Ni Dieu Ni Maitre

The Going Itself is the Way

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  • The Olympic Stair Climb

    I took up hiking after a nearly 50 year layoff when I had devoted my energies to bicycling and cycle touring. Restarting at age 75 was a most pleasant experience, with the surprisingly added benefit of strengthening my lower back muscles and solving a decades long chronic back problem. And so, the one remaining task in Shillong was to climb to the top of Shillong Peak at around 6,600 feet. Out of hiking shape? Yes, but I had spent a week of daily walks and hikes in the up and down heights of Meghalaya, and so, onward.

    The stairs to the top are located just around the corner from the hotel, and there are many, many of them. As mentioned earlier, the ground here is a pinkish hard clay which, when wet, is very slippery, thus the use of stairs as it is generally always at the least damp. I did not think I could do this climb, but physical perseverance is built into my nature by now.

    Slowly, with frequent stops to catch my breath, I moved ever upward. It doesn’t seem as though this trail gets a lot of use as parts of it were nearly overgrown with little thorny vines. However, there were people living up here in small shacks and I stopped to let a flock of small black goats cross the stairs. Eventually the shepherd came along as well and invited me to his camp for tea.

    But the mood was on to progress upward, and I told him I would see him on the way down. Eventually, the steps ended and there was a brief dirt trail to a concrete walkway which seemed to wander upward and around the mountain to the official peak at the top. Unfortunately, this uphill trail was covered with pine needles and other vegetative debris and was damp and quite slippery. This was manageable enough going uphill, but as I walked along the thought of coming back down on the slippery, occasionally steep concrete and its potential for injury grew and grew.

    The dirt trail

    A bit of the concrete trail on the left here. Going back down, I mainly stayed on the dirt where possible and only slid down on my butt once on the concrete. And so, I didn’t get to the official top, but very nearly and that will have to suffice. Here’s the trail to the shepherds encampment.

  • A week at Shanti Sanctum

    There are several things to do here, and through a week of basically resting and catching up on this blog, I managed most of them. One was, of course walking and hiking, which I pursued daily. Then the trip downhill to the Tibetan monastery.

    Here the well fed and healthy shaven-headed monks offered tea, but my conversation was with the monk’s painter and handyman who had walked over the mountains from Tibet to Nepal and freedom from the Chinese. Very interesting guy, and painter and handyman are a few of the skills in my resume as well.

    His handy work was evident.

    Next up was a trip into the city itself. Chanrei ordered a cab for me one fine day and on the winding, steep and twisty way down, it began to rain. No problem, as I pulled out my rain jacket and went onto a large pedestrian mall in the center of the city.

    Had to run a few errands, including a trip to the pharmacy for some cholesterol pills… met and had a nice chat with the pharmacist, who was not busy.

    Next up was a trip to the Don Bosco Museum of Indigenous Culture, supposedly having the best collection of artifacts and information on the tribes of the NE India states… Unfortunately, I picked a cab driver to whom the location of this, one of the most visited sites in Shillong, was a complete mystery.

    Really just a light rain.

    So, we rode around and got stuck in a massive traffic jam, caused by a slew of private schools getting out at the same time and the students all demanding cabs to get home. An hour passed before we arrived at the Don Bosco High School… no museum within miles. A short heated argument later, I found another cab back to town, who also had no idea where the museum was located. Just as well, as it was getting near its closing time… and just in time to get to a bar and enjoy the only beer I managed in all my time in Shillong.

    Ate at a fancy and very popular Pure Veg restaurant, and shared my table with first one, and later, another regular Indian tourist couple. Nice folks all.

  • Shillong, Meghalaya days

    Just crossing from Assam into this state was a revelation, as the small bus climbed and descended steep hill, one after another, on a well paved divided 4 lane highway. I had booked a room at Shanti Sojourn, to which some cab drivers flatly refused to tale me… no tuk-tuks here at all, since every journey, even across town, is steep ups and downs. Finally getting a ride, we went up and up and I wondered if we were still in Shillong at all. But Shanti Sojourn is perched just below Shillong peak, which is at 6,600 feet up.

