i've been to a camel fair. i've seen the camels. there's no way, no matter how hard you were to sing 'go alice go', that she could grow 9 humps. however, an extra chicken leg growing out of her back is not out of the question.

pushkar had moments of peaceful loveliness. like sitting by the lake, watching over the ghats, and seeing the evening puja.

there were also moments of death-defying madness - like the crazy dudes who drive their motorcycles and cars horizontally around an upside down dome-shaped structure that shakes because it's made of wood and bits of string.

(if you have a high speed connection and don't mind waiting, download a video of this event... click here (it's 11MB). make sure you have your sound turned up so you can hear someone (maybe me?) screaming 'holy shit! holy shit!' note that i nearly crapped my pants (it wouldn't have been a holy shit, just a regular one) during the filming, because i thought the structure was going to collapse and we were all going to fall to our death. note that i also nearly crapped my pants because at one point the drivers of both the cars and the motorcycles took their hands off the wheels and stood on their respective vehicles. something tells me that this wouldn't pass workplace safety bylaws in the west.)

when i thought about what a camel fair might be like, i pictured some of this:



but it was much more than just camels. cows and horses were being bought and sold too. there were even some albino horses with their ears pointing inwards who seemed to be going a bit nuts. looked like a little bit of inbreeding if you ask me.

there was lots of other stuff going on too - it was a full-on carnival. circus tricks, cars driving sideways up a rickety wooden wall (see above), candy floss, kids trying to stamp your hands with mendhi, drinks selling for four times the normal price, the chance to buy anything! you! could! possibly! imagine!!, competitions pitting slow and silly tourists against locals who knew what they were doing, cows with extra chicken-like legs growing out of their backs, etc. certainly no shortage of things to look at. or avoid looking at.

of course i still had the shits and was feeling rather sorry for myself through much of the madness. my diet consisted of fizzy soda made by an unnamed evil corporation and a piece or 2 of naan. i even wrote in my journal "i hate missing out on buffets!!"

that's so... me. i still have memories of a great buffet somewhere that my family traveled to when i was younger. no idea what country it was, but the buffet rocked!

anyhoo, back to pushkar. the colours of the saris were gorgeous and bright:



and like everywhere in india, the cows hang out on the street. they eat cardboard. their poop stinks.



after 2 days of that i was ready to not join the circus. so onward we headed... to jaipur. city of terribly pollution. it was worse than anywhere else we had been (yet). the bus ride there was luxuriously spacious (only 4 people per row!), and would've been quite pleasant if our driver hadn't glued the accelerator to the floor and decided to drive on all sides of the street, towards the oncoming trucks.

but we made it there in one piece, to our very chilled out hotel with massive gardens, making the air much more breathable than in the city itself.

there are a lot of very fancy buildings through rajasthan, many of which were once havelis (rich dudes' houses), that have been converted to hotels or other tourist attractions. it's pretty gross to see the excessive opulence (woah big words) next to the reality of life for most of the people who live in the cities. visiting and staying at these places made me pretty uncomfortable.

the highlight of jaipur was going to see a bollywood movie. i was thinking cheesy love story, song and dance routines, etc. etc. but what we got was The Don.



woah.

and julie bought a tshirt.
Q: hey julie, what does your tshirt say?
A:



(get it? ohhhmmmmm.)

a non-highlight was going to the amber fort. see above re: opulence vs. reality. plus there are elephants that are forced to carry people up and down the hill in the heat, during really long days, with no water for them to hang out in, and their feet get cracked and life pretty much sucks for them. and even though it's pretty hard to miss this information, some people still think it's neat to ride an elephant up to the fort. sometimes tourists suck.

if you could ignore all of that, there were some pretty parts to it.







and if you can see through the pollution, you'll notice the long line of tour buses along the road. see above re: tourists and sucking.



and that was jaipur.

next stop: agra and the taj mahal. but on the way we stopped in fetepur sikri to check out yet another fort. we had a horrible horse/cart ride from the bus stop into the city (if i could've walked, i would've). a lovely fellow made us lunch, which i couldn't really eat (still...). and we walked through a landfill up to check out the fort.

but don't fret my friends, there was joy to be had inside! the grounds contained a human sized parcheesi board and some of the gals decided to... leap.



all together now:



i had flashbacks to olympos and eating pomegranates off the tree...



and i snapped this shot outside the mosque next to the fort.



and then we were off on our last local bus. a memorable one, that's for sure. first, we all stood back while the local women scrapped it out to see who was going to get on first. like, really faught. pushing and shoving and shouting and everything. it was pretty nasty - an older woman hit a woman carrying a baby. yikes. in the end they both got seats.

