How I like to Travel - jim

To get he most out of traveling you have to let yourself be a little uncomfortable. This may seem an odd statement, but after many years of travel, and even more of life, I've come to believe that it is the secret to having a great life and learning experience while visiting those parts of the world that we don't call home. I believe being a little uncomfortable is useful in almost any life experience where your goal is to learn and grow more insightful.

In no way do I intend to demean other ways of spending free time away from home. I have taken trips where I was essentially a tourist, adhering to a tight schedule, staying in good hotels, and eating in fine restaurants, and have had a great time, as well as learning from the places I visited. I have also had great vacations, times for me to kick back, rest and recharge in comfortable places away from schedules and responsibilities. These are also great choices and, depending on the circumstances, some times the best choices in allocating free time.

But for me, when I have the time and energy, nothing beats the kind of travel that pushes my comfort zone. It provides the kind of experience from which I not only learn the most about the places through which I am traveling but also learn the most about myself and this life I've been given to live.

A fair question at this point is why I would possibly want to give my valuable free time over to being uncomfortable. Actually its is not only a fair question, but also an important one. So, by way of explanation, here are a few thoughts that might put this idea of mine into better perspective. First of all, when I say uncomfortable I do not mean miserable, being miserable only puts the attention back on the traveler and that doesn't help one learn. I mean that style of traveling that forces you to have interactions with the people and cultures of the places you are visiting. Simple things, like getting guesthouse reservations, ordering a meal in a local restaurant, traveling by locally used transport, bus, train, or rickshaw, not always contrasting how things are done where you are to how they are done at home, or getting to know the people in your sleeping compartment on a train, can introduce a bit of discomfort into travel. Not enough discomfort that one is miserable but just enough to focus attention. I know, for myself, that when I'm in familiar surroundings, whether at home or away, I am often on autopilot. Autopilot will get me through situations that I have been through a million times before but, because attention is not focused, it isn't conducive to learning.

To say it another way, allowing myself the opportunity to be a little uncomfortable when I travel focuses my attention, like a little pebble in my shoe. Because of the uniqueness of interacting with local people in new places I have to pay attention, and learning, as my teachers always used to tell me, only happens when I am paying attention.

I would be the first to admit that putting up with even this moderate discomfort would not be worth it if there was no return on the investment. Needless to say, I believe there is a great return on the time, focus and energy invested in this kind of traveling. When I start to live within a culture, even a little bit, around the edges, I start to understand the mechanisms of that new culture, and I also begin to realize that there are more ways than just those of my home culture to do things, and maybe even sometimes they are as good or better.

When, while traveling, I open myself up to the people around me I give them and myself the chance to experience something different, and though this isn't always pleasant, sometimes, actually many times in my experience, I get the chance to see helpfulness, friendship and human compassion, and that definitely makes it worthwhile.

Traveling in this style, with more focused attention, opens the way for me to observe and question myself more than in my everyday, more predictable life. I find myself questioning why some interactions make me irritable, why I'm uncomfortable in other situations, and why my mind fights acceptance of the way things are where I am. All of these situations help me to better understand who I am and why I am the way I am, and these understandings, especially when they are as conscious as they are when I travel, never fail to help me grow as a person.

This trip, for reasons that I do not yet understand, has motivated me to think about these ideas in more detail than I ever have before and since, for me, this was an important part of my trip I thought I would share them with those of you who have been faithful readers. I hope you will feel free to comment on this or anything else I've gotten on my soapbox about in the past three months if the mood strikes you.

Next, in a few days, my impressions of India and Nepal.

Back to the States

Just to let you know, we did get back to the states right on schedule and both of us are back home, Adam in Massachusetts and me in Ohio.

The trip home went right on schedule, though that does not mean it was much fun. We arrived at the Chennai Airport at 11 PM, arrival four hours ahead of flight time was required for "augmented security", and got through security and check in about an hour. So we waited and read for the next three hours until our plane left for Hong Kong on time at 3:15 AM. Hong Kong was about 5 hours away and the flight was pleasant, but once we got there we had to figure out how to kill the 6 hours until our flight to New York left. Now Hong Kong has a beautiful new airport with lots of stores and restaurants to explore but six hours is still a long time in an airport. We were flying on Cathay Pacific Airlines and they have more comfortable new seats in the coach section of their long haul planes, but no matter how comfortable coach seats are 14+ hours is still a long time. And after being up all day and all night in Chennai, on the flight to Hong Kong and in the Hong Kong airport, the fourteen hour flight to New York City was not much fun, even with the 30 odd movies they offered. But we finally got to Kennedy, picked up our luggage, went through Immigration and Customs and exited back into the USA. Kennedy now has a convenient connection to the NYC subway system which we each took to catch trains to where we were sleeping that night. Adam went to his sisters and I went into Manhattan to stay with my friends Shannon and Jaime. We both spent Friday in the city, mostly resting, and, as it turned out, taking in a movie. By chance we both saw the same film, the Indian based film "Slumdog Millionaire", I guess we hadn't had enough of India yet. Adam and I and his sister Becky had lunch Saturday and then Adam caught a train back to Massachusetts, I spent Sunday in NYC and flew back to Ohio Monday AM.

So our trip wound down quietly as we both returned to pick up where we left off before our three month adventure, the same but not quite the same as we were before.

Stay tuned, we will both be summing up our experiences and we have an absolute ton of pictures that we will be working on getting on line over the next few weeks.

Last Days in India

It is the afternoon of Wednesday the 28Th of January, we leave for the airport to fly back to the US in about seven hours, our plane leaves Chennai Airport at 3:15 AM,  so I thought I'd better get caught up before the trip back takes over and I never get around to it.  As it turns out the hotel we spent a night in in Chennai was worse than we thought, Adam was the favorite food of some local bedbugs - we will send an update on this place to the guidebook publishers.  After getting packed up and out of that bug trap we caught a city bus to the bus park from where buses left for surrounding towns.  After asking a few times we found our bus, a brand new air conditioned model, and within a few minutes were on our way 55 K south to Mamallapuram, a beach town with a several thousand year history of stone carving.  One thing about India, time lines are never short. In Mamallapuram we ran into the beach resort overbooking problem, the hotel where we thought we had a reservation said they were full but took us to a second hotel that would have room for us in a few hours, so we went for a walk around town and the beach for a few hours and returned to find that the room availability was again postponed.  After an hour or so we asked more questions and got the impression we were getting a real run around, finally they told us the truth.  Friends of the owner were in a room and the staff couldn't throw them out and they wouldn't leave.  We were fed up and started looking for another place that had rooms, which we found just across the street, and for about the same price; it felt good to move in and get settled.  Adam laid down to rest while did a bit of Internet stuff, when I got back to the room Adam was still exhausted, not like him at all.  At this point we had been fasting for over a day, we had eaten way to much at Rainforest Retreat, it hadn't bothered me at all but I guess my metabolism has slowed a bit, but Adam was dragging way to much for someone that my friend Paul calls the energizer bunny.  We talked about it and agreed to go get some fruit juice and see it that helped; we had the juice and an hour later Adam wasn't feeling much better.  This situation called for quick action, so we went to a restaurant a few door from our hotel run by a Frenchman for an excellent dinner.  By the next morning Adam was feeling more energetic. 

