Kitten Titties 2012

We jumped on a bus in Amritsar which finally took us among the hills of the Himalayas. First we aimed at Dharamsala and the nearby village McLeod Ganj. This is the place where lots of turists comes for two reasons: 1. the Dalai Lama and the Tiberian government in refuge stays here, 2. it's beautiful place with a wonderful atmosphere.

A little bit less cool during the monsoon period because this time it rains all the time. When reaching Dharamsala after a looong bus ride, it was pouring. We hurried under the roof us the bus station where about 300 people were waiting together with us for the rain to stop and/or for their bus to arrive. When the McLeod Ganj bus pulled in, 100 of the 300 people waiting stormed to the bus. Around 80 percent of them squeezed themselves in in a moment, we had zero chance with our huge bags. We just acquisenced having to wait for the next bus when suddenly the rain stopped and the people started getting off the bus. We didn't understand what was happening, we asked if there is a problem with the bus, and they said no problem, it will leave in a couple minutes. Se we quickly got on the bus. I made fast friends with some local kids, I asked them what happened, why all the people got off the bus. It turned out that just because the rain stopped half of the people got on the roof of the bus instead of the inside, I guess because of the crowdedness or for a cheaper trip. At first I was just surprised at this, but then I started pitying them when our bus had left and the rain started dripping more and more heavily.

McLeod Ganj is a small village packed with tourists, cute little hotels, beautiful and ludicrously cheap Nepali clothes shops, restaurants offering Italian, Chinese, Thai, Israeli, Tibetian and Indian dishes, and a lot of cows. This was the first place where we experienced that the cows wandering all around India is not just an urban legend, they actually do wander around everywhere We purchased various stuff for ourselves: some trousers, Judit bought a knit hat and a raincoat, and I got a new small backpack instead of my old dirty-shitty one:

The free food in Amritsar and the like made my stomach grumpy, so one day I took my cool poncho and went to the doctor's who gave me some antibiotics for a few cents, which, together with the delicious Italian food fixed my stomach in a couple days. But the way to the doctor, you should have seen it... Full street wide, ~20cm deep creeks streamed down, small temporary waterfalls at places, and the whole thing was brown, muddy. I think this was the wildest picture I got from the monsoon. Of course I couldn't take and photos of it, I was happy that the creek didn't take me :)

To provide you with some multimedia, I cut the crap here and let our pictures tell you a tale. With love (in Hungarian and English):

And a video (only in Hungarian, sorry, but there's not much talking in it anyway) about us crossing a huge traffic jam in one of the three streets of McLeod Ganj:

We started our Indian stay with Amritsar, trivially, this being the first biggest city near the border. Also, this is the city which hosts the great Golden Temple, which is one of the most recommended sights in India. The Golden Temple is a Sikh temple, and Sikhism is a religion. Most Sikhs live in the Indian state on Punjab, they wear colorful turbans on their head (well, men do, women wear scarves), they never shave or cut their hair (I mean literally, not even once in their lives). This is the reason they have the big turbans, because it under it hides their long-long hair. Sikhs carry a knife or sword, some big, some small. Guards of the Temple all have swords or this spear-like thing. And they are in very colorful dresses, barefeet.

We were stupid enough not to take any good pictures of these guards with swords, but you can find good pictures on the web if you're interested. I liked their colorful clothes :)

Around the Golden Temple people walk in circles all the time, while some guys play the drums in the middle 24/7. Amritsar and the Temple itself is a pilgrim destination for the Sikhs, they come here once in a while and pray and walk around the temple. And they do this in no little numbers: by the temple there is a (free) pilgrim dirmatory offering place for ~10.000 pilgrims (although many people sleep under the sky). Luckily we found place for ourselves too, there is a small separated dorm for foreigners with 2-3 old guards with long beards and swords. It was supposed to be free, but it wasn't completely: when we left they wouldn't have let us go until we donated them something, voluntarily... Hmm...

