War in Ukraine: The View from Kiev

A handful of people have noticed that I’m in Ukraine and checked to make sure that everything is fine. Some have also asked what’s going on here.

Bottom Line Up Front: I am fine, and all is well.  Things here are deteriorating, but very gradually. The blog is still trailing by a few weeks, so posting about Ukraine might be confusing, but, like Lela Dewey, I do what I want.  I’ve just come from Moscow, and in both Moscow and Kiev, you wouldn’t know there was a war on. In fact, there are complaints among Ukrainians that the military is fighting a war while the rest of the country goes to the mall. In both countries, everyone has been incredibly pleasant and friendly to me. I’ve now moved from Kiev to Odessa,  much nearer land and water crossings to US-allied nations, in the event that one needs to leave in a hurry. By the time you read this, I will be out of Ukraine—not because there’s a need to leave, but because that’s been my schedule all along. The situation changed slightly in Kiev two nights ago, when Russian troops entered southeastern Ukraine. The media went wild with this, Ukraine reinstated the draft, and all of a sudden you could feel the rising tension all around. 48 hours later, everyone seems to have relaxed. My take on the situation is that it’s only an incremental escalation in the conflict.

Tonight I went to the opera in Odessa. Apparently this is what a war zone looks like:

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The picture above is the Motherland Statue in Kiev, built to commemorate World War II. It reminds me of the first verse of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,”

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,

He is trampling on the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword,

His truth is marching on.

 

The Great Wall of China

We’d hoped to take a weekend trip outside the city—Vince hasn’t had fresh air in quite some time. We signed up for a weekend camping trip, but it was canceled. So we opted for a Saturday trek on the Great Wall, borrowed some camping gear, and separated from the group half-way in. It worked out even better because we had the Great Wall all to ourselves.

I’d intended to skip the Great Wall, but everyone insisted that I go, and I’m glad I did. Like Machu Picchu, the natural setting is where the beauty comes from, and the structure itself amazes you that anyone would ever go the trouble. As long as the wall was garrisoned with over a million troops, everything worked well. But as soon as it wasn’t, it was overrun. In this terrain, the wall doesn’t make much difference—the hills are themselves a wall. As General Patton famously said, “Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man.”

 

More on Beijing

The Manchu or Ming emperors, or whatever the Hell they were, kept two summer palaces in addition to the Forbidden City. The British and burned one to the ground in 1860 in retaliation for the arrest and torture of British envoys who arrived under flag of truce. The remaining one is in northwest Beijing. It’s arrayed around a large lake and surrounded by hills. The architecture here is similar to the Forbidden City but more varied, and the natural setting is much superior. Why anyone would live there when they could live here is beyond me. Sadly there is no Terracotta Army here either.

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I often think of many western Chinese journalists and pundits of having a China fetish. No subject can be discussed without the China-obsessed making it about China. After spending a couple of weeks here, I’m starting to understand Thomas Friedman’s erection for China. I don’t share it, to be sure, but am starting to understand it. The authorities here are doing much wrong, but much right as well. There are human rights issues, to be sure, but it doesn’t feel like a police state. There’s a Chinese saying that China is large and the Emperor is far, or something like that. On a day-to-day level, the people here do whatever the Hell they want, as long as it isn’t politics. China is heavily polluted, but then so were London, and Chicago, and New York, and every other city in the western world, in their day.

The pace of infrastructure development is astonishing. Sure, the economic growth numbers are cost-based and falsified, and there are brand new cities that remain empty because no one will move there. But what’s happening here is pretty profound. I’ve heard the China fetishists talk about tens of millions of housing units, or such and such many billions of yuan spent, but none of that properly framed it for me. So I’ll try to frame it for you in a slightly different way.

The Shanghai metro opened in 1993. Until 1999, it had one line and under 40km of track. As of 2013, it’s the longest subway system on the planet, with 14 lines and over 500 km of track. By 2020, it will include 22 lines running almost 900km.

The Beijing subway opened in 1969. Until 2003, it had two lines. It now has more than 20, is the second-longest in the world, and is by far the world’s busiest–busier than New York and London combined.

