Hampi.

the bus journey to hampi was interesting as it was our first proper bus trip in india. we took a taxi to some god forsaken middle of no where bus stop in Cancona for nine and waited patiantly for our bus. we met an english guy who said he had tried to get to Hampi yesterday, but had given up waiting at 12. the bus had eventually turned up at 3 in the morning. this filled us with a certain sense of apprehension. after calling the bloke who we bought the tickets off a few times and having our new english friend Olly, shout at him, we found out that the bus was “on its way”. a bus eventually turned up but when we showed our tickets we were told that it wasn’t our bus. our bus, as it happens, was on its way. there was a big crowd of disgruntled israelis waiting with us who were kicking up a fuss, as is their wont. the bus man was getting flustered and retreated back into the bus with a couple of people who had the apparent good fortune to own the correct kind of ticket. Olly wasn’t having any of it and tackled the busman when he emerged, stressing the fact that he had to wait for the bus the day before. the busman relented and he leapt aboard suggesting that i do the same unless i wanted to wait for another three years.

selecting a vapid grin, i sidled up to the busman and pretending that he hadn’t already checked and rejected my ticket only five minutes ago, i thrust it at him. he looked at the ticket then looked at his roster sheet. he nodded apparently satisfired by some obscure criteria i had passed. we were on. we evicted Olly from his bunk just as he was getting comfortable and sent him off to sleep next to a largish bloke of questionable hygene. the bunks were large enough for a slim person of short stature. having to share this small shelf with someone is pretty insane. i was hanging onto the lip of our bunk the entire way, the only thing stopping me from spilling out into the corridor when the driver, taking a speed bump to fast sent the bus skywards in bone shattering leaps, was a thin metal bar cunningly positioned near my face and shins. sleep was a fond memory that i mused on as we bounced our way to hampi. lucy seemed to sleep fine.

Hampi is a very picturesque place. the mountains of boulders look strikingly like small piles of pebbles. defying gravity in an eyepleasing manner. clambering up the mountains was good fun and i did a spot of light rock climbing as well. not strictly allowed we found out later. not much, apart from being dociley herded around temples, was allowed because a tourist had something stolen once about five years ago and this was still big news. we had to go the police staion to regester our presence and we were shown a picture of the dreaded criminal and were told that he was still at large and hiding in all the cool and interesting places so we simply musn’t go there. by ignoring this drivel we had ourselves a pretty good time.it was really nice to just stroll around and chill out in the shade of an ancient ruined temple. we also took some bikes out and saw even more temples, most undergoing reconstruction, presumably with original escavated stone. lucy got bored of this edylic lifestyle fairly quickly so we booked a ticket to mysore.

it was only after we had bought our ticket that we met a bunch of australians we had befriended in palolam, who told us of the absolute epicness of Hampi across the river. far more relaxed atmosphere and a lush lake to go swimming in. blast!

the less said about the train journey the better. i will say that it involved getting up crazy early, changing trains, lots of frantic running around and panicking and the loss of a ticket. naming no names but it was lucy.

Mysore, after Hampi was a bit of a disapointment. apart from the eformentioned hill, there was really not much to do apart from drink in the choking trafic pollution. we visited the famous maharaja’s palace. it was an eceptuanal peice of vulgarity. a farely large building, with crenelatioins and pointy onion bits on the top. what sets it apart from most buildings is that every surface had been coated in tacky lightbulbs.

presumably this is meant to be pleasing on the eye at night, but during the day it was hidious.

not so much gilding the lily but gilding something which should never have been brought anyones attention in the first place. and not so much gilded but galvanised rather cheaply.

possibly im going over the top here, but i had had a bad day and it offended me.

anyway after all this fun we decided to go to Bangolore.

our arrival in Bangalore as chance would have it, coincided with a massive international engineering/mechanical/political expo which happens only once every five million years and only when all the planets are aligned according to nostradamus’ pamphlet entitled when not to go to bangalore. this meant that we spent the first three hours or so trying to find anyone who would put us up for the night.

emotions ranged from amusment to mild irritation to disbalief as we called everyone in the book, visited countless hotels, even ones beyond our budget by miles. by the end i was nursing a deep hatred of the place that had gone beyond the rational.

we decided to go back to the station and get the next train out, no matter where it was going. we were even prepared to go back to Mysore. (shudder) our taxi driver though had taken it on as some sort of personal challange to find us a room. eventually we ended up down a dank and fetid side street, forking out an idiotic amount of money for the worst room i have ever had the misfortune of spending the night in. desperation had us in its grip however and my glazed mind bairly noticed.

after five minutes in our fully payed for room, we began to notice however. lucy noticed that the bed smelt as though it had already been slept on by ten sweating men with unquestionable dicey hygene. also there was no shower. this may account for the smell of unwashed bodies on the bed. the smell of sewage that permeated the air i attributed to the heavily stained sink, which cleary had at some point been used as a latrine.

