Versive

Great name for a pub, don't you think? Says it all really. Hopefully keeps the punters fixed to a stool and continuously ordering.

Riiight, the last three posts, as you can tell, were written some time ago at various intervals on the good old laptop, in bus stations and on restaurant tables and a tiny bit of stupidly-timed editing last night in the hotel. It is now 6:20 local time in Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

Bugger me, but isn't laos nice and relaxed? Yes. Yes it is, I'll answer that one for you It must be the quietest popular city in the world.

Anyway can't stop and natter: I have stuff to do and time is running short - I'm just gonna share with you the details of my last few days travelling to try and get something across:

Friday - wake early after bad night's sleep, pack and take care of final stuff in India. Wait 4 hours for my final bill to be calculated so have a last-minute panic to get the right amount of money transfered online, then get to a cashpoint. I fucked up the maths anwyay as we have seen, but hey
Rickshaw to the train station, stand on platform for an hour waiting for train with heavy lugagge. On scale of one to ten, ten being the hightest, this was registering about Joy Factor 4.

Friday night - 11 hour train journey, about 1 hour's sleep. The trains in india are meant for Indians and not travellers, as the AC3 and AC2 compartments; the poshest and most expensive; allow no room for lugagge.
I'll just repeat that: there is no space for any of your bags, at all. None. Zip. Fuckeldey doo-dah. Not any. I had 2 rucksacks and a laptop briefcase to share my bunk with which is an inch too short of rme anyway, and just wide eough for my shoulders. So, I had to curl up painfully or raise my legs uncomfortably or rack my spine ont hem dangerously. Ergo, 10 hours of quiet bitching about the kind of arsehole who makes these things.

Saturday daytime - from Chennai train station at 7:20am or so I had a day of mooching about the city and walking a fair bit to see what I could while I was there. Taxis aplenty as well, including one to the airport at about 6pm then 3 hours of checking in, waiting, waiting a bit more then a 1.5-hour flight to Sri lanka. No sleep, obviously. Joy Factor 2-and-a-bit

Saturday night - flight from Sri lanka to Bangkok after waiting for 4 hours at Colombo airport, caught a half-hour catnap on some impressively unergonomic and painfully dished seats before waking up late thinking I might have missed my flight. Surrounded by staring people so I was probably snoring ourageously, but I was in the departure lounge so the presence of others meant I hadn't been left behind
In-flight: Food = reasonably dreadful but not overtly poisonous, seats = too small. I caught a half-hour catnap before snapping my neck into wakefullness as is so funny to watch, and painful to do Flight time of 3.5 hours and too many interupptions for any more sleep than that. Joy factor -1 rising to 2 again once the head snapping was over with

Sunday daytime - Wandering around Bangkok after leaving everything at the bus station and buying a ticket as early as possible (bonus 100 point to Thailand over India in allowing one to buy tickets at any time in advance, not only 15 minutes before and having the ensuing free-for-all at the counter) and walking around in a lovely, but hot & humid city. Very tired and constantly stopping for coffee. Repair to the bus station for another 5 hours of waiting around with heavy lugagge and intravenous coffee injections until 9:45pm. No sleep at all on Sunday. Joy Factor 1.5, Tiredness Level 85.00%

Sunday Night - Bus from bangkok through the main bulk of Thailand to Nong Khai. 10 hours long in a space designed for a Lilliputian contortionist with no legs. Sleep? Hah! I got about 4 hours at most, but probably more like 3, and it was fragmented and unhappy - I wandered in and out of distressing half-dreams and saw an awful lot of the seatback in front of me. The guy in that seat reclined fully to get some nice relaxing sleep, further reducing my available space.

