Rural China: Yangshuo and Dehang

The trip from Guilin to Yangshuo proved to be the most scenic and relaxing way of travelling within China.  We made our way to the Li River, backpacks and all, and climbed into a bamboo motorized raft.  We drifted down the winding, lazy river for what seemed like ages, passing beautiful green covered karst peaks, waterfalls, and fishermen.  Two hours and 65 kilometers later, we arrived near Yangshuo, where a little bus took us into town.  The town of Yangshuo is smaller and cuter than Guilin.  Though the real highlight, like Guilin, is the surrounding countryside.  We spent the first evening exploring the town and eating delicious steamed buns filled with vegetables.

To properly enjoy the Yangshou countryside, Maren and I rented bikes the following day and set out along one of the tributaries of the Li River.  We didn’t have much need for a map; we just followed dirt trails along rice fields, streams, and through tiny villages.  The whole area is remarkably green and lush.  Even the rivers appear green.  Halfway through our ride we decided to cool off in one of them.  We didn’t find a real swimming spot, just crossed through a field to the grassy edge of the water and jumped in.  It really amazed me how people live in the tiny villages.  Life seems to move so slowly for them.  You can see on their faces they just don’t have the same concerns or sense of urgency as most Westerners or Chinese people from big cities.

On the ride back to Yangshou, we stopped at Moon Hill, a karst peak with a bizarre shaped rock formation on top.  We left our bikes and hiked up the mountain, which is a couple hundred meters high.  From the top, we had fantastic views of the entire greater Yangshuo area.  Countless green karst peaks sprung up in all directions with tiny villages nestled in the valleys.  We caught a great sunset over the Li River as we rode into town that evening.

The following day was a travel day.  After relaxing in the morning for our last few hours in Yangshuo, we started a long and slow train ride north in the afternoon.  We had to switch once in the evening, and finally reached the city of Jishou early the next morning, which was as close to our destination as trains go.  We then found a bus to take us yet again into the rural Chinese countryside, this time to the tiny minority village of Dehang.  Located in a nature reserve far from any large city, Dehang truly captured the perfect mix of authentic culture and beautiful scenery.  The village was practically devoid of tourists and was quite quiet, even in the main square.  We found a cute but rather run down guesthouse to stay in located right on the stream flowing through the town.  Part of the building literally hung over the water. 

We were quite hungry after the long train trip, so we ate a meal at our guesthouse.  The lady running the place cooked us four different vegetable dishes.  I can barely explain what they even were (Check out the picture I’ll be posting in Picasa) but they were all unique and delicious!  The sour melon and minced red peppers were really unusual.  It started raining during our meal and was absolutely pouring by the time we had finished.  We put on some rain gear and set about exploring the town.  There are several trails that lead out of the town through the nature reserve.  The first one took us past waterfalls and stone bridges, along rice paddies and a cute family of ducklings.  

The weather improved and we regrouped back in town with lunch and tea, only to set out again in the afternoon along another stone path.  This one took us up another stream to the Nine Dragon Waterfalls.  We turned off the main path, passed a miniature hut with a donation jar for some guy who apparently maintains the trail.  The path was muddy, steep, and treacherous.  We criss-crossed back and forth past rushing water, crossing crude wooden bridges and clambering along the jungle-like path.  We eventually reached what appeared to be an impassible waterfall, though there was an unstable wooden ladder leading right against the waterfall itself.  I made the rather poor decision to see what was beyond the top of the ladder.  There were some steps cut into the rock which I could hardly see due to the rushing water.  I climbed basically up through the waterfall itself, holding onto a steel cable which had been bolted into the rock in a few places.  I got soaking wet and slipped several times, but managed to make it over the top of the falls to a ledge and a pool where I could see more waterfalls above.  I made my way back to where Maren was waiting very, very slowly, gripping the steel cable for dear life.  As adventurous as Maren is, I made certain she didn’t follow me on that path.   :)

After the amazing Nine Dragons Waterfalls, we continued along the stone path until we reached the Liusha Waterfall, the tallest in China at 216 meters.  The height of the falls was really impressive, though despite the recent rain, the volume of water was pretty low.  There was a large green pool of water at the base of the falls with a couple of people swimming.  Maren and I walked along a trail in a loop around the pool, so that we actually went behind the waterfall, which was really cool.  There were four Chinese girls, obviously tourists, who took a liking to Maren and me.  We all snapped a bunch of pictures together.  One of the girls was so tiny that when she stood on a rock next to me for a picture, she was still only as tall as my neck.  It was already dark as we walked back into town.  Along the way back was an old lady selling tiny crabs and fish on sticks, fresh out of a hot pot of oil.  We realized it was fresh seafood caught from the stream that runs through the town, and we ate them whole, shells and heads too, yum!

In Dehang, all of the ‘restaurants’ were really somebody’s home, and always only had one person working in them.  Sometimes the family was eating together, but we were always the only guests because the town is so tiny.  It was bizarre to see every one of the handful or so places to eat in town have the same exact menu which they give the tourists.  The menu didn’t make much sense to us.  But the funny part was that when we pointed to one of the choices, the menu didn’t seem to make any sense to the people cooking the food either!  They stared at the Chinese characters and looked confused about what we were ordering.  After getting back from the waterfalls, we found a place to eat on the main square.  Instead of using the menu this time, for one of our dishes we pointed at some fish we saw, the same tiny whole fish we had tried earlier which came from the stream.  We were served a huge plate full of whole deep fried fish, along with some veggies and a bunch of spices.  One of the more interesting Chinese meals we tried.  And it went very well with Chinese beer.

The next day was filled with more hiking around Dehang.  Our first hike in the morning was a complete accident.  We mixed up some signs we saw and ended up climbing a gigantic mountain just outside of town.  We hiked up a steep path for quite a while before realizing it wasn’t where we intended to go.  But Maren and I were both a bit curious (and maybe stubborn) and decided to see just where this trail through the forest went.  We eventually got to a set of endless staircases taking us directly up a cliff.  After what must have been a thousand stairs, we reached the top of the mountain.  The path was so steep, that we were now looking nearly vertically down on Dehang from above!  The views around were decent, but not worth the long painful hike. 

We sorted ourselves out on the correct path in the afternoon.  This was a beautiful scenic hike along a stream winding upwards through a valley.  We passed tons of green rice paddies, pools perfect for swimming, and impressive waterfalls.  Eventually the hike started getting steeper and we climbed hundreds (thousands!?) more steps up to our destination:  the appropriately named Platform of Heavenly Questioning.  This was a naturally formed flat stone ‘platform’ jutting out into the valley.  The trail leads to the platform from behind, so you reach the platform with three sheer cliffs around you and an absolutely stunning view of the valley below.  This climb was definitely worth it for the views and the amazing platform itself.  We laid down on the rock for a long time and rested.  On the way back, we jumped in a couple of pools to swim and cool off.

The hiking Maren and I did in Dehang was incredibly exciting and beautiful.  Nearly every day we had spent in China up to this point involved hiking or biking, and we were rather exhausted.  For our next stop in the country, we picked a spot with no natural beauty whatsoever.  Xi’an is instead a cultural mecca in the middle of China.  Only a 20 hour train ride away…

I’ve published a few more albums on my Picasa Web Albums page (http://picasaweb.google.com/SkiMania29).  I finished the ones from Thailand and will hopefully be caught up to where my blog is soon!

