Pictures of... me

I've had a couple of requests for some pictures of me, so please forgive me this vain post dedicated to pictures of... me :)

One thing that has really surprised me is that frequently, we tourists become the tourist attraction. On several occasions, a friendly Indian or Nepali has motioned to their camera and then to me and said, "Photo?" I usually reach for their camera expecting that they want me to take a picture of them in front of whatever monument we happen to be visiting, but almost always what they mean is that they want a photo of me, usually with their family. It's very touching, but a bit odd to think that there will be photos of me in half a dozen Indian and Nepali family photo albums!

Taking pictures at the Taj Mahal at sunrise

With a local photographer's son at the Taj Mahal

With a baby elephant at the Elephant Breeding Center in Chitwan, Nepal

With an official mailbox outside the Pokhara, Nepal post office

Snuggling with a Nepali woman's baby goat (the owner is the woman in the orange sari)

I named him "Tenzing"

Drinking Diet Coke (I think that's what it says, anyway!)

It's all about the Gandhis

Showing off my fake henna (an ink seller on the street in Orchha, India grabbed me by the arm and painted me up before I could really protest)

Varanasi & Mother Ganges

To Hindus, Varanasi is the holiest place in the universe, and most Hindus make a pilgrimage here at least once in their lives to wash away their sins in the Ganges River. They also believe that if one dies or is cremated here, the soul is freed from the cycle of reincarnation and can finally ascend to heaven.

Our tour of the Ganges began with a sunset boat ride along the ghats, the steps that line the river. We were accompanied by a master sitar player and a tabla player. The music was wonderful and the perfect complement to the view of hundreds of pilgrims bathing in the Ganges, performing Hindu rituals, and preparing to cremate their loved ones and offer their bodies to Mother Ganges.

This holy place of reflection and freedom was especially poignant for me, since yesterday marked 6 months from my dad's passing. I thought about him a lot yesterday, and said a prayer for him as I floated a candle flower down the Ganges at sunset. I also said a prayer and sent a candle in remembrance for my grandma Marie, my aunt Babette, and my grand aunt Vi.

Sitar player Sitar and tabla
The holy city of Varanasi and the Ganges River

A candle flower -- a tealight surrounded by marigolds

A family washing their sins away

The crematory ghat

This morning we returned to the river for a sunrise boat ride, and the river was even more beautiful at dawn. Varanasi has been a beautiful and moving last stop in India. Tomorrow I continue on to Nepal.

Sunrise on the Ganges

Holy Cow!!

It wouldn't be India without cows wandering the streets. Cows are sacred in Hinduism, and they have free roam of the roads. I've seen more than one traffic jam caused by a cow standing in the road, chewing and staring into space. They act like they own the place. I guess they do!

I found the amusing article below (originally published in SFGate of all places) while looking for some information on the Indian cows.

New Delhi -- Scattered among this Indian capital of smooth boulevards and swank open-air markets, where cell-phone-yakking yuppies like to sip their espressos, is an army of drooling, defecating beasts. Four of them stood recently in a north Delhi commercial strip, their image reflected in the mirrored walls of street-side office buildings. Cattle catcher Bhajvir Singh crept from behind. He lunged for the tan bull with droopy eyes and slipped a lasso over his horns. The brute craned his neck, let out a great moo, and charged into the path of a white Mercedes, then, horns lowered, toward a bus stop, jabbing a man's ankle as he scampered up a ledge. "Out of the way, brother!" Singh shouted.
The bull panted. Belted with a bamboo pole by Singh's crewmate, he soon surrendered, shuffling into the back of a flatbed truck, the latest prisoner of a round-up campaign that seeks to rid Delhi once and for all of its estimated 40,000 itinerant cattle.

Cows are as ordinary to Indian cities as hippies once were to Haight Street. Worshiped by the country's majority Hindus and protected by law from slaughter, they are almost all owned, illegally, by small-time dairy vendors who milk the animals in the mornings then release them to forage among trash heaps. They occasionally go berserk: Last year, street cattle killed a priest, a retired railway worker, a housemaid, a scrap dealer and a 45-year-old named Rajveer, according to Indian news reports.

Cows, along with buffaloes, goats, street dogs and rhesus monkeys, came to dwell in India's cities as a result of authorities' struggle to manage the country's rapid urban growth. As Delhi's borders have ballooned, swallowing up scores of adjacent villages, it has absorbed a great number of village-minded folks, people who see cattle ownership as a natural right.

