Ever since I killed that dog in March, I’ve been terrified of motorbikes.

I miss tuk-tuks, I really do.

A fixture of my life for almost six months, I’m surprised it took me so long to notice that there aren’t any in Vietnam.

You can pay through the balls for a taxi, if you can find one and if the driver decides your journey is suitably lengthy to justify his time, or you can take your chances on the back of one of the dozens of motos that loiter like rusty dollar-hookers on every street corner.

In Hoi An, I quickly discovered, if you get on the back of a moto, you become the driver’s bitch. You unwittingly sign a contract to be his family’s primary source of income for the duration of your stay.

Ask to go to the beach and you’ll get taken to the beach restaurant his sister runs, or the one that gives him the best kickback or something.

Yesterday, I had this crazy bitch chasing me down the beach as soon as I arrived.

“Hey, you eat here!”

“No thanks, I’m just here for a walk.”

“No, you come back here and eat here!”

Hours later, I tried to get a moto back to town from a different cafe, where there were three or four moto guys hanging around, but she had spotted me from a few hundred metres away and came rushing into the shack, demanding that she phone the same guy who had brought me there to take me back.

None of the other moto guys wanted to argue with her – some kind of honour-among-twats system I imagine – so I had to wait for ten minutes, until I must have started looking impatient.

The crazy bitch then insisted I get on the back of her moto, which I certainly did not want to do. But since nobody else would take my fare, I ended up with her.

Unlike the other Asian countries I’ve been to, wearing a helmet is the law here. The moto guys and gals all carry two, one for their passenger.

But the helmets are all designed for tiny Asian heads, not bulbous mutant Caucasian bonces like mine. I’ve never found a hat that fit me, even in the West, so it came as no surprise to discover that Vietnamese motorcycle helmets simply rest on top of my massive heed like some kind of oversized cyberpunk Papal skullcap.

I look like Tron.

On the odd occasion I actually manage to get the chin-strap fastened, around my throat, it cuts off my ability to speak or draw breath through my mouth and feels like it has declared its intention to gradually decapitate me through attrition over the space of several months.

The helmets are no protection whatsoever, in other words, and I usually end up clinging on to the speeding bike with the strap hanging impotently at my shoulder.

I’m a fearful passenger at the best of times. I don’t even like riding in cars, especially if there’s a woman driving (I can’t rationalise or justify this sexist instinct, and I’m aware statistics don’t support it, it simply is what it is).

But with motos, I was even, at first, a fearful pedestrian.

In cities like Phnom Penh or Ho Chi Minh City, the traffic is relentless, six to ten lanes of 95% motorbikes. There are no WALK lights, no little green men to guide you across.

Jaywalking is the norm. You simply step off the curb and keep walking in a straight line until you reach the other side. The onus is on the motorbike riders not to hit you.

At first, until I became accustomed to this method, I’d simply find a little old Vietnamese or Cambodian lady who was trying to cross, and cross behind her.

Anyway.

I expect you want to hear about the dog now, right?

Okay.

CUT TO: Hampi, India, in March, night.

Hampi and its environs are pretty underdeveloped.

The only way to cross the narrow river, which runs through town, unless you fancy wading, is in a single tiny motorboat, operated by a fascist ten-year-old boy.

But he stops working at about 6pm.

When I was leaving Hampi for Bangalore, I found myself on the wrong side of the river at 9pm.

A tuk-tuk to Hospet, the nearest town, where my bus was departing, is supposed to cost about 80 rupees and take about 10 minutes.

From my side of the river, I discovered, the trip necessitated a detour to the nearest bridge, which was hell and gone from here, and it was going to cost me 600 rupees, or about $15, and take about an hour.

I didn’t have 600 rupees (ATM nearby? Hah!) and I had less than an hour to get to the bus stop.

The tuk-tuk guys, insensitive to my plight, could not be bargained with, but a guy on a motorbike offered to take me there for 200 rupees.

