Monthly Archives: March 2024

Travel day, EV style

I could not for the life of me figure out how to book a train ticket online, and by the time I got it sorted it was too late for our intended departure. At the very last minute I booked a flight for not much more than the train and certainly faster. The short hops around India are served by Indigo Airline who operate smaller turboprop equipment. That means our baggage allowance is 15 kilos instead of the usual 20 or 25 kilos for most international flights. We only have one bag and over the last few months the weight has crept up to over 17 kg. For two people our combined limit is 30 kg but you know the airlines, each bag must be under the limit. And we only have one bag. Which weighs 17 kilos.

To solve this problem I moved some heavy items to our overflow carryon tote and we’ll check both bags. Neither of us wants to add to our carryon weight, and many airlines now limit carryon to 7 kg.

I made up an ID tag and secured it to the tote with Gorilla tape (new addition to my travel kit), moved the AirTag from the big duffle to the small and maybe easily lost tote, and hoped my weight estimates get us past the airline checkin scale.

Meanwhile, I felt a cold coming on. I ducked down the street to a small pharmacy and asked what he had for the sniffles. He produced two packets of pills that he recommended I take, one each morning and night.

“Will they work?” I asked, struggling to read the ingredients.

“Of course they’ll work!” he countered. “I’m a pharmacist!”

You can’t argue with that, and I generally trust that local medicine men know their local bugs. While I was there I restocked other bits of our first aid kit, replacing expired antibiotics and other just-in-case drugs we carry. He had everything I asked for and my total bill was about $12.

We took an Uber to the Agra airport. Or at least we thought we did. Our driver stopped well short of the destination indicated by Google maps, and right before a very tall, very closed gate.

“This is as far as I can drive you,” he said, and he indicated a bus across the road. He assured us it would deliver us to the terminal.

We decamped to the bus. There was another couple there. French. We waited.

It turns out the civil airport in Agra lies inside a military base. That explains the barbed wire, I thought. And all the men with guns. In fact, we’ve seen more guns in India than we have in years in SE Asia.

We sat on the bus for 45 minutes until a man from Indigo came to check our tickets and passports. Finally a driver hopped onboard and we drove the final ten minutes to the terminal. Because we were in a military base we couldn’t take photos, and the military did all the security screening. They zip-tied our bags closed, even the outside pockets. How am I going to get those things off, I wondered. The scissors are inside the bag.

Our duffle weighed just under 13 kilos so we passed with flying colors. I was so excited I didn’t even watch the scale for the tote. With boarding passes in hand we bought bad terminal food and sat down to wait.

The flight was delayed but otherwise uneventful and we arrived at our guesthouse in Jaipur early enough to enjoy the peaceful surroundings. It’s a stunning place, picked at random, and I’m glad I booked five nights. After the whirlwind of Delhi and Agra, we decided to take a personal day and just enjoy this lovely marble oasis. The Pink City can wait.

Police horses next door.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Beauty and the beast

Dicing with death in Agra’s afternoon traffic our tuktuk driver was getting frustrated and aggressive, laying on his horn more or less continuously. Beeeeep beeeeep beeeeep beep beep is his prefered signature honk and that tattoo, with subtle variations, is repeated by hundreds of vehicles in this tangled town.

Every bazaar has a table loaded with replacement horns. Of course some are upgrading to programmed horns that play bits of songs. Have mercy on us.

We’re heading toward the mammoth hulking Agra Fort. A real beast of a fort, although we’re told that there’s also a palace inside. The fort grounds are roughly a mile and a half in circumference, crescent shaped and surrounded by a moat. The walls rise 70 feet from the entrance. Akbar started the fort in 1565 and periodically lived there.

The white marble palace within the fort is a marked contrast to the red walls that protect it. It’s certainly not as finely detailed as the Taj Mahal (and not as well kept) but it looks like it was a nice place to live.

Out on one of the terraces you can see the Taj Mahal in the city.

Every day someone will try to either sneak a selfie or ask for one. I feel like I’m probably stuck on someone’s refrigerator. Marce definitely is. All the women want a photo with her, individually and in groups. Is it the white hair?

Emperor Jahangir’s granite tub

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Rule number four

I know, I know, with the ink barely dry on rule #4 (No more dawn treks), I go and pull a major violation. I look forward to your comments and messages. Let me make my case. The way I see it there are two technical issues that in my mind mitigate the infraction. Marce can be very charming, in addition to quite persuasive, and while admittedly dark, the trek to the Taj Mahal sunrise was paved, flat, and not all that long.

