Delhi: Reconsidered

I came down a bit hard on Delhi in my first desciption of the city. It was my first day, and the immediacy of the garbage, noise and chaos seared the most immediate impression on my mind.

Yes, Delhi is all of those things. It is dirty, chaoitic, intense and exhausting. Sitting in a cafe on a rooftop somewhere it's almost easy to forget where you are. But down on the street, the reality of it kicks you in the balls.

But Delhi, in the four days I've been here, has shown itself to be more than just a snapshot of urban squalor.

Delhi, in its way, is beautiful. I remember two days ago I was walking down a market street, drinking bottled water and exploring the bazaar. I stopped to light a cigarette.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a flash of brilliant color. It was a family of orthodox Sikhs in their traditional garb being pulled along by a fellow on a cycle rickshaw.

The husband had a long beard and a beatiful, jewel-inlayed schimitar in a scabbard on his belt. All three members of the family wore flowing silk robes of the most otherworldly electric blue color I've ever seen. It looked like a cross between moutaintop noontime sky and the spark of an arc-welder. I envisioned the family standing in a room lit by nothing more than the luminescence of their own clothing. It was breathtaking.

I watched them merge with the frantic, dusty river of traffic. "This," I thought, "is the sort of thing I came here to see."

I met a very nice young couple from London, and we spent yesterday exploring the tomb of 15th-century Mughal ruler Humayan. It's an incredible, sprawling complex built around an ornate central palace, designed by the same architect who later designed the Taj Mahal.

It was beautiful, sublime, with bats squeaking in the domed roofs of the tombs and dozens of hawks flying in long, lazy circles outside.

I'm glad I've had the opportunity to digest a bit more of Delhi, and I can't say I haven't enjoyed it. But after two weeks I it's time to get out of capital cities.

That's why today I embark upon a 16-hour, unairconditioned bus ride to the foothills of the Himalaya and the town of Dharamsala, near the Kashmiri border - home of the Tibetan government-in-exile and His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.

Delhi: First Impressions

India. I've dreamed of this place for years. I thought I knew what to expect. Never in my wildest imagination did I expect this...

Strolling out of customs at Delhi International at 1 in the morning, I'm glad I called ahead to make hotel reservations and arrange a ride. I had spent the better part of Tuesday afternoon at my modest Bangkok hotel, the Thai Cozy House, trying to decode the cryptic cypher required to make an international phone call. The phone numbers in my guidebook were all out of date, so I had to switch between the internet and the phone in my attempts to line something up. I finally made it work, and a young, dark-complextion Indian fellow was waiting for me among the dozens of other taxi touts and arranged-rides, holding a sign that said "Mr. Hugh." He leads me to a rickity van and drives me toward the city center with the windows down.

Delhi at 1 in the morning looks like it has been crop-dusted with nerve gas. Bodies lie all over the sidewalks, in every available patch of grass, slumped over rickshaws, propped between parked cars, contorted at unnatural angles. This, of course, is Delhi's enormous, impoverished homeless population asleep for the night. They're everywhere.

When the driver drops me off at the Delhi Star Palace hotel on the Main Bazaar rode in Paranganj (the neighboorhood, which I'm sure I've just misspelled, just west of the New Delhi train station), I'm again grateful I made a reservation. The street is littered with garbage and eerily deserted. Dealing with the reservation difficulties in Bangkok I had been tempted to simply take a cab to the traveler-heavy neighborhood and walk into a place at random. It would have been a bad move, I suspect.

I'm shown to my room: a double bed with sheets but no blanket, a sorry excuse for a window air-conditioner, a showerhead over the drain in the bathroom floor, and a bucket for hot water, which must be ordered from the front desk for 10 rupees.

I have trouble sleeping and wake up at about 6:30 Wednesday morning, eager for nothing more than to spend a day strolling around this fabled city.

I thought Bangkok would prepare me for what I was getting into. I was wrong.

This is the third world.

I expected garbage, but this? I expected pollution, but this? I expected wild color and frenetic activity. I expected persistent, offensive smells. I expected people squatting to shit in the street. I expected noise and heat. I expected burping auto-rickshaws. I expected touts. I expected traffic. I expected to be enticed by street food. I expected to meet friendly locals. I expected the wild Hindu cows that back up traffic and shit in the streets, but never, ever did I expect the madness of this city.

It's unlike anything I've ever seen. After three hours outdoors I have to rest for an hour in my small, dirty hotel room - just to cool off and take a break from the merciless sensory blitzkrieg.

I've done pretty much nothing today except walk and marvel and rest.

Stay tuned, more to come...

Goodbye Bangkok...

