January 11, 2011 – 12:34PM – USA.

Airborne.

January 11 – 7:35PM – Chicago.

Tons of delays so far. We’ve been kicking back in Chicago for the last few hours while our plane gets deiced. Earlier in San Francisco we stood in line for two and a half hours waiting to get our flight rerouted. Snow in Chicago has been making things a little rough so far, but we are relaxing with an expensive airport beer.

I really wanted my first journal entry to be about something a little more interesting than just hanging out in airports, but a whole lot, lot, lot of nothing has been going on, so I’ll just say that morale is high despite delays as we, Kevin and Matt, embark once again on a world adventure, this time to India. We'll land in Delhi and then catch a connecting flight down to Mumbai, previously known as Bombay until its name was changed in 1995. Overall this trip was supposed to include about 24 hours of total travel time, but it is going up by the hour as snow keeps us from being in the actual air. We will eventually land in Bombay where we’ll sleep for about six hours, then head immediately to the train station for a 7 hour train ride up to a city called Baroda for a kite festival with one of Kevin’s coworkers friends. What the kite festival is exactly we’ll have to find out, but Kevin’s friend says it is supposed to be pretty epic. We’re up for anything. From there we’ll head back to Bombay to tour around the town for three days or so and then head eight hours north by train to Ahmedabad, catch a car there and then keep going up to Udaipur which is in Rajasthan and is supposed to be a beautiful old city build around a historic palace and lake. After a few days in Udaipur we’ll take a car to a town called Jodhpur which we will pretty much just use as a pit stop for the night before heading deep into the sand duned Thar Desert and a town called Jaisalmer, also built around a very old fort. From Jaisalmer we move by 24 hour overnight train to the town of Agra, home of the legendary and majestic Taj Mahal. From the Taj we ride six more hours up to Delhi were we plan to relax and take in the local sights.

From the research that I have done, it seems that India is not an easy country to travel in. With the congestion, late trains, masses of people and sometimes third-world infrastructure, travel in India can be brutal. I have planned train trips and booked hotels ahead of time, unlike on past trips were we just let things unfold as they came. Here in India advanced itineraries are apparently a must if you don’t want to spend days waiting for train seats to open. We’re currently not even out of the US yet and so far events are supporting those rumors. Despite all of this, Kevin and I are still positive. We know that life changing experience and adventure lies ahead that merits the struggle. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth it in the end.

January 13 – 2:37AM India Standard Time – Delhi Airport.

We are not where we are supposed to be. I really don’t want to fill too many pages with boring travel logistics, but they are filling a lot of the pages of our life, so I guess I’ll have to. Kevin and I left the house at 7:15AM in San Francisco and 24 hours have elapsed since. Because of delays we were rerouted to Delhi to get a connecting flight to Mumbai here instead of Brussels. Well, because of more delays we missed our Delhi connecting flight also and the American Airlines counters in the Delhi Airport don’t open until 7:00AM or so. There is no one to talk about how to get to Bombay from here to so it looks like we’ll be sleeping on “comfy” airport benches. I think we can still make the upcoming days of our itinerary work, we’ll just be sleeping in the airport instead of in a hotel in Bombay. Hopefully we can still catch our 11:35AM train to Baroda and the kite festival. I was pissed for awhile about all this mess, but then I remembered, hey, I’m traveling, be happy. I am.


So, if all goes right, we’ll be in Baroda in the next several hours. Before leaving the US, Kevin asked his co-worker, Pankit, to suggest a must see. Pankit had lived in India until graduating college, and he said that growing up his favorite thing was the kite festival. Six months later we are here and a day away from being at the kite fest. We just have to be epic travelers to make it. Luckily we are.

January 13 – Noon – Mumbai.

We made it. Actually we’re still traveling on board the Paschim Express to Vadodara, also known as Baroda, but we have now been officially been exposed to India. First impressions are as follow: dirty. Definitely dirty. If Kevin and I didn't have previous travel experience in other third-worldish countries like Thailand and Brazil, it might be shockingly dirty. If you are used to the clean order of the US or Europe, clean swept streets, garbage being in garbage cans, flat non-broken-up sidewalks and clean air that doesn’t smell like you are constantly sucking on an exhaust pipe or even worse, a toilet bowl, then this is probably not the place for you. Dust is everywhere, my shoes already have a permanent cover of red dirt on them and you have to be careful to step over open sewage and human and animal waste on the sidewalks. That includes both forms of bio waste by the way. It seems common here for people let their children do their number two's in out-of-the-way places like the railroad tracks or semi secluded alleys. I have, as of yet, not confirmed that this is also not common for adults as well, just haven’t witnessed it so far.

