From the Mother River

 Two furry hands groped under our door as another light fitting was smashed and another chair crashed to the ground outside. We were being held hostage in our room by a troupe of rather aggressive macaques. The veranda outside was a chaos of upturned furniture and shrieking monkey. Had we been able to step outside we could have overlooked the mighty Ganges, watched the pilgrims descending the ancient stone steps to take the holy waters. Slightly downstream, swarms of orange clad worshippers were making their way to the mother river, water containers dangling from gaudily decorated shoulder poles. They chanted and shouted, jostling past each other, unable to wait for their first touch, their first taste of this watery goddess. Considering the water is the depository for the nearby burning ghats (where human bodies are burnt before the remains are cleansed by the river), not to mention the destination for much of the city's sewage, we decided bathing in, let alone drinking, the water would not be wise. This didn't stop another army of pious germs flooding pilgrim-like into my weak and unsuspecting foreign gut. Though the monkeys had let us live, my poor culture-shocked tummy left me contained once more in our room. I lay there, guts and fan churning, and dreamt of cool mountain climes.

As always, Varanasi had slapped us in the face (and delivered a further blow to the stomach). It is a city where every journey to he shop involves pushing along tiny alleys, past vast Brahmin cows, harrying pilgrims and scabby dogs. As well as these obstacles, you also have to keep your eyes to the ground for it is slalom of cow shit, litter and scrawny puppies. The puppies in particular often blocked quick progress as Nic had to stop and stare adoringly at every one. Day by day, the heat brewed until it had exceeded 40 degrees (I'm not sure what that is in Fahrenheit but it's really about time you joined the metric age) and monsoon clouds boiled above the river. We needed to get out, we needed fresh air (and fluffier, less scabby puppies).

We took a train to Delhi, chatting all evening to the others in the carriage, dropping off to sleep to the rhythms of the train and awaking to the melodies of the chai-wallahs and snack men. We weren't in Delhi to see Delhi (we hav been many times before) but to take a bus north. The night was spent on a bus that twisted up and up into the Himalayan foothills, emerging into the Kullu valley as the sun rose behind the clouds that drifted endlessly down from green mountain slopes. The smell of pine and cannabis (it grows like nettles by the side of the road) drifted through the bus and expelled the fetid stuffiness of the plains from our lungs.

We are staying near Manali in a village of slate-roofed timber houses and slapdash concrete guesthouses. From our room we can see the opposite slopes of this vast green valley and, when the cloud momentarily slips from the summits, the snow-dusted peaks beyond. 

It's good to see India is still a gathering place for hippies, the traveller culture here has barely changed since the Seventies. Travellers still arrive Millets-clad and emerge two days later in baggy pantaloons, salwar shirts and beads. Even the original hippies are still here in their folds of tanned skin and Hindu scarves, their long hair receding toward balding scalps. Jim Morrison still stares gormlessly from tie-dyed T-shirts, 'No Woman No Cry' still plays endlessly from sound systems as old as the hippies themselves.

So we sit here in our cool mountain hippiedom, watching the local women pick their way down the hillsides with baskets of fresh-picked apples and the local men bathe in the natural hot springs (as always during our travels, it seems the men have the better side of the deal). We travel next deeper into the heavenly heights to a place not even the mighty monsoon can reach. We're going back to a world of dust and goats and wrinkle-faced peasants. Over the mountains and into the great wastes beyond...

In the City of Joy

As we left Calcutta airport by an aging Austin taxi, India wrapped its considerable arms around us. In this sweaty embrace, we breathed the familiar scents of frying food, incense, paan and sun-dried urine. The traffic and the city contracted and pressed around us so that every visible space contained anther life, another narrative. In that 45 minute journey, a thousand stories rolled by the window, stories of tragedy, joy and drama. Ragged men in grubby lungis pulled man-powered rickshaws laden with plump ladies, fat rolling from the gaps in their saris. The sides of the streets (for, in India, pavements are rare) were colonised by shelters of tarpaulin and stoves of battered tin, hot chai being brewed for the slow-wheeling masses. As we stopped at a traffic light (another rare thing), a child came to the window to beg, his clothes black, his skin grey, his eyes deadened from glue-sniffing. In all likelihood a  Fagin-like beggarmaster would be watching his young charge, waiting for his pockets to be filled. In many respects Calcutta is remarkably like Dicken's London. But such tragic views are soon obscured by a joyously hand-painted truck, gods and goddesses in garish colours, garlands of plastic flowers around the windscreens. 'India is Great!' proclaim inscriptions on the trucks, or 'Horn Please!' (this because many vehicles lack wing mirrors and subsequently any knowledge of what is behind them). In compliance, the roads are filled with the sound of honking, screeching horns that clash with the Bollywood music and holy songs that crack and spit from distorted speakers. Monsoon-ravaged colonial buildings sprout foliage and cracked plaster, like once-elegant 1920s dames that have lost their marbles in old age. Roots wrap window frames in an echo of Angkor Wat but here there are still faces behind the glass.

