Roma - Napoli - Pompei

A last glimpse of summer... loads of monuments, ruins, museums, pizza - all very big and impressive! And a lovely time with Mara, Francesco & Ilaria - cari saluti da Berlino!

Rom, Napoli, Pompei

Egypt Warm-Up

All-inclusive holiday with the parents, I don't complain!
Hurghada, a thoroughly artificial resort on the Red Sea, locals speak better German than English, the average tourist is around 65 (or alternatively an unadventurous young couple or a family with very small kids), exotic factor equals zero.

So I ventured out to see some of the real Egypt (with an organised tour group and German speaking guide of course :) and went up to Cairo to see the famous pyramids (and yes, the ones in Mexico are more spectacular).

Luxor has quite a variety of sights to offer (17% of the world's monuments are based there according to our guide). We had 1 day to see the highlights, which was quite sufficient - looking at monuments in the desert at 42°C was almost too much even for me (and apparently it was one of the cooler days...).

Apart from that I discovered windsurfing (we had wind speeds of over 40 km/h, great fun and so easy to learn compared to surfing!) And the obligatory snorkel trip - rather healthy reef, loads of fish, amazing visibility, what more to say...

Here's some of the pics:

Ägypten Mai

Mumbai, Indian authorities & Ayurveda

I arrived in Mumbai early in the morning with only the day to spend before I took the night train for Nadiad to the Ayurveda clinic.

I was supposed to register my arrival back in India at the Indian Foreigner Registration Office, so this was the first thing I went to do. I had believed that the re-entry visa nightmare would be over on entering Indian soil - far from that. For ridiculous reasons (I needed a hotel receipt as proof of a local address, which I did not have since I was in transit, the address of the Ayurveda clinic was no good since it was in another state, etc.) they refused to confirm my re-entry.

So I spent half the day of my 1-day-visit in Mumbai with inefficient, frustrating bureaucracy. The other half of the day I rushed through the city to see some of the sights, and I have to say I quite liked the place. There is nice architecture, you can actually walk around without being hassled too much, and there are street signs indicating where you are. Colaba would be the part of town where I could imagine spending some days and Chowpatty beach promenade seems to be a real nice place to hang out - anyhow, its rather romantic :)



I would have liked to have gotten to know Mumbai better but due to the time I'd lost with this unfortunate visa business, I needed to move on. And as I said, the nightmare continued. I had a rather unwelcoming arrival at the Ayurveda clinic - the head of the clinic blamed me for not having my visa in order before my admission to the clinic (as if I had not tried) and threatened to send me away.

In the end I had to visit the local police station for 4 times (the officials there clearly had no clue, their ridiculous inefficiency in handling the simple procedure would make for another blog post of its own - but I do not want to go into this anymore, same as the choleric fits I had to endure from the clinic head every time I needed to go to the police station, since patients were not supposed to leave the clinic).

I ended up receiving 2 pieces of paper (I was made to sign that if I stayed longer than March 31 I would face 5 years of prison and a fine - pretty harsh given that my initial tourist visa ran until June...). And the very end of the story is that none of the immigration officers looked at any of these papers when I left the country.

My personal conclusion: I have no immediate desire to visit this country again, there are plenty of other places where foreigners can feel more welcome and face far less hassle.

Anyhow, the Ayurvedic treatment was the main incentive for this trip. Right now I cannot really assess its effects in the long run but it was certainly the most thorough health treatment I ever had and I learned a lot. Anyone who is interested in more information, please contact me directly!

Here you can also find a good overview (in German) of what to expect of a Panchakarma treatment with Dr. Gupta in the J.S. Ayurveda College, Nadiad.

Photo album:

India Mumbai - Ayurveda

Good-bye Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has given me a good break from India, lovely beaches, nice surf and sooo quiet. I spent 2 days in Hikkaduwa, which is the more developed surf beach on the west of the island. Waiters even spoke German and there were plenty of retired people around, so after exploring some of the surroundings I moved to less developed Weligama, which was recommended to me by other surfers.

It was very nice. The guest house was right at the beach in front of the surf spot. Apart from the other 5 guesthouses and the surfers in them there is no tourism, it's a real fishing village. Apart from surfing, sleeping, eating and - well, one night of arrack drinking (which I sincerely regretted the next morning) - there was nothing much to do.

