Matthias in India: January 2012

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

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: