In two weeks time I am going to be flying off on my year out….this is potion ive had bubbling for years and its very close to the boil 🙂

The plan is too fly to Madras (Chennai) India, where me and my friend Kate are to be staying, volunteering and exploring for 2months. The place we are staying is part of the township of Auroville just outside the old french colony of Pondicherry. Sadhana Forest is project set up to recreate the indigenous dry tropical forest that used to grow there. Check the link to the website for more details. www.sadhanaforest.org

This is just the first part of our 10month trip around india and south east asia. We plan to see lots, expeiece new places and people, learn about new cultures and promote ecotourism.

After our two month stay in Pondicherry, where we will have plenty of spare time to travel around the district of Tamil Nadu- we plan to see much of india by train, as we work our way up to Delhi we shall stop in Bangalore, Mangalore, Goa, Mumbai, Bhopal, and Japuir. Crashing in backpackers hostels and learning about the surrounding enviroment and peoples and taking in as much as is possible. Is it any surprise I am to study anthropology next year?

 Once in Delhi we are to travel out to the Corbett Tiger Reserve where we have been offered a place on a research project looking into forest usage and the effects its having on the wildlife and enviroment. Standby for more information and our experience! After Delhi we have no more projects planned though we would welcome them! The next part of our journey will take us to the temples of Angkor in Cambodia, then through Thailand and Malaysia making our way to Singapore…..funds and time permitting we hope to make a stop over in Java and possible reach Bali before we have to say goodbye to travel for a few months and hello to the world of student life. Myself to Kent and Kate to Goldsmiths.

We are on the five day count down to letting loose and exploring for a good nine or so months….We have our flights, we have our visa’s, we have insurance and our jabs are complete….i have a map 🙂 . I love nothing more then exploring new cities map in hand (though some what slyly for fear of being spotted as the tourist), or mapping a route around somewhere and embarking on the journey be it by bike, train or on foot. I can’t wait for the explosion of colour that are the Indian towns, or the beauty of the Thai beaches and the dark caves of Malaysia, all the while experiencing the unexpected; feastivals, obsticles,surprises on the road. This is a summary of the best bits I have been told to expect from people of varying opinion…..we shall see how our experience compares and how OUR eyes drink in the scenery…..first stop Sadhana Forest. Pondicherry.

We shall leave our autumn and go and find theirs…

…so here we are, sadhana forest, arriving yesterday was a bit weird as you can imagen, a differnet contury, different people, a different life. despite our flights been slightly mixed up and slightly delayed due to air india staff going on strike we arrived in chennai only an hour late and thankfully our taxi driver- arranged from auroville transport was still waiting, our name boaard in hand outside the terminal.

we opted fro a taxi due to the fact we were arriving at 3am and we were happy we did, finding a hostel at that time would of been hell im guessing. So we drove through chennai and down tamil nadu towards pondicherry, crazy roads, cows, plastic and colourful posters. I fell asleep befoore we reach the forest so kate woke me just as we were entering the forest. we were welcomed warmly and had a walk round before being showed our hut and joining the rest for breakfast, we didnt have to work that day due to our traveling tiredness ect. we lept through lunch but then joined again for dinner, after which there was an open stage evening, we’d been introduced to people in passing and had a few coversations so the preformances were small incited intoo their personalities and the ways in which they function within the group here. The real ‘getting to know’ people coversations happened during the shifts of work today however.
it helped that we were less tired and well rested after a pleasant nights sleep under our mossie nets, i actually slept better then i would at home…though thats not difficult!

we started work at 7am, making bunds in the forest- mounds of dirt in a lng path that would trap water on the higher ground for the trees to absorb. About 15 people are here for 3yrs on the project, making sure things run smoothly and having daily meetings about the running of the place. The hunts themselves seem bigger then our house back home.wooden slats covered with woven or straw mats on the floor, open sides with the high roofs slanting sharply down to almost meet, almost tease the floor. after the work in the forest and breakfast i helped prepare lunch- a vegan affiar ofcourse for 60odd people- consiting of dahl, lentils, marrow, aburgine, cabbage steam and mixed with mustard seed and finally rice. the food here is good and plentiful no one goes hungry and so far me and kate have struggled to finish our plates….thursday night  is going out night here so we plan to follow the crowd to auroville or somewhere near by.

Its humid and sticky despite the small shower of rain this morning which made finishing the work in the forest all the more invigourating. Working hard but now ultimatley relaxed…the best way to be in his heat….

….friday was our last day of work before our weekend, it involed more bunding in the forest with the goal of ‘zero run off!’  and then some hard work in the sun for Swami the resisdant handy man who helps build and work the land. The some rubbish collectiong on the dirt track leading in to the forest, no jus ridding the place of awful plactic bags but glass and such like as villagers would later be walking down to our forest abode for the weekly film night.

A film called dark days was shown, about peopleliving below the subway in NY, ironic i thought to be watching a such a city based western documentry in a forest hut with lots of local indians and local aurovillians- who are mainly european.Usualy we would be watching a documentary about indian life back home in manchester.

We had the job of clearing dinner and washing the large pots in an equally large pum sink- larger then my bath so i made full use f the space and hoped right in as is customary at the lodge. Then an early night wa needed.

We had no wake up as it was a saturday but we rose early to shower and then i got on my oped and went speeding down the dirt road for a test drive which went awsomely.Driving with a passager however proved to be more challenging, so for our trip to the beach we rode with two others from the lodge and after much exploring through colourful indian villages and small slums we arrived at a beach which you acessed through a healing centre- then here we took our first dip in The Bay of Bengal.

Driving back I drove well enough, weaving round corners and and the crazy also beeping traffic of mopeds, vans and cows with a few goats and dogs thrown in for good measure. Then after stopping for some rice and having a few problems starting the bike we rode back to the lodge…though this involed a tricky dirt road and a dip in the mudpool.

Sunday, we decided to keep the adventurous spirit of the weekend and venture into Pondicherry. Catching the bus from thee side of the busy road- after a hot walk up the dirt track was simple, standing on the bus was not. We squeezed on and quickly became used to rubbing up very close against our fellow passengers- no issue and for 4 rupees, less then 5pence we were speed into the centre of Pondi. On the way we had  the journey entertainment. Signs and advertisements stating ‘123STD’  and ‘Customer is God’

Pondicherry will never be descirbed as a typical Indian city/town due to its French colonial past, but for my first view of city in India, it seemed just as it should be; busy, noisy,warmed and colourful. We explored the streets, visited the ashram and refreshed all of our five sense at Goubert market. We ate in a pure veg restaurant, sticking for once to our vegetarian diets at Sadhana. Then haggled for a rickshaw home.

Full moon Sunday evening meant after dinner we gathered fire wood and met at the mudpool for music and swimming. Squelching our feet into the soft warm mud beneath the cloudy murk of the water.

Health is a big issue here with atleast one person suffering from some form of illness each day,living and working so closely with the earth and within close proximity with a lot of people can spread germs easily.plenty of water is required and and homeopathic remedies are popular on a daily basis, simple things like turmeric in water to improve the immune system

Back to work this week tired us slightly, me especially waking at 5am to mission around the huts to play harmonica accompanied by drums- with the aim of gently waking the rest of the volunteers. Tuesday evening, last nite, with my bike still needing to be fixed we walked up to koot road- the nearest strip of shops and road side eateries. I sampled the things i had been told so much about, chi, dosa and beedie The chi is the Indian tea made very milky and sweet- i swear this one was made with cream- but served in a small glass it was a small sweet treat which was welcomed after the lack of sugar and fat we get from our vegan diet. The dosa didnt impress me much, more of a small thick pancake- though i was told that the better dosa are thinner and crispier.

It was surreal again to be walking through the indian villages under a disapearing moon with a group of fun and interrestinf people from th lodge, with talk mainly of experiences traveling and the differences in how we live back home.

I have been organising the library here and wish i could bring half of it with me on the rest of my trip. Colourful books on topics from anthropology to enviromental issues and novels from the far east.  ……a sleep in the hammock with one of the books resting next to me …then when its cooler around 4am a dip in the pool will be very welcome…..

…after a month a Sadhana Forest we are ready to get on the road. We have a bus ticket bound for Bangalore on monday and a hostel awaiting our arrival.

Last week we went on a 6 day impulsive excursion with two american guys we met at the lodge to Kodaikanal- 12hours ( 8 hours on the decent) south west and 7000ft up.  We took a semi-sleeper bus for around 5 pounds and the journey went smoothly…apart from an hours drop off waiting for a transfer we had no idea about. We were woken at 5am and scurried off the bus at a place which could of been anywhere….we were given chairs so it looked liked we were in for a wait, so we cracked open some peanut butter.

Climbing up the mountain road to Kodai actually took my breath away. Ive seen beautiful sights before but at 7am looking at the lush green forrested mountains above and below the snaking road, for a breif moment i actually didnt breathe. Waterfalls cascaded from the other side of the valley and clouds drifted just metres away blocking views momentarily.

We had considfered staying in Vattakanal so unpon arrival (after a breakfast of iddly and REAL dosa) we jumped in a taxi van and drove away from the entrance of the swish hotel we had been dropped infront of. As we drove bumpily down what i would later learn was Vattakanal Road, one of our american friends requested to stop at what he was almost certain was the small house of a man he had stayed with on a previous trip. Strangely/luckily since this man David didnt live there himself, he was at this house feeding his dogs he kept there…and even more strangely/luckily he remember our friend.

After a breif inspection of the house- 3 small stone rooms with a kitchen, bedroom with a double bed and a double fl0or materess, and a storage room- we were happy to stay foor the tiny price of 2pounds a night and the  sweet chai(tea) which the elderly indian man with a variation of a handlebar mustache made every two hours when we were home. On offering him some boiled egg one morning – he accepted politely- we learnt that normally he doesnt really eat breakfast , or lunch, he starts the day with grass and beedie follwed by chai and beedie every 2hours.

We walked the 3km to Kodaikanal and Green Valley View ( a valley not green but a mass of white cloud blocking EVERYTHING- you could of been at the end of the world) most days. Passing the trees, monkeys and endless stalls and shops selling oils, spices and chocolate – a novelty up in the cool mountanis with the promise upon purchase that it wouldnt melt for 40days. We in turn were passed by locals, taxis a few scattered tourists and clouds that brushed our faces.

The weather and enviroment was such a contrast from pondicherry and auroville. We were still in the same state of Tamil Nadu but we had replaces the flag like stripes of red earth, sparse but green trees and blue skies with lush green grass, dense trees and cooling white clouds. The evenings in our small stone dwelling reduced us to wrap up in wollen blankets agaainst the cold…and also the mystery biting creature- in our tired state we concluded it could of been the blanket. It was pretty sharp. Though the ridiculosity of the biting blanket and the awarness of teeth kept us awake with laughter and angst.

We ate a lot of iddly – rice flour balls served cold for breakfast with various sauces and cooked for ourselves – a rare change from the mass meals prepared at the lodge. The jounrney home ran smoothly…to smooth as we arrived in Pondy at 3am and were forced ( but lucky enough) to hail a rickshaw back to Sadhana. But we had the jounry down the mountains fresh in our mind. It had been noisy and colourful with the fire works of dwaili, and exciting and invigorating if you include the 5000 large fire crackers set off with out warning at our feet while waiting to board our return bus. We were bombarded with shells and force to take cover behind the wall we had been sitting on….maybe we should of moved when the indian men started to unroll a supisious long thin red strip over 4 metres long…passing right by us…..or even before that when they appeared with a large red box with warning signs on…..but we had done as the locals did and sit by…..idle and trying to fit in….the result was loss of hearing and bags covered with ash and shells…

The Moving Streets of Bangalore

   At 10m in Pondicherry we presented our case to the bus depot manager.  The case was we didnt have a printed ticket due to the failure of a the printer in an internet cafe… but we did have a reservation checked by phone and we had paid by card….his solution was, after many head wobbles and taking some information, to write a little note to the head office…then issue us with boarding cards…hoorah now we were reassured that we would be vacating Pondicherry on a bus bound for  Bangalore.

before boarding we ventured into a cheap looking bar full of local men drinking beer. the curious stares didnt bother me or make me feel unconfortable…gosh two white women drinking beer and smoking! we were going to look odd anywhere purely because we were western so i wasnt going to pay extorionet prices in a hotel for that to happen anyway. plus the bar was right next to the bus depot so i convinced kate to stride up the stairs behind me an we ordered two beers. the waiter asked me for a cigarette- i gave him the paper nd tabacco but hilariously he brought it back to us.. the only women in the bar and curiously white at that…him and his friend had had several minutes crouched over with concentrated looks trying to roll the tabacco and sadly failed. this left me and kate in chuckles after i had returned a rolled cigarette to him. We no longer felt we were too young or western to be in such a place. As Brits to be fair we were probably the most experienced drinkers in there…but sensibly stuck to one beer before boarding the sleeper bus. A screaming baby and several near falls from our bunks later we arrived in Bangalore.

A 5am rickshaw to the HSR complex ( i still don’t fully know what the abbrivation stands for, just that its a development of houses and shops out side of the city centre) ran us into trouble as finding the guesthouse wasnt as easy as we had thought. We eventually found the right building thanks to the persistant rickshaw driver but with no signage of  hosteli started for the first time to question Hostel world, the website we mainly relied upon to find us decent well priced hostels/guest houses. After accidently ringing on nd waking the neighbours we persisted to ring the bell to the door they had stired us towards. Thankfuklly we managed to wake the receptionist/chef/cleaner who turns out to be quite a decent guy.

worried at first that we may have selected a hostel in the middle of nowhere (despite the seemlying central description on hostle world) after a sleep and a nicley cooked breakfast we went exploring the area. we were provided wth a map from the kindly chef- who it turns out is a cartographer as well…though his maps arent in the same league as his coffee.

we found we werent 5mintues from a few bus stops, resturants, cafes, beauty palours, chemists, nurseries, juice bars and interent cafes. Infact everything we could want. After some lush pinapple juice we were determined to visit the main bus depot and the BDA shopping complex. I am in need of a camera and Kate, a watch. Much walking of the crazy street system later wwe concluded that the map while useful wasnt intirely accurate and we became confused with the apparently logical numberings of cross streets, main streets and side streets which introduced us to lettering in the system. There is 17^th cross, 27^th main but then 17^th cross B, C ect…just when u think you have a grasp of the street system in this newly built and fairly high class area of town 17^th main will jump to 26^th main…we rickshawed to the BDA complex and found a mix of shops in what looked like a beaten down precinct. A scatteriing of pricey technology, jewleery and quiet designer clothes stalls, mixed with cheap hardware stores and mini super markets. It felt like a shopping centre that hadnt quite taken off yet or one near to closing down. All the upper levels were devoid of shops.

we crossed the road and passed some road by stalls that in my mind looked much more intresting and found a terrace cafe which by its décor and custom appeared to be wheree the cool rich kids hung out to buy expensive coffee drinks and smoke sheesha. on our way back during much confusion and disorentation due to the streets( by now we had concluded that they were akin to the moving stair cases described in harry potter) we stooped at a supermarket and bought facial scrub – my skin was in tatters after the sweat and dirt of sadhana, non organic toothpaste that doesnt taste like mould…it is in fact colgate and cost only 33ruppees, and some other small luxeries to make us feel more human.

despite the choice of some western food and more expensive resturants we dined cheaply and very satisfyingly at a stall cooking parrota – a swirled kind of bready pancake served with spicy chutneys.

the next morning- wednesday we venture into bangalore, after much confusion with the buses at the stop nearest to us we rickshaw to the main bus depot in the HSR layout where we are told we can get a big10 bus to M.G. rd, the main shopping road in bangalore. after waiting on a corner and  seeing only buses marked 500 in regular consession i, un sure that the bus depot manager had even motioned to this particular coorner opt for a rickshaw, luckily it wasnt as expensive as we thought it would be.

we are quite lucky with our accomadation. at first we though we were in the middle of no where, but thiss new development complex has a life of its own outside the city and it perfect for the stop off and relax we want while planning our tripto mysore.

what we saw of bangalore seemed to be just another big city and indian city ofcourse with colourful and mish mashed delights round every corner though im not sure all would apprieciate them as much s my essy eye. lots of colleges and universitys, a few great malls, the first which we entered reminded us so much of being in a kendals back home (somewhere we would never shop) that we left within 5min. Kate got her watch for what seems like a gd price and i got a really gd camera for what seems like a gd price back home. Most food and shops where either expensive by our indian standards or extremely cheap.

i rebelled againts kates expensive watch purchase….which only actually equated to around 3 pounds and bought a super cheap one for 60 ruppees, about 80p. ets just say mine makes a fun piece of jewlery. the simplicity of the bus depot in the centre was a relief. we managed to quickly locate the stand we needed to get to mysore (with buses every 5 minutes) and the bus we needed to get back to the HSR layout. This aided by the help of the easily found inquiry desk. The men outside the inquiry reception seemed adiment we wanted to go to either pondicherry or goa. they were hard out of luck.

funnily when i wqs calling up hostels from an initernet cafe near M.G. road we were quizzed as to where we were from, information we dont mind divulging. A fellow internet user overheard and introduced himself. He had lived and worked in manchester, in wythenshaw, working for the NHS….I should of gotten his name, would have been typical if he had worked in the same departmnt as my mum! After all when we arrived at Sadhana one of the first people we met was an architect from Bury who lived not far from preswitch!. tuh! small world.m in Pondicherry we presented our case to the bus depot manager.  The case was we didnt have a printed ticket due to the failure of a the printer in an internet cafe… but we did have a reservation checked by phone and we had paid by card….his solution was, after many head wobbles and taking some information, to write a little note to the head office…then issue us with boarding cards…hoorah now we were reassured that we would be vacating Pondicherry on a bus bound for  Bangalore.

before boarding we ventured into a cheap looking bar full of local men drinking beer. the curious stares didnt bother me or make me feel unconfortable…gosh two white women drinking beer and smoking! we were going to look odd anywhere purely because we were western so i wasnt going to pay extorionet prices in a hotel for that to happen anyway. plus the bar was right next to the bus depot so i convinced kate to stride up the stairs behind me an we ordered two beers. the waiter asked me for a cigarette- i gave him the paper nd tabacco but hilariously he brought it back to us.. the only women in the bar and curiously white at that…him and his friend had had several minutes crouched over with concentrated looks trying to roll the tabacco and sadly failed. this left me and kate in chuckles after i had returned a rolled cigarette to him. we no longer felt we were too young or western to be in such a place. as brits to be fair we were probably the most eperience drinkers in there…but sensibly stuck to one beer before boarding the sleeper bus. A screaming baby and several near falls from our bunks later we arrived in bangalore.

A 5am rickshaw to the HSR complex ( i still don’t fully know what the abbrivation stands for, just that its a development of houses and shops out side of the city centre) ran us into trouble as finding the guesthouse wasnt as easy as we had thought. We eventually found the right building thanks to the persistant rickshaw driver but with no signage of  hosteli started for the first time to question Hostel world, the website we mainly relied upon to find us decent well priced hostels/guest houses. After accidently ringing on nd waking the neighbours we persisted to ring the bell to the door they had stired us towards. Thankfuklly we managed to wake the receptionist/chef/cleaner who turns out to be quite a decent guy.

worried at first that we may have selected a hostel in the middle of nowhere (despite the seemlying central description on hostle world) after a sleep and a nicley cooked breakfast we went exploring the area. we were provided wth a map from the kindly chef- who it turns out is a cartographer as well…though his maps arent in the same league as his coffee.

we found we werent 5mintues from a few bus stops, resturants, cafes, beauty palours, chemists, nurseries, juice bars and interent cafes. Infact everything we could want. After some lush pinapple juice we were determined to visit the main bus depot and the BDA shopping complex. I am in need of a camera and Kate, a watch. Much walking of the crazy street system later wwe concluded that the map while useful wasnt intirely accurate and we became confused with the apparently logical numberings of cross streets, main streets and side streets which introduced us to lettering in the system. There is 17^th cross, 27^th main but then 17^th cross B, C ect…just when u think you have a grasp of the street system in this newly built and fairly high class area of town 17^th main will jump to 26^th main…we rickshawed to the BDA complex and found a mix of shops in what looked like a beaten down precinct. A scatteriing of pricey technology, jewleery and quiet designer clothes stalls, mixed with cheap hardware stores and mini super markets. It felt like a shopping centre that hadnt quite taken off yet or one near to closing down. All the upper levels were devoid of shops.

We crossed the road and passed some road by stalls that in my mind looked much more intresting and found a terrace cafe which by its décor and custom appeared to be wheree the cool rich kids hung out to buy expensive coffee drinks and smoke sheesha. on our way back during much confusion and disorentation due to the streets( by now we had concluded that they were akin to the moving stair cases described in harry potter) we stooped at a supermarket and bought facial scrub – my skin was in tatters after the sweat and dirt of sadhana, non organic toothpaste that doesnt taste like mould…it is in fact colgate and cost only 33ruppees, and some other small luxeries to make us feel more human.

Despite the choice of some western food and more expensive resturants we dined cheaply and very satisfyingly at a stall cooking parrota – a swirled kind of bready pancake served with spicy chutneys.

The next morning- wednesday we venture into Bangalore centre, after much confusion with the buses at the stop nearest to us we rickshaw to the main bus depot in the HSR layout where we are told we can get a big10 bus to M.G. rd, the main shopping road in bangalore. after waiting on a corner and  seeing only buses marked 500 in regular consession I, un sure that the bus depot manager had even motioned to this particular coorner opt for a rickshaw, luckily it wasnt as expensive as we thought it would be.

We are quite lucky with our accomadation. at first we though we were in the middle of no where, but thiss new development complex has a life of its own outside the city and it perfect for the stop off and relax we want while planning our trip to mysore.

What we saw of bangalore seemed to be just another big city an indian city ofcourse with colourful and mish mashed delights round every corner though im not sure all would apprieciate them in the same messy way as I. Lots of colleges and universitys, a few great malls, the first which we entered reminded us so much of being in a kendals back home (somewhere we would never shop) that we left within 5min. Kate got her watch for what seems like a gd price and i got a really gd camera for what seems like a gd price back home. Most food and shops where either expensive by our indian standards or extremely cheap.

I rebelled againts kates expensive watch purchase….which only actually equated to around 3 pounds and bought a super cheap one for 60 ruppees, about 80p. ets just say mine makes a fun piece of jewlery. the simplicity of the bus depot in the centre was a relief. we managed to quickly locate the stand we needed to get to mysore (with buses every 5 minutes) and the bus we needed to get back to the HSR layout. This aided by the help of the easily found inquiry desk. The men outside the inquiry reception seemed adiment we wanted to go to either Pondicherry or Goa. They were hard out of luck.

Funnily when i was calling up hostels from an initernet cafe near M.G. road we were quizzed as to where we were from, information we dont mind divulging. A fellow internet user overheard and introduced himself. He had lived and worked in manchester, in wythenshaw, working for the NHS….I should of gotten his name, would have been typical if he had worked in the same department as my mum! After all when we arrived at Sadhana one of the first people we met was an architect from Bury who lived not far from preswitch!. tuh! small world.

We have only slept here two nights and I surprised myself by saying to Kate that I feel at home!

-actually just as i am writing this in an internet cafe a guy we met at sadhana forest just walked in and shocked us…he’s staying in the hotle opposite this place)

 So to continue,  arriving in mysore was easy enough- we have met several very friendly rickshaw drivers who seem more then delighted to give us tours- and for small prices…while we embraced that for a trip up to Chamundi Hill…we were adiment to keep explore the rest of Mysore for ourselves.

Chamundi Hill stands around 3700ft above Mysore, so on the way up ( in what must of been the slowest rickshaw in the world) we had some lovely views- places of interest pointed out by our lovely guide, with whom we oblieged to pictures with later. The temple at the top of the hill is devoted to a hindu godess who defeated a Bull demon. Names escape me at this moment, but the temple was intricatly carved, clean and packed with people givving offerings of money fruit and such things, a busy, squashed and enthralling sight.

We descended the 1000 steps from the temple- though more worshipers were climbing them for the next round of offerings- A breif stop was made after 400 steps to admire the black statue of the bull demon then we continued to the bottom to meet our rickshaw.

The hill adventure itself didnt take place until the afternoon, morning time we had experienced the zoo. I hadnt been to a zoo in years, and an indian zoo i wrongly asumed would be dirty, dingey and poorly constructed. Wonderfully I was very very wrong. Mysore zoo was lovely and we had a bri;lliant time walking round. We no doubt were also part of the attraction for indian visitors as around every corner we were asked if we would be in a photo with them….’ can i click with you once?’ ….’madam madam photo,…just one…please?’

 Hilariously in our chirpy mood fresh from the bird area we obliedged to 9/10 of them. So we no doubt will be all over indian facebook by now…brilliant. The photo taking didnt distract us from the main attraction for us…Tigers. We could of sat and watched them for hours. Thankfully they had a fairly large area in which to roam, though they could only roam indiviualy so they would attack or eat each other. This ment when they werent outside they were in pens… which didnt look all that entertaining…..Then again they do get all their food handed to them on a plate rather then having to hunt….would u rather be waited on hand and foot or go out and track then kill your own rats?

We’ve moved hotels here due to a full booking tonight at our first hotel – Dasaprakash…..which quiet frankly is bottom on the list of places we’ve stayed so far…now we infact have a ‘delux’ room at hotel Dasharath. It is actually luxury for us and cheaper then the larger Dasaprakash…and by the looks of it a whole lot cleaner too.

This morning after consulting the map weve abolished our plans to go to Hampi for the moment. Were going to hit Gokarna first for some beach fun…one more night here first. Its halloween so were going to hit the palace ce soir to see it all lit up and pretty..it is actually magnificant just as it is, then either we shall meet up with the friends weve just bumped into or go to the resturant bar we were at last night. We treated ourselves to some wine last night….well worth it, thought it cannot be a regular purchase at ***ruppees a bottle….we also sampled the hotest thai chicken known to man….the devil as Kate called it.

On our last night in Mysore (we were lucky enough to be there on a saturday) we visited the palace, saturdays are speacial as the palace and grounds are lit with thousands of golden glowing bulbs, making it look like something from a fairytale or an overly expensive palace using alot of electricty. I would not like to be the person looking for the faulty bulbs. I would however…love to take a sling shot or pellet gun there for some target pra ctice….I wont though. The guards have bigger guns for one.

Afterwards we went to Hotel Pooja’s ‘Infinte’ a roof top bar and resturant with gorgeous views excellent service and good food (indian,chinese,international) and drinks…wonderful fruity cocktails…we felt strange being in a place so posh after our budget traveling but the prices were very fair and the atmosphere relaxed.

It was just what we needed after a busy day running round after banks and travel agents. The latter was fine, it just took a while to come across one, but when we did we had this brilliant man, with a very direct and intense attitude (in a friendly/helpful and funny way) We are booked on a bus to somewhere near Gokarna tonite, then we have to get a local bus to Om beach, where we are stayin atop a hill with a view of the ocean. A place called Namaste cafe. I cant wait.

We stayed in Hotel Dasharath last night. I experience my first lot of hot water in over a month this morning!…..a tartan quilt is luxury after government buses and sheets with bugs in at the Dasaprakash! Also when your on the road the little things make you very happy…tartan for one… marmite for two ( i have sighted chicken flavoured bovril but no marmite as yet)

I has a angsty stress as i discovered that my visa card had stopped working…not good…when i eventually got through to the bank I discovered it had been blocked for a security measure…tuh! But nice to know im safe……the card was unblocked and let me pay for cocktails last night (Infinate had chip and pin!) so lets hope i can unblock it today so i can buy some reading material for our trip to a lake :>

You’ll here from me next if I find time to drag my self off the beach to check email…

The small world got even smaller on the day we wereleaving mysore, having run in to a friend from the forest in an obscure internet cafe we failed to meet him and another friend outside the palace that night for the magical light up. but the nxt day after passing a chi stall near sed cafe (id left my memory stick there, we saw another westerner crosing to a chai stop, she remained us of the friend from the forest who was staying in mysore so we curiously peeped in the chai shop and once again were re-aquainted with tom ( the westerner turned out to be his friend from back home) after a chat about plans- we iformed him of our trip to gokarna-we went our seperate wways, only to bump into him a third time when he wlked into the resturant we had frequanted in the city, after our meal we said our last…and what i asume will be our last goodbye,,,but who knows.