Too tired to search for a decent room, we took a darkened hole with peeling paint and a fan held up with newspaper and parcel tape. Pressing our faces to filth-smudged pillows, we drifted off to the beautiful music of a nearby prayer session.           

All of this may sound somewhat hellish and, in many ways, it is, but it is also so alive, so full of hope and joy. It's as if you can witness the full spectrum of human experience in a few steps down the street. It had been six years since last we were here and twelve since we first arrived as wide-eyed teenagers and we were now delighted that our own narrative had finally rejoined this great ocean of tales. In a strange way, it felt like we were home.

We took refuge from the teeming, reeking streets in an old British Museum. Many rooms had barely changed since Victorian times, glass topped cabinets of rocks and fossils gathering dust, eight-legged goat fetuses in jars, slowly decaying stuffed animals. If, like me, Victorian taxidermy is your bag, it's a fine day out. In Calcutta, you realise how permanent a fixture the British believed themselves to be, there are buildings grander than many of those in London, great bridges of iron, monuments to the distant, mythical monarchs. Despite our strict anti-colonialism, we couldn't help but feel some measure of sorrow at the sight of these buildings slowly crumbling, the rotting corpses of a vanquished empire. I'm not quite sure what is happening to me, in Bangkok we had somehow ended up waving flags at the passing King in a gaggle of fawning grannies, and here I was in Calcutta shedding tears for our once 'glorious' Britain.

With the car horns still echoing in our ears we left Calcutta by sleeper train, the city sliding, no, juddering, by. We settled onto our grotty bunks and enjoyed the night air that filtered in through the glassless windows. Our train was due in to Gaya (the sight of Buddha's enlightenment) at 5:30am but at midnight they announced that the train was being re-routed and was going nowhere near our destination. We were suddenly headed instead to a city which we were almost hesitant to go back to, a city so intense it was like no other in the world. Allowing ourselves to be swept up by the twin powers of fate and poor time-tabling, we shrugged and returned to our bunks. Lying in my juddering bunk, a grin spread across my face, we were back in good old India, riding the rails to the holy city of Varanasi.        

Another Road Ends

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this vagrant life is that we can change our immediate fate in a matter of seconds. Discussing the next few weeks in a restaurant in Siam Reap, we realised that we had had enough of Southeast Asia and that another land was calling to us from across the Bay of Bengal. It was already our plan to return to dear old India but, following this discussion, we were practically running to an internet cafe to advance our tickets. Within two days we were on a bus to Bangkok which is where we are now, waiting for our Sunday flight. Unfortunately, this means our overland journey is now over (it is not possible to travel to India through Myanmar) but we certainly haven't done badly, London to Bangkok without flying. In a sudden and highly uncharacteristic spate of mathematics l have reduced our grand journey to the following meaningless statistics.

22,000km travelled
189 days on the road
20 countries passed through
68 places slept in
54 buses ridden
12 cars
9 trains
3 boats
3 trucks
6 diaries filled with rambling nonsense
10 number systems learnt
3 alphabets mastered (almost, and one of them is our own)
3rd trip of a lifetime

So that about wraps it up. You may be wondering why we are returning to India for the third time but I hope my next post will serve as some sort of explanation...

Of Lost Histories

Bayon Temple, Angkor Thom, Cambodia. There are 216 such heads in this one temple.The woman on the left gives a sense of the scale.