In 2005, Beijing Capital airport didn’t rank in the 30 busiest in the world. As of 2014, it’s number one. And they’re building another one.

I had to travel back to Shanghai, 800 miles away, to pick up my Russia visa—all in a single day. I walked from Vince’s apartment to the subway. 1 hour, 2 connections, and 3 lines later, I was on the other side of Beijing boarding a bullet train to Shanghai. It covered the 800 miles in just over 4 hours. I caught the subway from the train station in Shanghai to the closest station to the Russian consulate. A 10 minute walk to the Russian consulate for my visa, and back to the subway. I rode the same line to connect to the maglev train to Shanghai Pudong Airport, breezed through security and boarded my plane. It landed in Beijing 2 hours later. I again boarded the subway, 1 connection and 2 lines later, was back in the neighborhood, and a short-walk took me to Vince’s apartment. Total cost was $250. And I was only outdoors during the short walks to/from the apartment and to/from the Russian consulate.

By no means do I mean to apologize for the bastards who run this place. I only mean to say that despite the many things they’ve done wrong, they’ve done some important things right.

 

 

Beijing: Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City

Beijing is less centralized than Shanghai, with a handful of commercial districts instead of a single central business district. Well, they have something called the “Central Business District”, it just isn’t the only central business district. Most of the famous tourist sites associated with Chinese Han culture are here—the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and the most accessible parts of the Great Wall. The metropolitan area here is as large as Shanghai, over 25 million people, and growing fast. As a result, the air pollution here is something inconceivable in the west. EPA guidelines set a limit of 80 parts per million (ppm). I lucked out and had relatively clear days, mostly between 180 and 220 ppm. In the wintertime, when the coal burning stoves and furnaces are running full blast, it hits 800 or 900 ppm. It gets so bad that the authorities have to close the schools. It gets so bad that US government employees here get hazard pay. Don’t believe me? Here’s an unfiltered, properly exposed photo of the naked sun at about 2pm on a weekday.

Beijing is also even more first-world than Shanghai. They have bbq, microbreweries, taco cantinas, Hooters, a Chinese version of SeamlessWeb, and anything else you might associate with civilization. I was enjoying the comfortable couch, chicken basil pesto sandwiches delivered to my doorstep, and HBO, but my friends insisted I see the Forbidden City, and I wanted to see Tianamen Square, so off I went.

Tianamen Square is enormous, surrounded by communist-style government buildings and featuring, at its center, a mausoleum that contains Mao Zedong’s pickled body, a la Ho Chi Minh and Lenin. The mausoleum was closed, which was okay by me—I don’t regard Chairman Mao as a particularly attractive thing to look at alive, much less dead.

China in general doesn’t feel like a police state, but Tianamen Square does. You pass through airport-style security to enter, uniformed and plainclothes policemen are everywhere, and thousands of CCTV cameras all around. Every lamppost has a half-dozen cameras and seemingly every other tourist is really a plainclothes cop—they give themselves away by yelling at you about what you can and cannot photograph. There’s also a permanent police garrison on site, complete with riot gear at the ready.

Adjacent to Tianamen Square is the Forbidden City, the primary palace of the Manchu emperors, or Ming emperors, or some damn thing. It was built primarily in the 13^th century, or maybe the 18^th, or 1953—I don’t think anyone really cares at this point. It’s full of vast open squares and intricately carved and extravagantly painted buildings, all of which look pretty much the same. And it’s huge—my pedometer told me that I walked 10 miles inside the Forbidden City looking for the Terracotta Army—which, as it turns out, is in Xi’an, 600 miles away.

 

 

McDonald’s: Grilled Chicken Sandwich, China-Style

You may have heard that here in China there’s recently been some controversy over tainted meat that resulted in a handful of Americans being arrested. The long and short of it is that a video surfaced of employees combining outdated meat with fresher meat and packing it, as well as packing meat that they’d dropped on the floor—basically what I always assumed happened in every meatpacking facility. If you think that the high school kids working late night at Wendy’s aren’t using meat they’ve dropped on the floor, you’re kidding yourself. China, it turns out, is kidding itself. Lots of meat was recalled, meaning that McDonald’s has run short of local beef supplies. (I always knew that someday pink slime would be vindicated.) The menu here is chicken only, which, at the risk of being overly theatrical, really fucking sucks.

