To explain the rather contrived title I’ll skip to the end. This morning (1/11/09 - which will be discussed in the next blog) when I arrived into Leh the first thing i noticed was that the sky was blue. Also, the sun was bright. Why would this surprise me, I hear you ask? Well, good question. The answer is that it’s because I’d spent the previous ten days or so in Delhi. Unless there was some weird seasonal effect going on, I can confidently report that Delhi doesn’t have much in the way of sky or sun, as they’re hiding behind the smog. It’s not like in Bangkok where you can’t see the pollution but you can smell it and taste it, or Beijing where you can only see the pollution if you find yourself a ... read more

As well as, obviously, the time to write this blog and prune out the photos, I just spent about two-and-a-half hours trying to upload the photos and save the text, but every time Travelblog ate half of the comments and put the photos out of order. Then it ate my whole blog. So the photos are all out of order, you can probably work out where they should go, it should be Delhi - Road to Manali - Manali (and Vashist) - Manali-Leh "Highway" - Leh. About 1/3 of the photos are missing too. I can't spend any mroe time on it - if anyone knows a better blog site which doesn't steal one's copyright, please let me know. I had less than two days - one night - in Delhi I stayed in Paharganj which ... read more

So we arrived at Maduraim, a city of about 1.2 million people, with much more of a “big city” feel than Trichy, and more popular on the tourist trail (inasmuch as anything in Tamil Nadu is on the tourist trail). This city is famous for its massive temple, the Sri Meenakshi temple. By now you might have guessed that Tamil Nadu is famous for its impressive stone temples, sometimes in the middle of nowhere, with distinctive architecture and lively, intricate, artwork. While you don’t see that many “holy men” which you see in the photos advertising Northern India (I wonder how many are mainly trying to cash in on the tourist dollar and/or the money from the English-speaking corporate types who might feel disconnected from that side of India), every little neighbourhood seems to have a ... read more

I’ve decided to give up on the missing weeks in my blog. I might write up about them later, but without the Guidebooks any more, or Internet access, it’s even hard for me to remember exactly where I went in an orderly way. Anyway, rather than constantly trying to catch up, I’ve decided to post this current one, and maybe later go back over the four weeks that are missing. I arrived in Mumbai airport around midnight Tuesday morning. By the time I got through customs and baggage collection and all it was about 01:00. I hadn’t read up about where to stay, so I approached the hotel reservation office inside the airport, which is obviously a bad idea. This was inside the restricted area so I thought it’d be reputable enough. They found me a ... read more

Since I’m still way behind with my blogs I thought I’d pump out another one. This one will be short, because I didn’t do much of anything interesting, but I thought my habit of sticking to a blog entry for approximately each week was working out pretty well (except for the previous two entries obviously). So this relates to the period July 20-26. After the archaeology survey I had planned to head up to Jerash, a well-restored massive Roman city, where retired Jordanian soldiers re-enact chariot races in the amphitheatre, or even up to Umm Qais, another Roman site where on a mountain where you can look out over Syria, the Golan Heights, and Israel. In the end I didn’t do any of this. After Turkey and Amman I’d kind of seen enough Roman ruins for ... read more