Sharon's leaving India!

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Unfortunately, the Andaman's didn't last as long as planned. The weather moved in and turned the paradise into a washout and it was time to go. It was fantastic while it lasted though. I got my Padi open water and advanced courses and got to do a few fun dives to which were great. The diving there is fantastic. I even saw turtles which was one of my dreams. The biggest one was I guess not quite a metre and a half long and almost a metre wide and the smallest one was a baby, about half a metre long. The first time we saw one was on a daytime dive, but we went out again that evening to do the night dive for the advanced course and we saw another one sleeping on top the ridge. aaaahhhhh.....really cool. It actually settled me into the nightdive quite well, as I'd been a bit wierded out up until that point. It's really disorientating going down with only a torch as you can only see what's in the torch light and nothing to the sides or behind you. With all that coral about, it's a bit disconcerting....not to mention the jelly fish....I turned round at one point and there was one about 6 inches from my leg. He didn't look too friendly either...the tenticles weren't as long as I remember from the ones in Kuwait - they were ribbon type ones about 6 inches long I guess, but the body had like a big blue cross in the centre. Freaky! I only had a shorty wetsuit on so needless to say I moved pretty quick! The other really cool thing about night dives is the plancton in the water. It goes illuminous when you disturb it, so wave your hand about in the water and it looks like hundreds of stars :O) The other cool thing is coming up under moonlight. It's pretty surreal. Apart from that though, I think I prefer day time dives. You can see for a start, and the fish are awake and moving around which is much more interesting (apart from the turtle of course.....he was cool asleep and awake!). Apart from the turtles, the other cool things we saw was a shark, and a school of baracuda. Luckily the shark was heading the other way......bit like the snake I saw on the island! So, now I can dive anywhere in the world apparently.....yeay!
The diving was pretty much the highlight of the Andamans. Apart from that, there was a bit of drinking, a full moon party....complete with jock dj (cheers John!), a few drunken nights.....not to mention rainy afternoons.
Did I mention I got stung by a centipede? Big buggers they are over there - they grow to about a foot long, either red or black and they appear when it starts raining. The last few days I was there it had rained a lot. This particular day, we'd all decided to have a few drinks in the afternoon.....not much else to do there in the rain. We couldn't find my purse in the bar so I said I'd head back to the hut to see if I left it there and headed off in the pitch black. Stupid really in a jungle, but we'd been out since the afternoon and I didnt have the torch on me. Anyhow, I didn't see what bit me because it was pitch black, but I knew it hurt like hell. By the time I got to the hut my foot had started to swell up and I was panicking a wee bit....only because I didn't know what it was that had bitten me. It could've been anything :O/ Having found the purse in my hut and a torch, I headed back pretty quick, thinking if anything happened to me I wanted to be around people! Dramatic I know, but at this point as far as I knew it could've been something really poisonous ........or deadly :O/ Anyhow, it turned out, it was one of the centipedes and it swelled up and hurt for 12 hours but then was ok. Phew. The alcohol helped with the pain too! :O)
Life at Pelican resort where I stayed got a bit wierd at the end. Not many people were eating too much there and the owner had gone off and left the chef in charge. One night when I came back there was a whole load of comotion going on in what turned out to be the chef's hut. Two women screaming. Anyhow, I was laying in my hammock wondering what it was all about when these two women emerged, shouting and screaming, one hitting the other with what I assumed was a plastic water bottle full of water (bit hard to see in the dark). The chef then came out the hut and walked off over to the restaurant leaving them to it for 10 minutes or so. I assumed it was the wife and the daughter coz she wasn't fighting back, just crying and screaming. Anyhow, eventually the chef went back over there and broke it up and the wife walked out the resort a few minutes later. Closely followed by the chef and then 10 mins or so later, the other woman walked out. Anyhow, that was the entertainment over for the evening, but then the other guys who were staying there turned up and said they'd just seen the chef....completely pissed, lying in the middle of the road with his head all cut open. Turned out, it wasn't the daughter at all, the wife had caught him in bed with the lover! ooh eer....it all goes on over here u know! Anyhow, the place went pretty tits up after that. It was a complete state.....the restaurant hadn't been cleaned or tidied up for ages. The owner came back and fired the chef and then went round lying to everyone, pinched a bottle of beer that Morris had put in the fridge to keep cold, and basically everyone left bar me and Lars and Lars was leaving the next day. The owner obviously wanted to close and got me to agree to leave (more lies at this point but I won't get into that......lying bastards!). I was going to move to the resort next door, but my last night the rain really hammered down and I woke up with a really strong feeling that I had to get off the island. I was down for diving too.....and was really looking forward to it, but I just had a really strong feeling that it was time to go. Turns out the weather got really bad after I left and they stopped all the ferries to and from the island for a few days. I bumped into Paul in Calcutta and he said it had got really grim over there.......glad I left when I did!
