Last update

After our auto-rickshaw driver pulled onto a third side street, this one even more isolated than the last—with people around small fires on the side of the road by ramshackle homes—Megan and I began to wonder if this was really the way to get to the nicest hotel in Chennai, or if our trip was about to take a turn for the worse.

It turned out to be just fine; the driver was just pretending not to be lost until he could ask someone how to get to the ITC hotel. We arrived there at 6:30 am, argued our way into the business center, called various hotels in town and figured out that we needed to get across town to a different hotel.

We hopped in a cab that, as he was about to pull onto the road, asked us which terminal we wanted to go to. Eventually he got the idea that we weren’t going to the airport, and decided to quadruple our fare because of it.

Eventually we arrived at our correct hotel, saw Taylor and Jac, checked in, and went to stay at our friends’ amazing Tower Suite back at the super nice hotel. We ate lunch there and hung out at the pool for the rest of the afternoon.

Now seems like a good time to catch you up on the last part of our stay at Lily’s Valley resort. After I posted last, I was offered a motorcycle ride, met some wild expats, and tried to sleep through blasting Tamil music.

The motorcycle ride was offered (but I never had time to cash in on) from Prince, an employee at the resort who I talked to just after I went to the central area to get internet to post onto the blog. He told me about his friends’ arranged marriages, his views on female education (positive), and about getting his MBA while working the night shift at Lily’s Valley.

The next day we went to a friend of Sukumar’s (Mark) in town for Christmas. There, we met a number of interesting people including Mark himself, who Megan talked to at length about their favorite philosophers. We went from Mark’s house to a 60-person Christmas party with a bunch of foreigners in Kodaikanal.

Expats always have great stories—there has to be some reason that they left. This is even more true when they are living in a small city on top of a random mountain in India.

We met one guy who works to make diamond mines more like cooperatives in the Ivory Coast. The host of the party brews his own beer. Another person, Benjy,  was a drama teacher in the US and now teaches at an international school in Kodaikanal. There were a few people who had lived their whole lives in the area, including a guy who is an “opinion-maker” on television, who told us why he doesn’t think India isn’t the best place for gay rights. All these people were really cool to talk to, and there were a number of other folks with interesting things to say.

As the outdoor gathering wore on, someone pulled out a guitar and started playing Simon & Garfunkle and Beatles songs. The guitar was passed around and people played and sang songs they are fond of. Megan and I had a great time listening and singing along, and particularly enjoyed one guy’s song about Kodaikanal that he had written. The food at this gathering  was also terrific, with a number of Indian dishes as well at stuff you’d see at any barbecue in the US like grilled chicken.

As the sun started to set we headed back to Lily’s valley, where we watched the second half (I had seen the first half) of Django—a really good movie. After that, I went to skype my parents for a while, came back, and went to sleep.

On our last day, we woke up late, went out for a drive with Sukumar and his friend who owns the farm. We drove by the huge pine tree forest, drank coconut water, saw an amazing overlook onto a village in a valley, and had lunch. We came back to the hotel, packed up, and headed to our overnight bus to Chennai.

The bus assistant put on a painfully loud Tamil film ripped from tamiltorrents.com. It was painfully loud because of the subwoofers right above our heads. The movie was about a bus assistant falling in love with a girl from a rural area, and had plenty of eardrum wrenching scenes where the bus wheels would screech to a halt. We tried moving back but there were subwoofers back there too.

ALSO, instead of having cuddle-cabins like the last one, there were just seats that leaned back a little. Sleeping in them was a lot worse than the bus we took on the way to the resort. Both were listed as semi-sleepers, but we’re pretty sure the first one was a full-sleeper.  When we got to the bus stop, we found an auto-rickshaw that took a very “interesting” route to the ITC, bringing us back to the beginning of this story.

Now I’m safely at the hotel for the debate world championships, and likely won’t be posting again. I appreciate the vote of confidence expressed by your willingness to read my ramblings, and I hope I’ll get around to writing something for my next trip!

From Hong Kong to India

Hiking in Hong Kong was incredible. Sylvie and I met up with Molly, one of Sylvie’s lovely friends from high school, and then took the metro to the end of the line to catch a bus. This bus was terrifying, by the way, and from the upper deck (British colony, remember?) we could feel every careening turn through the winding mountain roads.

The “hiking” was really a 40 minute walk, but the views didn’t suffer from the short duration (see first picture). We looked out over a beach, a golf course, and an area of HK I hadn’t seen before (which includes an American school and suburbish residential areas). Hearing gossip from Sylvie and Molly was entertaining, even though I had never met the people being referenced.

