Joan's quote

Joan Bailey overheard the following in the MAC exercise room by someone just back from India and I think it's right on target: It's like falling into the hole in Alice in Wonderland and not knowing what is coming next. Today, while watching a barechested Brahmin priest perform a ceremony with ashes and chanting and clanging of bells, we heard his cell phone ringing away with a very modern tone. We waited in the large inner sanctum of the temple complex in a spot with about 6 Indians. There was a closed curtain and two boys told me they would open it in 5 min. We suspected the shiva lingam described in the guide book was in there (giant phallus symbol) and sure enough when they opened up there it was. The priests first poured water over it and then something that looked like milk so that it was trickling all down it. We later watched a woman go around to each of the 108 smaller linga depositing some grass and flowers on each one and chanting away. We can only assume she was desperate to have a baby. Tonight's dinner was in a place with no English, no silverware (well they finally dug up a couple of spoons for us), banana leaves for plates but delicious potato filled pancakes with good chutneys. Total bill was less than a dollar. Love to all--Dana

Deviations

We're now in Thanjavur - in the circle on the black route on the map. Tomorrow night we'll take a sleeper bus into Madras (Chennai) and then a bus to Mamallapuram, marked with an x, where we'll spend a couple of days. I couldn't retrace the route change from Kerala because the Kerala map is not the best quality. I photoed a cool procession in the Madurai temple last night, but again can't find an internet place (in Thanjavur) that can upload the images. Hope to have better luck at Mamall. Roger

From Madurai

If it's Wednesday this must be Madurai. Sorry if the pace is too fast. We're battling colds and a little Delhi belly, but somebody's got to do it.




Dana shows the Munnar tea clipping women how to do it right.










Rani for a day.

Down Day in Paradise

We woke up to rain and mist in the hill town of Munnar and it felt way too much like PDX. It cleared so we tried for an excursion to Top Station with supposed stupendous views for the hills and tea plantations. Our motorized rickshaw weaved along a little winding road, horns blaring at us as jeeps, buses and taxis passed us almost forcing us off the road. The driver stopped at certain places and barked at us to get out and take pictures which we dutifully did even when we found nothing particularly appealing about the spot, such as the speedboats whizzing by on the lake. Then we came to the really bad pot holes and finally got out and walked, as he said it was only l km. farther. Then we had to walk down, down a steep path all the time realizing we weren't going to see jack as fog was swirling around us. R. finally gave up but I forged on hoping for a miracle which didn't occur. So back up the steep steps huffing and puffing at 6000 ft.

We each have a little cold, I discovered I had lost one of my shoes somewhere so had to throw the other one away leaving me with only my stinky, grubby sandals, and we realized the bird refuge we were going to go to was accessed 3 hours back on the road we arduously traveled yesterday. General power outages prevented us getting on the computer at the internet cafe which has 2 slow computers in a space about as big as my pantry and there is no USB cord to upload pictures. (power back on now--this is very frequent in India but most of our hotels and restaurants have generators when it happens). The day was saved by the sun coming out and having a lovely walk through the tea plantations watching the women cutting the tea.

On to the state of Tamil Nadu by bus tomorrow. Love to all, Dana. Nancy, check back on your last comment for an answer.

Movin' on.

Hello. We just climbed a few thousand feet from our house boat in the Alleppey backwaters to Munnar - hill station and center of a major tea growing area. The ride up on a local bus was exciting. We spent a delightful day and night on a houseboat, complete with a pilot and an excellent cook, living the life of a raja. We plan to do a trek here and then visit a wildlife sanctuary with hornbills. I didn't send photos because this little internet place couldn't upload them for some reason. Roger

Allepey

Hello from Allepey, in the middle of the Kerala backwater country. We did a seven hour "cruise" today, in a small boat paddled by one man, and will do a motorized houseboat tomorrow, spending the night on it. A lot of communist posters and flags on the trip. Actually Kerala is a bit of a communist state but also the most prosperous - go figure. We're staying tonight at this bungalow, great atmosphere, $12 per night, slightly wacky host - a retired accountant named Joseph.



This is the logo for the company that owns both the airline we flew fom Bangalore, and one of our bottled water brands. It's base is a beer company. Today we saw many of the bird it's named after, including the one below.

