Going tripping

Mumbai was a treat, but it was nice to be able to escape the city once in a while, and where better to escape to than Goa? It was a short flight away and somewhere I’d always fancied going.  We arrived almost at the end of the busy period, since although the monsoon doesn’t kick in until the end of June, the season is more or less over by mid May.  We had booked a beach chalet in Palolem beach, a couple of hours’ slow drive from the airport, slow not so much on account of the traffic, but due to the fact that the driver couldn’t seem to bring himself to shift out of second gear.  Still, it gave us ample time to gaze at the beautiful, brightly coloured Portuguese-inspired villas that line the route, many of them slowly crumbling yet still magnificent. 

When we finally arrived at our destination it was dark and we were led by or driver down an unlit sandy footpath and over a load of rocks (me, rather comically, with wheelie bag in tow) wondering what on earth we had let ourselves in for, until we arrived at a tiny cove backed by idiosyncratic wooden bungalows amidst the coconut palms.  Our home for the next two nights was Green Park resort, right at the end of the beach nestled on the foreshore of a tiny bay.  The bungalows were what could be described as basic – in these circumstances the sentence is usually followed by ‘but clean enough’ – which wasn’t really the case either, but the location more than made up for it.

It being so close to the end of the season the restaurant at Green Park resort was closed but fortunately a short rock clamber away there were many more to choose from, so our first evening saw us dining well on Kingfish and, it must be admitted, a plethora of extremely inexpensive alcoholic drinks including a vicious local spirit distilled by Sonny, the laid back owner of the place who appeared to do nothing other than watch cricket twenty four hours a day.

The view from our hut in the light of the following morning was sublime – to lie in bed and peer through the mosquito netting to see waves silently lapping on the shore just metres away was rather special, despite my tender cranium. It was a slow start but we managed a walk down Palolem beach, passing fishing boats, multitudinous beach dogs, sarong sellers and hundreds of places offering yoga and massage – Goa still lives up to its hippy reputation.  The beach huts lining the sandy beach look fairly substantial, yet incredibly are all carted away lock stock and barrel in advance of the monsoon season, to be built up once again the following year.  The monsoon is so fierce the huts would otherwise never survive.  We’d had quite a surprise come daylight upon stepping into the bathroom in our beach bungalow to find that it didn’t have a roof, just a bit of dark muslin.  Luckily no rain was forecast.  It was quite unnerving but also quite marvellous to shower with the treetops swaying above you, hoping that no-one had shinned up them to collect coconuts.  The basin was interesting; the water ran straight out onto the floor, lapping around your feet. It didn’t do to dwell too long on the state of the electrical wiring…

At the end of the beach we stopped for some caffeine and noticed how incredibly laid back the Goan people appear to be.  It seemed to be a lot of effort to take our order, even more effort to go and make the coffee, and a step too far to give us our bill.  But it’s done with a disarming half smile, a shrug and a complete lack of concern.

Sunday saw us heading out in one of the fishing boats for a dolphin-watching trip.  We weren’t really expecting to see any and it was just very pleasant to be floating about past the stunning coastline, no buildings in sight, just rocks and scrub falling down to the blue sea.  We had almost given up looking when suddenly we spotted them, rather larger than expected but most definitely dolphins, doing their dolphiny thing. 

Our second trip away from Mumbai was to colourful Rajasthan, and was a weekend of contrasts.

Our main aim was the search for the elusive Sumatran tiger at Ranthambhore National park, although our journey began – and ended – in Jaipur. Kicking off our weekend of two halves was an overnight stay at the Umad Mahal hotel in Jaipur, a confection of a building adorned inside and out with frescoes, mosaics, heavy, elaborately-carved oak furniture and other paraphernalia worthy of any museum.  It also had a rather splendid rooftop bar and a nice line in Spanish white wine. We were up early the following day for the three-hour drive to Ranthambhore, a 1334 square kilometre of wilderness, originally a Maharaja’s hunting ground, which since 1970 has been a Government controlled National Park providing refuge to a total of 61 tigers.  The long drive abounded with colour. In The ‘Land of Kings’, colours bear deep significance, and exotic colours are celebrated everywhere, a maelstrom of vibrant hues. Women are clad head to toe in saris of fluorescent orange, electric blue and canary yellow, whilst men sport saffron yellow, orange or pink turbans, all denoting their place in society. Tractors trundle down the long straight roads adorned with sparkling tinsel and gaudy plastic flowers, music constantly blaring.  Lorries are painted a myriad of colours and patterns, all displaying the command ‘horn please’ which our driver obeyed with gusto.

