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My answer:

Absolutely. Many women do. I have travelled alone to India over 20 times. To all parts.

I used to always stay in $2 rooms alone, and also travelled sleeper class in long train journeys alone.

You need to have your wits about you, more so that you are a lone woman, but this is true of all places if you have travelled alone before.

I’m not saying nothing untoward will ever happen, just that the most I have seen has been verbal harassment which was quite easy to disarm. And that this did not happen significantly more than other places I have travelled to alone, and I will include Yemen, Bangladesh, some parts of western Europe in that list. You will have some trouble travelling alone anywhere — I don’t think India is a special case in any sense.

Someone told me, very early on when I first started exploring India alone: when in doubt, talk to a woman. I thought he was nuts but then I tried it whenever I felt unsafe anywhere (this has happened just a handful of times). People in India are super friendly, so don’t be afraid to ask. It should not be too hard to find English-speaking local women who can help, as they deal with much worse on their own. I realized this person was absolutely right: Indian women got me out of situations with calm ferocity, each and every time. They would tell the guy/s to f*** off, and make sure they deliver you to safety. This has happened across India and I urge you to consider this if shit ever hits the fan (it shouldn’t).

Some things to note, from anecdotal experiences (all of this has happened to me):

- a generalization: you will probably find South India very safe compared to North India. If interested, ask some locals on their opinions on why that is. My experience is just that in south India people are more reserved and less taken by the idea of anything foreign.

- many people in India are unable to comprehend why you should want to do that. Many of my friends there who come from privileged backgrounds, are not even given the opportunity to travel alone the same way I did. Most of their parents thought I was mad, and thought their country extremely unsafe. I think as a foreigner, one is held to a different set of standards and you can see India in a completely different way. Don’t be put off or scared by stories of other people’s opinions. Discover India for yourself and never be afraid of her. There’s a lot to learn.

- you will be asked endless questions about your personal life. What is your good name, what is your country, how old are you, are you married, how many children do you have, do you like India, what is your native place, how much money you make and can you help them get a job in your native place. Be friendly, be open to making stuff up (“the correct/expected answers”) if you like. It doesn’t really matter. But do not take this personally: this stuff is expected, considered good form, and not intrusive at all. They will also want you to send their regards to your parents, who they haven’t and will never meet, just keep it all in good faith. Friendliness takes you far in India.

- an unpleasant quirk of travelling as a lone female: this is a strange, not very nice thing but you will find out that in some places, some local men will assume because you are a foreigner = you are willing and able to have sex with them because all foreign women are not Indian and therefore impure and loose by definition. You won’t hear this said, but it is thought by many. I have found this attitude more pervasive in the north than anywhere else. I have seen and heard and experienced this behavior personally from lowly educated men and highly educated men alike. Remember, most local men are GREAT. It’s a couple of bad eggs that spoil it, as always. Just remember this terrible idea comes from watching tv and never having interacted properly with foreigners and believing in the myth that all white (and foreign women) are interested in alcohol and sex (and necessarily with them). Many people also won’t be able to understand why your husband or boyfriend is okay with you travelling alone.

- in general, the “holier” the place, the more shit you will get as a single lone female. The negative stuff I’ve experienced have come exclusively from the touristy and/or holy cities/towns. No problems at all outside these parts. There’s a crap ton of hypocrisy in the so-called holy places. All the sexual harassment I have ever faced have come from weird men in “holy” places. Luckily none of it was ever dangerous, just annoying.

So, be on your guard but make sure you don’t let any kind of fear cripple your trip either.

I mean, I have more than survived India alone.. And I also have a lot of female friends who have travelled India alone many times over the way I do. Their experiences more or less corroborate with mine.

The assumption is that you will dress appropriately and be sensitive to local customs. You will be fine. More than fine. Make plans before hand to meet some prominent local people in major cities, especially if they are in a similar field of work or working in an area you are interested in finding out about. I’ve learned a lot from talking to journalists, artists, tech types. They can teach you a bit about their city, and they will also watch out for you as you are a guest of Mother India’s after all!

Approaching Yercaud

Thiruvannaamalai to Yercaud, 155km, though it ended up a lot more

I come from a place with no highlands. No real ones, anyway — the highest point, Bukit Timah Hill, is a mere 163 metres. Enough for families and joggers to work up a sweat on Saturday mornings; not quite enough to keep going. You run, you jog, you break up a tiny bit of sweat — then it’s time to “descend” for breakfast at the nearby hawker centre.

Not so in India. Home, after all, to the Indian Himalayas. My first time in India was magical, and one I will never forget. As a naive amateur traveller at the time I had mistakenly assumed all mountains were the same. I had only experienced winter, once, in Mount Sorak in South Korea. I remembered four degrees Celsius was quite doable, even without too many winter clothes. I packed just as light, then, for the Indian Himalayas. On reaching Darjeeling I realized what a mistake that had been. This time, I was no newbie: I had been to India about fifteen times since, and knew a thing or two about its disparate climates. I also knew a little bit about its hill stations, and its rickshaws. Something in my body — common sense? — also told me it might be a bad idea to climb a hill station in an autorickshaw.

One of the things that people who know me are likely to say is that I like to do the very things that I’m told would never work.

