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’.

Oi! We ‘ome yet, or what?!? Bali

Shirtless, beer-clutching mobs of over-muscled males; shoulderblade Southern Cross tattoos accessorising Australian flag boardshorts; pink, over-fed girls overflowing from spaghetti strap singlets; coagulated accents inflecting around a vocabulary consisting mainly of unspellable sounds - ‘aahhh’, ‘whhhoor’, ‘yahh – hahAAAH’, ‘Tay-LAH!!! Get BACK ovr’ere!’. It’s good to be home.


Oh no, wait. There’s a wedding on (Angie’s brother, Eric and his fiancé, Leah) in Bali, and that’s where we’ve just landed. Culture shock hit us hard; after India and its separation of the sexes, strange-uncle dress code and omnipresent air of devotion, it was a little confronting to find ourselves in Kuta amid a pre-drunken mass of holidaying Australiana; an alien, yet disturbingly familiar, uninhibited microcosm of home rarefied by Bintang and the Balinese sun… ya bastard!

We had two weeks leading up to the wedding booked in a nice hotel (with a hairdryer - a hairdryer!), a swish-ish way to cap off our nineteen months trippinballs. There was a week to wait before checking in, and rather than killing that week in Kuta amongst the shopping packs of braid-headed, flag swathed holiday makers and touchy-feely-grabby-and-ripoffy shopkeepers (plenty of time for that later), we went in search of something a little more serene.

Angie's Varanasi

People unimpressed by my vessel selection on the Ganges

Happy Tears

After buying some jewelery from a woman, we agreed to be taken by her son to his store, where he would show us some of his merchandise. As he led us through the streets, he turned to Angie and said:

‘I was talking to one man, and he said the saw you walking here and crying the other day.’

Angie replied that, yes, that was her, but before she had time to elaborate, he continued, with one of my favourite theories on the effects India can have on tourists.

‘All the time I am in Varanasi I see tourists here and they are crying. I think, maybe, these are happy tears?’

Angie explained that, probably no, they aren’t tears of happiness, and recounted the traumatic details of the particularly infuriating encounter with a travel agent that led to her storming the alleys in tears (a bemusing sight for the locals, which kept them talking for days, apparently.)

* * *

Morning on the ghats

Goat eating a schoolbook

After-school Job

Angie was walking around the streets, being harassed by hawkers, touts and guides, as is usual for any foreigner in Varanasi.

‘Miss, Miss!’ came the familiar call from a pre-adolescent kid.
‘No thankyou’, replied Angie, denying whatever was on offer before it was even proposed (again, usual for the foreigner.)
‘No, no, Miss, I am not a guide, I only wish to talk to you.’
‘Okay, but I don’t want to go to any silk shops or ghats. I only want to walk.’
‘Miss!’ came the melodramatically offended response, ‘I am not a guide! I am a student.’ He then proceeded to make chit-chat, asking all the usual questions about what country Angie was from, which city she was from (‘MCG or SCG?’ is how we sometimes get asked this) what she does in Australia, before getting down to brass tacks:

‘Perhaps you would like to come to my Uncle’s silk shop?’
‘You told me you were not a guide!’ said Angie exclaimed.
‘Oh, Madam!’ he cried indignantly, ‘I told you, I am not a guide! I am a student! In the mornings I go to school, and in the afternoon I work.’
‘And what is your job?’
Innocently, he explained: ‘I round up tourists and take them to the silk shop.’

* * *

Naptime at the Nepali Temple

Cow with a sense of humour

The Bookshop Trick

Me walking

We went for a walk one day to Connaught Place, which is an important site for tourists who wish to look at things (such as a circular park, a bunch of imported chain stores and an unnatural thickness of honking vehicles) and is thus a magnet for touts and scammers. On the way we were accosted by one such fellow, whose game was to act as your highly-paid tour guide, whether you want a highly-paid tour guide or not.

‘Don’t you want to see the India Gate, sir?’
‘Yeah, yeah I do but I’ll find it, thanks.’
‘But the Red Fort? Don’t you want to see the Red Fort, sir?’
‘Uh, I don’t know. Yeah, but I’ve got a book, we’ll find it.’
‘Why not sir? Why do you not want to see the Red Fort?’
‘Uh, I do, but…’
‘Okay I will show you the Red Fort, sir’
‘Nah, that’s okay. I’ll be able to find it’
‘No sir, I will come with you. We go.’

This could have gone on for hours, but Angie stepped in with a few stern words (for both me and the ‘guide’)

‘You’ve just got to be tougher with them. Stand up to them a bit.‘ she told me. ‘No!’ she demonstrated, index finger gesticulating formidably ‘We just want to be alone and explore the city ourselves!’

Predictably, this had no effect whatsoever on our unwanted companion. For a while longer we tried the ‘just ignore him and he’ll go away’ tactic of getting rid of him, but Angie soon grew tired of that and started ordering him again to leave us alone!! (Her exclamation marks). Of course that didn’t work, and he began pointing out things that he thought we’d find interesting. He could tell we’d find them of interest because we were already looking at them by the time he’d worked out what they were. ‘Ah, yes’ he explained form behind. ‘This is Piccadelhi’ after he saw us scoffing at an unamusing row of English phone boxes with ‘Piccadelhi’ written on them outside some awful shop.

It all came undone in a nearby bookshop. ‘Ah, yes’, he intoned again from three steps behind, ‘This is the Jain Book Depot’ as we crossed the road towards the Jain Book Depot. We went inside, thinking we could somehow lose him in a small retail space. Perhaps the lights would confuse him. We looked at books for five minutes, every now and then surreptitiously glancing toward the door to see if he’d gone. Each time, he waved back, smiling.

