India

This has taken me forever to finish. I finally had to resort to jotting down all of my thoughts as they came to me, otherwise I would've never posted it.

My number-one goal while living in Thailand has been accomplished.

Artwork by Beth Bachmann

But first things first.

Last December, we had a big group of people come to visit us here in Thailand: my parents, my Aunt Beth, and our friends Maddie & Manish with their son Eshaan. It was a lightning-fast whirlwind in Thailand, so this first part is going to be more of a basic description just so I can remember it all.  There was no time for philosophical reflection!

This is how I had to organize their visit, with full sheets of paper for each day. It was crazy.

They all arrived in Bangkok late at night. We had a mini-reunion at 3 am.

Day 2: Sat by the pool as I dealt with work BS. Went to lunch, poked around Terminal 21 (a very cool mall). Went to Grand Temple. Dinner at hotel. One of the nights we went on a dinner cruise, I just can't remember when. It was all fantastic.

Day 3: Early flight to Phitsanulok. I felt like quite the rock star for getting the girls up and ready and the room packed in time for us to be out of there by 5 am. It renewed my respect for single parents. When we landed, there were stairs from the plane onto the tarmac, but then… we had to kind of find our way over to the terminal. Nobody leading us, no van, no attendants, just… there’s the terminal about a football field away: Go! That was funny. There was some confusion in renting the van, but we got it. We drove to my favorite temple and spent a few hours.

I was sad to think I would probably never be there again. Ate lunch at Pino Latte, where Sophie was bitten by a dog and then fell down a spiral staircase. That was eventful.  Drove 2+ hours to Sukhothai and tucked into our guesthouse. Dad & Aunt Beth walked into town for pizza and brought some back. I skipped dinner and fell asleep immediately.

Day 4: After breakfast, we biked Sukhothai. Sascha hurt herself half a dozen times and flipped out each time. I was just happy to be in Sukhothai again. After lunch, we headed north to Chiang Rai. We hit tons of road construction and slow trucks in front of us, so it took way longer than we expected (like 7 hours instead of 5). That was frustrating, but we had a nice lunch along the way at a little roadside restaurant. Rolled into town around 8 and met Nick at Chef Sasa. 

Day 5: Nick took everyone to Khun Korn waterfall, and Sascha and my mom ran errands with me locally. Ran some laundry, went to Makro (our version of Costco). It was really nice to show her a bit of my every day life. Then we made dinner for everyone and had the Billinghams over. Getting everyone to the house on our dirt road was a bit of an adventure. I had a little too much to drink in my typical social nervousness.

Day 6: We had to be in Chiang Mai by 1, but we stopped at the White Temple. I was getting frustrated by everyone’s relaxed pace, and sure enough we were late to meet the Patara guy. But! Patara! It was epic. At one point, Maddie said, "This is the best day of my life!" That was pretty great.

Nick making a friend

Mom was absolutely petrified-- not of the elephants, but of getting injured, a genuine concern at her age. She ended up riding the elephant right out of there like a champ. I was so proud. When it was over, she actually said she would do it again.

Day 7: Chiang Mai. Breakfast at Blue Diamond, my favorite restaurant there. We decided to skip Doi Suthep because we were exhausted. Walked around a bit, went to Art in Paradise.

Ate lunch at the Lebanese restaurant, then went back to hotel to rest. Maddie & I went to get massages from the women’s prison place, and we loved it—we loved them! Sweet women. Met for dinner. Went to night market, briefly. I brought the girls home early and everyone else tried to find the Muy Thai fight, unsuccessfully. It was fine; everyone was exhausted. 

Now... India. 

Day 8: Aunt Beth and I flew to BKK, then went ahead to Gaya. It felt like a huge day, like my wedding day, something I'd waited for for so many years. I had brought half a bottle of wine in my suitcase, not knowing that the entire Indian state of Bihar is dry and alcohol is not allowed. I was stopped on the way in (our bags were also screened upon arrival, not just departure), and they told me to bring the wine over to some guy. I had every intention of following the rules, but we never found the guy, so I broke the law and kept the wine. 

