From the beauty of Ooty to God's Own (Communist) Country.

Having read through my previous posts, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out that in the interests of brevity and, well, interest, I chose not to mention every fort, palace, mausoleum and temple we visited on our interminable school-trip-like tour of Rajasthan. There were very, very many more. Very, very, very many.


One of the things that had consistently amazed and delighted us about travelling through India thus far was the sheer numbers of people that manage to cram into public transport. Trains, buses, auto rickshaws – all look like their occupants are trying for a Guinness world record. People on the roof, hanging on the back, crammed into the driver’s foot well, spread-eagled across the side. We frequently watched in awe as ostensibly three-seated tuk-tuks left school gates with a class and a half of children on board. This ceased to be funny when we boarded our flight to Coimbatore. Obviously, the aviation-authorities-that-be frown upon passengers sitting on the roof and clinging to the tail of jet airliners, but Spice Jet more than made up for it by cramming people inside in alarming numbers. Over 200 of us in a Boeing 737. Which is a very small plane. After 4 hours of that, I have some sympathy with battery farmed chickens.

And to top it all off, about an hour into the flight, I started to feel somewhat unwell. I don’t know whether it was the (very good) food at the hotel or the (not so good) airline sandwich, but I left Delhi with a rapidly escalating case of Delhi-belly. And Rachel, still not over the previous bout of food poisoning also took a turn for the worse. By the time we got to Coimbatore, it was all we could do not to flood the taxi with pre-enjoyed food in assorted liquid forms. We got to the hotel and spent the rest of the day sleeping, groaning and evacuating various fluids in rotation. We did manage to get to a pharmacy where, armed with a list of brand names of antibiotics, we bought a couple of strips of pills the colour of raw liver. They did the trick and killed off whatever bacteria had come to call us home pretty quickly. We looked up the pills on the internet to find that they are banned in most western countries due to the potentially devastating possible side effects, including exploding ligaments and permanent damage to most, though not all internal organs. Needless to say, though we weren’t troubled by digestive indiscretion again, we spent the following days panicking over every (normal) twinge and ache.

It was a pity, because Coimbatore seemed like a nice place – a lot more prosperous and, well, real than most of the tourist places up north. Our hotel was right by the station, perfect for our planned 5.15am train to Ooty the following morning. The train to Ooty is, by all accounts, spectacular – a 1 metre gauge, rack railway occasionally pulled by steam engines. However, with diahorrea being such a recent friend, and having experienced the toilets on a first class train in Sri Lanka the previous November, we decided that eight hours of rail-bound fun just wasn’t for us and booked a taxi instead.

The taxi journey was quicker than the rail journey would have been, largely because the driver seemed to be suicidal. There are 36 hairpin bends between Coimbatore and Ooty, all of which we took at twice the speed limit on the wrong side of the road. By the time we actually reached Ooty, four or so hours later, we were too terrified to take much in. We had booked ourselves into the Holiday Inn as, after all the personal service of the Rajasthani hotels we fancied a couple of days of international anonymity. As is happened, it was a fantastic hotel, a couple of miles out of town and looking down over the valley.

The view from the hotel room, Ooty. The clouds were very low that day

The room was big and comfortable, the bar was welcoming and the food in the restaurant exceptional, though Rachel quickly discovered that she didn’t much care for the local specialities. On the first night, I almost passed out after walking the single flight of stairs up to our room. I know that I am unfit, but this seemed a little excessive. Once safely back in the room, I looked up Ooty on the internet. It turns out that we were about 2,500 metres above sea level. That’s close to twice the height of Ben Nevis. Higher than I have ever been in my life. Ooty is in the state of Tamil Nadu and was one of the three hill stations that the British lawmakers in the time of the Raj would escape to in order to avoid the brutal summers. The hotel had heating instead of air conditioning. All the local shops sold knitwear. It was still warmer than most Yorkshire summer afternoons though. Ooty is in the Nilgiri hills, famed for their tea plantations. Having already bought vast quantities of tea from Sri Lanka and Nepal, I proceeded to fill every available gap and cranny in my rucksack with small foil-wrapped packages of the precious local leaves. We spent two nights in Ooty, and though the town itself is tiny, could quite happily have stayed longer. The hotel was wonderful, though the service was occasionally a little over-attentive (I really started to worry that the barman was about to start topping my beer up as I held the glass to my mouth so insistent was he that I not run out).

Rachel in Kebab Corner in Ooty. A wonderful place!

Tea pickers, Ooty

But two days later it was time to move on to Kerala – self-styled as ‘God’s own country’. Everyone to whom we had spoken in India, and every Indian we knew in Dubai had told us that we had to visit Kerala. It is, by all (and I mean all) accounts, the best, prettiest and most welcoming part of the subcontinent. It is a narrow state, the strip of land right at the bottom on the left, sandwiched between coast and mountains. The night before we left Ooty, I read up about it. Kerala was the first place in the world to elect a communist government, and the communists are still (democratically) in control. It has 100% literacy and social services that compare with the best in the old and new worlds. It also has the highest rates of alcoholism and suicide in India (ignorance is bliss – the heightened understanding of the world afforded by reading well frequently leads to depression and drink problems. Discuss). Fine, I thought. A state full of literate, depressed, left-wing alcoholics. I should fit right in.