Like driving an autorickshaw up a hill. Remind me to never do that again.

The last we ever saw of our route book

Andrew and I were to get horribly, horribly lost, that day. For the first — and only — time.

Karthik left us that morning in Thiruvannaamalai for Chennai. Having just obtained his PhD days prior to the race, he was slated to move to Brussels soon after. Due to some bureaucratic screw-up, he had to bus it back to the capital for a medical appointment for his Belgian work visa, then head back to meet us in Yercaud that night. Not having a Tamil-speaker onboard was doable, but my team had gotten used to the idea that we could muck around after flag-off, have breakfast, hang out with locals, see a few sights, then start moving.

Flag-off at Thiruvannaamalai was as uneventful as it could be — I could not wait to get out of there. Karthik bid us farewell even before we woke up. When Andrew and I got to base we were pretty sleepy, still, having spent the previous night sleeping on terrible beds (and I on the floor). When the horn sounded and all the teams started for Yercaud, we headed to the nearest coffee shop to eat a quick breakfast (muruku and some other snacks) and to take swigs of coffee before we started properly. It must have been 8am, usually an ungodly hour for me, but the faithful were already awake.

Hungry, we had kothu parotta in Kambainallur

That morning I woke up and dragged my feet and didn’t want to drive my auto. Off we went anyway. My job, since I was no good with driving these things, was to sit in the backseat and navigate. My tools? Google Maps on my iPhone. Google Maps in this part of the rural world was fine — if by fine you mean, places, villages, towns and cities actually show up, in English. The directions they came with were impossible. Being from the big city, you understand: if Google Maps screws up, it is the end of the world as you know it.

So we followed these maps on my phone, and the navigational directions they gave us. Except that we got hopelessly lost in the end. We kept going anyway, and the people we’d stopped for directions were no help. “Which way to Harur?” This way, that way, you go straight there and then you turn left… India is a pretty bad place to get lost in. Everyone wants to help, and does; except when you’re lost, all that help is really no help at all. At a petrol station we got the usual “OMG, foreigners! Driving a rickshaw!” curiosity. And still no worthwhile directions. We kept driving, driving, following one lead after another.

We passed lots of farmland, and lots of construction. We drove over bumps, we drove on very awful roads. We found ourselves in a village where I got out, and gesticulated wildly. Yercaud! Yercaud! Which way? (Making a note to myself that I should have paid attention to what little Tamil was spoken around me, growing up.) “There!” — followed by the Indian octopus. The one where at least eight arms point in eight separate directions. If you’re a newbie you end up following directions given by the person who made his case most forcefully and most convincingly. If you’ve been around these parts, it’s that guy you learn to ignore. We kept driving, in some direction.

With another happy passenger. Fare: zero rupees.

I was driving on one of the smaller highways, emboldened by how easy it was becoming, when the highway suddenly led into a town, and the town led to lots of people. Remember, I don’t really know how to do this — I’m just not good with manual gears, not yet — so I suddenly felt I could not control the rickshaw, and it was cruising along at a speed that was much too fast even for an small town. Andrew, who was chilling out in the backseat, was starting to realize this too.

I kept going anyway, freaking out and yelling “ANDREW I NEED YOUR HELP!” but by the time he scrambled and leaned over to take control of the gears, the rickshaw had already hit a motorbike. There was an old man on it. He fell. I felt like everything that could have gone wrong already had — and yet here we are, about to be in the middle of a large mob with possibly no way of getting out of it.

True to my projections, a large mob had formed around us and the old man. But they were not yelling, nor were they demanding anything. They gathered in large numbers but then some of them helped him up from the ground, another group picked up his motorbike and brushed off the dust, and others yet just stared at us. “It’s okay, just go,” the mob was saying. But I knocked over someone’s bike and it’s possibly not working now! “No, he’s fine, you should get on your way.” I tried to give the old man some money to fix his bike. He shyly refused, acknowledging the power of the mob around him. They were so nice to us, almost to the point of assuming that we must have been so unlucky to have had a tiny accident here in their town, even though it was my fault, that I felt embarrassed instantly. Knowing I could not out-talk the mob, not in a language I didn’t speak, and not wanting to embarrass the old man either by insisting openly that he take my money for his bike, I made it seem like we agreed, gathered our stuff, and got back into the rickshaw. But not without shaking the hands of the man whose bike I had knocked over (even if it was gently so), and pressing a small wad of cash into his hands. We took off then, and kept going.

Then the phone rang. It was Aravind, wanting to know where we were — everyone had already assembled somewhere for lunch — so where the hell were we? Ask someone, he said. With no Tamil between Andrew and I, and sign language not cutting it for when actual explicit directions are required, I passed the phone to someone who spoke in Tamil to him.

When I got the phone back, Aravind calmly told us we were at least two hundred clicks in the opposite direction. Please drive back towards Harur ASAP. Still the villagers pored through our route book, and were unanimously convinced we just had to keep going, there would be a turn, go up that hill, and then it’d be Yercaud. I could see it, and I wanted that hill to be Yercaud, quite desperately. But of course it wasn’t.

So we doubled back and drove off in the other direction.

