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~SS~
Found myself over at a fine tequila loving hippie’s house the other night, as we randomly decided to go for a little vertical tasting of the bottles he happened to have lying around. Below you will find the tasting notes for each of these wonderful products:
: Manana Anejo :
http://tequilamanana.com/
Appearance: Very light straw golden pour.
Nose: Very rounded nose, hints of subtle pines, butter, tender agave, and vanillad oak. Overall, it’s extremely smooth. In the very back end of the nose there is a tiny element of booze, letting you know it’s there, but making sure you also know how refined this product is.
Palate: Again, extremely smooth overall. Light hints of butter blended with tip of the tongue. It’s not anagave and hints of cacti in general. There is a spice prevalent, but is well built in to the entire flavor, which is refined so well, that it’s fairly amazing for the price of this bottle, which sits around $50 in California.
Finish: You receive a light caramel based blast and finally the peppery spice you’re used to with a tequila becomes present and sits around the tip of the tongue. It’s not an overwhelming finish, but it’s polite, and compliments the rest of the drink. Good stuff here.
Overall: 17/20 : This particular Anejo provides a clear look into how smooth an excellent tequila can really be. If you’re looking for something not too daring, as in spicey, in the fine tequila depart, that won’t blow a hole in your pocket, this is a fine option. Great enough to definitely not make with a mixed drink, the Manana is something to be served straight and enjoyed slowly to soak in the flavors of refinement.
: Oro Azul Anejo :
Appearance: Light straw with a hint of maple.
Nose: On first pour out of bottle you receive a huge blast of pepper spice, almost daunting in the nose. Pepper pepper pepper. After we let the sample sit for 20 minutes, it mellows out into smelling more like a light sugar cane with some hint of a steely presence. And it’s not a bad thing, rather enjoyable at that.
Palate: The pepper you get from the nose moves to the back end, we’ll discuss that more in the palate section. The body of the Oro has somewhat of a refined maple syrup aspect buried beneath the layers of pepper that continually hits you over and over. It’s almost difficult to gain much of anything else from this on the palate except pepper. What’s interesting is that if you let the sip sit on your tongue, it’s nothing but smooth, but once it’s pepper for days.
Finish: White pepper. Lots of white pepper. Hints of spicey nuts that last all the way down the throat. There’s elements of the soft agave in there, but it’s fairly buried underneath the spice. A pour right from the bottle sampled is almost the exact opposite, flaunting the buttery fruit elements over the pepper.
Overall: 16/20 : There is more of a complexity than refinement to this than the Manana. If you let this product sit our and oxygenate for 20+ minutes, it will actually develop other properties, where the Manana sits as it does. This particular product has elements of different classifications of tequila all smashed in to one bottle. Bang for your buck – this is a great choice.
: Clase Azul Reposado :
http://www.claseazul.com/
Appearance: Comparatively to the other products, there is the golden straw color, but also present is a deeper amber hue.
Nose: Rich. Rich. On the nose you’re going to smell plums, soft agave, refined sugar, and maplely soft cola nut aspect. There is no burn. It’s just happiness.
Palate: Soft sugary agave up front. The body is smooth. You don’t even want to swallow. Let it sit on your palate. There is no burn here either. It’s like pouring maple syrup right out there tree, that’s been refined to the finest extent, so that no bi-product is able to pass into the flavors, making it as simple and perfect as possible. Hints of vanilla, cognac, and sherry are all present, but undeniably built so well into the body that you can’t really pick apart all the different flavors. It’s a blend, it’s amazing.
Finish: Ultra smooth, hints of nuts on the almond tip with maple buried underneath. Butterscotch. There’s elements of vanilla from the oak, but no oak. Elements of cognac, but no burn. It’s hard to wrap your brain around how perfect this product is, but, it just is. Candied sugar. Almost a hat’s off to the perfection the Belgian’s reach with their candied sugared beers. Fantastic.
