To the mountains! (part 2)

The next morning, after our breakfast of dhal and roti we head to the valley of flowers. I'm feeling a bit 'bowelarily tumultuous' as I put it, so the walk is punctuated by...stops... but it's a much easier walk than the day before and the views are stunning.



I head back a bit early as I'm not feeling great, realising as I get back that Tyler has the only key to our room, and have a nap in an open spare room. When I wake it's dark and I find no sign of Tyler or Gribb. Downstairs no one has seen them either, and a czech couple said they saw them a few hours before and that they were trying to find a lake, deep into the valley. They also said it's a crazy idea and hoped they'd changed their minds. The woman speaks some hindi and talks to the locals, who are starting to worry, and she tells me there is a real danger of bears, who come out at night to eat.

I have a fairly hyperactive imagination and had idly thought about one or more of us being eaten by bears many hours earlier but I do it just to pass the time, without any expectation or worry. As the locals start amassing a search party to go into the hills I begin to wonder if one of my crazy daydreams might actually be coming true. When I get up to go with them they tell me they know the area and will be quicker without me which, having seen some locals on the paths, I don't doubt. I also had fallen in the river on the way back earlier and my spare clothes are locked away in my room, so realise it's probably sensible to stay behind. A hypothermic cheesies wont help the search. The minutes tick by...

After an hour or so, we hear shouting, see lights and our hotel owner carrying a huge flaming torch with a triumphant grin on his face. Tyler and Gribb follow closely behind.
"Where have you been you crazy bastards!" I yell in mock outrage.
"You were worried, huh? Yeah, I would've been too." Smiles all round.
Turns out they simply misjudged the time - though Gribb had started a 1hr+ steep unpathed hill-climb as it was getting dark, and he was not to be persuaded otherwise. Tyler turned back, and after a little while, in a rare moment of rationalisation (or self-preservation?), Gribb changed his mind and turned back too.

After our dhal and roti, Tyler gets us invited to a 'party'. I wish I'd got a video - it was just a bunch of old, very drunk Indians singing and staggering around a campfire. The entire village is there (perhaps a dozen people) and they are delighted to see us; shaking our hands non-stop, standing us up, sitting us down, trying to teach us a local dance (uncoordinated drunken stagger is more accurate!) We leave pretty quickly.

The day after we head to Hemkund - a temple 4.5km above sea level in the mountains. Gribb made himself throw up the contents of his stomach the night before because of indigestion from the roti ("roti is very strong food - make fire in belly") and diarrhea took care of the other end, so when he says he plans to not eat anything all day, we're surprised to say the least.
"You ever hiked for 8 hours without food before?" Tyler asks.
"I fine, I just have water, and sun energy." And he faces the sun, palms up, eyes closed. While he has his breakfast, we have ours: guess what?

It's not an easy walk; only 6km each way but it's a 1.5km climb so it's fairly steep. Gribb is, not surprisingly, struggling and turns back halfway. We're very glad we carried on.


The night is so cold I can't sleep. I'm wearing 4 long-sleeved tops and a hoodie, and hiding under the duvet but still am shivering uncontrollably. I feel worse and worse throughout the night, and by the morning I've got the works - aching joints and muscles (or 'moooskles' as Gribb calls), slight fever, headache, cough, cold and the runs. It's going to be a fun 14km hike back, I think grimly.

Turns out to be ok, weather is good, and I feel a bit better once I get moving. More naked swimming/being frozen from Gribb, more flirting with beautiful women from Tyler. We meet Shankie, an friendly Indian (are there any other kind?) who we passed on the way back from Hemkund, turns out he is doing the entire Govindghat - Hemkund trek in 48 hours, camping out at Hemkund. I can only imagine how cold that must have been. We walk together for the rest of it, and he is heading Rishikesh-wards too, and gets us sorted with a bus back, leaving 4.30am the next morning. Tyler is heading to Nepal though and gets a different bus, so we say our goodbyes ("lets hug it out, bitch!"). We end up sitting out on the street all night - possibly not the best idea considering my state but oh well - and finally get our bus. Not the funnest 12-hr bus ride I've ever had, but we make it back finally and I trudge to find a guesthouse in a daze. I have my first hot shower since arriving in India, and I can't quite put into words how good it is.