The next morning just after breakfast we went to the beach for a swim, neither of us can sit on the beach for very long.   So after a long swim and a little walk on the beach we went back to our hotel, all or two or three blocks away to change.  After lunch we walked around parts of the town we hadn't seen the previous day.  There is a beautiful old temple very near the beach and many examples of the carvers skill in a rock quarry a few blocks inland.  Specialists believe many of the carvings  in the quarry were done as examples for prospective customers of what the local carvers could do.  A lot of stone carving is still done in the town, both large statues for temples around India and lots of small pieces for the tourist trade.  The south of India, by this time of the year starts getting hot again and by the time we got back to the hotel we were hot and ready to hit the beach again, so off we went for a cooling dip in the ocean.  Later that evening we went to another excellent restaurant for dinner, really fresh fish, and then ambled back to our room. Except for a night in a fancy guest house near the airport in Chennai this was to be our last night in India and it was hard for us to believe that it had been two months.  After we both get back to the states we have promised ourselves and each other to right some reflections of our experiences during these two months, so stay tuned.  We will probably also update our 30 hour trip back to New York City, which includes a 6 hour lay over in Hong Kong.

The next day Adam was up before sunrise, he is feeling his old self again, to go to the beach for early morning pictures; I slept in till he got back.  Then it was breakfast, a swim, packing and catching the bus back to Chennai.  We had a bit of an adventure finding our guest house, but nothing awful.  We have a beautiful room in the owners house in a place called the Pleasant Stay guest house.  The owner and his family are very nice and the name of the place says it all.  So, in a few hours we will eat a bit, pack up and head for the airport to leave India behind but we will be bringing with us a boatload of memories and impressions that will take months or years to sort out.

Madikeri, the Rainforest Retreat and back to Mysore - jim

The next morning in Madikeri we had breakfast, visited a park with a beautiful outlook over the surrounding hills, and then went back into the center of town to look for a hotel a bit more in our price range. We had another night in Madikeri before going on to the Rainforest retreat. One of the budget hotels listed in our guide book had a room available, so we checked in and settled into our room. After a bit we went out for a walk to aquaint ourselves with the town. Madikeri is a modest sized hill station but because it is the market town for a large surrounding area of farms and plantations it has many more businesses and facilities than a town its size would generally have. We had a pleasant walk through town and a bit out into the countryside, stopping along the way at a Hindu temple, and on the way back at a few of the businesses selling spices. This is a spice, coffee and tea growing region. The spices most commonly grown in the area are cardamon, pepper, both black and white, cloves, cinnamon and vanilla, they all really smelled great and we bought a few things to bring home with us. After lunch I updated this blog and caught up on email while Adam caught up on his email. It was a quiet day, which was nice, I, at least, was a bit tired from all our travelling, especially the bus ride. The next morning we packed up, checked out of our hotel, called the rickshaw driver who was recommended to us for the ride to Rainforest Retreat, and when he showed up, a bit late, we loaded up the rickshaw with our backpacks and headed about 12K out of town.

Rainforest Reareat, or more precisely, Mojo Rainforest Retreat, is a twenty five acre organic plantation that grows a wide variety of crops, but specializes in cardamon, coffee, vanilla and pepper. It is run by an enthusiastic and friendly Indian couple who moved there 15 years ago after a first career as research biochemists at high powered lab in Delhi. They decided that someone needed to really try out in the field the things they were learning in their lab. A few years later they started the guest house part of the farm partly to augment the income of the farm but also because they had had to build several guest houses to accommodate the constant stream of old Delhi friends who were always coming to visit.

Our stay at Rainforest was a dream after all the hard travelling we had done in the last almost two months. The food was great, think hard to stop going back for more, the staff, mostly Indian with a few westerners were incredibly helpful and friendly, the room, in our case a large wall tent with two beds etc., was roomy and very pleasant and the location, peaceful and yet full of purpose, was just what we needed. The almost four days we spent there were a joy, it was just the kind of place we needed, no hustles, much beauty and time to walk, talk and begin to digest what we had seen, heard and learned over the previous six weeks. Our days fell into a pattern; up in time to get to an 8:30 AM breakfast and socializing with the other guests and staff, a walk from 10 AM till about 1 PM usually guided by one of the Indian staff who not only knew the countryside but also the trees, animals, birds and flowers of the area, lunch about 1:30, rest and reading till 4 PM tea and then another, shorter walk until about 6:30 PM. Generally after the walk we would clean up and after a bit stroll down to the eating area where by about 7:30 a campfire had been built and we would sit around it and socialize with the other guests, with maybe a beer or two before dinner a 8:30. Most nights we would be back in our tents by 10:30 or so for a nights sleep. After having to figure out every next move, every day for a few months it was nice to settle into this routine. Our fellow guests were great, there was particle physicists who worked at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva, a woman who wrote about walks in rural France, a British wood worker, a recently retired doctor, a hospital manager, a Indian woman who was writing a review of the retreat for an upcoming book on the 100 best escapes in India and the list goes on, it was a great mix which made for very interesting conversation. All I can say is that at the end of our stay we really weren't sure we wanted to leave, but it was time to move on and we reluctantly did. All this and we didn't even break our $25 per day budget, though we did come closer to this limit than we did on most other days.

After bidding everyone farewell we rode back into Madikeri where we quickly found and boarded a bus to Mysore, where we were spending the night. We arrived in Mysore earlier than we had planned which gave me time to pick up the eyeglasses and shirts I had ordered and check my email. Adam went off to the bank to change some $$$ and also spent some time online. We met for dinner at a restaurant we had liked our last time in Mysore and after a filling meal went back to our hotel. The next morning we slept in a bit a had a laid back day killing time until our 2:30PM train to Chennai. It was a pleasant trip, which we shared as far as Bangalore with some European friends we had met at Rainforest. Our train pulled into Chennai, on time at 9:30 PM. Chennai, formerly called Madras, is, to my surprise, the forth largest city in India, at almost 7 million people, it is crowded and it is busy, we weren't at Rainforest Retreat any more. We managed to readjust to the big city and find our hotel for the night after a 20 minute auto rickshaw ride through the city. The hotel, which was listed, but not highly touted, in our guidebook was just on the edge of acceptable, no screens and lots of mosquitoes, but we made it through the night with the help of a fan and were up in the morning for our last excursion before leaving from Chennai in four days, hard to believe this three month dream trip is about to come to an end. That's it for now but I hope to get back to a computer before we leave to let you know how our days at the beach were spent.

Leaving Delhi for the Last Time & More - jim

Today, the 18Th of January, find us in the beautiful mountains of south western India, west of Mysore. It having been a week since my last update, here I am updating the blog. Better late than never!