The drink stuck through the hole in the little foldaway table and stuck into my legs even more, so as a result it had to be finished or it would spill everywhere, and I was rendered thirsty as well as tired and severely cramped. Joy factor 0.5, Tiredness Level about 95:00%

Monday Daytime - from about 8am until about 3pm I was taken from the bus depot and went in tuk-tuks (3) and coaches (2) to a Visa On Arrival shop, a changeover junction where left-handed traffic becomes right-handed traffic and I had to transfer from tuk-tuk to a waiting coach, then onto immigration booths, border control, and finally across the border into Vientiane.
There seems to be a strech of about 2 miles across the Mekong river which is neither Thailand or Laos by this reckoning, but I'm sure they work something out between them In any case, I was busy with forms and fiddling with passports and then left mooching about on a wonderful city street in laos, a whole new country in the mid-afternoon.
Joy Factor 8, Tiredeness Level 99:50%

Monday Evening - since Thursday morning I had had 5 to 6 hours of sleep out of a possible 84 hours. Conventional wisdom recommends about 24 hours for this period, so I was a little crazy and my vision was starting to fracture, as can only happen with sleep deprivation and the very finest psychoactive hallucinogenics

-

And that is my point; yesterday I was really fucking tired. This seems to be a little belaboured, perhaps, but I like to get across just how much travelling can take out of you - and it is not just exciting but also pretty tiring just going about the place so much. Apart from the responsibilities (passports, Visa, not transgressing any international laws) which were hardly on my mind to be honest, there is an inertia you have to maintain in order to get where needed, and getting your luggage to and from all the places it needs to be, as well as yourself, is fairly tiring and occupies a reasonable amount of your mental space as well.

So it may be excused that last night I found the first hotel I could (after accosting some Americans for advice who were helfulness itself) and ordered some simple room service, whacked the Telly onto HBO, and settled down until early afternoon on Tuesday for a good, solid 16 hours.

Joy factor 10

So, I arrived safe and sound about 11 hours ago, and have seen something of Bangkok, too. What I have seen has been very nice indeed - the infamous congestion was not to be noticed, in fact the streets were a lot less jammed than anything in London proper and certainly a lot less hectic than Mumbai or Chennai. They have the count-down traffics lights here too! Pity I didn't get a photo.
I did get pictures of the tallest building in Thailand that seem to double as an advertisment for BMW but is actually the Hyatt building, not a hotel but the Asian offices for the company, I believe.
Anyway it's very very tall and slightly yellow, oddly constructed, and rather impressive. Seen it from the base and from the outskirts and everything.

Also a few other things worth mentioning, mostly architectural because the real notable features of where I went today - rambling through the poor backstreets and onto truly monumental building sites and semi-disused railway lines in the heart of the city - were places where I didn't fancy getting my camera out, just in case.
Generally though it seems I was needlessly paranoid, the Thai people here have been immensely friendly and helpful, polite, and very quick to laugh.
I was highly impressed with my taxi drivers, too, who presented themselves in an impressive variety of themes: quiet and reserved and sagacious and zen-like; loud and talkative and friendly and funny; patient and polite and keen to be helpful. All seemed to be totally genuine.
Two of them tried a little standardised overcharging (another guy who could have almost been mute and the loud and talkative one) and the first one gave back the difference when I admonished him about it, the second, highly talkative one I actually tipped even further, so charmed I was at the whole thing

There is a lot of building work going on here, in some city blocks every building seem to be rising almost simultaneously, but at different rates, like a patch of mushrooms or new groundshoots.
I can't imagine how much traffic they must have to warrant a serious congestion problem because the whole of the city that I saw - and it is a big city and I was in clean, massive, commercial streets the whole time - was laced with flyovers and land bridges and aerial highways, with more being built all over at the same time.

The building site I stumbled into was actually about 40 sites that I could see, each constructing a megalithic support for an even greater aerial transport platform, and it could have taken about a dozen trains abreast by the look of it. The supports were each about 60 feet high and about 50 feet wide - vast rectangles of steel and concrete that were engineering marvels in their own right, yet I could see only 40 of them because the path of the whole gigantic endeavour curved away from me in both directions once I had trudged a half-kilometer up the track to the nearest road junction.
God knows how much that costs or how long it will take to complete.