The National Park could not have been more of a contrast. The scrubby, rocky landscape adorned with stunted trees, occasional waterholes and rocky canyons was more reminiscent than the African savannah than the India I was familiar with. We spent a fantastic few hours bouncing along in an open topped jeep haring after possible sightings of big cats.  Did we see a tiger? Well, a safari park it is not, and whilst there are plenty of jeeps roving round, the park operates on a quota system whereby a defined number of jeeps are allocated into a certain zone in order to avoid overcrowding the animals. This, combined with the lack of radio contact between the various guides inevitably lessens the chance of seeing a tiger but in turn reduces any impact on the wildlife. So no, we did not see a tiger. As compensation, the landscape was hugely beautiful, particularly at the waterholes and most especially when the driver turned off the engine and we were enveloped in the still quiet, punctuated by the shrill mew of a peacock, an ever-present cuckoo, the staccato bark of a deer or the comical chattering of a lapwing. To discover such stillness and quiet in India is a rarity. We did however spot jackal, wild boar, a crocodile, storks, a golden oriole, an iridescent kingfisher and lots of other birdlife too exotic to identify.

Back in Jaipur were plunged back into the frenzy that is more usually associated with India. The return drive had been equally colourful, with herds of sheep in the road, cows walking serenely down the middle of dual carriageways without turning a hair, camels pulling wooden carts, and finally brightly coloured lorries laden to bursting with rice, trussed up in oversized, bulging fabric bags that dwarfed the body of the lorry and took up almost all of the road.

Jaipur is popularly known as the Pink City, owing to the fact that rather bizarrely in this land of riotous colour, its buildings are painted a demure salmon pink. Pink symbolises welcome, and the city was painted thus on the occasion of a visit from the Prince of Wales back in 1878. Aside from being aesthetically pleasing, the colour serves a practical purpose too as the matte pink colour reduces the glare from the sun off the buildings.

As hot as it was, we wandered around and saw the Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, an elaborate building in the turrets of which the royal concubines used to sit  away from lascivious eyes in order to view the royal processions in the street below.. We saw the City Palace – from the outside at least, and we saw the inside of a fair few shops, soon coming to the conclusion that everything is cheaper in Rajasthan.  It was hot, it was tiring, and we felt exactly like a jar of honey surrounded by wasps. I loved it.

A month in Mumbai

So, where did April 2015 go, exactly?

It was admittedly with not just a small amount of trepidation that I headed off to India once more. Mumbai was to be the third Indian city I’ve lived in - after unsophisticated, friendly Chennai, and powerful, aggressive Delhi, Mumbai is a different animal again.  Mumbai has only been Mumbai since 1996, but it has an identity of its own quite different to the rest of India. 

Mumbai is the Bollywood capital of India and I’m fortunate enough to be living in swanky Bandra, right in there where the celebs live and on the shores of the Arabian Sea – in fact my hotel room on the 20^th floor overlooks the ocean, with tiny boats bobbing about on the tide and the ubiquitous red kites swooping hugely past my window. This area of Mumbai at least is savvily sophisticated and cosmopolitan. One of my favourite things to do is to walk along Bandra seaway – Hove seafront it may not be but it’s pretty special; the corn sellers and coconut vendors on the rocks; the public doing their laundry; the smells and the oppressive heat of India tempered by the cooling breeze; torpid dogs lounging in the shade; guys selling bhel puri from little carts; all intermingled with the lycra clad power walkers and joggers and loved-up couples sitting in the shade.

