The Elsewhere Diaries

From googling Murdeshwar one of the things that struck me was that everything was called RNS. A tourist board maybe? Nope. Apparently RNS basically owns the entirety of the place, having been born there, he decided to revitalise it with a shit ton of money, a giant statue of Shiva, a gopura and the words RNS emblazoned on the skyline. It's all a little odd. The statue and the gopura, a kind of Hindu pagoda look nice from afar but up close it all seems a little Disneyland. This especially apparent when you spot that it has UVPC double-glazing, the scourge of Middle England, in all of its windows. However, the diving was incredible, which was really why I came. I have officially done my first two qualified dives and it was amazing, alas, no turtles, but plenty of coral and hundreds of fish and a (possible) shark! I actually had a great time in this weird little town and kept getting taken down alleys to illegal bars when people found out I was English, the food was great and I met my first unattractive Swedish couple ever. That, and while eating lunch in a tiny restaurant where they spoke no English I turned around to find a holy cow had wandered in and was stealing all the rotis.

From Murdeshwar I zoomed down to Cochin (on a train! I actually managed to get on one this time!) just in time for the Biennale. I won't lie, this was complete fluke and I had no idea of its existence but it has to be better than the Sharjah Biennial, which was summarised by my mother as "almost as good as a class of Year 2 students".

Cochin is gorgeous, though actually, the fort, with its heritage hotels and fishing nets is nothing spectacular, but the roads off of it, leading to Jew Town, are an amazing rarity in India. More like Marrakesh, old buildings are crumbling but have yet to be demolished and replaced by high rise apartments. Antique shops full of old doors, battered old cameras and bronze idols were penny-a-piece. While it is decidedly shabby, it is also incredibly chic, which is perhaps why the Biennale was curated so well and was genuinely interesting. We tend to forget how lucky we are in England, that we can toddle off and see world class art by getting on the tube. Often art galleries and especially modern ones in places like India are full of mediocre (at the best) and unsophisticated work. Of course, all the best is usually already in the Tate, and it is investment that is the problem, but not so in Kochi. I was happily surprised at how amazing it was, and the spaces, old spice warehouses, docks and public gardens had been appropriated amazingly for a mixture of modern art and traditional music. I even stumbled across an amazing (and frankly unphotographable) collection by home grown London girl and Sri Lankan Tamil Maya Arulpragsam a.k.a M.I.A, which was incredible.

I'm definitely in the south now, and things have changed. Besides the languages, the appearance and the thinning out of Russians, it's the food and the culture that are most apparent. After being overcharged for bad seafood in Goa it was amazing that when I asked for crab in Kochi they obliged by sitting me on the back of a motor bike and taking me to the fish market to chose one, which happened to weigh about a kilo and cost the grand total of £5.50 along with a teapot of "special tea", also known as Kingfisher. Life here is a little more carnivalesque and a little more fun.


From Kochi I headed down to Allepey, apparently once dubbed the Venice of the East, I find this comparison as accurate as Jordan being called the Kate Middleton of Essex. Dirty, busy, full of highly polluted canals populated only by plastic bottles, at first it's just another busy Indian town. But once I got out into the "backwaters", the marshy, river strewn land between the towns and the sea, I became slightly more sympathetic to the comparison. Sliding through tiny villages perched on little canals in the middle of nowhere, accessible only because I was too cheap to rent a houseboat and went on a canoe, it was gorgeous, striking and felt like the "deep south" that people have talked about. I had the most incredible thali, which was replenished with well meaning vigour. The whole thing was jut beautiful and I was sad to leave. Kerala deserves more time than I could give it and I would love to take the little local ferries from one place to the next, jut exploring. Alas, I had an appointment to keep in Pondy, a good 750km to the East, and so had to dash off.





Now I am in Madurai (or was, it's taken me almost 5 days to find WiFi and post this...), half way between Kerala and Pondicherry, it's a temple town in Tamil Nadu frontier. More of that next time, this is far too long already. But tomorrow I land in Chennai, ready to be scooped up and taken to the little ex-French enclave of Pondicherry, home for the next two months. Let's hope that it's all it's cracked up to be, by god I need a glass of wine and a decent coffee!

Gx

My route from Matheran to Goa was undoubtedly arduous and slightly harrowing. After waking up early to go for a final ride out onto the cliffs I packed and set off. First, a shared taxi down the tiny mountain roads, then a Mumbai commuter train (think rush hour Victoria line but for two hours and the train doors don't close/exist) and then I was faced with the fact I couldn't get the train I'd booked (I'd be "waitlisted" and was too far down the list). I had to fork out to get an overnight bus. Comfortable, I was told, and it has AC, it will only be 14 hours. Lies. 18 hours later, after lying on a pleather mattress with a turmeric (or piss) stained sheet in the sub-zero AC (I was so cold I took my socks off and put them on my arms, like inelegant evening mittens) I finally arrived in Goa.

