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.