Shit, Piss and Buses...

You have been warned. Some days are not so fun.

A bus station in a dirty provincial town. Me and my bag.

There is an overpowering smell of shit and rotting vegetables, of sun curdled sauces and sewerage. Buses arrive full and leave fuller. Conductors stand in the doorways blowing whistles while the drivers beep their horn, trying in vain to stop people boarding while the bus is still moving. People throw bags in through open windows to claim seats, others help their children wriggle through to fight the good fight from the inside. "You must fight," the stationmaster says, and waves his elbows around violently to demonstrate queueing Indian style. I stand in a crowd of mostly women, near the back, and think about milling into this brightly coloured group with my elbows. I realise that if I use my feet first, I can take out the children, the elderly and the smaller women, saving my elbows and upper body strength for the more troublesome opposition like the burly women and the occasional amputee male. I am pleased that with only a moment's thought I have improved on India's time honoured queueing system and I allow myself to be shuffled backwards as the crowd swells afresh with new males.

As I reverse out of the crowd the taxi drivers circle me like flies, as if I am the source of the stench. In their buzzing, I catch something about buses too full, no trains, bomb scares, short cuts, they lie as much as they need to lie to fill their taxis. The flies circle me aswell, and walk their shitty little landing gear all over my sweaty skin. The flies taste the open sewers, taste the pastries in the market stalls and come to see if i taste any different. They're happy out.

Beggar kids come up and flash their smiles or put on a hungry face depending on how they've sized you up. At this stage I've developed a rough "Need rating" in my head based on their age, the severity of their disability and the level of desperation on their faces. I don't see any other way.

I go to the stationmaster to ask when the next bus might be that I'll actually fit on. He ignores me patiently, and shouts some more at his friend/enemy who less patiently ignores me with a sneering smile.

I retreat to the bathroom to wash my face. Washing my hands under the tap I am joined by another who starts pissing in the sink. It dawns on me that he's a well dressed man who probably didn't get well dressed in life by pissing in sinks. If one of us is gonna confuse an Indian urinal with an Indian sink its probably gonna be me. A gentle mist of urine floats down from my neighbour on to my flip flopped feet.

Some of the cubicles don't have doors, but people seem happy enough to squat there anyway. The cubicle I get into has shit liberally sprayed on the walls up to chest height, which is impressive from a squatting start. It looms above me as I try and squat, with rucksack on back, struggling not to touch anything. Any hooks on the back of the door for hanging coats or bags are ripped out by the local kids so that tourists will leave their bags outside while they toilet. It works apparently.

I stumble out and back to the bus stand. Not much has changed. Buses come and go but the crowd remains. I ask a couple of people whats going on. No-one knows, but then this is India. No-one ever knows .

The crowd is getting older and more female, and my elbows start to itch. Soon, soon I will make my move.

On a Hampi hilltop...

The Hanuman temple is a temple in Hampi which shares its hilltop location with a large number of monkeys. Hanuman means monkey. However we were gently rebuked when we called this temple the Monkey temple. I am at a loss to know why, the subtlety was lost in translation. Myself and Aisling (just a friend) climbed to the top in the midday heat somewhere up near 40', stupider than everyone else but guaranteeing us the place to ourselves, the Sadhus and the monkeys. (More bad timing than inspired planning).

To our disappointment trudging up the last few steps we find a sign painted on a bit of rock before the temple saying no photography. Probably suffering vaguely from heatstroke I decided I'd take some anyway but just of the fields of boulders stretching away from the foot of the hill in every direction, not of the small temple. Suddenly a Sadhu (a sort of monk) appeared and I feared The Wrath Of Any God ( there are 3 billion in Hinduism apparently, nearly one each). He said the sign was just to stop people taking photos of the Sadhus smoking weed which just brought unwanted attention from the media. I nodded sagely not really following. He asked if we'd like to share a pipe.

Mrs O'Reilly: A fine mass, Father and a new bread of life if I'm not mistaken?
Fr. FitzSimon: Unleavened hash cakes, Bridie, fresh in from Tunisia.

