The Final Countdown

This will probably be one of the final Indian blogs, as tomorrow we set of on the last stage of our adventure around southern India. Mum arrives tonight (big yay!) and we are heading back to Kerala and Goa for some more western goodness before flying home from Chunderi in around 3 weeks time. It is very difficult to blog on the road, but we will certainly try!

Looking in the paper this morning our movie Chandra Mukhi (we mentioned this in the blog of the 19th Aug) is still running strong and is at day number 564- we need to get to day 587, and we will be safe and sound in Perth! Yeeeehar!

We will leave you with this thought:

Funniest label/ company name competition: Cock fireworks. There was four page handout in the local paper listing all the Cock fireworks you could possibly imagine all for ridiculously low prices and all available to anyone to let off in the street. There are just too many jokes to be made at the expense of this business. If you succeed in rocketing your firework it is known as a Cock-up. If you let off your firework on the bus it is known as a shuttleCock. Also the inevitable bad taste jokes emerged; there is now medication if your Cock goes off early. etc.

Ciao!

West Coast travels II

1) Train Picnics
Yikes!! We read in today’s paper that 21 people were arrested on trains between Chennai and Kerala for drinking alcohol! Oh. My. God! Luckily the guards on the trains we were traveling on did not catch us! Whahaha! Fly like a butterfly, swig like a bee. They would have been horrified at my father and my husband swigging large quantities of whisky. Mind you had we been caught, we would have said that it was all naughty- dad’s fault and that he made us do it.

The thought of being forced to stay an extra couple of years here is all too much! We will never do that ever again…. Sigh…

2) Keralan Kanoes
We are going back to Kerala in a couple of weeks time, so will write more about it then. Here is a snap of us in a canoe in the backwaters. What a great day that was!



3) Snooty- Ooty
Our last stop with naughty-dad was to the English established hill station of Ooty. When we read Lonely “the bible” Planet it said that 20 years ago Ooty “resembled an unlikely combination of southern English and Australian: single storey stone cottages, fenced flower gardens, leafy winding lanes and tall Eucalyptus trees. Times have changed… Ooty’s center resembles any overburdened provincial India town” (p.384) and when we went to the tourist office we were told directly that “Ooty has been ruined for 20 years.” Such was out auspicious beginnings with Ooty



The Ooty Steam Train
The most romantic way of getting to Ooty is on the miniature steam train, which chugs its way up the Nilgiri Hills, through tunnels, beside magnificent waterfalls and tea plantations. It goes through wilderness regions, which are very rare in over-populated India. Ooty is at 2240m above sea level and the steam train travels up the mountain at an impressively slow rate, allowing you to enjoy it. On our day of accent however, what was suppose to take 5 hours took 7 because the oversized expresso machine of an engine overheated and partly exploded about a quarter of the way up. The funny thing about this is that all of the Indians (there were only 5 westerners in board the whole train; the Indians on board that we met were very well off families from Bangalore and Chennai) jumped off as soon as the engine exploded despite the best efforts of the officials to keep them in. And they scattered all over the hill taking photos. We have perhaps not mentioned properly in previous blogs the Indian love of anarchy which on this wonderful day travelling up the hill to Ooty expressed itself in two forms i) a disregard for authority ii) throwing all their rubbish out the window and into the glorious countryside. While the train puffed its way though the countryside, out went lolly wrappers, newspapers, drink bottles and everything else you could possibly imagine. And this is common practice. When we went to the magnificent Mudumalai National park and wildlife sanctuary you have to get bussed around the park and are not allowed to get out at all, even at one of the most beautiful waterfalls we have ever seen, because our local guide told us secretly, "the Indian people litter and the tigers might be injured." So, thus started our “keep Indian Beautiful” campaign, with just 3 leaders and no Captain Clean-Up. Many people were told off in the process of this campaign. One such telling –off can be seen here in this picture (ali looking a tad frumpy and grumpy). A four year old girl threw a chip-packet onto the track when there were bins right next to her. She will never. ever litter again! One down only 999 999 999 people to go!

Our campaign will succeed damn it! Ooty will reverse the clock to pre-20 years ago! Ooty will be clean!!!

