Tag Archives: food

The Cigarette Lighter

  By spinetrak | February 25, 2006 - 11:36 am | India
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When we got back from Goa, we found a dead rat stuck in the A/C grill leading out to the terrace. Ok, maybe it was a mouse, but it would have had a decent size if it hadn’t already been well on its way to decomposition. We never got into the right mood to remove it, until Ksenia and the maid decided to take action. Well, more like Ksenia decided, and the maid took action. The same maid that only a few weeks ago complained about our neighbors throwing their food onto our terrace – although I think it seems to be dry food only now, no more wet French fries. So she fingers the thing out of the grill and without much looking throws it over the wall onto the driveway to the parking lot. Luckily, there was nobody walking around there, or maybe there was, but nobody seemed to mind.

Maybe it’s the same thing with the ongoing road construction saga. A few months ago, pretty much the entire stretch of 13km road between Bandra and Malad was reconstructed. Well, at least the sidewalks. Not there was much of a sidewalk to begin with, but in any event, they built nice new walkable lanes to the left and right of the road. It stayed sort of nice for a few weeks, so nice in fact that at least some of the pedestrians chose to walk on it, instead of on the road itself. That was over after a while, when cars started to park on it, the garbage and dust piled up, and it slowly turned into a public bathroom again.

So far so good, no news here. But what’s amazing is that last week or so they ripped open the entire stretch of sidewalk/bathroom again, the entire new stretch of 13km. Maybe they weren’t happy with the first results I thought, but in fact it turns out that apparently they had forgotten to put in the electric cable and sewage pipelines. No big deal, let’s just do it all over again and take care of it. I am willing to bet that they’ll do a third time in less than a couple of months, maybe for the telephone lines.

It is this sort of spectacular incompetence or corruption or maybe both that’s the most mindboggling about Mumbai. The fun part of it is that during the last almost two weeks, I had to make this trip in the auto rickshaw, because that’s how long it took the service station to do the regular 10,000km maintenance and a bit of a paint job on my car. Going in the rickshaw in Mumbai inevitably means being stuck between a hot stinking bus on the right side and a pre-war truck on the left, preferably with the truck’s diesel exhaust pipe sticking right into my face, which always makes for a good dose of black fumes anytime the traffic jam moves a meter or two.

I guess I could take a regular black cab or even a cool cab instead, but that only means four to six times the price of a rickshaw, plus the regular cab’s exhaust pipes quite often seem to end right in the passenger cabin themselves, and the cool cabs aren’t that cool, because the A/C typically doesn’t work as advertised.

I took the trains a couple of times, but watching grown up and relatively well-to-do men fighting for their lives in a desperate attempt to get a seat in the first class compartments is not my kind of fun early in the morning. Nevermind that the first class cars going uptown in the morning are actually not crowded at all, people nevertheless seem to think that unless they knock someone over while jumping onto the train as it enters the station they haven’t done a good job upholding the traditions of good train travelmanship.

Meanwhile, it took Ksenia and Deepak an hour or so to explain to the car service station what needs to get done to the car. After plenty of nodding and reassuring Yes, Madams, they said the car would be ready three days later, last Saturday, but then changed their mind to Monday. Monday turned into Tuesday, Tuesday turned into Wednesday, and then it turned out that they did the paint job, but forgot about doing the regular 10,000km maintenance. Instead, they seemed to be genuinely surprised that you would want to do the 10,000km maintenance when the car only has 9,761km on its clock.

The paint job was equally so-so – in fact, Deepak speculated that maybe they didn’t have enough light on the right side, which looked substantially less polished than the left side. Ok, so the maintenance job would take another two days, but unfortunately, they are out of stock on a number of spare parts needed – including suspension pads and petrol tank lock, both of which we needed, especially the lock, because it regularly takes half an hour at the gas station for the attendant to figure out how to lock the tank.

Anyways, to get those spare parts would take another month. Two days later, they hadn’t done much and the job obviously wasn’t finished. Deepak observed dryly that at least they seemed to have washed the car. But there was not much left of that when we went back again today. In fact, some of the interior was black with oil, and the brake pedal was squeaking and one door was rattling more than ever. Not to mention an entirely new big scratch they’ve added for extra convenience.

