You like shoes?
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| Someone milk me! |
“Yeeesss” is the opener that Indian sales people use to try and lure you into their shop. Depending on their wares, it’s “yeessss….you like shoes?”, “yeess…..you like memory card”, “yeeess…you like stuff?”. All of which we probably like, but not while pacing down a busy street trying to avoid cattle, cars and motorbikes.
If we do get sucked in however and are interested in the cost of an item, the response is often “as you like?”, followed by the customary Indian head wobble. As you like can mean anything from yes, no, maybe, happy to sad. It also makes the start of the bargaining process difficult, as inevitably what price we like isn’t reciprocated.
Ah India. No rules, no prices, corruption everywhere, but oh so much fun.
Mudgeting
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| Festival street art outside mudget accommodation. |
India attracts all kinds of travellers, but there seems to be more of the hard-core budget and unhygienic crowd than other destinations we’ve been to. We definitely had a budget and stuck fairly close to it, but there are people around whose sole mission is to live as cheap as possible, even if that means not really seeing anything or doing anything. “Man I can’t believe you paid to see the Taj Mahal” or even a train are comments we’d hear. Call us crazy, but just sitting in one location for months eating rice and chapatti probably isn’t the best use of time. We also don’t subscribe to the view, that your not travelling unless you smell worse than the local homeless.
So we have decided we are ‘mudgeting’, or mid-range budgeting. This means that we will treat ourselves occasionally, such as a room with an attached bathroom. Generally it still overflows when flushed, is rancid and is always a squatter, but for us it’s a treat. Moving up from the thigh muscle defining squatter to a European toilet would take us out of mudget category into economical. We also value meal times, so splurge on sit down dinners and the occasional G&T – generally a good dinner and a few drinks sets us back $6-$10. Mudget style.
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| We love 'thali' Indian mixed curry plate |
Enough Delhi already
After our visa debacle and a week in India’s capital, we vowed never to go back there. Fate got in the way with the cancellation of our direct flight to Kerala and we found ourselves in suburban Delhi at 6am after an overnight bus, thankfully with our passports. We’d already done all the galleries and exhausted the few sights of Delhi so thought we’d park ourselves at our favourite café with our packs and just read and eat out the day. Unfortunately the Delhi metro had other ideas; bouncing us from one incorrect train to the next until eventually we got to Central. Central must have been the centre of a vortex, because we couldn’t figure out how to get out and after a mini-melt down we ended up at a dive restaurant at the train station before deciding just to go to the airport five hours early. Great decision. Airports are clean and have European toilets – for free!
Healthy start to 2012
In 2011 we got married and spent 5 months travelling, so it was probably the best year of our lives. We’d started to reflect that luck was on our side and things kept working out, but the end of 2011 wasn’t as peachy as other points thanks to a cancelled plane, leading to an overnight bus and a flight out of Delhi that didn’t get us to Trivandrum in Kerala until 3am NYE.
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| Duncan eventually perfecting the scorpian |
Once on the ground in southern India, things turned back the Band’s way as we were picked up by a pre-arranged driver (sign and all) and driven an hour to Varkala beach. When we got there he asked “you know where you going?”, which was strange for a few whities fresh off a plane. Thankfully he walked us to our hotel, which was 20 minutes away through back alleys. After removing our shoes to walk through the flooded and muddy footpaths, we could hear the waves crashing below and popped out beside a tragic looking bar with the dregs of the NYE party walking bleary eyed towards us. We worried about the kind of place we’d come to, but after crashing in our mudget hotel we awoke to the sound of the Indian ocean, bright green palm trees and a notice on our wall about yoga on the roof top in 15 minutes.
Kicking off 2012 with yoga rather than a hangover, while gazing out through the palm trees to the ocean which we hadn’t seen in three months was amazing. We decided we may have turned over a new leaf, we’re just not sure what the other side looks like?
Free upgrading
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Trains in India are awesome to get around, but the 2nd and 1st class carriages are always booked out weeks in advance, which doesn’t suit our aversion to forward planning. We discovered on our trip from Varkala to Fort Cochin that ‘booked out’, doesn’t necessarily mean all the seats are taken. So we just jumped on a 2nd class carriage and with our stop only two hours away, we managed to get off before the conductor was in our carriage.
Encouraged by our successful fare evading, we adopted self-upgrades for the next few trains (mainly to avoid a repeat of the worst experience of Duncan’s life). The next time the conductor just shrugged when he saw we were in the wrong carriage, but our luck ran out for the last leg of our trip where we had to come to an agreement on a ‘fine’, aka bribe.