One hour. Still no sign of Harur. We were, instead, in Kambainallur. This being a good-sized village, and by this I mean there was actually a place we could stop and eat a proper meal in, we parked outside a little hut where I saw something I recognized. An iron griddle. With food on it. Food being kothu parotta, one of my favourite childhood foods. This far out from home, and from the places I knew in India, having something close to home like kothu parotta was a wonderful feeling. It reminded me of all those nights I walked from my university hostel in Singapore to Little India to eat parotta, chopped up, with egg and chicken. I decided I would have the same thing right here in Kambainallur just so that I could feel we might somehow find our way to Yercuad later.

The people at the restaurant were bemused, to say the least. When I think of rural Tamil Nadu now, I will forever remember it for the sweltering, still heat beating down on our backs. No wind, no breeze — just the slow oscillations of a very old, very dirty ceiling fan. Tic. Tic. For half an hour we ate our tasty kothu parotta in the hut, and entertained the people of Kambainallur who were coming into see what we were up to. Yes, we are driving this thing…

I’m often asked, wasn’t it dangerous? Dangerous, to the extent of possibly damaging life and limb on the road, yes — theft and other crime, not so. We usually parked our auto somewhere in sight. By the time we were here in Kambainallur we had gotten so comfortable in this part of Tamil Nadu we even experimented with leaving our bags of expensive camera equipment in the rickshaw, although well-disguised. Every single time we — as foreigners in this part of town — were treated with far more curiosity and amusement than anything we owned (which probably didn’t look like very much, considering how we were dressed).

We clambered back into our rickshaw with a small post-lunch stupor, armed with cold Pepsi and Thums Up, and took off somewhere into the distance. This time we had a small feeling we might be on the right track. We kept driving, and noticed people were trying to flag us down. This time we were in the small country roads that cut through the villages, not on the state or national highways, and not on the larger arterial roads between the towns either. There did not seem to be any public transportation — nor any other autorickshaws — around for miles. We decided since we had just had a small spot of good luck (with the tasty lunch and finally figuring out which way to go), we would pass on the karma. We began picking up passengers.

All of them were going a short distance, usually to the next village, so each ride lasted an average of 10 minutes.

With our music thumping in our rickshaw, food in our bellies and cold drinks in our hands, Andrew and I started feeling rather invincible. We stopped for every single passenger who flagged us down. Each time, happiness as we drew to a halt, then confusion, horror, as they looked into the vehicle and found us looking like that. They all climbed in in spite of the incongruity. Not knowing how to speak with them we simply drove on straight, and they told us when to stop.

Lady we gave a ride to in Kambainallur

After a few minutes, her curiosity got the better of her and she asked, in Tamil (which I understood a very limited amount of), “Where are you going?”

“Yercaud.”

“By rickshaw?”

“Yes. From Chennai.”

“Why didn’t you take a train? It’s so much faster.”

With that, she pointed to the village she wanted to alight at, and ran off into her sister’s house. I often imagine what she might have said to them. “I came here to your house in an autorickshaw, driven by an American and a Singaporean, and they were dressed like rickshaw wallahs.” I often imagine that might have been the rural equivalent of saying you just saw a spaceship.

We kept going. We picked up at least four people, each of whom was just as incredulous as the last. One man had huge gunny sacks of spices with him, and he too sat in the back seat with me. Each started out shy, embarrassed, but burning with curiosity — each ended up wondering why we were doing this. At that point I was starting to wonder myself.

One happy passenger after another, we were finally well and truly on our way. Harur was in sight. Our team phone was low on battery, so we had no communications from the Mothership (the convoy) since the last time we spoke. We found that M., who was responsible for making sure all teams got rescued if anything went wrong, had been waiting in Harur for us for hours. His pickup truck was recognizable from afar, so we drove up to him. It was 4pm. All the teams started making their way up to Yercaud about 3 hours earlier. “So you better start now before it gets dark.”

At Harur I don’t think either of us had any idea we were only halfway there. It seemed such a tremendous accomplishment to have made it thus far. I started to feel relieved, like we could take things easy from here. We even celebrated with a 20 minute fresh fruit juice break. But we were to face a truly uphill battle.

We left Harur and made for Yercaud. We were so hot and dazed and frustrated by this point that even the relatively straight road towards Pappireddipatti, from which we would begin our ascent, was difficult to find. M. drove his pickup truck alongside, doing the convoy equivalent of kicking our asses, and we were finally in Yercaud!

Not so.

After 45 minutes up the hilly roads into Yercaud, a gear and brake problem we had been ignoring for the last four hours began to act up. The rumbling sound from the rickshaw was growing so much louder we had to pull over on the side of the hill. M. was not far behind, so we got him to take a look. Yet another 45 minutes spent not-moving, even though M. had really talented mechanics working with him, the sun began to fade. I have been to many places in the world and I’m supposed to be used to this — but it takes a huge effort for me to remember that when the sun sets, sometimes what follows is total darkness. And so it was. “Turn on the front lamps,” I said to Andrew. “But… they are already on.” They were just feeble, and really quite pointless. We could not see a single thing. M.’s team sped off and we soon lost them, driving in the dark ourselves. Our feeble lights did as much as to allow us to see when something was immediately in our faces, but not much else.