The journey (by taxi again, effete, old-world milksops that we are) from Ooty to Cochin was long. Really, really long. We had been told it would be seven hours. It was closer to ten hours. This was largely down to the driver, a very nice man who seemed absolutely terrified of everything else on the road. Driving in India is something of a state of cooperative chaos. You will frequently find yourself overtaking a car that is overtaking another car on a two-lane road with a bus overtaking a truck thundering towards you. Then at the moment when it seems inevitable that someone will shortly be picking your body-parts from nearby trees, everyone slides into tiny gaps the existence of which you had been hitherto unaware. And all this is done without any of the gesticulating machismo that accompanies the control of automotive transport everywhere else in the world. But our driver was too scared to even overtake oxen carts when there was nothing on the other side of the road all the way to the horizon. He also had to keep stopping for directions. Even when there were no other roads he could have taken. At one point, he stopped the car, got out, wandered around for 5 minutes looking for someone to ask (there were hundreds of people around – I wasn’t sure of his criteria for a director), eventually asked someone, came back, sat in the car, buckled his seatbelt, looked out of the windscreen for a moment, unbuckled his seatbelt and got out to go and find someone else to ask.



The only thing of note on the journey was our lunch stop. We found ourselves in a small, fly-blown roadside restaurant whose staff were delighted someone had turned up. The waitress brought a menu. We chose our food and the waitress went away. A few minutes later she returned – my choice was off, would I care to choose again? I did so and off she went. Then she came back. My new choice was also unavailable. I said I’d have the same as Rachel. A few minutes later she informed us that that was off too. We chose again. No luck. We asked what they did have. She indicated a section of the menu. ‘Everything here,’ she said. I picked a dish, almost at random from that section. A few minutes later, yes, you’ve guessed it, she came back to tell me they didn’t have that and she was sorry. It was eerily reminiscent of Monty Python’s cheese shop sketch. We gave up and bought chocolate from the supermarket across the road instead.



Our first impressions of Kerala were good – very green, very beautiful, acres of coconut palms, banana trees and rice paddies. The previous night’s research was visible in the fact that every tiny village had a public library and several bookshops, that the schools finished for the day at 4pm rather than the 1pm end we had seen everywhere else and that there were many, many state run off-licences (all with very long queues) and toddy-shops (toddy is the local moonshine brewed from coconuts). In fact, the only thing missing was a preponderance of shops selling nooses, garden hoses and razor blades.



So it was that at nine o’clock that night, a mere nine and three quarter hours after setting off, we arrived in Ernakulam, the mainland part of Cochin (the rest being spread out over several islands). We were tired, hungry, dirty and frustrated. We checked into the hotel to find that the room they gave us was not the one we had booked – we had booked (and prepaid for) a standard double. They gave us their best suite. We dined extravagantly, cheaply and very, very well at the hotel buffet and went to bed thinking that there might be something in this ‘God’s own country’ lark after all.

Daniel Sahib and Rachel Memsahib visit the land of the Kings (part two)

Eight hours further down the road (including stops for a couple of temples, of course) was Jodhpur, city of the stupid trousers. Actually, Jodhpur is known as the blue city – in much the same way as all of Jaipur’s houses are painted pink, Jodhpur’s are blue. This, apparently, is because blue discourages insects.

A Jain temple, Jodhpur

View of the hills from the Jain temple

Jodhpur, the blue city

Our hotel, another homestay, was on the outskirts of the city. It was run by Indian Christians who also had some sort of link with an art and furniture export company – the place was stuffed with antiques: a Victorian billiard table in the upstairs room, old horned gramophones in a quantity that almost qualified as an infestation and, in pride of place between living room and dining room, keeping a pair of beady glass eyes on all who ate, a faded and slightly sorry-looking stuffed tiger. I mean that in the sense of taxidermy, rather than a cuddly toy.

Jodhpur hotel dining/living room. Note the tiger on the left.

That evening, we got a lift into Jodhpur with a view to wandering the streets as we had in Pushkar and Udaipur before. Jodhpur, though, is something like 50 times the size of Pushkar with a population around the million mark. It was crazy. We walked through the dust and fumes of the main bazaar, had a quick look round the purported tourist area then panicked and headed straight for the nearest expensive-looking hotel. As it turned out, our panic served us well and we ended up in the Lonely Planet restaurant pick for the second city running. The atmosphere was marginally spoiled by a rainstorm that Noah might have found familiar, but we returned the following evening for several beers and a perfectly wind-cooled, clear-skied end to the day. The day that was spent, surprisingly enough, looking round a fort. Jodhpur fort though was probably our favourite, on account of the informative (but not over-informative) audio-guide that came with the price of admission. It is a spectacular thing that fort, never once taken by force in all its existence. And it had a nice shop too.