Hut living in Arambol

Goa has been interesting. It's certainly made me think a lot. After the frenetic introduction to India in Mumbai and then Matheran, it was a shock. Arambol, where I arrived, is basically a beach and road, the beach lined with shacks and restaurants serving spag bol and mild curries, the road lined with shops selling "hippy clothes", undoubtedly made in the slums of Mumbai along with the H&M handbags. The whole thing was covered in a cloud of hash smoke.

After my first day the relief of not travelling wore off and it started to seem that this was all somehow, "inauthentic". As if Arambol (and Arambol being one of the "best" beaches for backpackers), had sprung out of the ground to provide people with the India that was comfortable, sanitised and safe. As if it wasn't really India at all. It seemed incongruous with the rest of small part of India I've seen, almost culturally spayed. But the more I thought about it the more I realised how I wrong was.

As travellers we often talk about searching for the "authentic", trying to beat the rapid development of resorts from hippy paradises into package holiday destinations. This has fuelled the constant beach hopping in Goa as well as the move from Thailand, to Cambodia, to Laos and now Vietnam as the place to go to experience the "authentic". But certainly in India, that idea of authenticity is a lie. The idea that it's a land of spices, colour, elephants, women in saris, curries, chapatis and the exotic mysticism of the "east" is simply not true. It is (and forgive, but I'm still a humanities student at heart) a Western construct, an Orientalist view of the 'Other', of the exotic otherworldliness of anywhere non-Western.

That is not to say that parts of India aren't like that, of course they are but there so many facets to modern Indian culture, to modern India itself, that this universality no longer holds true. India includes the Mumbaikars in their chic coffee shops, drinking espressos and playing with their iPhones; the people in Dharavi who looked at me like an was an alien and wanted to try out their English; the Matheran horseboys who had travelled from all over the country to plod plump Indian bourgeoisies around on ponies. And it includes these beaches in Goa too, that shrugged off Portuguese rule and replaced it with swathes of tourists, just as England includes Blackpool and Dawlish.

After Arambol and Palolem, Patnem was a gift. Still tiny and undeveloped I walked from Palolem through Colom, a beautiful little fishing village sat on a rocky cove, down onto the long, empty white sand. While still decidedly quiet and unfrenetic and with many an English voice (although the TOWIE extras have been replaced with young yogic families from London) it's been a lovely little beach break and a lot more Goan as opposed to subcontinental Malia.

After this I'm off to a tiny place called Murdeshwar (so tiny it's not in my Rough Guides, not sure how I'll cope!) to do some diving and then onwards to see some more of the great, wide South. Besides everything, I've met some great people and had some good nights, including one where I met a Russian chiropractor who clicked my back so many ways I couldn't stand and nearly vomited. And of course, I think it's been nice to sit around and process the tiny slither of India I've seen so far (so small in fact, it's frankly daunting). Wish me luck! I'm sure at some point I will be sat, hot and bedraggled off of a 12 hour train, shovelling rice into my hungry mouth and will miss the glorious calm of here, but right now I can't wait to hit the road again.
Best,
Gx

Patnem Beach this morning.

I had been waiting in Mumbai for what felt like weeks (5 days) for my camera to be fixed and I was itching to get out. Not that I don't like it but how anyone can stand it for more than a week is beyond me. Luckily I was saved by the arrival of Shaan, Rhys and Will, on their way from Goa to Sri Lanka. It was nice to see some familiar faces after being stared at since I got here and I managed to get some good tips on where to stay (not Delhi), where to eat (not hair thali) and what to drink (my discovery of sweet lassis is now a full blown addiction, rivaling my former penchant for Diet Coke). Check out their blog at http://wellstreetwanderers.blogspot.com, they're now off to the rest of Asia which has made me jealous as I realise I will be eating only curry for the next 6 months.

I was finally able to quit the hot sweat of Mumbai, leaving behind the enormous rats and constant buzz for streets full of horses and not a lot else. I arrived in Matheran yesterday, it's a tiny (in fact, the smallest in the world apparently) hill station about 300kms east of Mumbai. It's a great little place and the rather ardous journey ends with a tiny toy train (think thunder mountain at Disney) that rolls up the impossibly steep hillside for 2 hours. Luckily I was entertained my three wonderful old French Hippie ladies who made jokes about Toulouse being known for rugby, saucisson et le saucisson de jouer rugby. Putains sale!

Ganesh on the way up.

Thunder Mountain!

