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Posts archive for: January, 2008
  • Leave the past behind.

    I shall remove thine beaches from my mind, O Lord, purge myself of their shameful splendours, and get this bloody show back on the road.
    Speaking of roads, here's a motorbike, apparently belonging to a gay Hell's Angel:

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    Only in India, eh?
    (they're actually the flowers you see everywhere around Diwali, which happens at more or less the same time as Christmas. These little orange blossoms adorn everything from people, to buildings, to toilets and even your food, sometimes.
    Needless to say, women of the lower castes trudge along the beach every day trying to flog them to tourists ;)

    Gods that beach/island combination never got old, seriously. I am very tempted to go back there just as monsoon ends in a year or two (maybe take a holiday from my working holiday in New Zealand) and see what it's like when the weather is hotter, the tourists haven't got there yet, and the business' and shack have not yet been built for the season. If the whole place looks like this I might consider setting up shop there:

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    This could almost pass for `artistic`, too ;) :

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    North end of the beach from a lovely rocky little hill:

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    The North quarter of the beach, the least occupied and calmest part, at a pretty low tide:

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    The Southern headland which I drunkenly swum around in the blackness of night one time, losing my shoes and common sense all at once. This is the view of it from the same rocky hillside, about a mile away using my camera's modest zoom. The yoga centre which I hijacked a hut from for a while was on the top of this, I think:

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    That big rock on the beach again:

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    And finally from the beach, Green Island from the same hillside on the left:

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    .......and on the Right. Wow, is all I can say:

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    Personally I think that looks rather spiffing :)

    -

    Okay, I promised you more cows in public places, so here is a very typical kind of thing - the stalls in the background are virtually identical to 50% of all stall and shops in all beach resorts in Goa; massively colourful and bright, full of exciting looking clothes and jewellery:

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    This isn't especially interesting. You get frogs and toads in England, after all. Not quite as large as this usually, though:

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    Look I just love to see all kinds of animals alright? So there.

    And here I skip almost all the photos of people I met and friends I made, they'll all make it to Facebook of course but really, no-one wants to see them here, I think. Consider this my being good and kind to ya'll and saving you the tedium :)

    -

    What terrible liar I am; here's my mate Jon int he foreground who I knew 6 or 7 years ago, and who managed to track me down halfway across the world, and I'm now hanging about with him in Hampi. Also Chris the Belgian zen master in the background. Sort-of zen master, anyway. I haven't actually seen a certificate or anything:

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    Okay okay, no more.
    Okay for the benefit of Greg if/when he reads this, because it will take me a few months to get to a good enough PC to transfer this entire album (524 photos and counting) plus the last lot (another 300+ photos) across to facebook, here are 3 of the smirking charlatan himself. If you look carefully, you can see the confederate flag flying just behind his eyes (and a KFC Spicy Wing hidden in one paw):

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    Greg & Rachel, a Welsh teacher (teaching in Wales, not teaching Welsh, as far as I'm aware):

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    Yours truly trying to look cool, mission aborted because some shortarse yankee was standing on my left fucking up my Chi:

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    :D he he he

    -

    MARGAO.

    Okay, this is the only photo I got in Margao. What, did you want to see the inside of my freakin' hotel room or something? Weirdos.
    Anyway Margao had nothing very worth seeing, it was a generic Goan city that lacked even the most perfunctory statue of the Sith Emperor remotely strangling anyone, which is the least they could do, really.

    Anyway this was on display in one of the ATM rooms. Yes, every ATM has its own little room off the street! There are no street cash machines at all, each is enclosed and shielded and you have to insert a valid bank card in the outer door to open it, a surprisingly high-tech system and see in every city so far.

    Anyway, again; it is really not worth all this preamble folks, honestly; this poster was, I thought, worth preserving for posterity (and if you can think of a worse pun than that then please leave it in the comments section below!) as not only can you lovely people see the currency of this country, namely the Rs.50 and Rs.1000 notes, the latter of which I hardly ever see myself, and also because this, openly displayed in an ATM booth, seems a little bit like a useful sheet of hints for any budding master forgers out there.
    I mean would the bank of England put posters up in hight street banking branches detailing all the fraud prevention measures they have worked into the latest batch of hard currency??

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    T.I.I.

    -

    HAMPI - At Last!!!

    Okay folks, here is your first ever view of the Virupakshur temple:

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    The view on my first day, from my first guesthouse, from across the river:

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    The less-than-imposing miniature dome of another ancient temple attached to the Virupakshir complex. You're gonna be seeing a lot of this sort of thing; they specialise in partially-ruined clay-brick antique structures like this around here ;) :

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    Monkey! Yay!! Monkeys are so very cool :D :

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    And a few views of the valley and rocky things around it:

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    Same thing, zoomed back out a bit:

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    Right, I'm off for breakfast, It's 10:45 over here and I've alraedy put in an hour and half for you today, you lucky lot.
    I may be back later with the temple tour proper.

    And again, I'm encouraging a comment or two occasionally, please - just so I know you're still there and I'm not talking to myself on the internet as well as in real life ;)

  • Photo shenanigans

    The photos posted up in the new, smaller format have been a bit of a problem and this system of picture uploading is, frankly, quite dreadful.
    All the pictures have been set to `private` even though they were all uploaded as `public` - Blog.co.uk has a few problems, folks, and if I can get my money back I may move this to another site. We'll see.

    Anyway, if anyone wanted to see the previously posted photos then I'm adding the direct URL address' for the last lot right here, and another photo post showing them in the old, huge format is coming right after that :)

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    The view from our place in the evening:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot001.jpg

    Another view from our place:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot004.jpg

    One little cove to the North of our place:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/tdm001.jpg

    Me, as shocked as the rest of you at it all ;) :
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot006.jpg

    Cow invades restaurant. None injured, but the salad bar took a beating:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot010.jpg

    The very essence of a shit-eating grin:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot011.jpg

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    Goa Jungle Adventure

    Big f-ing spider:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot012.jpg

    People in trees:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot013.jpg

    Me up in the air, pretending to be cool:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot016.jpg

    This is a lot harder than it looks:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot018.jpg

    Failed to make the distance:
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    Greg dragging my raggedy ass back to the net:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot025.jpg

    Yay!:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot026.jpg

    Universal male shorts acquisition confirmed:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot027.jpg

    Middle of a big zipline, spastic limb movements provided spontaneously:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot029.jpg

    Quite high here:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot030.jpg

    And again:
    http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/palolemlot031.jpg

    Right, that's most of 'em. If anyone wants a particular one that didn't work out first time and I've missed out this time, just leave a comment below and I'll put it up here :)

  • Hulk Smash!!

    I read a series of articles by an English teacher working in Japan (teaching English) in the early Noughties (please, for the love of Ganesh and all his trunks can we please have a better term for these years people??!) and beyond, and among the many amusingly disturbing anecdotes (see the new webpage for the latest weirdness - Kancho is the best; the art of poking your fingers into someone's arsehole. Yes, their arsehole, in school, no less. Don't believe me? Even wiki-bleedin'-pedia has an article on it, so there! ...and of course that means it must be true ;) ) is the idea that in part gives title to this newly available site: the Gaijin Smash.

    Gaijin, in Japanese, means foreigner, or outsider. It is fundamental to the Japanese psyche to be polite to guests, and foreigners are pretty much guests of the whole country. So. The author of this site, The English Teacher, developed a few universal phrases along with his friends to explain some of the weirder behaviour of Japanese, among them for example the awesome Gaijin Perimeter.

    This dictates that the Japanese, bizarrely but you have to agree with the guy here, are mortally afraid of foreigners due to various things such as, first off, the fact that Westerners tend to be a lot larger than they are. Okay that's a bit of a joke and he plays up to it, but it is actually true (and this guy is quite a big guy by our standards) and along with that, plus a general latent worrying about the whole WWII thing - the Japanese are often readily prepared to feel unsubstantiated guilt out of politeness; even more than the English in fact - it's a general fear of the unknown, coupled with the fact that most tourists in Japan are quite magnificently loud, brash, more confident and a whole hell of a load more independent-minded compared to your common or garden Japanese person and everyone they've ever known.

    This creates a terrible fear, not exactly countered by the Japanese government at all in any way, of larger-framed white foreigners. Thus, the Gaijin perimeter is a boundary of about one person's extra personal space around all foreigners, particularly Western ones.

    Seats on the astonishinly overcrowded trains are left empty on all sides of the Gaijin, and whichever ones are left are fought for tooth and nail. Crowds practically part to let them through, and everywhere where there is any possible space the Perimeter will automatically establish itself.

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    My personal favourite, and probably everyone else's though, is the Gaijin Smash, taken off from the Incredible Hulk, of course, whose vocabulary was never very wide-ranging; "Hulk smash!" and "Hulk angry!!" took up a lot of printer's ink in the green one's comic books throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s.
    The idea is that through sheer obviousness of being a Gaijin one can smash through whatever social, economical or moral boundaries the japanese already have. Basic example is the Teacher's friend walking through a train station with an invalid ticket and the staff being unable to follow him, despite the flagrant abuse of the rules and minor defrauding of the rail network, because of who he is: a large black/white guy: Gaijin Smash.

    Others would be something like paying too little and walking away from a restaurant, barging through queues, demanding more from your hotel/taxi driver/employer than you are really entitle to, stuff like that. Read the original article that lends it's names to the new site.

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    Anyway. This is all irrelevant to what I'm thinking about today, but it was a very attractive diversion, don't you think? Makes me want to go to Japan again (not go again, but want to go again, or again want to go, if you prefer. Those of you fortunate enough to know me :D will be aware that I haven't ever been to the land of sumo and sushi, maybe because I'd become an active member of the former by eating way too much of the latter).

    What I meant by the title before I got distracted by the memory of the Gaijin Smash was me being pretty bloody livid with things this morning, for no good reason at all. Well, maybe two good reasons: the first was the speed of the internet connection over the water - imagine the movement of thick treacle at a low temperature down a very gentle slope, or possibly the small-scale observations of plate tectonics, and you'll get an idea of how achingly, soul-crushingly enraging this actually is. I could do a murder every time I use the 'net on that side of the river, I really could.
    Whenever I want to upload photos it takes, I do not kid you in the slightest good people, about 2-4 minutes for every single picture, and I am taking my photos at the smallest resolution my camera will allow. This is very, very annoying. Especially when you make a mistake or the system decides to reject the whole process at the `90% complete` stage.

    The second good reason was the memory of a general lack of willingness on the part of many people (Indians) that I've spoken to, to think outside of the box; literally. If you don't fit into one category then you must fit into another, sort of thing - I shall explain this properly at some point later, but basically it is an unthinking mentality that's used by many people, and the stupidity of it is infuriating.

    What is worse here though is my reaction to this less than joy-inducing service and company; this morning I was swearing not-quite-under my breath while incarcerated in the musical gehenna that is the local 'net office (I would have done more than one murder if another `1940's talentless warbler` album had made it onto the stereo), and received unimpressed looks from the ancient, ragged, bald European hippy who runs this cafe, right next to my new guesthouse.
    She knows English. She knows what "fucking come ON you motherfucking shitty fucking fuckwipe" means and she wasn't too happy to hear it in her own cave.
    Thank goodness she left and the bald, ragged, probably-male counterpart took her place and even played some better tunes. He even smiled as I paid, while I inwardly grimaced at paying out a hundred rupees for 2 hours of irritation, rage and forced suppresion of my more homicidal tendencies, of which there are still a large and powerful number, believe me.

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    Maybe it is the diet (appalling, I admit), maybe it's the fact my brain isn't wired together like a normal person's is (unfortunate but mostly self-inflicted), perhaps it's the way I'm neurotic beyond measure and have OCDs lining up behind my eyes with little numbered tickets, or maybe it's just the sporadic irritation at other people and myself for ever being less than charming and presentable and punctual and open-minded, but boy, I do feel like turning green and overmuscled and psychotic at times, and I really think it would do me good to trash a few science labs, overturn a few cars and walk through the occasional building as a bit of light relief.

    Either way, I'm gonna try a little Gaijin Smash theory out here in India, of course it will have to be renamed and rebranded and the dynamics wont transfer easily - firstly I ain't gonna try and defraud anyone and secondly the Indians wont let a simple thing like size and weight get in the way of an agreed price or an established procedure - but I reckon I can turn the idea in my favour.

    I can see the headlines in a few weeks:

    `English tourist Mr. Tim_____ has been nabbed by vigilant police officials as a result of the campaign instigated by him in Hampi, Karnataka, which was dubiously titled by Mr. ______ the Colonial Respression Maneouvre, which many locals found extremely rude and undiplomatic.
    Mr. ______ awaits trial and is said to be entertained by the whole idea, even now while waiting for justice to be served.`

    See you in court...

  • What makes India tick.

    G'day ya'll. We-urm've arrived in the Deep South urr somethin', folks.