Besides the lodging there is a canteen too, also for free (and this one is really for free), and they make very tasty food: some quite spicy dal, chapati (Indian bread-like thing), milkrice and if you're lucky, some soup too. They are extremely affective: when you enter you are given a tray, spoon, small plate for water, then you're taken to a huge hall where huge rolls of plastic foils are laid down forming long tables. Some people walk around holding buckets containing the different kinds of food, and each of giving you a huge splash from their bucket onto your plate. You can eat as much as you want, they don't care. People keep on coming without stop, about 20 meters of the "table" gets occupied in every half a minute for sure. The dining hall has two levels: the one not in use is being cleaned, then in about each 30 minutes as it's ready, they switch and start cleaning the other one. They don't stop.

When you're finished with your food, you walk out, give away the tray to the chain of Sikhs, dumping any remains of food, then washing it off, cleaning it etc. Like a machine, they feed about 10-20 thousand people per day. They keep the place open 24/7, free for everyone, although donations are accepted in huge boxes. As I interpret the situation, these Sikhs are quite wealthy people, so they give food to the poor. By the way, every (bigger?) Sikh temple has a dining hall like this, but the others are certainly are smaller.

So, that's it about the Sikhs. Amritsar, on the other hand is a city of one million, which was only interesting as the first Indian city we saw, so for the memories I uploaded a video about our arrival. It's 7 minutes and it can be boring because it's uncut, but I didn't cut in on purpose, I wanted to show you the real 7-minute rickshaw ride as it was, from the bus station to the Golden Temple (actually, 200m from it, because the driver wouldn't take us closer). We paid fifty Indian rupees for the ride but you can enjoy it free here&now:

For the sake of safety we decided to leave Pakistan on the 6th day of our stay, because we only had a transit visa for 7 days and we didn't want to risk running out of time. On the second-to-last day we said goodbye to the Hong Konger guys who we met in the Regale Internet Inn. They also left for India but a day before us. But in the evening they appeared again in the inn, telling us they were rejected to cross to India through the crossing called Wagha Border. They were told they could only cross to India by train (and were no more trains on that day). Why? The relations between India and China are not shiny since the long lasting conflicts in Tibet (you can find tons of information on this on the internet in you're interested).

The next day we left too. With several changes of rickshaws and buses (each of them telling us they were taking us directly to the border - they weren't) we finally reached the border. Although the official language in Pakistan is English (along with Urdu) nobody understood what we wanted. Or more likely they didn't want to understand us.

Plus, what is good to know about Wagha Border is that it closes every day at 3PM (Pakistanian time) and a border closing ceremony takes place. Both parties represent themselves (since 1948) on the two sides of the border line. Soldiers and clashing and marching till their boots fall off between two heavily exaggerated swing of the leg. The goofy soldiers doing ballet is spectated by hundreds of people every day, also shouting, waving flags and screaming like madmen. Alas we ourselves didn't see them because we'd have had to wait for 3 hours for the party but we got several pictures from the Hong Konger guys who told us about the strange "friendly handshake" of the countries. Pakistan became independent from the British in 1947 and it has bad political relations with India.

Despite this, crossing the border from Pakistan to India was very smooth, we could even make pictures, the customs officers didn't try to look super-secret or anything. Clean, modern buildings everywhere! And it's also easy to change money.

First impressions of India:

• Oh! India is cleaner than Pakistan. (Later on our opinions changed about this)
• People wear much more colorful dresses, the women wear whole jewelry shops on their faces
• There's different food on the streets. (Our trust went away at this point, seeing the lack of hygiene)
• Incents' smell in the air
• Men wear turbans (we'll tell more about this later)
• We could see more stray dogs who somehow lost their hair
• AND THE CHAOS

We wanted to show you some videos we made in the Iranian desert and around with our movie-maker friends, but the slow and unreliable Internet resisted all my efforts. So at last, with the help of my good friend Gyuri and Dropbox I managed to upload them. Thank you Gyuri, thank you Dropbox :)

First and longest video, 9 minutes long, making music with a long goat-herd:

Second video, 2 minutes long, later, when the party was at its peak and a crazy dance started :)

Third video, 1.5 minutes long, the two main characters do a homo-erotic dance on the bus:

Enjoy! :)

I've already written an article about our accommodation in Lahore, but still I'd like to share you some stuff about the second-biggest Pakistani city, Lahore.

