My First Three Days in India

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Day 1: We woke up in Chennai in the south of India. We had landed about midnight the night before. (When we landed, there were about 500 people outside the airport. Half of them were there to pick up arriving passengers. The other half were taxi drivers. We had gotten a cab and headed to our hotel. The cab ride alone was an overwhelming experience - we passed slums with people sleeping on the roofs and chai stands and people on bicycles and and there were fireworks going off for Diwali and there were piles of rubbish everywhere and, at times, the whole city smelled like poop). Jigar woke me up at 7. He was already dressed and showered. He was so excited to be in India for Diwali that he couldn't sleep. In the south, they celebrate Diwali the day before the north so the celebrations were already underway in Chennai. We could hear the fireworks already. We went downstairs and got some breakfast in our hotel. It was a buffet with idly, uppama, and sambar along with some other things that I don't know the names of. It was by far the best breakfast we have had in our travels thus far. It made our stop in Chennai worthwhile, just for the breakfast.We headed to the airport to catch our flight to Ahmedabad, Jigar's hometown. It was there that I learned that many places in India have what they call "Indian Toilets" (which is a hole in the floor that you squat over) and not many have "European Toilets" (the kind we are accustomed to). After some searching, I found a usable "European Toilet", only to find out that they don't use toilet paper in India! There is a system here that involves a pitcher of water and your left hand... I don't really want to elaborate. Anyway, thank goodness for pocket packs of tissues!

We got to Ahmedabad at about 1:30 in the afternoon. Jigar's dad met us at the airport bearing flowers for me. We drove to their house and some family friends were there to perform the welcoming pooja (ceremony or prayer) to welcome me to the house for the first time. We were both really, really happy to finally be in Ahmedabad.

After visiting with them, we had lunch. Then we had a rest before we got things ready for Diwali the next day. Diwali is like Christmas for Indians. It is the festival of lights so we filled up a whole lot of oil lamps and made the wicks out of special ceremonial cotton.

We lit the lamps and set them up all around the house. A neighbor came over to visit with his son for a bit and helped us with the lamps.

After that, Jigar's dad taught me how to make chai (that's Hindi for tea). Then we headed out to do some shopping. On Diwali, you are supposed to wear new clothes so I needed a new dress. We went out and got me some Indian clothes. They are so comfortable and still so pretty!

We went to the temple and we also stopped by a shop and got some sweets because you are supposed to eat a lot of sweets on Diwali. We finally stopped by and got some sandwiches (bhaji pau) before heading home. We got home after 11, and one of Jigar's friend's (Manish) and his wife (Dhwani) came over to visit. We were hanging out with them until 2am! The good thing is that they speak English so I was able to participate in a conversation for the first time all day.

Day 2: We woke up and Jigar's dad wasn't around. We found out that the neighbor (who had visited the night before), his mom had died in the night. Jigar's dad had gone to help them make arrangements. It was a sad beginning for Diwali. I made some chai for Jigar and some for his dad when he got home. We had a quiet day because everyone was sad. In the evening, we visited a friend of the family and then we went over to Manish's house to set off fireworks. We couldn't set them off around the Jadav house, out of respect for the neighbors.

Diwali is the festival of lights so the entire city is setting off firecrackers. Everywhere you go there is the sight, the sound, the smell, and even the taste of fireworks. By the end of the evening, I was literally dizzy from sensory overload. It was really fun, but really overwhelming.

Day 3: The day after Diwali is New Year's Day. In the morning, you do a special pooja for prosperity in the new year. You have to go to your place of business to do it and it must be done between 7 and 9am. We went to Jigar's dad's office and did the pooja.

You also have to make a rangoli. That is a design that you make outside the house so that Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth) doesn't pass you by. Jigar and I made the rangoli.

