Time travel using Google Earth: Kudle Beach

Google Earth image of the beaches of Karnataka, Southern India. Anticlockwise from top left: Gokarna Beach; Kudle Beach; Om Beach

It is tempting to regard travel in terms of physical movement, but when one travels it is through both space and time. One does not merely visit a place, rather one experiences a unique combination of time and place. When I did most of my travelling in the late '90s and early '00s my experience was very different to the accounts that I had read of the golden age of backpacking in the '70s and 80s, a pre-commercial age when travel was real travel and travellers were real travellers, before gap years became the norm, before travel became yet another bland, off-the-shelf transaction, before local people became so inured to backpackers that they stopped seeing them as people to interact with and started to regard them as units to be processed for profit.


I was lucky enough to get a bit of the real deal myself, proper down to earth, sub ten dollar a day, shoestring travel. One of the places that sticks most in my mind is Kudle Beach, to the south of Goa on India's Arabian Sea coast. There was no road, access to the beautiful sweep of wave-lashed sand was on foot over a headland of red laterite rock.  Amid the palms that fringed the beach were a handful of complexes of thatched huts where discerning skinflints could avail themselves of very cheap but extremely basic accommodation.  So basic in fact that there were no toilet facilities, the procedure was to do one's business in an adjacent, sun-scorched field, where a hungry cow came along and ate it up. Yes, you read that correctly. The cow ate the shit, all of it. I spent a happy fortnight there, swimming in the crashing surf in the mornings and evenings when the sun was low, sheltering in the shade of the palms during the baking, pre-monsoon heat, practising Tai Chi and relaxing in my hammock. 


It was there that I wrote 'The Cow-Toilet of Kudle Beach' a hilarious travelogue which is linked on the sidebar of this blog. That piece was lifted directly from my travel journals, which I was keeping assiduously at the time. Recently I took a journal from the shelf and read it for the first time in ten years. I was writing well and prolifically at the time, with the passage of a decade I could tell that I had succeeded in capturing the essence of the place and, more importantly, of the time and of its people. The text brought to life memories that had lain dormant for a decade and restored others that had slipped completely through the mesh of my mind. 

Google Earth images reveal changes to Kudle Beach, 2004 - 2011. I stayed at the Spanish Place, marked in red. In 2002 there was no plumbing and the toilet was a cow. Between 2010 and 2011 a swimming pool appeared.

When I had read those same accounts back in 2002 the memories were still fresh; the account seemed unremarkable, no more than could have been written by any of the backpackers who had stayed on Kudle Beach over the years. The passage of time has made them so much more. As the Google Earth images above show, Kudle Beach has been developed significantly in the last decade; where previously there were only thatched huts there are now large numbers substantial buildings, even swimming pools. My writing from 2002 has now been elevated from generic backpacker ramblings to a poignant portrait of a combination of time and place that  has been swept aside by progress, one that no longer exists outside the pages of my journal.

Urban exploration in New York

When this guy realised I was from Scotland he started singing the praises of George Galloway, who is now something of a celebrity in the US 

Last week I had the opportunity to travel to the US with work.  My itinerary took me to New Jersey, just outside the great city of New York. This was my first trip to the east coast.  While off duty I sought opportunities to interview the Americans whose paths I crossed, hence this week's post will be the first example of straight travel writing that this blog has seen for a while.

When the president of the US publicly states that the rich should pay more tax than the poor it can mean one of two things. Either we are poised on the cusp of great change, or Obama's days are numbered. Indeed both may be true. In any case it is unprecedented, particularly when on our side of the Atlantic Cameron and Osborne are taking the opposite position, keen to scrap the 50 p top rate of tax. Hundreds of protesters are occupying Wall Street, demanding that the rights of the many take precedence over those of business and the very wealthy. Now these ideas are out they will be difficult to contain. If the much feared double-dip recession materialises, I would not be surprised to see civil unrest. All in all these are interesting times.

Some people love to travel on business. I'm not one of them. Living in hotels makes me feel a bit like Alan Partridge and I generally find the experience at least mildly disagreeable. You may ask yourself what is so disagreeable about staying in fancy hotels and eating out on expenses. Well for a start there are the hotels themselves. The hotel I visited on my arrival in the Philadelphia area was a classic of the genre. On walking through the doors I felt immediately oppressed by my surroundings. The high ceilinged lobby was decorated with murals of paintings of hunting and agricultural scenes. A discordant muzak, slightly too loud, lent an edge of menace, jangling my nerves. From behind the doors of the Fox and Hounds Pub (advertised as 'genial' on a poster in the lift) came a most unfamiliar noise, the nasal braying of corporate Americans, loaded on alcohol after a meeting or conference of some sort. 