we had to get out. nothing was in walking distance so we took a taxi to the city center to find somewhere nice to eat. we didn’t, so we had a mcdonalds. i felt a cold darknes nibbling at my soul as we made our way back to our palatial residence.

at some point we stopped at a traffic jam and i watched in detached interest as womans face appeared out of the side of a autorickshaw and vomited with wild abandon onto the tarmac. with the attitude of a natural philosopher disecting a new specimin, i evaluated the size and consistancy of the chunks that flew out of her mouth with such velocity. she didn’t appear to be enjoying herself.

i regarded the spectacle with a bleak eye. i wasn’t suprised. it struck me that Bangalore was just the sort of place that it is almost impossible to ride in a taxi through without being violently sick.

very little to do in Bangalore apart from try to get out. to do anything you must first drive through about an hour of choking trafic fumes and after you have done whatever you wanted to do, you have to drive back. the unscrupulus taxi driver then atempts to swindle you. rather trying.

we went shopping and saw two movies. Blood Diamond was pretty good. we couldn’t sleep in our awfull room on acount of hords of indian business men, here for the expo, shouting at each other in the corridoor outside our room untill the small hours. this lack of sleep coupled with the squalid conditions contributed to it being the worst room ever. so we left. all trains to Goa and Hampi (our fist choice of destination) were booked upfor the next week, but we managed to get a couple of seats to Mumbai. a paltry 24hours. pah! i could do it in my sleep! we had been mulling over the idea of heading to south east asia early for a while now, and this proved to be the catalyst. as soon as we get to mMmbai we will change our flights accordingly

arrived in Mumbai. now my fourth visit…

can’t say i missed it, but its quite nice all the same.

so this is to be the last post from india. we went to the Taj hotel which housed the singapore airlines office, and got our tickets changed to tomorrow. the we felt out of place strolling through the glittering Taj, being peered at by besuited chaps who where no doupt wondering who let the the riff raff in.

no pictures im afraid, this place has no usb slot and i only managed to extract this blog through a bizzare form of osmosis.

i will blog a final summery of India as a whole when i have thought of one.

love julio

hail!

in mysore at present. not much to do here apart from struggle to find someplace nice to eat. walked to the top of some suposedly good karma inducing hill today. 1000 steps to the top, only to find, much like everywhere else that the top is infested with shops, hawkers, tedious temples, ect.

had an icecream which tasted like i was slurping on a lepers weeping sore. i chucked it down the mountain. the taste clung to my mouth so i had some water melon from a roadside minion. best i have had so far, very refreshing. the fruit in india has been pretty dissapointing, cheap but not very good. getting a fruit juice is such a gamble as to whether its nice or not that its easier to stick to the good old minaral water, which i now hear is laced with pestacides. nice!

 

 thanks for the letter ma! sounds like that trip home was pretty grim. hopefully my flights will run smoothly. i strongly refute the charge that i get up at 1.00pm! its closer to 12.30 than anything else! sleep is reletivly tricky at present, last night in perticular an indian family camped in the corridor of our hotel at around 4.30am. their children (of which there were many) played some sort of running and shouting game outside our door, which was apprently one of those games that can be played tirelesly and without sceaseing for many hours. all in all i don’t sleep that well.

on a good note hampi was really nice. only problem was we left too soon. might head back after bangalore. 

will blog properly when we get to banglore.  

love jul

 

p.s actually shantaram is true, or at least as true as papillion, which i have just read. rather good.

well, shantaram took place a while ago so perhaps things are different now. the crowd didn’t look likley to turn ugly.

your epic tale of trying to catch a few winks is not disimilier to trying to snooze in palolam. the barking dogs, the enfirnal heat, the cretins on the beach constantly letting off fireworks left over from new years. not much sleep here.

heading to hampi tonight. should be fun.

 

julio

onwards to palolam!

