My Inner Tarzan

Bangkok at Night

On a work trip earlier this year I had the good fortune to have a night in Bangkok on my way home. I went to the Sky Bar at the top of the State Tower. The views are AMAZING!!! I snapped a few pictures to share.

Heading Home

After more than a month on the mountain we were all more than ready to get back to civilization. We changed clothes about once every 8-10 days and none of us had bathed. Due to lack of proper sanitary conditions or facilities we had also gone without shaving. This was quite a treat for some of the younger members of the team who had been in the military since they were 17 or 18. They had never seen what their beards looked like.

What was a two full day hike in turned out to be a very quick descent. The faster members of the team managed to make it down to the village we had started from in about 4 hours. It is nice when gravity helps you out.

After four days of sitting around in a small mountain town - still without having bathed - we headed down to the local helicopter pad to be picked up by the Indian military.

In the process of waiting a poker game broke out that used one of our medical supply boxes for a table. Without poker chips, crackers, beedee cigarettes, and small pebbles had to suffice.

Other entertainment included the slack-line, which we set up between two soccer goal posts. The local kids thought is was the greatest thing ever.

The helicopter didn't come that day due to foggy weather in the Assam Valley. We were dejected to say the least. Fortunately, the helicopters were able to come get us the next day!

From The Abor Hills we returned to Dibrugarh. Over the next 48 hours we traveled from Dibrugarh to Kolkata to Pattaya to Hawaii.

It was a long haul, but totally worth it. I am very glad that I went.

A HUGE thank you goes out of all of the people in my organization and other entities that busted their butts to get us home on time.

View from the top

After it rained for a week straight we got a glorious day of sunshine. We couldn't go back to work that day because the soil needed to dry out so that we would be able to screen it. Left with a day of great weather and no work to do, a bunch of us hiked to top of the mountain that our site was on the side of. The elevation was about 10,000 feet.

This is a panorama taken from a rest spot about halfway between our base camp and the top.

This is a video from the top of the mountain.

Base Camp Life

We were living on the shoulder of a mountain at about 8800' above sea level. It was the only "flat" spot for several miles. Amongst the giant rhododendron trees we dug out places of our tents.

Needless to say, it was cold and rainy most of the time. We managed to get in about a day and half of work before the weather moved in. For the next week we lived inside of a rain cloud. Literally. It rained for a week straight. Needless to say, we were unable to hike up the mountain and go to work. We spent a lot of time sitting around the two fire pits that we built, Eating freeze-dried Mountain House meals, and staring at each other.

Base camp television, same channel every night.

Kitchen photo by Brad Church.

The kitchen. We would filter water with small backpacking hand pumps and then use small backpacking stoves to boil it. The water was added to the Mountain House and in about 15 minutes you had a tasty meal. While they were quite good, there was one serious drawback to them. Even the two person meals usually only had between 600-900 total calories. When you are at altitude, in cold weather, and working hard you need 3000-4000 calories per day. This resulted in needing to eat 4-5 two-person meals per day. Let's just say that I came home creepy skinny.

Thanksgiving dinner.

Absence

I was busy putting up posts in early January when I was sent out of town for work on very short notice. Since then I have been gone pretty much continuously. Now that I am back in Hawaii I am going to be putting up more pictures of India as well as my two more recent trips since then.

Enjoy!

Spot the exotic animal...

The Hike

Perhaps the toughest difference between India and Southeast Asia is that in south Asia we can not fly out to our sites in helicopters. This resulted in us having to hike for two days to get to the base camp.

Getting ready to set out.

We hiked through fields of grain.

This is where I slept at the intermediate over night camp. We were lucky and it did not rain that night.

I am not going to lie. It kicked our butts. I am proud of the accomplishment. While I was certainly not the fastest hiker, I was always somewhere near the front, which is not bad for a civilian science geek.

Flight to the Abor Hills

After a delay in Dibrugarh due to getting all of our final permits, we finally flew on to a small town in the Abor Hills to the north of the Brahmanputra River. The image below from google earth shows the large braided channel. It is about 5-6 miles wide at Dibrugarh.


This is what the river looks like when you are flying over it in a helicopter.



This is a panorama of the Abor Hills as we circled in for our landing.


The helo's shadow on the trees.

Hindu Deities

Hinduism is a very large and diverse religion. For an outsider not raised in the tradition it can be difficult to understand and down-right complicated and confusing at times. The deities in particular. While there is one god, Bhagavan/Ishvara, there are numerous manifestations of this god in terms of Avatars and Devas and Devis. There are 10 main avatars, 23 primary devas (male deities) and three principle devis (female deities). There are also often multiple forms of each of the Devas and Devis, all of which have unique names and are depicted differently. The devas and devis also have numerous avatars, each with their own name. Oh, and the different sects and branches of Hinduism places varying levels of importance on all of the things that I just mentioned. See what I mean by complicated.