Well, everyone, the travel begins in earnest tomorrow when I fly to Delhi, India. All things considered, I'm pretty happy about it. Bangkok has been fun, and an agreeable adjustment to life in Asia, but I'm ready to move on. This place is more of a hub - not many people are here for more than a few days, and it's time for something new. Hope you like the photos; I'll post the rest sometime soon. I'll check back in from the subcontinent...

Bangkok Photos

Alright, gang, I have a lot more photos than this, but the internet connection at this cafe is a bit iffy, and it's taking too long to upload them. I'm going to try again later. Until then, enjoy this teaser...


A giant, standing, gold Buddha the name of which I can't remember. The people at the bottom should give it some scale. A fellow standing at the entrance was charging ten baht (about a quarter) for the opportunity to release some songbirds from a cage, thereby increasing your spiritual karma and luck.


Wat Arun, a Buddhist temple named after the Indian god of dawn, as viewed during my boat ride down Mae Nam Chao Phraya (the main river through Bangkok).

The (in)famous Khao San Road.

Not everyone in Bangkok is out to rip you off

That can be a hard lesson to keep in mind with the constant scamming and touting that goes on around here, but let me share with you a very special story... Two days ago I was walking along the edge of Bangkok's Royal Field on my way to the palace compound, home of several of the city's main photo-ops and cultural treasures. I paused to examine the content of a food-vendor's cart. The old woman was doing a brisk business selling roasted grashoppers and fried grub worms (I haven't tried them yet; I'm building up to it). A middle-aged Thai man, contentedly munching on a grashopper, asked me where I was from. "United States," I told him.

"Oh, welcome to Thailand!" he said. "Here, come sit with me, I'm waiting for my wife."

I've already dealt with enough scams in this town to be skeptical of most people who stop me on the street to chat. But this guy was friendly, and I felt like I needed to give him the benefit of the doubt.

We sat down on a park bench and I lit a cigarette. He asked me for one. He had never seen Camel cigarettes before (sadly, they're unavailable here).

He introduced himself as Na-Na (a nickname) and told me he was a professor of corporate law at the nearby university. We chatted for a few minutes during which he asked me about my job and why I don't have a girlfriend (the people here seem to think I'm gorgeous).

He told me about his family and his work, but he seemed vaguely uncomfortable about something.

"Maybe you come to my house for dinner?" he finally asked bashfully.

I wasn't about to turn down the opportunity to have dinner with a local.

On the tuk-tuk ride to his house (his wife had phoned to tell him she had headed home without him) he kept telling me that he was "very poor." He seemed to be telling me out of embarassment. Apparently he was concerned that I, the wealthy American, would find his humble Thai home offensively inadequate.

We arrived in an unfamiliar neighborhood on the opposite side of Bangkok. I stopped to buy some Thai beer as a gift (which he suggested)

"I have a cold, I no drink, but my wife like sometime," he told me.

He led me down a narrow, dirty pedestrian alley to an open area where several Thai families sat under corrugated metal overhangs - nursing babies, repairing motor-scooters, smoking cigarettes, talking and laughing.

"This my family," he told me. "And this my house."

The family consisted of his wife, two sons, daughter-in-law, grandchild, a giant yellow (yes, yellow) St. Bernard named Rambo and a multitude of cousins and neighbors.

The house was a single room with a couch, TV, and a bed in an enclave - all on the ground floor of a four-story shanty that opend up onto the alley. Na-Na showed me to the bathroom, a concrete closet with a hole in the floor with a bucket of water next to it. Noticing movement in the corner I flinched, thinking it was a giant cockroach, but it was merely a medium-sized lizard.

We drank the Leo beer and Na-Na's wife started a coal fire over which she proceeded to cook whole fish (they looked similar to perch) in a wire basket. She whipped together some seafood stew, rice, some kind of shellfish fritter and vegetables all served with a spicy/sour fermented fish paste, sweet dipping sauce and chili/vinegar sauce.

"You like beef?" Na-Na asked me.

"Sure, I like beef," I said, thinking he was curious.

Without hesitating he handed his 17-year-old son a wad of baht and sent him jogging to the market. 30 minutes later we had grilled beef with lime and a flank-steak salad with chilis and herbs.

It was an absolute feast. We sat around the dark, dank alley eating with our hands. One of the sons eventually produced a kind of pan-pipe instrument and I listened as the rest of the family sang songs and we took turns dancing around.

And in that moment I couldn't have been happier.

After dinner Na-Na took me inside to show me his family photo albums and the video of his son's TV appearance (he's a singer).

"Nobody know that this the house of movie star!" Na-Na gushed proudly. He gave me a short lesson in Thai pronunciation and made me promise to visit him when I come back to Bangkok.

"We poor, but we happy," Na-Na told me after we said goodnight to the family and he walked me to a taxi stand at the end of his street. "You see, we have family, and as long as nobody sick, we happy."