Basilica of Bom Jesus, Old Goa, where St Francis Xavier's body is displayed

West Coast Travels Part I

1) Goa the Edible
(alternative titles: “Goa the Magnificent”; “Your not Goan at all are you Darlin?” [RAC ad from the 90s]

Imagine a land where coconut trees grow amongst 16th Century Portuguese churches and buildings; where you can happily eat seafood and particularly Goan fish curry all day long. You can even get a glass of red wine, which we have not had since we left Perth on the 24th June. Mind you it was Indian wine and fairly sweet (port-like), but it was strangely compelling and we were desperate! We have never been so grateful for Catholicism and its pro-alcohol stance. We really can’t find anything to make fun of here (unlike Chennai and its toilet roll- long list of negative attributes), except perhaps the altogether strange fascination with the body of St Francis Xavier (d.1552). His dead body is on display in the Bom Jesus Basilica in the hold part of Goa (aptly named “Old Goa”) , where people shuffle past and view him. Gross out! Apparently FX’s body has not decayed properly (a miracle) but from what we saw of it, he looks like that selfish Nazi in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade who “chose badly” and drinks from the wrong cup. Karrrr-booom! We even saw postcards of FX’s fingers (or what used to be his fingers) dangling over the edge of his casket- Why? Why? Why? But there’s worse to come! Apparently most things in Goa are edible, including the saint himself. In 1554 a Portuguese lady by the name of Dona Isabel de Carom bit off the little toe of the right leg as she wanted a keepsake. Poor FX! Reading a little booklet we picked up in the basilica it would seem that not much of him actually remains because he keeps getting shifted around. At expositions in 1890, 1894 and 1910 he managed to loose 4 toes off his right leg. The desire for relics of FX meant that these toes had fallen off an already dissected body: in 1614 his hand was amputated and sent to Rome and in 1691 the rest of his arm was removed and sent to the Jesuits in Japan. His shoulder blade was divided in three and sent around S-E Asia, China and India. Holy Shit! We fell sorry for the poor saint, and so when we filed past his 454 year old corpse, surrounded by people praying for good health, more wealth or more food, all we could think about was beef jerky.

2) Train Picnics

Our trip to the west coast of India was all about enjoying ourselves and the journeys between places was no exception. Trains invariably ran 3 hours late, and so what better way was there to pass the time than by having train picnics? Outside of Tamil Nadu you can get delicacies like olives, cheese and gin which the incredibly conservative state we are sentences to does not have. On our arrival in Pune (near Mumbai) dad had waiting for us Danish Blue cheese, pears, water crackers, nuts and gin and tonics for a midnight feast. This theme continued on the trains. 12 hour train rides whizzed by with the aid of Gilbeys gin. Clickity-clack, glug glug; clickity- clack, stuff olive in mouth [repeat]. Only real incident worth noting involved tipping the olive juice from the bottle out the window, not realising that there was a group of school children waiting to cross the track. Needless to say they would have smelt decidedly Mediterranean that night.

A day in the Chennai-life of AliGrae

(or the day the President of India visited)
4th September 2006

Theme song for the day:
Oh what a beautiful morning!
Oh what a beautiful day!
I have a wonderful feeling,
pollution is coming my way! [repeat ad nauseam]