The bus journey to gokarna departed at 9ama dn we were informed it would take no longwer then 9hrs to reach gokarna (includng a small transfer)…..a young indian man sat next to me on the bus and kindly made me aware that i would not be able to sleep on the journey,….not only because he insisted to poke me and engage me in conversation everytime i was difting off,,,but mainly because the roads were very bad. WE might aswell of been on a/ roller coaster, constant bumping fo r atleast 6hrs….it was difficultto stay seated, and also quite painful as the seats had plastic arms.

After 3hrs the young man asure me that if i was not confortable ( how could i be?) i could put my head on his lap. it wouldbnt be wrong he insited it wud just be like i was his sister. i didnt turn my head his way till he vacated the bus.

The rocky journey to our transfer stop in fact too about 15hrs,  but luckyl s the sun rose i was rewared with views of low lying mist on rice fields and later a misty lake topped with a glaring  yolk like orange sun. we were dropped off in what seemed like an abandaned bus stop. thankfull with the drive of only a sheer determined traveller i gathered my tattered mind and went in search of a rickshaw. i asked for a bus stop with a ride to gokarna, i understood he would take us to one. he took us to a corner of a dusty main road where we vacted and kate ill withered with our rucksacks againts a tree. i persisted to ask for transport to gokarnaa nd as a bus pulled up we had a ride to kumpta…where from we would hve to get another bus to gokarna…i felt like writing to our travel agent and informing him he had been mised informed about this journey, arriving in kumpta hauled ouver to the information desk and managed to get a short answer about a bus leaving for gokarna at 11am, wed been on the road 14hrs (was just breifly interupted from my typing on the beach by a fellowe traveler hula hooping with fire to the sound of drums and the waves brushing on the shore)

When asked which stand the bus would leave from the ridiculously unfriendly bus depot chief replied ‘anywhere anywhere’ helpful, infact most bus conductors, depot workers,drivers seem to think they have some excuse to be extremely rude and have power over all, here clealry to quote a previous blog  the customer is not god

(another interuption to watch a fire poi display but accomplice of previous fire hula hooping girl…..who then again took over the poi and out did the previous with a latino sexy style fire poi dance….then joined by a man with a doubled ended stick of fire- turned it in cartwheel so fast it hurt the eyes….i learn there from corsica.)

….to continue with our desperate journey to gokarna, after much asking and seeking at the bus depot in kumpta we found the right bus and reach gokarna.Since spending one night in namste cafe on Om beach and meeting our other friends from the forest we moved to dolphin cafe which costs a price that is almost a noon shadow of the tarrif at namaste. equivilent of 60pence a night.

So we are here and are resting our tattered feet for a few days in a paradise that we feel we earnt after the bones we bruised getting here. the beach is quite with a nice sprinkleing of fellow travellers, who outside dolphin cafe in the dark of the beach with the unseen arabian sea stroking the sand are playing amazing mixes of european music via gutair drum and maracas.As trechurous as the journey was travelling by local bus in india is one  of the best insights one can have. filled with old woen, men, bussiness suits and school children your hear what i can only translate through tone retrospectivley as complaints, spitting,mobile order and giggling.. you also see the morning, noon or evening wanderings,chores and games as you pass through villages and are rewarded with spectacular views.

And their armed with insanity. We arrived in Goa on Saturday to find Palolem Beach in good spirits. Full of holiday makers and backpackers passing through this little beach side village is full of restaurants serving everything from taccos to masala to organic vegtables…..and the little general stores are stocked with tinned tuna, baked beans, coco pops but most importantly MARTMITE… i was going to request having some sent over from england.

Many many a British person are staying here…such a contrast from spying a westerner on the streets of Mysore and becoming excited. Here you can pass by without a second glace, though with bars galore a good conversatiojn about Yorkshire, Devon or Surrey is easy to come by. As is cheap alcohol. decent wine and resonably priced sheesha.

The shops here sell clothes unlike any Ive seen in India so far, a large variety for varying prices…and some displaying various chain shop names of back home. Gorge, Monsoon and H+M to name a few. Despite this there are plenty pieces of floaty silk and novelty t-shirts to be bought, aswell as many a gorgeous bed spread and handcrafted ornaments.

In what may be a heaven for holiday makers and sunworshipers the weather as been moody. Lovely grey skys and humid air..occasional long angry bouts of rain. Weve spent the time here relaxing and getting our selves sorted. We have a big adventure to ahead to Rajastan via Bophal so we’ve spent exciting times over coffee discussing places we are going to head for in the next months and the best routes to take. Such afternoons were spent by eating out in the evening then heading to a bar for cheap portwine or cocktails and chats. Card games and snooker were involved….the card games mainly consisting of sticking cards on our foreheads with water. The sprints to the beachside bars….surprisingly some of which are 24hrs…and a late late night dip in the ocean.

Were gona move up further north to Anjuna soon…..a couple of days or similar fair I’m predicting, but with more to see around the area od Old Goa on our way to the train station. We can hire bicycles and motor bikes again and visit some hectic night markets.

If this blog has sounded at all dishearted don’t be fooled, im having a fabulous time. but illness stuck again last night, leaving me writhing in pain from an earache and a fever….mixed with dehydration (my tongue has returned to white) despite my efforts of drinking 4-6litres a day…and the lack of sweating due to the absence of sun. tuh….

To leave you with the thoughts of moody skys filled with palm trees we can view from our overly pink balcony….we can gaze down towards the beach but due to the foliage we can only catch a glimpse of what we found out to be a very salty sea. We are sharing a large room with friends we made at Sadhana though one left this morning for Rajastan and one returns home in 2weeks. We hope to meet up with Merav after we too have visited Rajastan and venture to Varanasi. This is going to be a very werid experiecne so Ive been warned, with bodies carried through the streets hundreds of times daily to be burnt. From Varanasi it has been decided that I shall go straight to Nepal and stay in Kathmandu for Christmas and New Year!!!! This was never part of the plan but Im sooo excited to visit the Himalayas and see Everest….I love the freedom.

Goa is a haven in India, mainly for the reason that as women we can kinda get away with wearing tank tops and shorts in lots of places, even the Indian women here wear jeans, tight t-shirts and carry western handbags.

Each place i see here gets more and more beautiful. Palolem was very much like a holiday village but with a nice relaxed atmosphere, nice places to stay, eat and smoke sheesa. from Palolem we caught about 4 buses, the journey was fairly easy compared to previous ones even though this time each ride was only between 30min and an hours. strangely when we alighted at Panji- the capital of Goa we were searching for the bus to Mapsua which is further north. after only several seconds walking to the crowd an urgent bus conductor from about20ft away tells us we want to get on his bus…..where is it going we inquire…Mapsua….how did he know? possibly he predicted as young white tourists we were headed for Anjuna….or he just wanted to get us on his bus….you see here most bus drivers and conductors must be on speed. they yell the destination of their vehicle repeatedly in a rolling rythmn till it no longer makes any sense, the gesture with their hands and bang on the side of the bus to tell the driver to wait whilethey usher you on before you even have chance to work out wether this bus is going in the right direction….with them yelling Mapsua Mapsua Maspa Mapeu Mallsu lsuudam’. You must be as fast and alert as them to co-ordinate your journey. the benefit of all this rushed aggressive encouragement to board a vehicle means that transfers and there for the journey time is reduced….providing you get on the right bus.

My advice for catching buses in india? dose us on coffee before a journey with many transfers, forget all British queuing customs, indians dont queue, dont take any information given to you as word, even from conductors, help desks or your lonely planet, somewhere there will always be another piece of information to contradict it and in most cases their will always be a second option of transport, route or fair.

So here we are in little Vagator a 5mintue moped ride from anjuna- both are eqaully small villages but complete with beach, shops, resturants bars and one or two clubs. a moped is essential though you will bearly use any petrol unless like us you venture to the hill top portgueguse fort in Chapora for wonderous views, or you drive back innto mad mapsua to catch a bus to river side old Goa with its towering baslica and churches.

Old Goa isn’t that pretty unless you count its cleanliess on the main boulevards. it has the importance and the cut of a colonial town with the large european buildings, but in my eyes the beauty was in large rusty boats on the river, seen from the bus ride annd the jetty. they added yet more colour to the patch work of trees and water dotted with portuguese style house riddled with cracks and vines and intricate iron gates. this style of house and buildings dominate much of goa and differentiate the state i have seen so farr from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu ( see a state map of India)

Here in Goa like in Gokarna you will find tourists and indians alike drinking kingfisher beer for breakfast and lighting a joint on the beach. it is lush with vegetation yet bright and sparkling from the sun reflected from the large stretches of river leading to the ocean. it does rain here in mad torrential storms preceded by gusts of ominous wind and power cuts.

The people we have met; Indian,Swedish, British , American, Dutch and German all wished me happy birthday at the stroke of midnight on the 16th, we celebrated Moris’s birthday ( a guy from Amsterdam) till 12am then the wreath off flowers was passed to my neck briefly between shots of tequila and dancing in the rain…then i handed them back to Morris as long as he promised to detached a large orange flower and put it in my hair so i could ‘more elegantly’ in the rain while Kate was spun round to hideously wonderful pop songs. birthday wished were sung in 3 languages and the tequila bill rose as photographic evidence of our crowd at the beach top bar was collected. I’m usually such a birthday scrooge, but it seemed like id been celebrating having a birthday in India for the past two weeks.

Sat here on my balcony looking at my view of Bhopal. power lines, a pile of red brick, white church, hotel signs, boys in uniform with back packs on their way to school,(the school uniforms here are fairly cute, old fashioned pinafore, shorts and breaches- some in tartan) a man pushing a wooden cart full of vegetables and noisy rickshaw drivers, in-fact noise in general overzealous bus drivers trigger happy with their horns. I’m accompanied by the marmite I found in Palolem and BROWN bread which i managed to buy last night…I was beginning to think it didnt existed except in posh vegan restaurants. 

Before more about Bhopal let me enlighten you about our journey to the city from Vagator Goa. After catching 3 local buses to Margo station- an art we have now perfected i like to think we arrived successfully a good hour before our train. the buses as I said went smoothly apart from a local guy trying to get us on a bus with him- he told us it was going to the station but as we had quizzed the bus driver minutes before about the destination of his journey we realised this local guys was trying o take us with him where ever he was going….he found it rather funny…we were just hot and pissed off….but as I said we did indeed make it to the station.

We ate Indian tali and boarded what was to be the 27hr train ride from Goa to Bhopal. i was surprised to find the sleeper class quite spacious and comfortable. each carriage filled with 3 tiered bunk beds some of which folded away during the day to make seats. we had the other two tiered ones that ran length ways down the other side of the train…kinda hard to describe the layout but the good thing was that we didn’t have to climb too high or fold our beds away at all seeing as I had the bottom window bunk and only Kate was above,so we could do as we wished with our beds.

Most people opened the windows fully to cool off as the train pulled out of the station-for this we were very grateful. then que the never ending stream of chai, samosa and other food wallahs roaming up and down the train corridor. chai on tap- the small sweet spiced teas you can buy everywhere for 5 ruppes or less. this was an entertaining and fun part of the trip a hit of sugar and caffine when ever you needed pretty much and the chanting of   ‘Chai chai chaiaa chaiaa masala chai.’

After a small nap and getting used to our surroundings, mainly the food wallahs chain wallahs and chai men attributing to the constant noise in true Indian style we realised we were traveling at the most beautiful time of the day through the most beautiful breathtaking landscape. It must have been around 5pm buy this time and the sun was getting lower in the sky bouncing through the forested mountains which rewarded us with magnificent views of waterfalls, rivers and vast hill sides intricately embroidered with green trees. Beauty is not the word. but it is the first that comes to mind.

Its one thing hanging out of a moving train (for the carriage door could always be open) smoking a cigarette with your silk elephant shawl flapping around your shoulders and collar bones…but then its another thing altogether when you realise its suddenly dark now the glow from the sunset has finally diminished and you can see flashes of lighting illuminating patches of clouds that have rolled in to your distant view. Storms which must be miles away as no thunder is to be heard and there is no rain to see or feel. just sudden flashes of electricity exploding inside the clouds every minute or so. you can view these from your bed which luckily stretches across two windows but even though the land scape is moving in one direction you could be travelling south, west or skywards because of the change of direction snaking round corners so tight that you can see what you figure must be most of the train because it is so long. the direction has too changed many times, you fall asleep travelling head first in the direction the train is moving, you wake up and the direction has been reversed so now your feet will be first to reach your destination (unless direction is changed again)

Sleep is good…until the snoring begins, maybe its just all Indian men or maybe as we realised when we ventured to a quieter cabin of the train- we were unluckily placed amongst the heaviest snorers know to young British girls. honestly it was like symphony of snores, deep, high pitched, long throttling drones and crescendo-ing snorts. anything less then this orchestra would have been frustrating but this was simply hilarious. i felt like joining in. today- before our next train journey…we are buying ear plugs.

 The morning mists on the fields you shuttling past is equally as magnificent at the sun sets – sun sets that you can imagine are only possible in India. Ive yet to see any  sun down in Europe or Britain that rivals the large deep orange egg yolk waiting to be burst by a fork or bread solider. a red generously applied ink dot blotting, seeping through a little water on a cartridge page. some times the colour spreads intrusively into the surround sky and other times like an un-burst egg yolk the coloured circle simply swells not quite fighting its way out imprisonment of the sphere. I’m not a romantic type..but such views call for such a description.

Bhopal is definitely the dirtiest city we’ve been in. Bangalore was mostly clean in the centre and the modern housing complex where we stayed. though as with everywhere after the first few pile of rubbish you neglect to notice them anymore. I was surprised to arrive at the hotel Sonali- posh and clean with a bell boy and door man nonetheless! ( note; we are still only paying the equivalent of 2.50 per night here -which is cheaper then the dirty hotel in Mysore) My surprise at the cleanliness was due to the dirty back streets wehad traveled down in the rickshaw to reach the Sonali.

 Despite all beauty India IS dirty and shockingly the people dont seem to care, many times food trays and packets weve eaten from at cafes and roadsides have been thrown on the floor besides us, as the waiter cleans the table on our departure. Its as if nobody seems aware of the impact on the enviroment in which they live, there just used to it and continue to throw rubbish off rooftop cafes and out of train windows.

Back to Bhopal…In the morning when I leave the hotel in search of breakfast I know Kate is going to hate it here. Instantly I’m pointed at and questioned- don’t i want a taxi, a rickshaw, a friend?…..a women smoking…that is q sin!! The gritty city howeverchas its own prettiness in the cold morning sun, for it is a lot cooler here then Goa was…and Goa in turn was cooler then Pondicherry – as has been the pattern as we travel north. Its so strange to us to feel chilly, and equally strange to see Indian business men dressed in knitted sweater vests and women (when spotted) wearing cardigans underneath their sari. Though its still a damn sight warmer in the day then an english summer! I mean it is still India. The ear muffs and puffer coats sold of cart vendors on the streets aren’t quite necessary for us Brits just yet, though I can imagine at some part of our trip in Rajasthan I will invest in a nice red duffle coat for the equivalent in rupees to a fiver.

Bhopal isn’t much of a tourist hive….well we haven’t seen another westerner at-all since arrival and their defiantly isn’t a tourist draw to the city since mostly it is associated with the chemical disaster several years ago. However these are the reasons I wanted to visit this city. The chemical spill is not mentioned or remembered anywhere which I found dissapointing but intriguing. I love Bhopals insanity. Only in India would u see a landdrover driving with poles double the length of the vehicle hanging out of both the back and front windscreen.

Another draw for me was the open air Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalya Musem. Essentlially a museum dedicated to the historical and indigenous Indian cultures. The grounds on Shamla Hill over looking the lake are home to specially constructed local houses of tribes from all over India. With an anthropological interest, it was reassuring to see recognition to native peoples and their ways of living. Though having traveled though India for almost 2months now I felt that the individually constructed homes of each community couldn’t really be represented in any other place but their own environment. In a way the museum park tried  to condense the way different indigenous people live into one complex. Almost to offer the option of seeing all of the localities at once. Still I was mightily impressed something like this existed, almost like a history museum before its needed, seeing as most of the construction I was familiar with from my time in Sadhana forest, and the beach houses and huts in Gokarna and Goa.

After a walk down from Shamla and lots of propositions from guy on bikes we hail a rickshaw to the lake, which in my opinion is the shinning jewel of the city- and its a huge jewel at that, as you can bearly see one side from the other. “That isn’t a lake” according to Kate. It doesn’t take much discussion between the two of us to decide that we’ll opt for the speed boat ride round the lake instead of the pedal or rowing boats. As much fun as the latter can be the men driving the speed boats looked as if they may make your ride worth while by tipping you into the water round a sharp turn….it provided a pretty view of the city just seeing the water and then the far off shore and none of the dirt.

And that was bhopal, we made the most of our ‘free’ wi-fi in our hotel room, ate cheap local chicken byriani ( successfully) then treated ourselves to a box of Indian sweets. We took a walk the next day deep into the city markets and passed through areas where I’d place a hefty bet no white girl has walked before. then its time for another train as we make our way to Bundi, Rajasthan.

 First stop; Bundi.

After much fustration on my part trying to find the quietest, easiest, cheapest way to Bundi we went to a travel agent….well two. The first had bearly heard of Bundi and wanted to send us to Bombay, and the second told us all the trains were booked…We were just walking out of his door when him and his son find a route we can take. Bophal to Bina, then Bina to Kota….I already knew that from Kota we could get a regular local bus to Bundi , plus after busing it around Goa we were used to 3 leg journeys.

The change from train to train unfortunately would take place at 2am, so after about 2hrs squished into a seat with 6 men opposite on a seat made for 3, we fled gratefully to Bina platform. We knew we had around an hour to wait and would have been grateful of a chai wallah, who always seem to be present at every station 24hrs. Instead we dealt with the constant up close stares of old men without the sugar or caffine and the sleazy smirks of boys trying not so successfully to take a sneaky picture of us on their phones. It was a strange scene at the station, as it was so cold most people were wrapped in scarfs and blankets.. Kate opened here rucksack to see how many layers she could fit on, the late time and coldness seemed to of made us a bit delirious, but still the sight of many many people sleeping on the platform shrouded from head to toe in sheets was surreal. Like I was about to board a funeral train.(Bring on Varanassi) The large mural of psychedelic mushrooms on the station wall above the bodies  didn’t help my sanity in this situation.

We made it to bundi still intact and headed straight for a guest house our friend had recommended. The R.N Haveli was no ordinary guest house, described to us as a home away from home it was definitely cosy and fairly cheap. It was owned by a family of power women. Mama, as she introduced herself was in-charge and certainly took no rubbish from the men in her family who visited from time to time, or any males at all, she told us of the things she would do to young boys if she caught them looking through windows to spy on her daughters. ( Alot of bitting and strangling judging from her actions too)

She was the first woman to open up her home to guests in Bundi and suffered much controversy for it. Bundi was unlike any other town I’d been to before in India, we were in the north now so apart from the colder weather I was expecting something different. The tall square houses with their flat roof tops and random clusters of stairs reminded me of the trips id been on to Tunisia when I was young.

Here music was blasted out in the streets for several processions that took place the first day we arrived. Lots of brass instruments, tubas trumpets were sounded for what we later learned was a wedding. I hadn’t heard music like this yet in India. From a roof top cafe at one of the other Haveli’s we had an awesome view of the town around us, over looked by the great fort and palace.We planned to go up there the next day.

As look would have it we met a Norwegian and a German over dinner and made more plans to go and see a waterfall the next morning. At sometime after 11am as the driver was late we packed 3 grown men and  two women into an unlicensed taxi -driven as a hobby by a nurse who also worked at a guest-house….On the way pointed out to us were ‘prostitute colonys’ .

For the first time as we set out to the waterfall we could see why Bundi was called the blue town, its strange that you don’t see the colouring from the ground but up on the road you could see that around 80 percent of the buildings were painted blue. Bhranham blue to keep the homes cool and ward off insects. After as many jokes as you can have with an Aussie, a Kiwi, an Indian, one Scandinavian and two Brits stuffed into a car, we reached the waterfall.

  Only the pictures will do it a little justice. It wasn’t especially tall, 40metres or so but the sereeness and the beauty of the green lagoon at the bottom was enough to make you want to throw yourself from the top and into the cool waters. We climbed the steps down past the two temples to the dried river below and clambered the rocks until we found a nice pair of flat boulders to bathe on next to the large pool. The water was icily cold, but we swam nonetheless, until we reached the mass of water cascading over the rock face. In the dazzling sunlight the water droplets sparkled and the whole scene was magical. We fought our way under the waterfall itself and sat behind it on the rock face.. with the water pouring down in front of us. I could have set up a house right there….though it would have been very wet so after a moment to ponder such a possibility, I decided my future home would be on a ledge opposite from where I’d have a full view of the rocks,water and trees.

We all ventured up to the fort that evening just before sunset so we had an amazing view of the palace and the town, at the most beautiful time of day. Climbing through the fort was much fun with the large wooden doors and stone gates still intact. We chose a little hovel about half way up to watch the sunset and weren’t disturbed by the infamous monkeys.. until we let our guard down. They stole my wallet…then dropped it after a breif chase and and a water bottle being thrown at them….we should of bought the sticks a wallah offered us before we set out up the hill (sold specailly for hitting monkeys with)…but then after this incident we found out own monkey sticks.

As our Norwegian friend said you could live up in the fort buildings and no one would be any the wiser, who was going to trek up the hill to see what you were doing? Who was going to care? Though you’d be cold so would have to be sure to take atleast 4 blankets with you for the night. Making our way back down and narrowly avoiding another monkey attack to the 1st member of the party (that would have been me)… we reformed and landed safely at the bottom of the fort with nothing but a large monkey ‘coming up behind us’.Presumably to see us off his territory.

 The next evening, an 8 and a half hour government bus ride later we are in Udaipur, reunited with out friend Merav. Illness has prevented me till now from moving or leaving the hotel much but this morning early on, before the morning prayer call that makes Kate groan I ventured up on to the roof top of our hotel where mattresses and pillows litter the floor, i sit here comfortably typing surrounded by views of buildings and lights with the prayer calls echoing round me.  From Rajasthan with love x

After a day recovering from sickness in Udaipur, I  ventured outside with ‘my girls’. You really do make the best friends while travelling. We had found Merav when we arrived the previous night, lying in wait for us on the staircase.

That night we went down to the ghats- the big article lakes originally meant for bathing- I wouldn’t try that now…. but they were pleasant enough to sit by and look out at the island buildings all lit up. Udaipur is one of the locations where they filmed The Bond film ‘Octopussy’.  I vaguely recognized the island/palace Octopussy herself ‘occupied.’ I had the urge to swim over and sneak in bond style. Sadly lack of energy prevented me.

The next Morning feeling much better we explored the streets – well, I was guided by Merav and Kate who had orientated themselves the previous afternoon while Iwas resting. All the shops were full of beautiful Rajasthani handicrafts and paintings. Here there was a choice of numerous painting and cookery courses you could take (as Merav had done while waiting for us to catch up with her.)

Colourful embroiderd juttis (simple Indian shoes) Pashmina as intricately embroidered as I have ever seen and delicately hand painted cards featuring Rajastani soldiers, princesses and gods. the bazaars were steep and winding as we made our way up to the beautiful palace which had amazing views and displays of injurious looking amour. In the sunshine we continued to the less touristy bazaars. I purchased Kiplings ‘Kim’ which I have been meaning to read, he wrote it in Rajasthan and my grandad filmed the BBC series here in the 80s. I was led to a small jewelry shop where I was told another nice Indian gentlemen would push a piece of metal through my nose for only the price of the gold used, he did a good job. two down one to go :->

On the way home that day in the narrow bazaars of Udaipur we got trapped behind a wedding precession, two large carriages carrying the wedding party followed a music cart blaring out drumming and singing from metal loud speakers. Behind the carriage followed a long train of beautifully coloured sari’s worn by relatives. Trying to weave our way round we got tangled in amidst the celebrations- it felt like we were crashing the party…

 Great fun was had in a shoe shop with two Indians who didn’t actualy own the shop but were looking over it for their brother. They were a little nervous about prices, but after a little joking and laughing I’m positive we got good deal. They also recommended their own businesses, one a roof top cafe, named ‘Cool’ despite the cheesy name (inavitable in India) we promised to pay a visit too later. We ate a good tali in a restaurant frequented by locals (a sign the food is tasty and good value) then we visited the Cool cafe in the evening as promised and shared sweets, some lassi and a kingfisher beer-this place was frequented by westerners obviously. We met some stoned French guys and an English couple who entertained us midly before going in search of chai.

We must of walked for about an hour looking for a chai stop. Honestly we thought, this is India you can ALWAYS get chai, but we failed to find a single place serving it. It was likely that this was going to be remembered as the laughable night we DIDN’T get chai.

 Dizzily we recalled that at our hotel the little roof top cafe did in fact served chai- masala tea, although it wasn’t as good a the small sweet shots the street vendors sold. We made our way up to the roof and ordered glad our search was finally going to be over but still seething that chai which is ALWAYS possible on nearly every street….was not possible tonight……on the roof of our hotel our ‘chai’ came. Alas! it had no sugar! It was served in a mug! Almost traditional English tea except stronger and a little spiced! This will forever be remebered as the night we ALMOST got chai.

The next morning we set out for Jodhpur, a fairly easy 5 ½ hour bus ride, though it was Kates turn to feel unwell. first impressions arnt everything I hoped as we arrived at a suburban bus stop in the newer part of town. I was reassured when we reach the old town within the city wall. the market we drove through looked full colourful and full of activity. We saw a few guesthouses within the same area and ended up with a lovely spacious room ornately decorated with statues shelved all the way around the perimeter above our beds. we were staying in sunrise guesthouse, owned by the infamous Mr.Prakash. ( there were posing photos of him all around the sitting room – in some of them he was wearing aviators)

Merav and myself explored the market around the old clock tower while Kate rested.It was busy, full of beautiful fabrics, cheap (some tacky) jewlery, spices and vegtables. we sucessfully bought chai and i came across some red hair henna, it was only as i looked up to ask the price i found the old man grinning a me and pointing to his beard. As red as my hair had been before i left! He proceeded to remove the bumby multi-coloured Rajasthani turban and pointed at his flame cloured hair. I was impressed. and vowed to myself to return to purchase the henna the next day.That evening with my favorite invalid on the mend we all visited a fabric handicrafts shop where i owed the owner a few rupees for some water – their so trusting here. As promised we looked round his workshop to find the most amazingly embroiled and mirrored bed spreads- made he told us from scraps of shirts and materials used and made by women out in the deserts…. The prices were so good and we would of bought if there hadn’t of had the burden of carrying them in our rucksacks. 

We didn’t eat brilliantly that night, we ate late at a seedy hotel where worryingly there were no other diners…we were pretty certain the waiter had just gotten out of bed as he rushed in apologizing for being late and took our order. Also we were sure that our bottles of water had to be retrieved from a street vendor as it took so long for them to run and get it. This is India.

Shopping the next day in search of cooler weather necessities, I tried and failed at two interval sin the day too find the red bearded man….I began to think that it had been a once in a life time opportunity to buy red henna off a man with a beard as red as rubies.

After a cheap tali again for lunch we rested for the afternoon and played with the toys we had bought (notepads, gorgeous threads and books) then we set out in search of the famous saffron lassi’s and weren’t disappointed. The lonely planet had recommend a place across from the clock tower, naturally since its appearance in the world famous guide lots of other stalls had set up claiming also to be recommended by ‘books’. Fourtantly we easily located the original place and expericed a lassi so sweet and creamy it had to be eaten with spoons. I couldn’t Imagen what saffron tasted like on its own and neither could i remember if i had ever tasted it mixed in a dish. This lassi tasted like the Indian sweets we loved so much and we described the drink as a glass of creamy heaven. Impressed by the guide books recommendation we stopped on our walk home at the famous omelette’s shop, every time we had passed it previously the owner called out; 

         ‘One stop famous omelette shop, highly recommended by lonely planet!’ In a horsey Indian voice that made  me laugh. As we sat we red the signs and news paper clippings around about the businesses that claimed to get through 1000 eggs a day. the story behind the small business that had grown after its write up in the guide book made the diners at the very small food stall feel that the experience was a must. Jodhpur fort is not to be missed we rickshawed up at a sensible time in the morning before the sun got to hot. it was an expensive admission which came with an audio tour that generally i would of opted out of…though as i had paid a sizable amount of ruppees i accepted the guide and placed it round my neck. i was glad i tried it, it was by far the most informative and interesting audio i had listened to…though it couldn’t compete with the views of the blue city from the fort and palace. intricate architecture, magnificent views (pictures can only hope to do it justice) and glorious artifacts throughout the palace made for an amazing morning.