I’ve noticed that crowds have an energy all to themselves, so faced with feeling the press of more and more people being added to the same vector, and when you consider the sunrise time limit, what could go wrong? You might ask yourself, “are these people stampeders?” Empathetic Marce seemed to absorb the vibe and even on a lazy Sunday stroll, walks like the wind. I could not keep up.

Before long we found ourselves in a long security line where the authorities were confiscating torches, books, cigarettes, and I don’t know what all. I think the country has gone amuck. Clearing that hurdle, we performed the funereal shuffle through the Royal Gate where one finds a peek-a-boo view through a sculptured arch, beautifully softened with an atmospheric dawn mist.

Even hyped to death like a hit song, you can’t deny this place will still leave you breathless with its overwhelming beauty.

Before we came to India we had no great burning desire to see the Taj Mahal. If it came our way, or didn’t require much of a sacrifice we were in. Great white hulking symmetrical buildings, with every square inch covered with busy textures, carvings, and media, usually doesn’t do it for me. However, somehow this works as a cohesive whole with grace and lightness. We really enjoyed exploring the angles that were there if you took the time to find the genius in the work. It’s truly breathtaking.

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Eating our way through Old Delhi

We wisely skipped breakfast before our Old Delhi food tour. This is a first for us. We don’t do tours in general but despite my love of markets and familiarity with lots of Indian food there are so many street foods that we haven’t tried, and having a guide to navigate us through the famously chaotic Chandni Chowk market seemed like a good idea.

While we waited for our guide we saw this man making samosas exactly as I’ve been making them for almost 40 years, and as Ericka and Drew make them now too. It’s nice to confirm that we’re doing it right.

We met our guide and our fellow tasters, an English couple and two women from Greece, and headed into the market.

We started with jalebi, a crispy sweet coated in a sugar-honey syrup. We all loved it.

Before going any further we made a stop at a Sikh temple. I remind you that houses of worship are not Jack’s favorite thing, mostly because he doesn’t like to take his shoes off. But he promised before we committed to the tour that he would participate in everything and here’s the proof that he did. We had to cover our heads like pirates and remove our shoes then walk down the street and through some areas that may not have been entirely sanitary. But Jack was game, and so were the rest of us.

This temple is a refuge for the poor and needy and volunteers prepare meals for 30-40,000 hungry people a day.

The people eat in shifts. They file in to this room to be served. When they finish the next group moves in. It’s very calm and organized.

After touring the kitchen and serving area we sat in the temple for a few minutes, then we were reunited with our shoes to continue the food tour.

The market area is nuts. This is one time I wished I had a GoPro and could shoot continuous video of wending our way through narrow alleys and dodging tuktuks and rickshaws across noisy streets. Still photos just can’t capture the madness. I loved it. I haven’t been this excited in a market since Palermo in the 80s.

I can’t even attempt to describe — or even name — all of the foods we ate, some familiar, others new to us. We knew to avoid that green stuff. It’s fire in the mouth.

Most of what we ate was street food but we did sit down twice. This was a paratha place, in business for over 150 years and six generations. There wasn’t a scrap left on anyone’s plate. Except the green stuff.

I must have 100 photos of various stalls and vendors. I always ask permission to photograph in markets and no one ever says no. (Well, except for a cranky German woman at the Turkish market in Berlin back in 2004 who yelled at me for taking a picture of her wares. They weren’t even that special.)

Deep in the narrow lanes of the market our group paused to enjoy another dish when seconds later we were almost run over by a fully loaded rickshaw trying to make the corner with a wheelbase not suitable for the width of the alley.

This is not a pedestrian only area. At any moment a vehicle of some sort will force everyone to the edge and squeeze past. It’s like the dimension-defying night bus in the Harry Potter books, ten pounds of pedestrian and vehicular traffic in a five pound alley. Somehow no one gets hurt, but it’s hard to believe it.

Full props to me for tasting everything (it was all vegetarian.) Jack passed on two, and this was one of them. It’s called pani puri and it’s a crispy little dough sphere filled with either a spicy or a sweet liquid mixture. You have to pop the whole thing in your mouth at once, and when you bite down it explodes in your mouth with intense flavor. I tried them both. The spicy wasn’t too hot for me, and the sweet one was delicious. It’s just a lot to have swirling around in your mouth at once. Most of our crew tried to bite into it daintily, which only resulted in squirts and dribbles on faces and clothing.

