The Anecdotes

After leaving home and traveling Asia for six years, I'm still here on the Happiness Hike. Here are my anecdotes and thoughts from a bohemian (pitiable?) existence. At the end of May I was living in Goa, India, where I'd been for six months trying to write a non-fiction book that never became, and learning computing. When my visa ran out it was time to leave...

The story so far...

Internal Index

Leaving Goa

Goan hard-sell methods are becoming surreal; and why the Japanese all go insane in Calangute. Can initiative go too far?

The Indian Election

Could technology harm democracy?

Death at Any Time

When The Indian Electricity Company nearly kills me, will it teach me to value life more - or send me as mad as the Japanese?

Polystyrene Nightmare

How packing material became terribly significant in my life --- OR --- The day I realised I was certifiably pathetic.

Belgian French Fries

Why the UN abuse men.

Kathmandu Rat Experiment

How the low standards of Nepalese Electricity can teach us about happiness.

Before I left Goa, things became so surreal. Firstly, a beer manufacturer held a festival in the open air with free beer, entertainment etc. Well, they made these huge models, maybe ten bottles made of plastic, each one around fifteen feet high, then 20 foot crisp packets and giant sandwiches, so it all looked like one huge party that you could see from miles away. Of course, typical of Indians, when the festival ended they just took the tents away and left the models in the middle of the rice fields. It's so weird when you're driving back from the Capital. You go along a road in the middle of nowhere and there are these huge cans and sandwiches strewn about the middle of a paddy field. People just arriving who had no knowledge of the festival probably think there are 500-foot giant Indians.

Not only that, it gets worse. All around Calangute there are various people trying to sell things like trinkets or get you into the hotel, restaurants, or whatever. Well, last year I was walking along and a man ran up saying "Sir, sir, there's soap in your ear". I thought, cripes, it must be from shaving. Well he wiped it all out and then tried to sell me a boat tour.

Later, sitting in the cold-bar drinking sodas, I saw him wiping soap out of lots of tourists' ears. It was just a scam; he realised there are so many people calling to foreigners "come here, buy this, mister, hey, hey" that he came up with a novel way to get peoples' attention.

O.K. so he showed initiative, but come this year and it wasn't even funny. Everybody in Calangute trying to sell something is using a variant of this scam. About half use the soap trick, the other half have thought up something new. But it's so weird. You're walking down the street and there are people everywhere calling that there's soap in your ear, your shoelaces are undone, there's a cockroach on your back, or a hundred other possibilities. Imagine some 50-year-old tourist just landed for a two-week break from Tokyo. On the way from the airport he sees giant beer cans littering the paddy fields, walking to the hotel, hundreds of the locals are calling warnings to him that are plainly untrue. He stumbles into his hotel, maniacally brushing invisible cockroaches off his back and retying his already tied shoelaces. He must think he's landed into a nation of lunatics.

There's to be an Indian election soon. I noticed they're installing electronic voting machines. Indian elections are the most contested in the world, so on each machine there are maybe eighty buttons, one for each party. I thought that was so awful, no? I mean you don't have the right to spoil your ballot paper. What if you want to make a statement that you don't like any of the candidates? There's no way for you to express that. Unless you blew the machine up.

I left from Margao to travel North to Kathmandu. I'll tell you a funny, or not so funny, thing that happened to me in Delhi on the way. I was in a rickshaw going back to the hotel when it suddenly screeched to a halt and the driver screamed, then turned and gaped at me with a look of pure terror. I don't think I've ever seen anyone so scared. He leaped out and dragged me into a clothes shop. I peered out while he tried to pull me back by my shirt. Everybody was running and when I looked up, one of the electric power lines was throwing off sparks. I thought, Oh, so what. Those sparks wouldn't have hurt us. Talk about an over-reaction... Well, maybe not. The line then exploded and the two halves fell to the floor, sparking and randomly jumping all over the road - like mad snakes. I was about to write I've never seen anything like it but I've been in India so long I don't think I'll ever be able to say that again.

Anyway, there I stand, surrounded by people in a shop - while the road has now been emptied because of the sparking lines that, by the dreadful faces of the people around me, are obviously death-traps to anyone who ventures near. Nobody calls the electric company, it's India, they'd arrive next month; yet no one dare go and catch the wires. A shopkeeper from across the road decides to solve the problem. He sends a screaming eight year old boy with a pair of rubber handled pliers, to catch the wires and throw them up to tangle with all the other wires where everyone can forget about them. Of course the boy doesn't want to go but changes his mind after his head is banged against the wall a few times. Jesus, that kid nearly died before he managed it. When we drove away, I asked the driver how he knew the wires would fall like that, and he said it happens all the time! God, I'm in a mad place.

I just remembered something else, when I was leaving Goa I drove past an accident involving three cars. None apparently hit each other but there were tire marks everywhere and all three cars were upside down on their roofs. Can you imagine that? It must have been a near miss and the lunatics all swerved so hard they just... well... ended up upside down.

Polystyrene Nightmare

Before I left Goa, I bought huge strips of polystyrene, two inches thick, to wrap up my typewriter. The cost of sending it all the way to Nepal was just $3. When I'd finished making the parcel there were hundreds of those little white balls all over the floor, they looked like snow. I tried to pick them up but they were charged with static electricity. Everytime I put my hand near them they'd all roll away. After a few days, the girl cleaned the room. She couldn't pick them up either and so brushed them out and down the stairs, thinking to sweep them into the garden...
...Maybe a fifth went in the garden. The rest just rolled everywhere, under tables, into the kitchen, just everywhere. I apologised, she said it didn't matter, and I went out to eat.

In the restaurant, I saw a couple of people who are staying at my hotel and I kept noticing they had white balls on them, mostly on the legs but a little on the arms. The next day I went to pay the rent and the lady was brushing the balls out the dog's fur. It became a nightmare. I'd go to restaurants a week later where I'd never been before, and people I have never met and don't live near would have a ball or two stuck on them somewhere. I've even brought this hell with me; they must have been in my bag. Thousands of miles away in a new room, I'm still finding them on the floor. It's not as bad here. It's only in this hotel, my room and reception that I see them, yet I've only been here a week and I'm worried it shall spread. I'll go to the GPO one day and the lady serving me is going blind from a ball that got stuck into her eye.

Actually, that reminds me of a book I have here in Kathmandu. I don't want it but I have it. It's 'Catch 22' by Joseph Heller. I brought it to read on the train, but I hated it - so boring. When I vacated the train at Delhi I left it there on the sleeper-bed, but the guard ran after me thinking it was forgotten. I tried to leave it at the hotel but the boy ran after me. I couldn't even leave the damned curse on the plane because the hostess ran after me. Maybe I should just accept that for the rest of my life both the book and the balls shall be following me.

French Fries

I saw a boy dressed up as a packet of chips today. He was walking down the street giving out leaflets to advertise a Belgian fast-food restaurant, in Kathmandu, and was dressed up as a packet of French fries. He looked so embarrassed. All the money the UN sends to make sure young females don't get sucked into a life of prostitution because of their poverty. No one thinks of the poor boys also in poverty, forced into a life of dressing up as French fries.

Animal Experiments

All the wiring in Kathmandu is ruined. When it rains you get an electric shock through your feet. As soon as the ground becomes wet, everyone goose-steps home like rats in an experiment. I always think it's like life, it hurts us most of the time so we scurry aimlessly, not thinking where we're going as long as we go somewhere. If we fixed the wires we could all stay where we are and be happy.

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