Guilin, Dazhai, and Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces

The most overdue blog in the history of the world…

Guilin really is as beautiful as its reputation.  The city itself is somewhat commercial and touristy, but as soon as you escape the center the scenery is fantastic.  Maren and I spent our first day exploring the area on bikes.  We rode in beautiful weather through green countryside passing karst peaks, farmers in rice paddies, and countless lakes and rivers.  We spent the entire day on the bikes and got lost several times.  We finally completed kind of a half loop around the entire greater Guilin area and made it back to our hostel.  In the evening, we found a busy street lined with restaurants.  Despite all the crowds, several Chinese people working at the restaurants came up to us to aggressively ‘convince’ us to pick their restaurant.  We had no idea how to compare, but eventually settled on one and ordered a local specialty: chicken hot pot.  The pot filled with random and unrecognizable pieces of a whole chicken finished cooking on the stove at the center of our table.  I still am not sure why so many pieces had weird bones in them; the only piece I could identify was the feet which were not particularly tasty.

The following day we decided to check out the scenery a bit further from Guilin.  We got our packs together and took two busses to reach the miniature minority village of Dazhai.  Dazhai sits high in the mountains and is populated by perhaps a couple of hundred farmers.  The rice terraces perched in the surrounding mountains are an incredible feat of engineering and give the area its name of Dragon’s Backbone.  The village was actually used as a model by Mao for its agricultural techniques.  At the other end of the Dragon’s Backbone is the larger and more touristed village of Ping’an, so Maren I decided to stay in Dazhai where we were virtually the only foreigners.  The bus journey had taken longer than we expected, so we found a place to stay for the night and delayed our trek until the following morning.  In the evening, we explored the village which is truly incredible.  All the homes seem to double as guest houses and are very large.  They are all wooden and have tons of red lamps hanging outside.  There are rice terraces built into the sides of all the nearby hills, and we found several pathways leading up for some great views over the town as it got dark.  For dinner, we ate some vegetable and rice dishes (of course), which included bamboo flavored steamed rice which was served inside a piece of bamboo.

We began our hike from Dazhai to Ping’an first thing in the morning.  We started out on a stone step trail, but along the way it switched from rock to dirt to the edge of the rice paddies themselves!  The path was hard to follow, but we asked locals along the way who helped guide us.  We passed through half a dozen or so tiny villages, completely isolated and unspoiled.  But the real highlight was the rice terraces.  The terraces are built right into the side of the mountains, and complex irrigation systems ensure a steady flow of water reaches even the most distant paddies.  The scale of the terraces and the way they wrap endlessly around ever y contour of the natural environment are what really make them so awe-inspiring.  They also look quite different during each season of the year.  We experienced them in the middle of the summer where the sun bounces off the water and the green shoots of rice are no more than half a meter above the waterline.  The effect of the sun creates a golden image across hundreds and hundreds of terraces.  It is easily one of the most beautiful scenes I have ever experienced.  During our 5 hour hike, Maren and I took somewhere close to 700 pictures (!), yet they don’t even quite capture the grand feel of it all.  In some sections, we literally walked in between rice terraces along the grassy dividers, a hundred meters above the villages in the valleys below.  We passed a handful of locals working the fields and only a couple of backpackers.  The entire hike was serene, peaceful, and beautiful.

We reached Ping'an late in the afternoon and weren’t sure whether we would be able to get back to Guilin the same day.  After talking to a couple of locals, we figured out where to wait for a bus.  The bus took us back to Dazhai where we had left our packs, but it was the last bus of the day.  Once getting to Dazhai, the driver planned on turning right around.  We used some complex negotiating (think hand signals) and jumped off the bus as soon as it stopped.  We literally ran 500 meters or so through the village to grab our bags from our guesthouse, then turned around and sprinted towards the bus.  Fortunately, the driver seemed to have understood us as he was still there, waiting patiently.  We made it back to Guilin in the evening to stay at the same hostel as a couple days earlier.

Our next adventure began the next morning on wooden raft travelling 65 kilometers down the Li River to Yangshuo.  Stay tuned!  I promise the next blog won’t take nearly as long as this one did!  Pictures coming as well.

Hong Kong, Macau, and Guangzhou

After our flight landed in Hong Kong, Maren and I took a bus straight to the downtown neighborhood of Kowloon, which is on the mainland as opposed to Hong Kong Island just across the water.  My first impression of the city was that it is a cross between Singapore and Las Vegas.  It is modern and efficient, yet wild and fun.  There is a constant sensory overloading stream of advertising, ranging from flashing neon signs to screaming people.  There are people everywhere at all hours of the day, and they seemed mostly friendly.  We stayed in a gigantic old building called the ‘Chungking Mansion’ on the main road through Kowloon, right in the center of the action.  There are several so-called ‘mansions’ in the area, which are basically 20+ story run-down apartment-style buildings divided into several sections filled with businesses, cheap guest houses, tiny shops and restaurants.  We found a miniature room in a guesthouse on the 6^th floor with its own bathroom for a very cheap price.  There was hardly even room for us to lay our backpacks down, but we didn’t mind for the price and the location. 

We spent most of our first full day in Hong Kong searching for a guide book to China.  It was surprisingly difficult to find a used book store, and we didn’t want to pay for a brand new book.  We finally searched through all the guest houses in our mansion.  Several places had books they didn’t want to sell, but we finally found a hostel with the newest copy of the Lonely Planet book.  We asked the guy if he would sell it to us, and he just said, ‘You can have it.’  We sure felt lucky and saved a lot of money!  Later in the evening, Maren stayed in while I took a ferry across Victoria Harbor to Hong Kong Island.  The skyline at night is truly incredible.  There is also a nightly light show where most of the major buildings on the island turn on colorful, flashing lights.  Once on Hong Kong Island, I wandered around until I found the Mid-Level Escalators, the longest set of escalators in the world.  They are outdoors, and take you nearly halfway up the peak at the center of the island.  Along the way, I passed through a few different neighborhoods and tons of bars, restaurants, and shops.  By the time I arrived at the top, I was surrounded by luxury apartments and Western businessmen.  There is an amazing diversity of people in Hong Kong, particularly in terms of class, culture, and clothing.

Maren and I took the ten minute ferry to Hong Kong Island the following day.  We walked between the high rises and took the elevator up the Bank of China building to the observation deck.  After the views across the harbor and the city, we took the famous peak cable car up to the island’s high point.  I was surprised to discover that most of Hong Kong, including the peak, is covered in rainforest.  It is quite easy to escape the crowded city and find yourself alone on a trail in the forest.  From the top, we walked along a cool trail that wraps around the entire peak.  The sky was gray, but the weather hung on to give us great views across the sea to Hong Kong’s numerous tiny islands, many of them uninhabited. 

The rain arrived that evening, and we bought an umbrella for about 3 euros.  We walked to a nearby street night market, which wasn’t very crowded due to the weather.  We drank fruit shakes and perused the stalls filled with fake brand name stuff.  It was easy to find a bar later on showing the World Cup, but only the England game, not the U.S. match.  We watched the later German game in the middle of the night with a crowd of people while standing on a sidewalk outside a bar.

