Jenniferious

We have weekends off from the hospital (or rather, the hospital has weekends off from us), so we've been taking the opportunity to explore the surrounding area. The three of us from Team Gudalur are joined for these little excursions by Laura, ANOTHER Kings medic on her elective in Calicut (the city I flew in to, if you have been paying attention). The first weekend we went to Ooty, a former British hill station. This was fairly unremarkable (look how totally blasé, and I've only been here six weeks...) but it did allow us to shamefully stuff our faces with western food. Real pizza! And something bizarre but wondrous called a 'sizzling' chocolate brownie which came served on a hot plate with rapidly melting icecream and chocolate sauce (Sidewalk Cafe). We went on the adorable funny ... read more

From Jaisalmer I got the night train back to Jodhpur, arrival time 5am. Again I was stuck with all my bags and about 10 hours to kill before my onward journey. Totally knackered, I retreated to the 'AC Class Rest Lounge'. This does not mean that the room has AC, it simply means that only passengers with an AC class sleeper ticket are allowed access. This place is the Indian Railways equivalent of luxury... minimal cockroaches, functional fans, toilets, separate rooms for men and women, a guard on the door checking tickets. The less fortunate majority, of course, just sleep on the floor of the platforms. I constructed a reasonably comfortable bed out of tables, chairs and my backpack, put a scarf over my face and went back to sleep until around 9am. When I awoke ... read more

From Dharamsala I got the night bus back to Delhi. Urgghh. 12 hours twisting and turning down from the mountains, thrown from my seat every time the bus swung round a corner. Didn't sleep much. During the obligatory midnight chai break I made friends with a nice Canadian girl and an Indian hippy from Goa. This was lucky. When we got to Delhi, Indian Hippy kindly allowed me and Canadian girl use of his hostel room to shower, nap and dump our bags, since we were both only in Delhi for a 12 hour stopover before moving on in the evening. I wasn't looking forward to a sweaty, sleep deprived day lugging all my bags around Delhi. Indian Hippy was really nice but had an annoying habit of trying to ascertain things about my personality based ... read more

So as I learned from the educational video I watched at the visitor centre in Ghangaria, the valley is famous for having over 500 species of flowers, creating great carpets of colour during the summer months. Sadly when I was there the weather was pretty misty, depriving me of the blue skies I had imagined and totally ruining my photos. The valley is surrounded by amazing 6000m peaks but you couldn't really see them for the mist, except at times when the tops of the mountains would break through like islands floating above the clouds. It was still gorgeous and the weather made for a very mysterious atmosphere, but it did not translate well to photography (not at my inexpert hands anyway). There were no more than about a dozen other people in the valley that ... read more

So as I was saying... Rishikesh. I didn't really plan on coming here (though to be fair, I didn't really plan on anything) but I wanted to get out of Delhi and Rishikesh, with it's chilled reputation and location a mere night train away, seemed an obvious choice. It's calmer and cooler than Delhi. I like it. I spent most of my first day here asleep because I just hadn't managed it on the night train (not the train's fault, think I'm still just getting over jetlag and the total ruination of my body clock after Glastonbury). Followed this with a bit of shopping to try and rectify my total packing failure (new camera but no memory card, no towel, no shoes other than mum's flipflops, bikini top but no bottoms, only three pairs of knickers...). ... read more