Versive

I have been somewhat lax in my respnsibiities of lat. This is in part due to my difficult circumstances, and in part dude to the inneffectal and downright horrendous provision of adequate technotlogocical facilities. In short, the keyboada keys stick quie appallingly, the internet connections are egregious to put it mildly, and the speed of connecton, particularly when it comes to uploading decent quantites of files are damned infuriating.
I have had to comprehensively re-edit that past paragraph no less then 2 times.

Colour me fucking livid - I am leaving India, to Laos in 3 weeks or less. I am leaving this fine, rich, exuberant and glororiously diverse and enigmatic country: but with the very best of reasons.

I understand this is a developing country but this frankly is simply not good enough. I am a creature of the Western world through and through and denying my feeling in that matter amounts to the secular equivalent of a blasphemy. Another 9 grammatical and pronuncization edits, right there. I am going to Kochi, skipping a large large part of my intended India excursion, flying out of the counyty via Chennai and going to Laos, where, at least, these thing are accepable and expected. They still hunt fish with spears, know littlem of the world beyond China, and hunt and gather meat in the finest traditions of the cultures that formed the foundationa of al that we know today as `civilisation` - whereas here they pretend to have multimedia capablitiies on a par with Europe and he fshions and, arguably, the fascism to match. Enough is, in the words of some famous so-and-so, is enough.

Anyway my next report will, typographical disiasters notwithstanding, do the justive to the city of mangalore that in this man's eyes it deserves.

A qck example of th disastrous typod, infrequet editing, keyoard malfucions and downright inadequacy of the suystems abilit o recognose simle words wil hopefully illustare theappaling level evel the mst mild-mamannered tyists can ony bearluy withstancd.

I hope that this, above all, will demonstrate the frustration I feel each and evey time I try to report back to you the candid, unbiased and unashamedly honest view of a westerner in this Eastern land of mystery and intrigue.

- James di Meo.

This is an entry about heroin addiction, obviously. More homework, boys and girls; for those few of you who may not have seen the film Trainspotting I strongly urge that you do, not for any relevance it bears to this entry but for the cultural good of your souls Anyway, I don't think that the characters from that film would ever be allowed on the Indian rail network, even if they were real people. The ludicrously-heavily-armed guards would probably slot 'em as soon as they appeared.

We all probably know that many foreign countries tend to have armed guards hanging about places more freely than we do in dear old England; Italy is litered with them, for example, serving as intemperate receptionists for banks, hotels, and suspiciously large mansions all over; but seeing as I know a thing or two about all this firearms business (at least from obsessing over the plastic toy kind ) then it seems a little over the top to have at least 3 specially-trained security personnel sporting, alongside slightly silly Texan hats and rather more elite uniforms, some excessively purposeful firepower hanging about on each and every platform at Bangalore train station.
The same rang true at Goa airport, a chiefly domestic place that sees very little international air traffic and not a great deal of traffic generally in the big scheme of things, where a guy nonchalantly (very nonchalantly, he looked a bit stoned) grasping a Kalashnikov was hanging about the entrance from 5:00 in the morning.

In most places where arms are cheerfully sported by security personnel and Mafia enforcers the weapons are usually small, pistols, revolvers and the like. The Ranger-look-alike guys at Bangalore station had slung across a shoulder an old British Army SLR, and a Galil. These names should mean nothing much to you because then you would be as nerdy an individual as I am, but to the keen-eyed and geeky it will be apparent that these are all large-calibre assault rifles, military weapons, not the domestic forces' pistols, or perhaps sometimes submachine guns that basically fire small, less harmful, arguably more friendly pistol rounds.
The distinction is a little bit important - as is that fact that the Galil and the Kalashnikov are fully automatic weapons capable of reducing the most determined crowd of peaceful protesters to just so much corned beef and claret - all in all it seems just a little but like, if you will pardon the tasteless joke, overkill.

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Anyhoo, the trip from Bangalore was extremely pleasant, and I wasn't even shot at once on the station, which was nice. Getting tickets threw light on more bizarre behaviour in this country, where the ticket desks each sold tickets for only one destination each. I can't even imagine why this should be, and it must keep changing at an inconveniently rapid rate because with only 16 or so desks and at least 10 times that many individual destinations on direct routes from Bangalore the numbers, they just don't quite add up. Call me Mr. Silly, but if everyone wanted to go to just a few destinations at certain times of day, as is very likely in a modernised, commuter-dependant city liie Bangalore, then a couple of poor sods at their desks will be working their arses off while their neighbours do sweet-F-A.

Once on the train, the best things in the Indian people shine through: everyone was extra friendly to Maria and I, and when it got crowded, extremely crowded I might add, and a seat became available then people, all sorts of people, would tap my arm and gesture as if I had some divine rigth to the only available seat for the next 100 kilometres and 45 minutes. Elderly women would cross the aisle, dodging chai-wielding maniacal stewards and three dozen irate commuters just to let me know that the seat was there, perhaps even losing their own seat in the process. I was touched, flattered, and not a little embarrassed; needless to say I declined, as it was I was loving the ride by the open door far too much anyway.

The roads are so universally dreadful it is a huge pleasure to ride the rails, and the scenery, the openness of the people and the openness of the carriage doors made for a wonderful journey, I can see now what Dad always says about riding the train; I always liked it, but there's nothing quite like some unique scenery and the wind rushing in your face.

Bring back the old roll-window, external-opening-only door-handled carriages on Britains railways, I say

If you would like to see a seriously good film, gently poke some fun at the Christians, and watch Graham Chapman expose himself to a huge crowd who think he is the Messiah then your mission for the week is to go and watch Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
I also sheds some light on today’s title, and even answers it in some ways.
They were of course talking about what the Romans did for the Jews, but what the British did for Indians, aside from a lot of cheerful slaughter and theft of natural resources, is in some ways similar, although there are many differences too and it took the poor old Jews 1,946 to get their own country, and we all know how that turned out…

While I’m here, I have to offer an apology. I cannot research my facts because this computer can only run one internet window at a time: that one window is uploading pictures & video to Photobucket.com, and keeping a word file open concurrently is making the poor beast sweat pure liquid silicone from its sockets, so dates and possibly some of the longer words might not be all that accurate this morning

Now, it has to be said that Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, Holland and a few other countries were very naughty boys when they came to India. As John Simpson put it, the simply treated the country as their own personal goldmine, and they fought down the indigenous people and each other in their attempts to secure it for Queen/King, country, national glory and a second mansion with en suite ornamental gardens.
It also has to be said, though, that before Johnny European turned up then India, like most strategically placed and/or mineral-rich countries, had been invaded over and over by the neighbours, and had got pretty used to it all, perhaps even accepting with stoic grace the occasional need to replace family members as various foreigners trundled up the garden path and lopped their heads off.

It also has to be said, most importantly, that before all the white bastards turned up then India didn’t actually exist. It was never even a country, not a nation state but what you get before you get countries; ruled by warring kingdoms and fiefdoms, mostly the Hindu Vijayanagara empire in the South, and the Muslim Mughal Empire in the North. There were several others, too, and none of them could claim more than about quarter of the present country’s land as its own – there are still tribes in Eastern India that bow to no-one, and until about the 1970s (from memory of reading the date somewhere) they were called the criminal tribes, and were eligible for arrest simply for existing despite being in their thousand-year-occupied native homelands. Nasty old business, as my Brother would say.

What united India was in fact the East India Company, as after 150 years of battling other patriotic entrepreneurs (read: Mercenary buggers) they effectively ruled the country from the 1760s until the middle of 1850s, and while they were exploiting the diamonds, spices, wood, minerals, people and culture as only a pre-20th century empire could do, they also made such an impression on the Indian peoples that they became the Indian people, and banded together against the universal aggressor.

