Ghostface Buddha

Sand Off Your Shoulder

2010-11-02T20:45:00.000+05:30

"Greetings brothers!" I shouted across the barbed wire.

(This is how I address squads of Sri Lankan soldiers.)

I strolled into the middle of the dusty provincial road and leisurely went around the end of the barbed wire and into their checkpoint. I, tromping around this obscure checkpost located in a backwater even by the local standards, wearing bright orange cotton pants and a ragged t-shirt depicting the Aztec calendar, was probably not among the things they were expecting to see that day. Judging by the surrounds, I would guess they were accustomed to seeing dust, shrubs, the occasional buses (whose infrequent schedules they had memorized in their boredom), and the odd cow whisking its tail as it ambles down the narrow ribbon of tarmac. The officer among them shifted from his leanin'-post to speak to me.

"Hey brother," (my greetings ignore such brutish notions as rank) "can I ask a question?" I carry myself so smoothly I can walk right into Sri Lankan Army camps without being stopped and chat with the garrisons. The officer said yes. "Brother, you know how far it is to the desert beach?"

"Walking?" he asked.

I took a slow look around. The breeze rustled the leaves of the tree above us. In the distance a single goat hobbled, bleating, across the road that disappeared into the gleaming mirror of a nearby lagoon. "No, brother. I am waiting for my helicopter. Can it set down here?" The soldiers exchanged suspicious glances.

"Sir, we don't have any place for helicopter here." He was telling the truth. The only airborne things that ever set down here were the funny-beaked birds that perched on the poles of the barricades gazing intently into the dust in hope of sighting a crab.

"Oh? Well then how far walking?"

"It is five kilometers on this road and then you must turn and walk to the left another two kilometers.Sir, you are not having helicopter?"

My answer to his question was really more of a response to his first statement. "Fuuuuuuuucckkingg balls" I said.

I was already quite well out in the middle of damn nowhere and a 14km round trip on foot (to a point which was itself several miles from any real town) put something of a wrench in my plans. I was on the far north coast of the Jaffna peninsula, not far from the Sri Lanka's northernmost point, and I had planned to kill a day by visiting a particular rural temple and then moving on to this desert beach. Nope. "Aight brother, here's the plan: guess I'm just gonna have to walk back to the temple over there and wait until some kind of vehicle comes by". With a nod of my head I said my farewells to the gathered soldiers, walked back out of their camp, and along the quiet, shimmering roadway from which I had come.

I stopped when I reached the temple I visited earlier, the somewhat-famed Vishnu temple at Vallipuram. It's the island's second-biggest temple, and I had intended to go inside because apparently it marks the spot where Vishnu incarnated himself as a fish and I was really hoping to see some psychedelic Hindu fish imagery. As it turned out, I found myself (again) in the sleepiest damn village I have ever seen. I knew it would be modest, but I was surprised by just how somnolent it was. The entire village consisted of the temple -a charming tile-roofed affair with a nice stone tower and a large wagon-house- , two grocery stores, and about ten houses clustered around a sandy clearing in the scrub. Vallipuram was formerly one of the greater towns of the Hindu north (hence the relative grandeur of the temple) and its name means "Sand City" in Tamil. Since the town's populace, or what traces of it I could find, consisted of four priests sleeping on the threshold of the temple, a few grocers sleeping in their stores, and a coconut-seller sleeping in a plastic chair, I propose that the community's name be shortened to the more accurate title of "Sand". Detecting no evidence that anything was ever going to happen there again, I decided it would be prudent to sit by the road and keep a vigil for any vehicle out of the place. As it turned out, the wait was so long I even made it past the horribly pretentious first chapter of the Salman Rushdie tome I had been uselessly toting around unopened for the past few days after encountering the second extended metaphor about the Flow of Time in ten pages. I briefly wondered what Mr. Rushdie would have to say about the passage of events in Vallipuram, then realized I was trying to imagine something that would give me a headache. The threadbare web of events in Vallipuram, as noted author Mr. Ghostface Buddha would say, are like goat droppings in the sand: scattered, dust-speckled, undistinguished, often involving sand flies, and so insignificant you wouldn't even collect them for burning.

As the wait wore one, things somehow became even more dull. I remember even the village cow which had until then been the only moving thing in sight giving up on finding something to do and relaxing into a bored sleep. When something with the natural curiosity of a cow exhausts an area's capacity for intellectual stimulation you know the place has a serious deficiency. The rest of the day was so slow I can't even write about. I've been sitting here for quite a long time just trying to think of one more sentence (a sentence about anything) that wouldn't be so dull as to embarrass me as an writer. I have failed.

There was sand.

Also there was scrub.

But some places just had grass.

I'm going to mail a ransom note and a photograph of 27 bound and gagged Barbie dolls to the office of Kim Jong-Il.

The sky was blue.

Photo Gallery Update

2010-11-02T20:20:00.000+05:30

The Ghostface Buddha Photo Gallery is now COMPLETE, proudly boasting some 7700 photographs of all the places in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka where Ghostface Buddha manifested his presence this past year, 1 G.F.B.E (2009-1010 C.E.) I have finally finished captioning and sorting all of them. As you will see, they are now organized by Indian state (or other country), and suborganized by town, and arranged alphabetically so you don't have to squint and scroll around the page cursing "WHY THE HELL IS PUNJAB NEXT TO GUJARAT?!". I would say it's the least I could do, but you don't want to test my capacity for idleness.

-GFB

Let's Call It A Year?

2010-10-29T17:54:00.000+05:30

Well, dear readers, once again we come to an important moment in this blog. I am writing now to announce something that may have been gnawing at your suspicions for some time as events have been unfolding, like when you're watching a cheap film late at night, but you missed the opening credits, and while you watch you slowly become more and more attuned to certain idiomatic expressions and turns of phrase, certain well-worn elements of plot, and you begin to realize that the film is almost certainly going to be a softcore porn, and the amply-endowed heroines are going to offer each other their breasts at any moment, and you wearily reach for the remote because, goddammit, you were actually hoping for an moving but accessible drama about sisterly bonding.

This is one of those moments; albeit a non-erotic one with nary an ounce of silicone in sight, where I announce what many of you have probably concluded: this blog, and the tale of Ghostface Buddha's journey in the kaleidoscopic mindscapes of southern Asia are soon coming to an end. No, this is not the last post. In fact, I have another one almost finished sitting in my 'drafts' box, and one or two little things down the line, but this is my last cable from the front. Aye, in but hours' time I shall be taking off from Colombo's international airport, and soaring brainlessly over the Arabian Sea, putting the patience of Royal Jordanian Airways' flight attendants to a mighty test. Since I have to, y'know, pack and shit, I have to leave this computer and sign off from the crappy realms of Indo/Ceylonese cyberspace one last time.

Keep reading in the next few days, when I'll be delivering a number of posts from American soil about my last adventures in Sri Lanka, at least one of which directly compares Sinhalese pilgrims to a woman's menstrual flow.

-GFB

WAR (What Is It Good For?)

2010-10-28T11:59:00.000+05:30

Indeed, war: what is it good for? Rather than sit around and ponder the question I decided it was time to hop into Sri Lanka's recovering post-war areas and find out.

It being a mere year and a half since Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war came to an end, with the formidable rebel army known as the Liberation Tigers Of Tamil Eelam [a.k.a the Tamil Tigers] utterly crushed at last, access to some of the areas in which the war raged is still carefully controlled. For foreigners, some parts are completely off limits, but fortunately it was possible for me to fly over the devastated region known as the Vanni (which I had earlier been denied entry to) and land upon the Jaffna Peninsula, the extreme northern part of the island and the heart of Tamil Sri Lanka.

The flight was certainly memorable in its own way, since I had no choice but to travel on a plane operated by the Sri Lankan air force. It was a rather strange affair. Though I have been to many airports, Colombo's domestic airport at Rathmalana was the first one I've visited where the tarmac was surrounded by manned pillboxes. After much to-do about security in the pre-dawn hours, me and the few other passengers were loaded onto a small and silly old twin-propeller aircraft with the colorful roundel of the Sri Lankan Air Face painted on its side. Clearly, they had pulled this plane out of God knows what depot and refurbished it on the inside for taking civilian passengers, with a hilarious attempt at making it comfortable by adding quite good cushions while utterly neglecting the total absence of legroom that owed to the plane's tiny dimensions. It was a surprisingly slow and tedious flight as the plane got whisked about in every gust of wind and we proceeded painfully slowly over the sparsely-populated scrub of northwestern Sri Lanka. Finally I saw what I was looking for as the unmistakable form of the Jaffna Lagoon crept into view and the plane began to descend in a dramatic swoop over the Jaffna Peninsula. I could see a flat and densely-settled swathe of countryside, washed here and there with the strange glistening forms of the many inlets of the lagoon. Getting lower, we could inspect individual buildings and began to notice the signs of war: roofless farmhouses getting swallowed by scrub, country temples with tin sheets hastily tacked over gaping holes in the tile roofs, entire village streets abandoned to silent obscurity.

We landed on the north coast of the peninsula, at Sri Lanka Air Force Base Palali. On our final approach we could see that the entire area around the airbase was devastated and militarized for miles in each direction, with successive layers of bunkers, earthworks, and and other defensive emplacements engulfing a wide perimeter inside which whole villages had been swallowed by the contingencies of war. We touched down and waited for the Air Force to do whatever it was they needed to do, and while my fellow-passengers (a trio of menopausal German ladies) made a big fuss being strangely impressed by the soldiers, I sat around and waited for the Air Force to provide the promised bus escort to Jaffna. It came, and not only did we get an Air Force bus driver, but also a baggage handler, a liaison officer, and a beret-wearing soldier who hung out the door pointing an assault rifle at everything we passed. For quite a while we drove through the airbase's perimeter, one of the "high security zones" imposed by the military upon the people. Within the perimeter we passed through a village, every house devastated by bombs and artillery, and many of them bearing facades pocked with bullet holes from nasty close-up fighting. Outside the village, a trio of Sri Lankan soldiers in full blast gear were clustered around a spot in the fields, near a vehicle marked "De-Mining Team". As we drove further from the airbase and closer to the city, the devastation became less total and the familiar bustle of life in South Asian towns resumed, though through the thickets and at intervals along the road there was still almost always the shell of a ruined household visible.

My first task after arriving in Jaffna city was, of course, finding a hotel. These were not altogether easy to come by. I slung on my pack and began the long march through the heat to an area where accommodation was rumored to be found. Along the way I began to get a feel for the Jaffna environment. It is a town wholly unlike anywhere else in Sri Lanka, and as anyone could tell you it resembles more a small city of far southern India than it does any community on the island of Ceylon. Where the average Sinhalese town consists of a single, traffic-choked highway and an unrelenting string of buses and rickshaws passing through the one, ugly, cramped modern bazaar Jaffna was instead a proper grid of mostly quiet city streets, used mostly by maniacal throngs of bicyclists wearing silent expressions of serene calm interrupted by the jingling of bells. What motorized traffic there was could be detected from some distance since the drivers of Jaffna conform to the Indian courtesy of honking at anything and everything that comes within 20 feet of suffering a collision. I trudged up the main artery out of town, noticing mostly that it was reassuringly boring, save for the occasional miniature jungle growing on the plots of ruined homes. Approximately ever other intersection had a detachment of soldiers watching it from small guardhouses or bunkers, their ever-vigilant eyes and assault rifles guaranteeing the security of strategically vital grocery stalls. Near more important facilities, heavy fortifications could be seen down unlikely alleyways and canals, with gun-laden watchtowers keeping vigil on foul, barely-used waterways, and numerous layers of barbed wire covered in signs warning of landmines within the perimeter.

One of the odd things about Jaffna is that though it is the heart of Sri Lanka's Hindu area, there is an enormous Christian presence in town. I don't presume to comment on the percentage of people following the Christian faith, because I don't know, but I can tell you that Jaffna is chock-full of enormous colonial churches and seminaries. I walked into the city's main cathedral, a massive structure on the edge of town, and was greeted by the local Catholic bishop, who had much to say about the history of the nearby seminary, and then by the guests arriving early to a wedding. A young man in a blazer and a bright purple shirt and flawlessly gel-spiked hair with blingy earrings in each ear approached me. "Damn," I thought, "this fellow looks something straight out of a British television miniseries...". He reached me and shook my hand. "Hello, I'm David. I'm from East London." CALLED IT. Everyone in Jaffna has relatives all over the world, thanks to the Tamil diaspora that was provoked by such things as the bombings and that one time when the Tamil Tigers forced everybody in Jaffna to abandon their homes... Talk to anyone and odds are good they'll say "Oh, my auntie lives in Toronto... I worked in Iraq before the war (their one I mean, ha ha!)... We're actually from Bristol... I am doing maintenance in Abu Dhabi..." David's relatives came up to tell him he was needed for some aspect of the wedding preparations, so he excused himself, telling me that I "seemed like a good bloke, best of luck!"

Closer in to town I found myself in the old colonial-era streets of Jaffna. It is a charming area, sort of like the neighborhood within Galle's fort, a throwback of modest new buildings mixed in with a lot of charmingly crumbling Dutch-period manors and merchant firms, without the sickly preservative feel layered on by Galle's tourism industry. Where in Galle there would be an old villa touched up and aesthetically sanitized into a high-class cafe, in Jaffna there is an old villa in authentic (if slightly dilapidated) residential condition, albeit possibly with an artillery hole in the kitchen ceiling. I went past yet more grand churches and an increasing number of ever-more devastated homes as I drew closer to the city center, and almost by accident plunged myself into Jaffna's grim but bustling public market. This is the sort of place where despite the fact that the upper floors are blasted open to the sky and the crumbling stairways up are blocked by crude barriers of rusting shopping carts, the dark and dirty ground floor is a thriving place of business where the locals happily stroll about buying vegetables and perfuming themselves in the poorly-ventilated garage-like area where dozens of stallholders display their impressive variety of stinking fish, squids, crabs, and chunks of shark. Wholesalers pack into the dark corners with great heaps of dead aquatic creatures on the floor, crying their offers to the stallholders with the bizarre squawks and screams that only an Indian-cultured man with unlikely merchandise can produce; "cuttlefishcuttlefishCUTTLEFISH CUTTLEFiiiiiaasshhhh!!! C-C-C-CUTTLEFEEEESSHHHH CUUARRRQQQQKKK ZIIYEAACKKKKKACUTTLEFISH HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY CUTTLEMOTHERFUCKINGFISH!!!!!"

Speaking of horrible smells, perhaps the single most Indian thing about Jaffna is the overpowering stench of stagnant water in litter-strewn, perpetually blocked drains. I will say this, however: unlike most cities in India, Jaffna has an excuse for a bit of poor sewage here and there, seeing that it has spent a notable portion of the past few decades under siege. The Sri Lankan Army, the Tamil Tigers, and the Indian Army (now there was an episode -don't even ask) all had their turns blasting the municipal infrastructure to hell. On the other hand cities in India just fucking smell.

I finally wandered through the old town to the edge of the lagoon, and found that I could not see the lagoon. Almost the entire coastline hereabouts has been fenced off in layers of barbed wire and all-concealing traditional palm leaf fences, presumably to thwart amphibious Tiger raids from their bases on the southern side of the lagoon. Even the local fishing jetty is a closely-monitored area, with its own little detachment of soldiers encamped in their diminutive fortress to keep this access point sealed. Not far from here I saw a wide empty field of some acres, and was puzzled why there should be unused land so close to the city center. Then when I drew closer I saw that the field was pockmarked with low ruins, and the rest of it covered in small chunks of rubble. I realized I was looking at the part of town on the approach to the fort that got the worst of it, being utterly and completely flattened by Air Force bombings and the raging battles that surrounded the fort itself. On one end of the field were the 'remains' of the Jaffna Town Hall, a single statue alone in the field, with bullet holes here and there and its entire head blown right off, leaving a gruesome steel spine jutting up to highlight the decapitation. Just beyond was the large but now almost hidden Jaffna Fort, a large and powerful Dutch "star fort", which finally got put to use in combat, suffering repeated dogged defenses and exchanges of control. Its centuries-old brick bulwarks seem to have done surprisingly well in the face of modern weapons, but the toll of many battles shows where artillery has blasted away pieces of the ramparts and the defenders of the fort have allowed a wild tangle of vegetation to grow around, making their layered defenses of wire, mines, and machine gun nests all the more unapproachable.

After having stumbled across so much, I almost forgot I hadn't yet visited any of the attractions which my vaunted Ministry of Defense travel clearance said I had ostensibly come to see. There are a number of medium-sized Hindu temples in town, and -surprise!- they were mostly like any other medium-sized Hindu temple from the south of India, but I saw that coming. There is at least a distinctively north Sri Lankan variation on the old temple design, which uses picturesque sloped tile roofs over the shrines, and also pleasingly incorporates Portuguese-style bell towers flanking the South Indian gopuram pyramidal gate tower. After a couple of these mildly interesting mediocrities I schlepped out to the suburbs to what was once the sacred village of Nallur to visit the renowned Nallur Kandaswamy temple, the largest and most extravagant place of Hindu worship in Sri Lanka. As with all 'large' Sri Lankan things, this term was revealed to be relative. Jaffna's great temple is nowhere near as impressive as the major shrines of Tamil Nadu just across the strait, though would fit in nicely with the temples there of secondary fame. That being said, it was worth a visit. I has a nice little gopuram-and-bell-towers facade and the hints of tile roof beyond, as well as a considerable red-striped perimeter wall where a huge south-facing gopuram is either being constructed or repaired (all over the Jaffna area, the end of the war is heralding a burst of temple expansion and restoration that was wisely put on hold while there was a good chance of the edifices just being bombed again). Within, the traditional Hindu layout includes an enchantingly decorated passage leading to the shrine of the god, with numerous interesting little shrines surrounding it. Up in the ceiling, the strange colonial influence manifests itself in the forms of chandeliers and hanging red drapery, which contrast oddly with the undulating piles of sand like a miniature desert that surround the dry pit which would be the temple's sacred tank. Following local tradition, men must take off their shirts to enter, which was a blessing in the sweaty heat, though the paleness of my skin beneath (in the Subcontinent it is almost always wildly inappropriate to take your shirt off) contrasting with the much darker skin of my arms and face drew a lot of odd looks from the assembled worshipers and the platoon of soldiers guarding the sandy square outside the gate. Thanks to hyper-exaggerated Indian inhibitions about the exposure of flesh, I now have a farmer's tan par excellence.

I returned to my part of the city via a road known locally as "NGO City." Its sides were lined with the offices and staff houses of numerous UN bodies, Nordic refugee agencies, and other well-wishing groups. Nearly all of these had a sign on its front gate depicting an AK-47 or other assault rifle inside a big red "NO" circle. I must admit, I really wanted to steal one, and I would have if they weren't on the front of heavily-guarded UN enclaves. Anyways, I'm returning home to the Washington DC area soon, and if I put it up in my yard it would just be mistaken for a commentary on gun control laws, and I would wake up one morning to find my sign missing and my lawn covered in tea bags and flyers depicting Barack Obama in a Hitler mustache and a turban.

So I'd seen Jaffna and was soon ready to head off into the surrounding countryside, but something nagged me. I still hadn't discovered what, if anything, is war good for?

Lacking any particular evidence of laudable benefits, I came close to allowing that the only positive thing it produces is iconic, feisty, and melodious songs with direct and unforgettable lyrics about the worthlessness of armed confli... wait. Hold on. No. I'm thinking of that song by Edwin Starr. I just remembered that Sri Lankan protest music takes the form of MIA, so I'm going to have to revise my answer to

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING

The Jaffna Travel Permit (M.O.D. Clearance)

2010-10-24T14:15:00.000+05:30

This is a guide for non-Sri Lankans who wish to travel to the Jaffna area. At present, (October 2010), there are various restrictions and permits pertaining to travel in this area. Since in my own experience I found a dearth of useful information on the internet, I will post a proper guide here. (Note to my regular readers: this is in no way meant to be entertaining, merely informative. You may skip this one if you like). My sources for this information are primarily myself, having gone through the process successfully, as well as conversations with the officers-on-duty at the Omantai checkpoint, Ministry of Defense HQ, and the Colombo and Jaffna airfields.

Do You Need A Permit To Travel In The North?
In short: yes.

If you are a Sri Lankan citizen, you may travel freely. If you are a foreign citizen "of Sri Lankan birth", you may travel anywhere but some areas (i.e. the Vanni) will still require permits. Other foreigners, meaning tourists, may get permits for some areas and not at all for others. Note that if you are with an NGO or somesuch, the rules are different, and I can't help you here.

What Areas Require Permits?
You must obtain a permit to travel anywhere in the Jaffna peninsula. The "Vanni" region from Omantai (just north of Vavuniya) to the Elephant Pass are completely off limits for now. You may however travel freely, without permit, to Mannar Island and along that road.

Can I Get A Permit To Travel To Jaffna By Road?
No. At present, only foreigners "of Sri Lankan birth" may use the A9 highway to the north. All other foreigners must get permission to travel to Jaffna by air.

HOW TO GET M.O.D. CLEARANCE FOR AIR TRAVEL TO JAFFNA
Set aside a day or two for this at least, and do it as far in advance as you can, or you may encounter complications that make the process take longer.

To apply for M.O.D. Clearance, you must apply in person at the Ministry of Defense checkpoint in Colombo. In theory, you can also apply via fax, but this involves communicating via phone with whichever Defense Ministry flunkie is on duty when you call (the numbers, should you wish to try, are 0112430880, 0112430881, etc.), and is also regarded as a special circumstance which they may not wish to indulge in your case. Best to go to Colombo. The "office" is the security checkpoint at the entrance to the Defense Ministry compound, at the extreme northern end of Galle Face Green, just before a short bridge crosses a water channel towards the Fort neighborhood and the Secretariat.

Take with you your passport (for ID proof), a photocopy of your passport (to hand in), and a pen and paper. You will be asked to produce a "Letter of Request", which is a simple statement saying who you are, where you want to go, the dates of your travel, and why. This can simply be written on a scrap of paper before the soldiers' very eyes, and needs say no more than "My name is Mr. James Jameson, citizen of Jamesland. I wish to travel to Jaffna on dates January 1 to January 17, for reason of tourism." You must also give your passport number. When citing your reason for travel, simple tourism will suffice. There is no need to be elaborate, and you will do yourself no favors by saying "I am filled with passion by the plight of the Tamil people, who inspire my gut-wrenchingly realistic and widely-published poetry..."

After you apply, ask when to come retrieve your permit, which should be given as a matter of routine. If you come early in the day, you may receive it that same evening, otherwise the next evening is likely.

Now you have permission to fly to Jaffna, all you need is your ticket.

GETTING A TICKET TO FLY TO JAFFNA
Currently, the only air service flying to Jaffna is the Sri Lankan Air Force's own "Heli Tours" service. There are only three flights a week (MWF) in each direction, and the plane is quite small, so book a ticket as far in advance as possible, or you may find yourself forced to travel on different dates, sending you back to the Defense Ministry for permission again (you may guess that this happened to me).

Reputable travel agents, which can be found conveniently nearby in the Fort and Kollupitiya neighborhoods, should have the contacts to get the ticket. Otherwise, ask at the Defense Ministry checkpoint when you apply and they may furnish you with the card of a local agent who does business with them. In order to get your ticket you must have your M.O.D. clearance first. Make photocopies of this as well, because your travel agent will need them, along with the usual passport copies etc. to procure the ticket. The price of a round-trip ticket is approximately 18,000 Sri Lankan Rupees (~$170), plus your agent's commission.

ON THE DATE OF TRAVEL
Show up punctually by the check-in time printed on your ticket. Remember, aside from South Asian bureaucratic tendencies, you are dealing with military notions of time here. You must go to the Rathmalana domestic airport (not the international airport), in the southern suburbs of Colombo. A hired driver will have no difficulty getting there. At check-in, your bags will be searched (perhaps repeatedly), and then weighed. Note that you may take only 15kg of luggage, which is not that much, so you may want to leave bulky items in the care of your Colombo hotel or some such arrangement. Then, for obscure reasons, you yourself will be weighed on an old-fashioned scale with an enormous gauge that everyone within fifty yards can read, providing mirth all around.

When finally, after a series of waits in the airport, you board the plane, the flight is about an hour long.

The airport on the Jaffna side, called Palali, is a much more militaristic affair than the one in Colombo. It is also quite far from the city so the Air Force provides a bus to take you to Jaffna.

On the date of your return flight to Colombo, present yourself at the appointed check-in time to the Heli Tours "office" (in reality a small concrete box with a desk inside), located across from the military's Civil Affairs Office at the corner of Hospital Rd. and 3rd Cross Street in Jaffna, and a bus will come to take you to Palali. Once again, if you get a rickshaw or car, this will be very easy to find.

OK, I think that's everything you really want to know, bizarre circumstances excepted. If you need further information you can always try the Ministry of Defense phone line (0112430880, 01124300881, etc.), but don't count on being well understood.

-GFB

Sri Lanka Boredom Relief Guide

2010-10-24T13:24:00.003+05:30

If, as fate may have it, you find yourself stuck for an extended period in the dull, southwestern part of Sri Lanka, you are likely to find yourself bored. Fortunately, Ghostface Buddha is here with a number of suggestions for Fun Things To Do in the area from Colombo to Galle. All of these have been road-tested and found satisfactory by GFB himself

The Pizza Hut Discourses
Materials: ~$12
Find a Sri Lankan Pizza Hut outlet (KFC will do in a pinch), preferably during a slow business hour. Engage the staff in conversation, then deliver a stunning lecture on the history and variety of pizza, methods of cooking, recipes, etc. Then, expand this monologue on the vast, diverse scope of world pizza as compared to the Sri Lankan pizza experience into a larger commentary on the vastness of Planet Earth, and the need to cast one's mental eye beyond the exaggeratedly significant confines of one's own island. Both you and your audience will be better for it.

The Clash Of Civilizations
Materials: A pair of French nudists
Check into a hotel where the only guests besides yourself are a perpetually naked child, a similarly naked Frenchwoman, and a strange, clothed French husband. If the naked woman provokes your desire, you may have trouble looking the French husband in the eye, but he is not really necessary for this activity. Now, go to the nearest English-language bookstore (you won't have many to choose from) and head to the romance section, where you should find a trio of headscarved Muslim girls giggling at a shelf of serial novels whose female protagonists seem to exclusively wear oft-torn lace bodices. Repeat this step over several days, until you have ridiculed the Muslim girls enough to have befriended them. Then, invite all three of them to your balcony for innocent conversation. Upon returning with the headscarved trio to the hotel, wait for the critical moment when naked French people walk into the hallway and marvel as the wide-eyed Muslim girls freak the fuck out and the French waver between passive-aggressiveness and outright apoplectic fits at the sight of headscarves.

Enhancing Your Cultural Sophistication
Materials: none
Think about going to the National Museum, then smoke a joint and cruise the internet instead.

Girls Gone Sort Of Wild
Materials: none
Hang out on a beach where both foreigners and Sri Lankan people are known to visit on the weekend. At some point a man will walk up to you and invite you to a party, coveting your hard currency. "Come, this afternoon, over at this beach cafe..." he says. You nod that you might consider maybe possibly going. "There will be six hundred girls" he says. Your ears perk, but then your mind catches hold and tells you it will be damn unlikely if there are more than 6 girls at this promised 'party'. Later, somewhat tipsy in the mid-afternoon, you go to see what all the fuss is about, and by God, there ARE six hundred Sri Lankan girls there. You have stumbled into a Sri Lankan, family-friendly Saturday beach concert. In addition to the various fat, shirtless old men waddling around, there are legitimately girls by the busloads. But as one fellow explorer commented, "Zees man did not say what type of girls..." We are dealing here mostly with teenagers, which is already a bummer, but they are also thoroughly wholesome Sri Lankan teenage girls. Most of them are involved in chaste but joyous unisex dancing in front of the stage where a horrific Sri Lankan "rock" band is playing Sri Lankan pop staples. None of the band members are moving much, but the guitarist is playing a bright-orange V-shaped "hard rock" guitar on tunes that would make Justin Bieber call him a giant pussy. The singer is wearing an open vest over his shirt, and around his neck are both an untied bow-tie and a pair of designer sunglasses dangling from his collar. This would be bad enough if he weren't also wearing a second pair of designer sunglasses on his actual face. Behind the girls are a legion of stern-faced matronly chaperones making sure that nobody gets any funny ideas, and a handful of wobbling drunk police inspectors who've assigned themselves to "security duty" at a beach bar where they get free arrack and watch teenage girls. In addition to the girls on stage, a great many will be dancing in the ocean itself. Once again, this is a massive dissapointment, because Sri Lankan girls swim wearing jeans and t-shirts of such astounding frumpiness that one imagines it is specially reserved as antisexual beachwear. Then, you shuffle away and continue drinking, which brings us to our next activity...

Getting Tanked On Arrack
Materials: Arrack.
Arrack is the ubiquitous Sri Lankan booze. It kind of tastes like rum, but is usually gentler. However, since Sri Lanka is a nation of sissies who go to bed early and are afraid of all big and powerful things, even the serious alcoholics usually take the drink with coca-cola or some sort of soda water or horrific Sri Lankan soft drink. To hell with this. Just finish the arrack, get good and drunk, be merry.

It's Sri fucking Lanka. You have nothing better to do.

Quickie 10/17

2010-10-17T17:21:00.002+05:30

Once again, dear readers, it is time for you not to hear from me for a week at least, but this time I actually have a good reason. Early tomorrow morning, owing to my dogged perseverance in dealing with the security/military Establishment, I will be flying on some sort of Sri Lankan Air Force craft to the city of Jaffna, in the northern extreme of Sri Lanka beyond the totally-off-limits Vanni region, where the recently-ended war ground to its brutal conclusion.

I have absolutely no idea what I am going to find in Jaffna and the surrounding areas, but I do know this: I'm not stupid enough to write about it while I'm still there. If there is anything the Sri Lankan military hates, it is terrorists, followed shortly by "journalists". And, seeing that the phrase "journalist" can be used rather expansively, and the fact that Sri Lanka ranks 162nd out of 175 nations in Press Freedom (just ahead of, let's see.... scroll down until you get to the bright red bit... YES! They just beat SAUDI ARABIA!), I think I'll just handle these things later.

So to recap: Submitting myself to the custody of the Sri Lankan military, exploring war-ruined towns and villages, back in a week. Don't worry about it being dangerous. I've done my research. The most explosive ordnance I'll be handling is the pickled chillies. They've killed better men than me. No, that's untrue. There is no man better than me.

-GFB

An Account Of Travels To And Beyond The Buddha's Brain

2010-10-17T16:17:00.000+05:30

Dirty South, Pt. 2, as transcribed by Konstantinos Mecheliarches, Anachronarch of Crete

"Konstantinos, will you be my scribe?"

"If that is how you wish my debt shall be repaid..."

"Indeed it is, for I have a tale of faraway lands, of marvels and tragedies and comedies such as you have never heard, and it falls upon us with the grave force of destiny that it should be recorded for all to see. You shall honor your debt by transferring my words onto the finest vellum, that which we call cyberneticus, and post it on the church-doors of St. Googliades' and St. Yahoo's.

"I should have thought the liberties you took with my daughter would be enough..."

"And perhaps they would be if your talents with the quill were even close to matched by her deficient talents with... begin writing or I shall elaborate."

In the year of our Lord, 2010, that is to say 7519 years since the Creation of the Earth, Ghostface Buddha-

"Begin again."

In the year of our Lord, 2010, that is to say 7519 years since the Creation of the Earth, the merciful, wise, and magnanimous Ghostface Buddha was stranded on the distant isle of Ceylon. As the annals show, Ghostface was at one time moving westwards along the southern coast, and did not find it entirely worthy of his attentions-

"Bunch of fish-eating fishfuckers."

-"A land of unlettered fishermen", he proclaimed. Nevertheless, finding himself in Tangalla he sought to amuse himself by visiting the laugh-worthy temple of Wewerukannala.

Arrivi-
Arriving at-

In fact he did no such thing, for the most interesting bit goes at the end , which a scribe would know if a scribe weren't such a bloody Byzantine cockup of a human being and didn't narrate events so damn literally. Ghostface Buddha was in Sri Lanka's southwest corner at the colonial city of Galle. While much of Galle city lies outside of its old confines, the new bit consists largely of the cricket stadium. The heart of the city retains its pristine colonial air by being isolated within its pristine Dutch ramparts.

"How's it so far?"

"Sir, I must warn you, the more I transcribe about Galle, the less perfectly I shall remember the copious and well-phrased remarks you have already made about Wewerukannala."

"But, sir?"

"Well do it small to leave some white space in the middle."

Galle, Ghostface Buddha reported, was enticing enough for those craving a taste of the old colonial flavor. There is the fort, sturdy and suitably scenic as it projects into the sea. There are old churches, merchants' stores, a lighthouse, the retooled mansions of the dignitaries of the successive European powers amid the quiet and scattered coconut palms. All, in essence, of what the well-heeled expatriate or wealthy visiting touriste desires most of a historic locale in the tropics; a trip to Gale engenders the faux-nostalgic satisfaction of admiring the achievements of the White Man's civilization alongside the climate earlier most undeservedly enjoyed only by the (so it is said) more sloth-ful and swarthie peoples. Its greatest architectural curiosity is its principal mosque, the dominant structure of the town's southernmost end, and which looks quite convincingly like a baroque Portuguese church, save that they've written in Arabic all over the front and added diminutive minarets. Therefore Ghostface mused that the edifice must have been a case of architectural mimicry rather than an attempt at concealment, though it could have been a brilliant example of hiding in plain sight since the British, who were the masters there at the time of the mosque's construction, would have regarded anything Portuguese as heretical anyways. It is one of the many unique flourishes that have graced Galle over the centuries, since its ancient origins as the fabled city of Tarshish -oh, by the saints, I'm running out of space.

"Well get on to Unawatuna then."

"But how? There only remains a sliver of blank space!"

"Listen, I'll be happy to rebuild the entire damn Colossus of Rhodes just to hang you off it from your oily Greek balls, you hear? Now be half that resourceful and get to scribbling."

Unawatuna: not far from Galle, G.F.B. says this ex-backpackery beach haven is scenic enough, and a decent place to hang out, but not that exciting. Pretty temple @ end of bch. Food prices ridiculously motherfucking inflated, worse than a walrus's prick after half a week of ru- SHIT... Fd.$$ too high.

"Your new-found gift for summation is an inspiration to us all."

The temple of Wewerukannala, aside from the weak chuckle it earns for being located just outside the town of Dickwella, is a hilarious and monumental sight in its own right. It is in fact not a lone temple, but a complex of various Buddhist shrines. There are of course a pair of modest dagobas sitting gracefully on the ground, and

"I say, old chap, why is that bit written so fucking small?"

"Sir, you told me to-"

"Well take this last bit and copy it BIG like a regular damn person. No, wait. Leave this first bit of this bit short to show what an olive-brained cretin of a Hellene I had to contend with. Do remember to use ink instead of tzatziki there, Achilles."

Wewerukannala, continued: There are of course a pair of modest dagobas sitting gracefully on the ground, and the usual bodhi tree shrine where groups of white-clad Buddhist ladies come with their more cooperative children on the weekends. There is also, for some reason, a small Buddhist shrine inside a water tower of sorts, which is weird, but really mere chump change in the context of the glorious freakishness of Wewerukannala. The main shrine itself, beautiful in its own curious way, belongs to that uniquely Sri Lankan school of architecture that produces Buddhist temples in the shape of small Catholic missions, where you half expect not be find a sleeping Buddha inside, but some angry, unsexed Spanish woman in nuns' dress cracking a ruler across the knuckles of insufficiently diffident native girls.

Across the plaza, not far from a fine little dagoba, lies the entrance to a subterranean chamber. Thankfully, for I might otherwise have blown a gasket, this subterranean chamber was not an ancient temple, but merely a reconstruction of the inner fires of Hell. Buddhist Hell, it appears, is not all too different from Dante's version of the underworld, populated largely by unjust kings and hypocritical monks, all of comically awful plaster construction, screaming in the agonies of hellfire with side-splitting hilarity. In one corner, the fat and red-bellied king of Hell pronounces judgment on a sinner, and nearby his demon minions are busy at work cooking screaming unfortunates in pots and impaling them upon pikes. The Catholic influence in Sri Lankan Buddhism, it appears, runs a bit deeper than temple architecture. Beyond the statues, for those who really seek an education in the price of sin, lies a dark tunnel containing literally hundreds of extremely shitty murals depicting people performing myriad sins, accompanied by a depiction of the corresponding infernal punishment and commentary in Sinhala. For the foreigner not fluent in Sinhala, it can be a bit confusing, since in most of the pictures it is hard to discern what sin is being committed, leading one to believe that, say, shaking a woman's hand in the poultry market leads to being torn apart by lusty sodomite devils, while shaking a woman's hand near a mango tree merely leads to being sliced in half and left to the dogs. The lesson I took home from all of this is that if you want to stay out of Hell, the refrain from speaking to anyone, take nothing but holy wafers for food, and avoid touching women at any cost unless you are dragging them out of their homes for floggings. But I was an altar boy when I was young, so I already knew that.

I have not yet described Wewerukannala's main attraction, and what an attraction it is...

Looming quite noticeably out of the clearing is a sitting statue of the Buddha. Remarkable? Perhaps not, if the Buddha weren't like SEVEN STORIES TALL on leaning his back against a horrendous concrete tower calling to mind the apartment blocks you would build for the workers at a Bulgarian state fertilizer factory. While the tower he leans on stands in barren ignominy echoing a mixture of ideological purges and babushkas' contraband sheep, the Buddha itself is resplendent in a million mosaic fragments of bathroom-tile glory. A sign pleads the visitor to contribute to the temple upkeep fund, which is in dire straits attempting to replace the thousands of tacky, easily-dislodged "gold" (i.e. orange) tiles that have so far fallen off the Buddha's robe. To top it all off, as there should be, is Buddha's halo of enlightenment, which for reasons that surely only the Enlightened One can understand, looks exactly like a 15-foot twist of strawberry- and vanilla- flavored frozen yogurt. Forget about the American restaurant chain, this is the real TCBY: The Cosmos' Best Yogurt.

Best of all, you can climb the stairs within the Bulgarian apartment block, passing even shittier murals depicting various episodes of the Buddha's past lives, and enter a chamber directly behind the Buddha's head. From here not only are there great views across the endless palm trees, but you can get close enough to Buddha's head to inspect his curls for dandruff. Fortunately, either by divine power or merely the slickness of bathroom tile, the crow droppings that cover this entire island slide right off the Buddha's untarnished locks, leaving it to reflect the afternoon sun in all the radiant glory of that bit of wall above the counter in my aunt's house between her refrigerator and her microwave. Within this final chamber, one wall is replaced by a strange, studded black surface, which I realized was nothing other than the tile "hair" growing out the lower part of the back of the Buddha's gargantuan head, and between two of these curls was a small glass porthole...

A PORTHOLE INTO THE BUDDHA'S BRAIN

I waited in queue behind a number of Buddhist ladies who were curious about what the window might reveal, but did not seem to be aware of the absurd magnificence of LOOKING INTO THE BUDDHA'S FUCKING BRAIN, which I was almost jumping in glee at the anticipation of seeing. When my turn came and I pressed my face to the glass, what I saw was

I'm not telling.

Pondering the recent revelation, I descended the tower and left the temple area, returning by foot to the highway through the goat-choked Muslim quarter of Dickwella. When, wearied by the tropical sun I stopped in a local bakery-

"Oh dear, what's that ringing of a bell? Can it be your daughter returning home from the poultry-sellers'? Why, it is! Penelope, darling, why don't you leave those fowls with your dear old father here so that he might pluck them after he is done transcribing this chapter of my Travels? -Why, yes, I think I should come up and aid you with that, ummmmmmm, bedeviled carpentry problem in your bedchamber immediately! Konstantinos, to the end of that bit, please. Do as you will."

Do as I will, he says. What have I left to do? Compose the rest of this drivel on his barbarous terms? My honor forbids it! Nay, the hemlock leaf, late the friend of Socrates and other honest men, shall be by my last companion. And this tale? And Ghostface Buddha? To the Turks with them!

Dirty South

2010-10-13T12:31:00.001+05:30

Pt. 1

The south coast of Sri Lanka is not a large place. It's about 200 kilometers long, and the southern plains are only a few kilometers deep. In this space are quite a few towns, some of which you may feel the desire to visit, particularly if you have been subjected to enormous heaps of disinformation telling you that southern Sri Lanka is a good place to go to the beach. I will comment on these towns in turn.

But first, however, I will take a brief digression to describe what lies between the towns so that you might have a feel for the coast as a whole. The space between towns on the south coast of Sri Lanka consists of:

Palm trees, and other miscellaneous fruits
Tsunami graves
Rice, one imagines, though it's surprisingly hard to find
Fish kiosks
Fish carts
People on bicycles selling fish
Piles of drying fish

There is really very little open rural land, because the spaces between market towns are almost completely filled with villages, which are almost identical to towns except they can support only one mobile phone store per square kilometer.

