Dry as Ghandi's Ashram

I had pretty low expectations for Ahmedabad. All I knew about it was that it was massive (biggest A city in the world, don't you know? A bit bigger than Athens and Amsterdam combined) and whatbthe guidebook said. And the guide book I had, absolutely slated it. And guide books normally paint a fairly positive picture of things, so I feared the worst.

Ahmedabad is ace. I'm staying right in the middle of the rickety streets in the old city and it's just about the first urban environment where I've not been able to hear motorbike horns. I'm staying in French Haveli, It's completely Best Exotic Marigold.

When I was asking people what to do I was told to visit Ghandi's Ashram (tick - saw his flipflops and everything) and the step well. I fear I may have visited the wrong step well. People have been telling me how busy the step well is, rather than how difficult it was to find behind the charcoal factory.

So what do people do of an evening in a city with no bars? Turns out they go to night markets. They are insane. I didn't really understand them. I can eat as much as the next man, but there's only a finite time I can stuff my face with streetfood.

City of Life

I can see why you might not like Varanasi. You're sitting in Blue Lassi (Lonely Planet's Number one lassi in all Varanasi, this means that it has wifi and has priced itself out of the market with the locals. As a tangential aside, this is the first place I've been where lassis are served in a bowl with garnish and a spoon - so pretty much a dessert rather than a drink. For the record, whilst it was a pretty good lassi, I think the Lassiwala lassi in Jaipur was probably better. Look at me being all traditional liking the drinking lassi. These brackets have gone on a while, haven't they? Should probably get to the main narrative rather than chatting about yoghurt. Where were we? Sitting in Blue Lassi) when a dead body goes past. I can see how that might be disconcerting.

I had it on pretty good authority that I was going to hate it. That the whole city was spectacularly dirty, the Ganges was a grey colour, that you would get hounded by touts and that all of it - the city, the river and the touts - smelt real bad. And yeah, the city was smelly and dirty, but not noticably smellier or dirtier than any other city I've been to.

Old Varanasi centres itself on Mother Ganges. So you have a series of ghats linked by a promenade which is only accessible by steps (the water level varies a fair bit between wet and dry season, as the metre-thick mud in some places showed). So whilst you did get a bit touted - "boatride, boatride, hashish" - this was comparatively pleasant compared to the full-horn full-throttle motorbikes of every other pedestrian area I've been to in the last two months. The whole river front had the feel of a British seaside resort, albeit with more cows and burning bodies. Insert your own joke with your preferred British seaside resort as the punchline.

Honourable mention goes to Kashi Chaat Bhandhar which may have served me up the tastiest thing I've eaten since I've been in India. If it isn't hands down the tastiest, it smashes the tastiness to cost ratio.

Tuktuk, Sir?

Udaipur is the prettiest city I've been to so far in India. The lakeside setting with the hilly backdrop makes for a pretty good base and the ramshackle new builds haven't yet completely drowned out the much more attractive, nineteenth century buildings. So it seems a shame that the trip revolved so fundamentally around money.

To update from two posts ago. There is still almost no money in the system. Cash machines are open again, but generally have no money. If they do have money they also have an hour wait.

Bureau de changes are only open to tell you that they have no money, so changing foreign currency isn't an option either.

No one has money.

This means that even if you do manage to get to a bank and get one of the new 2000 Rupee notes, noone will be able to change it. So you may as well not have bothered.

This meant that most of the conversations I had whilst in Udaipur went something like this:
Tuktuk, sir?
- do you take old 500s?
No Sir
- do you take US dollars?
No Sir
- I don't suppose you have a card reader in your tuktuk?
No Sir
- In that case, not to worry. I'll walk.

I racked up some serious miles around the lakes and hills of Udaipur.

So Long...

I'm Your Man was the only album I remember being in the house when I was a kid and it seemed very different from Sounds of the Sixties on Radio 2. Like it had substance. I listened to it a lot. Partly for thesubstance thing but mainly because First We Take Manhatten and Jazz Police were brilliant soundtracks for goodies versus baddies battle games.

When I first heard it I didn't know what a waltz was. I figured it was a bit like a wolf. Only an unkempt one, what with its freshly cut breath of brandy and death and all. Maybe it was the beast that won't go to sleep in I'm Your Man, I was fairly sure that was lupine too.

It wasn't until much, much later that I realised what the songs were about. "Everybody knows that you live forever when you've done a line or two." That was a very different message to the one they were putting out on Grange Hill.

Leonard Cohen taught me about depth in songs, taught me poetry, taught me language.

Thank you.

Politics, Hey... (pt. 2)

Let's talk politics again. We both enjoyed it last time. To be fair last time the politics extended to about seven words before I apologised and changed the subject. This time though, I'm going to risk saying something misinformed (/ obvious / trite / regrettable or looking like a sixth former who has just read his first broadsheet or sounding like an over-privileged member of the middle-class elite), and talk about actual politics. Because this affects all of us. By which I mean all of us in this room. By which I mean me (and 1.2 billion others)

And no, I'm not talking about THAT politics:
a. I've been expecting that since June. Go on, admit it, you have to. Once you saw that people could be completely self-destructive just to make a point, you knew that sense and fact and competence and experience didn't stand a chance. We've all had enough of experts.
b. There's enough bureaucracy in the US to stop any really stupid ideas growing legs (I think - there must be some halfway sane Republicans in the Senate, right?).
c. It's pretty much a footnote to the news here. One of those kitten stories to amuse you away from the real issues at hand. "Look at what those funny Americans have done now."

I suspect that the news here has been somewhat overshadowed by the news elsewhere (that news involved English speaking, white people after all), but they have demonetised some of the banknotes.

