operation chomolungma part ek: jiri to buddha’s birthday party

ok, i realize that’s a ridiculous, confusing title, but it will soon make sense. sort of. maybe.

the picture below will not clarify things at all though.

one of several wall paintings in a guesthouse restaurant in deurali

if you’ve been following this blog, you probably pieced together that i enjoyed my little side trip to nepal. so i decided to go back.

(ok, so what’s this whole operation chomolungma bit then?)

well! chomolungma is the sherpa name for mt. everest. sounds much more fittingly badass, doesn’t it? well…maybe not as much as the nepali name for it, sagarmatha. but since this whole story takes place in the khumbu, where sherpas live, i’m going with their version. so in any case, this is a story about that.

this girl looked exactly like grace as a 4 year old

before anyone asks (because the wombmate already has) no, i didn’t climb it. that’s hard. it also requires ~$70,000 and a better pair of boots than the ones i brought. there’s also that whole 1 in 10ish chance of death bit that i wasn’t too keen on.

as it turns out, it’s pretty hard to get to a place where you can even see everest, at least in nepal. its surrounded by a number of subsidiary peaks that pretty well hide it from all but a couple viewpoints. so that was good enough for me.

most people doing this trek fly into the airport lukla, which is a little sloping grass runway wedged between a cliff and a mountainside, which held limited appeal to me (as did the price) so i decided to walk in from jiri, a 7-12 hour bus ride from kathmandu.

the trail from jiri

it’s a six day walk from jiri to lukla, but they’re six pretty intense days, averaging something like 1000 vertical meters up AND down each day. it took me essentially the whole first week to get used to pacing myself–day one i walked 9 hours, then day two i was tired so i just went 4 hours, all of which were downhill. that left me with a killer day 3, which started off with a nice 1900 meters uphill to lamjura pass, then finished up about 1000 meters back down to junbesi.

on the way to lamjura

up top the clouds got angry looking and the trees looked like something from the forest of the ents, so i decided not to stay the night at the top of the pass, even though there was a guesthouse. it wasn’t too cold though…i think i did the entire thing in a tshirt. by the time i got to junbesi it was after 6, and i had set of a little before 7am. so that was a pretty solid 11ish hour day.

near the top of lamjura

junbesi was one of the cutest sherpa villages on the route, but we’ll save that for the return trip because i was too tired to take any photos on the way in.

mani walls like this are covered with stones engraved with buddhist prayers. as i got closer to the center of the khumbu, they started appearing more often

the next day, as expected, was a short one, thanks to a conspiracy between afternoon rain and my aching feet. i stayed in ringmo, which was a little town filled with wheat fields and apple orchards.

ringmo

a stupa, which is another common type of buddhist monument. this one had to have been hundreds of years old

past ringmo i met a few other trekkers who i ended up hiking with for the next week or so. the trek from jiri isn’t really a popular one even in high season thanks to all the hills, so i was surprised to see anyone at all. on my way out i snuck a peek at the logbook at a police checkpoint it looks like this trail sees about 1 trekker per day in may. four started the same day as me though; that was lucky…

prayer flags over khari la

from ringmo i did another two shortish days to jubing, then to bupsa, where i ran into my companions again after losing them for a couple days. after a long consultation with the map, we decided that we should be able to make it to phakding the next day, which was supposed to have really nice lodges with tasty food since it’s where everyone flying into lukla spends their first night.

as is usually the case, it was a harder day than the map suggested. the morning started with an 800 meter climb; that was supposed to be the only hard bit. it turned out that after that climb the trail slowly dropped back down almost that far, leaving a long, gradual climb up to phakding in the afternoon. i got a late start (typical) and was so tired when i finally got to phakding (around 6, again) that i didn’t even bother looking around town for my friends. which was fine, because all i really wanted to do was eat dinner and go to bed.

wheat fields on the way up to namche

the next day was a nice little climb up to namche bazaar, the biggest town along the trek. despite my tired legs from the long day yesterday, i still felt like a marathon runner compared to all the trekkers who just got off the plane yesterday. (two days later there was an actual marathon here. they were much faster than me. but that’s all in the next post.)

the eastern half of namche

namche was like a little slice of heaven–there were bakeries with pizzas, sandwiches, and cinnamon rolls (among other things.) we had yak steaks and apple pie for dinner both nights, which were actually pretty freakin’ good. and then there was buddha’s birthday party.

can i get carried through town with trumpets on my next birthday? pretty please?

the party consisted of two main aspects:

1. the parade

2. the part with free food

the parade was pretty much like it sounds, they carried the buddha through the streets, playing giant dr. seuss style horns (one guy to carry the thing and another guy behind to blow into it) cymbals, drums, and various other instruments i didn’t catch. all through the city people burned juniper branches outside their houses to the point where it looked like a cloud was forming over the town.

a guy in the procession

eventually the whole thing disappeared into the monastery, so we followed them in.

which brings us to the second aspect of the party: the part with the free food.

the dude with the candy bars was popular with the chillins. and the ians.

inside the monastery there was an outer courtyard filled with chairs and bleachers, and an inner building where the lama led prayers. most of the men went into the inner building of the monastery to pray, while most of the women and children stayed outside and shared in the free food and drinks. people would bring bags of rice and other things in to get blessed, and then give part of it away to the people sitting around outside. there were also people circulating around with tea, hot lemon (hot water + lemon tang, surprisingly popular with sherpas) and chyang, a millet beer quite a lot like pito. there was also fried bread, popcorn, candybars, various nuts, and tsampa, which is some sort of grain mixed with salty yak butter tea and sugar. i ended up eating most of my friend’s pieces of that…i guess its an aquired taste.

a gigantic prayer wheel in the khumjung monastery

the party continued the next day in khumjung, a town just above namche which is actually a little bit bigger but not nearly as scenic.

