Right now I’m sitting in an internet cafe in Rome trying to convert AUD to EURO which is surprisingly difficult. Well, when your maths level reels at anything more complicated than plus or multiply. It’s all good though as I’m transferring money to Tali so a few ‘convenient’ mistakes may occur.

The last two weeks have flown by and updating the blog has been really hard as there aren’t as many internet cafes in Europe, and Tali and I have been busy sight seeing and eating, excessively. In London we were lucky enough to have free accomodation from our friend and as a result London wasn’t too taxing on the funds. But landing in Rome was an absolute punch in the guts. The first night we stayed at a hotel we had pre booked on Hostel World and it was a dump. We paid 50 euros for a shoe box of a room without a toilet. The springs were poking up through the mattress and the pillow was as flat as a pancake. It was worse than most of the places I stayed at in Nepal/India where it cost me as little as $1.60 per night.

At 3am, aching all over and furious at my inability to sleep in this overpriced crap hole, I declared we were leaving first thing in the morning. I managed to drag Tali out of bed kicking and screaming (literally) at about 10.30 and we spent the next 3 hours trolling the streets conjuring up all kinds of foul words at each other as we searched for a new hotel. Both of us lack any sense of direction and blame the other when we get hopelessly lost. We finally found a awesome little hotel with a nice old Italian man and it has been all good since.

So I don’t know why I have spent two paragraphs explaining how expensive Rome is when I could be telling you all about the Colossseum, the Vatican, the Pantheon and heaps of other really old stuff. I’m sure you know all about them though - yes it’s all beautiful and we had an incredible time. I reckon art is pretty boring so much of it is wasted on me and 5 minutes in an art gallery looking at 16th century religious paintings makes me impossibly tired. 

In London we spent 30 minutes at the British museum and then we left. We got there one hour before it closed and worried we wouldn’t have enough time, but after seeing a few clay pots and figurines it all looks the same. We had been told to see the Magna Carta which is supposed to be a momentous piece of history so as we were browsing the isles we were both saying “we’ve got to see the Magna Carta” and both pretending we were interested. After a while I turned to Tali and said “do you even know what the Magna Carta is?” She burst out laughing and said no and I admitted I didn’t know either so we got the hell out of there (sorry Emma!). Neither of us are history buffs or art critics but we’ve had a lot of fun nonetheless.

 I have to admit though St. Peters gobsmacked me. Wow. It is the most impressive thing my eyes have ever seen and the amount of statues (statue bro) artworks, pillars, gold, other big things, surely must make it man’s greatest architectural achievement.

The highlight of Rome has been the food and wine and much of our time here has been spent devouring exorbitant amounts of it.  

London was awesome too and we did some sightseeing, caught up with a few friends and had a big night out at Fabric (a big London club). I don’t really know what else to say about it. I’m horrible at relaying past events.

I don’t think I’ll update the rest of India as I want to tell the stories from there first hand to all of you when I get back (sorry Mark!!!) plus I’m just lazy. My burst of enthusiam has burst. Like many things I do, I get excited at the start and then suddenly lose momentum. I’ll try and keep the blog updated every now and again but it’s getting harder and harder because I’m getting into the travelling groove.

Anyway, hope everyone is well at home and send me emails to my hotmail and I’ll write back!

I have been advised to post (shit a mouse just ran over my foot haha!) a map showing the route we have followed through India and I really should do that. It would give great perspective on the distances we have covered in a short period of time.

Anyway, we arrived in Amritsar from Lucknow after a 19 hour train ride and all of us were frustrated. I had been involved in a nasty case of a number two gone wrong and had been forced to destroy the evidence in less than ideal circumstances, but that story is not suitable for this blog We stayed in a hotel opposite the train station and immediately set out for some lunch.

Amritsar is north west of Delhi and when you look at a map of India, it is very high up and near the border of Pakistan. It is an interesting place as it is predominantly Sikh and is culturally (and visually) very different to the rest of India. All the men have enormous beards and wear turbans in which they tie their hair up in buns. Sikh men never cut their hair, and I felt rather bald walking among such mighty mounds of hair protruding not just from their chins, but from their ears too!