Our thirty two hour train trip from Delhi to Bangalore went smoothly, and we arrived within a few minutes of the scheduled arrival time. For me the time went by quickly, between reading, talking, eating, watching India go by out the window, and sleeping, we slept two nights on the train, the trip was over before I knew it. The most interesting part was watching India go by out the window, because it changed a lot as we traveled south. Moving south from Delhi we left the huge plain of northern India behind during the night and in the morning we were riding through upland valleys surrounded by hills, if not mountains, and from what I could tell the population, which was almost overwhelming in the north, seemed to thin. As we continued our trip we moved up and down the hills, sometimes surrounded by hills with little agriculture and sometimes in large valleys with loads of agriculture. In some of the hill areas we even went through areas of forest, not dense forest but forest non the less. Then another night closed in on us and early in the morning we were in Bangalore and loading ourselves and our packs out of the train. We weren't staying in Bangalore, it is a big city and high tech center but, we were told, not very interesting, so we headed to the bus station to catch a bus for the three hour trip to the much smaller and traveller friendly Mysore. We arrived in Mysore in late morning , found our hotel, checked in, got a shower rested a little, got some lunch and headed out to see the city. The hotel arranged for an auto rickshaw driver to take us to some of the spots to see around the city, or at least that is what he said, it turned out most of the stops were shops of people trying desperately to sell us something. The first stop was the exception, the spice market, most of you must have seen the pictures of Indian markets, think National Geographic, that feature dyes piled high and shaped into cones, well this was the place, and they really did sell the dyes as well as many of the spices we think of as coming from India, especially the south, They also sold plenty of local fruits there and we bought some for later consumption, some delicious red bananas, a mystery fruit that was OK, but both of us have forgotten what it was called, and some tamarind, as sour fruit that both of us like a lot. From that market we went to a place that made incense and also sold essential oils, the base for the scents that are in so many perfumes, foods etc., where we got to smell all kinds of oils and hear a pitch about how we really needed these things. Then it was on to a wood carving and furniture maker, the furniture was all the mother of pearl inlaid kind and didn't appeal at all, and the wood carvings, many of which were very well done, but was wildly overpriced. We didn't stay long there and so we soon found ourselves in a shop selling silk and all kinds of fabric. I decided to try to get a few shirts made, they make them up in a day to your measurements and are a lot cheaper than in the states, even at the tourist trade stores, so we were there a while while I picked out material and had myself measured. I would go back the next day to check them out before they were finished. Our last stop on the motor rickshaw trip was a drop off at Mysore's most famous site, the Maharajah's Palace. Many of you have probably also seen pictures of this building, it is the building most off pictured in books when they talk of the great and ostentatious palaces of the raga's of India. Anyway it is huge and it dominates the center of the city and so we paid the admission price and entered the grounds. The building is sited on a huge lawn and is picture perfect, and we took a few pictures to prove that we to could make it look perfect. The surprise, to me at least, was learning that the palace was only built in the early 20Th century. I have always thought of these places as hundreds of years old and drenched in history, not here. It was worth the tour, a huge building with beautiful formal rooms, lots of stained glass, and tile work and even a throne or two scattered around. These people sure had a lot of money and/or free labor with which to fulfill there wildest imaginings. After we left the building we spent a while just wandering the grounds which were very pleasant and well laid out. Then we went off to find an Internet cafe to check in with email and catch up on world and U.S. news. After that we found a place near the palace to eat dinner as we wanted to return to the palace after dark when it would be illuminated. They light it with 100,000 light bulbs attached to the buildings and it is reported, even by the locals to be amazing, and they usually only do it on Sundays, however they were doing it today because it was a Hindu feast day, something about both a Hindu calender New Years and a feast celebrating sacred cows, who were all painted up for the occasion, mostly in yellow. Tell me it isn't something to walk down the street and see a few yellow and black cows wander out of a cross street, you begin to wonder what the tea at lunch was spiked with. Dinner was good but service was a bit slow and we sat and talked for a while, so, to our chagrin, by the time we got back to the palace they had already turned out the lights, we didn't know this at the time but the electric draw is so much that they only keep the lights on for an hour between 7 and 8 PM. Having missed that we walked back to the hotel and went to bed, tired from a long day of travelling and touring.

Our second and last day in Mysore started with a splurge. We went to a very fancy hotel, $100 a night, for their breakfast buffet and it was all we expected. We left stuffed! We went back to the hotel where Adam stayed while I went out to check on the shirts I had ordered. The shirts were OK and done so I picked them up and started back to the hotel, I planned to take an auto rickshaw but just before I hailed one I realized that I didn't remember the name of the hotel, isn't age wonderful, so, being pretty sure I could find it on foot I set out walking, and sure enough after a few missteps I turned a corner and there it was. Adam was in the room and we decided to go out. I wanted to check on some of the eyeglass shops in town, prescription lenses and especially frames are about half the price they are in the states, and Adam wanted to see if he could find any less expensive backpacking sun glass' than he could find in the states. After a few stops I became convinced that they could make me prescription glasses that were as good as those I got in the states and ordered a backup pair for myself. Adam couldn't find the kind of sunglasses he wanted so he put it off until his return to the states. For lunch we stopped in a coffee shop, real coffee, this is coffee growing country, for a drink and a snack. Revitalized we decided to check out the larger general public marked and wandered there for a couple of hours before heading back to the hotel for some rest and reading. That evening we walked a ways to another restaurant and then back fairly early for bed. Tomorrow we had to pack up, check out and catch an early bus, we were going on the road again.

When we arrived at the bus stand about 8:30 AM we lucked out, the first of three buses we were taking that day was just leaving, we jumped aboard and settled in for the first ride of the day. We were heading for a small town northeast of Mysore that had famous hilltop Jain Temples. The Jain's are another of India's ancient religions, they were founded about the time Buddhism was founded in the 6Th century BCE. We got to the second bus station and after a lot of asking around we found the bus that would take us to our next bus station. We were going to be a ways out in the country and travel away from the main areas is always a little more challenging but usually more rewarding. Mysore is in the Indian state of Karnataka and riding through the Karnatakan countryside was fascinating. This part of the south appears to be much richer and much less thinly populated than the north, one certainly influencing the other. The land is well and diversely farmed, rice, coconuts, sugarcane, vegetables, corn etc, and large parts of it are irrigated. It is also physically beautiful, we were travelling through wide valleys with some hills in the distance and round volcanic domes spotted throughout the valleys. After one last bus ride and a slightly poorer road, the roads this day were all quite good when measured against what we had seen for roads earlier, we were at our destination Sravana Belagoia, a smallish town built between two volcanic domes which were topped by temples and it was only about noon. We checked in the Jain guesthouse, at 135 Rupees for a nice double with attached bathroom the best housing deal of the trip. After getting settled in we walked down the road to a restaurant to have lunch, after lunch I headed back for the room for an afternoon of bed and reading, my gout was acting up and there was to be no hill climbing for me that day, and Adam went off for a walk to see the temples on the smaller of the two hill. About 5 PM Adam returned having enjoyed the walk and what he saw, we hung out a bit and then walked down the street for dinner at the same place we had lunch, not a lot of choice in town and it was close and that was definitely an advantage for me. Afterward back to the room for a little more reading and sleep.

