Travel

The Subcontinental Shift SL #10

admin

While walking from the car park to Lion Rock, an ambulance drove slowly past. That’s ominous we both thought as the child bride’s and my psyches blended together resigned to a path of mutual destruction on the mountain casting its overwhelming shadow over us. Not to get too melodramatic, ambulance or no ambulance, we are going all the way even if it kills us. Okay, not to dramatise things too much, we’ll keep going until the discretion that supposedly comes with maturity gets the better part of valour.

It’s 187 metres high and sticks straight up out of the ground and it’s apparently a 1200-1300 steps climb, depending on where you start counting. I prefer to rationalise it along the lines of 3 metres per floor which means it’s the equivalent of a 62 story building. Would I contemplate climbing the fire stairs of a 62 story building? Only if I was retarded. Apparently you can say “retarded” and “gay” now that Trump’s  been re-elected. I was offered considerable encouragement by the rather diminutive lady at my side. It was a magnificent physical effort on her part considering she has such a soft arse relative to my buns of steel.

There are historical and religious places all over this rock including some incredibly detailed and saucy wall paintings in a cave half way up a smooth vertical escarpment. How the painters (and punters) got up there in the first place in many years BC, I’ll never know. But they gave the rest of us plenty of incentive to get there to see what perky used to look like pre-implants. In Australia we have an increasing number of rocks and mountains that are off-limits because of some religious significance or whatever even though they pre-date people by millions of years and as Australia’s early indigenous people didn’t have any written languages there’s only word of mouth stories to indicate a relationship between these places and some mythical thing. The Buddhists and Hindus are much more sharing of their religious heritage.

Here, people get to experience the history and mysticism by being in amongst it although on finally getting to the top of Lion Rock, those things were furthest from my mind. I didn’t have the energy to suck a barley sugar and thank God for blood thinners. If I was going to have another stroke (or TIA or transient ischemic attack as happened the first time), this would have been the time. We both felt pretty proud of ourselves to have made it until we saw some of the others who also made it, some wearing thongs. That feeling of deflation rapidly passed when we remembered how old we are. And it extended to that feeling of smugness as you go down past the sweating, weazing climbers going the other way. Going down is much easier than going up, right? Speaking of sweat, when considering the rather sparse hand railings, mine is now mixeed with the DNA of about a million other people. So even if I was permitted to climb a very old rock monument in the centre of Australia, I’d give it a swerve because that itch has been well and truly scratched.

The Subcontinental Shift SL #9

admin

We have left Colombo and I could say “finally” but that would be unfair. Nice place but you couldn’t get a beer (or anything else of significance) from a bar or restaurant for the two days we were there thanks to Buddha. The first day we were fortified by Air India’s perfectly acceptable French fizz. The CB and I took it as a challenge to see how much we could guzzle between Delhi and Colombo. A respectable amount by Absolutely Fabulous standards I think. Religious festivals unfortunately also apply to those who have no formal interest in them so we were collateral damage. But room service was the loophole we were looking for so the CB and I pulled a couple of chairs up to our hotel room’s window and pretended we were in the bar.

To get to the Dambulla temple caves you have to climb 393 steps, all of them up until you get to the top where they turn round and go down. When we got to the turnaround point I was sweating like Mr Creosote on death row. There were five caves/temples and each one had a huge (as in length not bulk) Buddha lying down. Apparently he was dead in one of them. You could tell by the way his feet were oriented apparently. I don’t think I was the sole person who couldn’t nail it. There were also numerous identical statues of Buddha all through the caves. They must have only had the ingredients for on mold.

Having completed the challenge of getting to the top but more importantly getting back to the air conditioned car in the car park, we went to lunch looking like a couple of San Franciscan hobos. I was extra uncomfortable because I had to wear long pants. I made the mistake (or was badly advised) in assuming i would’t get into the caves unless i pulled a pair of jeans over my shorts. If it had been a Jain temple l’d have got away with wearing no pants at all, like the Jain disciples we saw striding through the heaving Varanasi market crowds in their birthday suits trying not to step on bugs. But young ladies in crutch hugging shorts got in after having a sarong type thing tied round their waist. I’d have done that.