The constant din becomes a brown noise background and after a while I found my brain just tuned it out.

I think Jack’s favorite was a lemon soda in a unique reusable bottle. The seal is formed by a captive marble inside that’s sucked up to the top when the bottle is cleaned and refilled. You open it by pushing the marble down into the bottle, breaking the seal.

After more tasting we plunged into the spice market where so much spice was floating in the air that Jack and I donned our facemasks. The rest of our crew braved the thick atmosphere and sneezed and coughed their way around.

If I had a kitchen or space in my luggage I’d have filled up a tote with all the fresh spices, most grown all over India.

Our other favorite beverage was masala chai served in single-use clay cups.

Our final sitdown stop was a tandoor oven where we enjoyed fresh naan and masala paneer. Notice the sink nearby for handwashing before and after eating. There are sinks and other fresh water sources all over the market. When you eat with your hands you appreciate being able to clean up afterwards.

Jack’s last tasting was a sweet fluffy concoction whose name I forget. It’s a wonder I remembered as much as I did.

There was one last treat offered us, sweet paan, a betel leaf wrapped like a cigar around spices and who-knows-what else. Only three of us tried it. One of the Greek women spit it out immediately. The English woman gagged but managed to eat it. I ate the whole thing, and let me tell you, it was a Tim Burton movie of competing flavors and textures. The leaf itself was as tough as a garden hedge and after a journey from sweet to sour to flowery herbal I was left with a strong menthol aftertaste that for hours afterward burped back up again.

And then we were back where we started with full bellies, some new favorites and definitely a couple of never-agains. We will absolutely do more food tours in the future. It was the most fun we’ve had in one day in a long time.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Already changing plans

We expected to do a food tour today but I waited too long to book it and we had to bump it back a day. That meant we did all the peaceful things we expected to do on our last day in Delhi, figuring we’d need a rest day. No matter. We’re nothing if not adaptable.

We began by moving guesthouses. We didn’t want to but our preferred choice wasn’t available for our whole stay in Delhi and we had to book a different one for our first two days. It turned out fine though. After we met and chatted with our first host he moved us from the inexpensive basement room we’d booked to his largest park-view room, just because he enjoyed talking to us. And let me just insert here that so far the Indian people we’ve met rival the Irish in the gift of gab.

Mid morning found us checking in to the next guesthouse with a host who’s famous for being a friend to the traveler. He gave us a nonstop high speed data dump of what’s in the neighborhood, how to get where we’re going, and he even rearranged the day we’d planned to make it easier to navigate on public transportation. Then he drove us to our first stop, indicating eateries and points of interest along the way. When we finally got out of the car we were exhausted with the effort of remembering it all.

We began at the Lotus Temple, one of only 13 Baháʼí Houses of Worship in the world. This one in New Delhi has won several architecture awards and it’s beautiful from every angle. I was surprised at how many people were there on a week day and I learned that on some days there can be 100,000 visitors.

Jack never likes taking his shoes off so I went into the temple alone, well, with a couple of hundred others.

We walked up the steps in single file then lined up in rows guided by volunteers. We were invited to enter and pray or meditate in whatever way we wished, and were only asked to keep a respectful silence. No photos were allowed inside.

The inside looks exactly as you would imagine from the outside. Once we entered we could sit wherever we wanted. Most people spread out in the huge space on wide comfortable benches arranged in an arc. It was a lovely experience and we could take as much time as we wished. No one ushered us out and people left whenever they wanted.

I rejoined Jack and we took the Metro to Khan Market, the fancy shopping district, then walked to Lodhi Garden, a large city park.

We strolled north to south through the garden and visited a few of the historical structures, including tombs and a mosque. It was a beautiful day and the architecture kept us circling and photographing for a long time.

We aren’t very good at knocking off top ten lists and with such a short time in Delhi we know we’re missing a lot of Must See attractions but we go where the mood takes us. After the park we skipped a nearby important tomb and walked instead to the Lodhi art district to admire some street art and pretty gardens.

We stopped for a very late lunch at a restaurant I’d marked on my Google map a long time ago. We sampled a couple of South Indian specialties (I forgot to take photos) and a cooling cucumber-lemon drink.

By that time we called it a day and Uber’d back to our guesthouse. New Delhi traffic is an experience in itself and every time we’re in a car or tuktuk we consider it a win when we get to our destination in one piece.

