Friday 28 November 2014

and for one hundred rupees...

It's always a bit of a risk, goin public with creative stuff; sharing your art, your writing, anything. And since I'm what you'd call untrained, I'm usually in some doubt about the quality. So thank you, those who made nice comments about my previous post.  Much appreciated!

Today is the last day in Bodhgaya - so it had to be another afternoon at The Temple. With sketch book.

It was only as I was leaving that I noticed someone taking photographs with a tablet. So I asked Security, who suggested a payment of a hundred rupees...

With iPad retrieved from the consigne, I had about 45 minutes of rapidly fading light to snap away.
Most of the 20 or so pics show a quirky, personal view of The Temple Complex, but here are two of general interest. Where I sat yesterday.

Time now to repack the rucksack and move on. Setting off on a long train journey to Kolkata, arriving in the wee small hours of Sunday. So this will be the last for a while.





Wednesday 26 November 2014

At The Temple


Sitting watching while the body burns, and fat drips from the heels. (The feet are always left sticking out of funeral pyres and folded in later.) Mesmerising.
Sitting under The Great Bodhi Tree, descendant of the original one, surrounded by the constant chanting of pilgrims. Mesmerising.
I was drawn back several times to the flames. This afternoon was my third visit to The Temple.
Photographs of cremations are not permitted, and in Bodhgaya the risk trying to get an iPad past the two security frisks was not worth taking. So although photographs were allowed, I couldn't...
Time to give the art materials an airing instead.

Spent a very happy afternoon by The Bodhi Tree lost in my own thoughts, and making two pictures. It felt right.





Monday 24 November 2014

Man flu'

Got to Bodhgaya three days ago, but now suffering the aftershock of a bowl of spinach soup the night of arrival, (should have known better than to risk it,) and the bigtime return of asthma. (Bodhgaya is the place where 2600 years ago, Prince Siddharta Gautama attained enlightenment under a bodhi tree and became Buddha. Today it is an international centre of pilgrimage, with all that it entails. There are the most incredible temples and monasteries. But there is also incense burning night and day, and a great deal more than just a couple of joss sticks! It's gone to me chest.)
So back now on antibiotics, rehydration salts and upping the inhalers again, and the jury is still out on Bodhgaya. I have to say though, that much as I respect Buddhism, it all feels like a huge assault on rational thinking. CORRECTION: on rereading the next morning, it would be more accurate to say "a huge assault on the way that I have learned to think". (I feel I'm grappling with something big.) Anyway here's a handful of pics:






Sunday 23 November 2014

The Nitromorse Effect.

The old Colonial name was Benares, (similar root I was told to Buenos Aires.) The new name is Varanasi, ( a porte-manteaux of the names of the ghats at each end,) but before either it was Kashi (City of Life) and is one of the worlds oldest continually inhabited cities (Guidebook info.)

Just wandering the streets, ghats and galis, and I could feel the paint stripper applied on arrival some weeks ago really working... Peeling and scraping through my layers of gloss and undercoat down to the primer and bare wood.

It soon started to feel inappropriate to point my camera at the intimate details of people's lives, as they soaped themselves in the river, set up intense card schools, slept at night hunched in the hand barrow by which they made a living by day, or stretchered the corpses of beggars in noisy processions through the narrow alleys for cremation. So I didn't. This was their life. Dignified, but in full public gaze, and not just a show for tourists. 

I shalln't forget Varanasi.
















Friday 21 November 2014

The Best Exotic Marigold

Turning the clock back 20 hours or so; I'd arrived on the night train, tired and emotional, from Delhi and was met at the station by another shark. Said his name was Sandy, though I suspect more probably Sanjay. Shady Sanjay Sandy then proceeded to tell me that I was not going to the hotel I'd booked (The Dolphin International) but to a much better one; brand new. I was to be its second guest he said proudly. I shrugged and went with the flow. (Or as a thirty something traveller from Oz I'd met in McCleod Ganj put it: "you just have to surrender yourself.")
It was only after I'd checked in that I began to notice the details. The sticky tape left on the bathroom sink was just one of the many signs that this place was not actually ready for any guests at all. Workmen were creating dust on the landings, doors left open revealed mattresses still wrapped in polythene. The whiff of fresh emulsion. I went down to reception and asked about wifi...   Ahem......(But for the most part Indians don't do ahem. In fact, they seem unabashed about everything,) and there's usually a face saving explanation, not necessarily a truthful one. They phoned a wifi company ...tomorrow. Wifi tomorrow.

I spent the night in my room with one bottom sheet and one flimsy rough blanket for cover - no use calling reception for more, there was no one on duty.
Up before dawn to catch the taxi to catch the boat to catch the sun rise and get back in time for an early breakfast...
Where's the dining room, please?
Breakfast will be in your room, Sir.
There is no table in my room,
There is no dining room. Not built yet.
The last straw. Go with the flow? Surrender myself?
I thought of Dennis Gould. RESIST AND DISOBEY!!!
By 9 I was checked in at The Dolphin.