Driving to Bodh Gaya, I felt like my eyes would pop out of my skull. Every cell in my body felt alive, even though I had to remind myself to breathe. I’d wanted to come to India for over 20 years, and I was looking at scenes straight out of every Indian movie I’d ever seen, which is a fair amount. The dust and trash, the cows everywhere, the vibrant colors draped on all the women, the roadside barbers, the incessant horns from every moving vehicle!

 I couldn’t get enough of it, like my eyes were gorging themselves, pigging out, the visual equivalent of stuffing my mouth full of food with my bare hands and letting it dribble down my chin. My heart felt so full.

 

The air in Gaya was so dusty.

We arrived at the Root Institute, where a Spanish woman named Angela was working the desk. She was beautiful, with short curly hair and a wry smile. Everything about her was impish, and I never knew if she was smirking and chuckling at us or with us and our utter ignorance of India. Our room was sparse and utilitarian, but felt sweetly earnest with its heavy wool blankets and mosquito nets on the beds.


We took advantage of the masala chai available around the clock, and the food was some of the best I had in all of my time in India. There were giant pots of chana dal, vegetable stews, paneer soup, and fat fresh-baked rolls I will remember as long as I live. Every meal was a gut-buster.

Beautiful woman eating a beautiful lunch

The vast majority of the food in India is vegetarian. In the west, you might see a restaurant advertising its vegetarian options as an additional feature; in India, it’s the exact opposite, with “non-veg also available” in a little star on the side of some restaurants’ signs. I liked that, and often ordered vegetarian even when meat was on the menu. My go-to dish was vegetable Sikh kabab, but I’d happily dip my naan into everyone else’s plates as well. The food in India lived up to my every gluttonous fantasy. Even after a few weeks of eating the same dishes for breakfast, lunch & dinner, I’d get excited for the next meal. I was Homer Simpson in hell with the donuts. More. More. MORE.

The town of Bodh Gaya is very… local. There were very few Westerners. I felt like my blond hair was so conspicuous that I bought a scarf to cover my head just to blend in better. We quickly found out that getting money in India is next to impossible (a heads-up on this would be my #1 piece of advice for anyone going there; also, hang on to your boarding passes because they are checked many times even after you're off the plane). Either the ATMs wouldn't work or their limit was a small amount of money, the banks would be closed, or they'd have some other reason they couldn't give us rupees. One time, the bank told us they were just... out of money. Done for the day, thank you, bye-bye. We had to budget and borrow and piece our bits of cash together to make it stretch until nearly the end of the trip, when Maddie's dad was able to solve our issues for us. But... maybe a little fitting, no? When in Rome...

The central focus of visiting Bodh Gaya was the Bodhi Tree, where the Buddha first achieved enlightenment. We took turns going alone so we could watch each other’s phones, which were not allowed. They searched our bags on the way in, and the female guard was enthralled by the tube of liquid Pear’s soap I’d bought for my face.

Sitting under that tree, I suppose I had a bit of enlightenment myself. I watched all the people in deep states of worship, walking, bowing, singing and praying, grown adults prostrating themselves on the ground. I dug deep. I thought hard. I reached inside my heart, and…

I felt nothing.

I just felt nothing. There is nothing that would inspire me to lay myself out on the ground in front of a statue, or sacred tree, or person. The rituals are puzzling. It’s too vulnerable and suspicious to me. I have certainly felt spiritual connections before, most notably while working in my soft, sweet garden back when I was pregnant with Sophie, and listening to Bach cello on my headphones. But really, almost nowhere else. I think I’m just missing that… thing.

The highlight of my Bodhi Tree pilgrimage happened as I was sitting next to a girl of about 8 and her grandmother. The grandmother was holding beads, rocking, deep in prayer; The little girl just looked bored. She was wearing a dust mask so I could only see her eyes. I noticed a squirrel playing around inside a light fixture just above us and caught the girl’s eye, gesturing my eyes toward the squirrel. Her beautiful almond eyes broke into a slow smile above the line of her mask. That may have been my favorite part of the entire trip to Gaya, which was pretty great in itself. I also got a friendly, curious sniff from a soft black cow while walking back into town.  

