Gorakhphur
We crossed the border from Nepal back into India at Sunauli and got in a share jeep to Gorakhphur where we had to wait until 3am for our train to take us to Varanasi. We arrived around 8pm and checked into a really dingy hotel just across the road from the train station and attempted to get some much needed sleep before getting up in the middle of the night to catch our train. One thing about Gorakhphur, apart from a being a thoroughly depressing place were the mosquitoes – within half an hour of the light being out we both woke back up with horrendous bites all over us! We attempted to fend them off by covering ourselves in anti-mosquito cream and wrapping up in our sleeping liners but when we finally woke up again at 2am we had even more bites including some very itchy ones on our faces.

We had told the hotel manager that we needed to leave at around 2am so that we weren’t locked in but even though he was asleep next to the locked doors it took us about 5 minutes to actually wake him up after some increasingly aggressive shoving and hitting of his arm! Thankfully the train wasn’t running too late and we made our way to Varanasi, although it was almost impossible to get any more sleep on the train as our seats were surrounded by some really annoying men who refused to sleep and kept shouting and turning the lights on and off all night – not really the kind of start you need coming back into India.

 

Varanasi
It was such a relief to get off the train and go to our hotel and get some decent sleep as we hadn’t slept properly in over a day so we just crashed out until the middle of the afternoon. When we finally woke up we felt much better and headed out through the maze of alleyways to get something to eat – we also had to take a quick trip back to the train station to sort some train tickets out which was a bit of a trauma and took us a lot longer than we’d expected so by the time we were out it was almost dark. We had unknowingly arrived during the festival of Diwali, but apart from all the lights and fireworks there wasn’t really anything of any particular interest to see. On our way back from the train station some imbecile decided it would be funny to fire a firework at our rickshaw which almost blew both our eardrums out!! We were starting to get a little sick of everything by that point so went back to the hotel and hoped that things would be better in the morning – however, it took us until after 2am before we could get some sleep as there were constant fireworks and obscenely loud firecrackers being set off all night!

The morning came and we went down to the river to hopefully take some interesting photos and see some interesting people but it just seemed to be deserted, we didn’t know whether it was because of Diwali or whether it was just a bad time of the year but we were thoroughly disappointed!

 

Agra
We got to Agra not expecting too much as we already knew that the place itself was pretty crappy but obviously there are some interesting places to visit and as a photographer Kim really needed to visit them. We had arrived on a Friday which meant that the Taj Mahal was closed to all non-Muslims, which we already knew, but shockingly we overheard lots of other tourists who had no idea (it quite clearly mentions it in all the guide books so I don’t see how they didn’t know). So, as it was a Friday we went to Agra Fort instead – quite an interesting place although a lot of it was being repaired (seems like 90% of the places we visit are being repaired) but there were some really nice bits of architecture and decoration. Unfortunately the weather was really misty so it was almost impossible to see the Taj Mahal from the back by the river but we had planned to go the following day so it didn’t really matter. We had forgotten about all the rickshaw drivers in Agra until just before we were heading back to the hotel we started going down a street that looked awfully familiar, then came the lines about how he would get free petrol if we looked in a shop for five minutes. We really weren’t in the mood for it but told him that we’d look in one just to appease him – we never learn!

Luckily the following morning the weather had cleared and we could see the Taj Mahal very clearly, however I was running a little behind in my work so decided that I would stay in the room and get my work done while Kim went and took photos of the Taj – which was also a big money saver as it’s obscenely expensive for tourists! A couple of hours later Kim got back to the room and described the chaos she encountered inside the Taj – hundreds of screaming, pushy Indians and the stupid rules of no drinks allowed in (even though it’s baking hot and the free water fountains inside didn’t work) and the worst for a photographer, no tripods. So instead of being able to set up a nice interior shot on a tripod you’ve got to take about 20 shots to attempt to get one in focus! We then had to head off to the train station to get our night train to Jaipur.

 

Jaipur
We had missed Jaipur on our last trip so were looking forward to visiting somewhere new as it had been almost a month since we’d seen anything different. We hadn’t counted on quite how awful the place and people were though! It seemed like everywhere we went people were trying to fleece you of all your money and constantly lie to you. We had arranged a day trip to the majority of the sights which luckily for us went pretty smoothly but in the evening we heard some real horror stories from a really nice Australian woman called Leonie. She had arrived the night before and was supposed to be meeting up with a group of friends who’d arrived a couple of days beforehand, an auto-rickshaw had been sent to meet her at the train station but when she got in they took her 30 minutes out of the city to some remote hotel in the middle of nowhere and was then hassled constantly by 2 aggressive young Indian men. They had completely overcharged her for taking her around in a car and we also found out they had pretty much just taken her to jewellery shops where she was pushed into buying jewellery at ridiculously inflated prices. She then tried to run away from them the following morning and ended up at the hotel next door to where we were staying and told us all about what she’d been through and then from out of nowhere the 2 guys showed up and started hassling her right at our table where we were sharing a few beers. So we told them to leave her alone and then got the management to make sure they didn’t come back in again. We had a good night and I think she was quite relieved to unload the story onto other people and to get some supportive comments and advice.

