Holi Cow!

I’ll confess I’d never actually heard of Holi before I arrived in India. The Hindu ‘festival of colours’ seems to be celebrated by people throwing coloured powder at each other, and filling water pistols full of neon-tinged water, before randomly attacking all and sundry. That’s my kind of festival!

So, earlier this year (March to be precise) I was working in Delhi, and Holi was at the end of my first week’s work. I thought that I’d rely on my trusty friend Couch Surfing (there’ll be a LOT more articles about that in future, I’m becoming quite evangelical about it) to hook me up. And hook me up it did, with a festival called Holi Cow, at a ‘secret’ (it wasn’t really that secret) ‘farmhouse’ (it was in a more rural area, but I didn’t see any signs of an attached farm) in ‘Chatterpur’ (no need for brackets for that one).

Moooooooo

So I bought my ticket from a café coincidentally near work (handy!) and headed over there on Sunday. Mission 1. Finding it. Taxi drivers in Delhi seem to have a ‘best guess’ approach to navigation, and no matter what you ask them before you get in, they will always confirm that of course they know where they’re going, and then about ten minutes later confirm they’re actually lost and can you guide them. Certainly a phenomenon not unique to India that one. After we meandered aimlessly around rural Delhi for a while I cheated and got my phone out, activated the maps and GPS and guided us in. After a short and very chaotic queue I was given a wrist-band and a small, transparent, sealable plastic bag for my valuables and ushered into the grounds of the house. It took less than three seconds for somebody to smear my hair and face with what I am going to poetically describe as ‘purple stuff’.

Colour! Everywhere!

Welcome to Holi! For the following hours I wandered around talking to strangers, drinking, eating, listening to the live music that was on and all the while becoming more and more like Joseph, only he needed a jacket for all his colours, whereas mine were all over me. In your face Technicolor Dreamcoat!

There was a really fascinating mix of people there, locals (loose term here, I met people from all over India), travellers, short-term workers like myself, embassy staff, ex-pats, all with a common goal of letting their hair down and just having a plain old celebration – getting colourfully messy in the process. And speaking of the colours, I didn’t find out til afterwards that they are generally very toxic – are often lead or asbestos based (wait, did I say asbestos? Yes, I DID say asbestos…) and have been known to cause everything from renal failure to dermatitis to blindness. Oh. Never mind.

By the time the police came to break it up in the early evening, everybody was totally covered in these pinks, greens, reds, oranges, purples and silvers – and there’s something symbolically nice about that I think. Despite the broad number of nationalities represented, the number of different skin colours on display, basically everybody looked the same. And I think that’s a great message, because at the end of the day, heritage and culture and tradition is a wonderful thing, but behind it all is the people. We might look different, talk different languages, believe in different Gods (or none), have different hobbies, networks, jobs, dreams and expectations, but at the end of the day? People is people. Always have been, always will be. And that’s my take-home message d’jour.

Get That India!

Well, well, well.
Wellity, wellity, wellity.
Seems I haven't posted to my blog for a while. And I have much to share, dear reader, so sit back and enjoy/endure some updates. Topic: India.

Gratuitous use of Taj Mahal shot? Done! And only 39 words in...

If you're planning a trip to India, it's rather hard to know where to start. If you just look at it on a map, it is a massive place. Truly gigantic.

Fig 1. India vs Moon. True story*

Then you go. And come back. And then you realise that actually trying to write something about it is even harder than deciding where to go. If you've seen the "Incredible India" tourist board advert with the guy trying to write the postcard, well I feel exactly like him. I have literally hundreds of notes about tiny little things that happened when I was there that I wanted to write about. Lots of them I wrote on my phone. Some of them when I was drunk, so they say things like "Blog. REMEMBER THIS. Sikh guy in corner smoking. Nightclub. Lasers??" I'm not sure what that meant. Fortunately there were some that were more coherent. I'll try and fashion some of them into articles over the next few weeks...

Sikhs + lasers + beer + bhangra = AWWW YEAHH!!

So, I guess this post is about initial impressions. So, let's start easy. India is amazing. Hands down one of the most interesting, vibrant, exciting and just plain different places I've ever been. Great food, incredible culture and history, amazing people and beautiful scenery. Bustling cities, arid deserts, stunning tropical beaches, dizzyingly high mountains. Seems to be everything there, really.

I spent a lot of my time in a place called Gurgaon just outside Delhi. Twenty years ago I don't think there was much there, just a small satellite town of the sprawling metropolis that is New Delhi. But then it exploded into being a business district. Shiny steel and glass towers rise up from every corner, the building signage is like a who's who of international commerce. The local infrastructure is struggling to keep up – visibly straining under the pressure. Roads are congested, half-built, horns sound constantly, rikshaws ride the wrong way up pavements. Power outages are intermittent as the grid groans under peak-time surge, adding an almost daily blackout to daily routine. There are almost no street lights. The roads have more cracks and potholes than a 15 year old who works at McDonalds and is about equidistant from last and next (and infrequent) shower visits.

