300

I think - I think - this is my 300th day away.

But I'm too lazy to count.

****

Thanks to four five days of flight cancellations, and an evening spent watching a lizard rotate the room, I'm actually no longer too lazy to count.

If I discount the two weeks I cheated by going back to England ...

On 2nd June, I will have been away 300 days.
On 2nd June, I will have been in India 60 days.

By the end of my trip, I will have been in India 75 days.
And spent 32 days in Nepal, alongside 32 days on Fiji Islands.
I'll have spent 26 days in Viet Nam, almost all of them in Ha Noi.
And 22 days in the USA, all of them in Hawai'i.
I spent 21 thoroughly enjoyable days in Singapore.
And 18 days in Malaysia, of which 8 were in the Malaysian parts of Borneo.
Altogether, in three different bursts, I spent 16 rather forgettable days in Thailand.
And 15 days on Cook Islands.
I spent 14 days in Tibet that will probably, and unfortunately, never fade.
And 13 unexpected days in Laos.
I spent longer than it felt, 10 days, in New Zealand; and indubitably not long enough.
And, surprisingly, on an Asia-Pacific journey, by the time I return, 9 days will have been spent in Germany.
Thanks to the second Bali bombings, I spent just 7 brief days without a guidebook in Indonesia.
Which is marginally longer than the 5 days I spent technically nowhere, shuytned (shuytne-ed?) between two borders. (I actually spent 11 days physically trapped between two barbed wire posts there, but only 5 days without any official visa to remain anywhere).
Strangely, I also spent 5 days in Switzerland. No similarity, though.
Finally, I spent one day in the Netherlands when a plane was redirected.

Please don't be a nerd and tell me the totals don't add up; the international date line was frequently on my itinerary. I lost several days, I gained several days, simply sitting in an overheated aircraft, so the only way to count things is to use home-days.

7 people promised to meet me but for one reason or another didn't make it. But: 10 people have written me letters to poste restante offices and hotels along the way, several of them very very regularly - 5 of which were parcels of christmas tree earrings, emergency immodium, knickers, reading matter, and supplies of british duracell batteries; and another 4 people have sent me muchly listened to voicemail.

That's 18 countries in toto. 8 months in Asia, and 3 months on Pacific islands. In 315 days.

And on 17th June, I'll finally be going home.

So where've you been? 34, New Delhi airport

Three days. Three Four Five Seven fucking days.

Delhi airport.

Plane is cancelled, madam.
Come back tomorrow madam.
You want refund, madam?

Delhi airport is one of the shittest airports on the planet. Airports in tiny leetle indian towns in the desert are better than Delhi airport.
You have to pay an airport tax to sit down. To go near a stall that will sell you a drink of water, and a nugget of deep fried something. (In the country of amazing food, there seems an unspoken law that all airports must serve only inedible deep fried snackettes and nescafe. If you're lucky.)
You have to pay an airport tax to find shade.

Left luggage? No, madam.

As with many bureaucratic organisations in this country, it's not till I'm granted an audience with the airport manager (after the standard five minute wait that demonstrates he's important) I learn there is somewhere I can store my luggage. Round the back of the arrivals carpark.
No, the airline reps don't know of it. Yes, of course there's a tax.

This allows me three days of fun and bargaining with Delhi taxi touts, who even by my standards of taxi-distrust (around the level of Pluto), manage to shock me by haggling for 650 rupees for a 40 rupee skip down the road.

And ... eventually, to the nearest shopping mall. Hey, I've been in Maharashtra and Punjab for a while, my creature comforts are powered down.
Bookshops with REAL books, not the shitty crap that Londoners leave in India when they don't want to carry it back home. Stores that sell clothes that don't fall to pieces in four minutes, that actually fit me. Cinemas. Juice stands. A Sony emporium. A supermarket, with the white lights and the clean stone flags, and the boulangerie and the charcuterie sections. Not a paan spattered shack containing what in other countries would be the contents of a hotel dustbin. A bloody supermarket.
And ... 'Choko-La'. A chocolate emporium.

With sofas.

There are no sofas outside of the US and Europe.

