Richard's Travel Blog

I’ve had a couple of miserable travel days in the last week, but they have been worth it. A 12 hour combination train and two bus rides got me from Bhopal to Khajuharo. Khajuharo was the capital of an Indian Kingdom which lasted fromthe 10th to the 13th centuries. The temple building era lasted only just over a hundred years, before they retreated to their forts where they hung on for a long time. The complex they left behind was an exuberant expression of the joys of living a spiritual life to it’s fullest. Not only are the temples of architectural excellence, but the sculpted exteriors show beautifully, often erotically, the daily lives of a people comfortable with their place in the world.

 

Here is a close up of part of the exterior sculpture.

Let’s face it, most people go for the eroticism. Most of it is pretty tame. Some involves groups. One involves a horse. This first series is cute. First the couple is warming up, then they’re getting into it, then they get interrupted by a monkey which they are shooing away.

Finally, they can get back to business. There is a problem with one of the guy’s heads. His other brain is soldiering on.

Here are groups. I like the one where the woman is looking on through her upraised palms.

And finally, here is everybody’s favorite, including the woman’s whose head is in the shade. If you could see her, she’s peeking through her palms. Saddle up.

I think the people back then enjoyed their art as much as you have. Why not. Life can be fun.

From Khajuharo I went to Varanasi on another 14 hour government bus ride. I’ve got the photos uploaded, and will blog about this place soon, maybe from Lucknow, where I’m going tomorrow.

Until then….

After killing hundreds of thousands in conquering Kalinga in the 3rd century BC, Emporor Ashoka foresook violence, embraced Buddhism, and built many temples. The grandest complex was at Sanchi. There are a couple of intact stupas, which are just monuments usually containing relics of important Buddhists of the Buddha’s day. There are ruins of some more stupas. The gates fell and were restored about 150 years ago. Here is the biggest, best stupa.

If you look at the columns on the southern gate here, you will see the four-headed lion symbol of Ashoka’s kingdom. The one on the right is printed on every denomination of Indian banknote.

Mostly, the colums are carved with scenes from the Buddha’s life we know for sure he had, and of scenes from the other lives he is said to have had. Though the columns were re-erected, the details of the sculpture remained remarkable intact, considering they are over 2000 years old and the whole place was practically abandoned for many centuries while Buddhism went into decline and practically disappeared from India.

There are many insciptions there, relating to the debate between the pacifists and the practical, warning of scism. Apparently they had to decided whether to fight to protect themselves or not. It’s unknown how the details of that debate went. We do know they fought, but as in the case of all empires, it was eventually defeated. Some debates echo throughout history, eh?

Here is a scene from the walkway around the western gate of that stupa, about halfway up, out over the countryside. It is a very pretty place indeed.

I took the 32 hour train, two nights and one day, to Bhopal because I wanted to go to Sanchi, where there is temple complex built by the first great king of much of India, Ashoka, in the 3rd-2nd centuries B.C. Bhopal is actually a pretty nice city. There isn’t much for the tourist to see, so it isn’t jaded by tourism. I had a cold and it was rainy and cold (Can you believe THAT?), so I hung out and did very little. I hotel next to mine had the best Indian food for a good price I’ve had yet, so I really didn’t mind just eating and watching TV. At any given time, there are at least three English language movies on TV, and there’s CNN and usually BBC, not to mention English language Indian TV and news. “The Young and the Restless” is popular. so is “Cheers”, Seinfeld”, Malcolm in the Middle”, and Everybody Loves Raymond”. The favorite movie genres are horror and shoot ’em ups.

The one thing I wanted to do was see the site of the Union Carbide chemical disaster. Because so many tens of thousands were killed or disabled, and the birth defect rate went so high, the tragedy is still very much a part of their lives. Only after talking to someone for a while, can you drag it out of him that to some extent the accident was the fault of Indians too. The Indians are great at avoiding responsibility of anything, large or small. People don’t have jobs here; they have positions. The buck stops nowhere. Anyway, the prevailing opinion is that the CEO of Dow, which bought Union Carbide and washed their hands of the whole thing, should hang and the victims compensated more that the $80 some of them got. More money was indeed given to the government, which is still sitting on it. I assume it’s trickling away. This is India.