A much more agreeable character we encountered near Connaught Place

We decided to make a run for it; maybe try another bookshop. As we were on our way out, Angie whispered to me: ‘I’m just going to say something to him as we leave’ I led the way, brushing nonchalantly past our companion and pushing open the door, then froze mid-stride as Angie’s clear voice boomed out from behind me, drowning out all other noise in the busy store.

‘DO. NOT. FOLLOW. US!’ (Her capitals, full stops and bold type).

‘Oh-kay’ he sing-songed nervously as all eyes bounced between his embarrassed face and this small white woman with an abnormally loud voice. Sure enough, it worked, and we never saw him again.

Leaving America

After a restful month in Philadelphia, we had to move on. It was a fantastic rest from the silly amount of moving we had been doing. When the day came to leave, it was very sad for Angie and Stephie - as they said, it kept 'raining on their faces'.

Angie on our bus to New York

The last lights of The States we saw as the bus to Canada pulled out of the city - 'Tattoo', 'The World of DVD Female Peep Show Male Peep Show', 'Hot and Crusty'

To the Shore! Atlantic City!!

The boardwalk

On the Eastern side of America, when you feel like some time at the beach, you don't go to the coast, you go to the shore. We went to the shore, to Atlantic City. Atlantic City is a beachside mini-Vegas with all the class and sophistication you would expect from a gambling town. The boardwalk is the heart of the city. It runs along the beach and is lined with huge casinos, malls, gaming parlours and an infinite number of souvenir shops selling some really, really nice stuff.

Some of the classier merchandise

Perhaps the most shocking revelation I've had in a while came while we were strolling along the boards. It turns out that the original game of Monopoly was not based on London, but actually based on the Atlantic City boardwalk! Egads! It took me a while to get over that.

Cold water

One mall had beach-themed resting areas set high above the waves

Globe of DEATH!!

We went to a restaurant that gave out free paper hats

Surfer

New York Round One

My first day in New York was an ulcer-inducing succession of problems, setbacks and ‘very, very unusual’ computer malfunctions, as I went about obtaining my visa for India. In the capital of the world, the internet had somehow not made it down to street level, and on the rare occasion that it was available, cost at least eighteen, eighteen dollars an hour. After an ordeal I’d rather not recall, I submitted my application and began the nervous wait for my passport to be returned. Our flight to London left in two and half weeks, and processing time for an Indian visa was two to three weeks…


Meanwhile, Angie had a wonderful day browsing through expensive shops, making new friends in Central Park and even had a New Yorker buy her a coffee when she ordered before realising she had no cash. !!!

Once we got to eat some of the massive, famous New York Pizza slices, everything was ok.

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.

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.

Paradise- Day 1

‘Have a good time! Oh, of course you will, you’re going to Paradise!’ Those were the parting words we heard from London James, an intriguingly random character that had popped up a couple of times on our trip so far. Parque Tayrona is a coastal chunk of protected wilderness in the North of Colombia that James had just been to and was now deeming to be paradise.

Our group of four was made up of Angie and myself, and Paul and Charlotte, a couple from England, who we first met way back on the Bolivian pampas excursion and recently stumbled into again in Bogota. The journey to Paradise started with a multi-hour visit to the mall, where we purchased tents and stocked up on other basic camping essentials such as two-minute noodles and multi-pack Doritos. The search for transport took up a further sweaty portion of the baking afternoon, and we arrived at the park entrance with an hour of daylight remaining, hoping to avoid the dreaded ordeal of putting up new tents in the dark.


At the gate we were greeted with an ad-hoc price list that stated that all non-Colombian visitors were to pay three times the rate that locals would. It was a prime example of the unfortunate Colombian custom of uncompromisingly attempting to take gringos for all they’re perceived to be worth. Colombians are generally the most open and friendly people of everyone we’ve come across in this continent, but anyone who is selling you something won’t hesitate to overcharge, shortchange or in someway rip off visitors. It’s a really frustrating phenomenon, and one of the only bad points about travel in this country. To come across a government-sponsored version of this tendency, especially at the gates of Paradise, was a little disheartening.

Apparently, though, not something we had to worry about today, because Paradise was full, and there was no room for any more callers. We stood at the gates, which were being guarded by a group of bored, but as always in Colombia, heavily armed soldiers. In an interesting, seemingly reasonless turnaround, someone decided all of a sudden that there was room for a few more after all, and after handing over the cash and having our bags thoroughly molested, we were herded into a fourteen seater van with thirty other eager pleasure seekers.

The van putted uncomfortably along the winding road, coming to a stop in front of the entrance of a campground. Apparently this is where we were to stay for the night. After some confusing discussion we came to the conclusion that this was not up for discussion, and we wandered into the campground only to be greeted with the news that the campground was full. Again, there was a turnaround in which the owner agreed to let us stay as long as we were out of there early in the morning.

Paul looking oddly pleased at the prospect of fitting his oversized frame into this undersized tent.

In the fading light, we erected our accommodations. The tents turned out to be outrageously undersized- allegedly designed for two people, but those two people had apparently undergone a quadruple amputation. There was enough room for me to sleep contorted into an inhuman s-bend, and Angie was restricted to a similarly unnatural pose. Everything else- bags, food, bodyboard- had to stay outside, and turning onto our backs was an impossible posture. Ah- camping.