I was really looking forward to the food in Hong Kong, which was for the most part good and cheap.  We mainly ate at little hole in the wall restaurants with no tourists.  The food was not quite as diverse as I had expected though.  We only seemed to find meat choices to go along with noodles, rice, or soup.  They rarely added many vegetables, and we never found any vegetable dishes on the menu.  One highlight was some authentic dim sum, which we tried at a nice restaurant in Kowloon. 

We left Hong Kong by ferry in the morning, destination Macau.  Macau is a former Portuguese colony about an hour’s ferry ride away.  Like Hong Kong, the island has special economic status, which has helped turn it into a gambling mecca even larger than Vegas!  We didn’t want to spend too much time there, so we decided to make it a day trip.  We organized a bus ride for the evening and dropped off our packs.  We walked through the downtown area and checked out a couple of casinos, with the first being the Wynn.  I couldn’t believe how similar it is to the original Vegas version; in fact they are basically identical!  Several of the big Vegas hotels have built carbon copies of themselves in Macau in the last five years.  I attempted to try and play in the poker game going on at the Wynn, but the line for the low-limit games was way too long.  We also checked out one of the older ‘classic’ casinos.  It looked like it was designed in the 80s and the decorations were mostly cheesy and over-the-top. 

We next walked through the pedestrian only streets filled with cool Portuguese-architecture buildings in various bright colors.  We followed the road to the ruins of a very old Catholic church.  Only the front façade and the steps up to it remain, which is a bizarre sight.  Our last stop was the food and candy neighborhood, filled with shops and free samples.  We tried dried meats, egg custard tarts, and peanut brittle candy.  I had to fight the crowds of Chinese people to buy some candy, which seemed to be an incredibly popular souvenir.  We made it to our bus in the evening and took it to the border, where we thankfully didn’t have any problems with our Chinese visas. 

Our bus arrived in Guangzhou very late at night.  I am embarrassed to say I had never heard of this city before coming to China, despite its having over 10 million people and being the 3^rd largest city in the country!  But that is because I had only heard of it by its old Westernized name ‘Canton.’  Guangzhou is the capital of all things Cantonese, the most noticeable to us being the language and the food.  After hopping off the bus, we walked through the rainy night along the Pearl River.  After a few kilometers, we reached a tiny island where the river forks, and found our hostel.  In the morning, the weather was still dreary, but we grabbed our umbrella and hit the sights anyway.  After walking around our island and the river area, we found a metro stop and took the surprisingly modern and efficient metro north to one of the main train stations.  There, we bought tickets and dropped off our packs.  Our next stop was the Mausoleum of the Nanyue King.  This was the tomb of an important king in the Nanyue kingdom, over 2000 years old, yet it was discovered only in the 1980s by accident.  The museum and mausoleum were impressive; we saw the burial site along with tons of relics and artifacts found in the tomb.  The highlight was the actual burial ‘suit’ of the king, made of thousands of little jade pieces.

After the museum stop, we walked through the nearby neighborhood and found a local restaurant to eat at.  We found a place that had pictures of the dishes on the wall, because like many restaurants we found in China, there was neither an English menu nor English speaking people.  The meal turned out to be one of the best of our entire trip.  We got three huge plates of fresh vegetables cooked in different sauces and noodles.  It was delicious and enough food for the whole day, plus it all cost less than 3 euros.  We also found a bakery with strange looking sweets and got a few to try out later.  We then walked to a small lake set in a nice park.  The path around the lake felt like walking in the jungle.  There was a hotel that looks like a palace which was built basically on the lake itself.  The park was a nice and peaceful getaway from the frenetic industrial port city.  We had a nice leisurely walk around and then made our way back to the train station.  The stop in Guangzhou was quick because both of us wanted as much time as possible in China’s countryside and small villages.  Which is why we then took an overnight train west to Guilin, in one of the most beautiful areas of China.

There is one thing I forgot to mention in previous blogs.  While in Thailand I received news that my bank had put a hold on my debit card due to some unauthorized activity on my account (which I later found out came from Texas… bizarre).  Upon losing Maren’s wallet, neither of us had a working debit or credit card.  The rest of the trip was cash-only, which proved to be challenging at times.  It was nearly impossible to make any kind of reservation! 

Kuala Lumpur and Singapore

We arrived in KL in the very early morning and searched out a hostel in Chinatown, the backpacker heart of the city.  We got lost with a group of other backpackers from our bus and overshot Chinatown.  The others took a taxi back while Maren and I backtracked.  The place we found put us up for free in a dorm room to sleep for a few hours.  We caught up on our bus-induced sleep deprivation and moved into our room.  KL is an interesting and unique city, though not necessarily for a backpacker.  It is very modern and commercial, but there is not much more than a day or two worth of tourist sights.  In fact, the food is a bigger reason to visit the city than just about any other attraction.  We first visited the huge national mosque.  Malaysia is an Islamic country, though not in the Middle Eastern style.  Here, there seems to be much more tolerance and less fundamentalism.  The mosque even had English pamphlets with titles like ‘So do Muslims really have to pray 5 times a day?’ and ‘How to convert to Islam: It’s easier than applying for a visa!’  Maren did have to wear special clothing to enter the mosque.  But instead of just giving her a head covering, they gave her a head-to-toe purple cape.  She looked hilarious!

We next visited a gigantic park.  KL has lots of parks filled with rainforest to escape the surrounding urban metropolis.  This one had a nice lake with fountains and a deer park, both regular deer and mouse deer.  Our hostel hosted a free rooftop barbeque in the evening.  It was filled with delicious Malaysian food and we ate till we were completely full.  There was a huge variety of noodle and rice dishes along with barbequed meat.  We stayed on the roof with the other backpackers to watch the World Cup afterwards.  In the morning, we woke up early to get to the city’s famous twin towers with the connecting bridge/viewing platform.  We arrived fairly early, but not soon enough to book a trip up the towers.  They reached the maximum number of entries per day just as we arrived.  Instead, we walked through a cool park in the jungle right in the city center to another very tall building.  This was a communications tower with an observation deck much higher and with better views than the twin towers.   The walk through the jungle was fun as we saw and heard a troop of monkeys.  The views from the tower showed every side of KL.

We left KL in the afternoon by bus and arrived in Singapore later in the evening.  As soon as we reached Singapore, I could tell the city was far more modern and advanced than anywhere we had seen in SE Asia.  The border had a massive building with thousands of people shuffling through customs when we arrived.  We found the only cheap hostel in town later in the evening.  Prices in Singapore are nearly comparable to large cities in other first-world countries.  The city is clean and orderly as I had expected, but I never noticed any strict laws or ‘police state’ type rules that I had heard about.  The city is also covered in numerous rivers and canals.  The weather was warm and humid, but not as hot as Thailand.

We spent our first full day walking through the city.  We visited two temples, one Hindu and one Buddhist, both with phenomenal designs.  The Buddhist temple actually had an elevator which reached several floors, including a small museum and an outdoor rooftop garden.  We continued on to yet another well-decorated Buddhist temple before making our way toward the water.  We walked through the financial district where the ultra-modern skyscrapers made us forget we were even in SE Asia.  After a statue of a bizarre water-shooting beast, we circled back toward our hostel.  We stopped at a dessert restaurant, which are very popular in Singapore.  We tried a few strange desserts, including grass jelly and peanut paste.  Many of the popular desserts and drinks that seem like they should be sweet are in fact not sweet at all.  It is very strange that none of the different flavors are emphasized with any sugar.