Jodhpur fort

The sati marks by the fort's gate - each of Maharaja Man Singh's 31 widows left a hand mark on the wall as they made their way to throw themselves on his funeral pyre in 1843.

Musicians in Jodhpur fort

A camel cart - a very common mode of transport in Rajasthan

From the blue city, we headed to the golden city – Jaisalmer (golden due to the colour of the stone rather than the houses being painted in this instance). Jaisalmer is on the edge of the great Thar Desert and we were booked for a night in a hotel and a night in a desert campsite following a camel safari. The hotel, at first, seemed a little far out, but it turned out that Jaisalmer, despite having a fort that is visible for many, many miles around, is actually very small. The hotel was new (therefore clean – the habit here seems to be to build an hotel then run it until everything stops working through an accumulation of grime and lack of care, then gut it and start again, rather than the conventional hotelier’s program of ongoing cleaning and maintenance) and very comfortable. The rooftop restaurant served excellent vegetarian food with a fantastic view of Jaisalmer fort on one side and of what was optimistically termed ‘the lake’ on the other (in actual fact, with the monsoon season only just starting it was a tiny patch of mud with a few wild pigs rolling around). That night a storm of a magnitude never before witnessed by either me or Rachel hit. Jaisalmer frequently goes for years – often up to seven years between showers. But it more than made up for it that night.

The old and the new - mausolea and wind farming in Jaisalmer

Cricket in Jaisalmer

The next day, for a change, we went sightseeing. Jaisalmer fort is a living thing, with houses, hotels and businesses within its walls. The problem is that it was designed 500 years ago for a few hundred people. Nowadays, the millions of gallons of extra waste water coursing through its drains cut into the porous rock upon which the fort is built, undermining the entire edifice. Several parts of the fort have already collapsed into rubble and the whole thing is slowly sinking into the desert. The museum part of the fort was another with a free audio guide. However, the incomplete nature of the museum as a tourist attraction and the desire of its curators to be perceived as giving value for money meant that a great deal of the audio guide was given over to long and largely decidedly uninteresting stories about… well I don’t know as I stopped listening.

Jaisalmer, from the top of the fort

Autorickshaws (Tuctucs), Jaisalmer

We enjoyed Jaisalmer, though our day there was somewhat tempered by my constant fretting about the camel safari and desert camping. I don’t know what the hell I had been thinking when I agreed to it. Nothing, I suspect. As three o’clock drew near, I fretted more and more, coming very close to deciding to call the whole thing off. But we went through with it. Sort of. We were driven about an hour (though bearing in mind the roads, that was only about 25 miles) out towards the Pakistani border and the Sam sand dunes in the Thar Desert. We were dropped at the ‘campsite’ – a fly-blown collection of dank concrete huts ranged around a small stage. From here, we were hefted onto a camel each and led off into the desert. Oscar Wilde famously said that one should try everything once with the exception of folk dancing and incest. I can confidently add camel-riding to that. I have never (thankfully) experienced anything like it before, but if you can imagine being on a very smelly see-saw opposite a fat man on amphetamines who occasionally reaches across and hits you in the testicles with a mallet, you’re halfway there. I hated every stinking second. Unfortunately, towards the end of the ride (an hour! A goddamned hour!) my camel sat down suddenly wrenching my hip. This meant that because of the hard beds at the ‘campsite’, we couldn’t spend the evening there watching Rajasthani folk-dancing. Instead we had to return to the incredibly comfortable, air-conditioned hotel and have a fantastic supper and several cold beers before getting 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep. Damn those camels.

Rachel on a camel. She was a lot better at it than me.

The camel that tried its level best to kill me

Next came Bikaner. It rained like the end of the world, which was apt as Bikaner looked like the end of the world. We were supposed to spend 2 nights there, but chose not to. The hotel looked like it had been quite something 10 years ago, but in keeping with Indian hotel tradition, hadn’t been cleaned or maintained since. The room we were put in had minimal air-conditioning and a fan that sounded like a Spitfire. Rather than moving us to another room (of which there were hundreds free) we had to wait an hour while they buggered about trying to fix things. Then they moved us to another room. Which was a little better. Only with no hot water. We gave up, ordered room service and went to bed. The room service poisoned Rachel and she was quite severely unwell for the next 24 hours. We decided to leave the next morning. We drove up to Bikaner fort, but it was swamped by Indian teenage boys on some sort of trip who kept trying to take photos of Rachel. In her poison weakened state, this got on her nerves. To say the least. The fort wasn’t open for another hour, it wasn’t reckoned that highly by Lonely Planet and AFFS had well and truly set in, so, at the driver’s instigation, we set off to Mandawa, a small town that would break the ten hour drive between Bikaner and Delhi. On the way, we stopped at Deshnok to see the Karni Matar Temple – according to legend, rats in this place are the souls of storytellers and are thus revered. So the entire temple is given over to the worship of rats. As you might imagine, it’s a bit smelly in there. It’s supposed to be lucky if you see a white rat. We nearly saw an orange rat as one ran within range of Rachel’s first jet of vomit.