    Today's sermon will concern a few of the differences between what used to be our our green and pleasant isle, and is now everybody else's slightly brown and expensive isle, (oooh, political) and this chunk of nation statey goodness known as India.
    I'm joking about England being everyone else's, of course. We know it's really all owned by Lloyds-TSB and ASDA-WalMart.

    Something I thought would be particularly close to home for us Englischers is the state of tea over here. It isn't real tea at all, and comes in rather inferior branded bags (brooke bond batches fom 1992 seem especially favoured) which might surprise some of you; what might incite some of you to riot is the time it takes to get a cuppa in a cafe or restaurant - at least 10 minutes, and sometimes up to twice that. No electric kettles, see?

    Quite apart from the fact that the powercuts hits most areas at least once during most days, the kettles would be a huge waste of the already scarce electricity when there is already a fire going all day long, either in the tandoor oven or the various others used for cooking the majority of meals.

    On the plus side, a black tea costs just Rs.5 to Rs.10 per glass (No cups or mugs here either, all glasses. Everywhere. I have not seen a behandled beverage container in months) which is about 7p - 14p, which I think you'll agree is pretty reasonable.

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    Restaurants all have the same menu. Well, very nearly all. This is alarmingly true after a few days in any new place - it really is the same as the last place and the place before and the place before - and you find yourself drifting vaguely into various establishments on the pretense of being a customer, and moving discreetly in the direction of the menus to see if they do anything different at all.
    If they don't, chances are they wont get any of my custom. There are only so many times you can look at the same chinese dishes, the same indian veg dishes, the same pizzas, pastas, fruit juices, faux-burgers, lame Mexican meals and unrepresentative Israeli dishes before you feel like a good old fashioned murder, preferably of someone who sets these kind of things down and never trains their staff in anything new.

    Some of it is good, fair enough, but 90% of it is identical in mediocrity to everything else done everywhere else, and occasionally it is pretty sickening (sometimes literally).
    The upside of course is that if you want Hakka noodles or a generic veggie pizza or any of the standard Indian veg. dishes then you can go for lunch just about anywhere you please without any actual decision needing to be made, which is nice.

    The politeness and friendlines everywhere, too, is nice, in fact often it is superb with waiters rushing around or chatting jovially with you and everyone else, or just being the very pinnacle of charm and warmth. The speed of service, of course, isn't always up to the same standard ;)

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    Medicine in every shop in every town, with the exception of pharmacies (the closest to Hampi is 3 miles away and is very badly stocked, its the only one for dozens of miles in any direction too) is all Ayurvedic, which, for our purposes here, means Herbal. If I was any more cynical I would add that THAT means it doesn't work, but fact has proven this fiction to be just a convenience of cheap deprecatory verse because the stuff does, generally, actually work. There is one company with an apparent monopoly on the whole of India, called the Himalaya company, and all common medicine comes from them. They must be absolutely raking it in.

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    Every third or even second foreigner has dreadlocks. True. Danged layabout hippy scum...

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    Beds. Oh boy, they really saw us coming with the beds. The thickest mattress I have so far seen was a hefty 4" (about 10cm/100mm) thick, and that was twice the thickness of all the rest. None of them have any kind of springs of course, and may as well just be made of bath towels. Many of them seem to be, in fact, made of nothing but bath towels sewn together.

    In Anjuna I'm pretty sure I was actually lying on a stone table (possibly easier like that for the impending sacrifice?) for 6 days, but at least it wasn't infested.

    My current mattress is infested. There is a particular and unpleasant smell when bedbugs have taken a hold on your soft furnishings, and if I turn over at night I can't avoid it; still, I refuse to pay the full rate at places where the beds aren't laced with tiny bloodsucking insectoids so, for one more night at least, I gotta put up and shut up at least to the real world, of which the internet obviously isn't a part. Hey look at that! I managed to avoid ending my sentence with a preposition, and I finally learned what the hell that actually meant, like, literally just then. Wow. Go Tim.

    Thanks to these nighttime plasma fiends my feet look a bit like one of those hillsides on Salisbury plain that the army use for artillery practice; pock-marked, multicoloured and alarmingly lumpy.

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    Which leads me nicely onto the subject of mosquitoes and flies - there are a lot. More than you would have even thought for the climate, seriously, really a LOT.

    Probably something to do with the fields surrounding us on all sides, sometimes so close as to start within 2 or 3 feet from the wall of your room or the open side of the restaurant, being used to grow rice. I hesitate to use the term paddy field because I don't know if that applies to China or somewhere else in particular, but yeah, paddy fields everywhere, submerged 24 hours day in water and the very definition of heaven for a breeding mosquito and his 12million closest relatives.

    This does in turn offer some spectacular views over the fields and across the valley, really they are so gorgeous at sunset that I'm ashamed I haven't got any snaps of it yet (every time I go to one of the places with the restaurant next to the fields I forget my insect repellant/flamethrower, and end up losing a pint or two of blood and half my food to the insects with bad grace and plenty of indiscreet blasphemies. Thank Krishna this town isn't Christian or I'd be staked upside-down to a burning tree by now).

    A glorious view is to be had across the stepped fields, which are a work of art in themselves with their constant regulated flow of water trickling day and night from highest to lowest enclosure across each farm, and along the craggy, boulder-strewn sides of this valley carved out by a river which, in some place I haven't yet been too, apparently still supports some kind of crocodile. These would almost certainly be my ultimate wildlife photos from India so I'm gonna try and find out more...

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    Spitting on the street, and spending a good 20 minutes at the dawn of each day hacking your lungs up loudly and if necessary in public, is perfectly acceptable.
    You cannot walk ANYWHERE before 9am without hearing at least one or two world-class expectorators demonstrating their charmless and queasy skill.

    It's a land full of Coffin Henrys, and no mistake.

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    Now in case a lot of the above sounds like general bitching, bear in mind that if it was THAT important and THAT bad then I would leave and go to Indonesia or Thailand for a few months instead. Its not bad. Its really rather good, in fact.
    The reason all the little gripes are bearable?
    Well, apart from the scenery it has to be the people.

    Those same enterprising lot for whom money is so important, and an argument for the sake of it is forever only half a second away, are so universally friendly that none of it actually matters. You can walk down any street, any track, any road outside of a big city (and many in cities, too) and smile at a stranger and you will be rewarded with the same in return, and often with a supremely friendly chat, too.

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    Money. Money Money Money. So important it gets capitals even in the middle of sentences, such as they are.
    There is a lot of interesting psychology when it comes to flowing cash in this country, I'll try to make it brief:

    Money is the driving force behind all daily interaction outside of religion or cricket: you may argue this is the case in every country but I would disagree. In America, speaking very, very generally here folks, the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit (the pursuit of the pursuit? How far is he ever going to ever get with that?) of happiness is the daily goal.
    In Italy it's the pursuit of the next meal. In England it's the pursuit of total visceral pleasure via the medium of booze, or the pursuit of something else to complain about. Money underlies all these things and facilitates them, defines their specifics, and is affected by them, but in India the driving force actually IS the money itself.
    Well, that and religion. And cricket of course which is kind of a religion anyway over here.

    This is entirely necessary of course for most people, because it is a very poor country, evidently so when you consider that wonderfully cold and calculating definition of real people: demographics.

    A few have mentioned something while traveling about this being the third world - and it's true in some places, but nowhere most foreigners have been saving the odd village or town they have passed through. The third world to my mind involves a lot less in the way of electricity, internet connections, hot food, bottled water and lack of dead dogs and people littering the streets. Armed and lethal militias also feature in my view of that type of place, and this isn't anywhere nearly as hostile, in fact it's pretty goddamned cushy (even with the bedbugs).

    However, it ain't that far from it in many places, and almost no-one you see or deal with lives in the places where you see and deal with them. They coudn't afford to, for the most part.

    The `demographic groups` (that I just made up, obviously) that most people outside major cities fall into, are:
    cave-dweller (yes, people do live in such places in more remote areas).
    homeless beggar
    penniless tenant/probable slave
    scavenger or worker with bad job, shanty house
    worker with okay job, tiny house/room
    farmer with house
    worker with average job, house out of slums or rural area
    shopkeeper with anything from crap house to decent family house
    taxi driver or `guide`, hell, these guys might be super rich!
    restaurant or guesthouse owner with, obviously, a restaurant and/or guesthouse

    The first few have little hope and will take anything they can get, the last few will take you for everything they can, generally speaking, although the guesthouse owners are lovely poeple (unlike pushy drivers and guides), they are clearly the ones making the most money.

    The people who work in most places around most towns all seem to live in villages nearby, and come to the tourist areas for a few months or weeks and sleep pretty rough there, usually in the restaurant if it's a lounger-style place, and then can take their wages back to their home.
    Speaking to a guy in my place last night I know he earns Rs. 3000 per month (speaking about earnings and stuff like that is very common, totally acceptable. Money really is the foundation of everyday life, they treat your income and wages the same way we might treat political opinions), which is enough for him to save for his impending marriage, but leaves him very little to live on back at home.

    In these homes, I am pretty certain, children are taught the value and necessity of money from very early on, far, far earlier than we would bother - or need - to do so with children in our country. I have a sneaking suspicion that a sort of socialist way of looking at the world is instilled in many young people; that those with lots of money rightfully SHOULD share it all out with everyone else until everyone is more equal. Whether the same people would think the same with money in their hands is open to debate of course
    As we have seen, socialism simply doesn't work: poeple are human.

    This doesn't seem to matter to the kids, and doesn't seem to stay with many of them until adulthood either which is brilliant because that's a painfully jaded view of the world (and coming from a level 12 Cynic that says a lot).

    Some, however, still feel that because you have money then you should be gently mislead into leaving lots of it with them. Many of these people may drive taxis ;)

    But it is the shopkeepers who get angry that betray this sense of wronged socialist idealism, as when you start to haggle then some, only a few, get genuinely angry and demand you pay their asking price without negotiation which is especially irritating you know for a fact that they are overcharging to a ridiculous degree.
    A pair of shoes here might cost a tourist, say, Rs. 300.
    Those same shoes will cost an Indian at a local shop out of the way of the tourist areas about Rs. 70, and that is true of almost everything.

    I know you pay more in tourist areas, but, this is the clincher for me: there is a temple outside of town that is the most spectacular and well-preserved of all those around Hampi. There is a sign outside the little blue booth by the impressively gated entrance:

    "Admission:
    Indians Rs. 10
    Foreigners Rs. 250"

    So we pay TWENTY-FIVE TIMES AS MUCH for precisely the same thing. My old boss would be proud, profit margins like that...

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    Marriages are still arranged, or at least in rural areas this is almost universal. The guy I spoke to last night at length is 22 years old and will be married off to a girl selected by his family in 1 to 2 years time, and will start making a family of his own.
    I happen to know he likes a girl in the town here rather a lot and doesn't particularly like his future wife, but he is going to go along with the trend that's kept family life as constant and unchanging, and as starkly different to ours, as it has for thousands of years.
    Of course, we used to be all for arranged marriages too, but not on this scale, and not at every level of society.

    Funnily enough the highest levels of society in India are most likely to digress from ths norm, because, well, they can more often afford to, one way or the other.

    The fact that marriages are split into two groups called `marriages` and `love marriages` tells you most of what you need to know. Basically, if almost any couple want to marry because they actually love each other (and aren't supposed to, having been promised to other people) then they will have to leave the country for fear of their own lives - there are still often cases in more rural areas where young people have gone against the families wishes and have been murdered by their own parents as a result.

    I rememebr one case where the mother of a boy, who unsuccessfully tried to run away with his girlfriend, took him down to a barn somewhere amongst their farm fields and, with the rest of the village forcibly holding the couple, she took a rope and hung her son from a rafter, then took the girl to her parents after watching her young lover die, and they took her - their own daughter - to where they slaughtered animals for food and cut her throat rather than let her stray from their own ideals on the matter.

    Pretty strong stuff then, this arranged marriage malarkey. In the case above it was found out tanks to someone in the village disagreeing with the idea of socially-acceptable homicide, and the parents were tried and found guilty (long prison sentences were handed out if I recall correctly, not hangings in kind) but it often must go totally unreported.
    My friend in the guesthouse had no illusions about what would happen if he tried that and actually stayed in India.
    -

    This is all totally acceptable. Worse things happen at sea, remember, and worse things happen in the not-altogether-United Kingdom, too, and for reasons just as barbaric to you and I as the one above. I can't say that the universal helpfulness and cheerfulness of spirit here negates the odd familial murder, but India is no more brutal, bigoted or violent than England, unless you're a politician and frankly I wouldn't mind seeing a few of Tony's old Cronies or Tory posterboys getting shot up with lasers ;)
    Only joking.
    We all know no-one uses lasers.

    -

    The underlying theme with a large part of the culture is simply that life proceeds at a slower pace than everywhere else. It takes ages to get served food in a restaurant, even though you're paying four times the price of anywhere outside the tourist belt, because that's just how long it takes. Relax. Have another black tea.

