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!