Camels, caves, canoes (and curry, of course!)

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Lou: Wow, can't believe we're nearly at the end of our trip! It has flown by for us, hope you have all enjoyed getting a taster of our travels from the blog. Mark left you in Delhi, where, as he says we were limited what we saw because of foreigner pricing gone mad, but the shopping was very good! From Delhi we headed to Jaipur 'the Pink City.' It wasn't really pink to be honest, more orange! Again foreigner pricing meant the fees prevented us from going in to a lot of the buildings, but when putting these prices on, the Indians haven't really been very clever as in some of the attractions you can just walk round the fence on the outside and get as good pictures as you would inside. We went to the Observatory in Jaipur where we just walked into the entrance where you buy tickets and could see all the massive sun dials and things without paying. Other than having lots of 'pink' buildings Jaipur wasn't that exciting and people were constantly hassling us so we would go in their rickshaw/shop/restaurant....

After an overnight train which was nearly 5 hours late - it's not that fun sitting in an Indian train station til 4.30am - we arrived in Jaisalmer, the Gateway to the Thar Desert. We stayed in a cool little guesthouse with a lovely owner and spent our days wandering round the desert city and the fort which looks like a giant sandcastle! We also had a go at camel riding, which was pretty painful after only a couple of hours so I don't envy the people who go on 21 day treks! Our ride ended at the Sam sand dunes for sunset, which were really picturesque rolling dunes but absolutely packed, it was like a carnival in the desert!

We briefly stopped in Jodhpur - 'the Blue City' (are you seeing a theme here?) which had another cool fort and lots of blue buildings. We also finally managed to get some birthday cards, of sorts. We'd been looking for some for a few weeks and found a wedding card shop and went in to ask if they had birthday cards as well. The answer was 'all the cards are blank but they all have Ganesh (the elephant God) on!' I know many of you will now be disappointed your birthdays are not in November cos I know you all want a Ganesh birthday card!

In Jodhpur we met Liza and Steve, a couple from London (but Steve is originally from Yorkshire so we let them off). As we really haven't met or even seen hardly any other travelers meeting these two was a breath of fresh air, so nice to speak to people who understand sarcasm and have good banter! As they were only away for a few weeks so had less time and a bigger budget than we did they had hired a car and driver to get to Udaipur and very kindly let us tag along for a small contribution!

Our driver helpfully told us how amazing the scenery we were driving past was (we were driving in the dark), but he did then manage to sneak us into the biggest Jain temple in India even though it was closed! We arrived in Udaipur, found a bed and crashed for the night and woke up to stunning views outside our window. Udaipur is set around a lake with a palace in the middle (where part of Octopussy was filmed), it really is one of the most beautifully situated cities we've been to. We spent the day sightseeing, taking in the world's biggest turban, the City Palace and doing a boat tour on the lake. Then it was on to our much-awaited next stop - Agra where we would see the Taj Mahal!

Everyone we'd spoken to said Agra the town itself was pretty horrible and you got loads of hassle and to stay as little time as possible. However, we didn't find it any worse than any other north Indian city. Unfortunately getting hassled, lied to (I've lost count of how many times we've been told there are no buses running because it's a holiday - how many holidays can one country have!), stared at, even groped is part and parcel of traveling in India. As Dolly Parton once said 'If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.' And people say she's just a big pair of tits!

We got our first glimpse of the Taj from the roof of our guesthouse, which was pretty awesome, but seeing the tomb itself up close was brilliant. So much thought has gone into the design, for example it is raised so that the backdrop is just sky when you take a photo and the line of fountains in front reflect the Taj perfectly.

After seeing one of the most impressive buildings in the world, we'd had our fill of man-made monuments for a bit and headed to Bandhavgarh National Park to look for tigers. Our journey to the park was quite funny, we first had to get a train to Umaria and all the Indians on our train were asking where we were going then as they had never heard of it going 'no, no, what is that station name, this is not a station.' Clearly because they had not heard of one train station in this enormous country we foreigners must have got it wrong! We weren't quite sure what to expect as for starters we were arriving on Diwali so there genuinely were no buses and we had to get a taxi from the station to the park, and we weren't sure we'd be able to find anywhere cheap to stay as the only places we'd found online were all inclusive deals. We did manage to find a really nice reasonably priced room and signed up to go on a game drive the following day. We managed to fit in 2 drives, but sadly didn't see any tigers and there isn't really much else to see in the park so it was rather disappointing. Nonetheless it was a nice break from the madness of Indian cities!

Next we headed to Ajanta and Ellora, 2 sets of caves with Hindu and Buddhist carvings, some of which were really impressive, and both set in lovely surroundings with waterfalls and greenery. Ajanta and Ellora marked our welcome return to southern India, which in our experience seems to be more laid back and easier to travel round than the north! After the caves we headed to Mumbai. In Mumbai we met a lot of travelers who had just arrived and thought it was crazy and busy, but to us it was one of the calmest Indian cities we've been to! Much preferred it to Delhi, there's some really nice old architecture and it's safe to walk around at night, you definitely don't get as much hassle and there's even a few Italian gelaterias!

After all this we were seriously in need of a break and caught the train down to the Konkan Coast. Most people head straight for Goa so it was so nice to have the lovely beach at Tarkarli to ourselves and as there aren't many tourists there is no rubbish problem as there is at some of the Goan beaches. We spent a few relaxing days doing nothing and then headed down to Goa with a German couple who had also decided to get away from the masses, Andrea and Christian.

If you ever doubted that Germans can drink, you need to go out with these two! They insisted on buying us beers well into the early hours which meant that checking out at 9am was quite painful! We managed to get up though and spent the day exploring the churches of Old Goa and Panjim. Feeling refreshed we headed on to Hampi, a really cool little town surrounded by ruins set amongst massive boulders! We stopped briefly in Mysore to see the Maharaja's Palace before continuing to Kerala.

Kerala was certainly unlike any other state we visited, it is the most educated state in India and certainly laid back. We visited 'Jew Town' (political correctness gone mad!), did a cooking course and spent a morning exploring the backwaters on a little canoe. We got to see rope making from coconut fibres, ship-building and toddy tapping, it was a fascinating insight into Keralan village life.

Our final stop was Madurai, famous for its big temple and then we came full circle and headed back to Trichy! It was nice to end our Indian adventure here, as we stayed at the same guesthouse and ate at the same fab restaurant and it's a really nice laid back city. Now on to Malaysia and then home! Once we're back we'll do a final blog to let you know we arrived safely and what the best bits of our trip have been. Til then....

Louise and Mark x

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