They call these hills?

jdewyze5 Comments

Based on books I can no longer remember, I had a mental picture of the Indian “hill stations,” towns like Simla and Darjeeling in the Himalayan foothills where 18th-century Brits planted tea and officers of the Raj escaped the staggering summer heat of the lowlands. In my mind, these towns were cool and pleasant places, set in rolling hills that might look a bit like Kentucky. I wanted to get a taste of them. Now, having just spent three days in Darjeeling, I can report that my picture was so wrong. I’d forgotten that the foothills of the Himalayas make the Appalachians look like sand dunes. We have no mountains in North America like this.

Three years ago, Steve and I spent some time in Bhutan. That’s what the Indian hill country constantly reminded me of. There are differences, of course. Bhutan is a clean and orderly little kingdom, while the far northern reaches of India, so near to Bhutan and Nepal as the crow flies, are suffocating in smog, carpeted by garbage, deafened by incessant, ubiquitous car-honking. We found all that in Darjeeling. Yet with daytime highs in the low-60s and temperatures plunging to the 40s at night, clinging to vertiginous emerald mountainsides, the “hill” towns felt almost unimaginably different from Kolkata or the Sundarbans. Or Kentucky.

One thing our eco village in the Sundarbans and Darjeeling have in common is that neither are easy to reach. Darjeeling has no airport, and no normal train travels to it. Most tourists get there riding in cars or vans or jeeps. The other alternative is what people call the “toy train,” aka the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway. Built in 1880 and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, our Lonely Planet guidebook included it among the area’s highlights. Steve and I don’t consider ourselves rail fanatics, but we have a soft spot for trains. So even though we knew it supposedly took 7 hours to cover 53 miles, we booked tickets.

We began to suspect this was a mistake shortly after getting to the New Jalpaiguri train station, a madhouse of confusing activity. After some difficulty, we found our way to the unmistakable toy train track; it’s only two feet wide. But at 8 am, we found no sign of the train itself, scheduled to leave at 8:30.There was no sign of it at 8:30 or 9. Only about 9:10 did this contraption — call it an older brother of the kiddy train that operates next to the San Diego Zoo — chug into the station.Pandemonium ensued as befuddled passengers (us chief among them) tried to figure out where to sit. Rail attendants seemed to be non-existent. But someone finally directed us to places in the “First Class” car, and around 9:30, we were off.By the time we departed, every seat was full.

We were off for about 10 minutes, then we stopped for a while in the middle of a field. When we started up again, we traveled for only 20 minutes, then stopped again under an underpass. We sat there for almost an hour. By the time we reached our first scheduled stop, we were almost two hours behind schedule. It didn’t get much better.

I will allow that the toy train has a few things going for it. After a few hours, we were chugging through tea plantations…… then beautiful green forests filled with enormous trees or moving along the edge of jaw-dropping precipices.The train has big windows you can open wide, so at times it felt like we were hiking through those landscapes. It’s an engineering marvel, climbing from under 500 feet above sea level to more than 7000 in less than 50 miles. To accomplish this, it does some fancy tricks that include occasionally backing up and switching onto another track on a higher level. It also cuts across the paved (auto) road often, which is entertaining.But by 3:30, our scheduled arrival time, when we were clearly hours from Darjeeling, stuck in a jolting hell overseen by workers who clearly did not care a whit what time got there, with only a hole in a tiny compartment to pee in, and only potato chips for lunch, we were pretty miserable.

We finally arrived three hours late, after more than 9 hours of torture, finally reached our hotel, and I can tell you: a good dinner and a shower and a comfy bed quickly erases the memory of a difficult transit. Over the next two days, I even came to appreciate Darjeeling. It was touristy (jammed with Indians gathered in the town for yet another holiday). They were in high spirits. They dressed up in traditional costumes for photo opportunities… They captured images of their kids enjoying pony rides. They shopped for pashminas and visited the ancient Buddhist temple that adjoined our hotel.Some of them did what we did the second day: hiked about a mile to the excellent local zoo (specializing in Himalayan animals). The zoo grounds also contain the marvelous Himalayan Mountaineering Institute.It trains aspiring peak-conquerers and also venerates the memory of past heroes, like Tenzin Norgay, who guided Sir Edmund Hillary to the first conquest of Mt. Everest.The museum displays some of the great sherpa’s gear from that historic climb.

