Tribal Antics

Back in the land of moustaches again… that is lowland north India… In Calcutta now thinking about how to cross the Bangladeshi border. The thing is that it’s Friday afternoon and the embassies are closed until Monday. Unfortunately my Indian visa runs out on Sunday, so in theory I’d need to get out of here by then. Could chance it at the Bangla border without a visa but I’ve heard from other Irish people that they got laughed at when they tried that (although in theory the Irish don’t need a visa for tourist purposes – theorizing with border guards don’t always work though!). If that doesn’t work then I could make a beeline for Kathmandu, but I’ve got Bangladesh on the brain now. Maybe I’ll just overstay my Indian visa for a day, sort out my Bangladeshi one on Monday and go then. I’ll be a day late, but the Indian guards shouldn’t go too mad on that… I might just have to grease them up with some baksheesh to keep ‘em sweet! Anyway, it won’t have been the first time I’ve overstayed a visa and been an illegal alien… (USA, Bolivia, Pakistan…)

Anyway, let’s see what happens… In theory I could go anywhere I want, so we’ll see where I end up.

I’ve spent the last few days in a tribal village called Umsavvar in the East Khasi Hills of Megalaya, outside Shillong. It was a brilliant experience. A development worker I met in Shillong, Prince, invited me to accompany him to this village where his work was focused on education. He had a hut there and had been accepted by the villagers, so it was a great opportunity. I sat on the roofrack of a jeep for three hours while we dirt-roaded our way there (sore arse extraordinaire!)

There are three tribes in the State of Megalaya: the Khasi, the Genthia and the Goru. This village is Khasi and I met many of the villagers during the two days I was there. Prince brought me from house to house introducing me as Khana from Ri Pharang or The Foreign Land (as if there was only one). He also acted as an interpreter and would translate so that the villagers could ask questions. They asked about what we ate in my country, about my family and my work, about the weather and about my travels. I asked them about there kids, their work, their festivals and village traditions.

The village was pretty poor, without electricity or phones or anything like that. The land there was rocky and not arable, so people made broomsticks out of brush they found in a nearby gorge. Prince had been visiting the village for ten years and had established a school there and some other education-linked initiatives.

One of the interesting things about the Khasi tribe is that they are matrilineal. This means that the mother’s clan is of primary importance, rather than that of the father as is usually the case. Children inherit their mothers name only, and all property and wealth is passed on to the youngest daughter. The birth of a daughter is celebrated here as a son would be in the rest of India (given that a dowry is necessary for a daughter normally).

On a tangential note, I only found out last week that pre-natal gender determination is illegal in India, since in the past, female foeti have been aborted upon such. Is that mad or what?

Anyway, as I was saying: matrilineal… sounds alright doesn’t it? But it’s a bit weird as well! It’s not that it’s a feminist inclined society, considering power is still wielded by men: The local durbar, or village council, is a men only affair, with women banned. It’s just that the mother’s clan is of prime importance, i.e. The most important man in the family is the mother’s brother, as opposed to the father. This means that the nuclear family, as we know it in Europe, doesn’t really exist here and men are left slightly disenfranchised and tend to disappear off the scene as soon as their child is born.

I also spent the few days horsing this paan into me. They chew it all the time here, paan being to the Subcontinent what the coca leaf is to the Andes. In the northeast, they have a particularly vile concoction, which I have found myself actually getting quite used to: they wrap up a chunk of betel nut in a leaf from the paan tree smeared with a small bit of limestone paste and stick in their gobs. The betel nut and leaf make you salivate like a rabid dog and turn your spit red like blood, the lime gives you a slight high. It’s a bit of disgusting habit though. First of all, all public areas are covered in a layer of red spit that has been gobbed out by a variety of people. Secondly, you sometimes see lovely people only to open their mouths to reveal a stained set of rotting choppers from chewing paan all day.

See below for pictures of my tribal experience.

Dusting off my Salaam Aleikum

Fuck was I happy to leave Guwahati. I have to admit that I’ve become a bit of a right cocky cunt (if you’ll pardon my French): There I was exclaiming from the rooftops how much of a seasoned traveller and generally fantastic person I was ‘cos the heat in India didn’t bother me… Well, fuck me sideways… I’ve met my match! The heat during the day in Guwahati was like nothing I’ve experienced before. Combined with high levels of humidity, it meant that normal day-to-day life became a struggle of the highest proportions. Respiration during the day was like breathing with your face down in a bowl of scalding hot soup. The sweat would run down your neck in rivers and collect in little reservoirs under your arms and chest. The small of your back (see arsecrack) could have rivaled Niagara or Iguazu in volume. A shower would provide respite only for the amount of time that you were actually under the water. As soon as you step out of it, you’re a sweaty mess again instantly. Sleep at night was possible only under a dozen fans or else an AC unit. I had the former and managed a good night’s sleep.


