‘No Drugs, No Prostitutes, No Weapons:’ Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Tags

Cambodia, guesthouses, hostels, Phnom Penh, spiritual memoir, Travel memoir, Traveling, Travelling, writing

Draft chapter for book about our time in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in January

‘No Drugs, No Prostitutes, No Weapons:’ Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Cambodia was hot!  I stood outside with the bags while Anthony got a SIM card, then we got a cab.  The cab driver had a big, lived in face, open and strong at the same time; as I looked around I noticed a lot of the men looked like this.

It was still early when we arrived at our guesthouse and we had to wait in the restaurant area.  The front had windows and a door open onto the street, at the back were steps up to the rooms.  Around us were lots of young Western tourists, suddenly it felt like we were on the tourist trail.  We had fruit salad, a side order of baked beans- an expensive but necessary luxury/dietary requirement- and coffee; it seemed expensive.  ‘Everything’s going to seem expensive compared to India,’ Anthony said.  We’d travelled overnight, while we waited for our room I curled up and napped in a round wicker chair with a big cushion.

Our room was medium sized with a low coffee table, a window and its own bathroom.  On the inside of the door was a sign with the rules and information for the guesthouse, top of the list was No Drugs, No Prostitutes, No Weapons.  ‘Well that’s our holiday ruined,’ we said, laughing.

We unpacked a bit and then went out.  Down our street there were lots of laundry places with banks of machines and laundry hung out on rails outside.  We passed a few Western families.  The side streets with their bird’s nest wires reminded me a little of Kolkata or the old part of Bangkok.

Cambodian women wore skirts made of wraps of printed cotton with shirts, or short skirts with t shirts, covering up their tops from the sun like in Japan and Thailand.  Men sat in social groups chatting, with cans of red bull or beer at tables outside workshops and garages.

One of the first things I noticed was that the Cambodian men don’t look.  In fact I looked more!  I couldn’t help noticing men working on engines, not wearing tops, their bodies fleshy, soft, just natural.  An old Lonely Planet I read in a cafe in India advised Western women travellers to wear dark glasses and avoid making eye contact with Indian men, this of course this is a huge generalisation; I hugged male friends we made in India.  But in Cambodia it wasn’t just that men didn’t look at me, no one looked at us at all.

Our first meal, at a Western owned restaurant, mirrored the sexy-in-the-mouth-noodles of our first meal in Bangkok the first time we’d left India.  Perfectly fresh, perfectly cooked, mushrooms, carrots, green beans and chard; the noodles not salty or greasy, the tofu was tasty, and even, for total perfection, just the right amount of Chinese sweet corn (two or three bits.)  Even the lettuce was tasty.  Sometimes in India we missed fresh crunchy vegetables, and right then we were happy to be away, from the bad tummies and the awful journey, and just relax.

From the restaurant we watched the traffic of the main road; a little street food van with lights and music blaring like a disco.  A scooter with a child in the middle of two adults holding a baby/toddler.  Scooters with women holding giant teddies.  Lots of cars, most looked new some very big and shiny.  Rickshaws with curtains, silky shiny drapes.  A white rickshaw with neon lights went past, then another rickshaw full of monks in orange robes.  A cycle rickshaw- the passenger seat at the front like a Victorian bath chair- the passenger a woman with an orange cat on her lap.

As we left the restaurant a woman passed us with a big circular tray on her head full of bottles of nail polish and hair scrunchies.  We walked on the prom between the main street and the river.  There was outdoor gym equipment and people doing exercise classes to music outside.  A rickshaw driver beside his parked rickshaw was doing exercises, hands on thighs, swirling his knees, looking cheerful.  By the river were street stalls, mini charcoal burners, sets of scales, dumplings in a big pot, people with mats, little food stalls with tables and chairs.

People with little hand carts filled with ice and cans sold drinks including alcohol, but even though alcohol was the same price as Coca Cola, the night life didn’t seem to be all about drinking, people were just out.  Playing cards, sitting at the little tables, one group standing with two on the near side and one on the other side of the wall by the river.  Lots of women had little fluffy dogs on leads. Further on along the prom was a running track with distances marked out, and big neon screens with ever changing and moving images, tulips, rain water falling.  A covered area, a night storage area of bananas, coconuts, people sleeping on camp beds, guarding the produce I suppose.  A kind of a square, with grass, paving, topiary trees, palm trees with strings of lights wound around them, and lights outlining the pointed roofs of temples and a palace.  Like an upmarket Asian version of Great Yarmouth (link to a blog post explaining why Great Yarmouth holds a special place in my heart.)