At one point we were in our room when Merav came rushing back from checking bus prices to jaislamer. ‘I think we’ve just been invited to a wedding.’ ……’Im not sure’ she added. Well that was the next evening planned. Merav had though right, we had indeed been invited to a wedding party that night, by Mr.Prakash’s relative that we’d affectionatley named ‘Skinny’ Mr.Prakash and who worked at the guesthouse. Apparently its good luck for westerners to be present at an Indian wedding. Since this was just the after party we didnt need to be to formal and could dress in western clothes. Damn, no excusable sari buying.

There were many wedding parties that night as this year November and December were the  auspisoius time for weddings in southeern Rajasthan. Our celebration was a splendid display of sparkling sari, the one the bride was wearing clearly putting shame to all the others. She and the groom (him beaming and her traditionally moody) stood in front of an embellished swing seat on a stage, so all present could go and have there picture taken with them. Naturally we didn’t miss out on the opportunity to get a better look at the mesmerizing sari and jewels.

After some food and sweets, a few stares and conversations our chaperone ordered ‘Lets go’ just as he had done before we left the guesthouse. We were surprised he didn’t want to stay longer but then I realised he’d probably frequented so many wedding party’s that season he was probably bored stiff.(He looked it) Kate and Merav had ridden to the party in the rickshaw with the man from our guest house and as he had instructed one girl to ride on the motorbike with his cousin I stepped up. The ride there went smoothly. the ride back was a different matter. After he attempted taking me to a bar instead of home I threaten to jump off his bike and waved my arms knowing to attract attention….after some long repetative negotiationns while he drove to the bar I convinced him to turn around and take me back to the guesthouse…no I didnt want a drink nor did Iwant to put my arms round his waist. All this done in a friendly manner obviously as he was ofcourse in control of the bike I was riding. When we reached the guesthouse Skinny Mr.Prakash looked worried seemed to scold my driver. Amusingly or not the guys at the omlette shop had warned us of a  creepy guy with a mustache who worked at the guesthouse…we had laughed at them as so many indians have mustaches…..however thinking about it afterwards my driver seemed to fit the bill.

After our fun in jodpur we hit jaisalmer. We were touted on the bus by a really nice manager of a hotel and the offer sounded too good to be true. we checked it out anyway and an it was even better then ot had sounded. the quivalent of a small four star hotel for the price we’d paid for beach huts in gokarna. We felt like we were in luxury and the hotel arrange camel treks like we’d hoped to do here. Only the thought of riding a camel four 2-3 days  made my legs sore so we arranged to ride to some sandunes in the afternoon the have a bedouin dinner and camp out in the desert. the camel ride was as i had experienced it before, fun, bumpy and beautiful when we reached the dunes as sat down near a man who conviently turned out to be selling cold Kingfisher beer.

We had the rajastani  muscians and dancers almost to ourselves at the bedouin camp and then our driver (see also: the hotel manager) brought out some fouton matresses up onto some dunes accompined wth plenty of blankets and we set about making a fire for an evening gazing at the moon.It is such a happy feeling to wake up to a rising sun in the desert whilte the sand and th air are still cold. we werent that far to far from civilisation with desert camps in view but still it was so serene we could have been in sleeping in the wilderness.

Another night in our gorgeous hotel and then it was time for the bus to bikaner- this time it was Merav’s turn to feel unwell. There wasnt much to see in Bikaner, the main attraction being the rat temple near by (well 1hr and 15 bus ride away). It had  intrieged us from the first time it was mentioned an was the main reason to stay in the small dirty town. Our rickshaw from the bus stand was insistant we look at his brother’s guesthouse before we go to any others. It was nice enough and as we were only stying for one night we once again gave in to the touts- feeling lucky though a tad defeated as we prided ourselves in beating touts at their own games. We walked in to the town to book our bus tickets out for the next day-there really wasnt a lot to see save a lot of rubbish and cows on the streets.

We adopted an older british guy who told me facinatingly he had lived in Papau New Guinea for two years, or PNG as he called it (my ultimate goal is the south pacific). He accompained us to the rat temple and upon hearing of our plans for Amritsar booked on the same bus. From the tales I was expecting to see the temple over run with rats- don’t get me wrong, there were lots of them, well feed on vats of milk and allowed to run roit through the walls,pipes and any cracks they could find to cram themselves into. A lot of excitement was shown by the Indian worshippers over the ‘white mouse’ which sensibly had chosen th darkest corner to hide in. The rodents slept and play everywhere, alone or in big groups runnign over one another or scurrying in the way which rats do, quickly across the marble floors.

later that evening we boared our bus to Amritsar (a good 10hrs) at 5.30, this meant that after many crotches and arses rubbing against my sholder on the ride -invitable on most indian buses, we eventually arrived in amritsar at around 5am. We had planned to stay in the Golden Temple, the holiest place for good natured sikhs which opens their doors to everyone and provide beds for visiters. Unfortuanly our luck was outas  we were told  it was full and we opted for a rude and unfriendly near by guesthouse. We later found out that there were rooms spare and we could of stayed at the temple (for free i might add) in a special area for foriegners, in a room more comfotable then the guest house. You win some you lose some I guess. We’d wait to see how the rest of Amristar panne out, before we judged our luck.

 The Punjab- Amritsar 

Sitting up on the ‘Balcony’ or rooftop of sorts at our guesthouse I can see hear, smell and feel the golden temple…if I wanted to compete the last of the five senses i could go down stairs and touch it. for it is open 24hrs a day 365days a year to everybody or all nationalities and religions. i feel honored as a Britain and a baptised Christian (not practicing) to be allowed in to a place so holy for seeks.

Its a beautiful place with the golden temple its self seemingly suspended on water which is surrounded by a white marble walk way….from one side a golden and marble bridge stretches from the marble to the temple itself. in the mornings many take baths around the perimeters. this morning, sitting typing at 5am on the roof top….my favorite time it seems….i was listening to the forever continuous chants from the temple when a group young Indian men emerge from the other side of my (until now) private rooftop…Amritsar is a hive of activity at all times of day and night but i didn’t except other people of my age and Indian tourists at that to be up and lively. after introducing them selves and questioning my strange behavior of sitting out in the cold the tell me about themselves. they are a group from Delhi who work for HP computer systems, and the are visiting Amritsar like me. Unlike me they have decided to take a bath in the temple this morning along with the many worshipers. it seems to me it is something or a novelty swell as a spiritual thing to do- as their supervisor a very cute and friendly guy is rallying them to get up and come and take a bath…be ready at 5.30..no later……ok, ok 5.45…we go no delay..and 5 min later latest 6am as he see though lively and excited the troops are unwilling to leave the warmth of their rooms.

I decline not because I wouldn’t appreciate a cold dip…I’d probably get cleaner then I have been in weeks but also as Kate is still trying to sleep in the room behind the door I lean against …..the main reason however is that two white girls going into a holy place to strip off and wash? Strikes me firstly as an unnecessary attention missile and also we would appear very disrespectful although our intentions would be anything but.

After more talk -which I’m sure wakes Kate- I’m fed information about the temple and various other places on my lists to visit….the Taj Mahal is a symbol of love…the architect chopped off the hands of anyone who tried to copy the architecture…..the golden temple wasn’t always golden….a Maharajaha donated/supplied the 34carat gold to cover the once white marble temple. The small artificial lake the temple sits on is the holiest lake in all the land….in all the world I am told.

The nice boys invite me to a bonfire they plan to have that night and introduce me to a few lady friends they have with them -who they are trying to rouse for the morning bath. these are by far the most genuinely friendly guys of a large group I’ve met so far…..a great contrast to 12 hours ago when we were watching the border retreat between India and Pakistan and constantly getting felt up by various men. after exchanging numbers and email which i gladly do return to my writing and they to their attempts at getting each other to their freezing bath.

The border change on the Indian Pakistan border takes places every evening. the border is about 30km from Amritsar and we took a cheap shared taxi with the forfeit of arriving just in time. this meant we missed out on the special seats reserved for foreigners and instead excitedly and anxiously plunged into the Indian crowd who were standing every which way and that to get a view of the Indian border security force and the Pakistani side. the whole event is very friendly and a bit of fun as the Indians and Pakistanis show up everyday to rally for their side. the 8 or soldiers dressed in what would be the equivalent of beef-eater high kick and march their way to the gate in pairs and both sides square up and in my imagination growl at each other much like rugby teams. a spectacle to watch and to feel part of within the local crowd…an mazing experience if you can escape the sleazy Indians with camera phones and wandering hands…though Kate suffered much more then me, a blond attractive female has little chance battling against the pop star/porn star stereotype of fair hair here in India.

We also visited the Jalamwalabagh where as a Britain i felt like a trespasser,another Britain we had traveled to Amritsar with also said he felt guilty, as this was the place while during th unrest in Punjab amidst the struggle against British rule in India British general dyer unleashed random fire on an innocent crowd of demonstrating Indian locals. from what i have gathered (as my English history taught me nothing but medieval agricultural farming methods…the Indians were peacefully demonstrating against the enforcement of arrest without charge and they were banned from meeting in groups bigger then two. the general apparently saw them as a threat and squeezed an armoured truck down a tiny gap between two buildings to the ground here they gathered. he ordered fire, killing 2000 Indians.  the area is now a beautifully serene memorial garden….like said as a British person you are not so often but uncomfortably reminded from time to time about British rule in India….this is one of the more uncomfortable times. ( especially when 9 or 20 school girls on a trip in their tartan uniforms come running to make friends with you,asking for a picture…then asking where your from…..i was almost tempted to say the US.

The HP group have opted for a warm sweet Chai..presumably to make their dip in the water even colder…and have brought me a cup…as teens do they amusingly swap footwear between the boys and girls making jokes and referring to the boy in sandals as baby…..then they deliver birthday punches to the unfortunate candidate…..in a somewhat more prolonged and violent way then back home…the waiter bringing chai even jokes brandishing  stick….follows a conversation about traditions of birthday bump and a jokingly threatening
 roar as i tell them my birthday was only 2weeks ago.

We spend the next day getting lost through a maze of tall tightly packed whole sale stores. we’d stumbled in from the main bazaar and got a chance to glace at the fabrics without being hounded by shop keepers. from the lack of hassel should of guessed that these shops might be different. unfortunaly we only got told they were wholesalers after we’d fell in love with some fabrics and made them in to dresses and curtains in our dreams.

We set off on our over night journey to Jaipur where we’d catch a bus to Ajmer then another to Pushka. .We’d taken a chance as we were told there was a possibilities we moth might have to squeeze onto one bunk if there wasn’t another one available… but we were confident one would be as the seeing system always messed up anyway…..and unsurprisningly  we were right.  i slept well considering being moved on various other bunks. being on the train in India is one of the best experiences, the rattleing windows, doors and most probable tracks makes the journeys so different to the smooth quiter journeys back home…though not more so then the views. this ride we were treated to a candy cane of desert and towns on our way to jaipur. there is nothing better then the trains in India, especially standing at the open doors being battered by cold winds at 4am watching the world fly by, then stopping a Chai wallah on the way back to your bunk.

 The buses to Ajmer then to Puskar are easy enough to catch, though our young swarve rickshaw drivers in jaipur (one named tiger) who ferried us from train station to bus stand were dissapointed  we didn’t want to stay in Jaipur (I do want to return and visit at some point). They were helpful enough though at got rid of a tout who wanted us to pay for a deluxe bus to Ajmer.

So here we are in pushkar, the place to shop and buy jewlery, so its tourist area again and being back south in Rajasthan we can feel the sun once more. our hotel is cheap, friendly and lovely and the restaurants serving pasta and pizza make us feel like were on Holiday again. our porter at the hotel had to make us sit down and have a coffee so we would slow down. we had the intention to get clean asap after numerous days on the move without washing. We bombared him with questions of hot waater and laundry so he sat us down and made us relax first. then after some breakfast/lunch at 2pm we finally got clean. it is thee best feeling. we’d chatted with the manager after our lunch and he moved  us to an even nicer room with a loverly balcony, tv and a busy view of pushka- all for the same price.

A walk down the bazzars to find dinner confirmed the assurance that Pushka was the place to do shopping, Rajasthani handicrafts and traditional costume twinkled at us in the fading light, jewelry shops with hoards of interesting stones and gems glinted and sang…come take a look (as did the voices of the owners) the place was a long bazzar of heaven. Pushka was a little oasis (coincidently the name of our hotel) after the long hours of buses and sight seeing in Rajasthan.. here we will unwind and indulge in some retail therapy-in fact we already have slashed out at what must be the only vintage clothes shop in India, buying,  70s floral patterned dresses and trying on 40’s style skirts. Sensibly we have decided not to include that spend in our budget. It’ll only come to an extra hour and a half hours work when we get home.

Well after a fairly cozy but long night (13hrs meant to be 10) which had required skillful bladder control we reached Delhi, we had shared a double sleeper compartment on a an over night bus and it was surprisingly comfortable. unlike other buses however which usually stopped near a station of main street this one threw us off at a petrol station on a busy highway…..our only option which no auto-rickshaws crying for our attention we ventured along the side of the road for a while before giving into a cycle rick-shaw which looked less up to carrying a 60 litre rucksack then me or Kate….the driver insisted it could take the weight of two rucksacks plus us girls…..and surprisingly it did. after our first 200ms we learnt our lesson- we hadn’t arranged the bags well atop the wooden struts at the back and we’d only traveled for 60secs or so when we heard shouts from the petrol station behind….our duffel-esque bag (newly bought in Pushka for the purpose of transporting Christmas presents to be sent home) had fallen off the rick-shaw and into the middle of the busy highway. Indian traffic of course had no problem swerving round the duffel but the embarrassment of yelling stop and running to retrieve it added to the pain of being pulled slowly with our heavy luggage atop a tiny cart propelled by the legs of a man half our size. the drivers spluttering and coughing in the polluted Dehli air made me sure he as going to pack it in (drop dead rather then give up) halfway to the main bazaar. despite our insistent requests to ‘stop here, we walk from here!’ he drove (half pushed) us to the main bazaar…then also half way down before we got him to stop.

We found the guest house in which Merav was staying and bumped into her between buying necessities and checking in. The main bazaar is busy as one would expect and stocked with guest houses and many a shop selling everything from cheap poor quality garments to magnificent Rajasthani and southern materials. lots of curiosity/antique shops also mixed in with the usual tourist smoking paraphernalia. plenty of cheap places to eat as well with food ranging from pizza to dosa (a southern Indian pancake) of course the usual local street vendors and tali restaurants. The area is cheap in city terms with dusty or scummy but habital rooms for the price of a deluxe in other towns. No shining polished brass of prestigious hotels or expensive shopping malls thankfully so appart from the other western faces on the streets you do feel like your experiencing a slice of the Indian city.

Your more then experiencing it, your inhaling it. You can feel the effects on your respiratory system within moments of stepping off the bus or train. the hazy smoggy that hangs round the buildings is visual proof of the pollution and if you still want proof of the awful air quality blowing your nose after an hour of walking the blocks around the station and main bazaar turn your cheap white tissue paper a nice grubby black. Lovely.

Its an immense city of which we are only frequenting a fraction, remaining around the main bazzar, steeping out only to a nearby cafe, bar, post office or hardware store (British girl in search of pliers and wire cutters only adds to the bizarreness of her red hair and multiple nose piercings)

I was surprised to find street cleaners here…but it made sense with so many people living in close proximity and all no notion of or recycling 0or even bins..They’d be walking on a carpet of litter within days. While staying here we mainly shop for Christmas presents on the main bazaar. we only had a few days before Kate was to fly home to surprise the masses for Christmas. I would be heading to Varanasi with Merav they we too would go our separate ways, her to China and myself to Nepal. it was an very exciting prospect. all be it a tad stress full sorting out things i no longer wanted to carry and thing that Kate carried that i would need…on top of that wanting to shower people back home with gifts, but only having a limited amount of space. We would all be back in Delhi at some point and after a month of sight seeing round Rajasthan we took a break and kept away from the main tourist attractions. one morning however we did take a sly trip to The International Doll museum dragging a sweet Israeli boy in tow. Merav introduced us to some acquaintances she had made in our absence, a British stoner and a creepy Hare Krishna Brazilian dude along with some book another of his com padres had written….we were ‘krishned’ out.

All of us with colds (Kate with no voice) we said goodbye to the blond one and headed for out train to Varanasi. the train system in India is impossible to work out…but some how it works. we had paid the guy we booked our ticket through (the same guy we bought mobile phones from) an extra fee to ensure we would get two seats rather then one on the train. we thought we had been swindled when the ticket inspector told us we only had seat 15….but it strangely worked out as conveniently bed 16 was free the entire way to Varanasi too…

Wary of rickshaw drivers and there drive from commission we took a pre-paid rickshaw (though they still tried to get us to their hotel) the tiny streets surround the ghats on the side of the river Ganga didn’t along for rickshaws so at the main road I left Merav with out the baggage while i followed one of the drivers through the alley ways to check out a guest house. it was about a 10mintue walk…and i couldn’t help thinking how clever they were to split us up…now we were easier victims…haha no such luck – fresh from the crowds of Delhi we had both been itching to punch the next guy that tried to touch us and make scene.

The back streets were unlike anything I had scene in India so far- as I have said before each place is so different yet more beautiful. When I look back at my photos however I find myself reminded of how immensely beautiful previous places have been and am unable to compare the past and the current. The best thing is not to try. The alley so small and dark were still awash with people and tiny cupboard like shops, squeezing in a vague clearing of buildings was a vegetable market, adding more colour the the painted but peeling buildings and drawing my attention from the cow shit every half meter.

We weren’t heading in a straight line…nor even an Indian straight. We seemed to be turning corners every few seconds weaving deeper and deeper in although some times my orientation told me we must be turning back on ourselves. We reached the large Guest House and I went to see the room the receptionist had told me was free. I understood why he didn’t accompany me as I trasped up the four steep flights and past many guests (he obviously wasn’t desperate to sell us the room at the cheap price I had requested.

Satisfied I mazed back through the ally which would have been impossible without my guide. when I reached the rickshaw after noting that Merav hadn’t been abducted, whispered to her….’Ive just seen my first dead body’. Varanassi is the holy place by the Ganges that Hindus come to die. its a great wish by all to be cremated here then remains to be thrown into the great holy river. As I had been trying to familiarizing myself with the alleys on my way back to the luggage there had been a lot of drumming and noise- a procession led by a shrouded body tied to a wooden stretcher was headed our way. The body adorned in orange cloths and flowers looked almost like it was trying to escape as the men supporting the stretcher strode at different levels on the warped cobble streets.

we were staying near the main marakirna ghat. One of the main burning ghats in Varanasi. bodies are burnt here all day everyday and a holy flame, the flame of Shiva is kept burning through the night. it has been burning for 3000 years continuously. each funeral pire is lit from the holy Shiva flame. we made our way down to the ghat which cant be seen even from higher roof tops due to the close accumulation of buildings adopting a guide on the way who led us to the unmarked house from which non Hindus were allowed to view the holy flames and cremations. I hadn’t known what to expect as respectfully no pictures are allowed, so no one had ever showed me the amazing scene that was played out below me. around 10 large fires burned brightly and we felt the heat on out cheecks two floors up in a building 20ft away.

This building was actually a hospice the dweller told us and other western viewers. The dying would come here in their final days, to spend their final days/hours next to the river and ensure a cremation within 24hours of their soul leaving the body. Down below he pointed out a body shrouded in red cloth almost lost within the blazing grip of one pire- the body of a women we were told, men we could see were shrouded in white. the elder sons would shave their hair and beards before the body was carried through the streets to the ghat the representative of the hospice told us. The sons preformed the important parts of the ceremony by bathing in the river to purify them selfs, they would carry the fire of Shiva to light their parents pire and sprinkle the fire with powdered incense. they would wait 3hours for the body to fully burn then extinguish the fire with water from the river, the lass cup throwing over their shoulder then walking away without looking back.

The remains of the dead would be fished from the ashes, the strongest parts of the body would not burn fully, the hips of women and the chest of a man, these would be thrown into the river. sometimes flaming ashes are sprinkled into the river aswell. not every death is treated the same. The Brahman caste had a separate burning area higher above the river so their bodies are not touched by others flames. Holy men who are pure are thrown into the river without burning with a rock tied to their feet. Children who are also pure get the same treatment as do pregnant women. Strangely I find that if you are lucky enough to be killed by a snake bite you receive a holy death too and join the holy men and children in being thrown whole into the Ganga. Im told this is because a snake is the necklace worn by the god Shiva and so death by snake gives you right to a holier death.

The burning bodies didn’t smell. Bodies waiting to be doused in the water then place upon the piers of flames were laid somewhat unceremoniously on the steps till their fire was ready. All in all it was an amazing accumulation of ceremony taking place. No sadness just repect and smiles, even joking looked to be permitted at we saw smirks and laughs. We were asked for a donation and gladly gave what we could afford for the purchase of wood for poorer familes…it seemed not to be enough however as we were asked for more….they almost didnt take what we offered them.

We ventured round the streets finding all manner of things you could find in a town in India and lost ourselves within the allies finding our way back to the guest house where come morning monkeys would gallop across the congregated tin roof of the roof top cafe.

The next morning I rose around 6am and climbed to the roof top to find a magical sight, in the dark light I could make out the movement of a flame at the rivers edges, the light dancing its way round the angles of the building, the wind flickering the flame through the gaps to my eyes. Then on the water a boat of onlookers passed burning what must have been burning ashes floating on top of the water. The remains of a human. I watched the tiny pin lights till they disappeared. Eerie

Determined not to get lost in the maze of alleys again the next day we took notice of shop names and signs marking our way….we walked down the length of the ghats in the opposite direction from our guest house. The colours of Varanasi, alike with so many other places in Asia were predominantly saffron orange and red, but the sparkle of the saris wre different from the thicker multicolored mirrored dressed we had seen in Rajasthan and in turn different again from the paler floral patterns in the south.

Another body crossed our path, this time an old woman, we were able to tell as this bodies face was uncovered as it was carried through the streets.

The alley ways were just a smaller version of the moving streets of Bangalore, thought each one of these was akin to a secret corridor- if you didn’t take the right turn in on direction there was no getting back on track later on with out turning back…it was like there was only one route to each shop/square/place even though if it straddled several alleyways. We should have left a trail of red cotton behind us as it took us an hour to find the bakery we had ear marked for lunch- logically on 15mins walk away…but this is India.

That night a  river boat ride awaited. I dosed up on a pot of chai to make up for the little sleep I had last night and the potenial of another late one. My last night with Merav before he goes to china and I wouldnt see her till the summer.

The boat trip was at dusk which was eerie to say the least. I should add that this is also the foggy time of year in Varanasi due to the cold….and this, was a particularly foggy day. The boat trip we were to take was offered free by our guest house, so we assumed we wouldn’t be the only guest on the boat,…we were wrong. We had the boat and the driver to ourselves.

We started on the ghat just one further then the main burning ghat – Manikanika and our guide rowed us past the bathing men and the floating plastic and towards the flames of the funeral pires. We could feel the heat of the flames again as we sailed slowly past through the ashes and soot that lay in the water….a mixture of burnt wood and flesh. Safforn coloured flowers and red/orange drift in among the ashes.

The ride reminded me of some sort of dark pirate film or of the river of souls in the underworld guarded by Hedes…plus some other myths and legends which featured dark rivers of dead,,,as this was the thing we found strange, remains of hundreds were beneath us and around us in the water, we were floating on the dead. But to all th Indian people this is a way of life, no sadness or remorse is shown in the streets when a bodies passes, just respect, then the people get on with their lives, just as the sons of the dead would when they extinguished the fire with water over their backs and never look back.

Oh it feels like Christmas….its, cold, my nose is running and I have a cough. it began when we left Delhi when we all suffered from the pollution. Now its just me in Kathmandu and the cough is accompanied by sneezes.

The night before I planned to leave for Kathmandu Merav had to catch her train to Calcutta in order to board her flight to china the next day. It was the end of an era. We three; Kate Merav and myself had been traveling together for 3months and already Merav has scheduled a trip to England this summer and myself and Kate to Israel next year.

We said our goodbye at the rickshaw then I had the tricky business of finding my way through the dark streets of Varanasi. I got a tad lost but weirdly after trusting my instincts, I found my way back to Shanti guest house. Trusting your instincts in is not a method I’ve found to work in India.

The next day was the first leg of my journey to Kathmandu, tonight we would cross the border into Nepal and sleep in a hostel in the town of Sunali. This was all included in the ticket I had bought- as was the next days journey to Kathmandu. The ticket had promised a deluxe bus – not that I was adverse to traveling on the government buses but i thought two days spent never knowing when the next game of sardines would begin- a bit excessive. Plus the through ticket from Varanasi seemed the only/simplest way to make the journey.

What was promised and what was given was another matter. We were shown to a government bus that was to take us to the Nepali border. For a ticket costing 700ruppes we felt riped off and appealed to our tour guide. After much outrage and lack of options we boarded the bus. The gutting thing was that we could of caught the government bus ourselves and most likely paid less money- we wanted some money back because our fee, we had been told, included a deluxe tourist bus. Trust me theres a difference. instead we rattled up to the border draftily and luckily with thanks to my fellow travelers I slept most of that ride.

The border wasn’t guarded from what I could see, it looked like we could of just crossed anyway, but of course we would need our visa to book into the hostel on the other side. We were ushered through the visa forms all INFormally filled out on a dark table which we stood around and scrabbled for pens. I remember filling out my Indian visa application before the trip and taking great care with it. Here after I assumed I was done, the guard took it from me, scribbled and changed some things, presumably for formalities….. and sent me to the office where the visa was glued into my passport…..done.

This whole process too maximum 20 minutes. I proceeded to the hostel now tired and ill, had some hot thukpa (noodle soup) with my fellow travelers then gratefully fell asleep… I had double bed to myself as although the hostel/building site, wanted us to share beds thankfully several others kicked up a fuss as I was too tired.

There was actually no one else staying in the half built hostel so there would have been no problem giving us a room each….however this would mean a extra floor or two to sweep in the morning. A lot of the time I think some of the men that run such businesses just want to see how far they can push you. As a tourist they can tell you that this is how its done in our country or a shared bed is all your money gets you…but you can bet that the hostel wouldn’t of expected a group of Indian strangers, men and women, to share the same room.

The next day the 2^nd promised deluxe bus to Kathmandu….was also a government bus. This is India. (T.I.I.) Though I doubt a deluxe bus would of made any difference to the winding bumpy roads…or in fact the beautiful views. It would take 12 hrs to cover the distance to Kathmandu and it was a relatively short distance to the amount we could of covered in India in the same time. Each mountain had to be wound round, twisting through the valleys, following the M shaped path round the base of the mountains. The views were something so new to me. Yet again I was breath taken by what I saw. Green but rocky wooded hills provided the back drop for the turquoise ribbon that snaked the valley, the light green blue water gushed into rapids at the places where the white sand river bank turned in to stones and chalky rocks. Another image I will try and capture and bring home. Though 12hrs of such a view still allowed time for sleep and rest of this invalid.

Me and the only remaining traveler with me from Varanasi fell victim once again to a hotel tout on the bus….I didn’t feel so defeated this time however as I was planning to look round for a good place to settle after one nights decent sleep. Plus the tout gave us a free ride from the bus stop to the hotel pretty much in the center of town. We won.

I went walking round early the next morning looking for a better/cheaper hotel where I could set up camp for a week or so. Some of the rooms I saw might as well have been prison cells, they were as cold as too. The temperature up here reminded me of an English winter except in the day the strong sun heated up the air.