The only sandwich available at McDonald’s Shanghai was the grilled chicken. It comes out that stupid oval premium bun, with lettuce and mayonnaise, just like a home. So I gear up to eat a mediocre grilled chicken sandwich, pissed off that I can’t even blog about it. But I take my first bite of this thing, and it’s amazing. It is so moist, and so tender, and marinated in hoisin sauce. This chicken must be 80% injected saline to this moist. It’s the best McDonald’s chicken product I’ve had, and the second best non-beef McDonald’s product (behind only the McRib).

So here’s my advice to McDonald’s. Trash the US domestic chicken menu altogether, and replace it with the international chicken sandwiches. This hoisin thing and the Maharaja Mac run circles around the Premium Chicken Ranch BLT and McChicken.

 

Shanghai: City of Bad Haircuts

Shanghai, city of bad haircuts, is the biggest city in the world, with over 24 million in the city proper as of 2013.* It’s also now the world’s busiest container port. It was terribly unimportant until 1842, then a bustling commercial and trade port until 1939, then an unimportant dump until 1991, and now a bustling commercial and financial center. It’s developing crazy fast, like the rest of China, but more on that later.

Shanghai is the most surprising place that I’ve yet been. I was expecting Mumbai and I found New York City. This place is incredibly firstworld. Everyone drives a new car. Inexplicably, many of them are Buicks, which 1) went out of business and 2) suck.

I stayed near East Nanjing Road in the Bund. If you’re up to speed on your Shanghai geography, it’s in the heart of the Fluid Control District, with streets full of shops selling pipes, pressure hoses, gaskets, pumps, pressure gauges, and generally catering to all but only your fluid control needs. If you’re not up to speed on your Shanghai geography, Fluid Control is sandwiched between the Switching Section (switches, dimmers, junction boxes, but only electrical endpoint, i.e. no wiring, conduit, etc) and SE&MR (Small Engines and Motors Repair District, exclusively machine parts, bushings, etc).

I planned on spending a week or more in and around the area while waiting for my Russian visa to be processed. Russia visas can generally only be obtained in a country where the applicant has residency. In my case, that means only the United States. But after doing some research, I learned that the Russian consulate in Shanghai just doesn’t give three fucks about the rules (except, of course, when they do). After spending tens of hours filling out forms and putting all of the appropriate documentation in order, I showed up to the Russian consulate. I wait my turn, trying to look as respectable and admittable as possible. There was a Danish girl in front of me. I eavesdropped on her conversation, and she was in the same boat as me—needing a Russia visa to travel east to west but with only a 30 day tourist visa in China. The consular officer curtly declined to accept the application, explaining that without Chinese residency, it would be denied out-of-hand. Figuring that I’d come this far and had nothing to lose, I smiled like everything was in order and handed over my application. No idea why, but the good news is he accepted it! The bad news is it wouldn’t be ready until Monday after next, the day before my train from Beijing goes to Mongolia. And Beijing is over 800 miles from Shanghai. The worse news was that they had to keep my passport the whole two weeks. And you can’t do anything in China without a passport, most importantly check-in to a hotel. So it’s off to Beijing for me.

For my last night in Shanghai, I went to see the Chinese acrobats. There are lots of different troupes, all in competition, sort of like Cirque du Soleil. The show I saw was a lot like the Cirque du Soleil Beatles Love show in Las Vegas, except it didn’t suck, it didn’t force me to miss Sammy Hagar’s encore show at Ceasar’s, and most of my friends weren’t on acid. They don’t allow pictures, but let’s just say that now we know where the Chinese get their underage Olympic gymnasts from. The highlight for most people was 6 motorcycles inside the Death Cage or whatever the fuck they call it. This thing is like 30 feet in diameter. It looks close but if you do the math (3πr, or whatever), you’ll find they aren’t much closer together than you are to the guy that you’re tailgating on your morning commute. Internal combustion and centrifugal force (or centripetal, or both?) takes care of the rest—if Bob Hoover can pour a cup of coffee while rolling an airplane, Johnny Backpack can ride a motorcycle in a sphere. Color me unimpressed. (Now, if they were to ride horses around in that thing, it’d be a different story.)

