Kovalam

After driving us to Pondicherry, Johnson slept in his car so that the next night we would have a ride home. On our journey back up to Chennai before we left, he took us to his home in Kovalam to meet his family and have tea.

Johnson had two of the cutest little kids I have ever seen. I gave a shark tooth necklace that I had bought from the gypsy to his little boy. His wife made us some delicious marsala tea. Their hospitality is representative of many of the places we have been. Would a taxi driver in America ever take you by his house to meet his family? It really is amazing how kind and welcoming people are to us.

Transportation

India has by far the gnarliest driving I have ever seen. The traffic in the city is like Saigon on steroids. The mix of vehicles is what takes it to another level. Taxis, motor-rickshaws, bicycles, motorcycles, cows, scooters, and big public buses all fight over the road. The horn is always blaring, and it is complete madness.

The highway is a completely different animal. We drove on the two-lane from Pondicherry to Chennai at night. They strongly advised us not to travel at night, and now I understand why. People cut it extremely close passing on the highway. The bigger vehicles will push smaller ones off the road at 100 K an hour. Hindu’s hold their cows sacred, so they are wandering all over the roads. To try to slow down traffic, there are barricades every few miles in alternating lanes. Both directions of traffic have to slow down and zigzag through this one lane. It might work, except that nobody slows down, they just crank the wheel and fly through the barricades. This essentially sets up a high speed game of chicken with oncoming traffic as to who will get into the barricades first.

I saw two accidents in my few days in India, and one of them was a big public bus that went off the highway. It really is nuts here, a New York cab driver wouldn’t stand a chance in Chennai rush hour.

Auroville

About ten miles outside of Pondicherry is a place called Auroville. It is a project in human unity and love that was started by a woman known as ‘The Mother.’ People come from all over the world live there; two-thirds of the residents are foreigners. No religions are allowed, and material possessions are given up. A large portion of the land is used for sustainable agriculture, which feeds the community’s 1800 residents.

This was one of the trippiest places I have ever seen. Being a partial closet hippy, I usually like these kinds of things, but these are some really freaking crazy hippies! It actually felt more like a cult. Whatever the case, it was both cool and strange at the same time.

The community is laid out in the spiraling shape of a galaxy. The center of this galaxy is called the Matramandir and is the ‘soul’ of Auroville. The Matramandir is a huge golden sphere. Inside this sphere is a chamber lined with white marble, and a crystal that is two feet in diameter. A tracking mirror in the roof beams sun rays into the crystal to illuminate the room. Residents of Auroville go in this chamber to meditate. Are you freaked out yet? Corinne and I concluded that the Matramandir was in fact a space ship that would ultimately deliver Aurovillains to a much better place.

On the ship we do this thing when people complain about something. Like in the picture, we make a circle with our arms that is supposed to look like the planet Earth. This means "Hey, we are going around the world." So when somebody starts to whine about having to wait in line for dinner, or that the internet is slow, we just make the motion with our arms. Its just to keep the whole thing in context, "Ya thats a real bummer your laundry isn't done, but on the other hand we are sunbathing off the coast of Yemen right now." Its a big joke on the ship, and thats what the picture is all about.

On the way out of Auroville, we came across this huge Banyan tree. These trees grow roots out of their branches that drop into the ground to support themselves. I thought this was really the coolest thing ever. Corinne gave me a bunch of crap for being so excited about this tree, because apparently they have been in every other port we have visited. Whatever, just look at it. That is a damn smart tree. Isn’t that cool?

The wobble

Indians move there heads differently to nod ‘Yes’. They wobble their head side to side in a quick figure eight. It looks kind of like a bobble head does on the dashboard of your car, but faster, kind of how you imagine a sperm might wiggle. At first it really threw me off when I was talking to somebody and they started wobbling their head. I felt like they were mocking me and then I would just start laughing. It’s hard to keep a straight face because it looks so funny. The wobble is very disarming though, and made me smile and feel comfortable with whoever I was talking with. After a while I was able to get the wobble down and it was quite fun.

Elephant

Outside of one of Pondicherry’s Manakula Vinayagar Temple there was an elephant. At first I was stoked, but then I felt really bad for it. There was a sign saying not to feed the elephant coconut or banana, yet every 30 seconds somebody fed it a banana. It had some decorations on it, but it moved slowly and looked sad. It obviously did not want to be there. It is sad to see such a magnificent animal reduced to this.

Transies

In downtown Pondicherry we were wandering around the shops when a parade came through. The parade actually turned out to be some kind of rally for transsexual, transgender, etc. Take a look at some of the ‘women’ in the picture. Double Yikes!