So, what have you done? we asked and the guy tried to convince us wholeheartedly that they’ve done everything, all painting, all maintenance services, and new lock for the gas tank. I tried to check out the new lock, but was immediately assured no, no, new lock, new key, but then we wondered, wait a minute, so where did you get the new lock from, we thought you were out of stock on those? Maybe not surprisingly, it turned out that there was no new lock and no new key after all, the guy was simply and completely talking out of his ass.

So we talked to the manager instead, who was reasonably straightforward, and we explained to him that we’d like to see the list of things they have done. Well, we’ve done everything as per the regular maintenance service (as per is always a good expression to impress with). Ok, we asked, what does that regular maintenance service include? As expected, just like the other guy, the manager also answered this question with the attempt to reach for our service handbook, so that he can read its contents to us.

Well, we were not in the mood for a little reading session, and the obnoxiously demanding foreigners that we are, we asked for their checklist, some work list that shows that some mechanic has checked of on his the oil change, and the transmission fluid, and maybe even the brake fluid. After some shuffling around someone comes back with that list – except it didn’t mention brake fluids or engine oil, it only listed the really essential parts of the regular service: side mirrors, backseat reading lamp, and most importantly, the cigarette lighter.

At that point, I almost lost it, but there it was: a signed and approved checklist for the cigarette lighter, but no such thing for brake fluid or engine oil – after eight months in Mumbai, some things still manage to shock me. The manager’s explanation was that the engine oil and brake fluid and such they have to do, but the cigarette lighter they do, because people complain, so they make a checklist to their customers’ satisfaction.

Anyways, so that was our Saturday afternoon. Three hours at the service station. The rest of the time there we spent waiting for them to fix the door rattling and the brake pedal squeaking. The door they managed, the brake pedal apparently was a lost cause, and we didn’t even bother with the steering wheel squeaking. After that, we took refuge at the mall, which, given our contempt for malls under any normal circumstances really says something. At least we passed on McDonald’s though – I think we’d rather drink that new brake fluid that our car may or may not have gotten than go there – but we did end up at an Italian restaurant, which wasn’t half bad.

Meanwhile, our little adventure in Mumbai is drawing to an end. We’ll go trekking in Sikkim for two weeks in April, and then we are out of here. Not that we regret having come here, not at all, it was definitely an experience, but maybe Central Park in May won’t be so bad either. We’ll ride our bicycles around Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, in the middle of traffic on 2nd Avenue, and we’ll think: aahhh, New York City, fresh air, quiet roads, laid back people. But we’ll also search for the perfect Dosas and masala chai, we’ll miss Deepak and our maid, and if we ever find a dead rat in our A/C, we’ll know what to do with it, no problem.

Going South

  By spinetrak | January 19, 2006 - 12:47 pm | India
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So our trip to the South was moderately successful. One thing Indian airlines have going for them, is that the food is consistently edible. The coffee is unsurprisingly the worst on the planet, but the food isn’t bad. It sort of even makes up for the fact that no-one ever wants to see any ID. They instead prefer to have you show them your boarding card about five times, and God forbid your hand luggage has no luggage tag, or even the luggage tag of a different airline. They have a little box with the luggage tags from all the different airlines, and you better pick the right one, or else it won’t get stamped as the bags get x-rayed. The box looks a bit like a box of candies, so in that regard, their security measures are kind of cute, although probably even less effective than the ridiculous taking off your shoes ceremony they invented in the US.

Anyways, we arrived in Bangalore and were almost impressed with the fact that Bangalore’s name Green City isn’t entirely pulled out of thin air. It’s noticeably greener than Mumbai, which of course doesn’t mean much. There’s a hole bunch of colleges, an army of software companies, and then the real army in town. I don’t know for what purpose exactly, but the Indian Army occupies large areas right in what seemed to be the middle of town. Or maybe it was the Air Force, because there was also a sad looking statue of some little jet fighter or something right in the middle of some intersection.

We eventually made it to Nrityagram, which was quite nice. Right next to it is a fancy Taj resort, and Nrityagram itself is a nice little place. They take on only six dance students every six years, two of which, we were told, actually make it all the way. We saw them rehearsing for an Odissi performance, which was really quite fascinating. The were performing at The Joyce Theater in NYC last year, and apparently will go on tour in the US later this year.