Also, I would love to describe for you my quest for the best xiao long bao (soup dumplings) in the world. But the fact is that I ate them in Shanghai exclusively for days, and the best in the world are at Shanghai Dumpling King in San Francisco.

Oh yeah, and it looks pretty much nothing like the pictures that I have it, but you can Google it if you really want.

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 *Biggest city proper, not metropolitan area.

 

Bangladesh: The Unhappiest Place in the World

If Sri Lanka is India Light, Bangladesh is India Plus. Here there is more pollution, higher population density, and worse poverty.

Historically, present-day Bangladesh and West Bengal (in India) were united as Bengal. As Indian independence approached, the Muslim League (an Indian political organization) prevailed on the departing British to separate the majority-Muslim parts of British India into a separate country. Hence present-day Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh became one country called Pakistan, with two parts separated by a thousand miles. Ethnic violence followed the partition, with millions of Hindus fleeing Pakistan for India, and millions of Muslims fleeing India for Pakistan. But the two parts of Pakistan had nothing in common but religion—they were ethnically, culturally, and linguistically distinct. East Pakistan declared independence, fought a war, won, and became present-day Bangladesh. Pakistan generally behaved like assholes, and committed a number of atrocities, for which the Bengalis* never forgave them, and probably never will.

Surrounding the Bengal Delta, which includes the outflow of the Ganges River, Bangladesh is very much a watery world, sort of akin to the Louisiana Gulf Coast. I’d describe it in more detail, but have already told you most of what I know about it. I’ve spent most of my time here sitting in traffic jams.

Dhaka, the capital, is the rickshaw capital of the world. Consequently, it has the worst traffic in the world. There are hand rickshaws, cycle rickshaws (trishaws), auto-rickshaws (tuks-tuks), horse-drawn carriages, cars, and busses all vying for space on the most congested roads imaginable. The government has tried to address the problem, with plenty of modern synchronized and network traffic signals, as well as rules preventing rickshaws of any type from using certain roads or crossing certain intersections. All to exactly zero effect. No one obeys the lights or the rules, or, for that matter, the police frantically waving at drivers to stop to be ticketed. There’s a lesson in here somewhere—regardless of what form of government a place has, no rule is enforceable until the populace decides to allow the enforcement.

The drivers here aren’t the most aggressive in the world**, but they’re unquestionably the worst. The method of driving wouldn’t even be recognizable anywhere else. It’s like bumper cars. Every motor vehicle, including motorcycles, has steel bars welded to the frame and extending beyond the front and rear bumpers. And they use them, all the time. If the vehicle in front of you is slow getting started, you go ahead and give them a bump. Bigger vehicles use their size, busses being the king of the road. Every bus is literally involved in multiple accidents every day, dozens every week. And it shows. The fronts and backs look like someone took a sledgehammer to them. The sides have had most of the paint sideswiped off. Below are pictures of a couple of random busses taken from a cab window. I chose these not because they’re particularly rough examples, but because I had my camera handy. If anything, these are in better shape than most.

 

Bangladesh is also noteworthy as the unhappiest place in Earth—this is as far from Disneyland as you can get. I don’t know whether it’s the suffocating heat, people stacked on top of one another, crushing poverty, or constant roadrage, but everyone here is a raving lunatic. The constant bickering is mind-numbing. This is not a case of some silly foreigner misinterpreting the local way of communicating. Arguments can, and frequently do, become violent. In the 48 hours I’ve been here, I’ve seen:

A customer try to fight a bodega merchant

Two security guards fighting two passersby

My driver try to fight a rickshaw driver

A pedestrian fighting a beggar

Two airport policemen try to fight each other

 

It seems like every time I turn on the news, hundreds of Bangladeshis have perished in a bus wreck, landslide, building collapse, or ferry sinking. When you look around here, it’s obvious why. Everything is overcrowded and nothing is built to remotely safe standards. We went down to the docks where the death-ferries arrive and depart. Next time a couple thousand people die in a Bangladeshi ferry sinking, it will likely be one of those pictured below.