After the walk, we went to a Thai place that, among other things, had amazing buns with evaporated milk icing (which Molly may or may not have ended up eating with her chopsticks by the end).

From there, we took another bus to Stanley’s market, which had everything from Angry Birds chopsticks to Che Guevara T-shirts. We parted ways with Molly after bargaining our way through the market, and Sylvie and I took another double-decker bus back to Central—where we rode the world’s largest escalator chain back to her house. You didn’t misread that, there is a giant chain of escalator chain that is outside, and goes between buildings up to residential parts of the city central. I got a 20-30 minute nap while the bus was caught in traffic, the last sleep I would get until I was mid-air over Malaysia. OH, also, we stopped in an alleyway costume market once we got off the bus. It had costumes of all kinds, my favorite of which were the endless supplies of masks and Monster’s Inc eyeball costume which I would wear every day if it fit me (see picture below to understand). While going back to Sylvie’s place, I heard one british man say to another (in a british accent) “If you need a syringe, you can find it at a cookery store, maybe.” Not sure how this is relevant, but I found it amusing. Back at the apartment, I showered and packed while Sylvie took a nap before heading to the airport at about 7.

Things started to get interesting when we got to the airport. I didn’t get charged through the nose for my bag this time, but they did tell me I couldn’t get on the plane. That was distressing because getting to India is really difficult without a plane or an amazingly good rowing team.

They kindly informed me that my booking had been cancelled by my travel agent in October. I told them that my travel agent was Vayama, an international conglomerate that probably doesn’t cancel bookings without telling their customers. They didn’t find this convincing until we put them on the phone with a Vayama agent who I imagine told them the same thing, just less politely.

Despite Vayama’s objections, the people at the airport decided that since my tickets were still valid and I just wasn’t on the list of people to expect on the plane, they could at least put me on a plane  for the leg of my trip to Malaysia. They told me I would have to go to the Malaysia Airlines people in Kuala Lumpur when they opened the next morning to make sure I could get on my flight to Chennai. This promptly crushed my illusions about going to explore Kuala Lumpur in the middle of the night on my layover.

I couldn’t fall asleep in my aisle seat on the plane to KL, and was exhausted by the time I got there at 1:30 in the morning. I Facetimed my parents, then tried to make my way to the terminal I would be flying out of in 8 hours. On the way I found a transfers counter that printed my boarding pass without a hassle and were had no idea what the HK people were talking about with my not being on the list to be on the plane.

At last, I laid down on a bench with my bag underneath the bench but clipped onto my jacket which I was using as a pillow. This would have been a great time to go to sleep, but that’s not how this works. I was on my phone chatting with people and listening to The Fountainhead while I tried to go to sleep, when I was informed that Megan was having a shit-show of a time in Chennai. With her travel partners being held up in New York with Visa troubles, she was having an understandably terrible time as a woman alone in a city where harassing people if they’re alone seems to be the thing to do.

An inability to sleep along with a heroically complicated logistical task of finding a way to bring Megan along on my travels, kept me up until my flight the next morning. I have never seen as many barefooted people in an airport as I saw at my gate to fly to Chennai from Kuala Lumpur.

Notable things from the plane ride include my three hours of sleep and the awesome lush Mesa that was visible on the descent into Chennai.

Landing in India, I got the same feeling I usually get when I walk out of the plane in a new country—pure excitement about all the cool stuff I’m about to see that I can’t even picture yet. The immigration line was nerve-wracking, partly because I couldn’t find either the address or phone number for the hotel that I had put down on my visa application and partly because the consulate had spelled my freaking middle name wrong on my visa. After asking the guy in front of me what phone number he put down for a phone number—so I could make one up with the same number of digits—two things happened. One thing was that he told me he just wrote down the hotel’s name in the address box and left the phone number blank, and the other thing was that his 4-year old daughter interrogated me. She asked me where I was from, how long I would be in India, where I would be staying, and other highly personal questions. I parried back, asking her equally probing questions like how old she was, and how long she would be in India. Also, the immigration agent seemed to overlook the misspelling of my middle name—it would have been a very sad end to my journey to be deported back to America.

I have promised myself every time I have gone somewhere new that I will never use airport currency exchanges again. And, shocker, just like every other time I ended up using it and making another pipe-dream promise that I’ll never do it again. This time it was because my card was rejected at an ATM and I apparently taxis in India don’t accept American currency—lame.

