Touchdown India

Behold! The pyramids...in technicolor

India from the back seat of a rickshaw.

The Sundarams! Fantastic hosts.

My last few days in Egypt were fairly lowkey. I headed back to Cairo from Alexandria to pick up my Indian visa, then had pretty much two full days to hang out in the city. Visited Old Cairo and Islamic Cairo while there, getting completely lost in the windy little tunnels that they call roads. As usual it was extremely hot there and by the end of the day I had something along the lines of heat stroke. The last night there I accompanied an Australian fellow over to the pyramids for one last glimpse of them as well as the infamous Sound and Light show that they put on every evening at 8:30. We didn't want to pay 60 pounds to see it, so instead we just secured prime viewing seats at the nearby pizza hut. The lights were decently cool for a few minutes but, as expected, the show got really boring and stupid, fast. They had this cheesy booming voice, who talked about Ramses for a while that you would expect out of some kind of Simpsons joke. I'm sure the ancient Egyptians would be thrilled to see their monuments turned into this sad excuse for a tourist trap.

That night I grabbed a flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Yes, I know what you're all thinking, Addis Ababa WAS the spot that Lex Luther finally obtained the kryptonite that he was used to thwart Superman on several occasions. The airline was pretty cool after seeing the length of my delay and put me up in a hotel with all my meals paid for. Driving through Addis I was accosted by the endless hordes of beggars and cripples, more than I've seen in any other country. I had to keep the window tightly rolled up so that they would stop trying to shove their open wounds and broken limbs into the taxi. Instead of really exploring the city, I decided to catch up on my sleep in the plush hotel room.

From there I grabbed another flight to Mumbai, India, previously known as Bombay. Managed to secure a hotel that was literally located in the slums (for those that were in Brazil...think favelas, but somehow worse) but relatively close to the train station. Some thoughts on my first few days in India....

The Good: The train that I grabbed from Mumbai to Chennai was awesome. I secured a first class berth for a decent price and it was much better than pretty much any bus ride I've been on (with the exception of perhaps super-cama). There is a little guy that comes around to serve cheap meals every few hours and the beds are definitely livable. There's also peddlers at most stops that sell the latest North American novels for about $3, definite bonus given that I can read on the trains.

The Bad: Arriving in India I soon developed some kind of ailment. Not sure what it's from since I really hadn't been in the country long enough to catch anything I would think. I felt pretty crappy the first evening and sometime during the first night, feeling pretty crappy progressed into a fever, which I woke up with as well. I had to get to the train station decently early, so I painfully pulled my body out of bed and hopped in a rickshaw to the suburban train station. The suburban trains are what they use around Mumbai and are EXTREMELY packed. I was breaking out into random hot flashes and sweating profusely, so my sole concentration was directed at keeping my hand grasped on the hanging roof handle so that I wouldn't get washed away in the sea of humanity. After one crowd disembarked, I noticed that my day pack had slipped down and was hanging around my elbow, pulled it back and in horror saw that the front pouch had been opened and looted. Goodbye MP3 player. Finally got to the central station and went to pull out my train ticket for my trip down south, nope, that's stolen as well. Not sure if it was the same guy, but the ticket was in my front pant pocket along with some money. The guy managed to get the ticket and about 200 rupees, but somehow left the remaining Ethiopian money I had there...not sure how, but regardless, I have to give him some credit for that superb job. Frustrated and feverish I had a sudden yearning to be back home, curled up on my couch watching Star Trek with a 6 pack of Kokanee. I briefly looked for any trains heading towards Vancouver, but the closest I could come was Rajastan, just not good enough. 2 hours and 3 police reports later, I managed to get a replacement train ticket for a mere $20...pretty much the cost of the original. Given that the train line I was travelling along was the one hit by terrorists a few months back that killed 200 people, I GUESS things could be worse...

And The Ugly: Mumbai is a little disgusting. Its similar to many Central American cities but just with WAY more people. It didn't help that the place I stayed at was in a slum, but the piles of garbage everywhere are monstrous and just on the way from the airport to my hotel I saw several people openly shitting on the sidewalk.

Luckily I only stayed one night in Mumbai before, as I mentioned, catching a train south to Chennai. The train ride down was quite depressing as I didn't have my usual library of mp3's to keep me company. The guy across from my seat spent at least 23 of the 26.5 hours watching me. That's all he did, was watch me. He watched me eat, he watched as I fell asleep and every moment in between. The guy watched me buy the latest John Grisham book from one of the vendors, watched me read every one of the 461 pages of the book (I had a lot of idle time), then when I triumphantly raised it above my head to signal its end, he gave a brief applause. Attemping to replace my stolen mp3 player, I would periodically attempt to hum songs from the Abbey Road album, but found myself simply repeating the lyrics to Mean Mr. Mustard, making my cabinmates confused as to why I kept talking about shaving in the dark.

Waiting for me when my train arrived was Sesha, the reason I b-lined it down here. When I actually worked for a living, Sesha was one of the people who worked with me. He moved from Canada back to India about 5 months ago and mentioned visiting him when he found out I would be coming through. It really cannot be overstated the simple joy of seeing a familiar face amidst so much chaos. The room he has set up for me is lightyears ahead of my Mumbai accomodations and his family is quite nice. Unfortunately the strange illness that hit me my first night here is still with me. I visited the doctor once arriving here and he took some blood out (wanted to rule out a malaria relapse), he also gave me the scare that I'm showing the signs of Dengue fever, so he's going to run that test as well, keeping my fingers crossed on that one, from what I've heard, Dengue is not fun.