We were heading to the base hotel, but there was still a substantial climb to make. We were probably driving in the dark for about an hour before we finally saw a sign that said “Glenrock Estate” — our base camp for the next two days. Despite following the signs, and the instructions we received earlier, we could not find it. We would go straight, make a left bend, and then be in complete darkness again with no signs of a hotel anywhere near us. We kept going in what must have been circles in the dark. When we finally saw a bunch of lights, we knew it was not the hotel but the small village of Kakampatti. We pulled over for me to get some directions.

I ran into a store with a telephone, and dialled hopelessly for our friends. No luck — nobody had any cellular reception at the hotel. I asked a few villagers where Glenrock Estates was, and they said it was just ten minutes away, just up the slope we just came down from, where it was so dark we could not see the sign that said “turn right”, so we missed that completely. When I got back to the rickshaw and to Andrew, he was on the ground peeking into the underside of our rickshaw. Disaster, yet again.

A bolt had fallen off the rickshaw some time in the last ten minutes. It could not start without this bolt — there was a risk the rickshaw would simply fall apart, if we did. But it couldn’t even move at all. At this point I was beyond wanting to cry. Somehow I had some blind faith in how India always comes together for me.

A villager got on his motorcycle, and said he was going to buy the part for us from the garage 15 minutes away. When he returned, we found he bought the wrong bolt, and before we could even thank him for his help he got back on his motorcycle with someone who knew more about mechanics than he did, and they both went back to buy the proper part.

I sat on the ledge, wanting to help but really not being able to, just tired beyond belief. It’s the sort of feeling when you are not sure when the work day will end — except in this case you don’t know when the day will end, or whether you will get to where you need to be. I was fully prepared to spend the night in the village.

Suddenly, loud roars came riding down the hill towards us, and two men on quad-bikes came towards us.

“You must be Adrianna and Andrew.”

I thought they must have been angels.

“We’re the Bosen family, from Glenrock Estates. One of the village kids ran up here to tell us, quite breathlessly, that there were two foreigners whose rickshaw had broken down in their village. Since you were the only people not here yet, we assumed it must be you.”

The beauty of my mother India is in how in spite of the chaos, things come through. If you don’t panic, if you don’t worry too much, if you don’t allow yourself to be swept away by how different, and how insane, India seems to you, she will be good to you. Our rickshaw stayed in Kakampatti that night, but we didn’t have to — we got into the quad-bikes with the Bosens, and they brought us uphill to their comfortable coffee plantation estate where we joined the teams around the bonfire, with Kingfisher and coffee magically appearing each time we wanted some.

Coffee. Beer. Food. A comfortable bed, even though it was one I shared with 20 other beds in a dorm, I was happy we made it. Now that the worst was out of the way on the second day of the race, surely there could be no worse moments hereafter?

The villagers of Kakampatti fixed our rickshaw for us, and even drove it to the hotel when they were done.

Yercaud may not be in the Himalayas, or any other majestic mountain ranges, but as a compact and quaint hill station in the Shevaroy Hills it was all I needed it to be, right there and then.

Aside: Visit the Bosens at their lovely Glenrock Estates in Yercaud! Great coffee and quaint place to stay.

I've been spending a lot of time in the Philippines lately...

There comes a point in every traveller’s life when the experience of going to a foreign place no longer feels the same, nor as exciting as it used to be when she first began. Cities blur into similar skylines, restaurants and bars. Non-cities remain precisely that—good in small doses but rarely more. The magic of travel fades into a succession of airports, suited executives and boring business hotels, or a kaleidoscope of lobster-red package tourists and concrete bungalows on dirty beaches.

Even I could not avoid that fate.

Having travelled around many parts of the world on a student’s budget not too long ago, I used to skip perfectly affordable, mid-range hotels in favour of Rs100 rooms. I was used to travelling for three months or more at a time, and had a strict travel philosophy: “It’s got to be all or nothing. Either luxury on a private island scale, or whatever I can get for next to nothing.”

[...]

The Philippines, with its 7,107 islands, was especially appealing. Under-visited and often overlooked in favour of Thailand and Indonesia, the Philippines has a certain charm that sets on slowly, but lingers on long after you’ve left. It’s so large, with each region and group of islands distinct from each other, that it feels disjointed; and so disorganized and chaotic that it can be hard to pinpoint what exactly the Filipino experience is about. Is it about the colonial heritage of Intramuros in Old Manila, or the pine trees and mountain ranges around Baguio, where strawberries, ube (yam) jams and hot springs rule?

Why the Philippines is not overrun with tourists is the reason why it should be: It can be experienced in so many spectacularly different ways.

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Read online

Herding his cows, somewhere on the highway

Madras to Thiruvannaamalai, 185km

I’ve often said India never calls for me, she mostly shouts. With India, there is no moderation: you either love her, or you hate her to death — she never cares for you, or you can’t get enough of each other. It’s clear which camp I fall into.

I could have been in class, somewhere in Singapore, dying in a statistics lecture on an unbearably hot day. A message would come in from friends in Mumbai — usually about their plans that weekend — and I would not be able to work, talk, study, or function. Not until I booked a ticket to India. I could never explain it, I just had to do it.

It was like that again when I sat at the void deck of my apartment, decked out in my funeral whites, missing my grandfather terribly, not knowing how I would ever stop. Other people need Prozac; India’s yelling, honking and shouting did it for me. It did it for me every time I needed her.

