This is Eendia

This is war. This is a fight for survival. The movie Blood Diamond with Leonardo di Caprio springs to mind. He is repeatedly reminded in a South African accent “TIA: This is Erfrika”. TII. This is Eendia.

We are alive, but only just. Never, ever catch an overnight train in Eendia. Not only are the train stations infested with rats the size of cats, the carriages are full of their smaller cousins and snorting, snotting, farting, spluttering people. We were most unfortunate to share a 2 x 3 metre space with 4 locals, one of whom would, with frightening regularity, choke and cough blood, YES blood, in our direction. Nice. Would you believe that later in this post we mention getting sick?

Our 3 day, 2 night boat trip down the Ganges, Eendia's holiest river and the world's most polluted, began very pleasantly. The group split up among three small boats, with a kitchen boat in the rear, and we sailed, rowed and floated along some beautiful if slightly toxic and nutrient-rich waterways. (By the time you hit Varanasi the water is septic.) We camped on large sandbanks in the middle of the river. We sang songs on blankets in the sand. Riverfolk fished across the way. The boatmen were hard working. We were treated to buffet vegetarian meals on board the boat, in true Hindu spirit. How awesome is India, we thought? Our musings turned to pleasant TV ads rather than movies about death. In-cred-i-ble In-diyaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

All along we were slowly being poisoned.

Matt was the first in the group to succumb, and really set the tone. On the second night he scrambled up the sandbank, staggered a short distance from the campsite and proceeded to spectacularly jettison ten litres of fluid in various ways and means over about 40 minutes. It was a kaleidoscope of colour and smell, and interspersed at times with him lying in a crater moaning. One particularly charming deposit even earned a tombstone of baked riverbed clay.

You have to be careful lying on or in sandbanks. The Ganges is a holy river, but is also the national garbage disposal network. People bathe at Varanasi amongst 30 open sewer outlets. The sandbanks are strewn with medical waste disposed of upriver. Being a holy river, all good Hindus aspire to come here, and dying here frees one from the cycle of reincarnation. Hence the water and river banks are covered in bones, both animal and human, and occasionally bodies in various states of decomposition float by. On a toilet stop we saw a very fresh dead baby tied to a stone. This is Eendia.

And this is us looking like we are having fun.

Penny then took her turn getting sick (although more loudly ill than violently), as did every other member of the group bar one. As a result, we cannot really comment in much detail on the food in Varanasi, because not a lot has been consumed or kept down in the last couple of days. What we have eaten has been truly outstanding though. The Lassis are brilliant. The variety is incredible. And in between projectile vomiting and bowel urgency, we have managed to see the sights.

The holy cow is much revered, and causes traffic accidents frequently. No one dares touch the holy cow. Sadly for the holy cow, it suffers a life of street walking, pooing freely along the many Ghats (steps leading to the river where the locals bathe and wash their clothes) and masticating on garbage bags. The plastic bags cause the holy cow premature death by strangling its bowels.

Several Ghats are 'burning Ghats' reserved for cremation. The burning of bodies can be publicly viewed. The ashes are then thrown in the river. Interestingly, some people are exempt from being cremated, namely victims of leprosy and small pox, small children, pregnant women and holy men.

Two metres away at the neighbouring Ghats, locals frolic in the holy waters, bathing and washing, while the holy cows crap on the steps above.

Varanasi is renowned for its festivals. Every evening Hindus and gawking tourists gather on the main Ghat and watch the evening prayer light and sound spectacular, involving much chanting and candle waving.

We have seen snake charmers ...

dung drying .... (which also resolves a long-standing mystery about the McDonalds supply chain)

wedding processions and decorated vehicles ...

Ghat art ...

Cricket matches ...

and have enjoyed some local recreation - yoga. This is how it’s done.


This is not.

Next stop, stomach illness permitting, is the Taj Mahal.

Diverse Delhi

It has been an emotional few days in Delhi.

We had essentially two and a half days in Delhi before the tour started and we got some direction, and fending for ourselves went pretty badly. Travelling Delhi independently can be exhausting, frustrating, exhilerating and overwhelming. Today, with the tour guide, we discovered the joys and inexpensiveness of the metro and good restaurants. That made a pleasant improvement from the masses of dishonest (yes, we will lay it out there) auto-rickshaw drivers (one stopped in a small alley and spent 20 minutes trying to sell us something, then when we refused he got out and looked for a new fare) and security guards ("here, I will give you some false information that you can't understand, now give me my fee"). We parted with a great deal of money in the end and spent hours wandering around unsuccessfully looking for food.

