Letter to the India Board of Tourism

To whom it may concern:

I didn't know exactly to whom to write this, but I hope it finds itself in the right hands. My name is Aaron White and I recently visited your large nation for seven weeks from the beginning of December until the end of January, right in the heart of winter.

Fresh off an amazing two months in Nepal, I arrived in India quite excited about my time, planning to visit Sikkim before traveling across the North to Amritsar and back. Many people had told me stories not only of the hardships of traveling India, but also the rewards; I understood some of this from my time in Nepal and I felt ready to tackle the culture of India.

My first stop was Darjeeling and Sikkim. I noticed the great kindheartedness of the Indian people. Ethnically, the people were quite similar to the Nepalis, comprised of a mix of Hindu and Tibetan cultures. Everyone I met was amazing; locals would befriend me in a moment. They were so welcoming. I then headed down to Kolkata which I also loved. The Bengalis lived with such zest and passion, it was hard to not feel it as well. I formed a strong positive impression of India and I failed to see why so many people couldn't handle it. Yes, even in the first nine days, I had moments where I lost my cool. It is easy with lack of sleep; I'm sure you understand.

Place after place, I met more wonderful people and saw a little bit of the more negative sides of the culture. In Varanasi, I was assaulted by two men who claimed, falsely that I had photographed the burning of bodies. I defused the situation, but it left me shaken. It was so confusing to see such utter dishonesty and love all at the same time. It was not until I entered the “Golden Triangle” that I really saw why so many people hate the country.

Agra was horrible, there was no break from the hassling. Delhi was worse; I've never hated a place in my life more than Delhi.

This letter is getting quite rambling, I understand. If you are still with me, I would like to get to the main purpose of this letter. I would like to file a formal complaint to the Indian Tourism Board. Despite all the wonderful experiences I had, I was not completely satisfied, especially with the service of your country's workforce. Your employees do not have proper understanding of Western culture and how to deal with us on a business end. I am not so narcissistic to believe that you should cater to our culture and not the other way around, when it is we, who are the visitors, but I feel that with a slight change of approach, you could in the long run make more money for your business. Why am I writing this? Well, I see some real potential in your country and hope that you can improve on your business. I am not going to ask for a refund, but I may not return again unless some things change. So, I would like to leave you with some points to consider:

-No, Thank You, I do not need a rickshaw, I'm fine walking.

-Please refrain from calling me friend for the sole purpose of gaining my trust, this is a title reserved for people who at least know my name.

-Swiftly demolish the Pahar Gange area of Delhi immediately.

-No, I don't need a rickshaw! If I need one, I'll wave you down.

-If make a bowel movement into a bowl and try to sell it for 100 rupees, then cut the price 50%, then continually lower until I am selling it at a 75% discount, only 25 rupees, is this still considered a good price?

-When a customer says yes, quit selling your product. Further selling shows a lack of confidence.
-
I'm not ignoring you because I don't see or hear you, I'm ignoring you because I DON'T WANT A RICKSHAW!!!

Sincerely:
Aaron White

A disaster area

It started with a dark cloud in the horizon, slowing coming towards the bay from the sea. The open-air house I shared with Pink and JJ had a wonderful view, sitting high up on the jungled hill. We'd lived there for four wonderful days, but seeing the clouds made us worry. A house with no walls is great on sunny days, but we knew not how it would hold up in a storm. We aroused from the lethargy of our great music and conversation to put down the plastic flaps, which are surprisingly good at keeping things dry. Our two open walls were covered fine, save one section of the front that was broken; leaving a small opening in the top right corner.

The rain hit, but it wasn't too bad. Our house stayed dry and it let up to a light sprinkle by the time I had to walk to work. It was raining the next morning as well. Normally, I head down to Beam shortly after my cup of coffee, but with the steady rain, I chose to finish my book and have a couple extra cups. The second day's rain kept me inside, chilling with my friends, which was really not too different than any other day. Work was dead; few chose to brave the rain. That night, I could feel something building though. The peaceful rain became more ominous; the sky darker than normal. I'd heard rumors of a storm, but on a tropical island, there are always rumors of a storm with any drop of rain. It vacillated between steady rain and downpour, and during one lighter stretch, I asked Gae if I could leave early to not get too wet. He complied, but the rain picked up immediately. I stripped into my underwear and walked home, soaking.

I awoke in the middle of the night; the wind was howling, but it wasn't the wind that stirred me from my slumber; the plastic flaps were slamming against the wall of the hour furiously. I sprung up and tied them down the best I could. The rain was falling at rates I'd never seen. Fat drops like from exploding water balloons were falling so fast, I wondered if it was possible to swim through the air. I tried my best to sleep, but found it impossible. The rain didn't let up the next morning. I procrastinated breakfast as long as I could, hoping the rain would stop. Eventually, we lost power, so no electric kettle, and even with the windows shut and flaps down, the wind kept blowing the out flame of the gas burner. After my fourth cup of cold, instant coffee, I was too jittery to survive without food and braved the short walk to Beam.