I was going to write more, but in the end I think that speaks for itself.

(Postscript: I have a handful of photos from my evening with Na-Na's family, and I will post them as soon as I find a computer with a USB port - Stay tuned).

Welcome to Bangkok

Here are a few things I've learned in the last 48 hours or so: 1) When All Nippon Airways designed their economy section, they did not have the 6-foot-1 gentleman in mind. 2) My wrist is, in fact, broken from the spill I took while scuttling over the chain-link fence to go swimming during Marcel's barbecue. I learned this from a portly Indian orthopedic surgeon I met while waiting for my flight from Tokyo to Bangkok. We were chatting about various things when he mentioned his specialty, so I couldn't resist asking him about my wrist, which has bothered me for the past few weeks. "Does this hurt?" he asked, pinching it like a giant land crab. "Ow! Your goddamn right it hurt!"

"Tsk," he clucked. "You should have gone to the hospital. You've neglected yourself."

He told me to wear an Ace bandage for the next few weeks.

3) I also learned it is rather unsettling to see footage of Sept. 11, 2001, shortly after taking off from Dulles on Sept. 11, 2005. It was a Japanese news program talking about the anniversary.

4) ANA has installed nose cams on their planes that show an image from the front of the plane during takeoff and landing. It's very cool, but I kept thinking about what it would look like if we crashed.

5) While reading the Washington Post on the flight I learned that there is a major breakout of Japanese Encephalitis in the Uttar Pradesh region of India (where I'll be in 9 days). Japanese Encephalitis is the one recommended vaccination that I neglected to get because I didn't have time and I was told the risk is relatively minor.

6) Three meals, five beers, 2 hours of sleep and 25 hours later, I realized that plane crashes and Japanese Encaphalitis were the least of my worries, because I was convinced I was going to die in the cab ride from Bangkok International to my hotel. The driver burned through downtown at 160 kph (you do the math), blowing through red lights and simply honking his horn to warn anybody who was thinking of crossing.

- I made it, though, and checked into the Mandarin Hotel last night. It was late, so I relegated myself to a drink and a bite to eat at the hotel restaurant/bar. I had charcoal grilled pork with a fiery chili/ginger sauce and spicy roast duck curry. That and a Heinekin and I was ready for bed. The whole meal was less than $6.

This morning I made my way to the famous Bangkok travelers' mecca of Khao San Road. It's a chaotic throughfare of budget guesthouses, screaming tuk-tuks (motorized rickshaws), tatoo parlors and stands selling everything from noodles to brass knuckles to pirated CD's and Lonely Planet travel guides. That's where I'm sitting right now in a rather pleasant internet cafe, smoking cigarettes and pondering just what the hell I've gotten myself into.

I am here, though, safe and sound. For now, I must orient myself. More to come soon.

3...2...1...

I was originally was going to start this post with a photo of the coke-can-sized bottle of horse pills I have to take every day starting tomorrow to stave off malaria, but I forgot my camera. Alas, alas...

Well, if I were the space shuttle now's about the time they'd start spraying water at my ass. I leave the day after tomorrow. This will probably be the last computer access I have before then.

The next time I post will be in Bangkok, after 25 hours of transit, a full night's sleep and a clear head (which I hear can be surprisingly hard to come by in Bangkok).

I have to run right now because I have a dentist appointment. I will check back in on the other side of the planet...

School's out...Forever...

There we are: The graduating class of Medill DC, Summer 2005...

I'm sitting in the newsroom right now, and it's like a ghost-town. It's totally empty - and more than a little melancholy.

Two days ago I completed what will very likely be the final formal academic sequence of my life. At 4:30 on Wednesday I turned in my Crimes of War Project article (no word yet on when it will run - I'll keep an eye out). After that it was off to Ebbitt's where we had a magnum of champagne and said some tearful goodbyes.

I suspect I will have more to say after I've had some time to digest the past year, but right now I'll simply say that it has been a pleasure and an honor to attend Medill, and to work with these remarkable people. I've learned more than I ever imagined I would.

A lot of people left yesterday. A few (including Ed "the Hulk" and Smashtar) are sticking around Washington indefinitely. Ed got a job with Dow Jones doing SEC coverage. Smashtar is...I think freelancing a bit - she might have an internship lined up.

I, on the other hand, am going on this absolutely ridiculous trip to South Asia. Now that school is out of the way the magnitude of this thing is beginning to set in.

Some good news is that it looks like I have some freelance work lined up with my former news service while I'm there - more details on that as they develop.

Also, please take the time to check out the finest hip-hop artist I've ever heard: www.illmitch.com

I applied for my Indian Visa this morning. I leave in nine days...