around the world in 180 days

There are so many things that happen to you or around you when you’re traveling that just would not happen in the US. Some things are pretty prosaic, like in NZ, there were trampolines in public campgounds, which, because of insurance, would never happen in the US. Others, like people riding on the roof of the bus for long distances as in Nepal, are a bit more strange. In the Prague, we’ve had a few more.

For instance: in the US, you’ll never be scalded by water from a tap in a hotel. If anything like that happened, it’d be a bright, shiny invitation to a lawsuit and a ticket to a bunch of money for whoever was burned. Unlucky for me, I’m not in the US. Last night I took a shower. My sandals have been pretty stinky, so I brought them in with me to clean them up. After I was all done, I turned the water on as hot as it would go and sprayed down my sandals for a minute or to, just to get rid of any extra stink. The shower was hand-held, if you know what I mean, and when I was done, I propped it behind the faucet and started to dry off. As I was getting out, I accidentally bumped the faucet and it sprayed me in the side of the chest, with the water as hot as it will go. In the US, this would have been a shock, maybe, but it wouldn’t have scalded me. In Prague, they run their water heaters pretty damn hot, I guess.

I went back to the room and showed Anna, whose first response was (and I quote exactly) “Your skin is coming off!” It wasn’t. Not really. I did have a blister about the size of my thumb that had burst, so I can see what she meant, but it’s not as bad as she made it sound. Initially I had a red, extremely painful area about the size or my head on the side of my chest. Now, I’ve got the burst blister and an area about the size of a silver dollar around it that hurts.

Also: in the US, if there is a tourist information stand in a train station (or bus station or airport). it will have train information. In Prague, this is not the case. I can’t imagine why not.

Prague, aside from not being the USA, is very beautiful. It’s one of only a few cities that were spared in WWII, so the architecture is original and amazing. Prague is in Bohemia, so everything that your mind associates with gothic and the brothers Grimm is made manifest here. The churches are some of the most ornate I’ve ever seen and the castles, well, the castles are what you think of when you hear the word castle. They’re unbelieveable and almost unreal. We’ve been wandering around town for a couple of days and even the hordes of tourists can’t ruin such a beautiful city.

There’s more, I’m sure, there’s always more, but a blog is a blog and I can’t put it all here. We’ll be home in 2 weeks to start to dole out the stories and show the pictures and talk to people in person. We’re both looking forward to seeing all of you!

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!

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