Although it wasn’t always that aggressive, after the initial and `necessary` old “move in and slaughter enough to keep ‘em quiet” routine, so treasured by the redcoat Army. The East India Company was in it for money, and obviously employed `local labour` (i.e. slaves or at least slave-wages workers) to get most of the work done. However, once it was established that the British were better equipped, organized and trained then it was largely over until the First War of Indian Independence, or the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 (I think) when the E.I.C. was finally defeated and the British government stepped in and, calling themselves the British Raj, did the vaguely decent thing and governed the place and established all the glorious modern frills and twiddles that make life so much easier and faster.

India before the British had no proper roadways (not much has changed, then…) and no railway system, meaning all transport was manual, either on foot or by a drawn carriage or cart. This fact alone limited India to a low-technology, low communications, low-progress state of being.

Technology was also largely antiquated by the standards of the Western world and having no means of mass production meant that everything had to be made by hand, so it was costly, often unreliable, and cripplingly slow to replace.

There were no telephones, no telegraph, not much in the way of public health treatment (that worked) and the country could not stand up to any coherent and determined aggressor, as was seen when at least 4 different European countries all managed to establish strong holds on the place while still fighting three countries with the other hand!

In short, we shared our cultures and the Indians came off the better, in the short term. Now, India stands for an awful lot more than a vunerable treasure trove, available for sacking and looting to anyone with enough silly men in shiny red coats carrying a flag. One in every six people who walk the Earth are Indian, and that is a lot more than we British, or even the Americans can lay claim to – in fact there are more citizens of India than there are subjects and citizens in all the countries of Europe combined; there are only around 800 million Europeans in this world, and, yes, that includes all those pesky asylum seekers, too :

It is one of only nine Nuclear Powers in the world - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons -
and has produced and propagated their armed forces, political capabilities and industrial worth to sufficient extent that they are regarded as only being just outside the G8, being one of the 5 Outreach Countries that attend the recently created `G8 + 5` meetings that will hopefully not be attacked by loonies with paint and eggs in quite the same way as the original ones are

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Of course, if it hadn’t been the British it would have been the Portuguese or the French of the Dutch, but as someone who sees an awful lot of anti-Empire thought and feeling, and as someone who respects the facts of the matter; that England handed virtual control of a country to a commercial company (who it later had to reign in and regulate into oblivion) for an easy profit and an expanding empire; I also think it highly unfair to think that we came along and raped and murdered and stole for 200+ years without actually leaving a lot of good behind, and in bringing a whole new world to a whole world, as it were: and vice versa.

There are many instances of British reverence and love for this country, and many, too, of love and respect for the British among Indians. Thousands of our lot lived and died over here too, and although the beginnings were, ahem, ignominious to say the least, the endings seem to be far from it. Young Indians love and absorb Western culture with more fervour than we do in the west, economic fantasies being a largely responsible I imagine, but there is a lasting and meaningful exchange of ideas, and more material things, that is to be commended and loved.
There are also, of course, the old stories of Indian soldiers in the British army who love and respect the regiments and the King/Queen/Whelp as much as any stiff-lipped Bedfordshire Colonel. And this is hardly limited to Armies, although of course in the more militarized world of the 19th Century these things were more everyday affairs.

I am warmly welcomed by most people who ask where I’m from, which is everyone. It is know as a `good country` even among those who have never visited and have no intention of ever going there. We wouldn’t have the massive Indian populations in the UK without an acceptance of the Commonwealth, and overall, I think that the British occupation of India was actually a good thing; think what would have happened if it had been Kaiser-led Germany, or Fascist Spain that had taken control. What if it had been a country less disciplined, more bloodthirsty, and less obsessed with social grace and politeness.

Of course taking over any country should never happen, it is wrong and motivated purely by greed. This is deplorable, and it would be best, of course, if India had been left alone.
To leave a country alone as it was does leave it vunerable however, and a warring group of small empires with no coherent or countrywide structure, surrounded by China and the Muslim world and with virtually undefended ports on a planet world with 4 massively successful naval empires is open to a lot of negative influence. Imagine if was left alone until 1939 and old Adolf set his sights on it…

Which isn’t a valid excuse for all the misdeeds, of course, it is just a recognition that it wasn't as bad as it could have been, and of course we ended up leaving so much behind that we advanced the country more quickly and more stably than I can otherwise imagine, and in 1947 when Independence was established then it was right and it was proper.

And with all the culture, peaceful spirit and calming `mysticism` that we have absorbed from the subcontinent, the practices and beliefs of a tranquil, simple life and the wisdom of a few simple rules of life that have powered a large part of estern thinking and success for the past 150 years, it seems to me it turned out that that we Europeans fared at least as well from sharing the culture of, too

PS: today’s post was going to be about Mangalore, but I thought of the title and it all just flowed from that! I’m leaving the city tomorrow for a small town in the forests called Madikeri, hopefully lots of trekking and wildlife shenanigans, and maybe I’ll finally catch up on the pictures for this here page. Maybe.

Having seen a few cities in this country, and being both enchanted and infuriated in turn by the habits of Indians and the particulars of Indian culture, I have picked up yet more titbits of trivia, morsels of intrigue, and notes on this ancient, modern society.

Which makes me sound a good deal more professional than I probably am, but in any case there are ome things around here that are a lot like that themselves, and, once again I turn first to the taxi men of India for inspiration on this page.

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There is an endearing yet also unimpressive habit here among those commissioned to drive you places for money, in that they don't seem to think it too important to know where those places are, exactly.
If a car turns up at your hotel to drive you on, let's just say for example, a 16-hour journey of about 600km across a quarter of the width of India then, although it is a mighty task to know such a vast country in any meaningful detail, you might like to hope that since you were paying the equivalent of a week's wages for a much more highly skilled worker for the privilege, (the equivalent would be taking a taxi to somewhere in Eastern France) it would be quite nice if the driver knew some of the area more than 20 kilometres outside his home town. On a list of things not boding well, a driver driving a 600km journey who needs to ask where he's going while only less than a tenth of the way there bodes pretty big, heavy an dark, if you ask me.

Fortunately, my cynicism isn't an accurate measure of Indian society because, perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone else in the country knows more about geography than your driver.
Asking directions (or rather, watching folk who speak the proper languages ask for directions) is an almost ulifting experience: at first it seems tremendously rude; there is no pre-amble, no `sorry to bother you, but...` no `excuse me` - the destination is simply barked out at whoever happenes to be around, and creditably to everyone so far barked-at they all upstaged our driver in knowledge and wisdom of the highways.

This practice is most often used by autorickshaw drivers, and on autorickshaw drivers. Presumably there is some A.R.D. zen master who goes around schooling young neophytes in these subtle arts - "Dont use meter, use words of Johnny Ball-san; Think of a number, and triple it; Learn roads but always pretend no learn roads for tourists, long trip mean big tip; ask every foreigner they want taxi even if they in one already" etc.

Another thing worth noting is that the rickshaw guys, and taxis in general, will give a lift to any of there friends who happen to be around and want to go somewhere, probably detouring you ever-so-slightly and unnerving you ever-so-much if late at night. The prospect of two people driving you down some weird-arse little muddy track in the dead of night gives you cause to reflect ominously on phrases like `the dead of night`, although physical violence is one thing I really dont think they go in for here.

Strangley enough, the best person for directions and orientation was a guy I got a lift from today who wasn't even a taxi driver; down by the Managlore coast it is pretty quiet and rurl, and very disorientating. i rickshaw'ed down there and thought I had the lie of the land, got deposited on a bit of beach a few kilometres from where I wanted to be (a posh resort whose restaurant I intended to try out for lunch; nevr did see the place) and thought a nice walk on the beach would set me up for the mea nicely.

Turns out the road behaved like a crazed contortionist and passed through itself at least sixteen-hundred times so that North was South, and South contrived somehow to be upside down. I found an abandoned rickshaw and a bunch of youths saw me and asked where I wanted to go. Ended up commissioning one of them to ride me back to Mangalore city for slightly less than the rickshaw fare would have been, we only had one helmet between us but his directional sense was examplary.

