Hello ppl!
Sorry I haven't posted for so long, but I'm still alive, never fear! I haven't been kidnapped by gorrilas in the jungles of Laos, or buggered to death in a back ally of bangkok.... No, I have just been lying around on beaches either enjoying the sun or cursing the rain....
It's almost impossible for me to write any amusing anecdotes, cos there's just too many. It's been so long!! The problem is that internet here costs a fortune, so I cant relax and let the words flow as I'm always racing against the clock! Anyway, I just wanted to let you know I'm still alive and I will try and get you all up to date next time i'm in Bangkok and have cheap internet....
Btw, more India photos (the Taj Mahal!) have been uploaded here : http://community.webshots.com/user/undercover_hippy
bye for now!
Friday, June 27, 2003
Thursday, June 12, 2003
So much to write and so little time!
well, a lot has happened since I arrived in Bangkok, so i'd better start at the beginning....
As i may have mentioned, i met a swiss girl called Anna on the plane, and we found a guesthouse together in Khao sarn Road and decided to share a double room to save costs. The place seemed pretty nice although the room wasn't great. As we were arriving there was this big american lady having a huge shouting match with the owners, who were completely ignoring her. As she stormed off i said "what's up?"... "Don't stay here, it's a terrible place!" she cried! "why?" I asked "It..it... it just is!" She shouted and then stormed off.
Well, being a rascist bastard i just assumed that she was being a typical american tourist and getting in a strop about something trivial. As if to confirm this, a fellow english lager-drinking thug looked up from his beer Chang to say "I 'aven't ad any problems mate, it's noice n quoiet 'ere if you ask me"... so, i believed my fellow beer swiller and disregarded the fat american as being a silly fat american.
At 7am the next morning someone began trying to drill into my brain with a selection of larger power tools. Then i woke up and realised it wasn't my brain they were drilling, just the wall next to my head, which wasn't really any different to be honest. I went to the toilet to escape the noise only to discover that someone just on the other side of the toilet wall was methodically hitting it with a lump hammer. I decided enough was enough and set out to find a new guest house.
I found a nice little place on a road just off khao sarn called PC guesthouse. The old lady sat outside didn't speak any english, but she gave me a handful of keys, and someone had thoughtfully written the prices of the rooms on chalk on the doors, so i managed to find one without to much trouble.
After getting back and telling anna, we packed our stuff and left. After we arrived at our new guesthouse, anna suddenly realised that the 10,000 baht (US$200) from her money belt had gone missing! We worked out that the only time she had not been wearing it was when she had left it in her room once at the last guesthouse, but the door had been locked! So it HAD to be one of the staff at the guesthouse! I had also had my brand new shower gel stolen from the bathroom there, and the walls were covered in signs saying "The management is not responsible for belongings left in your rooms", which all added up to dodgyness...
We went back to the guesthouse and confrontd them. The old woman just laughed at us and waved us away with her hand (twice in 2 days!) so we went to the police station. There we were told that the police were all on a lunch break for an hour, but that even when they did get back they couldn't speak english, so we were better off going across town to the tourist police. This we did, and after a long wait a report was obtained....
Later that day we had a much nicer experience:
We went to see the Matrix, but the cinema was already fully booked! :( The guy told us we could get seats in the "Gold Class" cinema, but they were 500 baht instead of 140! We thought about it for a while, and then decided fuck it, we deserved it. Right choice! I cannot begin to describe how cool the Gold Class cinema is! We each had a huge leather lazyboy armchair with remote control reclinabilty, a blanket, a pillow, and socks to keep our feet warm in the aircon!!!! Each 2 chairs are sat either side of a little coffee table and you can order drinks from the bar. There's only about 30 chairs in the cinema, meaning you have loads of space! I actually curled up on my chair like it was a bed.... bliss! The movie was pretty good as I had very low expectations due to friends giving me poor reviews...
Today has been a tiring day:
I set out in the morning to see Wat Pho, which has a large reclining buddah. On the way to the bus, I was stopped by a tuk tuk driver who offered to take me around quite a few temples for 20 baht if I agreed to go to one "thai factory outlet" and look at the stuff there. I have seen this kind of thing before in india, so knew the score. I go in the shop and pretent to be interested, and the driver gets commision, in this case being coupons for free petrol. So i agreed and we set off. After the first temple, we go to a shop, which turns out to be a tailors, and I feign interest in getting suit made for about 10 mins before making my excuses and leaving.
Then we go to a second temple and it's closed, after which he asks me if I will please see another shop for him and he'll give me the rides for free. He seems very sweet so i agree, and once again spend 15 mins pretending to want to buy a suit. Then he took me to the golden pyramid (a big golden wat on a hill), but when I got down from my viewing, he is nowhere to be seen! Feeling rather stupid for being tricked so easily, I decided to get the bus, but while trying to decipher my out of date bus-route map, another tuk tuk driver approaches me.
I tell him that i'll only visit his shop AFTER I'been where I want to go, which he is not very happy about, so i offer to visit one shop first as a down payment, and then one more after as a bonus... He seems happy with this so we set off. When we arrive at the shop, I am filming with my video cam as I get out of the tuk tuk, and when i get into the shop the saleman greets me coldly. "Can i help you?" he says. "Yes, I'm interested in getting a suit made".. I say, but it's clear he is not going to serve me, and he bids me good day and ushers me out of the shop!!! All because I was filming as I got down from my tuk tuk!
My driver is very upset as he hasn't got his coupons, and he tells me to go and find another tuk tuk! "No way!", I tell him, a deals a deal, i went in your shop and did what you asked! He begs me to get out, telling me it's late and he has to go home! Still I refuse and tell him to take me to Wat Pho. I even offer to pay him for the trip, but he is not interested! He just wants the coupons, as today is the last day of the offer! I convince him to take me to another shop to try again, and this time I'm more convincing in my "customer pitch". Then i tell him to take me to wat Pho, which he almost does.
We arrive opposite a large and grand looking building, which looks decidedly like the Royal palace. "Wat Pho?" I say. "yes yes, wat pho!" he says. I know it isn't, but I'm too tired to argue by now, so i just get out. He pretends he's going to wait for me until I've crossed the road and then he burns off at full speed...
But my transport troubles aren't over yet! I decide I've had enough and head for the express boat which goes up the river to near where I stay. I've given up on seeing wat pho despite being 5 mins walk from it! I get a boat and ask for the stop which looks nearest to khao sarn on my map. After about 10 stops we still haven't reached the one on my map!!! I ask the conductor and she informs me that we passed it 4 stops ago! At this point i realise that my map is, for want of a better word, shit. All the names have been changed, as well as the routes.
I get off at the next stop, and then try to get back, which should be easy but isn't. The first boat I jump on I am told that it doesn't stop at my destination so i jump off. The next boat takes 20 mins to come and then the woman tries to charge me 6 baht just to do one stop!! The beauty of just going one stop however, is that if you refuse to pay, the conductor has to throw you off where you want to be, which is exactly what happens! :)
So now I'm back near my guesthouse and it's pissing down with rain.
This has been a VERY long blog entry, so I'm gonna go get a finger and eyeball massage....
seeya!
well, a lot has happened since I arrived in Bangkok, so i'd better start at the beginning....
As i may have mentioned, i met a swiss girl called Anna on the plane, and we found a guesthouse together in Khao sarn Road and decided to share a double room to save costs. The place seemed pretty nice although the room wasn't great. As we were arriving there was this big american lady having a huge shouting match with the owners, who were completely ignoring her. As she stormed off i said "what's up?"... "Don't stay here, it's a terrible place!" she cried! "why?" I asked "It..it... it just is!" She shouted and then stormed off.
Well, being a rascist bastard i just assumed that she was being a typical american tourist and getting in a strop about something trivial. As if to confirm this, a fellow english lager-drinking thug looked up from his beer Chang to say "I 'aven't ad any problems mate, it's noice n quoiet 'ere if you ask me"... so, i believed my fellow beer swiller and disregarded the fat american as being a silly fat american.
At 7am the next morning someone began trying to drill into my brain with a selection of larger power tools. Then i woke up and realised it wasn't my brain they were drilling, just the wall next to my head, which wasn't really any different to be honest. I went to the toilet to escape the noise only to discover that someone just on the other side of the toilet wall was methodically hitting it with a lump hammer. I decided enough was enough and set out to find a new guest house.
I found a nice little place on a road just off khao sarn called PC guesthouse. The old lady sat outside didn't speak any english, but she gave me a handful of keys, and someone had thoughtfully written the prices of the rooms on chalk on the doors, so i managed to find one without to much trouble.
After getting back and telling anna, we packed our stuff and left. After we arrived at our new guesthouse, anna suddenly realised that the 10,000 baht (US$200) from her money belt had gone missing! We worked out that the only time she had not been wearing it was when she had left it in her room once at the last guesthouse, but the door had been locked! So it HAD to be one of the staff at the guesthouse! I had also had my brand new shower gel stolen from the bathroom there, and the walls were covered in signs saying "The management is not responsible for belongings left in your rooms", which all added up to dodgyness...
We went back to the guesthouse and confrontd them. The old woman just laughed at us and waved us away with her hand (twice in 2 days!) so we went to the police station. There we were told that the police were all on a lunch break for an hour, but that even when they did get back they couldn't speak english, so we were better off going across town to the tourist police. This we did, and after a long wait a report was obtained....
Later that day we had a much nicer experience:
We went to see the Matrix, but the cinema was already fully booked! :( The guy told us we could get seats in the "Gold Class" cinema, but they were 500 baht instead of 140! We thought about it for a while, and then decided fuck it, we deserved it. Right choice! I cannot begin to describe how cool the Gold Class cinema is! We each had a huge leather lazyboy armchair with remote control reclinabilty, a blanket, a pillow, and socks to keep our feet warm in the aircon!!!! Each 2 chairs are sat either side of a little coffee table and you can order drinks from the bar. There's only about 30 chairs in the cinema, meaning you have loads of space! I actually curled up on my chair like it was a bed.... bliss! The movie was pretty good as I had very low expectations due to friends giving me poor reviews...
Today has been a tiring day:
I set out in the morning to see Wat Pho, which has a large reclining buddah. On the way to the bus, I was stopped by a tuk tuk driver who offered to take me around quite a few temples for 20 baht if I agreed to go to one "thai factory outlet" and look at the stuff there. I have seen this kind of thing before in india, so knew the score. I go in the shop and pretent to be interested, and the driver gets commision, in this case being coupons for free petrol. So i agreed and we set off. After the first temple, we go to a shop, which turns out to be a tailors, and I feign interest in getting suit made for about 10 mins before making my excuses and leaving.
Then we go to a second temple and it's closed, after which he asks me if I will please see another shop for him and he'll give me the rides for free. He seems very sweet so i agree, and once again spend 15 mins pretending to want to buy a suit. Then he took me to the golden pyramid (a big golden wat on a hill), but when I got down from my viewing, he is nowhere to be seen! Feeling rather stupid for being tricked so easily, I decided to get the bus, but while trying to decipher my out of date bus-route map, another tuk tuk driver approaches me.
I tell him that i'll only visit his shop AFTER I'been where I want to go, which he is not very happy about, so i offer to visit one shop first as a down payment, and then one more after as a bonus... He seems happy with this so we set off. When we arrive at the shop, I am filming with my video cam as I get out of the tuk tuk, and when i get into the shop the saleman greets me coldly. "Can i help you?" he says. "Yes, I'm interested in getting a suit made".. I say, but it's clear he is not going to serve me, and he bids me good day and ushers me out of the shop!!! All because I was filming as I got down from my tuk tuk!
My driver is very upset as he hasn't got his coupons, and he tells me to go and find another tuk tuk! "No way!", I tell him, a deals a deal, i went in your shop and did what you asked! He begs me to get out, telling me it's late and he has to go home! Still I refuse and tell him to take me to Wat Pho. I even offer to pay him for the trip, but he is not interested! He just wants the coupons, as today is the last day of the offer! I convince him to take me to another shop to try again, and this time I'm more convincing in my "customer pitch". Then i tell him to take me to wat Pho, which he almost does.
We arrive opposite a large and grand looking building, which looks decidedly like the Royal palace. "Wat Pho?" I say. "yes yes, wat pho!" he says. I know it isn't, but I'm too tired to argue by now, so i just get out. He pretends he's going to wait for me until I've crossed the road and then he burns off at full speed...
But my transport troubles aren't over yet! I decide I've had enough and head for the express boat which goes up the river to near where I stay. I've given up on seeing wat pho despite being 5 mins walk from it! I get a boat and ask for the stop which looks nearest to khao sarn on my map. After about 10 stops we still haven't reached the one on my map!!! I ask the conductor and she informs me that we passed it 4 stops ago! At this point i realise that my map is, for want of a better word, shit. All the names have been changed, as well as the routes.
I get off at the next stop, and then try to get back, which should be easy but isn't. The first boat I jump on I am told that it doesn't stop at my destination so i jump off. The next boat takes 20 mins to come and then the woman tries to charge me 6 baht just to do one stop!! The beauty of just going one stop however, is that if you refuse to pay, the conductor has to throw you off where you want to be, which is exactly what happens! :)
So now I'm back near my guesthouse and it's pissing down with rain.
This has been a VERY long blog entry, so I'm gonna go get a finger and eyeball massage....
seeya!
Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Greetings from Bangkok!
Yes, the indian saga is finally at an end....for now. I have flown out of the rubbish of calcutta and into the comparative luxury of Bangkok. It's quite wierd to think that people who fly direct from europe to Bangkok having never visited asia think that it's crazy, dirty, smelly etc etc, but having come from india it feels like it could be Singapore! It's so clean! and the streets have BINS on them! BINS! Can you believe it?! So I no longer have to throw my rubbish onto the largest pile of rotten garbage I can see!
Having said that, in Calcutta I encountered a whole new system of refuse disposal: In most of India, people just throw their rubbish on the floor, and then other people, seeing a pile developing, follow suit, until there is a veritable mountain of rubbish, which rots and festers and is eaten by cows and cockroaches. Then the rubbish just sits there until god decides to remove it personally, which he rarely does in my experience.
In calcutta however, it is a different story. During the day, everyone throws their rubbish onto the floor just about anywhere, and over the day it piles up, creating "trash drifts" against walls and gutters, and then towards the end of the day it starts to putrify in the heat and smell bad, and then, at about 5am, the magic happens!! Trucks arrive and men jump off and begin shovelling the layer of trash off the road and onto trucks!! Then the trucks drive away and dispose of the rubbish in a special place called "Somebody elses problem"! It's amazing! The amount of trash involved is mind boggling. I rekon about 20 metres of street fills one truck!
Anyway, so now I'm in Thailand. One of first experiences so far has been to be treated with rude indifference by salespeople!! Amazing! I was stood outside a shop looking at the hammocks as i thought i might buy one for the beach. Then the old woman from inside came out and started rearranging the hammocks I had just moved. I thought she was going to offer to show me one, but instead she gave me a withering look that said "How dare you disturb my display!". I said "are these not for sale?" pointing at the hammocks, and she waved me away with a scowl! Some people just dont want my money! It's amazing! In india, they may be pushy, but damn they know their customer service. The old woman was Thai-Chinese, and I have to say it reminded me of Singapore... :o
Anyway, for those that dont know, Khao sarn Road is the Bangkok equivalent of Thamel in Khatmandu. Just loads of tourists and loads of touristy shops and pubs etc etc. It sucks. I have to leave asap! Will decide soon....
seey'all.
Yes, the indian saga is finally at an end....for now. I have flown out of the rubbish of calcutta and into the comparative luxury of Bangkok. It's quite wierd to think that people who fly direct from europe to Bangkok having never visited asia think that it's crazy, dirty, smelly etc etc, but having come from india it feels like it could be Singapore! It's so clean! and the streets have BINS on them! BINS! Can you believe it?! So I no longer have to throw my rubbish onto the largest pile of rotten garbage I can see!
Having said that, in Calcutta I encountered a whole new system of refuse disposal: In most of India, people just throw their rubbish on the floor, and then other people, seeing a pile developing, follow suit, until there is a veritable mountain of rubbish, which rots and festers and is eaten by cows and cockroaches. Then the rubbish just sits there until god decides to remove it personally, which he rarely does in my experience.
In calcutta however, it is a different story. During the day, everyone throws their rubbish onto the floor just about anywhere, and over the day it piles up, creating "trash drifts" against walls and gutters, and then towards the end of the day it starts to putrify in the heat and smell bad, and then, at about 5am, the magic happens!! Trucks arrive and men jump off and begin shovelling the layer of trash off the road and onto trucks!! Then the trucks drive away and dispose of the rubbish in a special place called "Somebody elses problem"! It's amazing! The amount of trash involved is mind boggling. I rekon about 20 metres of street fills one truck!
