Two Weeks of Travel

Ok. Wow.

That was a lot.

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I don't really know where to start. I could go chronologically I guess, but that just seems boring. It'd be better to convey everything simultaneously: bam. It was a busy trip though. I gained a lot of experience points. Went clubbing in Yangon, ate a cockroach (or probably a grasshopper, but it seemed way too fat for that), visited three countries, caught a minor case of denge (I probably did not catch Denge and am anyways fine right now, don't panic, I did get a little sick and had a lot of fun symptoms though), went motorbiking through a forest of millenia old monuments, met several puppies, goats, pigs, elephants, and of course cows, visited some of the most venerated sites in the world, learned at least 3 words of Burmese, danced at Durga Puja in Kolkatta, slept for an average of 5 hours a night for a week, saw the stars, the milky way, sunset over the Irawaddy and sunrise over the Ganges and just wow.

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The Sickness was a rather unfortunate bit, though. Riding my electric bike through Bagan I began to get a bit of a headache. So I drank some water while sitting on top of one of the more than 2200 temples, pagodas, monasteries and other ancient buildings built mostly between the 11th and 14th centuries, watching the sun get lower over the Irawaddy river. I started feeling a bit of a fever as I was cruising through a denser part of town after dark, no helmet and wind in the hair (I was probably pretty safe). It would have been nicer if I still had the long hair to properly experience that wind, but. And then when we stopped at a little fairgrounds next to one of the most famous pagodas in town, the 11th century Shwezigon pagoda, where a brilliantly and garishly lit up spiny ride with rocket-ships and small children was 5 feet away from an ancient arch way, and from behind a curtain on a portable stage emerged the sounds of a live band paying what cannot be well described but is perhaps best approximated by dropping a variety of out-of-tune instruments down some stairs, amplified and distorted – that is when I finally felt that I needed to go home.

I got 8 hours of sleep that night! And managed to loose my cellphone charger, and then the next morning I had a rather extreme fever and when I went to pack my bags a spider the size of a CD jumped out of my kurta and all was awful. We left Bagan that morning, taking the bus to Mandala, I slept an additional 5 hours, and then was basically unfunctional when we arrived; I had to skip our activities for the afternoon and instead watched bad movies on the TV.

The next day the fever was much less and the headache was much less and I didn't look like I was dead and could walk around so: I did whatever we were doing that day. Not going to lie: I do not really remember what we did that morning. We did leave the country, though, and had a 6 hour layover in Bangkok (we were not allowed to leave the airport, so it wasn't the most exciting), and landed in Kolkatta at 1:30 in the morning. In Kolkatta, the fever was mostly gone but I just could not concentrate whatsoever, and felt slightly dizzy, so I took another afternoon off. In Bodhigaya, the fever was gone completely and I was done taking drugs and was able to achieve a basic ability of concentration when I noticed that my feet were rather more speckled than they should be. And then my feet and hands swelled and a rash spread from my extremities and then that too, faded, leaving a sense of itchiness, and in Varanasi my ankles and knees were aching a lot and then after that I got back to Delhi and am more-or-less fine! I mean, I have a cold, a cough and runny nose and my digestive system isn't at it's finest, but I'm more-or-less fine.

Yep!

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Really, though: it was an excellent trip even with the sickness, and I provide probably unasked for details because they were pretty influential to me and my experiences but they did not completely color the experience, and the bad bits mostly happened during transit.

I might never take a fully aware bus ride from Bagan to Mandalay, though. That would have been nice. On the other hand, next time, I'll take a ferry.

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So: clubbing in Yangon. That was a thing. I'd never been to a club before, and was not alone in that. And then there I was, dressed in full Indian garb (I never had the chance to do laundry during the 2 week trip [or at least I never did laundry] so I was wearing a nice kurta and some churidar, which are the most ridiculous pants) with a group of 9 American students dancing to American club music with the occasional Mandalay rap piece or Bollywood hit mixed in. A group of security guards from the club surrounded us all night, so it was almost entirely just us dancing with each other, or at least awkwardly flailing next to each other – enthusiastically, though, and with enough confidence that the awkward part of it was only noticeable in the photos afterwards. It was pretty silly. It was pretty thought provoking and weird but that was mostly day-after type thinking. In the moment it was most fun.

The next night was a more subdued night, we just had some beers at at a nearby pub, hung out with each other and Tomas, a guy who worked at our hotel and showed us around a bit. We ate some cockroaches, as one does. They tasted basically of deep-fried, the texture was rather unfortunate, and the eye contact was more so (easier avoided though). The police showed up when we were sitting out on a dock and after some calm explanations by Tomas we were simply asked to leave, so that was fine. This full-disclosure thing is kind of weird (hi Grandma!), but we were generally not over-indulgent with the alcohols or obnoxiousness and were mostly a pretty conscientious lot, so… I mean we are young silly people, after all. And I want to convey what my travels are like.

