[The following post was commissioned by BMW for the JOY3D campaign].
I’ve been a solo traveller around the world for most of the last six years. My passport reads less like a book, and more like a game of Risk; it’s the game of me taking over the world one continent at a time, turn by turn, page by page. It begins from the tiny speck on the map that is my home country of Singapore, then expands swiftly and engulfs Australia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, South Asia. My troops, those immigration stamps that I collect obsessively, then linger in the Indian subcontinent for many, many turns, filling up with pages and pages of Indian visas, before finally making the great leap across the Middle East, and onward into Europe (my armies have yet to conquer the Americas). By land, if possible.
The board game never addressed the issue of how those hypothetical troops criss-crossed the known world. Was it an aerial assault? Did they march? Did they cross the oceans on large vessels or tiny rafts? In my young mind, one which conflated all travel with each other (even military assaults in board games), they took the train. I wanted them to take the train. Trains were romantic; planes were not. Trains were about long journeys across the world with a giant trunk and an entourage of porters; planes were not. Trains were Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train, where clever, classy and charming individuals like Christie’s Hercule Poirot boarded locomotives and passed through faraway places like Istanbul, Ostend, Belgrade or Vinkovi.
I wanted to be in Istanbul. I wanted to be in Belgrade. I wanted to be in Vinkovi. I didn’t know it then, but the early dose of detective fiction, espionage movies, computer games about spies, and world domination board games set me on the path of the destiny I would create for myself. I would see the world, I announced at an early age, and I would do it — by train, if I can help it.
I waited impatiently for a childhood and an adolescence to end, and thus began my life as I had envisioned it — a flurry of locomotives, memorized train timetables, a carefully learned train route from Singapore to Helsinki, never mind why, or how I was going to do it. Never mind how I was going to make the money to do it. Adulthood was the time for adventure, and adulthood didn’t let me down. On my first try, I clocked 9800 kilometres by train, on Indian Railways alone. I kept going back for more: India felt right to me, and the fact that its railway service was the one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated, helped. I collected tomes and tomes of Trains at a Glance, memorized train routes, and got to the point where I could tell you the various options for getting from any city in India to any other city in India (I still can). I took great pleasure in travelling alone, and in every class — 4 days 3 nights! In sleeper class, in the heat of summer! My friends saw this as masochism; secretly, I wasn’t a fan of the sweaty nights and talkative strangers, but I was addicted to it.
The idea of travelling across great distances by train, in my mind, had become inextricably linked to the romance of travel, though it was anything but. It was the wait at the platform; the lovers bidding each other farewell, the long sobbing conversations in the bunk above mine with the lover they left behind, the large Indian families in my carriage whose occupations corresponded with the class of train they were booked in; it was the camaraderie, of sharing snacks with friends you make just for those 52 hours onboard the train, the sharing of magazines and newspapers, the amazing sounds I stayed awake all night listening to: chai chai chai, garam chai! chai kaafee tea mango frooti omlett!
It had become second nature to me. So much so that whenever I called home to say to my family, “I’ll be leaving Bangalore today for Bangkok”, they actually, and in all seriousness, had to ask, “on a…. plane?” (I wish I didn’t have to, but the Indian border with Burma is closed.) I was making decent money from my life of travelling, yet I was worried. Worried that I’d lost the wide-eyed amazement I once had, whenever I went to a new place or did a new thing. Travel fatigue set in, at the point when I began travelling more in a calendar year than I lived anywhere in the world, and I wasn’t interested anymore. I wasn’t interested in photography; it had become a job of endless shoots and night-long edits. I wasn’t interested in writing, too. I stopped writing except professionally and for money, it seemed repetitive to do it again for fun. I stopped having fun.
Once again a train told me where to go and how to get there.
I arrived in Aleppo one early May morning, fresh off the 5 hour bus from Damascus. It was one of those moments where I really didn’t know how to get somewhere (once in a while, I am suddenly seized with the idea of going somewhere I’ve never been, with the aim of going somewhere else I’d also never been, with no clue how to get there or who I’d meet or what I’d do or where I’d stay). Someone told me there was a train to Istanbul. Others said the train service had stopped. With all my life’s belongings in my backpack (I’d upped and left Dubai, where I lived, and gone on a madcap roadtrip around the Levant and the Gulf right after), and zero Arabic or French, I arrived at the Aleppo train station and asked for Turkey.
They didn’t tell me then, but I was booked for Adana, Turkey on train 69, a seasonal train that didn’t carry any sleeper carriages. My destination? Istanbul. Or Antalya. Or Cappadocia. I didn’t know. I’d forgotten all about it, but it felt like I was living the detective fiction of my childhood. Just hours before I’d been drinking (the very bad Syrian beer) Barada at the historic Baron Hotel — where Lawrence of Arabia and Agatha Christie lived and drank when they were here in Syria, almost a century ago.
Here I was, standing at the platform of the Aleppo train station, about to board a train to an indeterminate location. I stayed awake all night, as I usually do on overnight trains I love, just listening and watching. I chatted with an Australian Chinese artist in Mandarin. The guards looked at all our passports, and made a face at the lone Iraqi passport in our midst. The middle class Americans from small town America were on a six-month holiday, and they didn’t know what they were doing in Syria, but they loved it. The Brits and the Scots were rowdy, but fun. At the Syrian checkpoint, a fierce-looking guard kindly advised me to “get married before it’s too late”. When we arrived in Adana at 6 in the morning, it was raining the gentle yet gloomy kind of rain.