Anyways, we’re on a train headed north. We are not in our assigned seats but the masses of people pushing their way onto these trains and no indication as to seating numbers or assignment meant that we just grabbed what was open. No hassle as of yet. Also no beer, which would be great after 36 hours of travel. We really need to relax and recuperate once we get to Baroda, but we’ll see what happens.

January 13 – 7:05PM – Baroda.

We have made it to our first real Indian destination. We left SF on the morning of the 11th and just arrived in Baroda on the evening of the 13th. We also laid down on a real bed, or actually laid down for the first time anywhere in two days. Here in Baroda we have a decent if not a little sketchy hotel which is cleanish and has hot water showers and a real western style, non Indian style toilet. That is good. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to do in this small city so we’ll just wait to meet up with Kevin’s friend of a friend here and then see some kites fly. There is no beer in the state of Gujarat which is where we are. Prohibition of alcohol is enforced and was previously India wide but those regulations have been dropped. Unfortunately not here though.



















Crazy tired now. About to sit down and eat our first hot meal in an Indian restaurant. Hopefully it goes alright.

January 14 – 8:40AM – Baroda.

Today is our first complete day to see sights in India. After crazy amounts of travel and crazy amounts of tiredness, I slept like a rock for about 11 hours in a real bed. Kevin is showering up now and I am sitting on the curb in front of our hotel, the Ambassador Hotel, in the hazy morning sun enjoying the sunlight casting a golden amber color on the streets. It seems to be especially smoky and hazy in the mornings because the poorer people in town burn small sticks to cook their breakfast and warm there morning chai. It is common to see small piles of burning garbage in front of homes and shops. All of this, the golden light, the honking motorcycle horns whizzing by, the cows strolling down the streets, is an unreal experience for me, but real life for those who live here.


As I have observed many times in our yet brief time here, India is dirty. The streets and sidewalks all have a layer of dirt and dust covering them. There is smoke in the air, garbage is mostly everywhere and everything looks old. And even though you see slums with makeshift tents and homemade housing, the majority of neighborhoods aren’t slummy or ghetto, they just look really lived-in, well used. It’s authentic life going on, people making do with what is available.

Last night, despite being so tired, we went to grab some food. Kevin was literally falling asleep at the table. We got some vegetable shish kebabs, was it tandori?, don’t remember, and some vegetable curry and naan bread. I wish I could say it was fantastic, but it was just average, everything seemed to have that “just spicy” flavor that is common is some of the not-so-great Indian restaurants in the states. Hopefully that hotness doesn’t catch up with me later in other forms. I'm sure the food will get better as we do a little more research and investigation into where the good places to eat in the towns are.

As I am sitting here on the curb a new sound has just been added to the layers of Indian morning noises. Bells and drums have broken out a few buildings down the street. It is rhythmic and repetitive, possibly religious sounding from the cadence, for meditation possibly? I wonder what it is.

Anyways, after dinner last night we strolled around town and went through a very crowded street market. Such markets are very common in all of the countries I have traveled in besides the US. This was like a really huge, blocks-long, crowded farmers market, but I guess they go on all day every day. Thousands of people were packed onto the narrow streets shopping for brightly colored and beautiful fruits and vegetables from vendors lining the street. Men repetitively chanted what goods they had for sale, scooters drove by, honking all the way down the way-too-crowded-to-be-driving-a-scooter-down streets, cows walked briskly through the mobs not moving for people, running you over or pushing you into a pile of vegetables if you didn’t move, it’s pretty intense. One quick observation: cars have the right of way over pedestrians here in India. If you don’t move, well, I don’t know what happens because I have been close to getting run over with no sign from the driver that they were going to stop. Parked cars pull directly into your path of travel. Crossing the street is an adventure and it is fully one-hundred percent up to you not to get hit. With the intense amount of traffic (tuk tuks, motorcycles, etc.) you always have to be on guard, sort of like a small scared animal always with their head on a swivel so that you don’t meet a quick and unexpected demise. In India, size determines who has the right of way, the smaller traveler, such as people or motorcycles, are expected to move for the larger automobiles. Scary.

After walking through the Baroda streets we went back to the hotel and instantly passed out.

