around the world in 180 days

We began yesterday in Srinagar at 6 am and, after breakfast, were off to catch our bus to Jammu, a town that Lonely Planet only mentions to tell you not to go there. We paid an old man 10 rupees (about a quarter) to throw our bags on top of the bus and then stood around, waiting to leave. 10 minutes after our departure time, a man came over, said some gibberish (ok, it was probably Hindi) and pointed to a different bus. We gathered, by the other passengers unloading the first bus and loading the second, that our bus had changed.

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Our last day in Srinagar wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. Our conversation with the houseboat manager didn’t go too bad, and we ended up getting a nice, full day tour of the lakes the town is built on. We saw floating gardens, a floating market and a whole section of the old city (which was pretty nasty) that had canals through it, sort of like a 3^rd world Venice. It was a pleasant way to spend our last day.

I think I’ve been a bit unfair to Srinagar because we’ve both felt like we’d been fooled into coming here. While it isn’t the paradise on earth it claims to be (too much pollution), it is a beautiful place. Anna and I have had a very pleasant time sitting on top of the houseboat in the evenings and watching the sun set and the stars come out. The salesmen are relentless, but it is only because they have to be to survive. Once we stopped looking and just responded with a polite but firm, “no thanks,” they were much easier to handle. You have to say it four or five times, but they get the point.

It is a difficult life in Kashmir. The area has depended on tourism since before the British arrived and India and Pakistan’s pissing contests here have chased many tourists away. The locals don’t care much for either government and would just as soon be an independent Kashmir. They refer to themselves as Kashmiris (as opposed to Indians) and people from other parts of India as Indians. They are a people who are fiercely proud of their land, to the point that every person you talk to asks you three questions: how are you, where are you from and how do you like Kashmir, in that order.

So, all day today, we’ve been telling people that we like Kashmir very much, even if we don’t care for the haze of smog (China? India?) that hangs in the air and blocks our view of the mountains or the toilets in all the houseboats that drain straight into the lakes. It is a region that has had more than its share of difficulties and has still managed to keep its identity, which is something I respect.

We’ve been watching the English language Al Jazeera since we left the US and I can’t believe they don’t carry that station at home. As far as Middle Eastern, African and Asian news goes, it is by far the best source I’ve ever seen. The bias that the US media has made so much of must be either relegated to the Arabic language station or a fabrication, because the English broadcasts we’ve seen have been balanced, fair and full of quality reporting. The big advantage Al Jazeera has over most of the rest of western media, the ubiquitous CNN included, is tha they have permanent correspondents in every single country over here. Al Jazeera has a permanent correspondent in Zimbabwe. No one else can say that.

Whilst watching Al Jazeera this evening, we saw a story on the children of India and a report that the Indian governent released recently that said tha upwards of 60% of Indian children suffer physical abuse, more that 50% suffer sexual abuse and half work seven days a week. These numbers include all children, 0 to 18. They are staggering. We’ve certainly seen plenty of children working, from the four or five year old kids we saw in Delhi hawking cheap necklaces in street markets to the twelve year old we saw today who tried to sell us saffron, but I had no idea it was that bad. Almost ½, or 440 million out of 1 billion, of India’s population is under 18. That’s a lot of abused kids. Very sad.

Tomorrow we have a 12 hour bus ride, followed by another 12 hour bus ride. Sound like a blast.

Today we went trekking in the Himalayas for the first time. Or walking, anyway. The manager of the houseboat we’re on said we’d hike to a glacier that was so beautiful that we wouldn’t believe it. No glacier. A very nice hike, but nothing spectacular. The manager is less than honest.

For example: we paid something like $40 each for a tour of the city and a tour of the lakes in Srinagar, which Mr. Manager said would last all day. The city tour had us back at the boat by 2:30 and the boat tour had us back by 1. All day. Hmpf.