Adam wanted to get up before dawn the next day to be able to see the sun rise from the larger of the two domes and I woke up at the same time but didn't get out of the room till about 15 minutes after he was already on his way. My gout was much improved and I was determined to get up to the top of at least one of the domes but I didn't want Adam to wait for me, he is a hugely stronger hiker than I am even when I dont have gout. As I walked up to the gated entrance to the steps, 620 of them to be exact, that went up to the top of the larger dome I realized that the gates still weren't open and then I looked around and there sat Adam waiting. It was about a half hour later when they finally let us in, we checked our shoes, no shoes on the mountain, and started up, Adam going ahead to try to capture in pictures the sunrise. My foot was much better so the walk up wasn't to bad, but it certainly got my blood circulating. The views from the way up and from the top of the stairs were magnificent and peaceful, a huge fertile valley with hills scattered around and a few mountains, large hills, in the distance. There were a number of Jain temples on the top of the dome but the main attraction was a 10th century nearly 60 foot sculpture of a naked man carved out of a single piece of stone. This sculpture was standing in the open air but was located in the courtyard of a large temple, a setting that made it seem even larger and more dominating than it was. One of the ideas behind the naked sculpture was to remind Jains of the relative unimportance of the material world, but I believe it was also to remind them that salvation, or nirvanna, was each persons responsibility. Adam and I met up on top and walked down together and had breakfast, he went back to the room and I decided to walk up the smaller dome before we left, scheduled for late morning. I set off up far fewer steps to the top of the smaller dome, when I arrived I was one of only two people on top, not including guards etc. The tall naked man pulled in a much bigger crowd. The smaller dome had a series of Jain temples, mostly from the 10th to the 12th century which were architecturally beautiful and the setting, esp. with so few people around was magic. I greatly enjoyed my time wandering through and around this beautiful spot. I walked down, claimed my shoes and went back to the room where I met Adam packed and was ready to leave in a few minutes. We checked out and walked the 100 yards to the bus station to catch a bus to Hassan our first transfer point on todays trip to the mountain town, or as they say here, hill station, of Madikeri. We arrived in Hassan and after some confusion found our bus to Madikeri, some of the problem stemmed from me continually misprouncing it Madiriki. This bus ride went through some of the most beautiful countryside we have seen on the trip, not as spectacular as the bus trip into Nepal, but just as beautiful. As we slowly climbed through bigger to smaller valleys the agriculture changed and more and more of the land became forested, before we knew it we were in coffee plantation country, the coffee being planted under the forest trees for protection. Four hours later we stopped in Madikeri, got off the bus and went looking for the hotels recomended in our guide books, most of them turned out to be full and the only one that had room was quite a bit above our budget, but not having much of a choice, and me being tired, we took it, ate dinner in it's restaurant and went to sleep.

Leaving Bundi and Delhi - jim

Our last morning in Bundi we were up early, we had a bus to catch to get us to the nearest train station which was an hour's bus ride away in the industrial town of Kota. After breakfast we caught a auto rickshaw to the bus stand and connected with a bus that was just ready to pull our. The trip was pleasant, the bus never entirely filled up and it was interesting to get a look at the villages and farms that are between the cities that we have been travelling to . In Kota it was only an auto rickshaw ride to the train station. everything had gone to well this morning and we were early, so we made ourselves comfortable on some benches and read our books. Our train left pretty close to on time and so we were off to Delhi once again. We talked with an interesting 17 year old and his mother on the train. He was heading home after finishing a two year cram course to prepare him for the entrance exams for IIT, the Indian Institute of Technology, the most difficult school to get into in India. I had read an article about it in the states sometime in the past year. He was now heading home to study a bit more before the exam in late April. The time it takes to prepare for these kinds of tests is something I never experienced in the states and though there are now standerdized test prep courses two years still seems like a real long time. The train sped along and we were running about on time until we got close to Delhi and then it slowed way down and we finally got there about 7:30, around an hour late but not bad. From the train station we were only an auto rickshaw ride, a Metro trip, a bicycle rickshaw ride and a short walk away from our hotel, which when we arrived, for the third time on our trip seemed like home. We still had things to do this day, Shiela was leaving for the airport at 6 AM the next morning and she had to repack and also pack a new bag with things, a lot of books, that Adam and I were sending back with her. So we grabbed a quick dinner, ordered a cab for the next morning, got a few things we had left in Delhi out of storage and got her packed and ready to go in the morning. Then about 11PM we finally got some sleep.

Sheila was off the next morning, Adam and I got her things down to the lobby and she took the cab to the airport on her own. We went back to the room and back to sleep. When I woke up a bit later I discovered that Adam had been up three or four times since we had come back to the room. He had developed a case of travellers disease and he spent the entire day in bed drinking water and watching TV between trips to the bathroom. I spent most of the day updating the blog and doing a little reading, ironically I was finally feeling a bit better. And now today, and I am caught up. We got up late, I ate breakfast, Adam wasn't quite ready for that, we changed some dollars for the balance of our trip, checked out of our room and are now at an internet cafe in the final race to get this blog caught up. Later todau we might visit a few bookstores in central Delhi, but other than that we wont be doing anything else until we catch a train at 8 PM to the southern India city of Bangalore, from which we will go immediatly to the nearby city of Mysore. This is a one day, two night trip so you wont be hearing from us for at least that long and if experience is any guide a bit longer.

Bundi

Bundi is a small town of about a 100,000 people...alright its not so small but it seems a lot smaller that most of the other places we've been. Like a lot of the other cities in India it has a new city and an old city. Most of the old cities are filled with narrow winding alleyways, old buildings, the occasional palace and all the tourist, Bundi was no exception. In Udaipur the old city was completely over run with guesthouses, restaurants, travel agents, and handy craft shops, Bundi was a welcome reprieve from this. Bundi had all of these things but not nearly as many as Udaipur. When we got to Bundi our room was being cleaned so we had breakfast while we waited. After a little food and a short wait we were shown to our room, Jim decided to nap after his not so restful bus ride so my mom and I went out to explore the city a little. We walked around the old city for a bit and it was clear that they were preparing for some sort of festival but we weren't sure what. After some aimless wandering we found ourselves on the bypass road above the city, which provided us with a wonderful view of the old city and the new city sprawling out from the walls of the old city. We decided to walk along the road for a bit and then try to find our way back. On our way back we managed to stumble on place the bus dropped us off at and Raniji-ki-Baori, a great example of a step well (found in many parts of Rajasthan) which are used to be used to hold water during dry season. From here we set off to find the tourist office to get a better map of the city, after being led by a local who kept saying one km we finally go there to find it locked up tight. The local proceeded to try and take us to the directors house to wake him up. We gave our guide a few rupees and told him we had to get back. We managed to find our way back to the guesthouse without any problems to find Jim just coming out the door. He had been up for a while and had done his own exploration of the city. The guesthouse owners told him that the festival was an Islamic holiday where people stick knives in their arms. Now this is of course a crude description of exactly what goes on but for the non-Muslims in town its the major attraction. After a little research we've found out that the holiday was the Day of Ashura which is to honor the martyrdom of Husayn Ibn Ali, that's about the extent of my knowledge on it right now but I plan on doing a little more reading when I'm back in the states and not paying for computer time. Anyways we went to lunch and then Jim decided to go do some Internet work for a bit while my mom and I went up to and abandoned fort called Taragath. Taragarth was built in 1354 and now stands in ruins over looking the town of Bundi. Exploring the fort was a little like living out a boyhood dream. Unlike other forts and monuments there is no admission fee, no work to try and restore the fort and no rules. We spent a few hours just clamoring over walls, exploring old passage ways, and discovering fading murals. At one point one of the local monkeys decided to try and attack my mom. Luckily she ducked out of the way and I was able to come and fend him off with the monkey stick we picked up earlier (we had been warned of the aggressive monkeys). After that we headed down the mountain to go check out the festival. From the fort we could hear the drums in the streets below but when we got into the city we couldn't hear them any more so we thought it might be over. We decided to wander anyways and quite suddenly we found it. The buildings had blocked all the sound until we were on top of them. It was quite an event, think trying to have a parade with a huge number of people in an alley with just enough room to hold one car. We could barely move though. Eventually we got to a place where they were handing out food and everyone got really excited when I said I'd have some. A few insisted on taking my picture while I was eating. After this we found the guys with knives in their arms. It was pretty painful looking, all of the knives were just through the skin but when you have 15-20 knives in each arm, 2 pairs of scissors in your chest and 1 in your back it can't feel too good (pictures to come). After we had our fill of the festival we called it a day and went back to the guesthouse for dinner and bed.

