India. India is an interesting place. It feels huge, but it's not compared to the US, and it has 3 or 4 times more people.
We flew here via one night in London. Many thanks to Julie, Steve, and Harry (the wee one) for putting us up there and for driving us to the airport the next morning. We arrived at Heathrow, took the tube into town to pick up one leg of our flights which had not been delivered to us, and then found our way through the tube and a regular train out to their house in Surrey. Then we slept. Then we got up, ate Indian food (nothing like preparing the gastrointestinal system, right?!), and watched the movie Billy Elliot. Then we slept.
The flight to Delhi was long but otherwise uneventful. The biggest problem with the flight is that it arrives in Delhi, a notoriously hectic city in a notoriously hectic country, at 11:00 PM local time. We'd both read too many tales of people getting ripped off trying to find their way into Delhi from the airport, even when they had reservations, so we were excited to discover, two weeks before we departed, the company First 48. We had signed up for their basic package and even paid for it in advance. Such is the wonder of the Internet!
First48 covers the most stressful time: your first 48 hours in a new country. They pick you up at the airport, and they put you in a decent (or slightly nicer, if you prefer and ar willing to pay more) hotel. For us, it was well worth the cost to know that we were being picked up, and sure enough, there was one of those printed cards with our names on it as we came out of the gate. The driver pulled us aside and Roshni, who helps run the local branch, introduced herself to us.
They drove us to our hotel, which was basic but normal, and we slept again. Remember here that India is 10.5 hours off of EST, where we'd been four days prior. If we had to do it again, we'd have spent more time in London.... Roshni said there was another traveller, from England, who'd arrived earlier and was staying at the same hotel. A driver was being sent to pick her up in the morning and bring her to the First48 offices to get her bearings, and we were welcome to come along.
In the morning, the driver was there at 10:00 sharp and the front desk called us to let us know. We'd expected him to be late, but he was more punctual than he might have been in the States. The hotel is on a little alley off a small street. The night before, the small street was almost totally deserted, but this morning, it was an abolute riot of people and stuff. A car could no longer get down it, so he had parked some ways away. Every two paces someone else was greeting us and asking if we'd like to look in their shop, or accosting us to buy what's in their arms (many people here seem to try to make money by buying something -- tissues, carved wooden chess sets, cloth handkerchiefs, anything -- and selling them as they walk down the street). We put on determined looks and kept going.
Driving here is ... well, I can't quite describe it. Put everyone on the other side of the road, give everyone tiny cars and tuktuks (three wheeled vehicles used as small cabs; they are 'four stroke' engines and and have a modified pull-start with a bar not a rope, kinda like riding in a big lawnmower), and sprinkle in a bunch of bicycle rickshaws for good measure. Now add people, LOTS of them, a handful of jersey cows just wandering around, and almost all traffic control traffic circles, not traffic lights. This means everything moves constantly, and everyone uses their horns constantly to let you know they're there..... glad we're not driving ourselves.
Roshni's office is small, and is part of an 'office park', which means it's one prefab closet in a pack of 'em. We sit and chat and Roshni seems like she wants genuinely to help, rather than just take advantage to make the sale. We are suspicious at first, but eventually we warm to her. Her family runs India Tours and Expeditions, and First48 (out of London) contracts with her to take care of us in return for part of the cash and a potential customer. We talk about different parts of Northern India we want to see, and we end up settling on a trek in Ladakh. We wanted to get there anyway, and we wanted to trek, and if Roshni takes as good care of us up there as she does here, GREAT! And the price is right: $35 per person per day, as opposed to at least $50 we'd read about as an average (unless you set it up in the States or Europe, when you can expect to pay $100-170 per person per day!). She also set up our flights for us, which was a load off. We leave tomorrow morning!