With the Indian economy's expansion in the last 15 years, driving Delhi's modern makeover, the presence of snorting livestock has become intolerable, many here say. "Everyone should be in their own natural habitat," said Meera Bhatia, a lawyer who filed a suit to compel the government to fix the cow problem. "It's not that complicated."
The Delhi cattle roundup is part of a nationwide trend. India's cities have in recent years sought to shed what some see as a medieval image that is inconsistent with the country's superpower ambitions. A once-thriving community of snake charmers has been hounded into obscurity. Government bulldozers have razed vast swaths of city slums. And Calcutta officials said in the fall that they would clear the city of its thousands of "barbaric" hand-pulled rickshaws.
Delhi's High Court ordered the city to address the cattle menace in 2002. "The capital city of Delhi should be a show window for the world," wrote judges R.S. Sodhi and Anil Dev Singh in their ruling. "The stray cattle on the roads gives a wrong signal."

Authorities tried a series of failed schemes: small fines, a threat to cut off cattle owners' electricity, a $50 bounty offered to the public for captured cows. The new plan -- involving a beefed-up staff of cattle catchers, microchip tracking devices and a massive new dairy farm -- is foolproof, say several people involved in its planning.
"I expect 100 percent success," said veterinarian S.K. Yadav, Delhi's cattle czar.

The linchpin of the strategy is the use of microchips implanted in the bellies of the city's cattle. Captured animals have been auctioned or taken to outlying asylums, but many returned to the city.

Original owners would bribe gatemen, or new owners would offer phony promises to keep the animal in the countryside. Now, if a cow with a microchip encoded with the owner's information is found inside city limits, its owner must pay a $115 fine.

As many as 7,000 of Delhi's cattle have so far been micro-chipped, and officials plan to have them all tagged within 18 months. Meanwhile, Delhi's illegal cattlemen, called the "dairy mafia" in the local press for their tough reputation and purported political ties, have been warned to either sell their animals beyond the city limits or relocate to a new, subsidized ranch on the western edge of the city. More than half of the plots at the 140-acre Ghogha Dairy have so far been bought, say officials.

"Nobody wants to go," said Jagdish, an illegal cattle owner who declined to give his last name. "It's far."
Jagdish stood beside his brick-walled buffalo stall set back among the narrow residential lanes of northeast Delhi -- dairymen in the area torched six cattle trucks last spring, according to a local official. His nine chained beasts ate mush out of bathtubs amid dung piles and urine that spilled into the lane. Jagdish rejected the idea that his business sullied the city. "Tell me when it was ever actually clean," he said.

Construction at the Ghogha ranch is scheduled to begin soon. It will include a fodder market, drinking reservoir, veterinary services and a large milk processing plant, according to the plans. By the time the Commonwealth Games come to Delhi in 2010, officials hope to have shifted all cattle in the capital region, including those at 10 legal dairies, to the new property. The dairy will help boost the efficiency of Delhi's sickly cows, which produce less than one-third the milk of their American counterparts, says dairy expert A. Anand.

"In days to come dairy farming will become the major driver of the Indian economy," said Anand, who is director of technology at Everest Enterprises, the company managing the ranch as well as manufacturing the cattle microchips. Anand, like many of those involved in India's makeover schemes, rejects opponents of the project as self-seeking. "You spread filth," he said, referring to illegal dairymen. "You have to see the larger public welfare."

In a country whose leaders are viewed by most as money-grubbing scoundrels, though, Delhi's dairymen seem little moved by appeals to civic duty. On a recent afternoon, two illegal cattle owners, bundled in scarves against Delhi's short winter, studied a map of the ranch at the Ghogha property. "Fine, a milk plant," said Kirtar Singh. "But will I get the rate I want?" The dairy's milk is expected to sell for about 38 cents per liter, 4 cents less than what Singh claimed to get in his neighborhood.

Vijendra Singh plans to buy a plot. He hates to uproot his family, he said, but government men in his neighborhood were hassling him. "I don't like it," he said, tugging on a cigarette. "But I don't have a choice."

The Taj Mahal

We arrived in Agra in the sweltering midday heat, but I wouldn't let that get me down -- I was here to see the Taj Mahal! The Taj has been one of my personal highlights of this trip since I began planning it, and it did not disappoint. It's bigger and more beautiful and more moving than you can imagine from the photographs, just like everyone says it is.

