New Delhi and the Flaming Bovine

My one, glorious, sludgeless shot of New Delhi.

We arrived in Delhi at dusk, the plane sinking through what we were sure was a heavy plume of fog. A car from the guesthouse waited for us, a luxury we afforded ourselves when the prospect of chumming the waters of an airport taxi-stand on our first night in India seemed too bleak.

We were shaky, anxious, a little gun-shy. India was a legendary travel beast, a basilisk in the deeps, a white whale out on the horizon. Far-away looks gathered in the eyes of weary travellers when they described India, as though trespassing its borders would require weapons of old, the Golden Fleece maybe, a medusa’s head as the case warranted. People described a vacation in India the way they described serving in the Vietnam war. It was difficult to separate fact from fiction, self-aggrandizement from harsh truth, actual difference in culture and language and life from fatted, imperialist visions of a mystical, spiritual theme park for wealthy, spiritually-inclined adventure tourists. We drove out from the airport, into New Delhi, with our eyes as open as we could make them. I could feel my pupils dilating.

It was cacophony, at first, a blast of sound and sight and smell. Everything was so loud and so bright and so strong that it washed into me in a wave of synaesthesia, of tastes trickling into my ears, of smells passing through my eyes, of sounds running across my tongue. Honks and wheels and shouts. Hindi, Bengali, English. Animal noises: the cow goes moo, the goat goes baa. The smell of spices, the smell of flames, the smell of people. At the side of a busy street I saw a cow, wreathed in flame, its horns buried into an incinerating mound of refuse, ferreting scraps of food from the embers.

India Photoglut Pt.1: Don’t Milk the Mountain Goat

Friends, we have arrived, at last, in India. India: land of cows. Land of curry. Land of Kolkata. Other things beginning with a percussive /k/. Fully one-half of our Big Wild Asia Megasojourn occurred within India, and I have lots and lots to say about its ups, its downs, and its soggy, curd-filled middles. But before we get to that, let us now, as we always must, sit through a round of Michael’s photography. Don’t think you can just traipse in here and scoop up only the words. Sometimes you need to endure my other hobbies, so that I can give the old word-grinder (that’s what I call my brain) a rest.

India: let’s look at it.

Hoi An, or, No, Actually, I Don’t Need Custom Loafers

There are times when I must come off as a kind of travelling contrarian. While I occasionally allow myself Big Dumb Tourism trips, I generally prefer to act aloof and uninterested whenever I am confronted with the usual traveller path. Roads, after all, are for suckers: gravel is better, topped only by beaten earth, and surpassed only then by wild jungle, completely untouched by man. If the road has already been hoed, it probably already sucks.

Quaint, adorable Hoi An. Now with complimentary insoles.

This tendency was particularly pronounced in Hoi An, a city in central Vietnam famed for its shopping. Fine suits, handmade dresses, and uncountable varieties of custom shoes are available for perusal and crafting. There are bins stuffed with thousands of black market DVDs, including up-to-date boxsets of Breaking Bad. Other shops swell with piles of coppery jewellery, or thousands of books turned in by previous travellers (meaning numerous copies of 50 Shades of Grey, and most of Dean Koontz’ catalogue in German). Storefronts sag with the weight of shoe displays, tiny columns stretching to the sky, each piece of footwear displayed on glass and metal and wooden pedestals. There are shops bursting with fabrics, lined with dapper and elegant mannequins, and operated by hungry, nimble-fingered seamstresses ready to shred and sew a custom three-piece suit for you in under twenty minutes or your pizza is free, including hand-made, cruelty free pocket square, sewn from real yak’s brain.

Given that I hate suits, and also being measured, and also shopping, the finer consumerist points of the city were lost upon me. I walk down a busy central street past dozens of quaint , Chinese-styled buildings, and dozens of shop owners call out to me. Some wave, some gesture to their wares. A few times, people run across easygoing pedestrian roads full of bicycles and rickshaws to talk to me. They tell me their names, and ask me for mine. They want to know what brings me here. They want to lull me into a sense of trust and convivial spirit. Maybe I would be interested in going to their shop afterwards, just for a peek, maybe a cup of tea, perhaps a free, no-pressure taking of all of your measurements and silk preferences?

I Am In Some Chinese Tourist’s Vacation Highlights Reel

This was around photo number 43.

