Culture shock... in reverse

Getting back to the UK happened in a blur – I’d booked the plane ticket on the Saturday, was on the plane on Sunday after a taxi ride to Delhi through the night from Bhagsu, and got into Ipswich on Sunday night. The journey was easy until I got back to the UK – the trains from London to Ipswich were up the swanny again because of engineering works, so I had to get a replacement bus. All this time I hardly slept, so I was in a daze by the time I got here.

The taxi from Bhagsu to Delhi was an experience – the driver had, thanks to Anil at Sky Pie, been given instructions to get me to Delhi Airport as fast as humanly possible – and he did. I shared the cab with Fritz, a bloke from the guest house, and we hardly slept as the car was doing a hundred most of the way and the driver was weaving in and out of traffic. The car had a blow-out at one point, and I was starting to think that the forces of good were intervening for our benefit when he pulled into a roadside dhaba with the tyre flapping on the wheel, only to see a man sleeping next to a pile of tyres, a pump and a load of repair kit. It’s like getting a blow-out on the M1 and the lay-by you pull into having a Kwik Fit – except this Kwik Fit was staffed by one man sleeping on a mattress, and equipped with a gas canister, a mallet and a tub of water to try and work out where the leak was coming from by the light of a candle. After an early-morning search through the suburbs of Delhi to pick up my plane ticket from one of the employees of the travel agency, I was at the airport with hours to spare, waiting in a cavernous visitor’s lounge with no-one for company but a bunch of Indian men watching the cricket on TV, and nothing to drink but piss-poor chai.

I was served in Delhi Airport by a man with possibly The Most Pointless Job in the World – a toilet pointer. While waiting to board the plane, I walked into the gents where the man, with a big welcoming smile on his face, sprang out of his chair and pointed at the toilet so I knew where to go. Then when I came out he pointed at the sink for me. Then he pointed at the towels when I’d washed my hands. He obviously wasn’t doing this out of the goodness of his heart, helping confused tourists who have never been in a public lavatory before, so I tipped him ten rupees. I sort of felt sorry for him - working as a bog troll is surely a low point in anyone’s career.

The flight to London, with Virgin Atlantic, was really comfortable – a front-row seat with masses of legroom, constantly being fed and watered (roast chicken, fruit cake, cheese and crackers, vodka and tonic, white wine), and a cool stewardess called Natalie, even though the miserable cow behind me wouldn’t let me recline my seat, and I had to resist the urge to punch a young boy who kept pulling my TV monitor around. The boy’s mother was whining at Natalie as it seems Virgin Atlantic, as far as she was concerned, were responsible for providing her little boy with a Fun Pack for the flight – one of those cheap bags of colouring-in books and plastic toys that keep children entertained for precisely the amount of time it takes to empty the contents of the pack all over the floor. Natalie tried explaining that they only provided Fun Packs for kids on the outbound journey from London, and at this point I was thinking of offering to knock the kid out if that would help.

I’m going to be able to provide scores on the free packs they give away on flights by the time this trip is over – Virgin gave me a toothbrush and toothpaste, an eye mask, ear plugs, face towel, and a pen. I put the lot in my bag even if I didn’t use them, the same way you collect sachets of coffee from hotel rooms, because even if you never use them, they’re free aren’t they?

I’ve experienced a sort of culture shock in reverse after getting back to the UK. Everything seems unbelievably clean. Cows do not wander the streets. Dogs are on leads. Suffolk is as flat as a pancake and as cool as a cucumber. Tea is bland. Cars don’t look and drive like the Anthill Mob trying to catch up with Penelope Pitstop. Everything is unbelievably expensive. Warning signs are everywhere in case stupid people walk into ponds and sue the pond owner with the aid of some scumbag ambulance-chasing lawyer. I’m being a travel bore already, extolling the virtues of one of the poorest, most corrupt nations on the planet and dismissing my home country as an overpriced, homogenised nanny state designed for stupid people. It’s all very confusing.

Meanwhile, it’s a week since I got back to the UK, and it’s been spent mostly with the family, around Kate. I will be going back to India and continuing the trip, but at the moment, we're all staying here.

Going home

My favourite quote is a song lyric, from John Lennon's song Beautiful Boy - "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans". I'm going to be back in London tomorrow evening. My cousin Kate is extremely ill, and the family are getting together - the trip is going on hold for the moment.

More soon.

Cobblers and the Meaning of Life

Sunset no. 3,000,001
Originally uploaded by Natmandu.

Some people go to India to find themselves, apparently. They go to do Yoga, Reiki, get Ayurvedic massage, or do a 'retreat'. People have all sorts of expectations of the place. Some people come because they heard it was a 'challenging' place to be, it was cheap, or it's on the traveller's trail, and they know they can wear crochet and discuss the meaning of life with people of many nationalities while smoking joints the size of battleship cannons. Some people seem to be into poverty tourism, only feeling really happy if they've secured a piece of floor for twenty rupees a night sleeping on a lumpy straw mattress above an open sewer in the middle of a leper colony - all in the name of an 'authentic' Indian experience. Some people just disappear up the side of a mountain and hide in a hut for six months. Some of the more 'out there' reasons seem to bring people to mountainous places like McLeod Ganj, Rishikesh and Manali - there's something about steep gradients that seems more inspirational to people.