 

*Bangladeshi is the standard construction, but the country is really Bangla Desh, with Bangla being what we’ve Anglicized as Bengal. The people here consider themselves Bengali, and still connected closely with West Bengal in India. The people in West Bengal consider the people here Bangladeshi, and look down on them. Here, whether Bengali properly refers to residents of Indian West Bengal, Bangladesh, or both, it doesn’t matter, because they all hate Pakistan.

 

**That distinction is reserved for Georgia, where cab drivers throw you out of their cabs for exhibiting your lack of faith in their skills by buckling your seatbelt.

 

 

Trekking in the Himalayas

I linked up with my Sherpa, Gyalzen, in Kathmandu, and we headed out for the Annapurna range for a week. An array of airlines operate domestic short-hops in Nepal—Yeti Air, Buddha Air, I can’t keep them straight. They generally operate small turboprops seating 12 to 60 people, primarily manufactured by Saab, British Aerospace, or ATR. This time of year, they’re operating high and hot, and with Kathmandu surrounded by mountains, I was curious to see how they’d pull this off. But the flights are short so they don’t carry much fuel, and they’ve picked the right planes for job. We taxied onto the active runway in Kathmandu in our BaE Jetsream 41 and the pilots stood on the brakes. As they wound up the big Allied Signal turboprops, the weight of the plane shifted back so dramatically that I thought we’d get airborne with zero groundspeed. This thing took off like a rocket, and spiraled up out of the valley and out over the Himalayas without breaking a sweat. And these guys do this a half dozen times a day. (For reference, the rate of climb of the turboprop Jetstream 41 is 2200 feet/min, compared to 3000 feet/min for a Boeing 777.  And the takeoff run is just under 4000 feet, comparable to a C130.)

As I’ve mentioned, it’s the monsoon here, and everyone had warned me against hiking now. It’s either hot or rainy or both, conditions in the mountains can get dangerous quickly, and visibility is often limited. Despite their advice, I went anyway, and am glad for it. But they didn’t warn me about the leeches that were out in plagues. Back home, you only get leeches swimming. Here, they get on your pants, shoes, any exposed skin, and work their way into warm, damp places. There isn’t much you can do about it, short of wearing leech socks, but no one in Nepal has ever heard of leech socks. Even then, they’ll attack your torso, kamikaze themselves off tree branches and leaves into your hair, and do all sorts of other ninja shit to get close enough to suck your blood. One lady that I hiked with for part of a day got one on her forehead.

They also didn’t warn me that the first 1.5 days were all stairs. I’ll hike all day (why do you think God gave the men in the Beck family big asses?) but I hate stairs. You’ll be glad to learn that I survived. I’m not a particular competitive hiker, and it was just me and Gyalzen, so we went at our own pace. In general, my goal is to stay ahead of the Asian tourists and even with European middle-aged ladies with trekking poles. Unfortunately, the Asian tourists here were 20 Singaporeans, who hike like they do everything else—12 hours a day, 7 days a week. And the German ladies had porters, which I claimed gave them an unfair advantage. My approach to hiking is my approach to life—sleep late, skip breakfast, have a Coke, avoid the midday heat, and be settled for cocktail hour. This allows somewhere between 0 and 5 hours for hiking (2 morning and 3 afternoon/evening, depending on how long cocktail hour ran the prior day). I blew my ankle in the lodge at the absolute furthest point in, but will be damned if I was 1) admitting to injuring myself indoors or 2) leaving by mule or helicopter or 3) giving Gyalzen     the satisfaction, because he offered the mule option even before I hurt myself. In the end, despite some overblown pain and suffering, I made it out, ahead of both the Singaporeans and the Germans.