We begin our discussion of southern towns on the eastern end of the coast.

Kataragama
Covered in the previous post

Tissamaharama
Hardly worth the effort to spell, and even less worth spending an afternoon in.

Hambantota
Getting a sunburn here would count as one of the town's most exciting recreational possibilities. Honorary suck points for being the hometown of President Doucheface Rajapakse, whose eminently slapworthy mug I am tired of looking at.

Tangalla
Finally, a town with some potential. Conveniently located for a number of nearby attractions, and said to have a pleasant, low-key beach atmosphere. What is the truth? In reality Tangalle contains about 80 hotels and 5 tourists, possibly because there are 0 restaurants. OK, well there are places that say "restaurant" on their signs, but they suffer from the common Sri Lankan confusion about serving food. In a single night I walked into no less than four so-called eateries which were unable to conjure even a plateful of rice. "Can I have a kilo of cocaine then?", I finally asked. The proprietor looked at me in bewilderment, and reported that he did not have any cocaine either. I was expecting this, and bellowed "THEN WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR SO-CALLED RESTAURANT A FRONT FOR?!?!... If your darkened kitchen isn't full of hookers, blow, or fake passports -any of which I would consider accepting- then you'd better turn on a stove and cook some rice pronto if you don't want me to tell the world never to come to Tangalla!"

This failed to produce rice. Don't go to Tangalla.

Mulkirigala
South Sri Lanka's main ancient historical attraction is... *drumroll* a big-ass rock with Buddhist cave temples! Now, as a big-ass rock it isn't as good as Sigiriya, and as a collection of cave temples it isn't as good as Dambulla, but it's definitely worth a visit for its own unique charms. Chief among these is the utterly ridiculous Kandyan art that covers so many of the caves' random surfaces. The caves rather look like someone kidnapped a wagon full of second-rate baroque painters from a sheep-herding provincial village in central Europe, then forced them to paint every square inch of the Mulkirigala caves at gunpoint, substituting the standard subject matter of European art of the day (cherubs), for more Buddhist-specific material. The result, which never fails to bring a smile to my face, was Buddhist cherubs. This theme is epitomized in one cave where a statue of the dying Buddha is praised by the myriad Buddhist and Hindu gods in heaven, painted on the ceiling in plump glee with billowing robes, fluffy clouds, and goofy faces that make you want to punch them back into some Bavarian granny's tea-cupboard where they belong. There are also paintings from earlier periods, which look more typically Sri Lankan and have a great attention to detail and a profusion of demons and elephants, but really it's the wafting ribbons and Asian gods in neoclassical robes that stick in your mind.

Well, well, look at that. I actually have to be off. Paperwork beckons. I will smite the perpetrators of official obstructionism with my dogged and stubborn perseverance. We shall have to pick this up some other time. Happy travels, and don't let the huge, beetle-like flying things bite. Believe me...

The Dance Of The Deluded Peacock

2010-10-12T14:16:00.000+05:30

First of all, forgive the infrequency of my recent posting. My time around computers lately has been constantly interrupted by the need to go to the phone booth and make convoluted inquiries with the Sri Lankan Air Force, an organization even less noted for its achievements in conversational English than its achievements in aviation.

So where were we?

Ah, yes, I was riding a bus on a narrow highway leading from Sri Lanka's east to its southern coast, passing through the fringes of Yala National Park, an extremely well-protected bit of nature. So well-protected, in fact, that there were small bunkers, rows of barbed wire, and a classic clear-cut field of fire stretching for miles, in case poachers attempt to enter the park in a tank. This is the first national park I've ever seen that looked like a military front, though in true Sri Lankan fashion the bus had to stop at every other bunker and chicken-fenced barracks to drop off some guy with a badly-faked Tommy Hilfiger shirt and a polythene bag full of okra.

I was on my way to Kataragama, the inconveniently located and highly confusing pilgrimage village that Sri Lankans visit to pay homage to the god Kataragama, or something like that. Really, as you'll see, Sri Lankan pilgrimages are things that one does without deeply questioning the whys and wherefores. Kataragama (the god, not the village), is basically a Sri Lankan village god that somehow got important for reasons unknown, and became much endeared to Buddhists because he helped them in war against Hindus. Then, just because this is how religions work, Sri Lankan Hindus also started worshipping him, saying that he is in fact the same entity as Murugam/Karkkiteya/Subramianan, the South Indian war god. The fact that the Buddhists "already had him", so to speak, was no detterrent. Sri Lankan pilgrim shrines are like the Super Bowl. It doesn't occur to the worhsippers that God is being invoked by both sides. That and there is likely to be a lot of wild dancing at halftime.

The village of Kataragama has the distinct feel of a small community that gets an annual inundation of visitors but is currently out of season, criss-crossed by enormous roads (by Sri Lankan standards), hordes of craptacular pilgrim hotels, hundreds of merchants selling colorful trinkets for a living, and hardly a visitor to be seen. I quickly left the village itself behind me, feeling like it was some strange, Sri Lankan-scaled version of a horrific modernist city built under the auspices of Order and Progeess, but then realized it was probably just a normal town and this pathetic island has messed with my mind, accustoming me to settlements consisting of twenty houses, ten mobile phone shops, and a guy selling fish from a bicycle.

On the edge of the village I had a good wander in the kitsch religious bazaar, which is possibly the best place on the entire island to go shopping. If you need a small statue of Lord Buddha within a light-refracting prism within a snow globe, this is where to be. Amid the various psychedelic, flashing trinkets of Lords Kataragama and Ganesh posing by peacocks while Lakshmi floats around in her lotus leaf and pours money on their heads one can also find the sort of pilgrimage goods that have not much to do with either Buddhism or Hinduism (and are some of the least Buddhist things you will ever find in a Buddhist curio shop), but do have a lot to do with general Sri Lankan-ness. I mean, of course, to heaps and heaps of militaristic childrens' toys such as guns and helicopters emblazoned with the slogan "Sri Lankan Army - The Greatest Army In The World!".... Bitch, please. This is a country where recruiting posters for the Special Forces beckon with the image of men in ski masks handling the elite, 21st century tactical device known as the "Dirt Bike". No wonder the war lasted 26 years. If only the Tamil Tiger defenses had consisted of a row of wrecked Chevy Impalas, the Army could have jumped right over them.

Across the small river from the village is the "Kataragama Sacred City". Once again, this is a city by Sri Lankan standards, meaning that absolutely nobody lives there, but there are a cluster of mighty temples, some so mighty that they even have two rooms. The only architecturally imposing structure in the sacred city is its dagoba, but enormous whitewashed brick titties are the one type of large structure that Sri Lanka has for a dime a dozen. The first thing you come across is a lousy little Shiva temple, and across the square from that is the Muslim enclosure - yes, even the Muslims come here. The Muslims at least are doctrinally coherent and aloof in their monotheism, having nothing to do with the rather more flashy pagan activities going on nearby, but you can't help but remark that they've succumbed to every religion's childish inability to just ignore other religions' sacred cities and not try and claim them as their own. I actually rather liked the Muslim area, as they keep their strikingly green-painted mosques in the cool shade of palm trees, and because I just like the fact that they have a tomb of a saint that came to Sri Lanka from Kyrgyzstan, of all damn places. I like to imagine that his lengthy journey was well worth it, having passed all the way through the Afghan mountains, the Pakistani plains, and the sweltering expanse of India to finally reach an island where his co-religionists have a cuisine that isn't centered on goat.

From the Muslim area I headed north towards the heart of the sacred precinct, passing by numerous tacky little Hindu/Buddhist/whatever shrines, where the priests groaned and grumbled because I was not impressed by, say, an eensy-weensy Durga shrine made out of kitchen granite and decorated with plastic clocks from the 99-cent store. Nearing the very center of the city I finally found a shrine to Lord Buddha, and what a shrine it was. For starters, its interior was apparently done by an MS Paint enthusiast determined to use all 256 colors, and somebody had taken it upon themselves to make sure Lord Buddha was surrounded a multitude of red string lights, a flashing multicolor halo, and vividly cheesy posters of figures deeply important to Sri Lankan ~~"Buddhists"~~ Buddhists, such as Lord Ganesh. People were praying to the Buddha inside. I've always found this activity curious. The whole point of Buddha being Buddha is that he's not a mere god, having found the way to nirvana and more or less ceased to exist in any form (or something like that), which to me seems like it would make him the last entity you'd want to pray to. But anyways, there's a picture of a wish-granting elephant man who rides around the heavens on a mouse only a few feet away, so debating about the likelihood of divine intervention by liberated beings is perhaps splitting hairs, all considered. Outside of here, pilgrims filed by on their way to the main Kataragama shrine carrying large platters of assorted fruits. I would say that only about 60% of the fruit ever makes it to the god. The other 40% are the casualties of the unashamedly piratical Hanuman monkeys that charge at the pilgrims, tails held high, and directly assail the bearers of the goodies, leaving the pilgrims to stare in either amusement or horror as the rest of the money troupe darts in to snatch spilled coconuts, papayas, mangoes, bananas, and other Sri Lankan produce I'd be at a loss to name. Belive me, you can pass quite a bit if time watching this scene repeat itself.

I pressed on beyond the Kataragama temple (because as I've hinted it ain't much to look at and all the exciting stuff happens after dark) and took a stroll on the wide, sandy avenue leading to the dagoba. I wasn't expecting to get much out of this visit, since you don't have to see too many dagobas before you've effectively seen them all, but just as I was getting ready to leave I noticed a procession forming at one end of the boulevard. It was about this time that I learned for certain how to tell apart a Sri Lankan Buddhist and a Sri Lankan Hindu if they are coming to the same shrine to worship the same god. You can extrapolate from this observation as neccesary. It goes like this: If a group of worhsippers are quietly forming an orderly queue in the mid-afternoon and solemnly walking in unison to the accompaniment of rigorously-trained musicians, they are probably Buddhists. If a group of worshippers appears after dark, wildly flailing in every direction with various peacock-related accessories as shouting men haphazardly bang cymbals, drums, and play the trumpet while trying not to fall down, they are probably Hindus.

The proccession I was witnessing was of the Buddhist sort. Two rows of white-clad pilgrims, overwhelmingly women, formed on the boulevard and held at shoulder height a long, rainbow-striped Buddhist banner. They began to shuffle slowly and reverently in the direction of the dagoba. At the head of the procession were five figures. One was a Kandyan drummer wearing white pantaloons, a silly hat, and a red belt, and bearing a certain phsycial resemblance to Pumba from The Lion King. He was accompanied by another, slightly less ridiculous percussionist, and a Kandyan flautist in similar attire whose bearing of overwrought scowls and grimaces revealed the bitter knowledge that an overweight shirtless man playing a glorified Sinhalese kazoo in a silly hat faces an uphill struggle to be taken seriously. The fourth figure was a bespectacled monk in a brilliant orange robe, and the fifth was a mere dog which I only mention because that dog really started some shit. It was the sort of dog that likes people, and remains wholly ignorant of religious ettiquette, finding nothing but this utmost delight in distractingly hopping onto drummers' feet, getting shooed by the flapping of monastic robes, and causing one of the pilgrims to drop a loudspeaker unit with an ear-ripping squeal of electronic protest. Having a dog around was perhaps appropriate though, since the whole affair looked a lot like a large jury of little old ladies at a Buddhist dog-and-stupa show, getting ready to drape an enormous technical color ribbon on the Kataragama dagoba for having won in the category of Biggest Thing That Looks Like A Nipple.

The ending of this whole business came around just in time for me to get back to the main Kataragama temple for the much-lauded evening worship ceremonies, with a potential sighting of the famed "peacock dance", which the locals reccomended entusiastically. Night fell and I found myself in the rather modest enclosure, little more than three brightly illuminated shrines in a sandlot with some bodhi trees tucked around back. The local police and a few soldiers from the army were on hand to provide security, looking a touch preposterous standing around with dull brown assault rifles slung over their shoulders but no damn shoes on their feet. I can see the news now: "Four servicemen were wounded today by an IID -improvised incisive device- reportedly consisting of several pieces of broken glass in the sand. The Chief of the Army has placed the nation on its highest terror alert. Report any ~~minorities~~ suspicious charachters, especially those carrying bottles, immediately."

The ceremony, as they tend to be in this country, was a wildly boring affair in which huffy-puffy priests in front of a curtain concealing all the interesting bits, reciting long obeisances which I'm sure wouldn't have been an iota more interesting had I known the language. People lined up to pay their respects. In the sandy courtyard, some visitors clustered around a tiny, fenced-off pit where they prayed to the god somewhat more dramatically by setting coconuts on fire and then smashing them against rocks. Fair enough, I say, if you want to worship a god who rides around on a peacock then by all means throw flaming coconuts around for him. I just can't help but think, however, that up in the cosmic planes Lord Kataragama might be wearying of hearing for the millionth time "My Lord, I offer you this coconut..." "Great! Now this time don't -*CRACK*- sigh.... I just wish I could get offered some fruit that wasn't shattered and immolated first. HEAR, YE MORTALS. God proclaims that henceforth thou shalt offer thine coconuts in the form of daquiris. Thus shall I be honored."

Then as yet another pilgrim mustered the intense concentration required to make a brittle coconut husk break when thrown against rock after having already been set on fire, the peacock dancers arrived. At first I just heard the random shoutings of a mob, looked out of the shrine area and saw a gang of men carrying hoops of peacock feathers being swung this way and that. "Ahh, some unruly worshippers," I thought, "perhaps this will be a preamble to the elaborate, well-ordered 'peacock dance' that the Hindu pilgims will soon....oh, right". It still sometimes takes me a moment to remember that where people of Indian descent are concerned, waving around madly and shouting while people bash away on instruments they've apparently just been acquainted with is considered religious dance. There are of course myriad forms of Hindu worship, but the Tamils have long gone in for spectacle, intensity, and ecstatic participation. And by ecstatic participation I mean "doing insane things with your body like driving skewers through your face or just spinning around and around until you pass out." Tellingly, the most devout practitioners of this peacock dance performed it almost identically to the way the children did. I could make a caustic remark about religous faith in general here, but I will instead merely say that many of the more 'ecstatic' forms of worship in the world are essentially activities for strange people whose inner child never stopped saying "Look! I can dance so crazy I faint!", and proving it. The main difference is that an adult proclaims "I was overcome by God!" while a child says "That was awesome! Not let's trying doing it and glue at the same time!" Such extremes off devotion/delusion are however a step removed from the dancing of the general multitude. Most of the charachters in this flailing human tempest merely wore faces of resignation that said "I have to keep going. If I don't continue to adequately interpret the jumping of a mythical warrior peacock through the sublime medium of spontaneous dance, then I will really look foolish."

As I slipped back through the curio bazaar late that night I couldn't help feeling that I had not been incredibly edified by my visit to Kataragama. All told it merely graphically illustrated my increasing conviction on the nature of religions in general, that people will just believe anything so long as it's convenient. But then, why the hell not? OK, so a wee bit of education and pausing to think about the history of your deities or whatever, or taking a moment to look for glaring contradictions in the dogma you follow might reveal that it all doesn't make a terrible amount of sense. But once again, what the hell. In Kataragama, where just about every mish-mangly-mixing thing in sight is a reminder that the gods are our own creations, and sometimes rather silly creations at that, at least nobody is getting all up in arms about the details. Perhaps being surrounded by contradictory elements of technicolor nonsense has a soothing effect; maybe when you don't particularly expect your own creed to be possessing of rigorous mortal logic you don't have to go around proving to the rest of the world that you're right all the time. I turned about in bed a lot trying to glean something more useful than the two other foreign tourists I met had ("It's such a vibrant spectacle! yada yada, something about cultural diversity...), but as you can see I still haven't come up with much. I ain't got any answers for ya. I dunno... try setting some coconuts on fire and see what happens? I'll leave you to it. Me and Lord Kataragama (he's a notorious pimp) are taking some girls out for daquiris. Peace.

The "Arid Zone" Is A Malicious And Despicable Misnomer

2010-10-06T12:26:00.000+05:30

The climate of Sri Lanka is a mystery, suffused with perplexing and wicked secrets. Sri Lankan meteorology is a black art of deception and lies, made all the more vile by the frequency with which the dark spells used in its occult science go horribly and unpredictably wrong. You see, despite having the modest dimensions of, say, New Jersey, Sri Lanka has about four completely different climate zones. Traditionally, these are labeled by geographical boundaries, such as the hill country, east coast, etc. This is hogwash. I can sum up the four coasts of Sri Lanka in a single, bullet-pointed list.

East coast: a back-asswards province with no economy that the government actually pays people to move to.
West coast: a huge strip of congested, urbanized hell, kind of like India but with fewer trash fires and lamer pop culture.
South coast: a 200km promenade of fishmongers' kiosks separating the actual ocean from a figurative sea of tedium.
North coast: a minefield.

In reality the climate zones of Sri Lanka are purely relative areas. Allow me to illustrate. Sri Lanka's four climate areas are as follows:

Where you are at this very moment.
Where you are going to be in the near future
Anywhere you may be lured by the promise of good weather
Anywhere you have sensitive electronics.

The forecast for all these regions is rain.

I complain about the weather (yet again) now because I was supposed to be going to an area noted for its dryness, but noooooooooooooo, this is Sri Lanka. Little did I know, I was straddling some sort of magical weather line. The last feeble rains of the monsoon had fallen on the coast and the dry season was upon the isle, so I descended from the perpetually-damp mountains to enjoy the sunny tropical atmosphere. That was when I discovered that the east coast, which people have the gall to call "arid", suffers from the other monsoon, and the very instant that the rains are ending elsewhere, the east gets wetter than a school of tuna in wool trousers. Second monsoon.... I walked right on into it.

I was in the city of Monaragala, which is notable for absolutely nothing, purely as a matter of convenience heading towards the east coast with a stop at the nearby village of Maligawila, which promised an "Olde Lankan Bricks"-type experience of some grand Buddha statues in the forest. Getting to Maligawila proved to be something of an adventure in itself, a lumbering bus ride through a convoluted and narrow series of backcountry roads and unmarked turnings in obscure hamlets where the only sign of commercial activity was people very slowly bargaining over individual coconuts. I actually like this sort of journey because I enjoy getting a feel for the countryside, wandering around at a snail's pace on old rustbuckets through villages where the passage of an outsider, foreign or otherwise, is enough for the locals to make for a few minutes' conversation in between examining and commenting upon yams.

I arrived in Maligawila and sure enough it was primarily a patch of forest with heaps of ancient bricks lying here and there, albeit with one very impressive Buddha statue, and another butt-ugly Buddha statue that happened to be sitting on some sort of Sinhalese ziggurat lost in the jungle. So, for your information, that's what Maligawila has to offer. That and completely unnecessary and unwanted torrents of rain which converted the entire village from a sandpit with a few shacks in it to a swishing mud puddle with a few shacks in it. I took shelter inside the last bus back to the civilized world, and sat waiting for the driver to decide that the roads were likely to be passable again. Since no local in their right mind was going to travel at the time (and, let's be real, probably didn't have anywhere compelling to go) I was the lone passenger on the vehicle, affording me the luxury of stripping to my underwear and hanging my shirt and pants to drip from the luggage racks. Eventually, when the rains subsided and a handful of passengers did get on for a short hop home with their shopping, I got some very curious looks. I explained. "Rain. It is problem." Nobody could find any grounds to disagree with this statement so I was left in the relative comfort of my half-dry semi-nudity, though nobody sat within six rows of me. When, at long last the bus rolled into Monaragala station and I reluctantly wriggled into my clothing for the public slog back to my hotel, I felt ever so slightly oppressed. Damn this weather. As I walked, everybody was looking at me like I was some sort of idiot. "Look," I wanted to say, " I didn't want to be soaked head to foot, but I was in the middle of nowhere when your awful weather came to get me. What was I to do?"... I later realized that I was shuffling through the bazaar with my fly flapping open, exposing a pizza-slice sized triangle of purple boxer shorts with polar bear silhouettes on them.

Around this time somebody explained the oddities of Sri Lankan monsoons to me and I nodded a dripping, mop-like head in comprehension. I quickly decided that I didn't want to go to the east coast all that much, especially since the main highway involves ferry crossings (for readers who don't know, I hate ferries). Furthermore, nobody seemed able to name a single compelling place to visit besides one surfers' outpost and "elephants", which isn't really a place, is it? So, on to the south coast it was, and I gotta say, it has been appreciably less wet here, such that the fleet-footed and alert traveler can sprint back to his hotel room and dry laundry in between showers. I have to do a lot of laundry because there is a lot of sweat and sand, and the only place that doesn't smell like fish is a strange village where people of all religions come to set coconuts on fire... but that is a story for another time. OK, I have to go. The local gem merchants have all figured out what little tourist shop I'm lingering in and if I don't run soon I'm going to be torn about by clawing hands trying to force baggies of "sapphires" on me. It's wild out there....

-GFB

Buddha Walks

2010-09-27T10:54:00.000+05:30

Yo

Sri Lanka at war with terrorism
Racism
But most of all
Sri Lanka at war with themselves

Buddha walks
God show me the way because Sinhala road signs are trying to break me down
Buddha walks with me, with me...

UH. You know what Ceylon is? Young and restless
Well, Tamil TIGERS might snatch your necklace
And next these TIGERS might anti-tank mine your Lexus
Somebody tell these TIGERS who Asia's best is
I walk through the bus stand where the shadow of death is
Total chaos, the fumes alone will leave you breathless
*Huuuogghhhh* Try to catch it *Hyuuurrkkkk* Hard as shit
Same time getting choked by Lankan English - check the chat-chit
They be asking odd questions, harass and molest us
Saying "Do you eat papaya or jackfruit for breakfast?"
"Hey where you going? What's the basis?"
I ain't going nowhere but I've got mad buns and pastries
A backpack full of coke and a pet cockroach named Davis
The theocracy used to say only Buddha could save us
...Well homies, I know I act a fool
But I'll be gone til November, I've got legends to prove

Buddha walks
God show me the way cuz parasitic amoebas are trying to break me down
Buddha walk with me, with me
The only thing I pray is my colon don't fail me now
Ghostfaace Buuuuddhaaa waaaalks
And I don't think there's nothing I can do to right my wrongs
Ghost-face Budd-ha walks
'Cept for give these girls back their saris, bras, and sarongs
Ghostface Buuuuuuu-uuuuuddhhaaaaa
God show me the way because raging elephants are trying to break me down
GHOOOOOSSTTTTT
The only thing I pray is my taser don't fail me now
And I don't think there's nothing I can do now to right my wrongs
Ghooostface walks
I want to talk to God but I'm afraid cuz we ain't Skyped in so long
Buddha walks        So long...
Buddha walks with me, with me, with me, with me

UHHH, to the hustlers, killers, tea pickers, "Fancy" dealers
Even tuk-tuk drivers    Buddha walks with them
To the victims of Halal fare cuz the food taste like Hell here
Hell yeah    Buddha walks with them
Now hear ye hear ye you need to hear me more clearly
And shut the Hell up before my ears get weary
Cuz heroes like me is nearly extinct
I win fights with livestock - I act, I don't think
But I'm not here to tell you about my flawless features
We're here to turn haters into believers
I'm just here to say the way the people of Judah need kosher food-ah
The way oom-pah need tuba that's the way you need Buddha
So here comes my single, dawg, don't get the hype bent
They say you can rap about anything except fo' Enlight'ment
That means guns, sex, cows, and wickets-to-take
But if I talk about the Eightfold my record won't get played, HUH??

Well you can take from my fame but you can't take from my game
Which means you can't take away from my dames
And stop the day I'm dreamin' 'bout
Up in the Indian Sub' all the ladies screaming out
Buddha, come...
God show me the way cuz palm liquor is trying to break me down
Buddha come take me, take me...
The only thing I pray is Kama Sutra don't fail me now
God show me the way because patriarchal forces trying to break me down
The only thing I pray is Kama Sutra don't fail me now
Buddha come take me...

Field Guide To Sri Lankan Cliffs

2010-09-26T15:34:00.001+05:30

The Definitive Resource on Ceylonese Precipices

GFB exclamation of the day: "This isn't potato - it's fried fish heads!"

I have been quite slowly creeping along the southern edge of the Sri Lankan mountains, taking in the various places that are known for their natural beauty. In the Sri Lankan hills, this effectively means cliffs. I have been spending a great deal of time around precipices, which is perhaps a warning of how eating "rice and curry" every single night is making me feel about life. Anyways, I have seen such a number of cliffs on this island now that I consider myself something of an expert. So for the benefit of my readers and humanity as a whole (but I repeat myself...) I have compiled this guide, evaluating the relative merits of Sri Lanka's various planes of stone and associated vertical topography.

Each cliff will be briefly introduced, and then rated on a five-star system in four categories.

Scenery- The aesthetic quality of the cliff and its surroundings. 5 stars indicates a cliff is highly aesthetically pleasing.
Climate- An inverse measure of the awfulness of the cliff's weather. 5 stars indicates that the weather at the cliff does not often suck.
Bullshitlessness- An inverse measure of the amount of bullshit one most confront in order to visit the cliff. 5 stars indicates a bullshit-free experience.
Suicidability- Fun fact: Aside from having the world's highest alcoholism rate, Sri Lanka also has the world's highest suicide rate. Since the island offers such a bevy of dangerous falls, you could even consider it a suicide destination. "Suicidability" measures the suitability of a cliff for ending one's own life. 5 stars indicates certain death.

Let us begin.

Sri Pada (Adam's Peak)

Sri Pada has already been discussed extensively in this recent post, but in short it is a very steep and very sacred mountain said to be the home of the Sri Lankan Buddhist god Saman, as well as the site of a magical footprint left by Lord Buddha, while local Muslims and opportunistic Christian's believe the footprint is that of Adam, the first man.

Scenery- 3/5. I have seen video evidence of the fantastic scenery occasionally visible from Adam's Peak, though if you come during the wrong half of the year, or at a reasonable hour of day, you are liable to encounter a whole lot of clouds, about which I need not repeat myself.
Climate- 1/5. Terrible. In the best of times, it is guaranteed to be cold; at other times, well, once again I need not repeat myself.
Bullshitlessness- 3/5. Having a half-year "season", outside of which its conveniences and infrastructure are abandoned lose it one star, while the recommended climb-starting time of 2 a.m. costs it another.
Suicidability- 3/5. Definitely lethal, but the sacred mountain itself is too potent a reminder of the futility of the act; you'll just be reborn and have countless more lifetimes to suffer.

World's End (Horton Plains National Park)

World's End is Sri Lanka's most famous cliff. It is approximately 800 meters straight down, and offers uninterrupted views for miles and miles across the southern plains, and over the numerous crumpled hills to the east. It also lies within a splendid national park of high-altitude grassland and cloud forest, where deer and such can be seen running around. The park is also worth a visit for what are unquestionably Sri Lanka's, if not Asia's most spectacular toilets (located at the park entrance facility at the western gate). I am not joking.

Scenery- 5/5. Spectacular, and the surrounding parkland is lovely too.
Climate- 3/5. High and sometimes chilly, with a tendency for clouds and mist to come ruin the views and make you unpleasantly damp well before midday.
Bullshitless- 1/5. As a National Park, it is owned by the Sri Lankan government; ergo rapacious, piratical, and rife with bullshit. Entrance fees payable in cash or kidneys.
Suicidability- 5/5. You won't be the first.

Haputale

A relatively undistinguished Sri Lankan town with the usual assortment of claustrophobic vegetable shops and dubious bakeries, except for the fact that it sits right on the top of a ridge with open views both over the plains to the south, and the folds of the hill country to the north.

Scenery- 4/5. Superb, and seeing both ways is an added bonus, though since we are comparing cliffs it must be said that there are others that are better.
Climate- 2/5. Arriving at my guesthouse and looking out over the view and the village's topography for the first time, I immediately said "The weather here is going to be ass." Sure enough, perched on a near-vertical ridge with nothing but humid plains between there and the sea, Haputale sits at the top of a textbook case of "Rain Shadow". Clouds and rain at some time every day is the norm.
Bullshitlessness- 3/5. Haputale is a functioning Sri Lankan market town, which implies a certain amount of bullshit. For instance, did you know that Sri Lankan "Book Shops" do not sell books?
Suicidability- 5/5. It is conceivable that if you hopped from the wrong spot you might only go partway down and survive the first part of the drop, but then you would have broken legs and be lying in the middle of highway A16

Lipton's Seat

Named for Sir Thomas Lipton, a.k.a. the Lipton's Tea guy, this famous peak juts up from the hill country's southern escarpment in an area blanketed with immaculate fields of tea.

Scenery- 5/5. Fabulous views both of the plains and the mountains, with wonderful tea, tea, and tea in between. Even the walk is lovely, although rather uphill.
Climate- 3/5. Not particularly cold, but clouds and rain virtually guaranteed by the afternoon, and it is a long way to walk back down in a rainstorm. Come very early or hire a rickshaw.
Bullshitlessness- 4/5. Relatively devoid of bullshit.
Suicidability- 2/5.Though you can see a great difference in altitude from the Seat, if you attempted jumping in the immediate area, you would be most likely to land shortly below, and in a tea bush, which would just suck.

Bambarakanda Falls

Falling from the same extended southern escarpment on which most of these cliffs lie, Bambarakanda Falls are the highest in Sri Lanka at 241 meters (790 feet).

Scenery- 3/5. Reaching the falls involves a nice excursion through rural scenery in a cleft of the mountains. The falls themselves, while certainly high, are little more than a modest mountain stream encountering the laws of gravity.
Climate- 3/5. Fortunately, the falls are low enough down that you are unlikely to find yourself in a cloud, though you are in a rain shadow area.
Bullshitlessness- 4/5 Not much bullshit, save for the ridiculous road signs which tell you the falls are "5km" away no matter how far you have walked.
Suicidability- 2/5. Inconveniently for the incipiently self-destructive, one visits the falls from the bottom of the cliff. You could try drowning in the pool.

Ella

A totally touristy little village at the southeastern corner of the hills, best known for its peaceful atmosphere, you guessed it, its views down large cliffs and out across open plains. The village is set around the Ella Gap, a small valley made by the local stream, stony and precipitous in some places, grassy and sometimes even terraced in others. In fact, I am in Ella right now, at one of its various overpriced tourist eateries, where actual hunger is a financial liability.

Scenery- 4/5. No complaints here, and there are multiple points from which to admire the usual combo of verticality, distance, and tea leaf. The majestic Ravana Ella Falls a few miles down the valley add a major aesthetic bonus to the area.
Climate- 3/5. Lower, warmer, and less exposed to damp and awfulness than most of the other cliffs here, though that is a relative statement.
Bullshitlessness- 2/5. They try and charge 700 SL rupees here for a rice and curry dinner (normal price is ~350), which tells you all you need to know about the mentality here. Gahhhh. Tourists...
Suicidability- 5/5. The cliff at Ella Rock is fabulously deadly, and the one at "Little Adam's Peak" should also do. Meanwhile, in town the various establishments that serve alcohol a short distance from the Ella Gap's edge are a highly convenient option for those with easily-cooled feet.

Well, I guess that about covers it for the noteworthy cliffs of Sri Lanka. I must say, all this talk of suicide is a little unusual. I'm used to talking about myself at length, and about things that intend to murder me almost as much, but the combination of the two suggests an urgent trip to a specialist. And by "specialist" I mean the liquor store. It's Sri Lanka. 4 P.M. is not too early. Good night!

The Upcountry Journal of Sir Muttonchop G. Buddha

2010-09-25T14:48:00.000+05:30

What follows is the journal of a strange and mysterious figure known only as Sir Muttonchop G. Buddha to the Sri Lankan highlands around Nuwara Eliya, ostensibly to inspect his substantial holdings in the nearby tea estates, though even this detail is considered murky. More puzzling still is the impossibility of discerning if the journal was written in 1872 or 2010, but no matter.

Sept. 22, Nuwara Eliya

Aaah! and what a lovely day it is for a sortie in the tea fields of Ceylon! The day grants us an invigorating mist to shield us from the slothful Colonial sun, and a fine steed to ride about the curling plantation byways, visiting upon my estate managers and imposing the proper image of an industriously working man upon the natives...

I'm residing for the time being in the abode of a Ceylonese lady by the name of Miss Teresa. Of course, the name she was given at birth is unpronounceable and in all likelihood barbarous, with a lamentable pagan note to it, so I've given her a Christian name and hope that a Christian heart shall soon follow. No more fit for cultured tongues is the name of this town, Nuwara Eliya. It sounds like the name of a Rajah's daughter fallen to ill repute, offering the delights of her cinnamon-hued flesh to any slobbering member of the petty gentry with a half-purse of silver. Such salacious tales as these fill the pages of the obscene and lascivious "histories" by C.W. Chesterworth, which in turn fill the uppermost of my bookshelves.

I must confess, however, that these volumes -not that I've ever browsed them with more than a catalogist's aloof eye- are opened most rarely these days, as my advancing years and the thinness of the air in these regions do make it a test upon my constitution to read of "...sweat clouding the topaz jewels betwixt the Rani's trembling bosom...". Nuwara Eliya is situated temperately, though I dare say dizzyingly, at a height of over six thousands of feet, which may be a fine altitude for the local Asiatics or an uncouth, hemp-favoring Yankee adventurer, but it is no place for the refined breath of an English gentleman, to say nothing of the English ladyfolk. Alas that such fine grounds cannot be found in lower and less Equatorial climes! Without question, the rumpled seas of verdant, aromatic, and eminently profitable beverage-bound leaf amidst the skyward-striving montane trees hereabouts is indeed most pleasing to the tropic-tired eye. No less a delight is to behold the well-tended vegetables in the coolies' gardens, looking for all the world like my Aunt Perriwin's tomato patch on the Fline of Twee. I gaze upon my estate's laborers plucking fine English cabbages from their humble (though magnanimously granted!) Oriental plots, and I thank our Saviour for shewing to me that, yes, the myriad races of the Empire may yet be Redeemed. Of course, these particular toils are beneath me. It is no place of mine to pluck a cabbage -save perhaps if I were given the chance to pluck the fresh cabbage of Miss Priscilla Upworth, if you take my figuration! But, oh! I must retire. The air remains thin, and I shall require all my energies to sustain and endure my tempestuous nightly dream of caressing Miss Priscilla's auburn locks and siring an heir.

~~Interlude of Repose~~

Up before dawn for Miss Teresa's smashing eggs and toast with jam, and I think I shall head straight to the links. Blessed are we mightily to have a golf course bisecting the very center of town. There is never a wrong time to play a few holes on such fine and spacious grounds. These open spaces, I must admit, are to me the game's only real merit. Placing the ball in the distant cup is devilish hard, but in a full morning's play you may see no more people than are typically balanced on a single Ceylonese motor-bicycle. My caddy awaits me, as he always does whether I send ahead for him or not. He knows well that my munificence is greatest immediately after a display of utmost punctiliousness. He has even abandoned the cult of Shiva at the calling of St. James, or so he told me as he listed the numerous heathen practices that he has forsworn since last I withheld his salary as tithe.

My interactions with the locals of late have been most heartwarming. It is recently reported that Ceylon is the eighth-most personable land upon the Earth, and this shows in the honest warmth of its native peoples. However, I must sadly repeat here that Ceylon is also also ranked firstly among the nations in addiction to the wicked vice of strong drink. And aye, if ever you had beheld the liquor-scented gloom and insensate brawling within a Ceylonese arrack den, you too would know how the isle's reputation for friendliness falls seven places short of its promise. I, of course, do not frequent such establishments. I prefer instead to take my gin alone, in dim candle's light, at the empty and bare tables of my hosts.

I have been staying in many a family guesthouse on this tour of the hill country, which is both comfortable and economic, though my gentle and endearing manner seems to inspire a confidence in the minds of my hosts that is perhaps unwarranted. Too often have I been made a confidant in both sides of a marital spat, or been variously subjected to long and meandering discourses on the difficulties of broken households, the "evils" (so they proclaim!) of Western society, and the obscure vagaries of Ceylonese political affairs. I have even been left to sup with orphans. Orphans, I say. Worst of all, however, my hosts place in me a strange trust they do not grant to other strangers, and leave me unchaperoned with daughters of such age that they are too youthful for any but the most stringently chaste dialog to be desirable or acceptable, yet too mature for both parties not to perceive the awkwardness of the situation. And to think that in some less advantaged corners of this country such girls would be thought to be of marriageable age...

Pardon. Again I must retire. Curse the thinness of this air.

~~Interlude of Repose~~

After this interlude follow a series of impassioned scrawlings, writ so haphazardly across the subsequent dozen leaves of the folio that it is difficult at best to extract any cogency therefrom; nor is it the task of the responsible historian to conjecture. Beyond those pages the journal seems to have fallen into disuse -save, apparently, for absorbing spillages of gin.

The Return Of StairMasta Killa

2010-09-24T12:24:00.001+05:30

Once again a steep and mighty pinnacle loomed before me, taunting my impetuous nature with the call of hallowed ground and an unnecessary and grueling pilgrimage. Though in truth I could not see it with my eyes, I knew where it stood and knew that it beckoned. The pinnacle was Sri Pada, Adam's Peak. It is the home of the semi-Buddhist guardian deity Saman, and it here millenia ago that Saman himself became a Buddhist and begged Lord Buddha leave his footprint for worship. In the centuries that passed, the Muslims too came and proclaimed that the indentation at the peak was none other than the footprint Adam left when he landed after being cast out from Eden, proving once and for all the sort of ridiculousness that happens when you take "cast out" and other scriptural phrases too literally. Then the Christians came and declared "Adam? In Ceylon? Give me a break. Oh well, at least it's not heathen. We'll let it fly." The mount is also famed for its truly bizarre shadow, a phenomenon of nature that seems to defy all rational explanation, for when the sun creeps up from behind the horizon at the break of dawn, Sri Pada drops a perfectly triangular shadow on the hills beyond, despite not being itself a triangle. It is very weird. But Ghostface Buddha knows the true reason for Sri Pada's sacredness, a rationale that is, as they say, as old as the hills. Sri Pada is holy because it is a weird shape and fucking steep. Such is the the way of holy mountains. Ancient Sri Lankan man once said "Well, well, look at that thing. It must be the home of gods." The home of this god lies at the top of almost five thousand stairs, thus it was time for Ghostface Buddha to morph into another form...

From the stair-filled slums of Shaolin, StairMasta Killa strikes again. This, unedited and unaltered, is the chronicle of the stairs.

Stair 0: I'm in Dalhousie village getting ready to climb Adam's Peak. Or maybe it's "Delhousie" or "Dal House" village. Nobody is in agreement. I'm in the southeastern part of the Sri Lankan tea country, and many of the villages here still carry their utterly British plantation names. It's at least a little reassuring that the locals have as much trouble with "Norwood" and "Edinburgh" as we do with "Nallatanniya" and "Kilinochchi". The curious thing is that everybody has their own notion of how local place-names should be pronounced, and refuse to accept the interpretations of others. Thus, after I spent a minute or so testing variations of "Dalhoozie" and "Del Hose" on a bus driver, drawing squinting blanks until I hit the jackpot with "Dal House", I was rather surprised to find at the next bus station that "Dal House" got me nowhere, people looking at me like I was speaking a language from Mars until I uttered the phrase "Dellahoose". I don't know how these people go anywhere. Maybe they don't get out much.

Stair 120: Well, I'm off to a late start and the clouds are shrouding almost the entire mountain already. You're supposed to start in the middle of the night. More importantly, you're supposed to come in the dry season and not now, when everything is actually closed and nobody in their right mind would approach the peak because you can't see anything and the climb is a misty shitshow. We shall see.

Stair 250: I've lost count of the stairs already. So much for that conceit.

Stairs X...Z....

I'm at the entrance to the sacred reserve proper, looking at a giant and slightly cheesy stone structure called the "Dragon Arch". I know its name thanks to the latest of a series of large and informative billboards about local pilgrim culture brought to you by the fine people at the Lifebuoy soap company and their wonderfully pale-skinned and happy-looking collection of unknown Sinhalese actors pretending to be a family. This one is particularly marvelous. I quote: "This massive and intricate gateway was designed and constructed to seek divine intervention to resolve a technical glitch in the Laxapana power station, commissioned in 1950." So apparently obtaining a Sri Lankan engineering degree largely revolves around oracles and beseeching gods with the smashing of coconuts. You won't see me lingering on any local bridges.

I'm still not really on the mountain itself, just following the pilgrim trail up into the dale. I just got approached by the local Buddhist monk. My guesthouse hosts warned me about him. Sure enough he asked for money right away. Word on the street is he has mad cash, has various mistresses, and uses the proceeds of pilgrim donations to hire a mercenary priest to run his temple for him -and to support his lavish, import-favoring drinking habit.

