Delhi: Old, New, and Newest

Diwan-I-Khas (Hall of Private Audience), Red Fort, (old) Delhi

By the time we made it to Delhi, in all honesty, we were ready to move on from India. The day of our arrival, we hid out in our small hotel room, unwilling to tackle the tangled streets of the old city or to try and figure out the journey across town to where the government buildings stood. Despite our bad attitudes, the city turned out to be rather a pleasant surprise.

Delhi is a series of historical cities, overlaid one on top of the other, each in fact constructed as the Indian capital of a foreign power: Afghan, Mughal, British. "Old Delhi," such as it is, survives from the Mughal era, when it was the seat of power for one of the world's greatest empires. We visted the Red Fort, whose geopolitical history, if surprisingly brief, is no less impressive than that of, say, Beijing's Forbidden City -- though its architecture, while distinguished, is not as spectacular as that of its Chinese counterpart.

Old Delhi is linked to the British-built New Delhi by a conveyance of the newest Delhi: the city's fresh-out-of-the-wrapper metro system, which can whisk you rather disorientingly from a chaotic and rubbish-strewn alley in one district to a splendid monumental avenue in another. Our three-day stay wasn't enough to develop any sense of how it all fit together, and we saw almost nothing of the city's vast slums, but at the very least we were afforded a glimpse of the kind of contrasts that make Delhi -- old, new, and newest -- in its own way a suitable encapsulation of the nation it governs today: no longer as the seat of a foreign emperor, but as the capital of a complex and often disorienting democracy.

A row of white Ambassadors, traditional car of India's government elites, outside central government buildings near the Presidential residence, New Delhi

Fountain and government buildings, New Delhi

The brand-new Delhi metro

Two Views of Rajasthan from the Train

Our only camera was a little Canon PowerShot SD1100, no bigger than a box of Altoids. It had its limitations, but it was capable of impressive clarity and agility. We're not professional, or even really amateur, photographers, so doing what we could do with the PowerShot was plenty for us. Anyway, it managed to pluck these two images of Rajasthan's countryside from the blur that raced along outside the window of our speeding train.

Varieties of Travel Misery

A backpacker is a wretched creature. Your body dirty, your clothes rumpled, unfashionable, and smelly, you spend much of your time reduced to a primitive state of seeking out the basic necessities of survival: food, shelter, toilets. The language barrier renders you illiterate, and indeed barely able to communicate at the level of an articulate four-year-old, while you blunder about blithely violating customs, social norms, and basic rules of civility.

The locals, accustomed to the notion of rich Westerners, find you cheap and bewilderingly uncouth. Those who are more used to dealing with your type figure they have you pegged: what you want is to drink a lot of beer, listen to Bob Marley, and eat banana pancakes, in between being overcharged for taxi rides. Your fellow backpackers are mainly keen to impress upon you how much more intrepid they are than you, while your expat compatriots just find you embarrassing (though the feeling is very often mutual). Every so often you find yourself in your grubby hostel or third-class train carriage thinking wistfully of the mid-range comforts you could afford if you weren't trying to stretch your dollars through half a dozen different countries -- and if you happen to stumble into a high-end restaurant or a luxury hotel (maybe you're still looking for that toilet) the contrast, and the prices, make your head spin.

Of course it's not all bad. Of course your trip is filled with astonishing experiences and serendipitous pleasures; of course you can find all kinds of grounds to smugly pity the high-rolling tourists who will never have the experience of meeting the locals in the hard seat section of a Chinese train, or of the stark and simple joy you feel at the early morning appearance of a chai walla. And anyway, once you've been home a couple of months, all the bad parts begin to disappear from memory.

But sometimes things just suck. And in recognition of that simple fact, herewith I present three visions of travel misery for your schadenfruede-soaked pleasure.

1. Top Bunk Purgatory


Jaisalmer-Delhi Express, India. Top berth in a sleeper class carriage. It was hot, cramped, and dirty, and the train was sitting motionless at the platform, our departure delayed indefinitely while the conductor banged away at a broken bunk with some sort of hammer. The fans weren't working. Rachel thought it would be a good time to take a picture of me.