It also helped that we were staying in a living museum — the sort of place I never normally would seek out. Built in the 1840s as a boarding house for young British officers, the Windamere Hotel, as it’s known today, later catered to the cream of British tea-planter society.Happily, we were upgraded to a suite, the very one in which a young American student of Asia named Hope Cooke was staying in 1959 when she met and fell in love with the Prince of Sikkim, later marrying him and becoming queen.All the facilities today are a bit creaky, but where else have I ever been served five-course meals by white-gloved waters (and coffee kept warm under a knitted cozy)…The Windamere’s dining room

… or warmed in the evening with a wood fire and genuine hot-water bottles? It felt like time travel, and it was a lot less rigorous than all those hours in locomotive hell.

My battle plan — Part 2

jdewyze2 Comments

After Steve and I returned from the Sundarbans Friday night, we carried out the last step in the complex preparations we’ve undertaken to keep us healthy while we’re here in India. I detailed most of these in an earlier post.

The last step began in Seoul, site of the International Travel clinic I discovered online and where I’d made an appointment. It was tricky to find. We had to call them from the street and ask for directions.

Up on the fifth floor, we both had to fill out lengthy medical history forms……and have our height, weight, temperature, and blood pressure checked. Then we were ushered in to see the clinic’s owner, Dr. Sooyoung Kim, an urbane guy dressed in jeans and a casual longsleeve shirt who spoke English like an American. We chatted with him about what we wanted (vaccinations against Japanese encephalitis (for me) and cholera (both of us). He approved our plan and sent us off for processing by his efficient nurse.

The shot ($63 in Seoul versus the $868 it would have cost in San Diego) was painless. The Dukoral (approved by the World Health Organization for preventing cholera and traveler’s diarrhea, but unavailable in the US) sounded like it would be easy to take.

We didn’t realize there was a little problem until later that evening, when we went to take the first of the two required doses. The nurse had included an ice pack in the bag containing the boxes of vaccine ingredients, and that had chilled everything pretty well. (Taking the Dukoral required mixing a packet of fizzy stuff with water, then adding the liquid contents of a little vial.)But we wouldn’t be able to take the second dose for another week. And during that time, we had to travel to Kolkata via Singapore.

We did our best to keep those babies frosty: refroze the freezer pack the night before our journey and slipped the package through security in my carry-on backpack.

By the time we got to Singapore, the ice had thawed, but we filled up a plastic bag with ice cubes from the Priority Pass lounge. As we were heading to our gate, I noticed to my horror that we had to go through another security check. Confident that the bag of ice cubes wouldn’t make it through and might draw attention to the suspicious little vials, I ditched the ice and carried the vials in my liquids bag. They weren’t very cold by the time we reached our hotel in Kolkata. But our room there had a nice little refrigerator, where the Dukoral remained until we could polish it off.It surely got warmer than 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (what I think was the recommended temperature range) for several hours. I don’t know what difference that makes. If we don’t get cholera or traveler’s diarrhea, I don’t know if the Dukoral will deserve the credit. But I’d sure like to think it did.

No country for old gringos

jdewyze10 Comments

I have another entry for my short list of the Worst Places in the World to Live. It only includes places where I’ve actually slept. (Otherwise it would be longer.) Up to now it has included two locations: the Tibetan plateau and the altiplano of Peru and Bolivia, both cursed with oxygen-poor altitudes, bad food, cold and wind and skin-cracking dryness. Joining their company now in my sour estimation is the Sundarbans, where Steve and I journeyed last Thursday.We didn’t go there to suffer. Rather, we wanted to see one of the geographic wonders of the world. The Sundarbans is the enormous estuary where some of India’s biggest rivers — the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and others — split into dozens of branches and flow into the Bay of Bengal. The area includes both an Indian and a Bangladeshi section. What grows there, mainly, are mangroves, the shrub which somehow learned to suck up seawater and excrete the salt. The Sundarbans mangrove forest is the biggest on earth. More than 80 species grow so densely you can’t see more then a few feet into them, and they shoot up stick-like “air roots” that can impale anything that steps on them. Despite that, a number of creatures survive in this harsh environment, the most famous being the Royal Bengal tiger.

On the Indian side, at least 100 of the big cats prowl an area a little smaller than San Diego County. Except for mothers and their cubs, they live alone, hunting spotted deer and wild boar and more than a few humans. Around 70 people perish in their jaws every year, we were told, mostly luckless fishermen and honey-collectors from the local villages. Companies that take tourists here play up this creepy record.