We then took off to Mysore and arrived pretty late by train. As we got off the train, we got, as usual, mobbed by an army of rickshaw drivers, but we always prefer to stand in line for the pre-paid rickshaws, even though it might not actually be cheaper. This time, we got yelled at by some guy who told us that it’s against the law to smoke in public and that we should study the law before coming here. We were too tired to tell him to shove it, so we just stepped away from him. Presumably it’s decidedly not against the law for the rickshaw driver to yell out to everybody standing or sitting around which hotel we had asked him to drive us to, because that’s exactly what happened. At least no one gasped ah, expensive hotel! like the rickshaw driver in Kotchi did a few weeks ago.

Anyways, the next day our itinerary brought us to the Karnataka State Silk Factory, which, sad as that may be, turned out to be pretty much the highlight of the trip. Basically, they just let you walk around the factory, no one bothers you, everybody was friendly and no one made a fuss. So we walked by a zillion machines (the older ones Swiss, the newer ones Japanese), from where they twist, wind, double, and rewind the silk yarn to rows and rows of screaming loud silk saree weaving machines, all operated by one or two guys. Unfortunately, photography was not allowed, but the machines were quite complicated, and some of the patterns were quite elaborate. The people were obviously proud of their work, and were happy to try to show us how the machines function. This one jolly happy chap was asking me how much money I make in Mumbai – it’s a pretty common question of strangers to ask – and then he complained laughingly that the Rs6,000/month that ($150) he makes after 30 years of service are not quite enough.

Our next stop was the Government Sandalwood Factory, pretty much next door, but that place was more like a deserted museum and there wasn’t much to see. So we went to the Mysore Palace. For some reason, we couldn’t really warm up to that building. Maybe it’s because it’s probably the youngest palace I have ever seen (it’s not even 100 years old), or maybe it was the crowd. Our Brahmin tour guide told us at least six times that the palace is decorated with 100,000 light bulbs, which didn’t really help, and by the 10th time he marveled over useless stupid facts like this chair is made of 65kg of silver, that box is made of 17kg of gold, these windows were made in Belgium, those mirrors were brought here from Bohemia, and so on and so forth, we were about ready to smack him. Funnily enough, their website only mentions 97,000 light bulbs, so maybe that explains his silence when I asked him whether those 100,000 light bulbs all work. By the way, the palace was occupied by the last Mysore Maharaja, whose father had built it (well, he didn’t build anything, he just went on an expensive shopping trip to Europe). His big fat son is now a politician.

After that, we had about enough of royal families and annoying tour guides, so we took off in a bus to Mudumalai. It was a bit of a challenge to actually find the right bus, because no one seemed to know or care when there’s a bus going in that direction, or if they did know, they all seemed to be talking out of their asses, because we got about five different departure times from three different people. Eventually, we found our bus, kick boxed our way to some seats and there we went and arrived pretty late in the evening.

We stayed two nights in Mudumalai, because it was green and calm, and because it turned out that it wasn’t actually simply a rumor that there’s wild animals living there. The first morning we went for a two hour walk with a guide and a French couple from La Réunion, and we saw a whole lot of elephant shit. No elephants, but at least their bathroom. We saw a lot of deer, some peacocks, but no tigers or even boers. I wouldn’t completely rule out that people here would simply get up even earlier in the morning than we did, just to strategically place some elephant shit here and there to scam the tourists, but the next day, we did actually see a real wild elephant and a boer. And tiger shit, or so we were told. The evening before, we had also seen a pretty impressive elephant feeding ceremony in an elephant camp and made acquaintance with one elephant that was rumored to have killed 18 people. He was a bit mad, we were told, but now he is fine.

From Mudumalai, our trip went literally downhill. First we made a stop in Ooty, which was pretty unattractive. Always on the hunt for the ultimate fabrics, we were led to the house of a Toda family. The fabrics weren’t very impressive, and the man sadly smelled of alcohol on this early afternoon, but their houses were quite interesting.

Then we took the toy train to Mettupalayam. Because that utterly unhelpful woman at the Mysore train station ticket counter was not in the mood to make reservations for us, we were left with buying last-minute tickets, which got us standing room only in the completely overcrowded general admissions car, right behind the criminally loud steam engine, with hot steam and smoke for added pleasure. That trip lasted about three and a half hours, and really wasn’t all the fun that it’s made up to be. Judging from the ecstatic screaming every time we went through a tunnel, the other passengers were having the trip of their lifetime though.