2. Despair on a Train


As I mentioned above, traveling in hard seat class on a Chinese train is a great way to meet locals -- who are, it must be said, mostly solicitous and kind. It's also a great way to spend a night jammed upright among at least six other people, enveloped in a noxious cloud of cigarette smoke and the stench of un-flushed squat toilets, dodging the phlegm noisily hocked up and spat on the floor all around you, wishing for the comparative serenity of an Indian sleeper car.

This photo is actually slightly posed, though the sentiment was real. It was taken shortly after boarding, when we were starting to get an idea of what our night was going to be like, but before we were invited to take seats in what looked to us like a completely full compartment. I'll be bragging about the misery of that night for decades.

3. Washed Up in Likeng


Our first evening in Likeng, a tiny and painfully picturesque village in China's Jiangxi province, the owner of our guesthouse told us she was turning in early because she had to get up before dawn to slaughter the pig. Sure enough, we were awakened at three a.m. by the harrowing sounds of the deed being done ten feet directly below our window. In the morning there was blood on the rocks and a major butchering operation underway in the family's living quarters.

Likeng is a widely recognized historic village, under assault by waves of day trippers during holiday periods. It happened to be where we ended up parking ourselves during the May Day week, when, we were told, it would be foolish to try getting around or finding a hotel room anywhere in China. We stayed put in our simple room, with its hard beds, smelly squat toilet (yes, it's a theme in China), and wide variety of available pork-based dishes, venturing out to take pictures of the village or walk along the lovely path through a narrow agricultural valley surrounded by pine-wooded hills. For two days, it was charming. The third day, it began to get a bit old. The fourth day, it rained. We were confined to our guesthouse, sick of our books and our conversations, and totally fed up with the simple pleasures of the countryside. I spent much of the day on the balcony staring like an angry hunchback at a world I had come to loathe, no matter how beautiful it might be. While I was occupied with this, Rachel surreptitiously took my picture, capturing for posterity a moment of the impressive self-pity one can work up while enjoying the trip of a lifetime.

The Great Thar Desert: Dawn

The only clouds Jaisalmer had seen for a month hid the stars that night, and they muddled the dawn, but the dawn was beautiful nonetheless, bleeding in from behind the gray. The sand was combed by the wind and it picked up the uneven glow of the sky. I took a few pictures.

Camel Safari Pictures: The Great Stinky Desert

So it turns out that camels fart constantly. During the whole of our two-day trek through the Great Thar Desert outside Jaisalmer, we were enveloped in a cloud of methane, much of which was generated from all the deposits left behind by other creatures on the desert floor, but to which our camels made prodigious contributions as we rode.

I'd heard that camels were uncomfortable to ride, but the abstract knowledge is nothing against the actual agony of the experience itself. You spend your first ten minutes on the back of a camel marveling at the view, the stilt-walking feel of the ride, and the comedy of the animal itself. You spend the rest of the time desperately looking forward to getting back down again.

We rode out through bean fields dried up for the summer, across a vast scrubby plain (stopping for a break at an atmospherically-abandoned village), to an isolated sand dune where we spent the night sleeping in the open air under a field of clouds that hid the spectacular stars we had been promised. We were cripplingly sore, the food was awful, the camels were surly, and there were scorpions in our blankets (okay, one scorpion). But, also, it was amazing.

The picture above, as well as the second and third photos below, are by Rachel.







More camel safari photos here.

North India Photo Highlights

Tombs of the Maharajas, outside Jaisalmer, India, at dawn

Rajasthan, Delhi, and the Taj Mahal...North India highlights from the Flickr page are here.

South India Photo Highlights

Fishing boat at Chowpatty Beach, Mumbai

It's time to revisit this blog and finish out the posts - I'll start by pointing out that we've been getting the Flickr page organized. The next few posts will be links to the "highlights" photos for each country, which now feature captions for pretty much all the pictures (if you want to see more than that, feel free, but that makes you pretty hard-core...)

So, South India highlights are here.

The Journey Ends; the Blog Goes On

We're back in Tokyo after our swing through Kyoto and the mountain town of Takayama. Tomorrow morning we fly home, on a flight I've calculated will be long enough for us to watch ten formulaic romantic comedies, should we be so inclined (and that's not even counting the connecting flight to Hong Kong). Before we head out tonight for a celebratory meal of sushi-off-a-conveyer-belt, I thought I'd post a quick update here.