They have sofas and chocolate. Chocolate from Bernard Decai, Harrods' chocolatier.
I gorge on clafouti with brandy snaps. Coffee. Meze. Coffee. Rich dark mayan chocolate and praline. Coffee. Coffee.

When check-in time approaches, I'm clutching the warm brown leather and nearly crying. No. No! It's a sofa. You can't make me leave. A sofa. Don't you understand?

So where've you been? 33 Amritsar, the Punjab

Amritsar is one of those Great Places. Like Varanasi, a holy city; the birthplace of the Sikh religion.



I could tell you about bathing in the Amrit Sarovar (pool of holy nectar), at the Golden Temple - in itself a wonder, in India, one pool for all castes?
Or the fat koi that play around you as you bathe fully clothed.
Or the spicy namkin nibbles I gorged on every day.
Or how beautifully my tried and tested Losing Yourself technique succeeded - of getting a rickshaw as far as I can make the guy pedal (anywhere as long as it's out of the city), then trying to find my way without a map back again.
Or the fat black puy lentils that form a punjabi dal, or the butter covered spiral shape that transforms a lowly paratha into a slice of heaven.



But I think my abiding memory of the Punjab will be of the Pakistan border at Attari / Wagah. Around one thousand indians, and me, squashed onto terraces.

(and I read about this ceremony later, in a Palin travelogue, and he laments the lack of chairs, says they had to make the best they could without chairs, and feel worried that not only did I not notice the lack of chairs as I squatted on haunches with everyone else, but it didn't even cross my mind that there ever could be chairs. There may be some adjustments to coming home from ten months in Asia)

It's scorching 46 degree heat (that's something like 115 fahrenheit, I think), and my clothes are soaked with sweat. Not liberally dampened - actually soaked. There is one dry spot, somewhere around my ankles, otherwise it looks like I've been swimming. When the crowd thins, I notice a circle of spatter marks around me, where I've actually been gushing liquid. From such perspiration rich ampules as chin, elbows, knees.
I had a fan, but offered it to a family from Nepal, who promptly invite me to their home in Sunauli. Having avoided Sunauli once this year already, I politely decline.

It's the sort of press of people I've only seen before at an Edinburgh Hogmanay.
Border guards are over six feet high (in a country of three footers), with excessively poncey uniforms: white gaiters, red fans on tall black hats - all adding about ten inches and the look of those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park that learn in the third reel to operate machine guns. When they march, polished toes clip up to nose height.
And a man whips the crowd up into a jingoistic frenzy. Men race up and down with the Indian flag, cheered on by fat uncles dancing the dance of tubby indian men at weddings everywhere, the seductive rhythmic shoulder shrug of 'I-don't-care'.
The man yells into a microphone. And a thousand people next to me scream. Hindustan!
Hindustan. Hindustan.

Across the barbed wire and gate, the same ceremony happens in a different country. Two flags are lowered with competitive theatrical glares as gates are thrown contemptuously shut on the only land border crossing between India and Pakistan.
Hindustan. Hindustan. A roar. A delighted roar.

Above us an eagle circles, looking for prey in the rice fields.

So where've you been? 32 Maharashtra, India: fifty thousand years old and from another planet ... anyone could get distracted, right? right?

So-o-o, I was flying over Maharashtra, see, and the pilot pointed out the window, and showed us Lonar Meteorite Crater.

Fifty thousand years old. Give or take six thousand years

And so-o-o, of course I had to go there. Hang the cost. I could pick up a rock! From another planet!



I paid through the nose for the 7 hour drive there and back. Turned out being a tour guide wasn't included in the 1,700 rupee itinerary. Sitting with a cold drink by the car saying 'there it is' was about the extent of it.
'Path's on the right.'

Right of what? Staring down into a partially filled crater pool, fourteen tiny deserted temple structures scattered the sides. 2 kilometres diameter. 170 metre deep salt pool. The largest meteor crater in the world.

A perfect greeny blue hole punched into the earth, before the dawn of (our) time. Noted in the oldest sanskrit documents. Fifty thousand years old.
It made yesterday's second century cathedrals carved top-down into a rockface at Ajanta seem nouveau.

