India Weeks 3+4
We're currently hanging around in Singapore airport which I have to say is really quite swanky - even to the point of offering free internet. 'free' still being one of my favourite words...
So last time we bored you to tears with our tales we were on our way to Varanasi. The sleeper train had shitty food, but other than that was pretty good fun.
Varanasi Is one very holy place. Everything there, from the Ganges itself down to the lowliest rickshaw driver apparently had some direct hand in creating the universe all those years ago. Keen to soak up a bit of the good Karma we went straight out, hired a boat and parked it on the river right in front of a whole team of priests in mid incantation. We got totally blessed. I can still feel goodness and light leaking out of me now, two weeks later. It was pretty cool stuff.
We also saw some dead people being cremated.
Then back on to Indian railways...
I'd promised myself that I wasn't going to whinge too much this email, but this journey really took the biscuit. The first (air conditioned, reserved seat) train pulled into it's destination 4.5 hours late - actually nowhere near a record for Indian Railways, but certainly long enough for us to miss the connecting train. The helpful conductors happily pointed us towards another train and within 15 minutes we were back on our way. Only this time it was in a searing 35C heat, and our seats were the luggagge racks, clinging precariously to the carriage wall high above the other passengers heads in a crammed local (=slow) train. And that was relative comfort compared to the tribes bickering and screaming below us about whose elbow was on whose flip flop and in whose bit of floorspace.
8 hours (and probably about 5 miles) later we arrived in Pune. Not somewhere we'd planned or wanted to go - but hey....
Being the positive soles that we are we made the most of it and went to visit the local sights which consisted of:
A rock temple - pretty impressive, but reached by the most human poo covered road I'd yet found in India.
A park - closed between the hours of always (weirdly so are a lot of the city parks all throughout India we've discovered as we've gone along..)
The Botanical Gardens - also not too bad in the grander scheme of things. We saw a sausage tree - which was new to us.
The following day, having managed to 'cut a deal' with the station staff, we actually ended up where we were supposed to be in the sunny, laid back beach and party capital of GOA. Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So we laid in the sun on the beach and then went to a party.
OK just a few more details then. We got a moped and got stopped by the police three times, the resulting bribes summing up to more than the entire moped hire. We ate loads of nice food. We saw another fort and a church (complete with holy relics). We drank lime juice with curry powder and salt - an Indian delicacy. Don't try it, it's disgusting. All in all we did very little - enough to save you all having to trawl through a huge email again. Hope you're pleased :)
And then we went to the Big Chill (photos to be censored and uploaded later).
I'm gonna plug the Big Chill to any of you UK festival goers that want something to do in August. You may even have heard of it already, or Google it if you haven't. It's in the Malverns somewhere and I'd imagine, if the Goa version is anything to go by, it'll be rather good (except that you'll proabaly miss out on the delights of the neighbouring late night beach bar and it's happy staff ;> )
So yesterday we dragged ourselves up to Mumbai and just about managed to get ourselves round a few more (very impressive) rock temples before hitting Singapore Airlines (also very impressive) and here.
OK that's enough for now. Planes to catch and stuff.
Ps I forgot to say in the email that I ran over a goat with a moped. I didn't hang around long enough to find out if it was injured, but I was OK. Phew.
So last time we bored you to tears with our tales we were on our way to Varanasi. The sleeper train had shitty food, but other than that was pretty good fun.
Varanasi Is one very holy place. Everything there, from the Ganges itself down to the lowliest rickshaw driver apparently had some direct hand in creating the universe all those years ago. Keen to soak up a bit of the good Karma we went straight out, hired a boat and parked it on the river right in front of a whole team of priests in mid incantation. We got totally blessed. I can still feel goodness and light leaking out of me now, two weeks later. It was pretty cool stuff.
We also saw some dead people being cremated.
Then back on to Indian railways...
I'd promised myself that I wasn't going to whinge too much this email, but this journey really took the biscuit. The first (air conditioned, reserved seat) train pulled into it's destination 4.5 hours late - actually nowhere near a record for Indian Railways, but certainly long enough for us to miss the connecting train. The helpful conductors happily pointed us towards another train and within 15 minutes we were back on our way. Only this time it was in a searing 35C heat, and our seats were the luggagge racks, clinging precariously to the carriage wall high above the other passengers heads in a crammed local (=slow) train. And that was relative comfort compared to the tribes bickering and screaming below us about whose elbow was on whose flip flop and in whose bit of floorspace.
8 hours (and probably about 5 miles) later we arrived in Pune. Not somewhere we'd planned or wanted to go - but hey....
Being the positive soles that we are we made the most of it and went to visit the local sights which consisted of:
A rock temple - pretty impressive, but reached by the most human poo covered road I'd yet found in India.
A park - closed between the hours of always (weirdly so are a lot of the city parks all throughout India we've discovered as we've gone along..)
The Botanical Gardens - also not too bad in the grander scheme of things. We saw a sausage tree - which was new to us.
The following day, having managed to 'cut a deal' with the station staff, we actually ended up where we were supposed to be in the sunny, laid back beach and party capital of GOA. Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So we laid in the sun on the beach and then went to a party.
OK just a few more details then. We got a moped and got stopped by the police three times, the resulting bribes summing up to more than the entire moped hire. We ate loads of nice food. We saw another fort and a church (complete with holy relics). We drank lime juice with curry powder and salt - an Indian delicacy. Don't try it, it's disgusting. All in all we did very little - enough to save you all having to trawl through a huge email again. Hope you're pleased :)
And then we went to the Big Chill (photos to be censored and uploaded later).
I'm gonna plug the Big Chill to any of you UK festival goers that want something to do in August. You may even have heard of it already, or Google it if you haven't. It's in the Malverns somewhere and I'd imagine, if the Goa version is anything to go by, it'll be rather good (except that you'll proabaly miss out on the delights of the neighbouring late night beach bar and it's happy staff ;> )
So yesterday we dragged ourselves up to Mumbai and just about managed to get ourselves round a few more (very impressive) rock temples before hitting Singapore Airlines (also very impressive) and here.
OK that's enough for now. Planes to catch and stuff.
Ps I forgot to say in the email that I ran over a goat with a moped. I didn't hang around long enough to find out if it was injured, but I was OK. Phew.
posted by fuzzweed at 2:28 AM
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