The next day my mom and I decided to go for a little bike ride. Jim had already experienced the Indian bikes and didn't want a second round. We ended up having a great ride out into the country side. We went to a lake where Kippling once stayed and wrote part of Kim and The Jungle Book, and then further into some small villages. As we rode by everyone kept greeting us and we were eventually stopped by a road block of kids insisting we take their picture. Not having much choice we did and it seemed to make their day. We returned to town for a little snack and rest and then headed out the other way. We got back to the guesthouse mid afternoon and Jim wasn't back quite yet, so we played a little cribbage. After a short wait he came ambling in. We learned that he visited Taragarth, and then wandered the back alleyways of the old city where he found a mosque and helped an old guy down some stairs. After talking about our days for a bit we went upstairs to clean up before dinner get ready for the next day's trip back to Delhi.

Adam McCurdy 1/12/2009

Whirlwind Tour of Rajasthan

Now I am really behind on this blog, Sheila left this morning and I am just beginning to describe the 10 or 12 days she spent with us. Well, no more dithering, on with the trip. We had a morning train for our three hour trip from Delhi to Agra, this train was something new for Adam and I, it wasn't a sleeper, just quite comfortable seating, and before we knew it we were in Agra. Since we weren't going to spend the night in Agra we deposited our bags in the railway station check room and went off by auto rickshaw to see the reason all travellers come to Agra, the Taj Mahal. There we had to check the day pack we always carried with us, security was pretty strict, and wait in a long line to get our tickets, but it was worth the wait. I am one of those who is always a bit sceptical of tourist attractions, especially the most hyped ones, but the Taj Mahal did not reward my scepticism. It is truly one of the most perfect buildings I have ever seen. The siting and the proportions are wonderful, and the details, which don't get much comment, are truly amazing. It almost makes me wonder if I should have gone to the Great Wall when I was in China. One of the things that surprised me, that the pictures I have seen didn't show, or I didn't notice, was that the building is on a bluff above a bend in the river. This is part of what makes it seem to float in some pictures and it keeps unwanted buildings etc. from showing up behind it, imagine a tall office building poking up to one side of the Taj Mahal. We spent a few hours there enjoying the building and the grounds before leaving the site, collecting our bags from the train station and catching a bus to a town , about 20K outside Agra where we were staying that night. The bus, as usual, was packed and uncomfortable, but, unlike some of our previous bus rides, mercifully short.

Our destination for the night was Fatehpur Sikri, the town where the great Mogul emperor Akbar built his home and capital. But seeing that was for the next day, we checked into our hotel, a very pleasant place with very colorfully painted rooms, ours room featured peach and violet walls with a light green ceiling, somehow it all worked. We had dinner at the hotel restaurant and then sat out on the lawn in front, a unique feature, around a portable fiery brassier, talked, kept warm for it was a very chilly night, and listened to some local drummers and singers. Eventually tiredness took over, it had been a long day, and we went to sleep. Next morning, after eating breakfast at the hotel and stashing our bags in their luggage room we set off on the short walk up the hill to the city that Emperor Akbar built, over 16 years, to rule from. As things turned out he only ruled from here for about 14 years, from 1571 to 1585, and then this great work was largely abandoned. It is all but impossible to describe the palaces, mosques, churches, temples, fortifications, armories, barracks and towns that were held within the walls of this enormous structure. The main mosque is entered through the victory gate that is thought to be the largest gate in Asia, at 54m high and this is only the beginning of the many superlatives used to describe this place, but what was most interesting to me is that enough of it has survived that you can get an idea of how the highest officials of the Mogul Empire lived and ruled, and I have always found understanding this to be one of my biggest problems in understanding historical sites. Within the palace itself, which befitting the climate was on a very open plan, were rooms for public and private audiences, the harem, churches for each of his three wives, each was of a different religion, if I remember correctly one was Muslim, one Hindu and one Christian. There were stables for horses, camels and elephants, pavilions for playing games and beautifully laid out gardens. We hired a guide to help us understand what was what and after we had gone through with him we went back to just walk around and try to absorb it all. Oh, I forgot to mention all of this was on a ridge top surrounded by a large agricultural valley, so the views were great. When we left the palace we decided to walk around some of the ground that was within the old walls, this took us by a tower, decorated with stone elephant tusks from which the emperor used to hunt, past several kilometers of farmers fields, all planted with a second crop, and finally through the very old part of the town of Fatehpur Sikri, which was pedestrian only due to the narrowness of the streets, some of which made some alleys I've seen look wide. After that it was time to pick up our bags and head for the bus back to the train station in Agra, where we had to catch a night but not overnight train to our next stop, the city of Jaipur in Rajasthan.

Though our train was a bit late arriving in Jaipur the auto rickshaw that our hotel there had sent to fetch us was still waiting so we quickly bundled into it and were off to our home for the next two nights, the Sunder Palace Hotel. It was late, around 11PM when we got there so we moved in and were asleep in no time.

Next morning we had breakfast at our hotel and were soon out for a day of sightseeing in the city. As we were walking down the street that our hotel was on we saw an unusual site, a Baskin and Robbins Ice Cream store, and made a note to return later. Ice cream, and especially good ice cream, is a rarity at least in the parts of India that we had been frequenting and we were anxious to satisfy our cravings, but, for now, we walked on to the old part of Jaipur. Called the pink city, actually the color is more salmon, after the color of most of the buildings in the old city, Jaipur is both a large city, over 3 million, and a major tourist city for the look and feel of it's old city, forts and palaces. It was founded in 1727 by the local ruler Jai Singh II who moved his capital there from a fort that overlooks the new city, Amber Fort, where his ancestors had ruled since the 12Th century. Jai Singh II took a personal interest in the design of his new city and laid it our in a grid pattern, unusual for Indian cities of the time and made it very safe with formidable city walls. Our first goal for the day was to walk around the old city just to get a feel for it, as it turns out most of the main streets, though colorful, are major tourist traps, nearly all the shops are tourist oriented, but some of the smaller streets still functioned as market streets for the old city and were crowded with locals and interesting. We then stopped at the Palace of the Winds, a beautiful part of the Rajah's City Palace. Click on the link to get a view of the place. As you can see it would be very difficult to describe. Next on our list was the Rajah's astronomical observatory, which got all our interests, was a little mind bending to understand, especially for those of us who never had an astronomy course in college. Called the Jantar Mantar or translated , the instrument of calculations and looking somewhat like a modern sculpture garden the observatory measured time, the position of the stars, was used for calculating eclipses and other measurements significant to astrology. After seeing this we went through the museums of the City Palace and they were fine, but a bit repetitive with ornate rooms, old pictures, old cars, guns, swords and all, of what was becoming the usual for museums. You might have guessed. correctly. that we were fast developing serious cases of museum fatigue. It was time for lunch and we found a nearby restaurant and ate lunch with the locals. By now it was late afternoon and we walked back to the hotel for a little R & R before dinner. We had good dinner at the nice rooftop restaurant at our hotel and then walked a little way down the street for an ice cream desert.

