On the banks of the Fraser River, behind a massive distribution warehouse and just off the flight path to the airport lives a Vancouver summer tradition: the Richmond Night Market. It’s a medley of Asian traditional meets county fair where dim sum and hawker stands replace candy floss and ferris wheels. Wen and I had to go.
For us, the main feature was the food. We revelled in deep-fried fun. Taiwanese chicken:
Japanese yams and onions (coated in teriyaki mayo…):
The skewers and cups were a nice touch.
But that wasn’t enough dough-crusted fun. From there it was on to octopus balls:
Here’s how they’re made, in case you’ve ever wondered how they make them round:
And then some battered frozen lychees for dessert. The difference between the frozen centers and fried shell is great:
It wasn’t all deep-fried though, we also had roasted corn – although we removed any healthiness by slathering it in butter and then various cheese and salt toppings:
Wen also got some fresh-squeeze orange juice which came with this curious lid freshly stamped on it:
We were stuffed and we didn’t get a chance to try the duck crepes, assorted noodles or dip into the dim sum.
While the food was the main event for us, there was also a huge market where you could indulge your fantasies of buying cheap sundries from overseas. Apparently Angry Birds has been turned into a series of plush toys that now battle Mario et al. for kids’ attention. And, if you desire, you can now change your eye colour before hitting out a night on the town:
It was a great time and felt like a North American-ized version of another market I was in just over a year ago…
Way back in 2005, Wen and I were living in Toronto and we stumbled onto the now-defunct Toba for brunch. There I discovered a dish that I have not seen since: the duck and hoisin crepe (a.k.a. Moo Shu Duck).
Peking duck.
Hoisin sauce.
In a fresh crepe.
What more could you want?
I’ve been mourning and missing it ever since (and yes, I’m aware that I probably could have googled either a recipe or a restaurant that serves it at any time during the past six years, but I’ve got a complicated relationship with food).
So imagine my surprise when I found myself making it on Saturday afternoon.
Why?
Knife skills.
Wen signed us up for a knife skills class at The Dirty Apron. She told me that we were going to make clam chowder in addition to learning about how to chop, dice and julienne.
The class is highly recommended. I now know how to properly cut an onion plus I got to spend a few hours in the Dirty Apron’s awesome test kitchen (12 mind-blowing Wolf ranges plus the demo area below):
Imagine my surprise when it turned out that in addition to the clam chowder, we were also going to make my beloved Moo Shu Duck that I’ve been pining for for half a decade.
I figured I’d burn the living hell out of the crepes, but all turned out okay:
Here’s what the delicious Hoisin-soaked, stir-fried interior looks like:
I can’t wait to cook this at home; it won’t be five years until I try it again.
Here’s the recipe for those who are interested:
BBQ Duck and Fine Vegetable Stir-Fry
Ingredients:
250g BBQ duck meat (shredded)
They get all their duck from Lee Loy. It’s about $18 a duck, but if you bargain like mad you can get it for $13
20g Cashew nuts
2 Cloves garlic
4 Shitake mushrooms (julienne)
1/4 Carrot (julienne)
1/2 Small onion (julienne); can use 1/4 red onion
30 ml Oyster sauce
50 ml Hoisin sauce
1 tsp Toasted sesame seeds
Salt & pepper
Directions:
Heat oil in a saute pan, allowing the pan to get very hot. Add the small onion, mushrooms, and garlic to the pan. Stir-fry on high heat for about 2 minutes.
Add the hoisin sauce, oyster sauce to the ingredients and stir-fry for another minute. Next, add the carrot, cashew nuts and sesame seeds and then cook for 1 more minute.
Add the BBQ duck meat at the very end and remove from the heat.
Star Anise Crepes
Ingredients:
2 Eggs
220 ml Milk
20 ml Melted unsalted butter
1/2 cup Flour
1 tsp Star Anise (finely ground)
2 sprigs Italian parsley (finely chopped)
1 tbsp Butter (room temp for cooking)
Directions:
Combine the eggs, milk, butter, and flour then whisk together until mixture is smooth and free of lumps. Add the parsley, star anise, and salt and pepper to the batter. The batter should be the consistency of cold cream.
Heat a non-stick pan over medium heat. When the pan is hot, brush it with a little butter.
Use a ladle (about 3 tbsp) to put the batter into the center of the pan. Tilt the pan from left to right to cover the entire surface. Cook the crepe until the edges begin to brown and then flip the crepe over to cook the other side. Remove from the pan
It’s not stated above, but you fold the stir-fry into the crepe just like it was a burrito and serve.
Vancouver has an awesome food scene: great chefs, great restaurants and great food shops. Since we’ve arrived here, Wen and I have wanted to check out the stores that exist beyond the downtown/Granville/Kits core. On Satruday we finally got the chance, with a long walk from our place through East Van.
Here’s my attempt to take you on the ride.
The first place we went – and yes, I know that it’s not technically in East Van – was Benny’s Market. Benny’s has been around since 1917 and is worth a visit. At first glance, you might be dismayed: from outside it looks like a neighbourhood bodega, not a temple of Italian food. But when you go inside and venture into the bowels of the store you’ll find their broad selection of Italian delicacies: coffee, pasta, antipastos, meat, etc.
We left with a bag laden with pasta (including the elusive lazy man’s gourmet meal: Ripienissimi stuffed pasta), sauces and pancetta. The orecchiette ended up becoming our dinner:
We weren’t hungry enough for a sandwich, but we’ll be going back; they’ve been making sandwiches there since 1917.
Next stop was the East Van outlet of Les Amis du Fromage. Walking inside, we fell in love with the deep, competing smells of the different cheeses. We were tempted by the goat cheese below, but we settled on an Austrian Karotten Kase instead (it’s a hard orange cheese; hence “Karotten”).
They were sampling rose, orange and lemon-flavoured olive oils; if you ever stumble across these, be sure to try them. You wouldn’t want them every day, but they’re delicious.
We’re also going to have to go back to their wine bar, Au Petit Chavignol, which is right next door (one of the few places in Vancouver where you can get raclette).
At this point in began to rain and we did what any self-respecting Vancouverite would do: we went for coffee. Our chosen stop was Latin Organics. This tiny little cafe really is a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day: it’s all white walls with orange highlights and the most tasteful use of bamboo I’ve ever seen.
The spirit of the store is Colombian, so I had a coffee con leche and a corn arepa; Wendy had a delicious London Fog (Earl Grey tea, shot of vanilla and steamed milk).
Latin Organics is right next to the Gourmet Warehouse, which lives up to its name and stocks everything you could ever need to cook anything. Looking for 15 variants of cast iron griddles? Your choice of 80 different cooking knives? The Vosges bacon chocolate bar? Duck? It’s all there.
If you were to look at these last few stops, you’d notice that they’re all on East Hastings. This is the same one that’s home to the poorest postal code in Canada just a few kilometres away; oddly it’s a food paradise if you keep following it and know where to look.
In fact, our next stop was also on it: the East Village Bakery. We were tempted by their cheddar fougasses, but they were way too big to carry with us on our tour; we opted for a cheddar and kalamata olive loaf instead.
Our last stop on East Hastings was Moccia. I had been hankering to go here for a while: many of Gastown’s restaurants and many of the food stores we’d already visited sell Moccia’s meats.
When you step in the spare interior of the store, you notice immediately that they take their meat seriously. The stamps behind the butcher’s stand are a solid clue:
It was really tough to choose from amongst the many types of sausages, bacon and various cuts; we settled on some porchetta and breakfast sausages.
Thus ended the East Hastings portion of our tour. We backtracked a bit and went up Victoria Drive to the South China Seas Trading Co’s store.
This store might just pack the most cooking punch per square foot anywhere in the world. In the tiny store you can get an incredible array of spices sourced from over 10 global suppliers. We picked up some szechwan peppercorns; I’ve never seen them for sale anywhere else. They also were selling kasuri methi (dried Fenugreek), which I’ve never seen outside of India.
Incredibly, not only is this a store, it’s also a cooking lab; I’ll likely be coming back in April to learn how to make four types of noodles.
This was followed by a walk over to The Drive and a trifecta of Italian stores in quick succession.
First, JN&Z Deli. Meat lovers heaven; I couldn’t count all the hocks hung high from the ceiling; one of the most beautiful-smelling places on earth.
A hundred feet or so away was La Grotto Del Formaggio, where the sky-theme ceilings stare down on all things Italian: not just cheese. Much like Benny’s, we’ll be going back for a sandwich sometime.
Right next door is the Fratelli Bakery, where you can get your cannoli on.
By this point we were bushed, so we headed over to Prado for another coffee injection.
This place is one of Vancouver’s cutest cafes: lots of light, brushed aluminum navy chairs, whitewashed walls, wooden floor and – rare for Vancouver – brick. And the coffee’s great too.
It was a great day. Here’s what the haul looked like; call me if you want to eat well this week:
One of the simultaneously silliest and greatest trends to emerge from the 21st century’s fetishization of technology is the notion of “unboxing“. The combination of blogs and online video and cheap digital cameras now allow young male otaku to document in clinical detail the experience of opening the box of a new gadget.
There are whole sites dedicated to capturing this techno-narcissim in all its glory. Apple‘s variousproducts are the clear winners in the unboxing sweepstakes, accounting for almost half of the google hits on the topic-which seems appropriate given their leadership in turning us into techno-gear-fetishists.
I would like to take this moment to try and move the dialogue around unboxing forward and move it into a new domain.
Chocolate.
I recently procured a bespoke chocolate from Ritter Sport (this is an obnoxious way of saying that I went to the company store, waited in line with the other tourists/unemployed people for half an hour and bought an overpriced chocolate) and now you can share with me in the unboxing experience.
Here it is, my brand new, customized chocolate. My fingers are trembling as I look at it on the table. It really is my chocolate creation:
Before opening the box, let’s look at one of the accessories: the ingredient list. Nothing says sophistication like adding candied strawberry, crunch cereal, candied yoghurt and mini smarties to already sweetened milk chocolate. No one will mistake my gourmet palate for that of, say, a Chef Boyardee loving four-year-old.
