!ncredible !ndia

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

'The paradox of our time in history is that we have...

taller buildings, but narrower viewpoints;

more conveniences, but less free time;

more knowledge, but less judgement.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.'

-excepts from Dr. Bob Moorehead

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We had each heard stories about India ranging from threatening to absolutely horrid. Truth be told, only very few positive words had been said about it, and that may have been exactly why we were so rigidly braced for the worst when we arrived that things ended up seeming so wonderful instead!

If you remember, India wasn't in the original plan. Instead we were all booked for Cairo, Egypt until the shtuff hit the fan and we had to re-route. India is a place that can BARELY be tasted in the 8 days that we had as a result of backing into the plan. We knew that, yet we were determined to do our best to experience it enough that we could decide if we should ever want to return again and give it a real, thorough run-through (would take a MINIMUM of six months)... not to mention, maybe find a wife for Broey. 

Because of all the horor stories, we decided to shell out the few extra bucks to have someone from our hostel pick us up personally outside of the airport terminal - this would turn out to be a WISE decision. New Delhi is chaos. There are more than 18 million people living in the city with no traffic laws, and you'd be hardpressed to find blacktop on city streets, much less painted lanes or directions. You're likely to see cows and sheep in the median as you pass a camel-drawn cart driven by a 12 year old boy on the wrong side of the road while the grill of a bus is barrelling down right at you from the other way! All of this goes on normally without the driver batting an eyelash except when he opens the door and hangs halfway out of the moving car to spit out nearly a liter of chewing tobacco spew. 

At one point, there was an old man's body laying motionless on the sidewalk with nothing covering his bottom half at all - dead or alive, I will never know. Moments later, a 6 or 8 year old boy squatting to take a dump about 3 feet away from the vehicle window as we cruised by on the dusty road. I can't say from experience, but it might feel like watching the Twilight Zone on acid... And we hadn't even gotten to our hotel yet!

All of us in awe by the time we arrived at the Smyle Inn Guesthouse, we unloaded our bags and were greeted kindly by a gorgeous and comfortable room. After gathering our brains, we went to arrange our morning train to our first destination - the city of Jaipur in Rajasthan, where our first couchsurfing host of the trip would be waiting for us.

As we sat with the 'travel agent' guy in our hotel, he started laying out day-by-day plans and offering us a private driver/ city sight-seeing guide and all this extra stuff that we hadn't really planned on. We immediately got a bit defensive and had flashbacks of the fat Welsh-man trying to rip us off in Bangkok... but then something wonderful happend - he offered us the price and it barely costed more than doing it ourselves. Suddenly, we had an airconditioned car with personal driver who would show us around, drop us off where we request and then pick us up in the morning whenever we wanted - compare that to trying to fend for ourselves and lug our backpacks from one dumpy train station to the next amidst the India madness!! We were on our way early the next morning and explored the essentials of Delhi before heading West into Rajasthan.

Near New Delhi's main bazaar area - unlike anyplace I've ever seen before or probably will again!

The Lodi Garden. This beautiful FREE little stop turned out to be one of the hilights of the city!

The tomb of Sikander Lodi, a ruler of the region around the year 1500. (Thanks wikipedia! ;)

Sarah and I donning our new Indian (or at least Indian TOURIST) attire as purchased the day before in the bazaar.

Our driver, Nagdajin (or 'Nads' as we came to call him) fought off the insanity of the Indian commute as best as he could but still it took almost 5 hours to make it to Jaipur only 150 miles away. Now, I'm no math major, but that's averaging about 30 miles per hour, and even that was risking our lives most of the way!

Finally, we met up with our couchsufing host and his wife, Sunny and Nilam, just in time for them to invite us along to the park. We got to know each other a bit before settling into their beautiful home. Sunny's is a story of self-made success since having had to live out of his car, work two jobs and chase grants so he could afford university. Now still before his 30th birthday, he owns his home outright, is building one for his brother next door, has opened a school for poor children, (financially) adopted 60-some children and hosts anyone and everyone who wants to come and see Jaipur via couchsurfing.org!! I absorbed some powerful reminders about hard-work, dedication and GENEROSITY during our stay with him. This is a man who contributes to the karma pool as much as anyone I've ever seen. I consider myself very lucky to have stayed with him!!

