Royal Chitwan National Park

Hey again! Have a fast internet connection now so here are some photos - check out this entry and the Varanasi entry for new photos if you like!

Scott showing off his soccer skills

I think they like posing for photos...

Yum, elephant snot!

The playful elephant all by himself

Oooo, he likes that..

A gharial - small crocodile

Very excited baby wants our biscuits!

Buffalo crossing

Like a tank! Lucky we were on an elephant.

Ready for our safari on Emily.

Yay, we're still on, don't roll over yet - argh! (spot shell's leg below)

All the worries and bad feelings we still had concerning the problems we encountered at the border were completely extinguished soon after reaching the Royal Chitwan National Park. We had such a great time there and there’s so much we could tell you. We could go into detail about the beautiful boat ride we did up the river spotting various animals and birds including a stork and a crocodile, or we could try to explain to you how we were scared senseless before undertaking a bush walk with our local guide because of the countless warnings he gave us and the tactics needed in case we ran into a variety of different wild beasts that seemed to be present (like ruhnning in zigzags if a rhino charged us). Or we could give descriptions of how it felt to see, 2m away from us, a massive rhinocerous (about 2m long by 1.5m high by 1.5m wide), which we would not surprised if they were the orginal inspiration for military tanks, from the top of an elephant on our elephant safari, or we could try to explain what it was like to witness the unusual cultural/homosexual show that seemed to blend traditional stick dances with transvestite dances, or we could describe how we oohed and aahed over the absolutely gorgeous baby elephants that we fed and that chased us round wanting our cookies in the elephant breeding grounds, but we’ll skip all that and instead focus on the highlight of our time in the park... the bathing with elephants.

We had heard there was an area where we could go and they would let us swim and bathe with the elephants. We had to admit we were sceptical, but when we got to the area where the locals bring their trained domesticated elephenats to wash every morning we were pleasantly surprised to see four elephants playing around and splashing themselves with the water. Two of them already had tourists struggling to hold onto their backs as they squirted their riders with water from their trunks and wriggled their bodies in a playful way in order to try and dislodge their passengers.

The third elephant was allowed to play by himself. We have to admit, he seemed the happiest with his trainer siiting on the bank watching him. The great beast continued to play and splash himself with the water the entire time we were there. In fact when we left he was still playing, with his trainer patiently waiting for him. He seemed a little smaller than the others so he was probably younger and more playful and although sometimes it’s hard to tell when an animal is happy, we both agreed that we think that elephant was definitelty smiling.

Anyway, it didn’t take us long to skip down to the waters edge towards the fourth elephant (the biggest one). At that stage he was lying happily in the river with his trunk sticking out of the water like a massive snorkel. Scott nodded to the local indicating that we were keen to play with the elephant, where he held out his hand and helped us onto the elephant’s side. He then moved towards the back of the elephant and said repeatedly in a stern voice but not actually shouting "Hazza hazza hazza" or something like that at which the elephant began to roll from its side onto its legs. When this happened, we had to scramble from the side of the elphant, towards it back and then edge towards its neck for a steadier position.

Smiling and laughing as the beast stood and steadied itself, we waved like the tourists we were to our guide who was busy taking photos for us. It didn’t take the elephant trainer long to command "Chop chop", where the elephant, unknown to us, started to fill his trunk from the river. A couple of seconds later we felt the impact of the animal releasing its load of water, Scott especially who was in the front and hence received the direct impact and felt the force of the water hitting him like a firehose.

After another half an hour of the elehpant trying and succeeding in throwing us from its back and dozens more squirtings we left smiling from ear to ear after paying the owner of the elephant a tip of 100 rupees (probably the best 2 Australian dollars we’re ever spent). We took a couple of videos there too – will upload them soon!

It was a magical experience and we decided to stay another night simply to do it all again the next day, where Scott was able to convince one of the elephant owners to let the elephant pick him up with its trunk - something he’d seen one of them do earlier and was determined to give a try. Basically the elephant stands still and you stand in front of him, hold each of its ears with each of your hands, place one of your feet on his trunk and when you lean forward, it lifts you with ease where you walk up his trunk and onto his head. Then it squirts you when you get there, but we think it did that bit just for fun.

Crossing The Border...

Well, crossing the border from India to Nepal was an exciting and emotional day. At the beginning of the morning we knew that it was going to be our last day in India and Shell’s first ever overland border crossing. What we didn’t realise was that it would turn out to be also her first ever illegal border crossing. We were shocked and not surprisingly quite fucking pissed off when we got to the border and opend up the part of the bag with our backup English pounds, American and Australian dollars to find out that it had all somehow magically disappeared.

