Malaysia

Trading a thousand of one thing for sixty of another hits you right in the gut. I had been proud that we had each managed to save over a thousand US dollars in a year despite making $13 a day, but I’m running through money at an expected but frenetic pace. Rickshaws drivers simply do not live in the magical fairy land of Bhutanese taxi economics.

So while I’m still reeling from blow to my wallet and my belly (and fuck, I’m hungry, eaten only doughnuts and an airplane meal all day), Malaysia itself comes and dislocated my jaw. I’m just amazed. The first thing we notice is how modern everything looks, and by that I mean it looks exactly like how I remember the United States looking – though I have now concluded that my memory of things is completely corrupted: every step along this journey, from buying penny tamarind candies from pre-adolescent shopkeepers in shacks to the, so to say, bustling streets of Thimphu to the smog-encased, bus-rickshaw-car-motorcycle-bicycle-cow-cart sprawl of Chennai to the packed city streets of Kochi has been a series of reminders that most of the world is not like the world we’ve been living in, and in ways that we’d forgotten could exist.

So the first thing we notice is the modernity – glossy ads, chain shops, cleanliness (had thought that my repulsion at some of the things in India, especially the smog so thick we couldn’t get tanned spending hours at the beach at 10 degrees latitude, was due to the fact that, while Bhutan’s city’s streets are covered in grime and garbage, the country itself is pristine). The second thing that hits is the smell. And the smell is just weird – it smiles nice, real nice. Sweet, even. The third and fourth things, respectively, are the lack of hordes of people everywhere and the utter lack of anything by the sides of the roads. When I say the country looks like the U.S., I mean it – the’ve efffing mown the grass by the side of the highway. There is no one walking on the shoulder. The roads are not covered in a weaving quilt of makeshift vehicles. There are no hawkers with blankets of things yelling at you as you thunder away on a tin-can-concealed croaking two-speed engine.

And the fifth thing, by far the most shocking though it has taken me the most time to realize it, is the absence of animals. No animals. There are no cows sleeping on the highway. There are no stray dogs, no ownerless horses, no chilling monkeys . This has never happened since, hell, forever. I had forgotten that humanity has cut itself off, the only sentient beings alone in the universe. The man next to me in this bus has fallen asleep, his iPod earbuds pulsing.

Crackeraphobia

This is going to be a very un-Buddhist post, since typing it is doubtlessly going to result in the circuits of my computer frying a couple dozen of the ants who have quite understandably mistaken it for the untouched jar of jam sitting right next to it in my backpack. At any rate, I am not troubled by this anymore as we are not in Bhutan anymore. And how. For instance, there are white people here. Lots and lots of white people. More white people, in fact, than we have seen combined over the entire past year, sometimes sitting in a single restaurant.

Now, of course, all the usual questions one has when one sees a white person are going through our minds: Where are they going? Are they married? Do they take chilies? But all of these questions have taken on a deep and unprecedented weight and ominence (is that a word? A white person would know, but I dare not ask) in India. I am, in short, deeply unsettled by the presence of all the honkies here.

This is in part due to the fact that they are almost all The Wrong Kind of White Person. Having had the opportunity to study and analyze the entire chilip population of Bhutan, I have concluded that all white people lie upon a scale, and can be sorted into three basic gradients. At one end of the scale, you have The Wrong Kind of White People, who do little more than watch movies upon their Apple Macintosh computers and eat extremely expensive imported Nutella. While their behavior is irrational and confused, it is at least understandable in Bhutan because they have clearly only ended up there by mistake and will be leaving as soon as they realize that there is more to the culture and traditional than shopping for handicrafts. At the opposite end of the spectrum are The White People Who Are Trying Too Hard. A silly breed, they awkwardly wear ghos for the purpose of blending into the environment as obviously as possible and sometimes decide that their names are Tashi when in fact their names are Ron. In the middle of these two extremes are The Right Kind of White People, a genus I am pleased to say consists entirely of me, Jon, Jon, Eric, and lost Canadian teachers wandering far from their home villages in the East. The Right Kind of White People can be easily identified by the fact that they all are twins and have beards, something the Bhutanese are not capable of, except for Ugyen Wangchuk, the first and most awesome king of Bhutan.

So while The Wrong Kind of White People can be pleasantly ignored for the most part while living in Bhutan because they spend 90% of their waking hours either in their plush apartments or eating at the three gentrified restaurants listed in the Lonely Planet guide to Bhutan, here they cannot, because they are everywhere, doing weird white people things like being old and frumpy, paying five US dollars (or more!) for a meal, looking bored and confused, and not slathering everything with rice. I am not sure exactly what is so unsettling about this, other than that they are clearly not supposed to be here. There are more than enough Indian tourists to go around. I am absolutely certain that something sinister is just going to happen; I just cannot figure out what it is, because I can no longer fathom a mind that has not ever wondered, “Is it?” We have crawled deeply into the rabbit hole, and I need to book a ticket out of Bangkok very, very shortly.

So, at any rate, disaster. Adi missed his plane flight to Cochi, leaving us without the opportunity to see how Indian people react to a 6’ 4” Indian man, the chance to find out exactly how much we are being ripped off on things, and a very dear friend. Feyer and I tried to make the best out of a bad situation, however, by going to the beach. I doubt that this strategy has ever failed anyone once put into action, but we faced some very serious obstacles to its implementation today. Namely, the fact that the people on Vypin island have not had any drinking water for the past two days and have started striking and putting up barricades all over the roads.

I had been quite nicely surprised by the apparent success of the Keralan communist government till now. There are far fewer beggars around here than in the other parts of India, and there seems to be little if any strife generated by the heavy presence of three major religions of Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. And the omnipresent poster of a man raising his hand up in a vain attempt to stop a man swinging down a communist hammer upon a burning city turns out upon closer inspection to simply be a poster of a boy making a weird hand gesture in front of the communist hammer man superimposed over a background of a city tinted red with the cheerful spirit of communism. But yeah, water is kind of important. It didn’t seem like we could do anything to aid the protest that the barricades of burned-out fires, piles of sticks and women sitting chanting under tarps couldn’t do on their own, however, so we cobbled together a strategy of walking between barricades and taking rickshaws as far as we could, and ended up 25 kilometers later at the gorgeous and pleasant Cherai Beach, where the water is only four feet deep as far out into the ocean as you want, Indian couples bust out nude children and digital cameras, and fully-habited nuns frolic in the waves.

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