It’s hard to believe that my entire immediate family is currently in India; even my dad’s girlfriend arrived last night to travel with my dad. I am glad; I was tired of being alone, tired of knowing people for only bits at a time. I think also that I’m through traveling alone. It has been really good for me, but I think it’s beginning to exhaust its benefits. What I have proved to myself, however, in traveling alone, is that amidst loneliness, disorientation, and lack of routine I can keep myself occupied physically, intellectually, artistically, spiritually, and emotionally for long periods and maintain sanity, even happiness. This, for me, is no small accomplishment. I have tried to keep the attitude and approach that I will spend my life in community and routine; the least I can do is learn what it’s like to be alone, a stranger in a strange world.
I came a long way yesterday to meet my mom, who had set up a hotel room for us to watch the inauguration. I left Kochi, a port city in Kerala at the southwestern tip of India, at 5 AM to fly to Mumbai to Delhi and then to Dehradun, the closest airport to Rishikesh. I arrived in Delhi, sleep deprived and in a hurry to make my connection. To my relief, my Kingfisher flight to Dehradun was late. Kingfisher is the brand of the number one beer in India, and they seem to have started an airline on the side; imagine if we had Budweiser airlines (although I think Hooters does operate some flights on the east coast). I waited and waited for my flight, only a 40 minute hop, to take off two hours late. Finally we boarded and proceeded to wait for another half hour. When the flight took off they didn’t serve any beer. We could soon see the Himalayas crowning the distance and we were told to prepare for landing in the city below. After circling for a few minutes, the pilot announced that there was too much fog and that we had to go back to Delhi, that polluted, over-populated crowd of a city. With the Himalayas in view! What a cruel joke. I suspected the airlines were drunk on Kingfisher. We landed back in Delhi, after wasting a good amount of fuel and everyone’s time and were told to find alternative sources of transportation. They refused to compensate me in beer, so an Israeli yoga teacher and I decided to take our refund and make a net profit by sharing a 5 hour taxi to Rishikesh. I arrived at 2 AM, after 21 hours of traveling, missing the inauguration (was it good?) and the party my mom had planned for months.
But I arrived. Traveling in India is slow and taxing and I’ve been doing a lot of it. I love the places I see, but I hate getting to them, and I’m not sure if my patience for travel trials has increased or decreased. One thing is sure: I will be happy to be in one place for a while when I get back to Portland (or maybe I’ll take off on my bike!) and not spend my time bouncing up and down on buses.
But I think I have enough gumption left for the rest of the trip. I’m really glad to see my mom here, who has been staying in a beautiful ashram near the Ganges doing daily yoga, “developing discipline for things that are important and getting healthy”, the main goals of her trip. In her own words,
“Well, it took me about a day after arrival in Rishi to feel comfortable, and today – a week later – I think I fell in love with India. I definitely fell in love with something, whether Rishikesh, India, or my life in general, I can’t quite tell. All will unfold itself in due course.”
She was exhausted from traveling and feeling unsure her first day but soon made 8 friends, hiked to a waterfall and began her own spiritual routine. She’s on to India like a bee on a flower.
Rishikesh was a good place for her to start. The Beatles thought it was adequate as the site of their ashram stay. As the “yoga capital of the world”, everyone does yoga and lives in ashrams. The foothills of the Himalayas are to the north, the source of the Ganges that flows crystal clear and blue through the town. It does me good to see the Ganges in its pristine form, as opposed to the literal sludge of shit it becomes in Varanasi. We’ll stay here for about 5 days; I haven’t done yoga since I had a stable routine in Varanasi and that was a couple months ago, so that will be good. We’ll be going soon to Bodhgaya, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, and up to Nepal for a short trek and because it’s Nepal before I head off to Delhi to fly away from India.
Traveling with my dad was a success. My dad, since he’s on vacation and wants to pack as much as possible into his three weeks per year, is a fast-paced sight seer who likes moving rapidly from place to place. I like moving slowly and experiencing, and my aforementioned aversion to travel is exacerbated in proportion to frequency. We compromised, as he’ll be moving even faster during his trip with his girlfriend up north, often spending a night in each place. I thought he wasn’t allowing for Indian Stretch Time (an alternative to IST, Indian Standard Time), as occurences such as yesterday’s flight are frequent and annoying, but hopefully they make their way without a hitch.
