The Belated Wrapping-Up Of Things

After writing on this blog from internet cafes down twisty alleys, up rickety stairs, and in hotel lobbies, on sticky-keyed, decrepit computers, it seems almost farcically easy to stroll into the kitchen, sit down with a cup of tea, and type. And yet it's taken me almost a week. For this, I apologise.

There are a few reasons it's taken so long. I could allude to events in my personal life both happy and sad, but if you know me, you'll probably already know about them already. And if you don't know me, you probably aren't reading this blog. Okay; you definately aren't reading this blog...

It's more that after having been back for a week, I'm beginning to feel as though I've never been gone. The success of a travel blog, I think, depends on its immediacy - and back in Melbourne, without the jumbled-fragrant stench of India clinging to me like a film, without the compulsion of new things to do every day, and with friends and family at my fingertips, things are beginning to fade.

In fact, it's probably a good thing I've kept this blog, because it - and the good chunk missing from my bank balance - is all that's letting me know at the moment that I've really been gone. I went to get my photos developed in Mumbai and they all came out completely underexposed, so I don't have any photos to look back on. The negatives are possibly ruined, which would be disappointing... but Helen's photos turned out as well as expected and I might be able to get a few copies now, rather than having to buy them down the track for a fortune at some gallery.

So. From reading over this thing I see that I haven't written about our last weekend in India. Helen nearly became a Bollywood star, but pulled out at the last minute. We spent a lot of time walking around the street markets doing some last-minute present-shopping - our haggling skillz are superb, by the way. We finally discovered the perfect Indian meal, after a month of sharing everything in the hope of finding the perfect combination. (It's mutter paneer and chana masala with lots of rice and puri and raita, if you're interested. And I know you are.)

The last night we went to the cinema and watched an independent film called Mixed Doubles, which was pretty interesting. It was a Hinglish film, which meant that the characters would all say, "Now let me explain something to you..." and then break into a stream of Hindi - or else the joke was in Hindi but the punchline was in English. We didn't realise, but there's a whole stream of cinema in India called, appropriately enough, Parallel Cinema; small movies that break with Bollywood convention (and Indian conventional morality) and play basically like independant movies you'd see anywhere in the world.

This one was a sex farce about a man trying to convince his wife to become a swinger - not exactly something you'd expect in a country where kissing is forbidden in major movies. It would be fun to watch the movie with subtitles should it ever come out in Australia - though it didn't seem like a terribly good film, the audience loved it, and it would be nice to find out the punchlines to certain jokes, and vice-versa.

The flight back was fairly uneventful, though time-comsuming. Bangkok Airport is more entertaining with another person, especially when that person has a pack full of toys and is trying to attain the perfect spirograph. Qantas gave us truffle ice-cream to apologise for the lack of leg-room. Not to apologise exlicitly, but we all know what they were thinking... and then we were back, and home, and home has consumed us so thoroughly that it's begun to seem impossible that we were really away.

But we were, weren't we? I've not just made this whole thing up? (With no photos I could easily have written this from a darkened hideout in suburbia). We were gone, and now we're back - and I guess that pretty much wraps things up. Helen told me this afternoon that she has officially retired from Helen says, much to the dismay of her legions of fans. Instead, she is taking up a new career in photography, and the speaking of Japanese, possibly inspired by our Japanese photographer boyfriend Munenori.

As for me - I'm off to bed. I'm really bloody tired. I'm procrastinating a bit because I never know how to end things - so I think I'll go out with a whimper...

Bombastic Train Journey

Well, we're back in Mumbai, or Bombay, or whatever you're supposed to call it... there's a really interesting, not-at-all-marked divide as to who uses which, but Helen and I have decided to settle for Bombay, because then all our experiences here will be Bombastic.

We pulled into Bombay last night after twelve hours on the train. Taking the train in India is actually one of the few experiences that lives up to the romance of expectation. As you settle into your sleeper compartment, the wheels start turning, and the Train Song starts up... a symphony of toy and food and drink wallahs advertising their wares. In booming voices -

"CheesesandwhichbhajiOMlette!"
"Tomaaato SOUP! Tomaaato SOUP!"
"CoffeecoffeeNEScoffeeeeeeeee!"
"BIS-keeeeeee! BIS-keeeeeee!"