    A taxi may stop at a junction for chat with a fellow taxi driver for 5 minutes because, well, the journey isn't really important, it's the price that has been agreed on and the fact that everyone gets there with all their stuff safe and intact, a few more minutes don't matter to anyone, surely?

    Sometimes I get told to slow down, just walking along the street. I often walk pretty fast so I can see their point in general, but strangers; always men because there are still basic rules about who should be meek and who should be in charge here; will call out "slow! slow!" accompanied by an appropriate `calm down, lad` gesture just because I happen to be exceeding their perambulatory expectations.

    It is a calmer and more gentle pace of life.

    When we went to the Goa Jungle Adventure place Greg and I, being outdoorsy types I would say, ran around and set the pace and we all stormed through every course, obstacle, zipline and rope structure quickly enough to do most of it again, certainly the highest, last and coolest bits, and at a nice leisurely pace which was handy, really, because my mitts were blistered and bleeding by that point.

    The instructor there had been used to holidaying Indians doing the course and sometimes not finishing it once in the two and a half hours allocated, and because of nothing more than a sedate manner of getting through the thing in front of them.

    -
    I went to the Hanuman temple and clambered, sweating and half-crying, up and down the 575 steps and spent a good 20 minutes at the top - I got a whole load of photos and video and made it back down, made it around all the temples that day in fact (5 or 6 of them) in less than 2 and a half hours including the driving, and the guide was half impressed, half appalled.

    It usually takes people 5 hours or more, he said, and he didn't quite believe me that I even got to the top of the Hanuman steps until I showed him the pictures from the `summit` on my camera.

    A lot of people just don't expect you to go for it, it seems, and I find myself doing a day's-worth of sightseeing or walking or whatever and still have 3 or more hours to spare for you lovely lot on this here blog.

    And, maybe, that's the biggest difference (aside from murderous relatives turning up at the wedding): there is simply no sense of urgency to much of the place.

    I'm finding this both good and bad: overall I am loving it though because it gives me time to really think, and write, and sometimes draw, which I haven't really had for a long time.

    All is good :)

  • Goa Jungle Adventure - does it deserve an exclamation mark?

    Hello. My name is Tim (or Jack) and I went to Goa. I had an adventure, In the jungle no less.
    So they called the place Goa Jungle Adventure. Relevant I'll grant you, but not exactly imaginative. Not exactly snappy either.
    Still. They did have a big fucking spider front-&-centre just to ease you into things:

    shelob the demon-queen of Goa

    If she doesn't look that large do please remember that this is India, everything takes the natural equivalent of anabolic steroids from birth and leaves are very, very big here. Banana leaves average about 5-6 feet long, for example. Those leaves are big. So was the damned spider *shudders*

    -

    I tried to look cool during the day, but it rarely works even on the ground, let alone halfway up into the canopy. Okay, I gotta come clean here: it really was not a jungle, by any stretch of the imagination. You could see the floor for one thing, plus there was only one deadly creature in sight - and we were there more than 2 hours! Not a proper jungle at all, hence, no canopy. I lied to you. This was only about 15, maybe 20 feet above the ground. Oh well, at least you lot can have a good old laugh about my ponderous and sagging beer belly:

    muppet on a string 2muppet on a string1muppets on strings!

    -

    And here, in an exclusive scoop, is proof that all men think alike. Yes, it's true, you crazed feminists have been right all along; what us men can't help thinking about is: - olive green jungle shorts.

    shorts order

    Yup, you heard it here first. Without any prior consultation all 4 people all decided not only to first purchase such leg cladding, but also all thought it most appropriate for a day climbing ropes and sliding down cables.

    Men eh? They're all the same.

    -

    At least we help each other in times of need despite obviously clashing so badly: I missed my cue on one of the ziplines and, after smashing into the mat at about 80mph in a very arse-about-face fashion I was unable to secure a position i.e. I fumbled the catch, and drifted back down the line. Left dangling there it was inevitable the other guys were tempted to leave - I was completely helpless attached to the middle of a huge wire and couldn't realistically undo any of the gear. This would be the one line that doesn't have a rope strung along beside it either of course, so poor old Greg had to come and physically drag my lovely boots and me along the line, and sort of swing-throw me by the foot the last few metres. Needless to say, I almost lost my leg below the knee:

    please avoid `hanging around` gags, thank youmuppets, strings, etc.

    -

    Now I don't mean to be too critical, it was a few hours of good fun, but hardly as death-defying as was advertised. Oh well - T.I.I. - That Is India and I should have remembered it, in fact it was the instructor Gene who mentioned that some time on that day. See, I guess one good thing comes out of watching Blood Diamond half a million sodding times - we have a new catchphrase!

    -

    Because I already have them I may as well bore you further with these last few pictures - just a few random instances of me being taller than everyone else in a treetops/rope/harness/overweightEnglishman kinda way:

    net worth (they aren\'t getting any etter are they)can he kick itup on high, or somethingmiddle distance

    -

    It's okay, the next batch are all pretty beach scenes and what few pictures I got of the animal life around Palolem. There's a big toad, and several cows. No snakes sadly, although one did fall one me a few days ago.

    I tell you about it later.

  • Peachy Beachy and lets hope I stop rhyming right there.

    Alright, I've been in Hampi now for 11 days and not even done the Palolem photos yet. On the one hand this is lame, from me, but on the other things are good for you lovely lot because I have got a way of posting pictures in a more respectable size and format now.
    No I am not going to go back and do the others in the same way, I'm not that conscientious; neither does the lengthy interval bear much relation to me sorting this out at last, I was just being lazy before and not exploring the blog control thingies very well... *ahem*

    Anyway go to Palolem, I urge you, in fact I pretty much bloody well order you to (pass me my Dictatorship hat) if only for the wonderfully important difference between high-tide and low-tide. The beach gains and loses at least 200 feet every day, the high tide evens sees one restaurant gets a localised soaking - the front rows of tables and chairs is hit by the leading edge of the smooth, soft surf for about 45 minutes, washing your feet for you if you sit there while chowing down on good Thai food. In neon-lit semi-darkness, approaching midnight, this is as good a feeling as you are allowed without breaking laws, or at least some fairly respectable social taboos.
    The sensation is as good as it sounds, we should have gone there more often, really.

    At low tide of course the beach is immense and virtually flat (obviously), and everyone has so much room to walk, play football, volleyball, racquetball, frisbee, spin poi, twirl staffs, juggle, aimlessly blunder, drunkenly stagger and crawl on all fours if you so desired that you forget there are several hundred people nearby. It is massive, at low tide. You could make about 5 football (that's `soccer` to any Americans/imbeciles ;) ) fields out of it, if only it were flat and you could persuade David Beckham to get his lovely hair all sandy.

    An indication of the tide levels for ya; here is a rock that at low tide juts out from the beach as seen here, but at high tide is an island of stone some 70 or 80 feet from the edge of the water. Just look at the high tide marks on it, and see how flat the beach is! :

    tdm129

    Okay, this is funny, dark, and indicative of the Indian mentality when it comes to the tourists in Goa.
    Read this sign, and quite apart from the brilliant language have a guess at what the white'ed-out number 3 is:
    tdm120

    Yup, it's diabetes. This guy is claiming he can cure diabetes, completely, using the magic of India and its mystical medicinal marvels.

    A couple of sunsets for ya, taken from arguably our favourite place (Cosy Nook), and some random dusty point on the beach respectively:

    tdm123tdm126

    A palm tree, shot in some lovely light conditions I thought:

    tdm121

    There's that goddamned Yankee bastard Greg, caught in the middle of a hangover and in the act of making signs of the devil:

    greg

    High tide on the beach and Green Island is cut off by the sea, just about. At low tide you see the land bridge clearly from everywhere and in truth you can make it across the stones with only damp feet at any time. Shame I thought that the tree would actually help the shot, oh well... :

    rcok island view GOOD

    On Green Island there were, sadly, no monkeys or interesting piece of wildlife beyond the standard assorted lizards, but there was this awesomely cool tree right near the centre and, for want of a better word, summit. Don't care about trees? Well I do, so :P I just got a thing for the strangler vine/aerial root things I think, the 2nd pic shows how the aerial roots become lumpy trunks in their own right, that's ALL roots I think:

    vine 1vine 2

    And here, lucky sonsabitches that Greg and I were, was the view from the quiet little restaurant attached to our quiet little place of residence, on those quiet little evenings when the wind went somewhere else and the tide was right, and even sun conspired to make it look as good as this:

    OB view2OB view3

    Cows. Beasts of burden. Chewers of cud. Sacred forms of returned-to-Earth spirits. Walking burgers: just add abattoir. Placid and gentle quadrapeds. Turd factories with added flies. These things all make sense, but you don't often see them ordering a Bacardi and coke in your local Italian restaurant:

    cow walked into a bar

    Although they do often lurk in hedges, roads, gardens and paths at nighttime, totally invisible to human eyes and no doubt involved in some covert bovine action that we're better off not knowing about.
    There is something just a little bit too good to be true about a creature that seems so docile and forgiving, they're bloody up to something I'm sure.

    Cows: don't trust 'em.

    And finally you deserve to see me in full posing glory.
    So tell me: where's the Beach? :D :

    where\'s the beach

    Well there you go. I hope you weren't expecting witty or topical, or amusingly calamitous or otherwise engagingly diverting. I have a tedious little game to play now, trudging through the posting of the better pictures here for posterity, edutainment and self-flattery, so I ain't gonna be too sharp for a day or three yet.

    Notes on how sharp I never was in the first place would be better not directed at the comments section, thank you so much ;)

    Feel free (please, feel obliged :D ) to tell me if the pictures themselves are okay or not - these are the better ones so God help me if no-one likes them... I'm rather enjoying snapping away, so stuff it they're not your thing :P
    I toured some of the larger temples yesterday and took 166 photos in one day; that's probably about the same as my lifetime total prior to coming on this trip!

    Ciao.

    tdm120
    tdm120

  • Panaji photocall, Anjuna balls, et al,.

    Personally, I'm getting fed up with the photographs I've been taking playing catch up to the ever-rambling lingual bollocks spewing forth uncontrollably from my underfunded and underfed brain, so I'm getting rid of it, in a manner of speaking, by throwing it all at you right now. So there.

    George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars films, and comics, and toys, and spin-offs, and cartoons, and action collectables, and postcards, and special edition themed micro machines, and posters, and cuddly toys and... You get the picture. The tubby fucker had one good idea in his whole life and has spent the last 30 years milking it like a gigantic pliant golden cow. He is also a humanoid hamster, in case you hadn't noticed.
    Well, I've got your number georgie-boy, I know EXACTLY where you got the idea for Darh Vader and the Emperor from - this statue, near the Secratariat building in Panaji, Goa:

    Photobucket

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    Thought you got away with that huh? Beardy git.

    A big tree! In the central municipal park. I include this because this is exactly one third of the horticultural worth of the city. Yeah, it's that good: no botanists ever came from Panaji:

    Photobucket

    Still, it is a nice tree.

    A large fern tree thing, in the other large park, and the shot I took to distract the attentions of that guy with the colourful fingernails and dodgy handshake ;) :

    Photobucket

    Ganesh, or Ganesha the Elephant-headed god, made from coconut husks. Even the tusks looked wrapped in coconut fibres, it was outside the KALA academy and was rather worth a snap, I thought:

    Photobucket

    The Church of Our Lady of the...yada yada yada, by daylight:

    Photobucket

    This is a bad photo. Sorry. You need to adjust this a bit, just turn the brightness up and fiddle with the contrast - VINCE: if you could make this a decent shot and email it to me I would be very grateful, and will replace the awfully dark one here. Cheers bruv.
    Anyway, it's one of the myriad switchbacked stairways typical of the country, this time very large and in stone, and gracing an entire hillside, so I just *had* to include it:

    Photobucket

    Balcolonial madness. No it wasn't very funny, was it? Ho hum:

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    Them thar cunnin' drawin' thingums, in that that KALA academy place:

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    And finally the Indian idea of a carpark; why of course you can set up your stall here, that'll be 2oo Rupees please:

    Photobucket

    Oh, and I lied about the third good bit of horticulture. There isn't one.

    -

    ANJUNA.

    Again, they have a funny idea about small, local churches. This, is actually a mere chapel, in another village of a population: approx 500.

    Photobucket

    Oh they do take religion so very, very seriously, yes they do poor little dears.

    2nd best thing about Anjuna; the raptors in the skies above the cliffs, this is without any zoom and nowhere near as close as they sometimes got:

    Photobucket

    The best thing about Anjuna; being 2 miles away from it on the same cliffs, with this to look at:

    Photobucket

    And if you turn your head, this:

    Photobucket

    To be fair, they do a neat line on stranger vines and atmospheric ruins, there too:

    Photobucket

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    Aaaaaaaaaaaaand that's as much as you deserve. :P
    Actually that's the best of Anjuna and the last of Panaji, and Palolem is so fantastic it doesn't deserve to be in the same tainted post as those filthsome places.
    Okay I rather liked Panaji and in its own way it had a lot of charm, but Palolem - Palolem I shall be going back to, this I guarantee.
    Not this trip, but next year - oops, not next year, umm, sometime about 2011 maybe?

