Have yourself a Mulki little Christmas….

Get it? See, Mulki is where our Ashram home is located… see what we did there? Mulki instead of “merry”… well at least we think we’re funny.
Right.So anyway…

As this was all of our firstChristmas away from home, we were feeling a little homesick and were determined to retain some of our Christmas Traditions during the holiday season. A week before Christmas we ventured to Mangalore to scope out supply options. After scouring the city we returned home (the ashram) triumphant with some exceptionally tacky decorations and the ingredients to make gingerbread cookies (well, with some creative Indian substitutions). To supplement our purchased decorations we also convinced some of the other guests to make paper snowflakes with us to decorateour ‘Christmas Tree’. Well actually we were told it was a ficus, but if we have learned anything from travelling in india, it has been flexibility and adaptability (and not just in the yoga sense). Decorations in our room included a tacky wreath that resembled a pipecleaner and our quasi-clean hiking socks hung with care at the ends of our beds as stockings.We even made tags for the stockings with each of our names on them and some festive drawings. Oh, and we played Christmas songs non-stop. Please take the following moment to appreciate how cute we are….

…Done? Good.

Christmas eve also coincided with one of the boys at the Ashram’s Birthday. Fun fact about India: birthday cake here is not for eating. Its purpose is for shoving in the face, ears, nostrils etc, of the poor individual who’s birthday it happens to be and anyone who is standing nearby. This tradition is accompanied by a full thronged silly-string attack and shaken pop bottle spraying.It was take no prisoners; none of us escaped a smattering of icing as the evening escalated into a full on food fight. Gaura, whose birthday it was, took it all in good stride, however it seems like in India the term‘birthday’ is a synonym for ‘day of abuse from your friends’.

We began Christmas day like any other year… opening our stockings! Santa brought each of us some chocolate, cashews, and an orange. Although the swell was really small we still went out surfing… with our Santa hats on! That day we forfeited our daily nap to make ginger bread cookies. We, along with some of the other guests pining for Christmas (and one Jewish girl celebrating for the first time), made and decorated over 50 cookies, including gingerbread surfers. The boys at the Ashram and their friends loved the cookies, so much so that all the cookies were gone by the end of the night. After our Christmas dinner and cookie dessert we added to our list of unusual Christmas activities by attending a water buffalo race. Yes, you read right, water buffalo race. It’s a pretty simple concept actually, fill a drag track full of mud and water, harness together two buffalo, attach a rope for the driver to hold on to and let them run! The driver doesn’t so much drive them as run as fast as he can while being dragged by the buffalo. Needless to say it was quite the spectacle and made for an exciting end to our Christmas day.

While recovering from Christmas celebrations, ie hanging out on the dock one afternoon, we befriended two of the local ninth grade girls who were neighbours of the ashram. They invited us to the highschool dance recital that they had been practising for. And so, with a few of the Ashram boys, we attended what turned out to be a pretty big event with half a days worth of performances that ranged from traditional Karnataka dances to a fedora clad Michael Jackson tribute.We sat with our neighbours in a sea of 9th grade girls who were whooping, cheering, clapping and screaming for their classmates on stage. It was a fantastic, albeit sweaty, afternoon of facepaint, brilliant costumes, shimmying, Justin Beiber and dancing with swords… ya just don’t see sword brandishing incorporated into our own highschool dance performances back home.

By now, all of the guests we had spent Christmas with had moved on, many of them leaving to party on the beaches of Goa for New Years. The real party, however, was back at the Ashram. It was a terrific morning of surfing on the 31st,the swell was once again cooperating, presenting us with some fun, clean breaking end-of-the-year waves. After our daily nap, we were recruited to the kitchen where the boys were preparing a New Year’s feast for everyone including a few of the local boys who usually hang out at the Ashram. After hours of chopping, grating and deep frying, we all indulged in a huge spread of dishes from Gobi Manchuria to pasta to chapattis… needless to say we were stuffed. Now the party moved down to the dock where the real party began with a bonfire and dance party. While the fire was fueled by petrol and coconut fronds, the boys were fueled by soda, 5 tubs of icecream and some bumpin Indian dance music we were blaring out across the river with the help of a few extension cords. We rang in 2012 as loudly as possible and enjoyed the fireworks across the water, complements of someone else’s new year’s celebration.

New Year’s day itself, however, was bitter-sweet for us. We were moving on from the ashram that has been our home in India and we had to say farewell to the boys who have been our family this past month. We hate to leave but we hope to meet again someday and are trying to convince them to sport some 5mm wetsuits and come for a visit and a cold water surf in Tofino!

Merry Christmas!!!