Steve and I and an eccentric old Israeli guy were the only non-Indians in our excursion group. I found the three-hour ride from Kolkata to the end of the highway fascinating, if terrifying, as we avoided by inches head-on collisions with oncoming buses, trucks, cars, bulldozers, motorcycles, bicyclists, dogs, meandering cows, pedestrians, motorcycle-powered carts loaded with goods and humans, and flocks of lambs.

The road wasn’t horrible. We slowed more often for speed bumps than potholes. But the bouncy, uneven ride, the constant swerving and accelerating, the incessant horn-blowing wearied me.

After the van ride, we had to trudge in blistering heat through a couple of villages and take two ferries before arriving at the island “eco-village” created by our outfitter (Backpackers de Sundarbans).The village may be poor and backward, but the Indian ladies still dress sharply.

As mud-walled cabins go, ours wasn’t bad. It had lots of hooks on which to hang things and a private marble-floored bathroom. There was electricity to charge our phones, and if the lights were weak, the ceiling fan whirled vigorously, alleviating the heat and humidity.

That afternoon we hiked through the eco-village……where you can find unexpected beauty.

Then we clambered into oversized canoes for a sunset paddle into one of the narrow channels through the mangroves.

I felt serene, until one of the Indian civil engineers emitted a piercing shriek. I look in the direction where she was staring, petrified, and yelped too. Tarantulas appeared to be climbing up the tree trunks, just inches away from our vessel.

When I learned they were tree-climbing crabs, not giant spiders, that calmed me, but the young Indian woman and one of her colleagues generated lots of hilarity with their unrestrained crabophobia. It was a highlight of the day along with our foray after dinner to the village moonshiner to taste his rice wine. (Revolting, with strong sour buttermilk notes.)

I barely slept that night. Our bed was rock hard, and roosters crowed long before dawn. I’d found a three-inch-wide spider (no crab this time) in our bathroom, and when a staff member came to relocate it, it had disappeared.

Where DID he go?

Although our bed had a decent mosquito net, I kept thinking of the tree vipers and other extravagantly venomous snakes that call the Sundarbans home. The next day brought more physical hardship after we all boarded a much bigger motorboat, chugged to the tiger reserve office to get permission to enter, and picked up another guide. Parts of our river rambles reminded Steve and me of our recent Amazon River adventure. But whereas the skies there enthralled us, the murky Indian air reminded us of Los Angeles in the 50s. Before noon everything I was wearing was soaked with sweat. Mangroves may be interesting, but their charm fades when they’re the only thing to look at for hour after hour.

Animal spottings jolted us awake, though. These included:

Indian spotted deer grazing near the riverbanks…

A 5-foot-long monitor lizard enjoying the sun.

Macaques. We watched this group chase the one guy into the water. They seemed to be mad at him.

This is a yellow fiddler crab. Don’t you love his eyes?

Most menacing was this mature crocodile. Alligators also ply these waters, but it’s the crocs who are murderous, taking down even tigers when they’re swimming from island to island.

Sadly, but not unexpectedly, we didn’t see any tigers. We did spot recent tracks, and from them it was unmistakable the fiercesome man-eaters weren’t far away.

Because of the heat and snakes and air pollution and tigers and disease-laden mosquitoes and inhospitable mangroves and more, I will never move to the tiger’s neighborhood, nor likely ever return. But on balance, we were happy to visit.

Three cheers for the 10-armed goddess

jdewyze4 Comments

When I planned our Indian itinerary, I did NOT know that our arrival in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) would coincide with the festival known as Durga Puja. I’d never heard of Durga Puja. Now I think that’s pretty pathetic, considering that millions and millions of Indians think it’s the coolest thing that happens all year long. But it only entered my consciousness when I started reading my Lonely Planet guidebook’s Kolkata chapter and noticed the sidebar which begins, “Much as Carnival transforms Rio or New Orleans, Durga Puja brings Kolkata to a fever pitch of colorfully chaotic mayhem.” Uh-oh, I thought.

But it was too late to change our plans, and even while waiting for a taxi in that line from hell at the airport, a couple of folks told me how incredibly lucky our timing was. When Steve and I chatted with the concierge the next morning, he confirmed that almost all the city’s business and cultural institutions would be closed, all week long. But no matter, he assured us. Durga Puja was more wonderful than anything we could have otherwise seen.

