Tale of the Rat and the Camel

The New Year's begun, as we were leaving Varanasi. It's been almost a month now we are living in Rajasthan, in the desert. 2015 brings a lot of changes in our journey, in our destinations as well as in our ways of travelling. If we want to someday come back to Europe, we need to adapt our plans. This means : more volunteering (as we did last month in Darjeeling), to get accomodation in exchange of a few hours of work, and modifications in our route, as we realized less the countries, less the visas to pay. Bhutan was out of the list for a long time already, Myanmar would drive us out of budget, and even the rest of south-east Asia seems complicated now, as we want to take the trans-siberian railway later in the spring to come back home.

For the last three weeks we have been volunteering in a hotel in Bikaner, by the desert. Every morning I wake up around 5-5.30 to start the boiler, and feed it with wood continuously until 9 a.m.. No electric boiler here, so someone has to manage the fire every morning in order to provide hot shower for customers. It's a funny job. I like to work in early mornings, and finishing my work around 9.30, my whole days are free! We are not the only volunteers here. We share our work and our dorm with other volunteers from France and from Russia. Nice atmosphere and lot of fun!

In our free time we hang out in Bikaner. Bikaner is a town of Rajasthan, out of the traditionnal touristic routes. When we walk in the streets, people are usually surprised to see white people and like to chat with us. But English is not as well known here as in the rest of India, so conversations are sometimes limited. However when people know english, it's amazing how fast you can make friend with someone here. We met Praveen, a young and very nice student of Bikaneer, and he already invited us for diner with the whole family on our first week here. It was a surreal and magical moment. They were all very nice, and the cake so tasty. We still meet him very often and he shows us around Bikaner.

Bikaner is a real Indian city, with cows and rickshaws, temples and street food. The proximity of the desert add camels to the picture. Those big animals on spider legs are a common encounter in the streets. The absence of tourists make the city very "true" - sans chichi. Last weekend we spent in the desert. On camel we crossed dry lands of small spiky bushes and holes of sand mice. On the hottest hour we also crossed a desert village for our camels to drink. The village was made of small white houses with flat roofs. Children running around us on the sandy road with smily "how are you!". Later that day we reached our camp where we kept some rhum to face the cold night.

One the most "true Indian experience" we had here was definitly in the general hospital... A couple of days ago we went the hospital. We're both fine, but one of the volunteers had an accident on her way to Jaisalmer and we went to visit her there. The place was incredible. Like an Indian railway station with a hint of European war movies. We entered the dusty halls were the sick crowd was gathering. Pigeons were flying around old women in coma lying on medical beds in the middle of the corridor. Surgical rooms were less hygienic than a butchery in Europe. A nurse asked for backshish and rats were hiding in the bathrooms. The room where our friend was sleeping really recalled WWI movies. Busy nurses walking arround rows of narrow white metal beds in a big concrete hall. Inside the smell  gives you nausea more even than in the rest of the hospital. Tince almost fainted when she came along. This is India.

Today we saw rats in another place : the Karni Mata temple of Deshnok, about 30 km from Bikaner. This place was amazing. Inside the temple, hundreds of rats are running around, eating, playing, fighting, chilling... Because Karni Mata wanted to bring her young son back to life after his tragic death, she negociated the life of her child in a way that now on all the members of her family would be reincarnated into rats. Pilgrims bring them food and chill out with their family sitting in the middle of the animals. Either you are amused or disgusted, this temple is a very special place.