Anyway, so now I'm in Thailand. One of first experiences so far has been to be treated with rude indifference by salespeople!! Amazing! I was stood outside a shop looking at the hammocks as i thought i might buy one for the beach. Then the old woman from inside came out and started rearranging the hammocks I had just moved. I thought she was going to offer to show me one, but instead she gave me a withering look that said "How dare you disturb my display!". I said "are these not for sale?" pointing at the hammocks, and she waved me away with a scowl! Some people just dont want my money! It's amazing! In india, they may be pushy, but damn they know their customer service. The old woman was Thai-Chinese, and I have to say it reminded me of Singapore... :o
Anyway, for those that dont know, Khao sarn Road is the Bangkok equivalent of Thamel in Khatmandu. Just loads of tourists and loads of touristy shops and pubs etc etc. It sucks. I have to leave asap! Will decide soon....
seey'all.
Monday, June 09, 2003
Well, last night I managed to see a cool indian movie! It was actually a Bengali movie, not a hindi one. The difference being that it's not "bollywood", it's made in calcutta. (Bollywood is west coast, Bombay). Anyway, it was actually quite good. It made me laugh in places where it was actually SUPPOSED to be funny! The humour was corny, but actually pretty good. The story was as follows. Raju like Rena, but Rena likes kickboxing champ, Ronnie, who recently beat Raju's brother Rana in the inter-college championships. Raju borrows car and money from Govinda, who is secretly in love with him, and pretends to be super cool hotshot to get Rena to like him. Eventually Raju gets found out and humiliated in front of everyone. Rena goes off with Ronnie, and raja gets in fight during which not one single punch or kick is in synch with the cheap casio keyboard sound effects that accompany them. Rana has to save him. Ronnie is pissed of, so runs over Rana, who can no longer take part in championship fight with Ronnie. Raju decides to avenge brother by taking his place in fight and sets about becoming world class kickboxer in the space of a week through the cunning use of rocky style training scene. Raju beats the shit out of ronnie in the ring, everyone cheers (in the cinema) and then Raju tells govinda he loves her (everyone cheers again). The End.
Pretty cool huh! And check this out, when the film finished, everyone started pushing towards the exits, but i thought I'd just wait until it had dies down a bit. When i finally walked out the door into the corridor I walked straight into an Indian guy who I recognised "Alright?" I said and nodded at him, and he smiled and nodded back. Then i realised where I knew him from... it was Ronnie! The bad guy from the movie! I turned back to sneak a second peek.... he wasn't nearly as scary in real life.... :)
This morning i had another bout of diorreah. I'm getting a bit sick of it now, but the thought of having to provide a stool sample is still putting me off visiting a doctor (see earlier entries). But i've bought some immodium now, so at least I have emergency precautions! I was discussing with a few travellers last night some of the interesting things that people start collecting when they travel. One girl had collected buttons from all the different countries and sowed them to her shirt..another had collected one bead from each country and made a necklace... I told them that i was collecting diseases, as they are easy to carry. The extra exciting thing about this is that i won't know the full extent of my collection until I actually return home and get some tests done! Ooooh the anticipation! I feel like I could burst! Oh no...wait...that's the diorreah....
I gave my clothes to the guy from my guesthouse yesterday to get them washed. Today he gave them back.... about twice as dirty as when I gave them to him! Not just "dirty", but with BIG stains on them of a brown nature! I gave them back to him to wash again, although i don't know if this was really a good idea. Oh well, i needed to buy some new clothes anyway. Perhaps I'll give up my role of undercover hippy and become a new-age part-time pseudo hippy like everyone else. I'll buy a top from nepal, trousers from thailand, and ethiopian necklace with a lions claw in it, a string of wooden beads, an anklet with a "om" sign on it, and most impotantly of all, one of those shoulder bags made out of hemp that are really impractical to carry. :) I have to admit, i was walking through the market just now, and I was very tempted to buy some "real" indian clothes. "Real" indian clothes, i.e the ones that indians wear, are the kind of clothes that you buy at the market in England. No name brands of polo necked shirts, maybe with a little lightning flash logo on the front, or maybe a Rebook t-shirt, or some Nikee trousers.....
oh well, I'll let you know what i decide... :)
By the way, more photos up at http://photos.yahoo.com/billymation in the India 3 folder...
Pretty cool huh! And check this out, when the film finished, everyone started pushing towards the exits, but i thought I'd just wait until it had dies down a bit. When i finally walked out the door into the corridor I walked straight into an Indian guy who I recognised "Alright?" I said and nodded at him, and he smiled and nodded back. Then i realised where I knew him from... it was Ronnie! The bad guy from the movie! I turned back to sneak a second peek.... he wasn't nearly as scary in real life.... :)
This morning i had another bout of diorreah. I'm getting a bit sick of it now, but the thought of having to provide a stool sample is still putting me off visiting a doctor (see earlier entries). But i've bought some immodium now, so at least I have emergency precautions! I was discussing with a few travellers last night some of the interesting things that people start collecting when they travel. One girl had collected buttons from all the different countries and sowed them to her shirt..another had collected one bead from each country and made a necklace... I told them that i was collecting diseases, as they are easy to carry. The extra exciting thing about this is that i won't know the full extent of my collection until I actually return home and get some tests done! Ooooh the anticipation! I feel like I could burst! Oh no...wait...that's the diorreah....
I gave my clothes to the guy from my guesthouse yesterday to get them washed. Today he gave them back.... about twice as dirty as when I gave them to him! Not just "dirty", but with BIG stains on them of a brown nature! I gave them back to him to wash again, although i don't know if this was really a good idea. Oh well, i needed to buy some new clothes anyway. Perhaps I'll give up my role of undercover hippy and become a new-age part-time pseudo hippy like everyone else. I'll buy a top from nepal, trousers from thailand, and ethiopian necklace with a lions claw in it, a string of wooden beads, an anklet with a "om" sign on it, and most impotantly of all, one of those shoulder bags made out of hemp that are really impractical to carry. :) I have to admit, i was walking through the market just now, and I was very tempted to buy some "real" indian clothes. "Real" indian clothes, i.e the ones that indians wear, are the kind of clothes that you buy at the market in England. No name brands of polo necked shirts, maybe with a little lightning flash logo on the front, or maybe a Rebook t-shirt, or some Nikee trousers.....
oh well, I'll let you know what i decide... :)
By the way, more photos up at http://photos.yahoo.com/billymation in the India 3 folder...
Sunday, June 08, 2003
Last night I went to see a hindi movie. When i got to the ticket counter with my friend, we were asked "which show?". "What the hell does it matter!" we thought, "they're all the same! Boy loves girl, girls family dont like boy, boy and girl sing while 1000's of extras dance whilst changing costumes very few seconds. Boy get's wrongly accused of awful crime and has to run away and track down his enemies and beat them up for at least 30 mins until they are covered in blood, then they all sing and dance again, then eventually boy proves his innocence and has to choose between shooting bad guy and going back to jail or letting police take bad guy. He chooses to shoot bad guy, but police decide he was bad afterall so let him off."
However, we were wrong. The movie we had bought tickets for was part of a new breed of Indian movie that tries to push the boundaries of hindi movie making. It was called "Into the woods....again". I dont know if this means it was a sequel or if it is just the name. Under the name on the poster is written in big letters "bought to you by Surinda Coconut Oil"... Anyway, the movie started with a girl in bed who was traumatised by watching the news showing images of ppl suffering as a result of war that she screams and throws the remote control at the tv. This is a bad start, I thought. Then there's lots of talking and eventually these two middle class families head of into the woods...again. Occasionally the music wen a bit eerie and i thought maybe it was going to turn into a horror movie, but i was always disssapointed. There was even a scene where one guy went down on his wife! obviously the camera didn't follow him but you saw her face and she moaned a little. Anyway, after half am hor of watching this drivel, with not the slightest bit of violence, singing, or dancing, we gave up and went to see X-Men 2 instead. :)
Today I went out to see the Victoria memorial, which is a big old british building from the time when britain "liberated" India (notice i'm using post Gulf war2 terminolgy). On the way there I was stopped by an old indian guy who wanted to chat to me. He was very friendly and I chatted to him for a bit. His name was Clifton, and he was from Goa originally, so he was Roman catholic, spoke very good english, and had recieved an english education. Now he worked as a gardener at the Victoria memorial and earned 1000 rupees a month (about 12 quid). I told him I was going to get some breakfast and he told me he knew just the place. After walking for about 30 mins I realised that we had just done one huge circle and ended up back where we started!! I pointed this out to him and he said "Yes" and smiled at me, as if that somehow explained why I had been walking for 30 mins in the sweltering heat and humidity! Then he led me to a restaurant that we had already passed and said "It's still closed, but we can eat at the canteen at Vic Memorial if you like". Ok, I said, not caring where we ate, i was hungry! So we walked for a while longer and eventually arrived at the memorial, which is a big old building like the ummmm, you know ....the big one in london with the dome and stuff..... anyway, we went to the canteen and it was closed apparantly, so he continued walking. I followed like a sheep and eventually I had to stop before i fell down. This is a little emaressing considering he is 66 and I'm 25, but hey, he's had more practice than me! So we sit on a bench for a while and chat, and so far he hasn'r asked me for anything, so i'm feeeling quite comfortable with his company. He does mention that i I have any old clothes i want to give him they'd be appreciated, which is fine, and I say no worries.
Eventually after lots more walking we arrive back at the first restaurant, and it's open! We go inside and order some food and then he tells me about this great new job he's got. Apparantly one of his friends at the church has offered him a job as a security guard. Instead of his current 1000 rupees, he'll be earning 4000 rupees, and all he needs to do is turn up at the beginning of the month with 2 pairs of khaki trousers and 2 khaki shirts and some black shoes. It's at this point that i start to feel it coming.... the classic guilt trip. And this ones a beauty. So after the food is finished, He tells me that he has a favour to ask. He needs 400 rupees to buy the clothes to start his new job, and anything I can do to help would be appreciated. So there it is, the classic guilt trip dilemma. There's 2 possibilities here, and in both of them I lose:
1: He's telling the truth, and I have an opportunity to make a real difference to his life by giving him that little helping hand he needs.
2: He's been engineering the conversation towards this point from the moment we met and has been working on this story for weeks.
So, I'm left with two options:
1: Give him the money and feel like a gullable fool who's just been conned.
2: Dont give him the money and feel guilty for not helping a possibly genuine friend in need.
Neither is particularly appealing. I opt for a compromise and give him 200 rupees. This way i feel a bit conned and a bit guilty, but both are kept at an acceptable level!
So anyway, enough of that, I've bought my ticket to Bangkok, and I should be flying on tuesday. woo hoo!
seeya!
However, we were wrong. The movie we had bought tickets for was part of a new breed of Indian movie that tries to push the boundaries of hindi movie making. It was called "Into the woods....again". I dont know if this means it was a sequel or if it is just the name. Under the name on the poster is written in big letters "bought to you by Surinda Coconut Oil"... Anyway, the movie started with a girl in bed who was traumatised by watching the news showing images of ppl suffering as a result of war that she screams and throws the remote control at the tv. This is a bad start, I thought. Then there's lots of talking and eventually these two middle class families head of into the woods...again. Occasionally the music wen a bit eerie and i thought maybe it was going to turn into a horror movie, but i was always disssapointed. There was even a scene where one guy went down on his wife! obviously the camera didn't follow him but you saw her face and she moaned a little. Anyway, after half am hor of watching this drivel, with not the slightest bit of violence, singing, or dancing, we gave up and went to see X-Men 2 instead. :)
Today I went out to see the Victoria memorial, which is a big old british building from the time when britain "liberated" India (notice i'm using post Gulf war2 terminolgy). On the way there I was stopped by an old indian guy who wanted to chat to me. He was very friendly and I chatted to him for a bit. His name was Clifton, and he was from Goa originally, so he was Roman catholic, spoke very good english, and had recieved an english education. Now he worked as a gardener at the Victoria memorial and earned 1000 rupees a month (about 12 quid). I told him I was going to get some breakfast and he told me he knew just the place. After walking for about 30 mins I realised that we had just done one huge circle and ended up back where we started!! I pointed this out to him and he said "Yes" and smiled at me, as if that somehow explained why I had been walking for 30 mins in the sweltering heat and humidity! Then he led me to a restaurant that we had already passed and said "It's still closed, but we can eat at the canteen at Vic Memorial if you like". Ok, I said, not caring where we ate, i was hungry! So we walked for a while longer and eventually arrived at the memorial, which is a big old building like the ummmm, you know ....the big one in london with the dome and stuff..... anyway, we went to the canteen and it was closed apparantly, so he continued walking. I followed like a sheep and eventually I had to stop before i fell down. This is a little emaressing considering he is 66 and I'm 25, but hey, he's had more practice than me! So we sit on a bench for a while and chat, and so far he hasn'r asked me for anything, so i'm feeeling quite comfortable with his company. He does mention that i I have any old clothes i want to give him they'd be appreciated, which is fine, and I say no worries.
Eventually after lots more walking we arrive back at the first restaurant, and it's open! We go inside and order some food and then he tells me about this great new job he's got. Apparantly one of his friends at the church has offered him a job as a security guard. Instead of his current 1000 rupees, he'll be earning 4000 rupees, and all he needs to do is turn up at the beginning of the month with 2 pairs of khaki trousers and 2 khaki shirts and some black shoes. It's at this point that i start to feel it coming.... the classic guilt trip. And this ones a beauty. So after the food is finished, He tells me that he has a favour to ask. He needs 400 rupees to buy the clothes to start his new job, and anything I can do to help would be appreciated. So there it is, the classic guilt trip dilemma. There's 2 possibilities here, and in both of them I lose:
1: He's telling the truth, and I have an opportunity to make a real difference to his life by giving him that little helping hand he needs.
2: He's been engineering the conversation towards this point from the moment we met and has been working on this story for weeks.
So, I'm left with two options:
1: Give him the money and feel like a gullable fool who's just been conned.
2: Dont give him the money and feel guilty for not helping a possibly genuine friend in need.
Neither is particularly appealing. I opt for a compromise and give him 200 rupees. This way i feel a bit conned and a bit guilty, but both are kept at an acceptable level!
So anyway, enough of that, I've bought my ticket to Bangkok, and I should be flying on tuesday. woo hoo!
seeya!
Saturday, June 07, 2003
By the way, more photos are now available at http://photos.yahoo.com/billymation
look for the "india 2" folder....
look for the "india 2" folder....
Hello again.
I seem to be writing a bit out of synch at the mo. I'm now in Calcutta, but first need to write about varanasi... ok, here goes...
Varanasi is one of india's most spiritual places. It's situated on the banks of the river ganges, and the whole length of the town has ghats (steps leading down to the water) where everyone goes to have a holy bathe in the holy water. Apparently, bathing in this holy ganges water will purify your soul. Because it's so holy here, it is india's number one place to die. people come from all over the country, and even the world, to die here. Apparantly, if you are cremated here, you automatically go straight to Nirvana without any of the hassles normally assosiated with death like re-incarnation, karma etc etc. It's like arriving to the airport on your way to the states and being told that your criminal record has been wiped and you've been bumped up to business class...
It's so poular in fact, that lots of people come here a few years before they are actually due to expire, in order to spend the last few years of their lives begging to get enough money to burn their own bodies.... You see wood is very expensive, and the human body takes 3-4 hours to burn, so thats quite a lot of wood.....
The cremation Ghats here are much more raw than the ones in katmandu. Instead of the nice stone alters, the fires are just lit on the ground by the water's edge and there's a veritable production line.. or should I say destruction line going on.
Varanasi is also a poular hangout for Sadhus, or babas as they are sometimes known. Babas are people on an individual quest for enlightenment. they survive by begging for alms and denounce all material possesions. John, the american, was telling me about some of the babas he saw when he was here for the Kumb Mela a few years back, which is the biggest gathering of humanity in the world... (I think about 80 million people).... Here's a few examples: One baba had been holding his right arm in the air for 17 years. One baba had "rolled" (forward rolls) all the way there from Bombay (1000's of km's). One woman buried herself for 3 days. The list goes on..... sounds fun!
