China cancels tourism...

In a new twist on preparing for increased tourism during the Olympics, China has stopped issuing visas to foreigners applying from outside of the country of their nationality. So, when August and I went to the travel agent in Kathmandu to finalize our ticket to Beijing we were informed that it would be impossible for us to visit China. August has booked a new ticket home, departing from New Delhi May 28th, and I am planning to spend a month living in Delhi before flying directly to Mongolia. I might be a little annoyed at China for the inconvenience, but overall I am exceedingly excited about getting to live in the same city as Pratishtha and her family, and take a break from the tourist beat. Mongolia looks to more than make up for China anyway, with a national festival with music and horse-racing, and a TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN. My plan is to be on horse back in the deserted Western plains a little before sunset, when suddenly the sun disappears from the sky. Not so bad, eh?

Allahabad

The train ride to Allahabad (after a jaunt to Satna by bus) , was the most crowded we had seen. As a woman, I, at least, was offered a seat. According to a book I picked up on 'the life of a Hindu,' (first published in the 1890s), this practice is some sort of compensation for the fact that more likely than not, a woman will die giving birth to her first child around the age of 15. Apparently they also have a big party when she gets close to going into labor, explicitly to give her a last taste of life.

So, as compensation for the hardships I endure as a woman, I was forcibly offered a square-foot perch on the corner of a third bunk, with about 2.5 feet of head room and a fan spinning inches from my nose. (August got a groundfloor seat a few minutes later. Sigh.) As much suffering as standing would have spared my spine, this position at least gave me a bird's-eye-view over the aisle. Are those men watching me amusedly as I take take pictures like the tourist I am? No. They were staring before I got out the camera, and long afterwards. I think that is the main reason I've heard that foreigners don't take second class. It doesn't really bother me too much, though, strangely. I just think about how Americans would react to a 8-foot tall albino.

Allahabad turned out to be the most expensive stop we made in India, being more of a pilgrimage sight than a tourist destination. The cheapest hotel we could find was Rps. 550 ($14) and dinner cost a whopping Rps. 400 ($10)! It's funny how upset we were about it - we really have learned to think in rupees. Just think - Rps. 550 will buy you 100-200 cups of delicious chai, or around 90 samosas.

Then next morning we set out with the pilgrims to catch a boat to the exact spot where India's three holy rivers converge - the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the Sarswati (a mythical underground river). We found an early breakfast standing at a sweet shop, and eventually decided we liked the polite but persistent rickshaw-wallah who had been chattering at us in hindi as we finished our cold coffees. It was a nice long ride across town, with the shade-roof pulled up to keep the sun off our necks. Before we even got within sight of any of the rivers, we had a boatman ride up along side us on his bicycle. When we got there an outright crowd of them descended. It became clear that the first boatman was a kind of boat-pimp. We regularly use the term 'auto-pimp' to describe the one guy in a parking lot with good English who aggressively catches customers, haggles marked-up prices, then distributes the customers to the actual drivers, keeping a profit. Usually the auto-pimping system works out for the drivers as well, because the mark-up is small, and they don't have to lower their prices competiting with each other. And in exchange, we tourists get to haggle with someone we know understands English. I don't mind a little unionization.

The boat-pimp was intolerable, though. The beach was covered with Indian pilgrims and tourist, peacefully piling into boats for a charge of 20 rupees a head. The boat pimp insisted we pay him Rps. 350 for a private boat. When we explained we wanted to share, he said, okay, we could share, then quoted the same price. We walked (or rather nearly ran) along the beach trying to approach a boat, but every time the pimp would sprint ahead and fix the price (or at least some price, since the boatmen didn't seem to speak English). After about the fifth time, we were pretty frustrated, and went up the beach, trying to lose him in the chaos of wet pilgrims changing their clothes after bathing. He kept reappearing, though. I suppose we weren't that hard to pick out in the crowd.

In the end I resorted to my usual maneuvre in difficult situations - throwing myself upon the goodwill of youngmen. I spotted a group of five men in their 20s negotiating for a boat and temporarily confused the boat-pimp by talking to them instead of the boat man. They seemed a bit shy at first, but agreed to let us share their boat. I trusted myself to the flurry of Hindi that exploded between them and the pimp, and didn't question when one of them abruptly turned and said 'Get in.'

The five young men turned out to be soldiers from Darjeeling (explaining their asian-ness) completing an excercise in Allahabad, and taking advantage of a few hours leave to make their pilgrimmage. We rowed out to the middle of the water, where dozens of boats were tied together, held in place against the current by poles lodged into the shallow riverbed. Once we were moored, the men performed a short prayer ceremony, sending a little paper boat down stream, with flowers and a lighted candle. Then they stripped to their underwear and went to bathe in the murky polluted water. I took off my shoes and dipped my feet into the water, not taking various boatmen's advice to follow the men's example. Most women would bath fully dressed, but I didn't have a change of clothes and was wearing white besides. The men seemed pretty amused by my purified feet, though.