The next day, he offered to show us around some of the temples and explained basic belief systems and principles of the Hindu religion before personally driving us around the city for our first full day there. He was so helpful that we were able to give Nads the whole first day off as we unleashed ourselves upon Jaipur with our host.

Beautiful pure white marble Hindi Temple that Sunny took us to in Jaipur. We were the ONLY tourists there. 

One of the most beautiful things about their religion was their open-ness and recognition of all the world's religions. Pictured here in marble are Jesus Christ and St. Peter on the outside of their temple. Now if ALL religions could just follow that lead........

Our host (and general helluva guy), Sunny. Pictured here showing off his new-found hugfive skills in front of Jal Mahal (or 'water palace') - a five story building mostly underwater and built hundreds of years before they had even electricity.... how DO they do these things??

We had noticed that our time in India would coincide perfectly with the Cricket World Cup Finals when the U.S. State Department issued a terrorism target alert for the event. We didn't really mind the government's warnings at all, and instead got excited about the chance to finally figure out just what in the heck is going on out on that cricket field!

By the time we arrived, India was using their homefield advantage and had advanced to the semi-finals against their real-life blood rivals, Pakistan. Since the two countries have been at war or on the brink of war since they broke away from England some 60 years ago, the match was more than a little bit personal - maybe like North Korea playing South Korea, or The US playing Iraq for an olympic medal?

Sunny used the other semi-final game, Sri Lanka vs New Zealand, to teach us the basics so we wouldn't be asking questions during the real match. Amazingly, with some patience on his part, we actually got the jist of it fairly quickly. It's far less complicated than it has always seemed to we of the western hemisphere. The only biggest surprise was that the average game at this level lasts between 7 and 9 hours! Luckily, there's highlights and all the exciting action takes place in the last hour or two.

With basic cricket knowledge in tact, we got some sleep and had Nads pick us up in the morning for another day of sight-seeing. We kept him until about half-time of the India-Pakistan game before we cut him loose to go and enjoy. He did a much better job of being patient and driving around some spoiled tourists than I ever would have if the Vikings were in the middle of the Superbowl!!

The three of us in front of the Wind Palace.

Amber Fort in the background up above and Tiger Fort lower.

Sarah was like a celebrity with all the people of India - usually the men moreso - but here at Tiger Fort, these women approached her and started throwing babies in her lap. "Have it," one of them said to her, although we're pretty sure she only meant to borrow it for a picture. :)

When we got back to Sunny's house, he was glued to the TV. We joined him for the second half as India bowled and fended off the Paki batsmen! They won with a safe margin and advanced to the finals where they would play Sri Lanka for the title in Mumbai. Near the end of the game, Sunny emerged from his bedroom with a shopping bag full of fireworks and we headed to the roof to join the rest of the city in celebration. His favorites were firecrackers that made M-80's seem like a lake cabin toy. There were fireworks exploding, people screaming, cheering and waving flags in the streets, sirens and horns sounding off in every direction; it was pure madness! .... and this was only the semi-finals.

The finals would finish just hours before we were scheduled to fly out of the New Delhi airport the following Saturday. We KNEW we had only seen a taste of what was to come!


With that, our time in Jaipur was finished. We said our long-winded good-byes and left all kinds of open invites to someday repay the favor if ever they should want to visit a place what we end up living.

When you're home, there are very few good-bye's where you literally mean just that - 'I'll probably never see you again; have a great life.' Living out of a backpack, it happens consistently and can be a bit depressing from time to time, I have to admit. All we can do is take lessons from each encounter and know that every person you've met along your way was not by accident.


Our next stop was in Pushkar - a charming small town where we seemed to be just a step ahead of the curve. There was no single major monument there, we didn't read about it in a 12 year-old copy of Lonely Planet, and generally speaking, there just weren't more than a handful of other foreigners there. The signs weren't in English, the prices weren't inflated double and the street vendors didn't harass you to buy from them just becuase you stepped foot into their shop. I felt like a traveler instead of a tourist for the first time since arriving in India, and it was really satisfying.

Broey and Sarah camelback in the central market of Pushkar, India. Our guides led us out to a sunset look-out point in the middle of the desert. 

Some local musicians came and serenaded us as we watched the sunset! This picutre reminds me of the old game on Sesame Street where they would divide the screen into 4 and make you try to figure out which thing 'didn't quite belong' - apple, pear, rhino and an orange; which one just doesn't fit here?? hmmm....... :)

Freedom! Camels are MUCH taller than I had realized, and I never saw them spit even once.