    Assam state was uniformly quite hot and humid, with the heat abating a bit as the sun set. Here, the temperature ranges from 65 at night to 73F (18 to 22C) in the day, with rain quite intermittent but possible any time… easy to tell when just looking up. Fortunately, I have been lugging around a few pieces of warm clothing and a rain jacket.

    Outstanding in the cool, light rain.

    Booked in initially for 3 nights, but extending to get a rest and catch up on the blog, attempt to get into hiking condition and enjoy some cool weather. There is a forest nearby with trails, a Tibetan monastery just down the hill a bit, and the climb to the peak itself which could be a possibility. Here at the Sojourn there is pretty much little else, no shops, no restaurants, just a few more guesthouses a bit lower down. Chanrei, the manager gives me breakfast and the other meals are take out, ordered from a good place down in the town proper.

    Chanrei, who had the sniffles and was wearing a mask, as it turned out just for a few hours.

    The main tribe here is the Khasi, but there .are 2 others. “Meghalaya has historically followed a matrilineal system where the lineage and inheritance are traced through women; the youngest daughter inherits all wealth and she also takes care of her parents.” wikipedia. This is also one of the wettest places on Earth, but really, I’ve gone out for a ramble twice every day here and not gotten wet. As I said, just look at the sky, the little squalls blow by quickly.

    The forest trail… the hard clay surface is pretty slippery, and I’m continuing my practice of hitting the deck and failing to get injured.

  • Stumbling around in Guwahati

    It took 2 busses to go the 30km to the big city, and once again, thanks to the kindness of strangers, I made it easily. A middle aged woman on bus one asked me where I was going and led me to what was also her bus a block and a half away. Upon arrival, right on the bank of the mighty Brahmaputra River, she met her friend and the two of them took one of my bags each and lugged them up and down the stairs of a pedestrian overpass to a hotel in a purely pedestrian market.

    Bicycle rickshaws are still in use in all the amazing traffic here.

    This hotel up a flight of stairs, was not available for foreigners, and so out through the throngs, lugging my bags to get a tuk-tuk. We went all over the place for some reason, through endless traffic jams and pollution to a very poor hotel, which I had to accept.

    Coming down on the elevator from my spartan room I walked along the white ceramic floor toward the desk, not seeing an unmarked step down, white on white… blam I wound up sprawled on the floor, landing on my knees and elbows. I was able to shake this off after a bit and pursue my goal of getting a new sim card in my phone. But once again, this was not possible. I was finally directed to the Airtel offices across town… back into the traffic jam.

    Everything’s at a standstill, as a train moves through the center of town.

    At Airtel, I had my passport and visa photographed and copied, filled out detailed forms, had my picture taken, was at least not fingerprinted, and quite a while later I had a working phone. Now I managed to book a nice homestay on a quiet lane. Once there, sent out some laundry and on a web search discovered that the 30 day e-Visa was not extendible. Why? Answer: It’s India. Next day, a trip to the State Bank to try to get rupees.

    In the evenings, I found some quite nice places to eat amidst all the hulabaloo and the near suicidal road crossings. Got another tuk to the bank next day, tried a few ATMs and talked to a bank manager, whose advice was, keep trying. They had 3 ATMs and 9 tries with 2 visa cards hit the jackpot twice. So be it. Couldn’t extend at the homestay, so I moved to another hotel on a long, busy street full of sports related shops, gyms and so on… needed to figure out my next move as Assam state was looking like just more of the same.

    I actually stumbled several more times on the dilapidated sidewalks and banged my elbow once again. Decided to head south to Meghalaya state and a change of scenery. I was unaware as to how much of a change…

    The Brahmaputra from the bus stop, stock image as I forgot to take it myself on arrival.

  • Hotel Annam, Assam State

    This hotel is still under construction, with only the third floor operational. The restaurant, on the other hand, has been in business for a while and is quite popular. I had 2 prepaid nights and the first thing on the list was to get rupees. A trip to the local State Bank of India showewd that indeed, the ATM’s would not take either of my cards. The bank manager confirmed it, ‘No foreign cards here.’

