More scenes from Varanasi

Shot from my guesthouse balcony. For a room that cost only $5 a night, the view of the bathing ghats from the balcony was phenomenal.


It was hot in Varanasi. Lots of napping and resting in the shade to beat the heat.





Pujas being performed at the waterfront.



Ganges holymen preaching along the water.


Marriage ceremony along the waterfront. After being married, the wedding party traveled on a boat to the other side of the Ganges. The boat was still tethered to the shore by a flower laced rope.



Everyday life was on full display along the waterfront. Definitely no shortage of people who wanted to give you a haircut or massage.

112...

112. 112 days of sleeping in strange beds, buses, trains, and airplanes. 112 days of eating meals in restaurants, guesthouses, and from street vendors- some spectacular, and others probably the source of Delhi Belly. 112 days of traveling around India (and some in Laos) taking in the sights, sounds, and just watching everyday life unfold. I've really enjoyed taking photos everyday. It's been fun, but it feels like the lights just came on, the party's finished. It's time to go home, do laundry (with lots of bleach), eat some cheeseburgers, take a shower or 3, get a haircut, and watch some movies.

BUT I can't get too comfortable, I'm only turning right around in a week and a half! I start a 3 month position in Bangladesh for a STOP polio assignment with WHO. Woo-hoo, new adventures to be had! More photos and fun to come from Bangladesh. In the meantime, I'll post photos from my other 2 cameras once I get the film developed and scanned in. Stay tuned...

Venice Beach + India = Varanasi

Ok, the "Goodbye to India" blog posting was a bit premature. I decided to break up the 28 hour train journey from Calcutta to Delhi with a short stop in Varanasi, the holiest city in India. Varanasi is the center of the Hindu universe. It's been called the City of Life, and Hindu pilgrims come here to bathe in the waters of the Ganges River (also known as the Great Mother) to wash away their sins. As a tourist, you can't help but be captivated by everything as Hindu rituals and everyday Indian life unfold in front of you.

There's been only a few special places in the world (Yosemite comes to mind) where I just felt like everywhere I looked, there just seems to be a photograph wanting to be taken. Varanasi is definitely one of those special places. In some ways, it reminds me of Venice Beach with an Indian twist. Plenty of "performers" and everything is on full public display- grandmas bathing, kids playing cricket, oxen cooling off in the water, monkeys stealing food, goats eating garbage, babas (holy men) blessing everyone, bodies being cremated, dirty Indian men wanting to give you a massage (I stopped shaking hands with people, they kept on massaging it trying to get me to pay for a backrub, ugh)... definitely India's Venice Beach with a spiritual tinge.

There were about a dozen of ghats (baths) along the Ganges river, and there were plenty of boatmen willing to take you along the river. Like other water in India, it was used by both livestock and humans.




There were plenty of floating candle sellers for puja sacrifices during the nighttime.



My offerings...


Scenes from the waterfront at nighttime




Every night at the central Dasaswamedh Ghat, they have Hindu rituals being performed with music.



A special place indeed...

Zipping with the gibbons

Laos is one of those special corners in the world where you can use the words "ziplines," "gibbons," "treehouses," and "rainforest canopy" together in a sentence and no one will think differently of you. For the past year and a half, a different type of tour called the Gibbon Experience has been set up in the Bokeo Reserve in northwestern Laos- right next to the Thailand border.

As you might guess, there were treehouses in the rainforest canopy that you could stay overnight in. As an added incentive, you get to also confront your fear of heights by ziplining into and out of the treehouses. Treehouses and ziplines! It just doesn't get any better than that.

A forest guide helping Anna hook her harness onto the zipline for the first time.

And then you take a deep breathe, step off the platform...



These weren't just tiny ziplines with safety nets either. The treehouses were at least 30 meters from the forest ground, and on a few ziplines over a valley, you probably were closer to 100 meters up in the air. Most ziplines took a good 30 seconds to get across.