Until the events of the last few days, we had been vaguely regretting the decision to come to Southeast Asia. We hadn't felt properly challenged, hadn't felt that 'I can't believe we're here' feeling that we find essential to our way of travelling. The temples of Angkor in western Cambodia have gone a long way to set that right. 

You are probably familiar with images of Angkor Wat, the vast Hindu temple with its iconic three-domed silhouette, but Angkor Wat is just one of the many glories to be found near the city of Siem Reap. This was once the capital of a mighty empire, a city of a million people at a time when London had less than fifty thousand. An empire that, after overstretching itself into extinction, was swallowed up by the jungle. The temples of Angkor cover a huge area and, in the last two days, we have cycled fifty-odd kilometres visiting the various lichen-stained temples, monasteries and Buddhas. We've cycled down puddle-ridden lanes to discover walls and archways entangled in the jungle and clambered up crumbling pyramids to survey the stupas rising from the trees. In places, vast roots have ensnared the masonry like giant octopi, wrapping their thick tentacles around doorways and weather-worn carvings. We cycled through the monsoon rains and sheltered in ancient shrines that smelt of bats and incense or watched the brief washes of sun send giant serene Buddha faces into relief. It was utterly beautiful and made all our days of dissatisfaction melt in to meaninglessness. These are the kind of things you travel so many thousands of miles to see. 

Preah Khan, Angkor 

[My recent spate of tourist-bashing isn't quite over yet though. One middle-aged American was trying to frame a temple with his massively over-sized lens but couldn't quite cut out the poor grubby kids who were trying to peddle postcards and bracelets 'It's okay,' he said to his partner 'I can Photoshop the little sh*ts out later.' ]

Before arriving in Siem Reap, we'd spent a rather lovely week on the beach. I won't go into the details because talk of huts and beaches and glittering seas will bore you and quite possibly make you want to hurt me. The most story-worthy event of the week was when we signed up for a boat/snorkeling  trip to some islands. We were both terribly excited until Nic remembered that she hated both fish and boats. Instead of gliding smoothly over turquoise waters as I had imagined, the boat heaved over a choppy sea and we got thoroughly soaked by a sudden rainstorm. We then stopped to snorkel but there was barely a fish to be seen, the masks leaked and I cut my foot by accidentally kicking a stack of corral (perhaps also contributing to the slow death of a delicate ecosystem).  It wasn't the best day of our trip and, with Nic swearing never to set foot on a boat again, we headed back to our beach hut to spend the remainder of the week doing bugger all. And a mighty fine bugger all it was too.

Nic thoroughly enjoys her day out.

Continuing this strange, reverse narrative, we now travel back in time and space to Phnom Penh. Cambodia’s capital is a massive grid of monsoon-stained concrete and fish-stinking markets, ravaged by wave after wave of tuk-tuks and scooters. When I remember it now I think of suicidal dashes across liquid traffic while breathing the smog of a thousand two-stroke engines. There are many phrases with which I could describe Phnom Penh most of them involving the word ‘hole’. 

Phnom Penh

However, Phnom Penh was also a serious, if hugely upsetting education. Just outside the city were the Killing Fields. It was here that the brutal Khmer Rouge regime murdered nearly 20,000 men, women and children. This of course was only a fraction of those murdered across the country between 1975 and 1979 (it has been estimated that 25% of Cambodians perished as a direct result of the regime’s actions). Among the victims were people who had been killed simply for ‘looking intelligent’, babies and children slaughtered because their father was a ‘dissident’ or simply a personal enemy of an officer. Because of the recent rains, the topsoil on the open graves had partly washed away to reveal fragments of bone and scraps of clothing. Looking around the warm, smiling faces of Cambodia today, it’s shocking to think that anyone over the age of 35 must have either been a victim or a perpetrator. It feels like Cambodia is in a similar place to post-Nazi Germany, wanting to know how it was that Cambodians came to murder Cambodians but unable to look the painfully recent truth straight in the eye. This is perhaps why they so often look back with pride to the glories of a thousand years ago and why everything from the money to national beer is emblazoned with a glorious image of Angkor Wat, hoping that their pride in the ancients can eclipse their more recent shame.  

S21, Phnom Penh. This was the prison/torture facility from where people were sent to the Killing Fields.