Women in India get to dress in all sorts of colorful saris with lots of decorations, while the men just were pants and a collared shirt, so I can kind of see where they are coming from. One thing is for sure though, India is a healthy democracy.

Pondicherry

Tuesday night I left with my friend Corinne to travel south of Chennai. We got a taxi driver named Johnson to drive us down to a city called Pondicherry. Pondicherry used to be a French colony, and was handed over to India about 50 years ago. The street names are still French, and the local police wear funny red caps, but other than that it is definitely India. It is actually its own state and Johnson had to get a special permit to drive us there. After a 3 hour journey on some crazy wooded back-roads, we arrived in Pondicherry pretty late and stayed in a hotel.

I love the feeling of driving somewhere new at night, and waking up in the morning to see the place for the first time. We started out our day by renting some bicycles. The bikes had some old-school flavor with some super laid back handlebars, and I felt the French name “Garcon” fit my ride well. Corinne named her bike “Priscilla”. Riding in the city was pretty intense, although it was nothing compared to the roads in Chennai. Simultaneously adjusting to the crazy traffic and learning to ride on the left side of the road was exciting.

It was a little mellower at the beach. There was a big statue of Gandhi by the water. We spent about half an hour buying three dollars worth of jewelry from some “gypsies”. One of the guys told me to call him “gypsy king”!

We also checked out some of the local markets that were selling some really skanky looking (and smelling) fish. Yikes!

Mamallapuram

About an hour south of Chennai is the city of Mamallapuram, which is home to some amazing rock carvings. The highlight was the Shore Temple which is right on the beach. If I was to build myself a temple, it would be right on the beach like this one. There are tons of carvings in this area, and apparently the big monsoon that hit a few years bag uncovered a bunch of previously undiscovered sights.

I also met a kid named Daleep here. We got our business out of the way early: I bought a set of Kama-Sutra figurines from him for 200 rupees. After that he just walked around with me and told me about carvings. He speaks five different languages: Tamil, English, French, German, and Spanish. He was about 13 years old, and had learned all of his languages from tourists in his town.

Dakshina Chitra

About 15 kids from the ship went to a two day yoga retreat. We stayed at a place called Dakshina Chitra which was basically a Southern Indian cultural center. For two days my schedule went something like this: wake up at six, yoga, breakfast, nap, meditate, nap, yoga, lunch, nap, meditate, nap, dinner, read/relax, sleep. Meals were all vegetarian Indian food, which was super good and extremely spicy. This food gave spicy a whole new definition. Pretty much everybody on the whole ship had some bad reaction to the food in India. Here they call it “Delhi Belly”.

The accommodations were pretty fun. We slept in dorm style rooms, with a common bathroom that both guys and girls used. It had two buckets for showering, and two stalls with squatter toilets. They were the nice squatters that had a tank and flushed, and even came complete with TP. Evacuating in a squatter toilet tends to be pretty noisy, and it was a little awkward to be playing my morning music with a bunch of chicks brushing their teeth in the same room. Whatever. The rooms were brick, with three fans swinging from the ceiling, and were hot as hell. My watch said it was 93 degrees in there (And yes, I know I’m a dork for having a watch that tells temperature.) The beds were five to a room and had a super hard one inch thick mattress. Supposedly that is good for your spine, but my back hasn’t been this sore since racing the Six Hours of Glen Helen. We were lying in bed the first night, and Taylor said “Doesn’t it feel like we are being punished?” We both started cracking up. It really wasn’t that bad. My personal standards have dropped considerably, and this was nice compared to other places I’ve stayed on this trip.

After two days, I was feeling super mellow and relaxed. It was pretty nice to just chill out on land for a while.

India

We docked in Chennai in southeastern India in the state of Tamil Nadu. I didn’t travel farther than 100mi from Chennai, so I saw a very different India than those who flew up north. The cities I went to in southern India seemed relatively well off. It was definitely dirty and poor, but I didn’t see the extreme poverty that I was expecting. The places I saw were poorer than Saigon, but not as poor as Pnom Penh in Cambodia. India is an extremely diverse place, and I can’t really claim to have ‘traveled’ India. You can go to ten different places and see ten completely different India’s. What I experienced is just one small part of this huge and complex place.

