Day 100

Hello everyone!

Believe it or not, we have been rejuvenated in the crazy city of Varanasi. Mostly thanks to over-eating and over-sleeping, I suppose, but nonetheless we're back on our feet and ready to tackle the final 2 weeks of our journey.

There's not really much to do in Varanasi besides wander the narrow streets like rats. We're planning on taking a boat ride down the ganges at sunset and another at sunrise, as well as visiting the nearby town of Sarnath where the Buddha gave his first teaching on the Way.

We've had some pretty good food here including a salami sandwich made with real Italian salami. Ooh baby. We tend to frequent bakeries and I always have room for more Parle-G cookies (similar to my old love of Raja-G, I just can't get enough of these cheap glucose cookies).

We really haven't done much since getting here besides wander around and eat. It's no big deal. We're planning on heading out to Bodhgaya on December 6 and to arrive in Kolkata on the 9th or 10th.

Time's a tickin'!

Off the Island

After spending the whole day on two buses and a train, we've arrived in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's capitol. We've got a cheap but adequately neat room at Hotel Gulmarg (where apparently call-girls are available). We just had a lovely meal at The Green House, a garden terrace restaurant. Everything seemed to have at least a little mint, coconut or coriander in it. We finished things off with fresh hand-churned ice cream. Yumm.

***
When we first arrived in Diu, something very strange seemed to be going on. We walked down the main drag ... in silence. All the shops were closed; the place was deserted. Diu used to be occupied by the Portugese, and although they aren't around anymore, the Indians adopted their habit of taking an afternoon siesta. So from 1 - 4 everyday everyone goes home for lunch and a nap.

Something else you should know about Diu is that it is the only place in the province where drinking (alcohol) is legal. This means that many Gujarati tourists come to enjoy the beaches and get drunk. We encountered many men with poor English, insistent on getting a photo of us. Although this is not unique to Diu, something about our bright white flesh glimmering in the Arabian Sea caused them to sit on the shore, watch and wait for us for great lengths of time. Speaking of glimmering in the sea, the sea food in Diu was super fresh and delicious. Tuna, shark fish, pomfret, prawns, king fish, calamari ... scrumptious. (We hear that a lot of Europe's seafood is imported from Veraval, a fishing town a couple hours from Diu.)

In contrast to the men of Diu, which are enough to give my dad the creeps, the women of Diu were some of the most wonderful yet. (I have had such amazing experiences with Indian women. Quite often they just involve a smile.) In Diu I feel I made friends with two women. One was this lady who sold fruit in the market. There was something special about her; she had a kind smile that knew everything and saw the humour in life. I speak no Gujarati, and the only English words she knows are "thank youuuuu", but we were always happy to see each other and somehow we managed to do business together. She always slipped something extra in my bag. My other friend worked at a restaurant called La Dolce Vita that Pete and I liked to eat at. She and her husband had a little white puppy called Jacky that loved to play. The woman was slim, young and pretty, and had little English, but her warmth and giggles told me that she liked me. On our last day in Diu, the day I finally got a sari, we went to dine there and to say goodbye. The young woman was very pleased to see me in traditional dress and she thoroughly fixed up my amateur attempt at the complicated folds and tucks that make a sari beautiful.

Pete dubbed Diu "a quirky paradise". I think that fits perfectly.

DIARRHEA (part 1)

Greetings everyone!

It has become apparent that I am suffering from a lovely case of Traveller's Diarrhea (TD). At first, Stephanie and I both thought it only qualified as full frontal TD if there was blood in your stool, but this is not the case. Only in really bad cases is blood found in the diarrhea.

Anyway, I've been suffering from it on and off for the past month and it's gotten really bad in the past few days, so today-- after researching the symptoms again-- I've decided to stop being such a "tough guy" and start taking the meds to help fix myself. After writing this post, I will be taking my first dosage of Ciprofloxacin.

