Day 290 - Chiang Mai detox

The waiter, an unusually sullen Thai gentleman whom no-one has been able to warm to, deposits food on the table. A large wooden bowl contains a sizable salad. A tall glass holds a frothy shake made from various tropical vegetables. A selection of hummus-filled seaweed rolls, uncanny in their resemblance to Japanese sushi, sits between us on the table.

Now, normally I would likely turn my nose up at the in front of me. I prefer my food somewhat heartier. I'm no junk food junkie, but neither am I a mung-bean saint either. However, this is my first meal in seven days. Right now, it looks like a veritable medieval feast, laid out on a long wooden table, crowned by a single roasted pig with an apple in its' mouth.

As I tuck in, my mind drifts back to the first day I arrived. I was a podgier-faced cheeky-chappy back then. Full of the cuisine of a dozen nations, not to mention the alcoholic spoils of humanity's common interest in getting sozzled. Who knows what manner of parasites had seen fit to cadge a lift from the bacterial smelter of India?

Now, I am reinvented. 5 kgs have fallen from my frame like needles from a neglected Christmas tree. My eyes and skin positively glow. The hint of definition smiles out at me from my mid-section. I feel a million dollars.

Rachel also feels and looks similarly good. Her hair looks like a Pantene advert. She skips along the road like a twelve year old. Her farts smell of rose petals and expensive perfume.

As the little-known contemporary philosopher and amateur blue comedian Stephen Bowe - the man responsible for us being here - once coined, we feel "a euphoric sense of lightness".

Troy from Sydney - who, along with Rob from New York, has been our partner on this journey to skinny-dom - swears by a week at the Spa Resort every 3-6 months. I can see why.

Not that it's easy, this not eating lark. However, I will say that I was expecting to feel hungry at some point. But hungry I was not. Probably due to consuming a glass of fruit juice mixed with toxin-binding clay and psyillium every three hours, plus a handful of pills in between.

Did I mention the coffee? Probably best not, save to say that I never in my life envisaged the idea of it, let alone twice a day. I feel I have said to much already. I'll finish by saying, it brings a whole new meaning to the phrase, "wake up and smell the coffee".

And how the days fill up! We expected time to spare. Perhaps sitting around the pool, or churning into a good novel?

However, the hours seemed to wile by, filled with meditation, yoga, thai massage and steam room time.

When we did manage a block of 3-4 hours free, myself, Troy, Rob and Rachel formed a motorcycle gang - well, mopeds actually - taking off into the hills outside Chiang Mai to visit the Queens Botanical Gardens, an underground temple, the famous Chiang Mai markets and to cuddle tigers.

Yep, you heard that right. Cuddle tigers. Big, sleepy (not drugged!), cute, hairy and potentially deadly tigers. In actual fact, its not the tigers you need to worry about, it's the lions. Grumpy buggers.

But now it's all over. The salad feels crunchy and crispy in my mouth. I have no idea how my stomach will deal with it, but I'll worry about that later.

This detox lark, I give it the thumbs up. The fact that we got to do it in the wonderful surrounds of Mae Rim, Chiang Mai was a bonus. We take with us new learnings about raw food, healthy living, looking after the mind and body and ridding yourself of the toxins we pick up in every day life. I'd recommend it to anyone.

Now, where can we get a good martini around here?


Photos from the week of no food are here.

You may have noticed some adverts appearing on the blog of late. Turns out companies such as Amazon will actually pay bloggers to put adverts and other such links on their sites. So, we've added a few links to books, music and other such items of interest. 

If you feel like clicking through to any of them, that'd obviously be wonderful. Cheers!

India: final call

Darren believes in egalitarianism. He has shorn hair, with three ratty dreadlocks spilling out the back. He is wearing brightly-coloured happy pants, of the kind that not even fisherman would be seen dead in. Occasionally, he takes a break from his fire twirling/ glass ball juggling antics to tell the girl on the beach with him that, despite her clearly impressive yoga pose, she "in't doin' it 'ard enuff" because she is facing up the beach.

Darren is looking to "find himself". Rachel has privately suggested he start down the back of the sofa.

Rajeev is a con-artist. He is not alone. India is full of them. He seeks to spread disinformation (otherwise known as lies) - such as "the tourist office is closed", or "yes, this product does that" - in order to separate people from their money. When he cannot do this easily, he follows them up the street, "leading" them to places they were already going, to claim 'finders commission' those very same people will have to pay. Polite requests for him to leave will be ignored, for Rajeev is only interested in what he wants.

Rajeev does not take no for an answer. Rajeev is all about Rajeev.

India is a country in Asia. It is big and will soon be the biggest in the world. It is in the middle of an "Economic Miracle". This seems to mean that rich people are getting richer, whilst not so rich people become middle class. It does not seem to have any effect on the not-rich-at-all. They still eat garbage, shit on the street and die of curable diseases.

On the subject of curable diseases, India is not very clean. I'm not entirely sure why. It lacks a lot of infrastructure, but people also seem not to give a crap about all the crap.

India is diverse. This means that it has lots of different languages, food and cultural groups. The food is very nice, and is (in all fairness) a big reason for coming. The cultural groups are very different, united by a common ability to show disregard for one another. Still, in a country of 1.15bn people you can't expect everyone to be Mother Theresa.

I hate to be negative. We are both traveling to, amongst other things, become more open-minded, tolerant and experience different things. However, sometimes you have to call a spade a spade. Tell it like it is.

I came to India expecting an experience, spiritual or otherwise. "You either hate India or love it," said Arty to us in Rio. She was right. Hate is a strong word though. Let's just say neither of us are big fans.

Every destination we visited pales in comparison with others around the world. The north? I'd rather do Bolivia, or Mexico. The south, although beautiful, is still not as wonderful as Thailand, or Queensland, or Guatemala.

And the whole time, hanging over us like a fug, was the spectre of being ripped off, or taken for a ride. It really is hard to relax and warm to people when you can't get them to understand that following you up the street, standing and staring and laughing, or taking photos of you without asking first just isn't endearing. Maybe that's a lot to do with me. For a person who values privacy and time alone, perhaps India was not the best choice.

However, the clincher for me, the reason why India won't be the highlight of my trip, is the incredible proportion of travelers there who turn out to be wankers. Not all of them, mind, just a surprisingly high proportion. Pretentious, anal people who, despite their profession of love and spirituality as the answer to everything, are generally snobbish, unfriendly and aloof.

So maybe that's the problem. In the 70s, The Beatles turned India into an icon of spirituality. A generational symbol, much like Ibiza is today. In doing so, they created a beacon of bullshit that attracts every lost soul with a chip on their shoulder from here to Baghdad.

So maybe I shouldn't blame India so much. Maybe 30 years of dealing with these joyless culture-vultures has tainted the place. Perhaps they expect every foreigner who crosses their shores to be the same, and have altered their behaviour to suit.

Sounds like a pretty vicious circle to me, and one neither of us is keen to experience again.

Day 280 - What a difference 3,000kms makes

If I were anymore relaxed, I would be dead-set permanently horizontal.

If Bob Marley were sat next to me now, I am so relaxed that I would make him look, in comparison, like a recently-retrenched accountant living in London, complete with ex-wife, mistress and three kids in (extremely expensive) private schools.

I am chilled. And I mean....hold on....no rush....just getting the fingers ready....here we go......easy does it.....chiiiiiiiiiiilleeeeeeed Winston. Yep. That did it.

Now, picking up the thread from last time (when was that exactly? Hmmmmmmmm. Doesn't matter. Now, where was I), I vaguely remember writing about getting on a plane headed south. Something about being stressed? Hoping that 3,000km would make a difference? Yeah. That sounds right.

Oop. Nap break. I'll be right back.

Anyhoooooo. I guess that I was right. To say that north and south are different is like saying that dolphins are mammals and sharks are fish. It's accurate, but it's missing the point. (Hmmm. Decision time. Mango juice or coconut juice? Ummmmm. Can't decide. I'll have both).