So some people shared a pipe, not I, having asthma and all. They then offered us some sweet chai tea which had a special ingredient they said. Weed, I whispered to Aisling, nodding to myself sagely again, getting to grips with the shituation. I'm pretty sure its mint she says with touching naievety. We sat and chatted with these two Sadhus about their gurus, their gods and my head swam with the many names and the bad english. The monkeys wandered in occasionally to try and rob or cadge some food off the wily old men and each one seemed to have a name. Badu, the old one who our friends teased gently with a banana. Saddam, the bully who then came to rob Badu's hard-earned banana. I watched it all with wide open eyes and took many photos of these two fascinating men who'd renounced everything to live atop this hill. Well almost everything, apart from good company (not us obviously, but each other, their housekeeper, the monkeys, their 2 dogs and all the pilgrims), good food and drink, drugs, the internet (via a laptop), satellite tv (130 channels) and, as it turned out, mint tea.

Bits of Hampi

Hampi is an ancient city which used to be the centre of a Hindu empire about 500 years ago but was invaded by some conglomerate of damn Sultans or other who left it abandoned and vaguely ruined. Today it is a little laid back village/town which is a pilgrimage centre for Hindus and has the most spectacular temples and ruins dotted around a boulder-strewn countryside. It is stunning.


We arrived just in time to catch the end of the wedding season which is a 2 month period where a ton of weddings take place here, up to 20 a day, so it was inevitable we'd wrangle our way into one . The wedding procession we got caught up in involved 2 brothers marrying 2 younger girls. Leading the procession are the musicians dressed like some marching band. Mostly drummers, and one wildly self-absorbed fluter, they play intensely for ten minutes, walk about thirty feet getting their breath back and then kick off again. Following them was the lads of the wedding, drunken, shirts open, sweating profusely, dancing and yelling wildly (so far, so irish). The two bethrothed couples follow sheepishly along behind this crazed group of men who seem almost to be taunting the grooms with their bawdy man-on-man thrustings** over the nigh-on end of their bachelorhood. Finally behind the two couples come the women of the wedding with their collective reserve, giggling shyness in the younger ones and a fearsome dignity in the older ones. As the weddings are for pilgrims they often come from places where whities are quite rare and we found ourselves slightly eclipsing the married couples in our celebrity as we were dragged in to dance with the men. Starting out with a well structured two-step and moving smoothly into the chicken dance, I realised my sophisticated stylings would only be wasted on these sons of Vishnu and so, much to their delight, I started merely waving my arms around and yelping . They love that shit, those crazy bastards.


**
A quick note on men here. Homosexuality is still very much taboo in India. However there is a comfortable physical intimacy between guys here that does not exist at home. They drape over each other, arms around each others shoulders and waists, hands in each others pockets, they sprawl on each other if seated. They Hold Hands. You do not realise how intimate holding hands is until you see two guys walking by unselfconciously clasping hands and openly ogling passing girls. It is refreshing in some ways, this man on man affection, a change from the shuffling, throat clearing discomfort of a moment between Irish males, where every acknowledgement of good friendship is avoided as a potential Brokeback moment. I look forward to walking to football with you, Simon, hands clasped, swinging at our sides, the birds no doubt singing in the branches above us, me running a hand through whats left of your hair. Gone is the shame, no longer will our handheld walks have to be some dirty little secret. Aren't you glad?

Happy birthday to me.

A nice landscape shot ruined by some 16 year old.


Celebrated my 28th birthday by getting a cut-throat razor shave and ridding myself of that 5 year facial fungus. Good to remind myself what I really look like. I have a very small chin.

The folks I'm travelling with went all out and got me all sorts of little things including a home made card, a cake ( Happy Birthday D) and a variety of little presents. I'm blessed with company like that. Right now we have arrived in the hills, its cooler and outside a mosque is calling the locals to prayer, I'm off to get some birthday dinner. Cheers for the b-day emails those of you who remembered, a thousand pestilences on the houses of those who didn't.

Hampi in pictures...

There's far too much I need to write but haven't got the time for it right now, here are some pics (I think this is the highest quality it'll let me use) from Hampi which was just amazing.







Tourist, moi?



The view from my room.



In the Hanuman (monkey) temple.


The elephant stables, empty.

Goan out of that...