The first thing that you notice when arriving in India is the garbage. People throw trash on the ground wherever they go. Even on nice beaches and picnic spots, there is garbage strewn everywhere. My buddy Tyler was on a train, and he said that the attendant collected everyone’s trash and then opened a window and chucked it outside. The blatant disregard for the landscape is just part of the culture. Trash goes on the ground, and it doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

One thing that I didn’t really understand when I left India was the caste system. Caste is the Hindu social structure. You are born into your particular caste, it has nothing to do with where you live or what your job is. Currently in India they reserve spots in universities and certain jobs for lower castes. It is a kind of affirmative action to help the lower castes better themselves. Persons from different castes can live next door, and work the same job. I don’t really see the purpose of the castes, and the division based on birth seems completely arbitrary to me. I didn’t get to understand the system fully and I need to learn a lot more before I can say anything intelligent on the subject, but it doesn’t seem to be congruent with India’s title as the world’s biggest democracy.

In previous ports I had left each country with a completely different picture than I went in with. India did not shock me like that. This was the first port that was more or less what I expected. That being said, I enjoyed India. The people were extremely friendly and the food was amazing. Almost everybody spoke English which made things really easy. This country felt very unique among the other places we have been to. It filled me with a strange intrigue that I couldn’t really put my finger on.

Man Overboard! (not really)

After Burma, we had two days to get to India, which wasn’t very far away. For most if it we were cruising at ten knots. I guess the captain got bored, because twice in one day they threw a dummy overboard and practiced retrieving it. The dummy had a life ring around it and was complete with a moustache!

We had a brief warning of a drill over the speakers and then they cranked the wheel. When they do that the ship really leans, and people were falling all over the place. The Explorer can pull some serious G’s!

Inle Lake scenery pictures

Jumping Cats

This had to be one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Nga Hpe Chaung is the name of the monastery where monks have trained their cats to jump through hoops. Look at the picture! The place was definitely a tourist trap. The cats were amazingly well trained though, except for the one that dropped a deuce on the floor in front of a Buddha statue!

Hiking

The whole group met up at a Pagoda up on the hill, and after lunch we started out on what was supposed to be a 2 hour hike to another town up the shore. The group got split up and Darcy, Megan, and Kim, and I ended up being on our own. Of course we got lost in the muddy jungle and had a wonderful adventure crossing rickety bridges and walking through farming villages.

About 3 and half hours after we started we found our way into Maing Thauk, where we started. This didn’t do us any good, since there were no boats there. We sat for a while and three other kids showed up that had also gotten lost. The seven of us were able to talk a fisherman into taking us to a hotel we could see on the lake for a few bucks.

At the hotel we arranged a boat back to our place. In the meanwhile, the English manager insisted on showing us the rooms and spa and everything his hotel had to offer to “let us see what we where missing.” The boat showed up and this time we arrived at our hotel with a half an hour of light to spare. Unfortunately Darcy wanted a picture wearing my hat, fumbled it, and dropped Mr. Floppy right into the lake. She partly did me a favor because that hat was pretty ridiculous, but it is still a major bummer.

Maing Thauk Orphanage

The next day we went to a small village called Maing Thauk. A group of about seven of us spent a good amount of time at the boy’s orphanage in the village. They were super excited to have us there, and the boys all sang us a song. We followed by leading in “head, shoulders, knees and toes” as well as the hokey pokey. After that we had an intense game of duck, duck, goose.

Nyaungshwe

After a forty-five minute boat ride I arrived in Nyaungshwe. I arranged with the driver to meet me at 5:30 and took off. Ah, once again I got that excited yet anxious feeling of being dropped off alone in a strange place. My plan was to rent a bike and ride alongside the lake. After asking around I kept getting pointed towards the post office. Turns out that the post office was actually the place to rent a bike in town. Go figure. I threw down a nice crisp dollar and got my bike for the day.

My ride was a rusty maroon single speed with a nice basket up front. The front wheel wasn’t lined up with the bars and the brakes hardly worked, but other than that I was stoked. You can name a bike by looking at it, but to really know if the name fits you have to sit on it. I saddled up and as I suspected, ‘Crusty the Clown’ fit this bike perfectly.

Crusty and I took off down the shore and at the edge of town instantly ran into a big flood. The road along the lake was under two feet of water, so I hung a left and headed toward the mountains. I was riding through axle deep water until I made it out of town. All of the kids wading through the streets got a kick out of me.

I got onto a dirt road and started heading into the jungle. The road was in good shape, except for one big washout that I had to slow down for. I got to the end and turned onto another road that was in very poor shape. The mud got deep, and then it got really deep, and then I had to push and repeatedly lost my shoes in the mud. For a while I was wading through stagnant muddy water buzzing with mosquitoes. I definitely got my moneys worth out of my malaria pills this day!

