Yemens Little Qat Feet

Yemen just flew by; like a falcon I guess. I was only there a week, and no blackberry service! It’s so easy to get used to having this always-linked system but then again just as easy to get used to not having it. Already I’m here in Dubai, exploring some feasibilities.
Yemen was absolutely delightful, as always. I think these are my two favourite countries, Oman and Yemen. Really, so much alike yet completely different it’s really shocking.

I went back to my little hotel, in Sana’a, the Arabia Felix. It’s in the remarkable Old City, in what was once a private home, and staffed by quite a few very nice guys who always look after me well. Spent a couple of days wandering around, going to the souk, getting a few things for the store—of all the specialty items possible, Yemen’s stoneware is probably the most obscure. Need an incense burner for bakhur to scent your hair? How about one to burn Bakhur Hagmah? That’s the water incense, special to Sana’a; you scent drinking water with a mixture of subtle spices before offering it to your guests. Only in Sana’a do they do this, not even (I hear) in the rest of Yemen. You use a special tiny stone plate for this. I bought plenty. The airline is going to kill me with my excess baggage, and yes, I do have rocks in there.

I went to Taiz, with a couple of new friends, Glenn, an Australian teacher at the international school, and Mohammed, a Sana’a local who to came along to hang out and practice his English. I got to make my unannounced entry to my friends perfume store on Gamal street. I have done this every time I’ve been in Yemen over the years and I just like doing it. It's the same with any of my agarwood teachers but Mr. Ghailan is extra special because he was the first person to show me oud in any form. He gave me an empty bottle of dehn-al-oud which I carried around for 5 years, like a puppy with a bone, smelling it constantly, and over the years it became kind of a holy grail for me, eventually morphing into this spectacular Lao oud that is fantastic, and these guys all recognize it. And I think they are usually happy and proud of me. Mr. Ghailan was my first inspiration, the person I thought I would go and try to apprentice myself to so many years ago!

I was back, and quickly gave him my long list—we are out of most everything. And I was delighted to discover that he was back to making some of the exquisite scents he had made years ago, but in recent years had given up for more floral, “European” ones. Back we are with the old akhdreen, the unbelievable one, the really hot one, and the accompanying perfume, Magmoor, again, another scent he had stopped making, or made differently. And an older style of bakhur as well, so happy, and not only that, but one of the fundamentally more Arabic smelling cream perfumes. So I was in rapture and got everything and again I will say that Emirates Airline will curse me and charge me and hopefully still let me on the plane with all this excess!

We ate! I need to say this! And I also need to confess that I can't remember the name of the restaurant nor can I find the card. But the location is easy to find, on Gamal Street, across from the entrance of the debab stand—they specialize in fish, I think; it certainly seemed like their specialty. For sure they specialize in that Yemeni Khubz, the huge flaky breads, brushed with a bit of oil and black cumin seeds. This bread is baked in a kind of tandoor oven and is the best bread anywhere—absolutely delicious. It’s about a metre long, and maybe a foot wide and when they come up they just throw it in the center of the table all curled up and folded however it falls. You use this as silverware. Lots of places in Yemen gave me a spoon, or a fork even, to eat, but I really prefer not to, I prefer to use my hands, with a piece of bread. (In South India it’s just hand and fist eating, rice, and sauce, and dal; you mash it up in your right hand and stuff your mouth, getting it everywhere and it’s like being a little kid eating.) But I really like eating with my hands, and the sight of all these Europeans here in Dubai using knife and fork looks cold and prissy.
This restaurant is clean and tiled in blue and white, they cover the table with a giant sheet of plastic cling wrap and when your meal is finished someone comes over and wraps the whole mess up and takes it away.
First they brought us some “salads,” the first is “something like cheese, mixed with some other things.” Ok. It’s a dip that I had, with minor variations, in this same type of excellent Yemeni style restaurant in Sana’a with another new friend. (This one is called Al-Shaibani Modern Restaurant.--It's on Haddah Street, next to Ashtal Building against Porsche Exhibition--that's what the card says.) The other bowl was “hilbe,” which is a bitter froth of fenugreek leaves and some Yemeni hot sauce. It’s usually served on Salta, which is the national dish and made of lamb so I never eat it—hence I don’t often get to eat hilbe. But it’s really good, and if you don’t think that hot and bitter with a sour backnote is good, then you will hate this! But I love love love it. And I love that they serve it separately, in a bowl so you can just scoop it up with your bread and fish. The Sana’a restaurant also had this; I am actually describing two meals here then: there is the one in Taiz, which I started with, and the other one in Sana’a later in the week. They also both had little fresh vegetable salads of tomato and cucumber. Then the fish! In both cases we got an entire, flayed and roasted fish, each. The spices were less bracing in Taiz, with a peppery rub, perhaps, and lots of lemon, whereas in Sana’a there was a hot sour cumin pepper and possibly clove rub all over it. In both restaurants the fish was fresh, succulent and juicy, white meaty, that fell off the bone, a bonus for me, who never figured out how to de-bone a fish properly, and constantly fear choking to death as I enjoy my meal. In Sana’a we had rice with this, biriyani in a similar style to the Lucknow one, but I was otherwise occupied with my fish and the delicious bread and salads.

For desert in both restaurants we were served tihama bananas with a small bowl of Yemeni honey, widely considered to be the best honey in the world. All I can say about nibbling these sweet little, bright aromatic bananas dipped in honey is that it tastes as is you’ve gotten into a meal meant for God, it’s just the most ridiculous and marvelous creamy sweet, and lush gift of divine inspiration—these bananas and honey are 2 integral parts of the same blessed whole. The bananas of the Tihama are exquisite and delicious, and the honey of Yemen is truly manna from heaven. At the Sana’a restaurant we were also served my favourite dish, it’s called “Bint al Sah”and only a special restaurant, like this one, that you can find yourself served Bint Al-Sah for dessert. It’s a bread, but in a dessert form poured over with honey and black cumin seeds. I’ve had it in people’ homes, and never even seen it in a restaurant. These were both fabulous meals, and places I never would have found on my own.
Both times we had oud all around afterward.

This is one of the best things about Yemen: no matter how tough looking the tribesmen, no matter how many weapons, whatever, you can be assured that each one has a bottle of perfume in his bag. You can trust this. Only in Yemen can I be in a taxi with eight men, not only a foreigner, but an American woman, and bring our the oils, and no one has ever acted like this was bizarre or refused to put on some oud, jasmine, or sandalwood. And not only is it lovely, but it breaks the ice somewhat, especially the oud. And small world we live in, one of my new friends in Sana’a, Abdul, was in the agarwood business until 1991! So he really knows his agarwood, and comes from a time before shortages. It was so interesting, finding out a little bit about this, my world, but older, and completely different.

