There is no possible description of Delhi that does not use or imply the word “hole”. Whether prefixed by “hell-” or some other fragment, no other term could truthfully describe Delhi except as a pit, indentation, or aperture filled with some noxious substance.

Within minutes of leaving the dumpy Indira Gandhi airport in a taxi cab, clouds of smog and dust enveloped me. My eyes burned and I could feel something bad happening inside my nose. It was after midnight and my hotel manager was nice enough to pick me up from the airport, for what seemed like the modest price of 500 rupees (12 bucks or so – a ripoff, actually). Our car cut through the plumes of dust, weaving between motorbikes, bicycles, rickshaws (motorized and pedal-driven), horse-drawn carriages, and of course, cows. We passed slums, crowds huddling around enormous bonfires in the middle of the street, one-legged men begging at our window while we stopped at the red light. Parts of Delhi at night seem not so different from what I imagine Hell to be like.

I arrived at my hotel room and threw my bag on the bed. The room was freezing, the staff having left the air conditioner on all day in anticipation of my arrival. The ceiling fan whirled as if possessed by a demon. The toilet did not flush and the shower was a bucket. Outside, a lady screamed at her neighbours while a man slapped a carpet against his balcony. Was this my next three months?

Having hardly slept a wink, I moved to another hotel at Paharganj, also known as the infamous Main Bazaar of New Delhi, a teeming beehive of India’s finest merchant mayhem, with aggressive touts, beggars, and hustlers trying to grab your attention (or your wallet) as you scurry past. It is also the unfortunate site of most of Delhi’s budget hotels, meaning that us cheapskates have to run this gauntlet several times a day in order to get anywhere. At the end of the street is an mind-boggling pile-up of rickshaws hoping to take you somewhere for twice the normal price. Everywhere, there is filth: gravel, garbage, cow shit, dead animals, broken glass. I even saw a jawbone.

The Main Bazaar is the only place for which I’ve had to prepare myself mentally before stepping out the door. “Okay. Going outside now. Inhale and… ahhh.”

Within a few days, though, the havoc turns to background noise. A properly assumed Paharganj mien, your eyes pointed to the horizon, your ears turned off, your resolve steely and single-pointed toward your destination, is essential. With a bit of aimless wandering, before you know it, the hole known as Delhi actually starts to reveal itself as a sort of charming hole. The Indians are a nutty people, and high tragicomedy lurks around every corner.

For example, there’s a well-known scam in Connaught Place, the enormous circular plaza of New Delhi, where a shoe-shine man will point to your shoe, revealing shit smeared thereupon. But you don’t remember stepping in any. And the shit is on the side or the top of your shoe, not on the sole… so how the heck did it get there? Turns out… he threw it himself! Yes, there are actually people who sit around throwing shit on shoes in order to clean them off for you. Which pretty much sums up India: sad, funny, infuriating, beautiful, baffling, and ultimately nonsensical. Welcome.

As the postings here at Woolgatherer have been lagging significantly behind schedule (I’ve actually been in India for over a month now), what follows is a condensed version of the rest of my time in Europe and Turkey.

Back in Istanbul with ten days to kill before my flight to Munich, and feeling maybe a little sick of the streets of the Sultanahmet tourist area (sadly, a very unavoidable place), I decided to slip into Bulgaria for a little while. I took the first overnight train to Sofia, the capital, sharing a room with a 19-year-old Australian kid who’d spent the last year traveling Russia, the Baltics, and the Balkans. I don’t need to tell you how old this made me feel. He was on his “gap year”, which is something many Aussies and Brits take before entering university.

The kids today. In Austria I’d met a 19-year-old Brit girl with model looks and a stunning maturity who’d spent half a year in Laos and Cambodia. I can’t imagine not only having the money to travel the world at 19, but having the interest, or even the idea to do it. Not to mention the courage. When I was 19 I was still getting over being allowed to buy beer without having to cross the Quebec border, and beaming with pride whenever I’d get IDed.

Travel often brings about feelings of inadequacy. You feel that you’re doing the same ol’ thing as everyone else, experiencing the same things, following a predetermined path set out by the gods of Lonely Planet, and so on. And you meet people half your age doing the same things and having identical reactions to their surroundings. Or people twice your age. Travel is sort of ageless that way. The 19-year-olds are indistinguishable from the 45-year-olds. All your life experiences and wisdom, all those years of paying your dues in the real world, don’t seem to matter very much.

