Slowly, slowly

“I’ve never worked so hard to get to the Poon.” Robby Staley quotation, after reaching the top of Poon Hill (10,000 feet).

Since I last updated yall, the trip has been a lot more fun, mainly because we went to Nepal and now don’t have to deal with the bs of Incredible India. Nepal still has all the horrible things about India, the annoying touts trying to convince you buy their wares, the child labor, and the numbingly annoying bureaucracy, but none of its as bad as India. On the other hand, Nepal takes all the cool aspects of India, beautiful scenery and some cool cultures, and it amps these aspects up.

Whereas India was rough for me as a traveler, Nepal is a chill place for even the most squeamish of American travelers. Instead of being 115 F, it’s just in the 90’s (at the hottest). The people still try and bother you about their ‘homemade’ statues that they want you to buy, but they give up after you tell them to go away. Child labor is omnipresent, but it doesn't seem to wreck kid’s lives as badly, and the poverty in Nepal is not so horrible, or at least not on the scale that it is in India. That said, here in Kathmandu, its pretty bad. 

In Nepal, we spent a couple of days relaxing in this tourist city called Pokhara. It’s a pretty cool place, it’s the second city of Nepal, a little town hugging the east of Lake Phewa. Hills shoot up around the flat plain surrounding the lake, but towering over these green hills are the white-caped Himalayas.

We did a couple of day hikes around Pokhara a couple of days, and then headed out to do a five-day trek. This might sound really tough, but it was actually something called tea-house trekking. Basically, this entails carrying a couple of pairs of clothes in a little pack and then hiking all day (or until the monsoons pour down on you later in the afternoon). Then, you stop at one of the myriad of teahouses that pepper the trail. These teahouses are more than just restaurants, they also have very basic rooms for wary trekkers. About every thirty minutes, you pass through a village with three or four of these teahouses, so it’s not really that hard to find.

Just as we left on the first day, we asked the hotelier how long it was to the place that we were going to try and get to that afternoon, and she said “Six hours, but slowly, slowly.” There was more truth to that than I realized. That day, we climbed a vertical mile over about seven or eight trekking miles. Slowly, slowly.

The next day, we woke up and, slowly, slowly, climbed Poon Hill (named after Captian Poon). Once we arrived at the top, we were supposed to be able to see about five peaks that are over 24,000 feet. Unfortunately, the view was clouded over, so we only got glimpses of one or two of the peaks, but that was enough. These mountains are taller than you imagined mountains could be. And slowly, slowly we made our way along the edge of the Himalayas. 

From there we hiked a few days, sleeping one night on a little cliff looking up to some of the Himalayan mountains. The every once and a while, when we rested on some rocks, we got more peeks of the peaks, clouds clearing up here and there. The next day, we went to a village with a hotspring. The hotsprings sit on the edge of a surging Himalayan river that drains from a glacier and a 25,000 foot mountain. After a long six hour hike, we slowly, slowly healed our sore joints and talked politics with some Argentinian psychologists.

The next day, we hiked along this Himalayan river out to the road and returned to Pokhara. The next day, we left Pokhara. The bus moved on, slowly, slowly, eventually having to stop at a bridge traffic jam (a bus tried to pass a car, and the bridge is only two ways; there is no rule of law, and no courtesy in South Asia). While we waited out the traffic jam, the clouds finally cleared up, allowing us to see most of this section of the Himalayan range. The mountains dominated the landscape. 

But the pictures really tell more that I can, so check them out.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to post them, because my site is down, but I will let yall know when the pictures are up.

Incredible India!

The Indian Government has an advertising campaign going on now. They had ads in the New York Times and they have billboards in certain cities in the US. “Come see Incredible India!”

Unlike most ad campaigns, there is some truth to this one. The word, “Incredible” comes from the Latin “in” or not, and “credible” or believable, so it first meant “Not believable.” That pretty much describes India. It is hard to believe it until you see it. The disturbing poverty right next door to the nearly-royal wealth, the inefficiency that boggles the mind, and the abortion of human potential when children are put to work at the age of five. Welcome to Incredible India!

It’s difficult to pinpoint one specific instance where poverty was right next gross richness. I guess the best example is, in New Delhi, there is a five-star hotel called the J.P. Continental. The workers who built that hotel had to also build their own little shantytown. So within a hundred feet of one of the classiest business hotels in south Delhi are kids who grow up with no running water, who can’t go to school, who recycle plastic bags for a living. Incredible India!

A few nights we took a night train to get out of India to Nepal. We signed up for first class sleeper tickets, and paid about 300 Rupees (US$6), but they didn’t give us bed numbers. Generally, for night trains in India, they have a computer printout list of the names of passengers and their beds, but when the train arrived, there was no list. We got on and all the beds were taken. We meet these two dumb British girls (they were dumb but that’s not part of this story), and they were having the same problem. We found a train official, and he said that we would have to wait for the important train official to come. He couldn’t do it himself. The caste system has insinuated itself into the bureaucracy so that anyone has to have permission from someone higher up. This fat @*(#$ came onto the train. I could have spotted him as a tool from a mile away. He had a small gold chain around his neck and a little gold plate that said in Hindi that he was the big man on the train. But most importantly he wore a black jacket, and his authority seemed to be encapsulated in that black jacket. So, the train had been overbooked and this fat !)(@($ had to assign seats since no one had assigned tickets. He looked slowly at everyone’s ticket, car by car, and he gave his friends beds. For the guys he didn’t like, he assigned them to beds with other people. He didn’t like me, so I had some guy lying on my bed until 3 A.M. The bureaucracy is empowered, and its all idiots who run it. Incredible India!