But anyway, Varanasi was too hot. The only time it was really possible to move was for 2 hours in the morning (5-7) and 3 hours in the evening (4-7). I did get about a little bit tho, with the help of Rustom, my faithful rickshaw driver and his son who remained nameless despite doing all the pedalling. Rustom became my guide after i tried to take his rickshaw to the train station to get a ticket. After showing me a few scraps of paper with "recommendations" for him written by other tourists, he proceeded to offer me just about every imaginable service I could think of. To be honest I didn't really need anything, but the sight of him was enough to make me come up with some "needs" to keep him busy... His cheeks were so sunken that it looked like you could easily have fitted two golf balls in the depressions they made. His arms and legs were like matchsticks. He kept telling me "i am poor man but rich inside". I'm assuming he was talking about his heart and soul, as his actual "insides" were unquestionably as poor as his outsides, which they kept threatening to join every few minutes when he was racked by a coughing fit. Luckily he was not doing the pedalling, but sitting beside me and trying to come up with new things I might like to spend my money on. I kept him for most of the day and gave him what i thought was a pretty hefty tip. But it's so sad, because even my hefty tip was only enough to buy medicine for about 2 days, and what's the use of that?
The next day I met Rustom again, and again found a reason to use him. I asked him to take me to a place where i could get a packed lunch made up for my train ride, and he said he knew just the place, so we set off once again with his son at the pedals. I bought him lunch at the restaurant, and as i sat opposite him at that table I couldn't help but feel guilty. It's so easy to hide from the reality of poverty here, by simply detatching yourself from the people who are suffering. Instead you worry that the rickshaw driver is overcharging you by 10 rupees and behave indignant at the prospect of being ripped off. Somehow your eyes look through the emaciated body of the man in question, or some pathetic yet stubborn part of your brain convinces you that he, and the children in rags on the street, are deliberately looking like that to make you feel guilty. You find comfort in fellow travellers who are not about to make you feel guilty with there obvious need for help... But ultimately, whether the beggers are being controlled by a begger master, or the rickshaw driver is overcharging you, there's no avoiding the fact that all of those people are desperately struggling to make enough rupees to buy a bowl of rice at the end of the day, and that's the thing that we westerners just find it too depressing to accept.
So anyway, yes, i felt guilty sitting opposite Rustom, not for anything i had done, but for everything i was not prepared to do. Yes i'd given him 120 rupees instead of 20, but why not give him a 1000? Why not 2000? After all, it's only 25 quid.... But once you start thinking like that India becomes an impossible place to be, as almost everyone you meet in your normal day to day life is in a situation not dissimilar to Rustom's. Everyone needs a handout, everyone needs your cash. So what's the solution? One possibility is to join Mother Teresas Missionaries of Charity and wash a few lepers. This has an almost instant purging effect on your guilt from what i've heard, and allows you to ignore beggers with impunity.... ;) But then who are you doing it for? the benefit of the leper or benefit of your own conscience? I guess it doesn't really matter, as long as the leper gets washed.
So, in conclusion, I didn't give Rustom 2000 rupees, but at the same time i didn't try to cheat him of the few rupees he deserved. I dont intend to join Mother teresa and wash lepers, but i do intend to continue giving small amounts to random people who look like they need it, just as i would in the UK. And if I start to feel guilty again, i'll come in here and moan about it until i feel better.... :)
Right, i got a bit sidetracked there. I'm in Calcutta now, after a fairly pleasant train ride (interpret "pleasant" as "screaming adults, hyper kids, food fights, sweltering heat, stomach cramps..).
I arrived this morning at about 7am. First i tried a hotel recommended by a girl from the train. The only single room thay had was like a prison cell, only not as nice. I gave it a miss, and headed for the Salvation Army Guesthouse. I asked to be shown the dorm beds and was pointed in one direction. I walked through a door and did a double take. I thought i had accidentally walked into mother Teresa's Hospice for the dying. It was a crumbling, long and narrow old room with about 7 iron framed beds sqeezed in against the walls. The occupants of the beds looked in desperate need of medical attention, and i really expected to see nuns walking amongst the beds and mopping brows whilst telling everyone that God loved them... It was a horrible sight. For some reason i decided to stay. I guess I just had to be able to say i stayed in a dorm. As I moved my bag in and sat on my bed, not one person in the room looked up or made the slightest acknowlegement of my presence. Everone looked as if they were too deep in the contemplation of their own suicides to say hello. I then had my first dilemma of dorm life. Do i leave my valuables in the room or take them into the shower with me? Opting for the wet cash approach i headed into the shower, feeling very conspicuous with my "I don't trust you guys" day-pack slung over my shoulder. In the shower the owners had obviously anticipated I might try this and so had removed anything that could be used as a hanging hook from the walls and created an inch deep puddle on the floor. However, by balancing my bag on the toilet i finally managed to take a shower....
anyway, that's enough blogging to write a book!
bye!
I seem to be writing a bit out of synch at the mo. I'm now in Calcutta, but first need to write about varanasi... ok, here goes...
Varanasi is one of india's most spiritual places. It's situated on the banks of the river ganges, and the whole length of the town has ghats (steps leading down to the water) where everyone goes to have a holy bathe in the holy water. Apparently, bathing in this holy ganges water will purify your soul. Because it's so holy here, it is india's number one place to die. people come from all over the country, and even the world, to die here. Apparantly, if you are cremated here, you automatically go straight to Nirvana without any of the hassles normally assosiated with death like re-incarnation, karma etc etc. It's like arriving to the airport on your way to the states and being told that your criminal record has been wiped and you've been bumped up to business class...
It's so poular in fact, that lots of people come here a few years before they are actually due to expire, in order to spend the last few years of their lives begging to get enough money to burn their own bodies.... You see wood is very expensive, and the human body takes 3-4 hours to burn, so thats quite a lot of wood.....
The cremation Ghats here are much more raw than the ones in katmandu. Instead of the nice stone alters, the fires are just lit on the ground by the water's edge and there's a veritable production line.. or should I say destruction line going on.
Varanasi is also a poular hangout for Sadhus, or babas as they are sometimes known. Babas are people on an individual quest for enlightenment. they survive by begging for alms and denounce all material possesions. John, the american, was telling me about some of the babas he saw when he was here for the Kumb Mela a few years back, which is the biggest gathering of humanity in the world... (I think about 80 million people).... Here's a few examples: One baba had been holding his right arm in the air for 17 years. One baba had "rolled" (forward rolls) all the way there from Bombay (1000's of km's). One woman buried herself for 3 days. The list goes on..... sounds fun!
But anyway, Varanasi was too hot. The only time it was really possible to move was for 2 hours in the morning (5-7) and 3 hours in the evening (4-7). I did get about a little bit tho, with the help of Rustom, my faithful rickshaw driver and his son who remained nameless despite doing all the pedalling. Rustom became my guide after i tried to take his rickshaw to the train station to get a ticket. After showing me a few scraps of paper with "recommendations" for him written by other tourists, he proceeded to offer me just about every imaginable service I could think of. To be honest I didn't really need anything, but the sight of him was enough to make me come up with some "needs" to keep him busy... His cheeks were so sunken that it looked like you could easily have fitted two golf balls in the depressions they made. His arms and legs were like matchsticks. He kept telling me "i am poor man but rich inside". I'm assuming he was talking about his heart and soul, as his actual "insides" were unquestionably as poor as his outsides, which they kept threatening to join every few minutes when he was racked by a coughing fit. Luckily he was not doing the pedalling, but sitting beside me and trying to come up with new things I might like to spend my money on. I kept him for most of the day and gave him what i thought was a pretty hefty tip. But it's so sad, because even my hefty tip was only enough to buy medicine for about 2 days, and what's the use of that?
The next day I met Rustom again, and again found a reason to use him. I asked him to take me to a place where i could get a packed lunch made up for my train ride, and he said he knew just the place, so we set off once again with his son at the pedals. I bought him lunch at the restaurant, and as i sat opposite him at that table I couldn't help but feel guilty. It's so easy to hide from the reality of poverty here, by simply detatching yourself from the people who are suffering. Instead you worry that the rickshaw driver is overcharging you by 10 rupees and behave indignant at the prospect of being ripped off. Somehow your eyes look through the emaciated body of the man in question, or some pathetic yet stubborn part of your brain convinces you that he, and the children in rags on the street, are deliberately looking like that to make you feel guilty. You find comfort in fellow travellers who are not about to make you feel guilty with there obvious need for help... But ultimately, whether the beggers are being controlled by a begger master, or the rickshaw driver is overcharging you, there's no avoiding the fact that all of those people are desperately struggling to make enough rupees to buy a bowl of rice at the end of the day, and that's the thing that we westerners just find it too depressing to accept.
So anyway, yes, i felt guilty sitting opposite Rustom, not for anything i had done, but for everything i was not prepared to do. Yes i'd given him 120 rupees instead of 20, but why not give him a 1000? Why not 2000? After all, it's only 25 quid.... But once you start thinking like that India becomes an impossible place to be, as almost everyone you meet in your normal day to day life is in a situation not dissimilar to Rustom's. Everyone needs a handout, everyone needs your cash. So what's the solution? One possibility is to join Mother Teresas Missionaries of Charity and wash a few lepers. This has an almost instant purging effect on your guilt from what i've heard, and allows you to ignore beggers with impunity.... ;) But then who are you doing it for? the benefit of the leper or benefit of your own conscience? I guess it doesn't really matter, as long as the leper gets washed.
So, in conclusion, I didn't give Rustom 2000 rupees, but at the same time i didn't try to cheat him of the few rupees he deserved. I dont intend to join Mother teresa and wash lepers, but i do intend to continue giving small amounts to random people who look like they need it, just as i would in the UK. And if I start to feel guilty again, i'll come in here and moan about it until i feel better.... :)
Right, i got a bit sidetracked there. I'm in Calcutta now, after a fairly pleasant train ride (interpret "pleasant" as "screaming adults, hyper kids, food fights, sweltering heat, stomach cramps..).
I arrived this morning at about 7am. First i tried a hotel recommended by a girl from the train. The only single room thay had was like a prison cell, only not as nice. I gave it a miss, and headed for the Salvation Army Guesthouse. I asked to be shown the dorm beds and was pointed in one direction. I walked through a door and did a double take. I thought i had accidentally walked into mother Teresa's Hospice for the dying. It was a crumbling, long and narrow old room with about 7 iron framed beds sqeezed in against the walls. The occupants of the beds looked in desperate need of medical attention, and i really expected to see nuns walking amongst the beds and mopping brows whilst telling everyone that God loved them... It was a horrible sight. For some reason i decided to stay. I guess I just had to be able to say i stayed in a dorm. As I moved my bag in and sat on my bed, not one person in the room looked up or made the slightest acknowlegement of my presence. Everone looked as if they were too deep in the contemplation of their own suicides to say hello. I then had my first dilemma of dorm life. Do i leave my valuables in the room or take them into the shower with me? Opting for the wet cash approach i headed into the shower, feeling very conspicuous with my "I don't trust you guys" day-pack slung over my shoulder. In the shower the owners had obviously anticipated I might try this and so had removed anything that could be used as a hanging hook from the walls and created an inch deep puddle on the floor. However, by balancing my bag on the toilet i finally managed to take a shower....
anyway, that's enough blogging to write a book!
bye!
Thursday, June 05, 2003
Wow. It's been quite a journey.
I guess I ought to start from the beginning. When I last left you I was in Thamel in katmandu with a bit of a stomach ache. Well, later that evening I was on a bus to Sanauli (the border with India) clutching my butthole closed like my life depended on it, which in a way it did, as I'm sure the guy sat next to me wouldn't have been too pleased if I just let go the whole mess right beside him.
Before going on i think i should comment that it is now almost certain that Vishnu, the god of Buses, has put a curse on me. As you may remember from previous posts, every time I ride an overnight bus, I get Diorreah. This might be understandable if I often got it, but the fact is that the ONLY time I get diorreah has been on these overnight bus rides! I refer you back to ... 11th March, 18 March, 13 April 2003....
So anyway, back to this story. No sooner had I got on the bus than the telltale farts began. Then came the fatal fart. The one that you only just stop in time, the sheer effort of holding it back bringing out a cold sweat on your forehead. I clenched with all my might, but then the fumes coming in the window as we drove through central katamndu started to make me feel nauseous! I wanted to throw up, which would have been easy as there was an open window right beside me, but I knew that if I threw up there was no way i could keep my bum-dam operating. So I grimaced and beared it, and after a few hours of suffering we eventually reached a toilet stop. I rushed to the little corrugated iron cubicle and let rip a torrent the runny stuff. It was like turning on a tap in cambodia (if you haven't been there, the water is brown). The toilet was sooo hot that after a few seconds my whole body was literally drenched in sweat, my clothes stuck to my skin and my face dripped onto the floor. I waited in there until I thought there was nothing left in me, and then evntured outside. All the foreigners from the bus had sat in a long row directly opposite the toilet, and they all looked at me as if I was a freak. "What have you been doing in there?!" asked a Chilean guy. "Shhh, it's a secret!" I told him confidentially, before running back into the cubicle. After coming out the second time I went round asking if anyone had any immodium. No one did. The we got back on the bus.
No sooner had the bus pulled away than i needed to go again. Badly! For the next 3 hours i held on, desperately trying to control the situation. Every now and then I would nearly dose off to sleep but as soon as this happened my sphincter would start to relax and I would be woken abruptly by a loud alarm bell going off in my head "Wake up! Your about to shit your pants!!". Luckily i would always wake up in time to avert a disastor, but each near miss would bring me closer to my breaking point....
Eventually we reached the second toilet stop and once again I ran off the bus. This time the I had to share the cubicle.... with a large toad! After locking the door with a twig (don't ask) and squatting over the hole in the floor, I suddenly noticed a large toad trying to get out through the crack of the door. He was way too fat however, and every now and then he'd turn around and start looking for alternative exits, at which point he'd catch sight of me, look at me suspiciously for a bit, and then decide that maybe he could squeeze thru that crack after all and go back to his hopeless struggle. Anyway, apart from the toad, this stop was the same as the last. Bum becomes tap, tap washes hands, hands lift me over other passengers and onto seat, seat begins to bash bum, bum becomes tap again.....
After a few more stops, none with toilets (shit at side of road) we eventually arrived in Sanauli, or at least somewhere near Sanauli. The journey had been 12 hours of hell. I was sorely tempted to just get a hotel here and wait till I recovered, but the Danish guy I had sat next to convinced me just to pop some immodium and head onto Gorakpur, in India, to get my train ticket reserved. Ok, I thought, and popped some immodium.
After clearing customs, we got on a local bus to Gorakpur. the bus was packed to the roof (plus packed on the roof!) ans everyone was in the middle of a heated argument about something, so the bus couldn't move. We waited half an hour before we even started moving, and then after we started moving, i realised that I still needed to shit. great. I aslo need to sleep almost as badly as I needed to shit. Somehow i once again survived with clean pants, and we eventually arrived in gorakpur, where I was told that all trains to calcutta were booked up for the next 2 days. The thought of waiting in Gorakpur for 2 days was too much. It's a shithole. Luckily I met an american guy who also wanted to go to Calcutta and we both decided to head to varanasi, which is kind of on the way.... we got tickets and I spent the rest of the day in a hotel resting....
So now i'm in varanasi, which is a pretty crazy town. I'll tell you more about it later, cos right now my tummys starting to feel a little unstable.....
Oh by the way, Selene has put up pictures of our Nepal adventure. Check them out here : http://sg.photos.yahoo.com/billy_selene
I guess I ought to start from the beginning. When I last left you I was in Thamel in katmandu with a bit of a stomach ache. Well, later that evening I was on a bus to Sanauli (the border with India) clutching my butthole closed like my life depended on it, which in a way it did, as I'm sure the guy sat next to me wouldn't have been too pleased if I just let go the whole mess right beside him.
Before going on i think i should comment that it is now almost certain that Vishnu, the god of Buses, has put a curse on me. As you may remember from previous posts, every time I ride an overnight bus, I get Diorreah. This might be understandable if I often got it, but the fact is that the ONLY time I get diorreah has been on these overnight bus rides! I refer you back to ... 11th March, 18 March, 13 April 2003....
So anyway, back to this story. No sooner had I got on the bus than the telltale farts began. Then came the fatal fart. The one that you only just stop in time, the sheer effort of holding it back bringing out a cold sweat on your forehead. I clenched with all my might, but then the fumes coming in the window as we drove through central katamndu started to make me feel nauseous! I wanted to throw up, which would have been easy as there was an open window right beside me, but I knew that if I threw up there was no way i could keep my bum-dam operating. So I grimaced and beared it, and after a few hours of suffering we eventually reached a toilet stop. I rushed to the little corrugated iron cubicle and let rip a torrent the runny stuff. It was like turning on a tap in cambodia (if you haven't been there, the water is brown). The toilet was sooo hot that after a few seconds my whole body was literally drenched in sweat, my clothes stuck to my skin and my face dripped onto the floor. I waited in there until I thought there was nothing left in me, and then evntured outside. All the foreigners from the bus had sat in a long row directly opposite the toilet, and they all looked at me as if I was a freak. "What have you been doing in there?!" asked a Chilean guy. "Shhh, it's a secret!" I told him confidentially, before running back into the cubicle. After coming out the second time I went round asking if anyone had any immodium. No one did. The we got back on the bus.