I estimated thirty, maybe forty minutes to get to the bottom (noon. clothed in black. 42 degrees.). Ten minutes to eat salt based stuff and rehydrate, then thirty minutes back.
Started on the right of a crevasse. No path. Spotted a goat track on the left hand side, so retraced myself and alternately clambered / walked / skittered in an ungainly fashion down the road not taken instead.

After about ten minutes of photographing weirdy opals set in black basalt rock (from another planet!), and sliding warily down scree, I noticed the big set of giant's causeway type stairs on the right. Beyond the bloody big crevasse.
Ah well. Didn't fancy being stuck with Suresh, my driver, after dark, much, so there was a time limit. I was a third of the way down by then. What's the diff?

I ran into a herd of goats, thorny silver brambles that looked uncannily metallic, like the truly otherworldly silverswords that only grow above 2000m inside volcanoes. I nearly stepped in a massive honeycomb fallen from somewhere (the moon ...?), and made good use of my camera to photograph dead trees in order to remember the way back up out of there.

Forty minutes of clumping clumsily, trying to remember how trekking in the Annapurna I'd learnt to zigzag downhill, save your knees and ankles from repetitive and unaccustomed shock.
I made it. Emerald green kingfishers diving, cranes rustling in thick bracken clumps on the water. Peacock calls. In the far distance, buffalo bathed in the salt lake. The area surrounding the base of the crater was craggy, parched dry, magnificent. Like a riverbed in a David Attenborough 'Drought Special'.
It almost looked like there could be lava down there, where sun-leeched dust crust slowly morphed into black, into red, into algaed green, and then into thick salt water.
Sweaty hands clutching a faded dying camera. I wanted closeups.

I started noseying around the crusty bits.

African drought ridden riverbeds what you see on telly don't suck you in.
David Attenborough never looks down to find he's sinking.
How was I supposed to know this molten rock like stuff was liquid?

Yep. Unh-hunh. The curse continues.



I fell into the meteorite crater. The ground just Gave a little, and boom. Encased in thick black sludge halfway up the calves of my jeans.
With a forty minute hike back up the crater walls to go. Great. There's no such thing as quickmud, right? I remember thinking. I mean, there's quicksand, but there's no way there's quickmud.
I needed a photo of this. No one can be this clumsy. No one.

Long fumble in pack. Change batteries. Fidget. Find memory card full. It's too bright in the noon burn-beat-heat to seee the miniscule screen, let alone delete anything, and I thanked my foresight in buying a replacement card. Switch card. Fiddle. Fiddle. Fiddle with the stupid things. All this standing ankle-deep in ....

oh.

Knee deep.

There is such a thing as quickmud after all.

***

You know, I haven't even the energy to tell you about getting stuck in the crevasse on the way out (in four inch thick black mud-yeti boots), and having to remember my rock climbing instructor's words from back in 1983 to get up the basalt rockface to the top of the crater.



Or the three maggots I found living between my toes when I finally made it to a standpipe.

bloody hell!

Have you seen what the new improved Flickr can do?

Edit:

Karen said:
Yes.

Oh.

< head wobble > Hoi!

Indians! What does the head-wobble mean?

Edit:

PPQ commented:
Speaking as someone from the Indian sub-continent....I can only say that it is similar to the australian inflection...you know when even statements are apoken with the tone flicking up at the end so that everything sounds like a question?

I loved this idea, because it actually makes sense. And I think possibly in Nepal it could be true. But my confusion definitely stems from it being used as the sole reply to a direct question. As in:

* Where is the temple?
* [head wobble]

** Should I take my shoes off in here?
** [head wobble]

*** What time is it?
*** [head wobble]

Okay, so the last one is a tad unfair, they clearly didn't understand the question.
One of my most fun days in the Andamans involved hiring a moped to drive around Havelock island, and do a head wobble at every Andamanese we drove past. There was an 80% return-wobble success rate. And still none of us knew what it meant.