The driver returns at about 5:00 AM to pick us up. We go to the airport and go through a lot of security. This is before Sept. 11, but the district of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has quite a lot of violence in it, just none in Leh, where we're going. The Western border is hotly contested with Pakistan, and estimates have put the total Indian dead count at between 30,000 and 70,000 over the past 12 years. But that's 200 miles from where we'll be. Our bags are x-rayed before we check them, and then we have to wait to go through another check point to get to the waiting room. This one consists of x-raying our carry-ons and frisking us one-by-one. In the waiting room, we waiting with Holly (the English woman, 18, who had just finished her A Levels and is travelling for a year before University). Another travelling couple sat across from us, and some monks sat near us, in full red robes and shaved heads. The guy from the couple pulls out a Mamiya 2 1/4 medium-format camera (this is a large camera) and sets it up on a tripod to take shots of the monks. They're not terribly pleased at this prospect and one of them moves, but he's gonna get his shot and moves the camera all around the waiting room taking pictures.
When it's time to file on the plane, we queue up and exit the room to find ourselves outdoors with two tables in front of us. One at a time, you put your carry-on bag on the table for a person to search it by hand. Then women are put behind a screen and frisked by women and men are frisked just past the table by men. Then we board the bus that takes us out to the plane and we're off. This is only a one-hour flight, but it goes from the plains of India into the Himalaya, where Leh is sitting on the Western edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The views flying in a absolutely stunning, especially with the sun rising, and four of us (Sharon and I, and the camera couple) end up on the other side of the plane, each with a window. The flight attendants tell us we're not allowed to take pictures, but I do manage to sneak in a few (thanks for that small, quite Canon, Tags!). We land and get chatting with the camera couple who are not a couple at all, they met at the airport flying into Delhi yesterday. Shai and Dana are their names and they're Israeli. All of us end up going to a hotel together (following the First48 person who picks us up!).
The first day in Leh is sleep and nothing but. We are warned not to take a walk, not to shower, not to do anything but sleep or just rest. The altitude here is 3500 meters (11,500 feet), which is a big shock coming from sea level. Sure enough, within hours we feel like Hell. Mostly this is tiredness and lightheadedness and dizzyness, but it certainly keeps us in bed. By late afternoon I'm famished and must go find food. I walk up the hill, very very very slowly and I'm out of breath by the first Tibetan restaurant I find, where I eat a big plate of Tibetan-style fried-rice (salty).
The next few days are spent wandering this little town, which is winding down for winter. We see very few tourists, and many of the salespeople tell us they're leaving within a week or two to go home for a month and then go to Southern India (mostly Goa) for the tourist season there. We wander, we shop, we hang out. We are joined by Trina, a Danish girl of 19, who is also doing our trek with us, and, finally, Shai and Dana (pronounced Duh-nah) decide to join us too.
36 hours before we depart, we get an email from Sam, apprising us of the events still unfolding in NYC. In Leh, internet access is very expensive (3 rs per minute as compared to 10 rs per hour in Delhi) and it's slow (three or four computers networked to one modem, which itself only seemed to connect at about 42k). Electricity is also unpredictable at best, being on about 1 day in three. Almost all shopkeepers there have generators outside their shops to keep the lights on, which, when they all get cranking, makes for a very loud and exhaust-ridden street.
As you are probably aware, we felt very panicked and sent out emails to all of you asking for you to check in. Many of you did very quickly, and thanks to everyone who has emailed since then. Because of the time change, we were only able to be online until about 11:30 AM on the 11th, when the shops closed. We stopped into a hotel lobby with a tv set on and watched some BBC coverage, including various shots of the second plane's impact. We were very scared for many of our friends and family and we felt very very disconnected and helpless to do anything about it, including being able to check if everyone is okay. We sent a final email to Sam to ask him to call a bunch of people on our behalf, but of course phone lines in NYC were a mess too. Thankfully, Shai and Dana were still awake when we returned to our hotel and they were very understanding and helped talk us through some of our fears. Israelis have to face this spector almost daily, but we from the States have never really known it before, at least not on this scale.
In the morning, there was no electricity. Instead, we called Sam, who checked our email for us. This is the last contact we had before heading into the woods and it made us feel much better (although $1 per minute is a very expensive way to check email!). Thank you so much Sam.... can't even say how that and hearing your voice helped....
Then we hit the trek. This was 9 days in the hinterland. We started with a 4900 meter (16,170 feet) pass on the second day that gave most all of us headaches. Then almost a week walking up the Markha valley, which is quite beautiful and which changes every so often: the sides are sloping dirt, then steep scree, then steep rock faces, and the color of the rock is amazingly varied, from regular granite to deep green to a burnt rust red, sometimes in stripes or other designs.