Five minutes later I found myself sitting behind him, with my massive backpack on my lap, laptop bag slung over my shoulders, holding on as if my life depended on it (because it did) as the moto guy hauled ass along narrow, unlit, potholed country lanes, bitching at length and volume about the “fucking road taxes” he had to pay for these “shit roads”.

No helmets for either of us. Grit and kamikaze mosquitoes peppered my squinting eyes, sending streaks of grimy tears down my face. How he navigated, I have no idea.

Every so often we’d pass through a small village, each of which was punctuated by two or three speed-bumps in the road.

Somebody, my guess is the local moto guys, had carved narrow channels in each of these these speed-bumps. Useless for cars, but handy for a motorbike that doesn’t want to slow down, like my guy, to zip through unimpeded.

He knew the road pretty well. The first dozen or so bumps, he found the channel as if instinctively.

The next bump, we weren’t so lucky. We hit it at fifty, and left the road, vertically.

Roger’s Profanisaurus has a pretty good swearword for this kind of situation:

“Fuckshitfuckshitfuckshit.”

We landed on a dog.

It had probably wandered into the street to investigate the new light, as they do.

It yelped all too briefly.

The was a moment of silence, while I established that I somehow hadn’t come off the bike and was still alive and uninjured, and that we were still moving at a pretty rapid clip, then I started screaming.

“What the fuck! What the fuck!”

“It’s not my fault!” the driver was crying out, genuinely distressed. “Not my fault!”

Pretty soon, we hit a proper, sealed, two-lane road. No lights except the twin headlights of oncoming flatbed trucks heading down the other lane.

Or, as happened every three minutes or so, the four imminent headlights of an overtaking flatbed and the flatbed that steadfastly refused to be overtaken, neither of which seemed particularly concerned about the oncoming moto.

We’d leave the road, dropping into a drainage ditch sunk about a foot lower, barely slowing down, and carry on until it was safe to get back on the road proper.

This crap went on for an hour. I had blisters from clinging on so tight.

I caught the bus, which was predictably late anyway, and the moto guy got a tip, for not killing me.

2 comments  ::  Read on

Maybe I’m just being paranoid.

From: kev@kevinmurphy.info
Received: 7/17/08 7:10:57 AM CDT
To: children@children.org
Subject: My sponsor child?

Sir/Madam,

Re: Account# xxxxxxxx

I have been traveling for the last six months, unable to receive any mail Children International may have sent me.

But I logged into my account on Children.org today to discover that I now have a different sponsor child.

I originally sponsored an Indian girl named Raunak Wasi. Now, I appear to be sponsoring a child named Gulafsha Rahman.

Could you be so kind as to inform me why this change has occurred?

I hope that it is just some kind of technical problem, but I am concerned that something bad may have happened to Raunak.

Sincerely, with hope of a speedy response,

Kevin Murphy

Fishy reply:

Dear Mr. Murphy,

Thank you for contacting us.

We must advise you that Raunak has chosen not to continue to participate in sponsorship, and has chosen to withdraw from our program. We sent you information regarding this situation, along with information about a new child in need of assistance, Gulafsha Rahman. You should receive this information when you are able to collect your mail.

Mr. Murphy, we understand it can be disappointing when a sponsored child leaves our program, but we hope you will consider accepting sponsorship of Gulafsha. Your support would make such a wonderful difference in her life!

Thank you again for contacting us. If you have any questions, please send an email to children@children.org or call our Sponsor Services department at 1-800-555-3089 and one of our representatives will be happy to assist you. Our hours of operation are Monday through Thursday 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. and Friday 7:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Central time.

Sincerely,

XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX

Sponsor Services Representative

3 comments  ::  Read on

Kerala is a communist state.

I spent three weeks there, and I didn’t see any sign of anything I associate with communism.

Private enterprise was alive and well. Freedom of religion was enthusiastically practised. The shops were well-stocked. There were elections.

What the hell is communism, anyway? I started to wonder.

I saw one or two hammer-and-sickle flags, briefly, in Ernakulam.