Sitting in the cab before it pulled away, I realized that of all the cities I had been to in the past few weeks, Hong Kong was the only one where you could wear seatbelts in taxis. This is ironic because among Chennai, Beijing, Shanghai, and HK, Hong Kong is the one where I would trust a medical team MOST to scrape my body off the pavement and save my life. In China, cabs had fitted seat covers that went over the seatbelts, in India, they just didn’t have seatbelts in the first place. As soon as my cab pulled out of the airport, the driver started talking on his cellphone—terrific. That was the least of my worries. I saw my own death on that ride more times than I care to count. In China, the roads might be scary, in India, they’re terrifying. Lanes are more like guidelines, motorbikes weave through cars, and people use the opposite direction’s lanes as passing lanes. Oncoming cars were coming straight at us before swerving away at the last minute, the entire country seems like an elaborate game of chicken.

Luckily, the Tamil music the driver was blasting was pretty sweet, the air coming in the windows was hot, and we made it to the E Hotel alive. There, I gawked at Megan’s huge suite which they had upgraded her to and we went out for lunch after booking bus tickets for that evening. After seeing the malls in Shanghai, the mall attached to the hotel was puny, but it was kind of cool to see the fake gold covered, giant, tacky Christmas tree and the Biryani we got was great.  We wandered through a book store, tried to get Megan a Sari top, and headed back to the hotel to hang out before going to the bus stop for our 10:30 overnight trip to Kodaikanal.

We had expected our adjacent tickets on the semi-sleeper bus to give us two reclining chairs next to each other. Instead, we found ourselves in a cuddle-cabin—our term for the mediumish bed with a curtain and no window near the back of the bus. We talked about life, debate, and friends until about 1:15am, and then got surprisingly good nights sleeps for being on a bouncing bus winding through the streets of Tamil Nadu.

At 7:30am, Megan woke me up, warning me that it was getting close to our drop-off time of 8—the naiveté of that moment is palpable now. I told her that Kodaikanal was the last stop, so we didn’t have to worry about it. I went back to sleep, and when I woke up at 10:30 I worried about it. Actually, I freaked out that Kodai wasn’t really the last stop and that we were really ending up 2.5 hours beyond our destination. I poked my head into the alley and peered through the sliver of window visible behind the curtain separating the driver from the rest of the bus. I could make out a lot of green and could feel that we were on windy roads. This meant a few things: the winding meant that getting up to the front of the bus to tell the driver we needed to get off would be a physical challenge, with a high risk of falling sideways into a sleeping traveller’s cabin. And the green meant we were in a rural area, and getting up to the driver to have him let us off would be a pointless endeavor unless we wanted to be dropped off somewhere in the woods. I figured it would be better to wait till the next stop and then catch another bus back to kodaikanal. I was also worried because there might have been someone from the resort waiting for us for the last 2.5 hours. I felt terrible for oversleeping, but since it wouldn’t make any sense for us to get off the bus in the middle of nowhere, and there was nothing else we could do, I wanted to let Megan keep sleeping 

My letting in light through the open curtain and brief attempts to stand up, however, woke her up by 10:45. She, with more chutzpah than I, made her way up to the driver and concluded that we were on winding roads heading uphill. This was consistent with getting up the mountain that Kodaikanal is on, which was good news, but I wasn’t terribly satisfied seeing as it was almost THREE HOURS after we were supposed to have arrived. I made my way up there after Megan came back, got the bus driver’s left-hand man to open the door to the “cockpit” and said “Kodaikanal?” To which I was informed that we would be there in 15 minutes.

ALSO, there were monkeys chillin on the side of the road, which was awesome. We eventually made it to the resort, met Sukumar (the owner of the resort and one of my camper’s fathers), put our stuff in our room, and got a brief tour of the resort. It would get redundant if I told you how beautiful every little thing was, so just assume that the drive from the bus stop, the tour of the resort, the view down the mountain, and everything else was stunning—because they were.

We hung out for a while—I got some writing done and sat for my last final while Megan read, and then went to walk downtown. On our hour walk we saw beautiful views (etc. etc.) as well as stray dogs, a bull, a rooster, cows, chipmunks, monkeys, and a cat. This country has stray dogs almost like Israel has stray cats—and that is really saying something.

After that, our lovely host Sukumar took us out to dinner at a Tibetan restaurant. We enjoyed delicious soup, chowmein, and cheese dumpling things while discussing religion, politics, and the story of the resort. On the ride home , Sukumar told us a little of the travels he had done when he was younger. He has been to 30 countries, including Singapore, Afghanistan, South Korea (he saw Seoul in a very different age than I did), to name a few. I remarked that Megan and I are better travelled than most college students, but didn’t have anything on him.  I was wrong, Megan has been to TWENTY FIVE countries, which is wild and makes my 10 seem paltry (also, we both initially forgot to count India, which seems quite silly). 

