Vegemite

Vegemite is the name of a uniquely Australian spread that (like Marmite in the U.K.) is a breakfast-table staple.  I couldn’t get Erik to try any, but in the spirit of gastronomic tourism, I felt I had to give it a shot.

Vegemite

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G’Day, Australia

The night we landed in Sydney was cool and rainy, a blissful reprieve after the furnace of India.  As our taxi whisked us along the main drag of Coogee Beach, the seaside neighborhood where we stayed, we picked up a distinctly Pacific, even Californian vibe.  The oscillating hills and sidewalks lined with coffee shops, smoothie stands, and top-flight restaurants matched our idea of San Francisco, just as the numberless sunbathers who blanketed the beach the next morning seemed very SoCal.  Over the next ten days, the profusion of delicious food, wine, coffee and chocolate, along with the friendly, laid-back disposition of just about everyone we met, confirmed our initial expectations.  This was a hedonist’s paradise.

Our hotel, semi-ironically called the Dive, fit the bill perfectly. We could linger at breakfast until noon with a dozen varieties of coffee and tea and an endless loaf of Panettone bread (a favorite of Erik’s).  Once we’d finished, and made at least some headway on our daily quota of reading and writing, we could walk across the street to the beach, or walk up the hill to a bakery with outrageously good almond horns, fruit tarts, and lemon meringues, or catch a bus into the center of the city.  At night, we had to make more difficult choices. Barramundi (a mild white fish) or kangaroo (a lean, tender red meat, served medium rare, and also, at our favorite local place, with a side of grilled pumpkin and onions)?  Tasmanian mussels or halloumi salad?  Drinking chocolate or banana tatin?  It wasn’t easy, but we managed to pass ten days pleasantly enough – although the damage to our waistlines and wallets is another story.

A Room with a View

Despite my illness, we couldn’t help being dazzled by the idyllic atmosphere of Udaipur.  It reminded us of Stresa, a laid-back resort town on Italy’s Lago Maggiore, which likewise looks across a brilliant blue lake to the mountains beyond.  Of course, distinctly Indian flourishes added much to Udaipur’s charm: the ghats, wide stone steps leading down to the water, where swimmers and laundry-washers congregated; the massive Hindu temple, filled with chanting worshipers dressed in eye-catching colors; the flowery garlands and ecstatic music which marked the commencement of a Hindu festival.

After three days and a few brief jaunts through town, we felt we had done justice to the town’s few conventional sights.  The winding, hilly streets were lined with shops hawking tourist tchotchkes, as well as a few backpackers’ hostels offering cheap screenings of the unfortunately titled James Bond film Octopussy, much of which was shot in Udaipur.  But the most memorable moments came when we simply enjoyed the view from our room, watching the sun slip behind the mountains at the end of a long day.

 

Delhi Belly

Since we began our trip in Ghana, where the food didn’t always agree with him, Erik has been joking that there’s no better diet than “Delhi belly.”  (“You can only eat microbes, but you can eat all the microbes you want!”)  I should have known that repeating the joke in Delhi itself was tempting fate.  A few days before we boarded the train to Udaipur, I came down with an unpleasant array of flu-like symptoms; by the time we arrived there, my stomach was in the grips of a full-scale rebellion.  Our hopes for a merely temporary flare-up were dashed, and a trip to the “American hospital” confirmed the worst.  Somehow, I had been infected with E. coli.

Not to worry: I am fully recovered now, thanks to the antibiotics which Erik procured from a roadside chemist, and a diet of bland food which the doctor ordered.  But I was virtually bedridden for the duration of our lakeside sojourn, and the fact that we no longer had access to a kitchen made things difficult.  Every restaurant in town served an exclusively Indian menu, which I would have normally enjoyed, but the sight and smell of those spices in my stricken state had a stomach-turning effect.   I had to place the same order for three days straight: “water porridge” for breakfast (that’s oatmeal made with water rather than milk); white macaroni noodles with a side of grated cheese for lunch (the tomato sauce, I learned, was laced with Indian spices); more macaroni noodles for dinner; and a banana lassi (an Indian-style yogurt drink) with everything.