During our stay here, Tince took a lot of notes in her diary. Here are some quotes and pictures of Bikaner :

    Nav ne jausmas, kāds datums, Janvāra vidus, veļas diena
Tikai tagad, patiešām dzīvojot kopā ar indiešiem, sāku pa īstam apjēgt neskaitāmās kultūru atšķirības, gribas teikt, dīvainības. Es varētu rakstīt un rakstīt par to, kā viņi visi neatkarīgi no rocības un interesēm vēlas uzsākt savu biznesu (Pravinam vienalga, vērs vaļā skolas, viesnīcas vai varbūt slimnīcu); kā lai uzaicinātu meiteni apēst saldējumu vietējā kafejnīcā, viņu vispirms vēlams apprecēt; kā pilnīgs loģikas trūkums izpaužas visikdienišķākajās situācijās; kā ir pilnīgi pieņemami nostāties citam aiz muguras un blenzt pār plecu vai tukšā vilcienā apsēsties tieši blakus vienīgajam pasažierim; kā uz ielas garāmgājējs var pajautāt - Are you friends or... zīmīgs klusums... Jā, jā, mēs guļam kopā! Un tā tālāk, un tā joprojām. Tūrisma industrijas radītais reklāmas sauklis Incredible India! šeit iegūst pavisam citu nozīmi.

 Višnu templis, veidots Flinstonu stilistikā, drīzāk atgādina atrakciju parku nekā templi. 

    19.01.15.
Šorīt atgriezāmies no kamieļu safari. Sāp muskuļi un pašapziņa (par savu būšanu formā, haha). Jāt ar kamieli ir jautri, vislabāk ir sēdēt priekšā, no kurienes paveras labāks skats uz apkārtni un var novērot zvēra uzvedību. Aizmugurējais beņķis ir komfortablāks, taču nav kur pieturēties, līdz ar to zūd ilūzija par jebkādu kontroli pār savu kamieli.

    22.01.15.

Šodien piedzīvojām interesantu sarunu ar Pravinu. Par laulībām. Izrādās, Pravins zina, ka precēsies pēc aptuveni diviem vai trim gadiem, taču vēl nezina, ar ko! Jau tagad laiku pa laikam dažu ģimeņu tēvi apciemojot viņa māti, apskatot mājas un arī pašu Pravinu, lai izlemtu, izprecināt savu meitu šai ģimenei vai ne. Lēmumu, kura būs tā laimīgā, pieņems Pravina māte. Protams, meitene būs no hinduistu ģimenes un tas pašas kastas kā Pravins. Citādi laukos neesot iedomājams. Pilsētās, jā, tur precoties arī aiz mīlestības. Pravins jautā arī, kam mēs dodam priekšroku, laulībai aiz mīlestības vai aprēķina. Viņš grib zināt, kā tas nākas, ka es un Nicolas dzīvojam kopā, bet mūsu vecāki nekad nav tikušies. Indijā sieviete vienmēr pārvācas pie vīra pēc laulībām, savukārt vīrs visu mūžu dzīvo zem mātes jumta. Ģimenei jāturas kopā.  Ir savādi redzēt Pravinu stāstām, kā pie viņa precinieces jāj, mazliet smīnam, paskaidrojot, ka bija viņam reiz arī draudzene, bet to mātei labāk nezināt. Man savukārt nav skaidrs, kas notiek ar draudzeni, kad pienāk laiks laulāties ar citu, ģimenes izvēlētu kandidāti.    

    23.01.15.
Šodien pienāca ziņa, ka mūsu lidojums uz Taizemi ir atcelts. Savādi, jau otrais atceltais lidojums šogad, un jau atkal tas mūs nemaz nesatrauc! Drīzāk pat jūtamies priecīgi, jo jau kādu laiku domājām, vai tikai nesteidzamies par agru prom no Indijas, un uztraucāmies, ko līdz pavasarim sadarīsim Taizemē. Nu mūsu priekšā visi ceļi ir atkal vaļā, un briest jauni plāni.

    24.01.15.
Vakarnakt debesis rotāja horizontāls mēness sirpis. Kā mirdzošs Češīras kaķa smaids . Istabas biedrene Olga saka, ka ko tādu esot redzejusi agrāk, Taizemē.

Varanasi

Driving in a small rickshaw at high speed on the highway, slaloming between the huge orange sikh trucks, we are finally approaching the holy city of Vārānasī. This place should be one of the highlights of our Asian journey. Place of high spirituality and of dramatic water pollution, Varanasi is the place you have in head when you think of India, the place everyone wants to see, the place everyone should see perhaps, but a place that is not always easy to reach. It was with apprehension and excitement we did the trip to this place of extremes, and we arrived with fatigue as well. 