As is fairly obvious, we never really had enough time to keep this blog up to date, especially where photos are concerned. After we're back in New York, I'll keep posting until the whole trip is covered. I know it's more history than blog at that point, but you might be interested, and we'll have more time to do somewhat better posts. At any rate, it'll be useful for honing any "how was your trip" questions, and you'll get some interesting first-hand reports on the sounds and smells of camels.

Can't wait to be home, amazing as this trip has been. More meaningful reflection will have to wait, as there's an automated sushi dinner calling...

Greetings from Kyoto

I'm on a coin-operated computer at the Tomato Guesthouse in Kyoto, so I don't have much time to post before I run out of change, but just a note to say we're here.

We arrived yesterday by Shinkansen, the famous bullet train. Traveling in a country you find you have time to develop all kinds of sweeping and poorly-conceived theories about its people. For instance, yesterday we were speculating on whether there is a relationship among the following facts: 1. Many people in Japan apparently live in tiny apartments with little natural light - even when it would be possible to have bigger windows, they don't - which they further subdivide into small paneled rooms; 2. The traditional Japanese restaurant likewise features a series of small, windowless paneled rooms; and 3. When traveling by train - including the famous Shinkansen - people in Japan seem to prefer to lower their window shades and shut out the scenery zooming by, the better to focus on their handhold electronic devices.

We did manage to catch a few glimpses of Mount Fuji before all of the blinds were closed, but I'm looking forward to getting a window seat on the train next time. Meanwhile, we have lots of temples to see in Kyoto. After five months in Asia we may be a little jaded to temples, but Kyoto has a fabulous history, having served as Japan's imperial capital for around a thousand years (until the mid-19th century), and we're going to appreciate it if it kills us.

Seriously, though - we had a fabulous time in Tokyo; we probably enjoyed it more than anywhere else we've been so far. It'll be interesting to see another aspect of Japan.

Confused in Japan

We have made it to Japan, which unsurprisingly is very different to anyplace else we have been so far. Staying with friends in Koenji, a happening neighborhood (where the 'real Weird people' hang　Out, we're told)　Not far from Shinjuku. So far we're still in　The mode of trying to get our heads around things,　Like the multitudes of vending machines offering a bewildering variety of canned coffees and other beverages, to the mysteries of the various devices we try to use －For instance, the toaster, or in the current case, this keyboard, which keeps trying to render my text in Japanese and is the cause of the eccentric punctuation and capitalization in this post.

Uploading more China pix to Flickr today. Will do more posts here when we have the chance.

Photos from Jaisalmer

Gateway to Jaisalmer Fort

Once again, here's a flashback to India - this is from late February...

Our last stop in Rajasthan was Jaisalmer, a desert outpost not far from the border with Pakistan (in an area bustling with military activity, especially given the heightened tensions around the time of our visit). Jaisalmer grew wealthy as a stopover for camel caravans en route between India and Persia, protected by a storybook castle rising out of the sands, inside of which narrow lanes are now filled with shops catering to the new nomads: travelers dropping in before heading further out into the desert on multi-day camel safaris (I'll describe our own trek in a separate post). Today the fort is crumbling and in need of funds for preservation and repair.

Jaisalmer Fort

Internet and vegetable vendors, Jaisalmer town - photo by Rachel.

Lane inside Jaisalmer Fort - photo by Rachel.

Tombs of the Maharajas, near Jaisalamer, sunrise.

Jaisalmer town, viewed from the fort.

More Jaisalmer photos here.

Today is our last day in China - we're heading out in a little while to see some of the Olympic architecture, adding a historical bookend to our visits to the Forbidden City and Great Wall. Tomorrow we fly to Tokyo to begin the last two weeks of our trip. I'll try to get as many photos online as possible during the next few days.

Entering China: Guangzhou

Swimming in the Pearl River, Guangzhou. Not for the chemical-sensitive.