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Standard Operating Procedure

As far as Yours Truly is concerned everything was S.O.P. until we hit the ground. Let me explain. There was none of this floating down the runway hoping to grease down into a barely felt landing. First there was a proper hard crunch, one of those get-it-down-now landings, after which the beast bounded back up into the air and I knew we were in for another coming together with the tarmac. I haven’t felt anything like that in a long time but then again we were only a half hour late on a flight where they practically promise you to expect an hour or more delay. You know, I recall the plane had painted over logos, no markings, as if it was a rental. Still, the middle of the night is the middle of the night and we still managed to walk up the jetway.

S.O.P. means dealing with India’s strange visa requirements, ATM for a pocket full of Rupiahs, and lastly we play the sim card game and of course India has added a few new wrinkles. It seems one needs the phone number of one of your Indian friends willing to vouch for you, and a photo. We’re tourists, we don’t know anyone in India.

Normally you have to sift through many cleverly worded packages but here they only have one deal. Marce didn’t like the deal but strangely, there were no other phone companies at the airport. I went outside to find better competition but there was none to be found. On my way back in I heard someone shout, but you must never make eye contact with Tuktuk drivers or they glom on to you like a pickpocket in Barcelona. Suddenly someone had my arm firmly in his grasp and I decided to follow. He had a nice purple turban, an upturned mustache, and a well used assault weapon slung over his shoulder. I’m not good with Hindi but I understood that I was not going back inside with Marce.

By this time another flight must have landed and through a large window I could see quite a large crowd had gathered at the beleaguered Airtel booth. It was not going well. I was outside with the luggage watching a keystone cops silent movie featuring a half dozen airtel employees having great difficulty photographing dozens of impatient potential customers, and one pissed off Marce who naturally had my phone. I had to stop her from coming out to get me a couple of times. There are no signs and she didn’t know about the guy with the gun. Finally the manager came out but he didn’t know about the guy with the gun and he had to talk his way back inside. Eventually one of his crew came out to photograph me. First he held the camera up about a foot from my face and wiggled his head side to side like Peter Sellers in “The Party” and said, “blink.” I could not keep a straight face. Apparently it’s an app that triggers the camera shutter after you blink, but there was no amount of blinking that would get the thing to work. Blink…no BLINK. Twenty five minutes and countless blinks later I think they just gave up.

At least now we can call an Uber. There’s only one thing more terrifying than New Delhi traffic, and that’s middle of the night Delhi traffic. Eventually we wound our way through dark back alleyways running into gated streets that blocked our way. Sometimes we had to stop to push aside wires hanging down from somewhere above us all the way to the pavement, just to get past. Our driver would ask us if this was the way but naturally we’d never been here before.

Lit up like Christmas on the darkest of nights, I could see ahead the last building in the narrowest of alleyways and prayed that it would be our hotel. Not exactly S.O.P. but we made it just the same.

We understandably slept in a little but who can sleep when there is all of India to see. Five feet from our front door we ran into this.

I wonder if its purpose might be to keep people out, or is it to keep us in? The hanging wires are not so intimidating in the daylight.

We’re told that the Metro station can’t be missed and all we have to do is cross a dusty abandoned field and Bob’s your uncle.

A fellow field trekker showed us the way and Marce sussed out the ticket machine. We found the Metro clean with reasonably well maintained Metro cars, nuts-to-butts with people of all shapes, sizes, and shades.

It was a long ride and a bit of a hike to the famous Red Fort from the next to last metro stop. Without a clue where we might find the entrance to this massive fort, we headed toward where the most people were coming from. S.O.P. for us Escapees.

After a mile or two, walking along the fort wall, we ran into Deirdre and Rose, two Irish lasses who were touring India.

The consensus on the inside of the fort is meh, the juice is not worth the squeeze. What you want is the Amber Fort! Now that’s a fort!

We walked the wall a bit further and then struck out towards two huge towers that look like I.C.B.M.s.

Turns out it’s a massive mosque with a half kilometer of crazy outdoor market to wade through just to reach the bottom of way too many stairs up to the mosque entrance where I’m pretty sure I’ll have to take off my shoes, walk barefoot, and wrap some anonymous ladies ridiculous moo moo around me. No photos please.

I rarely go inside mosques. They’re basically empty but I’m told this one has a tower where you can climb up a claustrophobic spiral staircase and take photos of Delhi. I’m in. Jama mosque is one of India’s largest and was built in 1644. Let me tell you they did things differently back in 1644. Quite posh with three domes and a courtyard that can hold 25,000 worshippers.

