02 July 2010

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Desert fever

The sea has never gone inside the mosque
After a few more tasty meals and lively conversations at Janani’s house, I headed to the airport. As I walked up to the doors I was overwhelmed with excitement for the clean, quiet familiarity of an airport, this one especially so as it looked shiny and new. I settled in to one of a thousand indistinguishable seats with a lemon iced tea (after the barista mentioned the restaurant’s plugs didn’t work as he handed me the passport, wallet and plane ticket that I had forgotten at the counter) and suddenly burst out laughing at the enjoyment I had found in the Bengalaru domestic terminal. I have never in my life (I am so sure I will even keep that never in the sentence) thought of an airport as feeling familiar, quiet or clean in any way before now. I have actively thought of airports as the antithesis of all of those things, in fact. But my mind has changed. I felt comfortable and calm and un-overwhelmed in public for the first time in a while. I felt markedly less so in Mumbai when I waited for a ride to Nimesh’s house upon arrival or when I waited to pick up Amara late that night. But the stars aligned somehow to make that moment in the Bengalaru airport just what I needed, which was reassuring seeing has how it was the third plane ticket I had purchased for this leg of my trip.

Tea time!
The remains of a taxi driver strike were lingering around Mumbai when I arrived, making a bit of a disaster out of my transportation situation. I first called a private cab and after a long hot hour I gave up and called Shailja, Nimesh’s mom, to help me decide what kind of ride to get. I was hounded by touts, but when I tried to get a rickshaw they would just drive away and auto drivers quoted me three and four times the normal price – after negotiations.  Luckily Shailja’s driver was headed back into town though, so after another hour or so he came and got me. In the meantime, I struck up conversations with the touts as they were beginning to think I was just going to stay there and I knew had settled my business now that I had a ride secured. They sometimes wandered away once they realized I wasn’t on the market for a journey, but sometimes they just made fun of me for standing there for so long, and although standing there wasn’t so funny, a few almost got me to smile.

We totally fit in around here...
Upon arrival, Shailja knew exactly what I needed: a delicious snack of classic Mumbai fare, a run down of classic Mumbai sights and a nap. Her driver was ready to take me to pick up Amara at one AM and I tried really hard to shake off my post-nap bad mood in time to see her walk out the airport doors. I had been imagining the moment for a while, and although she looked a little differently than I remembered (since when did she get curly hair anyways?) it was as surreal as meeting my baby sister at two AM in Mumbai should be. Amazing. Not only did I make here, which is pretty crazy, but so did she. New adventure, commence!

Well, the new adventure commenced with sleeping. When we woke up, Shailja told the driver where we wanted to go in the city (a list of the top tourist sights) and we were off. It was slow going winding through the streets of Mumbai and somewhere along the way it started pouring. After that, the driver wouldn’t let us out of the car until we called Shailja and had her translate that we needed some lunch. In the seven or so hours we drove, we managed to see the Gate of India (where we were swarmed for pictures) and a lot of the city from the inside of the car where it was cool and dry. It was like an old person’s tour, which I rather liked, but wasn’t the exactly the Indian adventure I had been touting to Amara. That part started later in the evening, when a couple of Nimesh’s friends took us out on the town where we had Mexican food and Coronas, spotted Bollywood actors (actually, one of them is a Bollywood actor) and despite out grubby, hippie, bumish travel clothes, felt like classy Mumbites (I made that word up) in the big city.

Lotus ladies
The next day we tried to sight see again, this time spending the first half of the day getting plane, train and bus tickets so we could ensure the continuation of our journey. It was hot and expensive and frustrating, and the office we were in had a 5 foot ceiling (yes, really), so we tried to take frequent juice and tea breaks. Once we finally had a way out of Mumbai for Sunday and out of India for the 12th of July, we set off shopping. As we realized the night before, people in Mumbai dress up quite a bit, so we needed to get something nice for the evening. Kushboo, my friend Sonny’s girlfriend, would be taking us out and we wanted to look a little less like road warriors….we hopped on a local bus (actually, I shoved Amara on the bus, past old ladies and young men alike, as it drove off from the bus stand), then a local train (in the ladies car, thank god), and finally a taxi to Bandra, a shopping district where the streets were lined with stalls selling sandals and bangles and cheap cotton goods. I will warn you, neither of us likes to shop, but we tend to do better when we have specific goals. Three hours later we were running out of time as we wandered deeper and deeper into underground alleys of the most random assortment of Western-style clothing I could have ever imagined. Each rack started with fairly new stuff, usually branded perhaps from local factories, and as you moved to the right, the clothing got laughably old. In one of those laughably old sections, I found two rather odd mid-eighties dresses that I fell in love with and purchased immediately for four hundred rupees (eight dollars). A few stalls later Amara found two dresses on the left side of the rack (her style is much more modern) and a pair of shorts, just what she needed, and we were off for accessories. Rapid-fire sandal and bangle purchases and we were off to meet Kushboo and Bjorn, my German friend from St Gallen.

