Maybe. The more wanderlusty and bored amongst you will be happy to learn that I am now picking up the pace and will be zooming through a pretty good array of new countries in the next couple of weeks. I've met up with Greg again and he has two accomplices in tow, and between them they have an impressive quantity of get-up-and-go.
They are all three of them Americans, which explains a lot. Their can-do attitute has overcome my British empirical guilt and debilitating tea habit, and it looks like we are now going places; such as a couple of sites in Laos, bits of Cambodia, and a little of Vietnam or more of Thailand, too, which makes me a predictable enough traveller, but after seeing the immediate differences between my 5 months in India and my brief few hours in Thailand, and a day or three here now in Laos, it seems that there is very good reason indeed that so many people come to the South-East Asia peninsular.
I'll also be trying to ditch an absolute bucketload of photos today and/or tomorrow before/during/after transfering locations and hotels here in Vientiane (3 nights in a luxury place at $18 per night is oh-so welcome but really quite extravagant) so get your viewing face on, this should be a pretty whirlwind tour through the rest of India.
The title? Well I'll probably never do India again, except maybe for the deserts of Radjhastan and no, I can't spell that properly. I'm on my lappy in the hotel and it's half-past midnight (now it's 1pm in a different hotel in a different town, but hey 
) and I didn't go and buy a dictionary or encyclopedia package yet. Corrections almost certainly will not follow 
I wont even go back to Goa unless someone persuades me veeeeery artfully, I've seen pictures of the beaches in Thailand and I have to say, with only the faintest glimmerings of a dreadful pun, that the Thais have it
Amongst the rest of my collection of whinges, complaints and observations about this mighty foreign entity, I have a couple of - final - words about India that I need to clear through so I can prattle on about Laos et al instead. I find that despite the overwhelming bitchy nature of my notes, most of these things aren't all bad and often not really negative at all. It is the differences in experience that make a person take notice, and of course it is all a bit of an adventure, as an Enid Blyton character might say (although there would be a few `Goshes` and `awfullys` thrown in if we were sentenced to loiter among such pages)
-.
I have mentioned the bumpy roads before, as frequently as my spine tried to desert the front lines of my body's battle with a good night's sleep if I've had any sense, but not the tactic of how to deal with them - it is only really done in rickshaws, in a bus you are at the total mercy of the laws of physics and your evil-minded driver (and there seems to be no other kind) I'm afraid. I don't doubt his happens in a great many countries around the world, but so far my Thai coach experience has at least been smooth, if equally as cramped....
When in rickshaws the driver (more rider really, as they are nothing more than mopeds with a cab and oversized stabilisers) will slow down to tackle speedbumps and the more noticeable potholes, and as the front wheel goes over you can raise yourself off the seat a bit, so when the rear wheels hit it and would normally deliver a deadly shudder straight to your coccix, you can be raised off the seat and out of harm's way, letting your legs take any jarring impact through the muscles instead of it going straight into the tail of your spine which does, take it from me, get pretty annoying after a while. After about the very first time it happens, in fact.
On buses you can kiss this reprieve goodbye though because there simply isn't room to raise yourself up without adding to your existing recent collection of head wounds, abrasions and phrenological dentings. The angle of the seats makes this difficult to get leverage even if you could, and the drivers all like to travel at highly dangerous speeds anyway, so as soon as you could notice the front wheels doing anything relevant then the back wheels have already done something all too relevant and personal to your own personal structural integrity i.e. given it an uninvited yet nontheless thorough stress-testing - as if you had any choice in the matter
Again I do go on and on about it (yes I know, I do) because a bus journey of 12 hours in these circumstances does tend to stick in your mind a bit, not to mention your spine.
-
The smell - hardly limited to India I'm sure much like the buses, but it's what I've smelt in India alone so far on this trip that has made me reel, so it gets it in the neck I'm afraid 
I recall that certain places in Italy were part of the open sewer club too, but usually only the lowest-rent districts, and nothing too near where all the nice tourists like to go and aerate their wallets
In Mumbai, Mysore, Panaji, Margao, Kannur, Mangalore (not so much, mind) Kochi and Chennai (especially Chennai) the main high streets often have more than their fair share of primieval stenches, and sections of pavement are often missing to allow the full aroma of the sewers below onto the streets. Sections of the pavement - 3ft x 4ft slabs sometimes - are simply missing in places. No barriers, no warnings, and no streetlights in places too mean someone could come to a very unsavoury end...
