Old Goa, Panjim and Hampi

These uploaded in reverse chronological order, not sure why...


Beautiful Hampi.


I'd forgotten that mopeds are SO FUN. Thanks to Rickard for being my ride!

Exploring ruins with San-Min and Rickard, two of a cohort of other medical students from Lena's dorm in Vellore.

Wonderfully specific yet nonspecific sign (what activities? and why only in this area?) in a park in Panjim/Panaji.

Colonial Portuguese church in Old Goa.

Passing through Margao

Still here! Still alive! Have been too busy having fun to write about it - which is precisely how it should be.


VELLORE

From my arrival point of Chennai, I took a train to Vellore, a small city where my friend Lena is doing a medical internship at the hospital. Spent less than 24 hours there, I think, in which I met a bunch of international students, and experienced a most interesting autorickshaw ride: The road from the train station was fully blocked by traffic, so the driver swerved off the road and down into the dry riverbed, where we bumped along for ages on a kind of footpath in the dark under the bridge, and had to step out for a moment at the end, because otherwise the little two-stroke engine wouldn't make it up the embankment on the other side.


GOKARNA

Lena, her boyfriend Daniel and I took a night train from Vellore in the east to Mangalore on the west coast, killed time there (lunch, cafe, walking around in the intense heat, buying a shirt) before continuing on to Gokarna.

Gokarna, on the coast south of Goa, is an interesting place, because it's frequented mainly by two groups of people: Hindu pilgrims coming to pray at the town's holy temples, and Western tourists coming for the beaches. You'd think those two cultures would clash, or at least I would have expected to feel like I was causing an inappropriate disturbance for the pilgrims, but somehow everybody seemed to just work around each other without problems. And in fact Gokarna was very beautiful and very chill and we spent a relaxing two days doing the mini beach vacation thing, before taking a local train up to


GOA

Goa is actually a state, not a city - I didn't know that before a week ago - so we visited a couple different places: Panjim, the capital, still bears a strong colonial Portuguese influence in the food (bread!), religion (very visible Christian population) and even the way some people are clearly Indians but look quite Portuguese. Old Goa, the once mighty Portuguese capital, now consists of a handful of enormous, impressive churches - without really anything else left of the town. Margao is considered mostly just a transportation hub, but I had a nice afternoon here a few days ago, checking out the wonderful covered market and walking around.


HAMPI

Margao is where I parted ways with Lena and Daniel, who were both good company and almost impossibly capable travel guides (with a mass of acquired knowledge of how to travel in India, and more importantly, how to BOOK travel in India) and headed for Hampi, a tiny tourist town amid a sprawling complex of 15th century ruins.

I expected Hampi to be interesting and pretty - instead, it was amazing and beautiful beyond description. My pictures won't do it any justice, but I'll try to upload a few when I get a chance. I spent two fun days running around with a troop of Swedes - other students from Lena and Daniel's dorm who happened to be there at the same time - renting bicycles one day and mopeds the next, exploring ruins and climbing strange, rocky hills.

My last evening in Hampi, I walked for a while along the river and through a banana grove, just soaking in peace and beauty. I came to India expecting chaos and noise and dirty streets and whatever else - instead I got this.


IN TRANSIT

Now I'm back in Margao (third time...), hanging around between the daytime train from Hampi and the night train down the coast to Kochi. Four hours left to go...

Gokarna

Gokarna Road station (not actually particularly near Gokarna).

Laying out intricate chalk mandalas on the streets of Gokarna just before a festival procession.

Trains

The train network in India is a wonder.

Yes, things sometimes run late, nothing's particularly fast, and some of the train cars look truly ancient, generations of dust collected on the overhead fans. The biggest problem of all is the same shortages present in pretty much every aspect of this massively large, massively populous country: There just aren't enough spots on the trains for all the people who want to use them, meaning you often have to book days or weeks in advance.

But the system as a whole is almost inconceivably good - you can get pretty much anywhere by train, you can reserve a dazzling array of different classes and routes either at the station or online, it's extremely cheap, reliable and (mostly) makes for a pleasant journey - very little of what I've seen so far matches my preconceptions of hot, dusty train wagons with people packed in like sardines. (Though I know the south is better than the north in this respect, and apparently this part of the south especially.)


Daniel and Lena in the upper berths of a sleeper train.

I admit that after a night spent on a too-hot, too-loud sleeper train, tossing and turning in the narrow berth and unable to sleep most of the night, my main thought was: Please let me never have to do that again. (The nature of travel in India - the long distances and slow trains - means there are in fact several more night trains in my immediate future.)