It wasn’t till the last day in Yemen that I chewed qat. I wasn’t going to, but how can you not chew qat in Yemen? It’s impossible, really. I went to the qat market to buy myself some, as it’s considered normal to bring your own qat to a chew and nothing can be easier than buying qat, even if you have no idea what you’re doing, like me. Just show up where qat is for sale, and look at some. Immediately you will be approached by someone, asking if you want to buy qat. This is no tourist gimmick since most tourists don’t chew it and the Yemenis are utterly thrilled if you show interest at all. So I was taken in hand and had three guys helping me, and we looked at different qats as they crowd grew and soon we had a qat sale by committee, with everyone yelling about which qat I should have, obviously the best one, and the differences in these qats mean the difference in your mind set and how you sleep-I was away with a little bag of what I was assured was very good qat, for 300 YR. On my way back to the hotel I was stopped by everyone who could see I had qat, and grilled, my qat inspected and met with approval. Abdul had also bought me some qat, though, and much better quality, so I chewed that one, primarily, until I was high and whacked, chain smoking and drinking beautiful sweet water, all huge eyes and intent conversation. No sleep that night, and a shredded mouth the next day, but well worth it. I wouldn’t chew it often if I lived in Yemen, but you need to chew, as most people do, with this very social of drugs.

Shock and disbelief met me at the Dubai airport—the last time I was here my hotel had to arrange for a visa—faxing back and forth to America. This time I don’t even have to fill out a landing card. The place is monstrously huge, I can’t make up my mind if I love it or loathe it. Walking along the immaculate beach here in Marina the first evening, I took some time figuring out what was wrong with all the blinking skyscrapers—the entire neighborhood is just being built. It’s a huge construction site, replete with plenty of 5 star hospitality. It’s beautiful but a little intense. There is no street life, and no amount of tall buildings will give you a New York without people and lives and their messes and dramas below.
I went, yesterday, to Deira, first to visit the Dubai Chamber of Commerce, and then the spice market. No gold for me, not this time, just ambling around the Iranian spice shops, asking about things, and unable to resist drinking tea and coffee and so on until the sun set, a pleasant last aromatic experience. Today and tomorrow are going to be about me and the chaise lounge, and the pool and the sun, and meting my friend and relaxing—and I’ll be back in America, for a month or so, at the end of the week, Inshallah.

Lepers at the Hard Rock Cafe

Outside, actually. I was so relieved to see them. I had wondered where India’s lepers had taken themselves off to. Years ago there were lepers everywhere you looked, square-faced, waving their poor little melted looking stumps around, begging for alms.

Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, is contagious, although it takes an awful lot of exposure to contract it, like living in a leper colony for months or years. And it’s very treatable, and cheap to treat as well. The WHO has offered free treatment to lepers since 1995, according to their website. But like so many of the diseases that we in the west assume belong to another time, it’s a disease of poverty, as are polio, elephantiasis, rickets, and this sort of thing. You used to see all of these daily in India.

I remember an article I read in The Times of India in 1986 about a new invention, sort of like a wheelchair, but cheap to make, and possible to power with the arms. This was called the Jaipur Chair and the article said it would be given away to thousands of needy people in the upcoming years. I have to admit I didn’t think it would happen. But it seemed to.

Gone are most of the people moving about like beasts on all fours from rickets or polio, gone the multiple amputees rolling along the pavement or hopping along on bits of old tyre. And as for the incredibly gruesome, possibly manufactured (by cripple makers—something I’ve heard about but never seen,) deformities such as the razor sharp broken backs, and oddly amputated arms and legs….well, these are not so common any more. Even in Varanasi, compared to 20 years ago, there are not many of these people around, at least that I saw.

My question is: What happened to them? The lepers in particular confounded me. Years ago I was in Kolkata, at the Kalighat temple, and immersed in lepers, in every stage of the disease, and ever since I have looked for lepers everywhere and it’s amazing where you see them. There was even one in Santa Barbara years ago, a woman. She didn't have extreme deformities, but there is just an unmistakable look. And I understand there is plenty of leprosy in some of the slums along the US/Mexican border.

So now we have people with useless legs happily coiled under them as they tool through traffic in their Jaipur Chairs, instead of having to walk on all fours through the gutter, like beasts. I did not see a single person with elephantiasis the entire trip. I can only assume and hope that some concerted effort was made to deal with this, but I just don’t understand the dearth of lepers.

Even if you treated all the lepers, and why not since it costs pennies a day, and even if you eradicated it, which India hasn’t, according to their own reports, what about the ones who are already deformed from it? Leprosy eats away at the nerves, causing a loss of feeling in the extremeties. Eventually, most sufferers will hurt themselves and not know; burning their hand on a cooking pot for example. Or not noticing rat bites on the feet at night. None of us will take care of a wound if it doesn’t hurt, that’s human nature I think. And so it’s the same with a leper; all the more so since anyone who has contracted leprosy and can’t afford treatment probably also can't afford the luxury to get away from the rats, or wrap their hands, or buy good shoes.

Where did all these lepers go? I am sure they haven’t all died, for new people are still diagnosed every year, and so where are they? I looked for them everywhere and finally, in Varanasi, I saw a couple, but it wasn’t until Bangalore, (now Bengaluru,) that I actually saw groups of them in the street.

Leper colonies still exist, due to the fear and revulsion societies feel for sufferers of this disease, and the mistaken idea that leprosy is easily communicable and untreatable. And of course, it freaks people out to see it. The very first person I interacted with in India, over 20 years ago, was a leper at the Lucknow train station—she tugged on my arm, and beseeched me for alms. I turned to look at her and nearly jumped out of my skin. I knew what it was, what she had, immediately. There is just no mistaking it.

Oh our world.


For some disturbing leprosy images, click here.

and Wikipedia info

Flower Absolutes from Tamil Nadu

Even though I’m not yet back in New York, I had to write about the new and fabulous floral absolutes I got in Coimbatore. I like to write descriptions of the oils as I immerse myself in them, and even though I will also send out a newsletter, I need to record what these flowers do for me, to me, and with me.

I feel almost as though I’m shepherding home a few celebrities but it’s better than that as I’ve got these crazy absolutes! They are fantastic! And I’ve seen enough of where they come from to be satisfied and convinced that they are the real deal, no scientific “help” to make them smell good, they come directly from the flower to the pot, courtesy of the hexane express!

First of all, our new and narcotic Jasmine Sambac. This absolute is absolutely intoxicating, technicolor and fully grown up. The subtleties and complexities of this luscious flower all shine through this absolute. And Concrete! Don’t forget the concrete! A nearly overwhelming floral heart is accompanied by the green tendrils of sparkling leaves, raindrops, oxygen. Jasmine sambac is hardy and grows nearly everywhere but the flowers of Southern Tamilnadu in particular are known for their heady aroma, and exquisite bouquet. Local women wear garlands of these fresh flowers in their hair and tons of them are dedicated in temples all around India! This sambac is bright and happy, a 5 exclamation point oil!