So that's that! Back in Rishikesh now, heading off tomorrow on the enfield. Wish me luck! I'm gunna need it...

To the mountains! (Part 1)

Tyler, a friendly American I've been spending a fair amount of time with over the last few weeks, is planning a trip to the mountains; the valley of flowers and Hemkund, and says I should come along. On the surface we're fairly contrasting characters, (him a loud, open American, me a quiet, reserved Brit) but we have many deeper similarities and get on well. Plus he plays loads of poker - what's not to like? He also invites a Russian named Gribb... I guess I should explain about him now.

Gribb Gribb Gribb. Where to begin. I suppose a good place to start might be the fact that he named himself Gribb (Russian for mushroom I think) after a mushroom shaman, and when we asked his real name he wouldn't tell us, saying (please imagine the accent) "that is not me. I am not my name. I am not my biografia". He later won't allow us to take pictures of him because it would 'steal his energy', and tells us he's burnt all the photos of him that he can get his hands on ("I am not me. I am not human. I am nothing. How can you save nothing?"). This is a particular shame because he has a floppy Mohawk with shaved head either side, a penchant for bright or neon clothes ("is very acid!") and several funky ear-bar things. It's quite nice not being the crazy foreigner and center of attention for a while! Every local we pass either laughs, shouts something like "Good hairstyle my friend!" or just stares open mouthed for minutes on end.

His beliefs... I got most of it in one huge dollop the first night I met him. I wish I'd had a tape recorder or something, I've forgotten most of it, but suffice to say my jaw was on the ground the entire evening - some of the stuff he was coming out with was just... WOW.

He believed the world as we know it will end in 2012 because of the Mayan calendar (given to us by aliens thousands of years ago, along with the pyramids and various other things), he believed there are aliens on the moon, on mars, on earth, he believed you could survive on nothing but 'universal energy' and claimed to have gone 4 and a half days without food or water. He believed technologies in films like The Matrix and Total Recall exist and are kept secret by governments across the world. I think my favourite was his belief that when the poles melt after the apocalypse in 2012, the lost city of Atlantis will be free from its icy prison under the North pole and float to the surface, replete with 5-metre tall gods with strange skulls (pictures of which he assured us he'd seen) possessing special powers such as teleportation and telekinesis. I kid you not. It was incredible! And I honestly believe that he honestly believed it. I got to utter the words 'sorry, why are there demons in babies' minds?' which brought me great joy.

I asked him, somewhere towards the end of the evening, where he got all this information. Can you guess what he said? 'The internet'. I'd tried to keep a straight face, but couldn't help laughing (or should that be loling?). As one of the others said afterwards, 'some people shouldn't be allowed on the internet'.

So that's a not-so-brief intro to Gribb - the kind of person who comes out with sentences like "I fly.... outside of matrix!" with seemingly no context, that send me and Tyler into giggles. In short, he's bat-shit crazy, but enormously good fun. As Tyler points out, he adds a bit of life and energy into our group.


Ok... So the whole trip starts out pretty weirdly. We book a jeep for 6am, I turn up at 5:40, stick around for an hour and find no trace of Tyler, Gribb or jeep. I find Gribb and Tyler the next day, it seems they overslept, but I have no idea where the jeep was. We book it again, found my team this time, waited for an hour (which included over-friendly cows and a very spaced out lady who sat with us for ages howling at the moon) and then got told the jeep wasn't leaving because it wasn't full. Third time's the charm, and we finally take the 8hr bump-fest to Joshimath. From there we get a ride to get a ride to Govindghat, the starting point for the hike to Ghangaria.