It's rather unfortunate, since we're currently staying on the ex-Portuguese island Diu, where we spent the day yesterday on the shores of the salty Arabian sea. Soaking up the sun can really take a lot out of you, especially when you're unhealthy! It'll be great when I'm feeling better and we can both truly enjoy our surroundings.

The food here hasn't been that great, although we have found one real gem of a restaurant called O'Coquiero Music Garden. They've served the best pasta and the best salads we've had in India so far, and the drinks aren't bad either. While we wouldn't recommend their breaded calamari, we're still open to trying the other fresh fish dishes.

I hope you guys are enjoying good health back home. Maybe you could send some positive energy to Steph to help her deal with the side-effects of my illness.

Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

FOOD (part 2)

We've arrived in Diu after a long long trip. I think we were in motion for 17 hours straight on various buses and rickshaws. The sleeper bus turned out to be quite nauseating and neither of us got much sleep. Now we've got a small room close to the water right near the fruit and vegetable market. This morning we went and bought some guavas, bananas, nuts, roses, cookies and this crazy fruit that resembles a puffy artichoke and can be pulled apart easily. It tastes kind of like lychee.

We've eaten some pretty delicious stuff here in India. We've visited some ritzy restaurants where meals are expensive - but still a fraction of what it would cost in Canada. But I think some of the best meals we've had have been quite simple: sharing a couple of dishes like mattar paneer (peas and cheese) and dum aloo (stuffed potatoes) and a plate of naan bread. Yum! Fresh lime sodas are always a safe bet for drink, but fresh juice and lassis are fun too when the place seems clean. Yesterday, after checking in, I drank the water from a young green coconut Pete got off the street. Subtle flavour, quite nice. Palm trees are all over the place here and actually the vegetation growing in this province(Gujarat) seems much more lush; more cactai, more flowering trees.

Here are some food photos from the last month or so:


vegetable dosa at the Indian Coffee House, Shimla

baked trout in Minali - so so good

fancy dessert at the Crystal Restaurant, Amritsar

after dessert we went to a well known hole in the wall for amritsari fish: white fish with garlic, lemon, ginger, chilli ... deep fried - amazing

Ronald chillin' in New Delhi (we haven't eaten here - yet)

super duper sweets shop at LMB, Jaipur

while I had a lager beer, Pete had a large bear

really nice and spicy fish meal in Udaipur

Happy Diwali

Today is the first day of the 5 day Diwali festival. We are in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, it is night time and the city is glowing brightly with tiny butter lanterns, firecrackers and gaudy, blinking light displays. We enjoyed the view very much from the 14th floor of the Om Hotel, in the revolving restaurant!

We've been traveling quite intensely the last few days, have covered a lot of distance. It hasn't always been pleasant. After spending 2 nights at the Golden Temple in Amritsar (which is an amazing place that swept me off my feet that I'd like to talk about for a minute just here inside these brackets ... All are welcome; it is a sanctuary! Waves of people sit in lines on the floor, their plates filled with dahl, rice, vegetables and chapati bread [which is made by machine apparently, and is actually not very good but it doesn't matter much because it is a gift]. That's right, free food - and accomodation. They feed ~40,000 people a day. It doesn't matter who you are; if you are hungry, you are fed. The temple itself is lovely, and we waited in a long, sweaty line the first day to see inside, but enjoyed much more walking around barefoot [before entering one must remove ones shoes, wash ones feet and cover ones head] on the white marble around the temple at night. I felt so peaceful during those walks.) Where was I? Yes, after spening 2 nights at the Golden Temple, we got on a sweet 5am luxury train to Delhi, had lunch and then took a bicycle rickshaw to the bustand where we learned no bus from there went to Agra, so we got on one of those crazy Indian city buses you read about for a half hour ride to another bus stand where we hopped on another one of those buses you read about for a 6 hour ride to Agra. After crashing, we woke early EARLY to go to the Taj Mahal for sunrise. It was spectacular, and we joined in with everyone else in photo fever. (We were more goofy than the rest though.) After breakfast we got a supposedly delux bus for a ride to our current location, Jaipur, which took way too long because of all the stops made to pick up and drop off bags of some sticky sugar liquid that dripped on us and our stuff.