Nonetheless, there was no lack of excitement. I had some interesting experiences with the animal world of Sri Lanka. A massive beetle, around 5 cm long, with hooks on its legs and making the sound of a helicopter refused to leave my bedroom one night - it was 3 a.m. when I finally got it out. The similarly sized cockroaches living in the cracks of the bathroom floor were the real owners of the hut. A python and other types of snakes were put around my neck and an octopus came round during my snorkeling trip (only to end up as dinner of some locals).



Everything would have been so nice if this short excursion to Sri Lanka had not ended with quite a nightmare. Some weeks ago India had introduced a new law that does not allow re-entry into the country within 2 months (based on an incident involving terrorists last year who left and entered the country around 200 times without anyone noticing).

So now, anyone who leaves the country and tries to re-enter it in within 2 months is considered a potential terrorist and has to undergo a series of time-consuming, chaotic procedures that were mainly devised to make money (of course, you have to pay for the privilege to re-enter on a perfectly valid tourist visa) and give people as hard a time as possible.

This, of course, I not did not know and I had not been informed about on leaving the country. I only found out by another German surfer, who had spent 1 day in the Indian High Commission without receiving his re-entry permission and then had given up and changed his travel plans.

After I had heard about this on Saturday I made my way to the Indian High Commission in the capital, Colombo, on Monday early morning since my flight was due on Tuesday 4 pm. It turned out that spending the entire day of Monday and most of Tuesday at High Commission was not enough to get my re-entry stamp into the passport in time. Not to mention that I had only 8 days to visit Sri Lanka, 2 of which I now spent in the most unwelcoming place on the island, the Indian High Commission.

At the end I got my stamp 3 hours too late to catch my plane. The officers had known about my flight (from the moment of my arrival at the High Commission I had told them over and over again that I needed my passport back by Tuesday 12 noon to make it to the airport; in addition they also let down a group 12 elderly Americans who were on the same flight with me, we had begged, pleaded and fought together - in vain). The officers deliberately delayed (!) handing out our passports so we would all miss our plane. It was so obvious and there was nothing we could do.

I cannot describe the scenes that were taking place in that office. People who knew nothing about that law arrived straight from the airport because they had not been permitted to get on their flights, others had important business or family emergencies and were stuck because these officers were too lazy (or too mean) to speed up the process of placing a simple stamp their passports, others only flew to India to catch a connecting flight, which they were in danger of missing.

People were shouting, crying, begging, pleading. It felt like a refugee camp, only that the refugees were tourists on legitimate multiple-entry visas (that was the real joke about it!)

I had to spend a considerable amount of money changing my flights and buying new tickets, plus additional hotel nights etc. Apparently there are complaints about this crazy situation from international embassies, but who knows when this law will be changed... it's India after all.

I just advise everybody who goes to India:
do not leave the country planning to re-enter (at least not within 2 months), do not book any connecting flights over India, you might not be able to re-enter on the way back and miss all your connections, do not try to renew an expired visa (unless you are in your home country - after waiting for 2-3 weeks you will simply be rejected, I have seen this happen to various people during the 2 days I spent in the High Commission)!

So, I am off to the airport now - finally.

Sri Lanka pics:

Sri Lanka

How to be Indian...

Certain characteristics of Indians never cease to be the talk of travelers - they bring backpackers of all nationalities (except Indians, of course) closer together, you may talk shop with Koreans or Brazilians alike on the wondrous world of Indian behavior. So if you want to become Indian you might consider adopting the following behaviors...

- clear your throat prolonged and as noisily as possible of mucus and spit the collected matter in front of other people's feet
- burp often and loudly
- wear mustache (male & female alike)
- avoid politeness (exception: salespeople, train your "Hello Madam, look here Sir"), phrases like "sit here" or whistling will do the job
- cultivate lying and cheating
- never carry change (money), or at least always pretend not to
- pretend to be dumb if you don't want to deliver a service (equally: only understand English if you may gain a benefit from it)
- always answer "Yes" regardless of the question asked, support your answer by shaking your head
- consistently get directions and durations wrong (intentionally or unintentionally), if you don't have a clue about the directions you are asked make them up
- when you see a foreigner do not hesitate to force inquiries on them like, "Your name!" or "Which job?" without prior introduction.
(One anecdote on this habit: I was walking by the riverside in Hampi, which is also used by Indians for their morning toilet (i.e. shit), when suddenly a voice came out of a bush "Your country!". It seems to be a reflex in Indians that cannot be suppressed even in their most private moment of taking a dump...)