And I had the helmet for almost the whole journey, only swapping it for one section in town as we passed the police station - in India, pillion passengers recieve the cotempt they probably deserve and I suppose it's considered more or less okay if they die!

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The television here is a revelation to me, mostly in that it is occasionally good and there are at least 8 English language channels hidden amongst the 90-odd native tongue choices, most of which are either bad dramas from the Ramayana, televangelist preachshows or dodgy music-routine displays of staggering tackiness.
The English channels invariably include national Geographic, Animal Planet and The Discovery Channel though, so despite the latter's dreadfully low-brow presentation (do I hear you cry `kill the snob!` ?) if you leave me with a TV set I am a happy man.

actually it's worth mentioning tat I have been spoilt rotten lately; arriving in Mangalore 3 days I checked into the Hotel Poonja International, and you can rightly bet that any joint with the word `international` in its name knows how to bloody charge. Happily enough it was splendid beyond measure, with a proper marble lobby, doormen in suitably ridiculous formal costume who saluted you each time they held the door open for your arrival or departure (I tipped this poor mug all the change from my total bill in compensation for his ridiculous hat alone), and proper room service who understood at least a third of what I was saying at least a quarter of the time. For my plummy, middle-class conversational tones through an Indian internal telephone line, that is extremely good.

They had cable tv there, and the new place at a third of the cost a few streets away also has, amazingly, cable TV with an even better choce of channels.
It's a wonder I've even left the buildings here, as it is I've been surprisingly busy

Watching TV for over an hour, channel surfing as one does, it becomes obvios that your first susicions were true.
The guy who advertises satellite TV, cricket shows, Tag Heur watches and Suzuki cars also advertises Coca Cola, Ralph Lauren Polo clothing, Air Tel moile phones and government Television programming.
He is a cricketer, or rather, was one before he was rendered incapable of movement from all the labels, decals, endorsements and brand logos stapled onto every inch of his carcass. In reality he probably drives a Nissan Micra, drinks only tap water and prefers shabby sackcloth shifts to all that stuff.

Who amd I kidding the? The bugger is probably wiping his arse with a Coke-brand 1000 Rupee note as I speak - I shall keep you updated on all and any other things I see his face associated with Also his name would be kind of useful...

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Television again; many adverts (and there are many indeed) try to coax you into buying tapes and CDs. Tapes. Weren't they made illegal under anti-lameness laws years back?
Only joking of course; they were actually just rounded up and leant against a brick wall with a nice cigarette.

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You will see, or rather you would if any of tem were aesthetically pleasing enough, swastikas absolutely everywhere. No, it isn't a neo-fascist movement of Indians, I can hardly even imagine such a thing, but the symbol was of course stolen by old Adolf from the Eastern world, flipped around so the arms point anti-clockwise, and whacked on a snazzy red & white banner under which he bastardised this symbol of spiritualism as he bastardised the politics of Germany and the spirit of the German people.
Rudyard Kipling of Jost So Stories and The Jungle Book fame had a swastika printed - the correct way round - on the first editions of that latterly mentioned title.

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If you go into a shop with an awkward collection of money then you wont always get all of your change - never fear, though, because if there is a shortage of the right notes or coins then the balance will always be made up with sweets, chewing gum, pens or anthing else that the shop sells of equivalent value to the defecit. Isn't that just delightful?

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Last thing for now; the pavements. I mentioned this to Maria and she all bt burst out laughing; I mentioned that I was going to mention that they almost entirely absent from this country, with only the larger cities having them and then they were on at least 4 different levels, with some huge distance between tem and kerbs more than 18" high in some places. Not a country to drunkenly wander at night even in the most developed places, then, but Maria opened my eyes to the fact that this is a developing country.

Yes, you'd think i might have guessed that, but credit where it's dude, it hardly ever really seemed to be one to me - the media and politics are so up-to-date (in infrastructure if not in content or style - but then again, neither is America ). I should have suspected something from all those palm leaf & bamboo huts and overloaded bicycles really (I saw a rickshaw with easily a thousand coconuts on it last week, damn thing was bigger than a 3-tonne transit van and covered in brown fur. I'm tempted to make jokes about Ann Widdecombe here but I shall resist).

The shocking thing is how many people are living in those huts made from bamboo stakes and woven palm leaf panels: nothing more than tents, in reality, only far less waterproof. People, by and large, are poor and struggling and in a country of over a billin people - one 6th of all poeple onm Earth, this is pretty terrible at times.
The affluence of city life often fails to hide this, too, although the beggars are not to be believed

What is msot noticeable, in a way, is that the clothing of most villagers from goa and all across Karnataka, and across all of India I would suspect, has faded with wear and filth to a uniform brown, the patterns of every garment dulled by the all-pervadng mud and the quite brutal method of washing which necessarily involves a large rock, a dirty river, and a lot of hard thrashing.

But I will leave on a more cheerful note because quite obviously that is more likely to bring some of you back
The next Entry, unless I cram in another photo post or two, will revolve around the marvelous city of mnagalore, where i have been my msot delighted so far on this trip. It is lovely, it really is, and you will find out exactly why soon

So, I've found myself in Mangalore and have a nice fast internet connection at a super-smart place, which, because it is so super smart and up-tp-date it is in truth just massively annoying. Network rules meant to limit the damage all those pesky users can potentially inflict on the management's precious systems end up basically being pretty useless - case in point: they have disabled right-clicks completely.

The fact it doesn't limit a goddamned thing except proper use of a computer is proven by looking at the program list, where there is one little gem called Live Sex installed and ready to rot the gentle inner workings of each and every machine present, and another called Something So Rude I Can't Bear To Repeat It Here Because My Parents Are Reading.
The fact that right-clicks, the ability to save, and the ability to use time-saving Macromedia or Java applets have all been anulled doesn't seem to have prevented the msot basic and obvious of security problems, viz, some silly bugger has installed suspicious new programs that are almost certainly highly corrupt (in more ways than one ).

In any case, this is good for you, the valued and value-seeking consumer, because here are the best photos from the past four weeks, up to the point where we almost left Mysore (see previous post) for our 16 hour jolly (by the way, I came back from Goa airport as well and that trip took a further 9 hours, which is why I bitterly mentioned my `25 hour hellish taxi ride` yesterday. Just in case you thought my number work was a little iffy)

The photos are all linked, to save your bandwidth and sanity, and some are larger than others although the vast majority should be 1600 x 1200 pixels; I read that on the camera when choosing the shot size, it's not like I bloody counted them or anything; so just click on all that sound interesting to you.
Unfortunately I can't do anything more with the newer pictures yet thanks to the paranoid system restriction here, so you are not able to see the crocodiles we got within five feet of.
Oh yeah, my wildlife spotting has stepped up a notch or three

Anyway - these are largely in a very screwed-up order, and quite frankly I don't care

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A large temple, I believe the Achyutaraya (pronounce that word, I dare you) complex with the Sule ("sool-ay") bazaar to the left, proper pics of that to come. This was taken from the hill that leads to it, a mile or two from Hampi itself:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory024.jpg

The first temple and depiction of Hanuman that I saw there. Hanuman is the monkey god (face of a monkey, body of a man, sex life of a leper) and is reknowned as being the muscle in the Hindu pantheon. There is a typically Disney-esque animated film of a sort-of school-age Hanuman out in cinemas now in fact:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory022.jpg

The river between Hampi and Virrupapur Gaddi when I first arrived, note the level of the water and the lushness of the greenery:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory020.jpg

There are about 4 of these partially-eroded brick-built temples for every man woman and child in India all dotted around the Hampia area, but this beingt he first, I get to share it:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory019.jpg

First sighting of a monkey too, if I'd had my camera ready I would have got an awesome video of when a whole troop of the crossed right in front of me and climbed the side of s shop stall, one of them stealing something on its way, but I had to wait and snap this little bugger around the next corner:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory018.jpg