A bit further up the trail, almost at the end of the cleft. I'm looking up at yet another Japanese "peace pagoda", identical to the several of the same sect I have seen in Nepal and India. I don't know quite why they do it, but I do appreciate turning around random corners in the woods in the Indian subcontinent and suddenly finding myself confronted with a flashy slab of Japanese runes.

I've now gone up quite a few steep stairs, and ahead of me is a team of laborers lugging sacks of cement mix up the hill for repairing the stairs ahead. The mountain bends sharply up at a sudden angle here. I can't see a damn thing above me in these clouds, but I must be at the base of the final slog. Based on the pictures I've seen it's gonna be tough but at least I should be near the top.

Nope, that wasn't near the top. Fuuuccckkkk.

On either side of me is lush, green, and very shadowy cloud forest falling down the slopes. I am becoming acutely aware that this path is too steep to run on and I don't have the energy for carrying a large stick everywhere I go. Fight or flight might be necessary, because everyone I've spoken to within a hundred miles of the peak has warned me that climbing in the off-season carries a (so they claim) extremely high risk of being attacked by wild pigs. Please.

I've been pushing up a staircase for quite a while now. I don't mean a stepped path like you tend to find on pilgrim trails, taking you a step up every other pace or so. I mean the way up this bitch is an actual, soul-shattering staircase like climbing to the top of a tall building when the elevator's busted. I can't see shit and all I can say about this mountain is that its contours are, to put it mildly, memorably unhorizontal.

Well, I'm slightly higher now and completely immersed within the clouds. There's an all-pervading mist on all sides and above and below me. To make things worse, there is some cheery-looking dog bounding up ahead of me like these godforsaken steps ain't no thang. Yeah, try doing this bipedally, you smug little bitch.

All the way up I've been passing the refuse of a seasonally abandoned pilgrim trail. Hundreds of times have I passed little shut-up tea shops where I could have stopped for a chat and a snack or taken a moment's shelter from the wind and the rain with twinkling lights and cheery little Buddhist ladies asking me what country I'm from. Now it's so desolate I almost want to see these pigs.

Another Lifebuoy soap ad posing as pilgrim info. Apparently this is the spot where Lord Buddha mended his robe on the way up the trail, and now pilgrims mark the area by buying white thread and tangling it everwhere for the next few hundred yards. Now, months after the pilgrims have gone, all that remains of this jumble is a rather forsaken-looking mess of fading threads trapped in the edges of the encroaching bush. It looks like a sail got mauled by the world's largest kitten and left here to rot.

Good lord, but this is steep. I've been on this same staircase for over an hour, and the side of the path is now so steep and exposed that even the tea-shop frames have faded out. It's just too treacherous here even for selling tea. I think I actually am near the top this time.

Walking through the clouds is an exercise in suffering intermittent drizzles and bursts of large-dropped rain. In cycles lasting anywhere from two to fifteen minutes I am repeatedly treated the the various climatic offerings of being soaked gently, indifferently, or furiously, though invariably coldly. This is some miserable crap BUT I AM GOING TO THE TOP AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME.

OK, I'm definitely, like really, near the top now. The stairs now, which have somehow become even steeper than they were before, are now on a completely exposed rock face getting pummeled by the wind. I have to grasp onto the railings just to avoid being blown back down the stairs. People imagine Heaven floating about on fluffy, cozy clouds. I have news for you, people. Clouds are HELL.

The cloud moisture is flooding the ink in my notes all over the page like a bleeding roadkill fractal. This raises important questions, like Why am I trying to write this?

I'm at the top!!! And, oh, look, the temple's closed. Could have seen that coming.

I can see 100 feet in any direction. From the locked gate I can see the front of the shrine but not the back. Needless to say, there are no mountain vistas. My spasming, near-gelatinous legs are the only proof I have that this little circle of fog I occupy is actually on top of a big, sacred, fuck-off mountain.

I'm in a small dormitory now having tea with the peak's caretakers, a man and two boys. They are laypeople, with no monks in sight. Where are the monks? I ask. "Monks don't like it here so they hire us." So no priest or monk at so holy temple? "Sri Lankan monks don't do any religious. They just like the comfort life."

Sri Pada is an excellent illustration of my crypto-Hindu theory (my belief that the island's Buddhists are hardly Buddhists at all). Consider Sri Lanka's most important places of pilgrimage. One is the temple of a talismanic, kingmaking tooth relic passed down through the ages. The other is a giant pointy mountain where some strange, protective hill-god with oracular tendencies supposedly asked Buddha to leave a footprint because the locals need some sort of weird little relic to worship (never mind that Buddha explicitly forbid worship of himself and, having experience in lecturing to deities, would have thoughtfully instructed Saman in the lapses of his understanding). It's a culture of random gods and relic-praise, with a big Buddha veneer thrown all over the top of it, stripped of all ideology, but retaining the outward forms enough for the Sinhalese nation to think of itself as almost chauvinistically Buddhist. So there's my spiel on Sri Lankan Buddhism. Now I'm going to walk back down this motherfucker.

I haven't gotten too far down, and I've been slowed by walking on the wrong side of the divided path, where the plants have overgrown over half the trail. Wet leaves keep streaking my face and dripping branches somehow keep sliding up my sleeves. It's still raining.

So, made a lot of progress and stopped for a moment to rest my ankles. I was running my hands down my legs when I felt some weird lumps in the vicinity of my socks. I take a peek and what do I see...blood spots? What the fuck? I roll down my socks and... oh my god

LEECHES

WORMY BLOODSUCKING FUCKBAGS I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU. Actually, no. Plucking them just makes it worse. But, clever me! I brought a lighter! I seem to remember you can harmlessly send them off with heat and flame. How very convenient.

Oh, wait, no. Lighter no make fire. I'm inside a fucking cloud. Just going to have to keep walking until the leeches drop off on their own. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.

I'm still on an unrelenting staircase in the middle of an unrelenting shitstorm getting soaked through and through while I'm covered in blood that's dripping out of strange parts of my body. You know what I am? I'm a fucking tampon in a toilet bowl. This is bullshit.

I repeat, this is bullshit.

This same dog has been trailing me all the way back down the mountain and it seems to think my leg smells odd. I can't imagine why.

Finally, bottom of the "staircase" part. Now I can take a few paces between stairs. No, I can't, because I now have the knees of a shaky old grandpa. I want aspirin and meatloaf.

Last leech dropped off sometime back. Didn't stop to write because I was impelling my worthless frame to the bottom of the hill with unseemly haste, shuffling down all jazzy-legged like a senile old swing dancer with a big fresh accident in my suspender pants. I'm making a very intense show of concentration on my notebook right now because I can't run and I don't want my eyes to give away how unsettled I am by the three men approaching me with banana-sickles and pickaxes.

Well, that was unnerving. I'm now in the company of four jumpsuited sanitation workers and an odd little Japanese man who spends all of his meager vacation allotments every year making miserable, off-season Buddhist pilgrimages and the globe, always without his highly skeptical wife. She may be on to something.

At long last, I reached again the bottom of the trail and stumbled into my guesthouse. Sweet, sweet repose.

Then I was attacked by wild pigs and died. The End.

Bridge On The River Kwickie

2010-09-24T10:34:00.000+05:30

I've now been up in the hills of Sri Lanka for over a week, mostly undertaking hikes to various scenic vistas at painful hours of the morning and then returning to slump in my bed soaked in rain and sweat. It's in this state of fatigue that I only recently mustered the strength to start penning my thoughts on this region, which began with a detour so brief and devoid of lunacy that I almost forgot about it entirely, but recount now for the benefit of those who wish to know about such places.

My first trip in the hill country actually involved riding a bus halfway out of the hills, down the winding highway to the west coast, and stopping in the not-so-remarkable village of Kitulgala. There's a handful of tourist joints there where people go to arrange whitewater rafting trips on the river that flows by, but that's really it as far as the village goes, unless you have a peculiar interest in hens. The reason I spent an afternoon trudging around half-obscured footpaths in that forgettable hamlet was my mild curiosity to see the famous scenery at one particular point on the riverside, known to cinema fanatics as the place where they shot the scenes featuring the titular span in the classic film Bridge On The River Kwai. So, yeah, you can go around and peer at familiar-looking mountains and even stand on a boulder where some jutting steel bars are all that remains of the movie's celebrated bridge. Of course, one wouldn't actually expect to be able to see the bridge standing there, because if you've seen the movie you'll know [SPOILER] it gets blown to shit at the end.

Anyways, it's a pleasantly scenic place, though rather annoyingly wet in the afternoon, and the river levels made approaching the banks hard and obscured many of the clusters of low rocks on which certain key scenes take place. However, I was to find that "pleasantly scenic though annoyingly wet" is, though understated, an apt description for just about anywhere in upcountry Sri Lanka. I warn you, bitching about rain is going to be a recurring feature in upcoming Ghostface Buddha featurettes, so get your raincoats and galoshes and keep your mouse hovering above the "Close Tab" button, because you're gonna need it.

-GFB

Train Trussle

2010-09-19T18:30:00.001+05:30

Shortly before leaving the Trincomalee area, I had an experience that magnified my suspicions regarding Sri Lankan Buddhism. Basically, I have this theory that Sri Lankan Buddhist are crypto-Hindus, so thoroughly immersed in the myth that they are Buddhists and surrounded by Buddha statues that even they don't realize it. The most obvious counterargument to this theory (besides "nuh-uh") is the sheer number of Buddhist monks you see around. My counter-counter-argument is that there really isn't anything all that Buddhist about having an elitist, semi-theocratic upper crust of society that performs almost no religious function for society while simultaneously doing very little to pursue the path of Enlightenment, the task for which Sri Lankan society has basically subsidized them for the past twenty-three centuries. Now, obviously I'm not going to diss every Buddhist monk on the island, but I've gotten the impression that a great many of them are useless louts. So that's my theory; fast forward to my last night near Trinco and imagine my surprise to walk out of my beachfront hut to find three rifle-wielding policemen and two Buddhist monks sitting on the patio. I took one look at them, saw they were clearly expecting me to be filled with sudden touristic amazement at the Rexotic sight of having orange-robed monks outside my hut, and took another glance at the cops. They waited for me to speak. "I don't even care any more" is all I said, and sat down at the next table and ordered a Lion beer - an act that shows better than anything else the profundity of my indifference.

The monks, joined by a middle-aged Canadian expat of the kind you find floating around sleepy corners of the Orient of unexplained reasons, soon undertook the urgent task of "examining the truths of the Universe", by which I mean downloading various Apple products for their mobile phones. One monk, named Ananda after the Buddha's foremost disciple, patiently listened as the Canadian listed the various intermediary hacks that would be neccessary for getting streaming Sinhala pop music on 3G service outside of the Colombo broadcast area. With a sudden passion, Ananda exclaimed "I have many needs!", which is either the most Buddhist or the least Buddhist thing I have ever heard. "I have many needs." Indeed. Don't we all. If only there was some ideology at large which had at its core an elucidation of the nature of needs and desires, and if only there were individuals whose life purpose was to confront these very things...

Sri Lankan monks: I rest my case.

Anyways, I left Trincomalee and passed once again through Kandy (which I have decided is a pretty nice place) on my way to Sri Lanka's central hills, a mountainous clump of tea, jungle, rivers, tea, tea, and tea in the heart of the island. On the advice of apparently deluded individuals, I began my foray into the montane regions on the fabled upcountry line of Sri Lankan Ra... Sri Lankan Railwa... I can't stop myself.... I'm sorry but it's coming.... Sri Lank... oh god, it's so close.... SRI LANKAN FAILWAYS.

Let this be known: Sri Lankan Railways is shit. It's not that their trains are huge and miserable; indeed, they are modest in both size and awfulness. It's just that their service is so ludicrously incompetent that for a five-hour period I found myself fondly reminiscing of rolling around India for days at a time in bogeys designed for the transport of medically-quarantined, agoraphobic outcasts from the dregs of a rust-hoarding, dumpster-diving society of malnourished elves dwelling on the far side of the moon. Sri Lankan railways has none of these endearingly atrocious features, but makes up for it by being unable to manage the complexity of running a halfway-efficient service on all three-and-a-half of the country's rail lines. I wanted a simple thing: to go from Kandy to the town of Hatton by train, preferably in some amount of time approximating the two-hour printed schedule. I waited until an appropriate time when I had gathered sufficient evidence before announcing my conclusion that the Railways here are run by a bunch of jolly old chucklefucks. This moment came about half an hour after the train was supposed to have left the platform at Kandy, a delay one would have thought impossible on various logistical and philosophical levels given that Kandy was the originating station. Then, because I am generous, I reserved my judgment on whether Sri Lankan Railways' executive management were career imbeciles or just plagued by having to see the world upside-down with their pants over their heads until I had evidence for this as well. The answer, you may not be surprised to hear, was both.

I realized this when the train (labelled for Badulla on the other end of the hill country) which we were directed to stopped at Peradeniya Junction, a mere 5 kilometers down the line, and every single Sri Lankan passenger disembarked in a frenzy and transferred to a train on the opposite platform. Suspecting that the locals knew something I didn't, I followed out to investigate and found that every single passenger heading towards Badulla had been deliberately shepherded onto a train going to Colombo, and we were expected to flee towards the actual Badulla train at the proper time. I managed to squeeze myself and my bags onto the real Badulla train at the last instant, and wondered aloud why on God's Green Earth it was neccessary for us to take a special (late) train 5 kilometers to get to yet another train while at the same time risking being whisked away to the wrong side of the country on a mystery service carrying no passengers, when it would have been much simpler for all concerned if train #1 could simply approach the junction and -I dunno- turn left.

After this, matters were relatively simple, involving nothing more than crawling up the mountains and continually rolling backwards and crashing into the neighboring bogeys every time the pitifully inadequate locomotive decided to ease its journey by decelerating from going five miles per hour to going negative five miles per hour. I became more familiar than I would have liked with several clusters of pine trees between milestones 93 and 97, where the train frequently paused, presumably to make sure we wouldn't run over any of the local wildlife, such as the Ceylonese Somnambulating Boar or the Lesser Peraplegic Toad. All told we were merely two hours late to Hatton, which I suppose isn't that bad for a 250-mile Asian journey. Oh wait, it was like 60 miles. Don't ever travel in Sri Lanka by train. But if you do, make sure it's the one the local monks ride on. Shit's bound to have wireless and a minibar. Better yet, invest in some pirated softcore porn VCD's flogged by the drunk guy hanging out by the side entrance of the village music store, then get a flatscreen TV, an electrical transformer, and a car battery and mount that shit to a on the back of an elephant. It'll go just as fast, be ten times as stylish, and be a hundred times more visually edifying than watching a train engineer scratch his ass in some unnamed stretch of cloud forest.

Extravagant? What can I say? I have many needs.

Guns N' Fishes

2010-09-16T10:25:00.000+05:30

First, an update on an important matter. I have been following through (far too diligently) on my morbid fascination with Sri Lankan soft drinks. Here are the latest results:

Ole' - A beverage of the 'cream soda' variety, similar to Elephant House Cream Soda and just as vile. I now have the business cards of several Sri Lankan oral surgeons in my wallet for emergency access.
Apple Soda - Kind of like soda, kind of like apple, entirely like the phrase "mediocre swill"
Zingo - "Zingo" indeed. This drink is just so plain weird I can't even decide if it's fruitily awful or fruitishly palatable because the signals going to my brain are as crossed and confused as the traffic outside a rickshaw-drivers' bar at the end of happy hour.
Smak Mixed Nectar - Ah, Smak, aside from being Sri Lanka's most fabulously named foodstuffs-manufacturing conglomerate, you have outdone yourself yet again and produced a beverage that actually tastes more like mango than mercury. Bravo, bravo.

I sampled most of these beverages while on a slightly pointless detour to the city of Trincomalee. Trincomalee is the main city on Sri Lanka's east coast, which is not saying all that much because the entire east coast is a semi-impassable backwater. It's spent the last 6 years recovering from being one of the places hardest hit by the tsunami, the last 25 years being a war zone torn between the government and a host of rebel armies, and the last 1000 years being the sort of place where excitement usually comes in the form of admiring freak misshapen vegetables. The one exception to this is Trinco city proper, which has spent its long history getting invaded on a regular basis by the numerous empires which have coveted its harbour, a fluke of geography ranking among the world's finest places to park a boat. In modern times, the line of ships approaching Trinco at night produces a row of shining points almost like the street lights of a distant highway. Despite the huge number of ships passing through, however, you don't see any foreign sailors around the port. This, I assume, is because Trincomalee has such a dearth of entertaining things to do that the scrungy mariners on the moored vessels don't even opt to come ashore and instead spend another night below decks gambling for cigarette butts and drunkenly assailing each other with rusting tins of engine fluids. Also, there's the fact that if they tried to come ashore uninvited after nightfall they would risk being riddled with bullets by the less-than-totally-concerned-with-human-life Sri Lankan Army.

Trincomalee was after all a hotspot in the recently-ended civil war. It being the country's most multiracial town (about 1/3 each of Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims), as well as being the only place on that entire side of the country with something resembling an economy, neither side was going to let it slip away without giving the other hell. Adding to the local miseries, the UN deployed a large refugee-aid organization to the city, thus plaguing it and the surrounding villages with the maniacal engine roar of white-and-blue jeeps tearing around the district with the urgency and self-importance that only the world's most conspicuously impotent organization can carry. Now, even though the war is over, the government is still concerned about lingering resentments and the threat of terrorism, so the city's defenses are still almost fully manned. Countless little army posts line the highways into town, and machine gun toting soldiers huddle at every other intersection. Most strikingly, the beaches for miles in either direction are lined with small Army strongpoints consisting of barbed wire and sandbag-encircled barracks with the occasional concrete pillbox staring out at the beach over the tops of the thousands of beached boats and heaps of dead fish. Walking through this strange landscape, I was stopped numerous times by loitering fishers outside of sand-floored Hindu temples for a spot of conversation, which invariably began with the usual Sri Lankan curiosities and then suddenly shifted to a citation of some horrific number representing the number of people that died hereabouts when the tsunami hit. Continuing on, I beheld the somewhat disquieting sight of hundreds of fishermen pulling at nets, flopping fishes around in little plastic bags, and singing Tamil work-songs while the Army looked out with a motley assortment of automatic weapons listlessly aimed in the general direction of the sea. The long fishermen's ghetto was almost like a POW camp where the undisciplined flunkies and incurable cowards of front-line Army units were sent to be at least halfway useful and supervise the brutal, forced harvest of seer fish for the seafood-devouring war machine.

Trinco city itself isn't much to write home about (unless you happen to have a Sri Lanka-related blog and write compulsively about every sleepy dump you visit). Its main visitable feature is its fort, which is still occupied by a regiment of the Army, who very kindly and bizarrely let you wander right through the middle of their base to go up to the rocky point and visit the Shiva temple at the top. People of all sorts like to come to the army base for an afternoon stroll and I watched with intense curiosity as dozens of Sinhalese Buddhists and orhodox Muslim women walked around the temple area barefoot, pausing awkwardly at the Murugan-guarded door and visibly wondering if their curiosity about the temple inside was great enough to tread into a Shiva temple wearing a burqa. The answer, invariably, was not. Apart from the fort, there really isn't anything to see in Trinco but a few stray Hindu temples and the bizarre spectacle of spotted deer on the loose in the city center, wandering into police checkpoints and chilling next to crates of soda in the middle of the bus station.

So that was it for Trinco, and since I have absolutely no desire to go down a coast rife with creaky ferry crossings and devastated villages, so too is that it for the entire east coast. I'm off for parts of the country where one doesn't constantly have to face armed men and the stench of death, even if the dead are just tuna. You've gotta go at least a few miles inland, where fish are usually found in restaurants rather than dangling out of baskets on the back of bicycles. In them places the fish is cooked and seasoned like whoah, and the stench of death be right.

Ye Olde Lankan Bricks, Pt. 2

2010-09-13T14:51:00.000+05:30

Pardon the interruption. I didn't mean to intrude upon your time with a tale of pissing off yet another third-rate country's armed forces, but so it goes. We return now to our scheduled blog programming, specifically our discussion of piles of ancient Sri Lankan bricks, and the shapes thereof. I can't promise you any particularly compelling geometry, like say, a brick dodecahedron, but I do have some arcane and potentially amusing old Sri Lankan chronicles to relate, which involve mangoes, urinals, and other fascinating things.

So, before Anuradhapura became my week-long cultural prison, Anuradhapura was a place I was deeply interested in. As I recounted in Pt. 1, Anuradhapura was the center of Sinhalese civilization, and one of the world's great nexuses of Buddhist learning, for well over a thousand years. It was a truly enormous city for its time, considering that it was home to over 20,000 monks alone. Now of course this means that it is a truly massive expanse of land to go wandering around in, with some of its ruined monasteries covering hundreds of acres, and damn near nothing being more interesting to see than the infinite supply of two-foot-high brick walls. The exception to this rule, and the only thing that makes Anuradhapura really worth visiting, are the dagobas. The dagobas are giant Buddhist stupas, many of them over 2000 years old and painstakingly restored to their former shining glory by archaeologists backed by the Buddhist clergy and Sinhalese nationalist governments after a millennium buried in the jungle. You have to see these things to believe them. Even in their damaged states, mostly missing their pinnacles, they still stand hundreds of feet high, and (as will be recounted to the visitor at every possible juncture) were the largest structures in the ancient world after the pyramids at Giza. There actually is something compelling about schlepping through several miles of ruined bricks to get to the heart of the old sacred precinct, to find hundreds of Buddhist pilgrims visiting a massive, whitewashed dome that has been sitting there since before the rise of Rome.

There are also several good archaeological museums in the city displaying the various treasures that have been dug up, but I found I was far more interested by the demonstrations of the infrastructure of the city, by which I mean sewage management. It seems the ancient Sinhalese were much concerned with urban cleanliness, and therefore devised a sophisticated urinal consisting of a series of large pots filled with filtering stones buried in stacks underground to a depth of around eight feet. This explains a lot about the Sri Lankan national character, and illustrates the profound gap in cleanliness between this island and India. Whereas Sri Lanka apparently had proper underground sewers by the 3rd century B.C., to this day -the year 2010- seven out of ten people in India don't have any sort of toilet whatsoever and just do it in the fields or in a city drain. Now, bear in mind, "seven out of ten people in India" is a total roughly equivalent to the combined population of the Western Hemisphere. Not that the Sinhalese paid so much attention to their plumbing for purely pragmatic reasons. It is also recorded (and I love this) that many of the country's more purist monasteries, which renounced wealth and looked down contemptuously upon the monastic fat cats in the main, royally-sponsored establishments, nevertheless received fine and expensive donations that they had no philosophically justifiable use for. They solved their problem by taking their hoards of jewels and gold leaf and having these encrusted upon their urinal stones, so that they might literally piss upon gold and worldly wealth during their rigors, no doubt with a deep and smug satisfaction spelled across their faces.

Aside from the monasteries, which are now just collections of bricks, the remains of the rest of Anuradhapura are even less impressive and more pathetically bricky. The "royal palace", for instance, could just as well be the foundation of a smithy, save for the strange little carvings of incredibly obese dwarfs flanking its only surviving step. The kings of Anuradhapura (there being almost 200 of them) included some rather interesting characters. My favorite royal story by far concerns one King Yasalalakatissa, who ruled in the 1st century. Bear in mind that historians think this story is actually likely to be true. Mr. Yasalalakatissa was apparently something of an ass and liked to play pranks on the nobility. One supposes that with command of an entire kingdom at his fingertips, he had a rather dangerous imagination. Anyways, one day it was brought to his attention that a man called Subha, who was his gatekeeper, bore a remarkable resemblance to the royal personage. King Y..whatever, never letting a chance for mischief slip by, had his gatekeeper switch places with him and apparently greatly enjoyed the spectacle of his various nobles deferring to a commoner by mistake. Ha! Ha.... I guess. There really is no accounting for the humor of the aristocracy. This was apparently so riotously funny to the king that he had did the whole thing again. Except this time Subha the gatekeeper had a fantastic idea and had his "gatekeeper" executed for treason. The ministers who had unwittingly been made fools of had a good laugh listening to some ridiculous royal guard protesting that he should not be killed because he was, in fact, the king. Now here's my favorite part: after the passage of some time, the absurd events came to light and Subha was revealed for who he was, except by this time he was firmly installed in the seat of power and nobody wanted to fuck with him, so they just let Subha be king.

I also visited the nearby town of Mihintale, which is revered by Buddhists as the place where Emperor Ashoka's son Mahindu brought Buddhism to Sri Lanka by converting the king. Basically, it's more of the same: numerous heaps of bricks and one gleaming white dagoba, except on a hill. According to legend, the king of Lanka successfully answered Mahindu's riddle concerning mango trees to prove he was smart enough to be a Buddhist. I really feel it is too inane to repeat here, but if you want to look up the "Mango Tree Riddle" you will have no problem finding it and presumably solving it. I did however relish the opportunity to piss off a Buddhist monk by playing a little Buddha logic of my own. You see, Sri Lankan Buddhists maintain the ridiculous belief that not only did the Buddha himself visited Sri Lanka, which is unlikely, but that he visited it three times, which is downright preposterous. I noted, however, that it took the efforts of Prince Mahindu some centuries later to bring Buddhism to the isle. "So," I offered the monk "if Lord Buddha actually did come here three times, how come he didn't bother to convert anyone to Buddhism?"

The monk gave me a long, cold stare, then raised a finger in a perfect gesture of the highest pedantry and replied "Lord Buddha did teach the dharma in Lanka. He came to climb the mountains and preach to the gods." With this he was very satisfied. "Strange...." I added, "strange that Lord Buddha, who was born in the Nepal, should need to come to Lanka to find mountains... particularly when the Indian gods all are living on top of the Himalaya, which are bigger and closer." This drew a uniquely icy form of clerical spite. "Our mountains are special" he said. And that was that. Special, indeed. We shall see about that. I'll be up in Sri Lanka's mountains in a few days and then the GhostVerdict on Lankan mountains shall be delivered.

Somehow I seem to have made Sri Lanka's cultural attractions sound more boring than they actually are. So, take my criticisms with a grain of salt and...nah, whatever. If they wanted me to treat this dump gently they shouldn't have had the whole island conspire to throw strange and miserable obstacles at me from day one. Then I might have started with "Oh! The dagobas are so fabulous!" rather than interposing qualified statements like "The dagobas, which are indeed impressive, are the only things for a hundred miles that don't suck." Them and Lion beer, the only things in Sri Lanka that don't suck. Well, OK, Lion beer sucks, but it's no worse than Indian Kingfisher. Now if you will excuse me I have to apply a figurative fire extinguisher to a strange little pseudo-romance I seem to have become trapped in. I don't predict any more such episodes after this one because now I have to walk seven miles back to my hotel past dozens of Sri Lankan Army bunkers and hundreds of thousands of dead fish, and I fully expect to arrive in my bedroom suffering from permanent psychosomatic impotence. Such are the perils of the adventurer's life. You have been warned.

White Tiger

2010-09-11T17:33:00.000+05:30

On the 9th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Ghostface Buddha was treated like a terrorist. Granted, as a distinguished member of the Bush-era "TerrorWatch List", this happens to me quite a bit, but I certainly did not anticipate the blossoming feud I now have with the Sri Lankan armed forces.

It had been my plan to leave the center-north of Sri Lanka and its limitless supply of crumbling Sinhalese ruins behind me by heading into the far north of the country to Jaffna, the heart of Tamil Sri Lanka. Now, it bears reminding the reader that from 1983 until 2009, Sri Lanka was convulsed in a civil war in which the Sri Lankan Army and the Tamil Tigers fought bitterly for control of the northern end of the country. None of the tourist information in print has been updated since the end of the war (which came to its conclusion with remarkable suddenness and violence), and is thus spectacularly out of date. So, I asked the locals, and everything they told me about getting to Jaffna was absolutely correct... for Sri Lankan people.

As it turns out, the army checkpost at the former Army/Tigers border still exists, and though Sri Lankan citizens can go straight through after a baggage inspection, this is not true of foreigners, because as all government beaurocrats know, Foreigners Can't Do Shit Without Stamps. So here I am at this bleak-ass army checkpost, weaseling my way out of confrontation with whichever soldier is holding my passport by playing dumb, until finally the demands of communicating the depths of their displeasure with me compells them to kick me higher and higher up the ranks until I become the personal problem of the Major-in-Command. He informs me, in a very jovial manner, that because I am a foreign dunce I cannot enter the northern zone (never mind that the final Tiger bastions were in the east...) without doing a song and dance to get some silly little stamp from the Ministry of Defence in Colombo. I remarked that this was stupid, and that the Army knew damn well foreigners are infinitely less of a security concern than, say, Sri Lankan citizens such as the ones that actually fought in the rebel/terrorist armies in aforementioned war. The Major responded that nevertheless, I needed to be accounted for. My wise-ass impulses seized control of me at yet another critical moment. "Oh, so I must be one of the White Tigers!" I exclaimed. This, I immediately realized, was massively, massively foolish. The Major gave me a look which showed my feline-subspecies witticism had flown right over his head with a dreadful whooshing sound, and as far as he was concerned I had just made a crude and somewhat nonsensical racist joke, completely devoid of zoological humor, while simultaneously identifying myself with the murderous bands of ultra-hardline guerillas that he had been fighting his entire career. The outcome, needless to say, was not to my advantage. Within a very short span of time my ass was deposited on the first bus heading in the opposite direction, with no inquiries made as to its destination.

After various peregrinations involving a fair deal of standing around in the rain at unpronounceable Tamil village intersections, I finally returned to Anuradhapura where I had started the day. Lacking anything more productive to do, I came to this very internet cafe. Much to my surprise, I ran into a fine young lady, who we shall call Deelipa, with whom I recently had a perfectly enjoyable evening of light romance. She was much more surprised to see me, given that I was supposed to be 200 kilometers away, but nevertheless informed me that she was glad I was here, and that furthermore she had sent me an email in my brief absence. This email, I discovered while she monitored my reactions, contained a considerable number of floral/botanical similes, and also discussed with remarkable certainty our meetings in past and future lives.

That, at least, was something I could work with. I now have another dinner date this evening, and another in the year 7503 A.D.

Sri Lanka is fucking weird.

Ye Olde Lankan Bricks, Pt. 1

2010-09-10T15:28:00.000+05:30

I have spent the better part of this week doing naught but clambering around ruined heaps of Sri Lankan bricks from a 2000-year time span. During this period, I have discovered, the art and science of brick-making did not much change. Whether they were laid in medieval times or in the days of Sri Lanka's most ancient kings, the bricks of the era looked like any damn bricks. However, I have recently realized that by strange coincidence, my itinerary thus far has taken me almost perfectly on a path backwards through time, visiting the successive centers of Sinhalese culture in reverse order. I started with the craptacular modern metropolis of Colombo, then went to the colonial-era Sinhalese redoubt of Kandy. Of these I have said enough. Most recently I have visited the medieval capital of the island at Polonnaruwa, and the mighty capital of the Sri Lankan ancients at Anuradhapura. I have thoughts, as well as judgments that could be mistaken for actual thoughts, to share on both of these. But first, time for some history.... Wooooooooooooo!!!

In the beginning there was Lanka. It was populated by shapeshifting demons, and Lord Rama came to Lanka with an army of non-demonic shapeshifters, mostly monkeys, and kicked their asses. Then a couple thousand years passed and the Sinhalese showed up. They had villages and shit. Around the 4th century B.C., they found a city called Anuradhapura, which becomes sort of important. Then Ashoka, Emperor of India, sends his son Mahindu to Lanka for the purpose of converting the people to Buddhism, which he does. Anuradhapura around this time suddenly becomes super-important and grows into one of the great cities of the ancient world, with enormous monuments, many thousands of people, and ridiculous legends. The Sinhalese make mad money trading with India and Rome. Anuradhapura is a big deal for more than a thousand years. Indian kings, who reveled in pointless conquest and also had bazillions of highly disposable Indian people for their armies, invaded Lanka like all the time. At some point the Sinhalese make the mistake of actually fucking with the Chola empire near the height of its power, and the Cholas thirst for vengeance. They take Lanka, and in 993 utterly destroy Anuradhapura, and build a new capital for their island holdings at Polonnaruwa. Then the Sinhalese somehow take Polonnaruwa and rule from there for a few hundred years. Then more wars happen and civilization in general collapses. Then whitey shows up with some boats and guns and shit gets even realer, which is as far as I am going to recount right now because while I'm typing I am also vying for the attentions of a charming young Sinhalese woman, and any time I think about history for an extended period my flirtations are interrupted by this smug-looking novice monk. I hope you understand.

So, as I said, I found myself first at Sri Lanka's medieval capital, Polonnaruwa. It is now, as are most Sri Lankan ruins, located on the edge of some hot, dry, little village with a windswept lake, no decent restaurants, and a population of mustachioed men driving around on motorcycles with heaps of vaguely Buddhist souvenirs in wicker baskets. Modern Polonnaruwa demands absolutely no attention whatsoever, unless you are particularly interested in the unusual scents carried by villagers on their way to the lake to wash off. Let us turn instead to medieval Polonnaruwa.

Medieval Polonnaruwa is much publicized as being the most fascinating old city of Sri Lanka etc., etc., due to its unique and eclectic architecture, a heritage of its founding by the Indians and later reconquest by the Sinhalese. And indeed, the various ruins do come in a remarkable variety of shapes and layouts. There are the usual gigantic dagobas (dagoba is Sri Lankan for stupa), strange circular relic-houses, towering ziggurat-style temples, and crumbling, headless Buddhas galore. However, it must be said that for all the splendor it must have once represented, it is now effectively an open-air geometry lesson conducted entirely by examining the crumbling cross-sections of various things built out of the timeless and changeless Sri Lankan brick. I shan't go into naming all the various structures I visited. That's what real tourist guides are for. If you need to know which eroded, half-toppled shrine served as the Temple of the Tooth in which long-passed decade, you can look elsewhere, because beyond a certain point even I don't care.

There is, however, a distinct category of human beings that do care about such things, and they are called the French. Polonnaruwa is crawling with French people, which is not a surprise, because this is the exact sort of thing that French people visiting in Asia love. Without fail, you will find them in large groups following some well-educated and enterprisingly French-speaking guide in front of some long-abandoned heap of rocks with faded carvings that require a short treatise on obscure episodes in the history of South Asian art to understand. I don't actually speak French, but I know enough to get the general sense of what is being said, and time after time I run into packs of squinting Gauls listening with great care to a 3-minute monologue about, say, the technological and artistic development of millstones, with particular attention being paid to the audience's Frenchness. "This millstone is a fine example of 12th-century Sinhalese agricultural technology," the guide will be saying. "This one in particular has a circumference of 273 centimeters, and weighs a full 20 kilos more than the well-known millstone at the Abbe St. Poisson-sur-Fromage!" This prompts a lot of thoughtful head-bobbing and a chorus of French whispers. "20 keelos more zan ze meelstone of Poisson-sur-Fromage! Can you belize it?"

Apart from French people, Polonnaruwa is also ovverun with other varieties of primate. Somehow, monkeys and the French just don't seem to get along. My theory is that the French object to monkeys not taking themselves seriously enough.

And now, dear readers, I am afraid I must leave you, having said almost nothing of worth about Polonnoruwa at all, and having not even begun my discussion of Anuradhapura. This will have to be Ye Olde Lankan Bricks, Pt. 1 , because I've just talked my way into a dinner date and I need to scour this village for an eatery that isn't toxic enough to kill a 130-pound woman. From what I've seen of this town so far, this could mean my afternoon is booked

Prof. G.F. Buddha
Class of 323 B.C. Chair in Subcontinental Bullshit
International Institute of Thug Life

Rushing Elephants

2010-09-07T19:58:00.000+05:30

There comes a time when even Ghostface Buddha needs a reprieve from crawling about an endless succession of ancient ruins. There are but two choices: to find an activity that ignores ruins altogether, or to find some portion of civilization to destroy and so supply new ruins for posterity. I haven't yet found any part of Sri Lanka I really want to destroy, so I was forced to brainstorm alternative activities. "Now," I said to myself "I'm not in the mood for dealing with bizarre manifestations of South Asian cultures today, but I do feel like provoking something large and dangerous against my better judgment." Then I had the perfect idea: elephant spotting.

I hired a jeep and a driver named Ajay for an afternoon and we promptly rumbled off to Kaudulla National Park, Sri Lanka's newest wildlife sanctuary. Rumor had reached me via some noisome East London slags on vacation that in Kaudulla you could see "like, a hundred elephants." We approached Kaudulla via a filthy, red backcountry lane, which is actually a good sign when you're going to national parks, and before we even entered we started running across some of Sri Lanka's weird fauna. First we saw the usual peacocks, macaques, and miscellaneous little birds that you can never escape, as well as several of the enormous, vile-looking monitor lizards that are left to dart about the country probably only because Buddhism discourages wanton killing of animals. Nearing the park entrance we almost ran over what I believe was a civet. "Civets", as far as I am concerned, may be an entirely fictional category of animals created by scientists to satisfy all the raving, wild-eyed people who run into zoologists' offices at strange hours to announce they've seen some kind of hideous offspring of a cat and a giant weasel.

After much bouncing about over the potholes we arrived at the park gates. We were joined by a "volunteer guide", whose name I promptly forgot, but whose purpose was clearly to ensure that I didn't do anything too idiotic. Not every vehicle received such a guide. I suppose they profile visitors by the wicked gleams in the eyes of the ones most likely to make themselves a nuisance to a herd of elephants. He accompanied me wisely. The jeep rolled along a trail through low, shrubby forest for a while, and not long after we began we stumbled across Sri Lanka's rare national bird, the Sri Lankan Jungle Fowl. The Jungle Fowl, as the name suggests, is a glorified, technicolor chicken that scurries around in the bushes and allegedly emerges from the forests in the dark of night to make daring raids into the edges of nearby villages to rape the local poultry. It's like Sierra Leone, but with birds.

We popped out of the forests into a wide open expanse of grass around a lake, the Kaudulla tank. North-central Sri Lanka is a land of lakes, despite being the driest part of the country. Most of these lakes are actually artificial reservoirs built over a thousand years ago by the ancient Sinhalese to support their agriculture, and became one of the defining features of Sri Lankan civilization. The presence of such lakes all over the place is also much appreciated by the wildlife. During the dry season when many natural streams and ponds dry up, numerous herds of elephants converge on a handful of their favorite reservoirs, where the retreating waters leave large, level areas of grass to munch on as well. We drove over this seasonal grassland for about three minutes, and hey, presto, there was a herd of some thirty elephants. I was almost disappointed. Finding them was just so damn easy it took half the fun out of it. I was soon to abandon this gripe when two of the adolescent males in the herd promptly began sparring in that useless but highly photogenic way common to male mammals of every type. Humans are no exception. Ladies, you may think that teenage boys did really stupid macho shit to impress you 'round the high school stairwells, but believe me, you have no idea just how idiotic it would get when you weren't looking. We knew we were being damn fools and we didn't want you to see us, but there was just no way to resist the urge to hang from ceilings and kick-fight each other until our pants fell off. This, in essence, is what these two elephants were doing, though it took on a form more like a multi-ton, trunk-twisting version of "thumb wars." Elephants, of course, don't wear pants. Ever. You can put a costume on an elephant, basically draping him in carpets and strapping furniture to his back and all sorts of other indignities, but I defy you to walk up to a tusker and try to manipulate him into a pair of XXXXXXXXL slacks.

After that, we detoured to the side of the lake and enjoyed the great diversity of birds available for the spotting. Actually, our "volunteer guide" enjoyed pointing out birds and talking about them greatly, while I nodded my head and made vaguely interested comments because I'll be damned if I can tell the difference between an open-billed ibis and a white-back stork at 200 yards. I've never understood the hobby of birdwatching. I don't mean to hate on those who enjoy such things, but I personally have no desire to go trotting about the entire freaking globe to visit all of the planet's marshy wastelands and smile at the thought of having beheld two species of egret and a mating pair of obscure chickadees. Now, the greater adjutant stork, well ho, ho ho! My goodness! So glad am I to have traveled to the antipodes and see some fat winged fucker sitting on a log.