I, on the other hand, do try to adapt in some ways, if only to be able to advance in my travels and save time. My English dangerously deteriorated and I articulate myself in sentences like: "When bus coming?" or "Me already have dinner", and avoiding yes/no questions at all times.

I also had to reinvent my CV:
Now I am German (Austria is invariably mistaken for Australia and it requires a lengthy geographic explanation to illustrate the difference), I am married (being older than, let's say 18, and not being married is as incomprehensible to them as having no religion), so my husband is at home working, I am traveling with a friend (who accidentally is not with me right now), I am a journalist for a travel magazine, or in tougher situations: I work for the police/military, I have no money.

And now finally, my last photo album on India (including Hampi, Gokarna, backwaters):

India South

Writing this I am already in Sri Lanka - back to civilization, people speak English and sometimes apparently also the truth :)

I will check into the Ayurveda clinic on Feb. 18th, so maybe I can upload some stuff on Sri Lanka beforehand, but maybe I will be too busy surfing the waves...!

The backwaters of Kerala

I considered myself lucky again - my train arrived on time in Alleppey, and I had met a couple on the train, Angela from Melbourne and Manel from Barcelona, who also wanted to go on one of the famous houseboat trips in the backwaters. In the guesthouse we picked up Jess from England, and the next day the four of us set out on this incredibly relaxing trip.

The backwaters are basically water streets, people live in small houses lined up by the waterside and grow rice on a lower level behind the rivers. The houseboats seem to be used for tourism only but they are very pretty and it is tempting to stay on them for much longer than the usual overnight trip, which unfortunately lasts only half a day and a night as in the morning the boats rush back to prepare for the next customers.



After that I went up to Kochi, a nice enough town (especially the part called Fort Cochin, even though there is no fort to be seen), and surprisingly clean by Indian standards. The guesthouses call themselves 'homestay' but usually they are just the same as anywhere else.

I found a nice woman to take a cooking lesson from, so now I know how to make chapati and some other South Indian dishes - the big advantage of this lesson was that I got to chose the amount of chili to put into the dish. So finally I was able to discern what the dishes actually taste like!

On Gokarna beaches & Indian Men

I got myself a cute beach hut made from palm leaves and with a 'natural' sand floor for less than 3 EUR on Om Beach near Gokarna. The beach is quite nicely shaped like an Om-sign and not as overcrowded as the nearby Kutley beach (which is quite nice nevertheless, especially if you want to show off your Yoga or drumming skills or other weird forms of meditation at sunset on the beach).



What was rather disturbing on Om beach were the hordes of Indian men who came to stare at female tourists in bikinis and shamelessly took photos - they were hard to ignore.

I will never understand the double standard in this country - on the one hand people feel offended if you show your bare shoulders or knees (it is considered a sign of disrespect), on the other hand Indian men seem to barely be able to restrain themselves from tearing the clothes off female tourists.

The story goes that Western women uniformly have the morals of porn actresses, this knowledge is apparently taken from Western blue movies which are highly popular among Indian men. It happened to me more than once that a seemingly good-mannered, cultured Indian guy wanted to turn the conversation into dirty sex talk, and more than once I had to fight off stray hands from strangers and shout at them. It seems that the more restricted the society is, the more perverse its men are.



Anyhow, the next day Clip and Mellie from Berlin arrived and we hiked over to the quieter & more beautiful Paradise beach and spend a nice, relaxing day.

On the way back we even saw dolphins! That evening Susi and Jason also arrived and our group was complete for a few hours until I took off with the night train to Kerala.

The long road to Hampi...

It started out harmlessly - I got a ticket from Goa to Hampi on the overnight bus without any trouble, the bus was more than on time, that is, it left 20 min earlier than scheduled (this must have happened the first time in the history of Indian public transport).

