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?)
Jodhpur –
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Hi –
I can’t remeber the last thing we wrote, but we’re sitting in Mehrangarh Fort, in an air conditioned room inside the fort gate. The fort is enormous, and it’s built with a wall system around it much like the Great Wall of China. It’s built on a 125m high rocky outcrop above the city, and it’s the only place you want to be here – the rest of the city is a cesspool.
From Delhi to Jaisalmer
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Hi – We’re 60 km from the Pakistan border in the Thar desert, in a town called Jaisalmer, which may be the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. This Golden fort town is carved entirely from yellow sandstone, and every surface of every building is intricately carved in the most ornately detailed patterns and flowers. Every balcony is screened in stone screens (so the ladies of the court could look at the people outside without themsleves being observed). This is a former royal city, and the royal Rajestanis still own and occupy several of the Palace buildings within the fort walls.
There are several Jain temples here – a religion that is a mixture of Buddhism and Hinduism. The temple are amazing – they’re like sandcastles taken to an insane level.
I can’t trust this connection not to conk out on me, so I’ll leave it here – but so far, so good. We’re drinking 8 liters of water a day each, it’s so hot. We wake up in the middle of the night to hydrate the same way a junkie would look for a crack pipe. Other than the heat, India is far better than we were led to believe it would be… don’t drink the water from the tap, but the food is great, and the hassels have been minimal.
We miss our friends and our doggie –
Noel & George