We turned back inland a short distance, and lo and behold, more elephants! Granted, on open ground near a water source, elephants are really quite impossible to miss, but since there were only two of them, Ajay and my supervisory attache apparently decided to pretend not to have spotted them until I said "Look, more elephants!". They were two wandering males, which is slightly unusual because males are loners and there isn't really any reason for them to team up. We paused for photos, and as the second one passed we became, shall we say, acutely aware of its masculinity. This elephant had what was clearly a rather rosy daydream going on in its thick elephant noggin, and this was evident by some budding excitement down yonder. "Well, now I've seen that" I said, but no; no, I had not seen that. There was so much more. As I stared in what I admit was rapt fixation, the elephant's member extended itself to truly elephantine dimensions. The thing was like a giant purple snake dangling all the way to the ground. What followed next I shall not soon forget, for the elephant began swinging and curling his unit with the apparently mighty muscles within, and quite suddenly slapped himself in the belly with it three times in succession, each collision issuing a resounding *SMACK*..... *SMACK*...... *SMACK*. It was no wonder, I thought, that the other male seemed to be studiously keeping its distance. I was still quite impressed. "That thing's bigger than my arm!" I exclaimed. And it was.... at least when I'm not flexing. Truth.

At length, we ran into yet another herd of elephants, bringing our total elephant-spotting total for the afternoon to over sixty. It was just too easy for it to even really count. This time we got quite close and the elephants responded by rapidly forming a massive defensive circle around the babies. I clambered to the back of the jeep to stand and take a bunch of pictures and apparently spent a little too much time staring one elephant, who we shall call Angry Momma, right in the eye. The elephants were clearly a bit on edge and after a while Angry Momma, the enormous, ill-tempered matriarch of the herd began advancing towards us. Guide boy took notice and gently suggested we start the engine, which promptly made a pathetic stuttering sound followed by two echoing petroleum belches, which was all it took for Angry Momma to decide we had declared war. A moment before we were able to get our rattly shitwagon into first gear, Angry Momma was rushing headlong at the back the jeep. In the nick of time we lurched ahead over the uneven lake bed, with Angry Momma no more than five feet away from completely and utterly fucking our puny little wagon. Guide boy squealed something that must have been Sinhala for "Ohhh SH...." as the jeep tripped and stumbled forwards at a pace distinctively less than the maximum speed of a pissed-off mother elephant. Angry Momma got closer again and took a swipe at the back of the vehicle with her trunk, missing by about a foot. By this time I had settled into the truck bed in such a way that our desperate flight at least didn't catapult me out of the vehicle, and began trying to get some pictures of our pursuit. Alas, when all was said and done I had some very clear shots of the sky, the jeep's rollover bars, and about half of Angry Momma's face at the moment she decided we had fled far enough and were not going to get any closer again for damn sure. So within twenty-four hours I had been chased by a furious pachyderm, and butted in the groin by an AK-47. That second item was an innocent mistake, as far as incidents involving assault rifles go, and the soldier apologized profusely, but it did happen and it was a most unusual day.

Unsurprisingly, after having seen some sixty elephants and having been the targets of attempted trampling by one, we decided to call it a day and headed back to Park HQ. On the way we saw a crocodile basking in the sun, but we didn't hop out for a closer view. I have shared my opinions on crocodiles here before. They are quite overdue for extinction, whereas I, on the other hand, am not, and therefore I don't go near large crocodiles.

Signor Volunteer Guide escorted me into the park museum and quite proudly displayed its exhibits, which were as follows: a huge collection of elephant skulls, snakes and turtles in formaldeyhde, skulls of miscellaneous livestock, macaque skeletons, and the obviously fabricated remains of a so-called "civet". The centerpiece of the tiny collection, however, was by far the most depraved: an aborted, pale-skinned baby elephant pickled in a tank. I looked at it with obvious distaste, rather put off by the fact that it looked exactly like an actual elephant but was only about two feet long, and very dead, and very much in a big-ass jar. "Baby elephant", Guide Boy helpfully added. "Mother brain damage. Abortion." Personally, I think if you're going to keep dead babies in jars you should at least not put it smack-bang center in a room with four glass walls. Ideally, there should be some sort of creepy curtain and a deformed attendant who lures visiting children with whispers of "Hey, kid, you want to see something reallllyyyy gross?", then takes them into the inner sanctum, from which they emerge permanently changed, but at least the smart ones have the chance to raise an eyebrow and say "No thanks mister, I don't actually want to see something disgusting." But maybe I'm just an idealist.

Since the evidence seems to indicate that Sri Lanka's untamed animals want me dead, I shall have nothing to do with them for a short time. Mmmmmhmmmmm, it's time for some more collapsed-civilization skullduggery, methinks. Put on your nerd goggles on go to the pharmacy for a fresh inhaler, because we are going on an adventure to not one but two abandoned Sri Lankan capitals. I'll share my knowledge and we can make an evening of it. You bring the guacamole and I'll bring the riveting tales of adventure, with cross-referenced indices and footnotes. Don't worry about the red wine. I have plenty in the fridge. Like, a lot. Nobody ever comes to my parties.

Elephant Beer, Buddhist Vampires, And Other Sri Lankan Horrors

2010-09-06T19:47:00.002+05:30

Dambulla, being right in the middle of the "historical" part of Sri Lanka, is a good place for visiting many of the old ruins, statues, and the like scattered around Sri Lanka's "dry zone". It's also a good place to find strange insects crawling in your bedsheets, but let's not talk about that.

Near to Dambulla is the historic city of Sigiriya, which tourism-related people will tell you is the Most Amazing Thing In Sri Lanka. I beg to differ. The most astonishing thing in Sri Lanka are its soft drinks, which so far constitute the sole field in which I consider Sri Lanka to be infinitely more awful and backwards than India. For the most part Sri Lanka has the upper hand when comparisons with India are concerned. For starters, they keep beating India in cricket, which is considered extremely important here, despite overwhelming evidence that cricket is goddamn ridiculous. They also must have better minimum wage laws, because you don't see institutions with large lawns hiring 15 scrawny, baby-carrying women for a dollar a day to shuffle about hacking at the grass with 3rd-century farming imlpements. The Sri Lankan approach, which is economic and solves other problems to boot, is to get a cow, chain that motherfucker to a tree in the vicinity where you want the grass shortened, and leave the bastard there until he's mowed the lawn. On the other hand, you don't see cows being used as a means of urban merchandise transportation. In Sri Lanka they firmly believe in the virtues of the internal combustion engine, and have even developed an extremely economic little contraption for use by its poorer rustics. I don't know what this thing is called, but it is essentially about a third of a tractor. It's a little engine on two small wheels with a trailer hitch and two long handlebars allowing the operator to control the vehicle from whatever he's sitting on, which is usually a wooden bench on his wagon but could also just be a four-foot pile of potatoes in a cart. You see these things, which must cost almost nothing, everywhere, while you see archaic wooden carts being pulled by oxen or camels or donkeys nowhere. What a lovely, elegant, and egalitarian approach to development and modernity, I say.

Which brings us back to the soft drinks. It would be worth dragging the Sinhalese kicking and screaming back into the Middle Ages just to ensure that Elephant Ginger Beer ceases to exist. My goodness, Elephant Ginger Beer (which is not beer) is awful. It tastes like the bottom of a barrel. It has a ginger flavor, but one that suggests the ginger has been immersed in some rancid, fermenting cauldron of slime prior to bottling. It sort of tastes like really lousy, watered-down whiskey, the sort of shit that would result if (and I pray this never happens) Jim Beam decided to compete in the bitch-drinks market with Smirnoff Ice. Actually, no, I'm being generous. Elephant Ginger Beer is well below the taste-quality of Jim Beam. It tastes more like some horrid concoction devised in an unmarked shack in West Virginia, made of two parts moonshine, three parts bong water, one part lemonade, and an electrifying "bluegrass" mixture of roofies and methanphetamines.

Shortly after trying Elephant Ginger Beer I tried Elephant House Cream Soda, which is just unspeakable.

OK, so I had originally intended to say something about Sigiriya, but matters of greater priority seized hold of me. Sigiriya, in its essence, is a big-ass rock. Starting around the 3rd century BC, people said "Hey, what an interesting rock. Perhaps we should build a monastery there." And so they did, but who cares. It was later, in the 5th century AD when a civil war -younger prince kills father, makes war on brother, you know the drill- led to the rebel prince, one Kassapa, deciding that he was going to build his palace on top of a big-ass, unassailable rock. Fortunately, he also was possessed by the flights of grandeur neccessary for him to realize that when you do something so ridiculous you have to go all the way and make your rock-palace awesome. Kassappa was the sort of man who would say "Ok, so my palace is on top of this giant, sheer-sided rock, and the only way up is this absurd staircase we've attached to the rock face, but we've got this semi-useful ledge about halfway up. You know what we should do? Make the bottom of the upper staircase a massive stone fucking lion that you have to enter the palace by ascending into its roaring mouth. Now go down the rock and fetch me some wenches." Sadly, the precarious ancient stairs and most of the lion have collapsed, but you can still see the lion's fearsome feet and it is obvious that the place used to be seriously cool. High up on the walls of the rock, another absurd staircase leads you to a section of the rock face where Sri Lanka's most famous paintings have lingered for centuries, never declining in popularity because they depict a series of half-naked, very round-breasted women serving platters of fruit. Books have been published of the artful comments medieval visitors left on the rock after being moved by this spectacle, so for the interests of posterity I will leave my own thoughts unpublished because they were highly unpoetic, had nothing to say about the sensual beauty of the maidens, but did concern my strange and sudden desire for mouth-watering mangosteens, and I really don't know what that says about me.

Going back to Dambulla I had to wait at Sigiriya's village bus stop, which was a concrete bench entirely occupied by a sleeping bus driver, no sign of any village to speak of, and small cacti I discovered by leaning back from the stone I had sat on. Finally I just said the hell with it and climbed onto the empty bus nearby, assuming that wherever it was eventually going it would be more useful than being in Sigiriya, and fell asleep across an entire row of seats. I awoke to a loud trumpeting noise followed by a shuffling of chains and a massive form looming directly outside the window. I bolted upright, shocked by what seemed to be a massive eye lumbering past. And oh it was. It's Sri Lanka. There just be elephants walking down the road, dreaming of throwing off their shackles and trumpeting at sleeping people in buses. It's how they do.

The next day I hired a rickshaw to take me to a bunch of remote historical monuments because I actually do like creeping around the jungle and stumbling over vine-strewn piles of rocks that no other tourists can be assed to visit. First place I went was called Ritigala, which was an ancient "forest monastry", so called because it's way the hell in the middle of the jungle and getting from place to palce involves folowing a sinuous stone path through a darkness resounding with the calls of obscure birds and the neck-spinning sound of suddenly-rustled leaves where you will just catch a glimpse of a lizard or a snake slipping into the undergrowth. The ruins themselves tell you little more than that ancient Ritigala's buildings had four sides and were made of stone, but the jungle is the real fun. Beyond the ruins themselves, which stretch on through the trees for a surprising distance, you end up in the nature reserve that covers Ritigala mountain. The mountain isn't very big but it is steep and covered in thick plant growth, so after some dedicated scrambling you can get well up the sides to a rocky clearing where you can look out across the jungle and to the Sri Lankan plains in one direction, and up to the peak which Hanuman is said to have used as his jumping-pad on the way back to India in the other. I rather wonder what that scene must have looked like, since at the time he was jumpnig off this mountain, he was also carrying another mountain, which I have seen, and it is approximately twenty times as big, a proper snow-capped Himalayan affair. So in summary, if you were there, you would have seen a gigantic Himalayan mountain apparently balancing on a small, jungly mountain, being held in place by a speck that upon closer examination turns out to be a giant, muscular, mace-wielding monkey. As is so often the case, I feel I have been placed in this world at the wrong time.

From Ritigala, my driver, a chap named Ugama, led us off in search of the Aukana Buddha, which is a giant Buddha statue in some wee, extremely provincial village. On the way we got rather hungry and couldn't find a place to eat at any price. We would pull up at a cafe-looking place in some somnolent village and ask for rice or whatever, only to be informed that the food was "finished". It seems to me that Sri Lanka could really use a school of Restaurant Management, which small entrepeneurs can attend for a minimal fee, and where the first lesson is called 'Things You Need At A Cafe: Food". Finally we found a place, and the owner told us that though she was more or less out of food (why???), she was able to offer us some -quote- "lake fishes". Ugama and I exchanged a glance that revealed we were of one mind when it came to sampling some villager's "lake fishes", a term that usually means "horrid, shrivelled little beasts that have evolved in splendid isolation to adapt to our village pond's unique composition of sewage, psychoactive algae, and discarded tractor batteries." We circled the nearby villages in increasing desperation until eventually we conceded we had no choice but to take our chances with the lake fish. We returned to the cafe, and for some reason Ugama asked if they had eggs, perhaps hoping would scurry off to buy some to spare us the horrors of the fish. To our surprise, eggs were quite suddenly on the menu and we sat to eat. Within moments, a full, elaborate meal of rice, fried eggs, and curried vegetables was laid before us with hot tea and not a fish in sight. This suggests a title for the second lesson at the Ceylon Institute of Restaurant Management, "What To Do If You Do Have Food: Offer It To Paying Customers Without Sending Them On Some Bizarre Wild Goose Chase With Threats Of Your Village Lake Fish".

We finally arrived at Aukana, and found that the giant Buddha there was indeed a giant Buddha. 'Twas about twelve meters tall and well carved, in a style reminiscent of the Greco-Afghan Buddhist statues (you read that right) I have seen in Indian museums. The best thing about the statue, however, was that the Buddha was standing in the formal "Blessing" stance, which looks an awful lot like he's about to pimp-slap that shit out of somebody. Needless to say, I was deeply inspired and an image of this statue will grace this blog in the coming days.

From Aukana we drove on to see another giant Buddha at Sesseruwa, an ancient little monastry in a village so pathetic and obscure that even the people two villages over couldn't really tell us which convoluted series of dusty, one-lane country roads we had to take to get there (the answer, it turned out, was "All of them.") When we got there, I was directed into the care of a fat, orange-robed monk so dedicated to the pasttime of betel-chewing that his gums appeared to be dripping with blood like some sort of deranged Buddhist vampire. He hobbled towards me with betel-dribble trickling out of his mouth and a giant, twelve-inch metal key in his hand. He led me to a series of small cave temples that have been sitting in this sorry little place for over a thousand years, and finally showed me to the Sesseruwa Buddha, which he proudly told me was four inches taller than the Aukana Buddha. Speaking for myself, I felt the four inches did not compensate for the Aukana Buddha's superior artistry, but I admit I was distracted by my intense focus on keeping the monk ahead of me at all times, lest I be torn apart in a vampiric feeding frenzy and my body left to be discovered in mysterious circumstances, sparking wild (and correct) Buddhism-related vampire rumors that would ultimately be incorporated as an incredibly shitty device to shoehorn Asian people into the Twilight series. "We are the Doomed Reborn... born in this life to repay our sins in lives past.... and cursed to be immortal! Being a teenager sucks, and also we're Asian!"

It's too awful to contemplate further. You should never have to see such a thing. From now on I'm carrying suicide pills and blood coagulants in my day pack. I'm doing it all for you. Never forget me.

The Gaping Maw Of Absurdity

2010-09-04T18:26:00.001+05:30

There are some places that just refuse to be normal. They aren't full-out insane all the time, and the places that you are likely to think of as being perpetually "off" probably have had some very average, nondescript periods in their history. This is not so with the town of Dambulla. It has for centuries been a place where people have tried odd ideas, and all evidence points that it's only getting loonier.

Dambulla is located pretty much smack center in the island, and exhibits to a small, Sri Lankan extent the attributes commonly found in the interior of Asian landmasses, namely heat, dust, and tedium. I happened to be stopping in Dambulla for a couple of days because its central location is convenient for visiting many places in the north-center of the island, and because Dambulla has a few sights of its own. For instance, the Gaping Maw of Absurdity. The Gaping Maw of Absurdity's popular name is the "Golden Temple", though given the number of Golden Temples in this part of the world and the Dambulla temple's.... unique attributes, it seems they could have been a little more creative. It's not every temple in the world that rises three stories from the ground, with each successive layer being fringed by giant, pink concrete lotus petals. Nor is it every temple in the world that has an enormous, 20-meter sitting Buddha on top of said pile of concrete lotus petals. Nor is it every temle, or indeed any other temple, that has Lord Buddha sitting directly above an enormous golden lion's mouth large enough to devour any elephant that might stroll up the steps to visit the library. All around this temple, where Buddha ponders the cosmos astride a ravenous lion face, there are fake rock faces topped by rows of bright orange statues of Buddhist monks and miscellaneous other figures forming a queue to pay homage to the Buddha in all his lion-squatting glory. In Dambulla, weird as this seems, it is not entirely without precedent.

I do not mean to suggest that there is another massive lion-Buddha combo in town (if there was I might have to move there permanently). I merely suggest that the people of Dambulla have taken the common inspiration that Buddhism offers and have repeatedly leapt off with it into unexpected directions. Dambulla is best known for what is apparently my favorite thing in the whole damn universe: cave temples. "Woooo boy! Cave temples!" I thought. "It has been too long since I walked amidst eroding statues in poorly-illuminated shrines with a suffocating atmosphere of bat poop. I shall visit Dambulla forthwith." Dambulla's cave temples turned out, however, to be much cooler than expected, because it was clear to me that those who designed and decorated them were just ever so slightly deranged.

There are five cave temples all in a row, and as you walk along they get bigger and more intricate. The small ones are walkable rooms carved out of the stone, with perhaps a large sleeping Buddha and a half dozen seated figures scattered around. The larger caves are a whole 'nother kettle of Enlightened Beings. Unlike the makers of the Indian cave temples, the Sri Lankan masters decided (correctly, in my view) that it would much cooler if they didn't bother really finishing the ceilings into any particular shape, and that the effort expended cutting away at stones to make the cave, say, rectangular would be better spent painting the irregular ceilings to look like something out of a carnival funhouse. The walls and ceilings ripple with the folds and crevices of natural stone, reminding you that you are without a doubt in a cave, yet for some reason the Buddhist murals and plethora of semi-random Buddhist statues are accompanied by a background of painted-on black and white "tile work", not entirely unlike a claustrophobic European toilet stall. You'll be following one natural fold in the rock past a large depiction of Buddha preaching Enlightenment to the gods, only to suddenly come across a surface design apparently picked out from a Parisian home decor catalogue circa 1953. This somehow has the effect of giving the caves remarkable atmosphere, with the strangeness of the ceilings and walls in the darkness drawing you in almost as if you expect to find yourself in an illusion, like if you cross your eyes and stare for long enough, a 3-D image of the Cocoa Puffs toucan will seem to bend out of the wall at you. It's hard to explain, but this effect was highly dignified, and I left the caves thinking that their unlikely jumble was one of the more inspired collections of ancient art I had yet seen.

I sat outside the caves and cracked my guide to Sri Lankan cultural sites to try and make sense of what I had just seen, when a voice hovering above me asked what I was reading.

"Oh, just an explanation of these temples." I responded as helpfully as I could. The girl who had asked the question seemed a bit perplexed by this but made a gesture of acceptance and moved on. I myself returned to one of the temples to make sure I had good pictures of some of the stranger details (a mural wherein a demon points a firearm at Lord Buddha, for example). I then took some photos of the general scenery and began descending the rock into which the temples are cut. I then heard the same voice again.

"Hello? Hello! Hi! Hi! I was trying to talk to you!"
There were two of them, but the one in yellow was doing all the talking. "Well then you have succeeded" I said, though I don't know why. This caused another contemplative pause.
"My name is Samobi" was the uncontemplative response. "What you are doing here?"
"Oh just visiting temple" I said.
"Oh, very good. What is your age?"
"Twenty-three"
"Oh, good! We are same age!" And on it went. At this time a particular instinctive suspicion was beginning to creep into my mind. Conversation turned to where I had seen in Sri Lanka so far, how long I had spent in each place, and so on."

".... well I was only in Colombo because I was sick so I had to stay." I explained quickly. Perhaps too quickly to be properly understood. Though as it turned out this was just quickly enough.
"In Colombo you were sex?" Samobi asked with a certain eager puzzlement. Ah. So there it was. Girl had something on her mind. And that something wasn't on the outside of my clothes.
"No, sick" I clarified, but hastened to add "I am completely better now. Very healthy. Fully strong."

The three of us had reached the bottom of the hill and Samobi and friend had to turn off towards their homes. Samobi fished for a phone number, but ha! Ghostface ain't got no phone. It was instead agreed that I give her some online contact (this blog, heh) and that we would meet in the same place at seven that evening for further conversation, which seemed like it was going to be extremely stimulating.

In the meantime I had errands, such as visiting a museum on the history of Sri Lankan painting (I'm still hoping of getting some stray money out of this trip) and walking down the interminable baking road along which Dambulla is built to reach the banks on the far side of town. On the way I noticed a commotion at the market and peeked in to see what it was all about. People were congregating around a line of pickup trucks that had palm trunks balanced in them, giving an appearance akin to siege engines. I then noticed that there were people dangling from these trunks as the trucks moves, and that furthermore, these people were suspended from the trunks by numerous small strings which were attached to them by metal hooks passing through their flesh. One truck passed carrying a man in standing position, suspended Christ-like in a horrific web of ropes that tugged at him in every direction as he dimly gazed out of some sort of terrible trance that kept him from screaming in horror at the dozens of hooks sinking into his skin. Trumpets started blaring and the trucks moved ever so slightly faster forwards. Behind them a mob of locals headed by a child in a priestly loincloth pulled a tower-like chariot piled high with palm leaves and coconuts. I took in the entire scene. "Definitely the local Hindus" I mused. And indeed, so they were. From the darkness of their skin you could guess it was the Tamil populace of Dambulla, and when I asked about the nature of the festival I was given a great deal of evasion. The closest I could pinpoint was that it was in honor of a Tamil version of Kali, though nobody would give me the godess's actual Tamil name. As the procession moved along more men came out of the woodwork to submit themselves to various hook-related horrors, and the men dangling from hooks in the sky began swooping low like angels to touch and give blessings to the ecstatic crowd below. Every time they swooped down the hooks pulled at their flesh making stomach-churning tent shapes on their skin, and the men definitely had the appearance of people who were controlling their breath and other bodily rhythmns with intense concentration and a deep awareness of how goddamn awful they would feel if they fucked up and lost control of their yogic abilities just then. Common folk began dancing like crazy people, but they're Tamils so especially with the young men it's hard to tell if this was something unusual. Women began waving giant leaves around and shrieking religious chants to which the men responded. One woman thrust her way into the crowd dancing in a three-foot hat the shape of a temple tower of delicious fruits. Finally, things settled down a bit and people remembered that processions are actually supposed to go somewhere, so they made less with the madness and more with the processing.

Like I said, Dambulla is very, very strange.

I returned to the bottom of Dambulla Rock promptly at seven. Samobi was waiting and had evidently spent much more of the intervening time preparing for the moment. She had strings of small red flowers in her hair and had picked out a fine folk skirt to match. She was also wearing a local form of cotton blouse with some sort of string mechanism on the front that performed a lifting function, which she was putting to good effect, if I am any judge. She had on perfume - too much, but this was a fault I was willing to overlook. On the other hand, I looked (not coincidentally) like I had just walked four miles around a dusty shithole, pausing now and then only to take pictures of crazy people. Fortunately, "world-beaten wanderer" is a look I wear well. We went up and over the hill to a grassy slope on the other side and spoke. I learned (through the fine art of conversation, of course) that she tasted like soft and sugary fruit, though I couldn't place which one. I had oppurtunity to consider this at length but came to no definite conclusion, perhaps because I am easily distracted, especially by women clawing at my clothes. For the purpose of closure, let's just say she tasted like mango.

For the record, I taste like cannabis, tequila, and chocolate chip cookies. You're doubtful now, but you'll never know just how damn good it is until you try it.

edit: It turns out I was wildly misinformed by the locals re: the divinity in question at the "Kali" festival. It was in fact the local celebration of an island-wide Kataragama festival, Kataragama being a semi-Buddhist god who the Sri Lankan Tamils believe is the same entity as Skanda a.k.a Murugan a.k.a. Karkkiteya, the peacock-riding god of war, second son of Shiva. So there you go.

Ghostface Buddha Hath Eaten Of The Cow

2010-09-03T18:13:00.001+05:30

Greetings, revered Readers, for I do have News to tell.

As I recounted in these very pages not long ago, in the lands of Ceylon, aye, the wondrous isle of Taprobane indeed, it is permitted to eat Beef, the cooked flesh of the Cow.

And so, dear Readers, one fyne afternoon in Kandy, I did Consume of this Beef. Coalesced from the ravages of Strange and Uncouthe Oriental maladies, I walked, as is Salubrious, to a refined establishement by the name of Devon's in pursuit of Beef Steak with Fried Onions.

I waited and my Beef Steak with Fried Onions was served to me on a clean, white plate, along with Beans, and Potatoes crispened in the French manner. The steak was rather more Chinee of type than I had imagined, yet before no God shall I swear that it was not Goode. I ate of it fully, and reached such a Plateau of Satisfaction as can only be bestowed by the Goodliest of Meats.

In the days since, oft have I Partaken of the Cowflesh, and on all occasions it has been much to my Delyte. For truly, this Best of Beasts granted to us for the Relishing by the Almighty doth make a fyne fixing for many a dish and snackke. Place thee a strip of Beef in a Bun, with such Vegetables as Providence hath granted the lands in your surrounds, and indeed, ye shall find that it doth Savor of the very Ideal of Deliciousness. Else, place thee a portion of Beef in a saucerlet of fynely seasoned Sauces, and it shall make a most Wondrous Morsel of its own.

Let it be known that I harbor no ill will towards the Cows of the Island of Serendip, for Truth be told, they do not possess the Malice of their kin in the Hindoo domaines. Indeed, merely to be a Cow ought be fitting Karmic punishment for past Sinnes, the final Absolution of which is to be found Roasted upon a Plate, with Toppings and Sides, and by God's Grace.

Yours in Victory and Health,
Ghostface Buddha

Kandy Shop

2010-09-02T19:16:00.003+05:30

I saw my first loose Sri Lankan beast on the highway to Kandy, Asia's foremost city named after a stripper. Over a week in Colombo I hadn't seen so much as a chicken loose in the streets, let alone goats. This is not even to speak of cows being allowed to occupy the thoroughfares of India with such dispassion that it takes at minimum a multi-ton vehicle to inspire them to budge. I had hopped off the bus at a brief snack stop, and lo and behold, across the street was said Sri Lankan beast munching on a pile of discarded mango rinds. I stopped in my tracks and stared, because this was no common sheep, or even a yak in the road: I was looking at a four-and-half-foot monitor lizard, gorging itself on fruit by the side of the road as if it had just emerged, famished, from the fires of Lizard Hell and was enjoying some fresh produce and the mountain breeze.

I was slightly hesitant to tackle Sri Lanka's second biggest city immediately after pronouncing an unfavorable verdict on the capital, but if Kandy is all Sri Lanka's got left to throw in terms of urban madness, this will be a comfortable country indeed. Kandy, despite being much, much smaller than Colombo, is still called "The Great City" in some circles, because it is the symbol of the Sinhalese kingdom....STOP. I hate to do this, but it's time we had our introductory Ghostface Buddha Lecture in Sri Lankan History.

So, there was the beginning of time, and a bunch of stuff happened, and then the Europeans colonized the shit out of Sri Lanka. The Portuguese got there first, then the Dutch had it for a few centuries. However, in all this time they only had the coasts, because the kings of Kandy in the mountains became extremely paranoid, defense-minded rulers and made themselves unconquerable. Thus, for several hundred years (~1500's-1815), Kandy was the capital of all that you could call an independent Sri Lanka. It also bears mentioning that Kandy was a Sinhalese kingdom, populated almost entirely by Sinhala-speaking Buddhists. This is as opposed to Sri Lanka's main minority group, the Tamils, who are essentially the same as their South Indian cousins, mostly dwell in other parts of the island, and had their own coastal kingdom in the north that got conquered earlier. The Tamils' lack of interest in Kandy, and the fact that the Tamils and Sinhalese have never quite gotten along, figures in later as we shall see. OK, now that's out of the way, back to your stimulant-deprived Sri Lankan travelogue. God. These Sri Lankan drug laws are making me scholarly.

OK, so I arrived in Kandy and the first thing I did, as usual, was take stock of the city. I quickly decided that Kandy was Good. Yes, it now has its obnoxiously long, aesthetically offensive, highway-hugging suburban sprawl, but once you get into the urban center proper it is surprisingly small. Though it bustles relentlessly, it feels homey, a sensation no doubt encouraged by its well-ordered traffic, its plethora of open-fronted bakeries, and the many pleasant white Kandyan- and Colonial-era buildings at the heart of town. It all reaches a splendid glow when you get to the central lake and walk along its promenade looking at the forested mountains that creep all the way into the heart of downtown, right beside the immaculate white Temple of the Tooth.

Temple of the Tooth? Some more explanation is in order. Yes, kids, time for GFB to put his professor hat back on and start scratching arcane notes on the chalkboard while making snide Sri Lankan History Department in-jokes about Econ majors. The good news, is that although all this material will be on the final exam, during said exam Professor Buddha will instigate a bomb hoax in the building. Our story begins waaaaayyy back in the day of the Buddha (that Buddha). You see, thing is, he died. Then they burned his body. But -miracle of miracles!- one of his teeth was saved from the fire. Then, over the course of centuries, via various peregrinations that prove definitively (so it goes) that Sri Lanka is like Buddhist Zion, the Tooth ended up in the possession of the Sri Lankan kings. It then moved through just about every city in Sri Lanka that was ever a capital of some sort, until finally it settled in Kandy, where it allegedly rests to this day, although there is something of a chance that the Portuguese actually ground it to dust and threw it in the sea, forcing the Sri Lankan priests to replace it with a three-inch buffalo tooth. Suffice to say, portions of its history are cloudy. As it houses the sole existing relic of the Buddha himself, the Temple of the Tooth is far and away the most important Buddhist temple on the island, and lies at the very heart of the Sinhalese identity. This is probably why the Tamil Tigers, the world's most colorful defunct guerilla army/terrorist organization, decided that the front of the temple could use a good truck bombing.

I checked into a bizarre little hotel just outside the security cordon of the sacred precinct, a grand colonial building of some sort that looked like it had just been gutted by fire, which, the owner told me, it had. The hotel sat on an incredibly strategic location, no more than 50 paces from the entrance to the temple park, 100 paces to the "devales" shrine precinct, and 40 paces from Pizza Hut. I was to visit all of these repeatedly, usually arriving at an early hour on a slightly overcast morning and lingering within just long enough to be trapped by a monsoon rainstorm. Though let me tell you, walking nonchalantly out of the monsoon, sopping wet into the lobby of a Pizza Hut, approaching a group of despondent-looking Sri Lankan girls, and asking if they'd like me to go out and fetch them some umbrellas is one of the smoothest ways I have conceived to use being drenched to the core.

After a great deal of such gallantry brought about by my continual inability to predict the need for a raincoat, the day finally came to visit the Temple of the Tooth itself. I entered the security cordon, realized I had forgotten to put any battery in my camera, and exited the security cordon.

I returned soon after and had to explain to the guards why it was that they kept having to check the same doofus American. Eyes were rolled. Finally however, I entered the temple park for reals. The first thing one sees of the temple is the pure white octagonal tower jutting out towards you. This was the king's speechifying platform in the days of old, and continues to fulfill the same role for the country's democratic leaders. I don't know the first thing about current Sri Lankan politics, except that the people who rise to power here have a tendency to be a bit eccentric, and that the current President has a silly face. One such president, who had Parliament moved to a neighorhood of Colombo that happened to have the same name as himself, also made the more edifying contribution to the nation of an utterly superfluous but quite tasteful golden roof that balances delicately and uselessly on its perch above the actual roof of the relic chamber.

Passing the second security layer and crossing the moat, I was quickly within the main courtyard of the temple itself. It is an odd, semi-indoor space with elements of stone, wood, plaster, metal, and brick visible depending on where you turn, and monkeys jumping on shit regardless of where you look. In the center is the shrine itself, on two stories. The actual tooth chamber is on the second floor, with a lodge-like wooden ambulatory suspended in front of it. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the chamber directly below the tooth, which is what you see when you enter, can easily be mistaken for the actual thing seeing as it has all the requisite ornate doors and curtains, not to mention an impressive array of elephant tusks guarding the door. The door of the actual, upper chamber is comparatively understated, though the shrine within is said to be quite something. I never saw the shrine itself. They only open it a few times a day, and waiting in line to shuffle past the door would have also entailed suffering an hour and a half of the worship ceremony. The ceremony starts promisingly, with a display of drumming by half-naked men with strange hats, but then the priests disappear into the lower chamber and shut the doors behind them, leaving nothing to watch while you endure the endless wheezing of one of those accursed kazoo-sounding flutes that plague the Orient. I opted to explore elsewhere.

I went on to the rear building of the complex, a 20th-century piece called the "New Shrine", which was built to compensate for the fact that the original temple seems to have forgotten to include any actual Buddhist imagery. The New Shrine more than makes up for this shortcoming. It is a marvellous, thoroughly strange, pseudo-baroque chamber with black and white tile floors and rows of square, white pillars on either side, each topped by a capital of a golden elephant face. Hung from these are numerous paintings detailing the rather fantastic history of the tooth, and below these are a gallery of immaculately polished white Buddha statues. At the front of the room, a gold Buddha flanked by more shining white idols, rows of elephant tusks, and fabulous drapes makes for a spectacular, almost science-fiction neo-Rennaisance uber-kitsch that I thought was just splendid. It looks like what would happen if Stanley Kubrick revised the famous "hotel scene" at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey to have the astronaut hero encounter not the Monolith, but a big shining Buddha, and then the Space Baby shows up and squeals "Let me show you the Jewels of Wisdom", and then the movie ends.

Passing back through the main courtyard and observing that, yes, the insufferable assault of wheedling wind instruments was still ongoing, I passed out of the temple proper and onto the lawn, crossing through yet another rainstorm into the fascinatingly freakish Tusker Raja museum. Raja, the Tusker, is none other than Sri Lanka's favorite elephant, longtime servant of the Temple, and many-time carrier of the Tooth. People come to the museum to visit Raja and even pray before him, so high is the esteem in which he is held. And indeed, he is a fine elephant. The only problem with this entire scene is that Raja died in 1988 and now occupies his museum quite tranquilly. I must say, the skill (and the scope) of the taxidermy is quite impressive, but it is more than a little weird to be looking at a dead elephant in a glass case while people around you kneel and mutter prayers. If I were a Sri Lankan, I would take advantage of the fact that elephants never forget, and whisper many important things to Raja, then go pray to him in times of need. "Oh Raja, what's my social security number again? And where did I put the spare key to the baby cage? The wife comes home in an hour and she is going to be pissed."

The Temple of the Tooth was unquestionably the highlight of my trip to Kandy, so I will spare you a more exhaustive recounting of the sights, save for my thorough catalog of the exhibits in the Archaeological Museum, which is as follows: Miscellaneous Dusty Shit, ~100-200 pcs. I will however spare you the details, which are somewhat personal, of why I turned down a lovely Sri Lankan girl's offer to accompany me to the Peradeniya Royal Botanical Gardens, and went to the Botanical Gardens by myself, which did not go uncommented upon by the general public. So, there we go, I committed myself to loneliness and ridicule, but hey, that's been going on for a solid year now! Zing!

Oh God..... Dignity. I don't even know what it feels like any more.

On The Badness Of Colombo And Other Matters

2010-08-29T12:32:00.000+05:30

Inc. Rude Manners, The Insanity Of Indian People, and The Sexual Necessity Of Umbrellas

At first when I arrived in Colombo I was impressed. It was so clean! And the people were so friendly! As far as third-world cities are concerned, Colombo has a lot going for it. The only real stench is the cloud of automotive fumes in the air, as opposed to giant pools of festering water, exposed and clogged sewers, and man and animal alike defecating where they will. This is is significant improvement. There isn't even much litter, something unthinkable in an Indian city. Public transport is swift and efficient. Buildings are bland, but not ugly, towers of glass and concrete, rather than plastered brick hulks with the bent steel reinforcing bars still jutting out of the walls. Traffic follows the rules of the road (more or less), and the city is full of policemen and soldiers keeping order and safety for the citizens. What, you may ask, is not to like?

Colombo is massively boring.

The city offers something of a glimpse of the future. It looks out to all the other South Asian metropolises and says "You know, if you do things right, you can be a well-ordered expanse of featureless concrete as well! We can be just like America!"

Local people are very proud of Colombo, though it seems the rest of the country thinks it's hot and lacks a pleasant atmosphere (in both senses of the word). It's hard to argue with them about these things, because it would be rude and Sri Lankan people are so polite you feel bad for even thinking about slighting their hometown. Dealing with Sri Lankan people has been nothing but a pleasure. From time to time I catch myself being something of a jerk, a paranoid side-effect of living in India for almost a year. In India, people often treat other humans, especially those "lower" than them, mostly as physical obstacles (which on the Indian street, they are) or in the case of employees, livestock. Additionally, as a foreigner, there is the fact that a large minority of those who approach to speak with you are going to turn out to be some sort of hassle. Thus I've become accustomed to being a little curt to random people on the street, lest I spend my entire life telling people I don't want antiques. So, in Sri Lanka someone will come up and ask me a question and I'll say "I'm busy" or something, and then they look a little taken aback, so I use what has become one of my all-purpose excuses for uncivil behavior: "Oh, sorry brother, you must forgive me. I have been living in India." This always works.

Sri Lankans don't much care for India. Besides the fact that India is their overbearing neighbor, they tend to view India as a massive, teeming bowl of chaos. Gee, I wonder how they got that idea? Various people I've spoken too have also complained (in low whispers) "You know.... I don't like Indian people." I was curious why. An extension of cricket rivalry perhaps?... The whisperers continue, "They are such big rude peoples!" Aha! that's it! The first time I heard this I finally put my finger on something I had been trying to define with all the other long-term travelers I met there, the one thing about India that made it impossible for us to truly commit to spending a life there, some sort of strange and ethereal phenomenon we couldn't name. This was it. Indians are rude. You would never think that while you're there, because apart from the obvious assholes, people are very warm, generous, and deferential in conversation. But here's the twist: beyond the intimate context, in the wider social arena, Indian people just don't give a fuck about the people around them. Playing old Bollywood soundtracks into the dead of night (and there is no volume but full volume), using communal places as rubbish disposal, pushing to the head of any nascent queue and instigating a mob atmosphere. The list goes on. In a nutshell, no thought is giving to the effects of one's actions on others.

I make this long, harsh criticism of Indian manners for two reasons. One, it has at long last crystallized in my mind and needed outlet. Two, I wish to applaud the contrasting Sri Lankan attitudes, and the positive effect it appears to have on the entire country. For instance, everywhere I have seen in Sri Lanka, even the poor outskirts of the big city which in India would be a hellish slum, has been generally more prosperous and well-ordered than India, despite a comparative dearth of resources. Money here seems to go to making things actually work right, creating and improving infrastructure and doing so in a way that is genuinely useful to people.

My curiosity was piqued and I went on asking about Indian people. "Why don't you like Indians?" I asked one man, a gardener. "Indian people are crazy! We are only like that at a cricket match!" (Sri Lankans do love their cricket). So, having established that standard Indian levels of madness constitute peak insanity here, I couldn't help pressing on. "And what about Indians at cricket matches?". "Friend," the gardener replied, "this you can not even imagine."

So I knew I would be getting along well here. Anywhere where the people think India is crazy cannot itself be utterly insane, at least not in the same way. I was deeply reassured to know that any of the absurdity I am guaranteed to find on my way will at least be a little more mellow. I'm in the mood for mellow. After great feats, a man needs his rest.

Colombo is not mellow. Colombo is about as laid-back as you could ask for any 3,000,000+ Asian city to be, but that is not saying much. After several days out of the hospital, mostly spent tossing about in my bed, sweating up a stink, and reading ridiculous thrillers about Nazis, I set out on my first day of exploring Colombo's "sights" (as opposed to the approximately half-dozen unaesthetic suburbs I had ventured to so far). I quickly realized my first day exploring the wonders of Colombo would also be the only day.

I started out with the "worst". I headed to the Pettah bazaar neighborhood, which is reputed as the most crowded and teeming commercial district on the island, and is supposedly one of those excitingly cluttered and vibrant places. What I found was indeed hopefully the teemiest place in Sri Lanka, but there was absolutely nothing to set it apart from the central bazaar in any modern, industrialized Indian city save for a marked improvement in English spelling. So much for Colombo's characterful bazaar district. Next I wandered over to the historical heart of the city, the "Fort" neighborhood, which is now Sri Lanka's little baby version of Lower Manhattan, with its few soaring financial towers, heavily guarded government baking agencies, and a few streets of slightly pretentious eateries and cafes catering to people with belts and ties. Like Lower Manhattan, there also isn't a whole lot to do, but the strange sight of soldiers guarding the side-alleys behind curtains of razor-wire adds a touch of the local. I also picked out the spot- it's hard to miss- where the Standard Chartered Bank, now a windowless and fortified-looking little structure, gaily advertises that "We're Here To Stay". Well, the building looks empty, which is a bit ironic given that all the other business that fled the neighborhood in panic seem to returned first. The thing that made them abandon the entire area for over a decade was, by the way, an enormous truck bomb that blew the shit out the Standard Chartered Bank and killed hundreds of people.

