ghost writers in the sky

so, I come to at six a.m in a hotel room in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, lying on an enormous bed in the sticky heat, sweating already despite the fact that I’m wearing just my boxers. Sharing the bed with me are my travelling companions John (Pravjot- the Punjab/french Vincent Gallo) and Thomas (the french Jude law). We’re surrounded by the remains of Shahi paneer, butter naan, cigarette butts, and the other detritus of last night’s solemn end-of-trip royal challenge whiskey session. I gulp down half a glass of whiskey in an attempt to assuage my headache, shower and pack, and we stumble down to the restaurant for aloo paratha and banana lassi before we hit the road. For the past week the three of us have been travelling up and down the steep valleys of Uttaranchal’s Himalayan foothills on rented 350cc Royal Enfield road bikes. The little mountain towns are so beautiful, with large Nepalese populations, cool, crystalline mountain air, forests of marijuana growing wild by the side of the road, and staggering, awe-inspiring views of the tallest mountains in the world.

Each of the towns we visited had its own, completely different character. There’s Nainital (at 1938m), arrayed on the terraced hillsides surrounding her small lake, and resembling nothing so much as a classical picture-postcard Swiss hamlet. The surface of what must be the cleanest body of water in India roils with the turbulence from the upwelling rock springs which feed it, and at night reflects the glittering lights of the encircling town like a baby Geneva.  

Then there’s Ranikhet, a military town set in a pine forest with fantastic views. Ranikhet is home to the Kumaon rifles, who occupy what must be one of the world’s only army bases completely surrounded by feral dope plants. It was in Ranikhet that I invented ‘The Green Stag’, the second in my series of indian cocktails. (GREEN STAG : Take a 1-litre bottle of Royal Stag whiskey and drink some, then add to the bottle a decent handful of crushed wild marijuana leaves and tips (not buds!), a decent handful of wild mint, a tablespoon of sugar, and a teaspoon of fennel seeds. Place bottle in backpack for a day and a night, strain through tibetan muslin scarf, and serve in glasses made from drinking water bottles with the tops hacked off. garnish with marijuana leaf.)

Yesterday we were in Almora (1646m), a market town founded in 1560 by the chand dynasty. Occupying the head of a long, winding valley, Almora looks out at the inner Himalayan snows and the peaks of Trishul, Nanda Devi and Nanda Kot. Far below in the valley, sunburnt and dusty, we swam in the clean meltwaters of the Kosi river, which snakes it’s way out of the mountains, and eventually joins the ganges hundreds of miles away. Thomas accidentally made an offering to Shiva of his spectacles, swept away in the swift current, so we sacrificed a rupee coin each from the ghat at the water’s edge to pay for his bad luck.

 Clean water, amazing food from roadside huts, and yesterday, rolling down a forested gorge with the engine turned off, we came across a real, honest-to-goodness himalayan wolf, standing in the road! Brilliant! 

 (However,  the title of this post was ‘my last day in India’, and I have been digressing rather expansively, so, to return to my narrative…) After breakfast, we pay the bill, tip the hotel dudes (this paid off later on), and chalo! (Let’s go! in hindi)  The bikes roar like bengal tigers, and we take our lives in our hands again on the chaotic Indian highways. Now, here I want to describe the very particular thrill of piloting a powerful motorcycle on Indian roads. It’s like elbowing one’s way through the crowd at a concert. There are overcrowded buses, bicycles, cars, auto-rickshaws, cycle rickshaws, bullock carts, pedestrians, dogs, livestock, weird mad-max vehicles made from spare parts, scooters, other motorcycles, and of course, Trucks, in their hundreds, all fighting for a place on the road with you. There are no apparent rules, no lanes, road signs, traffic lights, authority figures, or any other concessions to order. The road surface alternates between passable ashphalt, rutted gravel, and slick mud, and is pocked with deep potholes and half-completed roadworks trenches. I have to stop every 20 minutes or so to clean my sunglasses, which become so covered in splattered mud, dust and bugs that I can’t see through them. At an average speed of about 70kph, it is the most demanding, adrenalizing, and ultimately exhausting driving experience I have ever had.