Gurgaon. That wonky building was where I worked. "Worked"

But despite all this, I liked it. You read a lot in the news about India being a 'booming economy this', 'next super-power that', but being somewhere like this, you can almost feel like it's happening right in front of your eyes. I'm fairly sure a new thirty storey building went up behind my back one day when I wasn't looking. Sneaky...

There's a rather new and swanky metro that connects Gurgaon with New Delhi proper, and it was comparable to riding similar systems in any other major city in the world. Air-conditioned, clean, frequent and cheap. Oh, and over-crowded. It was like rush-hour on the London Underground at times, but worse, and without the British penchant for organised queueing. Still, better than spending 2 hours sitting in traffic!

New Delhi itself? I'll confess, not a massive fan. Didn't see all that much of it (what with the working all day long, it was really only weekends I had to explore), but the best thing I think I did was stumble around Chandi Chowk, a huge network of narrow windy streets where every conceivable opening is a 'shop' (I use that term loosely), but people selling everything you can imagine. Everything. I saw about forty or fifty sellers in a row who sold nothing but glass beads used for making jewellery, hundreds of tinkers, some tailors (didn't see any soldiers or sailors in there though I'm afraid), welders, weighers, transporters, grocers. Riskhaws and bicycles everywhere. And cows. Many, many cows roaming the streets steadily, minding their own business for the most part, occasionally stopping to snack on some poor store-holder's livelihood. And although they did move steadily, when a one tonne cow is pushing you into a corner as an auto-rikshaw tries to squeeze past it, you'd better get out of the way quickly. Moo!

OK, I think writing this has given me some more clarity on what else I want to put down on paper to try and make some sense out of India. There'll have to be an article on cricket. On Holi. On trains, planes, automobiles, rikshaws, boats and bikes. On food. I think that'll do to begin with... watch this space, it's India shaped, and I'm going to try and fill in a few tiny little parts of it...

Sunset over Mumbai. Lovely.

*I originally thought this was a totally flippant comparison. It really isn't. The moon's diameter is about 3500km and the length of India, a shade over 3000km. So they're basically the same size.

You Know You Travel Too Much When...

You know you travel too much when:

• You use your suitcase as your de facto wardrobe even when you’re at home

• The default state of your fridge/freezer is off

• You lose something and the best you can do when narrowing it down is “It’s in Europe... I think”

• The taxi company know you so well that all you need to do is ring their number and say “Yes” three times in a row to get to the airport

• You can navigate your way through airport security checks about 70% quicker than everybody else because you have a seamless routine for it which begins about 5 minutes before you even get to the security area. Sometimes when I’m checking in the nice check-in girl sees me taking off my belt and gets scared. Or maybe excited! Nope, definitely scared

• Your watch, phone and computer are all in different time zones. None of them are your current time zone

It's eleventy past September! I'm late!

• It’s six weeks into the year and the council still haven’t emptied half of your bins because you’re never there to put them out according to their complex schedule calculated by using a freaking super-computer

• Your high level of laptop usage at strange hours of the day puts you in the same classification as jobless, basement-bound internet pornographers

• You have 1,000,000 times as many airline/hotel points as you have Tesco Clubcard points

• You get mail offering you credit cards in Turkish

• It annoys you constantly that of all the public transport systems in the world, you can only use your Oyster card in London

• The police put a note through your letterbox three times while you’re away saying:

1) Your lights were off, buy a timer to deter burglars
2) No, really, we said buy a timer!
3) Erm... are you dead?

"In hindsight, Mr Coroner, perhaps a knock on
the door would have been a more effective test..."

• It becomes impossible to have a conversation with anyone without saying “That reminds me of when I was in ||random foreign place||”, which everybody hates

• Your electricity company don’t believe the meter reading you submitted, suspect you of defrauding them, and send somebody round to check it

I'd welcome any additions in the comments section. I'm sure some of you have got things to share...

Why my timing sucks...

Wednesday December 28th, UK

So, I did start a travel blog. Hooray for me. And now I’m not doing any travelling again for a few months. Great timing. OK, well, I’m going to Poland tomorrow actually, but apart from that, nothing planned. It’s a bit strange. I've spent most of the past 18 months either ‘being’ somewhere or ‘preparing’ to be somewhere (which involves thinking about packing and pretending to do work preparation, and then leaving it all til the last minute, and getting in a big panic). So, instead I'm going to consider some personal ‘records’ I have broken this year. Plus that means I get to do some counting with real live numbers.

