The Amazon and Etceteras

The Amazon

The Amazon was one of those fantastic places that exceeded my expectations.  You hear so many horror stories about people on discounted Amazonian tours (Really?  That´s where you want to cut costs:  In the jaguar, anaconda-infested jungle?), so I red-eyed in and out of Manaus, and booked the good booking to go into the Great Selva, hassle free.  The way it worked at my lodge, each booking gets assigned one tour guide with a bit of overlap depending on when you arrive.  I was assigned to Cristoval, and though he was still assigned to Barry when I arrived, and a family of four when I left, the ´overnight in the jungle´ part of it, I was alone.  It didn´t occur to me that this was unusual until the family told me that when they were booking and feeling nervous about sleeping in the middle of the jungle, the Travel Agent told them, ¨You´re worried and there are four of you?  There`s a girl out there right now, all alone!¨


Of course, once Cristoval and I were canoeing out to our campsite and I attempted to landmark our route, I realized how impossible it would be to ever chart my way back, especially at night.  You start landmarking by memorizing things like "wobbly tree, with crook to the right of the fork", and then (being that it´s the Flooded Forest) you see a million other trees that look like that.   There are anacondas slithering through the Flooded Forest, though you can´t see them as you paddle through the oil-slick black water.  I said to Cristoval, " I hope you realize that if you get hurt out here, I`m going to be of no use to you!  I have no idea how to get us back to civilization."  I asked Cristoval if he was carrying the antidote on him for tarantula bites, and he told me they keep it back at the camp.  What good is that?  Sure, he can paddle back in an hour, but what about me? 

Setting up camp was cool.  Cristoval has his campsite set up with rudimentary forked and shaved wooden posts, for setting the tarp canopy and hanging the hammocks.  He made spoons and spatulas by carving the bark off sticks, and we gathered huge leaves to use as plates.  Despìte the fact that I had two caipirinhas at the campfire, I didn`t dare go to the bathroom once all night, as we could hear the jaguars crooning.  When I asked Cristoval how far they were, his response was "far away" (which he later clarified as being 500 metres!)  Actually, twenty years ago Cristoval`s Dad was in the jungle at dawn (6 am) cutting rubber trees, when a jaguar attacked and killed him. So I made sure I stayed mummified in mosquito netting and hammock until 7 am.


During our stay we went piranha fishing, sometimes setting long lines roped between two trees like a clothesline, with baited lines hanging down from the central line like pendants.  Sometimes we just did free fishing, in a little enclave in the Flooded Forest.  I was so anxious to catch a piranha, I tried and tried, improving my baiting and casting techniques daily, but, although I did kiss one, I never got to catch one.  The bait for pirhana fishing is (believe it or not) raw chicken and beef.   So for vegetarians who only eat fish...beware!  You might actually be eating an entire cow.  These pirhanas are smart; they know just how to nibble around the hook and despite my attempts to wait it and bait it, I was never able to snag one.  Every single other guest at the lodge caught at least one, if not five, but I was like the Anti-Pirhana.  Thankfully this aura also extended towards the mosquitoes as I didn´t get bitten once, though other people looked like they had the chicken pox.  So, every evening before the sun set, we tossed the residual bait overboard.  The fish must all have been spreading the word about the six p.m. buffet.


Cristoval was telling me about an extreme adventurist he took on a ten day Jungle Safari.  She insisted on doing it Survivor-Style, eating only what they caught, so they had to do the whole Lord of the Flies thing to get food.  They saw about ten jaguars, and  they learned to sleep high in the trees (she had to learn to pee standing up, from the fork in a tree.)  Not the vacation for me!  Another couple of French girls went on a tour with a fly-by-night guide who got them lost in the forest for six days and five nights, before they were randomly found by a hunter.  Their feet were completely swollen and they were bitten to bits by the time they were found.


Another danger of the Amazon are the huge tarantulas which tiptoe about at night.  We went on a day walk and Cristoval coaxed one out of its cave with his stick.  I wasn´t expecting to see something so huge and furry, like the Yeti´s knuckles, creep out of the earth.  Suffice it to say the Amazons deserve their reputation for being fiercely brave (that and the fact that they succumb to full body hair removal once every 15 days, something I tried once and will never ever repeat!)


Rocinha and the Favelas

One fascinating aspect about Brazil are the favelas.  These are huge shanty towns whose houses shingle the hills of Rio.  They say that 20% of the population of Rio live in these favelas, and Rocinha is one of the biggest of the 750 favelas in Rio.  It was featured in the movie "Ciudad de Dios" with actual residents from the favela appearing in the movie.  Though a large aspect of the favela is crowded, dirty and poor, it still hosts a network of fast food, cyber cafes, banks, cable services, pharmacies, and electronics shops in addition to the huge drug trade. The number of inhabitants in Rocinho is somewhere between 60 and 160 million inhabitants.  The narcotrafficantes operate out of a "boca de fumo" where they not only sell drugs to the locals but to the rich and wealthy inhabitants of Sao Corrado and la Barra da Tijuca. There was a big bust on the drug trade in the favelas recently, (which some people who live in the favelas say was ´´all show and no go") because the traffickers were using kids as messengers, drugs and arms carriers and between 1979 and 1989, the number of children killed by small arms fire increased 306%.  That said, most of the members of the gangs are under twenty and the favela lords are about thirty.  Even the youngest and lowest ranking favela members (between 12-16) earn about five times Brazil`s minimum wage (260 Rand or $162/month), so you can see why the trafficking continues. 

What you see now when you go to Rocinha are the new sports complex with pool, and a Smarties coloured housing complex with secure playyard bookending the simple, ramshackle structures with split cement walkways, broken CDs and used condoms littering the pavement.

It´s an oxymoronic place with cozy houses, tiled, with running water, beside rusting corrugated structures with dripping roofs.   The telephone posts are nested with wires that people have snipped and rearranged to augment their access.  We arrived up the mountain by motorcycle, and as we climbed up the streets were rewarded with a spectacular view of Rio, forests and beach and city.   Though the poverty seems extreme, one woman was apparently not even willing to sell her house for a million dollars, because she loves the view.

The favelas are run paramilitary-style.  Jorge Selaron, a Chilean artist who tiled an entire staircase with tiles from all over the world (I bought one of his paintings!), sums up the rules of the favela like this:  The art of living in the slum: no one steals, no one hears, nothing`s lost, dictate those who can, obey those who are wise.

Some of the things that are not permissible in the favelas (and are controlled by a quid-pro-quo system of juistice) are theft within the community, physical fighting between residents, rape, sexual abuse of children, wife beating, speaking to police and owning a gun without informing the local traffickers.

On the tour I was on, we walked past an unsmiling guy holding an AK 47, while barefoot children raced underfoot of vendors carting produce through the streets.

Sexto, Sabado, Domingo

Despite Rio´s repute for being ´the marvelous city´, it also doesn´t have a lot going on during the week.  I arrived pre-Carnaval and expected to see some rehearsals or pre-party parades.  Though I did stumble into one parade in the Botafogo by fluke, I spent one night wild goose chasing on foot, on the subway, and in taxicabs in the rain, trying to find a parade or dress rehearsal in the Sambodromo.  The refrain that kept getting parrotted to me was, "Sexto, Sabado, Domingo" (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), so if you arrive on an idle Tuesday, even at Carnaval time, I guess you`re out of luck.  I finally asked the taxi driver to just drop me off at a good restaurant nearby, and he dropped me off at...McDonald´s.

Saudade

The Brazilians have this thing called ´saudade´ which, according to the guide books, is something particular to Brazilians and Brazilian culture.  I once tried to translate it as "I miss" or "nostalgia" but got quickly corrected by Nem, who insists there doesn´t exist such a thing in English.  Since the Brazilians are for the most part indominatable optimists, I guess it´s the closest they get to ever being depressed.  I will say though that with the American music that got played in Brazil while I was there, I was feeling saudade.  Saudade of the DeVinyls and Bizarre Love Triangle.

Brazilian Telenovelas

I didn´t really get to tune in while I was in Brazil, but they are infamous programming in Brazil.  They run more like American mini-series, ending after about 6 months, but the plots are untoppable.  There´s one that´s called Caminho das Indias (Indians´Road) which combines Indian characters´ emotional dramas in Brazil with the Taj Mahal tossed in.  The telenovelas deal with issues such as land reform, the peasants´ movement, homosexuality, AIDS, and gun violence.

Uruguay

Uruguay for the long weekend.  Gonna miss that.  Funnily enough, when I was staying in Buenos Aires, jumping a ferry across the water to Colonia took the same amount of time as Catamaraning between Morro de Sao Paolo and Salvador during Carnaval in Brazil.  When the hip and hype of Buenos Aires get to be too much, taking it down a notch in Uruguay is just the right dose of cure.
Colonia was a very chill little place where you could sit on a patio and mull with a beer and Chivito, one of these famous sandwiches crammed with Canadian loin, tomatoes, mayonnaise, peppers, onions and french fries.  All the world carts around a thermos with a mate for their famous tea, to ward off the cold, and local bars play condombe music and serve amazing steaks.  The people are very friendly.  A little old man at this little diner called ´The Club` saw me pouring over my map, Pilsen in hand, and invited me to an asado with his entire family.  He took me on a guided tour of the Rambla, and I think he saluted almost every person we met, by name. 

Monte Video was a little different, and a little dead on the weekend, ironically.  They do however have this crazy street market which overtakes an entire grid of streets, and sells everything from action figures, to aprons, brass numbers to brass instruments.  There was even one stall selling an eclectic menagerie of electric fans, blender components, telephones, nunchuks and baseball bats.  One stop shopping for inquisitioners and hitmen.  When I was heading back from Montevideo to Colonia, I had to get to the busstop and had pre-ordered a cab.  However, the concierge at my wallpaper-covered hotel informed me that the taxi drivers had spontaneously declared a strike.  When I asked why he told me it was because a taxi driver had just been shot (In broad daylight.  By a drug addict.)  So, not so quiet on the weekend after all.  I was happy to get back to Colonia, where you wait an hour to be served at any cafe, another hour to get the bill, and thus spend the entire afternoon people watching.