He elaborated on what the guidebook had sketched out. This festival honors the warrior goddess Durga — one of the most important and popular deities in the Hindu pantheon. While folks all over India pay some attention to her holiday, it is supremely special in West Bengal (of which Kolkata is the capital). Here it feels like Christmas, New Year’s, and Halloween all rolled into a weeklong blockbuster of a party. Dozens and dozens of temporary shrines (called pandals) are set up all over the city, blocking streets and requiring major rerouting of the traffic. The shrines house clay idols of Durga and her four children. We had to see them to believe them, the concierge declared. He offered to arrange for a driver to take us to various points where we could stroll around and view them. If we wanted, he would have one of his assistants accompany us. The whole thing would cost about $15 an hour, he said.

Who could resist? The next morning we set off at 9 with the driver and 20-year-old Arundhati, a charming hotel-management student currently interning at the Oberoi. It was a great time to be outside. The temperature had only climbed to about 80, and the streets were pleasantly uncongested. (Part of the Bengali approach to Durga Puja involves staying up every night till 3 or 4 in the morning, then sleeping in until midday.)

The approach to this government-sponsored pandal was elaborate.
Outside its entrance, this version of the goddess preached various civic messages. Note that the evil she’s attacking is a mosquito.

Artisans work for months to create the fantastic altars and the statues. The most astounding part of the festival (to me) is that on the final day, all the idols are immersed in the Hooghly and destroyed.

But during their brief existence, priests attend to the idols with arcane and complex rituals.

Over the next three hours, we learned that some of the pandals are enormous…

While some are small and intimate.

Corporate sponsorship pays for a lot of the most elaborate ones, which often have themes. One boasted an Under-the-Sea motif. I think the exterior was meant to suggest a wave…

While the interior evoked the spirit of an underwater cave.

It made me think of Disneyland. Or Vegas. But in neither of those places have I ever seen such fantastic detail and craftsmanship. This white-themed pandal looked like it was carved out of ivory, but instead it was made of some kind of heavy paper.

Another Durga and her entourage were made entirely of bamboo and jute.

And who could resist the modern-day goddess armed with weapons such as a book, a gavel, a steering wheel, a stethoscope and more?

We had seen only a small fraction of all the pandals when heat and exhaustion and the swelling crowds drove us back to the hotel. In the early evening Steve and I ventured out again, this time alone and saw a few more in our immediate neighborhood. But we were in bed by 9. I barely ever attended a midnight mass on Christmas Eve. I think you have to train from childhood to muster the stamina for a holiday the likes of this.

Welcome to India

jdewyzeLeave a comment

Steve and I are staying at the best hotel I’ve ever experienced. But getting here was one of the tougher trips of my life.

I blame myself. I chose our routing partly because of the excellent price, but also because I thought we would benefit from breaking up the journey. We did relish our stopover in Seoul. But going from there to here was brutal.

We set our alarm Sunday morning for 6, and the plane for Singapore took off at 9. After six and a half hours in the air, we landed and spent six hours in Singapore’s Changi International Airport (rated consistently as the best in the world). We took off again at 9 pm for another three and a half hours aloft. There’s a two-hour time difference between Singapore and Calcutta, so it was only 10:30 pm when we landed, and we got through customs and immigration in just 45 minutes. Then we searched for the “pre-paid taxi” booth I’d read about in Lonely Planet.

The guidebook had made it sound like this was the best choice for getting into town. The municipal police oversee the safety and reliability of the vehicles, which travel from the airport to the center of town for a great price — about $5. Because I’d read about this, when our hotel (the Oberoi Grand) had emailed to ask if I wanted them to arrange for a driver and private car pickup for $60, I had thanked them politely but said we would just take a cab.

Ha! We found what we were looking for easily enough; the airport of India’s second-biggest city was eerily empty, approaching midnight. But we also found a throng of would be passengers more or less lined up before two stalls. Huge lines aren’t terrible if they move fast. But these didn’t appear to be moving at all.

We joined the flow and waited. We waited more. Nothing happened. Steve left a couple of times to search for alternatives, but the computers in the Uber booth were down and the guy in the Ola booth (an Indian competitor to Uber) said we couldn’t use his system without an Indian phone number. Steve found another prepaid taxi line out in front of the terminal. But it didn’t appear to be moving either.

Eventually it became clear we were inching forward, almost imperceptibly, to one of two windows, each manned by a harassed-looking clerk.

We didn’t reach ours until close to 12:30 (3:30 am Seoul time — and god knows what on our body clocks.) Weirdly, it took only a minute for us to pay for our ride (380 rupees or about $5.15), and out in the street, we quickly located the ancient taxi assigned to transport us. I can only guess that the line had moved so glacially because folks in front of us were going to more complicated destinations.

