Damien Filiatrault: Blog

Well, the monsoon was too much for me to take. I think it was the mold that started sprouting up all over my apartment (on my clothes and bed) that finally put me over the edge. Luckily, my company was understanding and let me come home a few weeks earlier than originally planned. Plus, my little bro (who also works at Solution Set) came to visit for the last three weeks so it wasn't so bad. He worked in the office with me for a week, then we headed to the Himalaya for 10 days, then another week of work and we flew home on the same Jet Airways flight direct from Mumbai to SF.

The trip to the Himachal (my second) was epic. We rented Enfield 500's (WWII style motorcycles) and did a 800 Km loop from Kullu (on the wet side of the Himalaya) to Spiti (on the dry side) and back. Here's a link to the photos:

http://picasaweb.google.com/damien626/spitimagic

Our flight from Delhi to Kullu was cancelled due to heavy rains, so we spent a day wandering around Delhi and visiting the National Museum which had some excellent sculptures. We ended up taking the 13 hour bus ride to Kullu instead, which would not have been complete without an emergency roadside diarrhea attack.

As we pulled out of Ankit's compound on our massive bikes in the rain, Steffen let off the clutch too fast and nearly crashed. I'm sure Ankit and his brother Panki thought we had no chance of making it back in one piece. The first day was the roughest. Steffen crashed twice (once on a steep hairpin turn and once crossing a creek) and I got drenched in muck after slipping out in a huge, foot-deep mud puddle. 9 hours of riding later, we were in bed knowing we had 9 more days of this ahead of us.

Despite numerous landslides and the most precipitous roads (highest in the world) I've ever seen, we made it back to Kullu with nothing more than a scraped toe and a sunburn. We teamed up with a couple of girls from Alaska touring on mountain bikes, a Belgian named Bavo (the Bavo Lama) and Amir, just out of a 4 year tour in the Israeli army.

Once we made it into Spiti (once part of Tibet) the clouds disappeared. We visited the highest village in the world (Kibbher) and played with children, ducked our heads into 10th century monasteries where the Dali Lama goes to get away and took turns playing a drum in a prayer room that overhangs the village of Dankhar. The highest pass we crossed was 4500 meters and we camped at a lake nearby called Chandertaal.

Before the trip I had a wicked cough and I felt healthy by the end. When back in the monsoon-denched subcontinent, we had a farewell lunch with the Persistent team, bought gifts for family and ate tandoori chicken at Palm Shades in Majorda every night (usually with an Old Monk and Coke). It was a great experience, but I am definitely glad to be home in sunny CA.

I haven't been able to properly capture the monsoon rains on my camera yet. If I were more experienced and had a tripod I would love to show you the enormous bolts of lightening that streaked across the sky just before the big rains hit. I would use a slow shutter speed to show how the drops of rain are so dense and hard that they penetrate my North Face shell as I am riding my scooter to work. Luckily, the Crab Key restaurant in the Shangrila Hotel is just across the street so I don't have to go far when it's pouring rain. 

The ocean has become too rough to swim in and the deserted beaches are now littered with miles of garbage that has washed up. 

New plants and animals are coming to life. After the first pre-monsoon showers there was a butterfly hatch one evening and hundreds of thousands of blue and black butterflies were floating up the beach on a northerly breeze as the sun set. Now that it is so wet outside, all kinds of critters are coming into my house, like this praying mantis. 

I've also been playing a game of cat and mouse with a couple of rats. Of course there are the spiders, too. 

At least the weather has cooled off, but now when you hang your clothes to dry, they don't. I have to admit, I miss the sun and I wish I were in California for the summer. At least my brother is coming on Saturday and we'll be taking off for the deserts on the northern side of the Himalaya to escape the rain.

NOTE: DON'T MISS THE LINK TO THE FLICKR PHOTOSET AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST! Himalaya means snowy mountains (just like Sierra Nevada) so it was natural that I've been wanting to check out Himachal Pradesh in northern India out ever since my friend Jenny Scott told me about the Parvati Valley a decade ago. Turns out that my friends Jason and Erin were going to be visiting India for 3 weeks, so Jason and I met in Delhi to head into the mountains while Erin (aka Schneids), relaxed at at my place in Goa at the beach.

Jason had just spent two and a half days in the hospital in Jaipur with typhoid and it showed when I first laid eyes on him in Paharganj. He was emaciated, pale and greasy and the shithole that is Paharganj wasn't helping. He's a pic of the dirty Delhi alleyway outside our hotel.

Our 9 days in the Himalaya was just what he needed. We breathed fresh forest air, swam in clean clear rivers, climbed snow-dusted peaks and made friends. By the end of the trip, both of us felt healthy and restored.

There is so much to say about this trip that I would have to write for hours to share it all. We hunted for yellow berries along the river Tirthan with Audaz, ate Cendrella's organically grown strawberry Jam, heard Lobu sing traditional Pahari songs, waded through fields of wild marijuana, and wandered through remote villages that see only a few outsiders in a year and still grind their own flour using watermills.

The wildlife of the Great Himalayan National Park did not disappoint. As we climbed the forested slopes, pairs of bright blue monal pheasants would take off and glide down the valleys while hoots echoed off the rocks and trees. Pine martens scampered across the fields. Herds of friendly goats munched on the mountainsides as enormous griffon vultures soared above and below us.