All of the above are fair enough reasons to want to come, not all of them are mine. For all the cool people I've met since I've been here, I've met just as many fruitcakes. You hear things in conversation like "yeah, it's a totally different energy there", "this exercise is designed to release energy from your spleen chakra", "I'm not totally comfortable with being out in public this morning, I haven't said my commitments yet", and liberal use of the word 'Shanti' (Hindi for 'Peace') to describe guest houses, restaurants, dogs, cars, trucks, seats, clothing, people and pretty much anything else.

An Indian chap I was just talking with described the word 'Shanti' as summing up the Indian attitude to life - that where, in the West, life is frenetic and people want everything yesterday, in India your train could be five minutes late or five days late, but it doesn't matter if everyone has all the time in the world. 'Shanti' is a great word in this respect, but in the hands of some people it comes across as 'This is the only Hindi this weekend hippy knows so I'm going to use it every other word'.

The people who come here expecting all the answers to Life, the Universe and Everything are possibly no more likely to find them here than anywhere else, but there's certainly an industry here to help them try. As soon as a wide-eyed girl in a sarong and a headscarf walks into town with a backpack and a fat travel wallet, there must be a few people around rubbing their hands with glee. I've met some genuinely nice people offering courses in yoga and massage, some sweet and kind 'babas' (Indian term for respected older men), and all sorts of other people who may be holy or just offering people something different - but for all of those people there are as many, if not more, that have the fake smiles of salesmen, TV evangelists, who ask for money to help support their ashram before pulling out a packet of Marlboro and lighting up while answering their mobile.

Money is only one thing people stand to lose - their sanity is another. Placing yourself in the hands of some of these people seems foolhardy, when they are offering healing and other 'services' that are mentally, and possibly physically, very intimate. And yet people do it, and take it very seriously.

Each to their own, I suppose.

"Go with the flow"

There's always plenty of advice available when you talk about going travelling. It's usually the only time that people who've been travelling actually talk about it, as it seems that you get back from wherever you've been to, talk about your travels for a little while, and then shut up and keep it all to yourself for fear of being a travel bore. The advice still comes when you're actually travelling, often whether you asked for it or not ("oh yeah, you've got to go there, it's, like, so chilled" et cetera).

Out of all the advice I had before I came away, and while I've been in India, the one piece of advice that has been most useful is "Go with the flow", particularly lately. I was supposed to be in Hong Kong now - but couldn't get on the flight, so I'm still in India, probably until later this month. After deliberating over whether to head off somewhere else, I decided to stay in Bhagsu because I like it here. After two months of moving constantly from one place to the next and feeling the wrench of leaving a place I liked, I decided to stick around. Now I'm here for a bit longer I've got into a couple of things, so my time in Bhagsu wasn't all used on idling. I've started a course on Tibetan massage, and I'm teaching English to a Tibetan monk.

Tibetan massage is a combination of therapeutic and relaxation massage techniques which, unlike Ayurvedic massage, doesn't use so much oil you end up feeling like a piece of marinated meat, and so far I've learned some killer techniques on the foot and the legs, with the back coming up this evening. After the first lesson, I bought some 'massage pants' - a pair of tight-clinging underpants - as I was wearing boxer shorts for the first lesson and had to get my trousers off for my partner to try leg massages on me, and was paranoid that I'd have bits popping out.

My English-learning monk is called Lobsang - he's 31, from a monastery in Karnataka. He's been learning English for about four days, so you could say his vocabulary is a bit limited. So far we've done numbers, letters of the alphabet, days of the week, and parts of the body. By the time we're done I'm hoping we'll have covered Shakespeare, elementary particle physics, and the recipes of Delia Smith.

Sorry no pics for a while now - my camera had a paddy the other day and I lost about 150 pictures from the recent part of the trip. This is gutting, but most of them are now on Flickr, and safe. Pictures I've lost forever include a photo of Kai and Laura looking disgustingly beautiful, Anil cooking his secret-recipe coconut cake, two mongooses copulating, and Caesar the dog upside down with his legs in the air. These jewels are gone, but I hope to add more soon.

How not to see the Dalai Lama, pt I

Arrive at temple where Dalai Lama has been giving his lessons. Large Tibetan security guard with kindly face who is still no doubt more than capable of kicking my arse from here to next week stands up.
"Hello"
"Hello. The Dalai Lama is giving his last day of teachings today, yes?"
"Yes."
"Is he here at all tomorrow or the day after?"
"Yes, the day after tomorrow. Would you like to come in now?"
"Oh no, thank you. I'll see if I can come back in the day after tomorrow.". This is partly because security regulations stipulate that you aren't allowed into the temple on teaching days if you have in your possession guns, phones, cameras or knives. I have all of the above in my day pack except a gun. "Do I need to register?"
"Yes."
"OK thanks, goodbye.". Think to myself, what a nice man.
Go to the Dalai Lama's security office to register my name. One man is typing a form in triplicate, very slowly. The room is full of Tibetans. Wait half an hour. The room starts to empty, with the single man pointing people towards the door. I sit down and wait. He says to me, "Can you go please". I leave the room. He locks the door.
I ask him, "Is it possible to register to see the Dalai Lama the day after tomorrow?"
"No, teachings finished today."
"A man at the temple told me he would be here the day after tomorrow."
"No, we get no instructions about that."

Stay tuned for the next installment in How Not to See the Dalai Lama. I bet Micheal Palin didn't have to go through this.