i counted 50 people packed onto the minibus. figured back at home the maximum occupancy would've been 20. it was cozy. and the music that was blasting through the speakers was pretty great - the same song over, and over, and over... it was a duet. i learned the chorus pretty fast (it was in english, the rest in hindi). first, the girl, sings 'iiiii looooove youuuuuu' then the dude replies 'iiiii looooove youuuuuu', then back to her 'iiiiii loooooove youuuuu' and then he wraps it up with an 'iiiiiiiiiii looooooooooove youuuuuuuuuu'. stellar. some day, if you're lucky, you'll get to hear my rendition of it. i bet Shyaam is still having nightmares.

we did make it to agra eventually, and caught these fantastic electric rickshaws to the no-vehicle border. the air in agra was the worst, but at least the pollution has been acknowledged there, and there have been some efforts to reduce the amount of vehicle emissions, especially near the taj mahal.

we got up early the next morning to catch sunrise at the taj mahal. the hordes of tourists marching towards the entry gates at 6am was quite a sight to see. looked like an army of zombies. (braiiiiiins... braiiiiiins!)

and yes, the taj is pretty spectacular. i helped to hold it up:





next to the taj are 2 mosques, and there was a little bat fella who wasn't lookin so good on the floor in one. he was still alive though. maybe he was just having a nap.



and i caught another arty bird shot on the way out.



so, i don't know if i'm the only one, but i had no idea what the taj was for before i got there and saw the tomb area. the emperor built it for his 'favourite' wife and buried her there. then some shit went down and he was sent to jail.

anyway for me it was sorta the last straw - sure the building is beautiful and it was a pleasure to walk around, but you can't ignore how much it cost to build and all of the labour that went into it... and what that meant for the public who had to pay for it.

ugh.

i did the running man as we were leaving agra. it was a hit. the kids scattered.
at the train station a bird pooped on stacy's hair and erin's shirt. lucky.

life on the night train:



that's enuff for today. my little brain is getting tired of remembering.

hope you all have a faaaantastic new year's! the centre of town here in dunedin has already been blocked off, and when i walked by there were some dance lessons going on on the stage. too bad i didn't know earlier; i could've signed up to teach.

peace out, and power to the people!
luv me

yep, back to india.

it's really weird to be blogging about india - it feels like a lifetime ago. the memories are already getting fuzzy in my head. good thing i have my journal to back me up.

so, after leaving jodhpur, we headed to udaipur. the bus ride was much less crowded, though part way through i did share my seat for a little while with an older woman who, like in turkey, sat more on me than on her part of the seat. cozy. we drove out of the desert and over some hills, through a landscape that was more jungle-like... it was so nice to see green! and MONKEYS! neato.

after checking into the guesthouse, stacy and i went on a banana mission, and not only did we find those but also a massive bubbling vat of gulab jaman. heelllloooooo. (for those of you who haven't had gulab jaman - go to your nearest indian sweet shop and get some!! make sure they're the ones that are fried in the honey oil - should be brown or golden - not the white, dry, rosewater ones.)

so as the fellow was plucking our tasty little balls from the pot, he managed to splash my pants with the gooey hot honey oil. (let me remind you that at this point i was still recovering from the loss of pants to the laundry. and now i had big drippy honey oil stains on my other pair. perrrrfect.) he looked at me, looked at the pants, and said 'don't worry! it's good luck!'. riiiight.

i also had my ass smacked by some little kids who were running up and down the street playing. no idea why they chose MY ass to smack... maybe the larger size means better odds of hitting the target while in motion? no one told me if that was good luck or not.

udaipur is a lovely town, right on a lake, that sometimes is all dried up. luckily we were there just after the wet season and it was full of water. in the middle of the lake is an extremely fancy hotel that was in 'octopussy' (costs a mere $300 US per night). which you would know if you were in udaipur, because every freakin restaurant advertises that they will show octopussy in the evenings. because everyone wants to see some double-oh-seven action while they're eating paneer butter masala (can we just talk about how good that is?? paneer - cheese with the consistency of firm tofu - in butter chicken sauce - helllooooo!). now THAT is some good luck.

i spent the following morning chilling out and having my teeny tiny fingernail painted in miniature. it was supposed to be a camel but the canvas was a bit small so it kinda looked like a raptor. but still! a painting on my fingernail?? for real! udaipur is the town of miniature paintings - they are everywhere. some of us took a miniature painting class... let's just say that my future in that arena is not so bright that i had to wear shades. (thanks corey hart)

udaipur is also the place to take a cooking class, which we also did, which was fantastic! i never knew i could make such a good biryani. the chapati making was the coolest part though - after rolling it out you put it on the hot plate and it starts to puff and you have to make sure it puffs all around evenly by pressing on it with a little cloth to move the puff-action to all of the edges before it burns. fun!

