Weed, Weed, Weed...Oh So Much Weed!

The picture speaks for itself. There is weed growing all over the place around here. Don't worry Mom, i did not partake and don't plan to (another potential "Locked Up Abroad" situation that is best avoided). Manali is not known for its weed, that is Malana - have not been there yet, but it is apparently an interesting place. "Malana cream" is the famous weed from that place and that is pretty much all they do besides "being spiritual." The people of Malana allow tourists but they are restricted to walking on certain paths outlined throughout the town. Anyone who is not from Malana (even other Indians) are not allowed to touch the people of the town and even if you purchase something at a store you must put the money on the ground and get your change back from the ground. This stems from the town's spirituality where they believe that their God is the greatest and they believe all people from outside Malana as a "lower caste." Pretty intense. We would describe this as "racism" in the US, here in India it is "spirituality." This is all hearsay from the group, but speaks to how interesting Manali is (i know, the names of the towns are hard to keep track of). Manali (where i am staying currently) is a very touristy town and our focus at the workshop is to pick a story and act like a photojournalist. Had no idea what that meant before coming...but what it means for this week is that everyone is very intense and talks only about their "story." Some of the stories people are doing are great and informative, most of them are useless and boring and can never be sold (i am not even going to try). The point is that we "practice" being photojournalists. The one part of practicing photojournalism we are not doing enough of is drinking! People are working too hard, but that is what happens when you actually have to work on having a career, thankfully I am not going to bother with that right now. Photojournalism is very intense and requires days, weeks, months of shooting the same picture, same scenario, etc over and over again. You really need to have a passion for it. Think i realized Day 1 - no thanks. Great skills to have, great way to become a better photographer, but definitely a tough, uber-competitive career path where people struggle to make a living unless they marry someone with money or are the lucky few to become very commercial.

Ok, enough about that. I will update you on India, not on my boring personal adventures to find an alternative career.

More about India:

India is dirty and poor. It has an amazing cultural mix, especially here in the northern parts. There are people from Nepal, Tibet, Pakistan, other parts of India as well as plenty of ex-pats from US, Europe, Israel, etc. The scenery is quite beautiful but the landscape suffers the same plight as other areas of beautiful wilderness throughout the rest of the world (especially in the developing world). People need to live and need to use the natural resources to sustain themselves. This puts pressure on the wilderness and wildlife and there is constant conflict. India's approach is similar to that in Africa, command and control from the state combined with local corruption and bribery that eats away at the protection. However, since this is the Himalayas (many parts inhospitable except for the few very strong-willed people) there is a variety of protected land.

One of the main problems with India, even here in the northern parts is garbage. People also use the rivers for disposal. This is probably mostly due to a lack of education about the consequences but also is due to tradition. People in India have viewed rivers as having the potential to carry away sin, evil, problems, etc. Rivers are also very spiritual (which is great, but has bad unintended consequences with respect to garbage). As a result people think they can throw their garbage in the river and it will just go away. Well, technically it does (but that missing the point), but it just exports the problem downstream. Despite the rampant garbage, it is apparently much improved over the last few years than in the past! Wow, that's what i thought as well. In talking to some local guys that run an NGO, they explained that there is a concerted effort by the Manali municipality to educate the local people and stress the importance of allowing the town to pick up the garbage. They also have a recycling center, of which i do not know how impressive or productive it is, but surely it is better than nothing. In all these "problems" there is one underlying theme - lack of education. Better education will improve healthcare, environment, economy and living standards all over the world. That is easy to point out and difficult to actually implement.

Interesting Observation:

India seems much more receptive to foreigners than the places where I traveled in Africa. In some remote regions of Africa they are fascinated with foreigners, but westerners are mainly viewed with hesitancy. People in India seem to be interested in interacting and speaking with westerners. Obviously in both instances westerners are viewed as ATMs that will spend money on all the trinkets sold in the streets, but here in India they are obsessed with taking pictures with a foreigner. This mostly happens to women, especially those with blond hair and fairly pale skin, but it also happened to me one night. Apparently it is a nice novelty to have a white person as the backdrop on your Indian cellphone.

