We're comin' home!

Teizeen:

In a little over 24 hours, we'll be back home to the fresh cold of early spring in the Pacific Northwest - a sharp contrast from India's summer season which just started and leaves us sweating after simply ascending a single flight of stairs. 

We've been walking around Mumbai a lot, despite the heat, but have discovered that the street-side sugarcane vendors sell fresh juice (no water added) for about 15 cents a glass, and they can be found every few blocks ready to refresh sweaty pedestrians passing by.

Ryan and I went started watching our budget the last 3 weeks or so of our travels, trying to see if we could get by on fewer Rupees a day and stock up on a slight surplus with which to splurge a little during our last few days in Mumbai.  Our careful budgeting earned us a night and dinner at one of Mumbai's premier music performance spaces, a comedy Bollywood movie, a fresh seafood dinner, and a day at Water Kingdom (which claims to be Asia's largest water theme park).

Water Kingdom was pretty big, but alas, not big enough for the number of Indian families who visit it on a Sunday.  The water park not only featured big slides, but also, very very big queues for almost everything.  There was one queue for a little tram that took you from the ticket counter to the entrance, another queue at the entrance to get in (they had to check that our bag's did not carry 'outside eatables'), another queue to get a locker in the changing room, another queue to rent lycra swimwear (T-shirts and long tights for women - no women were just wearing just a swimsuits out of modesty), and then a queue for each of the rides and slides.  We did, eventually, get to be in the water.

So, we've had our fun and it's time to come home.  We are both looking forward to being home now after 3 months of traveling, having to pack and re-pack our packs every 2-3 days, having to haggle for everything from taxi rides to souvenirs, dealing with touts, and not having any pedestrian rights.  However, we will miss bargaining, the cheap and tasty food, and simply not having many day-to-day responsibilities or having a fixed daily schedule.  I haven't cooked in 3 months!

We're both ready and excited to come home - but only after we've had a few more glasses of fresh sugarcane juice.  See you all soon!

Indian Cricket fervor

Teizeen:

Throughout India's ancient and more recent history around the time of independence, this large and diverse sub-continent has had a difficult time finding a unifying national identity.  The quest for independence was a unifying force, though even that led to certain divisions between Indians who spoke different languages, and those who followed different religions (e.g. Islam or Hinduism).

For the last 1.5 months, however, there has been a single and unifying force that has gripped the whole country's attention: the World Cup for cricket.  Cricket in India is the only major sport in India, and the World Cup happens only once every four years.  India last won the World Cup in 1983......and they won it again just 4 days ago on April 2nd 2011.

Cricket is not just a sport or a game in India.  It is an obsession that permeates across language, religion, and geographic lines.  During the World Cup games, small and large shops would always have their TV's inside tuned to the cricket channel - and crowds of people would gather outside the shop windows peering in to follow the game.  People on the streets had their mobile phones tuned to some cricket radio station that was updating them.  Security guards were listening to cricket on ther cell phones to entertain their evening hours.  Almost anyone you asked knew the current score for the game - even the small bhel puri (an Indian snack) beach vendor on Chowpatty Beach (in Mumbai). 

On the day of the final match, agaist Sri Lanka, the malls had giant screens showing the game and live drummers drumming after every good move made by the Indian team.  Cars on the streets were trailing large Indian flags out their windows, and people were getting their faces painted with the Indian flag.  Many shops closed once the game started.  And everyone had their fireworks ready in anticipation for the big win. 

In a country of over 1 billion people, most of whom seem to follow cricket, I felt like India deserved the World Cup simply because they all wanted it so bad, and there were so many people who wanted India to win it.  I just wanted to watch the whole country celebrate something they cared so much about - and they did. 

Ryan and I watched the last portions of the game from our hotel - and when India won, the hotel staff who were watching with us just couldn't wipe the smile of their faces.  There was genuine and intense satisfaction and happiness.  And within minutes, we heard fireworks outside on the streets coming from every direction.  And even though it has been four days now, the TV and newspapers simply cannot stop talking about it.  It has saturated the news completely.  And as the cricket captain said - this cup was won for the people of India.

Recent Photos

For those who have noticed a slightly extended absence of posts, we just wanted to let you know that we finally managed to post several albums with photos from Nepal, so check out the links to the left.