The businesses in the Annapurna Reserve operate as a co-op (read: cartel) insuring good quality service (read: insuring uniform quality service) and insuring fair earnings to the guesthouses (read: maintaining the status quo of everyone’s relative wealth or poverty). The guesthouses can be quite nice. The food leave something to be desired, and every place has the same menu/prices, but they are packing it in on mules, so I can’t complain. The lodges are charming and cozy, with fires going all night because it’s the only way to dry clothes this time of year. They also have great views (I think) of beautiful mountain ranges (I’m told). I spent most of my time looking at mist. There was a brief 10 minute period when the clouds broke (pictures below). I spent a week hiking in Nepal, and now you’ve seen as much of the Himalayas as I have. You’re welcome.

Kathmandu Market

Kathmandu, Nepal, sits in a valley at one of the lowest points in Nepal, only 4,200 feet high. It’s unique in that not only are the streets not laid out in a grid, but the houses don’t generally align with the streets. As you approach from the air, you see a hodgepodge of buildings facing in all different directions. Next door to each other you might houses facing north, southeast, and east-northeast. Families typically extend the support columns of the house one additional floor, to give future generations a leg up. The result is unfinished concrete columns projecting above the roofline all over the place.

I’ve visited temples and walled cities until I’m blue in the face, but the walled city in Kathmandu is among the best. There’s noise and color all around you, crowded wall-to-wall with people down winding alleys and streets that follow no rational layout. There are few tourists here. Some hikers come to visit, but almost stay across town in Thamel, tourist ground zero. These are local shopowners selling local goods to local buyers, with a healthy dose of teenagers just milling about, and business is bustling. Occasionally, but only occasionally, you’ll stumble across some elaborately carved building that once belonged to a Nepalese monarch, but that’s not the draw here. The appeal is the marketplace full of people. It’s as interesting as the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul or the souks of Marrakech, if rather less well-known.

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South Park Street Cemetery, Calcutta

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, my favorite thing is decaying grandeur. I want my history not destroyed but not restored. A perfect example is the South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta. It was once the British colonial cemetery, but that of course ended with Indian independence. Yet it escaped being defiled and efforts to restore it are taking decades, so for me, it’s perfect.

There are crypts, mausoleums, obelisks, and simple gravestones for dozens of British colonial officers.

The most famous person interred here is General Charles “Hindoo” Stuart, for whom the phrase “going native” was coined. He adopted Indian customs, converted to Hinduism, and made India his home, sort of an Indian version of General Charles George “China” Gordon, famously killed by the Mahdist army at Khartoum. The chipped and moss-covered stones are beautiful in their way, as are many of the epitaphs.

They range from completely anonymous…

 

To flowery and poetic…

“Ennobled by the virtues of his mind

Constant to goodness and in death resigned

Who placed true practice in a wise retreat

Privately pious and unknown tho’ great

Sure in silent sabbath of the grave

To taste that tranquil peace he always gave

O early lost in virtues fairest prime

Thy Pieties supplied life’s want of time

No death is sudden to a soul prepared

When GOD’s own hour brings always GOD reward

Thy death and such O reader wish thy own

Was free from terrors and without a groan

Thy spirit to himself th’ Almighty drew

Mild as his sun exhales the ascending dew”

 

To humble and reserved…

“To the memory of a virtuous mother”

 

And my favorite…

“An honest man is the noblest work of God”

 

Slums of Calcutta

I love crowded, dirty, gritty cities in the developing world. Perhaps the most crowded, dirtiest, grittiest of all is Calcutta. Formerly the crown jewel of British India (itself in turn the crown jewel of the British Empire), Calcutta was wrecked during and after the partition of India, and has yet to undergo the renaissance that so many former gems have been able to effect. Over 14 million people live here, of whom at least 1.5 million and possibly as many as 5 million live in slums. The slums are primarily populated by non-Muslim Bengalis who fled Bangladesh during the partition or during the Bangladeshi War of Liberation. The slum that we visited lies along an outflow from toxic industries upstream. The land formerly housed the tanneries of Calcutta and so itself is toxic. The water that flows through here is laden with benzene, heavy metals, and other extreme hazards to health. There is no running water and no electricity.