Anyway, Bulgaria. It’s lovely. Probably my favourite place on the trip so far. It could be that in contrast to loud, aggressive, messy Turkey, Bulgaria appeared to me as a calm sunset after a long day of pounding heat. The city of Sofia is a gentle place. The trains run on time, the pedestrians don’t spontaneously break into wrestling matches, nobody yells at you or offers you a tour of their handicrafts shop.

You can get a pizza slice the size of a football for about a dollar, and the Bulgarians go ahead and put ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise on the thing. As a devout condimentophile and sauce-ist, I approve of this conduct. They also have these strange convenience stores (or dépanneurs, if you prefer) in the basements of buildings, visible to the public only by a tiny knee-high window opening out of the sidewalk. You’re supposed to squat down and tell the clerk what you want (in Bulgaria, usually cigarettes), and they reach up and hand it to you. It is like sticking a tin cup into a hole in the wall with five bucks inside, ringing the bell, and pulling it back out full of whiskey. Why can’t we have nice things?

I made a half-hearted attempt to day-trip to the top of the mountain just outside Sofia. The gondolas up to the summit weren’t running that day, and I was instead chased by two enormous dogs and one bearded woman. But I still love Sofia.

Even better than Sofia was the hillside town of Veliko Tarnovo in Central Bulgaria. I have a fondness for places where you’re always walking either uphill or downhill no matter where you’re going. Veliko offers a most vertical experience of small-town life.

I stayed for almost a week, in the Hostel Mostel, one of the best hostels I’ve seen. Only two others guests were there (low season), a funny Dutch guy and an enormous, bear-like Englishman, and we spent the week dining on pig knuckle and mashed potatoes, having a beer, playing chess, cavorting about with the Bulgarians, and generally doing not much of anything. It was like a vacation from my vacation.

I returned to Istanbul to catch a flight to Munich via the distant galactic outpost known as Sabiha Gökçen International Airport. Now, in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, around the end of September and into the start of October there is some kind of “beer fest” happening. I hear it’s a pretty big deal. So I arrived in downtown Munich via the express train from the airport, stuffed my bag into a storage locker, and made my way to the fairgrounds of this supposedly popular festival to meet my pal Steve.

The week or so that followed was an enormous black hole. I think of the periods of “de-tox” taken by serious drinkers (a “corporate restructuring” as called by J. Tesauro and P. Mollod in The Modern Gentleman), and can only conclude that Oktoberfest is something like a yearly “re-tox”—a flushing-out of all the body’s health, a severe tax on the immune and nervous systems, and a prolonged period of self-afflicted morning malaise. It is like taking a nourishing retreat from human dignity.

I wanted to write a sprawling epic of drunken mayhem here, not unlike Hunter S. Thompson’s The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, but I am no Good Doctor, and am in fact, badly in need of an appointment with same.

Without a doubt, the very greatest thing about Oktoberfest is an antiquated contraption known as the Teufelsrad (Devil’s Wheel).

The Teufelsrad is nothing more than a flat, spinning wheel on the floor, surrounded by thin protective padding and a crowd of screaming, leiderhosen-clad Germans. Contestants pile onto the wheel and find their grip, while the sweet sounds of Bavarian drinking music fill the air. The wheel spins faster and faster. The contestants try to hang on for dear life, the devilish wheel trying to throw them all off. Then, slowly, a large padded “wrecking ball” descends from the ceiling, controlled by one of the “hired goons”, whose sole duty is to knock you off that wheel with it. If you somehow survive that, the goons try to hog-tie you with ropes.

The wrecking ball knows no mercy. Whether you’re a man or a boy or a little old lady, the wrecking ball swings the same cruel path. In the spirit of German schadenfreude, I couldn’t help but laugh cruelly at the sight of glassy-eyed teenaged girls and small children getting cold-cocked in the face by this thing, necks snapping back violently, their screams muffled by the crowd noise. The degree to which the Teufelsrad would not be allowed in Canada is immediately evident; after all, not only is it vicious, sadistic, and dangerous… it’s also fun.

And if that weren’t enough, every so often they have a “boxing round”, where the contestants are given boxing gloves and instructed to beat the hell out of each other in the midst of all this. The whole spectacle of the Teufelsrad is augmented by the fact that nearly everyone involved—participants, crowd, staff—is drunk. It is almost the Platonic form of human debasement. Needless to say, I highly recommend it.

Next stop, India.