Old stuff, beaches and lots of public transport.

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Such a shame I got so sucked in to Rajasthan. Having now left it 3 weeks ago, I can completely see how stifling and stressful it is there, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Happily, ever since the day I began my journey South, I’ve been smiling like a mad boy and loving every minute - well, with two minor exceptions, but I’ll get to that later!

So, in order to delay my trip to Mumbai as promised, my first port of call was Aurangabad, a very long way from anywhere, in Maharastra State. As soon as I arrived there, it was evident that I’d hit the South. By the way, ‘the South’ is not a creation of some arbitrary line I’ve drawn across the country. The southern States of India are not only culturally and politically polarised from much of the North, they’re also anthropologically distinct being Dravidian rather than Aryan. What you notice is that the Hindi language all but disappears, peoples’ skin is much darker, the weather is ten degrees warmer, the mosquitoes are back, the food is awful, but joy of joys, people actually give a damn about you as a human being rather than a wallet-carrier. Anyway, the language thing has been really interesting. I thought that having worked hard to be able to understand some of the daily chatter that washes around me, moving on to a place where this was no longer the case would be frustrating - far from it! I’m loving the fact that I can no longer tell what people are saying about me, I’m loving the fact that I have a genuine excuse to not talk to people I don’t want to and I’m absolutely grateful for the silencing of all that babble, chatter and endless preaching that is such a intransigent feature of Indian public transport. Clearly people are no less verbose down south, but switching off when you don’t understand is a whole lot easier.
Anyway, back to Aurangabad. Well apart from the Bibi-Qa-Maqbara, which is a mini Taj Mahal and is really quite cool, the city has little to offer but for the fact that it’s a rare place in India for having an absolute Muslim majority. Walking around the Old City, you really get a sense of how different Islamic cities look from Hindu ones, apart from anything else, there’s a beef shop on every street! When I first arrived in the town I was struck by how many people were walking and cycling around town with their mouths covered - I guess they’re hyper worried about pollution, though its visibly less bad than in the big Metros. However, this scene of beclothed faces becomes quite a sight against a backdrop of large numbers of Women in Purda - I felt so naked. The main reason for me heading to Aurangabad was its proximity to another of India’s phenomenal catalogue of World Heritage Sites - The Ellora Caves. The Caves are a series of 34 temples carved out of the rock faces of some adjacent mountains. Unfortunately they’re not underground as I had imagined them. Because my preconceptions were so awry, I actually found the whole site a little disappointing, but 2 of the temples specifically were absolutely breathtaking and really quite unique. One was a massive cathedral-esque chamber that housed a gigantic Buddha, the whole thing sculpted directly from the mountainside. The other is the World’s largest sculpted monolith and is almost beyond comprehension. We stood there for hours looking at it, trying to work out how such a mass of intricate work could be created out of a single piece of rock. Of course it’s by no means a dormant sculpture either, it was once a living breathing temple and so is sculpted inside and out throughout a mass of chambers and stairwells where people lived, worked and prayed. I wandered around the temples with two American guys I met on the bus. They’d only just arrived in the country and were already pulling their hair out with some of the more common Indianisms. Hearing their frustrations made me think about my journey and say to myself “no wonder I’m so exhausted!” Since then I’ve managed successfully to give myself a break, it’s all too easy to get absorbed by the misguided travellers’ ethic which dictates that we should ‘immerse ourselves in the culture’ - grief, I’m been so immersed I nearly drowned! So, with this new found freedom I headed off to soak up the wonders of Mumbai, though not before having a couple of hours of complete hideousness - the pleasure/pain principle in action me thinks. Basically I arrived back at my hostel from my trip around Aurangabad to be greeted by the lovely lady who looks after the place. She tells me that there’s ‘a problem’ and that I should come into the office. After much pussyfooting, the manager comes in and tells me in no uncertain terms that the local police have not accepted my papers and so I should leave the hostel immediately. Basically, I was being kicked out!! I’ve never been kicked out of anywhere before - I felt so criminalised and was so shocked I had no idea what to say. The manager took my protests as defiance and started getting aggressive and demanding I leave the premises that instant. He turned into quite a tyrant and genuinely freaked me out. At one point he even tried to deny me access to upstairs where all my things were. Basically what had happened was that the hostel is a YHA and is run by the Government, because of this, rather than just taking your passport details like every other hostel, they wanted a copy of my passport and visa which they gave to the police for verification. Now clearly I’m legally allowed to be in this country, if I wasn’t the police would have had no qualms about arresting me there and then, so what justification they could have for not accepting my papers is beyond me, but no one had any intention of gracing me with an explanation, let alone listening to my perspective. All I got was a barrage of veiled accusations. What bugs me the most is that my visa situation has been caused by some police official somewhere sitting on my papers for over 4 months now successfully avoiding spending 2 minutes to whack a stamp on them, and here we have police officials who took one afternoon to read and reject my documentation. Got to love this place (his says with exasperation!). So, anyway, that night it did take some effort to find somewhere else with available and affordable rooms, but in the end I was rewarded with a very lovely room and really helpful people and so my joy bubble was repaired and off I bounced.