Such is the pace of Latin American living.  I like.

Brazil: Beaches, Bodies, Bossanova, Caipirinhas and Carnaval

My trip to Brazil started like this.

Man in security line-up to board flight to Rio (carrying large zinc studded rock with jagged edges):  Wha'dayya mean Ah can't carry ma rock on 'a plane?
Security personnel:  Well, sir it's dangerous.
Man:  It ain't.  It's just a souvenir.
Security personnel:  Well, sir, we can't let you on the plane with that.
Man:  Ah just don' see wha' not.
Security personnel (biting back a laugh):):  Because you could hurt someone with it, by throwing it at them. [Please, don't explain.  It's better he doesn't know!]
With a resigned shrug, the man profferred up his rock (which was probably the foundation of the Iguazu waterfalls) and said to his wife, who was busy trying to cram an apartment's worth of contents into a carry-on "Honey, they jus' ain' gonna let me take the rock on board."

These are the people they are letting into the country. Meanwhile I had to beg, bribe and badger my way to a Brazilian Visa!
When I first arrived in Brazil my very first thought was:  'My God.  These people don't wear clothes.'  Even arriving in Rio at one in the morning, the heat was beyond oppressive.  Coming from India where shoulders and ankles cannot be exposed at any cost, even in 45 degree weather, it was something to see more skin than cloth.   Luckily I had that buffer zone of LAX where I saw  more booty and boobs in an hour than in the previous six months of travel.  In Brazil, the L.A. Factor gets further extrapolated.   You see it all.  Beer guts and Jesus cuts.  Tans and flans.  Welcome to the home of the Dental Floss bikini.
So here are some post-impression word strokes on Brazil.
The Language
First of all, when I arrived in Brazil having pooh-poohed away the phrasebooks my brother had encouraged me to read  while indolently lying about in the hammock, I was quite sure I could stumble along speaking Spanish as though I had a squishy banana in my mouth and get by.  Very wrong.  Sure enough, Portuguese is its own language!  I had a rude awakening when I went to the juice bar and tried to order some kind of "vitamina" (smoothie).  I had no idea what the woman behind the counter was saying, and ended up in some kind of ticket booth ordering an orange juice, because it was the only thing I knew how to say.  And even at that, I had no idea that 'suco' was the word for juice.  Or that 'naranja' is now 'laranja'.  So I ended up drinking some weird purple concoction that tasted hauntingly like cough syrup (but which I later came to love and know and procure as Acai, the purple Amazonian berry).  My first 'conversation' in Portuguese was with a random beach boy who talked on and on about 'perigro'.  I didn't know what it meant but it seemed from the context as though it must mean 'to impale oneself upon a sharp object'.  He said it happened to men a lot which seemed about right.  It wasn't until later that night when I saw a sign of a man falling with  the word 'perigro' emblazened across the top that I realized, 'Oh!  Perigro. Like 'peligro' in Spanish.  Danger.'  The thing with Portuguese is that it is so similar to Spanish it almost trips you up more, knowing the Spanish.  Kind of like how having a dance background in salsa or ballet trips you up when you go to learn Tango.  You'd think it would help but your feet want to point toe-first instead of heel-first. [Damn muscle memory!]  When I see a sign 'restaurante', I think of it in the Spanish way.  For the first two weeks I had no idea what a 'Hestoranchee' was.  You see the R's here in Brazil-Land all magically turn into H's.    Who knew Rio de Janeiro is actually Hee-o de Janeiro.  The Brazilian guy I am now dating (more on that to come) was asking me about a Canadian artist called 'Hickey Assley'.  I said, "I have no idea who  you're talking about, but I'm pretty sure there's no artist going around calling himself Hickey Ass."  In a Skol-induced epiphany later on, it occurred to me that he was referring to Rick Astley.  "Axl Hose" I figured out  because of the Axl, but it still makes me chuckle.  My favorite though was when he asked me , "What are your hobbies, as in past times, not as in 'Batman and Hobby'".  I am just as bad, talking about 'ruas' which  are actually 'huas'.   I live on the Hua Ondina.  Hu-ah!  I love it.  When I checked in for  my flight, the attendant glanced at the computer, then back at me politely enquiring, "Janela?"  I shook my head.  "No.  Jen-ni-fer."  I later realized 'janela' means window and he was enquiring as to whether or not I would like a windowseat.  My brother actually gave me the best advice on learning the language, which was: "Remember that weird expression everyone used to use when we lived in Chapleau, when they didn't get something? 'Yaoh?'  Just add that to the ends of words.'"
Passion is the Fashion
Not only is this true at the Copacabana, but in fact everywhere in Brazil.  I bought a book of plays by Nelson Rodrigues, figuring that studying plays would be a good way to learn the language, given the amount of sheer dialogue.  (This was before I realized all of his plays were about the Electra and Oedipal complexes.)  The two words I learned from that book that appeared over and over again were 'apaixonado'  and 'joelhos' because the characters were always passionately on their knees.
There was a famous triple-threat Brazilian couple who committed suicide recently, Romeo and Juliet-style.  Cibele Dorsa (the 'Brazilian Cindy Crawford') jumped off the same balcony as her drug-addicted boyfriend, Gilberto Scarpa, two months prior, because she couldn't bear a life without him.
Sexiness is obligatory in Brazil.  Women everywhere, especially around Carnaval time have boob implants and butt implants.  I have met an inordinate amount of beautiful, slim women in their twenties who have all had some form or other of plastic surgery.  One day walking the streets of Rio I counted at least eight people with The Jackson Nose.  I  felt like I might quite possibly be the only person left in Rio who has not had surgery.  What I find unusual though is that what gets characterized as sexy is subtly defined by the context of the country.  Brazilians are the only people I know who can get away with making braces sexy.  It's almost an accessory here.  A flash of bling.  And done with confidence it is somehow enticing.  The other sexual icon that fascinates me are the tan lines.  Tan lines are accentuated here.  Women wear strapless dresses boldly exposing their tan lines as pseudo spaghetti straps.  Even in paintings, womens' striped and shorn shoulders are revered.
I had to laugh looking at an ad denouncing smoking.  Whereas in North America we focus on the deleterious effects of smoking on unborn babes or a shiny white smile, the Brazilian ads focus on impotence.  A barely-clad beach boy with a frown has a large  fist blocking out his privates with the thumb pointed down, simulating his (now dysfunctional) family jewels.  Ingenious.
The cultural imperative on closeness weaves its way into the dating world as well.  I was at a beach party with the guy I am dating, Nem, during Resaca (Hangover Week) on the island of Morro de Sao Paolo.  At one point, he gave me a hurt look and asked if we were together at the party or not.  I wasn't sure if this was one of those weird rhetorical questions or not so I simply responded with the obvious:  "Of course we are."   He then indignantly  informed me that I hadn't touched him in an hour!  Which in fact was the case, because I was mingling a bit downstream (with a gay guy and another girl, I might add).  It's funny because I think on the Canadian spectrum I'm actually quite affectionate, but I can't compete with the Brazilians!  I'm pretty sure babies were conceived at that beach party!
Beaurocracy and Bilheterias
Though you might think of Brazil as having this super relaxed beach culture, (and you wouldn't be wrong), it also has its beaurocratic side.  A lot of times, when you go to buy something, there is a bilheteria, or ticket booth as an intermediate stepping stone in the purchase process.  If you want to buy an orange juice, you have to first buy the Orange Juice Ticket at the bilheteria, and with this ticket, you can then exchange for  an actual orange juice at the counter.  It's a kickback to the barter system!  I couldn't stop laughing one night when I was out at Sarkofo in the Pelourinho.  My dormmate, Cathrine was trying to  buy a simple caipirinha [best and most refreshing alcoholic beverage, bar none, with cachaca (fermented and distilled sugarcane juice), limes, ice and a truckload of sugar], but the bilheteria didn't have change (surprise, surprise.  Welcome to the Land of Latin America, where no one has change.  Ever).  Her Portuguese was even more fledgling than mine, so I was acting as 'the translator' and deduced that what he had given her amounted to a scribbled IOU of 10 reais.  Very official.  I went back to use her IOU to get myself a caipirinha and the bilheteria man thought I was trying to contest his IOU, spread his hands out wide in a gesture of supreme desperation, and declared:  "Nao tenho troco!"  (I don't have change!)
Another night, I went to a fancy schmanzy night club called Dolce in Iguatemi, with my newfound friend Maiene. [I met Maiene and her boyfriend Vinicius on the Island of Morro do Sao Paolo, where I spent the Resaca with Nem.  They were taking pictures of each other, and I offered to take one of the two of them together.   They befriended me, and I ended up staying with Maiene in her apartment in Salvador on my way back from the Amazon.]  So off we headed to the beautiful night club district in Iguatemi, where the clubs are harder to get into than the country.  We started off as five, but lost Ale and Cathrine at the front door when they didn't have ID.  Since I haven't needed ID  for a decade and a half, it was by complete fluke that  I even had a copy of my passport on me.  After two security checkpoints, at which they input all of your data into their computer system, you are given a plastic card.  I mistakenly assumed that this was a 'get a free drink' ticket, but it is a bar credit swipe upon which you can order all your drinks.  Well, you can imagine how that goes.  People treat the cards like Monopoly Mastercards, buying rounds, buying drinks they can't afford, losing their cards.  At the end of the night, you line up at the Bilheteria to pay up.  If you can't locate the card, it's a 600 reais (close to $400) penalty.  I met some girls in Rio whose companions didn't pay up at one of these clubs, and there is a special 'pay up' room where they creatively encourage you to pay your bill.  It ain't pretty.  It also isn't much fun hanging out in an interminable line-up at 4 am with drunk and disorderly patrons incoherently arguing their bills.
Crack Kids
Sadly, in the Polourinho District of Salvador, in amongst the colourful cobblestoned streets, are the omnipresent crack kids.  They are addicts from a very young age and live in the streets begging off tourists.  They can become quite incessant in their demands and even aggressive.  I had one run up to me and kiss my shoulder, but have heard of stories where they bite.  My dorm-buddy Claire and I were going for a walk one day when a straggly kid of about eleven grotesquely flashed us, and then wanted a tip for the show!  I was sitting on a shop stoop with Nem one night after supper, listening to some drummers in the street when a Crack Kid approached and begged Nem for money.  Nem told him  no and the child got quite indignant.  Nem shook his head and said, "Hey, me too kiddo.  I would love a beer right now but I don't have the money."  This infallible logic actually seemed to get through to the kid, and he shrugged his shoulders and went away.
I was on the second floor at the Laranjeiras Hostel one evening washing my face, and I had set my facial scrub on the windowledge where it toppled into the cobbled street below.  I ran down to get it, and wouldn't you know it, it was already gone!  Scooped up by a crack kid.  The security guard just shrugged his shoulders, as if to say 'What do you expect?'  Some crack kid is probably trying to smoke the exfoliating crystals as we speak!
The Story of Nem in a Nutshell

