Traveling in India: and the Berlin Wall

Twenty years ago today a wall that separated not only a city into east and west but an ideology came down. At that time I was in India, and had been there for about three weeks. I was in the tribal state of Meghalaya, far from the western world in many respects. Luckily the Khasis are fairly affluent and my girlfriend’s mother had a TV. It wasn’t state of the art but they did get several channels. Only a very few houses had fridges or showers/tubs. Most still heated water with an electric coil in a bucket, and sponge baths were the norm.

Yet everyone had flush toilets and most had TVs. So it was that one night I watched the Berlin Wall coming down as they sliced through the concrete in big chunks and bulldozers pushed the wall apart. It was surreal, already being divorced from the everyday world by being on a trip. But I remember we were all very surprised. There’d been no warning. There had been no publicized event of this eventuality. It just…came…down. I’m sure it was different for the people living in Berlin.

After a month in Meghalaya, I went traveling to Nepal and to northern India. Somewhere near southwest Nepal, I think Pokhara, I took a bus toward the Indian border. It turned out to be too expensive for the locals. That meant there was a lot of space, no chickens or goats, and the few people were all tourists. There were three people from Japan, one a Japanese Tibetan. There was a couple from Germany and me. The three from Japan didn’t speak much English and though the Germans did, we didn’t chat a lot.

However, at one point in conversation I mentioned the wall coming down. These Germans were obviously from the democratic side of Germany but I don’t know if they were from West Berlin. However, when I said the wall had come down they said absolutely not. I said, but yes it has come down and they adamantly said no way. But I saw it being cut down on TV.

They had been travelling for a few months and it was inconceivable that this could happen. It was such a quiet affair really, and so sudden. I don’t think these Germans believed me even then. They probably had a bit of culture shock going back to their own country.

Culture shock comes with a change from one’s norm of living. It can hit people traveling or living in foreign lands because it is so different to what they’re used to. I had my own culture shock while in India for those two months. For me it was mostly brought on by the dysentery and exhaustion I experienced, making every change and difference hard to take or understand.

The sicker I got the more I longed for home, wishing I could have a glass of cold water, a crisp salad and a glass of real wine, not the sickly sweet stuff they love in parts of India. I felt the culture differences most in the language barriers (the signs if there were any weren’t in the Roman alphabet so I didn’t have a chance of reading them), the sense of time (the “what to do” attitude in India is partly because of the rampant corruption-baksheesh system, so many don’t try hard; that and the heat of course) and communication (you’ll get directions, possibly five different ones if you ask five people but no one will say I don’t know so you spend all day trying to get someplace).

At times I was in an incomprehensible mire as I tried to figure out the culture enough for travelling. At times I realized how different my world was when I asked a group of men where I was on the map I had for a city (Varanasi I think) and as they discussed it in their own language I realized they had probably never seen a map and had no idea how to read it.

Our cultures are different and sometimes a change, whether sudden or by immersion can toss us into a sea of uncertainty. But in essence we are all dealing with our world though our traditions and the events and elements that shape us. Here’s to the wall coming down in Berlin and may we have more positive moves like this throughout the world of allowing people their freedoms.

Cultural Flavors: Sex and Living Alone

When I went to India and Nepal, I travel for a month on my own. Nepal, compared to India, is very used to tourists, and understands they are part of the economy. India, at that time, had many restrictions, as well as poverty, and service or helping tourists was not very near the top of their list. Nepal was almost too much so.

In Kathmandu you can find all sorts of trinkets and souvenirs, and Western food. Well, it’s sort of like Western food. It looks the same and has the same name but sometimes it just tastes different. Chocolate cakes were not quite chocolaty. Cheese bread was a huge favorite. In another Nepalese town I’d ordered a garlic pizza. It came with a full bud of garlic on it, mostly raw. Halfway through I had to pull of the cloves because they were burning my gut.

Still, Nepal tries to cater to the tourists because they make so much money off of them. Many Nepalese therefore can speak English. Kathmandu is beautiful with a myriad of twisting and winding streets, stupas of varying heights and a cornucopia of merchandise and foods. Elsewhere I would run into little children who would speak a couple of words of English and then want to be paid for this.

