Mumbai

Before discussing Mumbai, let me tell you something: I am super happy to come back home. The past week has been sort of a nightmare, since I have been sick for 4 or 5 days. I thought my stomach would go through this trip without any harm, there you go! I have to say it is really difficult when you have to g to the toilets 50 times a day (and night) and those toilets are outside of your room... I could not eat anything but plain rice and drink black tea and water. It obviously took its toll on me and I probably lost 6 kilos in the process! In any case, I feel better now, but the end of this trip has been epic and I am wondering what I did to deserve this bad karma, when I have kept calm, been very nice and kept smiling all the way during this trip! I thought the bad things would come once I am back home, but hopefully this won't be the case since I have had enough for a while in the last two weeks.

 As for Mumbai, it is probably the best big city I have visited in India. It is relatively clean, there not many touts harassing you at every corner, I understand the street map, there are no rickshaws so traffic is actually OK... Yes, I like Mumbai. During my two stays, I stayed in Colaba, which is at the tip of the peninsula and the backpacker area. During my first stay, I went for a bit of sightseeing: Elephanta Island, an island with temple-caves a bit like Ajanta and Ellora, but very underwhelming since there are only few caves, a walk through the city's colonial area (looks a lot like Londond), a walk in the city's bazaar, a view of the sea at Chowpatty beach (where the water stinks more than sewers)... Yes Mumbai has a lot to offer. I went to see my second Bollywood movie: a horror movie called Ghost (not a remake of the piece of shit with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze) and it is probably one of the worst horror movie I have seen in my entire life. The scenario does not make sense at all (it builds up and suddenly changes direction for no reason), there are romance/singing/dancing scenes like in any Bollywood movie, except that it does not fit here, the actors are really bad and the film is full of cliches (the best part being the introduction of the hero with a 10 minutes scene where is is riding bikes and sports cars, playing with kids on the side of the road, helping old people, all this with horrible music in the background...). It was ridiculous. I am just wondering how this works...

My second stay has been less active in terms of visits, since I was sick for the most part! So nothing much to say...

Now, let me tell you the reasons that make me want to be back in Europe:

- I am done with the food here: I have had enough Indian food for a long while, I mostly do not like what they make in terms of Western food

- I want to eat a good steak, and a burger (with bacon and cheddar), and a pizza (with ham and mozzarella), and a normal salad (with feta, olives, lettuce, and no peppers, cabbage, or onions), and French cheese, and drink some wine and some draught beer, and have a normal breakfast and a full English with bacon and baked beans, and eat some fried fish (and not something too salty and that always has an extra ingredient that ruins the taste of everything) and some pasta that is not overcooked and/or over oily and/or over salty, and some chocolate (proper one) and drink some proper coffee and...

- I have had enough rice and tea and dahl (lentils soup) and flat bread (chapatti and naan) and chocolate biscuits with no chocolate in them but only sugar

- I will kill the next person that lights sandalwood incense next to me (that smell gives me headache now)

- I will also kill the next person that plays some Hindu mantras/music next to me (that gives me headache too)

- I want to be in a city or on a road where everyone is not using their horns to drive (that also gives me headache)

- I want to take public transports and not be 400 people in a carriage or a bus that was built to take 50... even the London tube at peak time will seem OK now

- I want to take public transports and know that I will not be late by more than 15 minutes from what is announced on schedule (sometimes, shit happens, but not every time...)

- I want to be able to walk a street  without being asked something every 10 seconds (where I am from, if I want to take a picture, if I want to buy something, to give money, etc.)

- I want that when I say "no" to someone, it actually means "no" and that there is no point asking again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again... until I yell at them

- I want a place where there aren't consistently hundreds of mosquitoes or flies (not sure which ones I hate most: flies do not bite, but you can't kill them easily) flying around me

- I want a place where there is constant, good internet connection

- I want my TV, and my Playstation, and my computer

- I want to sleep in my own bed, shower with unlimited hot running water (and not with a bucket of cold water), cook my own food and wear clean clothes every day

- I need a haircut, but there is no way I let these guys take care of it (no, I do not want to shave my head again)

- I am not being shocked by anything anymore (begging children, crippled, poverty, dirtiness, all of the above)

- I can't stand seeing the standard Westerner outfit on people that think it is cool to dress like (what they think is) Indian style: Ali Baba pants (who ever said this looked cool), scarves on the head, tika on the forehead, lungi, etc. My message to them: guys you'll never be Indians, and in fact, you don't really want to be Indians, so stop pretending!  

- I miss you guys!