And several local businesses proudly displayed the fact that they were “Government Licensed”.

But that was about it.

One night, in Varkala, I was in a small group that included a Polish tourist and a Keralan musician.

The Pole was old enough to remember communism.

“We made cars,” he said. “We send the cars to Moscow. Moscow sends back potatoes.”

A potato story! That sounded like the communism I’m familiar with.

“After my father died,” he continued, “communist laws said we had too many square metres in our apartment. Now not enough people live there. They sent a man to live with us.”

The Keralan listened, incredulous.

“I know nothing about communism,” he said.

 ::  Read on

Once, in Arambol, I walked down the main street, using a licked thumb to surreptitiously erase the misplaced possessive apostrophes on all the cafe’s’ blackboard menus.

It took a while.

“Drive-by journalism,” commented Charlie, but I was just bored.

A good way to meet native English speakers is to hang around only in the restaurants with the most atrociously spelled menus, or a cafe showing bootleg English DVDs with bootleg English subtitles.

Anybody who pisses themselves laughing is your new best mate.

Some of the menu items can be quite cute.

There’s something almost Irishly whimsical about “Penny Pasta”.

But I refuse to believe anybody has ever ordered “Chocolate Crap” for dessert.

The DVD subtitles can be beautifully hilarious.

They appear to be written by somebody who has a fairly good grasp of English, and a feel for context, but some glaring gaps in their vocabulary.

I once saw the spoken word “womb” subtitled as “hormone room”.

A lost Cobain lyric.

The finest piece of accidental poetry I think I’ve ever seen.

 ::  Read on

I needed a haircut. I was beginning to look like a hippy.

But yesterday marked the official end of the high season. All the barbers on Varkala cliff, along with the staff of about half of the stores and cafes, have buggered off home to hibernate, live off the stored fat of their squirrelled tourist rupees until November.

I had to go into Varkala proper, get my mop chopped by a guy whose expertise has been shaped by years of shaving around enormous moustaches.

Everybody warned me against it.

“Don’t do it,” they said. “He’ll fuck it up.”

I went anyway.

I come away with a shit haircut, I’ll buy a hat. At least I’ll have an amusing story to tell you lot.

But he did an decent job. And it cost a measly buck twenty-five.

About half way through the procedure, a pretty little girl, a toddler of about three or four, stumbled into the barbershop, grinning at me, as kids do.

I smiled back.

“Your daughter?” I asked the barber.

He did that infuriating Indian bobblehead gesture, the noncommital shoulder-to-shoulder nod that could essentially mean fucking anything.

“My son,” he said.

Doubletake.

This kid was wearing a dress.

Not in the sense that Keralan men wear lungis, which are skirts only as far as Scotch kilts are skirts. The kid was wearing a little girl’s pretty dress, with flowers and stuff on it.

He also had an earring, and a bow in his hair.

This bothered me.

A few weeks back, in Gokarna, a bunch of us had a drunken argument about homosexuality and gender identity in India.

It’s common knowledge among tourists that some ostensibly straight Indian men fuck each other, because unmarried vaginas are comparatively aloof and unavailable.

Of course, it’s only common knowledge because it’s in the Lonely Planet. Nobody I’ve met has had the cojones to walk up to an Indian guy and say: “So… you bum your mates for fun?”

If more Indian guys knew that we know this, I doubt so many of them would hold hands on the beach.

There was a 19-year-old Canadian guy with us. Slight, pretty, soft-spoken, with shoulder-length curly blond hair. But very straight.

He was desperately trying to grow a goatee.

“Indian dudes keep hitting on me,” he said, frowning and scratching at his scrawny, ineffectual bumfluff. “I think they think I’m a chick.”

Perhaps.

“It can’t help matters that they dress their little boys like little girls until the age of five,” added one of the Aussies.

A few odd looks from others at the table.

“Surely those are just little girls with short hair,” I said, to murmurs of agreement.

I knew what he was talking about. I had wondered, too, to be honest.