One young guy latched himself on to me in Kathmandu and told me he was going to learn to be a jeweller in Flin Flon, Manitoba. That’s a pretty obscure place to know of, which lent credence to his statement. Except that there are thousands of people who visit Nepal every year and a savvy guy can pick up all sorts of information about the world. What they do with it, I don’t know. Get a date, have sex, offer a “massage,” make some money, become a tour guide; all of the above possibly. They definitely offered all of these to me.

Still there is an innocence about sex. People of India and Nepal see the movies of North America and presume a promiscuity of Western woman that isn’t quite reality. As I was once asked in India, “In your country, sex is free, isn’t it?” How do you answer that one? Yes, but I don’t have sex with everyone. No, some people pay.

The Flin Flon guy lead me around to various temples (which I could not enter because I wasn’t Hindu) and point out items of interest. At one point outside the Shiva temple he showed me this garden/park that had a area about 6-8 feet square in it. In it were a variety of concrete and stone cylinders varying in height from about two feet to just a few inches and around four inches in diameter.

This young guy asked me if I knew what they were and I said yes. They were representations of Shiva’s phallus, called lingam. I knew what they were but not exactly what they meant. But what was odd was that this man’s breathing grew rapid and deep and then he wanted our picture taken in front of them. It was then that I realized this might be porn for Nepalese or that it meant we were engaged. All I knew was that he was clearly excited and I didn’t know the culture, so I let our picture be taken but not in front of the linga. 

At another point in Kathmandu I was visiting with a merchant who sold masks. He was cute and young and we were attracted to each other. We ended up sharing information about our lives, which ultimately were about our culture. He told me that he lived with his parents and when he married his wife would move in with him and his family. I talked about how in North America, we moved out once we finished school and how it would be thought unusual for a person to stay with their parents, especially into our thirties. He said it would be unusual to live alone.

It was at that point that I realized just how different our cultures must be, where family units are meant to separate and live alone while there were others where the family unit includes generations. I think overall, North America is more the aberration there, where even many European families follow the old nuclear family lifestyle.

But just as some men in India and Nepal thought that a North American woman would kiss or have sex with anyone, I too thought that they understood my culture. It taught me a valuable lesson about assuming and about respecting another culture, especially when you are the stranger in a strange land, because you just don’t know what you could be getting into or who you insulted. In past history, people were often killed for such infractions and it can still happen today. It also taught me that humanity is diverse and that there are many fascinating customs, and more I’d still like to see.

Traveling in India: Removing the Mask

Years ago, I traveled in India for two months. The first month was in Meghalaya, a Himalayan tribal state in the northeast corner of India. I was there with my friend, a native Khasi of Meghalaya. (I’ll talk about Meghalaya some other time.) The second month I set out on my own, traveling to India and Nepal.

The hard journey began almost immediately. Because the Meghalayans were fighting with the Assamese (and because the plane out of Meghalaya, Vayudoot Airlines, was too scary to fly again) I had to take a bus into neighboring Assam. It was a very long, hot bus ride where we passed a crowd on the road standing near the stiffening corpse of man who had been hit by a car (I presume) and was bloating in the hot sun.

Hours later I arrived at the airport where of course the plane ran on Indian time and was over three-hours late. I had left in the morning but by the time I got into Calcutta, not that far really, it was early evening. I had a Lonely Planet guide and used it to find quality and affordable hotels. Except they were all full. I tried several places, each less reputable than the last, until I finally found a place. It was dirty, there were so many cockroaches that I slept with the lights on and the water sprayed from the tap at a 45 degree angle. I was completely dehydrated by the time I got into this hotel and asked the staff for some boiled water. They brought it and it was suspiciously lukewarm. I added iodine (this was before they had perfected cheap and easy to carry water purification kits or tablets) but I had to drink it.

