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Published: August 2nd 2016
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It has been an interesting first month away and we still find ourselves in India, partly by choice and partly due to the unexpected vastness of this intriguingly vibrant place! It has been interesting seeing how the country has changed having started in, relatively liberal, Goa, which was heavily influenced by the Portuguese. The impact of which can still be seen today from the architecture of its old town to the large number of Christians amongst the majority of Hindus there. We met a colleague of Charlotte's from Waitrose, from Goa now working in Brighton, whilst on holiday with his wife. He arranged a tour for us to south Goa, stopping at a spice plantation and various Hindu temples along the way. He introduced us to some of his friends and they then arranged our stay in an upmarket hotel in Mumbai at a discount through friends of theirs.
I treated Charlotte to our two nights in Mumbai and an afternoon tea in the Taj Hotel for her birthday. Our time in Mumbai was quite different to the budget travellers' experience we'd expected before arriving, accentuated by joining the hotel owner for a morning swim at 6am in his private
golf club in the centre of Mumbai on the day we left. It was a surreal experience having seen the crippling poverty in the city the two days previous. We were fortunate to meet friends and their friends and to be treated as well as we were for the first two weeks and gain an insight into the different lives they all lived. Since then we've been on our own, which has been just as much an adventure.
After chaotic Mumbai we headed to Udaipur, in the state of Rajasthan, in search of some rest. It was just as loud and bustled with touts, honking mopeds and relentless rickshaw drivers - a result of its visitors, including us!, which is understandable given the beauty of the city. Udaipur provided us with our first encounter of the old Mughal empire; best seen through the ornate palaces on lake Pichola. We also thought it was a good time to attend a cookery class, having seen the cuisine change from the tasty non-vegetarian meat and fish dishes along the west coast to the plainer vegetarian dishes of Rajasthan, requiring more creativity with its spices due to the limited ingredients available in the
more arid north. We arranged a class and jumped on the back of the teacher's moped, stopping at the local market stalls for vegetables and the local butchers, which was no more than a room with a cutting block and a cage full of live chickens waiting outside. No sooner had we stopped were we back on the moped with the chicken breast in our teacher's pocket. Certainty a change from the prepacked experience we are used to in UK. We arrived at his house and, having met his family, proceeded with the class on his bedroom floor, with help from his wife. It seemed a much more authentic experience than the classes offered by the restaurants in the city. We learnt to cook 10 meals, including Indian chai, which we're both looking forward to trialling when we're back in UK! We also attended an art class and learnt the basic Indian painting techniques and how to form the paint paste from various rock and gum from the gumtree, which was interesting.
From Udaipur we headed to the desert city of Jaisalmer, just east of the Indian-Pakistani border, popular for its camel safaris. The city seemed different to those
we'd visited and, despite the energy in the city and the nearby military base, much more accepting. There were less tourists in Jaisalmer and the city had more of a traditional trade feel, as a result. Much how I imagined the other cities we'd visited would have done in the past. We stayed 20km west of Jaisalmer in a desert village called Kuldhara in one of 9 mud huts built by a local man called Meer. We became good friends with Meer over the week we stayed there. I taught him some magic and set up his business on
hostelworld.com, in return for a discounted one day/one night camel safari calling at the annual desert camel festival on the way back where the main event at the festival was the local camel race, which was pretty gripping! The night before the festival we spent in the deep desert, as had been arranged with Meer. We went with two guides and were awoken in the middle of the night, with both guides nowhere to be seen, by a camel one metre from us feeding on straw. It was quite a shock to look up and see it looming over us. I tried
moving its food away from where we were sleeping, which riled it enough to charge at me. Its front legs were tied to stop it going astray in the night making its charge more of a uncoordinated limp, luckily for us! It turned out that our young guide had gone off to watch the filming of a Bollywood movie on one of the distant sand dunes once we'd fallen asleep. The following day we rode back to our mud hut, via the camel festival and all was forgotten. It was all quite an adventure.
After Jaisalmer, we caught the train to Pushkar, a spiritual hippie town surrounding a lake in the Arivalli hills, where we stayed for a couple of nights to soak up some of the peace and love man. Then on to Fatehpur Sikri, a deserted Mughal city, which Charlotte arranged for my birthday. It is 40km out of Agra and was very much off the beaten track, requiring a local bus ride for an hour to reach it. We both got a glimpse of a traditional Indian market and was interesting to just sit and watch everyone interacting as well as see the city palace, all
made from the local red sandstone from Fatehpur and a mausoleum built from white marble, the same marble used to build the Taj Mahal in Agra. Charlotte arranged for us both to see the Taj Mahal on my birthday, which could not have been beaten - it took our breath away. I had anticipated seeing it so wasn't expecting it to but all the book and documentary images I'd seen seemed to be forgotten when I saw it in the flesh!
We're in Varanasi now and have just had dinner in a rooftop cafe overlooking the Ganges as the priests carried out their twice daily rituals with candles, flames and bells on the river bank below. Everywhere we go religion prevails.
Heading south to the state of Madhya Pradesh next and into the Kipling inspired jungle to search for tigers signifying the end of our circular and so far eventful route of India!
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