The Taj Mahal was built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his favorite wife, Mumtaz, who died giving birth to their 14th child. Building began around 1632 and was completed around 1653, and employed thousands of artisans and craftsmen. Though it looks plain white in pictures, it is extraordinarily detailed, with intricate carvings and marble inlays and Islamic script around the arches. Every inch of it is exquisite.

The classic view
(not pictured - hundreds of tourists around me snapping the same photo)

Checking out the Taj Mahal

Though I could have spent all day there, we only had about an hour, so the next morning I woke up before sunrise to take photos of the Taj from across the Yamuna River. Overnight there was a crazy sandstorm, which I was afraid would kick up so much dust that photos would be nasty and hazy, but instead it did the opposite -- the skies were clear and bright and a gorgeous dawn broke over the Taj. It was absolutely magical. I haven't had a chance to touch these photos up yet; these are straight out of the camera with no editing.




As I was snapping photos, a local photography enthusiast and his son passed by me as they took a morning stroll. He told me that the skies are clear like that only 15 or 20 days a year in Agra.

It was a lucky morning, and one I know I'll remember forever.

Jaipur, the Pink City

Rajasthan -- the very word conjures a mystical vision of India, of maharajas and camels and palaces and jewels. It's still all that and more today.

After a tough early morning train ride from Delhi to Jaipur (see Attack of the Delhi Belly) and a rest at the hotel, I was ready to explore. The Pink City is large (3-4 million people), but feels much smaller. Though the pace is still hectic, the people are friendlier. There's also livestock everywhere... goats, cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, and even camels wandering in the city streets. The entire city was painted a pink color to welcome Prince Albert at one time, and still maintains the tradition today.

Goats hanging out in the alleys of Jaipur

Friendly kids in Jaipur

The three main attractions in Jaipur are the Palace of the Winds, the City Palace (where the of Jaipur still lives today), and the Amber Fort (the ancient city).

The Palace of the Winds, or Hawa Mahal, is a facade that one of the old maharajas built for his harem so they could observe city life on the streets below. It is the symbol of Jaipur and you see pictures of it all over India.

Hawa Mahal, or Palace of the Winds

The most impressive sight in Jaipur in the world heritage-listed Amber Fort. Amber (locally pronounced as Ah-MEHR) means 'sky', as the city was built at the top of the mountain. However, the name Amber is appropriate in English, too, because the fort is a beautiful yellow-ocher color.

The Amber Fort

As impressive as the outside of the fort is, it can't begin to compare with the inside of the fort. Rajasthan is one of the world's most abundant sources of jewels, and the maharajas who built the fort had nearly unlimited wealth in their time. The interior was lavishly designed in Italian marble and inlaid with semiprecious stones and Persian mirrors. Archways and ceilings are painted with bright, stunning images and are still vivid over 500 years later with no restoration.

A woman working on a restoration project in the Amber Fort

In the evening, I was ready for some local culture and went to a movie at the Raj Mandir -- the #1 Hindi cinema in India. The theater itself is enormous, with seating for over 1000 cheering Bollywood fans. It's the thing to do for tourists and locals alike, and nearly every show sells out. I paid 70 rupees ($1.40) for my ticket, which is pricey for a theater in India; the Raj Mandir is like going to the Arclight (for you LA readers).

The Raj Mandir, #1 Hindi cinema in India

I was hoping for a big singing-and-dancing Bollywood movie, but it turned out that the movie, "8x10 Tasveer", was an action-drama that took place in Canada. Interestingly, the movie was in a mix of Hindi and English. The movie was good, but more interesting was the people watching, because movie-going in India is an interactive experience, and the crowd cheers and yells every time something mildly dramatic happens (such as a withering glance from the star, Akshay Kumar, who kind of reminded me of The Rock).

A bicycle rickshaw in Jaipur

Another early morning train ride would lead to Agra and the Taj Mahal!

Day 3: Crazy, Crazy Delhi

Delhi has been as overwhelming to all the senses as I thought it would be. It's hot (although not as humid as I expected, so the 95-degree heat is a bit more manageable), loud, and constantly busy. The city comes at you from all directions, and so does the endless stream of touts, all trying to get you to take a ride in their taxi, visit their "brother's shop", and buy goods at the same stores (which undoubtedly pay them the best commissions). They're very persistent, but many are friendly and continue the conversation even after I've politely but firmly declined their offer. Some even offer good advice, such as one tout who advised me, "Don't talk to anyone in Delhi. You'll lose money." It's all the name of the game in Delhi, so I've kept my wits by keeping a smile, and taking respite from the crowds and traffic by visiting some of Delhi's many beautiful ruins, memorials, and gardens.

