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.
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.
We’re sitting on the shaded rooftop terrace of the beautiful haveli hotel ‘Seventh Heaven’ in Pushkar (despite phoning a week ahead we couldn’t get a room) listening to Janis Joplin blaring out of the speakers. It doesn’t get much more relaxing. We’re hanging around before jumping on a local bus to Ajmer and our 2am train departure to Delhi and back to hectic Indian life.
The bus journey from Jodphur to Jaisalmer (the ‘golden city’) was our first really long distance bus journey and it was actually pretty good! The journey was supposed to last 6.5 hours but the driver got there in 5! It’s pretty lucky we couldn’t see out the front of the bus because the driver must have been picking up some crazy speed to be so early! Because we were early the pick up from the hotel that we’d arranged wasn’t there, but some other bloke convinced us he was from our guest house and drove us there, the whole time telling us how bad our guest house was and that (surprise, surprise) he had a place that was much cheaper and better. Thankfully he did actually take us there, but waited outside to make sure we were happy with the room before he left.
So we made it onto the train to Jalgaon and met a really nice guy on it who works for a pipe making business there, he was pretty keen to tell us all about it and fortunately we managed to feign interest in large industrial pipes and farming irrigation for a polite amount of time. In return he gave us some good train travel info.
When we got to Jalgaon we jumped on a local bus to Fardapur (aka middle of nowhere) which is the town closest to the Ajanta caves. We only had the day planned for Ajanta and had to be on a bus at 7am the next day, so despite our lack of sleep we jumped in a car and headed for the caves.
We’re sitting on a train (our first Indian train journey) on the way to a new state, Karnataka where we’re off to visit the world heritage listed site of Hampi. We’ve been in India for a week and a half and have spent the whole time in Goa.
We had a pretty lengthy journey to India, we drove to Melbourne from Phillip Island, narrowly made our flight to Sydney (we were held up by road works through Melbourne), then to Singapore, overnight in Singapore (we stayed inside the terminal and had to trust that Air India would collect our bags from BA lost property and get them on the flight!!), Mumbai, Goa and then a taxi journey to the capital city, Panjim. All in all it was pretty tiring but basically uneventful. We arrived with all our luggage, in one piece!
It’s been nearly two months since the last blog post so here’s a quick breakdown of what we got up to in Australia.
We arrived in Sydney in time for Morgan and Brad’s wedding at the beginning of December. We were so happy to be able to be there for it, a beautiful wedding and a fantastic day! It was great to catch up with the bride and groom and other school friends I haven’t seen for a long time.
While we were in Sydney we had a little Sherlock Holmes reunion with Bruce Nelson and Sarah Smith… very weird to be meeting up in Sydney, but it was a fun night of schnitzels and steins at the Löwenbräu (our second visit, thanks Janna, for the first!)
The rest of the time in Sydney was filled with going to the beach, shopping, eating and catching up with friends. Thanks to all who made time to see us!
Next, my parents, Anthony and I drove inland to take a little tour of the town I grew up in, Armidale. While we were in the area we stopped at the famous Thunderbolt’s Rock in Uralla and the biggest tomato greenhouse I’ve ever seen in Guyra. We spent a day on the land thanks to our friends the Wrights who took us around their properties at Black Mountain and Inverness.
We headed north for Christmas and new year at the beach in Queensland… fortunately the weather was with us and we had plenty of sunshine. Didn’t really get up to much, just plenty of eating, drinking, reading, swimming and sleeping. Perfect holiday!
From Cairns we flew down to Melbourne… see Ant’s next post for details of what happened there!
We had a 5 hour bus ride from Chiang Mai to Sukhotai on Thursday morning, thankfully less painful than the one a few days earlier.
On arrival in Sukhotai we checked in to our guest house and set out to explore…
The three hour bus journey from Chaing Rai to Chiang Mai was pretty horrendous, lots of windy roads and an unpleasant smell coming from the air con… but worth it!
We arrived at about lunchtime on Monday and headed into town to find somewhere to stay. After trying a couple of places we ended up at a lovely little place in the old town called Siri Guest House. Spent the rest of the day orientating ourselves and eating… had falafels for dinner at a fantastic place called Jerusalem Cafe.
Sitting in Krabi airport with three hours until our flight to Bangkok, so this could be a long post!