Today was terrific. We went to a 400 acre farm on the other side of the Kodaikanal mountain range and wandered through the endless gorgeousness and delicious smells. Things we ate: delicious oranges, papaya, green beans, coffee beans. Things we saw growing: Jack fruits (which grow to be about 20 pounds). Things we smelled: a fresh grapefruit that I caught when the farm owner Thenebal shook it from a tree, a lemon, lemon grass, other cool smelling grass. The fresh from the tree grapefruit has this amazing aroma which exudes a freshness in a way that I’ve never smelled before, so I carried it around all day smelling it while we walked—don’t judge. I also climbed a tree.

We saw some horses, thousand+ year old burial formations, waterfalls, and stunning views. I know I said I wouldn’t say how pretty things were, but it’s hard not to ooze awe when you are hanging out with a great friend talking about developmental economic theory overlooking amazing scenery which THE JUNGLE BOOK IS LITERALLY BASED ON.

Also, in the morning we saw the insane Kodaikanal museum with 20 foot long snake skins, and among other things, half a dozen human fetuses. But also it had human artifacts from before there were humans in North America and “140 million year old teeth of big fish.”

This evening, we had a nice dinner, saw a small bonfire, and I beat a couple of resort people in chess. It’s now almost 1 in the morning and Megan and I are both weirdly awake and happy. Never mind, she’s an insomniac, so I’m the weird one.

It was probably below freezing in New Jersey today, but on a huge farm in Kodaikanal, India with huge papayas, ripe oranges, and full grapefruits growing, I got sunburned. Merry Christmas!

First 24 hours in Hong Kong

The capital city from the Hunger Games exists, and it is Hong Kong. Shanghai and Beijing are huge metropolises but have nothing compared to the vertical scale of everything in Hong Kong. Driving out from the underground station at the end of the airport Express train, I strained my neck looking up at the enormous, colorful, brightly lit buildings—until, of course, I had to look forward to avoid getting nauseous because of the incredibly hilly, winding streets. It felt like I was on a roller coaster ride the entire way up to Sylvie’s apartment building, where I would stay for my 48 hours in HK.

Once I arrived at the magnificent apartment of the Wong family, I was introduced to an amazing view, tremendous hospitality, and great food. This would be a theme of the coming days.

Sylvie and I then, with the accompaniment of her parents, took a tram up to the top of “the Peak” a mountain right next to Sylvie’s house which has a little tourist complex on top. We looked over the cityscape, and the family explained a little bit of HK’s geography and history. I decided that, in addition to being the capital city from the Hunger Games, HK is also the insane baby of Tokyo and Hawaii. It is a series of islands with huge skyscrapers stacked on top of them.

Then we went to the other side of the peak, and looked out on the dark outlines of the mountains on the other side of the main island. At this point I gave up trying to compare HK to any city I had ever heard of, because the juxtaposition of giant urban developments and open mountains just doesn’t make any sense. Imagine the Adirondack mountain range occupying part of Manhattan—it really doesn’t make any sense.

That night I slept in Sylvie’s brother (who was still at school)’s room—which contained an excellent book collection including the Artemis Fowl series, a Fareed Zakaria book, and The Giver (to name a few).

We woke up the next morning around 9, and I took the Star Ferry to Kowloon island while Sylvie went to the doctor. Kowloon is not spelled, despite my uneducated guess as Calhoun—before you judge me, say it quickly to someone else and ask them how to spell it—or, you know, don’t do that cause they’ll think you’re weird. The water between the islands was the kind of blue you’d expect to find in the Caribbean, not at all like any water near New York City, and the view from the ferry was stunning. On Kowloon, I wandered around in wonder the streets listening to people’s endlessly amusing British accents and trying to get a feel for the pace of the city.

I met Sylvie and her mom back across the water for a Dim Sum lunch, which was phenomenal. Just thinking about it makes me want to stuff my face with squishy buns full of pork and sauce—although, let’s be honest, it doesn’t take a lot of provocation to make me hungry.

When we finished lunch, they dropped me off at the subway stop to go see the Big Buddha. It is the largest metal Buddha in the world, and, even knowing this, I was prepared to see a statue about 10 or 15 feet high—this means that is was NOT prepared for how huge this thing was.

After taking the subway to the end of the line, and got ticket to ride the cable car that takes you up to the Buddha. I ended up sharing a car with a group of French-Chinese middle schoolers and their teacher. Despite the peculiar sounding company, the ride was stunning, and the view of everything from the mountains, to the water, and even as far as the airport was awesome. About 2/3 of the way into the ride, you noticed a mountain further away with something unnaturally jutting from the top of it. This, was the Big Buddha, which looks like a feature on a giant mountain—it really was enormous.