We were supposed to leave Srinagar and stupid Mr. Manager tomorrow, but when we got back from our walk today, we found out that there won’t be any busses tomorrow. Turns out there was a landslide on the road between Srinagar and Jammu (the next big town) and so traffic can only go in one direction until the road is fixed. Tomorrow traffic goes towards Srinagar and not away, so we’re stuck here for another day. The thing is, is that true, or just a scam to get us to pay for another night on the boat? The guy who told us, Mushtaq, has been very honest and seems like just a very nice guy, but who knows? I hate it that I’m even questioning this, but we get lied to so often, about everything . . .

For example: yesterday, we took a taxi into town to hit up an ATM before we left Srinagar, as there ae none at our next stop. The ATM was out of money, so we went inside the bank to find out if they could do anything for us. We talked to the ATM officer, told him the ATM was out of cash and he said, “No, it isn’t.” “Yes it is, we just tried to use it.” “It was just filled.” “In the last five minutes?” “Yes.” See, this was a lie. We went back out to the ATM, tried it again, and hey, guess what? Still out of money. Imagine that. Why couldn’t he just tell us he didn’t want to help us? Why lie? I guess this is one of those cultural differences that makes traveling so interesting, right? Anna and I are waffling on whether or not to call out Mr. Manager on his lies/exaggerations about the tours we signed up for. We haven’t paid yet, so we do have some leverage, but it seems like it will be more difficult than pulling teeth to get him to admit to anything. We also have to work out payment for tomorrow night’s stay. There are plenty of beds available in Srinagar, so if he won’t be reasonable, we’ll pack up and leave. It’s our only bargaining tool. We just need to make sure to take care of things early in the day, so that is still an option.

I will be happy to leave here. I feel like we were suckered into a tourist trap, where we paid a lot more than we should have for what we got and I want to put it behind us. We should have learned this lesson in Fiji, when we got hauled out to that crappy island and prepaid, but we didn’t. Don’t book ahead, unless absolutely necessary. Salesmen will say anything to get your cash, even if it isn’t true (except Josh).

I didn’t mean to go off on another rant about this stuff, but it really is just a huge down point that makes it difficult to enjoy an otherwise beautiful place. At the very least, maybe our mistakes can help someone else avoid them.

As I lay in bed last night around 8 pm, feverish and exhausted, listening to the prayer calls from a dozen different mosques ring our across Lake Nageen, where our houseboat is moored, I felt like I was in a movie and this was the scene where I died. I’d been feeling progressively awful throughout the day and by the time we ate dinner, my body ached and I had no appetite. Anna took my temp and I had a fever, so I took some tylenol and went to bed, sleeping for almost 12 hours before getting up, feeling refreshed and ready for the day.
As I got better, Anna got worse. She has the same stomach troubles I had a few days ago and is not very happy right now. We were supposed to go on a boat tour of the lakes in Srinagar today, but she just wasn’t up to it. It’s not looking good for tomorrow, either. I hope that a decent night’s sleeep will help, but, even with antibiotics, these things seem to take a day or two to run their course.
The stomach bugs are one of the worst things about traveling. Being sick is not much fun at home, but when you’re on the other side of the world, it’s particularly unpleasant. We’re lucky, in that our sicknesses hit when we didn’t have to do any long bus rides, but it sucks to lie here in Kashmir, surrounded by beautiful mountians, too sick to do anything.
Since I’ve been complaining, I’ll stick with it. I’m sure that traveling around the world seems like all peaches and sunshine to all of you back home, but sometimes, I’d rather have the house and job and everything else ad just be at home.
For instance: the salesmen/touts/whatever here in Kashmir are intolerable. I wrote bit about our argument with the houseboat manager when we arrived about our activities for our time here. Yesterday, a friend of Mustak, our tour guide/cook/housekeeper stopped in to sell us shawls. He was relentless, even after we told him we weren’t interested in buying. It’s tough, because they look at us as enormously rich and many of the people who stay here are enourmously rich, so when we say no, they take it as a personal slight against the quality of their merchandise. We bent over backwards assuring him that his shawls were beautiful, but we just couldn’t afford them. That was a mistake. In the future, we’re just going to say no, politely but firmly and not think about it any more. They use guilt as a sales tactic and we’ve got to stop falling into their trap.
Another mistake we’ve made is believing people when they tell us something. One of the hardest things about India is that people lie to you all the time, even people that you think should be trustworthy, like officials at the train station. We’d read in the Lonely Planet that you shouldn’t believe anyone who tells you that the tourist office in the New Delhi train station is closed or burned down or under renovation, but when we went to the station looking for that office, one of the officials there told us exactly that (we made the mistake of believing him because he looked, well, official) and hustled us into a cab that dropped us off at a travel agent where I’m sure he got a nice commission. That’s where we booked the trip we’re on. The official at the train station said that the agent was a government endorsed agent, but he was actually just government recognized, which is slightly different. Now we’re stuck on a houseboat that’s outside of Srinagar and can’t do anything without paying the owner/manager an arm and a leg. It was stupid not to remember what we’d read. What’s the point of a guidebook if you don’t take their guidance?
We’re looking forward to getting back to independent travel. There are a lot mre headaches, but you are in charge of your own fate. If a hotel is no good, you don’t stay there. If a cabbie wants too much to take you somewhere, you wait for the next one. Independence has its downsides too (nobody holding a sign with your name on it at the airport), but we’ve more or less been on tours for the last 3 weeks. It’s time to see India on our own terns.
Well, time to let Anna get some rest. Goodnight!