I had a zillion Syrian pounds but no Turkish lira; there was an ATM that didn’t work and no money changer. I remember sitting that morning at the train station at Adana, feeling like I should be worried, yet I was feeling like a million bucks. I’d just had a phenomenal train journey. I’d ended up somewhere I didn’t expect to be. I didn’t know where to go. I had no money. Somehow, as these things happen, I walked into the rain with all my bags and boarded a random bus, paid for with the one Turkish lira I found in my pocket from the year before. I boarded the first bus I could pay for with a credit card: it was to Antalya, where strangely, I had friends. 12 hours along the coastal road along the Mediterranean, 9 hours in an overnight Syrian train with no beds, 8 hours of drinking beer at the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, 5 hours from Damascus: all in day’s work.
Some mornings, I wake up needing to get into a train. Other mornings, I wake up in a train. Those are the mornings that drive me. Those mornings are joy.
Magical train rides to magical places: one of my favourite train journeys was the one to Jaisalmer, India. The train ran out of water 10 hours before we got to the desert city. The dust and sand was crashing against the windows in the heat of summer: 51 degrees. And suddenly, the mirage that is the old city of Jaisalmar appears — and everything is beautiful again.
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What does JOY mean to you? Submit your photos together with a short blurb to the BMW Facebook page and exclusive BMW lifestyle merchandise will be given out to the Top 3 stories.
BMW PRESENTS JOY 3D
Date 5 & 6 May 2010 (Wed/Thur)
8 pm sharp: 3D projection begins
Venue Fountain Of Wealth at Suntec City, Towers 2 and 3
Into the Heart of South India
This post was brought to you by SilkAir, the regional wing of Singapore Airlines. Flying to 33 destinations in 11 countries, SilkAir takes you deep into the heart of the action — where you want to be. Share your travel story with SilkAir Explorers today, and stand to win one year’s worth of air tickets plus 2000 SGD in cash.
It’s hard to say when my deep love for India first began, or how. After spending a substantial part of my adult life in that country, I can hardly remember what it was like before I first went, before I knew that of all the countries in the world, India and the myriad experiences I would have there would touch me in such tangible ways.
But I can try. If I had to pinpoint exactly when I fell for this giant of a civilization, I can think of exactly two situations; situations whose accompanying emotions remain fresh in my mind.
The first was when a school project at 13 saw me venturing off the beaten path of Little India’s main thoroughfare, and into the arterial lanes attached to Serangoon Road. It was so real, so honest, so full of life — that I kept returning week after week, in my school uniform, to wander these streets, and to talk to everybody I met. I have never really stopped that practice. From the fraud that is the parrot astrologer woman outside Komalas Vilas, to the Dravidian supremacist language teacher who tried to teach me all I had to know about love and sex from the Thirukkural, to the lovely Pakistanis and North Indians I now call my friends at Usman in Desker Road, Little India was the first place I had ever been to in Singapore that felt decidedly not like Singapore.
The second was when the usually boring programs on Discovery Travel and Living featured a lone female travel host entering a typical Tamil vegetarian breakfast joint in Coimbatore, one not terribly unlike what I usually have breakfast at in Little India, and she was regarded with such fascination that an entire crowd of men followed her around. She didn’t really care for the attention, but was not perturbed by it either; instead she carried on eating (with her hands), her dosa and idli. I’d known by then that I wanted to be someone like her — unflappable and adventurous in a completely foreign place — but seeing her do it on TV made me realise it can be done, that indeed, I shall.
10 years later, I was indeed in such a place. In Coimbatore, at that. Just a few days before I had started a journey — not just any journey — but the most incredible motor rally I had ever heard of, and driven an autorickshaw from Chennai as a participant of the Rickshaw Challenge. And here I was too, eating paratha and dosa with my hands in a place as far from Shenton Way as it could be, just as I’d dreamed of, years before. And it was one of the best parathas I’d ever had.
“How do you know where to eat, what to eat, and how do you find such awesome places.. in places far removed from where you came from? There’s no guidebook for that,” I’m often told. “And why would you want to go to a place like that?”
Off the map, off the grid, off the Google results — it’s those places with no good guidebook, or any at all, that make me want to be there. They reinforce your sense of detachment, of being foreign, of the existence of something bigger: of a culture and a city waiting to be discovered, without your prior conceptions in the way. Although I’d been to South India many times, and to India an even greater number of times, I’d never been to smaller Coimbatore, Chidambaram, or any of the smaller cities and towns or villages with no names. Yet each and every time my senses never failed me, and this time was no different. Whether it was Coimbatore, or Chennai, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Kottayam, Hyderabad or Bangalore, I enjoyed the uniqueness of each city and their superb cuisines. I had the best parathas ever at Subu Mess in Coimbatore; queued up for 20 minutes to enter a hole-in-the-wall shack in Puthur village, 15 km outside Chidamabaram (which had the most awesome Tamil seafood I’d ever had); in Tuticorin, I discovered the locals had an Indianized version of the French macaron with cashewnuts; in Kottayam, scared and delighted my hosts by eating a whole spicy fish at every single meal, more than the fish-eating locals would; and finally in Bangalore, chased down the dosa of my dreams at Central Tiffin Room in Malleswaram.
Few of these experiences are in guidebooks, yet they’re from the best and most accessible information that few travellers bother to use — and free too. Just ask a local. Then follow your nose.. That I’ve brought with me from Barcelona to Bangalore, Taipei to Thiruvananthapuram. I’m curious about what people do in their hometowns; how they live, how they spend their time, how they drink tea, whether they prefer coffee, where’s the best biryani or beer in Hyderbad or in Berlin, what they think about the world. The rest of the stuff: best places to eat, secret local spots, and where to get the best deals — are just what happens next.
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