    These waitresses are not Assamese, but come from another NE State. These states are all populated by various tribes, now mostly assimilated into the Indian lifestyle. The Assamese, to me, look similar to Indians, but I spoke several times to guys from these states while in Goa and they do experience prejudice for their looks.

    Interior of the restaurant.

    So, really, 3 things on the agenda here near the airport and 30km from Guwahati, the largest city in these 6 states. 1. Get rupees. This was accomplished by the hotel manager, who found someone to accept a $100 bill at the market rate, and on another day got the young man with the hand held card reader to take $200 out of my account and bring cash the next morning. Solved! 2. The Indian sim card in my phone is not working and needs to be replaced. This one was not solved.

    Here’s a friendly and helpful Assamese lad from the hotel taking me on one of 3 attempts out to get a new sim card… impossible in this area as it turned out. Why is this important? I cannot book a hotel in Guwahati without the use of a phone, and for whatever reason, neither can my current hotel.

    And 3. Get my visa extended beyond 30 days. Also not possible outside the official offices in the capital. The idea of going blindly up to the big city was quite daunting. I met an Englishman, Chris, in the restaurant on evening who recommended that I avoid Guwahati. “A shithole.” he said. Chris had been in the NE States for 60 days and was leaving. The first thing he said to me, after he came in and I waved t him to come sit down was, “You’re the first white face I’ve seen in 60 days.” I should have taken his picture, a massive man, 71 years old, who had made his living as a nightclub bouncer… a bit rough around the edges, but a great source of information.

    The hotel’s owner had been a revolutionary in his youth. These states have had their share of political turmoil over the years, but only one, Manipur, is off limits now as the two main tribes are having a row. Well, anyway, it’s off to Guwahati on a bus tomorrow with no hotel booked… fun.

  • A BAD TRIP

    A BAD TRIP (kinda like a bad dream)

    Arrived at Guhawati Airport after dark, a very small airport with just 2 halls, Arrivals and Departures. Looking around for an ATM turned out to be useless and asking around revealed that there wasn’t one. I had no rupees. I looked into Departures, and there was a money changer, but the guard at the gate wouldn’t allow me to enter Departures… since I had no proof I was departing… I was told there was an ATM 100 meters down the road, but after lugging my bags there, several people told me that there was no such ATM.

    Back to the airport where I convinced a cab driver to take me to the hotel I had booked, and there he would be paid… Finding that hotel took quite a while, as none of the other drivers had never heard of it, and my directions to it were vague. We drove up and down several roads and stopped a half a dozen times, including at an ATM which refused both of my cards. Finally, after nearly an hour, I spotted the tiny hotel with the tiny sign. Indeed, I had booked, but had not prepaid, and since I had no rupees, no room!

    The poor cab driver agreed to carry on. I was both mentally and physically exhausted, and waving a $100 bill in front of another half a dozen hotel owners elicited no response. Hours had gone by when he pulled into the dirt parking lot of the Annam Hotel. Several people were standing around talking, including the hotel manager and a young guy holding a hand held card reader. He accepted my card and paid for my 2 nights stay. The manager told me that food and beer would go on a tab, he paid the driver for his valiant efforts and at least this day was finally done.

    Morning at the hotel.

  • A Hellish Trip

    Started out with a 6 hour bus ride (one pit stop after 5 hours) meandering through rice paddies, small villages and cities and over the central hills, past elephant crossings on entirely 2 lane roads with the incessant crazy passing by the bus driver… traffic deaths are quite common, but not as frequent as in India.

    Stayed the night in City Beds, where I stayed upon arrival in Colombo 3 months ago. Next morning in the pouring rain, off by tuk-tuk to the airport. The first mistake of a horrible day, as the airport turned out to be nearly 30km from the city, on bad roads… slow, wet and expensive. I had been under the impression that there had been a universal extension of tourist visas for two weeks… read it in the paper, and numerous Lankans in Uppuveli mentioned it as well. Imagine my surprise when I was informed at a customs check that it was necessary to travel to Colombo and visit Immigration to get this extension and I was fined $360 for overstaying my visa.