I found Amritsar particularly daunting at first as all my ignorance about the middle east and Islam surfaced due to the slightly similar appearance of the Sikh men. I guess the turban and the beards immediately makes us westerners think Islam which leads to fundamentalism which leads to terrorism. However this prejudice was immediately dismantled once I spoke to a few men and they were incredibly friendly, gentle and honorable in any business dealings we had with them. In fact as we walked down the street, people would frequently come up to us to ask if we needed help or directions without wanting anything in return. I rate Amritsar as the place where people were the kindest to us and also the most honest. Honesty is something you really come to appreciate in India as so many people try and screw with you.

Amritsar is best known for the Golden Temple which was covered with 750kg of gold in 1802 by Maharaja Ranjit Singh who is a very well known Indian personality. We went to the Golden temple the morning after arriving to see the sunrise and it was indescribably spectacular. The temple area is large and packed with Sikh’s who go there daily to pray. The temple sits in the middle of an open area and is surrounded by water. A walkway leads right around the water and buildings surround it all. As you walk in, the temple is dazzling. As the red sun climbed into the sky, it shone brilliantly onto the gold which reflected perfectly onto the water. As the sun rises, the colours change and the light hits the gold from a higher angle until it shines directly on top of the temple.

Watching the sun shift its aim at the gold and refract the light in a kaleidescope of colours and shades was really breathtaking. It was the kind of sight you would never get used to - like the sunset into the ocean.

Four Sikh men sing prayers 24 hours a day inside the temple. They sit cross legged on cushions singing in deep poetic voices in 4 hour shifts so that the music never stops. This adds to the mystique and Holiness of the place as their voices are projected through speakers right around the temple area.

The Sikh’s inside the temple were incredibly proud of their temple and everyone was asking us what we thought of it. Everyone was smiling and it was obvious that we were in a very holy and special place. What an experience!

Amritsar was a cool place. Lots of good food and great conversations with Shane and Nicola over fantastic coffee. It doesn’t matter how incredible the sites you see are, in the end it all comes down to conversations and these are the things I”ll remember most fondly about our time there, sharing our coffees with a few friendly mice.

However we only had two days there and it ended for me too quickly. The morning we were due to leave, I went out to get a coffee and a feed. I realised I had no money left and needed to get some from an ATM (don’t do anything last minute in India!). I went to 6 different ATM’s by rickshaw and none of them would accept my card, or else they were out of money. It got to the point where it was 15 minutes before we were due to get on a 6 hour bus and I still hadn’t eaten or packed and I was totally flustered. I was lost, I didn’t have a map or a Lonely Planet, and I was starving.

Suddenly my rickshaw pedaled past Shane and Nicola who were going for a stroll and I leaned out of my rickshaw in a sweaty panic/flustered rage and said “Ï’m not coming. I haven’t eaten, the fucken ATM’s won’t give me any money. I’m not going”. Shane and Nicola looked slightly bewildered as my rickshaw slowly pedaled off into the distance.

I stayed another day and was very happy I did. I calmed down, ate some food and managed to get some money out. The next morning I met this really cool Sikh rickshaw driver and he took me around to see a different side of Amritsar - the rich area, some cool parks and monuments, and another temple and museum. Then he took me to the bus and we stopped off at a street tandoor where I had the best naan I’ve ever had with butter and spicy beans. I’ll add some photos soon.

However the highlight of Amritsar (along with the Golden Temple) was going to the Pakistan border to a place called Attari which is about 30km west. That will come in the next installment and was one of the most unique and hilarious experiences of my life.

Well once again my blog post begins with an apology for not posting the updates I promised, however there is justification this time! We were caught in the bombs that went off in Delhi.

Tali arrived in Delhi and I picked her up from the airport on the 13th. We dropped her stuff off at a nice hotel I had booked near Connaught Place which is the city centre of Delhi and the business hub. We got an auto rickshaw into Connaught Place and had lunch at a fancy restaurant, and then walked around for a while checking out the shops.

