I’m not one of those overly-concerned-about-cleanliness-types, but I’ll admit it– I HAD to wonder how clean it was to be sitting in the overflow of an Indian dam with hundreds of other people, sipping tea all the while.

This was definitely one of those days that broke all the health and safety guidelines my guidebook listed.

My travel mates and I sat on hundred-meter wide steps, the cold overflow of Bhusi Dam splashing down upon us, sipping cup after cup.  Everyone was packed onto the steps like sardines– young couples, families, groups of rowdy guys. Children shrieked in delight at the refreshingly cool water rushing past them, young men splashed each other and shouted, and everyone was smiling. The tea vendors stayed on the go, weaving their way through the crowds, stopping to pour hot chai into small plastic cups in exchange for a few rupees. Further down, below the steps, where the water was calmer and shallower, vendors sold fresh, hot corn– from stands set up smack in the middle of the stream. And, of course, there was a smattering of cows who couldn’t miss out on the action.

It was, without a doubt, one of the strangest places I’d been to in all my travels.

Maybe I should explain how I ended up in Bhusi Dam to begin with. A British friend of mine, Sarah (not the  Sarah I refer to in the two Syrian posts) was working at a NGO in Mumbai. It was July. Now those of you who know India know that Mumbai+July=dripping hot weather. It can be unbearable. We’d sat a bar one night earlier that week, our faces beaded with sweat, Sarah blowing her bangs off her forehead, when she suggested we make like Mumbaikers and escape to the hill stations in Lonavla that weekend. She said that there were a few things to see in the area, including the Karla Caves, and that the weather is allegedly much cooler than Mumbai.

My reply: why not?

Not long after we checked into our hotel– which was damp inside and out thanks to the monsoon rains (our sheets were damp, our towels were damp, and there was a damp cow standing in the lobby. Yes, IN THE LOBBY)– and not long after a woman attending a wedding celebration in the hotel had shoved sugar into our mouths with, “This is a sweet day, no?” we met Ben, another Brit.

We’d hiked up a gently sloping mountain to go to Karla Caves and the adjacent temple, only to find a long, snaking line to enter the temple. We couldn’t quite figure out why, but there was a marching band roaming the vicinity. Between the throngs of people waiting to enter the temple and the festive music, we sort of felt like we were at a theme park.

Ben joined us as we stood– in India, foreigners tend to act as magnets for other foreigners– kickstarting a conversation with a very witty, very British line (I wish I could remember what he said). Turns out that, like Sarah, he was from London and they launched into that “who do you know? where did you study? where did you go?” game.

Long story short– by the time we’d waited out the lines, the brass band with its crashing cymbals, Sarah’d made a friend. Ben invited us to join him on his next stop… only he didn’t know exactly what it was.

“A dam?” he told us, with a bewildered shake of his head.

He explained that the company he worked for in Mumbai had paid for a car and driver for his weekend in the hill stations and that the driver was taking him around to the local spots… and that his driver had been raving about this dam all morning.

When we reached the bottom of the mountain, and the car, Ben asked the driver what was next on the itinerary.

“Bhusi Dam,” he replied.

“What’s that?” I asked.

The driver looked at me. “A dam, madam.”

But of course.

Ben shrugged and smiled. “I have no idea,” he said.

Still not sure why anyone would want to see a dam, weary of the fact that we were getting into the car with two total strangers, off I went… against my better judgment.

About ten minutes later– after the driver regaled us with tales about coming to Bhusi Dam with his family when he was a boy, managing to never actually tell us WHAT Bhusi Dam was– we pulled into a muddy parking lot. I didn’t see much but some trees, and a smattering of people following what looked like a path into some thinly scattered trees.

The driver turned to us, grinning. “Bhusi Dam,” he announced.

Ummmm.

“Where?” we asked him.

“There,” he pointed to the small stream of people.

We looked at each other. “OK. Let’s go have a look. Shall we?” Ben said.

Why not?

We got out of the car and followed the small crowd on the muddy path… which quickly gave way to a small stream. The people ahead of us kept walking, the men not bothering to roll up their pants, the women’s skirts and saris trailing in the water.

