Kate discovers archiving, and the peasants rejoice

Alright, so having 23 posts with big-arsed images on one page was a bit silly. So Kate has learned to archive and older posts can now be found under those conveniently labeled archive links. Go technology.

The India Diaries - Back home

I've been back in Brisbane for 3 full days now and am still marvelling at the blueness of the sky, the lushness of the trees, the calmness of the traffic, and this wonderful thing called 'grass'. I feel so fortunate to be able to call this country and this city home. I want to hold onto this feeling of being grateful for what we have here for as long as I can.

India has certainly given me a greater level of tolerance and patience than I had before I left. I was able to go into the Indooroopilly shopping mall, buy a few t-shirts (the Indian dhobi-wallahs have all but destroyed most of mine) and come out felling serene and un-harried. And during school holidays as well. Before I went away, there is no way I could have gone into the Westfield wasteland without snapping at a store clerk or wanting to shoulder through a pack of giggling teenagers. I didn't realise how short my temper had become until India lengthened it again. And karma works. My new-found patience was rewarded by finding the perfect t-shirt in several colours and a great pair of pants, all very cheap.

It's good to be home in the comfort and oppulence of the west, but I miss India's innocence.

And now for something completely different...

Photos from the PeA pseudo-christmas party at the Belgium Beer Cafe, held on the day before I left for India.


The merry-makers gather...


Contemplate tasty offerings...



Bond with fellow merry-makers...


Before resorting to violence.

Much fun was had by all.

The India Diaries: Almost home

Just a quick post as I sit in the Sydney airport waiting for my flight to Brisbane to be called. I'm a bit sad at how my plans to keep up a travel blog have failed quite miserably. When I felt the need to write, I was generally nowhere near a computer let alone the Internet. Going low-tech hasn't been so bad, and I kinda like curling up with a journal and a pen rather than hacking away at a keyboard in a grimy Internet cafe.

My plan is to put together a digital photo album of sorts with images and my writings. I want to spend the next week before I go back to work to properly solidify the emotion I have felt and impressions I have made over the past month. I hope it all comes out well.

I've been in transit now for just over 36 hours, I think, starting with an overnight train from Jhansi to Delhi before flying out to Mumbai and on to Sydney. I cleared customs in Sydney and stepped outside to see the bluest sky I have seen in a month. Actually, to see the only blue sky I have seen in a month. I will never again complain that Sydney is a dirty place. Never. Its amazing how a few little basics now seem like luxuries. I had a glass of Aussie wine on the plane and I felt like I was drinking amber nectar. It was beautiful. I showered in the Qantas club here in Sydney. I haven't had a hot shower in a month, and a warm shower in 2 weeks. I was getting used to bathing by pouring hot water from a bucket over myself, but I think I can adjust back. It was bliss.

One thing I want to retain is my new found appreciation for those luxuries that I once considered necessities.

One more flight and I'm home!

Nameste-ji

The India Diaries - How to fit 4 foreigners and 14 Indians into a Jeep

So, I left Agra this morning to head to nearby Fatephur Sikra, an 800 year old city and fort. I thought the 2 hour bus ride there was crowded, with several people standing and one family of four sitting on a seat built for no more than 2 Ghandi-sized people. Nah! That was spacious compared to coming back. After a great day of wandering the old city, snacking from the vendors and chai stands as I went, I got to chatting with 2 guys from Mexico who had been trekking in Nepal, and yet another Canadian. So the sign at the bus stop said that there would be a bus back to Agra every half hour from 8am to 6pm. So we settled in for a late lunch and drink at a restaurant right next to the bus stop, thinking we would catch the 6pm bus back. Nope. 8am to 6pm means that the last bus leaves at 5:30pm, and aren't you silly for thinking otherwise. Fortunately, there was a jeep heading that way and we could get on it for only 5 rupee more than the bus would have cost. Sweet. A nice, luxurious (comparatively) jeep all to ourselves for only 20 rupee each. Nup. We were sharing it with 14 other people. There were two guys hanging off the back, one out of the passenger side door, and the driver was almost out the door. I say door, but this thing hadn't had any doors on it for a very long time. Comfortable? No. Scary? Oh god yes. Absolutely great fun? That too. And after almost freezing on the autorickshaw then bus ride that morning, I was nice and toasty squashed between 2 Mexicans, and half buried under their packs.

Off for a few chill-out days around the river in Ocha before heading back up to Delhi and home. I am going to miss this place.

At last! Pictures!

I have finally been able to find a computer which will play nice with my digital camera and has a fast enough connection to upload images. Forgive me if these are a little large. Decent image editing software is a little hard to come by in cyber cafes in India.


The view from my hotel in Mumbai on my first night in India. Yes, it is a slum, but from what I've seen since, it was a slum in the better part of town.