The gentle tab at the back of the box gave away easily under my finger and yielded the first view of my chocolate payload:
Notice that careful fold. It’s German craftsmanship matched only by the careful placement of the sticker on the reverse:
Bunte Schokowelt is not the outcome of some sort of Germanic physical altercation, but rather means “colourful chocolate world”. And all the colour is revealed by my first glimpse of the chocolate. The underside’s texture hints at the range of flavour about to be experienced:
And, flipping it over, here’s the pinnacle of chocolate engineering:
Internet, I hope you realize what a profound shared experience we just had. This is not navel-gazing on my account whatsoever, rather it’s me increasing our universe’s stock of knowledge.
Bon appetit.
(And in all seriousness, the chocolate was delicious – if a bit sweet – and I highly recommend getting your own one made)
Istanbul. The chaos of 13 million lives. A city bursting at the seams and simultaneously thriving. A place where you cannot escape over 2,000 years of history – nor would you want to. Where the East literally meets the West but it feels more like modern meets ancient. A fantastic place to spend a few days.
1.
A bit about the city. Founded by Greeks but developed by the Romans (most notably, they left the Hagia Sophia) whose Constantine made it the new capital of the empire. Inherited by the Byzantines who built it into the largest city of world. Conquered by the Ottomans; it took 100 years to recover. Now ruled by Turks, it has exploded in population (from 680,000 in 1927 to 1,000,000 around 1950 to 13,000,000 or so today) as waves of first Ottoman refugees and then poor Turks flooded the city seeking safety and economic opportunity.
Each of these rulers have left their fingerprints on the city; most obvious are the great monuments left by each. More subtle are the neighbourhoods. This is not really a city proper, but a series of mini-cities.
There’s modern and hip Begolyu; Muslim women sip wine in restaurants, head scarves are rare and the boutiques all have well labeled prices. There’s a modern art gallery with world class pieces. Movies are filmed. But don’t think it’s all Western decadence – in the alleys off Istiklal you’re as likely to find people playing backgammon, drinking tea and smoking a hookah as you are to find people drinking beer and cavorting.
In ancient Fatih, the crowded, narrow medieval streets are packed with open-faced stores hawking everything (negotiate furiously!), businesses shut for an hour at midday when the mosques overflow and nary a woman isn’t wearing a head scarf.
And then there’s the entire Asian shore, where well planned neighbourhoods abound with people simply living their lives and trying to create a better life for their children; the glass-walled buildings of multinationals border its many highways.
The city proper is incredibly colourful, bursting with it:
Curiously though, the locals seem to only wear dark colours. You can observe this as, on the weekend, you can conceivably walk the many kilometers from the Grand Bazaar down to the Galata Bridge via the Spice Market and then over to Istiklal and eventually Taksim square and spend the entire time in a crowd of thousands:
Perhaps the dark clothes reflect the huzzun (melancholy) that Orhan Pamuk believes hangs over this city (his book, Istanbul, is required reading before visiting the city).
Interestingly, none of the photos above capture the feel of this city. This is a city of interfaces and thresholds. The joy of the city is walking the streets and, in the string of a few hundred meters, finding yourself careening from the lighting to hardware to clothing to outdoor equipment to banking districts. Along the way the streets buzz with deliverymen lugging hundred of pounds of goods and runners delivering tea or food. Men loiter smoking furiously. And when you turn corners you never know what you’re going to see: wild dogs and cats, laundry hanging from a second floor window, an old woman or man teleported from the 1700s disappearing into a closing door or the sudden appearance of a mosque or hammam or cobblestoned alley. You have a constant feeling that things are happening that you cannot understand and all of it is ruled by some sort on unknown code.
2.
The past 90 years have been confusing for Istanbul. The empire collapsed and the city was ignored and began to decay. Then it’s population grew faster than anyone could imagine. The net result is that the city is undergoing massive change. The city used to be almost entirely wooden; you can still see this in some of the older neighbourhoods like Fatih. It can feel like going back in time:
Many of these buildings were torched in the 1950s in a spree that would have brought a tear to the eye of a 1970′s Bronx slumlord. However, you can still find many that have been restored:
The burgeoning population meant that an incredible number of new buildings needed to be built. The older parts of the city went from two storeys to six overnight and the one-horse-wide streets are now clogged with some of the worst traffic in the world; if you hate horns, beware where you walk.
Also, many of these were built on the cheap and are now being torn down. Scenes like this are everywhere:
The city is reinventing itself in six to eight storey standards of glass, steel, plaster and terra cotta.
3.
But no dispatch on Istanbul would be complete without a few comments on its monuments. The sultan used Topkapi Palace to make it clear that Istanbul was an Ottoman city and there were no more Romans or Byzantines to be found.
And the Hagia Sophia stands as a testament to Roman engineering combined with the clash of cultures:
The Grand Bazaar is literally a city within a city, with every store beneath a covered arch. You can wonder aimlessly and quickly lose your sense of direction as there are no ways to see way to see any of the city’s landmarks:
And then there are the ubiquitous mosques. They are everywhere, piercing the sky with their minarets while their stones plays tricks with the setting sun.
The sound of the call to prayer in Istanbul is haunting. Within minutes of each other, dozens (hundred? thousands?) of cries start to ululate over the sky. And within a few minutes it is all gone and it as if it never happened.
You could spend a month visiting the monuments of Istanbul (aqueducts, old city walls, fortresses…) but one additional one that should be on every visitor’s list is the cistern. If it looks vaguely familiar, it may be because Sean Connery rowed across it in From Russia With Love.
4.
For mild hapnophobes (fear of being touched) like myself, Istanbul can present some surprising issues. My first situation occurred when I went to get my hair cut. The actual hair cutting part was fine – no different from what I’m used to everywhere else I’ve had my hair cut. However, I learned that in Istanbul your haircut isn’t done simply because your hair is cut.
The barbershop consisted of two men. A young artiste who cut hair and an older man whose sole purpose seemed to be to make tea (it’s everywhere here and the national drink). However, his real job became obvious once the last strand was cut.
Through a series of grunts and gestures he directed me to lean over into a wash basin where steaming water had been surreptitiously running. He was soon lathering up my hair and running his firm old man hands across my scalp. Then down my face. A gentle poke in the eyes. A rub of the temples and cheeks. This was getting very awkward.
He then dried me off, but we were not done. My entire head – not just my scalp – was massaged. Then he worked his way down my neck and into the shoulders. Most people would enjoy this; I was trying not to squirm in my seat.
Still not done! He found time to slather me in first moisturizer, then aftershave and finally hair gel.
My hair was cut. I smelled nice. And my worst fears have been realized.
The other scenario I faced was going for a hammam: a Turkish bath. I found out that it basically involves you lying prostate, face down on a slab in a co-ed room with a piece of towel wedged between your butt cheeks while a man sits on the back of your knees and pounds your flesh. Not my idea of fun so I settled for a nice steam in the sauna instead.
5.
Turks are insanely patriotic people (or at least, their government is). Everywhere you go it is flags, flags, flags – and pictures of Attaturk.
In fact, you if you sit in a hotel that overlooks the city, you can pass your time trying to count all the massive Turkish flags that dot the skyline; they’re those massive flags that are normally only found in North America on car dealership lots at the edge of the city or next to a highway. They’re second only to the mosque minarets in defining the skyline. And they flap beautifully in the morning air.
6.
The Turks love al fresco dining so cafes and open air restaurants abound. If you wander enough, you’ll eventually find a place where grape vines have been strung across a cobblestone street and tables and chairs brought out.
But if unsurpassed quality is your goal, you will need to hunt a little further. One suggestion (thanks Jascha!) is Develi. The sign above the door says “Kebabs & Baklava” and they do not disappoint. They’re also set in one of the cutest locations possible: a square surrounded by wooden houses and fishmongers.
And no visit would be complete without a visit to Ciya Sofrasi. The New Yorker did a 10,000 word article on them in the 2009 food issue; at the time I thought it bordered on hagiography but having eaten there, I now understand it was not.
The experience is incredible. The restaurant is on the Asian side of the city, so you need to take a ferry to Kadikoy. From there, you need to wander the poorly marked pedestrian streets (one of the few grievances you can lodge against this city), through food and fish markets and past deceptively similarly named restaurants until you find it.
You then serve yourself a vegetable plate. Normally, self service is inversely proportional to the quality of the food, but it’s the opposite here. This mezze plate is one of the best things I’ve ever had, and it was all vegetarian:
To order a main, you walk up to a chef who is keeping a dozen pots of various home-style dishes cooking. You order what you want (Icli Kofte – Turkish stuffed meatball, falafel, and lamb meatballs in a mint and pomegranate sauce for us) and it is brought to your table a few minutes later.
This was easily one of the five best meals I’ve had on our travels and it came with the added benefit of being incredibly cheap for Istanbul. Don’t go to Istanbul – and you need to come here – without a visit.
Wen and I just wrapped up an eight day whirlwind tour of Uzbekistan. It was four cities, over a thousand kilometers of driving, one desert, countless mosques, madrasahs and mausoleums and more mud bricks than you can possibly imagine.
1.
We started our journey is Tashkent. This city was first rebuilt by the Czar who, after winning The Great Game, instituted his peasant eradication program by building a European-style city in the middle of the Central Asian steppes. The city – which has almost no traffic and only white cars – is full of eight lane boulevards flanked by trees, all of which radiate out from a central square.
On this square is the Hotel Uzbekistan in all its authoritarian glory – and it just happened to be where we were spending the night:
Like many things in Uzbekistan, the hotel is not all it seems to be. Despite the exterior, its interior strives to project the bland persona of a business hotel. Think Chinese machine-made furniture in anonymous colours and too much marble and fake crystal lighting.
However, if you’re in search of a drink of water (alas, tap water cannot be drunk here) like us, you might head up to the restaurant on the top floor, where you’re greeted by this sign:
An internet search reveals the following hint of what might go on up there:
This hotel is typical of what you get in this part of the world but is definitely one of the better ones in the area. Interesting item is that the lift goes to the 16th floor and you walk up to the restaraunt on the 17th floor. When you get out of the lift you will be definitely accosted by several prostitutes, The 16th floor has its own brothel. Girls will be knocking on your door at all hours once they have paid the receptionist to find out where all the single male occupiers are. $50 per girl will give you a night you won’t forget in a hurry. These girls are not ugly and some are quite stunning and are very surprised when they are refused. Buy them chocolates and pink champagne and you will be their hero. I stayed here for several months whilst working in Uzbek!!!!