so we decided that Vagator, not the jolly christmas retreat that we imagined, was to be left as soon as possible.
We asked our hotel bloke whether a train ticket could be bought from him, he looked like a chronically frightened weasel at the best of times and now he looked especially shifty. he told us that the best way would be taking a taxi (the hotel taxi of course) to Panjim and then a bus to palolem from there. weakened by lack of sleep from the previous nights excesses, we agreed. the next morning we arrived in panjim and where dropped of at the bus station. much like when Flo and i went to our first station it was a process of trail and error to find out how things worked. the bus station was a bustle of activity, with signs everywhere written in one of the 87 languages that are actively used in India. i queued up at a likely looking office, only to be told to go someplace else for palolam. the bloke wasn’t clear, his wild gesture taking in the entirety of the bus station. the station was built like a hub, so we struck out a quarter rotation in the hope of seeing something. i found a bus heading to margaon, a place halfway there, but i had no idea how to get a ticket. asking around i discovered that what i first thought to a be a large mob aimlessly clogging up the station trying to sell stuff, turned out to be the queue to get tickets. as i considered the rabble, trying to work out where it ended or even began, a couple of travelers wondered up. turns out they where from the chek republic and the prospect of queuing scared them. they offered to share a taxi with us to margaon. this seemed a good plan so we got a taxi after a protracted haggling session with the chek guy happily inventing fictional journeys he had taken of similar length but for a quarter of the asking price. i was in the back with the chek couple and lucy was in the front apparently pretending to be a deaf mute. i chatted away to the couple who were really nice. a couple of times during out conversation the taxi driver would swerve violently and break to avoid such things as the side of the road or a tree. this isn’t unusual in india, so we really didn’t take it onboard that we where in the hands of someone who had only the most rudimentary grasp on the concept of driving. it was also possible that he was drunk. i joked about the lack of seatbelts, miming strapping myself into my seat in mock terror. we all had a jolly laugh. what seemed like moments later we came to an intersection and i glanced up to see a moped appear in front of us. the driver braked wildly and i watched in slow motion as we smashed into the moped. the rider crunched into the windscreen, spiderwebing it inwards right in front of Lucy. the taxi stopped, shedding its newest addition. i looked around, no one seemed harmed. Lucy was understandably in a state of shock and covered in glass dust. suddenly a crowd appeared around us. i saw the mopedist being supported by a couple of people, he looked alive, if a little mangled. after a moments indecision we all got out and wondered around for another taxi. our driver, now on the phone to his boss, tried to charge us, but we declined.

as luck would have it, we had crashed directly opposite a bus stop. a bus rested on the tarmac like some blessed apparition, it was going to margaon, it was empty and it cost rp8 a tiny fraction of what the taxi would have cost.
on reflection, this is all disturbingly lucky.
this enchanted bus soon filled up and took approximately a week to get to margaon but the bus from there to palolam it was speedy. we had worked out the buses at that point. you just leap on the one with palolam printed on the back and hope for the best.
on this bus we met a guy called Miles, a very nice chap who become our companion in palolam for a few days.
we slid back into the thing of things in palolam fairly quickly. getting drunk with Miles every other evening and taking a rest the next day.
a note on Quicksilver.
this has become one of the finest books i have ever read. it bypasses even the quincunx as a pleasure to read. it centers on the royal society and natural philosophers in particular. a subject i new a little about having listened to a radio 4 program on it a while back. natural philosophers such as Newton, Hook and Liebnez created the way we view the world today. inventing such diverse things as the telescope and the clock to metaphysical notions such as calculus and the philosophical language. fascinating stuff with a really engaging story. Samuel Pypes was a member of the royal society at the time and has a small role in this book. when i have the chance upon returning home i might have a read of his diaries and see his perspective on certain events such as the great fire of london and being “cut for the stone”.
been in palolam for about nine days now. new year was an anticlimax of similar proportions to christmas. it was fun for a while but i went to bed at around 5am bitterly annoyed that the network had collapsed and not only could not send any messages but any messages sent to me where somehow lost in the aether as well. i’m still waiting to receive them. thinking about heading on to Hampi in the next few days.
see you anon!
love Julio

Flo and lucy scrumming down some pemello in the park in mumbai.

some urchins, of which, there are many, in agra.

a traditionally painted heavey goods truck.

me trecking into the heart of monkey island, armed only with a glazed expresion and a staff of my own construction. those monkeys had better watch out!

still on monkey island, i rest for a moment and enjoy a good pose as i servey my claimed land. i shall name it von julion land or some such.

a foul creature thats has crawled out of someones nightmare. they populate the beaches of palolam in their millions.

i believe i have messed up the uploading again. but this computor is like a satan and is not making it easy.

merry christmas one and all!

in vagator at the moment. stayed up till 5 in the morning and some ludicriously priced rave. the trance scene here is utterly dreadfull. music that sounds as if it was produced by ltj with music maker on the playstation one. only bad. the place i went to is still belting out its hardcore beats. it in fact doesn’t stop for a full three days. they take their 24 hours trance sessions seriously here. thankfully our hotel is situated right next door to the party so we can enjoy the regular beats as we sleep. or try to anyway.

its a bit crap here to be honest, might go to palolem for new years.

have a fun christmas!

love julio

 

after a palacial flight from Bombay we arrived 2 hours later in jaipur. we flew with kingfisher airlines, a fairly new offshoot of the makers of kingfisher beer, a staple throughout india. on a par with british airways for pleasantness.

jaipur was a seething cesspool of noise and corruption. coming from the south where a taxi minion would take a refusal of his services on the chinand move on, i was taken aback by the insane tenacity of the jaipurian taxi-wallahs and bicycle rikshaws, some going as far as following you around for hours continually bleating about about their “indian helecopter”.