No sooner had the bus pulled away than i needed to go again. Badly! For the next 3 hours i held on, desperately trying to control the situation. Every now and then I would nearly dose off to sleep but as soon as this happened my sphincter would start to relax and I would be woken abruptly by a loud alarm bell going off in my head "Wake up! Your about to shit your pants!!". Luckily i would always wake up in time to avert a disastor, but each near miss would bring me closer to my breaking point....
Eventually we reached the second toilet stop and once again I ran off the bus. This time the I had to share the cubicle.... with a large toad! After locking the door with a twig (don't ask) and squatting over the hole in the floor, I suddenly noticed a large toad trying to get out through the crack of the door. He was way too fat however, and every now and then he'd turn around and start looking for alternative exits, at which point he'd catch sight of me, look at me suspiciously for a bit, and then decide that maybe he could squeeze thru that crack after all and go back to his hopeless struggle. Anyway, apart from the toad, this stop was the same as the last. Bum becomes tap, tap washes hands, hands lift me over other passengers and onto seat, seat begins to bash bum, bum becomes tap again.....
After a few more stops, none with toilets (shit at side of road) we eventually arrived in Sanauli, or at least somewhere near Sanauli. The journey had been 12 hours of hell. I was sorely tempted to just get a hotel here and wait till I recovered, but the Danish guy I had sat next to convinced me just to pop some immodium and head onto Gorakpur, in India, to get my train ticket reserved. Ok, I thought, and popped some immodium.
After clearing customs, we got on a local bus to Gorakpur. the bus was packed to the roof (plus packed on the roof!) ans everyone was in the middle of a heated argument about something, so the bus couldn't move. We waited half an hour before we even started moving, and then after we started moving, i realised that I still needed to shit. great. I aslo need to sleep almost as badly as I needed to shit. Somehow i once again survived with clean pants, and we eventually arrived in gorakpur, where I was told that all trains to calcutta were booked up for the next 2 days. The thought of waiting in Gorakpur for 2 days was too much. It's a shithole. Luckily I met an american guy who also wanted to go to Calcutta and we both decided to head to varanasi, which is kind of on the way.... we got tickets and I spent the rest of the day in a hotel resting....
So now i'm in varanasi, which is a pretty crazy town. I'll tell you more about it later, cos right now my tummys starting to feel a little unstable.....
Oh by the way, Selene has put up pictures of our Nepal adventure. Check them out here : http://sg.photos.yahoo.com/billy_selene
Monday, June 02, 2003
My baby's gone!!!! :(
Once again I'm all alone in this big old world with only my imaginary headlice to keep me company... (I invented my imaginary headlice during a particularly lonely night in a train station in rajastan). But even scratching my imaginary bites isn't enough to take my mind off the fact that I can't see my baby any more.... :( And to make matters worse, the past two days selene has been really ill with Gastroenteritis (the shits) and hasn't been able to be her usual chirpy self due to the practical impossibilties of laughing and vomiting at the same time....
I took her to the doctor yesterday after she'd been up puking in the night, and he told her she had to give him a stool sample. Such a strange word to describe a shit... stool.... anyway, he showed her the bathroom and pointed to a stack of small plastic cups, like the ones you get out of coffee vending machines, and said "If you could just put a bit of stool in one of those cups and then inform the receptionist..." Hello! He made it sound like you could just reach into your bowels and fish out a nicely sized lump and pop it in the cup! Obviously he has never done a shit before. The thing about shits is that they are notoriously unpredictable, especially when you have an upset stomach. Lets imagine for a moment that you are holding the cup under your butt, trying to gauge the most likely trajectory, and then suddenly you have an explosive burst of diorreah!! It's not a pretty thought! Another equally disturbing thought is that you produce one of those prize-winning logs that you feel so proud of you want to call your girlfriend into the loo to take a photo. I mean it's not gonna fit in the cup is it!! Sure you could pinch it off halfway, but then you could end up with half a turd stuck up there, and anyway, with a pize-winning log it would be a crime to pinch it....
Ok Ok! I'll stop! But dont tell me you haven't at least once pondered on these matters in the privacy of your own bathroom.....
Anyway, back to the present. I'm hungry, low on cash, I have a stomach ache and I'm alone. Compared to Richard Branson I'm in a pretty sorry state. Compared to the leper with no hands or nose i just saw ouside, I might as well be Richard Branson..... It's a funny old world....
I'm gonna go and watch "8 Mile" again in a bit to kill some time. It's showing in one of these restaurants that show movies to try and entice customers because their food is so shit and they are situated down the end of a back alley full of shit. Sorry, a lot of shit in this post i know.... So anyway, I hope my baby is doing ok at the airport. I wasn't allowed inside the building! Bloody cheek! Not even as far as the cafe to sit and have a drink with her! I even offered to check my gun in at reception but they still weren't having it! ;)
By the way, could you all do me a favour and boycott ESSO. I have recently rediscovered (you know how people tell you these things and you forget them 10 mins later) that ESSO is run by evil goblins intent on destroying the world and building huge factories to cut up cute animals to be used as fuel for giant american cars.... or something like that.... Basically they are one of the main powers behind American policies on Oil, being as they donate huge sums of money to the Bush Administration. They are the main opponents to letting america develop any form of alternative energy or start using efficient cars like the rest of the world... To cut a long story short, they're bastards. Yes, it's all a conspiracy theory, yes I believe what I want to believe, yes it's all concocted by long haired hippies who spend too long surfing the net, but look at it this way, is it really that far fetched to imagine that a multi-national gazillion dollar oil company might be run by greedy heartless bastards? i think not. So trust me on this one and next time you think of putting esso fuel in your car, spare a thought for all the cute little animals and put in some "billyfuel" instead, coming soon to a highway near you.... :)
ok, I think I've said enough for one day. I've managed to take my mind of being all alone in a smelly city full of people who want to cheat me! When I write my blog i really feel as if i'm chatting with you guys, whoever you are, but I have to say, you're a quiet bunch..... please talk to me! all comments, no matter how dull, are appreciated.... :) laters.
Once again I'm all alone in this big old world with only my imaginary headlice to keep me company... (I invented my imaginary headlice during a particularly lonely night in a train station in rajastan). But even scratching my imaginary bites isn't enough to take my mind off the fact that I can't see my baby any more.... :( And to make matters worse, the past two days selene has been really ill with Gastroenteritis (the shits) and hasn't been able to be her usual chirpy self due to the practical impossibilties of laughing and vomiting at the same time....
I took her to the doctor yesterday after she'd been up puking in the night, and he told her she had to give him a stool sample. Such a strange word to describe a shit... stool.... anyway, he showed her the bathroom and pointed to a stack of small plastic cups, like the ones you get out of coffee vending machines, and said "If you could just put a bit of stool in one of those cups and then inform the receptionist..." Hello! He made it sound like you could just reach into your bowels and fish out a nicely sized lump and pop it in the cup! Obviously he has never done a shit before. The thing about shits is that they are notoriously unpredictable, especially when you have an upset stomach. Lets imagine for a moment that you are holding the cup under your butt, trying to gauge the most likely trajectory, and then suddenly you have an explosive burst of diorreah!! It's not a pretty thought! Another equally disturbing thought is that you produce one of those prize-winning logs that you feel so proud of you want to call your girlfriend into the loo to take a photo. I mean it's not gonna fit in the cup is it!! Sure you could pinch it off halfway, but then you could end up with half a turd stuck up there, and anyway, with a pize-winning log it would be a crime to pinch it....
Ok Ok! I'll stop! But dont tell me you haven't at least once pondered on these matters in the privacy of your own bathroom.....
Anyway, back to the present. I'm hungry, low on cash, I have a stomach ache and I'm alone. Compared to Richard Branson I'm in a pretty sorry state. Compared to the leper with no hands or nose i just saw ouside, I might as well be Richard Branson..... It's a funny old world....
I'm gonna go and watch "8 Mile" again in a bit to kill some time. It's showing in one of these restaurants that show movies to try and entice customers because their food is so shit and they are situated down the end of a back alley full of shit. Sorry, a lot of shit in this post i know.... So anyway, I hope my baby is doing ok at the airport. I wasn't allowed inside the building! Bloody cheek! Not even as far as the cafe to sit and have a drink with her! I even offered to check my gun in at reception but they still weren't having it! ;)
By the way, could you all do me a favour and boycott ESSO. I have recently rediscovered (you know how people tell you these things and you forget them 10 mins later) that ESSO is run by evil goblins intent on destroying the world and building huge factories to cut up cute animals to be used as fuel for giant american cars.... or something like that.... Basically they are one of the main powers behind American policies on Oil, being as they donate huge sums of money to the Bush Administration. They are the main opponents to letting america develop any form of alternative energy or start using efficient cars like the rest of the world... To cut a long story short, they're bastards. Yes, it's all a conspiracy theory, yes I believe what I want to believe, yes it's all concocted by long haired hippies who spend too long surfing the net, but look at it this way, is it really that far fetched to imagine that a multi-national gazillion dollar oil company might be run by greedy heartless bastards? i think not. So trust me on this one and next time you think of putting esso fuel in your car, spare a thought for all the cute little animals and put in some "billyfuel" instead, coming soon to a highway near you.... :)
ok, I think I've said enough for one day. I've managed to take my mind of being all alone in a smelly city full of people who want to cheat me! When I write my blog i really feel as if i'm chatting with you guys, whoever you are, but I have to say, you're a quiet bunch..... please talk to me! all comments, no matter how dull, are appreciated.... :) laters.
Saturday, May 31, 2003
Something i've been meaning to go on about for a while since being in nepal is agriclture. By far the most common weed in nepal is..... Weed. It's a terrible problem. The farmers grow their crops of rice in their fields, then they harvest them. Then, in the space of time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, millions of marijuana plants pop out of the ground and start growing like crazy. So then before the farmers can plant their next crop, they have to rip out all these millions of weeds, which by now have flowered and are literally packed with sticky smelly flowers, and throw them in the ditch by the side of the road where they dry out, get covered in dust, and then rot. It seems to me that a rather huge business opportnity is being overlooked here! I mean surely these plants could be rotted down and sold as compost! Such a waste! ;)
I rode the bike again today to the top of a hill with a temple on it. It was quite fun really, but stalling on the hill on a steep bit with a truck in front and a van behind was not a high point.... I've discovered that stalling on a slope poses quite a problem, especialy if you have passenger. The problem is, you need to kick start the bike, so you cant use the back brake which is under your right foot, but at the same time, using the front brake means it's tricky to control the accelerator. Then you've got to ride the clutch in first gear (very sensitive) while the passenger gets on. It's all rather stressful, especially if people are waiting behind you.... :( But anyway, I survived, and I now consider myself a bit of an expert at riding bikes in asian cities... :)
I'm not sure I want to ride a bike around India tho. It's just too tiring. My hands are aching again like mad! Hah, i'm such a pussy, I know, but what can I say, I have sensitive hands....
Selene is leaving on Monday! :( That means there's only one full day left! Then it's back to being a lone wanderer again.... I wonder how many hours it'll take to meet new friends this time..... :)
right, I've really got nothing to say today, so I'm gonna go and read other peoples blogs for a change... My favourite is my friend Joseph Tame's. It's at www.tamegoeswild.com look for the "daily mumble"....
I rode the bike again today to the top of a hill with a temple on it. It was quite fun really, but stalling on the hill on a steep bit with a truck in front and a van behind was not a high point.... I've discovered that stalling on a slope poses quite a problem, especialy if you have passenger. The problem is, you need to kick start the bike, so you cant use the back brake which is under your right foot, but at the same time, using the front brake means it's tricky to control the accelerator. Then you've got to ride the clutch in first gear (very sensitive) while the passenger gets on. It's all rather stressful, especially if people are waiting behind you.... :( But anyway, I survived, and I now consider myself a bit of an expert at riding bikes in asian cities... :)
I'm not sure I want to ride a bike around India tho. It's just too tiring. My hands are aching again like mad! Hah, i'm such a pussy, I know, but what can I say, I have sensitive hands....
Selene is leaving on Monday! :( That means there's only one full day left! Then it's back to being a lone wanderer again.... I wonder how many hours it'll take to meet new friends this time..... :)
right, I've really got nothing to say today, so I'm gonna go and read other peoples blogs for a change... My favourite is my friend Joseph Tame's. It's at www.tamegoeswild.com look for the "daily mumble"....
Friday, May 30, 2003
Hello.
Wow I'm cool. Today i hired a motorbike. This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time, but I've always been put off by the fact that i dont actually know how to ride a motorbike... I know, i know, I'm a chicken, but you know, the thought of crashing into the shop I've hired it from is really quite embaressing. So anyway, I woke up this morning with motorbikes on my mind. 1 down for first, 2 up for second etc etc... running over and over in my mind.... Then Selene told me that if I wasn't really confident I should just get a scooter like I always do. To be honest, i was quite glad of the excuse to chicken out. So, I went to the shop and asked to hire a scooter. "That one very expensive, 1000 rupees" he told me. "huh??" I thought. But surely a scooter is the cheapest. No, he told me, the cheapest is the 125cc Yamaha that I had been wanting to hire.... So that was it. fate had decreed that I must attempt to ride a real motorbike or die trying....
So, I told him i'd take it, trying my best to look confident, and he went off to fetch the bike. Then I started worrying about how badly I was going to make a fool of myself. I feel I must stop at this point to explain something. Driving a vehicle on the roads here is not like driving a vehicle in the UK or singapore for example. It's more like trying to drive through the middle of a Levellers concert crossed with a living scrap yard into which a 1000 farm animals have just been released. There are no road markings and the only law is the law of "biggest or fastest first". The fumes are so thick that you can barely see let alone breathe, and as I have mentioned before, horns are used more regularly than brakes, sometimes instead of brakes even. So my anxiety at riding a motorbike is not purely because I dont know how to drive one, but more to do with the fact that there is nowhere even remotely suitable for me to learn to drive one. It's a case of straight in at the deep end.
Anyway, i digress. So, he comes back with my sporty looking Yamaha ZBX or something like that, and I set about inspecting it to make sure it's in full working order. As you can imagine, my knowledge of motorbikes isn't exactly extensive..... So I just pretent to be examining closely..... Wheels: check.... handlebars: check..... horn (very important): check..... stickers: check..... all seems to be in order, i tell him. Then comes the scary part. I climb onto the bike, turn the key, and kickstart. It starts! Hoooray! Step one accomplished! Then I put it in gear. It stalls. Oh yeah, the clutch... No one seems to have noticed, so i start it again... this time I use the clutch and put it into first.... I gradually leapfrog my way around until I'm facing the right direction and I'm about to set off to find the emptiest road I can, when it suddenly dawns on me that i have no petrol.
"Where's the nearest petrol pump?" I ask.
"Down there, left, then left, then right" he says.
I make a quick mental calculation and realise that this route will lead me into the most hellish, congested, vehicular quagmire of death in the whole of katmandu!
"ok! Thanks!" I shout, and leapfrog off in the prescribed direction. After 5 mins of nail-bitingly bad clutch control and a lot of horning, I find myself face to face with a very busy main road. It's one-way and the way is left. But my guy told me to turn right! I stop a passerby and ask him "which way to petrol station??". He points to the right, against the flow of traffic. "But it's one way!" I say to him. He points again in the same direction. I'm not about to drive the wrong way up a one way street that is already about 6 cars wide congested with traffic, so i turn around and head back.
Back at the shop, i tell the guy I couldn't find it, in the hope that he'll direct me to one on a quiet lane somewhere.... Instead he shouts at his younger brother to come and ride on the back of my bike and direct me! Noooo! Now I have the added worry of killing a small boy, and the almost definite embarressment of stalling about 10 times with him on the back.
We set off, and as I had guessed he starts to direct me into the worst part of katamdu. The road I end up one is as wide as the M1, but with no road markings, and no rules. It's a complete free for all. Everyone just weaves in and out of one another like flies. Somehow i manage to get all the way to the petrol station without stalling or killing anyone! Then i stall as I pull into the station....
