Tibetan Settlements

As I went back and read some of what I have posted over the last week, it would seem that our adventure is going terribly. Rotting dogs and crazed hordes of temple-goers were almost all that I wrote about. But this is only half the story---and since it's such good story material, I had to include it. There are more relaxed aspects of our trip.

Take, for example, our present location. Bylakuppe is the largest settlement of Tibetan refugees in India. This place has such a beautiful scenery and landscape, I feel lucky to be here. In the background of the image below is the Sakya Monastery, one of the more modest monasteries in the settlements. We are spending a few days at their guest-house.

UPDATE: Many readers have sent requests for information about how to stay at this guest house. I am not providing any information other than to note that Bylakuppe is a refugee settlement, and it is the policy of the Indian government that foreigners are not allowed to stay in such areas unless they obtain a permit in advance. So far as I know, the only place to obtain such a permit is in Delhi.

It feels in many ways that we are not in India anymore. The Tibetans are lovely and very nice, and thankfully they hardly notice us. I have commented previously about the kind of staring and oogling we receive in India. It's quite overwhelming sometimes, and we have seen none of it here. These people are more "cool" as in "too cool for school." Small groups of young monks scoot around on motorbikes and look very stylish in their Nike footwear. It's all kind of surreal. And they are not interested in us.

I mentioned that we're staying here for a couple of days. This has become somewhat of a pattern for us. We'll bike for a long day and then find a place we like and stay for at least two nights. We have used the time here in Bylakuppe to do some serious relaxation and recuperation. I have finished my second book (a trashy novel) and Monica has finished her third. Unstructured time. Down time.

As I look back, I spent the last five years on my first real job, getting my Master's Degree, an experiment with homeownership, the flowering of my relationship with Monica. In the last year we had the fortune of having Monica's sister stay with us. This trip to India is, more than I had expected, a chance to look back on that and reflect on the changes in myself. When I stop and think about it, I have not had this much unstructured time since before I went to college. Ten years ago I was rambling around the American wilderness, looking for rocks and mountains to climb. I think that I have grown since then, but I can't quite be sure.

Our next destination is the Honey Valley Estates, a lovely mountain hotel located in the Kodagu region of western Karnataka. We'll use the place as a basecamp for an ascent of the area's highest mountain, or maybe strolls through the neighboring coffee plantations. Life sure is rough.

Sravanabelagola

We visited Sravanabelagola on Tuesday because of the strong endorsement from our Jain friend Somati Mohan in New York. This is perhaps the most significant Jain pilgrimage site in South India, and we heard it was quite lovely. The main image, Gomateswara, is a single monolithic statue carved out of the granite on the top of the hill. The image above is the statue surrounded by some scaffolding, which I take to be a semi-permanent part of the temple.

Here, again, was a frenetic Indian temple experience. One has to climb about 500 hand-cut steps to reach the temple. Lots of people. Everyone is pushing. Once we reached the temple we had to take a brake and sit down, not from the climbing but from the pushing.

Once inside the temple, the fury was only more intense. Visitors frantically worked their way around the melee while traffic cops with whistles tried to direct the flow and keep it moving. I have uploaded a large video clip (link, 12.3 MB) which may show a little of how crazy it felt to be in there. Try to turn the sound all the way up so the whistles and the screaming are too much to take.

I just have to wonder to myself how anyone can have a quiet, meditative connection with divinity in this kind of environment. Maybe I'm too much of a simpleton, but all I could think about was my personal safety.

School update

I am pleased to say that Monica has been accepted to the BSN nursing program at Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University and I have been accepted to the PhD program in the Department of Physics at the University of Arizona. We look forward to hearing from the rest of those schools on our application checklist.

The land of extremes

Before arriving in India I kept reading and hearing that India is a land of opposites: extreme poverty next to extravagant wealth; religious zealotry and jingoism side-by-side with tolerance and welcoming warmth. Here I add our own experience of a few extremes we found on Sunday while visiting Chamundeswari Temple (on the Chamundi hill overlooking Mysore).