Later in the day, you go to visit your friends and family or they come visit you. I was napping during the first set of visitors. When some friends of Jigar's dad came over, I had to make them tea (since i am the only woman in the house until Jigar's mom gets back from the states)! The pressure was on! Luckily, everyone said it was really good. After that, we went and visited 3 different families, some friends and some family. We stopped by the temple along the way. I didn't understand a single conversation the whole day. There is no pressure to follow along that way! I can think about whatever I want to and just sit there and smile at people. At every house you go to, they serve you snacks and sweets so there is a lot of eating involved. That part I could do!

It is really amazing to finally be here. India is indescribable. It is the most incredible place I have ever seen. To see so much filth and poverty and yet so much joy at the same time is overwhelming. It is somehow the most beautiful place I have ever seen despite all of its flaws. There are well over a billion people and each of them does whatever they want. If there is a rotary in the road, they go around in either direction! Whatever suits them. There are so many people and animals (camels, oxen, goats, elephants and I can't count how many cows!) and cars and motorbikes and its just chaos. There are entire families on one motorbike. There are ten people in a single rickshaw. The clothes the women wear are beautiful rich colors and designs. They stand out against the backdrop of grime and dirt. They are like jewels. And right now the whole city is lit up because Diwali is the festival of lights. It is beautiful and we are really, really happy.

Singapore... at last!

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After having our passports held hostage at the Indian embassy in Australia and making it onto the plane by the skin of our teeth, we were relieved to finally be out of Australia and on to Singapore. We loved Australia. We had an amazing time there. But we were ready to move on. It was time for some new energy for our trip… and Singapore has energy in spades.

Singapore is a hodge podge of cultures and Indian culture plays a big part in that. Since it was almost Diwali, we decided to stay in Little India to celebrate the holiday in style. We made it to Little India around 8 AM (our flight had landed at 4) so we had plenty of time to find a place to stay. We checked out a couple of hostels and were able to leave our bags at one while we continued our search. But not before we stopped for our first cup of masala chai. For those who are not familiar with it, masala chai is a delicious concoction created by the Indians in a flash of pure genius. It is a milk based tea with spices (some combination of ginger, cinnamon, clove, black pepper, mint, and/or cardamom – what masalas you get depends on who is making it) and sugar. It is the peak of deliciousness. In Singapore they put their own little twist on it by using condensed milk. Mmmm, mmmm good.

We decided to take a room at the hostel that we left our bags with. Since there was a festival going on, rooms were filling up fast. It seemed like a nice enough place so we just went with it. Then we went to check out the neighborhood. The decorations were beautiful. Singapore really goes all out for a festival – although, it probably doesn’t hurt that the Prime Minister is Indian. The decorations were top notch. Jigar said that the decorations in India aren’t that nice. We stopped by the temple along our way.

We rested in the afternoon because we wanted to go on the evening tour that conveniently started at our hostel. Before the tour, we went to get something to eat. Finally, decent, cheap Indian food! In Australia, Indian food was $20 per plate… far out of our budget. We stopped by Chellas near our hotel for some snacks. Jigar was very excited to find Bhaji Pau. The place was packed so they sat us at a table with a single diner. It turns out she was a college student from Singapore named Tanushree. We had a long, leisurely meal with her but then we had to run or we’d miss our tour!

Our tour guide was really nice. He guided us through the craziness that is Little India on the eve of Diwali. He was very excited to have Jigar on the tour – a real, live Indian person. We went through a market (where we got free garlands and some snacks) and then walked through the neighborhood. The streets were all lit up for Diwali – the festival of lights! Along the way, Elijah (our tour guide) would stop and explain various Indian customs or fill us in on some history. After the tour, we stopped by a restaurant that Elijah had recommended. Jigar got onion baji and I got a dosa. Onion baji is basically onion dipped in chick pea flour and fried. It was really good. Dosa is a big (and I mean big) pancake (or more like a crepe really) stuffed with potato. It is really good. When the bill came, we thought there must be some mistake. My dosa was only $1.50. But there was no mistake. That’s how much it cost. After penny pinching in NZ and Oz for the last four months, our relief was palpable. We knew traveling in Asia would bring its own issues, but it would be nice to not have to worry about money for a while. Exhausted after a long day, we headed back to our hotel for a good night’s sleep. The whirlwind of leaving Darwin and basically not sleeping the whole night was catching up with us.

