What to do in Bath in 48 hours? Everything.

The Roman Baths are below street level. The rising steam from the hot water spring gives it tremendous mystique. The Romans built a very sophisticated bathing and spa complex around it. During Roman times men and women would bathe naked in this pool. I can't imagine they didn't get up to some mischief.

  

The fan-vault ceiling of the Bath Abbey which stands right next to the Roman Baths. It has a gift shop which sells the most wicked fridge magnets. I bought one which says, "Fridge Pickers Wear Bigger Knickers."

The Royal Crescent - a grand sweep of semi-circular symmetry built many centuries after the Roman Baths. This was the fashionable end of town during Jane Austen's time. The best time to see the Crescent is in the morning when the sun is directly across it in the sky. It lights up this honey-coloured show-piece of Georgian architecture.

 I had a wonderful time at the Fashion Museum in Bath. They have some really interesting sections like the one on the evolution of women's underwear and this one on English dress. What I still don't understand however, and I'm serious here, is how you can sit with a stiff frill on your bum?

When you go to Sally Lunn's restaurant in Bath to eat the world's best bun, remember to nip down to the basement for a quick peek into their kitchen museum.

Of all the empty seats in all the world, the woman with the whooping cough had to occupy the one opposite ours. We were on an early morning train to Bath in England, eager to get near its famed hot spring. Having just rid myself of flu germs, the last thing I wanted was to be bathed in hers.

If we were Romans visiting 2000 years ago we would have inscribed a curse on a strip of pewter and tossed it into the hot water, praying to the Goddess of healing, Sulis-Minerva, to pre-empt disease.

The only thing we could do really was jump off the train in relief when it pulled into the Bath Spa station. We crossed the new shopping mall and within less than four minutes we were standing in the heart of Bath, outside the entrance to the Roman temple and spa complex.

While the city centre still throbs because of what the Romans built nearly 2000 years ago, all around it are the layers of the centuries. We sought out the 20th c. by diving into a Costa for a bit of coffee and cake.

We took an hour to warm the insides waiting for the doors to open at 9.30. Straightaway, I grabbed the free audio guide for its interesting section with Bill Bryson’s observations and was eventually disappointed that he didn’t make any wise-cracks.

Unlike many Roman towns that came up around a fort, Bath developed because of its religious and ritualistic significance thanks to the hot spring. Today we understand the science behind the hot water but you really have to envy the powerful grip it must’ve had on Roman imagination - a dark green pool of steaming H2O curing all kinds of aches and pains. That’s why they erected a large temple and sprawling spa complex around the hot spring which continues to bring up nearly a million litres every single day at a toasty 46 degrees celsius.

The audio guide gives you so much freedom to explore at your own pace that we didn’t feel like joining the tour guide. In any case, he was so brusque with me that I lent him a cold shoulder instead of my ear.

The most entertaining section of the complex is the little museum which houses the Roman objects that were found in the spring. The Romans wished for all sorts of favours and blessings but the more colourful amongst them, threw in a fair number of curses as well, inscribed in Latin, which were later found at the bottom of the pool for the entertainment of future generations.

One guy complained, “Dacimedes has lost two gloves. He asks that the person who has stolen them should lose his minds and his eyes in the temple where she appoints.” Tough crowd!

From the Roman baths we hopped across to the Bath Abbey, which is much younger at about 500 years. We did a quick walk through gawking up at the pillars that merge with the ceiling by bursting into what look like Chinese palm fans. Its really quite beautiful but having woken up at 5.30 am that morning visions of a soft bed kept distracting us.

We decided to pack in one more thing before we retired and sought out the Pulteney Bridge. This is only one in four bridges in the world with shops on either side of it. It makes a pretty picture but being on the bridge itself felt like being on any other road in Bath. Underwhelmed, we decided it was time to check in to our B&B.

On Sunday morning we left the Roman bit of Bath behind to discover its Georgian end. This is the bit with the grand, honey-coloured buildings and where Jane Austen’s characters flitted and flirted. At that end of Bath you can quickly forget the Roman spa and I began to realize how much Bath is like Madonna. It has constantly reinvented itself.

After the Romans left, the Middle Ages, like the Middle Ages will, saw the spa complex go to ruin, till it was revived again in the 18th century and became the place to see and be seen for fashionable England. Jane Austen lived there briefly and rather unhappily and you can pick up fragments of her life around town as well as at the Jane Austen Centre. The owner of our B&B, warned us that it was the “Disney version for the American tourists” but I learnt a thing or two nonetheless.

We just walked and walked on Sunday checking out the beautiful Royal Crescent – a massive semi-circular building and the neighbouring Circus – a great big circular residential block. Bath’s Georgian architecture imitated the Italian Palladian style with its strict use of symmetry – all perfectly elegant as well.