These three hours of madness were only the beginning for us. We then changed into the Express night train to Chennai. Luckily, we got a private sleeper coach, but we didn’t get much sleep, not least because the train conductors were helpfully knocking on our door asking about this and that and insisting that we fill out their customer satisfaction survey before they would leave us alone and let us sleep. The train arrived at 5am, and by that time we were seriously ready for a shower, but we still had another day to kill, and what better than taking a two hour bus ride to Kanchipuram, a town of many temples and many hand looms for silk weaving.

We went to RIDE and had a chat with their director, who was quite the character. There weren’t many sarees to see, but it was still pretty interesting. The director was basically saying that the poor get screwed by religion and corruption and that his organization is trying to teach them how to take their lives into their own hands, especially the women. We didn’t quite get what he was saying about getting death threats from some Swedish guy, and what the story was about him getting his feet washed by his maid, but it was an experience nevertheless.

The bus ride back to the Chennai airport was another death trap, but we somehow survived it and actually managed not to miss our flight. For some reason, you get cold wet towels in the plane these days. This time, we didn’t mind, and as we wiped our faces with them, they turned suitably brown from all the dust and dirt, so at that point it was definitely time to get home.

Kerala

  By spinetrak | December 24, 2005 - 1:49 am | India
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Our trip to Kerala started at 3am in the morning with the riksha driver making a big detour via the international airport to get us to the domestic airport. I suppose he was assuming that we must be wanting to get out of India, even though we repeatedly told him domestic airport. Or maybe he just wanted to take us for a ride and a little early morning scam. Either way, we were passing hundreds of parked rikshas, most of them with the driver sleeping under a blanket on the back bench. Even Mumbai gets a bit cooler at night at this time of the year.

We landed in Kochi at 8am, and the air was noticeably nicer than Mumbai, even while walking from the aircraft to the terminal, which looked like a repurposed train station. Most men were wearing white lungis, which look very comfortable. It would be nice if one could wear those in NYC, but then again, seeing that all the men in Kerala are constantly playing with their lungi, tucking them in and out, lifting them up or down and adjusting them, maybe not.

The can ride to the ferry for Fort Kochi was a bit of a ride from hell. The roads are much better than in Mumbai, but the drivers are even more suicidal. There was a disturbingly large amount of huge advertising posters everywhere along the 20 miles road, but eventually, we got dropped off at the ferry. Of course it was the wrong ferry, the ones for the tourist, so we got immediately harassed left and right, as we must have been the day’s first prey. But we successfully dodged this second scam of the day and rather than paying Rs400 for the tourist boat, we walked a bit further down to catch the Rs2.5 regular ferry, which had the added bonus of watching the security guy lock up all the passengers behind a steel gate as they were waiting for the boat to come in. Which it did, 15mins late, with another ferry in tow, whose engine had apparently given up.

In Fort Kochi, we had our first of many encounters with riksha drivers who simply refused to turn on the meter. At first, we were rather annoyed, but over the days it dawned on us that maybe this is one of the features of Kerala’s long history of communist governments. Maybe you can’t have the highest literacy rate and lowest infant mortality rate in India, a noticeably more equitable distribution of wealth and a school in literally every village, and still expect the riksha drivers to use the meter. Of course, the rikshas were still pretty cheap, but at two or three times the going rate in Mumbai, one had to wonder whether this was the tourist rate or whether the locals really pay Rs2000 or so a month just for their daily commute.

Kochi is quite nice, but the some of the aggressive sales tactics got a bit on our nerves quite quickly, and almost every riksha driver made the same joke about wanting to give us a ride in his Ferrari, which also got a bit old. One driver tried to tell us that petrol is much more expensive in Kerala than in Mumbai (it is not, as the central government sets the price). A waiter ordered us to sit and relax. And we tried a ayurvedic massage, which Ksenia loved and I found a bit too up close and personal for comfort (I take a Thai massage any time over that).