Then back across the main street and in again, through the market with beautiful fruit and lots of street food.  I saw lots of cats, most with short tails, one with no tail, one with a long tail.  I saw buildings with spiral staircases like in Tokyo.  We walked down the strip of bars with young women dressed in mini skirts and mainly older men drinking.   Not one person hassled us except one person offering us a (pink) rickshaw.  Not one selfie request.  ‘Don’t you know who I am?!’ we said laughing.

(Part Two on Sunday)

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left job, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

For more photographs of the trip see Instagram travelswithanthony

 

 

Not what you have let go of… What you are left with

A post from February last year. Minimalism was much more than clearing my house and head of clutter, although it was that too. Letting go of ‘stuff’ ultimately propelled me out of my old life and all the way to Incredible India. And onward to a new life living on a narrowboat.

Rachel

It’s not about what you’ve lost…

I think minimalism is misunderstood, or at least what I mean by minimalism.  It is sometimes portrayed as a harsh ascetic, a kind of magazine lifestyle to try on for appearances, rather than part of an internal process of peeling away the layers of the onion to discover who you really are…

I feel anything but harsh about my remaining possessions.  I feel really warm towards this chair which at the last minute I have decided to keep.  Previously it was stuck in the corner of the dining room, the door used to bash into it.  It used to belong to my grandmother, when I was a little girl I used to think that the ‘buttons’ on it did the doorbell.  It took me years to realise that couldn’t have been true.  Even now I wonder if someone somehow hooked it up to the…

View original post 442 more words

Picking up the things of beauty:

Tags

beauty, Blogging, Incredible India, Indian hospitality, Love India, meditation, mindfulness, Self realisation, serendipity, spiritual memoir, Travel, Travel memoir, Travel writing

Picking up the things of beauty:  Delhi before Nepal (October 2018) Draft chapter for book

On the train from Pushkar to Delhi, two young men gave us advice about a better Delhi station to get off at, closer to the airport where we were staying.  It was also their stop, and near the taxis they even looked for us to check we were okay.  ‘You are guests in our country,’ they said, when we thanked them.

A French woman we met in Pushkar said she usually brings her daughter each year to India, one year her daughter aged six had got very ill in Delhi, they had to go to multiple doctors and she lost a lot of weight before getting treatment that was effective.  Since then, the woman said she only eats at one particular hotel when she is in Delhi.  Even though guidebooks direct western tourists to Main Bazar (Paharganj), and all the shops there are geared to tourists, tourists seem to often get sick there, and middle class Indians told us they wouldn’t eat there and don’t understand why tourists go there…  So, having got sick both the previous times we’d stayed in Main Bazar, we took a leaf out of the French woman’s book and booked a hotel near the airport, for the one night and one day between Pushkar and Nepal.

Our taxi driver struggled to find our hotel and after driving around and asking directions he dropped us off and rushed away.  It was the wrong hotel.  It was late in the evening, we were tired and fed up, but as we began to walk, people came to help and give us directions; people actually ran after us to offer help.  This happened again and again in India, people went out of their way to help us.  Thank you so much.

We finally found our hotel, it was the slowest check in ever, we were tired and impatient, but managed not to show it.  Our intention always was to spend most of the time in the hotel room and eat hotel room service, this time the Delhi air quality was just ‘unhealthy’ rather than ‘hazardous,’ as it had been last time.

The hotel staff didn’t speak much English, breakfast was included but we struggled to order it when they phoned to ask what we wanted; one meal came first then we ordered the other when they brought the first.  Anthony had an omelette and I had milky coffee like children’s coffee, with four slices of toast which I dipped in, which was actually really nice.  For the other meals the staff came into the room and copied our order with us showing them the item on the menu.  We had finger chips, and veg sandwiches with thin cut cucumber and tiny amounts of shredded lettuce, which were also very nice, and milky tea in a pot.  We got what we got, we were hungry, the food was actually fine, and it didn’t make us sick.

Anthony wasn’t feeling well and stayed in the whole time but I did go out for a little walk.  We were on the fourth floor, I used the stairs for a bit of exercise.  There were unusual wall designs in that hotel in brown tiles and shiny brown wallpaper, on the stairs one side a mosaic design, on the other side giant pebbles, elsewhere there were even giant buttons.  There was a round window to outside, I looked through; the wall opposite had a hole in, like where a fitting had been removed, making a messy circle.  Inside the hole were a pair of pigeons huddled up together.  I thought it looked like one bird’s wing was out of position, but when I came back upstairs, it had gone and the other was still there, sitting all fluffed up.  Beyond the wall, on the roof of another building, I could see a terracotta saucer with a bird at it, someone had put water out.