 However, I am riding with Thomas on the back, who, in abject terror, keeps jabbing me in the ribs, forcing me to drive much slower than I would like (which actually feels more dangerous. At lower speeds, other motorists feel more confident about cutting you off). John, helmetless and talking on his mobile, has thundered far ahead, and I have given up on catching him. We are following an overcrowded bus with passengers hanging off the sides and riding on the roof, and I tell Thomas that it would make a good picture. As I match speed with it, thomas searches his bag only to find, with anguish, that he has left his camera in the hotel room.  “We have to go back!” he shouts in my ear. As we have travelled about a hundred kilometres in two and a half hours, and I must get back to Delhi in time to organize a few things and catch my flight, I am understandably reluctant. We find John at a roadside chai-wallah, and we sit in the shade of his hut and rack our brains for the name of the hotel so that we can telephone, but none of us remembers. Suddenly John drags Thomas out into the road, and flags down a passing bus (sardine-standing room only, and a woman is throwing up down the side of it). ‘this is your only chance!’ he yells at Thomas. “If you don’t go back immediately your camera will be stolen!”. Thomas runs alongside the bus and jumps on, and the last I see of him is his miserable, mud-streaked face.

“Dammit!” John yells. “He’s got the whiskey!”

to be concluded…

casio :: Jul.15.2008 :: 'journalism', india :: No Comments »

The following is slightly out of order, occurring before the previous post, obviously, and of course, is entirely fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincedental.

 Stumbling off the 19 hr train ride from my beloved mumbai/revolting ahmedabad bleary-eyed after 5-ish hours sleep in second-class (then the last couple of hrs sitting in the doorway of the traincar watching the rajasthani mountains go by in the misty dawn, my jandals dangling in the slipstream above nameless viaducts, smoking my hong-kong duty-free dunhills and drinking endless cups of chai proffered by kids at the trackside whenever we slowed to go through a country station) comma, I am met by an equally bleary (”too much of the beer, and of the whisky last night, sir”) rickshaw driver (a rickshaw being the chief method of transport in india; an ancient Bajaj, or Vespa scooter, with a wide, roofed backseat). UNLIKE every other fkn tout in India, i take one look at Manu with his beedie hangin out of his mouth, badly in need of a shave, and Immediately trust his judgement, and as we get into his vehicle for our madcap, cow-dodging careen through Udaipur’s narrow alleys, he thrusts a book at me, filled with backpacker’s (hisssss) glowing recommendations of his proud self. On finding out I’m from New Zealand, he snatches the book, and hands me a dog-eared copy of our glorious NZ Listener, and points me at some travel writer’s glowing recommendations of his proud self. OK OK OK. I get it, i’m in ‘the most romantic city in India’. We screech to a halt somewhere and sit down on a step for 7am chai and beedis and more chai on Manu’s tab. “relax, relax, you’re in udaipur”, he keeps telling me, and believe me, I am relaxed, after 3 days of Mumbai’s overcrowded glorious hectic insanity.

My hotel, the panorama (octopussy screening every day 7pm!) is utterly brilliant, my third-floor corner rooms overlooking the lake, city palace and ghats, looooong warm shower, and enormous bed which I lie on feeling exhausted under the fan for all of about 5 minutes before taking off to get a load of this place. Breakfast at ‘edelwiess german bakery’ (ha!) where I have my first espresso in India (shit), then spend an hour talking to the indian baristaabout his machine and coffee in general, him very keen to learn how to improve his, well, shit coffee.  A ramshackle brass band inexplicably marches by followed by a hundred women in really fancy saris balancing things on their heads. It’s just like octopussy. After shitty tourist shops I wander down to the last ghat on the lowtown lake edge (visible in photo above), and meet this guy Zep who introduces me to his friends; silent no-english guy, and some street dude who proudly tells me he hasn’t taken a shower in 5 years, and looks like it (smells like it too, but everything smells here). We sit in the shade sweating and smoking charras and Zep and I talk for hours, punctuated by him leaving me to talk w/ silent guy while he takes off to get some opium. Zep is from udaipur, but has been living in germany, for a while, so has a german/hindi accent and says ja instead of ha. Monkeys fang around in the trees above us and untouchables dig around for shellfish with their feet in basically what amounts to raw sewage below us (the lake level is very low, owing to a drought) Suddenly! it’s 5, and I have to get back to my hotel to meet ‘the greatest rickshaw driver in all of India’ for our trip up to the mountain palace high above to watch the sun set over the whole of Rajasthan in 360 degree cinemascopic octopussyvision. Yah yah beautiful etc, then I hustle across the (semi) dry part of the lake bed beneath the bridge, trying not to think about what I’m stepping in, on my way to meet Zep again. I’m very late, but silent guy has been posted there to take me on a vespa ride through narrow alleys to a street full of shiva temples and drug dealers. Zep’s there, and he hands me a squishy brown pellet, saying “chew this, its the cocaine cocaines” I watch him eat his, before following suit. We sit on a doorstep and watch the street go by, and the guy who does’t wash appears. He and I perform an impromptu duet, me beatboxing, and him singing and dancing a weird marathi version of jingle bells. I notice that everyone on the street comes up to Zep and greets him or complains at him, in hindi, of course, while he argues with his girlfriend in german on his mobile and continues his philosophical conversation with me in english, all at once. Money is changing hands constantly, I notice. I am genuinely beginning to like this guy. Did I mention octopussy?

