Udupi, India

Wednesday was one of the greatest days of our whole stay in India because for a long stretch we did absolutely nothing.

At breakfast that morning we tried to give Jody an Indian name. Peggy had already decided on Alfia, I had been christened Rahul Punjabi very early on, but we couldn’t think of an appropriate moniker for Jody. My suggestion that we call him Tonto was hooted down, but it was obligatory to get at least one American Indian/East Indian pun into my story so there it is.

After breakfast we went back into town for a few minutes where Jody got to perfect his George Clooney act. A busload of school kids stopped in the middle of town and they all started pointing at him and jabbering. He waved back and before we knew it he had a whole crowd of disembarking kids swarming around him. But just as George C himself probably discovers, fame is fleeting. A young German couple, apparently channeling Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears, climbed aboard a motorbike they had just rented and all of a sudden the entire herd of children had gravitated from Jody to them.

While in town I found an Internet shop where I could connect my laptop to check email (our lousy hotel did not have such a service). I got connected but everything was very slow. I went over to the proprietors’ cubicle, where he and 2 friends were madly playing an animated computer game, and complained. He demurely shut down his game and asked me to try again. Without him hogging all the bandwidth performance was fine.

Babu drove us as close as he could to Om Beach, but we still had to walk the last kilometer or so. Om Beach gets its name from its shape. Om is the symbol that represents the origin of all things. It looks like two crescents joined at their ends and the beach is actually shaped very much like that.

After walking the length of the beach we found a pleasant open air café right on the sand where we plunked ourselves at a table that seemed to get the best of the sea breezes and there we stayed for 3-4 hours doing nothing more than occasionally waving the waiter over to order another coke or snack.

The other customers were just like us – white-skinned Europeans there to do nothing. From time to time one of them would roll and light a joint or order a bhang lassi (marijuana infused buttermilk shake) from the bar, but mostly we just sat there talking softly or gazing at the sea. Or playing with one of the four cute puppies who were in residence. The waitress claimed one of the puppy’s was named “Om”, so we decided to christen his runty brother “Mo”.

Despite the fact that this was as close to utopia as we had probably ever come, there were, of course, still hawkers around trying to make a living and they would harass us from time to time. Jody’s friend, Lucky, tried to get him to buy some more drums, and one little guy almost broke my exercise-enlarged heart when he pleaded “please don’t broke my tiny heart”. But our lassitude was such that even vendors could not get under our skin so we lazed the day away.

Jody and I hit the Arabian Sea for a swim and marveled at the tiny huts behind the café that you could rent for 150 Rs ($3) per night. The huts contained a platform for a mattress (to be rented separately), a fan and one light bulb. With my insect bites starting to reactivate, the thought of spending a night in such a place sent chills up my overheated spine.

Against our better judgment, we finally roused ourselves to leave Om Beach. On the drive out we passed a crew of impossibly thin, very dark-skinned men using picks and shovels to dig a trench right next to the road. Babu confirmed our guess – this was a very third-world technique for installing that most ubiquitous of first world utilities – fiber cable.

Our Rough Guide raved about a local specialty in Gokarna – the gadbad, a mélange of ice creams and dried fruits and nuts. I had asked about this supposedly ubiquitous treat at any number of places, only to be met with quizzical stares. Rough Guide said Prema Restaurant was the best place to get this local treat, so I dragged our little party there. Sure enough gadbud was on the menu. I had been pronouncing it wrong, saying gaadbaad instead of godbod. We were allowed to choose the three flavors we wanted stuffed into our parfait glass, and we soon realized that gadbad (or gadbud) was nothing more than Neapolitan ice cream with some dried nuts and fruit thrown in. The coconut ice cream we each chose as one of out flavors was delectable enough though, so we went away satisfied and sated.

As we walked back to the center of town to find Babu, we walked by the Mahabaleshwar Temple. It is closed to foreigners due to some insensitive actions exhibited by tourists in the past. But standing outside we could hear the chanting by whomever was conducting the ceremony. The chants were all variations on the “om” meditative sound, but it sounded for all the world like there was a very spirited cattle auction going on inside. I wanted to yell “Sold to the bare-chested pilgrim in the yellow skirt!” but common sense prevailed and I simply walked on by.

The temples in Gokarna are off limits to tourists, but they also have strict rules for believers. Like in many places in India, you are expected to remove your shoes before entering. But in these temples, men are also required to be bare-chested. So another business idea came to mind – producing signs that read “shoes, shirts - no service”.

Before jumping into the car for the ride back to our dismal hotel, I bought a wall hanging with the visage of Sai Baba (the formerly living god who is now dead). Most pictures you see of him picture him as a handsome man with a neatly trimmed white beard, piercing brown eyes and a red do-rag on his head. I hope the do-rag is not hiding the Andre Agassi haircut. Jody thinks Sai Baba looks an awful lot like Ed Bradley, and he’s right on with that assessment.

On the way back to the hotel, Peggy asked about all the spitting that goes on in India. It seems like men are forever spitting red liquid onto the ground here. Babu explained it’s a small “mint” concoction called paan made of betel nuts and various seasonings. You see pouches of this stuff handing from ropes in many of the street stalls. I expressed interest in trying it at some point, so Babu handed me the pouch that he chews from and I gave it a try. It was sweet and a little spicy but nothing to rave about and certainly nothing worth spending all day staining your mouth and teeth red for. Babus’ version was pretty benign, though – most of the paan varieties include chewing tobacco and that’s where the spitting habit comes from. The most potent form of paan includes bhang – marijuana – which is not illegal here but is supposed to be used only for ceremonial purposes.

