I can’t really remember where I left off last time….and more to the point the internet here is too slow to persuade me to make the effort to check, so I will ramble on from what I think is a suitable point.
Kate messing up her flights gave us an extra few days to fill but as we had already visited the ‘major’, there are obviously countless other places to visit, cities of Rajesthan a bit of creative thought was required. The constant heat (and Kate’s fear of camels) meant there was no point going to Jaisalmer so we instead headed towards Pushkar. For those that don’t know, and I’ll assume that is most of you, Pushkar is one of India’s holiest sites. It is said that the city rose up from the ground after Brahma dropped a lotus flower to the earth. Consequently it has one of the few, if not the only, Brahma temple in the world and close to 500 smaller temples dotted around the city. Stayed in a fantastic guesthouse that had an interior courtyard surrounded by plants and fountains, the food was top-notch as well. Pushkar was a great little place to spend a few days in. Much quieter and laid back than many other places…..apart from when you go down to one of the ghats and get hassled by a fake priest for a blessing and ‘pushkar passport’ (piece of string around your wrist for which they demand an extortionate sum). But the temples and general atmosphere are great.
From Pushkar we went back to delhi for 15 hours and caught another train up to Ramangar, home of the Corbett National Park. Had a couple of nights at Tiger-Camp during which the following things happened:
a) We went on a jeep safari to find a tiger. No sign of said tiger except tracks until we heard a bunch of deer shouting out warning calls to each other. After sitting still in the blazing hot sun for half an hour and hearing the tiger crawl through the long grass to change position it was clear he wasn’t coming out.
b) Stood next to an elephant whilst she was being washed and scrubbed by her handlers in the river. I won’t go into details about this as I had a few problems with it. But watching her play around in the water for the half hour or so before the handlers started scrubbing her was really cool.
c)Missed an elephant safari because Kate was ill….no hard feelings darling. I’m going to do it in a couple of weeks anyway.
d)Ate some pretty shocking food which seemed to make a number of people ill (inc kate).
From Ramangar it was another train journey back to Delhi for a night before Kate flew home and I caught a flight down to Kolkata. The couple of weeks with Kate were fantastic, was really nice to have some constant company for a while, and of course seeing kate after 3 months was pretty good to! Right, now I don’t feel as if I have to explain every move over the last couple of weeks! Having only written once since kate arrived, trying to catch up on it all is not fun. But now for the more relaxed and interesting person that you all know and love…….potentially.
Kolkata has really suprised me, in many different ways. It is green for a start….really green. Trees grow alongside the roads, the ‘Maiden’ is a 3km long park in the middle of the city and as you fly in, you actually find yourself looking to find the city, rather than somewhere like delhi where the ground just turns from brown to, well a different shade of brown with buildings. I haven’t got about the city as much as I wanted to, felt a bit lethargic the first 2 days and the humidty down here is just unbelievable, but certainly the parts I have been to have been quite nice. Yes, the buildings are often crumbling, yes the side of the road is often covered with rudimentry shacks and yes if you look underneath the skin of the city there is quite clearly a huge amount of poverty, but there is also a bustling metropolis that is throughly modern, a population that is obviously proud of their city and a centre of learning.
Looking back into the history, you could argue that no other Indian city benefitted from British ruleas much as Kolkata (or Calcutta back then) did. It is also quite though that no other city suffered more as a result of the empire. The floods of refugees that came into Kolkata after partition and during the India-Pakistan war choked the city and were a major part of the reason why Kolkata gained such a reputation (justifiably) for poverty.
Anyway, I went round the Indian museum which was dusty old and just rammed with exhibits. Admitadly most of them were rocks or tiny tiny tiny fossils, oh and numerous human embroys at various stages of development in a jar of formeldahyde (gag), so it wasn’t the most informative of museums. The Victoria Monument (yes, yet another Indian building dedicated to a deceased British monarch) was stunning and had a great history of Kolkata inside of it. Other than that and general wanderings, I haven’t done a lot. Oh I found an Italian restaurant that served risotto…it was gooooood!
Off to Darjeeling in a couple of hours on the sleeper train. Annoyingly the train doesn’t go to DJ it goes to a town nearby, where for the last 80km you can take the narrow guage toy train (9 hours) or get a jeep (2 hours), I think I know which one I will be taking.
See you in Darjeeling….hopefully where the weather will be cooler and I get a bit of luck with the views…..which at this time of year the chances of are nigh on zero.