Just as I was about to climb the tower, of all things, they closed it for prayer.

Next up is a long hike to something called a Step Well, built in the 14th century.

Marce says you might consider wearing a hat at this step well. She moved to the side to avoid the sun and a pidgeon hit the target dead on.

Is it just me or does this well look Roman?

After another long slog we made it to the India Gate. I suppose it’s more of a memorial than anything else.

It’s big!

Mercifully the call for an Uber was made and we found a safe place to sit and wait.

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

India!

I don’t know why it was so hard for us to decide on India. I guess we were daunted. Through the years we’ve been traveling, and especially these last few years of land travel, we’ve been advised either “You must go!” or “Don’t even think about it!” We assumed it would be difficult on our own and we can neither afford, nor mostly tolerate, tours. In the end Youtube convinced us we could do it. Shoutout to all the YouTubers who share up to date real world experiences and offer a pretty good idea of what to expect.

From Kuala Lumpur every single affordable flight arrives late at night. We chose the least objectionable budget airline and arrived only slightly delayed to Delhi.

Our first task is always to get cash at an ATM and just like Indonesia, the maximum withdrawal is pitifully small for a country that mostly runs on cash.

Next up is SIM cards for the phones. We had one choice and I knew it wouldn’t be enough data for us but that’s all we could get at the airport. The process took forever, made even longer because Jack went outside to look for another vendor then wasn’t allowed to re-enter the terminal. He passed me his phone and passport under the watchful eye of the guard at the door, and the SIM vendor had to go outside to take Jack’s photo, a requirement to sign up for a phone card. The vendor was allowed back in. Jack wasn’t.

We took an Uber to our guesthouse, an impossible to find homestay down an alley parked so tight with cars that we inched along with millimeters to spare under a fine example of Asian wiring.

The next day we successfully navigated the excellent Metro system for a full day of sightseeing in New Delhi. Old Delhi will wait for another day— it’s a huge city and in a couple of days we’ll only get a taste.

It’s been difficult to decide on an itinerary for our month in India, and while we have a rough idea of the areas we want to visit for this initial trip, we haven’t booked more than the first few days of lodging or transportation. We know from experience that we may get suggestions from other travelers or guesthouse hosts and we like to be spontaneous. We’ll see how that works out.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Up and away

We spend the majority of our time away from urban centers so city life is fun for us. We eat the foods we miss when we’re in more remote areas, we shop in huge international stores to replace or supplement our traveling gear and clothing, and we can take care of any medical needs. Penang is great for all of that, but the airport has no direct flights to the places on our list so it makes sense to spend a few days in Kuala Lumpur before moving on.

We returned to the hotel where we stayed before Sumatra. It’s clean and modern and with a pool at a very reasonable price, right in the middle of the shopping district. This time we had a peekaboo view of the Petronas towers. Well, one of them. If you look between the Park Royal and the black building you can see a sliver of one of the towers.

It took another day for us to finally make a decision on our next destination. It requires a visa, and nothing online assured us that we could make that happen within the week. Monday night found me laboring over the online evisa application which, for the first time ever, required information on our parents, and for the first time since French Polynesia, questions about our criminal history. (Spoiler alert: we have none.)

That done, we thought we should wait before booking a flight until our visa applications were approved. Meanwhile it was off to the nearby Pavilion mall. For the first time in our many trips here the main court was completely empty of decorations. A few days later they were all ready for Ramadan which begins the day we leave.

Of course we walked over to the Petronas Towers. We didn’t go to the top again (we did in 2018) and I’m kind of sorry we didn’t. We never know when we’ll be back in a favorite place again.

Jack of course had to admire the Formula 1 car in the lobby.

We always enjoy modern big city architecture.

Two days after submitting our visa applications we got our approvals. That put the gears in motion. We booked a flight and hotels for the first few nights. The rest we’ll do as we go along. I contacted a nearby clinic for vaccination requirements and we made two trips around the corner for shots because they can’t administer both on the same day. They also gave us recommendations on medications to take with us, so we stocked up at a nearby pharmacy.

The rest of our time we spent reorganizing our packing, watching YouTube videos for destination ideas and tips. And of course, eating.

And now it’s time to go. We’re excited, apprehensive, eager to throw ourselves into deep end of the pool and experience the rush of popping back up again.

4 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized