Cruisin' the Ganges

(We’ve been a little negligent writing about India, in part because it’s a very complicated place, and in part because we’ve been busy doing other important things onboard, like kissing fish. Now, we’re past Mauritius and on our way to South Africa, and one of our upcoming Mauritius entries will also relate to India.)

(Bob:) As a Roman Catholic would revere attending Mass at St. Peter’s in the Vatican, or a Muslim would thirst for a pilgrimage to Mecca, so a devout Hindu longs to attend the Ganga Aarti, the daily prayer service on the banks of the Ganges in the holy Hindu city of Varanasi. The Holy Goddess Ganga, or Mother Ganges, is the source of purification for Hindus, and many people even attempt to die along the banks of the Ganges so they can be cremated and have their ashes placed in the river.

The Indians say that Varanasi is the oldest occupied city on earth, but I think there are some places in Egypt, Iraq, Greece and China that might dispute that claim. But there is no disputing that Hindus regard it as their most sacred site along the Ganges, their most sacred river. Hindus come to the river to be blessed particularly at times of significant events in their lives, so many people had traveled long distances to attend. The crowd -- and there was quite a crowd, as seems to be the case everywhere in India -- included many pilgrims dressed in white saris or robes; women pilgrims had shaved their heads.

The evening we arrived in Varanasi, after the trishaw ride described in our Wild Ride entry, we attended the Ganga Aarti. As the sun goes down, seven priests walk out on seven platforms above the river and perform a series of religious rituals involving bells, candles, chanting and so on -- quite similar to Catholic mass, as one person from our ship said. Many people light little candles in tiny bowls of flowers and walk to the banks of the river to float these, saying a prayer as they launch them in the water.

There were groups of Hindus and tourists watching all this, with some of the Hindus going down to the river and getting in boats during the ceremony after being blessed by the priests. Some of the tourists watched while standing behind the Hindus, some watched from boats; some, like us, watched from snack shops above the crowds where we could get Cokes. The ceremony lasted about two hours. It provided lots of good photo ops, but seemed somewhat touristy. (Luana: I didn’t think it was as touristy as Bob did; I thought it was quite spiritual and serene; I just wish the tourists had shown a little more respect.) Can you imagine what the response would be if a group of Indian tourists came to a U.S. church on a Sunday morning, taking photos, drinking cokes, and holding up the peace sign while they had their picture taken? But the Indians didn’t seem to mind -- I guess it‘s the tourist dollars.

You can see a short video of the Ganga Aarti online; Luana took a video but we can’t upload large files from the ship.

Our second ceremony on the Ganges came the next morning before dawn, when we went out in rowboats to watch the sunrise and see Hindus bathing in the river as a religious ritual. We also went further downriver to see the funeral pyres along the river. Despite an abundance of tourists in boats, it all seemed very peaceful, beautiful and serene, and like we had stepped back in time.

Of course, there were modern touches. Like the boat that came among the tourists with the big battery powered TV sitting high in the boat. The rower was selling DVDs of the Ganges ceremonies and was showing tourists what was on the DVD. Other hawkers in boats were selling non-high-tech items.

The cremations were nearly done when we arrived in that area, so we didn’t see actual bodies (which was in some ways a relief), but a couple of sites were still smoldering. It costs $100 if you cremate with the most expensive wood -- sandalwood. It takes about 4 hours for a body to burn to ashes. Then of course, the ashes are thrown in the river to try to return to the holy mother Ganges, ensuring a better afterlife.

After the cruise we got another taste of the religious diversity of India, traveling to the Buddhist shrine just outside Varanasi where Buddha gave his first lecture promoting Buddhism as an alternative to Hinduism. Buddha was an Indian prince and founded that religion in India. Buddha didn’t like the caste system and all it entails. The Buddhist temple at this site was very impressive inside, with a gold Buddha and a large group actively meditating.

Hindus now extol Buddha as the ninth earthly incarnation of their god Vishnu, protector of the earth. This all seems very strange to me: as if the Pope suddenly made Martin Luther a saint. And while Hindus seem to revere Buddha, they pretty much ignored his advice about the caste system.

I’m very religiously confused after India, but that’s nothing new. Perhaps the word “religiously” should be removed from that sentence.

The Year of the Cow, or, The Hills Get Horned Again

(Bob:) In most of Oriental Asia, it’s the Year of the Tiger. But for the Hill family it’s been the Year of the Cow, with the wily bovines apparently plotting their revenge against us for years of eating steaks, Whoppers and Tillamook Cheeseburgers.

First, last summer, daughter Julia hit a cow while driving a rental car in Botswana. The result: $1,500 of damage to the Toyota Yaris, which was uninsured because the company didn’t offer collision coverage. What happened to the cow is uncertain since it was dark and the cow was still mobile after the accident, running away in the dark, leaving a slight bloodstain and some hide on the fender.

Now the cows of India have struck, almost taking Luana to the next life -- hopefully not as a cow.

It happened at night, in the ancient town of Varanasi, just after we had watched the beautiful evening Hindu prayer services along the Ganges.