Somehow the nicest part was to sit in a tea house just a bit away from the main drag. But in the evening we saw a Kathakali performance, and that was great. Yes, there were virtually no Indians in the audience, and it was more an exhibition than the real thing, but it was very interesting and beautiful. We finished the evening with a pretty bad dinner and the next day we had a cold shower and decidedly horrible breakfast in our overpriced hotel – white toast and jam consisting of 50% sugar and 50% gelatin. What the hell happened to idli, we wondered).

After that, we took a two hour bus ride to Alleppey. Ksenia got a seat and observed a very suave guy quietly and slowly slipping a piece of paper into a female passenger’s hands, who took it after fifteen minutes with a coy smile, while I was standing the whole time, watching the communist flags go by. In Alleppey, we got picked up by the cook for the houseboat that we had rented in Kochi, and then we argued with the riksha driver, who also refused to turn on the meter. The cook got quite annoyed with us and said come on, sit down, everything is ready to go, which of course it wasn’t. But eventually our houseboat got moving and we got some food, which was actually quite nice.

We spent 24 hours on the boat, which is about enough for our taste. It’s nice and relaxing at all, but looking at rice fields isn’t really all that thrilling, nevermind the fact that one basically takes the boat through other people’s back yards, where the women wash their clothes, bathe, and brush their teeth, and some children (much better dressed than in Mumbai) ask the tourists for money.

Ksenia and I entered a lengthy discussion about possible explanations for the size of the paddles that the locals use with their little wooden boats. These paddles are basically teaspoon size: they are very small and look almost fragile, with an undersized surface for effective paddling, and they are only one-sided, i.e. they have to change their grip, if they’d like to paddle on the other side of the boat. If they had better paddles, let alone contraptions for actually rowing instead of paddling, they’d be quite a bit faster. After pondering many theories ranging from lack of materials or engineering expertise or rowing muscles, to they aren’t in a rush to get anywhere, to maybe they had never thought about it, we settled on the explanation that maybe they used to use these little boats to go on tiny canals into the rice fields, where rowing would have been impossible and paddling with teaspoons offered the best balance of moving forward and protecting the rice fields.

Anyways, somehow the engine of our own boat gave up pretty much in time for sunset, so we got towed for a bit by another boat, and the next morning we woke up to the smell of diesel exhaust as the cook and the two other crew members tried to repair the engine. Eventually, we got back to Alleppey, where we found a number of touts who didn’t understand the meaning of the word no, but also a bus station attendant with badly deformed legs who pointed us very helpfully towards the right bus to Thiruvalla, our next stop.

Thiruvalla has the only temple in Kerala where Kathakali is performed daily as part of the religious ceremony, and it also has a number of temples in the surrounding villages, so that’s where we wanted to go. But first Ksenia needed another ayurvedic massage, so we went to a place that was listed in our Kerala travel book, but that place really looked more a hospital than anything else. They didn’t seem to have any patients, because the owner/doctor pretty much spent his whole afternoon with us, embarrassingly eager to please us, to make us want to come back tomorrow, and to tell all our fiends. He even reserved a room and drove us to a hotel that he insisted we stay in, even though we had told him a few times that we don’t know how long and where we want to stay and that we might actually leave town altogether.

So instead, we just had lunch at the hotel, pondered our options and called a place outside of town, which sounded much nicer than this hotel in the middle of Thiruvalla. Of course, the receptionist followed us onto the street wondering where we are going, but ah well. We took one of the many HM Ambassador taxi cabs, and even the cab drivers that were immediately surrounding us were laughing with me when I laughed about the price the driver wanted for the 2km ride.

But at least we got there, and we were quite happy with our choice this time, the Vanjipuzha Palace in Chengannur, where it was quiet and green, the food was great and the staff was very helpful. Maybe a bit too helpful, because, since it is more a homestay than a hotel, the staff had no problem asking us all kinds of private questions, insisted on watching us eat while they served us very yummy food, and tried to walk into our room for our wake up call at 7am. Like many in Kerala, they are also Christians, which got a bit annoying when they started preaching about it or acted as if that were a special accomplishment, and downright embarrassing when one of them gave us a tour to a number of Hindu temples while going on about how Christianity is the opposite of Hinduism’s idol worship, as he called it. Strangely, he also was a devout anti-communist, the main reason seemingly being that the communist government was to blame for labor costs being too high and so many rice fields were no longer economical.