Sure enough, three days later began the fall into dysentery and three weeks of traveling to go. Skipping forward, I was back in Delhi and sick as a dog, puking or hanging my butt over a toilet. I spent a lot of my time laying in bed in the hostel, too sick to eat and tired. But I decided one day to go to the Red Fort I believe. It’s been a while and it may have been some other edifice.

Having now been in India long enough to know you had to ask specific questions and bargain, I made a deal with a motorized rickshaw driver (there were bicycle and foot rickshaws as well). We agreed on the price and I said, “That’s for both ways, right?”  He agreed, but when he dropped me off at the fort he asked, “How long are you going to be?” I shrugged lethargically and said maybe a couple of hours or so. And off I went.

You walk a gamut of merchants at the entry of the place and I was looking in this one shop when this merchant reached out and grabbed my breast. I was too sick and shocked to do more than look and walk away. I should have slugged him. But I saw the fort, took pictures and left a couple of hours later. When I get outside there is my rickshaw driver and he starts yelling at me about the length of time. We argued as I said this is what we had agreed to. I had told him I didn’t know for sure how long I would be, etc. etc. However, there were about another ten drivers standing around all staring at me, arguing in both languages. I felt intimidated by the pressure so pulled out half the fee for the one-way trip and threw it at the guy, stalking off to find a bicycle rickshaw driver.

I agreed to a price with him and got in, completely dissolute by the experience. I didn’t look at anything and just sat there in a distant haze. Only motorized vehicles were allowed around Connaught Place, the giant traffic circle (with many lanes from many directions) in New Delhi.  Around the outer circle were stations for the other rickshaw drivers to drop off their clients. I paid and despondently got  out of the rickshaw. As I trudged away I heard, “Mems’ib, mems’ib.” I turned back and there was the original rickshaw driver with the police.

At that point I didn’t think about the corrupt Indian system and paying baksheesh or about the lies this guy had told. I freaked out. I started screaming at all three of them, walking up with my wrists together saying, go ahead take me away. You’re trying to keep me here and who knows what other delirium was going on. Keep in mind that I was very sick and had been traveling with an overloaded backpack and a bag and a carpet (another long story) for three weeks. I was way beyond my normal comfort zone. I cried and screamed and then pulled all of the cash out of my wallet, threw it at the men and then went and sat on a wall and cried. Actually I bawled.

At one point the rickshaw driver came back and put my change beside me. I don’t know if he had an attack of conscience or if the police kept him honest. I didn’t care. I cried and cried and have no idea how long I sat there. At one point I heard a timid, “Mems’ib,” again. When I looked up there were about six men looking at me, concerned. One asked, “What is wrong?”

I cried out something like, “nothing,you’re country is trying to keep me here,” etc. I was at the end of two months and heartily tired of trying to fend on my own which had not been easy in many ways. Eventually, I wandered back to the hostel where I was staying. Before I got there a beggar came up and touched my arm, looking up at me with wide eyes. This was a child of maybe 12. Now I had already been told by my friend, and observed, that no one touches another in public in India. Actually no man will touch a woman and strangers do not touch. She had said if someone touches you, it’s a sign of disrespect. After the illness, the breast grabbing, the fight with the rickshaw driver, the police and my general lack of coping by this point, I sobbed at this poor beggar, “Oh just go die, it’s easier.”

Yes, I told a beggar to die, because at that point it’s what I wanted to do. It was perhaps the ugliest aspect of my personality and was one aspect of a life-changing journey. Before I went to India, I had this group of friends and that group of friends. I had the calm me, the conservative me, the partying me, the studious me, etc., and very few saw all of me. Like many people in our culture, I had my masques for different occasions.

Between the dysentery, the overloaded packs and the very different culture of India and their way of  dealing with time and communication, I ran out of coping mechanisms. I was stripped down to my essential self. When I returned to Canada and was at some point telling  a friend about my journey, she said, “Yeah, you’re more accessible now.” After that, everyone pretty much got the same me, amalgamated for good or ill, with fewer masques.

India was a very hard journey into my self, where I learned many valuable lessons about culture, environment, people and life. The biggest lesson was about me. I would still recommend that everyone travel to a third world country if the can. It is an eye opener and truly shows many of us how privileged we are where even conservation can be a luxury. But those are tales for another time.