Our group was crossing an extremely busy street -- all streets in the town are choked with motorbikes and pedicab and bicycle traffic. I was several steps behind Luana. Suddenly a motorbike rider decided he wouldn’t wait for a bunch of tourists and cut Luana from the herd (so to speak). She screamed and jumped back and then noticed the group of three or four cows running right at her from the opposite direction.
Then she really screamed. The cows brushed right by her, but by the time I reached Luana she was understandingly sobbing, ready to take the next boat down the Ganges to go home.

After it all happened, we could laugh about it -- I was able to do so much earlier than Luana.

But now that I reflect back on it, the whole situation creates all sorts of mental scenarios.

Suppose they had trampled her: Would any court in India have convicted the guilty cow? I think not.

If she had died there, we would have had to import for her funeral pyre along the Ganges a load of mesquite wood -- for that real barbecue taste. We would have had to play the theme from the old television series, “Rawhide” during the burning. Then we would have had to figure a way to get her ashes into a pair of cowboy boots and launch those boots into the river, all while hundreds of pairs of spurs jingled quietly in the background. And -- most difficult of all -- the kids and I would have had to find a steakhouse to hold the wake.

Anyway, an experience of this magnitude really deserves a song, so I composed the following to be sung to the tune of the old Western classic, “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”

Luana Hill went walking one hot and humid night.
In a crosswalk she stopped, purely out of fright.
A mighty herd of red-eyed cows was running toward her side.
If they knock her to the ground, surely she will die.

Chorus:
Yippee Ki Oooh -- Varanasi
Yippee Ki Aaaayy -- Varanasi
The traffic cows of Varanasi

Luana screamed and jumped,
Their hot breath she could feel,
As the cows ran past her,
Going home for their next meal.
The local people shrugged, it’s just India they said.
One minute you are here, the next one you are dead.
Repeat chorus.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Yes, I may have missed my true career calling. I may be moving to Nashville after we return home.

Family is Everything

When you marry in India (and usually your marriage is arranged for you), you don’t just marry a person. You marry that person’s entire family. The groom’s sister even places a toe ring on the bride’s foot to seal the marriage (and if there is no sister, they‘ll come up with a cousin or family friend). We didn’t get to experience an Indian wedding, but we had the good fortune during our stay in India to see little snippets of rich family life in action.

In Chennai on the very first day of our visit, we went to the home of an entire extended family centered around two brothers and their sister. About 15 people of their extended family took the day off work or school to host our group of 25 people from our ship, and they all dressed up in their best traditional clothing.

They had drawn a good luck symbol on the sidewalk to welcome us to the house, and brought us in through their front room, which was wall-to-wall shrines to Ganesh (the god with the elephant head), and other Hindu Gods. Then all 40 of us, with shoes removed, crammed into one room of their small, meticulously clean home and sat down on chairs, floor, bed, etc. They prepared fruit and something like the Indian version of Chex party mix for us to eat, explained their clothing and jewelry (nice bling!) and told us about family customs and religion. The grandmother sang in traditional Indian style for us -- quite beautifully.

I don’t know if there are any kinder, more warm-hearted people on the planet; they acted like it was a total honor for a group of strangers to descend on their home, eat their snacks, and take picture after picture. It was very humbling to have total strangers open their home to us in this very personal way. These folks have a family foundation to promote traditional Southern Indian culture, and they had friends at the local newspaper who came to write an article about our visit. We’ve been checking their website, where they hoped to post a link to the newspaper article. Their website address is http://www.srimylaporetrio.in/

An Extra Added Attraction

(Luana:) Yesterday the captain announced that we were going to idle for three hours so we would be awake this morning to see the Nicobar Islands as we passed them. I’m sure you would be as excited by this as we were, since we had never heard of the Nicobar Islands and kept calling them the Mallobar Islands all evening. We even googled the Nicobars to see what was special about them, and didn't find much of note. And yet, because we are Academic Ad-ven-tur-ers and here to learn, we dutifully got up in time to watch the Nicobar Islands go by at 7 a.m. We saw a shipwreck on one island shore, and the islands were nice and close, and they looked like islands.

Fortunately, we also went to Global Studies today, because a linguist on board was there to tell us the significance of what we saw. Evidently, a few of the Nicobar Islands are inhabited by one of the last true remaining hunter-gatherer groups who do not want contact with the outer world, pygmy-like and undeveloped. Of course they are getting more development, but they are hostile about it. They turned down aid following the 2004 earthquake and tsunami, when the earthquake moved some of the islands a hundred feet.

The islands once hosted about 14 dialects, none of them related to any other language on the planet, and there is speculation these are closely related to the original languages spoken when humans developed out of Africa. The Nicobar languages are dying out; the linguist thought they were down to about six. One 85-year-old woman died last year as the last person to speak her language, and she hadn’t been able to have a conversation with anyone for 25 years.