When the horn sounded at flag-off, we left Kodambakkam High Road behind. The gaggle of reporters, photographers, radio personalities, curious onlookers and well-wishers faded into the distance. Our destination: Thiruvannaamalai.

If you looked on a map, the holy southern Indian city is merely 185 kilometres from Madras. If you took a bus, it would take just under five hours. If you travelled by car, perhaps three and a little bit. Since we took an autorickshaw, our estimated travel time was something like eight hours. Or before nightfall; whichever came first.

It takes a while to actually leave Madras. The city is a sprawling mess of neighbourhoods, many of them neat and compact and middle class and manicured — by Indian standards anyway. We passed Thousand Lights, rode on to Cathedral Road, our music thumping in our DIY in-rickshaw entertainment system.

Near Menaka Cards factory on Arcot Road I made us slow down to stare at the ridiculous sign I have always loved on the side of its building: “Marriages are made in heaven. Marriage cards are made in Menaka”. We strode on confidently — empowered with the sort of zeal only people who knowingly embark on insane adventures can have — past Mount Road, on to Saidapet. Guindy. St Thomas Mount. Chennai Airport. And then it was the open road from there, our first “highway” on an autorickshaw.

From then on we were well and truly on our own. We would lose sight of all the other rickshaws in the rally, most of the time, and only run into them when someone broke down, when we ran into another team in a random village, or when we caught up with the rest of them somewhere on the road. It would be up to us to decide which way to go and how to get there.

Relief

We perfected the art of speaking without words. Most times we received instructions with a bob of the head, and we replied and expressed our gratitude in the same way.

Thiruvannaamalai was not a difficult destination to get to. Excited and pumped with adrenalin, we raced our rickshaw through the Great Southern Trunk Road and then the National Highways like champs on three wheels. We stopped when we found the first breakdown of the day, Tim and Gary’s, but otherwise stopped only to refuel, and to drink sugarcane juice. We got there fairly quickly, and without much incident. (Other than when we’d stopped for a train crossing in a small village, and a little girl came up to me to ask, “aunty aunty, what are you, white or Indian?” I said I was yellow, and drove off before she could ask me what a yellow person was.)

Chengalpattu. Tindivanam. Vallam. We stopped outside Gingee Fort to take photos of the fort and of the bulls with painted blue horns. Pennathur.

I have a love-hate relationship with India’s religious, holy cities. I know how my skin colour, and the fact that I was born outside the structures and strictures of traditional Hinduism, means I will never encounter holy life in an Indian holy city the way it was meant to be; I will always be an outsider, always a firingi, in the religious places far more than in most other cities. It also means I see much more of the harassment and the stupidity that their most aggravatingly frustrating touts and pimps and drug dealers subject to foreigners, who believe we all come to India’s holy places to seek darshan with the gods of drugs and sex, without exception, and must thus be given what we want: sex and drugs. In Benares I felt no holiness, only sexual harassment; I did not have high hopes then for Thiruvannaamalai.

Karthik at a rest stop

By the time we found Chengam Road, with some difficulty, it was already dusk. The town’s sacred vibe was apparent: in addition to the numerous temples, priests and sadhus, there were a great many white people in what I call “enlightenment attire”, wandering around town. When we pulled in into the grounds of our first base hotel, a fancy resort along Chengam Road, we were tired, but victorious.

I could not have asked for a better way to end the Rickshaw Challenge, having had such a great first day; but something about Thiruvannaamalai did not sit well with me. The hotel’s staff started off friendly and grovelling, but when they found out my team did not intend to plan to stay the night and spend a ridiculous sum on their “affordable luxury” they quickly turned sour. The cheap hotels we wanted to stay in were sneered at by them — we CANNOT stay in those hotels, they said, because “these hotels allow smoking”, and “they serve alcohol and meat.” I have utmost respect for teetotalers, vegetarians and non-smokers, but it’s this sort of holier-than-thou attitude practised by a small number of you that makes me run in the opposite direction and do those very things you dislike.

So off we went, back onto Chengam Road, back towards the town centre, in search of the Promise Land: a cheap hotel with alcohol and meat.

We were turned away by many budget and mid-range hotels, because I was “gasp a WOMAN!” I was a woman who intended to share a room with a white man and an Indian man, but the idea was inconceivable to many. I was told by several hotels that they were looking out for me by not letting me stay there, to protect my honour or something flaky like that. Others said they were protecting me from the many bachelors who stay in their hotels, as though these bachelors would not know how to deal with the presence of a Chinese woman in a rickshaw wallah uniform. Dejected, exhausted, and still ranting about self-righteous vegetarians, we finally settled for a bright pink hotel with a decent fan room for a handful of rupees.

A shower never felt so good.

I slept on the floor, deciding it was preferable to the hard double bed shared by the boys, and dreamed a long dream about driving down the Great Southern Trunk Road.

Tomorrow, we would conquer Yercaud.

Stopping for kaffee somewhere in Kerala

Madras, India

There are slower ways of seeing India. On a buffalo. On a “two wheeler”, a motorcycle, stacked to great heights with assorted luggage until you can’t see what’s in front of you. Or on foot, “by walk”, like a sadhu with no clothes on.

