UPDATE

SEPTEMBER 24, 2007

Have just heard from Alexander that Relief Riders International is no longer doing rides. The future of if he will take them up again is uncertain, but for now, the 2007/2008 rides have been cancelled...so this suddenly becomes a lot of writing about history...

HUMANITARIAN TRAVEL

Family and Friends-

Many of you know about my trip to India (February and March 2007), some of you may not have known I went at all. I’ve had so many people ask about the journey and I’ve found it so difficult to explore in small, conversation-sized bites, I decided I would write some of my thoughts and memories about it. Don’t feel obligated to read any or all of this. This is not publishable writing, and is more stream-of-consciousness than anything else. It will be my memories, and like anything in my memory cannot be trusted to be 100% accurate—I won’t be fact checking any of this until later when I develop some radically shortened version of the story for my magazine. Also, spelling is in the eye of the beholder with translating from Hindi to English—as we share no common alphabet, all spelling is done phonetically, and even when asking two people to spell something out in English, I frequently got two different versions…so I’ll use whatever phonetically sounds closest to me for names.

The idea of this trip had been haunting me for a few years—ever since I read a short paragraph-long blurb in an Adventure Travel magazine. It was a fantasy vacation that grabbed onto my imagination like a pitbull and would not let go. For fifteen days in late February and early March, I would join a group on horseback through the Thar Desert of Rajasthan, India, riding from one tiny remote village to the next, delivering school supplies, medical supplies, livestock, and working with the Indian Red Cross providing a free catarcat eye surgery camp and free medical camp to one of the poorest regions of India. We would camp in tents in the desert at night, and ride, sometimes seven hours a day, every day. It was the most intriguing trip I had ever heard of, a life-changing opportunity to combine adventure travel and humanitarian efforts in a country I’d always wanted to see. There was no way for me to predict how truly cinematic and huge the experience would be.

The inspiration of Alexander Souri, Relief Riders International (www.reliefridersinternational.com) teams with a local horseback adventure company to reach underserved rural communities. This is Alexander’s homage to his ancestry and his Indian father, as well as a way to promote community healing on a very human level. In it’s fourth year, RRI is changing the world one child, one ailing patient, one tiny village, one volunteer vacationer, at a time.


Our group of fourteen participants ranged in age from 24-70, eleven women and three men, twelve from America, one form Ireland and one from Belgium. I admit I was taken aback by finding I genuinely liked every single person in our group. A trip like ours self-selects some pretty amazing people. In the subset of travelers that is “horsey,” you know there won’t be any divas. Horse folk get dirty and physical and know what it is like to have to work (and play) hard. Factor in the even smaller subset of people who would spend vacation time doing volunteer work in such a difficult part of the world, and it adds up to a pretty special group. We were wildly different, yet bound by so many of the same intentions and priorities.

I won’t be writing here about the five days spent in Delhi and Agra (Taj Mahal)—they are their own Odyssey I’ll tackle elsewhere. Suffice to say I found urban India incredibly challenging emotionally, with more abject poverty than I’ve ever witnessed, anywhere in the world. In the rural villages I went for the Relief Riders trip, there wasn’t any more wealth nor creature comforts, but absent also was the desperation of the city. There are amazing sights to see in New and Old Delhi, and I met some fantastic people…and it was absolutely exhausting—physically, mentally, and spiritually. I’ll start this tale when I joined up with the Relief Riders group in a luxury hotel in Delhi.

FEBRUARY 21, 2007

Imperial Hotel, Delhi
The group of fourteen participants had swapped a few emails in the days before departing to India, and we made a loose plan, since “official” activities wouldn’t begin until the next morning, to meet casually for dinner on our first night in the Imperial Hotel. Those who felt like it and weren’t wiped out with jet lag would find each other in the lobby and go off to find a place to eat.

I went downstairs to the opulent lobby and pretty quickly found Barry (A mediator/negotiator from Detroit, brilliantly irreverent and curmudgeonly and likable from the get-go. Prophetic really, since Barry became my touchstone and don’t-take-yourself-too-seriously-you-ass reminder throughout the trip, whose company I was always grateful to have. Sadly, I still tended to take myself quite seriously, at least for the first several days, and was a know-it-all, pompous ass). Barry and I did a few brief introductions as we waited and looked around for anyone else looking like they might be waiting to meet up with strangers. Barry’s wife, Susan, was upstairs trying to shake off the flight and rally her energy for dinner. (Susan is a therapist and I also adored her right off the bat. She is also pretty irreverent and down-to-earth. These two let me glom onto them pretty quickly and became like siblings to me.) Many folks just arrived in the very early morning hours of this day and others had been in town for a day. I think I had been around the longest, at another hotel and in India for five days before transferring here.