The following day I had to get some more work done but as I plugged the laptop in the power cord blew up and pretty much completely melted! So now I had the tough job of trying to find another replacement – luckily I managed to find one within a couple of hours and also got myself a good quality adaptor with a surge protector to hopefully try and stop the dodgy Indian power killing the laptop! We had arranged to meet up with Leonie again to help her deal with the jewellery shop so while I was out sorting the power supply problems out Kim went with her to pick up a ring that she was getting made. However, once they arrived back at the room she noticed within 20 minutes of having the ring on that her finger had turned green – not really what you expect to happen when you’ve shelled out 3500 rupees on a ring! So I went back to the shop with her (always better to have some male backup in India) and she demanded a refund, unsurprisingly they were trying to convince her that the there was nothing wrong with the ring and that it was 92.5% silver and that all new rings did this. She handled it very well and very calmly told them she wasn’t happy with it and she knew that genuine silver rings didn’t turn your fingers green and she just wanted her money back – it only took us about 40 minutes before they finally, grudgingly handed over the money!

Leonie was absolutely sick of Jaipur but had told us that she had to wait until the following evening before she could leave on the train to Jodhpur – luckily for her we had a look in our train book and found about 9 different trains that she could have booked so quickly took her to the train station and managed to change her ticket so that she could leave that night! Our own train was leaving just half an hour after we got all that sorted out so we said goodbye and wished her luck throughout the rest of India and got on the train to Ahmedabad.

 

Ahmedabad
We were only in Ahmedabad so that we could get to Bhuj but we wanted to visit the tourist office here to try and sort out some kind of tour around the area of Kutch – the guide book had said that it was a really useful tourist office so we spent an hour waiting for it to open before realising that just like a lot of what we’d experience in India, they were totally useless! They only sorted out tours during very specific times of the year and apart from that you have to sort it out yourself! As we were unable to get a train to Bhuj we had to go and book a bus ticket, luckily we managed to get a decent sleeper bus booked for that evening with no problems (a first for India!).

When we were driving to and from the tourist office we’d spotted a McDonalds so we went back to get something to eat – Kim had been struggling to eat anything local since we left Kathmandu so a McDonalds was quite appealing (even if there is no beef) and she had her first full meal in almost a week! We didn’t really know what to do until 10pm so we decided to try and find a room for the rest of the day so that we could freshen up before getting on an overnight bus. The accommodation in Ahmedabad is unbelievably expensive compared to the rest of the places we’d been and the cheapest we could find was some shitty little room that cost us as much as a really nice room down in Goa, and it was only for 8 hours! It was finally time to go and catch the bus so we arrived at the office and awaited the bus with the usual suspicions that it’s not going to be anything like what they showed us when we booked it – surprise of all surprises, it turned up exactly as described and was by far the best bus we’d ever been on in India!

 

Bhuj
After a surprisingly good night’s sleep on the bus we arrived in Bhuj and had a look at a couple of hotels, both of which were more expensive than what we’d normally like to pay for a room and decided to opt for the more expensive of the two as it had Wi-Fi and a restaurant – anything to make life easier! The hotel also arranged tours around the local villages but we were told that we needed to get a permit from the police station before we could go to most of the places. So off we went to the police station to faff around for an hour to get given a little piece of paper with a few village names on it and then booked ourselves a car and driver for the following day. Kim had talked to the manager about exactly what we wanted to see and explained that she was a photographer and just wanted to see interesting people, however the day turned out to be a disaster as we were just taken to places where people just wanted to sell ridiculously overpriced embroidery and jewellery – there were a couple of nice people who weren’t too pushy and there were some interesting people to take photos of but as we’d been assured that we wouldn’t be taken to any shops we were pretty pissed off as that was all it had been all day. We cut the trip short and went back to the hotel and explained what had happened to the manager but he didn’t seem to care and just resorted to shouting whenever we were unhappy with something! The day wasn’t a complete loss as Kim had managed to get some really good photographs of some of the local villagers, even if we did have to pay 400 rupees for some crappy necklace that wasn’t worth more than about 50 rupees!