We have circumnavigated the great moat around the Golden Temple and are simply basking in the atmosphere. The sounds of tablas echo over loudspeaker while deep inside Harmandir Sahib, old men sing verses in quavering voices.  Pilgrims are everywhere: bathing in the holy waters, sharing in the communal langar, bringing offerings into the temple. Sikhs come from around the world to pray and join together here, in Amritsar. It is calm and still, and the white marble is cool below thousands of bare feet.

A man approaches us, throws his arms around Ty and I, and smiles wide for a camera held by his wife. They take five photos with enormous grins. There is no preamble or permission, though he thanks us and his son sweetly tries out some of his English on us. Not that it’s a big deal. It’s about the fifth picture we’ve had taken of us today.

Another time, we are splashing about in a waterfall outside of Luang Prabang. There is a rope swing and a perfect place to take a leap into the water, which I do after nervously vetting the pool below for jagged rocks that I might eviscerate myself upon. A tour bus lets out, and a crowd of Chinese tourists begins to pass in one great orbit, but they are caught, as though stuck in some gravity well. Ty and Faith are inching along a tree branch to a rope swing, he enormously tall, and Faith blonde and sporting a pretty serious leg tattoo. We are weird looking, probably, but we are not quite prepared for the wave of excitement that overtakes the crowd, as they shoot hundreds of photos of us leaping into the water (though we do not perish, which would have probably made the photos a lot more interesting). Several of the tourists later approach Ty and happily share the photos with him, which he admits are immaculately shot and make him look pretty adventurous.

The Conundrum of the Full Passport

Passport: cancelled due to being a badass.

I began my calculations in Denpasar, Indonesia. The plane set down on a sunny Balinese afternoon, and I began flipping idly over ink from several continents, arranged in letters and patterns that allowed my passage into various wonderlands. A smile was on my face, but I noticed that the pages unstained by ink and stickers were beginning to grow thin on the ground, that empty pages were starting to lose out in number to those completely full.

Some part of me, as is usually the case, was deliriously self-satisfied. I was going to completely max out a passport! What greater feat of journeyman spirit is there than to have travelled so much that they simply won’t let you do it anymore? My pride swelled, but there was also cause for concern. If my tabulations were correct, I would run out of pages somewhere between Laos and Vietnam, and maybe not be able to go anywhere.

Let us journey within my passport, then, and look at the wonders that are contained within its increasingly worn and convoluted recesses.

A Brief Solo-Travel Interlude, Regarding Horse Wangs, Ancient Citadels, and Jake the Dog

Some light gardening.

My companions had ridden off into the sunset, the sunset in this case being Cambodia. My passport was completely full, and I felt certain that I was nowhere near charming or rich enough to convince a Cambodian border guard to let me through with a wink and a wad of cash, so I was left to my own devices in Vietnam. I had already been to the south, and so I set off into the distant wilds (approximately two hours on a bus) to Huế.

Taxi drivers swarmed the outside of the bus like angry hornets. They spotted tourists on board and a frenzy began, chum spreading out across their waters. Some began scrambling for the baggage, removing trunks and backpacks and standing nearby, as though hoping the meagre effort would be rewarded with fawning thanks and the acceptance of an overpriced fare. It felt like a pretty poorly put-together dowry for such an interaction, but the sheer number of taxis and rickshaws wedged onto the sidewalk made it difficult to spent too much time scoffing.

A Brief Soliliquy on Losing

So, I come to you day slightly crestfallen, as I did not win The Big Blog Exchange. I can’t deny being slightly disappointed, but it was a battle valiantly fought, and some of the other contestants have some really cool content, and others some really dynamite motivation. So congratulations and bon voyage to them.

I lied awake at three a.m., considering that I was not getting a free trip, and feeling weird about feeling bummed. Nobody owes me this. This company is not duty-bound to fund my travel based on my mental assessments of merit. And really, this contest has always been an extrinsic reward I’ve tacked on to something I find pretty intrinsically motivating. The existence of this blog is not contingent on the creation of a contest on the internet. I will continue to travel, and will continue to write, because those are things I like doing and planned on doing anyways. A free trip to Iceland or Spain or South Africa might have been nice, but I know me, and I know that I’ll get to each of those someday. And I’ll be writing the whole time, and hope you’ll come along with me.

See you on the road.

Chronicles of Reverse Culture Shock: Language (How Do I Even Talk Now?)

