A Sea of Moustaches

New Delhi is, hands down, the craziest city I have ever been in. How can I even describe it?! It's noisy, filthy, dusty, colorful, smelly, and teeming with more Indian people than I have ever seen in my life. It's a sea of moustaches. There are 20 million of them here, and it seems as though all of them have at some point asked me what my name is, where I am from, where I am staying, how long I will be in India, etc. It's a real exercise in willpower to refrain from responding politely to every tug on your sleeve, but if I didn't ignore it I'd be locked in conversation (or someone's dodgy scheme) from morning til night.

Some things here are nice-- people are generally courteous (hello madam thank you madam) and the weather is sunny and temperate. I'm staying in a great big bazaar, so I went out and bought all sorts of special treats for unfathomably low prices. For example: sending an international postcard costs... 15 cents. Everything under the sun is for sale and it is all super cheap. Silk saris, car batteries, bushels of bananas, sticks of incense, bags of herbs and spices, bootlegged DVD's, monkey leather handbags, hashpipes and wallets and brassieres and vegetables and big glasses of milk and every single other thing one could ever imagine. I indulged in some comfortable shoes, a pair of sunglasses, some conservative clothing (sounds like the perfect disguise). It's important to wear long pants and keep your shoulders covered here, and my skinny jeans and tank tops weren't cutting it. Now I can go out into the light of day again!

Other things about New Delhi are decidedly not nice. The pollution is god-awful and the sunlight just sort hangs in the air in a smoggy, stinking haze. They weren't kidding about all the homeless little kids mingling around; it's really hard to say no to a hungry four year old, but there are just so many of them and there's only so much you can give. The common street scene in general just isn't all that pleasant: cars, scooters, and rickshaws barreling through crowds of people, kids running through the legs of cows carrying loads of bricks, lopsided cripples, people thrusting wristwatches and zipdrives into your face, women begging with nude babies in their arms, men urinating in a sidewalk urinal, food being cooked and eaten on the ground, lots of shouting and talking and laughing, stray dogs sleeping or dying right in the middle of it all... It's a sight to behold and a hard thing to get used to. This is India!

Actually not true; I keep running into other travelers that all say that New Delhi is the worst of it, and that it's a completely different experience than the rest of the country. With that in mind, I've decided to take a trip north for a week to Rishikesh, a town at the base of the Himalayas and on the banks of the Ganges River. Apparently, it's a very holy pitstop for Hindus who make a pilgrimage to the mountains. For me, there are assorted ashrams where I can stay for a week and do yoga, meditate, read and write, work on my inner yogi, etc. The Beatles went there in 1968 and loved it! I thought I'd give it a try, since J isn't coming for another two weeks (much to my great annoyance) and I don't want to spend all that time waiting for him in this dense shithole of a city. There are way more men than women out in public; at any given time, I'm surrounded by men, and most of them are staring at me. Being a woman alone here has been a little more daunting than I expected, and I imagine it will be easier once I get out of the urban sprawl. My mom is somewhat miffed about the whole situation, but I've been skyping her nightly to let her know that everything will be alright, and I'm feeling better about it every day. I miss J, but it feels good to miss him, and I'm looking forward to the day when he comes to New Delhi and we resolve our differences and kiss and make up and begin our Indian odyssey together.

Until then... Who knows what the days will bring! It's good to be alive!

7:36PM
New Delhi, India

Up In the Air

Several days before leaving Bali, J and I got into a minor motorbike accident. We hit an enormous pothole going down the slope of this mountain, and we flew and tumbled and hit the ground hard. I've got some road rash, and J thinks he might have broken his collarbone, but it's a miracle nothing worse happened. The bike was fine, we were both wearing helmets, and we rode home a little shaken--but all in one piece.

I feel like that is the point where things really soured. We (me and J) have been having some problems getting along and the accident just sort of set things in motion. I won't get into details of our disputes, as they are numerous and trivial. Wa wa wa.

So we left Bali-- it was an amazing island. We arrived in Singapore and spent our time with the sisters Woon and their family, who were all gracious and super cool people. I think we got caught up in the activity of planning our next moves (booking tickets, buying supplies) and making decisions, because we (me and J) evidently offended them bigtime by overstaying our welcome in their home, an oversight for which I am truly sorry.