There are just the two of us on this expedition with our driver/guide. So if things get a bit too strenuous and out of hand I can tell him to get f…d. After the Dambulla climb I was set to do that but we got to lunch and cold Lion Lager before I could. After lunch we were still struggling and I got all philosophical. The stages of our lives are generally defined by infancy, school-years, college, marriage, parenthood etc. Right now they are defined by the time it takes for the nearby fan to swing back onto me as it does it’s back and forth.

It sounds so crass but we just spent quite a few hours in a heritage listed place called Polonnaruwa which is magnificent and we saw everything. But we didn’t need to. All the temples look the same, especially from the outside – I am not taking my shoes off again. This is the attitude that emerges when you are struggling to make your legs cooperate, your shirt is soaked with sweat and you know there is something better. Little did we know but we were about 14 hours away from something infinitely worse.

The Subcontinental Shift SL #8

admin

The Child Bride and I are now in Sri Lanka. We’ve noticed one or two differences already with two standing out. In #3 of this saga, I outlined the tortuous procedure we went through to get into India. It was almost like they were agonising over whether to let these two reprobates in. Here, we bowled up to the almost deserted immigration line. We abandoned the business class line as it was occupied by a couple of dozen shouting, arm waving family members of a particular religious persuasion. Our immigration man looked at all of the items I put on his counter, took the passports, made sure it was us, stamped them and gave them back. I said “is that all?” He nodded and we headed to the baggage carousel where our bags appeared in the first half dozen or so. Way to go Sri Lanka.

So far all’s hunky dory. The drive in was on a smooth almost deserted highway. If this road was custard, the Gwalior/Orchha road mentioned previously (at length in #7) would be gristle. The roadside is mostly clean and tidy with no randomly arranged piles of dirt and broken masonry and walls don’t look like they are half built (or half demolished). In other words, while India looks partially finished, like Rome, the Sri Lankan’s have completed the job.

Colombo has quite a Singapore feel to it with lots of colonial style buildings and an increasing number of glass behemoths. I say “increasing” because these guys are relatively late to the building orgy which has seduced much of Asia. 2009 to be exact which is when the civil war ended. It’s amazing what can be achieved if you’re not spending most of your money on guns and bullets to kill each other. Consider the USA after their civil war, the Japanese and Germans after WW2 and the South Koreans after the Korean War. The Vietnamese are also going okay with their version of capitalist communism.

This blog has always tended to focus on the quirky, weird, funny or, as a last resort, the interesting. Something happened when we checked out of our hotel in Colombo which we have never experienced before and falls under all of those descriptors. We met our guide in the hotel driveway but there was a short delay in leaving. It turns out that something suspicious was found on a towel in our room. It was blood because the CB scratched her nose. I guess they had to ensure there wasn’t a body stuffed in the safe before allowing us to leave. You’ve got to think that nastier things than a drop of blood on a towel are left in hotel rooms on a regular basis. Especially this place which has just had a religious festival. Say no more.

TheSubcontinental Drift #7

admin

From space, the 100 kilometre road from Orchhra where our train is parked, to Gwalia would look like any respectable highway. Four lanes of bitumen and a well-tended median strip down the middle. Now we’re not talking about the drivers here – they are a constant all over the country. We are talking about the actual road. It seems to me that to make a bitumen road, you put down the base, put the hot bitumen on the base then roll it flat and smooth. This has been achieved successfully all over the world. Except here. This feels like driving on a cobbled road in a vehicle with concrete suspension, except the cobbles haven’t flattened and smoothed with age. They are bricks that were liberally and randomly strewn around last week with edges exposed. Passenger joints have been loosened to the extent that limbs litter the buses aisle. It’s taken about an hour to write this paragraph – line up the “t”, hit the “h”. And vehicles are charged a toll to use this road. Maybe it’s to raise money to put that top layer of bitumen down.

There’s a very impressive palace in Orchhra that was built by Shah Jahan’s (of Taj Mahal fame) father. He built it especially to welcome one of his regal mates in the area. It took 22 years to build. That’s a long time to wait to go and see a friend for a barbecue and a beer.

In #5 of this series I mentioned that to get a decent night’s sleep on this train, I’d have to drink more. This was proven without a shadow of doubt on our last night on the train. One of the great aspects of travelling with groups of people is that occasionally you meet up with kindred spirits and a great time is had by all. So it has been on this trip. The four of us gave it a nudge last night and I slept like a baby. I woke up a bit fuzzy about four minutes before the alarm was due to go off (don’t you hate that) but it was a night where rattling wheels, swaying carriages and piercing horns were shoved firmly into the background. It was also a night when we were all gifted Indian garb – saris for the women and long collarless shirt type things for the men. There was an expectation that we would all dance, Indian style. The women did but in keeping with the ancient adage that men over 40 should never dance, we didn’t.