Govindghat is eerily empty, not quite a ghost town, but certainly dying (or hibernating - the season is all but over). We are the only tourists, and the few locals we meet all seems to be emptying they're possessions into trucks (in a disconcertingly hasty, almost panicky manner) or huddled around fires of burning rubbish. We manage to get a room at the only open guesthouse, get told by several people that the valley of flowers is closed and there are no places to stay, but Gribb is insistent everyone is lying, and that we should go. "You think of problem, make problem! There is no problem" We try to explain dying of exposure or starvation would be problems whether we think about them or not, but he doesn't quite get it. We find one person who says there are things still open, and of course he's not lying - everyone else had 'bad energy'. We decide this craziness is why we brought Gribb along, and set out the next morning anyway. The walk up to Ghangaria begins wonderfully, a winding path following a tributary of the Ganga with the Himalayas in the background. I gaze hungrily at the view wishing I had photographic memory and mourn the fact the photos won't do it justice (not bad though):



Along the way we stop beside the river for Gribb to have a swim. It's glacial water, and putting my foot in for more than 5 seconds causes pain. I turn and see Gribb, absolutely butt-naked (as Tyler would say) dunking himself into the river over and over with a huge grin on his face. He emits a high-pitched roll of the lips, sounding like a Pokemon - 'brrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeee!' Then his signature choking noise, that I imagine to be similar to that of a strangled duck, and then a spit. KKKKARH-spit.

The end of the 14km walk gets tougher and we're pretty tired by the time we get to Ghangaria. It's even quieter than Govindghat , we see maybe 3 or 4 people. We find there is an open guest house though, and they serve food. It's starting to get dark and frighteningly cold; Tyler is shivering like crazy - I suspect he has a touch of hypothermia but he feels better after some dhal and roti (our diet for the next 4 days). Our room has no electricity, the toilet doesn't work, and the gaps in the doors and windows mean it's the same temperature inside as it is outside. It's certainly below zero at night as the edges of the river freeze over, and we spend the nights fully dressed and shivering.

What an eyesore....

So it seems I wasn't content with one infection, so I decided to get conjunctivitis too. It's only in one eye at the moment, but everything I've read about it assures me that it'll spread to the other eye soon, so there's that to look forward too (update: yup, both eyes). Yay! Actually my leg hasn't leaked strange-coloured fluid for a while so maybe it's a replacement infection rather than an extra one.

*sigh*

Oh well, at least it gives me an excuse to wear my sunglasses at all times and look incredibly cool.

So nothing much has happened since my last post. I've been reading a lot, drinking lots of tea, playing a lot of cards. It's been fine, but very slow and quiet, feeling like making a move. Been on a few bike rides up into the mountains which were amazing:


Amazing scenery, freewheeling the full 50km home, getting used the bike. Fun! But on one of the trips I bashed the exact square inch of burn that I really really needed not to (of course) which resulted in much blood and pain and delaying of recovery so I wont be doing any more until it's healed. Really looking forward to the next leg of my journey; worked out a route through the mountains up north to shimla, bypassing the huge cities and scary traffic. Will be great to see some tiny villages too, get away from the tourist trail for a while.

Seen some fun things, went to an arti - religious ceremony with singing, drums and fire next to a big statue of Shiva on the edge of the Ganges:


Also saw what was almost definitely the world's biggest spider:


Kind of hard to get the scale, but it was a good 10"x10". I was leaning against a wall when everyone I was with looked just above my head and went 'OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!??!?!?!1' so that was fun. It was in the middle of a heavy downpour of rain, so I think it was taking cover - apparently they hardly ever go near humans. Didn't stop me from checking under my bed when I got home though.

Biking in Relaxikesh

So we arrive in Rishikesh, and head to one of the main market/guesthouse areas. It's early in the morning, and crossing the ganges with the sun rising and the monkeys swinging about the bridge wires - it's a pretty darned cool welcome.

One of the locals:


We wander around, drink lots of chai and lemon tea, and find a great restaurant on the bank of the ganges with possibly the world's smiliest waiter. We also find an advert for a Royal Enfield Bullet - the quintessential bike for touring India. I'd been doing a bit of biking back in Britain with the hopes of doing some in India, so we try getting in contact with the owner, with no luck, but the idea is planted in our heads and we go on a bike hunt. We meet a very friendly Indian who is here on holiday and is clearly fairly wired on charras. He is wandering the same way we are and we keep bumping into each other and eventually he offers to help us find a bike, since he rides himself and is looking to rent one. I'm fairly dazed at this point, it's dark, we have no idea where we are, and we're trying to buy a motorbike with no idea how much I should be paying or what a good bike is, and one that I'm not sure I can ride, and am certainly not legally allowed to ride. Anyways, after settling on a good price for a nice bike that was about 10,000 rps less than I was expecting thanks to our Indian friend (27,000, about 350 pounds, all inclusive with insurance/luggage racks, etc) we sit and have a chai with the friendly man, I calm down, and I decide to go for it:


They tell me to ride it around for the day to get a feel, first to go the petrol station just down the road. I'm pretty nervous, not only because I've never ridden anything half this big, or because of the Indian roads, but also because I'm sitting outside a motorbike shop with tons of bikers outside clearly judging me. Obviously 100 meters down the road I fall off into the gutter and get covered in sewage. Standard. In my defense, the brakes and gears are on different sides than in Britain so instead of braking I changed into 2nd (the gears are also opposite, down for higher gears) but yah, not my finest moment. I ride around the petrol station a bit getting a feel for it, then try with my friend on the back (yeah, the first time on a much bigger bike with a passenger with different controls on insane roads in a different country is a great idea, I know I know) and we go buy helmets. We ride around a bit and find some awesome scenery on mountain paths:



There are a few scary moments, clipping a rickshaw on the busy inner city streets, a few (ok, about 3 bazillion) problems with things like turning around/maneuvers, and at one point we turn a corner where a bus is speeding towards us and there is absolutely no room so we get pushed to the side, both burning our legs on the silencer. We carried on our way, but deciding that going long distances with a passenger simply wasn't going to happen - or if it did, something bad and painful would happen. The ride back is fine though, and really nice. I drop Ali off and ride back to the shop - which is MUCH easier without him - for a few minor adjustments... (a huge iron pole and 6 men bending the engine guard thing back into place after the fall). Then I ride back to our hotel (in the dark + potholes and unmarked speed bumps + getting lost = eeeeeek) and finally get back to our room and have a small heart attack.

At this point my leg is looking pretty yellow from the burn - it doesn't hurt but then I read on the internet that it's probably because it's at least a 2nd degree burn and so the nerves have been burnt. So I head to a hospital (which is clean and westerny to my relief) and get attention almost immediately. First the doctors cleans the burn, then brings out a razor which makes me a little nervous, then he leans in to the wound and as he makes contact the lights cut out. So I'm a little freaked out, but he just starts shaving the hair around my leg, so I calm down. Until, that is, he starts cutting off the skin around and inside the burnt area. Slicing inside infected, burnt dermis with a razor without anesthetic is... not unpainful. So I chew my fingers off for a while, he sorts me out, prescribes some antibiotics and I pay a few hundred rupees. I was kind of laughing the whole way through, certainly an experience!

Which kind of takes it to now - I've been doing very little the last few days, I'm not supposed to walk much or get it wet, and have to go back every day for new bandages/to check on the infection. I sort of wish I'd taken a picture of the wound actually, but it'd just worry family members/put off other readers. Was pleasingly disgusting though, looked like the flesh of an orange covered in yellowy milk. ...yeah that was more graphic than strictly necessary.

aaaanyways, I've rambled for faaar too long - I have a lot of free time since I can't do much. Reading back it sounds kind of negative or like a bit of an ordeal but I've honestly been having an amazing time... there were a few unpleasant bits, but I'm just in a constantly good mood at the moment. It's been really nice just reading, meeting travelers and drinking lots of tasty lemon tea - it's a very relaxed place, peaceful and beautiful.



Time for some mutter pannier and roti methinks!

It begins... Delhi and onwards

Namaste! I'm in a little web cafe in a leafy suburb of Rishikesh right now, having a very slow lazy day, which was what I needed.

Anyway, yeah, blogging... um... where to begin... arriving. Right. so. Ok, yes. Brain function. Ok.

I arrive in Delhi at 10am (flight cancelled, 4 hour wait, funtimes) get 'screened' for swine flu (form saying 'do you have swine flu: yes/no') and head out, get a prepaid taxi to the train station, which is an experience in itself. Indian roads are fairly infamous - I enjoyed every minute of the ride. 2 lane roads holds 4 lanes of cars, rickshaws, bikes, motorbikes, mopeds, cycle rickshaws reversing towards the oncoming traffic, donkeys, cows all wandering/swerving about all over the place, everything honking or mooing incessantly. I actually saw a motorbike park in front of a tree on an empty pavement and beep 3 times. They just can't help themselves!