Mumbai is such an easy place to live. People are so laid back here it’s as if hassle is  way too much bother – even the tuc-tuc drivers put their meters on for a foreigner like me. Mumbai is justifiably described as he foodie capital of India and you can get pretty much any food here; take for an example the menu at my personal favourite the Palli Village Cafe includes none other than a Quinoa Formation – manna for a healthfood nut like me.

I say you can get pretty much anything, well yes you can as long as it’s not beef. Pro-Hindu President Pranab Mukherjee has banned the sale of meat from cows on religious grounds, which hasn’t gone down that well with the Muslim population, reigniting fears of a replay of the riots of 1992 which saw 900 people die after the destruction of a mosque in a move supported by the Government at the time.

My first weekend in Mumbai saw us embark on a tour around one of the most famous slums in a city that it is renowned for its slums – Dharavi.  This was led by a young guy who used to live in the slums himself and was an utterly fascinating insight into this city within a city, with its myriad interconnected businesses and residential quarter housing half a million people. Depressing it was not, but an eye opener it certainly was.  Everyone in the slum is gainfully employed and the living spaces although cramped, were not in any way squalid.  Dharavi slum is where a huge proportion of Western countries' recyclable waste ends up, from plastic bottles to paint tins.  The plastic is sorted – (pity the poor guys whose job it is to separate the needle bit from the plastic syringes sourced from hospital waste, no gloves worn) and melted down to little plastic nuggets which, depending on the purity, can be worth a fortune.  Paint tins are cleaned and used to make shacks.  Aluminium cans are melted down at ridiculously high temperatures by a man with a huge ladle, no mask, no shoes and inadequate gloves and recast into aluminium bars a bit like gold nuggets, Many of the workers sleep in their workplaces, fumes radiating into their lungs 24/7.  It’s tempting to think that recycling is great for the environment, and who doesn’t feel virtuous as we sling away our old plastic bottles and food cans but in reality it’s a dirty, smelly, polluting business – although a lucrative one.

Dharavi slum is where part of the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was filmed, and if you look carefully in the film you’ll see briefly in the background an early 1980s Space Invader’s machine, the slum’s must-do attraction for the kids; or at least it was when we saw it and at one rupee a pop actually quite pricey.

The opposite side of the slum is given over to housing as well as industries such as pottery and food production.  We watched one strong–armed young lady rolling out endless balls of poppadom dough with a tiny rolling pin and draping the resultant discs over a wicker dome to dry in the sun.  Once she has produced 1kg of these paper-thin poppadoms which takes her about a day, her wage is 100Rs, roughly £1. Apparently a fair bit of Mumbai food is produced in the slums, although it will never say on the wrapper that it’s made in Dharavi, otherwise few people would buy it.  Hopefully some of the food produced is a bit more hygienic than the poppadoms, as the backdrop to the rolling out was a young girl having a poo on the pavement…

She could be forgiven however as there are only two sets of public toilets in Dharavi, which means there is often quite a wait, and costing 2Rs a go, a big wedge out of the poppadom lady’s daily wage.  The slum is massive, but it is not allowed to expand any further by law, which means that the early slum dwellers have much more space, and their houses are far more substantial and roomy than the later arrivals, who basically could lay claim to less and less space.  The slum is more or less full to bursting now so people are now reduced to sleeping on the streets outside.  The Indian Government is calling for the demolition of the slums, to be replaced by tower block housing, and a couple of such blocks were erected a few years ago but proved unpopular when the residents discovered after they had moved in that living in a  tower block, even one that had toilets and a kitchen meant that they had nowhere to carry on their businesses and therefore no income, Add to that a bizarre law in Mumbai which dictates that if one lives in a place long enough – and I mean as few as 10-15 years – you then end up automatically owning it.  Thus it’s not in the landlord’s interest to have tenants stay long term so they basically fail to carry out any repairs.  It’s this which explains the beautiful but sadly neglected and crumbling mansions all around my neighbourhood in Mumbai.