Mumbai. Well what to say? I love that city!!! I just knew I’d love Mumbai which was part of my determination to go there, the other part was just to show that I saw no reason not to. Unfortunately, in this last bit of my trip I’ve not managed to stay anywhere too long as there are loads of places to see and so little time, but I did get to spend 4 very happy days in ‘India’s Global City’. An ironic slogan huh, considering the world’s success in globalising terrorism. The most apparent treats that Mumbai has to offer are the very Western goods and services on offer. The whole city centre is rammed with juice bars, patisseries, amazing bakeries, health food shops and even a falafel bar! - I went on a humous frenzy for a couple of days. There are also loads of bars, clubs, art galleries, museums and all the other joys of any modern and grooving city - though sadly the price tag is often comparable as well. There is lots of money in Mumbai and it shows; its clean, cared for and all the public services work. The city, well at least the large central hub of it, is proliferated with endless examples of stunning architecture, mostly British colonial, that rival anything you’ve seen in the UK. Doing a tourist trail in Mumbai would be something of a misnomer as every street in the city centre deserves appreciation. And of course, the city is on the coast, it has a busy but phenomenal beach in the very centre of town and the long sweeping curve of Marine Drive provides a stunning sunset walk around the bay with the towering CBD as a dramatic backdrop. Clearly though, as is the case in most of the World’s cities, all of this shininess serves to distract us from the grinding poverty that is its inescapable reflection. So while Mumbai produces over 1000 glitzy movies every year - way more than Hollywood - 55% of its population live in slums. I wonder though, what percentage of Los Angeles’ population lives below the poverty line, wouldn’t surprise me if it wasn’t too much less than that. Unsurprisingly, I met lots of people in the city who were keen to talk to me about their experiences of the bomb attacks last month. Mostly they were excited to see that I wasn’t scared off and I received a wonderful welcome. The most fascinating people to talk to were the tourists who were staying in my hostel at the time, a building literally across the road from the Taj hotel. I have to say, seeing the bloodshed first hand would most definitely have made me flee, but many of them are still there living out some kind of new bond that they’ve developed with the city. You can still see burnt out rooms and bullet holes all around. The realities of those 3 days are almost imprinted in the Mumbai air, especially when you stand in front of the Taj hotel and flash back to all those news images of the time - quite powerful. Ultimately, most of what I did in Mumbai constituted ‘milling around’ or eating, but I did get myself together enough on one day to become a Bollywood star!!! OK, OK, so that’s a little over-egging it, but I did manage my second TV appearance of this trip. With a little patience and observation, being in the right place at the right time to be approached as a potential Bollywood extra is surprisingly doable. This being one of my main motivations of being in Mumbai, I was well on it. So on my second day in the city I was whisked off with three other ‘foreigners’ to a movie set in the far North of the city. The thing is, Bollywood’s movie-makers are always keen to scatter random White people throughout the bar, market and beach scenes of their movies. It apparently adds an International dimension that Indians find exotic and exciting - who am I to argue? Really, the criteria for being asked is pretty damn lax, you just need to be willing and White, but nevertheless, I was well excited. As it happens, I was actually a little unlucky that day as filming on the latest Shah Rukh Khan movie was having a couple of days off and so the set was being used for a TV soap opera instead. Now Shah Rukh Khan, for those who are still uninitiated, is THE Bollywood God. The man is everywhere and is really very cool. To have been a groupie of his for the day would have made me Mumbai’s happiest little White boy, but sadly it was not to be, I got a cantankerous mother-in-law and annoying kids on the beach instead! That is not to suggest that I’m complaining, just explaining that you won’t be seeing me in a Bollywood cinema hall near you any time soon. Rather though, I will very shortly be appearing in a very popular Indian Soap Opera called ‘Mein tere parchi hun’. No one could definitively confirm the translation, but we think its something like, ‘My mother-in-law is my shadow’ - though don’t quote me. Basically, our scene was on ‘a beach in Goa’ where the family were playing out their obligatory angst against a beautiful backdrop of sun, sand, sea and a peculiar White man trying to get sunburnt! I was proud to be that man - I therefore spent much of my day lying in my shorts on a sun-lounger, being plied with food and drink and topping off my tan whilst chatting to lots of famous people and observing the workings of Bollywood. I also got paid for this hardship! Now there’s a happy day.