They're alive!

I would like you to think of this post as that quintessential childhood present - yet another edition of the Guinness Book of Records. An elderly relative got you it. You don’t want it. It’s hardback and impossible to read without an industrial crane and some winching equipment to hold it up. Don’t try and read it in bed whatever you do, more than 9000 children a year are injured in hardback book related injuries. The big problem though with the GBOR is that you just don’t care how many eggs someone blind-folded can balance on their chin while doing a hand-stand, while fencing with a tiger, while completing a Rubik’s Cube with their feet. And mainly, mainly, hardly any of the records ever change each year. Must be a terrifying job editing GBOR. You can imagine the publisher saying ‘OK, let’s have a new angle this year! What have you got for me?’ and the poor editor saying ‘Well... err... actually nothing has really changed since last year. Maybe we’ll just publish the same book again, with some new pictures. We can put Usain Bolt on the cover though!’ Which incidentally, works every day for The Daily Mail, only with rotating images of ‘foreign things that are bad’ instead of Usain Bolt. Although, he was on the cover of The Daily Mail after the last Olympics in fairness.

You should have seen the online comments

board from this article...

Anyway, this blog is the whimsical internet version of the hard-back GBOR 2011 (and don’t even get me started on that, how can the 2011 edition be out all ready? It was published on September 16th 2010! Unless one of the Records broken this year is the shattering of time-space laws to allow time travel that is SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE!)

Enough waffling for now; here are some personal records what I have done broken this year:

• Travelled more than 9000 miles by train. This is a long way. Further than I have ever travelled by train before. It’s actually enough to get you to the moon and back if trains could somehow go vertically instead of horizontally. Amazing isn’t it? It’s also utter rubbish (the moon part), the moon is a LONG way away! Don’t think that just because Tom Hanks almost made it there that it’s close.
• Flown circa 63,500 miles. That’s 2.5 times around the Earth. Did you know if you got a really fast plane (and I mean REALLY fast, like 1000 MPH) and you could refuel it in mid-air you could run away from the sun by flying round the Earth, living in eternal daylight? Or you could move to the top of Scandinavia for a bit during summer cos, you know, that’s a lot cheaper.
• My carbon footprint is a shocking 105 tonnes of CO2 per annum. I need to plant more than 5000 trees to offset it. 100 tonnes of weight is around 25 Indian elephants. Imagine 25 elephants, all made from carbon. Dark as the night and charging at you, their jet-black tusks extinguishing all light and hope. Pretty terrifying, huh?
• Slept around 220 nights in hotels meaning I could potentially have stolen: 220 bars of soap, 44 litres of shampoo and more than 100 metres of cotton from sewing kits. It also means I’ve spent around 7 hours of this year just checking in and out of hotels. Check in. Check out. Check in. Check out. It’s like a very shit corporate version of The Karate Kid, where Mr Miyagi is played by Alan Sugar. Think about it. But not for too long.
• It would take me more than 5 years to walk the distance I have travelled in 2010 (at 4 mph, 10 hours a day, every single day). I’m too lazy for that, but no doubt Ranulph Fiennes could do it!
• I have trained more than 200 people face to face. Almost all of them cool. Aren’t people great? Yes they are.
• I’ve drunk just over 1,000 pints of beer. The best? Hmmm... Zywiec maybe? The worst? Can’t remember. What does that tell you about the state of my memory, and my liver, and my memory!
• Sent more than 5,000 emails. How ridiculous is that? Admittedly, most of them contained pictures of a whimsical nature, or facts about cats BUT STILL!

Interesting facts huh? I think so. Ish. With that in mind I can craft some New Year Resolutions for 2011.

I will:

• Try and fly less, but I don’t think that’ll work, so instead I will start saving to buy some farm land in the future that I can then turn into a forest. Maybe in later life I will live there amongst the trees, like a 21^st century Peter Pan. Or an Ewok!
• Try and drink less. Scoff. Quintessential resolution engaged! We’ll see how that works out.
• Not even consider walking instead of flying or getting the train. That would be stupid.
• Steal everything from hotels I can get my hands on.
• Apply the Pareto principle to my email sending (but funny emails are unaffected by this change).

Done.

It's about time...

Tuesday November 30th, Bangkok

It’s about time I started a blog really. All this travelling around I do and I never document anything. When I’m old and ridden with disease from all my international debauchery it would be nice to have a record. Obviously that’s a joke.

I think that about sets the journalistic standard for this blog...

I’m not that organised enough to approach this with any structure, so I’m just go to splurge random musings. I don’t really expect anyone to be that interested or to wait avidly for new updates, but you know, some of you may find it interesting. Besides, I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for me. I don’t even like you.