I returned to the bus station in the afternoon after buying a couple of DVDs - which work so far - and realising that I could not explore any further as I would be charmed into missing my bus to Nong Khai in the North and let myself be sucked into the Bangkok charm all too easily.
I ended up swaying through and around the busy bus station for 5 hours in an attempt to not spend money, not carry my bags until I played the left luggage game again, and because I was slightly worried about missing my bus and losing the travel impetus as what I really wanted by this time was nothing more than some sleep.
Itt became hard to walk in a straight line and not just sit down every 5 seconds - and this bus station was Busy with a capital letter and everything, so it woudn't exactly have been a one of my best ideas

The bus system for tickets and toilets (yes you gotta pay to pee in Bangkok it seems) was easy enough despite there being few English signs and most staff speak very little of the lazy travellers dialect
One lady at the information counter, presiently, was well versed, well clued-up, and well helpful, like. Got an overnight bus which gave me the day to explore, which is what I did.
The other main theme of my meanderings - besides stopping for coffee every hour to keep me upright and conscious - was the markets and bazaars - and they are quite unlike those of india in that only 2 people actively asked me to look at anything, and were endearingly polite and somewhat abashed when they did so. I couldn't perform a Gaijin Smash here if I wanted to, I feel.

But still - people are people and there's always a couple of pushy types, although here if you say `No` they seem to take that at face value and leave you alone.
We shall see how Laos and South East Asia view these things in general - for now at least, though, if I have the chance to come through Bangkok again and the transport links outward-bound seem to make that likely, I will have no objections at all

*After the fact* I still like the idea of Bangkok but it is even more crowded than the busiest bits of India in some places, notably that bus station. Getting the right bus wasn't hard even though there is no English translation in almost every place you could need it (tickets, destinations boards, signs of every kind) because they use `normal` Western cardinal numbers as well as the Thai set, which confusingly look a bit familair but are completely wrong.
In Laos, now, the banknotes are a bit of a nightmare because the Laotian number `2` looks almost identical to the number 6 in our way of writing. Bit of an arse for me, but quite possibly a tuk-tuk driver's dream

But the bus was designed by, to use another phrase of Bryson's, `A midget seeking revenge on full-sized people' and I had to make the poor guy sat next to me pretty uncomfortable to match as I still couldn't sleep much and was encroaching on about 20% of his seat space with my bulky Caucasion frame and lumpy English ale-drinker's belly.
Plus I was wearing those boots which, while fine for climbing hard terrain and kicking in sturdy doors, are not ideal for long, cramped bus journeys where there is precious little space for size 10 feet clad in nought but socks, let alone size 11 steel-toe caps made sufficiently sturdy for the bloody Royal Marines to withstand desert warfare.
Nice to know they wont fall aprt on you, but something of a bit of overkill, I'm starting to think.

So I'm sat in the departure lounge at Colombo airport, Sri Lanka. Yes, I am finally getting out and about a bit

Bit of a shame to come to somewhere as lovely and famous and as famously lovely as Sri Lanka (or Lanka, as it is known in India*) and not see any more of it than a departure lounge, the immigration hall and the inside of the men's toilets, but still. It's the being here and meeting all the super-excessively-helpful toilet attendants that counts at least tipping here isn't so much of a chore, and it really is like play money now I've left India.

The silly thing is the Indian Rupee is a closed currency - no-one outside the country is supposed to have so much as a Paise - but they clean forgot to clear me out, somwthing I was led to believe was essential and automatic, for the purposes of preserving this fiscal seperatism that I don't understand in the slightest, but there you are.

All of which means I actually was able to buy things past the check in area, something you are not technically mean to be able to do on international flights because you ain't meant to have the money!

I must be missing something of the logic here unless it's one final, cruel joke to erect these shops, staff them, fill them with merchandise and refreshments all solely to taunt you as you get on board your 7-hour super-economy cheapskate aircraft from the cattle-car school of aeronautical design, that bears food last seen in this world under the supervision of the SS, where the few things that could alleviate your suffering for the next 400 minutes or so were dangled before you as you left just after you were rendered incapable of obtaining them.
I call that needelessly cruel, personally.