As soon as I arrive at the train station I realise finding my friend is going to be nearly impossible. There must be 500 people around the entrance, and I get approached several times immediately telling me to go buy tickets at a special foreigners booth (yah, nice try). I figure it's probably not the best place to hang around looking lost, so I head across the street to parahganj (a popular backpacker area in delhi) and end up bumping into my friend in the small winding market streets, we have some food, and book a train to haridwar for that night to end up in rishikesh. We have some time so we go to India's biggest mosque:





Me in a very fetching skirt as shorts weren't allowed (definitely the new fashion, I've always been a trend-setter)



So anyways, we experience some more delhi madness which really is hard to describe... just an all out assault on the senses. Amazing though. And then we get our AC3 train (very nice, beds and sheets, and 8 hour journey, cost less than a fiver) My friend ali tells me about the last train journey he took where a man got into the (very thin) bed with him and started stroking him, so I guess there are possible downsides... (or perks depending on your point of view I suppose)

We meet a very friendly man on the train and talk to him for a while, he tells us he is going to an ashram in Rishikesh (where we are heading) to seek medicine from a guru for his father. He shows us his father's files and it turns out he has untreatable lymphatic leukemia, and is hoping he will find a cure at the ashram. We wish him the best of luck. We meet him again just outside the station in haridwar and he buys us a chai and biscuits and we talk some more, before finally getting a rickshaw to rishikesh, a spiritual city, famous for the beatles' visit in the 60s. We don't plan on too much spirituality, but some peace from the madness of delhi will be welcome.

That's enough for now, but the next installment includes the ganges, buying a motorbike, major 2nd degree burns + infections and lots of tasty curry. Hooray!

GUKPT, and leaving on a high

I went GUKPT cardiff last week, I had a seat in the main event, and I played 2 side events. Predictably I bricked everything. Lost hooooge pots for the chiplead on the final 2 tables in both the side events, one losing a flip, the other getting it in on the turn with 75% equity, sigh. The main event was, as always, an anticlimax, as my stack dwindled and then got it in with the overpair and get 2 outered.

However... I had a pretty awesome weekend online, netting about $18k. Won a $75 for $10k, 2nd in a massive $26 for 8.6, and 9th in a $163 for 3.5, all on FT. weeee! Very nice as I had a horrible july and ended up roughly breaking even in august (somehow?!) so good to end on a positive note poker-wise.

No more poker for a while though... I fly out to Delhi on friday. eeek! Pretty damn excited. I think I'm going to turn this into more of a travel blog when I'm away if I get the chance - I got a fancy new digital camera for my birthday so hopefully there'll be pictures aplenty.

Anyways... back in 6 months I guess. Good Luck at the Tables!

Filling in the whole...

Been a really good week, just what I needed. Up just under $10k, lots of it from getting my 2nd biggest score ever yesterday, winning a huge field $26 mtt on tilt for $8.3k. weeeee! Hopefully I can have a good month as it will be the last month I play for the next 6-8.

Talking of which... I've finally decided on my travel plans. India! Flying to delhi in a month and meeting a friend there, and we'll head north up to a place called Ladakh in the jammu and kasmir region for some mountain trekking and maybe rafting. My friend only has a few weeks, so he'll be heading back.

I'll be heading to Dharamsala - a small town with lots of Tibetan refugees and either working for an NGO for a while, or simply teaching english to any locals that want it (apparently lots). Probably stay there month, and end up back in Delhi. Then I'm hoping to buy a motorbike (doing my motorbike restricted license in a few weeks) and bike around the deserts of Rajasthan for a while, not sure how long - kind of depends how much I like the whole biking thing. If I'm not hugely struck on it then I'll head back to Delhi to sell the bike, but either way I'll be hugging the western coast, going through Mumbai, Goa, all the way to Kerala in the south. I have an Indian friend who said Kerala is his favourite part of India, and if I find a place I like I might live there for a month or two.

That should take me to about 5 months maybe, so if I have time I'll head back up north, just depends on time really.

Pretty damn excited!!