We still haven’t quite figured out exactly when and where this occurred but it didn’t change the fact that we were now stranded at the border with no more cash than about 30 Australian dollars between us and hence no actual way of paying for visas into Nepal. No problem, we thought, very pissed off and inconvenienced but nothing too major – they didn’t steal any cards or the cameras or laptop or anything. We’ll just have to go to the ATM. Oh, there’s no banks or ATMs in the town on this side of the border. Look, there on the other side, in Nepal, where you’re not allowed to go yet.

So after a small sob story they let Shell sneak over the border and change some money while they held Scott as bond. Needless to say Scott was quite pleased to see Shell return with the 60 US dollars we needed to pay for our visas, so we started our time in Nepal a little displeased but at least there. However we soon discovered some cheap but good whiskey and set about forgetting our troubles.

Varanasi

Bathers at the ghats

Cow trying to play hide and seek, not very successfully

Sunset ceremony

Painting in the Tibetan Buddhist Temple

Scott with a huuuge prayer wheel at the Tibetan Buddhist Temple

An old temple half sinking into the river

Boats on the Ganges

Monks with video cameras! Scott loves these guys.

Our rower at sunrise

Saris getting dried after washing in the Ganges

Our last stop in India was a few days in the holy city of Varanasi. Despite some of the worst harrassment (beggars, rickshaw drivers, shop owners, hash sellers, religious sadhus, etc) we’ve come across in India, it was an intriguing place to stay for a few nights. The town is strung along the holy Ganges river, with over 80 bathing ghats on the riverside, each of which has a different special purpose or property. It was a great way to spend your days, wandering up and down the river, watching pilgrims bathing, people washing clothes, boats, sadhus, and just generally life going on. That’s pretty much how we spent our time in varanasi, although we did get up ridiculously early one morning to go on a boat ride at sunrise, which turned out to be worth it, it’s such a pretty time of day and the ghats were bustling already. We also saw some of the sunset ceremony they seem to put on mainly for tourists, with lots of smoke and bell ringing down by the main ghat. Of course this is India, so it didn’t start till an hour after sunset.

One of the most confronting experiences here was watching the cremation ghats. You can’t watch from too close because the families (understadably) don’t want tourists at their funerals, but from a nearby balcony you can watch all you like. It was morbidly fascinating, seeing them bring down the bodies all decorated and covered in shawls, where they were taken down to the river to be immersed in the holy water, then brought back to a stack of wood, removed from their decorations until they were just in a white cloth, placed on the pile and a fire was lit. There were pyres everywhere, and it was quite unnerving seeing charred body parts sticking out from the flames. We watched for a long time, it was hard to look away. Apparently they have 200 or so cremations a day – and it takes 360kg of wood each – so the place is covered in wood piles 2 stories high, and boatss keep pulling in stacked high with logs. It’s an auspicious place ot be cremated if you’re a Hindu, and there are more than enough people wanting to be burnt there to keep them busy.

We also took a day trip out to Sarnath, just outside Varanasi, supposedly the place where Buddha gave his first teachings. There’s a monument and a deer park, but the most interesting thing there is all the different Buddhist temples from around the world, which have very different feels to them – the neat Japanese one with a pretty garden, the colourful Tibetan one with prayer wheels and paintings, the austere and huge Chinese one with enormous statues, and the simple Thai one where 10 year old trainee monks were studying and were very keen to show us around – sooooooo cute! We managed to piss off a rickshaw driver who’d agreed to wait for us there and then take us back to Varanasi, but who kept following us around and showing us his watch, so we eventually paid him for one-way and told him to get lost.

Delhi

We turned up in Delhi on a train 4 hours late (fitting for our last train in India) at almost midnight, in the rain. We were very happy to have booked a place and went straight to bed! The next day was similarly rainy so we spent the time playing cards and doing mundane stuff like washing and buying a Nepal Lonely Planet and ringing the ATO. Woohoo! Actually Scott and I were sight-seen-out so we declined to go on a whizzbang taxi tour of Delhi on the last day there, when the rain cleared up a bit. We weren’t too upset – the Red Fort sounded nice but we didn’t mind missing the lengthy excursion to the taxi driver’s sister’s friend’s shop. So pretty much Scott and I saw nothing of Delhi in our 2 days there, but it seemed like a nice enough place! We were happy to hang out with Drew and Chris for our last couple of days together, before they headed to Eygpt and we headed to Varanasi, en route to Nepal.