    But things only got worse. After a long delay over the visa problem, I made my flight to Chennai, on the East coast of India to get a connecting flight to Guwahati, the largest city in Assam State, northeastern India. On the good side, these 2 flights with about six and a half hours in the air cost only $270. On the bad side were the delays in Chennai. First was a small paper form passed out on the plane, necessary to enter India along with my approved e-visa. Somehow, perhaps while cat napping on the first flight, I had not gotten this form, and the virago behind the visa desk refused to give me a second form after I made a mistake on the first one she gave me. She reduced the woman behind me to tears with her browbeating. Went to another line, got some more forms and finally got my visa stamped.

    On to the baggage check, where everything went wrong. I had to go to the back of the line twice and my 2 pieces of baggage were selected for a thorough search. Here I lost a small pair of rounded tip scissors, and finally lost my Swiss army knife which, on this particular months long trip had made
    it through US customs several times, Lankan, Indian, Thai and Korean customs as well. These delays caused me to rush to get my flight, missing a chance to get to an ATM and get Indian rupees. This turned out to be a disaster.

    Continued…

  • Adieu to Serendipity Isle

    As my visa ran out, I used my friend Peter’s knowledgeable son to guide me through the Indian e-Visa process as it had taken me 3 days just to get to page 3 of ‘Mother’s place of Birth’ and so on. Neither of us could figure out how to get a 90 day visa, which I got on my e-visa last year and have in all five of my trips to India over the years. So we settled on 30 days.

    My helpful friend from around the corner, on my birthday.

    Things at the hotel were confused, with Mr. Haseem returning from Colombo to collect my money and immediately leaving again with me as ‘manager’ to feed his cats. Locking the gate going out, I discovered that he had given me the wrong keys and I was locked out. This and other disasters (electricity going off, water in the rooms running dry and so on) were all solved with the help of my friendly neighbors.

    The kitties have had their milk.

    I heartily recommend Sri Lanka for its smiling and friendly people, relaxed life style, great seafood, varied landscapes and so on. Thus far Uppuveli has escaped mass tourism, but the handwriting is literally on the walls.

    The last few weeks, it had become pretty hot here and the locals were complaining as well. The ocean, lovely as it is, is the temperature of a warm bath, and my attempts to get in some sort of hiking condirion by climbing and reclimbing the only hill in the area were amazingly sweaty. Now to finish off the pics…

    My pal Shoban on his way to the ‘Rice n Curry’ for work.

    The inexpensive ‘all you can eat’ vegetarian buffet at the ‘R n C’.

    A breakfast nook.

    Random foliage.

    The high point.

  • Search for the New Land

    Northern Thailand is in an air quality tailspin. When I was briefly there in Chaing Mai at the end of last year, the weather was delightful and the air fresh. Currently it is, frankly, poisonous, running an AQI of 205 today. I am looking at far northern India as an option, but also at very southern Thailand, even though the rainy season is approaching there. Unfortunately, looking at three different AQI results today, the numbers are, as usua,l widely divergent for Phuket where such things are measured in this region. Plume Labs : 114, AQI: 78,Copernicus: 44. The official Thai site in pretty undecipherable as it is written in Thai script, but the general area is in the 70’s. Which is acceptable.

    Great album!+

    Of course, Phuket is a place I’d rather avoid, as it is a main center of Thailand’s sleazy ‘sex for male tourists’ industry… and it is on an industrial scale. Other, smaller and cleaner spots do abound along the southern coast, though. The Indian north-eastern states still look attractive with many areas featuring clean air and several winning awards for their great air quality.

    The problem with both Thailand and North India is rain, May being the beginning of rainy season in both areas. It’s not a monsoon, with endless heavy rains daily, but still 50% rainy days. Northern India does not have the high steamy heat of Southern Thailand though.

