Tibet
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Hi,
We only have time for a really fast post – the internet is hard to find in Tibet.
We finished our Annapurna hike in 3 days, and walked around like we had wooden legs for 3 days after, as we descended 1750m of stone stairs in one day. It was amazing, and I’d do it again – but over more time – in a second (we’ll give more details later…)
Tikhedhunga Annapurna Trek
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Well we just started our Annapurna trek, with a 3 hour hike to
Tikhedhunga. We left Pukhara this morning and drove 1.5 hours to the trail head. Where we proceeded through the official government check in center.
The hike was an easy flat up hill walk of about 300 metres of altitute over 7 km. The hike only took about 3 hours.
Varanasi – Kolkata – Nepal…
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Hello friends!
We are currently in Nepal, and loving it, but I’ll back up a bit to give some general impressions of our last few days in India.
Varanasi was what we expected all of India to be like – distinctly Hindu, with temples everywhere; full of cows and water buffalo on the streets; hot as hell; outrageously poor, and smelling of animal and human excrement everywhere. It is a place that makes you recognize how lucky we are at home, but it also makes you conscious of things about yourself that you do not like to admit are part of your makeup – we can not live like the people of Varanasi. They are miserably poor, yet they are not miserable. They have very little education, but they know how to do things we have forgotten – like how to grow crops, how to build your own house, and how to survive on the necessities of life and be thankful. Our Western ways have made us weak – we can not live the way these people live every day. The actions of daily life are carried out in public everywhere here – going to the bathroom, finding food, killing your meat, cooking your meals, washing your body, worshipping your Gods, and finding somewhere to sleep is all done on the streets or the ghats.
Bharatpur – Agra
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Hey!
We’ve been busy – in Bharatpur we went to Keoladeo Ghana National Park to bird watch, and we saw so much more than birds! We hired a cycle rickshaw driver who was a Naturalist to point out what we were looking at, and here’s the list: monkeys, wild boar, mongoose, jackals, Nilgai (large Asiatic antelopes) and endangered Indian soft shelled turtles. The birds we saw included Indian blue jays (their wings are turquoise), cuckoos, mynahs, parakeets, peacocks and peahens (one male with a full fan display), white-throated kingfishers, painted storks, greta grey herons, a black-headed hawk, a white ibis, and loads of ibis… It was the closest we’ve come to the peace and quite of home in India. All you could hear was the birds in the trees – no traffic, and no horns and diesel fumes. It was a much needed break…
Udaipur, Pushkar, & Jaipur
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I think the last time we wrote anything was from Jodhpur… from there we took the most uncomfortable train ride I’ve ever been on through ever changing scenery (from desert, to vallies, hills, and miles and miles of marble quarries) to Udaipur – the city of the water palaces.
The only problem with Udaipur is that India is suffering a significant drought, so the water palaces are actually field palaces, surrounded by muddy ponds that little children bike across the mud flats to go swimming in, side by side with the water buffalo. If you have supper on a roof-top restaurant at night, you can imagine the palaces are floating in the “lake”, as you look out at it’s floodlit white marble walls.
We did sign up for a thoroughly enjoyable Indian cooking class in Udaipur, and are now better versed in the spices, terminology and techniques of making curries (which are the same as massalas – just a different language for the same word – who knew?)