ama dablam above khumjung. up until here it was pretty much overcast everyday

of course, not quite as scenic is a relative statement, as the picture above will attest to. above khumjung, you are limited to about 2 hours of hiking per day to keep you from getting altitude sickness (namche and khumjung are already something like 12,000+ feet.) but we’ll save that for the next post. i’ll leave you with this puzzling photo from the khumjung secondary school:

landscape with a knife on oil

rajasthan: deserts, forts, and awesome moustaches

in the northwest of india is the state of rajasthan, which has a disproportionate number of awesome sights to see. most of the major cities were independent kingdoms up until indian independence, and most still have royal families–the one in udaipur, my first stop, can be traced back something like 75 generations!

udaipur is supposed to be “india’s most romantic city;” it’s bordered by a couple large lakes to the west with several buildings built in the lake itself, and the whole scene is surrounded by mountains. sounds pretty cool right? yeah, except because i got there right before the monsoon starts, the lake was mostly dried up. dang.

the lake, aka cricket field, in udaipur

it was still a pretty cool place to spend a few days. the big sight here is the royal palace, which is actually several buildings–in fact in the photo above pretty much everything on the right half of the picture is part of the palace complex. inside it was a maze, supposedly to confuse attackers, and was filled with crazy paintings (like the one below.) the subject of at least half of them (or so it seemed) was hunting: prince so and so killing tigers, king so and so killing bears, etc. so that was entertaining.

crazy mirror room in the royal palace

so the story here is that the guy on the left was a mewar king, and during some battle he supposedly cut a guy and his horse COMPLETELY IN HALF with one stroke. badass. oh man.

rajasthan is also known for its crafts–in particular puppets. here’s a picture from a puppet show we went to:

puppet air guitar championships (ok not really)

i did manage to find one scenic spot (where there was still water in the lake) and met this guy along the way:

huh?

ok so you see the potential here...

weirdly enough, this sunset scene was accompanied by THOUSANDS OF GIGANTIC BATS:

almost all of these are bats

seriously, they had at least a 3 foot wingspan. so that kind of cut down on the whole romantic atmosphere a bit (not that there were any girls around…just ryoma, the japanese guy i was travelling with.)

so thats about it for udaipur.

from there we got a sleeper bus to jaisalmer, which was a bit of a hassle: when we booked our tickets they told us it was a direct bus, but at about 4am they woke us up and kicked us out, saying we needed to switch buses. and on the next bus, they said we had seats, not beds–the bus company apparently way, way overbooked the bus and had something like 4 or 5 people in each sleeper. it was late, we were grumpy, and there wasn’t anyone else there yet, so we decided to commandeer a couple beds for ourselves–we paid for them, after all–and surprisingly it actually worked! (although i had to yell at the conductor for 10 minutes once the bus left.) stupid bus companies…

jaisalmer, though, was amazing. look at this:

jaisalmer

the fort here (something like 1000 years old) is still inhabited–it’s like a little city inside the city. as you can see, pretty much everything is made of sandstone, and the city is surrounded by full-on sand dunes and camels desert.

surprisingly, for such a major tourist destination (which it is) the city hasn’t been completely taken over by guesthouses, rooftop restaurants, and merchants selling ali baba pants. wandering out into the city, people seemed genuinely surprised to see us and several people bought me chai and just wanted to talk for awhile.

makin' tea

aside from the gigantic fort, the other crazy thing(s) in jaisalmer are the havelis: several incredibly elaborately carved buildings built by rich merchants in the 18th and 19th centuries. where’d all that money come from? opium.

a haveli

one night for dinner we went to this incredible rooftop restaurant in the fort. check out that view!

after jaisalmer ryoma headed off to some small town to go ride a camel out into the desert, which in retrospect i wish i’d done. oh well…next time.

full moon over the fort

after almost missing my train thanks to a group of friendly indian guys that kept giving me beer, i ended up in jodhpur, the blue city.

oooo blue.

the actual city here wasn’t quite as nice and laid back as jaisalmer, but made up for it with the most delicious thing i’ve eaten this entire trip: makhania lassi. it’s essentially a lassi (yogurt shake) with saffron, cardamom, and cream, but it doesn’t really taste like any of those things. i think i had at least 10 of them in the couple days i was here.

the fort

like everywhere else in rajasthan, jodhpur is overlooked by a huge freakin’ fort. jodhpur’s, in particular, was especially imposing: it was at least twice as high above the city as the one in jaisalmer, and the ramparts above are lined with cannons. the whole thing gave off a very strong “don’t mess with this” vibe.

a courtyard in the royal palace

inside there wasn’t much aside from the royal palaces, which are now unoccupied (the current raj lives in a GIGANTIC palace that looks like the taj mahal about 10 km away.)

no climbing over these walls

(this is not the palace, i think it was a tomb for various kings...)

i didn’t book a train ticket early enough to get to jaipur, so i decided to hop on a bus (a government bus, after that last experience im done with private bus companies) to pushkar, which is a little town by a little lake surrounded by hundreds of temples.

a sikh temple in pushkar

as i’m sure you can guess, the lake here was nice and empty too. dang. to be honest, there wasn’t that much to see or do here–foreigners aren’t allowed into many of the temples, and aside from that pretty much the only other things in town are guesthouses and people selling clothes. my hotel room came with a hammock, though, so i ended up staying a couple nights.

pushkar from above

the photo above is from a temple on the top of a big, perfectly conical hill on the edge of town. the temple is dedicated to savitri, one of brahma’s wives, and supposedly explains why he’s not such a popular god anymore. at some point brahma decided he wanted to marry savitri, so they picked a special “auspicious” day and time to do the ceremony. savitri took too long with the makeup, though, and was late, so brahma grabbed the first unmarried woman he could find (who happened to be of a low caste) and married her instead. savitri got all angry and cursed him, saying nobody would worship him except in pushkar (which is pretty much true–of the big 3 of the hindu deities, brahma, vishnu, and shiva, you’ll see temples to the last two in literally every town in india, while i’ve only seen a temple to brahma here.) she then went up to the top of the highest hill to pout, so they built her a temple up there.