photos of me in action:







Helen showing us her mad chapati puffing skillz:



the feast!





the roof of our guesthouse had a fantastic view of the lake at sunset.



the owner of our guesthouse was a colonel and he had heard that my pants would soon be arriving from jodhpur. (yeah, right! you gotta be kidding me. my pants, on a bus, from jodhpur to jaisalmer back to jodhpur then to udaipur and delivered to the guesthouse? riiiiight.) turns out you don't mess with the colonel. he knows his pant delivery schedule.

that was the good news. the bad news was the shitting, which started the following day. maybe i don't make such good biryani after all.

this became my diet for the next several days: soda. sometimes with lime.



normally i don't drink coca cola products (evil! evil! evil!) but in india there seemed to be no other options. every bottled fizzy product was made by coke, and even most of the water was as well. bahhhh. stupid beverage monopoly.

lucky for me, my case of shits arrived just in time for a bus ride. i had been warned not to get on a bus with the shits - the drivers don't really like stopping along the way, and i had heard a story of a pant-shitting while en route. not a pleasant thought.

the bus ride from udaipur to jojowar was our worst - the bus was rather small and rather cosy and rather hard (3 seats on one side, 2 on the other, no such thing as padding) and i got stuck in the middle through one of the windiest roads ever. luckily it was only a 3 hour bus ride... and i managed to not barf OR shit! must've been leftover luck from the honey on the pants.

i arrived feeling rather broken. we checked into this ridiculously fancy hotel place - we were greeted by drummers and marigold petals being dropped on our heads as we went through the entrance. i looked like a sack of shit who was about to vomit all over the gardens. too bad no one took a photo of THAT.

we were given a cool mothballed cloth and a welcome cola beverage and had a tour of the grounds - swimming pool and all. i checked into my bed and passed out, sadly missing out on watching marcus smash his head into the corner of the pool and bleed everywhere! (he was ok by the way - just a little harry potter-esque scar.)

the next morning Shyaam became my hero... he managed to get me onto the air conditioned, plush seats, spacious tour bus with the fancy tour group to get to pushkar. what a relief. and also a lesson that i never, ever, ever want to travel with a fancy tour group like that. the people were very friendly and very kind to me, but seeing a country from the inside of an air-conditioned bus is not my idea of fun. the only stops they made were for cash and booze (no alcohol is allowed in pushkar - it is a holy city). they could've been anywhere in the world and it would've been the exact same trip.

anyhoo, being in pushkar during the camel fair is a pretty crazy time, and deserves a whole blog entry of its own. which means this chapter is done.

so, til next time...
peace out!
luv me

i love new zealand teevee. it's so bad. tonight wayne's world is on! wooooahhh.

so, a quick update: 2 days ago i slipped down the ladder from my attic room and somehow managed to mash up my right hand before i crashed onto the floor. the blood and bruises and swelling came up pretty quick and freaked out a few people hanging out in the kitchen (including moi). it ended up being my first trip to an emergency room (actually my first hospital visit ever!), i had xrays of my little hand (bones look cool), and was bandaged up and sent home.

luckily nothing was broken, but it's pretty freakin gross.

and it has caused a premature ending to my shining hostel cleaning career. such a shame really, i was getting so good at whisking away skid marks from toilets.

so, onward we go. i am learning to spread peanut butter with my left hand.

if i owe you an email, you'll have to wait a while longer til i heal. typing is ridiculously slow at the moment. and the blog... well, haven't you given up on india yet? no, really, it is coming... hopefully before i leave this country for the next, but that depends on the healing. i'm heading to melbourne on jan. 2 for a faaaaantastic meetup with peeps from various parts of the globe. woohoo!

hope yer all staying warm. it's colder here than toronto at the moment, and this is supposed to be summer. that makes me bitter.
luv me

hi friends,

well, my email is down. so if you've sent me something in the last couple of days, or are waiting for me to write back, it's still somewhere in the ether. *sigh*

i'm going back to my room to watch another episode of melrose place.

peace out,
luv me

righty ho, here we go again. picking up where i last left off - post-camel.

we returned to jaisalmer and i showered and shook the sand out of my shoes. it's amazing that my feet still fit in them with all the sand i had picked up while walking through the desert. all shiny and clean (which lasted for about 48 seconds with the heat), we headed on our first bus ride to jodhpur. i somehow managed to score a single seat all to myself for the first part. and then the crowds came on.