So far, the south has been like scuba diving in a jar of honey. Languid, warm and far nicer and cheaper than you'd expect (Hmmmm. Not sure that analogy held up at the end there. But hey, what do I care? I think I'll turn over and tan my back now). And, like sex in the right relationship, things have only got better.

We started in Fort Cochin, which was lovely in a pseudo-Caribbean way. On the edge of the small colonial town, giant (Chinese) fishing nets by the water dip down every twenty or so minutes, pulling out hordes of prawns, crab and fish. You simply mosey on down, select whichever briny creatures take your fancy, have them cooked fresh and wash it all down with ice-cold beer. Too easy.

But, as is wont of Aussies, the lack of a beach began to take its' toll. Sun, sea and seafood are good, but it ain't a proper party without 's' number 4. So we took another train four hours south to Kovalam, which officially bills itself as "India's most developed resort".

We braced ourselves for the worst. I was dreading Surfers' Paradise Indian-style. Instead, we got a perfectly useful beach, hotel room perched atop a 50m cliff and a view to die for.

We had a much-needed few days of beach time, our first since Brasil. My soul continued to float softly down into the big fluffy duvet that life had become. Narmal, our own personal guardian angel, brought us plate after plate of fresh fruit. She took us under her wing.

She told us where to by gin (buying booze in Kerala feels like buying nuclear weapons on the black market). She told us the people to steer clear of. She even took it upon herself to shoe away the regular stream of Indian male 'amateur photographers', day tripping to the beach to take photos of bikini-clad strangers. Subtle as bricks.

Change is as good as a holiday, so they say. Seeing we were on holiday (so another holiday was out of the question), we decided to check out another beach. An hour and a half north took us to Cliff, Verkala.

It's well named. The whole place is arranged around a single path leading along the very edge of a cliff. Bars, restaurants, basic resorts and wooden shacks line it, affording a view out over an even-better beach some 100m down below, as well as the hazy blue of the India Ocean.

By now the tans were coming along nicely. Gone were the pallid traces of our European Christmas. That didn't last long.

The food poisoning hit Rachel first. Mine came two days later. Who knows where it came from? Eggs? Unpurified ice?

Everyone gets sick in India. We were no different. The ayuvedic doctor came. She prescribed a teaspoon of strong smelling spices with honey before food (usually watery rice porridge). 30ml of a dark pungent concoction after.

The first day, we both felt like we were dying. Or that dying would be an easy respite. Our guts ached, stomachs consumed themselves. My eyes rolled back in my head with the ache of my temples. Our muscles felt like they had needles stuck in them.

The second day, food stayed down. By the third, we were back on our feet. The sickness gone, but never forgotten.

Now, we're in Allepey. We are aboard a Backwaters Houseboat. It's like a miniature, floating palace, covered in dried-out water reed. It looks like a hobbit hole being transferred up river on a barge. The sweet smell of Indian spices are wafting down from the kitchen, a promise of the feast to come. We've manouvered through the thin canals (it's known as the Venice of India), watching small bunches of water-weed float past regularly. Now, we are out into the main lake, a hazy mass of water punctuated by the odd fisherman bringing up shellfish nets from the shallow bottom.

There's nothing to do but sit and take it all in. Think. Eat. Chat. Read. Drink. Smile. Laugh. Contemplate the world.

Relax.

A word of note to those back home; whichever morons are running around beating the living hell out of Indians are not only causing irreparable and serious damage to the reputation of Australia worldwide (did media learn nothing from the Cronulla riots?), they are also making it very hard to utter the words "I'm from Australia" out here.

We're both really sick of having to explain to every Indian person we meet that, no, all Australians don't hate Indians and, no, Australia is not dangerous to Indians and, yes, they will be safe if they travel to Australia. Only yesterday I was in a supermarket and picked up a Newsweek-style magazine with a picture of a bashed-Indian man and the title "Why Aussies hate us".

Please get them to stop!


Here are the rest of the photos from Cochin, Kovalam, Varkala and Allepey