Joachim's Travel Blog
Friday, December 12, 2003
I guess I should start with my arrival in Gopalpur. I got off the train at Brahmapur (it may be Berhampur on your map - spelling is optional here) and took a cycle-rickshaw to the bus station. I found the bus without any problems but everybody seemed to be smirking at me for some reason. I ignored them, climbed up on the roof to deposit my backpack and then found a seat at the very back.
Predictably the bus filled with people. We left the station packed pretty tight but I was in relatively good shape because of my window seat (in the back where I couldn't easily get bumped by a woman). Off we went to Gopalpur. Or so I thought. Actually after about a minute, we pulled over and the ticket guy started up his call of "Gopalapudagopalapuda" again. More people entered the bus. This happened again about five times, until the bus was crammed painfully full of people. Still we stopped and the ticket guy called for more customers. This is when I remembered being told today was the last day of the Beach Festival.
The new passengers didn't fit, of course, so they were placed on the roof, in the luggage rack. We had about fifty people in a minibus the size of a small Winnebago. As we approached Gopalpur, an amazing thing happened: we were stopped by the police!
You have to understand the police in India don't do anything. Mostly they walk softly, carry a big stick (sometimes an old World War I era rifle), and sleep a lot. But apparently our bus was so ridiculously overloaded that this cop really thought people were going to start dying right there, and he pulled us over. I had to walk the rest of the way, which luckily was only about a kilometer or so. Lucky for me I'd finally figured out how to adjust my pack correctly the night before.
Anyway, on the walk I met this nice Indian guy named Kapil. He lives in Bramhapur and came in to see the festival. We got to talking and he came out again the next day to visit me. I ended up spending two nights in Gopalpur, despite the complete and utter lack of anything to do.
I finally swam there! I am very aware of being a constant subject of attention from everybody around (I should write another blog entry about the guy who felt me up on the train to Bramhapur), and Indians don't (can't?) swim, so I figured there would be a lot of gawking. But what the hell, it might be my only chance to swim in the Bay of Bengal and the water was warm. I swam out past the breakers and paddled around for a little while. I'm a pretty bad swimmer these days but I think I still impressed the inner tube crew that were the only people in the water but me.
When the time came to leave, Kapil kindly assisted me. I ate a delicious thali made by his mother, and we hung out at his house for some time. Then he ferried me to the train station on his scooter to buy the tickets. Turns out 3-tier AC and sleeper class were both waitlisted. I booked a ticket for 3AC and hoped for the best.
Well the best doesn't seem to happen to me much but it turned out ok. When the train arrived, 3AC was completely full (we couldn't even bribe the conductor to get me a spot!). I asked the sleeper class guy and he told me to climb aboard, which I did. When I got to Hyderabad, I was able to get a refund for the rest of my ticket. That's good because I'm starting to think in rupees instead of dollars, and taking a Rs 300 train ride for Rs 900 seems like a pretty bad deal. So I got it at the regular price, in the end. Sleeper class is just as good as AC this time of year - actually I don't have a blanket so I got pretty cold when they started opening the windows at 5 AM.
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
On the Motor Vehicle
I spent a lot of today in a bus so it seemed like a good time to talk about motor vehicles in India. I've already discussed the topic a little but I feel my experience has broadened enough to merit a special section today.
I will limit myself to non-animal-powered vehicles on the roads. Trains will have to be discussed another time, as perhaps will oxcarts and the like. These latter are rarely found in cities, where I've spent most of my time.
So the vehicles one sees frequently fall into three major categories: human-powered, small passenger or freight, and large vehicles.
There are two primary forms of human-powered vehicle on the roads: bicycles and rickshaws. Bicycles are steel, single speed. They come equipped with a rear-wheel lock (it's a device which extends a metal bar between the spokes to prevent the wheel from turning. They have them in Germany too), a bell and brakes that basically don't work. I rented one yesterday and rode around for a while - it was fun but certainly didn't feel safe. And Puri's roads are far less congested than any big city's.
The other human powered vehicle is, of course, the rickshaw. This comes equipped with some decorative trim, usually a collapsible sun shade, and a driver so wiry and weatherbeaten he looks like some kind of computer-generated special effect. This guy, all 75 pounds of him, will haul the three hundred pounds of you and your friend and the additional 80 pounds of your packs (not to mention the weight of the rickshaw itself) across town, say ten minutes, for eight rupees. That's about twenty cents at the currency exchange, and will buy you the equivalent of maybe two bucks (you can get three glasses of chai on the street for that money) back home. Much respect to my hommes the rickshaw wallahs.
Small motorized vehicles include some I've described before so I won't to into too much detail. Auto-rickshaws are motorized tricycles with a roof and room for two (or three Indians) in the back. They race around the streets with abandon. Motorcycles and mopeds also abound and are, if anything, even more reckless. They typically carry two persons but it's common to see three men on one motorcycle, or sometimes a family with dad driving, mom on the back (always riding sidesaddle, of course), and baby sitting in dad's lap up front.
The new additions to the above-mentioned vehicles are the auto-pickshaw (my terms now), the cycle-pickshaw, and the tempo. Auto-picks are the cargo variants of auto-ricks. Instead of a passenger compartment, they have a cargo bed in the back. They're quite common, especially once you get out of the city, and you see them hauling anything from gravel to bottled water. Cycle-picks are the non-motorized version. They also haul everything from bricks to (I actually saw this today) electronics shops. It took two cycle-picks to haul the store, which like most stores is a shed, and they got honked by my bus driver for blocking the road. Tempos are gigantic auto-rickshaws that carry a lot of people. I have no idea why anyone would build a tricycle the size of a minivan but they're popular as minibusses.
Anyway, the final category is large vehicles, but I'm running out of internet time so I'll have to fill you in on the fascinating details later.