We came upon an interesting lesson along the road to our next stop when Nads took us to a tourist trap roadside restaurant for dinner. We sat for just a minute looking at the menu before realizing that the prices were more than double what we should be paying. We got up and left the restaurant and the owner chased us down outside. "It's okay, what do you need? 30% discount?... 50%?? No problem. Just don't tell the other customers please." If we had just arrived in India, we would never have known. The same thing took place along the way many times. Like when we arrived at our Agra hotel and the first price they quoted us was again, double what we ended up paying. Do your homework before you get to a new country! If I could re-do a couple of things, I would take back bartering the extra 20 cents out of the little lady street vendors in Cambodia, but paid more attention to the flat out 'we are blatenly screwing you because you don't know any better haha better luck next time' rip-offs. Lesson learned!

We arrived in Agra just in time to play a game of circle 15 on the roof with our dinner and get some rest. We would wake up at 6-something the next morning to explore the incredible, unprecedented, masterpiece; The Taj Mahal!!

Sarah and my mandatory reflecting pool picture. Some places never live up to their hype... Taj is NOT such an example!

Taken to record the fantastic detail inside the center tomb. If I'd been caught taking this picture, they'd confiscate my camera without any questions asked, I was later told by another tourist!

Close up to try to demonstrate the incredible detail of the Taj. None of the designs that you see are painted or colored-in in any way. Individual pieces of marble, hand-carved one by one over 500 year ago throughout the entire complex!! Unreal!

After Taj Majal came some dramatics unlike anything I would ever want to detail, but the incredible help we received from strangers that day make the story worth telling! It all starts when we stopped at an ATM to withdraw some cash...

I pushed the buttons on the ATM like I had done at least a dozen times all over Asia already on this trip, except this time, the machine didn't give me cash. Instead, it displayed a message on the screen that said plainly, "Your card has been retained." Just like that, Sarah and I had absolutely no access to our card - which meant no access to any of our money that was still in our Korean account .... namely, everything we had!

Our situation was severly worsened by several other factors: it was a Saturday afternoon where this particular branch of HDFC Bank was hardly open for a few hours in the morning and to retrieve the card was a process that would normally take 3 or 4 days, but we were leaving the country later that night! We were not citizens of their country, nor even customers of their bank. They had NOTHING in the world to gain by helping us. Oh and did I mention, all of the favors we were asking them were right in the middle of the cricket world cup finals (AKA the Superbowl, World-series, Christmas and Indi 500 all rolled into one)!!! The odds were not in our favor.

With nothing to gain except the satisfaction of helping strangers whom they'd almost certainly never see again (!!!), it took phone calls to Korea in the middle of their night, regional managers being interrupted mid-game and about 6 people's Saturday afternoon, but the people of HDFC Bank did what it took to get us our card back in an unthinkable show of goodwill!!!! We finally left them with our card in hand, about 3 hours after their bank should have been closed for the weekend!!

I'd call it legendary customer service, but it goes well beyond that considering we were never their customers. This was just people caring for others. As a service industry worker myself; my goal in my professional life has always been to be able to treat people that way. They cared about our situation and fought for us as though we were their family members and I promise that neither of us will EVER forget it!

So, Taj Mahal and this unthinkably great human experience in the same day - how could you beat that?? Well, we decided to celebrate an India World Cup Championship in the heart of it's capital city! Joe talked us into venturing back into the mayhem for a few hours before heading off to the airport. It turned out to be just enough time to absorb an undoubtedly epic life experience! India beat Sri Lanka comfortably and the city instantly lit up in a way that made the pervious experience in Jaipur seem like child's play! I wish I had captured more of the riot that ensued an hour later as we tried to make our way out of the city center!


This will never come close to capturing the pure bliss that was New Delhi at the end of that game, but it does give record of a hint of it. Note the nervous cows in the middle of the mayhem at the end! :)

I think there's a chance that Cairo decided to have its uprising when it did to help us fulfil our destiny to spend those 8 days in India. Strange that the stop we were most warned about from every direction, turned out to be my (and I think all of our) favorite and most valuable travel experience of my short life so far!!

13 months and 9 countries later, it was time to leave Asia. It's safe to say that my very last day there was one of my most memorable on the continent - perhaps one of the most memorable of my life. The next morning we'd wake up in Roma, Italia.