All that said this was a great trip where I saw amazing things, met amazing people, did amazing stuffs, learnt a lot about myself and what I can (and cannot) cope with, and which made me step back a bit and helped me think about what I want to do in the future. I will come back soon to visit the very North of the country (I have not had enough of the mountains) and maybe for different things, so if you are interested, let me know!

Now, I am back in Europe, I am mean again (I had become way too soft recently), and full of ideas. So be ready!

See you soon,

Matt

Now, pictures from Mumbai:

 Gateway of India

 Finsbury Circus? No we are in Mumbai

The University's architecture could rival Cambridge's (don't tell the English...) 

The Victoria Terminus... sorry they changed its name to the one of a Maharati hero: Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus, which is easier to pronounce...

The three headed Shiva in Elephanta Island: for real, it is quite impressive 

Leopold Cafe, a Mumbaiker institution, but the food is disgusting and also extremely expensive 

"No parking in front of this gate, else tyres will be deflated" 

This is certainly going to help move the car from the front of the gate thereafter...

Ellora, Ajanta and Omkareshwar

It would have been too nice if everything till the end of my trip happened smoothly and as expected. I must also say that one and a half month beachside had probably weakened me a little… Of course, my hopes and delusions were quickly brought back to the Indian reality!

I had booked a night sleeper bus ticket to leave Goa and arrive the next morning in Mumbai. ”Sleeper” means that you have a berth were you can lie down and, supposedly, sleep. The berth is usually the size of a shoebox, but is enough to put your luggage in and be relatively comfortable. I was happy with the size of my berth when I got into the bus, and thought I would spend a rather good night… until the conductor told me that I would have to share it with someone else. Now, I know that all the plans for these buses were probably made at least 30 years ago, when Indians were all midgets, and have not been changed since then. But nowadays, there are a lot of Indians thatare actually tall, bulky or fat (or the three combined). Therefore, maybe it is time to revise the way these berth are made since I ended up sharing mine with the biggest Indian guy I have seen through this trip: a 2 meters tall dude that probably pumps iron 5 times a week! Needless to say that our two muscular frames did not fit very well in that berth, and that I was on the verge of getting really claustrophobic during that trip. Anyway, arriving in Mumbai was a big relief and I spent the rest of the day sleeping.

After a few days in Mumbai, which I will cover in a subsequent post, I decided to go for a last tour into “real India”: Direction Ellora, Ajanta and Omkareshwar, about half a day from Mumbai. First, after a train ride that took two more hours than expected in a seater carriage that took five times more passengers than it was built for, I arrived in Aurangabad, a shithole (still 900,000 inhabitants) where there is nothing to do and the guesthouses are disconcertingly dirty. I had booked a taxi to go on a tour to Ellora and Ajanta on the next day: I was tired with public transports and it made me save one day in the process (and at Rs 2,000 for a full day and 300 kilometres, it was not that expensive).

Ellora and Ajanta are two amazing sites: both are groups of 30 temples that were dug and carved within cliffs between 1,000 and 1,500 years ago. Ajanta only has Buddhist temples, with remains of wall paintings all over the place, whilst Ellora has Buddhist, Hindu and Jain temples, some of which are beautifully carved and just let you wonder how much time it took the craftsmen to make this happen. These two visits took the best part of the day and my cab was then taking me to Jalgaon, another horrible city where there is nothing to do (400,000 inhabitants) where I was going to spend the night before taking an early train the next morning. Of course, we had to stop on the way to help push a bus that had a battery issue, but the ride went smoothly.

The next day was also OK and I finally arrived in Omkareshwar, one of these holy towns where pilgrims come and bathe in the local river. The place is built on both sides of a river, one half being on an island that is in the shape of the OM symbol (hence the holiness of Omkareshwar)… or rather, that was in the shape of the OM symbol until they decided to build a massive dam nearby, which changed the landscape for ever. It is still nice though. The only thing is that I had not planned that there would be a Hindu festival during my stay. On the first day, this is OK and looks cool, with the Ghats being full of people bathing and the streets being animated at the sound of mantras and songs. The thing is, that after three days of hearing all day long “Om Nama Shiva Ya” and “Are Rama, Are Krishna”, from 5.00 am to midnight (!!), I was becoming totally crazy. Yes there seem to be only two songs in the Hindu religion and the lyrics are not very varied. Omkareshwar is also one of those places where you meet very few western tourists, where no one speaks English, and where, even though you cannot speak Hindi, people keep on trying to have conversations with you and won’t let you go until they have an answer… tiring! I think (not sure though) I got offered to spend some quality time with the cleaning lady (I still wonder what she was cleaning) of my guest house at some point, against money… Imagine a really (really, really) fat ugly Indian woman smiling to me, whilst the guest house’s maintenance guy, also smiling, kept on telling me “Nice lady” and “Enjoy, yes?”, with rolling eyes… brilliant! So it was time for me to leave and go back to Mumbai, which I did.

