Todd and Lisa's RTW trip

Wow… It has been a long time since our last entry. We stayed in Varanassi longer than intended because we got caught up in shopping. Besides being the holiest city, it is also known for its silk factorys. We burned a little hole in our pockets. We moved on from Varanassi to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. Our plan was perfect, we thought. We arrive late at night, wake up early go to the Taj, and jet out of the big gross city that evening. EXCEPT…. The Taj was CLOSED. Aparently, the Taj is closed every friday (where is OCD Lisa when you need her). It was like ….. Wally world is closed… we felt like the Griswalds. So, the Taj was really nice from the outside. We took lots of pictures from the roof of our hotel, and looked at some postcards. On the plus side, Agra is known for being a very difficult city because of all the tourists and we got to see a diffferent side of the city… not the Taj Mahal side!!
In Agra we had to wait a few hours at the train station. We were very entertained by tons of monkeys. We were sitting on a bench and felt something. Todd looked up and it was the monkeys throwing stuff at us. They are so mischievious, like 8 year old boys.
From Agra we moved onto a town called Udaipur. It is a smaller village in Rajasthan on a lake. Its where the James Bond Octopussy was filmed. We got a nice little room on the lake and relaxed, and recooperated from the cities for a few days. We intended on renting a motorcycle for the day to cruise around, but Todd failed the driving test!! This is where we hopped onto our first all night bus… Oh what fun!
We arrived in Jaisalmer, in western Rajasthan… the desert. When our bus pulled in we were attacked by touts (people trying to get us to go to their hotel, rickshaw,shop etc.). It was awful. It felt like in the cartoons, when they look at something and it turns into $$. It was the first time that Lisa actually cursed at someone (in India that is). After much hassle, we avioded them all and started walking up to the fort that Jaisalmer is famous for. We teamed up with a couple of european girls that we met on the bus. Jaisalmer is a beautiful town in The desert, but has been spoiled by the huge amount of tourist. It was nearly impossible to enjoy the fort through the constant calls of “come in my shop”, “looking is free, me friend” and “rickshaw, rickshaw”.
So we headed out on a camel safari with Gaia and Claudia (from the bus), and another guy from Bombay. We each had our own camel and started treking!!! There were 3 wonderful desert men with us. We went through the desert, stopping in the shade to cook lunch, it amazing what a good meal they can cook up. True Indian food in the middle of a desert over a wood fire. There are these little villages in the middle of the desert, and it’s like… HUH, why is this here???? We stopped at one and picked up some desert whiskey. Its like the Indian equivalent of moonshine. We got to our dune and stopped for the night. Our desert men, cooked up dinner and we danced and sang (with help from the whiskey) under the stars. Todd was break dancin’. He invented the Camel. It was a perfect evening… Until we woke up with unbelievably sore legs and had to get back on the camels. It was a really fun thing to do, and our little group of people was perfect. We laughed a lot, at the the camels especially. They are such strange animals, and man do they fart a lot!!
We will update the ‘check the map’ link so you can see where we have been, unfortunatly the high speed internet place we finally found doesn’t have a driver reader for us to upload pictures. I guess we take what we can get around here……
We’ll keep you posted!!!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 1st, 2005 at 6:51 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.