We found, sitting on the schmancy settees and sofas of a side lobby, a small group of women who could very well have been horse-folk. Barry and I knew there was only one other guy on the trip, and a total of eleven women, so our bet was pretty sure. We all stood around and chatted, finally deciding instead of venturing into the crazy and hot city, to just adjourn to one of the hotel’s bars for cocktails and then go to another for dinner. Incredible relief washed over me when I realized cocktails were in order for all. Scary that a drink can feel like such a ground leveler, but I find it is, and also just loosens folks up in awkward and foreign circumstances (and nothing is more awkward or foreign than being in hyper luxury in India)

Some folks weren’t able to join us, but we had a pretty good turnout—maybe half of the eventual group. Rebecca 24-year-old Maryland horsewoman on her “gap year” after fleeing her cushy job at Morgan Stanley. She moved from Manhattan to a horse farm and lives over the barn. She is doing our three weeks in India, then on to Thailand to tour with her boyfriend—whose tenure in her life seemed of a limited duration—then to Sri Lanka to work at an elephant orphanage, then she hits an excursion to the Advanced Base Camp of Mount Everest, then back to India to explore the south before Delhi and home to facilitate her move to Los Angeles and law school. I kind of hate her since she seems to have grabbed so much of what was supposed to be MY life of adventure, Marianne from Dublin, Ireland, who at first strikes me as just the most pleasant soul whose accent I envy, and I later discover, with delight, that she has a wicked and mischievous sense of humor and is remarkably quick to laugh. She was always good for stirring up mischief. Lisa is a stunning woman right off the cover of an equitation magazine—she is the ideal of what everyone imagines a true equestrian would be. Long blond hair, fabulous Los Angeles/Bel Air (I think) lifestyle, horses, dressage competitor, great photographer, and so easy to laugh. She is the picture of grace in a crowd and so easy to be around. Lynn is the earth mother to all of us, She has two fabulous Arabian horses of her own in Connecticut less than an hour from me. She is a singer, quick to laugh, seems like she might get scandalized easily but not a chance. She exudes such a comforting maternal vibe and just makes me feel good to be around. Candy is a hoot. I sit near her at the end of the table and am thrilled at the choice of seats the first night. She cracks me up. She is the first to have gotten in touch with us all electronically. Her humor is dry and hysterical in her proper British accent, making sarcastic asides here and there, and always game for anything. We learn that she lives only about 20 minutes from me, and I can tell you now, afterward, that that makes me a lucky man. Bob and I have hung out with her at her beautiful home on a lake, and Bob adores her almost as much as I.

Dinner is nice as we begin the long unwinding of our personal stories and begin to chip away at the first layer of politeness and courtesy that initially stand in the way of getting to know one another…all this while we are remarkably indecisive about what to order. The food is Hotel-nice…pretty tasty if overpriced and dulled down for foreign palates. I had already discovered the enormous bottles of Kingfisher beer, a locally brewed very pale beer that goes well with spicy foods. I think most of us, overall, wished that the food we ate was always more spicy than it was, but I’m sure most travelers request mildness.

FEBRUARY 22, 2007

The group from last night, plus the six we hadn’t met yet: Curtis and Charlene (He is great, intellectual, occasionally it seems like he wishes people would disagree with him more than they do so he can debate a bit…but it seems like everyone is more or less on a similar page politically. Charlene is a quick-to-laugh Emergency Room doctor, and her professional expertise is called for more than once. I personally needed her drugs to help shake a terrible flu toward the end of the trip. She is funny, and exhausted, as used as you can be to working impossible hours then flying for what feels like weeks), Odile and Mary Anne, and Merilleon and Caroline (Merilleon is 70 years old and more energetic than I’ve ever been. Born and raised in South Africa and now living on Nantucket, I have such a crush on her. She is wise and helpful and irreverent and game for absolutely anything. One of my very favorite memories of the trip is sitting in a big wingback chair, feeling a bit under the weather, while Merilleon told me childhood tales of why the Elephant’s trunk is long and others. I could have listened to her recite the phone book and been in heaven—she made me feel so much better. Caroline is her daughter, from Washington DC where she is a therapist with several, evidently, important government clients. If confidentiality weren’t such a big deal and we knew how messed up politicians were, we’d fear even more for our country…Caroline is feisty, strikes me at first as the popular girl in school whose clique I will never be a part of, but I get over that. Since returning home I’ve been in more regular contact with Caroline via email than I ever would have predicted, and truly enjoy our similar smartass take on things.) all go sightseeing in New and Old Delhi for the day.

