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
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Aug 21, 2010
Quickie On The Beach
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.
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.
Aug 20, 2010
Li'l Andaman
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!
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!
Aug 9, 2010
Isles In Sea And Shadow
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.
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
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.
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.
Aug 3, 2010
Return Of The Dynamic Duo
(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."
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!
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.
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!
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!
Jul 30, 2010
La La La La 2
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.
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.
Jul 28, 2010
Oh Let The Sun Beat Down On Some Other Bastard's Face
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
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
Jul 24, 2010
Independence Day
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.
.....
"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.
Jul 21, 2010
Fear And Loathing In Ladakh
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.
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.
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