By the time i get back to Selene I feel as if I could ride into the depths of hell and return unscathed! Talk about initiation by fire! So with my newly aquired street bike skills, we set off to find some countryside. We figure if we keep going in a straght line for long enough we have to eventually leave this godforsaken city of smog. After 40 mins of riding thru insane traffic we eventually reach the hills that surround the katamandu valley. And then we go up. and up, and up. I'm basically just waiting for a vaguely flat bit to stop on, but none comes. Eventually I settle for about a 35 degree incline and pull over. Wow! I had no idea riding a bike was so tiring! My hands are siezed up from holding the clutch and accelerator for so long, and my face is caked with dust! I sit on the floor to recover and some local boys give me a plum to cheer me up... :)
Anyway, enough about my bike adventures. Needless to say I made it back safely, and me and Selene have just been to have a thai meal to celebrate our 1.5 years anniversary! It's the first anniversary we've ever celebrated, and the date is fairly tenuous to say the least, but at least now we have one! :) Selene has been winding me up all day by going "I want to give you your present now!", which makes me think "Oh fuck! I haven't bought anything yet", and say "No, lets not do it now, lets do it later", but she goes "No, I want to do it now! Close your eyes and hold out your hand", so i oblige, wondering what excuse I'm going to give, and she places something in my hand......: An empty bottle of hand sanitizer from her handbag..... "hahahahahahaha" she cries, "your sooo gullable!". Cheeky mare....
btw, i got a very funny e-mail today with an article from this american guy about the whole Bush bullshit war etc. I've decided to give it to you even tho it's very long. here it is:
BushCo Reams Nation Good
No WMDs after all, no excuse for war, too late for anyone to care
anymore.
Ha-ha, suckers
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Ha-ha-ha oh man did we ever get smacked on that one. Conned big time.
Punk'd like dogs. Just gotta shake your head, laugh it off. They reamed
us but good, baby! Damn.
Turns out it really was all a big joke after all. The war, that is. All
a big fat nasty murderous oil-licking lie, a sneaky little power-mad game with you as the sucker and the world as the pawn and BushCo as the
slithery war thug, the dungeon master, the prison daddy. You really have to laugh. Because it's just so wonderfully ridiculous. In a rather disgusting, soul-draining sort of way. See, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No WMDs at all. Isn't that great? What's more: There never were. Ha-ha-ha. Gotcha! No warehouses teeming with nuclear warheads, no underground bunkers packed with vats of boiling biotoxins, no drums of crazy-ass chemical agents that will melt your skin and turn us all into drooling flesh-eating zombies
--
unless, of course, you count the sneering vat of conservative biotoxin that is, say, Fox News, in which case, hell yeah baby, we gotcher WMDs right here beeyatch. Go figure. Those lowly U.N. inspectors were right after all. Who knew? It was all a ruse. We've been sucker-punched and ideologically molested and patriotically sodomized and hey, what the hell, who cares anyway, we "liberated" an oppressed people most Americans secretly loathe and fear and don't understand in the slightest, even though that was never the point, or the justification, or the goal. Go team. But wait, is liberation of a brutalized and tormented people now the reason? The justification for our thuggery? That is so cool! So that means we're going to blow the living crap out of Sri Lanka and Sudan and Tibet and North Korea and about 47 others, right? Right? Maybe Saudi Arabia, too, second only to the Taliban itself in its abuse of women? Cool! As if. Ah, but screw the liberal whiny peacenik U.N. inspectors, you know? Let's ask the U.S. search teams themselves, ShrubCo's own squadrons of biologists, chemists, arms-treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts and Special Forces troops who've been in Iraq for weeks now, searching frantically. Surely they've found something, right? Surely we can now prove that Saddam was fully intending to fillet our babies and annihilate Florida and poke the eyes out of really cute kittens on national TV for sadistic pleasure, right? Gimme a hell yeah! Whoops. Bad news. As The Washington Post reports, the 75th Exploitation Task Force, the very serious-minded group heading up all U.S. inspections in Iraq, the group absolutely certain it would immediately find steaming
neon-lit stockpiles of WMDs piled right next to Saddam's personal stash of gay porn and Britney Spears posters and opium pipes, is coming home with its tail between its legs. Found nothing. Nada. Psychopatriots are a little nonplussed. Bush is merely "embarrassed." Peace advocates are sighing and drinking heavily. We have done this ghastly horrible inane hate-filled entirely unprovoked thing in the name of power and petroleum and military contracts and strategic empire building, our nation is numb and more bitterly divisive than ever and our leaders are not the slightest bit ashamed. But of course you're not the slightest bit shocked. You knew it all along. The WMD line was just a ploy that, tragically, much of the nation bought into like a sucker pyramid scheme after being pounded into submission with hammers of fear and Ashcroftian threats and bogus Orange Alerts and having their tweezers confiscated at the airport. And of course the capacity to be outraged and appalled has been entirely drained out of you, out of this nation, replaced by raging ennui and sad resentment and the new fall season on NBC. This is what they're counting on. Your short attention span. WMDs? That's so, like, last February. Hey look, the swimsuit model won "Survivor"! Because now it's all done. Like a bad trip to the dentist where your routine cleaning turned out to be a bloody excruciating root canal and 50 hours of high-pitched drilling and $100 billion in god-awful cosmetic surgery, now the bandages come off. Smile, sucker. We're at peace once again. Sort of. But not really. Don't you feel better now? No? Too bad. Noone cares what you think. It's all over but the shouting. And the screaming. And the endless years of U.S. occupation in the Middle East, the quiet building of U.S. military bases in Iraq so we can keep those uppity bitches Syria and Egypt and Lebanon in line, forge ahead with the long-standing plan to strong-arm those damn Islamic nuts into brutal compliance with Bushco's bleak blueprint for World Inc. What, too bitter? Hardly. Should we care that Osama, the actual perp of 9/11, is still running around free? That terrorism hasn't been quelled in the slightest? That the Mideast is more of a U.S.-hating powder keg than ever, thanks to BushCo? That the economy is in the worst shape it's been in decades? Should we care that we just massacred tens of thousands of Iraqi (and Afghan) civilians and soldiers and suffered a little more than 100 U.S. casualties and have absolutely nothing to show for it except bogus force-fed pride and this weird, sickening sense that we just executed something irreparable and ungodly and karmically poisonous? Nah. Just laugh it off. Have a glass of wine, make love, go play Frisbee with the dog. Breathe deep and focus on what's truly important and try to assimilate this latest atrocity into your backstabbed worldview, add it to the list of this lifetime's spiritual humiliations, as you wait for the next barrage, the imminent announcement that we're about to do it all again.
Steel yourself. Protect your soul. Because man, they reamed us good.
Slammed this nation like a bad joke. Gotcha! Ha-ha-ha.
---------------
hope you enoyed that as much as I did!
laters! Billy.
Wow I'm cool. Today i hired a motorbike. This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time, but I've always been put off by the fact that i dont actually know how to ride a motorbike... I know, i know, I'm a chicken, but you know, the thought of crashing into the shop I've hired it from is really quite embaressing. So anyway, I woke up this morning with motorbikes on my mind. 1 down for first, 2 up for second etc etc... running over and over in my mind.... Then Selene told me that if I wasn't really confident I should just get a scooter like I always do. To be honest, i was quite glad of the excuse to chicken out. So, I went to the shop and asked to hire a scooter. "That one very expensive, 1000 rupees" he told me. "huh??" I thought. But surely a scooter is the cheapest. No, he told me, the cheapest is the 125cc Yamaha that I had been wanting to hire.... So that was it. fate had decreed that I must attempt to ride a real motorbike or die trying....
So, I told him i'd take it, trying my best to look confident, and he went off to fetch the bike. Then I started worrying about how badly I was going to make a fool of myself. I feel I must stop at this point to explain something. Driving a vehicle on the roads here is not like driving a vehicle in the UK or singapore for example. It's more like trying to drive through the middle of a Levellers concert crossed with a living scrap yard into which a 1000 farm animals have just been released. There are no road markings and the only law is the law of "biggest or fastest first". The fumes are so thick that you can barely see let alone breathe, and as I have mentioned before, horns are used more regularly than brakes, sometimes instead of brakes even. So my anxiety at riding a motorbike is not purely because I dont know how to drive one, but more to do with the fact that there is nowhere even remotely suitable for me to learn to drive one. It's a case of straight in at the deep end.
Anyway, i digress. So, he comes back with my sporty looking Yamaha ZBX or something like that, and I set about inspecting it to make sure it's in full working order. As you can imagine, my knowledge of motorbikes isn't exactly extensive..... So I just pretent to be examining closely..... Wheels: check.... handlebars: check..... horn (very important): check..... stickers: check..... all seems to be in order, i tell him. Then comes the scary part. I climb onto the bike, turn the key, and kickstart. It starts! Hoooray! Step one accomplished! Then I put it in gear. It stalls. Oh yeah, the clutch... No one seems to have noticed, so i start it again... this time I use the clutch and put it into first.... I gradually leapfrog my way around until I'm facing the right direction and I'm about to set off to find the emptiest road I can, when it suddenly dawns on me that i have no petrol.
"Where's the nearest petrol pump?" I ask.
"Down there, left, then left, then right" he says.
I make a quick mental calculation and realise that this route will lead me into the most hellish, congested, vehicular quagmire of death in the whole of katmandu!
"ok! Thanks!" I shout, and leapfrog off in the prescribed direction. After 5 mins of nail-bitingly bad clutch control and a lot of horning, I find myself face to face with a very busy main road. It's one-way and the way is left. But my guy told me to turn right! I stop a passerby and ask him "which way to petrol station??". He points to the right, against the flow of traffic. "But it's one way!" I say to him. He points again in the same direction. I'm not about to drive the wrong way up a one way street that is already about 6 cars wide congested with traffic, so i turn around and head back.
Back at the shop, i tell the guy I couldn't find it, in the hope that he'll direct me to one on a quiet lane somewhere.... Instead he shouts at his younger brother to come and ride on the back of my bike and direct me! Noooo! Now I have the added worry of killing a small boy, and the almost definite embarressment of stalling about 10 times with him on the back.
We set off, and as I had guessed he starts to direct me into the worst part of katamdu. The road I end up one is as wide as the M1, but with no road markings, and no rules. It's a complete free for all. Everyone just weaves in and out of one another like flies. Somehow i manage to get all the way to the petrol station without stalling or killing anyone! Then i stall as I pull into the station....
By the time i get back to Selene I feel as if I could ride into the depths of hell and return unscathed! Talk about initiation by fire! So with my newly aquired street bike skills, we set off to find some countryside. We figure if we keep going in a straght line for long enough we have to eventually leave this godforsaken city of smog. After 40 mins of riding thru insane traffic we eventually reach the hills that surround the katamandu valley. And then we go up. and up, and up. I'm basically just waiting for a vaguely flat bit to stop on, but none comes. Eventually I settle for about a 35 degree incline and pull over. Wow! I had no idea riding a bike was so tiring! My hands are siezed up from holding the clutch and accelerator for so long, and my face is caked with dust! I sit on the floor to recover and some local boys give me a plum to cheer me up... :)
Anyway, enough about my bike adventures. Needless to say I made it back safely, and me and Selene have just been to have a thai meal to celebrate our 1.5 years anniversary! It's the first anniversary we've ever celebrated, and the date is fairly tenuous to say the least, but at least now we have one! :) Selene has been winding me up all day by going "I want to give you your present now!", which makes me think "Oh fuck! I haven't bought anything yet", and say "No, lets not do it now, lets do it later", but she goes "No, I want to do it now! Close your eyes and hold out your hand", so i oblige, wondering what excuse I'm going to give, and she places something in my hand......: An empty bottle of hand sanitizer from her handbag..... "hahahahahahaha" she cries, "your sooo gullable!". Cheeky mare....
btw, i got a very funny e-mail today with an article from this american guy about the whole Bush bullshit war etc. I've decided to give it to you even tho it's very long. here it is:
BushCo Reams Nation Good
No WMDs after all, no excuse for war, too late for anyone to care
anymore.
Ha-ha, suckers
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Ha-ha-ha oh man did we ever get smacked on that one. Conned big time.
Punk'd like dogs. Just gotta shake your head, laugh it off. They reamed
us but good, baby! Damn.
Turns out it really was all a big joke after all. The war, that is. All
a big fat nasty murderous oil-licking lie, a sneaky little power-mad game with you as the sucker and the world as the pawn and BushCo as the
slithery war thug, the dungeon master, the prison daddy. You really have to laugh. Because it's just so wonderfully ridiculous. In a rather disgusting, soul-draining sort of way. See, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No WMDs at all. Isn't that great? What's more: There never were. Ha-ha-ha. Gotcha! No warehouses teeming with nuclear warheads, no underground bunkers packed with vats of boiling biotoxins, no drums of crazy-ass chemical agents that will melt your skin and turn us all into drooling flesh-eating zombies
--
unless, of course, you count the sneering vat of conservative biotoxin that is, say, Fox News, in which case, hell yeah baby, we gotcher WMDs right here beeyatch. Go figure. Those lowly U.N. inspectors were right after all. Who knew? It was all a ruse. We've been sucker-punched and ideologically molested and patriotically sodomized and hey, what the hell, who cares anyway, we "liberated" an oppressed people most Americans secretly loathe and fear and don't understand in the slightest, even though that was never the point, or the justification, or the goal. Go team. But wait, is liberation of a brutalized and tormented people now the reason? The justification for our thuggery? That is so cool! So that means we're going to blow the living crap out of Sri Lanka and Sudan and Tibet and North Korea and about 47 others, right? Right? Maybe Saudi Arabia, too, second only to the Taliban itself in its abuse of women? Cool! As if. Ah, but screw the liberal whiny peacenik U.N. inspectors, you know? Let's ask the U.S. search teams themselves, ShrubCo's own squadrons of biologists, chemists, arms-treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts and Special Forces troops who've been in Iraq for weeks now, searching frantically. Surely they've found something, right? Surely we can now prove that Saddam was fully intending to fillet our babies and annihilate Florida and poke the eyes out of really cute kittens on national TV for sadistic pleasure, right? Gimme a hell yeah! Whoops. Bad news. As The Washington Post reports, the 75th Exploitation Task Force, the very serious-minded group heading up all U.S. inspections in Iraq, the group absolutely certain it would immediately find steaming
neon-lit stockpiles of WMDs piled right next to Saddam's personal stash of gay porn and Britney Spears posters and opium pipes, is coming home with its tail between its legs. Found nothing. Nada. Psychopatriots are a little nonplussed. Bush is merely "embarrassed." Peace advocates are sighing and drinking heavily. We have done this ghastly horrible inane hate-filled entirely unprovoked thing in the name of power and petroleum and military contracts and strategic empire building, our nation is numb and more bitterly divisive than ever and our leaders are not the slightest bit ashamed. But of course you're not the slightest bit shocked. You knew it all along. The WMD line was just a ploy that, tragically, much of the nation bought into like a sucker pyramid scheme after being pounded into submission with hammers of fear and Ashcroftian threats and bogus Orange Alerts and having their tweezers confiscated at the airport. And of course the capacity to be outraged and appalled has been entirely drained out of you, out of this nation, replaced by raging ennui and sad resentment and the new fall season on NBC. This is what they're counting on. Your short attention span. WMDs? That's so, like, last February. Hey look, the swimsuit model won "Survivor"! Because now it's all done. Like a bad trip to the dentist where your routine cleaning turned out to be a bloody excruciating root canal and 50 hours of high-pitched drilling and $100 billion in god-awful cosmetic surgery, now the bandages come off. Smile, sucker. We're at peace once again. Sort of. But not really. Don't you feel better now? No? Too bad. Noone cares what you think. It's all over but the shouting. And the screaming. And the endless years of U.S. occupation in the Middle East, the quiet building of U.S. military bases in Iraq so we can keep those uppity bitches Syria and Egypt and Lebanon in line, forge ahead with the long-standing plan to strong-arm those damn Islamic nuts into brutal compliance with Bushco's bleak blueprint for World Inc. What, too bitter? Hardly. Should we care that Osama, the actual perp of 9/11, is still running around free? That terrorism hasn't been quelled in the slightest? That the Mideast is more of a U.S.-hating powder keg than ever, thanks to BushCo? That the economy is in the worst shape it's been in decades? Should we care that we just massacred tens of thousands of Iraqi (and Afghan) civilians and soldiers and suffered a little more than 100 U.S. casualties and have absolutely nothing to show for it except bogus force-fed pride and this weird, sickening sense that we just executed something irreparable and ungodly and karmically poisonous? Nah. Just laugh it off. Have a glass of wine, make love, go play Frisbee with the dog. Breathe deep and focus on what's truly important and try to assimilate this latest atrocity into your backstabbed worldview, add it to the list of this lifetime's spiritual humiliations, as you wait for the next barrage, the imminent announcement that we're about to do it all again.
