Horses for Gorses

Rolling countryside, fresh air and farms. Long walks and cycle rides. Cheese, beef, ale and sausages. A big, old dose of all the things that India isn't great at providing.

It wasn't completely dissimilar though. That there New Forest is a fan of the street animal: cows and donkeys all over the road. We squeezed in the Golden Triangle, at least that's what I'm calling the cycle to Burley and Brockenhurst. Rather than starting at a bustling metropolis, we started at the rather less bustling Fritham (in a wooden caravan filled with meat in a pub beer garden, I know, right?); the Pink City and Taj Mahal were replaced with cream tea and cider. So a very English India.

Still, Bombay Sapphire is Indian, right? Don't answer that.

The Rock Tower

Yay politics. But much like last time I'm not going to talk about current affairs in the mainstream news, even though there's a fair amount to talk about. I mean I'm definitely not going to ask how the White House can't find someone better at the press than Sean "it's okay to use chemical weapons for ethnic cleansing" Spicer.

I'm going to talk about crazy Indian politics. In an attempt to cut down on drink driving they have introduced a rule whereby noone can serve alcohol within so many metres of the National Highway. This sort of makes sense, you can see a logic at any rate. Unfortunately the whole Gurugram economy is based on the easy access to the highway (and in turn the airport). This means that all the high-end hotels and all the bars / restaurants set up for the Big Four crowd fall within this restriction.

For the record they introduced this rule on April 1st. The old double bluff, everyone assumed it was a joke until they couldn't buy a beer.

I can't help but notice a correlation between this coming into effect and how very busy my local (which is outside the restriction) was on a Tuesday night. Absolutely heaving, it was. You  could tell it was banging by the way they played Ice Ice Baby and Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. The Clock Tower? The Rock Tower more like.

Oh and if anyone actually uses this for useful travel information (more fool you, this is the idiosyncratic warblings of an idiot - go and use a real website), India has removed a stupid rule too - it's like a one-out-one-in policy policy. You now no longer need to get a baggage tag stamped when you go through airport security. This saves about a minute per journey and a veritable forest of baggage tags. Hoorah for coming into line with every other country.

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Shout out to Jaffa, now that it's gone okay I can make an inappropriate reference to your old nickname.

Clock watching

I'm in Salar Jung Museum and it's coming up for the hour. Everyone is heading towards the musical clock. There's an auditorium set up. Some people have snacks - they've been here a while. Three o'clock arrives. There's maybe 300 people watching. Waiting. I can't bear the excitement... WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN? This is gonna be epic.

The clock played one bar of music then did three bongs.

I'm not saying that that's a metaphor for my time in Hyderabad, but it had been perhaps a little too hyped. All that talk of it being the spiciest food in India, it was inevitable that I'd find it beige.

Hyderabad wasn't without its good points - the city does a nice line in boulders; the Persian influence means it looks different to the other Metrocities; Qutb Shahi was incredible; I had a proper tasty breakfast dosa - they just didn't entirely outweigh the heat, the smell or the failed hype.

For the record, after the bongs the other 299 people watching the clock went nuts. There was cheering and whooping. It was just me being an underwhelmed, been-there-done-that curmudgeon.

These guys better not go to Eastgates; SavaCentre will see a rush on clean underwear when Cat's Cradle Pussywillow III tips to the o'clock. Is SavaCentre still there? I hope so, although it's largely irrelevant to this post. And fade to grey.

The Tiger's Nest

"Let's get some drinks, I know a great spot for a party." And that's why I spent my last night in Bhutan drinking 8 percent beer on the side of a road by Paro airport, an appropriately weird way to end a weird couple of days in a weird country.

Until then Day Three had been relatively light on weird with its tried and tested temple-dzong-hill combo. But it was juxtaposed with Day Two where the penis-coated sightseeing was followed up by watching a terrible dance show in a delusional nightclub. So my weirdometer may have been off kilter.

We went to the Tiger's Nest, a temple in a cave half way up a cliff, so called because when Guru Rinpoche came here to meditate he came by tiger (it's the only way to travel). Whilst he was meditating the tiger hung out in a narrow cave beneath the main cave, which you can now get to by climbing down some rickety planks in the dark.

We had a picnic lunch (cheesey fiddlehead ferns, yum) in the woods underneath the Tiger's Nest. This sounds more idyllic than it was. We were joined by a pack of stray dogs, which added a frisson of excitement to the proceedings.

So, Bhutan, you big openair museum. Thanks for the fresh air and the sensible temperatures. Thanks for the genuinely spicy food. And, most of all, thanks for the weird.

Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom

This was what Bhutan was supposed to be about. As nice as pottering about Thimphu was it wasn't what I was looking for in my Bhutan. There's a time and a place for paper factories and textile museums but that time was not now.

Now was for temples and flags and three storey brown roofed buildings scattered across hills. Dochula Pass delivered on that. One hundred and eight stupas on the top of a mountain, what's not to like?

The main Dzong in Punakha, the old capital, was pretty incredible. To be fair most things about Punakha were pretty incredible. It was all temples and rice terraces and swing bridges. Again what's not to like?

I think it's fair to say that The Temple of the Divine Madman didn't let me down when it came to delivering weird. Drukpa Kunley, the aforementioned Divine Madman, had a reputation for banishing demons using his, erm, Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom. The temple has a reputation for fertility which all the local traders have exploited by painting fertility symbols across their shops. I could have called this blog post "Dongs and Dzongs".

And what of the temple itself? With that kind of introduction you don't go in expecting entry-level weird. Which is lucky, as otherwise the sight of two seven-year-old monklets playing trumpets whittled from human femurs would probably be seen as excessive.

The Land of the Thunder Dragon

So Bhutan knows how to make an entrance. The Drukair plane does a handbrake turn around a mountain that you can reach out and touch, before coming into land sideways. Never had a landing like that before.

And then once you land, you're in this bucolic, medieval theme park of a country. All the buildings are traditional. The air is fresh. There's no noise. All the people are wearing traditional dress. The air is fresh. The temperature is mild. Everywhere you look there are mountains and flags. It's like the backdrop to a Samurai film. And coming straight fro Delhi it doesn't really seem real.

The overall sense of weird was added to by the sleep deprivation:
A. 5am is a rubbish time to fly, especially given the unpredictable queues at Delhi's passport control.
B. Knowing that you're gonna pass Everest isn't conducive to sleeping on the plane.

But mainly things seem weird because they are weird. Here's some weird:

Weird One
The national animal is a takin. They say it came about because an old God (or maybe a King) put the head of a goat on a cow.

Weird Two
Archery is the national sport. Now you're thinking of Olympic archery, aren't you? You're thinking "That's not that weird." Aside from a bow and arrow there's not too much in common with Olympic Archery.

Start off by making the target a quarter of the size. Then double the length of the pitch. You can't even see the target at that distance. So far so ridiculous? I've not even started. There's a target at both ends. Both ends! In archery! From what I could work out there are two teams of eleven bowman who stand at either end of the pitch firing arrows at each other to try and hit the impossible to hit target. If on the offchance they do, they get rewarded by the other team dancing for them. Assuming they've not been skewered.

Weird Three
They treat chillies as a vegetable. This means cheesey chillies is a thing. What's not to like about that? It goes well with a nice cup of butter tea. Hmmm. Butter tea.

And we haven't even got onto the fact that one of the most famous people in Bhutanese history is known as The Divine Madman. I'm going to his monastery tomorrow. I have high hopes for more weird.