Southern Sunsets

Going through the photos I took in Goa and Kerala, Steve's and my last stops in India (and our travels together :( ), I found a huge number of sunset photos. These were so painfully stunning in reality that I couldn't resist putting lots of them here, even though they're unprocessed and straight out-of-camera.

Goa was, well, pretty exactly what we had expected and had been looking forward to for some time: gorgeous beaches without the overcrowding and concrete slabs so common on European beaches and in most holiday resorts. Palolem, near the southern tip of Goa, was to become our home for a few days - its temporary nature is due to the fact that all beachfront buildings have to be dismantled for the monsoon season. This means that all beachfront structures are made from wood, bamboo and canvas. 

Palolem Beach - fairly built up, but incredibly charming nonetheless. We were lucky in that there were unusually few people there for the Christmas season, meaning it was nice and quiet. Will most definitely be returning here - what a place to avoid all the Christmas build-up and cold!

 Most poignantly, we had a palm tree growing through a hole in our room, out onto the balcony and beyond - while admittedly somewhat inconvenient, it was actually thoroughly enjoyable that they simply built around it instead of just chopping it down. 

Steve and I on our £5/night beachfront balcony, with our personal palm tree growing through the wall from our room and many, many rum & cokes. Steve's holding the sign we wandered up and down the plane boarding queue with, looking for taxi-mates. We found some, although we ended up sharing a taxi with completely different people. Such is Goa. 

It was hot without being humid, and we had enough motivation to go for runs on the beach most mornings despite the occasional slight hangover (bottles of rum for £1.50 each, what can I say...). Most of the remainder of our days was spent with scooters, which we managed to hire for £3/day for two and with no documentation or drivers' license required. Having never driven any motorised vehicle before, this proved daunting at first but, thanks partly to Goa's quiet and gorgeous country roads, extremely fun very soon after. 

One of our trusty mopeds, en route to Turtle Beach.

 It was thus that we discovered Turtle Beach, or Galgibaga - not unlike Palolem Beach in size and nature, this place was completely devoid of people. Picture a mile-and-a-bit of pristine white-sand beach, and not a single person on it. This is thanks to the fact that protected turtles lay their eggs here, and all infrastructure is prohibited; the only restaurant and guest house had to be set up behind the trees lining the beach so as to be completely noninvasive. As such, Steve and I shared this little piece of paradise with large numbers of hermit crabs (and a topless sunbather).

Not actually Turtle Beach (hence the surfer in the background), but another quiet-ish beach we came across during our forays.

Galgibaga's other main strength was the ride there and back - this 30-minute ride was chock full of stunning scenery. This was one of the few places where I genuinely struggled to imagine ever being unhappy, simply because of where you are. Not easy to put into words, actually!

On the way to Turtle Beach...

And another, from a somewhat incongruous truss bridge in the middle of the jungle. Possibly the best non-sunrise/sunset colours I have ever seen, and sadly rather failed to capture here...

Our evenings in Goa were, for the most part, spent drinking cocktails, eating incredible seafood and moving on to rum and coke later. The Himalayan sunset from a few posts ago aside, I don't think I've ever seen any sunsets quite like the ones here, and certainly not with such regularity. Each evening was different, but all stunning - I've put together a quick selection here. Ion't think captions would add much - these all seem pretty self-explanatory...

This one just might be my favourite, almost looks like Jupiter has suddenly moved really close and taken up the entire sky. This just might have to be the giant photo print Helena got me for Christmas...

 

Not a whole lot to add here, I think. It probably comes as no surprise that we tried to prolong our stay in Goa by changing train bookings, but sadly this proved impossible. Still, we ultimately did look forward to heading down to tropical Kerala, even though our journey was hampered by a glacially slow (extremely stoned?) taxi driver who delivered our panicked selves to the station 15 minutes late. Of course, we needn't have worried - by this point we should have known that the train was almost certain to not be on time. Indeed, it ended up some 3.5 hours delayed so we had plenty of time to hang around the station, calm down and munch some Samosas.

Following a 16-hour train journey to Kochi in a carriage with the loudest gossiping, cackling gaggle of old Indian women you could possibly imagine, we headed straight up into the foothills of the Western Ghats range, to Munnar. Having escaped the muggy, tropical heat (or so we thought) on a deathwish bus ride up a narrow serpentine road, we decided to go for a little trek the next day. Munnar is famous for its seemingly endless tea plantations, mostly owned by the Tata corporation (which, aside from its better known steel and automobile branches, seems to dominate almost every conceivable industry in India). 