For those too lazy to read the whole post, Lahore in one pic:

Just as in Islamabad, we didn't spend much time in Lahore either. Those who read our blog from the beginning may remember that we were quite afraid of coming to Pakistan, especially because everyne, even The Ambassador told us it was dangerous. So we decided to get the 7-days transit visa for ~$40 instead of the 30-days tourist visa for about $70. We regretted that since then, we'd have happily visited Northern Pakistan and the such too. Well, next time. Anyway, for anyone coming to Pakistan we advise not to be afraid, Pakistanians won't hurt you.

During the little time we spent in Lahore we wanted to see a museum because everyone said good things about it, but it was some national holiday so everything was closed. :( Practically the only thing we found open was the zoo, so we went there :)

They see Lahore Zoo is the biggest in South Asia. Well, they can't be too big then because even the one we have in Budapest (Hungary) is bigger than this one. But we saw some funky stuff anyway, e.g. a dead lion:

And a hippo:

And we got free ice creams from the ice cream man.

We made friends with two guys from Hong-kong, and left together to India. We also met some Australians and an American girl who is brave enough to travel alone and she plans to continue to Afganistan. Well, rare bird but it exists.

And finally two funky pictures, first one is a National Geographic one with children bathing, not being afraid of bilharzia:

Second one in an almost-National Geographic one (would be better if the neck strap of my camera wasn't in the picture) about a full family in a rickshaw:

In Lahore we stayed at a very interesting little hotel called "Regale Internet Inn". We found it in Lonely Planet, and although its name sounded strange, the Lonely Planet wrote good things about it and I was happy to see the word "Internet", suggesting that I can write blog posts from the place.

The hotel is in a dirty little alley which is hard to find, and at the time we got there it was completely dark inside - I'll tell you later why. But the place itself and the guy at the reception were really friends. The room was quite cheap (about $2.3 per person per night) and we got free drinking water, cooking and washing facilities, and also for the first night the receptionist offered us a little dinner (some shawrma) too :)

To let you take a look into our lives I'll describe a day in the hostel:

• Sleep until 9AM. Our room is pitch dark as it has no windows, the fan turned to the max to make the heat bearable.
• At 9:00 the electricity goes: the fan turns off.
• My 9:02 we sweat a smaller lake so we got to get out to the rooftop terrace where it's at least a little cooler. At this time everyone comes out to the terrace for the same reason, it's impossible to stay inside.
• We chit-chat until 10:00 when the electricity comes back, the fans turn on so sitting in the terrace becomes quite comfortable. And which is even better, the flies leave because of the wind generated by the fan. There are a lot of flies and they are very annoying. If you want you can have some more sleep, there is going to be electricity for 4 hours now.
• At 14:00 the electricity is off again, for two hours. At this time it's better to walk around in the city. All these shortages are centrally timed in Lahore by the way, probably because the power plants can't provide enough electricity for the whole day or something. At the other parts of Pakistan we didn't see any shortages.
• If it's very hot on the street (It is very hot on the streets) we took refuge in the little rooms for ATMs because they are air conditioned, and they run from batteries even during the shortages. They are like freezers scattered in the city :)
• From 16:00 to 20:00 it's blogging time.
• From 20:00 to 22:00 power's off again, you can use candles or gas lamps to make some light and it's a nice opportunuty to share thoughts with other people. It's impossible to sleep still, even on the rooftop the weather is just moderately bearable as there's no wind.
• At 22:00 power's back again, so there is light and you can sleep too, as the fans turn on again, and they work until next morning 9AM :)

One day I was sitting on the rooftop terrace with an American girl, sweating and staring at the clock at 9:42, waiting for the fans getting back to work after 18 long minutes, a homeless-looking guy sat by us. It turned out that he actually owns the place and he told its whole story which was quite amusing.