  • More idle chitchat. Photo issue progressing...

    You would have had more photos today, but the site that hosts all mine, Photobucket, is down for maintenance, I've sussed another way to do it now but can't until I have the pics on this PC, not just online where I can access them. Still, I'm feeling loquacious so you'll just have to make the best of it :P

    I found a place that serves green tea back on Monday night so I ordered 2 for myself and, bless them, it only took them about half an hour to tell me they didn't actually have any. No problem, my patience was at an all-time high and the staff were the very epitome of friendliness and thoroughly helpful of spirit.
    Their chef clearly didn't share same ideals because the git gave me food poisoning. Deep joy. Much time was spent from VERY early on Tuesday morning speaking to God on the Great White Telephone, feeling more utterly dreadful than is proper even then because I hadn't eaten much in the previous day or two; basically my immune system spent several hours trying to eject my internal organs. It was exquisitely painful - there's nothing quite like having a fight between your stomach muscles and ribcage, and your own lungs.

    Still I'm more or less okay now, it seems to be a very popular local holiday here and thousands of semi-predatory, semi-drunk Indians have descended on Hampi like a huge flock of predatory flocking things, let's imagine them each as a kind of lecherous hunting goose in not-so-tight formation, prowling every street on both sides of the river in small groups of 70 or so, nonchalantly groping all white women in sight. Yes, I'm afraid there's rather of lot of that. I am very glad to be a fella today, I don't mind telling you.

    I knew it was generally pretty bad for western women, especially on public transport, but having just supplied my ample self as a walking human shield for a random French girl up the hill and through the town, after an anonymous waylaying and pleading, I understand it properly. Dark deeds, I am afraid to say, are often afoot :(
    Still, that's just part and parcel of the Indian experience, if you stick to the tourist areas.

    So..... I'm really missing being able to play computer games. Sad isn't it? The new Grand Theft Auto game will be out in a month or so and unless you have been living under an ice sheet in the Arctic ocean in a specially designed sensory deprivation shell as part of a forgotten Cold War experiment, then I know you have at least heard of that series of games.
    Yes, even you Mother and Father, you have heard of these games. People in ancient Indonesian tribal villages who can't read or write have heard of them, even poor demented souls languishing in far-flung Tibetan monasteries in the furthest reaches of the Himalayas have heard of them.
    Hell, they probably have 50" Plasma screen TVs and the latest Playstation 3 infra-red cordless controllers all gearing up for the release of the massively anticipated G.T.A. 4, the gits.

    Not me though, and I particularly love that series. No, the only chance I'll have to regularly use a TV and maybe buy a PS3 is my year in New Zealand: guess which two Western countries have banned the entire GTA series? Why, Australia and NZ of course. They (New Zealand) have also completely banned airsoft guns, those lovely replica toys guns I do so love to shoot my friends with - so I can't play the computer games I want, and I can't play the only sport I'm quite good at. Humph.
    Not that this is much of an excuse for complaining of course because I'll just have to deck myself out with a little extra Dangerous Activities insurance on my travel policy and try my hand at SCUBA diving, hangliding, skydiving, bungee jumping (this is the only one I'm genuinely terrified of), proper mountain climbing, white-water rafting and, if I can sort out a contact lens doohickey, perhaps even surfing.

    Either way I need to read up on New Zealand, and I'm hoping that in Australia I can actually get to use someone's personal 'net connection and be able to use decent machines with decently fast 'net connections, and not not have to pay punishing hourly rates to do so. I could of course but books, but researching is so much quicker and more objective when done (thoroughly) online.

    Reading up on Laos would be good too - y'know there's only one frickin' bookshop in Hampi? Disgraceful, I call that. I've been ploughing through books at a criminal rate recently, although still slow as hell compared to some (yes Greg, you can put your hand down now).
    If you ever get the chance to read a book by the BBC journalist John Simpson called `A Mad World, My Masters` then please do spare the time, it is extraordinarily good. Moving, amazing, nostalgic in a decently British way and uplifting at times, decimatingly tragic and once truly horrifying (I'll never make a media critic, I like everything too much), it is one of the best books I have ever read, for it's substance more than its style, and the latter is anything but shabby.
    `The Company` by Robert Littel. Just make sure you have a good chunk of spare time, it's pretty good too, far too long really, although nicely epic for it.
    Various others - if you want a few reviews and suchlike thing I've been making my Facbook page as uncluttered as possible, but have added most books to the GoodReads section of my profile page, check it out if you ever get really bored :D

    -

    The only other thing to say is that the most remarkable feature of me as a person these days is my footwear. Strange, but undeniably true.
    Not a day goes past, hell, not an hour goes past when wearing my boots that I'm not complimented or remarked upon thanks to my choice of pedal protectors. I suppose it is a little odd to be wearing such monstrously huge things in a country where dying of sunstroke is a cheerful possibility all year round, but I for one don't understand why people don't understand - this is a rough country, folks, and heavy duty footwear seems to be an essential, rather than a novelty. I guess a lot of travellers are only here for a few weeks or 3 months at most, but still I would bloody want some badass bootness so I could clamber on rocks and trek up muddy paths without having to track down my sandals each time a tricky step was needed.

    I guess not many people who come here are going on to South America or New Zealand though, and I would laugh like Nelsen in the Simpsons for a good hour and a half at anyone wishing to spend time there without such apparel.
    The locals of course, being Indian, have soles on their feet tougher than the thickest leather, seemingly having spent an hour with each foot on the grindstone every day from birth, and can probably survive nuclear blasts at moderate distances if they all form a sort of chiropodial Roman testudo.

    Honestly, it's worth a whole five paragraphs. It is quite amazing how many people seem to love them - as every lounging restaurant (the ones with middle-Eastern-style lounge spaces of mattress and roll-pillow instead of chairs) requires you to leave all footwear outside, as do all active temples, and many shops and almost all internet cafes, it is a bit of a worry that my £100 boots are going to get snatched by some enterprising Indian. Almost the msot depressing thought in this scenario is that they wont realise what they're actually worth and might get haggled down heavily on price too. If someone's gonna swipe them then they may as well get everything they should out of the things.

    A soldier in Palolem riding past on his Royal Enfield actually stopped to ask me if I got the boots in Iraq. Before I engaged my brain I said with a chortle "No way! You wouldn't catch me in the army." as the grey matter caught up with the situation I realised no-one outside of the British army would know these were the exact type as those supplied to our forces at the beginning of the year. Realising I had just insulted the man I quickly added that "far too hard a life for me I'm afraid, I got these from PoliMil, they're a private supplier to you guys and the police" and he left with a pleasant enough grin, and I was left with my grin intact, which was very nice.

    People (Indian men and boys) cross the road to compliment me on the boots, people from all over the world seem unable to resist remarking upon them.
    I was constantly looked on with bemusement and possibly sympathy whenever I took them onto the beach, even if walking at speed towards a rocky island or muddy headland. Honestly, people just have no idea of the advances made in `uppers` ventilation lately.

  • There's only 3 movies on Earth

    Every place I have stayed with a TV and a regular evening movie slot will show, during the course of my stay, Blood Diamond, 300, and something else I have already seen.

    This is no coincidence.

    There must logically be a tracking party that either follows me in conventional transport, or is airborne and traces my movements across land from the air.
    Either way, they send warning ahead to any place I choose to rest my carcass in and they provide the decision maker when it comes to movies with that evening's screening.
    I have been to countless places that show movies, have been to 2 states and 6 towns, and still I find that the one noticeable wedge of movie that comes out of it is that I can recite the script of 300 and call much of the cinematography in advance of it appearing on screen, which I do to piss off the other hundred people present who haven't been victimised by this strange audiovisual Chinese torture.

    The bonus is of course that they can distribute the same tattered, scratched copies to each place, thus minimising each restaurant's expenditures and maximising my fury level.

    Now if you will excuse me I'm just off to watch Blood Diamond. And murder the person next to me.

  • The importance of being Frank

    Style over substance, I specialise in this as you'll know if you've read anything here before.
    Substance isn't so easy to come by, you see, when your whole environment is geared towards you doing as little as you can: as little as you can allow yourself to get away with before scruples kick in, and you start feeling guilty about doing nothing beyond a twice-daily amble to the hotel restaurant and back.

    This is I did yesterday, ambled back and forth twice, I mean. Well it felt like it anyway.
    I think I actually walked off out of the little one-street village of Virrupapur Ghaddi in the opposite direction from the river crossing, through the miniature slum adjoining the tail end of the road, and out through a water meadow onto the first tarmaced road since the entrance to Hampi, across the water and a good 3 miles away by conventional non-avionic transport (i.e. not as the crow or any other airborne creature flies).
    I only think it because, while I know I have done this, I couldn't reliably state on which day - this tells you all you need to know about a place where I looked at my watch this morning and was genuinely stuned to note that we had entered double figures, the event had completely slipped me by.

    I had to check with myself again half an hour later (while ambling towards the restaurant) that the current month was indeed January [it is January isn't it? yes of course it is, any later and my birthday would be the day after tomorrow and I like to think I'd have clocked that on its way in; we are in 2008 now I know that, I'm pretty sure of that anyhow, well, I mean I have a rough sort-of idea that we are..].

    -

    Hampi is a powerfully tranquil place, if I may be allowed to get away with a conflicting phrase like that. It is, as the guidebooks say, a very easy place to stay longer than first intended, the beaches of Goa are just like that too but this place offers a lot more of that elusive substance. Not that I've sampled too much yet.

    As predicted, it isn't exactly a dry town and my liver isn't getting the R & R it probably deserves, although there is no booze on any menu at any venue and for extremely good reason; the police come around periodically and check up that no-one in this holy place, former capital of the Vijayangar empire as it is, is boozing it up, and I dread to think what happens if they find anyone doing so. The fact that every restaurant you go into for the first time, or the first time the owner or manager sees you in there, they make quiet mention that beer is very much available, just not on the menu.
    The cynic in me supected nothing less than this, naturally.

    But hey, there are worse things to do and I'm still getting out there and doing a reasonable bit of walking, hopefully climbing too although I haven't given my cold (physical symptoms persisting, the frogs of India aren't living in the ponds, toilets and showers any more as they apparently all have a timeshare arrangement rotating between them a permanent residence in my throat) time to sort itself out yet.
    This is a slightly weak excuse, yes, I know, but when you feel a bit shitty in yourself, and you can't get any painkillers to sort your little ailment out it can be hard to motivate yourself into going rock climbing.
    There is no pharmacy here in Hampi, nor across the river here where I actually am in Virrupapur Gaddi, and no shops sell western tablets or pills like paracetamol ibuprofen or aspirin - medicine here is universally ayurvedic, meaning, quite plainly, that it doesn't work. Actually that's shockingly untrue as many things do work, large chunks of synthetic medicine are based on naturally occuring compounds, but pain medication and temperature-lowering westernised synthetics are what I know and there seem to be no equivalent here :( (...although they do provide a natty line in an ayurvedic sort of Deep Heat muscle-rub, it burns the pain right out of you with...more pain!!).

    The other point in favour of my continual laziness is that I can often only breath on the third attempt thanks to the amphibians nesting in my oesophagus, so I feel just a touch disinclined to hang off a cliff face engaging in hardcore physical exercise. Reuben the fire spinner chappie didn't make the case for me doing stuff any stronger when he said that the grading system (already a sorce of quiet embarrassment for me when talking climbing) is brutally hard, and Reuben is one of those annoyingly well-built chaps made up entirely of smiles and muscle, and apparently biologically allergic to bodyfat. If he says they're hard then I'm gonna need amphetamines to get anwhere on these rocks!

    -

    However! Still! Yes! I've seen some of the 250+ temples they have in these here parts, and most impressive they are too. Having been here for a bit now, and having seen some baheaviour that can only be described as incredulous - not a morsel of these behaviours was in any way akin to a credule - I also want to prepare a little piece on the multitude of ways in which people expliot the tourist industry - it is amazing what people will ask for, that's all Im saying for now.
    Touring some of the temples between the Sacred Centre of Hampi and the Royal Centre slightly South of it, I have seen some awesome architecture, a lot of wonderful and slightly bizarre scenery, and a lot of lizards and, if I didn't know any better, what I would call chipmunks. The temples are swamped with these little critters although not being native to a country which the chipmuk itself is I can't be sure in my identification. They're cute sandy-coloured little squirrels with dark stripes down the body, and that's chipmunkey enough for this naturalist.

    Yes, I said naturalist. No, the episode with the Norwegians didn't count.

