mental status

Life isn’t easy you know, especially when i try to make the most of it all the time. Traveling really fucks with my head and im at the point now where nothing’s clear...whats up…whats down…I haven’t a clue…I don’t believe a thing. People are always so jealous when tell them im going traveling, but they don’t even know…it aint no fucking cake walk out there…especially not in fucked up, poor as shit, super over populated countries like India, where its hard to even find something decent to eat. Its like going to these places and seeing how messed up and doomed the world is and then having to carry that burden around for the rest of your life isn’t easy…its down right fucking depressing is what it is…and then you have this guilt on top of it…cause everyone’s so jealous and you feel like you owe them something for all your misery and burdens and sicknesses.
I mean sure, I had plenty of good times traveling and im going to keep traveling cause im a curious person and im a photographer, so im always looking for something new, but it doesn’t mean im a happier person because of it or that its won me any friends or anything like that…in fact the opposite…I don’t think have more than a dozen left anymore…I mean real friends…people that actually fucking care…with all these vanishing acts and seemingly selfish ways…no one even knows who I am anymore…and especially not me.
Sure, im still a nice guy, and I always try to act cheerful and optimistic when people are around and say everything is great and all, but on the inside…the lake is drying up…ive lost my appetite…but at least im honest. My bodies been abused, my minds all confused… the only thing left to do now is try and keep on keeping on…maybe ill write a song and just keep moving along…life is really short and the end keeps getting closer…and the more I travel the faster ill find out where that is. You know i saw my reflection the other day…and seriously, i looked mad…sometimes its scary how close I get…looking over the edge…into the great expanse…its tempting…but im not there.
Its like, the people in india have no respect, they’ve trashed everything they can manage and nobody even cares…seriously…nobody…not even me…and I cant wait till were gone. learning all these things and seeing all these places just makes me callous…cause you have to be when your traveling or your not going to last…its like the greatest lesson ive learned is indifference…and how depressing is that. Its hard you know, meeting all these amazing people, seeing all these amazing places, and knowing youll never see them again…and its all just empty and its all just a memory and some pictures and a new more dismal perspective on the whole stinking mess of it. So speak to me not of jealousy…and figure it out for yourself…in the words of john lennon…”I found out”…and you can too. code

delhi...again

We left chandigar after two days, a long stay at this point in our journey, and took our last bus ride of the journey back to good old delhi…my least favorite place in India by far. On the way there we passed the delhi dump that was absolutely disgusting and reeking of India…one of the worst smelling places perhaps in the world…I generally refer to delhi as smelhi. Anyways, we ended up getting food poisoning on our last day in chandigar so we were feeling pretty fucking shitty as you could imagine after all the traveling and mayhem that we had endured over the last few months.
The delhi pollution, chaos, and heat didn’t make things any easier, but we still ventured out to the red fort for some last minute sight seeing…non of which I enjoyed cause the whole time I felt like was going to fall over die. We bought one more mini guitar in old delhi so cow headstand can keep practicing while were apart and ate nothing but fruit and water for the last couple of days cause everything else made us want to barf. I lucked out and had a flight home a day before ian, who had to endure one more miserable day in delhi. The only nice thing about being back there was the place that we stayed, the first place that we stayed in India, where we had become friends with the guesthouse boys and could go up on the roof at sunset and thank god that it was finally over…and we had endured…and saw some of the most amazing things of our lives and had taken some big risks and made it out okay.
It was awesome getting to spend three months with ian, my only and dearest brother …something we haven’t been able to do since he graduated from high school and moved to new york almost a decade ago. Its funny that it took all the way to India to bring us back together, but it finally happened, and were closer than ever, and for this I am most grateful, and if nothing else, the trip was worth it for that alone. Love you bro, thanks for all the good times. code

Chandigar

The next day we headed off to chandigar, the capital city of Punjab, and an interesting place because its was a planned city from the ground up, designed by some swiss architect or something. It was unlike any other Indian city that we went to, it was organized with huge outdoor shopping malls and redundant architecture that made it super easy to get lost despite large maps everywhere with breakdowns of each sector that were organized numerically…it was like out of some science fiction novel or something…a little impersonal to say the least.
There were lots of western corporate stores like nike and shit and girls that wore tight pants and modern fashions and good book stores and all that. The largest rose garden in asia was there, and was very pleasant and romantic being spring and all. It was a great place to go to reacclimatize to western living right before the end of our trip and I think it worked, considering how smooth the re entry was on this occasion compared to my southeast asia trip.
The most note worthy thing about chandigar though was this colossal rock garden that some nut started building over fifty years ago all from salvaged materials. The place is enormous and intricate and bizarre, with beautiful waterfalls, narrow passage ways, massive mosaics, swings, thousands of sculptures, and about a million pounds of concrete. It was a real fantasy land…nothing like ive ever really seen…insane and genius and fun, all at the same time.

