The road to Nepal

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Goodbye Goa
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The great thing about travelling is when you leave a place, you get to go to a new place instead of having to make the reality-checking journey back home. Which incidentally was never truer this time around, considering the amount of stranded European's at the mercy of a certain volcano.
We've had a month in Goa and are happy that we have done almost everything there was to do. We spanned the coast from North to South, walked on white sand, red sand, hot sand and filthy sand. On our last day we waded through the hot jungle to find an abandoned 5star Resort Hotel we had read about. The project was left incomplete in the 80s and is now home to scores of monkeys and a few security guards. To say it was spooky would be an understatement! See pictures. Very very much like Lost for those who know what that means.

Hello Varanasi
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No one said the actual travelling part would be easy. Our journey to Varanasi consisted of a 5am wake up call, going up and down in the air 3 times in one day and negotiating our way through an unbelievable maze of dusty streets to find our "guesthouse" at the nuclear core of a city near exploding with life. It seems we had traded our plam trees for a labyrinth of concrete.
Varanasi is as Indian as you can get - situated on the river Ganges, the entire riverside is taken up by "Ghats" - Steps running into the river complete with platforms, temples and various Hindu paraphenalia. Each one slightly different and serving a different purpose. Manikarnika Ghat for example is where they burn the bodies - a particularly morbid fascination to us Westerners. When you see pictures of scores of Indians bathing in filthy rivers; that's it.
Now, you may have thought 35 degrees was hot - well in Varanasi it is closer to 48 degrees! When we got onto the tarmac at the airport, it felt like we were being blasted by giant hairdryers from all directions. Walking with our rucksacks near killed us. The culture shock was intense and we spent our first night looking at each other thinking "what are we doing here". (This was after Emma shooed a mouse out of our room before I got to see it) Our hotel mamager (who we just found out ISN'T our hotel manager!) delightfuly informed us of how dangerous it was outside, warned us of the hassle we would get and advised us to stay in our room - and then offered to take us to his mates silk shop. We went out anyway. And despite the heat, found the place utterly mesmerizing, peaceful and mostly hassle free. That evening we took a boat ride down the Ganges to see the Ghats from the river perspective and got eaten alive by giant mosquito's. We both lit a candle for Grandma Fox who is not so well at the moment, and sent it swimming down the holiest river in Asia. You can't get better karma than that! See photos.

Next update will be from Kathmandu from 2 drowned rats, after our epic white water rafting adventure.
Namaste.

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