Trekking means other people do everything for you on a camping trip. We carried daypacks with our rainjacket, a warm fleece, lunch, and water. The horses carried everything else, including a big tent just for us to sit in to eat and drink. The crew got there ahead of us everyday and had that tent set up next to the cooking tent, with low crates as tables and actual folding chairs for each client. Tea is ready when you arrive and soup is served immediately following. A full dinner comes later and they boil water for hotwater bottles. In the morning, we are awoken with calls and cups of Bed Tea served to us in our tents before we even emerge. Pretty cush, although it's mostly necessary for sea-level scrubs such as ourselves to manage at that altitude. The second pass, which came on the penultimate day, was 5200 meters (17160 feet), but we'd done some acclimatizing by then so it didn't seem as hard as the first one. Sharon did suffer some altitude sickness the night before that pass, but that was because we were sleeping at 4900 meters.....
The biggest problem with the trek was the cold. The Ladakhi people grow up at altitude and do not feel cold or much altitude. Our guide had to restrain himself a LOT to slow to our pace, and he wore two cotton shirts with a sweatshirt over it on the coldest night, which hit 8 or 10 below zero Celsius (approx 14 F). They did not bring the promised 3-inch thick sleeping mats, providing us instead with crappy 1/3 inchers. The sleeping bags were supposed to be -5C, but Sharon was given a special one because she's so cold. She was given a -40 down bag, but it was old and he said it's probably only a -30 now..... he was wrong. It's probably only a +10 now, considering all the places where the down has settled and there's nothing but nylon left. Oh yes, and then it rained (Leh is in an alpine desert), and the down bag got wet. By the end of the trip, Sharon was in my bag and I was in the now-dry down bag (I'm not as cold as she is), and she had Trina's +5C bag slid inside as well as a sleep-sheet for added warmth.
One adventure to relate from the trek: Another group was out trekking near us, a German woman, an Israeli man, and an Israeli woman, all in their early 20's. The day it rained, there was some confusion about crossing the river we'd been following. We passed a bridge with a sign in front of it that said Way To Markha (which we were all heading towards), with an arrow to the left, as in 'don't cross this bridge'. Problem was, the arrow was almost completely faded. Sharon and I were out in front of our group since we had rain gear and our group was mostly wearing cotton and no raingear. Our guide had told us not to cross the river, so we didn't, but the Israeli guy and the German woman did. They were way ahead of the other woman they were trekking with, and they were all on a discount trek, meaning no guide and the horse guy cooks and doesn't speak English. His instructions to them included 'Go to Skiu and turn left. Go on to Markha.' We'd all passed Skiu already, but their travel companion was still way behind. We'd seen her yesterday, also way behind her group and resting, it seemed, about every 10 minutes. Her attitude had been 'ah, camp's around the corner; I'll get there by dark...'
After our group had reassembled (just at dusk) at camp, we started talking about them. Turns out our entire day tomorrow was to get to Markha, where they'd been heading today. The Israeli guy and German woman had passed our campsite at 6:00 PM, which is after sunset, but before dusk, and no one had seen their companion in hours. It was now well after dark (as we're discussing it), about 40 degrees F, and raining. She had no light and no raincoat. Some of us were ready to go back for her, but our guide wouldn't let us, insisting that he go instead. I gave him my rainjacket and my headlamp and he set off. The other group's horseman came by about that time looking for his lost camper, but he was going to give up here. They'd camped only one hour past us. Our guide talked him into continuing, and they found the young woman almost two hours back, soaked through (having crossed the river three times, and not having a rainjacket) and hiding under a tree, since she didn't have a light to find better cover. They brought her back to our camp where we fed and clothed her, and put her up for the night.
In the morning, she acted as if nothing had happened, and, in fact, as if everything is fine. A few comments she made were inappropriate for the situation, and before we headed out, she got a stern talking-to in both English and Hebrew. She would have died that night and yet she behaved as if all was fine, and now she had a nifty story to tell when she got home. Under pressure, she expressed the opinion that her travel companions should have waited for her (ie it's not her fault). When we caught up to their group, we told the others that they had to wait for her today and got the most incredible response. They both felt that, even though they are a group out here, that they have no responsibility for her at all. As the German woman put it "she's not a child; if she wants to kill herself out here, that's her problem; I'm not taking care of her." Absolutely astounding.