Underpinning the whole thing like a Gloria or Dominus is the chai-wallah with his deep intonation of

"Chaaaaaaaaaaai! Chaaaaaaaaaai! Caaaaaaaaaaai!"

as he swings his kettle like a brazier, spilling wafts of cinnamon and cardamon and vanilla fleetingly beneath your nose. Every couple of stations, there is a flurry of activity, as the wallahs in their bright orange catering company shirts haul empty ice-cream and samosa and cheese sandwhich containers off the train and cart new ones on. Enterprising old women appear at the windows with baskets of bananas or hot roasted peanuts on their heads - beggers poke their fingers through the grates.

In the brief interludes between vendors strolling up and down the aisle bellowing, people-watching can keep you more than adequately occupied. The train to Bombay was especially good for this, as the people going there seemed more modern than those travelling in the opposite direction. We nearly passed out when we realised that there were women on the train wearing jeans. One had even chopped all her hair off. After sarees everywhere - even Delhi - it was a bit of a shock.

The other option is to stare out the window and watch the country change from red and dusty with palm trees galore, to wet and lush, to suburban, to urban... or if you're Helen, listen to cello adagios on your iPod and read The Odyssey.

In any case, it was great to be hurtling back towards the city - although saying goodbye to Shae was a bit sad. When you spend so much time with a complete stranger, you form a particular relationship with them - and it's odd to think that I won't see someone I spent two weeks of my life in close contact with for a year at least.

In anycase, that's that. What else? We spent our last few days in Goa visitng Panjim and Old Goa taking photographs, and went to the weekly markets at Anjuna. The markets were fun - rows and rows of tents set up like a makeshift village in a field in the middle of nowhere, perched on the shore. Amongst the usual crap we found some really beautiful things - rugs and shawls and Tibetan silver, embroideries, ground shell jewellery, shoes... and I took a photo of a whole row of Che Guevara T-shirts, flapping in the breeze.

"5 rupees for Che!" the vendor shouted out - and at that price it was almost worth it. Shae got her nose pierced by a woman who looked like Bjork, and Jane, our Irish speech-therapist/hippie friend (insert cheap "Irish accent/speech impediment" joke here), disappeared and came back with a giant moonstone bracelet. You could read your future in that thing. Helen and I walked around eating ice-cream. It was stinking hot in that field, and the ice-cream was easily the most exciting thing that happened to us that day. We took some very repetitive photos of gypsies and spice vendors and rows of shoes glistening in the sunshine, and went home all of us tired, happy, and loaded up with bangles.

Helen and I have been taking it easy here in Bombay, eating lunch at the restaurant next door to our hotel - we were the only white faces in there, I think - and wandering around. We're planning to do some last-minute shopping at the markets tonight, and catch a Bollywood film - hooray! Our grossly over-priced hotel even has a hot shower, so I will be soaking myself thoroughly. I thought I had a tan, but it turns out it was just dust from the train...


Helen says:

After recieving this glowing review, I have been forced to eat my words and grovel at Helen's feet, begging her to take some time out of her busy schedule and humour an old friend:

"Tell Helen says that I love her sardonic wit and adore the way she is able to sum up, in very few words, the absolute essence of her experiences. Her comments balance your writing perfectly... beg her from me not to stop!!!!"

A request with four exclamation points cannot be denied. Hopefully, this spells the end of my italicised attempts to account for Helen's whereabouts.

G'day everyone ! What's cracking?

I apologise for the lack of Helen Says-es during the last few weeks. I've been keeping busy getting in touch with my inner-hippie or, as Jess likes say, inner-ex-chiropractor-hit-mid-life-crisis-gone-on-vacation-to-India-15-years-ago-and-never-came-back/Israeli trance-dancer/Eurotrash.

Since I've spoken to you through your computer screen last, I've become a fully-fledged hippie! I've made friends with a Raaasta-mon (A.K.A. Jane with her monster dreds) and joined a drum circle on the beach. We sat in a circle jammin' on our djambes and I even tasted their apple pie. Jess and Shaemus were thoughtful enough to tell me after I digested that magic slice that it would surely have been packed full of mushrooms! Fortunately for Helen says, I came out of that drum circle with nothing more than a smile on my face. Rasta Jane on the other hand... She felt the wrath of that pie at her 8am yoga class the next morning when the crabs scuttled out of the Indian Ocean, up the sunny beaches of Arambol and into her yoga hut to "get her".

Not only have I excelled in djambe rythms, but I'm now down with quantam physics! In further attempts to get in touch with my inner-Israeli-trance-dancer, I sat at a rooftop cafe (with my fellow Israelis) one night watching a DVD of What the Bleep Do We Know? projected onto an all-natural, organic cotton sheet hanging off the bamboo roof!