Tuberose!—waves of somersault spinning voluptuousness, and a sensual delicious falling of completely ridiculous pure floral, caressing the teeth and tongue as one inhales. So many notes in attendance, almost a peas baadji similarity, with a red glimmering after the first few minutes, and that far off sweaty effervescence. What can one say about this fantastic flower? I always feel it’s inadequate using the accepted fragrance formulae. This tuberose is not sweet! Nor should he be! Tuberose is a formidable oil, who easily overwhelms, much like a tiger. Beautiful, but be careful! He will take you places you didn’t know existed, but will crave forever more. This is the meaning of a true sensual awakening!


Grandiflorum Jasmine--here is another side of obsessive flower love, the sweet side. As opposed to the frenetic all-consuming pull of the tuberose, the jasmine is the breathe of the Goddess herself. Sweet, sexy, demure but like fire, she is just as erotic, just as sensually rewarding, just as delicious; your salivary glands let loose when you inhale her. Your eyes will close in ecstasy, your tongue will vibrate, and you will feel your heart swoon and swell. She doesn’t need to ask your surrender—it may be the first thing you do when you smell her.

Jasmine Auriculatum!! He’s a sharp little happy springy sweet one! He has no indole, I was told, and he is pepper love and hits the roof of your mouth—he should be, could be, an ice cream. He may be my new favourite jasmine but I’m being coy, and not telling. He is a new flower, for us, and has that heavy oriental languorousness, but somehow fresh in his fragrance. There is an almost fruit-like, no-nonsense top to him, but the involvement and the power of his essence are truly remarkable. I am just getting to know him. He is like a new lover—although still jasmine, his nooks and crannies are different, his tops and middles are new and enchanting, and the feelings he evokes are strong and surprising.

All three of our new jasmines are mind blowing and fantastic!! And all entirely different, but fully complementary, like otoro, shiso, and sake; or silk, chocolate and roses; or tabla, harmonium and veena; or the desert, the ocean and the mountains; or a cognac, a kiss, and a promise……


Lotus! Pink and powerful, this oil is really wonderful and intoxicating. So beautiful, lush and intimate, this oil is ethereal and out of this world. She is like a lovely effervescent fairy, glimpsed only for a second, a whiff, and gone. Standing in the presence of this gorgeous absolute I can feel my heart lift and the top of head sail off. She is a hidden scent, a deep and rich, dark flower, mysterious and divine.

And now the ridiculousness starts, Champaka. It’s the white one, the sweet one! The little one! This may be my new favourite flower—it’s just an insane and delightful, powerful absolute, and truly unique. It’s so difficult to pick a favourite flower! It’s whichever one I’m smelling, usually. But this one is different! He’s not like the others! It’s love, I’m telling you. When you meet him, you might feel the same way. This oil is a relief, somehow, he makes you feel like everything’s ok. He has a larger than life quality, he stands on his own, floral all the way—no fruit, no sweet. There is even a barely discernable graham cracker dry running along the bottom and an edge of something edible but that you’ve never had, never smelled, never imagined.

Rose! Sweet as cream, and dairy is the theme of this rose absolute—the holy cow, the Holy Mother—but not at the expense of her sensual side. She is all comfort though, all love—she could be a dish of cowmilk out in the Mauritanian desert. Soft and creamy rose, she has no sharp notes at all—complementing our two rose absolutes already living at Enfleurage. This wonderful, soft and ultra feminine rose grows in the warm wet South of India, surrounded by verdant and fertile green! Bananas, sugarcane, coconuts, mangos, papayas, tiny sweet eggplants…..these are her childhood friends, she is grown amid abundance and so shows a contentment, a strength, a confidence, not found in too many places. I should think this will be an indispensable oil for anyone seeking to celebrate her feminine side! Did I just say that?


Frangipani! Well, what can I say about this? There is just no other flower that embodies the tropics like this stunning plumeria. To say this is “floral” is inane. She is the entire universe, this frangipani, and it’s no surprise people become obsessed with her. Even the Khmer Rouge, in their manical destruction of Phnom Phen, left the frangipani trees—I cannot describe this oil except to say she is not really an oil, but a delicious spreadable, honeycomb-like sweet treat, if bees flew down from heaven. Yes, she’s a “powerful floral.” Whatever. She is the world, the essence, when I smell this oil there is nothing else I need, nothing else I want, I am content to just sit her with her, my zahir, my universe, the delicious, delectable, divine decoction of love and ecstasy. If I could eat this absolute, spread on toast, or just on my fingers, it would be a last meal worthy of the angels! I am honoured to have this magnificent flower’s soul accompany me.


Mimosa is the last oil I have the pleasure to write about—soft puff yellow flowers from the hardy acacia trees growing in the foothills above Coimbatore. She is soft and sultry, innocent in her shy yet straightforward beauty. She is a grove of summer time afternoons; hot still days, anticipation and contentment. She is soft and wonderful, purring a harmonious little soliloquy of sweet yellow honey clouds.


I have to say that writing about these oils has been interesting. Usually I just sit at my computer and write a newsletter, just takes a little while, but here I have these 9 new wonderful friends, these oils, and I can’t smell them all at once and I have to immerse myself to write about them properly. There are a couple of reasons for this—first, my senses, which are quite fine and work rather well enough to get me into trouble on occasion, are completely overwhelmed. I can’t smell more than a couple of these, if I want to smell and enjoy them in the way they need to be enjoyed. And they are powerful aphrodisiacs; say what you like, but this is true, and it’s impossible to concentrate after some time with them. And third, even though I really honestly tried to write odour descriptions, it becomes less and less about that and more of a homage kind of thing. And the last, fourth reason, is that my brain turns to mush after a while, usually around the time the second reason kicks in.

From Kannauj to Coimbatore......

My trips have a way of ending, all of a sudden. At least, for me, it’s that way in India. All of a sudden, I’m done. And it happened yesterday, as I left Coimbatore. Madurai is not for me. Just not my place. Tried to go to the Jasmine fields this morning but it was a disaster. Impossible cheating driver, continually asking me for 200 extra rupees here, 400 rupees extra there, and on and on and I realized I was done. One thing I learn every time I come but never quite remember is that you really need help in India to do any kind of business. If you’ve got all the time in the world, and sightseeing is what you’ve got planned, then you can travel very cheaply, for almost an indefinite amount of time, depending on your stamina. But trying to achieve something, properly…..that’s another story. But I have managed it. This is all thanks to my friend Rajnish, who will now be very angry with me for one more thank you. But if it weren’t for him, and the people he connected me with, I would be leaving in a straitjacket. And I should know better—I can’t count the amount of trips I’ve made to India. Yet somehow I always think I can do it, and occasionally grace smiles on me, and I can. Like now.