We took a city bus to the top of the hill where the temple has a commanding view of the surrounding areas. As we have come to expect, upon arrival we were immediately accosted by no less than three beggars with serious deformities and fifteen people trying to sell us postcards and pens and other crap.

To deal with the onslaught, we have regrettably taken up the technique of not acknowledging the irritating people. I have never been one to give small change to street beggars, preferring instead to donate my time and money to organizations like p:ear who foster long-term support, healing, and growth. But I keep a little bit of pride knowing that I will always look into the beggars eyes and give the gift of human contact. I know it sounds cheesy, but to me it has been an important part of not making direct cash gifts. Anyway, that's all out the window. We just ignore them and they go away less slowly than when we say "no." The hassle is extreme.

I decided to go into the temple and make an offering to the divine. Which brings up another extreme aspect of India: the pushing-shoving-frantic-queueing style. You see it everywhere there is a line of people, at a food cart, on the bus, at a temple, on the street even. Everybody wants to get into this temple, and they want it right now. They are pushing my back and trying to slip around me. Seriously, people, this is a place of worship, not a line to get Madonna's autograph. And yet people are rushing and pushing as though the gods will not be there if they were to slip their place in line. (Actually, the worst queueing is found when you purchase rail tickets from the platform booth. Sharpen your elbows, folks, it's fight club in here.)

Here's a picture of me after emerging from the temple. Notice the dark dab of tikka on my forehead. Just above it is some cream-colored goo which I believe to be some sacred mixture of coconut milk and tikka. Each was applied by a different priest in the temple complex. I think it is normal, but I'm not sure. I was also given a banana, which I promptly ate.



Monica did not feel so comfortable going into the temple. Perhaps this was partly due to the pushing line and partly due to a bad taste in her mouth left by the prohibition of westerners from a particular temple in Gokarna we tried to visit last week. She decided to wait outside for me while I went in. This left her vulnerable to the non-stop attention of packs of men, a form of attention which she does not welcome. Another extreme of India: the constant staring of strangers. Especially: the totally dumbfounded stares of idle men, young and old, lining the streets everywhere. Seriously. The distraction of our presence has caused at least one traffic accident this week, as well as several near misses.

We decided to descend the hill. If you take the stairs instead of the bus, you pass by Nandi, Shiva's monolithic black bull mount. This is about 1/3 of the way down the hill. As we were leaving the temple site and heading town hill we passed by a sight of such extreme foul carnage we almost ralphed on the spot. The image below is of a dog eating the body of another dog. The carcass was evidently quite old and rotten for the smell was tremendous and the flies were loving it. Another extreme of India.


After this we continued, quite freaked out. We started to wonder if the stair-path down to town was not safe for us. It was nearly sunset and there were 1000 steps to descend. Are there muggings here? Are we not obvious targets? The further we went, the more freaked we became. But the only other option was to go back to the top and take a bus, which seemed silly after the progress we had made.

And then we were hit with another one of India's extremes. Crowded on the side of the stairs was a large family: a husband and wife, perhaps an aunt or two, and about eight little children. Mostly girls, actually. Happy and peaceful, they were there to enjoy the view and to have a nice little picnic. They smiled as we came down towards them, some clapped with glee, and they wanted us to sit down and share the meal with them.

What? Here we were, running from canine cannibalism, dung-covered cows, screaming monkeys, packs of overinterested men, beggars limping on stubs, irritating non-stop sales pitches, and---worst of all---our imagination of thugs and thieves. And here, in the midst of all that mayhem, was a happy Indian family who wanted nothing more than to sit us down and feed us and ask us questions and probably take us their home afterwards. It was too much to take; I nearly started crying on the spot.

We declined their plea, saying that the sun was setting and we wanted to beat the darkness. But the truth was that we simply could not change gears that quickly. We needed a break. We needed to get back to a restaurant or better yet our hotel room. I wanted my head to stop spinning.

