Week 15: I was the Walrus but now I am John

Tony at the Taj.  

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.

Varanasi alleyway pilgrim

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 :)

Varanasi Fire ceremony celebrating the end of day

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.

Launching prayer candles at sunset on the Ganges

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.

Monument to the location of the Buddha’s first sermon

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. 

Sunrise from a small boat on the Ganges

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).

Election rally for Modi as he ran for prime minister

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.

My palace in Narlai

(Note the multi story temple clinging to the lower left of the enormous boulder)

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.

Watching the moon rise from my palace in Narlai

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