Let me count the successes of this month in India. I got to hang out with my friends and we had a great time. I got to know my new friend a bit, and hang out with him. I got to see India again, with a fresh point of view, and eyes. India changes continually, and such major changes: it’s like going to a new country every time. I had some excellent food. I learned that for a happy belly, curd should follow cipro. I was able to visit some lovely temples dedicated to some of my favourite gods. I have had enough time to breathe, to write in my blog, and answer a few emails. And I certainly am sharpening my credulatory skills, as well as being continually humbled by the generosity, warmth and kindness of the Indians.
As far as aromatic successes………well, they’ve been pretty good. I found a master extractor of fine floral absolutes, and I’ve already ordered some ridiculous absolutes and concretes for the store: jasmine grandiflorum, jasmine sambac, jasmine auriculatum, pink lotus, frangipani, mimosa, tuberose, champaka and rose. I had been hoping to find the sambac source and I found them all! That was one of the last oils that I still had to buy from a broker, and not the producer himself. With every new contact I make with a farmer or distiller in their own country, with every person I sit down to eat with, and meet their families, go to their house, and see the process by which they persuade the plants to give up their essential oils, with every new friend I make in this business, my understanding of the aromatic world gets richer, and at Enfleurage, our oils get better.

Adulteration is a problem. Most companies lie, either unknowingly, or outright. Sometimes it’s clear, and sometimes it’s murky. Many times I think the chemical engineers think they are actually improving on nature. Here in India it’s often called “value adding.” Small-scale essential oil production just usually doesn’t pay that well, even for the best producers, which most people aren’t. So really, it’s the people with a passion that do the best job. Here in India every company will tell you they extract blue lotus, or make rose attar, or something similar. But most of these companies deal in aroma-chemicals, which has nothing to do with our industry, at least the one I see myself in. They supply flavor and fragrance to cleaning products, perfume houses, processed foods, paan masala, personal care; all giant industries that need isolates and chemicals, parts of things, and artificially cobbled together things, designed to appear “nature identical.” Nothing to do with essential oils, really. I am more interested in how these particular plants grow, are harvested, how, by who, when, and what happens after. I strongly believe in the energy of a plant, of an oil—you can call it prana if you like. Or chi. Or life force. You can’t measure it in a lab, and it doesn’t have much to do with how much santalol or phenol-oxy-ethanol is present, (although we do still look at those percentages.) Just as a “nature identical” oil will have no life force, I believe disrespectfully harvested oil will as well. It’s not something everyone cares about, but I do, and since I’ve made my life here, doing this, it seems I’m well suited to investigate matters.

Unfortunately, this is a minority view. In India, especially, it’s very very difficult to find the real thing in essential oils. Sandalwood was one of the main lures for me, as was agarwood, but that proved to be a red herring, and I will content myself with our Lao from now on. Sandalwood I have come to few conclusions about, and all I can say about my findings is that this is what I found. Your supplier may say something different and you should try to determine for yourself what is correct, if that matters to you.

The picture to the left shows sandalwood being distilled. It's an "illegal" distillation, possibly of African wood, but still so precious that not only is it behind locked doors, but the stills themselves are taped and signed. This is standard procedure whenever one deals with agarwood or sandalwood. This prevents tampering. Right below is a close up of the ubiquitous DOP barrel just outside.

I don’t believe there is any unadulterated Indian Sandalwood available, at all, for anything, except for the one Indian soap company I already wrote about, who loads the soap with perfume anyway, right on top of the sandalwood oil. That means no attars. No pure attars anyway. I will believe there are mixed attars, with sandalwood and DOP. But since it’s highly unlikely that anyone from the aromatherapy world is ever going to order this (I’d like the 30% sandalwood, 70% di-octyl-phthalate rose attar please!) it’s unlikely that you’ll get it for the price it actually sells for. For these companies do offer mixes and pure paraffin too, for domestic (India) uses. But despite assurances that you can get the pure sandalwood products, I would really be skeptical. I have mentioned that I am going to have some sandalwood distilled for me, in May, and there are plenty of hoops to jump through and plenty of waiting, and plenty of cost. I want to see just how easy it is, if I order it specifically, and express my concerns, and pay the yet-to-be-determined price.

Originally I was going to meet this distiller in Kannauj, but now I think the better thing is to actually go with him to the log auction as there is a strong possibility that the oil might come from African trees. Apparently this is happening regularly. South African or Tanzanian trees are being cut and shipped to India, then trucked to Kannauj or Kanpur for processing as “Indian Sandalwood.” And yes, they are still cutting it with DOP. A friend just asked me if I had read/heard about the sandalwood that is coming out of Kerala. She heard that the Indian government “is just opening that forest for sale.” Sure. Which port would all that African sandalwood be entering India through? Cochin, Kerala. There’s your new forest for sale. If you probe enough, almost every story falls apart. I won’t even start on what is being harvested in Africa and how.

So I’ll go to the log auction, if we succeed in setting it up, then ride north in the truck, ideally, and then we’ll camp at the still for 8 or 9 days, and then I will have a kilo or two of real, pure, Indian Sandalwood oil, Agmark and legally harvested. It will be what many companies purportedly have: pure, unadulterated Indian Sandalwood oil with all its papers. Should be interesting to see what actually happens. I won’t hold my breath; I don’t have too much faith this will actually occur. But you never know.

I think all over India, in labs, scientists and PhD students are frantically working on ways to make synthetic sandalwood oil, or grow it “in vitro,” or any number of other possible things. I’m sure I can’t imagine most of them. But they have a shortage of trees now, just when the value of sandalwood has grown hugely, and the price accordingly has shot up. This country is all about modernizing, growing, and I’m quite sure that if India can lull everyone into thinking that real sandalwood oil is available, and plentiful, (if limited,) then they can increase the supply, at the very high prices it commands now, into a sort of perpetuity. That will mean a lot of money—just imagine. It’s probably happening already, as many of the big fragrance companies are still buying “Indian sandalwood.” But that’s not something that is our place to try and stop, or control. I am just concerned with getting the real one, that beautiful, exquisite, warm and sweet, erotic and richly evocative sandalwood of old. But if you have a business, and you are formulating for others, it’s time to reformulate without sandalwood. There is no way you can make it pay, and no way to guarantee the quality. None. Unfortunately, you’ve got to explain it to the client, who probably doesn’t want to hear that; he wants to hear that it’s possible. The picture above is of the locked and unobtrusive sandalwood distillation, cleverly disguised as a vetiver distillery.