Open toilet

Something needs to be said here about the sanitation in India. To a westerner it is very difficult to believe how it could be this horrendous.

At our roadside lunch stop in Karwar on Thursday, I asked the restaurant owner if he had a toilet. He shakes his head no.

Where is there a toilet? I ask, hoping that his neighbors have one.

"Open Toilet," he smiled, waving his hand in the general area of the rest of town.

Really, I mused to myself could this be? Certainly there is cow and dog poop everywhere. And we do see people urinating in more public ways than we had expected. But it is also true that people do the number-two just about everywhere, too. I guess that for a very poor region with precious little infrastructure, closed sewer systems are just too much to ask for. But what is more frightening is the lack of understanding about how this can contribute to the spread of disease. The image below is from a public-information painting on a wall near the Chemundaswari temple in Mysore.


Monica and I went to eat dinner in the guide-book-endorsed "touristy" restaurant in Gokarna. It has balcony seating so that we can get above the flies, so prevalent at street level. Before going to our table I visited the toilet they had, which was a standard hole-in-the-ground outhouse style "squat" toilet. What struck me as odd, though, was that an identical outhouse was connected to the right. At the same level (and within splashing distance) was the location of the dishwashing station. This was not on some kind of table but at floor level.

I decided to block the whole scene from my mind---and forget also that none of the locals use toilet paper to wipe. I decided that maybe they are fastidious about cleaning their hands. I thought maybe there is some ancient system at work which can help avoid the transmission of germs. But when our drinks came out we were proven wrong. Monica ordered a Sprite, in a glass bottle. How could they screw that up? The bottle smelled strongly of rotting fish and had several globs of white goo on the upper outside. Monica had taken a sip before noticing, and when she put the bottle down she noticed a small brown smear on her hand.

Yes, it smelled of poo.

Needless to say we left and would never return to this eatery. But although this erred on the side of obvious, I don't think that it was unique. The place had average cleanliness, not worse than most of the places we went. We have hand sanitizer. We'll try to eat at places where food turnover is more frequent and where things seem thoroughly cooked. But it's always going to be some kind of a crapshoot (pun intended).

Believe what they tell you: don't drink the water.

110 km from Goa to Gokarna

At about the middle-point of Thursday's long ride, I quietly thought to myself what a perverse undertaking this is: why should we force ourselves to bicycle these distances when we can easily afford to pay for busses and trains and taxis to take us? Granted, these doubting thoughts were spawned in part due the noon heat. I was swerving to dodge cows and busses, and the truck horns had by then completely destroyed my right ear drum. I had also not really eaten enough for breakfast so that we could make the most of the early morning hours---which are lovely, by the way.

But at the end of the day I was reminded why we are doing this by bicycle---so that we can go slowly; so that we can be most free to choose our daily path; so that we can get a feel for the countryside and the shapes of the land; and so that we can wave to everybody and send out hundreds of "hello" calls along our way. The following image is one of a pretty river flowing near Gokarna.

There is another, more particular form of freedom that having your own vehicle brings to an Indian journey. We do not have to constantly feel as though all of the taxi drivers and rickshaw operators and tourbus companies and scooter rentals are trying to hassle us and twist every last rupee from our pockets at each and every turn. Many travelers get the sense that they are walking dollar signs in this impoverished land, which can be quite alienating and also draining. Being on a bicycle puts us above that melee

Mr. pumpy has written a rather humorous analysis of the "on-flow" experience of taking a bicycle tour of India versus the (more common) backpacker-style journey.

Of course, you could do this trip by motorcycle, and if you did it would clearly need to be on a Royal Enfield motorbike. We have thought of this many times while white tourists cruise past us going uphill five times faster than our crawl. And we have decided that on our next Indian adventure we will indeed go by motorbike. But that is not to say that we regret our present lot.

At the end of Thursday's ride we were dirty and tired but very happy. We brought ourselves from the laid-back beaches of Goa to this sacred Hindu pilgrimage spot in the span of one day. We have crossed from one state and language region to another completely different one. We have enjoyed fantastic scenery and animal life, and we did it all by pedal power. This is part of the genius of travel by bicycle. Here's a big wave from the two of us to our friends and family!