Rats!

Our last night in Rajasthan was spent in Mandawa, a small and very muddy town that, we had been promised, would make the following day’s return trip to Delhi much shorter. The hotel was a old Haveli – a large and somewhat stately house brightly painted. It was truly beautiful, with only one initial problem – the room we were given at first was one of the more impressive original ground floor rooms – large and interesting and fabulously decorated. Unfortunately, the bathroom was also old and Rachel, who planned to spend a lot of time in there with her stomach upset, balked at its condition. Consequently we chose a newer upper floor room that was less interesting but had a cleaner bathroom. That afternoon I ventured into the streets to find a chemist, but discovered that without the name of a drug, the chemist could only offer Indian medicine which I was told, in no uncertain terms, was no good for westerners. I tried a doctor too, but he (in his office that looked like the back room of a long abandoned newsagents) refused to do anything until he had examined Rachel – fair enough except she wasn’t well enough to leave the bathroom. So she just had to sleep it off, which she did with admirably little fuss.

Haveli hotel Mandawa

Interior courtyard

The next day we returned to Delhi. We had decided to stay in our original hotel, but in their best room (at a princely sum of about fifty quid) so Rachel could have a bath rather than a shower. She was feeling a lot better by this point, so we ate at the hotel restaurant, which was exceptionally good, and completely failed to get an early night in preparation for our 3.30am start to travel to Coimbatore the following day. It was our last night in Northern India – over all we had enjoyed our time there very much, but were looking forward to two weeks of indolence, sunshine and a complete absence of forts, palaces and temples.

Daniel Sahib and Rachel Memsahib visit the land of the Kings (part one)

After three days of flying and sitting in various airports (including one leg of the journey on a private jet!), we arrived in Delhi at around 5 in the morning. This meant that our first view of the city was of a relatively calm and relaxed post-colonial town drowsing through the early hours. We checked into our hotel (one which I suspect was designed after reading an improperly translated description of a European ‘boutique’ hotel) and slept awhile. We woke to discover that first impressions are often wrong: Delhi is as chaotic and seething megopolis as I have ever seen. The hotel was in the Parharganj area, by the main station, and a haven, so the guidebook would have it, for backpackers. What the guidebook didn’t tell us was that Parharganj was in the process of being demolished (presumably to be rebuilt) in time for the Commonwealth Games this coming Autumn. I have lived in and visited many towns and cities where urban regeneration is the norm – London is continuously reinventing itself and you can’t drive away a parked car in Sheffield without someone building a block of flats on the space you vacate, but I have never seen an entire street being demolished while people walk along it and without any of the shops whose fronts are being reduced to rubble closing, even temporarily. After nearly being brained and sliced by falling masonry and glass, we gave up and returned to the hotel.


As you might expect from the capital (though only the third largest) city of a country whose population is conservatively estimated at 1.2 billion, there are people everywhere in Delhi. Cows too, but mostly people. I first looked out of our hotel window to see a scene of rooftops and the shells of buildings either half built or half demolished (difficult to tell which). Not a soul to be seen. Then, slowly, on closer inspection I saw a man sitting on a rooftop opposite. Then a family in a hollow half-built room. Then three teenagers disentangling a kite string. Then more and more and more. In what seemed initially like a scene entirely devoid of humanity, there must have been in excess of fifty people secreted here and there. And, indeed, everywhere.

In the light of the total otherness of India thus far, we quickly reassessed our ambitious plans to travel by rail and bus throughout Rajasthan and booked a two week tour with a driver and air-conditioned car via the hotel. This meant we had the driver for a day in Delhi, so we saw what sights there were to see – the arch the commemorates India’s war dead, the Lutyens-designed Parliament buildings whose grace and elegance seemed in direct opposition to the greed and bloodthirstiness of the men it was designed to contain. Our driver mentioned, in his fractured English, that the buildings were from where the British ruled the country. “Not good men,” I said. For they weren’t. “Yes,” said the driver, looking at me somewhat curiously, “good men!” This, of course, meant that I would spend the next fortnight trying to bring up the miserable history of the Raj so that I could convince the driver that I wasn’t an ignorant, imperialist pig. But then again, I had just hired an Indian to drive me and the Memsahib around, so perhaps I was an ignorant, imperialist pig. Who knows?

As I write this, I have few photographs of Delhi. In preparation for the holiday, I bought myself a new camera. It has a much greater zoom and is lighter and more portable than my old camera. It has zillions of features and can correct all sorts of user errors – it has two different sorts of anti-shake compensation, lots of different colour and white balance settings and automatic everything. It is very nearly foolproof. I did find one problem though. It has nothing to make sure that the stupid idiot of a photographer remembers to pack a memory card. Oops. Consequently, my first 40 photos of Delhi are stored in its internal memory, which I do not have the cable to access with me.