We travelled by autorickshaw.

An autorickshaw isn’t too bad an idea on paper: it is, after all, capable of hitting up to 50km per hour. Which would be comforting if our speedometer actually worked. Instead, ours wavered meekly several times per day, mostly settling for the number 65. How machines lie. I wouldn’t even call our autorickshaw a machine — a primitive piece of equipment, yes, but machine, implying any form of mechanical achievement or efficiency, no.

We set off from Madras one hot morning, dressed to the nines. It was a good idea before flag-off, this brilliant idea we had of dressing just like a rickshaw wallah. The previous nights we had been in Pondy Bazaar every night, looking for various items to complete our get up. We’d planned to dress as Super Mario characters at first. The mustache and beret were no problem, the theatre costume company we’d checked out earlier had plenty of those things. They were initially designed for Roman centurion characters and other popular roles, such as various Hindu gods, but we could appropriate those items to create our Mario outfit. But the suspenders were impossible. Even the salesmen at Saravana Stores laughed at us when Karthik described what we wanted. “You mean you want dungarees, saar? They’re so old-fashioned. You cannot find them in Madras. They’re too old-fashioned, saar, we have no dungarees.” If a Madras salesman tells you they are out of fashion, they are out of fashion. So we thought we’d dress like a rickshaw wallah instead.

Saravana Stores is a bit like Singapore’s Mustafa Centre. Mustafa scores better on the “has all the crap you ever need to buy” front, but Saravana wins on the “has an entire section of the store dedicated to rickshaw men’s uniforms” front. We skipped over like crazy firingis, trying out different types of singlets (who knew there were so many?); a variety of khaki shirts, and patterned lungis. A few hundred rupees later, we were in business.

The author dressed as a rickshaw wallah with a tilak

Among the many questions posed to us by the Indian media, the one I could not answer was, “What do you hope to achieve by doing this? What is your intention?” Insanity has no intentions. It simply happens. Likewise, when I first read about the Rickshaw Challenge five years ago in Wired, I knew I had to go. The insanity took over and consumed me until I finally bit the bullet and went for it.

Where we would live, where we would spend our nights, how we would repair our auto when it broke down (and we knew it would break down at least once a day), I had no idea. Everyone else had booked the hotel package that came with the race, but we were too cheap adventurous for that. If we were going to see South India the way none of us had ever seen her before, we would do it the proper way. We would drive an auto everywhere and we would stay anywhere, as long as it was close to a TASMAC and a good breakfast.

With that policy of insanity and inebriation firmly in mind, we set off for the open road, cruising on the East Coast Road. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

My story in Mint's Valentine's Day edition in the Lounge section.

Download the PDF here

There I was, sipping my welcome drink in a posh Ubud resort, when I almost choked on it.

I was accompanying friends as they sought the best wedding venue in Bali. Concerned about the monsoon, they asked the hotel manager why it hadn’t rained at all in the week we were there.

Without batting an eyelid, she informed us there would be no rain for the entire month. “You see, Julia Roberts is in town.

The Hollywood leading lady has many accomplishments to her name, I get that, but the ability to control weather surely could not be one of them. As it turned out, one of the most popular myths in 2009 went something like this: Roberts came to Bali to shoot Eat Pray Love. To minimize interruption on the set, traditional rain-makers were hired to cast spells over the skies to keep the rains at bay.

One can never be too sure about these things in a mystical country like Indonesia (and I say this as a committed, practical Singaporean), but what’s certain is Bali—and by virtue of proximity, South-East Asia at large—has had an indelible spell cast on it by the Eat Pray Love marketing machine. You can now go on Eat Pray Love tours to trace Elizabeth Gilbert’s footsteps around the island. You can meet the medicine man she consulted, at $25 (around Rs. 1,145) a pop. You can meditate at a beautiful beach resort, learn yoga, and wander around Bali in search of the enlightenment that Gilbert and Roberts popularized in print and on the big screen, respectively. I love Bali, yet I could not help feeling like I wanted to eat, pray and hurl.

I trotted off instead to my beloved Thailand, into Bangkok’s chaos and the hidden order beneath it, and the secrets of the Andaman islands.

Download the PDF here

I have a piece in the Valentine’s Day issue of Mint, the Indian paper. Read it here. I have not written much since my cover story in Reader’s Digest Asia in July 2010, so I’m feeling pretty good about my “comeback”. I will be writing more regularly, here, as well as for a handful of publications.

Sunset in Nikoi island

I still wanted to keep this site around, but it went through something of an existential crisis, not knowing what it wanted to be. Before Twitter came about the dichotomy was easy to understand: offline, long form writing, was in magazines, newspapers, academic journals; everything else was here. It is now hard to write in the same intimate, personal way I once did. I hope I still can. I have good reasons to be less forthcoming. In any case, Twitter served instead as a fast and dirty way of getting all that other stuff posted. Life stopped being so dramatic. In turn, I had little to report.

For about a year after university ended, I had the time of my life because I learned I could spend all my time writing, taking pictures, riding in planes and buses, and get paid for it. I stopped living in Singapore full time in 2008 and went through Spain, UK, United Arab Emirates, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Oman, India, Thailand, Philippines, Germany, Sweden although I never really thought it was possible.