I was nervous about getting lost, but on my own I was able to look and needed to really look; an OYO sign, a hotel sign at the end of our road.  A tiny shop, a crossroads, side streets; the road was broken and bits of it were flooded a little.  Men’s groomers, two juice stalls, more tiny shops and street stalls.  On the way back I bought water.  Looking back at the crossroads, there was a momo stall, 15 rupees for half, 30 rupees for full.  I could see a room behind the street stall.  To one side was the little shop where I had bought the water, to the other the road.  Above the shop and across the road was a perfect bird’s nest of wires.  Down the road was a sign saying Health and Hygiene Institute.  To the left of the road was a block of faded flats.  A little girl stood on a balcony holding a red balloon or was that my imagination?  Definitely there was washing out.  The little girl on the balcony, the washing, the Health and Hygiene Institute, the bird’s nest wires, the little shop, the momos stall.  I tried to take a picture in my mind.

On my way out I’d made a point of saying Namaste and Good Morning (even though it was the afternoon) to the man on the hotel door.  I got back to the hotel then decided to go on past it a little way.  There came a man and a dog which I thought was on a lead, but then I felt its wet nose in my palm.  It was quite a big dog, with a collar, but not on a lead and not with the man.  The dog started being super friendly and started to hump my leg, I tried to shoo it, but I didn’t want to be too forceful in case I made it angry.  I quickly walked back to the hotel and asked the doorman for help, he opened the door and shooed the dog away.  ‘Friend,’ he said.  ‘Too friendly,’ I said.  I was on my period, the dog’s attention was embarrassing.

The area was made up of faded buildings interspersed with hotels.  From the window by the pigeons, looking sideways and above I could see two flashier buildings.  I could see washing hung out but otherwise it was a really non India view, and the view from our room even more so, ‘Our least India view,’ as my husband said, it could have been a faded area of any city.

I fed bits of the previous day’s train journey samosas to sweet little birds on the windowsill, poking the pieces through the bars.  I thought, Give me a song (in return) then immediately chastised myself for thinking that- but then they did!  Asking for more?  I gave them more, and later pigeons came too.

I wanted, needed, to see the strange giant button design again; sometimes I look at something but I don’t stop long enough to feel I’ve soaked it in or made the most of it and then I regret it.  Am I a pleasure denier?  And then I realised that the same wall covering design was in a corner of our bathroom!

I told Anthony about the t-shirt I saw when I went out for a walk, then later I spent a while sitting on the floor, going through all my papers and notebooks, chucking out and decluttering to get the weight of my bag down, and what did I see, the very same phrase:  ‘Fortune favours the brave’ that I’d noted down from a billboard on a journey at another time weeks or months ago…

Can it be like this in future, just picking up the things of beauty as I go without on purpose seeking any more?  ‘No more temples.’  And just putting in the blog?  So as to keep current; not like now, in Delhi and writing about Kerala, but maybe I should just accept that this is my job.

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left job, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

For more photographs of the trip see Instagram travelswithanthony

Living the Dream

A post from February last year. Life- and the kitchen- seem a bit busy to me now, but the undercurrent of peace and happiness is similar to how I feel now.

Rachel

‘I’m doing something for the first time,’ I said to my husband, ‘Guess what it is.’

‘You’re stewing apples,’ he said.

‘It’s not so much what I am actually doing, it’s about what I am doing.’  I said.

It was Friday morning and I was making something from a recipe that I had just read in a post on the internet.  I read it, and I thought, we have apples, we have oats, we have apple juice.  I can do it.  I can do it right now.

I have never done this before.  Funnily enough, a few days ago, I had been thinking that I did want to start doing this. Lisa Anniesette posts some lovely looking recipes, but I have never once tried making them.  I don’t know what’s stopping me from actually trying to make Lisa’s or anyone else’s recipes.  Am I intimidated because the food looks…

View original post 591 more words

Free Churro and the Free Churro Project

Tags

Bojack Horseman, Connection, Death of mother, Death of parent, difficult relationships, Free churro, Free Churro Project, Grief, Instagram, Internet, Netflix

Something wonderful from the internet.

200 people from all over the world recorded themselves recreating the eulogy that BoJack Horseman gave at his mother’s funeral.  That monologue filled the entire length of one episode and fans recreated it in full, many of them in costume, dressed up or with sets.  Or just themselves.  Clips from the 200 monologues were edited together to create the monologue above; the person’s country and Instagram name are on each clip.  The top video is an extract from the original episode.

If you’ve experienced grief and/or difficult family relationships, this may still resonate, even if you are not a fan of BoJack Horseman.  If you want to read about BoJack Horseman, I wrote a post about the show.  Here it is. 

Thank you very much for reading

Thank you to all involved in the Free Churro Project, you came together and did something wonderful.

P.S.  What is a churro? A: ‘A sweet Spanish snack consisting of a strip of fried dough dusted with sugar or cinnamon’ (Dictionary)  Sounds yummy!