Later that day we went back to our hotel and chilled out for the afternoon and crashed early as Tali was very jetlagged. In the morning, Shane and Nicola came around to our hotel at 11am and we caught the train to Old Delhi to see the Red Fort. After that we walked through the hectic markets of Old Delhi and went to a great restaurant to get Tali an authentic Indian feast.

It was a hot day and we got the train back to our hotel around 2pm, drained from the humidity and the craziness of Old Delhi which is so so busy. Shane and Nicola told us to check out the markets just up the road from our hotel in the afternoon, and we then organised to meet at our hotel at 6pm for drinks and have dinner at Connaught Place.

Tali and I were keen to go to the markets, but we crashed out and didn’t wake up until 5ish. At 6pm we waited in our courtyard and had a beer with two guys who were also staying at our hotel. They were good blokes and had done a lot of trekking around the world including the Annapurna Circuit. Shane and Nicola still hadn’t arrived at 6.30pm and we just thought they had fallen asleep or were running late.

I can’t remember the exact time they arrived but I think it was around 6.40pm. They appeared in our front garden, Shane covered in sweat and his face had a really weird shocked expression on it. He said “there’s been a bomb. We just saw a bomb go off”. Nicola started crying and we realised how serious it was. We turned on the tv and the news was already showing videos of women being carried away covered in blood, dripping on the floor, and there was debri and people everywhere. We were scared shitless…

Shane and Nicola had been in an autorickshaw heading for our place when the bomb had gone off in the markets 150m in front of them. These were the markets Tali and I were going to go to that afternoon and the markets Shane and Nicola had been at the day before. The only reason Shane and Nicola were 150m away and not closer is that Shane was arguing with the driver over the price. The two of them had to run to a train station and fight with crowds of people to get onto the train amid the uncertainty of whether other blasts were going to go off. It was genuine fear for their lives.

As we watched the news, we discovered 5 bombs had gone off and the death toll was rising. I think it is sitting around 22 dead now. An Islamic group claimed responsibility which really cemented the fact we were caught in the middle of a terrorist attack. We called our parents right away to tell them we were ok, and then we called the Australian Embassy to seek advice. We didn’t know whether to get the next flight out of Delhi or sit tight.

We had a train booked for Agra the next morning and after a long talk we decided to stick to that. The problem was that Shane and Nicola’s hotel was right next to where the bomb went off and they had to leave our hotel to go back to theirs and pack their bags and get their pasports. They left about 10pm and the bomb squad had found 3 more bombs and were still searching for more. I can’t imagine what that auto rickshaw back to their hotel would have been like as they had to go right past the bomb site.

Shane and Nicola were so lucky and so were we. The other bombs went off in Connaught Place which is where we would have been having drinks if Shane and Nicola were on time. They were running late because Shane was watching soccer (typical Shane). I didn’t sleep much that night - it was bad enough our hotel was in the vacinity, but what freaked me out was that two of our friends were one minute away from potentially getting blown up and it was the tiniest of variables that prevented it. You can rationalise all those variables and the reasons why we avoided the bombs are logical, but I think now there’s something else - luck, fate or some reason why everything came together to keep us safe. I dunno - but it’s good to be in Agra.

We’re staying here for 2 more days and just to be safe, we’re getting a private car straight to Delhi airport - neither of us want to get on a train to Delhi.

Anyway, we’re heading off to see the Taj Mahal and check out the sites of Agra. Tomorrow we’re going to an expensive hotel and are going to chill at their pool for the day and drink overpriced cocktails. I know i keep breaking the chronology of the blog, but after this I will get you up to date with Amritsar.

I’ve found it hard keeping up to date with the blog as once I fall behind, there’s so much to say that I lose interest. But tomorrow morning I will post a few mighty updates after my morning double espresso. In the meantime I’ll tell you a story about the trek which was one of the highlights for me.

It was day 7 and we had reached an elevation of 3,000m at a place called Manang. Manang is a small Tibetan influenced village with incredible mud houses hundreds of years old. Day 7 was our acclimatisation day and we were meant to spend the day resting, getting used to the altitude, and hopefully increasing the amount of red blood cells to cope with the reduction in oxygen as we climbed.

