[JPM Travel Journals] INDIA and NEPAL 01 Intro to India. Holi Holy Vrindaban The Sadhu in Taj's Shadow Pushkar's Respite A Sitar & a Vespa in Udaipur The Clean-Bombing of Mumbai Goa Beach Hippie Sighting Tours Unequal Vision in Benares Everest, Out the Window Into Their Thin Air Anna Purr Now Within You Without You Rishikesh Part 2 Amritsar: Bold, Gold His Holiness of Dangerous Liasons Delhi Visit #5 New Delhi Turns to New York [ PHOTO ARCHIVE ]

Intro to India 04 March 01 Paharganj, Delhi. After a sleepless night on the flight from Moscow to Delhi, I arrived four hours late this morning, touching down in India at 09.35, and sliding through passport and customs easier than I could have imagined. Tucked into a taxi (negotiated to a third of the initial price quote-- typical) and set through in the 20 degree C pleasant air towards downtown Delhi. Windows down, spirits way up. Road crews singing in Hindi, my driver smoking a Beedie. Do I know where I am? Delhi. Beauty in Chaos. Monkeys on the wires. Paharganj. Small quarter of tightly tucked alleys. Cows strolling down the dirt ways. Bells and horns and shouts. Merchants falling out of every possible half-constructed storefront. Bicycles. Scooters. Taxis. Children, Beggars, Sadhus, Monks, Ragmuffins, Vendors, Hippies, Dealers, Urchins. Chaos, a beautiful madness, alive with smells, striking the senses one after the other-- a sensory overload-- my eyes my ears my everything. I'm tired as sin. Slip into a hotel, after rejecting the first two and forty-minutes of hunting. Sweating and aching. $4/night room on the forth floor. Private tiled bath. Shuttered windows, open breeze, fan, spacious solid bed, and opens to the courtyard and roof deck one flight up. A quiet, minimalistic place. Will hopefully serve its purpose while I reinvent myself in these 48 or so hours, fix the exhaustion, and consume sizeable parts of a book or two. Delhi street vendors; Vespas. Must get a train schedule tomorrow, plot the route and times to Mathura, then Vrindavana, a holy city I've dreamed of seeing for almost a decade. From there: Agra and the Taj Mahal, down the west coast, to the south, back up around the east maybe cheating with a flight to ease off the trains, towards Varanasi and the funeral pyres, and up to Nepal and the Himalaya. All of there are only ideas, still. Six to Sixteen weeks and developing world unpredictability could change a lot. I've come here on a one way ticket with no scheduled return and no impending schedule. The monsoon and the tourist seasons and political happenings and endurance, interests, my only real restrictions. All day I have been trying to convince myself: Yes. I am really here. Really, I am in India. Really, this is Hindi script, this man is from India, this man has probably always lived here, I've never been here but I've thought about it for so long, and this is not a photograph, not a film, this is not a story, this is a real place and I am here. My mind is going ten thousand miles an hour. New Delhi. Jama Masjid Mosque. Try anything once. Moscow. Red Square. -10c to 40c in 36 hours. Addendum: Moscow. Does deserve its own entry. Cannot do it justice now, even though only having had 2 days there. Must write later of the oceans of furs, the mad subways, the cyrillic incomprehension (at first,) the snow falling on red square and the kremlin-- the striped spiral peaks of the church and the footprints of my chilled toes and heels back and forth for miles in the slush of it all. Aeroflot rattled us to bits, left me at Moscow Int'l six hours waiting for a delayed flight and then made an unannounced stop in Dubai (UAE) on the way to refuel. Absurd and insane but altogether incredible. Holi Holy Vrindaban >> ©2001 JPM. All photography and writing copyrighted.