Magic Bag-fixin' boyz

This is where they work and live.  I am standing in the doorway, the exit to their place.

Calcutta

Cheap, good food.  Busy streets.  Lots of beggars.  Closed zoos on Thursdays.  Big library.  Decent tailors.  "They really fixed my bag, dude.  Like, it's workin'." -Josh.  note: this is quite a statement.  Josh's bag was amazingly bad.  The zipper-- no, the failure-to-be-a-zipper-- well-- you get the idea.  But they fixed it.  He did.  Thanks, Mr. Tailor.  Bag man.  Good work.  You did the impossible. 

The 30 hour train ride wasn't too bad...  I am not sure if I can use that statement anymore.  I am not sure what 'too bad' is...  I keep having to reevaluate my standards on that issue.  Anyway-- train ride: survivable.  We did have nine people in our six person compartment.  One was blind, and one liked to rest his feet in between my legs, in my crotch, while I read.  One guy stole a good portion of Josh's bed space, but made up for it by giving us some food.  Our bread somehow got infested by little ants, but they were tasteless, so all was fine.  To save a few dollars, we spent 3-4 hours sitting in the train station at the end of the run, so that we could check into a guest house late enough to avoid paying for that night.  We made it.  I am pretty sure I have been train-lagged for the last few days.  This morning is the first time I have felt fully awake-- and we are leaving this city at 7pm.  Ah, Calcutta.  Your egg rolls-- which bear no resemblance to any other egg roll I have ever eaten-- were quite tasty, despite the oil.  I will miss the cheap, tastiness of your food most of all.  That street thali, for roughly 25 cents, was superb.  Keep scraping things out of gutters, frying it up, and serving it to the populace.

We go to Varanasi.  This is a place where people bathe in the river Ganga for religious reasons, it is the music capital of the country, it is an intellectual center, it used to be called Benares, ...  Yes.  That is where we are going.  And when I say people bathe in the river Ganga, I don't mean people clean themselves in it-- if anything, the river comes out on the better side of the deal, having been able to lose some sludge onto the bodies of the holy penitents, or whoever is crazy enough to take a dip in that swill.  The Ganga is essentially sewer water-- Josh looked it up.  I think I am dwelling too much on this river.  I hope it is as exciting as everyone says it will be.

Yar, we go.  Later, folks.  See you all so soon!

My Temple

This is a glimpse of my temple in Hampi. 

Auroville

"Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity."  -the Mother

We were not aloud to stay in Auroville because Auroville has policies requiring guests to stay for at least a week, and still frowns on those staying less than two, and seeing as we could only spend three nights (and promise to contribute a mere three days of labor), we were told that we were "not serious enough" for Auroville, and were kindly advised to go and realize human unity somewhere else.  So we went to a small town outside of Auroville, and we have spent our last several nights here, spitefully declining to volunteer our labor to support a cause that similarly declined to support us.  No, that is not true...  It would have been a long walk back into Auroville, and I was nearing the end of my book, and we needed to go into Pondicherry to buy rail tickets, etc...  We will head out to Auroville today to see what is going down.  The UW group will be back tonight from their weekend trip, so there will be a place where we are welcome.  And we rented a scooter, so it will no longer be a 5k walk in 90 degree weather.  

 We rented the scooter for today because we needed to head into P-town for those train tickets...  Scooters are expensive-- almost 2 dollars for a whole day-- so we only rented one.  We had already talked, a few days earlier, about the fact that Pondicherry is quite evidently one of the worst places to drive in India.  It is way overcrowded, with bicycles, rickshaws, mopeds and motorcycles rushing and flowing like water in a stream, interspersed with fast fish, cars dodging around and honking their way through motorcycle sized gaps, and great, blunt canoes, buses overloaded with 100+ people, counting on blaring horns and roaring engines to clear a path through the inferior transportational debris with which they must marginally share the limited roadway.  Buses trying to pass buses during rush hour on small, crowded streets, vehicles darting from side roads, or nosing out into traffic so as to stop enough of it to be able to cross the street-- that is, if they didn't just wing it, floor it, and hope for an opening-- these were, these are, the every day, every hour, every minute happenings of the streets of Pondicherry, and to a greater or lesser extent, the streets of most every city in India.  I expected it to be difficult and scary to navigate in these conditions.  Surprisingly, however, it really wasn't that bad.  Moving along at 40k, flowing with the stream of movement, feeling the changes in conditions around me as they occurred, weaving, dodging, braking and accelerating in that giant game of frogger (calculators, anyone?), driving in those wild streets quickly became natural and easy, even with Josh on the back of our little 50cc bike (/lawn mower).  This was good.  We were able to get our errand accomplished, and we did not die, not even partially.