Struggling to come up with more of an update. Honestly, Manali is good for outdoor adventures (something i am really craving after days of "shooting" meaningless stories). But to stay here from more than 2-3 days (without an outdoor adventure) is total overkill. Excited to move on or at least get some hiking/fishing in after the workshop...then off to China.

later

dave

!ncredible !ndia!

Is that too many exclamation points? Whatever it is, incredible is an accurate description. But let's start ya'll out slowly. Arrived in Delhi 2 nights ago, nice hotel, everything perfectly fine. At 9 pm (on arrival) it was still very hot and terribly humid (technically it is monsoon season, but the rains are a bit late). So the next morning I had about 8 hours to kill before the bus trip to Manali northern India in the Himalayas, where the photojournalism workshop would take place).

I decided to walk. Really had no idea where I was going, but why not, had some dinky map from the hotel so decided to try it. There are tons of rickshaws and bikes driving by all day long, some carrying people to work, some aggressively trying to find a customer. A younger rickshaw driver who spoke very good English convinced me to hop in his natural gas powered, yet old school rickshaw. Honestly, i thought he was joking when he said he would take me to town for 20 rupees. It is hard to imagine what people mean when they say that India is cheap, but it is ridiculously cheap. 20 rupees is about 45 cents! (Later that day i bot 2 waters and 3 packets of cookies/crackers for 85 rupees, that is less than 2 bucks!). Anyhow, the kid that picked me up (his name was Ansar) proved to be most helpful and took me to a cell phone place to exchange my Tanzania sim card for an Indian one. That was the most expensive transaction all day, but electronics/cell phone related gear always is in these countries. He then tried to get me to pay him $30 for a full days worth of activities. Showing me the sights around the whole town as well as getting back to the hotel to fetch bags and then off to the bus station by 5 pm. That was a good 7 hours of work. I stopped bargaining when he offered $20 because it feels pointless to argue over a few bucks especially with people that are clearly less well off (understatement of the year). Most people think you could pay $10 for the full day, but still sounds like a good deal. I was able to tour much of Delhi and have him direct me to food stores, places to eat, cell phone stores, etc all for the price of a taxi ride in NYC from my (now old) apartment to the UES!

Well, Delhi is pretty crazy. There are tons of people and there is a ton of traffic. We saw some of the touristy tombs and buildings, etc but also went over to the bazaars in Old Delhi. I was slightly surprised that people in India are less concerned with white westerners walking around. After having been in Africa for 6 week where everyone is waving or scowling at the white person in town, it was nice that most Indians really couldn't care less.

The Indian government is pretty strict about the traffic pollution and most vehicles are required to use CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) which burns much cleaner than regular gasoline or diesel. Having said that, the lack of exhaust leaves your nasal sense wide open for the various smells that pervade Delhi, anything from the food to bad body odor to urine and other nasty human smells.

Overall, Delhi was a nice experience, the people seemed to be rather friendly. After a day full of sensory overload, I headed to the bus stop to meet up with the photojournalism crew. We all piled into an large bus with AC to prepare for the 14 hour trip. Yes, 14 hour bus ride. Well, the bus ride started at least 1-2 hours late tragically prolonging the pain of the trip. It was quite difficult to sleep as the roads outside of the city (on our way to Manali) were quite curvy and the bus driver was not shy about going as fast as he comfortably could around those bends.

Honestly, i thought the driving was bad in Africa, but it is worse here. It is hard to tell whether people just don't care or if they are not educated enough to know what 2 speeding cars colliding can do. The road from Delhi to Manali is a small 2 lane "highway" (which in this case is equivalent to a residential road in the US) and it is packed with lorries (i.e. trucks). These are not the 18 wheelers that we are accustomed to because the roads are too windy to allow them. They are, however, still pretty big (and the drivers aren't terribly forgiving or cautious). The lorrie drivers and our bus driver don't have enough patience to wait for open roads, so they do a bunch of blind curve passing while letting the horn rip. This was mostly effective...except for this morning. Naturally, I couldn't sleep on the bus, too much motion and at about 6 am we were approaching a curve. There were 2 trucks parked on either side of the road. 1 in our lane, another in the other lane (really stupid positioning, but as pointed out previously, people that drive in this country don't think...at all). There was just enough space to fit one car through. The bus driver cautiously approached the space and started to squeeze through. A lorrie driver on the other side decided it wasn't necessary to be cautious and he plowed right into us. Not even a chance to break. Luckily, nobody was hurt...but there was some pretty good damage to the bus. Needless to say, this delayed our already delayed (and very sweaty and uncomfortable) trip even more so. We unloaded everything because the bus driver couldn't get the bus started again with the steering wheel all jammed up against the seat. We eventually chose to get some private trucks for transportation the rest of the way and our 14 hour journey eventually finished in a total of about 20 hours. Quite an ordeal. Honestly, not that stressful since my new state of mind seems to be intense "chill" and relaxation. Obviously the heat was unpleasant and we all needed showers (and never want to repeat the experience) but this is what happens in developing countries, you have to just deal with it.

