The Mountainous Callejón of Guanajuato, or, Why My Legs Hurt Too Much for Adventure

Trudge-match.

My taxi slid to a stop just outside of a pristine theatre, its front edifice gridded by marble pillars. People milled about on the stairs and sat in the sunshine on a warm weekday afternoon. Faith spotted me seconds after I put my first trepidatious foot on Guanajuato soil.

We talked the usual travel talk, I told her about my flight, about immigration. The sun beat down, and my friend bought be an icy, canned margarita. She then led me down an alley and to the pathway that I would come to know all too well.

I began to think of the people of Guanajuato as absurdly friendly, but this was partly because of my interactions on the daily trudge up and down the callejón. 15 minutes on rocky stairways and creeping, twisty alleys led all the way up to my friends’ beautiful, Mediterranean Sea-blue house, and this path had to be forded multiple times per day, step by painful, sweaty step. The others on the road saw my pain and knew it all too well, as this burden was shared amongst all.

I made the trek with my friends back and forth, multiple times per day, sweat pooling on my back and all over my feet. Once or twice I felt fairly certain I would just crawl into a doorway and beg for succour, plead with whatever pleasant Mexican person was inside that they just let me rest there, perhaps become a part of the family, and work towards becoming a valued member of Mexican society, so long as I didn’t have to climb any longer. Up and down we marched, and every old lady, every young man walking a cadre of adorable dogs, every posse of children and grocery shoppers and lovers would nod, smile, and wish us a pleasant afternoon.

The Glass Coffin Express to Goat Alley Station

Look into my eyes, traveller, and know despair.

Our 4 month trip nearly came crashing down en route to Jaipur. This was no mean feat: the only thing greater than our feeling of being adventurous and spirited travellers was our deep investment in this adventurousness representing our character. We were hardened, we thought: wizened, callused, tough. Our skin was like leather, and we all had our battle scars. We had not-so-idly considered purchasing eye patches, maybe spurs, and sitting in dusty cantinas rhapsodizing about the war. No pitiful “discomfort” could ever so upset us that we would even cringe, never mind head for the hills. Nothing could defeat us. We were Travellers, upper-case t.

We had chartered a bus to get us from Amritsar to our next destination, but were told that our path was a little odd and that few modes of transport plied this particular route. We would have to be a lot more understanding, a lot more accepting, of just about anything we got if we wanted to get to Jaipur cheaply. Our bus to Dharamsala had spoiled us in regards to comfort and pleasantness, and we were made to understand that this ride would not be a picnic. As we arrived at the expansive dirt lot surrounded in rusted chain-link and saw our chariot, this became clear.

Our bus was not so much a bus as a large, dilapidated heap of disintegrating metal and barely-working engine parts. For at least a few minutes after our rickshaw driver pointed us to our mode of conveyance, we wondered if we would be involved in powering the vehicle itself, if perhaps there would be little open slats under each seat so that everyone could Fred Flintstone us through the Rajasthani desert. We also considered that maybe the bus was coal powered, or maybe they would bring the horses to harness to the front bumper, or maybe we had died on the way to the parking lot and this was Chiron’s boat directly to the darkest, saddest, crustiest parts of the afterlife.

The Sacred Bond of the Line Buddy

We are all in this together now.

Trina shook my hand. Her flight left in 30 minutes, mine left in 40.

We were both in the depths of the sprawling monstrosity that is the Houston Airport, a space designed by Daedalus utilizing the kind of alien geometries that typically characterize HP Lovecraft novels. We had just passed through the hour-long immigration line required of those squalling unfortunates and huddled masses seeking entry into the United States, and were trying to get through the customs area of baggage claim to make our connections. Things were slow moving, we were tired, and everything sucked.

I didn’t learn much about Trina beyond her previous location (Costa Rica), and her eventual destination (L.A.), nor did she get much beyond my parallel travel facts. She was a woman, maybe in her 20s, and blonde. Perhaps she was a nuclear physicist, or maybe an ice cream flavour designer. One or more of her limbs may have been prosthetic. She was maybe secretly a KGB agent? There are a few gaps remaining in my understanding of her biography. But I felt an instantaneous connection with her, a sweaty-browed union of souls that bespoke our mutual desperation and our shared disgust for this godforsaken airport.

Freed from the clutches of immigration, we charged down a hallway and made it to the next line-up to be molested by the TSA. Elderly succubi screeched at the prone, quivering crowd to remove their watches and wallets, to rend their flesh from their aching bones, and to prepare their tired, weakened anuses to be prodded by the slovenly hands of a 300-pound wage-slave named Gus who probably hated his job.

I hated everything about this airport, and this process, but I didn’t hate Trina. She was about the only entity within the entire facility that I could mentally process as a human. I advised her to stuff her belt into her carry-on bag so that she could simply jog on once she had passed the screening, and she scouted out which direction each of us would need to sprint after our mandated proddings.

The Road to Pakistan is Paved With Lasers and Moustaches

Because I have exactly one picture from Amritsar, and because I didn’t know if I was allowed to take pictures at a border.