At any rate, the trek was good, but very cold. This got to Sharon, who, many of you know, doesn't tolerate cold weather well, especially when it's unexpected (we knew it would be cold, but the Ladakhi's told us "uh, yeah, you might want a sweater out there, I guess", which we later learned means that they feel NO cold whatsoever).
Back in Leh, we checked news and decided to head South. Although our original plan was to stay North of Delhi, we decided we wanted some warmth before hitting Nepal. We decided to fly back to Delhi instead of going overland, and then to head down South. First48 arranged our flight to Delhi (and MAN you should have seen the security flying back, way more than the way up, and we were happy for it; took us 1.5 hours to get through to the waiting room), and then they arranged our train ticket to the South. After two more nights in Delhi, we boarded a train that took 46 hours to get us to Kerala, one of the Southern-most provinces in India. Go look at a map and we're sitting on a beach at the very bottom of the province in Kovalum on the Western Shore. It's a fairly touristy area, but it's not nearly as hectic as Delhi and it's hot. The season doesn't begin here for another month though, which means we're easy targets for the people who wander around selling what they carry (scarves, pineaples, drums, cigarettes), but it also means we are paying half price for our room. The little pleasures in life, you know?
From here, who knows. Probably back up the coast as we make our way to Nepal. We'll keep you all informed from there. May all of you sleep well and be safe.
Peter and Sharon, Kovalum, India, 27 India 2001
Hello Everyone!
We want to give you all an update and would like to let you know that you we have been thinking of you and hope that you are all okay in the midst of the news of airstrikes in Afghanistan.
Last we wrote we were in southern India, enjoying the warm weather. As of 48 hours ago, we arrived in Australia after 29 hours of travel. Good timing to leave India, only it was not for the political reasons.
Five days ago I (Sharon) woke up at 2 in the morning with what looked like 100 mosquito bites on my arms, legs and back. By morning, the number had doubled. As we had already planned, we left Kovalam at 6:30am to take a 2.5 hour bus ride to Kollam, where we were to get on an 8 hour backwater boat ride and continue making our way up the coast. The plan was to head up the coast for a few days or as much as a week, and then catch a train North and go to Nepal.
Well, there is no better way to forget about the itchiness of bug bites than by riding a nearly empty bus in India driven by the most insane bus driver around. I think he would beat out any nascar or formula one racer in dodging/drafting strategy alone. Anyway, we got to our boat, dumped our bags and asked an auto rickshaw driver where I could get some itch cream. I showed him my arms and a group of autorickshaw drivers gathered around me. One of the drivers looked very grave and said, those are not bites, that is an allergy, you NEED to get to a doctor. So, one of them drove us to the skin/leprosy/vd clinic up the road where about 100 people were already waiting in line to see the doctor, and it was only 9AM! The driver took us through the line of people and brought us directly into an office where one old doctor sat next to a young doctor behind a desk. They saw me immediately and asked me what drugs I was on. I showed them our anti-malarial medication: malarone and they said, get off it now. The rash (severe hives) is clearly an allergic reaction, and the question comes down to cause: tuna from 36 hours prior, tiger prawns from 48 hours prior, or malarone which I’ve been on daily for 4 weeks. That’s a very late reaction to seafood (allergic reactions generally appear within an hour or so), but also a very delayed reaction to a medicine I’ve been taking for a full month. Right now, however, the cause is far less important than treating the symptoms, so they prescribed steroids, antihistamines and a topical solution of caladryl mixed with steroids, and told me to return the next day. The next morning the rash had not only spread to different parts of my body, but it merged so that raised red bumps became raised red blotches that were sooo incredibly painful. The doctors increased my doses of medication and added Ephedrine and said come back tonight. We went back at night and by that time my scalp and eyes were swollen, itchy and red. They said that I needed to get to the hospital in Travandrum (1.5 hours back toward Kovalam where we had just come from). They referred us to the local Medical College, which is a free hospital, but which you need a letter of reference to get into. They gave us such a letter and sent us off. The next morning we decided against the bus and took a taxi straight to the hospital. Good god! The building is one storey, but tall, with 20 foot ceilings. The main lobby is large and packed with people, at least 200 are sitting around, milling about, or queuing up at various desks scattered about. It felt insane, just soo many people and no sense of order or organization. But, after a number of wrong turns and confused looks, we found our way to a skin doctor/professor and her two students. They wanted to admit me to the ward for a few days, give me medications and run some tests. In order to admit me they had to take me to another doctor. I showed him my rash and he said there were no beds left. (Which worked out because the ward looked like one that Mother Theresa would have worked in—lots of people in white iron beds with a single bed sheet looking so terribly on their death beds). So, I went back to the teaching doctor who gave me prescriptions to increase and then decrease the doses of steroids, antihistamines and calamine (this time without the steroids). She too thought it was the anti-malarial drug, but also asked if I had eaten tiger prawns, which I had just 48 hours earlier. I had also had tuna 36 hours before that and had a very weird allergic reaction a few hours after I ate it--my skin blotched and my hands got really hot, but I didn’t get a huge intestinal hit and it went away.
