Holy Cow! India 2015

Holy Cow!

A Lunatic Escapes To (and From) India

 

Note:  As I’m posting this (on Christmas Eve), I’ve been back from India for less than 10 days.  Things have been very busy, so I’m just throwing up a quick outline of short paragraphs and will be adding detailed pages later.  Between the emails I sent back to my family and a few other things I wrote while in India, I hope to have this section looking a little less like a construction site in time for New Years.

 

Ah India, land of the Rajas (oh wait, the last one died of old age while I was there), elephants (I didn’t see any, except on on t-shirts), and oh so many cows (often in very unexpected places ). I’ve just returned from a working vacation (code phrase for “We flew you someplace different, so shut up and get to work!“) there. Ah well, I guess if one wants a surreal break from China, India’s a good choice to try a curry-flavored version of surreality.

First things first – Pretty much unless you’ve got an Indian passport, you’re going to need a visa. You can try the e-visa route (pray it’s approved and not lost inside the system when you arrive), or you can take a trip to Guangzhou and find out that your Chinese visas were very simple and straightforward in comparison to getting one for India. Just follow the helpful instructions on the Indian consulate website, then to redo everything later because those instructions were not up to date , and keep a large bottle of baijiu handy.

Also, you may find yourself in need of some travel vaccinations.  If you’re in some places, your local doc or health department may have them all.  If you’re in China, getting travel vaccinations for India is challenging.  Click here to see how fun the mini-adventure of getting vaccinated in China can be.

 

 

Even though airfares are down significantly from last year, I was VERY surprised that I could get there and back for about $500, but this did involve a very late arrival in Mumbai and a 2 AM flight back to Hong Kong.  

I almost didn’t get found by my colleague at the Mumbai airport. I’d changed planes in Delhi so arrived on a domestic flight. Turns out that the main domestic arrivals area was some distance from international arrivals (technically, I believe it’s 2 separate airports sharing one airport code  – at least until the new airport is fully completed.) Then, after a long drive, I ended up in the city of Surat in Gujurat State (at about 5 am). Being carnivorous, being in India presented me with issues.  Beef isn’t exactly a top of the menu item in much of India , and Gujurat’s large Muslim population kept pork off my dinner plate.    Even so, at least I managed to get a turkey sandwich the day after arriving so I could celebrate Thanksgiving weekend with Indians. 

 

 

After some efforts, I did find quite a bit of Indian food I liked. My personal favorite is a veggie wrap called a frankie, available from many street vendors for only 40-50 rupees (for reference sake, 1 RMB is just over 10 rupees – this made prices MUCH easier for me to figure out).  Frankies came in several varieties and I am particularly fond of the cheese ones.

For those times when I wasn’t ready for more street food and didn’t want to do the “point and pray” method common to learning a new country’s cuisine, I found cheese pizzas were surprisingly common. Domino’s offered an adequate one near the hotel, and the food court at the VR Mall had multiple places with pizza on the menu. 

Although I didn’t do a lot of touristy things, I did try to visit a couple of local temples. The Buddhist temple was mysteriously missing (perhaps the temple itself became one with the universe ). My attempt to get into a very large Hindu temple also failed. Evidently, the local deity had taken the afternoon off and locked the gates on the way out.

One semi-tourist thing I did was follow in Gandi’s footsteps to a beach outside of Surat.  He was doing something important, but my pale imitation will only result in something to put on french fries.  Click here to read where I followed Gandi’s path.

 

 

There was one other major side trip out of town.  That was to Giradhodh Falls (Click to read the details, including a world-changing challenge from a Lunatic) and Saputara Hill Station.

 

 

In China, I often get people wanting me to answer impossible questions about “All Americans.” American diversity is mostly due to immigration. India seems much more diverse, but most of the diversity is internal. Despite the occasional conflicts, overall, they seem to get along quite well. The only thing I could put in the “All Indians . . . ” category is that all the Indians I met were very proud to be part of such a varied country.

One specific thing that did deeply impress me about India was their efforts to accommodate so many religions. Even though Jains are only about 1% of the population in Gujurat, nearly every restaurant (even the frankie stands along the street) offered food that met Jain diet restrictions (vegetarian, but no root vegetables).

Living in China does make me very jealous of one aspect of Indian culture. In China, if I see a qipao being worn on the street, my first guess is that the wearer is not making a statement for traditional fashion, but is really a waitress on her way to or from work. If I see some other fancy traditional outfit, it’s almost always for a wedding or holiday.  Not so in India.  Nearly every clothing store has a large section for what’s called ethnic clothing. Although it’s more common for females to dress in ethnic clothes as everyday fashion, quite a few of the men do too.

I was so impressed that a few times I staked out a good place just to catch the view of Indian girls cruising past on motorcycles with veils, scarves, and other bits of cloth flowing behind them.  Another pleasant surprise was seeing veiled girls parking their motorbikes and then emerging from their wrappings like butterflies coming out of their cocoons.