Some time beginning 2009, I began to exhibit signs of wanting to settle down. I began working on an aviation startup with a business partner, and although I have moved on to other things since, I learned a great deal from the scene, the experience, and the people I worked with. I’m now between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore and Bangkok, getting my two companies up and running. Business is picking up, and I will link to it once our new website is up, and I am still learning and making it up as I go along. One of the companies designs and develops on the web, and also publishes lifestyle publications; the other, just a day old, specializes in iOS development. We have had the luck to work with some great clients in our early days, and we continue to learn new things everyday. We have done some good work, there are cool things happening at the moment, there are iOS titles we will soon be publishing that I can’t wait to tell you all about, and everything’s new and exciting and shiny at the same time.

I still write, but when I put down my bags and signed on for a two year lease and for animals, I told myself that I will save what little time and focus I have left after all the other stuff I want to do, for writing that matters to me. Offline, I will resume writing for a number of good publications that I like, on topics that I give a damn about. I will post links here as they happen (there’s a story slated for 12 February in the Indian paper, Mint). Online, I will save this space for the long form writing I want to do more of. Twitter and Tumblr will serve as the repository for the off-the-cuff ideas and thoughts that tend to become fragmented and scattered after a while.

I will be saving a whole section on this site for India, as it’s probably about time. I don’t think I will ever run out of things to say about India, even if I don’t write about anything else. I intend to start writing more about my work as well. In previous incarnations, the mystery wasn’t so much of one, as it was my complete and utter inability to get organized. Now that I’ve finally managed to define what I do, and to keep tabs on each aspect, I should be able to share them more thoroughly and frequently.

So why did I pull the plug on the old site? I haven’t. The old site and all its archives are still available here. I felt I needed to reboot my online life to make a complete break from the old way I used to write, and the person I used to be. I don’t know if this version is 100% different, or better, but I’d like to find out. I could no longer allow my 16 year old rants — no matter how eloquent or interesting I think they might be — to define my online self.

So we start afresh.

2009 was a year of many things: it was the year of change and death. More so it was the year of change because of death. Many famous people died that year; my grandfather, who was not famous, somehow also did the same. In April I called him from a phone booth in Beirut at US$2 a minute and had a 30-second conversation with him about minced pork noodles. In May I called him from London and had a 30-second conversation with him about minced pork noodles. In June they called me 3 hours after I landed in Kuala Lumpur from London, on the brink of my new life not far from home. 12 hours later I was sitting by his hospital bed, in a hospital 5 minutes from where I have lived all 24 years of my life, feeling like the last 24 hours of travel was about to change everything I knew about those very 24 years. By the middle of the month he was dead, and I didn’t get to see it. All I know is that 3 different people woke me up at 6 in the morning that morning and told me in 3 different languages that my ah gong was gone.

In Chinese familial taxonomy, the standing of every person in your family is relative and also language-dependent. Depending on your relationship to that person, and which linguistic branch is dominant in that side of the family, you call him or her a different thing. So your father’s mother is ah ma, your mother’s mother is gwa ma — if both sides of the family more or less speak the southern Min languages like Hokkien or Teochew, like we do. Your father’s younger sister is one thing, older sister is another; depending on their position among the siblings, and your own relationship to that person, each person is called something else. Like knowing whether tables, ties, or street lamps are feminine or masculine in French, everybody inherently knows this. But ah gong was only ah gong. To all of us.

I lived with this man and his wife almost every second of my existence. Then I grew up, travelled madly, lived abroad, and came home expecting not very much to change but instead everything did: no old Chinese man berating me about cigarettes and alchohol, no grumpy old man coming into my room at 3am every morning to check if I was alive, no funny old man who was a head and 3 foot sizes smaller than me telling me his slew of so bad they’re funny jokes that weren’t really jokes.

Then bloody 2009 took him away from me. We found out he was born on the same day as Michael Jackson. (Chinese lunar calendars and their ever-changing dates; we only found out when the date went up on his tomb.) A week after that, Michael Jackson died. Sometimes when I think about it, I think it was cosmically timed so that my ah gong could shine his torch at MJ’s face, laugh at his nose, and tell him that in Singapore we’ve immortalized him in a soya bean milk and grass jelly drink, after the ambiguous colour of his skin (and his famous song).

The rest of it in a nutshell, because they just don’t seem as important: I lived in the United Arab Emirates. I went to a camel market. Some camel trader offered 20 camels for my hand in marriage. I said no. I went to Yemen. Missed two bombs. Called my parents to tell them I was alive, and they said “okay, good”, because they were asleep and thought I sounded too happy for someone who’d just had a bomb scare. Happened to be in Pattaya and Bangkok at the precise moment the Red Shirt/Yellow Shirt April demonstrations erupted. Swatted flies with a tennis racket electric mosquito swatter while watching Thaksin on TV, with all his evil. Did my ultimate roadtrip: Beirut, Bekaa Valley, Damascus, Palmyra, Homs, Aleppo, Adana, Antalya, Goreme, Istanbul, London. Messed around in London for a while. Went home. Ah gong died. Mourned for a long time. My friends say India is my Prozac, so I went to Chennai, Fort Cochin, and Mumbai for a while to, well, “find myself”. Moved to KL. Settled. Got a dog. Started a business. Spent the new year with my love without having to spend a thousand dollars flying to see her.