I first had to stop in Indore for the day between two buses. Indore is possibly the most horrible place I have been to in India: dirty, polluted, overcrowded, nothing to do. I hated it from the first few minutes (plus I was tired because of a very early bus, so I was in no mood of dealing with misunderstanding, being misunderstood, getting lost, etc.). I had booked a night bus to Mumbai and, to spare myself the bad surprise of last time, I decided to go for a seater: at least I knew I had my own space. Of course the unforeseen happened and what I thought would be a standard, reclining bus seat materialised into being a one-person sleeping berth that I had to share with another dude! It makes, of course, a lot of sense: you cannot lie down so you have to seat! This time, I think I really developed some degree of claustrophobia and I spent one of the most uncomfortable nights in my entire life. Thankfully, the guy I was sharing the berth with was rather small and skinny, otherwise, I would have probably killed him (I think I was already about to do it sometimes…).

Finally, I made it to Mumbai and now, I am not moving until my flight home. I will tell you more about the big city and why I think it is time for me to go home in my next post.

Take care,

Matt

And now, few pics:

 The caves in Ellora

 Ellora, again

Some of them look like cathedrals once inside  

 Another cave-temple in Ellora

 Painting in Ajanta

 View of the caves in Ajanta

 Still in Ajanta

 They are Buddhist caves

 View of Omkareshwar

The Ghats in Omkareshwar

Gokarna and Goa, part. 2

Last time I wrote I had just arrived in Gokarna and was planning to stay there for a while. Well, after spending five week there, it is probably fair to say that the prophecy has been fulfilled! I even got to think that the OM symbol shape of the beach gives the place some sort of power that makes people stay longer than they initially intended…

First, let me describe the place where I stayed: it is called Dolphin Bay Café because there actually are dolphins swimming around in the bay! And yes, I could see some of them… once in a while. The place is a shack in the middle of OM beach, with a restaurant area in the front, and some bamboo and coconut tree huts in the back. When I say huts, I mean it: sandy floor, a bed, a mosquito net and a fan on the ceiling. Obviously, you get to share the space with the local wildlife: the place’s dogs and cats, but also rats, mice, cockroaches, mosquitoes, geckos and, I have heard, the occasional snake (apparently, there are king cobras in the area and Shanka, the owner of the Dolphin Bay Café, has even been bitten by one of them a few years ago… and survived!). For the bathroom, it is bucket shower (with cold water from a tank that is filled twice a day, so be quick…) and squat toilets. Anyway, this is the best you can get for Rs 150 per night… and I must say I enjoyed the experience (damn, I hate this word…) very much, especially falling asleep every night with the sound of the waves, and having breakfast every morning feet in the sand and eyes on the ocean. It seems that I am not the only one as many people seem to stay for a long time (ranging from one to six months).

On my first day there, I decided to walk to the next beach, Kudle beach, about 20 minutes from OM beach. As I was getting a bit lost in the hills separating the two beaches, I came across an Indian guy named Abhilash, who seemed as lost as I was. We decided to walk together and ended up drinking beers on Kudle beach. This is how I found my drinking buddy for the following three weeks… (Abi, if you read this, sorry, but I had to explain how we became friends!). Abi, my friend Sandra, and I even decided to spend Christmas Eve together in Goa, and had one of those crazy nights that cannot be described in writing (let’s just say that it took me a few days to recover). After Christmas, my friends had to leave Gokarna, but I decided to go back and spend a few more weeks there.

The Dolphin Bay Café is also a place where people from a lot of different horizons gather: young and older, from a lot of different countries, some of them with amazing/crazy lives, and all very interesting to talk to. I must say I had lots of good conversations and, above all, lots of fun. Since it would take too much time to describe everyone here, I will just thank those people without whom my stay there would not have been the same: Patrick, John, Sarah, Sandra1, Sandra2, Aad, Marcel, Joost, Sean, Valdis, Lorena, James, Clifton, Roberto, Alyssa, Diego, Peter, David, Erwan, Olivier, Nicole, Beno, Sami, Daniel1, Daniel2, Perry, Shaloo, David, Agnes, Myriam1, Myriam2, Miki, Katia, Ajay, Julien, Manu, Ioanis, Nuria, Jan, Xavier, Ninou, Shanka, Rama, Gyanam… and the ones I forget. Guys, it was fun!