I would not like to go into details any more than I have already, but more importantly I would not like any of you to have to experience it yourselves if you didn't absolutely have to, which says enough I hope.
The occasional dead animals; crows, cats, dogs etc; on the street probably help to make it so impressive a display of `odorosity`.
-
The transport system is really rather good, once you get past the needless bureacracy of the ticketing systems and the bizarre mindset in which people are happy to travel a thousand kilometres or more from one side of a great country to another with no luggage at all but the personal transport is less than impressive, and the main form of personal locomotion favoured in Indialand is the scooter, moped or chicken-chaser, depen ding on your cultural bias.
That anything more powerful than a 125cc moped is considered `racy` is testament to the easy-going lifestyle of most Indians, but what is far less impressive and not at all endearing is the unfortunate habit many men have of sticking their entire families onto one scooter for trips about town. More than a dozen times in any city that I've stayed in for a week or more in I saw one adult and up to four children zooming around busy city streets at rush hour on the back of a machine designed to just about take one person, who knows what they're doing, through maybe some reasonably busy streets and suburbs, but not truly engineered to deal with the ups and downs of big city India.
More often than not a man and (presumably) his wife, and two children all try this little parlour game. The woman sitting side-saddle (which is frankly quite fucking stupid anyway) with sprog 1 on her lap, sprog 2 sat behind her hanging on for dear life at the very farthest extremities of the pillion area, and sprog 3 sitting in front of the man at the controls, the child invariably grinning like a necrophilliac in a morgue but actually getting completely in the way of Father who is at the mercy of not only the formidable Indian traffic, but also a hyperactive pre-teen on a sugar-rush from hell. Personally I would rather have invasive surgery in a toilet with a stick, but this seems to be de rigeur just about everywhere in the South of India.
-
The Indian people are, by and large, immensely confident and this sense of confidence stems from, it appears, their sense of religion. I really, really don't like the all-pervading nature of religion in India. this is the thing that underscores everything else.
I'm not too keen on the ludicrous ideas they have about feet and shoes either but they take that a lot more seriously in Laos and Thailand, so I'll probably start scoring up the points to mock these guys here soon enough
They have the confidence to come and ask you - from the age of 6 or 7 at the very least - to giive them some money, thn to insist that you give them money, in exchange for something or nothing, it doesn't seem to matter a great deal.
They have the confidence to push their way onto ferries and trains without letting the passengers inside off first and to start taking their seats before they've been vacated. There is a special trcik wherw one person runs on board then all their mates pass them bags through the windo so one guy can secure a whole booth or half a railway carriage, to the detriment of everyone else who got on before the new claimants.
They often have the supreme confidence to ask you for outrageous prices and simply laugh and deny everything when you tell them you know it costs nothing like as much as that - and to rope in other people ad-hoc to support their claims.
They have often confidence enough to lie to your face even in some restaurants without presenting you a bill, then when you call them up on it and get the proper, far cheaper bill they then hover as you leave between you and the door and ask you for "something something?" and/or "some baksheesh? for me?" with a grin, even though they know you called them out on a lie just a minute before.
The `gurus` and priests have the outright audacity to ask you for baksheesh for nothing more than standing on the same bit of road as you, sometimes. And that doesn't go to the temples - these guys worship at any place that might serve them some drink.
The confidence they have comes from, I believe, never having questioned a great many things, and never having been given the idea that other people might find fault in, for example; staring at someone relentlessly for hours; pushing in front of someone or outright taking someone's place in a queue, transport device, cinema, restaurant; groping foreign women publically; ripping someone off to a huge degree and smiling the whole time; pretending to be a religious and spiritual holy man and probably just dressing up as one to scam tourists; lying outright about anything to do with money; and being loud and argumentative and involving whole scores of people to bully the other party into submission.
Now, that wasn't a very nice little tirade against a whole people and nation, was it? This I realise full well, and it isn's a statement that applies to even a quarter of Indian poeple - it is only true of some Indians, but unfortunatel these are the ones you have to deal with, more often than not.
First off, a mere half of all Indians only are eligible for receiving this nasty little onslaught, because the women, apart from the panhandlers and beggars and Goan stallholders, won't harass you in any way; they are as likely as not afraid to even talk to you in the first place.