Overall: 19/20 : This is in a class of it’s own. It sits in cognac, sherry, and bourbon barrels for a while before being blended into it’s refined smooth presentation you get when you pour it from the bottle. At an asking price of around $90 in California, this is definitely one of the more intriguingly perfect bottles of tequila you can buy for this price. Excellence at it’s best. I highly suggest doing some further reading on this particular product. It’s one of the world’s best, and for specific barrel-aging reasons. They let this sit in sherry, cognac, and bourbon barrels before blending them all and bottling it for the shelf. Not many other tequila’s go that far in geekery to achieve this excellent of a flavor. Each bottle is hand-painted and number, complete with a ringing bell as the cork! Get this when you can afford it!!
The above photo provides a clearer look at the appearance of each pour. Not too much variation, but the extra barrel aging on the Clase Azul definitely shows up in the color.
This concludes my first tequila write up…I hope this inspires some fine drinking, and if any of you have another fine tequila recommendation, please send it over! Can e.Mail me directly at: skoinfinite @ gmail dot com . Thanks!
Ciao!
You take off from Indira Ghandi International Airport with the destination of NYC. You’ve found this incredible deal for the flight, Delhi to NYC, for $530. The airline is Saudia Airlines, which recently just joined SkyTeam Alliance, meaning that’s got to be a decent airline at this point.
Leg one of the journey: Delhi to Riyadh. Quite surprised at how pleasant the trip is. Friendly and helpful service, big clean cabin, they even took my request as needing more legroom due to my knees. Foods decent enough for airplane food, they even have a veg option for those of us that don’t eat animals. So far so good.
Quick stopover in Riyadh to let some humans off and clean the cabin quickly and take off for Jeddah. I knew already I was going to have an 11 hour layover in Jeddah, so I was prepping myself for the whole airport forever task. Here comes the fun.
We land in Jeddah after another quick and easy 1 hour and 10 minute flight. Simple. Walk into the Jeddah airport, look for the transfer desk to figure out what gate I’ll be departing from, and you get this really odd looking face from a guy who just hands you this random piece of paper saying that you’re a transit passenger. No gate information, it’s dated March 30th, and it’s actually May 1st. Okay? He says to proceed upstairs. I do so, find myself going through a thick security detail (of course) and end up walking through a duty free area (no alcohol, of course, it’s Saudi Arabia), and once through the duty-free zone, a bunch of chairs,a large amount of faces covered women, and sheiks everywhere. Fair enough, it’s a Muslim country.
I walk around for a maximum of about two minutes to discover that the transfer/transit area is maybe the size of the tiniest wing at a normal airport (but smaller than that even), with 10 gates, all leading underground, as it’s all bus to plane here for international travel apparently (they’re in the process of building some ridiculous $40 billion dollar airport through the means of crazy corruption according to a guy I chatted with on the plane to NYC). There is three shops to buy things at. One coffee shop, one snacky sweet shop, and one fairly under-par ‘restauraunt’. Fair enough, if they have water, and something half-way decent to eat, I can deal for 11 or 12 hours.
Here’s the catch. I just flew in from India. I have very little cash left on me (on purpose), as it’s all in Rupees, and I don’t like getting ganked for exchanging currencies at airports. I plan these things accordingly for a reason! But here in this very small confined space there are NO currency exchanges, and NO ATM’s. I ask around about this and they all shove me off semi-rudely saying, ‘No this is a problem, they are all outside the passport control area, where you can’t go’. Specific quote: “This is your problem.”
Okay…so I start to ask what I can do about it, as I’m here for 12 hours and I need water and probably some food at some point. They wave me off, somewhat rudely (mind you these are security guards). I head back in thinking of course that one of these three shops will take credit cards, as it’s an airport. NOPE.