    -

    Beyond that, seeing as I'm just gently exploring the countyside and templescape at my own pace, and as John seems pretty happy sitting in palolem for the time being seeing as he, on his 2nd or 3rd night in the place shacked himself up with an Indian girl, and more power to him I say. He may be there a while longer.
    I can't resist saying at this point either that when Greg and I arrived in Palolem he managed to shack himself up with a nice lass on his first night, too.

    And I woke up on Christmas morning to find he had acquired a bedmate then, too.
    Just saying, some of us got it and some of us ain't.
    Did I mislay that application to the Buddhist monastery? ;)

    And the style/substance thing, finally, I have to say was influenced entirely by a post from Ransfuchs, here - read the comments underneath, not just the short post.

    The featured blog thing, seemingly arbitrary beyond all sense or meaning, got me slightly pissed off at the way of the world, although only vaguely; I wasn't going to set any fires this time or anything.

    What I get annoyed about in the world of blogs and journals, of which I am myself capitolly guilty, is the mindless reporting of trivial details from lives we don't much care about and lifestyles we may even abhor, let alone might just disagree with or be annoyed by.

    I understand the irony completely, thank you for pointing it out.

    My point here is that if you haven't got fuck-all worth saying, at least say so in a way that's half interesting, which I try to do.

    Style over substance, not altogetehr a bad thing, then. Unless you look at the last labour leadership which was often accused of exactly that - mind you, if I can string things out for a full 12+ years, I'll be pretty happy.

    -

    As an aside, that title there is rather good isn't t? I feel its quite wasted here, but I couldn't think of anything else. I will almost certainly use it again, watch out.

  • I refuse to make hair jokes

    Okay so Jason particularly asked for it - here's a picture or two more of me without hair. Go on, laugh it up -

    I the middle of the operation, quite literally:

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    and one I insisted on getting because I knew it would make me look like a Romanian torture victim (it's a look I'm trying to cultivate):

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    A few days later, this just makes me look like someone with an irrational fear of camera lenses who is unble to hide his extra chin, but here goes anyway:

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    Still, the man next to me was in a worse state, this being Irish Jason at his formidable best after 2 bottles of whisky and a handful of industrial-grade tranquilisers:

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    That's his girlfriend moving his poor ailing headskullpiece into camera-shot there.

    -

    Aaaaand a couple from my first night in Panaji, the state capital of Goa -

    A Very Big Church (they have a lot of them here), called, I believe, The Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, a name so clunky and unnecessary that it ought to be elected to its own committee:

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    A tree that lost it's fight with a nest of ravenous wooden snakes, apparently:

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    There's that place with the silver Jesus statue - silver Jesus! What will they think of next. I see Buddha with a tie-dyed sarong and hemp sandals, myself:

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    Just in case that wasn't clear enough for you:

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    !!!

    A very impressive temple to Hanuman the monkey god on an urban hillside in Panaji:

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    Some wheel thing at the side of the temple, possibly for torturing non-believers (okay I completely made that up):

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    The same temple's entrance down the hill:

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    And that's it. I can't write up anything more yet, and my internet fees here in Hampi are Rs. 50 per hour whereas they are 40 in Go and only 25 back in Panaji. So there; the worst computers and slowest connections in the place with the highest prices, oh well - T.I.I. - This Is India!

  • Arambol revisited, again, yes it's more photos for this one

    Right, a few more things to look at then:

    First off the last picture of people for a while. You never met 'em but still, I'm gonna put a few up now and then.
    There are quite a lot of them and I estimate that I'll have about 500 pictures ready for posting and sticking on my Facebook profile, so one day I will do this and also find and tag all the people concerned.
    I estimate this will take me about 2 weeks assuming I am unemployed and within reasonable striking distance of some kind of takeaway food delivery service.

    So, here are a few of the fine folks from Arambol, including sort-of from left to right Nevada, Tom, Dougal, Shane and Alice:

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    There, we can all feel better now.
    There was this Catholic church in Arambol, a mile or so from the beach and en route to the native village, as it were:

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    Beats most of the shoddy little square huts you see in England (not that I care much, but still) and this is just a rural village, remember. Population only about 1000, or about 2000 including cows ;)

    The other guy I went up that nasty little goat-suicide path with to go parasailing, a Brit guy called, I think, Rob. I may be completely wrong on the name of course, it was a stressful situation and well over a day ago:

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    Still, looks good.

    I also got my first shot of the Raptors (another Americanism, this time the transatlantic substitute for the clunky phrase `birds of prey`. I will use raptor from now on, if only to save on the expenditure of glucose and oxygen) but it's small and shit, better one from Anjuna later on :)

    The strange landscape on top of the headland at Arambol; the divisions seemed to serve no purpose but wre clearly manmade so, either they are pretty ancient building lines, or they are crop dividers used for tiny parts of the year maybe just after monsoon? The ground must be baking and totally without any irrigation (being on top of a narrow, pointed hill) so yeah, weird:

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    I just loved this sign:

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    And this typical village house, for some reason:

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    And I tried to get a shot to demonstrate the cow/anywhere situation, but at the time this was the best I could do:

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    A not-especially meaningful, artistic or well composed shot, but it just looks a little like, well, a little like the quiet side of beach life in Arambol (you tell because of the lack of peddlars and dogs):

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    Kingfisher waiting to fish by the sea!:

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    Okay you can barely see it - it's in the middle, not the wading bird on the left, I've not gone senile at the age of 25 (although not far from it).

    Hah - got ya ya little bugger:

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    See, I wasn't losing the plot.

    The moody rocky headland, ooh, dramatic:

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    And after waiting only 2 hours I managed to get a picture of the waces breaking on this little patch of rockishness, moody headland included:

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    Even cows need to sunbathe:

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    ..and they will..

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    ..because they can fucking go anywhere they please; they're cows. Of course.

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    Lizards don't have the same rights, as far as I'm aware ("you have the right to be squashed accidentally, you have the right to break your tail off in the event of partial capture, you have the right to look about the show with beady little reptilian eyes.."):

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    Oh yeah cool thing: in the middle of the locally-occupied (mostly) village next to the beach, but between the main touristy road and the beach, which is quite a large area,is this sunken pool:

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    Which I thought was rather cool.

    And lastly, before we leave Arambol, here's Luca, an Italian guy who I hung around with for the last 2 or three days, doing those wonderful over-the-counter medications you could only get in India (think horse tranquilisers ;) ) and generally having a right good laugh. Marvellous chap, he even absorbed my erroneous Italian phrases with good humour:

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    Right well that's just about it for the pictures so far, Arambol has been, more or less, documented :)

    -

    Oh and as a side note, if you are in any way interested in sciencey stuff and the way popular science gets abused by idiots (and some of the stuff here is truly amazing) have a read of Ben Goldacre's site:
    http://www.badscience.net/2007/11/a-kind-of-magic/#more-578

    I got drawn in by a story about homeopathy and how many homeopathic solutions contain, quite literally and undeniably, absolutely nothing but water. To quote directly:

    "On the Society of Homeopaths site, in their ?What is homeopathy?? section, they say that ?30C contains less than 1 part per million of the original substance.?

    This is an understatement: a 30C homeopathic preparation is a dilution of 1 in 100^30, or rather 1 in 10^60, which means a 1 followed by 60 zeroes, or - let?s be absolutely clear - a dilution of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000.

    To phrase that in the Society of Homeopaths? terms, we should say: ?30C contains less than one part per million million million million million million million million million million of the original substance.?

    At a homeopathic dilution of 100C, which they sell routinely, and which homeopaths claim is even more powerful than 30C, the treating substance is diluted by more than the total number of atoms in the universe.
    Homeopathy was invented before we knew what atoms were, or how many there are, or how big they are.
    It has not changed its belief system in light of this information."

    Being a firm believer that the human mind can do more for its owner's/user's body than anyone fully knows yet, I'm fascinated by the placebo and other effects that bring about the favourable reactions to homeopathic medicine.
    Being a goddamned cynic I just love to see these silly hippy ideas debunked :D

  • Forward men, follow me!

    Ahhh, so it has been a more mobile and cultural day or two. I have left the beach, left Goa behind, and sit now, typing to you, from a town called Hampi in the Indian state of Karnataka, and yes, there are still fucking taximen here. It's a big tourist draw, quite evidently, but still very different.
    I'm 360 kilometres from the sea, for one thing.

    Last days in Palolem - extremely messy, two nights of utter debauchery and drunkenness, very entertaining though. Good people, good fun all round.
    There was a noisy interloper in the group, who managed to get the wind up just about everyone in the end through her constant - and I really mean constant, not one sentence uttered was in any way different in tone - complaining. Yes we all like a good moan and there are things that need moaning about and yes I'm guilty of this more than most but please fortheloveofJehovahwillyoushutthefuckUP, woman?!! I won't mention her real name, but the episodes of woe did lead to Greg and I thinking up the term Duchess Buzzkill, which we both agreed would make an awesome name for a heavy metal band.
    I personally like the idea of there being a Duchess of Buzzkill, both a good name and a mandate to spoil fun wherever her Grace went. I could deploy her to parties of people I wish to annoy, send her off to San Francisco and bring all those hippies down from their permanent 30-year high, that sort of thing.

    The day before the silliness began, however, I hopped into a hastily (and not too economically) negotiated taxi along with Greg, a Brit guy called Mark, and another damned Brit called Marlon. Yes, we are all Brits now - this is what happens when you live with a Kentuckian for 3 weeks, your vocabulary becomes shamelessly adulterated.
    We taxied (that ain't a verb) to the Goa Jungle Adventure park a few clicks out of Palolem and spent 2-3 hours climbing up rope ladders, swinging on ropes, walking across highly ricketty aerial bridges and walkways and, most importantly, throwing ourselves down zip lines - deathslides, we call them, when we're feeling especially cheerful - which was rather a lot of fun. There was something grimly satisfying about watching Greg shoot 320feet or so down the last and largest line, attaining something approaching the speed of pain then safely managing to break the force of impact by tactically using his face as a buffer.
    I lol'ed, I don't mind telling you.

    Pics soon - got shitloads more from the other beaches and Panaji to get through too, try not to be too touristy about it all but, when the pics go up eventually you can also see our special friend from there, Shelob the demon spider queen.

    Standing at the very outer entrance to the park, Marlon let out a shriek and informed us, in the tones of someone preparing to watch acquaintances die before his eyes, that we were standing underneath a spider. He was not wrong. It turned out to be something none of us had seen before (except Gene): large, square-edged body in yellow and black, and legs that comfortably spanned 10"/25cm across its web. The body of the thing was almost 5" long, and that's a lot bigger than any other arachnid I've met.

    Gene, the instructor, informed us that it wouldn't kill us. As long as we got the anti-venom injection, at least. I think what he meant to say was `it could kill you, but there's a GOOD CHANCE you'll get the life-saving antidote in time`.
    I don't fancy testing Good Chances with my actual bleeding life in India, so I left if the hell alone, I don't mind telling you.

    -

    So I buggered off from the beach, Greg and I went our seperate ways although if he doesn't get to Geneva in time and with the merchandise then he wont get the antidote (insert evil cackle), and I went off for one night and a smidgeon of a day in the city of Margao, Southern Goa.

    It is a pleasant enough city, not as busy as the guidebooks would have you believe although I only wandered into some areas not all, what with only my smidgeon of available time. The have a Dominoes pizza which I studiously avoided (after a good twenty minutes mental in-fighting) and a municipal park that looked a lot nicer than Panaji's. No gay hookers either, as far as I could tell which made me feel just that little 2000% safer the absence of these things naturally engenders.

    I did eat a meal I didn't understand, from a menu I couldn't decipher, and sat crammed with 4 people (in a tiny booth) that I didn't know in a restaurant I could never identify if it came to a police investigation.
    It was about the only restaurant I could find open, strangely, and a meal costing Rs. 40 filled me up more than a Dominoes pizza that would have cost about Rs. 400 and that clinched it. Hoping I didn't cause too many offences or ate with an incorrect number of limbs, I read the same passages in my Lonely Planet as I had done dozens of times before while I ate, and waited to pay the bill quietly and safely extract myself. The food was superb, and plentiful. Alomst certainly very healthy, too.

    In case anyone ever goes to Margao as a stoppover, go to Hotel La Flor, it really is the best place. I indulged myself with a proper hotel and, for only Rs. 560 for a night's stay - I have paid as much for a frickin' bamboo hut with no toilet - they gave me an immaculate twin room of adequate size and modernish furnishings with a truly modern and quite perfect en suite bathroom with, this will make any of you who've backpacked through India before groan in envy, hot Power Shower :D

    After nearly 10 weeks of cold water that smells slightly of poo this was absolutely heavenly. The reception staff were also top notch, being helpful and professional beyond expectation. Also prompt, which is not one of the qualities of Indian employees in general, although rather endearingly so, it must be said.

    Also, more cable TV, which along with the 4 days I spent in Panaji languishing at HItler's pleasure at the Comfort guesthouse brings my 12-monthly total now to about 3 times what it was before I left. It was good, to be a slob again.