He flew into Chennai, the mega city of SE India and we made our way to Pondicherry, the only French colony in India, which they Frenchicized as much as the Portuguese Latinized Goa. The continental powers seem to have focused on taking over small portions of India, making themselves feel at home and converting the locals, while the British took over the whole continent but hardly left an architectural mark. From colonialism to food, continentals do things on a smaller scale but with more class than us manifest-destiny anglos.
Pondicherry is really nice, on the ocean, chilled out, beautiful and very French. It disturbs me that I apparently determine a place’s livability by how European it was, but Pondicherry was the first city I would actually desire to live in, had I something to do, in India. Many French expats thought the same, or maybe they didn’t realize the colonial days were over, as they while away time in luxurious (and real) French restaurants that cost a fraction of what they do at home, living near the beach and letting the locals live off of it. Coming to live off the wealth like this and even tourism in general really do feel like a forms of colonialism in which I feel culpable. But Pondicherry was really sweet. Good restaurants! and my dad and I took in the sights, drank and played chess. My dad describes one sight seeing journey as a comment to the post below (Jan 
Just north of Pondicherry is the international spiritual community of Auroville, started in the year of all years 1968 as a planned community of thousands from around the world revolving around a big gold plated ball that looks like epcot. It’s not really a cult, it actually seemed really cool, obviously very ecumenical, cohousing for the spiritually serious. More information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroville.
We took a sleeper bus to a wildlife preserve on our way to the west coast. We didn’t see much wildlife but we did go on an elephant ride. Dumbo was calm and cool and I felt instant affinity for him. I never realized that elephants (at least Indian elephants) are such old souls. We also went traipsing around the forest with a spice guide who tore off chilly, cardamom, egg plants, and many other spices from the trees. He didn’t understand when I told him there was a party in my mouth and everone was invited. We also witnessed a Kathakali performance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathakali) which is a setting of detailed and long stories to drum patterns with dancers made up in spectacular fashion. The plot is enacted silently through dance and facial expressions. The list of potential expressions in Kathakali is diverse and subtle, but it was amazing how universal expression is (at least on the Eurasion continent) and that the expressions for sadness, fear and embarrasment, especially when caricatured, are palpable independent of cultural origin. I’m sure cultural anthropologists have a lot more to say on the subject.
We made our way to the west coast of Kerala, which is composed of a network of canals rolling along the blissful tropical scenery where Keralans live, bath, and boat. My dad and I rented a houseboat, which is the tourist thing to do around there. It took us along the waterways for an evening, night and the following morning. The boat was equipped with a captain and a chef, who prepares lavish and delicious food, of which there was way too much. My dad and I set out to play chess until the captain challenged us. He proceeded to clean both of our clocks. My dad muttered in despair, “Harvard and Reed devastated by backwater boatman.” The houseboat was pretty luxurious, but at 50 dollars for two including delicious meals, comfy water lodging, and canal tours, pretty good value. Not something I’d have done myself, but there are good points to traveling with a lawyer on vacation!
We ended up in Kochi, the second most liveable (ie, most European) city I’ve seen in India, a seat of colonial power from the Portuguese to the Dutch to the British. There are even Jewish communities there from BC times! Very diverse and beautiful port city. We stayed in a guest house that was also an art gallery, played chess and said our goodbyes.
I was really glad to have seen South India. Many people, especially us Americans for whom India is far far away, stick to the North where the more obvious manifestations of Indian culture reside (the Taj Mahal, etc.). But the South has a really different vibe. With tropical scenery, it’s way more relaxed, way more beautiful. My impression was that the south was far less overpopulated, more prosperous, more egalitarian (the Aryan/Vedic caste society is more of the north), less mysoginistic and more chill. I have little empirical data to back this up. In any event, I’m now at the foothills of the Himalayas again, so, if anything, I was thankful for the weather. Cause I didn’t think India actually got cold, but it’s chilly up here!