Day 10: Christmas Eve. We flew to Delhi the night before everyone else arrived so that we could meet them early the next day. We stayed in my first Air B&B, which was a guest room in this fabulous woman’s apartment. She is an artist and her house was full of her work. She also had an enthusiastic yellow lab and a house servant who cooked for us. That was a pretty cool experience.

The rest of the group arrived in Delhi, where we also met up with Manish’s sister Aparna and her daughter Dimpi, who is in college. (We never took a group photo! Damn!) We had two hired vans ready to take us to Jaipur, our first stop. We would get to know those vans intimately over the next two weeks.

These three kids were total champs!

Our hotel in Jaipur was just gorgeous, and a great place to spend Christmas.

I’d ordered some of the gifts on Amazon and had my parents bring them, but they weren’t wrapped. While Nick put the girls to bed, my mom & I wrapped gifts in my parents’ room using Hindi newspapers. We draped my Gaya scarf on a coat rack in place of a tree. The kids were thrilled.

We opened gifts in the morning and rolled around in pajamas playing for a short while, when Maddie came in and told us we had sightseeing plans for the day. I think all of us were disappointed to hear it, but we were so glad we went! We saw the Amber (Amer?) Fort, this massive work of art that actually moved me to tears. The pictures cannot capture the scope of this place. I was clutching my chest all day.

The sheer SIZE of it!

Monkeys everywhere.

Oh my Christ, was this ever delicious. I think it was bhel puri?

After the Amber Fort, we had a midday Christmas dinner at a local restaurant. Manish told the waiter that I was a chef in the US (truth bomb: I was a lowly pastry cook for two years, 20 years ago), and could I possibly tour their kitchen?

This is one of my favorite memories from the whole trip. I got to see a real-deal Indian kitchen. One of the cooks showed me the tandoor oven and demonstrated how to make naan. I was in absolute heaven. I don’t know what Manish told them, but there were guys crowded in doorways peeking in like I was Anthony Bourdain.

We got back to the hotel and some of us decided to go tour the City Palace. My mom and Aunt Beth stayed back with the girls. That night, my mom told me that there had been… an incident. She took the girls outside to play. This is what it looked like:

Sophie saw the green grass beyond that window, ran, and launched herself over that little wall without a thought.

Nobody knew that there was a 10’ drop to a stairwell below.

And? Sophie landed on her feet on one step without a single bruise or scratch. In flip-flops. I’m writing this five months after it happened and it still makes my skin crawl. 99 jumps like that out of 100, and she would have broken her neck, or at least multiple bones. But she managed to stick the landing in that 1% sliver of a chance. It was our Christmas gift. An actual miracle. I finished the day with a lot of wine.

The next day was December 26^th. Boxing Day. This one was the hardest day of the whole trip, but probably the most memorable. The plan was to drive to Jaisalmer. According to Google, that’s a 9.5 hour drive, which is already ambitious.

Well… It ended up taking us sixteen hours. In puked-in vans, on partially paved roads under construction that just never ended.

How I spent several days, engrossed in the movie that is India

Cleaning up carsick puke!

The kitchen at one of our rest stops.

While we were on the road, I became obsessed with Indian truck art. It's a thing! There's an entire book and documentary about it.

I remember around dinnertime, already over it, having driven about 9 hours. From the back seat I saw Manish check the remaining distance on his phone, seeing “6 hours” at the top of his screen and shaking my head in denial. It was a great bonding day for the twelve of us though; we named ourselves the Rajasthan Raiders. None of us could believe how well the three kids were handling it. They never complained.

We arrived at our hotel around 2 am. We stumbled out of the van, and as I carried a sleepy Sophie into our hotel I gasped quietly, “Sophie. Oh my god. We are staying in a palace.” It was stunning.

Beautiful, right?

Then we got our rooms.

They were filthy. It was just as ancient and rustic on the inside as it was on the outside. The bedspread was stained. Our room had no toilet paper. My parents’ room had toilet paper but no soap, and a toilet that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in months. We paid extra for a flimsy mattress on the floor for Nick while I shared the bed with the girls. The girls wouldn’t stop asking “why” questions. Our exhaustion was up to several exponents, so we slept to the best of our abilities.