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| Big enough for two? |
Huge houseboat, 3 staff, ensuite with western toilet and sunbed…check!
Mudgeting means that you can skimp on some things, like legal train travel, to splurge on luxuries like 2 nights, 3 days on a houseboat on the Kerala backwaters. We’d been told that if you can afford it, it’s one of India’s most memorable experiences.
Cruising down the backwaters looking at the relaxed lifestyles’ of southern Indians compared to the manic lives of Rajasthan was super relaxing. We felt a bit uncomfortable having more staff than us aboard, but we quickly got into the rhythm of having food and drinks delivered to our private upstairs balcony with two thrones and a sunbed.
On night one, we learnt that our crew planned to use it as their private party boat, with music and DVD’s blaring from downstairs. After much debate, we decided for the money we were paying we could ask them, “hey do you mind turning down the volume on the gun fire in the fighting scenes and maybe disconnecting the subwoofer?”.
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| Chinese fishing nets at Fort Cochin |
A teacher, not an instructor
By the time we reached Fort Cochin in northern Kerala we had done quite a lot of yoga and were on the lookout for a good teacher for a few days. We got lucky, finding a small poster on a telegraph pole for Sanjee who after the first class Duncan announced “was the only yoga teacher I have ever met. His amazing. Everyone else has been an instructor” – so enlightened!
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| Not many fish caught in the Chinese fishing nets, but they make awesome photos. |
Fort Cochin was really touristy, but we couldn’t quite tell why. It was extremely hot and humid, but with no beach. If it wasn’t for our ‘teacher’ and the fact Pip had managed to halve our room rate we would have moved on sooner. So stuck in Fort Cochin addicted to the yoga, but craving the beach we hired a scooter and spent the day exploring.
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| A few teething issues on the car ferry |
The first obstacle was Duncan reacquainting himself with a scooter and Pip who for ‘mudget’ reasons couldn’t have her own, like we have done in the past perched nervously on the back. The second obstacle was that after only five minutes we had to get a car ferry. While Pip sorted out our tickets, Duncan awkwardly moved the scooter into the line to get on the next ferry. Managing to park right up the back on an odd angle, made getting off very difficult but extremely funny for Pip to watch as he held up the traffic waiting to get on minutes after the rest of the ferry was off. A few hours later, that would turn out to be nothing as the return trip created even more dramas with the bike somehow parked
backwards. There were also screams of “the electrics are f&*ed” as Duncan failed to get the bike started and eventually had to push it off the ferry to avoid the wrath of the conductor. Pip took video of the debacle, so make sure to ask to see it when we catch up!
Other than the car ferry, Duncan’s scootering skills proved superb (thanks to Pip’s backseat driving) as we whizzed up a busier than expected roads before turning off and winding through palm lined streets and houses lining the canals. Less successful were the sandy stretches of roads, where results were mixed.
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| A giant Ganesh at Hampi |
Free love baby
On a 16-hour bus ride to southern Goa we managed to get ourselves in the second row (always smoother up the front). What we hadn’t anticipated was that the driver was a maniac and we were looking straight out the front window while simultaneously watching our lives flash before our eyes. The lady in front of us was even more outraged and with shared anger we began to chat, commencing a 10-hour conversation with “Venus”. After Duncan closed the curtain so that we were naïve of how close to head-on collisions we were, Venus turned around and proceeded to talk at us about her crazy life. There were some inconsistences, but we welcomed the distraction of a 50 year old south African woman, who had spent a year in India, been married four times, set up numerous businesses with Indian men, danced for middle East oil squillionaires and started a business after running out of money whereby Indians could pay her 100 rupees to take a photo of her in a bikini under a palm tree. She also had other endeavours, like roping Swedish girls into the bikini palm tree photo business as well as big plans to perhaps expand to prostitution. It was an entertaining story that kept going even after we closed our eyes and the rest of the bus was asleep. Even pulling down our eye masks didn’t clear up our intentions, “Are you guys asleep?”.
Sadly we had to part ways at 4am with Venus, as we were getting off the bus early.
The driver’s skills were horrendous, but not nearly as bad as his customer service when he refused to tell us if we were at the right place. After much debate we ended up back on the bus and went another 45 minutes north, before having to get local buses back to the original spot. As with everything that has seemingly gone wrong, it worked out for the best. By the time we were 45 minutes north it was starting to get light, public transport was running and we met Henning and Vera, a German couple, who we ended up travelling with for a week.