Okay here it is, the best shot of the Virupakshur temple I have, and... it's sideways. Sorry, I don't think I can even upload and change the picture on this wonderfully thought-out system here so you'll have to do it yerrselfs, like.
If you have Windows XP you can save it right-click (at least some of us still can) on the picture and save it on your compooter, then right-click again and select `edit` to do all sorts of wonderful stuff to it:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory015.jpg

Another of the Virupakshur temple, but showing only the two smaller towers, (and it's sideways again too) taken from the massive yet gently-sloping, boulder-laden slab of rock called Hemakuta hill:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory014.jpg

This one is of all three templey bits; I think these towers are called gopurams, but that may refer to another kind of gateway feature or ancient tower, I haven't actually checked.
Anyway, the main temple, eet ees preeeetty biiiiiig is it not, senor? Actually no, it's actually quite sodding gigantic, considering it was all carved by hand and that no two carvings are the same:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory013.jpg

Baksheesh. Baksheesh Baksheesh Baksheesh. Even the holy men ask for it after they attack you with salutations and conversational tactics, then ask if you want to take a photo of them. They even have a little notebook in whch other gullible fools, I mean tourists, have testified that they happily donated and precisely how much. Having seen these endorsements in the hands of the Ear Cleaners of Goa (sounds satisfyingly like that wonderful Pratchettism `the Fleshpots of Ur`, doesn't it?) I somejhow dount that `Arnold from Canada` or `Carl from London` ever existed
Anyway I was young, foolish, and still not afraid enough of the clergy to know any better so I got this photo, gave them less than a third than their sheapest other customer had ever dared to surrender and legged it up a side alley before I could receive a Hindu curse.
Strangely, they look like pretty decent folk, after all that:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory012.jpg

A shot of one of the many, many hills composed solely of boulder around Hampi, taken just off the ferry boat and the other side of the river than the last one:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory011.jpg

And zooming out, the same exact shot:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory010.jpg

Not too bad a little camera, this.

Mount I-Ain'tNever-Climbing-This-Motherfucker, near the Goan Corner guesthouse and on the quiet, rock climbing side of the river:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory009.jpg

A paddy field. Ooh, I can smell your excitement from here:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory007.jpg

Okay, Monkeys. I just wantd to say that.
Okay, there really are monkeys, but again, the file saving shenanigans are not cool: I can't save the file even without using the right mouse button - OH HOW CLEVER YOUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR SETTINGS ARE, Mr & Mrs INTERNET CAFE OWNERS!! Not like customers can still install porn applications or anything.... ...anyway, monkeys are cool but, thanks to the genius here present, are also sideways:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory124.jpg

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory125.jpg

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%20things/rory126.jpg

This last one kinda proves I'm actually in India, check it out.

I would just like to add at this point that I hate powercuts Yes, thank you Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva et al, I probably shouldn't have slated you so much, so I just had to do a bunch of stuff again thanks to your `divine` intervetion *sigh* Bunch of tantrum-throwing bastards.

`Roight, 'ave some architecture, yerr complete barsterds!!`
By which I of course mean that I would love to show you some of the simply sumptuous stonework and craftmanship evident in and around Hampi, naturally.
A pillared temple in, I think, the UnderGround Temple (the bottom of the inner sanctum is actualy flooded, very Indiana Jones and very atmospheric :

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See it's not technically underground, really, but it does sound good:

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This shot kind-of sums up a lot of rural India around the Hampi region; sparsely populated, mostly farmland, temples and shrines all over the place (some in the middle of crop fields) and overall just a little bit shabby. Every family has its own deity, you see, so as well as there being the usual standard pantheon of around 40 or so popular gods, the enlarged pantheon of up to 2000 gods from the Mahabaratya and the Ramayana (two f-ing lengthy poems - each one 2 to 3 times the length of Homer's Illiad, I think - telling the story of the gods, more or less the bibles of Hinduism) there are also, technically, upwards of one million gods in this country.
I wouldn't want to be an atheist around here *ducks*
Anyway, here is another slightly disappointing photo that follows an enlengthened preamble:

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Rock/boulder formations/arrangements, ont he way back from a nearby village and about 3km from Hampi. Yes, I actually walked it, aren't I good:

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Tree in a field. Even I can't think how to jazz this one up, but it is a very nice tree:

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Okay, this is really what sums up India (in case you hadn't guessed, you really can't do that ) the old and the new in not-so joyous harmony - "hey, Pravin, how abou we shove a 100-watt bulb on a big metal bracket right above that temple? We want everyone to see it, right?"
"Sure, and it's only 700 years old so no-one will really notice it, especially when in rusts down a bit"
"Quality. Pass me the steel wire.."
All over the place, this is what you see:

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Some templey place with some rocks and some nicely framed trees and a road and stuff, look, it's got a precariously balanced boulder and everything:

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An inscription near the Krishna temple, you could almost be in Egypt... :

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And can I just say `Yay!!!` at this point - we's got 'lephants!! Okay, this was the first elaphant I really saw, still haven't `talked` to one yet (and I intend to, strangely) and I want to feed one, and ride on one, and play about with it/hi/her and, yes, you get the idea. I really love elephants, this one is called Lakshmi and, apart from shitting wherevr she pleases she is absolutely delightful:

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Monkey also:

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More brickwork delapidations:

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And a few carvings - I have many photos of carvings, most of which I will spare you. I am quite shocked at this myself, it's almost as if I've caught Culture out here or something:

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Right, so, I am off. This place closes soon, I don't know how many pictures I have left, but it's at least 16 (pics per page in Photobucket) times 40 (pages left in this album) - and that's not including the 2 memory cards I have yet to offload onto the internet!

I hope you've seen something you've liked so far, that's all I can say. Tomorrow or ze day after I should have what I was intending to actually write today; insights, opinionated claptrap and hyperbole about crocodiles; and then we can all get on happily with our lives

So, I have some amazing news: I got married this week!! She is a fabulous girl called Maria, met her in Hampi and we disappeared from the standard traveller scene together and went down to Mysore, a place that is just crying out for rude jokes to be made about it.

Okay, I was going to keep the pretence up but I just can't; we did indeed `get together` as the kids say these days, and sharing a room and loitering about each other in a furtively intimate manner makes the Indians think only one thing, usually (that being that the lady, why, she must be a whore! This is my main problem with the culture in the country,and this problem is dwindling pleasingly away as I get just that little bit less prejudiced every day, you'll be glad to hear) so we told everyone that we were married for the sake of an easy life, and it was a bit of a thirll going all over palaces, into shops, checking into hotels and catching autorickshaws with `my wife` ("Hi! Did my wife come in here - oh there you are. Found anything nice? We haven't much room in the hallway now, remember..") has been strangely exciting.

I do take a pleasure in misleading my fellow humans, and it's been a fun game to play this last week; and it keeps the majority of Indian men off our backs although, seing as she was commiting the trampish crime of baring her lower shins to the world it's no wonder they mistook her for a hooker. Obviously.

It does still get to me, that women are seen in such a callous and bigoted fashion - the main problem is, you see, that she looks Indian.
Maria's parents were Indian even though she was born amongst our (her) green and pleasant hills herself, so a white guy and an Indian girl makes it actually quite dangerous, potentially. pleasingly however, I'm the one who would get lynched of course. In some strange bittersweet way it is a good thing I despatched her on a plane back home this morning

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Oh and when you read this darling, XXX. God it makes you sick, doesn't it.

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Anyway, I have seen some cool stuff, oh yes: we took a sleeper bus from hampi (well, Hospet, the city 12km away) at some ungodly hour of the night and arrived at an equally godless morning hour in good spirts thanks, entirely, to Prince Valium
You really are excused of all pretension of bveing teetotal and stright-edged here if you plan to travel by bus - I have many bad words to say about Indian roads and their complete lack of smoothness, comfort or sense, generally starting with personal insults towards the roadlayers and their families and working all the way up to a spittle-encrusted tirade of unseemly horror regarding construction methods, materials used and the completely appalling c***s in government who fail to fund the enterprise properly.
Imagine being plonked into a man-sized blender and being slowly converted into a slush puppy, and you're somewhere close to the sensation of riding on the Indian road.