This is actually quite a flattering picture of the room.

In the morning, we had a little pow-wow at breakfast. Maddie was horrified and had apparently been in tears the night before, since she had booked the place over the internet. The rest of us hated that she felt so guilty. She told us that she found us another place to stay, if we were okay with paying the rather high price. After the previous 24 hours we’d endured, we readily agreed, and slipped out the door past the rude manager (we may or may not have paid… Maddie and Manish would only say “don’t worry about it”).

15 minutes later, we were greeted with drums, fresh flowers, scarves and blessings in the nicest hotel I have ever set foot in. This. Freaking. Place.

This picture has absolutely nothing on the real thing.

All we wanted to do was shower, eat, and sleep, and that was what we did for the entire day. I do believe this is the best hotel experience I have had to date. I think I temporarily died and went to heaven.  

Of course, it came at a cost. But I didn’t care, and four months later when we’re still paying it off on our credit cards, I still think it was worth every penny. I know everyone in our group agrees.

We did a little shopping in Jaisalmer, where I found myself falling in deep, velvety love with that town that became my favorite. It’s tight and messy, dirty, loud, and crumbling, but all spice and character.

Maddie holding court in a sari shop. I had the best chai of my life here, out of a Dixie cup.

Hello, sweet faces.

Jaisalmer is art come to life, surreal and rich like a movie set. Even the merchants seemed less aggressive here.

I get a pulling feeling in my chest around Arabic architecture. The light, the colors, the sandstone everywhere; I was swooning. I must have been Middle Eastern in a past life, probably a woman who was offed for being mouthy, but hey, bygones.

On the 29th, we ventured out to ride camels out in the dunes. It was very touristy, but I still loved it. My face hurt from smiling so much. We finished the day with a light birthday dinner for Maddie and a little champagne.

Trying to wrap her head around it... our #1 activity there.

We left Jaisalmer for Indore, where Maddie & Manish grew up. We took a five-hour train for the first leg to Jodhpur to avoid all the road construction we’d hit coming in. The train was about as luxurious as a yellow school bus. But it was not uncomfortable, and I was glad we did it.

Maddie trying to get us all on the right cars.

There's me!

We stopped overnight in Udaipur, where I made a bold-font mental note to visit again. It looked like an unusually lively and accessible town with a very cool vibe, and I wanted to see more.

Driving into Indore was eye-opening, and throat-closing. Outside of town is a factory district. I do not know what they are making there, but for several miles, even the air inside the closed van had a powerful, bitter, chemical smell and I had to cover my nose. I was shocked that people live in that air all the time, and made a note on my phone to Google cancer rates in India. I also had a bewildered mental chuckle at all the effort I used to make, buying organic milk, reading labels and whatnot in my relatively sparkling Massachusetts existence. I avoided high fructose corn syrup, bought natural peanut butter and sulfate-free shampoo. And people live in this, their entire (probably short) lives.

We arrived at Maddie’s parents’ house in the afternoon. We’d met before, and they were just as warm and sweet as we remembered them. Her dad, a locally renowned scientist, put us up in a guesthouse on the campus of the institution where he works. We were exhausted when we checked in, but the eager staff still made us a several-course meal. The guesthouse had cold showers, the Carpenters’ “Yesterday Once More” on a constant loop in the hallways, and wild peacocks on the grounds outside. They also knocked on our door at 6 am with tea service. The rooms cost $1.50 per night.

We had a wonderful time with their family.

Greeting 2017 in Indore

At this point we parted ways with the vans, Maddie and Manish, and all of their family members. We flew back to Delhi for the grand finale.

No trip to India is complete without seeing the Taj Mahal. It was a few hours’ drive from Delhi, and it did not disappoint. The tour guide we hired was a real pro. He had shown Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi around, and he was also Karl Pilkington’s guide on “An Idiot Abroad.”

Ramesh! The man.

This place was incredibly crowded. It left little opportunity for deep reflection or quiet awe.

A very accurate depiction of what it's like to try to get pictures there. All elbows and bodies.

As westerners, we were able to stand in separate lines from the local hoi polloi and get in faster, which made me squirm a little.