Delhi was a fascinating place and one I would like to spend more time getting to know. Unfortunately, I was not a good choice for our first experience of India – just too many people, too frantic and too overawing. Which meant I had high hopes for our second port of call – Agra. Famous for the Taj Mahal, Agra is on every tourist’s itinerary. And tourism is massive in India right now – with an emergent middle class still uncertain about travelling beyond their mother country’s borders, there are about a hundred times as many Indian as Western tourists. The Taj Mahal is astonishing. It would be astonishing were it built today. The detail and intricacy is beyond belief. It was the mausoleum built by a heartbroken Emperor Shah Jahan for his wife who died bearing their 13th child. He was later imprisoned in Agra fort by his son, from where he could sit and watch his creation every day until he himself died and was buried by her side.

Taj Mahal

Agra itself was a different matter though. The poverty was breathtaking. It looked medieval – people living in huts cobbled together out of dung and straw while pigs and goats and cows wandered the streets. Agra is in Uttar Pradesh – a state with a population nearly five times that of England. And it is one of the poorest in India. It didn’t make for a comfortable visit.

So, with Delhi and Agra palpably aggravating our already acute culture shock, we were beginning to wonder whether we had made the right decision visiting India at all. Next on our itinerary was Jaipur, a smallish town in Rajasthan with a population of over 5 million. That gives some impression of the overcrowding.

Jaipur is known as the pink city. Because…it is pink. In 1876, to welcome the Prince of Wales, the local ruler had all the buildings painted pink, a colour linked with hospitality. And the tradition continued. Today, it is still pink and still quite welcoming. It also has a couple of world-class forts.

Amber Fort, Jaipur

The World's Largest Sundial - the gnomon is the little pavilion thing at the top of the stairs

Our travel arrangements included a guide to Jaipur for two days. We began to fear the worst when our driver started moaning about the guide and refusing to answer his mobile as we approached the city. The guide put me in mind of a Muslim, Indian Mr. Bean. He managed to be simultaneously interesting and a total pain in the arse. When he wasn’t filling in interesting facts about Jaipur and Amber forts (the former has the largest sundial in the world! And some truly fascinating astronomical and defensive features) he was trying to sell us a carpet or going on and on (and on) about how great he was (“I play all sports and am good at all of them. I am a great musician. I had only been learning guitar for three weeks when my teacher told me to take over the class” and so on). And he kept giving us quizzes. And making us guess things. “Guess how many knots there are in ine square centimetre of the rug”. And he wouldn’t accept “I don’t know”. And we had to guess at least three times each before he would tell us. And this happened every 5 minutes. But overall we were glad of his knowledge as there is a lot to see in Jaipur.

The hotel in Jaipur was a ‘homestay’ – something akin to a bead and breakfast 20 years ago in the UK. It was absolutely lovely, but we were the only guests and they only had 2 beers to go with our dinner (in the absence of anything else, Rachel has adapted well to Kingfisher lager with fresh lime). So the second evening we tried to go out. However, it had been raining and the puddles at the emd of the road defeated us entirely. I say puddles, they were big enough to accommodate a modest yacht. Not yet brave enough to try haggling with an autorickshaw driver, we dove into the hotel round the corner which had a dark and Indianful bar and stayed there till they closed.

Our next stop was for one night only in the holy lakeside town of Pushkar. Pushkar has one of only two temples in India dedicated to Lord Brahma. Which we nearly visited. I am ashamed to say that in the confusion of tourists and pilgrims, with no signs in English and suffering from AFTS (Another Fucking Temple Syndrome – much like Another Fucking Fort Syndrome, Another Fucking Mausoleum Syndrome and Another Fucking Palace Syndrome, all of which we have increasingly fallen prey to over the last fortnight) we went for a cup of tea instead. We both really liked Pushkar – it was the first town of a manageable size we had visited and the views from the rooftop cafes were excellent. It is a very holy town, which meant no meat, no eggs and no booze. Except we found a café that served us beer with our (delicious) vegetarian meal and more to take back to the hotel.

Pushkar, from a rooftop cafe

Flower sellers outside a temple, Pushkar

Produce sellers, Pushkar

Much like Nepal (report yet to come even though we went there in April…sorry!), distance and time don’t link up in India as they do in the west. Pushkar to Udaipur is about 170 miles. But that takes about 7 or 8 hours. The roads are far from brilliant – particularly in the monsoon season when small lakes appear restricting traffic to a few kmh. And we had to slow down further every half kilometre or so to allow for cows sitting in the fast lane. This happens a lot.

After Pushkar our hearts were further lifted by Udaipur – our very favourite town so far. Another small town based around a lake, Udaipur is known as India’s most romantic town. And it really is beautiful. Our hotel was less than inspiring – the first room we were shown had a filthy bathroom and frogs in the bedroom, the second was a little better but the aircon was asthmatic and the ceiling fan looked vicious. But the windows looked right out onto the lake and at the main part of town opposite. And thanks to the very heavy rains that had slowed our journey and curtailed our Jaipur explorations, the lake was full for the first time in months.