-

Anyway Sri Lanka seems quite lovely What little of it I've seen anyway, and the internet facilities were an unexpected bonus; as unexpected as the guy who came up to me just now while I was typing in fact - not an airport employee but some random Thai or Chinese passenger - who seemed to be trying to tell me to go to the departure gate or something...? Either way he wanted me to do something other than what I was - am - engaged in.
If any other nations would care to send their minions too try and make me let go of the internet, then be warned: I'm ready for yerr; I've had enough messing about over this

*After the fact*
This time I was using only one of 8 PCs and the rest were all free, so unless it was a scam to get me away from the crowds or and rob me or something, it must have been a mistaken identity scenario thingy. The flight wasn't scheduled to leave for 3 hours and didn't actually leave for 4 hours from that moment. Which was just great

Totally uneventful in its execution as was the first flight to get to Colombo in the first place, except that I remembered again what it's like to be nervous about the takeoffs and landings - they seem to favour onboard live camera feeds in the cabins here, taken from the nose of the plane during takeoff and landing.
While it is reassuring to see you edge closer to Earth and land steadily or move away into the atmosphere smartly and confidently, when coming in to land on a windy day it is just a little nerve-wracking to see how much the wings are tipping out the window, and to watch the tarmac oscillating in unsettling harmony.

You quickly remember just how susceptible to high winds these steel birds are.

-

* The prefix `Sri` applies to a million things as it is an auspicious little adjective to stick before any kind of name; person, place or object. A bit like `Sir` in English it is a sign of respect when speaking to someone or about someone, but, as with everything in india, it conveys strong religious and spiritually beneficiant overtones, and officially makes a place just that little bit holier or more blessed just by its usage. Particularly popular in the name of your local restaurant

So I'm sat at a restaurant in Chennai, being spoon-fed chilli sauce. Practically. My are they keen on it in this place, I've got more sauce on my plate than onion masala in my onion masala dosa.

Just something I might have omitted from my previous ramblings, about that word; masala.
You can indeed get a tikka masala and not be thought a terrible British curry slob (they don't seem to have any notion of disdain for British curries, at least up until the point you barge into the kitchen and tell them to put down the assorted thousands of interesting spices, and that all they need is some Tesco's curry powder and a few bay leaves) and although I've not seen a Madras dish which would be rather appropriate for me sitting here in Madras right now, you can readily get Kormas (Kurmas) and Rogan Joshes and Jalfrezis too, as well as many other things.

What you wont get is what you expected, but that's all part of the fun.

Funny thing you notice though, if you order just a chicken tikka it is dry, nothing more than chunks of spiced meat, but if you get a chicken tikka masala you get it in the classic adopted British fashion with sauce (gravy) enough to smother small mammals. If that's your idea of fun, you sick, wrongheaded young man.

Now if you get a masala chai instead of a plain old chai it comes with added spices in the drink. Chai is very very sweet tea; made with condensed milk and then sugared further into unfathomable depths of sweetness, by the way.

And if you get a masala dosa instead of a regular dosa it contains the usual spiced potato innards (and lovely innards they are too - a dosa is a very thin pancake made with rice flour, naturally, and is generally rather massive so it gets folded over the filling once, twice, or even more times depending on the ambitions of the chef when he bought his pans. The filling always revolves around the theme of potatoes.) but these `masala` potato innards are spiced just as much as regular 'tatty innards, but in a different way that I, being a mere mortal and not in the queue for reincarnations, can't quite grasp.

Masala means `mixed` or as close as a translation will allow. Next time you get a tikka masala, don't say I never told yerr nuffin'!!

-

Another note I leave you as I leave India, is what to interpret from the head wobble.
The answer is: nothing. Ignore it completely - it does NOT mean no, it does NOT mean yes, it does NOT mean that anyone either understands you or not - the most useful answer I can divine from it is that it quite often, but not always, means "Yes, okay, I either get it or I don't but what this wobble means right now is I wish you'd stop going on about it, whatever it is."
This much I can happily assume to be true from how people have talked to me and moved the conversation on with a head wobble and a conclusive remark, and how I have seen plenty of Indian couples obviously having small arguments of some kind, and one of them starts wobbling away trying to drop the whole subject.

But sometimes it means no. Sometimes it means yes, maybe, I don't understand, okay I get it, and possibly even "Marmosets; aren't they an interesting life form?" for all that it affects matters..
In short, it is best to completely ignore it lest you get mislead, as I have been doing for about 4 months.

