Mumbai

In lots of ways, Mumbai is identical to the rest of India. Morbid congestion infests the roads, hawkers harass on the footpaths, the number of people going about their daily lives is too large to comprehend, and the noise never ceases. In other, surprising ways, it is most un-Indian. The architecture has been lifted straight out of olde-England, with lots of big stone, big arches and statues. Red double-decker busses plod about streets with names like Henry Road and past buildings called Victoria Terminus (the busiest train station in Asia, which is really saying something).

Most of the younger women wear western clothes, and some even wear business suits. Men and women hang out (and talk) in restaurants and bars and everyone speaks English, even if they’re in a group made up entirely of locals. And there are comparatively obscene amounts of cash floating around. We saw plenty of people being driven around in expensive cars, and we were forced to pay over forty dollars for a hotel room, an amount that would have kept us bedded for a week in other parts of the country.

Most surprising of all – among the usual handkerchiefs, fake watches and sunglasses that are sold at stalls on the footpath, in Mumbai they sell sex toys, cunningly boxed as ‘massagers’.

Charming Puerto Vallarta

Angie, self-portrait with 2-for-1 margarita

Enormous, waddlesome tourists clutching ice creams and fistfuls of pesos guffaw along the spotless waterfront. Tour agency spruikers attempt frantically to strike up conversation in the hope of a commission. ‘Hey, are you guys from Minneapolis?’ they ask us too brightly, their distended eyes betraying their desperation as we keep moving, heads down. We hear their anguished calls from afar: ‘Do you want to go to Yelapa??’


Restaurant spruikers block the pavement and manhandle pedestrians into their establishments. The touchy-feely one dressed in a gorilla suit seems especially popular. Taxi drivers cluster on the dark corners and offer drugs, massages or taxi rides (in that order). Plump North American students in seas of gelatinous sequins joggle in the windows of loud, flashing clubs like satiric Amsterdam window displays. They wear balloon sculptures on their heads and chug 2-for-1 margaritas. Their liquored, glossy lips mime along to the music: ‘Man, I feel like a woman’.


A block away, in the brimming tourist market, untold oceans of lurid fecal matter (or souvenirs) are on display. Listless t-shirts hang like carcases in the suffocating, breezeless air while small fans struggle valiantly to circulate the wretched atmosphere of an marketplace both figuratively and literally overcrowded. ‘I’m shy, BUT I’VE GOT A BIG DICK!!! Puerto Vallarta’ the shirts proclaim. ‘F.B.I.- Federal Breast Inspector. Puerto Vallarta’ sings another. Below the shirts are shelves filled with souvenirs- pieces of crap that have been superglued to other pieces of crap. The resulting amalgamations have then had ‘Pto. Vallarta’ scribbled on them with felt-tip marker and been thrust optimistically into the world.

In contrast to the tack of the waterfront, the people at the hotel were lovely, and even had Escher in to do the staircases

That this exists is novel and amusing at first, but it soon becomes scary and intensely depressing. All this stuff is here because that’s how people want it. They buy the shirts and guzzle the weak drinks and get groped by gorillas and look positively enthralled and come back for more next holidays. It’s everything the Gold Coast wishes it could be, and once the novelty of the spectacle had dissipated, we couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

San Cristobal de las Casas

Markets

Three Veedubs lined up in Mexican colours

Trinket Castle and the Hammock District

Market town Masaya rides on the back of all kinds of tourist knick-knacks. Apparently most of the souvenirs in Central America are made there, and there is an entire city block bordered by faux-colonial turreted walls that enclose an extensive tourist market stocking hammocks, bright clothes and pairs of dead toads taxidermically posed in compromising positions. After browsing the markets, whose best stock came from Guatemala, we spent the afternoon wandering the hammock district, a section of town filled with hammock workshops. The workshops were actually people’s homes, and the showrooms were the living rooms, which meant that while you were browsing, Grandma would be sitting there knitting trim for hammocks, the kids would be watching cartoons and the sound of the weaving machine could be heard from the spare bedroom.

Onwards and Upwards

Another burn northwards landed us in Otavalo, a town a couple of hours North of Quito, and home to the largest indigenous markets in South America. The largest market in South America, we found out, is very similar to every other South American market except much bigger.

Guardians of the hotel room keys

A nativity scene we found in a bank. Something is missing...

Islas Flotantes

Back in the day, an indigenous group was forced to relocate from the mainland to avoid the nastiness of a neighbouring people. The safest place, naturally, was the middle of Lake Titicaca, and they lived there on a series of Islands that they created from the reeds that grow in the lake. These days, not many people actually live there, and as our guide explained, the Islands exist almost purely as a tourist attraction.



Our boat pulled up to the first of the Islands, where a portly collection of brightly decorated women grabbed our vessel and hauled us ashore. After a history lesson, we were free to be once again accosted by the women who had transformed from longshoreman into saleswomen of the highest western calibre. Their technique of asking your name and offering a soft handshake made it hard to pull away from their collections of trinkets, blankets and children.