Great, so I have a 12 hour layover with no Riyals, no water, and no food. There are no comfortable places to sit, basically no power outlets for charging anywhere, no free Wifi, and I’m fairly at a loss at this point. It makes no sense! Don’t places like this WANT you to be spending money while you’re waiting around for 12 hours? Then why is there no ATM or currency exchange, or simply, why don’t they take credit cards?!??!? Mindnumbing.
Thank gods for the $100 bill I keep for crazy random circumstances like this. Apparently, I figure out, if you buy something at the duty-free shop with American Dollars, Euros, or British Pounds, you get Riyals back in change. Wow. This is the only option. If I wouldn’t have had this bill, I’d be in this chair filled room, with no water, no food, no nothing (let alone place to kind of rest or wander around LIKE EVERY OTHER AIRPORT IN THE WORLD – at least that I’ve been to), for 12 hours. Absolutely incredible. It’s like jail, but with AC and a place to pray – if you’re Muslim.
The first few hours just kind of drudgingly go by until I figure out you can purchase 30 minutes – 2 hours of Wifi from the ‘restaurant’ for about 15 Riyals, which is around $4. Ok, normally, I would never do this, but at this point I’m down for the charge, as I for whatever reason do not usually succeed to well at reading books or novels in airports. Success on one front. Next I see one of the guys from the plane handing over the same type of slip (that I got from the information booth guy as I stepped off the plane) to the restaurant, and they’re giving him food! I head over and ask about what’s going on, and apparently this slip is good for one ‘free meal’! Wow, exciting, and kind of amazing to me at this point in the whole experience. I hand over my slip and get back a tray with a tiny bottle of water, a huge bread bun, two strips of airport chicken, some rice, and an apple. Beggars definitely cannot be choosers, and as vegetarian as I am, I’m hungry, and down the hatch it goes!
I go over and purchase a coffee and finish my water, and life is slowly returning to my system. I find a decent table in the corner near one of the only power outlets I can find to huddle around for the next 8 hours. From then on it was the same sort of routine over and over again. Any backpacker or Westerner within a certain frame of mind would head to the restaurant from getting off the plane, see me, and start up the, “Did you know there’s no ATM or currency exchange or place to smoke or alcohol or…” conversation with me. The delirium has set in already and every single one of these interactions I have becomes excessively hilarious until I finally get asked about power outlets by this man that appears to be a fairly young and chilled out Indian!
Turns out he is (from Mumbai), and we end up having a brilliant chat about my last months in India, where he’s from, what he does (he works on shipping boats in the Mediterranean for nine months out of the year), what I do, and then has a load of tips for non-touristic spots to hit with the Enfield next time I’m in India. STOKE. Exactly what I needed. A little taste of India, and a little sliver of feeling like I’m not going back to the States. Perfect.
The next single-serving friends I run into happen to be a Canadian and a Columbian, coming off an excursion through the Philippines headed to Istanbul. Obviously the American (myself) and the Canadian have a fair amount to chat about, and Kelsey and I end up chatting and sharing some music while Edgar somehow takes a nap on the hard-as-a-rock bench chairs in one of the sections of the prison. This definitely passed a lovely chunk of the rest of the time, and before you know it, my plane is boarding.
Having been through a fair amount of airports in the world and the States at this point, I couldn’t have imagined anything like this existed. I later find out that Saudi Arabia has NO tourist visa! Absolutely incredible. They are so wealthy, that they literally don’t care about making money from tourism. The wealth is also at the top 4% of the people or something of the sort, with King Abdullah heading up that department worth around $18 billion (interesting side read on rich royals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_richest_royals). Corruption is thick, and widespread. If you’re not Muslim or have invested business in the country, you’re basically not welcome. These types of circumstances just keep piling up. Rather unfortunate as well, as even though I want nothing to do with Islam, I have a fascination with world religions, and would love to see Mecca someday – not possible…unless I convert and have proof of it. As I’d say in India, “SANAKI!” (crazy).