Annapurna Trek, Nepal

Teizeen:

We returned from 3 weeks in Nepal a few days ago.  We spent 16 days on a trek called the "Annapurna Circiuit Trek" which circuits around the Annapurna Mountain range with views of several 8000+ m peaks - some of the highest peaks in the world.  Below are some quick facts about our trek:

Total trekking distance: about 300 km (186 miles)
Highest elevation: 5416m (17,769 feet) at Thorung La Pass
Highest change in elevation in a single day: 1600 m (5250 feet)
Average hours walked per day: 6 hours/day
Number of days Teizeen was cold at night: 6 out of 15
Number of photos taken: hundreds, more than we are willing to admit
Who won the blister competition: Ryan (his blister's were way more impressive than mine)
Sickness: One cold each, not altitude sickness
Number of showers Teizeen took: 7
Number of showers Ryan took: 5
Number of 'hot' showers that went cold mid-way: 4 out of 7 (for Teizeen), 0 out of 5 (for Ryan)
Number of days walking in rain: zero

Enough of facts, let's get to the gritty details. 

We had one guide and one porter.  Having a porter, at first, felt a little bit elitist, and felt a little bit like cheating.  So, I spent the first few days of the trek pondering whether I could do this while carrying my own pack for 16 days - and I would alternate between "yes, I could do this with my own pack" when we were talking on flat or slightly downhill terrain and "no, there's no way I could" when we were on a steep uphill or downhill gradient.  And everytime I saw independent guideless and porterless trekkers on this well-travelled trail, particularly women, I would be inspired. 

We met many trekkers at the various 'tea house lodges' from around the world, chatting over dinner.  We met a family from Colorado with two boys (aged 10 and 12), who were in the midst of a year-long trip around the world!  Knowing how I had felt climbing up to Chame (one of the night stops) the night we met them, I was totally impressed with the boys' attitudes - this trek is in no way extreme, but it isn't easy.  If I was 10 or 12, I'd be complaining.

We saw avalanches - 3 within an hour on a single day, high up on the mountain slopes as the sun warmed the top layers of snow.  Cold fast raging rivers carrying glacial water paralleled much of our path, providing water to all the little villages along the way.  At each village, there was food of all sorts (Snickers bars, Nutella, beer, etc), being brought uphill by people or mules, up to high elevations - the cost of each of these items increased as we got higher and higher.

Porters.  Porters deserve a story of their own - especially human porters.  We saw porters carrying planks of wood about 10-feet long over steep terrain on trails that lined steep cliffs, manouvering with great skill.  Porters carrying stones, firewood, huge furniture, other trekker's gear, and our most favorite porter of all, the chicken-porter who was carrying a cage of a dozen or more chickens on his back!

The mountain views were some of the best we had ever seen - huge huge mountains that just don't look quite as big in photos as they did in real life. 

When we got to the big pass (Thorung La Pass, 5416 m), which was snowed in, a 6-hour uphill climb, and at an altitude where the air is much thinner, we found ourselves huffing and puffing every 10-20 steps.  My guilt about not carrying my own pack dissipated completely.  The winds were nasty, blowing hard powdered snow into our faces, stinging us like pin pricks so that we had to duck.  It was like getting a cold hard slap in the face every time a large gust of wind picked up.  My toes (under 2 pairs of socks and thick leather boots) froze to numbness, and we stopped in a small lodge on the way up to thaw them out with a nalgene bottle filled with boiling water.  And, my Marmot mittened gloves proved all their worth as my usually ultra-cold-sensitive fingers remained warm in their cosiness for the full ascent.  We descended from the pass into less wind and soon, warmth, and then, no snow at all within a matter of hours.  This was our longest day; almost 9 hours of walking up and down in a single day.

Now in the extreme warmth of the Varanasi sun, back in India, our cold mountain experience seems surreal.   We've got some remnants of our trek - blister scars, and slightly sore muscles still, as well as a little trimming of fat around our waists.  But the latter will be lost now that we are back to tasty oily Indian food....

Off to Nepal

Teizeen:

We leave for Nepal tomorrow morning from Varanasi, and we will be there for the next three weeks.  Other than 1-2 days in Kathmandu at the start and the end of these three weeks, we will spend most of our time in Nepal on a 16-day trek called the 'Annapurna Circuit.'

Since we will have no access to internet during our trek, you can follow our daily itinerary by following this link that details our daily trek itinerary: http://www.adventureaves.com/Annapurnacircuit.html

We will have the help of porters to carry our big packs, and we will only be carrying day packs with our water for the day and extra layers of clothing, etc.  Trekking in this region of Nepal is predominantly in the form of a 'teahouse trek', which involves staying in teahouses along the way (there are several scattered in this region, which is very well travelled), where food and accomodation is provided.  The teahouses are nothing fancy, more like huts I think, but it does eliminate the need to carry tents and food.  Our living quarters will not be heated (though the dining areas might be), we'll be sharing showers and toilets/outhouses with other trekkers, and electricity is not available at most of the teahouses.  So, it's like camping in a hut without a tent while carrying fewer things.