Andre commented: it means yes

Ahhhh, but.
The only definite translations I have are confusing - I certainly have seen the head wobble used to represent, without any verbal accompaniment, all of the following phrases

• Yes.


• No.


• Maybe.


• Not this week.


• Thursday.


• You cretin.


• I'm fine, thankyou.


• Again?


• You tell me mate.


• Baksheesh please.


• Is that all?


• Hello.


• You're funny.


• I'm going to fucking get you now you bastards.


• Thankyou very much.

You see my problem? [wobbles head]

Edit ii:

Eguiguren commented:
Ah, yes- the lovely head woggle. I first became acquainted with it in the UAE, where something like 80% of the population comes from the Indian sub-continent.
It can mean "yes." Or "I don't know." Or "maybe".
But here's a radical thought- it actually means nothing. Just think of it as someone blinking. Sometimes blinking in utter incomprehension, but just blinking nonetheless.

You could be onto something, y'know. (Apart from a woggle being something the boyscouts tie their neckerchiefs with :)
So I got me a book on body language. Apparently in Indian expatriate communities around the world (NRI - non-resident indians), the head wobble means yes.
It's close enough to a head shake to be interpreted by a european as no, which is where the double-take and confusion starts.

But apparently, in India, the head wobble means this:

Mm-hmm. I'm listening. Go on.

So where've you been? 31 Mumbai: Heat Haze

I scheduled myself a week in Mumbai, with no further plans, to see if I could handle the heat before I made any more decisions.

India has three seasons: The Cool, The Hot and The Wet.

This is the last three or four weeks of The Hot, before the monsoon kicks in, and the contents of the sewers float up to greet you.
I had a taste of it in Kolkata, when I first got there - and found that at 43 degrees centigrade, I vomit frequently.

Didn't want to repeat that. So my previous plans, to go north, to the hottest part of the country, to the deserts of Rajasthan, were shelved. Put off slightly while I sat and saw if I could handle the heat in Mumbai.



I've learnt that I'm going to overheat whatever I do, it just makes it worse to hide behind air conditioning. That the early thirties is too hot for you to function between mid afternoon and late evening.
If it hits the mid thirties, you can scratch doing anything between noon and eleven pm. That your eyes don't really open - you miss things. That you need eight cool showers a day to keep going. That salt-sugar solutions don't restore you, they make it possible to stagger to the nearest rickshaw/taxi. That transport will give you a breeze, in the same way that positioning your face above a hot toaster gives you a breeze. That AC is not a refuge. That humidity levels are way way more important than temperature. That lying under a fan for the eight hours a day when movement is denied you is impossible levels of boring.

I've learnt to sleep at thirty degrees (and that at these temperatures, just two degrees can feel like a huge switch into unbearable), with just a fan. Not happily, but I can sleep. I've learnt how much humidity counts - as the monsoon approaches from the south east, the humidity soars. By now, the locals in Mumbai are referring to it as unbearable.

Rajasthan is about 45 degrees right now. It's a heatwave like nothing they've seen in years. 31 people have dropped dead of heat exhaustion (of course! didn't I tell you about the curse?).



Rajasthan is Out Of the Picture.

But it's so-o-o-o tedious to have just five or six hours a day where you can move. My activities are circumscribed by taxis, fans and the amount of shade available.
I'm too bored to do anything but bite the bullet and go touring Gujarat and Maharashtra despite the swelter. It was that or go home - I'm serious. It's that hot that I would give up and leave early.
I shan't. I'm too stubborn for that.

Yet.

But: any tips? On dealing with heat? The humidity? Any tips for a pasty-skinned coward?

Edit:

It occurred to me I'll never be this (suddenly, forcibly) acclimatised again.

Fuckit. I'm going to the Great Thar Desert.

camera shake

we were so bored that ...,
originally uploaded by digitalia.

My camera keeps dying. Cameras seem to last about three months in humid countries, and this one's been to Everest along the way (I had to rub the battery points just to get a current going most days in Nepal and Tibet).

The first camera upped and died in Fiji.

The first memory card upped and died in Indonesia, losing about a bazillion shots. Losing every shot, as it happens.