We didn’t have anything else to do but book a trip for the following day and hope that it would be better than the first one – this time we had paid extra for a guide to show us around some of the less accessible villages which turned out to be the best move as the second trip was much better than the first. The guide was from the Rabari tribe and took us to see predominantly Rabari villages, everybody was really friendly and we were invited into a number of houses and given chai and Kim was allowed to take photographs of pretty much anyone that she wanted to!

Our guide then took us to a small village where we were invited into someone’s house and they offered to dress us up in traditional clothing, they found it all very amusing as did we and everyone had a good time taking photos of the foreigners dressed up as locals! The highlight of the day was being invited to a festival that was being held at the house of our guide’s uncle to commemorate the deaths of his parents. It seemed like most of the village had turned up and we were quite an attraction as most of them had never seen a foreigner before! Everyone was very hospitable and all the kids followed us around the entire time we were there – it was quite an experience! If anyone is planning on a trip in Kutch we highly recommend our guide Paba (+91 94272 66535 or +91 99258 54550 or email paba_rabari@yahoo.co.in) – don’t often plug anyone but this guy was really nice and was a great guide for the day.

Almost forgot to mention that the hotel decided to ban me from using their internet as I’d downloaded over 4GB on the first day – they should really put up a sign telling people not to download if they have a limited connection! Apparently the broadband company charged him 1000 rupees due to me downloading a few movies – it was difficult not to when it was the fastest connection I’d come across since we left England!

 

Ahmedabad
Luckily we were only back in Ahmedabad for a few hours before catching a train to Ajmer so we went straight back to McDonalds for some decent Western junk food and played some cards for a few hours before heading to the train station. While we’d been in McDonalds we’d realised that the train we’d booked to Ajmer seemed to take almost twice as long as all the others so tried to book a ticket on a different train when we got to the station. Unfortunately it was almost 11pm by the time we got there so we were really pushing our luck as the train we had already booked left in half an hour, by some minor miracle we managed to bag the last 2 tickets on a train that left an hour and half after the one we were supposed to be on and arrived 6 hours earlier! It also turned out to be a really nice 3AC berth where we got the comfiest pillows we’ve slept on since we left home!

 

Pushkar
After a surprisingly good night’s sleep we got off the train in Ajmer and took a short trip to the bus station to catch a bus to Pushkar. Within five minutes we were sat at the very front of a bus (in the driver’s compartment) and headed out of the bus station – within a minute we regretted our decision to sit at the front as the driver seemed to have modified his horn so that it could play 6 different tunes and it was deafeningly loud! While he was busy honking his horn every 20 seconds we both put our headphones in which luckily blocked out some of the noise and before too long we arrived in Pushkar.

We had booked a room right by the lake (same place we stayed last time we were in India) and because the annual camel fair was on all the rooms were at least 5 times as expensive as normal! After getting a quick bite to eat we went over to the fairground to see what all the fuss was about. The whole place was in chaos, thousands of people crowding through the narrow streets, ridiculously loud Indian music and some very bizarre fairground rides and side stalls. Not exactly what we’d expected but there were a few camels knocking about too! We weaved our way through the festivities and sat down in a nice quiet chai tent and got talking to some local Rajasthani women. Within a few minutes they were more than happy for Kim to take their photographs (for a small fee of course!) and they all seemed quite at home modelling and posing for her! We told them that we’d be back the following day and when we returned it seemed that word had spread as there were a group of about 10 women all waiting to get their photographs taken! We were also invited back to their village where everybody was very friendly and almost everyone, men included, wanted to have their photo taken as well!

Apart from the photo sessions which were a lot of fun there wasn’t really much else to do in Pushkar, the food also gets very boring after a day or two – it’s amazing how quickly you miss eggs when they’re not available – because a lot of the people in Pushkar are Brahman there is no meat, eggs or alcohol in the whole of the town, although you can get hold of an overpriced beer in most of the restaurants.

 

Bikaner
We were supposed to be travelling from Pushkar to Jodhpur but after going through our travel plans a few times realised that would give us too much time there so decided to fit another place in. How we wish we could go back in time and tell ourselves not to bother!