They say you always meet someone when you're not expecting it and this was certainly true of me and Nem.  I met Nem about an hour after arriving in Salvador, sweaty, tired and jetlagged, in a bathroom line-up.  It happened like this.  10 minutes after arriving at my hostel, I met some cool people who invited me to go out to a street party with them.  But they were leaving in 10 minutes.  As such, I had no time to shower or freshen up and had to throw my hair in a ponytail and leave in what I was wearing, a tee-shirt and gypsy pants.  We ended up in the Pelourinho, listening to a drumming contingent and then we split ways; I ended up at a salsa club with a couple of other girls.  I met Nem in the washroom line-up (I  didn't actually have to go to the bathroom, but was trying to elude this crazy guy, and thus apologetically had to slip out of the line-up and head for the terrace after the fifth girl asked me, “Are you in the line-up or what!”)  Nem followed suit (although he actually did have to go to the bathroom, but he held it...that's modern love;) and we spent the whole night dancing and talking.  Though I don't know how.  We always joke that my Portuguese is like a five year old's and his English is like a five month old's.  We speak 'Portunol'.  Connecting afterwards was also a problem as he had given me his mom's number (he was staying at his mom's house for Carnaval) and when I called she had no idea what I was saying (I had only been in  Brazil a couple of days at that point).  To complicate matters, when he tracked me down at my hostel, he asked for 'Jennifer from Spain'.  But we eventually figured it out.  Since I was staying on the island of Morro, off the coast of Salvador, we had to commute back and forth on the Catamaran.  Originally I had thought this would be a good opportunity to study Portuguese until I realized all my forces would be compromised just trying not to throw up.  So we had some turbulent boat rides back and forth trying to meet.  We have been dating for about two and a half months now and Nem surprised me by flying to Argentina to come and stay with me, my brother and his girlfriend in Buenos Aires, a couple of weeks ago. He's a Football Coach for kids/youth and is studying Physical Education as a mature student in Florianopolis. He also has a background in massage and cooking and has worked as a Masseuse in Sports Injury for an International Football team.  He makes me laugh like no one can, and despite the language barrier (which is lessening) we talk about everything and anything and nothing under the sun.  Our relationship is possibly improbable.  But it is also for-sure-fantastic.

Carnaval
My reason for going to Brazil!  I have always been curious about Carnaval but this was the first year I've had time off in that time-frame, so I jumped at the chance to go!  Given that Carnaval is one of the hugest parties in the world with people in attendance not only from all over Brazil but from all over the world, you would expect sheer chaos and calamity.  The fact is that the infrastructure of Carnaval is exceptionally tight.  There are basically three ways you can experience Carnaval:
Camaroches
These are like temporal elevated mini-clubs overlooking the Carnaval.  You can see the throng of plebian partygoers parading past without ever having to descend from your Rapunzel Tower.  They are expensive (usually a couple hundred dollars), but are safe and all-inclusive.  You can descend into the street and party whenever you want and then come back up to the Camaroche.
Blocos
These are groups of people affiliated with a samba school who party behind one Trio Electrico, which is a giant float with costumed dancers, singers and animators atop and on board.  You buy a jersey for that bloco and bip, bop and boogy in the cordoned-off area (manned by body guards) behind the float.  Only people wearing the jersey are allowed into this section (the abadas [jerseys] cost a little less, usually about $50 to $100 dollars.)
Fiz Pipoca
Literally this means 'to make popcorn' and from the viewpoint of the people up in the Camaroches, this is probably exactly what it looks like. This is the cheapest version, because it costs nothing.  You basically fill in the blanks on the streets and party where you can, pipping up and down like popcorn, in the thick and schtick of it.
I hung out with Nem and his friends during Carnaval and we did a combo of Fiz Pipoca and Bloco Beijo (Kiss).  We partied for 12 hours straight some nights, dancing, singing, merrymaking, eating Street Meat and drinking 4-for-5-reais Skol beer.  I still have the beat from the “Superman Song” (the official song of Carnaval) in my head.  It is a song mocking Superman for being a wuss, and even has a dance to go with it, not unlike 'La Macarena'.
The way  that Brazilians recover from this week-straight of partying is by having a Resaca, or Hangover Week.   Nem and I spent Resaca on the quaint island of Morro, at my brother's girlfriend's best friend and her fiance's pousada.  Though I don't know how you're supposed to recover when every night there are foam parties, costume parties, live bands (Ziggy Marley!) and beach parties. Nonetheless, winding your way along the beaches in the daytime, eating eggburgers and sipping Fruitarinhas, does you in good stead!
So, that's a quick snapshot of life in Brazil.  More to come on...the Amazon!

India North: Of Mice and Maharajas

Northern India...After leaving the beautiful colourscape of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, I flew to the North, to the princely state of Rajasthan.  I had heard the North would be cold and chaotic, so I was pleasantly surprised by the beautiful North and my experiences there.  Here are some of the highlights.

Palaces and Forts

One absolutely fantastic thing about the princely state of Rajasthan was that we got to live, as the princes do, in palaces.  Our tour leader, Veerendra liked to let things fly under the radar and downplay our accomodations, warning us that the next place on the list might be 'dodgy'.  The first dodgy place we stayed, the Bissau Palace in Jaipur, blew our minds.  There were marbled hallways, arches and lookouts, foyers and murals.  Us ladies were outfitted in flowing saris and the men in snake charming turbans, where we danced around a campfire under the stars, in the courtyard.  The Hotel Raj in Ranthambore had mosaic'ed and muralled rooms with crossed swords and rifles adorning the walls, and a series of beautiful courtyards and spas (Ayuderic massage #5) rimming the outdoor pool.  We stayed at the Ishwari Niwas in the small village of Bundi.  This was a charming, but eccentric little village where the village children were extremely mischievous and kept pinching my butt.  They were little camera hounds too and very fiesty.  You almost had to run up the hill to escape them, up to the palace.  Here, we had drinks on the terrace with the King, a strapping young man with a pseudo Salvador Dali-esque moustache.  After all these palaces, Veerendra warned us that we were going to be camping overnight, but again, it was this amazing place where the Feudal Lords used to camp, in Pangarh.  Here were permanent campsites with immaculate canvas tents housing cosy beds with plaid wool blankets and fully functioning plumbing!  We had an amazing catered meal in the dining cabin, followed by a campfire by the lily padded lake.
My absolute favorite castle though, was the Castle Bijapur.  This was a castle I could have stayed at for a week as it was replete with every kind of lounging area imaginable.  You  had nooks and crannies of lounging areas, chaise lounges by the pool, swinging chairs on the terrace, cushioned benches on the lower floors, massage parlours and henna parlours.  Actually, this was another weird massage I had.  I had asked for a female masseuse, but her baby was fussy and she had to breastfeed, so she got her husband to sub in for her, until her baby was sated and she could take over.  My travelmates Eva and Norrae and I all got henna done on our inner arms and compared results as the days went on.  I was so glad I decided to do henna in India as one of the guys from my hostel in Manaus got his henna from some beach boy in Rio, and God knows what they were using for dye, but when he went up to the Amazon for five days, that stuff permeated his skin to the point of a chemical burn.  And set.  Best  to do you henna'ing in India, my friends.

Our final stay was in the Jagat Palace in Pushkar.  It was a total fluke that we got to stay here at all as rooms cost hundreds of dollars a night, but the owner of Intrepid is friends with the owner of the Jagat, and so we lived the life of luxury in marbled rooms with muralled en-suite bathrooms and a sparkling ice-blue pool where the brightly turbaned waiters bring you hot dishes wrapped in steaming foil.  We took a camelride here, and when we arrived back at the Palace, twinkling and opulant against the black and stars, I couldn't believe this was my home for the night.  And then like Cinderella after the ball, it all came crashing down the next night when we took...

The Night Train (and the Local Train)

After domino nights in the brilliant palaces of Rajasthan, it was a bit of a rude awakening to  board the night train from Ajmer back to Delhi, at the end of our trip.  This actually was dodgy.  Reality check.  Although I had taken a night train in the South, bunking in with the girls in a pseudo sleepover, I wasn´t prepared for this particular night train.  First of all, we were mixed in with the locals, some of whom had absconded our bunks and weren´t too happy about being booted out in mid-snooze.  Second of all, I was chatting to my dormmates, Eva, John and Matt with our Tour Leader Veerendra and this crusty old man hushed us vehemently and nattered at us in beligerant Hindi.  Then, at 3 a.m. he decided to wake up and order a seven course meal while blaring music and blasting the lights.  So, I´m not sure where the reciprocity was in that.  Poor Veerendra was runnng around like a headless chicken, jack-of-all-trading to get people settled in bunks, accomodate Jean who was sick, get extra bedding and deal with what I like to call ``Post Palace Partum Depression``.  I sent him a text that he was doing a good job, because I think this was probably the most stressful part of the trip for him. Then, because it was cold in the North, they had the heating on full.  That, combined with the copious amounts of food scraps dropped by people trying to eat, cross-legged, in vinyl bunk beds, attracted scores of mice.  At night I was sleeping and could feel a strange sensation cobwebbing across my face.  Belatedly, I realized what this sensation was, and to confirm it, sat up straight in my bunk and peered over at my cabinmates.  Sure enough, there was a party of mice scampering across the bodies and faces of my sleeping mates.  At least the mice are small enough that you barely feel them. I was thinking about what I could use to cover my face. I had some pashminas in my bag, but refused to use them for evil.  Still, I was so nervous, because I always sleep with my mouth open, and I had visions of a mouse falling into that manhole.  My grandma used to say she could stuff an apple into my Grandpa´s mouth while he slept and I had visions of myself as a stuffed pig with a mouse in my mouth.