So Baroda is a small, somewhat backwater feeling town. We came here to see the kite festival and have Kevin’s friend of a friend show us around here and hopefully it is worth it. I do have to admit that a kite festival seems pretty, mmm, nerdy or lame but I have a feeling that the common, just like everything else in India, will be very interesting to us cultural outsiders. We’ll see how it goes. The bell ringing I mentioned earlier just stopped and some soldiers walking down the street with some old looking guns just shouted, “Hello, how are you!?” to me. That’s cool. Alright, that’s it for now, I’ll update more later.

January 14 – 10:25PM – Baroda.

Epic day today. We started out by walking around town again, first to the train station near our hotel to see if we could get an earlier train tomorrow when we leave and also a better class of seating. We had originally booked “sleeper class” which is the cheapest ticket you can get, but after seeing how crowded and packed and noisy and slightly dirty the sleeper cars were on our way up here we decided to see if we could up our options. In sleeper class there are multiple bunks in each open compartment with people basically hanging from the ceilings. It is only a difference from six dollars for sleeper to sixteen for first class, so it is definitely worth it to have a less crowded private compartment with a door that closes. Maybe we wussed out and missed out on the authentic Indian experience, but we figured why put ourselves in unnecessary discomfort on an already long train ride. I’m sure after this and other 12 or 24 hour train rides we’ll be happy with going for first class.

We also cruised the zoo today which was sort of rundown with old buildings that are closed and look neglected. Saw some monkeys, the planetarium, some alligators and some deer.













Headed back to the hotel after that to wait for Kevin’s friend Pankit's friend to pick us up for the kite festival. When he showed up we stopped by a kite stand that was selling all types of small paper kites. We bought a bunch of them and some big spools of kite string also. Pankit's friend whose name is Pranav (hell of a dude) drove us out to his house in the sort of suburb area of Baroda in his car. The ‘hood was in a nice working class family area, good and clean, with three or four story homes with flat roofs. We immediately went up to the rooftop and were overtaken by a 360 degree view of thousands upon thousands of people on top of their homes flying thousands upon thousands of kites. Pranav and a younger guy that was with Pranav when he picked us up as well as another buddy that came up from Mumbai started flying their kites also.

The kites themselves are a little smaller than a foot square and are made from thin sticks and tissue paper. They aren’t easy to fly and I never really succeed at getting one to actually fly. It mostly thrashed around for a few moments before crashing over the side of the house. I gave up after losing a few and just took in the sights which were completely amazing. The guys and gals who are really good at flying kites purposefully try to get them entangled with their neighbors kites in order to cut each other’s kite strings. The string is actually lined with glass so that they can cut other kites out of the sky. It’s like a little battle or game which all is done in good fun.

As the sun moved lower in the sky and the light over the white rooftops turned to that only-in-India-amber-orange-color the sky filled with more and more kites. Everyone as far as your eyes could see were out on their rooftops enjoying the evening. To truly do justice in words to the beauty of seeing so many thousands of kites in the sky is hardly possible, not even pictures can duplicate what experiencing the event is like first hand. My expectations of the kite festival were far exceeded and I couldn’t even have imagined what seeing the sky completely full of kites zipping around like gnats everywhere I looked would be like. It was a life moment that will stay with me forever, the views, the people, the interesting Indian candy and chai tea provided by Pranav's wife and the good company. It was outstanding.

While it’s on my mind I want to mention that everyone, no exaggeration, everyone on the streets here in India stares at you. As far as I can tell it probably has something to do with the fact that we are white or maybe westerners, can’t think of another reason, we don’t dress a whole lot different than younger locals and, well, it just feels really weird. As I was walking by myself around the streets of Baroda today an old man on a bench noticed me from a distance and pointed me out to his friend that he was sitting with. Earlier, when Kevin and I stepped into a restaurant for lunch many of the people eating stopped and did a double take toward us at the door. There was that “old record player scratching sound” and it got quite for a moment. The staring doesn’t have a malicious feel to it though and if you smile at the people staring at you they will definitely smile back. I guess they don’t see westerners a lot in Baroda.

Anyways, back to the kite festival. As darkness fell things got really neat. All around us people started lighting fireworks off from their rooftops, and not small ones either, real full-sized mortars going off in every direction. This was definitely the most fireworks that I have seen going off at one time in my life and they went on for more than an hour. The fireworks, and the hundreds of paper lanterns propelled by hot air from little candles inside, made this nothing less than a completely magical, once in a lifetime experience. It was better than anything I have seen like New Years or the Fourth of July on the Embarcadero in San Francisco because the fireworks here surround you for 360 degrees. Kevin and I had a great time and we are privileged to have been given an inside look into this experience by the locals.



