Everything is loud. CJ and I seem to have spent most of our time following incomprehensible maps around incomprehensible streets, being hooted and beeped at - almost crushed out of the way. I’ts almost like being back in India. Almost... Palermo is louder and shoutier than I remember but it’s also more elegant. Well, some places are. The ones that pay their protection money that is... The others are made up of crumbling buildings, half-open to the sky, showing what’s left of their previous lives - a sink attached to a wall, speckled and torn wallpaper, a skylight.... Whils [View Full Entry]

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Man elopes with Eunoch - headline from Times of India, Thurs 10 Jan 08 Dalit boy’s eyes slit for eloping with girl - Times of India Both headlines showing caste and sexual differences are still strong. I’m currently watching a documentary on TV about transsexuals in Iran, which reminds me of an incident in Mumbai.... On one of my first days in Mumbai, I caught a train downtown. In order to avoid the staring and offers of help and the inevitable ‘Are you married?’ line of questioning I chose to take the women’s carriage. Here Sari-clad women compa [View Full Entry]

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The other place of interest in Jodphur is the Umaid bhawan Palace. On top of a hill stands a palacial edifice of dreamlike proportions. It has a central cupola of over 105 foot high, 347 rooms, a private throne room, a public throne room, a banquet hall, an auditorium, 4 tennis courts, 2 marble squash courts, a croquet law, a simming pool, a ballroom, a library, a nusery and a garage for 20 vehicles. It is set in 26 acres of garden and took half a million donkey loads of earth to build. But unlike many of the monoliths in the [View Full Entry]

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Dlehi is a much more weldcoming city than Bombay. Wide open avenues installed by the British make it much easier to get around. Old Delhi is all mosqeus and souks entwined with hanging electric cables like broken spiders webs, which make you wonder how any city birds avoid electrocution. What I did see for the first time was the overt begging. Parents refuse to have their leper childrne cured so that they can push them up against tourist taxi windows, exchanging the sight of their weeping, bleeding sores for a few rupees of pity. At Agra, the level of hassle was [View Full Entry]

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So, I’m back in India. This time it’s been a different experience. No barefoot children running circles round me every morning and causing havoc in classrooms, no daily puja, no manic monsoon, and no daily enticement of adventure. This time, it’s been champagne, beaches (yes, I finally found a beach), laugher and love. Oh, and there’s definitely been less staring. My brain still swills with the discrepancy between my two Indian experiences. Last time I was here I was learning and exploring. This time it is pure rest and it both saddens and thrills me to see what a [View Full Entry]

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I spent the last 2 weeks of my trip in Zanzibar. Mostly as a guest of the president’s son, but that’s a whole other story and probably not as exciting as it sounds. Stone Town, is as you would expect, a winding maze of whitewashed streets full of women swathed in black robes and bright kanga head scarves, along with men in square hats pushing bikes. As the women saunter through the narrow streets you can’t help but be mesmerized by what you can see - just their alluring eyes peeking out through the black hijab. However it’s also a place [View Full Entry]

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It was one year ago that martin died. How do you adjust to that? I don’t know. What I do know is that you have to remember the good times. The smiles. The explosion of sudden laughter. What I also know is that he would have hated being in a dusty dirty truck for five days. He might have ruined his leather jacket for one. But he, like anyone who knows my luck, wouldn't have been surprised that BOTH the safaris I’d booked (one as a back up) fell through the day before I was due to leave. So it was [View Full Entry]

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1 in 5 climbers make it to the snow-capped peak nearly 6000 m to the roof of Africa. The mountain the local and notoriously entrepreneurial Chagga tribe call 'Mountain of God' was formed 20-30 million years ago during the faulting of the Great Rift Valley, whose furrows run right across Tanzania as part of its trail from Lebanon to Mozambique. It has 3 main peaks - Kibo, the summit, actually a large crater formed a mere 100000 years ago, the last time the volcano erupted, Mawenzi and Shira. Tourists flock from all over the world to take on the challenge of [View Full Entry]

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I've now been in the country for nearly 2 months and I've just about stopped making comparisons between here and my experiences in India. Well almost. Unfair and trite as it may be, it's been impossible not to. Once again, I've found myself having to adapt to and soak up a different culture. But this time I feel like I’m wearing my own clothes. I don’t feel quite so ‘other’ here. Things seem somehow more familiar, more Western. I’m surrounded Western music, Western cothes (mostly football shirts for the men and shimmering polyester dresses for the women), [View Full Entry]

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Well, I've booked my climb of Kili - heading off on 12 September, and am now wondering about the sense of taking on the biggest physical challenge of my life… Am thinking it would have been far more sensible to treat myself to a luxury safari for my 34th b-day rather than face the -37 degree summit. The Guardian here (that's the Tanzanian version and nothing like our very own Grauniad) reported the other day that 2 men lost their lives for a $3 duck. They tried to steal it and an ‘’ enraged mob ‘ took them down and beat [View Full Entry]

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