Steel yourself. Protect your soul. Because man, they reamed us good.
Slammed this nation like a bad joke. Gotcha! Ha-ha-ha.
---------------
hope you enoyed that as much as I did!
laters! Billy.
hi guys,
just thought I'd share this with you. It's a site I stumbled upon by accident. It's called the "United States Institute of Peace", and it claims to be "an independent, nonpartisan federal institution created by Congress to promote the prevention, management, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts." But when you read it, the fact that all it's team are personally selected by the president himself is rather apparant. go take a look.... http://www.usip.org
Also, please go read the news on www.independent.co.uk, especially if your in singapore and rely on channel news asia or straights times.....
enjoy!
just thought I'd share this with you. It's a site I stumbled upon by accident. It's called the "United States Institute of Peace", and it claims to be "an independent, nonpartisan federal institution created by Congress to promote the prevention, management, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts." But when you read it, the fact that all it's team are personally selected by the president himself is rather apparant. go take a look.... http://www.usip.org
Also, please go read the news on www.independent.co.uk, especially if your in singapore and rely on channel news asia or straights times.....
enjoy!
Thursday, May 29, 2003
Today was a very tiring day. We set off in the morning for Posh-potty-not (I'm serious! that's what it's called!) which is a temple/creamation site just outside katmandu. Upon arrival we hired a guide and set off into the complex. The first thing we encountered was burning people. Lots of them. They were dead, which was a relief, but my guide informed me that the temple I was stood next to used to be used for sacrificing live people as an offering to Kali, the hindu goddess of bitchiness. She's a bit like Xena warrior princess in the episodes where she turns bad.... Apparantly she eats babies or something. I think people worship her more as a precaution than out of reverence...something like "O hail Kali, goddess of darkness, you are the best, please dont eat my baby". She's actually earned herself the title "protector of children" due to the fact that appeasing her will increase your childs chance of survival by keeping it off her menu.... cheeky bitch. Ironically she is actually just a reincarnation of Parvati, who is really nice and lovely...
Most of the temple is devoted to Shiva, who is the most popular Hindu god in this area. I have to admit shiva is pretty cool. Once, Shiva tried to prove his coolness to his fellow God mates, Vishnu and.... umm, i forget the other one... but anyway, to prove he was the don, he got his dick out and made it grow into a pillar that streathed in both directions as far as the eye could see. He then challenged his mates to try and find the ends. They both set off, and when they came back, one of them addmitted that shjiva did in fact have an infinitely long willy, but the other, vishnu I think, claimed he had found the end! Shiva proved he was lying however, and they all laughed at him.
Shiva dick, as i may have mentioned before in my blog, is very popular here. I think Imust have seen over 500 "Shiva lingas" around the temple complex, most of them housed in their very own little temple. A shiva linga looks decidedly like a cider press. It has a round stone base, with a kind of spout, then it has a big "knob" sticking up out of the middle. It's supposed to represent male and female genetalia apparantly. So I supposed shiva's not such a lad after all, more of a hemaphrodite....
Lots of the temples have erotic carvings around the roof to "protect" the temple. By erotic I mean stuff like a woman getting taken up both holes whilst fellating another man and giving two hand jobs simoultaneously! Talk about multi-tasking! It truly is a "holy" experience.. hohohoho!
Anyway, back to more sombre topics. Burning people. Yes, It's very strange. I couldn't help feeling it was a bit sick, all these tourists standing round and gawping at someone elses funeral like it was some kind of freakshow. I was so appaled in fact that I decided to zoom out my handycam slightly as a mark of respect.... I have to admit that i couldn't help taking a photo of someone burning on a funeral pyre... Altho afterwards when I looked at the pic on my digital camera i was disgusted with myself and decided to delete it... not that I actually did delete it mind you, but at least I showed a slight bit of remorse for my callous behaviour! It's so hard being so self-righteous and at the same time so shallow.....
I'm in a dilemma at the moment. Selene leaves in a few days (sobs) and then I'll be back on my own again. So, should I head for thailand and lie on a beach, or should I buy a Hero Honda and go burning round the North of India with Danel. Selene has forbidden me to buy a motorbike, so that adds a bit more rebellious credabilty to the bike idea.... but still I can't decide..... I think I'll hire a bike here and see if I actually can ride it before I decide....
ok, 5 mins of political discussion before I go. Tony Blair is a cocksucking sonofawhore. George Bush and his weapons of mass corruption can kiss my bony butt. I've just been reading the online newspapers again. What the fuck is Donald Bumsfelt talking about! Cheeky fucker! "Oh yes, they might have destryoed them before the war....that's why we haven't found any...". Think about what your saying you dumn twat! Maybe the american public are so stupid they'll buy that as an excuse, but the rest of us still remember what you said before the war! A certain UN Resolution 1441 which stated that Saddam must destroy all his weapons of mass destruction or we'd blow him to hell.... well if he did, then how come we still blew him to hell??! Duh! I hope you all burn in hell for this your lying bastards! Right, glad thats off my chest. Time to go and take some more advantage of my priviledged western money........
Most of the temple is devoted to Shiva, who is the most popular Hindu god in this area. I have to admit shiva is pretty cool. Once, Shiva tried to prove his coolness to his fellow God mates, Vishnu and.... umm, i forget the other one... but anyway, to prove he was the don, he got his dick out and made it grow into a pillar that streathed in both directions as far as the eye could see. He then challenged his mates to try and find the ends. They both set off, and when they came back, one of them addmitted that shjiva did in fact have an infinitely long willy, but the other, vishnu I think, claimed he had found the end! Shiva proved he was lying however, and they all laughed at him.
Shiva dick, as i may have mentioned before in my blog, is very popular here. I think Imust have seen over 500 "Shiva lingas" around the temple complex, most of them housed in their very own little temple. A shiva linga looks decidedly like a cider press. It has a round stone base, with a kind of spout, then it has a big "knob" sticking up out of the middle. It's supposed to represent male and female genetalia apparantly. So I supposed shiva's not such a lad after all, more of a hemaphrodite....
Lots of the temples have erotic carvings around the roof to "protect" the temple. By erotic I mean stuff like a woman getting taken up both holes whilst fellating another man and giving two hand jobs simoultaneously! Talk about multi-tasking! It truly is a "holy" experience.. hohohoho!
Anyway, back to more sombre topics. Burning people. Yes, It's very strange. I couldn't help feeling it was a bit sick, all these tourists standing round and gawping at someone elses funeral like it was some kind of freakshow. I was so appaled in fact that I decided to zoom out my handycam slightly as a mark of respect.... I have to admit that i couldn't help taking a photo of someone burning on a funeral pyre... Altho afterwards when I looked at the pic on my digital camera i was disgusted with myself and decided to delete it... not that I actually did delete it mind you, but at least I showed a slight bit of remorse for my callous behaviour! It's so hard being so self-righteous and at the same time so shallow.....
I'm in a dilemma at the moment. Selene leaves in a few days (sobs) and then I'll be back on my own again. So, should I head for thailand and lie on a beach, or should I buy a Hero Honda and go burning round the North of India with Danel. Selene has forbidden me to buy a motorbike, so that adds a bit more rebellious credabilty to the bike idea.... but still I can't decide..... I think I'll hire a bike here and see if I actually can ride it before I decide....
ok, 5 mins of political discussion before I go. Tony Blair is a cocksucking sonofawhore. George Bush and his weapons of mass corruption can kiss my bony butt. I've just been reading the online newspapers again. What the fuck is Donald Bumsfelt talking about! Cheeky fucker! "Oh yes, they might have destryoed them before the war....that's why we haven't found any...". Think about what your saying you dumn twat! Maybe the american public are so stupid they'll buy that as an excuse, but the rest of us still remember what you said before the war! A certain UN Resolution 1441 which stated that Saddam must destroy all his weapons of mass destruction or we'd blow him to hell.... well if he did, then how come we still blew him to hell??! Duh! I hope you all burn in hell for this your lying bastards! Right, glad thats off my chest. Time to go and take some more advantage of my priviledged western money........
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
mmm, i seem to have run out of time before writing anything.... ok, here's 4 mins worth of ramble....:
I have come to the conclusion that all vehicles in nepal (and india) are "horn powered". By this i mean that the horn is actually vital in the running of the engine, being the only thing that pumps fuel from the tank into the engine. This conclusion is based on the fact that all drivers use there horn at least once every 6 seconds regardless of whether they are in congested traffic or on an empty road. The horning has absoultely no correlation whatsoever with people in the road/cars in front/other drivers etc, so I ealised that there must be more to these horns than I had first suspected. Another thing that supports my theory is that the larger the vehicle, the more frequent and more powerful the horning becomes. Trucks for example, dont have a simple "Beeeep", or "Parrrp" sound, but a "NeeNawNeeNawNeeNaw" noise which is loud enough to rupture an eardrum. This sound is used at least every 6 seconds, and even more when going up hills (more fuel needed i suspect). Anyway, times up.... think about it......
I have come to the conclusion that all vehicles in nepal (and india) are "horn powered". By this i mean that the horn is actually vital in the running of the engine, being the only thing that pumps fuel from the tank into the engine. This conclusion is based on the fact that all drivers use there horn at least once every 6 seconds regardless of whether they are in congested traffic or on an empty road. The horning has absoultely no correlation whatsoever with people in the road/cars in front/other drivers etc, so I ealised that there must be more to these horns than I had first suspected. Another thing that supports my theory is that the larger the vehicle, the more frequent and more powerful the horning becomes. Trucks for example, dont have a simple "Beeeep", or "Parrrp" sound, but a "NeeNawNeeNawNeeNaw" noise which is loud enough to rupture an eardrum. This sound is used at least every 6 seconds, and even more when going up hills (more fuel needed i suspect). Anyway, times up.... think about it......
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
wow, I'm achin like shit. Just got back from a 2 day rafting trip on the Bote Koshi, Nepals most hardcore river. It was awesome. The rapids were.... rapid. And big and wet and everything else you'd expect from white water rapids. Me and Selene were the front paddlers today after our two english chaps, James and Charlie, proved useless yesterday, either failing to respond to commands or responding by doing the opposite... (hehe, sorry guys, but you sucked!). So we got the front seats, which I have to say is way better. You get the full brunt of the water as you crash headfirst into it. We had quite a few occasions where our raft got stuck and nearly flipped us out in some severely huge rapids, but somehow it always worked out. It could have had something to do with our guide, who was steering the raft at the back. Krisna, which is his name, is the biggest guy I have seen in a long time. He is just a huge wall of muscles, some of which I think belong to an as yet undiscovered muscle group which he has cultivated himself from scratch. Despite looking like a Terminator, he is a very nice guy, and I'm sure he saved our lives a few times. I'm not so sure, however, about the time he told us "Forward! Forward! faster!" before aiming out raft directly at a huge rock with water rushing round it and falling about 2 metres into a kind of spin cycle washing machine type whirlpool. We hit the rock at full speed and our raft literally bent double, almost spilling us all into the middle of the spin cycle. he thought it was all terribly funny, and I'm sure he did it deliberately....
Anyway, we survived. Now we're back in Katmandu (yes, I'm still refusing to spell it correctly), and it's absoultely packed! It's the most packed we've seen it, which is wierd, as it's gradually ben getting more and more empty since we arrived in Nepal. The reason for all these people is that it's the 50th anniversary of the first Everest Summit expedition (at least the first successful one!), so loads of wannabe mountaineers, and a few real ones, are all coming here to celebrate. Having climbed the peak twice (see earlier entry) we are presiding over the ceremonies as guests of honour....
ok, I'm starved, gotta go and eat some rice and lentils.... or maybe a big juicy steak and a cold carlsberg.... ahh, the joys of being a tourist! :)
Anyway, we survived. Now we're back in Katmandu (yes, I'm still refusing to spell it correctly), and it's absoultely packed! It's the most packed we've seen it, which is wierd, as it's gradually ben getting more and more empty since we arrived in Nepal. The reason for all these people is that it's the 50th anniversary of the first Everest Summit expedition (at least the first successful one!), so loads of wannabe mountaineers, and a few real ones, are all coming here to celebrate. Having climbed the peak twice (see earlier entry) we are presiding over the ceremonies as guests of honour....
ok, I'm starved, gotta go and eat some rice and lentils.... or maybe a big juicy steak and a cold carlsberg.... ahh, the joys of being a tourist! :)
Saturday, May 24, 2003
WE'RE ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, that's right, we're back, and you wont believe what we've been thru! After making it to the Annapurna base camp in only 3 days instead of the usual 5, we decided that the base camp wasn't enough of a challenge, and set out alone to tackle the peak.....
ok ok, I'm lying. Here's the real story:
Day one:
Got a cab to Nayapul, from where the book says it's a 20 min walk to Birethanti, the start of the annapurna conservation area. 1 hour later we arrive in Birethanti...... start to have doubts about the trekking times given in our guide book...... The book also told us it would take us about 4 hours to reach gandruk, our destination for day one. We set off from Nayapul at 8am. By 2pm we were still in the first village along the trail and having trouble getting up the first hill. Then it started raining..... and hailing..... and then more raining..... We sheltered in a tea house and watched the crazy nepalese porters continuing to trek past us in the rain. I say crazy, as the path no longer resembled a path... more of a cascading river/waterfall/mudslide affair.... and these nepalese were wearing flip-flops (slippers) and carrying about 40kg of stuff on their heads...... Anyway, after about two hours the rain stopped and we headed off. Our plan of arriving at lunch time now turned into a plan to try and arrive before it got dark.... Selene decided she couldn't go any further with her pack, and luckily for us a local guy offered his services as a porter for 200 rupees (about 1 pound 50).
So eventually we arrived at the start of Gandruk, just as it was getting dark. At the first guesthouse we came to we stopped for a rest, and a voice from the balcony above us shouted: "Hello! Come and stay here, it's great!". We didn't need much convincing, and we trapsed in. Anyway, they were right. It was the most fun place i've been so far! It's run by this old nepalese lady who we called "Ama" (mother) and she called us "Chora" (boy) and "Churi" (girl). These 3 words formed the entire basis of every converation we had with Ama, and beleive me we had a lot! A typical coversation would go something like "Ama!"..."Chora! Churi!"... "Ama!".... "Chora!".... But she laughed and smiled so much that you felt like you were sharing your life story with her, and being damn amusing in the process! The other word she knew was "Ganja", which she would add onto the "Chora!" every now and then before offering us and huge pile of ganja for 20 rupees...... I cannot beging to explain how much this woman laughed. And no, she wasn't stoned, she only grew ganja to give to other people! Let me give you an example. You try to order some food... "I'll have and onion omelet please".... "Omelet!!! Chora omelet! hahahahahahaha!!!!!".... you get the picture.....
Then there was Cook. Cook, not surprisingly, is the cook. He is 21 years old, and completely insane. Having a conversation with him is like putting your brain in a blender. I wish I could recount even a part of what we talked about with him, but it would be like trying to explain random events in a sequential order..... It usually involved a lot of hysterical laughter from both parties, although never at the same thing..... However, Cook could cook, let me tell you! As long as you asked for no salt... otherwise you got 2 heaped teaspoons full no matter what the dish.... :)
The guys who called us from the balcony were a bunch of very friendly Israelis, and that evening we sat around a campfire with them and had a lot of fun... Effy, the guy who shouted us, had been there for 3 days, after deciding that trekking was not for him on the first day of his trek. Having been there for so long, he had appointed himself manager, seeing as no one spoke english, and ama and Cook had both wholeheartedly accepted him as such!
Day 2:
Decided that after the hard day on day one, we needed a rest day. Spent the day lazing around. walked into gandruk and looked at the view. Decided that maybe the ABC (Annapurna Base Camp) was a bit adventurous for us and started thinking about alternative routes....
After having my second nap of the day, i emerged from my room to find about 13 nepalese sitting on the lawn playing cards. There was aslo about 5 tents pitched in the garden. Wow, I thought, nepalese tourists! I was wrong. They were in fact part of a 14 strong crew (11 porters, 1 cook, 1 guide, 1 assistant guide) who were part of an organised trek. So where were the "customers" of this organised trek?? Then i spotted them. All 3 of them. 1 english guy, fresh out of school, not looking a day over 18. One English girl, who was too nervous to make friends on her own, and one ozzy girl. All 3 had signed up for the trip back at home, and were paying about US$70 a day for the trek!! And they were staying in tents and having their food prepared by the cook. As you can imagine they were a bit shocked to find out that we had rooms with comfy beds and were paying 100 rupees for them.... :) The brit girl asked me... "but what do you eat??".... "whatever I decided to order off the menu in the restaurant" I replied. Poor ignorant fools.
