Don't Tell 25 Year Old Me I Stayed At A Holiday Inn Resort in Thailand

Fly to Geneva, drive to Milan, stopover in Doha, Qatar (the only airport that carries its own fragrance, 'Doha, The Departure'), another long haul flight to Bangkok, an 8 hour wait, then the Asian flight carrier equivalent of EasyJet to Phuket, a taxi price negotiation ending in a ten passenger mini bus trip to the port, a ferry to Koh Phi Phi, a long tail boat to Laem Tong Beach.... AND THEN.... serenity. The serenity of a resort! The peace of mind of a valet, a welcome drink and no haggling; not to mention a flushable toilet. 25 year old me would be appalled by my lack of stamina, that I did not find a base price, bare bones local sea gypsy run establishment full of characters. But my ankles hurt and my back... and I'm only here for two weeks and I want to go to bed. 25 year old me says 'Go out! Drink a beer and rally!!!' But I say, this room has cable TV, I think I might watch The Dog Whisperer.

This is not to say that my trip was without adventure, oh no, there were catastrophes and unpredicted upsets galore! An allergic reaction to sea lice that resulted in a trip to the hospital and ingestion of a wide array of unlabeled medications for starters! My partner Daniel's head got attacked by a bird of paradise (whether the bird saw him as a potential competitor or a potential mate is still undecided). Then a jellyfish besieged his head underwater, but this was less of an attack and more of a mingling waltz with his hair. I was the victim of the vampire tendencies of Damsel Fish repeatedly! The name is quite deceiving - there's nothing helpless and vulnerable about these little reef fish. They stake out their patch and bite like piranhas until you can escape their evil clutches!

I also learned many things on this trip. My holiday was filled with educational activities, another departure from backpacking when my days were made up of languid lounging or languid floating(?) Whatever it was, it involved limited movement, and perhaps one task fulfilled by the end of the day - probably the purchase of shampoo or toothpaste. In contrast, my two weeks yielded great results. I am now a certified Open Water Scuba Diver! The process was really tough, I felt like I was in some kind of Navy Seal Academy. I had to complete a swim test, a theory test (an entire section of which focused on ways you can die while diving - one involves a lung moving up into your esophagus and another bubbles in your brain????!!!) and then do the actual submerging myself in water and sinking to the bottom part. Neutralizing buoyancy is a skill I am so happy to have acquired. It felt like levitating but controlling how high or low you were suspended in space through breathing in and out. All I can say is that it made me wish I was Buddha or an astronaut in a zero gravity rocket!

There are pluses and minuses to diving, a big drawback is the nitrogen you suck in along with all the lovely oxygen. The nitrogen is the part that can cause the brain bubbles, it also pretty much left me brain dead and sleepy as a dormouse every night. Some might see this as a plus, as do many who enjoy a state called 'nitrogen narcosis' which happens when you go down too quickly and it makes you feel drunk. Clearly this is not a good state to be in 18 meters under water where there are so many things that can kill you - like the WATER itself!! and big rocks, poisonous fish and shifting body organs - I think the clue is in the name narcosis.... Another minus is that it doesn't look like Finding Nemo on the sea bed. It's awesome and there are some beautiful soft corals, but it's nowhere near as colourful as the movie (because of the way light travels through water colours are lost the deeper you go) and there are some empty bits that look a bit like the desert. Lots of divers seem to love walls. They get really excited about SEA WALLS!! Walls in the sea are exactly the same as those on land except they travel down to the depths and have things that live in crevices and pop out to scare you - like lobster and puffer fish. This is not my bag. I don't want any surprises somewhere I have to wait 3 minutes at the same depth before swimming up. There can be no fast getaways! I like little anemone fish (like Nemo - the False Clown Fish) who are cute, petite, colourful and look like they live in a Vegas Showgirls dressing room surrounded by feather boas tickling them. And Sea Turtles!!! I LOVE Sea Turtles! Who also hang out around the anemones paddling about in search of snacks. They are the most stoned acting creatures ever to have evolved. It’s a wonder they have managed the complicated task of survival, although they do perform the great feat of eating their munchies suspended upside down. They are my neutralized buoyance heroes!

Whilst in Koh Phi Phi I also learned protocol for tsunami alerts, because there was one... It seems the best thing to do is to climb up to the highest possible point and then sit for 8 hours and eat a lot of bread and rice. All joking aside, there was an earthquake in Aceh, the same place that caused utter devastation on Phi Phi 7 years earlier. It was pretty terrifying watching the skyline and waiting. In a way it was a relief when it went dark. I was amazed by and so grateful to the Thai people, who were so calm, generous and organised in the face of a natural catastrophe ripping apart their lives a second time in less than a decade. A few of the resort guests who were up on top of the hill, had literally just hit shore as the alarm started. They had to drop everything and scramble up. I'm sad they didn't get their welcome drink and to watch The Dog Whisperer, but I'm happy we all lived.