For our next day in Jaipur we were going to see the forts above the city, building forts and palaces in Rajasthan seems to have been a hobby for the local aristocrats and every former capital town had more than one and sometimes dozens, and Jaipur was certainly no exception. We hired a motor rickshaw for the day, the distances were a little much for walking and it was cheaper to hire for the whole trip and have the driver wait than to hire them for each segment. So, off we went, to our first stop, the Amber Fort, high up in the hills that surround the town of Jaipur. The fort was huge, included within were palaces, and was built over a long period of time; again it had all the usual features, audience halls, harem, Rajah's rooms etc. I am not going to try to describe all we saw there, those interested can see our pictures after we get back and can work on them and/or read about it on the web. However one thing I will mention about Amber for is that they still offer elephant rides up the last part of the hill, through the aptly named Elephant Gate and into the palace. We chose not to try this, out of sympathy for the elephants who looked both tired and bored. As we were leaving our tour of the Amber Fort we were offered a free snack in one of the last courtyards on the way out, confused, tourists our seldom offered anything free that doesn't have strings attached, we asked around till we found someone who spoke good enough English to explain what was going on. It turns out that off that courtyard is a Jain Temple, the Jain religion, started around 550 BCE is one of India's many home grown religions and one of their practices is to feed as many as they can whenever they can and we were beneficiaries of this practice. After that snack it was back down to the auto rickshaw and on to a fort or more correctly, a series of forts, further up the hill that were collectively called Jaigarh Fort. This was more of a military fort and a little less of palace fort but like all the Rajasthan forts had aspects of both. There were great views from Jaigarh Fort and a lot of walking was done and not to be forgotten we saw the worlds largest wheeled canon, a 50 ton monstrosity that took 100KG of gunpowder to fire its cannonball 30 KM, which was forged in the fort's own armory. Tired of forts we headed back to our hotel stopping for a quick look at an artificial lake that had an entirely walled island that held one of the Rajas's gardens. Back at the hotel we rested a bit and then ate dinner at a restaurant around the corner, after which we made our mandatory stop at Baskins and Robbins. Later that night it was off again to the railroad station, we had an overnight train south to our next stop in Rajasthan, Udaipur.

Our train to Udaipur was scheduled to leave Jaipur at 10:20 PM and did finally leave the station by about 11:15 PM. The overnight trip was uneventful and we arrived in the small city of Udipur, population about 400, 000, at about 8:30 AM, made our way by auto rickshaw to the Panorama Guest House and checked in. We had breakfast in their panoramic rooftop restaurant and then went out on a walk to get a feel for the city, or at least the old city where, as in most all towns we visited, most of the interesting things to see are located. Further out in the new parts of the city it's mostly concrete block houses and fairly uninteresting, except to get an idea of how people live today. By the time we reached the far end of the old city my tiredness from all the touring and walking in Jaipur, the travelling and my still not cleared up congestion etc. hit me and I headed back to our guest house for a little more rest. Adam and Sheila, who are a bit to a lot younger, healthy and not tired went on to see other parts of the area. Udaipur's most important claim to fame is the palace that one of it's Rajahs built on an island in the lake that the current Raja, or his predecessor turned into a very high end hotel many years ago. And, as if that wasn't enough some of the outside scenes in the James Bond movie "Octapussy" were filmed there and that really put the town on the map. To this day many to the guest house restaurants screen the film on their TVs every night. One of the things Adam and Sheila did was take a boat trip around the lake which included a close up of the island Palace hotel, but not a stop, that requires either a meal or an overnight stay, overnights start at about $800 (or about our budget for three weeks). The boat trip did however allow them to stop at another lake island which had a smaller hotel and some beautiful gardens. Later they stopped at one of the very expensive hotels, but not quite as expensive as the island hotel, on the mainland to take high tea, they had a fun time and splurged a bit. When Adam and Sheila got back, about 5:30 PM, we all cleaned up and went to a very nice, and a little more expensive than our usual choice, restaurant that looked out over the lake and it's hotel and had a very nice dinner while enjoying a scene out of James Bond. I must have really been tired because when we got back to the hotel I went right to sleep, even though I had slept most of the afternoon.

The old part of Udaipur is located on several hilly ridges that run down to the lake and which the lake more or less separates from each other. So there is some up and down and some bridges to be crossed and some waterfront. All of these aspects can make a town more interesting, if more difficult to get around, and they certainly did this for Udaipur. Our guest house was on one of the smaller ridges and thus was quieter which we took to be an advantage. When we wanted to go the the main commercial and tourist part of town we walked across a pedestrian bridge a few blocks from our hotel and up a hill or along the waterfront ghat to where we were going. And we did this the morning of our second day in town to have breakfast at a bakery restaurant we had spotted the day before. It turns out all of us were fond of bread and other baked goods and bakery restaurants, wherever we found them were always given a try. This one turned out to be quite good and so we had a good breakfast before heading back to our guest house. Adam and Sheila were hiring a jeep today for a ride out to a few of the surrounding towns, and I, still a little under the weather was staying back in town for a bit more rest and maybe some walking around town. Adam and Sheila bounced from town to town and had a great time. They found that most of the buildings and houses in the towns they visited were built of carefully stacked, mostly flat rocks with no use of mortar and looked like they had been there for centuries, though some were also still under construction. They also said that there was very much less English spoken and foreigners were still a strange sight and not just an opportunity to sell something. I spent some of the day resting but did get out to walk around a lot more of the town than I had the day before, and I did some shopping. We all got back to the hotel about 3 PM just in time to rest a bit and clean up for dinner. Dinner this night, January 6th, was to be a celebration of two months of travelling together for Adam and I and Sheila was treating us to a highly recommended Italian restaurant called Savage Garden. Dinner was great and we had a good time though I was still dragging a bit. It is worth noting that it is quite amazing that two people of such different ages can travel together for as long as we have and not have any really major tiffs. The biggest problems we have had have usually involved styles of travel, I am not much of a planner when I travel, and what we want to, or can do, based on our different energy levels, or should I say Adam's energy and my lack of same. After a very pleasant evening we strolled back to our hotel and called it an evening.

