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Quake

First things first, we are all safe here in Cambodia -- which was totally unaffected by the tsunami -- surrounded by friends and family.

As most of you probably have heard, a quake of truly biblical proportions struck off the western coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra early this morning.  This quake, reported to be between 8.9 and 9.0, is the fifth largest in recorded history.  It created a 20 foot tidal wave that, suddenly and without notice, crashed across beaches in eight separate countries from India to Thailand.  Tales of devastation are coming in from everywhere.  In Phuket and Kho Phi Phi, beachfront bungalows filled with sleeping tourists were swept out to sea.  In Indonesia, helpless divers were raked across the razor-sharp coral and then tossed back out.  In Sri Lanka and on the eastern coasts of India, thousands of dead are being laid out upon the beach and covered with sarongs in makeshift open-air mausoleums. 

The death toll is currently near 11,000 150,000 and will certainly grow.  In perspective, this is 4 60 times the casualties of the 9/11 bombings.  Many of us have friends or co-workers who were in the affected areas at the time.  There is no word of their condition. 

Click here for a list of organizations accepting donations for the victims of this tragedy.

The World is One Big Shopping Mall

I am disgusted.

We arrived in Bangkok early yesterday morning, and have spent the last 24 hours moving from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned hotel to air-conditioned sky train to air-conditioned shopping malls. I could be in Singapore. Really, everything is exactly the same here as it is there -- full of Western-branded stores. Mango, the Body Shop, BeBe, KFC, McDonald's, Boots drugstores. My god... what have we done to the world? We all worship at the altar of modernization, which really means commercialization. Shopping malls and hotels are where people meet, hang out, eat, see movies, go clubbing. It's all so generic and sterile. 

This was one of the amazing surprises of India. It seems to have escaped being flattened by the bulldozer of "globalization."

Dinner for a Dollar

And it's no Taco Hell, either. This entire delicious vegetarian feast at a proper sit-down restaurant in Mumbai cost 45 rupees. That's exactly US $1.

wireless

You know, there's been an awful lot of travel posting around here lately. This one is for the techs/teks/tex....

I'm sitting at the bottom tip of India pondering the idea of living here, but with one major addition: a proper data connection. There is no DSL in India. No broadband cable. I haven't seen a dish in ages. Internet cafes routinely have 10 PCs sharing one 56k line. All the while I'm happily getting 3 - 5 times their speed through my mobile phone. And my cost is only 99Rs a month ($2.20) for all-you-can-eat GPRS access.

Which gave me an idea. Group together a handful of cheap (used) mobile phones with GPRS and link them (Bluetooth or USB) to a junk Linux box to make a cheap, redundant and scalable wireless modem. For $650 ($500 for 4 phones and a $150 PC) you could get 1024kb/s -- DSL speeds, but symmetric as well.

Oh yeah, use a laptop with wi-fi instead and you become a mobile hotspot with a one-megabit connection. Not bad.

Thoughts?

Husband 2.0

This is Dale?!

Note the lack of hair, Bengali artisinal Ganesh amulet, and simple Indian linen drawstring pants. There's no denying it: My husband has become a hippie.

While on this trip, the former BMW convertible-driving captain of industry -- who just 4 years ago during our SE Asia travels balked at the idea of 'backpacking' -- has gone through a personal transformation. In the past seven months, he has:

- Sold nearly all his personal posessions, including his beloved car.
- Shaved his head.
- Spent a week at Hippie Summer Camp in Northern Italy doing breathwork, building a tipi, and eating vegan food.
- Done a 3-day colon cleansing fast.
- Been to a yoga ashram in Southern India where he spent 4 hours per day in chanting and meditation, and another 4 per day doing yoga.
- Regularly woken up before dawn.
- Left his computer and almost all other technology (except his precious Treo, of course!) behind for over 6 weeks of travel in India and Cambodia.
- Voluntarily offered to stay in shack-like accomodations with no more than a squat toilet for under $10/night.
- Become an afficianado of street stand food, which he used to deem 'scary.'
- Expressed an interest in learning to meditate and live in a 'hippie' community going forward.
- Embraced the value of simplicity.

Even some of the locals here in India have called him 'Guru.' Go, Dale!

Signs

Thank God. And just in time for Christmas.

Things to do in Goa

Goa is famous for its raging all-night psytrance music-fueled dance party scene. This is still going on, though not as strong as it was a decade ago. The free outdoor parties hosted by the likes of Goa Gil have been shut down by a government that's made clear its interest in attracting a more upscale brand of tourist than the hippie backpacker crowd.

