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Tony at the Taj.
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The Magical Mystery Tour is complete after 15 weeks (105
days) of traveling. I trekked through
Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Nepal, India, and then some decompression
time in Texas with friends and family.
I’ve just arrived in California and this will be my last travelogue for
some time.
I am thinking about having a cocktail party at my house to
show some of my travel photos. Send me a
private message or comment if you are interested in joining (so I can pick the
best day).
When I last posted, I was scrambling around Nepal armed with
a lonely planet guide and an increasingly dilapidated backpack. Subsequently, I joined forces in India with
Alexa La Plante, who is a former colleague that was doing charity work in West
Bengal before starting a tour of Northern India.
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Varanasi
alleyway pilgrim
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I was in India for 3 weeks and visited around 12
cities/regions. The first stop was in
Darjeeling where two friends doing charity work with Alexa named Anne and Kunal
joined us for sightseeing. The Darjeeling
region is adjacent to Tibet and was once part of Nepal. Although an Indian province, most people in
this region can still speak Nepalese and you can’t go too far without seeing an
ancient Buddhist temple. As such, the
area is an interesting combination of Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetian cultures
set in the backdrop of the Himalayas.
Darjeeling is probably best known to westerners for its tea
and its depiction in a movie called ‘The Darjeeling Express’. The tea planting areas were similar to the
Napa Valley hill country – and it was great fun to take gondola rides and do
tasting tours of the tea plantations.
The Darjeeling train that we went on was a little too authentic for my
tastes since it still used coal and if the wind was wrong, choking smoke and
fly ash would fill the passenger cars.
Usually I’m totally down for languishing in toxic fumes, but for some
reason, on that day in India, I was not in the mood for it :)
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Varanasi Fire ceremony celebrating the end of day
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Rounding out the Darjeeling region, we visited Pelling,
Gangtok, and Kalimpong where we focused mainly on the ancient Buddhist temples
that occupy the highest peaks. One day,
Alexa and I were fortunate to be in a temple nicknamed binoculars (because it
was at the top of a mountain and you could see every direction from the peak)
when a prayer ceremony was performed by monks in a temple several hundred years
old. They began with around 5 monks
chanting, and then added a 4 man horn section playing instruments I had never
seen before. The air was thick with
incense as we sat on prayer mats silently joining a tradition that has been
continuously practiced for over 2000 years.
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Launching prayer candles at sunset on the Ganges
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After Darjeeling, we headed for the Northern Plains of
India. The terrain went from mountainous
and temperate to flat and boiling. When
I say boiling, I mean boiling mister bigglesworth! The average daily high was 110F (43C). Needless to say, we were some of the only
Westerners visiting during that season.
Weird as it may sound, you sort of get used to the heat. Our tour guides
were especially happy to see us, since many of them had not had work in a
month. We went from being curiosities in
the hill country to
“what-the-heck-are-fair-skinned-people-doing-around-here-let’s-ask-if-we-can-get-a-picture-with-them-for-facebook”
local entertainment. People were so rabid
to take photos with us that one time a group of guys asked me to take a picture
with them while I was actively using a urinal – presumably to beat the rush of
other paparazzi lurking outside.
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Monument to the location of the Buddha’s first
sermon
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The first city we went to in the Plains was Varanasi - which
is the oldest continuously occupied city on Earth. People have been living on the banks of the
Ganges in Varanasi for over 4000 years.
Bathing and being cremated in the Ganges is central to the Hindu
religion – some Indians plan their whole life to have a sacred pilgrimage to
the town. Alexa and I watched the
sunrise and the sunset from a small boat on Ganges near ancient temples – it
was majestic and spiritually moving. In
the evening, there was a fire ceremony to give thanks for the day and to pray that
loved ones make it through the night.
During the sunset ritual, we launched votive prayer candles on the
Ganges – I can’t remember what I wished for, but fingers crossed it was
something worthy of the occasion.
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Sunrise from a small boat on the Ganges
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While we were in Varanasi, there was a political rally for a
prime minister candidate visiting the region named Modi. With 1.2 billion people, India is the world’s
largest democracy and their election is phased in regionally over several
months for logistical reasons. Mad-house
is the only way to describe walking the streets with throngs of political
supporters hoping to catch a glimpse of their candidate. The crowds were so worked up that when I
asked to go into the heart of a rally the guide said that only I was allowed to
go and that Alexa must stay in a car for safety reasons. When I went into the crowd, strangers
festooned me with an orange Modi hat and then people mobbed me to take photos
and videos with me ‘supporting’ a candidate I had just heard about :)
Near Varanasi, we visited the Dhamek Stupa which marks the
place where the Buddha gave his first sermon after ‘achieving
enlightenment’. The whole concept of
achieving enlightenment confuses the scientist in me. How do you know objectively if you achieved
enlightenment? Is there an Olympic
committee that judges you – or one day do you just sorta feel enlightened? Maybe you or I are already enlightened and we
don’t know it yet! Regardless of your
belief system, the eight principles the Buddha espoused that day are quite
inspiring (1. Right Beliefs, 2. Right Aspirations, 3. Right Speech, 4. Right
Conduct, 5. Right Means of Livelihood, 6. Right Endeavors, 7. Right Memory, and
8. Right Meditation).
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Election rally for Modi as he ran for prime
minister
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Next stop was Agra - which is the home of the Taj
Mahal. The Taj lived up to its billing
as a wonder of the world – it was amazing beyond words and I won’t even try to
sum it up in my clumsy journal. After the Taj we explored the cities of Jodpur
and Jaidpur that exemplified the success of the fabled Maharajas.
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My palace in Narlai
(Note the multi story
temple clinging to the lower left of the enormous boulder)
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A highpoint of the plains IMHO was a little religious temple
hamlet named Narlai. This town was the
most rural of all the places I visited in Asia (population of 7,000) and we
were the only tourists in the region.
Our hotel was a former Mogul/Royal palace that has been converted into a
35 room hotel. In the backdrop of the
palace was a 40 story boulder with a Hindu temple clinging to it that looked
like a storyboard out of an Indiana Jones movie. We went to the temple at sunset and Alexa was
encouraged to join the procession. As
such, she was ringing the prayer bell and joining in the chants with the locals
while I discretely took photos in the lurch.
Although Narlai was relatively temperate while we were
there, fear of desert heat kept all other tourists away. As a result, Alexa and I’s two rooms were the
only ones occupied on the compound and we had a staff of around a dozen or so
attendants to serve our every need.
‘Our’ rooms looked out over ‘our’ courtyard and ‘our’ pool and ‘our’
massage/spa tents. When we were asked what
we wanted for dinner, we were also asked where on the property our table should
be placed so we could best see the moon rise over ‘our’ palace. I will never forget the feeling of being a
king in my own castle – even if it was just for two short days.
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Watching the moon rise from my palace in Narlai
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After Narlai, we went to
Delhi (a town of 17 million) that is the capital of India. I’m not personally interested in mega-cities,
so after one day I jumped a 15.5 hour flight to New York (free first class
courtesy of my amazing sister). I took a
standby flight to Texas to visit my parents in San Antonio and couch surfed in
Austin for a spell (special thanks to Chris, Amy, and Ryan for hosting me)!!!
I’m now back in California, posting my last, and
bittersweet, travelogue of this journey.
I’m so very grateful for the opportunity to have seen with my own eyes
things that I had only dreamed about before.
I would like to give special thanks to the wonderful people that I met
along the way who made me feel at home in faraway places and to my friends and
family who were with me in spirit every step of the way.
-Tony