The numerous deities are represented in countless iconographies which are displayed in almost all aspects of daily life. Fortunately, these common artistic manifestations be appreciated without having to understand all of the subtle intricacies.

A Vishnu tile outside a temple. Vishnu is the all pervading essence of all beings in the past, present, and future.

A Durga outside of a temple. Durga is the one who can redeem an individual in times of extreme distress. She is also the embodiment of creative feminine force.

An intricate ceramic depiction of the elephant-headed god of luck, Ganesha.

Hanuman, the monkey king, who famously helped Rama defeat the evil king Ravana.

Kali, and incredibly powerful warrior is often considered to be the goddess of death. At the same time she is also thought of as the goddess of fertility because she is considered to be the controller of eternal energy. The statue above was inside of a small shrine along the river. The statue below was in a public park.

Small pictures and paintings of the various deities were

Shops and Stalls

One of the best things about exploring a city is seeing what is available for purchase. A traveler is surrounded by a brilliant rainbow of color, varieties of aromas both enticing and repulsive, and a cacophony of sounds including ringing bicycle bells, hawkers selling their wares, and people haggling in seemingly incomprehensible tongues.

As usual, I did some serious damage at the fabric store

Hand embroidered Kashmiri shawls.

A fruit stall next to a religious paraphernalia merchant.

The spice guy.

Much to my dismay, I forgot to take a picture of the chai shop where I purchased tea with the goal of making the same delicious beverage at home that I had been drinking while in India.

Details of my chai recreation adventures will appear in a future post.

Cows

It is time to discuss cows. Yes, the sacred cows according to Hinduism. For the most part, Hindus do not eat cows. They do milk them, but on the whole they seemed to be treated with a mild neglect and were allowed to wander around wherever they liked; and I do mean wherever.

Hangin' with the guys.

Checking out the fabric store.

This cow was just standing in the middle of a major street.

Regardless of wherever they may roam, they are NEVER harassed. They will be gently pushed out of a shop if they have wandered into too far, but they can lie down in the middle of the busiest road and will not get touched. Drivers would hit a human before they hit a cow.


One of the most interesting things about the sacred cows is that they are left to forage on the piles of trash that accumulate around the city. The piles are left on the street for a couple days as they accumulate so that the cows have somethings to eat. When the pile gets too big, it is burned. The one shown below was about 50 meters from our hotel and it was not uncommon to see up to 6 cows, 4 dogs, and numerous chickens dining at the same time.

Dibrugarh

After two nights in Bangkok we flew on to New Delhi where we remained for approximately 10 hours before pushing on to Dibrugarh, Assam Pradesh, India. This is where the waiting game began. While the final approvals for all of our permits were getting taken care of we had a few days to explore the small city.

Map of India with Dibrugarh highlighted by a red oval.

Our hotel sat on the south bank of the Brahmanputra River, which cuts a massive six mile wide braided channel through the Assam Valley. The hotel had a very large rooftop patio that we spent a lot of time on. It afforded wonderful views of both the river and the town.

View to the north over the Brahmanputra River from our hotel roof.

View to the south over the city of Dibrugarh from our hotel roof.

In our attempt to fill the time, we started a rock climbing training regiment using a set of rock rings. The training involved a ten minute workout combining pull-ups and hanging from the various sized pockets. It kicked our butts at first, but as time went along we got much stronger.

Feeling the burn during a 10-second offset bent-arm hang.

We also got out and explored the town on foot. In some respects Dibrugarh was very much what I anticipated India to be and in other facets it was not what I expected at all. As I figured, it was noisy, crowded, dirty, and very dynamic. The traffic on the main streets was very intense and the general rule was mass makes right. The larger the object the more right of way it had. Pedestrians were expected to get out of the way.

A typical street in the city center.

For long distance shipping. These trucks, affectionately called lorries due to the British, had to have been made in the 30s and 40s.

I expected the city to be dirty, but not to the extent that it was. There are no public trash cans. When you finish with a wrapper, water bottle, piece of paper, or a plastic bag you simply drop it wherever you are. Street, gutter, sidewalk. It didn't matter. Eventually someone would come along, collect the recyclables, and sweep the rest into a big pile. Eventually, after the pile of trash has accumulated over a few days, it is burned at night.

Playing cricket on a giant pile of trash between two buildings.

A stream that runs through the middle of town.

One of the most unexpected things I immediately noticed about Dibrugarh is that the population does not look very "Indian" like you see in Baliwood movies. Because the city is so far east and tucked between China, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Burma a large portion of the population looks very "Sino-tibetan/SE Asian". I would say that the split is somewhere around 50:50. I also did see a few people who looked as if they had varying mixtures of the two gene pools.