And that’s pretty much that for the Indian leg of this expedition, unless I think of something else. Sri Lanka will begin just as soon as I see something that you need to know about.

The Subcontinental Drift #6

admin

In Agra we were subjected to another bout of economic tourism. It’s to be expected and is perfectly understandable – milk the foreigners like Old Macdonald’s cow. Incidentally the various monuments are in on this as well. Entry signs say 50 rupees for Indians, 750 rupees for foreigners. You can’t get more obvious than that. Agra is all about the Taj Mahal so local artisans make various tables and othe items requiring flat surfaces and inlay them with semi-precious stones fashioned into shapes like flowers and….other flowers. If nothing catches your fancy here, the swarm of salesmen, one of whom is always at your elbow, will usher you into the next room which has similar stuff only smaller, like drink coasters. The next room, but wait there’s more, has wooden carvings and metal things and wall hangings. The next room is souvenirs where the CB bought a fridge magnet – our contribution to the local economy. After negotiating what seemed like the local version of Ikea we felt we had to buy something just to escape.

Moving on to Varanasi then Khajuraho, we see a life and death comparison or more accurately death and life respectively. Varanasi is dominated by death with two cremation areas on the Ganges in a 7 kilometre stretch of 84 ghats or step areas down to the river from the higher up town streets. Each crematorium can handle 40-50 bodies at a time without mingling grandad with the widow on the adjacent pyre. There is an element of “life” in the process I guess, because most of the ghat area is for people to cleanse and rejuvenate themselves in the river. Judging by what we saw in the river, this would be a short cut to crematorium 1 or 2 for people like us without the immune system of a mechanical bull.

Khajuraho on the other hand, is an overflowing font of life which has manifested in every newly wed’s (okay, in the 1950’s) favourite book – the Karma Sutra. They were randy buggers back in the 12th century, getting up to all sorts of shenanigans, all carved into temple walls in more loving detail than your average Pornhub video. We won’t go into what soldiers and their horses got up to when in the field with no (human) female company to speak of. Suffice to say, carving a surprised look on a horse’s face must have taken a lot of skill.

To emphasise the extent to which pleasures of the flesh dominated procedings in Dark Ages India, there were originally 84 temples in this area of which 25 remain. That’s a lot of dirty pictures and an absolute boon for the illiterates (and everyone else) although it would.d be rather difficult to hide a hindu temple under your mattress. However wild your imagination the good burghers of Khajuraho had it covered, bearing in mind they had no electricity for more elaborate kinks. There were either a small number of energiser bunny artisans, carving day and night for years or a very large number of equally talented sculptors dedicated to their art (and various proclivities). It must have been on for young and old on Saturday nights in Khajuraho.

You’ve heard of the caste system right? It’s a bit like a family hierarchy with Dad at the top (where’s that laughter coming from) and the pet budgerigar at the bottom. Indian society is similarly structured with Brahmins (spell check tried to change that to Bradman which I guess makes sense for cricket fans of which there are a few in India) at the top and Untouchables at the bottom. These Untouchables aren’t FBI agents although Melania Trump may have felt they were bottom feeders when American FBI agents were rummaging through her knicker drawer during a Mar a Largo raid a couple of years ago. No, they are societies forgotten people. But they apparently have their own king and you can see his big yellow house on the west bank of the Ganges in Varanasi – who knew? I don’t think his name’s Fagin, but I get a very Oliver Twist taste from this.

The Subcontinental Drift #5

admin

If I’m to get a decent night’s sleep on this train, I’m going to have to drink a lot more. I swear, last night we went cross-country and there were pot-holes aplenty. Trains aren’t supposed to do that. They are supposed to glide smoothly on two polished ribbons of steel. Walking back to our room involves pinballing down narrow corridors and I think i’ve done a hammy. Don’t get me wrong, the staff are great as is the service, the food is superb, the drinks are eminently reasonable and the presentation is immaculate, but this train has square wheels. The shinkansen it aint.