After about 40 minutes of mudding, I wasn’t on a road anymore, just a footpath going through the jungle. I came up on a weird kind of grave yard. There were about 10 large cement tombs that sat above ground. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but then I saw some gold flickering through the trees. I followed the path around the corner and there was a huge golden pagoda in the middle of the jungle!

I could tell that the pagoda was built on the site of some very old ruins. There was a crumbling brick wall perimeter that looked very old. I walked around the outside a bit, and noticed two pairs of shoes at the doorway. Around the back I noticed another building across a small clearing. There were some cows walking around and right away I noticed it some monk clothes hanging from a line.

It was indeed a small monastery. I walked across the field, took off my shoes and walked up the stairs. There were three monks sitting on the porch and they didn’t quite know what to make of me. They didn’t speak English, except when I said I was from America they all nodded and smiled. One made a picture motion with his hand, and when I gave him my camera he said “digital” and they nodded their heads. Three other monks came out and smiled at me. They took turns taking pictures and laughed a lot. After a while they got used to me sitting there and just chilled out like they were before. We sat there for thirty minutes without talking. One monk hummed a little chant. After a while one of the monks left and came back with some bananas for me to eat. They showed me around the monastery, where they slept and their worship area. We sat out on the porch for a while longer, and one monk pulled out an old wooden checker board and a bunch of bottle caps. I got my ass handed to me twice. Apparently they have a lot of time to practice out there. I really would have liked to spend the night at the monastery, but unfortunately being on the group trip that wasn’t an option. After spending about two hours hanging out with the monks it was getting late, so I headed back.

I made pretty good time through the mud, and before I knew it I was back on the road. I was going pretty fast, a good 15 mph. Two kids on bikes were coming the other way up ahead, on the other side of the road. They were going really slow through the rocky part of the road. “Horrible line selection” I thought, “These guys suck.” They both feverishly pointed at the ground when I passed. “Ya” I thought, “I see that piece of wood. Look I’ll even bunny hop over it.” I landed, and I realized that in a quarter second I was going straight into the big washout. I slammed the brakes, nothing. As the bike dropped into the ditch I bailed over the bars and my body and my bag of stuff yard-saled all over the road. I sat there stunned for a second, and then got up and bowed and did a little dance. The kids started cracking up and hollering and lots of heads poked out of windows across the river and yelled and clapped.

Back in town, I returned my bike, and headed to one of the many pizza places that they had in town. It started dumping rain just as I got there. It took 45 minutes to get my pizza, which seemed to be about the norm in SE Asia. They don’t really do fast food here. It was cool though because the guy who owned the place sat and talked with me. He said that the last time the city had been flooded like this was about 15 years ago. A bridge had collapsed on the road to Yangon, and trucks could not get through. He said the price of tomatoes in Yangon would be about 4 times normal because if it. Good thing we were flying. He recommended the super spicy pizza for the cold weather. He was right, it warmed me right up! I asked if he had a toilet and he told me to go to the big house behind the restaurant. It was actually his house, and his kids took me in and let me use their bathroom. People are so nice here it is unbelievable!

My ride home showed up at 5:30 and we took off. It was still dumping rain, and the sun set while we were out on the lake. The hotel strongly recommended not being on the lake after dark, and I can see why. None of the boats have any lights, and all we could see were a couple of lights on the land. It was pretty scary hauling ass not being able to see what was in front of you. Even the driver was freaked out and shaking his head when we got back to the hotel. Many times back on the ship I’ve looked over the railing at night and thought of how terrifying it would be to be floating in the water in the complete darkness, and I got a little taste of it that night.

I got back to the hotel that night shivering, wet, and covered in mud, but had a huge grin on my face. This will definitely be one of the most memorable days of my trip, and to me this is what traveling is all about.

Festival

We were in Inle during the three week period of the Phaung Daw Oo festival. Every morning by the one of the big temples on the lake four golden Buddha statues were ferried around the lake on a royal barge. They also had boat races with long boats that had over one hundred people rowing on each boat.

Because of all the warnings about Burma’s government and restrictions, I had signed up for an organized group trip for this country. I wasn’t sure if I could travel here on my own, and it sounded pretty dangerous. It turned out that traveling here is not hard at all.

Traveling in big groups pretty much sucks, so when we got to the festival at 6 am I split off for the day to travel alone. It felt good to spread my wings and do my own thing. Traveling alone is cool because you have the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want, but if you come across a cool experience you don’t have anyone to share it with.