When things quieted down a little, Pranav took us back to our hotel area but first showed us one of his favorite street vendors in town who he called the Omelet Guy. The Omelet Guy was really more of an egg scrambles guy, but he definitely made some great egg-based dishes, all very flavorful. The three three selections of Pranav's favorites that he ordered for us were extremely tasty. The cart was busy with locals ordering every combination of eggs, vegetables and spices that you can imagine. I only caught the name of one that we had, which was a masala omelet, but they were all great. Definitely the best food we have had so far on this trip. I did personally think it might be a little early in our trip for street cart food but the hygiene of the cart seemed alright and the food was hot. My fingers are crossed.


After dinner we got some ice cream and when I told Pranav that I eat pretty much any food he said he had something for us to try that we couldn’t get in the US. I was interested. We went to another street cart down the road that had a man wrapping some sort of filling with large green leaves. It was called paan and is a sort of after dinner breath freshener and digestive. I read about it before I came to India and learned that they are most commonly filled with tobacco and betel nut. It is common to see Indian men spitting the red juice from the paan everywhere. These that we had were the non tobacco version and had an intense mentholy minty eucalyptusy flavor, cleared your sinuses instantly and tingled in your stomach. My mouth was super minty fresh. Kevin didn’t like it at all and almost offended the whole of India by instantly spitting his out.

It was about 9:00PM by this point and Pranav had to work the next day (six day work week in India) so we parted ways. We are eternally grateful for everything he showed us and we most definitely owe him and his family a fine day in San Francisco.

Before Kevin and I called it a night ourselves we decided to check out a rumor that we'd heard about some of the larger hotels in Baroda having alcohol despite, as mentioned, it being prohibited in Gujarat. The rumor turned out to be true and the hotels actually have devoted liquor and beer shops, called wine shops here in India, out in the open, not hidden, you just have to have a foreign passport to purchase the liquor or beer. Unfortunately the shops closed at 8:30PM and unfortunately it was 10:00PM by the time we arrived. Oh well, probably better off in the end for us anyways.

It’s 11:30PM now and we have an early train to catch to Mumbai where we will hang out for three days. Gonna hit the sack now.

January 15 – 1:25PM – Paschim Express to Mumbai.

India has a population of one billion people. Look on the streets and the way people stand unnecessarily crammed and clumped together in lines, how they are comfortable brushing by you as they walk or gently touching your shoulder to get your attention. Personal comfort zones are about an inch here. In a nation of so many people, physical contact is inevitable.

Look out the window of the six hour train ride from Mumbai to Baroda or Baroda to Mumbai and you will be constantly traveling through civilization, small and large towns, countryside farms. Out of the train window there will always be a person in sight, pushing a cart, purchasing Indian snacks from a train station wallah, tending their crops, working on a crew hand digging a ditch or often relieving themselves in a field. People live close together here, lots of them.

It is probably partly because of the large population - way too many people and not a lot of employment - that as you look out your train window at the ancient countryside and city settlements streaming by that you will inevitably see a lot of poverty. It is a fact here. Small shanties and shacks line the train tracks with tarp roofs held in place by rocks and wood. Old men with long gray beards gather whatever-all-that-refuse-is on the ground. A just over two year old child watches a just over four year old child frantically yet purposefully yanking at a purple kite tied with pink string. They both are wearing shirts but are both pantless. They are both smiling. On the streets little dirty girls lightly tap your arm like brown butterflies and hold out their small hands, gesturing that they are hungry. Their eyes made to stand out by their dirt darkened faces and dust lightened hair.

With one billion people not everyone can be rich, not everyone can even be middle class. Life happens in its realest form like any biological ecosystem where the fittest survive and this survival is a constant struggle. Maybe I am jaded from past travels and from working as a TV cameraman who sees pain and death most days, maybe it sounds hard and indifferent, but it doesn’t seem to bother me, I just know that in a world with almost seven billion people struggle is a part of how life functions on this planet, both in civilization and nature. Indians here seem to ignore or shun those less fortunate. I know that any help the poor can get to survive will be gladly accepted but I have to say that I don’t see pain in the children’s eyes. They seem happy as they fly their kites or chase each other around the alleyways although I cannot guarantee that they don’t feel the pain of an empty stomach. Life at its most basic level is clearly visible. The poor and those way below the poverty line are unfortunately part of life. I believe that all people deserve basic human rights but how you ensure this, especially in a country as large as India is hard to say. No matter what though, life goes on and it is always a struggle, sometimes more so for some than for others. If you know the solution to widespread poverty I know a great place for you to start.

