I'm in Krabi

I had a great experience this morning. Sally and I crossed the border into Thailand at 8am and headed straight to the mini bus stop. We booked our tickets and went into a nearby restaurant and started our regular mime antics ‘no meat, no fish, no pork, no beef, no prawns, no chicken’. I went with the cook and pointed to all the ingredients I wanted. We sat down and giggled at the ridiculousness of having to list every meat imaginable in order not to eat it. After just minutes the cook had sliced and diced and called me over to cook the food! I cooked my own meal in a Thai restaurant and even better – it tasted fabulous! Sally didn’t even mind eating fried veggies and noodles at 9am.

We have spent all day today and yesterday on buses and trains on our way to Ko Lanta, an island on the south west coast of Thailand. I had no idea it would take this long. So far we have spent two hours on a bus from Taman Negara to Jerantut, eight hours on the Jungle Railway (this I highly recommend!) , five hours on a bus this morning and we are due to get off this bus in another five hours, arriving in Krabi at approximately 8pm tonight. Hooray! We have been talking about how fun transport is when you are traveling, how it is possible to spend ten hours on buses as we will today and to be entertained the entire time. Good company helps!

 Rose Apples Mum!

Speaking of the good company I have been keeping, Sally and Dan have exchanged places as my travel companions after a brief overlap on the 20th January. Dan has gone home to Australia after doing some testing traveling with me through India and the glorious Philippines. No more loving for me : (

Since her arrival Sally and I have worked our way overland from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia right up and over the border into gorgeous Thailand. The women here are stunningly beautiful, the food is delicious (even when I cook it myself) and the weather is so lovely.

In Malaysia Sally and I spent a day exploring Kuala Lumpur, eating fantastic veggie food in Jalang Petaling, climbing the twin towers with our bare hands (this is a lie – we actually went up in a Charlie and the Chocolate factory style elevator with a zillion buttons), and running around madly in the pouring rain and flooding streets looking for Titiwangsa bus station. It was ridiculously fun. The next stop was Taman Negara, a world heritage rainforest in the heart of peninsular Malaysia. It was also Sally’s 28th birthday which we celebrated with a traditional Morris St pancake breakfast with tea.

Only ten minutes out of the city heading to Taman Negara and we were already surrounded by trees. Malaysia is a nation full of surprises. Despite the ‘Malaysia, truly Asia’ advertising campaign, I found this country to be less the expected Asia than anywhere else I have ever been. This is truly a very comfortable place to travel. If only the taxi drivers would turn on the metre…

This is a peacock fern! It's BLUE!

Taman Negara was incredibly beautiful – although still nothing on northern nsw. We caught a narrow wooden motor boat to the local village, zooming along the brown water, surrounded by jungle. It reminded me of the river I stayed on in Sukau in Borneo, beautiful! We did a trek through the jungle in the morning and explored the canopy on a suspended bridge. In the afternoon I am ashamed to admit we visited the natives, the ‘Orang Asli’ people, and it appears their lives have been changed forever by bad tourism practices. It turned out that the place we visited was fully equipped with mod cons that were hidden away for our viewing pleasure. Never again! In the evening we cruised up and down the broad river spotlighting for animals coming to get a drink. Sadly I didn’t spot my beloved mouse deer apparently they are quite a nice meal for the locals.

Back to India (because even when I hate it I am obsessed with it...)

I did my best to undermine the Incredible India advertising campaign in my last blog entry even though there are some amazing things to see there. The most outstanding place I visited was, without a doubt, Varanasi. Varanasi is a city built on the edges of the mother Ganges. The Ganges river runs deep, flat and wide, through Varanasi. The water is filthy, it even looks filthy. There are all sorts of bizarre things suspended in the water, strange particles of I don’t know what, strange oil slicks on top, ash from the fires, soap residue from the laundry that is washed there, fuel from the boats, and garbage from the bursting population of locals, pilgrims and tourists. I asked a boat driver if the water that came out of the taps in Shanti Guest House was pumped from the river and he assured me it wasn’t. He said it came from underground water, far away. I hope he was right because I brushed my teeth in that water, somehow though I don’t believe him. Why would they pump water from afar when the Ganges was only a hundred metres away? Either way the driver was happy to drink it straight from the river, visible suspended particles and all.

photo of some guy and a goat - by Dan (posted without permission... hehe)

Life on the edge of the mother Ganges is a photographers delight. I could have easily sat in one spot all day and watched life go by. There were cows, dogs, monkeys and goats and people all over the giant steps known as ‘ghats’ that led down to the water. The animals all ate garbage to survive as there is no vegetation there. The cows would reach into the edge of the water to pull out garlands of marigolds that had been sent adrift as offerings, I’m sure all three stomachs must be full of string.

I stayed in the ghats at a lonely planet recommended guest house called Shanti, ‘Peace’ in English. The guest house is nine levels high, with mountain goat style stair cases that made my legs burn and my lungs heave! It was great training for the adventure trip in the Philippines. At the top of the guest house there is an open air restaurant that overlooks the Ganges and the city. It was a good spot to watch monkeys stealing laundry, kite-fights on the skyline and the cremation smoke made beautiful sunsets.

