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It's been a hectic past week & a half so there's been no entry, sorry folks. After leaving Jaisalmer and our desert experience we headed to Jodhpur (the Blue City) and were taken by a bout of apathy....spent three days in a lovely 400 year old
haveli, got ourselves an a/c room with cable tv and just chilled (literally) out drinking beer and watching crap flicks -real cultural! We did manage to see the fort there but it was turned into a museum and didn't have the breathing vitality of Jaisalmer's fort so we weren't too impressed. Left the Jodhpur and headed to Udaipur where one can always catch a screening of the Bond flick
Octopussy -it's shown everynight
ad nauseum in most hotels at 7:30pm. The city is built around a lake in the centre of which is the former maharaja's summer palace which is now a 5 star hotel. The streets were packed with the usual: shops selling silver, textiles, statues, travel arrangements; cows and their patties; innumerable tourists; etc.... As far as Indian cities go Udaipur was nicer than most but it really wasn't overly Romantic, probably something to do with the ever present scent of sewage,
urine, and fresh manure! On our second day there i was suffering from heat exhaustion and didn't feel like doing anything so we found a tranquil oasis and spent the afternoon drinking lemon ice tea, reading Kahlil Gibran's
The Prophet, and smoking grape flavoured
seesha. That evening we took a horrendous arse-numbing-Bollywood-tunes-blaring-in-our-ears-all-night overnight local bus to the holy city of Pushkar. We didn't think much of Pushkar upon arrival but in fairness it was probably due to our voyage there more than the town itself. Eventually we managed to find a gem of a hotel, among a sea of ramshackle hovels, with a/c room, a lovely pool. and grassy sunlounging area. Spent the next 2 days swimming&suntanning, and wandering the streets of the town which managed to redeem itself by it's innumerable number of tailors and well priced silver shops. On the third day we boarded an express
shatabdi train for Delhi (
shatabdi's are the zenith of Indian rail travel with spacious chairs in a/c compartments, serving free 3 course meals...but still it's India so don't be thinking it's all that luxurious -we've learned to temper our expectations of luxury). We didn't do much sightseeing in Delhi 'cause we'll be
passing through here a couple more times in the near future when we meet up with Em's sister (my Irish big sis) Nikki -our priorities were to start sorting out plane tickets outta India for South East Asia, and finding Emma some red wine! Initial impressions of Delhi are that it's a bit vacant and doesn't seem to have the same historical stamp of British Imperial architecture that Mumbai has; perhaps in future visits we'll find otherwise. After 2 days in Delhi we headed Northwest towards the Pakistan border to the town of Amritsar -the holiest town in Sikhdom. The Sikh religion is a hybrid of Islam and Hindu supposedly taking the best of each religion and fusing it into a monotheistic religion based on personal development and charity -they are also reknowned as fearless stalwart warriors. The epicentre of the religion is the Golden City where Sikhs come to perform prayers, converse, hang out in the gardens, and converge for mass meals (taken from the tenets of Islam is the principle of charity -the Golden City has a huge kitchen and dining lounge where they serve free meals consisting of chapatti, dhal, and coconut curry to all peoples from
all walks of Life...nice idea, we had a good filling breakfast there). Apart from the Golden City there's not much of tourist interest in Amritsar and so only 14hours after arriving we undertook a series of buses North and East into the foothills of the Himalayas to finally arrive in the cool pleasant climate of yet another important Holy site, Dharamsala, the home of the Tibetan government in exile and his Holiness the Dalai Lama. Above Dharamsala is the traveller's enclave McLeod Ganj (named after some British mountaineer) where we are staying in a nice little Tibetan hotel with stunning vistas outside our window....we woke up this morning to watch the sun rise over the snow capped peaks to the left of our balcony to eventually light up the valley which extends out below us. Think we'll be staying here for a little while. With bearable heat Emma and I are going to pick up our yoga (did a few classes before leaving London but it's been too hot to even think about doing it thus far!) and might venture off to do a little bit of trekking. The mountains here are beautiful, very alpinesque and reminiscent of Austria, and
reach heights between 4000m-5000m (to compete with the tallest mountain in western Europe, Mt. Blanc, at 4817m) but we're after the big boys -the Himalaya range- and will probably head closer to them in a few days by going East and North to the adventure/trekking haven of Manali.
We're happy to get out of the heat stricken plains and deserts of Rajasthan into the Hills. Despite being a person who loves the heat, it's been over a month of temperature in the high thirties/low forties with a hot sun constantly beating down and it's a pleasant respite to be somewhere with clouds and cool evenings...as this entry was being written there was a brief refreshing rain shower which was most welcome! A new leg of the travels has begun.....
ps- As we've just arrived there's no photos yet to post of the hills, they are to come.
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