At first we had planned to just rent equipment, but our uber-guide, Ankit, informed us that you need a guide to enter the GHNP. Somehow we ended up with a guide (Ses Ram), a cook (Dilip), and two porters (Lobu and Prathap). They showed us things we never would have found, cooked us insanely good meals (they actually hauled around a pressure cooker) and just generally spoiled us. By the end of our trek, we had laughed and played music with them around the campfire and were so glad we didn't go it alone.

The local villagers were extremely friendly and offered us chai whenever we arrived at their village. We sat among carved wooden houses with slate roofs and attempted to talk with them (with Ses Ram as our translator) and promised to send the pictures we took back to them. We even witnessed a yearly celebration of the departure of the godess Galadurga from the village of Karongcha complete with bugles, drums and singing.

Most of our trip was spent trekking, but we did have a little time at the end to explore the area by bus and ride bikes from Manali to Kullu. The Kullu valley is filled with wheat fields and apple orchards and surrounded by snowy mountains. Of course there is the omnipresent Indian garbage problem, but here it is easy to be distracted by more beautiful things.

Since I don't have the time to tell all the stories, definitely check out the photo set that I have put on Flickr for the trip here:

http://flickr.com/photos/damienf/sets/72157605048198066/

In Palolem there's a great restaurant where you sit on the sand underneath a big banyan tree and eat Thai food to your heart's content while listening to chill music. I was really digging the songs they were playing so I spoke to the owner and he told me how a guy from Europe had made two mixes for him: morning and evening (each with over 100 tracks). He ended up burning me copies of the morning and evening mix which I've been listening to at home. Whenever I hear a song I really like I look it up and I've discovered some new artists that I like such as Panteon Rococo, a ska band from Mexico City. But the artist I've fallen in love with is Lisa Ekdahl. She writes and sings most of her songs in Swedish, but her vulnerable voice is ideal above a bossa nova guitar. I was intruiged by the guitar behind her brazilian-style jazz tracks and after some research learned that the guitarist is Paul DiBartolo, a very interesting character who I would love to meet someday. The track "Daybreak" is incredibly good, however the one that speaks to me most is "Open Door". I've uploaded the mp3 for you to enjoy. 

Click here to download it (right click -> "save target as" works well).

The office is located in the Verna Industrial Estate next to drug and telecom companies. As is true everywhere in Goa, cows and wild dogs roam the streets of the "electronic city". Persistent Systems Limited has its headquarters in Pune, but operates offices in many other cities in India. The company is backed by Norwest Venture Partners (a client of SolutionSet), and recently went public. Many of the currentPersistent employees in Goa worked in the same building but for ControlNet, a company headquartered in Campbell, California but with 80% of its staff here in Verna. When ControlNet was having a tough time marketing its telecom software (apparently its networking software was doing better), Persistent bought them out. The building has 3 floors: ground, first and second. SolutionSet takes up most of the SS (Second floor South) section of the building seen below with the bougainvillea on the balcony. 

If the surrounding industrial estate isn't exactly the picture of cleanliness, at least the inner courtyard of the office offers sanctuary from the surrounding heat and pollution. It has a lovely garden (a snake was spotted the other day) and pantries where you can make tea and toast any time.

People typically take one of the many shuttles and coaches operated by Persistent to transport the employees from the surrounding towns to Verna. The morning shuttles arrive at 9am and there are departing shuttles at 6:15pm and 8:30pm. It's not uncommon for people to be at the office from 9am to 8:3pm, but people do take frequent breaks and play table tennis (TT), and other games. Two of the people who are often here until the last coach are Nandhin and Sunit (as seen from my desk).

They both commute from Margao. Except on special occasions, everyone eats at the free cafeteria on the 1st floor which serves vegetarian Goan and Indian food. It's not bad. Overall, its a pretty damn nice place to work. The offices are air-conditioned (often too much) and there is a friendly, relaxed atmosphere. I usually eat lunch with a crew of Goans, and the conversation often leads to recommendations of where I should go the next weekend, differences between India, Goa, and the US, or how much I overpaid for something. I'm getting to know the PHP team pretty well since I interact with them a lot, but the .NET team has been heads-down working on the San Francisco Symphony website that just launched (http://www.sfsymphony.org/) and the EFI Partner Portal, so I haven't gotten to know them as well yet. Here is a picture of the entire SolutionSet Goa team (click for higher resolution) . 

At 6:30 pm the caterers put out snacks for us. Typically its South Indian stuff like samosas or batata vada (fried potatoes). A mixture of Konkani, Hindi and English is spoken around the office. The environment is a LOT different from downtown San Francisco at 2nd and Mission, with the bustling business people and various lunch eateries, but the work itself isn't. Writing a spec, zoning into a tricky piece of code, or sitting on a hour-long conference call is the same wherever you are.

This post is taken straight from an email I sent:

Yeah, I'm learning my way around.  I know Goa already better than some
Goans...its the Geographer in me.  I've been riding my motorcycle
everywhere.  On Saturday I had an interesting experience.  I was
trying to reach this rain forest preserve in the mountains and I
thought I'd take the back road instead of the main road.  As soon as I
got on the back road there was a line of about 1000 dump trucks at a
complete standstill in the left lane (my lane).  There was a fairly
steady stream of dumptrucks going the opposite direction, so it took
me a while to weave on the side of the trucks get to the problem which
was a one-lane bridge.  After crossing the bridge, I weaved for
another hour in the midday sun sweating and getting covered in dust
while riding through the heart of the state's iron ore mines (Goa's #1
industry).  It was quite a contrast to the Goa tourists typically see.