The local train was slightly better, in that you could see and avoid the mice, as they scampered among the peanut-carcass strewn floor (like a mobile East Side Mario's).  There were musicians crammed into the top bunk of our train whom we tried to communicate with in broken Hinglish, and who kept smiling and laughing.  They were barefoot with brass.  Trumpets, trombones and saxophones.

The Toilet Man and the Tips
 
One of the absurdities of Indian culture is the tipping.  It was by no means as aggressive as the petulant demands for baksheesh in Egypt, but is was equally bizarre in that people appeared out of the woodwork, doing these types of make-work jobs, to earn tips.  One day I was in a restaurant and this comical man was shadowboxing me by the sinks right outside the cubicle.  I must have raised an eyebrow or something, because he said, with that beautiful Hindi lilt and head tilt, "Yes?  I am toilet man?"  Very strange to have someone in such close proximity, waiting for you to finish peeing so they can hand you a towelette to dry your hands.

Then, when you might actually need some professional help, like buying medicine, it's very DIY.  I was sick with this weird throat/ear infection in India.  In the South, I had two doctors, a nurse and a pharmacist in my tour group so it was easy to get diagnosed and dosed.  In the North, I had Veerendra recommending me different dosages of 3 strips of pills.  I said, "How do you know this is what I am supposed to take?"
"Ah, no problem.  I know."  Meanwhile I had some of these pills left over and asked a Brazilian pharmacist if I could take them, after I got a fever in the Amazon rainforest, and he said, no, absolutely not, and went into this whole 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' speil on the adversities of abusing antibiotics.


Palm Readers and Miniaturists

One day in Udaipur, Veerendra took us to a shop of miniaturists, who paint absolutely exquisite cityscapes on fine pieces of cloth.  The detailing is so finely articulated.  They paint day scenes in a myriad of colours, and night scenes with hues of blue, and use all natural paints.  The yellow colour comes from extracted cow urine, dried in the sun, until it becomes bright and odourless.  These men remind me of the miniaturists I read about in Orhan Pamuk´s ``My Name is Red`` while I was in Turkey.  As a bit of a tourist gimmick, they also do miniaturist manicures, with small scale portraits of the Maharajas, lotus flowers and tigers.  In India, the Camel denotes love, the Tiger power,  and the Elephant, good luck. Veerendra and I had a bit of a banter going on, because he was teaching me phrases in Hindi, and one night when we were trying on saris, Veerendra told me ´´Kapri Kolo`` which means to take it off.  Then, realizing what he'd just taught me, he added, ``Ah, but in this context, I mean to take off your sari to give back to our host, but in other cases, it just means to take off your clothes, so be careful.`` 

I was teasing him, saying, ``Do you realize what you´ve taught me to say in Hindi, Veerendra...Hi, my name is Jennifer.  I come from Canada.  Take off your clothes.  How much?  Your price is too high.  It´s too small.  Lower your price.  See you later.``  So this would become a running joke, and Veerendra would parade me around like a circus parrot, prodding me to do ´´the monologue`` for his friends, and giggling like a teenager.  He had me do the monologue for his miniaturist friend, who then winked and gave me a miniature manicure of the Kama Sutra.  Surprisingly detailed for such a small canvas!

Given my love of fortune telling and palm reading,  I asked Veerendra to set me up with a palm reader after my Panchakarmic nasal cleansing.  Usually, I get a kick out of fortune telling, but let me tell you, after this one I needed a bottle of rum to chase my sorrows.  In a very equitable manner, the fortune teller proceded to tell me a bunch of nonsense:  that I fight with my mom (though we are extremely close), that my relationship with my brother ´´doesn´t serve me´´ (though I was off to Argentina to visit him in less than a month), and to ``beware of my friends`` (though they were flying to San Francisco the next week to visit me).  He told me that I will have 2 big relationships or marriages, but that they will end in disaster.  One will end because I have no communication skills, and have a big miscommunication with my partner (hmmm, this could be my current relationship with Nem, since we speak Portunol), or an affair, and he will abandon me.  I am supposed to have 2 daughters whom I will be very close to, but who won´t be close to my partner (because he has abandoned me).  Also, I have major health problems halfway through my life.  I asked, ``Do you see anything good in my future?  Anything at all?`` And he said, ``Yes! Your career!  It´s fantastic!`` (though I am not working at the moment.)  And then, I had to fork out money for that! 

What made me laugh though was that later I compared notes with my travelmate, Matt, who had had his fortune read by the same guy on the same day.  I told him, ``Yeah, that guy told me I had some abilities and talents, but that I don´t use them...that I am not living up to my potential and I had better shape up.``  Matt told me the guy had said the same thing to him.
``Really?  Did he also tell you you bring unnecessary stress into your life?```
``Yes!``
``Get out!  What else did he tell you?``
``He told me I had to fast on Saturday to fix my life problems!``
``Me too!  He told me I´ll have a disastrous relationship, but that if I fast on Monday, and wear coral and pearls, and a green handkerchief, it will all be okay.``
``Me too!  Coral and black onyx.``  Comparing our cheat sheets, we realized that virtually everything was the same:  the templated Foreigner Fortune!  At one point, he started telling me there would be a major life change at 28, then quickly backtracked looking from my palm to my birthdate, to explain how that had actually already happened.  I asked, ``So is this fortune about my past or my future?``  He smoothly replied, ``Both``.  He told Matt the same thing.  I guess 28 is when people have the pre-30 crisis and instigate major life changes.  That was about the only accurate thing he said, given that I moved to Mexico at 28. That said, I still fasted on Monday, which was easy since I was so jet-lagged in L.A. that I slept through most of the day.  I´ve also been wearing a lot of black and green, just to be on the safe side, though I haven´t managed to find any coral or pearls.

Tailors

The tailors here are incredible, much as in Vietnam.  You show them a picture of something, they swatch you with a measuring tape, and 24 hours later, you have a custom-designed ´whatever-you-want´.  I commissioned a green velvet smoking jacket with purple silk lining, modeled after the protagonist in this Bollywood movie I saw, Band Baaja Baaraat.  It is smoking!  Matt got a suit made, and had to tweak it a bit because they make the suits so tight here!  But the quality is amazing, and 24 hours!  I also commissioned a green, aqua and gold raw silk bedspread modelled after a bedspread I saw in a hotel suite we ate dinner at.  That said, I am still awaiting the delivery of said bedspread to Canada...(cross fingers)...The tailor shop makes me nervous as the second floor is a crescent shaped marble balcony overlooking  the marble first floor, with no railing.  I just have visions of the tailor, abstracted my some creation, walking off the gangplank.

Auto Rickshaws and Cycle Rickshaws

They are just cool.  I mean the auto ones go tuk-tuk-tuk and just weave crazily in between all the cows, and cow paddies and vendors.  And the cycle ones...well, your heart just goes out to these guys.  Veerendra convinced us to take these as often as we could, because the poor cyclists, some of them well into senior citizenship, are trying to make a living pedaling these things and can't make ends meet, because all the other modes of transport are so much faster. And really, we were in no rush.  When you see the momentum it takes these guys to crush down the pedal to heave their passengers though...ish!

The Taj Mahal

You know how some famous monuments are so iconocized that when you actually see the real deal, it can't compare?  Well, this was not the case with the Taj Mahal! (though it was the case for me with the Mona Lisa).  At the beginning of our trip in Northern India, we stayed in Agra, the old Mughal capital, and made our way to the Taj Mahal.  I am a sucker for love stories and this was a good one.  The Taj Mahal was Shah Jahan's monument to and mausoleum for his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to her 14th child in 1631.  [And 329 years later, the birth control pill was inveneted...] It took 20, 000 workers 22 years, 41 million rupees and 500 kilos of gold to build!

That's love.  I mean, the guy had 200 women in his harem, but he still was so devoted to Mumtaz that he did all this.  Sadly, Shah Jahan's evil son, Emperor Aurangzeb, later imprisoned Shah Jahan in the Red Fort (and Shah Jahan had built it with two other Mughal Emperors.  Talk about building the coffin they bury you alive in).  When you look at the Taj Mahal from the Red Fort, it looks like a wistful doll house.  Shah Jahan had to look out at his beautiful Taj Mahal without being able to visit it, for 8 years until he died. They say that when his eyesight started to fail him, he ordered a huge diamond ring, so that he could see kaleidoscopic microcosmic images of the Taj Mahal, up close to his face.

The Pink City and the White City

Jaipur is the Pink City, being that a lot of the architecture and buildings are a faded rose shade.  We went to see a Bollywood movie at the Raj Mandir Cinema, which is pink, and guidled and ornate.  If Barbie and Ken had a Dream Cinema to which they drove their pink porsche to see Bollywood movies, this would be it. Udaipur is the White City, purportedly the most romantic city in the world.  We stayed at the Aashiya Haveli and travelling by boat from there, you see the shores surrounded by the Summer Palace, the Winter Palace and the Monsoon Palace, where the royal family retreated during the rains of the monsoon. Octopussy was filmed here. [On a side note, it seems everywhere I have travelled this year, has been the site of a James Bond movie.  A View to Kill was filmed in Meteora, in Greece.  At the Place of High Sacrifice in Petra, they filmed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (okay, that's not James Bond, but still), and I just got back from Rio where they filmed Moonraker, on the SugarLoaf cablecar.


Pushkar Priests and Opium Dens

Pushkar is this amazing place where a lot of Indian people make their pilgrimmage.  It comes from the two words, pushpa (flower) and kar (hand), and is believed to be a holy lake, such that you can wash away your sins and earn a place in Heaven.  It's a lot like Singapore in that there are a lot of rules:  No meat, no fish, no eggs, no alcohol, no drugs, no shoes [in fact, keep your shoes 30 feet from the lake], no kissing, no embracing (not a place for the Agentinians or Brazilians!)  It houses the only Brahma temple in India, and there are Brahma priests who "make puja" (perform holy rituals) for you, down at the lake.