-

So as I leave the country, feeling a little sadness about leaving Kochi and Kerala behind, but a lot less (in fact, none) about departing Chennai later on today, I feel like making mention of some things I may have forgotton, skipped over or simply not impressed upon you strongly enough, my dear long-suffering audience, that really ought to be noted, for better or for worse.

I am going to seperate these out though and post them up some time after the fact, because i) I don't want you getting too bored and ii) I won't have international-networky access until Monday at the earliest, respectively.

-

Seeing as I am here and have relocated to a bar for a bit (yes, I know, this means I'm having a couple of drinks. Just a couple, as a farewell to India and to let me be terribly weak and succumb to that most treasured old thrill of mine: going somewhere brand new and finding places to drink) I can get the first of these little runaway trains of thought down in writing.

According to the old LP, the licensing laws in Chennai are stricter than most, and the only places technically allowed to serve the sauce are hotel bars, which generally gives boozers nice views with their pint because they tend to be rooftop bar/restaurants, although this one is on the 3rd floor and has a motorbike hanging from the ceiling on wires which looks pretty awesome.
It's called the Bik and Barrel, a literal if slightly erroneous take ont he English pub naming tradition, and as well as an excellent pool table and the aforementioned two-wheeled conveyance (a Royal Enfield, predictably enough) is boaats much classic memorabillia signage and posterwork all over the walls, fancy staff in appropriately over the top costumes uniforms and a notice on the door telling people like me that photography of any kind is strictly prohibited.

This hotel here is amazingly plush all over, really quite over the top. The grandest hotel I've ever soiled the threshold of, Grander than even the Woods Manor back in Kochi.
The Woods Manor was the nicest setting for a restauarant you might ever think of, and it was an amazement(?) to me that when I mooched in looking for a posh meal instead of Pizza Hut yet again the food was universally mediocre, although with some interesting choices I have to say.
The prices were totally average to match (I was expecting the cost to be about triple that of other places) and the general ambience of the restaurant was totally normal, average, mediocre, nonplussing and bland.

Which is strange because the hotel entranceway and lobby, with its grand sweeping staircase and vast indoor rock wall with cascading waterfalls and a sizeable pool at the base full of large, koi-carp style fish was something quite amazing. It seemed engineered to look awfully impressive and comfortable, which it did very well.
As you enter, sweaty and bedraggled, the precisely-calculated temperature of the air is thrust down your facial cavities, blissfully cool after the Indian city street temperature of too-fucking-many-for-comfort degrees Celsius, yet not anything so traumatic as the arctic chill many places assault the innocent with, possibly in the vain belief that "everywhere these white people come from is cold so let's make 'em feel at home, eh Vijay?".
I would like the record to show that I do not live inside a deep freeze, nor are my neighbours called Santa or Frosty. I do not appreciate frostbite at the best of times, let alone when I'm supposed to paying and smiling for it.

But Woods Manor Hotel managed immediate and blissful comfort, and the food was attractively priced to the cheapest of wallets (such as mine) so I ended up with a three course meal for the same price or less than a pizza delivery. I even had dessert, and taking dessert in an Indian restuarant is something like taking your life into your own hands because they have a real sweet tooth - and that phrase does nothing to convey the sumptuous depths and giddy heights that the India palate willingly soars to and from every time they even think about sugar.

One of the national favourites is, let me see if I've go this straight: little bright orange wheels of confectionary, comprised entirely of dozens of tiny rings of spun sugar, which are then caramelised slightly, then coated in an exceptionally concentrated glucose syrup, then fried in a little sugar - caramelised again - then left to cool and dry and coated with icing sugar to finish.
That's somewhere close to a lethal dose, by my reckoning.