The guy's called Shams Malik, his family started a newspaper in Lahore in 1927, which goes from father to son since then. Now he's in charge for it. In the 90s the building hosted their editorial office. In 1997 this guy decided to start an internet cafe, because although most Pakistanis had no idea what the Internet was, he realized that there's a demand for Internet use from the foreigners coming to the country. So of the 32 computers he had in the office he separated 6 and put them in another room. This became the internet cafe. He tried to find a good name for it: I don't know how he got the word "Regale", it might have been just some name he made up or the name of his newspaper. He though about "Regale Internet Café" but he was afraid that if he uses the term "café", he might attract some locals wanting to have a tea, which was not his intention. So he picked the more neutral word "Inn", so the place became "Regale Internet Inn", the first internet cafe of Pakistan.

Foreigners started coming, but as the place was called an "Inn" some people wanted to stay overnight too. In the end the guy had to say "Well, okay, you can stay, but leave the place by 9AM because the journalists come to work at that time and work starts." So this went like this for 3 years, but then in 2000 he moved the office to a new building and the old place became a dedicated inn and internet cafe, plus, because the guy tries to support performers of sufi music, he invites bands three times a week to the rooftop terrace - even some quite famous bands among them - who make small concerts for the guests. The only condition is that there must be at least 10 people listening. By the way, having seen the size of the terrace I think much more than 10 people wouldn't even fit there.

About 200 people visit the place in a half-year season, but of course many of these stay for more nights. There were about 10 poeple staying for a half year in the hotel, also a British guy spent there 5 years so there are permanent guests too :)

The guy also told us that this inn is just a hobby for him, that's the reason why it's so cheap too, because he's not making it for money, it's just a good opportunity for him to meet foreigners. He doesn't want to renovate it either, because he thinks it has everything an average backpacker needs, even if it's not the cleanest place on Earth. He also runs his newspaper and by the way he's a millionaire anyway, he used to work with the current president of Pakistan. So much for homeless-looking Pakistanis, don't judge books by their cover :)

Unfortunately I didn't take a photo of the guy because I'm always too shy to ask people to take their photos. But at least I've found an article about him.

So, after 3 days and 3 nights of traveling we arrived from Eastern Iran to the capital of Pakistan. Our Chinese friend left us and we continued with Hameed whom I met on the bus. Hameed speaks a pretty good English and as I found he's a very mindful and honest person. He's from Quetta, Baluchistan (so he's also one of the people wearing pyjamas and a beard :), studies in Islamabad, soon finishing. He helped us to find some lodging which was not easy because more hotels refused letting us stay for being foreigners. They said they might have problems with the police if we stayed there or something. Without Hameed it wouldn't have been easy to understand them. Then, after we found some place Hameed gave us his number and told us to call them the next day, after we had a big sleep, and he'd show us some nice places. And so it happened.

Islamabad is an artificial capital, it's been built in the 60s next to Rawalpindi. Today these two are so-called twin-cities, separated by a big overpass as two very different worlds: Rawalpindi is dirty, while Islamabad is pretty clean. Rawalpindi is all noisy of horns blowing and packed with rickshaws, while in Islamabad there are only taxies, rickshaws are forbidden. Rawalpindi is a chaotic, natural city, while Islamabad has an artificial grid-like plan, dividing the city to equal-sized "sectors". Rawalpindi is brown and gray, while Islamabad is green and white.

We stayed in Rawalpindi.