Tomorrow night we plan to head to Udaipur on a sleeper train. We've heard it's very nice there and I'm hoping it's somewhere we'll want to spend some more time. The worst thing about many of the places we've passed through lately has been the air quality. I feel like in the last week I've shaved some chunk of time off my life just from inhaling so much air thick with exhaust and garbage burning. The garbage burns are brutal - on every corner around here. Gahyuck! Please take a deep breath in and, if you're lucky enough, enjoy your relatively pure dose of oxygen.

P.S. There are lots of camels in this province!

Up in the Clouds

We missed our train to Shimla, so we took the bus. Winding through forested mountains and scattered road stands that make up villages we got up to about 2200 meters above sea level. And that's where we are now, in Shimla, were the air is thin and quite chilly.

We were initally charmed by the steep and busy streets (the town is built up and down a cluster of mountains), the colourful fabrics in the street, our room with a view... but have encountered a bunch of rather unfriendly people today, and are not feeling so energetic. We did however find some wool shawls today to keep us warm, and Pete got a cute vest and hat outfit. And we had a great lunch: vegetbale dosa's at The Indian Coffee House. The place seemed to me like an old boy's club. Waiters in pouffy formal uniforms, a bunch of old Indian men sitting around in leather chairs, drinking coffee and talking seriously in the big, dimly lit space. It was funny and the dosas were sooooooooo good.

I think we'll leave here in 2 days. We've been asked to do a trek to Kashmir, and attend the Kashmiri wedding of the guide's nephew, but it is quite a bit out of our budget.

FOOD (part 1)

I've been meaning to tell you about what I've been eating for a while now.

At the ashram, they treat us well. Breakfast is served with hot chai every morning. Sundays we eat a bowl of chicpeas; Thursdays, the blob (we don't know what it is exactly so we started going out for breakfast on Thursdays); the rest of the week either a bowl of tumeric rice or a bowl of hot, sloppy, chunky, chewy wheat and coconut porridge. Can you guess my favourite?

Lunch and dinner are the same deal: a mass of white rice (which I stopped eating 2 weeks ago when I got a cold), a bowl of dahl, a scoop of curried vegetables and fresh, hot, buttered (or not) chapati bread. Often some raw cucumbers or tomatoes are served on the side, and a guy usually goes around with a plate of green chillies if you feel like spicing things up. You can have a second helping but you've got to finish everything on your plate. That hasn't been a problem with me. I love this food.

ashram grub

Now I want to tell you about a few wicked things I've tried here in Rishikesh.

"The Himalayan Health Pancake" (Madras Cafe): A huge whole wheat pancake spread with curd and honey, decorated with slices of apple, papaya, orange, banana and pommegranite gems. SO GOOD.

Street samosas: Two of 'em in a banana leaf bowl, a sweet red sauce, hot green chilli sauce and pinch of spice on top, eaten with a wooden spoon. (Pete's already mentioned the ones we get at The Office.)

large masala chai and a chocolate banana samosa

"Lemon Nana": Fresh mint lemonade in slushy form.

"Origanic Greek Salad" (Prem Namaste Cafe): A bed of cabage topped with tomatoes, cucumber, olives, feta cheese, grilled potato and eggplant, pineapple, mixed nuts, raisins, parsley - sweet and creamy dressing. I didn't mind that it wasn't your typical Greek salad; it was nice to eat all those raw veggies.



Traditional rice pudding: On the 12th anniversary of Shayla Mataji's husband's death, we were served this for desert. (Shayla is an old holy woman who has lived at the ashram for, like, 30 years.) It is so creamy and comforting, made with tiny rice and lots of cardamonn. Mmmmm..

Crazy peanut sweet: Everyone loves this stuff. It's kind of like fudge. Twice I've been handed a piece on the street as I I came across a parade; we also get a piece every Monday and Friday night after Kirtan.