I moved my bags to my nice warmer room nearer the center of thamel. It was complete with wardrobe and my own hot shower…I was splashing out, literally. it would be more expensive now that i was traveling alone and couldnt’t share a room. I rested that day and ventured out feeling a little better in the evening. Thamel the tourist district of Kathmandu has everything. Plenty of ATM’s, Irish bars, English fish and chips (in some restaurants) street vended momo’s and supermarkets stocking everything from Hershey’s chocolate to Wrigley’s chewing gum.

The city is lively, though I am bearing in mind I am staying in the thamel district. Apart form the guest houses, hotels and restaurants, the bazaars were lined with; trekking shops, book shops, vast map shops and adventure tour operators, splashed with a few jewelery shops selling amber and turquoise pendents as big as the street vendors oranges. Plus the Tibetan and Nepali Yak wool and handicrafts, this was my dream town.

The map shops vast and fascinating made me vow to find the perfect map of nepal to add to my collection. The bookshops were well stocked and agonizingly had many large coffee table books with huge panoramas of the Himalaya and the national parks of Nepal. Portraits of Newari women stared at me from the tribal culture section next to the books full of rhymes and folklore.

The trekking shops filled with some authentic some fake items of north face and Salamon hiking gear, I took pleasure in spotting the fakes from the real items. This is what working in blacks does to you (amongst other things).

In the evenings music shops blared their CD players, while men on the streets pushed tiger balm and more subtly hash on tourists. The amusing thing is the hash sellers looked dodgey and would whisper ‘smoke’ to you as you passed, it didn’t matter whether you were in earshot of the police or not, the approach and the get up was always the same…dodgey puffer jacket and baseball cap… as almost if those guys either felt it was part of their job to dress up like that and act suspiciously…or they got kicks from acting like drug pushers from the east end of London. in reality I learn’t form some Europeans,that they were selling hay. Highly amusing.

Now the music scene is thriving in Kathmandu…. the bands playing in restaurants and bars with their groupies sat at the front tables painfully reminded me of watching local bands back home….even more painfully these bands of young Nepali guys where playing songs from the 80s that I often danced to in our hideous favorite clubs…i concluded Kathmandu was out to make me nostalgic and homesick with its music and its Christmas trees. The bands were good fun though and to add more insult to injury many menus at bars listed hot rum punch and/or mulled wine!…..it would only disappoint, nothing would beat the mugs of mulled wine on the German markets back home. From that 1^st cup of overly lemony, weak, red, luke warm wine, served in a wine glass no less I decided from there on in to avoid anything that tried to compete with the festive season back home…in other words…I became a scrooge.

After a day or so of resting trying unsuccessfully to improve my health, frequenting cafes and drinking thukpa I was to hear some local news. At the German bakery one morning I learn’t that for the next three days all businesses would be closed and there would be no buses in our out of the city! This ‘strike’ was enforced by the Maoists who from my shaky knowledge had marched on Kathmandu and claimed it only days before, now they were enforcing strikes to make people aware of their aims for peace…..or something along those lines….I’d best find a book that explains it all to me as all I ever learn’t in history was medieval crop rotations.

So the city would be on lock down for the next 3days….brilliant. I was in a hip hop song. It would force me to rest at least and get over my spectacular cold. I had hot water, a heater for tea and soup, my laptop, books and a t.v. to keep me occupied. I stocked up on some comfort food and was prepared for the worst. Luckily the worse didnt happen… aware they could make a killing by being the only ones open many restaurants and shops opened up in the evenings- after all people had to eat…

The guy at the hotel had told me…’ shops might open in the evenings, some restaurants, bar,cafe, but if a Maoist see them open day or night, they get rocks and throw at the the windows’ A brief Google search told me they’d been several strikes lately and their was an official warning for US citizens in Kathmandu to stay away from large crowds ect. a look out my window however told me that people were pretty much just going about as they usualLY would. the streets were a mix of tourists and locals visiting the odd shops of street vendor that took the risk to open up. I would learn later on their had been more violence in Pokhara.

A walk out of the tourist district and around more or the shops and cafes visited by local people, were open, making me aware that many shop owners weren’t afraid of opening though many had there shutters only half open or partially closed, in order I presumed for a hasty closure should trouble arise.

Tragically that day I got half way up to the monkey temple before I forced myself to go back to bed coughing…I went out that evening and replaced the herbal cough mixture the pharmacy had given me with a chemical ‘stronger’ one, on which it said under dosage….prescribed by doctor only….well this has got too b good I thought.

I had quickly had to regain my wits whilst shopping for shoes and clothes in Kathmandu as one pashmina was offered to me at 1,200, then as I walked away 700 and as I continued…ok, ok 500 or you name the price….the were out to rip me off for more money then the Indians. Or so it seemed.

Now my dilema would come…..I had around 3 weeks in Nepal and therefore would have to formulate a vauge plan of where i would spend my time ..the 3 days of strike were set…of course all I could do was walk round the city, the small bits which weren’t closed were poised to play dead at any sign of trouble….a roof top cafe – the tallest in Thamel I might add, provided wonderful photo opportunities of the high rising higgledy piggledy witchy looking flat roofed houses…if I hadn’t been coughing and snivelling so much I would have loved to sped and hour or so there with a sketch pad.

After India I don’t know how on earth I will kick the habit of putting sugar in everything. I presumed the first unsweetened coffee i was served in Nepal was a one off…but no, as well as the 15 minutes time difference the Nepalese differ from the Indians in the way they drink their hot beverages…even mas ala tea cam unsweetened…Nepali style

Of the cafes and bars, there were many gorgeous little finds with low dark wooden table intricately carved and surround with adorned pillows. Large tree trunk tables and smooth jazz or Moby…playing in the back ground. At night most were candle lit to ensure there would be light if the electricity cut out..which was custom around 7pm. It was all awfully cosy, friendly, romantic and festive. I met up with the American who had came from Varanasi on a few occasions, he had watched me sample the hot rum punch and mulled wine with disappointment while he sipped hot Everest whiskey and we watched bands.

I ate some beef… simply because I could, and then remembered I didn’t really like the taste. We eyed the stylish preformers and giggled at the one or two head banging friends. We got street side momo’s that could possibly of been yak meat…I mean there was yaks wool everywhere the meat had to go somewhere right? At this one momo stall a drunk/drugged nepali guy was given no attention as he proclaimed i was a prostitute and shouted abuse at me. Insultingly he told my American friend he would give him 30ruppes for me….just 25pence….

The drama didn’t end their that night as when I returned safely to my guest house the Nepali guy who worked there came and talked to me about applying for a visa for England….and if we went to his village and ‘got marriage’ … only on paper he added, it would be easy for for him to ‘get visa’….I explained to him that even if he did get a visa for England he would be able to live there as it would cost him nearly 600 rupees just for a 20min bus ride to town and back. ‘OHMYGOD!’ he exclaimed and made me type the number on a calculate to make sure he had understood me right.

On one of my ill days I thought I had slept off the worst (little did I know the worst was still to come) so I decided to venture the short distance through Thamel to ‘The Garden of Dreams’. It had intrigued me when I’d first opened the Nepal Lonely Planet and although it wasn’t listed a MUST do I definitely had to visit. It was a bit pricey to get in at 160ruppees, but it was defiantly as the guide had said. A paradise in the middle of a busy city.

Built by a Dutch man many years ago there was only a quarter left of the green colonial gardens. Neat and prim with native and foreign plants, plenty of peaceful little pavilions and private corners….I avoided the couples and found my own little nook to sit down and take in the greenery. Droplets from trickling copper fountains sparkled, glistened and disappeared in to basins like diamonds never to be found again and saffron coloured flowers sprinkled the vines creeping the side of the restored mansion that encased the jeweled garden. The vast lawns that were unseen else where in the city were as foreign as the silence only interrupted by occasional truck horns from the other side of the wall. Quiet cafes at either ends of the garden offered over priced coffee and lassi’s and high terraces provided a panoramic view, aswell as even more benches on which lovers hid. It almost had me thinking…if i had a wedding…..but then I actually laughed out loud at the thought…..it was a beautiful place though, juxtaposing what was on the other side of the walls.

From the garden of dreams I decided to take a taxi to the monkey temple…after my failed attempted to get there a couple of days ago I knew that although feeling better, I still wasn’t up to the journey. Besides I could always walk back. Aha I was kidding myself as the walk up the steep steps to the hill top temple nearly killed me….but it was worth it. It took me nearly 15min to climb the steps, stopping to take pictures and to cough a little. The views were magnificent. Tibetan prayer flags crisscrossed above my path and a pleasant amount of monkeys ran free over the stupas and statutes. Edging up the steps I caught new views of Kathmandu through the trees getting to the top I paid 200 rupees to walk the final ten steps to the temple. This was turning out to an expensive day.

The golden covered temple stood a-top the hill surrounded by alters and prayer wheels which worshipers spun as they walked round. I can’t remember if I was imagining it or there was actually peaceful pipe and drum music mixing from several sources around the temple and viewing areas of the Kathmandu valley. The platform on the hilltop was like another little town with shops and cafes offering yet more opportunists for visitors to spend their money. I spent an hour taking pictures and wandering round feeling very at peace. Mesmerized by the processions of fearless monkeys and the colours of new and faded prayer flags, some which bridged far across to another building on the neighboring hilltop.

I taxied back to Thamel that day, tired and coughing and my purse a lot lighter but feeling that I had achieved something..unfortunately it was not health and inner peace.

So Christmas was but days away and things would be very different this year, alone and away from home I was looking forward it being low key and their being little fuss and nostalgic music….but i hadn’t counted on how much I would miss the fuss and music in company of friends and family. I also hadn’t counted on western Christmas pop being played in certain cafes. It would have been easier to pass had Kathmandu not been full of westerners, fairy lights, decorations and the make shift Christmas trees (a native potted tree with shiny red bells and lots cotton wool- I honestly don’t know why we don’t use cotton wool more at home). nevertheless I imagined I’d clebrate something bigger then Christmas when came home to my family and friends in the summer….So for my own amusement I splashed out- literally.

Christmas eve was to be spent rafting….the day itself sleep shopping and eating expensive but homely foods….then boxing day would be the flip of one spent at home, instead of a relaxing day probably with a leisurely walk I was going to do a bungee jump. Christmas was sorted.

Despite my never ending cough I booked the rafting. Thanks to my forever changing and problematic sleeping habits i barely slept that night…nodding off completely at 5am….my alarm was set for 5.30. I was awoken at 6 by the cursed phone in my room then 30 seconds later a knock on my door. My driver had arrived. I bundled warm clothes into a bag (something I had planned to wake up early and do ) and hurried down stairs.

Now I was in for an excellent yet slightly frustrating day. I was told I would be picked up my my driver and we would continue to collect around 8 or 9 others….instead I was walked a good 15mins in the cold morning haven barely woken up then asked to wait on a stone step while my ‘driver’ went to collect two more people- who it turned out were actually catching a bus to Delhi….No intention of rafting…..I was then handed over to the care of a Nepali guy in a duffel and bundled on a bus bound for Pokhara,…I’m meant to be rafting I informed …Yes indeed, I was told I would be chucked out on the side of the road after 3hrs and met there by a guide. Brilliant. where are the other people who I was meant to be joining? they will be there….hmmm  ‘kidnap….again’ I thought, Id already been misled about being picked and traveling WITH my rafting group. I knew the guys at the booking centre had been too enthusiastic….

At a rest stop I did however come across two other people, a couple who were wondering where their rafting ‘group’ was….except they were doing two days not three…they had also been told around eight people would be in our group….but us three were the only ones chucked out across the road from our rafting centre. Fantastic…third wheel time once more Laura, and this time I hadn’t even agreed. Thankfully they turned out to be nice enough, an English woman and her Dutch partner, her with the just right amount of fear and him with a big teethy grin that would add to the views fro the enthralling rapids.

A brief form was filled out and we were awarded our life jackets, helmets,not-so-waterproof shirt and paddle. Then it was raft time and a safety briefing with some simple instructions of how to actually raft. This was all fine enough except the Nepali’s English was difficult to follow and while listening to him, I thought faintly of home where I wouldn’t be instructed to put my bags in the ‘backside’ and no one would insist on always using ‘for’ with the word ‘the’ or ‘to’ or a combination of the three. e.g. take to the right hand with for the paddle…

Thats not dig at language skills just a change I longed for so I wouldnt pick up the habits and return home sounding like a non European non Asian no American, lazy traveler who had let their language and grammar go…for goods sakes if i wasnt signing hotel guest books I’d forget how to hold a pen. So many things slip when your away from the norms. We had already met a new yorker who had fully adopted the Indian head wobble and grunting- so much so I had thought he was from the Middle East and to some one else he was Eastern European or even half Indian. But no, born and bred in the states with not a hint of an accent. Oh David.

Any who, Back to the rafting. It was easy enough to get the hang of, and we simply followed our guides instructions….in the large dingy it was just the 3 of us the guide and a Nepali boy who obviously worked for him. This boy had a sour face the whole way, barely spoke and did not even appear the slightest bit pumped up after the biggest rapids. To be fair…he looked like he did it everyday. Lucky kid. And he might of even got paid for it. He atleast got fed for it.

The water was light chalky blue an the tree on the mountains either side deep velvet green. I had counted on the rafting being quite energetic but our guide knew just when we could let the river do the work and we could lay back, literally, as the sun warmed up the air and cleared the mist. The views were amazing, I wished I could have had a camera, but the rapids later on would have seen an end to any photos taken and the camera itself. They were harsh big waves that ripped over our raft and soaked us to the skin, despite our ‘waterproofs’ and layers the icy water found its way in. I regretted not putting up a fight when i was told to remove my Gortex jacket and don their flimsy anorak. We let ourselves be beat with the water as we battled through the angry river colliding with wave after wave of bubbling foam. Peaks and troughs of at least 2metres. At times I went to dig the paddle in the water for my next attempt at a viscous stroke only to find the dingy on top of a wave and no water to the side of me, we were paddling the air above a large hole which we would drop into only to be pounded by the next wave.

In the calms between the storms the guide would tell us about the next rapid coming up and give us bits of advice- mainly paddle harder into the wave so we wont get flipped over…..easier said then done when your concentrating on staying inside the raft. “This rapid called lady’s delight….” make of that what you will. I found it highly amusing and typical of Nepali men’s sense of humour.

Needless to say we were very wet when we finally step out of the raft, we must have been on the water for over four hours….but it had felt like two. We hadn’t known what the river would churn up next, thankfully our guide did, but you still doubt him when the raft looms towards a massive boulder the size of a small house, picking up speed. It the was the iceberg to our titanic…except at the last minute the current of the water guided us side ways, the edge of our raft following the curve of the rock, just inches away from a collision.

At a slower point we passed local men and boys quarrying rocks with mumptys and crowbars. Sandstone we concluded. looking up above us we could see them winching their collected quarry in steel buckets across the river, using a concoction of rusting pullys and fraying ropes. We held our breather as a bucket with a heavy load passed slowly over our raft. A cry went up and at first it was hard to spot its purpose, but then I saw the white chunk of rock tumbling dustily down towards the water…thankfully we were well clear of its watery grave. It felt like we were in a old video game or adventure movie with mining carts and quarry buckets.

Things turned eerier and the mist returned as the sun quickly hid between the high rocky hills on either side of our narrowing river. We came through a set of rapids to see a group of people gathered around a pile of wood built on truck tyres at the edge of the river bank. I saw them throwing dust on to the pire and could vaguely make out a white shroud amongst the wood. A funeral pire. I recalled that our guide had said our river- the Trisuli flows into the Ganga, the holiest of rivers. They lit the pire as we passed, the ashes had a long way to float to Varanasi where other bones and ashes were being flung into the waters.

The rafting was an awesome experience, that I must do again. I wish I could say the same for the journey home. Oh it was an experience, but a hellish one. We changed into warm clothes after beaching the raft, then after exchanging mail addresses with the couple my guide flagged down a bus bound for Kathmandu, and my 4 and half hour of pain and suffering began. It should have been Easter and I could of included an ill made comparison to the stations of the cross. I was in pain of the stabbing kind and coughing up my lungs while fighting to keep warm in my many layers. The buses windows of course didn’t shut properly, the Nepali boys would laugh then look at me, then laugh again….I glared at them through the cold….though it was difficult to keep this up the whole way as the bus took longer then usual due to the slow crawling traffic…apparently caused by a simple break down 14hrs ago….

Finally reaching Kathmandu I had to get a taxi back to Thamel ( I had told all travel was included) it cost me nearly 300 ruppees. the driver walked me 5minutes from the bus in the dark and shouted at any other drivers when I tried to jump into the nearest taxi to escape the cold. ‘ Kidnap’ I thought again. It didnt get that bad thankfully but after a considerable amount of time waiting- while the driver gabbled deciding which of his far away taxis I should get into, I shouted and threatened to get in another taxi if he didn’t get me home soon. He stopped messing around and this also shut up the taxi drivers shouting half English degrading comments at the western girl. The taxi driver didn’t know where he was going after all the fuss and I ended up giving directions having only been in Thamel 6 days. Then he led me down a route to a one way street 10min walk from my hotel…. arguing that he could go any further,,,,I’d seen this trick before in Mysore but, frustrated and cold, I didn’t want to stay in his car a moment longer, so I set out on foot throwing him 200ruppes explaining he wasnt getting the agreed 250 as i wasnt at my agreed destination……He placed his hand out for fifty more rupees pretending he didn’t understand….so I just up and went in my distressed ill state, slamming the car door and ignoring him calling after me. You need times like this to set you up for a decent nights sleep.

I woke late Christmas day feeling better and ready for some hearty vegetable thukpa…sometimes things also have to get worse before they get better. I went and booked myself on a bungee jump for boxing day, phoned home and left various Christmas messages for friends…then tucked myself up and slept some more.

The rafting had been awesome- apart from the trip home….I didn’t know how much I was going to be rewarded with the bungee jump. But my god! It was one of the best things ive ever done. I was feeling better by the early morning on boxing day when I set out to meet my bungee group. I was wearing a mammouth hand knitted yak wool jumper I had indulged in, along with another fleecy jacket while shopping on Christmas night.

B-day

I wasn’t the first to arrive at the meeting point, 10mintues from my hotel and with a cafe open next door despite it being 5.30am. I was very grateful for the good but expensive ‘Illy’ coffee no less. Hmmmm. Soon a group of 15 or so people had gathered. Mainly tall males. (One joked he hadnt seen so many tall people in one place at the same time…though he had been in japan for 6months) Australian, German and American, Nepali and a British Couple too. This is what i had expected the rafting to be like. With rafting you need a team a damn good sight more then you do for a bungee jump.

Soon we were all talking, asking questions and making fun of each other nationalities as is customary. We filled a bus then chatted, joked and slept the beautiful 3hr journey to the bungee site…just 10km from the Tibetan border on the Bote Kosi river. It was especially cold that morning, I was very glad id worn a vest, two ice breakers and a cotton top underneath my yak. The mountain views were again beautiful, stepped rice terraces and deep valleys. The views alone were worth paying for. I was feeling a hell of a lot better and really excited. 160m and the highest bungee in Asia didn’t sound frighting to me…especially not after a sky dive from 14000ft that I’d done for my 18^th birthday. I cant believe that was over a year ago.

We finally arrived at The Last Resort and walked across the valley on the swaying steel bridge. I couldn’t believe this would be where I was going to do my first bungee jump. It was beautiful. Mountains facing each other were divided by the river below, It looked small and weak from our viewing point on the bridge. It was rockier then I had expected too, if you fell an managed to miss the rocks I’m pretty sure that would be your luck used up and the river would r drag you away…freeze you also. From the bridge the mountains over lapped and fought for space in the sky, like faces in a crowd struggling to see. Getting fainter the further back they were,. Just like we were told to colour them in art class. Paler greens the further away they where.

The canyon below was two sides of trees and greenery with the river a chalky turquoise strip running in between sprinkled with rocks and boulders looking no bigger then pebbles from the height we were at. Walking across the bridge was the first test, for me it was amazing but I can imagine if your scared of height you might of bottled out of your jump there and then. we passed the point in the middle where we would leap from…it looked like nothing more then a small platform, almost part of the bridge.

I was told the last resort built the bridge and their company here by the local village, as penance for intruding they let the locals us the bridge for free and provided jobs for them in the hotel….the hotel would have been a beautiful haven and had I the option of going an activity the next day staying over would have been an expense easily justified. All dark wood buildings and small tents instead of rooms, cold yes but the views would make you forget your numb limbs in the morning.

After a brief lesson in how to jump off a bridge…..a chair was used in the demonstration…. we were weighed and given a number…well our weight in kgs and told we would be called when our number was up. the group laughing and making jokes about the elasticity of an old rubber band the group was a mixture of excitement apprehension and nerves as we stood waiting. We were told the first jumps to go would be the canyon swings, which I quickly handed money over for, not wanting to miss out on 7 secs of free fall before winging at 150 mile per hour across the canyon until the pendulum ceased. A good warm up to jumping off head first for the bungee too we all agreed..

We all agreed there was part of the swing you instantly forgot, the first 3 seconds of free fall pass instantly and taking in the view is not an option until you feel the rope take the tension and the air rushing past you at 150mph takes your breathe, then you see the river stretching out far in to the distance, it now looks a lot bigger and more fearsome then it did from the bridge, no longer a ribbon held down by stones but a force that has cut through the cliffs either side of you and the single rope from which you are suspended. Now you can fully appreciated the colour as the adrenaline courses through your veins. You appreciate the beauty of the location and the freedom at which you move. Letting go with your hands you are flying, but it takes no effort, relaxing as you pendulum to and fro in the valley. Your swings slow and a man on one side of the valley catches you with a rope. You grab hold and pull your self towards the trees.

After you have been unhooked and you gush how amazing it was to the man detaching you from the small harness that was the only thing that kept you from plunging/crashing into the river/rocks- you start your 20minute hike back up to the bridge from which you just threw yourself. I wish I had had my camera for the hike back up, the river from below was raging and mesmerizing and I almost jumped in to continue the adrenaline rush. The path zig-zag-ed back and forth across the tiny waterfall that trickled down in to the river 50 times its size. The sun which warmed that side of the valley and the effort of the hike kept you warm as you stumbled us the stone steps and dusty paths, blinded and enchanted by the light coming off the small path the water made back down the mountain. At times you were in the waterfall, part of it. A camera would of doubled the time of the trek and I was still filled with excitement for my bungee jump which would be next.

The hike threw up another surprise, I came breathlessly to the top of the hill (I was thankful that I hadn’t been so slow the next swinger hadn’t caught up with me.) To get back to the bridge and the last resort the path took me through a small local village on the hilltop. children playing cards in the hay, an old couple sat silently watching from a woven mat, mother and daughter pounding straw, a got a hey….you hair is very..nice…very red….from a husband with the chickens and two more children playing a game involving a basket and a piece of elastic they were tangled in. The serenness was magical, whether the endorphines or the spectacular settings i returned to the bridge with the biggest smile.

Bungee time. This time there was no long wait on the cold bride to contemplate my fate, I was one of the first up to have my legs shackled. We had been told to jump from the platform like a kangaroo for the swing, the guy filming the process didn’t get much out of me- I jump off tall things but I don’t preform for cameras, I more just gave him a ‘Well this is it’ look and admired the view hoping he would stop filming. I joked with the guy attaching me to the over sized elastic band..’ I feel like a prisoner,… haha’ as I waddled to the edge of the platform… ‘Ah now you are imprisoned…but when you jump, soar free like eagle’…I liked this guy.

Then that was it. I jumped…watching the video back I saw embarrassingly I hadn’t lost the habit of standing on the edge of a diving platform, arms up. I dived as i would of done form a 5m metre platform 3years ago…my diving instructor would have been proud, and whats more. impressed at my form. It was a magnificent feeling, jumping out from the platform and feeling your body tilting toward the river, the blue came in to sight and from then on it was straight down eyes open all the way, the river coming to meet you. From above it looked as though the jumpers were almost touching the rocks, but in reality you were only half way down the canyon. Suddenly the rope caught my tension and after falling fro one more second or so, I was brought back upwards. If it hadn’t of been for the wind gushing in my ears I would of thought it was the river that was moving further away from me; as it grew smaller again then regaining its fierceness as I shot back down with th only feeling of suspension on my ankles. I could see a mixed canvas of the gorgeous river and dense forrest as I began to stop bungying and started spinning….my left hip was leaning to one side and the more I tried to correct it the more I spun,so I thought, I’ll fly with it, and just spun and spun- all the while drinking in the surroundings and feeding on my feelings of amazement and exstacey. Today was by far one of the best things I had done. Absolute brilliance, and it forces me to smile with giddiness as I sit in a small cafe relieving the moment, with Jack Johnson playing while I sip cold coffee from a beer tankard.

Final Efforts

So Katmandu had me jumping off bridges and ripping through rapids, now I had recovered and seen Christmas through- it was time to move on, 10days was the longest I’d stayed in one place since Sadhana Forest, in October. but Katmandu would not be left without a good drinking session. I met up with some South African guys on the last evening and although my bus to Phokara was at 6am the next morning I decided to make the most of the night, Wandering through the late night lifeless streets of Katmandu with my new acquaintances and sipping rum and coke at the few remaining open bars. In the end we resorted to buying some vodka and lemonade and sitting on the rooftop of my hotel until 2am. These guys would also be going to Pokhara a day later then I, so we could meet up to enjoy the local street festival for New Years or whatever. Eventually it was time for bed..but not before the guy working at the hotel who had wanted a ‘paper marriage’ came to my room and declared his undying love at 3am.

If you meet Budda on the road, Kill him.

With only a few hours sleep I made my bus easily the next morning, and the ride turned into quite a social affair for me as I talked with various people at each rest stop. The middle aged guy next to me was from Bangladesh and told me various interesting facts about his country…including that he had reached the middle of years so he decided to travel and get away..sounded like what we call a mid life crisis. Don’t get me wrong I was sympathetic and grateful for his knowledge but like most Indian men he would tell me what to do….Don’t take that medicine, eat this orange….eat this biscuit… zip up your bag…..despite the fact the zip was barely loose 2cm…. Not liking being told what to do at the best of times I didn’t appreicate this…but its a typical example of how the men over here think they are in charge of women, even when your a stranger.

I also met an Australian girl who was taking part in the famous tuk tuk (rickshaw) race through India, apparently there would be lots of teams in Pohkara gearing up to start the long journey down to Cochin in Kerala, southern India.

I hadn’t met any one else my age traveling so far…but within one day in Phokara I had met two. You come across some people doing some really interesting things. This one girl was working on a program with street kids and had been in Pohkara for 4months! A long time in this small town.

The Beauty is Insane

Small is far to often beautiful however. I wake up in the mornings here step out of my door to a balcony with a view of flowers and old decrepit wicker chairs on a coragated iron roof, damp with the rain that fell lat night. I can easily appreicate the beauty  in this as  he morning  is sunny and the air feels so fresh with the ground still wet. A large lake in one direction and mountains in the other. In the middle of the lake is an island temple and on the further shore a hill of forest with the stupa of the Peace Pagoda on top. Words can not try and describe the perfection of colour, atmosphere and surrounding….and photos come only a small way to doing the place justice.

One of the best bits about traveling is the people you meet and the insight you get into their lives. Other travelers from anywhere from Russia to South Africa. Some people are like minded travelers, others have different agendas, but the people you click with along the way add to the awesome experience. Through meeting other people I’ve been given a little window into their home towns, Tel Aviv, Johannesburg, Singapore, Amsterdam Sydney, San Francisco and Queensland. Through the people I talk too I’m not just traveling Asia.

Pokhara has been the ideal place to spend new years, the streets were alive with locals for the festival, cooking food, selling crafts and playing games…including one in which the player is blind folded and has to make his way down a path without stepping out of the lines…he does this with a big stick in hand for when he makes it to the end of the path his next task is to blindly aim for a large clay pot. Presumably if he succeeds in smashing it he wins…we didnt see anyone win on our trips through the streets, plus it looked to me like the player could easily smash the prize (a botle of beer) which sat dangerously near the clay pot he thrashes at with a big stick. The people in the streets loved it and there was a fair amount of shouting and cheering going, defiantly enough to let me know they took this game seriously.

