Trivandrum to Allepey

Catholic idols enshrined behind oily glass - lime-green mosques with speakers poking out of minarets - Hindu temples with air conditioning units jammed in between the concrete slats, cold stone goddesses guarding the entrances - stern swamis or gurus or politicians, I couldn't tell you which, preaching to bored crowds - Brilliance college, Futureplus Institute of Tech, dozens and dozens of diploma mills at every turn - hammer and sickle, sickle and grain tattooed upon the walls - an ad for mango pickle, the model licking her wrist in delight - Office of the Circle Inspector - slightly weak-jawed girls, thin noses, full lips walking by, many pretty but none beautiful - a boy hacking apart a refrigerator, strips of white insulation scattered about - my stomach climbing into my heart, more ravenous than sick - goats high-stepping through reedy grass underneath coconut-laden palm trees, palm trees upon palm trees every rising up green firework head and smoke-tail trunk, waving timelessly in the breeze - slick rippled backs of skirted men lifting boulders onto trucks - Kalyan silks - Malayam script loopy and fanciful, or solid and blocky - Arabic words like the doodles of a bored child - the thin horn of the bus, angry buzz of the rickshaws forced from the incoming lane to shoulder - Famous Power Tools - sad rusty bicycles - sacred cows veins coursing popped dragging carts led by old men with withered legs - young boys carrying computer towers on the back of motorcycles - a lonely politician's statue in the tall weeds - druggists, chemists, ayurvedics - a pretty girl gets on the bus at the next stop - I wink at her and she smiles back: the world is never as foreign as it seems.

I Had Been Swimming in the Ocean and Was Extremely Tired

1 medium-sized crab + 1 large crab fried and covered in garam masala: 100 rupees

Cheers

I write this having faced approximately 7 shots at the Bagdogra security checkpoint. I had thought that it would take approximately 20 minutes to feel any effects, but my knowledge of esophagol and stomache absortion rates is apparently lacking, as this is only 5 minutes after having gone through.

At any rate, Indian security has bought into the ridiculous liquid-explosives scare, and I had stored a little more than a third of a (750ml) bottle of Coronation Silver Jubilee Rum in my Nalgene before coming to the airport. CSR is smooth and light, with a hint of sweetness and a nice mellow finish. It is by far our favorite liquor from Bhutan, surpassing even K5, the 5-times-as-expensive whisky brewed in honor of His Majesty Jigme Singye Khesar Wangchuk (not to say that K5 is bad. It is a light, slightly tart liquor that goes down pleasantly while delighting the tongue with hearty overtones, to approximate the literati’s liquor review-speech). And, at $3 a bottle, it is by far my and Feyer’s favorite bargain-rate liquor (though, to be fair, in Bhutan 130 Nu is a little more than half a day’s wages for a significant portion of the population).

At any rate, we have made it to Bagdogra Airport. We are set to fly to Chennai, the southernmost tip of India [sober ed. note, not the southernmost tip at all, just very southern], in approximately an hour. Though I said earlier that there are no gates or fences on the border between India and Bhutan, I happened to be wrong in my exact wording. There is indeed a large fence lying on the border between India and Bhutan (though it has nothing on the US-Mexico border fence, that abomination), but the border is exceedingly porous. We managed to find the Bhutanese immigration office in order to get our passports out-stamped, but it took talking to both the Bhutanese exit police officers and the Indian police force, not to mention our coolie driver to find the Indian Immigration Office, where a man did not check our bags to see that we were not, in fact, bringing contraband into India.

Before we even checked our visas, however, we had another crisis. Our next stop after Chennai is Karela. Strass had booked our tickets from Chennai to Karela on an Indian train through a friend of a friend of his (and ours) at Kuenga. We spent Sunday afternoon fruitlessly calling said friend, and ended up concluding that the whole thing had been a scam, and were resigned to trying our luck at the Indian bus system in order to get to Adi. Surprisingly, our man called Strass at 8am this morning to inform us that he had the tickets and that we could pick them up at his office, which we did the moment he walked in. The timing of the whole thing (we had planned to stay overnight in Silguri instead of Phuntsholing and thereby avoid timing problems in getting to the airport) worked out however, as we had failed to take in to account the fact that Bhutan is 30 minutes ahead of India. At any rate, here we are.