Me at Amber Fort in Jaipur, Rajistan. These guys were serious about their forts and built them big, impossible to attack, and very very luxurious.


Breakfast at the Karni Mata temple in Deshnoke, near Bikaner in Rajistan. Its a beautiful Hindi temple overrun by tens of thousands of storytellers reincarnated as rats. To see a white rat is considered very lucky... I saw two. Oh, and its a temple, so you have to leave your shoes at the gates. Mmmm... rat poo between your toes.






I still can't get used to the celebrity status my whiteness carries here. Everywhere I go, groups of Indians come up to me brandishing cameras. They don't want me to take a picture of them, they want to have their picture taken with me. I usually ask for one of them in return.


An 8 metre high, 2000 year old stone Buddha in the Adjunta tample complex. It's a series of 34 temples carved out of the cliff face and painted. The weight of the work the monks did in this place is absolutely tangible. So powerful.


Christmas day on a camel in the desert north of Jaisalmer.


Inside the Jaisalmer fort. Around 30,000 people still live inside the fort and it was a great place to get lost for a few hours.


Vegetarian thali. The most wonderful meal to order when you have no idea what anything on the menu is. Its assorted veg curries with chipati and roti (breads) and rice. To be eaten with the right hand, which I'm getting quite good at. Food tastes so much better when eaten with your hands.


Monkey and swamii getting cleaned up in the morning on the ghats at Pushka, Rajistan.






An amazing afternoon after stumbling upon a Brahman temple in the middle of Jaipur. A young and very enthusiastic student Brahman priest and yoga teacher took me in and introduced me to his family, his school, and his spirituality. He chanted the sanskrit he was learning. Such a pure and genuine man.

That's all for now. Must get off to bed before an early start to head to Fatepur Sikri in the morning.

An very Indian Christmas and New Years Eve, and why its hard to keep a travel blog when backpacking around India

At last! An internet cafe that isn't closed, without power, or running a 4kbs connection (I'm not kidding). I've pretty much given up on my original plan to keep travel blog going. The time and effort required to find an access point on a regular basis is just not worth it. In keeping with the trend in India, I've decided to take the more labor-intensive but less technologically advanced option of a notebook and pen for my travel diary. I've also wanted to get some of the amazing photos I've been taking up but it just hasn't worked out.

I spent Christmas eve and Christmas day on a camel in the sand dunes of the desert near Jaisalmer. Much much fun, and very fitting of a traditional Christmas, although paneer, dhal, and chipati cooked over a campfire is not really a traditional Christmas lunch, but oh so tasty.

It's New Year's Day today, and I'm in Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. My plan to spend New Year's Eve in Agra didn't pan out due to overbooked hotels and trains, and as it worked out, I'm glad I stayed in Jaipur for the past 5 nights. I've met up with a fellow Canadian who is also traveling alone so we've decided to spend the next week traveling not so alone. I also met up with a British couple who were interested in splurging on an Indian New Year's so we all trooped into a taxi and up to the Le Meridian Hotel in Jaipur for dinner and disco. The place is an absolute palace and certainly not something I could ever hope to afford in the west. For the paltry sum of 2999 rupee per couple (approx AUD90), we had an amazing dinner, all the drinks we could manage, and the pleasure of watching some serious Bollywood dance imitation on the dance floor. So so great. A few amusing and very Indian points:
- The power went off in the entire complex at around "Nine!", and was back on by "Two!" No one seemed to be concerned.
- A lot of Indians don't drink, so the mood was significantly lighter (and more letch-free) than it would be at a similar event in the west.
- At midnight, the four of us non-Indians exchanged the traditional New Year's kisses. We were the only ones to do so and got some odd looks.
- An amazing fireworks show was let off right over our heads. I've never seen a fireworks display launched directly over a group of people. When a tent nearby caught fire, I understood why, but it was very very beautiful.

Agra is so polluted and filthy after the clean air and rural areas of Rajistan, but I just couldn't come all the way to India and not see the Taj.

Only one week left before I head into the post-apocalyptic hell that is Delhi and onwards to the land of Oz. I'll return carrying silks from Jaipur, jewelry from Solupur, kurtas from Pune, and a sense of wonderment at this place where 1 billion people manage to live together in utter chaos, yet somehow find the ability to create small oasises of perfect harmony.

Not a tsunami in sight

Just a quick note to let everyone in blog land know that I have been up in the state Rajistan the last week or so, about as far away from the coastline and the areas of India hit by the recent tsunamis as possible. So far away that I haven't been close enough to a computer to make a post.

The news came as a bit of a shock, especially so because we had no idea until I got back to the hotel in the evening and happened to switch on CNN. We had spent the day wandering the forts and city of Jodphur and hadn't seen any groups of people gathered around televisions or any of the other behaviour you would expect to see in a country in the midst of a natural disaster of this scale. A little disturbing actually. Since the earthquake, the topic hasn't come up at all when I've been talking to Indians, only other travellers.