Day 3
Having realised that we hadn't bought enough money with us to hire a porter, it was decided that i would become the porter, and selene would transfer her stuff into my bag and leave her bag at the guesthouse. What an amazing plan! So we set off at 8am heading for Chomrong. With Selene packless things were going much smoother. We made it to the halfway mark with time to spare, and were just starting to feel really optimistic when it started raining. We didn't let thing dampen our spirits however, and set off thru the rain, which wasn't that heavy anyway.
An hour later, and we were still trekking thru the rain, but surprisingly, still happy. If Selene started to look a bit miserable, all I had to do was pop a gummi-bear in her mouth and her scowl would immediately be transformed into a look of joy! The power of gummi should not be underestimated... Eventually we reached the only tea house on the way to chomrong, just in time, as the rain, which up until then had been of the english variety (relentless but pissy and weak) suddenly turned into himalayan kind (torrential, turning into hail and back every few minutes, accompanied by lightening that singes your eyelashes and huge clouds that envelop you and block out the sky).
We stayed in the tea-house for an hour and drunk burnt milk tea while I played my flute to try and calm the gods a little. Eventually the storm passed, and we set off on the last leg of the journey as the sun came out.....
.......for about 5 mins, after which the storm returned with a vengence. This time we had no tree cover and the wind was blowing the rain directly into our faces. Selenes face was now displaying signs of Acute Mountain Depression, and no amount of gummis was going to work this time. But still we soldiered on (we didn't have a lot of choice) and in the end we reached Chomrong. We stopped at the second guesthouse we reached (an improvement on Gandruk!) and peeled off our soaking wet clothes.... My so called "waterproof breatheable" jacket had breathed about as much as a week old corpse, and as a result I was soaked thru to the skin with either sweat or rain... does it really make a difference?
After we dried a bit, there was a break in the clouds and for the first time we caught a glimpse of the mountains. Wow. This is why we came! They were so big and pointy with white bits at the top! Awesome!
Day 4:
Woke up at dawn and went out to have a piss. Was confronted by the most amazing view I've seen on my trip so far. The sky was cloudless and the air was completely clear. The sun hadn't yet risen over the ridge to my right, but it's rays were searing their way accross the sky like a halogen torchlight in a dusty cellar. Where these rays touched the peaks of the mountains, they caught the fine spray of snow blowing off of them and illuminated them like a floodlight. I cant fully describe this, but luckily the photos I took can, so keep your eyes peeled for them....
We had designated today as a rest day, but i was feeling restless, and when the guest house owner invited me to the hot-springs I couldn't resist. He was taking this french guy, Jean, there. Jean had broken his foot on the way to the ABC and had been resting in this guesthouse for 3 days waiting for his foot to heal. Apparantly it was just about ok, so he was going to attempt this walk. I was told it would take about an hour to get there and 1.5 hours to get back. No worries.
After about 20 mins of going down the steepest steps I'd encountered so far, my knees started giving me some trouble. And from what I could see the path went pretty much straight down into infinity and beyond.... But I survived until the bottom by running ahead, therefore taking the risk off my knees and placing it on my life instead. I don't know if you've tried it, but running down mountains is exremely effortless compared to walking down them, and just requires a bit of quick footwork and an acceptance of a possible, probably very painful, death.
At the bottom I lay in the hot spring and rejuvinated my aching muscles... bliss! However, rejuvintaing your muscles is a fairly pointless exercice if it forces you to completely fuck them up beyond repair trying to get home, which is exactly what I did. I set off back up the hill following Jean, who despite his "broken" foot was setting a pace that was somewhere between an olympic walk and a sprint. I'll remind you now that these were very steep steps, with no flat bits, and no traversing, just tight zig-zags going all the way up the steepest side of the mountain. One hour later we reached the top (30 mins faster than it was supposed to take) and I thought I was going to die. It was midday and the sun was beating down on me. Every step felt like I was being stabbed in the chest with a large kitchen knife, and my legs were numb. I staggered into the courtyard and selene greeted me with a look that said "Oh my god, your about to die!". Somehow I didn't die, but my rest day had succeded in completely straining every muscle in my legs. Tomorrow was gonna be fun.....
Day 5:
Set off for Gandruk at 6am. Almost all enthusiasm had evaporated by now as we were no longer heading towards the mountains but away from them. My legs were fucked. For the fist 30 mins I was actually hobbling as my knees felt like they might go "pop" at any moment. Just in case you sitting there saying "God billy's such a hypocondriach!" I'll have you know that my doctor has told me that I do have some condition with my knees called "old man's knees" or something, and if you dont beleive me I'll get him to write me a note!! So anyway, I'll spare you the details, but we trekked back to gandruk.
When we arrived it was like ariving home! Ama came rushing out to greet us, and the time honoured shouts of "Ama!" "Chora! Churi!" filled the air once more. Once we'd settled in, I appointed myself manager seeing as effy had left, and sat on the balcony trying to coax in tourists. I managed to get in one Israeli and was later offered a large bundle of Ganja by Ama as payment.... !
Day 6:
Set off early again and made good time as it was all downhill. By the time we arrived in Pokhara again we were sooo knackered, but the thought of all the luxuries we could buy was too much so we headed out into town. First we ate thai food. Then singaporean food. Then Japanese food. Then we bought a large bag of sweets and chocolate and made ourselves thoroughly sick. Then we went and slept for a long time.....
Right, I'm sick of writing, and I'm sure you're totally bored shitless of reading, if you are still reading of course. I'm actually back in katmandu now btw, just to confuse you all. :)
Yes, that's right, we're back, and you wont believe what we've been thru! After making it to the Annapurna base camp in only 3 days instead of the usual 5, we decided that the base camp wasn't enough of a challenge, and set out alone to tackle the peak.....
ok ok, I'm lying. Here's the real story:
Day one:
Got a cab to Nayapul, from where the book says it's a 20 min walk to Birethanti, the start of the annapurna conservation area. 1 hour later we arrive in Birethanti...... start to have doubts about the trekking times given in our guide book...... The book also told us it would take us about 4 hours to reach gandruk, our destination for day one. We set off from Nayapul at 8am. By 2pm we were still in the first village along the trail and having trouble getting up the first hill. Then it started raining..... and hailing..... and then more raining..... We sheltered in a tea house and watched the crazy nepalese porters continuing to trek past us in the rain. I say crazy, as the path no longer resembled a path... more of a cascading river/waterfall/mudslide affair.... and these nepalese were wearing flip-flops (slippers) and carrying about 40kg of stuff on their heads...... Anyway, after about two hours the rain stopped and we headed off. Our plan of arriving at lunch time now turned into a plan to try and arrive before it got dark.... Selene decided she couldn't go any further with her pack, and luckily for us a local guy offered his services as a porter for 200 rupees (about 1 pound 50).
So eventually we arrived at the start of Gandruk, just as it was getting dark. At the first guesthouse we came to we stopped for a rest, and a voice from the balcony above us shouted: "Hello! Come and stay here, it's great!". We didn't need much convincing, and we trapsed in. Anyway, they were right. It was the most fun place i've been so far! It's run by this old nepalese lady who we called "Ama" (mother) and she called us "Chora" (boy) and "Churi" (girl). These 3 words formed the entire basis of every converation we had with Ama, and beleive me we had a lot! A typical coversation would go something like "Ama!"..."Chora! Churi!"... "Ama!".... "Chora!".... But she laughed and smiled so much that you felt like you were sharing your life story with her, and being damn amusing in the process! The other word she knew was "Ganja", which she would add onto the "Chora!" every now and then before offering us and huge pile of ganja for 20 rupees...... I cannot beging to explain how much this woman laughed. And no, she wasn't stoned, she only grew ganja to give to other people! Let me give you an example. You try to order some food... "I'll have and onion omelet please".... "Omelet!!! Chora omelet! hahahahahahaha!!!!!".... you get the picture.....
Then there was Cook. Cook, not surprisingly, is the cook. He is 21 years old, and completely insane. Having a conversation with him is like putting your brain in a blender. I wish I could recount even a part of what we talked about with him, but it would be like trying to explain random events in a sequential order..... It usually involved a lot of hysterical laughter from both parties, although never at the same thing..... However, Cook could cook, let me tell you! As long as you asked for no salt... otherwise you got 2 heaped teaspoons full no matter what the dish.... :)
The guys who called us from the balcony were a bunch of very friendly Israelis, and that evening we sat around a campfire with them and had a lot of fun... Effy, the guy who shouted us, had been there for 3 days, after deciding that trekking was not for him on the first day of his trek. Having been there for so long, he had appointed himself manager, seeing as no one spoke english, and ama and Cook had both wholeheartedly accepted him as such!
Day 2:
Decided that after the hard day on day one, we needed a rest day. Spent the day lazing around. walked into gandruk and looked at the view. Decided that maybe the ABC (Annapurna Base Camp) was a bit adventurous for us and started thinking about alternative routes....
After having my second nap of the day, i emerged from my room to find about 13 nepalese sitting on the lawn playing cards. There was aslo about 5 tents pitched in the garden. Wow, I thought, nepalese tourists! I was wrong. They were in fact part of a 14 strong crew (11 porters, 1 cook, 1 guide, 1 assistant guide) who were part of an organised trek. So where were the "customers" of this organised trek?? Then i spotted them. All 3 of them. 1 english guy, fresh out of school, not looking a day over 18. One English girl, who was too nervous to make friends on her own, and one ozzy girl. All 3 had signed up for the trip back at home, and were paying about US$70 a day for the trek!! And they were staying in tents and having their food prepared by the cook. As you can imagine they were a bit shocked to find out that we had rooms with comfy beds and were paying 100 rupees for them.... :) The brit girl asked me... "but what do you eat??".... "whatever I decided to order off the menu in the restaurant" I replied. Poor ignorant fools.
Day 3
Having realised that we hadn't bought enough money with us to hire a porter, it was decided that i would become the porter, and selene would transfer her stuff into my bag and leave her bag at the guesthouse. What an amazing plan! So we set off at 8am heading for Chomrong. With Selene packless things were going much smoother. We made it to the halfway mark with time to spare, and were just starting to feel really optimistic when it started raining. We didn't let thing dampen our spirits however, and set off thru the rain, which wasn't that heavy anyway.
An hour later, and we were still trekking thru the rain, but surprisingly, still happy. If Selene started to look a bit miserable, all I had to do was pop a gummi-bear in her mouth and her scowl would immediately be transformed into a look of joy! The power of gummi should not be underestimated... Eventually we reached the only tea house on the way to chomrong, just in time, as the rain, which up until then had been of the english variety (relentless but pissy and weak) suddenly turned into himalayan kind (torrential, turning into hail and back every few minutes, accompanied by lightening that singes your eyelashes and huge clouds that envelop you and block out the sky).
We stayed in the tea-house for an hour and drunk burnt milk tea while I played my flute to try and calm the gods a little. Eventually the storm passed, and we set off on the last leg of the journey as the sun came out.....
.......for about 5 mins, after which the storm returned with a vengence. This time we had no tree cover and the wind was blowing the rain directly into our faces. Selenes face was now displaying signs of Acute Mountain Depression, and no amount of gummis was going to work this time. But still we soldiered on (we didn't have a lot of choice) and in the end we reached Chomrong. We stopped at the second guesthouse we reached (an improvement on Gandruk!) and peeled off our soaking wet clothes.... My so called "waterproof breatheable" jacket had breathed about as much as a week old corpse, and as a result I was soaked thru to the skin with either sweat or rain... does it really make a difference?
After we dried a bit, there was a break in the clouds and for the first time we caught a glimpse of the mountains. Wow. This is why we came! They were so big and pointy with white bits at the top! Awesome!
Day 4:
Woke up at dawn and went out to have a piss. Was confronted by the most amazing view I've seen on my trip so far. The sky was cloudless and the air was completely clear. The sun hadn't yet risen over the ridge to my right, but it's rays were searing their way accross the sky like a halogen torchlight in a dusty cellar. Where these rays touched the peaks of the mountains, they caught the fine spray of snow blowing off of them and illuminated them like a floodlight. I cant fully describe this, but luckily the photos I took can, so keep your eyes peeled for them....
We had designated today as a rest day, but i was feeling restless, and when the guest house owner invited me to the hot-springs I couldn't resist. He was taking this french guy, Jean, there. Jean had broken his foot on the way to the ABC and had been resting in this guesthouse for 3 days waiting for his foot to heal. Apparantly it was just about ok, so he was going to attempt this walk. I was told it would take about an hour to get there and 1.5 hours to get back. No worries.
After about 20 mins of going down the steepest steps I'd encountered so far, my knees started giving me some trouble. And from what I could see the path went pretty much straight down into infinity and beyond.... But I survived until the bottom by running ahead, therefore taking the risk off my knees and placing it on my life instead. I don't know if you've tried it, but running down mountains is exremely effortless compared to walking down them, and just requires a bit of quick footwork and an acceptance of a possible, probably very painful, death.
At the bottom I lay in the hot spring and rejuvinated my aching muscles... bliss! However, rejuvintaing your muscles is a fairly pointless exercice if it forces you to completely fuck them up beyond repair trying to get home, which is exactly what I did. I set off back up the hill following Jean, who despite his "broken" foot was setting a pace that was somewhere between an olympic walk and a sprint. I'll remind you now that these were very steep steps, with no flat bits, and no traversing, just tight zig-zags going all the way up the steepest side of the mountain. One hour later we reached the top (30 mins faster than it was supposed to take) and I thought I was going to die. It was midday and the sun was beating down on me. Every step felt like I was being stabbed in the chest with a large kitchen knife, and my legs were numb. I staggered into the courtyard and selene greeted me with a look that said "Oh my god, your about to die!". Somehow I didn't die, but my rest day had succeded in completely straining every muscle in my legs. Tomorrow was gonna be fun.....
Day 5:
Set off for Gandruk at 6am. Almost all enthusiasm had evaporated by now as we were no longer heading towards the mountains but away from them. My legs were fucked. For the fist 30 mins I was actually hobbling as my knees felt like they might go "pop" at any moment. Just in case you sitting there saying "God billy's such a hypocondriach!" I'll have you know that my doctor has told me that I do have some condition with my knees called "old man's knees" or something, and if you dont beleive me I'll get him to write me a note!! So anyway, I'll spare you the details, but we trekked back to gandruk.
When we arrived it was like ariving home! Ama came rushing out to greet us, and the time honoured shouts of "Ama!" "Chora! Churi!" filled the air once more. Once we'd settled in, I appointed myself manager seeing as effy had left, and sat on the balcony trying to coax in tourists. I managed to get in one Israeli and was later offered a large bundle of Ganja by Ama as payment.... !
Day 6:
Set off early again and made good time as it was all downhill. By the time we arrived in Pokhara again we were sooo knackered, but the thought of all the luxuries we could buy was too much so we headed out into town. First we ate thai food. Then singaporean food. Then Japanese food. Then we bought a large bag of sweets and chocolate and made ourselves thoroughly sick. Then we went and slept for a long time.....
Right, I'm sick of writing, and I'm sure you're totally bored shitless of reading, if you are still reading of course. I'm actually back in katmandu now btw, just to confuse you all. :)
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
I have alittle story to tell you about our safari in the jungle. We set off at 6am with our 2 guides, rajendra and monuch. Both are very experienced in jungle survival and animal tracking, as they grew up in villages inside the reserve. Their experience began to show as we entered deeper into the undergrowth, and they started pointing out various tracks and marks left by rhinos, tigers etc. Every few minutes, rajendra would stop suddenly and hold his hand up to signal we should do the same. We would all stand in deathly silence, not even daring to breathe as we strained our ears for the sound of wild animals. Each time we heard nothing except our own heart beats, until about the 5th time we stopped. It seemed like every other stop, and we had no idea what was about to happen....
