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Published: October 31st 2007
Kolkata
Tipu Sultan's Mosque
Ok, I am not that inspired today, but I will do my best to entertain you with yet another blog...
After Bhutan I picked up Victoria in Calcutta... I met her in London during my stint as a guinea pig... She was staying in the same hostel as me and took the daring step of deciding to travel with me in India for a while...
We stayed in Calcutta for a few days, both of us resting from either jetlag or in my case a long bus journey down to Calcutta from Bhutan... As it turned out, it was the time of Durga Puja, a 4 day festival in honor of Durga, an incarnation of Parvati, who in her turn is the wife of Shiva... They build elaborate temporary temples from bamboo and cloth and inside sits the little effigy of Durga... On the last day they bathe her image (not the effigy itself) in the Ganga River...
Apart from that I also took Victoria to her memorial so she could come face to face with her illustrious namesake...
After all this we took a slow train to Guwahati, stayed a night there and than a bus
Kolkata
Some colonial stuff in Kolkata
to Kaziranga in the hope of spotting a one horned Rhino... As bad luck would have it, Kaziranga was closed due to the severity of the monsoon this year! But on the positive side, the tourist lodge we stayed in was in a wonderful location in between the green tea fields and our room was of palatial size... We did eventually manage to spot some Rhino's in the distance from the park entrance... Victoria had a pair of binoculars which came in handy and her camera had a 12 times zoom capacity so we even managed to get some blurry photo's of the beasts... At least we didn't have to pay the exorbitant fees for touring the park, taking photo's and general entry fees... Than again we also didn't get to see the Rhino's up close... As the famous Dutch football player, Johan Cruijff says: 'Elk voordeel heb z'n nadeel' or in English... 'Every advantage has it's disadvantage... ‘Wise words indeed...
Next we tried our hardest to get to Haflong, Assam’s only hill station, and we did get there, though not without some difficulty and a forced overnight stop in Nagaon, which really hasn't got that much going for
Kolkata
Evil Ravana and his hench men and hench heads?
it... Haflong was nice and cool, being the hill station it is and in the middle of it is a small lake... We didn't stay long though and moved on the following afternoon... This time to Silchar from where we were hoping to catch a bus to Agartala, the capital of Tripura...
Now getting to Agartala by bus involves driving in convoy and getting an armed escort through central Tripura, due to ongoing guerilla activity... This means the trip takes rather long as busses invariably break down, get flat tires and all that stuff, slowing down the convoy... Still it was a memorable, though tiring ride...
Agartala itself is quite a pleasant little town, centered around the former palace of the Maharaja of Tripura which now houses the state government... It also has several nice temples and most importantly a Bangladeshi consulate where we could get visas for our next destination... Around Agartala are Udaipur, which has one of the 51 Kali temples that are spread around India... These are the temples where they sacrifice various animals to placate Kali another form of Durga... It also has a pond at the back of it, with holy fish that
Kolkata
Victoria Memorial at sunset
seem to like crackers a lot... Also around Agartala is Neermahal, another former Palace of the Maharaja, quietly decaying on a little Island in a lake...
As I said, not very riveting writing this time... I trust you will forgive me, and if not... Ah, well...
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ABHIJIT PAUL
non-member comment
impressive
its really verry nice to see all this pictures.and i really appriciate this.