We did a short but very steep 500m ascent up a mountain on one side of the village of Manang. Up there was a spectacular view of the village, a violent river, and a panoramic view of endless mountains dotted with buffalo, goats, and an incredible glacier. On the other side of the village, directly opposite us, was a much higher mountain which I guess was about 1,500m high. About 1,000m above the village set into this mountain was one lonely white house, a small white speck.

Leading up to this house were incredibly steep switch backs (a path that zig zags upwards) which looked very dangerous. I asked our guide what the white house was and he told me that a monk lived up there. I was astonished as this was 4,000m above sea level and 1,000m above the village - incredible isolation. The monk had lived in this house for 35 years in meditation and was now 90 years old. He never left the house, ever, and his family carried food and water up to him daily.

It was things like this which made the trek so unique. Beyond the scenery, we met people and saw things so distinct and foreign that you would not experience them anywhere else in the world. Here we were, a 7 day walk into the mountains of Nepal, 3,000m high, looking up at a place where a man has sat in meditation for 35 years. A renouncer who has left the world to focus the mind in an attempt to stop generating any negative karma which would continue to bind him to the cycle of death and rebirth.

A lot of people would say this is a wasted life and a lot of Buddhists would agree - meaningful engagement in the world is a central tenet of Buddhism and is tied up with the notion of compassion and the Bodhisattva (of which the Delai Lama is believed to be a reincarnation)- putting off one’s own liberation from suffering to help others.

We sat up on this mountain for a few hours and just talked, with no one to hear us but the soft flowing  pure air, the birds, and the sound of the water from the glacier. Shane and I threw rocks and I naturally dominated at hitting our set targets. The simplicity and profundity of that moment has etched itself into my fondest memories of life, and to me that cemented what I hope to be a life long friendship with Shane and Nicola.

Sorry I have been a bit slack in keeping things updated. We have been travelling such long distances that when we get somewhere, the last thing I want to do is get on the internet. From Varanasi we got a train to a place called Lucknow. Shane had seen it on ‘The Amazing Race’ and this was the reason why he wanted to go. Apparantly the food was good too and it is famous for kebabs. The kebabs we deep fried, small rolled up veggie patties and were not ‘good’… Thanks Shane.

The time in Lucknow was great and it has a rich history with the British. It was the place where the Indians took on the British and fought an 87 day battle at the British residency in 1857. There are cannon ball and bullet holes at the residency (which is a series of buildings spread around a large maintained garden. As a result of this battle, Lucknow is a place of great national pride.

However the highlight was Bara Imambara which is a huge building which contains a labyrinth with over 1000 different route possibilities. I’ve never seen such incredible and unusual architecture, and because the walls are hollow, a whisper reverberates all throughout the small narrow halls. So as you’re walking down, whispers are coming from everywhere as though you are in a horror movie. 

The food definitely didn’t warrant the long distance and the town is not really equipped for tourists - little english, everyone staring at us, a few guys heckling me, and we only saw 4 whities in 2 days, but overall it was an interesting experience - very modern and a unique Indian snapshot which is Western in one sense, but not at all geared for Westerners. 

My favourite meal wasn’t the tastiest, but was the best experience. We went to a very local restaurant - dirty, low plastic chairs, everyone eating with their hands etc. It was packed with Indian’s and there was only one choice on the menu - veg or non veg. We had an absolute feast of different curries, rice and unlimited chapati (I had 5). The bill came to 60 rupees for the three of us (50 cents each). 

We left Lucknow to head to Amritsar and arrived at the train station one hour early to make sure we didn’t miss it. It was due at 6pm, but it didn’t arrive until 8.30pm. There were no updates and it was very hard to find information. It also changed platforms at the last minute for no apparent reason which left us feeling very flustered. The train station at Lucknow was the dirtiest place I have ever been to and there were rats everywhere feasting on the rubbish. There are also people EVERYWHERE and it was incredibly humid as we sat on our bags waiting on the platform. It was also interesting when there was a power cut and we were left in darkness surrounded by rats and extremely poor people - a rather unpleasant and disconcerting mix.