We did, however, spend our last night together by going out on the town. We saw a show that went through some of the major folk dances in India, including a harvest dance, a demon vs god dance with extravangant costumes, a drum dance and a stick dance where the guy did impossible things with an oversized diabolo. We’d thought it might be a bit touristy but it was actually really entertaining and well worth it. Forgot to take our camera though. After the dancing, we splashed out on dinner at a revolving restaurant, 24 floors up. It was a strange experience – fun to be in a posh place with an amazing view over nightime Delhi, and the food was delicious – but Scott escpecially found it a bit of a culture shock to be somewhere so decadent in a country with so much need. We’d spent 5 months eating simply, spending little and dealing with everyday Indians like beggars and rickshaw drivers and tea-sellers, so to be suddenly surrounded by rich Indians spending on one meal what could feed another family for months – was weird and made us feel a bit guilty too, wondering why we were there. Although the truth of it is that spending less on that meal wouldn’t have meant we would give more to beggars or something, it just felt out of place. Anyway, we still had a nice meal and it was pretty fun watching the floor move!

Then finally, after a fun 3 weeks in which we all had (mostly) a good time and nobody killed each other, we bid goodbye to Chris and Drew and set off on our train to Varanasi, having seen pretty much nothing of Delhi but not minding all that much – we were getting pretty sick of the constant harassment in touristy places. It wasn’t so bad at JITM when we worked there, the locals just wanted to say hi and sometimes ask questions or show us their homes, and the teachers at the college were really friendly, but in tourist places there are so many people trying to get you to buy things or give them money or come look at something or ask you your life story or tell you theirs, that it can get tiring and you’re not so inclined to go exploring. It’s not a good attitude because it stops you from giving your attention to genuinely nice people, and from getting to know some interesting new people, but in the end you just become that way in India to stop yourself going crazy. It hits you sometimes, when you just walk past a crippled beggar without really seeing him, or wave your hand in dismissal at a scruffy child saying "one rupee", or tell a rickshaw driver to get lost when they pull up beside you to ask if you need a rickshaw. It hits you how easy it is to become complacent about things that might have made you cry when you first arrived. Maybe it’s the ubiquity of the poverty, or maybe it’s getting sick of the invasion of your space, or maybe it’s because our efforts to help at JITM seemed more like banging our heads against a wall, or maybe it’s because we’ve been eating similar food and using squat toilets and squeezing in overcrowded buses/trains and sleeping in flea-ridden beds too, so we don’t feel as different from the people in the street as we should. And I think that’s why we’re happy to be going to Nepal – we need some space, and some perspective.

The Breathtaking Taj Mahal and Other Events in Agra

After our relaxing time in Pushkar, it was back into the fray of harrassment in the tourist Mecca of Agra. We couldn’t spend 5 months in India without seeing the Taj Mahal. And it was definitely worth the visit. While you have to navigate your way through the thick throngs of tourists, they kind of make the place more alive and colourful. The Taj mahal itself has a peaceful aura, and is breathtakingly beautiful – made completely of marble, inlaid (by hand) with millions of precious stones from around the world. The work is so precise and detailed you have to admire it, and the place put tears in our eyes (ok maybe just Shelley’s eyes) because of the love that inspired it. If you didn’t know, the Taj Mahal was constructed by the Mughal emperor Shar Jahan in the 1600’s when his wife died in childbirth (of their 14th child!) – she made him promise to build a monument to their love. Or, as Drew says, it’s man’s biggest erection for a woman.

So we spent a pleasant couple of hours exploring the Taj (incidentally the most expensive place to visit we’ve been to in India – 750 rupees, about $25 – but you do get a free bottle of water). We didn’t get up to much else in Agra, since Drew and Chris both has short bouts of stomach upsets, something we’d all been expecting but thankfully lasted less than a day each. While Drew was having close encounters with his toilet one morning, Scott, Chris and I went off for a walk to explore the Baby Taj – a monument to the father of a Mughal empress, that was the predecessor of the Taj Mahal – and ended up surrounded by about 30 inquisitive kids while we stopped to drink chai on the way home. They were only mildly interested until Shelley decided to show them how to make houses from cards, and then Scott and Chris got their cameras out, at which point mayhem commenced. It was all fun until we paid and left, and then predictably some of the kids followed us to pester us for money and pens and sweets.

Chilling out in the holy city of Pushkar

Ok then, we will! A great cause.

The holy lake at Pushkar is believed to be one of three places in the world where water spurted forth after Brahma, the Lord of creation, laid down a lotus flower to begin the world. So it’s very popular with Hindu pilgrims, and the lake itself is square-shaped, bordered on all sides by the steps of bathing ghats. We have to admit, all four of us got suckered in, and followed some Brahmins (religious caste people) down to the lake to put the flower they gave us into the water. Of course it was more than that, and they made us repeat mantras after them and sprinkle flowers, coloured powder and sweets into the water, then gave us a coconut to hold while they started to tell us about how much money other tourists usually give them. Unsurprisingly “donations” were asked for afterwards.