Langostino lunch in the backwaters.

D. makes a feathered friend.

Hi from Kochi (Cochin)

D. signs on with a local Chinese net crew to pay for the flight from Bangalore.


Waiting for the sleeper bus.
We made it to Kochi, yahoo! We did the walking tour and have seen most of the things to see here - fighting fatigue from the rough bus ride last night. Even got to watch a little of the filming of a Bollywood movie on location in old Kochi. Went to see a traditional Indian dance performance tonight and both of us fell asleep - several times. Tomorrow we head south for the houseboat. We're settling in to the Indian way of doing things. Our energy and interest levels are high.
Read another version of the bridge collapse today, which said that six people were killed and many others injured. Roger

So far so good.

Bumpy ride last night, started 2 hours late, but we have made our flight. We're now in the new Bangalure airport, which is very spiffy and has free internet. Flight to Cochin in Kerala state in an hour or so. More to follow from there, although we'll be on a houseboat for a couple of days, celebrating our 39th anniversary. Roger

Correction

This is the bridge that collapsed. Paper today said 3 injured and 5 missing. The rumors were wrong, or they're downplaying it.

Catching up - again.

Still in Hampi, soon to catch an auto rickshaw to Hospet for a sleeper bus to Bangalore and a tight connection for a flight to Cochin in Kerala state.  That's a change of plan - originally we were going to go back to Goa and then south, but we couldn't get a train to Goa until Saturday.

I mucked up the picture loading again and so the captions to go with the new photos, from bottom to top are: 1. Laxmi, temple elephant getting a bath. She really seemed to be enjoying it. 2. Dana in a new form of transport for us, a caracole, essentially a round reed boat. 3. Dana giving a namaste to a holy man. 4. Dana biking among the rice fields and rocks across the river from Hampi. A tragedy here today you may hear about in the news. The bridge under construction in the background of 2. collapsed later in the day, killing 51 workers.  I thought it looked a little dodgy as we were crossing. 

Roger

New Friends

Our last overnight train berth was shared with Massimo, an Italian Daoist engineer on a quest of spiritual places in India who had a strong opinion on everything and his own special apparatus to make good Italian coffee.  Our other companion was Yati, a tall handsome Indian who has lived in the US for the last 40 years and had both a computer consulting business and vineyard before he retired.  Yati very kindly invited us to stay with him in his Goan home, a 20 min. walk from the beach.  We had a great time kicking back and swimming in the deliciously warm and salty Indian Ocean and gorging ourselves on seafood prepared Goan style with lots of coconut and spices.  In the evenings, the little beach shacks put the tables out on the sand under the stars and cooked up what the fisherman pulled in in their nets that day.

Hello from Hampi 2

A stone chariot.  The wheels actually worked until they cemented them - to deter thieves, I guess.
Hey, hey we're the monkeys!
R. subs for the Hampi bowling team.
D. finds an abandoned spice cart.
Hampi at sunrise.
Hampi - Joshua Tree NP with temples.
Unscheduled stop.  Another train lost some cars and they had to bring another engine to haul them.  Don't ask - we don't get it either.

Hello from Hampi

Yati, our new Indian/Californian friend who kindly hosted us at his Bogmalo, Goa beach house.

Food

As we're in S. India, most food is vegetarian & we haven't missed meat a bit with all the varied fresh & tasty fare. Don't know if it's this healthy diet or warm sunshine, but after the first couple of days I've been migraine free--a real blessing. Still packing around my various sacks of pills however. No stomach problems. We managed to find the Italian gelato shop in Mumbai--aaah globalism!

Catching up, from Roger

We've been on the move and having some problems getting the images to the blog, so our text has been incomplete. If you refer back to the maps, we are more or less following the plan, having taken the sleeper train from Mumbai to Ajanta to see the caves with the 2000 yo paintings, then to Ellora for the most impressive cave complex, including the Kailash temple carved from one monolith - largest such structure in the world. We spent a night in Aurangabad near Ellora and the next day climbed to the top of Fort Daulatabad (we spell it differently each time) where Dana set off a mini-riot by doing the hokey pokey with some school kids. The Fort is at the top of a small mountain and is famous for having been the place where a Moghul king moved the whole kingdom from Delhi, then changed his mind and moved it back. We has some time to kill at Aur, so we hung out at a hotel with a pool and some neat birds. Last night we took a sleeper bus back to Mumbai and today hung around here getting ready to take a sleeper train to Goa tonight. Spent the afternoon at a hotel pool.