You've read that sentence and you haven't understood it. You've maybe got distracted by the "demon" and assumed some voodoo ritual. Or else you have completely understood it but ruled it out as ridiculous. But no, you're right. And no it doesn't make sense. The logic behind it is sort of sound, but the implications...

India is largely cash-based. Two thirds of the population are rural and don't have access to a bank (that's approximately the population of Europe). To say that the cash is worthless without giving any real provision for people to prepare is ridiculous. Seven o'clock Tuesday night you could go to a cash machine and get cash out, the cash would be given to you in either 500 or 1000 notes. At 8pm it was announced that in four hours time 500 and 1000 notes would be "worthless bits of paper".

Obviously you can change old notes up at banks over the next month or so. But all banks were closed yesterday and were understandably bonkers today.

What's that? Go to the cash machine and get more cash out. No problem, except cash machines have been closed since the announcement too. Presumably because the current largest note in circulation is worth £1.20 which even here doesn't buy you that much - stocking cash machines is going to be a big old job.

And the cash machine thing is fine for us over-privileged idiots. I can gad about bouncing between shopping malls and putting everything on a card (maybe they are using the fees for expats using foreign bank cards to fund the gap in the economy). Not so good if you are any of the working class service industry - tuktuk drivers for example - relying on other people being able to access cash. Days without cash for a cash based society are going to be hitting the bottom end of society pretty hard.

And I understand the aim and intentions. I applaud the Prime Minister for taking drastic action to fight terrorism and corruption. I understand the need for the surprise tactic to try and make black money worthless. I just can't help but think there must have been a way of doing it without pulling the bottom out of the economy.

So yeah, that shinyhaired game show host with the new job, not really that important.

Follow the Monkeys

So a lot of people had told me how nice Jaipur is and how it doesn't feel like one of the big Indian cities. I can confirm that this is largely nonsense. The hustle and bustle are still there. And added to that the people come across as slightly less helpful. It seems that everything is designed just to make it that little bit more difficult for you.

Lassiwala is a case in point. It's possibly the most famous lassi stand in India. It's surrounded by four other shops all also called Lassiwala. For reference you can tell the original by the catchphrase "Kishan Lal Govind Narian Agarwal" written just above the awning so you can't see it from the street. Easy.

So yeah, Jaipur. The Pink City. I figured that's the most famous bit so I started there. Some bits of it are pink, more than you'd like are a murky orange colour. And it is a bit of a smelly city. And not in a good way. Didn't add to the charm. The Jantar Mantar is a big thing in Jaipur, rather than the minor curiosity that it is in Delhi. And don't get me started on Hawa Mahal. The most overrated Major Tourist Attraction (TM) I've seen since Manneken Pis [Insert your own joke about the previously mentioned smell].

Sightseeing highlight of Day 1 was probably the Pigeon Watching Area. Yes it was marked on the map.

Day 2 was outside of the city proper, box ticking forts Amber, Tiger, Jal Mahal. Ticked. And then the tuktuk driver casually mentioned The Monkey Temple. To say it was an assault on the senses would be an understatement.

It started innocuously enough. I say innocuously, I saw a monkey riding a pig. If that's not a good omen, nothing is. So there was a temple and some monkeys and that might have been it, but there seemed to be a steady stream of people heading into the mountains. And there were more monkeys that way.

And then it all got weird. I saw some freak cows. And I think a man put a curse on me for not giving his freak cow any money. And there were more monkeys. And people. And colours. And firecrackers. And a snake charmer. And more monkeys. And then I was in a festival where a queue of people were prostrating themselves before bathing whilst an MC was commentating and I really didn't know what was going on but it was brilliant.

That kind of nonsense is the reason I travel.

Foke

I know I mentioned that the sky was ridiculous when I posted yesterday. I suspect that you didn't believe me. I suspect you thought I was being deliberately hyperbolic, just to make it funnier.

It's not been all that funny today. It's about the worst sky I've ever seen. Corroborative evidence? Here's the Beeb.

Rangolis

I had been really excited about Diwali. I was accidentally in Kathmandu for Diwali five years back and it was a ridiculously fun atmosphere, slightly scary, but ridiculously fun. And I figured if tiny, tiny Kathmandu was that good then Delhi would be immense.

Now when I was in Kathmandu I was staying in the middle of a tourist area, so everything was a. Accessible and b. Open. Turns out when you live with nothing in walking distance it's a bit less exciting.

That said the sky was kinda different. So many fireworks. And when I say fireworks I don't mean an orchestrated firework display. Nor do I mean the kind of fireworks you get at home for the garden. These were fireworks whose main aim was to make noise. Consequently all the nights this weekend have had a bit of a warzone vibe. Bangs. Flashes. Smoke.

I say smoke, it's pollution. The sky is ridiculous. And that's from a baseline where the sky is too thick for the sun to set.

So yeah, turns out just about everyone leaves the NCR for Diwali so that they can breathe marginally fresher air. Consequently, not as exciting a weekend as I had hoped.

On the plus side I did tick off a few more of the Delhi sites. Humayun's tomb was ace, for my money the wow factor was better than the Taj. But that was probably just because I wasn't expecting it. So forget I said it was good. Ditto Jama Masjid. Massive. Less impressed by the National Museum - it always irks me when museums charge full price when they are under renovation. Still did create the nice juxtaposition of a "Silence Please" sign and a pneumatic drill being anything but silent.

I went into hibernation for the main Diwali day. I read The Call by Peadar O'Guilin in one sitting. You should too (not necessarily in one sitting). But don't read the blurb first, it will make you cringe a bit, or maybe just not read it. You're just gonna have to trust me.