At The Zoo...all the animals are crying

Sunday 19th June 2005 3:09pm

Dear everyone,

First I’d like to I say how worried I am about you all. I heard via the internets that it's really, really hot in England and that the MET Office is worried for the well being of the average Joe Englishman. Isn’t it like, nearly 25 degrees or something there? How the hell are you all managing? Are old people dropping in the streets? Is the wide spread looting of air conditioner suppliers and ice cream vans being tipped in the streets by roaming gangs of ten year olds? How can a country cope in such sweltering heat???

Here in Delhi the summer is drawing to a close. So as you can imagine the real heat is over, and it's just...well I s'pose you could call it an "Indian Indian summer" yeah? It was "only" 44 degrees yesterday, but luckily the temperature dropped to a chilly 42 last night. The week before we arrived the temperature was as high as 47. I think that the meteorological term for that is "Shit Hot". It’s also really dry and dusty as well as we’re fairly close to a desert, and so for the first time in months I'm not wet with my own salty body juice all the time. We had a mouse in our room (which I'll come back to later) and the bread we used for bate dried up to a biscuit in about 15 minutes. It would amaze me but I’m incapable of complex thoughts since my brain is a shriveled bag of sun-dried proteins and what’s left of my electrolytes. My scrotum resembles a sun-dried apricot and my mouth is drier than a post-menopausal nun for most of the day and I’m drinking more than Judy Finnegan.

So we left moist-Mumbai on Friday, after a few days of weirdness. Basically, Mumbai is like London, but with more Indians (but it is a close run thing...), older busses and about 15 degrees warmer. Apart from that though it's uncanny. The buildings are all Victorian stile london-esque mansions, the busses are read and of the double decked variety. Even the post boxes are old red royal mail style ones and the ordered grid layout of Goa is but a memory of logic, a faint shadow of effective town planning. It’s like they want to be us or something; I’m like “hello, has anyone else noticed that they’ve totally ripped us off here? We demand royalties!”.

Mumbai was good, and fairly eventful considering we were only there four days. we went to the pet market (really disgustingly filthy. I was shocked...I thought only the people lived in shitty conditions), the zoo (like the pet market, except not for sale and with some very bored and confused looking African lions). I got all excited like a five year old about seeing some big animals; before I remembered how inconsiderate animals can be...they all just lay there doing nothing, even when I threw stones at them. That’s obviously a joke, but I was inspired to write that after seeing a kid on a school trip actually do this, right in front of his teacher, who did nothing. I was pretty angry so I told the little fuck that Tigers can read phone directories and a pretty good at Googling small boys’ addresses.

After the Zoo, and once I’d stopped crying about the depressing site of an emaciated and bored looking tiger, we went to the general market (rubbish...which is ironic because I think that's all they sold) and the Dhobie Ghats where all the washermen wash all of Mumbai’s skiddied underwear in 5000 basins. 10 000 (TEN THOUSAND!) people work there, which is more than the working population of Liverpool, washing a metric shit load of clothes. They start at 4:30 in the morning and work right through 'till sunset. We managed to arrange an illegal tour with the government foreman who ran the whole soapy operation. It was really interesting and I took a few cool pictures.

It's amazing how easy it is to bribe people out here. it only cost us 50 Rps to bribe an actual government dude. That’s 62.5 pence (that's quick math) to get this guy to risk his job and stick it to The Man, even though he kinda was The Man. it would only have been like 150 Rp fine if we were busted though so it doesn't matter really. Bling Bling!

We also managed to hit a few bars in Mumbai (well, three) which were quite good. Three litre pitchers are about 3 or 4 pounds, which is nice. The weird thing about Mumbai is that there are loads of men on the street who try to take you to see some guy called Charlie. They come up to you and say "do you wan' see Charlie? dye wan' Charlie brother". I tried to explain to one of them that I didn't know who Charlie was, but Ben recons the guy was selling Charlie. I wasn't sure if Charlie was a rent boy or some kind of man slave, but it seemed stupid to buy him as it’d just be another mouth to feed, so I said "Ben, lets run away" and that's what we did.

there was this other guy who was trying to sell us weed, which we didn't want either, having already shoveled the best part of a kilo of coke up our arses (it absorbs it better...) so we just pretended and we asked him how much. He said 500 RP, so we were like “er, 10 Rp?”. He countered with 400Rp, so we said “er, 10Rp?” (this is how you barter in India...or how we do any way). Eventually we got this guy down to 15 RP which we found really funny and totally ridiculous. Especially when he'd been jogging to keep up with us for about a km before we told him we didn't want anything, even if he was willing to pay us for it. That’s right, we’re so extreme that we get our kicks from winding drug dealers up.

It worries me how many drug related anecdotes I have from Mumbai. There’s a lot of everything knocking about there.

So we left Mumbai by train, first class, which was more than sweet. There were people waiting hand and foot on us, and they brought us free orange juice, chocolates, tea and coffee. They even helped me with my cross word, which was useful because the clues were in broken English and made no sense, as well as having little bearing on the actual answer. And no, it’s not because I’m just crap at crosswords.

So finally, the mouse...

There was a tiny (and I mean TINY) little baby mouse in our room at the hotel, and 6ft 5 Ben nearly shat the bed. I swear to god, I’ve never seen anyone so terrified of a mouse. I told him they like to climb into bed with people and bite their toes and that they like to lay their eggs in peoples urethras and for the rest of the night he was really paranoid. It nearly killed me. then when the mouse trap finally went off he wouldn't get out of bed to turn the light on or anything, and got really angry when I brought it over to show him and did the old "woops...nearly lost it there" gag. definitely a highlight of India.

hope you're all well