Furthermore, of the remaining half a billion people, only those in public service industries will really have the chance to rip you off or be rude or bully you into being overcharged, which is maybe just 5% of all those people, but then there are frighteningly high numbers of the general public (well, the general men, as it were) who are only too happy to cop a feel of a woman in the street or who might practice the country's 3rd national pasttime all day long (staring at foreigners) and then again there are of course the general bystanders and religious zealots who would scream blue murder and ask for your severed feet on a platter if you dared to wear shoes (Oh my god!! Shoooeeeeess!!!!) inside a temple or holy place.
So, but my estimations there are about 150 million rude motherfuckers in that country. Which is a shame because when you get chatting to so many people - most people - they don't so much see a problem with it but would rather that the tourists didn't deal with them. Fair enough, but that confidence comes back to make all this mentionworthy and true, again, because they are the pushiest people - the beggars and hawkers and taxi men - I've ever met, some of them so desperate for a sale that they might abandon their stall and chase you down the street with some jewellery they try to sell you, or call out the ubiquitous "Hello Friend, Taxi, Taxi, taxi" and surround you with their cronies barring your way to leave so you feel threatened into getttin an (overpriced) taxi or autorickshaw.
I have a sad and sinking feeling that, like people the world over, a lot of this comes from most people never really seeing anything from anyone else's point of view, because they have never been told this might be a good thing sometimes. And that, for one thing, I put down to the insular all-encompassing proliferation of so many competing religions, none of which ever allow and thinking outside of their own little boxes of rules and taboos and rituals and oh-so-convenient pantheons of Gods, so that people go through their whole lives secure in their own little worlds that are, in my view at least, completely false and a huge and total waste of a person's life. But hey, that's just me, and I'm a Level 48 Cynic, I'll have you know
-
A perfect case in point, and one in which I felt so sorry for the guy, was when a young fella was so absorbed in his own little world talking to some girls, chatting them up, being cool and funny and unfortunate in that he was about to come up against me - 220 pounds of muscle and fat - and as he tripped off a joke to these ladies he was so obvously showing off to he spun round to face the way he was actually walking in, skipped forwards and jinked to his right wihout looking and the instant he rounded to face me he was jumping forwards gaily right into me as I was walking briskly forward, as I do.
The poor sod literally bounced off me and shot back about 3 feet, straight onto his arse on the wet street. It must have been like hitting an iron bar, albeit wih a slightly squidgy coating, and I almost didn't feel it but his pride must have been bruised more the his butt from hitting the deck, or his fac with neatly ricocheted off my shoulder joint and made it look like he had been smacked right in the eye. Poor bastard, so I helped him up, but his forlorn looks at the now giggling ladies were quite clear as to how he felt.
This is my case in point when I saw Indian men are small. Not just a bit shorter on average, but a high-vegetable diet, not much protien, and a hot climate means that India will be hard-pressed to ever support an international rugby team
-
One thing I must say I love more than anything about India is the art - if you ever see a collection or new opening of a gallery or an exhibition that involves Indian artists, particularly any Keralan ones, then I urge you to go and look at it all. I have hardly seen one painting that wasn't at least interesting but I've seen so many that are simply fantastic.
There is a lot of favour for the colourist style and, as I technically have a nartist who favours and works in the same style in my family, maybe I have an innate liking for it.
Either way it is unfailing superb. I made a point of checking out all the art galleries I could find in Kochi after the Mangalore government museum just blew me away with its one simple hall containg more paintings I've wanted to pore over and look at thn anything I've seen before anywhere.
I've said it before and I'll surely say it again: Indian art is Fantastic 
-
My last few comments for this post are the following: the Indian man's skirt, possibly called a Mundu but I take that from the Arundhati Roy `The God Of Small Things` and not from any reference sources (as I don't have 'em yet) is an interesting piece of clothing. It may signiy caste and if it does I would suggest it is the labouring castes due to the often shabby state of the mundu, the rest of the clothes they have and themsives, and of course that these are often the guys doing manula labour, usually drain and ditch building. Mind you it is so often I saw people seemingly of the merchant classes, wandering more proprietorially in the same areas and in cleaner appearance and garb that wore them to, that I think it's pretty open.