The slum-dwellers have no official status here—they are refugees, and as such have a hard time receiving healthcare, seeking justice, and obtaining schooling. Wealthier parts of the city are nearby, with some apartment blocks looking down into the slums, but the legal residents and refugees live worlds apart. The slum problem here is pretty intractable. Unlike China, where homes can be cleared and residents forcibly moved, many of these people are here to stay. They live under British common law, have continuously occupied the land for decades, have made improvements to it, and so have a legitimate common law claim to it. And although they have issues accessing the courts, they vote—perhaps fraudulently, but in large numbers. The problem is therefore more complex and less tractable than simple slum-clearing, and more akin to efforts to deconcentrate poverty in the urban United States.

When you hear of the wretched slums in other countries, they’re talking about right here. Words fail to adequately describe the depravity. In a slum community of less than 5,000, at least one child each year drowns in the toxic effluent (pictured below, you don’t want to touch water that color). A resident of this slum recently sought treatment for a minor problem at a local hospital. When his wife went to pick him up, they claimed to have no record of him being there, even though she had personally taken him. He had been killed there, and harvested for his organs, and with no legal recourse.

And yet, our visit here was incredible. The people are open, friendly, and beautiful. We took candies for the kids and soaps, toothpaste, and shampoo for the mothers. They were unbelievably appreciative. They have fun here. By any objective standard, these people are in a really bad way. But they’re inexplicably happy, which is a wonderful thing to be.

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Doctors of India

Submitted without comment.

 

Darjeeling, Gurkhaland

Darjeeling itself is a small and charming town clinging to a steep mountainside. It’s the heart of Gurkhaland, home of the Gurkha people. In colonial times, the Gurkha were counted by the British as a “martial race”, i.e. one particularly well-suited to soldiering, alongside the Sikhs and Pashtun, primarily because they’re fucking terrifying. They’re generally short and slight, but still fucking terrifying. They’re also among the very happiest people in the world, smiling pretty much all of the time.

So when I describe them as fucking terrifying, I don’t mean terrifying in the cowardly-willingness-to-blow-up-women-and-children-with-a-suicide-vest sense. I mean terrifying in the having-a-friendly-conversation-with-you-but-always-prepared-to-disembowel-you-where-you-stand sense. They famously carry large curved khukuri knives, the bloodying of which is a rite of passage for young men. As the old joke goes, a small man with a large knife and a grin is far more terrifying than a large man with a small knife and a frown.

To this day, the Gurkha’s make up special sections of the Nepalese, Indian, and British Armies. They are particularly proud of their record of valor in combat, having won a number of Victoria Crosses for the British, and the tradition continues today.

Bishnu Shreshta fights off 40 train robbers with only a knife, or

Dipprasad Pun fights off 30 Taliban in Afghanistan, or

Gurkha’s in the British Army help take an enemy position by bayonet charge—in 1982.

If you think I’m kidding about the friendliness part, take this as an example. Our regimental mottoes in the US military are martial and even threatening, like “No Step Backwards” (the 111^th Infantry Regiment) or “Keep Up the Fire” (the 9^th Infantry Regiment). Ditto for the British military—“By Strength and Guile” (Special Boat Service). The motto for the famed Indian Gurkha Engineer Batallion? “Service with Smiles”.

Even the Statues are Fucking Terrifying

 There’s what’s called a “toy train” that runs from Darjeeling down the Gurkha monument, following the road. It’s an authentic 100+ year old narrow-gauge steam train, so isn’t really “toy”, but I guess it’s smallish and so they call it that. It’s a bit of a letdown if you’ve already done the drive (and by virtue of being here, you’ve necessarily already done the drive), turning around with in some dump called Ghum. But the train itself is interesting and picturesque, and makes for some nice views. But be warned, you’ll spend the next few hours picking jet black dirt particles off your skin, hair, and clothes, before realizing that you’ve become covered in a thin veneer of soot.

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The Drive to Darjeeling

 

 

 

In the northern part of India’s Bengal province, high in the Himalayas, near the Nepalese border, is Darjeeling, the tea-growing capital of the world. Darjeeling was once one of the more famous hill stations (summer retreats) for the British colonials.

