Delhi onwards

As we had decided to fly out of Khajuraho and save ourselves a 12 hr bumpy bus ride, we arrived in Delhi. Delhi was nowhere near as bad as we were expecting, actually we found a good hotel and decided to stay an extra day just to relax! We knew we'd be returning here in a few weeks and we'd see the sights then.

We took the finest looking train we'd ever seen ( in India of course) to Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal. The super fast train is put on in the morning so people can do a day trip from Delhi, so it was mainly full of tourists. They even served tea and coffee and breakfast, it was more like a plane and certainly nothing like the other trains we have been getting around on. The first thing noticeable about Agra train station were the amount of people defecating on the track. The guide book didn't mention anything about this! We WILL be writing letters. Unfortunately this is not an uncommon sight in India. It doesn't leave much to the imagination. I could imagine some one having just arrived in India and spending a couple of days in a nice Delhi hotel, eating at good restaurants, then taking the wonderful train to Agra, having a bit of brekkie and then a bit of a nap thinking, "Ah, India's not too bad is it?" and then waking up in Agra train station and seeing THAT! Wow. I bet they weren't expecting to see the black hole of Kalcutta so soon!

Anyway, the Taj Mahal was amazing. Quite surreal seeing it with your own eyes. Too many cliches available to describe it. I took far too many photos, enough said.

Agra itself is a bit of a dump, it's train station hardly lets the town down. We resisted buying one of the many ' Via Agra - what a wonderful erection! ' ( or something like that) tee shirts.

We then headed into our final region, Rajasthan, expecting a lot more tourists which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but where there's tourists, there's touts.

So Rajasthan ( the land of the Kings), full of forts, palaces, men with huge moustaches and muticoloured turbans and saris.

Jaipur, the great bustling capital of Rajasthan, with it's pink walled old city, palace and a huge sun dial! A city of great contrasts, you walk over the road from the palace and you'll find yourself walking a round with goats, chickens, pigs, camels, the odd elephant and of course a few dogs and cows ( nothing new with these 2).

The nearby Amber fort was one of the best we'd seen.

Then to Pushkar, a small easy little town to get a round. Quite peaceful even by Indian standards. This sacred town allows no meat, alcohol or eggs. Sounds great eh! Nice to keep out all those egg eating trouble makers, really there's nothing worse!

We actually managed to get an 'under the table' omelet! No joking, we ordered it on the hush hush, but soon after the order was placed 2 local guys came into the restaurant and sat at the table next to us. We must have been waiting 40 mins for this omelet. The owner then made up a story to get me to go into the kitchen, here he told me that the two men next to us were police and that's why they couldn't bring out my food! So they had to wait for the 2 boys from the egg squad to leave. Afterwards the owner explained more about the delay, explaining, "We couldn't even have started to cook it. They would have smelt it!" Wow, these boys must go through some serious training to join the police force out here. They can sniff out a cooking egg from only a few away. I wonder what the penalty is for serving up illegal eggs? Do you think the police have problems with poachers?

We then headed to the small town of Chittor to gorge ourselves with eggs and to check it's fort, according to the guide book 'The finest fort in Rajasthan'. We disagreed. It was, however, the finest in Chittor.

Then to Udaipur. Famous for being a city in Rajasthan that doesn't have a fort. It does have a palace in the middle of a nice looking lake, so who needs a fort. But the true claim to fame that everyone who has ever been to Udaipur will tell you , is that the James Bond movie Octopussy was ( partly) filmed here. All the guesthouses, hotels and restaurants advertise that the movie is played every night. We didn't see it once. We also took a cooking course here and it's take home message was ' why grill, boil, steam or bake when you can just deep fry everything?'.

Oh yeah, this guy could deep fry until his heart was content, but judging from the fat content of the daily diet, I'd imagine his heart was seldom content. Infact, we were amazed he made it through the lesson.