"Welcome, Christmas, bring your cheer. Cheer to all Whos far and near. Christmas Day is in our grasp, so long as we have hands to clasp. Christmas Day will always be just as long as we have we. Welcome Christmas while we stand, heart to heart, and hand in hand."

- How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Love,
Nouri, Christina and Vanessa

PS just in case you were wondering, yes, we wore santa hats for Christmas morning surfing. They turned out to be suprisingly effective at keeping one's head cool in the water... though they don't stay on too well if you wipe out.

Also, yes, that is a Christmas ficus tree.

Surfin India?

For the last two weeks we’ve been living the dream…Literally and figuratively. Rarely has a day gone by where we don’t nap for several hours! Add to the mix malaria meds and the result is some crazy dreaming. We got ourselves in this situation because we decided southern India is hot, and travelling in the heat sucks, so it would probably be best if we just found someplace nice to settle down for a while. And settle we did. At an ashram. With surfing. And Yoga. And delicious food. Told you we’re living the dream.

We’ve been staying at a Hari Krishna ashram in Mulki, a small town on the Southern coast of Karnataka. We’ll be here until the new year, then we travel around for a few days and fly home. The ashram isn’t like any other ashram, because these guys surf. In fact, they were the first surfers in India and are in the middle of setting up a surfing federation for Indian surfers. There are between 4 and 6 devotees at the ashram at any one time, and anywhere from zero to 10 guests. The devotees cook two meals a day, perform pujas and offerings (to Krishna) several times a day, and then surf and play volleyball and ping pong the rest of the time. They’ve got a pretty sweet set up. But ours is better. Let us take you through a typical day for us:

We get up at about 6am for yoga as the sun comes up… nice way to start the day and we’re all much more bendy than we were 2 weeks ago. After yoga, we chow down on a bit of fruit and some muesli before piling into a tiny zodiac and slowly put-put-ing our way to the break. This nautical commute deserves special mention as anywhere from 4 to 8 boards are piled onto the front of this little inflatable plus the corresponding number of people. As if we didn’t look like a clown car enough at this point, the boat also slowly fills with water from a massive leak and we’re all ankle deep by the time we reach the sand bar across the river. At least we provide the local fishermen with some early morning entertainment. We surf for a few hours (unless the surf is flat, then we do more yoga on the beach, or play soccer, or play a little game we like to call “beach nap”), then load up the clown boat and head back to the ashram. We arrive to a delicious feast, including fresh made juice (some mornings its lemon, sometimes its cantaloupe, but the best is watermelon). After breakfast (which is more like brunch, since its eaten between 11 and 12) we usually nap for a few hours. After our nap we spend the rest of our day reading, playing ping pong, watching movies, playing cards or chess with the ashram boys, or checking out some of the local sights (i.e., ice cream). Occasionally we do work, but that’s a rare occurrence.

The surf here this time of year isn’t amazing (usually less than 4 ft), but the waves are very fun and the water is warm! Apparently the surf gets pretty big here in the peak seasons (around monsoon season), with 8ft hollow waves and the occasional barrel.

We’ve gone on a couple day trips of note. The first trip was up to Udupi, which is a town 40 minutes north of Mulki. As far as we could tell Udupi is famous for three things: its temple complex, which contains 4 or 5 connected temples; an ice cream dessert called Gudbud, which is basically just fruit and ice cream, but for some reason it’s supposed to be better in Udupi, and kettle cooked potato chips, which are also available all over India, but again are inexplicably better in Udupi. Run down on Udupi: The temple was pretty impressive. The main temple room houses one of the most expensive deities in India, which is a gold statue of Krishna. Christina and Vanessa, for the low price of 10 rupees a piece, were also blessed by the temple elephant! The Gudbud was only “ok” according to our ashram friend who came with us. But the chips were amazing.

The second trip was a short trip into Mangalore (which we’ve done several times), but this one was special because we we’re there to celebrate Christina’s birthday! To celebrate we tracked down the Natural Ice Cream Shop… but wait, isn’t Christina lactose intolerant you say? True, however, Natural Ice Cream is made with water buffalo milk which contains far less lactose than cow milk. So as the best birthday treat in existence we brought joy and happiness to the lactose intolerant Christina through the enjoyment of the usually gastrically forbidden ice cream. Other birthday treats we tracked down in Mangalore include Masala Dosa’s (which are delicious and satisfying as they are paper thin but almost half a meter in diameter) and coffee. Back at the ashram we celebrated with a fantastic homemade pizza party (as we are currently living every 12 year old’s dream it seemed fitting). The boys even made a pizza sans cheese for Christina.