The next day, we decided to explore some more. We weren’t feeling any pressure to see all of Singapore since we’d be flying back through in March. I was hoping to catch up with my friend from high school, Dotsie, since she lives in Singapore these days. Unfortunately, since we couldn’t give her much notice (as in, "Hi! We're in Sinapore. What are you up to?"), she wasn’t available so we’ll see her in March. With no plans for our last day in Singapore, we headed out on foot.

We thought we’d head toward Clarke Quay. Jigar had been in Singapore a couple of years ago and he had fond memories of the neighborhood. We stopped to ask someone directions and they told us to take public transportation. Singapore has lovely public transportation, but we wanted to walk. The woman we were speaking with told us it was impossible to walk there. It didn’t look impossible according to our map, so we pressed on. Was there some obstacle not on our map that blocked our way? Next we stopped by a camera store because Jigar wanted to price some equipment. As we were leaving, we asked the man who had been helping us how to get to Clarke Quay by foot. He told us that it wasn’t possible. Intrigued, we asked why. He said that it was as if we walked from Little India to his store. I told him we had just walked from Little India to his store. He said, “Well, it is 10 times that long!” It had only taken us about 5 to 10 minutes to make that walk so we weren’t too concerned. We just kind of wandered around the city, heading generally in the right direction. We walked through a Chinese market. We passed a Hindu temple. Then we came across a place to eat that our friend, Tanushree, had recommended the day before. It is called Kopitiam. It is cafeteria style dining with all different types of food – Malay, Chinese, and Indian to name a few. We ordered some sort of flavored ice concoction. They pack a bowl FULL of shaved ice and then pour flavors over it. Ours was rose and pineapple and a few other flavors that were delicious but not easy to identify. Then they cover the whole thing with beans. Underneath the ice is flavorless gelatin and corn. OK, well, we’d give it a try. We figured these people knew what they were doing. And other people seemed to be really enjoying this dessert. We thought that the beans and the corn were probably sweetened and the gelatin would taste like jello. Nope, on both counts. It was pretty much just as you’d expect – if you take away the corn, the beans, and the gelatin, the shaved ice part was quite tasty. We enjoyed it (after scraping the beans off the top). It was a fun experience.

We finally made it to Clarke Quay after about two hours of walking. It would have been a 10 minute subway ride. Maybe that is why everyone was telling us to take the train… It was a cool area, but Jigar says it is a lot more fun at night than on a Sunday afternoon. After checking out the area, we decided to spend the rest of the afternoon in the Joo Chiat area.

Joo Chiat/Katong is an area unique to Singapore. The people who settled the area were predominantly of mixed race – wealthy Chinese men and their Malay wives. As a result, there is a mixing of cultures in that neighborhood which gives rise to some particularly delicious food along with some interesting history. Our true goal in visiting this neighborhood was the Laksa – a particularly delicious soup that originates from this neighborhood. After 15 minutes on the train and a 30 minute walk, we found the famous laksa. And it was good! We refreshed ourselves with lime juice and lychee juice and enjoyed big steaming bowls of seafood laksa. Then it was time to go head back to our hostel and pick up our bags and head to the airport. Our 36 hour layover in Singapore was coming to an end. It was a lot of fun. We look forward to going back to Singapore and visiting the world famous zoo and catching up with Dotsie, but we were really excited to get to India in time for Diwali!

The Amazing Race Continues... Darwin

It seems that the amazing race continues. After we made a sad announcement to our parents that we wouldn't be able to make it to India for Diwali (biggest Hindu festival of the year), we were very sad.

The reason why we weren't going to be able to make it to India was because of our visa situation. In New York in takes only a day to get the Indian visa and with that knowledge in hand, we went to the Sydney Consulate General of India to apply for our visa 2 weeks before leaving Australia. Turns out it takes a minimum of 5 business days and a maximum of 15 business days to process the visa. We also provided our itineraries showing our departure date and flight out of Australia. We were informed that it wouldn't be a problem getting the visa in time. We left our passport with the visa office and continued our travel. The plan was that our new friends in Australia, Tooey & Van, were going to pick up the passports when the visas were ready. The plan was solid, almost fail proof. Unfortunately, we didn't take into consideration on how unreliable any government agency or a consulate is. We were very hopeful to get the visas and stayed optimistic until the end.