"High value"? Yeesh.

I wanted to get a picture on the Princess Diana bench. There was a guard there with a piercing whistle, manhandling people on and off the bench for quick snaps. He pushed people out of the way so the white women could sit. Ugh.

White privilege at the Taj, everyone. This was so rushed, it looks like my mom didn't even get the chance to sit all the way down.

After we went back to Delhi, my parents and aunt headed home. Due to a scheduling misunderstanding, we didn't leave for another two days. This ended up being a blessing in disguise though. We were able to relax and spoil ourselves in another gorgeous Marriott. We hired a babysitter at the hotel and Nick & I ventured into Delhi for a little shopping. I'm not a huge shopper, but the shopping in India is EPIC. In one local mall, we absolutely cleaned up, where Nick got almost an entire new wardrobe for less than $100. Everything he bought fits him so well he wants to find the store online now.

I need to wrap this up because it's been hanging over my head since January. So-- my final impressions:

India is like another planet. Going there is almost like being reborn, because it's so different from the western world that it's like your first time seeing colors, smelling smells, hearing music. Want to try psychedelic drugs? Go to India instead. I wish I had gone there in my 20s, when my standards for hotel rooms and bathrooms were much, much lower. I think of myself at 25 or so, and I think I could have stayed quite a while in India (leaving a trail of romances in my wake, because my god there are some gorgeous men there) and it would have woven itself into the person I am. That said, if you're not 25, it is the perfect antidote if you're feeling jaded or stuck in your life and need a bit of a wake-up. It's a spiritual ice bucket challenge.

The poverty is shocking. It's beyond your wildest imagination. We've all seen it in movies, but seeing it is different. We'd drive down the street at night and see this:

Not in line for the new iPhone.

And it wasn't just one section of street, or one section of town, or one town and not another. It just goes on and on. Naked kids hanging out on the street. Entire families just... sitting on the sidewalk. (I wondered where they'd slept the night before, and then thought... Oh. Right there, I bet.) We had many, many philosophical discussions wondering how aware these people were of the suckiness of their situations. Do they think it sucks? Or do they just not think about it because it's all they know?

Look at this. Do you see what I see? Look at the woman's face.

It is amazing to think of the great intellectual minds that come out of this country, the tech geniuses, brilliant doctors and engineering masterminds.

The garbage is everywhere. I saw a cow munching on a large sheet of newspaper in Jaisalmer. India makes Thailand look as clean and civilized as Sweden. Probably the worst I saw was homemade tents on top of a large trash dump. Many of these are not my pictures (it felt wrong to take pictures of that), but it looked something similar to this:

The tent was flimsier and the garbage was much more of a mountain.

I think the biggest challenge for me was the bathrooms. When my girls were newborn, every night this feeling of deep dread would dawn on me as bedtime approached, because I knew it was going to be a rough night with no sleep. In India, that is how I started to feel every time I had to go to the bathroom. In my head, I'd be whining "noooooo-ho-ho-hoooo, don't make me go."

Again, not my picture. But we saw quite a few doozies like this, most without lights.

On several occasions, I'd look at the bathroom, then look at the large field behind it, and wish I could just squat right out in the open because that was so much cleaner. This would be no problem if I was a dude.

This was such a common sight that we'd count how many "pee-ers" we could see every day. I think we got up to 7 one day?

Public peeing is such an issue that some places will hang pictures of Hindu gods at hip level.

But then, half of the country's people have no toilets. Half. That's a country of over a billion people.

I don't want to finish this on a downer note, because ultimately, I loved it. I loved it so much. It was everything that I'd hoped it would be. It's almost impossible to properly describe India, and we spent most of the trip trying. It challenged everything I thought I knew about everything, and my brain was working overtime. Nick said, "Everywhere you look, it's a photograph." Everywhere, every sight, was WOW. We also agreed that the photographers who win awards for their pictures of India are actually hacks, because India does all the work for you. Everything is in the extreme: the beauty, the filth, the smells, the colors, the flavors, the noise. Do I want to go back? Absolutely, in a hot minute, yes.

And now, I sit here at my table in Thailand with five weeks left in Asia.