Still my go-to stock photo for language.

“Well, when I lived in Asia…” begin so many of my sentences these days. Moving away is hard, and as it turns out, so is moving back. Chronicles of Reverse Culture Shock is a series devoted to these difficulties, and is also an outlet so that I don’t become That Guy Who Won’t Shut Up About Korea to all of his friends.

I was on the subway, deep below the earth, talking freely to a friend. My tongue sluiced freely around my mouth. My teeth chattered, unbound. Phonemes flew unabashedly off of my stupid lips. Maybe I was talking about bowel movements, or my visceral hatred for a certain coworker, or fairly deep spoilers to books three, four, and five of A Song of Ice and Fire. Maybe I was expressing untoward personal opinions on Margaret Thatcher, or my thoughts in unicorns in North Korea. Perhaps, at different times, all of these subjects of discussion. In polite company I would usually try to refrain from blabbing on about touchy subjects, about the crude or the vulgar or the spoilerific.

And while I was still largely in polite company, I was in polite company that was speaking in Korean and had no interest in my dumb English conversation. Under the sea of a completely different language, my own sentences were slipping completely under the radar, too fast and too idiosyncratic and too boring for anyone to bother listening in. I had diplomatic immunity of the mouth, and I could say whatever I wanted, almost whenever I wanted.

I had grown used to this luxury. It seemed, for a time, that I was walking around in a glorious English bubble, a great movable sphere of incomprehensibility. No one around would understand me, and unless I tried with particular effort, I couldn’t understand anyone else. It was a gentleman’s agreement on eavesdropping, and the difficulty of translation meant that nobody would bother trying too hard to overhear my tedious communiqués. Every conversation was intimate and private, even if we were sardined into a bus with hundreds of strangers at rush hour, or swarmed by waiters and other diners at a restaurant. No one was going to bother trying to understand me, and thus my words were all free.

Tourist Shop Shuffle: The Intricate, Elegant Dance of Not Buying This Chintzy Garbage

Fresh made tchotchkes, here!

There is a tourist mall approximately halfway between Hanoi and Halong Bay, directly opposite a nearly identical Korean tourist mall. It is large and sports a wide array of hilariously overpriced silks, coconut candies, and enormous marble statues. Every single bus that follows the trail to the Bay parks at the mall for 45 minutes to encourage their flock of tourists to buy as much junk as humanly possible. On our way from Hanoi, I breezed through the mall in seconds, marching directly from the entrance to the exit, and sat in the hot parking lot waiting for the bus to set off again, because I am nothing if not petulant.

On our return drive from Halong, the bus began to slow along the highway. “Our bus driver didn’t get a chance to eat any lunch!” our guide bemoaned, despite it being 3 p.m., and also the fact that we were just recently at lunch. He shrugged his shoulders, imitated human empathy. “So we are going to stop for a while so he can eat something.”

I raised my hand. “Are we stopping for his lunch at the same mall as last time?”

I begrudged the pitiful lie, though I did not begrudge the second go-around to the mall. These shops and economical shanties would not exist if people were not buying from them, and this well-plied tourist route was carefully crafted by money-siphoning artisans, skilled tradesmen and women who had finely honed their abilities to squeeze dumb foreigners of their dollars. This was all a part of the dance.

Da Nang and the Church of Our Lady of Giant Floating Eyeball

Marble Buddha and his stalagmite buds.

Ty has grown obsessed with the idea of a scooter. Of riding one. Of owning one. Of being on one. Of being adjacent to one. In his mind, I imagine there is a vision of him with a black helmet, a coat with a scorpion embossed on the back, of an epic steeple chase across the continent. On his initiative, we decide to spend a day scooting, although both Faith and I are reluctant to drive them ourselves. Faith’s concern is probably just nerves, and they ride together on one scooter to save on costs. My concerns are more realistic, as leaving me alone on a scooter means I would almost certainly crash it, break both of my legs, and somehow end up tangled in seaweed.

We set off in different directions, Faith and Ty on their scooter, while I ride on an impressive motorcycle owned and driven by an elderly Vietnamese man who refuses to tell me his name. I look out to the horizon: the first stop has to be the Marble Mountains.

They make marble things there.

The mountains are notable for the expensive rocks contained within, but also for a hiking trail leading into and around the biggest mountain, as well as two caves lodged within.