But we finally got the train which ended up being 19 hours long and by the time we arrived in Amristsar we were frustrated as hell as we had been travelling for almost 24 hours. More on Amritsar soon

I wrote this yesterday in Varanasi but then the internet died so here it is again.Straight after writing this, a van stopped outside our hotel and 5 men in plain clothes holding machine guns came into our hotel where we were standing in the lobby. It’s weird, but for some reason it didn’t worry me and I even went to get my camera much to the horror of Shane (hindsight eh). Someone told us they were bodyguards, but as Shane said - “it fits in with the scenery”.

Yesterday it rained in the afternoon for about 30 minutes, and as it hadn’t rained in two days, the ground turned to mud, combining shit, rubbish, dirt, and a myriad of other unimaginable filth. I made the rooky error of going out for a walk in thongs at about 8pm to see the Varanasi nightlife and my feet were instantly covered in slimy mud. It didn’t help that I was wearing thongs I had found halfway through the trek in a room which were almost worn through on the heel.

However once you have a bit of shit between the toes, you may as well have a lot of shit between the toes. I got a rickshaw into the centre of town but got out early as the driver was trying to sell me young prostitutes and after a heated exchange I got off. I then walked for about 45 minutes getting lost in the winding alleyways and markets which were buzzing with people. Everyone was laughing and shouting expressively and I received a lot of attention, mainly beckoning me to check out their stalls.

I was amazed how happy everyone was despite the absolute filth they were in, and it cemented my view that happiness is relational like everything else in the world. The chair I am sitting on now is made of metal and plastic which is constructed in a way so that we label it a chair. It is through the collective agreement that the object I am on is a chair that defines it as such. When we look at a chair, there is no inherent quality that forms its ‘chairness’. It is merely a set of relational qualities or materials arranged in a certain way which we then identify as a ‘chair’.

If you deconstruct the qualities that make up a chair you are left with nothing. Look beyond the metal, paint and plastic and you have elements. Strip back elements and you have atoms. Strip back atoms and you have protons and neutrons? My science is probably off as I failed it from year 7 onwards, but the point is that nothing has an inherent quality to it. Everything is relational and empty of inherent reality. But when does the chair I am sitting on become a chair? At what point do the qualities which constitute a chair make the object obviously definable or recognizable to us? How many qualities of ‘chairness’ do you need to form a chair? If it has three legs is it a chair? Two legs etc? Or does it merely have to be labeled as one?

Whenever I have thought about these things it has always been in the abstract – unanswerable questions which are fun to challenge the mind but offer no real benefit to ones daily life. But the reason I’m writing about this now is that I’m thinking about it in the practical sense because when I saw the dead body floating in the Ganges yesterday, I felt nothing. As though the object I was looking at wasn’t a human with whom I could empathise.

A human is made up of arms, legs, skin, organs etc. If we strip these back we end up with the same thing as everything else in life – elements, atoms and other wacky scientific terms. But is there any inherent ‘humaness’ to us? Something irreducible like a ‘soul’? Or can we too be stripped down to nothing? – purely relational matter held together by laws of nature.

If you are a scientist or an atheist and you believe in the latter – that we are simply made up of atoms, albeit in a very complex arrangement, then when does a human become a human? At what point do the qualities that make up a human define it as such? Consciousness? Self awareness? DNA?

If I saw a dead body in Australia I would be horrified but as I saw the body in India it didn’t bother me. Despite my best efforts to bury the reality of what that indicates, I don’t think I viewed that body as being ‘human’ in the same way a body in the west is. And it bothers me greatly that it didn’t bother me because the reason is a relational one.

As I lay in bed last night I thought about this for quite a while and it perturbed me. Did that body have a soul and was it important? Are all human bodies important and are they all as important as each other? If there is a soul then the answer is yes and that resolves the existential conundrum. I wish I could find solace in that religious notion but I can’t accept it, but I also have a need to answer it.