We returned after our long day of walking back at the hostel, when I noticed something horrible.  Maren’s wallet, which I had been carrying with me in the bottom pocket of my cargo shorts, was missing!  The bottom of the pocket had a huge hole ripped across it which revealed what had happened.  My cheap shorts had failed in the worst possible way.  We spent the next two days in Singapore attempting to track down the missing wallet.  We retraced all of our steps for the entire walk we had gone on.  We talked to people working at every place we had stopped.  We filed a police report and followed up at two different police stations (on a side note, it was strangely difficult to find a police station).  The wallet had Maren’s debit and credit cards, which were the only sources we had been getting cash from.  It also had her ID, driver’s license, etc., but the most immediate concern for us was getting money for the rest of our trip.  

We both recognized the irony that I was able to get my lost camera back from the seemingly dishonest rickshaw drivers of Delhi yet couldn’t get a lost wallet back from the honest and law-abiding Singaporeans.  We were getting desperate, but fortunately Maren’s father (the ‘Packrat’ :) ) stepped in to the rescue.  He has a friend who lives in Singapore who we were able to contact.  We met up with him and received a supply of cash to last us the next few weeks through China.  Lucky!  Unfortunately we didn’t hear any positive information from the police by the time of our scheduled flight to Hong Kong.  We left Singapore very disappointed about the wallet, but we had money and passports, which is all we needed to continue on.  After a quick ride on the metro and a short flight across the water, we landed mid-morning in Hong Kong.

Koh Samui, Railay, and Phi Phi

The next ferry took us to Koh Samui, the most famous and (over)developed of the islands.  With good reason, however, the beaches are incredibly beautiful.  The sand is perfect and just stretches on and on.  We were lucky to find an amazing bungalow in a perfect location at the same cheap price we had been paying.  Our bungalow, on the gorgeous beach of Lamai, was a tiny but cute A-frame and was literally on the sand itself.  For the next two days, we never left the beach.  We swam and relaxed, drank fruit shakes and whole coconuts.  I went for a run on the beach in the morning, from one end of Lamai to the other.  In the afternoon, Maren and I both got Thai massages at a little hut next door to our bungalow.  200 baht (5 euros) for an hour long massage and well worth every cent!  A Thai massage is a unique experience that involves some stretching and sometimes painful pressure.  But overall it felt fantastic and relaxing.  In the evening, it started raining, the first we had seen in Thailand.  It rained very hard but didn’t last long as we watched the World Cup from a bar next to the beach.

Both Maren and I could have used a couple of more days on Koh Samui.  We were lucky to have found such a perfect place to stay and relax without huge crowds of people.  But it was time to move on to the other side of Thailand.  We took a ferry back to the mainland, and then a bus across the peninsula.  We ended up in Krabi, a port town that is the gateway to a few beach destinations along a peninsula.  We arrived fairly late in the evening, and decided to stay the night in Krabi before continuing.  We found a decent hostel and went to a night market next to the harbor for a late dinner.  We had the cheapest food and drinks of our whole Thailand experience.  Delicious fried noodles with fresh seafood and vegetables plus a beer for under a euro!

The following morning, we went down to the pier and negotiated with a boatman to take a longtail boat to Railay Beach, about an hour away.  Railay is famous worldwide for its rock climbing.  There are incredible limestone peaks and cliffs on both ends of two beaches running parallel to each other.  In the middle is jungle with paths running between the beaches.  The tide moved the waves in and out by nearly 500 meters!  We arrived at high tide, but in the morning people had to trek (or get a tractor ride) through muddy tide pools just to get to a boat to leave.  Again we found cheap and amazing accommodation: we stayed in a wooden bungalow that felt like a condo in a jungle setting right next to the beach.  We spent the first afternoon just exploring the area.  Railay is a very small place, and it only takes a few minutes to walk between the two beaches.  There was an amazing lightning storm late in the evening which we watched from the beach.  It was far away but lit up the clouds for hours.

I decided to go rock climbing the next day.  It wasn’t cheap, but I wanted to check out why Railay is so famous for climbing, and those rugged limestone cliffs looked pretty inviting.  Maren is not a big fan of heights, or at least of voluntarily climbing up cliffs.  She walked through the jungle to spend the day on Railay’s ‘third beach.’  I went with my Rasta-looking climbing instructor to a popular area of cliffs at the end of our beach.  There were about 8 other climbers around, with dozens of different routes up the wall.  I first went over the basics with my instructor as it had been nearly ten years since I last climbed.  In the following couple of hours, I did 5 different climbs.  The second and third were my favorites.  The second because it took me 25 meters high and had incredible views over the bay and the beaches.  The third because it was the most difficult and I barely managed to do it without falling.  By the 5^th climb, my forearms were completely useless; I could barely hold my own body weight with both hands!  I called it a day and met Maren over at the beach.  We walked through the water to a tiny island, then over some rocks to the secluded tip of the Railay peninsula.  There were bizarre and beautiful limestone cliffs and stalactites and caves all around. 

The final stop in Thailand was Koh Phi Phi (pronounced ‘pee-pee’).  From the beach at Railay, a longtail boat took us out into the bay, where we transferred to a ferry to Phi Phi.  It was raining during the trip, but our good luck with the weather continued.  We arrived at Phi Phi with blue skies.  The first view of the island is similar to the islands off the east coast.  But soon after walking through the town, we realized Phi Phi is quite different.  There is only one real town, though it is fairly big.  There is also not much need to explore the island as everything is close by, particularly the best beaches.  Phi Phi has a very interesting shape that, like the Railay peninsula, produces two beaches right next to each other facing opposite directions.  Unlike the rugged beauty of Railay, however, Phi Phi is just a pure picture postcard beauty.  The beaches are just flawless.  We heard from various people, including our guidebook, that Phi Phi is quite expensive, especially for accommodation.  Fortunately, this was not true at all.  We managed to find a nice secluded bungalow right in the center, just a one minute walk to the beach.  The price was becoming a broken record: 6 places in a row were each just 300 baht a night.

Our first mission on Phi Phi was to head straight to the beach.  It was crowded, much more so than any other place we had been in Thailand.  I felt as if we had suddenly left the low season and entered the high season.  It wasn’t any trouble finding a spot on the beach though.  After recovering from the sun-drenching, we walked up a path at the edge of town.  It took us up a hill to a couple of lookout points, the highest of which had a perfect view over the island.  Afterwards we went for a Thai massage right next to our bungalow.  In the evening, we found countless restaurants and bars, all seemingly packed.  Phi Phi seems to be a magnet for backpackers, many people seem to stay much longer than they had planned.  Some of them work at the bars, get free accommodation, and party every night.  We checked out the beach bar scene at night.  There were fire shows, dance parties, and buckets and buckets of booze.  Phi Phi is definitely a place to drink and party a few days of your life away.

We rented a kayak the following day to enjoy the perfect weather.  We left right from the main beach and paddled out of the bay and just around the corner.  We reached a beach called Monkey Beach, though we didn’t see any monkeys there.  The only people there were leaving just as we arrived, so we had a 100 meter long stretch of sand all to ourselves.  The beach had some of the most amazing sand I have ever seen, or should I say, felt.  It was wet and soft and we just sunk right into it.  After an hour of playing around in the water and sand on our own personal slice of paradise, we paddled back to the main beach.  In the evening, we finished off our Phi Phi experience with yet another Thai massage;)  We awoke in the morning to heavy rain, which was fine by us as it was to be a travel day.  I put on the poncho my mom had given me just in case (thanks mom!) and we made our way to the pier.