I stay back at the hotel since I have been in the city for several days with private guides and have been to all the places they are going. I go instead to the Imperial Hotel’s spa for a 2 hour Ayurvedic massage that blisses me out completely. I meet up with the group for lunch and spend the second part of the day with them, still getting to know each other.

ALL NIGHT TRAIN TO BIKANER

OK-The freaking train...

The day before we are to leave on this all night escapade, a Delhi to Pakistan train is the target of a terrorist attack—bombs, death, injuries. It is all over CNN in the hotel, but none of us mentions it. I think it is more alarming for Bob back home than it is for us…what is it about lightning never striking the same place twice?

We drive for hours to get to the station late at night. The train, meant to leave at 11:20PM, eventually leaves an hour late. When we climb down from our bus, dozens of men of all ages who seem to live in the parking lot descend upon the bus to help unload and porter our bags to the outdoor platform. The bus driver chooses two or three of what seem to be the oldest and feeblest men to put our gigantic and ridiculously heavy bags on their turban-wrapped heads to stagger up over the elevated stairwell and back down to the center train platform. We were standing around in the gloom on the ill-lit platform with distantly spaced bare bulbs for several minutes before our eyes adjusted and somebody noticed the cow just a few yards away, apparently waiting for her own train.

We are divided into groups of four for our sleeping cabins, with at least one man assigned to each cabin supposedly for safety, which in a group of eleven women and three guys is hard, but our handler who will get us as far as Bikaner is in one of the cabin groups. My group, consisting of Rebecca, Marianne, and myself are in a cabin together. We think the arrangement of just three of us with some extra space sounds sweet…until we learn that a stranger will be joining us for the night. Our bags are put into the cabins for us and we follow. A couple of our groups have boarded before the three of us, and sidled down the narrow passage…we can hear their laughter. Once we get to the sliding steel door of our cabin we know why. It feels like prison—our bags take up all of the floor space under and between the berths, which are plywood planks folded down from the wall with a vinyl pad over them. Two curtained windows are at the end and the space between the stacked berths left and right is about a foot. We can do nothing but laugh, and everyone starts roaming from cabin to cabin like kids who just got their camp assignments, making faces and jokes and sharing the thinly disguised horror that this is where we’ll sleep. Some disguises are thinner than others. It’s actually not that bad, but we ramp each other up feeding off the energy, and everyone bonds over it a bit. Our laughter is redoubled once the first person comes back with a report from the toilet closet at the end of the car, and we all trot down to see and gasp. It is an all steel room with a hole in the floor that opens to the track below, but has not seen the business end of a scrub brush for quite some time. Every surface inspires nightmares…and still it is funny. Some folks are settling down into the rooms as the one-hour delay ticks by, and an attendant comes and delivers small pillows, sheets, and threadbare blankets. My threesome is still waiting to see who our mystery roommate will be.
Eventually a group of five Indian men arrive, and the other four start good-naturedly ribbing the guy who drew the short straw and is stuck with us. He’s a great big bear of a man, but smiles wanly and just stacks his small bag on our huge pile, and kicks off his shoes to sit cross legged on the lower bunk across from me. Once the train starts moving, the doors are slid shut, and the big guys proceeds to pull, like a rabbit from a hat, several aluminum foil containers of food we never saw he had. His selections are quite pungent, to say the least. The three of us have made a Jonestown-like pact to swallow Ambien at the same time so we can sleep through the night, and now is the time since the guy has a several course meal ahead. He burps and champs his way through what must have been an enjoyable repast, and eventually kicks off his shoes to sleep…snoring and farting through the night. We have quieted down since his arrival, as if the teacher walked into class and all horsing around ceases immediately, but one of us barely stifles a giggle and it gets us all going.

In the morning, familiar sleepy faces pop out to the tight hallway as we see the dramatically altered landscape whizzing by. Rolling hills of khaki sand, scrubby trees, and grey-green thorn bushes with which we’ll grow all too familiar. Someone spots eagles in the trees, and an occasional peacock appears bobbing along. Villages of sandstone and mud buildings and what must certainly be cinder block and cement (though it is all sand colored) roll by and we make a few brief stops at some of them. As the sun is still on its upward way, we arrive in Bikaner and detrain.