If there is no soul and our existence is relational, then how do we justify our importance or belief in equality? Why do we all have an equal right to life and why is all life judged equal? And do we actually believe this or do we just need this belief system in order to sleep at night? Meanwhile nameless bodies float down the Ganges with birds picking at their flesh.

Were people grieving over this body floating down the Ganges or was it some poor man who lived and died without making any impact? Of course to act is to make an impact, but I mean an impact to other people’s lives or a meaningful impact to the world.

Equality of life is relational (not in the ideational sense but in reality). We have an egalitarian belief system in Australia, but even this has its anomalies when we walk blindly past the homeless. I guess it’s the acceptance the world can’t be perfect, but in saying this, I firmly believe in the goodness of people - we all do the best we can, some better than others obviously. But on a global scale equality is a novel concept. I’m not trying to be some high and mighty do-gooder blaming the rich, or blaming governments, or trying to solve the world’s problems. I guess I’m just trying to make sense of it in the bizarre mix that is India.

I thought about the idea of relativity further and I believe it extends to everything. As I said in a previous post, happiness is not contingent on ones situation necessarily but rather their state of mind. Many rich people are miserable, many poor people are happy. Many people in positive situations are unhappy and many people in negative situations are happy. On the trek I experienced this in the practical sense for the first time in my life.

On day 12 of the trek I had gone 8 days without a shower. We had been walking about 5-6 hours a day and had done 7.5 hours when we tackled the summit on day 10. Worse still I had been wearing the same socks (worst part), undies, pants and t-shirt for that 8 days as all my other clothes were filthy. We had to pack light as the three of us needed to fit our gear in one bag. Up high many of the places didn’t have running water so there was no opportunity for a shower, and the few chances I got in those early stages (day 2-4), the shared toilet was so putrid that I decided I would get dirtier entering it than the current state I was in. I had no thongs at this point and the floor was concrete with a thin layer of water which was contaminated from the putridity of the overflowing squat toilet. The shower head was about one meter away from the toilet and judging by the smell I guessed this space was rarely cleaned.

So every night I got into my silk liner, sweaty and stinky, between filthy sheets, covered with a moist, dusty doona to keep me warm. This wasn’t actually that bad because I don’t have a problem being dirty although even for me this was testing from day 6 onwards as I started to smell like a hobo rather than a sweaty sportsman.

However on the afternoon of day 12, we had walked through desert-like landscape which I rate as the most spectacular part of the trek, and arrived at a lush green oasis set deep within the barren orange/brown mountains. It felt as if we were in Afghanistan because it was so dry and desolate. In this oasis we found a tea house to stay in and it had an on suite in the bedroom with hot water and it was clean!! Relative to Sydney standards this place was a dump, however from what I had gotten used to, it was like a palace. It is no exaggeration to say that I felt it was the fanciest hotel I had ever stayed at (in relation to the past 12 days).

I had a shower and felt an overwhelming sensation of elation. I derived more happiness from that shitbox than I would have staying at the Grand Hyatt. Now when I look at bottom class Indian people washing in the streets and laughing together at the markets I understand the world is relational. Obviously I can’t relate to their life experience and the constant struggles and it would be arrogant to assume an 18 day trek gives me any real idea; but the notion is now less foreign and it still taught me a valuable lesson of the distinct separation between happiness and money and the situational relativity of life.

Even if you have absolutely nothing, you can be happy from the smallest of pleasures – a cup of water; a wall blocking the wind if you are sleeping outside. In our case it was sometimes toilet paper. And that happiness is authentic and as legitimate as the elation a billionaire may feel from buying a Ferrari and tearing down the street (though I’m sure Doug will disagree with this point).

Happiness is a state of mind. The same is true for immigrants in Australia. I can’t imagine how stoked many of them feel to get a roof over their head and to get hot water straight from the tap, or to get consistent electricity (which fails at the most critical moments in Nepal - like when I’m beating Shane in backgammon).

To experience a genuine lack of resources and then to feel so happy getting something so basic made me optimistic about life and its future and the ability to be happy in any situation. I feel after 5 weeks in Nepal I have a basic appreciation and perhaps even envy for the simplicity of their way of life.

