REWIND: India, 2--Mountains and tombs

A summary of my Indian odyssey, part 2:

Manali
Exhausted from 4 days of Indian Bus Hell, I settled gratefully into Appleview Manali, a Ladakhi guesthouse recommended to me by a friend from university. The hostel was set outside the modern town, in a lovely apple orchard owned by members of outlying villagers. I slept copiously, ate delicious homemade food cooked by the married couple who owned the guesthouse, and admired the view of the Himalayan foothills from all four corners of the guesthouse´s flat-topped roof. Occasionally, I ventured into town to explore a shrine to the goddess Kali, see a street magician perform, and watch the motley throng of soldiers, monks, wandering salesman, dirty-clothed backpackers, sleek-suited businessmen, old Ladakhi women in robes, and old Tibetan women in rainbow pinafores that converges on this town, which feels drawn from some ideal Tibetan Wild West.

The view from Appleview Manali

Some things are universal-- a street magician performs in Manali

After I was suitably recovered, I did something I had thought I might never want to do again: I got back on a bus. This was no ordinary journey, however. Our van convoy left Manali at 3 AM, traveling in a pack of 4 over the second-highest road in the world, traversing the Himalayas, and arriving in Leh, the capital of the semi-autonomous Ladakh province of India 22 hours later. In the course of the trip we waited patiently as we were engulfed by herds of goats on narrow mountain roads, stopped for chai and instant noodles in yurts on windswept plains, held our breaths as blood pounded in our heads in high passes piled with snow, and broke down twice. The landscape outside my window looked more to me like the moon than anything on earth.

A sampling of the most stunning pictures from my 22 hours of my trip


This is where we broke down

Leh
*My Indian visa was set to run out much earlier than I preferred, so I only had a few days in which to pack all the beauty of Ladakh, an ancient civilization on par with Tibet (that has in fact been at war with Tibetans on and off for millenia.) I wandered the winding, beautiful streets of Leh´s old town; explored the ruined castle that lies in the dry mountains above the city; stumbled on a traditional Ladakhi archery festival.

One day I took a car trip over an enormous mountain pass to Pangong Lake, which lies 1/3 in India and 2/3 in Tibet, a stunning drop of blue in thousands of empty miles of forbidding desert and mountains. Another day I went horseback riding through the stony plains outside of town, then hiked my way through the 2 most famous Buddhist monasteries, Thiksey and Shay, which slope up mountains to amazing views at their topmost points.

In the end my time in Ladakh presented only a taste of a world I had also glimpsed in Zhongdian during my travels in China. I found this universe, culturally, geographically and politically different than any I knew, to be fascinating, much like the frustrating, amazing, gorgeous world I had also discovered further south. Some travelers I've met refer to I.N.D.I.A, as in "I'm Never Doing It Again." But I know I have only had a taste and that I want to return for a deeper experience.

The view from my guesthouse

Ladakhi archery

Downtown Leh, with the ancient palace in the background

Yours truly, on the way to Pangong Lake (the sign says "Border Roads Organization Himank Welcomes On World Third Highest Pass, Chang La)
Pangong lake, one the most beautiful places I will ever go

Monks in class at Thiksey monastery
A stunning 3-story Buddha at Thiksey. He's sitting on the floor below.
Thiksey

Agra
*Of course, no trip to India is complete without a visit to the country´s international icon (or at least, so I felt.) So during my few days back in Delhi I boarded an early morning train and visited Agra. The city was dirty, but interesting, with a fascinating market quarter. The Red Fort palace complex was beautiful, even as I melted in heat that reached 48 degrees Celsius (almost 120 F!) My experience at the Taj Mahal was frustrating-- the list of items you cannot bring in include flashlights, iPods, books that are not guidebooks, any kind of food, and I had all of these things in my bag. Once I had resolved the matter of where to keep my bag, the enclosure itself was mobbed with people (I found out later it was the run up to an important festival.) But even debilitating heat, beauracracy, and crowds couldn´t dim the beauty of this building. As I remarked to Faith, and later to other friends around the world, the capacity of the human race to find infinite ways to make architectural beauty continues to stagger me. And stagger I did, back to the train, on to Delhi, and toward the international airport, where a 5 am flight awaited to take me to a cultural universe far, far from the Himalayas. I was bound for a month in the Middle East.

48 degrees!(!!!)