We kept our last stop for the evening for the oldest house in Bath home to the Sally Lunn restaurant. Sally Lunn was allegedly a refugee from France who came to England nearly 300 years ago. She is credited with creating one of the most delicious buns I have ever tasted. Ever. When you tear off a piece, its like tearing off bits of cotton candy. Utterly and completely satisfied, we boarded the 8.30 train back to London with a bag full of buns, making it the oddest bit of shopping I have ever done.

Collapsing in my seat, I pulled out my list of ‘Things to do in Bath’ and found that 48 hours later, I could check off almost everything.

Trip Planner:

There are plenty of trains to Bath Spa station from London Paddington station. The train ride is an hour and a half. Tickets can be booked at http://www.thetrainline.com/. You can even do a day trip just to see the Roman baths. It is well worth staying in the UK for an extra day for it.

Where to Stay:

Bath is a really small town and you can get to all its attractions on foot. If you’re really exhausted taxis are cheap. This means that you don’t really have to stay in the middle of town near the Roman baths. Hotel prices can be quite expensive. We stayed at the Grove Lodge – a B&B off the London road which is a 20 minute level walk from the Roman baths. It is an excellent Georgian villa with tastefully decorated, spacious rooms and large bathrooms. The owner, a former teacher Isabel Miles offers a great vegetarian breakfast and good local advice on sight-seeing. 85 GBP a night. www.grovelodgebath.co.uk

When to go:

The best time is when it becomes warmer. But going in the winter ensures that you are not navigating throngs of tourists.

This piece was published in The Indian Express on 21st February 2010.

A Trove At the End Of the Road in Alaska

The Sterling Highway in Alaska ends at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula in a town called Homer. Homer’s main claim to fame though is, its famous spit – a narrow, hooked finger of land, nearly seven and a half kilometers long, jutting out into the waters of the Kachemak Bay. We were on a 12 day road trip in Alaska in an RV (Recreational Vehicle or motor home) and this really was turning out to be a vacation of good clichés. The journey was as important as the destination and we went where the road took us. That is partly how we ended up in Homer.


We rolled into town in the evening and headed straight for its spit. There aren’t too many of these in the world so we were keen to see it and find an RV park on the spit itself. The Homer spit is a lively place with shops, cafes, seafood restaurants and tour operators for fishing expeditions and chartered flights. But as we continued on down the single narrow road that runs to the end of the spit, the landscape became distinctly more scarred. There was junk lying around from what appeared to be abandoned boats and broken down cars and all the RV parks were over priced and crowded with everyone who had reached the end of the Sterling Highway, deciding to stay on.


After just a few days in Alaska’s lonely wilderness, crowds were beginning to annoy us. So we quickly turned around, and found an RV park inside town, away from the spit. It turned out to be a wise decision since it was empty and offered what we really wanted - a breath-taking, uninterrupted view of the Kachemak Bay state park across the water.


But when we woke up the next morning, we didn’t know what to do in Homer. We didn’t want to wander aimlessly through the shops and we certainly didn’t want to sit around in a café all morning. With such beauty outdoors we didn’t want to dive into a museum and while Homer is a great destination for those interested in fishing, the thought of sitting in a boat with a string out, waiting for something to bite, didn’t exactly thrill us to the bone. We were a fussy bunch that morning. So what now?


In the next half hour we worked the phones and came up with a plan that we will congratulate ourselves for, for the rest of our lives. We got out of Homer. Just across the water from Homer lies the Kachemak Bay state park, a vast 400,000 acre playground of mountains, valleys, glaciers and wildlife and therefore a haven for hiking. The only way to get there is to hire a plane or a boat. We found a guy from upstate New York who shows up in Alaska every summer to make some money running a water taxi service between Homer and the Kachemak Bay state park. So in about two hours of waking up and twiddling our toes wondering what to do, we found ourselves huddled in warm clothing, racing in Todd Scanlon’s boat across the cold water to the other side for a five hour hike.


Todd dropped us on a lonely gravel beach that marks the start of the “Glacier Lake Trail” and headed back for Homer. To our deep satisfaction there was absolutely no human being in sight and we entered the trail through the woods with little idea of what lay ahead. Just as we were growing comfortable with the forest of cottonwood and spruce, it ended abruptly opening into a treeless zone of gravel. We marched on, following the trail, curious about where this sudden change in the landscape was leading us, when the trail suddenly started sloping downhill. We could see a huge mountain in the background and as we advanced we felt the excitement similar to an audience waiting for the curtains to go up.


In a few minutes a dramatic sight emerged. We found ourselves standing at the edge of a lake, which had a rim of ice cubes and icebergs in the middle. And coming down into this lake at the opposite end was a majestic river of ice – the Grewingk Glacier.


The glacier, the lake, the rocks, the raven overhead, all seemed to have a personality and it felt as though they were looking at us than we at them. We felt, we were interrupting something very private in this natural kingdom, as though we weren’t supposed to know that this place existed. We just stood there in dumb-founded silence unable to express any admiration for the sight before us. After taking in as much sensory pleasure from the place as possible, we decided to address our hunger pangs. On a fine flat rock we laid our out makeshift lunch of strawberries, granola bars, grapes, bananas, Oreo cookies and a packet of trail mix and found that never had a meal of such odds and ends been so satisfying.