Of course these are just overarching ideas and it doesn’t account for the hardship of being denied resources, the multitude of health issues, housing, clothing and the misery that permeates an inescapable life of poverty and premature death. However I feel what I have said describes one important aspect of life I have previously been unable to understand.

I hope this doesn’t sound too pessimistic because I’m having the best time of my life and life has never felt so exciting and random. Last night we changed our plans and are doing a totally different route for the next two weeks which is going to be awesome! I can’t wait for Tali to get here and for the fun to double. It’s just that at night when the tooting and chaos subsides, I have time to myself and my mind begins to race like the traffic outside, and with the heat of the night, getting to sleep is slow. Normally Tali would bear the brunt of my rants but right now it is just you and I.

Hope you enjoyed the read.

Ok, so I have put some better quality photos up on flickr -

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25947232@N02/

It takes ages because of the internet connection, but once I find another quick internet cafe, I’ll re-upload all the crap quality ones because you really need the high quality to capture the colours and the sheer size of everything. Looking at the photos now makes me miss it badly. It was definitely the most incredible thing I have ever done.

This morning we got up before sunrise and walked to the Ganges to do a boat ride. As we were cruising down the riverside, we saw a dead body floating in the water nearby with two birds perched on top pecking at it. I don’t think that poor fellow made a smooth transition into the afterlife.

We visited the burning ghats again and this time we went right up close. All around our feet were the ashes of people and the smoke was thick with the acrid smell of bodies and the heat of the flames. Both Shane and I felt like we were intruding on a sacred affair so we quickly moved away, but as we got back into the boat, two shovels worth of ashes were dumped one level down onto the ground. Not very dignified! Then they get swept into the Ganges. The Ganges is the mother for Hindus and everything goes in there. I don’t know how their stomachs don’t melt when they drink the water.

Our boat driver ripped us off through a dodgy deal and after an argument we ended up getting off without paying. He was a massive dog and it was justified as he reneged on our agreement.

I promise I wil get around to documenting the trek, but right now I need to go and eat. Tomorrow we head north east to a place called Lucknow. There isn’t much there but Shane wants to see a random Indian town.

Hope everyone is well.

Hello friends!

Well it’s been a long time since my last post and so much has happened that I have no idea where to start. As I am in India, perhaps I should listen to Gandhi and begin with the first step… But first, I’ll tell you a bit about where I am now because the temperature is in the high 30’s and describing the trek will take some time and I’m in too irritable a mood.

After the trek we arrived back in Pokhara and spent two days recuperating. Food on the trek consisted of rice, lentils and curry potato (dal bhat), so we naturally decided on a steak house for our first meal back and it was superb. We smoked 2 Japanese guys in a pool game and sunk a few cold beers which was well deserved. Then we met a Spanish and UK couple at a bar for a few more drinks, But our tiredness soon caught up with us and we crashed out.

Monday morning at 7.15am we got an 8 hour bus to the Nepal/India border. We then rode on the roof of a jeep bumping along a dodgy road holding on for dear life which was awesome fun. Crossing the border was no problem and we then jumped a 3 hour bus to a town called Sunauli which was a crazy place. We were riding down the street on a rickshaw towards the train station and everyone was staring at Nicola and I - her with the blond hair and me with the dreadlock pigtails. It was pretty weird having thousands of Indians staring and pointing but it was fun to shout a few ei ei ei’s at them.

When we got to the train station, Nicola and Shane got their first taste of India - people lying everywhere. Thousands of families taking up every inch of floorspace. We climbed over them all and ended up getting an overnight train to Varanasi which took 10 hours. The journey from start to end took us about 22 hours. The train was great as we had a sleeper and I was so spent that I crashed out straight away. The bus however…

It’s fair to say that Nepalese buses aren’t built for people over 5 foot 8. The bus was a local one and my legs pushed hard into the seat in front. To make matters worse I had an obese American woman in front pushing back in her chair because she was even more cramped than me. So for 8 hours we played a silent battle - her waiting for me to move my legs so she could extend her chair back, and me keeping my knees together so I didn’t lose my precious space. With my shoulders hunched forward, knees getting hit from the seat in front, and sweating like a man wrapped in plastic, we painfully wound our way through the mountains.

