Our Time in Vizag Begins

     We flew last night from Hyderabad to Visakhapatnam. Like all of our other flights, this flight was delayed by an hour, but we eventually got on. I had the world’s strangest window seat – not an emergency exit row or anything special that I could tell, just no window at all, a big blank wall. Compared to our 13 and 6 hour flights that we had taken on the way here, 45 minutes flew by and soon we had arrived in our sticky new home. The temperature difference here is huge – it was in the 70s and 80s there, and here, it’s been in the high 90s and low 100s with tons of humidity added in. It supposedly is 2 degrees C hotter by the water than just slightly inland because of the heat from the sea. This is going to be an interesting adjustment to make! We apparently got lucky, though, it was 108+ last week, and it is supposed to cool down even more after this week.

     I’ve been waking up before 6 most days here (and I think/hope I’m done with jetlag), which is completely abnormal for me normally. That’ll give us time to get things done in the morning since we will probably collapse after dinner when we work long days, starting tomorrow. The heat definitely doesn’t help keep us upright, though with the help of tons of water, I’m managing fairly well.

     Our hotel is much nicer than anywhere I typically stay when I travel. Someone dressed in a semi-ridiculous outfit to open the car door when we arrive, porters carrying our bags up to the room. We aren’t facing seaside, but from the fourth floor, we have a nice view in the distance of the hillsides and the buildings in the city below us. Directly below our window is the swimming pool, which (maybe in the delirium after a long day in the heat?), we found a great deal of amusement in. There was a kids swimming class going on the pool. Usually one watches kids in a pool at ground level, face on, and there’s lots of splashing and flailing. But from four stories above, it somehow was better than television. There was a nice head-on collision from a few girls swimming perpendicular to each other, and lots of funny moments as the kids, especially the beginners, attempted to make their ways across the pool. Anyway, the hotel is nice and super air conditioned and well-insulated, so much so that we had to turn off the AC last night, but it is a very welcome relief from being outside.

    We started today off with the buffet breakfast (included) downstairs, which was a nice mix of Indian food and basic continental stuff. I’m still getting used to eating spicy food first thing in the morning, so this will be a good gradual transition. I also was just eating food that Viru’s mom cooked before, which was hugely toned down in spiciness, so now it’s time to get more used to super intense spiciness drowned with yogurt. As always, I love the fruits abroad - mango, papaya, and pineapple, and a few glasses of guava juice.

      Our driver picked us up later and showed us around the city a bit before we got dropped off at the VSCPA (Visakha Society for the Protection and Care of Animals) office to talk to the director. It’s much greener here than in Hyderabad, a lot more trees lining the roads and green everywhere in the distance when you get even slightly out of the city. The roads are equally as crazy, and we haven’t seen a single red light here, so it’s a free for all at intersections. Luckily most areas, at least the really busy ones, have some sort of barrier between the two sides of the road, but the smaller roads are narrow and people will happily drive on either side of the road to get where they are going as fast as they can. The little autos and motorcyles are good at squeezing, so there are often quite a few vehicles together in a lane. We waited at the office for a while because he was out on urgent business, and eventually he arrived and we got to talk to him. Apparently the shelter had four vets until recently, but are now down to one because the other three moved to government hospitals which have a much less demanding way of life. To add to that, in the last month or so, the shelter has had to take in about 500 cows and bull calves (background on that later), so the vet is just a little bit overburdened. So, that changed our plans a bit – they definitely will need our help on site. We will still do some rabies awareness work when they hold mobile clinics and will get to go out into the community at times, but it seems like most of our work will be focused at the shelter. We’ll find out tomorrow more about what we are doing, but there will likely be some element or surgery or surgical assisting (they usually have two dozen dogs brought in from rural areas for ABC – animal birth control, aka spay/neuter and vaccinations), treatments, and learning a ton about working with cows. 8:30-5:30 six days a week with a 30 minute commute each day, so we will definitely be exhausted.

     Then it was supermarket shopping spree time. We’ll have our breakfasts covered at the hotel, but need to bring lunches with us and definitely don’t want to collapse in this heat, so we bought tons of snacks and lunch supplies and Tupperware. We brought a rice cooker and some spices with us, so we have a little mini kitchen hidden in our hotel room which is absolutely not intended to be a kitchen. We’ve filled the mini fridge with our juices and yogurts and cheeses. The closet shelf is devoted to all of our snacks (which we currently have more of than real food) and grains and big bottles of water. For now we are being lazy, but it’ll definitely be useful and cheaper to be able to just crash in our room after a long day and be fairly self-sufficient with our food.

     After lunch, we headed out to the shelter. It’s a bit out of town, so we drove through some really pretty areas on the way there, lush greenness with deep reds from the hills. When we pulled up to the shelter, we were greeted by countless dogs mulling about. Some were very happy to see us, a favorite being a sweet tan dog who absolutely loved attention and kept right at my side. Others felt the need to announce our presence and were very nervous to approach but eventually settled down and went back to sleep in the shade. We got taken around the grounds of the shelter, dogs wandering everywhere. Some had serious skin conditions and hair loss but most were very well fed and happy. The cows, on the other hand, were not in such good shape. The shelter wasn’t exactly equipped for 500 cows when they started arriving about a month ago. I’m fuzzy on the details, but a bunch of bull calves have been abandoned at a nearby temple because people don’t have a use for them. Calves are sacred here and not euthanized, but these were in awful shape to the point where you could see every rib on many of them, and they of course have various ailments. There are also a bunch of cows that were rescued from being taken to a slaughterhouse. The shelter is trying to re-home many of these animals, but will first bring them back to health. Until then, they are living in pretty cramped quarters and require a lot of medical attention. We also walked around to the monkey area, which includes an adorable rhesus who loves to grab people’s hands, I’m very excited to get to know him. Yes, I absolutely love hanging out with monkeys. There are the tortoises, ducks, a single rabbit, and birds, all of whom have come from various bad situations. There are also several communal cat housing areas. The cats here look different from back home, much smaller, big wide eyes, some of them almost like a Sphinx cat with hair. Many were very happy to see us, purring and meowing as we pet them from outside their enclosures. The whole shelter was pretty much animal heaven to experience, especially after being away from a constant animal presence for almost a week (a long time in my world)! I’m excited to find out tomorrow what the next month holds for us and be able to help out hopefully both at the shelter and in the community. And, that’s enough of a novel for now, more later, and of course tons of animal pictures to come eventually.

P.S. I have no clue how many people are reading this, but please let me know if I should post on facebook when I update it or just leave it as is and you can read it when you feel like it - there's some sort of follow button where I think it can email you when I post. If I start to ramble on too much and no one wants to read it, it's still a good way for me to keep track of and remember what I'm doing here!