Anyway, the doctor told me to come back in 3 days and if it got worse sooner than that, then just go to the emergency ward. Peter and I walked out of the clinic knowing that we would get another opinion at the private hospital down the road. Peter’s grandparents had made us members of IAMAT (International Medical Assistance for Travellers—thanks Mummum and Pops) before we left, which is an international organization of medical people for travellers. We had been carrying their pocket guide to doctors around the world who speak fluent English and who have studied in the west and/or have equivalent medical training. The private hospital up the road is in that book, but we figured we’d wait a bit to see what the new medicines would do. We went and found a hotel room with a tv (hey, that’s a serious luxury compared to how we’ve been travelling) and it had cable, including BBCWorld and CNN Asia.
I did take all of the medication prescribed and of course, the pain continued to grow. It got really fierce, especially in my arms. I have NEVER felt pain like this before. Any air moving around my body sent me through the roof (Hello NERI: I now know allodynia first hand!!!) So, we had to turn the fan off. If the silk bed sheets rubbed slightly against my body, I went bezerk. I really just wanted to be levitated. I learned that if I could pace my breath, slow my heart beat, then the pain would subside for just a bit. But then, the itching would start and it was the worst. I would try not to itch, but it would be too much, so I would end up itching off all of the calalac that Peter had patiently applied to my body. Even the topical corticorsteriods on my scalp got itched out! Each time I itched there would be this intense rush of endorphins after I scratched and I felt really high, and then the heat turned up and I went into pain, then tried focusing on the breath, etc…. It has been a real test of my strength and trust that the suffering would end.
The next morning, the pain was still severe and the hives had continued to spread down my legs. I slowly made it out of the hotel to the autorickshaw who took us to the private hospital. Still, there were sooo many people, but we had the name of the CEO of the hospital from our IAMAT book. So we find the CEO—Mr. T. Jacobs in an air-conditioned office with a few assists and an administrator at his desk. We just walked right in the office (because in India, you just walk right in anywhere, no matter who is first, it really just doesn’t seem to matter) anyway, we asked for him and he stood up and shook our hands and asked us if we had heard about them through their website! This man was a trip. He looked like a very cool Cuban singer. Probably in his late 60’s, he was about 5’5 with white balding hair. He had this tiny black moustache (skin and hair darkened way blacker than what remained of the hair on his head) that was severe in aspect since he’d shaved the bottom half of his upper lip and shaved a gap in the middle of the moustache (but slightly off center) so it looked like this small black pair of L’s hovering just right of center beneath his nostrils. He wore a pressed orange silk shirt and blue pinstripe pants with leather sandals. He was a stylin’ CEO. He was also extremely helpful. He first led us to a neurologist who said we should see the skin specialist. At the skin specialist, we just…walked right in and we were seen immediately. The pain, at this point, was so great, I really didn’t care about protocol. I told the doctor the facts and started taking off my clothes (which, by the way, this was the only doctor who I could do this with, all other doctors just looked at my arms and back they didn’t want to see the rest). So I start to take of my pants and the rash had gotten so much worse in less than an hour, that I totally broke down and started to cry. Then I showed her my shoulders and as I was crying, she strongly patted my back and told me not to cry and this, of course, caused such a huge rush of pain that I jerked away. She had no tissues, so she took out a pair of forceps and lifted a piece of gauze out of a ‘sterile’ tray—it ended up being a little brown, but I used it anyway. Well, this doctor got it. She ended up prescribing injections of steroids and antihistamines. She told me I would see immediate relief. Sure enough, within hours, relief came and the rash began to roll back, the pain in my arms began to subside. I slept at the hotel, while Peter did absolutely everything to get us out of India as soon as possible. He is amazing; he called our travel insurance company to square that away, he called our London travel agent to change our RTW flights, he emailed Tags and Sam to get the medication info to our States-side doctor to be sure I was on (and had been injected with) the right meds (we’ve been checking everything with our travel clinic doctors at home via Sam and Tags since the docs don’t have email; thank you guys soooo much for that!), he found the Jet Airways office on the other side of town to buy tickets to Mumbai, and he went online to secure Australian Visas. He got us a morning flight for the next day from Travandrum to Mumbai (Bombay). There, we took a half-hour bus ride to the Mumbai International Airport, then we flew to Singapore and then caught a flight to Syndey. In all a 29 hour travel day.