The view from our hotel, Udaipur

Our hotel as seen from across the lake. Our room had the three windows on the left in the middle row.

We dined that night in the Lonely Planet Guide’s ‘our pick’ restaurant which was a hundred yards or so up a very narrow road (one that earlier we had had to reverse right the way down due to an elephant coming in the other direction) and right on the shore of the lake overlooking the spotlit palace and fort opposite.

View of Udaipur Fort from the restuarant

Confronting an elephant on a one way street, Udaipur

Udaipur town was small enough to walk round and we quickly found ourselves a café as a base. The fort (AFFS was yet to set in) was beautiful and we both enjoyed the absence of a guide. There is a hotel on an island in the middle of the lake that is very expensive and in which much of the James Bond film Octopussy was shot (a great many Udaipur hotels show the film every night at 7.30). One day, we promised ourselves, we would return…

Lake Palace Hotel, Udaipur. One day...

On new cars, being a tourist and a visit to Oman

February marked the next milestone of our stay in the Middle East as that was when I received my third monthly bank statement. Which means I am credit-worthy. Which meant we could buy a car. Although we are here primarily to pay off debts, it seemed silly to be paying nearly 2000 dirhams a month for a very basic hire car. So we looked into what we could afford for the same amount through finance. I had decided, before our arrival here, that due to ultra-cheap petrol (23p a litre) I was going to go for something that I could not afford to run in Europe. My initial criterion was that it needed to either grunt, go off road or waft. A survey of locally available nearly-new automobilia suggested a Chevrolet Lumina/Caprice might suffice. Despite the American brand name, these are actually rebadged Australian Holdens. They look like normal family saloon cars. Except that they have 6 litre, Corvette derived engines. But, in the end, the lure of desert camping trips proved too high, and we went for a 2 year old Jeep Cherokee (pics to follow, along with pics of the flat, school etc.). It’s a wonderful thing, with a 3.7 litre V6 engine (so it does grunt and off roading) and, being American, it was relatively cheap. Most people here drive 4x4s and 90% of all 4x4s on UAE roads (and, occasionally off UAE roads) are Toyota Landcruisers. They are, as an almost failsafe rule, driven by the ignorant and arrogant who make no concessions to other road users whatsoever. To the point where I feel a little bit sick every time I see one. Which, as I’m sure you can well imagine, is frequently. The rationale given for the dominance of the Toyota brand is their bombproof reliability and consequent very low depreciation. Imagine my delight then when Toyotas recently started killing people and had to be recalled. One of the branches of the Landcruiser family is so dangerous, apparently, that they have had to stop selling them here. Secondhand prices will plummet accordingly. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.




Our first adventure in the Jeep was a trip to Al Ain Zoo. I’m not much of a one for zoos, but it seemed like a good one. The animal enclosures were spacious and there was a variety of beasts.

Meerkats!

Being the UAE, of course, they were all the biggest animals available – the tiger was the size of a small horse, the bear the size of a large Jeep, and so on. They have a pair of white lions, which I’m fairly sure aren’t normal lions that have been bleached.

White lions

The high point for me came when I spotted some very strange birds in an enclosure:

I called Rachel over to show her and they all took off and flew away. They were, of course, native birds, not an exhibit. I sometimes forget we live in an exotic and faraway land.



Towards the end of February, my parents came to stay. This meant that we got the chance to do all the touristy stuff that residents (fools that we are) rarely do.

Me and mum being tourists

We went onto the Palm Jumeirah by monorail, looked at the Burj al Arab (the sail shaped hotel) and tried, twice, to go up to the observation deck of the Burj Khalifa (the tall building). But, less than a month after opening, problems with the electricity supply meant that it closed down temporarily. We tried at the beginning of the visit and again at the end, but to no avail. As I write this (halfway through April) the observation deck is still closed with no immediate prospect of change.

The Burj Khalifa! Still haven't been up it though.

Bastakiya - the renovated 'old' part of Dubai - now a warren of museums and art galleries and part of the tourist trail

We also went to Oman. The problem with owning a car in Dubai is that there really aren’t that many places to drive it to. You can’t drive through Saudi (not that anyone would want to), which means you can choose between other parts of the UAE, Oman and the Yemen. As the latter is pretty terrifying, the only other country is realistically Oman. So we set off in the Jeep to cross the mountains. It was a pretty boring journey – the mountains are not particularly spectacular, and once in Oman, the scenery is unchanging for the three or four hours it takes to get from the border to Muscat. Unlike the UAE, Oman feels like a real country – it has older buildings. It is much greener and, despite the UAE’s much vaunted oil wealth, Oman actually feels more prosperous.

Muscat is lovely. Strange, but lovely. Due to the landscape, it is divided into several clearly separate sections, each kept apart by rocky bluffs. We were staying in Mutrah, which is the main (as far as I can tell) tourist part – very pretty with one of the best bazaars in the Middle East. As it is also the main anchorage for cruise liners, it tends to be overrun by western sightseers. Of which we were a small but significant part.