We never did figure out what made me sick – especially since Erik, who ate the same things I did, was unaffected.  But by the time we left Udaipur for Australia, I was grateful for a respite from Indian cuisine, and I haven’t been tempted by it since.

Midnight Train to Udaipur

We had originally planned a taxing itinerary for our last two weeks in India.  But for various reasons (I was just starting my M.A. program, Erik needed time to write, and we both felt fatigued from three months on the road), we decided to stay an extra week in Delhi and limit our explorations to Udaipur, one of the three great market cities of Rajasthan.

We could have taken a quick plane ride from Delhi but opted for the train instead.  Since my grandfather used to work on India Rail, owns a travel agency in London, and has been dubbed the “rail doctor” by guidebooks for his knowledge of the system, I wanted to travel the old-fashioned way at least once before leaving the country.  Given that neither one of us had ever set foot on an Indian train, or a sleeper car anywhere, we weren’t sure what to expect.  We had at least a dozen different classes of tickets to choose from, and since the prices are much cheaper for trains than planes, we thought we’d spring for first-class, air-conditioned seats.  As it turns out,  though, those are much sought-after commodities, so by the time we got our act together, we had to settle for third-class, air-conditioned.

We arrived at the station on a sweltering night, and before we ever caught sight of the train, we were feeling overwhelmed.  As the driver unloaded the bags we’d been carrying since we left New York in early July — two big suitcases, two carry-on suitcases, and two overstuffed backpacks — we stood staring up at a huge set of stairs, with no elevator or escalator in sight.  Though Erik just managed to lug his bags up the stairs, I certainly couldn’t.  So when the inevitable swarm of porters materialized around us, Erik commissioned a pair of them to carry our things for two dollars each.

It was the best two dollars I’ve ever spent.  Not only did they sweep up our bags, stack them on their heads, and start hustling up the absurdly long staircase, they navigated the crowds and corridors without even a glance at the signs and schedules posted everywhere.  Our long walk down the platform was like a scene from an old movie, with porters and conductors jostling with passengers as announcements droned from the loudspeaker and steam escaped with a hiss from the trains.

Once we arrived in the proper section, we had to locate our names and seat assignments on printouts which were posted by the entrance of each car.  As we staggered inside, we saw that each compartment had six beds — a bottom, middle, and upper bunk on each side.  Prior to bedtime, the middle and upper bunks were folded into the wall and the bottom bunk functioned as a bench, with three passengers on each side sitting face to face.  (If we had succeeded in procuring first-class tickets, of course, we would have had a compartment to ourselves.)

As soon as the train lurched out of Delhi, a procession of vendors began marching through the car with chai tea, soup, soda, “crisps” (meaning potato chips), and eventually, a vegetarian dinner.  It wasn’t at all bad – better than most airline food in the U.S., certainly – although the primitive nature of the bathroom facilities on board had us worried in case something should disagree with us.

When it came time to sleep, Erik and I both snagged top bunks.  This was preferable to being sandwiched between two strangers, but making up our beds for the night was a challenge: we couldn’t use the bunks below as a perch, since people were sleeping in them, so we had to crouch beneath the low ceiling and shimmy around on our own bunks.  When the sheets and blankets were finally in place, we deployed the curtain for a modicum of privacy and settled down for a surprisingly restful night – much more so than a flight would have been.  After many months of red-eyes and layovers and airport security screenings, this was a great way to travel.

Dog Days and Cow Towns

As we walked around our usual Delhi haunt, the Defence Colony market, the other day, it struck us that we were becoming inured to life in the the developing world.  Experiences that jarred us when we first arrived in Ghana more than three months ago have become de rigeur: taxi drivers accosting us at every turn, piles of garbage spilling out of alleys, anarchic and smog-choked traffic almost everywhere.  Of course, Defence Colony — an upscale enclave named for the many military pensioners who live there — is the furthest thing from a slum, and we have taken full advantage of its European restaurants, Lavazza-brand coffee shop, and bakery.  (The chocolate tart, a small pastry shell filled with truffle, is especially good.)  So it took a quite conscious effort, as we stepped over a feral dog sprawling on the sidewalk for perhaps the twentieth time in four weeks, to realize how far we had come from Boston.