In the end, I decided not to join them on their trip to Borneo, and instead to just hightail it to India. J and I probably need some time to be apart, I didn't want to hang with his friend Claude anymore, and mostly I just didn't want to spend a week in Borneo feeling angry and hurt and unresolved with J and a bunch of strangers. I hope they have a good time.

So that's it. I got on a plane, spent a long and very sad night awake at the international airport in Kuala Lumpur, then boarded a flight to New Delhi the next morning.

I never thought I'd be alone in India, but here I am.

4:07PM
New Delhi, India

Bali Bali Bali

What's not to love about Bali? We got here a week and a half ago and it's been one happy, silly adventure thus far; upon arriving, we met up with J's friend Claude and his friends Vic and Caroline, two sublime Singaporean sisters he had been traveling with in weeks prior. They went home and we took Claude, and together the three of us have been rolling along our Indonesian odyssey in the highest of spirits. It's a little more fun with three, I think-- more stories, more laughs, more fart sounds, etc. Claude is funny and interesting, so it's been extra nice traveling with him and hearing his take on the whole lot.

Bali is... Amazing! We rented someone's car for a week and we've been cruising all over the island-- to the southern coast, rife with obnoxious Australian tourists and surfer-dude culture; to lush and leafy Ubud, where vicious monkeys beg for bananas and beautiful Balinese women peddle handicrafts and suckling pig; to the mountains, to the dry and rocky western coast, where the mountains loom over the ocean and the scuba diving is world-class... We went everywhere and got lost everywhere and it was all a gas. The landscape changed so drastically along our course, especially for such a small island. One minute we were up along the green edge of a volcanic crater, looking out and over endless slopes of idyllic rice paddies and stretches of jungle.. And then half an hour later, all the trees disappeared and there were kilometers of arid grassland and burning piles of leaves and black volcanic rock. J taught Claude how to drive stickshift on the left side of the road (just like he taught me in the land down under!) and even that was fun, until Claude got behind the wheel, when it became a death ride in this poor random guy's personal vehicle (I can just hear J now: "It's okay! If we lose the car, we lose the car!") Practice makes perfect, Cloudy!

We put our new AOW scuba licenses to good use in Tulemban, and saw every single amazing sea creature in the Java Sea-- rays, turtles, sharks, big bumphead parrotfish and cute little box fish and funny little shrimps that cleaned your cuticles and climbed into your mouth and cleaned your teeth if you let them. What a strange delight! We dove at night in the USS Liberty shipwreck (originally beached after WWII, but sunk officially to sea in the great eruption of 1963) which was eerie and bad ass in every way.

What else may be said? They call Bali the "island of the gods" and they're not far off their mark. People here are so warm and friendly and quick to smile, and the women and girls are all beautiful and radiant with their natural allure. Nudity's not a big deal here (the rest of Indonesia is predominantly Muslim, and naturally nude=lewd) so we've had the pleasure of seeing lots of brown bodies in all their glory. Old ladies walk down the road with baskets of fruit on their heads and wrinkly bare breasts to their navals, all skin and toothless grins... We went rafting down a winding river, and around every corner there were nude men and women just bathing and splashing and having fun. Near the end, our boat was ambushed by a large group of maybe 15 nude little boys who scrambled aboard and nearly overthrew our guide-- probably somebody's big brother. Hearing their peals of laughter, seeing their joyous leaps into the water and watching them climb over the stone walls and scamper around with their little wieners bouncing like cashew fruits against their sleek brown bodies... It was a sight to behold, hysterically funny and heart warming in every way.

Bali has been a major highlight of our big trip, and I feel so lucky to have seen so much of it, to have found Claude along the way, to have had such an easy and happy go of it here... We're figuring out our next move this week, and it looks like we're going to join Claude and the Sisters Woon on a journey to Borneo, Malaysia. I'd like to spend more time exploring other parts of Indonesia, but that requires a more expensive visa and besides that, Borneo has some of the most dense and colorfully populated rainforests in the world, and the boys really want to spend time with some orangutans. Can you blame them?