Back down to Earth, I left Mumbai to find a proper Goan beach. Goa was never top of my travel list as I was envisaging the swarms of European package holidayers that I would be fighting for a patch of beach. I was thankfully, dramatically wrong. I have no doubt that some of the beaches in Goa fit that description pretty well, but it seems each beach along Goa’s short but phenomenal coastline caters for a slightly different crowd. I managed to find one of the last bastions of the hippy era at a place called Arambol. You arrive in the village to find swathes of tourists and the usual multitude of locals that make their living from them, but determination to reach the beach is rewarded with what is geographically one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen. Its upwards of 30 minutes walk down the waterline to find a decent space, but there are literally miles and miles of broad-sweeping, shallow, immaculately clean, fine golden sand beach and so searching out somewhere for you, your book and your utopian fantasies is actually remarkably easy. Arambol is full of aging hippies, but unfortunately they’re mostly the less attractive sub-section of them; basically, those who are running away from something rather than looking for it. I have to say, I found it hard to be around and the general feeling of the place conjured up images of retirement homes; everyone there sounded like they were waiting to die, sparks of passion were few and far between. I could see how people arrived and never left, that kind of negativity sucks you in and in such a beautiful place, the incentive to escape is perhaps not so clear. It actually felt that is was very much like ‘The Beach’; a pseudo-idyllic community on self destruct. I was having none of it. I left after 2 days in order to upgrade my utopia. Basically I moved a few beaches southwards, but as I crossed the border in to a different state, the public transport to get me there was less than synergistic! 7 hours, 4 buses, 1 train and 2 very sore shoulders later, I arrived at Gorkana and finally found my little piece of paradise. Gorkana is actually a village in its own right, rather than a strip of shops selling tourist tat like Arambol. It is indeed a really nice village with lovely people and four amazing beaches to choose from. The beaches here are small and certainly a lot less dramatic than in Goa, but as it’s in Karnataka State, Gorkana is far less hyped and so really enjoys the kind of atmosphere that probably got people so excited about Goa in the 60’s. I went to Kudle Beach and met some lovely people - absolutely nobody running away, everyone’s eyes were wide and full of stories. I stayed in a small hut on the edge of the beach from where I could listen to the waves crash as I fell asleep. The hut was lined with dung and thatch and was surprisingly cosy. I was really lucky as I was there during full-moon. The beach was lit around the clock and I enjoyed my night-time walks along the beach chasing my moon-shadow as much as the afternoons spent sun-bathing and swimming. Actually it was violently hot while I was there, the hottest place in India at the time - over 35 degrees Celsius and breezeless, pretty intense bearing in mind that it’s winter here too! Because of this I spent a lot of time in the shade chatting in restaurants and cafes. The most fascinating people I met were a French Canadian couple who had one of the most extreme travelling stories I’ve ever heard. Allow me share it... are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin… When I started travelling around I remember writing that I couldn’t unfortunately go to Ley in Ladakh because the weather beat me to it. It’s high up in the Kashmiri Himalayas and it seems this year it had particularly bad weather. I was thinking of squeezing in a trip there at the beginning of October just before the usual end of season in Mid-October when the real snow hits. Having spoken to that Canadian couple I’m very pleased I decided not to. They were there in September for the Ley festival. While they were there they kept hearing stories of violent storms around and the odd avalanche, just before they left there was news that a bus from Srinagar heading up to Ley was caught in an