07.00am: Our toilet blocked.
07.15am: Showered in brownish water, which we know is in someway connected to the toilet blockage
8.00am: Flag down autorickshaw out the front of our hotel.
8.00- 8.15 am: “Ride from hell”, so called for the following reasons; i) the driver started smoking a joint whilst navigating Chennai’s disastrous peak-hour traffic ii) He re-arranged his rear-view mirror to get a better look at A’s boobs (they were already more viewed than the Mona Lisa) iii) He tried to charge us double the price.
8.15-8.30am: frisked vigorously by security lady and had bag (with camera and passports) seized. We managed to get the passports into G’s pocket, but the camera was forbidden. We sent the next four hours hoping camera was sill in bag.
8.30- 12.30pm: Four very long hours were spent listening to Chennai’s “elite” speaking about the university and how modern it is (note: the other day a large chunk of the roof fell down outside our room); how technologically advanced it is (note: there is one computer between 23 full time teaching staff in English); and how wonderfully situated the university is (note: today, the 5th, it smells like drying fish, and yesterday it smelt like someone had pissed in the office). There were however some very funny moments, like when the chief minister of Tamil Nadu walked on stage (sorry, we mean waddled) and took his seat next to the president of India. The chief minister looked like Jabba the Hut, the chair was engulfed and Jabba leaned his body to one side to prop up his head on the back of the chair. He could not even walk to the podium for his speech, which was in Tamil and went something like this: “dur wean surum –ho ho Hans Solo”. The performance was only to be outdone by the President with his “Hair-part of Destiny”, so called because a Grasshopper (or something of that size) would view his head as a theme park, complete with slide down to a deep crevasse and a chairlift back up the other side again. Then there was the Vice Chancellor, and his list of thanks which sounded more like a horse racing announcer: “the president is in front by a head, and the chief minister is sticking to the rails.”
12.30-1.00pm: View the newly renovated Senate House. We were not sure if we were to be part of this elite party, but we tried to get in, and (perhaps thanks to the much admired boobs?) were successful, and were able to steal food. Yay!
1.00pm Pub! Found a beauty a couple of weeks back, or Lonely “the bible” planet did. Actually could be a pub in Freo; the Waiters are dressed like Jedi Knights (to keep with the Star Wars theme) and food is pretty good too and not too pricey. Yay! There goes the arvo….. Actually it is our second wedding anniversary, so we celebrated in style!
Sometime in the evening: Beery goodness makes Chennai disappear. Only other highlight was waiting by the phone (humming Lawrence of Arabia theme music) for dad to ring to let us know that he had indeed survived the camel safari he took into the desert in Rajasthan.
Late evening: toilet still blocked.

Chennai (again…)

Well! After nine weeks in India we finally succumbed to the dreaded tummy bug. We were extremely ill and very very sorry for ourselves. We think that it is Chennai, and proof of this also lies in the fact that our laptops too got viruses. So they are locked away in the department cupboard, awaiting for a computer professional in Perth.

So in other words, our blogging has been limited, and this is about a month’s worth of scribblings and notes.

1)Signs /Labels

a) “Hitler’s Lock”.
That’s right the lock on the door of our hotel at Mahabalipurum is a brand called “Hitler’s Lock” and there is a sticker on it called “Hitler Tested Ok.” We read in the paper that there is a new café in Mumbai called “Hitler’s Cross”. Damn right he’s cross he’s having to test locks.

b) “Liquor Runs Country, Family and Life.” Amen!

c) In a suburb called Ideal, 60km south of Chennai we found the “Ideal Police Station.” It was immediately opposite the “Hotel Trafficjam”

d) “Season’s Greetings! Have an accident”



It’s a sign… Let’s overlook the fact that it is now mid-August and discuss Chennai driving style: reckless with a slight preference towards not running over pedestrians. It’s all about cutting people off, weaving and dodging other traffic.

Amazingly enough we have only seen one accident, a motorbike under the wheel of a car, though no one was injured. They seemed to be more interested in biffo, and our good pacifist inclinations were to egg them on, even whacking them ourselves with a banana shouting “you stupid bloody bad-driving git”. But we didn’t of course. We might have bruised the banana.



Buses are the worst of all. Our Autorickshaw driver Tirumallai (seen here in his heroic “I have a big autorickshaw stance”) said to us “transport too much crazy.” We look out for Tirumallai as he is one of the more sensible drivers around, only going though 2 red lights as opposed to the usual 5 on the way between the university and our hotel. We would never get the bus (quite literally too as buses which should usually carry 30 odd people (sometimes very odd) carry around 80) so there would be no room on it for us Aussies and our huge personal spaces. People dangle off the buses like the prams did off the old buses when we were kids. Buses have a lean.



Motorbikes are the norm here and this picture is really one of the less- populated motorbikes we have seen: only six on one? We have seen much better. 8 even. No one stops them, the police are completely powerless. It’s the clown-stuffing car trick inverted: the number of people are visible and the car (ie motorbike) is not. We did see one family of four on a push-bike the other day, and while this was not surprising the manner in which the family (consisting of dad peddling, mum riding side-saddle holding twins of about 6 months dangling on each side of the bike) was: riding in the middle lane of a freeway-like road. Oh my god!