In the morning, the apprehension disappeared. Varanasi wasn't as scaring as we expected, in fact the place seemed to us somehow very peaceful. The atmosphere around the ghats, even when very busy, seem to hold on the time and give us a rest. Still the place remains an extreme concentration of Indian colors. The ghats step down in a chaos of irregular stairs to the river. The morning mist over the Ganga leaves slowly the place to the crowd. Boat drivers constantly come to offer their services. Men wash in the waters of the Ganges. Women dry clorful clothes on the dusty stairs. Children play with their kites while teenagers prefer cricket. Old saddhus meditate the whole day. Constantly corpses are burnt on immense piles of wood. Cows, goats, dogs, monkeys and other animals make Varanasi an open-air zoo. The city is so full of colors, action and everchanging details that makes it a perfect place to snap photos on every corner. We're joking, that after some time spent here one could open an exhibition of e.g. pictures of only cow shit.

 

 

The old bazaar is also a significant place, even if sometimes the city of Varanasi seem to be reduced at the ghats. The bazaar is articulated around the Temple of Vishnawath. We had a long walk bare-feet in the dirty streets to reach it, carrying offerings in a basket and making the queue with other pilgrims. But the place is highly protected by the army, and we had to walk the way backward to the market when we couldn't convince the soldiers of our hinduism... In the bazaar we found also am amazing lassi, in the Blue Lassi shop, where we could enjoy the creamy drink in a narrow room while outside corpses where carried under colorful cloth toward the nearby cremation ghat. Cremation in Varanasi was very different than cremation in Pashupatinath. If in the temple of Kathmandu we were immersed in the most intimate moment of one's life, in Varanasi cremation is just an element of the general picture. It seems normal and even the goats lay in the ashes.

 

In Varanasi the religious life never stops and temples come one after another. On our first morning in Varanasi we visited a few small temples. At the entrance of one of them, young men were selling bhang lassi, a lassi mixed with cannabis butter, a popular offering to Lord Shiva, allowed in Varanasi for this religious reason, but openly sold around by local smugglers. In front of another temple, we encountered a talkative saddhu who spent his morning teaching us mudras and mantras. We couldn't hold our laugh when learning one mudra of Ganesh wich looked pretty much like a raised middle finger...

 

It is true that in Varanasi some people are pushy when they see tourists. Beside the boat drivers who want to sell helicopter tours, some others sell drugs with a snaky voice "hassshisssh...", fake saddhus ask for money and weird men try to shake your hand to force you to a hand massage. Often a smily "No, thank you." is enough but sometimes you've got to be more imaginative. If one want to shake your hand, better join them in a traditionnal Namaste. Or like me, hide them in your sweater and explain that you were born with no hand.

 

Many people come to Varanasi to study Indian music. Varanasi is a center for Indian classical music. That's why, for this entry there will be no hidden songs (as in all of the entries of this blog), but you can listen here to one of India's most famous classical master. 

Indian trains

19 Ganeshs, 4 Toy trains, a dozen of Buddhas, several chinese cats waving their paws, numerous Indian gods, 1 Jesus on the cross and a portrait of Mother Theresa. The booking agency where we purchased our train tickets doesn't know the meaning of "too much". The agent is as his room, with huge rings at each fingers and an over-comforting speech. He promises us all the tickets to everywhere, as he "will not make a lady cry".

But travels in India can always keep some bad surprises on the way. And when you go by train, prepare for the worst. To reach Varanasi we need to take two trains. From NJP (Siliguri train station, downhill from Darjeeling) to Patna, we drive by night in a sleeper train. For this first train experience we decided to go for 1st class but somehow we got in second class, which was as nice but less private. In the evening we are joined by an old Indian man looking like a wizard with his two colored beard. His "collegue" (but apparently his servant/bodyguard) follows him with his gorilla's shoulders and his unexpressive face. We share dinner and stories, before sleeping.