During my stay in Gokarna, on a nearby beach called Paradise Beach, there was also a Rainbow Gathering. I still have not fully understood was this is all about, but it seems that this is some sort of hippie gathering over several days, in communion with nature. I went to the said Paradise Beach to see what this was all about, but it only seemed to be a bunch of people camping on that beach and leaving in some sort of community where you seat all together to eat and sing around a campfire, that for a couple of weeks. Exactly the type of thing I love… not.

New Year’s Eve was also a special day, with hundreds of Indian tourists coming to the normally quiet OM beach, and overcrowding the shacks (even though they did not sleep in the huts, as every place was full…). This ended up in tears, with a girl being groped in the Dolphin Bay Café, a fight starting thereafter between the owner and the aggressor, and the said aggressor being carried out of the café by the kitchen boys to meet his fate… whatever that means. After that, I do not remember everything I said (not that I remember everything I said before either…), but I know it really upset the English girl I was doing so well with until that point, and I ended sleeping by myself instead of having a well-deserved happy ending.

My time spent in OM beach was also the opportunity to do some serious reading of India-related literature. I therefore read two books by Herman Hesse: Siddhartha and Steppenwolf (one of my new favourites in the genre), and one very cool novel called Shantaram: the factional story of an Australian convict who escaped from jail and came to Mumbai in the 1980’s to try to disappear. This is the book equivalent of a very good blockbuster movie, mixing crime, adventure, love, hate, philosophy, fun, etc. and I must say I really enjoyed it. The descriptions of Indian life are very accurate which was a big part of the fun, but also showed me that this country has not really changed over the last 30 years. In any case, I highly recommend it, even though it is 1,000 pages long.

Finally, I managed to leave OM beach and Gokarna. It was really nice, but with less than a month left before going back home, I needed to start heading north. I started this slow journey towards Mumbai with a stop in… Goa. Yes, I have already spent more than a week there before Gokarna, but I had not done many things due to the events of last time. Anyway, this time, I decided I would go and see what’s around. Well, North Goa is definitely the coolest place, where the young people and the best parties are. Central Goa is just spoiled by mass tourism (I thought Anjuna was, but it is nothing compared to Candolim), with fat English and Russians frying in the sun and getting drunk over dozens of kilometres. South Goa is split between high end resorts and nice beaches like Gokarna, but five times more expensive and more crowded: no point. I also met with one of my fellow former Trouville-Deauville-Touques men, who owns restaurants in the area, which gave me the chance to drink my first glass of Calvados in a long time. Finally, I had my first unsolicited encounter with the Indian police: as I was heading back to Anjuna on my rented scooter after spending the afternoon in a nearby town, I was arrested (along with some Russians that were riding their bike in front of me) and asked to provide my driving license, which I did. Then the problems started: my license does not state that I am allowed to drive a scooter (I am wondering which country’s license does since you don’t need a license to drive a scooter… and also how many Indians actually have a license for this!). Therefore, I was breaking the law and had to pay a fine. I tried to argue a little bit (couldn’t help it…), but soon noticed that there was no point and had to pay the Rs 3,500 that they requested (official price of the fine). The beauty of it is that, as good Indian touts that they are, they finally made me a discount of Rs 500 on the baksheesh… sorry “fine”, and they let me go on the scooter I was not supposed to drive (with a smile, of course)! MOTHERFUCKERS!!!! In Hindi, I think it is “Mudachukh” (or something close, and they also have “sister fucker”, but I am not sure of what it is… “Badachukh” maybe), and it took me a lot of mental strength not to tell them what I thought… and probably saved me some quality time in the jail of some Indian police station! In any case, this certainly does not brighten the image of the Indian police (and of the police in general for that matter). I hope they all rot in hell (or whatever they believe in) and if they could also rot a little bit on Earth that would actually be nice… MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!

It is now time for me to head to Mumbai. I have planned to spend a few days there to visit and to go and visit few places that are not too far (which in terms of Indian distance means less than 12 hours by train or bus), but this is for a future post.

Take care,

Matt 

And now, few pictures:

View of my hut 

 Another view of my hut

The "corridor" to the toilets 

This is where I had breakfast every morning 

A tanker that ran aground in Goa. It seems they thought it was nice to leave it there...

In Candolim, we are in Russian and British territory (look at the flags in the top right corner...) 

Yes, when I am not partying, it is easier to take pictures of the party (Shiva Valley, Anjuna) 

The flea market in Anjuna

A Banyan tree: branches become roots, which makes the tree look like there are several of them