Incredible India: Jenny

Surrender. This is what is necessary to experience India. India is a world where extreme filth and poverty exist alongside temples dripping with gold. It has been described as a place you will at once love and hate. The corruption is palpable, but the people have a lighthearted and loving quality that is irresistible. In the West, we commonly experience the existential angst of too many choices, of manipulating our environment to fit our needs and expectations. In India, there is a lesson for us. The people of India, without the choices or ability to control their lives in many ways, have learned to be content, if even happy, with what IS, and have learned to control what is INSIDE. Holding on to Western ideals in India will drive you crazy. Surrender.

Lane Driving is Sane Driving
We spent the first half of our trip in cars and buses. The concept of staying in the lines is as absent here as it has been in most of Asia. But the concept of stopping in the middle of a highway for a crossing cow, well, totally acceptable. Or a goat, a camel, a pig, an elephant. No problem, hit the tuk tuk next to you. But DON'T hit the holy cow! Starting our journey in Delhi, we met Jenny's friend, Ang. She is headed to Goa for a month-long course on providing aid to developing countries. Our hotel Ajanta was great, besides the part where we all had to run out of the hotel lobby due to an electric fire caused by an overloaded circuit and someone turning off and on the switch until it blew. No problem, you can all come back in now. Our first day on the town was the last day of the Commonwealth Games, which are a competition in sports between all of the former British colonies. (Well, if you can call ping-pong, lawn billiards, and leap-frog sports.) Unfortunately for us, everything was closed. But it gave us a nice rest day. We eventually got out to explore Delhi, the Red Fort, the National Museum which Brett loved (he especially wanted to spend hours looking at the tapestries and textiles), and the Gandhi museum. At the Gandhi museum there is a wall of text that you could spend hours reading like a history book. We wished we had more time to stay and read. Gandhi was not only timeless and progressive, but also a product of his time and culture as well. A fascinating man and force of nature, nevertheless. And revered in India.

No Money No Honey
We left Delhi for the other two points of the "golden triangle", Agra and Jaipur. We had Ram as our driver, who luckily used his horn at every bottleneck, every stop sign, and every cow. Ram was confusing at first, as every sentence started with "You". "You going to Agra. You are museum is open. You are we go shopping". Later we learned that this is a common way of speaking for some regions of India. But this is supposed to be a story about love. It is about the one place worth going in Agra, the Taj Mahal. The Taj, the symbol for eternal love, is a mausoleum for Queen Mumtaz Mahal, the Muslim wife of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. The story is that, as his favorite wife and one that bore him 14 children (dying in childbirth on the 14th), he built her an architectural feat of beauty and perfection, of white marble with inlaid semi-precious stones. Years later, Shah Jahan's reign was forcefully seized from him by his own son, who proceeded to imprison Shah Jahan in the fort across the river for the rest of his life, but always with a view of his beloved and the Taj Mahal. You start to feel sorry for the guy, until you hear the rumor that he ordered the hands of every man involved in building the Taj to be amputated, so that another Taj could not be built to rival his beloved's. An impressive display of love, or of power and wealth? Hmm. Hard to say. We also visited the Agra Fort, luckily one day AFTER the man with a gun boarded a tour bus and opened fire (apparently missing everyone).
Jaipur was our next stop. We still had honkin' Ram as our driver, and gained a tour guide as well, Vijay. We spent a day just shopping in Jaipur, and another day sightseeing. We visited the Amber Fort and the water palace, remnants of the Muslim Mughal empire, the period of time when Muslims reigned over Hindis. Brett and I bought lots of fun things that now fill Luke and Todd Landin's living rooms in large boxes.

