Anna & Christian Hit The Road

What the heck? Where did south america go?

I have no idea. Glaciers, mountains, Argentian Steaks (lots of them), Chilean Hitchiking, que mas, volunteering in the campo of Bolivia, in the gorgeous town of Sucre (that I might add is making me think I’d like to go back for another 6 months to learn more spanish, and help the people here a bit more). No really.

Crossing the border into peru tomorrow for our final month, for a week of hammock swinging down the amazon, then 2 weeks sitting on a beach in columbia, before we head home.

Then, well, I have about 15000 photos that need post processing, and some credit cards to pay off.

The blog well, I dont know, As much as this is supposed to be a holiday, i feel like we havent had time to even look at it.

I’m really looking forward to getting back and putting this trip into a bit more context, cos at the moment, it feels like the best rollercoaster ride, that never stops.

Pokhara on the lake, inspiration for trekking and parasailing

Photo Gallery – Pokhara

There have only been really two instances since I started travelling asia about 8 months ago where the local music has really moved me.  I mean yes, I hear different interesting music every single day.  Its everywhere from the public transport when it blares out of the cheap speakers of over packed buses on a trip from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, or on the streets of Delhi, when DVD shops play hindi pop music loud enough to hear down the street, or even to the young men who on the train from Jaisalmer to Jaipur turn their tinny mobile speakers as loud as they can go, to share with the carriage the sounds of punjaby hymns for all.  This is great, and even memorable I hope, but its different to when you actually begin to understand a culture simply by experiencing the full extent of the traditions through their music.  Both of these times the music has been played live.  The first happened in Bali, where we saw a performance of the Ramayana story in Ubud, where the tribal sounds just got right underneath my skin, and the second, I can feel right now.  In this dark hotel room, with the light of the laptop the only thing I can see, it is Diwali in Pokhara, Nepal.  The people in this heavily, touristic town, have totally forgotten about what we are doing, and are spending their evening really partying.  Just sitting here, only listening is awesome, and the pitch of the womens voices changing to the rhythm of the local sounding drums is mesmerizing on its own.  They have been playing and singing and dancing just below us for the last 4 hours.

Kathmandu, with Gortex and pollution… the himalayas over there somewhere…

Photo Gallery – Kathmandu

Even though the guidebook made the truth about Kathmandu reasonably clear, for some reason I expected the town to be more like a village, quiet and quaint with small shops selling trekking gear by old men with long beards, all of whom had scaled Everest at one point or another.  Kathmandu, whilst in places retains some sort of Nepali charm is well and truly a capital city.  It oozes pollution, traffic, poverty, with very little sign of the impeding Himalayas just a few kilometres away.  It does however have a lot of people.  Outside the tourist areas, we found a city bursting at the seams with Diwali celebrating families on every street corner, dancing, singing, drinking, and having fun.  And it was a great time to see festivities, and despite staying there only a couple of days, most of which was recovering from a very long bus and train trip, we still didn’t manage to completely avoid the saddest part of the city.  The fact that competing on every street corner with the locals, were Gore-Tex clad mature tourists inflating the prices on two week breaks to do base camp and get the hell out of there.

First beach in 3 months – Bay of Bengal on a beaten up old Honda 125.

Photo Gallery – Puri

The decision to head south for 12 hours on another train for a few days was a tricky one.  We have just over a month left on the continent before returning back to UK for a few weeks and then on to South America.  We are going to be in Nepal for the most part, so the question was, should be make our way north from Kolkata, and perhaps hang in Darjeeling, the tea making, trekking capital of the north east for some more mountain chill time, or south, the wrong direction to Puri, and get a chance to swim in the Bay of Bengal.  Given that nearly half of that next month is going be trekking in Nepal, and the fact that the only thing close to the sea we have had since leaving South East Asia was the pool in Jaisalmer a few weeks ago, it seemed worth checking out Puri.  It wasn’t exactly a beach resort, I’ll say that, but it did go some way to showing us the completely different atmosphere coastal and southern towns have to the rest of the nation.    We filled the week with motor biking and swimming at a few different places, each trip in the monsoonal weather a new experience of what there is out here.  It’s so great to be on the bike with Anna.  One trip to a huge coastal lake had us leaving really early, so that we could experience the dolphins that are only found here, and whilst they were good, it was the ride that made the day so incredible.  Winding roads where people walk with their families from one village to the next, stopping for dosa’s and soft drinks, where we were the only foreigners for miles away, and just changing that bike’s gears, compared to some of the bangers we have had in the last 9 months – an absolute dream.  On the way back, the sun was setting as we cruised along the lake, stopping every 5 minutes to take photos, or talk to the locals, most of whom spoke no English, and were just pleased to meet us with wide smiles.  There were groups of men in coloured dress, singing in a local dialect as they took in the sunset over the lake, just like us.  There were women standing on a dike between the lakes, perhaps fishing, perhaps just living, they certainly looked in no hurry, and when I started taking pictures, they seemed more amused by the situation than I was.  Conscious that we had another hour and half to ride, Anna gave me a little push along, but it was too late.  The sunset was incredible but short, and soon enough we found ourselves riding in the dark when the only problem with the bike made itself known to us.  The headlight was hardly enough to light the road in front.  So the journey back was painstakingly slow, requiring intense concentration on the road ahead.  And to make matters more interesting there were hundreds of people on the streets the whole way back.  Sometimes getting to a standstill while people pushed across the road, it was an intense ride of mainly first and second gear that seemed to take forever.  But we felt strangely part of India that night, and although absolutely exhausted when we got back to Puri, totally content to have experienced this tropical rural part of India in the same way that a lot of the local people do – on the back of an old Honda.

The holy man in the photos was a Sharman at the sun temple.  Apparently both me and Anna will live to 96 and have three children.  Incredibly photogenic, he was only to pleased to pass on his knowledge at that temple, to two foreigners who contently sat and watched him practice yoga while the sunset.

Diwali Trading, in the trading town of India

Photo Gallery – Kolkatta

So the bridge I talked about in Kolkata that we visited just a couple of weeks ago, as mentioned is the heaviest trafficked bridge in the world.  This time I wanted to show Anna also, so we walked over it in sweltering heat with the thousands of other commuters making their daily wander.  As we reached one end, I casually glanced over the edge and saw the spectacle of the market that stretched into the horizon in front of me.  Traders yelling at each other selling bright yellow and orange necklaces for the Diwali festival – the biggest of its kind in India, due to start in just a week or so – line the floor creating a carpet of colour that looked like a buzzing bees nest from above.  We didn’t need to move, except that we wanted more toast, and I needed a shave.  Further on, for 20p i got one, the skilful young barber propping me on a wooden stool for 15 minutes while he carefully attended the few hairs I have.  As a test to his ability to keep that blade as still as required to do the job right, I whipped out the 24mm lens and attempted a HDR.  That’s when you take 3 photos in quick succession each of differing exposures and then put them together afterwards on the computer to get a much better tonal dynamic range.   Wow, I am enforcing the photography geek on you today.  Unless the subject remains perfectly still, its impossible to get the shot right, but as you can see, he had no problems.  The second last couple of shots amazed me also.  Walk the business district street of Kolkata, a city with more than 10million people, and in between the suits and ties, somewhere on the gutter you will see a mother washing her baby boy.  I saw a man completely covered in black soot.  He was obviously homeless, and sitting out the front of large bank, where the security were happy to leave him.  It was only when I sat next to him to eat my lunch and people started taking photos of us that the security got a bit nervous and shooed us away.  Time to go to Nepal.