Thence I turned south to Galle Face Green, the pride of the city, Colombo's seaside park by its old colonial government buildings. I've seen better. For starters, "Green" is a bit generous. Let us just say that a lawn one lay there and is currently being attempted. The sea breeze is nice, but Colombo stretches along the sea for mile after mile, so really it's a long way to come for that. You can however get a pretty decent view of the towers in Fort and the endless, soulless ribbon of middling glass office buildings that run down the coast until they fade in the distance. One curious thing about the park was that all the couples (and it was mostly couples) were carrying umbrellas on a sunny day. Why, I wondered, was this necessary? Do Sri Lankans share the Indian obsession with pale skin and need umbrellas to protect lovely ladies from the sun's cruel rays? Are umbrellas themselves some sort of symbol of romance? I thought it might be this as countless pairs of romancers sat on benches with umbrellas unfolded over their heads. Then I saw it... in the distance a large umbrella lowered diagonally, completely obscuring the holders' uppers bodies, leaving only a pale of male legs and a pair of female legs leaning over at a telltale angle, revealing without a doubt that umbrellas are for making out. And then I saw it over and over. Yup, in Sri Lanka you cannot put your tongue in another person's mouth, no matter how obviously and publicly you do so, unless you've got at hand an umbrella. I may have to consider replacing my rain jacket.

And that is all there is to say of Colombo, unless any of you know a fabulous and obscure word I don't which means both busy and bland. I've seen more than enough of Sri Lanka's biggest city, and there is one obvious way to proceed: Going to Sri Lanka's second-largest city.

'Til next time...
-GFB

Welcome To Resplendent Fucking Lanka

2010-08-28T11:27:00.000+05:30

The first thing I saw in Sri Lanka was a large blue sign that read:

POSSESSION OF ILLEGAL DRUGS

CARRIES DEATH PENALTY

Some five minutes later I saw the sign

WELCOME TO SRI LANKA

ENJOY YOUR STAY

They sure do know how to greet people.

It has been a week since I left India, and I have to tell you, Sri Lanka is... different. I haven't seen a cow in days and not one person has even suggested that I should try their fabulous goat meat curry. When you order chicken here, you receive.... chicken. Not some thick bowl of hot slop with an anatomically impossible amount of chicken bones within, but actual, tender pieces of spiced chicken. Rather than say, run over my foot while parking, rickshaw drivers here sometimes actually slow down to let pedestrians cross busy traffic. Whereas in northern India it at first took me about three weeks to get a local girl to so much as say hello, in Sri Lanka I walked away with some digits within 24 hours. In the central bazaar of Colombo, policemen ensure that drivers, cart-pushing coolies, and everyone else stay in their lanes of traffic, and seem to take it personally when some asshole forces them to unfuck a traffic jam. The soldiers patrolling every other corner of downtown with their AK's are just delighted to stop their rounds and chat you up, and as yet not one of the approximately 80,000 people who've asked me where I'm from have tried to use that as a way to lure me into a souvenir shop.

And, ladies and gentlemen, they serve beef.

Now, one would suspect I'm finding things much on the up? Wrong. Maybe I would be, if Sri Lanka wasn't so enthusiastically responding to India's demands that I suffer a miserable and/or unlikely death overseas.

Attempted murder #1, and the main reason I've spent so long in Colombo is related to visiting the doctor and being whisked off to the hospital for "acute gastroenteritis". Good. I've already dealt with fucking dysentery on this trip once and giardiasis twice, so it's nice to mix things up a bit.

Attempted murder #2: walking out of the hospital in a half-conscious haze, going a few blocks, and then discovering a blind man was accompanying me, I lost what little concentration I had, and almost got hit (again) by a bus. This wouldn't have been half as maddening if there wasn't also a blind man present who apparently avoids buses with much greater aplomb.

So, Sri Lanka, I see how it is. You want to throw down the glove as well? Fine. If it's a battle you want it's a battle you have. If I may offer a word.... don't bring a knife to a gun fight, and don't bring gastroenteritis and public transportation to a pimp juice showdown.

IT. IS. ON.

The End?

2010-08-21T20:20:00.003+05:30

Well, so ends my account of the Andaman Islands, and yes, so too ends my account of India. I've been thinking about what to say in this post for a long time. Do I try and sum up some inner wisdom I've gained? Do I try to encapsulate the Indian spirit in a few paragraphs of cheeky prose? Do I just say "Fuck all y'all! I'm GFB! Peace!" ? Do I concoct some elaborate bookending narrative. I started and stopped on a few different conceits for Ghostface Buddha's Last Post From India over the past few weeks, only to find that they were all too limited... I wanted to write everything. "Everything" wasn't happening. Some of it felt redundant. I already wrote my summary of the Indian experience. I've already expounded all the critical observations I have to share. On the other hand, I had about twenty closing lines of various types, some of them good, some of them massively inadequate, and all of them jostling in my mind to clinch that single moment at the bottom of this post. Then, just last night as I pondered my fading Indian moments in a shabby Chennai hotel block, it hit me: I don't have to settle on just one. So, my friends, here are not one, but several endings to GFB's Indian odyssey. It's like a DVD! Alternate endings.... that is, if the "endings" are really endings...

....................................................

My neck cracked as I hunched over the map, its wrinkled and watersplotched surface straining to reveal a sign. I needed one desperately. "God damn.... I've been everywhere in this dump" I muttered to myself. I scanned the printed Asian names with the eye of a batty old woman looking over a middle-school yearbook with a magnifying glass, trying to determine which snotty-nosed little shit she had seen in the back of the Hendersons' yard taunting the cats. Rajkot: seen it. Uttarkashi: been there. Tambaram: the name rings a bell. I despaired of finding a new place to roam, when suddenly the low afternoon sun glinting off the mirror of a rickshaw blasted through my window like the very laser engraver God himself used to score the tragically lost fine print on the Ten Commandments. A wisp of smoke began rising from the corner of the page, and there in the massive expanses beyond the Himalayas I caught sight of a single word, a mere five characters of striking bold text in length.

C......H.......I.......N........A

I froze. A sudden sense of certainty held me. I did not feel seized or taken. Rather, this pure, uninhibited knowledge swelled from within. Regaining my senses, I glanced back down at the map, where China lay beckoning, curling a long, opium-stained fingernail towards me, sensually reciting the many industrial virtues of the People's Republic, and all was clear.

"Well, fuck that shit. PEACE"

...................................................

India does not want me to leave. I've decided half the people just desperately want me to stay, and the other half want to detain me here as a form of punishment. I imagine the divide runs straight down the gender line. In any case, it was a man who tried to fuck me over at the Chennai airport. Now, I am willing to admit I was cutting things a bit close with a lateish arrival to the international departures lobby, but what followed was inexcusable.

Up walks some fancy-looking idiot from Kingfisher Airlines, informing me that he can not allow me to claim my boarding pass. "Oh, and why not?" I rightly wondered. He told me that I was late. I felt that in India of all places, where people sometimes won't even get onto an empty bus until three times its capacity try to board it in motion as it roars out of the station, getting to the airport an hour before the flight out to be fine. But no. Nooooooooooo. I was there only fifty minutes early, and ticketing closes an hour before departure.

"Sir, it is 12:00. Ticketing closed at 11:50"

I realized this was no time to express my immediate reaction, which was "So fucking what?" and instead tried to feign surprise and outrage, and while the outrage was genuine, the feigned surprise I fear was overshadowed by the boiling hot tones of contempt I felt dribbling out of my speech. This man believed I was trying to be special. I thought he was being a tool. I attempted reasoning. "Yes, sir, I understand, you cannot keep a plane waiting for one man, but there is almost an hour left. The plane is there. I simply find it unreasonable you do not allow me to try and reach my flight, even if I must be rushed." That, of course, is how airports work in sensible places, but this is India, and India has Indian beaurocracy, and The Rules Are The Rules. I even tried philosophizing, getting him to appreciate the reason the rules are in place (to discourage tardiness and delays), and how they applied to the situation, but found it was impossible to do so without making blistering remarks about the Indian timekeeping psyche and bit my lip.("Well in some countries we have the sense to time our own arrival at airports, for ur own sake, and staff try to help when we face the disaster of missing a flight rather than beating us over the head with a stopwatch and a clown noses, making us sit on our hands while the jungle slowly reclaims the terminal until vines clog the customs desk and monkeys are to be found fornicating in the luggage scanners, all because 'ticketing closes at 11:50' ")

Somehow I prevailed upon him to just take my damn luggage after having him lecture me like a schoolboy turning in a late essay. "Do you think it's fair, sir? Do you think all these people who were here before should have come now instead?" My silence was burning me, but the visions of having to deal with some other dunce at the Immigration ministry in a few days to explain why I'd overstayed my visa kept the rage barely contained inside.

Now, unbeknownst to me, but certainly known to Chickenshit over here, the flight I was aiming for was delayed. The plane was not even in India yet when he was trying to send me away for tardiness. That hypocritical, lying, half-wit weasel shagger....

But I was to have my revenge. Oh yes, sir.

He led me to where my boarding pass was to be printed and started discussing something with his assistant, looking much concerned about seating arrangements. The assistant seemed to find a solution immediately, but he looked deeply pained. Finally, because The Rules Are The Rules, he was forced to surrender.

"Sir, because you are late there is a seating assignment problem, and we must accommodate you in... First Class."

Oh, you mean the First Class where the delectable stewardesses assume I'm a First Class paying customer and treat me to all the enormous seats, silly perks and gourmet cuisine received by the legitimate bigwigs? That First Class? BWAAAAHAHAHHAHAHHA

Nice try, India. You almost got me good there.

Hey, India......

SUCK
MY
DICK

PEACE
......................................

"Hey, cows" I said.

"Moooooooooooooooo?" 280 million cretinous mounds of ambling fertilizer factories asked in unison.

"Guess what?"

The pitiable cheesebeasts hazarded a guess. "Muuuoo?"

"Nope.....what I was going to say was...... I WIN. FUCK ALL Y'ALL. PEACE."

......................................

The time had come at last. Girlface Buddha and I faced off in the Chennai airport. My flight was finally being called for boarding. Her flight back to the northwest left in another three hours. After many travails, shared joys, and shared miseries, it might now be our final parting. No more hobbling down Himalayan slopes in the snow together. No more coordinating pincer-strike blitzkriegs against sari-nibbling insects in jungle huts together. No more clambering down muddy mountainsides to retrieve luggage launched from bouncing jeep roofs together. I was leaving more behind than a beautiful country and its miscreant cattle.

I almost didn't mention this because it's a wee bit personal, but y'all might have got confused if Girlface suddenly diappeared from the pages of this blog. But like I said....endings might not be endings, and all I can say is there is a chance we shall all be hearing from her again. And since endings might not be endings, it bears repeating what many have said before: that an ending is just the bit before a new beginning.

And it is with that thought that I would like to announce a certain "new beginning".

Ladies and gentlemen, you are now reading the very first lines of....

Ghostface Buddha: Sri Lanka

SUCK
MY
DICK

PEACE

Quickie On The Beach

2010-08-21T09:10:00.002+05:30

Looking back on the time I spent on our final stop in the Andaman Islands, namely Havelock Island, it seems that not much happened and there isn't that much to tell. So, you guessed it: it's time for another Quickie, to keep the bonds of affection and attraction between us fresh, albeit perhaps devoid of meaningful content.

Havelock Island is the most touristy of the islands. It's small but has several nice beaches, a bunch of beach hut resorts, and places to book boats for scuba trips and the like. It's in a group of small islands called Ritchie's Archipelago, which is nice, because it means many of the beaches look across perfectly smooth, turquoise, lagoon-like waters to unspoilt jungle islands just a short way away. There's also a good patch of jungle in the undeveloped parts of the island. As a place with actual tourist facilites, unlike some Andamans I could name, Havelock is meant to be an easy place to sit around and chill.

Of course, that would be durng the tourist season. When Girlface and I arrived we found that the majority of restaurants, for instance, if they weren't owned by the family next door, would inevitably have no more than three ingredients available with which to prepare meals. At one place I asked for some chicken noodles and was told "Sorry, sir, we have no chicken. Is not the season." In reply I said "You'd better not be trying to tell me it's not the chicken season. Throttle a bird."

At another place I asked for my fish, boneless, as was offered on the menu. "Sorry sir..." the waiter began, "... we do not have the sliced fish available. Whole fish only." I took a long moment to ponder if this man was as much a fool as he sounded, or if he had ever heard of cutting things with knives, then suggested "Oh, well then, you should ask the fisherman to catch you a sliced fish."

One day I cycled across the width of the island to see Radhanagar beach, reputedly the finest in all of India. Well, you certainly do have to a damn long way to visit it. As for most beautiful in India? I think not. Perhaps the impending monsoon clouds of doom that soon drenched me as I pounded the bike furiously back through the jungle had a negative effect on the color of the ocean and the lighting on the sand. In any case, I could name several beaches in the Andamans, even on Havelock itself, that I find finer.

One day we also bicycled south into the jungle to visit the government's Elephant Training Camp. After following a trail through the coastal forest for some time, we came across a small, primitive camp where two grubby-looking men were lying around, with no traces of elephants to be seen. "There are no elephants?" I asked. "Elephant no" was the answer. It didn't occur to me to ask him if was enjoying the government salary he was receiving for not training any elephants.

Anyways, I must be off. I have a plane to catch. There will be some Big News soon. But first I need to kill about a trillion mosquitoes. There will be no hostages.

Li'l Andaman

2010-08-20T21:10:00.001+05:30

Returned from the rainy North Andaman, Girlface Buddha and I faced exactly what we did not want: 3 days in Port Blair, the most boring place in the entire Indian Ocean, during an incessant rainy shitfest. Worst of all, we arrived on a Sunday, and Port Blair is so dedicated to inanity that there was a hell of a lot of nothing to do. The only way we maintained our sanity was by checking into a hotel with cable TV. We remained glued to Star Movies, by far the best English-language channel on Indian TV because it shows an incredibly random selection of Hollywood films. It is Girlface Buddha's commendable verdict that Face-Off is one of the best movies ever made, and for the next week she wouldn't stop talking about it, delving deep into the social and philosophical quandaries raised by the possibility of waking up to find your face replaced by that of either Nicolas Cage or John Travolta. This, I feel, is infinitely more pressing than the over-examined issue of how, metaphysically speaking, Vishnu becomes Krishna, or for that matter, a fish.

The main reason we were stuck in Port Blair so long, aside from being unable to buy a boat ticket on a Sunday, was the petty spitefulness of Captain Tool, master of the merchant vessel MV Dering. It takes a special type of pathological misanthropy to seriously contemplate the sort of douchebaggery committed by this scuttle-fucking mariner. When we arrived at the jetty at the ripe hour of 6a.m., in the rain of course, Captain Whalesplooge had apparently decided that in order to facilitate the most obnoxiously punctual departure in Indian seafaring history, he would withdraw the gangway long before leaving and not allow last-minute passengers to board. Girlface, a couple locals, and I all looked on in puppy-eyed dismay and tiger-eyed outrage as this stupid-hatted, waveriding chucklefuck refused to allow the gangway to be put back in place, which would have required nothing more than having the flunky with the forklift move the bridge two feet to the right and lower one end. As we stood there gaping, too loaded with baggage to shake our fists, our squid-buggering nemesis pulled a fresh prawn out of his crotch, bit its head off, and sailed into the mist. I will not budge on the details of this story.

When we finally did get on a boat to Little Andaman, the MV Rani Changa the next day, we quickly realized why the ticket for the seven-hour journey over open seas cost $0.55. It seems the Little Andaman route is served by the more "nobly oxidized" members of the shipping directorate's ferry fleet. The seats within were so awful I joined most of the other passengers in lying on the bare, somewhat crusty steel floor of the passenger hall, singing little songs in my head about not going to the bathroom until the ship was stable enough to not shit sideways. After many hours of this, and one very strange dream wherein my college buddies and I rented a zany funhouse to live in, only to discover that it mysteriously rocked day and night ("Oh my GOD, it feels like a ship at sea!" I thought within my dream), we finally landed at the jetty of Hut Bay, the small strip of civilization on Little Andaman.

Little Andaman is the most isolated of the settled islands in the group, lying hundreds of kilometers from the other Andamans, and still almost entirely consisting of a dense jungle which is home to the remnants othe reclusive Onge tribe. I never saw any Onge myself, but I can tell you that the Indian settlers of the island hail from all over South India, as evidenced by the great diversity of inscrutable alphabets found on their temples. Little Andaman was also one of the places that got utterly pounded by the 2004 tsunami. Behind the beach there are a few hundred yards of land now overgrown with weeds but filled with ruined concrete boardwalks, houseless foundations, and piles of toppled temple pillars. Behind those lie the new residences, a strip of shabby tin shacks. Further behind those lie the new neighborhoods where people are building proper homes. One notices that this quarter sits upon the closest hillside.

There aren't many tourists on Little Andaman ( a peek in the police register revealed I was the second in the month of August), but when there are, it is inevitable you run into each other because there are about three guesthouses and two eateries not crawling with vermin, and these are connected by the road... the road. Yup, Little Andaman has precisely one vehicular thoroughfare.

Anyways, after discovering all these titillating facts, Girlface and I went for a lengthy walk along the beach. Once you get past a kilometer or so of fishermen's rubbish and a prodigious amount of empty liquor bottles, the beach becomes a pristine arc of shining sand between the jungles, the palms, and the glistening blue sea. On the far end of the beach, where there is no village and no path nearby, the only things interrupting the silence are the lapping of waves on the shore, the calls of birds, occasional wandering cows, and one or two villagers scrounging for dry palm leaves. I got immediately to the business of something I haven't done for a very long time... lie my lazy ass on a sunny beach. It was magnificent. Girlface thought so too, as she demonstrated by dumping clumps of wet sand in my hair. For someone who lives in a state pretty much defined by its sandy composition, she found that substance surprisingly novel. It then occurred to me (because she told me) that she had never properly enjoyed a beach before. Indeed, the only time she had ever been to the ocean, not counting our monsoon-soaked adventures earlier in the week, was to Chowpatty Beach, a teeming wad of sand in the heart of Mumbai, the City That Never Stops Testing New Ringtones. Anyways, she loved the beach as well. And people say I don't do anything for the Indian people.

We awoke the next morning to the bizarre and harrowing screams of some of the islands endemic avian life. I swear, I haven't been driven from bed so rapidly by a cacophonous gaggle of randy birds in the morning since I lived by the Amsterdam zoo. We then went on another walk, this time out into the jungle to visit the island's much-trumpeted waterfall. I'll spare you an account of the jungle itself -imagine I said the word "lush" a lot- and go straight to the waterfall, which was utterly fantastic. In a green... lush.... opening in the forest, the waters of the local stream fall about 15 meters off a small cliff face into an idyllic shady pool. The only downside is the rumor of crocodiles about. I hate crocodiles. There are a great many deadly animals in this world, and the odds of being slain by them are generally slim, but crocodiles are just fucking evil. One second you're there, a second later you're gone in a flash, and twenty seconds later your ass is dead. The way I see it, crocodiles have been around for millions upon millions of years. They've had their day in the sun, and as a sort of Evolutionary Achievement Award, we should treat them now to an all-expenses paid dinner and afterparty at the Extinction Lounge. Fortunately, no crocodiles were about ( we were told the area right by the waterfall should be safe since crocs don't like it for some unspecified reason, which leaves me suspicious) and I waded out under one of the falls for one of the finest showers of my life.

One day, however, one must leave Little Andaman as one leaves all places, and in our case we were fated to sail overnight on a miserable, grungy shitcan... the vile MV Dering. How we were allowed to board I don't know. An oversight of its nefarious captain perhaps? I have never encountered such repeated nautical discomfiture at the hands of a single being. I mean, Poseidon is powerful and all, but unlike the master of the MV Dering, you have to actually blind his children before he stoops to using his power to be a dick about it. Seriously, to hell with boats. When this is all over I'm breaking into an antique shop in the night and drowning all their bottled ships in vodka. My Popov funnel shall feel the heat of battle once more! To arms!

Tao Te Bling

2010-08-10T12:51:00.001+05:30

I.
The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way:
The names that can be named are not unvarying names
The Way that is nameless some call Tao.
The Tao in truth is called Melvin;
It is Melvin that is nameless.

II.
It was from the Nameless which is neither Tao nor Melvin
    but more Melvin than Tao
    that Heaven and Earth sprang.
And it was Heaven whence came the real OG's.

III.
It is because everyone under Heaven recognizes beauty as beauty
    that the idea of ugliness exists.
It is because all know a Baller for what he is
    that there can be Haters who hate.
Just so, if every one recognized virtue as virtue
    this would merely open new gates of virtuelessness;
That is where the Baller comes in.
For truly, Hustle and Bitching grow out of one another...
Difficult and Easy balance one another...
High and Sober determine one another...
Husband and Wife test one another...
Wife and Floozie-On-The-Side complete one another...
Foreplay and After-Snuggle give sequence to one another.
Therefore the Baller relies on Actionless Activity,
     effortlessly doing what others say must be hard,
     and is, but he makes look easy.
The Baller carries on wordless teaching:
     Balling.

IV.
Pour a tequila flask to the very brim
And you will wish you had stopped in time.
Polish a pinky ring to its very finest
And you will find it soon grows dull.
When stacks of Franklins fill your hoarding-hall
They can no longer be made to rain.
Women and liquor breed carelessness;
That brings babies in its train.
Before the deed is done, withdraw!
Such is Heaven's Way.

V.
As the heavy must be the foundation of the light,
     so idleness is lord and master of activity.
Truly, a man of consequence, though he travels all day,
    will not let himself be separated from his BlackBerry.
However magnificent is the corner-office view,
    he sits quiet and disconsolate.
How much so then,
    must a true Baller be lighter than those around him!
If he is heavy, he is naught but foundation,
     and the spirit is lost.
Best to be light;
Float as though borne by a palm leaf upon the ocean.
The ocean we call Sex
The palm leaf we call Drugs.

VI.
Can you keep the unquiet physical-soul from sleeping,
     hold fast to the Unity, and never quit it?
Can you, when concentrating your breath,
    pass a roadside inspection?
Can you wipe and cleanse your vision of the Mystery until you know
    where you were the night before?
Can you love the people and rule the land, yet not forget
    your cell phone at the bar?
Can you in opening and shutting the Heavenly Gates,
    find your pants thereafter?
Fueling your appetites, then feeding them;
Doing dumb shit, but not being made to lay claim to it;
Impairing your wits, but always having your wits about you;
Buck wildin', but having everything under control;
That is called the Mysterious Power.

VII.
In Tao the only motion is Balling;
The only quality, flava.
For although it is said all creatures under Heaven and Earth
     are the product of Melvin
We mislead you earlier:
Melvin itself is the product of Balling.
Balling produced Melvin behind a pool hall in Jacksonville, Florida.
Ask Melvin's mother.

Isles In Sea And Shadow

2010-08-09T16:14:00.002+05:30

The Andaman Islands are a strange place. Perhaps this is true for many settler societies, which are populated just by whoever feels like coming. In the Andamans however, the general weirdness sneaks up on you. Port Bliar is a city that looks to be doing its utmost to be nondescript and in conformity with the bland provincial towns of the motherland, but soon after you leave the city and get into the hinterlands you begin to wonder just what the hell is going on.

There is one "major" tourist point in the archipelago: Havelock Island, which is by all accounts beautiful, reasonably convenient, and developed just enough for a few tranquil comforts. Needless to say, this is not where Girlface Buddha and I were going. We were heading instead for the northern end of North Andaman, which you may have guessed is the northernmost and least settled of the three "main" islands. Getting there was a tedious pre-dawn crawl up the spine of the islands on the territory's only "highway" the Andaman Trunk Road. In the early morning darkness we rumbled through the boring Tamil and Bengali villages in the region around Port Blair, then made a sudden turn onto the highway itself and into the jungle.

Let me just say that 12 hours on the Andaman Trunk Road reveals that it is not and has never been a "highway". For the entirety of its mind-numbing 300 kilometers it is naught but a single lane of asphalt winding in a most laborious fashion through the islands' small hills, usually with an all-obscuring wall of impenetrable jungle foliage on either side. From time to time the road widens beyond one lane, but these are merely waiting areas where you sit and admire the trees while waiting for a forest police checkpoint, a tribal reserve checkpoint, or a ferry across the inter-island channels. It is horrendously boring, yet still worth taking, because amidst the jungle and the isolation and the tedium you are occasionally reminded that you are passing through India's Twilight Zone, a chain of islands to which India has banished strange, strange things that don't fit into its own psychotic society. If India is a half-naked lunatic dancing on one leg, screeching mumbo-jumbo with a burning torch in one hand and a pink spotted umbrella in the other, the Andaman Islands are a set of deep eyes lurking in the bushes and a distant, haunting laugh drifting on the winds.

For hours we rolled along our little road-channel cut into the teeming, dripping rainforest and there was nothing particularly unusual to report apart from the prominent mustaches on the women across the aisle from me, who were either members of the same pantheistic cult we encountered on Ross Island or were Christian nuns. I didn't see any crosses, so I assumed the former. Then, after a pair of checkpoints we entered into the Jarawa tribal reserve.

The Jarawa are on of the indigenous tribes of the Andamans, a stone-age people of obscure origins who populate parts of the jungle on South and Middle Andaman, where those few who survive carry on living as they have for millenia, and periodically burst into violence against those who encroach on their lands and their way of life. This is what the checkpoints are for: keeping out thoughtless developers, loggers, and other provocateurs while maintaining the only road link to the far-flung settlements on the northern islands. A massive sign at the entrance of the reserve laid out the rules for vehicles passing through: we were to travel in approved convoys only, photographing "natives" was stringently forbidden, and we were bidden in very vague but commanding terms to avoid all interactions with the Jarawa whatsoever. The Jarawa are known to hang out by the road sometimes, and this reportedly often degenerates into a degrading spectacle of camera-happy foreign tourists and the open jeering and other antics of Indian visitors. We didn't expect to see much, if anything, of the Jarawa as we passed through. After a short time, however I glimpsed a group of people ahead on the road, and as the bus diligently roared on by I saw that they were indeed Jarawa. They were dark, almost pitch black in skin, with a rough rather than glistening texture. The one man I got a good look at was shirtless, with a necklace of leaves, and with two large, ghostly patches of white paint in the shape of leaves under his dark eyes. Next to him a younger Jarawa raised a wooden club above his head in a gesture that said in any language "Keep that bus moving." "So," I thought to myself, "that was my one view of the Jarawa, and I won't soon forget it."

In thinking that was the end of our interactions with the Jarawa, I was as wrong as it was possible to be. Only a few minutes after this first incident another group of Jarawa awaited ahead of us. This time they blocked the road and brought us to a stop. Before anything could be done they forced their way aboard the bus and amid a chaos of shouting between the conductors, passengers, and aboriginals, got themselves free passage. I smiled inwardly at this, proof that common sense is widespread among the peoples of the Earth and that the Jarawa do not need the art of metallurgy or any other trapping of civilization to know that taking the bus beats the hell out of walking. The group consisted of a man, a woman, and a multitude of children aged about two to ten. None of them wore shirts. The men and children all wore faded cotton gym shorts such as those I used to wear as a boy, while the woman wore a short brown skirt made of a simple rectangle of brown cloth. They all had short, tightly curled black hair and white paint upon their bodies and faces, each in different pattern. Some had aggressive whorls beneath the eyes, others had their entire faces covered in a grid of white stripes. The mother had a radiating pattern of chaotic white strokes that extended even onto her hair, complementing the strong, sturdy woman's assertive attitude. Her belly seemed to be in the early months of pregnancy and her bare breasts hung freely as she settled on her perch on the arm of Girlface Buddha's seat. Though Girlface herself was only unsettled so far as to shift in her seat as much to my side as she could, this provoked an uproar among the crowd who were incensed to see this near-naked 'primitive' with her offending breasts almost in the face of a wholesome Hindu girl. I, of course, was not particularly disturbed, and was more occupied with that guilty American preoccupation of deliberately not staring at the woman while making a point of also not rudely staring away too much.

The furor, however, was so general that the woman was eventually made to move. This did no good as she instead sat on the arm of a seat belonging to another young Indian girl who actually was deeply upset by the circumstance and soon was cowering miserably by her auntie's side. The Jarawa woman, who had already been moved once for no good reason she could discern, thenceforth refused to budge an inch. Immediately behind her the cultists/nuns were clucking with disapproval and generally nosing about the whole affair while not deigning to touch or otherwise interfere themselves, which sealed in my mind that they were in fact evangelical Christian nuns. The Hindu girl and her relatives, on the other hand, were deep in the throes of a tittie-inspired psychological collapse, and had dramatically withdrawn from the world, focusing with all the intent imaginable on a small Hindu prayer book from which they were desperately repeating prayers and not lifting their eyes even for an instant.

The conductors at this point mostly had their hands full with the children, who aside from not being versed in the bus-riding etiquette of modern peoples, were also just generally being rambunctious young boys, shouting, hanging out the door, and so on. While this all unfolded, another group of Jarawa loomed on the road ahead. They seemed to have weapons and the two groups shouted back and forth as the bus approached. Then, obviously in great cheer and jest, but completely mind-blowing nonetheless, the group of shrieking Jarawa on the road proceeded to assail the sides of our bus with a barrage of stone-tipped spears. This stands above all other incidents as the craziest fucking thing that has ever happened to me on an Indian bus, blowing engine fires, landslides, and struggling livestock all out of the water.

At some point, the children all demanded to be let down and were ejected from the bus with great enthusiasm. I say "at some point" because only residents of this very jungle could possibly have any idea where they were. "Stop by the 17,938th tree on the left", they must have said, because there was no other distinguishing feature for miles. The man and woman remained aboard, and when at length we approached a police checkpoint they were made to crouch and conceal themselves behind piles of luggage, lest we all get in some kind of shit with the cops who are supposed to be keeping us apart. Finally, however, we came upon another group of Jarawa standing by the road with a sullen-looking cop standing guard over them. The conductors somehow compelled the Jarawa to disembark and the lonely policemen greeted them with the unmistakable look of a man standing in the jungle with an unused rifle and a gaggle of misbehaving aboriginals, slowly counting the days until his pension. As the woman rose from her perch, her entire little skirt carelessly slid down to her ankles, revealing all beneath. The bus was stunned into silence as the woman politely but slowly and without much concern lifted her skirt back up to where she wanted it. I however, thought it was fabulous, not for any prurient reason, but because it was simply the perfect finale -I hesitate to say "climax"- to the whole ridiculous episode.

We left the reserve and the Jarawa behind us and finally came to the crossing for Baratang Island. They tell you Baratang is a nice little island where you can go look at nature, but I will inform you that its sole purpose in the universe is to force the Andaman Trunk Road over a pair of ferries. Some people apparently look forwards to this part of the journey. I have said my piece before about people who romanticize travel by boat, but just let me add that you must be new to Asia indeed if the words "Indian ferry" conjure up for you any sort of magic. Apart from the fact that in the newspapers the words "Indian Ferry" are usually followed by the words "Sinks, Killing Dozens", I knew that this ferry trip was goint to entail a lot of standing around a smelly rustbucket in the hot sun with little thought given to the conveniences of shade or seating, and it was so. Then, courtesy of delightful Baratang Island, we were soon again on another ferry, making the crossing the Middle Andaman.

Middle Andaman sucks. End of story. It's big, it's boring, and the bland fields and lumber yards by the road only make you reminisce about the jungle and the lovely dragonfly you saw by palm frond #73,432.

Hours of Middle Andaman ensued, and then, by the grace of the Surveyor, we found that the roads on either side of the channel separating Middle Andaman from North Andaman were actually aligned with eachother, and therefore could be connected by a bridge.

North Andaman is for the most part as empty as can be. The bulk of the island is an impassable tropical wilderness, and after yet more winding through the forest we finally arrived in the small agricultural colonies at its northern end. We popped out of the canyons of green and into a land of small fields, where the brilliant yellow-green rice paddies sat shimmering after monsoon rains on the flatlands, and isles of jungle jotted out of every spot of steep ground. Buffaloes splashed freely among the fields and at intervals stooped figures were shin-deep in the paddies, weeding their modest crops and fetching tools from their bamboo-thatched houses. With great indifference our bus finally chugged to a halt in Diglipur, the main town of the north. Then, with equally great determination to the bus's indifference, Girlface and I got out of Diglipur, because it looked hopeless.

While the town itself was pathetic and grubby, the people to me looked fascinating. They had a look about them I certainly did not expect. Many of them seemed to hail from odd corners of Asia, and I was not wring. A great many refugees have ended up here, one of the few areas of India where there is yet unsettled arable land. Many were Bengalis, as evidenced by the names of the towns... Durgapur, Kalipur, Kalighat. Someone clearly missed their Mother-god. The faces of others spoke of more distant lands, and sure enough many told me they were Nepalis, Burmese, Indonesian, and even a number of people who said they were from the various oppressed hill-tribes of northern Burma.

We eventually settled ourselves in the coastal village of Kalipur, where we rented a bamboo hut from a cheery Tamil woman of apparently Pentecostal Christian bent. Her entire household, which were of the curious Asian hodgepodge I described, were also Christians and said that were not Catholics, but of the "Hoely Espeereet" type of Christian. This, I learned, meant that they listened to praise music and watche Tamil-language evangelical TV at nearly all hours of the day and night. Girlface and I spent four days in the hut, sometimes going out to the immaculate, undeveloped beach where some isolated mangroves backed onto a highly incongruous row of pine trees and the jungle hung over the mountains around the bay casting dark shadows even when the monsoon clouds were lifted. It rained much of the time, and I mean it really, really rained. We spent many hours huddled in the hut listening to the water pound on the roof as if each drop was a soldier in a wet, furious army told to seize our drying laundry no matter the cost.

At night of the second day of rains, the torrent faded to a patter, and over the dripping we heard a wailing man moving about the grounds. We couldn't see him but his voice moved to and fro in an ecstatic frenzy in an unknown tongue that bespoke some strange shamanic ritual. The blinds of the family's home were drawn and I almost didn't want to know what was going on within. Then, piercing the night came the cries of "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" I swear, I will never see a Southern Baptist minister speaking in tongues and flailing about at the pulpit again without thinking of the night I was mesmerized by a hidden Tamil Christian singer. I tell you, this place is eery even from the most harmless things.

I slept fitfully. Perhaps odd Christian worship was still going on and the cries slipping into my half-conscious mind. I dreamt of magic and spells and animistic conjurations. Awaking to Girlface's prodding, I saw what she was so intent on drawing my attention to: our bed full of dark, bean-shaped cocoons that had appeared in the night. What freakish insectoid form they were I do not know, but I do know this: whatever left them were heinous fucking bastards that ate into the stitching of my clothes, severed the cords of our hanging bags, and indeed assailed with a passion anything string-like in its shape. They ate right through and severed one side of my favorite pair of earphones. Mother. Fuckers. Days later, these vile demonspawn hatchlings are still appearing in our luggage in the most deep and unlikely places and we are disposing of them with the greatest malice. Even more have been annihilated by Girlface's wrath than my own. They really should not have fucked with her pink shawl, as several unborn generations have now discovered on their short-circuited lifecycle to and from the bowels of Hell.

But there are more rainstorms, more strange shadows, and more vile bugs in these islands, and we are going to go from end to end of this twilight archipelago and face them all. Really, seriously, they should not have fucked with her pink shawl.

The Gulag Archipelago

2010-08-09T14:05:00.001+05:30

Port Blair is an ugly place. Not in an Indian the-streets-runneth-foul-eith-sewage kind of way, but more in a Latin American grungy sprawl of laid-back disorder kind of way. By Indian standards, Port Blair is tiny for a regional center -it only has 100,000 people or so, but it still seems excessive. I can't imagine what economic force keeops people there. As far as I can tell, the only things the Andaman & Nicobar Islands export are timber, coconuts, and anthropology studies.

Port Blair was founded by the British. There were of course other people here first, but -and you will be shocked to hear this- most of the native tribes have dwindled to the brink of extinction and now live on ill-secured "reserves" in the jungle. The population of the Andaman Islands consists now mostly of Tamil and Bengali immigrants who have made the settled areas of the islands, in the words of one proud fellow I spoke to, a "mini-India". Fortunately, mini-India does not display all the excesses of its mammoth sibling such as pulsing mobs, thumping Bollywood music, people indiscriminately lighting fireworks in the market, and general soul-rending poverty. There is, however, a thriving business in whiskey-steered rickshaws, 1:1 ratio of mobile phone service shops per capita, and -on an island chain whose endemic mammals consist only of shrews and bats- cows everywhere.

Girlface and I woke up somewhat late after our first night in Port Blair (the journey there was rather sleep-depriving) and were annoyed to find that the day was already half over. India is one of those countries that insists on lying entirely in one time zone, regardless of how much sense it makes. While this might be a feasible stretch of geographical reality for the bulk of India, the country has a lot of odd nooks. Look at a world time zone map, especially the area around Bangladesh, and tell me nobody in the government here is being obstinate. They do of course claim to have a good reason: India has only one time zone (and this one time zone is half an hour "off" the usual scheme) to reflect the fact that the "real" prime meridian has been fixed since ancient times in the holy city of Ujjain, predating the unsanctified Greenwich line by over a millenium. All this, however, would be mere trivia to me if it weren't for the fact that the Andamans are quite far away from India. The Andamans are are so much closer to Southeast Asia in fact that in certain parts of town you can still see bunkers built by the Japanese during World War II at the western extreme of their ill-fated island-hopping adventures. Anyways, the stubborn time zone conformity means that the sun goes down by about 5:30, giving the slobs in government offices a perfect excuse to shorten their business hours.

Fortunately half a day is all you need to see most of what Port Blair has to offer. It has never been a beacon of culture and refinement. In fact, the most notable part of its history was being a tropical British gulag. The British built it to be a penal colony, not the way Australia was (an exile for petty crooks, Welshmen, and other undesirables), but as an isolated torture camp for uppity brown people who had the nerve to resist the occupation of India. The Andamans were less New South Wales and more Guantanamo Bay. Pretty much all of Port Blair's "sights" are depressing. The worst of these is the "Cellular Jail" above the harbor. It is a horrendously ugly brick building from the early 20th century built on the tower-and-spokes design still common in American prisons today. The idea, it seems, was to keep hundreds of freedom fighters and political activists in solitary confinement, allowing them out only for their daily quota of being worked to death on crude menial labor. It's now a museum where you can go read about the prison and the Andamans' colonial history in general, which is not to speak of much since people who live in the vicinity of torture camps don't usually take to doing anything too exciting.

Far more pleasant was our visit to Ross Island, a little islet about a mile off shore. As we approached on the ferry I began to winder why the British had built their colonial administration center on Ross Island, a place so isolated from the people they were ruling, and realized I had answered my own question. Ross Island was also a prison camp but later settled into its role of being the place where white people lived, with a church, a tennis court, and all the other niceties of civilization which demonstrated how much God wanted Eden to look like Sussex. It seems however that He must have lost some kind of bet against Shiva, because an earthquake came along and destroyed it. Now Ross Island is a cool place to visit for the sight of the quintessential Victorian brickwork being swallowed by the jungle.

Things were a bit odd, however... a feeling we were to get throughtout the archipelago. For starters, most of the other tourists wandering around the isle were a group of white-robed Indian cultists with flowing cloaks and shining medals on their breasts, having quite a fabulous time in between the frequent monsoon bursts that sent them all scurrying into little cult-huddles in the picnic shelters by the jetty. By far the cultists' favorite feature of the island were the curious spotted deer that somebody must have imported from the mainland and left to wander in the jungle and ruins for purely aesthetic reasons. We passed many deer on the way to the lighthouse, watching them freeze the way deer do as we stared at them from beneath the massive trees we chose for our often-needed rain shelters.

Later, somehwere on our way from the lighthouse to the vine-strewn Presbyterian church we managed to stumble into the worst guarded Indian Navy base ever. We didn't even realize we were in it until we came out the main exit and found a sign that read "Coastal Battery Ross Island--Indian Navy Territory Restricted Area" and some puzzled coolies wondering how we got in. Though, to be fair, I'm the first person to actually arrive on this island with conquering intent since the Japanese. I just want the one little island. I'll strengthen the defenses a bit, install a jacuzzi, fix the volleyball net, and maybe add an artificial volcano with a giant mind-control beacon and an army of bikini-wearing ninja guards. Y'know, the shit Ghostface needs.