All that glitters

"Nearly everyone you meet elsewhere in Australia will tell you, "Oh, you must see the Gold Coast. It’s awful.”
"Really", you say, intrigued, "In what way?"
"I don’t know exactly. I’ve never been there myself. Well, obviously. But it’s like-- Have you seen Muriel’s Wedding?"
"No."
"Well, it’s like that. Just like it, apparently."
So I was interested on many levels to see the Gold Coast, and disappointed on nearly every one of them. To begin with, it wasn’t tacky at all. It was just another large, impersonal, well-provisioned international resort. I could have been in Marbella or Eilat. Perfectly fine, it just wasn’t very interesting."-- "Down Under" by Bill Bryson, p. 260

Sometimes when I'm traveling I find it hard to resist putting on my Anthropologist hat. My training at school has really shaped the way I experience the world, but there are certain times when I make a conscious effort to think like an anthropologist, and my visit to the Gold Coast was certainly on of those times. Like Bryson, as I traveled north toward Queensland I was constantly told how terrible the Gold Coast was. Even Johnny, my host for the first night on the Gold Coast, called it "soulless" and compared it to LA. "Everyone is plastic here," he said.

Johnny wasn't plastic, just shy. He very sweetly offered to pick me up from Byron Bay, an hour from Gold Coast City, and drive me back to his apartment.

In any case, my motivation for visiting Gold Coast was partially pretty beaches, partially a desire to cram in as much as possible all the time (this is something I'm working on), and partially curiosity to see if a place could live up to such negative hype. Like Bryson, I found it wasn't so bad as all that--but then again, maybe I just didn't go to the right places.

I slept at Johnny's (he insisted on giving me his bedroom while he took the couch) and in the morning we dined at his favorite local cafe. We spent the few hours before he began his shift visiting three different beaches within the city limits, the surfing and swimming meccas the area is known for. First we took at Miami beach (yes, it's really called that), then walked along Broad Beach, and then explored a national park-type area where you can walk up into the bush-filled headlands and watch the surfers. The beaches were gorgeous, wide expenses of smooth sand and impossibly blue water, filled with hard bodies and little kids at surf school. We shared a butterscotch gelato milkshake as we walked (oh man, mmm) and I forgot to put sunscreen on my back, a mistake I would suffer for for the next week at least.

Johnny went to work and shortly afterward I was picked up by Erik, a quick-witted, friendly Norwegian immigrant who does TV ads for a living. After a stop at his very pretty apartment (complete with sunny balcony) we went out to Jamaican food with Sabrina, a French woman who came to Australia and found that the boyfriend she was following was not as nice as she would have liked. I was not expecting authentic Jamaican food in this opposite hemisphere, but the family who runs it were clearly Jamaican immigrants, and the fare tasted authentic (at least in my limited experience with Caribbean food.) Our waiter at the restaurant was painfully shy and could barely take our orders, speaking in a tone slightly above a whisper. I thought perhaps he was the owner's son, coerced into working for the family business, and that struck me as a bit cruel. He did, however, manage to slip in quiet questions about the US once he caught wind that that's where I was from. I always find it interesting how we are simultaneously reviled and the subject of so much fascination.

Later in the evening we were joined by Sanna (pronounced San-NA), a bombshell Finnish woman and fellow couch surfer. We spent the night at Erik's, drinking and discovering two overarching universals: funny youtube videos and dragging your friends to do obnoxious things at 1:30 AM.

To start out, we watched silly video after silly video, from classics like Teen Girl Squad and The End of the World to surreal Finnish dancing and the music video for "Take On Me." Finnish, French, American, and Norwegian, we all laughed helplessly. Around 1:30 Sanna, who was fairly well drunk, starting agitating for going to Surfers Paradise, a huge strip of clubs (some of them minus the "of") near Gold Coast City, and the main draw in the Gold Coast mystique. They urged, begged, wheedled me into going, even though I was sleepy and night clubs are not exactly my scene.

Here is where wearing the Anthropology Hat gets confusing. Is it good, or even is it important, to do things that you don't like when you travel? On the one hand, people on vacation are in some way always a bit hedonistic, doing only things they enjoy-- the point of vacation is certainly not to cause oneself discomfort. But on the other hand, people seeking to understand another culture will miss out on important components of that culture if they stay in their comfort zones and do only things they like or that are familiar to them. So where does that leave me, an extended vacationer attempting to enjoy a year experiencing new cultures? Well, on this particular night it left me under the bright lights of Surfers Paradise, having decided that I would wonder what I missed if I didn't come along. And it has left me since with food for thought as to what I'm willing to do for the sake of travel and experience, what risks I'm willing to take, and what exceptions I'm willing to make in the march of "who I am and what I like to do" outside of the US.