We flew from Delhi to Srinagar, in Kashmir, which in the not-so-distant past has played host to a few skirmishes between India and Pakistan. After the Soviet Union imploded and pulled its troops out of Afghanistan, many of the mujahadeen fighting there came here and fought in the flare up that occurred in the early 90s. Things have been quiet here since 1995 or so, with tensions rising a bit a few years back when India and Pakistan both started rattlng their sabres and revealed their nukes to the world and falling again since then.
The legacy of this past is still very much alive in the heightened military presence in Srinagar. The airport looks like a military base, with lots of camoflaged buildings and soldiers everywhere. The town is also occupied, with soldiers manning every major intersection, brandishing automatic rifles and patrolling with stern looks.
Before we came up here, we asked specifically about the safety of the region, knowing that it had been a dangerous area in the past. We read about the military presence in our Lonely Planet and I asked the travel agent that booked us if this was still the case (quite often, Lonely Planets are several years out of date, despite being a 2006 edition or whatever; it’s been a source of frustration for us) and he assured us that it wasn’t. He was apparently engaging in the ancient art (quite common in India) known as lying.
There’s nothing to worry about, though. The military are here because the area is disputed; they’ve been here since Partition Day in 1947 (or ’48 or ’49, I can’t remember), when Pakistan became the world’s first muslim state, and they’ll remain here as long as the gov’ts of India and Pakistan can’t get along. There haven’t been any attacks here in years and we’re keeping a close watch on the news, so if anything does come up, we’ll be out of here immediately.
The people we’ve met since we arrived have told us about the damage the war has done to the people of Kashmir. Tourism is the main industry in this area, along with associated industries like woodcarving and carpet weaving, and in 1989 when the last war began, tourism vanished as an income source. Many Kashmiris moved away, some starved and a few managed to remain. Both men we’ve met spoke of the war with great bitterness. “It’s not the people,” they both said. “It’s the governments.”
When we arrived, we also got to have a money talk with the boat’s manager, who wanted to sell us a bunch of additional activities that we couldn’t afford. He put together a beautiful package that would have been an extra $700 on top of the $400 we already spent to get here. It was way out of our budget and we told him so, but he didn’t believe us. “You never talk money with two people,” he kept saying. “Americans and Saudi Arabians. Americans have all the money and Saudis have all the oil.”
We tried to explain that not everyone in the US is rich, but he wasn’t buying it. Of course, we are rich, for India. Just being able to come here is a great privledge and wen both feel very fortunate to have been born in a place where a trip like ours is possible. That still doesn’t mean we can just throw away money like it means nothing. After some tough talk, we managed to work out an itinerary that’s more in line with our finances. I think part of the problem is that most Americans he sees here really are rich, and don’t sweat dropping $1100 on five days of vacation, but I don’t think most Americans that come here are traveling for as long as we are either.
Enough is enough. Goodnight.

