We each ordered, and I ordered the Chicken Tikka Masala.  When the food came, the server elegantly slid up beside me and began to serve the food onto my plate as the always do in India, and politely spoke, “Your Butter Chicken, sir.”

“I’m sorry, I ordered the Chicken Tikka.”

“This is the Chicken Tikka, sir.”

Now, I do always take a few days to re-accustom myself to exactly which dish is which, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and let him continue.

Then they began serving my colleague, who had ordered the Chicken Kabab.

“Your Chicken Tikka, madam.”

Overhearing, I jumped in, “But you said this was the Chicken Tikka; she ordered the Kabab.”

“Yes, this is the Chicken Kabab, and you have the Chicken Tikka.”

I began to suspect that we were being held to very flexible and creative rules around what constituted each of our meals, but let the matter go since we were both satisfied with how appealing each of our meals looked, regardless of what we actually ordered.  We enjoyed our meals and left the restaurant.

This afternoon – back at the hotel – I ordered a Vodka Martini.  About 20 minutes later, my server appeared carrying a Manhattan on his tray.  Being a semi-professional drinker, I know my alcohol and this was definitively not a Martini.

“Your Manhattan, sir.”

“I’m sorry, I ordered a Vodka Martini.”

“Yes, sir.  Vodka Martini.  This is a Vodka Martini,” replied the server.

“No, it’s not.”  I showed him the menu and pointed at what I had ordered, the 007 Vodka Martini.

“Yes, Vodka Martini.  Vodka.”

When traveling in foreign countries, sometimes you have to pick your battles.  Besides, his logic that the drink contained vodka was armor clad.

As a matter of fact, I am quite enjoying my Manhattan.

We had a big meeting on Thursday with a client and then took Friday off to see some sites.  First, we went to Bannerghatta National Park.  We arrived early, so we passed the time wandering through the local zoo.

Then we boarded a bus to take into the wildlife preserve in the hopes of spotting elephants, tigers, lions, or cheetahs.  The bus was a rickety old thing that looked like it would topple at the slightest hint of a curve or bump, but that didn’t stop our driver from careening around a bumpy and rutted road that had all the passengers hoping for a quick death.  On more than one occasion it occurred to me that should the bus roll over, it was not in a condition to protect us from the elephants, tigers, lions, or cheetahs which we were so hopefully to see.

We did manage to survive and we did manage to see lions and tigers, including some white tigers which were, not surprisingly,  white.  Tigers look surprisingly cuddly, but my recommendations to my colleagues to go pet one went unheeded.

The next day we jumped in the car and headed out to the Dodda Aalada Mara, or Big Banyan Tree.  This is the fourth-largest tree in India, and covers over three acres.  The tree is inhabited by wild monkeys who are alarmingly comfortable with human presence and are perfectly willing to let you get close enough to take photos of them.  There were babies who were trying to escape their mothers, youngsters picking fights with elders and everything else that would demonstrate we did, in fact, evolve from these smelly, furry little honkers.

This whole thing is nowhere near as glamorous as it seems, though.  Being in India has seriously hampered Birth Month.  And that’s a major problem.  I’m working on a strategy for making up for lost time, but all my requests to the U.S. Government for “Free Money For Being Awesome” are getting rejected saying they’ve given all their free money to “Wall Street”, whatever that is.

There has been some time for relaxing, though.  My birthday was Saturday, and together with my coworkers who are here in India with me, we headed off to one of the old British Hill Stations, Ooty.  The British used to call it, “Snooty Ooty” but I have no idea why, aside from the obvious rhyme.  There must be another reason because most British quips are clever enough that I don’t get it, and I’m assuming this is the same.  It probably has something to do with Cricket.

While I’m on the topic of crap I don’t understand, what is the deal with Cricket?  I’ve watched at least three dozen games during my two visits to India, and I have absolutely no idea how it works.  I keep waiting for the guy to hit a “homer”.

Anyway, the road to Ooty is the worst I’ve ever been on.  Potholes you could loose a herd of Mongolian antelope in.  I think I might be done with road trips in India.  On the other hand, the road passed through a wild-life sanctuary where we got to see monkeys, elephants (captive), buffalo, and peacocks.  The journey concluded by passing over a mountain pass that was remarkably steep and twisty.  If not for the certainty of death by motor-vehicle impact, it would be a perfect road for riding.  What was really freaky for me is that Ooty is so far south that the tree line is crazy high.  The pass was somewhere around 2600 or 2800 meters, and we were still well below the tree line.  In France, the roads we ride have the tree line around 2000 meters; at 2600 meters, you’re on some of the highest roads in Europe and riding through glaciers.

