So! Less than 12 hours left... That's if the plane leaves as planned. It's been an amazing nine months that somehow simultaneously feels like years and just a few weeks. Everyone's already started asking what the highlights were so here's a run down:
1st= Hiking from yurt to yurt in Kyrgyzstan. Drinking kumis (fermented horse milk) and hot tea as the sun set over the meadows and then cosying into a wonderful warm bed.
1st= Japan (the whole damn country for its great design, sushi, lovely people and wonderful baths but particularly Kyoto)
2nd Evenings full of ridiculously long and elaborate toasts in Georgian restaurants followed by restorative hikes to tiny remote churches.
3rd Endless lovely food and the joys of the open road in Oz.
4th Eating like kings in China and Hong kong, and watching the Olympics.
5th Following tigers on elephant back through the forest in India.
The other common question seems to be whether we wanted to kill each other. Answer: only occasionally... On the whole we ambled along pretty well. Tom would say that I still don't know how to cross the road and I maintain that he gets too enthusiastic about his bartering. Luckily they have price tags and traffic lights back home.
If I start lavishing you with more details than this over one too many gin and tonics tell me I'm turning into an old travelling bore and I promise I'll stop!
Before I go for good (although there might be some more photos if I can be bothered) here are a few more number ones:
- Most embarrassing moment: Not releasing we didn't have double entry visas for Uzbekistan until we'd left its neighbour...
- Worst toilets: India generally and the overflowing one on the ferry across the Caspian, shared between twenty of us for 3 days, some with stomach bugs.
- Best toilets: Japan's automated warming, washing, noise producing marvels.
- Country where we were most photographed by random strangers: Uzbekistan followed by India. What strange albums they must have.
- Most hippies: Pushkar in India and Byron Bay in Australia.
- Most irritating fellow tourist: The guy living in a Japanese hostel who claimed to have pulled his tonsils out with a toothbrush as they were annoying him, to have teeth that fell out and regrew every couple of years, to be making a Kung Fu film and to play in a Japanese jazz band.
- Longest train journey: 36 hours through the deserts of Kazakhstan.
- Most surreal bedroom: An open air bed in the yard of a lady in Aralsk, now miles from the Aral Sea, and a government hotel in the semi ruined palace at Orchha in India with a bath the size of a small car.
- Weirdest food: kumis (see above), barbecued sheep gullet, pig ear and knuckle. We turned down the deep fried baby birds.
- Most ex-KGB moment: when policemen in Kyrgyzstan repeatedly came up to Tom and warned him journalists weren't allowed to cross into Uzbekistan. It happened too many times to be a coincidence.
- Best meals: People 7 in Shanghai, the tasting menu at Circa in Melbourne and fresh sushi 6am from the fish market in Tokyo
- Most persistent song of the trip: Fat bottomed girls and something annoying in Russian.
- Winner of the most scrabble games: Me (but only just which is pretty shameful when playing a dyslexic).
- Winner of the most connect 4 games: Tom
- Winner of the most card games: Hard to be sure as we were well into the hundreds....
Monday 22 December 2008
Friday 12 December 2008
Mumbai lows and tiger hunting highs
It's been a strange couple of weeks. Suddenly nine months of loafing has become a two week holiday and every moment seems precious. We've posed for photos with guns and small children, seen the teeth of a tiger and almost missed the Taj Mahal.
The shootings in Mumbai were a horrible shock, even more so as we were oblivious in the mountains for the first day of the crisis. We'd been to several of the places attacked and stayed just round the corner from the Taj Hotel.
Luckily the closest we got to it all was a couple of days later in the northern town of Chandigarh. We were admiring old bracelets assembled into chickens and men with brocken tea pots for hands when a bunch of jubilant off-duty marines turned up and insisted on posing for photos with us and some of their guns. Very surreal but they were nice guys with guns so we agreed.
Chandigarh was planned by Le Corbusier, a great lover of straight lines ("the curve is ruinous, difficult, dangerous" apparently), but it has evolved into a very Indian version of modernism with al fresco barbers set up among the leafy arcades and chapati makers crouching among the stark facades. I'm not sure what the great man would have made of the junk yard art either.
We went one night to the beautiful 1950s cinema to watch Yuvraj the film we were extras in. Sitting in isolation among just a handful of bored children we made it through two and half hours of hindi with the odd english phrase ("la la la anti-family man la la") and several power cuts. Just as we were coming to our appearance in the dances at the end, the screen suddenly flicked off, the house lights went on and the last stray dog filed out. Maybe we'll have more luck with a DVD!
Our next stop was the Corbett national park where we ended up chasing a tiger on elephant-back, all very colonial. The elephant wasn't terribly pleased and kept trumpeting as the tiger turned and growled. We asked later what kind of defences we had on board and the handler pointed to a small pointed stick. We spent the rest of the day on a smug post-tiger potting high infuritating everyone else we met and then somehow managed to get another peek from a jeep in the evening.