I'd never seen the restaurant so filled. Every resident of the nearby bungalows were entrenched, some wrapped in blankets, all wore sweaters. I'd never seen most of the people wearing more than beachwear. A man I'd never met had set up a few bongo drums, which he played with wild vigor. Many were dancing around the restaurant to the beats, smiling, making the most of the insanely rainy day. I took my normal seat and prepared for another day inside. It seemed less fun than normal though; even though I did the same thing on sunny days, I liked having the option of leaving. None of us went to work that day; word from one brave soul said it was closed anyway.

The next day offered no relief. The downpour had now been going on for 36 hours. I couldn't comprehend that the air could still drop precipitation. When I walked to Beam, even more people crammed in. Some of the hermits who lived on the hill found their homes flooded, unable to handle so many days of constant rain. The morale had sunk only a little; many were just annoyed, especially those on two weeks vacations, finding their beach holiday spent inside. JJ had brought his guitar from the house, so we spent much of the day singing songs, doing our best to stay happy. We had one customer that night at Spice.



The next few days all blurred together. The downpour slowly let up after the fourth day, but the rain continued for a solid week. On day four, the food started running low; not that we were going hungry, we just didn't have many choices...potatoes were the first to go, followed by fresh coconuts and most disastrously, Oreos, but the coconuts were not a loss: cold weather yields little desire for its magic hydration. Nobody was going anywhere. I only left to attend work. Even the short walk to Spice was dangerous, trees were falling everywhere. My coworker Stu had missed being creamed by a coconut tree on the way to work by inches.


We all became quite close those days. One day, we started a massage parlor. Michelle, Cara, Rob, and I were all taking turns giving each other rub downs. It was quite a nice experience on both sides of this deal. We weren't the only ones. With a bay full of massage therapists, the upstairs area of Beam always had somebody face-down on a mat for most of the storm.

One night, trapped by the rain and the late nights socializing, I was invited by my friend Michelle to spend the night on her giant bed in the big dorm; all others were taken by the refugees. We awoke holding hands and finding it quite nice, we decided to start some romance. Given my new lack of fear of being close to other people again, it was quite lovely to find some physical closeness in such depressing circumstances. Everyone seemed to be cuddling anyway, a natural reaction to the close quarters and cold weather. Michelle and I continued to date until we both left the island and we plan to meet in Laos in the near future.

It was impossible for laundry. In a bay void of luxuries like dryers, we were all forced to were our dirty clothes. Most of things became moldy, including my hiking boots which I needed to chuck. The day before the rain started, I was already down to my last clothes. We all played the game of finding our least damp sarongs and shirts, after a while, we just got used to the smell of dampness and feeling of being wet.

I abandoned the house for good after a point; the small hole in the plastic flaps were enough to saturate the whole house; it happened slowly, but after the third day of downpour, Beam was a much better option for sleeping. The beds were all wet; there was precious little floor room that was not waterlogged. The dorm was slightly better, though many people had ceased even walking the few steps to the toilet, choosing to urinate in a bucket that lived on the balcony.

When the rain hits the bay, even slightly, the internet and phone reception disappears. We had no contact with the outside world. For all we knew, there could be nuclear war; we also didn't know how bad the storm truly was or how long it was going to last. Our best hope was it wasn't a crisis that would worry our families at home. The boats were not running for days; the road had washed out. We were all trapped. Many missed flights. Every once in a while, we'd hear rumors that the military was evacuating the neighboring islands Koh Samui and Koh Tao.

Finally, exactly one week after it started, the rain stopped. First the downpour tapered to just a steady drizzle. Some people tried to escape, only to return, finding that nobody was leaving the islands, except by the emergency helicopter and aircraft carriers that had evacuated the nearby areas due to massive floods. If they could have caught boats to the mainland, they'd find themselves trapped in Suratthani anyway. The mainland was devastated, roads flooded, all transportation halted. Thailand had been declared a disaster area.

We were lucky to be in such a secluded bay, because the damage was quite minimal compared to everywhere else. There was no flooding except for some odd houses. My first walk in the post-rain through the familiar palm grove was surreal. A large percentage of the trees had fallen, I lost count after forty. Some huts had been destroyed by the falling trees, but most were fine. We were lucky.

Saturday was the first day of sun and there was no better day to usher the warmth. The whole bay convened on Guy's Bar for the weekly morning party. We all had so much energy to blow, nobody stayed sitting. The dance floor was a mass of wiggling bodies, loving the first good sweat in a week. We were all alive in our disaster area.

Lesson Five

There might be something to this whole “energy” thing

It seems as if every person living in Haad Thien fits into one of four categories: yoga teacher, massage therapist, energy worker, or a student of one of these three disciplines. Of course, given that Koh Phangan is one of the top destinations in Thailand for yoga and eastern medicine studies, aimed at foreigners, this is not too surprising. I've been practicing yoga off and on for years and have noticed the positive effects on numerous aspects of my life. With regular practice, I found I had more energy, ate less, and in general felt happier, added to the expected increase in flexibility, strength, and svelteness. Despite this, I never really bought much of the philosophy surrounding it, merely practicing the assanas as a physical exercise; this is a common practice in the West, where as many from the East buy into the philosophy, but look at the west's obsession with assanas as quite silly. I never really found chakaras to be total b/s, though merely ways of visualizing the flow of blood through the body and the different centers blood flow seems to effect.