Boarded my flight tired like I hadn’t been in a while, immediately passed out, and the journey back to the States continued…
Some further reading on the craziness of Saudi Arabia I found from trotting through Wiki articles after writing this:
Mecca, Saudi Arabia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecca
With this fort: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajyad_Fortress
Built to protect the Kabba: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaaba
Destroyed to create: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraj_Al_Bait_Towers
Built by: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Binladin_Group
Who will eventually build: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Tower
Insane.
(Click for an enlarged view.)
It’s days like today that really remind me of the whole Catch-22 of traveling.
Will start with the weird. Riding through the spectacular hills around the Solan and Shimla area in Northwestern India today on my way to Mandi, the Endfield Thunderbird 350cc started acting up again, as it had the previous night. When throttled to a certain point the bike starts spurtering. Knowing a bit about bikes I had an idea what was wrong, but wasn’t sure. Thankfully, I made it safe to Solan last night, and hadn’t broken down in the middle of no where.
Today after making it through the crowded Highway 88 through Shimla, the bike started to spurted again while driving. At this point I was a good 30ish clicks outside of Shimla, and there was not much around in sight except the grey-purple-bluish hills and greenery everywhere. Then, Narita (she, the bike gave herself a name yesterday) just decides to putter a few spastic times while slowing down in 3rd, and comes to a halt, and shuts off. Ahem.
(Quick insertation to note that about twenty minutes before this I had just pulled over for almost an hour to fix it a first time, replacing the spark plug, fuel line to the carburetor, and cleaning the carburetor itself for 100 rps, I tipped the man, who really knew his stuff 40 rps. Narita seemed like she was fixed…)
I’ve had plenty of issues with bikes traveling in the past years from the obvious flat tubes in the tires to bald tires to crashes to beyond crashes to fuel lines bursting to driving into a restricted area and spending the night at military barracks to…having your bike decide to completely quit on you no where near a shop, and especially an Enfield shop (which are politely enough placed around India, but mostly in larger towns/cities). Trying a few quick fixes put me no where. Next step: find someone and see if they know anything about bikes.
There just happened to be this odd, decently sized building about a fourth of a click back. I walked over to find a few security guards hovering around, one of which spoke decent enough English to have a conversation about what was going on. He tells me to roll the bike over to attempt to get it going near the shop and off the road. After pushing it over, a few tries of the same sort were gone over, and the fuel was checked, as for some odd reason, they were convinced I’d been given kerosene even though I’d told them I’d gotten petrol at a real station. Strange. Through this process, I noticed smoke coming from the carburetor, obviously not a good sign.
Narita would not start whatsoever, she’d give a few turns of the engine and that was it. Next step: see if they know anyone they can call for me to pick-up truck the bike back to the Enfield shop I’d seen in Chakkar, right before Shimla, for a fee. A little chat between the guards, and they decide on a number, give it a call, and the guy agrees to come out and take me where I need to go.
By this time, the usual crowd of watchers and/or participators has happened. This is a phenomenon here in India that can happen anywhere at anytime as a traveler. You can be going about your merry business of whatever, and this action easily could turn into something that will have a few to a load of spectators just staring you down silently, or asking you in broken English where you are from and what is going on. If something is wrong, a few of these people may help you out in some way. The case today was that the 6 or so men that happened to come out and check out the issue all helped out, which was great, as it required all of us to lift the bike into the back of the truck.
Loaded and strapped, Narita sat in the back and I gave many handshakes and said many thank you’s to them all, then took off for the Enfield shop. The driver spoke no English, so the ride was mostly silent except for a random call from a friend traveling through Thailand, which ended up being a perfect little dip out of what was going on to chill out for a moment while driving through the hills. Being around half past six or so, you never know if whatever destination you’re going to will be open unless it’s a hotel or a restaurant – and even then…places just close whenever they want out here.