I have memories of my scoutmaster, Mr. Mullens, staying awake the entirety of our Boy Scout trips through the western U.S. because, as he put it, “[He] paid to be on this trip and [he] was gonna see it.” Consequently, I have taken a liking to staying awake on long taxi rides and taking in the scenery. The drive here was exceptional. The minute we walked into India, the landscape was transformed. Bhutan is clean, respectful, quiet. The government obviously has a lot of money and concern for keeping Phuntsholing nice. India, on the other hand, does not have the resources to cover its sprawl, and Jaigon (the name of the Indian border town) reflects this. While in Bhutan there are cattle wandering the streets and people on pilgrimage occasionally ask for handouts to give to monasteries, in India the cattle eat the garbage littering every wayside and the beggars are quadrupled (we did give small children some noodle soup packets though, it is not to say that people do not experience hardships). The masses of people crowd the streets, and the rickshaws (called coolies) and construction trucks tread not-so-delicately through them. Once we caught a taxi for Bagdogra, we too threaded our way amongst the fray. Leaving Jaigon, the landscape is covered by tea farms. Tea apparently grows on squat hedges, tended ceaselessly by old women and hacked to harvest by young men with machetes. We passed by tea plantation after tea plantation, occasionally driving through small hamlets populated by women in sarees selling roadside baturas, children with their arms wrapped around each other, and full-teated bitches dragging their asses along the ground. The word for India is burgeoning: in every square foot there is either someone or something growing, from the people hustling street food, faux designer goods and a startling array of services to squads of monkeys and dark-grey-blue-throated crows eating every bit of food and fruit that falls by the wayside. Even the alluvial plains left dry by the end of the monsoon season are covered in rocks that construction trucks load up in order to expand the roads. The people pursue every possible road of commerce, and no minute is wasted. I imagine India to be what the U.S. looked like before we became nationalistic and fat: a nation devoted to improving itself through every possible means. We passed truck upon truck of young men in sweater-vests clinging to the luggage racks on top of buses, old men dragging on bicycle carts of grain, 15-year-old girls hauling along their infants to work, private school-signs advertising themselves as (literally) Harvard. Nowhere in Bhutan did I see people as devoted to making it as I did in my first drive through here.

Also, did I mention there are troops of monkeys everywhere in the jungle? India is awesome.

And there are lobster in Chennai.

Heading South for the Winter

Being quite cold, Jon, Jon and I have decided to roam around the warm parts of Southeast Asia. First we are going to enjoy Indian beaches and Indian food, then we are going to enjoy Malaysian beaches and Malaysian food, then Thai beaches and Thai food, and lastly Cambodian beaches and Cambodian food. Apparently there are large lobsters that cost fifty cents everywhere. My stomach is going to rupture.

Currently we are in Phuntsholing, a Bhutanese border town. There are hordes of people. I have not seen this many people since we were last in India.

Tomorrow: we try to find wherever the hell the border visa officer is (the border has no fences, walls, nada. You just walk across) so we can get our entry stamps, then on to Bagdogra airport, and lastly a four-hour flight into Chennai, the southernmost province of India. Where there are beaches. And lobsters.

Driving in Bhutan

The road to Phuntsholing

The Sky Catches Fire, the Rivers Run Red, and It Snows

A day before New Year’s, and our last days in Bhutan: the perfect time for auspicious and inauspicious signs. We walk out of the grocery store at just the time the sun set. Normally in Bhutan all that happens when the sun sets is that it gets dark, because there is no pollution in the air. Jon Strassfeld, in Paro, happened to catch a picture of the sun set this particular day:

In Thimphu this phenomenon appears as a dark-orange streak that covers more than half the sky. As we watch it, the sun manages to break through the haze and briefly stares at us, a blood-red ball. I run into my student, Yeshey Samdrup.

“So, is this auspicious or inauspicious, do you think?” I say.
“There was a forest fire today, sir,” Yeshey says.
“Ah, inauspicious,” I say.

Haa continues to burn the next day, but the sunset is only a mild purple color. However, the smoke has seeded clouds that roll in during the night. Now, in addition to there almost never being colorful sunsets in Bhutan, there is almost never snow, because precipitation falls mainly during monsoon season. In addition to this, while it gets damn cold during the night, during the day the fact that we are at 27 degrees latitude kicks in and the sun heats things up to around 70 or 80 degrees, even in the dead of winter. However, this New Year’s day, because the clouds were thick enough to block out the sun, we awake to snow falling gently over cypresses.
Pictures to come as soon as I ask Feyer’s dad to send some, as he was the only one taking pictures that day that I know of. At any rate, New Year’s day also happens to be the day that we hike to Taktsang.

Quickly I break off from Jon and his parents. Completely alone in the woods, the only sound I can hear is the sound of Bhutanese hollering down from Takshang. All around me snowy wisps of old man’s beard moss trail from the trees, stirring gently in the breeze. As I climb over ridges, the only thing I can see is a grayscale sky. The clouds are all around, the soles of my worn-out shoes let in the snow, and I sweat as I climb as quickly as I can.

By the time I reach the monastery, the sun has burned through the edges of the haze, and a light-blue sky advances slowly over the ridge. I turn and look below. A valley-sized cloud blows in, writhing and boiling. It melts like licked cotton candy, and then it twists and writhes, elongating into the form of a dragon, its gaseous horns crowning a featureless face. It slams pressurelessly into a ridge, and rolls over as mist. A minute later, I hear the thundering of a jet flying into Paro.

Blessed Rainy Day

Pictured above: the torrential rains and lightning-filled storms of Blessed Rainy Day

The 23rd of September is the last day of monsoon season in Bhutan, and is known as Blessed Rainy Day. The night before, you're supposed to leave a bucket out and then take a bath in the morning with the night's rainwater. This ritual cleaning supposedly will wash your sins away. Due to Blessed Rainy Day being more like Blessed Picnic Day, the only rainwater bath I got on Thursday was when I scooped a thimble's worth of water out of the concave top of a mushroom and wetted my hair.

Jon and I went hiking to a nearby monastery. More pictures of the beautiful place I live in, aren't you jealous, blah blah blah.

Above picture by Jon, I think.

Most monasteries have solar panels since the power lines don't go to the tops of mountains.

Picture of the Thimphu valley. Picture by Jon.