The Final Days

Two months into my trip, nearing my departure from India, I hit a wall. I’d thought the sensory overload would have done me in a lot sooner coming from a place of relative serenity, open space, clean air, hygienic practices, sufficient personal space, reliable food and western amenities. Too, I’d anticipated being curled up in agony with Delhi belly at least once… and never was. It’s true that I was super careful, rinsing my toothbrush with purified water and fasting for as long as I needed to rather than buckle and eat from a dicey venue. 

That worked and I remained optimistic, bowled over by the warmth and deep spirituality of the people, blown away by their ability to remain happy and loving and the women always dolled up in shimmering sarees, looking drop dead gorgeous while inhaling sewer vapors and diesel exhaust and shuffling through garbage and cow poop. But abruptly, with less than a week left, the romantic haze insulating me from the many nauseating discomforts vanished, and I woke to find myself pissy and combative. While most of these posts are child-friendly, this one is not. My brain began filling with adult language. I started shoving back and blockading those who tried to push in front of me in queues. My logic had been that getting angry and confrontational would only make me unnecessarily miserable, but I came to agree with Freud that keeping it in was worse and I didn’t hesitate to call the pushy women in the airport line fat whores, or to tell the men behind me who handed money over to the stall vendor in front of my face that they had tiny shriveled up dicks. I’d had it. I was pissed off that India didn’t have garbage pickup. Pissed off that their lack of air quality enforcement was killing my planet. Pissed off that everything smelt of sewage and burning plastic. And pissed off that everyone was trying to rip me off. 

It was funny then when I finally found a lone remote trail in the Kalaledeo national park that I was startled by the grunting of an angry boar, the power animal symbolic of confrontation. Busted by the Great Spirit himself. “Here’s where you are sweetheart,” he pointed out. It had been building, but I think it hit full force at the railway station in Agra when I truly believed I’d lost my passport after unzipping, re-zipping and unzipping every hidden pocket in my travel vest. And I started shaking. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d shaken. Something hormonal triggered. And I just wasn’t going to put up with shit from anybody, no matter how innocent they were. 

Backing up a couple days. From Puri I took a car to Bubeneshwar for a flight to New Delhi. I booked a night at the J Residency near Nizamuddin Railway Station to catch a morning train to Agra. The hotel was surprisingly nice. Artsy lighting. Clean, modern rooms. Western shower. Super staff. They were finishing off building a rooftop for a cafe. The view from there is stellar. The manager took me up after sunset so I could see the marvelous skyline. I’d visited Huyaman tomb earlier and wanted to see its silhouette, so I was grateful for the invitation. Too, somehow they managed to send out and get back a load of laundry for me in a number of hours though I’d checked in a bit late in the day, an almost unheard of feat in a place where clothes are mostly air-dried.

 

Huyaman’s tomb and the surrounding gardens with lesser celebrated tombs was unexpectedly romantic. I’d wanted to see it as rumor has it the Taj Mahal was somewhat modeled after it. Muslims definitely have a different take on the disposal of remains than Hindus and I can’t say that these huge tombs (the bodies are actually underground below the grandiose monuments) are sustainable with the world’s population being what it is, but the grounds were impressive, the architecture and layout pleasing to the eye and the rosy-headed bright green parakeets super cool. I am always bothered by the selfish arrogance of the elite but I do understand wanting to create works of beauty. 

I took the train to Agra the next morning. It was delayed but I was having a nice conversation with a worldly microbiologist who’d lived in Dallas and I barely noticed. Over the course of my trip I’d heard Germans praising the punctuality of trains in India and stressing that theirs were quite the joke, whereas I’d had quite the opposite experiences. I was grateful for all of the glitches with public transportation my first week in India because since then I had zero expectations that I would even arrive at my intended destination, so a few hour delay didn’t even make it on my emotional radar. I had an entry ticket to the Taj Mahal for late afternoon and I made it. That was kind of important to me because it’s closed on Fridays, the following day. I was staying at Joey’s Hostel in Agra which had a surprisingly clear view of the Taj Mahal from its rooftop cafe. It was pleasant to be among travelers again and I had some delightful and meaningful conversations up there. Too, the food was good and that evening a duo planning to open a restaurant were trying out their appetizers on us. They were quite good and in my book, this was a far better event than the usual hostel offering of a pub crawl. Once you hit a certain age, or maybe a threshold of having drunk too many boatloads of alcohol, got in a lot of stupid arguments, slept with a lot of cute but weird strangers and wasted a lot of days with hangovers, crawling from pub to pub just isn’t as inviting a prospect as it once was.