Mutrah seafront

The old and the new - a dhow and a cruise liner in Mutrah harbour

Hotels in the Middle East are generally expensive, so the Hotel Mutrah was, by necessity, a 3 star establishment. But it was an excellent place to stay. Made more so by the Omani people we encountered. Without wishing to stray into generalisation, I have heard from many sources that the Omanis are very welcoming people. Unlike the Emiratis. And our stay certainly did little to disabuse us of this notion. The hotel bar was obviously a pretty rough, local watering hole – bar girls aside, entirely male and given over to playing bar-sports and watching other sports. As the only Westerners (and with two women!) in there, at no point did we feel uncomfortable or in the least bit unwelcome. Imagine a group of middle eastern tourists walking into an East End local. Do you think they would be able to say the same? Assuming they survived, of course. The restaurant attached the hotel was also excellent. It didn’t look like much – a staff canteen at best. But the Indian food there was of a quality I have not come across before or since. I only hope that it hasn’t raised the bar so high that I am disappointed when we go to India in the summer!

On our second night, we ventured into the part of Muscat where the big international hotels are, hoping for a bit more life. Which is what we found. It had three bars! Three! One of which was too full.

Before our return to Dubai, we visited Muscat itself – the administrative centre of the city. We were near enough the only people there. We had a look at the Royal Palace (fantastic! Concrete!). Then we went home.

The Omani Royal Palace

Following the parental visit, not much happened. We are sufficiently into the everyday grind now for the seemingly exotic location to make little difference. The only thing of note was that last month, I got to payday with the equivalent of £150 still in my bank account. That has never happened before! As with most people, it is now the holidays for which we live, and we had 6 weeks of grindstone heading towards the carrot of 10 days in Nepal. Except that Nepal seemed so alien to me, so far outside of my comfort zone (as, to be honest, is nearly anything that doesn’t involve cheeseburgers, games consoles and shopping malls – I appear to be an American teenager) that I really wasn’t looking forward to it at all.

I need not have worried. As I write this, we have been back from Kathmandu for about 12 hours and, as will be told in the next blog entry (which I am hoping to complete in the next 2 days or so), we had a wonderful, wonderful time.

Kandy, the Klub Kup and Khristmas

OK, so I’ve been a little lax in keeping this thing up to date. So here goes.
The train to Kandy left at 3.35pm and we had to check out of the glorious Galle Face at midday. Cue a couple of tortuous hours spent sitting on the verandah reading a book. A wonderful way to spend our final hours in a wonderful hotel. That and another trip to the factory shop to score some more shirts and another suit (Cerruti this time).

The train arrived about half an hour before the departure time, giving us plenty of time to settle in. At first, we thought we might have got it wrong – this was supposed, after all, to be the jewel in Sri Lankan Rail’s crown, the first class non-stop express between the island’s two main cities. It didn’t look like any jewel in any crown I have ever seen. The carriages were at least 50 years old, the promised air conditioning was four ceiling mounted fans that didn’t work. The toilet, well, I’ll leave that to your imagination. Can you imagine it? Actually, it was worse what you just imagined. This was first class. Second class seemed to consist of wooden benches in cattle-car conditions. Third class was basically clinging to the outside of the train.

Our seats, however, were worth every rupee of the £1.80 they cost us. We were facing backwards, but with a big window from which to watch the receding tracks.

Rachel travelling first class. We had lots of really good photos of the train on Rachel's camera but she lost it. Again.

It mentioned in our guide book that the train could be “a little bit bumpy”. In the same way as Hitler might be said to be “a little bit naughty”. I have been on tamer roller coaster rides. There were stretches of track where we were leaving our seats (vertically) twice every second. I feared I could feel my internal organs pureeing. I don’t like roller coasters. And I didn’t like this very much either.

This was the closest I was able to get to a level photograph due to the roller-coaster-like properties of the train

But on the calm stretches of track, it was beautiful. Farm and paddy land gave way quite quickly to mountains. Looking backwards down the track, we noticed that there seemed to be a surprisingly large number of people appearing from the undergrowth in our wake. It turns out that the railway tracks are also kind of public footpaths – there aren’t that many ways through the mountains.

The journey took close to four hours. Dusk came about three hours in, bringing flocks of what looked like massive gliding birds, but turned out (in true Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom fashion) to be fruit bats. Huge, massive fruit bats. Fruit bats the size of small geese.

It was fully dark by the time we reached Kandy, and the collection we requested from the hotel didn’t materialize, so we just jumped into a cab/minibus and off we went. The Queen’s Hotel is owned by the same people who own the Galle Face, and though not quite as old (built in 1895), it is every bit as colonially charming.

The lobby of the Queen's Hotel

At first it was a bit of a culture shock – after the Galle Face, it was, shall we say, unrestored. The room was spacious enough, with lots of dark wood and high ceilings, but there was little there – no bath (and the shower was…old), no room service, no booze in the minibar. Though there was a phone, there was no internal directory. The check-in clerk had reeled of a list of different numbers we might find useful, but there was no chance we were going to remember them.