Attars. As nice as it is to determinedly believe that there is still such a thing, I can’t swallow it. I can only mourn the Mitti—I don’t even know if the last batch we got of that, of rose attar, and of jasmine attar, were real. Perhaps they were—I’d like to believe it. The quality is not always testable either. A GC will only help you look for something you already suspect is in there, and most of the chemical engineer guys are talented enough to adulterate artfully, adding extenders with the same GC value, so they tuck up under another, known constituent. It’s folly to think that can’t happen. And does anyone test their attars anyway? We didn’t. What would you compare it to? You would have to compare it with a standard of a “real” and “pure” attar and just how would you find that? You would have to do what I am going to do in May, and then distill into that finished product. I know people hate to hear this and would rather believe anything else. I have a long waiting list at Enfleurage for our next batch of Mitti attar. Some of those people will go buy it from other companies who claim to have it, but I can’t any longer, now that I’ve seen the sandalwood situation.

On the bright side though, if you care that much for attars, it’s conceivable that you could have one done for you. The attars seem to continue to be deg distilled. It’s the receiver that’s no longer viable. I saw marigold (above) and henna and shamama being done while in Kannauj. I shudder to think of the logistics, but I don’t see why one couldn’t bring in jojoba oil and distill into that. Coconut is from India; you could use that. Or palmarosa for rose. But you’d have to baby-sit it or you are going to get cheated. Period.

Coimbatore, O Coimbatore

Where there’s a yin there’s a yang. I managed to ditch Chennai and surface in Coimbatore, which is, for me, one of the most amazing places ever. It just shows that you never really know anything. I was first here in Coimbatore, “The Manchester of Southern India,” in 1986 with Jon. It was kind of a mistake, our coming here. There was not much except a cotton industry, and no seats out on any transportation. We languished for days at a small hotel opposite the train station, situated over an open drain, and, although spotless, still harbored some of the largest cockroaches I have ever seen. I remember we wandered around this main traffic circle, eating and drinking coffee out of sheer boredom. There was nothing to do, nowhere to get away from the dust, the heat; there was no shade to retire to, unmolested. We joked about it then, how hard it was to get out of this place. If there was one town neither one of us would ever come to again, it was Coimbatore.
I didn’t know then that the best way to seal your fate, to ensure that you will constantly revisit a place, is to swear never to again. It doesn’t matter how remote the geography or the chances—you’ll find yourself back there, 100% assured, as long as you’ve sworn not to.

So 12 years later I was back in Coimbatore—this time with a bunch of people who owned aromatherapy companies. We tooled about Tamil Nadu, jasmine farm to tuberose farm; extraction unit to lotus pond to mimosa grove, winding up back here, in Coimbatore. We stayed at the best place in town—it was something like a 3 star hotel. There was even a pool. It wasn’t the cleanest, but it was cool and wonderful! There was some AC in the hotel as well, and the marble floors felt good on my bare feet. I’d given my only pair of shoes to one of my friends who left the trip at Coimbatore. He was flying back to New York and I wanted my Golden Friend, my pup, to understand where I was, so I gave my shoes, caked with Indian dust and soil. We were staying on the edge of town, in this nice hotel with a pool, but the town was still basically dust. We went walking in the old part of downtown, and I saw that hotel I’d stayed at long before, with Jon. Considerably the worse for wear, mildew spread thick and black over the peeling yellow paint, men’s laundry flapped along all the balconies, and dozens of hard looking young guys sat, bored and staring, in the afternoon sun. I think it must have been a men’s hostel. Coimbatore wasn’t quite the end-of-the-road I remembered, but I recognized it, for sure.

Ten years later I don’t recognize it any longer. I am in that same hotel—only now it is a five star business hotel with beautiful manicured landscaping. The pool is now tiled in an azure blue, crystal clear, and a koi pond surrounds it. Uniformed waiters and men in suits glide through the poolside restaurant, illuminated by fairy lights, and thousands of people with briefcases swarm out in the streets. Coimbatore is now an IT center, an automobile center, and many western companies have large branch offices here. Coimbatore is now all about Bougainvillea and education. Everywhere you look, you see another engineering school or medical college. And here, as in most of the rest of India, you can see the trend toward clean-air buses, no traffic zones (although not yet here in Coimbatore,) the paucity of plastic bags, which were the scourge of the 1980s, and a general frenetic planting of green living things, neem trees, bougainvillea, oleander (for center meridians on the new highways as animals don’t eat them.) Overall in India, the pollution seems to be much less, the sky bluer, the landscape greener, and not so dotted with plastic blowing in the wind.

When I tell people I’ve been here every decade that get a big kick out of it, grinning and laughing—yup, sure has changed.

I came to find jasmine—Coimbatore is the Jasmine grandiflorum capital of India while Sambac grows a bit better just south of here in Madurai. But they are both available here in Coimbatore, as well as Tuberose and few others. I had a couple of names, courtesy of my friend Rajnish, who is insisting that he not be thanked any longer. I made a few appointments, hoping someone would take me out to their farm and extractor.

The first man I met, whose name I shall not put down here, was just the most wonderful, round and rolling, and a little bit happy. He took me out to his village, and to his factory, in the middle of recently pruned jasmine fields, sugarcane, eggplants, all ringed with coconut trees. The little factory was a breath of fresh air. Since this gentleman is not a chemical engineer, there are no apparatus such as I usually see, to mess with, and “improve” the natural oils! Not even a GC in his place. He was trained a mechanical engineer, so he designed and build the stills himself. For they are actually stills, I think you can still call them that, even though they use hexane and have more steps than a simple alembic.

I used to think it was fine and even normal for chemical engineers to be involved with essential oils in India and now all I can say is that I’m grateful this guy is not. Chemical engineers are trained to engineer chemicals, obvious as that may sound. And so why would we think this is even a desirable background for someone whose job is to simply extract the natural oils and not do anything else to them? How can one expect a chemical engineer to leave those oils alone, to resist the temptation to mess around with them? It’s always obvious in retrospect I suppose.

His offices and extraction rooms were clean too—this is not always the case, but I felt I could sit on the ground anywhere within his little complex, and not have to throw my clothes away afterward. Well, I think I struck the jackpot. He does 9 flower oils, all the same way: jasmine, jasmine sambac, jasmine auriculatum, champaka, rose, lotus (pink and white,) mimosa, tuberose, and frangipani. These are all done in hexane. First the flowers are put into the still, and washed with hexane, allowed to sit for 30 minutes, drained, immersed again in hexane for 30 minutes, drained, and it’s repeated a third time. Then they are washed with water. The majority of hexane goes back into its own tank and the rest is temporarily present in the concentrate, which has flowed out into its own container. The stills are opened and the flowers removed by basket, in the same way they were put in in the first place. Next, the concentrate is filtered 4 or 5 times. Then it’s put into another device, which heats it over a water bath to about 60C (at least for jasmine) in a vacuum. It travels, in this vacuum, to another container, cooling in the coils as it does, and the rest of the hexane separates out. What’s left is concrete.