About the author

Sold house, left job, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

For more photographs of the trip see Instagram travelswithanthony

What does living in accordance actually mean?

Tags

confidence, creativity, Eat Pray Love, following your dreams, happiness, India, Living in accordance, relaxation, Spiritual experience, spiritual memoir, stress, Travel memoir, writing

Ann wrote about it beautifully here, about how we can be so aware of what others might or might not think/the approval/disapproval of others that we stifle what actually makes us stand out.

SMUT. AND SELF-ESTEEM wrote a beautiful piece about what it looks like and what the effects are.

In Eat Pray Love (the book, always the book) a young man goes off to spend time in an ashram in India and goes home and waxes lyrical about it to his father, who is sitting quietly looking into an open fire.  ‘It gives you a quiet mind, Dad,’ the son says.  ‘I already have a quiet mind, son,’ the father answers.

In India it was a big focus of my husband’s to learn to relax completely without feeling guilty.  In Pushkar the owner of the guesthouse emphasised again and again how important relaxing was and was in the process of creating another relaxation area for guests.  He told us that the local Chief Minister had even commissioned the creation of a garden for Indians and Westerners to relax in.

Yes, I went from a forty hour a week stressful job to not working, and of course I gradually unwound, rediscovered myself etc etc.  But I didn’t want to do nothing, and I didn’t want to come home without the trip having meant something or resulted in something concrete.  So I wrote, an hour or two or more almost every day, writing for my travel memoir and for this blog.  I often pushed myself too hard, writing when my hand, arm or shoulder hurt- I have some RSI- or when my brain had gone foggy.

The real lessons of India perhaps haven’t sunk in until I am back here in the UK.  I’m still writing almost every day for a couple of hours.  I stop when my brain is tired or when my body aches.  I go for a walk every day, sometimes twice.  I cook and eat healthily.*  What I’ve noticed recently is how quiet my mind is.  Really there’s only two, three subjects on there.  The book, the chapter I’m on, *, and the sheep and lambs opposite.  All is quiet with my family, I’m maintaining a healthy emotional distance to keep my independence and boundaries.  The only thing really are the sheep and lambs opposite who I have become very fond of.  And there’s sheep and lambs everywhere, and if I don’t watch it I can 1) Get fond of them; watching them jump in the air, run up and down the small hill, eat grass, eat hay, suckle from their mum, etc,  and 2) Think about what’s going to happen to them.

But compared to my previous list of worries this is nothing.  And compared to how we often felt during the last half of the trip, fearful about the future, now it/I am here it doesn’t feel scary at all.  Just get up, live, repeat.  With less on my mind I’m a lot more present.  The only things I want to do each day are write for a couple of hours and go on one or two walks.  Minor chores such as emptying the loo or doing some hand washing (laundry!) are easily fitted in. So the rest of the time, it doesn’t matter what I do, and I can go with it easier.  As opposed to before when I’d be constantly thinking ‘What’s next,’ about protecting my ‘me’ time, and almost overdoing things in my mind and in practice the way I overdid things at work, almost like a form of self harm.

It’s like I had to do all that, to get here.  I mean I could have just sold the house, bought a boat to live on instead and used the spare money to have a year off to become a writer, but I never thought of that.  Doing it all to go to India seemed somehow more obvious a thing.  And of course it gave me something to write about.  Or rather, something beautiful to hang my random internal thoughts around.  And now I’m here, sitting at my little desk in my little study area, writing, and not really worrying about anything else.

*except for you know whats, those pastry things I am obsessed with

Photograph: It was my birthday at the end of April, we don’t really do presents or not in a big way if we do, my husband bought me a new chain (the original one had recently broken) for my Om necklace that I bought in Kerala to mark a spiritual experience there, plus vegan birthday cake and vegan chocolate from the health food shop, plus gin, tonic and lemons, and Corona and limes.  He waited on me all day, and made dinner while I lounged in the bedroom and watched Netflix.  Okay so the partying took a few days to get over, that’s why we don’t do it very often, but you’re only forty-nine once.

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left job, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a personal travel memoir.

For more photographs of the trip see Instagram travelswithanthony

 

 

 

Lalbagh Botanical Gardens Bangalore India

Tags

Bangalore, Bangalore Botanical Gardens, food, food in India, India, Lalbagh, Lalbagh Bangalore, Travel, travel blogging, travel comforts, Travel memoir, Traveller's tummy, writing

Draft extract from my travel memoir:

Our flight to Bangalore was delayed, delayed, and delayed again, until there was clearly no hope of getting our night bus to Hampi.  Bangalore traffic is famously awful and two women on the same flight that we spoke to confirmed this; in spite of what Google maps said, there was no way we were going to get from the airport to the bus pick up point in time.