More things I love about Sumatra

I should probably start with things I dont like as there are much fewer,

Love:
1. How everything works on the honesty system, with toilets in the bus station you have to pay more for a pooh and they ask you before you go in, "pee pee'? On the bus there is a guard by the toilet who stops you from poohing, he says 'no shit' and then smells the air when you come out

Hate:
1. EVERYONE SMOKES EVERYWHERE - on the bus, with the window shut and no ventilation, and a lot of people smoke filterless and big fat cone shaped ones that look like spliffs, I do like smell of the posh clove cigarettes that spark like firecrackers when people inhale them

Love:

the lack of tourists, we pretty much met everyone on the circuit. There were 2 guys whod had the same room as us in bukit lawang where we saw the orangs, we all had the same pet rat who gnawed through a canvas bag to get at cream crackers and ate a bar of perfumed soap and sugar coated paracetemol. We heard about a lot of people before we met them, like the aussie man who'd taken his 11 year old daughter on a 7 month trip around indonesia and india and made her walk 7 miles in the rain and fast at ramadan, apparently its a rite of passage he makes all of his children go on at that age, she kept saying 'its a good education' but not with any conviction...

love the way you can see genetics at work, a lot of the cats have stumps instead of tails and we thought theyd been docked, but actually they were just inbred

I love that a lot of people wear hard hats on bikes instead of helmets, what good they do I dont know because there are no straps so if they fall off the hat does too, little children have 'bob the builder' helmets you buy at toy stores

Facial hair in sumatra is also pretty fantastic, the muslim beards are quite funky, just whispy goatees, it seems to be a prerequisite to have a tash and a mullet to work for a bus company, I love that the developing world is still embracing the mullet look, I hope it continues

I love that the childrens school uniform is like an airforce cadet outfit, lots od caps with laurels leaves

wire donation boxes in the middle of the road, I thought maybe it was a toll again using the honesty policy, but its actually to build mosques, it should be to repair the roads which have enormous craters, but that does tend to slow the drivers down somewhat

I love the wild girls of pulah weh, they are so beautiful and feminine but also so earthy, they climb trees and build fires on the beach and jump over them and say 'ooh I burn my jungle' after theyve lept, they all have foreign husbands who are not really around and young children, but the babies are sort of communal so everyone looks after them and you never know whose is whose. They use plants from the jungle for medicine or to make their lady bits tighten up after birth - they told me to come back if I ever have a baby

I love that in pulah weh I just went out to my balcony and looked below and saw clear water and tropical fish, you didnt even need to snorkel or dive to see all the parrot fish and sweet lips and turtles and puffer fish and sting wray and barracuda. Fruit bats flew by like eagles and ate from the trees by the balcony. We sat at breakfast and saw whales, heard mata wray belly flop as they jump out of the water. We went fishing for our dinner with eva - the most amazing woman Ive ever met who shouted 'sexy too much' at stan the 72 year old englishman who comes every year for two months as he walked past in his trunks and flippers.


I love that indonesians watch indian soap operas

I love that sumatrans are such kind people who will try and shove 3 people on a seat so you dont have to stand and when you walk through their gardens they offer you fruit and vegetables or whatever is growing, which sometimes is turnip and you have to eat it raw so as not to offend.

I love Arrafin the 57 year old guide who took us into the jungle with his 17 year olf boy band member son, he believed if it was easy it was no fun and that following the path was cheating, so instead we macheted and crawled and climbed (the aching in my armpits by the end of it was phenomenal) and scratched and slipped and fell and hung from vines and jumped and got attacked by leeches and bugs. We also got chased by a wild orang utan. I love orang utans, but now I love them from afar, they are so strong and so agressive its frightening, we were deep in the jungle and spotted one in the distance, arrafin ran but left us behind and until it started growling like king kong we hadnt twigged that it was coming for us or rather for whatever food it assumed we had - guides occasionally bait them for the tourists so its really our fault and believe me if I could get away with biting people until they give me chocolate I would, I also got pinched by mena the notorious, she has bitten and scratched 63 guides, she is a semi wild orang - they come to the rescue centre everyday for milk and bananas - a diet the people who run the underfunded centre - locals with no outside backing or trained vets or zoologists, hope they get bored of so the orangs will eventually return completely to independent jungle living, apparently she only attacks men, so she just wanted to get a look at me.

