trains > buses > planes

or at least that's my opinion on travel in India, according to a complicated formula plotting economy against comfort and interest and dirtiness (clearly some factors outweigh others) ..unfortunately I've just spent a very frustrating hour and half on the IRCTC website discovering that trains all over India are booked solid for the next couple weeks so I seem to be destined for a few more overnight buses then I was planning on. Somehow Nirupa and I were able to book trains all across Rajasthan only a few days in advance, but now we seem to have come back to the reality of nothing being simple here.. Oh well, I guess the whole business sort of adds an element of destiny into where I go when (i.e., wasn't planning on going as far south as Mysore but apparently I have to if I ever want to make it north again without flying).

Anywayyyys I figured it was time for a lil update if I ever want to catch up, we've been covering a lot of ground. Let's see, we got to Jaisalmer in the morning.. sometime last week, spent a day and a night there, went on a camel safari in the desert for like a day and a half, had the rest of that day in Jaisalmer, then caught the sleeper to Jodhpur. Day and a night in Jodhpur, bus to Udaipur for most of the next day, night and a day in Udaipur; then sleeper to Indore, train to Kandhwa, train to Jalgaon, night in Jalgaon, Ajanta caves today, and now we're spending the night in Aurangabad. I guess it sounds kind of exhausting but there's a few days of sitting on buses/trains in there, and we actually didn't really rush around in any of the places in Rajasthan.. in general I think we could have spent more time in most of the places we've been just hanging out, but we wouldn't actually have done much more than we did in a day and a half or so.

Highlights have included camel riding, camel trotting, being on a camel when it stands up (first with both front legs, then both back.. sort of like a see-saw), trying not to step on camel poop, bonding with the camel drivers and listening to them traditional Rajasthani songs and then a personalized version of 'Barbie Girl' and impart wisdom such as 'no chapati, no chai, no woman, no cry', sleeping on the sand dunes, watching the sun rise over the sand dunes.. watching the procession for the Gangaur festival, with little girls dressed in amazing bright and sparkly outfits and women with bangles covering their upper arms and the maharaja on his horse (who stepped on me)... walking the narrow streets in Jaislamer with intricately carved golden sandstone balconies and facades arond every corner, the beautiful palace and Jain temples inside the fort, hearing about how people used to live in the desert before they had running water (using one bucket of water five times!).. finding possibly the best Italian food in India (sorry, I can't eat straight dahl for 2 months).. blue houses in Jodhpur, the huge impenetrable fort, busy bazaars and saffron lassi.. the hills and green and only partly dried up lake up Udaipur after the golden desert in Jaisalmer and rocky red land around Jodhpur.. watching artists make miniature paintings and point out the details with a magnifying glass... 2000 year old Buddhist carvings and paintings in the cave temples at Ajanta

Tomorrow we're going to see the rock-cut temples at Ellora and then... a water park!!! Oh man I couldn't be more excited. I'm pretty adjusted to being constantly sweaty but I've been craving a swimming pool.. or water slides.. or Goan beaches...!

Nirupa's pictures

So I am I bit too lazy/short on time for a long update, but we went on a camel safari and saw the Gangaur festival in Jaisalmer, got to Jodhpur this morning, saw the fort/markets/etc, and tomorrow we're busing to Udaipur.. and Nirupa is really good about putting pictures up so here's the links to some of her albums:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1578930019&ref=mf#/album.php?aid=2156358&id=94801466&ref=mf
http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=94801466#/album.php?aid=2155897&id=94801466
http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=94801466#/album.php?aid=2156690&id=94801466
http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=94801466#/album.php?aid=2156692&id=94801466

mountains to desert (and Sikhs in between)

So in the last.. 4 or 5 days (time passes so strangely when traveling) we've gone from the mountains of Himachal Pradesh to the plains of Punjab to the desert of Rajasthan, and I'm definitely experiencing one of the main things that made me want to come to India: the myriad of landscapes, peope, and cultures all contained in one country (and that you can go from one to another so easily on train!).