6:42PM
Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

KL

We chose Kuala Lumpur because it was close enough to bus to, and because flights to Indonesia were way cheaper than they would have been from the now-flooded city of Bangkok (their international airport has since been shut down). It took us about 12 hours to get in, and the whole time I was reading this grueling Steven King story about a group of boys walking hundreds of miles without resting to win a great prize or die trying (The Long Walk, when he was writing as Richard Bachman) and it made the whole drive seem that much longer.

Kuala Lumpur is described as a clean, modern, melting pot of a city-- Singapore's more authentic sister, gleaming and proud, carved right out of the oldest jungle on earth. It had, for a slim period of time, some of the world's tallest buildings, and beautiful government buildings and rail stations and mosques, a hopping arts district, scrumptious delicacies of one hundred different cuisines wafting through the air...

But, expectations are the blue prints for disappointment (words of wisdom ala PT!) We got into that foreign city at two in the morning (the bus driver tried to let us off on the side of the highway, but luckily this Malay kid on board told him how to get to the station) and it was pouring rain. We searched for about an hour before we settled on a tiny room in Chinatown, and felt grateful just to have a bed.

I was glad to only spend a few days in Kuala Lumpur, because it's almost as expensive as Singapore and definitely not as nice as they would have you believe. Garbage is piled high in every alley way, on windowsills and rooftops, in deep trenches by the roadside, and it stinks. It rained quite a bit, and the water steeped all sorts of different smells-- people, stray animals, trash, urine, cooking food, car exhaust-- into a thick stench that rose from the ground and hung at nose level in the heat of the day.

Going from neighborhood to neighborhood was fun, since the ethnic groups that inhabit each section are so different from one another. Burkas and halal food in the Moslem section, fast Cantonese and roasted hanging ducks in Chinatown, high pitched music coming from every single store front in Little India--a sea of little dark mustaches and the sickly sweet mixture of incense and curry.

We busied ourselves writing postcards and reading books. We visited a bird sanctuary and the KL tower (just another phallus on the landscape, I thought). We spent an afternoon in a panicky scramble after we discovered our tickets to Indonesia had been cancelled without warning; always good to check and make sure!

We spent the rest of our time meandering around and getting lost in what turned out to be, more or less, just another big, dirty city in Southeast Asia. Here's a funny thing about sidewalks in KL- they're tiled like a bathroom floor (maybe to look cleaner?) and they're slippery as all hell when they're wet. I never had a spill (J ate it down a flight of stairs in a park, not as hilarious as it sounds) but there were many moments spent almost slipping-- camera in your hand, heart in your throat, crowd of people standing by.. Who the hell tiles the sidewalk in a city where it rains once a day?

On one particularly awful night, in a sketchy hostel where the mattress didn't even come with a sheet, and where construction noises screeched endlessly from morning til night, J awoke to the sound of a woman being hustled against her will into some dark room across the hall. She kept on shouting "No! No! No!" and then there was the sound of many locks clicking shut on the door, and then two men standing guard, just shooting the shit. What could we do? Go out and try to help her, and get knifed and robbed, or worse? It was just sickening and heart breaking, and probably not that unusual. This was when we decided we didn't like Kuala Lumpur.

We left on a Sunday and spent seven restless hours waiting at the airport for our delayed flight, itching to be in Indonesia already. The whole time in KL felt like a long game of waiting. How many days were we there? Four? Five? What did we do that whole time? I have a Malaysian stamp in my passport, but that's about it. Time spent getting from one place to another can feel so dreamlike and vaguely uncomfortable. I wonder how people do those lightning stints of travel-- "Europe in one month!" or "3 weeks, 6 countries, see all of Asia!" We met folks along the way who had it all figured out; maybe they had purchased a big tourist package, or they were still high on the thrills of their last adventure in Cambodia, or they were gearing up for a big jump to Australia.. Seemed like they left very little time to be present and to reflect, which is maybe why we needed a layover in Kuala Lumpur. In-between travel time is good for that -- musing on the move. We weren't alone; there were scraggly backpackers, making their lazy way to the next island, anonymous bodies lying on the floor of a dark night ferry, speeding moped riders with their faces hidden, weaving through traffic and swerving past stray dogs, so many people in transient circumstances-- and us, moving through all of it, trying to get from one place to another and collecting little pieces along the way.

And trying not to lose any of them!


10:29PM
Bali, Indonesia