had to lay down in this shady area with the guards for a couple hours to get myself together for the trip back. then i just stayed in my hotel room. but the fort was pretty cool. i think.

the day before that i explored the old walled city of jaipur, the capital of rajasthan and home to 3 million people desperate to rip off a tourist. can't blame them, there's nothing else to do in town. its a pretty crazy place - the bazaar area is absolutely huge and there is a separate street for every imaginable thing to purchase. also any camels, cows, monkeys... wandered around all morning looking for something to eat - remarkably not a single establishment around opened until 11 am. climbed this huge free-standing minaret in the middle of the city for a great view. and i went to this amazing structure called the palace of the winds that is a huge facade that women used to hide behind to watch the world go by back in the dark ages when they weren't allowed to be seen in public. beautiful building. a rickshaw driver promised me a great rate for an extensive tour (20 cents). i now know that any time something sounds too good to be true in india it most certainly is. i knew that before but i must not have been thinking straight. it turns out the rate was contingent upon him taking me to all these overcharging textile factories where they pressure you to buy things and he as the driver who brought the tourist there gets a kickback. i don't have room in my backpack for textiles. so we argued, and we argued, and we argued, and i ended up walking.

"all" the trains from jaipur to delhi were "booked" - hard to believe considering i inquired 2 days in advance and there's a train leaving for delhi every 10 minutes, but whatever. so i took the bus. call me shallow, but my first day in delhi i was magnetically drawn to a shopping mall. i just felt this need to get away from the heat, incessant touts, beggars, bicycles trying to hit me, etc. and to eat something other than veg thali, masala dosas, and puri, as tasty as those foods are. "the great india place" is apparently the best mall in india. it was really nice - for india. don't let the hype and the gdp growth figures fool you though - india is very much "developing", and will be for a long, long time. a month ago i would have imagined the nicest mall in india to be a lot more amazing than it was.

after saying that, delhi has an amazing new metro system, being built in preparation for the commonwealth games that are going to be here this fall. the best thing is that you don't have to barter for how much the trip is going to cost. although that sort of takes the fun out of it i guess. anyways, after taking it to the mall in the suburb of noida, i took it to the largest hindu temple in the world. today (sunday), i went to the international church here (after searching for quite some time to find it. rickshaw drivers sometimes say they know where something is and it turns out they have no idea). it was so nice. first "normal" church service (i'm not really counting the rift valley academy church that was aimed at the middle school crowd - although that was pretty good too) in maybe over 4 months - it was absolutely refreshing. i love church. had a sit down chat with the pastor after the service, at his request. he was the man. there aren't many churches here, to say the least. then i went to a museum devoted to gandhi on the site where he was shot, then humayun's tomb, perhaps india's most impressive piece of mughal architecture. apparently there was a serious delhi-specific terrorist alert issued this weekend. so the military is absolutely everywhere right now, doing pat downs and waving their ak-47s around. they even had a little bunker set up in a shiny new metro station - completely surrounded by sandbags. i'm not going to say its overkill or they might arrest me - after all i had to give up my passport and every piece of personal data imaginable just to use this computer. personal liberties............ i digress.

tonight i head down to indira gandhi international airport to embrace my good friend devin from home, whom i will be joining as wingman on his indian adventures. he was supposed to get here last night but the toilet on the plane broke or something, so its 3:15 am tonight. yay! it will be really nice to have someone sleeping next to me every night.