Here is the factory site, mostly a goat pasture now, the wall in front, and the memorial garden.

The only other interesting thing that happened in Bhopal was while I was being lost trying to find the Union Carbide factory, I blundered into a funeral. I was invited to join the prayers, procession and cremation. I had seen cremations from afar, but not up close. I was discouraged from taking pictures, so there are none. It’s very real, watching the departed person placed in the middle of a very large pile of  logs the set alight. After she had burned for about an hour, as is customary so evil spirits don’t enter her next reincarnation’s body, her eldest son smashed her skull with a big bamboo pole. Very real. One of her nephews then took me to the factory site. It was a very real day.

   I went through Tranjavur (Tanjure) and Tiruchirappalli (Trichy) on my way to Madurai. There are nice temples in those places, and it broke up what would have been another grueling all day government bus ride. Also, I caught a cold, so three nights of downtime in Trichy was good for me. I have pictures of the temples in those cities, but there is no reason to post them because the 17th century temple complex in Madurai is the crown jewel of Tamil temples. All of them in Tamil Nadu are distinctive, riotously intricate, and sometimes grand in scale. I will let the pictures of Madurai mostly speak for themselves.

   First, there is no vantage point from where you can photograph the whole complex, so here is a picture of a model which is in the museum in the Thousand Pillared Hall.

   All of those towers are connected by halls, rooms, and sanctums collectively known as the Thousand Pillared Hall. 1000 must be an approximately right number for how many there are.

   Non-Hindus are not allowed in the sanctums, but you can see but not photograph inside. There are, however, many altars like this. This is about 10 feet high.

   Here are some shots of some of the towers. The best view is from the rooftop of a 5 story textiles/jewelry/carpet/handicraft store. They have a good gig going. They meet you in the street and encourage you to get the best view of the complex from their roof. There’s an elevator, but you get to be tended by a salesman all they way back down through the store. I TOLD them I wasn’t buying, but they insisted “No buy, just look”. So I looked at wonderful Kashmiri carpets and drank lots of tea on the sofa for about an hour. The better pictures are from ground level.

 

And here are close-ups and closer-ups of, as put well in Lonely Planet, “the spectacular pastiche of Dravidian architecture”.

 So there you have it, the reason I’m still in South India. Now it’s time for the home stretch. With less than a month to go in India this time, before hopefully returning in May, I’m catching a train for Bhopal (yes, that Bhopal) tonight. It’ll take two nights and a day to get there. From there I’ll bunny hop over to Sanchi where the legendary founder of the first grat Indian empire, King Ashoka, built Buddhist monuments in the 3rd century BC. He embraced Buddhism after slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people establishing the Mauryan empire. I’m mixed about visiting the site of the Union Carbide chemical factory disaster which killed tens of thousands and permanently disabled hundreds of thousands in 1984. The victims got pittances from Union Carbide and nothing from Dow after it acquired Union Carbide. I went to the killing fields in Cambodia, Auschwitz in Poland, and Vietnam. I suppose I could stomach Bhopal. At least Ashoka saw the error of his ways.

   I’ll probably write from Sanchi. Be well, all of you.

Most people come to the Andamans to go to Havelock Island. That’s tourist central, such as it is. There are about, I’d say, 200 tourists there, mostly stretched out along a main, one lane blacktop road on the east side of the island. That’s where Lonely Planet said the diving was, and that’s where I went on the ferry from Port Blair as soon as I arrived there back on the 18th of January.

