I’m here in Mombasa on the coast. Mombasa is Kenya’s second largest city and a popular holiday spot for its beaches and laid-back lifestyle. It’s also a different culture from the interior. Here, the Swahili, Arab, Indian, Portuguese, and British colonial influences blend into something uniquely Indian Ocean. It’s tough to tell where one culture stops and another begins, or which person belongs to which group, or even if such concerns matter at all.

There are auto-rickshaws plying the streets (called tuk-tuks here), people in every variety of Islamic garb from skullcaps and robes for men, to scarves and full purdah for women—or no special dress at all. With its colonial architecture, palm trees, blue ocean, and cultural melange, Mombasa seems a lot like Pondicherry. The tourist development is elsewhere, so the place is surprisingly “local,” and the people are friendly. In the late afternoons the streets are full of schoolkids in uniforms. Mildew grows on the yellow and white apartment blocks, with laundry drying outside.

I took a tour of the Old Town and have posted some tourist snaps below. It’s the poorer quarter of the city but the most interesting, with architectural flourishes from all the contributing cultures. My guide was Mahir Mohammed (who also goes by Ali Mohammed and Ali Baba). Photography wasn’t particularly welcome in Old Town, but he smoothed most things over. The issue seemed to be that I would make money off the photos and was therefore exploiting people commercially, so I didn’t take many pictures or press the issue. At one point, we were in a narrow lane looking at a coop of pigeons. Ali was telling me about them and clucking at them (I wasn’t photographing), and a woman came out of the house and yelled at him. We walked on. He told me she was accusing him of using her pigeons for his business.

The Indian presence is very strong in Mombasa. All the restaurants serve more than one Indian dish (curry, biryani, somosas, chapatis, etc.). There are Hindu temples and Ismaili mosques. Well-off Indians own shops in town and estates on the ocean, but there are poor people in the mix in Old Town. My hotel, a colonial-era three-star with mosquito nets, a fan, and a dipper in the bathroom, has Preity Zinta calendars at the reception desk and behind the bar. (There are also a large number of a craggy old single European men in shorts, and this is the tourist off season, which makes me wonder how Mombasa figures in the sex trade.)

Some tourist snaps from Old Town and the rest of Mombasa are on the flip. Continue reading →

This is brilliant. Via SAJA, here’s the story of the Pakistani-American brother who has bought land in Lahore, Virginia, and has great plans for its use:

We spoke to the present American owner of a portion of the town’s land, and also the Pakistani American who has recently bought that piece of land to develop it to match the Pakistani town of Lahore. The new Lahore will have a school, a museum, an airport, and a replica of the famous Shalimar gardens in Lahore, Pakistan.

The report, for the Voice of America’s Urdu TV service, is by journalist Imran Siddiqui and features great local characters who are interviewed in English.

This opens up a lot of possibilities. For instance, there is a Delhi in New York, Delaware, California and Ohio. There’s an Agra in California and Kansas, and another in Oklahoma where there seems to be no shortage of land to build your miniature Taj. There’s also a Bombay in New York, population 1,192, with a tantalizing but undeveloped backstory:

The town of Bombay, comprising township Number One of Macomb’s purchase and. all of the St. Regis reservation on the American side of the boundary, was erected from Fort Covington by an act of the Legislature passed March 30, 1833, to be effective on the first of May following. Its name was chosen by Michael Hogan in compliment to Mrs. Hogan, who was a native of Bombay, India.

There are also Calcuttas in Ohio and West Virginia, a Madras in Oregon, and even a Lucknow in western Ontario. I couldn’t find a Thiruvananthapuram. Continue reading →

I hope y’all are enjoying your holiday travels. For me it’s yet another December spent at home on the East Coast, followed by 3 days of hard-core academia at the annual South Asian Literary Association and Modern Language Association conferences. (Note: I’m not really complaining: this year we are blessed by the presence of a smiling, gurgling little baby. But yeah, a change of scenery would still be nice.)

Travel journalists, by contrast, get to have leisurely travels all the time — for work. Today I was particularly drawn by a recent New York Times article about visiting beaches in Bangladesh, and a Times of London travelogue (thanks, Indianoguy) of a reporter’s trip all around India. Going to the beaches of Bangladesh (on the eastern tip, near the border of Burma/Myanmar) is something I would never have thought of doing, but it actually makes perfect sense. Incidentally, the tourist board’s official motto is perhaps unintentionally comical, but actually works despite itself: “Visit Bangladesh Before Tourists Come.”

And my favorite bit from the London Times travelogue is about a train ride to Jhansi:

Train journeys here are great levellers. Few Indians frantically fill their time, as westerners do, with work or reading. They regard the journeys as a chance to “interact” and talk, about anything from the price of aubergines to the finer points of Tantric meditation. By the time they get off, they’re exchanging business cards and pledging eternal friendship.

As fillings turned to extractions, the cabin attendant slouched past with an urn of peppery tomato soup, which he served in plastic cups (they would have been biodegradeable pottery cups five years ago). He scattered it with a handful of croutons from his pocket. The lady dentist seized her moment. “How does your daily routine here compare with back home?” she asked.. “How does India compare with UK?”