It struck me just now, as I write this in some internet cafe next to a child playing GTA in Spanish and someone just stop for a chat while saddled up, that this really is the only place where people actually ride through the middle of the town to get to the shops. Cars and auto-rickshaws are banned so the now familiar tooting has been replaced my the clip-clopping. It's all rather lovely and definitely cured me of Bombay malaise (... I sound like a Raj civil servant, dear god). I actually got the balls to go out for a ride today (bearing in mind most of the bridle ways are next to sheer cliffs) and it was bloody amazing. Before I wanted to buy a Hindustan Ambassador and drive around, now I want to ride a horse to Goa. Unfortunately, there were no photos, I was too scared for the safety of my accident prone camera, and today also happened to be laundry day so I rode in shorts. Suffice to say I'm in pain.

I head back down tomorrow and back into Mumbai to hop on a train to Goa. I'm not quite shore what ticket I have so god knows what will happen but hopefully I'll arrive in one piece eventually. Wish me luck! As always, love to all. Send me an email and I solemnly swear I'll write back.

P.S Check out where I'm staying!

Well I have definitely missed an update or two. My last few days in Turkey were spent in the South East, Turkish Kurdistan, and they were remarkable and filled with more busses, more kebabs and more lovely Kurds. I zoomed my way from Urfa (I say zoomed, my flight was cancelled and was bussed half way across the country to then zoom) to Istanbul and then was back to Dubai for Christmas. And now, a few weeks and a whole lot of paperwork later, I am firmly ensconced in a room (I am denying it the classification of "hotel") in Mumbai.

We've all read (or seen) a hundred clichéd introductions to Mumbai and nothing I can say will change that. Suffice to say that it is not Slumdog Millionaire. It is the noisiest place in the entire world, it stinks and it is constantly rammed. I've nearly been run over twice today, someone tried to sell me peacock feathers for 10 minutes and I'm pretty sure I stepped in wee (in flip flops). Saying that, I love it for all of those reasons and more. When the smell of car exhaust and sewers is suddenly cut with the waft of frying rotis or you turn a corner from grey, concrete tenements to be met with bright, crumbling Raj-era buildings, it definitely makes it all worth while. Despite it's problems modern Mumbai hasn't obliterated old Bombay and it still maintains a lot of its charm.

The place I'm staying, admittedly is definitely not the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It must have once been quite nice but it's now such an indistinct dirty colour it could have been yellow or blue or green for all I know. However, it has an original cast iron lift and it costs the equivalent of a Boots meal deal so it's swings and roundabouts.

I flew in two days ago, arrived in the evening and had the inevitable problem of my taxi drivers not understanding me, or my map or the women on the phone and so I got to wander, backpack and all, through the middle of "Old Bombay" before I finally sunk onto my rock hard mattress. It definitely felt like a scene from a movie (one of those clichéd intros to Mumbai) but it was less than amusing at the time and I've never been happy to find see a streaky sign that said "Hotel Lawrence".

As much as I'm enjoying it here I'm not hugely inclined to stay too long. I know I'll eventually be back and it's a drain on funds (yes, a Hoisin Duck Wrap priced room is expensive...) but my camera broke the night I left Dubai so it's currently in a tiny shop somewhere getting fixed and I'm here until Tuesday. After that I start to make my way South and will end up in Pondicherry in early March to start my internship. I've written this sat in my room trying desperately to tune into BBC world service as internet access here is properly lacking and WiFi even more so and I've got Guardian withdrawl. Hopefully I'll be able to post this soon.
Love to all,
Gx

While I have some time on my hands (more on that later) I thought it was just about time that I wrote another update. Right now I am sat in Van but since my last update I've gone from Istanbul to Cappodocia.

So Istanbul seems a bit of a blur now but bloody hell it was a fantastic whirlwind of excitement; on the run again, with inordinate amounts of amazing art & architecture and a bucket load of çay (that is, chai, شاي, tea). Certainly the highlights were the ones I'd read about before, and happened to be on my doorstep; the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. The Hagia Sophia is a huge and incredibly ancient former church, mosque and now museum. It's scale is something incomprehensible (it makes English cathedrals look like chapels) but it's more than just a big, old building. Its covered with meticulous, glittering mosaics of Byzantine emperors and various religious chaps which are a definite highlight. The low point however, is that even in depths of winter and the low season it was still full to the rafters with obnoxious tour groups (fast becoming my least favourite thing, even more so than touts). The Blue Mosque was then something refreshing. Less grand (but still monolithic) it is still a working mosque and has still got that air of being a reserved place (no giggling or shouting please Mr & Mrs Obnoxious). Better still I arrived just after morning prayer and it was basically deserted meaning that I got to sit under one of the huge elephant feet columns and spend my time looking at the ceramic tiles that cover the walls and domes for which it is named (it is actually relatively grey from the outside, the "Blue" is the inside). The smaller scale is a lot nicer for being able to see anything (n.b get glasses) as the Hagia Sophia reaches so far up that I struggle to even glimpse the domes.

