| The Waking: The Angry Tourist |
[Dec. 15th, 2005|07:43 pm] |
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I'm back from India and really sick with the flu, though I hope to get well by the end of this week and start volume 2 by the beginning of next week. I haven't been this sick for a long time, so I'm hoping I get well soon and back to normal. So far, there's been no improvements - I cough so much at night I can't get to sleep. Pure agony. Because of the flu, it was pure agony in Bangalore too, with my friend's wedding as the sole source of solace. That said, Bangalore was alot more fun AFTER I've experienced it rather than before. But first, the usual news.
The Dreaming: Is out on the shelves, and online. I've still got my list of Australian bookstores up, and the latest preview chapter for the book is still up on the TOKYOPOP site. I hear that my book is selling pretty well at Sydney's Kinokuniya bookstore. I wonder how it's doing at the other stores?
3 out of 3 Postive Reviews: To list them out, they are the AnimeFringe review, the IGN Review, and the ListerX review. Thanks very much to all those reviewers, and I will post up more reviews as they come.
Bangalore: The Angry Tourist
I won't miss my chance to talk about Bangalore; not while I'm still in Angry Tourist mode and recovering from the flu. The thing about travelling is that while it's always excruciating going through a third-world country, it's always alot more fun in retrospect. In my instance, I've travelled in Vietnam and Cambodia, so third-world countries don't bother me - however, I can't say that I have the same affection for India as I did for Vietnam and Cambodia. Once again, it's got nothing to do with the conditions. India is actually BETTER than Vietnam and Cambodia in terms of things like, er, shopping, but it's the PEOPLE that get to me. I assure you, it's not NORMAL Indians - who are perfectly nice, helpful people, but certain types of SERVICE people. Somehow, Indian hawkers and rickshaw drivers manage to annoy me 10 times more than their equivalents in Vietnam and Cambodia. The others who travelled with me, many a well-experienced third-world traveller included, actually agreed with me on that. But unlike me, they're politically-correct enough to say "It's just different over here". Yeah. If you say so.
The wedding was the best part of the trip - ahhhh, finally some peace and quiet, and seeing a good friend getting hitched. She had a traditional Hindu wedding, with much chanting of prayers and esoteric rituals. Most Hindus there had no idea what was going on either, since the priests chanted in Sanskrit. The bride Sunita is in mauve. The groom Prashiba hasn't arrived yet, though he is in other pictures I have.
I may not have liked my Kerala tour as much as I liked my Vietnam/Cambodia tours (conducted in the same manner), but it's Bangalore that drove me completely crazy. Kerala was actually pretty nice, and I would recommend it to others, but I swear to God... if you EVER want to travel through a third-world country, make sure you ALWAYS book a private car and a driver for the duration of the whole trip. Because unless going insane is your objective, you will be saved alot of trouble. I travelled through Kerala, Vietnam and Cambodia with these private car + tour guide arrangements, and quite frankly, I didn't realise what a godsend it was until my group had to travel around Bangalore on our own. And THAT was what turned me into the Angry Tourist.
Mehendi, a purely decorative ritual just before the 3-day wedding. It's a brown mush you apply in fancy patterns, and you wait for it to dry and wash it off. It dyes the skin a brown-red colour, and is the Indian equivalent of hen's night, I suppose.
Travelling in Bangalore
It's not that it's hard to travel around in Bangalore. Well, actually it is. For a city that's supposedly the high-tech capital of India, it's amazingly frustrating to get around in. That wouldn't be a problem if you were just a backpacker, and you had time on your hands. However, I was in Bangalore as a wedding guest, meaning that I had to go to 4 days of religious and pseudo-religious ceremonies, and quite frankly, getting ANYWHERE on-time in this city is virtually impossible. That probably explains why nothing in India starts when they're supposed to. Everything from airplanes to wedding functions to taxis are late.