From Shimla we took a lovely 10-hour bus ride complete with all the cliches: winding roads, careening around corners, and constant honking (even some puking, but I'm not going to name names) and by the end of the day we were gasping over the Himalayas being RIGHT THERE and settling down in McLeod Ganj. Like Shimla, it felt pretty similar to the mountains at home (but with more monkeys) although the mountains were much more amazing then then the Cascades and closer than in Shimla.. but the people were really different. McLeod Ganj is uphill from the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, and the area around there has a huge Tibetan refugee population, so we saw lots of different faces and could even tell the difference in clothes (the Tibetan women wore long wrap-around skirts and striped apron things). And then there were all the Tibetan Buddhist monks, wearing red robes (and red socks!), some of them chatting on cell phones and some fingering prayer beads. Oh and the sizeable expat/backpacker population, who seem to land in McLeod Ganj to study Buddhism and learn to play the tabla and dreadlock each others' hair or something. Anyway we had a great day there, hiking up for awesome views, checking out the main Buddhist temple (w/lots of fiercely debating monks!), the Dalai Lama's residence (well the outside of it) and the government complex. Oh and shopping, of course.

Then we had to get the 5 AM (only) bus to Amritsar, down out of the hills and into fertile plains.. the Punjab countryside seems to be lots and lots of wheat fields. By late morning we were in Amritsar, where we went straight to the Golden Temple, were led to the foreigners' dorm in the Sri Guru Ram Devi Niwas guesthouse by a nice old Sikh man, and adjusted ourselves to not having any privacy for 2 days. There's more to Amritsar than the Golden Temple--we also went to a Hindu cave temple which was sort of like a amusement park funshouse complete with mirrored walls and tunnels to crawl through, a nice park, the memorial for the British massacre in 19something, and a fancy restaurant in the posh "new city"--but we spent most of our time there just chillin at the Temple, people watching, etc. First of all it's pretty amazing the sheer number of people that stay for free at the guesthouses and eat for free in the massive 24 hr community kitchen (which make reallllly good food, surprisingly); then there's the diversity of pilgrims, from the old guys in sarongs and loose shirts with blue trubans, long beards, ceremonial daggers and spears to the adorable little boys with their topknots and gorgeous long eyelashes; then there's the afct that you can see all these people doing everything from bathing in the holy pool to drying their laundry to helping prepare food in the kitchen to drinking chai in long rows.. and all the time! I actually got up at 2 AM the second night to see what was going on, and it was liek the middle of the day.. people were ven still lined up to get into the temple itself. Which of course was gorgeous; it was really cool seeing it at different times of day, sparkling in the bright sunlight or illuminated at night by flashes of lightning. It was a pretty amazing couple days, but what with the not showering and the hardly sleeping real noisy) we were okay with leaving yesterday.

Everyone kept saying we had to go back to Delhi to get to Jaisalmer but that made no sense so instead we went through Jandalhar (just southeast of Amritsar) which was notable only for the plastic roses in the train station refreshment room and Bikaner, where we ended up spending a night and a day. We actually ended up at a really nice hotel, a gorgeous haveli w/ a hot shower! And nice restaurant. Went to the Karni Mata RAT TEMPLE outside of town which was crazy, everyone was bringing food to give to the rats and the had all these big bowls of milk and like branches to play on and things.. bizarre. Also saw the current maharaja's palace/hotel and the fort, which has amazing palaces and furnishings from when the maharajas lived there. It really feels like the desert, with the sand everywhere and camels pulling carts down the street And the people are different again, the men wrap their turbans differently and lots of them have pierced ears, and a lot of the women wear really colorful bouse/skirt/shawl combinations instead of saris or salwar.

Tonight it's sleeper to Jaisalmer, where we hope to find a camel safari into the desert dunes, a Shiva/Parvati festival, etc etc. More soon!

malaria, monkeys, and mountains

Yeah so by the way, I had malaria for a little bit.. but don't worry no big deal it's gone now. Basically I had a nasty fever last Saturday but conveniently there was a pathology lab below my bedroom, so I got a blood test right away and after it came back positive for the lovely P. vivax I got the necessary pills right away. It's funny, because we in the northern hemisphere think of malaria as this big scary thing, but at the clinic everyone was like, "oh yeah everyone gets it, lots of the volunteers who have been on doxycycline before got it anyway, just take the pills and it'll go away". Which was mostly true, the only drawback being that the chloroquine can have some nasty side effects so I was fighting nausea/dizziness/fatigue for the first leg of the post-Sambhavna journey (the whole waiting-in-Delhi-for-nine-hours thing); but I finished the chloroquine a couple days ago and am now eating lots and all seems to be well. Although I still haven't gotten my appetite back for Indian food.. the Chinese on offer has been good though.