As the delay passed a certain point the airline gave us little cardboard boxes of food; samosas with tomato ketchup, tiny little square white bread sandwiches, cake, and cartons of orange juice.

I didn’t find the wait at the airport annoying, although it became very tiring as the afternoon and evening wore on.  I worked on my blog until I got too tired.

When we got to Bangalore my husband looked up hotels, seeing where was near the bus pick up point and also looking for areas of green, thinking it would be nice to be near a park.  The Botanical Gardens was near to the bus pick up point and an affordable hotel.

The taxi from Bangalore airport to the hotel was very expensive.  We knew that Bangalore was developed and expensive, home to a growing section of India’s middle class.  We passed grand venues, function places for weddings, their entrances decorated with huge trails and walls of lights, with names of the newlyweds on large billboards outside.

We reached the area near our hotel.  Down one street was what looked like a rickshaw repair area full of broken or upturned rickshaws, down the main street was a bus depot with travel agents and a few small shops selling drinks and snacks.

The hotel was smart and looked like an actual hotel, usually we stayed in guesthouses. ‘WiFi not working on your floor,’ the man said, but we were too tired to try to change anything at ten pm at night.  Almost next door was a travel agent, we got there with minutes to spare.  We sat on a little wooden bench in his office.  At first he seemed a little gruff, we watched him shoo someone else out, take calls and deal with us all at the same time.  He booked us onto the last two seats of the sleeper bus to Hampi for the next night. He told us how much a rickshaw should cost to our pick up point, then he said to come to him the next evening, he would get us a rickshaw and tell them where to take us.

We were both hungry but also understandably nervous about eating somewhere new before a bus journey.  The hotel kitchen was closed.  We asked the man at the hotel ‘where tourists go’ and he recommended a place.  The kitchen staff wore hair covers, water came from a bottle, and they used filtered water in the kitchen, which were all good signs.  We ordered vegetable fried rice which is usually a safe bet (it’s made hot, it’s vegetarian, rice is gentle on the tummy and helps ‘stop you up,’ as do bananas and bread).

Our room was white and clean, with its own bathroom.  The bed was so comfy with fat squishy pillows and a weighty duvet that felt like a hug; I slept til 11am.

We asked a rickshaw driver for The Botanical Gardens, he said no and drove off, maybe he didn’t understand us, or maybe it was too short a fare.  A friendly man came out and offered to help us; we realised it was the travel agent from the night before.  Another rickshaw driver came, we asked again and he gave us a price.  We looked at the travel agent.  His face was completely impassive.  ‘Is that an okay price?’ we asked.  He didn’t say anything.  It seemed people won’t interfere with other people making money.  It was probably too much but we got in anyway; we intended to remember the way and walk back.

Lalbagh looked a bit like Crystal Palace with its glass houses.  There was a lake and lots trees.  Stalls sold fresh fruit chunks and ice cold drinks.  We bought peanuts in shells wrapped in newspaper from a woman seated on the ground, she had no English, she showed me a note of money to show how me how much.  Signs said beware of snakes and honey bees.  It was very hot.  I bought a Sprite on the way back from the lake, keeping my promise to the man on the stall at the start.  We sat on a bench and very unusually for India were bothered by wasps, or perhaps they were honey bees, and we walked off down to a different bench.   It felt like an English park, with benches lining the wide pathway.

We walked back.  I really wanted a cup of coffee and maybe a snack.  Sometimes I wanted something specific like a coffee and a pastry, but whilst travelling it made things difficult if you got stuck on wanting something that you may well not get.  We went to the restaurant from the night before, they weren’t serving coffee or even chai, something to do with the time of day; like in Pondicherry, that had a menu with very strict times about when you could have certain items including hot drinks.  I bought crisps and a soft drink from one of the small shops instead.

I sat downstairs in the lobby and finished my blog post for the following day.  Maybe the WiFi didn’t actually work on any of the floors, as people were always in lobby.  Other hotel guests were there, two well off looking Indian men, and a Western family with children playing computer games.  The Indian men helped me with the password and the WiFi, and the family left.

After I had finished writing we went out again, stepping outside, it had cooled down a lot, and I felt that familiar feeling of being sorry that I’d missed it.  We had been out in the day, and it had been very hot, but now it was like we’d just missed maybe the nicest part.

Over the road by the little shops there was a little chai stall open, they had paper cups which were more hygienic than glasses but a shame for the environment.  When my husband was in India twenty years ago chai was served in little clay pots that afterwards were thrown on the ground and broke and went back into the earth, it was such a shame that they didn’t do that anymore.

We went back to the travel agent and waited for a rickshaw, lots went past full or without stopping; we watched a group of women struggle to get out of a packed rickshaw.  I saw a cat with one kitten crossing the road, I could barely look.  It was good that the man was there to help us.  He agreed the price and explained to the driver where to go.  The rickshaws were smaller compared to the Kerala ones, in Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu they were even bigger.  Maybe it was state to state, maybe it was that the ones in big cities were smaller.  Once inside, we cosied up to save our knees and legs from poking outside.