We were happy on Thursday morning to check out of the Om Beach Hotel – one of the worst hotels we’ve stayed at in a long time. The one time I really wanted a comment form, the owners were smart enough to not offer me one.

We drove for a while and came to an excruciatingly large statue of Shiva, one of the main gods in the Hindu religion. This statue, along with an ornate temple, had been built within the last 10 years, so it’s not listed in any of the guide books. It was built by one of the Shetty clan, an outfit Babu described to us as one major family in the Indian Mafia. In the state of Karnakata, there are a number of families who have developed mafia-like operations, the difference being that here they operate much more openly, often in direct cahoots with the local government.

As at most tourist spots in India, there were hawkers trying to sell us things, mostly postcards of the local attraction. As the only white people there, the young buys selling the cards gravitated to us. We tried to buy a couple of them off with popsicles, which they gladly accepted, but being true to their tasks they refused to open the cold treats as long as they thought they still had a chance to sell us something.

Here’s a surprise. The road to Udupi was bad and our progress was very slow! We were yet again on National Highway 17. Yes, I did say National Highway, but in many places it was more primitive than the worst country road you’ve ever been on. In one stretch we managed 5 km in 30 minutes, not because there was a traffic jam, but because the road was in such horrible condition. If you’re keeping score, we covered a total of 170 Km in a little more than 4 hours before we made it to our destination at Malpe Beach.

Before getting to Malpe, we arrived at a town called Bhatkal, where Babu, a Hindu, informed us there were lots of radical Muslim sympathizers who created many problems with the Hindu majority. The day we were passing through ironically was 11/26 (which they call 26/11 here), one year after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. There were ceremonies held in many cities that day to commemorate the loss of life. Apparently, the small boats that were used to ferry the terrorists from Pakistan to India stopped in Bhatkal to be refueled by sympathizers.

On the road that day we crossed quite a few rivers, and on the banks of many of them we saw small crews of natives loading sand from the riverbank into low-slung skiffs. The boats were loaded until the gunwales were just centimeters above the water. The skiffs were then poled down the river to battered dump trucks that took the sand to Vishnu-knows where. Babu told us these people were smuggling sand, an illegal activity that they had probably paid some local officials to overlook. When we asked Babu what would happen if someone reported this activity to the local police, he just laughed.

We got to our hotel, checked in and immediately walked out to the beach. Why, I don’t know unless it was because we had not experienced enough sweltering heat yet that day. There were a couple of camels about and through some hard-bargaining on my part, I bought Jody and Peggy a camel ride for less than $2.00. Here’s how it went. Me: “How much for a camel ride?” Kid: “40 Rupees.” Me (having not understood his answer): “How about 100 Rupees.” Kid (having not understood my reply): “40 Rupees.” Me (now realizing that I was bargaining against myself): “OK”.

Tourism is way down in India, we hear that lament all the time. Earlier in the trip at the Sinatra restaurant we had been the only folks in the whole place. At the Paradise Beach Hotel in Malpe Beach, there were no other cars in the parking lot on that particular evening. Peggy thinks it might have something to do with the incredible amount of deferred maintenance, not to mention deferred cleaning, that has built up in the country. It’s not hard to see for yourself that everything is filthy and most of it needs to be fixed to boot. Table cloths are not only not changed between dining parties, they are not even changed daily, and even when they do get changed, they are replaced by equally soiled alternatives. Dishes, silverware, glasses – they all probably get washed, but none of them well. In India you have to resign yourself to wiping every dining implement within your reach or simply ignore the dirt and carry on.

Thursday was Turkey day for you – for us it was Dose-A-Dosa day. Babu drove us into Udupi, where the dosa was supposedly invented, and we found the best dosa spot in town, this time foregoing the AC room to see just how cheaply we could eat. $2.00. That’s what it would have come to for our Thanksgiving dinner – 3 dosas and 6 bottles of soda. It would have been $2.00 had I not noticed on the menu this item: gudbud – 32 Rs. Gudbud (or gadbad or gadbud, you decide) is apparently NOT a local specialty in Gokarna as claimed by Rough Guide, but rather a generic name (like Neapolitan) for a dish of ice cream containing 3 different-flavored scoops. I was more than a bit disappointed to learn this, but I salved my hurt with a bowl of the goodness and that seemed to take the edge off.

Leaving the restaurant, I performed a ritual that I’m sure innocent standers-by assume is religious in nature. I touched myself four times: left pocket, right pocket, center of the chest, left chest pocket. I do this every time I leave any place of business, but it has nothing to do with religion. It’s my way of making sure I have my wallet, my phone, my passport and my camera. It’s possible that all religious gesticulation is borne of something as prosaic as checking for your valuables, but I wouldn’t make that claim in Wikipedia just yet if I were you.

On the way back to the hotel we quizzed Babu about his family. It turns out he is in a love marriage, not an arranged one. He has high school aged children, so he’s not necessarily a harbinger of the diminishing role arranged marriages are playing in India. He told us he comes from a strictly veg family, but his wife’s family is non-veg and that caused some serious problems after he and his wife were married. But he claims that his wife and his parents worked out their difficulties and now get along just fine. He did hasten to note that even though he became a non-veg after marriage, he eats strictly veg whenever he goes home.

Unfortunately, that evening Jody fell victim to Maharaja’s Revenge, the ailment that sent me to the hospital during my first week in India. We could only hope that Jody would weather this better than did I.

Photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26545681@N07/sets/72157622958488770/