I became even more intouch with my inner-topless-Eurotrash-doing-yoga-on-the-beach-in-my-g-string-at-sunset (vicariously) when Shae had her nose pierced by Bjork. This was possibly maybe (PLEASE let there be other Bjork fans reading this blog) the penultimate step in the long and windy road to becoming the world's whitest white-girl hippie, the ultimate being the massage I copped from some barbers today.

Allow me to digress...

I had about an hour to kill this evening while Jess was writing on this thing, so I thought it might be an idea to see if I could score a massage to rid my body of the damage done on the 12 hour train trip.

After being harassed 24/7 by massouses (please forgive my spelling) in Goa, I thought it would be piss-easy to find somewhere in Bombay! How wrong was I...

I only had about 20 minutes left until I had to write Helen Says so in a last ditch effort I ran into a barber shop and yelled "Gimme a massage, STAT!" So the fellows there put me in a chair and wrapped a towel around my shoulders. So far, so good. Then they promptly massaged 2 or 3 handfuls of Vaseline into my face and clean hair. Disappointing! THEN, my eyes sealed shut by the sheer weight of the mighty petroleum jelly - but heightening my other senses in the process - I heard my barber switch on some electrical instrument which began to buzz in fury! I used all the strength in my mortal body to open my eyes just in time to see my Warwick Capper-esque mullet-ed barber poised, [I should take this time to apologise for the length of this sentence] with what looked like a power-sander attached to a rubber glove with cable going into the wall, ready to go to work on my face!

"Yikes!", I screamed. I decided to flee the scene, seconds later there was nothing left in that shop but a cloud of dust in the shape of Helen, Road-Runner-style.

Does anyone know the nightmare when (and Steve I know you will - Jess told us tales of your late night experimental dental surgery back in the day) you're at the dentist, and you wake up from the gas to see Dr. Death with a power drill or chainsaw rather than an electric toothbrush hovering over your mouth, ready to strike! If you have experienced such a nightmare, then, and only then, could you perhaps begin to grasp the magnitude of my newly aquired fear of barber-shop-massages... and Australian footballers from the 80s.

Gotta run, have a hot date at the movies with a choc top (and Jess).
See you soon!

Love Helen

Goa-ing Strong

That is, the puns about Goa are still coming thick and fast. Ah, puns about Goa. You never get old.

Turns out I won't be going to Hampi after all, which sucks, frankly. Part of the reason we're spending so long here was so we could fit in a trip there in the middle, but the overnight bus is booked out for the next few days and that's really the only affordable way of getting there. Rats.

I'm not really complaining, of course, but I didn't come to India to spend a week lying on the beach, lovely as it is. Still, I have no doubt that I'll be back sometime in the near future - that is, as soon as finances allow - that is, retirement. I'll go to Hampi when I retire.

However, if one has to spend a week lying on the beach (...I'm so unfortunate), there's no arguing that Goa is a pretty good place to do it. This place really does have a split personality. There's the Eurotrash and Israeli trance crowd, the dropouts and the stoners on the one hand - all the whities that have made Goa famous for its party scene - and the locals on the other, who, away from the beaches are just mainly living traditional village lives. They come to bathe in the ocean in sarees, standing bright against the gemlike sea, while half-naked Western women haggle with male sarong vendors on the beach. Some of these women make me blush. Really.

The women wear sarees, but the men just get around in their jocks, which Shae is immensely taken with. She's got photos of men walking along in Mumbai holding hands, as well - this place is homosocial heaven. While coming out is still pretty much the worst thing a Good Indian Boy or Girl could do, society has no issue with the full gamet of homosocial behaviour - which means that boys walk along the beach in their wet singlets and jocks with their arms slung around each other's waists, totally platonically. It's hot.

The bathing-in-sarees thing seems really sensible, and I suppose the funny thing is is that India has made me quite conservative, not in thought, but in dress - I'm so used to the women being covered head to toe and so aware of being respectful to the culture that it's become second nature to cover myself completely (less chance of sunburn, too). I mean, it's not as though I get around half-naked in Melbourne, either, but Shae lent me a skirt that was above the knee the other night and I barely felt dressed at all. Getting out in my bikini was horrifying - although I think that had more to do with not having seen any sun (malaria pills make you really photosensitive) or having done any excercise in the last five weeks. Ugh.