Basically, they give you a dish of flower petals, rice and colourful powders to toss into the lake, giving you blessings for health, happiness, wealth and love.  He then ties a significant red bracelet onto your wrist which has to remain in place until it wears off naturally.  I did this ceremony Feb 1st.  It is now April 4th.  I am still wearing this mangy, dogeared piece of string, because I am too superstitious to take it off.  It has survived India, L.A. and San Francisco, Argentina and Brazil.  The ritual was making me giggle because I could see the mischievous monkeys gobbling up the holy flower laiths, looking naughty; it reminded of Japan, where families would erect temples for Day of the Dead in honour of their loved ones, and put out sweets and cigarettes, which the members of the household later picked up to eat or smoke, as if to say,"Right!  We're done with this, then?" The Priest kept having us repeat these fortune cookie English phrases amongst the Hindi, like "happy, healthy, family", "holy lake", "good time" and then out of nowhere:  "kinky".  (Perhaps an ode to the Kama Sutra.)  To top it all off, there are all these people in various states of undress, bathing on the ghats, with all their wiggly and jiggly bits dangling!

Despite the fact that this is a holy place, you have the tribal girls accosting men on the streets, trying to forcefeed them henna tattoos on their arms and extracting money for it, the beggar boys supplicating you for "one chiapati, please", the nefarious undersellers of 'magic lassis' and the Opium incense stores.  I happened upon one of these stores with my travelmate Matt.  The guy was so keen to have us buy that he sat us down on stools in the back corner room and had us sample all the flavours.  He had these huge cylindrical sticks that looked like they could prop up the House of the Three Pigs, which burn for four hours.  He had a special box marked 'Opium' and when we asked to sample that one, he brought it out very ceremoniously and set it on the bench.  He said it wasn't actually opium, but what I know is that when we left the store, I was so dizzy I could barely walk.


Kama Sutra and Camel Rides

Of course, when you're in India, you have to buy a pocket guide to the Kamasutra.  Reading this little book makes me laugh so hard I cry sometimes.  It talks about ways to seduce women; for instance, if it looks like it's going to thunderstorm, suggest a walk in the garden, such that you'll be forced to take cover and can shield your woman from the rain under a noble pretext.  It also talks about the importance of pressing a woman up against a wall.  Here's a memorable quote:   "When a person fails to obtain the object of his desire in the normal course, he should then have to recourse to other ways of attracting a woman.  Indeed, in the absence of good looks, qualities, youth and liberality, a man or woman must have to resort to artificial means or to art by using certain recipes to make one more appealing."  It's like a how-to manual for the sexually-challenged.

Being that we were in Pushkar, the land of the fabled camel fairs, we had to go for a camel ride.  It's hard to top the camel ride of Egypt, but this was an eclectic route alongside huge transport trucks, through small villages and winding deserts, back to our palace.  We stopped for tea in the middle of the desert, and as I was dying to go to the washroom, having consumed about 2 litres of water.  I was hard-pressed to find any coverage in the desert, but finally encountered a small rivet.  Wouldn't you know it that crouched in the optimal moment with my pants around my ankles, I hear the roar of a motorbike with my guide and one other guide, ripping past me.  Fantastic.  A big moon, in the land where you can't even expose ankles or shoulders. 

What's funny about camels is that when they're on a break, they repose in the exact same manner, like a well-postured paisley.  However, there was this one camel (Peter's ), who was sprawled out like a tantrummed-out toddler.  I have never seen a camel 'rest' like that.  He looked like he'd been shot!

Clever Scams

They have so many clever ways to get a quick buck from the tourist, selling you a book with an original cover (but photocopied pages inside) or selling you something in a store that is bona-fide, and promising free shipping, but then shipping a good you didn't order.(Where is my bedspread?) I met a balloon vendor on the streets of Mumbai with my travelmate, Christophe.  He was selling giant man-sized balloons, but a woman confided in me that the ones is the package are just regular-size.  Sure enough, when you examine the dimensions printed on he package, they are a fifth of the size of the models.  So I got the vendor to sell me singles, just to be sure I got the real McCoy.

Entertainment

This was in the South, but we saw an incredible dance festival in Mamallapuram, set against the stones of the temple, with bright, beautiful costumes and grandeur, illustrating Krishna's life.  In contrast, we went to see Kathakhali theatre, a style of theatre from the eighteenth century using only costumes, makeup and intricate hand gestures to illustrate the story. We watched them put on makeup for an hour before the show even started.  It was a two hour 'snippet ' of what is meant to be an eight hour play.  The only part I understood was when the warrior Jayanthan runs after Nakrthundi, the sister-demon imposter, and cuts off her nose, ears and breasts, with this crazy maniacal smile on his face.  And curtain! 

South India: Ayuverdic Massages, Tea Plantations and Tigers

India!  Where do I begin?  In the South. A Land of head bopping Hindus, the ubiquitous cows twining through the streets eating chiapati, and beautiful powdered and adorned elephants.  Here are some of the highlights of Southern India.

Ayuverdic Massages and Panchakarma

I remember when I first got to India and people were talking about Ayuverdic medecine.  I had never heard of it, and could never remember the name, Aya....??  Well, this is my new mantra.   After one ayuverdic massage, I proceeded to have one a week.  The first I heard of these, I was strolling through Kochi with my travelmate, Jana, and we decided to treat ourselves to a nice massage.  From the menu, I picked the ``relaxing massage``, and when the guy at the desk told us there was only one female masseuse, would one of us mind having a male masseuse, I shrugged and said sure.  As soon as I got into the room, the masseuse guy handed me two rectangular strips of hospital gown cloth and asked me to take my clothes off.  [What now?]  I laughed and said, ``Yeah, I´ll be keeping my underwear on, thanks.``  He gave me a suit-yourself look and said, ``Okay, but you clothes get dirty when I pour on the hot oil on your body.``[What now?] This did in fact prove to be the case.  He gestured to this wooden coffin box, no padding, where I had to hop inside and sure enough he poured the oil all over me and proceeded to marinate and karate chop my entire body.  I don´t remember any of this from the brochure and called over the wall to Jana to see how she was proceeding with her massage.   I had to declare a few ´no go zones´ but his hands were frottering so fast from head to toe, that your whole body basically gets treated as one cut of beef, so to speak.  After this dubious massage, which in fact felt incredibly good, I moved to the shower room, where I had the female masseuse, thank God!  She sat me on a stool and soaped me up and down, shampooing me vigourously, before towelling me off like a recalcitrant toddler and then braiding my hair.  The whole experience was disconcertingly odd yet so rejuvenating that I ended up in the massage parlour (with women) five more times.  [I once had an ayuverdic massage where the woman put me in a steam coffin and had me breathe through a mentholatum humidifier.  Magnificent!  Sauteed and steamed!]

When we got back to our hotel, I was explaining the whole thing to my roommate Francis, who had already spent 10 days in India, and she nonchalently proceeded to explain that yes, this is how it´s done, only she had had her ayuverdic massage at a friend´s wedding, so in lieu of the massage coffin, she was massaged by [wait for it] one of the bride´s male relatives, who was suspended from the roof of a garden shed by a rope, and used his earth-trodden bare feet to massage her body.  So, as it happens, my massage was relatively tame!  Many women in the Lonely Plant report being ´´molested´´ by their masseuses, and I wonder if this is actually true, or if they just had the same massages we had and don´t understand them.  I later asked Ravi, our tour leader, ``Why is it prohibitive to touch women, even wives and girlfriends, in public, yet a male masseuse can give a woman a massage like that?``  Ravi´s response:  ``Because it´s science.`` 
Which brings us to the next topic:  Panchakarma!  (Same, same but different to Ayuverdic Massages)
So basically, Panchakarma is another, ``enhanced`` way to purify the body and eradicate the toxins and bad ``doshas`´ (humours) from the body.  The way they do this is through:  nasal therapy (Nasya), enforced vomiting (Vamana), purging (Virechana), therapeutic enema (Vasti) [Is this not an oxymoron?], and (I´ve saved the best for last) -- bloodletting!  Since I was having an intense nasal congestion situation while I was in India (this actually was in Northern India), whereby I felt like someone had removed half of my brain and replaced it with a giant phlegmball, I asked our Trip Leader, Veerendra, to take me to the Panchakarma Master.  Though I told him, ``Just for the Nasal Therapy!  No enemas or bloodletting.  Me be on vacay!``  Also, I kind of had the bloodletting in the South when we went on the Jungle Walk, and Ravi said, ``Oh, you don´t need leech socks!`` and I ended the walk with a bloody anklet of leeches.

Getting to the Panchakarma site involved a very nefarious motorcycle trip through the cobbly, cow-entwined backstreets of Udaipur (Rajasthan), dodging auto and motor rickshaws, bicycles and pedestrians.  I was imagining some kind of Frankensteinian nasal drip, but really it involved some acrid nasal drops, a dehumidifier and a very vigourous metholatum chest massage.  And repeat.  I have no idea what kind of magic was involved in all this, but that night I felt like my head had been used in a gong show, and could eat only tomato soup.  But the next day, pow, my sinuses completely cleared.  It was insane. I am a total convert to the mysteries of Ayuverdia.

Yogis and Ashrams

After reading about India, I was thinking I would like to go to an Ashram, but after visiting the Auroville Ashram outside of Pondicherry, I changed my mind.  This Ashram was like a cult, with pictures of ``The Mother`` everywhere (very 1984/Big Brother), a huge kaleidoscopic gold orb in the middle of nowhere, and video loops with scrolling words and a haunting narrative inviting you to relinquish all religion and worldly possessions to join ranks with the Natural Ones.  Looking around, I couldn´t fathom what these people were doing with their time.  How many hours can you actually meditate, as an Everyman?  I asked Ravi, our tour leader, what he thought of these blonde gringas wearing saris and bindi dots, with dreadlocks and journals. He just rolled his eyes and said, ``No comment.``  He told us about an accomplished friend of his who renounced all his worldly goods, and left his job to enter one of these ashrams.  He ´went missing´ and his parents were imploring Ravi and other friends to find him.  They found him in an Ashram where the leader was keeping all the passports hostage was.  They ended up having to threaten the guy with baseball bats to free their friend.  So, yeah, no interest in ashrams.  But I did participate in quite a few yoga classes.  Let me tell you.  Yoga classes in India; yoga classes at Goodlife...different.

