To My Homies

Hello to everyone listening (both of you), and welcome to this special Christmas blog entry, brought to you in honour of Christ our Lord from Varanasi, holy city of the....Hindu faith. Actually, before I make too many jokes of that nature, Varanasi contains a healthy mix of many different cultures - the streets are full of travellers, Tibetan Buddhists, Nepalese market-stall owners, Sikhs and, of course, Hindus. Today we visited the Muslim quarter and this eve we'll jiggle our way across town atop a cycle-rickshaw to witness Christmas mass at the huge edifice of St. Mary's (just like home). First, though, I've got a blog to do, and more than a few days to cover...perhaps only tardy grammar and poor sentence construction can get me to the church on time.

An advance warning: this spesh Crimbo blob will contain mesages at the end to certain members of friends and family. If you belong to neither of these two categories and are, so to speak, an imposter (you know who you are) - or if you simply wish to bail out before the soppiness kicks off - I will provide notification prior to our arrival in schmaltz central.

When I last left you, I was crouched in terror behind the desk in Tala's only internet cafe, warily scanning the darkness behind the lounging locals, waiting for a tiger to come bounding out of the gloom. Well, it turns out that they're not quite so obliging in providing you with a sighting. 6am Wednesday morning and the first few rays of sunlight catch what appears to be two huge penguins, moving with difficulty across the lawn of the Mogli Jungle Resort. In fact, these two pathetic specimens are one Dixie Hawtin and another Peter Beech, intrepid explorers bent on catching tigers in their natural habitat. During a whispered pre-dawn conference, they have solemnly and jitteringly decided to wear almost every item of clothing they own. Hey, Bandavgarh at 6am was a cold place. Colder than the moon, probably. Ernest Shackleton would have cried off to his mammy and stayed in bed.

Obstacle two: not ten minutes after rolling ourselves aboard our Gypsy jeep, the safari experience has ground to a decidedly unintrepid halt just outside the gates of the Bandavgarh National Park entrance. 15 jeepfuls of expectant amateurs (Dixie and I snort and adjust our monacles) are queued up around us. It seems that a group of farmers from local villages are barring the entrance, protesting about the behaviour of the Park when, years ago, it absorbed their land like a white blood cell ingesting bacterium (or something). They want jobs, or revised compensation, or justice. Or they might be protesting about water. Nobody seems to know. Perhaps they're protesting for the sheer love of protesting. Already feeling the fatigue, we debate whether or not to open our packed lunch. Exploring is a tough business.

The stalemate is cracked when the guides waiting inside the park for their customers signal something to the waiting drivers. Goram, our driver, is the first to twig. With all the stealth available to a diesel engine, we sidle an innocent fifteen yards along the fence. There, some park workers are already unlacing the eight foot wire fence that separates us from our tigery nirvana. Others join in. Within minutes, a flood of guides and drivers are tugging hard for their livelihood. One man falls over with half of the fence in his hand - the stone is rolled. Our engine roars, we jerk forward, and Goram is first in.

Dixie and I pointedly do not look at the faces of the dispossessed farmers as we streak past into the reserve. We try to content ourselves with reasoning - the guides have to eat as well, we've paid an awful lot of money, but somehow we can't quite mask a distinct twinge of guilt. A protest must be so hard to pull off in India.

The first half of the morning session unfortunately never lives up to the adrenaline rush we got first thing, stamping on the small dreams of little people. We saw a few boars, some red-arsed monkeys (a Latin term), a multitude of spotted deer, some stags, even an elephant plodding in placid massiveness along a jeep-trail, but certainly no Tony the tiger, nor any of his cuddly, ultraviolent brothers. We had to wait until we'd reached central point, wolfed a few sandwiches, doused ourselves in tea and screamed back along route B (pursuing a lead) to catch our first glimpse. And there it was, burning bright, in the forest of the night (day). I was impressed immediately by the colour of the thing. It was practically luminous, a sea of ochre monkey-buttocks, waggling mockingly, could not compare. Sometime, somewhere, I had picked up the idea that wild animals were designed to blend in with their surrounding, to camouflage for purposes of hunting and defence. Not so here. A certain cosmic arrogance has gone into the making of the tiger. It is as if nature has produced something so massively powerful that it disdains to blend in. Hypnotic; enigmatic; actually they even look a bit camp, padding tremendously through the undergrowth like that, dragqueens of the animal kingdom. But they are absolutely massive, so I suppose they can wear what they want.