Now, we must end this blog, because food is ready and then its nap time…

I'm on a Boat!

T-minus one week until our month of surfing begins, so to kill some time we thought we’d check out Kerala and the famed backwaters (backwaters: noun. The Kerala backwaters are a chain of brackish lagoons and lakes lying parallel to the Arabian Sea coast of Kerala state in southern India). We left Bangalore aboard a night bus, and yes Harry Potter fans, it was EXACTLY like the knight bus in Harry potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The following morning we arrived in Kerala, one of India’s southern most states. Our starting point was Fort Cochin, an old Colonial town midway down the coast. Fort Cochin was settled by the Portuguese and Dutch (after the locals of course) some 400 years ago, and the architecture and culture of the area reflect this history. Catholicism has a noticeable presence here too, thanks to the Portuguese. Fort Cochin has a number of Catholic churches and religious monuments, including India’s oldest European church (built in 1503). We also met many catholic locals.   

Since we arrived at about 7am, we had the whole day to spend exploring. After checking into one of the heritage homes-turned guest house, we went on a whirlwind tour via auto rickshaw. Our very informative driver took us everywhere from the Dutch palace to the Santa Maria Basilica to the town laundry station (quite literally ALL the laundry for the town is done here, everything is hung to dry in a massive field and they even use a real iron iron…hot embers inside and everything!). He also took us to visit the Water Temple which is where people get married but what was more impressive was that it has its own guard elephants. 

That evening we took a cooking class with the lady who ran the guest house that we were staying in. She taught us to make chapathi and veg curry from scratch…. DEE-lish! Oh and it gets better: in the morning we learned to make “puttu” which are columns of steamed coconut mixed with rice flour  that you mush into banana….. yummers! Side note: one of the best parts about being in the south is that fresh coconut is used for virtually everything! Almost makes up for the relentless mosquitoes….  Don’t worry moms, we take our malaria drugs religiously

That day we left Fort Cochin to spend two nights on a houseboat that looked like it might be owned by Bilbo Baggins. Our vessel’s Hobbit-esque feel was charming… the hobbit sized double bed  equipped with three pillows meant to sleep the three of us was a bit less charming. Not anyone’s fault really; these boats are often taken as a romantic cruise for couples…. Not particularly intended for couple+ Vanessa. Other than the tight sleeping quarters, our float on the backwaters was lovely and the food was unanimously voted the best we’ve had in India so far (see Figure below) and was served to each of us on a Banana leaf. The scenery was also stunning with coconut trees as far as the eye could see as we quietly floated through the spiderweb of inter-connected channels that Kerala is famous for.

After our relaxing vacation (from our vacation) we spent two days in Alleppey where we were finally reunited with the ocean! After a bit of running around in town, we spent our last afternoon in Kerala hanging out at the beach reading, taking in a beautiful sunset and watching a camel go by (yes you read correctly, someone was taking a camel for a stroll on the beach, though camel expert Nouri informed us that it was actually a dromedary. 

That night we hopped on yet another train bound for Mangalore and 4 whole weeks of surfing, yoga and vegetarian food heaven!

Smashing Good Chai!

Before you think India has transformed Nouri and Vanessa into cup smashing jerks, this is actually a common sight in the city. Men sell chai in terra cotta cups intended to be smashed on the roadside after its delicious contents are enjoyed. Naturally we had to try for ourselves....

Colonial Calcutta and the City of Boiling Beans

Ready for warmer weather we boarded a train to visit some friends from the mountaineering course in Calcutta. As you may have guessed from the title of this blog we are keen fans of the train travel (and Wes Anderson for that matter…okay, until this trip none of us had been on a train but we certainly liked the idea). Alarmingly, we almost missed catching our first “big boy train” (the toy train doesn’t fully count..) as all three of us were on waitlist and we couldn’t find any direction on which berth we were supposed to go into once the train arrived. Luckily we all made it onto the train, which was going to travel overnight to Calcutta, unfortunately only 2 of us actually made it off of the waitlist, leaving one of us without a sleeping berth. As a result Christina and Nouri shared a berth (already made for indian sized folk… which Nouri is not by the way) by contorting their bodies in various renditions of the foetal position throughout the night. Needless to say, it was not quite the romanticized version of our first train travel we had conjured in our imagination. 

We arrived in Calcutta at 6 in the morning… way earlier than any establishment that we could loiter in opens. So we found a park with suitable benches and entertained ourselves for several hours eating the most time consuming fruit known to man… the pomegranate. Luckily for us this park was also the popular hangout for the city’s senior citizen crowd, who spend the mornings performing their fitness routines. Highlight of the morning incudes a local senior who chatted us up and performed not only a pretty good cover of “Adelwise” from the sound of music but also rapped us some Frank Zappa songs. Talk about vocal versatility. After a full day of aimless city wandering we met up with our hospitable friends Nikhil and Madhu who cooked us up a delicious Indian feast and treated us to great conversation till the hours of early morn… You heard right Christina stayed awake past midnight (insert gasps here). 