    -

    The trains of India, I have finally sampled. I bumped into a retired Canadian couple waiting for breakfast in the hotel and split the taxi to the station, chatted with them and then another retired fellow who turned out to be a German ship's Captain, although whether during Ze War or not I wouldn't like to say and couldn't politely ask ;)
    In any case the seating was haphazard as hell and I wasn't given an actual seat by my travel agency, so I swung myself and my bags up into the uppermost of the 3 tiers of sleeping bunks, much to the amusement of all the European passengers, as soon as things got crowded in the first carriage I came to.

    They sleep 6 in each little cabin, with 3 tiers of bench seats/beds on each side, an aisle for bumping into people and swearing in, then a further pair of bunks running parallel to the train's length. Me, with my size 11 military boots and looking (in tan buttondown bush shirt and olive green jungle shorts) not a little like an Australian crocodile hunter, and my direct approach were pretty visible as ther are no divider between `cabins` so everyone had a good laugh before realising that's what the Indian were doing too, once they'd found their seats.
    Not having a ticket of course I worried myself silly on the two occasions a ticket inspector came around, the first vaguely indicated i wasn't in the right place, but only scrawled something illegibal on my paper printout of a ticket and motioned down the carriage without further word.
    The second seemed quite amazingly officious and browbeat an Indian guy for a full five minutes over what looked like him sitting at the wrong end of one of the benches in the next cabin, where the bench was otherwise unoccupied. Fearing he would pretty much execute me on the spot for sitting in the wrong CABIN, having my impossibly conspicuous boots up on the seat as well as being shamelessly foreign, I made sure I was heavily absorbed in a massive book (The Company by Robert Littell, in case you wondered) and looked as unflustered and native as I could. Mercifully he was either too stupid too look above his head or didn't fancy the look of my greasy form that had, at that point, not changed clothes in 3 days (I had a launderette malfunction if you must know).

    -

    So I got to Hampi, after 7 hours on the train, and as we all jostled to get onto the platform then joslted even more to get the hell off the platform because the taximen and postcard sellers crowded it so thickly, I got talking to another English couple called Steve and Emily I think, and as a single Imperial force we battered the taxi men down and eventually achieved the front doors, where we then had to fend off the other thousand touts and taxi drivers with pre-sharpened poles and makeshift riot batons. Alsomst, anyway.

    The spirit of enterprise is seen nowhere more obviously than in the taxi drivers, I am beginning to understand the sheer joy the entrepreneurial Indian male takes in extracting oversized transit fares from tourists.
    As we slowed down, back on the train, one enterprising chap jumped aboard the rapidly moving carriage and travelled the last minute or so with passengers standing eagerly by the doorway (all doors are simply open, at all times, during travel) pitching them to use his taxi.
    He must have walked a kilometre or more up the tracks and ran alongside us to jump on early enough in order to beat the other thousand guys at the station.

    When you do arrive they literally cram the doorways six or more people deep, almost as if you can't leave the train until every one of them has stitched up a tourist of their very own with an inflated fare.
    Not being so sensitive to these things any more, and weighing still a good 190 pounds not including attached rucksacks, I walked straight into them and they parted like a group of skinny underfed people before a boisterous fat man. Score another point for Pies, folks, they're the sixth food group.

    Leaving the station I lost Dteve and Emily to another rickshaw as the German ex-ship's Captain truned up and we shared one for the 13km ride to Hampi. Turns out his name is Wilfred and he seemed to be something of an adventurer, very keen on hiking about although he must have been at least 70, and at journey's end he paid the entire rickshaw fare with a smile and wandered off to find accomodation among the ancient stones of Hampi Bazaar. I couldn't help wondering if he was in some way apologising for his country's actions during ze war by being so effusively charming and helpful, although there is the chance of course he was trying to recruit me for the CIA or other such secret service (I've been reading The Company for a bit too long now, as you can see)

    -

    So, the town of Hampi, I am here and I am ill (cold, ther's a nasty one going around all the travellers from what I gather) and for the next day as well as this and the last I plan to acheive sod-all, and generally cruise about and/or take gentle walks.
    I have seen so far, I can tell you, both cobras and monkeys, first hand and not 10 feet away. However the monkeys had an agenda of their own and after crossing the street in their little group they monkeyhandled themsels and a bit of stolen fruit up the side of a fruit stall and over the way. I hadn't the heart to tell the owner of the stall about the tehft, they were so unbelievably adorable.

    The cobras were the property of a snake charmer by the river and, I strongly suspect, have been operated on to either remove their teeth or possibly disable their jaws, sadly. I watched them for a few minutes and they lunge for and must strike their handler many a time, he encourages them to do so when they lose interest in him and his reedy pipe in fact, but they never open their jaws. Poor little fuckers have probably been mutilated, or possibly they have been drugged, either way I know enough about snakes to know that they don't strike out unless they are trying to attack, and that guy was not in any danger of getting bitten.

    Strangely I met a bunch of the jugglers from Palolem, Reuben Darrol and Adam, last name Wherley, and who came up with the best trick ever to make people remember his name; he had a couple of t-shirts made up with
    ADAM
    FUCKING
    WHERLEY
    embroidered on the front. Not subtle, but a better way to make sure people know who you are I can't think of.

    -

    Met up with John in Palolem (and left him there for a few days) who I hadn't seen in 6 years or so. He'll be coming along to Hampi very soon, so much clandestine alcohol procurement can be acheived and all taxi fares can happily be split :)

    Right that's it - pictures coming again soon, although we're still playing catchup of course.

  • All your megabytes are belong to me, ahahaha!

    Okay, I didn't get round to fixing the image size thing yet. Please tender your proposals for my bloody execution no later than midday friday; in the meantime, please allow me to further abuse your eyesockets with some more of the same! If your dial-up connection no longer loves you then, well, you know how I feel ;) I ruin your bandwidth, haha!

    Arambolic things, um, in no particular order of meaning or sense. Sorry.

    View from my room in Arambol at Piya guesthouse, nothing fantastic, but isn't it nice to see palm trees irst thing in the midday?

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    A coconut field that presented the shortest route to the beach there, for me. Affectionately known in my mind as `deathwish alley` due to horror stories of falling coconuts everyone was so nice to share with me. They'll kill you from that height you know: Mass (up to 3Kgs) x distance (up to 40 feet) X acceleration = splat.

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    But when it sometines looks like this, it's worth it:

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    Rocky reflections (not actually a Stallone DVD commentary, thank the good lord Ganesh):

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    Veritable towers of rock! Okay it wasn't that big, but it as on the very point of the headland and looked awfully pretty:

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    (this is what the side of headland looked like, face-on. I clambered up it one day and then, when I got my breath back I came back down it the next day. Not true. I went up to true and shake off a hangover through the medium of pain and once conquered wandered off into the scrub a few miles without shirt or sunscreen, at or around midday-2PM, lost an appreciable amount of weight and ended up tripping, laden with much scorched plant stem inserted into my feet and into the backyard of a house rented by a load of Danes (not including that fella Kristian, funnily enough). Kind as they are as a nation, it seems to me, they didn't kill, skin and eat me (nor did they invade the North of England, as far i've been told) but directed me back to the village. Anyway we've quite lost the point of the image now haven't we? This was going to be such a short paragraph too, bother it:

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    A Nice Faux-Colonial House (very near my guesthouse, no more digressons) :

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    Shock: Rock/sea/sky collaboration shocking shocker thing:

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    They have many of these in Goa. Many many indeed:

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    By god and king Harry I hope that's either 100% accurate or 0% unnecessary (remember what I said about reincarnation over here):

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    'Zis eez the local school, you see. Eet is not far from ze beach, in ze veeelage itself:

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    Totally self-gratifying one - i haven't got this one finished or done yet, but I rather like it (thinking in shades of green and black on my calf to cover that, well you know, the really ridiculous thing on there. I still secretly blame Jason for it for course:

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    Trees grow through buildings here (and the people let them):

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    I offer no defense for this, but I really like all these switchback staircases:

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    Ace lads - from the left Dougal, Nevada, and Neal. Nevada's Mum just liked the name, he's from somewhere else. Dougal is the instant silliness unit, kind of like a party in a can, a device for creating a state of party that requires you simply wind him up, with booze, and let him go:

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    He was heavily tranquilised for this photograph.

    Strangler vine thing in mid-takeover:

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    Coconut fields again; "only 3 casualties this hour!!" :

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    Cows!:

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    Pigs!

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    Backlit palm trees!

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    That Danish researching fella Kristian! Yes, he does look a little like a musketeer, what a spawny git:

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    There was to follow a shitload of drunken pictures of one magnificently messy evening with, lets see if I can rememebr, the mad brawl-happy Irish couple Jason and Marie, coupla younger English lads Ben and Laurie (if you ever read this guys please get in touch :) ), Aussie Nick who did enough valium to sink a battleship and STILL drunk all night with us (as did those insane Irish types), Kristian, myself and a half-dozen transitory co-residents who wanted to wake up the next day without feeling like Satan himself had shat on their toothbrushes, the soppy muppets.
    I'm sparing you them though because they're not good pictures and they're not at all interesting.
    Alright here's one:

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    See what I mean?

    -----------
    are you bored yet by the way?
    -----------

    Climbed round the next headland bit ater the next beach North and ther was some More Rock! Wow this is exciting.
    -
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    I can see a triangle thing going on in the last one, which strangely justifies me sapping your bandwith with a photo of, well, a pile of rocks.

    I wandered along deathwish alley one night and tried, I really tried to get a good shot of the sunset going down down the centre of this path, I haven't even seen them yet and each takes so long to load here I can't either:

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    And that's as much as I can ever do right now. I write things at you tomorrow, haha!
    I really don't know why I feel like a contentious Mexican bandit today.

    -

    Oh yes, see the wikipedia entry for the possibly slightly odd (for many people I'd guess) reference from the title. It's really, really not that funny unless you are really quite sad indeed. I damaged my ribs laughing.

  • Photos, at last! Of Mumbai, no less.

    Okay, so I said I would and, eventually, I have: I have snapped a few frames (well over 250 so far) and gotten myself into many awkward places to get better pictures, looked like a fool many a time with my pasty untanned hide and little digital camera, and I even stood in people's way and often on their toes, just for you, the discerning media consumer.

    *ERROR ERROR ERROR! The photos have come out somewhat largely. I will get them down to a thumbnailish size - they're still not showing much though, click each picture to see the whole thing *

    Here is the first picture I took, in Mumbai, of the Gateway of India. Less than entirely satisfactory because the park in front of it was a mess of sewage, pipework, Indian officials and beggars so a full shot was impossible.
    The other side was made up of Bombay harbour -not the best surface for the amateur photographer to bestride - and the Gateway is, well, ratehr large:
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    That's the small arch, here's the widest shot I could possibly get:
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    -

    Plus I braved the hugely sluggish (like, Jabba style) internet connection in a dozen different places around Goa to upload them all onto Photobucket.
    This has taken me the past 5 weeks, on and off, and chiefly when I could stand the boredom of watching an antiquated PC struggle like a beached whale through each uploaded image.
    Each sodding shot took up to 2 minutes, and the connection fails every time you queue up more than a couple of pics so it really is the least interesting way to spend your time, ever.
    Oh, and woe betide anyone fool who dare tryeth to run another task at the same time! No, that just guarantees failure, and means you not only start again but have also just wasted all the time waiting for the last batch. In short, it's been shit. You may now kiss the arse, however...

    A thin slice of that harbour I mentioned, with a sizeable chunk of the Indian Navy loitering about in the deeper waters beyond:

    Photobucket

    I may have mentioned that VT train station in Mumbai was large, too. I was not telling porkies - in the shot below the trees are full-grown and the lamppost in the bottom left was on my side of a 4-lane highway, which gives you an idea of scale - and this is only one of several towers ranged along its mighty length. You can't get the front in frame without specialiast ultra-wdie angle lenses, because there are buildings 50 feet away in all directions. This is just a part of the side, where I could back up enough (fighting Bhelpuri stallholders and taximen for space) to see a decent chunk of masonry.
    It actually isn't possible to get it all the station in one shot except by air, but it all looks so stunningly pretty all round;

    Photobucket

    I really got only a small smattering of pictures in Mumbai I'm afraid, these are the only ones worth showing - this is, according to the overexcitable Muslim cab driver, the British Embassy in the city, although by the lack of teapots, bowler hats and tweeds piled outside and a conspicuous absence of writings in the latin script visible, I think he may have been making it up. But hey;

    Photobucket

    Yeah I know, not the best photographer alive, but hey. I thought the harbour shot was quite nice myself.
    So, a bunch of stuff from Arambol and a rather better collection, I hope.
    Toodle pip!