We’d wondered if the bus pick up point at ten pm at night would be a bit dodgy, but it was like a city; so many buses, so many people moving about the country.  There were so many agents near our hotel and we passed many more on the way.  The rickshaw driver dropped us at our stand.  There were various stands with offices, and some public loos.  The rickshaws looked tiny like toys especially when driving along in front of the big coaches, many of which were double decker sleepers.  In front of the buses before leaving they did a blessing, lighting a small fire on the road and saying prayers.

If you are interested in India check out Broken Traveller here is a link to a post Incredible India Unity in Diversity with beautiful photographs

About the author

Sold house left job decluttered almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a personal travel memoir.

For more photographs of the trip see Instagram travelswithanthony

Messing about on boats

Tags

boaters, canals, ducklings, Greggs, Greggs vegan sausage rolls, Life on a narrowboat, Narrowboat, swans, weight loss

On Good Friday we took the boat out for the first time, intending to just do a short run then turn the boat around ready to paint the windows on the other side.  (And to have a change; having the boat facing the other way livens things up slightly, like sleeping up the other end of the bed, or going a different route to work.)  Anyway, serious live-aboard types generally advise against going out at times such as Summer Bank Holidays and Easter Weekend, due to the amount of traffic on the canals, particularly hire boats.  It was funny that without any planning and without either of us working right now we just kind of naturally ended up having an Easter weekend like everyone else, going on a boat trip Friday-Saturday, and then driving to Norfolk on Easter Sunday to see my son ahead of his trip to New York.

Anyway back to the boat trip.  My husband lived on a narrow boat for five years and so has a lot of experience, me not.  I began the day feeling very anxious and almost panicky.  The steering takes a bit of getting used to, the tiller and rudder are at the back, it’s not like a car, there’s a delay between moving the tiller and the boat nose responding.  It needs constant tiny adjustments to keep it on course and if you lose concentration it can start to drift to one side surprisingly quickly.  Well not quickly, but….  If it is going off course, you have to over-correct and then correct again.  Anyway the only thing to do is do it, and I did begin to get a feel for how the boat moves and how the steering feels.

If you have a very small boat you can turn around anywhere, but for ours we need a turning point, a wide part of the canal designed for this purpose.  With few turning points on that stretch we ended up going much further than we intended.

Just as we approached this marina and diesel point, the engine conked out.  We thought we’d run out of diesel.  We moored up right by the pumps, only to find they had just closed- they closed early as it was Good Friday, and wouldn’t be there until nine o clock the next morning.  There was a cafe, but that was also closed, and there was nothing nearby.  So we resigned ourselves to just chilling out on the boat for the evening, which was absolutely fine, and were waiting at the pumps at nine am.  The boat hadn’t run out of fuel after all, but because it hadn’t been used for ages silt had got in, then settled again overnight and the engine started easily.  We bought some more diesel anyway, plus a new fuel filter, turned around in the marina and headed for home.

Me steering and concentrating hard and my husband looking like the seasoned mariner that he is

By the end of the trip I had steered past moored boats, past moving boats, through a narrow gap, around tight bends, and under bridges.

My husband steered the boat through a narrow course between double moored boats and oncoming boats, with inches to spare, and reversed the boat between moored boats into the marina to turn around.  In the hierarchy of difficulty this ranked even higher due to the moored boats being made of fibreglass.  If you bump into a narrowboat they are made of steel and very strong, it does happen, someone on a windy day bumped into ours when we were moored up, no problem, but if you crashed into a fibreglass boat, well, that would not be so good….  Anyway my husband had lost none of his skills and completed all manoeuvres successfully while I thanked my lucky stars it wasn’t me in charge.

Pulling the boat in is surprisingly easy, it is slow to start moving, then once it starts it comes easily.  You pull in from the centre rope and then tie up with the centre rope and a rope at each end, to rings if they have them, or using one’s mooring pins if not.

We stopped a couple of times for a cup of tea or to stretch our legs.  It was lovely sunny weather, really quite hot. 

Arriving home was again another tricky manoeuvre due to the very tight mooring space between our neighbours and of course not wanting to bump their boats.  And- apparently due to all the boats going past on Friday and Saturday- there was a silt bank and getting the boat in was very hard, needing a bit of engine and a lot of pulling.  Since then there’s been storms and rain so it should have cleared a bit, and the more you go in and out the more it clears it.