Food is great and there is an eyeopening floorshow with girls in see through negliges. THIS IS NOT A WIND UP I CAN ASSURE YOU as anyone who has visited/worked in this part of the world.
Needless to say, we went elsewhere for dinner.
2.
What the Czar didn’t destroy in Tashkent, an earthquake in the 1960s did, so there’s not a whole heckuva lot to see. However, there’s a beautiful mausoleum/mosque/madrasah complex that includes the oldest copy of the Koran (alas, no photos allowed):
This site (the Khast-Imom complex), like every historical site in Uzbekistan, has been rebuilt. I used to be quite anti-restoration, thinking that if something was ruined, it should simply be left there for us to imagine what it might have been like.
After visiting Uzbekistan, I’m not sure I feel this way anymore. Most of these sites were literally just destroyed arches with a few tiles and collapsed domes. Now they’ve been beautifully reconstructed to almost exactly what they were at the height of their glory. If they hadn’t been remade there certainly wouldn’t be a single tourist who wasn’t an archeology major (instead, every tourist we saw was a 50-plus German or French person; we only saw six people under 40 the entire trip).
3.
As I mentioned above, things in Uzbekistan aren’t always as they seem. For one, the capital appears to be like an Eastern European city: a little shabby due to 50 plus years of Soviet occupation, but coming on strong. However, once you leave the city you realize that things are different. By the time you get to Khiva, mud brick construction is sporadically dotting the highway.
Similarly, the capital has all the trappings of a city, like, say, functioning gas stations. Once you leave the capital you pass abandoned gas station after abandoned gas station. In Bukhara and Khiva drivers were lined up fifty deep waiting for a lonely pump to open based on a rumour that there would be gas there later in the day. Entrepreneurs lined nearby streets trying to flag down cars with black market gas stored in plastic drinking water bottles.
The other major black market is for the currency, the s’um (pronounced like “sum” and “zoom”). There’s been a nasty bit of inflation since independence and since the largest bill is 1,000 (about sixty cents at the official rate), this is what USD 100 looks like; apparently the 10,000 s’um note is coming soon:
However, you quickly learn that the unofficial exchange rate is much, much higher. In Bukhara I was able to get 2,270 to the dollar – or about 40% more. Your introduction to this comes quickly as everyone – your hotelier, your guide, people on the street – will openly tell you that if you want to exchange dollars with them instead of the local bank, they’ll give you a better rate.
My favourite experience was getting one of our guides to help us exchange money. He led me down a set of near-forested back alleys, across a street and into a market that consisted of near-identical stalls selling a uniquely Uzbek perspective on Western fashion. The tenth or so shop turned out to be our hookup and, amongst the jeans and fur-lined jacket-wearing mannequins, they casually started pulling out stacks of elastic-banded 1,000′s to convert my money.
4.
When most people think of Uzbekistan, they think of Samarkand. It’s the most famous of the former Silk Route cities here, and it has the most massive monuments. Beyond Samarkand, I knew nothing of this country before coming here. And, before coming here, if I’d only seen Samarkand, in my naivete, I would have been satisfied.
The first place most people go is the Shaki-Zinda complex. It’s a series of mausoleums with an attached mosque. The finery of the tiling is incredible:
The entrance makes you feel like you are walking through an Islamic cavern:
Another major stop is the Gur Emir mausoleum, where the corpse of Amir Timur is kept. He’s a polarizing figure: he’s got a massive statue built to him in the geographic center of Tashkent; people in the provincial towns that he razed consider him a barbaric murderer.
Next to his tomb is the tomb of a holy man. There’s an interesting tradition here where holy tombs are marked by a yak tail hung from a high post (and I am not making any of this up):
But the real reason people come to Samarkand is to see Registan Square: two beautiful madrasahs that balance a mosque. It’s the postcard for all things Uzbek:
The details of the madrasahs are exquisite. The image below shows the one on the right in the photo above. The orange blobs above the arch are massive tiger lions (locals believe that they were tigers with the mane of a lion; alas they were conveniently hunted to extinction before someone did a proper drawing of one) with a face in the moon above their backs. These are unique in Islamic history as they come from a brief period when imams allowed designs that actually included visual representations of animals and – gasp- almost a human. I think the empire fell shortly after.
5.
If you ever find yourself in the Tashkent airport between 3 and 4 pm on a Tuesday you’ll see an interesting sight. Airports are normally a polyglot demesne, but in Uzbekistan it takes on a whole new level as the two carousel arrival area receives two flights from Seoul and one each from Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing and Bangkok. Baggage careens randomly onto one of the carousels at an arbitrary time after your flight’s arrival; the locals while away the time with flagrant disregard for the omnipresent no smoking signs.
Flying in Uzbekistan is also an interesting experience. You never have to worry about which airline you’re flying as there’s only one. Uzbekistan Airways is the only carrier that services the country and it does so via a fleet of battered Boeings and aging Iluskyins interspersed with the odd BA Avro and some things that look like they’re converted from fighting forest fires. There must have been a garage sale on some Eastern European airlines in the 1990s.
They’ve also developed their own flying techniques, most notably the ability to drift into the sky and only then fire the throttle. Avid flyers will notice that this is the anithesis of North American flying where you hurtle down the runway as fast as you can and then gradually reduce thrust once you’re in the air.
People also follow the quaint tradition of clapping upon a successful landing. However, I want to give Uzbek Air credit for it’s landings: they are single handedly the smoothest landings I’ve ever felt. You literally touch down and find yourself noting “oh look, we’re on the ground”. The pilots also don’t immediately hit the reverse thrust, so you have a few seconds to reacclimatize yourself with the Earth before you start to slow down. In fact, the pilot of our RJ 85 (yes, it is a model of plane, look it up) actually managed to slow the the plane to halt using only the brakes: no reverse thrust. It was, simply put, the best landing I have ever had. 10/10.
6.
Samarkand was followed by Bukhara – a UNESCO World Heritage site that I’d never heard of until I arrived there. It’s a shame I’d never heard of it, as it’s an ancient town that has over 500 monuments spread over a few kilometers. As you walk around the town you keep stumbling upon more and more history.
It would literally bore you to death if I were to list all the places we saw, but the highlights include the Kalon minaret and its associated mosque complex. You used to be able to climb to the top of it, but a few years back a geriatric German hurt himself (gee, maybe you shouldn’t try to climb medieval minarets in second world countries…) and then had the gall to try and sue the Uzbek government (good luck winning). In a stubbornly autocratic state this unleashed bureaucratic terror and the minaret is now closed for non-existent “renovations”:
To navigate to the complex you pass through several of the “trading domes” where merchants used to sell their wares. Now it’s mostly souvenir trinkets:
On the outskirts of town you can visit the former Khan’s summer palace. It’s built in a combined European/Islamic style and shows the influence that the Czar had over his vassal states:
Here’s the roof of the room where breakfast was served:
This palace also has one of the prettiest details I’ve seen anywhere on this trip. Many of the rooms have alcoves that use the cave design that’s so common in mihrabs (alcove in a mosque that indicates the direction of Mecca); the cave is an allusion to the one where Mohammed first received his messages from God.
In the palace they’ve painted some of the alcoves white and then placed mirrors on the flat bottom of the cave elements. The effect is sublime:
7.
I’ve never been on an organized multi-day tour before, but after this one, I could be convinced to take them in otherwise hard to visit places (to get into Uzbekistan you need a visa and that requires an invitation from a travel agency).
Here are some of the characters we met on our tour:
Anastasia. Our Russian guide in Tashkent. She showed up dressed to the nines in all matching black, heels, makeup and fingernails finished purple. She in her early twenties and has a master’s in English – explaining her fluency. She’s paying back the government (her education was free) by working for them; as she battles for choice roles against the sons and daughters of ministers and prominent citizens, she’s learning how the game is played (Uzbekistan is 174th out of 180 in Transparency International’s 2009 corruption rankings. Unlike golf, a low score is bad…).
Serik. Our Kazakh driver. He speaks a creole of broken English, florid Italian and the odd bit of German. He served in the military and his favourite motion is drawing his finger across his neck. He’s full of humour, referring to an old vodka factory as a “communist mosque”. He also refers to himself as “just the driver” but he is full of interesting wisdom, like the fact that the kindly old man who seems to run our hotel in Samarkand actually is the biggest crime boss in town
XYZ. Our guide in one of the cities. A hint of bitterness came into their voice when informing us that “of course, Uzbekistan has a new king now. But don’t tell anyone I told you that!” This was a reference to Islam Karimov, the undisputed leader of Uzbekistan – and the only leader they’ve ever known.
He took office in 1990 and then, after Independence in 1991, started routinely winning 88% of the vote. Realizing that his popularity was making elections a waste of time and money, he extended his term from five to seven years. Next election is in 2014.
He shows up for all the photo ops and is so beloved for his wisdom that monuments and museums frequently contain tributes to him, like this one from the Ulugbek Observatory museum in Samarkand:
On the basis of National program of personnel training developed and carried out under the direct supervision of our President Islam Karimov the modern educational system fairly recognized by the world community is created in Uzbekistan.
8.
Our last stop was Khiva, another Silk Route trading town that I, sadly, knew nothing about prior to visiting. It’s a stunning walled city, dotted with minarets (that you can actually go up!) and palaces, mosques, madrasahs and mausoleums.
While it’s profile is beautiful, it actually appears quite grey:
However, Khiva is home to some of the most incredible craftspeople you will ever meet and they have tiled the walls, carved the pillars and painted the roofs of all of their monuments:
It’s a beautiful city that we had to rush through in a day; I would have loved to have spent some more time there.
9.
Two things struck me with Uzbek society.
The first is that they are trying to practice autarky (creating an economy that is 100% self-sufficient). Unless they absolutely can’t make it, they don’t import it. This means that you can get a car, but unless you want to pay 100-150% of the price in import duty, you’re going to be getting a locally-made Daewoo or a Chevrolet (and a weird model with a model name like “Lacetti” or “Matiz” or “Nexia”). And it’s going to come in white or silver or black. Why would you want a different colour?