We’ve just been to the Taj Mahal. As with all ancient or at least centuries old wonders of the world, the numbers associated with it are mind-blowing. It took 20000 workers 22 years, from 1631 to 1653 to build it (admittedly short by European cathedral standards) in honour of a woman who bore 14 kids in 18 years, a tradition which families in this country have striven to uphold ever since. After a marathon like that the poor lady expired from over exertion but she has a magnificent monument to her efforts which one or two catholics might be a tad jealous of.

Actually, regarding the time it took to build this thing, if the heat is anything to go by, it’s not at all surprising. It’s all we can do to drag our feet around unencumbered let alone carrying a big block of marble. But if the Taj had been built in Norway, it’d have been finished in about three weeks. Have I mentioned how hot it’s been. It’s been, should I visit one of the wonders of the world or stay in the train’s airconditioned bar, hot. It’s been Monica Bellucci hot. And I got a cold. How did that happen and how mesmerisingly ironic. Bloody climate change….or something. Actually that’s been mentioned a few times by the guides and as there are only 18 of us (excluding staff) on this train, rather that alienate the climateers I’ve kept schtum. Notwithstanding climate debates and entirely due to the heat, I’m currently surviving on muscle memory and sense of smell.

Further on health matters, we’ve been in India for well over a week and the inevitable is yet to happen for me. In a perverse way I was sort of looking forward to it because my hat’s a bit tight and when the trapdoor opens you can usually be guaranteed to drop a couple of hat sizes. But Delhi belly will be lurking I have no doubt so the wait is like what the redcoats had to endure at Rorke’s Drift. Only a matter of time before the Zulus explode into view with debilitating mayhem on their agenda. Actually, the wait’s not quite that bad.

One thing I have noticed, or haven’t to be more precise, is the complete absence of the once ubiquitous Ambassador car. When I first started coming to India in the late 1980’s, they were pretty much the only cars on the road. Now, in your typical city commute, you are totally hemmed in by Korean and Japanese cars and the same trucks and buses – they haven’t gone anywhere. But where could the Ambassadors have gone? The things were damn near indestructible. I was in an accident in one many years ago. Today the front of the car would have needed considerable TLC from your favourite panel beater. Our Ambassador back then – not a mark. The inside of the car was chaotic with papers and bags  (and people) strewn about but the outside was business as usual.

Many years ago I spent some time walking the various government ministries trying to get a number of projects underway. One of the most comical scenes I saw was when convoys of Ambassadors left a ministerial building, like a stream of Noddy cars, conveying a minister somewhere. Amidst all the flashing lights and sirens there were security people hanging out of windows waving their arms to get traffic out of the way. Good luck with that.

The Subcontinental Drift #4

admin

We’re now on our way to see some of India’s and the world’s great sites via train. Apparently one of them isn’t the Ranthambore safari park but back to that later. We’re on the Deccan Odyssey and it’s not a bad way to travel especially when you have your own double bed and your own bathroom which is bigger than the hotel bathroom we had last time we stayed in London. In that one you could take a dump and have a shower at the same time – in the conventional ways and not the way you’re thinking.

We are so spoilt it got me thinking about Graham Nash on the Marrakesh Express (the music is never far away). There wasn’t any wifi back then in the 60’s, no newspapers for days and I can’t imagine being able to get Netflix on Moroccan TV. So when we get the shits because a football score back home in Australia isn’t immediately available, we need to pause and just for a change, watch the world around us drift by. So I’ll be looking at the world through the sunset in your eyes and smelling the garden in your hair, my love.

Back to the Ranthambore safari park. Apparently it contains between 75 and 80 tigers. We saw exactly none of them. This was slightly more disappointing than our Nepal tiger safari where we saw zero tigers but did see tiger footprints and tiger crap, according to our guide. I’m coming to the view that there are actually no tigers in the wild. They are all in zoos. Add to that, our vehicle had cement wheels and my arse can’t take much more of this luxury. Bouncing around in that vehicle did have one upside however. It doubled my steps for the day and I’m claiming them simply because of the energy expended in trying not to be thrown out of the vehicle.

Having done a few cruises we are in a position to make comparisons. So this is like a cruise on land. We are on a land cruiser, if you like. Sorry Toyota but this is the real deal. We stop in a place with something worth seeing, stagger round in 40 degree heat then retreat to the airconditioned bar immediately on returning to the train/ship.