“Wagah border?” Every taxi driver in Amritsar chanted this phrase to us on the daily, sometimes shouting it down the street at our retreating frames. They would shrug their shoulders, and look at us curiously. “Wagah wagah wagah?”

Charmed by their dual reference to Pacman and to a local site of interest, and found out that Wagah was the lonely road that led from India to Pakistan. Given the tightness of our visas that allowed us entry into India in the first place, and what we imagined to be similarly labyrinthine processes to be granted passage into Pakistan, we didn’t see what all the fuss was about. If we couldn’t enter Pakistan personally, we certainly didn’t want to hang around and watch people get visa stamps or submit to baggage checks.

In time, though, it became clear that this was one of the major attractions of visiting Amritsar. After you had grown tired of all that history and spiritual homeland of the Sikh religion stuff, Wagah was the place to go.

Off We Go, Apparently: The Art of Winging It

Our hobbled chariot.

The smell was growing worrisome: it had the fragrance of action figures in a microwave, of an immolating computer hard drive. Burning wires, fried circuitry, sparks and electrical calamity. There were six of us in the Ranger, with two grown adults wedged into the trunk space atop the baggage like so much meaty cargo, and we were speeding down a mountain pass where travellers died about two or three a week. I ignored the growing terror fragrance for some time, until smoke began to issue out from the depths of the vehicle, somewhere amidst all the bags and humans. It became apparent that something was on fire.

We somehow managed to get the vehicle into the parking lot of a Tim Horton’s, and then set to work poking at the trunk door, which was still smoking and hissing. The inside panel was ripped off, wires were disconnected and put back in place, and the door was once more sealed. We sat around outside the vehicle, looking at it suspiciously, as though it was just waiting, trying to lure us back into its death trap.

But in time we all climbed back in, each with a nervous chuckle, and a particular, concerted effort to secure our seatbelts (except for those people in the trunk, who just tried to hold on to the beer cooler and sleeping bags).

We drove another 9 hours in that vehicle, arriving in Calgary at around 4 a.m. We eventually forgot about the constant risk of electrical fire and, we assumed, super cool explosion that would claim all of our lives as we were travelling, and danger was part of the adventure. Plus, there were hundreds of deer along the roadside late at night, each spookily watching the vehicle as it passed, and our concern was more about slamming into so many hundreds of pounds of walking venison.

Mexico Photoglut: Sorry, I Only Eat Ham in Discotheques

Oh, internet, I have tricked you once again! In preparation for my trip to Mexico, I went on a writing spree and pre-posted 4(!) different jewels of blogging splendour to be released into the wilds as I stuffed my face with quesadillas and low-grade tequila for 100 pesos a bottle. Even as I appeared to be rhapsodizing about my entry into India and regaling you with my fascinating anecdotes and bon mots, I was in the wind, as I often am.

Why did I go to Mexico? Why, to reward myself for all of my hard work in unemployment! But seriously, there were a few reasons. Some of my best friends currently live there. I had been to Mexico once before, but on a cruise when I was 17, and barely for a day, to the point that I barely count it as a notch on my travel belt. I had been feeling down from the job hunt, which has involved 5 months of continuous resume-ing and cover letter-ing all across the globe. Also there was that chance that I could have won that free trip but I totally lost and felt bad about myself, and nothing perks me up like a big frivolous money-hemorrhage in another country!

What was I saying? Something about Mexico. Avocados? I swear I had something for this. You get the idea. Let’s go!

Dharamsala in Saffron and Maroon

Thataway.

We have flee Delhi by night, driving straight out into the countryside. Traffic swells all around us, as along the highway a great, trembling ocean of light forms. Diwali preparations: electricity and oil burning ten thousand tiny tea lights, each attended by busy people, each surrounded by movement and food and tension. We are barely moving and it seems for a time that we will stay in Delhi forever, or perhaps in this new makeshift nation along the roadside, which is warm and bright and bustling, a city made of diyas and coloured powders, beautiful and glowing against the encroaching nightfall.

The cars eventually clear as people break off for evening revelry amongst the lights. We drift farther from the city, and the lights launch upwards, disappear behind clouds, and suddenly reappear as we gain altitude and move away from people, from cars, from buildings. The country reclaims the sky. Homes drift further apart until they are not present at all. Night is no longer balmy, but grows chill, and quiet. Ours is the only vehicle on the road at this hour, and we begin up a steep incline.

Our bus is half-empty on this midnight run into the mountains, and I stretch across two reclining seats, pulling a complimentary blanket around my shoulders. I can’t sleep–maybe I am uncomfortable with this level of silence, with the growing still outside of my window. I’m a city boy, and I’ve been in nothing but cities for some time. Trees are everywhere, and the road is very sloped now. Several times our bus stops as the shepherds of Himchal Pradesh lead cadres of sheep and goats across the road and into wilier, more secretive passes. The road is narrow, and we must make several cautious attempts at each switchback.

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?