This also means that you can get a chocolate bar, but only one type. Ditto for cola, chips and a whole slew of other consumer products.
It also means that many services, like their airports, pretend at being modern, but since, for instance, there’s only one airline and zero competition, things don’t work as you’d expect. You’ll have time to think about this when two flights leave from the same gate within five minutes of one another (there are not that many flights from Uzbekistan…) and four hundred people need to herd through a six foot wide door to get on unmarked buses to their respective flights. This problem was solved generations ago in competitive economies but autarky means that we’ll have to wait a little longer for the solution to come to Uzbekistan.
The second thing I noticed is how conservative society is.
On our flight to Turkey they played the PG-13 movie “The Duchess”. At the briefest hint of any inappropriate behaviour (usually an amourous scene), the movie would cut away to images of Air Uzbek planes flying over mountains.
The plane also had an informational pamphlet on AIDS that included the following gems:
Q: What is the relationship between HIV/AIDS and people traveling abroad?
A: By going to another country for employment opportunities, business trip or tourism purposes; as well as being away from family in a new environment, changing lifestyles, the person is more exposed to the risk of being infected by HIV/AIDS.
and:
Virus transmission may occur in the following cases:
1. Unprotected sexual intercourse with persons of easy behavior.
…
This is likely a holdover from the particularly conservative branch of Islam that was/is practiced here and led to sharia being law until 1920. In Khiva, when the law was revoked, there was a festival held where women could burn their body-covering paranjas. Many women burned them and upon returning home with hair uncovered, were stoned to death by their family members.
In fact, the paranja is possibly the most suffocating device ever created to spare a woman the lustful glances of men. It’s a smock that drops down over a woman’s feet and contains decorative sleeves: her actual arms are contained within the garment. The kicker is a veil that’s a mesh of horse hair so that it’s impossible to see any part of the woman’s face:
Here’s a too-short one modeled by Wendy:
10.
The food in Uzbekistan is great. They specialize in lamb shish kebabs; if you get whole meat chunks, they come deliciously coated in salt to keep the flavour in during grilling:
Here’s the ground meat alternative:
The locals are also proud of their bread (and they bake it in a tandoor!). Each city has a variant on the same style of loaf; the people of Samarkand claim that there’s is so good that it will stay fresh for 100 years:
Quite a few dishes involved a stuffed surprise. This one was lamb crepes:
Here is a pepper stuffed with lamb and rice:
Again, the food is delicious (if you like lamb). It does take a little while to get used to the cooking style: since Uzbekistan is the world’s 3rd largest cotton exporter, everything is cooked in cottonseed oil.
11.
A few other random things I noted while traveling there:
Many Pakistanis come to Uzbekistan as it’s close and cheap. Mostly large groups of men. One of our guides told us that they quickly visit the sites and then go out and get truly wasted as it’s apparently rather difficult to do so back home
They used to have slavery in Khiva and on a truly colossal scale. When it was outlawed in 1873, they found themselves with 40K new citizens versus a population that used to only contain 30K official citizens
Names are impossible to pronounce here. One particularly overzealous soap opera actor has three apostrophes (!) in his last name
The local instruments make beautiful music. Here’s a guy demonstrating a few of them; skip ahead to 1:40 hear him play the Tor (12 strings). The Chang (75 strings) is right after: uzbek_music
This part of Rajasthan is a land of superlatives and machismo; it is the Texas of India.
Jaisal built a golden city in the desert by erecting a massive fort on top of a rock. It thrived along the Silk Road. Unsurprisingly, he called it Jaisalmer.
Jodh responded by building an even bigger fort on top of the rock near his town. And it was known as Jodhpur. He also let the Brahmins paint their houses indigo, hence the town is now known as the Blue City.
A few hundred kilometers away, Jai decided that he would not be outdone. He build a palace beneath a fort nestled amongst hills crisscrossed with fortified walls and then built another palace in a lake. Unsatisfied, he decided to build a whole new city – arrayed along grid lines – with a palace at its center and then painted the whole thing pink. In keeping with the theme, Jaipur is known as the pink city.
When not erecting monuments to themselves, the kings of these different city states would attack one another over petty grievances. For instance, raiding each others’ caravans, snubbing one another’s invitations to meal and therefore laying siege to cities, etc. The usual contrivances of small principalities.
With Independence they were all forced into one state which was called Rajasthan as it is the land (stan) of kings (raj). Nowadays there are still Maharajahs, but they no longer command armies and audiences. To attack one another they use the major tool at their disposal: the audio guides to their respective forts.
When you tour the different fort/palace complexes it’s advisable to get the audio guides as there tends to be minimal signage. Each tour explodes with hyperbole about how the carvings/gates/walls/howdahs/palanquins/weapons/warriors/etc. of that palace are the most ornate/strongest/most beautiful/biggest/fiercest/etc. in the world.
There are interviews with the Maharajahs plus the CEOs and Senior Lead Researchers of various charities and foundations (people here are obsessed with rank and titles) tossing you pearls of wisdom about the pomp and prestige of the each fort.
A slightly revisionist history has been written where there are only brave warriors and the forts are unconquered (ignoring that several times the forts fell when guards were bribed). The Rajput kings are now unbeaten – but what’s left unsaid is that the Mughals coerced them into siding with them, understanding that they never needed to beat them to control them (the British then did exactly the same thing again).
Moreover, we hear about how strong and wise some of the Maharajahs were. For instance, there’s one of Jaipur’s Maharajahs who was made a brigadier general (or something similar) by the Brits in World War II. What’s not mentioned is that he was 22 years old and surely this could not have been for political purposes (I’m sure it was due to his Rajput attitude of “death before defeat” as is frequently repeated in the audio guides).
In all sincerity, the guides are great and they walk you through breathtakingly complex structures with hundreds of years of history. They could just use a little humility (for more on this theme, see the section below on the Commonwealth Games).
2.
Wendy is extremely popular in this part of India. Witness the following:
Everywhere we go, people want to have their photo taken with her. It’s cute.
Less cute is when boys want to have their photo taken with her and then paw her/try to kiss her/etc. That’s when my blood boils and we call a halt to it.
Equally less cute are the stares that she (and me, but more her than me) gets as we walk around. Hardcore leering: men stop work and stare at her. Boys on motorcycles gaze unblinkingly. When we sit in restaurants she has to turn her back to the crowd.
Sometimes if I stare back at these yokels they’ll stop but frequently they just don’t seem to care. The irony is that if I stared at their wives or daughters like that they’d probably come after me with a knife.
But it would be impossible for me to stare at their wives or sisters because they’re all practicing pardapratha – or parda (pronounced per-dah) for short. This is a tradition – imported to appease the Mughal overlords – that states that all women (and we’re talking predominantly Hindus here) should cover their face with a veil to protect them from the leering glances of men. There’s an even more conservative interpretation that insists that women should not go outside.
As a result, you see a disproportionate number of men on the street and rarely intermingled groups of women and men. In villages you never see women at all (unless they’re collecting children, searching for firewood or drawing water while men sit around smoking, chewing paan or drinking chai).
The whole damn culture is built around segregating women from (and keeping them below) men. When you visit the beautiful Meherangarh fort at Jodhpur, you learn that the beautiful carved courtyards were created entirely so that women could look out from behind a screen (jali) and not be seen by the men below.
Ditto with a whole wing of the Amber (near Jaipur) palace where only women were allowed. The Maharajah wasn’t even allowed in and eunuchs sent messages from him to his harem and back. In fact, the only royal woman allowed out was the mother of the current Maharajah; the rest had to stay inside (I can only imagine the politics this created within his harem; the quest to have your son become designated heir must have taken on a whole new meaning…).
(More royal nonsense: in Jaisalmer and Jodhpur, when the Maharajah died, his wives were expected to walk into his funeral pyre. This tradition was finally snuffed out in 1834 or so).
Parda, a purely cultural and not at all religious tradition, has survived the decline of the Mughal empire and shows only a few signs of abating. In the cities you see younger people of both sexes intermingling, but it’s the exception, not the rule.
In fact, this conservatism has trickled into many other aspects of life here. For instance, I have not seen a single woman driving a car. I could be in Saudi Arabia.
I’ve only seen two women wearing an outfit that revealed their shoulders. Both were young women who were obviously from a city (big sunglasses and skinny jeans). I haven’t seen one woman wearing an outfit that shows her calfs. A further irony is that the men are encouraged to show more skin: Bollywood actors have made the sleeveless vest a popular look for muscular men.
An interesting aspect of this conservatism is that it’s only come about in the past few hundred years (I’ll guess its perfectly correlated with that Muslim invasion). When you visit any number of the ancient Hindu temples around the country you can’t help but be struck by the early Indian love of the full bodied, scantily clad, big breasted woman. There are statues to them everywhere.
In other temples you also witness couples carved in erotic poses from the kama sutra. And there are numerous paintings of bare breasts and shoulder in paintings depicting scenes from the Ramayana and other sacred Hindu texts; only in the more recent versions do wobbly bits get covered up.
3.
Being close to the Pakistani border, this is one of the most heavily militarized zones in the country. As you criss-cross the state you pass numerous garrisons, each proudly displaying their division’s name: Desert Foxes, Lightning Lancers, Prancing Prancers (okay, I make that last one up).
And, in case you weren’t sure about it, the enemy is Pakistan. Outside Jodhpur we drove by one military base and perched before it was the half-destroyed fuselage of a 70′s era fighter plane; the Pakistani flag is still visible on the rear wing.
In Jaisalmer, you’re constantly reminded of the nearby presence of Pakistan. The airport is run by the military and while there’s technically a commercial flight out of there, it hasn’t run in ages (although you can confound yourself trying to book it on Kingfisher Airways’ website). And given the number of military jets performing maneuvers there, the risk of a commercial jet getting too close to the border is probably just too high (especially as these nuclear enemies are only about 30 seconds away from each other by missile; Russia and the U.S. were nine minutes).
Interestingly, the flights appear to be under radio silence. We would sit on the roof of our hotel under the blazing sun, with the smell of raw sewage occasionally wafting over us (this just randomly happens in India), and watch the jets scream in to land. Once we saw a flare rocket up from the ground and the incoming plane broke right; three minutes later he came back and made the landing. I’m guessing the runway wasn’t ready and the only way to signal it, sans radio, was to fire the flare.