Return Of The Dynamic Duo

2010-08-03T20:39:00.001+05:30

(Nothing Dynamic Happens)

Ghostface Buddha's girlfriend, Girlface Buddha, was at first skeptical when I suggest that we go to some islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean during the monsoon, the time of year during which said ocean is being dumped onto India in great cosmic buckets by splashhappy gods. Every culture has gods responsible for inclement weather, but Indian gods are extremely numerous and often possess a multitude of limbs, so the Hindu pantheon can move a hell of a lot of buckets. Anyways, Girlface Buddha believed that the idea of going to the Andaman Islands during the wet season was "probably stupid", minus the "probably" (she is not one to shy from calling me a fool). I made no effort to deny this, which was fortunate, because we are in the Andaman Islands right now, we are soaking wet, and the reasonable conclusion is that coming here was indeed stupid.

Before getting drenched here, however, we had to first get drenched in a variety of other Indian jurisdictions. We got drenched in Rajasthan going to the bus station, and we got drenched in Gujarat stopping for dinner. We even got drenched in the Union Territory of Daman and Diu, for fuck's sake, because we mistakenly believed the bus had stopped in Daman for us to get breakfast. And finally, we crossed the border into Maharashtra to get drenched in the famously wet megalopolis of Mumbai.

Though we found the whole ordeal as boring as it was damp, everyone else along the route took a great interest in us. When Girlface and I were walking around the Himalayas with plenty of space and not ostentatiously acting like a couple, people are usually too busy on their pilgrimages to notice. They just assumed for the moment they saw us that we were walking adjacent to eachother by some accident since everyone is walking the same way anyhow. We only got that occasional locked-in judgmental stare of the sort that makes you feel something weighing down on your shoulders like a particularly overweight and contemptuous cat. When, however you are a foreign man getting off a bus with a sari-clad Indian girl in a crowded Mumbai street and there is no doubt about the nature of your acquaintance, the obese and haughty cat on the shoulder is replaced by the thousand burning glares of moralizing and intensely jealous hyenas. Interracial relationships are one of those things that can be a bit ticklish in many parts of the world. I don't know what to reccommend for other people finding themselves in analogous situations. The Ghostface Buddha solution, which I don't particularly reccommed to anyone, is to first actually imagine them as hyenas, and then imagine a big poof of smoke and all of the hyenas on the street suddenly being transformed into the pokemon Psyduck

We came to Mumbai for reasons of economy, sparing hundreds of dollars by riding a terrible, leaky skeeper bus down the west coast to catch a plane to the distant east coast, whence to catch another cheap plane to the even more distant Andaman Islands. These were, in fact, the first flights I have taken since landing in Delhi so long ago and hauling my sorry ass across this entire subcontinent by road and rail ever since. In the northern reaches of Mumbai's mega-"suburbs" we tumbled off the bus and into a rain-battered asphalt gulch of highway flyovers and Mumbai squalor near the domestic airport and rushed into the first hotel we could find without gleaming bronze stars by the name and a Raj-era throwback coolie in a red coat and silly hat waiting at the door. Girlface hates Mumbai and I was in no mood to deal with the place, so we passed the entirety of our 22-hour stay in India's "most dynamic city" in a 13'x15' hotel room. Anyways, it was raining, not the sort of epic downfall for which Mumbai is known, but an oppressive bout of precipitation nonetheless. The news of the day (we watched a lot of cable TV) was a malaria epidemic sweeping the city. The relentless rain was combining with Mumbai's claustrophobic conditions and India's near-mystical ability to generate festering bodies of stagnant water, creating nightmare conditions for anyone trying to control the spread of virus-carrying mosquitoes.

On the other hand, Raj Thackeray, a leader of Maharashtra's worrisomely popular Shiv Sena party (who are about one failed artist away from being the Maratha Nazis), declared that the source of the problem was actually much easier to deal with. Malaria he said, is "...caused by people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar." He went on to elaborate further the theme that North Indians cause malaria, which is about the 937th reason he's concocted for expelling them from Mumbai. I usually find Indian politics intensely boring because no matter what ideology a group purports, with the occasional exception of the Commies, any action or statement they take has nothing to do with beliefs of any kind or any policy they will subsequently enact. It's 99& hamfisted electoral politics where even for the out-there loonies (revolutionary socialists, ethnic separatists, genocidal right-wing maniacs, international jihadists... the works), the means have long since become an end in themselves, where political activity has become the domain of party machines, massive corruption, and the shameless distribution of spoils. Above all politics has become about the narcissistic self-interest, the outlandish greed, and the gaseous inflation of the blimplike politicians whose mugging, dirigible faces taunt a billion or so honest people from every billboard, wall, and low-hanging wire in the country.

So I guess that unexpected little outburst just became GFB's definitive statement on Indian politics. Before I got onto that I was going to say that I was surprised to see myself actually paying to the details of political stories for the first time in months. First I watched this Raj Thackeray thing with horrified fascination because I was bewildered how a guy, who admittedly says a great deal of things that are incredibly stupid if you give them a moment's thought, had said something so overwhelmingly idiotic that I had to take many, many moments of thought to get my head around just how stupid it was. After the whole malaria debacle we flicked to CNN India, which leans a little towards sensationalism and promised that the rest of the evening would be spent on a live expose of the Shocking and Exclusive variety. And, by God, it was actually a shocking exclusive. For two hours we watched as CNN India busted a half-dozen state-level politicians of multiple political parties (and implicating many others) brazenly selling the votes that determine the delegations to the Indian equivalent of the Senate, on tape. This was followed by a bunch of sensationalist crap, which happened to include among it such actual gold as the Election Commissioner's jaw dropping on live TV, the chairman of the Congress Party losing his shit, a senator being directly accused on air of having gained his office by the same corrupt methods, CNN immediately adding praise of itself to the "news" ticker, a politician waxing philosopical and quoting from ancient Sanskrit texts, a state legislator selling his vote on hidden camera while his shirtless man-tits flopped about the room, and a member of the BJP being a decent person. The CNN reporters sounded like they were only a sliver of hesitation away from announcing that Mahatma Gandhi himself was about to descend from heaven, little round spectacles misted by tears, to woefully denouce the state of Indian democracy before the entire nation. It was riveting.

Much less riveting was waking up at 4am to go to the airport, fly to Chennai, and get the connecting flight to the Andaman Islands. Flying over the ocean is never interesting, unless you have a squadron of Japanese Zeroes on your tail, and even then it helps to have a failing propellor to keep you awake if you haven't had your coffee in the morning. Since none of this happened to us, I will skip recounting anything about the flight except to say that Kingfisher Airlines is utterly shameless about how it hires female crew members, and that for an airline based in India it should really have much better call centers.

So, finally, we touched down in the Andaman & Nicobar (Andaman-Nicobarese?) capital of Port Blair, across the Indian Ocean in the middle of nowhere, closer to Malaysia than we were to Delhi. It was raining outside: big, fat drops falling slowly, seemingly having rolled off the sides of the clouds as if they were soft, wet marbles rolling of celestial coffee tables. We trudged around all afternoon attending to the mundane matters that pester the visitor upon arriving to provincial centers. From one errand (I had gone alone) I returned to the hotel also carrying a handful of brilliant aqua-blue brochures of the Andamans' paradise beaches and unspoilt tropical islets under a spotless sky. Girlface gave them all a cursory flip-through, discarded each one with a toss vaguely in the direction of our sopping laundry, and Told Me So.

"I told you this was going to be stupid" is how she put it.

She went on: "I know, I know, we agreed for stupid and I like your stupid trips. Is all OK. But I must say, really, that this is stupid." Her reassurances had the desired effect on my psyche, allowing me to believe for one more day that just because you call something stupid in advance, you are somehow a wiser person for having done so when you then go and act on the stupid idea regardless. It is a soothing belief, like a coconut-scented cream to be rubbed on the stressed inner aches of the mind when everything goes to shit exactly like you knew it would.

We then established our plans for the next few days. Today, for instance, we went around visiting the local sights of Port Blair, and tommorow, of course, we are waking up at 3a.m. for our first real adventure in the Andaman Islands. Obviously, since we are going tommorow I can't yet tell you how it turned out, but when Girlface and I made the plan I felt it neccesary to say one thing.

"This one might actually be really, really stupid."

Damn The Monsoon... Full Speed Ahead!

2010-08-03T17:14:00.002+05:30

I landed in India last September with a contract to write about tourist attractions in India and a massive plan to see hundreds of such places by the end of August. By the end of March I quit my job, and by the middle of July I had seen everything on my grand itinerary and more. I knew I would have time to kill anywhere I liked, and my newfound leisure came to me just in time for the annual 'southwest' monsoon, which has been described as "perhaps the most dramatic recurring weather phenomenon on Earth." It is a meteorological battle, and the carnage is of continent-consuming scale. The antagonists in this bellum ad eluvies are the Indian Ocean, the scorching heat of India, and the Himalaya mountains. It isn't clear which of these comes out the winner, but the loser is always non-marine lifeforms. Looking up my trusty and wrinkled map of India, I set my course from the Himalayan foothills to the arid edge of the desert in Rajasthan. Unlike Ladakh, Rajasthan actually does get affected by the monsoon, but I reasoned that if the monsoon was anything to worry about in that state they would actually have water in their holy lakes more than twice a decade. Conveniently, this is also the region where Ghostface Buddha's Indian lair is located, enabling me to relax amongst my Indian friends, including Rajasthan's most notable resident, Girlface Buddha.

I first, however, had to pass through Delhi for the sixth or seventh time this year. I have seen Delhi now at just about every possible time of year and let me tell you this: in the autumn it is a tourist-swarmed pile of shit; in the winter it is a foggy, frigid pile of shit; in the spring it is a dusty, searing hot pile of shit; and in the summer it is a sweltering, monsoon-stew pile of shit. (But it's really interesting!...once). Delhi was made no more pleasant or sensible by the frenzied construction efforts anticipating this year's Commonwealth Games, a sort of sad, anachronistic pseudo-Olympics that mostly serves as a way for British athletes to compete against impoverished but talented African and Caribbean opponents without the pesky Yanks and Chinese gobbling up all the remaining medals. In the case of the CWG '10, as they are known here, it is also almost certainly going to be one of the great disasters in sporting history and an enormous embarrassment to the government and people of India. In short, Delhi is comically unprepared, the management is probably corrupt, the new venues are a testament to shoddy Indian building practices, and the miserably botched "beautification" efforts in Delhi's tourist areas have had the truly astonishing effect of making them even filthier and unnavigable than they were already. On the other hand, maybe they'll pull it all off in the nick of time. We'll see in October.

As soon as I could I got on an overnight train deep into Rajasthan. When the sun rose and I could make out the scenery I was amazed to behold something I had never seen before in that state: the color green. Yes, if you go to Rajasthan sometime between June and August you can actually see plants not looking like they've just emerged from a Pyrrhic victory in a death-struggle against a camel. I moved back into the GhostLair to rest on the laurels from my Himalayan campaign and hide in its semi-arid bubble from the summer rains inundating the rest of India. It didn't work.

I spent a lot of time "working in the cyber cafe", which is what I told my hosts when I was actually going over to Girlface Buddha's house to watch TV and trap her small cousins on shelves in the unplugged refrigerator. One day, when I actually was 'working' (i.e. typing a GFB post) in a cybercafe, I noticed an ominous darkening outside. The monsoon was clearly on its way. The air was suffused with energy. You could feel the thunderstorm coming. Even the cows joined the city residents in prematurely concluding their business (in the case of cows: standing, pooping) and turning for home with a an anxious briskness of pace. I figured I only had an hour or two to finish up and scurry home before the deluge. Actually, I had five minutes.

The monsoon struck with the subtlety of a rhinoceros carcass being launched over the city walls in a siege. In moments the street was blurred by the light-refracting torrent of rain. Rivers tumbled down the temple steps. Storefronts became like ancient caves concealed behind waterfalls, where the intrepid treasure hunter would go looking for hidden gods only to find chains of dangling paan baggies and jars of cigarette lighters. I finished the post I was typing, and seeing that the rains would not soon relent, I forded out into the slushy brown aqueduct where the temple lane had once been. By the time I had jogged and splashed my way home, I received nothing but a lot of odd stares, numerous attempts to sell me extortionately priced umbrellas, and an eye infection for my troubles.

I thenceforth adhered to a policy of going nowhere more than 700 yards from my or Girlface's houses when there were any clouds out whatsoever, and no more than 400 yards if the clouds were a bit on the dark side. I thus comfortably spent most of the rest of my two-week stay in one haveli or the other watching sheets of rain fall into the courtyards and ducking between drain spouts on the way between the sitting rooms and the kitchens. A recurring nuisance was the entrance of desperate cows taking shelter from the rains, often for hours at a time, in the front room of my house, where they would stand dripping and mooing until they felt like going home, wherever that was. Needless to say I would have ejected them with great swiftness and prejudice back into the rains if I wasn't forbidden from doing so by my Hindu hosts. On the other hand, a similar compassionate line of reasoning prevented Girlface's parents from ejecting me into the streets to go home, so I guess that balances things a little.

The rains would often start in the morning and continue until dusk, so I had great reserves of time to waste on things like teaching my host's seven-year-old son how to hit the girls next door with paper airplanes, throwing bad mangoes at bats, and becoming distressingly familiar with the cast and plots of multiple Hindi-language soap operas. When the alternative is walking through murky, road obscuring waters where you know there's a giant heap of sticky animal shit lurking like a harbor mine every five paces, domesticity becomes surprisingly engaging.

Now, friends, let me tell you some things about the future. The Ghostface Buddha Hellraising Ticket (my Indian visa) expires in August, so I was not going to waste my last weeks in this country watching midday reruns of Jhansi ki Rani that even I've already seen. I made two momentous decisions for the future of the Ghostface Buddha endeavor.

1) To spend the month of August on some cockamamie adventure in a far-flung corner of India, monsoon be damned.

2) That just because my Indian visa expires doesn't mean I have to then make myself useful. The Indian government has effectively given me that timeless instruction to malingering deadbeats everywhere, "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

I shall elaborate on #2 at greater length later but for now #1 is what concerns us. For various reasons I had been doing some reading on India's most remote Union Territory, a place I had no plan of visiting until recently, and I was suddenly hit by a flash of my irrepressible brilliance.

"Hey Girlface," I said "would you like to join me on a trip to some remote tropical islands thousands of kilometers into the sea during the middle of the Indian Ocean monsoon?"

"Can we do something that isn't stupid?" She asked.

"Absolutely not."

"Well, OK."

Next time on GFB: Ghostface Buddha and Girlface go to... the Andaman Islands!

La La La La 2

2010-07-30T16:54:00.003+05:30

2 Much La

Rebuffed in my plans to visit Kashmir by Orwellian forces intent on bringing all movement in the Kashmir valley to a standstill simply because of a few riots and murders, I was faced with an ugly truth: the only other way out of Ladakh was to repeat the long slog over the mountains back to Manali. Another ugly truth was that violence between the power of the State and its abused citizenry is both cyclical and futile for all concerned, but really, if you've seen the condition of the highway on the way to Manali you'd know which is the greater injustice.

So I booked a ticket on a van going back over the 475km of high passes and barren wilderness, but at least I knew what to expect, and knew how to prepare so the ride would be more comfortable.

2 hours before beginning what was supposed to be the 19-hour journey over already-nausea-inducing altitudes, I began my monthly schedule of unprovoked vomiting. This, clearly, was not going to be good. So it was that at 2 in the morning I found myself boarding a van to drive up the Indus River in the dead of night, at least with the good fortune of having the front seat, which is very useful for suddenly bailing out and puking. The front seat, however, comes with responsibilities, the most important of which is staying awake to keep an eye on the driver and make sure that he also remains conscious. Furthermore, you have to act as a kind of co-pilot, attending to all the driver's needs so as to preserve as much of his physical and mental stability as possible while your lives are in his hands. This, I discovered, includes acting as a foster mother to the driver's endless chain of cigarettes, not only lighting them but giving them the requisite starter tokes for a satisfying burn. After the seventh or so cigarette I partially smoked for this guy, I could tell it was not going to reduce the rate of pukage, which was becoming a constant inconvenience. I can't say it was all bad. Curling on your hands and knees, pathetically prostrating yourself while you disgorge a plethora of colorful fluids into a pile of sand at 16,000 feet can even be a learning experience. For instance, until about 8 that morning I had no idea that the pea curry I consumed the night before had contained solid pieces of red pepper.

Here is a brief summary of events at the four major passes between Kullu and Ladakh:

Tanglang La (~5300m): Vomit
Lachulung La (~5000m): Vomit
Baralacha La (~4700m): No vomit, but ohhhhhhh boy, read on
Rohtang La (~3900m): No vomit, but again, read on

Despite my (and others') frequent emergency stopping of the vehicle, we were making pretty good time, mostly because our 16-year-old driver was apparently determined to be the first Ladakhi to achieve powered flight in a MaxiCab. By midday, things started getting a lot uglier. First, as we approached the Lachulung La, we stopped at an army camp for a break, during which one Israeli passenger felt like she had to collapse and stupidly decided to take a nap in the middle of the road and was almost forcibly evacuated on an army convoy. At the same time a fellow American passenger developed intense altitude sickness requiring medical intervention, while I wandered off and discovered the second-worst toilet in all of India.

Coming as it does so near the end of my journey, this assessment carries some serious weight. The worst toilet in India, which is in a class of its own, is a public facility near the Taj Mahal, and cannot even be safely approached because it is surrounded by about an acre of festering human and animal faeces and islands of swarming maggots, whose crunchy bodies serve as the only stepping-stones across the putrid morass of festering shit. The toilet in question here at the Pang army camp by contrast looks like a harmless if utterly basic tin shack on the sand from afar, but when approached reveals itself to be a horrific entrance into a terrible new world, like the titular garment-holder in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but smaller and more rancid. The world this toilet leads to is a perverse mirror-reality where people dig holes in outhouses to throw rubbish into, and then shit in precise, strategic patterns around the periphery of the revolting cavity. This forces the unfortunate visitor to treat the floor of the shack as a balance-challenging, extremely high-stakes Twister mat. In C.S. Lewis's world, when the children return from their exploits as heroes of Narnia, they find that they haven't grown a day older. Returning through the dimensional warp-barrier at the edge of the Pang gentlemen's outhouse, one instead finds that he has been aged by many years.

After convincing the army that our unconscious Israeli companion lying corpse-like under a sheet in the highway was neither a security threat nor a medical emergency, we tore ass across the most remote reaches of the highway in the trans-Himalayan wilderness as we rushed to get our actual medical emergency case to the oxygen machines at the military camp on the other side. When we arrived hours later, our American friend was in what looked like serious misery and got whisked directly into a green aluminum hospital shed. I apparently looked like hell too because the soldiers in charge were giving me the look-over as well, but I reassured them that my case was one I had to resolve on my own, and promptly vomited just outside the door to the Officer's Mess. Heh.

Not long after this emergency stop, our oxygen-infused companion now feeling much better, we stopped for food at a tent camp just below the snows of the Baralacha La. Finally I felt I had purged myself enough to tempt fate and down a few biscuits and some chai, huddling with some other passengers in a yurt-like dhaba. We hear some sort of commotion in the distance. What could it be? Shepherds pursuing spooked goats? An obscure dispute among nomads? No. Our driver suddenly burst into our yet and began excitedly narrating something in Hindi. I pieced together the core of it, which was "Our American girl just [did X] right in the middle of the other dhaba!" The next minutes would reveal that my guessing was correct, and "[X]" was "...dropped her jeans and took a shit all over the floor..." Poking my head out of the tent, I could see that the entire community had mobbed around our van and were making good their threat that we would be going absolutely nowhere until we attended to cleaning the outrage. I believe the peak of surreality for the day was achieved about the time we parted the picket line to escort the offender back to the other yurt with a plastic shovel and a fuel can full of ice water in her hands as if we were scabs breaking a strike at the Indo-Tibetan Sewage Workers' Union.

After that, there were no great biological disasters on the trip. Indeed, from that point forward the only impersonal scientific phenomena that antagonized us were of a purely geological nature.

We crossed the snowbound Baralacha La without incident and entered into the state of Himachal Pradesh and the Lahaul valley. Lahaul, which I had largely missed out on the last time due to sleepiness, was as stunningly alpine as anywhere deeper into the mountains. As the final valley beneath the spine of the Great Himalayas, it gets pretty much all of the rain and snowfall that somehow manages to get past the rain shadows of the more southerly mountain ranges. The result is that though it also lacks much in the way of major plants, the incredibly steep sides of the valley are lush by comparison with Ladakh, covered in glistening wet grass and punctuated with tumbling waterfalls and narrow glaciers hanging to the rock face disconcertingly like frozen snot on a shivering brat waiting for a midwinter school bus. Paradoxically, the closer the road got to ‘civilization’ (meaning the bulk of India), the worse surface conditions became, as we drove deeper into the fringes of the Subcontinent that was now being battered and muddied by the monsoon. By the time we were ascending the final pass, the infamously foul-weathered Rohtang La that traditionally serves as the cut-off point not only of the summer rains but also of Indian civilization, the highway had deteriorated into a sloppy, mud-spattering quagmire. We crossed the pass as dusk crept over the verdant, forested mountains of the Kullu valley and cheered that the trip was finally coming to an end and we would soon be all effortlessly sitting on pillowed benches listening to reggae and “Indian fusion” techno in Old Manali pizzerias. That is, we would have been, if a 300-meter length of road hadn’t just fallen right off the side of the mountain.

We found ourselves stalled in the darkness, our second night aboard the godforsaken van, getting shouted at by army engineers telling us where to back up and park for the night so that the excavators and bulldozers could get through and open some sort of pedestrian opening in the morning. There was no question of driving to Manali: the road wasn’t just blocked, it was fucking gone, and there wouldn’t be any way for vehicles to pass for days. (Little did we know, this same landslide was causing havoc for a scheduled Aishwarya Rai film shooting team trapped on the other side…oh Aishwarya, how the stars have crossed us again…). The Army announced that in the morning, when it would be light enough to begin dynamiting (because you need visibility to flee boulders being loosened from unexpected angles), they would try and force open a passage for people to cross on foot so that they could be picked up by vehicles on the other side and taken into the valley. Until then, well, we could sleep, again, in the fucking van.

Dawn broke around five, several hours after most of the passengers’ fragile composures had done the same. We got out to make our inquiries among the breakfasting platoons of soldiers, and it became clear that we were going nowhere soon. In the course of the night, several more minor landslides had occurred (luckily, none on our MaxiCab), meaning that the work was likely to be more delicate than expected, and we could expect a laborious but doable foot-crossing of the slide area (so they claimed) shortly before nightfall. We evaluated the prospect of spending an entire day sitting at the pass with nothing but expeditions to the summit for noodle-shops to while away the hours and the unacknowledged likelihood that we would actually be spending a third night about the goddamn van. Unanimously, we declared “Fuck. That.”, and began gathering out luggage for a hike, not across the slide zone, but directly down the side of the damn mountain, not stopping until we would again make contact with the road and somehow get a vehicle up there to come get us the hell off of Rohtang mountain. We made rather humorous figures as we tromped, slipped, and tumbled down the edge of the mountain. I merely had half a bag full of hardcover books I had intended to sell in Manali weighing me down. On the other hand, the incredibly stereotypical troupe of California backpackers accompanying me on the scramble down the rain-slickened boulders were attempting to make the descent with guitars, bongo drums, dream catchers, a poorly disguised bong, finger-cymbals, and a five-foot didgeridoo swaying from their luggage, making their pratfalls are the more frequent and melodious.

Finally we reached a loop in the highway on the mountainside near the village of Marhi, and had nothing but praise for the vulture opportunism of the Indian jeep-wallahs who were so enterprisingly waiting for people to clamber down the mountain. We arrived in Manali by mid-morning, a full 33 hours after leaving Leh, and I immediately found my much needed respite in the company of some exuberantly orange-clad Dutch girls, an uncertain quantity of beer, and some bitchin’ pizza.

My trip through the Himalayas was over, and though this made me a little sad, I have other places to go, and I was sure I had seen enough of mountain passes for quite a while. G'z up, La’z down while you motherfuckers bounce to this.

Oh Let The Sun Beat Down On Some Other Bastard's Face

2010-07-28T12:07:00.001+05:30

When wandering the world for extended periods, one occasionally runs into conflicting motives, such as "Should I spend the better part of the week travelling on foot between remote Dard villages, or should I bum around Leh doing nothing so that I can watch the final stages of the World Cup?" I found this quandary simple to resolve. I have been a lifelong fan of the Netherlands football team, while I can't say that I like yak milk and barley porridge all that much. In this time, I managed to accomplish extraordinary amounts of fuck-all. One day I was encouraged to go to the nearby Tibetan refugee town for a celebration of the Dalai Lama's birthday, but decided to sleep in when I heard there was no shade and no snacks. This decision became irrevocable when it was announced that His Holiness was flying in to attend in person. Ghostface Buddha and the Dalai Lama should simply not be in the same place at the same time, for the same reason that Bruce Willis and Vladimir Putin should never be left in a crowded room: a brutal clash of raw charisma, numerous civilian casualties, and at least one person staked through the heart by a billowing, bullet-ridden flag.

My stay in Leh, however, had reached that point where I had been there so long that every huckster on the street knew my face and was beginning to take it as a personal insult that I ignored their thinly veiled entreaties to have a cup of tea and discuss the retail price of hashish day after day. It was time to leave, so I set my sights down the mountains to the west, to the (in)famous Vale of Kashmir. Despite the inconvenience of travelling around a virtual police state covered in barbed wire, where you don't walk the streets at night because the darkness makes it too hard to see which way the hand grenades are bouncing, I was prepared to go. I even reconciled myself to the guaranteed ubiquity of Kashmiri hustlers, the most obnoxious and gratingly loquacious class of people this side of the Moroccan silver bazaars. Then, the very morning I was to leave for the waystation town of Kargil (a place best known for being the fulcrum of 1999's inane but potentially calamitous Indo-Pak mountain war), the police in the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar shot and killed a number of young street protesters, and half the state was immediately placed under 24-hour lockdown. This was an unnaceptable problem for me, not because I was concerned with confronting the police (indeed, the Amsterdam Police Department, the Romanian Immigration Police, the municipal police of Sofia [Bulgaria], the US Department of Homeland Security, the Grand Ducal Police of Luxembourg, and the Guatemalan and Turkish armies have all tried to lock me up without success), but because I needed unrestricted access to a pub where I could watch the World Cup Final.

Speaking of which, the solution to another of my problems would have been to send that nimble goal-scoring bastard Andres Iniesta to Kashmir in my stead. But let us speak no more of that match.

Anyways, that I why Ghostface Buddha did not go to the fabled Kashmir valley. The sun will not, as Led Zeppelin rather vaguely suggest, beat down upon my face, and there won't be any stars to fill my dream. That's what hallucinogens are for. "But Ghostface? You said Jammu & Kashmir was the last state you were going to visit, and if you aren't seeing any more of it, does that mean this journey is...over?"

No. J&K may be the last Indian state I visit, but I never said anything about Union Territories!

4:20 Abuse Semantics Every Day. PEACE

Independence Day

2010-07-24T19:55:00.004+05:30

It all began (this twisted saga of war with cows) many months ago on a backstreet in Vrindavan, when the vile cows of India launched their scheme to subjugate or eradicate the will of the last man who could shatter their tyranny. Little did Ghostface Buddha then know that far away, in the craggy, thunder-echoing redoubts of the Court of the Cow King, an ominous scene was unfolding...

.....

"Could it be?" Flodp, the Cow King asked his assembled ministers.

Borf, High Prophet of the Bovinae, swirled his tongue over the Amethyst Orb and lowed the ancient incantation of the Scarlet Heiffer. Thick, cud-speckled saliva dribbled down the sides of the Amethyst Orb. Borf squinted his dull, egg-like eyes on the resulting trickle stains. The augurs of the drool could not be worse. "Without a doubt, my liege, the Ghost-faced One walks this kingdom's roads."

"Then there is nothing for it but to make battle. Summon the Council of Beasts at once! We shall need every able-bodied cow, buffalo, camel, goat and whatever other minions we may summon to face this threat... and if the beasts do not comply, remind then the price of defying the King of Cows. In the meantime, we will address this 'Ghost-head' threat with... special measures."

.....

His name was Mog, elder by moments of the Assassin Twins of Braj, the most feared cows in Hindustan. He crept silently through the alleys of Vrindavan to where Ghostface Buddha sat on a stoop, eating one of his first ever lunches of rotis and dal. He approached, as delicately as a cow had ever approached anything before. Stealth was Mog's specialty. But, no! A step too far! Before the fatal lunge could be administered, Ghostface Buddha felt hot and heavy breath upon his neck...

"What do you want, you fat fuck?" Ghostface sputtered through his lentils.

The moment was lost. Mog knew he had failed, and this failure would cost him his life. Maybe not today... he was, after all, the most shadowy and ruthless killer in cowdom, but they would get him eventually. The power of the Cow King cannot be defied, except by one... the Ghost-faced. Mog looked with sad envy upon Ghostface Buddha who, though he did not know it, possessed a power and a gift of which Mog could only dream: the power of Freedom. "Well, I won't make it easy for them" Mog said. He thrust his face into Ghostface Buddha's own and with a lunge of his snout spilled the bowl of dal all over the alley pavement.

"You fucking son of a fuck bitch!" Ghostface Buddha exclaimed.

I've warned him the only way I can, thought Mog, and he turned and sauntered off, at cow pace, into the billowing clouds of the village dust, off into the endless fields of India where a cow might wander lost for aeons, and off into Oblivion.

As Mog began his long shuffle into perdition he spared hardly a thought for his twin, Doooo the Deadly. At that very moment, Doooo was closing on his prey, who had returned to the city of Mathura. Doooo never much resembled his twin. In cow-school, when Mog would be lurking in tall fields of corn silently noting and making order of the movements of local goats he planned to visit upon in the night for unspeakable horrors, Doooo would be at the feed-trough, headbutting his classmates in the testicles. Doooo could not be said to have many skills, but what he did, he did well. On the streets of Mathura, as Ghostface Buddha blithely squeezed his way through the sweltering, camel-clogged consumer electronics bazaar, Doooo caught sight of his target. Doooo was impelled towards his mark not by the requirements of his mission or any broad sense of duty, but by pure, blind, ball-busting instinct.

When he connected, the reaction was instant. "Jesus Fuck!", Ghostface Buddha shouted to anyone who could hear him over the market din. With the brutal effortlessness of an action trained into perfection so that it came to him no harder than breathing, Doooo lifted Ghostface Buddha onto his face by the scrotum and rammed his flailing cargo through the crowd, impressing upon anyone in a reflective mood where the word bulldozing really comes from.

What happened next no Indian cow could have foreseen, and Doooo was not a cow oft given to foresight. Using Doooo's horns as handles, the plucky human regained a semblance of balance, turned, and after a moment's pause smacked Doooo across the face with a muttered "Jesus... fuck off, you fat prick." A slap across the face? Inconceivable! Doooo was gripped by the deepest confusion, which admittedly was not all that deep, for let us remember that Doooo was a cow. However, even Doooo saw the writing on the wall, knowing what his brother and every animal in India knew all too well, and fled into the dust and chaos. He left in the wake of his flight nothing but an echo... an echo of the Bitch-Slap Heard Around The World.

.....

Many months passed and many beasts withered in shame. The first great loss was felt by the mercenary camels of the Thar Desert. Before long even the elephants were panicking enough to waver in their unsought alliance, being forced to bring ever larger and more fabulous gifts to stave off the growing restlessness of the Council of Beasts and the murderous glare of Flodp, King of Cows. As the war grew more desperate and the Guardian Cows at the very extremes of India fell one by one, and rumors of cows even being spat on from the roofs of moving vehicles filtered into Flodp's black citadel, a sense of doom washed across the heart of cowdom.

Borf, the Cow-Prophet spoke "There is yet hope... "we have yet to awaken the Beasts of Nubra."

"The Beasts of Nubra? Ha! They haven't been seen out of their valley in nearly a thousand years! I should hardly call that a 'hope'!" bellowed Flodp with a roar of gas and sputum that only a King of Cows can muster. Along with that he unleashed a methaneous tremor so rancid that even the fear-frozen Council of Beasts found themselves taking an involuntary step back.

"Nevertheless, my lord, once the Beasts of Nubra cross the Khardung La, there is nothing even this 'Ghostface Buddha' can do to stop us!"

.....

So it was a real bitch for them that at that very moment Ghostface Buddha was crossing the Khardung La in the other direction, wasn't it?

.....

North of Leh and the Indus Valley, at the very extreme of what you could conceivably call India, lies the Nubra Valley, a fork-shaped sliver of rubble and sand trapped between the Ladakh mountain range and the mighty Karakoram in the heart of Asia. A treacherous journey in one direction might lead you over the Himalaya to the riches (and rices) of India; another over glaciers and desert to reach the fabled road to China; and yet another to the ever-remote Central Asian mountain chiefdoms of the Karakoram, the Tian Shan, the Pamirs, and the Hindu Kush. The Beasts of Nubra are a herd of of long-abandoned high-altitude, two-humped Bactrian camels formerly used on the Silk Road, for fuck's sake. This is a place so damn far into nowhere that even the camels haven't wandered off in the last several centuries. It's as far north as you can go in India and even still it would be damn near impossible to reach if the Indian Army hadn't built a ludicrous road through here to supply its battle posts on the Siachen Glacier, the world's highest, most treacherous, and most utterly fucking ridiculous battle line. And to get to this marvelous little patch of desert between its walls of rock and ice you have to go over said army road, the highest in the world, over the Khardung La.

As Ghostface Buddha rocked, restricted area permit in hand, in his jeep seat while the vehicle climbed the staggering 5600 meters of the pass, he could feel the air grow thin and the road ominously icy. A heavy snowstorm coated the windows with white blots and the abandoned hulks of cargo trucks that never made it over that top were a vivid reminder that his luggage would be very heavy if he had to hump it down the mountain on foot through puddles of ice water and 60% oxygen deprivation. At 5600+ meters after a short trudge uphill from the road, Ghostface Buddha found himself standing in the snow at an altitude higher than all but two peaks in North America, all but one peak in Africa, and any point in Australia, Europe, or Antarctica. Thousands of feet below, yaks grazed on alpine moss and eagles fidgeted awkwardly as they flew from the deeply unsettling feeling of having humans watching them from above. Seeing Ghostface Buddha descend the snowfields on the far side of the pass, a light bulb may have lit in the yaks' heads and they may have thought "Oh, shit." On the other hand, yaks are not very excitable so they may have just thought "Hrrmmmmmm... wonder what that's all about? Ah, who gives a fuck? Where some more moss at? I'm a yak."

.....

Contrary to the expectations of the Cow King's baffled court, Ghostface Buddha once again wandered about a deelpy cow-critical area, apparently at his leisure, visiting the desolate Panamik hot springs at the northernmost civilan access point in India and dispatching the Last Cow In India posted there with little but a cursory slap on the belly and some choice words about forcing him to cross a big fuck-off 18,000+ft. mountain for the privilege. He then hobbled about the Diskit and Surmur monasteries, which he thought were alright, and killed time by chatting up the traditionally-clothed Tibetan village girls. This time he had the unsolicited "assistance" of his friend Sandeep, who was translating the Ghost's speech into Hindi, a language native to nobody for 500 miles.

"What is he doing?" The Cow Wizards mumbled in their cabal. "Are we really to be undone by this... fool???"

All day and night as Ghostface Buddha crisscrossed the Nubra Valley he left its camels in peace. He opted instead to scour the village of Hunder for a television on which to watch what became Germany's epic World Cup drubbing of Argentina and the final melting of Diego Maradona's last curdling, runny reserves of dignity. Much contented by this sight, GFB and Sandeep returned to their tent.

The summer sun rose early on that next, fateful day, July the 4th. And what did Ghostface Buddha see by dawn's early light? The entire herd of Nubra Bactrian camels.

"WHO DARES DEFY US, IN THIS, OUR ANCIENT VALLEY?!?" a massive camel groaned, its two empty humps flopping to either side like smelly sweatshirts slowly falling off the back of a couch. "HOW DARE YOU ENTER THE NUBRA VALLEY WITH THE FALL OF BEASTS IN YOUR MIND?!?"

.....

"How indeed dare I?" Ghostface Buddha began...

"How dare I tread so many miles on the soil given to all creatures great and small? How dare I pimp-slap the cows that aggress upon me so far and wide? How dare I stand before this double-humped magistrate of wickedness and assert that I was born a free man, beholden to neither man nor beast, and owe nothing to account to any ruminating quadruped armada or its spit-slinging desert lackeys?

"This, gentlefucks, is the Fourth of July, a day when free men in wigs affirmed what I tell you now: that even Man shall not rule over men, and that by extension men most certainly can not -will not- be ruled by crude mercenaries-for-hire whose principal occupation is stirring clouds of sand with their farts.

"I hold that all men are created equal, and that notwithstanding certain mystical revelations of greater venerability than validity, cows, goats, camels, mules, buffaloes, and all their like are in fact not equal but merely a bunch of trife bitches. I hold these truths to self-evident to anyone whose cerebral lobes outnumber their stomachs. And so that government for the people and by the people might not perish from this Earth, I have had to bitch-slap a few dumbass animals in my time.

"How dare I defy you? The question, I think, is how dare you challenge me? No, not 'How dare you?'...'Why dare you?'. Though the sweet language of Liberty may fall upon ears deaf to its subtle harmonies, the delicate curl, glide, and stop of the tongue as it utters the word Freedom, it should be at least clear to any beast high or low that you have chosen, of all possible candidates, the absolute worst bastard to fuck with.

.....

Falling upon the Nubra camels like an ice-hemmed boulder in the spring thaw, Ghostface Buddha left not a one without memories of the back of Ghostface Buddha's hand and a grave insult to its soul. Casting his gaze over the defeated, collapsing bodies in that sandy valley floor at the very ends of the Indian world, he gave the Nubra Bactrian camels, the Cow King's dark wizards, and all Indian beasts some final words, never to be forgotten.

"This is Independence Day."

"...And FUCK cows.

Fear And Loathing In Ladakh

2010-07-21T12:48:00.007+05:30

Another depraved day dawns... I'm holed up in a Ladakhi family's guest room with a moaning South Indian engineering graduate named Sandeep, and I've just learned the Telugu words for "My god, I'm about to vom' something the size of a papaya", or possibly "Fuck the parademics. I'm flipping this stew pot in Hell."

I'll never forget the look on that saddhu jackass's face when he left the bar last night. Oh, and just what is a Hindu holy man doing walking out of a Tibetan pub in those dogfight-behowled hours of the darkness? Being a self-worshiping rat-fucker, that's what. It's almost a bad joke -a tourist, a drunk, and a saddhu walk into a bar... We're watching the World Cup, by the way. This is a subject on which the locals are keen to offer chestnuts of footballing wisdom after glimpsing a fluff piece on David Beckham on E! News India. That such a program exists is only further proof that this entire planet will be destroyed in a massive crisis of socio-moral neglect long before the first Chinese nuke hits Tokyo (Japan gets it again. Life's a bitch). Visions of nuclear holocaust and subsequent Godzilla vs. Mutant Hello Kitties of spectacular post-apocalyptic futility aside, I had the more immediate gripe of a smug baba on my hands, itching at me like those lifeforms that lay their eggs in plates of village-saloon chowmein. The game's about to start, and despite the fact that it involves the Slovaks (a most redundant variety of the Slavs if there ever was one -have you ever heard the term "Slovak exceptionalism"?- I thought not), it at least gave me the chance to root against the Italian team and spit a little in my beer at the sight of Fabio Cannavarro's troll-distressingly ugly head. So, getting back to the main track of things, in comes this baba who looks like he hasn't seen anything but the undersides of the floorboards in an opium-dealing snow leopard's stash cave in the last half decade. He sits down, looks at the pub TV for about five seconds and announces "Slovakia will beat Italy 3-2", a rather specific and unlikely prospect. Then, he sanctimoniously orders a chai from the bartender and shuffled on his bench to a spot behind a pillar with an Avril Lavigne poster on it, and proceeds not to watch a moment of the damn game.

Slovakia beat Italy 3-2.

This, I felt, was a twinkling of hope in the oppressively deterministic world our planet is becoming. But then this motherfucker, this baba, rises up like an overly-content gerbil lying on a baking pastry in the oven and says "Slovakia 3; Italy 2" and leaves, and just then I remember there actually is no justice on this Earth since the birth of the human beast, and ahahaha guess what? right now somebody's probably busy raping the Congo.

This is the spirit in which I awoke to my puking roommate, and the spirit in which I was preparing to embark on another day, visiting indices Ba.-Ch. of the Ladakh Encyclopaedia Of Indistinguishable Buddhist Monasteries. In a cruel twist of destiny, Sandeep was as masochistically into monastery-hopping as I am. I forget which monastery we were going to that day. But then again I forget a lot of things now, like the reason I ever came to a country where Cruelle and Numerous Gods forbid you from eating beef, and for how many days I've been wearing the same pair of tamarind-encrusted boxer shorts (that by itself being a wretched tale too devoid of virtue for the telling).