Either way, he was quite knowledgeable about the area, and he showed us a lot of things that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. In the evening, we went to the Kathakali temple and apparently he was able to tell us what the story was all about just from reading the hand gestures. Amazingly, the Kathakali performance is almost every night from 10pm to 5am. Not there were many people there apart from us, but it was quite impressive. Later on, there was a bit of a cat fight amongst the staff, because he hadn’t told the others where we were going or when we would come back, so they got all worried and showed up at 2am at the temple to find us and take us back to the hotel. Sadly, both staff members were strongly hinting that they would like to help us get themselves or their children a work visa for the US, again emphasizing that they are Christians.

Anyways, we left after three hours of sleep to catch a 6am train to Trivandrum. We only had time for a quick stop at the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, whose inner square was closed for non-Hindus anyways, as is the case in a number of temples, and then it was back to Mumbai, Ksenia’s backpack enriched with a number of fabrics and a hand-made metal mirror she had bought and me already looking where should we go onto our next little trip.

Ready To Strangle Someone

  By spinetrak | November 26, 2005 - 8:41 am | India
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Well, I think we’ve about reached our all-time low in India these days. At least I have, but I think Ksenia is following suit at a life-threatening pace. Today we moved from the hotel back to our apartment. We are not sure yet whether that was a good idea, because the air in our apartment definitely has a certain aura of cancerous dust and disease about it. Then again, our almost three weeks in the Grand Hyatt cost us bloody $1200 just for food and laundry etc. alone. Not that the food had even been any good. In fact, we got pretty sick of their menu, really. Worse, their morning coffee was absolutely poisonous. When the waiter asked me the other morning whether I’d like some coffee, I just told him, “yes, I’d like some coffee, but your coffee is so atrocious that I’d rather decline”. I suppose it is a bit of sign of my current state of mind, because I don’t usually treat waiters like that.

Anyways, either our relocation guy is even more useless than I had thought, or maybe it’s the Grand Hyatt that’s to blame, but when it was time to check out of the hotel, nobody seemed to have any idea about the fact that my company will be paying for the room, while I pay for food and laundry, etc. A bit of name dropping and half an hour later they had sorted it out and presented my with my bill of fifty-two thousand Rupees. The price tag of Rs9000 a night didn’t even include their crappy breakfast. To top things off, the concierge made me sign my bill twice, because he wasn’t pleased with the way my signature looked like the first time around.

We stopped at Barista on our way home for some coffee and breakfast. How is it even possible that breakfast for two at Barista is 10% of what they charged us at the Grand Hyatt? Of course, at Barista they served us our coffee, but then they completely forgot about our food. Add to that the fact that some motorbike rider on crack drove into my car the other day, giving it a seriously nice big scratch. Oh, plus, every evening that I’d come back to the hotel from work, their security staff would stop every car, look underneath them, and peek into the trunk.

They didn’t actually really look into the trunk, but they did insist that I open it every single evening. Which, because it’s an HM Ambassador, meant that I’d have to switch off the engine, get out of the car, open the trunk, close the trunk, get back into the car, switch on the engine, and drive off. Why? Because I have yet to find a single person around here who is capable of closing, i.e. actually locking, the trunk. Granted, the locks don’t seem to be the strong points of my car – it regularly takes 10 minutes every time I get gas for the attendant to figure out how to properly lock the gas tank.

Anyways, so it wasn’t even 11am this morning and I was already fully in the mood to kill someone. Mumbai is bloody hot these days and the noise and dust and pollution just never stops. Coming back to our apartment didn’t exactly improve my mood. There was cement dust everywhere, there still is. It smells damp and poisonous. It took my an hour to clean my PC – obviously, my landlord’s brilliant construction crew had not even considered covering my PC. Our shoes they had managed to first cover in dust and then just throw onto the terrace. Last we spoke to our landlord he proudly announced that he had cleaned the apartment, whining about how much money he had spent, but of course wherever we touched, our hands got covered in dust. The furniture shows nice streaks of dust, because some genius had simply used a dirty wet cloth to smear the dirt around a bit. The couch now displays a cigarette burn, and a piece of wooden ceiling just in front of the terrace is now completely ruined and covered in cement.