In the jungle we saw a leopard track, thomas leaf monkeys, a black squirrel which arrafin was very excited about and disappointed that we didnt share his enthusiasm for rodents that we get in our backyards, we also saw a tree fall directly next to our campsite - that night we slept on a plastic sheet while the plastic sheet above us leaked rain as the river 10 feet away from us rose rapidly and we felt the tremors of an earthquake, its a wonder I slept at all that night

I loved watching the locals walk across thewild river, theyd wade in and disappear under water halfway and then resurface 100 meters further down stream on the other side. I am absolutely fascinated by the people who live in bukit lawang and their relationship with water, 4 years ago the entire village was wiped out by a flash flood (since then very few hotels have rebuilt, bukit lawang has not really recovered) and people drown all the time, yetthey are so calm around it. To a certain extent that is a bad thing, especially when they rent out tubes but forget to warn people about the washing machine effect that sucks you in half a mile further down.

I hate - giant gecko shit - they are big meaty poohs - they eat baby rats as well as insects, at first we didnt know what all the black stuff on our beds were - we assumed they were big dust particles from the palm roof of the hut, so I sort of rubbed it into the sheet with my hands, we were plagued by it, the geckos would climb onto the ceiling as you were eating and pooh on the table, I think its them taking their revenge on us for pulling off the tails of their little brothers to see if they grow back. As side note, I saw a civet, a cat/fox/weasel type thing whose pooh is sold for 300 bucks - apparently when they eat coffee beans the kernel passes through whole and makes for a very flavourful cup

I hate that all of the jungle is being cut down for palm oil and rubber plantations, in my western mind I do find something attractive in the orderliness of the trees and the diagonal strips on the rubber trees dripping white thick liquid into the little cups on the trees

I hate the fact that in Lake Toba on the idyllic samosir island (like a south pacific tropical island on an alpine lake with warm water) you go 2 km inland and the villages are some of the poorest Ive ever seen and deformities are rife - like clef lip and mental disabilities

I hate that so many people who work in the tourist industry are so bored, apparently in the 80s and 90s sumatran was a tourist hot spot, but since all that earthquakes and floods and tsunamis and conflicts - the government and achenese separtists, hardly anyone comes. While we were in sumatra there were 3 earthquakes and 1 tsunami.

I hate that mosquitoes bite you in the day as well as the night.

I hate all the face whitening products, ladies lather up and rock a kind of marcel marceau mime look

I hate the NGOs and how rude they are to locals and travellers when they come to pulah weh and that they talk shop with other NGO people and care on a power trip and have egos the size of a small country. I hate that the locals think when they leave the troubles will start again and the only option for young men will be to run away because either the militia will force them to fight or the government will assume theyre freedom fighters even if theyre not and imprison them

I also hate ramadan, which I know is intolerant, but pretty much the whole of sumatra went on lock downduring daylight hours and no water in such a hot climate is stupid. People will still feed you though, they 'pssk' at you and tell you to sneak round the back and then you find even the sumatrans hiding in the kitchen eating. I also hate call to prayer at 5.30 am over loud speaker

ok, sorry that was so long and rambling - Im actually nearly 3 weeks into sri lanka, so that blog will follow shortly

Surviving Sumatra

Right the power is constantly going down so Im going to type with fingers of fury - sorry claire for the awful grammar.

I shouldnt really have named this 'surviving sumatra' as it is absolutely lovely and the earthquakes were only in the first week and there havent been any tsunamis or flash floods yet (we're now out of the flash flood zone - bukit lawang (jumping point for orang utan jungle trekking) - 4 years ago the entire village was washed out and 300 people died - not a very big village so a substantial portion of the population, they never received international help so a lot of people never rebuilt; and going into the tsunami zone up to Pulah weh off the coast of Banda Aceh - the place worst hit by the tsunami killing 250,000 people, a lot of whom died because the government refused any aid to enter aceh because of its very militant separtist movement, aceh is rich in oil and other natural resources and is exploited by the javanese central government and US (thankfully 3 days after the tsunami the aussies flew in without permission - love that aussie indominatable spirit). Ok so now that Ive loaded you up very quickly with facts, things I like/love about Sumatra

1. When people greet you they shake you by the hand and then put their hand to their heart, so sweet and welcoming. Sumtrans are all smiles and how can they help you. We got stuck after hiking out to a volcano, gunung sibayak, near berastagi - it looked a bit like there should be teradactyles flying and brontosauruses stomping, the volcano had a jagged crater top and rotten egg sulphurous fumes, coloured in flurescents billowing out, - and some guys in a pick up truck gave us a lift and wouldnt take any money for it, they picked up other locals on the way, who smoked next to open canisters of petrol which was a bit terrifying. But EVERYONE (every man - apparently women in asia are the only untapped market left for cigarette companies) smokes constantly - unfiltered fat cigarettes and they save the ends to make a new one. Some people smoke clove cigarettes which is such a lovely lovely smell and the cigarettes spark as they drag - if I was a kid it would definitely make smoking seem appealing to me.