The real shame about the Woods Manor was that this kindly attitude towards the frugal and the cheap didn't extend a millimetre outside of the restuarant. I checked the prices after my meal, feeling satisfied, full, pleasantly chilled and smug at finding somewhere so nice, and a single room with AC and TV (well, duh. With a lobby like that it wasn't gonna have any rooms without AC/TV, was it?) was just a fraction less than 2000 rupees. Plus tax which in Kerala is punishing in the extreme.
A luxury room was almost 4000 rupees and you could have a suite, if you just could not get a handle on your shoppig habit, for a mere 7000 rupees per night, which made it approximately 21 times my own accomodation budget. Shame, because I really wanted to have a suite of rooms in a posh hotel.
Oh well, there's always Indonesia...

But back in Chennai; this place, woah! The central lobby is bigger than most houses, and manages to cheerfully and opulently exist without any clumsy walls or pillars anywhere for an area about the size of a small carpark. It has bloody cloisters outside of that, and the distance to the roof might well be measured in tenths of a mile. If I wasn't so sure that the prices would be just as bad as the Woods Manor I might feel bad about not staying in this East coast city a couple of nights and exploiting this lovely place to the full.

-

As it is, Chennai has not impressed me at all so I don't care to stay on principal. The taxi drivers are the worst yet, I've been in two rickshaws and both have tried to extract far more than they should have, bloody cheek.
The first guy who hassled me asked for 100 rupees for a drive of about a mile - almost thrice the rate even in an expensive city! Like those who test the sanity of the inimitable Bryson, he received a hollow laugh in reply rather than my custom.
I've seen one pretty much certainly-dead woman on the streets (no-one has gotten round to clear up those who didn't survive the night, I suppose), dozens of homeless and destitute who aren't far off it themselves, and the smell is the worst yet in India, I believe. I have been here for 4 hours.

I'm not even slightly moved about the dead woman, I fear I have become a little indifferent to woe and misfortune

That smell: it's not that it's there any more frequently than in, say, Mumbai, but it has a certain penetrating quality I've not run up against before. Maybe there are more dead people in the rivers - that certainly seems to be where the smell is coming from, and it is so noxious I could well believe almost anything could be behind it..

One river I crossed must have been entirely composed of the result of the near-terminal incontinence of several million people, and to cap it all off some of them also seem unable to restrain themselves from pissing on the pavements, such is the evidence of huge damp patches and terrible fishmonger odours on passing them.

The streets are crowded, people are cheekier than ever, there isn't space for the tens of millions of people on the streets and the queuers for the left luggage counter at the train station seemed unable to show any patience at all. The guy behind me was pushing his suitcases over the top of my bags trying to get the staff to take his stuff before mine which is frankly just about as fucking rude as you can be without speaking to someone, and when I moved about to push my stuff forwards he began knocking my bag to the left and right in a way that simply could not have been accidental, as he did it about 20 times in 2 minutes. I was getting pretty irritated with it by then, so
I twisted spasmodically after a little while and I think I clipped him in the face. Only once, unfortunately, so to thwart him fiuther I used my laptop to deflect his baggage advancement maneuvreings the next time he tried to stack all his cases on top of my rucksack.
And I hope he misses his train, loses his job and his wife gets pregnant, the pushy bastard.

Overall Chennai had better pull something out of the bloody sack in the next *checks* 6 hours, or I'm never coming back to distribute my hard-earned wealth amongst its rickshaw drivers again

*After the fact* It never did much but irritate me, so I swooped down to the train station and collected my bags, then taxi'ed to the airport for a fairly easy check-in and departure. Chennai airport was efficient and pleasant, if still typically relaxed in the Indian style when it comes to reminding stupid foreigners like me that you have to get your bags checked, scanned and labelled under your own inertia before checking in, and there are no signs or handy filtered passages to tell you this is so just a large, open hall with no queues or paths outlined but a crowd gently besieging the checkin-in desks at one end, and bag scanners arrayed in a well-spaced line at the other, but it gets sorted out quickly enough even when dealing with me

If only I had managed to spend all my remaining rupees I wouldn't now have about 16 quids-worth of wasted funds that I'l never be able to use. No-one in Bangkok or Laos can change rupees and I suppose no-one outside India can, at all.
Hey ho; I can set fire to them or make paper planes out of money and discard them from tall buildings to pretend I'm just soooo recklessly extravagant, I guess