So here’s a cropped photo of the Taj Mahal from Joey’s rooftop…

An unrivaled splendor to a poet. To a romantic. To an architect. To a dancer who can feel the love moving within it and around it.

Not just because its design and every detail is exquisite.

Or because it is a profound monument of an abiding love few of us will ever feel. But all pine for.

But because it opens the heart chakra like there’s no tomorrow.  

Shah Jahan, the Mughal emperor built the tomb for his wife who died in 1631. Later, his son usurped his throne and had his father thrown in a prison across the river from where he could see the Taj Mahal from his cell window.

                                                                                                        

I can’t imagine how splendid it was, its silhouette mirrored in the river below under the moonlight, back when the river wasn’t just a sewage drain. The changing hues of the brilliant white marble with the passing clouds, the setting sun. Fuck India for damming up the waterway and not allowing the fresh water to continue maintaining the integrity of the foundation of this UNESCO world heritage site. Doesn’t award of the title mandate a global responsibility? It’s the world’s treasure, not just your personal building to neglect. 

I’ve almost said it all so that I don’t need a separate post titled: India, the elephant in the room. 

I have one final vent. It’s the hawkers. How as exhausting as it was to be hailed several times a day for a photograph with friends or family, it came from a sweet place and made me feel a bit like a movie star. But the “Ma’am! Ma’am” catcalls every two seconds from those who saw me as a dollar sign got old as did the intricate shenanigans to exact unreasonable amounts of money for nothing. 

I closed my trip with a visit to the Kalaladeo National Park, known for its bird sanctuary. The tuk tuk driver who eagerly stole me from any competitors waiting outside the railroad station assured me, although his English was paltry that he knew where the Forest lodge was. Well, it turns out he knew where the Jungle Lodge was, which was not at all helpful. An interesting phenomena in India is how willing everyone is to help out their brothers and will not hesitate to stop dead still in a traffic jam and give directions yo another driver who had asked. Despite providing him my phone with the route shown on google maps, my driver couldn’t follow. I’d found by then that there’s illiteracy and then there’s beyond illiteracy among a lot of the tuk tuk drivers. 

And so I ended up transferring tuk tuks midstream to ride with a driver who had free entry into the park and generously indicated that I should pay the first driver full fare though we were only halfway there and that he’d take me the rest of the way for free. That I assure you is never the case. It quickly becomes, “You pay me from what comes from your heart. And you are like a sister to me. You have such a pure heart. Do you want to stop and eat (and pay for my meal or pay my family for the meal they will prepare) and do you want to rent a bike? You need a bird guide for the park. I know the park well. See the sticker on my windshield for the park. I know the park for twenty years.”

Although I was past exhausted by the time I escaped from the tentacles of this guy, as I was checking in I thought I might want a naturalist guide. The naturalist at the bird sanctuary in Diu really did point out birds I would never have seen myself. The receptionist assured me that he’d line one up for the next morning. It would cost 800 rupees for two hours. Sounded good to me. The next day he wasn’t working and he hadn’t lined it up, so I was left with the fellow at the desk who called some slimy creep who told me I needed three hours as the park was twenty-nine square kilometers in area and we needed two tuk tuks, one for his equipment. The total would be 4800 rupees before tipping. I told him no. Someone in the lobby who overheard us told me that I could just walk, and he was right. The only road the tuk tuks can even go on was a total of four kilometers up and back from the Forest Lodge and you’d have to be stone blind not to see the birds. There are millions. Or at least thousands upon thousands. The best places to explore are really the tangential paths where the tuk tuks aren’t even allowed. 

