Dec 2008

Welcome back to India. After 6 years and a lot of speculation on what it still had to offer us, the sub-continent still held a promise of mystery and adventure. The love affair was rekindled.
One of the reasons that we fell for this place was that something would always astound you every day. We thought the Philippines and Indonesia would give India a run for it's money for the sheer amount of weird stuff that would happen to you but India was in good form from the off.
You know that there are cows roaming around and sleeping in the middle of busy traffic, you know that it can take a few hours just to buy a train ticket, you even know that there are nearing one billion people living in and around and on top of each other but as you take your first auto rickshaw ride through the city it still can take your breath away. I'm told India for a tourist is a bit like taking heroin, the sensation is incredible but after a while it can turn you mad. But what a rush!
We return to familiar territory taking the same first steps though the south of India as we did all those years back. Chennai had indeed changed. It seemed quieter, less busy and cleaner. India is, after all, the worlds 4th largest economy now so progress has to happen but the madness of it all is still apparent. Our first night threw up some classic India surprises. We had book a room in a hostel because we knew we were arriving after midnight but when we arrived our reservation had been forgotten about so we had to bed down in a grotty dorm with a snoring Indian guy in his pants. We later found out that the room we reserved was occupied because a wedding that was taking place had run a day over schedule (!) so we were left with dorm with no shower or toilet. We asked for a room with a toilet and the manager said he could sort one out for us. He did this by trying to kick out 12 guys in an other dorm so that the two of us could have the room. We thought this unfair and also a very odd business decision so we moved on leaving the 12 guys wondering why we were so important that they nearly all had to leave.
Mammalaporom was the next stop. A small fishing village that gets it's fare share of tourists. Apart from the sea it's surrounded by paddyfiels and ancient carvings etched into rock. Temples dot the surrounding area and long tailed Macaches lord over them as there own. Stealing bottled water from the tourist is the way of these monkeys. They know how to unscrew the lids and down the contents with ease. if you can avoid getting mugged by them it's possible just to litarly hang out with them. Sue and I spent s few good hours just sitting around with them in the evenings.
Temples are everywhere so you can spend almost all of your time exploring them. They are almost always full of devout Hindus doing, to western eyes, bizzar and colorful things to appease some of the 36,000,000 Gods. Smashing bagfuls of coconuts, feeding the temple elephant who blesses you back by placing it's trunk on your head, shaving your head and even covering your self in yellow powder.
I won't forget the first time I saw a bright yellow woman walking about the streets and it seemed that only Sue and I thought this to be strange. Nothing in India is strange to the Indians, except a tall guy with dreadlocks and a western woman. We still draw more looks than all of the other bizzar stuff that you can find roaming the streets. It's nice to be noticed but can we really compete with a bright yellow woman? Only in India.

After the relative calm and organisation of Malaysia, it was nice to get back to some more hectic randomness, which Indonesia provided well. We spent most of our time around the coast, snorkelling and surfing, both of which are very good in Indonesia.

The roads and driving conditions horrify most tourists, as people seem to apparently overtake on blind bends, there are hundreds of scooters wizzing past you everywhere, dogs sleeping in the side of the road, and huge trucks suddenly appear on the wrong side of the road hurtling towards you. However, there appear to be surprisingly few accidents and there are rules to the apparent hecticness. We tested this by hiring a car and trying for ourselves. It was really nice to have the freedom to travel where we wanted and when, rather than having to sit on full busses waiting for them to 'fill up' i.e. until someone's sat on your knee, it's not full enough.

Dan will probably delete this, but it's the first vehicle he's driven while travelling that he's not crashed. Although, he made up for this by going surfing with the car keys, and the hostel keys in his pocket. His pocket somehow came open in the surf and the keys lost. We spent a good couple of hours topping up our sunburn by walking up and down the beach hoping that they'd been washed up. We eventually had to cut our losses and begin the long walk back to our hostel in our swimmers, when the taxi men offered to take us a locksmith. The locksmith followed us back to our car on his scooter, with a utility belt full of devices for breaking into a car. He accomplished this by taking the lock off the boot and poking things into it until half an hour, and only 4 pounds, later he had produced a new key for us. The part of me that isn't considering joining the police thought that we maybe should have pointed out a slightly better model of car and claimed that it was ours!

The food in Indinesia was good and spicy. The locals even started calling Dan after one traditional dish, Gado-Gado (vegetables with spicy peanut sauce), as it means mixed, or half and half. This may sound like they were being a bit offensive, but really they weren't. After asking Dan if he's Indonesian, then if his Dad was a Chinaman, they're always really interested to hear that he's mixed race, and comparing him to a National dish, a way of celebrating this!

The locals are very friendly and after trying hard to sell you something for a few minutes, relax and want to chat with you. Since the Bali bombings tourism has dropped dramatically, mainly through Australians staying away, especially as they've recently executed the bombers and were fearing further attacks as a result.

Kuta, in Bali is the very, very touristy area, where you could be in any beach resort in the world. Not really our scene, but it's where all the surf is, so we had to go. We stayed outside of the very touristy bit, but ventured in out of curiosity. I wish we hadn't as the rest of Kuta is quite nice, and seeing monkeys dressed up on bicycles and more dimdims than locals was not really what we came to Indonesia for.

Alcohol is very hard to get hold of in Indonesia, being Muslim. The beer is very expensive and the government introduced licencing on shops selling liqueur, so none do anymore. This meant that we got our booze from chatting to the locals and them offering to find us the local tipple. We enjoyed lots of arak, a rice wine and brum, or farmers wine, which is made from palm. It came in an unlabelled bottle with a chunk of coconut husk for a cork. Luckily we didn't go blind drinking it!

We both really enjoyed Indoneisia. Where else can you ride on busses where the driver is wearing a full crash helmet, visor down; see signs on schools informing us that carrots are food, not weapons; sit in a cramped bus for 40 minutes unable to move while the driver insists that it's not yet full enough to leave and then drive round the streets for another 40 minutes as the movement when setting off has released enough space that someone who just happens to be standing by the side of the road might like to fill, before arriving at your destiation that was only actually 20 minutes away in the first place... Well we are flying to India tonight...

Photos of Indonesia are to follow, but we had a delete all, rather than delete 1 incident with the camera and are still working on retrieving some of our pictures.