The cable car ride ended a little way’s walk from the top of the mountain, and I dutifully made my walk up to it. I don’t really know how to describe being there except that it was pretty surreal to see something that old and enormous, with so many people—from monks in orange garb to tacky tourists like myself—all there to see it.

I made the trek back to Central to meet Sylvie+mom and we drove to a seafood restaurant on an outlying island (there are tunnels, don’t be silly, cars don’t drive on water).

I got a healthy nap while we sat in traffic on the way there and picked up Sylvie’s sister Sharon along the way. I was told that the restaurant was in an old fishing village. My first question upon getting out of the car was, “do all small fishing villages have skyscrapers?” Then I remembered that I was in Hong Kong.

We walked through what was basically an aquarium, with giant fish, and when we go to the last mini aquarium, selected our living fish from the different tanks full of lobster from Australia, Mollusks from South Africa, and tons of other stuff from all over the world. Dinner was amazing, pretty close to perfect, and the restaurant topped it all off by bringing us tremendously fresh mangoes to cleanse our pallets.

Following the long drive home, Sylvie and I went out for a fairly low-key evening and met a bunch of Sylvie’s friends from high school on a street that a significant portion of the HK youth (and a more significant portion of HK’s creepy old men) frequent on weekend nights.

I had trouble sleeping when we got back, which would have been fine except that 5 hours of sleep didn’t prepare me for the next 26 hours of my life—during which I would get nothing more than a 30 minute nap.

Miscellaneous:

-I got a not-terrible haircut in Shanghai and a free ride to the Airport Shanghai with some NYU women who were finishing their junior semester abroad.

-Shanghai has amazing soup dumplings which are a terrific breakfast

-Spring Airlines, the low-cost Asian airline, TOTALLY ripped me off and charged me an extra 50% of the sticker price of my flight for my overweight back. It also wasn’t possible to just transfer heavy stuff to my carry-on, because they make you put that on the scale along with your normal bag—and then evaluate aggregate weight.

-People call Hong Kong what china would be without the cultural revolution. This is both believable and depressing. For those of you who really like assassinating people, this can make you feel good about the assignation of Mao’s son (by US soldiers while he was visiting the DMZ from the North Korean side) which created a significant shift from Maoist policies after Mao died.

-Having cabbies who speak English is a true pleasure that is not often afforded to travelers on the mainland, but it is almost always true on HK

Seeing Shanghai

I think dumplings taste better when you travel an hour and a half to get them. This mornings breakfast-turned-lunch was a phenomenal set of dumplings from Yang’s Fry Dumplings in Shanghai (before and after picture below). It turns out that they have a Yang’s in the subway stop right next to where I’m staying, but who would go there when you can get perilously lost on the metro system and helped out by a female, middle-aged, Shanghai accountant who speaks some english?

After that I went to the Jewish Refugee Museum and learned a bit about the tens of thousands of Jews who fled Germany to Shanghai (a part of the world that would take them) in the early 1940’s. There was a mini holocaust museum on the third floor, which was powerful even though it was only in one medium-sized room.

After that I headed to the Bund—the waterfront in Shanghai with an amazing view of some huge buildings across the river. One of those huge buildings includes the yet-to-be-finished second tallest building in the world. I always assumed that every building that was ever the second tallest in the world was the tallest at one point. There is probably a deep truth about human nature somewhere in this.

After that I went and walked around the market outside of the Yuyuan gardens (the actual gardens were closed but the market was really cool). I sat in a Starbucks there for a few minutes waiting for the next chapter of The Fountainhead audiobook to download, and while I was inside I saw the old Chinese style buildings outside light up. Not on fire, just with lights, but the lights were like tiny fires inside the bulbs—you know how lights are.

After that I met up with Chadsey, his suitemate Jose, and friend Tim, and we went out for a spicy dinner. I’ve just started four paragraphs in a row with “After that.” I’m getting either lazy, tired, or both.

After that (it’s now ironically stylistic), we used up all of Chadsey’s work-provided 200 RMB gift card for Haagen Dazs on a lavish ice cream fondue pot which was made up in decorativeness what it lacked in taste. We then walked home in the cold and stopped in a shoe store for Chadsey to buy slippers. Below is a picture of Jose with a shoe which, according to him, is like “having a tiny dead pet on your feet.”

Now I’m off to bed, with more dumplings and a flight to Hong Kong on the agenda for tomorrow.