Tales from India - 2007

Listening to other people's stories is one of the best aspect of travelling. I wrote these down while I was working in Hyderabad back in 2007, but never had the time to finish & publish them.


What will a guy go through for Pamela Anderson?
A guy from my studio found a cool water bubble/ripple screen saver, he called his mom to show her. For some reason the screen saver stopped working, and his mom saw the background image of his desktop: the sexy Pamela Anderson.

It was just a normal fashion shot, not from the infamous home video, but his mom still got angry, slapped him and called his dad. His dad came and also slapped him.

Imagine this happening to a big tall 25 year old~


A mysterious disease in Chennai
A story from another guy in our studio. He studied animation in Chennai for a period of time and stayed in a hostel. One morning he woke up and found his foot had a strange skin disease, the skins appeared to be peeling off. He told his friends about it and they told him it's not a disease, a flesh eating species of rat in Chennai must have fed on his foot during the night. He thought his friends were bluffing, and did not believe it.

That night he stayed up, with a brick in his hand and waited. AND....? You guessed it, the rat came, and it was at least 60 cm in length (excluding the tail)!
He screamed, and threw the brick at the rat. For the remaining time in that hostel, he slept by curling up in a sitting position, and surrounded his bed with bricks as weapons.

It's hard to imagine how big the rats are in India, I did not believe it myself until I saw one lying dead beside the road. Only then did I realize the rat stories weren't exaggerations.


Not your usual national park adventure
My friends M & K once decided to visit a national park in a place called Etumagaram, about 300km from Hyderabad. They looked it up on the map, and drove there on their motorbike. When they arrived, they noticed something wasn't quite right.

First, they asked the locals where could they find a hotel or a guest house, but everybody told them there isn't one and urged them to leave.
They thought if there is a national park here, there must be accommodations so they didn't believe them.

Finally they found a guest house and asked the owner about the national park. The owner told them there is no national park, they can stay for the night but have to remain in a room without windows in the basement, and leave the first thing in the morning.

When dinner time came, they asked where can they find a restaurant. Again the owner told them there's no restaurant and they better stay inside.

Strange right? What were the locals playing at?

Once again they looked around and found a supposedly non-existing restaurant, sat down and ordered their food. Half way through the meal, all the locals suddenly stopped talking, and an uneasy silence fell upon the restaurant. There at the doorway, entered several Naxalites (Indian Maoist rebels) with automatic weapons, and their attention immediately turned to the 2 foreigners.

The rebels pointed the guns at their faces.
M smiled at them, tried to be friendly "Hi..."

"Who are you? What are you doing here? Are you Americans?"

"No no, we're tourists from Germany." They could feel cold sweats coming down their back.

The rebel leader took their cellphone, look through the contact history, and finally his suspicion dissipated. He warmed up to them, even apologized for the disturbance and said "enjoy your meal" before leaving.

They realised afterward, there are two places with the name Etumagaram, one has a national park, and the other is within the Maoists' territory. They've obviously visited the wrong one.

There's a not so well known picture behind India's modern image, poverty in rural areas drove many people to the Naxalite movement. M told me "In many rural areas, Naxalites are clearly the ones in charge, not the Indian government." M & K drove passed some police station & military check points during the trip, but on their way back they found them in ruins.

Now I have to say that M & K seem to have a knack for getting themselves into these situations (and live to tell the tale). They lived in Nepal for more than a year during the Nepalese civil war and witnessed the fighting between the government and the Nepalese Maoist rebels. Their best friend was on a plane to join them in Nepal, while the royal massacre happened, so he arrive and found Kathmandu in chaos.

So it should be no surprise that some interesting things happened when I travelled with them, right?

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Bits and pieces

A dozen of my blog posts stayed in draft mode and never got published. Most of them are from 2008, which was unsurprisingly the year with the lowest number of entries.

March 2008, I exclaimed "what a ride!" in regard to everything that had happened.
"I am sitting in a small lifeboat, floating in the middle of a vast ocean called reality. Being thrown and pushed around by the raging waves and currents, what can I do other than to hold on tightly?"

April, an entry titled "miracle" never got finished.

May, another unfinished entry titled "Too much to write, too little time".
"Sometimes I feel like time is running forward madly like a wild stallion. I have one of my legs stuck in the stirrup, so it dragged me through a rough terrain while I, to no avail, tried to grab on to something in an attempt to slow it down."

June, a post titled "beauty".
"Contacts with beauty always send emotional shockwaves through my body, shake me to the core of my being."

