So after Africa I did a trip across India and Vietnam. In India I learned the following things:

1) Before a movie in India, they play the national anthem and you have to stand up.

2) Diarrhea is not as inevitable as I was lead to believe. I only had the runs once. It was at the Taj Mahal. Which brings me to...

3) The bathrooms at the Taj Mahal are awful. It's not just that bathrooms in India are bad -- those were the worst ones I found anywhere, right down to the guy who charged for toilet paper by the sheet. In comparison, the Turkish-style squatters on moving trains were luxurious. Fuck the Taj.

4) For that matter, fuck Agra. The only city I went to in India that I straight up didn't like. Garbage everywhere, everybody mad hustling, that town can blow me.

5) If you want drugs, apparently you should go to Varanasi. Nobody else in India offered to sell me hash. Everybody in Varanasi did.

6) I had been led to believe that Goa was full of partying hippies and Europeans. These were not in evidence. There were however lots of friendly stray dogs, who were cleaner than hippies and nicer than Europeans.

7) All of the money has Gandhi on it -- all of it. Which kind of makes that scene in "Slumdog Millionaire" stupid. Remember, where the guy knows who is on the $100 bill, but not the 500 rupee? Because he's "never seen" a 500 rupee note? Well, maybe he should have taken a clue from every other denomination. It's Gandhi. It's always Gandhi. It's never not Gandhi.

8) Every building in Udaipur has a sign advertising a rooftop restaurant and a 7:00 PM showing of Octopussy. Evidently Octopussy was filmed there, and Udaipuris operate under the assumption that all tourists are James Bond pilgrims or something.

9) Do not stay at any hotel that does not offer you a stick to fend off monkey attacks.

10) Spectators are welcome at cremations.

1/13/2016 4:06:59 PM

magical

1/13/2016 4:24:21 PM

*clap clap clap*

1/13/2016 7:15:17 PM

There's always got be some hippie-punching line in your posts doesn't there

[Edited on January 13, 2016 at 7:34 PM. Reason : HIPPIES ARE PEOPLE TOO BRAH]

1/13/2016 7:34:14 PM

felt like i was reading mad magazine right there

1/13/2016 7:55:14 PM

Quality thread.

1/13/2016 8:01:17 PM

^^OK it's one thing to not like the thread but low blow, man, low blow

11) Interstate rivalries are taken seriously. Every single car accident we passed, whatever taxi driver we had would blame the Gujaratis, and would go on to say that Gujaratis are all drunk drivers who don't know what they're doing. Eventually I pieced together that Gujarat is a dry state, so when its inhabitants travel they are thought to overdo it on the drinking front and go wild. Personally I like this state stereotype better than West Virginians fucking their siblings.

[Edited on January 13, 2016 at 9:34 PM. Reason : ]

1/13/2016 9:30:43 PM

I don't get it. Grumpy takes a vacay in India and makes an awesome thread about it. I have lived in Germany now for 2 and a half years and have made no contribution to TWW regarding my travels. GG Grumpy.

1/14/2016 4:07:20 AM

Quote :

"^^OK it's one thing to not like the thread but low blow, man, low blow"

was supposed to be a compliment. thought it was quality wolf webbin

1/14/2016 5:25:56 AM

Quote :

"Before a movie in India, they play the national anthem and you have to stand up."

Fuck that.

I never stand up for any national anthems. Never have, never will. Score so far: 3 countries.

1/14/2016 6:10:17 AM

Quote :

"2) Diarrhea is not as inevitable as I was lead to believe. I only had the runs once. It was at the Taj Mahal."

You mean Delhi Belly? Yeah, you just got lucky.

1/14/2016 7:58:23 AM

Quote :

"Yeah, you just got lucky."

and on the fact that gandhi is on every note:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi_Series_(banknotes)

[Edited on January 14, 2016 at 9:43 AM. Reason : TRIVIA]

1/14/2016 9:40:24 AM

or africa strengthened him

1/14/2016 9:40:58 AM

I'm pretty sure it was ^

After 3+ years in Africa my system got exposed to a lot of the typical bugs. Though in general I've always had a hardy digestive system and rarely had the runs even in Africa.

Also a more serious note about the trip:

Darjeeling was kind of way the fuck out of the way for us and added a couple of really strenuous travel days, but it was worth that and then some. It may be my favorite town anywhere. Relaxed atmosphere (albeit a slightly thinner actual atmosphere), fantastic food, tourists haven't tourist-ed it all up yet (though there is a KFC wedged among the old buildings downtown), and you can't look in any direction without seeing a gorgeous view. Do you see this?