We arrived in Bikaner at about 4.30am so it was difficult to judge the place based on what we saw travelling to our guesthouse, but from our initial impression it was pretty dull! After we got some more sleep in the room we got up and headed out to see what was nearby – absolutely nothing! There didn’t appear to be a single shop, cafe, restaurant or internet cafe unless you travelled the 3km back into the centre. Thankfully the guesthouse also served food (barely) but again there was no meat or eggs on the menu – we met up with a guy that afternoon who agreed to take his bike into town and see if he could get hold of some eggs for us and when he came back he’d managed to find one person who sold boiled eggs (but only had one) and also a couple of raw eggs which he’d tried to get people to boil for him, but everybody refused. I tried to get the people at our guesthouse to cook them and they also refused, I tried to offer to do it myself but again they refused and explained they would not cook it because eggs are a life! I didn’t have the heart to tell them that they weren’t as they were all unfertilised and basically just a chicken’s period!

The following day we planned a trip to Deshnok and Kolayat – the only two things of interest within a 100 kilometre radius. We’d seen Deshnok featured on a travel guide program before heading off on our travels and it looked pretty cool as it’s a temple that’s filled with rats, however when we got there it was just plain boring. Yeah there were a few rats scampering about but they were all pretty small and there were only a few hundred not like the thousands that we’d seen on the TV – the temple itself was also very uninspiring so we left after five minutes. After an hour and half of driving through the middle of the desert we arrived at Kolayat, a place that is supposed to be home to hundreds of Sadhus (Hindu holy men) but the whole place was like a ghost town and we saw maybe four or five people and after half an hour of wandering around decided to give up and head back to the guesthouse and get drunk instead!

We were supposed to be spending another day in Bikaner but instead of having an enthralling day marvelling at the spectacles in the “Cooking Utensil Museum” we changed our train tickets and got the hell out of there!

 

Jodhpur
By the time we arrived in Jodhpur we were already wondering how we could get down to Goa quicker than planned as we had grown very tired of being constantly let down by places, food and especially the people – not that we’re saying that everything had been bad, but the vast majority of the time things weren’t great. Luckily we could finally eat half-way decent meals again and get some much needed energy back into our systems.

We had come up with a new plan that cut out the last few remaining places that we were going to visit and would get us in Goa a couple of weeks early and headed off to the train station to try and get the new tickets booked. As I mentioned before we’d been having some problems with people and the staff at the railway reservation centre in Jodhpur were probably the most incompetent people we’ve ever come across in our travels. To start with they refused to accept that we should have been able to check and book the “foreign tourist quota” seats on trains and then told us that you could only book tickets leaving from Jodhpur! Now we’re no experts on the railway system in India by any means but we certainly did know that that was complete bull so we asked to speak to the manager. This guy was as completely inept as the rest of the employees and he also refused to accept that they were designated as one of the very few stations in India where tourists can book using the tourist quota system. After about five minutes of arguing we finally convinced him that we were right and he told the staff to check our tickets for us. After all this messing about by the time we actually got round to checking the tickets the tourist quota seats that we’d seen earlier had now been booked so we were back where we started!

The following day we tried to forget the previous day (or weeks) and had a nice day out visiting the very impressive Meharangarh Fort and Jaswant Thada temple – afterwards we stumbled into a very fancy looking hotel thinking it was a museum and stayed for a coffee – how very civilised! After a decent night’s sleep we got up at the crack of dawn the following morning and jumped on a bus to Udaipur.

 

Udaipur
The bus journey from Jodhpur was possibly the worst we’ve ever had to endure, even beating the god-awful road from Siem Reap to the Thai border!! As soon as the bus approached 40kmph or above the whole thing started vibrating uncontrollably, it started off quite relaxing but once he tried to accelerate a little more the vibrations started to make your skin itch, it was like having a million little mosquito bites all over your back and bottom!! Somehow we managed to endure that for the next 8 hours and finally arrived in Udaipur where we’d luckily booked a room before-hand so we didn’t have the trauma of trying to find somewhere to sleep!

Unfortunately the room that we had booked turned out to be a bit of a disappointment as it started to really smell and we were both convinced that some small animal had died in the walls or in the ceiling or something so we ended up changing to a rather more expensive room but which turned out to be well worth the extra rupees. The bed was much, much more comfortable, it had a TV and a sofa and we could also get room service which was quite a novelty – especially when we could sit in front of the TV with our dinner!

There were a few places that we wanted to visit in Udaipur but the first thing we did was to catch a local bus to Ranakpur (we were too cheap to hire a taxi) and visit the impressive Jain temple. We had been told that the bus took about an hour and a half so we didn’t set off until midday thinking that that would give us enough time to get there visit the temple and get a bus back in time for dinner. How wrong we were! For some reason our bus took close to four hours and we arrived with only an hour and half before the temple closed – and to make matters worse we saw a traveller attempting to get on a bus back to Udaipur, he only just managed to get into the bus and was practically hanging out of the door as it drove off because of how ridiculously crowded it was!