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In between those two nights, we did some pretty amazing things to that had less to do with engaging in contemporary youth culture of Yangon and more to do with historical and modern religiosity of Myanmar, a country that is 95% Buddhist. First we saw the Shwedigon Pagoda, which was quite frankly breath-taking. I mean, a lot of what we saw was breath-taking, but this did take the cake.

The main pagoda or stupa was just this giant pointy dome covered in gold-leaf, 100 meters high. Wikipedia tells me that the spire is topped with 5500 diamonds. It is encircled by hundreds of smaller stupa, statues and shrines of the Buddha and of nats (Myanmar spirits). And then there is a circle walkway, which you are supposed to walk around clockwise, with your right shoulder towards the stupa and the relics contained there. Surrounding this there are tens of further buildings, each intricately and beautifully decorated, containing worshipers and tourists, gold-plated or jade-plated or covered in mirrors or beautiful redblack lacquer, with Buddhas that are lit up by the everpresent brightly-colored LED halos.

Within the stupa, the reason for this incredible display and construction, are supposedly 8 hairs of the Buddha.

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I walked around it three times, and the rain that started off as a mere dripdrop became a torrential downpour. At the end even those that had umbrellas were taking cover, and it was just 4 of us silly tourists that were walking around, watching the rain rush down the sides of the stupa in rivulets and rivers and fully saturating our clothes.

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After that, we visited a more contemporary site. Archaeologists and historians seem to think that the Shwedigon Pagoda was constructed sometime between the 6th and 10th centuries; legend has it built shortly after the death of the Buddha. The reclining Buddha located in the Chaukhtatgyi Buddha Temple is less than a century old. At 70 meters long, it is not the longest of reclining Buddhas, but it is longer than any other that I've seen, and a pretty impressive site at that. It had less gold, but still a polished face and gigantic glass eyes, eye-lashes about a foot long and a golden crown and robe (perhaps not genuine gold-leaf, but still rather golden). And a calm, sympathetic demeanor, although that is scarcely surprising. It was quite awe-inspiring.

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We flew to Bagan, which is an ancient city as I mentioned on the banks of the Irawaddy. The clouds outside of the window on that flight were probably the most amazing I have seen, and that is not just because, herein Delhi, individual clouds don'texist so much as a perpetual haze of smog and pollution. Those clouds were just spectacular.

The temples and pagodas that dot the landscape of Bagan seem to almost be a forest of buildings that sprouted out of the ground. These days, they are mostly just red and gray brick with the occasional, more spectacular and significant stupas covered in gold leaf. They used to be covered in stucco, but that chipped off probably around the 14th or 15th centuries, and I found the brick to have an excellent aesthetic effect, binding the town together and complimenting the hues of the surrounding vegetation. We rented electric bikes twice, once at sunrise and once at sunset (this is when my body began to degrade), and although the air was quite clear and clean, it was foggy at sunrise and we missed that. But we were still able to ride through tiny trails through the mud and muck, and climb to the top of a monastery that is now missing its roof and look out over the river and the town.

The hotel that we stayed at for those two nights (despite stealing my cellphone charger and harboring giant maneating spiders) was wonderful, and there was this one tree which was pruned back so all the leaves were at the very extremity of the branches, meaning that at night you could look up and see the tangled and chaotic branches illuminated and leaving tangled and chaotic shadows on the leafy canopy. And we could see the milky way, and sit out on the lawn and watch the stars, and we tried some of the local wines and had some cookies which disappeared by mysterious means.

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On the bus ride to Mandalay, I was kind of out of it, and in Mandalay I was kind of out of it, but we really weren't there for very long. And anyway I think I'll start speeding up this narrative a little bit, as it is getting rather lengthy.

Kolkatta was rather colonial; it waws the capital of the British empire in India for quite a while, and only started being a city in 1690 or so. Lots of Brittish influence, and that is mostly what we talked about. And I missed some of it, and was spacing out pretty badly during a lot of it, so it is kind of vague. But! I might go back for my independent study project, which is a month-long excursion that I have to plan for myself and write a paper about and will probably deal with some of the modernist painters in Kolkatta (Rabindranath and Abanindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, Nahandanal Bose, maybe a touch of Jamini Roy (the eyes that he paints!)). But I did go for a walk around at night, and it was pretty interesting.

Kolkatta, rumor has it, has the most spectacular Durga Puja, a festival celebrated in honor of the mother-godess Durga and 9 of her forms. Pandals are places with clay statues are set up of Durga and some associated figures, a demon she is killing and Ganesha and a handful of others. Taposhi-ji described getting the clay from prostitutes and then throwing the statues into the river at the end of the festival, but I do not know if that happens everywhere or just for her Pandal (she was on an organizing committee and one third place of eco-themed pandals in Delhi! Congrats! And Tonbhi (always have to come up with a new spelling of that name) won second place for her colored saw-dust sidewalk art design! Double congrats!). Anyways: walking around at night in Kolkatta, I passed a number of Pandals, and some loudspeakers blasting Bollywood hits, and one place with a statue just of Durga but also a live band and dancing!