Aside from learning to steer, the most fun thing for me was looking at all the other boats.  Like houses, they cover the full range of money, class, styles and tastes.  Hire boats are usually fairly traditionally painted and neat.  Then there are the serious hobby people whose boats are beautifully traditionally painted and lovingly restored.  There’s a kind of hierarchy of authenticity/grit, starting from the bottom with hire boats, then the weekend boater (people who have their own boat but don’t live on it), then people who live on their boat but have a permanent mooring (that’s us) and finally at the top of the cool hierarchy are continuous cruisers who have to keep moving and don’t have a base to moor up at. All boaters have to pay a licence fee to the Canal and River Trust and they provide toilet emptying and water points along the canals.

Continuous cruisers have to move their boats regularly to comply with the regulations of the Canal and River Trust, this can be as often as every two weeks, but they can sometimes stay put for weeks or even months, depending on the area and the frequency of warden patrols.  Continuous cruiser boats will have a wheelbarrow and often a bicycle on the roof as well as firewood and/or sacks of solid fuel.  Wheelbarrows are useful for carrying the toilet cassette, collecting firewood etc, and the bicycle is for cycling back to get your car if you have one.  Often there’s plants and pot plants on the roof and deck.  Some boats are neat and tidy, some look more lived in, some cluttered, one looked like a hoarders’ boat.  We saw one with loads of firewood including a huge log wrapped up that would need chainsawing, and another with loads of sacks of coal on the roof and extra gas bottles and water butts outside.  Fully prepped…  Especially if you don’t have a car, it’s good to be stocked up. There’s also a fuel boat, we met ours the other day, they come every month selling solid fuel, firewood, kindling and gas bottles.  We are fortunate we also have a yard selling fuel and gas over the road- we stocked up via wheelbarrow when we first got home before the car was MOTd and insured.

We saw many boats we coveted, from big wide beam Dutch barges to cute little ones, which would be so easy to steer and move but small to live on.  I liked a smart little shiny burgundy boat, a little dark green boat called Wilson, as well as a grey undercoat punk boat, and an eccentric looking one aptly named The Shed.  We saw one with the roof hand-painted in silver glitter, the doors decorated in mauve glitter.

My husband was a continuous cruiser when I met him, he travelled up and down a stretch of the Grand Union Canal around Watford, Hemel Hempstead and Rickmansworth, within easy reach of his children in North London and his work on the M25.  He had regular mooring points he used, all with their own advantages, one might be nearer to work, another near a shop or launderette, one near a water point, all had to be near somewhere to park the car. One was near a field with horses and in the mornings the horses would come down to the water’s edge and enjoy the water, dipping their heads in it and splashing the water about. Living on a boat is fun enough, taking it out adds a whole other layer of fun.  Knowing you didn’t have a base and just kept moving felt like a romantic prospect on a sunny day, but I am sure it would feel less so in the middle of winter when the ropes are frozen and it’s moving day or you’ve run out of water.

Photo of iced buns consequences

This is the photo where I realised the iced buns* had caught up with me.   Since then, no bread, no pasta, no rice, no noodles, and absolutely no iced buns.  In a week or two I’ll have another photograph taken and hopefully see a slight difference. This random aside is inspired by Bryntin who wrote a very funny post about  how, having written one post about losing weight and tagged it ‘weight loss,’ he suddenly got 10% more followers; albeit ones that may only be interested in weight loss and therefore find that the rest of the blog is not quite what they’re looking for.  If that’s you, Welcome anyway!

*possibly Greggs vegan sausage rolls had something to do with it.  They’ve been in the news again this week, cited as the cause of a fight between two women in a Greggs store (fighting over the last one).  Although this may turn out not to be true after all, who knows

The swan has returned with their mate and eight cygnets!  The family came by for the first time a few days ago and were fed and admired, before continuing on their way.  They passed by again presumably on their way home that evening, most of the cygnets were having a ride inside underneath the wing feathers of one of the adults.  As I was writing this they came by again and were photographed, above.  They have grown a lot already.  Also a new family of ducks with seventeen ducklings has appeared; together with the new born lambs everywhere things feel very Spring like.  Although this being the UK temperatures have randomly plummeted as I write this….

Thank you very much for reading

 

 

 

Pushkar Part 3

Tags

acceptance, everything possible, Hello to the Queen, India, Music, Pushkar, Rajasthan, sab kuch milega, Self image, Travel, Travel memoir, Travelling, writing

I loved Pushkar, home to Babas, gorgeous looking cows, and fun monkeys.  We were in Pushkar Oct-Nov 2018 as part of a year of travel.  I am writing a personal travel memoir.  Extract from draft book chapter:

Sab kuch milega (everything possible):  Pushkar, Rajasthan, India

In the masala dosa restaurant, my husband saw two older ‘hardcore hippies,’ you could describe them as, looking disdainfully at two younger travellers, apparently judging them.  We talked about our dear friend DW, one of the coolest people we know, but who outwardly looks perfectly ordinary.  But if you underestimate him, more fool you.  He doesn’t care.  He is not interested in so-called cool people identifying him.  ‘Style is saying who you are without words,’  is an often quoted phrase.