The answer to "what I would have missed" that night is "not much"--a street full of shined-up, over-dressed Aussies/Europeans gyrating to bad techno. It was gaudy and sort of amusing in a Crikey-look-at-the-Australian-in-its-native-environment sort of way (no, the irony of that sentences does not escape me.) But when we went to enter a club called The Bedroom and they asked for $10 at the door I decided I'd had enough. I took a taxi home and used the time to work on reading "The Graveyard Book," which I'd started originally in San Francisco but hadn't had a chance to finish. I finally did so in the morning on Erik's balcony, eating toast in the Queensland sunshine with not a techno beat to be heard or a stiletto heel to be seen. I entertain lofty goals of stretching further outside my comfort zone next time around, but you can lead a horse to water, can't teach an old dog, etc... Choose your own cliche, I enjoyed the evening and morning nonetheless.

Noontime came and Erik dropped me at the train station. Next stop: Brisbane.

Miami Beach

Making tracks in Sydney: Part 1

I am surprised every time exactly how long a 14-hour flight is. That is to say, I haven't done it too many times (back and forth to China twice; back and forth from New Zealand once), but every time I am surprised exactly what it feels like when you have been in a plane for 7 hours and you know you will be in that same plane for another 7 hours. And then when you leave you will be in an entirely new place very far from where you started. Such is the miracle of air travel.

To be fair, Qantas made it as enjoyable as possible to sit in a tin box for that long. They have an absurd selection of movies, TV shows, even video games and CDs, all available for starting on-demand whenever you want. I watched a funny Indian sitcom called "Mumbai Calling" about a call center, "In Bruges" (which, sorry, I don't really see the big deal), some standard American sitcom fare, and two tourist videos about Sydney and Brisbane. Qantas served a couple of quite passable meals, I managed to procure some Australian wine to help me fall asleep, and I woke up in time to help the Greek Australian woman next to me with her immigration card.

Customs took forever, as usual, but then I was wandering out into the bright light of Australian morning. The humidity even in the arrival hall was palpable. Without really understanding what I was doing, I used my AAA travel card to get some money from an ATM and bought myself an Australian SIM card, marveling at this brand new place in which I could function, even delirious from air travel. I took a long, sweaty bus ride from the airport to Burwood, the suburb where I would be staying for the next five days. I watched the Sydney streets crawl past and all I could think was “This is real this is real this is real.” For so long I had been looking ahead to this morning, and it had arrived.

As it turned out, Burwood was a nice medium-sized suburb/village with a huge Chinese population, obvious in the foot traffic on the street, the Chinese language signage, and the multitude of yum cha/dim sum restaurants lining the main street. This street also featured coffee shops with doors closed until after the New Years holiday week; several Adult Book stores; a grocery store; a fruit shop called the Fruit Bowl; a couple of Chinese-style bakeries (my favorite of these was called "Leanly Hot Bread"); and trinket shops of the kind I got used to in Kunming that sell plastic shower shoes, $3 hats, and a world of other non-necessities. It was a fairly quiet, safe town except once, late at night, when a couple of drunk boys yelled so loudly and suddenly out their open windows that I stopped short and then hurried back to my host's house.

The Rs were a lovely first-time couch surfing host family. The father regarded me suspiciously but was friendly (he once made a half joke about my stealing all their money.) The mother was rotund and looked vaguely like an ex-nurse although I never found out what she did. She spent a lot of time kindly lecturing me on wearing enough “mozzie spray” and sunscreen and was less than helpful in a friendly way about figuring out train tickets-- she was in short a nice stand-in for a mom. James, their son and my connection through couch surfing, was in his late 20s or early 30s, a science teacher and avid traveler, in great shape and fairly handsome. He was in the habit of raising his eyebrows a lot while he talked, so I could never tell if he was amused by something I said. As a teacher he was in the midst of summer holidays and had just bought a motorbike, so he was often off helping his father learn to ride or taking a spin down to various areas of the city, most often Bondi Beach (pronounced Bond-EYE, not that I knew that until I heard someone else say it) where I think he had something going on with a French couch surfer. That meant my Sydney time was mostly self directed.

The foyer of the R House; James, looking amused as usual

Dazed from the 14 hour flight, unable to believe I had really arrived, and feeling as if I were in another world, I dropped my bags at the R's house, walked 10 minutes down to the train station, and in half an hour was goggling at the Opera House. The building is pure poetry. You’ve seen pictures, but I have to say that nothing is quite like being next to it. It is breathtaking. The two partners, opera house and bridge, make for a fantastic view. You walk out of the subway stop at Circular Quay (you say it "Key," another pronunciation obstacle for me) and boom. There they are.