So we forged ahead, too. Past a defunct merry-go-round on the bank, past “name on rice” stands, past an empty red ferris wheel, past a sign that cautioned us swimming here could result in death. Past people who were frolicking, splashing, and sliding about in the water. Past cows, past corn vendors…

You know where this story ends.

Bhusi Dam– you sit in the surging overflow. That’s it. It’s simple. It’s strange. It’s delightful. It’s freeing. It’s India.

That was the strangest travel destination I have seen. What was yours?

It was nearing 2 AM and my travel mate and I– two women, obviously tourists, alone in the middle of the night on the empty streets of Damascus– were desperate for a hotel room.

We’d been wandering from full hotel to full hotel for half an hour when we saw a small neon hotel sign in a window—far up in what looked like a residential building. We entered the quiet, litter-strewn stairwell. There was graffiti on the walls. We wondered to each other if the building was abandoned.

As we rounded the corner to the next landing, a hand-printed sign that only read “Hotel” with an arrow urged us to continue up the stairs.

“I don’t know about this,” Sarah said.

“What choice do we have?” I asked her. “Look, let’s give it another flight or two and if we don’t see it, we can get out of here.”

She agreed and we continued up.

After another two flights, we heard voices and strains of music. A light shone from above. We pushed on.

We entered the “hotel”– which looked more like an apartment– out of breath, hunched over from the weight of our large backpacks. Three Syrian men sat in the living room, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, the TV blaring classical Arabic music.

My Arabic speaking companion was too out of breath to speak, so I gave it a try in English. “Is there a room?” I wheezed.

The men looked at each other.

“Sit, sit!” one insisted.

I didn’t want a chair. I wanted a bed. Dawn was just hours away. I wanted to sleep. “No, no, we need a room,” I said.

They looked at each other again, spoke rapidly in Arabic. I glanced at Sarah. She shrugged that she didn’t understand them.

Finally, they turned to us. “Yes, we have a room,” one of the men said. He offered it to us for 10 dollars and suggested we see it.

“That’s OK,” I said. “We’ll take it.”

The small room had a sink, three single beds, and an armoire. We flung our packs down on one bed and didn’t bother with changing or washing, we each got into our own bed.

“This room is sort of dirty,” Sarah said.

I looked around. A pair of reading glasses rested on the edge of the sink, as did a used bar of soap. A button down shirt was draped across the slightly open door of the armoire. Three pairs of slippers—one pair next to each bed.

It hit me. “Sarah,” I said. “They gave us their room.”

OK, so the sheets weren’t clean, and neither was the room, but I was so touched it didn’t matter to me. I slept deeply that night and woke up content and relaxed, ready to see Damascus, hoping to encounter more people as gentle and friendly as the men who gave up their beds.

“There’s no room here for you! Go!” the Syrian hotel clerk pointed at the door. We stood, frozen, looking through the glass-paned door at the dark streets of Damascus.

We were two women, weary about the prospect of wandering around downtown Damascus in the middle of the night. But we were also weary of price gouging. It was 1:30 AM and we’d just arrived to the city. We’d spent five hours on the Lebanese-Syrian border as one mustached, cigarette-smoking Syrian border guard after another told us our visas would be ready in an hour. Then another hour. Finally our visas were granted. After the short ride from the border, we went straight to a hotel that our Lonely Planet highly recommended… only to find that the clerk was quoting us double the price listed in the guidebook.

When we’d walked in, he’d eyed us—up and down—taking in all the signs of travel fatigue. We’d asked for a double. He quoted us 60 dollars and offered to show us the room. “This had better be an amazing room,” my travel mate, Sarah, whispered to me as we followed him up the stairs.

It wasn’t. A handful of tiny roaches were scurrying across the walls. Sarah flicked an unfamiliar bug off of a bed. “For 60 dollars a night? No way,” she said to the clerk. He shrugged, indifferent, what did he care if we were two women alone on the street?

Back downstairs, I tried to haggle with the clerk, but he repeated the same price over and over.

“But it says 30 in the guidebook,” I insisted.

“That’s an old book. Prices change,” he said with a sniff.

A European couple walked in. “Wait,” I said to them. “Are you guys staying in a double?”

“Yes,” they said hesitantly, looking at each other.

“How much are you paying?” I asked.

“Thirty,” they said.

I threw my hands up in the air and turned to the clerk.