amritsar, the golden temple, and the border

We packed up the following day and bused off to amritsar in the Punjab province to check out the golden temple and the only border crossing between India and Pakistan. We arrived unknowingly to the largest Sikh festival of the year called holla mohalla and a city fully booked with pilgrims. It seemed hopeless, but we eventually came across a room after hours of searching and nearly reaching the point of killing the next person who asked what country we were from. Things chilled out though, and we walked through the crowd over to the golden temple to check it out.
The place was absolutely amazing, Sikhs are some of the most beautiful and enchanting people ive ever met. They broke off from the hindus in the 17th century to escape from the caste system and were nearly wiped off the planet by the Indian government when their numbers reached a mere ten thousand. Today their number are back into the millions, but they haven’t forgotten their bloody past and to this day still carry weapon such as daggers, axes, and swords with them at all times. There an wonderful looking people, straight out of another era, carrying ancient weapons, wearing turbins and colorful robes, huge beards, and hair that they never cut worn in buns on the tops of their heads.
To enter the golden temple, the holiest place of the Sikhs, one must remove all socks and shoes and cover their heads with a turbin or hat. Upon entering the temple everyone walks through foot pools to wash their feet. I witnessed the act of many people drinking the foot water as they walked through, as the water is considered holy…more like disgusting if you ask me. What is it with holy shit that makes people go fucking nuts and do the most retarded things.
Anyways, the complex itself was magnificent, and made almost entirely of white marble, blinding in the mid day sun, and revolved around a large central square lake used for bathing. Pilgrims would walk around the lake clockwise, stopping to bath and pray along the way, or drink more of the nasty water, bathed in by millions. The golden temple itself jutted out into the lake, and thousands of people would stand in line waiting to get in. along the outside of the lake there were many different shrines and where monks read from scriptures and conducted elaborate ceremonies. There was an amazing and gruesome museum also on the premises depicting the brutal history of the Sikhs with rooms filled from floor to ceiling of amazing portraits of bearded men in turbins, often wearing sunglasses.
The golden temple feeds an estimated 40,000 pilgrims a day in a huge industrialized kitchen that we tried out. We stood in line with everyone else and collected our plates and bowls and whatnots and then squeezed through the doors moshpit style and sat cross legged on the ground in rows of hundreds of people, we were the only tourists in the place jammed with easily over a thousand and it made for a very unique dinning experience. Servers would walk down the rows efficiently slopping out dahl, handing over chapattis, and throwing rice down with their hands…it was quite delicious actually, and we were starving, so we appreciated it immensely and it was totally free and without a doubt the strangest dinning experience of my life.
The following day we hung out at the golden temple some more and then in the afternoon caught a microvan out to attari, the only border crossing between Pakistan and Indian, where thousands of people show up everyday to watch a hilarious ceremony conducted by the soldiers and cheer for their countries. The ride out I sat bitch with the stick between my legs, the whole time trying not to get my nuts jammed by the drivers fierce motions to get it in gear. The place was real zoo, with more moshing Indian men and flag wavers and kids selling dvds of the event and popcorn and shouting and whatnots. The tourists got “vip” seating which kept us out of the mobs, but wasn’t that great of a view. We also had to sit facing into the squelching hot sun the whole time and really couldn’t tell for shit what was happening…but occasionally we saw the clownish soldiers go flying by in full on speed walking spazz, mocking towards the border before promptly stopping and throwing the most hilarious straight leg high kicks ever…and that was pretty much that. code

holi

Holi is the famous festival of colors in India where people buy bags of powdered paint, get wasted, play music, and cover each other is clouds of pigment. We decided to leave Buddhist dharamasala for the hindi occasion and headed to the small city of kangra a couple hours away. It was great little town with one of the most amazing temples weve been to…it had a giant banyon tree in it covered in ribbons and bangles, an assortment of shrines devoted to various deities, a crap ton of monkeys, checkerboard marble flooring, and a spectacular view of the snow capped Himalayas.
On the actual day of holi we put on our worst clothing and headed to the streets with our stash of red, green, and yellow paints. It was only a matter of minutes before the first group of men kindly accosted us over breakfast, applying paint to our faces, making for a colorful meal. We were two of the only tourists in kangra, so once we got hit, and they saw our stash of paints, they knew we were game, and it was a pretty much nonstop barrage of men covering us in paint for the rest of the day…women don’t pariticipate in the festival so much caused the men get too wasted and end up groping them…gross, I know. Regardless, it was still fun, and most of the people were respectful, and things were conducting in a friendly manner. I had brought a waterproof camera for the event, which worked out nicely, I think, none of the images have been processed yet, but it would have been suicide bringing out my expensive camera, which I attempted for the first few minute, before realizing its uselessness.
There was a fort a few k out of town that we decided to walk to for something to do. Along the road, motor bikers covered in paint would pass by and wave, often stopping to cover us in more paint before sending us along our way. There were lots of parties with people playing music and joining in on the festivities and begging us to come join them. We made it to the fort, that was geographically spectacular, it was basically built on the cliff side of an island surrounded by rivers and more cliffs and beautiful mnts. From there we wandered back through the village and passed though some more rowdy parties where we were basically forced to dance around and play music for their entertainment…but it was fun anyways.
We ripped ourselves away from the crowds and eventually made it back to town as the festival was starting to die down covered head to toe in paint that started out as beautiful streaks of colors and ended in one giant smeared purplish pink tone. We got some pictures back at the room and packed away our clothes to remember the occasion. There wasn’t any hot water at the hotel, so we froze trying to clean ourselves off, washing off layer upon layer of endless pigment away the best we could, but it still ended up dying our hands and hair and got stuck in our ears for the next week to come.