We think we have done a pretty good job of seeing what Delhi has to offer. Obviously we wandered past the monuments ...

And gigantic Mughal tombs ...

We had a large tourist map without a scale on it, so we set off on an awful number of long walks on dusty highways past numerous slums, begger children and scabby dogs without really appreciating how far apart things would be. Rickshaw drivers didn't help by regularly pulling up on the side of the road and lying to us about how far away things were. We can proudly say however that we have been off the tourist track and have thoroughly witnessed the real Delhi.

That was probably the way we saw the most interesting things. There are very few public toilets, so when we came across them photos were in order.

We have also wandered past a number of slums. They have been remarkably close to large government installations and government houses for generals and justices.

There have also been a few amusing signs. "Sham" is a common name, so there are "Sham Tyres" and "Sham Brothers Traders". Keep this firm in mind for your next childrens birthday party.
This morning we went on a guided walk to the city's largest mosque and, very interestingly, a Sikh temple.

The Sikhs are very generous. They run a free canteen for all people of all castes and all income levels. We wandered through their kitchen and Penny had a go at making chapati.



We then toured the local spice market in Old Delhi which was very nice, very cheap and smelt of a magical combination of human faeces, incense, anniseed and burnt samosas ...


We are now off on an overnight train into the wilderness, and then spening two and a half days on small (4-person) boats to float down the Ganges. We may head into the markets tonight to buy a sarong, which will be a DIY toilet screen on and off the boat. Wish us luck.

The Black Hole of Delhi

We have moved into the warm pool of urine stage of the holiday. We had a couple of free days in Bangkok and there was wiz everywhere, particularly in the tourist district where we caught our bus to the Bridge over the River Kwai. The other places we stopped on that trip did not disappoint on the wiz front, either. We are pleased to announce that Matt also got diagnosable travellers diarrhoea just in time for a twelve hour bus trip. Our final memories of Bangkok are certainly pleasant ones. At least the tour bus had the situation in hand.



Here is the (current) bridge over the River Kwai.





Then came Delhi. We are now pretty used to banged up cars with no seatbelts screaming down the wrong side of the road. Delhi is a bit different though. Here people actively fight for the road. No one dares crawl through congestion because a tuk tuk will squeeze in front of you if you do. The result is vast amounts of smog and lots of old Tata hatchbacks driven by well groomed young men lurching back and forth.


The touting is also at a different level. You can get rid of South East Asian street merchants by just saying no. Here they will get within about 4cm of you and follow you all the way up the road.


The poverty here is far more obvious. After we eventually found and checked into our tiny internal hotel room (hence the "black hole") in a dusty, delapitated part of town, we caught a tuk tuk into the Old Quarter. Mistake number one. Most of the trip was spent in traffic. A couple of little girl beggars asked for some money while we were stationary on a highway, so the tuk tuk driver got out and belted the oldest one (about 10) around the head. A few minutes later she yelled abuse at him from the side of the road, so he got out again, chased her down the street, and punched her up some more. There was nothing we could do. It was incredibly disturbing.


We walked through a sacred park which is where shot Ghandis are laid to rest. After emerging from the park, a dog with bits missing (tracts of skin and flesh were somehow torn off), trotted by and we wandered past bearded old men sitting in the gutter talking to themselves.


Here is a guy sleeping, we presume, on the side of a highway overpass.




The traffic jams caused by motorbikes have been replaced by traffic jams of people. We made the mistake of walking through the Old Quarter on a Friday night. At times we could not physically move or even bend over because of the masses of people. We were the only honkies for miles, and Penny one of a very small number of females out and about, so the stares were intense.



There are also of course cows wandering around freely and beasts of burden working the streets.

We were emotionally exhausted by the end of all of that. No photos because the drive to escape was all-powerful. When we struggled back to our suburb we collapsed into a Pizza Hut up the road from the hotel. A very touristy thing to do, we know.

Time to crawl out of bed and go see some museums.

Cambodia, Cambodge, Kampuchia (Peoples Republic of)

Today is our last day in hot and Sunny Cambodia.