So, armed with plenty of extra batteries, a solar-rechargeable UV water purifier, warm sleeping bags, warm clothing, and plenty of other gear, we are about to embark on what will likely be one of the mose scenic and amazing mountain experiences we have had so far - and probably one of the most physically challenging experiences for me (in addition to potentially cold temperatures). 

You'll here more about how it really went in about 3 weeks, so stay tuned...

It's cold in Shimla

Teizeen:

Last night, we returned to Delhi from our hill top experience in the town of Shimla.  We spent the last five days here in temperatures in the low 40's (farenheit), or 5-10 (celcius).  We were going to spend 7 days, but the cold cut down our visit to 6, then 5, days - we changed our train tickets two times!  The day we arrived, we were greeted by hail as we walked around town with our large backpacks, trying to find a reasonable hotel (the one we had reserved turned out to be more expensive than we had thought, and further away from town).

Shimla was once the summer capital of British Viceroys of India during colonial rule, and after that, by Indian governmen officials, who took their clerk books and escaped to Shimla from the heat of Delhi for weeks at a time.

Ryan and I did the opposite: we escaped to Shimla from Delhi in the middle of the Indian winter, and it was cold.  And there was no central heating.  We could rent a heater for every night, but the cost of renting one exceeded the cost of purchasing one, so we decided otherwise.  We would envelope ourselves every night into our 15 deg F (-9.5 deg C) rated sleeping bags, which where our saviours at night.  The nights were warm once our body heat was trapped inside our sleeping bags, creating a warm cacoon.  Emerging out of our cacoons in the morning was the biggest challenge - we would poke our heads out into the cold room only to snuggle back inside like tortoises inside our shells, cautious to expose ourselves to the outside world.

We didn't quite make it out of bed till 10 or 11 am, eating 'breakfast' at noon at the Indian Coffee House down the street (with excellent and extremely cheap breakfasts - about $3.00 for the two of us). 

Though this picture I'm painting of Shimla may sound cold and grim, it was actually a really spectacular little town.  We could walk from one end to the other in less than half an hour, observing the street life around the bazaars, and not worrying about cars (no cars are allowed on the main roads).  Spitting, littering and smoking is banned around the town - so the streets were clean.  There were few to no beggers or homelessness - the cold makes that prohibitive.

There were no cows on the streets, but lots of monkeys (macaques) with naughty eyes trying to get at whatever scarps of food they could, showing off their expert climbing skills as they clambered from tree tops to buildings and slithered down water pipes.  One even got half way up my leg with its agile little hands!

Ryan enjoyed his daily morning ritual with the monkeys from our hotel window sill (the sound of monkeys was enough to get him out of his warm cacoon), where he fed them our fermented guava fruits, and dried dates, watching them scramble up from neighboring rooftops simply because of the sound of our creaky window opening, and the sight of his hand poking out with a piece of food.  He tried to fool them once by throwing out a non-food item, and they didn't budge.  These monkeys were smart.

The whole town of Shimla is perched on the side of steep hilltops, and vertical buildings are stacked in a terrace-like fashion - a structural feat, to say the least.  And in the background further north, was a magestic line of snowtopped Himalayan mountains visible when the morning haze had cleared.

We spent our days either walking around a lot (since this was the best way to keep warm) and trying to find warm places to eat and hang out.  We found a cosy little timber cottage-like restaurant where we sipped banana lassi's and played our first game of chess (the first for both of us).  The owner was a friendly middle-aged Indian man with kind eyes and good English, and we were so excited about this find, we vowed to return again the next day.  However, after 3 hours, when we were ready to pay our bill and leave, we found out that this friendly owner also charged a friendly cover charge for 'long sittings' in his cafe/restaurant!  Though the charge wasn't too high in American dollars, it cost us more than our night in the hotel for our drinks, snack and cover charge of Rs. 100/hour.  The cover charge was higher than the cost of using internet somewhere else for an hour!  We left, annoyed, not as much because we had to pay, but because he wasn't open about it when we sat down in the first place - his friendly cafe had turned out to be a little sour.

Nevertheless, Shimla was beautiful, even if cold.  But I'm glad to be back in warmer temepratures where I don't have to wait 30 minutes for my fingers and toes to thaw.  Growing up in warm places has left me unarmed with the right kind of blood to withstand the cold.  Our trek to Nepal is around the corner, coming up in a little over a week, and I am thinking of our 16-day trek in one of the majestic moutnain landscapes in the world.  I am both excited and eager, but also have a little bit of trepidation.  I hope that the spectacular views and constant movement of our bodies will make me numb to the cold. 