From reading LP, I thought diving would be more of a big deal than it was. Most of the people there are there just to hang out at the beaches and cottages, eat and drink, maybe snorkel a bit. There are three dive outfits there. Each can accomodate four divers. That means there are about 12 divers a day. While I was there, the writer for South India Rough Guide was staying where I was. He asked me to write a bit about diving from Port Blair, the capital and only place in the Andamans that would pass as a city. I wrote a bit about Havelock too. I’ll post that later, when I get confirmation that the info I got is correct. I’m having trouble getting the dive shop in Port Blair to come up with a useable email address. Suffice it to say here that the diving at Havelock is generally uninspiring. But then again, I’m of the school that all diving is good diving.

As I was there for the diving, that’s what I did almost every day. There was the first day, when there was no space on any of the boats. Then there was the last day, when I didn’t dive because it’s not recommended to fly within 24 hours after diving. Other than that, my day consisted of showing up at the dive center at about 7:30 AM, making two dives before 1 o’clock, then sometimes hanging out with my dive buddies, and sometimes returning to my hut and rinsing off the salt water. In the evening, I usually hung out with the folks at the place I was staying, had dinner and a couple of drinks. Not exciting, but laid back for sure. As I said, most people there were there to mellow out. So that’s the scene. Here’s the hut I stayed in.

There’s my towel I still have from Sharm al Sheikh. Boy, I still haven’t dived anywhere like that since then. Here is one of my dive buddies on the boat. As you can see, these are not luxury rides.

Here are a couple of shots of the scenery. Havelock, as well as the rest of the islands has mile after mile of just this, beaches alternating with forest, often mangrove. The beaches are romantically numbered. This one is beach No. 7, popular by Havelock standards, meaning about 10 people a day go there. It’s about 10 km from the main strand. There are frequent busses. Those are work elephants I ran across on the path to Beach No. 7. The mangrove trees are by our cottages/huts, maybe 100 meters up the way.

Actually, Beach No. 7 is a series of small beaches like this, so not all 10 people crowd onto this one.

It’s typically “island” in the Andamans. I’d write what went on, but there’s not much to write about. You catch up on your reading there, be romantic if you’re with someone, party if you’re with a group, or take up beachcombing. There is no internet, barely phones, no entertainment, no nothing. If that life is too exciting for you, you can go to North Andaman or one of the other remote destinations, and write that book. Here’s a kid.

There are other islands south of the Andamans, the Nicobar Islands, but regular tourists aren’t allowed to go there. The Indian government has minimal presence there, it was terribly devastated by the tsunami (which is mostly cleaned up in populated parts of the Andamans), and several of the islands are inhabited my tribal people who do not welcome outsiders. Some, in particular, greeted Indian relief helicopters after the tsunami with a hail of arrows.

After about 6 days on Havelock, I returned to Port Blair to dive from there. The diving is much better. Neither place is good for big animals, though I did see the biggest, most beautiful, charcoal with purple trim sting ray I have ever seen. It’s about the coral and the little fish that hang around coral. you know, “Nemo” clowns, tetras, angels, parrots, napoleons, butterflies, etc.. The usual only biggish ones are little tuna, barracuda, jackfish and bumpheads. There are sharks, but I didn’t see any. Lots of turtles. The visibility is ever so much better out of Port Blair and a village about a 45 minute bus ride away, Wandoor. Wandoor would be a good place for a non-diver to go. It fronts the Mahatma Gandhi Marine National Park. There are very pretty views of dots of islands surrounded by blue-green reef. the diving there is said to be not so good because outside the reef is mud instead of sand, which usually means the visibility is murky. Sometimes the visibility is no more than 5 meters anyway, though at the good loccations south of Port Blair/ Wandoor, it’s usually 15-20 meters, which is fine. The water sure is rough sometimes, though. Rough water isn’t a problem once you are in, but getting out to the sites and getting in and out of those fishing boats in 5 foot chop are not for those prone to seasickness or concerned about getting bashed against the hull getting back in.