they filled the remaining seats, and the sitting compartments above, some on the roof, and the rest squeezed into the aisle. a woman who looked like she was about 900 years old got on the bus and folded herself into a tiny little package and perched on the aisle floor just ahead of me. the bus driver was completely insane and we were flying across the road and back again, and you could feel the whooooosh of air as we passed the massive trucks coming right at us as we zipped back over to our side of the road at the very last possible second. i wanted to offer her my seat but knew that if i even tried to get up and go anywhere, on the next lurch i would fly down the aisle and knock everyone over like a set of dominoes. she got off shortly after that and a woman with a baby and 2 other kids got on. the driving had calmed slightly at that point so i offered her my seat but she said no. so instead i offered to share the seat with her kids, and i squooshed my big bum over as far as i could go and one of the little dudes perched shyly on the edge. i made my oh-so-hilarious fish face for him and he sorta warmed up a little, but decided in the end he'd rather sit on the floor with his mum (could have something to do with the fact that my ass took up most of the seat and he was just left with the hard plastic bit and the knob to tilt the seat back - not so comfy).

it's amazing how quickly you adjust to the things you see. we were flying down the highway and out my window i saw a camel at a gas station. i was like 'ho hum, camel at a gas station, whatever'. and then it hit me: woah! camel! at a gas station! ahhhhahaha.

maybe you had to be there.

we finally arrived in jodhpur about 5 or 6 hours later, and watching the bus empty out was amazing - there were streams of people that kept coming off the bus from every possible corner of space. legs dangled from the compartments above and babies were passed through windows. i was glad to be on steady ground.

the following day a few of us decided to spend the morning visiting a Bishnoi community outside of the city. on the way out we saw all kinds of wildlife - a skinny crew of camels and a pack of goats too!





when we arrived, we got a brief introduction to some of the 29 principles followed by the Bishnoi people - one that stood out is to protect all living things. that means no eating animals, no squishing mosquitos, no chopping down trees. there was once a king in the area who wanted wood to build a palace, so he sent the army to chop down the trees in the Bishnoi village. the villagers put their bodies in front of the trees (the original tree-huggers!) to prevent them from being chopped down, and were slaughtered.

wow.

the family we visited were lovely. we were distracted at first by a black cobra in the yard (caused great excitement!) but eventually made it inside and met the woman in charge - she was super cool! she showed us how to grind millet with her super strong arms (and kindly pointed out that i don't have strong arms, but a big tummy - guess that means i eat more millet than i grind). we hung out with the kids and drank chai. and then off to the next stop: carpet weaving cooperative.

now, i have to admit that i never actually went into a carpet shop in turkey. they didn't really appeal to me. but these ones were lovely! and to prove just how lovely they were - my good friends richard gere, prince charles and camilla, and billy corgan had all sent letters to thank them for the visit and the beautiful carpets, and the carpet dudes had put the letters in a book next to photos of said famous people. i was like, woah, i'm sitting in a seat that billy corgan sat in. how cool is that?? i don't even LIKE smashing pumpkins but THAT'S COOL!!

so yeah. carpets. nice stuff.

next stop: lunch. a lovely lovely woman cooked us lunch at her house, over a cow dung flame. the fire set up was awesome - some day i want to recreate it (minus the dung). luckily that was back when i was still enjoying food. (*sigh*)



the last stop: pottery. also lovely. he got the wheel spinning with a big stick that he hooked into the wheel and spun and spun and spun... and it just kept going, and going, and going... no electricity, no foot action, so cool!



and then we drove back to the city. our taste of rural life was short but sweet.

back in town we checked out the mehrangarh fort:



which looked over the blue city of jodhpur:



it had some pretty stunning rooms (like this one, the 'pleasure room'):



and the view of some other visitors resting in the courtyard was lovely (i think they coordinated the colours of their saris just so i could take this photo!):



but what struck me the most was this:



after the death of her husband, the queen would take one final walk through the gates towards the city, and on her way out would leave her handprint on the wall. she then walked through the city and joined her husband's body on the funeral pyre (the act is known as sati).

wow.

after the fort we headed back to the town centre, where some of the others decided to try 'the best lassi in india' (i would really like to meet the person who said that because they were sick-ass!! made with butter. ewwww).

clearly shyaam enjoyed his!



we wandered around the market and saw a small dog and his giant swinging nutsack (sadly i didn't snap a photo of THAT).

all across India (well, across the places we went to, at least) the vehicles are decorated very beautifully. there are actually truck stops along the highway where you can buy decorations for your vehicles! this rickshaw was particularly decked out. so shiny! (no, the kid is not the driver - he just wouldn't get out of the way of the photo. whatchoostarin'at?)



and that was jodhpur. also the place where the laundry was lost, sent on a bus, then back again, delivered to the hotel, re-washed, folded, and put on another bus, but you already know that story.

see why this damn blog is taking so long? this massive entry covered two days. TWO DAYS! gadzooks.

more to come. yes indeedy.