2. Appreciation of natural blessings - Berastagi is surrounded by volcanoes and has really rich volcanic soil so its the garden of indonesia, they have a monument of a giant cabbage in the centre of town and in the next town along its ripening tomatoes. Not only are there enormous fruit and veg markets - selling smelly prickly giant durian - I met a lady who named her daughter after this ugly fruit, tamarillos, passionfruit, they also have nurseries selling blossoming flowers. Sumatrans are also pretty understanding of mother nature and her sometimes cruel hand, when we were in the jungle in bukit lawang we felt a tremor in the middle of the night, when we asked the guides they shirked it off and said only a little one, it wasnt until we encountered an aussie couple with a mobile - reception in the middle of primary rainforest??-that we found out there had been 3 earthquakes, one 7.9 on the richter scale and the effects had by felt as far afield as jakarta, in java, another island???!!

3. Yodelling - at the moment we're on lake toba, it sort of looks alpine but there are avocado trees outside our hotel, the island is batak (in the north people are acehnese and at the coasts most people are muslim, in the centre most people are christian and mainly batak - which is a little beer sanctuary in the middle of ramadan). We saw a traditional batak show at our hotel, little girls dancing - hands together pointing down and toe tapping, seemed really easy til I tried, the littlest girl was a bit of a nazi and kept shouting at me to correct my movements, 'all together!!!' at the same time!!!', but the band was AMAZING, they had a 2 part program with an mc, the first was all pipes and wind instruments and some bongo drumming but with sticks - the drummers break beat sounded a bit like phil collins in the air tonight but Im sure phil probably stole it from them, the second program was all boy band styley, 5 guys, 3 certainly over 50, 2 with guitars the others with sports jackets all sang and harmonised, a bit sort of four tops-ish, but with yodelling bits and the music sounded slightly hawaiian a bit spanish guitary and it was wicked, I bought the cd. Harry the drummer said there is batak blues, batak hip hop, Im gonna have to investigate.

4. All cats in indonesia have the same name, manis, or cuching manis - sweet cat, but often just sweet, a lot have crooked tails or stumps but Im assured that they arent broken they're just born that way

5. People here do eat dog, but they prefer black dog - something to do with power and virility. Nice change to the european preference for blondes. The bataks also keep them as pets, so its difficult to figure out which is for eating and which is for stroking

6. The sumatrans confuse the letter 'f' and 'p' in english, Araffin, our jungle guide said he learned english from the bbc worldservice and prided himself on his proper pronunciation - would say things like 'fardon' instead of pardon and the river is going rather 'rafidly' now.

7. Araffin, actually Araffin should be top of the list,

ok got to go thunder going off will finish later

Dates - luxurious sweets of the gods

This is completely an afterthought. But a lovely one. I was in the health food shop the other day and I saw pitted dates on offer for 99p. And it made me think of siwa and discovering dates with almonds and the pains in my tummy I got from eating too many. I thought at 99p for a pack why not try it, it's a bargain, I would normally go for something more ressemblent of junk like carob chip cookies or a carob covered hemp seed bar (a poor imitation of the godly chocolate covered flapjack - I have a similar relationship with clothes, have you ever heard of asos.com? There is a greek cigarette brand of the same name that made me laugh during my sojourn in the hedonistic island of ios - 'I like asos' I would say and giggle - because of its blatant double entendre - I know sophomoric but I was of the beavis and butthead generation. Anyway this website is as seen on screen where they have a photo of a beautifully attired celeb - a venerable walking advert for a designer, personification of chic, and then they sell shabby knock offs that only look like the genuine article through a myopic squint. Kind of like when you see the brother or sister or child of someone very attractive and you can see the shared family characteristics and on one it looks like perfection and on the other it looks somehow alien or strange or wonky.). Where was I? Right dates. So when I actually bit into it, it was like sweet nectar with the consistency of turkish delight. It was so sweet and rich and reminded me of the desert where it was such a an amazing discovery and a welcome change to the taste of sand. I was just surprised and felt so lucky that a pleasure that had meant so much to me on my travels and I associated with my bedouin apprenticeship!!!

Right so finally getting to Egypt, now that I've been back for 2 weeks....

When I think about how wrong I had the arab world in my head it kind of alarms me. I think I expected birkas and moorish men weilding crescent moon shaped sabres and lots of men on the back of pick up trucks being rowdy and firing off guns - well that's what you see on the news. You expect that everyone is poor and miserable and horribly angry. Nothing is farther from the truth. I think you become a little deluded by what the media sells you, when I was little I think I really believed that all Russians were like dolph lungren in Rocky IV - 7 foot tall and a monosyllabic evil he-man programmed and brainwashed to destroy everything in his path. Now I just think all russians are either gangsters or lesbians like tatu. ANyway I digress... The Egyptians were so welcoming and friendly and open, especially the desert people. I got invited to so many campfire singalongs lit by a big yellow moon and found an arab father figure in Mr Badhu who kept the horrible german boys away from me and guarded me as I slept and when it go so cold that I shivered he threw his camel scented blankets over me and he just smoked his sheesha and I heard it bubble as I drifted off to sleep. The funny thing about the desert people was how open they were with you. I went for a dinner of salad and henna - I swear it was henna, smelt like it, looked like it, didn't know it was edible at snoozi and said's house and after the meal my friend karine and I were invited to the ladies quarters to thank them for cooking. Karine lived in Siwa and could speak a bit of the local language and they started to tell her about their swollen legs. Then they hiked up their skirts all the way to the tops of their thighs and showed us. They seemed to expect that as westerners we carried around doctors kits, but all that I could offer them was tiger balm. I know it's a remedy for most things but I wasn't sure on this occasion that it would work.

But I loved Siwa - the people were so beautiful - literally physically beautiful, they had caramel coloured skin and blue green eyes - they were berbers originally from morrocco, and they were always prepared in their houses for visitors. The rooms themselves were quite bear but they stacked 12 matresses in the side of the room with about 5 or 6 rolled up carpets next to them. The shops were never open, it was actually a tough place to buy things, you had to search out the proprietor and beg him to open, I guess it's a way of weeding out time wasters.... Siwa seemed as untouched by tourism as you can get in Egypt, and they seemed to like it that way, some things you paid for some you didn't, like our trip out to the great sand sea - it was like the english patient or lawrence of arabia. whatever way I say it, it won't do justify to what I saw. I saw oases and swam in a cold lake in the middle of sand mountains, I saw mirages float up and float away, I saw ancient fossils from when it sea - petrified sand dollars and star fish. I sandboarding from the top of sharp spines of deep dunes. We even got mohammed the driver - a 50 year berber to try it too and nothing compares to seeing him with cigarette in his mouth coffir (headdress on) gracefully glide down to the bottom. I visited the ruins of the oracle that alexander went to consult and legend has it that he lost 500 thousand men in a sand storm on the way there. ANd when I left I got presents - a big bag of dates and a scarf.

Now I don't know if a lot of it is because I rank well on the traveller talking hierarchy - this is scale of how much other people might want to talk to you.

My friend Jacqueline is a number one candidate, she ranks above all others

1. she's female
2. she's pretty
3. she's dutch (dutch and canadian are the most popular, followed by british commonwealth)
4. she speaks the native language
5. she has a sense of humour
6. she's nice

My friend David on the other hand is kind of at the bottom - this by the way is all superficial first impression stuff

he's big and hairy and wears speedos and is gruff and is Israeli (this is horrible but true, I think sometimes through no fault of their own, just a language barrier but Israelis can sound a little pushy and a little scary, everything comes out as if it is fact that what they say is the truth, the only truth and everything else is offensive and wrong). WHen he first came to sit next to me on the beach in Sinai I didn't want to talk to him. But then he offered me lemongrass tea with lots of sugar and I was in. If you don't rank high on the hierarchy you have to have a pull. Tea is a HUGE deal in Egypt, everyone in the desert has rotten teeth and it's because the way they drink it it's one part sugar one part tea. They have a ritual of pouring half a bag of sugar into an enormous cup and then pouring tea in it and repeating this process until the sugar is all dissolved, then they pourout individual cups and add more. It becomes addictive all the sugar highs and the headaches from the come down. David was great though, he spoke arabic and made friends with all the bedouin guys, he seemed to have an appreciation for things that I would get annoyed about. Like the fact that they have no sense of distance, everything is cigarette smoking distance, we walked 15 km from nuweiba to the camp and everywhere we stopped to ask how far long until ras sheiten, they'd say oh cigarette smoking distance...

The Nubians were lovely too, I met a guy, lets call him mohamed because most people were called mohamed, though there were a few ramadans and saids, but because there were so many mohameds I now can't remember who wasn't, I sat with him on his roof terrace and petted a baby crocodile - when the fishermen would catch them he'd rear them until they were a year old and then take them back to lake nasser, and watched the feluccas go by. In Luxor when I stopped for lunch the chef not only fed me but mended my shoe. My experience with the general population was so overwhelmingly positive it made me not really care about the hawkers and the tricksters. I felt wise to it all now. I rented a bike on the east bank in luxor and when I tried to take it across the river they told me that they weren't allowing bikes on today, or when two lads lied and said that the entrance to the pyramids was through the stables, I just pushed past them all. If anything I think a lot of egyptians are really embarassed by these boys - because they are mainly boys, and they often tell them off. I get more hassle from men in NYC then I got on the whole of my trip. I found that if you don;t wear a bikini and miniscule shorts that the men were really respectful. If they did show any interest it was often because they weren;t really able to have a chat with egyptian girls so they were just using an opportunity given to them to converse.

There is a phenomenon in Egypt though, a kind of a mirror to Thailand. If you go out to clubs or bars in Luxor and at the resort towns you see tons of 50 and 60 year old western - mainly english, women with young nubile toy boys. They were all a bit fabio beefcakey for my liking but the ladies enjoyed the pumping muscles. I guess maybe it's the whole omar sharif thing?

There is also another phenomenon of western women of that age, a type of traveller I like to call the battlin betty - after the first one that I met. They travel alone and Betty in particular was travelling off of the alimony her husband pays her which makes it doubly satisfying. They are all so spirited but something seems a little word worn about them, a little faded clint eastwood or jack palance grizzle about them. Betty in particular, she said in india she kept a stick with her at all times in case the men came up and tried to grab her. She mentioned she'd had a few altercations here and she had a mind to get a stick again.

Favourite Bits of Egypt

1. second hand market in Cairo it's like 24 hours or something - always people rummaging through
2. om kolthum cafe - play this classical arabic music star's music 24 7 and have walls covered in paintings and statues of her everywhere!!
3. egyptian museum - the layout, like it's someones attic?!
4. seeing a fennick fox in the white desert - white desert AMAZING!!!! Like a 3-d psychological blot test - 10 ft chickens and mushrooms, going to sleep in it looked like the moon, as the sunset the white rock formations turned gold and pink and purple and blue
5. Ramses smiting - EVERYWHERE he was really into his smiting
6. Amazing Sufi dancers - whirling dervishes like the planets, one guy twirled without stopping at speed for 35 minutes while playing a drum, just loved the music, each musician danced and talked with his instrument.
7. sinai gorges and canyons, so old and world worn, could see how the wind had shittled them down and the granite came in pinks and reds and blues and oranges.
8. Mr Badhi saying that marrying your cousin can be a problem, I said oh because of the close genetic connection, he said no because you're family is too involved
9. everyone had an opinion about diana and dodi

Most of all I just loved the people

India Round up

Yes I am so lame that I stopped writing my blog entirely and now that I am home and stuffed with chocolate and wine - b/c it's easter I am too lazy to write anything properly. So it all comes down to the list again...

The most important bit of news that I'd like to add is that I now have found justification for the girlie wimpering I carried off around the subcontinent. Having returned home, I immediately went to the doctors to see what kind of rare fungal spore I may be carrying or what creature may have imbedded itself within my scalp, and it turns out that my medical paranoia on this one occasion was right. I am allergic to dust! I felt so vindicated in that instant, after all my moaning about crap and garbage and shit, I thought, yes, it did actually get to me, I am now a damaged human being, my lifespan is now shorter...

If you can't get a tropical illness you might as well be allergic to the world.... So after this year I've decided to stop travelling and accept my fate as a lonely cat lady who has an OCD in cleaning. Within two years I fully expect to be living with all my furniture covered in plastic.

Anyway, on with the India list....

1. Pooh, all conversations become scatalogical in India, you may start off talking about the weather or a train timetable, but then in the background you'll notice someone squat down and start taking a dump. My friend Julie was having a conversation with her dad in which he said that he knew someone who had visited India and he said people just shit in the street, 'yup' julie replied, 'what they just shit in the street?', 'yup that's what they do'. Small children on trains aren't bound by the need to be stationary, they just wander up and down the car as it slowly leaks out. Sometimes, polite parents will take their children to just outside the toilet and let them deficate there, it makes you think that the toilet may only actually be for adults. While on a train journey, we learned quickly to evacuate whatever is in you early on, b/c visiting the toilet after about 6 hours on the train is like visiting the cell of the most depraved of mental patients. People seemed to open the door and shit there, not directing it anywhere specifically, nowhere near the hole. As you go past villages you see ladies on the side of the road with huge steaming piles of pooh around them, making dung patties that look so perfect and pretty and like sand dollars. You imagine that in the toilets on the train, maybe the work continues and that their industriousness would attribute to the mess?

Still I have visited houses made of pooh in the Thar Desert and they were beautiful constructions, personalised by individual lattice designs, cool smooth lines. So pooh put to certain uses can make something beautiful and practical.

2. While in India, I had 2 apocalyptical experiences. The first an earthquake in the middle of the night in darjeeling and the second a sudden ice storm in dehli when it was about 30 degrees - huge cubes pelting down. All the locals seemed rather amused by it all, a bonus of not having a biblical frame of reference

3. Taj Mahal - it just really is that special. Instead of pigeons flying about the place there are green parrots. YOu turn the corner and see it and the only thing I can equate the feeling to is when I saw the magic castle at disney land when I was 7. That's was a fairytale should look like. It was amazing to see something so perfectly pristinely white and sparkling and clean and peaceful - in india. Even though it was 38 degrees out, the stone of the taj mahal felt cool. All the colourful patterns were inlaid stones - lapis lazuli blue, quartz black. Just the symmetry of it I think made you feel calm. Of course, the taj was more a testiment to muslim creativity and engineering. I can't tell you how gutted I was, I had found something in india to be in awe of and it's wasn't even indian, it was turkish!

4. beggars - we started calling them the zombies. As we were sitting in a 4 x 4, waiting to go up to darjeeling, a family of beggars slowly shuffled towards us, doing the head bobble thing and tilting backwards and scratching at the glass, I felt like we were in the night of the living dead. You just become so desensitized and there are children covered head to toe in soot who come up to you to try to hold your hand and you shrink away from them b/c they are so filthy. Can you imagine, recoiling from a 3 year old? The vast number of the people who have nothing and live in crap (people do live at the dump, but in a way it's better there, they can make houses out of garbage and children can find things to play with) means that after a while you just stop caring. There are levels of nothingness, some people have tarpaulin houses set up on the pavement or cardboard boxes. Others have nothing to shield them - we saw a man covered in fresh burns and he had nothing to shield him from the elements of keep his sores clean, I think he was the person with the most nothingness. But when you do find something to care about, it isn't people, it's puppies. Seeing a tiny puppy on it's own on the train platform, not knowing how to take care of itself, but desperately wanting love and knowing it'll be dead in a few days. The indian people kick it and it yelps and your heart breaks even more. But the way the indians see the puppy, a pest and a scavenger and a leech is sort of how you end up seeing the beggars. I would've given half my sandwich to the puppy, but I probably wouldn't to the starving person - it's a horrible indictment of oneself....

4. Indian tourists - the funniest people in the world. When we were at the Himalayan Mountaineering institute - which was really nice, it celebrated the gurkhas as opposed to the white guys who climbed everest and other neighbouring peaks, the tourists would put on local traditional garb and pretend to be tea pickers. They'd all have their pictures taken by a hedge with a basket on their heads pretending to pick tea leaves. They're so cute, they buy wooly hats with the name of the place that they've visited and wear them immediately and eat lots of ice cream. Then sometimes, they ask you to be in the picture. It makes you feel like a masai mara warrior or something that worthy of picture taking.

5. monkeys on bridges - dangerous things, in rishikesh, they sort of had you cornered as you crossed the river, they could always sense if you had food in your bag. I actually witnessed a lady vs monkey fight. She was ferocious, obviously a veteran and eventually the monkey backed off. Be good bloodsport to bet on.

6. Agoris - a hindu sect who worship Kali goddess of destruction and once or twice in their lives they have to eat human flesh. So they go down to the burning ghats and take a chunk of the bbq body as the family of the deceased look on!!! India's kind of a weird place b/c you have intense superstition - curse of the he-shes , so you have to pay them to ensure they don't; they believe that the ganges in Varanasi a place polluted with millions of decomposing corpses is clean - it's the mother, free from bacteria, fine for a morning bathe as you swim past floating dead pigs...

