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Published: August 12th 2007
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I'll start where Verity left off a couple of weeks back...
When Verity last blogged we were in Jaipur after taking a 30 hour train journey from Goa! It was a bit of a mission but nothing a couple of books, a pack of cards and travel scrabble couldn't see us through!
We were in Jaipur for a dew days which was mostly taken up with booking trains and tours. On our last day in Jaipur we went on a city tour which took in the old town better know as the “Pink City”, the Royal palace, an outdoor observatory which included the worlds biggest sun dial, amber fort and various other sights that we just seemed to zoom past in the bus, oh yeah and we also saw a snake charmer which was cool although he didn't seem to understand that we didn't want to have our photo taken with the snakes as he kept dropping his price for the picture but he could have paid me and I still wouldn't have gone anywhere near them!
After Jaipur we took another overnight train down to Udaipur. Udaipur was a beautiful city on a lake and was much
playing scrabble
on the mammoth train journey! more chilled out than the larger cities we had been to such as Mumbai and Jaipur, it was also the setting for the James Bond film Octopussy! During our two nights there we just relaxed, wandered the streets, ate nice food (although by this point we were both getting pretty sick of curry!) and bought a couple of souvenirs. Our plan from then was to get a train straight to Delhi for our last three nights and while there take a day trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. This was not meant to be as there were no spaces on trains to Delhi until the day before we flew home. So after some thinking we decided that we would head back to Jaipur on an overnight train, stay in Jaipur for one night, then take an early morning train to Agra, go see the Taj Mahal, stay in Agra for the night and then take a taxi to Delhi the following day arriving there for our last night, and that’s exactly what we did.
When we went back to Jaipur we stayed in a different hotel as the one we had previously stayed in was full and
it is because of this that we discovered one of the best budget hotels we had stayed in during our travels. It was really nice and topped off by a great roof top restaurant with hand sculpted tables and chairs which is candle lit at night. It was just a shame we only stayed one night and left at five in the morning to get our train to Agra.
In Agra we were lucky enough to have a hotel room with views of the Taj Mahal. In the afternoon after we arrived we headed to the Taj for a couple of hours to look around and watch the sunset. Being one of the new wonders of the world we expected the Taj to be pretty impressive and it didn't disappoint, it is just such a stunning building that you can't help but just stop and stare at it for ages or take hundreds of pictures of it like I did! Strangely while we were there we kept being asked by groups of Indian people if they could have their picture taken with us as if they had never seen a western person before! At one point it got so
bad that we had to say "sorry no more pictures" as if we were film stars or something!
The next day we took a taxi to Delhi where we spent our last night. Luckily it was only one night as the room we had didn't have any air-con and it was about 40 degrees!
So we woke up on the morning of Thursday 2nd August ready to take a taxi to the airport, fly home and see our family and friends for the first time in nearly 7 months, however our taxi driver had other ideas! He turned up on time at 10:30am allowing us 2 hours until the gates closed (we had online checked in) and it was only a half hour journey. We were then made to walk about half a mile with all our luggage in the baking heat and when we finally got to where the taxi was supposed to be we waited for another 45mins for it turn up! Then to add insult to injury they put another couple into the taxi as well and they were going to the domestic terminal which the driver decided to go to first! Needless to say
I reached a level of anger I didn't know I had in me and hurled a lot of abuse at the taxi driver (my low point came when I threatened to kill him if we missed our flight!). Anyway, we just made our check in and arrived at our gate all flustered and wound up only to find our flight was delayed by a couple of hours!
So we flew home, on a brilliant Virgin flight, brilliant for the in-flight entertainment, and were met exhausted and emotional by both our parents.
Now we have been home just over a week, we would have written this earlier but the website has been down and we have since lost half the blog and then had it restored. We're both extremely happy to be home and even happier at the three stone we have lost between us.
Thank you all for reading our blog, posting your comments and messages and sharing our adventure over the past 7 months, I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!
Over and out
G&V
xxx
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