The sights of Sydney Harbor

It was incredibly hot and I found myself in a torpor of epic proportions. I ordered an ice coffee along the Esplanade, only to find that that meant ice cream and coffee rather than coffee made cold. I drank it watching tourists of all colors come and go, the ferries from all over the harbour fill and empty. At one point in the afternoon I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art--hooray, free admission!-- which had some really interesting exhibits. But jet lag hit big just then, and I spent the last part of the museum barely looking at the art, wandering from room to room, and trying to decide if it would be acceptable to lie down on the lawn outside the Museum with all the tourists going by. Luckily, within an hour or so the feeling passed.

Just outside the museum I met Graheme, a great-looking character busking on the Quay for the tourists passing by. I got into a conversation with him in which he revealed that he was a milkman by trade until about 10 years ago, when milkmen finally lost out to supermarkets. Now he sits on the Quay day in and day out playing Bob Dylan and traditional folk Australiana and trying to convince people to leave him tips. I sat and listened to him for awhile. He played some great old Dylan and “Waltzing Matilda” (which might as well be the national anthem here), as well as another song whose chorus included the worlds “tie my kangaroo down, boys.” I really loved having a chance to talk to him. That sort of interaction with interesting, real people, however brief, is one of my favorite parts about traveling.

Graheme in action

Before dinner I was supposed to meet James at a bar to watch salsa lessons but got hopelessly lost in the business district. It was a nice way to see a bit of the city, but I ended up having to buy a meat pie from a fast food purveyor (meat pies are left over from the British influence) and after a brief stop at said bar (where they were just finishing off the salsa lesson) jet lag called me back to Burwood.

Although exploring the city alone had its own merits, I decided to try and meet up with some couch surfers also traveling in the area for the next few days. The next morning I found Wil, from Sussex, England, in a coffee shop in The Rocks, which is the oldest part of Sydney, and later on we met up with Sonia, who hails from Brookline (Massachusetts) and with whom I had friends in common back in the US. The Rocks is a great tourist draw that has been heavily preserved, and it is very charming, with lovely Victorian architecture. As I remarked to my companions, I was very aware that the neighborhood was engineered to appeal to me-- and it quite succeeded. We spent the morning wandering along cobblestone alleyways past at least three bars claiming to be the Oldest Pub In Sydney, and divided our time between a neat historical museum, a honey shop (who knew there were that many kinds of honey? I could even taste the difference), and an amazing puppet store located in an old basement.

The puppet shop

After the Rocks we headed to the Australian Museum, which was a nice diversion that included interesting bits about Australian history (a subject about which I have learned a great deal since I arrived here) and some funny exhibits about weird Australian pets. We wandered from there through Darling Harbor, a very ritzy area chock full of fancy boats and fancier bars, through to the area of the city known informally as Chinatown. The street was lined with yum cha shops and tea houses, but we walked past them to Market City, a massive Asian-centric mall filled with internet cafes, cell phone bling shops, Hello Kitty outlets, fully stocked arcades replete with sweaty DDRing coeds, and an enormous food court featuring most Asian delicacy you can think of. As I rested our feet and relished my cheap, rich miso ramen, it was easy to forget where I was. Sitting in Market City was like landing on a piece of an entirely different continent. I saw maybe two other Caucasians in the entire mall, which is remarkable considering that Australia is something like 95% white.

It was raining by the time we'd finished, and we made a dash to the train station to go our separate ways. But not before Sonia and I decided to take the plunge and meet up at 7 AM the next day to go to what was said to be the best and most extensive fish market outside of Tsukiji in Tokyo.

An Aboriginal man in traditional dress and paint sells his techno-didjeridoo CDs to the throngs on Circular Quay. I had mixed feelings when I saw this, and still do, but having witnessed the poverty of many Aboriginals living in Australian cities my perspective is a bit different. I especially like this photo because of the bridge acting as a frame.

Ring Around the Province, Part 6: Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog (And So Was I)

The last chapter of our two-week-plus field trip around the province is rather anticlimactic in some ways and rather dramatic in others. Basically: our last stop was Lijiang, a small city I went to with my parents in 2004 during our three-week trip around China. At that time, Lijiang showed definite signs of impending touristification, but it was still heartstoppingly beautiful and incredibly charming. The huge snow-capped Yulongxueshan (Jade Dragon Snow Mountain) loomed against blue sky in the background and the sound of running water from the city-wide canals (the city has had running water for 1200 years) followed us wherever we went. I was positively enchanted, and so were my parents.