As with much of the subcontinent, June-July is the height of the monsoon, and therefore is NOT the time to be here. So here we are.

An 8-12 hour train ride north from Calcutta gets you to Jalpaguri, the jumping off point for Darjeeling. From there, it’s a 3-4 hour ride by 4×4 of some of the most picturesque switchback mountain roads in the world. The distance is 25 miles as the crow flies, 42 miles by road, over which you climb 6,500 feet. That’s the same vertical climb as between say the Mississippi River and Denver, meaning the British wore out a lot of good horses (or, more likely, sedan chair porters) getting up here.

The road is about 1.5 lanes wide and shrouded in fog. Landcruisers race up and down taking corners on two wheels, with the side view mirrors tucked in because of the small clearances, dodging lorries laden with 40,000 pounds of tea. In both the aviation sense and the literal sense the visibility here is zero.

Given the width of the road, I had visions of having my head knocked off if I stuck it out, just like the family dog in the old SNL Jack Handy Fuzzy Memories clip. And so I resolved to keep my hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times. Our driver was the most aggressive of all and had no such compunction, so spent most of the time with his entire torso out the window of the car yelling at other drivers. I should mention that he bore the scars of one having his left orbital collapsed, meaning that he was not be toyed with, or possibly that he was. I opted to take no chances and left him alone to rant and rave.

There are no other driving rules, but apparently you aren’t allowed to blow the horn on your pantechnicon.

McDonald’s India: The Chicken Maharaja Mac

In India, they pretty much don’t do beef. McDonald’s is not the sort of operation to be deterred by the fact that a billion or Indians observe a religious prohibition on eating their main product. They simply rise to the challenge by offering a full range of chicken options. The flagship item, and India’s answer to the Big Mac, is the Chicken Maharaja Mac. It’s a pretty straightforward modification of the Big Mac, simply swapping the 1/8 oz all-beef patties for chicken patties in the same dimension as the McChicken…but these are no McChicken patties. These are actually tandoori chicken patties with a delightful flavor, albeit with a mushier consistency than the McChicken. They make for one Hell of a sandwich. The only drawback is that they are so flavorful that they overwhelm the other ingredients, including the special sauce. Missing is that perfect balance of flavors that make the Big Mac the world’s signature hamburger. But in a country without beef, the Chicken Maharaja Mac is king.

 

Beautiful People of Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has, in my opinion, the most beautiful people in the world. There’s wide variation in skin tone, ranging from light tan to inky. They identify strongly by ethnicity, so may not agree with this themselves, but the population here, like India, has been a melting pot of different peoples for thousands of years. It supports, I think, the theory in evolutionary psychology that people with the most genetic diversity are regarded as the most attractive.

Here are a sampling of pictures from all over Sri Lanka–places and events that didn’t warrant posts of their own.

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Galle

Galle (pronounced like Gaul in Roman times)

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is a picturesque colonial town on the very southern tip of Sri Lanka on the Indian Ocean, centered around the “old city” inside the walls of a 17th century Dutch fort. It isn’t high season, but it’s still remarkable how few people are here. It’s like Cartagena without the crowd, but in a couple more years it will be altogether like Cartagena. There isn’t much to say about the place–it’s the sort of town where one just wanders the street, taking in the narrow alleys, colonial architecture, and spray off the ocean.

 

Yala National Park

In the south of Sri Lanka is Yala National Park, the country’s largest and most famous. It’s primarily known for an annual gathering of elephants (known as “the gathering”) where over 300 wild elephants gather at a single water source. Our visit didn’t coincide with theirs, but as I mentioned in a previous post, elephants are about as common as deer in Sri Lanka. We were, however, very lucky in the other animals we saw.

Wild peacocks fill the farmer’s fields here–I would compare them to wild turkeys or pheasants or other game birds, but the peacocks and peahens are actually much more common than any of those, more like crows.

 

We also got close-up with lots of elephants and water buffalo, and saw birds, warthogs, spotted deer, and crocodiles by the dozens.

 

The highlight was seeing two different leopards, which we were told is quite rare

Here’s a monkey approaching, reconnoitering, and finally having a drink from a pool of water.

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