We reached Patna in the early morning. We are already accustomed with the chaos of Indian train stations and decide to be patient and wait our train to appear on the screen. On the screen, the other trains show delays : some 20 minutes, some 3 hours, some 12 hours. After a while our train is announced with 14 hours delay! In the waiting room loudspeakers shout announcements in hindi and english continuously, while we have to accept that we'll probably spend the night in this place. But soon the voice announce our train is cancelled. The agent might have been right about ladies crying and so was the time for the gent to move some tables and get things right...

I went first to the office of the station manager, who sent me to another office, which sent me back to the first one, where I was sent again to the second. I happen by accident to smash a door while opening, so I decided to keep the following talk at the same level and started shouting at the manager until he followed me to the other office. I continued argueing until the director of the station came to ask what is going on here. In the end I got refunded and we got 100 ruppies tickets with which we could take any train we want from Patna to Varanasi.

We jumped aboard the first train, doors open. Other passengers were helpful, even if some didn't quite understand why we couldn't speak hindi. The real India was in this train. From the banch in front of us, as well as from the shelf for luggages where some men were sleeping, faces were looking at us, with teeth used by the chewing tobacco. A cockroach crawls on the ground where men took of their shoes. Young men comes in at every stations to sell chai and snacks. After few hours in the smell of chickpeas, toilet and tobacco, we reached the holy city...

Greetings

Priecīgus Ziemassvētkus, no Dardžīlingas tirgus!

Joyeux Noël, depuis le marché de Darjeeling!

Häid Jõule, Darjeeling turult!

Merry Christmas, from Darjeeling's market!

Do you like dragons?

Sikkim. In the Himalaya, ancient kingdoms used to exist, hidden and unreachable in the high Mountains. But today only Bhutan remains preserved. Ladakh was conquered by the British, Nepal opened progressivly to the world in the end of 20th century, Tibet is occupied by China since 1951, and the little Kingdom of Sikkim decided to become part of India in 1975, when the last king died. Still Sikkim stays apart. To reach the place we needed to get a permit, a sort of "Sikkimese visa" and got a new stamp on our passports at the Indian-Sikkimese border. And Indeed Sikkim is quite different. Cleaner and more expensive, Sikkim is a bit the Switzerland of India, up in the mountains...
 

We arrived in Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, on the first day of the winter festival (a week before Losoong, the Sikkimese new year), and were very surprised. The main road in the center is a pretty paved road, for walkers only, with nice banches where to sit, Christmas decorations, people walking around. Loudspeakers on the street plays Christmas songs or some kind of crooners singing in Nepali. Small stands along the street make a Christmas market. A normal town before Christmas, you may think, but somehow surrealistic here.
 

It got even more surrealistic during the night. Gangtok has a rather western nightlife. Except nightclubs are crowded around 9 pm and close at 11 pm. Oh and Gangtok is also very much into karaoke. For the worst and the less worst. And we somehow got involved into a karaoke party. A very weird guy, overfriendly, started to chat with us while we were having beer, and short after that I was singing in Nepali and dancing with his friends. In the same bar, a guy tried flirting with Tince "Sikkimese style" : "Do you like dragons?"

But we didn't stay in Gangtok for the whole festival, as we wanted to discover the west of the country. With Christmas songs stucked in our heads, we left Gangtok to Pelling. A long jeep drive through beautiful valleys. The road was terribly long. In Sikkim you need some 5-6 hours to make 60 kilometers. The road was almost as bad with asphalt than without. But the view was worth it. Crossing from east to west across the hillland, window on Kangchenjunga (3rd highest peak of the world) and the fluffy green hills : Sikkim is really one special place. Jeeps are also a way to meet locals. One man, travelling with fish in a jar, paid the driver with mandarines.