There's not really much to do, though, except laze about, except get Ayurvedic massages (there are little massage huts everywhere) and shop for hippie-chic threads. Last night we went to see the advertised "Jam Session" at a local restaurant. The place was packed out, but open-air, so we went to the restaurent next door and ordered a beer. The band came on and it was, quite honestly, the worst thing I've ever heard, playing original songs like "Hey hey, little monkey" and butchering a medley of Bob Marley classics. The "jam" part of the session came when a random balding, bearded German guy came up on stage and played a selection of pseudo-folk songs on a borrowed guitar. We thought his head would fall off from all the emphatic shaking it was doing between lyrics.

There was also an Afro'd white guy who falsetto'd into the mic at ill-timed intervals, and a drummer tapping a tabla and grinning manaically at all the pretty patterns. Patterns everywhere, man. And so many colours. The crowd really dug it. Best Worst Gig Ever.

There was also a big Hindu bash on the beach, which was a bit like a school fete. The music was blaring, and then some guy started making speeches over the megaphone in Hindi. The speakers were aimed right at our tiny bamboo hut, so we got the full benefit. We're used to it by now, though... the other morning we were woken at dawn by a bunch of hippies having a drum circle on the beach. There are people here who walk up and down the beach strumming their guitars and singing. I kind of wish I'd brought my flute along so I could break out into some Mozart over the loudspeaker. That'd learn those hippies...



Helen says:

Helen is off lazing on the beach - again - and it might be time that we acknowledge the failure of this section. It was a noble experiment... Apparently, she has no desire to spend half an hour every couple of days in an internet cafe purging her own inane observations onto the interweb - unlike some of us writing on this blog... Whatever will become of an Arts student with no taste for literary self-indulgance?

"It's a Goa!"

( ...has been Helen's response in the affirmative to every question posed since we ditched the city, took a 12-hour train and wound up in Arambol, in the north of this state.)

Goa, from what we've seen today, is a pretty amazingly contradictory place. Everyone we spoke to before we came warned us, "It's not India," - and they were right. I do kind of miss Mumbai, for all the pollution, the poverty, and the commercial hustle: you don't get more India than that. Still, with me still recuperating and Shae coming down with a cold, we thought that a few days on the beach sounded like a good idea - and just because it's not India doesn't mean there isn't plenty to see.

Oh no. Arambol is supposed to be one of the most relaxed places in Goa, but if so I really can't imagine what the others are like. Here it's a frenticly low-key mix of faded hippies, stoners, middle-aged drop-out ex-lawyers, Israeli psy-trance freaks, multitudes of backpackers, locals, shopkeepers, tradies, and cows. There's no getting away from the cows in India - they wander on beaches framed by palm fronds past topless, G-stringed Eurotrash; by yoga devotees doing stretches as the sun goes down; and into the rubbish bins beside the restaurants and beach shacks that line the shore.

We're staying in one of these shacks, for about $3 a night each - a little bamboo hut with a double bed, mattress on the floor for the third of us (we plan to rotate), and a little plaster Jesus above the light switch. Goa is the most heavily Christian place we've found so far, being a former Portugese colony - there's a little whitewashed church lit up by neon lights on the main road, and crucifixes and statues everywhere. We're planning to spend some time in Old Goa, where there are many many cathedrals, some ruins, and the relics of St Francis Xavier, who last went on show two years ago and who will be resting deep in the tombs when we visit.

It's odd to be in a place with such a heady mix of religious devoutness and hedonism. We're planning to go to church tomorrow to atone for the day on sloth we've had today, browsing the stalls and drinking Indian wine. Then for me it's on to Hampi, and after that... well, a few days of leisure never killed anyone, did they?


Helen says:

Helen is off drinking wine and so not available for comment. I plan to join her very, very soon.

Continued as promised...

...though I still don't have much to say.

I'm back at the Salvation Army Hostel, where we've been leading a very school-camp-like existance for the last couple of days. Mumbai is much more expensive than Delhi, oddly enough, so the Rs 150 we're paying for a bunk bed, a breakfast consisting of white bread, jam and a banana, and all the cold showers we can handle is a comparative bargain. Also, there's the free entertainment provided by the Indian women staying there hacking up their phlegm in the early hours of the morn. Hacking up one's phlgem is a national passtime in India. Sometimes I feel as though I'm on holiday in a TB colony.

We got into Mumbai late last night, although it seems much longer ago than that. It's such a vibrant place - though when people tell you that it's filthy, they aren't kidding. We taxi'd it out to the Hanging Gardens today and could hardly see across the bay to the other side of the city for all the smog. It's a city of tar-filled lungs, of slums, and of colour - so much colour. The air smells alternately like roses and sulphur gas.