Our friend Hameed is a great guy, after we slept a half day we called him, he fetched us in our hotel and took us around in lots of interesting parts of Islamabad. He showed us many kinds of Western-like and Pakistanian shops, then this modern mosque we mentioned (we went inside too but it was forbidden to take photos in there), a beautiful park ("Rose & Jasmine Garden"), a fancy but fairly cheap restaurant and surprisingly many transvestites protesting for legalization of gay marriage:

Our experiences in Pakistan so far are that people are very nice and helpful and as there are hardly any foreigners in the country, they stare at that little a lot, which didn't frustrate me much but it did Judit. While talking to Hameed it turned our that "love-marriage" (as they say here) is as rare here as it is in Iran, it's more likely that the family picks a partner for their children, and the rest is up to them: getting divorced is not impossible if they don't like their partner but it's looked down upon and so it's quite rare, they are more likely to accept the situation. Men are quite famished for women though, for example Hameed sent us about 10 SMSes after we left, many of them with the purpose of tempting Judit back to Islamabad. Anyway, not being offended by this, we are very thankful for Hameed, he made our stay in Lahore a much deeper and nicer experience.

We left Islamabad quite quickly because we only have a 7 days visa to Pakistan, and we still wanted to see Lahore.

Getting to Romania from Hungary was no big deal, a little bit dirtier place with a little worse roads, but no big difference, European-quality accommodations etc.

When we got to Bulgaria it got a bit dirtier again with slightly worse roads than Romania, but still not bad, e.g. Burgas is a beautiful and clean city.

In Turkey the way things work got different in many aspects, we glanced the first piles of garbage in some parts of Istanbul, and basically there were no trash bins any more. Then, going deeper into the Asian part of Turkey, people started to look different from us, the cars were honking more and more, but still was not a different world from ours.

In Iran the strange things started: lots of garbage on the streets, cars honking basically continously, not caring about lanes and red lights, people ate from the floor and the cleaniness of the hotels became questionable. But Persians are fundamentally clean beings and very friendly and helpful, and the country is in many aspects very orderly.

And then we entered Pakistan. Well, if we ever had a cultural shock during our trip, this was it. The Iranian side is asphalted, a little dusty but generally in order, while the Pakistani side is more or less just sand and garbage. In Pakistan the cars are very different (not mentioning the steering wheel being on the right side), perople have very different looks and mentality, sometimes taking a sh*t on the street. Excuse me, I don't want to look down upon the Pakistani, they are really cool people and all as I'll tell about them later, I'm just trying to picture you the difference as we felt it. It was a cultural shock for sure.

Some words about the border crossing, someone might be interesed how it went: we took a night bus from Kerman to Zahedan (the last bigger city in Iran on the way to Pakistan) then a friend we met on the bus helped us in getting a taxi to the border. For some reason there were no buses going there and all taxi drivers wanted to fool us. Finally our friend found some ambulance people who were so nice to us that they took us to the border for free. On the way there there were military stations in every five kilometers because this is a territory with problems. From one of these stations a soldier accompanied us for safety. They looked at our papers every some kilometers, once they even took them somewhere for 10 minutes, but meanwhile we got some food from our ambulance friends :) These Iranian people are the friendliest nation ever. I mean it.

So finally we arrived to the border with military escort, and our friends left us. We walked by some trucks waiting there, then in the passenger part we walked by an approx. 100m queue, or actually two of them, waiting for the 1-1 border guard person stamping their passports: one queue for men, one for women. All men wore pyjama-like clothes, which is the traditional Baluchi dress.

The Baluchis live in Baluchistan, which is the Eastern part of Iran (approx. the east of Kerman) and the Western part of Pakistan (the part which is said to be dangerous for bomb blasts and kidnappings of which we were afraid). The Baluchis are Shias while the Iranians are Sunnis so they have a bad relationship. The Pakistanis are also Shias so they have no religious difficulties with Baluchis but they have problems because some of them smuggle drugs in the desert.

But these people in their beards and pyjamas are a really friendly nation, really just one or two of them smuggle drugs, so love them and don't be afraid of them :)

The queue went really slow but our military escort (who didn't speak English and wasn't friendly at all) waved to us to follow him all the way along the queue, directly to the booth. We showed our documents, they scanned and checked them in 2-3 minutes, then we were free to go. They treated us quite VIP, but noone in the queue seemed to have hard feelings because of it, they were just staring at us as at aliens :) Then, on the Pakistani side it was a very good surprise that everyone spoke English (with a strange accent though, but I got used to that in a couple days), and also that we still got priority in every queue, even though there were long queues too. We managed to change money (and after some bargaining the fooled us only a little) and I traded my Iranian Lonely Planet for an Indian Rough Guide with an Australian guy on a motorcycle coming from the other way. He even added an India and a Delhi map. After about an hour we finished at the border and we could enter Pakistan.