We then moved on to Jodhpur, where the men don't wear those ' baggy at the top, tight at the ankle' riding pants that the town lends it's name to, but instead they all wear ill fitting polyester trousers pulled up so tight that they should help slow down the rampant over- population problem they have here. Jodhpur's fort was pretty amazing, but the gangs of street kids asking for ' one chocolate' or ' money, money' was quite off putting.

And so, on to our last stop, Jaisalmer, before we head back to Delhi.

(note: all of these photos were taken by Phil - instead of lifted from the internet like most of our pictures - so we have included two pictures taken from the Black Hat Dance for Tibetan New Year that we saw in Darjeeling.

Almost Full Circle!

We noted today that we are only about 800 km from Mumbai where we started. It was a pretty random moment of realization.

We have just arrived in the town of Udaipur after a dash around a few places in the state of Rajasthan. But first, a retrospective:

After Varanasi we took a flight to a town called Khajuraho known for its erotic temples. I have to say, as you can probably see for yourself, that they are pretty graphic and acrobatic, but erotic art aside the ruins are fabulous. They're from the 1600s and in mint condition - the best ruins we've seen in India so far and well worth the flight.

We kicked off our time in Khajuraho with an excellent sound and light show, the kind of thing that would normally be pretty low-grade and cheesy, but was actually really interesting and whetted our appetite to see the ruins close-up in the morning. Besides two sets of noisy neighbors, not too bad in this neck of the woods, we got to hear almost everything said by the narrator.

Varanas[t]i

Every picture of Varanasi makes it look colourful, intense and lively*. The steps are supposed to be awash in the colourful saris and the river is supposed to be rammed with exotic boats. Sadly, the Varanasi we experienced was soooo much worse. It is maybe the only time we have wished for scads of Indians wandering around and it was one of the things we did not get in spades. The steps were almost entirely deserted, the river had only a few row boats, and what was around by the bucket full was shit (sorry mom). Literally shit - cows, goats, dogs - you name it and we can probably find traces of it on our shoes. Some of the steps were covered with 3 inches of gooey mystery mud which got incredibly slippery in the rain. In short, we did not have an intense, colourful, exotic time and the best part about Varanasi (now dubbed Varanasty) was leaving.

*I have tried to upload a few typical ones, but there is a funny setting on this computer so I'll have to do it later

Darjeeling? More like Dar-freezing.

We have ventured North and are now freezing cold in Darjeeling, a town that seems about as un-Indian as they come. We flew from Chennai to Kolkata on the posh Kingfisher airlines and spent a few ritzy days enjoying the food in Kolkata/Calcutta before heading a South to the Sunderban Tiger Reserve.

The Tiger Reserve was a nice change of pace from the city - very clean and quiet, but we never really felt that our chances of seeing the illusive Royal Bengal Tiger was much better in Sunderban than Sunderland. The "guide" never spent time spotting from our river boat and our time at the watch towers were short (about 15 mins each) and marred by the hundreds of noisy Indian tourists (despite the constant reminders of "Keep Silence"). Anyway, it was nice to get away and we met some fabulous people on the trip, so it was time well spent.

We took a night train over to Darjeeling (more or less) in 2A (luxury!) and arrived yesterday, completely unprepared for the cold. According to a few people it was -3.5 Celcius a few days ago and there is snow at night - even if there isn't it's freezing cold.

The town is built into the side of a hill and everything is rammed tightly beside the few roads that pass through the town (making traffic a lot worse than it needs to be, considering how quiet it is here). Driving up here it was like stepping into another country - the towns look a lot different without all the usual ads and trash, and the change ethnicity has been a bit of a shock. While we knew there was a strong Tibetan community here, we never assumed so many of the people would look so Chinese.

We are going to spend a few days sightseeing here (and cowering in our room, trying to avoid the cold as much as possible) and then we are (probably unwisely) heading even farther North and slightly higher up to Pelling (in Sikkim) to see the Tibetan New Year. If we survive, it will be great.