Anyway, we got hammered on Valium and Diazepam for the journey and I, with a creaking spine and Maria with a trapped nerve in her back, felt pretty damned justified. So there.

We went to the IT capital of India: Banglaore, also known to be the most progressive of all indian cities. We stayed for, ooh, at least 2 hours and most of that at the train station, so I can hardly claim to have investigated this most cosmopolitan of native conurbations.
Funny thing though, progressive as it is deemed to be they have some weird laws; I read in one of the daily papers (fresh towels, newspapers and disapproving looks every day in the hotel in Mysore; life doesn't get any better) that live bands, or livebands as they are always known (indians love running words like these together and creating new ways of looking at the concepts) are almost completely banned (ha ha) in the city through unnecessary and highly awkward legislation and licensing, and sin any case dancing has been criminalised. Dancing, illegal!! In bloody Bangalore it just doesn not compute, honestly I can't imagine what they were smoking the day that new law was passed.

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Trains in this country are fantastic; the doors in each carriage's end and centre are left open - it would be a clean and easy murder method if you felt so inclined - and I spent almost all of the 4-hour trip from Bangalore to Mysore next to one or the other of them, chatting to an engineering teacher at the university of Bangalore, and consuming at least half a dozen cups of masala coffee from the screaming chai-wallahs who squeeze their way through the thickinging crowds every 10 minutes.
Oh yes overcrowding: this was `sleeper class, a class of train ticket that allows no sleep unless you grew up in a blasting quarry and were savaged by roaming coffee merchants every night of your pre-teenage life. Still, it's better than `2nd class` where the seats are plain wooden slats and people still climb outside and on top of the carriages to get on board in rural areas. It's just one of the 8 available classes of tickets in India; they're nothing if not bureaucratic about these things

So I got some cool photots and a few vidoes, and now have nearly 2000 photos from India alraedy and I'm shitting bricks at the prospect of sorting them all out for this blog, I can tell you.

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Mysore: busy and not as pleasant as we were led to believe; so we spent most of the time in the hotel room. What a terrible burden this was.
Room service got to know us, and we got to know them very well if only because we had to keep shunting them out of the fucking room as they had this endearing little tendency to barge straight in, even silently unlocking the door before knocking, in the hope of seeing what it is western couples get up to that their religion and upbringing doesn't allow them to get any of until they're married, the cheeky fuckers.
Well, this would at least explain in some way why they like to marry by the age of 24 at the latest!

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The palace in Mysore is splendid, but with no cameras being allowed inside I couldn't show you the best bits even if I had got my finger out and managed to get the photo situation under control. Nice temples in the grounds though, and even though we had to buy 3 tickets from 3 seperate parts of the ground to enter the place itself (one office/booth for the entry ticket; one at another booth for depositing your camera, and one half a light-year away for depositing your shoes at - the shoes thing is pissing me off a little actually - bureaucracy rears its ugly head once more) it was superb in every way.
I haven't seen so much gilt since that convention of Catholic pries- err, waitasec', since that convention of old Scoutmaste- no, no that's pretty dark too. Umm. Sorry, you'll have to think of your own perverted joke there folks.

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And since then, since Mysore that is, we travelled today and yesterday on the most mighty of taxi rides I have ever had the displeasure of undertaking; they little man in the little office in Mysore said it would take 7 hours; we were in the car for 16. Oh yeah - more than twice the advertised time - this is what is known as Indian Time.

5 minutes = 15 - 45 minutes. 3/4 days = 1 week or more. An hour is at least twice that according to my heathen western watch, and a 20 minute break can in reality be anything up to a calendar month.

Life is taken at a pretty slow pace, generally speaking.

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Right! My back is aching from this chair and I'm off to my hotel to watch antiquated holyywood films and drink imitation champagne - the rest of my witterings shall be up tomorrow. I made notes but abandoned the idea halfway through - tomoorw I shall try for a little more structure and elegance.

You have been warned

It may have been a week or so, but it seems a lot longer. Strange things have happened, dark deeds are afoot, or at least they were at some point recently, and circumstances have changed somewhat, generally for the better you may be pleased to know.

But sod that, I still have a half a million pictures to plough through, so, here goes. If they have appeared before or a chunk of stuff is missing blame this odd, odd system here on blog.co.uk, either that or my total inability to click buttons correctly at least one of which has made the last 2 or even 3 posts not appear, and possibly even disappear.
In short, I want a laptop and my own website from now on. I may contract the inestimable Gregory; of Palolem and IT wizardry fame; to build me a cool new blog site with shiny stuff, video hosting, and a bunch of cool features like he has on his page.

Check it out: www.wanderingnerd.com and take a look at the quotes and featured pictures boxouyts and stuff, he built it his very own Yankee self and I want one now too! *eject toys from pram* Waaaaah!!

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Actually, no I dodn't have a load of photos. Well I do, but they are ordered in a very odd way - basically it makes no sense as I had to upload bits of different memory cards in different orders at odd times, and until I figure out what is what and which is when, I'm pretty screwed for getting it all sorted. Plus, this hosting site adds them all in the order they are in your memory crad or camera, and I forgot to reverse that order when saved onto the computers and so it is all extremely fragmented.

I realise you don't care about this, but lately I've been having a bit of a hiatus from writing and haven't much wanted to get anything down - I have had more than enough distractions - so I want to figure out either a way of sharing the whole album with ya'll, or just a way to organise all pictures in photobucket into chronological order, as the site does actually preserve that information. Fucked if I know how to use it, mind you.

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So, errrm.... yeah. I was going to go with a couple of people up to the North, near Nepal, for a highly stupid mission. We were about to run up to Dharamasala and come straight back spending 5 days solid on trains and buses with no break, and if you can't work out why on Earth people would do that then I ain't gonna spell it out for you.
Let us just say that it would have been very handy but the risks far outweighed the benefits, and in the end we all realised that, with a little help from our friends

So here we are, still in Hampi, about to leave tomorrow if all goes to plan.

We, meaning Maria and I. She came out fom England and we're spending a bunch of time together before she buggers off back to blighty on the 16th; coincidentally my birthday so if you wanna show the love then my paypal address is evilhippy@onetel.net
hehehe

In other news, I've seen a lot more of the temples, been climbed on by many monkeys and insects and have ridden a motorbike for the first time (actually a shitty little 50cc scooteresque device that struggled, poor thing, with my bulk).

I tell you this for nothing: these things are unbelievably stupid.
The headlights, feeble at the best of times, only work when you're actively rev the engine, and they uct out whenever you brake for some unfathomable reason I can only attribute to a very sneaky form of population control.

At night when you are riding back in pitch darkness and have to go downhill through villages - the roads in all small settlements are merely packed-Earth without any proper surface, and have unsigned speedbumps, foot-wide potholes and stray children and animals flocking unconcernedly across your path - you have to brake to prevent fatalities and your lights automatically go out; and the best and steepest hills are often right in the middle of tiny yet busy villages. Wa-fucking-hay.

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Also I can chalk up an experience of bus rides in Idia for the first time: they are quite Special.

The first was to Gokarna and the ride was intreesting - our seats were properly labelled as `gangway`. This did not mean we could charge through th crowds

In this fine and colourful country it isn't enough to simply sell all the seats on your vehicle, nor the beds and bunks as well but also the aisles between them are up for grabs. Gangway means just that: you're sleeping in the aisle, buddy. Only 12 hours to Gokarna!

Lickily there was one seat spare so, before anyone else could swipe it from my I baksheeshed the bloke in charge for it and got myself a place for the next half a day.
Jon and Aliya weren't so lucky (the aisles were about 15 inches wide and the boss-man filled them up directly the doors opened so there was no hope for anyone wanting to back up or get off or even turn around, or find their seat if they weren't quite near enough) and they found themselves at the head of the queue next to the cab with no seats and, because there is no seperate room for luggage, the aisel itself was filled with the rucksacks of the 80 or so travellers on board.
Quite how they can sell `gangway` tickets for a gangway that for all intents and purposes doesn't exist is beyond my feeble imagination, but hey. T.I.I.