I’d met up with the South Africans I’d met in Katmandu, and we went out boating on Pewa lake .Appparently the 2^nd largest in Nepal…I couldn’t imagine the largest could be more beautiful though. The morning mist on the lake would disappear and the sun would shine and bounce off the rippling water. In the boat we could see the lake was fairly clean and after some fooling about with piracy, a telescope and my harmonica we rowed beyond the colourful island temple in the middle and made our way to the opposite shore to attempt the 40min hike to the World Peace Pagoda. A beautiful climb that took my breath away with the views but equally with the effort. I’m obviously the exception to the rule, that you become fitter when traveling. The views and the tranquility round the peace pagoda were well worth the struggle however and the forest we’d hiked up through seemed like a magical place, a perfect setting for a midsummer nights dream.

It was New Years Eve and after a beautiful insanely serene day we hit the town for a night that would juxtapose it. Plenty of vodka, boats, paint tubs and cowboy hats made an awesome way to see in the New Year,(apparently there were 3 count downs) the first day of which we spent nursing small hangovers and the injuries wed achieved. A few hours on a rowing boat again and I felt like I hadn’t been at such peace in a long long time. Great company, plenty of alcohol and an insanely beautiful place. I couldn’t of asked for more. It was going to be difficult to leave. Luckily I didn’t have to think about it until, sadly, the Jo’burg guys returned to Katmandu the following day.

The morning they were leaving, we woke up to find the sky the clearest it had been since we arrived in Pohkara. For the first time we could see what we had been surrounded by the whole time. It was enough to make us swear and curse in disbelief. Majestic snow capped mountains of the Annapurna range. It was a view that kept us quiet while we stood atop a their hotel and took in the view. After hugs goodbye I had to think about my journey on back through Nepal in order to make it to the tiger reserve the following week for my research project. So much to look forward to this new year, but also so much to take in and appreciate in the moment.

Disheartened with my friends gone….it had been great having such good company over new years, but now I had to disconnect and carry on with the rest of my journey. It was the 3^rd and I was scheduled to arrive in Ramnager for the Mahseer Concservancy project on the 7th. I had scheduled a couple of days in Chitwan National park I thought….see some elephants. I caught the bus to the small town on the edge of the reserve where most of the expensive resorts are, but I wangled a cheap cottage for the night despite being hounded by hotel touts.

We were out of the mountains now and the green fields and country roads reminded me of the countryside back home, especially in the south in Oxfordshire where i would often visit family. Long green grasses and a misty sky. I had a hot meal in a cafe not knowing it would be my last in some time. The village seemed dead and a forest trek alone wasn’t apealing to me at this point..neither was the expense…I simply wanted to get to the tiger reserve and start the project. So I booked a bus out the next day.

I would head to Sonali. I almost felt like Chitwan had been an unnecessary detour, but it was good to see it, break up my journey and relax for the afternoon plus I now knew what was there was to return to. I had abandoned my ‘simple’ plan of going direct to Delhi and then to Ramnagar, I would over shoot the mark, spend unnecessary time on the road and spend more money. So Sonali it was, then a bus to the nearest train station Gorkapur, 4hrs away then overnight train to Lucknow and finally a train to Ramnagar. Passing through immigration wearily after an early morning start and4hrs on the bus, I was tired and hungry, and vulnerable. Inevitably (although I took as many precautions as I could) the travel agents took advantage.

I was led to these guys by an Indian man who had first wanted to bundle me into his already over filled landrover and drive me to Gorkapur for only 100 rupees…this might have saved me a lot of money but there was no point turning up at the train station without a ticket. I must book first. I was wary as the agent demanded money even before he;d made a phone call to confirm the ticket…I insisted i see the tickets first. I wanted two. One to Lucknow then to Ramnagar. He had me sit in a roadside Chai stall while he got the tickets then hurried me back to his office and took a considerable amount off me….but calculating it it worked out about right for 2 late notice confirmations….it was then he got me…

In a rush he thrust one ticket and a bit of paper into my hand and yelled ‘Quick! Quick! Bus bus…and practically pulled me on to a bus where him and his friend blocked me into a seat and demanded more money for extra false charges…when I argued they said if i wasn’t going to pay they would cancel the tickets …after protest and demanding explanation I realised they had me..I was on a bus heading to a train station and I could either have a ticket when I arrived or face a night at the statio… if they canceled the ticket I would lose the money already invested plus have no guarantee of a train…perhaps possibly for the next few days..who knows….In the end I gave them the extra they were scamming me for. The also over charged me for the government bus ticket, not letting me speak to the conductor, just demanding money then giving a small denomination of my fare to the driver….they then wanted a further 70 rupees for baggage!….’No no no!’, they knew they were pushing it and my outcries were drawing attention. They hastily jumped off the bus.

At least I was rid of them, even if I had paid 6 times too much for the journey….it should of cost me around maybe 5 pounds and sneakily in their small denominations and harassment they took 30…I turned to the rest of the bus in outrage, shocked and very pissed off….’Its not right’ an Indian voice said…I was glad some one sympathized….I sat writhing in anger for a long while trying to tell myself it was the first time I had been scammed..I was safe, I had all my belongings and atleast had one legitimate train ticket….it could have been a whole lot worse.

After swearing my trust in these local people was forever lost…ivery soon it was restored as a kind Nepali couple bought me chai and sympathsied with me at the next tea stop, also after seeing what the rouges had done the husband kindly walked me to the train station as we arrived in Gorkapur- knowing full well any rickshaw would take advantage in the falling night. He sat his wife at a chai stop and walked me into the station and made sure I found the inquiries office. There are kind people in the world after all….if I had the means to do anything for this couple at that moment in time I would of done. Though I couldn’t restore health and sadly they were on a journey to Lucknow for medical treatment. A long journey from their home town in Kathmandu. Saints.

I had worked out on the 4hr drive from Sunali to the rail head at Gorkapur that my first train ticket was authentic….dates times ect….as for the other scrap of paper…well, we would see. I had plenty of time to contemplate options of guest houses,buses,taxi’s as I waited the 4hrs for my train…which was then an hr late. I sat reading The God Delusion (which might account for my religions references) A controversial book to read in most places…and in India most travelers pick up some Buddist read or Guru teachings to guide them to enlightenment. I had picked out this well argued investigation in to the exsitance of god while ill in Kathmandu. It had been the conversation starter for the South African guys also, as one had read it and I had said it reflected my current mood….

The books and people watching entertained me, the usual packs of dogs hunting fun up and down the platform gave me a break from watching people watching me. the rats helped me to keep weary of my surroundings as exhaustion crept in. I found an omlete man as I hadn’t eaten anything but some digestives and a samosa all day. When I returned to the guards office to check my train hadn’t change platform (I failed to work out the announcements) I was told to ‘Sit!’ and relax….my train was late but two policemen getting on the same train would make sure I got to my bunk without any trouble….personal armed guards….nice.

Finally I could sleep…well after my ticket was checked and I had ignored a guard that tried to tell me Ramnagar would be 3 stops BEFORE Lucknow…..my trusty map told me otherwise.(I love maps..)…Ramnagar was a good 9hrs after Lucknow… which was where the train stopped.

I was vaguely aware of movement in the night, but being so tired dreams confused me….all my luggage was attached to some part of me….though when I woke up my scarf/blanket was gone…..I was pretty sure I had gone to sleep with it round either my head or my legs….scary to think someone had managed to make off with it….why MY scarf? There were plenty of other warmer blankets on warmer bodies knocking around…..oh yeah…because I’m a foreigner.

So I arrived in Gorkapur and pretty much as I expected the travel agents had fobbed me off with the scrap of paper…telling me I had a ticket for 8am.. TUH!…there wasn’t a booking made and the only train to Ramnagar was at 9pm….I didn’t fancy a day in the station or paying for a guest house, or trying to tour round Lucknow…I just wanted to get to Ramnagar…I was on a mission….or should we say a pilgrimage, to get to the project I’d been planning for a year or so..the promise of which had got me through college.

Buses were easier then trains, as no advanced booking or extra fees were needed. I headed to the bus station and inquired about Ramnagar….I was still a good 12hrs away by road. Quickly sent to the interstate bus station for 6ruppes I inquired again. Helpfully they told me I could catch a bus to Moradabad then a bus to Ramnagar….not bad I thought, Just another day on the bus.I was told to get to Moradabad it would take around 7-8hrs so I would arrive around 4pm. This seemed a reasonable hour for me to catch what couldn’t be more then a 3hr bus to Ramnager, in good time to get a hotel.

Though I hadn’t calculated in Indian inaccuracy, traffic and chai stops….So as we headed west to Moradabad, racing the setting sun I realised that I would be arriving in that place well after dark…..Moradabad…it doesn’t sound like an idyllic place to be in daylight never mind night time…Would there still be buses to ramnagar at 8/9pm? Would I have to find a guest house? (this transport centered town wasn’t in the lonely planet)…Who could I trust….Would I wait at the train station?…Ect ect…In a saner part of my head I had several options; stay the night -train stations are better for advice then the streets or I could always fork out for a 3hr taxi ride (equivalent in price to a 20min taxi ride back home)…atleast I would be safe….I had plans. Though luckily as I was thrown off the bus at the final destination my request for a ride to Ramnagar was rewarded with news that a bus was leaving soon….I had time to sit, thank which ever god I’d chosen that day;….fate…luck…my intelligence and persistence….smoke and buy some sort of food that resembled dough in batter. Urgh. But I’d had maybe a packet of crisp and some chai all day.

I would reach Ramnagar tonight and consulting the faithful lonely planet it looked like there would be a hotel, even a decent budget one which would provide me with a bed!…Finally!…..So after 39hrs on the road….6bus stops, 2 train stations, 2 immigration offices, countless chai stops and one rickshaw, I arrived in Ramnager, had a comfortable bed and the promise of porridge in the morning. Hats off to me.

I met some Irish bird watchers the next morning and set out with the aim of contacting the project manager, Sumantha.The first two attempts sent me back to the hotel without luck and in the need of coffee…the 3^rd later in the morning however; prevailed and I was to be picked up in half an hour. I had no idea what to expect of this project, it look all very well on the paper. Really interesting infact when I reminded myself about the things I would be doing…but how would the people be? What would the work be like? Other volunteers maybe?.Would i want to stay a whole month??? It was crunch time, D-day. As with Sadhana I was finally going to find out what this place was about.

I was picked up from the hotel by a guy on a motor bike who I would soon find out was a park guide. Little did I know I was going to be thrown amazingly head first in to a demonstration by about 20 other park guides. Most of what i am going to tell you I learned from a flurry of guides I was hastily introduced to. Being far away and on the road I hadn’t heard much news from this small town.

Three tigers had been found dead in less then 3weeks. Park guides and conservationists and local people were calling for proper investigation into the deaths of the tigers. So far it ad been reported that all the tigers had died due to territorial fights, though they were also unofficial reports that 2/3 of the tigers didn’t have a scratch or drop of blood on them. So what was the cause of death? Maybe disease, maybe poison? Why wasn’t proper investigation being undertaken to project this animal whose official numbers had dropped from 40,000 to 1,400 since Indian independence.

I discussed this in broken English and was inquisitive yet appalled. l I was then told an interview was wanted as I was the only English speaking person present. oh dear talk about being put on the spot. I answered the questions best I could with a camera pointing at me and a microphone at chest level, not knowing whether to look at the interviewer or the camera….I was pretty pleased I stumbled through it ok, usually I’m fine with public speaking, provided I know a little about the subjet matter,(which thankfully I did) but when they started asking me about park authorities I dithered not wanting to say anything controversial that would get anyone in trouble. I knew the park authorities must be corrupt. Every hierarchical organization in India is in some way or other, and your naïve if you think otherwise.

Mouth dry but feeling ok I returned to my seat and begged fate never to let me come across the video clip. ( though 3weeks down the line id really like to see it) Next we started chanting for the cameras…save the tiger ‘bahg bachau! in Hindi, little did I know this first bit of Hindi would be the basis for a month of absorbing the language a best I could and sponging what communication I could of my fellow volunteer. The cameras flew about some more taking shots of this chanting Indian crowd with on white red headed girl….before moving on to interview Sumantha Ghosh himself. Head of the Mahseer Conservancy.

After the hectic first hour I finally got to chat with Sumantha, the man with whom I had been communicating for 18months. He explained what had been going on and answered my questions while we drove in his gypsy to the home stay. It was brilliant. and open top floor with blinds either side to keep out the wind, a cosy bedroom with several chairs, bedside table and even a locking wardrobe! One better then Kathmandu…sadly there was a second bed where Kate should have been sleeping…. Across the open plan dining and sitting area is a large and a VERY clean bathroom, with a geezer to provide hot water….theres a small cold office which houses the wi-fi system and which I’m told later a desktop computer,printer and scanner in order to become an office…..for some reason unknown to me the kettle in is this room rather then a dark kitchen complete with fridge,sink, a can of bacon, and some vinegar but no stove. Whats more Sumantha introduces me to Sakir Ali a young boy who runs the home stay (he probably older then me but you really cant tell) He brings me enough food for 2 people with hearty appetites 3 times a day…..though I’m dying to buy my own little stove so I can make porridge and also communicate better with Sakir so the food is less oily….but I don’t want to put him out…i don’t know weather the brilliant food he makes for me is the same as the family eat downstairs.

There is a room next door to mine which I’m told is Fred’s, the other volunteer who has been her 10months and by the sounds of it is popular with all the locals as she speaks Hindi. She is older than I so I feel a bit like the helpless younger sister. Not that she treats me like one…I’m more like her apprentice, though when it comes to formulating articles or invitations in English I’m in my element…well I’d better be…it is my mother tongue….and all so my messy drawing skills come in handy, as well as my computer literacy and years experience of typing English essays, plus my extra pair of clumsy hands…

Baagh Bachau!

3 tiger deaths in 21days had caused a demonstration to be organized on Sunday the 10th, 3days after I had arrived in Ramnagar. myself and Fred were going to take part and represent the Masheer Conservancy. I didn’t quite know what to expect, how big would it be? Would people take notice?…..Que me and Fred marching front of the troop, banner in hand shouting ‘Baagh bachouu!’, while walking though the streets of Ramnagar for 2hrs followed enthusiastically by supports and journalists. It was a big event….and part of an even bigger day… a few days later we found our picture in a local newspaper and were recognized for some time there after….while I was marching I saw the rare sight of another westerner atop a gypsy driving past….he looked at me cautioously smiling with a hint of disbelief…..in my mind I was like….yeah you better believe it….I AM HERE.

People stopped shopping to watch the march go past and shop keepers came into the street to watch. Good at least people were taking notice….I’d seen festival parades and marches for I don;t know what in Nepal and India and mostly people carried on bout their business. Young children rode atop the gypsys too holding home made signs and chanting down the microphone. Despite the support I knew only awarness can be raised and petitions signed by people such as us,…..decisions are made much higher up and don’t always succumb to public pressure.

After we had finished the march, and Fred had done her Hindi speech for the cameras, more interviews in front of cams and microphones followed for the both of us….we found ourselves repeating the same thing…..proper investigation is needed. (see my article for details)

That afternoon, Sumantha had a surprise for us. A previous long term volunteer of the conservancy, Kieth, had returned on a visit to the park with his wife. We had been to spot vultures in the village of Ringora the previous day, then walked along the Kosi so Sumantha, respected naturalist that he was, could help Kieth (wildlife fantic) to spot the ibespeil, a ver rare bird found only in these parts. (Kieth had been out some days again and failed to spot it…but Ghosh pulled through) Keith and Sumantha were good friends and drinks always came out when they got together and comments, teasing, joking and honoring always were passed between one another. I was glad to have some other Brits around. Anyway the big surprise was that we were to go into the park that very afternoon for a 2day guided safari….we were to surprise Kieth who had left with his wife and guest early that morning.

I’m told permits are hard to get at short notice but Sumantha’s success in obtaining them without trouble within a few hours gave me some clue to the sort of influence he had here.

The Tiger Hunt

So it was to be we were off to the reserve, we met after lunch at Tiger Camp (the hotel where Mahseer Conservancy has its office) to drive into the park gate. With our permits (which i never saw)  and lots of warm clothes we were ready to go. I’m assured its hot in summer but Ramnagar in winter reaches around 4 degrees and drops at night. If there’s sun the ground warms up, but for the last two days mist and cloud had covered the usually blue sky.

We drove to our designated gate and then on the road ways through the park to Dikala. On our journey to where we would be sleeping that evening we spied lots of wildlife. Wild boar, spotted deer and the rare tawny fish owl, which posed for us nicely, positioned in a tree near the road edge….in fact we had the chance for a good luck as our gypsy refused to restart after we’d taken our pictures…so we were broken down right underneath it….until we got out and gave the jeep a running start.

We even took a detour down samba road before we reached the guesthouse, and not surprisingly spotted some samba as well as some more wild dear and a lovely big bright male peacock. I learned some interesting things about the park that evening, though tired from my busy day, went to bed at a reasonable hour despite more whiskey being poured. it was an early start the next day.

We climbed into the gypsy at 7am, open top it was cold but I had wrapped myself in layers included my big yak wool jumper. We were on a mission today to spot several things…tiger included…though I didn’t get my hopes up, as the reserve says, this is not a zoo, wildlife roams free and so there is no guarantee an animal will be sighted….especially the elusive Corbett tiger, which is shy and scare in comparison to the abundant spotted deer.

The landscape is rewarding enough before you even take into consideration the wildlife. around Dikhla is a panorama of hills, forest and grass lands with the Ramganga cutting its way through. That day from one of the watch towers we climbed we spied otters playing in the river. Elephants were to be seen in the grass lands, and deer crossing the river. We had taken breakfast out with us but returned for lunch only to be told as we were driving in that a tiger had been sighted in some nearby grass lands…..We trundled faster along the paths to the location and were told by some park staff keeping an eye out that the tiger was lying in amongst the grass….quite where they didn’t know….we decided to skip lunch and wait on the road should the tiger decide to cross and head back into the forest….. it was not to be and we later discovered the tiger had sneaked past us and cross the road else where in the view of another lucky gypsy…damn. A gypsy I may add that contained the same European couple that had seen a tiger from elephant back the previous day…..have they been dragging meat behind them?

We continued with our safari, wrapped up warm with binoculars in hand. a mongoose scurried across our path and monkeys made noise in the trees. The undeveloped natural land obviously a haven for wildlife. The evening was looming and as all vehicles must be back inside the camps fences before 5.30when darkness falls we decided to take a last journey down Samba road. Listening and trying to interpret alarm calls from deer and birds we hoped to catch a glimpse of a tiger…

Our guide J.P. spotted some tiger pug marks….which are always exciting we you think one of the magnificent beasts has recently stepped on the ground before you. the we heard some alarm calls…and headed in their direction….there was a tiger about. we met another gypsy on the our path that told us the tiger had crossed in front of them a only a few minutes before but had now gone into the bushes…the had not seen it go over the edge of the hill however. there was a good chance he may cross the road again…..so we drove further down on J.P.s instruction, quietly and slowly we watched the bushes, pricking our ears at the sound of snapping twigs….adrenaline was rushing…..the tiger growled…it suddenly struck me that I was on an open gypsy with nothing but air separating me from the tigers claws….but then I trusted our excellent driver Divan one hundred per cent to keep us a safe distance from the tiger….

A flash of rusty orange emerged from the bushes not more then 10metres ahead….we had our tiger. ‘Tiger is coming, tiger is coming! ‘ J.P. hissed as the tiger weaved through the road side bushes then causally walking on to the path….he walked several paces, a large male, then turned causally to look at us….he held his glare for a second or two warningly then turned slowly and proceeded to cross the road ahead. several other gypsies hearing the alarms of surrounding animals and the bird call let out by J.P.

We trailed the moving creature down the road…weary as it made its mind up of which way to go. Thankfully this male decided to reward us by keeping to the road for a 20metres or so before disappearing into the bushes. With the head guide J.P. And best driver (ensured by Ghosh and Kieth) we were ahead of the line of gypsies cameras at the ready. After the tiger had disappeared into the shrubs on the opposite side of the road, the other drivers and guide were still wondering what to do, but J.P had directed Divan to drive several hundred meters up to a swamp visible from the road which he suspected the tiger to visit.

We waited their and just as the other gypsies had caught up the tiger came into view…the amount of time in which he had covered the distance we sped along gave me some idea of how far this animal can carry itself in a day….We got a good look at his beautiful winter coat before he decided to disappear from view into the grasslands. We waited a little further on to see if he would reappear but he did not….We cursed the car whose reversing alarms made a lot of noise, and cussed the guy who jumped out of his vehicle into another one in the vicinity of the tiger….and we laughed at the girl who almost fell backwards from on top of her gypsy as her driver sped away…she would have been on the ground within 20metres of the tiger if she hadn’t had her legs wrapped around the top bar she was sitting on…..most of all however we gazed in awe at the majestic tiger.

That night was celebrated with whiskey…though whiskey flows every night like water when Ghosh and Keith are reunited it seems. We drank and spent the night talking wildlife, wildlife issues and politics and environmental happenings…here I was talking nature and wildlife with the top naturalist in the area, the head park guide and his chosen driver and other wildlife fanatics and experts…I learned a lot despite the drink.

The next day we had only half a day in the park. Tired and cold we crept out in the gypsy early again binoculars at the ready. But we woke to the news that a forth tiger had been found dead in the night….bad news that really hit home having seen my first tiger only hours before…and in the same area…

So now, cold, tired and in mourning we soldered on. We spotted mongoose on the road plus mugger and gorihal crocodiles which thrive in the reservoir. We headed to Kieth’s lucky watch tower and expected to wait patiently for any signs of otters again….but this time we had hardly scanned the horizon with our binocs and put them down for a cigarette when Keith, bincos still raised…hissed…’Tiger, tiger!’….yeah right we though…but ‘No loook’ in an innocent tone caused us to look in the direction he had the glasses pointed. And indeed a tiger there was! Stepping out from the dry grassland in the the cold looking dark grey sheen of the river, like a gem tumbling on to the land that had been come the bed clothes of normality. Dipping his paws into the river we watched while fumbling for cameras….luckily Eduard, Keith’s Barcelonaean guest had his at the ready, as I had been caught off guard. Our second tiger stepped, all paws into the river….before deciding it must be to cold to cross, looked up at us even though we were at least 200m away and 15m up…then he retreated into the grasslands….it could have been his sharp hearing had picked up Keith’s hiss of ‘Eduard…..no…its really Its a tiger‘ as Eduard thought he was resisting one of Keith’s teases.

I thought that would be it, but Eduard and Kieth were determined to find the beast once more in the grasslands….my eyes aren’t accustomed to watching cleverly camouflaged animals or spotting ting birds in tree…but this was part of Keith’s chosen career with the Indian wildlife tour company he had set up back in the UK.

The tiger was soon spotted again wandering in and out of the tall grassed….fortunately the grasses by the river was in patches so the tiger conceal its red coat prowling through the bushes….by this time Ghosh and Fred who had been in the gypsy behind us, had caught up after spying a jungle cat…..though this couldn’t beat the tiger and soon they were up the watch tower with us joining the twenty minutes of hide and seek the tiger played with us. We got some awesome views across the grass lands though hoped the tiger would track back to the river to attempt another crossing….he reward us with such a luxury though, never the less this parade of his was enough to leave me feeling elated that this was a wild tiger in his natural habitat, the one on the road the previous evening had felt more like a hunt with gypsy’s in hot pursuit. Eduard with his expensive brilliant lens equipped camera got some great shots of the gleaming coat in the sun.

A reminder that all this had happened within the first four days of being on the project. And there was more to come….

So Sumantha explained how he had some projects in mind for me while we drove the usual hazardous style to the happy homestay, There seemed to be a large chunk of meat for me to get my teeth into- part of that being tiger meat. So after lunch at the homestay I continued the day shadowing him, sitting in various meetings in varying offices with larged varied people; journalists who I would never see again, Manoj who was helping organise the Sports for Conservation event, someone I would get to know better later. The only thing that didn’t vary was the language…it was mainly in Hindi…but magically I got the gist of the discussions.

The main project which I would be conducting mostly on my own was to work with the WWF and learn about the women’s self-help groups in rural communities- who mainly produce a vermicompost (compost using worms) which I would become very familiar with. For this I went on a few trips which a women from the WWF named appropriately named Geeta (meaning vulture- which are part of our conservation effort) who had been working in conservation for 10yrs now. Conversation and communication was slightly limited but obviously her English was better then my almost non existent Hindi. Again I manged top grasp what the villagers were talking about and common sense of the subjects told me the rest of Geetas sentence before it struggled to come out of her mouth, so in a way I like to think we helped each other out.

Into the Valley

A couple of days after id been aquainted with fred, we had barely got back from the safari when she asked me if id like to accompany her to the lodge in Vahngat. Riverine woods was place Sumatha had built as an eco-friendly cottage accommodation surrounded by native plants and employing local people. He’d done an excellent job. Though still tired from the safari I decided to accept Fred’s invitation.

Getting there involved a bus ride then an hours trek (thank god it was downhill) on a steep slope which marred with my clumsiness could have been fatal…thankfully the fates decided I should not die this way. Apart from the danger of the drop before we even got to the slope we march for half an hour through the dense misted forest….a tiger -known to be aggressive towards humans had been spotted here recently. Sumantha had insisted someone come and meet us half way, but Manoj being himself was late…..Fred piked up a big stick as we entered the woods. It was very misty and damp adding to the eeriness of the gallant dark trees and dead leaves lying like unclaimed bodies of battle on the floor….It could have been a case of being ravished in ramanager if we came across the tiger- though being ravished by a tiger would mean in the way of being seized and carried away by force as I had read about in Jim Corbett’s books.

Manoj typically timing impeccable met us after we had walked though the woods and had reached the slope. He greeted us with umbrellas and shared Fred’s cigarettes, while I wondered if the tiger lay below with its mouth open ready for us to land….just like my cat used to o on the bird table- tigers are much more gifted in stealth then that cat. It was great hearing the French and Indian make comments teasingly in Hindi and later, in the many times I sat around outside the kitchen of the lodge- waiting for chai or food, the banter that went on always seemed like good fun even if I could barely make out what was being said.. I knew enough to glare jokingly at Manoj when he mentioned my name in a sentence, looked my way and laughed….The banter with the staff looked like great fun though I’m sure for Fred who could understand most of what they were saying wasn’t as entertained ‘ boys’ she would say and roll her eyes (or the equivalent that she would do which was pursing her lips to one side and closing her eyes.) The situation for me was more like a comic strip with blank speech bubbles to fill in…

We walked through the fairy tale green village where the sports event was going to be held the following week. A big open space was available for playing cricket on and our mission this visit was to bus/trek to a nearby village where a Mela was being held. We were to put up posters that Manoj had seemingly slaved over but was still rampant with mistakes. Posters can go anywhere in India with no one bothered about messiness of old 5 yr old posters still clutching to their wall, though of course we asked permission from shop owners before pasting the posters to their shop fronts with a glue of flour and water some one had mixed that morning..not out of eco-friendliness but sheer lack of glue. With messy hands Manoj helped then switch from the paste to black marker and corrected his typing error of LPW to the cricket abbreviation LBW.

Me, Manoj and Fred had drunk rum and discussed the usual as foreigners do when all together….their own countries. We laughed muchly through broken communications but the following night I was given the option of returning to the homestay in Dikuli…..I took it, not wanting to intrude anything, as at that moment I didn’t know if there was more then just a friendly spark flying around.

 Ramnagar errands

One morning we set out on a mission to buy rope, foam, ans several other obscurities.

I was always fearful of lonely planets description of Ramnagar as a dusty little town, turns out it reminds me of those parts of Rajasthan, like the old city of Jodhpur in particular with those jumbles of shops that sell only polythene,or metal or bike tyre inner tubes, and you wonder how they make a living. Though as this part of India doesn’t really have any local handicraft, there’s not really any shops with pretty things directed at tourists. There’s the typical bangle shops all grouped together selling an array of cheap jewelry, toiletries and cosmetics.