There is nothing to do in Port Blair, and Wandoor is sleepier than Havelock. Time there got sucked up because sometimes you don’t get back till 6. All you want to do after two dives and 2-3 hours of rough going on the surface is rest and get something to eat.

So, that’s about all I have to say about those places. I flew to Chennai from Port Blair, and immediately took a bus to Pondicherry, south of Chennai. I’ve been here three days, and will write about it before moving on.

1.   Be well, all of you. Enjoy the Super Bowl. It’s on TV here, but at 2:30 in the morning. I’ll read about it.

I’m heading off to the Andaman Islands tomorrow, leaving here at 4 AM for a 7:15 AM flight from Chennai. I don’t know what the internet access out there will be like. I think it’s agood idea and a good time to post pictures from Mamallapuram.

Mamallapuram is on the coast, about 50 km south of Chennai. It’s a comfortable tourist destination for foreigners and Indians alike. You can swim on beaches near here, though the beach in town has severe rip tides. You can also look at one of the many cave temples and rock sculptures, many of which date back to the 7th century. They aren’t as dramatic as Ellora of even Elephanta, but they are in pleasant settings. The most important place is called The Five Rathas. They were carved out of granite boulders where they stand.

There are several more places of interest, but you’ve seen so many of those type things, I’ll spare subjecting to more pictures like that. Even I grow oversaturated with some of the antiquities here. At least some of these sculptures are just art, not religious.

Her are shots of the beach to the left and the right this morning at dawn morning at dawn. There were several people like this tourist, besides the fishermen, enjoying sun up. The second one shows the shore temple artistically positioned above a fishing boat.

As in Goa and Gokarna, it’s nice to sit and have a meal, only this time it’s to watch the dawn instead of the sunset, this time to have eggs, toast and tea or oatmeal instead of tandoori fish, fried potatoes and beer.

The main every day thing in Mamallapuram is the rock sculptures and shopping for carved objects, but during January is a month long classical dance program. There are two performances a night, for free. Some are very good, some are students. Here is one of the dancers, a forty-something year old who may not have been as athletic anymore as the others, but she was very graceful and alluring. Her daughter (and “disciple” she called her) both performed for one hour.

 

Here are the musicians. The backdrop is part of the rock carving in the area where much of that is. Behind the musicians is a temple carved out of the rock. Behind the dancer is the depiction of a battle.

While I was here, there was a festical called Ponga. It celebrates the harvesting of the rice. I went to a village where they had prayer and made four kinds of rice. Then we ate the rice from banana leaf bowls which is a common way to serve food here, with all due respect for the efforts of the many who make life possible. I liked the sweet one made with cinnamon, raisens and cashews. First, the women making the rice:

Second, here are a couple of cattle having their horns painted for the procession. This evening was for thanking the cows for the labor, milk and everything else they provide. As you know, cows are revered here in any case. They also drape them with jewelry. This village was poor, so they had almost all costume jewelry on. Internet speeds are particularly slow here, and it took forever to upload the pictures you are seeing. I wish it was possible to show more.

The festival is going on as I write. Outside on the main street are cars going up and down, blowing their horns, people are hanging out the windows and off trucks and tractors. There are firecrackers and other noisemakers, and the occasional band of musicians. It’s the strip in American Grafitti, Indian style.

I’ll write from the Andamans, if possible. If I can’t, I’ll be in touch after the 30th, when I get back.

Be well.

The plan originally was to go south through Kerala and sweep up Tamil Nadu, then go from Chennai by air to the Andaman Islands to dive. It turns out that almost all the flights to the Andamans and back were booked from now till late February. Going in late February doesn’t work for me because I’m returning to the US on March 4. The only date available to go was Jan 18, and the only return date was Jan 30. That was a little sudden and a for little longer than I had planned to stay there, but I took the tickets and away I go.