For years I’ve heard terrifying stories about Indian drivers; that they were more insane and reckless even than the seemingly suicidal motorists of Shanghai. Our ride into town confirmed the stereotype. Over and over we careened within inches of other vehicles. But I didn’t care, I felt so desperate to get to the hotel. I had a stabbing pain in my side that I hoped wasn’t appendicitis. (In retrospect, I see it was probably the wages of terrible airplane posture.) I felt so exhausted I wanted to throw up. Unfortunately, after about 10 minutes, we hit heavy traffic and the ride became downright hallucinogenic. We inched through vast crowds of people strolling past displays of colored lights unlike anything I’ve ever seen outside Las Vegas.Occasionally we passed a floodlit shrine containing what appeared to be a multi-armed goddess.

We finally reached the hotel around 1:30. And as I said, it is a paradise. When we got up the next morning and learned that virtually every tourist attraction in the city would be closed for the whole time we would be here, we didn’t even reel. The city’s normal jewels would be inaccessible, we learned, because something even more wonderful would be going on. Hard as it is to imagine, I can tell you this has proved true.

31 Hours in Seoul

jdewyze8 Comments

I’ve wanted to go to India for as long as I can remember. Korea… eh, not so much. Still we began the longest trip in our life with a three-night, two-day whirlwind visit to Seoul.

The whimsical logic of airline routing explains why we did this. You can’t fly non-stop on any airline from North America to India. With a stop somewhere between the two, you’re looking at 20-24 hours aloft. If Steve and I routinely flew Business class, that might not be too bad. But we don’t. We’ve come to dread super-long trans-oceanic stints crammed into the Deep Vein Thrombosis zone. So last November when I saw a bargain fare on top-rated Singapore Airlines that would take us from LA to Seoul, let us lay over there for three nights, then continue on to Calcutta, via a 7-hour stop in Singapore, we jumped at it. We could rest up a bit in the South Korean capital, begin to recover from the jet lag, and add another country to our Visited list.

I’m composing this post on the flight from Seoul to SIngapore, and with the taste of garlic and kimchee still lingering in my mouth, I can report that our Korean interlude was strenuous. But satisfying. In the roughly 31 hours we were awake there, we:

— figured out the city’s superb metro system and covered a LOT of ground using it. My iPhone says we also walked 24 miles per the two days.

— went to our appointment at the International Travel Clinic for additional vaccines for India

— took a 2.5-hour free walking tour of a recently renovated riverside park and walkway course…

— zoomed through one of the city’s oldest (but still eye-popping) food markets and eating mega spaces…

— gaped at the incredible building and “culture park” designed by the late brilliant British architect Zaha Hadid…

— took a 90-minute walking tour of the most beautiful of the city’s ancient palaces…

— walked for several more hours through one of the few enclaves of traditional Korean houses (hanoks)…

A cultural appreciation event happened to be unfolding that day, so the streets were filled with young girls clad in traditional Korean dresses.

— ate breakfast at one of the most breathtaking bakery/confisserie/cafes I’ve ever visited…

— and enjoyed four good Korean meals, including two that required sitting on the floor.

Dumplings were the specialty of this place.

The city crackles with so much energy, I felt I might get zapped every time I touched something metal. The year I was born, Seoul lay in ruins. Since then, its tough, crazy-hard-working people have created things that have changed life all over the planet: electronics and cars and trucks and ships and steel and K-pop and cosmetics and more. The wealth and power that has flowed from all of that is evident everywhere: in the safe and spotless streets; the towering buildings; the profusion of public art. Through simple ignorance, I always overlooked Seoul on my mental list of Earth’s Greatest Cities. But it belongs there. The thought that it lies just 30 miles from the Demilitarized Zone, on the other side of which lies what it arguably the worst hellhole on the planet (populated by the literal cousins of the Seoul residents) left me speechless every time it crossed my mind.

One fear I had in making our oh-so-brief stop here was that it might result in our never returning to Korea. (“Been there. Done that.”) Now I urgently want to return. I’d like to see the DMZ myself (it still feels so unreal). I’d like to do dozens of other things in Seoul that we had no time for, as well as to glimpse some of the beautiful countryside. Steve is less keen to come back, but we’re a bit tired at the moment. Soon we’ll be relaxing in the chill vibrations of India. (Right.)

.

And we’re off!

jdewyze4 Comments

We decided for for the first time ever to get from San Diego to LA via the combination of Amtrak train and shuttle bus (from Union Station to LAX). So why not go old school all the way? Instead of taking a Lyft to the train station, we walked from our house to the #30 city bus station and paid $1.10 each for the ride.

