A Passage to India (pt 2): Quick Hotel Review and the Flying Car

Hugh Paxton’s Blog can thoroughly recommend the Green Hotel in Mysore. The food is curried, the rooms are safe if you are not on the ground floor and at one o’clock the party in the gardens ends with a final rendition of Country Roads Take Me Home and a tremendous series of bangs.

The car, (brand new, didn’t even have a license plate) managed to leap a hedge, several flowerbeds, turn over four times on a garden path and smash into my hotel wall.

I was rather grateful. Country roads is bad enough when sung in American. Sung in Indian? Torture.

The driver of the car was either unhurt and ran away or just ran away grievously injured to die somewhere else.

Next morning lots of people looked at the car. I think we all were thinking similar things.

“How the bloody hell did the driver manage it?” “You couldn’t do this if you were trying really hard.” “How are they going to get this car out of here without wrecking the garden?” Things like that.

I think most of us were relieved that there wasn’t a mangled body in the car. The gardener, however, looked rather different. I haven’t seen such a mask of rage in many years.

Verdict: A memorable second night’s stay in India. I won’t bother you with an account of our first night’s stay. I’m still too busy trying to forget.

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Leonie’s View: ANNUAL APOLOGY

Hugh Paxton’s Blog received the following New Year’s resolution from our regular and most politically incorrect Namibian columnist, Leonie.

Breaking a New Year’s Resolution usually takes me a couple of days. Leonie has always moved faster.

Cheers!

Hugh

And over to Leonie.

Annual apology Over the past few months I have forwarded some inappropriate pictures and jokes to friends who I thought shared the same sense of humor.. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case and I seem to have upset quite a few people who have accused me of being sexist and shallow.. If you were one of these people, please accept my sincerest apologies. Looking to 2013 onward, I will only post or send e-mail with a cultural or educational content such as old monuments, nature and other interesting topics. Below is a picture of the Pont Neuf Bridge in Paris . It is the oldest bridge in Paris and took 26 years to build. It was completed in 1604. OH CRAP, WHERE DID SHE COME FROM???? Happy New Year!

Feliz Año Nuevo from ARCAS

Hugh Paxton’s Blog is always delighted to hear from Colum, our man in Guatemala. It’s called proof of life.

Over to him!

Happy New Years from your amigos at ARCAS. Our many thanks to our friends and donors around the world for their support, and best wishes for a peaceful and sustainable 2013.

Colum

Colum Muccio
Administrative Director
Wildlife Rescue and Conservation Association/Asociacion Rescate y Conservacion de Vida Silvestre (ARCAS)
Lote 6 Calle Hillary, Km. 30 Carretera Interamericana
San Lucas Sacatepequez, Guatemala
Tel: 7830-1374, Cell: 5704-2563
E-mail: Colum_Muccio Website: www.arcasguatemala.com

Thai Days: A million new cars, a re-build of the transport network, my Gramp, and only five years to wait for congestion and Bangkok traffic jams to evaporate

Hugh Paxton’s Blog notes that the Transport Ministry is warning Bangkok residents  to “brace for what could be five years of extraordinary traffic congestion.”

Extraordinary traffic congestion?

Bangkok is ALREADY extraordinarily congested with traffic!

Apart from on Sunday when you can drive with open roads and a sudden sense of how quickly it is possible to move.

HUGH PAXTON BLOG ED: That’s a helpful travel tip, Hugh. But isn’t it time for a digression?  Tell us about your grandfather and how he came to have his car covered in cow dung? You can call the digression, “Sunday Drivers!”

ME: Yes. A good plan. Who needs political commentary when one can be bored by something else?

Sunday drivers? Ah yes!  They used to be a joke in England. Elderly, slow, a thermos of hot tea and some sandwiches packed as they went for a drive to see the view and stay well below the speed limit causing faster drivers,vicars  late for church and such, to honk horns and yell expletives. My beloved Gramp was a classic Sunday driver.

If the speedometer so much as nudged 20 mph, Gramp would apply the brake.

It takes little effort to start a traffic jam in the Lake District. The roads are designed for Beatrix Potter’s lovable hedgehogs and rabbits, not big buses full of Japanese tourists on a quick stop before falling asleep again and waking up in Edinburgh.

Gramp, was pre-tourist Lake District. But he kept small children,  ailing snails and lost lambs with no legs fully functional but  stable,  safe by ensuring that none were out-run by his car.

He was also a bit deaf and didn’t hear horns. I loved the man. He was a perfect Gramp. Walking stick. Walks up the fells. He burned toast so completely and so often that I always knew breakfast was not just ready but in flames.

He wrote great poetry, too.

He also did a terrible thing to a mole.

BLOG ED NOTE: To a mole?