Since the Nicobars are under the administration of India, I guess this means we are now in India, even though we don’t arrive for two more days. We are officially in our second of three oceans--the Indian Ocean--and in the Bay of Bengal. We are also at about half way into our trip--hard to believe!

They say the more you know, the more you find you don’t know; today's little lesson confirmed that for us. Class dismissed!

We Laugh at Danger

(Bob:) Today our ship stopped off the coast of Singapore just for refueling. The ship couldn’t take on fuel in Vietnam because that country has just one refinery, so fuel is very expensive and the quality is not that good. So we anchored far from downtown Singapore, which we could just see when we sailed past. We were refueled for several hours by a fuel barge, but no one could go ashore.

While the refueling was going on, we learned there was a terrorist alert for the Straits of Malacca -- between Malaysia and Indonesia leading to the Indian Ocean, where we are sailing now. Some terrorist group said they were going to target a large oil tanker “or some other ship” in the strait. All day in Singapore harbor we had Singapore Navy patrol boats sailing near us and Singapore military planes flying overhead. But they are gone now that we have left Singapore. We have been sailing for about two hours in the strait.

Anyway, we just wanted to reassure our readers that everything is fine, this terrorism stuff is nonsense and there is no need to worr…..Oooooh NOOooooo, Not thaaaat! Aieeeeeeeee! ……………………………….................

Vietnam Past and Present

(Bob:) It was especially interesting for me to visit Vietnam under the circumstances I did. Of course, I had many friends who served in Vietnam, and it was only by happenstance that I avoided it and served out my Army tour in Texas.

Many of the college students on our ship knew virtually nothing of the war. It was sobering for them to hear a panel discussion before we arrived in Vietnam that included two veterans of the war who broke down in tears during the discussion. It shocked them to see the emotions we of our age group still have about the war.

Of course that didn’t stop some of our more sensitive students from visiting the Cu Chi Tunnels and firing AK47s: as described by one Vietnamese-American student on the cruise, “It is like an amusement park of death.” Imagine if our country had a museum glorifying our dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan; I think that might create a little outcry.

So the Vietnamese government does present one-sided pictures in some of their museums, but I guess that’s their right. Anyway, there is no detectable bitterness among the Vietnamese people toward Americans. They tend to take a long view of history.

They also love our money and our investments. They have about 25 to 40 percent inflation, so many merchants would rather get U.S. dollars than dong, which is the Vietnamese currency. (We’ve already heard all the jokes.) Most businesses price their goods in both dollars and local currency.

There is a lot of American investment pouring into the country, including a number of golf resorts on the coast. It is a great country to get inexpensive goods, including tailor-made suits, crafts and delicious food. (Thank God it’s our last chop stick country.)

The war in the jungle may be over, but the war in the streets goes on every day. Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City) has 10 million people and 11 million motorbikes. Crossing the street for pedestrians is truly survival of the fittest. This is how you do it. Look at the far side of the street and begin crossing in a purposeful manner. Look neither right nor left and neither slow down nor speed up. Definitely do not turn around or stop. Rely on the motorbikes to miss you. Then, when you reach the sidewalk on the other side, stop and look both ways on the sidewalk because motorbikes could be coming down it. We did survive, but we had a couple of close calls.

Cambodia’s Killing Fields

Fully one-fifth of Cambodians, or 2 million people, died between 1975 and 1979, when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge brutalized the country in a civil war.

The ship offered a flight from Saigon to Cambodia that included a trip to Pnomh Penh, where there is tourism related to the Killing Fields. We chose a different trip that flew us only to Siem Reap to see the Angkor Wat temple complex. Knowing the story of the Killing Fields, we really didn’t feel up to seeing the gruesome sights of torture chambers and rooms full of human skulls and bones, important as it is. But it is hard to get away from the devastation wreaked by Cambodia’s civil war, no matter where you are in the country. We heard a first-person account from our tour guide, a lovely man named Bunrith, who told us his family story.

Bunrith was three years old when his father, who was in the Cambodian Army, was executed in 1979. The government was forcing all the city people back into the countryside to be rice farmers, and the Khmer Rouge executed most of the educated people and intellectuals. Please don't ask me why, because I still can't understand it.

Bunrith’s sister later starved to death in the aftermath of the war, and his brother and mother were so affected in terms of health that they died prematurely, about 10 years ago. Bunrith managed to grow up, get an education, marry, and have four children. He has worked as a professional guide for about 16 years. In a country that has 50 percent unemployment, he is fortunate to be doing so well.

The students on our trips often chat during the tour guide lectures, a fact that is often disappointing as well as irritating. But as Bunrith shared his sad story, the bus became entirely quiet. Deathly quiet.

Everywhere we went in Cambodia, it was hard to miss the repercussions of this terrible war. Children hawking postcards and bracelets when they should have been in school. Children diving into trash cans looking for food at the temple complexes. A band made up of land mine victims playing traditional instruments for spare change. Siem Reap as a city was actually pretty nice, with lots of beautiful new hotels to serve the rapidly growing interest in Angkor Wat, a world heritage site. But the country has a long way to go to recover.