Vikram, his cousin Nitin, Nitin’s wife Chin Chin and I all hopped in Nitin’s car and made the three hour journey from Guwahati to Shillong. At 1450m, Shillong is a nice respite from the heat of the lowlands. It’s the capital of the Indian state of Megalaya, bordering Bangladesh to the south and Assam to the north, and, due to its rolling hills, more temperate climate and history, is known as Scotland of the East.


For the past two days I’ve been driven around the city; taking in the various attractions and eating like a king. Vikram’s extended family are very hospitable and are really taking care of me. I’m going to stay here until the 21st of June, when my Indian visa runs out and it looks like there’ll be some exiting stuff on the cards. We’re going to a Jazz concert tomorrow evening and I’m going to look into doing some pot-holing in the caves around here and also visiting some waterfalls over the next few days. This evening, I had dinner with Vikrams friends. One of them works on a development project in a Kasai tribal village, Umsabhar, three hours from here and has invited me to come and stay a few days there, so that should be an interesting insight into the more remote rural areas of Megalaya.


So… the big question… what am I doing when my visa runs out? Well, I’ve decided (a while back actually) that there’s no point in continuing overland to South East Asia. First of all, I don’t have the money for it. I’ve already been away for over ten months now, two months over the initial eight months and my bank account will officially be at zero within the next month. Also, I’m ready to settle down again now for a while and am looking forward to working (and being able to live out of a wardrobe and cook my own food). And there’s no point rushing South East Asia: I’d like to give it some time and its due consideration, so look forward to exploring it in the near future.


I’m going to fly home to Ireland in August for a month or so. Then I will fly down to Melbourne to find a job there for a year or two. I already have my work visa, so I just need to find a way of getting some cash, and given the economic situation in Ireland and the fact that I’d look forward to working abroad again for a while, I figure Oz is as good a place as any.


So between now and August, I don’t have too many choices. I need to leave India on the 21st of June (visa runs out), so my choices are Nepal or Bangladesh. In July the monsoon will have hit with full force so it’s not the perfect season for travel in either country: Nepal’s famous treks will all be closed with leeches the main customers on any remaining open; Bangladesh’s deltas are infamous for flooding and its coast will no doubt be hammered by cyclones. However, I have to go somewhere.


Bangladesh is what I’m aiming for. I’ve decided that if I’m gonna witness the monsoon, I might as well do it in style. Also, the ‘road-less-travelled’ naturally draws me there and after the positive experiences of my time in Pakistan (Muslim country) and Calcutta/West Bengal (Bengali places), I figure it could be interesting.


I’ve heard on the grapevine that Irish citizens don’t need a tourist visa for Bangladesh. If this turns out to be true and if I can cross from one of the border crossings around here (there’s a border three hours from Shillong), then that’s where I’m headed. If it turns out to be a porky, that I actually DO need a visa, then I don’t have the time to make it to the consulate in Calcutta and will instead make my way to Nepal.


Either way, I’ll be away for another six to ten weeks and will be finish up my trip by the end of August by the latest (over a year from when I left Ireland for Istanbul).


Will update on Bangladeshi visa situation and plans for Shillong over the next few days.


Ur man in the Northeastern Subcontinent,


C.

Big-tuskers and one-horners

I’m in Guwahati, the biggest city in the Northeast of India and the capital of the state of Assam. It’s hot and it’s humid. The monsoon is playing with our minds… it hasn’t really started raining yet, but there is the occasional downpour. It’s getting late in the season and the city’s suffering a water shortage. Any day now, the heavens should open and the continuous reliable rains of the monsoon should cool the earth and lessen our infernal anguish, but so far, the clammy heat and pea-soup humidity prevails.

I’ve met up with my friend Vikram, whom I met in Bombay, and he’s been good enough to let me stay with his family here. We’re going to leave tomorrow morning to Shillong in the state of Megalaya, which is only a three hour taxi ride away. I’ve been assured that Shillong is a good deal higher and that the climate there is much more agreeable, which is good because neither Guwahati nor my wardrobe can sustain the fourteen-showers-and-three-shirts-a-day habit I’ve developed in the last 24 hours.

Vikram’s family has been a culinary delight and a welcome break from the samosa diet I’ve been on for the past while. For breakfast this morning we had chickpeas in a light tomatoe sauce, scrambled eggs with peas and onions and the Assamese equivalent to the ubiquitous Puri, which is a type of deep-fried bubble made from refined flour. For lunch we were invited to his uncles house where I gorged myself on multiple helpings of the most wonderfully light Dal (lentils), fish in a mustard and coconut milk sauce, fish cakes with spicy sweet olive chutney, lightly battered ochra, mixed vegetable and potato curry, followed off with a semolina desert with fruit and nuts; and ice cream. To aid our tummies in the monstrous challenge of digestion, we chewed betel nut and cardamom seeds.