Now time was running out. A week before we were going to fly out, I emailed the Indian consulate general inquiring what was the status on our visas and they informed me, "it was still being processed." Two days after that, Gin & I were getting really nervous about not getting any update on visa. Finally, I called the consulate and spoke to some people about how frustrating this entire situation was. They told us that it takes a minimum of 15 business days to process the visas for non-Australian residents. I was outraged that we were totally misinformed. We told them that had we been given that information, we would've never applied for visa in Australia. We would've gotten them in Singapore instead. I told them how important it was for us to get to India for Diwali and that it was my wife's first time visiting my family in India and her first Diwali in India. They made a note to expedite the visas, but told us not to hope for getting the visas anytime soon.

We waited until the day of departure, but we didn't get the visa. Of course, when things go wrong, they go wrong in dozens. We called Tiger Airways to change our departure date to a later date. We were sadly informed that Tiger Airways was no longer flying the route from Darwin to Singapore. To our astonishment, we couldn't believe they wouldn't refund us the money. Our argument was that we don't mind flying with Tiger, but they canceled the route. We felt that we should've been given our money back since they were canceling the route. They told us to fly out of Perth instead. So their idiotic solution was we pay them $100 ticket change fee, plus buy another ticket to Perth just to fly out to Singapore. I was totally outraged with the way Tiger Airways handled the situation and did not refund us anything. Matter of fact, I had to pay an additional $100 to cancel our tickets. The only reason why I did that was because I filed a dispute with my credit card against Tiger Airways and they had told me specifically to cancel the flight and get a confirmation number from them. They were so sketchy about this entire situation that they wouldn't even give me a cancellation number. They told me it would take 3 to 4 weeks for them to email me about the cancellation of the tickets. That was absolutely ridiculous.

When we left Melbourne for Darwin, we forgot our cell phone in our friend's (Ian’s) car. So now we had no means of communication. Luckily, the phone had slipped out of my pocket while we were in the car, so it wasn’t that bad.

We were in Darwin during this entire ordeal. To make matters worse, it was 40 degrees (about 108 degrees Fahrenheit) with high humidity. It was absolutely gross. So we were stuck in Darwin, waiting to hear any news about our visas. Since we were waiting to hear about the visa, we couldn’t even go to Kakadu National Park or any other day trips from Darwin. It wasn’t the most fun time we’ve had in Australia, but we were trying to make the most of it. For the 10 days we were there the daily routine was to wake up and check the status on visa and then come back to the hotel for lunch and then go back to check the status on the visa.

Finally, the visas got done on the 24th of October which made us optimistic about going to India. Unfortunately, there were still quite a few hurdles in our way before that dream would come true. By the time I called Tooey & Van to pick up the visa it was already to late for them to go and pick them up. That was Thursday. So the earliest they would be able to pick up the visa was on Friday. Sadly, we had to pay $300 AUD to get the passports shipped on the same day. The courier service told us they would deliver it in about 8-10 hours on the same day. So now we were waiting in our hotel biting our nails to get our passports delivered. Finally, at 4:30pm I decided to go to the Darwin office to check the status on the package. TNT couriers told me that there was no way we would get the passports on the same day because Darwin is so isolated from the rest of the country and things never arrive on time in Darwin.

It came very close. I was able to get the phone number of the guy who delivered urgent packages 24/7. He informed us that our package would arrive at 10:40pm and it would take him at least 40 minutes to locate the package and deliver it to the airport. Gin & I had checked out of the hotel in the mean time and we were waiting in line without any ticket or without our passports to fly out of Darwin to Singapore. The flight was supposed to leave at 12:50am. Luckily, the courier guy was able to get the package on 11:15pm and I was running around the airport trying to locate the guy. Finally, I was able to locate the guy and we bought our ticket to Singapore all within an hour. We couldn’t believe that we were on our way to India for Diwali. I called my dad to inform him that we were heading that way and good thing I did that because my dad had planned to go to the USA.