After Mumbai something to get used to in Goa is the fact that many of the Indians round here are tourists like ourselves. Some are grown men who've never seen the sea before and splash around like schoolkids. Almost as childish is their tendency to gawp at the scantily clad western women in their bikinis, with no effort made at disguising it as anything other than good old fashioned leering. Some of them try and get photos taken of them with the girls or, failing that, they will pretend to take photos of each other with all that sinful flesh lounging in the background. I saw one intimidatingly built woman threaten to throttle a middle aged indian fella for taking her photo on the sly. He was quite unstirred by the whole thing, even when she removed his camera from him and made as if to throw it in the sea, but the other whitie women almost burst into spontaneous applause.

Their fascination with all this pink and brown skin is not suprising considering how little nudity there is in Indian culture (where apparently it is not unusual to wear "over-underpants" in the shower). If you've rarely even seen yourself naked then the men's reaction is a little more understandable. As you walk along the beach there are whole families of fully dressed indians standing in the shallows looking bemused, as if they have just got out of a taxi at the wrong place. Elsewhere can be seen the time honoured spectacle of fathers in rolled up shirt sleeves with hearty laughs enthusiastically dunking their terrified children in the sea. Some things are universal.

The water is as warm as dirty bathwater and quite unrefreshing but walking along the shore with the waves breaking over your feet reminded me of puppies licking my ankles. I'm not aware of ever having had puppies licking my ankles so I'm not sure what that was all about but i am now looking at getting myself a sunhat. I left my Nike sunhat in a Mumbai restaurant, no huge loss.

Like on one of those enema holidays i've read about the conversation amongst many of the traveller's is the various states of our stomachs and bowels. Though I am used to discussing this with some of my friends, who take a disturbing amount of interest in my regular and healthy toileting back home, hearing a well spoken and reserved Danish girl use the phrase "shitty panties" is something you need time to adjust to. ( In the same vein but altogether less surprising was hearing an Irish girl use the phrase "big ould titty massage". It is no wonder I save my love for Italian girls.) My stomach so far has been well behaved by my standards and I remain vigilant. The more first hand horror stories you hear about shit/vomit fests lasting up to 10 days ( can you imagine?!?) the more inclined you are to go with the vegetarian option. Accordingly I have not eaten meat in a week and find it surprisingly easy but then my appetite has all but vanished since i got here. Though I daren't hope to altogether dodge Bombay bottom, I do hope to minimise its impact on my trip.

One final thing. I have met some great people already and we have a regular gang on the beach at this stage. We were joined by a Polish American Islamic vegan for dinner the other night. He had a lot of smug and interesting things to say. Him and a friend did five days trekking in the tropics living only on coconuts that fell from the trees along the way, he ate the coconut flesh, his friend drank the milk. His friend doesn't eat anything cooked and doesn't eat anything but about ten types of vegetable, mostly green leaf ones. He also doesn't believe in drinking water (he survives on what he gets from the leaves.) Between the high falutin conversations on this and Islam it was a welcome relief to have one of the girls ask if his sister had to "wear a durka". Realising her error she started trying to explain that she had got it from Team America: World Police until I finally nudged her into a silent state of barely suppressed giggles. Priceless.

Some badly processed pics

Right this is pretty badly done but i'll work it out over time, below are some Goa pics, me looking hot hot hot, and a bit of mumbai skyline, shade and station.

Samantha Mumbai...

Where to start. People warned me about starting in Mumbai, in India, in May. and I shrugged it off. Cos its really very difficult to imagine what this place is like until you land here. Those warnings suffered from the same thing this blog will suffer from, the complete overwhelming of the senses that occurs is very difficult to capture.

As we descended to land after midnight in Mumbai I could see lamps spreading for miles with no discernible pattern to them. I imagined shanty towns spreading out in the darkness and my palms began to sweat. Less than twenty minutes later I was in a taxi with two young lads who seemed intent on killing me. My "driver" paid scan attention to the rules of the road but I relaxed as I realised that neither did anyone else. An ould toot of the horn at regular intervals semed to work wonders. Matthew's reassuring parting words "Trust no-one" are useful but ultimately you have to trust someone and these lads had a sign with my name spelt correctly on it, most of my friends couldn't have done that.