Before we head to Nepal, we still have 4 days in Delhi, and a long train ride to the city of Varanasi, which sits alongside the holy and mighty river Ganges. 

Indian Marble Madness!

Ryan:

Marble floors & staircases can be found in even the most run down hotels we have stayed at. The Indian state of Rajasthan apparently is well endowed with vast deposits and numerous varieties of marble. At ~$0.75/ft², marble flooring in India runs about 1/3 the price of the cheapest pergo flooring offered at a Home Depot back in the states.   

On one particular stretch of road from Kota to Udaipur, our bus drove through a ~20 mile stretch of back-to-back marble wholesalers.  Each wholesale yard contained literally hundreds of car-sized blocks of marble covered and aligned in formations that stretched to the boundaries of their property.

One of thousands of marble wholesalers between Kota and Udaipur

Through centuries of building forts, palaces, and places of worship, Rajasthanis in particular have become especially adept at extracting these deposits, as well as those of sandstones, lime stones, and granites (also plentiful in these areas).   


Near the border between Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh lies the city of Agra, former capital city of India during part of the Mughal Empire and home to the massive Taj Mahal.  The Taj Mahal was built by the Shah Jahan (5^th ruler of the Mhugal Empire and grandson of Akbar), as a mausoleum in honor of his wife Mumtaz who died giving birth to one of their children.

Many of the monumental buildings before and after it were constructed using locally available dark red sandstone.  Surrounding these monuments is a maze of dirty gray masonry buildings (3-5 stories tall) containing shops, residences and guest houses.  The white marble of the Taj Mahal (a special variety that comes from the Makrana region of Rajasthan) rises in surreal contrast against the dreary architectural backdrop of Agra - It is a massive building unmatched in height by anything else in sight (people look like ants against it), -Its symmetry defies the randomness of the surrounding township – And the white stones of its construction give it a light/faint cloud-like appearance that is augmented by its domes and spires (reminiscent of  a fairy tale castle).  In real life, it looks as it does in the postcards – like a painting against the sky – unreal.

The surreal fairy-tale like Taj Mahal - just like the postcards

The streets of India

Teizeen:

So far, we have probably walked several miles on Indian streets.  We think we're averaging 5-6 miles a day of walking, and since we've been here for over a month, that comes up to more than 150 miles of walking so far.  Most of this (so far) has been amid bustling city streets, with people trying to sell us their goods, child beggars asking for spare change, and spectators staring at us from the sidelines.  We're also slowly becoming expert jay-walkers; you'll be waiting on one side of the road forever if you wait for the traffic to clear.  So, you have to weave through the traffic whenever you want to cross the road.

Most of the cities so far have dirty streets, scattered with litter, the odd roaming cow (and piles of cow poop to match), and skinny stray dogs curled up in odd corners.  I'll be frank: the streets are dirty, with wifts of poop and urine in many places.  There is no centralized wastewater treatment, so there are open sewers lining the streets, funneling liquid waste of all sorts downhill to the nearest river or stream.  Delhi recently had to close some of its water treatment plants (and water supply/delivery to several areas) because of high levels of ammonia in the river.  There are also obvious spots where men urinate on the side of the road.  We've become used to the dirty smelly streets now, watching our step and warning each other about the next pile of cow poop. 

So, when we arrived in Chandigarh (north of Delhi), the streets almost caught us by surprise: they were clean. Not only clean, they were straight, in a grid-like pattern.  We hadn't realized what we'd become used to until it wasn't there anymore.  There were trash cans, and underground sewers.  And now, we have come even further north up to Shimla, where there are state laws prohibiting littering (the fine for littering can be a hefty Rs. 5000 = $ 125 !!  There is also a fine for spitting, and plastic bags are banned).  There are also public bathrooms. 

I don't know about the history of Shimla's litterling laws and how they got implemented, but it seems like the city (and the state it is in) a model for the rest of the country.  However, the town is small, while most of the other cities we've been to are much larger in population, which makes the problem much more difficult to tackle.  Also, Shimla is perched amongst steep hillsides, making open sewers less feasible simply because of topography.  If there were open sewers here, they would be like mini-waterfalls!

Right now, I cannot see how the transformation from dirty streets to clean streets can happen in a country of this size.  It would require drastic behavior change from every individual who walks the streets: no littering, no spitting, no urinating.  When Ryan and I need to trash something while we walk the streets, we have no options.  We end up carrying our waste back to our hotel room's trash can.  But who knows where that end up; I haven't seen big dumpsters anywhere.  Individual efforts may be in vain until the whole system changes at a massive scale.  And when I say massive, I mean massive: some way to change the behavior of over a billion people who walk the streets of India, and one that treats the waste generated by them. 

