The man who traveled 3 days to get cookies from Jaisalmer

The ex-news presenter, ex-monk, and now a meat eating oddjob, who was mentioned earlier here, popped up again while I was still in Delhi. These are the focal points of our discussion:

1. He thinks he has found the secret to being comfortable in Delhi. On this trip to India, after being in Delhi and in the country for a few days he felt it was all too much. So he took a train to Jaipur, waited there for 9 hours, then took a night train to Jaiselmer, his beloved city of the golden fortress. But it wasn't the fortress he wanted to visit, it was the famous government authorized bhang shop. He asked them to bake him thirty cookies, which took them 4 hours. After that he jumped on a train back to Delhi where, after three days of traveling to Jaisalmer and back, he now eats one cookie a day for the next few weeks before heading home.

2. He once spent three months in Pushkar with a family, who's daily routine it was to have a bhang lassi every day at noon. His representation of the 70-year-old grandfather coming trembling to the table to get his daily dosage has undoubtedly earned him standing ovations from other backpackers.

3. After six years as a monk in the Buddhist center of Dharamsala he is back to eating meet, drinking, smoking and orgasming when having sex.

4. Sharing all this info took him about 40 minutes.

5. He wanted me to call him "my master". I refused and decided it was about time to get moving.

(Bhang is a type of high quality weed.)

Next post: Amritsar and the Golden Temple

12 additional symptoms that tell it is time to leave India

31. You always refer to Indian cities by their new, post-colonial names. Yes, even Thiruvananthapuram.

32. You spend an evening watching the sun set over Manali with Russian-Free-Jazz-pioneer-turned-full-time-hippie Viktor Lukin who's trying to tell you your future using numerology. Strangely enough, he keeps getting all numbers mixed up or forgetting them completely. Must be something in the water.

33. Of the three main mango juices you only drink Frooti, because Maaza and Slice are owned by evil multinational corporations (Coca-Cola and Pepsi, respectively) that are raping the earth of it’s love and resources. You also think that Limca > Sprite and Thumbs Up > Coke, regardless of the fact they're essentially identical products manufactured by the same company.

34. You consider Ravi Shankar a sell-out.

35. Octopussy has your become favourite Bond-movie, but you never miss an opportunity to nitpick about it's errors (like the fact that Bond flies to Delhi, yet we see the plane landing over the Taj Mahal, Agra, and when he arrives in India he's suddenly in Udaipur, not Delhi. WTF?).

36. You can quite accurately determine the quality of a chillum just by looking through it. This endowment usually goes hand in hand with the ability to comprehend the meaning behind the lyrics of Jefferson Airplane's "Hey Frederick".

37. Continuously using the phrase “Real India” when conversing with other travellers (especially if they‘re less experienced than you), and it's always some place they haven't been to and never mentioned in the guidebooks. Also take pride in the fact that you never disinfect your hands, have stopped using malaria medicine, wash your clothes in a bathroom sink, walk around barefoot and complain constantly about how India has changed for the worse (implying that it's economic boom, increase in living standards and influx of foreign tourism has diminished it's "realness").

38. You’ve adopted the following local traits: You never pay any attention to the traffic when crossing a street; wobble your head when talking to locals; understand and follow cricket; are able to recognise “India-virgins” from a mile away (“look at that insecure walk, you can tell he has just arrived“); pronounce “bus stop” as “bus-is-stop" and never buy a full pack of cigarettes, only a few separate ones (either beedies or Gold Flake).

39. Having reached astronomical heights of pretentiousness, you rename yourself after a Hindu God. This has actually happened! I was sitting by a tea stall in Delhi when a dreadlocked backpacker and his hippie girlfried, who hadn't shaved her armpits in years, sat opposite to me. When I asked the guy for his name this happened:

"My name is Ganesh."

"Your name's Ganesh?" "Yeah."

"Is that the name on your passport?"

"No, Ganesh is my real name."

What an asshole. This is why we can't have nice things!

40. When a two eager young Indian guys in Pahar Ganj, Delhi, constantly keep asking you what sex with a blonde girl is like, you amuse yourself by finally answering: "Let me put it this way, you guys wouldn't last twenty seconds", and watch their jaws drop in disbelief.

41. The police catch you drunk driving a rickshaw, yet you manage to talk your way out of it without paying any baksheesh.

42. India aside, the only country that you have visited in the last 4 years is Nepal where you go every six months to renew your visa with a week long side trip to Pokhara.

Entry contributed by Toxic Waste Man, a.k.a Aleksi.

I've never had sex with a blonde girl.

You can read the 20 original symptoms here

and the 10 additional symptoms here.

20 symptoms that tell it is time to leave India

1. You don't swear anymore if you step on cow dung.

2. It's July and the monsoon is at its worst but you are still in Goa, playing to be a baba and living in the jungle.

3. You've found a way to make the 10 rupee begging kids to give you money.

4. Explicit carvings in places of worship don't make you want to photograph them anymore.

5. You drink tap water in order to cut expenses.

6. You pray to Hanuman and think it's perfectly normal for Westeners to pray to a monkey god even if they still were Christian yesterday.

7. You manage to spend days without anyone asking you "what is your country" or "what is your job".

8. You sport natural dread locks and think they look cool.

9. Blood red teeth and gums from betel nuts don't seem gross to you anymone. In fact, that's just how your mouth looks like.

10. You've developed immunity to seeing deformed children.

11. The old hippies in Pushkar seem neither tragic nor funny to you anymore.

12. You don't think it's weird when an internet cafe owner strikes a conversation with you about how having sex with horses is good for manhood.

13.You can't remember the last time you had Delhi belly.

14. You can describe filth with the same precision as the Inuits do when decribing snow.

15. You know your way around the old town of Varanasi.

16. You don't freak out if you get bitten by a stray dog as you figure that you probably would have had rabies already if you were meant to have it.

17. Even Indians understand why you are not married.

18. You don't get angry if you see a rape victim's name and photo in a newspaper.

19. You see a green dog and think nothing of it.

20. When you wake up in the middle of the night because a cockroach is crawling up your nose your first thought is not "fuck" but "I'd like some chai".

Want to read more? Ten additional symptoms can be found here.