more monkeys

from pushkar i headed on to jaipur, which was undoubtedly my least favorite place in india.

the pink city from above

jaipur is the major shopping town in india, where most of the indian stuff you get in the us comes from. it’s also part of the “golden triangle:” delhi, agra, and jaipur, which are the places you go if you have about a week in the country. in the three days i was there, i managed to meet one person who wasn’t trying to sell me something (or scam me.) one person. everywhere else in rajasthan i met 4 or 5 per day!

pottery merchant in the pink city

the city itself was nice enough but to be honest, there wasn’t as much to see as there was in jaisalmer or jodhpur, and the hassle of actually wandering around the city made me want to just go back to my hotel room. not really recommended.

the jantar mantar

the one really cool thing in jaipur (in my opinion) was the jantar mantar, a garden filled with gigantic astronomical instruments. actually, i should say astrological, because the point of the whole thing was to calculate horoscopes with extreme precision, rather than science, but it was still incredibly cool.

this sundial is accurate to two seconds!

these are each little sundials--one for each astrological sign, used for calculating auspicious marriage dates

so that’s about it for rajasthan.

just riding some elephants down the street...

ok i lied: i can’t really finish a post about rajasthan without mentioning moustaches.

yes!

in rajasthan, the crazier the moustache the better–this guy wasn’t even close to the best i saw, but he let me take a photo of him.

and that brings us to delhi, where i am now. wow! i think this is the first time this blog has been up to date since i left home. that feels good.

up next (hopefully) my last stop in india, the taj mahal!

on the road again

after i left tiruchuli, i figured i had enough money to last me another three weeks or so in india if i wanted to go to nepal and (hopefully) thailand afterward. so that necessitated a whirlwind tour of all the major sights i wanted to see but hadn’t yet, which i’m now almost at the end of, and which i now realize was kind of pointless thanks to my tax refund check. (so thanks for doing my taxes dad! and thanks mr. irs man!)

so now i have time to stop and update the ol’ blog!

lets get on with that then.

a bit of kochi

from tiruchuli i caught a train to kochi, a city on the southwest coast in the state of kerala, which was the first european colony in india (portuguese) but was also owned by the dutch for awhile, and then the british. it was pretty much the city i was expecting pondicherry to be–laid back and vaguely european. the city is built on a series of islands, which you can hop between on ferries for 2.5 rupees per ride, which was nice because i ended up having to go back to the train station 3 times to get my ticket to mumbai sorted out.

a little more kochi

a church in kochi

not surprisingly (considering the town’s european background) kochi had a lot of churches. what IS interesting is that the christian community here dates back to the 1st century ad (supposedly–although historical evidence is not completely convincing one way or the other.) apparently st. thomas (one of the apostles) founded “seven-and-a-half churches” in kerala, leading to the obvious question: what the heck constitutes half a church?

chinese fishin' nets

one of kochi’s more scenic features are the 11 (i think, don’t quote me) chinese fishing nets, which, according to the guys fishing with them, were actually invented and introduced to kochi by the portuguese. (apparently the nets themselves are made in china.)

here i am hauling in the catch:

(ok so this is admittedly a bit touristy, but at least i got to go out and see how the things worked!)

the goats are there to enforce the "stick no bills" rule

the last thing i’m going to mention regarding kerala is kathakali:

a kathakali actor

kathakali is a keralan theater form which is generally performed in hindu temples for special events. the plays are storys from the vedas, and typically run all night. unfortunately, the real thing is a bit hard to find, so i went to the tour-bus version (literally–when the show was over everyone else filed out onto a tour bus) which was only an hour, but long enough to get the feel for the thing. the plays are silent, with the exception musicians; the actors convey the story through extremely complex hand, eye, and face gestures. most plays end with a demon being slayed, like this:

take that!

(for reference: the story in this play was that the “woman” on the right was the guy in green’s fiance, and wanted to get down to business before the wedding day. the guy in green realized that this meant she must be a demon, so he kills her.)

a quick 40-something hour train ride later, and i was in mumbai for the second time!

this is roughly mumbai's equivalent of central park, except if you're not playing cricket, you can't use the lawn...

along marine drive, which is the first place where i really got a sense of how big the city really is (biggest in the world by some measures!)

that doesn't look too comfortable. why would you sleep like that?

here i am with the guys i mentioned a couple of posts ago, at leopolds: mumbai's number one hangout for people not from mumbai

i didn’t spend much time in mumbai (and already mentioned most of what i did there.) from there i went on to aurangabad, which had a number of interesting sites nearby, including…

the ellora caves:

ellora cave

ellora is a series of 30ish (i don’t remember the exact number) caves excavated from a cliff face–most of which are buddhist temples or monasteries (although some are hindu temples and some are jain temples.) the whole site was a lot like mamallapuram but on a much larger scale, as evidenced by things like this:

outside...