The one street rule of shop gatherings applied here, with the linen and sari shops on one though mayb with other odd ones dotted around the town. The cheap cotton products shops grouped in another area and the chemists lined up opposite the non signposted doctor. Dusty yes. But useful and cheap. We went to a shop that sold every type of rope possible except typically the one we needed to play tug of war with….We went to another where we found the right rope but the shop keeper refused to cut it to length..he was obviously waiting for the day that big sale would come and he would sell the whole length!…..eventually we found another shop with better rope and bought ten meters ( later Fred would kick herself as we obviously needed 30…then it would be a last minute dash)

We bought some pieces of foam…which was far more expensive then I thought it would be…but was of very comfortable quality. This was for the lantana furniture that was being made…Lantana is an invasive weed that is a nuisance in the forest as it takes up much ground space from native plants plus Isn’t very nutritious for the animals. However this is a very useful product when harvested- as I would find out when I met a man who had written his whole thesis on this plant that was bought over from Mexico.

Lantana Lady

Fred was heading the Lanata project and in other parts of Indian the weed had been molded in to strong furniture, like the piece we were buying foam for. The idea for the project was to offer the opportunity, to boys from a known tribe that engaged in poaching, to go to Bangalore to learn how to make furniture out of this free and abundant raw material .The trouble was getting two rural village boys on a train- some of the women in such villages had never seen roads I was told. Later when I visted their village I would find this wasn’t true of the Kunjar tribe from which we had harvested the boys. The people had been driven out fo the forest and were now living in very poor conditions on the edge of the road. In the end they succeeded in finding to young boys up for the challenge and enthusiastic about making a living from such work. From the shape of the village you could see why they’d taken the initiative to make a move to a big city, in the hope of a better life for them and their families. Don’t get me wrong they seemed happy enough, but then again they had learned to live with the hardship they incurred.

Fred was greeted by many of the people/shop keepers she already knew and her skill at Hindi was well respected (and slightly feared) by the men and enjoyed, by local women. We went to buy some more raw material for another project. Neema dolls. Sumantha had told me about this. Neema was a girl who lived in the village of Ringora between Ramnagar and Dikuli. Sumatha had told me she was a ‘character’…. and when I met her later on I was surprised by her moodiness, however she made these obscure but pretty dolls simply designed, using of a shredded grass with platted arms and ribbons around their waists. Some of the dolls were carrying bundles of wood on their head, representing the women who went out to collect the wood from the forest. This was another attempt of the Masheer Conservancy to develop local handicrafts that could be sold on oder to prevent that excess wood being collected for selling/trading. Money made from such project could be used to buy cooking gases- which although isn’t best for the environment in the long term, in the short term it helps to take the pressure of the forest and its wildlife. Until an alternative is found. In my opinion the sooner an alternative is found to using LPG for cooking the better, otherwise we are just encouraging gas consumption and dependency.

At first I thought it would be a good idea if the dolls stood for something, like the Peruvian Worry Dolls or dream-catchers, something that would offer an incentive to buy, in the end it became clear that the dolls told of the hardship the women face in the forest, putting there lives at risk by entering the wild animals habitat ( conflicts have been common in the past) So guess eventually the dolls will represent protection of these hard working women, as again production of such handicrafts would help keep the women from having to work excessively in the dangerous forest areas.

Geeta Bachou!

So one of the other things we got involved in was a Mela in the Ramnagar itself. The conservancy had taken advantage of the display; hill top tribes accompained byl music and costume parading around the town on floats, singing and dancing. We decided to get a few floats going ourselves, in the form of gypsies displaying banners for the vulture campaign, yet another project of ours.

The story with the vultures is that once upon a time Indian used to be rife with vultures, and it needed to be, with the biggest cattle population in the world. These cows which I don’t think I’ve made enough of a point of saying how there EVERYWHERE,(its like the Cravendale advert.)…for religious reasons ect they aren’t killed or eaten, and when they die cannot be burnt or disposed of….so this is where the need for vultures come in. When the carcass is put out in a field by either a farmer or someone who has removed it from the town the vultures come and feed. However, a couple of years back a new anti-inflammatory drug came out for veterinary use. Diclofenac; evil. This drug was given to sick cattle in the hope it would save the farmer from losing ones of his heard…though 9 times out of ten the cattle would die anyway and the drug would remain in the body for up to 3 days…the vulture who would then come to feed upon this carcass would ingest the diclofenec and with the doses to the cattle needing to be large it would be fatal to the vultures, who would endure 3days of pain before death released them.

Without an important part of the food chain- the savager other problems would arise, stray dogs would feed on the decaying cattle carcasses usually picked clean by vultures, their population would increase with this new source of food and running among towns would quickly spread disease to other dogs and humans. Its crazy when you think of one species of vulture, only one per cent of the population (counted at the depart of the British) remains

Corbett Tiger Compost

So with the compost project I went out a few times with Geeta to visit the places where local people were producing vermi-compost.

One village we visited was near a some land where an elephant had outwitted the electric fence (which usually turn off during power cuts anyway) and ruined some crops. We also dropped in on a family who were using producing bio-fuel to use for cooking. They offered us Chai and sugar cane (which I remember been given once as a child by my dad….however with the bark tough on this stick i was given my teeth weren’t strong  enough to remove it and get to the sweet interior, the children happliy biting, spiting and chomping away laughed as a failed miserable to get more then on or two bites.

We visited a forest corridor the WFF were monitoring and i saw my  first set tiger pug marks. this had been before my trip to the park for safari….and would be one of many to come.

The villages were a sight of beauty, despite what people may think about cutting trees to create room for agriculture, the forest was protect and the land used for agriculture here was a  to grow food….even so with such a large population I met some people who Geeta told me were ‘landless’ and therefore very poor, and only able to do labour work.

Despite the poverty the village was beautiful and I was taken to some more houses that were producing the compost, and inspected the banana leaves and the worm eggs amongst the dirt….one lady tells me in Hindi translate wed by Geeta that she used her vermi-compost for growing onions…and the crop grew the biggest onions shes ever grown. Just inspecting it before  it even sieved you can feel how rich and moist the worm castings are.

After this we went in to the forest across the now dry river from the village, no tiger pug marks this time but there we did spot peacock marks, porcupine burrows and fresh elephant droppings…we also encountered several groups of men and women heading deeper into the forest to cut wood. We had been told of a tiger frequenting this part of the Forrest so when the village men accompanying us started to head deeper into the bushes after the elephant trail Geeta, a little anxious called called them back.

Shoot to Kill

When keith who had previously worked on the project returned from seeing his partner to the airport, we had a nice drinking session where I met yet another friend of the project, a man named Param who I was introduced to with the added note that…he too works in conservation..but in a very different way….I later found out he had a very different approach to dealing with poachers…He believed in the shout to kill policy enforced in china and told me about once getting out of his gypsy with a shot gun and firing at some poachers….Fortuantly he’d had a few drinks and his aim was off, otherwise he might of been in trouble…he’s still backing the policy though.

He’s also making this amazing documentry film about a village where every year a festival is held in which 300 or so men throw rocks at each other….The idea is, every year the blood of one human must be sacrificed to the goddess (I’ve yet to read up on it)  There used to be human sacrifice of some sort, but as the outside world go more sensitive they started instead to have these rock fights, where rocks…not stones, as big a people’s head are lifted and thrown at other men with the intention of drawing blood….Only when the priest judges that sufficient blood, equivalent to one human, has been spilled does he have to run through the fighting crowd without being hurt and declare ‘enough!’

The drinking session me and Fred set to work on the vulture exhibition for the sports event we were hosting . The display would be made up of laminated photographs which we spent the night making holes in and stringing together along with descriptions underneath (in English and Hindi)…the hope was that we would give people at the event something interesting to look at and they would take away with them awareness of the situation of this large bird. Fred had previously made a life sized vulture with another volunteer, Ollie (who I heard much about…So we were to take that along to and hope that on the hill it would magically become real so we would be know as miracle makers who added another bird to the decreased population. We were up till 4am with more whiskey and an album called ‘look into the flower’ on repeat (it played 4 times over). Other prep for the event had included some art work on by my hand in the making of a flag bearing the Mahseer logo for the girls tug of war event….I had spent an hour carefully copying the Hindi- it could of said anything….before Sakir kindly came up and offered to help….He corrected most of it ..though he also wrote in straight lines (and re-wrote it in bold print so I could paint over with fabric paint) So it turned out making sense and looking good.We also put to gether a display board (well reycled polysteren bordering on its 5^th reuse) on Sustainable tourism and the bio-diversity of the Ramganga river.

We visited a school (which surprisingly reminded me of my previous high schools,) this was a town school though and very different from the young huts in villages with kids sat out side drawing or playing. It makes them so happy if you wave at them and they find me and Fred so fascinating, though to be fair were not you average westerners….short red hair and nose piercings dressed as I do….and then Fred with her 15 facial piercings wearing combat trousers….there more used to seeing wildlife fanatics kitted out in desert type outdoor wear…We were at the school to arrange a drawing competition that would be exhibited with the vulture display. We gae them the title of ‘Unsustainable Tourism is a Curse’ and left their imaginative minds to create some hilariously cruel ideas but also some good art work.

Looking through the drawings later, one featured an overly bloody car/animal road crash ( very common here) another took the curtsy of writing ‘ the blood will become in the water’…i couldn’t make out weather he was trying to make a religious reference to ‘the water will become blood’ or he was just scared about lots of blood in his river’

Tiger Tales

one night I was sat having my dinner – I often ate alone at the homestay as Fred who did occasional work at tiger camp took her dinner their- suddenly I hear a chital-spotted dear raise an alarm call. It continues and gets nearer…..i carry on with my chapatti and then I hear the cow call – just downstairs, shortly after Sakir comes up and asks me did I hear the calls, yes I say as the cow moos again and the chittal continues to call….’tiger, 100%’ says sakir ‘just here’ motioning to a tree the other side of the wall. We cant see from the closed mezzanine where im sitting so I go out on to the roof and look one of the bigger trees just across the road, its pretty close, no wonder the cows scared. We cant see a thing because of the foliage and the darkness but the alarm calls confirm it, most likely a tiger has come over the ridge and down towards the road. I search for eye shine in the darkness but see nothing…its enthralling to know a big cat is so close but we can’t see it. Kieth had told me about a time he was walking down this road late one night..only to look behind and catch glimpse of a tiger following him. Unlikely to be a man eater it probably wasn’t interest in Keith as l0ng as he wasn’t a threat. Another story I was told involving a volunteer and a tiger. The guy had gone down to the river to get water while staying in Ringora village…on his way up he looked out as usual for pug marks….none…on the way back however, simply a minute later, he saw pug marks that had no doubt been stalking him as he had walked in the direction of the river. There’s many stories like this, and a thousand more within the villages, telling of attacks and man eating tigers….

5 Days in Dikuli

So five days of cricket…how on earth did I manage it? I mean I used to love playing cricket, but 3 matches over 6hrs was a bit much for four days. The first day was the girls event where so games were played which such skill I thought I was watching a senior netball match…one game quite like musical chairs…but strangely without the chairs and the music….anyways if I thought the shoves and grabs in this game were violent for girls I should of know of the next game…which was a bit like British bull dog except in this one team of girls drags only one member of the other team to the ground….a girl had a gash on her neck were another girls nails had cut into her skin…blood sports. I took part in the tug of war as one team were a girl short…..we lost…the girls all out up a gd fight, in all the games in fact. It was really enjoyable day followed by heading back to Vanghat lodge (Sumantha’s luxury eco-lodge) where we sat down by the river in the darkness drinking whiskey and raising debates. Then we were cooked the meat Keith had treated us to, and sat around a small fire until the alcohol and heat took effect.

The next few days were similar….except of course now the cricket was playing, so all in all me and Fred didn’t have much to do but tend occasionally to the exhibition, which none of the boys were interested in, 6ypical. More river drinking was had again that evening and again before Keith left, then again with some friends of Sumantha’s…..at the end of the five days I couldn’t believe it, the cricket, and our social sessions, were finally over.

One day we had walked up the track to the village form he lodge and Sumantha has spotted leopard pug marks, we had heard alarm calls that morning from the same direction…meaning we were treading the ground the leopard had been on only hours before….I spent the later afternoon wondering if leopards would play fetch with a cricket ball.

(see writen articles for more details, I’ll post them later)

Coming to an end

So after the sports for conservation had finally come to an end, it was time to write everything up for the blogs and media articles and sort out other things. I worked determinedly on my articles for the sport, the compost and the long article I was writing on the four tiger deaths….One night Sumantha informed us that a man named jay would be staying the home stay…he couldn’t take a room at tiger camp lodge as he was working undercover and so trying to keep his presence here unnoticed….He was the journalist who had cracked the Sariska case (when the government had insisted there were tigers in the reserve…he unearthed the truth… tigers were extinct from the locality.) Jay was here at Corbett of course to look into the poisoning of the forth tiger and the possibility of others….though I spoke to him later on the phone, the night he stayed we didn’t see him come in or leave..neither did we hear him….just an informative publication for me to read.

All in all my time on this project was amazing, so many times I pinched my self when riding in the morning sun light- either on motorbike family gypsy cum taxi, or local bus. I was finally here, I was doing interesting work with amazing people, I felt honored to have been given this opportunity. In a way it was hare to throw oneself into altogether, I was only to be staying a month, and in the grand scheme of such things, this is a very short time. If plans had been different, if I was at a different stage of my life, I had finished my studies, traveled some more, then maybe I could of committed myself to something like this. Hopefully this will be possible in the future. :> ill learn the local language, marry a local tribal chief and take care of the goats :>

Old Delhi; 4.45 I arrive at platform ten..and to the right of me is platform nine…

In the early morning-spring into action mind of traveling on a sleeper train -only to be forced to wake up and gather your life you carry suddenly in order to carry on with your journey- my first sensical thought, is where the fuck is platform nine…..I’ve no need for platform nine, I am catching no other train I am at my destination I must conjure up some wits to get me safely to my guest house.. but first as I follow the long queue to the exit I must work out…where the fuck is platform nine? I need to know it exists.

In a magically (and Harry Potter inspired) thought it comes to me. I should run headlong into the kiosk-christened coca cola but born only to sell chai- I must throw my self against the wall which grows dirt and maybe possibly I will end up on platform nine- possibly it will lead me to a Narnia away from the bustle and stress I’m encountering. I am in my place of choice, I have reason and take delight to be in Delhi, there’s beauty in the dirt, but maybe just maybe this kiosk will be a portal to a different sort of magical land…

The reality of the now is  I’m sat in a cafe next door to my windows-of-cardboard guest house now…where in another universe leaning against the kiosk with confidence (an a sprinkling of magical genes) a Laura is running through a forested island, around lakes and mangroves and to one side a is the ocean, to the other a vineyard before snow capped mountains….

The snow haired French woman has moved on from her one way conversation with two unnoticeables, in which she was discussing her views on smoking and its need for solitude not socialization….shes now expressing her views on sex rather loudly and while using the cliché ‘oh la la’ a dozen times she condoms casual lovers an links this somewhat tangently to Indians and their life in a dreamy world of no reality….I’d take great pleasure in discussing such points with her and no doubt provoking her into even more passionate hand waving outbursts- however I don’t think she needs any encouragement, plus its all a bit heavy for 10am…I’ve had a long night and before I indulged in any such sport, I’d need a drink.

I sip my non Irish nescafe and dream of Rome, good espresso, tobacco and wine, and being reunited with many of my friends old and new. I scratch the mosquito ravished skin on my foot (the only part of me that was exposed to open air on the train ride sleep) and I should really go and phone my bank so that I have more then one pound fifty in cash in this crazy country. However, coffee first.

The Damsel(s) in Distress

I’m hungover from drinks the night before with two old men. One a doctor the other a judge, the doctor, a friend of Sumantha’s, was north Indian but has lived in Nolkfork since becoming a general practitioner. He now regards himself as British and a tourist and is very well off as he likes to tell us. The Judge, his friend from Nolkfork, and a typical posh old English man (if you’ll allow me the stereotype) They were drinking whiskey before we got to their cottage at tiger camp. Me, Fred and Sumantha were going out for dinner with them, and I dont think me and Fred could of felt more like escorts accompanying these two drunk men and some comments that were made. Award laughs were a must and consequently we too gulped down the whiskey that was going round. When whiskey is drunk here, it is mostly with water, which I’m getting quite used to. Though at the same time..why water down good scotch?

This is how typically upper class English they were…they had bought Waitrose packaged snacks and nibbles which they laid out on the table during our pre-drinks sesh, while they told us they only shop at Waitrose and even do shopping for their daughters there some times so the poor girls, god forbid don’t have to go to Marks and Spencer or Sainsburys.

They asked us a lot about ourselves- and when we had said as much as we were willing to share without further interigation they exclaimed how they wish their daughters could be more unconventional- their daughters were too lawyers and doctors. Oh Dear, after more talk about ourselves and comments like ‘Your soo interesting you really are’ and ‘My gosh you are intrepid’ and a lot more whiskey we went to the restaurant.

Here we ordered fish and drinks and when the men were done with their talk about how our parents must be really proud and how beautiful we were (and litterally falling asleep at the table) Sumantha drove them home and left an exhausted Fred and me to have some cocktails- finally I could burst into laughter at how ridiculous these men had been…I mean you can blame the alcohol also, but the mixture of their mannerisms,opinions and character were something I hadn’t experienced in a long time…I’d had to go to the bathroom several times to laugh to myself a bit as they brought up such hideous opinions about the real world and India. Honestly these guys live on a different planet.

After some Pina-coladas and some swiped chocolate fudge cake we drove into Ramnagar for some Pann and headed bck under the hazy moon to the home stay for bed. (this would be very similar to my last evening, where we would drink in th company of an amazing local forst man who was an expert tiger tracker and new the forests as if they were his own garden- it was an honor to dine with the eccentric 80 something) Nights of Genius no doubt.

So now to another damsel in distress. I was nursing this hangover which had only gotten worse after the whiskey we drunk in the gypsy on the way to get pan (a betel nut treat wrapped in a leaf with all sorts of weird flavors). I returned to my computer at one point in the evening to find Ian needing to talk to be urgently. ‘Kate’s in Bahrain’ I immediately googled the place while waiting for Ian to say more.

Bahrain is a very small country in the Persian gulf east of Saudi Arabia, across the gulf from Iraq. Its bad to be stuck at an airport. But in Bahrain? Its just ridiculous. And being there because you arrived in India and are immediately deported is just a hideous situation.

Kate was in Bahrain of all places because this is where she had caught here connecting flight to Delhi, only to arrive and be immediately sent back from whenst she came. Without even collecting her baggage. She was questioned ect and led round like a strange dog to different people without being told what was going on so she reported (I’ll get the full story when she returns). Turns out on January 14th a new Indian law was enforced concerning tourist visas. Any tourist on a multiple entry visa who leaves India, must stay OUT of India for 60days. Kate had been back in england 45 of those 60days and so was very quickly deported to Bahrain, where god knows how she managed to keep it together, sort whatever out and then contact her mum and Ian. I can just imagine how she must have been feeling on that flight back to Bahrain. Seething. As I had been when I got ripped off coming back from Nepal.

We hadn’t heard of this law…I had been to Nepal and back and not encountered any problems (apart from the travel agents) I vaguely recall hearing something about such a law in passing from an American but didn’t take much notice as for I assumed it only applied for his nationality as Kate hadn’t been forewarned of this before she left for home, neither had Merav. Neither had Kate been informed of this when she booked her flight back, or at any of the airports of passport control or immigration until she actually reached Delhi. She had to wait what felt like forever in Bahrain to unravel the situation and with no phone or luggage some how manged to contact her mother and actually pay for her own flight home. If we had known it would have saved her the air miles and the stress…and I could of planned on spending longer at the Tiger reserve. When I heard the news that she would be returned to england asap I had already tied up my projects and booked my train to Delhi. Once again I will say- T.I.I, this is India :>

So that leaves me here in limbo while Kate tries to retrieve her luggage, be refunded her plane tickets and appeal to the Indian high consult in London so she can return. I’m waiting for news. Kate will either be here soon or in 2/3 weeks depending on the high consult appeal. If she is indeed a fortnight or more I shall make plans to visit else where for that time..but until I know the verdict here I am making Kate a t-shirt that says ‘I got stranded in Bahrain and all I got was this lousy t-shirt’.

Soo I figure I’ve been here 10 days in Paraganj.

Everyone in Delhi is waiting for something

where it be flights, visas, passports, friends, a miracle.

Sometimes its all five.

Clearly Nepal and Corbett stole the last of my cynicism which the beauty and dirt of India had chipped away at and diminish…but the waiting in Delhi has seen it all safely back to my door.

The metros here are a miracle amongst the current mud of the main bazaar…they are cleaner then London underground(though without the retro yellow tiles and the history)again they work because their complicated. And with the commonwealth games been held here this summer security is in training….your wiped all over with a metal detector then your bag has to go through the magical machine that can see through cloth, leather, sheep skin and any other material your luggage maybe made out of. So basically its like airport security every time you get the metro, though without the need for your passport. You do however- ever since the bombings in Delhi last year,need your passport for using any internet cafe or hotel.

I went to the Central Secretariat area yesterday….amazed at the cleanliness of the streets and whose colonial majestic buildings were is all their grandeur on the road leading from the presidency towards India gate, was comparable to the Champs Elysees. I walked despited the pavements being empty as most people where on tour buses. Then was taken by rickshaw to Lodhi gardens, a loverly chilled out place with some ancient temple ruins and many gardens of specific species including the inevitable couple who can escape the sin of PDA by hiding in some bushes or on a well placed bench….

A lot in all sights in Delhi are limited to yet more temples, a fort and many a bazaar. All of which I have seen many many and so rather then do the usual, pay to get there, get confused, pay to get in, take a picture and look at stones, in my highly cynical mood I’d rather just come across such sights. Simply wondering and finding is more thrilling then the planning and anticipation no matter how big or small that may be…..I think Ill marry an explorer…I was clearly born in the wrong time, we know too much about the world already, and in my current mood I hate how useful guide books are.

I get the feeling in Delhi sights are made to be sights. Thats tourism. And stopping outside the red fort on my first metro trip with some Brits we declined to go in because off the price and closing time was looming. I suggested I do it another day….but another fort? Have I the energy? The interest? Any enthusiasm? In every city we visited in Rajasthan had an ancient fort…each different though some more magnificent then others, either way it was seriously outdone by those in Rajasthan (land of the kings after all) which were more interesting and impressive then the outside of the not so exciting castle-. Ancient empires Mohgals in particular only interest me to a certain extent because in my mind its too far away to fathom….theres always something at the back of my mind telling me that its a conspiracy…..

When Merav arrived however we day tripped to Chandigarh, 5hrs on a decent train there and back and 5hrs in the city. Which both freaked and amazed. I mean, the shops had doors. There were side walks. The whole city was organized in to blocks, called sectors, so asking to be dropped at sector 17 was like volunteering to enter a horror movie. It reminded me of a quite kind of retail park, except that it was a city. I suppose the fact that the city had been destroyed and rebuilt accounted for its modern un-indian feel, but the fact that we were still in India was hard to fathom. The main reason for our visit was the Chandi rock garden. I guy who had used all the industrial waste when the city was destroyed to create a beautiful yet surreal garden on government land. Walls covered in plates and hundreds of statues made from anything; bangles to bottle caps. The whole place had a Gaudi feel to it and we could easily have spent a long time wondering round this still growing park. Concrete structures made to look like trees and mosaic of tigers, miniature palaces and swings placed between Greek columns. Water cascades down a 20ft wall green with moss and slime, while above statues, almost Tim Burton esque stand guard above. This place was popular with Indians who saw the beauty in the place and even met their girlfriends here with flowers on pre-valentine dates.

Met some British guys one night that enforced the stereotype and reminded me why I vowed to marry an Indian tribal chief…‘and the (Indian) boys go on and on and on and on and on and on……’ you can meet so many people in Paraganj, westerners and Indian alike, and I find that theres even nice shop keepers in Delhi who don’t want to blow kisses at you. The attitude to western girls is as such that and 8yr old creepily blew me a kiss in the way that the men did……but hey thats tourism, business. Ive met some nice people as well who haven’t made the attempt to get me to their shops or been in anyway creepy, just interested to talk a little. Ive been subconsciously drinking in groups of people whose home countries ll start with the same letter, one night A’s, the Aussies, Americans, Africa and Austrians, the next night M’s. The only constant being me and cheap gin, as mostly people are celebrating their leaving Delhi. But I’m with the waiting. I’m glad of the people that send drinks to your table at MY bar, where Miss Laura is a regular. ‘...it should be called YOUR bar..‘ Ive clearly been in Delhi far too long, but Miss Katya herself will be here finally if India excepts her and wine shall be drunk.

The return to the adventure,  I’m sat here in Chaing Mai, Thailand at a not so un-godly hour, braving the mozzies lying in a hammock in our uber hip and therefore very popular guest house…..the room wasn’t much better but now I swear the buggers are biting my threw the hammock..its bloody hot in the room plus mozzies….at least out here I’m getting a night breeze. We cant find where the damn fiends are coming into our room as in theroy, the gauzed windows should make it mozzie proof…yet I’ve still been bitten…. on my stomach….

Enough about mosquitos and their plan to destroy us through frustration (one just tried to get me on the nose)` so I’ve retreated under my sheet I brought out with me…

Its been ver frustrating without a place to type my ramblings down as and when I want……if I write short hand I just write notes and nothing much makes sense. First of all the adaptor to my computer broke- queue me on missions around Calcutta and bangkok trying to find a replacement…then just as we are about to go to a magically place where I will find out if a replacement is actually possible…..we discover we’ve been robbed…..Laptop, camera, Kate’s phone and money (thankfully not passports) and we curse the damn devils for all eternity for robbing us of some amazing images from the start of our Indian trip( on the laptop) and the end (on my camera),,,the latter of which I will describe as best as possible before they fade.

First I think the most important thing is to get  up to date…I have such a back log of things which I’ve not been able to write about (or have written about but was unable to access and then was robbed of) so a quick summary will get me up to speed and I’ll back track on the missed during some of the long journeys and painful hangovers I’ve yet to come and re conjure the full adventures and insert them to the right time frame.

Summary goes something like this;

Delhi; Merav prepares to leave for home but not before we take her on a day trip to see the Taj in Agra…I mean it has to be done even if I have now lost the photos…a train ride from hell is followed by wine and then by another bout of food poisoning for me leaves us just about fit enough to book our flights to Thailand….from Calcutta for a ridiculously cheap price.

So we journey on to Varanassi, which carries on as it was when I last left it (which takes some of the mystery with it) and its secret passage way type corridors.  This time Merav is replaced with Kate…we cross to ‘the other side’ of the river…and mostly we don’t get lost…also had several specials from the blue lassi shop and some night time walks down to the ghats….plus a clever young colour seller, and amazing but simple sight in the washing of the steps and a man laying himself in front of us in some kind of worship and not letting us past until we hop over him.

Calcutta becomes one of our favourite cities with the freedom we have in the night time and the easy access around the different points in the city…an awesome adventure in the heat,…to an old surreal English graveyard….a freaky trip to a posh shopping complex…..the amazing colour festival that is Holi day, gin prevails and then some…. cheap wine and  whiskey at dawn…..all these amazing tales will come out eventually I promise.

Then we, I especially, freak out about leaving India, but get on our plane excitedly and arrive in the humidity of Bangkok and its high rise buildings, modern cars, lack of  human rickshaws,cows and smooth rides on smooth roads in vehicles with smooth wheels.

THE NOW

Heres where I slow down and bring you right up to date for we only left bangkok 3 nights ago.

In the taxi from the airport I couldn’t take it in, where were the retro cars decrepit advertisements and litter masses? What were these..motorways/highways? High rise buildings and gigantic ad campaigns. Getting out of the taxi was another shock. FLESH and lots of it. Thai women in there denim shorts on mopeds with toned tanned legs and high heels, tourists in their floaty dresses all white and pasty but showing shoulders and cleavage none the less!

we hobbled in awe down the busy Kho San road in search of a room that would accommodate us…..we took the first one at 300bt a night still shocked by the heat and the activity of the main street. We noticed later that despite the clean simple room and the clean large shared bathrooms, the walls wore nothing but planks of flimsy wood and ours with a number scribbled on paper taped to the door was probably and additional late add on….most likely over the kitchen as we could of invited people back to use it as a sauna.