    75 – Musée Rodin – Ève au rocher, grand modèle – Auguste Rodin

    Letter to a friend…

    I mentioned a while back that I was studying art (at a leisurely pace) and now I wonder if this pursuit would interest you. It began back when I subscribed to the Washington Post (masthead motto: Democracy Dies in Darkness) where their art writer, Sebastian Smee was presenting single works of art with his reactions and observations to each work… a process spread out over several years. These articles were pretty informative and I was reading through them chronologically until Jeff Bezos (owner of Amazon) bought the paper and began his several years of dismantling the paper and firing most of the staff, including Smee. I was an early subscription canceller and thus lost access to these columns on art. The masthead, so proudly displayed for many decades now serves as the epitath for a once respected news source.

    In any event, I have turned to WikiArt as a new source of material. This site features multiple thousands of artworks and is somehow linked with the indispensible, for me, wikipedia, although the art site is for profit while still free to peruse. Here, once you learn to navigate the site, you can see the works of thousands of artists or explore various movements and styles (Impressionism, Blue Rider, Baroque and so on). I recently looked at several hundred works by Rembrandt, the famous artist whose work has always failed to impress me… and it still doesn’t. Camille Corot, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise. These days of leisure, I’m on WikiArt for an hour or so almost every day. Sometimes randomly and otherwise looking at the works of a single artist, Rodin or Berthe Morisot or one of my favorites Wassily Kandinski.

    My hopes, in addition to broadening my appreciation, are that I may begin to see the world differently and that my photographic ‘skills’ will improve a bit, balance, lighting, composition, color, not photographing my thumb and so on. But the exercise itself is a welcome pleasure.

  • Up in the Air

    When I arrived in February, it was the end of the monsoon season here, with occasional rain squalls and only a hardy few tourists on Uppeveli Beach. Thanks to America’s fearless (and clueless) leader bowing down to Benny Netanyahu’s mad plan to avoid going to prison in Israel by fomenting endless warfare in the Mideast, the ‘tourist season’, lifeblood of the Sri Lankan economy, has not occurred. There are petrol and gas restrictions in place now and the occasional power outage, however.

    Beers and a chat at the Blue Sands.

    The headwaiter at the Blue Sands tells me that they have a staff of 50 and only 7 guests… at the supposed peak of the season. Meanwhile, my cameo as hotel manager has stretched into its third week and I’m still the only guest. My friend Tony is staying at an upscale hotel with a pool where he is the only guest. Fortunately several tankers are arriving at Trinco Harbor, and more across the island at Colombo… from Russia and relief from nearby India.

    Perfect, and perfectly deserted.

    I have rented a bicycle several times now and, covered in sweat, have visited Nilaveli beach, 10km to the north, and toured the sites of Trincomalee several times, lastly checking out its massive harbor. Walking several miles every day as well.

    Exhibit at the Naval Museum showing a Lankan potentate sending his army off to conquer Southern India.

    So, the temps here are high as is the humidity. The air quality is remarkably good here with a cool breeze blowing in from the ocean. Blue skies, white clouds and a low AQI pretty much every day. However, my years long plan to spend my second retirement roaming around SE Asia has hit a major snag over the issue of air quality.

    Cycling around the massive harbor.

    In December, when I was briefly in Chaing Mai, Thailand, the air quality was decent with the same blue skies and puffy white clouds. Unfortunately, those days have gone, with an AQI of 239 today! Similar for the more northern and smaller Chiang Rai. Smaller and sparsely populated Laos is now posting AQIs of 160 or higher. The Southeast Asia dream is fading fast as the pace of rapid ‘progress’ destroys these once pristine environments, choking the roads and mushrooming cities with fumes. An AQI over 100 is considered ‘Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups’ which is described as persons 65 and older. I am in good health, but I turn 81 in 2 weeks…

    Tony will actually complete this enormous meal, as do I several times a week, fish curry.

    So, my visa runs out an April 29 and where to go? One option is to actually return to India and do the Northeastern States, which seem to have mostly clean air, and do a month in Ladakh as well, inside the Himalayas featuring pristine mountain air. And from talking with numerous long term travellers, certain European countries seem pretty good budget options. Albania, anyone?