Well the last two days have been fun. Yesterday morning there was a protest down the street with thousands of people, many of the guys were wearing balaclavas and holding metal poles and sticks looking for fights. The riot police were out, horses everywhere and lots of loud drumming, shouting and fireworks. Then this morning Tali fell down the marble stairs of our hostel Bridget Jones style and now has an epic bruise on her bum. The last two nights there have been fun parties and we met some cool people - a few aussies, pommies and a trio of irish girls. Tonight the guys are dressing up as girls and going to a lesbian bar but I think we might skip that… I really want to see Gran Torino. Clint Eastwood is testament to the fact that to be a super intimidating nutter, you don’t have to be big or even be able to fight. You just have to have that glare and squinty eyes. He kills people for fun, like Chuck Norris back in the day.

Anyway, from madrid we got the bus to Barcelona and I spent most of the trip reading The Pillars of the Earth which is one of my favourite books of the trip. Tali can’t read on buses and her ipod was dead so she basically harassed me the whole way. After hours on the bus we finally stopped at a petrol station which had a big restaurant attached. We got off the bus and ordered two roast dinners and waited excitedly with our knife and fork poised in the air.

Just as the waiter brings over our huge roast dinners the bus driver walked past us after buying cigarettes. His eyes opened wide and he started gibbering away in Spanish and waving his arms in the air like a lunatic. All we picked up was ‘dos minutos’ meaning the bus leaves in 2 minutes. We had only stopped for a toilet break and everyone was waiting on the bus for us while we were ordering food. So I put down my knife and fork and started shovelling the meat in my mouth and scoffing the potatos. We inhaled our food in dos minutos and ran back to the bus where everyone was waiting for us and the bus driver was scowling.

Anyway, from madrid we got the bus to Barcelona and I spent most of the trip reading The Pillars of the Earth which is one of my favourite books of the trip. Tali can’t read on buses and her ipod was dead so she basically harassed me the whole way. After hours on the bus we finally stopped at a petrol station which had a big restaurant attached. We got off the bus and ordered two roast dinners and waited excitedly with our knife and fork poised in the air.

Just as the waiter brings over our huge roast dinners the bus driver walked past us after buying cigarettes. His eyes opened wide and he started gibbering away in Spanish and waving his arms in the air like a lunatic. All we picked up was ‘dos minutos’ meaning the bus leaves in 2 minutes. We had only stopped for a toilet break and everyone was waiting on the bus for us while we were ordering food. So I put down my knife and fork and started shovelling the meat in my mouth and scoffing the potatos. We inhaled our food in dos minutos and ran back to the bus where everyone was waiting for us and the bus driver was scowling.

We arrived in barcelona at 1am and once again hadn’t booked anything. We walked down some back alley and it was full of dodgy characters trying to sell us drugs and cans of beer. It would have been fine normally but walking with a backpack and dragging Tali’s bag along a coblestone street that late is asking for trouble. So we ended up staying in a semi expensive hotel so we wouldn’t have to keep walking around.

Barcelona is a wicked city and one of our favourite places. It is really ecclectic and the club scene is heaps less restrictive than Sydney eg you don’t have to be wearing a collared shirt or look like a private school jock to get in. Although it is almost the opposite of Sydney eg if you aren’t alternative then people will judge you. Anyway, we went to one of the big clubs called Apollo and rocked up not knowing what to expect. The place was full of randoms dressed in Halloween gear and heaps of metalheads. There was a folk metal band playing and they were all dressed as zombies playing a bizarre mix of folk with banjos crossed with screaming metal. At the front was a moshpit full of vampires and werewolves and all other kinds of costumes so we were like wtf! It was an awesome vibe with a cool crosection of people and we joined in on the madness. As the night went on the music changed from house to dirty 80’s classics to 90’s rock anthems and we were stoked by the end.

A few nights later we went and saw The Presets at another big club called Razzamataz and they were awesome as well. The place was full of aussies and the night ended up being loose. The rest of Barcelona was spent sight seeing doing things like Gaudi, some museums and I can’t really remember what else. We caught up with my cousin who is studying there and she and her friend took us for some tapas and then to a bar with over 100 types of shots. We had some flaming ones on the bar which was fun and it was cool catching up with her again.

We didn’t meet many people in Barcelona or Spain in general. One night we hung out with a Frenchie who didn’t speak english, two guys from the Ukraine or Russia, and a slutty Irish girl who was incredibly annoying. In fact we’ve had quite a few of those nights where you sit down for a beer with some people and they turn out to be freaks. Anyway the Ukraine guy seemed fine at first but then he started going on about his dad who was 150kg and 6 foot 6 with white hair to his bum, a white beard to his belly button and was in the Ukrainian army for 30 years. He was going on about how if you don’t drink vodka straight you aren’t a man, and how him and his mate were tortured in the army. Things like lining you up against a wall and fly kicking you into it to toughen you up. He thought this was a good thing and made his country strong. 