4.
Jaisalmer is also probably the only city I know of where you can still get a stone house build. And it’s not just any stone house either: it’s going to be sandstone carved into some of the most ornate screens and details you can imagine. These are some of the best stone masons in the world:
Like all things, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The downside here is that there are open sewers and the streets are lined with cows and boar (the dark spot beside the cow) to dispose of garbage:
5.
Wendy and I went on a one day camel safari. It would be better described as a two hour camel ride followed by a night on a charpoy (webbed bed)in the desert, but that doesn’t sound quite as romantic.
In was a great time. The sun in the Thar Desert is stupefyingly hot plus the desert is more scrub than sand dunes (they appear intermittently), so anything beyond two hours would frankly get a little repetitive. You’d feel like you were seeing the same thing over and over again. You’d want a break from the monotony of the repeating scenery. You…
More importantly, Wendy got to ride a camel; her second favourite animal after elephants. Our camels were incongruously named “Lucky” and “Babluji”; I can’t remember who had which:
The scene above shows two of the overwhelming contradictions that you find in India.
The first is that Ali, my camel driver, is able to talk on his cellphone in the middle of the desert. It’s amazing how wired this country is (and they don’t even have 3G networks yet; can’t wait to see what happens when that occurs); everyone is connected.
The second is that Ali’s nephew Salim is leading Wendy’s camel when he should really be in school.
When I think of child labour I think of Dickensian factories with little hands for little places and it all takes place behind closed doors. I know that some of that exists here, but a lot of the 12-60 million child labourers (gov’t vs. 3rd party numbers) here are doing much more mundane things. Washing cups at a juice stand. Updating inventory at a store. Carrying water or maybe just leading camels.
At first you think they’re just helping out part time but when you go back the next day and they’re still there you realize that this is their life. It’s scary how banal child labour is here.
In this charming scene straight out of the 20th century – BC, not AD that is – this son is helping his father out blacksmithing:
Okay, I pulled a cheap shot with the photo above (although I stick with my statement that the blacksmithing techniques are the same as those used 4,000 years ago). This kid is actually in his school uniform. He’s actually a symbol of one of the truly great features of India: society’s incredible drive to educate their youth. He’ll almost certainly never work as a blacksmith and hopefully won’t work outside at all.
It’s heartwarming to see the quest for education in this country. As you walk the street of any town or read any magazine you are bombarded with ads to learn how to program, to get an MBA, to become an engineer. (In fact, the most common ads seem to be for cell phone carriers, cement and advanced degree programs)
If you’ve ever taken a subway in New York or any other North American city you’ve also been bombarded with education ads. However, they’re for online associate degrees to become nurse assistants or medical billers; they’re low value training offered by scam universities.
I can’t speak to the quality of the education being offered here (but India has some of the finest universities in the world; witness the IIT’s), but the sheer scale of it and the focus on the higher end of the value chain is awe inspiring. I can only imagine what it’s going to be like here in 20 years when the country is teeming with highly trained people trying to solve all the complex problems India – and the world – faces.
These guys have a great future:
6.
One of the things you have to come to terms with when you travel in India is that, unless you’re buying railway or airplane tickets, there is not a single listed price in this country. And even if someone does show you that elusive listed price, it, like everything else, is negotiable.
Moreover, you are a walking ATM. Your mere presence as a tourist makes you a mark: everyone is going to try and rip you off. In fact, it’s almost perfect game theory: you’re unlikely to ever do another transaction with anyone you meet here so they’re going to try and extract the single highest price they can get from you at that very instant.
This means you should expect any of the following to happen:
You go to a fort. There are rickshaws outside and you ask the price back to your hotel. It is IDR 250. You offer IDR 100. You are then told how these are reserved rickshaws and therefore cost so much more. Threaten to walk away and you get it for IDR 100.
You call a hotel. They quote you a price that is way north of what is in your guide book. You quote the guide book. They offer you a 10% discount; now only 40% more! You reply with “I’ll pay <book price>” and they say no. You say “okay, I’ll go elsewhere” and they cave.
You want a driver. You go to the government tourist office and they show you how it costs x/km and you’re going to have to pay 2x that as the driver needs to come back. You quote the price you’re willing to pay (~1/2-1/3 less). The tourist officer tells you how he knows a few people who don’t work for the government and maybe they could get you a price below the government rate; you end up paying almost what you wanted
You’ll notice a common theme here as to what to do: threaten to walk away. In a country of over a billion people there are thousands of other people within arms reach who will happily sell you the same service for a lower price.
Another common experience you’ll have: people will follow you around trying to extort money from you. A common modus operandi is that you walk into a fort/palace/etc. and someone starts following you around. You say “thanks, but I don’t need a guide” and they say “oh sir, I’m not a guide; I just want to make sure you see a few things.”
At this point, you have two options:
Tell them you’d like to just walk around by yourself
Get ready to listen to sob stories: “I don’t make much money”; “My father is old and I am responsible for my family”; “I need to get a gift for my girlfriend.” It never stops
A similar approach is followed by some touts. They come up to you and start to engage you in pleasant conversation that it would be rude for you to shut down e.g., “where are you from”. This is followed up by a compliment to you: “you look like a Bollywood star”, “you take nice photos”. All of this is buttering you up for the ask: “why don’t you come by my shop”.
They’re using the law of reciprocity (doing something positive to you in order to make you feel like you’re indebted to them) in order to guilt you into their shop, etc. You’ve just got to be firm in letting them know that they can talk to you but that under absolutely no circumstances will you go in their shop/give them money/etc. It’s also fine to request you be left alone for your own privacy.
There are a lot of other tricks people use to try and get your money. At forts, the ticket issuers take extra long giving you your change, hoping that you’ll forget it and walk away; they even post signs telling you that if you don’t check your change before leaving the wicket, you’re out of luck. Not only will your admission price be 4-20X an Indian, you’ll also need to pay an additional camera fee.
If you have a driver, when you reach your destination, your driver will ask for more money saying that he miscalculated the rate (and this is after he picked a restaurant where you’d be overcharged so that he would eat for free). Drivers, in fact, are particularly stubborn: we’ve had a few who have tried to negotiate toll rates on the highways.
You’ve got to be in the mood to handle these things or you’re going to go insane.
Also, remember that none of it is personal.
We’ve had fierce negotiations over rickshaw prices (usually over $1; hey, it’s principle) where the driver is trying to make me feel like I am pulling food out of the mouths of his starving kids. Minutes later we’re in his rickshaw (usually at our price) and he’s asking us where we’re from, telling us how his family is so happy, etc.
It’s like we’ve never met before…
7.
From the above, you might gather that I don’t enjoy being in India. Not at all.
Rather, India is a place where you have to learn to balance two exactly opposite ideas in your head. You’re going to love what you see and experience. Unless you are paying a small fortune or traveling with a local, the process of getting to experience it is going to be awful. Zen, zen, zen…
Here are some snapshots of various great things we’ve seen recently. All were worth it:
8.
Jaipur has some pretty stupid traffic, but it’s manageable:
As you struggle to cross the road (note the local above throwing her arms up in exasperation), you can play traffic bingo by trying to count all the different forms of transports: motorcycles, bicycles, tricycles, auto rickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, cars, trucks, buses, tractors and camels:
Less fun is the traffic we faced getting to Jaipur. We had a driver for the 11 and a half, 600 km drive from Jaisalmer and we spent the last few hours of it on a three lane highway at night.
This was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. The road was choked with overstuffed trucks whose unrestrained diesel emissions cast a pallor of the apocalypse over the highway. Many of the trucks lacked rear lighting and would just suddenly appear on the road ahead. This, combined with an arbitrariness of both their lane choice and decisions as to when to switch lanes, gave me the feeling that I was in a space ship flying through an asteroid belt.
Our driver brought this sensation to life by slaloming between these trucks. Sometimes he’d tag team with another car and we’d pass on the left while our wingman took the right. You had to be careful in the left lane (the curb side; opposite side of the road here) as it contained the odd slow-moving tractor or camel cart or someone randomly entering the highway and coming up to speed, all the while hidden from view by the endless slew of trucks.
Wendy prayed to the winged goddess of alcohol to come down and kiss her lips with her sweet nectar. I thought of how I’d tell this story assuming we got through it all…
9.
Newsflash: India is hosting the Commonwealth Games (pop quiz: who hosted the last one? Answer: I have no idea. I think it might have been Edmonton or Singapore)
The games almost didn’t happen because India did such a bad job organizing them. Bridges were falling down. Roofs were collapsing. Wild dogs were fouling the unfinished athlete’s village. Some countries almost pulled out; Britain ended up putting up their athletes in a hotel.
But the games are on! And it’s a big deal here. I don’t think India has ever hosted an event this big and they’re indignant at the success of Beijing 2008 and the current Shanghai world’s fair.
The opening ceremonies were last night (when I wrote this) and today India’s 200 channel television universe is chatting incessantly about it.
In fact, the reportage is unabashedly, navel-gazingly hagiographic. Words fail to describe the ridiculousness of the “coverage”. Check out these photos of the “news”:
In case you can’t make that out, the sentence is “World media bows to truly shining India”. Living in the U.S. I got used to over the top new coverage (Hello CNBC!), but this is a whole new dimension approaching nationalist propaganda.
And come on India: “truly shining” countries don’t have to tell themselves that they’re “truly shining”. They just are.
10.
Obligatory food notes.
Verdict: still excellent.
Check out this tandoor platter from the kitchen at the Umaid Bhawan hotel (crazy hotel: if Liberace was an Indian hotelier, he would have built it) in Jaipur. The tandoor platter is three types of grilled chicken and two types of grilled mutton. My mouth waters at the memory:
A gatta curry is a local specialty. It consists of steamed gram flour dough dumplings in spicy yoghurt gravy:
I’m also crushing on the murgh malai tikka; it’s like chicken tikka but marinated in yoghurt. This one’s from Saffron in Jaisalmer (and that’s a cucumber transmuted into a candle):
They’re all outdone by the incredible kebab stand at Handi in Jaipur:
I’m going to have to buy a tandoor when I get back to Canada…
We went to Mandu on a Saturday without booking a room. When we got there, there wasn’t a single hotel room available. We had two options:
a) Drive to a town 40 kilometers away in the wrong direction from our next destination
b) Stay at the dorm rooms attached to the local Hindu temple.