I watched the festival from some super crowded docks. Groups of kids would come up to me, and I would make a face and they would all scream and run away. “Min-gala-ba” means hello in Burmese, and was one of the few words that I knew. When I would say it to the kids they would all laugh and dance around saying “Mingalaba Mingalaba” while laughing. It turns out that “Mingalaba” is a word imposed on the Burmese language by westerners who wanted a formal word for Hello. The only people who use this word are foreigners, so that’s why the kids were laughing and dancing. The literal translation for the informal greeting that the Burmese actually use is “Have you had your rice today?”

There was quite a bit of military at the festival. A bunch of young guys walking around with machine guns on their shoulders. I saw some of the soldiers run into friends and start joking around with them. They have guns, but they don’t seem very scary. There is really no need to govern people in Inle. They are so peaceful it seems silly to bother them.

After the festival ended I caught a boat ride back to the hotel. It started dumping rain. I wanted to get a water taxi into Nyaungshwe, a town on the northern end of the lake. The guy at the front desk said that he had just gotten a call that Nyaungshwe had been flooded from the rain. I went back to the room to figure out what to do. I ended up falling asleep.

I must have crashed out hard, because when I woke up the maid had taken the dirty towels and left some water bottles on my bed side table. It was around noon and the rain had stopped. I called the front desk and the guy excitedly said “Oh yes yes, you go Nyangshwe now.” I love it when a plan comes together.

Golden Island Cottages

Like most buildings on the lake, our hotel was on the water and not attached to land. It cost $25 per person. Not bad!

Inle Lake

Inle Lake is in the eastern part of Burma known as the Shan state. It is a whole different world up there, and it feels completely cut-off from the outside. I did not see a single sign of western culture the whole time I was there.

This place is very unique. Houses are built on stilts over the water, and the only way to get from place to place is by boat. The roads that exist around the shore are poor, and are not used by cars. Every aspect of life at Inle takes place on the water.

The people have developed a technique of rowing their canoes with their legs. They wedge the end of the paddle under their arm, and wrap one leg around the paddle. Balancing on one foot at the end of their canoe, they pull the rowing leg and paddle back and forth like they are doing a hamstring curl. It is really cool. They have some serious balance and coordination. I saw one guy rowing with one leg and using both arms to pull in a long net of fish while his canoe was rocking hard in rough water.

The people in Inle are hands down the friendliest people I have ever come into contact with. As we went floating past houses on our boat, kids would come running to the porch. Children, women, old men, everybody smiled and waved and yelled. I don’t think there was a single person on that whole lake who didn’t smile and welcome us. When exploring the villages, many people were invited into Burmese homes for tea. It was amazing how welcoming theses people were. Inle is a very, very special place.

If we didn’t get a big excited smile and wave, we got a smile and a point and a laugh. When accidentally stumbling through peoples backyards in the forest, they would laugh like somebody had told a funny joke. They weren’t shocked, just very amused, and wouldn’t even bother to sit up in their chair. If I was in my backyard and a group of Burmese walked by, I think I would react differently!

Backround on Myanmar

Myanmar is a very tightly controlled society. Myanmar was a British colony until 1948. After the British left, a military junta took power. This military government has brutally controlled the country since then. Myanmar’s name was actually Burma until 1989, when the government officially changed it. Almost everybody that lives there still uses the name Burma, and so will I.

The military junta has been controlling the country and killing dissenters for a long time. In 1990 the government reluctantly agreed to multi-party elections. The National League for Democracy (NLD) won the election by gaining 80% of the vote. The military did not like these results so they imprisoned the leader of the NLD, Aung San Suu Kyi, and kept control. Aung San Suu Kyi still remains under house arrest in Yangon today.

Burmese society seems to be slowly opening up to the outside world. They are allowing more foreigners into the country, and a few people even talked to me about the government, although not in public. The country is still very censored. I saw no signs of western culture, and I couldn’t access my google email when I found a computer. Search engines like google and yahoo are blocked. Cell phones are illegal, as are unregistered modems.

The U.S. and many other countries have placed economic sanctions on the country. There is question as to whether people should travel there, as some of the money inevitably goes to support the regime. It does seem like awareness about the situation in Burma is growing, and I will be really curious about what will happen in the next 20 years. I believe that something will be changing in this country soon.

The muddy waters of the Andaman Sea

As we got closer to Yangon, the ocean turned brown! This part of the Gulf of Mottama is only 30 feet deep. Most people thought it was gross, but I thought it was pretty cool.