...inside. the roof is supposed to imitate the look of a wooden building.

and (much, much larger) things like this:

the kailash temple, aka "cave 16"

this thing was crazy. even for a normal hindu temple it was pretty big, but the whole thing was, again, carved from a giant rock. except rather than starting from a boulder, they started from *a giant cliff face* and excavated down over 100 feet, leaving a giant temple in the middle. you can see the sheer rock walls in the background. and look at the size of the people compared to it! and this was all done something around 1200 years ago!

at one point the whole thing was elaborately painted, although not much of it remains

even more impressive than ellora was ajanta, ANOTHER set of 20 something caves a bit further out, but with elaborate paintings throughout.

cave paintings in ajanta

giant buddha on his deathbed

ajanta is something like 200 years older than ellora, and although there’s nothing as massive as the kailash temple there, it makes up for it with even bigger caves than anything at ellora, surprisingly well preserved paintings, and the fact that the whole thing is located in an incredible river gorge:

ajanta from above: see the caves lining the outside edge of the canyon?

a close(er) up

a slightly racy cave painting: supposedly this couple are enjoying a last glass of wine before giving all their belongings to the poor

the last cool thing near aurangabad (although nearby is a bit of an understatement: it was a 4 hour bus ride each way) was lonar lake, which is at the bottom of a meteor crater.

lonar lake / meteor crater

it was kind of a pain to get there but worth it–i saw all sorts of monkeys and birds (including quite a few kingfishers.)

monkey!

some sort of bird.

i did lonar as a day trip, which meant i spent 8 hours on a bus for about 3 hours at the lake. which was a bit silly, considering i had an 8 hour train that night back to mumbai, then another 8 hour train the next morning to ahmedabad, then another 8 hour train ride to udaipur that night. so that kind of sucked.

up next: rajasthan, land of dried up lakes and freakin gigantic forts.

odds ‘n ends

for your viewing pleasure: random photos from the last 3 months.

we’ll start it off with one of the most frightening things i’ve ever seen

what the hell is it? and why doesn't it have any feet?!

lions and tigers and bears oh my!

this comes courtesy of the chennai government museum, the aforementioned weirdest museum ever. the embalmed animals thing was pretty weird, but then it got weirder (note the buffalo hairball from the last post)

what is that dude in the corner taking a picture of? and why is there a person in the same picture as a dinosaur?!

here's our recreation of that last photo...

so then we went over to the bronzes gallery, and there was some pretty cool ancient art in there, and we were beginning to think, “hey, maybe we’re judging this place a little too harshly. so they have lots of creepy stuffed animals and there’s a flying fish in every exhibit, but its not that weird, right?” and then we went into the modern art gallery, and this is the first thing we see:

Air India Boeing 747 (model) AKA wind-up children's toy in a glass case. hmmm

and then:

parts of a pump

maybe if it wasn't so specific...

so it turns out there wasn’t any modern art in the modern art gallery. just…pumps. and examples of things made of plastic. and models of chemical plants. upstairs there was some art, but it was all portraits of old british men–definitely not modern by any stretch of the imagination. so that led to the conclusion that the building name was a typo, it was supposed to be “modern, art gallery” because they had modern things, and art things, but not modern art things.

but then i thought: “india is a practical place. and there’s no real reason art can’t be practical (in my opinion) so maybe all this weird stuff is modern art in a sense, and its just our idea that modern art has to be a dead squirrel tied to a string on a motor that spins it around the room that is a bit close-minded.”

in any case, it was weirdly thought-provoking, which is more than i can say for a lot of modern art galleries…

moving on:

back in tiruchuli, sunset from my roof

these statues in the entrance of a big building in tiruchuli would move their arms up and down to welcome you into this building. they had that lifelike-but-something's-not-quite-right quality that made them seem like something out of a horror movie.

kids! everywhere!

one weekend i went out to mamallapuram, a small town on the southeast coast of india where almost everything revolves around stone carving.

the shore temple

see this temple? it was carved out of a single giant boulder about 2000 years ago! that’s crazy!

and see these 5 (!) temples? they (as well as the sculpture around them) were all carved from the same giant boulder!

the five rathas

funny note on this one: see the big thing in the shadow of the rightmost temple? it’s an elephant, facing away from the camera. and in sanskrit, the word for apse translates literally to “elephant’s butt.” so this picture has two elephant butts, but only one elephant. (ok maybe not that funny, but its about as close as you can get to a 2000 year old fart joke.)

from there i headed down to pondicherry, which i’d heard was a nice seaside town with lots of french character (it used to be a french colony) but turned out to me a relatively nice and clean, but typically indian town. it was also the sweatiest place i’ve ever been–when my shirt finally dried overnight parts of it had so much salt they were stiff enough to hold their shape.

the beach in pondicherry, the only place that didn't feel like a sauna

there wasn't much traffic, at least. that was nice!

the sri aurobindo ashram owns practically everything in pondicherry, as well as auroville, a utopian experimental village that is supposed to be mostly self-sufficient. the whole aurobindo empire had a vaguely cult-like feeling about it, although ODAM was doing some work with them working on replacing cement buildings with mud-brick houses (which should be cheaper and less energy intensive to produce) so at least they’re working on practical stuff.

pondicherry was also one of the few indian cities i’ve seen which has an abundance of public trash cans.

a giant rabbit, humping a trash can

there wasn’t really too much to see there, which was fine because i only had two days to explore anyways.

the last side-trip i took while i was in tiruchuli was to kodaikanal, a hill station about 4 hours from madurai. ODAM was facilitating a training session for other NGOs in the region, so christina and i tagged along, which was silly, because the whole session ended up being in tamil. we ended up hanging out in the hotel most of the time, and ate something like two pounds of chocolate (which kodai is famous for.) deeeelish.

a monkey at suicide point

the place we were staying was actually about an hour from kodaikanal so one day we went up to the actual city to go sightseeing. there were lots of monkeys.

the scenery

(ok so this is actually from the car ride up to kodai, but you get the idea…)

i can’t really wrap up the whole ODAM saga without mentioning jaya, our cook. oh man. i think i put on 15 pounds in the two months i was here–the food was beyond delicious and there was generally enough food to feed 7 or 8 people even though there were only 2 or 3 of us for most of the time. (when i get home i’m making a big batch of coconut chutney and putting it on everything. chutney burger…mmmmmmm.) she also made us tea and some sort of other tasty drink, like lassi or papaya juice with every meal, and is pretty much solely responsible for teaching me all the tamil i know (which is about 5 words, most of them synonyms for “i’ve had enough to eat; please no more.”) here she is making tea:

jaya, my tiruchuli mom

and then (so quickly, it seemed) it was time to leave tiruchuli and get on with my travels. the staff had a little going-away ceremony for me where everyone said nice things about me, and jaya made an extra delicious lunch, and then i was off to the train station, headed to kochi. i hope i can go back sometime soon.

