Celebrity

If you have any unfulfilled dreams of being a celebrity, go to a place full of Indian tourists and no foreign ones. For example the Daulatabad fort will do great. I met exactly two other foreigners and thousands of Indians there. They were asking me my name, country, following me around, wanting to take photos with me (sometimes I refused, sometimes not) – no autographs though. The school trips were best, I even got an offer from a (maybe 15 year old) girl to take her home with me!

But mostly (unless the people were too “aggressive”) I didn’t mind this all too much, just found it strangely amusing. And as elsewhere in India, I had a couple of nice conversations, though limited by our knowledge of English and Hindi/Marathi. And no one knows Czech Republic, so I mostly just say Europe as my country. And if they enquire more, Czechoslovakia has a decent chance of success.

The fort itself is amazing and huge, with a special dark curving passageway through which any attackers would have to pass while the defenders would welcome them with burning coal, arrows, and boiling water. Nowadays it’s a great place for bats.

Christmas & Ellora Caves

It seems that both in Czech Republic and Goa the main Christmas day is December 24. And (contrary to the rest of India) there are many Christians in Goa, the Catholic church came there with the Portuguese and there are certainly more churches than Hindu shrines nowadays. During the day it didn’t look like Christmas at all, the weather being sunny with temperatures over 30 degrees! But it turns out that in the villages on the coast the locals like to build outdoors Nativity scenes (hopefully that’s the right English term, in Czech “Betlem”). Some of them were really big (maybe 6 by 3 meters or so) and intricate, with waterfalls, churches, and of course coloured lights and stars. Only the Baby Jesus was missing, but that was probably it was before midnight when he’s supposed to be born. And almost all houses had at least some star or lights, so overall the mood was surprisingly Christmasy :)

What was not so great was getting a rickshaw or taxi take me to the airport early in the morning on the 25th. Almost everyone goes to a midnight mass (I’ve seen chairs prepared for maybe 1000 people outside a church) and afterwards to get drunk at a party. You can imagine how excited they were about giving me a ride at 4.30 am, but in the end I of course got one, only pretty expensive (800 rs, at least twice the normal price).

I flew to Mumbai, spent the day in a nice museum and a zoo, where the animals were either missing or asleep (I still am not sure if some of the crocodiles were alive or just statues!), and then took a crowded 7-hour train to Aurangabad. Arriving there (yesterday) in the evening, I found out that also Indians like to travel during Christmas and that almost all hotels were full. In the end I found a got and expensive room, but today in the morning I walked around some more and quite a decent one.

After that I went to the nearby Ellora Caves. They were terribly crowded (and as you may know, Indians in a crowd are quite aggressive at shoving and pushing), but beatiful as well. They were all just cut into rock, just imagine that the biggest one, Kailash Temple took around 200 years to complete and is huge – and was the way most crowded one! Fortunately, once I got a bit away from the center, it was much better, and I really enjoyed walking around the great caves.

Still in Goa

Today and yesterday I went to some of the cities here in Goa. Both a couple of rather long, sweaty, and crowded local bus drives away.

Yesterday it was Panjim, the capital of Goa. It’s really pretty, with narrow not too dirty streets, colourful small houses, Hindu temples (one in an incredible orange-pink colour sitting on a hill), a hidden mosque, and a beatiful white church. One of the interesting differences between churches here and home is that here they always have couple of birds flying just below the roof inside.

And I had the best lunch so far, in a local, entirely plain looking restaurant. It was a thali (a bit of everything) – but this one had maybe 10 different tasty dishes served in small bowls, and cost only 70 rs (which is not too cheap in India, but it’s just around USD 1.50).

And today I went to Old Goa, the former capital (~1500 – 1800). It used to be a big and powerful city, called the Rome of the East, but nowadays it feels more just like a place just for tourists (and there were many of us, mostly Indians). It has some nice churches, including the biggest cathedral in Asia and the remnants of St. Francis Xavier.