I mentioned a little bit about Guangzhou's history in a previous post. Over the centuries it has served as one of the main (and, sometimes, one of the only) gateways for foreigners visiting China. A short drive up the Guang-Shen Expressway from Hong Kong, it continues to be a popular first stop for international tourists like us.

It certainly makes for an easy landing. We had a nice room at the Riverside International Youth Hostel (YHA: the secret to successful budget travel in China), right by the Pearl River on a street full of outdoor bars and restaurants. Just across the river was the old foreign concession on Shamian Island, with leafy car-free streets lined by French and British colonial architecture. Beyond Shamian stretches a big and vibrant city with beautiful parks and great historical sights, from the ancient through the 20th century. Getting around is easy, too, on the city's brand-new, shiny metro - which turns out to be in many respects a copy of Shanghai's system.

I'm sounding like a spokesman for the Guangzhou Booster Committee. The place was just nicer and more user-friendly than I was expecting, and we ended up staying an extra night, taking the city as a place worth seeing in its own right as opposed to just a stopover. A little bit of Guangzhou came with us when we left: our next two destinations were filled with tourists from the city and its surrounding province.

Neon sign right outside our hostel (but thankfully not outside our window), Baietan Bar Street.

Waiters lined up to receive their daily briefing, Shamian Island. We saw this at a number of places, and I couldn't help wondering if it was a holdover from the old danwei work-unit system. But I don't really know. Photo by Rachel.

Cargo by the river. Pic by Rachel.

Bust of a young Mao, Peasant Movement Institute. Guangzhou was the shared base of the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party and the Communists during their brief period of cooperation in the early 1920s. The Communists, including Mao and Zhou Enlai, used a former Confucian temple as a place to train cadres. Now it's a museum, fairly interesting despite the lack of English captions on most of the exhibits.

More Guangzhou photos here.

More from Hong Kong

Grouchy cat, near the Mid-Levels Escalator, Hong Kong. Pic by Rachel.

In some not-quite-tangible sense, Hong Kong felt big the way New York feels big. It's something about the combination of wealth, grand physical presence, and grittiness. As noted below, by night it's actually a more impressive sight than NYC. By day it's pretty cool, too. Here are a few more pictures.

Above: minibuses and apartments in Kowloon.

Shoppers at the Goldfish Market, Kowloon.

Girl on a bike, Victoria Park, Hong Kong Island.

We're currently in Beijing, our last stop in China before flying to Tokyo. We arrived this morning after a marvelously comfortable overnight journey in a soft-sleeper class high speed train. Spent the day biking around the city, which was great but which has left us extremely grimy and with bloodshot eyes and sore throats from the pollution. Tomorrow: the Great Wall.

Chinglish, Part 2

Maybe these are funnier when you actually see them instead of reading about them on a blog but I can't resist posting this updaded list of hilarious English translations we've come across in the last week or so.

Names of shops:
Monopolying Shop of Tree Rock Carving and Jade Article
Satisfied Ornament
Thousand Predetermined
Eminent Frog Porridge and Soup Company Limited

Item on a menu:
North Peasant Family with Boiler
Dumpling with Ovary and Intestines of Crad

On a packet of almonds:
Absolutely You Cannot Resist This Palatable Food

Road signs:
Do Not Drive Tiredly
Climbing Section Driving Prudently

And my favorite, this sign alerting us to a pedestrian ramp at a bus station:
Caution Landslide!

Shanghai Would Like You to Buy a Watch

The first time I visited New York was in 1989. I was 13 years old, on a student tour group seeing the sights and taking in Broadway musicals. We spent a lot of time wandering around an unreformed, pre-Disney Times Square, for which we were carefully prepped: instructed, among other things, not to engage with the shady characters selling fake Rolexes out of black briefcases on the sidewalk. One of our group's members, a slightly older girl named Angie, took the message very seriously, and when I happened to cast a glance over my shoulder at one of the hawkers, barked out an anxious reprimand: "DON'T LOOK AT THEM!"