But the rest of what I've experienced on trains has been lovely. Take today's trip on an unreserved passenger train from Gokarna to Goa, precisely the kind of train you would think would be crowded, hot and unpleasant. Instead there was a cool breeze from the window, lush green landscape sailing by and as always a procession of samosa, chai and cold drink vendors marching up and down the aisle chanting out their wares. If you have a breeze in your face and chai in your hand, as far as I'm concerned, everything's pretty much perfect.

The women next to and across from me peered curiously in my travel journal as I wrote (private life is indeed very public in India) and we asked each other some basic questions (their English was pretty basic and/or I can't understand the accent here AT ALL - latter is decidedly true), but as far as I could make out they were quadrilingual, you know, just as a matter of course, no big deal: the local language Kanada, plus Konkani (spoken in the neighboring state of Goa), Hindi and some English).

Passenger (i.e. local) train arriving at Gokarna Road.

Chennai and Vellore

Street in Chennai.

Four in a rickshaw! (Actually five, since Daniel was up front with the driver.)


This temple cow (I literally mean a cow hanging out in a temple) was kind enough to pose for me.
Leaving tonight for Gokarna with my German friends Lena and Daniel! All is well so far. And boy oh boy, you should see how rapturous Germans abroad are when you bring them chocolate!

Chennai

Am here, alive and far less overwhelmed than I thought I'd be! After all that worry that even having lived in Thailand would in no way prepare me for India (so much more of everything - more crowded, more noise, more poverty, more crushes of people), you know what? India reminds me a whole lot of Thailand. It even smells the same - it's (almost) a bit like coming home.

We flew over Lake Van (stunning, snow-capped mountains in the last moments before sunset), Iran (a carpet of lit-up villages under a starry sky and one long, very bright highway connecting - I think - Tehran and Qom). Pakistan, India. Indescribably beautiful. I laughed at myself a little for my penchant for sitting transfixed in front of the seat-back screen showing the different scale maps of the plane's current location, watching that instead of the in-flight programming. But the world is fascinating.

Arrival in Chennai at 1 a.m.: actually quite relaxed, airport practically empty. Bathroom was squat toilets - Ah, I know this, my tired brain thought. This is just like Thailand. Everything easy: change money at the exchange counter, book a taxi at the prepaid taxi counter. Show my passport to approximately four different officials at different stages of the exiting the airport process.

Rain, palm trees, honking trucks. Warm, humid air, the general building style immediately and visibly different (but again, just like Thailand), everything square and concrete and molding a little in the humidity. And yes, one of the first things I saw on the main road from the airport was a cow by the side of the road.

The taxis are these marvelous, ancient, cute, little cars, no idea what type, but black and white and old and maybe British? The windshield wipers didn't work, so the driver kept leaning out the window to wipe the windshield clear with a cloth. Vehicles squeeze themselves through the smallest possible spaces and then some, and red lights seem to be entirely a matter of personal choice. The taxi driver was actually very good and got me into town safely, but I think I'll stick to trains as much as possible while here...

2 a.m., arrival at the hotel my friend who lives here booked for me - they don't have a reservation in my name. They're full, or maybe just "full." Finally, they do turn out to have a room - in the more expensive class. Fine, this is India, that's how it works, the lines between tipping, baksheesh and flat out bribery blur and it's 2 a.m., so anything is better than having to hunt for another place now. Whatever.

Then the first thing I have to do in my drab but functional "executive" class hotel room is kill a cockroach. Small moment of panic and homesickness, because really, I can deal with just about any kind of inconvenience, but please, not cockroaches... Breathe. Sleep at 3:30 a.m. under a blanket and the overly blasting AC. (Seems to have only one setting - but maybe the cold will keep further cockroaches away??)

Breakfast this morning was various puffy pancake products and mysterious sauces. (Thanks to Anna N, who sent me a link about South Indian breakfast foods the day before I left - indeed, my breakfast matched those pictures!) Everything seems to be automatically vegetarian, and the tea comes automatically as chai, milky and sweet. Love.

I'd planned to let myself sleep/hide out in my hotel room as much as necessary today, being lame as a traveler but allowing myself to acclimate slowly. But through the breakfast room window, India was calling me, hot and busy and bright. And very noisy (every imaginable type of honking). So I went out to wander up and down the high road in front of the train station, just absorbing.

People move as a mass so it's easy just to go along, crossing the road when everyone else crosses, obeying some invisible law of balance between bus and pedestrian. Women selling food from makeshift carts, men selling chai, everywhere tuktuks and rickshaws and packed-full, open-windowed buses. Stray dogs scrounging. A family of goats. Just chillin'. On the sidewalk.