“They’re paying in Euros,” he said.

Sarah, who speaks and reads a little bit of Arabic, spied a framed government document—an approved price list—on the wall behind him.

“Just a second,” she said. She pointed to the sign. “That says 30.”

And that’s when he kicked us out.

We went from one hotel to the next, only to be told that there were no rooms left. One clerk explained to us that October is high season in Damascus and that the hotels were full of Iranians and Europeans. She wished us luck and sent us back into the night.

(To be continued…)

Tripbase received an email from a friend recently: “I’m sorry to say I got laid off this week,” he wrote. Our friend explained that the company he worked for needed to trim 300,000 US dollars from its budget, and his position was one of many that were eliminated. “HR and I signed some paperwork,” he said, “and that was that.”

“I’m not overly upset,” he continued, saying that his wife and he have been wanting to leave Alaska, where they’ve been living for two years, for quite a while. “That’s suddenly a lot simpler,” he said. “It will take about two weeks to wrap up loose ends around here, and then we’re going to visit friends and family for awhile. We want to see loved ones and decide where to live.”

Our friend’s family lives in Puerto Rico, his wife’s family lives in Florida. While taking some time to rethink his career path, our friend and his wife will visit with both.

Sure, they won’t be paying for hotels, but it got all of us at Tripbase thinking about travel destinations with low overhead costs… places we could take a time out from the recession and size up our lives from afar.

I thought immediately of another friend of mine, a writer. He spends the school year teaching, but every summer, he sublets his places and heads to India to spend the summer vacation writing. Yes, the plane ticket is pricey, but the overhead is so low in India, he swears he saves money this way (and gains material, as well).

Sitting out the recession, or at least part of it, in India doesn’t seem like an awful idea to me. Why? Let’s do some quick math here. Bear with me…

Rent varies wildly throughout the United States, but just for the sake of argument, let’s assume an average of 1000 US dollars a month of rent, including electricity, water, cable, and internet. Of course there are other living expenses, too, such as gas and food, so let’s knock that average up just a bit to 1400 US dollars. Six months would cost you somewhere in the ballpark of 8400 dollars.

Now let’s compare that to the cost of spending six months in India.

Let’s assume that you’re paying ten dollars a day for your room (and this is estimating high– we’ve paid half of that in hostels in India). That’s roughly 300 dollars a month in overhead costs. What about food? Let’s budget something outrageous for India… let’s say 200 dollars a month. For 500 dollars a month, or 3000 dollars for half a year, you’re living in India! Even figuring in a plane ticket, you’re coming out ahead of what you’d be paying in the States or Europe.

OK, we know this idea isn’t for everyone. We know that some people have mortgages and families and can’t just pick up and run to India. But if you do have the flexibility and you want to take a breath before plunging back into the less-than-stellar job market, why not spend 6 months on the subcontinent, rather than 6 months sitting at home while the economy is stagnant?

Some other interesting travel destinations where we could stretch the dollar or Euro came to mind… one of us lived in Alexandria, Egypt for part of a summer and paid about ten dollars a week for a small room in a shared apartment. What about retreating to Egypt? Morocco? Thailand? Laos? Vietnam? Central America? Certain areas in South America are quite affordable, too…

Getting fired is never fun, especially in these uncertain economic times. But if you have been saving up for a rainy day, and you have a cottony cushion sitting in the bank, there might be a silver lining to recession-related job cuts.

Let’s be honest with ourselves… how many times have you sat at your desk fantasizing wistfully that you would be “let go” so you could have the time to do the things, like traveling, that seem to keep getting pushed aside for the sake of slaving away at a 9 to 5?

You haven’t?

It’s just me?

I hope my boss isn’t reading this.

Ahem. In any case, if you’ve got some cash stashed away, you can use this unexpected break in work to your advantage… instead of rushing headlong back into the shaky job market, you might consider picking a low-cost travel destination. Stretch your time and money out. Clear your head and reassess. Go backpacking in India or take a long trek through South America. Retreat to an ashram on the subcontinent or go spend a few months being a beach bum in Thailand. Have you always wanted to volunteer abroad? Now might be the time to do it.

You will return rich with experience and gifted with a new perspective on the life– and work– you left behind.

Next topic: Sitting out the recession in India.