Wednesday Jan 7th was to be our last day in Udaipur so when we woke we packed our bags and put them in the guest houses' baggage room and went off to breakfast at the bakery from the day before, called strangely the Edelweiss Cafe. It was once again very good and got us going for a two or three hour walk through the old town and out into the new parts, I was finally feeling a little better. It felt good for me to get out and stretch a bit, after all the time I had been spending sleeping and when we got back we had a light lunch, Adam and Sheila played cards and I went out to pick up a few purchases I had made in town. We were killing time till our 3 PM appointment for an Indian cooking class with the wife of one of our guest houses' owners. If we learned anything at the cooking class remains to be seen but we sure took a lot of notes and were shown how to cook a lot of things in our three hours of class and the best part was that afterwards we got to eat the results for dinner. Afterwards we hurried back to the guest house and then across the bridge to a folk dance performance that we had tickets to see. Some of the dances were fun, some not quite so good but it was a distraction and we didn't have to leave to catch our sleeper bus, we were not sure how to picture a sleeper bus, until 9 PM. After the dance program we had plenty of time to fetch our bags and catch an auto rickshaw to the bus park.

We checked in with the bus company as soon as we got to their office and then made ourselves comfortable to wait for the boarding, we had about 40 minutes until it was scheduled to leave for the town of Bundi, our next stop. The buses were parked about a quarter mile from the office and when it was time to board one of the bus company workers led the passengers carrying their luggage to the bus. As we approached the row of gleaming new buses waiting for passangers to many places we began to think that this was going to be a pretty comfortable ride, but we just kept walking till we got to our bus at the end of the row. It was old, someone elses company name had been roughly painted over on it's side and a few of the windows were glazed with plywood. So much for the dream of a very comfortable trip. We borded the bus and sure enough there were sleeping booths for two above and seats below on one side and up and down sleeping booths for one on the other side. These were just big enough for one to lie down in, the only problem being there was no place else to put luggage so we had to somehow get ourselves and our baggage into a space just big enough for one or two to sleep in. It must be admitted that we are bigger than the average Indian, but even for them there was not room to stretch out and sleep. We got ourselves situated and the bus started down the road. After a while on the road Sheila heard a load bang, the rest of us must have dozed off, but the bus didn't stop and we assumed that all was well until about a hour or so later, probably about midnight, when the bus pulled to the side of the road and the driver and helper got out and began pulling out jacks and other repair equiptment. I couldn't sleep so after a while I got out to see where we were and what was going on. We were spopped at a little cluster of run down open fronted eating and repair places but we didn't get any help from them, the driver and his helper were doing the work to fix whatever the problem was. After watching them for a while I guessed that we had some type of problem with the springs, some or all had possibly come loose from their shackel, and to fix it them seemed to have to jack a the bus a great deal, which took a long time. After two and a half hours they finally lowered the bus, started it up and we were again on our way. But then an hour or so later we pulled off the road again, and my hopes crashed about ever getting to Bundi, but it was only a rest and food stop. I had some tea and roadside food at the stand, Adam and Sheila were still mostly asleep. and before to long we were again on our way. A few hours later we pulled off the road at a highway intersection and we were finally at the Bundi stop about three hours late.

Varanasi to Delhi - Sheila Arrives - jim

When we finally arrived in Delhi we hurried to our hotel, the same one we stayed in when we first arrived from the Philippines, because we wanted to clean up, eat, nap a little and do a few chores before we had to go to the airport to meet Adam's mom, Shiela, who was arriving at the airport around 9PM to spend 10 days traveling with us. We got all that done in plenty of time and had the hotel find us a car that would take us to the airport, wait till we found Sheila and take us back to the hotel. It was a surprise to me how pleasant it was to return to a place I knew, even if just from a few days a month ago. When traveling I often forget how much work it is each time we reach a new city to find our way to a hotel, figure out where things are we want to see etc. So it was pleasant to be back in a city we knew a bit and a hotel that we were familiar with and liked. The trip to the airport to pick up Sheila was uneventful except that Adam and Sheila somehow were both in the arrivals hall for about a half hour without spotting one another, but eventually everyone found everyone and we were on our way back to the hotel in our Toyota Corolla with driver. It was funny how fancy the car seemed, it is really quite a small car, but it was probably the most room we have had and the only vehicle we have had to ourselves in about two months. Back at our hotel we visited for a while, though it was quite late for us, and then went to sleep. The next day we spent in Delhi. Adam and Shiela went out to do a little sightseeing and I stayed back at the hotel to catch up the blog, it seems like we are always behind on it, change money, rest a little, I cant sem to get rid of a cough and congestion from the cold I had a while back, and do a little organizing work for our upcoming trips.

Varanasi - 12/26 - 29/08 - Jim

So we finally arrived at our guest house in Varanasi, a city formerly known as Benares, the Sahi River View Guest House, by auto rickshaw about 8AM with with fervent hope, after our night in the train station, that our room would be ready. No such luck, it would be ready sometime after 11AM which was check out time for last nights guests. We dropped our bags at the guest house and decided to go for a walk on the ghats, we were somehow too tired not to do something. Varanasi is famous for many reasons including it's ghats and what goes on there. First the city, Varanasi is one of the oldest continually occupied cities in the world, up there with Beijing and Athens, it was contemporary with Babylonia, and has for most, if not all of that time been a holy city, for the Hindu's and their predecessors. The Buddha taught there as did the founder of the Jain religion, that was in around 650 BCE, when Varanasi was already an ancient city. The ghats are stairways down the bank of the Ganges river that line the river bank for 3 or 4 miles, maybe more. The Ganges River and Varanasi our sacred to the Hindu's, if you die in Varanasi you get out of the cycle of rebirth, and bathing in the river is kind of like a plenary indulgence, pardon the Catholic allusion. So on most mornings you can see thousands of the faithful worshiping at the many shrines and temples on the ghats, getting advise from holy men and bathing in the Ganges. The river itself is not in very good shape ecologically, we read that its not the human waste that you should most worry about but the heavy metals dumped by up river plants. In another place we read that it was in such bad shape that there was no dissolved oxygen left in the river, making it organically dead. In our walk that first day we saw little of this, for whatever reason not many people were out that morning, we saw none of the weirdness that we had heard about. It was probably a good thing, I was very tired and the ups and downs of the stairs weren't helping that. Adam claims I was actually grumbling at the stairs, imagine!! After a while we went back to our guest house and had some breakfast, I fell fast asleep on a couch, I remember none of this, and after a while our room became available and we thankfully moved in. I napped, Adam showered, and then when I finally pulled myself out of bed I also got a shower, which felt great after our train station floor experience. Later we walked a ways up the ghats to lunch in the old part of the city, me grumbling all the way about all the ups and downs; I was really tired and a bit worn out. Later in the day we found a place close to the hotel for dinner and then to bed.

Woke up feeling a lot better - and anxious to see more of the ghats and the city. We had breakfast at a place right next door, which had great Muesli and curd, similar to yogurt. We decided to walk the length of the ghats that morning and off we went. Along the way we saw a lot of signs for a concert that night, Sitar, Tabla and dance, we decided that would be fun and part way through our walk we cut off into the old city to find the concert site and buy our tickets. This was more of an experience than we originally planned on, fun though. The old city of Varanasi is all curving alleyways with no street signs or method of determining which direction you are heading in, it's alleys are also narrow and a few stories high so you cant even determine your direction from the sun. After a while and a lot of asking we finally found the concert site and bought our tickets. Then it was back to our walk up the ghats, past the burning ghats, where cremations go on at the riverbank all day long, and up almost to the far end. On our way back down towards our guest house we stopped at a place for lunch, the Brown Bread Restaurant, which we really liked, real good baked goods. The restaurant once again took us through many of the allies of the old city, can't say we were learning our way around but we were certainly getting used to being lost. Almost back to the hotel I found a place that was going to cost me, a nice book store just a little way from where we were staying. We spent a little time there and then went back to get a little nap for me, a little reading for Adam, before setting out for dinner and the concert. We tried a new place for dinner, a Japanese place in a Hindu holy city, the world is small, and then found the concert venue again, a little easier this time. The concert was fun, we had to leave a little early as our family run guest house locked the doors at 10:30 PM and we didn't want to be sleeping on the floor again.