Besides these two wonders I managed to cram in the ridiculous ornate, sprawling Topkapi Palace which almost puts Versailles to shame (you can understand why the Turks got rid of the failing Sultanate now you can wander through their cosseted domain of golden thrones and diamond encrusted candle sticks (No, seriously). I also got to see Abraham's saucepan, Moses' staff and various other religious relics which I assume of are quite dubious authenticity. With all that I'd barely left Sultanahmet in the old city, so the next few days I wandered, found good food, good drink and enjoyed life on the continental crossroad.

After rushing through Istanbul (I spent five days there and felt like I only saw a smidgen of it) I shoved everything back in my backpack and got on a bus to Goreme in Cappadocia. I left at 7 O'Clock and arrived at 10 in the morning. Suffice to say it was uneventful and utterly hideous. But waking up stiff and tired I stepped off the bus to be greeted by snow and the strange, beautiful and utterly astonishing Martian landscape of Cappadocia.

Nothing, photos nor words, will justly describe how entrancing the landscape is. It appears that termite mounds have erupted all over this vast, flat plateau but as you drive down the precarious mountain roads to Goreme you see that those termites mounds are huge connicle homes to the people who live, and have lived for thousands of years, here. The whole region is like this, doted with these cave homes that cluster around rock formations and in the near vertical walls of the valleys. Not only are they above ground but there are also numerous underground cities, burrowed into cave systems as refuges fornthe first few communities of Christians who lived here from the glory of the Roman Empire to the fall of the Byzantine Empire and they left behind tiny but exquisite churches, cut into rocks and decorated with thousand year old frescos that were only saved by having pigeon shit preserve them. The sheer concentration of things to see is astonishing,p and everywhere you walk there is a cave or church or cliff just waiting to be discovered.

So what else to do in this amazing place but go exploring? So with Luke and Luke, who I met on the bus from Istanbul, we set off down a valley that should have taken an hour or two to get to the next town. However, we set off down the wrong path that took us down a tiny canyon which we clambered up only to discover we had to cross three valleys which took a couple more hours than expected (read: all day). Eventually we had to abandon the walk back down the right valley when, half way down and in the dark, the valley floor dropped off by a good 50ft. We took the road back. Far from a failure, our of the beaten track tour was an amazing way to get to grips with the landscape and I got to drink çay overlooking the amazing citadel of Uçhisar.

So I spent a few days in Goreme exploring the rest of Cappadocia and making it back to Fat Boys, the Aussie bar in town, for a few beers and some food that wasn't a kebab (for once) before deciding to hit the road again before I got too comfortable. And so another lovely long coach journey was scheduled. I say scheduled, my transfer to Kayseri, the main transport hub, involved hoping into a car that sounded like a wheezing, asthma ridden mule to flag down a local bus on the way. Typical. But I got there in the end and spent a lovely night curled up on a bus next to a fat, old Turk who sputtered, snorted and snored. Next stop Van, pronounced pretty much like "one" (please imagine the hilarity of trying to get anywhere: "One for Van, Van for One, Van, One?!". Absolutely impossible, very Beckett).

That's enough for now. This is already an epic and I have to get on a boat.
Miss you all,
Gx

I then had a rubbish kofta at a rubbish restaurant where I met Yosef, the oly part of Istanbul that has borne any resemblance to the vodka tinged vision of our lads + Kate holiday to Gumbet on the south coast. Yosef asked me if I knew how to use an iPhone, which he brandished in front of me, and my first thought was "Is this a scam?". But it wasn't (shame on me!), for Yosef had merely gone through what I presume is a Turkish right of passage and fallen in love with a visitor called Alicia, who is apparently "beautiful and very clever". Unfortunately Yosef had taken her to dinner at a fish restaurant and they'd got drunk in raki and eaten bad fish and he was worried that she was "Ill, maybe dead". Poor Yosef. So, he asked, would I send her a text in English professing his love and apologising if his bad fish had upset her. Well of course I obliged and pulled out all the stops but fear poor Joe may never hear back from beautiful Alicia, and I'm not sure it was the fish but he has promised me a 50% discount of any future rubbish kebab I wish to have so my skills as professional love letter writer have paid off.

In summary: Turkey is brilliant, Istanbul is beautiful. I still miss my beloved Libnan but exploring a new city is amazing fun.

I booked my ticket to Cappadocia today for 4 days time (Google it and you'll get why I am excited) and right now I feel like I've just taken the first bite of an amazing meal.

Love to all, email me and tell me about my flooding homeland.
Gx

P.S. sorry for the formatting, this is my first iPad exclusive post and it's certainly a learning curve!