So we left for this monastery -which one matters about as much as which side of the bed Hugh Hefner decided to shit on this morning- and we no doubt admired it greatly while at the same time mentioning to eachother in very tentative language that we despised our selves. I don't think it was Shey monastery. Shey monastery was the least pleasant and most unedifying of the bunch. This was partly because Sandeep and I had to walk five miles across a shimmering desert road in a desolate, arid mountain wasteland to a hopeless village that looked like it would have been full of strip malls and sand wholesalers if the entire populace hadn't blinked at the crucial moment when some Promethean, Asian god poofed into materiality by the roadside and said "One, two, three, I show you... Commerce!". Shey monastery is a nondescript, whitewashed Tibetan pile with a second-rate giant Buddha inside, and is surrounded by Ladakh's biggest stupa field. This merely means a large concentration of extra-crumbly iterations of those same ubiquitous, highly unfascinating displays of devotion that dot the Ladakhi landscape the way that ill-painted crosses dot South Carolina. The funny thing about the cross is that until Jesus got his carpenter self nailed up there, the structure had no more religious significance than Chapter 1 of Woodworking For Dunces. Imagine if Jesus was condemned to be nailed onto existing religious iconography and they pinned him to a 20-foot Buddha in the "Have No Fear" pose. Now that would have been something.

Before Shey we had been in Tikse. To that extent, Tikse is to blame for luring us into close proximity with Shey, Shey's only restaurant, and Shey's only restaurant's gallingly rustic two-storey latrine. You read that correctly. Tikse on its own merits, however, is at least a dozen times better than Shey because it contains friendly monks, several large and rich prayer halls, fantastic views across the Indus valley, and a gargantuan bejeweled Maitreya Buddha that is literally the face of Ladakh's tourism promotion efforts. Perhaps the reason the monks are so friendly has to do with what Sandeep and I found on the roof: a box of broken glass, in particular, broken liquor bottles. To a shard -this would be far too inane a joke to bother concocting from thin air- the broken glass belonged to discarded bottles of Old Monk rum.

Let's see...so one day we also went to Thak Thog monastery. What a letdown. We get there on this obscure little road, having already misdirected ourselves on every half-visible cowpath in the Chemrey valley to see this Thak Thog because it has a special Buddhist cave. Then we get there, and the cave joint is closed. It was about to open in a week when the monks make their much-celebrated annual return to monastic duties. "Yuppp, I'm a monk, just gonna open the crib for spring worship...in July". Good fucking gracious, no wonder the Theravada school of Buddhism argues it takes millions of lifetimes to attain Enlightenment. They must have been observing these guys. These Mahayana-branch monks on the other hand are clearly striving for Truth on the assumption that it leaves time for deep-sea fishing. Incidentally, while at Thak Thog I also had to relieve myself next to some horrible desert plant that must be Tibet's answer to the saguaro cactus. So now you know.

Chemrey monastery is in the Chemrey valley too, though rumor is that they actually had to secretly change the name and burn the old records because in context being called the Lower Hudson monastery just sounded fucking stupid. It's got a great hill-perch, great views, a little museum with some fabulous cloth paintings. You should go there, if only because I've wasted my life visiting obscure Asian worship venues and I want someone to talk to.

Ohhh, and Alchi monastery, what fine memories I have of you. Alchi is famed for containing "some of the greatest art treasures in Asia", and fondly recalled for doing nothing superfluously awful to me. Also -and I mean this as a compliment, Alchi, in a way- never before have I seen a place so perfectly encapsulated by its Wikipedia page.

Hemis monastery, that's the famous one. It's apparently the place to be if you're the type to pore over calendars and show up at monasteries on the dates of traditional dancing festivals to get Rich, Vibrant Photographs with a hundred SLR-toting, L.L. Bean Brigade members scratching their cellulite in the background of every shot. We, however, did not arrive on such a day, which was for the best because that day the whiskey-hashish dialectic was really revealing the shocking and sordid material history of Buddhism in a vivid way. Really talking to a motherfucker, right through the vindictive seismic anomaly in the sonofabitch's cranium, y'know? Hemis has the largest (and probably most interesting) monastic museum of them all, but it was the "largest" aspect that directly concerned me as I painfully shuffled back towards the water closet by the entrance, desperate to forestall the spontaneous disintegration of my physical being by expelling the contents of my neutron-emitting stomach in an as-yet-to-be-determined direction up or down my digestive tract (it was up).

Then, finally there was Likkir monastery. We perused a collection of Tibetan tantra paraphernalia. There was one bowl made out of a polished fucking human skull. I looked at this for a moment, then pulled out my guitar, shredded a death metal solo in like five different time signatures, and rode a fuck-train all over the summoned Valkyries while the local lamas pounded gongs until the moment of climax.

Everything except that last sentence is absolutely true- the deranged and aimless wanderings of a man for some reason trying to rationally categorize a bunch of monasteries in one lost corner of this deranged and aimless world.

The Princess Is In This Castle

2010-07-16T13:44:00.003+05:30

"We're in Aghanistan!" Sandeep shouted.
"Well, I wouldn't go that far..."
"No! It is just like that movie...Body Of Lies! Have you seen Afghanistan in that? It is exactly like here!"

He kind of had a point. From where we were standing, the city of Leh did have a certain Afghan appearance, save for the fact that the large painted Buddha on the hillside was not obscured by a thick cloud of dust and a crowd of black-turbaned Taliban snickering next to a TNT detonator like Wile E "the Mad Mullah" Coyote.

The people of Ladakh - the Ladakhis - are quite similar to Tibetans but not exactly. They have their own language, costumes, and a slightly different majority sect of Buddhism. It all gets a little confusing though with the number of Tibetan refugees that live around Leh as well, but there is one thing that is clear: they aren't "Indian". As I've mentioned before, they are proud to consider themselves the southeastern fringe of Central Asia, a claim that has some merit given that they are on the other side of the Himalayas from the rest of India, and there isn't a Hindu in sight except on the massive army bases. Most of all, the appearance of the land itself is Central Asian, a huge expanse of arid, craggy mountains capped with snow and dotted with isolated monasteries and the odd minaret. In fact, I was told that a number of movies set in Afghanistan have been shot here (on the other hand, the Times Of India reports that Richard Gere is shooting a film about Tibet here soon, God help the people of Ladakh).

There isn't much debate about what constitutes Leh's most striking feature; it's the palace. Right in the middle of town is a large, steep ridge with a ten-story palace on the tip. Supposedly, it's a miniature copy of the palace in Lhasa, Tibet, but since it has been completely denuded of paint it is now a hulking pile of bricks the exact color of every rocky crag for miles around, and makes it look more like a tyrant's mountain hall than a pleasure palace. Ladakh used to be its own semi-important kingdom, but thanks to a series of foolish wars that coincided with the underhanded advance of British control in the Himalayas, the royals got deposed, sent to their summer estate, and their kingdom handed over rather incongruously to the puppet rulers of Jammu and Kashmir, a bizarre political union that continues in republican form to this day. Long story short, the palace looks completely awesome looming over the city, but thanks to history now possess one of India's all-time boring interiors. There's no trace of the royalty, of art, or of anything other than plaster and bricks inside (other than one small temple chamber), for which the Archaeological Survey of India has the gall to charge a hundred rupees admission. The Leh palace is like a Bulgarian stripper: pleasing to the eye but best admired without paying to enter.

Sandeep and I ended up staying for the long term in a Ladakhi guesthouse in the old town, with fantastic views, a puzzling absence of tourists, and immediate proximity to the town football pitch, which revealed one of the great gulfs of opinion between Ladakhis and lowland Indians: Ladakhis, and especially Tibetans, love the vague patriotism of the World Cup sing-along "Waving Flag", and are even more enamored of the song which is surely to become the ultimate relic of 2010, "Waka Waka". Investigating this phenomenon further, I found that this song is less popular among mainstream Indians because "Shakira sings like a man." Well, I suppose you might hold this opinion if your male pop singers sound like women and the main qualification for female pop music in your society is the ability to murder a kitten at 2,000 yards.

Over the next several days Sandeep and I embarked on an extensive tour of Ladakh's numerous Buddhist monasteries. At the end of one such day we pulled up to the palace of Stok, which Sandeep swore up and down was actually supposed to be a monastery (though to be fair, Sandeep also swore up and down that the entire Tibetan Buddhist faith, and indeed every religion, is plagiarized from the Rig Veda). Not allowing this disagreement to deter him, he wandered around the "monastery" enjoying the palace-museum's exhibits with great interest, periodically coming over to me to ask in whispered tones "Why are there so many females allowed in this one?" Because I was busy I refrained from informing him that the females in question were members of the deposed Ladakhi royal family, who have taken it upon themselves to preserve the summer palace and the royal heirlooms as pieces of cultural heritage for the public. I must say, of my various encounters with deposed Indian royalty (that this has happened to me more than once is itself slightly remarkable), I must say that this was by far the most enjoyable, not least because one of the Princesses of Ladakh is quite the cutie.

Given this and my self-appointed mission of dashing adventure in India, I undertook as a matter of principle, and for your sake, my dear readers, to flirt with the Princess. Sandeep was still shuffling about, apparently engrossed by a display of semi-precious jewelry and wondering what possible use the monks could have for golden bangles, while I set myself the modest goal of hitting on the Princess until she laughed. It was to prove something of a challenge, as much of my charm comes at the expense of dignity, which I felt I had to preserve at all costs. Howevwe, comrades, I accomplished my goal fully, swiftly, and without a single reference to the excretory habits of cattle, finding myself soon engaged in a surprisingly vibrant conversation with a much-delighted and highly eligible royal. In fact, I seem to have been at least passingly amusing enough that I was told that if I wanted to converse more extensively (and observing full regal decorum), that I was welcome to ask permission for a chaperoned rooftop rendezvous from the Princess's mother. At this point however I had to politely decline, partly because Sandeep was finished talking to the palace's sole actual monk and was eager to leave, but mostly because if I actually had a flirtatious meeting on a royal balcony with an actual princess, regardless of how innocent the circumstances, Girlface Buddha would never let me live it down and I would be forced to spend untold amounts of time uttering trite apologies like "But you're my real princess..."

In any case, this is my triumphant story of how I captured just a sliver of the heart of a mountain princess. It helps, when flirting with royalty, that Ghostface Buddha is the King of Pimps. Kiss the ring.

La La La La Leh

2010-07-14T15:38:00.002+05:30

The state of Jammu & Kashmir consists of three parts: Jammu, which is essentially an extension of the Punjab and is full of Hindus and Sikhs; the Kashmir valley, best known for natural beauty, international jihadism, and Led Zeppelin songs; and Ladakh, which despite getting no love in the state's name actually comprises most of its territory. Ladakh is a vast, incredibly empty expanse of desert mountains and valleys on the far side of the Himalayas, wedged in between Hindu India, Tibet, and the Central Asian 'Stans. Most importantly, Ladakh is completely immune to the South Asian monsoon, which was heading towards the Kullu valley at an alarming pace for those of us without gills, so I booked a van up into the mountains with haste.

There are only two roads into all of Ladakh. One is a paved road up from the Kashmir valley that passes right by the Indo-Pak battle lines on the Line of Control, and the other is a notoriously rugged and remote road starting at the Rohtang La and going over the spine of the Himalayas, through hundreds of kilometers of nomad-populated mountain wilderness, and over high mountain passes including the world's second-highest stretch of road. Since I planned to visit Kashmir as well, the only question was which way around these two roads to go. Thinkly deeply on the question, I decided that if Lashkar-e-Toiba and their buddies in the Pakistani Taliban and paramilitary services decided to start lobbing artillery at the Kashmir-Ladakh road, as they do from time to time, it would be easier to dodge mortar fire running downhill. Thus did I embark on the epic, infamous slog from Manali to the Ladakhi capital of Leh.

The journey did not get off to a good start. My van was half an hour late in leaving. Admittedly, this was entirely my own fault, as I was standing right there watching the climactic overtime finish of the World Cup playoff between the USA and Ghana. I got on the bus, cranked with about a gallon of chai in my system, and instantly began to see the drawbacks of beginning journeys on chai-binges at 2:30AM when I had the mother of all sugar crashes as we wound our way up the godforsakenly long switchbacked road up the Rohtang La in the dead of night. [Oh, by the way, "La" means "pass", which I probably should have mentioned several posts ago].We stopped about halfway to the top, where we could see the lights of half the Kullu valley twinkling in the crisp night air. The mountainside was silent, save for the distant crashing of snowmelt waterfalls leaping off the cliffs, and the very close crashing of vomit waterfalls splashing around our shoes.

We reached the top of the Rohtang La in the wee-est hours, which is the way to do it, because unlike my previous passage the road was completely unblocked. There were no hordes of tourists trying to execute three-point turns over icy puddles in Suzuki town cars, no herds of ponies waiting for custom in the street, and no blindingly awful snowsuits threatening to distract the driver and plunge us all off a cliff. By the time we were halfway down the almost-as-interminable northern side of the mountain we were treated to a spectacular dawn view of the Lahaul valley, a sparsely settled, almost tree-less mountain valley that shimmers green with grasses clinging to the dark stone mountainsides and ice cream-like snow toppings dribbling down its peaks. This valley is defined by snowmelt. I assume that's what keeps the cliffsides green, and if you go two hundred yards without seeing a waterfall, it's only because a glacier is parking in the waterfall's spot. Unfortunately I missed most of the scenery in Lahaul because my chai-induced molecular decay had me slipping in and out of a half-sleep trance for the remainder of the morning.

At some point in the morning about seven hours after leaving Manali we stopped in the Lahauli capital of Keylong for breakfast and chai, of which I did not partake. Beyond Keylong is a whole lot of nothingness, marked by India's most famous highway sign, which announces that there will not be another petrol pump for 370 kilometers. As I faded into unconsciousness again we started the crawl up the second of the high passes on the journey, Baralacha La, which would take us over to the far side of the main range of the Himalayas. I woke up with a shiver as we got near the top. We were in a gigantic snow field, surrounded by nothing but dark pinnacles of rock capped in thick sheets of immaculate white snow. In case you haven't gotten the point, even at the end of June it was a memorably snowy place, and I have spent multiple winters in New England.

The fact that we had just crossed the Himalayas made little impression on us, as we were still not even halfway and the far side of the Himalayas actually consists of even more mountains and the road proceeds to get ever higher and rougher. Just after Baralacha La we crossed the state boundary into Jammu & Kashmir, but where we were exactly was an excellent question. If you look at Indian maps of the Himalayas, you will see that this area is somewhere in between Lahaul, Ladakh, and the ludicrously remote area of Zanskar, but none of the maps actually have any name for this area at all, and indeed depict nothing but a little red line twisting through a bunch of mountains. This is pretty much accurate. For hundreds of miles, there isn't so much as a village along this road. There are a handful of tent camps in the summer and two or three army stations along the way where understandably bored-looking soldiers tend to small medical posts and bulldozer maintenance shacks. Not even the Tibetan mountain peoples have seen fit to civilize this region. I have heard that some people call the area "Korzok" (a barbarian name if there ever was one), after the nomadic the region of the same name which is actually about a week's donkey ride away.

As the hours wore on and the afternoon stretched across the arid Trans-Himalayan wastelands with little other than the occasional nomad and his sheep to relieve the monotony, we all became extremely grateful that the Manali-Leh highway offers what is undoubtedly the most stunning, epic, and beautiful expanse of endlessly boring shit in the world. Once you've climbed over your twelfth pass and four-hundred-and-seventy-eighth switchback of the day, you begin to wish the dramatic vistas would just end for a second and you find yourself daydreaming about cloverleaf highway off-ramps with hundred-foot high signs for Denny's and Cracker Barrel beckoning in the distance.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention (it almost goes without saying) that for the vast bulk of its 474km length, the "highway" we are talking about consists of a single lane of dirt and rocks, punctuated by permafrost, ice puddles, and glacial streams running over the track. The only good thing you can say about the road itself is that it mostly manages to keep a reasonable margin of safety along deadly precipices. I have also excluded recounting a great deal of jovial quips and other bonhomie amongst the passengers of the van, because the circumstances warp one's perspective to find the utmost hilarity in remarks that are only the slightest bit relevant or amusing to people who are enduring the Manali-Leh bus together. Anyways, carrying on...

By the time we got to the third high pass, the 5000+ meter Lachulung La, the road had become almost Escher-like in its torturous geometry. It climbs up the side of valleys, through gorges, up serpentine slopes, and cuts into cliff-faces in such preposterous sequence that you half expect that getting back down the other side will require flooring the gas to clear a roller coaster style loop-de-loop carved into the hanging ice of a frozen waterfall. Sadly, there is no such contrivance, and you are merely forced to descend yet another freakshow of erosion, a veritable Barnum's circus of grotesque geological forces, to get to the other side.

The most terrifying part of the trip, paradoxically, is also the safest part. After many hours of alpine meandering you suddenly find yourself on a semi-paved, almost straight road running down the middle of a high-altitude valley called the More Plains. After 12 hours on some of the world's most painful roadway, the drivers can't resist gunning it and flying across the plains with reckless abandon, swerving dangerously to avoid stray boulders, broken culverts, and the odd herd of angora goats. On no account should you encourage the driver to slow down, or even ask for the day's 19th urine break, because THEY WANT TO MOVE GODDAMMIT, and when the same man is responsible for driving 19 hours straight over a dirt track that defies the laws of physics and human endurance, you should be prepared to indulge whatever keeps the driver at ease, even if it is allowing him to play teeny-bopper pop hits about first love on repeat. I'm not saying the choice is by any means a clear one, but the other option does happen to be death.

At long last, the road begins to gently rise on the side of the More Plains on its final ascent to the big boy itself, Taglang La. Taglang La, as every single person who has crossed it will gladly tell you, is the second-highest road pass in the world at some 5300 meters (17,000+ft.). When we reached the top just in time for a spectacular sunset, the sky streaked in dark hues of blue, purple, and grey.Below the wispy clouds far above in the atmosphere we had an uninterrupted view across the snow-capped peaks of the Zanskar mountains, the Ladakh mountains beyond that, and the saw-like profile of the mighty Karakoram on the horizon. I was gripped by the desire to whoop with joy, and even more gripped by the inability to do so because I felt like I was breathing from a helium balloon. The pass is at 5300 meters, whereas the unacclimated human body begins to suffer from altitude sickness at about 3500. Though I have spent much time in the mountains lately, I felt a slight shortness of breath, and strange dizziness with a rumbling headache and dryness of mouth that reminded me distinctly of many a Sunday morning recovering from the biochemical demands of a liberal arts education. My co-passengers, who were mostly on their very first venture up from the foothills, were not faring so well and were in various states of unconsciousness, misery, disorientation, high-energy experimental regurgitation, and conspicuous flatulence. *Sigh…*freshmen.

The remainder of the trip was made in the dark (again). We flashed down the northern side of the Taglang La in our van in much the same way that Donkey Kong and Indiana Jones traverse caves in a mining carts. Under the shroud of darkness we finally broke into the valley of the upper Indus river, the heart of Ladakh, and blindly passed by a number of fascinating things on our way to Leh...but the tales of those things are for another time. Just before midnight, when I was becoming finally convinced that my bladder, my pancreas, and at least one of my kidneys had been replaced by hacky sacks, we pulled into the bus lot at Leh. We were far too exhausted to take any stock of our surroundings, and splintered off to find just wherever the hell would let us sleep. I ended up in an alliance the van's token Indian passenger, a Hyderabadi named Sandeep (whose identity shall be concealed in this blog for his sake) and we ended up crashing in a Tibetan guesthouse.

I awoke the next day around noon. Sandeep would rise from sheer motionlessness and in complete misery at about six that evening, and by the time I returned at 8pm he had read the part of my guidebook that discussed a most interesting phenomenon he had never before heard of, but had certainly now experienced, called "Acute Mountain Sickness". Anyways, as I stepped out of the guesthouse that afternoon, I was more than a little curious to see the town I had gone to such lengths to reach, and what I saw...

...could only be described in the words in my next post. Laterz!

Bourgeoius Bonanza

2010-07-12T20:02:00.002+05:30

Many days after arriving in that uninspired dump, I was finally granted an escape from Kaza. The road out of the Spiti valley into Lahaul, and thence over another mountain range into civilization was finally cleared of snow (it being pretty near the end of June). I found a jeep full of equally impatient Tibetan people and got the hell out as fast as I could.

After several hours on Spiti's solitary road, we began the ascent of the Kunzum La, which served as a graphic explanation of why nobody lives in Spiti: getting there is just ridiculous. Though the road had supposedly been cleared, its appearance was that of a gouge in the side of the mountain created in an epic battle between a white-furred Godzilla and a Tibetan thunder god. Near the top the road was surfaced not with the usual combination of dust and loose rocks, but breadloaf sized boulders, running rivulets of snowmelt and sheets of permafrost. At the pass itself, a glistening snowfield graced by a handful of immaculate white stupas, we stopped to gawp and I took the oppurtunity to teach the ecstatic children in the jeep how to make proper snowballs and hit their uncles in the back of the head while they're not looking. Descending down the other side into the Lahaul valley, which is supposedly more civilized, it became abundantly clear that the people who say these things must be talking about an entirely different part of the Lahaul valley. The end up near the Kunzum La is a near-arctic wasteland of rocks and ice, with an abundance of pristine blue streams crashing over the rocks in front of the mouths of hulking grey glaciers.

Before we got to the part of Lahaul where people actually live, we took a turnoff for a much more notorious mountain pass: the Rohtang La. Over the Rohtang La lay the Kullu valley, the allegedly-idyllic mountain wonderland that has served as a setting for about 92% of all Bollywood dance scenes. The Kullu valley is the northernmost extension of what is traditionally regarded as India, those regions to the north of it being the domain of Buddhists or mountain-dwelling barbarians, depending on your prejudices. The name "Kullu" is actually a distant derivation of an ancient name meaning roughly "The End Of The Civilized World". This is a great name because it suits the worldview of the people on both sides. The Rohtang pass itself has an even better name; roughly, it means "The Giant Pile Of Corpses", so called because it has terrible weather and it kills people. Believe me, when thinking about the future composition of this post, I was quite certain I was going to make a terrible joke along the lines of "Roh-tang pass ain't nuthin' to fuck with". However, I soon discovered that Rohtang Pass is something you can and definitely should fuck with.

The first hint that something was off was when I saw someone zipping around the snowfiled at the top on a skidoo. "Fair enough," I thought, "someone with a sense of adventure." Then we rounded a bend and I was at a loss to describe what I was looking at.

It was quite possibly the most ridiculous place in all of India.

Around the corner, at the top of the pass on the side facing the Kullu valley, was a middling expanse of snow, and on that snow were about 20,000 Indian people, 19,873 of whom looked incredibly stupid.

Here's the thing about Rohtang: it is quite near Manali (our destination), the most popular domestic tourist hotspot in India; a middle-class wonderland of unbounded absurdity. It also A) has snow, and B) has a road, meaning that it is one of the few places in India where you can get to snow in the Indian vacation season without having to actually walk up a hill. Now, it cannot be said that Indians are lazy. Indeed, you can't help but be stunned by the amount of hard work that goes on in this country. Along any roadside in the area you can find confirmation that India has the world's largest and most active manual rock-breaking industry ("artisan rubble", I like to call it). However, it is true that middle-class Indians as a group are stunningly, jaw-droppingly disinclined to any form of physical exertion, especially non-religious activities that separate them from their Toyotas. So, that's why every Reebok store manager and makeup-rocking housewife in North India are simultaneously failing to fashion snowballs on top of the Giant Pile Of Corpses.

Quite aside from the fact that there were thousands of them, everyone there also looked utterly ludicrous. Snow, in the Indian mind, is basically a more romantic form of liquid nitrogen, requiring incredible precautions to venture into safely lest one's limbs be shattered into icy shards while making snow angels and then carried off into the wilds by leopards, leaving their former owners to stumble through the icy death-fields on a single leg all the way from the cotton-candy mixer to the chai stall. You could probably see the crowd on top of Rohtang La from space, not because the area is all that large, but because they are all wearing heavy-duty snowsuits the color of an industrial accident at the Froot Loops factory. Not only was everyone walking around in one-piece sealed jumpsuits as if they were going to climb Mount fucking Everest rather than munching roast corn and riding ponies that were being led around by local men in t-shirts, but these jumpsuits were also just outrageously hideous, a true horror of outlandish patterns. Vanilla Ice wouldn't be caught in one of those outfits if he was freezing to death on planet Hoth. In America, it would be illegal to wear these things outdoors in turkey season, because hunters would spot you instantly and then shoot you on purpose. Even worse than the jumpsuits were the minority of visitors who tried to class things up by arriving at the pass in fur coats. These fur coats were not actually fur, and looked rather more like bathrobes, or the product of a tragic time-travel/teleportation accident involving a Labrador retriever, a New Jersey carpet dealership, and Czar Ivan IV's court.

Manali was almost as ridiculous.

Manali, as I've mentioned, is a maelstrom of middle class; a sensory bombardment of bourgeois. I got out of New Manali as quickly as I could, for fear that my constant laughter would make me choke on my food. Beyond New Manali is of course Old Manali and a handful of other villages, where not a single Indian person stays, partially because there are no Punjabi restaurants, and partially because they are overrun by stoned people who think they're hippies and can't help entering into uninvited conversations with Indian newlyweds about the flaws of arranged marriage. The Kullu valley, by the way, is reputed to be the source of the world's best hashish, and has been one of the universe's focal points of loungeabout backpackerdom for decades. Between the Indian nouveau-riche and the Western psuedo-non-riche, few venture into the others' territory save for the odd inconveniently located temple or bus station. The exception to this are the local Pahari villagers who still amble about in traditional dress and drive tractors in the streets apparently unawares that their town has expanded hundredfold and most of the old fields are now covered by Kashmiri-run souvenir emporia, and for some reason the women walk around carrying extremely fat, fluffy bunnies. I, however, crossed the trench lines with impunity, and let me tell you, it was worth it.

Now, I may have just developed a peculiar sense of humor that makes me actually enjoy being in the company of hordes of Indian people being ridiiculous, but I cannot speak too highly of some of the adventures you can have on the periphery of Manali. Best of all was the Hadimba temple. Actually, the Hadimba temple was a mediocrity, but if you go there you are likely to stumble into what I consider the real attraction: the Hadimba Adventure Park. The Hadimba Adventure Park is a small clearing in the forest with a variety of fun-park type activities such as you would find at a crappy American county fair, made infinitely superior by the peculiar local activities on offer. For instance, I discovered that the reason Pahari women carry fat, fluffy bunnies around is because they go to Hadimba Adventure Park and pose with their fat, fluffy bunnies in family photographs for small change. Pure economic genius. I have never seen anyone make such as money as being paid to sit around with a soft, adorable animal that is too obese to run away. The star attraction, however, were the yak rides. Yup, yak rides. I stayed at the Adventure Park for an unusually long time, which in the United States would probably have earned me a place on the paedophile registry, just because I was having such a great time watching fat, turbaned Sikhs and their fat Sikh children wobble around in circles on huge, confused-looking yaks.

Eventually I tired even of this and returned to Old Manali, through a gauntlet of the world's least motivated drug dealers and that ubiquitous feature of all Western haunts in India; 15-year old boys selling saffron in little jars out of a messenger bag. What the fuck is it with saffron? Why is everyone trying to sell it to me? Does anyone ever actually buy the shit, and then what do they do with it? I mean seriously, I can't think of a single use I would have for a little jar of saffron on my vacation unless somehow I got lost and wandered into the forest hideaway of a tribe of tantra-practising Amazon warrior princesses with an uncontrolled craving for saffron. [Note: since drafting this post I have learned that most of India's saffron is grown in Kashmir, which explains everything. Every product originating in Kashmir is ultimately destined to somehow annoy the hell out of people.]

Finally, even Old Manali wore me down. I've determined I can overhear only a finite number of jam sessions before I'm driven to move across state lines. Himachal Pradesh has been surveyed by Ghostface Buddha, the contours of its mountains mapped and the fuzziness of its goats adjudged. Only one state remains on Ghostface Buddha's tour of India: Jamma & Kashmir. It's gonna Blow Up.

Actually, since it's Jammu & Kashmir, let's hope it doesn't.

More Excuses

2010-06-28T14:55:00.001+05:30

Greetings, readers. May the beneficence of a thousand gold-eyed tortoises shine upon you.

I am writing today to tell you why I am not writing tomorrow. This is after all a blog about traveling in South Asia, and I am not in South Asia.

OK, that might be stretching it a bit. I am in the town of Leh, which is here. The locals proudly claim that they are part of Central Asia, which based on the surroundings I won't dispute, and they even have a Central Asian museum.

In fact, I plan on writing about this plenty (and catching up with my previous exploits, as usual), but since this entails paying for satellite internet at 90 RUPEES PER HOUR, my dazzling wit and penetrating insights into the universal foibles of humanity so tellingly illuminated on the Indian street will have to sit in my notebooks until I find an economical way of going about this. Time is money, and let's face it, you weasels aren't worth $2.05 of my time for every half-post about stepping in yak shit. Might I suggest you find something else worthwhile to read for a spell? I hear the Twilight series is also very good, in that it is also like reading about stepping in yak shit.

As always, your faithful narrator-demigod,
-GFB

Only Built 4 Tibetan Linx...

2010-06-26T01:07:00.002+05:30

After being ejected from a monastery, even in very polite and Buddhist fashion, one might think there is a period of introspection that follows. "What have I done to offend? Or what have I not done to deserve remaining?" you might ask. Not I. Rarely tormented by notions such as the possibility that I may have done something wrong, the manically squawking ensemble of discordant practical voices in my head drowned out the lone chirping cricket of self-evaluation. I turned the full attentions of my mind to the question "Well, what now?" First, you have to establish a goal, and lure the disparate strains of thought towards that common point. In this case, it was like tossing a pile of situational-awareness birdseed in front of a raucous aviary of independently-minded birds of different species. The voice of Reason, in my head, can be like an old man in waders and glasses, who bears a strong resemblance to Sean Connery's appearance in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, tossing seeds for much the same reason (crashing Nazi fighter planes). I offer some tasty logical morsels such as "OK, there's no bus for the rest of the day", "OK, I know I am precisely 6.25 kilometers downhill from a village with proper accomodation", "I suppose the thing to do would be to start walking now, on the road leading east, which is in the opposite direction from the afternoon sun", and so on. The problem is, a great number of the metaphorical birds in my head are not, say, pigeons and warblers, but loud-ass parrots and the like who don't want any damn birdseed and flap off in search of mangoes. "Nahh, let's just stay here until we can get a picture of a monk at an unfortunate visual angle to a shitting mule", they'll say, or "SQUAWK I WANT MOMOS." The most annoying of these birds is the pouty ostrich who usually says something like "Well, it's FUCKING COLD like always, why don't we spare ourselves the trouble and JUST DIE, since laying these fucking ginormous eggs is killing me anyways?"

In the end, the ever-wily raven won the day, asserting its authority over the other, more easily distracted birdies by seizing upon the pertinent fact that going anywhere else but the aforementioned village would be much longer, and in a brilliant sop to the parrots, teasingly suggested "There could be yaaaaakkksss...."

So it was that I and the various entities inhabiting the haywire thicket of my neural pathways began our trudge up the mountains to the village of Kibber, despite knowing full well that at 4205 meters, Kibber is one of the highest villages on Earth (the bird who raised this objection, a Brazilian toucan, was shot, a fate common to the more troublesome members of my brightly-plumed flock of sentience at inconvenient moments). The walk up was not as hard as it could have been, since there was a proper road. The people of Kibber are very proud of this road, because it enables them to boast that they are the highest village in the world with both a motorable road and electricity. They formerly claimed to be THE highest village of all, but I guess their attention was drawn to a competing claim. In any event, their current boast, carefully phrased though it is, is still patently false, as can be demonstrated by undertaking the short walk many people in town recommend you go on to the higher village of Gete. Gete, it must be pointed out, is connected to Kibber by both road and electricity. Kibber's only defense is that Gete is hardly a village, consisting of seven houses and a fluctuating number of sheep.

This is not to detract from Kibber, which is indisputably altitudinous and borderline uninhabitable. Seeing as the height of summer is still rather nippy, and that the winters must be horrendously cold since the snow is enough to block all contact with the rest of the world, I was rather puzzled by the locals' insistence of hanging out in their stone houses year-round, despite having no immediate labor or other compulsion to do so. This seemed to me to reveal that this particular group of Tibetans is both exceedingly hardy and exceedingly immune to the temptation of other parts of the country where labor-free winters involve sitting under coconut trees and trying to get monkeys to pose with the little umbrellas from your drink.

As I said, the walk up was none too arduous, though it did presage difficulties to come. Most obviously, it gave me my first glimpses of certain mountains than soon were to factor heavily into my discomforts, but I also noticed that all the way up I was walking alongside a very, very deep and utterly vertical gorge. The completely denuded terrain and the rocky bluffs atop the gorge make a spectacular setting for Kibber indeed, and when the village comes into view your natural thought is "So that's what an infamously high village looks like." Kibber is cradled in a plateau of sorts (a plateau "of sorts" in that it is not even slightly flat like a proper plateau should be, but is on an undulating sheet of rocks and dust with a large enough expanse of not-utterly-vertical land to make it more suitable for habitation in comparison with surroundings that even the local goats refuse to traverse.

As one would expect from a village whose life centers around growing barley once a year and hiding from snow the rest of the time, the only real activity is leaving it. I am being a bit harsh. I mean the town itself is quite boring (but in a serene, potentially appealing sort of way), and the natural source of entertainment is to go for walks in the surrounding slopes. My first such walk was out to find this Gete village. "Why?" you may wonder. Simple. I was told, with no ambiguity, that there would be TONS of yaks. Predictably, I somehow missed the proper path and ended up climbing a mountain gully until I came across stray piles of snow and ice and concluded it was probably time to move in a more horizontal direction. I scrambled over loose rock slopes and all the way up and over a steep ridge with primitive Buddhist memorials on top, all in hope of gaining a vantage point from where to espy a throng of yaks. When I crested this ridge, I saw without question, the village of Gete: seven houses with a large expanse of rare green pasture stretching high above it on fortuitously "level" ground (i.e. a 30 degree slope). Dotting this pasture were a handful of gray ponds, and in the distance of mighty herd of... about 12 cows and an assortment of sheep. I WAS PROMISED YAKS.

It had occurred to me also by this point, that I was walking completely alone across a wilderness, where there were visibly no other people for miles, that I was also ill and therefore fatiguing quickly, and that if anything bad happened it would be a long time before anyone stumbled across me. Not that anything bad could happen, or at least nothing worse than being alone on the mountain and being caught in a snowstorm. I was standing up there, marveling in my solitude. Now, surely I have been in more isolated places on this trip, such as in the middle of the Thar Desert, but that was with other people. I have also been on numerous camping trips and such into fairly unspoilt areas, but at that moment it dawned on me with complete clarity that I was as alone -as far away from any other human being- as I had ever been. The unobstructed, cover-less panorama confirmed that much. It occurred to me, recollecting my recent evaluation of the situation, that it was probably not good to be so alone, especially if, like I suggested, something bad were to happen, such as (I don't know), a snowstorm HINT HINT.

There may or may not have been a snowstorm. What I will tell you is that were definitely no fucking yaks.

Arriving rather bedraggled back into town, I called it an early night, since after all I had been on monastic adventures that very morning and since climbed up to Kibber and thence stupidly over some mountainsides. I awoke after a long sleep when I could no longer resist the morning sun assaulting the dark cocoon of my massive quilt through my carefully-maintained breathing hole. Stretching on my balcony I said to myself "Hey, I know! Let's go for a walk today!" I think the voice was that of a spoonbill.

Plainly visible from Kibber is the village of Chicham and the appealingly green, albeit steep, pastures above the town. From above Kibber, you can also see the winding dirt road that leads around the end of the gorge and up the slopes on the other side. Except, when you actually walk on the road, you will not fail to notice that the road does not go around the end of the gorge, but dead-ends at that same gorge at a point where about 8% of a bridge has been constructed on the other side. Since the sides of said gorge are inarguably vertical, made of solid rock, and approximately 3000 feet deep (by crude eyeballing), it goes without saying that the lack of a bridge posed something of a conundrum. Something, however, was pecking at my mind, and it wasn't a bluejay. There was a steel cable across the gorge, such as one would expect to find on the site of a future suspension bridge, except it was completely alone and there was in fact no bridge tower. There was however, in the distance, what appeared to be a crude metal basket hanging from said cable...

Nuh-uh. No. Fucking. Way.

Just then a local laborer came and confirmed my suspicions by pulling on a long, dangling rope which was also attached to the faraway basket, causing it to slowly climb the cable towards us. It was now pretty clear how we were supposed to cross the gorge. When we finally got the basket all the way up our side, I took my seat within and prepared to laboriously pull myself back across...and went fucking zooming. On the slightly downwards slope of such a cable, the basket behaves much like a zipline, save that it has no mechanism for braking and there is no harness to save you should you wobble yourself out of the basket. Almost as suddenly as the swift descent of the cable began, it stalled. I seemed to have reached the nadir, and though I was about 3/4 of the way across the gorge, this still left about 50 meters to manually pull to a safe disembarkation, and about a billion fucking meters down to the river. Fortunately, there is usually someone on hand to take a moment from their work and help tug you up to the landing (and then ask for money). "Well, that was much easier and about equally nerve-wracking as I expected", I thought. "The way back should be much easier."

I walked to Chicham and found it was much like Kibber, minus the idea of commerce, so I proceeded to Chicham's pastures, which were much like Kibber's minus the idea of slowing erosion. After a great deal of awkwarldy slipping about over the side of a creek, two options appeared before me, and they were both in retrospect the crazed jabberings of suicidal parakeets with nests in privileged positions on my frontal lobe (I suspect these nests are adorned with a mixture of tinsel, twigs, and cuttings from underground nihilist newsletters). One was to go up and over the top of the pastures, which appeared very very high and led to a mountain pass (it turns out that this route is indeed the beginning of a long trek into Ladakh). The other was to go directly up the side of the mountain immediately next to me so as to tromp about its relatively low-looking snowline and feel smug about myself. I doubt you will have trouble guessing which I chose.

The problem with this mountain, obviously, was that it was steep. And I mean really steep. I've talked a lot about steep paths, but this was no path, it was just the side of a very, very steep mountain. Aside from a number of tough stream crossings, I rather underestimated the steepness of this slope, which at times reached about 70 degrees, yet I foolishly pressed upwards, pulling my way up with my hands as the ground constantly gave way under my feet. It was a slope best tackled with proper climbing shoes, a rope, carabiners, and an Austrian man named Jurgen. Lacking any of these aids, I had to make do with the supplies on hand: sneakers, a backpack containing a 500-page history of Muslim India, and a large pair of polished titanium-alloy testicles. As I got higher and higher and neared the 5000-meter mark, the dangerously loose soil ceased and the dangerously loose stones began. I have never studied geology, but based on my firsthand experience, it would be better if it did not exist. It would seem that the part of a mountain that is usually covered in snow all the time experiences dramatic effects from the summer thaw, and this summer-denuded area consists not of a solid rock surface, but of about a two-foot layer of precariously balanced, very sharp stones about the size of a loaf of bread. Whereas lower down the soil beneath my feet slipped and forced me to cling desperately to handholds above, I found that hanging on these rocks was a very poor idea indeed as it tended to send similarly large rocks crashing down towards me, and many of these rocks were in turn maintaining the delicate equilibrium of very lethal-looking boulders. Nevertheless, I pushed up, charting a torturous course on ground I chose on the basis of how far I would fall if the entire pile slipped (and this was important because the pile always slipped), and the likelihood of triggering a non-trivial avalanche. Weaving between islands of snow at a snail's pace, bloodying my hands grasping which sharp stones seemed most immobile, and bruising my hands many times as the rock immediately above tumbled ever-so-perfectly onto my knuckles, I finally reached the bottom of the Himalayan snowsheet. This being the astronomical peak of summer, the summit was a mere 150 meters above me. I looked up at the possibility, and saw a whole lot of rather deep snow, some even worse slopes, and some much unsteadier-looking rock piles. I thought to myself "Fuck. That." The eurasian nuthatch may be a little bitch of a bird, but he has his uses.

I contented myself with using some of the smaller stones nearby to assemble the Ghostface Buddha signature you may be seeing in the photograph on the side of this page [unless I have changed it by the time you read this], and then made my way down the mountain. "Making my way down" the mountain entailed bringing much of the mountain down with me, taking very worried glances over my shoulder, and turning several spots on my ass and thighs the same blueish-gray color as a North Atlantic fish. Unable to cross the streams back over (since I had made several daring leaps that were obviously not possible in the other direction), and with the memory of soaking my feet and walking back down the Kedarnath trail with boxer shorts on my feet fresh in my mind, I hit upon a desperate, and ultimately stupid strategy. I could easily have dry socks and shoes, I figured, if I just hiked up my pants, went barefoot, and scampered through the freezing rapids as unclumsily as I could manage. A serious tip: though idiotic, this actually proved much more pleasant than having drenched footwear.