One class I went to at 6 am ended up being a private lesson with the yogi outside the pool.  The first thing I learned was that I breathe all wrong and have been doing so for my entire life.  The yogi was absolutely apalled that I would ever breathe through my mouth.  He chastised me beligerantly:  ``No!!! Why would you do this?  The mouth should only be used as an escape hatch!  Why would you use it for normal breathing, then we abuse the escape hatch!``  I still can only breathe using my nose exclusively for about five minutes, before I feel like I´m suffocating softly, despite his teachings.  The yogi taught me how to use wooden blocks to support the various poses and had me contort my spine, cobra-esque, into all kinds of positions, culminating in a shoulder lift at the very end.  I remember the days when I used to think yoga was liquid and soft.  My butt muscles, which I don´t even remember using, were sore for three days.

I did another yoga class with the houseowner of our homestay in the Backwaters of Kerala. His class involved a lot of breathing too, but he was modelling how to breathe by snorting the evil doshas out of your nose, the way a horse would eject a bothersome fly from a nostril.  I couldn´t really manage it, diplomatically. He also had me do the shoulder stand and then uncoil from it, vertebrae by vertebrae.  This didn´t work either as I invariably came crashing down like a piece of scaffolding.  Most of his class was dedicated to breathing rather than poses, and though 60, this man could ripple his stomach like a belly dancer, concave, convex, concave, convex.

In the North, my travelmate Matt and I did a dawn yoga class on the rooftop of our hotel, overlooking the multitudinous palaces of Udaipur.  This yogi was all about the poses.  He would tell us things like:  ``Put your feet into Lotus position.  Now press soles of the feet together and flatten thighs to ground.  Wrap your arms around your back and press them to your feet.`` [What now?]  Matt and I just took pictures of him doing the various contortions.  For posterity.  We did manage to do a few backbends.  I forgot how much strength and flexibility it takes to hold your own body weight like that.

Cows and Beggars

One of the most endearingly frustrating things about India are all the cows.  Of course, you hear about them, but there is something about seeing this proliferation of stray cows wandering about the streets that discombobulates you.  They are like stray dogs, but they are huge.  And clueless.  And sometimes irascible. I was trying to enter a pharmacy one day and two cows, (one a bull!) were blocking the entrance.  I asked a passerby, in Hindinglish, if I could pass through.  He laughed and said sure.  I asked if they would spear me and he found that very amusing.  (Clearly he has not attended the Pampleonada in Mexico!)  The other thing is that these cows are not vegetarians.  I was eating at a restaurant one day and was about to ask the waiter to wrap up my stuffed pepper, as I was going to give it to a beggar.  He had already absconded it, so I chided him and told him that I didn´t want to waste food, when I could give it to someone.  He looked at me incredulously and said, ``Not wasted!  We feed it to the cows!``  That night, the cows were eating buttered chicken, massala, stuffed peppers and chiapati.  Which explains the rampant diarrhea street cows have, further contributing to the nastiness of the streets.  One day I saw a cow happily munching apples off a fruit stand, while the cow down the road was eating sewer garbage (he hadn´t cottoned on yet.)

Beggars are everywhere.  One of the saddest sights I saw were all the huddled families around bonfires by the side of the road outside of Delhi, dirty, emaciated, and desperate.  It´s a hard sight to see, but as Ravi has explained to us, there is a mafia of begging here, whereby the Pimp gets all the spoils of the begging, while children are maimed or babies rented to elicit more sympathy from the foreigners.  You are often approached by women with nicotine-stained teeth, addicted to beetlejuice, who pirate their rented babies in front of your face, pretending the money will go to feed the mouths of babes.  You also can´t give sealed food to the beggars as they then resell it for money which fuels into the whole mafia of begging.  At times, I have given open bags of food to beggars.  One woman and her bare bottomed son were sitting cross legged on the railway platform to go to Chennai, and I gave them an open bag of crisps.  They were elated.  Jana had a sweater she was tired of and gave it to the woman, and she wrapped the boy in it, waving happily as she boarded the train.  That said, in the North, at the Ajmer train station, we encountered a high density of beggars.  One boy had an infected toe which he had put salve on, but being barefoot, had nothing to cover his toe. I rummaged inside my first aid kit for a bandaid to give to him, but the other teenage boys must have thought I was going inside my purse for cash, and descended on me in a writhing mass of scratching arms and pushing hands.  It was like something out of Alfred Hitchcock´s ``The Birds``.  For the first time, I seriously understood how someone can get trampled to death in a crowd.

One day, outside the Hindi Temple in Pushcar, a charming boy with a flute was shadowboxing me down the road, begging not for money, but ``just for chiapati to eat.  One for me, one for you,`` he added solicitously.  I acceded to his request with a smile, thinking we were going to a stand to buy one chiapati, but no, he took me to a grocery store where instead of paying 2 rupee for a hot chiapati, I paid 20 rupee for a box of Chiapati mix! Gotta respect the entrepreneurship though.

They say that a third of the global poor are in India and that 25% of India´s population survives on less than 20 rupees a day.  That´s less than five dollars a day.  220 million people are living below the poverty line and I read somewhere that for every 2 million people there are 17 public washrooms.  Which would explain the onmipresent scent of urine and the multitudes of people peeing against buildings and pooing into the railway tracks.  Our tour leader was telling us about a woman who lost her diamond engagement ring down the train urinal...not a ring I would ever want to put back on my finger.  I don´t understand these women I see travelling with their engagement and wedding rings on, in developing countries.  That is just an invitation to disaster.  As I´m writing this, I´m in Salvador, Brazil, and you just don´t bring anything on the street with you.  The crack kids will get it.  A girl at my hostel had a gold bracelet on (Why?) and a crack kid stole it from her, ran down the street with her in hot pursuit (Why?) and when confronted by the Tourist Police, swallowed it.

But, back to India.  One day, I saw a woman wearing a beautiful magenta sari, with her gorgeous black hair twined in a braid down her back, peeing down the side of her leg into the road.  India is filled with oxymoronic sights like this.  The beauty of this country defies the poverty and desperation.  One thing I found hard to get used to was going barefoot.  Because we were in Kerala State during Pongal, the Harvest Festival, there were a lot of celebrations in Temples.  It´s not proper to wear shoes in the temple because it´s perceived as irreverant (cow hide) and unclean.  However, I get nervous leaving my awesome South African sandals in the shoe box (remember that episode of ``Sex in the City`` where Carrie had her Manolo Blaniks stolen at the Bridal Shower), and am repulsed by the idea of trodding barefoot through the urine-soaked streets frequented by the cows afflicted by diarrhea.  We visited a Hindu Temple in Madurai during Pongal and the streets were so congested with people on Pilgrammage that our Tour Leader had us retreat and go again the next morning.  Four people had been trampled and killed in one of these pilgrammages in Kerala four days prior, and he didn´t want to take any chances.  The sheer volume of people here is astounding.  Similiar to the situation with the beggar boys, I could see how people could be trampled to death in the outbreak of emotion and impatience.

Head bopping and Bollywood

One really endearing thing about the South is the head bopping.  People have this way of letting you know they are listening to you, by weaving their heads in a type of figure eight pattern, while entertaining you with this type of bemused expression on their faces.  At first I thought it meant yes, until one day I ordered a banana lassi and was waiting half an hour for it.  It always reminds me of those dolls with the bopping heads on coiled springs.  I asked our tour leader, Ravi, one day why he doesn´t have that idiosyncracy and he told me he used to do it, but that people made fun of him, so he trained himself out of it.  I think that´s too bad because it´s such a cool characteristic of the South.  The saris here are also striking.  The colour combinations are beautiful and you see vibrant swatches of magenta and orange and pink like match strikes against the verdant green of the rice paddy fields. Because people adore gold jewelry, you also see flashes of gold twinkling in the fields.  I love seeing so much colour every day.  It is such a contrast to the monochromatic sandpaper colour of Jordan. 

I also fell in love with the Bollywood movies.  I met this European traveller, Cristophe, at my hostel in Mumbai, and one night we took a tuk-tuk to the movie theatre to see a Bollywood film.  Though it was a very  simple movie theatre (full of pre-feature advertisements about noise pollution [don´t honk your car horns!!] and anti-corruption) with hard seats and 2 rupee samosas, we watched a 3 hour Hindi movie with no subtitles in complete rapture!  I was completely drawn into the colours, costumes, singing and dancing, despite the fact that I couldn´t understand a word.  This movie had the most intensely wound kissing scene I´ve seen in any movie, and I could not stop staring at the costumes.  I actually had a green velvet smoking jacket with a purple silk lining tailor made for myself in Udaipur, modelled after a jacket the main protagonist wore in the movie.  I had to laugh though, when I saw this Bollywood movie in the Pink Cinema in Jaipur.  To ``exoticize`` it, they had a scene set in suburban Vancouver, showing a Punjabi man married to a Canadian woman.  She was this Playboy Peroxide Jenny McCarthy type, very ditzy, speaking very bad Hindi.  I had to put in a disclaimer to the group about Canadian women.  Not a good representation!  My travelmate Matt and I liked the music from the movie so much that we hunted down the CD in Pushkar.

Religion

During our trip, we were able to visit many Hindu Temples and one Sikh Gudwara, in the North.  They believe in community service, so we were able to help the women make chiapatis for the people coming to worship.  One thing Veerendra, our Northern Tour Leader, told us which I found really surprising was the fact that the Sikh people won a contentious court battle in India, allowing them to carry the kirpan (dagger) on board airplanes as it is one of the five K´s baptised Sikhs are bound to wear:  (uncut hair [kes], small comb [kagha], iron bracelet [kaa], special undergarment [kaccha], and the dagger [kirpan]).  One can only hope the Sikh people I am travelling with are all well-adjusted individuals!  I find it ironic since anti-terrorist measures are so tight here.   I had to present my passport just to use the internet and pass a screening process more exigent than the visa-screening process to be able to activate my Indian SIM card.