It was amazing how you really could see the line where the two rivers came together - the yellow waters of Mother Ganga swirling together with the turquoise Yamuna. When we got back to shore, the boatman started arguing with the men, and it became clear that he was demanding Rps. 1000 for the boat, and saying they should just make the foreigners pay for it. The boat pimp returned and I would hypothesize that the men from Darjeeling swore at him with the phrase "No, these are our friends" thrown in somewhere. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but we all walked away as a group, with one of the men holding the proper fare out to the boatman, who wouldn't touch it demanding something higher. So in the end, I think we paid less than Rps. 20 each. I never would have tried that myself, but I think the soldiers were outraged at their country's way of treating foreigners. I hope the boat pimp learned a little bit of a lesson, at least. We offered to buy them a coke or cup of tea, but their commander herded them back into a giant truck, and they drove away.

Khajuraho

Khajuraho may be famous for its erotic temple sculptures, but for me it means only sickness. Just to give fair warning, this post might be considered gross on both accounts.

It had a bad start. When we arrived at the bus station in Jhansi, we were immediately rushed to a bus that was leaving 'right now.' We hurriedly paid our fare and gave our luggage to the trunk-man, and climber onto the bus, where we sat and waited for two whole hours. About two hours after we finally started moving, I realized I was having motion sickness for the first time in my life. I tried looking out the window, and taking deep breaths of fresh air, but to no avail. I managed to limit myself to choking and gagging until we got to the half-way stop.

I got off and went in search of a bathroom in the crowded bus station, unsure how long I had before the bus would leave again. I didn't make it, though, and that was the first time I have vomited in public since a particularly embarrassing moment in first-grade PE class. I am used to being stared at in India, but standing right in the middle of the dirt-floored station area with a slightly soiled shirt front and a puddle in front of me, I wasn't sure whether it was pity or condemnation they were feeling for the poor weak white girl. I have since seen an Indian traveller surrendering his lunch in a train station, so I don't feel quite as bad. In terms of sanitation, you also have to keep in mind that almost every street in an Indian city has a man urinating on it at any given moment....

Back on the bus I had to make do with a bag held outside the window, and pitied the people around me. August tried his best, but there wasn't really anything he could do. When we finally got to Khajuraho, he grabbed all our bags and led me to a bench where I sat while he arranged a rickshaw to the hotel. I wasn't much in a mood for bargaining (and would have looked pretty desperate, so while he went into the hotel to negotiate I sat on a bit of curb. Some youngmen asked me where I was from. I responded by throwiung up into my already splashy bag. They helpfully pointed out that I was sitting across the street from a doctor's office.

I was so glad to see that bathroom, though I didn't have much left in my digestive system at that point. The luxury of a nice clean tiled floor to lie on. A few hours later, August's system exploded, too, and we had quite the night. By about noon the next day I was feeling up to the task of seeking out more water and a bowl of vegetable soup. I ate it over the course of two hours, in between semi-conscious rests.

The next day we were still pretty helpless, and August's stomach issues had changed direction. But we finally managed to see the temples, taking a few bathroom breaks. Almost every inch of the ten or so buildings in the complex was elaborately carved. Most famous are the explicit depictions from the Kama Sutra, but there were rows of individualized elephants wrapping an entire temple.

It was interesting, if a little awkward, to see whole Indian families visiting the temples. Even if we were just examining the detail of a female statue's jewelery, we didn't want the grandmother walking by to think we were looking too long at the four-person scene carved right above.

These temples were also inhabited by monkeys, who seemed rather interested in stealing shoes. Most temples will have a shoe-check of sorts before you enter the consecrated area barefoot, but all Khajuraho had was a uniformed guard with a big stick. He comicly chased the monkeys around the site, yelling in Hindi.

As for the sickness, we recovered completely withing a few days, without even taking the antibiotics I brought with.

Orchha

Orchha was really more of a pit-stop on the way from Gwalior to Khajuraho, but we spent two nights there, taking it easy (and getting food poisoning).

The bus from Gwalior left several hours late, so that when we arrived in Jhansi, it was already almost 10 pm. From there we had to take a 20-km ride in an autorickshaw, which took some hard bargaining. Even that late at night, a hoard of drivers pounced on us before we were even off the bus. Their numbers gave us a little leverage, but they knew we were desperate to get to our hotel. Being more experienced in such things, I was handling the haggling, sticking to a price a little below what we had read in the guidebook. I finally decided to give in to their price, which was slightly higher than the guidebook, and turned to August for the okay.

"Nah. Let's just go to that hotel here," he says. I look at him blankly as he starts walking away. We don't know of a hotel. Where is he going? I'm about to ask if he really thinks it is worth the inconvenience, when the auto-wallah breaks in - "Okay. One hundred rupees."

August had learned how to play the game.

The only thing to do in Orcha, really, is to see some palaces for a very over-priced ticket. Once again, August and I opted to check out the free ruins. The landscape was rather desolate, but wandering around gave me an unprecedented opportunity to photograph the second type of monkey we've seen in India.