avalanche killing 18 people. This is tragic news, but nothing exceptional in the Ladakh winter, what was exceptional was that it wasn’t winter yet. It seemed prudent to leave and so they did so the following day in a shared-Jeep and began the 30-hour ride to Manali - apparently one of the world’s most beautiful and spectacular road journeys, which includes the world’s highest road-pass. Anyway, unfortunately from this point on, the story gets messy and really quite scary. I can’t begin to do it justice, but listening to it expressed with all the recalled fear of a first-hand account was very powerful. I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with my précis. Very soon after they left Ley, the snow began to fall, it progressively snowed harder and harder for several hours. Visibility was shocking and they were driving on narrow mountain roads with extraordinarily long drops over the edge. Their nerves in tatters, eventually their driver agreed that it was getting ridiculous and parked up the jeep by the side of the road, by this point the snow was so think as to cover the wheels. Soon loads of other jeeps were stopping behind them and the snow kept falling. It happens that they were within walking distance of a small number of yurts that are erected permanently so that errant travellers can use them at will. It was decided that as it was getting dark and that it would be freezing cold in the jeeps, they would walk down to this yurt camp and stay the night there taking just a few essentials with them. Some people decided the walk looked too risky and so waited it out in the jeeps. The group arrived safely and settled in, only for one of the couples to realise that they’d left their passport and £1000 (!!!) in their jeep, a jeep which was now unlocked as someone was sleeping in it. The prospect of losing these things was scary enough to make the guy determined to go back into the ever-worsening storm to rescue them. Mallick, the guy relaying the story to me, was gracious enough it seems, and sensible enough, to refuse to let him go alone and so the two of them went back up the 2-hour steep hike in almost waist high snow! They reached the jeeps ok and recovered the valuables, but as they tried to return they were coming up against avalanche after avalanche. In all, 12 of them had fallen in the time since they’d passed uphill and now they had to gingerly navigate the very lose snow that each one had left blocking their way, not knowing when and where the inevitable follow up avalanches may fall. Jumping ahead slightly as the details now elude me, it suffices to say that much panic and fear ensued. The boys did eventually make it back in one piece, but Mallick then suffered a breakdown for several days afterwards as he was so traumatised by the experience. The story goes on. Because the snow kept falling, they had to stay in that camp another night, and another, and another. In all, they were there for 10 nights!!!! They only had a few basic things with them and the temperature was minus lots. There was nothing to do but chat and worry and so fear got the better of most of them. Apparently they were all nervous wrecks by the time a jeep was finally able to take them down to Manali. In that time, the snow only stopped for one day and sadly not long enough for any melting to take place. Thankfully the yurt camp has a kitchen and so there was some food, but by the 5th day, it began to run out and they literally had to ration themselves to very little and ate mostly just carbs for the last few days. Once they were down in Manali the true horrors of what they had been through came to light as they were big news. Many of those who stayed behind in the jeeps when they first stopped had died and numerous other people were caught in avalanches. Indeed many people had died including some of their fellow tourists, making their escape all the more transparent. One of the many anecdotes that they added to the story was about the fact that there was a whole yurt full of Indian army soldiers there with them and they were apparently the most non-plused, utterly useless people to be stuck in a disaster with - I’m afraid I’m not overly surprised. All in all, they had quite a welcome to India!