Maren and I decided to try and save some money and make our own way to Malaysia, instead of buying an expensive bus and boat combo ticket.  We first took a ferry back to Krabi, followed by a shared taxi to the bus station, and a cheap bus ride across the Thai peninsula to Hat Yai.  From there, we asked for any bus to Malaysia, but got rejected by everyone we asked.  There didn’t seem to be any ‘normal’ busses heading across the border, which seemed very strange.  We finally gave up and bought a ticket from a travel agent to take one of the tourist busses.  I still have no idea how the locals make the trip.  We still managed to get to Malaysia at way under budget compared to the expensive package price, but unfortunately it was getting late.  Our bus left in the evening, and we thought we would arrive in a town called Butterworth late at night.  Butterworth is where we had planned to get off to take a short ferry to Pulau Pinang.  Once on the bus, however, they told us we wouldn’t arrive until past 1 in the morning, when the ferry wasn’t running.  So we had to scrap our plans mid-bus ride and turned our trip into an overnighter all the way to Kuala Lumpur, the bus’ final destination.  Next up: KL and Singapore.

Bangkok and Island Paradise

Hi everyone, sorry for the lack of updates!  Maren and I have safely arrived in Seattle!  We spent the last 3 weeks in China, where Blogger (and Facebook) are banned.  So I was able to write my blog but unable to post it.  I will post blogs over the next week or two to update the last 6 weeks of travels.  And we are both working on sorting through many pictures which are going up on Picasa (http://picasaweb.google.com/SkiMania29) Let's start where I left off, in Thailand:

The first thing both Maren and I noticed upon arriving in Bangkok was that we were being completely ignored.  What a relief after India!  No one was staring at us, and only a handful of touts wasted their time bothering us.  There weren’t a large number of tourists in Bangkok due to the recent violence in the city.  We saw no sign of unrest during our stay, though I did make a conscious decision not to wear a red shirt.  After navigating the public transit, we made our way to the most popular backpacker area of the city along Koh San Road.  In the afternoon, we hopped on a tuk tuk, which is pretty similar to the autorickshaws of India, just a bit bigger and generally in much better condition.  Our tuk tuk driver drove us around to a couple of sights in the city, waiting for us at each one.  Normally we wouldn’t be interested in this type of ‘tour,’ but the price was too good to pass up.  The driver was offering some sort of ‘government special’ for tourists for one day.  The price was 10 baht (about 25 cents) for both of us, as many sights as we could see in a couple of hours.  The only catch was a required stop at ‘tourist information’ which was really a travel agent where the driver collected a commission.  We stayed for about 2 minutes.  We wandered through several temples and saw a giant golden Buddha statue.  We next visited a temple perched high on a hill with great views of the city.  Later on I tried my first authentic ‘phad thai’ (famous noodle dish) from a street vendor.  For 50 cents it was everything I had hoped for.  We finished off the evening with a couple of beers along Koh San Road.

The next day, we exchanged our Lonely Planet India book for Lonely Planet SE Asia.  We did some quick research and took a bus out to the train station where we made our travel plans for later.  We then took a walk through the city until we reached the main river which divides Bangkok in half.  It was fairly easy to hop onto a small passenger ferry at one of the many piers.  The views of the city along the river are unique.  We passed lots of small boats, temples, giant office towers, and old wooden homes hanging out on stilts over the water.  We stopped at Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn on the opposite side of the river.  The architecture of the main temple, the design and shape, along with the four smaller pillars at each corner, make for an extremely impressive sight.  We walked around the temple and through the green surroundings.  Unfortunately we couldn’t go inside the temple; we hadn’t remembered reading that there was a dress code and they didn’t like our shorts nor our flip flops.  After taking a boat back across the river, we walked to Wat Pho, a massive temple complex.  It is filled with a number of small Buddhist temples, lots of Thai architecture, and the highlight: a giant golden statue of the reclining Buddha.  It is kind of funny to see a statue of a person lying down, but that is one of a few popular poses of Buddha (sitting cross legged is another common one).  The complex was also filled with tons of other statues and relics.  As we continued our walk back, we stopped in a market for some delicious and fresh Thai food.

In the evening, we got on a bus heading south.  We booked a bus-and-boat combo ticket and joined a gang of other backpackers all headed for the south of Thailand.  I am sure there is plenty to see in the rest of Thailand, but Maren and I wanted to spend as much time as possible on the beach ;)  Our bus left at a very inconvenient time, which meant we arrived in the port city of Chumphon in the north of the southern peninsula very late at night (more like early in the morning).  All of the backpackers had to attempt to sleep on the floor of a room by the pier.  We were woken up as it became light out and walked onto our ferry, arriving a couple of hours later at Koh Tao.  Off the east coast of Thailand there are three main islands.  Each has its own atmosphere and activities, so we decided to see all three, going from north to south, beginning with Koh Tao.  Koh Tao is by far the smallest and least touristy of the three islands.  It has become famous in the last ten years for diving, and that is certainly the thing to do.  Koh Tao is not known for having beautiful beaches, but we quickly learned a funny thing about Thailand: even a ‘bad’ beach can still be pretty damn good!  After one failed attempt at a guesthouse our guide book had recommended (out of our price range), we ending up staying at a quirky little guesthouse in a great location, just a one minute walk from a sandy beach.  The price for a double was 300 baht (about 7.5 euros) which, ironically, was the exact same price we ending up paying at every place we stayed at during our whole time in Thailand.  Koh Tao, like other islands in Thailand, is incredibly green and beautiful.  There are wooden bungalows, round rock formations, sandy beaches, palm trees, and tropical weather.  In a nutshell, it is paradise!

We spent our first day on Koh Tao doing practically nothing except the beach.  We walked the length of the sand near our guesthouse and across some rocks to the island’s main beach.  The rest of the evening was swimming, relaxing, drinking fresh fruit shakes, and eating yummy Thai food on the beach.  It was a great feeling to stay in one spot and relax for the whole day.  We rented a motorbike the following day to explore the island.  Though Koh Tao is quite small, it is rather hilly, so a bike is necessary to get to the center or to the smaller beaches.  This was my first time ever driving a motorcycle (or dirtbike, scooter, etc.) and it took a little while to get used to.  Once I did, Maren hopped on the back and away we went.  Some of the hills were quite steep, and the underpowered motorbike couldn’t handle both of us.  We slowed to a crawl while I revved the engine, then Maren had to hop off the back and walk just before the bike would have come to a complete stop.  We first went to a pretty beach on the south end of the island.  It was mostly empty except for a couple of guesthouses.  The wooden bungalows perched on rocky outcrops right on the water looked like a peaceful way to relax for a week or two.  There are only a handful of decent paved roads on Koh Tao, the rest are dirt and rock and some can be pretty bad.  On our way to one of the beaches on the far side of the island, we had our first (but only!) crash.  It wasn’t too bad considering we were only going about 3km/h up a steep, rocky hill.  The tire slid into a rut and I didn’t get my foot out in time before we basically just fell over sideways.  Unfortunately we landed on a rock which cut a pretty good gash in my left leg.  Maren also got an injury on her leg, though it was from the hot exhaust pipe of the bike searing her skin.  We dusted ourselves off and decided to forget that hill.  Later on, we made our way into the center of the island.  I was driving extremely carefully at this point, and when the road started to get bad, we parked the bike.  The walk through the jungle wasn’t too much further to reach one of the highest points on the island.  There were fantastic views of the hilly green landscape and the tiny villages along the beaches. 