Ooty itself was beautiful.  Nestled into the valley, it has a very strong Tibetan presence since the government of Tamil Nadu has given Tibetan refugees permission to live and work in Ooty.  Between the scenery, the usual Indian city energy, and the Prayer Flags hanging from most buildings, it was an amazing place to visit.

I didn’t notice much difference, that is, until I was walking to my airplane on the last day. As I walked across the tarmac, I noticed that my plane was a rickettey old prop plane which looked like it was held together by masking tape and chewing gum. Wanting to take a picture of the contraption which would surely lead me to my death, I snapped a photo of it. Within seconds, three police officers with machine guns grabbed me and threw me up against a wall. Two of the officers held me at gunpoint while the third took my camera and sifted through my photos and deleted everything he felt was inappropriate for me to have photographed.

Kerala was amazing. The drive to Thekkadi was stunning. We drove through mountains in the jungle, through tea and spice plantations, and through rubber tree farms. We saw people commuting by elephant.

Our hotel in Thekkadi was on an island which we could only get to by boat in the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary which was originally the hunting grounds of the Maharajah of Travancore – and the hotel we stayed in was the palace where the Maharajah stayed while hunting. I can understand why he choose this place: the area was crawling with wildlife: wild boars, deer, buffalo, elephants, tigers, monkeys, eagles, vultures, birds, you name it. We saw no cobras, but we did spot a small water snake. It was quite far away, so it could have been a stick or a weed, but I’m pretty sure it was a snake. Probably poisonous.

We went on a long hike through the jungle where we were followed by monkeys who were trying to get some insider tips on how to be more human. It turns out I am not very good at keeping secrets. By the end of our hike, two of the monkeys had laptops.

Michelle and I rode an elephant called Akbar who I fell completely in love with. I am quite certain he fell in love with me, too. Michelle and I got to feed him after riding him, and he stared at me and leaned his giant head into my face while I pet his trunk. Michelle wouldn’t let me take him home.

We also made friends with an English couple who were on the hike with us. I am frustrated that I don’t have an English accent; I don’t sound anywhere near as clever as they do.

Then it was on to Alleppey where we spent a day and night on a houseboat. The crew cooked us three amazing meals including the largest tiger prawns I have ever seen and fish which were caught by the crew only minutes before being cooked. The crew laid anchor for us along a canal where Michelle and I were able to enjoy one of the most stunning sunsets in the history of the universe.

Then it was on to the Kumarakom lake resort where we spent the last days of our vacation getting spoiled rotten by the staff. The resort was a two hundred year old palace and the woodwork was stunning. Our cottage was on a meandering pool where we read books in the sun and relaxed until we became tense. I wore a dhoti which delighted the staff. Despite looking like a dress, a dhoti is a manly garb.

On the last day, we spent a few hours in Cochin, which used to be Dutch-controlled port. We visisted a Dutch-built cathedral, cemetery, and the old Dutch port. One of my ancestors lived in Cochin when it was controld by the Dutch; it was an amazing oportunity to see the old colonial buildings and imagine how strange it must have felt to arrive there without any idea what to expect and try to start a life.

As delicious as the food in India is, first thing Michelle and I did when we got back to Seattle was get hamburgers and microbrew at Quinn’s Pub on Capital Hill. It was awesome.

Ironically, our first weekend home, the New York Times travel guide featured a section on Kerala and happened to specifically mention the houseboat and lake resort we stayed at: Liquid Assets: A Perfumer Noses Around Kerala.

More NYT travel information on South India:

South India in Two Weeks

In the Land of Four-Star Asceticism

India Travel Guide

We’ll fly into Cochin and travel 5 hours east to Thekkadi where we will spend two nights in a “cottage on an island in a wildlife sanctuary”. Having seen the animals running around the tiny sanctuary in Mysore, this actually scares the bujezuz out of me. Sleeping on an island with this guy as my bunkmate sounds more like “terrifying” than “relaxing”.

India’s national mascot is the King Cobra, the world’s largest venomous snake.  It really bothers me that one of the deadliest animals on the planet is fast over land, can swim, can squiggle into small areas, can move about silently, and can strike accurately and lethally from something like 10 meters away. If it can kill a full-grown elephant with a single bite, the least nature could do is make it super gimpy or blind or something.

One of the managers here in Bangalore is from Kerala and I expressed my concerns about getting up in the middle of the night to stoke the fire only realize that what I thought was the fire poker was actually the business end of a cobra.  He really got a kick out of me being afraid of snakes in the cottage.  “Oh, they make sure there are no snakes in the buildings.  But you should be careful when you go outside or leave the door open.”  Thanks.  That helps.