On a positive note, we did all make it safely to our destination and Manali is a very scenic place at the edge of the Himalayas. The last few hours was spent driving up the river valley (think the Beas river) and the mountains were over 1,000 meters high on either side with virtual straight drops to the river below. There was cultivation all the way up some of these mountain tops, pretty amazing to see. Some people even have baskets and pulley systems suspended over the river in order to get themselves (or goods) from one side to the other. The week here has just started and the jet lag is kicking in. Will check in later if there is any interesting news. Hope all is well.

dave

The Serengeti - A World of Difference

After leaving the relative hardship of Eastern Kenya's dry landscape and decreasing wildlife, I joined an overlanding tour with 23 other people that went from Nairobi to Zanzibar. Our first stop was the Maasai Mara, the famous Kenya Game Reserve that is in the south west part of Kenya and borders the Serengeti in Tanzania. After 2 days there we went to the Serengeti for a few days. These 2 parks comprise about 20,000 square kms and are the focus of most East African wildlife programs we would see on TV in the states. Don't get me wrong, these parks also have their issues with respect to decreasing wildlife and human-wildlife conflicts, but they seem to be in much better shape and the animals are much more abundant. Part of this is due to increased tourist traffic (more money is spent seeing these animals so the community increasingly benefits as a result). Part of the difference is habitat. The Serengeti and Mara (part of the Maasai Steppe ecosystem) have always been more productive habitat give the terrain and relatively abundant rainfall. Over the 3 days we spent in these parks, we saw over 40 lions, many different prides as well as many lion cubs (of various ages) as well as 3 leopards, 2 cheetah and massive amounts of zebra, wildebeest, gazelle, etc. The Serengeti/Mara parks are also famous for the large wildbeest migration that happens twice a year.

These trips were obviously enjoyable and certainly productive from a photo standpoint (the pictures are coming, don't fret, and you will be shocked at how good they are and how close we are to the animals...my 400mm zo0om lens helps a bit). This was also a positive experience after leaving the harsh reality of dead lions near Tsavo National Park. In the Serengeti/Mara ecosystem (slightly smaller than Tsavo) there are 3,000 - 4,000 lions, there are only 200-300 in Tsavo. Again, there are issues and they are the same issues that pervade all of Africa's famous wildlife areas (mostly related to poverty affecting wildlife), but after witnessing the Serengeti, conservation seems achievable.

Additionally, after returning to Tanzania, it seems fairly obvious that Tanzania is in better shape than Kenya. Both are obviously poor, but in the northern pars of Tanzania, where there is more abundant rainfall, people are not struggling quite as much. That, as well as Tanzania's much larger conservation system (39% of Tanz is protected whereas less than 10% of Kenya is), seems to mitigate the pressure on wildlife and help alleviate human-wildlife conflicts. There is still a lot of work to be done and people clearly need more economic and agricultural development. But the wildlife is relatively safe for now.

As for the trip, it is officially over now (i am actually writing this from Zanibar), i have lots of new British friends and we had a blast over the last 12 days. Plenty of wildlife, good times and the occasional night of drinking. It is sad to be leaving Africa and the group (most of whom are continuing on for another 15-20 days) but it will be nice to get home to NYC and see family and friends (also think Mom needs a breather from stressing about about my 6 weeks abroad). Only about 8 days in the states, then i head off again, hope to catch up with everyone while I am back.

Later