The coolest thing here: the bakery.  The Bakery!  Auroville's bakery is located about 200m from our room, and it is the first real bakery we have come across in India, baking real bread, real pastries, real cakes and sweets and whole wheat pumpernickel giant muffin loaves that are thick and dense and strong and weigh a ton and barely set you back 70 cents........!!!!   Oh, bread, how I look forward to baking and eating so much of you when I get home (in three weeks!)!  This bakery was unfortunately closed this morning when we walked over for breakfast, I believe due to the fact that today is a big Auroville holiday, the birthday of the Mother, one of two major spiritual philosophers (?) who were the founding idealists of Auroville.  I was bummed not to be able to get my hands on some of that fresh bread...  But we ended up getting lost in Pondicherry, running across a woman cooking up some breakfasty goods on a back street, and giving her the equivalent of about 70 cents to feed Josh and I up with some tasty brekkers.  So it was ok.  But bread is better.  Her food was rice flour, white flour, and oil (throw in some spices, sauces, etc).  The bakery has whole wheat.  No contest.  

Ok.  Tomorrow night Josh and I will hop on a train in Chennai, to ride up to Calcutta.  Hopefully we can stock up on bread for the ride tomorrow morning at the bakery.  We have 2.5 weeks left in India.  General excitement.  See you folks soon.

Rock Climbing and Ruins

Hampi is renowned for two things, both made of stone.  One is the ruins of a civilization of over 500,000 that lived here during the early part of this millennium, before being entirely razed by a rival empire.  The other is a whole lot of giant boulders.  Yesterday, we explored some ruins-- only 'some,' because this place is carpeted with ruins-- and climbed some boulders.  Climbed a sort of mountain/pile/stack of them, actually.  And, fittingly, on the top were some more ruins.  Which we explored.  The best bit of exploring yesterday found us in a dark series of corridors, connected in a U shape about some central room, lit only sparingly by a few shafts of light that slanted down through small holes crumbled in the granite ceiling.  Bats clung to the roof.  Except for the occasional flutter of wings, the room was filled with a heady silence, and the must and dank of ages.  The shadowed walls and columns were adorned with mysterious carvings.  Black recesses loomed with potential.  I felt like I had discovered something real in History, that I had stepped into a piece of History that, unlike the the Hampi civilization, had not fully died.  Secrets seemed to still swirl about, roused from the motes of dust to which they had clung for centuries, disturbed by my unsure steps in the darkness.  We stayed there for a little while, before moving on.  I am going back there today, to that little cave of history.
    Tonight we take a sleeper bus to Bangalore.  Tomorrow we will see a little bit of Bangalore, perhaps no more than the inside of a restaurant, before taking another bus to Puducherry, to check out Auroville.  A few days after that, we are booked for a 30 hour train from Chennai to Calcutta.  It is worth noting that one only has to remove a few letters from 'travelling' to get 'raving.'  30 hours on an Indian train may have us closer to the latter.
    3 weeks remain.  The trip is planned (yes, 'plan' is a part of my vocabulary) from here on out.  Delhi is in sight.
    Dance.

Chance

A 10 second auto-timer barely gave me enough time to climb/jump/scramble into this shot...  Overlooking Hampi, a big temple, a bazaar (not the one in the Josh pic), etc.

What remains of a Bazaar, perhaps, from 500+ years ago.  And Josh.

Blast!

Alas dear friends, along with Chances wallet, my camera seems to have grown legs and run off.  Damn!  This is a sad moment because we had some good pictures in there.  We won't have any pictures from Mumbai, where we found architecture straight out of Batman, enjoyed a beer at Leopold's, indulged our carnivorous selves at our favorite Mughal eatery, and strolled down the Queen's Necklace after having watched the sunset from Chowpatty beach.  Memories I hope will remain as vivid in my mind as they would have on the camera.  But nothing else is gone.  It was a mistake on my part for leaving my bag so close to the door and I've learned my lesson the hard way.  Grandma, Liza, and Joe, thanks for that camera, it did me well.  And Karen, thanks again for the batteries.  Hopefully I can get my hands on another camera that use the same kind.

Love,
Josh

Posers

Om Beach

The majority of the beaches are stretches of sand without rock..  But rock is beautiful.  So I take pictures of the rocks.  The sand is understood.

View from our current home

We are still here

We live in a hut thatched with palm leaves, behind a restaurant that knows how to make both muesli and pasta pretty well (a rarity), on Kudle beach, a stretch of sand roughly half a mile long, bounded on each end by palm-forested headlands of black rock and red earth.  We share our hut with a lot of inquisitive, hungry, rambunctious little rats, all named Sampson, too many mosquitos, and a load of other mysterious insects that appear to enjoy the warmth of a human body throughout the warmth of the night.  We read all day, interspersed with swimming and body surfing in the ocean to cool down, and eating to power ourselves on for further reading.  Cliff-side trail running on the headlands, south to further beaches, provides a welcome break from an otherwise sedentary lifestyle.  Long swims in the ocean, out to small rocky isles, serve this purpose as well.  The sun is very hot.  It is good that we are here during the winter.

Our spot

Cooking happens to the left, sleeping and reading happens to the right. 

I accidentally poured red paint all over myself-- this is not the worst sunburn I have ever had in my life.

No paint.  This is definitely the worst.  Feel sorry for me.  I do.