Stupidly, I continued using it. So it upped and died again this January, losing all my shots from the UK, from Germany, from Switzerland, and particularly annoying - all my shots of Chinese New Year festivities in Bangkok.

My spare memory cards got nicked in Nepal, and the camera resolution started to expire in Tibet. I used to set it to 1 or 2 megapixels. Now it's on 4, and looks less defined and clear.

Forced to keep using the duff memory card, it died again. Losing all my photos of the Andaman islands, of Port Blair, of Havelock, and of Kolkata.

It's weird how depressing it was to have no means of taking photographs. My plane to Mumbai passed over the water filled Lonar meteor crater ... and I couldn't take a photograph. I was the very picture of glum, and started to email morose hints about going home.

Two days ago, I rescued all the last batch of photos, got my camera fixed (though in a city filled with 70% humidity in a heatwave, every shot is still blurry as fuck), and bought a new memory card at a knock down price.

... and continued to use the old, faulty one.

Go me.

So where've you been? 30 Kolkata, India again

Last time I was in Kolkata, my train took 23 hours to get there (8 hours longer than expected: 23 hours of no fans, no seat, trying to sleep on top of my luggage, the only inhospitable indian family in the whole country, raw sewage spilling through the carriage), I missed my plane, I ended up waving eleven inch knives at strangers, the heat made me vomit four times a day, and everyone - everyone I met cheated me.

So this time was to be different. Calmer. Relaaaaaaaax.
I was looking for some science fiction books in the ritziest bookshop in Kolkata, and they file everything with the tag 'science' together on one shelf. Stephen Hawking is next to Douglas Adams. The race to uncover the secrets of DNA next to Terry Pratchett.
Weird way to make you look twice at something you think you know.

Their fiction section, too, only went as far as S.

I thought I was missing something, like an entire wall, maybe, and asked about W. They said they can't possibly find me a W author without knowing the last as well as first letter of his name. I did a double take that only someone who's seen beaky in Buck Rogers in the 24th century lately would recognise (a sort of 'biddly-biddly-hunh?') (do excuse me, I've eaten a lot of sugar.)

So I asked about the rest of the alphabet. They said there aren't many authors after S in the world. "No good authors after S, madam. We do not stock after S."
I asked about T. They said there were some good T authors, but they generally mixed them in anywhere.

I said it seemed an odd thing, strangely random to discriminate against a whole part of the alphabet. What about U? What about ... V?

At the idea of there being an author worth stocking who began with V, the chappie shook his head, mystified, and walked away.
In case I didn't make it clear: Biggest. Bookstore. In The City.

India's insane. In a head-wobble, cutesy, I'll knife you if you don't give me that rupee sort of a way.

So where' ve you been? 28 Varanasi, India

From my Varanasi outbox:

Sorry for the group email...

Hey, you may get a bizarre Indian postcard of Varanasi. It's from me. I was delegating too fast too soon to the two 11 and 12 year old urchin helpers whom I employ to do all my dirty work*.



I asked them to check stamp prices, and buy stamps and cards, then leave me a day to write them, and they got over excited after I bought them a fanta, and posted the damn things blank!

Love Vanessa

* Yes, other tourists have pointed out to me that this is child labour.

So where've you been? 29 The Andaman islands

I thought it was the monsoon coming at first. Then I thought it was me being weirdly unsettled because I was staying in a bamboo hut with no door ten yards from the sea, in an area where there were no other women right now.



And the packs of wild dogs, they didn't make me feel much safer. First person I met on Havelock had twelve stitches on her calf from the last pack's power struggle. The andamanese humans are too small to pose any physical threat, but the dogs ... you learnt to carry a large sharpened stick with you at all times.

Beautiful deserted island hideaway. Remote. Unspoiled.



Six hours from a hospital. Six hours from any concrete structure that could withstand a cyclone.

Add in some seriously disturbed mefloquine dreams. Carnage every night. Dream disaster.