I'm sure there are genuine efforts to do this in a country of this size, and I may not have the chance to experience the results during this trip.  Nevertheless, the magnitude of the problem remains immense.

Some new photos

We just uploaded some new photos from the last 1-2 weeks, including those of the Taj Mahal.  Check out the links to the left.

Are you Indian?

Teizeen:

Standing in the queue at the entrance to one of the great Rajput Palaces of Jaipur, I am about to pay the entrance fee (which is higher for tourists, and lower for Indian citizens), and I am asked, "Are you Indian?"  Which means, am I an Indian citizen?  Was I, or were my parents, or my grandparents born in India?

To reply "No" would deny my Indian heritage, and the answer would be received with confusion because of my obvious Indian-ness.  After all, I look Indian.  To say "Yes" would be easy, but I would be pretending in order to take advantage of cheaper entrance fees (they don't check you passport, so this is easy to get away with).  In addition, being and looking Indian goes hand-in-hand with speaking Hindi (especially in northern India), and my limited Hindi-speaking abilities would automatically expose my pretend-Indian character if I were to say "Yes, I am Indian."

And so, I often find myself telling the story of my heritage to the people I meet who look at me, assume that I am Indian, but then find out and are surprised that my Hindi does not quite pass the test.  I explain that my ancestors - 5 generations back - moved to East Africa (Kenya), and we have been there ever since, and that this is my first visit to India.  To counter my lack of Hindi skills, I proclaim my fluency in Gujarati.  In this way, they are suddenly impressed and somewhat enlightened by the fact that a local Indian language has survived for 5 generations in the far off continent of Africa. 

If we add my American husband to this mix of Indian-Kenyan-non-Hindi-speaking-Gujarati woman from Kenya, their enlightenment reverts back to confusion.  In order to explain Ryan standing by my side, I have to add an addendum to my heritage story to explain that my family and I now live in America. 

Inter-racial marriages in India are extremely rare and not condoned.  Responses to us walking down the street range from innocent curiosity to disapproving looks (the latter may just be my imagination since I don't really know what they are thinking).  We are often greeted with ominous stares from people who are either not shy about staring, who have never seen such a sight and are genuinely caught by surprise when they see us, or whose parents never told them it is rude to stare. 

However, it is difficult to know, without asking, what people really think of us.  I actually cannot stand being stared at, and because it makes it uncomfortable, I over-inflate what they are probably thinking in their minds (even though they haven't said a word to us):  I think that they probably think that I have diluted my Indian heritage by traipsing around with an American husband, and I am therefore no longer worthy of posing as an Indian and being allowed to pay cheaper entrance fees!

I am slowly getting used to the stares though, and have decided to either respond by (1) glaring right back at them, (2) asking Ryan to glare at them since they are staring at his wife, (3) giving them a big unexpected smile, or (4) keeping my eyes on the ground 24/7 so that I can't even know who is staring at who.  The latter option, however, might inevitably land me in a dangerous spot between rickshaw drivers, scooters, bicycles, cars and buses since pedestrians never have the right of way in India - so if I look down, I'm game to be sandwiched between a number of possible moving vehicles.

Teizeen's Kota family

Ryan:

We spent the last few days in Kota where Teizeen met some of her native Indian relatives.  If you followed our Kenya blog a few summers back, the food part of the experience was much the same as having dinner with Shafiq Uncle’s family: intense family pressure to consume unnatural quantities of super oily food.  Here in Kota, however, the family’s insistence to consume bordered on the annoying and resulted in physical pain to my abdomen and intestines.  It should be noted that my honeymoon with solid stool and stable stomach came to an abrupt end last week in Udaipur (the illness, I suspect, came from the cilantro we used in an otherwise excellent cooking class).  We let the family know ahead of time that I was not well but they did not relent.  As a result, I had a series of loud and embarrassing experiences with eastern style toilets. 

The houses of the family in Kota were, as they were in Kenya, shared communally by multiple generations - elders, the kids of the elders – and the kids of the kids of the elders (the youngest generations were bone skinny, getting progressively rounder with age, until becoming quite fat in their middle ages).  The basic composition of a house: kitchen, toilet room (eastern style), bathing room, and a multifunctional living area that covered dining, tv/entertainment, and sleeping.  

