Back in Canada

So we're back. Crashing at Joel's place and infesting his attic. I haven't been writing anything here due to a combination of the Koreans love of getting white people drunk and then recently trying to adjust to a bedtime 12 hours away from where it used to be. There are still a couple posts on India in the works, we ended up in two five star hotels and I tried to find my old apartment near Juhu beach. Turns out things have changed the last 20 years. I also need to write about Korea, which ended up being one of the highlights of the four month trip.

I'll be heading to South America in a few weeks and will keep writing about my travels, but Derek will be staying in Toronto. He managed to land a job before we even got back, to the collective sigh of relief of all parental figures. I'll be in Chile and Argentina for almost two weeks, and then to Bogota for a month. I was born in Bogota, so I'm particularly excited about that. Also, already knowing how to say hello, please, and thank you in Spanish without even having been there yet! I could never figure them out in Korean. There's like 6 syllables in thank you.

So, anyway, posts coming soon, if I ever figure out which box I put my computer monitor in.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROBERT from Korea!

The best part of this video is Jonathon on the left drinking his beer and being too hungover to sing or even acknowledge what is going on. The St. Patrick day parade is going on in the background, and by parade I mean a bunch of expats milling about and drinking free guiness.

Mumbai, again

We spent another couple days in Mumbai before leaving for Korea to do some shopping. Thankfully our train ride in was not 48 hours, it was 26. Derek blames the Lonely Planet book, I'm just very thankful he was mistaken.

Most of the tourist hotels downtown are near the Taj hotel, so up and down the main road there are tons of tourist shops and the sidewalk is lined with stalls. We wandered around and did some shopping, and there was one women, just off to the side, who I noticed last time we were in Mumbai who was still in the same spot. She sets up her stall before anyone else, and shuts it down last and she sleeps beside it at night. There are a number of people who sleep on the streets, but she stood out in my mind partly because clearly everything she has for sale is trash she's cleaned up, and I never saw her sell anything, but also because she has befriended a fat street dog who sleeps curled up beside her. And one night, when it got cold... she put a t-shirt on the dog. Fine. You win this round old woman. I wandered over to buy something from her and poked around the broken jewelry and dirty scraps of clothes before choosing a piece. She said it was 70 rupees, I offered her 40 and bought it and as we were walking away Derek was like ... what the hell?

I don't know what happened. I was trying to treat it like an actual shopping experience and we'd been bargaining all day, so I guess it was like a knee jerk thing, but seriously, who goes to buy some garbage from an old street person and offers them less money. Arrrg. I suck at this.

I love you India

This probably could have been easily predicted, but now that we're leaving I don't want to leave. I blame the north. I started thinking that I must have just over reacted, but the taxi driver we caught from the train station in Mumbai tried everything he could to scam us and Derek is still in a foul mood and oh right. The scammers. There are many of them in India, but the concentration is in the north. That rickshaw who offered us a tour of Kerala? Didn't once try to take us to a gem shop or a government store. Not once. I'm still vaguely stunned by this.

We're leaving on the 10th, for Korea (the south. Mom, not the north) which means we miss Holi by one day. One day!! This is painful. It's the festival where everyone goes around and throws paint at strangers. One traveller we met told us about how his hotel manger stormed into the dorms as soon as the sun was up, yelled out HAPPY HOLI and doused them in neon pink. And how they were on a bus which suddenly hit a roadblock made from debris and everyone started rolling up their windows when a bunch of 10 year olds ran out out of the ditches and pelted the bus with colour.

So mad.

I blame the bachelour party. The bachelour party I am not even going to. I am missing Holi so my boyfriend can go to the strippers. I think this is karma for trying to give a 5 rupee note that had been ripped in half to two different urchins.

Alappuzha (Alleppey)

So we decided to take a houseboat on the backwaters. Derek thinks calling it the 'Backwaters' makes it sound very mysterious and adventurous. It isn't. It's something you do when you are old and like to sit in a wicker chair and look at things. I am both glad we did it and glad that we only did it for one night.