It’s a tempting idea, but it doesn’t work for me.  ‘Saying who you are without words’ usually means just emphasising the cool aspects.  So I’d emphasise the writing, go about all in black with a sleek laptop and a cool Moleskine notebook?  Or emphasise the yoga, the meditation and the spirituality?  Why not emphasise my anxiety or OCD?  Show it all.  Or none of it.  Be plain, and more fool people if they write you off based on that?

In Pushkar I read a blog post by Adie about therapy, about the ‘places’ we inhabit.  The place where everything is bad and nothing is good.  The place where everything is good and nothing is bad; ‘unicorns farting rainbows.’  People who get into spirituality can get stuck there.  The functional place is the ‘And And place,’ not all good, not all bad.  Our friend at the guesthouse said that on the television news everything awful is reported, all the hideous crimes from all over India.  He said that he watches it all, to know that there is bad. ‘I know there is everything,’ he said.

For a couple of nights our neighbours were a young Indian couple, they played music loud at midnight, one am.  ‘They do that thing that young people do, not playing a whole song,’ as my husband said, making it more annoying.  The guesthouse staff told them to be quieter, he said to us, ‘I told them, the British, they like to go to sleep at 9.30!’  Which wasn’t true but it was quieter after that!

At the same time, Des* on WordPress wrote post about how his daughter aged twenty five had phoned up to tell him that she listened to a whole Beatles album all the way through and that she understood the context, the time, etc, from listening to the whole album rather than single songs.  Des wrote that it was unusual for a young person to listen to a whole album, and that individual songs apparently only have a 48% chance of being listened to all the way through!  I hadn’t really realised it was ‘a thing’ until then, although once I started thinking about it I realised that my stepdaughter did the same.

The next evening my husband and I went to a nice restaurant for what felt like a date night, just beyond where the women sold beaded jewellery on the pavement.  There was a green garden with lights, and unusually they had alcohol and eggs openly on the menu.  I had two mojitos and a whole pizza made in a wood oven (no cheese).  They played REM- Automatic for the people, they played it all the way through.  I used to have that album and listen to it a lot.  It has the track Everybody Hurts, which was a real life call back to Sick and Tired in Delhi.  Then they played The Beatles Help all the way through too.

Everywhere we went in India we had seen a dessert called ‘Hello to the Queen’ on the menu.  Once in Kerala we did look up what it was- biscuit, toffee, banana, cream and ice cream- but we had never succumbed to temptation.  In Kerala I had read that India said it was Israeli, Israel denied it.  I wondered, why deny such a wonderful thing, why not want to say you’d invented it, like the pavlova rivalry of Australia and New Zealand?  But it’s not in Israel, it’s only in India.  Like Gobi Manchurian, sometimes called Gobi 65, an Indian interpretation of Chinese food, not found in China, or indeed anywhere outside India.

I read two versions of the creation story, one, I’d read when we first looked up what it was in Kerala, was that an Israeli chef had been smoking marijuana and got the munchies, and invented this dessert!  The second I read in Pushkar sitting in the mojito restaurant, where it was also on the menu, and I wanted to refresh my memory.  The one I found then was slightly different, it said it was an Israeli customer who asked the chef to bring this, add this, add this and this, and ‘Hello to the Queen’ was born.  Best of all, on this version, it said it was invented in Pushkar!

By this time, we’d decided to abandon our vegan principles for one night and try it, just once.  ‘Wow,’ I said, ‘how amazing, that when we finally decide to give in and try it, we are in Pushkar, where it was invented!’

I still think it was amazing that we decided to give in and try it while we were in Pushkar, but it’s perhaps not such surprise that it was invented there, given that Pushkar is very popular with Israelis and has lots of marijuana!

We ordered one Hello to the Queen and one pancake with banana and Nutella to share.  It didn’t disappoint.  On the way home I bought Dark Fantasy biscuits (our regular near-as-dammit vegan biscuits) AND a family size bar of Dairy Milk (which most certainly is not.)  When I fall off the wagon, I really fall off it.  ‘Everything’s a gateway drug for you,’ my husband said, referring to my descent from mojitos to cigarettes to chocolate…

If you are interested in India check out Broken Traveller here is a link to Incredible India Unity in Diversity with beautiful photographs

*Also check out this post by Des The beginning and end of a survival blog, inspirational and a great read

About the author

Sold house left job decluttered almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK and living on a narrowboat.  Writing a book about everything…

For more photographs of the trip see Instagram travelswithanthony