I always thought that jasmine absolutes kept well, but apparently they don’t keep as well as I thought! For the most part, these guys here will keep the concretes on hand until they actually get an order to ship out absolute. The final process to separate out the waxes doesn’t take long.

He opened immaculate stainless steel can after immaculate stainless steel can. Every absolute, every concrete, was beautiful and smelled authentic. Nowhere at all, anywhere I looked, did I see a single barrel, bottle or jar of any chemical, any isolate, anything fishy or weird at all. And believe me this is not normal, especially in India. Usually you can spot everything from linalool to geraniol to citronellol to di-octyl phthalate and beyond. And while the presence of isolates, per se doesn’t mean the essential oils are adulterated, there is no reason for them to be there if the essential oil distillation is what we are hoping it is. I’m not looking for oils “enhanced” with any isolates. That’s why so many people grow palmarosa, by the way—to skim off the geraniol and enhance rose fragrance with it.

Happy to report that there was none of this going on here, and like I said, it’s rare to not see that stuff. All we had was absolutes, concretes, and waxes.

I missed the grandiflorum season. And sambac is just now beginning to bud but the price of flowers is too high and so it will take a couple of weeks before that starts. Tuberose is growing but not being extracted yet. Mimosa is happening now, but, due to odd weather patterns, and too much rain in Ooty, where Mimosa comes form, there has not been mimosa for a few days. Roses are full on though. So I saw rose done. The Tamil roses are sweet, soft and creamy, dreamy, yet without the powdered sugar of the Thar Desert roses. These are apparently Damascene rose, like the Rajasthani ones.

When we came back from lunch the roses had already arrived and were spread out in a thick, luscious pink and red carpet in the carport, on the clean and shiny concrete floor, and on rattan mats. Bearers scooped them into baskets, and carried them up the ladder to the still openings. A basket was placed inside the still, and 4 basket loads of roses went in it. Then another basket, and three baskets of rose, then another, and yet another until 4 steel baskets separated the flowers in the still, to allow for more room, for the hexane to persuade the roses to give up their scent in more comfort, and to help the roses not crush each other with their weight. Each of these took 3-4 woven baskets of fresh roses, weighing enough for two men to hoist onto one man’s shoulder, and for him to climb a ladder with it.

All these flowers are done in precisely the same way—the timings may vary however.

I am very happy with my trip to Tamilnadu and tomorrow I shall set off for Madurai, home of the sambac, where I’ll pester and annoy as many farmers as I can. Everyone here has been really nice though—we visited a rose field, and a tuberose field. And today I went to the flower market here in Coimbatore and nearly started a riot. “Gina Lollabridgida!!” one guy shrieked as I waltzed in, hoping someone wouldn’t object to me taking a photo or two. I was besieged. I received more flowers this Valentines day, than I ever have in my life, roses, champakas, marigolds and tuberoses; I have garlands in my hair, and garlands on my wrists. Jasmine ropes hang from my camera case, and my purse is stuffed almost obscenely with lotuses, Artemisia, and marjoram. Needless to say, I got a few pictures. Everyone was ready with his visiting card, and I have been instructed to send the print copies to everyone. I finally had to escape, as I was getting weighed down with flowers. But my half-baked idea of stealthily walking though the flower market, snapping photos of the local flower dealers at work while they barely registered I was there, was a joke. Every photo was posed, often with the same wildly grinning people in the background; there was a real mania. Once again, I felt like Madonna as people shrieked to get my attention (and a picture.)

Later, I wandered until I found some likely looking street food. First thing was bel puri, served here with peanuts—which I asked for just because all the men in the place were eating it. Then I saw another dish I couldn’t place but it was coming bubbling hot out of a wok type pot. “Mushrooms.” I don’t really have anything to say about it, any description except that it was very fine indeed. I couldn’t describe one ingredient even though I was told it was “mushrooms.” Later, they told me it was "mushrooms manchurian." All I know it that it was hot as in heat, and very spicy and I took a to go serving in a little bag so I could have it later. Then they brought me coffee and my money was no good in that little eatery. It was, they were, so sweet.

Irritating

I called a jasmine guy, on a friends recommendation. He came to pick me up at my hotel. Now remember, I am the president of a functioning business in America, in New York. A business that is over a decade old. And here I am on the other side of the planet, sourcing some of our most expensive products.

As soon as we met and had a beverage I told him I was going to Coimbatore to look at some farms and he immediately said that he had to go too and promptly got on the phone and got us tickets of the next evening train.

We chatted for quite a while and left, finally, for his extraction facility about 100 km away. He had a nice little place, growing sambac, grandiflorum, a few tuberose, palmarosa, groundnuts and the like. I think most of the extractions are done from flowers from neighbouring farms. Fine. But there was nothing going on, nothing being extracted, but he tried his best to explain the equipment and told me that this was his own design and I was very lucky to get to see it, etc. Proprietary information. And he told me many times he's counting on me to support him in this effort, to use these new, low heat extraction units.

Then he showed me a contract, showing that he had sold this information for plenty of money. I'm always a little embarrassed when someone wants to talk such money issues that are none of my business. It was a contract between him and some other company. So ok, look at how much money he makes.

I felt things getting a little over familiar in the car and so I asked a couple of questions about Hinduism and he was unleashed for the whole drive, explaining to me the meaning of a "real hindu" and this includes, not surprisingly, having mastery over lust, and the other senses, etc.

Later he showed me photos of his wife and two daughters.

Then we drove back to Chennai and had dinner at the Dosa Hut (the same as the one on Lexington, between 28 and 29, on west side of street, opposite Udippi Palace.) It's excellent, and it's called Baghavan something, not Dosa Hut any more, but I can't remember. They are headquartered in Chennai though, and this place was really great.

But right afterwards, as I was enjoying the aftermath of dinner and sticking my head in a delicious sweet bag of Sambac buds, he asked if he could spend the night with me, so we "could have some fun."

I really can't understand where so many men get their enormous huevos from. I mean, what is that? Are we dating? It was a business meeting. And he was trying to get me to spend a lot of money with his fledgling company. This is a married guy, with kids, meeting a foreign woman, the president of a company, and all it comes down to is, can he get in my pants? I sincerely doubt that I gave him any signs that I would be up for this. After all, I have traveled a bit, and lived, as a female in this world, for over 4 decades, so I think I'm a little aware of what is appropriate and what gives another idea.

If he had a little fantasy, then fine, but why share it with me? Because as soon as he started, and I said no, in a nice way I might add, then he started on the usual whiny track that men always seem to when in this position and they think they can wheedle their way in: "no?" "you don't like?" "i just...." "no problem, we are friends....." "nothing, just have a good time...." "What?" "what?" "what do you mean?" And it's always so uncomfortable, this bullshit.