We stood there in silence, once again straining our ears for the slightest sound. Then we heard it. "kuuurwaaarrp"..... It sounded like it was coming thru a loudspeaker in the choking silence. An inhuman animal sound that made your hairs stand on end. And then we caught the scent, which was almost overpowering. It was close. But where had the sound come from?? For me, this was a rhetorical question, as I knew exactly where it had come from: my butt. Yep, that's right, I farted. What could I do?! Farts are like children: eventually you just have to let them go. Admittedly I didn't realise it was going to be quite such a vocal fart, but then farts by their very nature are unpredictable beasts. Selene was standing in front of my and got a full earful of my bum's strangled cry. She turned to me, at first shocked, and then as the silence continued post-fart, the shock tirned into an uncontrollable urge to laugh very loudly. We both creased up, desperately trying to regain our composure as our guides stood alert, ears pricked and noses primed for the signals of the rhino. Obviously they were not as susceptable to toilet humour as we were, and they kept their proffesionalism intact. For us however, even after we had continued walking, every time we made contact we had to fight to keep the laughter down..... :)
ok, enough silliness. Back to the present. Me and selene have suicidally decided to try and trek to the annapurna base camp, which is at least a 10 day trek up very steep mountains with snow on and everything. We have also opted to take no proffesional assistance at all and carry all our own gear. We have however bought a book, so we are not compeltely unprepared. I have also purchased 2 bars of cadbury's dairy milk, so I think the mountain will have to try very hard if it wishes to defeat me.....
I'm spending so much money here in nepal. It's not so much that nepal itself is expensive, it's just that there's so much touristy stuff available that it's impossible not to spend.
We climbed a hill today as a bit of training for the trek. I think we did fairly well...... kind of. Selene only stopped every 20 mins for a rest. Unfortunately her shoes had no grip on the soles, so she kept slipping all over the place, but we've just bought her a pair of genuine counterfeit walking boots. These shopkeepers make me laugh! I ask them "Are these genuine?" pointing to a pair of "Columbia" walking boots... "Yes! Yes!" they assure me. Then I point to an identical pair of "Salomon" walking boots, and I mean IDENTICAL in every respect except for the name on the label. "How about these ones?" I ask. "Yes! also genuine!" they tell me. Even after I point out the similarity of these shoes, they still insist that they are genuine, although they are happy to admit that both are the same shoe...... Oh well, they're surprisingly good quality, so who cares? Mind you, I say that now, I'll probably be cursing myself when selene's soles fall off on top of the mountain.....
I've had 2 experiences recently with bad food. The first was with some "french onion soup". I know, what was I thinking ordering french onion soup in nepal, but i wanted some, and it was on the menu. Anyway, after waiting about an hour it finally came. It looked like boiling water with onion floating in it. It was. The second was a similar experience with a usually delicious tibetan dish called thukpa. Once again, i recieved boiling water, this time with noodles and cabbage floating in it. Unfortunately, being english, I am forced to pretend that the food is delicious and only complain when the waiter's back is turned. Sigh.
ok, enough. This may well be my last post ever, so if i dont make it back from the peak, you may all become very famous for having known me, and you are all welcome to sell interviews to the national press. wish us luck!!! We need it..... :)
We stood there in silence, once again straining our ears for the slightest sound. Then we heard it. "kuuurwaaarrp"..... It sounded like it was coming thru a loudspeaker in the choking silence. An inhuman animal sound that made your hairs stand on end. And then we caught the scent, which was almost overpowering. It was close. But where had the sound come from?? For me, this was a rhetorical question, as I knew exactly where it had come from: my butt. Yep, that's right, I farted. What could I do?! Farts are like children: eventually you just have to let them go. Admittedly I didn't realise it was going to be quite such a vocal fart, but then farts by their very nature are unpredictable beasts. Selene was standing in front of my and got a full earful of my bum's strangled cry. She turned to me, at first shocked, and then as the silence continued post-fart, the shock tirned into an uncontrollable urge to laugh very loudly. We both creased up, desperately trying to regain our composure as our guides stood alert, ears pricked and noses primed for the signals of the rhino. Obviously they were not as susceptable to toilet humour as we were, and they kept their proffesionalism intact. For us however, even after we had continued walking, every time we made contact we had to fight to keep the laughter down..... :)
ok, enough silliness. Back to the present. Me and selene have suicidally decided to try and trek to the annapurna base camp, which is at least a 10 day trek up very steep mountains with snow on and everything. We have also opted to take no proffesional assistance at all and carry all our own gear. We have however bought a book, so we are not compeltely unprepared. I have also purchased 2 bars of cadbury's dairy milk, so I think the mountain will have to try very hard if it wishes to defeat me.....
I'm spending so much money here in nepal. It's not so much that nepal itself is expensive, it's just that there's so much touristy stuff available that it's impossible not to spend.
We climbed a hill today as a bit of training for the trek. I think we did fairly well...... kind of. Selene only stopped every 20 mins for a rest. Unfortunately her shoes had no grip on the soles, so she kept slipping all over the place, but we've just bought her a pair of genuine counterfeit walking boots. These shopkeepers make me laugh! I ask them "Are these genuine?" pointing to a pair of "Columbia" walking boots... "Yes! Yes!" they assure me. Then I point to an identical pair of "Salomon" walking boots, and I mean IDENTICAL in every respect except for the name on the label. "How about these ones?" I ask. "Yes! also genuine!" they tell me. Even after I point out the similarity of these shoes, they still insist that they are genuine, although they are happy to admit that both are the same shoe...... Oh well, they're surprisingly good quality, so who cares? Mind you, I say that now, I'll probably be cursing myself when selene's soles fall off on top of the mountain.....
I've had 2 experiences recently with bad food. The first was with some "french onion soup". I know, what was I thinking ordering french onion soup in nepal, but i wanted some, and it was on the menu. Anyway, after waiting about an hour it finally came. It looked like boiling water with onion floating in it. It was. The second was a similar experience with a usually delicious tibetan dish called thukpa. Once again, i recieved boiling water, this time with noodles and cabbage floating in it. Unfortunately, being english, I am forced to pretend that the food is delicious and only complain when the waiter's back is turned. Sigh.
ok, enough. This may well be my last post ever, so if i dont make it back from the peak, you may all become very famous for having known me, and you are all welcome to sell interviews to the national press. wish us luck!!! We need it..... :)
Monday, May 12, 2003
hey there,
internet here very expensive so must be quick!!!!
have been in Chitwan National park for the last few days. We went on a jungle trek to try and spot rhinos, tigers etc, but in 3 hours of trekking we only saw 2 beetles, 1 caterpillar and a cockerel!! anyway, the next day we went back this time on the back of an elephant, and after a couple of hours of being lashed by branches and brushing off hundreds of bugs, we finally saw a family of rhinos, lying in the water doing nothing in particular. It was great to finaly see them, but I have to admit I was secretly a little dissapointed... I wanted to see a rhino fighting a tiger whilst being simoultaneously attcked by a sloth bear....... oh well.
now I'm in pokhora, which is where ppl do all the trekking and stuff. It's by a lake and it's pretty cool from what I've seen so far.... The mountains are obscured by clouds at the mo, but I'm told in the morning it's clear...
The guy who owns this internet place is bugging me now as he's sat behing me supposedly having a friendly chat with slene, but basically trying too sell her any kind of service he can think of.... grrrrr. ok, my times up. gotta go!!! :)
internet here very expensive so must be quick!!!!
have been in Chitwan National park for the last few days. We went on a jungle trek to try and spot rhinos, tigers etc, but in 3 hours of trekking we only saw 2 beetles, 1 caterpillar and a cockerel!! anyway, the next day we went back this time on the back of an elephant, and after a couple of hours of being lashed by branches and brushing off hundreds of bugs, we finally saw a family of rhinos, lying in the water doing nothing in particular. It was great to finaly see them, but I have to admit I was secretly a little dissapointed... I wanted to see a rhino fighting a tiger whilst being simoultaneously attcked by a sloth bear....... oh well.
now I'm in pokhora, which is where ppl do all the trekking and stuff. It's by a lake and it's pretty cool from what I've seen so far.... The mountains are obscured by clouds at the mo, but I'm told in the morning it's clear...
The guy who owns this internet place is bugging me now as he's sat behing me supposedly having a friendly chat with slene, but basically trying too sell her any kind of service he can think of.... grrrrr. ok, my times up. gotta go!!! :)
Thursday, May 08, 2003
Ola!
It's another sunny day here and Khatmandu, with temperatures reaching a scorching 275 degrees centigrade! The tarmac on the roads has melted, turning them into sticky black rivers which flow in the direction of the traffic. I've seen many a hapless tourist who ventured out with slippers (flip-flops) on get stuck in the tacky ooze and burn his tender tootsies! Visibility has been reduced to 7cm due to the dust and pollution, making getting around very difficult. Most people have chosen to stay inside, but even this has its risks, as millions of poisonous flying ants seek refuge from the dust in hotel rooms and restaurants. It's like a scene out of a bad 50's b-movie! The government has called a state of national emergency, and plans are being drawn up to destroy the sun and anyone supporting it's evil regime of heat. Alternative plans are being suggested by the peace movement that we tunnel underground and rebuild a new subterranean society of mole people, but most object to this idea on the grounds that earth is dirty and will make clothes intolerable to wash.
Some have suggested that the heat is actually the work of "Islamic Fundamentalists", although no one is exactly sure how or why. Others claim it's due to the fact that it's summer and are pointing to previous summers to try and back up their theory. Of course no one is taking them very seriously.
As you have probably guessed by now, I have nothing of interest to write, so I am subjecting you to the strange world of my imagination. Mind you, it is very hot. :) We're heading off to Chitwan national park tomorrow to try and shoot tigers and rhinos! We may also get the chance to shoot some endangered species of bird as well! Gotta make sure my camera is locked and loaded....
Yesterday we went to Patan, just south of Khatmandu. It was pretty cool. Well actually i suppose it was amazing, but to be honest I've seen too many temples now, and so something that 6 months ago would have seemed breathtaking now doesn't even seem worth picture-taking! Time for a change, hence the tiger shooting. Mind you, the guide says that Chitwan will be "unbearably hot", so we'll have to see how we manage to bear it. Is it possible to bear something unbearable? I rekon it is. You just have to be hard like me... ;)
Just spent 20 mins trying to find my archives which dissapeared once again. I'm a bit worried that ne day all my journal is going to dissapear. If anyone has a lot of spare time on their hands, they could backup all my journal onto a word doc or something for safekeeping! i'd be very greatful.... :) I'll give you a mention in my blog and then you'll be world famous!
Right, I'm gonna go and find some asbestos wellies to wade thru this bloody tarmac river and buy some Baygon to kill all these bastard ants....
It's another sunny day here and Khatmandu, with temperatures reaching a scorching 275 degrees centigrade! The tarmac on the roads has melted, turning them into sticky black rivers which flow in the direction of the traffic. I've seen many a hapless tourist who ventured out with slippers (flip-flops) on get stuck in the tacky ooze and burn his tender tootsies! Visibility has been reduced to 7cm due to the dust and pollution, making getting around very difficult. Most people have chosen to stay inside, but even this has its risks, as millions of poisonous flying ants seek refuge from the dust in hotel rooms and restaurants. It's like a scene out of a bad 50's b-movie! The government has called a state of national emergency, and plans are being drawn up to destroy the sun and anyone supporting it's evil regime of heat. Alternative plans are being suggested by the peace movement that we tunnel underground and rebuild a new subterranean society of mole people, but most object to this idea on the grounds that earth is dirty and will make clothes intolerable to wash.
Some have suggested that the heat is actually the work of "Islamic Fundamentalists", although no one is exactly sure how or why. Others claim it's due to the fact that it's summer and are pointing to previous summers to try and back up their theory. Of course no one is taking them very seriously.
As you have probably guessed by now, I have nothing of interest to write, so I am subjecting you to the strange world of my imagination. Mind you, it is very hot. :) We're heading off to Chitwan national park tomorrow to try and shoot tigers and rhinos! We may also get the chance to shoot some endangered species of bird as well! Gotta make sure my camera is locked and loaded....
Yesterday we went to Patan, just south of Khatmandu. It was pretty cool. Well actually i suppose it was amazing, but to be honest I've seen too many temples now, and so something that 6 months ago would have seemed breathtaking now doesn't even seem worth picture-taking! Time for a change, hence the tiger shooting. Mind you, the guide says that Chitwan will be "unbearably hot", so we'll have to see how we manage to bear it. Is it possible to bear something unbearable? I rekon it is. You just have to be hard like me... ;)
Just spent 20 mins trying to find my archives which dissapeared once again. I'm a bit worried that ne day all my journal is going to dissapear. If anyone has a lot of spare time on their hands, they could backup all my journal onto a word doc or something for safekeeping! i'd be very greatful.... :) I'll give you a mention in my blog and then you'll be world famous!
Right, I'm gonna go and find some asbestos wellies to wade thru this bloody tarmac river and buy some Baygon to kill all these bastard ants....
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Bastard fucking PC.
I just wrote some side splittingly funny anecdotes about the last 2 days, and then the pc crashed, and all my efforts dissapeared in a puff of binary code. So here is a very bitter and unenthusiastic attempt to re-write the same entry:
went to a temple. it was on a hill. it had monkeys. good view.
ok ok, I'll attempt to write from this point on in my uaual style, but I'm not promising anything....
So yeah, we went to this temple. Anyway, on the way there, we decided to walk, as the guidebook (Rough Guide, not Lonely Planet!!!!) told us that it took 20 mins. Anyway, after 20 mins of walking down streets dodging insane drivers and inhaling a toxic mix of exhaust, dust, and SARS bacteria, we had had enough. Selene wasn't dong so bad, as she was wearing one of those protective masks for SARS that you see on the cover of every newspaper in the world at the moment. It was quite fun pointing out to people that she was from singapore and could well be a SARS carrier, pointing to the mask to emphasise how potentially dangerous she was... :) Anyway, we'd had enough, so we went over to a cycle rickshaw driver and negotiated a price. However, when we got into the back of his rickshaw, we started to doubt whether this was such a good idea after all. The seat was tiny, and the sun-shade over our heads meant that your head was almost touching the struts. This is all very well, but once we started moving, a new problem surfaced. The road, if youcan call it that, was basically just a series of holes connected by small areas of tarmac, and this cycle rickshaw had nothing in the way of suspension. When I say holes, I mean HOLES! Big bastard holes with no bottom. So we bounced and crashed along, every hole causing me to crack my head on the frame of the shade above us, trying desperately to stay perched on the edge of our tiny seat as we anticpated the next crunch...
Eventually we reached a bridge, and at the other side of the bridge the driver stopped and said "here". I got down and looked at my map. "But we're only halfway there!" I said, pointing this out to him on the map. It turned out the next part of the journey involved a slight hill, and he didn't do hills, so we had to walk.... oh well, we were glad to be back on the road again to be honest!
right, I'm out of time, so you'll have to just imagine the rest. Make it interesting ok?
I just wrote some side splittingly funny anecdotes about the last 2 days, and then the pc crashed, and all my efforts dissapeared in a puff of binary code. So here is a very bitter and unenthusiastic attempt to re-write the same entry:
went to a temple. it was on a hill. it had monkeys. good view.
ok ok, I'll attempt to write from this point on in my uaual style, but I'm not promising anything....
So yeah, we went to this temple. Anyway, on the way there, we decided to walk, as the guidebook (Rough Guide, not Lonely Planet!!!!) told us that it took 20 mins. Anyway, after 20 mins of walking down streets dodging insane drivers and inhaling a toxic mix of exhaust, dust, and SARS bacteria, we had had enough. Selene wasn't dong so bad, as she was wearing one of those protective masks for SARS that you see on the cover of every newspaper in the world at the moment. It was quite fun pointing out to people that she was from singapore and could well be a SARS carrier, pointing to the mask to emphasise how potentially dangerous she was... :) Anyway, we'd had enough, so we went over to a cycle rickshaw driver and negotiated a price. However, when we got into the back of his rickshaw, we started to doubt whether this was such a good idea after all. The seat was tiny, and the sun-shade over our heads meant that your head was almost touching the struts. This is all very well, but once we started moving, a new problem surfaced. The road, if youcan call it that, was basically just a series of holes connected by small areas of tarmac, and this cycle rickshaw had nothing in the way of suspension. When I say holes, I mean HOLES! Big bastard holes with no bottom. So we bounced and crashed along, every hole causing me to crack my head on the frame of the shade above us, trying desperately to stay perched on the edge of our tiny seat as we anticpated the next crunch...
Eventually we reached a bridge, and at the other side of the bridge the driver stopped and said "here". I got down and looked at my map. "But we're only halfway there!" I said, pointing this out to him on the map. It turned out the next part of the journey involved a slight hill, and he didn't do hills, so we had to walk.... oh well, we were glad to be back on the road again to be honest!
right, I'm out of time, so you'll have to just imagine the rest. Make it interesting ok?
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