Losing it in India

In1989 I travelled through India for two months. The first month I spent in a tribal state with a friend and the second I travelled through northern India and Nepal. There are many tales from that trip but this one takes place in the last two weeks.

I was in Delhi and sick as a dog with dysentery. I was puking, had diarrhea and generally could not eat. But I tried to see a couple of things and finally dragged myself out one day. I can’t remember but I think I went to the Red Fort. I bargained with a rickshaw driver for a price. This was one of the motorized rickshaws and when we finally agreed on a price, I said to the driver, that’s for both directions, there and back? And he agreed.

So off we went. When we arrived, he asked how long I would be, and I said an hour or two. I had no idea because it was a large site and I was still pretty sick and lethargic. So I wandered around and took pictures and then came out about an hour and a half later. The driver started berating me, standing with about eight other drivers, saying I’d taken too long and that it would cost more, etc. After some arguing, with the other drivers giving their opinions in his support, I couldn’t take it and felt ganged up on so I took out half the money for half the trip and gave it to him and then went and got a bicycle rickshaw.

By this point I was completely distraught and depressed and didn’t even pay attention to anything. I just let the driver take me back to the hostel. Except the hostel was off of Connaught Circle (can you see British influence in that name?), a gigantic traffic circle with radial roads. Far too much traffic zooms through there so bicycle rickshaws must stop at stands at the edge of the circle so as not to interrupt traffic flow.

We arrived at the stop, I paid the rickshaw driver and started to walk when I heard “memseeb, memseeb.” I turned and there was the motorized rickshaw driver with two cops. At that point I completely freaked out. I started crying and shouting at them, holding my wrists together to them saying things like, “Just lock me up. Your country is trying to destroy me. Go ahead and take me away.”

The cops were so flabbergasted I don’t think they said two words to me and in truth I never even tried to argue reasonably. I’d already seen how the baksheesh (bribe) system worked. I continued crying and took all the money from my wallet and threw it at them. Then I went and sat on a wall and bawled my eyes out. I don’t know how long I was there crying but the police made the rickshaw driver give me back any money above what he’d asked (I presume–I never counted it.) He gingerly placed it at my feet when I yelled at him and asked why he didn’t just take everything. Then they went away.

I stayed and cried and cried. I had been ill for three weeks at this point and was in fact my sickest in Delhi and Varanasi. Eventually I noticed about six men standing around me in concern as I cried, asking, “Memsahib, what is wrong?” To which I wailed, “Nothing. Your country is just trying to keep me here.” I wasn’t exactly in my right mind.

I eventually got up and walked disconsolately back to my hostel. At one point a beggar came up to me and touched me. I already knew that in India people don’t touch each other unless they think you don’t know the culture. It’s a sign of disrespect. The beggar touching me was just another injurious straw. At that point I was so distressed with the day that I said, “Oh just go die. It’s easier.” To a beggar. A child. Because I wanted to. It was not one of my more stellar moments.

India was the hardest place I ever travelled to, where nothing ran on time, bribes were expected, and no one would say they didn’t know something so you could end up with six directions to get somewhere and none of them would be right. The culture was different enough and the concept of time was hard to grasp. With trying to fathom these things, on top of trying to find signs, which were few, and if they were there they were in Urdu or Hindu, as well as being severely sick and carrying an overburdened pack, it was too much.

I learned something about myself in India. I found my melting point and my darker side. But I came back from my trip and was forever changed. This of course wasn’t my only adventure in India but it was my hardest.

We wear a lot of masks in our society. There are ones for work, for friends, for dates, for family. Sometimes there are layers and layers of masks. I had them when I went to India but I had way fewer when I came back. India stripped me down to an essential aspect of myself. I truly was just surviving the experience by the end of the trip and was sick for another month after I returned. To this day, I have fewer masks. India made me integrate myself and my different aspects.

Everyone gets much more a blend of me these days. I remember one friend telling me I was more accessible after going to India.The barriers had been stripped away and I built new ones, but not as high nor as thick.