Now, I do geek, and I'm not prim, but I do cover up, wearing a shalwar khameez and dupatta. And I love the flowers and act like a dork around them, but I really don't think that is some sort of go-ahead. This is actually quite rare of India, this kind of thing, especially after the age of 21.

The irritating thing is this: It doesn't matter what I do, how hard I work, no matter how successful, or how smart when this sort of thing occurs--it's not being seen, not being heard, not being taken seriously. And this is the reason that women, no matter where, have always got to do better, work harder, be more serious, and try harder, than men, to get the same amount of respect. Would this yokel have acted in the equivalent way had I been a man? Of course not.

So I'm supposed to be impressed with his success, to support his efforts financially, and have sex with him in the train as well? It's a great mark of my self control that I didn't side kick him. It occured to me, as I got out of the car, that those trains tickets were for 1st class sleeper, which means a private, curtained, locked compartment for the night. And you can bet that I would have spent that whole night arguing, explaining, and threatening, getting angrier and angrier, while he would have pestered, argued, and whined, pretending to get more and more offended, until he finally dropped off to sleep.

It's not like he's someone I met and was attracted to while traveling, some chance encounter that grows. It was no flirtation. It was a business meeting. Nothing personal about it, except to share the photos of his family. He wasn't some guy I met on a beach, someone I had a connection with, someone with whom something clicked. This was a possible new jasmine supplier, who thought he saw an opportunity to get laid along with getting some cash. How gross is that? We had no friendship, nothing in common, no relationship for anything.

Nothing so frustrating as not being taken seriously.

Needless to say, I bought a plane ticket to Coimbatore in the morning, and was sitting happily in my new hotel hours before this guy even knew I was gone. I didn't tell him I wasn't going on the train with him until I got here. I used to feel a bit guilty about stuff like that, long ago, but no longer. It's not my problem he bought tickets. My only regret is that I left my shawl in his car. I hope he returned it to the hotel--I asked him to. It's the only article of clothing that I really love.

Critical about Sandalwood

Does anyone really know the truth about sandalwood? Is it available? Can you really get 100% unadulterated Santalum album from India? Not necessarily from Mysore--I know that's not available. But I stand corrected about the 30 year closure. Apparently the state distillery has been closed for about a decade. I have heard of sandalwood growing in Tamil Nadu, and also in Kerala. But I have no proof of this, other than what certain brokers and wholesalers say.
All questions of purity aside, it seemed to disappear from the world market in 2004, just after Veerappan was shot. Now it's rare indeed to find any semi-reputable essential oil vendor who professes to have it.
Here in India it's still available in small quantities, theoretically. Ironically, one of the Indian industries who seem to have access to Indian sandalwood in perpetuity is a soap factory! And they use perfume as well so all that sandalwood oil really might as well be poured into a drain....Ah well.
There is still an export quota for oil but I don't know what it is this year, or last year, but it's not much and I suspect that those big companies who buy it, if one is to believe some of these people who profess to sell sandalwood to these big names, are getting an adulterated product although it seems hard to believe that giant companies like IFF and Estee Lauder would allow it.

But I do know that the only sandalwood distillation I actually saw was behind locked doors, highly secretive, and there were plenty of drums of plasticizer waiting just outside. I suppose one could argue that I didn't see everyplace and at every time and that would be correct, but judging from the reactions of the people we asked, I'd say sandalwood is pretty rare, even in its diluted form. The diluted one seems to be going for what passes for the sandalwood price--ie over $1600/kilo. The one I hope to camp out and watch (thus making what will undoubtedly be the most boring videos in the world,) will be much higher in cost, and the gentleman who is to do the distilling would not even guess at the price. Someone with highly developed math skills could probably figure out the dilution ratio based on the amount the 100% undiluted/pure oil costs in comparison.

In Varanasi I met someone with a little perfume shop and as is usually the case, once I bring out some good agarwood the tourist rap fades away and we sit and drink tea and talk shop. It's always fun for me and I think some of these guys get a kick out of talking to me, someone from the same business, who knows a little, which is not something you see from the general public anywhere, of course. Aromatics is a specialty and a fairly rare one. He smelled the sample I received from Mr. Kapoor in Kannauj and declared it was adulterated with liquid paraffin. This may or may not be true. I assume he is an expert but I may be wrong. Also, he could have his own reasons for saying it but he gave me a formula for parts of sandalwood to "light" and "dark" paraffin so as to come up with the exact weight of sandalwood and probably something to do with refractive index or something similar. Language barrier here marks the end of that understanding but it was something to do with evading detection. Interesting though.

Most people probably don't really give a rap about purity although it's easy to say one does. But faced with not having sandalwood or having it at the price of believing a fantastic story, I think most will choose to suspend disbelief and take the sandalwood. In fact, I know this to be true. It's certainly easier to just believe what you're told but in my position it's a bit different as there are a few who truly want to know and they ask me and I am one of them in any case. The longer I go on in this industry the more fed up I get with the bullsh*t and cons.

Now to attars. For some reason there are many people who know about the state of Indian Sandalwood, yet somehow choose to imagine that attars are available. I practiced this breathtaking sleight of mind as well, for some time, so I know. But......if you are really and truly interested in something beyond a pretty smell, if the life force, or the energy, or whatever, of these essential oil plants is what you seek, then how in the hell can you expect sandalwood to still be used in attar making, when it's not available as sandalwood in the first place? Most of the attar industry goes for flavoring for pan masala/mouth fresheners. These sell for pennies a packet.
There are several distillers of attars you can find online--one of the most obvious is Shiva Exports, and they broadcast who their "reputable US customers" are, so as to bask in that reflected glory I suppose. But I really doubt these are reputable distillers, as they not only did not allow me access to their distillery, which is something I have never encountered before, but even told me they had a "secret" method of producing attars that I couldn't watch. I cannot imagine that they have something acceptable that is so secret I wouldn't be allowed to see it. I managed to see other attar distillations in Kannauj--and that's all I saw of those--degs bubbling. It doesn't prove there was or wasn't adulteration going on. All I can imagine is that these guys must have some obviously fake thing happening, so that they worry I would be able to tell from looking at it. It must be very obvious indeed. They do little prayers and otherwise talk a good line on their website. They know who their customers are I suppose. It's easy to believe, especially when a buyer has not been to India and seen the amazing scope of scam and con here. I'll probably annoy a lot of people with this post, if anyone reads it.
Oh well.