We originally ended up in Kottayam, booked into a hotel and then realized we needed to go to Alappuzhu. This is what happens when I plan things. The hotel (which was very nice and had a pool because Derek, in his sickness, has turned into a princess) offered us a houseboat for 8000 rupees, and we said we wanted to pay 3000, and they scoffed and said it would never happen. Everyone says this when you don't give into their scams. EVERYONE. Oh, you don't want to book my hotel? All the other hotels are full. Oh they aren't, you were just there? Well, you will never get a room for 300, that is insane. What, they all had rooms for 300? IT ISN'T TRUE. (Derek had that exact conversation a few days ago) The one thing you can say about the scammers in India is that they are poor on originality. If one person does it, they all do it. It makes things easier, but there's also an element of oh god just shut up I've heard this a million times.

So we get on the bus to Alappuzcha, which I enjoyed if only for the bat jerky hanging from the electrical wires. At first you think they are leaves, and then when the bus stops beside one for a moment you realize, no, that is a very large, very dead, very dry bat hanging 12 feet in the air.

We walked into the first travel agency we found and booked a houseboat for 3000 (HAH). One of the enormous difference between the north and the south is how relaxed people here are, which is best demonstrated when Derek gets off the bus and is promptly surrounded by touts. Alappuzha is hugely touristy, more so then many areas we were in in the north, and the touts stood in a circle holding their business cards waiting quietly for the one currently giving his spiel to Derek to finish. This would never happen in the north, they'd all be yelling and waving in your face and you'd end up with three of those cards up your nose before you managed to break away and then two of them would chase you for at least 10 minutes. I imagine this is climate related, no one in Kerala is worried about starving to death in a desert.

The houseboat was very nice, it even had a tv on it that we never used. We floated around and looked at things and read books.

They offered a canoe ride through the smaller local channels (extra money, of course) so we hopped on and Derek got to paddle me around which THRILLED him to no end. The best part was all the other tourists we saw in either motorized boats or two locals paddling. I don't know why Derek was so whiny, he keeps talking about all the time he's going to spend at the gym when we get back.

We also purchased a very large fresh water prawn, from a passing canoe, that had the longest blue arms I have ever seen on a crustacean. You can't really tell from the photo, but his arms are BLUE.

He was delicious.

All the food was really awesome, with enough for four people. It was the best part. After dinner entertainment was a gecko a few feet from us eating all the bugs that were attracted by our light. We went to bed early, because Derek is still feeling sick, and there's really not much to do on a houseboat at night.

The next day we were heading to the train station to catch a ride to Kochi so we can get on our 48 hour train ride of death tomorrow, and the rickshaw driver kept pushing a much more expensive tour up, with him of course, where he would take us to some sites on the way. I said no at first, but with the upcoming train ride looming in the future, decided that maybe it would be better. Plus while it was clearly more then a local would pay, no one in Canada would ever drive you around for 3 hours for 17 dollars. It turned out to be a good idea because neither of us had any idea there was an amazing beach here.

HUGE beach, no one on it, but some fisherman, gorgeous sands. Far better then anything we saw in Goa. I'm so confused. There is a resort that charges 500 dollars a night, so clearly people know about it. There are cheaper places, of course, and some homestays. If you wanted to go to a beach, then we found you one. We also found you a miming Jesus. He's good, you could almost believe he's actually stuck in a glass box.

Our driver also took us to some small factories where they were making coconut fiber mats and string, which was really cool to see because it's all made by hand, and the workers are all friendly and (occasionally toothless) smiles.

Illness!

Derek caught some bug yesterday, leaving me to wander around the town by myself. It's so different here then it was in the north, I'm the only white person around, and NOBODY CARES. I love it. I picked up a large dinner for the two of us with desert for 3 dollars. I was getting really worried last night, Derek felt like a radiator, but was shivering and complaining of being too cold. Then a few hours later his fever broke and he was all clammy, now he's almost fine. Who knows what that was, probably food related. I was worried I'd have to bundle him onto our 42 hour train ride all fever-dreaming.

We're in Munnar right now, surrounded by tea plantations and spice farms. It's lovely here. A month ago I was all GOD why won't this end, but now I don't want to go home. Of course. We're heading to Mumbai on the 4th to do some shopping, then a week in South Korea annoying Courtney before heading home so Derek can go to a bachelor party in Montreal and I can send him angry text messages every few hours.

There's a shop nearby that sells spices and homemade chocolate (of questionable quality), and their halwa is AMAZING. It's like a large block of jujube-jelly full of figs and nuts and every spice in the store. Also it's 30 cents for 100 grams.