And unfortunately, you don't quite make it all the way to the end of the line most of the time. You just kinda dangle in mid-air until you go hand over hand on the line to the platform on the end. I knew I should have added some extra weight before doing this.

Err... just ignore the short-shorts on the G-man until I can photoshop them out, hah!



Living in a treehouse is kinda like reliving a childhood dream. You just can't believe you're doing it half the time. The cooks and guides would deliver us food and water by zipping into the treehouse. I wonder if Dominoes delivers this way too...
Treehouse 2

Treehouse 4

Inside a treehouse.


It would get pitch black at around 7pm, so what did we do then? Nocturnal ziplining of course! It pretty much goes against every survival instinct to step off a creaky wooden platform into complete darkness, but man, what a rush! We were well prepared when the guides wanted us to come down because of an incoming thunder storm. I'm guessing a treehouse and a metal line are not good places to be with lightning nearby.

We didn't see any gibbons, but we heard them singing to each other early in the morning. We would wake up to mist covered tropical rainforests, definitely made the speedboat journey from hell worth it.

In the instuction folder, it said to avoid hitting gibbons on the ziplines, which I guess must have happened before. Apparently, there was one gibbon that liked to hang from the ziplines.

The organizers of the Gibbon Experience built treehouses and ziplines in the reserve as a way to generate revenue for local villages and pay for badly needed forest guards. The reserve has been heavily used by hunters to illegally traffic animal parts to China and other asian countries, and the habitat of the gibbons were being seriously threatened.

This 2-month asiatic bear cub was a handful. It liked to do sneak attacks on shoe laces and gnaw on shoe leather. It's mother was likely killed by poachers for body parts to be shipped to China or Vietnam. It's hard to ignore the role of economics in conservation efforts.


Belly rub

Go Speed Racer, Go!

So we only had 4 days left in Laos, we wanted to make it to the Thai/Laos border to live in a treehouse and zip across the rainforest canopy with gibbons (another story for another day), but it's a 2 day bus or a 2 day slow boat along the Mekong river journey away. So what did we do? Take a 7-hour speedboat ride of course! It seemed like such a perfect solution at the time...



Yes, yes... we were all staring in disbelief. You see, when someone says "speedboat," I automatically think of hydrofoils or some other sleek watercraft straight out of Miami Vice. I wasn't expecting something that looked like it was a high school woodshop project where you are 2 inches above the water.



The boats were funny enough, but having to wear the Speed Racer-like helmets made it all that more surreal. I'm not too sure what the styrofoam would have protected when we're flying down the Mekong at 70+ kph...




And I honestly think there is more leg room on those kiddie ride boats at an amusement park that go in circles in 2 inches of water. Knee to chin for 7 hours on a wooden bench isn't fun! Still haven't completely gained all the feeling yet in my backside.

Once I got over my initial fear of us hitting something in the river, the scenery along the Mekong river was actually spectacular.






I actually have a videoclip of us zipping along the water at 40 or 50 mph but I will have to post it later.

More MORE Lao New Years celebration photos

And it can't officially be a celebration without a parade or two. There was the "official" parade that lasted 10 minutes, and then there were the unofficial ones that lasted for 3-4 days. Other than the monk processions and the costumed dancers, there weren't too many differences. There was plenty of water throwing at both, and people drove up and down the streets multiple times to splash and be splashed.








It seemed to be really popular to run around with cooking woks and smearing the grease from them on peoples faces. This guy had it perfected to an art form.


And nobody, not tourists, not locals, not grandmas, not crotchity old white fat tourists with rain jackets on while glaring at all the little kids with squirt guns (hello?! when in Rome??!!) and apparently, not even the King back in the day, was immune from the water throwing. How often do you get to throw water on cops in a communist country? That'll buy you at least a stick massage in the US!







And if you tried to protect yourself, it just made the water throwing, flour tossing, color dyeing, and black tar greasing that much worse. If people are opening up car doors to douse the others inside, what do you think is going to happen when you pass by with an umbrella?