ME: Yes. It was one of those things. He reversed and saw a pink thing fly away over the fry stone wall. It was a mole. He’d squeezed it out of its skin by one of his car tires  and the mole had been propelled …

BLOG ED: The mole thing. Let’s not pursue this avenue. Children read this blog.

ME: They shouldn’t. Sometimes I use rude words and say things.

BLOG ED: How are going to stop them?

ME: I have no idea. And before you ask me what happened. Yes, he drove his car a little too slow and a farmer decided to make a point and dumped his load of manure over Gramp’s car.

BLOG ED: Are we getting back to Bangkok and traffic jams?

ME: No, I’ll not bother about it today. And nobody’s going to bother about it for five years.They are digressing. Slowly.

Let’s Dope the Games and See What Chemicals Can Really Do!

Hugh Paxton’s Blog thinks that Lance Armstrong, who confessed to using drugs to Oprah Winfrey, should not have to say sorry.

Cheating is part of sports. Always has been.

Rather than saying sorry to everybody, Armstrong should branch out, expand, and go for a new kind of Olympics.

An Olympics fueled by performance enhancing drugs.

It would be sensational! We could all see comparisons.

Jed Kdogo made a half minute mile. Using *****.

Armstrong did the Tour de France in just two days and is now a strongly favored entry in the shot put.

Let’s get the drugs flowing and those chemical athletes going!

Of course the normal Olympics should go on. But my guess is my version would attract more viewers.

Rapes in India

If  Hugh Paxton’s Blog was an Indian  rapist I’d think twice about raping a seven year old girl in a school toilet next to the office of the headmistress.

Following the hideous gang rape of a medical student in a bus after she had had a jolly night out watching a movie…

BLOG ED NOTE: The culprits including the bus driver lobbed her out of the vehicle after stabbing her with blades and then tried to run her over to obscure evidence of their misdeeds – this last act of violence is under-reported

…and her subsequent death in a Singapore hospital, there are millions of Indian women and men yelling outrage and the police, accidentally have shot a journalist trying to film protests that became riots.

So let’s have a quick think about rape. This rapist in particular.

I’m assuming  he’s incapable of reading and will miss this Blog post. But he can’t be deaf. He must have heard that rapists in India are about as popular as the guys who blew up the Mumbai (Bombay) Taj hotel and ran amok in the beautiful Raj era station.

India can be obtuse, and some Indians can have views that baffle or beguile those who don’t know India.

I’m including Indians here. The ones I’ve met seem as confused as I am about India.

But let’s return to our rapist. India wants to boil rapists in really hot ghee.

And this man, despite the fact that millions of people are yelling “Death penalty, kill rapists!”  breaks into a school and rapes a small girl.

What was he thinking of?

Why?

I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all.

The police have swooped.

And they have arrested the headmistress. For negligence.

The rapist remains at large.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thai Days/Bali Days: The Hotel K

Hugh Paxton’s Blog has reviewed a number of books describing life in Bangkok’s prisons – all pretty harrowing.

The latest ghastly account of doing Asia time focuses on “Hotel K”, Kerobokan, not in Thailand, but in Bali.

Unlike the other books I’ve bought, read and reviewed, Hotel K is not written by a former inmate but by Kathryn Bonella, an Australian journalist who rose to prominence covering the sad story of her fellow countrywoman, Schapelle Corby, a beauty school student caught with 4.2 kg of marijuana stashed in her boogie board bag.

Schapelle’s physical beauty, her frailty, her professions of innocence, and the “excruciating shock on her face as the judge sentenced her to twenty years” captivated Australia. The trial was broadcast live on Australian TV networks, public opinion was split – did she, didn’t she do it – and Schapelle left the world of beauty school and boogie boards and entered the darkness and entropy of Hotel K.

Kathryn moved to Bali to write Schapelle’s story and it appeared in No More Tomorrows, a book that did very well indeed. Kathryn then returned to Indonesia to write a broader book on the prison (and other prisons in Indonesia) and the prisoners and people who inhabit them.

A lot of research – a lot – and the picture painted is not one of Bali Hai.

Her dedication isn’t to Mum, or all the people who made this book possible. It is dedicated to people who might help her write a sequel.

 

“This book is dedicated to anyone travelling to the tropical paradise of Bali.

Be careful. It could be a holiday you never forget. Even one ecstasy pill could cost you tens of thousands of dollars and a stint in the hellhole Hotel Kerobakan.”

Check Kathryn’s website.

www.kathrynbonella.com

Her sales team are earning their pay. There’s a lot of “buy this book, buy this book” stuff, and I found the check sexy scenes link a bit tawdry.

But if you are going to Bali, and are weighing the pros and cons of bringing in a bit of extra-special duty free, maybe you should follow her advice and buy this book.

Hotel K is depicted as money driven. The corruption and bribery make life easy for some – days out on the beach, flat screen TVs, eye-opening reductions in sentences should the right judge get the right amount etc. but if you are poor it won’t work like that.