I took the overnight train to Chennai. I t was nice, quiet in my car after 10, and I slept the whole way straight through till 6. That is a rarity. During the ride, I looked at Lonely Planet about Chennai. It had little good to say about it, so upon emerging fromthe train station, I headed 50 km south by bus to Mamallapuram. This is one of the few touristy places in Tamil Nadu, though there are a few spots to see here, especially if you are very into Hinduism. There are lots of westerners here. There are nightly classical dance performances. thee are some nice rock temples and statuary. I’m a little jaded after places like Ajanta and Ellora, but it’s very pleasant. If I wasn’t already rested up, this would be as good a place as any to hang out. There is also a rice harvest festival, Ponga, going on. For that reason, there are many Indian tourists/festival goers here. I’m going to go be part of that this afternoon.

I’m leaving the 18th from Chennai, but should be able to post a few pictures before going.

Happy Martin Luther King Day.

Since before independence from the British, Indians have been proud to build “indigenous” products, and prove they can take their place among the world’s leading industrial powers. To be sure, you can get reasonable facsimiles of products one sees in the West, often mostly designed from the basic blueprint. Sometimes the Indians put their nameplate on a foreign product, such as the Suzuki Maruti. The little Maruti is a functional puddlejumper, alright. It is most Indian’s dream to own one.

There has been a movement for decades by the military/space establishment to design and build “indigenous” vehicles and weapons. For example, they are trying to make a new main battle tank to replace it’s aging, obsolete Russian tanks. It’s been many years and the thing is still “in testing”, thereby becoming more obsolete as the years go by. The latest is, they bought off the shelf a German nitrogen gas suspension for it. Cool! The only trouble is that the crack engineers at the defence reseach department failed to protect it with armor, so the tank can be disabled by small arms fire. And it’s way overbudget. Americans are used to costly projects that won’t work, but this is even worse than we must endure.

They have also been building an indigenous fighter aircraft to replace their aging MIG 21’s. I think they should call it the Osprey-29.

Now, India wants to have an indigenous mission to the moon. This, I need to see. I can just see teams of flip-flop clad, $2 a day, boys and men climbing around on the new spaceship. One’s job is to put the ladder up against it. Another brings the rivets of state of the art indigenous design. Another cleans them each according to his specific instructions which CANNOT be altered in any way with out authorization through the appropriate chain of command. Finally, the rivet will be placed, and another boy can go get the tea.

Some others will cut the fins out. Some others will paint. The engines and technology will be borrowed and modified by the research department which has almost finished testing the newest, best vacuum tubes in the world. Either that or they will buy products off the shelf from that German suspension company or someplace.

Everybody wins in the military/space industry, so that’s how that goes.

You get the point.

Need I say, in a country without education, clean water, electricity, three sets of clothes, housing with a door, or health care for hundreds of millions of people, this is painful to observe. We think we have other fish to fry? India’s going to the moon. The Indian Defense Research Institute is going to do it…. Right after tea.

The most common car in India is an Indian made Suzuki Swift called the Maruti. It cost about $5000 US, and you get what you pay for. One model, the Zen, comes with a few features, like choice of color, a radio, and optional air conditioning with the larger engine (I hope). The Sally Rand model comes with pedals, I think. Yabba dabba do.

In probably the most ill-conceived marketing campaign since General Moters tried to market the Chevy Nova (No va means “It does not go” in Spanish),  the TV blitz’s catchy music is a person whistling Pete Seeger’s “Little Boxes On The Hillside”. For those of you who are too young or are non-American, as you approach San Francisco from the south, on the hill in South San Francisco, were built in the 60’s lower income apartments. These were plain, low quality, pastel colored shoeboxes. Probably, they are expensive now. Malvina Reynold’s wrote these lyrics. Now whistle along….

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same,

There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

As we travelers caught in the cultural divide often say, “Well, this is India.” If I ever write that book, I may call it, “Well, This Is India”.

My apologies to those of you unfamiliar with sometimes arcane American iconography. You can take the boy out of America, but you can’t take America out of the boy.