First of all, there are no proper maps of Bangalore. This city has road, streets and traffic lights, but no one has bothered to map it out properly. A map may show you the mainstreets, but none of the sidestreets, and they're often wrong. Most people get by on landmarks, and by asking the locals where a certain place is. So that means while you can still buy a map, it won't mean anything, because the driver of the most common form of transport, a three-seater motorbike called a rickshaw, won't know where they're going anyway. So while you can flag down a rickshaw almost anywhere in the city, 100% of them won't know how to get to your destination, nor will they even know where the suburb is. And to top it all off, they drive like maniacs, even for a third-world driver. I've been on rickshaws who go up one-way streets, with people going the correct way shouting at the driver, and another one who did two U-turns at night at a busy unlit round-about, right into the pathway of a bus who couldn't see us. I survived, but I actually didn't mind the insane drivers so much.
Why didn't I take a photo of an actual rickshaw? Well, here's what it's like riding in one. See the visible dust on the road. That's how bad the pollution is.
What I hated, was knowing they'll overcharge you 99.99% of the time. Some drivers, despite the meters saying 80 rupees, will demand 120 rupees at the end of the trip. Or they'll say they deserve extra money because THEY got lost, and had to ask the locals, who will always point you in the WRONG direction instead of saying "I don't know". In these sort of instances, you'll fight with them on principal, but after a few days, I found that our group was becoming exhausted by the constant fighting. We had to wake up early to get ready for the wedding, catch a rickshaw 4 times a day, try to be on time, and eventually we just got too tired to argue with the rickshaw drivers. So we just forked over the money and got the hell away from the road, just to get some respite.
Was there no better way to travel around Banglore? Sure there was. Pre-paid taxis; which are taxis belonging to certain companies with a reputation to uphold. If you go on a normal taxi, you could be driven somewhere remote and blackmailed for a large sum of money - as happened to someone else from the wedding party. You call up the pre-paid taxi company to give the origin and destination, and they normally quote the price before you go, and they even know how to get to a certain place on time. They also charge alot more than rickshaws, but even this service is annoying and full of holes. Firstly, we got ripped off by a pre-paid taxi when we first arrived - demanding extra money for our luggage when we've already told him BEFORE we got on that we had extra luggage. We shouted him down, but shouting them down isn't the problem.
Pre-paid taxis must be booked at least 2 hours in advance. Still, they can be an hour late, or they can charge extra money for having to wait for you (without telling you). They can't be booked too early, as the operator told me, because they'll forget the booking. You can book an early morning taxi the night before, but you can't book a taxi normally for more than 5 hours before your departure time on the same day. They also have to be booked and charged for hour blocks, so if you want to book a taxi at 9:00am from A to B, and book the same taxi from B to A at 3:00pm, you'll have to pay for that 6 hour block where they'll just sit there and wait for you. Or you can book the morning trip, and then re-book at 1:00pm in the afternoon for the 3:00pm taxi. And don't tell me about the time when we called up, and the operator can't take bookings because he was in the shower. It didn't seem to make any difference which pre-paid taxi company you called.
And I never got on any trains or buses, which I was grateful for. If you've ever seen either in India, you'll know you don't stand a chance.
The Food in Bangalore
The wedding was the best part of Bangalore, which I'll talk about some other time. It was just too smooth to make for a good story. That said, India has dangerous food and water. If you're lucky, nothing will happen to you, but if you're really unlucky, you may end up with a severe stomach bug and vomit up anything you eat for the whole week. Such has happened with a friend of mine from the groom's wedding party, and since catching up with her I'm glad I never ate any fish the whole time I was in India. Said friend has been to Sri Lanka, and told me that she and her party didn't have half the transport and food problems in Colombo than they did in Bangalore. At the time, it was pretty surprising, since Sri Lanka is supposed to be at civil war.
Eat with right hand, unless you want to horrify everyone. We could have asked for spoons, but we wanted the authentic experience, which included the mild diarrhoea in the morning. It's not the food - rather the tap water that was used to wash the leaf before food was put on it. The food was fantastic though - worth the mild diarrhoea.
The water, as always, must be bottled. You'll probably die if you drink the same water as some Indians do. Meat-wise, there isn't alot to choose from. High-class joints will have great food, but I've noticed that there is a curious lack of meat on most menus I've encountered in the country. "Curious" isn't the right word - I know mostly why - Cows are sacred to Hindus, and Pigs are unclean to Muslims. Therefore, no beef or pork on much of the menus, and you're lucky if they have mutton in the kitchen (no matter what it says on the menu). So that leaves chicken, and if you're low on protein, alot of egg omelettes. Protein deficiency aside, the curry is fantastic. But you'll have to know where to find it, that's for sure.