When it comes to economic tourism the CB and I have been stung five times. Okay, we’re not talking trinkets and baubles here or in my case t-shirts with I Heart Jaipur on them. We’re talking serious stuff for serious money – glass in Murano and linen in Burano (or maybe the other way round) near Venice and carpets in Turkey, Nepal and Jordan. This is entirely voluntary of course. You’re not being tricked into spending big bucks on a carpet when you’ve been negotiating for the best part of an hour. But we managed to resist in Jaipur. A silk bed duvet for $260 was a heart-beat away from  confirmation until we pulled back from the brink. That’s an extra $260 to put over the bar in my world so we are way in front and additionally don’t have a pile of material to cart all over the subcontinent. Yesterday we were also taken to an establishment ostensibly to marvel at the intricate skills of gentlemen grinding and faceting precious stones into jewellery. Then, as an afterthought, how about we buy something? A skilled and persistent salesman almost had a turquoise necklace round the CB’s neck but we triumphed again.

My name is Chris and I put sugar in my coffee this morning. I felt like an alcoholic sneaking a surreptitious vodka. Not putting sugar in coffee has been vindicated by Bobby Kennedy’s appointment as Health Secretary in the Trump administration and his relentless pursuit of processed foods. But the coffee here is bitter and I weakened.

The Indian railway system is one of the wonders of the modernish world. When there are no highways to speak of and plane tickets are prohibitively expensive for your average village dweller, the train is the answer although the authorities are starting to clamp down. A prominent sign at Jaipur station advised potential passengers not to travel on the roof of the train. Electrification would render this sign somewhat redundant generally. But if you’ve spent your life with the wind in your hair, a few wires will help prevent you falling off, right. Notwithstanding the wonder of it all, the system is not conducive to a leisurely chuff chuff through the countryside. It seems like our train has to wait for an access slot then it’s hell-for-leather to the next waiting spot, then an hour later, repeat. And when this thing hits top-speed it feels like a Cessna in a hurricane. It’s all you can do to stop being flung against a wall as Casey Jones slams another shovel of coal into the boiler and hits the accelerator.

The Subcontinental Drift#3

admin

I have stood fuming, behind people in immigration queues in India who appear to be trying to negotiate their way into the country. I get most impatient in check-in lines at the airport and in immigration lines. How hard can it be, I’m saying to myself. Have a valid passport, get a visa, fill in the immigration form, you’re in. Now it’s e-visas and we became that person who’s holding up the queue a few days back. We had our e-visas and all of the other required documentation so what could possibly go wrong. Something induced chagrin in our immigration officer but we still have no idea what. So after handing over passport, boarding pass, e-visa print-out and customs form, he did this :

1. Takes the paperwork and stares at it like it was a ransom note.
2. Consults his colleague in the next booth who shrugs – a problem shared is two problems so he’s not interested.
3. Gets up and walks off. Not a good sign. Fortunately he didn’t return with an officious looking gentleman in uniform, just a worried look.
4. Re-takes his seat and continues tapping his computer and shuffling paper.
5. Stamps passport – a good sign but then…
6. Continues to scratch his head and stare intently at the computer screen and the paperwork yet again.
7. Hands everything back without having said a word or even looking at me during the whole process. I say “thank you sir”, step into India and hope I don’t have to step back into non-nationality limbo (remember, we’ve left Australia) to rescue the Child Bride..
8. Repeats with CB’s paperwork.

At least we didn’t have to wait for our luggage to appear. After this rigmarole it was rotating on the carousel when we got there.

So Trump’s new tariff regime has been announced. I think our hotel here in Delhi must think we’re Americans because our bar bill last night had 4 taxes attached. S.C. was 8%, CGST was 9%, SGST was 9% and DVAT was 25%. I don’t know what any of those are apart from variations on consumption taxes but it increased the bill by about 30% which, apart from being rather excessive, doesn’t appear to make mathematical sense until you realise that the two 9%’s were 9% of the 8%. So the original bill of 6050 rupees became 8133.62. Our government, with only a 10% GST are obviously rank amateurs, especially at milking foreigners.

My first visit to India was 1986 and I haven’t been back since 2013 so it’s changed a bit. The bit we have seen so far in Delhi including the airport, has changed in some fairly fundamental ways especially with their Metro rail system. The place has evolved from the East India Company to the Jetsons. Indians have always been pretty tech savvy – look who runs or at least drives a big chunk of Silicon Valley. But whilst your average Indian can code a moon launch, ask them to drive between two white lines and see how far you get. Those lines represent wasted paint; nothing more, nothing less. How else do you convert three lanes into five if you can’t ignore those pesky lines.