You don't see wallpaper like that every day. Unless you live in a hotel.

 My room was located down a seemingly endless corridor with wallpaper so vile I photographed it. Even in my drowsy state I knew that I would never be able to recall it in its true, horrifying detail. The bed was a four poster, overfilling the room. I groped for light switches, eventually realised that I had to reach inside the shades of half a dozen lamps in order to locate fiddly, rotating switches. Eventually the room was bathed in sufficient light for me to establish that there was no minibar. There was nothing for it but to brave the wallpaper and head downstairs to the bar. The noise was such that I expected to find the place packed but there were only around ten people, all roaring at one another across the tables t the tops of their voices. I caught snippets.

"...up by 25 %, broke all records again this year."

"This account is gonna explode."

"Those guys love Larry, they love him!"

I soon managed to filter it out, quickly drank a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, then retired for a restless night, wrapped against the chill of the aircon while outside the cicadas' chorus filled the sultry night air.

After a day's work I travelled north to New Jersey. My driver was a London-born Arab who celebrated his roots through the consumption of Walkers ginger biscuits and Cadbury's Dairy Milk. We crawled through rain and dense traffic, through unremittingly built-up but leafy country.  He told me his story, how he had three daughters and a Mercedes that he couldn't really afford but couldn't bring himself to release, so loaded was it with boyhood memories of his father's Merc. He had relocated from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to improve his children's schooling, but the pharmacy in which he worked had renaged on their promise to transfer his role. After fifteen years they asked him to start at the bottom, forcing him to quit and leaving him without redundancy or welfare entitlement. He was philosophical, reasoning that plenty people were worse off than him. My driver earlier in the day had touched upon similar themes.  Since the downturn he had reined in his spending and had found the experience revelationary. Both resented the eastwards shift in the balance of world power, of jobs and manufacturing, to China. Perhaps it was all part of their pitch for a tip.

My next hotel was reassuringly bland, with accessible light switches and none of the distinctive but disconcerting touches of my previous lodgings. It amused me that the room contained a catalogue through which all the furnishings of the room were offered for sale, allowing those so inclined to furnish their homes like a Marriot hotel. I read in the guest information that a map of a jogging route was available from the front desk. The description was very American, clearly setting out the conditions of use and guarding against litigation. The menu on the TV contained a similar warning prior to the adult film selection, cautioning the viewer that the acts depicted were not necessarily safe and that the hotel was not in any way responsible for any injuries sustained while trying to emulate them.

'This course has proved to be a favourite of past guests. Although we provide a map for your convenience, we assume no responsibility for injury or damage which may occur while using this route.' 

The rain had stopped and I was in the mood for exercise so I decided to head out. The desk guy advised that I run part of the route then retrace my steps but I set out intending to complete the route. Where possible I ran on the thick, leafy grass that adjoined the pavement, sweating in the humid air. I passed floodlit softball diamonds where teenage girls were practicing. The thump of the ball in the catcher's mitt took me back to my childhood, when I had played Little League baseball with the Bute Buccaneers. We travelled to the nearby US naval base in Dunoon to play with the offspring of the servicemen. The base had a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop where we paid in pounds and got change in cents. This was back in the 1980s when such delights were unknown in the UK. There was always vomiting on the return journey. My baseball career was short-lived. The first year we were beaten in every game. The second we practised hard and won the league. We weren't invited back to defend our title.

The route became harder to run, with the pavement petering out unexpectedly. It became unclear what was verge and what was unfenced garden. The wooden houses felt sinister, set back from the road amid trees. Streetlighting was minimal or non-existant. I was forced to run on the shoulder, nervously eyeing the oncoming traffic. I had read of joggers and cyclists being harassed and even assaulted - pushed over or scalded with hot coffee - by suspicious, uncomprehending motorists. Upon reaching the suggested turnaround point I was confronted by a pavementless, unlit road. I heeded the desk guy's advice and turned round, glad to have explored my surroundings. If that route was a favourite I wouldn't bother to try any other. I can only assume that the past guests for which it had proved a favourite weren't quite right in the head.