We elected to do the latter and stayed in a room that was decked out in the latest in 19th century Turkish prison chic.
The next day we drove to Udaipur, easily one of the most romantic places in India. To celebrate, we checked into the Jagat Niwas Palace Hotel. It’s a converted haveli (mansion); one of the most beautiful hotels I’ve ever stayed at.
Here’s the view from our room:
This sunset greeted us from our room on the first night:
Candles floating amongst flower petals greeted us outside the room:
After two consecutive days of 10 hour drives, you have no idea how good this felt!
2.
The highlight of Udaipur is the City Palace. It looms over the city:
It has some of the most beautiful carved stone windows I’ve ever seen. Every room seems to be designed in a unique geometric pattern, some with stained glass:
Sometime’s it can seem like a bit much. This room kind of felt like being in a bad 70′s disco:
3.
The Maharaja of Udaipur wanted an elephant, but had to settle for a horse:
This caused nothing but problems for his official portraiteurs who were unsure of how to render the princely battle beast:
I’m just kidding about him wanting an elephant; he had lots. It was never explained why he put a trunk on his horse (he wanted a helephant to give the enemies hell? Sorry for the bad joke); I can’t think that riding into battle on a crippled horse made out to look like a baby elephant would be that intimidating to your opponents.
4.
There’s an interesting mathematical construct called a Menger Sponge. It’s a fractal that you create by doing the following:
a) Start with a cube
b) Remove the middle third of the cube
c) Repeat to infinity
The result is a structure that has infinite surface area and no volume. It’s just a mesh of incredibly finely connected points.
It’s the sort of thing you’d end up with if you told an engineer to carve you something and you’d pay her based on the amount of dust she brought you.
If you were a Jain and told a craftsman to build you something and you’d pay by the dust, you’d end up with something like the temples at Delwara just outside Mt. Abu.
The temples are pure marble carved into the most intricate patterns. Lotus flowers burst out of lotus flowers which are surrounded by elephants and monkeys and ducks and gods and too much to even imagine.
Alas, you can’t take any photos there, so you’ll have to settle from some metaphotos. Here are some photos of photos of the temple (this is getting as recursive as the process of carving the temples):
5.
Mt. Abu is a curious place. It’s like a Niagara Falls or Atlantic City for Gujaratis. They swarm here to hang out on the weekends and it’s still busy during the week. There are overflowing family restaurants and arcades. Vendors hawk peanuts and candy floss. The hotels even have names like the ones in Niagara Falls:
Hordes of people trek out to Sunset Point to watch the eponymous event:
In the rush to get there, some folks sacrifice their dignity and take a push cart rickshaw:
But the sunset isn’t the only thing to see here. Wendy’s a pretty entertaining site as well. All these boys wanted their photo taken with her:
We’ve both had our photos taken with countless people and shaken innumerable hands. The oddest experience was when a police officer walked up to me, gave me his phone number and insisted that I call him when I get to Canada. He actually wanted my phone number to call me, but since I technically don’t have one right now, I had an easy out.
Another great little moment came when we walked up a hill to Toad Rock (which looks nothing like a toad). We passed a miniature temple and the priest insisted I take a photo of him in front of it. Check out that beard:
He also insisted that we have a drink of holy water, slapped a dot on our head and gave us a ceremonial mint. It was a little surreal.
6.
To get to Mt. Abu from Udaipur you need to take the highway. It’s a magnificent highway cut out of rock, set against the rolling hills that intermittently appear in Rajasthan. It’s also weird as rocks have fallen off the cliffs and onto the highway and simply been left there. Some rockfall has been there for so long that there are now plants growing on them. As you can guess, the highway isn’t too heavily trafficked.
The other cultural difference on the highway is the tendency of some Indians to wail in tunnels. I think a few people on our bus had never been in a tunnel before and they began ululating when we got inside. There were a lot of tunnels and a lot of wailing…
7.
I had a new dish called a nargis kofta at Arbuda restaurant. It’s a boiled egg wrapped in vegetables. Served on a kashmiri pulao (rice with candied fruit and cashews) it made a delicious – if sweet – meal:
I also had an interesting treat called a kutchi dabeli at Cafe Coffee Time. It’s a puff pastry containing curried potato, peanuts and pomegranate seeds. Delicious.
Traveling in India, like so much of this country, is able to simultaneously embody both the best and worst of the world.
For example, India is one of the last places on Earth where flying is truly enjoyable. The (private) airlines here are ruthlessly efficient with almost obsequiously polite staff. New world-class airports are going up faster than they can be filled with passengers. The security is a little heavy handed, but this is a country where terrorism is all too common and, thankfully, the zealotry of the security staff is currently greater than that of the terrorists.
If you fly during the tail end of the monsoon season – as we did – you can catch some stunning sunset views:
The only problem with the whole system is that it is hub-and-spoke and there are only a few hubs. There are a lot of places that you simply cannot easily fly to.
And that leaves you can with the bus or the railway.
We haven’t taken the train yet as the convoluted system of booking (you reserve, you then get a ticket, then you find it’s overbooked, then the trains cancelled, then…) has been off-putting and we’ve been traveling to places better served by bus.
However, the bus, for the most part, is a complete zoo. You head to a station or an unmarked stop on the road and ask every single bus that comes by if it’s going to your destination. Occasionally, a friendly Indian will tell you which bus to get on (a few kind souls have saved us more than once) and then you’re off. The bus may or may not have a door; for the locals it will only come to a rolling stop and no matter how long the journey, they’ll keep filling it up as long as there’s space to fit one more person:
It’s cheap, but very slow. With all the stops, plus the fact that the bus is twenty-going-on-fifty years old, you’re going to top out at 40km/h.
There’s another option available that straddles both: a private driver. For two people this is a nice way to travel to out of the way places at a somewhat reasonable cost. What would be two days via two or more buses or impossible by flight can be condensed down into about nine hours in a cramped Tata Indigo (the seats have not been optimized for North American stature).
Even with your private driver, you shouldn’t expect to go too fast. In fact, there’s likely to be an order of magnitude difference in speeds during your journey. Some of the tracks (I can’t call them ‘roads’ as that would be unfair to real roads) you’ll follow in various towns will be so badly paved that you’ll top out at just under 10km/h. And these are the major routes: you’ll be sharing the track with any number of trucks (or, as they are quaintly called here, lorries).
The most random reason we lost speed was because young entrepreneurs in one village had strewn logs across the road and started collecting their own tolls.
Also, heaven forfend that you need to stop at a railway crossing to wait for a train. This country is massively overpopulated and everyone has to fight for temselves; personal space in non-existent. That’s why you see everyone clustered on the bus above. It’s why people play crappy Hindi pop from their cellphone speaker while taking the bus; headphones be damned. It’s why a mob forms to board said bus. It’s why everyone elbows you in the free-for-all that is a ticket counter anywhere (the British habit of queuing did not survive Independence). And it’s why traffic fills up each lane at a railway crossing.
This has the obvious consequence that when the guard railing rises, you’re left with three rows of traffic each facing each other separated by about eight feet. Both sides move forward, testing who will blink first. Nobody moves for a good 10 minutes while honking, screaming and hand-waving erupts. Somehow cars contort themselves in different directions and traffic begins to flow again after a wait that could easily have been avoided had everyone simply stayed in their respective lanes.
Sometimes India makes the simple very complex.
Between towns a fairly robust network of divided four lane highways is sprouting (there’s an impressive network of private highways). They’re relatively car-free right now (at one point I timed 3:45 between two cars; on average, a car came by about every 1:00-1:20), but are swamped with all sorts of trucks.
Some of these trucks are almost too big to even consider driving:
Others are simply ridiculously overloaded:
Our driver assured us that many of these overloaded lorries “weren’t heavy”; I’m sure that will be consoling to some poor bastard who finds his legs sticking out from underneath them after it takes a corner too fast. You’ll see frequent accidents. (These trucks are also an environmental mess, spewing nasty diesel fumes; your snot will turn black)
Curiously, in an unforeseen outcome of globalization, some of the tarps on these trucks are old cloth billboards from America. So far I’ve seen a Verizon ad plus another for the classified section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Overloaded trucks driven by new-to-driving drivers aren’t the only issues to contend with on highways. Social norms are a little different here, so you frequently see people driving the wrong way down a divided highway. They don’t want to have to backtrack to get to a location, so they take the fastest route by switching to oncoming traffic once they near their destination.
Many of the previously mentioned trucks don’t consider it important to give way and amble along in the passing lane; you have to honk to warn them that your passing. If you’re expecting anyone to signal a lane change, you’re kidding yourself. In fact, it’s amazing how much surface area the horn occupies on an Indian car’s steering wheel – easily three times the amount of space as a North American car; honking is effortless.
Similarly, many towns are simply built onto the highways and appear with a sudden alacrity as you round a bend. Some older towns were so close to the highway that the government tore down rooms that were nearest to the road but kept the rest of the structure intact; you can look into some people’s houses as you drive by.
Old men think nothing of walking across the road with the full expectation that you should get out of their way. Interestingly, we also passed a massive quarry built a mere 10 feet from the highway and without a single protective wall.
The biggest risk though are the herders. These new highways represent the fastest route through the countryside and this has not been lost on wily goat, cow and sheep herders. They frequently herd their animals along the highways and you have to slow down/stop to avoid the random movements of their flocks.
Awkwardly, their animals – and more often one of the millions of stray dogs here – are sometimes run over. The carcasses are then simply left to bloat and bake in the heat of the middle of the road; no one ever comes along to remove them.
These forces all conspire to keep you moving at an average of 60-70 km/h.
It’s just not easy to travel around India.
2.
But travel you must, as there’s much to see and some places are simply off the beaten track. The most obscure place we’ve visited so far is Mandu, which is perched on a 23km square hilltop that towers over a verdant farmed plain.
If Mandu was in England, it would have been overrun with Romantic poets who would have sat there crafting love stories set amongst court intrigue and the movement of empires, for it’s that kind of place. As you drive up, you pass though one medieval Mughal (the former muslim rulers of India) gate after another while cenotaphs and crumbling defensive walls are scattered in neighbouring fields. All this is given more character as this is one of the few places in India where Baobab trees grow.