On our arrival in the capital, Phnom Penh, we started in true colonial style by going to the Foreign Correspondents Club (the place from which foreigners were evacuated when the Khmer Rouge seized the town in April 1975) and enjoyed some cheap but tasty cocktails.

After a bit of a monk drought in Vietnam, the orange cloaks are aplenty in Cambodge, so the last few days have allowed Penny to revisit her former hobby of stalking monks.

We had some very interesting walks around town. Phnom Penh means “Hill of Penh”, and the focal point of town is a temple on the small hill which houses some Buddha statues which washed up in the Mekong around 1000 years ago. On the hill little macaques run free, and a lot of money and energy has been poured into large parks and monuments.

The food has been quite a sensation. The local delicacy is “amok”, which appears to be a fancy way of saying “sensibly spiced curry”. This is a particularly stunning fish amok from a restaurant run by a former street kid, who was trained by a local charity.

We were a little bit shell-shocked after visiting the S-21 genocide museum and the killing fields, where we learnt about the Khmer Rouge’s brutal regime. Anything that makes you sit down in horror and cry should not be made light of, so we won’t even contemplate doing that. When the Khmer Rouge arrived in Phnom Penh in 1975, within three hours they performed a forced evacuation of the city, turning it into a ghost town. Currency was abolished and the reserve bank blown up. A city high school was turned into a torture centre. The Khmer Rouge wanted to execute all “new people” and start life at ‘Year Zero’. “Base people” were peasants, and “new people” were those who spoke foreign languages, were the educated (lawyers or doctors or intellectuals), or those who had soft hands or who wore glasses. They were tortured into giving the names of their colleagues, who were then also tortured and killed. There were many such prisons around the country. In S-21, 17,000 people entered its gates and 7 survived. Even the guards were replaced and killed by their replacements each year because they knew too much about its operations.

Some died there, and were buried behind a school building. Most were driven just out of town to a killing field where they were bludgeoned to death. Bones still litter the footpath and stick out from the soil. It was abhorrent. We took no photos, but will remember this site forever. Estimates of the death toll at the hands of the Khmer Rouge vary between 1.5 million to 3 million over a 4 year period, equating to about 20% of the Cambodian population at the time. The Khmer Rouge has left an indelible stain of poverty on this country – even without the shocking stories about 1975 to 1979, what we see each day makes us enormously thankful for the good fortune of being born an Australian.

So, jumping unnervingly quickly into pleasant stories again, while eating breakfast one morning we looked up and saw an elephant gently strolling down the street. We also saw it coming back the other way later that day.

On the second night we went to our guide’s house for dinner and ate ... tarantulas.

We visited a small truckstop / farming community where tarantulas are farmed the following morning. This young lass kept putting the tarantula on tourists in an effort to convince them to buy her pineapple. Only one dollar.

This girl is a rarity, because she is still smiling at us. Intrepid has a policy against passengers buying anything from children because it encourages them not to go to school. They refuse to take no for an answer. After Penny repeatedly refused to buy an 11 year old boy’s post cards, he waited outside our breakfast stall for half an hour and then told her “you lie to children lady” as she returned to the bus.

Then it was time for Angkor Wat, which is an enormous series of Khmer temples built between about 900 and 1150 AD. They were simply abandoned about 400 years ago and the jungle did a pretty good job of reclaiming the smaller temples, before the French re-discovered the sites between 1863 and 1914 and started rebuilding them. That marks quite a departure from the usual colonial approach of wrecking things.

One of the temples has 49 individual towers which faces carved out of stone on all four sides. Some are quite high – the tallest tower in the largest temple is 65m high, and these towers were around 40 metres above the ground, and were reached by scrambling up narrow stairs.

We also saw the temple where Tomb Raider III was filmed. The biggest gaggles of tourists were around the places where major scenes were filmed, and around a humorously shaped tree.

We finished our first day with a visit to one of the oldest temples, built of brick around 900AD. It was impossible to resist the urge to introduce another backside to our photographic record.

That brings us nearly to the end of our Indochina trip. Tomorrow we head back to the Thai border to try to break the stranglehold of the foul-smelling fungus seems to have taken over our sandals before flying off to India to give new and interesting stenches their turn. Stay tuned for tales from Delhi!