While staying in the sanctuary, we’ll be going on an elephant safari or some similar activity that seems to border on suicide.  The good news here is that apparently, it’s possible to reattach limbs that get torn off by jungle beasts.  The base assumption here being that you survived the attack.  And even then, I bet it still ruins your trip.

After Thekkadi, we’ll be heading to Alleppey to get on a private houseboat for an overnight tour of the Kerala backwaters, which Conde Naste ranks as one of the ten things everyone should do before they die.  What they forget to mention is that you should time this trip so that you do it before you spend the night in a cottage on Cobra Island in Thekkadi because then it becomes one of the ten things you should have done before you cozied up to a 12 foot venomous snake.

The houseboat will then drop us off at our final destination in Kumarakom where we will have a room on a big lake.  Apparently, this is the place to be this time of year because most of the streams around the area will have dried up by now and all the wildlife will come to the water to drink.

If not, I’ll just use my croc-call to bring ‘em in.

Download audio file (croccall.mp3)

Disclaimer for both our mothers who I’m sure I have scrared half to death with this post: the dangers of this trip have been greatly exaggerated.  This is a very common itenerary and almost no tourists die on these trips.  Usually.

I feel like that’s great progress and I’m actually rather pleased that it happened so quickly.  The downside, however, is that at the end of a long day at work, when I’m tired and cranky, I’m feeling comfortable enough to show my frustration and get annoyed by the little things – just like I do when I’m home.  I suppose that means the honeymoon is over, but it doesn’t mean I love India any less.  It just means I got crabby at the housekeeping guy for making me fill out three forms because he couldn’t take my laundry without having all the right paperwork that goes along with it.  (In India, even laundry has a paper trail.)

Despite my comfort, some things don’t appear to be changing.  For example, my success rate of ordering room service is steady at about 67%.  I will place my order and the guy on the other end accepts it; only to have someone else call me a few minutes later to clarify the order.

I am routinely called a “Wine Weennie”. I prefer Old World wines; reds from the Rhone Valley in France, or a nice oaky Rioja.  Anything with a Grenache grape is aces in my book.  Indian wines don’t appear to fall into that narrow zone, so I don’t like to order wine at the hotel.  For beer, the Kingfisher lager has a nice, fresh taste, but lagers aren’t my thing (I’ll have a nice hoppy IPA, thankyouverymuch.)  With no other options (that I’m willing to try), I order gin and tonics with my dinners.

Room Service and I follow a rigorous process which is not deviated from:

I spent the weekend in Chennai with Michelle, kicking around her ‘hood.  Michelle has spent 3 of the last 6 months in Chennai, so she almost feels as though it is her second home.  She knows all her favorite restaurants and shops, the best markets, where to get the best poori and dosa, places to avoid, and places to go.  I have heard so much about Chennai from Michelle while she’s been here; it was utterly amazing to have the opportunity to spend time with her there and see it all first-hand.

We checked into the RainTree – one of the nicer hotels in Chennai – for the weekend.  We enjoyed dinner and drinks on the rooftop bar, passed the midday heat on Saturday lounging by the pool and swimming, and spent the less hot hours shopping and going to markets.  We did the same things on Sunday, except that we also visited a beautiful temple in Chennai, located at one of the original city centers (Chennai grew from two villages which became the two city centers.)

Chennai is a beautiful city with a completely different character from Bangalore; while it’s grittier, it’s also more real and has an intangible sense of life which, in an odd manner, reminds me of Toulouse.

The bottom line is: I love Chennai, miss it already, and can’t wait to go back.

I flew from Bangalore to Chennai on Friday evening and we drove down to Pondicherry, about a three-hours drive. Along the drive, we have various surprising experiences. The first was seeing a motorcycle driving on the highway with a passenger who was holding a 4×8 sheet of plywood in his hands. He was holding it straight up and perpendicular to the direction of travel, like one of the sails on the Black Pearl. We were half-tempted to hang behind them and wait for the guy to inevitably sail off the back of the bike. But we didn’t.

Then, once we turned off the main road onto the smaller road that leads to Pondicherry, we struck up a conversation with our driver, Sethu, who had lived in Italy for two years. It turns out he was on the roadside of the Giro d’Italia when Marco Pantani won in 1998. The cashew trees were in bloom, so here we are in the middle of South India, chatting about Marco Pantani with Sethu while smelling the fresh scent of cashew blossoms. In India, you just never know what is going to happen next.