He also said when people step on his toes at concerts he knocks them out. He said in the Ukraine that’s just how it is - if someone looks at your girl, you beat the shit out of them with your bottle of vodka (spoken in heavy Russian accent and menacing voice). He was a big guy and he wasn’t kidding so I was pretty keen to leave the conversation although Tali thought the whole thing was hilarious. He offered us some strange Ukrainian raw fish which I desperately didn’t want but I was essentially forced to eat out of fear. I don’t know where the hell the Ukraine is but I’m never going there.

I don’t think anyone really cares about hearing how beautiful the Vatican is or how enormous the Colosseum is. In a conversation with someone it might be cool to hear about but who seriously cares enough to read paragraphs about architecture. So I won’t bore you with a detailed account of our day to day activities. Instead I’ll focus on some of the funny situations we got ourselves into. For the R rated stuff it’ll have to be offline

So anyway, here is a story from Spain:

We arrived in Spain after one month in Italy (which was definitely the highlight of the trip). We got super lucky with the weather and it was low to mid 20’s every day which was uncharacteristic for October. From Italy we went to Spain and we flew into Madrid expecting similar kinds of weather. We touched down about 11pm and hadn’t thought to book any accomodation (an organisational problem we have never quite resolved) and it was freezing. It would have been about 8 degrees with a fierce wind blowing and I was in shorts and Tali was wearing a thin jumper.

We hadn’t bothered to look up anything about Spain so we just rocked up in Madrid with no idea where to go so after getting a train to the centre we started trudging around in the freezing cold and ended up in a filthy den of sin. On the second night the guy in the room next to us (old and fat) hired a prostitute and for the next 30 minutes spoke in a deep Spanish voice, like some Antonio Banderas nightmare. The prostitute screamed and shouted the whole time in such an exaggerated way that we were lying on our backs in silence staring at the roof, dumbfounded. At one point it sounded like there was an exorcism going on and she was roaring in a deep satanic voice and I thought our paper thin wall was going to cave in. By this point it was 2 or 3am and we were incredibly pissed off. But the room was so cheap we sucked it up for a few more days.

We didn’t do much in Madrid, just a lot of shopping for Tali and endless tapas. There are meant to be some good museums there but after Italy we were cultured out. If I ever see a renaissance painting again I’m going to destroy it. Tali and I both love theme parks - the rides, the fairy floss and all the dudes dressed up as cartoon characters, so we decided to go to Movie World. We got on a train about midday and after a few hours we arrived and everyone was dressed up for Halloween and the rides were all huge.
 
At the end of the day we went into a haunted/horror house with real people dressed up and as you walk through they jump out at you. We thought we were going on the batman ride (bad Spanish) and Tali was very unimpressed. The actors could smell Tali’s fear and picked on her the whole way through. This one girl dressed as a zombie bride/dead woman with a stake in her head came walking towards us with her hair covering her face. Just as she walked past us she lifted her face and hands and screamed in Tali’s face. Tali screamed at the top of her lungs right back at her (bloodcurdling) and fell into me and two other random guys, grabbing onto my shirt and another guy’s shirt with a vice grip and trembling. The actor got such a scare from Tali’s scream that she jumped back about 5 metres and then scurried off to change her undies. 
 
 
 
 

I hadn’t logged into the blog for a while so I decided to check out some older posts from early in the trip. I found a few that I forgot to publish so here is one of them:

Well sensibilities flew out the window the moment Tali touched down in India. My little sidekick and partner in crime. The only person I know who is a bigger idiot than I and capable of creating hilarious stories within days of arriving.

She arrived with a suitcase strategically packed like a game of tetris. Once the clothes come out I knew they were never going to fit back in. Already I’m carrying a hooded jumper for her. Then we go to a shopping centre and she buys a stuffed toy - an elephant - who buys a stuffed toy when they are backpacking for 6 months and already have no room???

Our hotel looks good on the outside but it has a severe electrical problem and the power is constantly cutting out. No air con. No fan. No light. We’re on the top level and the temperature is in the high 30’s even in the middle of the night. We discovered the extent of the heat at 2am this morning when we both awoke in a pit of sweat burning up in a furnace. Shane was next door and also woke up and together we stormed down 5 flights of stairs (Shane in his underpants) to get the power back on. There’s a generator but they hadn’t bothered to turn it on. The man on duty was asleep and tried to ignore us when we asked him to go outside and turn the power back on. Shane who is not known for either patience or politeness in these kinds of situations shines his torch in the man’s eyes and starts jabbing him until the guy eventually rolls off the couch.

The next morning we’re sitting on the rooftop of our hotel. It’s an open air restaurant which looks straight at the Taj Mahal. Imagine sitting at a table in the morning, sipping a coffee and looking at one of the most beautiful structures with the sun hanging high in the background - truly incredible. So we’re sitting at a table, the restaurant is packed with people, mid afternoon enjoying a late lunch. Tali suddenly screams at the top of her lungs and jerks her legs from under the table. The entire restaurant flinches from the scream and everyone turns to look at us. Tali apologises and mutters she thought something was under the table. She had her ipod sitting on the table and one earphone had fallen off and swung into her knee. And then she says to me “I thought my earphone was a monkey” causing the 3 people next to us to laugh hysterically and me to go bright red.

Earlier Tali had opened our door to the balcony and a big monkey had run across the railing. This had also caused an ear splitting reaction and left her on edge.

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.