We returned the motorbike the next morning before our planned snorkeling trip and were faced with an unwelcome surprise.  Neither Maren nor I had noticed any damage to the bike despite our fall.  It seemed so harmless we had hardly considered it.  But the bike shop noticed the side of the plastic piece where you rest your foot was a little bit scuffed.  I am certain they later just sanded it smooth in about 10 seconds, but they ended up charging us for a replacement piece.  It was an agonizing negotiation, especially considering the language barrier, but we finally paid them the incredibly overpriced ‘replacement fee’ of 1300 baht (a little over 30 euros).  It was frustrating because that amount of money goes a long way in Thailand when you are on our type of budget.  But there wasn’t a whole lot we could do except try to lower their fee, considering they held my passport as a deposit.  Luckily, our depression didn’t last long.  Our snorkeling trip was fantastic!  We got our gear sorted, and then went out on a boat with a small group to 5 different dive spots all around the island.  There was quite a bit to see, some interesting coral and types of fish I never knew existed.  At one dive, I swam through the largest school of fish I have ever seen.  There were thousands upon thousands of them, all moving in unison, dividing as I swam back and forth through them.  We ate lunch on the boat and later stopped at a private island.  We relaxed on the beach until we got too hot, then we swam through some coral known as the ‘Japanese Garden’ due to the bizarre white color and flower shape.  I would have liked to have gone scuba diving, but the prices on Koh Tao if you aren’t certified are pretty high.  Snorkeling got us much more to see and the full day trip was only 500 baht each (12 euros).

In the evening, we booked our ferry trip to the next island to the south, and did some shopping in town.  The shopping, food, and drinks are all very cheap on the islands, despite them being tourist hotspots.  We also continued to feed our new addiction to fruit shakes, which usually only cost between 50 cents and 1 euro and are unbelievably fresh and delicious!  In the morning, our ship set sail.  Less than two hours later, we arrived on the hippie, beach-party island of Koh Phangan.  The island is famous for its full-moon parties, though we didn’t plan our trip using a lunar calendar and therefore completely missed it.  We also somehow missed the black moon and half moon parties as well.  Because of that, we were on the island during the lowest of the low season, it was nearly deserted!  We decided to stay on the ‘full moon beach’ anyway to check it out.  The beach supposedly fills up with as many as 15,000 people during the full moon, but it was also cool to experience it the way we did.  Most of the people in the area either hadn’t planned around the moon, like us, or they were the permanent expat types.  It is easy to see why the island has become an enclave for hippies.  The beaches are beautiful, the villages aren’t overdeveloped, and the attitude everywhere is extremely relaxed.

We followed our first day of relaxing and swimming with exploring the island the following day.  We rented a motorbike and rode to the eastern side of the island towards a waterfall we had read about.  The area was thick jungle; we parked the bike and found the small river.  Then we started trekking upstream to find the famous waterfall that had been visited by Thai kings for centuries.  There was no obvious trail, so we hiked through the jungle and crisscrossed the river over rocks.  We passed several small waterfalls and even found a few inscriptions on rocks written by Thai kings, but the main waterfall we were looking for turned out to be little more than a trickle.  We drove our motorbike down to the end of the stream, where there was a nice secluded beach to rest on for the afternoon.  We drove back as it was getting dark, stopping for some petrol along the way to make sure we didn’t get stranded.  The Full Moon Beach was still pretty empty in the evening, but we drank beer on the beach anyways, and had a cocktail at the one beach bar with a small crowd.

We returned the motorbike in the morning before our ferry left, only to get completely scammed again by the bike shop.  I had driven very carefully, never crashed, and we were both certain we had not caused any damage whatsoever to the bike.  But the guy, who had seemed friendly the day before, now looked for any possible minor damage he could get us for.  He found a few nicks on the underside of the bike and demanded 3000 baht!  It was déjà vu, and we hardly argued with him for 5 minutes before agreeing that I would go to the police while Maren waited.  I came back an hour later with two sympathetic cops who believed my story.  Unfortunately, it was basically this guy’s word versus our word, and the cops insisted we pay something to resolve the situation.  After a very long debacle, we walked away with 1000 baht less in our pockets.  We agreed to never rent a motorbike ever again in our lives without taking pictures of the bike first.  Fortunately, there was another quick cure for the depression caused by overpaying for two motorbikes in a row: Koh Samui.

Agra, Varanasi, and Bodhgaya

­After taking a rickshaw from Agra’s train station to the main backpacker area of town around the Taj Mahal, we found a nice guesthouse to stay at.  It was in a quiet garden setting despite being right next to the most visited attraction in India.  Not long after we settled in, I looked for my camera and a horrible feeling set in.  I searched and searched, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.  I began to think it might have fallen out of the pocket of my Indian pants, which was starting to tear.  The only place I could imagine having lost it was in the rickshaw, which meant there was practically no chance of getting it back.  Maren and I both thought it would be nearly impossible to ever again find our rickshaw driver (there are an infinite number of them), and even if we did, the chance that he would have found my camera and would give it back to me was even less.  I was completely demoralized that the likelihood of ever seeing my camera again was pretty slim.  It was even more frustrating that we only had a narrow window of time to get to the Taj Mahal before it closed in the evening.  It was Thursday afternoon and the Taj is closed on Fridays, so we couldn’t wait for the next day.  Nevertheless, considering the value of the camera, I thought it would be worth trying to find the rickshaw driver and see if he had it.

We found another rickshaw to take us back to the train station to retrace our steps.  Once there, we went to the same place we had gotten our original rickshaw and were mobbed by drivers asking where we were going as usual.  We split up and tried to pick through all the faces, which wasn’t easy.  But after only 5 minutes or so I turned and saw our driver!  I wasn’t totally sure at first, but when he saw me, I noticed a flash of recognition.  I pulled him aside and he said ‘Iknow, I know.’  I was excited and frantic as I kept asking him if he had my camera, but the only words he would say were ‘I know, I know.’  Finally he walked me to his rickshaw and pulled out my camera!  I felt such a massive sense of relief I thought I might faint!  This tiny old Indian man had just saved this part of our Indian trip from being a total disaster.  He of course demanded a large sum of money for returning my camera.  I already had the camera in my hands, so I could have just said thanks and walked away.  I tried to negotiate a fair amount instead, but Maren finally convinced me to just be grateful and pay the amount he asked, which I did after he drove us back to the Taj Mahal.  Considering the guy could have just taken the camera for himself, I certainly was grateful, and paying him ten times the normal fare definitely made his day.