And let me add one of the things to keep in mind when travelling in India: You have to hoard change, as much a you can! It often happens that a shopkeeper or a rickshaw driver doesn’t have change (or at least claims not to have it), even when paying with a 100 rupee (= 2 USD) banknote. And getting rid of a 1000 (the biggest one, and also unfortunately the one you get from an ATM) is something to be strategically planned ahead!

Goa

I have to say that Goa is the biggest surprise in India so far. I was really unsure if I wanted to go there, expecting throngs of tourists partying all night. But since I was to be really nearby, I decided to give it a try – and picked the village Benaulim in the southern part of Goa for my stay. And it is great here!

Of course, there are quite a few tourists, but it is certainly not too bad (here it’s mostly Russian; Hebrew got replaced by Cyrillic on the keyboard in the internet cafe). I am staying in a nice and reasonably cheap (300 rs – 6 USD – per night) guest house, it all has a quiet feel – and the beach is great! Wide and long and clean. The sand is really soft, it even feels a bit like cement, when you move it in your hands it shifts and vibrates almost life-like. Really, first I needed to make sure I was not crushing some small animal inside. There are quite a few of them – starfish partly visible hiding in the sand at low tide and various crabs, with or without shells.

They even have a “supermarket” here – meaning quite a big shop (around the size of smallest shops in CR or US). And a nice bakery with decent-looking bread :)

But back to Hampi: besides from walking around the monuments, one day I rented a bicycle. There are many of them on offer and all equally bad. Well, the main thing is that they’re running, so it’s no big deal when the breaks are not working much. And they all proudly claimed the prices they have won in France and Switzerland. On the bike I went to a temple on the Anjaneya hill, where the monkey god Hanuman was supposedly born. Accordingly, there are monkeys jumping around, and of course the indispensable beggars and sadhus (something like Hindu monks or priests), who will mark your forehead with the red or yellow dot.

Then I went to the village Anegundi, also full of ancient buildings, but yet mostly unspoiled by tourism. It’s really beatiful in its simplicity, but I quite felt that I don’t belong there, I certainly wouldn’t like foreign tourists going around Doubravice (my home village in CR) and excitedly studying everything. I guess that’s the dilemma with travelling: either you go to a place that’s prepared for tourists, but at the cost of authenticity – or you go to less spoiled places, but there you are interfering with people’s normal lives.

My journey from Hampi to Goa was also interesting. First you go to Hospet, but even from there, there are not many direct trains to Goa (around 1 every 2 days), so I had a train ticket only to Londa, around 100 km east of Goa. We spent quite a lot of time just standing somewhere in the fields (once for an hour just outside the Hubli train station), so the trip took 8 instead of supposed 6 hours. From Londa I wanted to take a bus, without having any reservation or fixed idea where to go (I was also thinking about going to Gokarna, a sacred village on the coast south from Goa). Londa turned out to be quite a small place, mostly just with mud roads. A bunch of rickshaw drivers at the train station tried to overcharge me for taking me to the bus stop. Eventually I went with one of them and caught a bus to Goa just on time. On the bumpy way down the hills we stopped for a quick dinner – I take a great pride in my stomach for so far being able to survive eating anything (although I’ve of course been drinking only bottled water, I don’t feel that courageous).

Well, that will be it for now :) Tomorrow I’m planning to go to Panaji, the capitol of Goa, it should be full of nice buildings. Have a great time home!

Hampi

The semester has ended, and so I headed off to India! I arrived on Dec 14 and I’m staying till Jan 12 – and I’ll try to write something here once in a while :) Even some photos may eventually appear here, but not today. And I’m a bit tired, so the text might not make much sense and contain lots of typos :) Whoo – but it’s pretty long!

So: on Wednesday at 4 in the morning I finally arrived to Mumbai after a 20 hour flight from Chicago via Istanbul (and with 10.5 hour time difference from Lafayette). Fortunately I was able to get exit row seats for my both flights – and that meant more leg space and more sleep. When thinking about where to go, I decided in the end to take two flights also in India, to be able to see a bit more without too much suffering in trains or buses. And the first of them was the same day in the evening.