2009 was good; but I can’t wait for this one to really kick off.

Downtown Beirut was swanky. Saifi Village was strange. I had to duck into a hair salon and get my hair cut by a gay man in Ashrafieh to avoid the guy following me on his scooter, and the other guy trying to sell me drugs. All I wanted was a steak. Walking around Beirut, glamorous, fashionable Beirut, the party capital of the gay Middle East, where everyone, straight, gay, and in-between, was artsy or beautiful or a bit of both, was mind-bending. Here was a United Nations tank, soldiers armed with rifles. Here was a pockmarked building, riddled with gunshot wounds, the architectural reflection of Beirut’s own wounded but eternal soul. In the fashionably frumpy quarter of Gemmayze, I joined the artsy young Beirut set for a night. Saturday nights in Gemmayze’s many hole-in-wall bars and clubs felt right; in early 2009, this was where Beirut’s heartbeat was to be found. Every couple of years, that changes, according to my friend Dana. Like many Lebanese, she left the country as a teenager because of the war. Never quite settling elsewhere, she joined the permanent Lebanese diaspora in Montreal and then in Dubai. I cannot imagine what it’s like to call such a beautiful, vulnerable strip of land “home”; it must be hard to juggle so many identities. “The New York Times Travel page just ran a story about how ‘Beirut is back’. Bars, clubs, it’s so hip now, yada yada,” I said. “Oh, please. Every five years or so the New York Times “rediscovers” that “Beirut is so different from the Middle East” and “and how we’re a party town,” she scoffed. “It’s a surprise only to them. Every five years or so somethings blows up, the shit hits the fan. Then we’re okay, and we make the New York Times again. And again.” Meanwhile, a gorgeous gay Lebanese man held hands under the table with his strikingly handsome French partner, while Dana ordered us more beer and whisky and expounded at length about how weird it is that Middle Eastern culture places so much importance on what’s been between her legs. I remembered what a foreign correspondent once said about this city being every old-school foreign correspondent’s dream: you could interview the Hezbollah at lunchtime and count on foie gras, wine and beautiful people showing at your parties after, on the other side of town. I love this place.

My months through the region are coming to an end. As I travelled through Dubai I fell hard for the United Arab Emirates, but not for its most famous, brashest city. I loved Abu Dhabi and I loved Al Ain. I loved the weekend drives into the desert, and camping trips to Oman. I discovered the lengths people will go to for bootleg alcohol, when liquor licenses and hotel drinking start to dry up (driving to Ajman to get bootleg supplies etc).

And as I embarked on my quest to see the real middle east, after giving up on Dubai – I was in for a treat. Yemen, bombs and all, shook me; it was like nothing I had seen before. Then my ambitious overland journey, beginning with Beirut. That’s now drawing to an end.

The last month or so that i’ve been properly on the road, I’ve navigated my way around Lebanon through Syria through Turkey, without once knowing how to drive a car. I’ve met ridiculously awesome people. I’ve had countless cups of tea with strangers. I’ve seen some sights.

And the sights I’ve seen, I’m amazed by the opportunity – and good luck I’ve had in seeing some of these wonders. From a castle built by one man, still alive, in Beiteddine, to the phenomenal Kraks des Chevaliers in Syria (the embodiment of all childhood castle jousting fantasies, says Theroux, and he’s right – again). The ancient cities of Damascus and Sana’a. The friends I’ve made all through Beirut, Damascus, Palmyra, Aleppo, Antalya, Cappadocia and Istanbul.

The long bus rides. I left Damascus last week and 36 hours later arrived in Antalya, but not before being stranded in Adana with too many Syrian pounds but no Turkish lira – and no money changer or warm clothes in the freezing cold of an eastern Turkish morning.

Done with my last bus ride (12 hours from Goreme to Istanbul), I now sleepwalk through Taksim Square at 7 in the morning, pleased to be back to one of my favourite cities in the world. One that makes me thankful for the beautiful people I call my friends, who last shared this city with me
- Alp, Z and gang. It was the city where Fortylove.tv was conceived, at the start of this tremendous journey.

But journeys never end, only their chapters do. It strikes me now that for all my complaints and grievances about the middle east, this region is truly special and needs to be seen to be understood. And I’m glad I had the chance to see it while I could.

If I could do it again, I would do a few weeks in Iran. But that will have to wait.

For now, long Turkish bus rides and what’s left of my Istanbul days – one filled with lots of ‘midye dolma’, wet hamburgers, fish sandwiches, Bosphorous views and raki when the sun goes down, I’m sure.

Then London. Then moving into my new pad in Kuala Lumpur. Then a new chapter in life, love, and adulthood. I think I have airtickets booked or planned for every month from now through January, though, so the adventure doesn’t end – it’ll be the last of the middle east and Europe for some time, but more awaits.

Time to finish breakfast, put on my heavy backpack, and walk the last 1km to my hostel. It shall be the last hostel in awhile – I’m not giving up backpacking, I’m just… Upgrading. Life, travel, trading in my hobo life for the chance of getting to own things beyond my baggage allowance for the first time in a while.

I’m happy.