For three days before the cyclone, there were rains. Lashing downpours, hard enough to bounce back up at you. Showering at a standpipe in the forest, the rains left you freezing after the baking dry heat of a normal day. Gradually, the rainstorms grew longer, harder, more dramatic. Thunder that shook the hut. Thunder that shook the ground. Electrical displays in the sky that made you thankful the mangrove forests had been thoroughly dampened down.

The day the cyclone hit, at 75 km per hour, the storms stopped. You could hear the winds approaching before they got to you - a dry rustle. If a rustle could sound like it's forty feet high.
Whistling, buildings shaking, mangrove pods and branches falling onto the hut roof at four minute intervals. Scared enough by the thumps and bangs and whistles, I nearly cacked myself when I heard breathing in between the wind bursts. The wild dogs were sheltering under my hut.

The tsunami had taken the beach shelf already. The tides were rising, and there were three ageing mangrove trees between the tides and my bed.

I know what to do if there's an earthquake. If there's an avalanche. If there's an uprising. Alls I know about cyclones is you wear red shoes and cry for Toto.

The east germans who looked like Freddie Mercury lit out at dusk, saying "aren't you scared to stay here?"
Not till you said that, mate. Not till you said that.

Don't think I slept a moment that night.

Disordered recollections

Pfffft ... I still can't even think about Tibet and feel calm.

Let me see. What are the scraps?

Snowburnt cheeks. Looked so pretty on the local girls, with their high cheekbones. Peruvian, almost.



I got snowburns on my bum (my other cheeks) from 8 hour van rides across snow deserts. You drink 4 times as much water a day at altitude, and you can't hold your pee. There aren't any toilets. There aren't any buildings. There's only three sealed roads in the country, and they're all 2000 kilometres away.



So, like the locals, you shit at the side of the road.

One thing I hate about travel guides is their pompous, didactic tone.
'Sterilise your water instead of buying water in plastic bottles.'
'This region isn't safe to travel at the moment, so we haven't included it in the guide.'
'This city isn't interesting - use it as an overnight stopping point to get money and email before moving on.'
'If you must use toilet paper instead of water, at least bury it.'

Fuck off. You're a list, not a bible. Don't tell me how to live.

I once was appalled by the sight of a posh Malaysian babe climbing up on a western toilet seat to squat-shit. That was before I realised cisterns, toilets, paper, soap, water, partitions, planks of wood with a hole in them - they're all for pussies (so to speak) - anything but the side of the road and a handy sleeve or cuff is extra to requirements.



Pffft. Still can't think about Tibet calmly.

So where've you been? 27 Nepal again - Responsible Tourism

Trying to contextualise and think of moments that stick in the cerebellum:

In Kathmandu I sat watching a city cow eating rubbish in the street after dark, some 8 year old streetkids scrabbled up and asked for money. I was patiently explaining to them that if I give them money it would mean other children come to the city and beg instead of going to school or finding a real job, and halfway through my pompous diatribe about responsible tourism, a german couple walk past and cut the shit by just giving the kids two papads.
I felt *that* big.



Multiplied by a hundred, when their first reaction was to eagerly split them into three and share them out with me.
Not only did I not give them anything, not only did I lecture them on why, not only did I press them to agree it was better they go hungry - I actually took the food from their mouths.

Go me.

Force Majeure

Where next ... India!,
originally uploaded by digitalia.

Brief placeholder, to fill in the details later ... just to point out that I am accursed. I only have to think of going somewhere for disaster to fall.

Nepal: mass rebellion and overthrow (touch wood) of the monarchy; strikes and power cuts, and closed borders.
Tibet: avalanches (two!).
Varanasi: bombings.
Andamans: Cyclone Mala... A cyclone. For crab sake.

Apart from the night I spent in a wooden hut five yards from the sea in the cyclone, it was gorgeous. Full of mind bogglingly big fish, and octopi.
A cyclone. Though.

A bloody cyclone.

I thought about going to Ecuador in August, and, sooner than that, Gujarat - cue bombs and riots and terror.

Mumbai on Monday. Bollywood better watch out.

Let me know if you're going on holiday anywhere - it's possible by now that I can distract the vile forces of fickle fate from your path, such is the sucking intensity of my hold over force majeure.