I’m back from India and really sick with the flu, though I hope to get well by the end of this week and start volume 2 by the beginning of next week. I haven’t been this sick for a long time, so I’m hoping I get well soon and back to normal. So far, there’s been no improvements – I cough so much at night I can’t get to sleep. Pure agony. Because of the flu, it was pure agony in Bangalore too, with my friend’s wedding as the sole source of solace. That said, Bangalore was alot more fun AFTER I’ve experienced it rather than before. But first, the usual news.

The Dreaming: Is out on the shelves, and online. I’ve still got my list of Australian bookstores up, and the latest preview chapter for the book is still up on the TOKYOPOP site. I hear that my book is selling pretty well at Sydney’s Kinokuniya bookstore. I wonder how it’s doing at the other stores?

3 out of 3 Postive Reviews: To list them out, they are the AnimeFringe review, the IGN Review, and the ListerX review. Thanks very much to all those reviewers, and I will post up more reviews as they come.

Bangalore: The Tourist
I won’t miss my chance to talk about Bangalore; not while I’m still in Tourist mode and recovering from the flu. The thing about travelling is that while going through a developing country on your own can have its difficulties, it’s always alot more fun in retrospect. In my instance, I’ve travelled in Vietnam and Cambodia, so developing countries don’t bother me. Once again, it’s got nothing to do with the conditions. India is actually BETTER than Vietnam and Cambodia in terms of things like shopping, but it’s the PEOPLE that get to me. I assure you, it’s not NORMAL Indians – who are perfectly nice, helpful people, but certain types of SERVICE people. Let me just say that rickshaw drivers in Bangalore drove me nuts.

The wedding was the best part of the trip - ahhhh, finally some peace and quiet, and seeing a good friend getting hitched. She had a traditional Hindu wedding, with much chanting of prayers and Hindu rituals. Most Hindus there had no idea what was going on either, since the priests chanted in Sanskrit. The bride Sunita is in mauve. The groom Prashiba hasn't arrived yet, though he is in other pictures I have.

Kerala was real nice, and I would recommend it to others, but if you ever want to travel through a India, make sure you book a private car and a driver for the duration of the whole trip. You will be saved alot of trouble. I travelled through Kerala, Vietnam and Cambodia with these private car + tour guide arrangements, and quite frankly, I didn’t realise what a godsend it was until my group had to travel around Bangalore on our own. And THAT was what ignited my irritation with rickshaw drivers. For Bangalore had CRAZY rickshaw drivers.

Mehendi, a purely decorative ritual just before the 3-day wedding. It's a brown mush you apply in fancy patterns, and you wait for it to dry and wash it off. It dyes the skin a brown-red colour, and is the Indian equivalent of hen's night.

Travelling in Bangalore
It’s not that it’s hard to travel around in Bangalore. Well, actually it is. Without a private car, it’s amazingly frustrating to get around in. That wouldn’t be a problem if you were just a backpacker, and you had time on your hands. However, I was in Bangalore as a wedding guest, meaning that I had to go to 4 days of religious and pseudo-religious ceremonies, and quite frankly, we were late 99% of the time.

First of all, there are no proper maps of Bangalore. This city has road, streets and traffic lights, but no one has mapped it out properly. A map may show you the mainstreets, but none of the sidestreets, and they’re often wrong. Most people get by on landmarks, and by asking the locals where a certain place is. So that means while you can still buy a map, it won’t mean anything, because the driver of the most common form of transport, a three-seater motorbike called a rickshaw, won’t know where they’re going anyway. So while you can flag down a rickshaw almost anywhere in the city, 99% of them won’t know how to get to your destination, nor will they even know where the suburb is. And to top it all off, they drive like maniacs. I’ve been on rickshaws who go up one-way streets, with people going the correct way shouting at the driver, and another one who did two U-turns at night at a busy unlit round-about, right into the pathway of a bus who couldn’t see us.

Why didn't I take a photo of an actual rickshaw? Well, here's what it's like riding in one.

Was there no better way to travel around Banglore? Sure there was. Pre-paid taxis; which are taxis belonging to certain companies with a reputation to uphold. If you go on a normal taxi, you could be driven somewhere remote and blackmailed for a large sum of money – as happened to someone else from the wedding party. You call up the pre-paid taxi company to give the origin and destination, and they normally quote the price before you go, and they even know how to get to a certain place on time. They also charge alot more than rickshaws, but at least they’re safer and more reliable.