The stopover in Jaldapara National Park in the West Bengali Hills was a fantastic experience. In the wild, we got to see rhinos, elephants, deer, ghul (the Indian version of bison), peacock and lots of other birds. We also got a close look at leopards in captivity. One day we were driving through the forest when a huge wild elephant (or a ‘big tusker’ as the guide called it) came out right onto the road behind us. It was magic (even though I nearly shit myself cos it looked like it was gonna charge us). The next morning, we rode out on elephants to look for the endangered Indian one-horned rhino and managed to find two fine specimens.

It was weird, I dunno if it was something unique to these two Rhino specimens, but they appeared to have some kind of issue with projectile defecation and urination. One of them went for a shit and it exploded out its rear end and landed about five feet away. The other one went for a piss and, again, it fountained up into the air nearly soaking an elephant-full of Injun tourists.

So I seem to be more of a novelty out here in the Northeast of the country. When I made my way from Jaldapara to Guwahati yesterday, I passed through the town of Cooch Behar, which is the setting for ‘Memoirs of a Maharani’, a book I read before I came away. I had this romantic notion of the town, which the book describes in detail, in reference to the princely states which existed before, during and (to some extent) after the Raj (British India). Anyway, it’s the arsehole of the universe; and they had clearly never seen a ‘whitey’ before so I caused a bit of a ruckus as I passed through the town. The Injuns have little sense of embarrassment about staring. There doesn’t seem to be the ‘rude’ taboo linked to it like we have at home. Most of the time I don’t mind, and I’m happy to stare back, or else to ignore, or else to smile and head-bobble, but sometimes… if the person looks particularly stupid… I’m liable to stop in my tracks, stare right back at them with my mouth open, tongue dug under my bottom lip and my eyes all googley in an attempt to illustrate to them how fucking ridiculous they look staring at me like a retard. Like any attempt at misguided social conditioning though, it falls flat on its face, with their gaze only turning even more moronic due to the increased peculiarity of engagement.

The staring reached its zenith this morning at the train station. I arrived at 3.30am and had to hang around until half six until my friend collected me. I was sitting outside the station minding my own business when I realised that ants had discovered the biscuits in my bag and had… well, ‘taken it over’ as such. I started dancing around like a lunatic trying to get the little formic fuckers out of my bag. Of course all I ended up achieving was getting myself covered the little bastards and then proceeded to attempt de-ant-ification through a series of jerks and slaps that must have made me look like I was suffering the advanced stages of dementia. Every station in India is besieged 24-7 by an a plethora of a people in one or other stage of transit, be it sleeping in the middle of a stairwell or arguing with rickshaw wallahs. And by the time I had managed to quell the invading armies, I looked up to find about four hundred people – stopped in their tracks - staring at me, smiling from ear to ear. I laughed and they all laughed too, it was actually pretty cool.

See below for pics of Indiana Jones-style jungle exploration in Jaldapara.

I promise the next post will be about what I’m going to do in the future, cos I’m coming to a crossroads pretty soon.

Ur man in Hindustan…

C.

Back to guilty boozing

Just a quickie... After a final few drinks with my fellow trekkers last night, I left Gangtok this morning at nine o'clock. I got a five hour boneshaker jeep to Siliguri and from there caught a four hour local bus to where I am now.

So where am I now, I hear you ask... Well, I've left the mountains and come back down to the plains. Together with Siobhan, one of my fellow trackers, an Irish girl stuck in a Scottish accent, I've shacked up in a little place called Madarihat, in the West Bengali Hills. It's just outside the Jaldapara Wildlife Reserve, where tomorrow morning, we're due to mount elephants (in the transport sense of the word) to go rhino hunting. Well, OK... that's a bit of a porky. We're going rhino spotting, rather than hunting. (Siobhan would never agree to that, she's a vet and ridiculously animal friendly... although she's been regaling me with stories of how she castrates puppies for a living).

I'm gonna do some rhino spotting and forest trekking tomorrow and then I'll head down to Cooch Behar the next day to get a train to Guhati (in Assam) where I'll meet my friend Vikram from Mumbai and we'll boogey on down to his family's house in Shillong.

It's weird being back in the lowlands. Sikkim was very different from the rest of India. The government is quite well off up there, so it's very clean (plastic bags are forbidden) and the infrastructure is very good. Gangtok itself feels more like a town in the Alps than an Indian town. Also the people are more like the Nepali's or Tibetans (of which there are many) and not really like the Indians that much. There's lots of meat everywhere (even pork and beef) and it's got to be the only state where you don't feel like an absolute evil deviant if you want to have a drink. They have off-licenses galore and really nice bars and clubs where you can have a tipple, nothing at all like the dingy, men-only, dark backrooms of Indian bars, where you feel like you're waiting on a child prostitute instead of a beer. But it is a weird state, it was only incorporated into India in the 70's, before that it was a kinda of Indian protectrate. Click here for more Sikkim info.