To my surprise, everyone pretty much ignored me, even most of the rickshaw drivers. Almost all the women wear saris, to the point that the ones in jeans and t-shirts look kind of out of place. I saw just one other white person, a middle-aged man, and there was that odd foreigners' moment of mutual recognition, like, Weird seeing YOU here. Where you feel like you should greet each other just because you both stand out so much, but then, why would you greet each other just for being European?

Time to go. This afternoon: train to Vellore, where my German friend Lena is doing part of her medical student internship, then we're going traveling together for a few days.

One More Day

Aw. This morning between doing a million and one other things, I zipped over to the nearest pharmacy to get more Dramamine (motion sickness medication is an essential travel item, obviously, if you get motion sick on every single kind of thing that moves) and the woman working there actually remembered me from the last time I was in, also for trip-related things (insect repellent, water purification tablets). This time too, she was warm and conversational and wished me a good trip.

I love when those rare bits of personal connection manage to break through the veneer of disdainful anonymity (I'll pretend you don't exist if you'll please pretend I don't exist) that often marks public life in Berlin. Especially in winter. Especially on the subway. But anyway...


Departure for India: T minus one day and a very small handful of hours!

Right now I'm flattened by a nasty cold, somehow managed to end up with even more work than I expected in these final pre-trip days and haven't had a chance to finish packing. So far, successfully not panicking! And in just over a day I'll be determinedly leaving behind work and anything that in any way resembles it and, for the next three weeks, turning myself over to just experiencing and exploring and being - NOT organizing and stressing and just generally making myself crazy like I do in normal life.

I consider this extremely important.

The Next Big Adventure

This is so crazy: I'm going on a trip to India in less than two weeks, and I haven't even mentioned that here yet.

Folks, I'm going to India!!!

I'm excited, nervous, terrified, overwhelmed, all of that. I'm not even sure if I can handle India. Which is exactly why I feel like I need to try.

I've been spinning my wheels here for a while, feeling a need to do something big and exciting and really alive, but not having the energy to get it together. Feeling a desire to travel again, but not sure quite how to start. So I'm just simply making myself do it. (It did help to have a friend currently living in India for four months, making it a now-or-never sort of opportunity.)

I'll be in India for about three weeks; first I'll be visiting my friend, who's doing a medical internship in Vellore, Tamil Nadu. Then we (possibly with her boyfriend too) will travel somewhere together for a couple days. After that... it's wide open. And I'll be on my own completely - no friends, no group, no travel partner. I'm planning to stay in the south (not to rush around the country trying to see "everything") but beyond that I don't even have much of a plan - and I think I like it that way. I'm just going to arrive and see where things take me.

I'm going to India!

Bike Tour in the Wendland

Friends from New York, Anna and Ian, came and visited me in Berlin a few weeks ago.

This provided several benefits, namely 1) it was lovely to hang out with them, 2) it's always fun discovering my city through visitors' eyes and 3) we went on a terrific four-day bike tour!

The Wendland is a region of farms, woods and river landscapes about halfway between Berlin and Hamburg. Throughout the Cold War, it was a little pocket of West Germany tucked in amid three sides of East Germany. This small map gives you a bit of a sense: the dot is, roughly, the Wendland, at that point where the state of Lower Saxony (former West) meets three states of the former East.

For West Germans, it was a far-flung corner that seemed removed form everything – and thus a reasonable place to stick a nuclear storage facility. For West Berliners, it was the closest place they could get to actual nature, since the Berlin Wall kept them trapped within their part of the city, not allowed to access the East German countryside that surrounded them.

Since much of the Wendland was essentially the border and the no man's land along it, it accidentally ended up as a good preserve for wildlife and, as we discovered, the Elbe River is a major migratory stopping point for Siberia geese heading toward North Africa or the Iberian Peninsula.

Now that Germany is reunited, of course, the Wendland is no longer a far-flung corner but in fact right in the middle of things and a strong protest movement has sprung up around the nuclear storage facility in Gorleben. Artists and alternative-minded folks who have moved to the area to be part of that movement lend the region a very different culture from your usual rural landscape - and best of all, the farmers and artists seem to get along well, united in their opposition to the nuclear waste transports that come in by train more or less once a year. (The next one, in fact, is this weekend. For a few images of past protests, look here, here, here and here.)

It's a fascinating place on all fronts - nature, history and culture - and I've attempted to capture a tiny bit of it in a pictures. Click on this image to go to the photo album:

Wendland Bike Tour

The Chimney Sweep

The chimney sweep, playing out his chimney-cleaning line on the roof of a building (six stories up) across the way. I love these little anachronistic moments in Germany.