I can’t get my little gadget hooked up to the computer, but I wanted to post to let everyone know we’re alive and a bit of what we’ve been up to in India. I’ll post the rest when I can. but in India, internet, like everything else, is sketchy.

We did a tour of the so-called Golden Triangle (Delhi, Jaipur and Agra) with Anna’s Mom and we arrived back in Delhi yesterday. We saw a bunch of Mughal architecture and, of course, the Taj Mahal, which I gushed about in one of the posts that I can’t post right now. The Mughals were the Muslim rulers of Northwestern India from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, when they were displaced by the British. The tour was great and we had many adventures that I’ll detail later.

Anna’s mom flies home tomorrow morning and Anna and I are flying to Sringar, in Kashmir, on the fringes of the Himalaya. Everyone we’ve talked to has said that Sringar is beautiful, maybe the most beautiful place in India, but it’s hard to know if they’re telling the truth or not.

It sometimes seems like everyone in India has something to sell. The Indian people are warm and welcoming, but sometimes it’s difficult to know if they’re being so nice because they want you to buy something from them (or through them) or if they’re genuinely being nice. We’ve met touts on the street who will walk us to the places we’re looking for, asking us all sorts of friendly questions, and then when we arrive, they try to get us to book our onward travel through their agency, so they can get a commission. I can’t blame a person for trying, everyone’s got to make a living, but it’s frustrating when you don’t know who you can trust.

The other thing that is difficult about India is the intense, brutal poverty that much of the population lives in. We had the same driver for our whole tour and, while he wasn’t fluent in english, he could speak enough so we could converse and we grew fond of him. He was 28 years old and basically lived in the car he drove, sleeping in it each night as he took us from Delhi to Jaipur, Jaipur to Agra and Agra to Delhi. He made 2000 rupees a month, which works out to about $50 or $600 a year. He was about average as far as income goes, I’d guess, maybe a bit on the low side.

He really is one of the lucky ones, though, because at most stoplights beggars weave their way through the throngs of cars, knocking on windows, showing their infant children and generally looking very pathetic and sad. Some of them are horribly disfigured, with limbs that were broken years ago that never healed properly or other stomach-turning medical issues. It’s difficult to say no, because I want to help, but quite honestly, any amount of money we give them wouldn’t be enough to get them off the streets and only insures that they’ll still be beggars tomorrow. Still, I can’t visit here and do nothing, so Anna and I have decided to donate to a charity in India that works specifically with the poor. I think whatever money we have will be put to much better use there and will go much farther. In the mean time, though, it’s difficult to be constantly turning away beggars.

That being said, all three of us have loved India. It is a beautiful (if hot) country that has a rich cultural history that is fun to learn about.  Anna and I will be here for another two weeks or so and we’ll barely scratch the surface of the country. We won’t see anything south and east of here, but we’ve learned that you can often see more if you see less.

Stay tuned for future updates, which will appear below this entry.