Signing off for your correspondent back in the sweatshop of India.

C.

Kachmanjunga and Gochala Pass

I’m back… I expected to be absolutely fuckarooed, but I’m not actually that bad. I had an absolutely brilliant trek, it was very exiting and adventurous! Considering that it’s the basecamp for the worlds third highest mountain, it’s quite an undeveloped trek and doesn’t compare with (the Nepalese) Everest or Annapurna in that regard. At one point, the weather looked to be disallowing our progress (we caught the arse-end of a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal), but just as we were getting ready to abandon ship and head for the lowlands, it broke and opened up a window for us to make it to the top: Gochela Pass.

Days 1 and 2 were spent hiking up trough the lush Sikkimese forests. They were fairly easy days with no more than three hours trekking each day. I had left Yuksom (the starting point at 1800m) with an Israeli girl and a British guy, as well as a guide, a cook, three porters and three dzo’s (a mixed breed of a yak and a cow).

Day 3 saw us arrive at the Zongri trekking hut, at 4000m, when the worst of the weather set in. We arrived to find a group of two Aussies, two Kiwis, two South Africans and another Irish girl. The driving rain meant that we were unable to leave the trekking hut for a good 36 hours. Luckily for me, this constituted an acclimatization day in my itinerary (or a day of rest), when I hadn’t planned to move anyway. For the others, it meant a day was shorn off the end of their trek.

On the morning of Day 5, we awoke bright and early to find the sun shining and the mountains inviting our ascent. We lost one Kiwi, the Israeli girl and the British guy (who had only planned to come as far as Zongri anyway) and the remaining seven of us started up the mountain to the Thangsing trekking hut, set in beautiful meadows at the bottom of an awesome glacial valley. We went to bed early to prepare for our ascent to the Gochela pass the next morning. This is the valley we stayed in in Thangsing.


After a 1.30am breakfast of porridge, we started up the valley under the cover of a starlit night. By 5.00am it was bright and we had reached the first viewpoint, a mountaintop overlooking a glacial moraine stretching up to the Gochala pass. It was cold… really fucking cold! We could see that there was snow on the pass and its access ridges (the rain we experienced lower down had been snow up here). Many of us weren’t really kitted out for snow and were already pretty cold, so only one of the Kiwi guys, the other Irish girl and myself continued (yes, the Irish are hardy fuckers…!).

After a near-vertical descent, we traipsed across a dry lake bounded by Mt. Pandim to the east and huge glacial ridge to the west. After the lake, we reached the snowline, but the snow was still cold and concrete-like so at first it was easy to walk on. We moved up the access ridge, but the trail was super narrow and wasn’t one that was meant for snow and we quickly found ourselves moving across the face of a very high steep ridge standing on extraordinarily icy snow (needless to say, we didn’t have crampons or any of the kit one might have appreciated in such a scenario). I was roaring at the guide that “this just isn’t fucking safe, you fucking gobshite”. One slip and… well, who likes to think about that. The trail was traversing the ridge, rising slowly towards the top, but at one point it became so steep that we decided to ‘go vertical’ and make a break for the top of the ridge. Using sticks and our boots we hacked footholds into the snow and climbed the ridge like a ladder.

When we got to the top of the ridge, I was fucking ecstatic that we hadn’t died and was… ahem… “marginally flipping out” at the guide that he had brought us that way. (He later admitted he had never reached the pass in snow). We decided to come back down from the pass by a different route, but first we had to make our way along the top of the ridge to the pass.

This was not as easy as it sounds. As described the ridge was about 300m high, and had steep slopes of icy snow. As we walked along it, every now and then, there would be a fucking ginormous boulder in our way. Some of these we could climb over, but others we had to walk around, meaning we had to go onto the sleek, icy face of the ridge, either to the east or the west and somehow manipulate ourselves around a boulder. We had about four or five dodgy boulders to circumvent, but with teamwork and resolve, we did a good job and arrived at the pass at about 8.00am, six hours after having left camp and just as the sun was coming over the mountaintops.

In fairness, the view we were rewarded with was nothing less than spectacular. Although the view of Kangchenjunga, the worlds third highest mountain, was somewhat underwhelming due to its distance (20km to the north), it formed a nice backdrop to things. And the view back on the valley, its glacial ridge dividing a lower dry lake/desert from a higher (startlingly blue) lake and the surrounding 6-7000m peaks was absolutely gobsmackingly beautiful.

OK, this entry is way too fucking long, so basically over days 7 to 9, I came back down the mountain again and am now in Gangtok, the capital of the Indian state of Sikkim.

See below for pics…

Peace out,

Ur man in the mountains…