Anyway let's see, on Wednesday night we arrived in Chandigarh, the magical city of tree-lined boulevards and controlled traffic and dramatically reduced amounts of garbage in the streets! It was basically created from scratch after partition when they needed a new capitol for Punjab, so this French city planner/architect/artist Le Corbusier planned it as a "garden city" with the streets as "vectors" with roundabouts for better traffic flow, "sectors" with residential areas, commercial, and schools, etc, as well as the capitol complex and some kind of wack monumental-type buildings. It felt like a world away from the dust and noise and hassle of Bhopal.. we actually walked along tree-lined paths! And there were flowers everywhere! And we could find our way around because the layout made sense!
So that was all very exciting, and wasn't even the real reason we came to Chandigarh.. that was the Nek Chand Fantasy Rock Garden, aka one of my second favorite place in India (after Taj of course.. but much more economical if you have to choose one to visit). This random refugee guy Nek Chand started building sculptures and things out of all sorts of industrial waste in the '50s I think, then the government "discovered" his whole little land and decided to pay people to work for him and make the whole thing into a park/tourist attraction. It was all sort of maze-like passageways of rock with tiny doors leading to more passages and open spaces with waterfalls, bizzarely shaped rocks, more walls decorated with everything from old light sockets to broken plates.. and then there was this whole huge section with all sorts of people and creatures made from basically everything.. my favorites were the people decorated with bits of bangles, or maybe the smiley three-headed giants. I'll put up pictures when I can as it's a little hard to describe, but I'm sure you'll get some good stuff if you google it.. anyway, that was awesome. We also went to the High Court and City Museum in Chandigarh, and wandered around the central shopping plaza with lots of posh international shops and some lit-up fountains.

THEN we took the train to Kalk, sat around for six hours, and got the toy train up into the hills to Shimla! The toy train runs on this little narrow-gauge track with something like 102 tunnels and lots of bridges and amazing views the whole way. Although the Indian tourist kids who felt the need to scream every time we went through a tunnel were pretty annoying, it was all in all probably the best train ride I've been on yet. Oh and the highlight was when this old lady was trying to cross a bridge with her cow, and the cow went on the tracks so they had to stop the train while the conductor got out and chased it off the tracks! The higher we got, the clearer the air got, the greener the vegetation was, and the more it felt vaguely Pacific Northwest-y. it even started to rain as we reached Shimla!

So now not only are we in the foothills of the Himalayas, with snow-capped mountains barely visible through the clouds, but it's cool out, it rained, and there are pine trees everywhere. But it is still India; for one thing, all the pine trees are full of monkeys, which LP warned us were a "menace" and therefore we've been paranoidly avaoiding them all day. On a hike up to the Hanuman (monkey god) temple this morning, we rented sticks which we tried to thump threateningly, and it was probably a good thing we were armed because we saw a monkey jump onto some German tourist lady and try to grab her glasses! Also they were coming for my popcorn and chai this afternoon, I just know it. In addition to fraking about the mountains and making lots of comparisons to Pac NW/Canada, we walked at least 15k today, up to the monkey temple and back, then out to the Viceregal Lodge (aka the castle from Beauty and the Beast) and a bit further for more views and back. And lots of wandering the markets and hiking to and from the YMCA where we are staying (yes it is fun, but we are hanging out with no boys, much less all of them).

Tomorrow we have a 9 hour bus ride to Dharamsala, which is the transport hub for McLeod Ganj where the Tibetan government actually is and all the tourists stay. So that should be fun.. I guess we've sort of been on a one day travelling, one day in one place shcedule but it's been good so far, I think we've done what there was to do in Chandigarh and Shimla and although it was sad leaving Sambhavna and our friends there, it feels great to be moving. And north! Supposedly it rains more in McLeod Ganj..

goodbye to Sambhavna

Amidst packing, saying goodbyes, typing up Supreme Court documents, eating cake, and other things that go with last days I thought I'd upload some more pictures of Sambhavna and around..
w/Lalita and Ratna
gardening/medicine making crew
garden
medicine making area, free of gilo vines and clippings for the first time since I've been here!
current volunteers at the train restaurant for our last night.. Nirupa and Lukin have Nirupa's boxes of stuff to ship home on their heads
clinic
chillin in the entrance of the clinic on Holi
pictures of some of the staff
Jayshri in the kitchen
clinic