One things for sure, ou won't see any Brahmin with them, nor any of the traditional warrior caste which is only one level down fom Brahmin, traditionally the prist caste, but no basically just anyone whi is stinking rich
It may well be the case that in all countries the rich have more power and social importance, but I don't much like a society where these people - by dint of nothing more than being rich - can walk the streets and everyone of lower status will bow and scrape out of their way, by the mercifully no evaporating social norms.
Anyway the point of all this was the way you see Indian men spend approximately half their waking lives untying, wrapping, raising or lowering this Mundo, or Lungi, or wraparound skirt thing. It is a strange sight to see these men apparently starting to get naked in the street, although thankfully they all seem to have long shirt tails.
In India culture anyone wearing a Mundu with the skirts raised and tucked in for, say, working, should never speak to a woman or to their social superiors (i.e. statistically just about most people) as it shows their knees.
I find that weird, but okay; their culture, not mine.
-
I just have a few more quick mentions here, namely on the streets. Back to the open sewers again (plenty) the open holes in the pavements leading straight and unpleasantly down to said sewers (fewer but so much less welcome than even the former) and the poor buggers who spend their lives sifting through the rubbish, I think it safe to say that the whole urban experience in this country leaves something be desired. Certain people who say that "nuking the site from orbit; it's the only way to be sure" would be called for, but I'm not that cynical (quite ) and less harsh in my feelings towards the place. I mean it has got a lot of charm in its own way, the wildlife is fantastic, and if you can get a good view with no impromptu tips along the wy then the scenery is often incredible.
What mis most strange, perhaps, is that random people sifting though rubbish - not the slumhouse workers who are paid (sod-all, usually) to go through city rubbish and take metals, plastics and other reusable back to treatment plants - but poorer people off the street going through the stuff on any high street in any city, looking for, I believe, discarded batteries, tin cans, possibly even discarded banking slips, all because someone, somewhere will pay a miniscule pittance for a godd enough quantity of them. These are not the government-employed rubbish sifters. These are the guys who do it for rackets and gangs and entrepreneurial business types, and to see them hunched over a massive pile of the shit in a doorway or right on the kerb in busy traffic, is fairly downheartening 
-
One thing about food: in India they treat eggs as meat, not like a vegan won't eat eggs, but eggs are meat, to them, and this kinda weirded me out.
Not only that, but if you ever go there and ask for an `egg roast` be prepared not for anything omeletta-like or even much egg-like, but instead for a full onion masala sauce mix; strong, spicy, sickly-flavoured sauce with wo hard-boiled eggs in it, chopped inti halves.
Dunno about you but that seem kinda strange to me..
Another thing about food is that generally, I can't stand it. So many saues (gravies) dishes and spices have a quality and a flavour that makes me want to retch; it just isn't for may palette I'm afraid. Something about the unending use of all spices together that makes them all very much the same, and all very much quease-inducing. But hey - I vastly prefer Indian takeaways in England which is of coourse not real Indian food. But it is tailored for the English palete, and, therefore, I rest my case!
There is also the state of the meat, especially mutton, which makes me feel sick now even thinkg about it. The meat is just great but yoiu have to fight gristle and bone to find any of it, and there is always so much more of both than meat that it becomes a nauseating chore to tackle any dish with the last given gifts of sheep and lamb within it.
-
The simple best thing about India though, is the willingness to help of most people when asked, and their quickness to smile. Also their hospitality is beyond reproach, and I have seen a great many more homes of Indian people than I imagine I will anywhere else until I start to make friends and influence people in New Zealand
-
My last gripe for today is about the internet cafes. Or `cafes` as I should put it, and `Internet Cattle Markets` as should the office of fair trading (hah!) insist they actually festoon their doorways with rather than the totally untruthful usual wordings.
Only 2 places out of maybe 60 or more that I have been in serve drinks, and theye were all from a fridge, bottles of water or Coke or Limca: no snacks, no coffee, no cafe as far as I'm concerned.
Also they like to ram in a about 25 people in an appropriate area for about 7, as a rough guideline. And the connections are often dire in the extreme. Oh yes, you can poke your `cafes` right up your jacksie, thank you so very much if it's al the same to you I do beg your pardon but you seem to have missed the entire fucking FORESTS of the world, let alone got the wrong end of any offered sticks.
-
Right that's it, no more nasty stuff about India. One more quick post and then it's all photos, and the all Laos and Cambodia and Thailand and all the rest!! Woooo 
Well it's another valid Star Trek ripoff and that's all that matters.