Shopping in Bangalore
Shopping in Bangalore is centered on and around a stretch of road called MG Road, MG for "Mahatma Gandhi". Just about everything that can be named after someone in India is probably named after Mahatma Gandhi, and it's no coincidence that this is the main shopping street in town. Thankfully, most rickshaw drivers know how to get there, even if they don't know how to get back to where we stay. Intersecting MG Rd is Brigade Rd, which clearly says "Bridge Rd" on the Bangalore map, except that not a single soul in Bangalore knows where "Bridge Rd" is. Apart from that, there is also Commercial Rd, which used to be a good place to bargain, until Lonely Planet made it into a tourist strip and so therefore the last place you'll want to bargain.
I went to Bangalore expecting new-fangled shopping malls everywhere selling cheap electronic equipment or clothing, and guess what? I'm probably shopping in the wrong district. And I really should have done my clothes shopping in Kerala, because Bangalore is much better at fleecing tourists than Kerala is. Not saying there aren't great shopping if you know where to look - there are great discount stores that sell excellent quality stuff. Rock onto Giruja Silks on 8th Cross in Malleshwaram for great saris, and Bhavani on DVG Rd, Basavanagudi (near Gandhi markets) for anything involving jewellery. But then neither are tourist places, and can be difficult to find.
Endless rows and rows of colourful cloth...
Out of all the shopping, Bhavani and general sari shopping has to be the best. Sari shopping the best of all, because here is a form of clothes shopping that involves little to no energy. You don't even have to try anything on, because a sari is just a piece of cloth, and the skirt and blouse are bought separately and stitched by a private tailor (that's the complicated part). For the first part, you just go to a swank sari store, sit yourself comfortably at the counter, then demand the service people to show you all the saris there are of a certain type and within a certain price range. They then will retrieve stacks and stacks of colourful cloth for you, while you go through it and pick out any you may be interested in buying. You can probably go through 50+ saris before you find about 5 you like. That's the "correct" way to go sari shopping, and if you feel sorry for the clerks who have to fold everything up again, then you've never seen a RICH Indian go sari shopping before. Which points to one thing I've noticed about India, specifically when dealing with service people.
No photoes in Hindu temples, and no shoes either. For a foreigner like me, it was the chance to deprive me of my shoes and camera, and then make me give 2-5 rupees afterwards to get it back. In terms of experience, Hindu temples are much more photo-worthy on the outside than they are on the inside, though it was eye-opening.
The Angry Tourist in Bangalore
Being nice to service people gets you nowhere in Bangalore. Saying "please" and "thankyou" may be nice, but it also means that things gets done on your behalf much slower. Loud, demanding people are the ones who get what they want quickly. Within 2 days of Bangalore, I've completely dropped all pretenses with manners and found that things got done much faster that way. "I want that one. I don't want this one. Get me some tea. More spoons. I'm not paying that." Add all that shouting at rickshaw drivers with the way I glowered at street-side trinket sellers to keep them away, made me into a very grumpy tourist indeed. It's just as well, because I had the flu, exacerbated by all the dust you eat while on a rickshaw - so at the end of my Bangalore trip, I was just grateful to get away. It was a fun wedding, but the insanity just got to me big time. So much that when I get to Singapore, I was amazed that nobody ripped me off, and that the hotel toilet worked.
Doraemon on TV, in Hindi, very popular, as it is all over the world except in English-speaking countries. Along with Yu-gi-oh too - the voice acting is FANTASTIC! They sound almost exactly like their Japanese counterparts, except for Yuugi. Makes you wonder why English voice acting sucks so much. Bollywood relies much on voice-synching, so perhaps the voice actors come from there.
Was it a good experience? Sure, now that I'm back in Australia. It taught me a few things about travelling TRULY without a tour guide of any sort, and how difficult it can be. But perhaps that's just India. I've had friends who's travelled in Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and South America without tour guides, and they said that Bangalore was more difficult to handle than anywhere else they've been in. Either way, I'll have to travel more to find out. |
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