But, you know, Occam’s razor and all that.

Now, I’m not so sure.

 ::  Read on

The hardest part about travelling in India is Kingfisher.

There’s an art to drinking it. Well, it’s more like a science, really.

Open it, and chug the whole fucking thing down before it gets warm and you can start to properly taste it.

In Gokarna, the choice was between Kingfisher and Fosters. Which is kinda like opening a menu to find you have the choice between eating some sand, or some other sand.

Here in Varkala, there’s no choice. Kingfisher is Beer.

The Fish Of Beers.

So I’ve become a cocktail drinker.

Cocktails.

Pink Ladies, specifically.

As long as you request them without sugar, which they apply in huge spoonsful here, they’re quite drinkable.

As part of my development as a human being, I think this marks the end of a journey, a journey that began the first time, in San Francisco, I purchased a bottle of balsamic vinegar.

So, therefore, acknowledging these changes, it is with a heavy heart, and a tear in my eye, that I hereby formally relinquish any claim I might have to be a working class northern bloke.

My transformation is complete.

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The fishermen in Varkala wear skirts and sell drugs to westerners.

One of them approached us, as we were walking down a quiet beach. Myself and Bob, who hits just about every cliché about West Indians you can think of.

Bob gets stopped for a friendly chat by every Indian he meets. White people may be rare here, but black people are virtually endangered.

“Strong black man,” the fisherman says, ignoring me, smiling.

Bob’s almost horizontally laid back. This kind of thing doesn’t bother him. He smiles and laughs along.

“Nigger,” the fisherman says, still smiling.

Okay, that I wasn’t expecting.

Bob’s still smiling though.

“Nigger… nigger… nigger…” the fisherman says.

I’m uncomfortable now. Where is this going?

“Some call nigger,” the fisherman says. “I not call nigger. Nigger is bad.”

Yeah, but you know the word, don’t you? You, who can barely speak English. You know the word.

He’s still smiling. Bob is too, kinda.

I’m just shocked. Shocked that I now know there’s at least one person on Earth who thinks the best way to befriend a black man is to, immediately upon meeting him, tell him you don’t like the n-word.

Really emphasising how much you don’t like it by saying it over and over and over again.

Anyway, then the fisherman busts out a doll, from his bag, and tries to sell it to Bob.

It’s a gollywog, holding a spear in one hand and a slice of watermelon in the other.

Okay, that last bit didn’t happen, but it could have.

 ::  Read on

Unbelievable. This nightclub actually has lots of hot young Indian women in it.

None of them are wearing saris.

I’m actually having a decent conversation with one of the prettiest ones.

And, unless I’m reading it all wrong, she’s being mildly flirtatious.

I didn’t think such things were possible.

“So, where are you from?” I ask.

“Romania,” she says.

Oh.

“Oh.”

I’d mistaken her for Indian. Well, maybe not Indian-Indian, I thought maybe she was a TV Indian.

“What’s a TV Indian?” she asks.

You know, one of the Indian women you see on TV over here.

They all look like Eva Longoria or Salma Hayek, with slightly straighter noses. Dusky, dark-eyed Mediterranean temptresses. Nothing like 90% of the Indian women I walk past on the street, who, while frequently very beautiful, are dark-skinned and don’t seem to get as much airtime.

An ex-girlfriend of mine was a TV Indian, much to her annoyance. Ethnically Italian-Taiwanese, her modelling agency had her headshot filed under White, Asian, Latina and Indian.

“Interesting theory,” says Salma, doubtfully.

“I haven’t watched that much Indian TV, to be honest,” I admit.

This place is called Taika.

It’s a stylish nightclub on the top floor of a mall just off MG Road in Bangalore. Immaculate white couches, thumping dance music, a sweaty A/C dancefloor, a breezy balcony refuge.

Even on a Tuesday night, the floor is heaving.