the ODAM office at sunset

back-to-bom!

hello again!

it’s been a month since i updated this thing, so this post is probably going to be too long and unspecific to be interesting. so, uh, sorry about that. also i forgot the cable to upload pictures in my hotel. dang…

i’m back in mumbai now–i was here back in december but didn’t really get a chance to explore until now (not that 2 days is really enough time to see one of the biggest cities in the world.) the downtown really does look and feel more like new york than an indian city, although the further north you wander the less true that becomes. the proximity of extreme wealth and extreme poverty gives it a strange, uncomfortable atmosphere at times.

on a lighter note, last night i went out to marine drive in the evening to take some photos and generally wander around, and met a couple local guys who i ended up going out for drinks with. so that was fun; we talked about music and what they thought about india and the united states and motorcycles (apparently harley davidson officially started selling bikes in india yesterday, but with a 100% (!) duty.) afterwards we went out and had delicious fried chicken and roti the size of a pizza. mmm mmm.

before mumbai i was in kochi, which is in kerala, way down near the sourthern tip of the country on the west coast. i think pictures will tell that story better than words, though, so i’ll leave that for next time. very pretty, but not a ton to do…

which brings me back to ODAM and tiruchuli.

tiruchuli from above

in my last post i gave a brief overview of what ODAM does, so i’m not going to repeat that here. (for more info, go to www.odam.in) i was orignially going to be working on their biodiesel plant, but for a number of reasons i won’t get into here (ask me if you’re curious, which you probably aren’t) there wasn’t really much for me to do on that project. i ended up doing some experiments on their charcoal briquette project (for cooking and heating water), which is one of several projects trying to find ways to take advantage of juliflora, an invasive species that is depleting groundwater reserves and taking over farmland. the design of the briquette was borrowed from a similar project in nepal and tibet–my goal was to find some way to modify it to get the briquette to light faster. my conclusion: the thing was designed pretty well to begin with, and there’s not really room for drastic improvements (at least by easy things like changing its shape. throw some kerosene on it though and its a different story…) so that was a little disappointing, although still useful in the end.

waiting for the bus down at the biodiesel center

the other big thing i worked on was setting up a new website for ODAM: originally they had asked christina, the only other volunteer here for most of the time i was there, to update their existing website. after weeks of discussions with the guys in charge, though, she came to the conclusion that the current website was so out of date with the organization’s current goals that it would be easier to just start over from scratch. (we also discovered they were paying way, way too much for web hosting, and there were ownership issues with who their current domain name was registered to that prevented them from going somewhere cheaper.) the result: www.odamindia.org which isn’t done yet, but the basic outline is there. because i’m lazy, and christina isn’t, i got the easier job of doing the technical stuff and designing the thing (most of which was borrowed from an open source wordpress theme) and she got the much more difficult job of filling in the content.

i also did some other, smaller projects, like fixing computers, and generally organizing files and things like that (although again, christina did the lions share of that work.)

festival!

tiruchuli is somewhat holy town–a well known (at least in india) maharshi was born there–so there was an almost nonstop string of religious festivals happening while i was there. the biggest was the mariamman festival (goddess of rain and disease) at the end of february, which went on all night, every night, for about a week.

the main street through town during the mariamman festival

we missed the first couple days of the festival because we went to chennai for a weekend, which was probably a good thing, because trying to sleep through this thing was hopeless. aside from the crowd noise, constant honking of trucks trying to make their ways through the crowds, and eardrum-burstingly loud tollywood (tamil movie) music which accompanied every festival, this one also had an endless stream of marching bands that would plow through the main street every 15 minutes or so and drown out everything else. these were usually accompanied by crowds of people in dancing as if they were in a trance, or carrying large flaming lamps, or dancing in a trance and carrying large flaming lamps.

the procession

and again...

and from street level!

here are some more random photos from the festival or thereabouts:

excuse me. one photo!

hmm

power cut!

and now for some other random photos from around tiruchuli:

naptime

aaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhhh!!!!

a gold star to whoever can figure out what the heck is going on here

and now, because this computer is about to snap under the weight of this post and i promised it last time (and i like to keep my promises) i give you: a tiny piece of the strangest museum ever.

awesome.

waiting for the bus down at the biodiesel center

small town life

technicolor cow!

so, i’ve been living in tiruchuli (a small town, pop. ~3,000, right at the southern tip of india) for the past month. i think i may have mentioned that already.

for the sake of completeness:

from hampi i caught a bus to bangalore, which to be honest wasn’t really that interesting. bangalore is india’s answer to silicon valley, and mg road (bangalore’s downtown) was a lot like times square: kind of like a giant shopping mall. which is to say, it reminded me of the aspects of america that i like the least. but that would be like judging new york by times square–not exactly fair–and the other parts of the city were pleasant. just a bit…uninteresting. there was a theater showing avatar in 3d though, which i took advantage of. so that was nice.

from bangalore i headed down to madurai, the closest major city to tiruchuli. by some lucky coincidence grace was also there, and we both ended up at the same hotel without planning to…spooky.

meenakshi temple

madurai’s main sight is the meenakshi temple, the biggest temple in south india (and maybe the rest of the country too–its gigantic.) there are 12 more of the towers shown above (they’re called gopuras) in the complex, some of which are 150 feet tall (which doesn’t sound that big, but it is.) it’s supposedly the place where shiva and parvati spend their honeymoon.