  • Begathon Jack and the Rickshaw Run

    I'm taking a leaf out of the assorted vagrants, beggars and conspicuously crippled street folk's book over here and I'm asking you outright for money, for your own actual money that you earned at work or sold your blood and organs or whatever it is you do for your readies.
    .
    My next cues are taken from the stallholders, boating touts and taxi men, so I am insisting loudly and repeatedly that you give over some bloody money, immediately. I will use terms like `you pay friend` and `give money now`, possibly even `come look my shop NOW` even though I have no premises in this galaxy.

    Finally, my exorbitant little list is completed by my copying tourist tailors, unhaggled hoteliers, touts of all kinds and bloody taxi drivers again by including the subtle detail that you must pay an awful lot cashmoney to receive awful little, in fact none whatever, int he way of goods or services.

    You may think I've slipped even further down that spiral of lunacy I like to call my mind, but honestly you will want to do this. It is is all in the name of charity, you see.

    I, well really we (meaning Greg and I, who are pretty much joined at the hip these days) met a smashing couple of lads called Mark and Ross back in Anjuna who then also mooched on to Palolem, who are taking part in a Great Race of impressive scope and nobility of purpose.

    The Rickshaw Run is a trip of ludicrous design and proportion, involving small teams of worthy souls piloting their own autorickshaw - also know as a trishaw and basically just a flimsy little scooter with an even flimser cab bolted on - all the way from Kochi/Cochin to Khatmandu. From the centre of India's most southerly, all the way state to Nepal which is North of India itself. The mission they have chosen to accept is to drive a quite horribly unsafe 3 wheeler bike-taxi, sporting only a 2-stroke 150cc engine, a total distance of around 2,500miles/4000 kilometres in no more than 16 days.

    In India; land of no traffic laws, realm of highly dangerous roadways, and a place where because everyone believes in reincarnation a mild bout of death really isn't a problem, and they have this strongly in mind every time they get behind the wheel. I'm serious about the death part; a lot of people really just don't worry about it, especially when driving, I was chatting to some English bloke who once went to the funeral of a young friend he'd made who died in a bike crash, simply because he wore no helmet. His friends and relatives attended the service and most of them then left on scooters and motorbikes, none of them wearing a helmet. It is just how they do things here: figuratively speaking, death is an everyday thing for most people.

    The actual size of the routes is variable because in addition to the roads, the underpowered little rickshaw, and the casual attitude towards life and death of every other driver, the team have had to plan their own actual route as well, and accurate maps are hard to get hold. Plus, if it all goes wrong then they have no assistance nearby and no-one to rely on but each other, as a team these chaps really are out there on their own.

    Brave, brave lads I say.Take a minute and go to their site, read a little about it all if ya like and then please, give a quid or two to one of their charities.
    They are doing this primarily for Mercy Corps, who fund and administer numerous projects in India to improve all manner of living standards for the poorest and most vulnerable people.
    Also they are donating to Cancer Research UK, and I think eveyone can appreciate what a little more funding for those guys can do, no-one I know is untouched by the issue here and I hate to quote a feckin' supermarket in a matter of goodness towards fellow our humans, but every little helps.

    So, go here: http://www.legendsofthephaal.co.uk/index.htm this is Mark and Ross' private site, the name of their team is explained first by looking here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110322/
    And then here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaal
    Just in case you were wondering.
    The official Rickshaw Run site is here: http://rickshawrun.theadventurists.com/

    So, in honour of these guys and all the other teams who are doing the Run, have a little look and chuck in a quid, even 50pence.
    It'll make you feel good all day, I bet.

    (N.B. the Jack reference in the title is because I've taken to using the name whenever I don't quite trust someone. It is a useful mental marker because it leaves you open and aware to the possibility of lying your way out of situations you think are ajust a bit dodgy, when you know soemthig's not quite right - it makes it a lot easier to excuse yourself when you just plain don't like a person, people or a place, too. You meet lots of people in Goa and some of them are met in slightly unlikely places that smell just a bit too incongruous to be trustworthy, and most of them, being foreign to you, are hard to scrutinise reliably and get a proper take on due to the cultural nuances that are different, and unknown to you. So, in honour of my past haircut and the bar tab I used to run in the Olive Tree under `Cap'n Jack` I am now being slightly dishonest with a percentage of everyone I meet. This pleases me even more than kittens, I can tell you.)

  • WAYN - a needless tragedy.

    The website known as WAYN.com - Where Are You Now - should be my first port of call for all this travel malarkey. A bunch of my friends are on there, and if there's a better way to keep track of someone doing a global trip then I don't know what it is, but it should be WAYN and it just isn't.

    Have you had a look at the thing? It is obtuse and obscure and obfuscating and other words beginning with ob. I dislike the whole look, feel and navigation of the place.

    Am I an idiot? Please, anyone reading who uses it and uses it well please, save an idiot from WAYNscurity (too many obs in this piece already) and drop me a couple of hints, please :)

    Retard out.

  • The Day Today (hello you...)

    This is a story about stories, from the fairytale world of the media. But first, these messages from our sponsors...

    I have just finished a very nice snack of balled falafel in a restaurant with an unusually effusive introduction to its menu. Menus often have introductions, usually a welcoming line or two on the front itself or just inside the cover, they don't often contain a potted history of why this particular proprietor, exactly, wants you to have such a good meal, although sometimes phrases like "you will have the most excellent of gourmet foods here" and "we wish to show you the true goodness of the Indian cooking" crop up around this point.

    One gathers from this little essay - occupying the entire opening page complete with a faded photo portrait, that he (the proprietor) had a mentor, now deceased, who seemingly represented the global zenith of benevolent gastronomy, at least in the eyes of this bloke. In some zen-like way the late chappie, one `Osho` of indeterminate surname, wanted to share and spread the message of world peace and unilateral military disarmament through the medium of food.

    I think it's little gushing and over zealous, even for Indian English. The falafel, however, really was excellent.

    Anyway I meant to keep this short - it's about the newspaper I read in the restaurant not the place itself. I swiped the latest edition of The Navhind, the official paper of Goa. Well, it's about as official as anything else is here, things are pretty much always `official` `guaranteed` and `best` in name only - the whole idea of advertising basically amounts to how much you can get away with before someone shouts "Oi!!" and pulls you up on your extravagant and unfounded claims. The Advertising Standards Authority would have arresting seizures within 90 minutes of landing here.

    Right, the paper: some of the stories are .... interesting. More revealing, really. I made notes:

    There was a `Gold Medal award for fire officer`, so ran the headline. `Plucky hero saves family/family pet` I'm thinking as I read, but it turns out he simply completed a 6 month training course in first place. O-kay then. It made The Navhind's page 2 because it was the first time the first place award was won by a Goan. Not quite the same as a heroic dash into a burning ruin is it? I'm guessing also that awards handed out for training courses that are more to do with typically bureaucratic Indian management schemes and procedural paperwork aren't worth a light, quite frankly. Still, nice headline.

    The former Prime Minister of Pakistan (who's affairs are always closely tied with India's being that Pakistan is the Muslim part of an originally much larger country. It split because Islam & Hinduism just couldn't live together without squabbling, and they still kill each other over it near parts of the border. Well done God Squad, chalk yourselves up another point.) was assassinated a few days ago. Benazir Bhutto, female, former PM and up-till-recently leader of the opposition as well (she now does a nice line in martyrdom) was attacked after a party rally, there was at least one explosion and several gunshots, Bhutto was hit in the head at least once and the surgeon operating, in true gritty Indian style, was directly quoted in the paper: "part of her brain and a lot of blood were outside her head" ran the cheery report, and she died on the way to the hospital for all intents and purposes. Not surpised. Brains are notoriously hard to spoon back in, or so Igor tells me.

    It was a suicide attack, but whether that applies to the bomber alone or whether the gunman/men were operating remotely and did the deed without losing their own precious claret was unclear.

    One semi-crazed report outside the front page (the story was about the current PM's grief, sadness, call for international investigation - Scotland Yard are sending a team - and probably his personal absolution of sinful thoughts he might have had against his key political rival) claimed she wasn't shot with bullets but with lasers. Well fuck me, folks, I know a little about modern weapons and I tell you, that sounds just a touch unlikely.

    It really wouldn't be necessary to use something like a bloody laser to kill a single person in a public space, and apart from the fact only the US, China, and possibly Russia have any kind of laser weaponry that can punch holes like those referred to, they are in fact generally mounted onto aircraft or the very heaviest of tanks, and cost a few million dollars each. I'm fairly certain they even cost tens of thousands of bucks just to deploy each time you want something wiped out.

    It seems to me, and without getting too worryingly specific, that if you're going to that kind of trouble for an assassination then a modern laser-AIMED large calibre rifle of the anti-tank variety (may as well do it properly) set up a couple of miles away would do the job an awful lot more efficiently, and a good few million pounds cheaper. Call me crazy, but even evil-minded politicos and affronted fundamentalist eunuchs have to work to a budget.
    Bhutto's wounds were apparently "injuries that were completey new to me" according to the eminent surgeon, which doesn't suggest anything so much as that he ought to get out into Afghanistan and Iraq if he wants to see the entire range of bodily perforations available to the modern ballistics victim. I'm sure he has seen urban gunshot wounds, I doubt he has seen what the United State's heavy armour penetration rounds can do to the human body.

    Anyway it's a crackpot version of a shocking story - leader of the opposition shot and blown up in public. Shameful, not to mention irritating for all those near to her having nasty dry cleaning bills. if only someone had tried it on sleazy old Mickey Howard a year or so back, though, I would have written a personal cheque to Sketchleys myself.

    A motorbike thief was caught after pinching a Honda in the town of candolim. This made news ahead of a whole load other stories, including one bout a domestic argument that ended rather draatically as the wife, after threatening to set fire to herself promptly laced her person generously with kerosene and put a match to herself, the husband, shocked, grief-stricken and plainly very much demented copied her and did the old `kerosene incineration death` himself. I mean, it's a bit melodramatic isn't it? There are easier ways, any number of tall buildings and freely dispensing pharmacies in this country, honestly. Still, anyway the bike thief. Why would it make page 3 of the state paper (`The paper you can trust`)? Maybe you might say nothing else happened yesterday, or maybe it's just so rare the police manage to leave the tourists alone in their eternal quest for baksheesh that they managed to catch an actual criminal.

    I shall leave you to decide.

    The odd thing is, the bike's registration number was clearly printed along with, if I'm not mitaken the name of the thief and the name of the rightful owner. Turns out printing vehicle registartions is a matter of course - every article to do with cars and bikes included, wherever possible, the makes, models and registration numbers of the particular vehicles, often with owners names somewhere in there as well. Traffic accidents involving 4 cars resulted in each identifying person and plate number appearig in a newspaper - do they really care THAT much about motoring? I never knew it was quite so serious.

    This isn't especially short is it? Oh well, one to go;

    There was a blockade of some road or other in protest of some new piece of legislation, I forget what. It was about land laws or property possesion laws or something. Anyway, a bunch of protesters formed a road block, so the police shot them and killed 3, several officers were also injured although how many wasn't mentioned.

    What was that? A citizen's road block, made up of a human chain and a bunch of pissed-off members of the public, seemingly the worst foe an officer of the law could possibly ever face so clearly the only way to solve this one is, hey, we'll just have to shoot some of them dead, take aim, lads....
    I would bet you large dollar amounts that more than 3 protesters were killed, I mean they had to fuck it up so gloriously I'd bet two or three times that many were blown away once they'd finished firing.
    Oh yes, they called it a `firing` never a `shooting`. A less emotive and intentional term, perhaps.

    There was a little quote here which really didn't do the situation much justice: "the Magistrate in charge ordered lathicharge ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baton_charge read it, it says a lot, and take a look at what a lathi actually IS too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lathi ) then firing in the air. But when these measure failed to contain the agitators, police had to resort to firing".

    Well rioting civilians can be nasty, I'm sure. A thrown brick can kill a man, if he isn't wearing riot gear and armour, and a sharp word about your personal ancestry can really hurt.

    Not as much as a bullet though

  • Perking up in Paradise

    If only there weren't so many bars assimilating the idea into their business names and flaunting the P-word from their rooftops, we might be even more awestruck by its beauty.
    If the bars were just thinned out a little then that would be great in itself, once again though I have to forgive them. Such excellent wording
    There is a certain Indian brilliance in many things, Indian English in this case, so it seems a richer, more vibrant form of a language grown stuffy and overly clinical in its own land. Nevertheless between the likes of Stephen Fry, a swathe of (invariably expatriate) British authors and a few pompous amateurs *cough* we try to redress the balance in our favour a little bit.

    They like to use exciting, evocative words and they thrill in all new things when they speak, eyes light up whenever a conversation with leaves the pedestrian and necessary ("where you from/which country, where you staying, what would you like to order/eat/drink" etc.) and drifts towards families, other places you have been, they have been, where you/they want to go, and especially about their interests and when they share a joke. Some of them could laugh for a whole country.
    I simply haven't dared to talk to anyone about Cricket yet (it's getting the capital letter, it deserves it over here) for fear of being swept away in a wave of passionate opinionating and longing reminiscence.