Last night we had a very funny experience: it has been raining here and with the drainage practically non-existent, the roads were flooded in places. Our autorickshaw driver went very slowly though a deep puddle so that the water would not splash the open side of the vehicle. However a taxi (they are all old Ambassadors here, built like tanks) went through next to us very quickly and all three of us ended up drenched. We thought that it was funny but the driver was really annoyed and sped up to the taxi and proceeded to yell at them for at least 2kms. It was really embarrassing as the taxi would pull away and he would speed up and start yelling again. Finally he gave up, but not before 5 yelling sessions. We couldn’t stop laughing!

2) Chennai Media II

a) Funniest Name Competition: Senator Dikshit. She just opened a new dam in Andhra Pradesh, poor love! Stop Press! An even funnier one has just presented itself, the musician called Dikshitar! Only to be outdone by his cousin, Dikshit Dikshitar-Dikshitarissimo. The last one is the only slight exaggeration here.

b)Madurai University’s motto: “A University with potential for excellence”. Well obviously.

c) 24th July Sunday Express
Sport’s Page heading “Table tennis: It is not an act of revenge”. It is about the autobiography of table tennis champion V. Chandrasekhar, entitled My Fight Back from Death’s Door. The author reports that not even a word is exaggerated.

d) 26th July The Hindu
Sport’s back page headline: “Sania Mirza streamrolls opponent”. So you would assume that she won her tennis match convincingly but in fact the opposition retired due to a shoulder injury. No steamrollers were injured in the making of this injury.

e) Matrimonial sections. (please note that we are not making fun of the institution of arranged marriage, we just think that some of the categories are fascinating.)

i) The Hindu, Sunday July 23rd
Proposal for Muslim Girl
NRI-Muslim parents having roots in Kerala and with very strong corporate concerns abroad and India, seek suitable alliances for their daughter, 23, medium built, fair, smart, religious & graduate. Proposals from parents of professionals (engineering/ management/ Business/ Industry) educated in premier institutions in India/UK/US are preferred. Linguistics bar is not a constraint

Commentary:
Suitor: Hello? I would like to marry your daughter.
Father: what?
Suitor: Sir, I am asking about the ad in the paper. I have good credentials; my father was captain of the Indian cricket squad.
Father: what?
Suitor: I am a millionaire with a golf-ball making factory in Qatar.
Father: what?
Suitor: But?.......[hangs up]

ii) The Hindu, Sunday July 23rd
CSI Christian
Godfearing, goodlooking, 29/160 B.Sc(N) working in the USA with green card coming in Nov.06 requires Godfearing male Nurse 29-32 appearing CGFNS/ passed preference working in the UK

Honey, we all need god-fearing male nurses in our lives.

f) children’s pages, The New Express, Monday 7th August
Outrage over Mumbai being voted the world’s rudest city was discussed in the children’s section of the paper (akin to the Westkids section of the West Australian.) The front page of this lift out was devoted towards deconstructing the data, it reads “[Indian] cities scored low [because of] the Western Criteria used to assess cities. While in the West people may thank each other verbally, in Asia people have different, non-verbal ways of extending courtesies such as a warm smile or a simple namaste.(hands in preying position)”…… Or a Glasgow kiss perhaps? Trust me you are lucky if you walk away from the counter not picking up your change off the supermarket floor.

g) In the last Chennai media section we told you about a film called Chandra Mukhi, which was running up the days it has been shown. We are now up to the 501sr day. So we thought that we would use this to our advantage and get them to calculate for us the number of days that it is until we leave for home. Watch out for day 587, there’ll be a party at Club AliGrae….

Kodaikanal: Getting Close to Nature

Kodaikanal is the most superb hill station in the Western Ghats in Tamil Nadu: a welcome relief from the hustle and bustle (actually let’s be honest, the ‘crap’) of Chennai. In the hills you can walk freely around the town without being harassed by auto-rickshaws and shop assistants we have been feasting on nuts and fruits and are positively happy. We have never been this close to nature before...

