Back in the BKK!!!!
Thursday, April 24th, 2008Ok first off I’m going to explain the lats blog title… which I realised I hadn’t done as soon as I’d posted it, but was too lazy to rectify. Basically, one evening in Hampi, Tim a Canadian guy we’d been jamming with took us up to some rocks to see some tiny little wild puppies he’d found and been feeding. Me and the girls spent our time oohing and aahing over them.. picking them up, tickling their bellies, that sort of thing, whilst the boys spent a good half an hour throwing rocks at a sign that said ‘Please do not throw stones’ seeing who could hit it (none of them could!) On the walk the back the usual smutty innuendo and double entendres were made about looking at puppies, playing with puppies, stroking puppies and so on and so forth… it was highly amusing. When asked where we’d been and what we were doing we replied “Throwing rocks and looking ar puppies”. So there you go.. that’s that cleared up!
As Cat mentioned we went to a big temple and the city was preparing for a big Hindu festival the following day. As with a lot of Hindu temples, you are not allowed to take your shoes in, and Cat being a girl couldn’t stand on the hot stone floor for too long, so she waited outside while me and the hardcore Canadians paid our 2 Rupees and went in, jumping from one shaded spot to the next. The temple had a temple elephant that was trained and sacred, which enabled it to bless people. You put some money in its trunk, and it passed it back to its keeper, then it put its trunk on your head, and you were blessed! I think this was more of a tourist attraction because the locals seems to pass up the oppurtunity to be blessed by an elephant. The keeper was a nice guy though, and he said he would give us a free tour of the temple. There were many old relics some dating back to the 800’s and many old statues of shiva; see the pictures.
So after some culture we retired to the one restaurant open on our side of the river and had a that well known indian dish for dinner, chicken schnitzel. Tasty! The next day was the start of the festival, but Cat was feeling unwell so she stayed in bed while the rest of us went to party with the locals. There was a real lack of westerners present which was a nice change and the whole town was decked out in streamers and young children were decorating the streets by throwing handfuls of coloured paint at each other; a ritual which is a regular occurance at all Hindu festivals. Having wandered the strip a few times we came across a huge crowd of people heading down an alley and people pointing us in saying ‘Free Food’. Now as a traveller, whenever you hear that something is free alarm bells start to ring and you have to ask, what’s the catch? This time though we hit the jackpot! As we wandered down the alley we were aware we were entering into somebody’s house, and having followed suit we took off our shoes and were greeted by a big Indian man! He seemed so elated to see westerners he barged past all the locals to shake us all by the hand! He led us to an empty room and laid out mats on the floor for us to sit on. We could smell some gorgeous food being cooked and we started to try to ask the guy what was going on, he didnt speak much english so he went and got his grand daughter. It turns out it was a family home and every year for the festival they open their house and offer free food to everyone who comes in; they were farmers who grew rice, bananas, coconuts and sugar cane so all the produce was their own. After a quick lesson in how to eat properly using only your right hand we were give the best Indian food I have ever eaten, all served on a banana leaf plate. Starter of a rice pudding style dish, then pilau rice and a spicy pickle with curd! Brilliant!
We then had to hop back across the river to catch our bus up to Mumbai for the next leg of our adventure. 16 hours on a bus! Quite a trek but we arived in Mumbai and checked into a nice aircon hotel close to the airport. Early the next morn we were up and out and on a plane to kolkata, Formaly Calcutta, then onwards to Bangkok BKK airport!
So thats where we are now, back in BKK, and man do I love being back! No one stares at us, or tries to touch me inappropriately… well only James, but I’m used to that!
We spent our first day in Bangkok in MBK, an enormous shopping centre with aircon that’s set to ‘Arctic’! We wandered round, mentally spending every penny we have, but we did pick up a few bits and bobs. Most importantly, a USB card reader so we can upload our photos. However, irony of all ironies, when we got to a computer we discovered it doesn’t actually work… what a waste of a pound! So instead, we burned our pics to CD and uploaded them that way, so please do check out our Flickr page to see some new photos! You’ll be better off just looking through the main bulk of the photos though, rather than looking at our albums, as apparently as we only have the free package we’re only allowed three albums, so the rest are just floating around. We’ve also used up our ‘upload allowance’ for this month, so you’ll have to wait until May until we’re able to uplaod more I’m afraid. I hate Flickr… see this is what happens when James leaves me to do the technical internet stuff… I do it wrong! So we may be finding ourselves a new photo page, but we’ll let you know.
So while we were sitting in the lovely air conditioned interweb cafe discovering all this rubbishness, we heard a loud crack of thunder and BAM torrential rain descended! And I mean TORRENTIAL! We got the full works.. Thunder, lighting… and the flooding of the entire Khao San Road… we had to walk back to our hotel in water up to our calves! Lovely!
Tonight, we’re jumping on a sleeper bus up to Chiang Mai, to do some exploring of the North (again). We’ll let you kow how that goes.
Much love and hugs to you all
xxxxx
Cat and James