In India, we found that most people see a tourist and want to separate them from their money. Absolutely everyone wants to sell you something, be it the armload of handkerchiefs they’re holding, something in their store (which is always nearby), or a service like guiding you around or finding you a tour or trek. I really hit my limit at the Mumbai airport when these 2 losers who claimed they were with our Airline (even though they were not wearing the uniform all Jet Airways employees wear) tried selling us a 7 hour hotel stay so we wouldn’t have to sit in an airport lounge. I just pulled a (Mary Lou---jen and lyd): I just kept repeating over and over again that we had business at the airport and we didn’t want a hotel room. Finally, they showed us where our bus was waiting. We were so tired and I got really mad, but didn’t do anything. I just felt spent but the whole con-game.
So many obstacles, but now they would be over, we were own our way to Singapore and then Sydney! We just needed to find the Qantas office at the airport and have them reissue our round the world ticket (because we weren’t originally headed to Australia for another 8 months!). It took a while but we found the office. Unfortunately, they don’t reissue airline tickets at the airport, they only reissue them at the downtown office, one hour away and that office closes in half an hour and is not open tomorrow (it’s Sunday)! Well, our travel agent in the UK had told us that issuing at the airport wouldn’t be a problem. Now we had a huge problem. Honestly, I totally lost it, went into the hall and cried. India would just not let us leave. I gained composure and patient Peter helped work it out. The women in the Qantas office were really sympathetic and they ended up spending the next 1.5 hours reissuing our tickets – because they don’t do this generally, they don’t have the machinery and had to fill out three ticket booklets for each of us by hand… Qantas will definitely be getting a commendation letter this week!
Another obstacle cleared. We had our tickets to Singapore! We had our Australian visas in the form of a reference number---for Australia, you can get them on the web! Peter is super brilliant. We board the plane for Singapore. It was a long flight. We got in around 7am. The airport was soooo incredibly clean. We had just walked into another universe. It was like an uber mall and almost clinical. But the weird thing was the 3 18 year old military boys walking in wide formation with their fingers near the triggers of their machine guns. We never found out what happened, or if this is just random security presence. We checked in and watched American TV show re-runs. One: Margaret Cho’s sit com about a Korean Family living in SF (I had always wanted to see it since it had been cancelled) and Herman’s Head, another sitcom with a ‘young’ Hank Azaria, and Becker, with Ted Danson; how’s that for high entertainment? Across the call was a relaxation area with a big screen tv and sofas… playing a skate-board long-jump competition on ESPN. The flight to Australia had hundreds of people waiting (747-400) and the plane was late. But, we finally boarded, watched Seinfeld, Laura Croft: Tomb Radier, Crazy/Beautiful. We breezed through immigration and customs and looked for our hosts, who I had never met. I decided to just stand and let Peter look around since he knew Rich and Tess (she is Peter’s aunt Jane’s sister). As he was off looking I saw this woman who looked just like Jane, and it turns out to be Tess. She and I greeted one another and I finally felt like we had made it through!
We drove back to their house in Balgowlah Heights, one of the suburbs of Sydney, and this tale is continued on the Australia page.
