I loaded pictures for all of India except the last few days in Kolkata! I attached them to the blog that they go with so you'll have to go back through all the India blogs to see the pictures. Enjoy! [View Full Entry]

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Our last 2 days in Kolkata my dad and I did a bunch of last minute shopping, visited a couple places, and saw some pandals. Pandals are for the Durga Puja festival, the biggest one in Bengal, which starts the evening of the 4th. So literally right after we leave! Lame! Really disappointing! But at least we got to see the pandals. They are structures made out of bamboo and then decorated with cloth or clay or basically anything. They're special shrines for the Goddess Durga. So probably during the festival it's mostly just prayer, but it still would've been cool [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday we explored the town in the morning. All the Muslim-owned shops were closed. Tuesday was the last day of Ramadan so Wednesday was a celebration day. Tuesday night they were doing prayer over a very loud loud-speaker right down the street from us. It was still going on when we went to sleep and the next morning it started again around 6 am. Around noon we got on our houseboat, home for the next 20 hours, to explore the canal system that Kerala is famous for. We definitely felt like royalty! There were 3 people all there just for us [View Full Entry]

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Sunday morning we arrived in Kolkata early, The man who picked us up gave us a short driving orientation tour of Kolkata before taking us to our hotel. We then spent the morning rearranging suitcases because my amazing mom organized a bunch of stuff for my dad to bring along for me to replenish my supplies and I’m sending a bunch of stuff home with him. For my whole trip so far I’ve had my backpack/suitcase and then also my sleeping bag separately. Now everything is going to fit into just my big backpack, including my smaller sleeping bag and sleeping [View Full Entry]

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Thursday evening our group went out on the River Ganga. We went upstream a little ways, went out to the middle, and floated back. While on the river we released candles into the water as a prayer ceremony. They were in little leaf bowls and the candles were in tiny wooden bowls surrounded by flower petals, so it was all biodegradable. For the ceremony you have to release at least 100; I think we released 108 because that’s a significant number. So it took a while. We didn’t get to go very far up the river because the water level was [View Full Entry]

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Well we made it to Varanasi without any train troubles! The Agra train station is supposedly the station in India with the highest crime rate so we really had to watch our stuff. One of the Intrepid tours had a bag stolen about a month ago and a tour leader got stabbed in the stomach. We were okay though. But it was really scary! There were a lot of shady looking people and a bunch of them wanted to be our "porters" and "carry" our bags for us, aka run off with them. We had to wait there for almost an [View Full Entry]

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I'm going to give a bit of an evaluation of the tour operators that I've travelled with. Maybe this will someday come up when someone's researching one of them and hopefully it will help them out! Greenforce: The pre-trip stuff is a nightmare! It's hard to get questions answered and a couple people in our group were misinformed about various aspects of the trip. Once we were in Nepal it was amazing! Our tour leader was well-travelled and experienced so he knew how to deal with any sort of event that came up. The local Nepal group, RCDP, wasn't as great. [View Full Entry]

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This morning we had a bus ride to Agra. It was the worst local bus so far! Everything was covered in a layer of grime and some of the seats were even damp! At least it was only for 2 hours! Then we got another private bus to take us to our hotel. We had to switch again to another bus that was electric because diesel/gasoline vehicles aren't allowed within a certain distance of the Taj Mahal. Our hotel (Hotel Sheela) is about 100 meters from the east gate of the Taj Mahal. It's pretty nice; not as good as some [View Full Entry]

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Friday we rode a public bus for a couple hours to Jaipur, our second largest city so far after Delhi. We're staying at the Jaipur Inn, and, get this: we have a bathtub which means that the shower is separate from the rest of the bathroom! So the whole floor doesn't get soaked when we take a shower! Amazing! The hotel is quite nice. The restaurant has good food but it takes 10 hours to make! After lunch we went to Raj Mandir to watch a Bollywood movie. The theater was really nice inside but we weren't allowed to take pictures. [View Full Entry]

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Our second day in Udaipur 4 of us did a cooking class! Indian food is actually pretty easy, as long as you have the spices. Curries are all cooked in the same basic way just with some different ingredients and spices. We cooked and got recipes for a couple curries, chai, another tea, chapati, vegetable patty things, and biryani. It was fun and now I can make yummy food! In the afternoon, Ana, Anita, and I went to the hospital. Anita is a nurse and Ana is a nurse's assistant so they both were interested in seeing an Indian hospital. I [View Full Entry]

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