On the plateau proper are a few mosques and ancient palaces which glow in the evening and morning light:
The sense of romance is increased by the water features installed by previous sultans. One built a series of pleasure pools for his harem and many of the palaces are built right onto overgrown water tanks:
In addition to be the most romantic place in India, it also has some of the cutest kids who are all precocious enough to insist that they have their photo taken:
These kids are also learning English, although in a manner that occasionally confuses English with Hindi. In Hindi, namaste is a greeting used both upon arrival and departure. As a result, many of these kids confusingly say “bye-bye” when they meet you for the first time.
3.
The story of India is one of the world’s great epics, full of some of history’s most colourful characters. One of the more interesting footnotes in this story took place in Daulatabad where Mohammed Tughlaq created his capital in 1328 and marched the entire population of Delhi 1,100 km to populate it. Despite meaning “City of Fortune”, it turned out to be anything but. It left the north undefended and after a few years he marched everyone back.
Today, the fort is in ruins and over 5km of run down walls surround it while macaques are its only inhabitants.
The main doors have spikes on them to prevent elephant attacks.
It’s a 45 minute walk to the citadel at the top and to get there you need to go through a series of fortifications. Gates with doglegs, a moat that needs to be crossed and the unique andheri. This is literally a ‘dark passage’: it’s an unlit corridor full of twist and turns, dead ends, steps of different sizes and numerous bats. Back in the day, defenders could pour boiling oil down the passageway or direct invaders around a corner where they would suddenly tumble to their death in a hidden pit.
Bring a flashlight.
4.
When I lived in Calgary, Wen and I went out to Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump to see Western Canada’s glorious UNESCO World Heritage Site. Natives dressed as wolves used to lure bison to their death by cunningly running them over a cliff. The beasts had bad eyesight and by the time the rear of a herd realized what was going on, they had already pushed the front of the herd over the cliff.
I was anticipating a huge 500 foot cliff with a pile of bleached bones at the bottom; the reality was a lot more banal: a slight grassy escarpment.
When your human history consists of primarily nomadic societies, your cultural relics are few and far between.
Nothing could be more different with India’s World Heritage monuments. In Ellora, the ur-Indians spent about 500 years carving one of their escarpments into a series of over 30 competing Jain, Buddhist and Hindu caves.
Giant buddhas have been hewn out of rock:
Life-size elephants stand guard at a Jain cave…
…while the Hindus went wild and spent up to 150 years carving the ultimate cave in a tribute to Shiva and his mountain abode of Mt. Kailasa:
The entire cave used to be plastered and painted. And, yes, those are parrots on the right; as if that wasn’t enough, there are also monkeys.
What is mind-blowing about all of these, is that they are carved from a single face of rock, from the top down. You have to keep pinching yourself to remind yourself of what an undertaking this must have been.
Oh yeah, and as it that wasn’t enough, there’s another site nearby (Ajanta) where there are another 30 buddhist caves that date back to 200 BC or so. Besides massive buddhas and stupas, they also include several paintings that are still intact over 1500 years later (and well lit; all these photos were taken without a flash):
Again, all carved from the top on down…
5.
As with elsewhere in India, the food here has been delicious. I have a new favourite dish in vegetable kofta (ironically, ‘kofta’ means spiced meatball). The photo below comes from Prashant in Aurangabad; the kofta is in the upper left:
If you go to Mandu, be sure to try the kofta at Shivani (which shouldn’t be hard, as it’s one of three restaurants in the town).
6.
We’re slowly learning different Hindi words. One of the most versatile words in ghat. It has three meanings and in one day you can actually experience all of them. A ghat can be a chain of mountains as well as the road you take through that mountain. And then, at your destination, you may find a temple with stairs that lead into a river. Yup, those stairs are also known as ghats.
7.
For some reason, cheesy songs keep following us around Southeast Asia and India. We are being stalked by The Carpenters’ “Every little shalala” and Craig David’s “Seven Days”. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this but please Buddha/Krishna/Adinth, make it stop!
Whenever traveling gets really bad, I like to pretend I’m describing the situation to a friend. I think how, once this is all over, I’ll look back and laugh at what’s going on and realize that it wasn’t so bad. It also helps me imagine just how bad it could get and realize what’s likely/unlikely to happen. And that’s what I thought to myself on the tuk tuk on the way to Fort Kochi.
We’d arrived in Mumbai the night before at around 1a.m., a little later than expected, but not too delayed. We waited in customs for a while and then when we finally got to the front of the line I was sent to the back as I’d apparently used the wrong coloured ink; alas the permitted colours are common knowledge to only Indian bureaucrats. This was only a temporary setback as we soon got our bags and were on our way to the hotel…
…it was then about 2:30 – or 4:00am Bangkok time; India is an awkward 90 minute time zone difference. As we got into the room we looked down at the bed and it was swimming in bugs. We were so exhausted that we prayed they wouldn’t bite and just slept on top of everything; we were up five hours later to find the room choked with diesel fumes and us looking for a flight.
We checked out and asked the motley assortment of people who may or may not have been hotel employees at the front desk if they’d get us a cab to the airport (a mere two kilometers away, but in the chaos of Mumbai it might as well be on another planet). This started a flurry of discussion whereupon the bellman asked the front desk clerk who called out to a man who was dressed like a retired military officer who chased down three guys in t-shirts who went out looking for a cab.
We were told to wait five minutes and ten minutes later the scouts returned to the general to debrief him. The whole process ran in reverse and the bellman finally informed us that a taxi could not be procured as there was apparently a national strike. He had a bizarre way of making it feel like if we’d only been 30 seconds earlier, we would have missed the strike – which was, of course, ridiculous.
At this moment, a man who had been quietly sitting in the corner reading the Hindu Times told us that our flight was probably cancelled and we shouldn’t worry about leaving Mumbai that day. A quick call to the airport proved it otherwise so he surprisingly offered his car to get to there. It turned out that he was going to a training session (he was in the merchant marine) and we could have his driver take us to the airport after he was dropped off at the training center.
Perfect! We all piled into an undersized and equally underpowered Tata just as the monsoon rains began to erupt. It being Mumbai, the streets were clogged with traffic (albeit oddly devoid of cabs) and we gazed jealously at the speed made by the throngs of pedestrians found everywhere in the city.
We finally began to move but we were left with the impression of going nowhere in circles. At one point we found ourselves in Bollywood, being shown where all the different studios were (I just want the airport!). At another time we were driving through a stable of cows, waiting for them to find some garbage tasty enough to motivate them to leave the road (Airport, please!). All the while the rain painted the city black.
After two hours in the car – and maybe 10 km of driving – we made it to the airport exactly as our flight was taking off. Since this sort of thing happens all the time in India, it wasn’t a problem to change our ticket to a later flight to a nearby town (Kochi instead of Trivandrum) – and heck, Kochi was actually a more convenient place for us to go to. A little frazzled, but calming down, we hung out in one of the Mumbai airports many cafes (ironically, the domestic airport is the most relaxing place in the city; only ticketed passengers are allowed inside).
Getting to the flight was interesting as, depending on which sign we looked at, we were either going to Kochi or Cochin (damn you India, pick the British or Indian name, but not both!), but we managed to get on the bus to our flight and there we got to see this walking cliche:
Two hours later we were on the ground in Kochi and our bags came within seconds! We got a cab to the city after confirming with the dispatchers that we’d be able to catch the ferry there to Fort Kochi (the heritage district is on a nearby island).
When we got to the ferry terminal – a dirty patch of grass with a concrete bunker at the end – the cab peeled away and it was eerily quiet. As we walked to the terminal, a man came up and told us the terminal was closed. There was a nearby tourist office where the attendant told us we were out of luck as it seemed the strike was national, not just Mumbai cabbies, and there was no possible way on earth to get to Fort Kochi and we should go to a nearby hotel – and then he literally went back to sleep.
Except that this wasn’t true. Fort Kochi is connected to the city (Ernakalum) by a bridge and you can almost see the bloody thing from the tourist office. Unfortunately, our cab had left and, due to the strike, there weren’t any around. So, we eyeballed our scale-free tourist map and started walking in the 30 degree heat. (At this point you may be wondering why the folks at the airport didn’t tell us to take the cab there due to the strike; I’m still wondering why)
As we walked, we got quite a few stares. I don’t think anyone could believe that we were walking there but we had no desire in spending a night in a crummy hotel on the mainland where there would be literally nothing to do. After an hour of walking and almost no sleep in the previous 24 hours, we were starting to fade. And at that moment, the greatest entrepreneur in India, a man with a tuk tuk who had said “damn the strike, I’m going to make some money!” came by and offered us a ride. I could have cried; he quoted us a price he probably thought usurious but he had severely underestimated us and we folded like wet paper bags. Soon we were in the back and rocketing towards Fort Kochi with the wind in our hair and dust in our eyes.
And that’s when he very seriously asked us if we had our booking. Panic struck my sleep-deprived brain. Is this a polite way of saying “you guys are idiots for going there as there are no rooms available” or is he just trying to get us to book at a friend’s house? This is going to be like Mt. Bromo where we arrive and can’t find anything and end up in a home stay where the room and accoutrements haven’t been washed this century. And that’s when I decided I’d start telling this story to myself.
We looked around and realized that we hadn’t seen another westerner yet (there were only two on our otherwise 3/4 full flight) so there had to be rooms available. Yes: there would be a beautiful room with a fresh, comfortable bed and a hot shower and we’d nap and get a meal and sleep again and laugh it off the next day. Which, is actually exactly what happened.
2.
Kerala is the spice market to the world. One of the highlights of Fort Kochi is walking around and observing the chaos that is the spice trade. The stores of Market Drive are lined with spice wholesalers who show off their wares:
Outside their shops, workers move more spices and 55kg bags of rice than you can imagine; pigeons greedily eye the spillings:
When you head inland (up to Munnar), you reach the Western Ghats where every square inch of arable land seems to grow tea or eucalyptus or cardamom or any of a variety of other herbs and spices:
Traffic stalls as buses randomly stop to let their passengers alight and gaze at ladies cutting tea leaves.