The abortion of human potential, the inability for people to live lives that comes close to meeting their potential, is something that you see in both of the other stories. Kids who can’t go to school but spend their childhood collecting bottles can never reach their potential in a modern world. They will always make a dollar a day. And if idiots in black jackets run the country, then the country is going to go to Hell in a handbasket pretty quickly (India has been there for a while). We meet young guys who spoke good English in several places. They could get good jobs at call centers or somewhere else, but there are no good jobs in these areas. So they just hassle tourist to buy their knickknacks in some mosque in bumbleflip, Uttar Pradesh. Sometimes poor parents will even chop of the foot of their children just so that they can make more money begging.

New Dehli - Hot, Hot, Hot

I'm currently in Agra, India. Today we went to see the Taj Mahal. It was worth all the hype it gets. It was incredible, beautiful and massive. Can't say much more without becoming too trite. We also went to this palace ghosttown built by Akbar (the grandfather of the guy who built the Taj). Not going to get into Mughal history, but it was pretty sweet, particularly the mosque right next to it. Akbar built this giant capital out in the desert, 20 miles from Agra, the previous capital. Unfortunately, it had no water, so they abandonned it when he died.

I said desert. New Dehli and Agra are both in the corner of India where the desert meets the Himilayas. That means its basically a desert climate. The streets of Dehli are dusty from the sand blown in from the desert, and they are hot. The themometer reached 115 in Delhi yesterday, and today, when we were tramping through the abandonned desert palace it got up to 118, I think. Hot. In Delhi, its even worse because the smog is horrible, think downtown LA in the 1980's. This is tough to deal with when you are riding on the back of a motorbike.

By the way, I'm not sure if many of you know why I went to India. An old friend of mine just finished studying in India. So he has been taking me around on the back of his motorbike in true Delhi fashion. This has really thrown me into the heart of the Delhi experience. Driving is crazy here. There are no rules. When there is traffic, we squeeze onto the unpaved sidewalks and go around it. They turn the red lights out after a certain time of night to save energy, not that that makes a difference since no one obeys them anyways. If they do obey them, there is apparently a 3 second rule. You can keep going three seconds after you get a red light and three seconds before you get a green light. This should cause collision, but in Dehli, it just kind of meshs so that you maybe try to avoid hitting anyone who gets in your way.

Its intense. Everything about India could be described as intense. The people are everywhere, in your face, and, to a certain degree, most are trying to trick me. I've seen some cool things, but so far I have a fairly negative impression of India. They think they are all that and a bag of chips, but its really kind of a craphole, worse than I've seen anywhere else. 5 star hotels next to slums is a common occurence. And these slums are horrible. We saw a kid today, bathing in filth, his stomach bulging from malnutrition. Just above, rich Dehlites wandered around this ancient desert palace for the day, sitting in air conditioned Landrovers.

There's more I could say, but we're running out of time. We'll be going to the most sacred site in Hinduism tonight by night train.

Before the Journey

Before the Journey:

So, I'm going to be going to India on Wednesday. I'll be meeting with my friend, Robbie Staley, who just finished his Masters in Economics at JNU in New Dehli. 

He's going to take me around New Dehli and then we are going to take off. 

We'll be going from New Dehli to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. From there, we'll go to Varanasi, a sacred Hindu pilgramage site, to Bodh Gaya, the birthplace of Buddhism, to Calcutta, the seat of the British Raj. We'll also go Nepal and try to do some trekking there. 

From there we will go to Malaysia as the cheapest way into China. While in Malaysia, we plan on traveling around, although we're not sure where exactly. 

The reason that we are going to Malaysia is because I have to be in China on June 21st. At that time, I'll be starting another Chinese program at Qingdao. 

In August, after my Qingdao program is over, and I have to go to Nanjing, near Shanghai. There I'll be starting masters classes at Nanjing University. 

After that, I'll be doing an internship starting in Februrary. I'm not sure yet where it will be at, but it has to be for a Chinese company or organization or something like that. 

And then I'll travel some during the summer before I come back and get married. 

While I'm traveling, I'll be keeping this blog. I'll try to send these posts out by email, but you might want to check the blog as well:

http://free-roaming.blogspot.com/

I'm also going to try to keep track of my journeys, particularly when I'm traveling, I'm going to be using mapvivo.com to post my journeys. You can find my profile and journeys at 

http://mapvivo.com/search/travelers/sp=lee+moore

I've put some past journeys on this site and I'll put my travels on the site as well. The cool thing about this site is its connected with googlemaps, so it actually shows where I'm at, and it will show pictures and have a little dialogue by me. 

Finally, I'll be putting a lot of my pictures on my shutterfly site:

http://leeharrismoore.shutterfly.com/

Let me know if you have any problems finding these websites.