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.

Read the rest of this post »

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.

Read the rest of this post »

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!

Read the rest of this post »

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.

Read the rest of this post »

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.

Read the rest of this post »

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.

Read the rest of this post »

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.

Read the rest of this post »

After the eventful 7 1/2 hour bus journey with the 2 flat tyres we made it safely to our guest house in Udaipur, a beautiful small city in southern Rajasthan. These few days were a bit of a holiday from the holiday as the fast pace we’d been setting around Rajasthan so far meant that we just felt like not doing much for a while, and this seemed like the perfect place to not do much at all! We had a room on the quiet side of town, with windows along 2 of the walls (joy!) overlooking Lake Pichola and the City Palace, which looked beautiful at sunset.

Read the rest of this post »

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.

Read the rest of this post »

After treating ourselves to a night in a very nice hotel in New Delhi to allow Alexandra to recover from her twisted ankle we filled up on the huge posh buffet breakfast (knowing that we wouldn’t have the chance to eat a full fried breakfast, followed by cereal, followed by pastries, followed by fruit, followed by cheese and crackers, followed by coffee for some time), jumped in a taxi to the airport and caught our flight to Jodhpur, the ‘blue city’.

Unfortunately on our first night we were unable to get into our guest house of choice in the old town and we were stuck in one of the new areas of the city which meant loud traffic noise and lots of smog. Fortunately the ‘rooftop restaurant’ is about as common as a dodgy bathroom in guest houses across Rajasthan. So we spent the evening relaxing and enjoying the view while having dinner on the roof.

Read the rest of this post »