Having seen off our hunger pangs, we bid farewell to our private glacier (we now feel proprietorial to the Grewingk glacier) and started out again to complete the rest of our hike downhill. During the summer, Alaska has nearly 20 hours of daylight so there was no fear of the sun going down on us in the middle of the forest. But it was starting to get grey and cloudy and we really didn’t want to get stuck in a cold rain. Secretly everyone prayed that Todd had not forgotten us.


As we started on our descent the Kachemak Bay came into view again. In the far distance we could see a little speck of a boat heading our way. Again, secretly everyone hoped it was Todd and not a fishing expedition. The boat kept coming closer and closer as we kept getting nearer and nearer the shore – the scene building up nicely for a Hindi cinemaesque slow-mo reunion. We were about 100 feet away when the bushes finally cleared and we got a good view of the boat. To our immense relief, it was Todd who had shown up at the stroke of five!


All sides were proud of their clockwork precision without the exchange of even a single phone call. We jumped into the boat, happy and exercised, and with the warm glow of those to whom nature has revealed a little secret – beyond Homer where the road ends.


This piece was published in the Indian Express on September 27th 2009.

LOOK CLOSER HOME BEFORE INVOKING AMERICA

America has been invoked in recent times after every terror attack on Indian soil.

Experts and ordinary Indians react in anger, naturally, to the violence, and urge the Indian government to look at the American example of counter terror.

After all, as we’ve been reminded many times before, there has not been a single attack on American soil since 9/11. In India on the other hand, there have been at least 15 major terror strikes after the Parliament attack on 13th December 2001.

But this analysis is over simplistic because during this time when American citizens have been safe in their malls and subways, their country’s “war on terror” has actually destabilized large parts of the world - the Middle East and India’s own neighbourhood of South Asia.

So, if we just for a moment apply more stringent conditions in examining the US record in protecting its citizens it becomes clear that it has come at the cost of someone else’s safety. US policies have hurt the security of the region and in fact India as well. The result of the American effort in protecting Americans – no further attacks – is good; but the approach is heavily hypocritical and morally unjustifiable. It sends out the wrong message that the means in this “war” don’t matter. So those who invoke the US should be reminded that there is little to emulate and for various reasons.

Some simple numbers first. The 9/11 attacks killed a little less than 3000 people. Within a month of launching strikes in Afghanistan the US surpassed that number in Afghan civilian casualties. You can imagine what the figure must be like seven years on. The US military, however, does not document civilian deaths or “collateral damage” so the exact number is unknown but according to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, in the last
two years alone nearly 8000 people have been killed.

In Iraq the numbers are much higher. According to the Iraq Body Count Project more than 85,000 people have died.

So, collateral damage is a euphemism which means that some people are killable under some circumstances (like Afghans and Iraqis) while American citizens are not under any circumstance.

There are more double standards. For instance, democracy is good in some places but not good in others. It is not good in Pakistan because it slows everything down. Oh bother! So as long as Musharraf - the Undemocrat can get things done then he gets Washington DC’s support.

Admittedly, Pakistan has been a very difficult question for the Bush administration but it beggars belief that they continue to studiously support Pervez Musharraf even after voters rejected his party. On the other hand, Pakistani lawyers who have surprised the world with their tenacious movement to have the judiciary restored have not received any support from Bush and Co.

So even while propagating the virtues of democracy as the antidote to terrorism and war the US stoutly supported a military autocrat. While Indian admirers were looking at America’s secure shores they didn’t notice the damage being done just across the border even if Pakistan’s own leaders should get a fair share of the blame.

Beyond the double standards the major problem with the war on terror in South Asia has been that it was relegated to second place. Iraq’s witless war had to be won and so Afghanistan was ignored. The best troops and equipment were pulled out and diverted to Iraq. During that time the Taliban and Al Qaeda regrouped in Pakistan and today they are launching vicious attacks inside Afghanistan. NATO says they need at least 10,000 more troops to be effective in the country.

These policies negatively impact India as well albeit in a less direct fashion. Today Indian reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan are running up against a nasty old foe in the Taliban. Pakistan’s reckless military has allowed these fundamentalists to regroup even as the US was too busy in the battle in Iraq. In the past the mujahideen have turned their attention to Kashmir so this Talibanisation of Pakistan is just bad news for everyone.

America’s actions abroad belie the lofty language it has used in the war on terror. I smile ruefully when the US is invoked after terror strikes because the world is possibly more unsafe because of America. South Asia doesn’t look rosier for sure.

So, for those who still think the “tough” measures of the US are admirable, here is a beautiful question from the late Catalonian cellist Pablo Casals. He asks, “The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?”

It does and that is the problem.

Published in the Indian Express on July 3rd 2008.