Many of the people I spoke to drew my attention to the difference between the laid-back west coast and the stressed, joyless east. People in California look after themselves, eat well and exercise regularly, they told me. Not so in the east where everyone wears dark clothes and splits their time between working themselves into the ground and being pre-occupied with traffic. A ninety minute commute is standard and the New Jersey drivers are reputed to be among the worst in the US. 

I was amused by how unaware the typical American is of the extent to which their culture dominates the rest of the English-speaking world. One guy who lived in Philadelphia drove past the Rocky Steps on his way to work each day. He checked that I was aware of the Rocky movies before telling me that any time of the day or night you can guarantee that someone will be running up those steps, acting out the scene from the film. It is little wonder that Americans find so little time to travel, it being pretty standard to have only ten days leave and five public holidays for the first few years of employment. Their allocation only rises to twenty days total after five years of service. An Indian guy I met in a bar joked that lack of time off is never really an issue because they get fired so frequently that they can always count on some time off between jobs.

After my work obligations were over I had some free time to head into the Big Apple. The cab driver that took me to the train station was a fat barrel of a man. Not fat in the wobbly way, he looked pneumatic, as if he had just been freshly inflated with a bicycle pump.   We were driving down a street in which a large proportion of the houses had flags mounted on the front. It was raining heavily and the flags hung limp. I mentioned them to the driver and set him off on a rich rant.

“Fucking Americans.” He noticed that I was looking at him oddly and clarified, “I’m Irish.”

He gestured to a house with a flag. “White trash. In Europe you would call these people Nazis.”

He spoke positively about life in the US, claiming that he and his wife received free healthcare and three thousand dollars state pension per month.

“You get state welfare and local welfare too. Nobody tells you that shit, they think we’re all dying on the streets. It’s not like that at all.”

His mention of welfare reminded him of the Republican Presidential hopeful Rick Perry and his comments about welfare.  “Rick Perry said that welfare is a Ponzi scheme. It’s not a Ponzi scheme – that’s a criminal activity. Man’s a fucking lunatic. Michelle Bachmann said that the hurricane and the earthquake were God’s punishment for spending too much on welfare. They’re all fucking lunatics.”

I asked if he thought the new Tea Party brand of Republican was worse than George W Bush. He felt that Bush was so near the bottom of the barrel he would be hard to surpass. We marveled at how poor people on both sides of the Atlantic continue to vote for parties that will only ever look after the interests of the very wealthy. The cabbie summed it up elegantly, his wise words rang in my ear as I shouldered my bag and walked into the train station.

“People are fucking stupid, they’ll always be fucking stupid. Ain’t nothing anyone can do about that.”

I changed trains at Newark and the final approach into New York reminded me of taking the train from Weymss Bay to Glasgow Central in the height of the early 1990s gloom: vacant yards; derelict red brock warehouses; industrial wasteland interspersed with the river and its reed beds.

The weather had been unusually wet in the east while drought hit the west. The drought meant a lack of food for bears and there had been a number of attacks in recent weeks as hungry bears sought food in populated areas. Upon exiting Penn Station I found pouring rain, a real monsoon downpour, the likes of which is rarely seen in Scotland. Umbrella salesmen touted their wares. Their time had come, up to four inches of rain were forecast over the weekend.

“Buy an umbrella, stay dry!”

I suddenly remembered a story about someone taking advantage of a downpour to offload a dodgy batch of umbrellas with runny black dye that left the unsuspecting customers looking like wet coal miners.  Anyhow I wasn’t convinced that an umbrella would do much good with the rain bouncing off the pavement. Everyone else had one and once the water started to run down the inside of the arm of my Paramo jacket I began to question the wisdom of my decision. I certainly wasn’t going to buy an umbrella after I was soaked.

An open topped sightseeing bus drove past. At the corners of the top deck were holes designed to let water drain out. It was as if a fireman’s hose had been pointed out each one. The top of the Empire State building was in cloud. I made for Times Square in the hope of finding a suitable window through which to watch the rain and the wet people. Blue Fin, a sushi bar, provided just such a window. Outside I saw a parade of improvised raingear. Umbrellas of all sizes. Ponchos, clear, blue, pink and camouflaged queued for tickets to Broadway shows. Each group of tourists had purchased simultaneously so they looked like teams in uniform. Bedraggled toddlers were pushed past, swaddled in polythene. Despite the rain it was very warm, indeed the impression was tropical, accentuated by a tented village in which an Asian cooking festival was taking place.  Live footage of the cooking was beamed onto huge plasma screens. The stallholders used sticks to drain the accumulated water from the roofs of their tents. This combination of ponchos and sizzling woks brought to mind a tropical downpour I experienced many years ago in Bangkok. For a moment I was caught in a reverie, looking back into the mind of the person that occupied my body thirteen years previously.