A standard road in Munnar - tea and tuktuks.

These are surrounded by cloud forest (higher-elevation rainforest) which, as the name implies, provides less-than-ideal conditions for taking photos. Or maybe it was just me that struggled with the omnipresent hazy mist that made strong colours all but impossible - trying for even slightly better lighting just washed out all colours even more. My best efforts (below) don't quite get across just how much like a slightly more rugged version of the Shire this landscape was, with its rolling hills and impossibly vibrant greens.

Tea everywhere - it grows quickly enough that each plant is harvested every 15 days. No wonder everything looks so lush!

Along little paths and through tea plantations and dense forest, our steps took us to a little homestay up in the hills where we spent a tranquil evening stuffing ourselves with fantastic curry and fruit and chatting to an Italian hippie and anthropologist-turned-documentary maker. This vegetarian fellow had spent the previous summer filming with a documentary crew in remote southern Siberia, where they'd apparently run out of food in the middle of nowhere and had to adjust their diet to include badgers, herons and other critters they happened to find and kill. I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I'm pretty this is the best travel story I'm likely to hear on this trip...

Some pretty jungle flowers - I like how these look like their middle is aglow, presumably due to the sharp difference in colour.

I like to think of this one as a compositional win, although it was mostly accidental!

Following Munnar, we returned to sea level to spend our last few days in this mad, maddening, beautiful country in Kochi. Southern India on the whole is a little less in-your-face and blatantly money-grabbing than the north, which made wandering around the touristy bits of this otherwise industrial city much more bearable. Here you can get into a tuktuk without much haggling and rest assured that you will be paying no more than 150% of the lowest tourist price, as opposed to the 500+% you'd be charged somewhere like Varanasi. This contributes to the generally more tranquil feel of Kochi, which retains some of its old-world charm in the tourist districts and the seaside. 

Old Chinese fishing nets in Kochi - horribly inefficient but endearing. They have been thoroughly replaced as the city's economic mainstay by whatever industrial contraption stands in the background.

A cool bit of street art in the old city - either one artist has been very busy there lately, or this is actually one of a series of street art made for tourists to take photos of; the colourful feathers appeared in a suspicious number of alleyways all around. Still - thought they looked pretty cool!

 So, that's that from India - with any luck I'll be able to catch up in my writing and be reasonably up-to-date from now on. 3-and-a-bit weeks was nowhere near enough to properly explore most of a country this size, but it has been a fantastic way of figuring out what parts of the country to revisit or devote more time to on future trips. For now, though, the return to the Western world was an extremely pleasant one. More soon - stay tuned!

Mumbai Madness

Evening,

Let the rapid-fire blogging of India continue - although following feedback that I was omitting rather a lot in these posts, I've decided to dedicated a post to Mumbai alone as Steve and I did and experienced quite a lot here, a fair part of which actually seems worth mentioning. This surprised me more than anyone, as after two weeks of hectic city-hopping in the North I was very much preoccupied with Goa and viewed Mumbai as little more than a stepping-stone on the way there. This was confirmed in my first, none-too-favourable impression of this 18-million-inhabitant behemoth of a city. The muggy, humid heat, endless miles of depressing slums and shanty towns and a shockingly inept taxi driver who nearly coughed his lungs out the window with a sound like a dying poodle every 15 seconds all combined to form a rather glum, unpleasant image of Mumbai. Low, thick, grey clouds and the endless smog cloaking the city gave it a post-apocalyptic look to match.

Fortunately, things took a decided turn for the better once we reached our hotel, cranked the AC to some 20 degrees colder than outside temperatures and settled into the expat-type Restaurant next door. Plentiful beer and sizzlers - at prices that shocked us after the rest of India but were still dirt cheap compared to London - helped lift our moods considerably (well, Steve's mood required less lifting...). It was thus buoyed that we headed off to explore the next morning. At the Gateway of India, the ubiquitous touts (instead of the usual tat) were hawking photo prints. This meant dozens of ragged-looking Indians with new, bottom-of-the-line DSLRs and 18-55mm kit lenses - on full auto mode, of course - pestering us and proffering samples of their "handiwork". Dripping sweat after just a few minutes outside, we retreated to the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the other main tourist sight in the area.