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| Relaxing with Henning and Vera watching the sunset |
Cows instead of tauts
Gokarna was beautiful and best of all there were no touts harassing us to buy tacky bracelets while we lay on the beach. In place of the touts were a few cows that sadly like all Indian ‘holy cows’ were scavenging for food. The beach was a tricky scavenging ground, particularly for sunbakers who had to keep one eye on the cows at all times to avoid being trampled.
For a holy animal, it’s sad to see how cows have been reduced to scavenging for their food. They obviously don’t have a great sense of smell, having been designed for grazing grass, as they often miss food scraps by less than a meter. Instead of grazing they are forced to pace up and down beaches, streets, dumps hoping to run into some food scraps or most likely rubbish. Often this means they eat plastic, but not while Duncan was on patrol. If a cow was trying to liberate some discarded watermelon skin in a plastic bag, Duncan would avoid a gauging before removing the watermelon from the plastic for them. Hopefully good karma to draw on later!
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| Could we live below a sarong and get our hippy on? |
Hippy commune
With Vera and Henning we set off on a walk to the beaches over the point. The first beach wasn’t anything special, so we pushed on to Paradise beach. As we scrambled over the last of the rocks, we saw the beginnings of a true hippy commune. Sarongs were used as privacy walls, group kitchens had been erected, there was lots of drumming and singing and clothing was optional. Wowsers, what a spectacle. We spent the day lazing in the sun, swimming in the ocean and of course observing the hippies in action and wondering if we could live in the commune for a summer….
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| Temple and a few boulders |
Boulders and temples
For weeks we’d been tossing up whether to go to the UNESCO World Heritage site at Hampi, but decided to take the detour and see for ourselves what all the fuss was about. Probably the best decision of the trip, as missing Hampi would have been a crime.
Huge boulders precariously perched on each other, with 13th century temples scattered all over the place that restored our interest in temples. Ancient rock carved temples and statues are much more interesting than temples adorned with fairy and neon lights.
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| Many more boulders |
It was a brief visit though, with an overnight bus in and two days exploring before an overnight bus out to Patnem in southern Goa. Annoyingly once again we arrived at a beach before dawn, so at 4am we simply pulled our sleeping sheets, beanies and thermals out and slept on the beach. Unfortunately for Vera and Henning they weren’t able to as easily slip into the life of a hobo so sat freezing on the sand until the sun came up and then checked out all the accommodation options. None of which suited our budget, so Henning and Duncan headed back a street and found some great accommodation only a block back and accessible to the beach from the beach bar in front of it. It was almost perfect, until Pip put a padlock on the door and took the wrong set of keys to breakfast. So Pip spent another hour apologising as Duncan tried to dismantle the door, before Pip found a hacksaw to cut the lock off.
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| Duncan's sand turtle creation - a hit with the locals! |
Give us a sleepy beach
We had been tossing up going to northern Goa, after Venus praised it’s crazy culture. Other people talked of a seedy party culture and obnoxious Russians in thongs (both men and women) and we were leaning towards keeping it to sleepy beaches. Patnem was probably the busiest we’d been to and after spending a night with Geeza Oly, who was there for two months and announced at full volume after sitting down at our table “I’m dirty, I’m scum, I’m here to get messed up” we were sure that any busier and seedier was not what we were after.
A strong finish
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| Kayaking with Meg & Anders near Agonda. |
Thanks to Meg and Anders from the Ashram who we’d been staying in contact with, we found Agonda beach. They’d already been there for a week and we could see why with little shacks right on the sand and no big beach bars or party scene.
After parting ways with our German travel buddies we took an easy local bus to Agonda and as we began walking north along the beach road an English guy stopped on his scooter to ask us what kind of accommodation we were looking for. For our budget he pointed us to the last place on the beach, where we got a great deal for a quaint little shack right on the sand with a good restaurant run by lovely Nepalese guys. The beach itself was huge and to meet Meg & Anders each night for dinner took us half an hour, but we loved our little tucked away shack right on the ocean.
We had definitely transitioned from travelling to being on holidays by this point, forgetting too much about the budget at meals and just eating and drinking whatever we liked. We also did whatever we liked, with no time pressure other than to occasionally make a yoga class or meet for dinner and the salt drying on our bodies. Life was good! A perfect spot to reflect and plan our future over many G&T’s.
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| We'll miss how friendly Indians are |
All good things must come to an end…
Leaving Agonda symbolised the end of our adventure. We still had three days in Mumbai and a first class train for the first time to look forward to, but our carefree existence was coming to an end.
So we thought of what we’d miss, but also what we wouldn’t miss when we got home:
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| Won't miss locking up our valuables to furniture |
- Using leg muscles in the loo
- Carrying toilet paper everywhere and the impossible to predict question – how much is too little or too much to carry?