Times Square 

Times Square is an appalling and engrossing magnet for humanity, people are drawn there from all over the world. Some are there to see Broadway shows, others, myself included, were there only to see the others. Such an accumulation of life is a spectacle in itself, like the zebra herds in the Masai Mara, like the elver migration in the Sandaig burn, so elegantly captured by Gavin Maxwell, whose biography had filled my empty evenings in faceless hotels. On the plasma screen the chicken was drained from the wok. Surrounding them was a sea of flashing neon Americana; the golden arches, TGI Friday, the Roxy Deli, movie and show billboards. Above the buildings reached higher than I could see. If the fauna of Times Square was engrossing so was the landscape. If the skyscrapers were rock towers they would be genuinely awesome. 

It was still raining and I knew I hadn’t the heart to trudge round Central Park, or to take the subway down to the recently opened memorial at Ground Zero. In any case I had only a couple of hours until my train. Near Penn Station I found a marvelously shabby Irish bar called Blaggards. Some of the letters had fallen off the name and the toilets were in a terrible state of repair. I took a seat at the long bar and ordered a pale ale. A gigantic man with a red and white pinstriped shirt and matching bow tie took the seat beside me. He twisted his waxed moustache as he ordered a beer. He revealed himself to be a banker. Commercial lending, he hadn't touched any sub-prime mortgages. As the plasma screen in the bar dispensed financial tips explaining how to make money in a falling market the banker told me that he was only a year from retirement and had cashed in all his investments, fully expecting that we would be in full-blown recession a year from now.

The owner of the bar was, unusually for an Irish bar, actually Irish with a broad Dublin accent undiluted by 20 years in the US. I only just managed to decline his offer of a fourth beer before he started pouring it and made my way into Penn Station, aiming to catch the 1809 Dover train. Due to the rain the trains were delayed and I found myself packed into a humid subterranean holding chamber along with hundreds of other commuters. We watched the screen as train after train went from ‘On Time’ to ‘Delayed’. Some went all the way to ‘Cancelled’. I struck up a conversation with a trio of Indians from Chennai and a bespectacled, sallow-faced youth who stood beside me. 


Our banter was interrupted by a loud altercation between a tall, bearded thug of a man in his twenties and a middle-aged Asian. The thug had knocked the Asian as he barged through the densely packed crowd. Afterwards he turned and, instead of apologizing, shouted a torrent of abuse and then stared menacingly, at the poor man, who, clearly mortified that several hundred people were witnessing his silent face-off with the thug, stared at his shoes, hoping the floor would swallow him up. The thug moved on and a babble of chatter filled the silence. I was delighted, for angry people shouting at one another in the street was a New York stereotype that I had been hoping to encounter. It could only have been improved if one of the participants had been carrying groceries home from the deli in a handle-less paper bag which had split open during the collision. Or if one of them had pulled a gun.

A train arrived and part of the crowd, including the Indians, exited left. They were immediately replaced. I interrogated the sallow-faced youth; after a few beers I fancied myself as something of a Louis Theroux. He was a film student who wanted to direct horror films. He had spent the day doing unpaid work at his church, which owned video equipment that he hoped to make use of in future. He was dismayed that they had made him spend the whole day coiling cables then testing their integrity. His church was St Andrew’s but he was unaware that Andrew was the patron saint of Scotland. I tried in vain to recall what connected this middle eastern apostle to my homeland. Clearly something of an innovator, Andrew had eschewed the standard cross and insisted on being crucified on an X shaped cross.  At some point after this I believe his remains were transported to Scotland and the shape of his cross was incorporated in the national flag.

On the train I sat beside an attractive female student who unsettled me slightly by taking a well-thumbed illustrated bible from her bag and starting to read. On questioning she revealed that she was studying business and theology at a catholic college. She wasn’t religious herself, but she tolerated the theology which was compulsory. Her only interest was in the business part of the course, which she saw as a passport to travel in Europe after graduation. She clearly didn’t want to talk to me and soon managed to get her headphones on.