But not alone. Because we got a Chinese man which was a fellow alien at the border so the officers just kind of joint us (luckily for us as he spoke Urdu!) and also a very funny-looking little soldier with a big gun who was our escort and we were told that he would accompany us everywhere in Baluchistan, so for about 1 day. I'm so sorry I didn't take photos about the border (it was forbidden) neither took a photo about our escort (I forgot), because we've seen many funny and interesting thigns. Anyway, this was our bus:

Our bus left at 4PM and we arrived to Pakistan at 11AM so we sat in a restaurant to wait. Our cultural shock got deeper: the "restaurant" was kind of like a normal old house with multiple rooms, where we got one full room for the three of us, a small carpet to the ground and the food (chicken biryani, very tasty) on it. Our Chinese friend helped us with ordering foor for us and stuff. Here we are sitting in the restaurant:

Our bus trip took 16 hours, so starting at 4PM it reached Quetty at dawn. In the bus we couldn't really sleep as about every hour we crossed a military station where the two of us had to leave the bus and the full bus was waiting for us while we each time had to scribe our various data to a huge book. It would have been funny if we didn't want to sleep. But like this it was not funny. Seriously, if I ever got an own house I'll buy one like those huge books and if any Pakistanis visit me I'll bring my big book and they will have to write all their data in it. Seriously.

There was only one incident when I felt they wanted some bribe or something at a checkpoint: it was about 3AM, bus stopped, we got out with Judit, we walked cross the road (with military help), jumped over some big canal, and there were some soldiers sitting there in the dark. They looked more suspicious than the others and may have even mentioned some money. Of course they also had a huge book to scribe our data. The guy who seemed to be their boss looked like he had been sleeping before we arrived, and just when I was finished with scribing my data I yawned and looked at him real desperate like "Why the hell do we have to do all this?", and he was just yawning at the same time so our eyes met, he looked at me quite understandingly and told us we were free to leave and gave me an apple. :)

Quetta is a plain, dirty city, as far as we saw it from the rickshaw between the two bus stations. (By the way this was our first rickshaw trip :) We arrived at dawn and our next bus to Islamabad (the capital of Pakistan) was to leave in the afternoon. So we laid down on some chairs in the waiting room and had a few hours sleep. I hate being homeless so I felt terrible.

But after it we jumped in the bus to take the last and longest, 26 hours long part of our trip, spending our third night on buses in a row. It was very tiring but it was worth it as it was the first time in our lives to share our vehicle with a cock (an animal):

Finally, only 10 minutes before reaching Islamabad I felt such an urge to go to the toilet, probably because of the Pakistani food or something, that I just set my teeth and tried to find out how far we were. I was told we were already in the outskirts of the city, but after 5 minutes I felt it's impossible for me to wait another 10 minutes So I took a deep breath to be able to stand up without shitting myself and I stumbled to the driver and told him to stop ANYWHERE. He told me it was only 10 minutes more but I told him I can't make it. So after thinking for a moment he stopped by some part with a tall grass and I took care of my business really fast. Well, it was not nice :) But at least after this I could take that 10 more minutes to the station :)

Finally, you get a real authentic Pakistani truck. If someone didn't understand what I meant by cultural shock, maybe they'll understand from this :)

Back for sure, and I'll be back soon with my article about the meditation thing. Just need to translate it and then you get it :)

We are in Rishikesh now, in a place like this, look:

This is our room:

Aaaaaaaand we have a bathtub! :)

Be happy :)

I go meditate a little and Judit buries herself to the dark kitchen of the cooking school, so see you sometime around the 24. August. In the meantime you will get some scheduled articles not to get bored :) Xxx