the market

the city itself is old. really, really old: it traded with ancient greece. there is a public market near the temple that looks about that age too. it also has a spaceship themed bar that looks like a set from “forbidden planet.” (no photos yet, but i’ll take some next time i’m there. get excited.)

i didn’t spend much time in madurai though–grace and i and a friend of hers went on a whirlwind bus tour the day i got there, and i got picked up the next day.

tiruchuli at night, from my roof

(so, uh, what have you been doing for 5 weeks in a tiny little town?)

good question! i’m doing volunteer work for an organization called ODAM, which is primarly concerned with providing livelihoods for rural women. they do this by setting up self-help groups in rural villages and providing them with microloans and vocational training, and they’ve done a heck of a job: since the organization started in 1995, they’ve set up almost 900 self-help groups totalling over 13,000 women. in recent years they’ve expanded to deal with issues of rural development, first with a bio-fuels demonstration plant (the first in south india!) and more recently with a couple of charcoal based projects. the first of these, which i’ve been working on primarily, is a charcoal briquette made from juliflora, an invasive plant that grows on fallow land like a weed. even cooler is the terra preta project, which is a compost made from charcoal and biomass which becomes an extremely fertile topsoil (and is a carbon sink!) i’ll get to all of these in more detail later, when there’s more time…

india's iconic car, the ambassador

instead, i’m going to take the easy route (like i always do) and just post a bunch of photos. so, uh, sorry if you were hoping for something substantial. maybe next time!

man with dinner

this guy was the leader of a group of, what the ODAM staff calls for the lack of a better word, local gypsies. until recently they were migrants (although they now live in housing projects in APK, a bigger town nearby) but they still more or less live off the land, catching wild animals for food. see the rabbit on the table there? he caught it behind the ODAM office, with a net, skinned it, and ate it for dinner.

the second week i was here we were invited out to a small town to pick rice. or so we thought: when we got there it turned out the rice needed another month, and they just wanted to show us around. these pictures are all from that trip:

nagalaxmi, an ODAM staff member, and her daughter

school!

there was a wedding. the guests were literally trucked in.

skeptical kid

these guys are cute by day, but nasty as soon as the sun goes down.

"what on earth...?"

a typical family home--two rooms.

father and daughter

preach it, child!

volunteers in the rice field (left to right): elektra, me, cecilia, sara, and christina

in the next post: the world’s strangest modern art gallery, OR more about the volunteering projects. or maybe both. maybe.

more hampiness

doctor! the patients require an additional shot of hampi. a hampi booster! stat!

alright then, here you go:

nap time!

as i mentioned in the last post, hampi, although no gokarna, still had its share of hippies. and rock climbers. and what is the preferred activity of hippy rock climbers? slacklining, of course! so naturally the goan corner had like 4 of them.

for those who have no idea what i’m talking about: a slackline is a lot like a tightrope, except that it’s slightly stretchy and less tensioned. it’s a bit easier (so i understand) than tightrope walking since it lowers your center of gravity, but the combination of lower tension and stretchiness make it tend to oscillate while you’re standing on it. after failing miserably in teaching myself to balance on it, andreas, this swedish guy i met (yet more scandanavians!) explained the technique to me and after a few days i could pretty consistently walk across it without falling! so at least i have that to show for my two weeks in hampi…

damn these swedes!

i also went out climbing with andreas a few times, although i only solved one of the problems he found for me. (the other thing i learned in hampi: rock-climber-speak. a problem is a particular route to the top of a boulder.) i could have done the problem in the picture above (physically, that is) but it was probably 20 feet high, and the only thing protecting you if you fell was a little crash pad at the bottom. so even though i’m 95% sure i could have done the last few moves to get to the top, psychologically i couldn’t thanks to that 5% chance of broken bones. that little guy on my shoulder is always getting in the way of fun.

the view from the top

a few days later i climbed to the top of one of the big rock-strewn hills with a temple on the top of it with a guy from bangalore i met. my camera battery died at the top though, so i only got a few photos.

like i mentioned before, lots of the climbers stay for months at a time, which gave the guesthouse a really friendly atmosphere. most nights almost everyone would cram in around one table in the restaurant–when your food came you’d have to squeeze your way in close enough to the table to eat, and then once you finished someone else would squeeze in so they could eat their food. at some point we all started playing dice every night after dinner, which is a surprisingly engaging game considering there’s literally nothing to it other than rolling dice…

one day we got a game of volleyball together and someone made some joke about setting up a volleyball tournament. and then, almost magically, a couple guys organized the whole thing–the next day there was a sign in the restaurant, and a big trophy which had been engraved (with a typo, as per indian fashion.) there ended up being 10 teams of 4; my team got knocked out in the first round, so then i got put on another team, and that team also got knocked out the first round. so it’s probably a safe assumption that i suck at volleyball.

the first annual goan corner international volleyball tournament. i'm in the red shorts, failing to block that spike...

the victorious swiss/german team, with their trophy

sadly i don’t have a picture of my favorite part of the tournament: if you broke a rule, say, touching the net, or something, the referee (who just sat up on his high chair with a beer all day) could give you a yellow card or red card, sort of like in soccer. except instead of using colored cards, he just had a sign that said “stop being a dick” on one side (= yellow card) and “you’ve been a dick for too long” (= red card). maybe you had to be there…

a traditional boat!

a few kilometers away was a pretty big lake, which i think was actually the water reservoir, so it was actually clean enough to swim in. there were also some pretty good cliffs around it:

i'm not sure how high this was...maybe 20 feet?

how we got out to the lake...

on my last day in hampi i realized i still hadn’t been out to see all of the “attractions” so i did a little whirlwind tour. here’s the photographic version:

awww

more temples!

i'm not quite sure what animal these are supposed to be...