We walked up to the entrance of the Taj Mahal still with a sense of disbelief that we had gotten my camera back.  It was especially ironic that this had happened just before we went to see the most photographed sight in India.  There are three entrances to the Taj which all lead to a large and beautiful garden ringed by red sandstone walls.  As we walked through the gate of the fort-like building leading to the Taj, the giant white domes appeared before us.  The very first thing we noticed is how big the Taj Mahal is!  It is something I had never considered from seeing photographs.  The gardens and fountains between the main gate and the Taj are gorgeous and immaculate.  They are also in perfect symmetry, as is the Taj and all the other buildings in the complex.  The gardens and fountains make a perfect foreground for amazing pictures of the Taj.  There are several other impressive red sandstone buildings on either side of the gardens, including two large mosques on either side of the Taj itself. 

You have to take your shoes off to walk up the stairs to the Taj and the two mosques.  The temperature was still in the low to mid-40s this evening, which meant the stone tiles were very hot.  We had to practically run to the shade inside one of the mosques, and then had to tiptoe around the back of the Taj above the river in order to see it from all angles.  Finally we walked up the stairs to the giant white marble pedestal to the most beautiful building in the world.  The massive onion-shaped domes really tower over you.  When you get close enough, the craftwork and design of the marble itself is incredible.  Inside the Taj, the marble is just as beautiful and intricate.  There are only two tombs inside, one for the maharaja who built the Taj and the other for the wife he built it for.  We walked through the forested section of the gardens on our way out where there were hardly any other tourists.

As I mentioned, our guesthouse was situated right next to one of the entrances to the Taj.  This area of Agra was originally built to house the 20,000 workers the maharaja brought in to build the Taj.  Now it is filled with guesthouses, restaurants, and tourist shops.  Fortunately a few of the guesthouses have rooftop restaurants with nearly unobstructed views of the Taj Mahal.  We picked one for dinner and another one for breakfast the next morning.  That night, however, was the worst of all our nights in India.  As I wrote in my last blog, we were drinking tons of water all day long.  We usually bought two or three 1.5 liter bottles at a time.  When we went to sleep that night, we somehow miscalculated how much we had.  One thing I haven’t mentioned so far about India is the power outages.  Nearly every place we visited has regular power outages.  They usually affect different sections of the city at different times.  Sometimes they last a couple of seconds, other times twenty minutes, and occasionally even longer.  Despite the insane heat which was now pushing close to 50 degrees in the middle of the day, neither Maren nor I wanted to pay double the price for rooms with air conditioning.  Therefore we were relying on a single overhead fan.  The location of our room in this particular guesthouse in Agra made the room, despite the fan, hotter than any other place we had stayed.

 I woke up in the middle of this particular night to the sound of the fan clicking off, which had become familiar due to the power outages.  I discovered I was lying in a huge pool of my own sweat, with more sweat literally running down my skin all over my body.  Maren and I drank what was left of our water supply, then began to get very nervous.  I decided to go wake up the reception and buy some water, but the guy told me some nonsense about the water being in the restaurant and he didn’t have the key.  No shops were open at this time, so I returned to the room to suffer.  The next few hours were miserable.  The power did not come back on.  Neither of us could sleep.  We were both becoming very dehydrated very quickly.  Finally we went to our last resort: tap water.  We each drank just enough to make it through the night and hopefully not get sick.  We finally left the room at about 5:30 and miraculously found a shop that was just opening.  The bottles of water we each drank next were the most refreshing of our lives.  When the fan finally clicked on, my sheets were so soaked with sweat that the air from the fan completely chilled them and I actually became cold!

The next day in Agra we spent at the other impressive building in town: Agra Fort.  The walk there was mostly through a peaceful park.  It also passed a temple and some ghats on the riverbank.  We had read that one of them was a ‘burning ghat’ which means bodies are cremated on the steps next to the river.  We passed by some fires and then later a funeral procession passed us with men carrying a body over their heads on its way to be cremated.  This was an unfamiliar event and gave us both a strange feeling.  Before we went to the fort, we first bought our train tickets at the Agra Fort station for our overnight train that evening.  We were told that all the tickets, both AC and regular sleeper, were sold out, but that we should still pay for the AC sleeper to get on the waiting list.  We were numbers 9 and 10 on the waiting list, so there was a good chance we would get on if we showed up a couple of hours before the train left to check.

Though obviously overshadowed in fame by the nearby Taj Mahal, Agra Fort is a gigantic, impressive red sandstone fortress with beautiful gardens and a maze of white marble architecture, detailed stonework, staircases leading to nowhere, and windows facing the Taj Mahal.  The Taj is just a few kilometers away, and the view of it across the river is a cool perspective, though probably not for the maharaja who built it.  His son took over and imprisoned him in Agra Fort, where he had to stare at the Taj from afar for the last 8 years of his life.  There is an incredible amount to see at Agra Fort, and the architecture is phenomenal; it is a shame it is not in another city where it would be much more famous.  An interesting phenomenon happened as we walked through the fort.  Several of the Indian tourists asked if they could take a picture with either Maren or I.  One of them shoved this chubby baby right into Maren’s arms and started snapping photos.  The annoyed look on the kid’s face combined with the confused look on Maren’s face while she awkwardly held him was hilarious.  We started refusing people who asked after that because it seemed weird and no one would explain why they wanted a photo.  When a group of young guys asked for a photo with only me, and Maren not included, I definitely began to get a creepy feeling.  Later in the evening, we gathered our things and made our way to the train station.  We found out we were now numbers 3 and 4 on the waiting list, but there was not a lot of hope that that would improve.  Our best bet was to talk to the reservation guy once the train arrived. 

Our destination was Varanasi, to which there is only one train per day.  We were told that we could get a refund for our ticket and leave the next day, but I felt like that would be a waste of time as we had already seen the two highlights of Agra.  I decided I was not going to take ‘no’ for an answer.  We started talking to everybody we could, the inquiry booth, the reservation staff, even the station manager.  Unfortunately no one seemed to speak English quite well enough for them to help us.  One of them seemed to say that we were allowed to just go on the train and try to figure it out onboard.  When the train finally arrived we were running around in a panic.  We found the reservation guy who pretty much told us, ‘No seat for you.’  We ran around more talking to more people, the station manager in particular seemed very confused about what we should do.  Finally we found someone who said yes, we were allowed to go on the non-AC, sleeper class train and try to find a bed or wait for a bed to open up.  We went back to the reservation guy to ask him if that was OK, and now he just nodded his head to the side, which means ‘Sure.’  We climbed onto the train and prepared for what was to be our 2^nd most uncomfortable night in India.

Our overnight train left Agra just after 10 PM.  We spent the next 6+ hours on the dirty, metal floor of the sleeper class car next to the toilets.  There were lots of other people all around us doing exactly the same thing.  There were people constantly walking past and over us.  We found some newspaper to lie out and attempt to sleep on, but most of the trip we were sitting on our bags or trying to sleep while lying against them.  We also didn’t want to both sleep at the same time for fear of thieves.  The heat was stifling which meant we had plenty of sweat to go with the filth and grime we had acquired from the dirty train.  Our space was also tiny and horribly uncomfortable, and the smells from the squat toilets one meter away sure didn’t help.  We finally arrived at some station in the early hours of the morning where many people got off the train.  We managed to find two empty top bunks and fell asleep clutching our backpacks, dirty and exhausted.