MEETING

It is easy to recognize the large, handsome man who is waiting for us since we’ve all explored the Relief Riders website ad nauseum. Alexander Souri is waiting in long linen Kurta Pajama shirt and a white shawl thrown dramatically over his shoulder. He guesses each of us correctly as we get off the train onto the cement platform. Alexander is the organizer and founder and creator of this whole adventure. 36, a resident of Massachusetts (and looking to buy property in Jaipur, India), born to a father of Indian descent and French mother (she was a race car driver, he did several things I can’t remember, but one of them was date Deborah Harry and perform in a band with her long before the Blondie days). Alexander is tall and stupidly handsome, and able to pull off some interesting wardrobe choices and make them look good (after a while I even begin to covet a swooping draped shawl to throw dramatically over my shoulders…but it would never work for me…sadly I’d look less like a young sheik and more like a community theatre version of Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Alexander is enigmatic and works pretty hard, at first, at creating and maintaining mystery. This is confronting to some, and annoying to others, but grows on us. He smiles knowingly instead of answering questions, nods to questions that can’t be answered by a nod. He doles out morsels of information, but rarely enough to satiate the thirst for “What will we be doing” so that we all, eventually, learn to let go. Before we can let go, we have to go through being frustrated, and Alexander, Buddha-like, just smiles as he sizes us up. It is Alexander's intention that each person have their own journey, and that it unfold for them in an individual and unforced way. To many of us, it feels like manipulation until we learn to surrender...surrendering is, of course, a skill I've never had. Simultaneously, he is fantastically funny and acerbic and dry—first to mock himself and anyone else within range. I, who can never usually get enough of being a smartass, am even occasionally taken aback when he whispers sarcastic jibes in my ear at ostensibly serious moments (at medical camps, gatherings of important mucky-mucks, etc) but being that kid in school, I quickly fall into a tit-for-tat volley of inappropriate murmured comments.

MEAL FIT FOR A KING

We climb into two vans and make our bumpy way to an over-the-top hotel, Lakshmi Villas, formerly a Maharaja’s Palace, for a buffet breakfast. There are huge gardens and courtyards surrounding this giant, ornately carved sandstone building. The breakfast room and hallways are festooned with colonial era memorabilia and framed historic photographs of tiger hunts and war campaigns and meals with world dignitaries. There is no shortage of stuffed animal heads on walls, and there is even a “Game Room” with dozens of “trophies” including so, so, so many tiger pelts with growling heads still attached.

Our buffet is fine—a buffet is a buffet to my mind, but we are all glad to be sitting, drinking coffee (some of the last real brewed coffee we’ll get) and really meet Alexander. Shortly we bid farewell to luxury and the turbaned, curly-toe-shoed doorman, and get in our vans for more bumpy transport. Can I just say that, if I can’t make the shawl work, I am desperate for curly-toed shoes? There is one shop I get to much later in the trip that has several pair, but none of them fit me. I think I could rock a turned up toe like nobody’s business, but sadly, the soles of my shoes remain, to this day, steadfastly on the ground.

Over three weeks in India, I can count on one hand the number of women I’ve seen driving a car or motorbike. As you move farther and farther away from large metropolitan areas, caste system and gender roles become more and more pronounced, increasingly staid and traditional. I was under the mistaken and naïve impression that the caste system was a thing of the past. I knew that the lowest caste, the untouchables, were renamed “Children of God” but that had little effect on the hierarchy. It is fascinating that nobody seems at odds with the system. It is just for this lifetime, why worry? There are so many more lifetimes to come. No struggle against oppression. To my frame of mind it astounds me to know that an untouchable is not even supposed to let their shadow touch that of a member of a higher caste. The stables where our horses are based make it a particular, and controversial policy to hire untouchables, precisely BECAUSE it is such a difficult life. We are told that many Indian nationals would refuse to ever get on a horse that was saddled by an untouchable, and it would be unthinkable to eat food prepared by them. It never becomes clear to me how you know another’s caste standing, though some have black symbols and marks between their brows that I am told are caste markings, but certainly not everyone has these. Sex roles, too are so very rigid. Rural women keep heads and frequently faces covered. Men are affectionate together, walking hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm, hugging. Westerners don’t recognize the ease of men together and overlay a sexual connotation that is not part of it. The sexes aren’t allowed to intermingle, so affection is very free and easy. As a Westerner, I have to learn NOT to extend my hand in greeting to an Indian woman or physically interact with the opposite sex.

Rajasthani men, the vast majority of boys and young men, at least, wear earrings in both pierced ears. Almost always it is the “Rajasthan Flower” which I am told is the symbol of the region. Like when we were little kids and drew flowers by scribbling concentric loops into a larger circle, many of this design have what appear to be rubies or diamonds—always red and white—I presume, perhaps erroneously, that they must be glass chips since these guys live off the land as goatherds or are unemployed, all dwelling in tiny villages. The staff working with us for the ride has them, and most of them are untouchables. Many women are also pierced in noses and ears, but on them I don’t see the flower design, just simple studs. Though to be honest, women’s ears are regularly covered by veils.