All day and all night long bodies are cremated on the banks of the Ganges. As we would walk through the tight, confusing network of narrow alleyways towards the river we would hear people chanting and turn to find a convoy of men carrying a deceased person, wrapped tightly in red and yellow cloth, decorated with tinsel, heading towards the ghats for cremation. The bodies are placed on stacks of wood, specially selected for quality, burning properties and price, and then burned. They are not sent out onto the river the way I thought they would be, it all happens on land in public. There are dogs sitting near the fires to keep warm, family watching and people stoking the fires.

The first time I went to watch a man stoking a fire he lifted up a spinal column with the pelvis still attached, let it fold, and then dropped it back in. I think my eyes nearly popped out of my head. On another occasion I noticed someone’s feet poking out the end of the fire. It sounds so horrible and gruesome, but when I was there it was so disconnected from reality. No one looked upset or horrified by the process, it was more real than that. Being in Varanasi made me reflect on the disconnected way that we deal with Death and dying in our culture. Everything seems private to the point of being hidden. I liked that the family was able to watch their loved one return to the source, it felt honest, cyclic, and complete, not to mention entirely foreign.

Varanasi is not all about the burning ghats, it is also famous for its universities, silk and for kidnapping foreigners. On arrival at the guesthouse after a fifteen hour bus trip that landed us in the dangerous city at 1am our unfriendly hotelier advised that it wasn’t safe to venture out after dark, and that many travelers go missing in Varanasi each year, robbed, tied to weights and thrown into the Ganges to be eaten by the river turtles within hours. Considering how many incompletely burned bodies lay in graves at the bottom of the river I don’t think these fabled travelers could ever be recovered.

Calcutta (I’m sorry, I cannot bear to call it Kolkata) is also a pretty cool city although I only spent a day there before flying out. This is the city of Mother Teresa’s hospice and maybe because of this, maybe not, there is a great scene of travelers who hang around for more than just a few days. Sitting at a very cool juice bar near Sudder St talking to another Australian an English guy approached me, asking if I was interested in going to Laughing Yoga with him in the morning. I swallowed all apprehension – hadn’t I come to India to do Yoga after all? – and left the hostel at five am to meet him and journey to the other side of the city to stretch and do belly laughs with middle aged Indians in a creepy foggy park.

In Calcutta we also met the most endearing, hungry street kids to date. My general policy is to not give to people who are begging, not even food. It is easier for me. This way I don’t have to think about the arguments for or against it, I get to stay out of it. Is there a pimp sending these kids out to beg Slumdog Millionaire style? Am I reinforcing and supporting a corrupt system? Will the kids rob me when I get my purse out? Is this a decoy for something more sinister? Fortunately for me Dan didn't seem burdened with these hang ups and happily bought people food everywhere we went. His enviable philosophy is that even if the circumstances are questionable there is plenty of food in the world and plenty that is wasted, and there is no reason for anybody to ever go hungry. I have never seen food disappear as fast as it did off the plate that he put in front of them. They were HUNGRY and it was all gone in less than a second. I was horrified. A month later I still think about this every day.

Early on in the trip I was keeping myself sane by retaining a sense of humour. Only two or three days into the trip I queued at the Mumbai tourist ticketing desk (tatcal), located in the biggest train station in India. We sat in a semi circle on bench seats waiting to be seen by a lone worker who dealt with foreigners. There were free staff all around him, waiting for regular customers, but we had to wait for him. I had been waiting for about ten minutes before he finished with one customer. He then put up a ‘thank you for your patience sign’ and went to lunch for half an hour. There were staff everywhere, but no one would help us because they didn’t work at the Tatcal counter. With 15 – 20 foreigners already in line ahead of me the scene was quite comical. A crazy African man next to me was losing his mind over the rudeness. A German woman came and yelled at everyone in the queue (except you, she said to me), she thought they were all Indians pretending to be foreigners. I was there for a couple of hours, and when I finally was served I got the ticket I wanted, paid through the nose for it, and left smiling. This was a very typical Indian bureaucratic nightmare which I’m sure was designed to test my patience. Amazingly I retained a sense of humour, but after a few weeks of being taunted, stared at and blatantly ripped off, my humour waned. I became angry, tired and frustrated. I still don’t think I have really recovered. I caught myself telling a taxi driver in Manilla that he was going to go to hell for being a liar and a cheat and that when he goes to church on Sunday he better pray for redemption. Who do I think I am! Maybe someone who needs to chill out or go home.

This rambling chapter has come to an end. I successfully paid far too much for a taxi to our Krabi hotel with Sally tonight without freaking out or telling the driver he was going to have a scorching afterlife. I think Thailand is doing me good.

The highly sought after position of travel companion will become available again on the 3rd of February. Submit applications via email : )