Feral, mangy, emaciated dogs are inescapable on India’s streets.  (Not only India’s, to be sure: I seem to remember a similar phenomenon in Athens.)  They weave expertly between rickshaws, cars, and pedestrians in search of scraps of food amidst the trash, but most of the time, they just lie down and sleep wherever it suits them.  One of our mothers — we won’t say who! — recently sent us a charming story from the New York Times about an American businessman who was attacked by a rabid dog in Delhi and later died of the disease.  This news introduced a welcome frisson of danger-defying excitement to our everyday trips to the market, but otherwise, it hasn’t affected our behavior much.  As with sleazy touts, aggressive rickshaw drivers, child beggars, and suspected pickpockets, so too with street dogs on the move: whenever we see one, we quicken our pace and steer clear.

Of course, dogs aren’t the only fauna to inhabit India’s urban
jungles.  The sacred animal of Hinduism, the cow, must always be
treated with reverence — with the result that cattle which wander into the road and decide to take a nap there can’t be pushed or prodded out of the way.  Hence the creatures — more than 40,000 of them in Delhi alone — roam more or less freely through city streets, provoking traffic jams at a whim and cutting wide swaths through even the densest crowds.  If anything is more effective at bringing the typically hectic whirl of people and vehicles here to a grinding halt, we have yet to see it.

Bukhara

A confession: we have developed an addiction during our Indian sojourn.  Since the country’s major export in the nineteenth century, produced under British control and shipped en masse to China, was opium, we think we’ve gotten off lucky.  But it’s still embarrassing to acquire a habit you just can’t kick.  The truth is, we haven’t been able to keep away from a restaurant called Bukhara.

To be clear, this isn’t just any old dhaba we’re talking about.  It has been ranked, by no less an authority than Britain’s Restaurant magazine, as the 38th best restaurant in the world, and the best for Indian cuisine.  Bill Clinton has eaten there so often he has a special dish named after him, the improbably huge “Presidential Platter.”  (For a healthier alternative, there is an exclusively vegetarian menu named after Chelsea.)  It is said that Vladimir Putin stayed in the Maurya Hotel, where Bukhara is housed, for the express purpose of eating there three times a day.

The name of the game is Punjabi fare: chicken kebabs, legs of mutton, and other choice bits of meat marinated for hours and roasted in a stone oven, or tandoor.  Just about everything we tried, including the brown dal (lentils) simmered in cream, was delicious.  But we simply couldn’t get enough of the Peshawai lamb: cubes of surreally tender meat coated in yogurt and smothered in spices.  They practically dissolved on the tongue in an efflorescence of flavor.

I’d like to say that the complimentary chocolate cake which appeared on our table at the end of our second visit was a reward from the management for showing such expert appreciation of the food.  “Welcome Back,” it said.  This gesture was the culmination of an evening of unexpected and unbidden royal treatment, including a prime table at the height of the Saturday evening rush and a complimentary serving of dal topped off before our eyes with an extra dollop of ghee, or liquid fat.  (This turned our stomachs, but it was meant as a generous perk.)  We wondered if perhaps Sheela had been mistaken for a Bollywood star, even though her American accent and body language seemingly made this impossible. When the cake arrived, we finally learned the banal truth: the staff was trying to make up for our previous visit, when they mistakenly tossed our leftovers after we asked to have them boxed up.  We hadn’t given this a thought since then, because our waiter had immediately apologized and produced a fresh batch of food for us to take home.  But the incident had apparently weighed on his conscience, and we reaped the benefits in the form of a delicious cake frosted with ganache.