What I can do is value and appreciate even more deeply my own luck… and that is what it is, fortune of birth. I can be grateful that I have the opportunity to wake up at 2:00AM with bloodshot eyes to go to an early work shift, or to be angry that I forgot to move my truck and got a parking ticket, to worry that I might lose my job and not be able to buy organic apples or ground flax seed. Those are worries that I am sure millions in India would be happy to take on. I will remember the less fortunate that I have seen from my air-conditioned train window as they fly by, over and over, never to be remembered individually as separate faces but hopefully as a reminder of their mass as well of my own fortune that I have and to value and appreciate it more deeply as a privilege rather than a right. Their troubles are ones that I will never have the hard luck to experience no matter how bad I think I have it.

January 15 – 5:10PM – Mumbai.

We just made it into Mumbai. We're now sitting at Café Universal a few buildings down from our hotel which is called Hotel Traveller’s Inn (yeah, two L's) in an area called Fort. I think. Everything that I have said about witnessing poverty on this trip should now be multiplied by eight. The car ride from the train station to the hotel area was greatly eye opening. The buildings into town were more like continuous tin construction projects that held everything from egg shops to machine shops and looked so rickety that it was shocking beyond words. There were piles of garbage and families living on the street most everywhere we looked. I saw kids chasing a rat. I stared in disbelief at it all but it is definitely real. Kevin put it best and brought to mind something that I always do when I travel somewhere new which is wonder if I could ever live in the city that I am visiting. Most places you think, “I could probably get along here if I needed to.” Mumbai, not so much.

In Mumbai there is the craziest snarl of traffic that I have ever been in. City streets are crammed with cars and trucks and motorcycles, none obeying traffic lanes and very few obeying traffic signals. Cars literally travel within inches of each other and horn honking is an almost constant drone. It is really miraculous that there isn’t just one big accident happening on the streets at all times and that people can get anywhere without ending up locked in a snarl of twisted metal. We did see a motorcyclist with a woman on the back skid out on some oil or something and eat it but everyone was okay. For a moment traffic actually yielded to the smaller vehicle and several people ran out into the street to help the man limp off the roadway and get his motorcycle out of the middle of the street.

Fortunately, well fortunately for us only I guess, the area that we are staying in is a lot better than the slums on the way in although it still has that very lived in Indian feeling to it. There are huge multistory stone buildings on streets lined with massive trees. I am excited to have a look around but we are going to relax now with a beer in the open air café that we are sitting in for a bit longer. That’s right, I said beer! Legal I guess. Thanks Mumbai.

January 16 – 10:35AM – Hotel Traveller's Inn, Mumbai.

Today is the beginning of our first full day in Mumbai, and from what I have seen it is a pretty amazing city. Buildings here are very old, with multistory stone construction that you can tell was constructed by the British. They seem over-sized related to everything else we have seen, especially the shacks in the surrounding areas of town. Most of them do not seem to be completely occupied and don’t look to have had a paint job in many years. These noble looking structures, now somewhat neglected and moss strewn, are a little spooky and out of place, but in a beautiful way. Their nobility is like a once distinguished gentleman who has grown old and been forgotten, but who still exudes a respect worthy air. This feeling gives a very mystical aura to the Fort area. The decay that you see happening to the sidewalks, streets and buildings is mesmerizing. Once dusk sets, it is very easy to picture yourself in an 1890’s Sherlock Holmes version of London.



So far this morning Kevin and I have walked to the Gateway of India which is a large freestanding archway that was built as a monument or sort of welcome gift I guess, a commemoration, to the visit of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911. It was also the last place that Britons stood on Indian ground as they departed by ship in 1957 during the handover of power. Pretty cool to look at. We also saw the Taj Mahal Palace hotel where many people were killed during the 2008 terrorist attacks.

On our walk back to our hotel and search for breakfast we stumbled upon a Bollywood flick being shot on a small side street. The crew had big lights and scrims up and was shooting a scene that had something to do with a little kid sitting on a scooter. I don’t know what it was about, but we watched for awhile. I’m happy I got to satisfy my goal of seeing a movie being shot here without having to travel the hour or so in traffic up to the studio area of Mumbai which is called Film City. Awesome.

Anyways, we finally found breakfast after a not so easy search and are now making plans to head out to Elephanta Island by boat. The island apparently has some very old caves carved out of rock which were used for some sort of religious purposes back in the day.