Happy Birthday, Andrew. I hope you had a good day today. As for me, I’m a little sick. Not much, just a touch, but that’s enough and I hope it goes away soon. Delhi belly, one of our tour guides called it, which must be some kind of poetry or something, because it rhymes. Beauty, right?
Beauty is the Taj Mahal, which we visited and photographed today. You can go online and look up probably a thousand different angles of the building and not a single one will do it justice. We took about 30 photos while we were there, and, looking at them now, they’re a pale reflection of the real thing. Some things just can’t be captured in a photo and the Taj is one of them.
The Taj is made from Indian white marble, which is as white as Italian alabaster, but much harder. The stone is translucent, which is why the Taj changes color as the lighting changes. The building is covered in intricate patterns: Quranic verses in fine Arabic calligraphy, flowers, vines and geometric patterns that all look painted on. They’re not, though, but inlaid in the marble. Every different color is a different stone, and all were (and still are) mined locally, in India. The craftsmanship is absolutely unparalleled.
The secret of this technique has been passed down from generation to generation for the 350 years since the Taj was built and is still practiced today in a workshop owned by a funny old man named Krishna. After the Taj, we visited his shop and he showed us how each stone in an intricate inlay is individually sculpted on an emory wheel, tiny pieces shaped with the tips of a worker’s fingers on a wheel spun by hand. A normal sized plate with a significant amount of inlay work might take 4 months to complete, from start to finish, and they had entire tables on display, with scenes of elephants, camels and flowers of all kinds. I can’t imagine how long they must take.
Krishna was a great salesman, full of jokes and amusing comments. We bought a single tile (probably the cheapest thing in the place) for about ten bucks. Mary spent a bit more and got a small box. I’m not much for handicrafts–most stuff looks like cheap crap to me–but the pieces in this place were works of art, absolutely amazing. I told Krishna I’d be back when I made my first million and he said that it’d be best for both of us if I did so as soon as possible.
As I see all these old buildings that are relics from a once-great empire, I think about how India that has risen, fallen and is rising again. I look at the streets, crammed with cars and bicycles and people, I see the intense, crushing poverty that drives people to desperation, and I see the kindness and hospitality that the Indian people offer to strangers and I can’t help but wonder if the US will look something like this in a couple hundred years. Who knows?
Of course, there’s one major difference between the US and India: colonialism. The US isn’t likely to be colonized by another power and thus won’t have its natural resources drained away for a couple hundred years as Britain did to India. Western empires alwasy seem to get as soft landing as they crumble, while eastern empires have been taken over by the west (with the possible exception of Japan).
Ok. Enough of that. Tomorrow, we’re on our way back to Delhi. Mary will be with us for 2 more nights, before flying out Saturday morning at 7 or some other ungodly hour and then Anna and I have to decide what we are doing next. India is already insanely hot, 40 degrees in the middle of the day (about 105 for you fahrenheiters), and its getting hotter. I think we’ll be heading for the mountains. Brace yourselves: more mountain photos on the way! See if you can tell the difference!

24 hours ago, our plane was landing at the Delhi airport and we’ve already experienced so much that I’m not even sure where to begin.
We were greeted at the airport last night by a man holding that always-comforting placard with our names on it. We climbed into an ordinary white sedan with him and a driver and got our first taste of driving in India, which is quite different from anywhere else we’ve been and also quite terrifying, if you allow yourself to think about it too much.
Traffic in India is impossible to explain. It’s just too crazy, too crowded and bizarre to discribe, but I’ll try to give you a small taste.
The first thing we noticed is the honking. In India, people believe that a car has a horn for a reason: to be used. And so they do, constantly. A horn can mean hello, I’m passing, get out of the way, or any number of other things.
The second thing we noticed is that, while there are lines painted on the roads just like everywhere else, these lines apparently have no meaning in India. Maybe they’re just decorations, or something the British put there that India decided to ignore after independence. I’m not sure. Traffic in India reminds me of the halls at a school between classes: all of the vehicles are crammed together in a crowd, and they all jostle and honk and nudge their way forward.
Another thing we noticed is that cars aren’t the only thing on the road. Anna counted 18 things besides cars on the road, including regular things like trucks and tractors and small taxis called auto-rickshaws and not so regular things like cos and camels and elephants.
Anyway, we survived the ride from the airport, arriving in a neighborhood rundown enough to make me say “please let our hotel be somewhere else” to myself over and over again. The hotel itself didn’t do much to inspire confidence either. It was old and dingy and the beds made us wonder of we would wake up with strange bites. We didn’t give it too much thought before we fell asleep.
The world changes with a good night’s sleep. Lucky for us, the world also changes with a crappy night’s sleep, because around dawn (5:30 or so), it sounded like a large group of people were attending a cockfight or a horserace outside our door. I don’t know what was going on, but there were a bunch of people yelling about something–not angry, just excited.
The new day brightened our spirits, though. We are on a three day tour of the so-called golden triangle: Delhi, Jaiput and Agra, where the Taj Mahal is. Today held a tour of Delhi and a drive to Jaipur in store for us and we were ready to get moving. We visited a Hindu temple, much more ornate than anything we saw in Bali, and our guide explained a bit about the Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Buddist religions and how they were related. Next we visited the oldest mosque in India. We ate lunch and were off to Jaipur.
We were on the outskirts of Jaipur when the bus hit us. Anna and I were sitting in the backseat, Mary in the front, and, though we all saw it coming, none of us could say a thing. Everything passes with such a small clearance, that I think we all didn’t believe it would actually hit us, even when it was only inches away. Our driver was passing the bus, cars, motorcycles, bicycles and autorickshaws were all around and the bus just drove into us like we weren’t even there.
The accident was a low-speed collision and no one in either vehicle was injured. Our driver was sure ticked off though, understandably so. The bus had hit us, but the police had taken the bus driver’s side because he was from Jaipur and our driver wasn’t. He pointed at the car and yelled at the bus driver for about 30 mins before he decided to take us to our hotel and finish with the bus driver later. We still haven’t found out how things worked out. I hope things are alright. I feel bad for the driver, he was such a nice guy, it’d be awful if he lost his job or had to pay for the damage himself.
Our hotel tonight is much nicer than the one last night, which is good because we’ll be here for 2 nights.