We saw this painting for sale in Kochi. They wanted about 600 dollars for it. I'm tempted to go back and try to bargain them down, this is the most amazing thing I have ever seen.

Camel Trekking Part 1

(I wrote this a month ago and haven't finished it, but it's getting long so I'll just put up the first part for now. The camel trek is one of the reasons I'm glad I went to Rajasthan. Also - green mustard curry.)

Part of our over-priced car rental was a free camel safari, which is a very touristy thing to do in the northwest of Rajahstan. I was looking forward to this, and not too worried since I figured if they deal with hysterical suburbanites and their sullen children then we probably won’t get thrown into too many thorn bushes. (Just the one.) Now that I’ve done some reading on the treks, I think we got very very lucky, not in where we stayed (scammer central), but in one of our camel drivers, The Smartest Camel Driver in the World. He must work for tips, and instead of being the smarmy annoying scammer that is all too common to the north, he’s gone with the be really nice and authentic style of tip-upping. Is it possible to start a school to train people in that style? Somebody needs to write that book. I feel like I need to track him down right now and give him more money, with everyone else I just want to go back and kick them in the butt. Derek’s camel guy was somewhat less impressive, a 15 year old who treated it much like your average teen would treat flipping burgers.


Khuhri is a small town outside of Jasailmer, located within a national park. The place we were at, The Desert Camp, has a group of thatched huts inside an enclosure for tourists to stay. They offered to show us around the village, which is all old-style mud homes with goats and cows wandering around, which of course ended with a sales pitch. Oh, won’t you help these poor people by buying these homemade blankets that take them many months to sew, you know, the ones you can buy in Canada for half the price that are made in Nepal. TTHHPTH.

There were two options with the camel ride, sleep out in the desert (a kilometre or so away) or come back and sleep in the hut. I chose the desert, so they piled on the heavy blankets and assured us they’d be bringing us dinner.

(My camel driver and his Camel, Lalu. When I went to take the photo he held up a hand and took his turban off and stuck it on Derek's head. This is when I realized he is the Smartest Camel Driver in the World.)

Riding a camel is a lot like riding a horse, if that horse was on pogo sticks. They lie down for you to climb on, and when they stand back up they stick their butt in the air, putting you at a nearly vertical angle. It's terrifying. It's also the only thing keeping you from telling them you want down, because you know the camel going to stick their butt in the air to do so. And there’s nothing to hold onto. At least on a horse you have that thought that if things get out of hand you can grip the horse’s neck. A camel’s neck is very far away, and long enough so that it can reach around and bite you, or perhaps spit in your face. Our camels were very nice though, and only stumbled occasionally.


They took us on a roundabout journey, a few hours through rocky land before hitting the sand dunes. We saw lots of antelope, some large Egyptian vultures, a desert fox that they chased for a bit, and, of course, goats and cows. I didn’t get many photos as that would have required loosening my death grip on the saddle. My camel driver, who sat behind me, only knew the few English words he needed to know, “okay?” “welcome”, and “okay, okay, many many tourist”.

(Camels have weird feet. I'd never really thought about it before. Also weird tails, they don't have a brush on the end, they have thick fur running down both sides so it looks like a big centipede growing out of their butt. Usually their tail is tied up by the tip to the saddle, I'm not sure why. Probably poop related.)

We set up camp in the dunes and wandered around barefoot. I tried to track some animals by their prints, but we could never figure out which direction they had gone. It’s just as well, turns out they were spider tracks. A very large spider. Some small local urchin showed up and tried to get Derek to give him his watch, then maybe 10 rupees? Pen? Rupees? Rupees? Rupees? And so on.


Our driver and a man from the resort showed up with our dinner in a large tiffin box set and stayed to chat for a while by the fire. It was a very good dinner, including small thin “desert beans” and fresh chapattis that my camel guy (I think his name was Acheze. It was very guttural. There are only so many times you can ask someone to repeat their name before you just smile and nod.) roasted for us on hot embers. They got to eat after us, which I found awkward. If we ate too much, they get less dinner, if we take too long, their dinner gets cold. Cultural difference between valuing a guest over not wanting to be a hassle, I suppose. After they washed up by rubbing everything down with sand, and a tired looking dog came by and licked the spot for a long time.


(to be cont...)