For the past two days, I've started my mornings by visiting my corner fruit juice vendor, having a glass of freshly-made melon juice, and stocking up on bottled water. Then I grab a quick breakfast in the neighborhood. My favorite has been the masala dosa (a thin, crunchy crepe pancake stuffed with spiced potatoes) from "Dosa Yes Please" across the street from my hotel.


Then it's off to see the sights. I've visited the Red Fort (the center of the Mughal Empire at its end); Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India; Humayun's Tomb (a World Heritage site); Lodhi Gardens, and Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi's main bazaar.

Humayun's Tomb

Tending the grounds at Humayun's Tomb
Praying at Jama Masjid, India's largest mosque Praying at Jama Masjid, India's largest mosque

Hustle and bustle in Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi's main bazaar

Visiting all the sights in Delhi can make you very hungry and *very* thirsty. Thankfully there are drink sellers nearly every 100 feet, but since the drinks are not quite as ice-cold as you'd hope for after walking around in the heat, I'm not too ashamed to admit that I visited a McDonalds for a truly ice-cold Diet Coke. Also, it was fun to read the menu -- the McTikka Aloo was the most amusing thing I saw on the menu, which had a vegetarian patty and some sort of curry-ish looking sauce.

McDonalds India-style, with the McTikka Aloo and no beef products

Signs in Old DelhiA boy in the ruins of a mosque at Humayun's Tomb

After a day of seeing the sights, I come back to my neighborhood and find some dinner, which has usually been at the rooftop place I found on the first day. I've had some very tasty lamb and chicken curries, accompanied by as much naan as I can stuff myself with. After dinner, I stroll through the main bazaar in the neighborhood, which has a dizzying array of merchandise for sale.


This afternoon I'll meet up with my first group, and tomorrow morning I'll say goodbye to Delhi and continue on to Jaipur, known as the Pink City. Delhi has been a good introduction to India, but I'm ready to see what else is out there!

Day One: Cows, Monkeys, and Peacocks - Oh My!

Hello from India!

It's hard to believe I'm really here, despite the long journey. However, it would also be hard to believe I'm anywhere else, with the constant commotion in the street below, smells of curry wafting in my window, and cows wandering the streets at every turn.

My flights were uneventful and I didn't have much trouble sleeping on the 19 hours of flights after staying up much of the night before. Air India was comfortable, and the food (all THREE meals) was good - mmmm, lamb curry!

French chardonnay & Indian cheetos

As we descended into Delhi, I caught my first hazy glimpse of India. I was surprised at how quickly urban Delhi becomes farms and pastureland, given that nearly twelve million people live here. I also spotted the famous Baha'i Temple, shaped like a lotus blossom, and Humayun's Tomb, a famous Mughal tomb whose architecture partly inspired the Taj Mahal.

After collecting my bags, exchanging money, and clearing customs (a snap), I met my hotel's driver and we took off for Delhi. All manner of vehicles shared the main highway into the city - cars, trucks, buses alongside bikes, scooters, and tuk-tuks. Though the traffic and pollution didn't surprise me, the wildlife did -- from the car, I spotted my first brahmin cow (with a calf), several monkeys, and a peacock! I was also surprised at how much green space there is in the city - there are many overgrown, wild-looking parks ringed with wrought-iron fences, which kind of reminded me of The Secret Garden.

Drivin' in Delhi

My hotel, called Yes Please, is in the busy neighborhood of Paharganj, which straddles Old and New Delhi. It's noisy and crowded and definitely feels like India! When I ventured out for some dinner and bottled water a bit ago, I found pakoras sizzling in sidewalk vendors' pans, saris hanging in nearly every window, and motorbikes nearly running me over at every step.

View from my window at Hotel Yes Please

I found a rooftop restaurant overlooking the main square, and couldn't take my eyes off the commotion in the square below: tons of traffic (foot, motorbike, tuk tuk, bicycle, and cow), buying and selling of myriad merchandise, hundreds of conversations, and music blasting from every other shop window. A litter of puppies even tumbled about in the thick of it. I was able to divert myself from the view to enjoy my chicken curry, butter naan, and sweet lime soda ($3).

Having stayed up til nearly 10pm, it's about time for sleep! If I sleep through the night, I shouldn't have too much trouble with jet lag and be ready to see Delhi's sights tomorrow.