Eventually we were taken from that Island by a reed boat, where the process of selling was skillfully repeated. Once broken free of the stalls, we were able to enjoy a spectacular sunset over Lake Titicaca.

The Witches Markets

Knickknacks

'Hidden' in a alley in the warren that is inner La Paz is the 'Witches Market', where you can find (among the plethora of usual multicolour ponchos and bags) dried llama fetuses, stuffed wildlife and all kinds of potions. Whether or not anyone actually buys these oddities is a mystery- its well known that here, any kind of hook to get someone into your shop is valuable, and the bizarre goods on display seem to be bait to lure the tourist into the knickknack trap.

San Pedro Cactus drying out

Beady beads

The famous fetuses

Zumbahua- 1st Stop on the Quilotoa Loop

Every Saturday Zumbahua hosts a market in vibrating technicolour where farmers from the surrounding mountains buy and sell their weekly supplies. The market is for locals, and thus is filled with the neccesities of everyday life; vegetables, meat, grain and livestock. There's not an 'Ecuador' emblazoned wall hanging or figurine to be found.

Angie says hello to some groceries

It was fascinating to see this little economy at work, and to watch the people who depend on it, but the on-site, open-air slaughterhouse/butcher was rather graphic for those who are not used to seeing the entire, brutal transition from animal to foodstuff. Much more pleasing to the eye was the amount of colour (that wasn't crimson) on display; in the produce, the buildings and the clothes of the locals.

Nervous

Transport home

Cheap Paris- The City not the Heiress

19 hours on a bus? Surely no amount of money saved can be worth that brand of prolonged stationary torture. In most countries, this is true. Not in Argentina. In Argentina time on a bus is time to unwind, be still and glow the same way you do when you've just done something really clever.

The seats are generous, three to a row and they recline 180 degrees with the grace of a timelapse flower blooming. Wine, coffee, champagne and whiskey served on takeoff, hot food, and from our seats at the very front of the upper level, a view over everything else on the road to where this elegant machine is taking its payload of 24 passengers, 1 driver and 1 attendant. Yes, this is first class travel, comparable to 1st class air travel (at least I assume it is), and for just $80AUD. (Shot taken during one of the multitude of hair-raising overtaking manoeuvres we witnessed from on high. I am convinced that Argentinian bus drivers possess eagle vision and can see around corners)

After I had a relaxing and luxurious 19 hour bus ride we arrived in Buenos Aires. Angie's 19 hours was less enjoyable than mine, due to a second assault by suspected food poisoning. BA is a huge city, 30 million people live there. We jumped in a cab to take us to our hostel right in the middle of the nest. Angie was still recovering, so I went out and had I minor explore of this new city.


The feeling of arriving in a new city is something that you only get and can only keep for perhaps a few hours, maybe a day. Its the precious first impression, the intensity of meeting a city for the first time which is unique. Everything is brand new, there is no point of reference and you can't rely on anything being familiar to centre yourself. Its a magnificent sensation of new, and you have to drink it in, because as soon as you turn a full block and end up back where you started, the brief moment of pure virgin experience is diluted, and you start to know the place.

This pigeon slept outside our room every night

Of course, the more you try to extend this moment of newness (by not concentrating too hard on where you're going of where you've been) the more likely you are to have set yourself up for a royal case of 'I'm lost and have no idea where home is'. Which of course a got an acute case of. After deciding that I had wandered the streets long enough and it was now getting too cold and too dark for me to be out here, I tried to turn back and experienced the downside of new. A really good way to extend that feeling of being new is to go walking around at night, because then your points of reference tend to be much fewer. But by all accounts, Buenos Aires is not a good place to be doing this sort of accidental exploring at night, because there are places which you just don't go (dangerous places). With the sun now down and a rising sense of paranoid tourist panic now bubbling away below, I quickened my step and thankfully, found a map outside the 'Subte' station (subway). After returning to it a couple of times I managed to find my way back to the hostel, inches of daylight remaining.

20 lanes of pure urgency

Now it was tourist time. Over the next few days we wandered around the city (Angie calls it Cheap Paris), feeling a little overwhelmed by the size of the whole thing. Our hostel was on Avenue 9 de Julio, the widest street in the world. It's 20 jam packed lanes wide, full of motorists keen to beat everyone else to the end of the road, wherever that is. They're so keen that they tend to squeeeeeze in between cars next to each other at the lights, so often there'll be two lanes painted on the road, but three vehicle nestled together inside those lanes, engines revving like dragsters in anticipation.

Acres of trinkets

At San Telmo, we went and saw the largest markets I have ever been to. It was a combination of street stalls, show halls and blankets on roads, selling every kind of tourist trinket imaginable (with a brutally heavily emphasis on tango-themed souvenirs) along with really fascinating antique treasures. In the four hours we spent walking the market, we backtracked once to buy some vintage postcards, but that was the only time we doubled up on seeing anything.