No Hurry, No Worry, No Camel, No Curry
In the west of India, in the state of Rajastan, the desert stretches for hundreds of miles. Camels are the working animal of this area. It was here, about 30 km from the Pakistan border, that we set out on a camel safari. Contrary to popular belief, only African camels spit. In fact, they are pretty cool animals. I rode baby Kingfisher. Brett sat atop Johnny Walker. Ang was on Michael Jackson, who according to Ang, was flea-bitten. We rode for three days through the desert, stopping at night on soft sand dunes to dwell under the full moon. Despite the heat of the day, it was a magical experience. We had three Rajastani men and a young boy cooking us meals of potatoes, dahl and flame-cooked chapati bread, all with a sprinkling of sand. (Helps digestion, apparently, and adds a crunch.) We had a little doggy guardian angel who followed us for two days, and slept curled up next to Ang, flea-bitten. In the evening after dinner, we sang songs while our guides played the empty water-container drum. Some great Indian songs were sung, as well as "Old MacDonald had a Farm". But obviously, this farm had elephants and tigers and such. The moon lit up the sky, and crept slowly over us as we slept. We awoke to the strange cries of wild peacocks. And I learned that camels have a sweet spot like dogs...if you scratch their necks, they will lie down and even turn over on their side. Really cool animals.

South to Goa
We decided to fly with Ang down to the old Portuguese colony of Goa, then have a little guy time/girl time apart. Brett went a little further north up the beach and found a little yoga joint to practice, and tried his hand at paragliding. All of the Indians I talked to said, "Ooo, that's dangerous! He is crazy!" Meanwhile, Ang and I did spa day. We had golden facials (?), pedicures, and had our toenails decorated with shiny things. We drank some Indian wine, took walks on the beach, and relaxed at Bernard's Place. We took a cooking class in an old Portuguese-style home, complete with a lighted shrine of Jesus and Mary. We learned of the "Seven Sisters", the spices that all good Indian housewives have in their kitchen: pepper, cumin, tumeric, cloves, cinnamon, cardamon and mustard seeds. We visited the spice plantation, where we were amazed and astounded to see that cinnamon is actually the bark of a tree, cocoa grows in big pods on trees, vanilla grows on a vine, and all of the other spices come from plants too, not from the grocery store! Saying goodbye to my buddy Ang, Brett and I met in Delhi for what we would soon discover would be the creepiest bus ride ever. We took an overnight bus from Delhi to Dharamsala...well, we ended up on the "local" bus. The five white people were designated the hard bench seat in the back of the bus. They tried to shove more people back there with us, but we protested. Most of the seats were broken. In fact, one man's seat literally was in the lap of the man behind him...see pics. There were no shocks on the bus. The bus driver, like every other driver in India, drove with his brakes and used his horn every five minutes. We are not talking a single beep. Oh no. It was a short tune at a very loud volume. No air conditioning. Dust flying in the windows. In the middle of the night we happened upon a truck broken down in the middle of the road. Our bus driver attempts to drive around it, scraping the sides of the bus and shattering several windows, showering glass down on those sitting on that side. We finally get going again after an hour of shenanigans, now with the bus swaying back and forth, and glass sliding from side to side, front to back of the floor boards. At dawn we arrive in the mountains. Our aggressive lead-footed bus driver chooses the narrow and winding mountain road. To make up for the slow uphills, he races the downhills, barely missing people walking by; and I swear we were on two wheels on a few of the tight turns that he misjudged and went flying into. I was imagining the headlines for the paper "...A bus with 40 locals and 5 white tourists die when their bus overturns and rolls down the side of a mountain nearing Dharamsala..." Brett gave us a good 10-20% chance of crashing. Thank goodness he was wrong. But what we didn't realize, not only was the bus transporting people, but we had half-a-dozen delivery stops of large packages. When all was said and done, we were crammed like sardines in the back of the death trap for 16 or 17 hours. We arrived in McLeod Ganj and slept for the rest of the day. McLeod Ganj was an adorable little town in the foot-hills of the Himalayas. It is a town full of monks and meditation, the home of the Daili Lama, and of exiled yet thriving Tibetans. We wished our India visa was not expiring after the meditation retreat.