Contrast with the other bars I’ve been into tonight, where the clientele was exclusively male, and every available vertical surface bore either a risque glamour shot of a TV Indian, or a sign warning “Strictly Dancing Not Allowed” in red-on-white sans serifs.

Like spontaneous boogie outbreaks are a big problem. Like the only thing a bunch of moustachioed middle-aged Indian blokes really want to do after a few Kingfishers is lambada. Eight warning signs are required to calm the urge.

But in Taika the crowd is mostly wealthy young Indians in figure-hugging western-label clothing. Groups of unmarried men and women drinking and dancing together. A handful of foreigners, mainly working ex-pats.

There’s a Rs 300 cover charge just to get through the door. At $7.50, an absurd price. This “night” club, like every other drinking establishment in Bangalore, has last orders at 11pm.

I had a long chat with an Indian guy who said the Indian regulars don’t pay the cover – it’s for the foreigners and those who can’t talk their way out of it.

Salma thinks this is a cultural phenomenon that has its roots in the caste system.

The higher castes, she says, felt duty-bound to help out those less fortunate, and one of the ways this manifests itself today in the whiteboy tax.

It’s a compulsory tip, forcibly applied to those who look like they can afford it.

It also manifests itself in ubiquitous chronic over-staffing.

The rich feel a duty to provide employment for the poor. So each goods vehicle has two or three drivers, each shop has more assistants than customers, each restaurant more waiters than diners.

I wonder how globalisation and US-led corporate outsourcing will affect this. Those fuckers are duty-bound, to their shareholders, to provide as little employment as possible.

“Interesting theory,” says Salma, who’s a management consultant, less doubtfully.

 ::  Read on

We’re at the market.

“Kevin, you’re being unreasonable,” Charlie says. “Not everybody is a liar. Not everybody is trying to bullshit you out of your money. You’re being paranoid.”

“I’m pretty certain I’m right about this.”

“You’re talking rot.”

“Okay, don’t believe me? Watch this.”

I approach the nearest stall.

“Excuse me, sir,” I say. “How much for one of these hats?”

The lampshade salesman regards me cautiously for a moment.

“Four hundred rupees,” he says.

 ::  Read on

Like plague carriers, the Portuguese spread Christianity to Kerala, like Goa, about five hundred years ago.

Fort Cochin today reminds me of a Mediterranean fishing town, but with more spices and open sewers.

The official road signs declare Kerala “God’s Own Country”. Note where the apostrophe has been deliberately placed.

I had always thought that that God preferred deserts, but the Kerala I’ve seen so far is the exact opposite – densely jungular, insufferably humid, crisscrossed with waterways.

Perhaps He was just fucking with the Jews, back in the day.

On the night bus here, very early this morning, I witnessed several groups of men, dressed in orange, each carrying a huge wooden crucifixes on their backs.

Not big enough to nail up an actual Christ, but certainly big enough to do so if they’d caught him 30 years sooner.

Still, lugging all that carpentry around seemed a little extreme. Back home, people have far smaller, metallic crosses, strung around their necks.

These Keralan Christians are hardcore, I decided, and went back to sleep.

Later, somebody told me that it’s Easter.

There are other religions on display too. Fort Cochin has a small Jew Town, complete with synagogue, Jew Cemetery, and notices warning tourists against getting ripped off by shopkeepers.

Apart from some bizarrely pornographic religious imagery in the Dutch Palace museum, I didn’t see much overt Hinduism.

Fort Cochin is the first town I’ve been to in India with no obvious cows.

There are a hell of a lot of goats roaming the streets, but no cows.

Maybe that’s the Christian influence again.

Goats are sacred to those guys, right?

If I recall correctly, they worship the Father, the Son, and…

“Wait, Murphy, hold on. You’re not seriously planning on making that joke, are you?”

“Yes, I’m going to make it. Then I’m going to laugh like it’s the funniest thing I ever heard.”

The Christians, see, they worship the Father, the Son, and the Holy GOATS!

Hahahahahahahahahhaha!!!

Do you see what I did there?

Good Lord, I’m on form today.

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