After going through a week’s worth of anticipation, Gin & I needed a break from traveling. Fortunately, we were heading to India where I knew would have plenty of time to relax and not worry about anything. But before we get to India, Singapore here we come!

The Great Ocean Road

We passed through Melbourne on our way to the great ocean road. We had heard from everyone that it was a must see/do in Australia. We had pretty high expectations since everyone we spoke to told us to do it. Even Uncle Ron & Aunty Cathy highly recommended it.

We knew where to start the great ocean road trip; it was in the town of Torquay. The great ocean road is about 300km long from the beginning to the end. We had about 2 days to do it. Since we had our own campervan, we had plenty of food and water supply. On the first day we passed through Geelong where Ian lives. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to call him and hangout with him. We were going to do that on our way back to Melbourne.

Our first stop was Bells beach. This legendary beach is where they had supposedly filmed the end of the movie Point Break. Gin & I had our lunch sitting in our campervan watching the surfers try to catch some good waves. It was awesome to see them from above the cliff. After the lunch we decided to check out the beach, but it was too cold to go in the water. There was absolutely no one around the beach area except the surfers. I couldn’t believe that they were surfing in that cold water. Hats off for even attempting.

We drove onwards towards Lorne and continued towards Apollo Bay. We were going to stay in Apollo Bay, but we were recommended to stay at Blanket Bay since we had our campervan. We kept on driving past Apollo Bay and there were no signs of Blanket Bay anywhere. We came across the sign for Cape Otway and we just decided to go in that direction. It was already getting very dark and we were in the middle of the rainforest. We were getting a little worried since there weren’t any signs of Blanket Bay. Luckily, thanks to Gin’s good eyesight, she spotted a sign for Blanket Bay. We had a similar experience in New Zealand where we were looking for a camp ground and spent a while looking for the camp ground eventually giving up on that idea. We had very little hope about this camp ground at Blanket Bay as well. We continued and got to the camp ground. A right turn led us into a spot where about 20 people were camped out. That was a big sign of relief. Finally, we were relaxed and got ourselves a spot to camp. After dinner I tricked Ginnie into going for a walk. It was absolutely gorgeous. The moonlight hitting the waves and the silhouette of the moon was absolutely mesmerizing. We were glad that we found the spot.

Next morning we continued onwards towards spending a few hours at the Cape Otway light house. It was fun few hours at the light house with some spectacular views of the sea. The history of the lighthouse was also very interesting. It was the oldest light house of Australia and served a very important role in WWII.

We were totally excited about seeing the famous 12 Apostles. It is the hallmark of the great ocean road. We wanted to go see them around sunset because by sunset most of the tourist buses disperse. It was certainly the highlight of the great ocean road. We hung out there until sunset. We met a very nice couple, Tal & Efuat, from Israel. They had also rented their campervan with Jucy rentals. For our last day in the campervan, Gin & I decided to stay in a Holiday Park in Port Campbell. It was the only holiday park close to the 12 Apostles. The reason why we wanted to stay there was because we were going to wake up early for sunrise and go see the 12 Apostles again. We told the Israeli couple to go and stay at the holiday park as well and they did. It was wonderful hanging out with them and we were invited to go to Israel and stay with them in the north of Israel. We’d certainly take them up on that.

The great ocean road was certainly very beautiful and very unique to Australia; however, it didn’t even come close to the beauty of the South Island in New Zealand. Gin & I enjoyed the great ocean road very much, but felt a little gypped, since we had done New Zealand first. The great ocean road is supposed to be the best drive in all of Australia and if it is so, then it’s far from being amazing. If I were to go to the South Pacific again, I’d go to Australia first, and then go to New Zealand because after going to New Zealand, Australia had no chance of coming close to the natural beauty and the picturesque setting of New Zealand.