So tonight at 7:30 Nirupa and I are catching the sleeper, getting to Delhi in the morning, killing time for 6 hours and then taking a train to Chandigarh in the afternoon where we'll spend two nights. The real on the 20th more trains to Shimla and mountains! And after that we have many plans but no tickets..

elephants, tourists, and Holi.. oh my!

ask and ye shall receive.. thanks for the comments loves. And in return, I'm attempting to put up lots of pictures as promised! Even if it takes hours on the dubious internet connection.
Meanwhile.. my plans changed a bit and I am actually still at Sambhavna; basically realized I wanted more time here and was only really leaving so soon b/c of the elephant festival.. so I just went out to Jaipur for two days, saw the sights and the elephants and then got back this morning. Now I'm planning on leaving the 17th with Nirupa, or maybe a day earlier if I try to go tiger-spotting in a national park first. It's definitely nice to have a "home" here, and in some respects I feel like I could stay for quite a while.. but then there's so much I want to see in India, I've got to get moving at some point, and I think I'll be really happy when I do. The couple days in Jaipur were actually great for getting back into travelling a little and having some time to remember I can do things on my own, and I'm really glad I went even though my instinct is not to go somewhere and then back the way I came.
I took the passenger (i.e. stop everywhere along the way at every single tiny station) sleeper train to get there which was quite the experience what with three sections of three levels of bunks within like a 12 by 6 foot space, the various bugs, random people getting on and off all the time.. but it was actually fine, I spread out my nice little sheet bag and had plenty of time in the morning to watch the for the desert. Course we got to Jaipur like 3 hours late, but it all worked out b/c I found out the elephant festival wasn't until 4 the next day, not all day like I expected, so I had plenty of time to do the sights and festival. Monday afternoon I went to Amber fort a little outside of town, which was sort of a huge palace with all these labyrinths of rooms with stair cases leading to unexpected places.. I could just see myself running from all the Indian tourists and getting more and more lost, like "No! I don't want my picture taken! No!" Then Tuesday I walked around the bazaars a bit, went to the part of the City Palace (where the Maharajah and fam still live) that's open to the public, saw this crazy observatory made out of sculptures that one of the Rajput kings built, and dodged all the people trying to sell my sparkly shoes and gorgrous Rajasthani tie-dye. Jaipur is right up there with Delhi and Agra on the tourist track, quite a ways from Bhopal, so it was pretty weird to see all these white people everywhere and tons of touristy shops and a lot of international chain stores. Then there was the elephant festival, which on one hand was just a huge photo op (complete with people yelling at each other for standing in their shots) but on the other hand was some crazy cool stuff I wouldn't have seen anywhere else, like painted and lavishly decorated elephants and costumed dances. I caught the express (and much cleaner and calmer.. the food vendors even wore uniforms!) train back to Bhopal and arrived this morning, just in time for Holi!
Holi is the big spring festival for Hindus, which involves lots of coloured powder and water and rowdiness and fun. I'm not too clear on the religious significance though.. for the last couple days there've been tons of stalls in the streets selling powders in all kinds of bright colors, water guns, balloons, etc..and a few people got started yesterday, with powder throwing during the day and bonfires and music at night. Today we got started early making a mess at Sambhavna, then went to a party on a rooftop nearby for lots more powder, some intense water fights, and old ladies signing and playing drums. All of my hair and exposed skin were dyed, and a lot of it still hasn't come off after the first scrubbing.. I guess I'm having a relapse to my purple-hair phase.
Tomorrow the clinic will be back open after two days of holiday, and our group of volunteers has changed a bit.. Mary and Frank are gone and missed, and there's a new American volunteer, a 26 year old guy from Montana. Really my last week now!
me and Nirupa mid-Holi
Elephants at the festival
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bazaars in Jaipur

largest sundial in the world

City Palace in Jaipur

bangle guys making little wax powder bombs for Holi

powders

demonstration for International Women's Day (can you find me?)

kids of the woman who cooks dinner

kids at a school we visited

sunset from Sambhavna

Lalita-ji making medicine

Union Carbide plant



Wall around the factory


Sanchi


Puja's birthday party

the birthday girl herself

the corner store

in the neighborhood

part of the family who live next to the tailor

at the tailor

I fit right in

gilo-free fence!

