Just the facts from India to date!

This is the evening of March 20, Maundy Thursday, the first day of spring up there in the northern hemisphere, fall down here, and my second day in Malaysia....

I left the blogosphere on March 11, when we pulled into the unspeakably polluted port of Chennai (formerly Madras). And, though I just called it unspeakable, I have a photo of a dalit (untouchable) woman in red clothes sweeping the port tarmac with a hand-held bundle of rush; she appears as a reddish glow on a dark gray background. It was mid-morning when I took the photo. The same afternoon Courtney and I flew up to Delhi, where Elizabeth met us at the airport. The next morning, Bel (from Brazil), Elizabeth and Courtney and I set out for Agra, for what turned out to be a seventeen hour day, culminating with five after-dark hours at the filthy and dangerous Agra train station. Agra makes Chennai look tidy and sweet, but more about that later. We returned to Delhi at 3:30 am instead of 10 pm, and James was kind enough to come out in the middle of his sleep to fetch us for our two hour turn-around before catching the early morning train to Haridwar. The train to Haridwar and the taxi to Rishikesh were lovely. Rishikesh was as heavenly as Agra was hellish. After a day and a half we returned to Delhi for a short night's sleep and flew back to Chennai the next day.

Elizabeth joined me on the Explorer for three days of sailing to Malaysia, so she got to experience normal life on the ship, to the extent that you can call the 24 hours of stunned silence after India "normal life on the ship." Everyone was shaken and exhausted, but we bounced back into the teaching/learning life for two days before arriving in Penang, Malaysia, a clean and safe, even kind, place. I cannot say that we pulled into port here because we have not and cannot--we are 'parked' out in the water and get carried over ("tendered" is the word; as contrasted, I wonder, with being thrown overboard and required to swim ashore?) to the dockside by boat, waiting about half an hour on a sweltering and pitching enclosed lifeboat for each disembarking and each returning to the ship.

Last night we took the sleeper train (Elizabeth loves the trains!) to Kuala Lumpur; it was actually much more civilized than the overnight train from London to Glasgow! We got Elizabeth to the airport express train and me to the monorail through the city so that she could fly to London and I could shop in the Central Market of Kuala Lumpur. I was still exhausted from India, so, while I enjoyed KL, I was minimally functional and got an early standby flight home to
Penang.

Now for some dinner and a shower and SLEEP!