Govardhan lila

8:20 a.m., Saturday April 4th, 2009
Vrindavan, India



Yesterday we managed to miss Siddhi Ma darshan at Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram (too late; will try again today), but later we enjoyed a nice afternoon barefoot stroll around a portion of the Govardhan Hill near Jatipura, said to be the most-circumambulated sacred hill in the world. Walked with Shyamdas and Sridhar, Sara and Marjon, Mohan and Govind. Always a pleasure to feel the dust of Vraja in one’s toes.

Here’s some pics…

Drill, baby, drill!

11:11 p.m., Monday March 30th, 2009
New Delhi

Sara arrived a couple nights ago and I’ve not written since. Suddenly life seems busier than ever. She just today got some dental work done (an implant/tooth replacement) here in Delhi, at a fraction of the cost in the USSA even including the airfare etc. Bizarro-world. She’s been a trooper, even with the mandated prescription for post-surgical ice cream (Royal Alphonso-flavored, courtesy of the Saravana Bhavan restaurant down the road.

Flip Flop Lila

Sara's been insisting that we share this little footwear meltdown from the side of the Jaipur>Delhi freeway. Sigh. What can I say? Having had my killer American flip flops disappear mid-trip (while worshipping at a temple all day, of all places), I was trying my best to make do with the really low-qual sandals usually available in India--and precious few in my size, to boot.

Later in Delhi, I lucked out and found some $10 flips that really fit me comfily--but at the time of this roadside video, I feared I was stuck with these heinous, too-tight, $1 chappals for the remainder of my long road trip. Watching myself accidentally destroy these wretched sandals was a depressing moment--Sara's laughter notwithstanding.

Back to the Old Sod

Tuesday April 29, 2008
A timeless afternoon at 35,000 feet altitude
Somewhere between Amsterdam and New England

Nine weeks later, home is on the way. It is light out, and I am sitting in the first row of this old 757 flying west across the Atlantic Ocean. I’m taking a break from a tear-jerking love and death movie, P.S. I Love You, and mulling over the sudden changes in landscape from the India-Afghanistan-India-Europe trek, a tour which will land me in springtime Leverett Massachusetts in another three or four hours. Life moves fast these days—unnaturally so, and some part of body and mind take their own time to catch up. There’s often a funny quality of surreal netherworldliness in the first days of our sudden presence in a realm previously hidden by extreme distance and inaccessibility. Here we go.

We landed at Amsterdam’s Schippol Airport around 7 a.m., and with the next flight at 1 p.m. decided to take the metro into town for a grey morning’s amble in my namesake town, A’dam (that abbreviation is everywhere around Amsterdam, making me feel oddly at home). Tonight and tomorrow the Dutch celebrate Queen’s Day—everywhere town was festive with orange balloons and streamers (the House of Orange, don’t you know), though mostly the town was slowly rising at 8 a.m. The friendly cobblestone streets, quirky beautiful architecture and sight of the houseboats hugging the walls of Amsterdam’s canals tugged at my heart like they always do there—there’s just something so livable and aesthetically pleasing and, well, civilized about the Netherlands. Even the airport, as much as I’ve heard people diss it, seems well-designed and speckled with high culture—there was a mini-Rijks Museum exhibit with a dozen or so original Vincent Van Gogh paintings on display about 100 yards from our boarding gate—when was the last time you saw original Master’s art hanging in an airport?

I had a nice surprise as I was finally checking into the flight queue back at the airport—my brain, after some initial resistance, finally allowed me to hear what for a moment had been sounding so unlikely: someone calling out my name in the terminal. Turns out my good friend Monique, a Dutch national who’s been a Leverett neighbor and friend for years, was calling out to me from the check-in line. Small world: Monique and her eldest son Remer—somehow 18 already and basically bigger than me—are on my flight back to New England, after spending 8 days on the old sod checking out various Universities for him to begin next fall. Remer has settled on the University at Maastricht, which Monique described as a wonderful little mini-Amsterdam and a terrific place to go to school. Lucky man, Remer—what a wonderful opportunity to be a curious student and citizen of the world.

And with that, the journey home begins its final leg.

And in the Third Month Comes Return

Sunday April 27, 2008 2:48 p.m.
Delhi National/Domestic Airport

OK, the always frazzling final Delhi work stretch is completed: we are now cooling our heels at the airport waiting for our flight down to Mumbai, where our return on Northwest Airlines departs tomorrow night back to the states via A’dam (Amsterdam).

Since we returned from Afghanistan it has been more than 40-42 degrees centigrade in Delhi, or way above 100F—brutal. I wilt in this kind of weather—I do not know how people live in heat like this for months at a time. I suppose it’s partly the heat, partly the final wave of non-doing that is just beginning to settle upon me after pretty much 60 straight days of major doing (not counting a couple days here and there in sick bay). But I feel spent—utterly drained of energy, totally ready to come home. Or already be home, really, but first there’s 50+ hours of travel to endure, including the upcoming 24 hour Mumbai window. After all this travel, I guess another couple days shouldn’t be too bad. I’ll just keep holding the vision of strolling barefoot in the fresh growing grass back at Tree Toad Farm.

Upon arriving home, the next wave of the trip unfolds: the months of reviewing and editing footage to develop some finished video pieces from the journey. The idea is to integrate a lot of this work into the new Dharma Boutique web shop/adventure site that I am working on for a summertime launch—so it will be a busy season once I get home. A little time to decompress sounds good first, though.

Sara’s heard about some kind of evening reception on May 1st in New York, something regarding Afghanistan and photo-journalism—given our most recent adventures there, it would seem like a room we should perhaps be in. Though pulling that off barely 48 hours after we land seems a tad harsh to me. But we’ll see. The journey continues…

Sara has a post on her blog about Shira the Lion Cub of Mazar-e-Sharif—if you’re up for a good cry and some sweet photos, you can find them both there. Once I get to a semi-fast web connection, I’ll also try to throw some photos up here on some of the posts where I’ve been frustrated in uploading photos. But for now, there’s more cute puppy photos than you can throw a stick for right here:
http://www.sarakarl.blogspot.com/

But, now that our flight to Mumbai has been delayed by some unknown measure of time, I think I’ll first just lie down on the tile floor and pass out for a couple days.

On the Road with Dharma Boutique