Delhi Belly

We thought we were invincibile, but alas we both fell ill. It was not that bad, really: only one round of vomit and two days of the watery-doo for each of us.


Good bedrest for a day and some good old fasioned pills (Cipro) helped clear up our GI tract.

No, we do not know what food made us ill. And it does not matter: we're much better now.

First day on bikes -- a success

Here is a picture of Monica looking very pleased that we are now on bicycle. Our night train from Mumbai dropped us off in Kudal about four hours behind schedule, which meant that we missed the morning hours and started biking in the middle (hottest part) of the day. Better judgment would have had us sit out the heat in a food stall, but we were far too excited to be on the bikes. And besides, we also wanted to see the beach.

From Kudal it was a moderately hilly 22 km to the coastal town of Vengurla, where we happily ate the first real food of the day. The bikes were a big hit with the locals. Hoards of men and boys came out to stare and prod and sound the big horn I put on the front of my bike. Riding these roads by bicycle makes me feel like some sort of a goodwill ambasador: we have said "hello" and "how are you?" to hundreds of waving onlookers as we pass from village to village. I think that the beauty of travelling by bicycle is that you can really smile and pause for a moment, that people feel comfortable approaching you, and that you never get anywhere too fast.

The bikes work well enough, but they will definitely need some tweaks here and there. The bottom brakcets are loose, as is my headset; the brakes are wimpy and it is hard to shift into my lowest chainring. But for only 85 USD or so, they are more than I had expected. I think we will do alright (fingers crossed).

We continued south along the coast to enter the state of Goa. Very hilly! We are taking a rest day today, because 55 km was too much for the first day. We are enjoying our time relaxing at this beautiful beach town (Arambol) and drinking mango juice. I'll save my comments about the bizarre nature of the Goa beach scene for some later posting.

Bicycles now purchased

We made a quick dash through Mumbai on our way to the Konkan coast simply to purchase two brand new "gear bikes." Monica and I had built touring mountain bikes in the USA which we intended to bring to India. As luck would have it, someone took the door off our storage closet in our Portland apartment and lifted the bikes. Bye bye bikes.

We decided to buy new ones in India. Indians love bicycles; bicycles are everywhere. They are all made by two Indian brands, Atlas and Hero. The design has not changed since 1937 and none have more than one gear. Well, almost none. We had to look pretty long and hard to find a store which sold "gear bikes" because we knew we would be going up and down hills on the coastal ride.

The image you see was taken at the railway station in Mumbai. Krishna (the railway luggage office guard) is marking our bikes for shipment to Kudal where we get off the train in the morning and start our bicycle journey. Notice the figure on the right. He was helping? He was just standing there? In the process of dropping off or bikes as luggage, we met about eighteen men who were directly or indirectly connected with the railway luggage system. First there is a form to fill. Then you take it to the man behind the counter. Then you go and have the burlap-walla apply some amount of burlap to the luggage. Then you pay him. Then you pay a different guy behind the same counter. Then you go and show a receipt to the guard and he marks the burlap with your train information and destination and reservation number and date and oh-so-many other things. Then you go and sign for something and they sign something and then about five signatures and two counters later you are done and my goodness, if these bikes don't make it to Kudal then I don't know what.

They have a system. It's totally insane, but it is a system none-the-less. Welcome to India.

Confrontation

India is constantly confronting us.

This is not uniformly a bad thing. People are constantly showing us kindness as well as need as well as hassle as well as soothing. And while not always bad, it never stops.

A dirty boy of about eight years is pulling on my elbow and asking "one rupee."

The man sitting on the bench next to me at the train station is playing with a length of string, moving his harms clearly over my airspace, while staring at my face. Burning holes, in fact.