Varanasi is located directly on the Ganges River and is one of the most holy sites for Hindu pilgrims.  The center of the old town is filled with narrow alleys and tiny shops and is closed to rickshaws.  We took a rickshaw as close as possible with a truly infuriating driver who repeatedly tried to take us to the wrong place, then stopped several kilometers short of where we told him we were going.  After that, we got quite lost in the alleyways looking for our guesthouse.  One of the problems is that there aren’t addresses in India.  I don’t mean they aren’t labeled, I mean they literally do not exist!  If the street has a name (which is only common for major roads), that is the address, but there aren’t numbers.  We asked some clueless people which direction the river was and got very conflicting directions.  We even said the name of the river to some people, pronouncing it the Hindu way, and got some blank stares.  I still have no idea why.  When we finally made it to our guesthouse, Maren and I both enjoyed long showers and a large breakfast.

The Ganges River in Varanasi is lined with dozens of ghats and is truly a sight to behold.  The ghats are the lifeblood of the city and there are people around them twenty four hours a day.  We walked to the river in the evening, and were surprised to see tons of people all moving in the same direction.  There was a Hindu ceremony taking place at the first ghat we got to, which we later found out happens every single night.  The steps were filled with crowds of people, and even the river was filled with boatfuls of onlookers as well.  Several guys wearing traditional Hindu outfits stood on pedestals on the ghat and performed rituals.  While music played, they made loud noises, waved sticks of incense, and lit some things on fire.  We walked around the ghats for awhile and found some other smaller, similar ceremonies happening nearby.  Because it was the hot season and the water level was at its lowest point, we could easily walk from ghat to ghat all along the river. 

We organized an early morning boat ride with our guesthouse, in time to see the sunrise.  In the morning, however, the guy didn’t show up at reception.  So we walked to the river, found a boatman, and settled on a price which was lower than what we had booked.  The sunrise turned out to be less than impressive as it was overcast, but the boat ride was phenomenal nonetheless.  Our boatman turned out to be a very good pick, because he spoke English quite well.  For an hour as he rowed he gave us commentary on each of the ghats we passed.  We learned about the history of some of the ghats and the buildings on the riverbank.  At the furthest point of the ride, we reached the main burning ghat in Varanasi.  Because the Ganges is the holiest river, Hindus often come here to die.  It is believed that dying in Varanasi can end the cycle of reincarnation.  Cremations happen at this ghat all day and all night long.  There is a very complex process of how people pay to be cremated here, because the wood used to burn the bodies is expensive for most Indians.  When we arrived we saw a few fires and bodies being prepared for cremation.  It is quite shocking to see this happening in the most public of surroundings.  The ashes, or sometimes even partly charred bodies, are dumped straight into the river.

There were tons of people swimming in the river as we passed by in the boat.  It was Sunday, which meant there was even more than usual.  I would have thought that a pilgrim bathing in a holy river would be a solemn and private affair, but that could not be further from the truth.  It appeared to be any other day at a beach: groups of boys laughing and splashing in the water, families, people swimming across the river, and guys waving at us.  It looked like fun, and Maren and I both would have liked to have a swim ourselves in the holy water.  The only catch is the one thing that cast a bit of a shadow over the whole Ganges experience:  the river is incredibly polluted.  Not by farming chemicals or some factory or even ordinary garbage, but by raw sewage.  There are over a hundred sewage pipes in Varanasi alone leading into the river.  We read that the contamination levels are thousands of times higher than what they should be for safe swimming.  The hundreds of not-always-completely-cremated bodies every day don’t help the situation either.  So we dipped our hands in the water during our boat ride, but a swim in the ‘holy’ water would have more likely resulted in an infectious disease than a purifying experience.  There are some recent efforts to clean up the river by establishing a real sewage system in the city, hopefully they work.

It is a bizarre sight to see cows living in the middle of a city, but they are everywhere in India.  Cows lying around, walking the streets, and in the case of Varanasi, even hanging out in the middle of the crowded train station!  We found out from an Indian guy we met later that no one actually owns them.  Cows are used on dairy farms, but once they get older they are just abandoned.  No one cares for most of them; they pretty much just eat garbage, create traffic jams, and are ignored.  The amount of garbage is another sight to get used to in India.  There doesn’t seem to be any public sanitation service, garbage cans are few and far between, and there are makeshift dumps on the side of the road, in rivers, or in random holes in the ground.  When you combine this with the lack of any sidewalks, it makes for very, very dirty feet!

The next stop on our way east was Bodhgaya, a famous Buddhist pilgrimage sight.  Bodhgaya is the site where Prince Siddhartha attained enlightenment while meditating underneath a Bodhi tree and became Buddha.  We took a train from Varanasi to Gaya, where we arrived late at night.  We found a place to crash before taking a rickshaw to the small town of Bodhgaya in the morning.  While on the rickshaw, we passed tiny villages of mud and straw huts, and people that appeared to be living an agricultural, subsistence lifestyle.  Bodhgaya is in the state of Bihar, which is one of the poorest in all of India.  When we arrived, we walked through the quiet town until we found our guesthouse.  It was located in a tiny little village on the edge of the city, complete with primitive houses, small farms, and half naked children running about.  It was quite a different experience from other guesthouses we had stayed in and it was intriguing to ‘live’ and experience this side of India.  We spent our first afternoon at the main Buddhist attraction, the spot of Buddha’s enlightenment.  The small complex is filled with plants and greenery and is a great spot to relax.  The main temple has stood in its location since nearly the time of the enlightenment itself.  The actual Bodhi tree surprisingly still exists there, well, kind of.  The current one grew from a branch taken from the original Bodhi tree which was taken to Sri Lanka.  The tree and a small monument where Siddhartha sat meditating are behind the temple.  There are tons of other Buddhist relics all around the area.

The town of Bodhgaya is filled with monasteries from every Buddhist country.  As this is one of the holiest places for Buddhist pilgrims to visit, many of the monasteries are quite impressive.  There is also a massive Buddha statue in town, which we visited the next day.  It was ordered by the Dalai Lama fairly recently and has a 30-some meter high sitting Buddha surrounded by his disciples.  Apparently the Buddha is hollow and filled with 20,000 miniature Buddhas, though I am not sure what the point of this was because there is no way to look inside.  We spent the rest of our time in Bodhgaya just relaxing and trying to stay out of the heat, which had climbed into the high 40s.  In the evening, we took a rickshaw back to Gaya, where we caught an overnight train to Kolkata (the new spelling of Calcutta).

Maren and I met a young Indian guy in Gaya on his way to Kolkata as well.  He spoke decent English and was pretty helpful answering our questions about the train trip and India in general.  In Kolkata the next morning, we arrived at a chaotic train station jam packed with people in the center of the city.  We had to fight our way through the crowds, and then took a taxi with our new friend just to get across the river to the nearest metro stop.  After getting directions, Maren and I headed to the north of Kolkata near the airport.  There was more chaos and an unbelievable number of people everywhere.  We somehow managed to get on a bus which dropped us off close to the airport.  We had incredible difficulty finding a cheap hotel next to the airport which Lonely Planet had recommended, and when we finally found it, it was full.  No problem though, the place next door had better prices anyway.  We had some grand plans to explore Kolkata on our final day in India, but the long train rides and one uneasy stomach finally caught up with us.  We walked through the markets and neighborhoods around our hotel, but that was the extent of our Kolkata experience.  The next morning, we woke up early and made it to the airport in time for our much-anticipated flight to Bangkok, Thailand!