Pulling up to the Royal Enfield shop, we can already tell they’re packing up for the night and shutting down. The driver explains in Hindi what’s up from what he knows, and I give my version in English. Turns out one of the mechanics speaks the language rather well. He takes off his gloves and and sets down his backpack and we grab the bike out of the truck and double wheel it upright inside the garage. Two gents quickly get to work on taking apart the carburetor and fuel filter assembly. The fuel filter is basically black, and the carburetor is cleaned, and the bike reassembled. The main guy (can’t remember his name) takes it for a spin, comes back, and isn’t satisfied it’s working. At this point it’s either the carburetor, or they’re not sure. A second-hand carburetor for a Thunderbird is found, implemented and she’s driven for another test.
Success.
This is great news, even though at this point the day is basically a wash. You never know if the shop will have the part, how expensive it will be, or a multitude of factors, though you can pick up how much some items are after a while of buying them over and over.
The whole process ended up taking about five plus hours and costing somewhere in the 3000 rps range (the shop also did not charge me labor fees, while the two gentleman and lady were working after hours), which in reality is only around $55, though in travel talk that is a day’s worth spending, or when speaking to the right person, four or five days worth of budget. At this specific moment in time I’m a bit tight, so I wasn’t too excited about all this.
Begin the Catch-22 of traveling. I’m traveling around a foreign country, literally half way across the world, riding a gorgeous motorcycle that most Indians would dream of owning once in their life time, eating wherever I want, doing whatever I want, and living it up the fullest. Those around me, besides the occasional other backpacker, are mostly earning anywhere from 100-400 rps a day, with your exception every so often depending on their line of work. Today I spend a month or more‘s worth of someone’s income just to deal with fixing my motorcycle so that I could continue on to meet some travelers from Isreal and the UK that I clicked with well in Rishikesh days prior.
Right. Perspective.
I notice while traveling in developing countries this notion of a Catch-22…the in-between point of being so overwhelmed with emotions of the positive nature, while plowing through neighborhoods of very poor human beings, who only many times, have this idea in their head that coming to wherever it is that you come from is a much better place than where they reside. In some cases, this is absolutely true. I’ve seen slums so humbling out here in India and other countries in Southeast Asia, that I was silent for hours. Coming from white, middle-class America in Edmonds, WA, places of this nature were as unknown as walking on the Moon until I saw them, breathed the air, and felt the energy of their people.
This notions will always remind that while my country, the United States of America, is not perfect by any means (mostly due to the government and the people paying the government), it is a country where you more than likely are driving a car, saying whatever you want, own a laptop and an iPod, go through smartphones all the time, and hey, you even have a shower head and a toilet to sit on! So many in Westernized countries forget that most of the world does not have these leisures that many would freak out if they did not have.
I am extremely fortunate for what I have been able to see and witness in countries far away from where I am from, and usually reside in. Tell the larger percentage of Indians or Southeast Asians how much a plane ticket costs to the States, and you just get a smile and laugh, with the vibe that they know they’ll never be able to afford it, or afford the trip with enough space to be able to take a ‘holiday’ or even better, live and work in instead. I am humbled a thousand fold by this, and when the travels get tough for whatever reason, need to remind myself exactly what it is that I am able to do because I was born in the United States to a loving family with a solid income (thanks Mom and Pop for everything!).
Tomorrow I will ride on towards the Dharamsala area and continue to smile heavily towards every single sentient being wherever it is I decide to stop or stay. There is reportedly 7.1 BILLION humans on Earth, and we are all special in our own way. The views and the beaches and the motorcycles and the food (gulab jamun!!) and the ashrams and the temples and the backpackers and the lifestyle of traveling are exciting, stunning, and breathtaking – but being able to meet human beings that have a different set of beliefs and lifestyles through the planet – this is life changing, and I will forever take to heart how massively unique this our rock flying around the Sun truly is. When we figure out how to unify as a planet, as a species, something magnificent will take place. I have hope.
travelsandtuness 