After our brief stay in Siliguri, we took the toy train for the 7 hour journey climbing 2000m into the Himalayas to its terminus in Darjeeling. After so many kilometres travelled horizontally over the previous 7 weeks, it was amazing how much India changed after a travelling a couple vertically. Not only did the obvious things change, like the climate, the vegetation and the wildlife, but it was also the changes in the people and the food and drink that made Darjeeling one of my favourite places in India.

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At the start of the Varanasi section of the Lonely Planet it says “Brace yourself. You’re about to enter one of the most blindingly colourful, unrelentingly chaotic and unapologetically indiscreet places on earth.” Colourful it was, but chaotic and indiscreet it was not. We found wandering along the ghats next to the Ganges one of the most relaxing experiences in India to date.

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Our journey to Agra started with us being ready for breakfast with plenty of time to eat and get to the station for our train. So we sat in the garden of our guest house in Jaipur and ordered some food. The staff in the kitchen, all 4 of them, then proceeded to take almost 40 minutes to fry two eggs which left us with no option but to take the first auto-rickshaw we could find otherwise we’d miss our train. Being two tourists with huge packs on our backs (and fronts), asking to be taken to the station and looking like we were in a rush, we were prime targets for an absolute ripping off. We decided to take this one on the chin and pass on our frustration with a bad review of the kitchen staff at the hotel on Trip Advisor!

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We didn’t have huge expectations of Jaipur, we were a little disillusioned after Delhi and expected Jaipur to be a big, ‘new’ Indian city ie. a bit of a mess with not much of interest to see. Our train left Delhi at 4.30am, but we both managed to catch some sleep and much to our surprise and delight a friendly driver from our guest house spotted us coming down the stairs and greeted us by smiling and waving his little piece of paper that said ‘Hotel Anuraag Welcomes Anthony’ with a floral border.

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Yes, a bit like Marmite. I’m talking about the whole love it/hate it thing.

Up until our arrival in Delhi, India had been amazing. Of course, before we left to come to India we had read about how challenging and frustrating it can be, but we’d also read that the rewards for coping with the challenges are greater than at most places a traveller can go. Up until Delhi we’d had the energy to cope with the frustrations and setbacks it had thrown at us. But we’d never come up against The Delhi Evil Army of Auto-rickshaw Drivers (probably their official title). Sometimes in our 5 days in the capital these people made us angry enough to hate everything about Delhi and made the thought of heading right to the international terminal at the city’s airport oh-so-attractive.

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Despite being water bombed (and Alexandra egged) last night on the way to a restaurant for dinner, we decided to brave the streets of Delhi this afternoon for the Holi celebrations. We intentionally wore nice white tops and, as we thought, like a red rag to a bull the happy locals just couldn’t resist getting us involved. We had water poured over us from the top of buildings, water bombs thrown at us from every angle and people jumping out from behind corners to squirt blue dye at us. Then there was the powdered paint which was lovingly smothered all over our faces and heads by well wishers, and unfortunately for Alexandra, accompanied by a good old grope from some of the more drunk of them.

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I’ve just heard the great news that Sherlock Holmes has won the VES Award for

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Feature Motion Picture

Congratulations to all of the crew at Framestore and Double Negative who worked on it, and a special mention to Kate Windibank, Sam Osborne and Jan Adamczyk who attended the ceremony and accepted the award on the nominees behalf. You guys look like you do this stuff every day!

Photo from neonmarg‘s Flickr photostream

For the full list of winners head over to FX Guide.