back home - 4/5/1999
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Friends:
We're both back safely in the U.S., getting back into the grind of work and enjoying the clean food, hot showers, and honest people.
I was going to send another update from Delhi, but that never quite happened as expected, and now it's Monday on a life-as-usual work week and I can hardly remember what we did last week. I remember a few things in no particular order, like a wild ride on the back of a motor-scooter to a kurta pajama shop in Karol Bagh, several rikshaw drivers who needed "firm handling" (to use the euphemism often used with unruly dogs), a spectacular meal at Dumpukht that ended with some nauseating "Indian ice cream" which contained nothing resembling ice nor cream, and a pleasant couple of hours at an orphanage for little girls on our final afternoon in Delhi, where we saw a level of unmitigated joy, camaraderie, and acceptance of strangers unlike anything else we experienced in India. That was a good way to end, and we went straight from that orphanage to the Delhi airport, where we didn't mind being four hours early for the flight home.
Thanks to everyone who was reading along with us. I know that the tone of the emails slowly changed from "waxing rhapsodic about scenic grandeur" to "whining about confrontations with petty people," but that's a pretty accurate reflection of how we felt and what we spent our time thinking about as the trip went on. I thought this trip would make me more like Gandhi, but instead I think it made me more like Sam Kinnison, the late comic who pretended to scream "GO WHERE THE FOOD IS!" to starving Ethiopians. India deserves India, in my opinion right now. In any case, it was nice to feel like we were still in touch with everyone, even if it was only one-way communication. And thanks to Gail for forwarding all the messages and (especially) typing in the faxes we sent from places where e-mail wasn't available.
We were going to try to sum up some conclusions about Cambodia, Nepal, and India in this final e-mail, but we discussed it a bit and it seems like that's too hard to do right now. We both feel like we can unconditionally recommend Angkor Wat, Royal Chitwan, and Amritsar, but after that it gets too hard to say anything general and too tedious to get into all the specifics. Maybe the photos on my web site will eventually characterize our trip better than words would have. In that spirit, here's a quote from "Area of Darkness" by V.S. Naipaul (which we both read on this trip), regarding a letter he wrote to a friend immediately after his first trip to India ... "I forget now what I wrote. It was violent and incoherent; but like everything I wrote about India, it exorcized nothing."
We're glad we went, and it's good to be back. - Doug & Mom
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That final email to our friends was a pretty accurate indicator of how we felt at the moment: exhausted, disgusted, and glad to be home. Those feelings would eventually fade, but they were vivid at the time.
The day before we left Delhi, we took a walk in the morning, but became so tired of the hassles after a couple of hours that we went back to our hotel room and spent the rest of the day watching CNN, reading, and eating meals in the hotel. Neither one of us even mentioned the possibility of going out and doing anything for the rest of the day.
I shot about 80 rolls of Fuji or Kodak slide film during our five weeks of travel, on the Nikon N90s SLR that I had purchased just before we left. When we got to Delhi nearly a month into the trip, I had not seen any of my photos yet and was very curious and concerned about whether they had turned out OK, since I was new to the camera and also a pretty inexperienced photographer at the time. A biologist we met on the train from Shimla to Delhi had recommended a film processing lab in Delhi that he used for his work, so I brought all of my film there to have it processed. Then I bought an inexpensive carry-on suitcase and packed it full of slides for the trip home.
Did traveling across Southeast Asia with Mom change me? At first I thought it hadn't. Then, in 2006, seven years after our trip, I was working at Microsoft and had to take a business trip to Delhi.
My flight arrived in the middle of the night (as most international flights to Delhi do), and after getting my baggage and bracing myself for what I knew was coming, I walked out of the airport and into a teeming mass of taxi drivers. It was pure chaos, with the taxis parked in no discernible pattern, and a mob of drivers and others yelling to the people coming out of the airport on a warm Delhi night. Hands clutched at my arms and my luggage, but I held on tight and pushed through the crowd, scanning the drivers along a row of taxis. Eventually, I saw one I decided to take a chance on: a middle-aged man who looked calm and thoughtful. As I approached him, a young man – who turned out to be his son – took my luggage and loaded it in the trunk.
On the way to the hotel, we talked about many things. I told them of my previous trip to Delhi, and how excited I was to be back, and they asked about my current trip and what I would be doing. They asked what it was like to work at Microsoft. I mentioned that I saw in the coverage of George W. Bush's recent trip to India to sign a proposed nuclear arms agreement that India's current President is Muslim, and they said that, although they were Hindu, they liked him and thought he was doing a good job.
I was glad to have found a driver who seemed a good fit for me, and I tipped generously when we arrived at my hotel. I took his card, in case I needed a taxi to the airport when I left.
When I walked into the hotel, a well-dressed Indian man was engaged in animated conversation with the front desk staff. As I would soon learn, he was the limo driver they had sent to meet my flight, and he was explaining that he had been there, but I had never showed up.
When I said my name at check-in, the limo driver turned to me and held up a hand-lettered sign with my name on it. He then started yelling at me, instead of the desk clerks. "I remember you! Why did you ignore this sign? I was standing right there as you came out of the airport. You walked past me to outside the airport, which could have been dangerous."
I apologized profusely, then headed up to my room, feeling like a savvy world traveler. Thanks, Mom!
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