Blogs from India, Asia - page 1924

Well after another beautiful beach we booked a grueling 12 hour night train to Kerela just to remind ourselves that we are actually backpacking and not just on vacation. Kerela is famous for the backwaters where you can hire your own personal house boat and cruise around the canals and lakes for a day. So after sharing the lovely 2nd class train with no air conditioning with quite a few locals and of course a few cockroaches as well we decided to treat ourselves and stay at a pretty posh hotel - this is definitely not the backpacking I remember... Well after a quick dip in the pool and another beautiful sunset at the beach while amusing the locals as I try and play catch with the local kids, we pack our overnight bags for a ... read more

Unbelievable. Humidity and pollution so high that walking the street is like being repeatedly slapped around the face by a warm and rather dirty flannel. And the streets - so hectic they make Mumbai look like Milton Keynes on a quiet Sunday, and Bangalore like Worthing on Sea off-season. The traffic is gridlocked, every pavement is crammed with stalls, touts swoop on you as soon as you stop moving, and the beggars are spectacular. You almost feel like clapping them on the back and saying 'well done'. (But I think that might be in poor taste.) The traffic is an experience in itself. Everything is knackered, from the taxis pouring out black exhaust fumes to the old boys pulling the human powered rickshaws. Forget auto rickshaws. Or bicycle rickshaws. This is the real deal. For a ... read more

It's not every day that you can decide, over breakfast, to go and see the Dalai Lama, but that is what happened to us on our second day in McLeod Ganj. Of course, we knew the Dalai Lama was in town because of the grid-lock of buses, jeeps and cars on the narrow streets, the hundreds of maroon-cloaked monks, all the hotels filled with westerners and the smiles on the shopkeepers' faces as business was good. What we didn't realize was how easy it was to go and see the Dalai Lama. Every day he held a 'teaching' session at the main temple adjacent to his residence and anyone can attend. The teaching began at 1:00pm but the crowds - foreigners, Tibetans and monks - were streaming toward the temple complex before 11:30am to get a ... read more

My next three destinations all occupy the southern section of the very large state of Rajastan. After leaving Bundi, my next destination was a whistle stop tour of Chittorgarh, a town boasting what is billed as the finest fort in Rajastan, as well as some one-of-a kind architecture that you just have to visit to appreciate. The town isn't supposed to be that great to stay in, so I went to Udaipur that evening, which is widely considered to be most romantic city in the 'Stan. I wanted to describe an experience I had riding the train - I had to buy an unreserved seat ($1) on the train because I was buying the ticket just before it arrived, but the unrerverved seating cars where it entitled me to sit had people hanging out of the ... read more

Et bien il etait temps... de quitter Varanassi, je veux dire ;o) Apres bien des difficultes que j'imputerais a Lord Shiva (;o), j'ai decide de suivre un pote Israelien, histoire de me donner force et courage, et hisser les voiles... Le pote Israelien, il s'appelle Gilad, et sa destination, quelque peu opposee a celle de mes plans de depart, est la Vallee de Chamba : un endroit inconnu des touristes. J'aime bien, quand c'est comme ca : je veux dire "partir pour l'inconnu", et bien sur, c'est beaucoup plus simple quand on est deux ! Alors nous avons pris un billet de train pour le 22 Mars, et dit "au-revoir" aux habitudes bien vite prises dans la Legendaire Kashi, que bien sur j'espere revoir un de ces jours. Merci a Santosh (mon logeur), qui pour la ... read more