Nothing in Hotel K seems to work like anything, come to think of it. The prisoners have a tennis court. They have a garden. They can get stoned, remission, a death sentence, a toilet that looks like a gateway to Hell’s sewer system, they can import prostitutes for sex nights on the prison lawns or in smelly cells with reeking blankets, they can snap group photos.

My take on this book is that it’s a serious piece of work and Kathryn deals squarely with some horrors/farces/injustices.

But she’s only seen them, she hasn’t lived them.

The books born in Bhang Khwang are birthed from those who have had years, many years, to suck the milk of degradation and struggle.

If you do get busted for drug smuggling it’s probably better to be busted in Bali. Not Bangkok. Nothing described in Hotel K comes close to what goes on. Or went on, in Bang Khwang.

Best option, as suggested by me?

Don’t go to Bali and don’t go to Bangkok to go to prison.

Be good! Have fun!

Hugh

Kate, Duchess of Cambridge portrait

Hugh Paxton’s Blog finds the Paul Emsley portrait of the Duchess of Cambridge uncomfortable viewing. She looks old, wily, knowing, sinister, wreathed in shadow.

A few reviews:

“I am really sad to say that this is a rotten portrait.”

Daily Mail art critic, Robin Simon (being typically to the point).

“Sepulchral gloom…how is it she has been transformed into something unpleasant from the Twilight franchise?”

The Guardian arts writer, Charlotte Higgins (sepulchral, a good choice of word).

“Just amazing.”

Kate, (being nice).

“Absolutely beautiful.”

Prince William, (being what a prince should be, charming).

I’m glad the subject and her spouse like it but it’s not a picture I’d hang on my wall. Too bride of Dracula by far.

Not as vile as the tortured, Night of the Living Queen, painted by Lucian Freud in 2001, admittedly, but, yes, if I drew the curtains wide on a full moon night and saw this face peering in through my window I’d start flinging garlic.

Namibia snakebite: Emergency in Ojtiwarongo

Hugh Paxton’s Blog received this message. MESSAGE READS :

” My nephew was bitten by ring haed cobra threedays ago but his condition get worst he was bitten in the head and is swalling badley help please is in otjiwarongo state hospital.”

I can’t do too much about that. Wish I could.

I review books about snakes and offer advice but I’m eight thousand miles away from Otjiwarongo and my guess is the ring head was a zebra snake in which case the nephew is in difficulty.

If anybody is in Otjiwarongo (Namibia) and, knows anything about snakebite and wishes to help here’s the uncle’s email.

Prisley!  prisley14@ovi.com

He’s Petrus. The uncle. He didn’t mention his nephew’s name.

I’ve asked for full details of the incident but I guess Petrus has other things on his mind.

Hope this one has a happy ending.

Best,

Hugh

Thai Days: We’ve got big balls

Hugh Paxton’s Blog has become a fan of big balls. Here are no less than six tediously similar images of my daughter in a big ball, taken a couple of days ago in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand.

“Some Balls are held for charity, and some for fancy dress,
But when they’re held for pleasure, they’re the balls that I like best.”

AC/DC (who else?) in their immortal song Big Balls.

And another ball/bouncing musical ditty:

“I like bouncing boing, boing, boing, up and down until I get a pain in my groin.”

Not the Nine O’clock News (who else?) in their immortal parody of English pop group Madness.

I’ve run out of ball related ditties. Let the story move on!

These Zorb Balls are bouncing into the Thai tourist scene with a mixed rate of success. If my daughter sees a Zorb Ball she is both enthused and wary. She asks the Thai guy who is smoking and eating noodles and overseeing the ball with a noteworthy lack of interest in health, safety regs or maintenance, whether the ball is safe or will pop and either drown her in a pond (as featured in this post’s images) or strike a sharp rock and explode while rolling her down a mountain slope.

The Zorb Ball guys can be relied upon to say, “No problem.”

And to date, they’ve been right.

No problem. Annabel enters the Zorb Ball, gets zipped in, it is inflated and off she rolls or bounces away. Across a pond, down a slope.

The slopes offer high speed and the guys at Khao Yai strap their Zorbers tight to avoid them following their fun with three months in a neck brace.

HUGH PAXTON BLOG TRAVEL ADVISORY: If you want a ball, you are probably going to have a nice bounce if you do it in Thailand. Stay well clear of Russia’s Caucasus mountains. Last week, two Russians were told by their Zorb Ball curator “No problem” before being zipped in, inflated, and given a push to get them off to a flying start.

They sailed off a precipice and didn’t bounce at the bottom.

One of them survived. But he couldn’t be described as being a Zorb Ball enthusiast. The authorities are suggesting tightening safety regulations in the Caucasus. An unlikely prospect.

Cheers from Bangkok! Keep rolling but skip the rocks.

Hugh

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