 Zep tells me to give this kid some money, who disappears on a vespa, to return with a bottle of whiskey, paneer masala, limea lemon drink and bottled water, whereupon a few of us cross the road to a tall building, enter, and begin climbing stairs to the roof. We’re passing through offices, with computers, and when we stop in one for opium, I ask Zep what the deal is, does he live here? He laughs “No, this is a government building, this is our place. We’re safe here”, before indicating silent guy and himself and proudly telling me “Mafia, we are mafia”.

We sit on the roof of the building with the best view in udaipur, the whole city twinkling below us ocasionally lit up by fireworks celebrating the indian premier league finals at that moment being contested between Rajasthan and Chennai (Rajasthan’s captain? Shane Warne). We drink whiskey and laugh and talk late into the night.  At some point silent guy stretches out against the parapet, indicates udaipur, and says “Mine. This is mine. I am King”.

“you’re the fuckin maharajah”, I say, and seriously he turns and says “No no no no no. I am not Maharajah. I am Don”.

*(p.s. Large sections of the James Bond film Octopussy were filmed in udaipur, and the whole city seems obsessed with this claim to fame. many of the guest houses and restaurants screen it EVERY NIGHT at 7pm)

casio :: Jun.07.2008 :: 'journalism', india :: No Comments »

so, I’m in my hotel room at the ‘friendly apollo hotel (habby travels!)’ in Agra, lying on my bed under the blissful wash of the noisy a/c unit, listening to the cackling of the monkeys, and being watched by a large chameleon-looking gecko who is hangin out on the wall. It’s 2.30 in the afternoon, and the heat is crushing, but, surprisingly, not as unbearable as the humidity in Auckland. I arrived at Indira Ghandi international airport in delhi at 2a.m this morning (where the first thing one sees is a row of those clocks that show the time in london, paris, tokyo, etc, except that half of them had been stolen, or were smashed). Following some fairly harrowing adventures in the slums of Delhi, where I was cheerfully ripped off by a thoroughly organised and friendly bunch of standover guys, I procured a car and a brilliant buddhist driver, and set off undaunted, and surprisingly untired, on the three hour drive to agra as the dawn was rising through the smog.
So far India is simultaneously completely nuts, and full of kindness. There are 30 million people in Delhi, and they all seem to be out at 4am wandering around the streets. There are absolutely no road rules here, and cars, trucks, rickshaws, brightly decorated and overladen ramshackle trucks, bicycles, pedestrians, livestock and packs of dogs all weave around each other like bumper cars in a tremendously enjoyable ballet of chaos. The wrecks of various vehicles littering the sides of the roads, however, attest to the relative danger of road travel, although none of the vehicles seem to be able to go terribly fast. We stopped at a railway crossing, where an enterprising market had sprung up to service the halted traffic, and a pair of five-year-old beggars did an amazing acrobatic routine for me, to the beat of a paint-tin lid. Having no change, I gave them cigarettes, and they were stoked.
There are animals everywhere. This is one of the first things you notice, other than the permeating, ubiquitous, and surprisingly, not particularly unpleasant smell of shit. On my first day, I’ve seen wild dogs (the most common), monkeys (my faviourites, obviously, clambering along powerlines, hissing at you from rooftops, baiting the dogs), squirrels (very tame, but probably rabid), bats, cows, rats, mice, goats, camels, donkeys (we swerved around a dead one on the highway), huge crows (everywhere), and , soaring above it all, gigantic eagles. Outside the cities, the countryside is very beautiful, and hugely polluted, full of ramshackle structures, shanties, weird turreted temples, and basically just new crazy stuff to see everywhere you look.
Agra is hot and crowded and stinking, and looks like a completely over-dressed movie set. Just walking along the street attracts an entourage of smiling kids and adults all trying to sell you something. I went to the railway station to book my ticket to mumbai, and id was lively and brilliant. Indians all live squashed so closely together, they seem to have no concept of personal space, and they treat each other like siblings, pushing their neighbors out of the way, squabbling, and laughing at each other.
This place seems so desperately, fiercely alive, and at once, there’s an overload of everything. It makes where I come from seem so uptight and boring. I’m off to go wander around the taj mahal at sunset now. 24 hours on a train tomorrow!! woohoo!!
The culture shock is like tripping constantly.

casio :: May.29.2008 :: 'journalism', india :: 3 Comments »