This morning we walked about half way up the ghats to get breakfast at "Brown Bread" and suddenly the ghats were filled with people the way they had been described to us. Lots of people taking the plunge in the river, yogis doing yoga and all the other activities that we had been told about, we must have seen Varanasi's only two off days our first two days here. On this,our third day in Varanasi, we decided to try to find a Temple that M. Ghandi had sponsored years ago, strange for a temple but it featured a huge relief map, in granite, of the Indian subcontinent, plus a bit. It sounded good to me, esp given my love of maps, so off we went into the newer part of Varanasi, lots of hotels, stores, small shopping centers and traffic. After a while I began to despair that we would ever find the Temple and began being, according to Adam, a bit of a grouch. It just seemed we were walking in circles and not getting any closer, despite the fact that everyone told us that it was just down the street. Finally, we took up one of the rickshaw drivers on his offer to take us there and in a few minutes we were there. It was really a neat map and it was amazing to see how straight up the Himalayas went, with this my irritability went away. Strange the effect of maps on me. After seeing the map we walked back to the guest house and I took a nap, guess I needed it. We then hung around the guest house for a while, I had a great conversation with a young Chinese student from Chengdu and also headed back to the bookstore for a little book shopping. Just a note, most book stores will ship back to the states for you, so no I am not carrying all the books I have bought, I'd probably need a caravan of yucks to do that. For dinner we went back to the Pizza place we had gone to for breakfast, they had quite good pizza, the best I've had in India, baked in a brick oven, and great apple pie a la mode.

On our last day in Varanasi we were up early, 5:30AM for a hour and a half dawn boat ride up the ghats. It wasn't a spectacular sunrise but it was fascinating to see all the activity from the river, it actually seemed that a lot more was going on from that perspective and maybe there was since we had never gotten out this early before. After a while Adam asked the boatman if he could row for awhile, he rowed crew in college, and he rowed us part of the way back, perhaps not on quite as straight a course as the boatman. After our boat ride we had breakfast and then split up for a while; Adam went back to the guest house to work out and I went for what I thought would be a short walk. Well, as is often true on my walks I got lost and found a lot of interesting places including ending up near a pontoon bridge across the river. On the other side of the bridge I remembered was the fort of the Raja of Varanasi which the guide books said had an interesting museum, so I headed there. The museum was interesting, if in need of a little dusting. There were old cars, palanquins, arms, including swords pistols and elephant guns, and some fabrics which were in pretty sad shape. On the way back I ran into Adam on his way there and then continued on my way. We had agreed to meet back at the guest house about lunch time. While walking back a guy on a bicycle, out of the blue stopped to chat with me, he turned out to be working on his doctorate in philosophy at a local university, and we had a very animated and interesting 45 minute talk. Then it was back toward the guest house, as I approached it, from the opposite direction that we usually took I walked right by a book store we had been looking for the previous day but were unable to find. The guide book had said it was the best in town, so I went in and did a little damage to my credit card. By this time we had checked out of our room, we were leaving for Delhi by train that night to meet Adam's mom, Sheila, at the Delhi airport, so I hung out in the guest house lobby and had some food. When Adam got back he decided that a trip to Varanasi wasn't complete without a dip in the river but he had no place to take a shower afterward, as we had given up our room. Some people from Oregon that I had been talking to in the lobby offered their shower if he really wanted to take his plunge. All of us trooped down to the river and Adam took the plunge, which I recorded with his camera. Adam took his shower, and no longer glows in the dark, and a bit later we had an early dinner at a nearby Middle Eastern restaurant, before leaving at about 6PM for the railroad station. We had to catch our overnight train to Delhi at 8PM - which was scheduled to arrive in Delhi at 9AM. This would give us plenty of time to get to our hotel and get cleaned up before we had to meet her plane, which was due in at 9PM. This, however, wasn't the way it worked out, the train left a little late but overnight it must have stopped, both of us were asleep, because when we got up in the morning we began to realize that we were running late, real late. We finally arrived in Delhi about 2:30PM.

Gaya to Varanasi

So as I was the only one awake during this whole trip I'm obligated to be the one writing about it. Jim being the more responsible studious blogger has already written all about our time and Varanasi and our trip back to Delhi and has only been waiting for me to post our little journey before he puts up the other post, so here goes. Our trip to the train station was basically without incidence, in true Bihar fashion we wound through numerous dirt roads seemingly headed to the middle of nowhere only to suddenly emerge at the train station which was festively decorated with palm trees made of xmas lights. We made our way to the train station to learn that our train was right on time, but we still had an hour to wait so we hunkered down on the nearest concrete bench. While waiting we talked to a retired merchant marine who's train was running at least 5 hours behind schedule and probably more since no one seemed to know where his train was. After saying goodbye to the mariner we boarded our timely train and quickly went to sleep since our train was arriving at 2:30am and we wanted to get as much sleep as possible. Despite past indicators of just about every train running late our train got in exactly on time which meant we had a 4.5 hour wait in the train station before our guesthouse opened. We had hopped to secure a retiring room (small rooms with beds in train stations) for this time, but they were all full so we once again pulled up a nice piece of concrete and hunkered down for the long haul. I quickly realized I wasn't going to be going to sleep so Jim tried and was quickly sound asleep. I tried reading but I didn' t have quite enough sleep to concentrate on the words so I took to playing solitaire (which drew a few watchers). This was going well till Jim got splashed with some water. We both thought it was someone emptying their water bottle from above until I too got splashed and we realized that it was workers cleaning the stairs above us. So we moved to a new spot and I continued playing solitaire. This whole time people would come up to me and try to get me to go to their hotel or take me somewhere in their taxi. So I took to ignoring these people. After awhile there was one who came up as per custom I ignored him (I had headphones in so I couldn't hear him), when he walked away I noticed he was a station worker and I wondered what he wanted. A few minutes later I saw him a short distance down the platform with a hose, I quickly woke Jim and we made a hasty retreat from the on coming water. Our new home was short lived as the man with the hose came to where we had retreated to, so we moved into the crowed station hall. We now had about an hour and a half left so I continued playing solitaire. After a short time someone came up to me and grabbed all my cards, I grabbed them back and put them safely in my pocked. The card thief proceeded to squat down in front of me and lecture me in Hindi. I kept saying I didn't understand but he kept talking, drawing more onlookers as he went. Eventually a station worker came over and shooed him away for which I was grateful. After all of this it seemed like 7am would never come but it finally did and we called our hotel only to find out it would be another half hour before they sent a rickshaw to fetch us. We decided to get a taxi and finally got to the guesthouse at around 7:30.

Adam McCurdy
1/3/2009

Happy New Year