    Another excellent yet seemingly insignificant thing I love is the `horn OK please` message seen on the back of any vehicle larger than a family saloon (estate vehicles are strangely unpopular, I've seen about 4.5 of them in my 8 week jaunt, spread around half a dozen little towns and in one case spread around the sides of a hefty tree, hence the .5 - and you thought I made a mistake didn't you?), which I may have mentioned before in the entries about Mumbai.
    I can't really justify it but these are a joy in themselves to me, not only because of the usual lavish splashings of colour used in adorning the vehicles with such a message (as they often adorn the whole damn truck, I can see where the inspiration for multi-coloured vans so beloved by '60s hippies came from), but the very fact that they are asking politely to be honked at if they're in anyone's way.
    You can't help but admire a culture that unquestioningly allocates to themselves this humble gesture in one of the most passionate aspects of their lives. Mind you, it could be an excuse to get the paintbrushes out as they do love to colour things up, equally it might be to give them moral excuses to deafen the rest of the motoring population themselves, either way I love it.

    Motoring and its means is of great importance to a lot of Indians, far more so than I would have previously thought, and there is far less shame (in fact none) taken in a little swaggering and posteuring, the likes of which would be laughed off the very streets in merry old England (except in the very least discerning places. Like Hull. What's that about axes? Grinding?).
    On most busy street corners and hangouts for the Indian male youth; Indian girls lead a far less public existence and, somewhat shamefully, are far more often seen working during the day and the night while the lads are doing standard jocular lad things in large numbers; the young bloods about town see nothing ironic or anything to be cynical about in sticking BMW badges onto the front of their 150cc Yamaha motorbike.
    Slapping iconic decals (that's `stickers` to all us non boy-racers) from Hollywood blockbusters along the side is also popular, although to be fair the bikes themselves, despite being about as powerful as a hand-whisk, are usually in splendid condition with fresh, gleaming paintwork - although this only applies to richer lad's sporty bikes; the rest of them are 1000-year old Enfields that look most recently used by T.E.Lawrence.
    A faux-BMW chicken-chaser of a bike with a `XXX` or `DieHard 4.0` sticker on the side is less a humiliating social catastophe than an acceptable and slightly tongue-in-cheek shared joke. Again, I can't help thinking it would be a nicer world in some ways if the lack of cynicism were more shared by the rest of us, although I do draw the line at Triple-X stickers. I mean, at least choose a film that wasn't shit.

    I haven't seen a Dominoes Pizza emporium in Palolem *victory dance* I succumbed to the one in Anjuna as there bizarrely actually was one (am I covering stuff I covered already? I'm far too lazy too check and too much of an ex-stoner to remember) so working through the various scraps of paper, knapkins, NYE club flyers and human skin on which I've made my notes I'll just crack on and get it all down before they disintegrate, or the police trace the victim and find something for the sniffer dogs to work with:

    The girls in this country, by and large, I have to say, speaking in terms of comeliness and fair features, really do knock spots of those in dear old England. This obviously does not apply to any girl I know and can call a friend. You are all quite lovely, but as such are not exactly in the majority. There is something individual and identifiable in the faces of the different peoples from all areas of the world, undiluted as yet in many places by gross multiculturalism we can still pick these out and, I have noticed, there are a great many more pretty young women around than in the UK: and this is really only the countryside.
    Just an observation. Maybe it's me and my own personal aesthetic preferences, or maybe it's that I have seen one too many corpulant teenage chavs in England, bloated from a thousand too many McDonald's meals and recovering badly from an onslaught of cheap makeup and fake gold jewellery, plus of course the aftermath of their fourteenth child, I don't know. Maybe I'm being a little harsh. A lot of them merely live in Hull after all.

    Cows: not as sacred as you thought. You can get steak and many other previously moo-capable dishes in quite a few restaurants, which led me to believe the religious significance of the beasts might be a little two-faced; they walk everywhere and are allowed everywhere - and allowed to shit everywehre too, which makes life interesting if a little smelly.
    I snapped one inside a restaurant last night, brazenly standing by the bar as if expecting a grass 'n' bamboo smoothie, not 5 feet from a table of diners. What would happen if Daisy had chosen to evacuate her bowels right there I do not know, the staff seemed keener to please her than they were to serve tables (that particular place does SUPERB food but the service is intermittent at best. It's a genuine Italian restaurant. They exported more than just the chefs.)
    But then, there is a get-out clause even though you see them in the streets and on the beaches just the same - buffalo; technically not cows, so line 'em up and pass me the boltgun, there a'cookin' to be doing. Bit of a sneaky one there I feel.

    -

    Ooh ooh ohh - actualy genuine new developments: I was feeling particularly miserable, okay, I'll admit it, very EMO (god I can't believe I let myself fall for that shit again) on new year's eve and the preceding day, so I went out got a new tattoo (one I drew in Arambol a month or more ago) and the next day a professional shave, new haircut and a face massage, the shave/hair/face combo costing just - you're gonna hate me - Rs 120.
    That's just less than £1.50. Booyaa!
    I said something to Greg the other night about punctuation abuse and especially the wanton abuse of exclamation marks and yes, I've been especially guilty of it lately. But hey. You are going to have to live with the fact that I think some things might be a little `racy` whether you think so or not.
    At least I didn't use one at the end of this sentence!
    (sorry)

    So, pictures coming honestly soon honestly, including one of my lovely new tattoo (it's in colour, you know) and all sorts of other random wotsits.
    I have booked my escape route from the beach and will indeed make it Hampi on or about the 8th of January of this year, m'lud.
    Sitting in the same office I booked my ticket it seems I certainly wont be alone, approximately half the western world will desend on the place because every person, every single one of them in the 90 minutes I've spent in this busy little travel agency/internet cafe has asked for a trains or bus to Hampi, and this is only one of about 20 or so travel places in the village (which gives you an idea how touristy it really is) so yeah, I wont be short of company.

    Oh, and a note from Australia: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=181996
    I'll be flying into Darwin the Northern Territories around the middle of April or middle of May. Looks like I'd better behave!

  • A quick note on a slow process.

    Did you honestly expect it to be quick? Fools.

    Okay, I promise to whichever deity happens to be passing that the next post, material for which I truly am collating at the moment, honest, won't be about me again. Yes, that means this one is. If you really, really want to bend your face inwards with your keyboard at the prospect of another whinging idiot banging on about their `issues` on the internet then please, don't unsubscribe, I love you really, but skip this one over and just you get your Wanderlust valves loosened up for the next entry.
    Until then this is your captain speaking, from the bridge of the HMS Lugubrious, for your comfort and convenience please engage your sympathy ports and uncouple your woe deflectors, thank you.

    Every time, it happens every bloody time but still I don't quite recognise it: the seasonal cold.
    Well, more truthfully, the tri-seasonal cold as I seem to get about a dozen miniture editions a year, but usually one or two of them truly knock me for six. The same thing happened this time last year and caused no end of misery for everyone within 2 miles from the blast zone - why the hell I should get one when my current environmental temperature averages 29º Celsius I can only wonder, although I would postulate a likely answer: those poxy tourists. I guess one of the dashed blighters came along from their frosty homeland (and we've suffered an invasion on a scale similar to 1944 Normandy these last 3 days) and spread about their sinusational woes (I'm allowed words like that, I'm ill) amongst their fellow man. The insurmountably inconsiderate gits.

    Anyway this at least explains, in part, my self-piteous misery and lack of agreeableness, which I know must be sensationally nonplussing for you readers who don't even know me personally. Its hardly riveting for the poor fuckers who HAVE met my greasily pompous avatar upon the Earth, but hey, that lot are kind of obliged to give a damn by dint of being so dashed bloody politely British. I love inflicting Englishness upon the English some times, you can all share a bit more of this self-effacing deprecatory nonsense that Americans rarely understand and rightly often scorn, spread it out a bit, I have far too much on my plate thank you very much.
    In fact, it is actually the cause of a good many of our own personal troubles and those of our fine country today as well, in this smoking-jacket-wearing padded-leather-chair-bestriding pseudo-intellectual's opinion, what? Harrumph!!

    *removes stick from arse*
    *descends from soap-box*

    I would very much like to thank every one of those lovely people that do know me in the real world, whatever that is (isn't life all about USB sockets, serviceable broadband connections and alphanumerically chronicled vituperations, after all?) for all their worthy messages of help and support in the midst of my silly little upheaval recently. A fantastic thanks to you, I was impressed by the sheer number of kind words from all quarters, so here's to you *raises bottle; of TONIC WATER (honest ;) )* A very happy 2008 to every one of you, you certainly deserve it.

    It's almost true about the tonic water you know. Vodka mysteriously finds its way into most of the damn glasses as well, but that's not my doing, that's all Greg's fault :P

    Colds: also known as Man Flu. I strongly denied for years that I was amongst those distinctly unmanly males for whom a cold represented a near-death experience.
    Although I never complain (any more than usual) about the sense-stiffling blockages, crippling expenditures on tissues or the aches and pains in joints and muscles that most blokes do every time one of our kind gets the sniffles (as a smoker and direct descendant of Captain Catarrh [sorry Dad, these things do seem to be hereditary] a shameless public expectorator and also a foolish self-wounding drunkard & ex-manual labourer, these symptoms are either a constant feature of life or are total nonstarters, regardless of my immune system's opinion) I failed for a long while to realise the psychological impact.

    True, for a few years now I have been able to identify myself and some others, especially my Dad, as having an impending cold up to 4 days before it became in any way physically obvious, it was in itself obvious to me by a stark downshift in joie de vivre and our usual joyous dispositions, but when you're feeling a bit shit about more important things - especially the most important things i.e. life, death, love and happiness - and in a climate that you are unfamiliar with, it is easy to attribute the weird night-time scratchings in your left ear as some alien insectoid beast burrowing unstoppably towards your brain with dark desires to feed her brood (which of course is about to be laid inside of your skull somewhere) upon your delicate cerebral tissues.

    Well, it's easy to think that when you've got a bit of a fever and can't ever sleep for more than 2 hours together, so it takes a day or two to realise that it's not actually Lady Centipede and her thousand young but actually your own dear sinuses shifting their unwanted filling around in an effort to clear up your hearing and balance a little bit.
    Good stuff for quietly shitting yourself late at night when you're all alone abroad and can't sleep though, I recommend it to anyone who wants to experience some good solid paranoia, really first class stuff.

    So, as seem inevitable around new year's time, I let my own wicked immune system infect my mind with manifestations of it's own shitty issues, so yes, it's not as bad as all that.
    Still not happy though, especially after last night's NYE party where, having got to know a whole load of people (which is a marked improvement on all the time since Christmas day) and generally chatting with lots of ladies, I found that even given my ludicrously lofty standards it was really only me that was wanting, whereas they all wanted someone a bit more cool. Damn these fashionable youngsters, with their lack of noticeable bodyfat and uncomplicated deficit of jaded worldly wisdom. Okay `wisdom` is a bit grand, I take that back. It did make the sentence run nicely though you've got to admit.
    .
    I tell you what I leanred last night, the old myths are a complete lie: what women want in a fella isn't intelligence, courtesy and kindness, nor is it anyone tall dark and reasonably not-too-hideously-hideous: it's actually just a little childish bravado and a falseness that comes across as some kind of confidence. I can see it (the falseness, the unwarranted swagger and the lies, the so fucking OBVIOUS petty lies argh!!!) in all these guys, and still the women last night all went off with them, and not me. Doubtless they all had a lot of energetic and messy fun. I went off before sunrise and had a hugely overpriced bottle of rum. Hooray.

    Mind you, a lot of people at that party were totally whacked out on MDMA (an especially nice drug if I may so so) and Valium, a combination I'm sure is quite blissful, but as I was only drinking; and that not a lot of before I found my friend Rum; there wasn't a lot of point hanging about.
    The talking had mostly been done - I have been to about a hundred too many all-night parties and had at least half a million too many drugged-up/drunk conversations in my short little life already and am pretty sick of hearing the same old shit from the same old drugs, merely through a different person - and everyone who managed to make enough sense earlier on was either somewhere nearby rutting away like beasts of the field, or were entwined around someone of their preferred gender and preparing themselves for same.

    A quiet confidence founded on real life experience and, dare I be a little conceited here, an artistic soul - plus the fact none of these uncommitted charlies can dance for toffee and hey, I allow myself a little self-praise here because I know I'm good at at least 4 things in this life and dancing is most definitely one of them - count for nothing in the face of overtly happy lads 5 years younger than me and, I gotta admit, a whole hell of a lot skinnier.

    Oh well - I've come to believe these last weeks that you gotta be very much like whatever it is that you very much want to get, so I guess that I want to lose 30 pounds, a quarter of my spoken vocabulary and at least 90% of my life's experience and/or cynicism.

    Next issue: things apart from me, yay!!

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