So eventually we needed some food and we drove to this fairly decent vegetarian restaurant. Last time we were there they had valet parking. I always use valet parking, because there is zero regular parking to be found in Mumbai. Anyways, this time the guy in the restaurant tells me to just park over there, on the sidewalk. Ok, I park over there and some other guy comes running towards me and tells me to park over there, where there’s obviously not enough space for my car. So I go back to the restaurant guy and tell him what the story is, but he obviously doesn’t give a fuck, nor does he speak any English now. So I yell at him a bit and ask him why he doesn’t just tell me right away that he doesn’t have any valet parking. Then I get back into the car, trying to drive off and somehow manage to rip off some other car’s front license plate.

Of course, that car’s driver gets out, doesn’t speak a word of English either, but starts gesturing around. We are immediately surrounded by a dozen gawkers. I tell one of them that there’s nothing to fucking see here, why doesn’t he just move on? His very thoughtful reply was: “This is India. This is not your country.” So the driver can’t explain to me what he wants, or rather: how much he wants, but then this very important looking woman comes along, and she’s obviously the owner of the car. She has no idea what to do either, other than ordering her driver to write down my license plate number and than turning towards me and telling me all huffy and puffy that I should have seen her car. “Yes, I should have, but I didn’t.” – “Well, if you drive, you should look.” She quite clearly was the expert driver, which would explain why she needs to get driven around by her chauffeur, but I left it at that and drove off.

Our next stop was some other restaurant where the waiter insisted that he doesn’t have any cold bottled water, only mineral water that comes in a bottle that is cold. It’s one of those small language things. The food wasn’t bad, but unfortunately we were sitting outside, next to a main road, and one could just see and smell the dust and exhaust fumes settling onto our dishes. I haven’t had a cigarette in two weeks now, maybe that’s why I am in such a pissy mood these days, but clearly I am just about ready to strangle someone, or to get out of this shithole, because it’s giving me a serious headache these days. But I think we need to clean our apartment first.

Matheran

  By spinetrak | October 19, 2005 - 12:24 pm | India, Videos
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Last weekend we drove to Matheran, probably one of the most popular and nicest places in Mumbai’s vicinity. Matheran is a hill-station, 2600ft above sea level, and is apparently the only village or town in India where vehicles are not allowed, so it has lovely air and a calm atmosphere, despite being quite touristy. It is only 110km east of Mumbai, but of course that still means a 3 hour drive. Add another hour, if you can’t read Hindi like us. We were kind of hoping to see signs for Matheran or Chauk or any of the other places shown on our fairly useless map, but no such luck, at least not in English. I had noticed on the way to Kashid that there were big signs for Goa for a while and then, all of a sudden, none of that, and we missed the road to Goa. So I was extra careful this time, but we ended up doing a little detour, reversing directions and passing through the same highway toll booth three times, until we finally understood the toll booth guy’s directions. We were meant to actually make a u-turn right at the toll booth, to get onto that little pothole infested dirt track, which then brought us to the road to Chauk. The toll booth guys only made us pay once, but they probably had a good laugh about those stupid Westerners. Try that on the NJ Turnpike, and you probably get shot at.

Anyways, so eventually we found Neral, which is the valley town where we could have taken a little toy train, which takes two and a half hours to climb up to Matheran, if that train weren’t currently out of service, due to the heavy rains this year. So we drove up the hill to where the road stops at a big chaotic parking lot. The road up there was quite something – hundreds of feet straight down on one side, canyons of water drains ripped and carved into the semi-destroyed road on the other side. The road was basically made of clay and had a nice 20% or so climb. One really had to wonder when this road will go down the valley in a landslide, but after half an hour driving in first gear we arrived and left the car on the parking lot.

From there we took horses, which is the main means of transportation in Matheran. Of course, there were two horsemen enthusiastically fighting for our business and before I knew it they literally pulled me in two different directions. We are not exactly practiced horse riders, so the fact that our horses were a bit on the small side was quite welcome. Half an hour later our horses dropped us off at the hotel that we had made reservations for. The place was recommended to me, and it looked like an odd mix of Sovjet exteriors and British-Indian colonial – well, at least the dining hall did, the bungalow-type hotel rooms looked just Soviet and didn’t have any windows to speak of. But they bathrooms were ok, and we picked the one that smelled a little less strong of whatever hotels in India smell like, probably some sort of anti-mold chemicals or maybe it’s anti-cockroach spray or whatever. There also was a strangely shaped and unused swimming pool, a cricket field that had not seen a batsman in 50 years, and something that was threateningly advertised as a discotheque, but which luckily also just turned out to be a threat.