Noteworthy so far is that everything is so dang cheap we find ourselves pondering over the spending of amounts that turn out to be less than $1. There are few tourists so that we encounter lots of space everywhere. The downside is that the hawkers have only us to work on and they're desperate.

The media here is happy about the critical success of Slum Dog Millionaire, calling it a British film set in India, although there is controversy over the wisdom of showing its negative side.

Finally, I have never, ever encountered such a wonderful mix of friendliness and politeness, anywhere.

Roger

Dana with fellow travelers.
Roughing it.
It's a nation of contrasts.
The mini-Taj of Aurangabad, Who knew? A moghul king built it to honor his mother, to rival the Taj in Agra, but ran low on funds and had to cut corners, leaving a memorial that is famous only for its inferiority to the latter.
Getting down with the Buddha.

more catching up from Dana

We already feel as seasoned travelers as we've negotiated our first few stops by taxi, auto rickshaw, local bus and overnight sleeper train. Finding our way around the mammoth Victoria Station in Mumbai (as seen in Slumdog Millionaire) was a piece of work. Biggest problem was finding our platform and then where to stand, as it went on forever & had so many people vying for places we couldn't possibly believe they could all cram onto the train. Then a kind man noticed our dazed looks and showed us to go way further down where the reserved sleeper cars would be. As the train pulled in, a large group of young people rushed towards the reserved section & a uniformed man was yelling and whacking them back with a stick as we cowered to the side. Quite the scene. Our little compartment was definitely adequate with 4 berths. I climbed in, popped a half an ambien and was out by the time another passenger boarded and climbed in the third berth. We started at midnight and arrived at our destination at 7 am near the astounding World Heritage sites of Bhuddist and Hindu carved caves of Ellora and Ajanta.

Not many foreign tourists were at these sites. According to the souvenir sellers, business is way down after Mumbai bombings. We are thus gently hounded in skillful ways to buy their wares. Whenever I get irritated by them following me, I try to imagine myself eking out a living in this country.

As we visited the various sites, we were a huge curiosity to many villagers and school children on field trips and constantly asked to pose with them. Their English was mostly limited to asking our names and country which we repeated over and over. One particularly vivacious group had a teacher with good English and we were surrounded by them begging for pictures taken with us. I tried to spread world peace and remedy 8 years of G.B. by teaching them all the hokey pokey and caused a lot of giggling & screaming as we "shook it all about".

Dana's hokie pokie creates adolescent hysteria at the summit of Fort Dalautabad.

Catching up

Dana's peanut vendor buddie.

Dana's bus buddies.

The national obsession.

Dana's laughing yoga buddies.

World's largest by-hand laundry.

Laughing Yoga - at its birthplace.

Fellow tourists at Ajanta.

This is all one carving. Ellora is a combination of Petra and Angkor Wat, and maybe greater than both of them.

Darn German tourists!

You can't help liking people who paint their cows horns.

We're in Mumbai. Highlights so far:

Giant Star Wars machines de-icing the planes causing delays.

Lufthansa staffer in Munich living up to the German sterotype by meeting our plane and running us (literally) through the airport to catch our Mumbai flight being held for us.

View of Crater Lake in Kurdistan (or thereabouts) - see above. Lots of the locals there haven't seen it.

Watching a Bollywood bhangra on Lufthansa state of the art in-flight monitor.

Wonderfully disguised security at Mumbai airport.

Prepaid taxi many of you would not have gotten into.

Thrilling ride from airport with driver who knew his karma would not allow him to crash, and who minimized wear and tear on his taxi by never driving on more than two wheels - sometimes one..

Hotel in section of Mumbai that proper terrorists would never visit, let alone expect ransomable tourists to be using. Bombing it would be mistaken for urban renewal.

India bureaucracy alive and well - triplicate form for bottle of water at hotel.

We made the mistake of walking around to the back of the restaurant.

Dana inducted into the Mumbai Red Hat Society.

Bhangra down

Moved by "Slumdog Millionaire" .......

testing email

Testing blogging on the go.

Rajasthan