1) When monkeys’ Attack
(alternative titles: ‘Lonely Planet of the Apes’; ‘So long, Donkey Kong’; ‘Bubble’s Revenge (Who’s Bad?)’; ‘Monkey See, Monkey Spew’; ‘India has drop bears too’)

A: Awww, aren’t those monkeys sitting on the wall cute?
G: Yeah, look at the little baby one, it’s eating a mango.
A: Oh well, we’ll just walk up passed them up to breakfast
EM [evil monkey]: GRRR! Hisss! Grrrr! [translation: bugger off; none shall pass; but you do look very tasty.]
[monkey throws itself at Aussies, fangs out; Aussies run off and lock themselves in their room. Repeat x 2]
A [on telephone]: umm, reception? This may sound a little strange, but we can’t leave the room as monkeys keep attacking us. Can you please send help?
R [reception]: Yes madam [said nonchalantly as if this thing happens all the time]
G: let’s just have one last try
[A and G walk outside towards the steps and are relieved to see no monkeys, only to have one rather aggressive monkey jump two metres off a tree and land on a powerline one metre over our heads.]
EM: Grrrrrr! Hissss! Spitt [translation: I’ve told you before, bugger off tasty morsels; hope you’ve had your rabies shot]
[A and G run back into room. Man with stick for monkey removal arrives. We are saved. Yay! Much amusement amongst staff]

Hear no evil, so no evil, my arse! Those monkeys are the devil incarnate.

2)Kingfisher(s)

Beautiful little blue kingfisher birds fly around Kodaikanal Lake, and we have been lucky enough to have seen two of them so far. But we have also been having encounters of another kind of kingfisher as well: Kingfisher Beer. That delicious amber liquid that comes in king-brown bottles and costs $3 each, and in the Calton Hotel (the only pub for 1000 kilometres) you get snacks too for that price. But the reason why we wanted to comment on the Kingfisher Beer is the label. It reads: “Kingfisher Premium: Since 1857…. Liquor ruins Country, Family and Life.” And when we looked at the door to the pub, the door too had “Alcohol ruins Country, Family and Life” printed on the saloon-like doors. So we thought, wouldn’t Kingfisher Beer be the ultimate weapon in times of war? All you need to do is to lob a few over the border, and sit back and watch.

3) The Cattle Grid
So if cows are sacred, then why are there so many cattle-grids preventing the bovis sacra from wandering around freely? We have two theories on the matter. A) cows are like cats and b) cow are anarchists; and humans have clicked on.

a) Cow are like cats
Cows take advantage of human generosity (no offence Burby the cat of Como, who will no doubt be currently sunning himself on the couch surrounded by delicacies of a feline nature which he will subsequently remove when a human gets home and pretend to be hungry.) Cows, like cats, see human weakness and take advantage of it. The other day we saw a cow family having a picnic on the lawn by the lake, and taking up most of the park, but no-one had the heart to move them on. People are very obliging with the cows, leaving them food and water around the place. To quote John Berryman, but making it a bit more bovine, “Cows have no bankers, and do not drink, and cannot be arrested, and pay no taxes, and in general, cows have it made.” (taken from the Dreamsongs; Bats have been substituted). But humans have clicked on somewhat, and around Kodaikanal you see many cattle grids preventing our bovine friends from walking into shops, home driveways and churches. You see there is nothing worse that not being able to hear the sermon because the cow next to you is chewing cud loudly.

b) Cows are anarchists
Having just argued that cows are cats, let’s continue with this theme and explore the notion that cows are anarchists. Cows walk purposefully in the middle of the road to stop traffic. Radio announcement: “Its bumper to bumper cows on Kodaikanal road. Pure grid-lock.” They stand there and mooo at the top of their lungs, and people think that they are stupid, loud animals (but with religious significance) but in fact they are plotting world domination. They have a control centre which they are in fact communicating with, and if we translate the cow [lingua bovium] then it in fact says, “Daisy, central control says that we are to move slightly to the right to prevent the bus getting though.” To which the reply is “thanks Clarabella, I have already strategically placed a few patties and will move presently.”

The only problem with this theory is that we are not sure what anarchists aim at doing in India. The normal definition seems to already be in place, with a decided lack of infrastructure, police, road rules, medical facilities and any other form of government control. So perhaps the cows succeeded in their anarchist endeavours long ago and are merely maintaining it.

4) the quest for Cows with views
Fiona dared us to photograph cows, and we just thought that it was too easy. So we upped the bet: we have to find cows with views. Cows grazing on cliffs was a particularly easy one, and we are hoping that no one practices cow-tipping here.

These will be seen on Flickr soon, once we increase our collection….