When I was younger and more naive I made the mistake of thinking that the bond of a common language meant that the UK was more closely aligned with the US than with Europe. I realise now that our values are European, and nothing makes me feel more European than a trip to the US.  It was a relief to get down from the train and retreat into a Scottish enclave, where I spent the rest of the evening and the next day catching up with friends who now live in the US. It is invariably a great pleasure to meet up after a lengthy separation, especially when you find friends apparently unchanged by the passing of a decade. 

Groundhog (or woodchuck) on the golf course. 

Keep Off the Grass: A Grand Tour of England

Officious men wearing bowler hats will ensure that you keep off the grass in Oxford, but whose job is it to make sure you don't stray too far from the footpaths, bridleways and byways of rural England?

During last week's tour of the south it dawned on me that Ordnance Survey maps provide an unexpected insight into the cultural differences between Scotland and England. South of the border the maps swarm with green lines of varying solidity, each denoting an acceptable route through the countryside. Footpaths, bridleways, restricted and unrestricted byways, long distance routes, 'other routes'. And then there are the orange lines denoting permissive footpaths and bridleways, on which the right of access may be withdrawn at the whim of the landowner.

It is unclear what sanction awaits the independently minded rambler who leaves his map at home, instead using his aesthetic sensibilities to plot his course through the countryside. Presumably he may find himself in a local magistrate's court, answering a charge of trespass. I expect that examples might be found where he would be sentenced by the owner of the land on which he trespassed. How quaintly, repressively, medievaly English such a fate would be.

Maps of Scotland - on which such paths, bridleways, routes and byways are conspicuous in their absence - must seem strange and even frightening to the visiting Englishman. How is he to know where it is acceptable to walk? The happy truth is, of course, that the Scottish tradition of free access to the hills - now enshrined in law through Access Legislation - means that one may quite legitimately rampage through the countryside at will. The knowledge that - should the urge possess me - I am at liberty take off in almost any direction contributes greatly to my sense of wellbeing. So accustomed am I to this freedom that England feels constraining, almost claustrophobic.

Oxford - the ultimate destination of my tour of these strange southern lands - elicited genuine feelings of claustrophobia. As one approaches within fifty miles of its famous dreaming spires there is a palpable increase in the level of congestion.  The city has the sense of a museum; its ancient road layout means that there is simply not enough tarmac to accommodate the traffic that crawls angrily through its streets. The constant din of these impotent motors reflects off the limestone walls of the colleges, assaulting the ears of those unaccustomed to this mild form of torture. Much of the city is off limits, hidden behind these fank-like walls, which funnel and corral the city's infuriating mix of bumbling, bewildered tourists, haughty, plum-mouthed students and impatient, exasperated townspeople through its congested thoroughfares. When I think of Oxford I picture the neat stripes of its immaculately manicured lawns and the simple message of the signs that adorn each and every one of them, 'Keep Off The Grass'.

I thoroughly enjoyed my tour of the south; climbing on the sandstone crags of Northumberland; visiting family in Durham; walking the North York Moors; meeting old friends at a wedding in Oxford. But it is great to be back home.

Informal snowholing and a new full length article in pdf

There's been a fair amount of chat this week about the banning of 'informal camping' on the east shore of Loch Lomond. This isn't a term I'd heard before and I suspect it has been coined recently to differentiate car-side, bevvy fuelled,  litter producing camping from the more honourable pedestrian based, zero impact ideal of 'wild camping' that is permitted under the access legislation.

A trip to Cairngorm at the weekend revealed that 'informal snowholing' is a possibility at present! The slopes immediately to the south of the Ciste car park have a two rows of commodious looking snowholes dug into them. If the urge took you you could simply park up and sneak inside for a night's kip.

This discovery inspired me to add a new article to the site, documenting a less than entirely restful night spent stormbound in a snowhole, high on the Cairngorm plateau. Click on the link to the right to access a pdf file containing 'A room without a view: snowholing in the Cairngorms'.

The Cow-Toilet of Kudle Beach

“I don’t have any toilet,” the Spanish owner explained as we checked into her beach hut complex. “When you need you must go outside into the field. Do not worry. The cow, he is eating everything.”