I said the UK is ordered, startlingly quiet and clean in comparison, and that its people are reserved and, in places, few and far between. I mentioned North Ronaldsay, the Orkney island which is three miles long and one mile wide, and has a population of less than 50. “Amazing!” said the dentist. And I described how my wife and I go walking in the Derbyshire Peak District and sometimes meet no more than six or seven people in four hours. “Astonishing!” said the biotechnology student.

He had a point. In the packed 3rd class carriage next door, some sort of evolutionary struggle for survival seemed to be going on. I said that British trains sometimes travel with as few as a dozen passengers. And that, if it’s even ten minutes late, there could be a riot.

This was a lie, but it seemed pretty relevant, as our train was now four rather than three hours late. (link)

I especially like the point about how mass-transit in the west is largely anti-social, while the experience in India (or perhaps all of South Asia?) is the opposite. (Does anyone have favorite subcontinental train/plane/bus experiences they want to share?)

Incidentally, if you’re sick of reading about western travelers in India (while they’re far from uniform, the stories always seem to have comments on the crazy traffic patterns and the smell), there are some great “internal” desi travel stories up at OkTataByeBye.com. I thought this in-depth article on Lucknow was an especially good read. And there are plenty more. Continue reading →

From today’s New York Times, this lede:

SHE was Glinda in a sari. Early that morning, she had glided ethereally across the courtyard with her fellow healing goddesses, their feet bare, their flowing white garb edged in gold. The bird trills reverberated off the palace walls.

“Please sit,” she said prayerfully. Soon, thick warm sesame oil infused with medicinal herbs began to permeate my meager muslin thong. She breathed heavily, karate-chopping the oil with the edges of her hands. She gently pummeled me with poultices, hot bundles of herbs resembling bouquets garnis. In the background, I heard oil sizzling. I felt a strange compulsion to go fry myself in a wok.

Pummel me with poultices! Stay me with flagons! Gag me with a spoon! What on Lord Krishna’s blue earth is going on here?

It’s just San Francisco-based writer Patricia Leigh Brown receiving treatment, for research purposes, at the Kalari Kovilakom Palace for Ayurveda in the hills of Palakkam, Kerala, where “ayurvedists — longevity-seekers who are already deeply into the present moment — come … to detoxify and purify with ayurvedic doctors, the new yogis, for whom mind, body and spirit have been fused for more than 3,000 years.”

Exempted from the resort’s two-week minimum stay rule, Brown was able to pick and choose her treatments, avoiding the “stamina-challenging sequence of enemas” and secretly brewing Peet’s Coffee in her room.

The article is long, and not entirely as ridiculous as would appear from the opening. By the end, in fact, some interesting cultural analysis has crept in. En route, however, you get lines like “My spine was a cobra unfurling,” and the apparition in Brown’s mind, during treatment, of a vision of Dick Cheney. Surely that can’t be therapeutic. Continue reading →

No, not Star Trek — across the Himalayas. Xeni Jardin, a freelance journalist who is on the Boing Boing blogroll, recently went to India, China, and Tibet for NPR, as part of a four-part series called “Hacking the Himalayas”. The Boing Boing post introducing the series is here; the main focus is on how technology is transforming the lives of Tibetans, both in Tibet and in exile in India.

The first two parts in the series have links up at NPR, though as of now only part 1 has audio (part 2 is expected to go up later today). The first story is actually not on the Tibetans themselves, but on a partially-nomadic local tribe called the Gaddi, who are based around Dharamsala and various villages in Himachal Pradesh. Most of the story is about their local folk traditions, which are apparently somewhat in decline. I’m not quite sure what technology (or Tibet, for that matter) has to do with it, but at least the story is something other than the usual, “look, they have Cyber Cafes!” type of thing.

Xeni has started a blog dedicated to providing auxiliary material to the stories that air on NPR. Among other things, she has a short post there on the popularity of hip hop amongst Tibetan-in-exile teens in Dharmsala.

(Link via Desipundit) Continue reading →

While browsing the deeply-discounted “remaindered” aisles at my local Barnes & Noble, I came across Satish Grover’s Masterpieces of Traditional Architecture. It’s a coffee-table book with beautiful photographs and appreciative descriptions of fourteen of India’s ancient and medieval architectural masterpieces.

In his introduction, Grover points out that the ancient sites in India are all religious (Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Muslim), not because India was traditionally especially devout. In fact, only the religious structures were carved in stone, so they are the only edifices to survive. The secular architecture of ancient India might have been pretty wonderful too, but those brick and timber buildings have all vanished.

Since I can’t do any real traveling this summer because of work, I thought I would link to images on the web of the various monuments in Grover’s book as a kind of vicarious travelogue. A lot of people have tagged these sites in their Flickr photos, though for slightly more obscure places like the Karle Caves you have to search on the open internet to see what comes up. Continue reading →