Well, we actually did know what would happen next: we spent the following day in Pondicherry, a French colonial town on the Bay of Bengal. Needless to say, it’s a beautiful town and – since we’re in South India – it was crowded and stiflingly hot.

The next day, we drove up the coast to the ancient temple town of Mahabalipuram. These amazing temples were carved straight out of a solid hunk of granite. ALL OF THEM. ONE HUNK OF GRANITE. Holy buckets. Unfortunately, most of the temples were never completed due to wars and people dying, etc, but it is a truly amazing site.

Read more about Mahabalipuram and Pondicherry.

I walked down the main road where my hotel is, and turned left onto a larger road and was amazed at how calm the traffic was at 8 in the morning; I only heard about a 7 honks per second, whereas normal traffic hovers around 35. I went about a block and turned down a side street and headed back towards the hotel.

India is amazing. To a Westerner, there is a lot of noise and commotion, and things seem disorganized and messy. But, if you look closely, there is beauty everywhere: people take care of everything they have; sweeping and cleaning, putting on their best clothes, and making sure their belongings are as tidy as possible. A valuable lesson for anyone.

I had heard countless times about the traffic and activity on Indian streets, but nothing can prepare you for what it is like. I’m in Bangalore on business, and I have been working with people from India for most of my professional career. In my experience, they have been intelligent and hard-working, but most notably, they have been very process-oriented. With this in mind, the complete chaos of Indian traffic is a paradox beyond comprehension. The only rules of traffic that I’ve been able to identify are (a) there is no incident small enough not merit the honking of a horn, (b) traffic signs and lights are for sissies, and (c) although the idea is that the flow of traffic is roughly split between left and right and, in general, one drives on the left-hand side of the road; lanes are meaningless. Even this last one seems to be more of a “guideline” than a rule, and there have been more than a few occasions where I was in the sole car going the wrong way through oncoming traffic because it was slightly more convenient for the driver.

As a pedestrian, the experience shifts from being nerve-wracking to utterly terrifying. I wouldn’t say that traffic tries to hit pedestrians; it’s more that it doesn’t really try to avoid hitting pedestrians. While it appears to be frowned upon, it doesn’t seem to be a major concern. My strategy is to shield myself in a crowd that I estimate is bigger than any driver is willing to hit. Twenty to thirty appears to be the magic number.

With the goal of having me survive my visit to India, my company has assigned me a driver, Murali, who drives me everywhere I want to go – day and night, 7 days a week – and who waits for me while I shop, or eat, or try to hopscotch my way across a street (and he probably also laughs at my ignorance, but he doesn’t get paid for that part). Murali’s charter includes showing me around Bangalore and the surrounding area, taking me to any kind of restaurant I like, and keeping me alive.

On my first weekend here in Bangalore, Michelle came across from Chennai by train. She arrived around 1:00pm, and after some minor confusion on how to meet each other, we met halfway around the world from where we’d last seen each other.

My driver took us around Bangalore, showing us some important government buildings and taking us shopping. Afterwards, he took us to a restaurant where we were going to have some drinks and dinner.

We arrived at the restaurant around 5:00pm, and were told that they won’t serve dinner until 7:00 because they had to fuck first, but we were welcome to have drinks while we waited. Michelle and I stood in stunned silence for a few very long moments while we tried to understand what the hostess could possibly mean. Finally we realized that they were planning to fumigate (fog, not fuck, apparently) the terrace to clear out the various flying nuisances that are common in the area. Relieved, we accepted and settled into a table and ordered some drinks. A few minutes later, we found ourselves in a suffocating cloud of DDT or whatever they fumigated with. Ever since, my elbow has felt funny, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m growing a second head there. Stupid DDT.

The next day, Murali took us to the city of Mysore, about three hours – 100 kilometers – southwest of Bangalore. On the way, we stopped at a Muslim temple where orphans were attending Karan school, we went to a Hindi temple where I was blessed by a holy man, and to a bird sanctuary where Murali arranged for a private, covered boat to take us around a lake where we saw a stunning array of birds and were much closer to crocodiles than I would care to ever be again. Oh, and we saw monkeys.

To recap: traffic is crazy, if you’re not honking, you’re doing something wrong, DDT makes my elbows feel funny, and monkeys and crocodiles are cool.

A geeky bonus joke:

I mentioned to one of my team members the paradox of how process oriented the team is, yet how chaotic the traffic is. He laughed and said, “Yes, we are very process oriented only in the office. In traffic, we follow the Agile method.”