Our other stops were Varanasi, very spiritual and beautiful in the misty morning light but far too full of excrement for my liking, and Agra where we marched towards the Taj Mahal wondering why we were visiting when we already had a picture postcard view wedged in our minds. In the end, we went through the gate and burst into laughter. The winter fog had come down and just the faintest outline was visible.
We're now admiring erotic temple sculptures (gravity defying bestiality, lovely) and posing in photos of school outings (at their request).
The shootings in Mumbai were a horrible shock, even more so as we were oblivious in the mountains for the first day of the crisis. We'd been to several of the places attacked and stayed just round the corner from the Taj Hotel.
Luckily the closest we got to it all was a couple of days later in the northern town of Chandigarh. We were admiring old bracelets assembled into chickens and men with brocken tea pots for hands when a bunch of jubilant off-duty marines turned up and insisted on posing for photos with us and some of their guns. Very surreal but they were nice guys with guns so we agreed.
Chandigarh was planned by Le Corbusier, a great lover of straight lines ("the curve is ruinous, difficult, dangerous" apparently), but it has evolved into a very Indian version of modernism with al fresco barbers set up among the leafy arcades and chapati makers crouching among the stark facades. I'm not sure what the great man would have made of the junk yard art either.
We went one night to the beautiful 1950s cinema to watch Yuvraj the film we were extras in. Sitting in isolation among just a handful of bored children we made it through two and half hours of hindi with the odd english phrase ("la la la anti-family man la la") and several power cuts. Just as we were coming to our appearance in the dances at the end, the screen suddenly flicked off, the house lights went on and the last stray dog filed out. Maybe we'll have more luck with a DVD!
Our next stop was the Corbett national park where we ended up chasing a tiger on elephant-back, all very colonial. The elephant wasn't terribly pleased and kept trumpeting as the tiger turned and growled. We asked later what kind of defences we had on board and the handler pointed to a small pointed stick. We spent the rest of the day on a smug post-tiger potting high infuritating everyone else we met and then somehow managed to get another peek from a jeep in the evening.
Our other stops were Varanasi, very spiritual and beautiful in the misty morning light but far too full of excrement for my liking, and Agra where we marched towards the Taj Mahal wondering why we were visiting when we already had a picture postcard view wedged in our minds. In the end, we went through the gate and burst into laughter. The winter fog had come down and just the faintest outline was visible.
We're now admiring erotic temple sculptures (gravity defying bestiality, lovely) and posing in photos of school outings (at their request).
Tuesday 25 November 2008
Saturday 15 November 2008
Teetotal vegetarians and Bollywood superstars
Mumbai predictably was a huge shock after Sydney: a mad whirl of coloured saris, crazed rickshaw drivers and stray dogs. Looming Neogothic train stations to match London, crumbling Art Deco apartments, red buses and cricket but with palm trees, dust and Bollywood. Luckily there are mighty fine cake shops to help newcomers adjust, particularly those staying in the bed-bug luxuries of the Salvation Army hostel.
We spent a day as badly dressed ball goers in the back of the next big blockbuster, an instant introduction to the celebrity gossip and a chance to wear someone else’s ill-fitting shoes, then wandered the backstreets past temples strewn with drying laundry and small boys flying kites.
The town itself was choked with pilgrims, men in day-glo yellow turbans, women in firey hewed saris with huge noserings covering half their faces. They'd come to bathe in the lake and were out on the terraces surrounding it from five in the morning.
We're now in Jodphur - the "blue city" and ancient capital of the princely state of Marwar ("the land of death"). A dark fort with cannon-ball scars sits on a vast rock overhanging the cluttered rooftops of the old city, looking out to the desert beyond. Inside are huge spikes to deter elephant charges, the handprints of widows leaving to throw themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres and Christmas baubles bought by the British. Tonight we board the night train to Jaisalmer further in the deserts to the west.
We spent a day as badly dressed ball goers in the back of the next big blockbuster, an instant introduction to the celebrity gossip and a chance to wear someone else’s ill-fitting shoes, then wandered the backstreets past temples strewn with drying laundry and small boys flying kites.
Rajasthan’s deserts further north seem to concentrate the madness. The women dress in deep pink, yellows and oranges, cows loiter chewing plastic bags and monkeys practice James Bond-style leaps between rooftops. Our first stop was the "pink" city of Jaipur, rather more red in reality and full of infuriatingly ingenious touts, but with an amazing observatory full of multi-storey Escer-esque sun and moon dials accurate to the nearest two seconds.
The town itself was choked with pilgrims, men in day-glo yellow turbans, women in firey hewed saris with huge noserings covering half their faces. They'd come to bathe in the lake and were out on the terraces surrounding it from five in the morning.
We're now in Jodphur - the "blue city" and ancient capital of the princely state of Marwar ("the land of death"). A dark fort with cannon-ball scars sits on a vast rock overhanging the cluttered rooftops of the old city, looking out to the desert beyond. Inside are huge spikes to deter elephant charges, the handprints of widows leaving to throw themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres and Christmas baubles bought by the British. Tonight we board the night train to Jaisalmer further in the deserts to the west.
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