I felt reasonably fresh when I arrived and didn’t want to spend the day just lazing around the airport (mainly because it seems to me that being active at day is the best way to quickly overcome the jet lag) – so I went to Sanjay Gandhi National Park near Mumbai for the day. On the way I got my first healthy dose of a thickly polluted air around the roads, but the park is quite big and nice. I was almost the only non-Indian there, the nature is really nice, a bit jungle-like – but now it’s all dry (except some lakes and rivers), the rainy season is far away. They have a bus running inside the park and a tiger and lion safari – but both need at least 15 people to run, which was simply too much (there were many more, but not interested). So I walked some 6 km to Kalheri caves, which were dug by Buddhist monks who used to live there sometimes in the past. It was hot (above 30 C) and tiring, but the caves are interesting – there are over 100 of them! In the afternoon there were even enough people for the safari, so we saw some lazy tigers and a lion… And then I hurried to take an autorikshaw to the airport, together with the usual joys of bargaining about the price.

I flew south to Hubli, where I just spent the night in a cheap hotel Ajanta, most of whose guests were Indians. In fact, in whole Hubli I saw only very few foreigners (but quite a few Buddhist monks), staff in restaurants don’t know almost any English, etc. On Th I took a train to Hospet and from there a rickshaw to Hampi – that I consider one of my big bargaining successes, going for 70 rupees when the usual “after-bargaining” price is 100 :) But the price for an Indian would be even lower, maybe even a lot, I can hardly know.

I’m staying in a guest house in Virupapur Gaddi, a village at the quieter side of the river from Hampi. There are no bridges (the one they were building a few years ago collapsed) across the river nearby, which means that people have to take a small boat across – when I took it back here 2 hours ago, they fit in 25 people – in the US, the boat wouldn’t run with more than 12, I guess :)

Hampi has quite shortly been the capitol of a kingdom in the 16th century, you can read a lot about it and see some nice pictures on wikipedia.

Already on the train I was surprised how many foreigners I’ve seen there. And (not surprisingly), there are even more of them in Hampi. And probably more than half of them are from Israel. As far as I know, they quite like going to India, expecially to get some rest after finishing the long (2 or 3 year) military service. Some of the hotels are even advertising themselves primarily in Hebrew; my guesthouse has an Israeli owner. But there are even more Indian tourists here. It is both an important historic place and a sacred one.

I’m glad haven’t suffered much from jet lag! Clearly my (not so original :) ) strategy of sleeping as much as I can on the plan and then being active at day worked. However, very quickly I got a nice cold, with throat-ache going partly down to the lungs or something… no doubt the shock from the (terrible) air. Fortunately, Hampi is much cleaner and I’m feeling fine now.

Yesterday I’ve been a bit tired from the cold, so I didn’t do much, just went to the main temple here (Virupaksha Temple), looked around, had a massage, some nice Indian food and papayas and bananas. There are growing the bananas right here, you can see them still green on the trees! Also there are lots of palms with coconuts.

Today I walked around the ruins for most of the day. Among them there are also lots of huge rocks, it all looks even better than at the wikipedia pictures.

Well, I’m getting tired, so I’ll end soon and go get some dinner. I had lots of fun today with Indian kids on school trips here, they get easily excited by crying “Hi!” to you, especially if you reply or smile back. Most fun it is with pretty girls ;) And the English I’m using is getting some bad influence from the locals – as I’m trying to communicate with them as well as I can, using the few Hindi words I know (although Hindi is not the local language, here they use one of the South Indian languages, which use different script and are not similar).

But it is very touristy here. Sort of “standard touristy India”, with the same restaurants as for example in Leh. I guess that’s what most people want and expect, for me it’s also more comfortably than dealing with people who don’t know English – but that is much more challenging… and authentic as well, hopefully :)

Another thing I remembered: This village has electricity only between 6.30 pm and 11 am – and almost no places have generators.