As we approached the temple we were told to go and purchase our tickets and then we were told that no bags were allowed inside the temple – big, big problem for us! There was no way we were just going to trust the guards there as there were no lockers and the contents of the bag were more than I’d care to mention on here so I decided to just wait outside with the bag while Kim went in and took some photographs. After Kim came out she asked whether I wanted to go in and said that it was really impressive but to be honest it’s not really the same on your own so I declined and said I’d rather look at the photographs. By a sheer stroke of luck the next bus that turned up had some seats available and was much more comfortable than the one we’d arrived in and actually got back to Udaipur in an hour and a half.

For our final day we visited the City Palace which was quite interesting, although it had been slightly traumatic attempting to get permission to use a tripod for photography. We had gone the previous afternoon and went through a few different people until we were sent to some administrative offices to speak to someone higher up. After a while they finally gave us the number of someone else, even higher up, to call that night to ask whether it was OK to us a tripod, which thankfully they did.  

Ahmedabad
Before we left Udaipur the guy we’d booked our bus tickets with had told us about an interesting Jain temple in Ahmedabad that wasn’t in any of the guide books and showed us some nice photographs on the internet – however once we arrived in Ahmedabad it was already mid-afternoon and we didn’t think we’d be able to get there in time, plus we had no idea where it was so as usual we took a trip to McDonalds to have some tasty food. As we were walking in Kim had noticed some young boys outside painting henna onto girls’ hands so after our meal we went back out and had a look. They were by far the best henna designs we’d seen since being in India and Kim ended up getting both of her hands painted before we went back to our hotel.

 

Palolem
The train journey down to Goa didn’t take that long but we were very relieved once we got off and caught a taxi to the bus station – after all of our careful planning we’d managed to free up a full three weeks to spend in Goa – and relax! Within a couple of hours we had arrived back in Palolem and went to the place we’d stayed earlier in the trip as it was by far the cheapest option available, however after a couple of days we found it too depressing and shelled out some extra cash to stay in a beach-side hut – money very well spent in our opinion!

Shortly after we’d arrived we heard about the trouble in Mumbai and realised that our train had travelled through the city the same evening and were very relieved that nothing had happened to us. This also made us wonder whether or not to end out trip in Mumbai, it really didn’t seem worth going there for three days just in case more trouble arose nearer to Christmas so we cancelled our train tickets and booked a very cheap flight that got us to the airport the morning of our flight back to the UK – it also saved us sitting on a train for 14 hours!

The rest of the time was spent sunbathing, playing in the sea and eating good food and drinking – a nice end to a rather stressful trip in India. This pleasant routine was rudely interrupted one day when Kim came out of the sea very quickly and told me that an Indian man had been about five metres away in the sea playing with himself! Needless to say we were both very wary of anyone in the sea nearby and keeping a close watch on what they were doing with their hands…

Our nights were spent on our balcony playing cards and drinking very cheap whiskey! Certainly not a bad way to spend three weeks… The three weeks flew by and we only had one more incident a few days before we had to leave, somebody had stolen Kim’s shoes (her only pair) off our balcony and left their cheap nasty flip-flops behind! Kim was pretty angry to say the least as they had been the best shoes she’d ever had while travelling and was hoping to use them on our next trip but instead had to buy some cheap plastic ones so that she could at least walk through the airports with something on her feet!

 

The End…
After 9 long months it’s time for us to get back to the UK, we were meant to be going to live in Australia for a couple of years but after looking into it more it turned out that it would be much more expensive than being in the UK, so that idea got scratched! All in all we’ve enjoyed our latest stint in Asia, Bangkok has made a firm impression on us and maybe we might go and live there for a while, other than that I’d say our favourite place has been Sri Lanka as it’s just so colourful and interesting (especially for Kim’s photo’s) closely followed by Nepal. India has been a big headache for most of the time we’ve been here, we have had a few really good days but the bad ones seem to stand out more in our memories!!! I would say we weren’t going to come back for at least 10 years but we have to be here in February and March 2010 for the festival seasons, hopefully some of the bad memories will have faded by then!

So there we have it, another trip is ending and we’re coming home, who knows how long we’ll manage this time but we’ll look forward to seeing you all soon and catching up on your news!

If any of you fancy seeing where we have been sleeping for the past nine months take a look here – http://travel.cooleimages.com/rooms