Pushkar was a chillout place for us – we spent a fair amount of our time in an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet ($1.50) where Scott got our money’s worth and Shelley enjoyed as much muesli as she could eat, and everyone experimented with pancake toppings. We spent lots of time wandering round the lake, climbed up a mountain to the little temple at the top to watch the sunset (and marvel at the disco lights surrounding the idols in the temple – did they bring electridcity all the way up the mountain just for that?). Here's a few hill-climbing photos...

We also witnessed a couple of days of the leadup to an Indian wedding, which included much decoration, boys carrying lanterns in the streets, horses and parasols and jewellery-encrusted women, but most annoyingly, the loudest and most terrible brass band you have ever heard. Not one member seemed to understand melody, rhythm or the point of listening to anyone else in the band. And unfortunately they had that dreaded combination: loudspeakers and a superhuman stamina. We’d go to sleep to their clashings and bangings – no matter what part of the city they were in – and wake up to them 8 hours later. But it’s India, and you couldn’t really get mad at them, you just have to smile at the inanity of it all!

Scott has come up with a great analogy for India – it’s like kids cooking a mother’s day breakfast. You might not get what you wanted, the food will probably be cold or undercooked, and it might come 2 hours late. But it’s delivered with love and a childlike innocence, and there’s a certain beauty in the earnest smiles, so you just eat your cold burnt toast, and sometimes you even like it.

Oh, and Pushkar was also the place where, against all odds and expectations, we managed to get Chris onto a moped! Admittedly she clung onto Drew the whole way and used up a year’s supply of swear words, but we think she might have even enjoyed it by the end of the excursion! They weren’t the flashiest mopeds, but we had lots of fun whizzing round the desert scrub and little villages. We were looking for some Shiva temples – didn’t find them but it didn’t really matter! Shelley had a go at driving this time – so Scott found out how much bumpier and scarier it actually is on the back – and now we both want to get a motorbike back in Oz!

Pretty Pushkar Lake


Colourful saris everywhere...

Colourful turbans in the Pushkar streets

Riding with the wind on speedy camels

The highlight of Jaisalmer was definitely our camel safari. This involved a jeep ride out into the desert where we hopped onto some camels for an hour or so, to wander around the dunes. Scott’s camel was led by a cute but serious 10 year old boy, the son of our guide, who we nicknamed the “maharajah” because he supervised the preparation of dinner later with a very regal solemnity. (Or maybe he was just staring into space and thinking about bugs, but he seemed to be supervising!) The guides started preparing dinner and left us all on top of a dune to watch the sunset. No sooner had Drew commented “Gee it would be nice to have a cold beer right now!” than an enterprising young man from one of the villages hiked up the dune with a sackful of beer! Not cold, but we were still impressed enough to buy some! After a yummy dinner cooked right there in the desert by our guides and driver, and some wandering round the dunes by the light of a full moon, we headed back in the jeep to town, satisfied and smiling.

Drew, Chris and Tomas watching the sunset

Scott flipping - anyone on his African trip may remember similar photos..

Happy alcoholic

We have to have the occasional romantic photo

The maharajah - Scott's escort

The sand-coloured city of Jaisalmer where photo opportunities were too much for us to resist

Another day, another fort. But this time, we were actually staying inside the fort! Our rooms in Jaisalmer were cheap, spacious, had hot water (sorry if this is boring for you, but these are very exciting facts for us!) and best of all, had little balconies looking out from the turret we were staying in, with views of the sandstone fort and the desert-coloured city below. It was hard to tell where the town ended and the desert began – although the view was contrasted somewhat by the line and lines of wind-power turbines on the horizon. This is a photo of Scott in our window - see if you can spot him!



The highlight of Jaisalmer was a camel safari (more in the next entry), but our few days there were also interesting because it happened to be the Hindu festival of Holi. If you are uninitiated, this festival celebrates peace and friendship, and no one is allowed to fight or argue for its duration. These feelings are demonstrated by everyone throwing or squirting coloured dye over each other so that all different colours blend together and everyone looks the same. We couldn’t escape, so we wore old clothes and had lots of fun! Some people in the fort invited us to play Holi, so we had some colour on us in the morning, then we got absolutely covered by the kids in the village where our camel ride began – luckily Tomas, a German friend who went on the camel ride with us, managed to grab a squirt bottle from them and get some revenge! Scott still has red dye in his hair 5 days later, and Shelley has a pink bra now!

The view from our turret balcony

A goat eating Scott's shirt

Peacock man!

Scott found some playmates