The busy and surrounding roads (Kho San obviously been the most OTT) where lined with street vendors serving everything from the traditional padtahi for 60p a plate to whole squid, fish broths and fried grasshoppers a stoners paradise. And soon we were to meet some people who prided themselves in trying every sort of weird snack available, I’m all for trying weird things, I ate the fried grass hoppers, live shrimp; which jumped about in the box and your your mouth, and the dried frogs…but I drew the line at a microwaved chicken burger from the abundant 7/11 newsagents (which unlike their name suggests are open 24hrs)

Apart from the mass of flavours and smells which included mango sticky rice and fresh fruits mingled late at night with the alcohol from the bucket bars….there were clothes or all varieties which could reveal any part of you you chose, dresses so mini they should be illegal…but hey I’m the prude that just come from India…..many a slogan t-shirts that were offensive to every gender, male female and lady boy….

Oh the Ladyboys. The bars were fronted by tiny beautiful Thai women in heels and sexy dresses promoting certain beers, all the Thai girls are soo beautiful its a wonder men bother anywhere else in the world. The lady boys may put them off, in Bangkok particularly the quality of get up is so that even sober women have difficultly spotting them (Kate). You’ve got to know what to look for…it wasn’t long till we met more than one guy that had got themselves tangled up with a Ladyboy at some stage during a night on buckets.

Learning more about this new gender it seems boys get sex changes very young, parents are proud of their lady boy sons and they are very accepted even which their own separate toilets at schools in the city so were told….we discussed at length why the gender change only seemed to go one way from male to female….then realised back in Manchester its very similar your much more likely to see a male transvestite as its accepted that women can dress like men anyway.

So bangkok was 6days with evenings spent drinking buckets of cocktails (long island iced tea and Sangsom that infamous Thai whiskey mixed with red bull were among our favourites) and dancing at a nearby, fun and not so seedy club on the main road. Frequented by Thai men, women and ladyboys as well as the handful of Westerners. This activity was very much necessary for us, me especially having not danced to anything but a street mela since leaving home and the only club id visited was an empty one in Kathmandu…..

So the nights were spent laughing, talking, drinking, bucketing and dancing having an awesome time with the people we’d met and the days that followed involved a late rise and hangover breakfast (more then once without realising it at a British cafe called ‘Oh My Cod’..Oh the shame) then consisted  of  one trip or another out into the city itself, you can see a lot of people getting stuck on the Kho San road….it has everything you need to a point. The roads behind are lined with more relaxed cool/retro/ chic restaurants cafes, tea shops and massage parlours (actually massage parlours)

its a nice area in that sense…except for the expense of course…

Coming from India we were horrified at the prospect of such prices when in realty the city was cheap compared to back home, we ended up deciding to more then double our budget in order to live cheaply but not have to worry about buying that next bucket, we were hear to have fun after all.. we met some very generous people who taught us to ‘splash out’ but I don’t think they’d be proud of our attempts  however extravagant they seemed to us.

One day we went to the crazy weekend market, so big theirs a bus around it. There was more of our sort of 2nd hand old style clothes here as apposed to the sexy floral things on Kho San road….we like to dress up…but the Kho San sometimes calls for something extra when everyone is in their tiny little skirts and barely there dresses. Also here we food the live shrimp and dried frogs and live dogs….these weren’t for eating though, very ‘cute’ and preened (fluffy to the point of shag pile rugs and dandelions)…not my sort of thing at all and I couldn’t help being intrigued by how the  bredding process and the possible or inevitable defects.

Sitting down and having a beer at the bars and people watching is very entertaining and the best way to get to know the goings on of a place, hip young Thai teens shopping for retro gear, Chinese and japanese tourists out for bargains and to soak up the delights, Westerners exploring or appearing to know their way around from frequent visits. There’s so many people here of every variety that you could never complain of craving one sort of company or another as I did in India at times.

Thailand is colourful, but in a very different way to India….its less about the bright solid or floral masses and more about western styles like fuchsia pink scooters driven by girls in heels, or enormous  computer advertisements clearly in expensive prime space and well looked after, unlike the peeling Hindi posters…. I suppose it is wrong to even bate the countries against one another, especially in cities, they are there own, though at the moment simple description doesn’t seem enough to justify the shock we were in and the many western luxuries we are still getting used to. And its not.

The subway wasn’t so much of a shock having experience trams better then home in india and the sky train likewise as all I could see were high rise buildings with nothing beautiful or messy about them. The malls were huge but then again we have the Trafford Centre back home although every huge shop here was Burberry or Hermes, purely designer, none of even your upper high street. The  food section wasn’t quite on the same scale as anything I had ever seen, as it seemed to stretch for miles in each direction, while out side in the main square was a car promotion show which involved a young children’s talent contest……A boy in aviators and leather pulling stud moves and a young girl who in no way at all cute, wiggled her no existent hips in a short skirt while talking on a mobile phone,,,…..

We were taken one day for Chang beer or its more expensive equivalent in what was once claimed as the tallest tower in Asia…(its been since beaten obviously and their probably building another to beat its successor as we speak) ….We looked out on the city from a magnificent height (this was the day we discovered my laptop and camera stolen…an activity to distract me from my outrage) we spotted all the retro shaped private swimming pools and helicopter landing pads on the posh hotels while studded in between where the run down and not so posh apartment flats? I don’t really know what to call them, they were only a tad more decrepit then everything else and with bangkok being a very young city  everything was round about in the same style…very strange when you thing of Britain having architecture from Victorian times to the 60s to now..the city almost looked model like and futuristic with its winding raised high ways that weaved inbtween the buildings like vipers

while other traffic struggled on the ground roads below. The one beer appropriately turned into a tower of chang which we digested slowly.

The view really became itself though for me when darkness fell. On the roads a strip of yellow headlights continuing for miles in traffic and jams ,with read breaks lights luminous on the backs of cars headin in the opposite direction. Advertisements lit up, smiled and shone  in thia part of the city with nothing atall so garish (though still Thai)  as the tacky but fun Kho San road (it was more akin to India with its mish-mash of vendors and stalls and  occasional tinsel)

We were dying after a week on no more then 8hrs of rest/sleep ( we hadn’t slept well in Calcutta a week early either) so when our friends had left us head- fucked insisting we must go to Laos (many people had done this, though not quite so well) we got sorted to head to Chaing Mai which thankfully though not as I expected…. it was a great place to sober up- well to some extent…and chill out, re-fuel, and supply our selves with necessary items and procedures that would secure our sanity now that our plans had changed yet again. From Chaing Mai we would head to Laos,….and do Cambodia after the full moon party on the souther islands later in the month (this meant back tracking across a country…not something we had done or had planned…but  Thailand is small and narrow…so we can, and why not?

After the business of bangkok we were shocked at the restful atmosphere of Chaing Mai. We’d had a far to comfortable train ride in sleeper class, with sheets, blankets and even pillows….inevitably with having so little sleep and being hit with ridiculous comfort we failed to fall into any sort of deep slumber. A nice clean journey all the same though,.

We looked up a random guest house in my faithful but old L.P. Julies we would found out was thee place to stay , there were queues every morning with people looking for the cheap funky rooms surrounded by good travel services helpful advice and chilled places to hang out. It was so colourful though all most overwhelming with the activities that were on offer.

We hired a moped, and just as riding a bike, I hadn’t forgot after four months and was grateful for the freedom, I got the feeling that if you didn’t drive in Chaing Mai you could get very trapped. We escaped one day up to Doi Sutep, which took about an hour on the bike, once again with Kate as my backseat driver making appropriate warning ‘wooaaah!‘ every now and them. The roads were unfortunately stricter then India and it frustrated me that I couldn’t go which ever way I like down a one way street or do a u-turn in the moving traffic…which by the way are a ploy to get you to spend more on petrol as driving round and missing turnings adds up eventually.

The windey up road hill to the temple of Doi Sutep reminded me of playing racing video games and was much fun in the heat of the day to feel the cool breeze speeding past us and being hit by the occasiaonal angry fly buzzing in the opposite direction.

It was fortunate that just as we got 200m from the top of the hill where the temple stood that our tyre decided to give in….the reason for its demise we found after a handy thai man had wheeled it to his work shop was that the inner tube had now split right down the seam….it was an impressive reason for a flat tyre and I was surprised we had made it thus far before I felt the wobble and decided it was time to pull over. Efficiently as most if not all Thais are the tyre was fixed and inner tube replaced for 1.50 sterling and we got a free lesson on changing an inner tube before we sat down to noodle soup and pad thai.

The temple itself was an impressive if not slightly enforced mass of gold and red, beautiful though I enjoyed the contrast of the screened construction work going on about the temple while the Buddhists held flowers between their hands and walked around the wat. After being beautifully blinded with the clean clean gold we were eager to return down the steep hill…well I was with the snaking roads and the sun beginning to set.

We breezed through the dappled light soaring round the curves (albeit not as well as the locals) our faith restored in our previously collapsed tyre drinking in the yellowy orange light and looking forward to some wine coolers back at Julies.

Our plans had changed so vary much in the last week it was weird just booking tickets to laos which like Nepal had never been on the original plan…its so exciting that we can just plod off to Vietnam or Cambodia with the only hindrance being a shorter amount of time and money else where…but then more places; more new things more beauty more fun are all available.

The last day in Chaing Mai involved more a mission to get me re acquainted with the technology that was stolen from me…cue a nice red camera with which I can take a photo of my own choice any time anywhere (you so miss that luxury) and surprisingly a laptop- a tad more expensive then I would of liked but hey its worth it to be able to type whenever I want for example 2am when I cant sleep. If I limited myself to Internet cafes I’d never record the things  I want to remember ( visual and description is a must with a memory like mine)

Cuts and Bruises;

…..Whose idea was it to put alcohol next to a  river inhabited by jagged rocks? ….Along with mass loud music to contrast the ominous back drop of overcast skies and dark, strangely ,blackened green mountains?…. Plus the inconvenience of a building sight before you step into the bars, concrete and stones knocking around, then100s of half naked 20ish year olds drinking copious amounts from buckets….. and then being permitted to fling themselves from great heights with the added animal-ism of a trapeze? Give them some marker pens,body paint,cameras and no inhibitions…and oh yeah they can drink straight spirits laced with snakes and hornets for FREE- who ever was hideous enough to imagine such things…and let them become reality??- well…if your out there…I adore you.

This is Vang Veing, Laos…

…..The infamous tubing river talked about in awe by so many travelers of the partying style….where water tubing is the name but the actual activity is definitely not on the agenda-why? A tube is pointless because, surprisingly with a river full of bars offering free booze the mass party never really brawls past the 4th bar….. the only time people are in the water is when their somersaulting off the swings and zip lines, playing a game of alcohol enhanced volley ball or getting pushed in to the battered river by a potential or current ‘friend’ or ‘lover'( I use these terms very loosely.) Other than that the main thing in the water must be reminisces of the hornet and dead snake whiskey -which is a novelty- and also free…..the alcohol percentage of the river is surely akin to a premium beer by now with all the spills, throws and little Laos girls emptying failed buckets.

Off course their not mop buckets….I’m pretty sure that would result in more death, from experience the buckets can  hold 2/3s of a  bottle of whiskey with a smattering of lemonade (mixer of your choice) and a fair amount of ice…….and a few hornets plus various missing legs from their friends.

To put this in perspective this is just the day time…night offers a whole new scene with the imaginatively named ‘Bucket Bar’ offering free buckets and music to dance all night to on platforms around fires….the other clubs that side of the haggled bridge offer similar experiences, and like at the river the crowd moves on as one and continue till 6am (though frequenting still no more then 3 bars….)

Its beautiful, hellish, amazing, surreal, gnarly and cheap…but mostly I know that if I had a soul, I would of lost it in Vang Veing….the cuts and the busies would make a concrete wall proud. We never knew walking could be so difficult, I have a total of nine cuts just on one foot, my back despises me and my vital organs….especially heart and lungs are refusing to co-operate with one another.

We have been Vang Vieng-ed…luckily my injuries are as less visible then Kate’s and I’m sure shes in quite a bit more pain…. a swollen finger being the least of her worries followed by a bruise the size of Sweden on her thigh- a whole new meaning to treacherous waters since she flipped from one of the swings. Plus just to show that accidents are more likely to happen in the home, she achieved a a gash on her chin from slipping on a flip flop….I wish it had been a banana skin for cliched comical value- though we really mustn’t laugh- it cost 20quid for 3stiches at the conveniently placed ‘Hopital de Vang Veing’… to be fair I thought the hospital would be a little rushed seeing as the combination of alcohol and rocky rivers/rope swings/bridges, but the staff had no one else to repair and Kate seemed a mild form of entertainment…. especially after the wound was cleaned and stitched and the comedy bandage we’d joked about on the way there actually became reality..

The experience has to be seen to be believed I could write a book just on the things we’ve seen/heard done in the last 5 days. My advice for people as they roll in however….is ‘Get out while you can’ ….(naturally this spurs them on as they know they’re in for a gnarly but fun time.) Just 2 days and this town is to small- from what i watch when i rise early one day ; war wounds, shoe-less walks of shame and ‘bhang’ overs are an essential part of this place it seems….

15hrs is a long time in side a car…

After our hellish journey to get here we hould of known what to expect.

We left Chaing Mai on a 5hr mini bus ride to the border on the way we stop for a ‘toilet break’..except this is no ordinary stop, we’ve landed at ‘The White Temple’ (not that we’d heard of it before but its something of a tourist attraction) without being told, and after being jolted awake, seeing an incredibly beautiful and unexpected fairy ,ice queen esque palace is mind boggling to say the least…….we just step out of the van and its there behind the toilets….no info, no explanation from our driver, just handfuls of Thai tourists and this beautifully ornate white temple compiled of from many buildings in a royal icing like sculpture….

on schedule we arrive at the border town..its obviously been going too well so far….so we were then told that it was impossible for us to carry on with our journey the same day and we must leave in the morning instead….Thankfully it wasn’t to difficult to negotiate (after some insistence) free accommodation and a meal as ‘compensation’- though the witchy woman we dealt with did hate us as we refused to by her dollar, needed for the visa fee -at an extortionate exchange rate .

A tad narked but accepting that this is how things are in south east Asia..we spent the rest of that day walking and finding some creature comforts (wine and good noodle soup) Little did we know we’d be much worse off the next day…..already 12hrs behind schedule we jump on the boat to cross the river….actually we’d seriously considered swimming it or commandeering a boat after the wine the evening before,…at that point we didn’t know the small river was actually the border. Damn we could of just swum to Laos.

We exchange baht for Kip, another new currency and one that would mess a bit with our heads due to one pound being 12000 Kip,luckily everything is cheaper in Laos then in Thailand so spending becomes easier…..also helped along by the alcohol…

We get our visa and then are told that leaving before 5pm is not negotiable..and its 9.30am. Bullshit. Then they say we can leave at 12 if we take local transport despite the fact we have paid for a mini bus. More bullshit.If it was India I wouldn’t of booked anything in advance and hopped on and off local buses all the way….but South East Asia seems to want to only offer private transport to tourists, and in packages. Maybe if I become as accustomed to here as I did India and Neapal then ill find cheaper, less scam prone way to travel….but I’m new to this game, language and cost of living.

Eventually were told for an extra 20,000kip we can leave at 10am on the mini bus….we consider paying….then as we take a long time deciding, the guy gives in to our group of 12 and takes us to a mini bus that will drive us to Vang Vieng with no extra cost then what we have already paid. So basically we end up getting what we were promised for the fee we paid…They’ll try to get anything out of you honestly, though coming from India we accept that’s how things are, there’s no point being angry, we got what we wanted in the end, at least we are moving even if we cant take the original 12hr delay back

The mini bus in itself isn’t that bad, though it is full, has little leg room for the smallest person but its bearable,and decent on any normal journey…. the 15hr drive on road still being built ( we even stop for 30min to actually wait for a road to dry) is hideously bumpy so sleep is not an option….15hrs is a long time inside a car without sleep and we naurally become delirious and amuse ourselves with ridiculous and stupid things, stories from our new found friends ..unfortunately to add to the trauma Mr, Jelly ,our driver- insisted on playing 90s pop at full blast…and not the good stuff…..Backstreet Boys, A1, Boyzone and Westlife amongst the worst. Plugging into your i-pod isn’t that easy when at full volume you can still here Ronan Keating and Five…and the insult to the injury was a quite inappropriate lady, of around 40 making comments I will not repeat should you ever want to look at a banana in the same way again….lets just call her May.

Among our team was an entertaining Canadian….(his tattoo he showed us right above his crotch confirmed his nationality) and some girls from New Zealand both of which we would spend time with over the next few days (as if 15hrs of each other wasn’t enough) in Luang Praubhang- our introduction to Laos and Vang Veing The patriotic Nate ‘hospital’ Canada and Kiwis were a refreshing and wonderful escape from some of the absolute twats that turn up or are born out of Vang Veing due to the nakedness and alcohol. Though we couldn’t of been much better ourselves seen as one ‘Mojito Dan’ shouted for paracetmol everytime we stepped near the bar he promoted…though in my opinion it was his own fault…he asked us if we had any questions…and yes..yes we did..

Where was the free alcohol he spoke of? How long was it free for? How much did he get paid? Where was the free whiskey he claimed to know of? What time were the bars open till? Where was the free gin buckets he wanted to give us?

And that was just the first night……after all of the cuts and bruises above, we got out alive…surprisingly.

So return to bangkok; it was a slightly easier journey then on the way in as we treat ourself to a train from the border crossing at Veintiene…though everyone’s train appears to be at different times even though were crossing in the hands of the same company, lets just say things get a little heated as we race in a tuk tuk to make the 3.30 train that is on our ticket…which actually leaves at 6.30pm

Another comfortable over night train ride aided by Spy and Chang – we can finally sleep and its beyond heaven….plus its always a ‘darling’ to wake in the morning and have a Thai man pack away your bed and turn it into an extra large chair that in India would of housed 4 people….Out the windows is pink cherry blossom on the occasional tree,not so often seen so that it is sickly, in-between wooden greens and browns and withering yellows of banana palms. Green fluffy grasses add texture with occasional sparse hordes of trees that are a welcome, almost English hindrance to the luscious colours…… the mango and papaya trees redeem the exotic.

Oddly every here and there a blue water tower juts amidst the foliage…(the colour blue popular in Thailand despite it contrasting hugely to everything else…I’m glad they don’t try and blend everything together.) The train travels at a pace which back home would be painfully slow but here fits in with the laid back atmosphere and allows you to take in the smells of wood burning from farms/house/plastics which add life to the pretty pictures.

Returning to bangkok we took a place that had been recommended to us with air con at a small price….though now complaining of the cold instead of the sauna like qualities of our previous room.Not drunk or hungover and now well rested we explored off the Khao San road and found many a treasure.We weren’t weighed down with Aussies anymore and had a night off from drinking, so were free to make purchases the next day in sober mind….we found some supermarkets that to us were heaven, as they sold all the coinvent items you wanted to find in a supermarket back home….I also discovered that this is the place the none tiny Thai women buy bras, a little cheaper then back home and not so bad….typically you try to buy a bra or bikini on the Khao San and you’ll be lucky if it fits your thumb.

We found sushi (for the first time more then 6 months and walked passed a million apparently edible things we couldn’t decipher…we’d slowly grown accustomed to the once unknown street snacks in India….and now we had to start all over again.

 The Sister Arrives

The next day Hannah was finally getting here….it had seemed ages ago that I was booking flights with her over Skype and now her plane landed that evening….we had a whole plan of how we’d ease her in to bangkok that night, where we’d take her to drink, what she should drink and so things….I hadn’t counted on her flight being 3.30hrs late- queue me waiting at bangkok airport buying and English newspaper (The Independent) and keeping my eye on the arrivals board…..

I’d left Kate at the inn on Rambuttri where we were staying and had jaunted off to get a taxi to the airport to for the sister collection…I’d had a few Spy ( Su—Pii!) wine coolers (beware children india has turned me into the ridiculous lightweight I started out as….) and opted for a motorcycle taxi,..agreeing in my tipsiness to pay a tad more then I should of done…..it was well worth it though….sat side saddle because of the near absence of my skirt ( even I can get away with such things in bangkok) I was catapulted along the bangkok highways and back streets at 130kmh by an elderly driver….thai women style with my legs crossed and wind beating my face… enjoying every dangerous minute.I wasn’t sure if I’d actually make it to the airport alive at the rate.,his driver was nudging the motorbike here and there in and out of cars, lorries and buses at top speed..I craned to look at the speedometer…but his was broken….so I glanced as we passed another motorcycles..and 130 seemed acceptable….I laughed as my driver pointed out a short cut – a whole in some rocks underneath a concrete bridge which motorbikes were crawling into occasionally, like bees entering a hive`…..I suppose he took my laughter as enthusiasm and thus we took the next short cut which came up…surprisingly similar to the first, except with a dirt track to some railway lines which had planks in-between the tracks for a dashed crossing….upon making it to the airport I noted to remind my sister that she was a lucky girl having me survive to meet her there…..and I’d do that ride again in an instant …( and does the next week on the island)

We took Hann out that night to our favourite bucket bar, thee Club for some dancing and then Gazebo Bar, for sheesha,… for my annoying antics that night I was striped of my harmonica at 7am and then on awakening rewarded with one hell of a hangover.

Boarding the bus, after a humid hungover 10min wander through Bangkok’s back streets led by our travel agent, was heaven…unlike Indian buses, as I may have described before, these VIP clean reclining, blanketed double deckers…complete with toilet, also showed movies (namely the latest pirated ones bought on the ko san for 2pounds or so)….despite the comfort and the entertainment of Tim Burtons Alice in wonderland, we didn’t sleep well when the lights finally went out….plus we were interrupted from slumber for ‘last stops’ at eateries in league with the bus companies.

We did make it to the pier in Surat Thani however at around 7am, then caught the ferry to koa phanang…..the views of islands and beaches over blue seas and skies were surely images cut from a magazine, that conventional tropical beauty so available to all that land on the shore., I usually prefer things a bit more gritty, but there’s no arguing that the immediate beauty leads to a relaxed and smile-y state.

On the ferry along with a few cockerels and boxed chickens some men were filing curved spikes and attaching them to metal platforms…innocently in the beautiful morning light we presumed they were some kind of show jewellery (though they looked darkly familiar)….when Hann inquired we were told they were for attaching to birds legs for cock fights on the island….lovely…the look on our faces went from interest to stifled disgust, I remembered that I knew very well that in South East Asia and Indonesia cock fighting is a major sport for villages with the losing cock being spit roasted for the evening meal.

Buckets and Fire 

Arriving at Thong Sala we were a long way from our reservation at the beautiful Mai Phen Rai ….wed splashed out a bit…though still only paying five pounds a night, we thought it’d be worth it to have a nice chilled place to stay away form the carnage on Haad Rin beach every night….however we hadn’t counted on it being so expensive and inconvenient to get to the main town from our secluded paradise- don’t get me wrong I’m all for a bit of getting away, as long as I have freedom to move around….. when I want it.

With kho Phanang being a centre of tourism the thai people have less morals when it comes to taking your money….luckily Mai Phen Rai (meaning never mind in thai) was an honest and hospitable place…..a restaurant and reception on one side of its private cove, and huts on the jutting rocks facing into the beach….our hut being one of these it was necessary to boulder our way to each and every time.We vowed never to attempt it drunk and if we managed to return one night from Haad Rin, we would remain on the beach and claim a deck chair as a comfortable bed for the night….luckily as the parties in Haad Rin continued past 7am we never had to worry about scaling the rocks until we were relatively sober and the sun was up.

The first couple of days were overcast and one night storms caused Hann to think she would be washed away from the rocks, the echoes from waves crashing against the rocks however made the weather seem more violent then it actually was…nevertheless the taxi boats didn’t run the next day on the rough seas which would have been awesome to take a kayak out on (though a boat had capsized in the bay the previous night :/), so a taxi up the steep dirt hills across the island it was, until we reached Haad Rin, where the infamous full moon party was to take place in a couple of days.

Haad Rin was as to be expected really…desolate of people during the day due to self induced wounds and hangovers of the tourists, like Vang Vieng on many levels, complete with the cafes constantly showing friends, family guys and jackass movies for people to wallow in and nurse their hangovers with carbohydrates and more beer.

The beach fine fine sand helped by all that plodding and dancing….the sea warm and prices un varying…the clothes cheap and un interesting, cheap alcohol in excess for reasonable prices….

We inquired about rooms to stay nearer the beach as a pit stop incase we failed to make it through a night and didn’t want to pay 20quid to return to the other side of the island…..the dingiest places wanted 600 per person…we were paying 275 per person for paradise…no way were we giving that one up….even if it added up paying for taxi boats and trucks…

Our beach was just what the doctor ordered after a harsh night out…well we stayed drinking buckets watching fire pois and fire jumpers, dancing on the sand platforms and drinking yet more buckets till the sun came up. Haad Rin is a beach party taken to the extreme…though after all I’ve heard I’ve seen more drugs out at a lame student bar on a Wednesday night…its just a beach lined with bucket bars along with several fire poi players and fire baton twirling…and anything one can don with fire…skip, limbo ect…surreal and fun for sure…chancing the night away..

I think we were expecting something more from the full moon however….it was just as the Friday night had been ….except when you looked down from your spot on the tables and across the beach you realised that you’ll never bump into all those people you met along your travels ….all of whom on a night after many gins said hey! Yea! See you full moon!….the beach was carnage…though more blood would of provided excitement…the music (like that of James blunt that plays at central bar where I am now)…was a tad repetitive…though I stumbled upon a ‘dubstep’ open bar and played antisocial …not talking or dancing with anyone but yourself…..To be fair the whole night was a giant leech feast…with some decent people thrown in ..

 I had a great time don’t get me wrong..but with so many nights out in Thailand I cant really pick it as the best….the highlight for me was a guy tall dark guy from Glasgow lighting my cigarette with a lighter from the sporran of his kilt…a perfect moment…then it was back to the sandy dancing until the sun came up….

And that was full moon….a good party…..amazing  an all, but then so is whole travelling lark….no epic stories….(well not ones that can be written) no injuries (per se)  just laughs, sand and sea…..(contact me personally for more details on the unspeakables) oxo

We made our way by boats ferries and buses ect to Bangkok. Which was as usual….except this time we decided after all the hype we must visit a ‘pingpong show.’ We might not like the idea of it but it seemed like something we had to do..just once…..I wont go into descriptions or even adjectives….and be grateful…all I will say is that I can never look at Christmas lights or bananas in the same way again…

Ok maybe a little description and conclusion for those of you who know what I’m talking about…. The girls looked a tad bored at preforming for what must have been the eighth time that night on a rolling schedule….it was impressive don’t get me wrong…however, I wouldn’t choose to sit through that again by choice….Males on the other hand; some found it sexy others were less then impressed…..sicken one might say….I know most women, however impressed and intrigued they were by the skills of these women, were obviously hurt by the sexism.

The worst thing for our group was that we arrived at the finale. Take a wild guess at what that involved…..and sat to watch the rest of the show as it rolled round continuously……To be fair you’ll hear so much about ‘pingpong’ all around Thailand its worth going just to see what all the fuss is about….and it is worth making a fuss about…on a more serious note its very worth questioning how it came about and why it still carries on….

So that and the weekend markets were the last things we treated Hannah too….The weekend markets being where you can get just about anything if your prepared to look. At the night markets you can get stuck in the vortex of car-boot style selling mostly in the dark and you take the chance of paying 20baht for a dress, that may or may not be what you make it out to be, in the torch light of the stall holder….all good fun…..We also went to MBK the massive shopping mall… one floor sells one thing it seems…and the floors carry on forever…..and you can find the same thing 100times over for pretty much the same price…….

While we were staying in Bangkok this time, the protesting that we had seen going on when we first arrived here in march, had grown in scale quite considerably and Bangkok was soon declared in a state of emergency as the red shirt anti-government protesters attacked government buildings and blocked yet more roads….We could hear the chanting through the night as before…on the rotating mega speakers (we were also staying in a different place yet again… it was more open so you could hear the goings on),…One night there’s helicopters flying around and police sirens going off.