fly like paper, get high like planes

(..watched Slumdog the other night and Nirupa just got the soundtrack, so we're going through a big MIA phase)

It's been brought to my attention that I've been slackin on the blog, so let me see if I can bring this up to speed..
Workdays around the clinic have been relatively routine, I'm still trying to do yoga in the morning, working on cutting the giloe vines (finally got em all off the fence but now still have to chop into little pieces), scanning/classifying old articles for the library. It just keeps getting hotter and hotter, consistently in the 90s during the day now so I'm trying to stay in the shade and near fans until 5 pm or so and appreciating that I don't have to work out in the sun in the garden. In the afternoons/evenings we sometimes go to the markets, Chowk (in the old city near a mosque) or New Market, where all the upper-class people hang out; I'm much worse about resisting the temptations of ice cream this time around. I've helped out in the kitchen a few nights, cutting vegetables, trying to learn what the woman who makes dinner is doing, and playing with her adorable kids. Sometimes we watch movies on Dash's laptop, and while it's a little weird being "home" for a couple hours and then coming out into the Bhopal night, it's nice to be able to relax. Occasional visits with the neighborhood kids/families; every time I walk by the tailor's the people who live next door invite me in for tea and I get to hold their cute cat and slightly intimidating parrot. Oh I went back to Ratna the gardener's hosue the other night to celebrate her daughter Puja's 14th birthday! All the kids blew up balloons and hung them around the room, I got to help make dinner (mashing potatoes with my hands while squatting on the floor 3 feet away from the family cow), they sang a slightly twisted version of 'Happy Birthday' and cut the cake (but no candles), a few presents, and then delicious dinner. Puja is an awesome girl-really smart and friendly (with good English); she showed me her school notebooks and told me about how she wants to be a scientist.

On Sunday Dash, Frank, Mary and I went via private car (with a friend and her brother) to Sanchi, a Buddhist site about an hour outside of Bhopal. It was late afternoon when we got there, so the light was beautiful and we spent a couple hours wandering around looking at the stupas (stone mounds that have relics/tombs inside) and beautifully carved gates, and ruins of some other temples and two monasteries. Back in Bhopal we stopped for tea and made a bit of a scene coming in to sit at a very male-dominated sidewalk cafe place, where the owner showed us a framed news story about how his tea shop got really hoppin after midnight.. then we went to dinner at a restaurant in the fancier part of 'New Bhopal' and got to see how the other half lives.

Monday afternoon, we (all of the volunteers) walked over to the Union Carbide plant about 10 minutes away from the clinic to see what we could see.. first encountered a wall painted with lots of anti-Dow slogans in Hindi and English; walking along it discovered a big hole that people were using to get in and out, namely a bunch of kids who were playing cricket in a field just inside. But we were a little wary of going in without a permit, so we went back the other way past the huts where people live right up against the wall and some sketchy pools of water that a little kid seemed to be drinking out of. Wal;ked around to the "front" (off the main street) where we could get closer to some abandoned-looking buildings, but weren't sure exactly what we were looking at besides more kids playing in old radio towers so headed back. But THEN yesterday a French journalist showed up who had a permit to visit the site, so we went with her and got to walk around inside and actually see some things up close. I guess I didn't really know what I expected to see at the abandoned site of a gas leak that happened 25 years ago, but what was there was definitely bizarre. Kind of hard to describe, I'll try and put pictures up soon, but basically the tanks and pipes and things were just sitting out in the open all rusted over (whatever walls had been there were scavenged, I guess) and our "guides" (police?) kept pointing out places where there was still toxic waste sitting around (there definitely is still some somewhere in there, "cleanup efforts" have been basically non-existent). But since we couldn't see any bubbling green pools of sludge and there were all these trees and grass grown up around, it sort of looked.. not very sinister. We did go to the old control room, which was really trippy: still signs there with emergency warning messages and a plaque that said "SAFETY is everybody's business", labels for where pressure gauges to the tanks were, and random papers covering the floor. It seems like whoever wants to pretty much can go in there and take what they want; animals are living all over the place and the people who live nearby don't really seem to realize that the site is still contaminated. Lots more to say in that regard but better leave it til later..

I've bought my train ticket to leave on Sunday, when I'll have been here for 3 weeks and in India for almost a month! And definitely will try to have some pictures up before then. Love to all (and if you're reading this, leave a comment so I know I'm not just writing to no one!) xoxo