That was basically the view from the toilet in our airbnb. It's Kanchenjunga. It's the third tallest mountain in the world.

---

Anyway...

12) The overwhelming majority of tourists in India are Indian. This makes sense, given how goddamn many Indians there are, and the rapid expansion of the country's middle class, but it stuck out in my mind. Everywhere else I've been, tourists have been 85% white, 14% Chinese/Japanese, 1% "other." But soon I think we'll be seeing busloads of India everywhere...

13) And they'll all have selfie sticks. The country is immune to any sense of shame about whipping one out. There are a billion Indians, and they own at least three billion selfie sticks.

1/14/2016 11:00:04 AM

Quote :

"9) Do not stay at any hotel that does not offer you a stick to fend off monkey attacks."

1/14/2016 11:11:36 AM

Chilled monkey brains!

1/14/2016 3:28:57 PM

Ya know I used to think selfie sticks were stupid and a lot of the times they are, but I found it very useful on vacation in Greece. If you aren't with a group of people who can take photos, it can be hard to get decent ones of one or two people just using your arms. Also there was no way I was handing my iPhone over to some random person in a foreign country, having financial issues like they are in Greece, to take pics of us.

1/14/2016 3:53:51 PM

So you basically wasted your entire trip?

1/14/2016 4:06:09 PM

I never thought that a tourist with a selfie stick was stupid. It is very practical and I'd do it for time to time if I had one.

Dump shit that tourist do is go to a resort Island somewhere on an all-inclusive resort package and then never leave the resort. That shit is fuckin dumb.

1/14/2016 4:16:27 PM

Quote :

"Ya know I used to think selfie sticks were stupid and a lot of the times they are, but I found it very useful on vacation in Greece. If you aren't with a group of people who can take photos, it can be hard to get decent ones of one or two people just using your arms. Also there was no way I was handing my iPhone over to some random person in a foreign country, having financial issues like they are in Greece, to take pics of us. "

When we started taking pics to post up for strangers to see where we are, versus to remind ourselves/friends what we saw, selfy sticks started being acceptable.

1/14/2016 4:49:25 PM

did you get rape? no? ok then!

1/14/2016 5:04:01 PM

^^ Exactly. When I go to a new place, about 1‰ of the pictures I take are selfies. Actually, it is almost always zero.

1/14/2016 5:26:15 PM

How about China? Similar as China

1/14/2016 5:30:17 PM

I'd like to do China next. This last trip was a longtime fantasy that actually came true, and if I can repeat the feat of turning dream into reality, the next one will involve the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Mongolia, and northern China.

Maybe the selfie sticks would have seemed less stupid if they hadn't been in such constant use. And I suppose for me they'll never be a necessity. I got these long-ass arms, I was able to take selfies of my girlfriend and I with no trouble.

14) If you're taking an overnight train, you want AC 2 class. The fancier class isn't worth the extra expense, and the cheaper ones rapidly get less and less comfortable, but I slept like a baby in air conditioned 2-tier berths (and I rode on seven of them, so it wasn't a fluke).

15) Buying the train tickets online as a foreigner is a colossal pain in the ball bag. At one point you have to enter an Indian cell phone number to get a password texted to you. Obviously foreigners don't have that. So rather than fix the system so you can get it e-mailed to you, they advise you to enter a fake number, e-mail them, explain why, and then receive it that way.

1/14/2016 6:26:45 PM

This mirrored my experience almost to the letter. The Taj Mahal is still gorgeous but poop before you head to Agra and leave immediately after seeing the Taj Mahal.

Jaipur and Udaipur were both big surprises and loved both towns and the ride from one to the next.

Varanasi was the dirtiest place I've ever been, by a factor of at least 5x. But it didn't matter because everyone was high as fuck and it really is an incredible place to experience. Visited the "birthplace" of Buddhism and all that stuff.

I almost made it clear of diarrhea until making the mistake of ordering ice cream for dessert. The ice cream is fine, the cold water they keep the scoop in will make you shit your pants immediately.

I was there with my blond haired blue eyed (now ex) wife and my coworker (he and I are both very tall, 6'3 and 6'6). Every tourist site we took dozens of pictures with people who thought we were NBA players and the ex was a movie star. They REALLY don't see many white people.

1/15/2016 1:50:41 AM

I've always wanted to visit India. I love Indian food, parts of it sound beautiful, and I'm always up for an adventure. With that said, ZERO of my friends would ever go, and that includes Indians who say for the kind of money required to have a nice trip, I might as well go to Australia or South Africa. I even have a Pakistani friend that says I'm nuts for even considering it, and she calls it a "squalid, third world hell hole"

1/15/2016 3:12:12 AM

^^I wish we'd made it to Jaipur, but it was a little out of the way of our west-east arc (we went Goa-Mumbai-Udaipur-Agra-Varanasi-Kolkata-Darjeeling).

We also had a lot of people asking four our pictures. Maybe it was because of my height, I thought they just wanted to have creepy pictures of my girlfriend (since everyone asking was male)

And AMEN to Varanasi being dirty. Just cow shit everywhere, and when we went it rained, so make that slippery puddles of cow shit everywhere. However...

16) In Varanasi, there are two ends of town. One of those ends sucks. It's the end with all the old white hippies.

--

Quote :

"that includes Indians who say for the kind of money required to have a nice trip, I might as well go to Australia or South Africa"

That sounds dubious to me, though I guess it depends on what you mean by "nice trip." Once you've gotten the plane ticket, India is incredibly cheap. I stayed in Airbnb places in every city except Kolkata, and the accommodations ran from "fine" to "great." I think the most expensive one might have been $30/night for two people, with the cheapest being like $15. The trains were clean, punctual, and overall not something I would put "beneath" a nice trip, and they're very reasonable. And you can eat for next to nothing. Average meal price was around $1.50. Our most expensive meal was maybe like $10/person.

In total I think three weeks in India ran about $2,500 per person, and that's everything we bought from plane tickets to lassis to souvenirs. No doubt you could go to Australia for $2,500, but you couldn't have the same quality we did for the same length of time.

---

As for it being squalid...Goa, Udaipur, Mumbai, and Darjeeling were certainly NOT that. Varanasi, Agra, and Kolkata I'll grant you might have had some squalor. Your Pakistani friend can talk to me about "third world" after she spends a few years in West Africa. India does not qualify.

But it all comes down to what you want out of a trip. If you want perfect relaxation, stay the hell out of India and try a resort in Aruba. There's no shame in it -- after a month scrambling around Asia that would have felt mighty good, the traditional "I need a vacation after that vacation" feeling.

But you will not have all your senses and every part of your brain stimulated in Aruba. You will have that in India.

The whole trip was born out of a debate between my girlfriend and I about where we wanted to go after Africa. I started the bidding with, "I want to get a berth on a cargo ship bound for South America, then wing it traveling around the continent at least as far as Panama."

She responded with, "Well I don't want to die, so how about we go to Italy an Greece and look at pictures?"

I countered, "I don't want to die of boredom, so what about instead we go to Russia and look at WWII shit?"

And so on and so forth until she suggested India, I raised her a Vietnam, and we both had a great time.

1/15/2016 1:06:47 PM

Fair enough!

1/15/2016 1:52:27 PM

^^ Well said

1/15/2016 2:19:21 PM

^^^

To each his own. I guess the level of comfort is what they're talking about. Europe, the US, and Australia all have creature comforts that some people simply refuse to give up. Maybe it's snobbery, or maybe it's just having a real aversion to poverty and sanitation issues. I've had zero problems traveling all over Mexico, but some people flat out refuse to go because they think they'll get kidnapped. I've never been to a third world country, but parts of Mexico are tough to swallow, for sure.

Like I said, I'd definitely like to go someday. Maybe I just need to find some new friends.

[Edited on January 15, 2016 at 2:23 PM. Reason : .]

1/15/2016 2:23:41 PM

I don't mind 3rd world BUT India just sounds way to dirty, smelly, Hot & Humid, and crowded for my tastes.

1/15/2016 3:46:07 PM

Quote :

"Europe, the US, and Australia all have creature comforts that some people simply refuse to give up."

I can't think of any that I had to give up in India. Every place I stayed had all the usual plumbing Americans are so bizarrely obsessed with (normal toilets, hot water, etc.) and faster WiFi than I have in North Carolina. They had AC. It's not like the beds are made of jagged rocks or anything. I guess I'm just curious exactly what it is these people think they would have to endure.

Quote :

" India just sounds way to dirty, smelly, Hot & Humid, and crowded for my tastes."

You can't fairly say that about a place as big as India. There are dirty, smelly, hot, and humid parts of the United States, but people don't refuse to visit the US because of Alabama.

Dirty? OK, Varanasi, Agra, and Kolkata were kind of dirty, but Mumbai wasn't. Udaipur wasn't. Goa and Darjeeling were gorgeous.

The weather varied a lot. Mumbai was hot and humid. Udaipur was hot and dry. Darjeeling was chilly.

I expected to feel crowded but didn't. There's a lot of people in India but it isn't a sardine can. The places that had crowds were exactly the same places you'd expect to find crowds in any American city: the train station at commuting time, for example. I actually have a pretty low tolerance for crowds and tend to get a little bit of anxiety in them, but this was never an issue in India.