- Cold bucket showers
- Wondering where the next powerpoint will be to charge cameras
- Throwing away plastic water bottles
- Sleeping in separate sleeping sheets like little bugs
- Car horns being used for no reason
- Only having a tinyquick dry towel
- Chaining all our valuables to a table or bed in our packmesh
- Wearing the same dirt covered clothes day after day
- Transport stress: finding it, praying for our lives, other peoples sweet and numb bums
- Being intimately aware of each other’s bowel movements
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| 3 headed Shiva at Elephanta Island caves |
Not quite the India we know
Mumbai completed the amazing contrasts of India: Slums, right beside luxury high-rise appartments; Locals only speaking English to each other; and the richest and poorest people we’ve seen side by side and the caste system more obvious than anywhere else.
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| Many k's, many repairs, many memories |
With dreams of a shopping spree to fill our backpacks with, our trip to one of Mumbai’s best malls yielded only a paneer chilli wrap from McDonalds and some hankies for Duncan. We were both amazed and appalled at the new fast money set of Mumbai. Everyone spoke English to each other and wanted brands, brands, brands. Brands are the new religion in India. As someone told us later, it’s not about how much money you have, but how much you look like you have. So bling was big, which isn’t really our style.
Our last day was spent at Elephanta Island where after another lengthy debate with security about why locals paid 10 rupees and foreigners 250 rupees. We can understand some difference to encourage local tourism, but 250% is crazy and only reinforces the perception that all white people are rich. We stood strong, eventually getting in for half-price, which no doubt went straight in the security guys pocket.
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| My goddess pip |
Thankfully we didn’t follow through with our threat not to pay, as the Hindi temples carved into caves between 450AD and 750AD were spectacular and an awesome almost finish to our trip. Our epic six month adventure actually finished as a trip to India should, with a saucy Bollywood film, while we filled in time before heading to the airport at midnight for a 5am flight, which kicked off a lengthy 42 hour commute home to reality.
Thank you India, we had the best time of our life!
And we are pleased to report that Team Band returned home more balanced, wiser and more in love.
xx
dMore Photos
Hampi
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| Hampi, a truly weird landscape and a must for any rock climbers |
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| What you looking at! |
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| Ruins amongst the boulders |
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| Huge boulders - see people far left for perspective on boulder size |
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| A tank for watering the rocks! Unsure why this equipment is needed |
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| Clothing dye |
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| one of the best meals we had. it was offered to use by an indian family. |
Kerala Backwaters (houseboat trip)
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| life on the backwaters |
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| Kerola back water. Very relaxing. |
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| He wanted his vindaloo hot! |
Fort Cochin
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| baba pants for sale everywhere! |
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| Ambassador classic cars are a relic of the colonial era. Beautiful machines |
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| halling in the chinese nets. |
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| Don;t worry pip, these scooters love sand |
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| I think the rabbit has got the wrong idea. |
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| Holy cow, living in plastic dump! Milk anyone? |
Gokarna
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| Exploring the Indian coast line. |
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| Hippie cove, free love, free spirit and free rent. |
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| Old stoner playing with the beach cows |
Hampi
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| Holy man living amongst the historic ruins |
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| Believe it or not, this stone chariot was used to transport royalty |
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| Locals washing their brightly coloured clothes |
Agonda
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| Beach huts in Agonda. Take me there now! |
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| Pip being chased by a cow. |
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| Afternoon yoga on the beach |
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| exploring the coast line by sea |
Mumbai
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| Gateway to India |
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| Beautiful Mumbai Beach - sluggie |
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| The captains cabin is located in the engine room. Vision is only impaired by 30 passengers. |
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| tiffin delivery at central station |
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| yeah I know, its hot on your face! |
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| Back yard cricket indian style |
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| Duncan taking on the locals |
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| Rubbish removal indian style - honestly they take it to the roof and burn it. |
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| Everyone congregates at Mumbai bay promenade each evening. A metro city |
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| Slum , below mumbai rich living in apartment blocks |
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| Taj hotel - what a building. Thank you Englishmen. |
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| More back yard cricket - bowlers and batsman everywhere! |
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| Buying local food - risky but delicious. |
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| Duncan negotiating with the street toughs to enter the slum |
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| All washing for the big hotels is done by hand inside the slums |
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| Food preparation is questionable. |
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| 100, 000 tiffins (lunchboxes) are delivered each day in mumbai |
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| 50,000 taxis in mumbai CBD |
Elephanta Island
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| Vishnu carving |
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| carved stone pillars |