The man at the historical cave site claims to be a farmer and poor, and he is constantly trying to sell us little pieces of quartz that he has found somewhere. We don't want quartz pebbles. He keeps lowering the price. He won't leave us and though we have left him, he seems to always appear where we want to go.

The very friendly local guy on the bus turns out to also be a seller of carvings and quarts pebbles, and he somehow extorts a promise from me to visit his stand at the bus stop. How did this guy pull a fast one on me?

Each auto-rickshaw driver in Arungabad has said "hello" to us and "where are you going" as if to offer a ride. We don't want a ride, we want to walk. But we are also walking dollar signs---they stand to get good money from tourists like us, so they never stop bothering us.

The porter who took us and our bags to our seat on the train is complaining that eleven rupees is not enough payment: he says it is twenty rupees. But I clearly read a sign, in English, instructing me that the going rate for porters was eleven rupees for one parcel, up to 35 kg, carried on the head, and twenty-two rupees for four parcels carried on a cart. We had one light bag, and so I though it totally slimy of him to demand more than the posted rate. I am embarrassed to say that I really fought with him about this. Monica tried to get me to stop. I hated the feeling that I was getting taken for a ride, and I also felt that I had some sort of pride to defend: "I am not that stupid tourist who will pay whatever you say." Thankfully I gained some perspective and yielded. The difference of nine rupees is worth about twenty cents in US currency.

There are many many many confrontational experiences to face in each day traveling. The hotel room becomes our sanctuary.

But I do not regret the choice to come here. There is far too much to be happy about. The people are warm and lovely. Everyone we reach out to feels happy to talk with us. As we visited the historical caves of Ajanta and Ellora we met many many Indian families who just wanted to take our picture and talk with us and thankfully English is spoken widely and well enough to convey nuance and intent. In all of the chaos rides a communal sense of care and purpose. If you place your will into the mix---lovingly---the cacophony will take you where you need to go. The train system, the traffic jams, the food carts on the streets, the wobbly bicycles, the bullock in the middle of the highway: this is the fabric of the Indian experience, and I love it already dearly.

We are alive in Mumbai

Let's get one thing out of the way: it took over 40 hours to get here, and that's a lot of airplane food. Fortunately, the Cathay Pacific staff are very friendly and they had lots of vegetarian food for us. But it's still a long a lot of flying none-the-less. The stop in Hong Kong did, however, provide a nice break in the trip, though it also wore us out for the final two flights.

By the time we got in our Mumbai taxi to the Sea Green hotel, we were so overstimulated and overtired that we could hardly absorb

1. the unbelievable driving style: the approach to driving in Mumbai seems to be to drive (with your lights off at night) as fast as possible and to keep honking as you go so that the hoards of people crossing in your way can know exactly which moment they need to jump to avoid injury. And you should not have side mirrors because the cars drive so close together ... seriously less than four inches at times.
2. the encampments alongside of the roads. We knew we would wittness extensive poverty here in India. It is all right out in the open.
3. the smog blowing into our eyes and jeez, what was that smell?

Now that we have slept a little, we have found Mumbai to be quite an overwhelming experience. This will not be possible to explain here. Partly it is the traffic, which comes at you from all directions and does not seem to pause even if you are not getting out of the way. Partly it is how everyone stares at you all the time. As a white man, I am not used to this. It is getting a bit more normal, though. Partly it is the constant sounding of horns. Everywhere. Nonstop. One gets the sense that you can not stop on any sidewalk anywhere or you will get run over and honked at and it will smell bad as you die slowly in the gutter and nobody is noticing.

Mumbai hardly has any white tourists in it, partly due to the great expense of staying here. Our hotel cost us almost 70 USD each night, which is more than I've paid for hotels in the US. Monica and I will leave tonight on the night train for Arungabad, which we will use as a base camp from which to explore the historic caves at Ellora and Ajanta. We'll come back through Mumbai to pick up some Tiawanese "gear cycle" bicycles from a shop here before taking off again for the souther coastal area of Goa.

We are happy and relieved to be here. We are looking forward to spending time at the beach.

Some Images from Hong Kong