Having spent 5 days on the beach I decided that I needed to get a shimmy on. It was tough leaving Gorkana, but I hopped on a bus and was soon in Hampi. Hampi is yet another World Heritage Site - you could easily get complacent - and is really quite unique. It’s the remains of a once-powerful ancient civilization that are scattered amongst a bizarre and fascinating rock landscape. Unfortunately however, these days it also has a bizarre and hideous human landscape to add to the mix and so Hampi ranks as only the second place on my trip that I truly didn’t enjoy. It doesn’t help that while I was there I was overcharged for a room from which my mobile phone was stolen and nearly every meal I ate in the town was really bad. On one day I hired a bike and cycled around the surrounding villages soaking up the countryside and really enjoyed myself, but otherwise was really grateful for meeting some other travellers who managed to keep me sane. What was amusing was their colour-coding. When I arrived at the hostel in Hampi, it was the first time I’d had a mirror for over a week and I got quite a shock to see how tanned I was. This made me notice for the first time how colour-coded travellers in India are. From chalk-white to coco and everything in between; how much time they’d spent in India and where they’d been was burned into their skin (or not!). It became an amusing guessing game whilst whiling away a few hours over dinner. Of course you had to factor in where they came from in the first place, so it’s not as easy as all that... Eek, can you tell how much I enjoyed Hampi - I spent my evening turning people into Dulux charts! Anyway, having escaped Hampi for Bangalore, I had a serendipitous meeting with a visa official that prompted me to relook at my remaining 2 weeks in India. After some mind-boggling, I was eventually lucky enough to get myself a ticket to Kolkata that night and off I went. The urgency came about as it became clear that only in Kolkata could I possibly get permission to leave the country and in my one single day I’d planned to be there before flying out, should I find my visa officer ‘unavailable’ - all too possible - I would really be up a very smelling creak with only my hands to propel myself. Thus skipping up to Kolkata with great haste and sadly missing out on my few days in Kerela. I’m a little disappointed about this, but really I needed to give myself every chance of a smooth transit on the 29th. So, I took the 34-hour, 2000 kilometre train journey from Bangalore to Kolkata, back to the comforts of familiarity - never to be underestimated. Then yesterday I spent many hours on buses and waiting at various Government and police buildings throughout the city, but finally, just before close of play, I had all the right documentation and had paid all the right monies to the right people and my police registration officer finally agreed to stamp and sign my exit permit… phew! Unbelievably stressful, but in theory, I should now be ‘all go’ for leaving India this time next week. After a celebratory trip to Flurry’s, Kolkata’s famous colonial-style cake and coffee shop, I got myself on a bus to Bhubaneshwar and here I am - happy as a lamb and very much looking forward to Christmas.

So there we are. I’ve just realised that this is a mammoth blog entry and will be populated by comparatively few photos, so apologies for that. I’m going to write one final blog on my return, but until then, wishing you all much revelry and over-eating. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Hugs. Me. xx

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Photos

Bibi-Qa-Maqbara, Aurangabad
It was built be the son of Shah Jahan, the guy who built the Taj Mahal - can you see the resemblance? The son is also the guy after whom Aurangabad is named.

Cave 16, Ellora Caves
It's really hard to do it justice in a photo, but this temple would rank as pretty stunning had it been built in the normal way, but carved downwards to maintain its integrity as a monolith - just amazing!

CST, Mumbai
This is Mumbai's main train station, which unfortunately you may have seen images of in the news. Its a phenominal building, in scale as well as design - it's Asia's largest train station.

Taj Hotel, Mumbai
The boarding up of this iconic hotel is a sad sight, but it opened its doors again yesterday for the first time since the blasts.

Kudle Beach, Karnataka
My little piece of paradise.

Hampi
Not an interesting picture or even subject for that matter, but it shows the kind of lanscape around Hampi. This combination of ancient monument and bouldered landscape can be seen in all directions for a few miles.