As Geoffrey Chaucer sagely observed in 1395, “time and tide wait for no man”, and neither does Indian traffic. As I remember, the traffic rules aren’t. They’re just for guidance and once you get past vaguely sticking to the jeft side of the road, you ‘re on your own. I couldn’t help notice the dual speed limits – 70km/hr for cars and 40km/hr for trucks….on the same road. Now there’s a recipe for disaster. Not quite as bad as the urban myth about Sweden switching from driving on the left side of the road to the right in 1967 – cars this weekend, trucks and buses next weekend. If you’ve seen pictures of the traffic on the actual fateful day you’ll notice vehicles being hit from all directions. It’s why Volvos are so boxy. What did really cause a small problem in Sweden was that the buses all had doors on the left side so stepping off said bus into traffic mayhem was somewhat problematic I would think.

The Subcontinental Drift #2

admin

Man, Singapore has changed over the decades I’ve been visiting and you especially notice if you haven’t been for a while. It now epitomises what can only be described as architectural porn. If Lily Philips and Bonnie Blue were buildings, they’d be here. Men would be queuing up at their various entrances to come inside. These days the newer buildings especially, are extravagant and extroverted and for a modest fee you can go all of the way… to the top. At this point (because i just deleted a whole lot of R18+ material) I’m reminded of that famous joke – a beautiful woman walks into a bar and asks the barman for a double entendre, so he gives her one. And I can hear Led Zeppelin singing songs from In Through The Out Door. That’s enough; time to move on.

Do you know how hard it is to drive in Singapore? Okay, it’s not that the traffic is like it is in Boston (scroll down a few pages to find out) but it’s really hard to be able to drive in Singapore. The government wants to keep the traffic moving and the fewer cars there are on the road, the more room there is for the buses. As I have said before, if you close your eyes and step into the road in Hong Kong you’ll get hit by a taxi or a Rolls Royce (okay, maybe not as probable now as 25 years ago). In Singapore you’ll be hit by a single decker or double decker bus. Only a certain number of cars are licensed at any one time so when a slot becomes available,  it’s auctioned. So how did that guy driving the clapped out Honda Civic afford the 90 grand for a certificate to drive before even buying his car. Oh…that does explain it.

When you visit Singapore, Raffles Hotel is a venue for tourist pilgrimage. Not so much the hotel itself, where dressing for dinner requires a cream linen jacket, jodhpurs, spurs and pith helmet, but the Long Bar which much to the chagrin of visiting colonels, accommodates shorts, t-shirts and thongs (of the foot variety). But you are made to pay for these indiscretions because the management knows you are only there to sample the famous Singapore Sling so one for me and one for the child bride plus GST plus service charge sets you back cents short of a ton. And that’s Singapore dollars which used to be worth somewhat less than the Aussie and are now worth 20% more. Thanks Albo. The only compensation (and reasonably priced nourishment ie free) was peanuts still in the shell. On relieving the nut of its outer layer, said layer is discarded on to the floor – tradition, old boy.

On our way back from Raffles to our lodgings, we happened upon a bar/restaurant that looked suitable for our custom. It was serving Taiwanese cuisine which is a bit too Cantonese for my liking but the menu looked okay so we went in. After dozens of trips to Taiwan you can get used to anything. A pint of Heineken for me and a stubby of Tiger for the CB and we were set. It was a good sized establishment but there was no one else in there, only us. The bar down the street was packed. Was there an imminent Chinese strike on the cards which we hadn’t been told about? There wasn’t. You would have heard about it.

And now, in the immortal words of Monty Python, for something completely different. The worst thing that can happen to you on the road is to have your credit card stopped by your bank. It happened to us yesterday. This has happened to me a few times in my travels. For example, a night out with my marketing team in London many years ago, in a less than salubrious establishment, resulted in a frantic phone call from the CB at some ungodly hour when I was still barely capable of lying down without falling over. The supermarket had rejected her card and apparently our bank was a little miffed. So this afternoon a couple of texts from the bank set off alarm bells. I was pretty sure it wasn’t my fault this time but what??? This is Singapore and everyone is scrupulously honest, right. It turns out, a card which I thought had expired years ago and been replaced, was still active and someone was using it. Apparently I am now a member of the National Gallery of Victoria. WTFingF. After being on hold for 15 minutes on an International call, it was eventually sorted