At 2 a.m. I got rudely woken up by Indian screaming "bus change!!". OK, whatever. The 'new' bus went off, soon started making roaring sounds and stopped shortly after. I woke up at 8 a.m. realizing that we were still at the same spot, in the middle of nowhere. Scenario: 2 broken down PAULO buses by the side of the road, some very confused tourists, and one tiny food/drinks stall making the business of a lifetime:



Apparently a mechanic was on the way, expected to arrive within 2 - 3 hrs. Since Hampi was "just" 250 km away some of us figured it might be wiser to call a taxi. Miraculously (that is after promising a fee of 5000 RS) a taxi appeared and 7 of us happily piled in, almost sitting on top of each other. That was at around 10 a.m. At 12 a.m., a number of errants and two fillings of propane gas bottles later (I didn't know that cars can run on this...) we finally hit the road.

The driver had promised to arrive around 2.30 p.m. The hours passed. The driver seemed to be lost in small village roads (although he would never admit to it), his average speed was 45 km/h. Food was nowhere to be found and we were all starving. We finally arrived at 10 p.m. - 12 hrs after he had picked us up, and 24 hrs after starting a supposedly 10 hrs long trip!

In Hampi all guesthouses were full due to a festival going on that was attended by 4 Million (!) Indians. Luckily we all managed to find some place or the other to crash. The next day we heard that our bus had arrived 1 hr after us but dropping the remaining passengers in a different town 14 km away!

After all this transport hassle I decided to be my own driver for a change and rented a little girlie-motorbike. I thoroughly enjoyed cruising through the impressive boulder landscape and along the rice fields of Hampi, jumping from rocks and visiting innumerable temples.

My favorite vehicle so far on this trip:



For the way back I steadfastly refused to take a PAULO bus again and luckily found a ticket for ISLAND bus, whose driver raced like a madman over the bumpiest of all roads dropping us in Gokarna at 5 a.m., I could not believe that I
a) was still alive (well, at least until the cows started attacking...)
b) had really arrived after traveling only for 1 night.

In heaven - and its called Goa...

It is warm, it is chilled, it is soooo nice.
I expected something like Thailand since Goa is such a household name and I also went to the 'most developed' beach, Palolem.

Well, Palolem itself is not my favorite beach around here, although it has nice shops and shop-owners who actually let you look around in their shops peacefully without hassling you with their selection of goods (which is usually of a taste you would not even give your grandmother as a gift) - I spend my days in Patnem beach only 10 mins walk away.

People seem to be fine, you have your usual share of pink English but they are surprisingly quiet, there are hippies, young hip families and single moms, and also retired people and/or retired hippies.

There are just little beach huts and beach restaurants, not one hotel building in sight (actually, every off-season most of the huts have to be taken down and can only be set up again in the next season, where the owners need to negotiate their spots anew).

In the evening they have little tables and cushion chairs on the beach, they light a few candles, sometimes they provide a Shisha, nice chilly music in the background and this is it. Sooo romantic, sooo relaxed. No 'Goa parties' (these times are long gone, and the police is omnipresent controlling on the one hand the 10 pm curfew for music and on the other the Indian lechers who like to stare at foreign women in bikinis).

I met up with Susi, a friend who I have not seen in ages and we have a very nice time here. Speaking of - its time to hit the beach!

Good-bye north India (forever)

Finally, I am in a 'real holiday', all that happened up to now I would rather call 'survival training'. People in the North of India are doing their best to scare even the most adventurous and good-natured tourists away and make them never want to come back again.

I kept on wondering how the compulsory lying and cheating agreed with their believe of karma. Possibly the northern people don't care if they get reborn as cockroaches in their next lives.

Some 'golden rules' to observe when you are traveling the North:

1. Argue about EVERYTHING you pay money for (attn.: they will even cheat you even on the price of a bottle of water).

2. Do NOT believe anything anybody tells you until you see it with your own eyes (train is not going, hotel is closed, tourist attraction being very far away so you need a rickshaw...)