It's funny how precisely the mood of a place changes with its climate. Jaipur was beautiful, dusty-pink, with pigs snuffling in the streets, and kites for some reason lodged in every tree. The people moved slowly there, being technically in the desert, though the tourist-hassling aspect was at full bore. Mumbai has the peculiar affability I always associate with places on large bodies of water - Can Tho had it, as did Hoi An - as though every day is a holiday.

We met Shae, Dave's friend, at the hostel, after a gruelling two-hour taxi trip - the traffic here is incredible. We got in tired, and were immediately taken to the local pub by Shae, her friend Anna, and a career counsellor from Melbourne Uni named Julie - five Melbourne girls sharing a beer on the other side of the world. It was pretty surreal. We took the circuitous route back to the hostel, via the India Gate, and took in some of the night-lit sights. This area has such a funny British Raj feel to it; colonial architecture and red double-decker buses, taxis instead of rickshaws, and an incredibly elaborate train station built like some Duke or Earl's place in the country somewhere.

Shae had, with great forsight, organised a taxi to drive us around for the morning on a photography excursion, to places like the Hajiali and the Hanging Gardens, finishing off with a jaunt at the Ghandi Museum. The museum was really cool, the highlights being a recreation of the room where Ghandi slept, and a series of three dozen one-and-a-half by one metre dioramas, each depicting a key scene in Ghandi's life, using very elaborately handcrafted dolls. It sounds odd, and could have been really condescending, but instead it was a good way to follow his biography without the usual drily-captioned photos and heavy tomes printed onto the walls. Yes, dolls. You had to be there, alright?

The Shanteram reading turned out to be for Saturday (if in fact it's happening at all); we just had dinner and a beer instead. Right now, Helen, Anna and Shae are out at an Indian hip-hop night - I'm bloody exhausted, so as soon as I finish this, I'm off to bed. The bug I wrote about wasn't too bad but the hangover from being sick is a bitch - I'm just tired all the time. Of course, I've been getting up at four to catch trains and whatnot and haven't really slept for the last few days, so it could just be that. I'll let you know in the morning.


Helen says:

What, weren't you listening? Helen is off dancing to Indian hip-hop and is having far too good a time to sit around this hostel thinking of witty comments to write on her friend's blog. Jeeze.

Pinch and a punch...

...what am I, six?

This is going to be a brief one, as I don't really have much time. Also, I don't really know where to start with this entry - we've had an action-packed last few days, and listing everything we did in them would be tedious and time-consuming.

If you want to know the sights we see'd in Jaipur, I suggest you grab a guidebook and look up the entries for the Mammoth Crazy Giant Jaipur Fort; the Legoland Telescopic Theme-Park; and the Honeycomb Observation Deck; all of which have real names that I've forgotten. It will make for a fun fact-finding expedition. (Actually, I'm just too lazy to run upstairs and grab the Lonely Planet, but I'll fill you in on the real names when I can be bothered - possibly, never.)

We see'd all these sights with a hugely enthusiastic French guy that we met on the Agra-Jaipur train. His name is Sylvian, he's a jeweller, and apparently he found us hugely amusing, as after a few hours of conversation in (his) broken English and (my) broken French, he declared,

"I will go shopping tomorrow with you. It will be funny."

"Fun," we corrected, fearing being laughed at.

"Fun," he amended, "but also funny."

In any case, we never made it to the bazaars - there goes our dorky plan to get matching friendship rings in Jaipur. We did see practically everything else the town has to offer, though, courtesy of Sylvian, who had organised a driver for the day and whisked us around the city in a whirlwind or spectatorship and tourism. And all without us contributing more than a few dollars. He told me (while Helen was sleeping on the train) that an older traveller had shouted him a day on the town twenty years ago, and so he was repaying the favour, and Helen and I should take out some young kids when we're jaunting around the subcontinent at the ripe old age of 42.

So that was lovely. The next day at four in the morning - I was suprised to find out that they have one in the morning, too - we got up to take the train to Delhi - then on to Mumbai - then many things after that that I will detail the next time I write, as now I am off to see Gregory Roberts of Shanteram fame do a reading around the corner. You can take the girl out of Melbourne Uni Arts...


Helen says:

Still reeling from the back-gammon loss; too ashamed to type.



To be continued (like so many cheap radio serials)...