Amazingly, it worked like a charm. We arrived at the airport 35 minutes before we could even check in for our flight.

We’ll head to the boarding gate in a few minutes and see if Singapore Airlines can get us across the Pacific Ocean to Korea as smoothly

My battle plan

jdewyze6 Comments

In nine days, Steve and I will depart on the longest trip of our lives: seven weeks in India, a week and a half in Sri Lanka, and a few days of South Korea and Japan (in transit). As I’ve planned the arrangements, the question I’ve been asked most is: aren’t you afraid of getting sick?

My answer (a bit of a dodge) is that I’ve done my best to prepare us for fending off germs. They’re likely to get at us in three main ways:

Breathed out by other people

Starting more than a dozen years ago, when we began traveling to more adventurous destinations, we’ve been vaccinated against a bunch of infectious diseases, including yellow fever, typhoid, polio, meningitis, hepatitis (A and B), tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, and flu. Steve is a Kaiser patient, and when he called their excellent travel clinic back in August, the nurse confirmed that he (and I) have already been immunized against everything that people in India are likely to spread to us by breathing. Relief!

The bad news, however, is that illness spreads in other ways, including…

Via mosquito

Mosquitos in India transmit several nasty diseases, including yellow fever (for which we’ve had the vaccine) and several for which no effective vaccine exists (chikungunya, dengue, Zika). Japanese encephalitis also exists on the sub-continent and can kill people, but there IS a vaccine that works well against it. The nurse told Steve our chances of getting Japanese encephalitis are low since we won’t be spending months out in the countryside. But the vaccine is safe, and Kaiser could provide it at no charge (to him). He rolled up his sleeve, and apart from some transient soreness, suffered no ill effects.

Unlike Steve, I have no coverage for travel medicine. I must pay out of my own pocket for any shots or pills I get in preparation for any trip. When I inquired at a local travel-medicine clinic about protection against Japanese encephalitis, the news was stunning. The vaccine would cost $403 per shot, and two shots would be required. The clinic-visit fee would add another $65 to the total.

Since we’re spending three nights in South Korea en route to India, it occurred to me to research travel clinics there. I quickly found one with a good reputation, where I can get a single-dose version of the Japanese encephalitis vaccine for just $63 (instead of the $868 it would cost me in Mission Valley). I’ve made an appointment to visit that place, in Seoul, a week from Friday. There both of us also are hoping to obtain a reasonably priced vaccine against a scourge that attacks along the third major route…

Eating or drinking contaminated food or water

Although we were immunized against typhoid years ago, in India cholera poses another danger, one reportedly on the rise. For some reason, the cholera vaccine was unavailable from Kaiser, however. Instead the nurse simply warned Steve to be careful about what he eats and drinks.

I learned that my Mission Valley travel clinic could administer a cholera vaccine (by injection) for a mere $295. But the travel clinic in Seoul sells an oral version, taken in two doses a week apart, for about $64. Dukoral, as this version is called, was approved by the European Union in 2004 and is available over the counter in Canada. The World Health Organization has judged it to be safe and effective. It supposedly protects not only against cholera but also traveler’s diarrhea. That sounds good to us, so Steve will get it too.

India also has the fourth-highest number of malaria cases and deaths in the world, so we’ll be taking anti-malarial pills every day. Kaiser told Steve doxycycline should work well there. That was good news. We’ve taken it before, and the only obnoxious thing about it is that you have to continue on it for 30 days after you’ve left the affected region. Steve’s 80-day supply from Kaiser cost about $40, and my doctor didn’t make me come in for an appointment but instead kindly called in a similar prescription to CVS. To my shock, the cashier there told me my 80-day supply would cost $189. Suspecting that a different formulation might be cheaper, I asked if they could make the switch. When they did, the same number of almost-identical pills cost $2.20.

Our preparations won’t end there. This weekend, we’ll spray most of our clothes with (mosquito-repelling) Permethrin.

We’ve bought two tubes of time-release bug repellant that’s more than 30% DEET, and we’re assuming we’ll be able to buy more in India once we run out.

To further protect our guts, we’ve also resolved to each take two tablets of Pepto-Bismol with breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day. (The evidence that this can help protect against traveler’s diarrhea convinced me.) After intensive online shopping, I got 24 boxes of 30 tablets for $77 from Target.)

360 Pepto-Bismol tablets actually don’t take up much space

We won’t pack the UV water purifier that we bought years ago for some African trip; it turned out to be a pain in the neck, and we never trusted it. But after reading about how even bottled water in India can sometimes be contaminated, I did buy tiny bottles of iodine pills and taste neutralizer. If we never use them, at least we’re only out about $10 and a couple of square inches of suitcase space.