I lumbered back to Chicham extremely slowly and scrounged a bowl of barley-thickened milk curd to assuage the fatigue of hunger. Finally off the mountain, I had a long night of very dedicated nothing-doing in my bed to look forward to... on the other side of the gorge.

Some time later I was once again in the crude metal basket and zipping over the void, though this time I stopped quite near where I began. Going back up, I had neglected to calculate, was going to be a much greater challenge. Pulling on the rope relentlessly, I inched my way across the chasm, and the closer one gets to the middle, the more acutely aware one becomes of the extreme height one is dangling at, the suddenly perceived immensity of a 200-yard crossing when made in five-inch increments, and the incredible crudity of the contraption in which one is sitting. The problem isn't so much the height: presumably, if you were to sit and do nothing, you would just harmlessly sit there until you muster the willpower to get yourself the hell out. However, on an upwards slope this is not the case, because if you let loose your aching grip on the pull-rope for even an instant, you are going to zip back down to some other point in the middle of the gorge as helplessly as a baby on a treadmill, and until you can pull yourself all the way to one side in a single, continuous application of brute force you will never reach the end. That, and because you are sitting in a basket rather than a box, you continually worry that important items may fall out of your pocket and be a real bitch to pick up later. Suddenly, I was inspired by another classic Sean Connery role (all I can say is that it must have been one of those days), though this time a less happy one. I refer specifically to the scene near the end of The Man Who Would Be King, which fittingly takes place in an obscure Himalayan kingdom, and made a strong impression on me as a child when spoiler! Connery is walked onto a rope bridge, the ropes are cut, and as the narrator hauntingly recalls, "It took him half an hour to fall..." Later, Connery's head is presented to a rather stunned Rudyard Kipling, but it was the falling part that stuck with me. As I looked down, I had the presence of mind to at least do some elementary physics calculations and concluded that a very nasty wobble would be the beginning of a fall lasting a mercifully brief 45-85 seconds, depending on the terminal velocity of a pimp.

Needless to say, I successfully crossed the chasm and gloated inwardly at length while I rested. I hobbled along the desolate road and approached the tin-sided work shacks that were there for no apparent reason. Just outside one, a young Tibetan women was -gasp- changing her overshirt, and in the open terrain it was impossible for me not to see her undershirt. To say it could have been awkward is a massive understatement. I smiled and made a great show of looking as apologetic as I could while trying to indicate that to me it was really no great deal and I wasn't about to mistake her for a harlot and inform her relatives of her careless dishonor, or whatever the ingrained fear would be. Unlike my Hindi, which is awful, my Tibetan does not exist, and I assumed that I had done all I could do to ameliorate the catastrophic faux-pas. As I passed right by her, I felt acute anxiety of what she might do in reaction to my own reaction. Much to my surprise, in a land where things that are "much to my surprise" have ceased to really surprise me all that much, I was actually much surprised by the surprise that followed.

She showed me her tits.

Then, much to my surpise.... I will spare you further grammatic contortions, but I was very surpised indeed, she took hold of hy arms and pulled my wounded hands directly onto her cream-brown breasts.

There are several observations to make here. Firstly, it would appear that altitude and decreased atmospheric pressure have no detectable effect on the texture and consistency of the human mammary organs. Secondly, it further appeared that in this particular case, it was the effects of gravity that had instead been suspended. What I'm saying is that they were some very perky breasts. I paused for a moment and came to a third conclusion: regardless of the unexpected circumstances, having one's hands grasping a comely Tibetan girl's soft, naked breasts is a considerable improvement in a day that had theretofore been marked by grasping very sharp rocks.

What naturally is to follow in such situations I will leave the reader to imagine, for I cannot empirically provide the answer myself. Interrupting the research prior to its conclusion, as it were, I pulled myself away remembering that Ghostface Buddha's customary state of bachelorhood is currently in a state of deluded yet happy compromise thanks to the nefarious yet delightful wiles of an Indian sweetie. With the Tibetan tongue once again eluding me (though the other Tibetan tongue had not found me so elusive), I struggled to gesticulate that by declining what seemed to be a very generous offer I was not being ungrateful, but merely had other commitments. Unfortunately, I had no idea how Tibetans would sign "girlfriend", so I tried "married", though since I was even more clueless of the markers of a married Buddhist man, I had to make do with "Hindu wife". This only seemed to add to the confusion, as the girl's face registered first that I apparently was proposing marriage, and then a second look of even greater confusion, perhaps meaning I had accidentally told her that I transgressively dabble in the customs of Hindu women. Finally I tried the gesture for having a "child" or "something about knee-tall", and though I have no idea what she thought, the cyclone of her desires had seemed to fade into mere tropical storm territory. With that, I left.

"Go back, you moron!" I heard myself thinking. "It's not too late!" "She WANTED you, man!" "That was a way better Tibetan experience that Dharamshala."

My head contains a multitude of sexually voracious birds.

Conversing With The Ancients

2010-06-23T22:48:00.001+05:30

My position in the drab Spitian market town of Kaza could not be maintained forever. Anywhere where a mainstay of the local economy is the import and distribution of exotic goods such as "wood" is usually not very exciting to begin with. As soon as I saw the righteous victory of Dutch soccer prowess over Danish iniquity I no longer felt attached to the sweet, sweet flypaper of the FIFA World Cup that kept me trapped in the stewing, impatient pot of resentment that the snowbound tourist community in Kaza had become. It was time for a trip. "I say," I said, "let's go to somewhere I can spell for once. What's this? A monastery called 'Ki'? Fantastic." And off I went.

Of course, I didn't go immediately. This was after all a town that had to wait days for gasoline and chicken to make it up the highway. I spent quite a while on the edge of town waiting for a tractor heading the right way to pass. Since you can count the number of roads in the Spiti valley (including town streets) on your fingers, I felt pretty confident that something would head my way soon enough. I got a ride to Ki, and when we arrived at the village on the valley floor the driver helpfully pointed out the way to the monastery.

Not that it would have been possible to miss it. The Spiti valley is one big wide gap in the mountains dominated by the seasonal battles between the colors white and brown. Presently, most of it was a smooth brown with a layer of glistening white at the top, not unlike a glazed chocolate pound cake, though this would perhaps only be appetizing if you digest in the manner of Jurassic herbivores by swallowing rocks. The monastery, by contrast, is a bright white towering pile of monastic cells and Buddhist temples on a conical spike of hillside striking out directly above a cliff. It looks like some sort of Buddhist answer to Minas Tirith from Lord of the Rings, which makes sense given its location and my belief that China is Mordor (However, despite the occasional Buddhist monk who immolates himself to protest oppression, there were no flaming figures flailing their arms and jumping off of citadels).

With some effort --because the back stairs are steep and one doesn't feel like stopping to catch one's breath when the back stairs also happen to lead through the cowshed-- I reached the prayer hall at the top, where a very old and shaky monk waved me in. As I entered I heard a lot of garbled chanting. There were some seven monks within, being supervised in prayer by their head lama. All evidence indicated that they had been repeating their mantras for a very long time, but none of the evidence suggested that these were all the same mantras. The effect was that of a particularly busy afternoon in a grumpy assistant headmaster's detention period with half a dozen delinquents each being forced to wearily but rapidly recite their particular offenses until the bell. I sat silently in a corner because at that moment anything besides prayers was clearly going to be the subject of intense fascination and the head lama gave me a look that said "Ahhh, Mr. Buddha, --if that's the title you really think appropriate for yourself-- have you come to observe our little correctional session or have you come to...participate? I should think any wrong moves on your part would suggest the latter."

I remained awkwardly still for a very long period of prayers, but couldn't take my eyes of the chief lama. I knew I'd seen his bespectacled mug somewhere before. Then, somewhere in between recitations of "Om padme I will not throw erasers during tantric meditation Bodh Bodh om", it hit me. He was in little framed photographs all over Spiti and Kinnaur, usually off in a corner somewhere giving pride of place to the Dalai Lama and the local abbots. He is without question a figure of some authority in these parts. For instance, I am told that the village of Tabo is essentially a theocratic village-state run by the monks of that order, with the unacknowledged crutch that half the villagers are on the government payroll for "jobs" they spend several moments a year performing. According to some people (a qualification I make because it seems like the sort of thing people would give me faulty info on), this bald bloke with the glasses is the current reincarnation of Rinchen Zangpo, a Buddhist monk and scholar of the 10th century who is credited with, among other things, translating a zillion Sanskrit texts and establishing half the monasteries in Tibet, and is revered as a sort of Deputy Buddha. When the ceremony finally concluded and the monks dispersed with great haste to go do anything else, the lama, reincarnated soul of the Propagator of Tibet, shared a few words with me...

They were "Where are you from?... No. Don't go back there. Room is closing now."

With great humility and great gratitude, I have received Wisdom from the sages. In life, one must go forwards, never backwards, no matter from where one may have come. For the one certain thing in the great prayer room of life, which we cannot delay with backwards reminiscences, is that the Prayer Room of Life will one day close, and Death will drawer a Frilly Ceremonial Ribbon of Mortality across the door, and one must put back on the Shoes Of The Transmigration Of The Soul and tie the Shoelaces of Eternal Rebirth to walk along the Chilly Stone Pathways of Earthly Existence until we reach the Dingy But Warmish Noodle Shop of Nirvana.

Or you're Mormon and you enter into either the Celestial, Terrestrial, or Telestial Kingdom for a thousand years of Christ's rule until you a reborn in an immortal body in heaven, which is possibly on another planet. Who's to say.

Blockade In The Kaza Strip

2010-06-22T18:18:00.004+05:30

[And this is the part where Ghostface Buddha makes lifelong enemies of both PETA and the Jewish Anti-Defamation League in a single stroke]

It had been two days since arriving in Nako, and two things were quite obvious: 1)It gets very cold at night, and 2)There's only so much to do in a village most notable for the dramatic emptiness of its surroundings. I decided it was time to move on to the Spiti valley proper. Waiting for the bus (yes, the one same bus again) I met a rather disconcerting trickle of tourists in jeep convoys coming the other way because the far end of Spiti was snowed over, and the only way to get out was to backtrack for days on the sort of "awe-inspiring" roads that recently tried to knock my bus off the cliff with a mild cascade of rocks and dirt. Mostly because I get bored of backtracking, I chose to press forwards towards the snowed-in end of the valley and hope for the best. Ehhh, I figured, I'll be visiting villages and such for most of a week, and by the time I'm done they'll have finally plowed the snow, it being the middle of June and all. Hooooooo boy. Assumptions can be one's most formidable adversaries.

After a rather serpentine descent of the mountains we reached a point where there is actually a kilometer or so of open ground on either side of the river: the Spiti valley. It looked much the same as the Hanglang valley, but wider, with actual green patches of soon-to-be barley crops at the bottom, and mountainsides composed of about 90% loose scree the color of a Kit Kat bar that's been sitting open in the bottom of a drawer for too long. As the driver of the bus (who had spent all day reaching Nako on the torturous paths described earlier) elated at the sight of straightaways and barelled along the level road at high speeds without any regard for the numerous potholes and rocks that repeatedly launched those of us in the back rows into skull-numbing collisions with the ceiling, we passed the occasional 20-person hamlet and sent showers of pebbles flying in the direction of very alarmed herds of sheep. After a relatively brief time being tossed about on the antiquated seismo-wagon I hopped off in the village of Tabo.

The Israelis I had been travelling with quickly (and not entirely subtly) ditched me, probably because I was crimping their style with my repeated announcements that I was going to do things like "go outside" or "check out the village". I did not particularly mind this development and looked forward to finding some more international company that did not need to be constantly reminded I am unfamiliar with the Phlegmato-semitic languages. I checked into a separate guesthouse and went up to the cafe for dinner. There were 15 Israelis within. Soon they were joined, or rather forced to share the room with, by a group of 15 American medical students, and there was absolutely no crossover whatsoever. I sat aloof from it all and observed the cultural differences on display. The Americans' first order of business was to ask for the delivery of the village's entire supply of beer, while the Israelis quickly filled the entire cafe with chillum smoke. Both groups were extremely loud and monoglot. Eavesdropping on their conversations I noticed that the American medical students talked primarily about 1) beer, 2) themselves, 3) occasions on which they themselves had consumed beer. The Israelis on the other hand... well OK, I don't know what they were talking about because I don't understand their kabbalah moonspeak.

In the morning I woke up early to visit the widely-renowned Tabo monastery, the oldest one in Spiti. There are several monasteries in the Spiti Valley, which is essentially a surgically-removed slice of Tibet. The people are Tibetan-looking, they speak Tibetan, and they worship in temples attached to Tibetan monasteries full of paintings of Tibetan gods and pictures of the Dalai Lama. Not that there are all that many Tibetans here to go around: Spiti subdistrict is, I quote, "One of the most sparsely settled areas on Earth", largely because (I quote again) "[it has] an average altitude above 4500 meters". The few, small villages (and one "town") there are are all lined up along the one narrow valley of the Spiti river and on a handful of tributaries and small nearby plateaus. The vast remainder of Spiti consists of the upper portions of row after row of very steep, hard, and snowy mountains without any habitable interruptions. It's a perfect site for monastic life and retreating from worldly concerns unless you suffer from a pathological interest in rocks.

Tabo in particular, located on the southern end of the valley floor, is known for housing one of the world's most ancient stores of Buddhist art. The paintings within the monastery temple date back to the 10th century, the very dawn of Tibetan Buddhism. Luckily, the American students had a trekking expedition scheduled in a side-valley and the Israelis were occupied all day exploring the mystical secrets of the cafe balcony, so I had this ancient treasure all to myself. I got to the monastery and started searching for the main temple. The whitewashed Tibetan buildings I gravitated to turned out to be the monks' quarters and a community center. A monk directed across the plaza and around a corner and pointed the building out to me. Well, I never would have guessed. The temple was ancient all right. I was standing in an enclosure of yellow mud shrines of vaguely cubic form with a few wooden posts sticking out here and there and ladders strewn indifferently about. All in all it looked like something out of "City Dwellings of Bronze-Age Sumer", not a Buddhist monastery. I went inside the largest of these, and though I had been warned (by a weird American retiree dwelling in Tabo, no less), I was not prepared for the atmosphere. It was seriously Dark and Mystical and Ancient, with light filtering in from a small skylight to illuminate just the centermost aisle of the eery prayer hall, leaving its flamboyantly-colored idols hanging off the elaborately-painted walls in haunting shadows on every side. In non-awed moments my thoughts were something like "Damn, they've got this sitting in this pile of mud?". In my more awed moments my thoughts were occasional flashes reminding me to close my hanging jaw.

After seeing the monastery and spending quite a lot of time there I moved on from Tabo that very afternoon, as my list of cultural interests does not include Tabo's other feature, screes. I hopped on that day's incarnation of The Spiti Valley Bus and traveled up the valley to Kaza.

And I got fucking stuck there.

Kaza was thronging with tourists, not because it is the slightest bit interesting or enjoyable, but because the Kunzum Pass which leads over into Lahaul and from there to the Kullu "Hippie Paradise" Valley and the rest of the reasonable-altitude world was still covered in several feet of snow. In the other direction, the long and uncomfortable journey was apparently being interrupted by numerous landslides. In effect, I was snowbound in Spiti, in motherfucking June. There was naught to do but sit and wait.

And sit and wait I did. For the duration of my stay in Kaza, there was not a single moment of working electricity, and food supplies were dwindling. Well, if I wanted food consisting of goat or barley, that could be obtained, but even the menus of three-choice-offering dhabas became a mockery for lack of ingredients. On the third day in Kaza, a group of 12 distraught Israeli motorcyclists was informed that Kaza was running out of petrol, and if they wanted any to escape to the south, they could apply for a petrol reserve permit at the Subdistrict Collector's office. Kaza was under blockade.

Kaza did however have one saving grace, and he called himself "Jamaica." Jamaica proved himself the most enterprising man in all of Spiti by renting a shitty little generator that could chug along on kerosene and cooking oil, which combined with satellite TV and a chalkboard reading "FIFA World Cup 2010 LIVE", made his place the jumpingest in town. I was dying to see the World Cup, and despaired of missing key games for my teams while I wandered the mountains. Fortunately, because my alpine peregrinations take me so close to their mountain abodes, the gods thought it wise to throw me a bone. However, knowing the outcome of games between such contestants as South Korea and Greece had only a modest dampening effect on my passions for deicide.

The main problem with this otherwise wonderful arrangement was, as it was literally the only place for miles with any form of entertainment and also served pretty decent Israeli cuisine, all 38 of my snowbound fellow-travelers also converged on the spot, 36 of them being Israeli pseudo-hippie backpackers, who are (as you may have been gathering from the fixation of this post), objectively, the worst tourists on the face of the goddamn earth. And that's before the whiskey bottles join the chillum rotation. I soon found myself being treated to a great amount of food and favors on the house, for no other reason than I was nice to the owner, behaved civilly, and didn't make an ass of myself. On the other hand, several Israelis also got food on the house by running out on the bill. This (and my monthly spell of digestive ailment) went on for days.

On the fifth day in Kaza --well, I wasn't counting the days any more because they all seemed about the same, but I think Cameroon played against Japan that day-- we were told that the government was helping traders get supplies to Kaza. A petrol truck was on its way, though delayed by rockslides, and rumor spread that several more trucks were creeping their way up, one containing live chickens. Rays of hope shone through the chickenless clouds of despair.

Excavators cleared the Kinnaur road again on the sixth day and a three-truck convoy trudged along the road towards the Kaza Strip. The Israelis heard the blockade had been broken and swarmed upon the cargo as soon as it arrived.

When all was said and done, dozens of chickens had been interned in cages and five had been killed.

"We vere seahrching for contraband eggs."
"Wvhen our inspectors reached the truck, the chickens revealed claws."
"Whven the chickens threatened us, we had to take action."
"Some even used beaks."
"We will not bow to criticism from the biased Avian Bloc."
"Only those cheeckens which posed a zreat to theah embargo on poultry-less lafa and salat were harmed."
"I think theah chillooom is empty."
"We responded ehw-vith appropriate force."
"No, ze remains of thees *burp* chickens must remain secret for reasons of state *burp* security."
"Do you have some mayoneshsh?"
"Vee demand the continued internment of thees cheeckans."
"And an order of fry potatoes, and one order of taina."
"We remain committed to the Two Side-Dish Solution."
"FVORTY RUPEES FOR TAINA?!?!"
"Who has theh chilloom?"

Will man and fowl ever live in peace? One can dream, one can dream...

Here There Be Rocks

2010-06-20T19:54:00.004+05:30

There's a certain tension when you really don't want to miss the bus. And I do mean the bus, since there is exactly one bus that heads north into the Spiti valley. Perhaps there is only one bus because sending more would be foolhardy; the highway through Upper Kinnaur to Spiti is, according to several sources, "possibly the most dangerous road in India." Well, no kidding.

At first the passage did not seem particularly intimidating. I am, after all, something of a Himalayan road veteran now. We passed through much of the Kinnaur valley with ease, following the Sutlej river all the way up to where the Spiti meets it right by the Chinese border, and then turned into the Hanglang valley. You can actually tell you're getting close to China because the spelling of geographical features on road signs ceases to distinguish between the letters L and R. I kid you not.

In the Hanglang valley, if I may continue to overuse the phrase, shit got real. The Hanglang valley road is narrow. Well, they're all narrow up here, but I mean really narrow, as in so narrow the conductor should use a plumb line to help the driver determine how far the wheels are from rolling off a 6000-foot cliff. The bus crawled as it scrambled over rocks that sent the bus slowly rocking to and fro like an ungainly man-of-war, to the great concern of all those on the side of the bus who could see the valley floor. Eventually at one particularly deadly-looking spot the bus actually stopped after the passengers spotted a cascade of falling rocks ahead. We could hear the dull thuds of fist-sized stones bouncing off the highway, and rather ominously could not hear them coming to their distance resting places far below. When it seemed the danger had passed the driver crept the machine forwards, rocking even more disconcertingly on the freshly 'repaved' track.

We didn't see the rocks start falling again; we just heard bangs and crashes of increasing volume on the roof of the bus. The driver tried to skid onwards, but the intensity of the bombardment was knocking the bus off from its smooth course. The left tires edged ever so slightly off the precipice and back onto the road as the lurching can recoiled from the pummeling stones. I can tell you this much: the total oxygen intake of the passengers on that bus fell to zero for about two minutes. It was with a great feeling of relief that I got off in Kinnaur's last town, Nako.

Stretching my limbs and feeling the ground to make sure the entire village wasn't at risk of sliding into the Hanglang valley, I took a look around at my surroundings. Nako is very high up and commands utterly spectacular views of the valley around. It was a serious departure from the scenery before. This area doesn't even look like it belongs in India. It would fit much better in somewhere like Tajikistan, or possibly Mars. The Hanglang valley has a great many features, but none of these are grass or trees. Actually, it really only has a great many features if you count 'snow' as one and each individual rock as all the others. The village itself, as its location would suggest, is a small and humble affair that casually mixes the clothing and speech of Kinnaur, the houses and religion of Spiti, and the climate of a Siberian quarry.

There was a wee shortage of places to stay in the village. In the end, I came to share one of two double rooms that I rented with a frustrated and odd-numbered trio of Israelis. Israelis are to figure prominently in my recollections of the Spiti area.

It cannot be said that Nako is the most modernized place in the world. Aside from the standard erratic electricity supply and a high density of angry donkeys, Nako doesn't have, say, cell phone service. Now, I don't think everywhere in the world needs cell phone service, but it would certainly help when the place also doesn't have regular phone service. A shopkeeper informed me that I was welcome to use a phone if I liked, but it could only be used for local calls within Nako village. I paused and looked around at the extent of Nako village, which takes about a minute and a half to cross if you don't take any wrong turns or find a cow blocking the alley. I suppose having local phones is useful for communicating across the village without having to strain your voice over the incessant protestations of unwillingly-confined goats.

Nako does however have honest-to-God, imported Tabasco sauce. Who would have known.

Another interesting feature of Nako is that it happens to be extremely close to Chinese-occupied Tibet. In fact, if Nako were at the same approximate position on the other side of the mountain it's nestled on, its people would be too busy being oppressed to celebrate the fact that their village would probably have working telephones. From Nako it is a mere two-kilometer climb up to the crest of Leo Pargial mountain where India and China meet at its climax, not that anyone ever does this, first of all because it is extremely steep and cold, and secondly because the number of Tibetans sneaking into China can be assumed to be minimal. I don't know what it looks like on the other side, but I've come to imagine China as a snowier version of Frodo Baggins's first glimpse of Mordor, a hellish wasteland of conical-hatted slaves marching and tilling rice paddies amidst storm-shadowed boulders and lava flows laced with MSG. I was tempted to bundle up and go for a stroll to relieve myself most satisfyingly upon the Middle Kingdom, but I happened to be stoned and wasn't about to go up that 6800 meter motherfucker without having some french fries first.

I did however see something that demanded my urgent attention. I will give my long-time followers an arbitrary paragraph break to guess what I had to deal with near (hint hint) the end of Indian territory...

... I spotted, once again, the Last Cow In India. It was standing near a Buddhist prayer mound on a fairly steep slope of loose rocks below the glistening white peak of Leo Pargial. It was young, perhaps in its early adolescence. It was also a hairy little bastard... and it was utterly fucked. It couldn't outpace my scramble up the rocks and slipped trying to flee, leaving it helpless in my path. A one-two-three of gleeful pimp slaps later and the devil calf was shamefacedly slinking away, slipping on more stones as it focused on the still-present slapping danger and its inner self-doubts rather than its footing. THERE'S NOWHERE IN THIS COUNTRY WHERE YOU CAN ESCAPE FROM ME, COWS.

I returned hurriedly to the village, mostly because I was in shirtsleeves and suddenly found myself getting snowed on again. I popped into Nako's ancient little monastery, an eminently missable maroon mud structure on the outside with incredibly old and incredibly faded, exquisite Buddhist painting within. I returned to the guesthouse to find a distinctively cannabis-like aroma in the air and all three Israelis sitting where I left them, knitting indeterminate forms out of wool. "So I visited the monastery...it's very nice" I offered. "Oh, there's a monastery?" they replied. You see, Israeli backpackers, who are essentially a louder, more irritating form of pseudo-hippie, never actually do anything in the places they go besides sit around smoking hashish, occasionally knitting or walking as far as the balcony, sometimes getting very drunk, and asking cafe owners if they serve shakshuka. "Is it still cold out?" they asked. "It fucking snowed" I answered.

"Oh, it snowed?"

The after-effects of conscription, my friends. We need peace on Earth, man. No more armies, no more war. One love.

The Valley Of Old Hats

2010-06-20T12:28:00.001+05:30

As I write this (i.e. long before typing this) I am working by candlelight and freezing my balls off in the town of Kaza, with little else to do because I am stuck here. It's the middle of June and thanks to the weather on the Spiti valley's only road, I am snowed in. Let me repeat: I haven't been graced by electricity in three days, and the peak of the astronomical summer is approaching, but I'm sitting on my ass and waiting for a fucking snowplow to push its way over a practically unmotorable, contemptible "highway" used mainly to provide a trickle of palatable foods to the snow-hugging yokels who live here. I thought this was India, not fucking Canada.

I will pass over my multi-day crossing of Himachal Pradesh's reasonably habitable southern hills briefly. There wasn't anything particularly exciting to see, unless you count the falling trees, miscellaneous flying objects, and smashing glass occasioned by a headline-capturing windstorm that kept me very much indoors while I stopped in the town of Mandi. Also, I suppose as an interested observer of the behavior of Indian people in crowds, I could glean some insight from witnessing a mob fleeing from a smoke-filled bus with a flaming engine and mysterious leaking fluids. Upon seeing their response I quickly decided to hide in the corner seat and take my chances with the fire until the locals had stampeded to a safe distance.

After some more arduous (but less combustible) travails on H.P.'s darling road network, the first place of any note I visited was the temple village of Sarahan, on the side of a mountain in the lower reaches of the Kinnaur valley. Kinnaur is one of those magnificently obscure areas that you can't impress people with having visited during cocktail party conversations because it actually is obscure enough that nobody will have heard of it. Scenically, the district is beautiful but could be any one of a hundred such valleys in the western Himalayas. The real draw is the culture. Because the Himalayan regions are just so obnoxiously hard to penetrate, they generally remained outside the massive empires and other forces of history that repeatedly pummeled the lowlands. Each little cluster of valleys created its own unique culture. So far, my wanderings in Uttarakhand hadn't really left that impression on me, as the area's great significance to Hindus kept it under the nosy watch of orthodox brahmins for centuries, and the modern flood of motor-pilgrims has affected the religious practice there with all the subtlety of a fifth-grader with a gong and a sledgehammer. However, once you get out of the yatra-crazed reaches of Garwhal, the Himalayas become what they naturally are: extremely difficult passages and sparsely-scattered clusters of largely backwards villages in ribbons of habitable land amid gigantic snowcapped peaks that even Hindus can't find a reason to come and visit. Being left to modernize on their own terms and without a great deal of outside interference, the Kinnauris are forging a more pleasant way forwards than many of their Indian brethren. The wearing of locally-made wool clothes is near-universal and most adults still sport identical wool caps with a folded-up green brim on one side. Like everyone else, their big new houses with modern amenities are coming up remarkably quickly, but many of them still feature distinctive curving roofs and alternating bands of stone (or cement) and wood construction (this is apparently the traditional Kinnauri way of protecting themselves from earthquakes).

Kinnaur is a sort of transitional area where the humble, very local forms of mountain Hinduism sit side by side with the outermost fringes of Tibetan Buddhism. From the outside there's no obvious clue which religion the temple at Sarahan belongs to, and it could easily be mistaken for some sort of basic mountain castle. Within a series of stone walls stand two square-based wood-and-stone towers with elaborately carved wooden shrines flaring out several stories from the top, like giant rococo perfume boxes perched upon unusually classy upended cinderblocks. In one tower is an important idol of the mountain version of Kali, which ensures that the patient queue of Kinnauri villagers waiting in the upper sanctum is complemented by a minority of Kali-loving Bengalis. The Bengalis, whose life in bustling Kolkata and its rambunctious Durga/Kali worship has not prepared them for the peculiar condition of silence, remedy the painful stillness with neurotic glances at the distance in the queue separating them from the temple bell.

Upon riding back to the main town I checked some information online and saw that the infamous Ladakh passes leading to the final stage of this trip will still be snowed over for some weeks. This meant I had time to kill and could afford my much-desired current detour up into the Spiti valley. From Kinnaur, Spiti can only ne reached by following a series of remote river valleys that pass through the militarized zone on the very edge of the Chinese border. I spent some time getting the customary permits for crossing the Inner Line, the boundary which prevents unregistered persons traveling in either direction from passing the wonderfully-named villages of Pooh and Hurling. I got the permit easily. It was far from the first time "pooh" and "hurling" have failed to impede my progress in this country.

The first stop was the Kinnauri town of Reckong Peo, which isn't reputed for much, but you can't fail to notice the giant gleaming Buddha statue up on the hillside. I set off to visit this monastery, only to rediscover that the street layouts in these steep hillside towns are so inscrutable that you can actually get lost trying to find a 20-foot, bright yellow statue. I ended up on a series of extremely narrow footpaths between stone walls in the woods and stumbled into a little village just above Reckong Peo. It was a lovely place, and one temple in it I recognized from a semi-famous British painting of the area. Despite being no more than two kilometers above the main town, I could find no trace that enyone ever visits this charming locale. There was but one shop, which seemed completely unprepared for any sort of customer other than the local candy-crazed schoolchildren. I tried to determine where I was, and getting nowhere in that inquiry I asked at least where I could find the road to the village. I asked "You have road? Where is car road?" and things of that sort until someone finally pieced together my naive questions and told me "No road".

I tried to find my way back down the winding paths in the woods, knowing only that "downwards" out to be about right. Of course I got very lost, had to hop over vast amounts of cow shit, but at least I made one very important discovery: there are parts of Himachal Pradesh where cannabis just grows everywhere. Vast bushes of ganja sat in the shade beneath the trees. Cows and dogs ambled about between the unmistakable and world-renowned leaves. Attuned to its prevalence, I even noticed that in the towns of H.P., weed literally grows out of the cracks in the sidewalk like, well... weeds. The only problems were that the plants were not budding, and furthermore they are often found near the area's other common weeds, which sting like a motherfucker. So be warned, there is no true stoner Shangri-La. I suppose an enterprising visitor could ford into the leafy depths with a beekeeper's suit, but if I was enterprising I wouldn't be transfixed by large thickets of marijuana.

After going some ten miles up the hill to visit the village of Kalpa, which was a beautiful wooden hamlet with lovely carved temples, quaint houses and dramatic vistas of the sort that traveling in the Himalayas is quickly making me tire of describing in full every time, I finally headed back down and quite accidentally stumbled into the monastery with its giant fucking Buddha. I was idly sitting and watching a monk frustratedly try and pluck all the cannabis out of the monastic garden (they don't approve of intoxicants, and especially don't approve of weeds fucking up their garderns), an old Kinnauri monk waved me over and led me into the prayer hall. He sat me down and began to converse, except I quickly realized he didn't care what I said. His interest laid entirely in making fun of me to relieve the tedium of knitting prayer pouches.

I escaped in the commotion caused by a flock of Bengali tourists who had just arrived. The youngsters were occupied in taking photos mimicking the postures of the Buddhist statues around, while the adults were mostly busy adjusting their sunglasses and poking curiously at the monastery's drums. I was walking down some crummy stairs through the trees near the bus station when I suddenly heard a rustling in the cannabis and out burst... A PUPPY. God damn, this country can be perfect sometimes.

Shorty Wanna Be A Lama

2010-06-08T11:13:00.001+05:30

My destination was Dharamshala, the hilltop town that is now home to the Tibetan Government In Exile, including the Dalai Lama, and a great number of Tibetan refugees. The name "Dharamshala" roughly translates to "rest house", which is apt because it turns out that there isn't really that much to do that doesn't involve sitting down. I got to Dharamshala and found it peopled quite differently from your typical Indian town. The population consisted chiefly of, in this order: Tibetans, rejects from auditions for Beatles cover bands, spiritually-inclined iMac aficionados, middle-aged authors, and Indians. Speaking as an authority on this subject, I judge that Dharamshala has the highest proportion of white people in its municipal limits of all the places in India. Tourists come here from far and wide for their fix of good liberal concern over vanished Shangri-Las with tantalizing proximity to the world's wisest celebrity, in a convenient snack-sized morsel of a nation ("Free Tibet in every box! Now with 99% less sovereignty!").

The Tibetan population, it must be said, are really chill, and quite easily distinguished from their Indian neighbors. Aside from the obvious facial differences, they can be told apart from Indians even from behind and at a considerable distance. If the dude is wearing jeans and a t-shirt, he's a Tibetan. If the dude is trying to be the COOLEST PERSON EVER, and is wearing jeans with a tucked-in pinstripe shirt, popped collar, "designer" shades, and the words "Authentic Power Wear. New York 29 Urban Life. Ultamate Connexion POLO" anywhere on the ensemble, the dude is an Indian. Tibetans apparently shop in the youth section of the Sears mail-order catalog. Indian men shop by mail-order from a combination of bilingual MadLibs and Braille editions of GQ interviews with Kanye West. When you get closer, the differences become even more sharp. A Tibetan in Dharamshala will greet you with "Hello!", whereas the Indians open with "Excuse me sir, would you like some...saffron?"

I booked into a cheap hotel room that happened to be a completely isolated room next door to a massage parlor and opening directly onto the dining area of the largest, touristiest terrace cafe in town. My attempts at napping were constantly perturbed by the musings of John Lennon and Salman Rushdie wannabes, and in particular by a group of obese ecumenical Religion students (who, I admit, deserve credit for going to India to study other faiths while most of their classmates squat in Arkansas). There really are too many students and writers around. "I'm just going to journal for a few hours" I heard. Oh really? Anyone who uses the word 'journal' as a verb should go back to sixth grade where that shit is encouraged. Reread some Newberry Medal shit if you need inspiration. Julie Of The fucking Wolves. Recapture that sense of wonder, and learn the parts of speech. Write an essay about why we should free Tibet while you're at it, two pages, no double space, name and class section at top right. I would love to hear your thoughts.

I made the more or less mandatory visit to the main Tibetan temple complex, which is a giant, hospital-yellow pile of concrete pillars with a temple chamber somewhere in the middle. Inside the sanctuary, which does have nice paintings, devotees leave offerings to large, fine metal statues of various boddhisvattas, the compassionate semi-divine gurus of Mahayana Buddhism. The Boddhisvattas apparently like their edible offerings to be delivered in sealed boxes, and have a special place in their all-embracing hearts for Chips Ahoy!. Just outside the temple is the Dalai Lama's actual house. He was out on some Buddhist sermon in the mountains, but the house was interesting enough to look at from outside the gates for a minute or two. Nothing glam, but a comfy little pad with a nice zen garden. Between the house and the temple is a courtyard, where I witnessed a gathering of a few monks and their monastic students. The students were apparently being trained in debate. Tibetan debate, it would seem, largely consists of taking turns shouting, making ritual hand gestures, loudly clapping hands, and performing dramatic, torso-twisting foot-stomps. It all looked like a rather unusual form of communication amongst monks. Indeed, if only they had been members of the Red Hat order they could have filmed a perfectly synthesized Buddhist dialectic Limp Bizkit video.

Just around the corner is a little building called the Tibet Museum, which is where you go to get really depressed about how gratuitously awful the Chinese government is to Tibetan people and culture. I mean, everyone knows China does Bad Things over there, but seriously, some of it is just malicious. We actually should, like, free Tibet.

All in all, I found Dharamshala to be a very potentially interesting place. I say 'potentially' interesting because I got bored. Dharamshala is without a doubt the best place to delve into Tibetan culture. There are Tibetans everywhere eager to share their heritage, there are frequent cultural programmes and a plethora of oppurtunities for serious study. However, unless you are really willing to commit to an extended time with Tibetan stuff (which I wasn't. Tibet is fascinating but my purpose and mental energies have become intensely channeled on Indian culture while I'm here), there isn't really a whole lot to....do. Not that this stops anyone, since Dharamshala is also a good place with decent weather to sit around and do nothing and eat, on average, the best budget-oriented Western (i.e. Italian) food in India. If anything I should help free Tibet because for four days Tibet freed me from Gujarati food (I've come to regard the ubiquitous Punjabi-Gujarati-Bengali diners in India as inane petit-bourgeois establishments for plump, unadventurous domestic tourists where the only culinary flair is the risk of acute diarrhea.)

Dharamshala is an unusually pleasant, welcoming place, and most of all reasonable place, but here's the thing: "reasonable" is not on Ghostface Buddha's agenda. My heart just isn't really into it until I've spent twelve hours riding public transport on a single-lane mountain road until the bus engine catches fire - not that that has happened to me since leaving Dharamshala. OH WAIT. Remind me again why the hell I love India?

Notes From The "Satluj View" Bar

2010-06-08T10:10:00.000+05:30

So here I am sitting with a brand-new notebook in the Satluj View bar. It's called that because it's on a cliff above the Satluj river. I came in here for dinner, found that the restaurant portion had been requisitioned for the night by the Ministry of Energy, and I don't know why but I decided to go to the bar side and have a beer. They have a decent selection of rums and whiskeys, but I asked for a beer. The bartender, in a tone I now know was an apology, said "We only have Godfather beer, sir." So be it.

OK, I now start drinking the Godfather beer and it tastes awful. It has this guy who kind of looks like a young Karl Marx on the bottle and he seems to be having a good time. The bottle, which is large, also proclaims that it is "Super Strong" beer. We'll see about that. It might actually get me drunk. My tolerance for alcohol is at an all-time low. I rarely drink in India, mostly because the bars are vile, the booze tastes like crap.

Actually, now that I think about it, I puke considerably more often than I drink here. Questionable food and drinking water is probably to blame, but to me this reeks of SOCIALISM. In godly, American countries we firmly believe in a man's right to puke at most an equal number of times to drinking. LET FREEDOM RING.

Stray thought (I think there's going to be a lot of these): if I had to describe my "inner" "personal" journey on this trip using only well-known literary references, my life would be a mixture of Heart of Darkness, the Bhagavad Gita, and Where's Waldo?

Speaking of Where's Waldo?, you could produce a whole new Where's Waldo? anthology in any Indian city using only a bag of colored pencils, a dirigible, and about a quarter-dose of psychedelic mushrooms.

You know, I don't know if anyone has every said this before, but religion can, like, make people do really good things, but it can also make them do, like, really bad things. BARTENDER. ANOTHER GODFATHER.

It's impossible to get a good burrito around here.

I am drunk.

Catching the 6am bus is going to be a bitch.

Think about this: you can get to the end of a river really quickly if you just think of the "end" as the bottom.

You know what really sucks? Honor killings.

Jesus fuck, this beer tastes like detergent. From the makers of Tide, this shit. Come home drunk and puke in the hamper for savings on laundry. Compromises for a happy marriage. Wife send me back to the bar for a whiskey, clean the fucking dishes.

What's the rhyme Nas uses on that Ludcris song right before "Bartender, put a cosmo in that girl's hand!" ? I need to know.

I wonder if that cavity in my bathroom wall is supposed to be the shower.

Wait, have I even had a proper shower in this entire state?

No.

OK, Satan, here's the deal: if I eat less than eight unhygienic paranthas in the next week, you get my soul. Fair odds.

Google Maps driving time estimates are a perverse joke of diabolical origin.

That girl with the burnt ear on the bus was definitely hitting on me with the winking and the chewing gum.

Definitely hitting on me.

Awwwwwww I should call my girlfr.....ohhhh ho ho ho, no I shouldn't.

If India was a moment in stereotypical "hippie" recorded music it would be like getting really high and listening to Dark Side Of The Moon and forgetting about the part with all the fucking clocks and then jumping out of your sofa in surprise, except it happens every five minutes and whatever's causing the commotion is either completely unnecessary or it can kill you.

India has a plethora of crazy, mystical, super-yoga ascetic saddhus. India also has a space program. These need to be put together. SHIVA IN SPACE. I would so go on that mission.

If Indian bus drivers were football coaches, they would run the quarterback sneak three times in a row and then set the ball on fire on fourth down.

Hell, if Indian bus drivers were cricket players they would still move farther in a a day.

Dude, saddhus in zero-gravity. I'm still on that.

You know, I think I like sky-blue saris the best.

Where the fuck are my keys?