I'm trying out a new idea for the blog - if you look to the right you'll see a new frame from which you can view and download full length illlustrated travel articles in pdf format. The first one is a personal favourite of mine 'The Cow-Toilet of Kudle Beach'. Have a read but be warned, you may actually piss yourselves laughing!

I'd love to get some feedback on this piece so please leave comments.

If you enjoy it do tell your friends and get them to visit the blog too.

Paul Theroux in Inverness

I spent part of saturday fruitlessly wracking my brain, trying to think of a dildo-related phrase that might be wheeled out in the heat of an argument. This strange line of enquiry had been occasioned by a comment of Paul Theroux's in which he speculated, based on the content of their quarrels, that the owners of his Inverness Bed and Breakfast establishment may be users of 'what the dirty shops called 'marital aids''. Sadly Theroux, that meticulous note-taker, did not carry through to his final draft the exact words that had conveyed this  impression.

For those unfamiliar with his work, Theroux is a hugely influential travel writer, though nowadays he has been eclipsed in the mind of the British public by his documentary-making progeny, Louis and Marcel. He rose to prominence in the 1970s after writing 'The great railway bazaar', an account of a train journey from London through Asia on the Orient  and Trans-Siberian Expresses. This proved to be the first of many great voyages; a few years later he made a tour of the coast of Great Britain, in the course of which he passed through Inverness.

Finding myself without opportunity to venture any great distance from my house this weekend, I had hatched a plan. I would locate the book in which he described his coastal odyssey, 'The kingdom by the sea', find out what he had said about Inverness, then visit the described scenes to see if any of his observations still rang true.

Theroux devoted part of his short stay in the city to studying his map and debating whether or not Inverness qualified as coastal. In his mind it all hinged on whether or not the Moray Firth was part of the North Sea. I can understand his confusion. If his map lacked detail, the intersecting spits of Chanonry Point and Fort George may have appeared to be joined, making freshwater lochs of the inner Moray and Beauly firths.

He was ignored by the bickering hosts of a cold and unpleasant Bed and Breakfast.  The dampness of the bathmat and the owner's bowling trophies troubled him. The appearance of their diseased dog was so objectionable that he wanted it to be put down. After making the marital aid related observation mentioned above he took the train to Aberdeen.

I was mildly disappointed that there were no footsteps in which to follow, but pleased to find further evidence to support my long held suspicion of Bed and Breakfasts and their proprietors. There is no need for me to try to recreate Paul Theroux's time in Inverness - a quick visit to tripadvisor.com revealed that similarly dissatisfying accommodation experiences being dispensed in Inverness to this day.


Instead I spent sunday walking up a small hill at Abriachan, where I took the photo that accompanies this piece.

Delhi

A legless beggar loomed from the crowd on an improvised skateboard, his stumps wrapped in revolting bandages. His hands, filthy from propelling himself through the unpaved streets, pulled at mine in an appeal for pity, for a donation.

When my friend Martina revealed that she had booked a flight to Delhi, such memories of my own subcontinental forays came flooding back. How the polluted air permeated the cabin even before the plane had touched down. The seething mass of humanity that filled the roads, the pavements, the tops of the walls and the branches of the trees.

Litter-chewing cows lurked in the shadows of the dimly lit, otherworldly streets of the Paharganj, the main area for budget backpacker accommodation. I squeezed to the side of the street to allow a heavily laden truck to inch past, its load piled so high that a team of wallahs crouched on top, lifting the telephone and electricity wires so that it could pass underneath.

In the light of the next day, the baking April heat enhanced the smell of India, an indescribable mix containing hints of excrement, rotten fruit, burning tyres, spices and incense. Touts of all descriptions delivered a constant stream of hassle: traders; salesman; beggars; scam artists.

On the strength of these recollections I had advised Martina to prepare herself for non-stop harassment. Her reports, delivered via a stream of emails modestly entitled 'Spam from India', painted a different picture. Her impressions were overwhelmingly positive.

This apparent contradiction lured me to my bookshelves to find the handwritten journal in which my true recollection of that arrival in India had lain, dormant and unread, for eleven years. All the images I recalled were present. What distinguished the written record from that in my memory was a wealth of qualifying statements: that it wasn't as bad as people had made out; that the actual frequency of encounters with nuisances was very low.

It seems that the myth of Delhi is so strong that, even after having personally debunked it, I found myself engaged in this act of negative revisionism, allowing my own recollections to be displaced by cliché.

The photos that accompany this post are Martina's.