Meditation for me as an activity typically bored me. If I found myself stressed or finding difficulty sleeping, I'd use breathing exercises and meditation techniques to relax myself. For the most part, I considered myself as one who didn't really like meditation. After taking a few yoga classes in India and actually doing some meditation, I realized that I meditate all the time! The type of relaxed state of mind and focus I feel with my eyes closed, focusing on my third eye is same feeling I get from hiking alone in the woods or cooking a complicated dinner. Meditation is not an activity, it's a just a state. Of course, this was no new lesson for me, just merely a change in vocabulary.

So, once I accepted that I've been in fact meditating for a long time, I actually opened my mind to the practice of sitting in half lotus or savasina for fifteen minutes after my yoga practice to see what happened. Sometime, I'd try to focus on the energy of the jungle, attempt to block out everything but the insects and birds or I'd focus on the energy of ocean, only hearing the sound of the waves. This was typically before work and I found that putting myself in that relaxed state paradoxically gave me a burst of energy for the night, as if the forces of nature were entering into me. Again, I attributed this to an increase in blood flow, since both meditative poses keep the body more or less lined up. Surely, it had nothing to do with the fact that the world is comprised of particles, and at a microscopic level, air, trees, people are all made of the same things and in this mindset, there is a transfer of atoms between it all. Definitely not.

But then, suddenly, when I opened myself up to these ideas that energy can be shared, pushed around between people, that negativity can swirl and envelop others in the same ways as positivity, I noticed that it was there. When visiting Guy's Bar, first thing in the morning every Saturday, dancing among the crowds, under the beating rays of the sun, everybody happy, sharing a single feeling, happiness. I knew that there was something there. By this point, the drug heads from the night had left, leaving only the long-termers, the yogis, the hippies, all getting high on togetherness, smiles. I know it sounds cheesy, like a bunch of flower-power BS, but we share energy and we can harness it. Taoists, Hindus, Buddhist, they don't see this as hokey new-age thinking; this is just the world.

Living on Haad Thien, a person needs to be careful differentiating the real world from delusion. One drawback or positive, depending on your open-mindedness, of the place is that many new-age hippie types are actually insane. And in a loving, open place such as this, insanity begins to seem quite normal. People just let themselves out with no worry of judgment. A friend of mine on the island was a veteran of the Iraq War, disabling underwater IED's for many years. Simply put, this damaged him immensly, and he went deep into the rave scene and all that come with it; this may or may not have caused delusions, it's not my business. He was an extremely gifted massage therapist and energy worker who was getting rave reviews from everyone. I've always believed in the therapeutic powers of massage, but energy work always seemed a bit hokey; a closed-eyed person with hands hovering two inches above somebody's body for half an hour hardly seems worth the money.

Well, the day before he planned to leave, I decided to hire him for a massage. At first it started as a pretty normal, better than average massage. It then changed tone, less to muscle work, to more light touch and stretches. Apparently, I wasn't surrendering though; I didn't realize that I had to surrender to anything; he seemed not to be doing much. So, I just stopped thinking about what he was doing and let him do his work. Next thing I knew, I...well, I can't really explain it, but I entered into the deepest meditative state I've ever experienced in my life. Images, dreams, memories from the past, maybe things from the future all flashed before me rapid succession; all of it so fast, I couldn't even grasp it. I knew I wasn't asleep; I could still hear him occasionally convulse from a surge of energy he felt. I know not how much time had passed, it seemed forever and instantaneous at the same time, but I came out of space, lying in savasana, feeling quite dazed. I've gotten into relaxed, meditative feelings during massages before, but I've never completely left my body before, especially when I was barely even being touched.

I told him what happened and he wasn't surprised, apparently this is common when he does energy work. I asked him exactly what he was doing; he explained that he was realigning my chakaras and making the energy in my body flow freely; certain points in the body are connected to memories and emotions by removing energy blockages, streams of visions will come. Whatever went on, it was crazy and changed the way I thought about energy work!

Many of my fears involving a budding romance with my good friend Michelle evaporated that night and went into it with no fears. Since the massage, I have felt as if there was some major blockage in myself that was lifted. It's quite hard to explain.

I'm still not a complete believing in raiki and many other forms of energy work, but as I get older, I begin to see that is some sort of energies that we maybe could once grasp, but somehow over time, we've lost our ability to see it...or believe it. Whatever it is, be it just blood flow or a real, mystical seeming power, many Eastern traditions of thought provide pretty easy to grasp models of what's going on. I know I'll definitely look at these models with a more open mind in the future. Besides, I'd rather listen and believe some robed people right here on Earth than some white-robed thing that lives in the sky.