I was surprised, even incredulous to learn that the three tigers we spotted that morning, and again in the afternoon, were only cubs of 10-11 months old. They were, I would estimate using Dixie's pictures (caught up in the excitement, a have several fascinating shots of leaves, the floor of the jeep and the sky, but, alas, very few tigers), about 10 feet from nose to tip. It was with growing fascination and amusement that we watched, also, the antics of the jeep drivers vying to provide for their customers the best shot of the animals. The efforts can prove frustrating, when, for instance, you have wrenched, full-locked and craned your way to within three metres of some yawning beast, only for you to find yourself, one engine rev later, staring at the back of a tourist's head as the Star Hotel vehicle comes sailing into the gap. This all, mind, on tracks built for one jeep at a time. Around ten jeeps were jostling in the vicinity of our morning sighting - one reversing up the bank, one careering into the vegetation, one stuck in the sand as the driver curses all the gods and his passengers look on, bemused. It is little wonder that the tigers are so proud of themselves, when their every move is followed by a chorus of whinnying engines.

You probably, to be honest, don't want to hear about the particulars of our transfer to Varanasi once our safari day was over. There probably isn't much to say, save that we were very sad to leave the Mogli Resort behind. It was run in-part by a lovely English couple, who had been living in India for 3 years and had a lot of Hindi to teach us, of the sort you don't find in the guidebooks. Our train from Katny (2nd worst station in terms of theft in India) to Varanasi(worst station in terms of theft in India) took 12 1/2 hours to travel 400km - it should have been 8. Our situation wasn't helped by the fact that we followed some delightfully friendly chaps onto the wrong locomotive and had to leg it onto the correct one at a crossover. One of these days, I swear, we'll get the trains right.

Varanasi, despite all the horror stories we received from whey-faced, shuddering travellers, despite all the tales of dung and duplicity, has been brilliant. We were picked up at the station by a bloke on a bike from our hotel, the Yogi Lodge ('Do NOT speak to anyone, do NOT go with anyone', he warned on the phone), and spent the rest of the day on the ghats - the steps down to the Ganga/Ganges. Yes, we saw the burning ghats, where Hindus cremate their loved ones - it is said that someone cremated in this holiest of places attains instant enlightenment and freedom from the cycle of reincarnation - and the experience was both harrowing and uplifting, organic somehow. After cremation ('burning is learning, cremation is education', prattle the local touts in a bid to extract a 'donation'), the ashes are scraped into the Ganga and after that they just...sort of...wash away, mixed with the ashes of others. At any one time, twenty four hours a day, around eight cremations will be occurring simultaneously on this one ghat alone (I think there are three burning ghats in total). Fifteen yards from where the grieving families crowd, an Untouchable will be carefully trepanning the shoreline for gold teeth and jewellery - India!

Later, we were cornered by a smooth-talker and guilt-tripped into buying trousers (it still happens, over one month in). I am now the proud owner of some absolutely ridiculous Aladdin/MC Hammer-style threads, complete with pendulous, knee-level crotch (the trousers). Defiantly, I'm continuing to wear them, simply because I don't want to admit that I was sweet-talked into buying something I don't like, but really I'm dying inside. One other, even sadder piece of news is that my guitar didn't completely survive our 'Indiana Jones meets the Chuckle Brothers' train leap at Umaria. A few days ago, I picked it up and it started to make a hideous racket. Then I remembered it was because I can't even play the damn thing. A short inspection later, however, and - alas! - there's a crack where the spine meets the body. I've given it to an Indian bloke to mend, in the hope that it won't come back with sellotape on.

!!!Christmas soppiness alert!!!

Many happy returns to anyone who is reading this. Friends: Shackleton hope the art's going well, Joel hope the pecs are going well, Charl hope you haven't crashed your car or got stuck in a parking space. Mary stop pretending and do some work. To anyone else, sorry I can't be more specific, there's a mildly impatient Frenchman waiting for my computer.

And the fam! Merry Christmas to kith and kin all over England. You may even be reading this at the annual Beech-Nuttall-Langham-Price Crimbo scrimmage, in which case I'll do it properly: Merry Christmas Beeches (that's 'George Harrison Senior', 'Rod/Hyacinth', 'the Doc' and Al Gore), to Uncie Pete and Pete P, to Grandma and Al, Auntie Linda, Uncle Neil, Beth, Joe, Grace, the rabbit, Tiny Tim, Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch. A special Boxing Day Merry Christmas, too, to Grandma and Grandad Beech - save those chocs, I'll have some when I get back! Missing you all this Christmas time, hope you all have a lovely festive season and have been enjoying these accounts of my travels so far. Dixie sends her love. God bless us, every-one!

Right, that's quite enough of that.