Amara trying to shop in a mini-store
The club we went to had massive statues of goddesses and four story-high ceilings, it was gorgeous. Not the intimate Los Angeles-style place we had been the night before, but a whole different vibe, which was perfect for our short trip. We stayed out too late to go back to Shailja’s so we slept at Kushboo’s beautiful downtown flat and got up as early as we could to grab Bjorn, run up to Shailja’s for our stuff, and head out to see the sights we had missed the past few days.

I would like to add that when we say run, we mean take a taxi with no air conditioning in bumper-to-bumper traffic for two in a half hours, but we made it to all of our stops.

Both the temple and the mosque were amazing, and I had a fun time as tour guide for Bjorn and Amara, neither of who had been to a Hindu temple before. We bought gifts for Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and covered our hair to go into the mosque. Mumbai was really starting to grow on us, and we had one last evening to enjoy it before heading up to the desert. Kushboo took us to an open-air hookah place and we called it an early night to catch our flight (oo so fancy) to Jaipur.

Yep, its a desert.
I had debated long and hard about Jaipur. It dropped off the itinerary with all my conversations with Westerners, only to be added back in after talking to Indians. The land of Kings must be seen, we finally decided, and we would brave the heat to do so. Stepping off the plane we exclaimed, it’s not even that hot! And after dropping our bags at the cute little Pearl Palace Hotel, we scurried off to a nighttime circus like place to see a bit of ‘traditional’ Rajasthan culture. About fifty paces in, we realized it was that hot. It was about nine at night, dark as anything, but we could barely move. We found out later it was a hundred and seven. We dragged ourselves to the camel, pet him, and sat. We slowly, slowly got to the bowl-balanced dancy lady and then sat. Same for the palm reader, the swings, the magician, the ice cream seller, the water seller, the tight ropewalker, the elephant, the water seller, the huge white cows and the strange plastic jungle. Finally we made it to a deserted stage, where I forced Amara to do a rain dance with me before we collapsed into a rickshaw. The driver, of course, got lost five hundred times (ok, that’s an exaggeration, but literally fifty times he asked for directions) before we just got out and called the hotel to pick us up. By that time we were feeling woozy and could barely manage a shower before passing out.

More tea please.
In the morning we realized that it wasn’t just the heat wiping us out, but we were both quite ill. I had a fever over a hundred and couldn’t really get up. Thank all of the gods and the not gods and the Lonely Planet and everything else we can thank that the hotel had room service, and they brought us tea after tea after tea while we tried to recover enough to get on the train at five the next morning. We had the Taj Mahal to see….

I was really worried I wouldn’t be able to make the journey, and I told Amara if we could do this, I think we could do anything. The plan was to leave Jaipur at 5:15am and arrive in Agra at 11am in time for the heat of the day (47C) and a quick tour to the Taj. At 4pm we would leave for Delhi, arriving at 8 to change stations. Leaving at 9:45 to Kalka, arriving at 5am to catch the 5:30 train to Shimla where we had a nice hotel reserved. It was by far the most aggressive schedule yet and was intended to see the sights as quickly as possible, to get out of the heat without missing the main stuff. Some of our train tickets were reserved, some waitlisted, and around 8am I realized in the fog of the fever I forgot to even buy one of them (which we solved with a travel agent in Agra). So, as I said, now with the heat, the disease and the schedule, if we can do this we can do anything.

There were camels & elephants on the streets too!
Somehow my fever broke in the night and we got on the train. Amara started to deteriorate at that time, so we rented an AC taxi to take us around Agra. It seems you have to actually walk into the Taj Mahal and there is (apparently) only one single spot outside of the gates where you can see it at all. It happened to be located directly over a river of open sewage, but hey, we saw the Taj...and if you look really hard you can see it too in that pic. Hehe. Luckily Amara could sleep on the top berth once we got on the train, and only had to wake up long enough to change trains in Delhi – no small feat. Again winding through the exhaust filled streets I bought her a string of Jasmine to freshen the air and we tried to relax as the clock ticked closer and closer to our departure time and the wheels sat still. The only time we seemed to move was long enough for a pair of boys on a motorcycle to reach in and grab at us, which made us scream but the driver didn’t seem to notice at all. We ran through the Delhi station, searching for our platform then our train then our car then our seat. Amara curled into the top berth of the sleeper, clutching the Jasmine and a bottle of water. It was a long, hot night with frequent stops where the air stagnated and I would check to make sure Amara with still there, and breathing.
Look reeeeally hard to the left of that forked branch
Around two AM we reached some place high enough that the air cooled and I slept for a few hours. Stepping off of that train in Kalka to brush our teeth and wash our face so we could be seen in our first class car to Shimla we knew we could make it. Amara was feeling a little better after a night’s (and almost the whole day’s) rest (how she slept in that heat I will never know – I suppose that’s how sick she was) and we were both the happiest little things just to be in fresh, cool air. A few hours left, but I think we made it. The mountains! Home! Air! Breathing! We haven't gotten to eating yet either, but hopefully soon...

Oh my. Ooooh my.