What is it with us and bars? If you’ve read about our recent trek through north-east America and Canada, you’ll know that not everyone takes these things anywhere near as seriously as I do. We’re talking Vince Lombardi’s seriousness about winning serious. So we’re in a perfectly respectable hotel in Singapore with a perfectly adequate lobby bar. Call me old fashioned but one thing expected of bars, especially with happy hour draining away, is that there will be someone behind the bar to do what people behind bars normally do for people in front of bars. So for two consecutive nights I’ve had to go to the front desk and politely ask, on behalf of us and other patrons, the whereabouts of the barman. Each time they’ve tracked him down long enough to pour a couple of drinks then promptly f.. off again. There’s a much better party going on somewhere else obviously. And while we’re on this topic, we just got on our flight for which we have lashed out to sit up the front and they are serving Singapore Slings. For nothing. More champagne, my dear. That can either be a question addressed to the child bride or a statement addressed to the flight attendant.

The Subcontinental Drift #1

admin

I used to have a love-hate relationship with India – I hated going and I loved leaving. But after 80 or so visits, with 1993 being the peak with nine, and about a year of my life spent there all up, I think I’m finally getting the hang of the place.

After a life snuggled up in the bosom of Western civilisation, my first experience of Madras as it was then called, was queuing up on the airport tarmac, patiently waiting for my turn at the single immigration desk. The door out of customs emptied us into the car-park where I was immediately identified by my then agent and now great friend who whisked me through the dark but crowded and noisy streets to a Taj hotel where I was introduced to something the Indians excel at – hotel bars. If you like subdued lighting, wood panelling and leather chairs, join the club. I always felt like I needed to be wearing a tux and smoking a cigar when sitting in one of these places, ordering my dry Martini, shaken not stirred. They are about as far away from the ubiquitous slums as it is possible to get.

But back to trip number one. I had decided that the food was going to kill me so during the ten or so days I was there, I subsisted on fried chicken, toast and beer, apart from the last meal. The last stop before going to the airport to leave was a revolving rooftop Chinese restaurant in Bombay, as it was then called. The Asian gentleman throwing up into a bathroom sink should have given a clue so by the time I reached Singapore, my body was the equivalent of a supermarket shopping trolley – it just wasn’t cooperating with my brain so all the way back to Brisbane I sat motionless staring straight ahead. If I moved my eyes above or below the horizontal I experienced what it must feel like riding a tumble dryer – rather odd actually. Mind over matter got me out of that plane and I have only ever once since felt worse, courtesy of a dodgy prawn in Seoul. That’s a story for another day. Incidentally I am now a slavish devotee of Indian food and have graduated to putting hot chillies in green salads. So I love hot food but will admit to being beaten by it twice; once in Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and once in Singleton in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. That night I had to saw the top of my head off to let the fire out and I swear my teeth and hair were sweating.

A friend once told me that you can tell how “civilised” a place is if you fly in at night and look down at the lights. If the streets and houses are arranged in reasonably predictable rows, you’re coming into a place with some semblance at least, of planning. If the lights appear to have spread like mold with just the occasional waving ribbon of flickering light, like a vein in cheese, you’re in for an interesting time. Not criticising here. Just saying. The culture shock comes in many guises. There’re the wash-your-eyes-out-with-bleach moments which I won’t go into right now (think of the children) and there are moments of incredulity like a hotel breakfast for three for the equivalent of $6. Admittedly that was before the ravages of 1990’s and more recent inflation, but seriously… I’m still expecting to be shirt-fronted by something entirely unexpected but the more mundane, like a man on an elephant patiently waiting for the traffic lights to change will be contemplated with a stifled yawn.

We won’t be restricting ourselves to India on this trip. Why fly over places when you can stop over. This doesn’t apply to the USA of course where the snobs living on the East Coast or the Left coast consider the rest of the place to be redneck flyover country. We don’t consider Singapore to be even a little bit redneck so will be stopping there to look at all of that glass. We wanted to go to the Maldives also so Sri Lanka gets a guernsey. And joy of joys, it’s not international cricket season although Australia has beaten both India and Sri Lanka recently so I would have bragging rights. I still expect cricket to come up in conversation but only every time we speak to the locals.

We’re on our way to Singers now so see you at #2.