I’ve put all our photos so far up on flickr and they can be accessed here.

They’re divided into sets by where they were taken. I’m working on getting titles and descriptions up, but there’s a lot of photos and I’m not done yet.

Hope you enjoy them!

So we’ve been in Kuala Lumpur since Friday evening and we’re having a good time seeing the city with our trusty tour guide Paul. Patty is working on a PhD and has a paper due on Monday that she’s been immersed in most days, but Paul’s been great, hauling us all over the place. This morning, we visited Batu Caves, which are gigantic limestone caves with Hindu temples inside. After that, we went down to Chinatown and checked out all the stalls. Paul kept commenting on how much things had changed.

30 years ago, KL was a small community with little international significance and no large buildings. Many of the roads were dirt and the population was small. It sits a the confluence of a couple of rivers, though, and as Malaysia entered the global economy, it began to boom. Now it’s the largest city in Malaysia and the capital of the country. Because it’s so young, it’s a relatively unremarkable city, as far as architecture goes. It has a set of twin towers, called the Petronas towers and a spire, but not much that is old or of cultural significance.

Even while Paul and Patty have lived here (10 years), KL has changed a lot. A huge highway runs nearby their house which used to be a two lane, tree-lined road. The central market, in Chinatown, used to be a wet market, with vendors selling fish, fruit and other food, and today it’s an upscale tourist destination. Chinatown also used to have tons of vendors selling pirated DVDs for around $2 a piece and now they’ve been driven underground. That isn’t to say they’re gone, because they’re not. It’s just a more back-alley affair, with people who say, “DVD, sir?” and lead you through a maze to their warehouse, or, more commonly, a table with the cover art for DVDs, showing what they have to offer.

There’s also an area that used to have rows and rows of software for similar prices. We stopped by, and just since Christmas, all of the shops had converted to laptop and other computer equipment sales. We shopped around, looking for a set of portable speakers for our CD player. We found a set to purchase ($7) and when the salesman was bagging it up, he leaned over the counter and said, “You want software, DVD, games?”

I said sure, and he pointed to a room in the  back of the store that had a man sitting in front of a computer, smoking a cigarette. They had lists of their inventory and told us that they’d call and have whatever we wanted delivered on blank, unlabeled DVDs or CDs, depending on the program.
They also had pirated DVDs in Indonesia, selling for 15,000 rupiahs (or $1.50) in Ubud and for 10,000 rupiah ($1.00, easy, huh?) in Kuta. Kuta also had PS2 and XBOX games for the same price. It was unbelieveable.
Of course, we didn’t buy any. That would be immoral and wrong, right? It’s stealing, right? Stealing from billionaires who produce and profit from these things. That’s why we don’t have any to ship back. Not a one.

I’ll have some more photos online soon, everything from California through Bali. I need to sort them and label them and all that fun stuff, but once that’s done, I’ll post the link.