I led with the fact that I infact danced in the Durga Puja, and now I'm afraid to confess that I did not really dance per se, or at least with enough enthusiasm to properly count. But there was definitely dancing that happened, and it was wonderful.

Another n otable part of my walk was later, when I was joined by Ilan, and he took a wrong turn (I assure you, it was entirely his fault and not reflective of my decision process whatsoever, no) and we walkied up a row in a weird market thing that was just lined with so many bags of chickens, about 10 chickens to the bag, smelling rather unfortunately with rats scurrying back and forth across the aisle. And then there were the public urinals right next to that.

Otherwise though, a decidedly pleasant walk.

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We spend two nights in Kolkatta, but it was really more like one day for me. We saw the Indian National Museum, which had a decent collection and some very interesting art works, by those people that I mentioned and some others. And then we took the train on to Bodhgaya.

Bodhgaya is where Gautama Buddha, sitting beneath a Bodhi tree, achieved enlightenment. Bodhi trees apparently reproduce something like a phoenix: when one dies, another grows in its place. Or so the story goes. I hope its true, but have not confirmed that. It probably doesn't catch fire, though. Anyways: that same Bodhi tree has since reproduced several times and now there is a temple built next to its great-great-great-great-great-great grandchild, or something like that. Inlaid into the walls of the rather obeliskesque temple are hundreds of statues of Buddha, and walking around the temple and staying in a little camp nearby and performing obeisances at shrines nearby are Buddhist monks of all sects and all walks of life (including, apparently, the fraudulent type, one of whom might have scammed one of the kids – but prayers probably still count if they are hidden in scams, right?). Again, the inability of words or at least my words or even my thought to capture the feeling of the place, the essence that probably doesn't exist but can perhaps at least be pointed to and that I am failing to point to. I mean I know I am not a Buddhist but there is definitely probably something there, in places that have been places of worship for thousands of years; a connection made concrete to the deepest devotion of millions throughout history.

I dunno.

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Varanasi was another such place, a city thousands of years old (although moved a bit in the BC era and then raised a few times) and the site of thousands of temples (Buddhist, Jainist, and Hindu) and thousands of mosques. It is located on the banks of the Ganges, and it immediately sinks in that it is only the west bank of the Ganges: on the other side, where it is considered bad luck to die, there are no buildings. When we went on our evening boat ride, there was a lone man over there, riding a horse along the beach at sunset. He probably had it all figured out.

Despite being raised a few times and none of the buildings being older than a puerile few centuries, it still does feel like a city that is a few thousand years old. It is something in the labyrinthine layout of the cobblestone or stone-tile streets, in the positioning of the buildings and the steps that lead down to the Ganges. Every morning at sunrise and every evening at sunset, a ritual called aarti is performed at several of these staircases, called ghat. Hundreds of people crowd around on land and hundreds of boats pull up on the river, while children leap from boat to boat, selling flowers and candles to be lit and deposited gently in the Ganges. The ritual itself consists of several priests performing a languorous dance with metal pots filled with fire, and the crowd chanting along with them.

Down the river a bit from the main ghat on which this is performed is the southerly cremation grounds. Every day, more than a hundred people are cremated in public at one of two sites in the city, in a ritual that is a very strange mixture of public and private. As we boated by, several of the students took out cameras to take pictures of what they thought were just bonfires, but no: those were dead people. There was a boatload of white tourists parked directly in front, just watching the ceremony. But there were also locals sitting on a pier nearby, doing the same and also clearly not actually associated with the funerals being performed. And then, of course, there was us: watching in mute fascination while simultaneously judging the other voyeurs. Weird. Death is weird.

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And that was pretty much it. I mean, there was a lot more. But in Varanasi itself we didn't actually do terribly much. Oh: there was one last lecture, by an expert in sacred geography, who stressed repeatedly the millimeter precision GPS measurements that he used to derive his graphs, which as far as I could tell were just circles drawn on top of a map. He told as, as an introduction to his work, that he had spent some time in Italy doing research with The Da Vinci Code as his guide. That was an interesting perspective. He had published more than 100 papers, though, so perhaps there is something there? Who knows. And then I sat on a ghat and watched some cows laze about in the water, occasionally mooing (the cows, not me) and generally seeming contented (I probably did too, I wasn't really not contented). And that was the end. We drove for an hour and a half to the airport, took our seats, and took off.

Back to Taposhiji (and now her husband! He showed up, from wherever he was, and seems to be a very nice guy so far. He keeps asking me hard questions about what I hope to experience here and how I will go about contributing to my society when I return, though), back to badminton and my very own room, back to interminable haze and heat (although: any day now: winter will arrive), and back to Delhi.

For a week at least, and then I'm off to Rajasthan, specifically the town of Nathdwara and the village of Molela, for a week of making traditional pottery.

Meanwhile, I have sooooo much homework, I'm glad I wrote this instead.

And hey! Thanks for reading! That was a lot.

I'll post photos in a bit. I didn't take enough, or of great quality, but I'll post what I have.

I hope you are feeling well and being well!