Some groups were easier to identify than others. Although rare in Surat, between the turbans and the never-cut facial hair, Sikh men were the easiest to spot. Most of the local Hindu guys were clean shaven, and the bulk of the Muslim guys went for beards, usually without mustaches. On average, Hindu ladies dressed in much brighter colors than their Muslim counterparts. For reasons I haven’t yet determined, so many of the military, police, and security guys I saw were sporting impressive mustaches that I was left wondering if that’s part of the uniform. 

Like China, Indians seem to use car horns as an integral part of navigation. What I found odd was that most of the trucks had labels on the back asking other drivers to honk. This resulted in Indian traffic being even louder than Chinese traffic. After finding a second “horn happy” driving culture, which also tends to take a very open-minded interpretation of traffic rules. I spent some time contemplating if there could be any possible valid reason for this. I’ve finally reached a conclusion which fits all the available facts. Drivers in India and China somehow are using sonar to help them navigate in conditions which are both very crowded and have so many vehicles driving in random directions.

Have you ever wondered if Bollywood exaggerates the amount of dancing in India? Maybe during the rest of the year they do, but during wedding season, street dance parades (complete with anything from a small set of DJ gear in a truck bed up to a semi-trailer loaded with speakers and disco lights) are so common that weddings can end up colliding. A little bit of the music is traditional or Indian pop, but most of it sounds like recycled techno leftovers – perfect for dancing in the middle of a major highway.

One suggestion. Don’t get too close to a street wedding, unless you want to risk being dragged in to dance.  If this happens, escape can be difficult, at least until the groom’s father comes to deal with you.

After a couple weeks wandering the streets and malls of Surat, and enjoying being surprised by the occasional highway horse or camel drawn wagon, a couple local friends and I retreated to the lovely tropical Palolem Beach in Goa State. Although my laptop (and work) followed me, it was nice being able to sit on the front porch of my palatial beach house shack and listen to the waves while slaving over a hot keyboard.

The beach had a couple of cool features.  First, the semi-wild dogs were a lot less mangy than the ones in the cities (seriously, get your rabies shots before you go!) as well as somewhat friendlier. And, in addition to the omnipresent Indian street cows (both urban and rural) there were also beach cows.

 

 

I’m still contemplating what’s in it for the cows. There’s no grass on the beach. The crows (which apparently ate all the seagulls ) swoop in for any bit of food accidentally dropped. The dogs are experts at using advanced canine hypnotic “feed me” begging tactics, so there’s nothing there for cows to eat. My working hypothesis is that some of the cows are just trying to get a tan, but I’ll need to go back and gather more data to be sure.

 

 

The beach was incredibly nice, but something was stalking me (besides the hermit crabs and mosquitoes).  I felt a little ill the morning of the flight to Goa, but felt fine later. Then I felt a little ill the next morning, but recovered by lunchtime.  The following morning, I woke up feeling extremely ill. I had a pretty good idea where this was headed, so drank as much water as possible to try to make that which would inevitably come next be a little less painful.

Although I hadn’t gotten into any temples in Surat, my beach shack had a bathroom which was properly equipped with the appropriate emergency religious edifice. This allowed me to kneel before the porcelain altar and loudly call out the name of the god of regret (R-R-A-A-A-A-A-L-L-L-F-F-F-F) as I offered up my previous evening’s dinner. 

Happily for me, in my quest for assorted pre-travel vaccinations, I’d visited the good people at Global Doctor in Dongguan. While there, I was also equipped with enough Cipro to contain any sort of food-borne illness. I’m still not feeling 100% recovered, but I’d be writing this from inside an Indian hospital instead of in my village in DG if I hadn’t had those pills with me.

One thing that’s well worth the time while in Goa is to get an Arurvedic massage. It’s quite different than the classic Chinese foot massage. These can cost 1000-2000 rupees per hour, but being a massage fanatic, it was worth the higher price just to check it out. The only hard part is getting all the oil off afterward.

One final thing I did was to arrange one of the best jokes ever for my wife.  You can read about my adventure with tattoos in Palolem any my wife’s reaction here.

 

 

I do hate spoilers, but there’s one very important thing you need to know before trying to fly out of India. You can’t just walk up to the counter with your ID and get your boarding pass (which is how I handle plane tickets in other countries). Those nice guys with big mustaches (and bigger guns) won’t let you inside if you don’t have your reservation on paper or available in your phone. Just to complete my nightmare scenario, although I did have the info in my email account, there was no wifi outside the airport. I couldn’t access it through a friend’s phone, because my email account requires a code texted to my Chinese phone (which didn’t work in India) to get in from any new device.

In the end, using a courtesy phone, and a LOT of explaining, begging, pleading, and finally threats to become a beggar living in front of the airport entrance, I managed to convince an airline employee to print out a paper with my reservation and bring it out to me. Then I got to wait around until my 2 am flight back to HK, I celebrated my arrival back in the carnivorous lands where all meat is on the menu by grabbing a ham and cheese sandwich at one of the airport 7-11’s before catching a bus back to DG.