Those two ended up baksheeshing the driver and his Mate to sleet in the cab with those guys, although at one point Jon, lying next to the driver in the Mate's bunk while the Mate counted his baksheesh and quietly suffered in the corner, was thrown into the steering wheel in the middle of the night after a sharp corner. The driver had to fight off a sleeping Englishman while trying to keep a 20-ton bus on the road and all of us alive, an impressive feat but one which, with a little more sensible thought, maybe shouldn't have been required.

The bus back was a lot better although I can't remember a single thing about it. For all I know it could have been a train.

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Maria met us in Gokarna; she is a friend of Jon's from back in England (Oxford no less) and is of Indian descent being born to parents from Punjab.
Being an English lass though of course she doesn't dress as people here would expect her to, so basically she looks, to most people, like a westernised native and by showing unswathed arms and legs, and hanging about with a bunch of pasty white blokes, she becomes automatically a `Bad Indian` and were she to, for example, kiss a man in public then there is a very real chance of getting herself shouted at and attacked.

Cultural sensitivity prevents the public showing of affection between men and women; in a country where at least 20% of boys and men hold hands and drape arms around each other this is at first very strange, and eventually just amusing.

Don't know if I mentioned that before but people of the same gender always walk about with hands on shoulders, holding hands, and generally being more affectionate than you would imagine possible, let alone likely. It's just another cultural thing and the way women are generally viewed, and I have a bit to say about this but I'll keep it short here, isn't too great.
Basically if a woman is seen to speak to a an outside of marriage it has to be for commerce or some practical reason, and all western women, by dint of their wearing light summery clothes and having boyfriends and speaking equally and freely with men, are all whores.

Okay that's not true of everyone, only those steeped heavily in the religion and the traditional way of life, but this is, to be fair, about 85% of people.

This is the reason why Indian men come and stare at female travellers all the time, and if they go to one of the lakes or reservoirs for a swim then they are guaranteed an unashamed audience of staring men as soon as they come out of the water, seeing as they're dressed even more lightly than usual.
The chances of being attacked are very, very small but frankly, it is disturbing as hell just being with the girls when this happens.
Hey-ho.

Another thing that happened in this vein was on a bike ride back from the reservoir with Jon and Aliya.
There were three of us on the bike - yes it's not legal, but to be fair none of us had helmets or bike licenses either - amd Aliya wasn't wearing trousers but a dress, so, showing a bit of leg, she was an open invitation to the local boys.
We passed a bike with two Indian blokes on it and they passed us again soon after, honking all the way. They pulled up level and the driver - not the pillion passenger but the driver, while riding the boke - got out his phone and totally unashamedly started taking pictures of Aliya on the bike - it was hardly the most revealing thing but it was amazingly rude, but there was no shame there at all.

If a woman gives away her virtue, by either having premarital sex or just having boyfriends or simply by dressing for hot weather (26 degrees Celsius today and it feels cold...) they are, basically, the same as prostitutes i.e. bad Indians or just whore-women. This cultural acceptance and reverance is hard to deal with sometimes, in the face of such insane unthinking bigotry.

But that's quite enough of that: what else? Errr, what else indeed... I'm not quite sure.
Things are good, pictures are a real pain, and I'm off tomorrow to Bangalore and straight onto Mysore, with the intention of getting to Nagarhole, Wayanad and Bandipur national parks, and hopefully another one as well.

I am stagnating here and want to see what I wanted to see in india and get the hell onto the next country, start actually travelling (and keeping on top of the photo situation) and see some new and interesting things.

The monkeys, which crawled all over me last night at the Hanuman temple, were especially cool though and made the extra days spent in Hampi totally worthwhile (even though one did have a go at biting me when I tried to remove her from my shoulder). I have to get the pictures from a supremely chilled-out Australian called Holly, utter diamond as she is she managed to get it all on tape as it were, as well as a whole bunch of other stuff.

The least favourite animal interaction of all however was the mosquito incident: I thought it ould be rude not to go to as surreal a place as Hampi and not do at least a little bit of Acid so while ending a jolly little trip a few days ago I crawled into a hammock to watch the pretty pictures while getting a few hours kip.
Not feeling anything like pain I drew the sides of the hammock up to cover the entrance slit, and slept from 10pm to 2am to wake just in time for Holly to give me a painful and difficult lift home thanks to me weighing distinctly more than the little 50cc bike, and at least four times as much as Holly herself.

During those kaleidoscope hours I was bitten on one hand - get this - more than sixty times. That's 60+ mozzie bites on one hand alone; it must have been the one blocking off the last of the night air from my slumberous form, the other hand only scores about 20 bites and I may have started out with one or two anyway.

Overall I'm very pleased to have contributed to the natural world even if it did mean said world taking half a pint of my blood, but honeslt, it would have been nice to have been asked.

A few differences I somehow forgot.

Open sewers in all towns and cities, often half covered with stone or concrete slabs, but never truly seperated from you as you tread the streets, following that wonderfully sensitive olfactory protruberance on the front uh yerr face.

There are a great many more beggars about for the tourist season, and the ones you see live hundreds of miles away and come here, specifically to beg. In teams, no less - yes, the organisation gehind it all is pretty impresive, and it seems that each beach of decent size is controlled by one man who hangs around there all day, or more of them if it's a big beach like Palolem was, and hundreds of bggars and sellers of drums, stallholders, ear cleaners and the like descend upon a town on one day, and stay for the best part of the tourist seasons.
The controllers are kind of like pimps, and often probably are a well, managing other girls doing other things in other parts of the town.

In Bombay, by all accounts, this is seriously well organised and comes frighteningly close to something like the Beggars Guild mentioned in detail in few Discworld books; from Men at Arms and later. Rea 'em! They are so very entertaining.

Pavements, like sewers, are a kind of optional extra not taken up anyone (least of all the government or civil engineering depertments) and you have one on one side a busy road or you may have none. You can always walk in the open sewers of course.... but it is unadvisable, especially in larger cities. I wouldn't and couldn't bring myself to drawing you a picture even if you asked really nicely.
Many of the have been largely covered over and a full route is provide by means of a continuous stone-slab bridge, but basically it still smells terrible and they leak in places, not least of them into the water supply.

The cars and drivers! You know about the cars and drivers. They are all a few plates of sandwiches, a quiche,, at least 6 bottle wine and all the fruit short of a picnic basket.
They are also sometimes very good and gracious, even unaggressive and reasonably priced. Some other people are not so sympathetic.

Jon has a peanut allergy; if he ate one whole peanut he would, without immediate hospital treatment, die. He could go into anaphylactic shock and his heart would stop if the dose (one fully ingested peanut) was high enough. So when we passed a stall at the bottom of those big stepped ghats just off the boat, and around the valley floor area, we got some street food, which is in fact perfectly safe in terms of hygiene as all the locals eat from them and it is all cooked as you literally watch.

He did ask if if there were any nuts in it and being told `no no, no problems` would seem to be an indication that all was good, so unthinkingly he munched some and then went a sort of ghastly white/green colour and announced the problem; his tongue and throat were starting to swell and he needed something with enzymes in that slow the process down; the only two available within a thousand miles from here being either milk or beer. Problem 1]. Milk here isn't milk, it comes almost always from powdered milk or (over-diluted) condensed milk, or it's buffalo milk which doesn't really work. Condensed milk is the only thing that does the job and is the thing that survives storage at Indian temperatures.