Calcutta wasn't as bad as the picture I had in my mind. It's an Indian city still, which are all bad to a degree, but it was slightly better than I originally thought it would be. Good job, because I had to get my camera sorted out. I'd managed to dunk my bag in the water walking back to shore from the diveboat one day and everything electrical bit the dust.....camera, phone.....even my little mosquito click thing which had saved me from ripping my ankles to bits!! bummer. expensive mistake and one I won't be repeating. Anyhow, turned out, having had my camera for 5 days, the canon centre couldn't fix it for less than 100 pounds, probably more i was told, so instead I had to get another one. Unfortunately the choice over here was limited so I ended up with a previous model to the Ixus I had, but it's ok. There seems to be a lot of noise in the photos I took so far with it, but I'm hoping that I just haven't got the settings quite right. Not much happened in Calcutta to write about. I bumped into Paul from Andamans and Morris and Becky..... Apparently everyone had pretty much bailed out as soon as they could. Paul and I went on a bit of a bar crawl.......quite funny in India! We trailed round all the posh hotel bars. One of them had a band on.......Indian rock band! Not bad for India.....played Pink Floyd and a few rock numbers I knew ....jumpin jack flash etc. It looked like a pair of brothers, dad on the drums and a computer geek on the guitar. It wasn't bad though considering I haven't hardly seen live music for nearly a year.
Anyhow, left Calcutta and headed to Bodhgaya......where Buddha became enlightened. I tried sitting under the bodhi tree but nothing really happened :O) To be honest, I wasn't really struck on Bodhgaya ....maybe it was more to do with the heat. It's in the 40s now over here. I stayed in a monastary room, which in itself was lovely. Really cheap, big, clean, bathroom etc, .......but it was like an oven. The walls were hot, even the mattress and pillow felt like radiators and sitting under the fan felt like you were in front of a hot air blower. Not good. I ended up wrapping myself in soaking wet sarongs to try and cool down. Still not a good nights sleep, but having resoaked them a few times in the night I think I got an hour or two's kip. I was going to do some volunteer work at an animal hospital there, but luckily the guy was away and didn't want any new volunteers while he wasn't there. I say luckily, I'd loved to have done it, but having discovered how hot the place was, I think it may have been for the best. I left after one night and headed back to Gaya to get a train ticket for Varanassi the next day. Gaya was horrible. More beggars than Calcutta. I had children trying to kiss my feet and people staring at you because you're white more than other places. Really really horrible. I spent the four hours waiting for the train hiding in a restaurant with air cooling, drinking copious amounts of tea so they wouldn't moan at me.
So then I arrived in Varanassi. Had the usual rickshaw touts trying to rip me off til I found the shared rickshaw stand. Even then I think I paid 2 or 3 times what the locals were paying, but hey ho. Varanassi is an eye opener. If you come to India you have to come here just to see it with your own eyes. But 2 or 3 days is enough. For me anyhow. I'll be glad to leave. It's the holiest city in India, with the Ganga flowing through it. The Ganga is the centre of the action here.....you have the burning ghats upstream....that's right, dead bodies. Lots of them. About 200 a day apparently. Definitely a steady stream from what I've seen and the constant lingering smell that hangs in the air and your nostrils! The ashes get thrown in the ganga. It's 'interesting' to see, for want of a better word, but after a while it's a bit depressing! My guesthouse turned out to be about 50 metres from where they burnt the bodies. If I was staying longer I'd have moved. The highlight of the stay here and a must do, is the sunrise trip along the ganga. You have to get up at 5 in the morning, but you see it all. Heading downstream from the burning ghats you get people swimming, washing, doing their laundry, fishing and generally having loads of fun n frolics! The water may be filthy, but apparently it's holy, so it's all good. Anyone for a swim?! mmm nice.
I can't wait to leave here. It's all been a bit much actually for the last week or so, so I've decided to go to Nepal for a breather. I've got to the point where the bad things are more apparent than the good, and I want to remember India for the good things, so its def time to go. Having said that, I want to go to Ladakh in the north of India for monsoon as its one of the few places you can escape the rain in this part of the world, but apparently it's completely different there to the rest of India, which is good! There's supposed to be a big Tibettan influence there and the mountains and desert landscape are apparently beautiful. Anyhow, for the time being, it's Nepal on the horizon. I leave Varanassi tonight at midnight, so abut 5 hours time.....yeay! Hopefully by this time tomorrow I should be in Kathmandu. I'm not sure how long I'll stay there. Originally I thought a month until monsoon kicks in and then up to ladakh. The decider will be the visa - I want to get a new india visa before going to Ladakh. The one I have runs out mid July and I don't want to have to come down from Ladakh then and get caught in the monsoon. Hence a new one will take me through to Sept Oct when I can go back to Nepal for the trekking season. When I was speaking to someone yesterday though, they thought I wouldn't be able to apply for a new visa until the old one had run out. If that's the case it'll be a couple of months in Nepal instead...... but hey, that's not so bad :O)

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