Dharamsala/mcleod ghang

Mchleod gang is the town outside of dharamasala where the dalai lama lives in exile from Tibet. It just so happens that the Chinese have been occupying the country since 1949 when they waged war against Tibet, breaking an ancient peace code that lasted over a thousand years. Since, Tibetans have been fleeing the country on foot having to climb over the Himalayas to do so…many suffering from frost bite and dying along the journey. Many Tibetans are still fleeing their homeland and seeking refuge in countries such as India, Nepal, Bhutan, and some westerns as well. The summer Olympics in china have heated up the tensions between Tibetans and Chinese and mass protests have been conducted in the last weeks that have ended in bloodshed in Tibet…a country known for their peaceful protesting. China is denying that they have used any force, but they’ve been conducting a genocide of the Tibetan people for almost sixty years now so don’t believe it.
Here is mcleod gang, large scale peaceful demonstrations have been going on for the past couple of days, and last night a press conference was held with the dalai lama discussing the situation. The people here are really pumped up, chanting we want justice, we want freedom, long live the dalai lama, no more torture, no more killing, china china china out out out…and so on. It was a real thrill to see the crowds of protesters stomping up the streets at us last night and trying to get a video clip and not get knocked down…people were being careful though and no one was hurt and all that…but it was no joking around, and I wasn’t about to get the way.
Its mostly young people marching the streets, but there’s a lot of monks and a few elderly and babies and whatnots, including a handful of tourists. The young men were the most intimidating, often shirtless, with their bodies and faces painted with statements and fake blood. Some had even shackled themselves to look like tortured prisoners, but most just wore whatever and carried flags and banners instead. It’s a small town, so I can still hear the chants and protests that have been going for the past few days…the people are very dedicated and some are even on hunger strikes staked out in front of the dalai lama’s compound… waiting for answers.
At the press conference, the dalai lama didn’t seem to have any. He commented on the weather to start and spoke of his retirement…I think he’s just as fed up as the rest of his people with the whole mess…he said this is wrong history, wouldn’t it be nice be somewhere else…and I agree…the way things seem to be working out. Tibetans are perhaps the holiest, most peaceful, and beautifully cultured people on the planet…but on a planet like this, those things don’t seem to earn you much respect with your neighbors…and what does the rest of the world do…sit around and worry about their time and money…the two most worthless things in history…it’s like a fucking joke…but nobodies laughing…cause it already too late…and its obvious… so why don’t we do the earth a favor, and never have children. There, I said it…so shoot me…it could be nice. code

mandi

Mandi was a sweet little city on the confluence of two rivers…in India these are always holy places so the town was filled with great temples and bridges and sunken shopping centers and scissors big enough to chop your arms off. We took a day trip out to this holy lake town that was mostly Tibetan and had so many fish in the lake that im sure youd be drown upon falling in…that or have your eyeballs sucked out…they were carp…not very dangerous realistically speaking…but whatever.
Our neighbors back at the guesthouse invited us over for tea and ended up being amazing middle agers from Ireland. They had bought a motorbike upon arrival and were getting around just fine despite all the mad truckers in the mnts and their outstanding 900lbs loads…they were big. Anyways, the guy was one of the og members of mutated waste…some legendary art group from London…whose members I tend to meet in exotic places. The lady was very sweet, and makes a living designing tea cozies…sounds gay right…but she showed us some pictures and they were fucking amazing…all hand knitted and intricate with depictions of heaven and hell and all sorts of other crazy ideas and colors and bangles and whatnots…brilliant beyond words. that’s gotta be one of the best things about traveling…all the crazy motherfuckers you meet along the way…I love it…I have friends all over the world now…it’s a life goal to travel around and visit them all…till then, it’s a lonely road and the unknown. code