The food was fantastic though. All vegetarian (and of course no alcohol), but very very yummy. The dining hall had a huge mirror with a kitchy etching of some wild horses, but one could well imagine a bunch of stiff British officers walking around in jackboots smoking cigars, so we didn’t even really mind that there was zero relationship between the price they had quoted on the phone, the prices on their price list, and the price we actually ended up paying.

The rest of the weekend we pretty much spent on horses and feet, going from one valley view point to another. People were annoyingly eager to try to nail us down on certain times of the day (or the next day) when they would be waiting for us with their horses, and wherever we went we or our horseman got asked where we were from and which hotel we were staying, but other than that, it was all good. One of our horsemen liked to watch WWF on television, the other one told us that his horse was the fastest horse in town, and of course the blatant staring and hello, how are you never ended.

We took one of the bigger horses once, but that was a bit scary, since it’s not like we actually have any clue about how to ride a horse. We also firmly decided that we don’t like monkeys. There were quite a few monkeys running around, and they are well trained to get their food by scaring tourists off their bags. Just a few minutes after we had seen one of the monkeys grab a plastic bag out of some tourist’s hands, I was sitting down with my bag next to me, lighting a cigarette, and before I knew it some monkey had snatched my bag and ran away with it. I guess I should not have left my bag alone, especially not if it contains a few slices of sweet bread from a Bandra bakery. So that monkey grabs the bag and as I try to go after him, the bastard just retreats right to the very edge of the cliff, a couple of hundred feet of air behind him. And then he hisses at me like a bloody monkey who just stole my bag, which by the way contained my passport, foreign registration card and another camera lens.

But of course that monkey is too stupid to actually open the bag and get the bread. Just like they are smart enough to get scared when you simply pick up a stone and raise your hand, but they are too stupid to throw stones themselves, thank god. So eventually he gets bored with the bag, leaves it right at the edge of the cliff, where there’s already a nice slope, and buggers off. Alright. Needless to say, we have an audience now and one guy deplores me not to go get the bag, because, you know, it is very dangerous and it goes down a couple of hundred feet. Well, yes, we are in India, and thankfully, it’s not like they turned that view point into a plot of concrete with benches and garbage cans on top and nice railings and warning signs around it, like they would in the US. And if anyone fell down that cliff into the valley, good luck with trying to sue the town of Matheran, telling them they didn’t know that falling down the cliff could hurt.

Anyways, so Ksenia was no longer in the mood to use her video camera or to take pictures, but just asked me nicely not to kill myself, as I got onto my knees, crawled towards my bag (go slow! someone yelled), and rescued my US passport and, more importantly maybe, my official Foreign Residents Registration Office book, the one printed on toilet paper, stamped many times by Indian government officials, the one and only document that sometimes allows me to pay local rates for museum entrance fees instead of the foreigner rates, which are usually ten or twenty times as high.

So apart from the nice views and the clean air, that life and death experience was another highlight. Well, plus the fact that it started to rain heavily just as we were about to head back home on Sunday afternoon. Not only didn’t we have umbrellas and weren’t in the mood to ride back to the parking lot in the rain, we also weren’t particularly happy about the idea of trying to drive down that little nasty clay road in heavy rain, because that seemed like just asking for trouble. But then it stopped raining, so we rode back to the parking lot, and of course by the time we got there, it was dark and now it was raining again. Ah well. So we had no choice but to slowly slowly feel our way back down that road, 1st gear all the way, and then back home from there, this time without any detours. All in all, not bad, and we’ll come visit Matheran again some time.

In other news, Ksenia is getting a tooth pulled tomorrow. The Indian tooth fairy hasn’t been so kind to her so far. Also, one of her first exectutive decisions when she got back was to fire our maid. And when I asked her today what’s new in the world, she said well, apparently, policemen in Mumbai are raping women left and right… Ok, so maybe some more on those things another time.