So all in all, all is well.

The India Diaries: To hell with numbering and order... I'm spending New Year's at the Taj!

I've found a nice friendly Canadian (aren't they all?) who wants to spend New Year's eve in Agra so I have someone to brave the crowds with. I wasn't too keen to go it alone. So... yay!

The India Diaries - Part 9: An Indian resturant in India and how to dress like an Indian woman without even trying

Okay, so I just had dinner here in Pune at the Resturant Hydrabad. The food was absolutely awesome, the service wonderfully attentive, but thats been my experience since I've arrived. What struck me was that we were eating in a themed resturant. Hydrabad is a city in the east, and from what I could tell from the incredibly opulant and Hollywood-like decor of the resturant, it is a city renowed for very good lamb marsalas, tiny mirrors everywhere, massive coloured glass chandeliers, and tassels, lots of tassels, even on the menus. So this was an Indian themed resturant, in India. Huh.

One thing that has struck me, particularly in Pune, is the variation in the way the women dress. Pune (pronounced Poona) is a very modern (by Indian standards), medium-sized city (around 4 million people) with an awful lot of universities and therefore an awful lot of students. For the most part and with only a few exceptions, the men wear western-style trousers or jeans, and untucked buttoned shirts or t-shirts. The women vary far more drastically. There seem to be three distinct styles and classes that go with them.

About half the women are in sarees and within this group, there are two sub-groups: Those that drape their saree in the traditional Majherasta style that kinda makes the skirt of the saree look a bit like a very long diaper are usually the peasants and construction workers (yes, there are an awful lot of woman working on road crews). Not terribly graceful, but a bit more practical. The other group wears saree in the style of southern India with the skirt pleated and left long. It is a very graceful way to drape saree and it seems to be the middle and upper class more traditional/conservative women who dress this way.

Then there are the women who wear chorta. Chorta is a set made up of loose trousers, a long tunic slit up the sides, and a scarf or stole. Very graceful, and also very comfortable. The women who wear chorta seem to be the professionals. Doctors, accountants and politicians all wear chorta. I bought one last week and have worn it out a few times. After a bit of confusion over seeing a western woman in traditional dress, I find I get very good service and am respected and generally treated well.

Then there are the young women, mostly students, who wear typical wester-style clothes. Jeans, t-shirts, sneakers, but nothing very low-cut and nothing shorter than mid-calf.

In some parts of the city, I felt very conspicuous in my whiteness and jeans and t-shirt. I'm starting to get used to the constant stares and groups of teenagers asking to have their photo taken with me but it does feel a little strange. I do like that my culture is as fascinating to them as theirs is to me. I felt like if I could dress like they do, I would blend in a little. So I am sitting in an internet cafe right now in the very young and trendy Koregan Park district wearing chorta, and feeling a bit out of place amongst all the girls in jeans and t-shirts. Contrast and contradictions, that's what I will take away from this place most clearly.

The India Diaries - Part 8: Heading North

India is such a place of contrasts and contradictions. I am sitting in an internet cafe (finally!) in Pune, just east of Mumbai. I'm surrounded by young, western-looking university students who are chatting, working on assignments, and just bumming around on a Saturday night. Down the street are cafes, resturants, and the place has a typical young Saturday night feel, although a little tamer than in the west. But across the road, a mangy dog and an old woman in a pale green saree are rumaging through a dumpster and less than a block away, children sleep with their parents on the sidewalk next to the most filthy stretch of river I have ever seen. The contrast is simply amazing.

I wish I had more time to spend posting updates but voluteer work with Rotary has kept me very busy and moving around the state, nowhere near an internet-connected computer. I've been keeping a written journal though, and will transcribe it when I get the chance. Photos to come too, I hope.

For now, its up to Ragistan for some desert trekking and a week at a meditation centre in Jaipur before starting the journey home.

Namaste!
(Namaste means both hello and goodbye in Hindi - like I said, a land of contradictions.)

The India Diaries - Part 7: First Impressions

Sitting on a balcony in Pune listening to the neverending noise on the streets below and thinking what a truly magic place India is, in all its noise and smell and dust.

How do I even begin to describe this place? Seeing it as I am through my wealthy western eyes, India is a place of devastating poverty, disease, disfigurement, and filth. Looking closer, there are brilliant smiles, woman in sarees and churtas of every imaginable colour, and an order and grace to a place that at fist glance is the very epitamy of chaos.
When I arrived in Mubai on Thursday afternoon, exhausted from almost 36 hours in transit, the first thing that struck me was the uniquness of my whiteness. It is such an interesting sensation after a life as part of a majority to suddenly find myself painfully aware of my minority status. Somehow I had carried with me to India a mistaken assumption of multiculturalism.

