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 ... [Continue reading this entry]

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 ... [Continue reading this entry]

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 ... [Continue reading this entry]

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. ... [Continue reading 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 ... [Continue reading this entry]

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 ... [Continue reading this entry]

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 ... [Continue reading this entry]

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 ... [Continue reading this entry]