Topic for the day: Chilika Lake, India's largest lake and apparently the largest body of "brackish water" in Asia or something like that. Sometimes Indian rhetoric runs a bit towards hyperbole. For example, I did not know until reading about it that Puri's beach is "the world's most beautiful", and this despite having spent several hours there! Anyway, there's little question that Chilika Lake is a big body of brackish water, so let's just leave it at that.
I took an OTDC tour there today. That's the Orissa Tourism Development Corporation. They run hotels and take people to places of tourist interest, like lakes and stuff. Now I don't want to pretend that this was the tour of a lifetime - it certainly had its share of flaws - but I enjoyed myself.
The bus contained thirty middle-aged Indians and myself. Because I was alone (the only person on the bus not with at least one other person) I got the best seat on the bus, in the front next to the door. It's the only single seat there is. I also got special treatment from our tour guide who, for example, pointed at some huts and said "these are the prawn cultures" before launching into a twenty minute ode to prawnoculture in Hindi for the rest of the crowd.
Well no matter - the views were still nice and the road wasn't that bad, mostly. I guess parts of it were that bad, but not most parts. Actually there were some really great images on the trip that stick in my mind. Villages nestled under the distant hazy spire of the great temple of Lord Jaganath. Fishermen poling their boats along the lake, walking the length of the boat to push it against the pole. A bicycle, and later several cows, precariously perched on a foot-wide mud retaining wall that separated prawn farms in the lake. I got my first good look at rural India today and it was really pleasant. And, perhaps surprisingly, much cleaner than the city.
The lake itself was pretty dull but I did get temporarily adopted by an Indian family on holiday. They looked after me and eventually invited me to stay with them. Unfortunately they live in the direction opposite my own path, so I reluctantly decided to turn them down. Perhaps I'll see them again on my next trip to India.
Tonight is my last night in Puri. I've been here four days now and that's about three days longer than I should have stayed (or indeed, than I planned to stay). Strangely, I've decided to temporarily move on to Gopalpur-on-Sea where, if anything, less is going on. I feel like I'll be better able to relax there, though. Maybe I'll finally get a little swimming in. After that I will slowly make my way towards Bangalore, where I hope to meet my friend Amar. Verena and I are going to split up here - she will head off to the west coast to find her boat. I'm back to paying full price for hotel rooms, I guess.
Sunday, December 07, 2003
On The Internet
Like most things in India, the Internet is handmade, ornate, and elaborate. It also teeters continuously on the verge of total disfunction.
Here in Puri, there are about six internet access points within a two minute walk of my hotel. Actually that space encompasses the entirety of the foreign tourist district here. In this space the Internet access shops come in two varieties. The first type is the Internet access store - these places provide nothing but Internet access. The second type is the communications store, providing Internet, telephone, bus and train tickets and package tours (for example of the tribal areas of Orissa).
The connections used are identical no matter what kind of store you visit. The Internet-only stores are generally slower because they connect multiple computers through one 56K modem. The general purpose shops sometimes have only one computer. Prices, as always, are random and not in any way determined by the quality of service.
The proprietors of these shops also seem to have been chosen more or less at random. If a problem occurs, they (I've seen this at three shops now) repeatedly select the "refresh" item from the Windows desktop menu. This item does not do anything, or at least nothing related to the connection. One computerwallah was also fond of rapidly opening and closing the "Details" portion of the modem's connection window. Since he was clearly not reading it, I have to assume that either he does not understand the meaning of the window, or he thinks I don't understand it, or both.
It's always a little wild and wooly here, and the Internet is no exception. At least I get Buddha, the Taj Mahal and a camel in my cubicle, along with some nice incense. And, in the end, I can post my blog, so everything turns out all right. Nothing more than a little patience is required.
Today I post from Puri. I actually don't have much to say but I haven't been able to access my email for the past two days so I might as well do something with my internet time. Puri is a pretty quiet place and there's plenty of internet time.
Puri is a beach-side resort. It's pretty popular among Indians (apparently from Calcutta) but there are also some Israelis here. They vacation in India after getting out of the army. I haven't seen an American in a long time. Anyway the beach isn't too bad, but apparently the water isn't too clean here. I'm hoping I get down the coast a bit to Gopalpur-on-Sea where I can do some swimming. Swimming isn't really a high priority for me since I plan to do a lot of it in Thailand.
I was here last night but the previous three nights I spent in Konark. I saw three nights of the dance festival, and I believe I described one of them. The second dance show I saw, on the fourth night of the festival, was interesting but not as good as the first night. The last night completely stunk! I think it's strange that they ordered the performances so that some of the worst material was at the height of the festival. Anyway, overall it was a great experience. I think a lot of the Indians couldn't afford the Rs 20 ticket price, but they had their own festival outside the dance ampitheater that went long into the night. There were people dancing at street stalls, and the usual snacks and toys for sale. It seemed pretty cool (well not for tourists maybe) but it was loud and went on pretty late into the night.
Thursday Verena and I ate a little something at a fishing village on the beach. Friday Verena got sick. This gave her a good excuse to miss some of the less exciting parts of the dance festival, but it was hard on her since she loves eating local food everywhere she goes. After a day without food here in Puri, today she is back on her feet and again consuming copious quantities of thali. Actually I had a fish curry last night (I don't eat as much as she does, for some reason) and it was really quite good. Makes sense, since the fish comes from about 500 meters away.
So next stop may be Gopalpur-on-Sea, where I don't expect to have any internet access, or possibly somewhere further south, on the coast of Andhra Pradesh. I hope to make it to a big enough city in the next week to be able to read email again, but it may not happen. Maybe my ISP will ressurect its web mail service before I leave Puri.