In fact, there are sites in the wetlands where there are so many cackling and screeching birds that the ear-splitting sound of the traffic in Delhi is like a whisper in comparison. Definitely no guide needed unless there are small facts about birds you don’t know, and need to then and there. You could see everything they were up to. Mating, nesting, fighting for territory and food, fishing, feeding chicks. It was all there front and center. After taking ten million photos and five million videos, I couldn’t wait to get someplace quieter. And unexpectedly, I found one.

I was an hour away from anyone and Google maps put me another forty-five minutes from reaching the main road when I heard the snuffling of the wild boar. It was irony at its scariest. I didn’t care about the sign warning of leopards because I knew they’d really killed them all, and if any survived, they would stay concealed. I’d actually love to see one. I’d read a sign about the origin of the park, a hunting reserve for one of the British colonialists, which seemed to aggrandize his accomplishment of shooting over 4,000 birds in one day. I thought of Guy Bradley, the game warden murdered in the Everglades by poachers and pictured this pompous asshole glorifying in his blood bath and wondered why after he’d killed thirty, someone didn’t turn a gun on the psychotic bastard. 

So, despite the warning about the leopard, which only made me smile, I was unnerved by the boar. They are more known for their aggressiveness than their shyness, so I looked away from the grunting, forward up the path, determined to not show fear. I picked up my stride, when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but an unruly-looking pack of monkeys with sharp teeth and sharper claws, forty strong, glaring at me. 

I remembered reading this sign and tried hard not to seem like I was staring back. Monkeys are not cute, cuddly or friendly. And chances were pretty good with the sheer number of them that I’d be walking between mothers and babies. How could I navigate through them without looking at them?

I pictured a white light surrounding and protecting me and kept up a steady prayer to my angels, even calling on the Archangel Michael. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

The Forest Lodge inside the National Park, run by the government of India and competently staffed, was a pleasant place to stay.

The view from my balcony:

I took the train back to Delhi, spent the night with a friend in the government district in Vasant Vihar, bought some ginger jaggery to take along for my tea, spent the last night in a crappy place closer to the airport (Hotel Seven Inn which goes by a couple different names so exercise caution… and while the room wasn’t horrible, the staff worked assiduously to find different methods of exacting cash from its victims.) It was situated in a neighborhood of hotels for travelers. I suggest you seek out a nicer one. I arrived at the airport five hours early for my flight to Vietnam. I’d canceled my return flight to the US so I could at least recoup the taxes. I was grateful my flight wasn’t grounded. Two hundred were that day, due to poor air quality. And eighty trains delayed. Turns out that five hours was just barely enough. A couple hundred people were already in line ahead of me for my Vietjet flight. Their luggage regulations for carryons was strict. They weighed them so I had to check in my backpack which it turns out was close to sixteen kilograms. A check in bag was included in my flight so I didn’t care that much. I like to keep it with me so that it doesn’t get lost in transit. This meant that I’d have to pick it up at the Saigon airport and check it in again for my Da Nang flight. I’m not sure how many times I had to show my passport, boarding pass and explain that my visa was electronic. It seemed like too many times. And did they really have to confiscate the lighter i just bought? I don’t smoke, but I carry incense to mask the smells in hotel rooms when I have to.  India has a lot of mildew and I’m not sure that using “green” cleaning products is a concept here. Seems a bit esoteric. By the time I arrived in Saigon, I was well past exhausted as my flight was an overnight one, and I thought that my departure was from Terminal Three, weirdly a long shuttle bus ride across town which would press me for time. Just before arriving at Terminal Three, I realized that information was still lodged in my head from last night’s flight, so I had to catch a taxi back and barely made my connecting flight thanks in part to a wholly inept Vietjet customer service rep roaming the airport. A competent one at check in picked up the slack and helped me get where I needed to be in time. The upside was that I got to see a bit of Ho Chi Minh City aka Saigon, which I’d wanted to do. 

I was picked up at the airport in Da Nang by a driver who took me to my sweet digs on Hoi An Beach. I have since learned that the car service Grab is more reasonably priced and reliable. Download the app if you’re in Southeast Asia.