Rather than go into the day by day details of what I have been doing, I want to record my impressions of this place. I spent the day yesterday assisting in a camp being run to perform corrective surgeries on children disfigured by muscular dystrophy, polio and conjenital defects. Attempting to write what is was I was able to witness is so difficult. These children came through the door on hands, feet, knees and whatever else they could use to allow them to get around. After the doctors spent a few minutes with each to establish what could be done, I helped the nurses soak and wash their gnarled legs to get through the layers of dust in preparation for surgery. They were so nervous and afraid but all I could do was smile at them in lieu of any shared language. The smiles on these kids were so amazing, even as scared as they were, they smiled right back at me.

Later in the day I was helping remove the plaster casts from kids who had been operated on a few weeks earlier. There was one beautiful little girl with polio who's father spoke a little English. He was able to tell me that when she came in for surgery, she was only able to crawl and shuffle about on her bottom (her father did a great imitation of this to get the point across!). After we took her cast off, she slipped off the gurney, grabbed her fathers hands, and walked out of the room. She had been calling me Aunty Katta.

The people here are so very beautiful.

The India Diaries - Part 6: The Singapore Chapter

Okay, so not even a full 24 hours into my adventure, and I've already had to talk myself out of having to spend the night wandering the streets of Singapore, had problems with my tickets (StudentFlights are really bad at issuing correct tickets, that actually take a person ALL the way home, not just leave them stuck in Sydney), and been woken up out of my 3am nap by a very friendly woman police officer flanked by three very friendly male police officers with very large semi-automatic weapons strapped to their chests. Just a routine passport check, but what a way to wake up!

You meet some very cool people in transit bars at 2am. It was fantastic to sit in the outside balcony bar surrounded by so many different languages and accents. Makes me realise how much I miss the whole multicultural tapestry that is so missing in dear old Brisbane. I really hope that nice Canadian girl who was on her way back home from teaching English in Jakarta made her flight. She asked me mid-beer what time it was and I told her 11:45. "Shit!" she said "My flight boarded at 11:30!" and promptly dashed off, although not before a last gulp of her beer. I didn't see her back at the bar, so I presume she made it.

All in all, Singapore seems like a great place. Next time I visit, I would like to make it out of the airport cause if the airport is this much fun, man, the city must be fantastic!

Next posting: Somewhere in India...

The India Diaries - Part 5 1/2

Okay, so I managed to make it as far as the Brisbane international airport before finding myself in front of a computer again. Yay Qantas club! And to those of you who doubt that I could pass as a 50 year old Australian woman, hah! I say to you... hah! For that is exactly what I have done. Thanks mom, for letting me use your old membership card : )

So going through customs was frighteningly easy until I heard, "Excuse me ma'am. Could you step this way please?" Hmmm... I thought, do I look like the kind of person who would be carrying a bomb? Apparently so. So this guy showed me a laminated card that explained (in several languages) that I had been randomly selected to be screen by a chemical detection machine (it had a TLA but I have forgotten it already... damn acronyms). To this I responded "Cool!". Said man looked slightly taken aback, and replied that I was the first person to have responded to him with said exclamation. He then proceeded to touch my pockets with a small plastic wand with a bit of sticky-tape on the end of it. The sticky-tape was removed and put in a machine that "Heats up as hot as, well, probably as hot as the sun." according to Sticky-Tape and Wand Technician. A few beeps, and the machine told me I was clear to go. Now, not that Sticky-Tape and Wand Technician wasn't a nice enough guy, but I still reckon sniffer dogs are cuter.

Tasty Qantas club snacks beckon, so my next post will be from Singapore Airport, land of free internet access.

The India Diaries - Part 5

Only 6 hours to go before I wing my way off to the great unknown. While I have promised a few people that i will try to make regular posts, complete with photos, I don't know how available free internet access will be. The TCP/IP (Transfer by Cow Protocol/ India Protocol) connection could be busy holding up rush hour traffic in the middle of Delhi. However, I will be spending the night tonight at Singapore airport, voted best airport to sleep in 8 years running by Lonely Planet - what I want to know is, who has been sleeping there for 8 years running? (bud-um ching!) - and the free internet access there is world-renown.

Had Christmas drinkies with work folk yesterday afternoon... What a wonderful way to spend my last work day for 5 weeks, having tasty, disease-free food, safe water, and overdosing on that unique blend of humor and punnage that I have grown to love in my collegues.

And now, after months of researching, reading, planning, and getting stabbed by needles, I am almost on my way... yay! Next post will be from.... somewhere that is not here.

And for some cool insight into Indian culture, check out http://www.indax.com/trculture.html