New York used to be a place with a worldwide reputation for parting rubes from their money - from the thieves and swindlers of the 19th century to the Three-Card-Monty dealers of the 1980s, the city was traditionally flush with dangers for visiting bumpkins, immigrants, sailors, and other first-timers. I mention this because it's funny to note that Shanghai seems to be carrying on the tradition, at least in a more modest form. Of course, Shanghai was famous for waylaying people as well - the city's name became a notorious verb; what goes on now isn't anything as bad, but it's notable for having more hustle and hassle than other places we've been in China. It ranges from the merely annoying (the constant badgering by fake-watch vendors) to the infuriating (the $5 haircut that balloons to $40 when a handful of "conditioner" is thrown in), to the criminal (the common tea festival scam, which was tried on us - unsucessfully, I should add - by a trio of seemingly-friendly young "tourists from Shenzhen").

It hasn't seriously damaged our impression of Shanghai - pissed off as I was about the haircut - which is a really pleasant and fascinating city. But if Shanghai had been our first stop in China, rather than our second-to-last, we might have developed a level of cynicism about interacting with people that would have been unfair to the many honest and kind people we've met elsewhere in this country. But I guess that's just the big city for you...

UPDATE: After I wrote this post, Rachel and I walked down East Nanjing Road to People's Square, where two more groups of clean-cut youngsters tried to strike up conversations in textbook tea festival scam-style. Apparently People's Square is a notorious staging point for this swindle, but it's quite striking to see how common it is.

Jodhpur Photos

Mehrangarh Fort looming over Jodhpur's old city

So, as mentioned below, the India posts are flashbacks to an earlier phase of the trip. We arrived in Jodhpur in late February, making it a stopover before beginning the final leg of our travels through Rajasthan.

The city is astounding. Like the other cities we visited in Rajasthan, it was once the capital of a small kingdom - in this case Marwar, which is in fact the place whose name means "land of death" (below, I incorrectly attributed that meaning to Mewar, the area around Udaipur - sorry, it's been a couple of months...).

The dramatic name is derived from the fact that Jodhpur stands at the edge of the Great Thar Desert, which stretches out death-ishly to the west. The old city comprises a vast jumble of square blue houses, painted in the color traditionally associated with the homes of Brahmins (though these days, as the palace museum's audio guide disdainfully notes, "anyone can paint his house blue"). Lording over it all is Mehrangarh Fort, a massive citadel that must have brought stomach-churning despair to any potential attackers who laid eyes on it.

Jodhpur was typical of Rajasthan for us in that it was an extraordinary place to see - and it looks great in pictures - but also full of hassle and kind of an annoying place to actually be. At any rate, here are some pictures, presented hassle-free.

Another view of the fort

Jodhpur old city

The three pictures below are by Rachel.

Central market

Blue house, old city

The Omlette Shop near the Central market: best omlette I've ever had.

More Jodhpur photos here.

On the Fact that This Blog is Getting Confusing

Sorry about jumping around so much in time and place - the trouble is that it takes such an ungodly long time to upload photos to Flickr, and in many places it isn't possible to do at all even if and when we can manage some internet time. For that reason, the photo posts have turned into posts about the past.

It's like this: we were in India from January through February, and I'm still trying to finish out the photo posts from that period; after India came Thailand and Malaysia; on April 11 we flew to Hong Kong and began our trip through China, which has taken us to Shanghai, where we are now. I'm trying to include some photo posts from our month in China since those are more recent, but even those are a few weeks behind. Meanwhile, there are the occasional posts without pictures, which are usually about what's going on right now.

Clear as mud, right? I know, I know - just try to enjoy the pics....

Hong Kong by Night

Chinese cities look good at night. Even the provincial towns, we've noticed, are often glamorous, bathed in neon and digital light shows, with giant glowing Chinese characters cutting the darkness. Neon, sadly a near-dead form in New York City these days (Times Square notwithstanding), is still popular here.

The glitziest of all is Hong Kong. We first saw Hong Kong by night, and we were struck by how atmospheric it was - the dramatic landscape and architecture looming in shadows while the lights bring bright colors to the streets. Here's a sample (the second-from-last and third-from-last pics are by Rachel).









The very best sight - one of the best things I've ever seen - is the view of Hong Kong from Victoria Peak at night. Sadly, our fantastic little camera couldn't really capture the scene, but here's a good picture from Wikipedia.

More of our own Hong Kong photos here.