At a basic level, I found myself able to follow some of the Gujarati conversations between Teizeen and her aunts and uncles.  I could not, however, speak enough Gujarati to hold a conversation myself, and very few of the older generation spoke English.  The youngest members of the family had not yet learned English, were just beginning to learn English, or were too shy to exercise what English they had already learned.  For conversation, I therefore found myself leaning heavily on Moiz and Mustafa, two of Teizeen’s college aged male cousins (unmarried as of yet) with good English skills.  Moiz and Mustafa were fantastic hosts, shuttling Teizeen and I all around Kota and showing us the local sites.  Both had many questions for us about work opportunities in the US and Canada since employment prospects in India, even for qualified college graduates, were looking pretty grim.  Moiz’ brother had recently been granted admission to Canada, providing Moiz himself with hope to join them in a few years.  Mustafa, was still looking for opportunities. 

All in all, the family was mega-hospitable, welcoming, and never stopped reminding us that their home was also our home, and that the three days we spent with them were totally insufficient.  However, Teizeen and I are somewhat relieved to be back by ourselves continuing further north on our travels through India – we will be viewing the spectacular Taj Mahal by the end of this week after a brief visit to one of India’s more famous bird sanctuaries.

Our Quest for Juma

Teizeen:

Juma is the Muslim day for congregational prayer accompanied by a sermon, and always occurs on a Friday afternoon - somewhat equivalent to the Sabbath for Jews and going to church for Christians on Sundays.

So, this last Friday, Ryan and I were on our Quest for Juma: we were in Jodhpur in the state of Rajasthan, and we wanted to find a mosque where we could attend the Juma prayers and sermon. 

Step one involved finding a mosque - the crooked narrow streets of Jodhpur were not particularly conducive to us stumbling upon a mosque.  Buildings merge into one another, and houses, shops, and places of worship were therefore not easy to spot.  Roads do not have names, and all sign boards (except those catered to tourists), were in Hindi. 

So, to find a mosque, we needed to find a Muslim who we could ask.  We began combing the streets with our eyes to look for someone wearing a topi on their head (traditional Islamic head wear - they can come in various forms, but worn only by Muslims here), and had our catch in a matter of just a few minutes - a man with friendly eyes, who was sitting nearby in front of his spice shop and also happened to speak really good English. 

Welcoming and eager to share Juma with us, this man named Ramadan, said he was going to Juma in a few minutes and we could join him.  As we waited, we talked about Islam, the importance of education in Islam, and the our role of Muslims in the world today.  Islam, said Ramadan, is a beautiful religion, but there are people who do not know how to practice it.  Then, he started talking about the Rolls Royce: "The Rolls Royce is a beautiful car - if someone drives it and crashes it in an accident, it is not the fault of the car - it is the fault of the person driving it."  And with that simple analogy, he explained how the religion itself is beautiful, but there are people who don't know how to practice it the right way.


As it came closer to the time for Juma, I wanted to know if the mosque had a space for women to pray.  Congregational Muslims prayers involve standing right next to the people to the right and left of you in a line, "shoulder to shoulder, feet to feet", touching your neighbor on either side.  I believe that part of the wisdom behind this is to emphasize equality before God: everyone has to stand touching each other regardless of which mosque you pray  in, making segregation due to race or skin color, or social or economic status that much more difficult. 


Men and women, however, are segregated for the simple fact that your purpose is to pray before God and focus your attention on your prayer. Because of the close physical proximity that is required in congregational prayer, men and women pray in separate lines, or different spaces within the mosque.
The mosque we went to either did not have a space for women, or it was not accessible at the time, but as we walked towards the mosque, I was gently shuttled into the home of a Muslim family living right across the alley from the mosque, whose women were instructed to 'take care' of me during Juma.  The loudspeakers on the mosque reverberated loud enough for us all to hear the sermon and prayer from inside this house. 


Here I was, in a strange family's house, who opened their doors to me based on the simply fact that I was Muslim and so were they - I was automatically welcome.  I was offered a cup of tea, and tried to converse in my limited knowledge of Hindi with the women of the house.  We prayed together - the Muslim prayer is in Arabic, so no matter where in the world you are, and no matter what language one speaks, the prayer is exactly the same.  This universality was what made this house, for the brief 1 hr I was there, feel like home: we all knew what to do for the prayer, and we were doing it exactly the same way, even though we couldn't speak the same language, and knew very little about each other.

After the Juma service was over, they insisted that I join them for lunch.  I told them that my husband, Ryan, would be waiting for me outside in the alley and I should go, but this did not deter them: they extended the lunch invitation to both of us.  So, the afternoon ended with us all sitting on the floor in a circle, dipping our chappati's in tasty mutton curry, and chatting in broken Hindi and English (and some Gujarati), while I tried to appreciate the scene: a white American Muslim man, a Kenyan-Indian Gujarati speaking girl who has never lived or visited India and now lives in America, and am overly hospitable Muslim family in Jodpur, all coming together because of our common religious heritage.

Photos, finally!

We have finally managed to post some photos online.  Look to the left side of the blog, under "PHOTOS!" and click on the links to view some of our photos so far.  We will be adding more links to photo albums when we add more photos (newer albums will appear at the top), so check back for more photos...

Our first trek

"Charles", our trekking guide in Mt. Abu - the post below is about him.

Teizeen:

I was really hoping to post some photos today, but we have been somewhat unlucky with the cyber-cafe's we have used so far: this one doesn't recognize my USB stick, so I can't upload any photos tonight.  So other than my cranky mood resulting from having failed (again) to post photos that I would love to share, today has been a good day.

We are currently in a small hill station in southern Rajasthan called Mt. Abu.  In India, smaller towns and villages perched on hills or in mountainous areas are called 'hill stations'.  In the earlier days, these areas used to be visited by rich Raja's (King's) during hot Indian summers as a cool retreat.  Many of these Raja's built extravagant vacation homes here, some of which have been converted into luxury hotels or guest houses (some more charging more than $200 per night).  We, however, are staying in a relatively budget hotel (just under $9.00 per night), since we have to stretch our budget over 3 months...

This morning, we went on a half-day trek with Charles, who is The Person To Contact for treks into the Mt. Abu Wildlife sanctuary.  Charles turned out do be an excellent and charismatic trekking guide, with animated stories that he would act out with facial expressions and the right European accents (British, Irish, French, German, Australian - he's still working on his American accent).  A native of Mt. Abu, he was named Mahendra by his parents, but given the nickname 'Charles' by a British tourist who thought it would be easier for tourists to pronounce and might help his newly flourishing one-man trekking business (he was also given the name options of Thim or Jimmy).  His father is somewhat disapproving of his new name and his trekking business (What kind of a job is this?  People pay to walk, and pay you to walk with them?!)

Charles practices both Hinduism and Buddhism (more recently leaning towards the latter), and talked freely about his beliefs, his meditations and aspirations to be a pilot.  He is convinced that the name Charles, if he can find the $$ for a lawyer to make it official, will make it easier for him to get a visa to visit a foreign country, which it seemed was his ultimate desire: to travel outside of India, which he has never done.   He would like to live and work in Australia.  When Steven Irwin (the Australian Crocodile Hunter) died, he fasted for two days in his remembrance.

Despite having born, bred and lived in small Mt. Abu all his life, Charles had the best spoken English of anyone we have met so far in India, and, his English had a slight British accent.  Having never learnt English in school, he said he has learnt it through tourists over the last 9 years.  And despite not having stepped foot out outside the Indian sub-continent, he had and immense stash of informed knowledge of the outside world which I think he has absorbed from the tourists he meets.  It was almost as if he had traveled to all the places from which tourists come from.  I imagine him waking at dawn everyday for his morning meditation, and using his meditations to absorb the linguistic attributes of the tourists that he meets, meditating his way through their cultures and origins, and somehow acquiring a relatively accurate depiction of life outside of India.

During our mid-morning tea break, he gave Ryan and I an animated show of his dream of being a pilot: all in a British accent.  Though he has never set foot on a plane, he did a better animation of the take-off scene then I could ever do.  His one-man act included details like the communications he would have with the radio-tower getting ready for a fake Lufthansa airlines take-off, how he would tell passengers to tie their seatbelts, ask the hostess for black coffee (please), being excitedly greeted by expectant US immigration officers upon safe arrival, and traveling to all the parts of the world where he has met people from.

He was literally waiting for his moment to shine - to get out of Mt. Abu (which he admits is beautiful, but is too limited a place to fulfill his desires and aspirations) and travel the world, even if only for a few weeks.

I am putting him on top of my new list of most deserving people to receive a free flight.  And, if he ever gets to fulfill his dream, I would love to spy on him during his travels.

Honing my Gujarati skills

Teizeen:

We have been travelling through parts of the state of Gujarat over the last few days - it has been a whirlwind tour of numerous sites and events, including the annual kite festival and exquisitely carved mosques.  The kite-festival itself deserves a separate blog posting, so that will have to wait; tonight, we are dog-tired from our 1.5 hour dawn ascent up several hundred stairs to a sea of 16th century hill-top temples.  We woke at 5am to make ascent without having the sun beating down on us - joining hundreds of other Jain pilgrims making the ascent.

Gujarat is the homeland of my ancestors, and I have come to appreciate the language skills that I have while travelling through this state: I speak relatively fluent Gujarati.  Despite never having set foot in Gujarat, or India, the language of Gujarati has survived for five generations in Kenya, where my ancestors immigrated to, and has been passed down from one generation to the next - down to me.  Here, in Gujarat, I get to test my Africanized-Gujarati, and so far, it has been quite a success!