The next day we checked out College street area where one can feast their eyes on more book stalls than seems sustainable in a city of any size. We also rode one of Calcutta’s famous antiquated trams around the city. Once they were off work we met up with Nikhil and Madhu for some dinner great live music. Before our departure Nikhil toured us around the flower market and the Ganges before guiding us to our next train to Bangalore—the city of boiled beans.

Thanks again to Nikhil and Madhu for being such great hosts!

The train to Bangalore was pretty amazing. First of all, as we booked our tickets late, we ended up having to travel first class. Not only that, but all THREE OF US had our own berth! Needless to say we were very excited as we boarded the train, would this ride fulfil our train riding dreams? Not to spoil the suspense, but it definitely did. Our cabin was huge and even had a door. As we set about organizing our bunks one of the servers came in to great us with a flower (yes, Nouri got one too) and bottled water. Off to a good start. After the train departed the server came around taking lunch orders (the two options were: “veg” or “non-veg”). Not only was the food good, but it was plentiful. Our meal started with soup and bread sticks, then came out the actual meal (which was dal and rice!, but it was tasty and accompanied by some other snacks), after a suitable digestion period they even brought out ice cream! We spent a couple hours watching India roll by the window (which meant watching a lot of cows mostly) and napping, after which the server came by to drop off more snacks (which was almost a full sized meal). Again, we passed the next few hours reading, sleeping, and gazing out the window. It doesn’t sound particularly amazing, but keep in mind that sleeping and eating constitutes an almost perfect day for most of us...

And so, after 26 hours of read-eat-sleep-repeat we reached Bangalore at about 4pm at which point we pretty much met up with Arvind, our super friendly couchsurfing host, ate a few dosas and went to bed (ya know, because our train ride was exhausting). Our following day in Bangalore could be described as a vacation from our vacation: Bangalore, being the IT capital of India, is a very large modern city complete with Booster Juice and Levis Jeans outlet stores. So in our days here we got legs waxed (not Nouri), beards trimmed (only Nouri) and ate at a decadent buffet on the thirteenth floor of a building where we were obviously judged for going back for seconds on the dessert round (all three were involved in this one). Oh and we also saw a matinee of TinTin in 3D.

That night we met up with Vishal, Smitha, and Shirley, all friends Nouri and Christina met mountaineering. They took us to get South Indian chat (which are basically Indian tapas) and coffee (which is like any filtered coffee, except it’s made with chickory), and then we checked out one of Bangalore’s many restaurants. 

The next day we were off to Kerala, the neighbouring state, to check out the famed “backwaters” and tour a bit more of the south before heading to our month of surfing. 

Reunited!

After one month of separation the Darjeeling ltd blog team has been reunited! Vanessa survived the long Kathmandu to Darjeeling journey with an escort of a few Israeli travellers and the three of us celebrated with balloons, cookies and chocolate (and hugs…hugs are key). Despite Nouri and Christina spending their loitering days in darjeeling waiting for Vanessa to arrive in fog, rain and general miserable wetness, we were treated to clear views of the Sikkim Himalaya and bluebird skies during Vanessa’s stay. To take advantage of the weather, we took a stroll around the town to some great view points of kanchenchunga (the third highest mountain in the world I’ll have you know), visited a tea estate, the Himalayan mountaineering institute (to show Vanessa, Christina and Nouris home sweet home for the past month) and the Darjeeling zoo (of Red Panda fame… google how cute these guys are and you won’t be disappointed). Oh and we ate. A lot. All sorts of things. Waffles, French toast, chocolates, pasta, banana bread, cookies, veg sizzlers, smootheis, hummus sandwiches… the list goes on. While waiting for several days in Darjeeling for Vanessa to arrive Christina and Nouri took it upon themselves to diligently track down the best food options of the city (before passing judgement sympathize that we ate the same repetitive meal of rice and dal for a month ). 

And now to the exciting part… the train of blogname fame! We spent a sunny afternoon riding the world heritage steam train of the Himalaya railway in darjeeling with permanent smiles of glee plastered upon our faces. In reality, the experience was actually quite slow (had we not been eating so many cookies we probably could have run faster than the speed it travelled) and dirty from all the coal. But as a bonus Christina did convince a reluctant conductor to let her stoke the steam engine!