Aliah and John, now unable to much speak and kind of exhausted at running up the 40-foot steps, found the first litle chai stall above the steps and Aliah told them what was happening, that he need milk, chai, chai milk, whatever, immediately, a serious life-threatening thing was going on if we didn't start dealing with stuff quickly, so, they sat there, snickering and laughing.
Aliah was speaking t them in perfect Hindi and Telugu and they perfectly understood what was going on, they just weren't going to be disturbed, these laid back chai peddlars with their little stoves and kitchens and tins of condensed milk sat there doing nothing; eventually they ambled about the proces of opening a can and pouring it out for Aliah to pass to Jon but they would pass it to Aliah, this tiny cup of condensed milk that could help save a man's life, until they had been paid for it = 2 Rupees. Two fucking rupees, and they weren't going to see anywhere outside of their blinkered little box where money has o be paid before aything is offered, and this foreigner wearing no t-shirt and doesn't even belong to our caste system, on any level, simply doesn't deserve anything from us or even anything but to die, if that's what the gods want. That is the impresion in part, the caste system thing I mean, that I am forming about this hindu society.

Anyway while they were climbing the steps I did my valiant deed of the hour and dashed up the slope in the middle of the steps with a scream of "I'll get you a beer Jon!!!" feeling all herioc and like I had something to actually do for once, spare wheel syndrome having begun to nudge at my mind that morning. Halfway t the nearest bar I remembered: Hampi is a dry town; that's why we live across that bloomin' river!
So milk was needed, and I ran in and found after asking 2 strangers someone who actually worked there, and asked fro 3 glasses of milk, quickly quickly, please.
They were not quick, and took at least 2 and a half minutes to get this - in the kitchen, which was tiny and open to see, I would have had 3 glasses of milk and be out of the door within about 40 seconds, so I explained in careful, slow English that my friend has an allergic reaction (try that one in sign language - very very ill! was what I used in the end) and that he might collapse, and if he had had too much "poison" he could die within 10 minutes.
This did not speed things up at all, however.

After realising I wanted to take it away they said to 'you want it in a bottle?' so they decanted it into a bottle and, oh yess most definitely, put maybe one and a half glass into the bottle instead and topped the rest up with tap water, which isn't especially different than river water and often comes out brown and makes your sink smell of sewage.

What a prize for humanitaianism they shall one day receive, eh?
So if he got over the allergy shock he'll

Read more!

So now I've been approached by both male and female prostitutes, which is at least in some small way reassuring. Right next to the Virupakshur temple too, the hussy.
You're going to see a lot of the Virupakshur temple in the near future; it looms over the Hampi skyline and has a habit of sneaking into every photo like an unctu.ous child, oiling its way into frame and runing around the back of the crowd to appear in the other end as well.
The temple itself is nothing but impressive, deservedly imposing and absolutely stunning to look at but, like Michelin, Goodyear, Dunlop and Paris Hilton, it sure does get around.

What was most noticeable back in Hampi (read on, dear readers...) was the river. The huge boulders that heavily punctuate the riverbed like a paragraph from Jules Verne (I have still been reading, you see) now lie measurably exposed, the water lines banded around each one like tidal markers which, in a way, they are. Okay that's a complete lie, technically; the river ebbs and flows back only once each year; but they look very similar and are for the same reason. Just bear with me on this one, I haven't slept much at all during the last 2 days.

It is 3 months since Monsoon and the balance of the seasons is more apparent now; instead of the dry heat and lush greenery all around I can see the result of all that unrelenting dryness exacting its toll on the flora of the subcontinent. A little grand, perhaps? I haven't really seen much subcontinent, and am in fact now back at the beach. I will explain shortly.

As the water has dropped and the banks have enlargened, this annual drought has encroached drastically on the lives and habits of all things that line the river's course, as it does obversely when the rains come again in April or May. I've tried and failed to remove cliches from this thing before, and phrases such as "when the rains come" just sound too good in themselves to leave out, so, tough

The rains, conspicuous by their absence, have consequencially allowed the river levels to drop sharply and the habitat of many animals is reduced, and possibly even erased from sight for months still yet to come. There are more frogs in bathrooms - a tree climbing variety has taken residence in quite a few places at night-time; in Gokarna yesterday I blagged a shower at someone else's guesthouse (ours, now, is especially primitive) and locked eyes with a spindly yellow and green thing looking amazingly like a two-tone muscle car, albeit a more amphibious one - and bigger lizards in every room. It is a given that lizards will enter your room (the walls don't ever meet the ceiling; they call it ventilation you know) and loiter on the walls or around the back of the cistern, but usually they are small and of the skink (long, slender, striped and smooth) or the translucent type (no description needed there, I hope). They are NOT usually the thorned type of the kind used in the original King Kong movie, and they don't normally come in the on-screen size from that mvie, either.
I met one on my first night at a new place in Hampi that might not have descended through too many generations since the Jurassic, and looked a bit like Uncle George and Aunt Daphne might be a pair of Brontosaurii. Or at the very least, a good-sized alligator. Honest, it was massive.

-

There is a reservoir a few kilometres from Hampi where, like a coward, I failed to jump off a 20-foot boulder into the water. Yes, it was actual cowardice and is not to be repeated - I go there again, I jump. It is a big thing for me, unlike parasailing where I was entirely - uncharacteristically - calm, jumping into water is a whole different adventure. The phobias are queuing up behind each other waiting for a chance to dangle form my nerve endings; vertigo, agoraphobia (the fear of not being able to deal with social situations, not the fear of the outdoors as is often assumed), fear of drowning (big one here), fear of unclear water (there's a better word for it but you know what I mean: you can't see the bottom, you don't know what's down there or how deep it is), fear of pain and a fear of being rendered effectively blind during the whole proces, as I have to lose my glasses for fear (ha ha) of losing them.
All in all, I'm readily shitting myself at the prospect, but I've got to do it. Jon and (many, shamefully many) other people are now backflipping off it and are soon going for the next one - a drop of nearly 80 feet. I have to at least do the little one forwards, and maybe even try a swan dive if I make it through the first clumsy attempt.
In all unlikely weirdness, Jon is a trained Lifesaver so I have nothing to worry about. Nothing outside of my own head, anyway

-

The reservoir will also be drastically reduced soon according to the landlady of the Goan Corner, arguably the best place to stay in Hampi and my choice of lodging when I have time and chance to rest my overly large and crispy hide. Been out in the sun and got burned, feeling a little like Cod and Chips Twice at the moment
When this happens (the reservoir becoming depleted) there will begin a finely-judged contest between the rate of consumption and the available quantity of useable water, everyone hoping that the bean counters in central government switched their calculators on that day, and that there wont be a painful, costly and crippling drought immediately before one of the heaviest deluges in the world.

Mind you, the phrase `useable water` is open to a little interpretation. I saw a girl of 9 or 10 filling a 1litre bottle straight from the river - a river used by every community upstream for hundreds of miles to wash clothes, and cooking equipment and to bathe in themselves - and take a hearty slug of the light brown liquid before stalking back up the ghats; great stone steps to the river of a ceremonial nature; and off with her little 10-year-old life. I hopenit continues significantly beyond that, and it probably will despite the fact that she just took on board enough hazardous material to lay a town to waste back in England. The natural resistance to such things has made these people strong, biologically. Their thinking, as I shall explore in another post, is less impressive and the very individuality that leads to such incredible resistance to disease is all but completely lost when it comes to the mental side of life.