The poverty is pretty stunning in the true sense of the word. In the hour long taxi journey from the airport we drive through what I can only assume were the edge of the slums. "Pavement people" sleep along the side of the road, lining the streets for miles, some on carts or the occasional flatbed truck but most just on a bit of cloth or cardboard on the ground. They seemed strangely unthreatening, their beds appealed to my sense of basic living, its hot, so sleep outside without blankets, though I was very tired at this point. Behind are their "homes", structures made of anything and everything, with here and there a crumbling row of two story buildings almost indistinguishable from the shacks around them. Where I am staying is in the centre of the tourist area so the poverty is less obvious but not hugely so. People still sleep where they see fit, day or night, with mangy dogs panting sluggishly in the daytime shade and chunky big rats running around at night. Everyone wants something off you, of course they do.

The heat, though I have said it was fine, is never going to be a non issue. Up north they are having heatwaves of 45' and people are dying, down south here its only 35' so we count our blessings a little. I am drinking more water than I have ever drank. Mum/Matthew you'll be delighted/disgusted to hear I bought a baseball cap( Nike) to protect my cheann from the sun. Mum I am also wearing that sleeveless monstrosity you bought me, it works well in this heat. In Mumbai the streets were often beautifully shaded by huge amazing trees but the shade is little relief from the sun. It's the most beautiful city, so bizarre. The people, the taxis. All sorts of buildings thrown in to the mix. I couldn't even start to describe them without pictures. Which I am taking .

I gave in to one beggar when i was buying my cap, she was a mother with a very cute kid I think she said his name was Marcus, he'd a great big cheeky grin, most of the kids seem to. The thing was she didn't want money, she wanted rice and she needed me to go into the supermarket for her as she wouldn't be allowed in without me. So we went in to maybe get some rice. She knew she had me whatever non commital frowns and grunts I was making and she picked out 10 kg of rice. But we were both winners, my guilt was assuaged slightly, I could ignore the next thirty beggars I met with a face a little harder than before.

Sometimes it gets too much. One evening after no real human interaction for maybe 36 hours I was taking a last walk before heading to my room to watch reruns of the 2005 Berlin Athletics Meet ( did you know there's now a 50 metre dash?). I was pretty run down, and getting a bit fed up with the constant harassment when this guy tapped me on my bare arm from behind. When I glanced around I realised it was the stump of his lower arm tapping me and that the guy's face was almost melted. I didn't look again just returned to my air-conned room and watched people run for six seconds at a time until i felt tired enough to sleep.

It is lonely of course, all this change so suddenly and no one to share it with, to self pityingly commiserate with over how mad it all is trying to deal with it. Fortunately I've been lucky and have met a lot of people already. It's weird how quickly the company of strangers can be familiar and comfortable after a matter of hours. I travelled around Mumbai and down to Goa yesterday with two Danish girls (who pretend to be Swedish cos of the cartoons). I was roughly following an Irish girl Aisling who I met the day before who I am probably going to head on to Hampi from here with. All strictly celibate of course, true to form.

I haven't said enough about Mumbai (for the record probably the most impressive city I think I've ever visited) and now here I am in Goa, at the end of the season. Paradise apparently and sometimes you'd believe it. We are on the beach in stilted huts, lounging reading in hammocks. Baby wild pigs roam around under my hut (Gina I have named the smallest Snuffles in honour of the late great Nibbles) . It's pretty idyllic. But the poverty is still there, the filth building up around even the smallest resorts.

Met a very proud Indian mother on the train to Goa, her sons a bank president in Bahrain and a lawyer headhunted to London. She earnestly emphasised the importance of being highly competitive to succeed in life and of how driven her sons were. I concluded that they were probably complete dicks. But they will be secure, successful dicks and in a country with such constant reminders of poverty and its effects I can only hope that I would be a secure successful dick if I needed to be. What was also very interesting was the unashamedly patriarchal household she lived in. Her husband decided when she had to quit her job, where they went on holidays, where she lived (they had two houses.) I've decided I will find an Italian woman who has been adopted into an Indian family at a very young age and now wants to see Ireland. There's bound to be one around here somewhere.

Mumbai - the eagle has landed

Thanks for all the texts n mails n presents and stuff before I left, much appreciated and I was in preparatory hibernation somewhat so didn't get to reply to all. What follows is fairly garbled. This place is garbled.