July, "Riding motorbike in Nepal"

August, "The long hiatus", in regard to my blogging efforts.

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Things About Edwin

1. Steve Irwin and Richard Branson are my favourite celebrities.

2. Most of my favourite songs were sung by female singers.

3. My favourite comedian is Jon Stewart, now you know my political inclinations.

4. Things I learnt from travelling: it can take you to places that evoke surreal and wonderful feelings beyond description.

5. I weighted a mere 44kg by the end of my journey in India. If someone sneezes next to me I would be blown into the air like a feather. However my luggage was so heavy that the gravitational force it exerted would then pull me back down and go into orbit.

6. I have a love affair with the ocean, but I'd cheat on her and have affairs with rivers and lakes whenever I can. I plan to convince them to have a menage a trois when they meet one day.

7. I still believe in magic and miracles, and I'm still fulled of ideology and dreams. These things are so essential to me that taking them away would be like cutting the oxygen supply to an astronaut.

8. I still dream about my childhood pet, the cutest Sheltie in the world.

9. I have a very high tolerance for spicy food, I was trained by certified mystic chilly gurus in secret locations in Asia.

10. I once stayed overnight in a hospital during my trip in Spain, where everyone's English was as good/bad as my Spanish. P.S. No hablo mucho Espanol.

11. I once attended a 2-week German-run marble sculpture course in Italy, where I was the only non-German speaker. You should see the instructor's face when he found out that he had to teach in English.
I could almost hear him thinking: "why you weirdo...why would you come to a course run by Germans in Italy?"
But we ended up having a great time, the instructor would do his best to get me to drink all kinds of alcohol: Limoncello, Grappa, Sambuca, Campari..."Eddie, come here, drink this!"

12. I find that experiencing a beautiful scenery is a whole body affair, my eyes can get watery and I can often feel the chill travel through my spine.

13. I was crazy about Swiss knives when I was a kid, and I suppose I never fully grew up in that respect.

14. When I was 6, I was once reported missing to the police.
In reality, it wasn't me who was missing, it was my dad. He was waaaayyyy too late to pick me up after school(it seemed like hours), so I walked home instead.
I don't remember how long it took (the distance was about 5km), but apparently long enough for my parents to file a missing child report to the police.

15. Beautiful art works affect me emotionally in ways that are hard to describe, but I don't care much for modern art.

16. I think a playful & slightly mischievous spirit in a girl is extremely attractive.

17. A bungy jump used to be something terrifying and off-limits for me, but now I've done it and I'd like to try skydiving next. Getting over a fear and/or a preconceived limiting belief always give me a great sense of achievement.

18. I obsessed about doing things differently from everyone else when I was a kid. Once I had to write a fairy tale in a writing class, I wrote that once upon a time there was a little sheep, who's father passed away 3 years before he was born. The teacher commented "this could not happen" and I couldn't understand why.

19. A spider once built a web between my thumb and index finger during my sleep. Fortunately it was one of those skinny long-legged spiders which didn't look so menacing.

20. I was super competitive as a kid. For a brief period of my life, I indulged in mercilessly crushing my opponents in chess. Until some time later, I helplessly watched atrocious war crimes being committed to my mini soldiers, that's when I started thinking about karma...

21. I often visualize stories while I fall asleep.

22. I like the feeling of being intrigued, and I want to travel to almost every country in the world.

23. when I rode a motorbike for the first time in the messy Kathmandu traffic, my feelings were so intense and I was so occupied with surviving the journey that I had no time to stop, think and be afraid. However I did have time to curse at my friend on the leading bike whenever he started to zig-zag through tiny gaps between cars, trucks & buses. What else can you do other than to follow-on?

24. My favourite quote at the moment: "something is not interesting unless it's inappropriate".

25. I used to think that achievement is everything, until life taught me that finding joy in everything is...everything. Surprise surprise.

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The three acts of surfing

Each of my surfing sessions can be divided into three acts so far.

1
It begins with me throwing myself into the wild west coast sea.
The waves would then start to beat me up, giving me rounds and rounds of powerful poundings.
It is not difficult to see how the current can easily drag you out and have its way with you, so it's only reasonable that my mind is focused on staying alive.

2
The most distinct sign, is that I'd suddenly have an awareness of my body moving through the water against the waves with a sense of relaxation. Everything seems to become natural, and this is where the fun begins. I begin to notice small improvements in my techniques, like how to move with the waves, how to jump up and balance on the board.

3
Get exhausted and go home with some bruises and a sense of satisfaction.

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