The city is the ancient heart of the Naxi (another Chinese minority) kingdom, and in 2004 Naxi people still went about their business-- Naxi women in their distinctive clothes carried baskets through the alleys, danced in the square, or talked over a game of Go; Tibetan traders hawked antiques in the side streets; and basically the city was still a working, living, breathing entity. For a wonderful picture I took of Naxi women in 2004 in Lijiang, see my entry at the very beginning of this blog, in February, entitled "Getting Ready to Get Ready" (if I were more internet adept and/or less lazy, I would provide you with a link.)

Lijiang has... changed a lot in the last four years, to say the least. One of the men they brought in to give us a lecture, the Director of Visitor Somethingorother quoted a number that basically breaks down to 11,000 tourists a day. It is now the most touristed city in all of China-- and you can really, really tell. The throngs of Chinese tourists following a guide, inevitably in faux minority get up, wielding a flag and bullhorn in each hand; the flashy bars and fake minority dancing; the pure volume of people everywhere you go... we were not impressed, and I don't know if I'm using the Royal We there because everyone else was as disgusted as I was.

A word about Chinese tourists: people talk about the Ugly American, and those people are very much in the right, but not every American visitor to another country is neccessarily Ugly. There seems to be at least a spectrum going on. But Chinese tourists that I have encountered, while many times extremely friendly and charming, are, in their natural habitat, nothing short of obnoxious. Loud talking on cell phones, inappropriate picture taking, spitting or blowing of noses everywhere, more incredibly inappropriate picture taking, getting drunk off of bai jiu and staggering around. Basically: blah. Also, I suppose it didn't help that my first trip to Lijiang featured pristine, gorgeous springlike winter weather, whereas our stay this time around was mostly rainy or overcast.

I did try Lijiang v. 2.0 out a little bit, honestly. Tania, Mike, and I went out to eat a few times together at the grossly overpriced cafe-type places in the gorgeous old city. Every time we were faced with bizarre approximations of western food, however-- the first time I ordered some chocolate cake for desert and was given, basically, sweet white bread with something kind of like nutella on top; the second time, Mike ordered cereal with fruit and was giving some strange grits-like concoction that tasted like it had lemonade in it. Odd, and we paid way too much for it. One of our meals featured bored looking women in Mosuo (another minority here costume parading around the room in some approximation of dancing. We just ignored them. We did get to see a Dongba ceremony (an ancient animistic religion Naxi people practice which uses the only true remaining ideographic-- that means symbolic, a la heiroglyphics-- written language in the world) at a park near the city. It was really cool to see, although it was hard to tell how much had been fabricated for tourists. Actually, that's kind of Lijiang in a nutshell right there. I did have a cool adventure with John and Kailey where we met a Mosuo girl who led us around Lijiang's new portion looking for an affordable restaurant and then insisted on paying for us before she went back to work, but other than that...

Anyway, whatever I might have seen of Lijiang was cut off abruptly when, after ironically the only decent meal I had in the old city (incredible Tibetan soup and an oreo milkshake, although thinking about it now makes me queasy), I was set upon by a positively vicious case of food poisoning. I think it was the milkshake (never trust dairy products in China), but regardless of the cause I was what my trip-mate Chris termed "bullfrogging" (the nice way to say it is... working both ends, sometimes simultaneously) for a full 14 hours. Tania was incredibly understanding and sweet in looking after me, and my mother kept in cell phone contact hourly (cell technology is fantastic) but it was not so much a pleasant experience. I ultimately because so dehydrated, unable to drink anything, that I fainted for a few seconds.

The next morning I went to the hospital with Ashley, who had a similar affliction, and got a rehydrating IV for a very reasonable Y110 (about $16.) We were so lucky to find two beds together in a room-- Chinese hospitals are... I don't even know if I have a word to describe it. All the beauracracy of the Communist Party but when you're probably sick and unable to navigate it, with too little space so that people have to take IVs on benches or in waiting rooms, and with very little regard for hygiene (we insisted on one-time-use needles, naturally.) On the plus side, the hospital was the one place I really got to see Naxi culture in action, with old women coming in for treatments from the countryside.

Ashley, Lisa, and I stayed an additional day in our hotel in Lijiang trying to recuperate before beginning our ISP. And then, filled with anxiety and still not feeling exactly myself, I set off on my month-long adventure, starting with a 4 hour (that turned into 7-hour) van trip to Lanping, Nujiang Prefecture.

(To be continued next time...)