not much to see in jaipur apart from a much fabled pink city. the attraction being ofcoase, that its all painted pink. after a disasterous attempt to find it on the first day, which i blame entirely on the crappy maps in our respective guide books which sent us miles in the wrong direction, we went back to the hotel to rest, vowing to tackle it the next day. on the morrow we finally made it though it took miles of walking. i had become so affended by the constant barrage of transport goons, that i had decided to walk everywhere.

the pink city was if possible more dirty and smelly than the main town. its pinkness was infact non-existant, most of the buildings having turned a rancid shade of brown. there were countless shops and mini bazzars all selling pretty much the same thing. lucy bought some cheap bracelets. i sat on the sidelines soaking up the ambiance. it was what you might describe as livley, if by lively you meant to describe the roads like a river of cars and choking smoke,the screech of a thousand horns going off in your ear and every person who spots your pale skin leaping in front of you with the glittering eyes of a fanatic and gesturing wildly at their identakit shops. there were some palaces/temples or some such but finding them in the tumultious city was nigh on impossible. we eventually found a palace but it was pricey to get in and was apparently crud inside, on the plus side though, i found chap taking people’s photos with a 150 year old camera outside. i had mine done for a small fee. looks rather classy if i say so myself.

the place we were staying was next door to a really nice hotel which was unfortunatly fully booked. our place was a bit crap and filled with wierd surly staff. we made a point of going across and eating at the other place though. one nice thing about our place was the open roof which i would wonder of a night. all the roofs in jaipur are flat and the aquitecture is very nice, hints of arabian nights about it. gave flo a call with my super cheap new indian mobile.missing flo a lot since her departure. doesn’t seem the same without her.

the next day we went back to the pink city so that lucy (who liked jaipur for some reason) could get a bag and there was a possibilty of elephants being around in some location of the city. in the end both of us got a bit tired of it all and headed back to the hotel. tomorrow ho for agra!

as we left the pink city for the last time, on the way out we passed a man sitting on the side of the road screaming violently and hitting himself in the head. i sympathised. a couple of days more i would be hunked down next to him a broken man.

the train to Agra was at 2.00am. yay! to add to the excitment we didn’t know exactly when our train was set to arrive, so we could easily snooze right through our stop. intence! sleep was tricky and we arrived shattered. the cold at night up north is crazy! huddling on my bench a thin sheet keeping the morning frost of me, i considered the purchase of a couple of blankets might be wise.

agra, home of the taj mahal, is assentually a village with a touristy center. it is surprising that it isn’t more industrialised considering it is such a tourist mecca. on the first day we went for a bit of a ramble in a park, the first bit of greenery i have strolled around in india. quite nice if a bit run down, we met some small street urchins who followed us around a bit, demanding i take photos of them. we came to a rise and getting to the top we had an impressive view of the Taj. it is a majestic building, sadly tarnished by the smog of the nearby town, but still very nice. it costs rp750 to get in though, so we decided to give it a miss. content with exterior views.

the trouble with travel is one can end up going too quickly. days are are filled with booking onward travel, finding a sutable room, and the neverending quest of finding somewhere to eat that won’t give you dysintry. most of the days filled like this and it becomes less like traveling and a series of hoops you have to jump through. bit of a pain, and not much room for actual enjoyment of ones suroundings.

the origial plan was to go to delhi for christmas and then ninja it down to goa and have new year there. feeling a bit phaged by all the moving around i footed the idea of skipping delhi and heading strait to goa and there take a leasurely route around the south. things were looking a bit dicey though with trains to goa being booked by every christian in india. thanks to lucy’s perseverance and a helpfull guy behind the train counter we managed to scrounge a couple of tickets to goa on some speed train taking a mere 25 hours. nothing to a 40hour man like myself!

we are currently in a nifty hotel next door to the taj, in a very quiet area of the town. its nice to have a relaxing atmosphere. though nights are still broken by the bitter cold and the early morning yodeling from the muslim prayer towers.

the night before we went to pizza hut to eat. it took us a while to get there becouse once again the glaring inaccuracies of the lonely planet/rough guide maps came into play. the reason we went was becouse we were craving something substantual and familier. it was pretty run of the mill, substandard fast food. however after we had finished out meal and were waiting to pay the manager got up and announced something to general applause. we clapped, not clear what was going on. then five of the serving staff lined up and started to dance frantically to bollywood music. it was hilarious, and actually not bad. on a par with some of the bollywood dancers i have seen. this went on for quite some time with indian girls leaping up from tables and joining in to the dance fest. i felt my foot twitching but avoided ambarrasing my self. all in all a much more interesting place to eat than it’s english counterpart.

our train tomorrow is at six. must get an early night.

love julio