 

When I was child, I imagined adventure looks like a long walk, with heavy bags, crossing mountains with a pretty girl, and stopping to ask villagers for direction or hospitality. Usually it's not like that (more like diarrhea and dirty rooms). But between Kecheopalri lake (pronounced like the Georgian Khatchapuri) and Yuksom, it's exactly how it was. We left the holy lake in the early morning to go up and up until Yuksom. The weather was as great as our bags were heavy. Passing farms, we went down until one river which name I don't remember but it sounded like Rhum Cola. Then, up, up, up. The last kilometers were killing us. More we climbed up (and thought we were reaching the top) and more the hill got higher! But with the help of locals and the tea one offered to us, we made it until the top.
 

Sikkim is one amazing place for the landscape, but also for the pleasures of the mouth. First they know how to use meat and dairy products, which is a positive point. And they make really tasty soups, from nettle, cauliflower and radish leaves. The best soups of south-Asia! They also have less strict laws about alcohol than the rest of India. They make their own drinks. Local Hit beer seemed almost good after 3 months in Asia. We tried also great home fig wine in bamboo mēriņš!
  

Living with monks

This week we lived in a buddhist monastery in the town of Ghoom, 7 km from Darjeeling. Sakya Guru Monastery was destroyed by an earthquake few years ago and now it's being renovated. Every morning we woke up by the sound of bells, drums and mumbling voices of puja, the morning prayer. After a cup of Tibetan butter tea (black tea mixed with melted butter and salt) we worked for some hours painting rooms in orange, beloved color of monks.  We spent the rest of our time with monks sharing the daily rice and stories about Latvia and Tibet.

View from our balcony

 Unusually grey Buddha that still needs to be painted

 Introducing monks to Latvian culture

What the fog !

We left Nepal (after a long journey by local buses) to arrive in Darjeeling, up the hills, on a foggy day. The fog was so thick we only discovered the mountains around after 4 days.

 

 

 

Misty town between the tea plantations. Narrow dark gray streets going up and down (but mostly up). Darjeeling looks like a beautiful British old city ...that was abandonned and let to the care of no one. The place is lively : Streets busy by small markets, people washing outdoor, street dogs, icones of Shiva or Ganesh in the corner... Like any indian town that would have teleported in the middle of a British ghost town, between colonial houses and surrealist clock-tower. And Darjeeling was a British city, founded in the hills after the colonial army took the region around (Gorkhaland) from the Kingdom of Nepal to incorporate it inside the Bengale province. Still people here keep a strong Himalayan identity. Yesterday we had a taste of colonial empire at tea time. Tea and scone in fancy British style house.

 

We really are in love with Darjeeling. The town is tranquil and the people welcoming. The small streets are familiar. The weather is chilly, or even cold when the clouds come down. It feels like home. Here we had opportunity to try not only the best tea, but also the best food! A few good adresses here have put our stomacs in joy after the daal bhat diet of Nepal. In Hasty Tasty, a self-service Indian cantine, we had some of the tastiest Indian meals so far. Everything was good : the thalis, the uttapams, the masala dosas, the malai koftas... And all those great things costed nothing at all! In Darjeeling we also had the best breakfasts at Sonam's and the best beer snacks at Gatty's for something "not Indian".

 

Obviously I can't write about Darjeeling without writting about tea. Here we stand in the Kingdom of Tea. Walking around the tea plantations we enjoyed the rare sunny and warm weather in Darjeeling before to reach the factory. The factory is closed in December but a funny woman welcomed us in her shop to give us a taste of the local tea. Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe Number One is the name of this very special Darjeeling tea, she says with a singing voice. This "golden tea" is not really black, and not green either. Very mild. Its preparation is the most impressive. Only 2 or 3 seconds in boiling water and the tea is ready. The woman threw the boiling water through the tea, and that was done! From Darjeeling's tea leaves are also made green and white teas.

From today we'll be in Ghum, a village near Darjeeling (7km). A recent earthquake demolished a buddhist temple. We proposed our help to the monks and so we'll spend the next week with them working together. And to reach Ghum, a short ride in the Toy Train!