Postcards from Varanasi

"you must see the sun rise on the Ganges..."
So that's what I did on my first day here.
Felt the quiet magic of first light,
And tried to capture it in postcard shots.

Lovely to look at, but they do not tell us anything about Varanasi.





Thursday 20 November 2014

...and troughs

No. It wasn't good going back to Delhi. It was the place I'd received my first taste of the disingenuities of this country and pride had taken a bashing.
I recognised the feeling exactly. A teaching group that can tear you apart on a Friday afternoon, and you've got them again on Monday. The shadow of stress hangs over the weekend.
I think learning theorists call it a "specific phobia", but whatever the name, you still have to try and sort it... Easier said than done.

So that evening I replied to a friend's email. Decided to let it go viral, (ie blog it,) and set out for a night walk round the immediate neighbourhood and the closing hour of a big Sunday street market. Things were already looking up.
Next day decided to treat myself to a cycle rickshaw to The Mosque near The Red Fort, and a walk in The Ghandi Cemeteries. Not top of the guidebook lists of "things to do" but beginning to learn that I'm a funny bugger, and that what guide books tell you are the Must Sees are not necessarily the things that have most personal appeal... Beautiful lake, but look! No ducks!

That evening, happy to get the train to Varanasi. Top tier sleeping berth, which meant a night spent a good six feet above the carriage floor, with just a few inches between me and the ceiling, and only a couple of foot holds to reach it! Two other passengers snored beneath me. Fortunately still agile enough to climb up, but by no means easy.



Note to self. Try and book the bottom bunk in future...



Wednesday 19 November 2014

PEAKS...

Before I blog on I just want to say a really big THANK YOU to  FerenjiNan for a two week Gatherette pas comme les autres. Sat now in a hotel lobby in Varanasi, I look at a photo stream of memories, and am filled with happiness. And all on one click of the mouse... Oh, and some B12's and half a kilo of Brazil's.
xxUntil the next time...x








Tuesday 18 November 2014

All is well...


FFishy is sitting by the Ganges in Varanasi and loving it.  He is happy again but won't have internet for five days so he asked me to let all his fans know...

Sunday 16 November 2014

Reply all.

Dear B,
Thanks so much for your email. The timing was perfect.
I got into Delhi at 4-30 this morning, dropped off in the dust, the dark and the cold before the dawn at a Tibetan community centre in a filthy suburb... The nightride down on the bus, taking hairpin bends on bumpy unsurfaced roads, made me feel utterly sick, and there were vomiting noises (and smells) coming from somewhere behind me. But now, here I am 14 hours later, in a fairly central hotel, and itching to get the train out, having spent a few hours this afternoon attempting some sight seeing, but eventually ending up in a local park. Pretty dilapidated, very sleazy, but there was space; and air that was just a tiny bit more breathable ...
I think of Delhi, and I come up with Hell on Earth. Or Bosch's Garden of  Earthly Delights. Now, if I could just get into bed and pull the covers over my head and wake up the day after tomorrow in Varanasi (the next stop) that'd be just fine!

Anyway, as you can tell, you've caught me at a low point. Am wondering whether I should have stayed longer in the mountains, but am also mindful that the season was changing there, and ultimately the South beckons... But so, tonight, does Gloucester!

Lots of love,

xxCol'.x












Saturday 15 November 2014

Delhi Jelly

The horrible feelin I keep gettin in my stomach at the thought of goin back there. ((I'm booked on the overnight bus...)

Thursday 13 November 2014

Paper Moon

Andy Warhol didn't throw stuff away. Papers, that is. Bus tickets, laundry bills, magazines, were all put into a large  storage carton and once full, each box was sealed, numbered and stashed away. A few years ago, pre-QCC, I saw a Warhol show in Edinburgh. two or three of the boxes had been opened and their contents scattered tastefully in glass display cases. An ephemeral biography.

I have cardboard boxes stashed in the cupboard under the stairs in Gloucester. They have been labelled "Warning! May contain explosives!" Which ensures that one day someone will open them.
Meanwhile, the current box is receiving birthday, Christmas, greetings and holiday postcards, letters, theatre programmes, entry tickets to houses, gardens, and exhibitions.

India, I said, would be different. Breaking the obsession. An exercise in letting go. Collect nothing. And travel on light.

It was very difficult, but I have already got rid of a number of entry tickets to royal forts and palaces, including The Taj Mahal.

But what to do with the security pass into The Temple to attend the teachings given by HH The Dalai Lama?


Wednesday 12 November 2014

Smellin n Sin Tax

Everything wobbles here. If it doesn't, there's something wrong.

This afternoon I took a jeep-share down to Dharamshala and within a hundred yards or so, had snapped these valiant notices.

Never again shall I insist on askin for a panino...







Tuesday 11 November 2014

Advice to (pedantic) bloggers

Sorry to intrude in your blog, but I saw this and I thought of you....


Feel free to delete me...  XXX