But don't worry. There's still lots to do in the Anjuna area, even if you're not into pounding techno music and flourescent blacklight colors. Here are just a few examples:

1) Sip a $1 beer at a cliffside cafe surrounded by palm trees, like the Nine Bar in nearby Vagator, and watch a perfect sunset over the sea.

2) Chill out at The Jam Connection, a garden cafe with a fantastic treehouse and colorful tapestries hanging overhead, while you feast on organic salads and homemade ice cream.

3) Rent a moped and cruise over to one of the 24 gorgeous white sand beaches in the region, where you can spend the day sunbathing, swimming in the warm ocean, and snacking on fresh fruit.

4) Visit the Wednesday flea market where, for $100, you can stock up on enough Burning Man costumes and accesories, Indian tapestries and linen clothing, and Ganesh/Om/Shiva stickers/t-shirts/bags to last a lifetime.

5) Make friends with your neighbors at your beachfront (read: sand out your doorstep) hostel, who are just as likely to be Indian domestic tourists as they are Israelis, Northern Europeans or Aussies staying in Goa for the whole winter season.

6) Enjoy an Aryuvedic vomitory purge, colon cleansing, or saltwater nasal flush -- if that's your idea of how to 'relax.' For the rest of us, there's plenty of massage and yoga around town.

7) Just sit and watch the cows go by...

Correction to Yesterday's News

The editors of this blog would like to apologize for any broad, sweeping generalizations we may have made about India based on our limited experience travelling in Calcutta, Varanasi, and Agra during our first 11 days in the country.

Upon arriving in the region of Goa (in the South, on the beach), we felt as though we had been transported not to a different state, but to a different country. Aside from being much wealthier than its neighbors, Goa is distinguished by its Portuguese cultural heritage -- meaning a more laid back approach to life.

To celebrate, we've recorded just a few of our 'firsts' since arriving in India:
- Hand dryer in bathroom (you can forget about ever having towels or paper towels)
- Non-Indian music
- Seatbelt (in a vehicle of any kind)
- Jesus on a dashboard (as opposed to the typical Ganesh on a dashboard)
- Tank tops and bikinis (even the Western women in the North know to wear long pants and keep their shoulders covered)
- Raw vegetables (Western cafes here serve delicious salads washed with filtered water)

Oh, and did we mention beach, sun and surf? It's all good. ;-)

-meimei

I Used to Want to be Famous

Not anymore.

Being a Western tourist in India, we have concluded, is a lot like being a celebrity. Here's why:

1) Crowds of children incessantly scream 'Hello!!', want to shake our hands, ask our names, and follow us wherever we go. (For a laugh, Dale has started introducing himself as Julia Roberts and I say Tom Cruise, but the names go unrecognized in this land where Bollywood dominates, not Hollywood.)

2) At tourist destinations, it seems the locals are as interested in taking pictures and videos of us as of the monuments. Yesterday we must have posed for a dozen photos with strangers who weren't even interested in having the looming Taj Mahal in the picture alongside us. For them, we were the 'tourist attraction.'

3) We are constantly stared at -- we're talking uncomfortably long direct staring, sometimes through an entire meal -- to the point where we now call ourselves 'Fox TV.'

4) The 'paparazzi' (touts) chase us down all the time. The only escape is to enter a 'protected area' such as a hotel or tourist restaurant. I have newfound empathy for Princess Di.

5) We're about a gazillion times richer than most of the people around us. We live high on the hog for $20/day (compared to $0.65 a day for a local Indian). But we are consistently nagged by a sense of guilt about it -- as, I imagine, are most stars who earn $1 million plus per film or TV show.

6) Train, plane or bench at the chai wala stand all full? No problem! There's always a seat available for a VIP. (Airlines and trains even maintain a 'tourist quota' and silently boot locals off to gain access to the hard currency spent by foreigners. I bet that engenders goodwill...)

While fame has its advantages, on the whole I prefer anonymity. There's something to be said for just being able to walk the streets, relax on a sunny lawn, or eat a meal in peace. I'm giving up any lingering dreams I had of celebrity. Although hey, I'd still take a bestselling book some day!

A Whole New World

We have traveled from places where piles of feces pave the streets and you encounter more suffering than you could ever imagine, to the home of what is considered by many to be the finest building on earth -- the Taj Mahal. And wow, is Agra a completely different experience from the India we have seen to date.