supposedly this building had a cool water cooling system, although i couldn't find it

this is where the rich people parked their elephants. seriously.

so that about does it for hampi. sorry this post was a bit more disjointed than the last one…

next up: a gigantic temple and life in small town india.

hippies and hampis

gokarna (there are actual beaches too, but the trails between them had the best scenery)

isn’t that purty?

that’s gokarna, a group of five beaches in northern karnataka, just south of goa. i met up with grace at om beach, which is the most touristy and is shaped like the om symbol (or the number 3) and is completely overrun by indian men and hippies. it makes for a…unique…atmosphere, to say the least.

which leads me to the series of tubes (not a big truck!):

i’ve met my share of hippies in my time (and have even been called one on occasion) but gokarna seemed to attract a whole other breed of crazy. i kept running into one guy in particular–a friendly british guy who had apparently been staying in om beach for months and in the process had some way or another made himself unwelcome at the majority of the beach-front restaurants. (the first time i met him he hid his face every time one of the waiters went by because he was afraid they were going to throw him out.) when he found out i was american, he told me he had something to tell me that would “totally blow your mind, man!”

now this is fact, man. believe what you want but this is fact:

in 1974, a patent was filed for a nuclear powered tunnel boring machine. (side note: this actually is true, except for it was filed in 1972. the patent is here.) now the CIA, of course, would have seen the awesome potential of something like this, so naturally they took the patent and built the thing, in secret. (where?) in area 51, man! this is fact!

therefore, there unquestionably exists a series of intercontinental tunnels built in secret by the CIA. unquestionably.

i mean, why wouldn’t they, man? they had the machine to do it, they had billions of dollars in government funding, there’s no way they wouldn’t have built it! you can believe what you want man, i’m not judging, but i’m way, way ahead of you man, i’ve read books *this* thick about this, man, and believe what you want, but this is fact, man. fact!

that’s the long and short of it. maybe ted stevens isn’t so out of touch with technology, he just forgot what committee he was in…

so that was my om beach experience in a nutshell, terrible almost-pun intended. (sort of funny side story: the last time i ran into this guy i was sitting in a restraunt when he walked up and without saying anything very covertly handed me a postcard and big quartz crystal, and then left. it was odd…)

the other beaches, though, attracted a considerably more considerably more conventional clientele. i spent a couple days at kudlee beach too, although nothing happened worth mentioning.

onwards! from hippies to hampi! (and, honestly, still quite a lot of hippies.)

this was on the way from gokarna to hampi. in retrospect i don't know why i passed it up...

retreating from my statements in a previous post, i actually have lots of pictures from hampi, even though i spent two weeks there. maybe this will explain why for me:

hampi

a bit of (very oversimplified and possibly downright false) background: hampi was a huge and prosperous city (over 1 million people!), until about 500 years ago it was utterly destroyed by muslim invaders from north india. apparently the city’s rulers, all cocky about how impenetrable their city was thanks to the giant boulders surrounding it (as well as several layers of city walls) sent the city’s defense force off to war, leaving the city undefended. lesson: giant boulders can’t defend cities.

and now, on with the pictures!

a temple in hampi

although not much remains of the city of hampi, many of the temples are in decent shape, and some are still in use.

the temple elephant

many of the bigger temples in india have resident elephants, who will bless you for a rupee. this one in particular was amazingly well trained: she could tell the difference between a coin and a 10 rupee note (she’d take them out of your hand with her trunk) and then would give you a different blessing according to how much you paid. she also wasn’t restrained in any way–which says something either about how confident her trainers are in her or how lax public safety laws are in india.

monkey bandit!

also, as in much of india, hampi’s temples are havens for monkeys. this one totally got a bunch of bananas from some guy’s bag. luckily india doesn’t have a good samaritan law, or i could have been in trouble…

ruins

i found this guy in that pool of water:

one of hampi's many amphibious inhabitants

as you might expect from the terrain, hampi attracts quite a few rock climbers.

bouldering

most of the climbers stay at a guest house called the goan corner, which is where i also ended up staying (thanks to the recommendation of some cool norwegian girls i met in gokarna. seriously, so many scandinavians!)

which brings us to the turkey.

the turkey, showing aishu the dog who's the boss, and generally struttin around like he owns the place

the goan corner had quite a few resident animals, among them a huge, colorful turkey that must have thought he laid golden eggs (i know, i know), or was god’s gift to the lady turkeys, or something. the dogs were afraid of him. so was a group of korean girls, who would get out of their chairs and run away when he walked through the restaurant. hilarious.

ginger the puppy

there was also ginger, the world’s cutest puppy (until he peed on me, then he was downgraded to pretty cute but best appreciated from afar.)

grrrrr

he also tried to steal my backpack.

carrom!

the goan corner was also the first place i actually got to play carrom–i’d seen men playing it in other places, but never got the chance to try it myself. what is carrom? time for another analogy!

tennis : ping pong : : billiards : carrom

so, basically, there are flat wood discs (about the size and shape of checkers pieces) and you have to hit them into pockets in the corner of the table using a slightly larger, heavier, striker piece. it’s quite difficult–it took a couple games before i sank a single piece.

festival!

around the end of january, there was a big festival with music, dance, speeches, famous people like jackie chan, somewhat gaudy lighting all around the city, and huge, huge crowds. a group of us tried to get into the actual festival grounds, where we could see the stage, but apparently we needed a vvip pass (apparently only the very very important are allowed in) and among the throngs of people we couldn’t figure out where we needed to go to get them. so we didn’t get to see anything. sad hat.

festival-goers

and now, because it’s easier than actually writing something, here are some random picture from around hampi:

i rented a bike and went out into the countryside, where i met these two

he's not actually stuck. don't worry!

snack! puffed rice and peanuts, spicy of course.