Breakfast at the Taj - read on...

The Taj is India's equivalent to the Ritz, and we revelled in the luxuries of top-notch tea, coffee and biscuits while looking exceptionally scruffy compared to the actual clientele of the hotel (rooms $300/night and up - mad by Indian standards!). This place was the polar opposite of the vast parts of Mumbai that eke out a living in various states of squalor: class and opulence at its finest, the Taj is an institution for the 1%, or even the 0.01% in the case of a country as populous and poor as India. Being white, we seemed to somehow be accepted into this 1% despite our unkempt appearance, and we wandered the corridors of the hotel for a while. We found a small shopping centre normally catering to guests of the hotel - mentioning that "we'd left our credit cards in our room" triggered dollar signs in salesmen's eyes whenever we failed to mention that said room wasn't actually at this hotel - and walked out with some rather nice cashmere scarves (if I do say so myself) for the girlfriends. These would also go on to inspire what have to be among the best/ worst Christmas cards Steve or I have ever produced.

A walk through Mumbai's colonial-style centre brought us to a massive park which, it being Sunday, was packed with cricketers. And I mean PACKED - there must have been thousands of players, with stumps every few feet and balls flying absolutely everywhere (thankfully, they used tennis balls - otherwise there would have been many casualties!). This was another fantastic, and entertaining, example of order somehow hiding in the utter chaos that is India if you accept it rather than trying to fight it. 

In the middle of the park, overlapping casual games from both edges, an actual match was going on, and yet another - this one a club game - at one end of the park; at the other end, the Dutch national team (yep, apparently a Dutch Cricket team exists...) were doing an afternoon with a charity teaching homeless kids the game. It was refreshing to see scenes of general fun and enjoyment uninterrupted by beggars, hawkers and touts and to the backdrop of the stunning University and Courts of Justice.

How many cricket games might be happening in this one picture...?

The Dutch Cricketers teaching some street kids basic cricket; it's not a public-school sport here, but a national one.

Being shown how it's done.

And a bit of well-deserved rest post-game?

 That evening, following a recommendation from a Mumbai local named Lloyd whom we had met in Jodhpur, we hopped on a commuter train to the trendy Bhandra district for an all-you-can-eat Asian extravaganza. Unheard-of levels of anticipation accompanied this excursion, which we duly starved ourselves for from midmorning onwards. The local trains were great fun, too - in the evening they weren't crowded and have gaping holes instead of doors which makes for a nice breeze and the novel feeling of hanging bodily out of a moving train.

Unsurprisingly, this is about as steady as I could hold a camera out a moving train...

Bhandra is the playground of the middle classes - lacking the opulence of the Taj, but with a healthy bustle and young people with iPhones. Still, poverty is ubiquitous: many sidewalks doubled as beds for rows upon rows of people loincloth-clad people. In the restaurant itself, obesity was rampant - it seems this is still an affliction of the wealthy here, unlike in most western countries. Not unexpectedly, we went completely overboard on the food when presented with unlimited dim sum, sushi, sashimi and various SE Asian goodies after two weeks of street food! Steve's crucial mistake were the four(?!) portions of prawn dim sum he ordered after trying one...

Facing facts...but spirits are still high!

...while I pushed myself very close to the edge with my second soup bowl of ice cream and bits of cake floating in it.

This is actually my first helping of pudding. I didn't bother using the puny ice cream bowl for the second one...error. Wearing a look of pained determination by this point...

 Still, we both retained all our food, so on the whole the evening was a winner. On the way home from Victoria Station, our taxi driver on the way home cheated us out of 20 rupees by charging more upon arrival than we'd agreed. When we argued he began screaming abuse at us to attract other drivers' attention - faced with a choice of trying to take on an angry mob of Indian taxi drivers or paying the equivalent of 15p more, we decided (well, Steve made an executive decision) that there was a time and a place for arguing, and that this was not it. Given the minimal sums involved, the episode did not bother our food-comatose selves very much...

Having had a taste of luxury the night before, we decided to push the limits all the way while we were in Mumbai. This involved drinks at the rooftop bar of the Intercontinental Hotel to catch sunset over the bay, and a return to the Taj Mahal Palace for their buffet breakfast the following morning. Unfortunately for my wallet, drinks at the Intercontinental turned into drinks and cigars, which apparently incur a very hefty tax levy in India - but it had to be done. 