Many people have left bangkok to get out of the way, though as of yet there was no threat to the tourists or the road we were staying on..though the main streets are dead and shops start to shut at the main backpacker street is on high alert due to protesters frequenting it, the atmosphere is darker and although I’d like to believe many businesses were shutting earlier for the upcoming new years festival it appeared more that the stores had just decided to shut earlier due to the demonstration …The same demonstrators in-between the time we had left bangkok for the first time and gone to laos had collected and the spilled1000litres of human blood in front of the government building…demonstrating the red-shirt protesters (mainly country folk) want for the government to step down- as they believe they came into power illegitimately.

…The papers the morning two days before were due to leave bangkok for Cambodia ,tell us of the clashes that had happened in the night between, the protesters and the police…17dead and 500 injured in bangkok..many close to the government building quite near to the backpacker district Banglampoo and the Kho Sarn road……A lot of the other information I learned later, the death toll rose into the 20s, 27 last I heard, though I’m not sure of the source, the day we left the protesters carried coffins representing their lost fellows, to the government building….at least two of the coffins contained bodies I read. We receive a lot of messages from people back home telling us to be careful…but to be honest, though its not a nice atmosphere to be in, as long as you stay out of the way and don’t get mixed up in it your safe, there not targeting tourists after all. And both parties are determined to keep violence to a minimum.

 Leaving the bad atmosphere of bangkok behind us we head for the border once more. Besides our visa is up and time is running down.

A comfortable mini bus to the Cambodian border at….was followed by what would have been an equally fine journey to Siem Reap, if we hadn’t of happened to be on a small bus with a large group of some other British girls. Lest say..we weren’t compatible..you get a very different type of tourist/traveller in South East Asia then India and although we were prepared for this it doesn’t stop the irritation seeping through on a long bus journey, especially when your ill and they won’t shut up bitching about home and how dirty this country is. ( If you dont like it GO HOME. Dont subject me to your drivel or rudely patronise me with offers of water in a vain attempt to stop me coughing)

I also asked a fellow British traveller if I could glance at his lonely planet for a hostel to head to….he looked at me like I’d offered to decapitate him. After some more then uncomfortable hesitation in which I smiled and assured him that if wasn’t O.K, I could cope,,…he then agreed. (I felt like I had lost all faith in fellow Brits travelling at this point)

We spied a place in that there book called Garden Village which turned out to have dorms for only a dollar a night….cheap yes, so we got what we paid for, outside mattress with mosquito nets on a raised platform…..was no problem for us apart from the unforgiving heat and humidity, but I doubt if we’d strechted to a fan room it would of made all that difference…besides we used the money we saved to go on a few more adventures.

I should explain that in Cambodia the national currency riel is used only for small change, US dollars are preferred with most shops pricing in the foreign currency. Its 4000 riel to a dollar, so anything under one dollar was paid for in riel not cents…This meant no coins, just a confused mixed currency. Almost a game, it was the aim to get rid of all your riel when ever you could, otherwise you’d be carrying around a mass of notes, and when you left Cambodia your hard pushed for anywhere to exchange the country’s low currency.

We ended up staying in Siem Reap for around a week, I’d like to think we took some time to relax and chill out, but in reality it was more time to sleep after hot temple exploring- thus hiding from the heat and resting our burnt out legs .(Its currently the hottest season in Cambodia with even the local sweating profusely.) We used a day or so but no more to recover from daily hangovers, self induced by a trips down pub street.(We’ve got to the point where if a hangover occurs it has to try hard to stop us getting out and about)

We had ben told about the legendary pub street by a few people ,who had only said good things as one would expect- the name speaks for itself…or so one would think….but the idea of pubs here and around is so different from ours, pub street was just a lot of restaurant bars (two of which stretched to dancing at around 1am) …No traditional British pub and of course…everywhere served buckets…on a less threatening scale then Bangkok and Laos, more a friendly place where you gathered at either Temple or Angkor What? bar to exchange stories and drunkenness, mixed with hopeful plans and arrangements to see temples the next day.

Ah the temples…..Angkor Wat itself seemed almost like a stately home, made supreme with restoration, impressive yes but not the overgrown, jungle temple complex invisioned in my head from whenst I was young- first hearing about ‘The lost temples of Angkor’.

Angkor Wat was situated in a vast open space with its moats and bridges either intact or more recently restored…there was no clue as to which and I’m no archeologist, still, interesting to walk through the cool stone corridors and marvel at the detail and size. I had forgotten much of what I had learnt from several brief documentaries or articles I had read about the ancient civilization, though I’m sure I’ll pick up something along my travels, or when I get home, so things are just enough to see and take in and let your imagination do the trick for the time being…facts can be bothered about later.

Our tuk tuk driver for the day took us next to Angkor tom, much more interesting atheistically with large worn Khmer faces looming out of the stone. We didn’t need to walk around every corner of it and step through every path way… but just sit on one of a high central point and drink in the atmosphere….though we would of liked to have been there without any other the other sight seers milling around…and I’m sure they felt the same.

The last temple of the first day was our favourite, more spread out across lower levels with trees threatening to pull up foundations as they grew in and around the stones. This was actually the temple they filmed Tomb Raider in I hear whispers say. Its hot and sweaty, but the stones are cool and we hear tour guides preach in French, English and Chinese to their groups.( we huddle in close to all but the latter to pick up information) The carvings as in all the temples we have seen are exquisite and detailed, topless curvaceous women dancing, gods akin to the Hindu ones I learnt about,and repeated patterns fading away or brought back to life by restoration. Of course this is an archeologists and architects dream, imagine piecing together the civilization that once lived here and figuring out how the massive jigsaw of such a temple fitted together….a whimsical idea, but then again id love to draw a map of them :>

The dappled light filter through the trees creating an illusion of coolness while the humidity rose with the heat of the day, the fig trees spread their webbing roots like spiders on ecstasy, fallen exquisitely cut slabs of rock – the building blocks of the temples gathered in heaped piles, so where they had obviously fell, others in pile made as a route way was cleared for visitors.

We had already earmarked a trip to the floating village, though we had envisioned cycling there as we were eluded to think that it wasn’t far…..after excepting that we would have to pay for a tuk tuk to cover the distance instead of hiring a very much cheaper one dollar a day bicycle we joined forces with a British couple who were keen to go too, turned out they were from Salford and Blackpool…..

A Goregous tuk tuk ride there breathing in the bright sun light dryingthe green pasture, gardens and open sided stilted houses made me fall even more in love with the country. We got on a boat that would take us down the Mekong to the edge of Tonle Sap lake…the massive lake rises by 12 metres in the rainy season. As it was the hottest time of the year, just before the rains, the lake was at its lowest murky and brown, with the house boats out on the lake scouring for fish rather then at the banks of the river- where they retreat to in monsoon. Glimpsing slices of peoples lives as we motored past, while they snoozed, work, ate, played- they must feel a bit on display with a few groups tourists coming to see their floating houses, but all in all the trip is very insightful…learning about the river, its wildlife and how the people here live….also it creates jobs for them, which in dry season when fish are scarce, provides income, and a trip always involves an excursion to a shop and restaurant where you feel obliged to buy a little something, even if it is just a cold drink.

There are some more sureal sides to it though, kids running round with large pythons rounds their necks asking for money in return of a picture…..other boats pulling up out of nowhere besides yours as a kid leaps across the gap to ply you with cold drinks and hops back to her boat just as quickly ans speeds off to hijack another boat….and when we disembarked from our long boat a women came rushing up to us forcing ceramic plates in our face, it took more then a second glace to realise the photo graphs stcuk in the middle of the plates were actually of us boarding the boat, a very comical souvenir that we had to refuse….they would just peal the photo graph stickers off and replace them with pictures of the next unawres models.

Siem Reap was full of adventures, and looking back one of my favourite places. we were intreiged by some of the temples out of the angkor area, which had been more or less left to their own devices in terms of nature, unrestored still over grown in the jungle, very close to how how they would have been found when first discovered by french explorers. Away from the crowds and very beautiful, we took a long, beautiful (if not a little hungover- well buckets and fellow travellers always make for good fun) tuk tuk ride to Mela Telek.

The cambodians are by far some of the loveslist people I have met, we stopped on our hour long ride to fix a flat tyre in the unforgivable heat, and were offered seats and good conversation from a beautiful 14yr old practicing her English and exchanged information about our families. In the burning midday sun we passed hammocks complete with their fill next to the raised wooden houses and dry fields that became lush when the yummy rain drops fell and even splashed us under the hood of the tuk tuk.

The temple was exactly as we had wanted it to be; mossy and untouched, deserted apart from a Mr. tomnness like character who gestured to us to follow him around one side of the once magnificent stoney south gate. He indicated before we even got near that we should follow his path up through the fallen stones for a better view of the inside of the temple walls. He led us along the narrow ledges around the edge of the now waterless moat and through half falled arches and door ways. We mazed, climbed, trickled, and stumbled around the fallen wonder, its massive stones and most magically the nature that had been left to creep through the foundations and walls, slightly distorting but mainly becoming part of the structure. I could of lived there, amongst the caved in stone libraries and creeping fig trees.

 Talcum Powder and Whiskey

We were lucky enough to be in the country for Khmer New Year, which coincides with new year festivals in Thailand and Laos…we had very much wanted to be in Thailand for Songkran their annual water festival, but visas permitted otherwise, Cambodians celebrations though were on a similar level I dare say with dancing and water being thrown in the streets- The main parties of the 3 day festival (of which they celebrate the days before and days after- so it turns into a 5 day festival) were held out of town in the forest by an ancient temple….We had had a tip off from a South African guy in Angkor What? bar the night before we went. He had been to the celebration that day and told us we had a missed an amazing party….if we knew what was good for us we should go the next day….So around 3 pm the following afternoon we hailed a tuk tuk, pre bought some wine ( we weren’t for starting on whiskey so early despiste the lead from the locals) and headed off.

The party in the forest was, in one word, magical. Thousands of Khmer people, either with families or friends were laughing trough the walkways of food stalls in the forest….a peace temple up a small hill one side of a dancing compound ring where some distorted kind of Cambodian dub-step was playing as young and old alike milled around a tree in the centre of the circle. The way to do it was it seemed to dance counter clockwise around the tree to one song…and on the next to stop still and dance in one spot for the next song’s duration.

As tradition many people were covered in white talcaum powder…which I can only guess is another symbol of cleansing in the New Year festival…naturally we joined in and once the khmer boys saw we were helping them celebrate they of course insisted on covering us in the more talcum powder then most…… the action preceed or followed by shouts of ‘Happy Khmer New Year!’

There were cafes set up serving food, also selling whiskey and Angkor beer in vast quantities…a man powered child fair ground ride squeaked around for the many numbers of young children joining in the festivities. Stalls selling freshly cooked meat – mainly chicken- were there in abundance, we joined in with the chicken and rice cooked in large bamboo sticks as the light fell and powerful hanging lights took over lighting up the still dancing crowd. A beautiful forest festival that felt like something from another world with orange/brown dust being kicked up amongst the dark green shrubbery and tall trees… marring vision and along with the grey smoke from cooking meats.

Beyond the land of the Temples.

After a little more rum at Angkor what? Bar we were up the following morning for a bus to Phenom Pehn, we hadn’t planned to spend a long time in the capital, mainly because we had heard it was even more humid then Siem Reap had been ( a ghastly thought) and with less to really see. I think you have to have an understanding the recent history of Cambodia to have an understanding its people and its cities. The mass genocide caused by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the 50s still scars the country and the current generations, though memories are slowly diminishing and as of yet there is no teaching about the blood past in schools.

I didnt know much about the Khmer Rouge before going to Phenom Penh, I had only a vague idea, but I picked up a memoir in Siem Reap called ‘ First They Killed My Father- a daughter of cambodia remebers‘ by Loung Ung. So it was only after visiting the killing fields and reading the enthralling story of a young child, did I start to really appreciate and gain an understanding of the country and its people.

I knew the country was poor and that the Khmer people had encountered great losses and suffering, but I didn’t know the whole story behind it. At the killing fields you are greeted by a memorial 20m or more high, with glass panels all the way up showing shelf after shelf of skulls and bones found in the mass graves at the killing field. This was where many of the people deemed to be rich, educated (even those who wore glasses) or un-pure (of foreign blood) were sent in order to cleanse the country.. The site was as haunting as the descriptions by Luang Ung, but it showed me another part of the world, its political troubles and mass suffering that I had never been exposed to, never had it been covered in history lesson ( in my school we mainly learnt about British history, politics, religion)

So after our brief, if not spirit damping spell in the capital, we headed for a place called Sihinoukville, a beach town that is deemed to become very popular in the next 5 years…..and it will, with all the development and bars springing up its likely to become the Costa del Sol of Cambodia with Westerners and richer Cambodians from the capital, making weekend trips to the coast. A lot of apartments were being built and the beach already flooded with chilled out bars offering sea food buffets and late night drinking (‘buckets’ were a plastic drinks bottle cut in half)….made for a good setting, though lacking the people and the beautiful space to house such commercialism. (for the time being)

Fun was had on all accounts, first night syndrome with buckets galore always houses some good stories, memories and thankfully/unfortunately not photographs. I definitely wish our time in Cambodia could have been longer for some more exploring but yet again it was time to go back to Thailand, for the final time, visit the last few towns and islands,then and head further south to Malaysia.

Kho Chang; Elephant Island

Time was really pushing on, so we crossed the border back to Thailand for the last time, we’d only get 15days visa coming in by land so had to plan our time carefully. We had our sights set on Kho Chang an island in the northern gulf.

After some negotiations at the border with a mini bus driver and a quick trip to the small market to re-casio Kate and fetch me some replacement nose rings( you know Sihanoukville must have been a messy night), we were on our way to Trat province, we raced against time to make the last ferry and make it to the island that night…..as with most races against time, it proved to be unnecessary , as the ferry left an hour later then we had been informed.

We bused and ferried with some people that had been to the island several years ago when the it was no more then several small guesthouses offering beach huts. They had a lot to reminisce about when they saw the large hotel resorts and trail of 7/11 (thailands number one convience store) along the main strip just of sunset beach. Of course it would have been nice to see a couple of years ago when the place was more isolated…but to be honest the island was expensive enough as it is, so we welcomed the recent competition that kept prices down. Still we found food to be at prices well over what we would usually pay,(as you do off the mainland) so we frequented two cheap local eateries once we accepted that none of the cafes near to us offered budget food….we’d expereicned isolated beaches in India, namely Gokarna , which I imagine if we visit in a few years will be quite different. (maybe)…time changes all in the end, the hippies will seek out somewhere new as the party goers move in.

saying that, Kho Chang wasn’t a party island, we saw young people but the main visitors seemed to be ex-pats with their Thai wives and kids, or general rentals with hopeful men, in fact it was the most obvious place we saw western men with bought girls….funnily the girls all seemed to be not trying that hard with politeness to their customers/boyfriend and spent most time on their phones probably swapping stories with friends in the same boat- the men on the other hand would try hard to be polite and make conversation, quite amusing yet hideous to watch- though we cannot judge- just as me and Kate were complaining about money and expenses we were saying how we wouldn’t mind an older richer man to pay for everything and look after us…..

At the place we stayed we climbed the long stairs (part of the tsunami escape route) to our nice isolated hut first led by a scouser who worked at the hostel….stoned out of his head most nights….don’t believe the stories about not being able to smoke weed in Thailand due to the death penalty, in sleepy parts most police are too stoned themselves to notice…..possibly having bought their weed out of the money the hotel or cafe owners have used to pay them off….

The island was a paradise after drinking days- not once did we wake up screaming from a hangover, we lazed on beaches, drank spy and hired a motorbike again- best thing to do on an island where there are waterfalls, beaches and mangroves to drive to. Kho Chang however would provide a nice challenge for many Tour de France aspirates due to its ‘sharp curves’ and killer hills, challenge enough on a bike with a motor and automatic gears. A beautiful place to ride though, coming over hills to views of green trees and a beautiful ocean, we stopped at some white sandy beaches and rode though thunderstorms to parts of the island we could see still under sun.

We went to one of the several water falls on the island and spent some time reading and frolicking in the deep pool before venturing to lonely beach and been given the task by a bar owner to seek out males that the island obviously lacked, to invite to a party that night….apart from the ‘rentals’ and their clients the island seemed to house mainly single scandinavian girls (give it a few years and the boys will catch on to this paradise)…. we didn’t try too hard,in fact not at all, we werent planning of visiting that particular bar that night anyway…. this island was a wonderful rest, as fun as meeting new people and making friends is…it does get tiring.

Our adventure day, as we called it consisted of a ride to the other side of the island to find a place where we could go kayaking through the mangroves….inevitably we got lost and spent a long time driving the roads in-between sleepy villages and zooming down leafy roads, seeing what Kho Chang was all about…after going too far and backtracking through a storm cloud we found the mangroves and the kayak station. We rowed down through the paths of forest into a large basin, which on one side housed a small floating village, in the middle was a small island…strangely shaped like a stingray..we claimed the narrow path of shells for ourselves (though we had no flag) and looked out of the cove to the sea, back to the forest and the hills…and realised were in bliss,,…Kate comically fell into the water while trying to remount the beached kayak…she claims she was trying to pulling me to safety……a feeble claim as I was life jacketed and ready to kayak away.

After that excursion we returned to the bike. As we were half way or more to ‘long beach’ we decided to attempt what was unknown to us, a treacherous road….my ‘adventure strap’ (a white strip the sun hadn’t been able to get at as it had been underneath the strap of my faithful desert bag which had been across by shoulder) had deepened by this point after several hours spent on the bike already.

The road of death as we named it belonged to the devil with its steep hills and rocky road- so much so that it was impossible to ride with two on the bike- we made it over after some dismounting and left the thoughts about the possibility of getting back behind. We had reached the beautiful long beach- not that long all in all…another original name formed for tourists. It had cheap places to stay and a younger more ‘Zen-ed’ out crowd, but t’was ages and a devils road away from anything else.

We were leaving the next day so couldn’t stay on the beautiful white sand next to clear clear blue waters for the full moon, celebration bonfire that night….we had Satan’s path to cross again…..which, as with most bad things for a second time- wasn’t actually that bad…but then again we did know what was coming this time. We almost ran over a monitor lizard that ‘eats mammals and shit’ I hear, and small blonde girls as I told Kate, (as most things do) then drove the hour or so back to our beach.

Bangkok Finale

It was time to head back to bangkok for the fourth and final time….we stayed in the same place as we had done previously and visited the infamous golf bar for buckets and ‘the club’ on Khoa Sarn Rd. The red shirts had moved out of the commercial district and to the financial district instead, so the ‘backpackers’ hub was buzzing once more (though not as full as when we had first arrived- we could still actually move on the streets). We met yet another group of people from a large party of friends that had start out ravelling together- we had met the first group on the way to Laos and travelled with them, and the second group in Cambodia- now we met the last of them in bangkok- funny out of all the travellers we shoul meet the good friends of people we have already met. I’m sure there’s more of them waiting to jump out the woodwork!

All the things we had vowed to buy in bangkok on our last time in the city were still unbought when we pieced together our large coffin shaped package of things that we had accumilated in last three countries. The price to send the package to England was notably more then in India, but can you put a price on the books and clothes, diaries and mementos that have themselves seen so much? Either way we knew we would never want for clothes again, though I may feel quite akin to a Thai city girl when I go home in cutesy retro dresses….I’ll have to balance it out with all my dirty, gypsy things I picked up and trailed round for the last 6months. (though my rucksack looks some what like a cross between a gypsy and a person that doesn’t know how to sew, at the moment anyway)

Books are the hardest thing to part with when your travelling, you find a good one and your like..that has to go on my book shelf back home, except you can’t carry them with you so they must be swapped our sold or left behind in order to make your load easier. Many classics I’ll finds in a second hand shop back home I suppose. Though one ‘ The History of Secret societies’ written by a man in Calcutta I know ill never find again (so it has a special place in my rucksack regardless of how reliable the sources may be)

Our las night in bangkok we sat and had a bucket…as is necceasy, and had a street side leg massage, street pad thai, and spent our night sat in the co-ordened off smoking room in the club where other people provided so much entertainment.

A confused Canadian ;

‘ doctors and lawyers, you can thank my mother for that one….trees and branches….branches branches…you understand me don’t you?’

A sadly stereotypical brummie wearing just underwear ‘…if you’ve got it get it out yeahh! (then some things which are too crude to write…then to the un-complaining guy who’s knee she sat on ‘ I love nature too, its soo goood your job…i just love the trees and nature ‘ in a drunken put-on posh accent’

A comic Italian ‘ Kate…Kate like Kate moss? Ah Thank you Pete Doherty…but what are you doing Kate Moss!’ and then later after mauling a Thai girl ‘ Kate eet iz ok she is not my girlfriend, I just wanted you to know she iz not my girl friend’

and many more comical characters made the night.

Phi phi the island of dreaaaams.

I could of lived in phi phi..and not just for the free alcohol and parties every night….but for the beautiful scenery of the clear blue waters and surrounding cliffs and islands, swimming in beautiful lagoons, snorkelling, diving and cliff jumping opportunities- in the most dreamy setting. Wonderful people in entertaining dorm just within budget. Despite the usual expense of islands, we hardly spent a thing,
12 quid for a whole day tour of islands, snorkelling, throwing yourselves of cliffs with hangovers and to the beach were Leo Dicaprio once set foot to film ‘the beach; is pretty good going.
Our dorm was at a place called The Rock where peoples memories and x-rated drawings litter the walls around the bunks…my favourites include

‘ We Are The Vikings…We don’t ask..We take’ , ‘

You don’t sleep at the rock you pass out’

…….and similes involving otters pockets and mouses waist coats lend a hand to many many obscene quotations I cannot write here.
Strangely dorm rooms and drinking seem to make for a stay with a family feel…… and each evening we would gather to ready for dinner,(de-sand/salt plus beer)…then all traipse down to the best restaurant on the island, Papaya- it was by no means expensive, with dishes having to be shared due to the large portions and the food being just what is needed either; to restore energy from a days dive, snorkel or climb….or to line the stomach for a night of bad alcohol. This was a place where you could help your elf to drinks and ice, specify at what percentage of spice you would like your dish (30% always went down well) and where the cats slept in the bottom shelf of the glass fridge. They would wait at the door to be let in or for someone to reach for a cool drink and snooze away coolly..if only we’d had a human fridge to cool us..( our dorm, obviously being on the cheap, lacked aircon, so was more of a slow cooker…one had to lie strategically to make use of the small fans).
After dinner each night we would all return to the rock for reading and pre-drinks…no matter if it was your first day or your last….and with people coming and going each day there was always a different mix. The thing about phi phi that makes it cheap is that alcohol is basically free…yes FREE-.if you make use of the free buckets they give away at the beach bars each night.
There would be the opportunity to get 6 buckets,free of cost saving you 20quid if you were actually going to drink that much….with food being of island prices and accommodation not being particularly cheap such a promotion run by each bar was a god send. One could collect flyers on the street leading to the beach and head out for the first bucket between 9-9.30….each bar gave a 10min interval in which to jossel at the bar for your free bucket, if you were clever you just bar hopped with your flyers from Apache to Slinky’s to Ibiza, the nights usually went something like this for us’ drinking games and conversation on the long tables at Slinkeys followed by fire rope ( like skipping but with fire)and games involving balloons and fire at Ibiza, eventually ending ending at Apaches when enough buckets were collected, mixed and absorbed into the blood, for dancing and ring of fire( jumping through a giant ring doussed in petrol and set alight). The music only carried on till 1 most nights, but we were lucky to be there for full moon when they stretched till 3am. Dancing on the wooden platforms and benches to the typical playlist.
Drinking, dancing and partying didn’t come first and foremost on this island however. You were in amongst the most beautiful turquoise waters, white sands, green cliffs with strong sun and a constantly clear sky. I’d walked past a place advertising cliff jumping tours on the first day and knew it had to be done, and me and Kate were keen to go snorkelling, it was dirt cheap, a long half day out on the boat, cliff jumping, snorkelling, visintg shark point, a frolic in the calm azure lagoon monkey beach and watching the sunset on the famous maya beach. All for 12pounds. We booked on it one morning, determined to do something after spending the previous day in a hungover state. It ended up that most people from our dorm came along for the fun after we told them what we were planning, and everybody was keen for something to do- the cliff jumping especially- because after a drunken embarrassing night out we all need to through ourselves off a jagged cliff into some beautiful warm salty waters.

After India monkeys were nothing special for kate and I, and some people from our dorm had a hate of them after being subjected to monkey attack or robbery, others had never seen wild monkeys before…on Monkey beach they were as free as could be, except they probably got enough fruit of passing boats and could drink water from bottles held for them…so I doubt they had a hard life except for posing for pictures. Though it was fairly surreal to see the creatures throw themselves from tree branches into the sea, playfully attacking each other or diving for a lost piece of pineapple. Most were fairly clever, avoiding getting their fur wet by waiting for the waves to wash the fruit close enough for them to snatch out of the shallows with their little monkey hands.

For the cliff jumping we were given rubber shoes and woven gloves, for climbing and to protect our feet and hands from impact. We were jumping from some heights, starting from 10m all the way up to 20. For some reason throwing myself from great heights doesn’t phase me (and hasnt in the past)..and from my diving days ive learnt to take a hard hit from landing on water so I worked up to the 20metres.The guyss jumping after me as the shouts of ‘If a girl can do it!’ lured them on. Water is water from which ever height to me (though you can break your legs at over 30m) Some of the boys were phased on the other hand and landed painfully, I was the only one that managed to lose the gloves and shoes typically but iluckily retrieved most of them, the boat went away one glove down. Climbing jagged cliffs on a hangover is no mean feat and the easiest way down was to leap off if you manage to jump pain free…though I did manage to cut my lip, but not wind myself too badly. Defiantly the best part of the day.

Swimming in the luxurious lagoon was heaven, so blue so calm, so stereotypically beautiful and I could of easily spent all day their, but we had snorkelling to do….which again was awsome, seeing some massive golden coral and even a baby shark…I wish I had flippers and a snorkel every time I swam in the sea. Maya bay- the setting of the film ‘ the beach’ was as to be expected, thankfully it was small enough that no hotels had sprung up, just boats of tourists invading it each afternoon,a toilet block and a small shop for those come to watch the sunset across the bay…my camera had ran out of battery in the first hour of the trip, so ill be stealing some photos from fellow people at the rock.

The day had been long, fun and definatley the best way to spend a hangover…we hadnt eaten much all day so naturally we hit Papaya hard before we headed back to the rock to ready ourselves for another night…I gave up with exhaustion though by 11 and hit the hay….only to be woken when everyone came in at 2pm and told the man in his mosquito net in the bed next to me- that he would become a beautiful butterfly….in all fairness he did look like he was in a cocoon…..the legend of cocoon man will be remembered….
The people we met….in our dorm; Remi a wonderful french man that came back with a new tatoo each morning, asked us to wake him on the morning of our departure so he could ‘ watch us go’, A group of people who had stayed at the rock before and travelled with the guy we’d gone to a ping-pong show with in bangkok, 2 German guys, one from Cologne and one from the hills of Bavaria…who we constantly tried to get to yodel…which eventually he did and even showed us the traditional barbarian dance….. ‘ if you do it in lederhosen its not gay’ ( a quote soon added to the wall) .Several British guys who were good banter and a patriotic Canadian and Australian…..one which had a Swedish friend we deemed ‘Smash’…due to his powerful build and silent nature, ….plus another British couple who got on well with everyone……it all made for a lot of good laughs.
I became ill again towards the end trying to keep up with everybody else, but in the end it was time to go anyway as we had to bus to Malaysia before our visa ran out….obviously in such a wonderful place we pushed it right to the last day.

Phi phi had been the island of cats for us and for this reason amongst many, many others, we were sad to leave….though our bodies told us leaving was for essensital to regain health and our visa told us it was necessary, so after a good night out we rose early and departed the island and after a few hours on a bus we were crossed the Thai border for the last time on this 8month stint.