As a complete contrast to the slum, our next stop was the Taj Palace in Colaba, The hotel stands near the Gateway of India and was one of the targets of the Mumbai terrorist attack along with nearby Leopold’s café, a backpackers’ hangout.  People go there, now, to gape at the bullet holes which still dot the walls, but to my mind 2008 is not very long ago and whilst lightning rarely strikes twice, I found the whole place quite sobering. A total of 173 died in the attacks, and I remember the whole thing very clearly.

The third item on our agenda that particular day was Dhobi Ghat, where the men (on one side) and the woman (on the other) wash their clothes in what is a an open air laundry. If you’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire, it’s where Jamal’s mother is killed.  Seemingly even commercial laundry is washed here at the Ghat with hotel sheets and towels fluttering in the polluted Mumbai breeze.

The other Friday after work we decided to make a trip to swanky Juhu, a beach suburb about 20 minutes north of Bandra. It’s the haunt of celebrities apparently, who often jog along the beach flanked by their minders.  Not that we saw any celebs amongst the throngs on the beach, splashing about in the filthy water and playing endless games of beach cricket. It’s a curious thing about the Indian psyche, as it was a large beach and either end was relatively quiet, but everyone chose to bunch together in the middle.  In a country where personal space is so limited, it must be strange to be on your own.

Passing time in Istanbul

As always when living in a big city the passage of time led to an intimacy with the place, with the result that finer and finer details were gradually noticed in familiar districts, a bit like peeling away the layers of an onion to reveal hitherto unseen aspects.  So it was with Istanbul. Every day I noticed new things, like oversized street dogs fat from chips and kebabs lounging listlessly on the pavements, pedestrians literally stepping over them; the small boy or old lady tenderly placing a handful of cat biscuits on a street corner; the shoeshine men; the elderly woman sitting on the cold floor of the underpass selling her hand knitted woollen socks ready for winter; the immense cruise ships like apartment buildings moored on the quay, the rubbish boats sucking up the debris from the Golden Horn, the Syrian beggars with their sleeping babies huddling by the air-vents to keep warm, the ever-present riot police strutting pompously, guns cocked and water cannon at the ready. Such was the tapestry of life in Istanbul.

As ever though, it was refreshing to get out of the city.  So one weekends in October we decided to visit the Black Sea coast.  Only a little over an hour out of Istanbul by a combination of metro and bus, our destination was Rameli Feneri, a seemingly insignificant fishing village where the Bosphorus empties into the black sea overlooking a harbour shielding the fishing boats from the choppy Black Sea waters. We found a Turkish coffee in a cafe and gazed at the tankers trundling back and forth.  The town played a fairly significant role in history, the lighthouse being built by the French during the Crimean war – there is a separate lighthouse on the opposite side of the Bosphorus – to guard this strategically important access to Istanbul.

The coast is rugged and reminded me of North Cornwall with rocky headlands backed by sandy pine forests.  Our plan was the walk along the coast, a plan which was thwarted slightly by the fact that the road led through a beach resort – private and, in autumn, stubbornly closed.  Rows of empty chalets, forlorn sports pitches and unused beach umbrellas brought to mind the holiday parks popular in 1960s Britain.  Undeterred we forged off on forest paths to find an inland route to our destination, Uzunya beach where miraculously the restaurant was open for lunch, overlooking the chilly sea and the coarse sandy beach.  It’s worth adding that the forest was deserted and beyond the firebreak tracks, impenetrable, and even if it seems unbelievable that an hour out of a city of 14.6 million people that there could be wolves or bears living in the forest, I would still like to know what left a paw-print a good six inches in length…..

Back in Istanbul, one weekend saw me visiting the intriguing Museum of Innocence.  Fans of the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk will know this as the title of his most famous book and the museum occupies the former home of the man who was the inspiration for this book.  The author tells the story of this man’s obsession with a young Turkish girl, which led to him collecting items such as pepper pots or spoons pilfered from the family home, along with the butts of every cigarette she ever smoked in his presence – which are all preserved in the museum.  No doubt it may have made more sense to have read the book first, but as a microcosm of life in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s it is a veritable time capsule, not to mention a slightly spooky and unsettling place.