The Hindu temples are amazing, especially the Sri Meenakshi temple in Madurai.  It´s so exceptionally elaborate, perhaps a bit gaudy, that you wouldn´t be able to take in the detail even if you were to spend a month examining it.  The Hindu temples used to offer the only form of sex education to children, so there are Kama Sutra-esque carvings along the outside of the temples.  I definitely learned a few things! Sadly, they have chained elephants, decorated with pastel designs and flowers, inside the temples.  From what I´ve learned about elephants in Africa, one day that elephant will realize he ain´t diggy being chained to a pillar and will trample them all! 

It´s interesting seeing the genesis of a culture through the looking glass of the temples, because the depictions of unveiled buxom women draped provocatively in harems pre-dating the Mughal invasions challenges the notion of women in burquas, heavily draped despite the weather.  What I find interesting is that woman can bare their midrifs without censure, but the breasts, bottom, shoulders and knees must be covered.  [As I am typing this, I´m in Brazil, at 8:30 at night, sweltering like I´m in a sauna, wearing a tank top and skirt.  I positively cannot imagine how women in India withstand a heat of 40 degrees, wearing saris.]  We visited some mosques in our travels as well, though the South is mainly Hindu.  They are peaceful places, and you are invited to rest inside, but our guide told us we could only visit each mosque or temple for 20 minutes max, due to the risk of terrorist bombings.

One other fascinating thing about India was the overt displays of affection between men.  Though men and women are not allowed to touch publicly, you often see men with fingers intertwined, strolling along the boardwalk or locked in an embrace.  I asked Ravi if that meant that it was easier for homosexual men to go undercover, but he said absolutely not, because although the culture is ostensibly open to it (gay marriage is legal) society still considers it perverse and supposedly people can ´tell´ if the look goes on too long, or the embrace is too intimate.  Again, I am noticing such a contrast in Brazil and Argentina, as people make out here publicly all the time.  My friend and I got flashed by a twelve-year-old in the Pelorinho yesterday, who then wanted money from us!  Like a tip!  That said, in India, as in Egypt, there is a lot of ass-grabbing and ass-slapping going on.  And then they run into the temples!  Very santimonious!  As well, they have women-only cars on the metro.  I´m beginning to wonder if Canada is one of the few countries that doesn´t have this.

Tea Plantations and Tigers

Continuing my cat hunt from Africa, I spotted two tigers on my trip.  I must have honed my spotting skills in Africa, as I was able to catch a glimpse of tiger butt and tiger tail, where others missed it.  It was exciting, but since it was just a glimpse and I was exposed to such sites in Africa (it´s hard to top the Lion At The Campfire) I wasn´t incredibly excited.  What I found funny was that there was a convoy of jeeps full of elementary kids on a school trip, despite all the disclaimers of being eaten by a tiger.  I can´t imagine that school trip going through in Canada;)  Speaking of school trips, we were staying in the mountain village of Ooty and some school kids were on a field trip.  They had booked out most of the hotel and were having an insanely loud bonfire in the parking lot.  I figured ´If you can´t beat them, join them´ and went down to participate.   They were absolutely hilarious.  They had me dance in the centre of the circle (a little too close to the bonfire if you ask me) and had me lead the ´´catwalk fashion show´´.  School kids here are hilarious.  Or people in general.  They always want to do a photo shoot with you.  My friend Christophe and I went to the museum in Mumbai, and barely saw a thing, we were so busy doing photo shoots with the kids on their school trips.

In Ootacamund (Ooty) we also travelled by toy train, preceding a tour of a tea plantation where we were exposed to all kinds of teas:  red, green, white and black, my favorite being chocalate tea, of which I sent a kilogram back to my Mom and Dad in Canada, in lieu of apres-ski hot chocolate.

Such was the South, land of rice paddies, tea plantations, saris and head-bobbing....J.

Egyptian Adventures!

My ambivalence towards Cairo aside, I love, love, loved Egypt on the whole.  It is a fiesty and intriguing culture.  Here are some of the highlights!

Red Sea Beach Camp:  This was our first stop in Egypt after disembarking in the cacophanous harbour of Nuweiba (coming across from Aqaba in Jordan).  If someone were to paint a mural of the Nuweiba port, it would show pairs and triads of mustachio´d men having heated arguments over boxes, and loading, hauling and cargo´ing said boxes with attitudes of menace.  So going straight to the Red Sea Beach Camp was very chill.  We lounged on cushions, drank wine and beer, ordered banana pancakes, snorkeled, and then lounged on other, different cushions.  The Coral Reefs extend out forever and there are tons of fish to be seen.  Sandia and I saw 2-banded clownfish, glassfish, masked butterfly fish, and blackspotted sweetlips! 

Sometimes there were tough decisions to be made.  Should I lounge in the hut, or on the beach?  Or in the tent?  Wine? Or beer?  We celebrated Grahamses´ birthday here on a table out on the beach, and I will never forget the frosting on his cake.  It tasted like those hard Halloween candies made from melted scraps of all the other leftover Halloween candies.  Yum!  On  a side note, I was looking everywhere in Jordan and in Egypt for an Arabic birthday card, since we had four birthdays to celebrate on the trip, but couldn´t find anything.  For my birthday, Beishan just made her own.  I know extremists don´t celebrate birthdays, but it´s becoming a part of pop culture, so I guess Arabic birthday cards are just not a big hit.

Mt Sinai
We first went to the Greek Orthodox monastery of St Katherine to see the burning bush (not the original obviously, because, as the eponymous name suggests: it burned, baby!) but a bush nonetheless.  Much like the promised land, it seemed fairly mundane to me, but I´m not religious, so maybe other people assigned it more import.  Climbing Mount Sinai was much cooler as you felt a sense of accomplishment during the climb.  Ian and I were originally going to climb the 3750 ´´Steps of Repentance" but Ian decided he´d rather see the real route, and it isn´t advisable to climb those steps alone, so we joined the others for the 3 hour hike.  Some people wind up on camels while others climb, and you see the chilling sparsity of the desert with the sunset backlighting the panorama.  It´s a bit hard to concentrate on the image of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments with the call-and-response catcalls of ¨Tea?  Cafe?  Cho-co-late? Tea?  Cafe?  Cho-co-late?¨, but I have to say that the hot chocolate I drank on Sinai, on top of that rock wall overlooking the sunset, was the best I´ve ever tasted.  Served in a Styrofoam cup. (Actually, I´m in Argentina now, so the submarino hot chocolates are almost on par.)

Felucca
Our group travelled by felucca, a wooden sailboat with broad canvas sails, from Aswan to Luxor.  It was an incredible experience.  And far more relaxing than the night train from Cairo to Aswan which was patrolled by soldiers with guns.  As Grahamses put it, ``Did I get up to use the toilet?  No, once the guy with the shotgun passed me, I didn´t get up at all.``  The felucca´s deck was laid over with cushions placed end to end, and we lounged on these cushions (a practise we had perfected at the Red Sea Beach Camp), reading, chatting, and drinking copious amounts of Stella.  I think I have a disproportionate sense of how much I can drink.  We had to place orders for the boat, and afraid of getting dehydrated, (recalling my ´black tongue incident´ in Mexico), I ordered two bottles of water and four juice bottles to offset my six Stellas.  Well, I could only drink one beer, because there is no W/C on the boat and I had to keep asking the Nubian guide to stop. He was getting annoyed with all the pitstops along the shore, so I got Latifah to ask for the next stop, but he clearly knew I was behind it and was giving me the evil eye. Graham kept chiding me on my lack of inebriation and urged me to drink more, but I couldn´t keep up. I had to ask for three washroom stops based on one Stella alone! We zigzagged along the Nile the full day, stopping only to jump in the river (like swimming in ice cubes with a really strong current! No Bilhazia here!)  We passed the hotel where Agatha Christie wrote ``Death on the Nile``.  At meal times we spread a tablecloth over the cushions and ate Eish Masri (pita breads) with dip, and at night we banked on shore, where Grahamses (a.k.a Ali) was commissioned to dig out the toilet tent.  Really, I should have been the one to dig that out since I probably used it the most.  I had five beers left to finish! but "Ali" had to earn his keep as an honourary Egyptian.  We built a campfire and sang songs with the Nubians, before thrusting all our supplies below-deck (pirates) and rocking to sleep on the felucca in harbour.

Temples in Luxor
Exploring the temples with my travelmate Beishan in Luxor was a real treat, especially since we did it by bicycle.  Mine was a bright pink bicycle that screeched like a broken parrot every time I rode it, replete with basket, and of course, no helmet.  There is no respect for bikes in Aswan, so you just have to chance it and hope for the best.  We hefted our bikes onto the morning ferry to the West Bank, glimpsing the sunrise of Luxor, and on the way back, we completed the cycle with  a sunset ferry ride.  Landing on the West Bank we biked past the two giant Colossi of Memnon, guarding the entryway to the famous Valley of the Kings and Queens, where they started burying the Pharoahs after the pyramids were looted a few too many times.  Beishan and I spent the day exploring, getting lost, and promising marriage proposals and baksheesh to avoid getting our bicycles stolen.

The tombs are decorated in dilapidated murals depicting stories of the gods.  You have to love the Egyptian stories and Gods:   Seth is jealous of Osiris for being King.  Makes him a custom-made "Cinderella" coffin and sends him off down the Nile.  Wife, Isis, freaks out and recovers the coffin to give husband a proper burial.  Seth reacts and dismembers Osiris, for finality. Isis recovers individual body parts and uses dismembered penis to impregnate herself.