And you're downright wrong about smelly. With the constant exception of fucking Agra, India smelled great, because everywhere you go somebody is cooking or serving Indian food. And if by chance they aren't, there are incense or flowers around. No shit, we actually commented to each other a lot about how good the place smelled.

1/15/2016 4:13:29 PM

I just pictured Slumdog Millionaire with the Kid shitting on a pier above the river/beach

1/15/2016 4:27:36 PM

Quote :

"I just pictured Slumdog Millionaire with the Kid shitting on a pier above the river/beach"

That is some ignorant shit right there. India is a huge country with varied climates and standards of living. If you go to big cities and live in decent hotels you will not have to endure dirt, smell, heat, humidity, and crowd.

1/15/2016 5:26:45 PM

Great. We're alienating HUR internationally at this point.

1/15/2016 7:04:26 PM

you didn't stay at the lake palace in Udaipur? missed opportunity, man. loved that hotel. agra was meh to me too, although I do have a nice set of inlaid marble coasters made in the same style of crafting that was used to make the taj.

i loved goa and partied like a motherfucker there - around the same time of year you were there, too. maybe it's become passe? i dunno. also went to the kingfisher brewery down there and had lunch with the CEO in their executive cafeteria. had flash cooled beer right off the assembly line. best beer I've ever had in my life.

jan sucks. it's dry and dusty and filthy. think the best time is to go right after monsoon season so that all the shit is washed away but it's not raining all the time.

when I went to the ghandi memorial, I spent half an hour taking pictures with indians who were amazed to see a 6'1" tall redheaded white man there.

i never got the shits there. also never took malaria medication. #blessed

BTW, if you only stay at Taj property hotels like we did, you'll have all the luxury you need and more.

[Edited on January 15, 2016 at 10:12 PM. Reason : .]

1/15/2016 10:12:32 PM

Quote :

"you didn't stay at the lake palace in Udaipur? missed opportunity, man"

Missed opportunity to what? Spend a pile of money? We stayed in airbnb that turned out to be more of a small hotel, but we loved it -- gorgeous room, awesomely helpful owner, great rooftop restaurant, and it ran about $25 a night for both of us to sleep there.

Quote :

" agra was meh to me too, although I do have a nice set of inlaid marble coasters made in the same style of crafting that was used to make the taj."

Obviously I don't know what you bought, and I hope it was legit, but "marble made in the Taj style" is what they say about every piece of shit they sell within a hundred miles of that town. Painful experience buying a statuette at what turned out to be around a 15x markup has made me doubt everything. Only time I got hosed, though.

Quote :

" i loved goa and partied like a motherfucker there - around the same time of year you were there, too. maybe it's become passe? i dunno"

I think it's mostly that Goa is bigger than people give it credit for. The part we were in was very sedate, more a fishing village than anything, but on clear days we could see parasailing and shit going on south of us. I assume there was partying. For my part I'm glad we missed it. Normally party time is great, but getting out of Africa to India was exhausting, and I selected our place there to give us a few days just to relax. And that we did. My personal adult record for sleeping is 16 straight hours after we finally made it to Goa.

Quote :

" think the best time is to go right after monsoon season"

That's when I went, and I'm inclined to agree

1/16/2016 1:59:57 AM

thought this thread was about Jesus. whoops.

1/16/2016 5:12:50 AM

things I learned by not going to India: never go to India for anything ever :3

1/16/2016 3:57:18 PM

We stayed exclusively in converted castles. There are hundreds of former royal compounds around India that started going to shit in the 80's after India's move to a democratic nation.

As a result all the former tribal royal families started going broke and couldn't maintain their properties. Fast forward to today, they figured it out: turn the castles and compounds into luxury hotels.

95% of the places we stayed would be called 5 star hotels in the US. In Udaipur, we stayed at a place called the Fateh Garh, a mountain palace that overlooked the lake. We went swimming one morning and there was a phone next to the pool that said to ring when finished swimming. A Rolls Royce came to the pool to drive us the 1,000 ft back to our room so we wouldn't have to walk up a flight of stairs.

Average cost per night to stay in a palace in India? $60.

1/17/2016 11:45:06 AM

palace-staying sounds like a pretty kickass idea, actually

1/17/2016 12:43:39 PM

^^^^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_years_of_Jesus#Claims_of_Jesus_in_India_before_crucifixion

1/17/2016 5:37:44 PM

Must have gotten a good deal if you were paying $60/night. Fateh Garh's listed rates start at $180/night

1/17/2016 11:53:30 PM