Finally in Africa
Well, I’ve made it to Africa – I’m in Tanzania now and getting ready to do a 6 day trek up Mt Kilimanjaro tomorrow. Haven’t seen any large animals yet, but I’m sure they’re lurking out there somewhere. I left the Asian continent yesterday at 1 PM, and I have to say India was a truly unusual mixture of pleasure and pain. I took 2 consecutive overnight bus rides which just about wiped me out, but I was able to visit some pretty cool sites. I mentioned the Ajanta caves last time, and have included some more pictures of them. They are quite stunning, enormous temples carved out of sheer rock – I don’t think the pix really do them justice. The next day I travelled to Ellora caves, which are reported to have the world’s oldest religious paintings- around 400 BC. They used vegwetable fibres, natural pigments , and other substances to paint them, and the color is still very vivid. India at the moment is incredibly hot and dry – I’ve included some pix of the people carrying jars of water from communal wells. They would throw buckets attached to ropes down about 20 feet to a puddle of mud, and then carry them miles back to their villages – an unbelievably harsh life. They say that the monsoon is late this year, and they are all waiting for the rains to begin planting they’re crops. I didn’t spend long in India (5 days), but it was enough to get a glimpse of how a lot of the world lives.
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