R.I.P. Sir Edmund

Edmund Hillary passed away the day before our arrival in Auckland. Here in NZ flags have been at half mast; notes and flowers have been collecting in front of the various Hillary statues and portraits that dot the country; newspapers are filled with reflective anecdotes about his life.



We were in Queenstown the day of his funeral; on television we watched the Auckland procession and ceremonies that included large Nepali and Maori contingents.

Hillary was knighted by Queen Elizabeth (apparently it was one of the first things she did upon ascending the throne), and there were some ruffled feathers in the NZ press (to put it nicely) when it was found out the royal family had no plans to send any representatives to the funeral.

Sydney food

Our best meal of the entire trip, hands down: a place called Est. Maybe the best meal we’ve had in the past year, even.

Sydney is considered a culinary rival to SF, and we arrived armed with a list of restaurants, cafés, patisseries, delis, bakeries and takeouts that had all received glowing reviews from the press or recommendations from fellow visitors. The list didn’t prove very helpful though. Turns out that Sydney pretty much shuts down in January, and almost every single place on our list was closed for the month. After a few fruitless cab rides and metro trips, we learned to call ahead.

Sydney is home to some of the nicest McDonalds I’ve ever seen. They almost look... upmarket(!?) Modern & spacious with a pseudo Jonathan Adler design aesthetic; faux leather and woodgrain. One downtown branch had pillars, chandeliers and a cathedral ceiling. Oh, and they’re all pristine. After India, it was a strange thrill to actually see employees wiping down tables and mopping floors. Ahh, beautiful.

The perfect city

A Sydney cabbie asked us where we were from. "San Francisco? Our twin city!" he remarked at our answer.

Sydney and SF are often compared to one another; both are scenic coastal towns with similar cultural and culinary scenes (and iconic bridges, of course). I’m not sure this is entirely fair to Sydney: At its heart, San Francisco is still a shabby frontier town, no matter how expensive it gets or how respectable it pretends to be. Sydney, on the other hand, is strangely perfect. The city is safe, clean, modern and sprawling, with pleasant contemporary architecture, good infrastructure, and determinedly cheerful inhabitants. It’s scorching hot in the summer (that would be January), and there’s an almost complete lack of graffiti or panhandlers. It’s Scottsdale with a harbor.

Sydney is pretty quiet for a city of four million--most businesses and retail outlets close up around 5pm. Sydneysiders, though, treat themselves to one night a week to stay out 'late': stores are open till 9pm on Thursdays.

I can’t offhand think of two cities that are more different from each other than Mumbai and Sydney; Jacqueline and I experienced some real culture shock in flying directly from the former to the latter. In Sydney we were thrilled with the novelty of being able to drink tap water and eat food without getting violently ill, and relieved at the general ease of life here. But the calm and cleanliness and efficiency of Sydney seem…well, colorless. And empty. I felt like an ingrate for not appreciating it or embracing it.

Technology

Outside of Jodhpur, our bus stopped for a roadside bathroom break. Several of us walked over to a nearby water wheel. The elderly farmer proudly showed us the elaborate pulley system that hoisted water buckets out of a deep well, powered by an ox that moved the wheel. To irrigate his crops, the farmer spent hours a day riding his ox around in circles. His wife and family washed clothes on the rocks nearby. I was impressed with the inventiveness of the system, even as I pondered how it can take so much time and effort to do something as basic as retrieving water.

I turned around and noticed Jacqueline talking to a young boy, maybe about 10 or 12 years old. My headphones were on his ears, and he was staring at the iPod in Jacqueline’s hands. She was smiling, showing him how the controls worked, playing music and showing videos on the small screen. His jaw was slack and his eyes were transfixed; he looked disbelievingly at Jacqueline. Afterwards on the bus we wondered if the boy would tell all his friends about the strange spaceship that had landed on his family’s farm.

Slideshow: Waitomo caves

To see the full-size slideshow with captions, click here.

In the news...

...Madonna and family have been closely following our footsteps through Rajasthan and Mumbai (Though it looks like they're enjoying much nicer accommodations).

Slideshow: Jaisalmer to Mumbai

Click here to see photos full-size with captions.

Notes on "Most Disturbing"

Peter, one of our travel-mates, was sitting in our room late at night. He was relating a story to Jacqueline about a legless man with shoes on his hands, pulling himself through the street. I was fumbling with the laptop, half-asleep and only half listening; I absent-mindedly asked "Was he naked??" Waves of confused laughter from the two of them. I’m not sure exactly why I assumed the guy was naked, but it seemed plausible to me. We then talked about how India sharpens one’s sense of the sick and absurd. It got to be a common question people in our group asked each other: "What’s the most disturbing thing you saw today?"

From these conversations comes this unofficial, still-being-compiled list of some of the more unsettling things we’ve seen in India. They’re not in any particular order, and perhaps I’ll be adding to the list as I remember more.

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On the express train from Delhi to Agra, a cross-eyed & legless boy dragged himself down the aisle, tugging on peoples’ sleeves, asking for spare change and collecting the garbage/recyclables from our back seat pockets.

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In Delhi, as we sat on a tuk-tuk momentarily idling at a busy roundabout, a man hobbled up to us, dodging traffic, wincing in pain, naked except for a turban and loincloth. His loincloth, however, was pushed completely aside by the giant brown beach ball he tenderly balanced between his legs as he shuffled--he had scrotal elephantiasis(!!), something I had always thought was mere urban legend. The beach ball dangled down about mid-calf, and seemed in danger of hitting neighboring vehicles. "Money for medicine! Money for medicine!" he pleaded to us in a gravelly Tom Waits voice. We knew we were witness to something unique when even our tuk-tuk driver recoiled from the sight--he seemed genuinely spooked, and tore us out of our gridlock as soon as he saw the slightest opening in the traffic.

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In Bombay, stopped at an intersection, a handless beggar put his forearm stump through our cab window and asked for some rupees. Another day, at another intersection, a young man completely covered in blistered burned scar flesh (face, chest, and arms; he barely looked human)--leaned into our cab and asked for money (yes, I suppose I should know by now to keep my window rolled up, but it gets so hot). It had been mentioned to us several times that families sometimes deform their children on purpose—set them on fire, cut out their tongues, etc—to increase their "earning power" as beggars.

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Beyond that, there are the more common deformities we noticed: missing arms or legs, people with strangely “reversed” knee joints who walk around on all fours like dogs or horses. There are countless people with disabilities that seem treatable: basic limps, cleft palettes, cataracts... Evelyn (a longtime resident of Mozambique) shook her head: "It’s amazing. It’s like home; people die from completely stupid things like toothaches."

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In the muddy, open-sewered streets of Jaisalmer, feral pigs engaged in violent turf-wars with feral dogs. When walking, we tried to give them a wide berth. Some of our travel-mates saw a puppy shaken to death in the jaws of a big mamma-pig; this was what had set off the last round of animal violence & retribution near our hotel.

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Also in Jaisalmer, whenever walking back and forth between our hotel and the internet café next door, a rabid dog with hip dysplasia excitedly stumbled/wobbled after us with his mouth full of foamy saliva. We would throw rocks at him to keep him at bay.