Because these just had to be taken...

This is about as clear as the air ever gets in Mumbai. Somewhere on the far side is that 27-story lad pad that REALLY rich Indian guy built himself.

 Still, it was good fun feeling superbly classy for about half an hour and, to live up the contrasts between rich and poor that are so striking in Mumbai of all places, we proceeded to have dinner at a grubby little Thali (3-4 curries with rice and poppadum-type things) place by the train station for about 2% of the cost of the cigars we'd just puffed away.

Cigar: £20, 0 kcal; Dinner: £0.6, 600ish kcal. So...why do people smoke again?

Breakfast the next morning was what you'd expect from the breakfast buffet of a high-end luxury hotel; very, very tasty and long-lasting. The only slight drawback was the *extremely* obnoxious group of Englishpeople who sat next to us - the most annoyingly pretentious, stuck-up kind of 20-somethings who (in all seriousness) complained about the fact that they had a car but no driver. Fortunately, we were distracted enough by all the foodie goodies that this didn't bother us too much and even became somewhat amusing.

RANDOM BONUS IMAGE! Some guys on a moped expertly weaving through rush hour despite carrying a full-size windshield. No further questions...

And thus ended the adventure of Mumbai - I struggle for words to describe how much we were looking forward to getting to Goa by this point! More on that asap...

North India: Chaos, Carnage, Confusion and Castles

Apologies, yet again, about the delay - it's time to get involved with India which is, unsurprisingly, rather too big to write about in just one post. Even two won't reeeally do it justice, but it's gonna have to do as I've since been back to England for Christmas and then moved on into Australia...things are almost happening too quickly for me to cope!

But yes. India. Having very recently re-emerged from the vast emptiness and desolation of the Himalayas, being dropped headfirst into the evening rush-hour traffic of Varanasi was a bit of a sensory assault. After all, we had not seen anything with wheels for nearly three weeks! Preconceptions of traffic in India proved fairly accurate - no lanes, no traffic lights, no order of any sort whatsoever. It's a survival-of-the-fittest situation out there, where "fittest" in this context stands for "most willing and able to weave through non-existent gaps in traffic". Add endless streams of three-wheeled tuk-tuks (which are great fun to ride in!), a generous dollop of cows ambling around aimlessly and a sprinkling of elephants, painted and hung with jewellery for weddings and other ceremonies, and you just about get the idea. The word "cacophony" has rarely seemed more appropriate. 

One of the countless tuktuks congesting India's streets. Their drivers exhibit varying levels of death-wish driving, affection for Indian beats (excellent driving music!) and talkativeness, but sitting in the front seat of one - basically on the driver's lap and blocking half the steering "handlebar" - is an experience not to be missed! Tuk-tuks are also slightly different from city to city. 

This is, well, an elephant. Not the one we saw blocking traffic in Varanasi, but the only one I have a photo of. Still painted from a wedding it was used at a few days previously, Steve and Jonatan were keen for a ride. I thought the conditions he was living in (a concrete barn/bunker and fetters around his legs) were rather depressing and didn't want to pay, being content to wait for them to return, but the owners ended up letting me go along anyway. Couldn't say no... 

Fortunately, then, our hotel was a rather more tranquil affair: the Ganges, holiest of rivers to Hindus, flows placidly in a wide bed here and the smog is bad enough that the far bank is obscured most of the time. Horrendous pollution problems aside, the evenings, when the smog and river are illuminated by the rising moon and out-of-sight orange streetlights, are pretty magical. Our evenings were duly spent wandering the riverbank Ghats, always on the lookout for street food - one of the best things India has to offer. Steve and I regularly managed to overeat for the equivalent of about 50p each! Buying food from street vendors also offers the advantage of trying lots of different things in one evening. It is just as well that our stomachs were prepared for non-Western fare after a few weeks in Nepal, as I managed not to fall ill at all. 

Eating sessions tended to end with various sticky affairs from little bakeries. These generally turned out to be lumps of solid sugar, held together by liquid sugar and often immersed in syrup for good measure. Sweet!