7. TRansport, while in india a very real fear for me was dying in transport. Sarah Julie and I took a 48 hour journey into the deepest pits of hell. Beginning with our descent from darjeeling - all three of us at some varying degree of shitting and vomiting bile at this point after not consuming anything for 3 days apart from a bowl of porridge - ahhhh the life giver, I will always love you porridge, the despair we felt when we couldn't find anything but curry to eat when we were sick and then stumbled upon porridge, anyway we piled into a little car where the driver switched between having the engine off rolling down the mountain and turning it on and belting round blind corners overtaking other vehicles at full speed. How he could gamble with our lives is one thing, but they only way we could rationalise it was that he had a death wish and didn't care who he took with him. He laughed as we cried and made crazy faces in reference to us to the other passenger. In the end after opening the door to jump out of the moving vehicle he realised he'd have to be a little more accomodating. Once down in the valley we got on an old rickety bus where people were sleeping in the overhead compartments. That night on the bus was like spending a night with mike tyson beating the crap out of you. I don't know how many times I hit the ceiling or was thrown bakwards and forwards as we went past a graveyard of overturned bus and trucks knowing that could very well be our fate. Then we got on a train in the cattle car shoved into the sidecar with the back and front of my head up against two mens crotches. THEN we took a rickshaw for 2 hours with 23 people hanging off of it through an area of town black with coal dust. And then I swore to hate india forever....

8. Decorated Rickshaws - they take such pride and care, covered in rhinestones, named, it's so flashy and vegas, they should export them. And they cut out eyes from magazines - I thought it was a sexual thing, but it's for protection, so someone has their back always.

9. Tibetans, Tibetans!!! They are the best part of india, they have the best sense of humour and crack jokes all the time. The guy who ran the hotel we stayed at in darjeeling was one of the dalai lamas top four guards in the sixties and seventies and he led many of the exoduses - exodusii? I don't know grammar, across the himalaya from tibet. He had amzing pictures of the black hat sect and the warrior monks and tons of him in tibetan get up, whatever the season he had the same john wayne stance and was always grabbing his gun in his holster. He'd talk about his 'digs' when he was a student in leeds and how he liked the pub. And talked about how sometimes he'd have to shoot people in the crossing because it was so dangerous. When I asked him what tibet used to be like, he said it was great - tons of parties all the time. I felt like I was talking to a real life cowboy. Tibetan monks rock too, the wear cut off t-shirts with free tibet printed across them - they look like rockstars - can you imagine a vicar or a rabi or a nun looking so cool? Plus I went to a tibetan funeral and everyone who attends gets a little party bag with goodies and cakes in it. I think we're approaching religion from totally the wrong starting point in the west.

10. Sickness - I;m going to try to describe the pain - but those of you who don't want to know what came out of my body don't read, so this is really only for me I suppose. Coming out from both ends, but mainly my arse. And when there was nothing solid nor liquid to evacuate, bile and blood came out. I have never experienced burning sensation like it, I was pretty sure part of my sphincter had been squeezed off and now my intestines were trying to push their way out. Cramps to me were also an indicator that my stomch was on the long march out of my body, and so I lay awake for hours at night contemplating how I might survive with my insides on the outside? Or if I could push them back in. When we finally received medical treatment, our bodies became confused and our stomaches became swollen as if we were pregnant, I thought it was my stomach giving up forever and on the verge of exploding as a final measure. When we called the doctor out he seemed equally bemused by our reaction. I still can't believe that I am truly healed. For a month after I couldn't go to the bathroom without poohing something... But Sarah and Julie and I now know each other in a way in which no one else will, as if we had been in prison....

11. rajput mustaches are the coolest things ever - giant waxed mustaches that are longer and fuller than most girls hair. We saw one guy with a mustach so massive you could see either bushy end from behind curling up.

12. english influence - mainly positive I think, lots of parks and botanical gardens and pretty public spaces, the only evidence of chav poor taste is in the fort in Jodhpur in one of the state rooms where they covered the ceiling in giant xmas baubles, it looked like the ceiling had developed leprosy. I think they kept it as a little dig to the british, which is fair enough.

13. I love that Indians smack children, because we met so many obnoxious little boys and whenever they step out of line, they get clouted on the back of the head with a ruler or whatever is hard that the person can find - they need the weapon.... In the desert we had a 'music man' come (in daylight the next morning he came up to all of us individually and announced I'm the music man you know, proudly) - who had a sitar but seemed to only bang the strings and not pluck them or use the frets and then he'd sing scales, but whatever, not the most proficient musician in the world but it was very atmospheric by the campfire and nice to all hang out together. His son had spent the whole day following us around and galloping around us while counting to five and at each number sitcking his bum in our general direction and smacking it, that night he started accompanying his dad in his precocious presumptuous way and we assumed the proud father would be happy to have his son and heir engaging with him, but instead he threw a rock at him and told him to keep quiet and moved him to the outside of the circle. I've never been so satisfied to see someone be bullied essentially. If only we could do that with annoying children in the western world.