The downside is that pre-paid taxis must be booked at least 2 hours in advance. Still, they can be an hour late, or they can charge extra money for having to wait for you (without telling you). They can’t be booked too early, as the operator told me, because they’ll forget the booking. You can book an early morning taxi the night before, but you can’t book a taxi normally for more than 5 hours before your departure time on the same day. They also have to be booked and charged for hour blocks, so if you want to book a taxi at 9:00am from A to B, and book the same taxi from B to A at 3:00pm, you’ll have to pay for that 6 hour block where they’ll just sit there and wait for you. Or you can book the morning trip, and then re-book at 1:00pm in the afternoon for the 3:00pm taxi. It didn’t seem to make any difference which pre-paid taxi company you called.

And I never got on any trains or buses – I knew I did’t stand a chance.

The Food in Bangalore
The wedding was the best part of Bangalore – it was went very smoothly. That said, India has dangerous water. If you’re careful, nothing will happen to you, but if you’re really unlucky, you may end up with a severe stomach bug and vomit up anything you eat for the whole week.

Eat with right hand, unless you want to horrify everyone. We could have asked for spoons, but we wanted the authentic experience. It's not the food - rather the tap water that was used to wash the leaf before food was put on it. The food was fantastic.

The water must be bottled. You’ll probably get real sick if you drink tap water. Meat-wise, there isn’t alot to choose from. High-class joints will have great food, but I’ve noticed that there is a curious lack of meat on most menus I’ve encountered in the country. “Curious” isn’t the right word – I know mostly why – Cows are sacred to Hindus, and Pigs are unclean to Muslims. Therefore, no beef or pork on much of the menus, and you’re lucky if they have mutton in the kitchen (no matter what it says on the menu). So that leaves chicken, and if you’re low on protein, alot of egg omelettes. Protein deficiency aside, the curry is fantastic. But you’ll have to know where to find it, that’s for sure.

Shopping in Bangalore
Shopping in Bangalore is centered on and around a stretch of road called MG Road, MG for “Mahatma Gandhi”. Just about everything that can be named after someone in India is probably named after Mahatma Gandhi, and it’s no coincidence that this is the main shopping street in town. Thankfully, most rickshaw drivers know how to get there, even if they don’t know how to get back to where we stay. Intersecting MG Rd is Brigade Rd, which clearly says “Bridge Rd” on the Bangalore map, except that not a single soul in Bangalore knows where “Bridge Rd” is. Apart from that, there is also Commercial Rd, which used to be a good place to bargain, until Lonely Planet made it into a tourist strip and so therefore the last place you’ll want to bargain.

I went to Bangalore expecting new-fangled shopping malls everywhere selling cheap electronic equipment or clothing, and guess what? I’m probably shopping in the wrong district. And I really should have done my clothes shopping in Kerala, because Bangalore is much better at fleecing tourists than Kerala is. Not saying there aren’t great shopping if you know where to look – there are great discount stores that sell excellent quality stuff. Rock onto Giruja Silks on 8th Cross in Malleshwaram for great saris, and Bhavani on DVG Rd, Basavanagudi (near Gandhi markets) for anything involving jewellery. But then neither are tourist places, and can be difficult to find.

Endless rows and rows of colourful cloth...

Out of all the shopping, Bhavani and general sari shopping has to be the best. Sari shopping the best of all, because here is a form of clothes shopping that involves little to no energy. You don’t even have to try anything on, because a sari is just a piece of cloth, and the skirt and blouse are bought separately and stitched by a private tailor (that’s the complicated part). For the first part, you just go to a swank sari store, sit yourself comfortably at the counter, then demand the service people to show you all the saris there are of a certain type and within a certain price range. They then will retrieve stacks and stacks of colourful cloth for you, while you go through it and pick out any you may be interested in buying. You can probably go through 50+ saris before you find about 5 you like. That’s the “correct” way to go sari shopping, according to everyone.

No photoes in Hindu temples, and no shoes either. For a foreigner like me, it was the chance to deprive me of my shoes and camera, and then make me give 2-5 rupees afterwards to get it back. In terms of experience, Hindu temples are much more photo-worthy on the outside than they are on the inside, though it was eye-opening.