Of course, cars and traffic also kill a lot of people in India. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, only vigilance provides some immunity against getting hurt that way.

California dream drive

jdewyze4 Comments

California’s Pacific Coast Highway, aka Highway 1, shows up often on lists of the most scenic drives in the US, even the world, but it’s not the most practical way to get from Southern California to the Bay Area. Planes fly from San Diego to San Francisco in just 90 minutes. Google Maps says the drive up Interstate 5 can be covered (at least theoretically) in 7 to 9 hours. Going up the coast road adds a minimum of 4-5 hours to the journey, but you trade the hot, flat, dusty Central Valley panoramas for sublime seascapes.

I’ve lived in California for more than 45 years but had only traveled Highway 1 once. In the summer of 1995, Steve and I incorporated the famous drive into a family road trip to San Francisco, where we had arranged a house trade. To be honest, my memories of the glorious views out the front windshield commingle with those of the awful traffic that bogged us down in some stretches and the complaints from our sons, then just 11 and 6. So when we decided to drive up to Palo Alto for a high-school reunion to be held in the fall of 2017, I agreed it was time we took the high, slow road again.

Then came the heavy rains in early 2017. They weakened the cliffs, and a huge landslide on May 20 (2017) wiped out a bridge and closed several sections of the road. Throughout the summer, we assumed we’d be able to find local back roads that would enable us to slip around the blocked parts. But when October rolled around, we had to face the grim reality that the impassable sections still were well and truly impassable. Sadly, we headed north instead on Highway 101, a pretty road. But no Highway 1.

This year another reason to visit the Bay Area materialized.And to our delight, we heard at the end of July that — after 18 months — Highway 1 was once again open to travelers. On August 15, we drove from San Diego to San Simeon, spending the night in a little hotel set a few blocks from the ocean.

We took our current service-dog trainee with us, another reason it made sense to drive.

North of Morro Bay (about a half hour south of San Simeon), the landscape changes dramatically. Most of the development disappears, and the scenery gets more rugged and arresting. But the road north from San Simeon is even more wondrous. Here are a few of the highlights we encountered.

About 4 miles past Hearst Castle, we stopped to see the colony of Elephant seals at Piedras Blancas. They’re so much more huge than our local seals and sea lions; they astonished and delighted us.

Continuing north, some of the road looked pristine, but some sections, though passable, were clearly works in progress.

In Big Sur, we noted the presence of the legendary Esalen Institute…

…then we stopped for a brief hike to McWay Falls, one of the few waterfalls on earth that flows directly into the ocean.

We wound up with lunch at Nepenthe, where Steve remembered his folks taking him as a kid.

The day was misty, and we missed seeing some of the archetypal views. I wouldn’t mind going back sooner than in another few dozen years.

10 questions I had before our Amazon River adventure to which I now have answers

jdewyze1 Comment

To prepare for our recent trip down the Amazon River across Brazil, I relied more heavily on blog reports than ever before. But I still had unanswered questions as we began. We learned a lot over the two weeks we were in and around the river. Here are some of the top answers we acquired.

1. What will the food be like?

We wound up taking three boats, and the food supply varied among them. For the first leg between Tabatinga and Alvaroes, our 1200-real ($320) cabin on the Monteiro II included two days of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for both of us, plus purified water. The breakfasts were all carb — bananas, bread, cake, hominy, super-sweet coffee.IMG_2133.jpg Lunches and dinners were much tastier — a meat stew with noodles, pot roast, ground beef. It was simple but hearty food (accompanied by high-carb side dishes.)IMG_2120.jpgMeals were also provided along with our two-day cabin passage on the Fenix (on which we traveled from Tefe to Manaus.) Once again, the food was passable. One dinner consisted of the typical meat hash, very good grilled sausages, white rice, and spaghetti. (We skipped the unappealing vegetable salad.) Lunch the next day was fried chicken legs and wings and more of the sausage.

