I spent my last week in India on the beaches of the state of Goa. Goa is on the central west coast on the Arabian Sea. It is very popular with European tourists. About half of the people on the beaches were Europeans. About 30% of the locals are Catholics since it was settled by the Portuguese back in the day. It was weird seeing big white Catholic churches in all of the towns. It seemed like most of the churches were named St. Anthony’s. Most of the taxi drivers had pictures of Jesus in them instead of the usual Hindi [View Full Entry]

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From Assam, we flew back to Delhi for the end of the Sierra Club trip. It was sad saying goodbye to all my 8 new Sierra Club friends from all over the US and Canada. But it was also exciting to be on my own to do some independent traveling. For our last night we were booked in the Delhi Radisson and ate at an Italian restaurant in the hotel. The next morning I took advantage of the internet access at the hotel and caught up on some emails. Then I did some research to try and figure out where I [View Full Entry]

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Kaziranga National Park is one of the last refuges for the one-horned rhinoceros. We also got to see wild elephants and wild water bufalo for the first time. Much of the park was covered with very tall grass and open meadows, which were great for viewing the rhinos and elephants. There were also a few tigers in the park, but we only caught a quick glimpse of one. This was the first park where they brought guns with us on the safaris. Sometimes the wild elephants and rhinos can become aggressive, especially if there are young ones around. They have been [View Full Entry]

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From Khajuraho we flew to Delhi and spent a night at a hotel near the airport. All of the internal flights we took for the Sierra Club trip were on Jet Airways Airlines. The planes were just like any jet planes you take in the States with about 30 or so rows of seats and a meal on flights longer than a couple hours. One nice feature was that they had English language newspapers (The Times of India and The Hindustan Times) in front of every seat instead of the Skymall advertisement magazines on American flights. They also passed around a [View Full Entry]

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Leaving Bandhavgarh National Park, we took a 6 hour bus ride to Khajuraho. The bus ride gave us another chance to see a lot of towns and villages in the countryside. When I first read about Khajuraho, it said they are famous for erotic temples. I thought it was a typo and should have read exotic temples. But it was not a typo. The temples were built 1000 years ago by a Chandela dynasty. We’re not sure why, but they depict some fairly graphic sex acts. Their isolation in the jungles allowed them to survive through the centuries from the more [View Full Entry]

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On our last day in Bandhavgarh National Park a few of us went on an excursion to a nearby village in the afternoon between our 2 safari drives. The village was about 10 miles from the park and took about a half hour to get there in our jeeps. Our guides first drove us to what was apparently just a random family’s house. The mother and 5 kids were at home. For some reason the kids were not in school on the weekday. They showed us around the house and showed us some of the tools they use to make food. [View Full Entry]

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From Agra we took a 12 hour overnight train ride to Bandhavgarh National Park. I slept surprisingly well on the moderately bumpy train. Bandhavgarh has the highest density tiger population in the world. There are about 55 tigers and 22 leopards in the 105 square kilometer park. It is the former hunting grounds of the maharajas of Rewa. This was our first chance to get up very close to tigers. When tigers are found, they ride in specially trained elephants to take tourists to the tigers. The elephants have a platform strapped to them that holds 4 people and 1 ‘driver’. [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Agra in the late afternoon for our first visit to the Taj Mahal in the evening. The Taj was built in 1631 by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan for the love of his wife. She died that year giving birth to his 14th child. He was so heartbroken by her death that he had this extravagant structure built in her honor and to act as her tomb. It took over 22 years and more than 20,000 workers to complete the building process. The main mausoleum is a massive marble structure with thousands of semi-precious stones inlayed that were imported [View Full Entry]

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We left our lodge near Ranthambore National Park early in the morning to catch another train to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. Since it was on the way, we had a change of agenda to go see the bird sanctuary Keoladeo National Park. The park has just one straight, narrow road going through the center of it. They took us on a rickshaw for about a mile or so into the park, where we walked along the road to see the birds in the wetlands on both sides of the road. We got to see a few new bird species [View Full Entry]

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The second day of our tour we took a train to Ranthambore National Park. The park covers 1334 square kilometers and has about 35-40 tigers. Until 1970 when it became protected, the park was the hunting grounds for the maharajas (high kings). The ride from Delhi was 5 hours in an air-conditioned 2-tier (AC2) class train car. It was very comfortable with curtains and bedding for overnight trips. There were vendors selling Chai tea, water, pop, or snacks walking up and down the aisles. Each car had a couple toilets with one being ‘western style’ where you can sit down and [View Full Entry]

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