Every town has multiple spice farms where you can go and taste the various goods; you leave with a curious concoction of flavours in your mouth. Here’s a sample of some of what we saw.
Mace covering nutmeg, as demonstrated by hand model Wendy:
Hibiscus; the leaves are used to create shampoo (next time you see one, tear a leaf apart to feel the gooey sap):
Tumeric:
The hottest peppers you’ll ever try. Spice appears to be inversely proportional to size:
And cardamom (turns black when ready to harvest):
There seems to be a special place in Keralites’ hearts for cardamom. In addition to acres upon acres of the stuff alongside the roads, there’s a research center into it, numerous hotels and restaurants are named after it (only “tiger” seems to be a more common hotel descriptor) and there are delicious cardamom cookies too:
3.
Fort Kochi is a great place to start a visit to India and it also shows you just how complex the history is here.
The original Hindus arrived from the north thousands of years ago and then shortly after JC’s crucifixion, Christianity appeared here; India had Christianity before Europe. Over time, many cultures have come and gone and left traces of themselves.
The port contains massive Chinese fishing nets, indicating there must have been trade with them at one point:
Vasco de Gama came here in 1498 and was briefly (14 years) interred at St. Francis’ Church before having his remains returned to Portugal:
The Dutch came next and left their gravestones inside the fort and the emblem of their trading company (VOC for the Dutch East Indies Company) nearby:
Most recently it’s been the Brits, who have left the area with some beautifully decaying colonial buildings:
And it’s not just these folks. The muslims came to Kerala shortly after the establishment of Islam and a sizable chunk of the population has converted. There were a lot of Jews too (now mostly emigrated to Israel) who lived in the beautiful part of town that’s now literally called “Jewtown”:
3.
One of the highlights of our trip so far has been taking a backwaters houseboat tour in Kerala. The coast of Kerala is separated from the mainland by a series of waterway and dykes. You can rent a houseboat and lazily amble through these backwaters. Life moves like molasses there and time seems almost as still as the water.
/p>
The people here almost live on the water. They build their houses on the narrow ledges between the rice paddies and the waterways. Their kids take the local school boat instead of school bus. And going anywhere requires a punt.
LIfe here is bucolic; at night the sounds of families singing together echoes across the otherwise still landscape. Fireflies come out and blink in the sky. You get a sense of why Gandhi was obsessed with building an India that was centered around the village.
The area also gives you a few insights into other aspects of India. For instance, there are many Christians in Kerala and sometimes they are accused of proselytizing, raising frictions with the Hindu supermajority (80% of Indians are Hindu vs. about 2% Christian). The Christians haven’t done much to help their cause by creating some unique-to-Indian-Christianity traditions. Such as the flagpole that they have outside all their churches; it looks conveniently like the flagpoles Hindus use for their ceremonies:
Another insight on India. This house is far and away the largest house we saw. In fact, there are actually two houses: the main house (shown below) is the owner’s; the second house is for his wife’s family. That’s his boat outside.
So who is this rich person, this role model for all, this beacon of the future of India?
None other than the local federal politician. Hmmm…
5.
I received a lot of advice on where to go in India, and unsurprisingly some of the best advice came from my Indian friends. One insisted that our trip would not be complete without a visit to Periyar Tiger Reserve.
The reserve is based around a series of lakes, formed from by a dam in 1895 (the park itself was declared by the Maharaja in 1935):
You can take a bamboo raft along one of the lakes (it’s closed to boats, so you’ll have it to yourself) and you’ll almost certainly see gaur (Indian bison) and lots of boar along its banks:
Alternatively, you can climb the hills and roam around, possibly scaring one of the afore-mentioned bison:
Irrespective of which you choose, you’ll be surrounded by wildlife. This is a birder’s paradise, with cormorants, egrets and kingfishers hanging out in the lake while eagles and parrots fly overhead. Hornbills belligerently bray from the underbrush; they’re rarely seen but the sound of their wings disturbing the air can be heard as they fly.
Black butterflies with iridescent blue tinges chaotically whirligig through the jungle while white and black monkeys (local terms, not mine) jump from tree to tree. Giant malabar squirrels scurry from place to place. Touch-me-nots recoil from you and giant bats can be seen in bamboo groves.
This all takes place under the hidden eye of the tiger (you almost certainly won’t see one; our hotel owner worked in the park for 13 years and saw two; we had to satisfy ourselves with a footprint) and reminders (dung and footprints) of the wild elephants nearby.
In fact, if you spend a few days in the park, you’ll almost certainly see some elephants.
We saw two different sets. The first was in some hills half way through the boat ride. The trip had been a little slow up until then so we were taking random photos of the flowers when all of a sudden…
…a few elephants trundled out of the bush partway down the hill, their young in tow. They pulled at some bamboo and then noticed us. One trumpeted at us and our guide told us that it as time to go as they thought we threatened them – even though we were probably 1,000 feet away.
The second set of elephants were seen on the hike out after the ride. We came to a clearing and some elephants were walking along. They never even saw us and were eventually swallowed up in the aptly named elephant grass.
Afterwards our guides mentioned that they could hear the elephants talking to one another (alas, the frequency was too low for my loud concert-ravaged ears to pick up).
Now, a word on the danger involved. Because Periyar is the greatest and most successful and <insert superlative here> park in the world, as any Indian will tell you, and tigers are so dangerous (even though you won’t see one), you need to be armed. But since you would melt in fear at the sight of a tiger or a charging gaur, you need a strong local man to protect you. And the Indian army has stepped into the fold.
Here’s our guard. Thanks to him, all members of our party made it back alive.
We had a great time in Periyar (square inch for square inch, it could be one of the best parks in the world), although there was definitely a little bit of a culture clash going on, mostly due to this man below:
Yup, we were out in this beautiful still lake, surrounded by nothing but the chirping of birds and braying of beasts, when he started talking on his cellphone. Repeatedly.
We (Wen, I and the two Germans on the rafts with us) were put off by this, but chalked it up to cultural differences. However, later in the day, we snapped.
We were coming back and the guy had given his cellphone to his young child. The kid started using it to play some Shakira song from the World Cup. I politely asked him if he’d turn it off; none of us had come into one of the few truly wild places in India to listen to crappy pop music on an even crappier speaker.
Alas, this was misunderstood by the kid and his family who thought that I was really impressed by the fact that the cellphone could play music. One of the Germans went nuts and in a truly Teutonic way began screaming about how we’d come for silence and turn off the damn cellphone, etc.
The cellphone was turned off and we rode awkwardly in silence for a few minutes but then it was forgotten.
6.
Our last stop in Southern India was our only stop in Tamil Nadu: Madurai. People come here for the massive Minakshi Sundareshvara Hindu temple.
This stunning place was originally built in the 7th-10th centuries and greatly expanded between the 14th and 18th centuries. In the past 60 years they’ve started painting the 50m tall gopuras (the gates to the temple; arranged along the cardinal axes) multiple colours:
Inside, Hindus from across the country pray and light lanterns. The smell of spices and cloves from burning oils and incense wafts through the air. A band plays traditional prayer music. And colour explodes around the Thousand-Pillared Hall:
It’s one of the most incredible places of prayer I’ve been to anywhere.
7.
Oh, the Indian food. It is some of the best food I’ve ever had. Check out this cashew curry (from Ginger Restaurant in Fort Kochi):
It came with a Kerala specialty: appam. It’s a mix of ground rice and fried coconut and is served instead of a chapatti.
At Shala in Fort Kochi we had one of the best vegetable curries ever (on right). It also came a delicious side: just a mix of shallots, fried coconut and molasses.
They also served us puttu as a side: steamed wheat flour (kind of like couscous) instead of rice:
In Madurai we went into the oddly named Manorama for a vegetarian meal. It turned out to be one of the most unique culinary experiences I’ve ever had. We were whisked to our seats and suddenly two banana leaves appeared before us. A man holding three metal tins came by and started ladling out various curries. Then bowl after bowl of different sauces began arriving (sweet, yogurt-based, curry-based, etc.). Rice appeared, as did some pappudoms. Mercifully, spoons arrived specially for us (eager readers will recall the last time – Yogyakarta – that I tried to eat with my hands).
We were instructed to mix it all together; since none of the staff spoke English, this was through a series of entertaining hand gestures. We also had to learn hand gestures for “stop, I don’t need any more food!” as the service was so great they almost wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Here’s Wendy getting ready to enjoy the meal:
If you look closely at the photo above, you might notice a few black dried peppers on the right middle of the leaf. The meal came with an accompanying set of dried and salted peppers (some hot, some just flavourful). I’d never tried these before and am writing this as an addict in withdrawal; I need to find them again.
Our last meal in the south was a breakfast dosa in the Chennai airport. I hadn’t found one yet (they’re don’t seem to have been popular in Kerala) so I was glad to finally taste the real thing:
And finally, the Indians have a national sweet tooth (which suits me perfectly). Here are some of the sugary sweets you can buy in one of the local bakeries (just don’t look for bread there; it’s just sweets and pastries):
Numbers one and four are particularly good – kind of like Maple sugar and marzipan respectively. Number two is a cashew cookie and it’s neighbour – laddu – has a clove in the middle. The one on the right is like a ginger-based version of a rum ball.
8.
In keeping with the traditions of this trip, another country and another fruit. This time it’s musumbi, which is like a tart orange. It makes a mean juice:
9.
And a few random closing thoughts:
On September 10th, I reached a special club. In fact, it’s a club that as far as I know only included my buddy Tom. It’s the club for people who have eaten curry for all meals in one day (okay, maybe it’s really for Westerners as there are about a billion Indians who are standing members of this club). On the 10th, I started the morning with a vegetarian curry followed by a chicken curry for lunch and another vegetable curry at dinner. Curry trifecta!
Internet upload speeds here are faster than New York, providing further evidence of the continued failure of Time Warner and the need for the feds to do something to force an upgrade of the system. Alas, the power grid is much more robust in New York than here; those upload speeds were useless when the power went out
When driving through fog, Indians put on their four way flashers, not their headlights. Thought it was an interesting way to deal with it
Finally saw EyesWideShut only 12+ years after it's release. My confusion over its meaning led me to this awesome screed http://t.co/xF0e9u0r42 years ago
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