Doraemon on TV, in Hindi, very popular, as it is all over the world except in English-speaking countries. Along with Yu-gi-oh too - the voice acting is FANTASTIC! They sound almost exactly like their Japanese counterparts, except for Yuugi. Bollywood relies much on voice-synching, so perhaps the voice actors come from there.

Was it a good experience? Sure, I would go back (next time to Northern India). It taught me a few things about travelling TRULY without a tour guide of any sort, and how difficult it can be. Next time, I’m hiring a private tour guide and car though.

Update: I can’t believe that I’m in Bangalore, and I HAVEN’T had the time to surf the internet or even check my email. My suitcase broke down, so my priority is to buy a new QUALITY one before the Indian Airline carriers turn my broken suitcase into a thousand clothing articles on the conveyer belt. But on the bright side, there’s another positive review of “The Dreaming”, an IGN review.

Kerala (23rd November): Still at Kerala, and this time, we’re taking a 4-hour drive to see some “nature” scenery. Yesterday we went sight-seeing as well, and this time, we ran into the well-worn backpacking trail of Kerala. We visited the church where Portuguese explorer Vasco De Gama, the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope, was buried; and we also visited a place with the very politically-incorrect name of “Jew Town”. So there are Jews in India too, known as “Ohdu” in the Bible. They have a long history – dating from when the Romans sacked modern day Palestine in 70BC, and some Jews were dispersed to the India subcontinent. Most of the people running Jew Town don’t seem to be Jews though; my Indian friends actually pointed out that they look either Pakistani or Afghani. Either way, because of the backpacking trail that goes through Jew Town, they’ve pretty much turned it into a giant tourist attraction. The only signs of Jewish-ness that I see are the occasional Star of David – whereas the shops are more likely to sell Christian or Hindu memorabilia. A very incongruous mix, bu not so when you consider that Kerala is 40% Hindu, 40% Christian and 20% Muslim.

Kerala (21st November): Took a plane at noon to Kochi, Kerala, which is supposed to be tropical beach area. I got here and I don’t yet see any beaches, but there’s a reason why we’re joining a tour here. My friends have booked a 12-day tour around here for a pretty good price, which includes one night on a houseboat. I believe we’re going to roll around all the usual suspect places in Southern India, and then fly to Bangalore. Apart from that, Kochi is like a busier version of Kerala, and just about every South-East Asian city looks like this. People here stare alot too, but then I never much notice people staring at me, though my friends do. Asian girls are just unusual here, naturally.

George Washington is still having trouble finding a taker, but I’m holding out for a Western Union.

Chennai (21st November): When you find access to the Internet, use it. Here in Chennai, India, the weather is as hot as I’d expected – and it’s monsoon season, meaning that it downpours every now and then. Well, I’ve always liked hot weather, so I’m happy about it, except that so far I’ve run into several problems.

First of all, they won’t take my “old” American dollars. You supposedly can’t get Indian rupees from outside India (that’s not true, you can get it at SOME international airport money exchanges), but I took American dollars along becaus US cash is always reliable. But at Chennai International airport, the money exchange clerk looked at my money as if it were counterfeit, and promptly refused to give me rupees for George Washington. Luckily I had a few “new” ones amidst my old US cash, so I was able to get SOME rupees, but hopefully I can find a Thomas Cook exchange later on to change my money into something I can actually spend. Either that, or mooch off my friend’s credit cards.

Apart from that, all I can say about Chennai is that it’s better than Cambodia. Crossing the road here is like crossing it in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh city (you just walk across the road and trust in the people driving to not kill you). My Indian friends told me to be careful about a HUGE culture shock, but I must adapt well, because the only places where I’ve ever gotten culture shock are in first-world English-speaking countries. They also told me to expect to be ripped off, because I’m the only foreign-looking person travelling with a bunch of Indian-looking people. Oh well, I’ve been ripped off before – I can live with it.

I’m only staying in Chennai for, uh, 15 minutes more, because we’re flying down the coast to Kochi, Kerala and Trivandrum; all tropical resort places. Afterwards, we’re flying to Bangalore to attend a friend’s wedding, and coming back on the 10th December.