At 1:30 am, the fight broke out. “Moooooo” (said angrily). “Woof, woof, woof, woof woof grrr, grr, grrr”. “Moooo…snort, snort…moooo…moooo”. “Rrrrr, rrrrg, woof, woof, woof, woof”. And then a sound like a Tasmanian Devil. A minute later it was over.
I’m not sure exactly what happened or what was resolved. I suspect there was a territorial conflict between the cows down by the water – represented by their lead bull – and some street dogs. The pack sounded angry, but I get the feeling the bull held his own. National Geographic – Udaipur.
When they all settled down, I realized that even those who know Udaipur intimately can have a rough day.
We almost always forget it because the overall experience overshadows it so much, but first working days in a new place are always the worst. Like a first kiss, it’s exciting, but never the best one. You just think so for a moment. So it is with the excitement of a new place.
Our enchantment with Udaipur and its charm didn’t change the fact that at 11:30 am, Emily sat on the sofa of our suite, frustrated saying, “I get so tired of chasing Internet!” The power had gone out in the hotel for about an hour – just as she was about to complete a project she had been working hard on all morning. When she went to use her wireless USB modem, it also glitched.
It’s par for the course. Technology every now and then likes to remind us that it’s in charge. You can’t work online and not run into issues – especially in Region 2.
But the first day is always the most vulnerable. We don’t know the systems yet. Where is the wireless router located? Where’s the best place in the room to get signal? Does this city experience power-outages? For how many hours per day? Does the hotel have a generator for expected outages? Much of India has rolling blackouts because local power plants don’t have the capacity to meet consumption.
Once we know the lay of the land, things work better.
It’s true of almost everything. Do we like the hotel restaurant? Do they deliver Emily’s essential morning coffee or do we have to go out and find it? What time do restaurants operate? Indians seem to eat within a particular window – late like Europeans, but not too late because most places shut down by 10pm. Show up at 6:30 and you’re a senior citizen, come at 9:30 and you’re the annoying person keeping the poor restaurant people there late.
Last night we had dinner at 9:30 because Emily had live lectures from 7:30 to 9:30. While our restaurant officially closed at 11:00, you would have thought we were lepers wandering into their restaurant uninvited.
We figure out the best place to do our laundry – sometimes the hotel, sometimes an outside laundry service that charges by the kilo. I go in search of a barber who believes in electric clippers. And there’s always the mystery of our hot water situation. Is it Asian-style water heater which heats the water as it flows through the device right in or near our bathroom, or is it central. If it’s central, do they shut off the hot water at a particular time?
Last night, after staying up late to finish some articles, I decided to take a shower before bed. The hot water knob produced only cold water until it slowly petered out into no water. Shower aborted. Like our hotel in Mumbai, there’s a central hot water heater which they shut-off after 10pm. In the morning, there was plenty of very warm water.
It’s all part of life on the road. When you’re a tourist on vacation, these are the little hiccups that make an experience unique or that you write-off and probably forget ten minutes later. Some of us consider it part of the adventure and when we don’t want the hassles of adventure, we stay at the Hilton.
At home or if you live abroad, you figure all these things out and they form the invisible backdrop to your functional daily life. How many of us think about which dry cleaner to use once we’ve lived somewhere a month?
Traveling for a year, we live in-between. We need the services, tools and functions that support our daily lives, but we uproot and figure it all out every one to three weeks.
Recently, Emily has come to dread packing up and leaving. Not because she wants to stay and not because she doesn’t want to go to the next place – because she always does (except when we left Patmos).
She almost subconsciously hates tearing up her now-working system and environment only to reconstruct. I think there’s some female nesting instinct in it, but there’s also just the plain inconvenience of figuring out how it works when you finally have it down where you are.
In our last place, the hot water required flipping a switch to activate the heater and then waiting five-minutes before the water was ready. Once we turned off the hot water, we had to start again.
It doesn’t seem like much, but it took a day to figure it out – because they didn’t mention it. Then it took Emily three days before she figured out that she couldn’t turn off the water while she shampooed and she needed to wait longer than the five minutes if she wanted enough hot water to get through her long, hair-washing showers.
The worst part was when I thought I flipped the switch for her and told her I had done it. She verified with me four or five times because it was cold at night and didn’t want to get caught in a cold shower. It turned out I had actually turned off the heater when I thought I had turned it on. Emily’s hot water cut out about two minutes into her shower and while she was freezing, the room heated with anger.
When you finally conquer the temperamental hot water heater, you want to savor that victory for awhile and keep it on the shelf like a trophy. Only then, it’s on to the next hot water battle.
The trickiest and most pressing of all considerations is finding the right setup for Emily’s twice weekly live lectures. Emily’s best paying school requires her to do a real-time audio lecture, which means she needs quiet and good Internet speed. Hence our absolute requirement of in-room WiFi. Until Nepal, there were no issues with it. In Nepal, the quiet space at Hotel Vajra was easy and the Internet and power supply seemed to always miraculously align for her at just the right time – despite things barely working the other 166 hours of the week.
However, in India we don’t know what time some crazy, loud thing will happen just outside. In Kerala, it was the houseboats with loud motors which occasionally honked at each other during her Thursday morning lecture. In Mumbai it was the loud buzzers of people calling the bell-hops located just outside our room.
Jodhpur had the temple chanting and camel crying in the background as well as the incident in which a pack of dogs fought on the street outside our window. Emily’s students actually commented on that one.
Last night, there were loud fireworks over the lake. We didn’t know they were coming. I think hotels sometimes do them for events – probably without any permit, scheduling or approval. It sounded like a war outside our hotel. Every time it seemed they had stopped, another round began. Completely coincidentally, Emily ended her lecture a few minutes early and escaped the most intense part of the shelling.
In the end, these are the things we remember and laugh about anywhere from five minutes to two days after they happen. They are the little frustrations, perils and quirks that go with traveling and living this way. We would never trade it.
Arphan, our guesthouse owner in Jodhpur told us on parting that in his ten years of running his business, he’s never encountered anyone doing what we do – traveling and working online as they go. He said he’s probably encountered tens of thousands of guests and we were a first. Like so many people we’ve met, he found the idea fascinating and said how he wished he could find a way to do it too.
No doubt, our experiment is somewhat unique, fun and amazing. Still, every once in awhile – especially after a first-day someplace – I hear a bull fighting a pack of dogs and I can sympathize.
Sent from my iPad
