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Published: October 27th 2006
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the blue fort, jodphur
this is where those ridicluous riding trousers come from merry greetings to you all my lovley goat children!!
so it's been awhile, for which i am sorry, but life on the road is so hectic (i hear you laugh)!!
Mcleod gang, my last stop in the himalaya's. home to the dali lama and 250,000 of his fellow refugees! i never did find the lama, he was hiding from me in finland, which i thought was a little bit extreme, india's a big anough country to hide from anyone if so you want to! this place was an eye opener as to the oppression that the tibetan's faced and are facing from the chinese! a shocking 1.2 million tibetans have been murdered by the chinese in what can only be called genacide on a large scale, not so disimilar from hilters regeme!
again mcleod was a bhuddist town and like most of the north it seems like you could be anywhere but india! monks roam the streets freely, they almost out number the cows, that loiter on street corners giving you the beedy eye!
met alot of of really sound people in mcleod and for the first time in india i actually find a bar (endorsed by pierce brosnan of all people)! so at night i find myself sliding through cow dung on my way back to my guest house (nb there are little to no street lighting at night, so there very hard to spot)!
an indian guy treid very hard to convince me to take a rhaki course! 'on your bike son' i said ' i'm not departing with 2000 ring peas to learn how to hover my hands over someone, i can do that for free!!' but while i was there i thought i might take advantage of some of the courses that they had on offer! yoga, was the flavour of the day, 2 hours of yoga! not aproblem i thought this will be easy! far from it i was trying to contaught my body into positions that just weren't natural! by the end of the two hours i was highly frustrated through my lack of flexabilty. i was planning on going the next day, but on awaking the next morning there was no chance of a repeat performance, my body was seriously punishing me for the day before!
so from mcleod to delhi for about 45 minutes ran through there and got my next bus to jaipur for the cricket, england v india! met up with my man, mat whose been in the south! bang welcome back to india! getting of the bus in jaipur was an expiernce in it's self! rickshaw drivers all fighting over me to get into there rickshaw, i showed them the finger and went and found my own rickshaw! this was most definalty not the north!
15th oct mat and i went to the cricket! there must of been only about acouple of hundred english people in the stadium of about 30,000 indians! as per usual england one day cricket didn't fail to be inpressivley shocking! 124 all out! talk about being embarassing, should really get my ticet refunded! the atmosphere was amazing though! the indias go totally mental for there cricket they'll stand up and shout at anything, then the sit down police come along and hiyt people with there sticks to sit down! it's probably a good thing that we lost, i wouldn't of wanted to be walking out of there had we won!
the next day mat and i where getting a train to jodphur, the blue fort! sitting on the platform in jaipur waiting for our train which was 4 hours late (flash backs to england) we decided to take on deifferent nationalities! indians love to ask you where you are from. some to minamise the piss taking about the cricket, mat became sweedish and i was from poland! it work a treat to start of with, as the only two white folk on the platform we attracted alot of attention!
all went amazingly untill our train arrived. we were sat on the train and we got talking to this indian guy on the platform, the usual questions went by where are you from bla bla bla! turns out that he was a school teacher with 100 kids in toe taking them to see the west of india! we happened to be in the same carrage as them. all these kids where aged from 14 -16 all at military school and all there lesson's where taught in english! for six hours these kids where just swarmed around us aking questions the whole time, and for the whole time i was polish and mat was sweedish!
thought i did a sterling job on keeping the facade up kids asking me about the cultureal deifferences between india and poland! the hardest part was when they wanted me to teach them polish! had to think on my feet really quick so i mixed up some german with just made up words and treid to remember what i had said, so i could repeat it to them! managed to blag my way through and then started teaching them bits of thai, french, anything to get away from being found out!
by the end of the journey i was knackered and so was sweedish mat who had had the same problems with the old language questions!
jodphur! probably one of my favourite places in india so far! the old city is painted blue! in the old days painting your house blue signifided that you where of higher caste! now though anyone can paint there house pblue so everyones jumped on the band wagon and to good effect!
on the hill is the massive fort which in itself is worth going to see, and its surrounded below by the tiny streets of jodphur! it's as it like a maze of alley ways going in all directions, the streets bussaling with people rickshaws and of course my best friend the cow (they don't give you any back talk)!
from jodphur to jaisalmer, which is about 80km away from pakistan in the heart of the desert! another amazing city but this place is built in sand stone, again on a hill! i honestly thought i could of been the middle east, with the arcitecture, i did half keep my eyes open for jesus walking dwon the street with his crew, but he never transpired, he must of been with the mighty lama in finland!
in jaisalmer we went ona three day camel trek into the desert! after about an hour os sitting on the back of this delightfully smelling hunped camel! i thought to myself 'i can't last three days on the back of this thing! thurns out that we only did about 4 hours of camel ridiong a day! it's just so dam hot that all you can do from about 1200 to 1500 is fill your face and then sleep! stopping for lunch on the first day we were joined by two local elderly village guys! they sat and spoke to our camel drivers while we eat acter about an hour of the old dudes beparted and the other one decided to take a slumber with us! after about half an hour he started vomiting and then vomiting some more, this went on for about an hour! mat was convinced that this guy was going to die on us! we ask one of our camel drivers what was wrong with the old dude! to which he told us that he had been to a village to celabrate devali and had drunk a litre of opium tea! as which point we all started to laugh at him and he didn't take to kindly to this and went for a wonder never to be seen again!
we didn't really some across to many people in the desert! we saw a few villages as we past by occassionaly got water melons of farmers! we did meet a couple of people out there, and our conclusionwas that deffinalty needed to be a wider sharing of the gene pool in the desert, all this marrying there sister's and cousin's doesn't do them any favours!
so after three saw days of humping a camel we returned to jaisalmer for a shower and then moved on to udiapur! which is where i am now!
it's not much like the other citys that i've been to in rajastan, the town is biult round tweo lakes , and people will prodly tell you this is where they filmed octopussy! theres quite a few temples around here but apart from that theres not much else! so on the 29th i leave and start making my way east again, in an attempt to get to thauilnad for christmas!!
sorry it's been such a long one! next time i wont leave it so long!! hope all is cool with everyone! until next time namaste!!!
ps a goat only costs 1000 rupees to bye, that's just over 10 quid! do i have any buyers!
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