Should anyone want any of the attars distilled into sandalwood/dop, or liquid paraffin, or any other petrochemical jumble, then they are for sure available, as these are are the ones made for the mouth freshener industry. My only quarrel and question is......why then are these so expensive? I was quoted lower prices for these from the distillers I visited (not Shiva Exports, who I did not waste any time trying to visit,) but I think that I was quoted those lower prices for the non-sandalwood attars because I was sitting there with Rajnish. I would certainly have never enquired about those on my own. Somehow, the soil of India lovingly distilled into paraffin or di-octyl phthalate just doesn't have the same romance......I wonder if they do it in harmony with the moon, or bless each batch. What utter rot. And like I just said, this will probably make some people really angry, I already know it. But this is what I found. I may be on the cynical side, but there is a very good reason for it!

Three Creatures in Uttar Prasesh

After a quick visit to Agra and a very early morning at the Taj Mahal, we drove back to Delhi to catch our train to Varanasi, the three of us and Raj, who had been our very excellent driver for the week, and we all piled into his house in Old Delhi for a delicious home cooked Rajasthani meal before making our way to the train. His entire family and as many neighbours crowed into the tiny house to meet and greet the foreigners as we sat on the floor eating. The house consisted of one room, about 6 x 10 feet, where his mother and the four children sleep. He and his wife have a smaller space above a ladder outside. But their hospitality was as generous as their hearts as they cooked us a wonderful curry of paneer and peas, with rice and fresh bread.
Then it was on to the chaos of the New Delhi Railway station where porters grabbed our bags and we raced after them into the pulsing melee to our train, where they shoved us and our luggage into our berths, and we all argued about the payment. Tom had been warning Jill about the trains as even though they can be really beautiful, this is not always the case and he had memories of the train we took back from Raipur to Mumbai in 2006 which was apparantly horrible, rather like the hideous Gompti express, but which I missed due to ambien. This train wasn't so bad but it wasn't a private compartment, as he had thought, and there were cockroaches crawling out of the walls. It took us a good hour to become adjusted but here is a very funny picture of them. Despite Tom's insistence that he wouldn't even lay down, let alone actually sleep, he was out before we left Delhi's suburbs and he didn't wake until the coffee wallahs got on in the Varanasi outskirts.

There is not really any way to adequately describe Varanasi, also known as Benares, or Kashi, which means "City of Light." I have tried to describe it and threw it all away. Suffice to say that Benares is the city holiest to hindus and if you die there, then you have bought a quick ticket out of the reincarnation merry-go-round and you go straight to heaven. Kashi is Shivas city and full of temples dedicated to the Lord of Destruction. His devotees, clad in ash from the cremation ghats, and orange cloth, are everywhere, following paths of renunciation and austerities in imitation of their Lord. Bathing in the Holy Ganges here in Varanasi will wash away ones sins and every morning at first light thousands of the devout come down to the bathing ghats to immerse themselves in the Great Mother. Meanwhile, cremation ghats burn merrily 24 hours a day as the grim parade of bodies never stops. We nearly stepped on someone's mandible and part of their cranium laying on the path. Animals are everywhere--monkeys on every building, buffalos and cows all over the ghats, stealing straw from the great piles of firewood, goats eating marigold garlands, and dogs laying in the warm embers, waiting to sneak a treat from the cremations. Beggars and guys trying to rent their boats to foreigners are thick along the ghats. Bells ring, people chant and sing, and the crackle and smoke of fires waft through the foggy air. Varanasi is a world unto itself. It's easily the most interesting and bizarre place I have ever been. I spent more time in Benares just staring, just gaping, and considering, than anywhere else I've ever been. We stayed right on the ghats, at the Rakshmi Guest House, which I would highly recommend. This photos above is Shiva's mount, Nandi.

We stayed in Kashi for three days, also visiting Sarnath, where the Buddha preached his first sermon and collected fallen leaves from the Bodhi tree--a cutting of a cutting of the original, supposedly. We left the Varanasi airport just as the European devotees of the now deceased Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came for his funeral, in exquisite silk saris and massive gold necklaces. They were greeted by the Indian paparazzi, out in force to photograph these important foreign devotees. This is a photo of the Bodhi Tree in Sarnath.

I should mention here that my main reason for coming on this trip was to see our Indian agarwood oils distilled. I had come once before but my supplier had canceled at the last minute and unfortunately it happened again. He was supposed to come and meet me in Varanasi but when I didn't hear from him in the final days I called and was told he had to go to Malaysia. So irritating, and nothing I could do. I have no interest in going to see one of the showcase agarwood farms in Assam. I've seen enough young planted agarwood trees. So I decided to once again cancel Assam and instead, I am now down in the south, in Tamil Nadu, where I'm looking for new Jasmine Sambac. Might as well make the proverbial lemonade, n'est pas?

Roses in Rajasthan

What a surprise this was. I thought my aromatic explorations were temporarily on hold while I gadded about Rajasthan and UP with these creatures of mine.

I managed to get rid of whatever took over my insides, with the help of cipro, and to get rid of the damage the cipro then caused, with lots of yogurt. Cipro and Curd, my new mantra. And after a few days of no food I was once again ready to hit the street stalls.

We went off to Jaipur, and then Pushkar, one of India’s holiest cities and the site of the only temple dedicated to Lord Brahma. It’s also a backpackers magnet, and we whiled away the days strolling, shopping and eating, drinking tea and making a puja to the Brahma temple. Holy men, both real and fake, line the streets, and scams abound. One of the more odd spectacles was a holy man, a sadhu, leading his, if amateurishly, implanted. I suppose you could call these guys pseudo-sadhus. As you walk in the direction of the Brahma temple, helpful locals try to press flowers into your hands to give to the lake, but if you take them then they will catch you later and demand a ridiculous amount of money. So you have to ignore them, but eventually you will get caught as someone will attach himself to you somehow, and you will be hounded and pestered until you have completed your puja. So it’s best to just accept it and ride it.

But I found a guy selling rose products and there are rose fields all around Pushkar, with even some small scale distillations for rose water going on, although not at the moment we were there. Plenty of roses were growing in the surrounding fields though, and we took good pictures of the fields behind the Sikh temple on the outskirts of the bazaar as we cavorted in the flowers, neighbors watching (and laughing) incredulously.

We decided not to go to the tiger preserve at Ranthambore, after deducing our exact chances of even getting into the park, never mind seeing a tiger, and the amount of cunning and bribery we would have to create. All the better to haveanother day in Pushkar, and we left the next morning, early, for the wholesale rose market at Ajmer, about 20 kilometres away. These are the pictures you can see here--the Pushkar roses smell like heavenly rose sugar and powder--they are absolutely fragrant and nearly narcotic in their lushness. The market was redolent with them, and marigolds were also for sale in huge piles. Roses, both pink and red, and equally delicious, cost about 40 Indian rupees per kilo in this market.

Ajmer was very friendly, and the rose market guys were welcoming. But it's been very difficult to get on the internet and and now that I have it, everything is in chaos!