We took the Amazon Star from Manaus to Santarem to Belem, and our cabin booking on it did not include meals. Food was available for purchase in the galley, but few of the passengers were eating it. Most preferred to buy meals sold at some of our stops along the way. Although we ate the ship’s offerings our first night, it made us nervous. In Manaus we stocked up on picnic supplies, but we should have bought more. Our final night we bought mixto quentes (grilled ham and cheese sandwiches from the little top-deck snack shop). They tasted better than we expected.IMG_2538.jpgAs for the purified water, we drank it for the first two days without incident, but after we both developed traveler’s diarrhea in Manaus, we began to question the sanitation. The water appeared to be coming straight from the river into the refrigerated holding tanks after passage only through a very small filter. We switched to bringing bottled water onboard and had no further intestinal trouble.IMG_2139.jpg

2. Will we drink too much alcohol?

Beer and other alcoholic beverages were less available than we expected. The Monteiro had none for sale (though passengers brought their own onboard). The snack shops on the Fenix and Amazon Star sold beer, and some passengers drank a lot of that. But we found the Brazilian beer to be uninspiring.

3. Will the ships carry lots creepy insects?

They might. The river does run smack through thick jungle. But we sure didn’t see many bugs. I spotted a couple of tiny spiders here and there, but neither of us ever saw or heard any mosquitos. The creepiest moment came when we pulled into Manaus around dawn and were hustling to disembark. Steve felt something crawling on him and brushed it away, with an shudder so visceral it was contagious. He saw a “large” spider disappearing into the gloom on the floor. I checked our belongings compulsively when we got to our hotel, but the arachnid didn’t appear to have hitched a ride with us into town.

4. Will there be mosquito nets?

We never found a hint that anyone on any of our three boats had ever heard of them. And there were none in any of the hotels we stayed at in the towns along the way. The one exception was the somewhat tattered netting over one of our two twin beds at the Casa do Caboclos in Mamiraua Sustainable Ecological Reserve. (Ironically, one of the vacationing biologists we met there said there’s no malaria in that immediate vicinity.)IMG_2261.jpg

5. Will we be attacked by river pirates?

Piracy on the river is apparently increasing. I had read several reports about it, and because so much of the river is so isolated, it’s not inconceivable. Still, on the large boats that we took, it seemed almost unimaginable. Any vessel big enough to attack a big ferry would be awfully easy for authorities to track down, or so we thought. And if ferry attacks were commonplace, a few machine guns would make the big boats easy to defend.

Furthermore, the police presence on the river was notable. Federal cops searched the boat before we left Tabatinga. And more federal officers boarded at two different towns along the way to search for drugs and then disembark.

6. Will I have many opportunities to practice my Portuguese?

Over and over, I felt grateful for every hour I worked to learn some Portuguese (starting about six months before our trip). It enabled me to ask simple questions — and roughly understand the answers. This was invaluable, as almost no one we met on any of the boats spoke English. (Even Spanish was scarce.) One exception was a friendly federal policemen who boarded the Amazon Star in Obidos and cornered us to chat about his upcoming vacation in the Southwest U.S. Steve also conversed with a truck driver who had learned passable English when he lived in London for 5 years. But not a single crew member on any of the ships spoke any English.

7. Will it be hot and steamy all the time?

Surprisingly not! Traveling in late May, we were almost never uncomfortably hot, and that’s only partly because our cabins were air-conditioned. Motoring down the water gave us a breeze that almost always made the days pleasant. Only when the boats docked (sometimes for more than an hour) did the temperature and humidity climb to oppressive levels.

8. Will the ships become disgusting after a day or two?

We were surprised and impressed by how hard the crew of the Monteiro worked to keep her shipshape. Workers were always sweeping up and mopping and cleaning. IMG_2135.jpg When I checked one of the hammock folks’ bathrooms, it seemed respectable even after two days of hard use. IMG_2136.jpg The other two boats were a bit less well-tended. Still, they seemed tidier than most long-distance trains we’ve traveled on.

9. Will there be WiFi onboard?

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! In our dreams. The vast majority of the time we were on the river, there was no phone signal of any sort. Occasionally, approaching or docking at a town, a weak signal would show up on our phones. It invariably took an annoyingly long time to be able to start download data over the signal, and then we’d get headlines: Meghan Markle’s dad will not attend Royal Wedding!!! Trump claims he saved $999,800,000 on Jerusalem embassy! and if we were lucky, email. But then we’d be moving downstream, and the signal would soon evaporate.

10. Will we get bored?

No. The onboard entertainment that I described in my earlier post kept us endlessly engrossed. Beyond that, just being in a place so unusual — so normal on the ship but so alien for thousands of miles in every direction around us — never ceased to interest us. Depending on how the geographers measure it, the river is said to be about 4,130 miles long. We don’t know exactly how much of that is in Brazil, but we figure it’s at least 3,000 miles. We covered that distance at an average speed of 12-15 miles per hour. It takes a river of time. But we flowed with it.