I'm not sure if the locals can tell that my Gujarati is different or awkward, but it has helped us get directions, and allowed me to converse with the people we are meeting along the way.  I can buy bananas in Gujarati, and I think that makes a difference of getting two bananas for Rs. 10, or two for Rs. 20 or more: I can't get ripped off as easily if I'm speaking in Gujarati.

With the help of a friend of Ryan's from grad. school, we have hired a car and driver for five days to drive to places around Gujarat that you can't really get to by train.  Our driver has a blue Seattle Mariner's jacket, and I don't think he has any idea who the Seattle Mariner's are.  Yesterday, I told him that his jacket represented a 'famous' sports team from the city where Ryan and I are from in America.  I had to describe the sport, since baseball is foreign here, so I said: "It's like cricket with a bat and a ball, but instead of running in a straight line up and down, you run in a circle."

I never thought I would be using my Gujarati in India to describe baseball...

Mumbai: the beginning

Teizeen:

After a long 24 + hours in the air, and being almost run over by one of those airport buggies (the ones that transport people inside the airport - the driver was backing out and didn't see me because I was "too short"), we finally arrived at our hotel in Mumbai at 4:00 am on Tuesday morning.


We were walking through town getting some errands done (getting local cell numbers, checking out the train terminal, buying a Hindi-English book and stocking up on hand sanitizer), and came across this little internet cafe called "Portasia".  Cost = approx. $0.50 for an hour, and the internet speed is not bad (better than Kenya).

Our room is spic and span with shiny tile floors and a sink about 1/4 the size of what we have back home.  Breakfast was served on a tray in our room: paratha with lemon chutney (yum!), and hot Indian milk tea.  We're already looking forward to some good dinner cuisine... I've already set my eyes on the street-side banana stalls to get my daily morning banana fix!

Ryan:

As always, it was nearly impossible for me to get comfortable enough to sleep on the plane.  This is probably some kind of payback for having worked at a place that designed airplane interiors for four and a half years.  Anyway, the not sleeping on airplanes took place over a ~24hr period so my brain feels like mashed potatoes.  Teizeen was able to use her height to her advantage and curl up in the airplane seat.  She slept a little (but not much) better than I. We are both cranky!

It's 2:00AM back home in Washington as we write this - and our minds & bodies still think it is 2:00AM as well.  As a result, this first post may be a little thin - but, before we sign off, here are a couple of first impressions from both Teizeen and I from our walk out in town:

• All the taxis look like the volvo sedan's of the 1970's - except really tiny versions of them - and most of them that I have seen are black with chrome details.
• People honk to warn others to get out of the way rather than to scold traffic offenders.
• The streets are vaguely familiar - dusty, crowded with vendors of all sorts, and busy.  It reminds us of Mombasa streets (but with fewer livestock and more people)

The beginning of our 3-month adventure!

Ryan and I have been plotting an escape from our busy lives of work and school for a while now. We leave for our 3-month trip to India and Nepal on January 10th 2011, and will return to the USA on April 12th.

As shown in the map below, we will be travelling through several states in northern India during January and February, including Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Haryana, then heading east through Uttar Pradesh, ending in the city of Varanasi. From there, we will fly into Nepal in early March for a 16-day trek in the Annapurna mountain range in Nepal, return to Varanasi, and then travel through parts of the state of Madhya Pradesh back to Mumbai where we started.

 

































So that's the plan, but if you'd like to see how things unfold in reality, all you have to do is follow this blog!  We will try and update it as often as we can.

Here's a shortened list of some of the main items we are carrying:

• One backpacking backpack and day pack each
• A very small fraction of our wardrobe; clothes that pack small, don't wrinkle and dry fast
• Lonely Planet Guide to India, filled with handy tips, where to stay, what to see (and what not to see), how to get around
• A pair of Chacos and a pair of hiking shoes.  We've also been advised to carry a pair of flip-flops just to use in bathrooms...
• Water-proof dry-erase map of northern India (in case we change our mind, we can simply erase and re-draw our route!)
• A sleeping bag each, for cool nights on overnight train rides and trekking in Nepal
• Malaria meds galore
• Steri-pen and water purification tablets
• Cell phones, credit cards, cash,...
• Camera and 50 GB of memory cards (!)
• A first aid kit each
• A good knife and a compass
• iPod (to carry our tunes along during our travels)
• Books to pass time: A New History of India and Midnight's Children
• A mini homemade travel chess set and a mini pack of cards
• Hidden under-shirt travel pouches