if you look closely at the picture above you may see why i included it here. first person to identify it gets a special prize!

best to be wary of advertisements that put an asterisk after free. i'm not sure how i feel about that moustache either.

its almost dinner time, so i’ll leave you with something to meditate on:

there will be another prize for the best caption for this photo

at long last

hello everyone!

i’m falling behind again. bah.

before i get back to last month’s happenings, here’s a quick update of what i’m up to now:

last week i started my volunteer work in tiruchuli, a small town (pop. ~3000) about an hour south of madurai in tamil nadu (almost at the southern tip of the country.) i’ll be here another month or two–haven’t really decided how long exactly yet. the organization is called ODAM (organization for development action and maintainence) and is mainly concerned with running self-help groups for rural women. recently, though, they’ve started working on sustainable agriculture projects, notably a small scale biodiesel plant (which is what i’ll be working on mostly) and some really interesting experiments with terra preta (using charcoal and biomass to enrich topsoil and act as a carbon sink.) but more on that later.

(time warp back to new year’s day)

the scene: 8:30 am on the first day of the new decade, grace, martin, and i are frantically packing our bags to make it out of the hotel by checkout time, which is 9. between the 3ish hours of sleep, hangovers, and lack of cleaning we’re not going to make it, but grace talks the front desk man into giving us an extra hour.

at 10am we’re standing out on the corner in what feels like 90 degree heat waiting for a local bus to panaji. the first bus comes by but looks too crowded, and martin has wandered off to get water or something. twenty minutes and a half gallon of sweat later the next one arrives, just as crowded as the one before, so we stand the whole ride (which is only an hour or so.) between the heat and the hangover and general claustrophobia martin isn’t feeling too hot, and pokes his head out a window, leaning over a terrified-looking indian family in the process.

from panaji we catch another bus to margao, which is thankfully less crowded, and then yet another bus to palolem, where i was a week before. and then suddenly we’re on a beautiful beach having lunch, and everything is good again.

palolem, with its forest of coconut palms

i was only planning of staying in palolem a couple days until i finished my grad school applications, but the battle between work and sitting on the beach…well…you can all imagine which side won that one.

so, i ended up staying here almost two weeks. and it was good. oh man.

palolem is much less developed than northern goa, although it’s still very much a tourist spot. the real difference is the type of tourist it attracts: palolem gets all the 20-something backpackers and european college students on winter break; northern goa gets families on package holidays. so even though its still touristy, its a much nicer atmosphere–straw huts on the beach rather than resort hotels. the beach itself is a mile long crescent of white sand backed by a dense forest of coconut palms, with rocky points at either end keeping the water nice and calm for swimming. local fishermen head out every morning and return in the evening with fresh seafood. even the women selling jewelry on the beach are friendly. and: cheeseburgers. with real beef. despite the blatant tourism, i couldn’t really fault it.

i don’t really have much to tell about those couple weeks, because to be honest i didn’t really do much. which was kind of the point. most days i’d wake up, grace and i would go get breakfast, and then i’d sit out on the beach for a couple hours and read, then go work on applications when it got too hot, and then go back and read some more. after sunset grace and i would meet back up for dinner, then go to bed. palolem isn’t exactly a party spot, which was a pleasant change from northern goa.

actually that’s not exactly true.

problem: palolem (like much of goa) has a strict amplified music ban after 10pm. it kind of puts a damper on things–nobody really wants to party without music.

solution: silent parties!

(but wait a minute, you just said nobody wants to party without music, right?)

solution (detailed version): wireless headphones. and more than that even! they have 3 different channels, so if you don’t like whatever crappy house music they’re playing you can switch over to some nice old school funk. sweet. i’ll admit, this is the sort of thing that either sounds awesome or absolutely awful the first time you hear it. take it from those who have experienced it though: its awesome. if you want to talk to somebody, you can just take off your headphones and have a normal conversation, no shouting required. and there’s something about watching a couple hundred people dancing in silence that’s strangely mesmerizing. the first time we went i ran into julia and malin and their swedish gang again. it was so much fun i decided to go back again the next week (even though grace and martin and everyone else i’d met had already left) and ended up meeting (yet more!) swedes and we all stuck around until they kicked us all out at 6am.

beached fishing boats in palolem (the harsh environment is starting to get to my camera: sometimes when i turn it on it randomly switches to "art filters" like this one. it looks a bit better full size...)

initially i told myself i wasn’t going to leave until all my grad school apps were done, thinking that eventually my desire to move on would force me to get the stupid things done, but i severely underestimated how long i could sit on a beach and do nothing before that desire would kick in. eventually it was monetary concerns that did me over–palolem is cheap, although not quite as cheap as the rest of india, and i decided there was no point in spending 400 rupees a night to sit on a beach in goa if i could be spending 150 to do the same thing in gokarna. so even though my apps weren’t done yet (although close!) i gave in and caught a train an hour south to gokarna, a group of small beaches in northern karnataka.

its almost dinner time though, so thats it for now.

in the next post: viscous turkeys, the world’s cutest puppy, and the first ever public report of the CIA’s giant network of subterranean intercontinental tunnels. stay tuned.

getcha subscripshuns!

a shameless plug for iandia:

you can now subscribe to my blog, which means you get email updates whenever i post something! and if you subscribe now, i’ll throw in a surprise free gift! (which may or may not be something intangible, or lame)

i know you’re all asking yourselves: how do i sign up? simple!

if you scroll down to the very, very bottom of this page there’s a button that says “sign me up.” press it. you’re done! cool. (weird bug: if you’re viewing this on my website using firefox, the bottom of the page is hidden under a big black thing. solution: use a different browser, or go to iandia.wordpress.com)

(i was planning on making this real post, but i brought the wrong memory card for my camera so i don’t have any pictures i wanted to write about. so lazy! but there will be more soon!)