Sunrise from our rowboat. One of the advantages of the smog is being able to look directly at the sun while it's rising for quite a while, and the incredible reds and oranges of said sunrise! 

A Holy Man (or, all too often, a guy with a painted face who expects tips for putting red dots on tourists' foreheads) sat in one of the colourful Ghats lining the Ganges in Varanasi. The rubbish in and on the river is depressingly ubiquitous.

Sunset over the Ganges - not a very exciting photo, unfortunately, but this is about as clear as the air gets there. 

 Anyway - it'd be far too easy to just go on and on about all the food we had. Eventually, Steve made the crucial error of drinking orange juice from a street stall. Almost certainly made with water fresh from the Ganges, it knocked him out completely for about three days. This made jumping off a moving train - after we'd boarded the wrong one trying to get from Varanasi to Agra - all the more enjoyable for him! We hadn't planned to stay a night in Agra, which has very little to offer apart from the Taj Mahal and a lot of seedy tourist ripoffs, but Steve was ill enough that he ended up staying the night and joining us (Jonatan, a Swedish guy with an unusual but endearing affection for small furry critters, and myself) in Jaipur the next day. 

The Taj itself, despite the swarms of people wandering its grounds every day, was absolutely magnificent; I was in awe, and spent a fair while just sitting in front of it and looking at it (while trying to ignore the thousands of people all trying to get jumping/touching-the-tip/waving photos at the same time). Try as I might, I couldn't really get a photo I was really happy with - the rule of thirds doesn't really apply here as nothing in the surroundings of the Taj really adds to the building itself; it is the unquestionable centrepiece of everything one could possibly do here. Still, a few shots below...

Our view at dawn, during breakfast on a rooftop.

Some detail from below. Marble plinth and writing around the doorway - it gets bigger further up so it looks like it's all the same size. Ingenious!

From the gardens - though they add little to the building's beauty...

And the obligatory overall shot.

Rajasthan was our last stop in North India - we visited Jaipur, the capital, and smaller Jodhpur. Jaipur drove home the point that big cities in India - especially when it's not the monstrous ones like Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata, the sheer, staggering size of which makes them spectacular in their own right - are less attractive than smaller places. They're less walkable, more polluted and on the whole, touts and tuktuk drivers are more obnoxious. In Jaipur, we had one particularly keen would-be chauffeur follow us some 300m up a six-lane road during rush hour - on the wrong side of the road! Then, having ignored our loud "no"s before we ignored him completely, he became indignant that we didn't want his services. 

Still, the place was pleasant enough - the Amber Fort (not actually named for the fossilised resin, but appropriately coloured) was our first taste of the giant fortresses dotting all of Rajasthan and relating the state's tribal history. Wandering around these was particularly fun because unlike most European medieval castles, these things are less ruined and can be freely explored. The windy corridors, unplanned layout and hundreds of rooms, alcoves and staircases (and the royal latrines) conveyed a very Game of Thrones-esque feeling and were great fun. 

The Amber Fort - a largish affair.

Fortified walls - Maharajahs, having thousands of people at their disposal, appear to have used them not just to build them nice things, but also to send them to war against other Maharajahs - presumably to conquer other nice things.

Of course, there are plenty of other palaces around - the maharajahs of old (and less old - the current one is, unsurprisingly, Eton- and Oxbridge-educated) are rich chaps, after all! One of them decided to have a massive artificial lake created in the middle of his desert city, with no other purpose than to then have a palace built in the middle of said lake (and creatively naming it "Water Palace"). Almost like a 17th-century Dubai...

As close as one can get to the Water Palace. Steve and Jonatan posed for portraits here with some chuffed-looking Indian tourists...

Jodhpur, then, was more laid back and a lot more walkable. Our efforts to buy pashminas here failed spectacularly, but it was a nice change that people here seemed slightly less used to tourists. We got plenty of stares, even more thinly disguised than usual, and small throngs of children following us for short distances screaming (in excitement, I hope, rather than hurling abuse...but you never know!). 

Jodhpur's Mehrangarh Fort dominating the city utterly. The place looks like it grows out of the hillside, and it seems unsurprising that it's never been conquered.

This post took rather longer than anticipated - it turns out there is rather a lot to be said about India after spending over 3 weeks there, even though this is of course far too short a time to even come close to seeing the whole country. More on the South soon - a very different affair...!

Happy New Year!