The murals painted in the tombs all depict stories like this and since everyone was marrying their brothers and sisters and killing one another, there are lots of stories to be told.  Some are dilapidated and faded, but the ones protected by glass leave the paintings in vivid and clear detail.  As a group, we were cautioned against buying a separate ticket to view King Tut´s Tomb, as there is "nothing much to see" and it´s "expensive" (20 bucks), but having studied Ancient Civ. with my Grade Five class, and having talked about King Tut ad nauseum, I felt I had to see the real deal.  You descend down a ramp into the tomb, which isn´t very big, only about four metres wide, and there on one side you see King Tut, encased in glass, a tiny shrivelled up cadaver of a teenager. He looks incredibly small, and crusty, like a mummified raisin. As the Tour Guides say, the only memorable thing King Tut did was die.  Still it´s amazing to know that King Tut died in 1346 BC and is still there for the world to see.  Granted, most of his burial treasures are at the Antiquities Museum in Cairo (since looted in the Mubarek riots), but it´s eerie to see the place that Howard Carter unearthed, unleashing the hex that befell him and his men.

There are tons of touts in the Valley of the Kings, all chasing you for baksheesh. Everyone´s got a story, and after awhile the stories recycle themselves through the same prologue-to-sale.  One guy I met, said, "Ah, you are from Canada?  Canada Dry!  Never die!"  (I happen to like this one.  So much more original than, "Hello!  You dropped something!  It´s my heart!")
 "You are from English side or French side?  (Everyone asks this as though Canada had a big red line down the middle.)Yes, I can parler francais aussi, I used to live in Montreal!"
I said, "Oh really? Which street?  I know Montreal quite well."
"Ah, well, it was a long time ago.  I don´t really know."
"Oh, mais vous parlez Francais. C´est marveilleux!"
"My French isn´t that good. But hablo español."
"Really?  Good. My Spanish is better than my French.  ¿Como apprendiste Español?"
Then, exasperated he said, "You buy my book, Valley of the Kings, good price!"
Ah, yes, now we have it.  The crux of the matter.  This goes on outside every tomb, every valley, with an entourage of vendors trying to sell you books, flashlights, scarves, jewelry, and memory cards.

We also saw the Mortuary of Hatshepsut.  She is my favorite Pharoah by far, a female Pharaoh who kicked butt in the world of business while maintaining a salacious affair with her courier, Senenmut.  She always portrayed herself in the guise of a man and convinced the people to follow her by telling them the Sun God, Amun had assumed the form of a bird and impregnated her mother, giving Hatshepsut a holy lineage.  She was married to her half brother, or step brother, Tuthmosis the Second (hence the need for a salacious affair) who later had a child with Isis:  her evil stepson, Tuthmosis the Third.  At the Temple of Karnak, you can see the obelisks she had erected, which her jealous stepson Tuthmosis the Third had scratched off to expunge any record of her.  He was jealous of her 22 year reign and hated her so much that when she later disappeared, he was suspected of having murdered her. (Though our Tour Guide told us that the Antiquities Commission just found new information to suggest that she actually died in her 50s of bone cancer.) Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis the Third had a strange relationship because she was his Step-Mom, his aunt, and I think his Mother-in-Law, all-in-one.  Gotta love the Ancient Egyptians!

The Pyramids
The Pyramids were of course, amazing, though it´s really the history and execution that you marvel at (and the fact that these people invested more time as the architects of their afterlives, than of their current realities), because when you see the Pyramids they are after all, just big triangular rocks.  We were told that going inside the Great Pyramid of Giza (the biggest pyramid-Pyramid of Khufu) was a waste of money, when you can go inside the Pyramid of Menkaura, the third Pyramid, for a lot less.  But, again, having just taught Ancient Civ. as part of the Grade Five curriculum, I felt compelled to go inside the biggest and the best and do the ´Real Deal´. So, as with King Tut, I paid my 100 Egyptian pounds and in I went.  The Great Pyramid is 139 metres tall and weighs about  5.9 million tons and they say it took about 20 years to build it.

True to tale, there isn´t much to see inside other than a great chamber, but I waited until there were no tourists other than me inside (that took awhile) and climbed inside the sarcophagus in the King´s Chamber, and just laid down inside, imagining what the Ancient Egyptians must have thought their Afterlives would have included.  Then, to document the occasion, I texted my friend Sandy, back in Canada:  I´m inside the sarcophagus inside the Great Pyramid!  (though I couldn´t send it of course.  No SMS reception in the AfterLife!)  So I just chilled for a bit inside until I heard the footsteps of the next group of tourists. [Side note:  When I was lying in that sarcophagus, I was wondering if that was going to bring me good luck or bad luck. I am now in Brazil writing this, and I just met a fantastic guy at a Salvadorenan salsa club called ``Sarcophagus``. Coincidence?  I think not!]

Camel Riding
What would Egypt be without a camel ride?  Technically, I missed my opportunity for this by not going when I was at Mt. Sinai, but Mohamed, our group leader, went to bat for me since I was dying to ride a camel for my birthday, and some of the others hadn´t yet had a chance to ride either.  Usually when you do the camel thing it is very touristy and you are lead by a Camel Boy, however our guide meant business.  He taught us how to actually guide and steer our own camels, because he thinks this business of the camel boys is a bunch of touristic bull roar.  It´s kind of like riding a horse, except that the camels do what they want, and aren´t in a hurry to do it.  My camel was in a bit of a depression from a miscarriage, so the guide attached a baby camel to mine, to give her the sense that she did have a child.  Camel psychology.  Camels also give kisses.  If you say ``bosa`` (the Arabic word for ´´kiss´´), the camel twists its rubbery lips against your cheek!

The Desert
For my birthday, I had the incredible experience of being in the middle of the White Desert.  We explored the White and Black deserts by 4WD, at 200 km an hour!!  And we did not have the Americans in our jeep, so no speed control.  The natural rock formations created by wind erosion are incredible, and we had fun doing photo shoots in the desert.  We had had a couple of birthday celebrations on the trip already, and Mohamed pulled me aside and said, ``Listen, Jennifer, I can´t do this for your birthday, because we are gonna be in the middle of the desert and there´s nothing there, I mean nothing!`` I was happy just being in the desert, and getting a homemade Arabic card signed by everyone and random presents from my travelmates.  So you can imagine my suprise when, after an amazing Bedouin dinner cooked over the campfire, (the best roasted chicken!), they came out with this cake and candles!  I was so touched.  Mo and the guys had to bring all the ingredients out to the desert separately (since we were speeding around the sand at 200 km an hour) and then put it all together in the camp, fashioned from 3 walls of vehicles parked in a U shape with carpets pegged against them to make a cozy little enclave.  That said, sleeping the night there was subterraneally cold.  I wore my Silver Space Suit and my travelmates were wondering if the Mother Ship was coming to reclaim me for my 37th birthday.

The Desert Oases we went to were unforgettable. In the Siwa Oasis, a town of salt and clay buildings with palm tree thickets and hot springs, the women are dressed in Black Burquas whose only openings are eye slits bound by an elastic.  The Laws of the Land there are very strict and even to swim we had to wear clothes, which float around you like lily pads and really inhibit the sleek feeling of swimming.  It reminded me of an Indian Womens´ Lit course I took in Uni where one book spoke of women drowning in their Burquas, the cloth caught in drains or on logs.  I was dying for a massage and Grahamses found something in the Lonely Planet to indicate that there was a Thai woman living in Siwa giving Thai massages.  However, when I went to investigate, it was in fact a Siwan man.  I asked Mohamed what he thought about that, as Vicky, Jiwon, Fiona and I were all keen to get massages.  His response:  ``Jennifer, these are men who never see a woman.  Then a man from Siwa makes a massage parlour for tourists...I think you better wait to get the massage in Alexandria.``  At night, Jiwon and I went to a hot springs designed for tourists, so you could actually wear a bathing suit.  We twisted Jan´s arm to come with us, so we would at least have a guy as backup.  It was divine, but true to form, infiltrated by Siwan onlookers who are desperate for a glimpse of skin.  Poor guys there,  very repressed.  This one Siwan guy asked if he could swim, but then took off his bathing suit in the hot springs.  And we couldn´t see his hands...so even though we had a guy with us, we had to evacuate!

Arabic
If I had more time, I would love to learn Arabic.  The script winds across the page like the footprints of a snake and the sounds of Arabic are succulent.  Even learning small bits and pieces of phrases was like a key to chambers of the culture.  My favorite expressions are ``A la tool!`` (straight ahead) and ``moutachefer``, which means hospital.  I just imagine all these cartoon men with handlebar moustaches having a fair on the hospital grounds.  In Siwa, we saw a man running pell mell down the street, chased by another man.  Two minutes later another man came in hot pursuit.  Beishan and I screamed ``A la tool!  A la tool!`` pointing in the direction the other man had fled.  And ``beautiful camel`` is ``gamel gameela``.

Alexandria
As a city, I adored Alexandria.  Far more than Cairo. It was built in 331 BC, honoring Alexander the Great, and has a winding boardwalk along the water, decadent cake and chocolate shops, and fruit stands with bobbles and necklaces of hanging fresh fruit in the millions of fruiterias.  Sadly, on New Year´s Eve there was a bombing outside one of the churches.  80 people leaving the candlelit vigil were killed. They say it was retaliation by Islamic militants but who knows.  We stayed in a colonial period hotel, with balconies overlooking the sea, and here we planned a surprise party for Mohammed who was born on New Year´s Day.  We all went out to dinner  and then Sue and Joe detained Mohamed to buy a special kind of map while the rest of us went back to the lobby to blow up balloons and get out the cake which we´d bought at the infamous Trianon restaurant.  Mohamed was actually surprised since we´d gone to a coffee shop the night before and ordered a slice of cake for him with a candle, and smoked cherry sheesha while watching Lebanese music videos.  So he didn´t actually anticipate a celebration.

My trip ended back in Cairo, and though of course I had no sense of the chaos that would soon erupt against Mubarek, I still felt restless to leave Cairo, the oppressive patriarchal streets crammed with Mom and Pop auto parts shops and cell phone stalls, the Nile fetid and stale, and the corrugation of impatient traffic and horns.  But, like I said, Cairo aside, I love, love, loved Egypt and am happy that the youth have won their battle and are carving out a new Egypt.