A sign in the bedroom

The view from the bedroom window

We got used to the comparative lack of luxury fairly quickly though. To be honest, I had kind of fallen in love with the place after a couple of hours. Particularly the bar attached to the hotel, the Pub Royale which was resplendantly Victorian and...just wonderful.

The bar at Pub Royale

We ventured out into the dark and rain-slicked streets of Kandy to find that pretty much everything was shut. This was at about 7.30pm. Turns out it was Poya – the monthly full moon festival where they celebrate the full moon by shutting everything. We ended up eating at Pizza Hut.

The town of Kandy

Over the next few days, though, Kandy showed itself to be quite a lot livelier. Though it is Sri Lanka’s second city, it is tiny. It has three major streets, a lake and the temple of the sacred tooth (one of Buddha’s teeth is said to be contained therein). Tiny, but busy. We took a day tour of the region with the taxi driver who had picked us up at the station, including visits to the elephant orphanage (a field with lots of elephants in it), an elephant-poo paper factory where they make paper from elephant poo, a tea factory (my favouritest, favouritest place – it smelled utterly wonderful and I spent a small fortune on different kinds of tea) and the Kandy botanical gardens, which were beautiful and had some wildlife.

The Geragama Tea Factory

Tea leaves before...

...and after.

Elephants at the elephant orphanage

Some of the local wildlife

Some more of the local wildlife (monkey in a wig)

Fruit bats

In total, we were in Kandy for three days, which felt about right. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to tour the ancient cities (another 2-3 day tour), but that’s a reason to go back next year, right? We got a cab from Kandy direct to the airport (faster than the train) and home we went. The duty free shopping in the departures section of Bandaranaike airport was a bit disappointing – the arrivals duty free sold guitars, cookers, fridge-freezers, you name it. I suppose it might be a bit difficult to get a duty free washing machine onto the plane though.

Overall, we loved Sri Lanka – the hotels, the history, the (seemingly) genuinely friendly people, and we will definitely be going back next year some time.


After Sri Lanka, we had an interlude of two weeks at school before the start of the Christmas holidays (or December Break as we have to call it). The day after we broke up was the final of the FIFA World Club Cup in Abu Dhabi, for which I had managed to procure four tickets. I was a tad trepidacious about the whole affair – the tickets had not been posted so we would have to drive into the centre of Abu Dhabi to collect them and then find our way to the park-and-ride facilities and so on. It turns out I really need not have worried – it was as easy as fruit-filled baked goods. We (myself, Rachel and two friends, Marie and Harry) collected the tickets with no fuss and discovered that we had been allocated parking at the stadium (presumably because I must have been one of the first people to buy tickets) so we got there with plenty of time to spare. The stadium itself is a masterpiece in reinforced concrete that speaks volumes on the subject of 1980s municipal architecture.

The Zayed Sports City stadium

Stadium interior

I liked it, anyway. The first match we watched was the 3rd/4th place playoff between Atlante of Mexico and the Pohang Steelers from South Korea. Pohang won on penalties, but the standard throughout wasn’t much above the bottom reaches of English league football.

We arrived quite early

The final was between Barcelona of Spain and Estudiantes of Argentina. The standard was much higher, as you might expect with players such as Lionel Messi, Xabi, Carlos Puyol, Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Juan Sebastien Veron on the pitch. It was relatively slow starting, though a thrilling finish saw Barcelona win 2-1 in extra time.

Barcelona fielded a very young side (boom boom)

The week after we got back, it rained for the first time since we arrived. It rained quite hard for about 3 hours. The result was near catastrophic – there are no drains on the roads in the UAE, so the whole country seemed to have flooded.

Our apartment building suddenly had a moat – we were unable to drive into the car park on the ground floor.

The road outside our apartment

Christmas was a week later. It seemed a bit flat, though most of the shopping malls had some sort of Christmas decorations up. Many people bemoaned the lack of snow and cold as not being Christmassy enough. Having watched the news reports of the devastation being laid waste to the UK by freezing temperatures, I can’t say I would swap weather, however unChristmassy it might be. It was 26 degrees on Christmas day. We went round to Harry and Marie’s flat for Christmas Dinner which was extremely pleasant. I’m still considering returning to the UK next Christmas though, if I can afford it, of course.

Other things:

New Year’s Eve was spent in the desert at a camp that promised unlimited food and drink. The food had run out by the time I got to the front of the queue and the drink had run out by 1 a.m.. We had a pretty damn good time though.

January the fourth was the inauguration of the Burj Khalifa (that which used to be called the Burj Dubai and now officially the tallest building in the world). There were lots of fireworks. We saw them on the way to a restaurant to celebrate Rachel’s 30th birthday. My wife is officially exactly 30 years older than the tallest building in the world. As an aside, the local paper put what has to be the most positive spin I have ever seen on the recent global financial crisis. Thanks to the crisis, it said, no-one would be able to afford to build a building taller than the Burj for many years to come. There’s positivity for you! Happy New Year!