So, first post, how exciting. And first post has an exotic location too, well, it’s an airport which is not really that exotic, but it is in Bangkok. I have just arrived from the Philippines and a long weekend in Boracay, which I guess is the main subject for this entry...

So, Boracay. What an awesome place, and the perfect contrast to my two weeks working in bustling Manila. No-one in Boracay bustles. Unless you can bustle a beer. Or a surfboard. Or another beer. After a fortnight of eating cheeseboards at 3am in the lobbies of 5 star hotels came to an end, and after a couple of hastily grabbed hours of sleep (and some even hastier packing) it was off for an early flight on Saturday morning. Carrier de jour? Cebu Pacific for the one hour flight on a little prop plane over to Caticlan (Boracay is too little to have an airport, how cute). It was a pretty fun flight in the end. Anyone who’s flown Cebu Pacific before will know of their penchant for playing mid-air games with prizes (and for dancing the safety briefing, although they didn’t do that on my flights with them). Can you imagine Ryanair playing games on their flights? Other than their obligatory game of ‘the customer is a prick’ of course. And who’d be without that? Not me. Wait, yes, me.

Caticlan ‘airport’ (it’s just about 1000 yards of straight(ish), flat(ish) tarmac, think Fisher Price ‘My First Airport’) was reached just as a tropical downpour started, but fortunately Cebu Pacific provide umbrellas for the 50 yard walk to the terminal from the plane. How lovely! Again, I’m pretty sure if Ryanair thought to do this there would be a £5 umbrella surcharge (£8 unless you booked in advance, you just have to guess if it might be raining or not don’t you. You should know that!) Exiting the airport, it was a quick motor-trike ride down to the port, on a boat, and 10 mins across to Boracay. Total cost was about 3 GBP, cheaper than even a 100 yard cab ride in the UK, and British taxis hardly ever take me to tropical islands! Bastards.

Hostel-age was provided by the deliberately mis-spelt ‘Frendz’ resort, and even though I have a mild hatred for deliberaet mis-splellings, I had booked three nights in advance thanks to some good reviews on TripAdvisor and HostelBookers. I was greeted by the owner and his wife on arrival, and immediately given a frosty welcoming beer. Clearly they knew the way to my heart - through my liver. I was staying in a 6-person dorm (all male), which was clean, but slightly hot (no air-con, just fans). Quite the contrast to life in The Peninsula in Manila...

Following my check-in the following three days consisted almost entirely of the following five activities: eating, drinking (lots), beach time, sleeping (not lots) and meeting new people. The last one is the key one here really. It might surprise some people who know me that I’ve never really travelled on my own before, and certainly not to a totally new place of my own. I will confess I was a bit worried about meeting people. No-one wants to sit on their own for three days, well, some people might, but not me for sure. Too many dark, dark thoughts. JOKE! I needn’t have worried anyway; I met some really cool people, and had a great time chatting away and sharing stories. Mostly I seemed to hang out with English and Australians (which sounds rather like my life in the UK actually, so much for new experiences... ;)) but met lots of other random people too – all happy to share a beer, or teach me how to throw a Frisbee (it’s HARD!) or to try and find the Ashes on TV.
Going into a bar in Boracay and asking a Filipina working there “Do you have the Ashes on?” is not a great move FYI. It is generally met with “What’s the Ashes?”, “Oh, sorry, it’s a cricket game between England and Australia”, “What’s cricket?”, “Oh, sorry, it’s a bit like baseball... only not really. And it takes 5 days.” “5 days, for one game? Are you sure?”, “Oh yes, absolutely, can you see if it’s on any of your channels?”, “OK... I have 7 channels of basketball, is it any of those?”, “Not so much... I’ll try somewhere else... thanks”. Repeat that a few times and you’ll realise that trying to watch what, to the rest of the world, is quite an obscure sport is not the best way to spend your time when on a tropical island. But in my defence it was raining (and England snatched a draw from the jaws of defeat, so you know, it was important!)

Anyway, the subject of this blog was supposed to be ‘meeting new people’ and not ‘sports at which England are un-arguably superior to Australia’. What else do I want to say? Well, nothing really, I guess you had to be there. Which is probably the point. Stop reading my blog and go to your own tropical island, or even down the pub and chat to some strangers, end result is probably similar even if the location isn’t.

All too quickly it was time to leave Boracay anyway, so a quick walk-trike-boat-trike-plane-minibus-plane later and here I am. Sitting in Bangkok airport, waiting for some more adventures to begin. I have a Singha keeping me company though, so I’m utterly content with the waiting. But it’s getting warm, which means it is time to stop typing.