-

Anyway; the only other things to mention are a) I sat in a guesthouse a few nights agoi and felt an insect scramblinh up and across my leg; no, oops, silly me, it wasn't an insect at all but a scorpion, an arachnid, since you ask. Not massive but a good three or more inches long, sting jutting up like a poisonout mast and generally scuttling about in the way of scorpions. Strangley, as much as I don;t like insects and especially arachnids, I find scorpions rather pleasant, despite the obviously painful result of trying to stoke one. Scorpions can't kill you, basically, and this one was small even for that - I think the heaviest sting from the most venomous scorpion would need to be repeated 5 or more times to be life-threatening, so no real worries. I pointed it out and, unfortunately, the staff killed it like vermin, I would rather have liked them to let me take it away in a glass for relesae/inspection/planting in someone's bed but no, T.I.I. and a scorpion is little more to the locals than an angry bumblebee is to us in England.

b) Ants. Millions of the buggers - so far I have seen at least a dozen different types and 4 or 5 I can recognise from the way they organise themselves as well as just their colour and size. Not amazingly interesting and coming under the whole `insect` thing again of course, but still you get them in every restaurant and room so you may as well check 'em out, that's my view.

c) Left Hampi for Gokarna and was about to enter into a crazed mission to the North - now cancelled. More information to follow shortly and, when I get back to Hampi in a day or two and can use another PC - the comouters here are EVEN SLOWER than those in Hampi! - then the photo - mission can also continue.
We frollicked muchly in the that saline mass of disputed nomenclature; it IS the Arabian sea, but middle nd upper caste Indians on holiday will insist, almost swear blind that it is the Indian ocean that runs all round India. Meh.

So lets get back, fae the bus journeys again and reenter our little Eden in Aulde 'ampi town. Until then, chin up, eyes front and tally ho!

....did this appear last week sometime? I wrote it a week ago. I seem not to be able to check if things are actually appearing, and the system here seems to want to relegate a load of entries to `draft` or `private` status, making the whole point of a weblog pretty
redundant.
We'll see if I can't get my own private hosted site... anyhoo, this may or may not have materialised last week: the way the blog appears to me as a reader says it never made it.
Someone please tell me if it did or not!!

>>>----------->

So now I've been approached by both male and female prostitutes, which is at least in some small way reassuring. Right next to the Virupakshur temple too, the hussy.
You're going to see a lot of the Virupakshur temple in the near future; it looms over the Hampi skyline and has a habit of sneaking into every photo like an unctu.ous child, oiling its way into frame and runing around the back of the crowd to appear in the other end as well.
The temple itself is nothing but impressive, deservedly imposing and absolutely stunning to look at but, like Michelin, Goodyear, Dunlop and Paris Hilton, it sure does get around.

What was most noticeable back in Hampi (read on, dear readers...) was the river. The huge boulders that heavily punctuate the riverbed like a paragraph from Jules Verne (I have still been reading, you see) now lie measurably exposed, the water lines banded around each one like tidal markers which, in a way, they are. Okay that's a complete lie, technically; the river ebbs and flows back only once each year; but they look pretty similar and for the same (sort of) reason. Just bear with me on this one, I haven't slept much at all during the last 2 days.
It is 3 months since Monsoon and the balance of the seasons is more apparent now; instead of the dry heat and lush greenery all around I can see the result of all that unrelenting dryness exacting its toll on the flora of the subcontinent. A little grand, perhaps? I haven't really seen much subcontinent, and am in fact now back at the beach. I will explain shortly.

As the water has dropped and the banks have enlargened, this annual drought has encroached drastically on the lives and habits of all things that line the river's course, as it does obversely when the rains come again in April or May. I've tried and failed to remove cliches from this thing before, and phrases such as "when the rains come" just sound too good in themselves to leave out, so, tough

The rains, conspicuous by their absence, have consequencially allowed the river levels to drop sharply and the habitat of many animals is reduced, and possibly even erased from sight for months still yet to come. There are more frogs in bathrooms - a tree climbing variety has taken residence in quite a few places at night-time; in Gokarna yesterday I blagged a shower at someone else's guesthouse (ours, now, is especially primitive) and locked eyes with a spindly yellow and green thing looking amazingly like a two-tone muscle car, albeit a more amphibious one - and bigger lizards in every room. It is a given that lizards will enter your room (the walls don't ever meet the ceiling; they call it ventilation you know) and loiter on the walls or around the back of the cistern, but usually they are small and of the skink (long, slender, striped and smooth) or the translucent type (no description needed there, I hope). They are NOT usually the thorned type of the kind used in the original King Kong movie, and they don't normally come in the on-screen size from that mvie, either.
I met one on my first night at a new place in Hampi that might not have descended through too many generations since the Jurassic, and looked a bit like Uncle George and Aunt Daphne might be a pair of Brontosaurii. Or at the very least, a good-sized alligator. Honest, it was massive.

-

There is a reservoir a few kilometres from Hampi where, like a coward, I failed to jump off a 20-foot boulder into the water. Yes, it was actual cowardice and is not to be repeated - I go there again, I jump. It is a big thing for me, unlike parasailing where I was entirely - uncharacteristically - calm, jumping into water is a whole different adventure. The phobias are queuing up behind each other waiting for a chance to dangle form my nerve endings; vertigo, agoraphobia (the fear of not being able to deal with social situations, not the fear of the outdoors as is often assumed), fear of drowning (big one here), fear of unclear water (there's a better word for it but you know what I mean: you can't see the bottom, you don't know what's down there or how deep it is), fear of pain and a fear of being rendered effectively blind during the whole proces, as I have to lose my glasses for fear (ha ha) of losing them.
All in all, I'm readily shitting myself at the prospect, but I've got to do it. Jon and (many, shamefully many) other people are now backflipping off it and are soon going for the next one - a drop of nearly 80 feet. I have to at least do the little one forwards, and maybe even try a swan dive if I make it through the first clumsy attempt.
In all unlikely weirdness, Jon is a trained Lifesaver so I have nothing to worry about. Nothing outside of my own head, anyway

-

The reservoir will also be drastically reduced soon according to the landlady of the Goan Corner, arguably the best place to stay in Hampi and my choice of lodging when I have time and chance to rest my overly large and crispy hide. Been out in the sun and got burned, feeling a little like Cod and Chips Twice at the moment
When this happens (the reservoir becoming depleted) there will begin a finely-judged contest between the rate of consumption and the available quantity of useable water, everyone hoping that the bean counters in central government switched their calculators on that day, and that there wont be a painful, costly and crippling drought immediately before one of the heaviest deluges in the world.

Mind you, the phrase `useable water` is open to a little interpretation. I saw a girl of 9 or 10 filling a 1litre bottle straight from the river - a river used by every community upstream for hundreds of miles to wash clothes, and cooking equipment and to bathe in themselves - and take a hearty slug of the light brown liquid before stalking back up the ghats; great stone steps to the river of a ceremonial nature; and off with her little 10-year-old life. I hopenit continues significantly beyond that, and it probably will despite the fact that she just took on board enough hazardous material to lay a town to waste back in England. The natural resistance to such things has made these people strong, biologically. Their thinking, as I shall explore in another post, is less impressive and the very individuality that leads to such incredible resistance to disease is all but completely lost when it comes to the mental side of life.

-

Anyway; the only other things to mention are a) I sat in a guesthouse a few nights agoi and felt an insect on my leg; ops, silly me, it wasn't an insect at all but a scorpion, an arachnid, since you ask. Not massive but a good three or more inches long, sting jutting up like a poisonout mast and generally scuttling about in the way of scorpions. Strangley, as much as I don;t like insects and especially arachnids, I find scorpions rather pleasant, despite the obviously painful result of trying to stoke one. Scorpions can't kill you, basically, and this one was small even for that - I think the heaviest sting from the most venomous scorpion would need to be repeated 5 or more times to be life-threatening, so no real worries. I pointed it out and, unfortunately, the staff killed it like vermin, I would rather have liked them to let me take it away in a glass for relesae/inspection/planting in someone's bed but no, T.I.I. and a scorpion is little more to the locals than an angry bumblebee is to us in England.

b) Ants. Millions of the buggers - so far I have seen at least a dozen different types and 4 or 5 I can recognise from the way they organise themselves as well as just their colour and size. Not amazingly interesting and coming under the whole `insect` thing again of course, but still you get them in every restaurant and room so you may as well check 'em out, that's my view.

c) Left Hampi for Gokarna and was about to enter into a crazed mission to the North - now cancelled. More information to follow shortly and, when I get back to Hampi in a day or two and can use another PC - the comouters here are EVEV SLOWER than those in Hampi!! - then the photo mission can also continue.

Until then, chin up, eyes front and tally ho!