3. Do NOT TRUST anyone, especially if they seem nice and (almost) normal - these are the most dangerous ones; speaking of which: never trust travel agents, especially not in Delhi!
I got nicely scammed for a rather sizeable sum of money by a Dehli travel agent - supposedly from a 'government-approved agency', don't know where they bought that title from...
Take special care with Kashmiri travel agents, they are the most skilled and have no shame to bill you 3 times the price of what their services are worth (apparently Karma does not apply to Kashmiri folks since they are Muslim).

4. Bring a winter jacket if you are going this time of the year.

5. If something seems expensive, it is. If it seems alright, you're still paying double of what it's worth.

6. EVERYBODY is getting commission, get rid of any Indian company if you need to buy something or you will always lose money.

7. Keep answering 'Yes' to whatever anyone is telling you and never stop walking - it will save you a lot of time, believe me.

8. Alternatively, pretend to be deaf.

9. Go South.

But I do not mean to say that everything was bad, we saw some very nice places including the Taj Mahal, Ranthambore National park (the promised tigers didn't care to show up, however), and mystic Varanasi.

I then went down South and spent a few days in Aurangabad seeing these amazing temples that were carved into stone with hammer and chisel over 6 generations during the 5th - 10th century (they are a World Heritage Site and truly impressive, read more )
Apparently, when the workers got bored they started carving pornographic scenes to amuse themselves - see pics.

Here a selection of pictures of the past 3 weeks (click to see album):

India North

Namaste - my first week in India!

As many say: it's impossible to describe this country, you have to see it. And smell it. And - especially - taste it!

Everything Indian-experienced friends predicted or warned me of happened of course: arrival in Delhi at 5 a.m. and the hotel taxi nowhere to be seen, found a taxi into town with apparently vision-impaired driver who hit the rail on the side of the highway and continued driving as if nothing had happened, he had no clue where the hotel was, after driving around for a while he dropped me in the darkest quarter of Delhi so I had to find it myself, the street full of garbage, beggars, stray dogs , all very scary - but I found the hotel, which did not have my reservation (even though I got an email confirmation), and so they put me in their most expensive room, which was a total dump etc. etc. But I was still happy I had arrived in one piece.

The next day I set foot out on the street and after 5 mins I thought my head would explode. My hotel was in the middle of a busy bazaar, people approaching me from all shops I walked past, "come here, look here, Madam", kids following me, clinging to me begging, Rikscha drivers stopping offering their services, the air dark with exhaust fumes and smoke from little fires that the beggars burn on the sidewalk to warm themselves (it was actually quite chilly), this all happening simultaneously while I try to find my way.

Crossing my first street was a big achievement. Approximately 5 lanes of traffic, donkey-carts, mopeds, rikschas and people all going into different directions, blowing their horns like mad, no sign of a traffic light or even a pedestrian crossing - the best method is to stand behind a local and when he starts, close your eyes and run as well.

I got through the chaos, and moreover was really lucky to meet the right people. At the end of the day I was all set with a new family accommodation, a 20-day-travel plan with all reservations and bookings made (which apparently is difficult to manage yourself because it is high season).

So now I am on a tour of Rajasthan, sharing hotel rooms, a car and our very nice chauffeur Sureis with Ilaria, an adventurous girl from Italy. It is an intense time filled with impressions and information, every second day we arrive in a new place - but it is the best way to see some really impressive parts of India in not too much time and without too much hassle.

We started with Pushkar, a beautiful pilgrim town, where we successfully completed all the typical tourist activities in a day: meeting some Sadhus (holy men), but also plenty of locals, who showed us the tents in the desert where they live; I took some more or less successful (but fun) music lessons of sitar and flute, then saw the sunset on a camel and got my hands painted with henna, drank countless Chais, went shopping... At the end of the day I even met a Brazilian tourist guide who is studying music in Varanasi, so I got my second Sitar lesson already arranged plus a local tour guide for the city :)

The next stop was Jodphur, also very beautiful with the massive Maharaja Fort, then Udaipur with the magic palace on the lake, which was not quite so magic because there is hardly any water in the lake at this time of the year - it was the palace surrounded by mud, and today we arrived in Jaipur, especially famous for the Hawa Mahal (palace of the winds) and its excellent shopping (the latter will take more of our time tomorrow than the sightseeing I reckon :)

To see a small selection of my pictures, click on the album below:

India 2010