However when we finally got to Varanasi it was all worth it. We arrived about 5am and went straight to the Ganga (Ganges) to see the sun rise. The sun rising from the Ganges has to be one of the quintessential Indian sights and it lived up to the hype. Stretching along the bank it was packed with people bathing and in typical Ganges filth, a floating dead cow joined the party. In 100ml of Ganges water there are over 1.5 million faecal coliform bacteria. Water that is safe to swim in should have less than 500.  Oh, and people brush their teeth in there too.

We enjoyed the spectacle for a while and then went to see the burning ghats where bodies are cremated in public. This signifies liberation from the cycle of birth and death as Varanassi is the crossing place between the physical and spiritual world. It was strange seeing a body out in the open and there was a very mystical feel to the experience as Varanassi is the holy place for Hindus - the Mecca equivalent.

Varanassi is one of the oldest continuous living cities in the world going back over 2000 years and it definitely feels like we are in the heart of Indian culture - at least in the religious sense. Tomorrow morning we will take a boat ride down the Ganges and watch the sunset and people from the water. I can’t wait!

I’ll get more photos up from the trek - unfortunately my camera didn’t work up the top because it was too cold so I need to get Shane’s photos. I’ll also begin writing up the adventure of the trek when I can.

Stay posted!

Hi everyone,

Thanks for tuning into the blog and posting all the great comments! This will be my last blog post for the next 21 days as Shane, Nicola and I head high up into the Annapurna region. Nepal has been incredible, but now I’m ready to see the ‘real’ Nepal.

Right now we’re in Pokhara, and tomorrow morning at 6.30am we get a 4 hour bus with our guide and porter, and begin our 300km walk. Shane and Nicola have crushed my idealized opinion of walking ‘into the wild’ and I now see this as a grueling 21 days of pain in basic living conditions. On day 10, we ascend to Thorung La Pass which reaches an altitude of 5,416m, totaling 8 hours of trekking. Walking for 8 hours in one day is difficult enough, but combining this with an elevation of over 1,000m and 50% less oxygen in the air, I’m feeling rather ill prepared.

But we’re all excited by the challenge, and the Annapurna region is one of the most magnificent places on earth so I’m sure it will be worth it. I’ll be documenting the adventure in my diary which I’ll transcribe to the blog as soon as I get back.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to upload the bungee jump and giant swing to youtube. I re-encoded the DVD to avi but I ended up with two files of 27mb each and it’s impossible to upload that on these connections. Might have to wait until we get to London! Some guy took some photos of me though so I’ll put them up after the trek (I’m waiting on an email from him).

I hope you have enjoyed reading the blog so far, and I thought I’d leave you with one last anecdote from yesterday.

I was sitting at the computer on the ground level of my hotel, chatting on MSN to Tali, when I heard a crashing/toppling sound from upstairs followed by an extended scream of agony. It sounded like a woman had fallen down the stairs and broken a bone, so I rushed up the flight of stairs with the hotel staff and looked around. Strangely there was no one around and we all looked at each other trying to identify the source of the commotion.

All of a sudden, the room door opposite mine is yanked open and a woman in her 30’s runs out stark naked screaming. Behind her was a white man who was very tanned with a outrageous beard that came to his nipples and black flaring eyes (true rage is held in the eyes). He was dressed in all the hippy gear and looked sufficiently wild. He kicked her hard in the bum on her way out and yelled some abuse in another language. She went running up the next flight of stairs in the nude while he cursed her from the doorway. Inside their room was a stifling amount of burning incense and some trippy music. I’m not sure if it was some perverse sexual act gone wrong, but it was quite bizarre. The hotel staff were very embarrassed by the nudity and the situation dissipated as quickly as it had begun. I walked back downstairs to MSN and typed “Tali, you won’t believe what just happened”.

That’s all folks. Hope to see you again from the 26th August onwards!