Goodbye India

This is the last post I'll make from India. We've done a lot in the past week - We had three nights in Varanasi. Hotel sunrise where we were staying was full of backpackers and we made quite a few friends there sitting around in the communal rooftop area eating, drinking and listening to music. There wasn't a great deal to see in Varanasi other than the Ganges and a few temples and we ticked them all off with a package tour deal from the hotel including a sunset boat ride, sunrise boat ride and temple tour for Rs. 250 - not bad value there. The morning we went on the sunrise cruise, I had been up till 4am playing chess with one of the other backpackers at the hotel, then had to be up at 5.30 again for the sunrise. After we got back from the boat I went back to bed, so the boatride seems like it happened in a dream. There wasn't much of a view of the sun anyway, it was quite cold and foggy (or was it smog??). We had a brief tour of the Varanasi University and it's temple, the Mother India temple with a huge map of India with 3D elevation sculpted from marble, and the local Monkey temple (there's lots of those!)

We left Varanasi at 6pm one night and arrived in Jaipur at 4pm the next day (the 22hr train ride was only meant to be 17hr...dodgy). We met up with Joel Tuckett the next morning (he had just flown up from Goa) and he has been with us since. An Israeli girl from the hotel in Varanasi called Maayan was also on her way to Pushkar so she was travelling with us too. We were offered a free ride to a nightclub by someone we think was in the Mafia. We stopped at a different club and the guy asked us to change cars, so we just thanked him and went in to that one. It was a really good 'western' club and we had heaps of fun (and scotch hehe) . We had booked a bus for the next morning at 9am but due to alcohol we only woke at 11. We quickly re-booked our bus to Pushkar for 1pm and rushed to make it - all of us sporting naaasty hangovers. The busride was on a really good tollroad in a really nice tourist bus with plenty of head and leg room which Kev and I were thankful for.

Pushkar is a small town situated on a lake north of Ajmer. It is renowned for its shopping and we did plenty of that. The morning after we got there we climbed 'Snake Mountain' for some great views and then hit the shops with our wallets full of cash (which we were lucky to get - the only ATM in the town was out of order so we had to get cash from a western union). We said goodbye to Maayan and hopped on an overnight bus to Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal. We had 'beds' on the bus but it was so cold we didn't sleep much (I had my sleeping bag so I was ok but Kev had to put on all the clothes he had bought in Pushkar to stop himself freezing - he had his feet in his bag to keep them warm!)

We met up with Georgie again on a rooftop restaurant overlooking the Taj just after the sun had risen. It really is an impressive sight. We'd heard that it was better to see the Taj at sunset, so we spent the morning at the almost-as-impressive Agra Fort, a 20 min walk from the Taj. We entered the Taj precinct about 3pm (along with half of India) and chilled out in the grounds until the sun started to set. As we weren't staying in Agra, we headed to the train station. Our train was delayed 2 hours and we finally made it to Delhi around 1am, cold and tired. Suzie and Jenna joined us yesterday morning and we spent the day yesterday catching up on stories and doing more shopping. We went to a great textbook emporium and stocked up for the academic year at prices about 10% what we'd pay at home. Admittedly, we had to pay a king's ransom to send them home, but the total was still a great deal.

Tonight the fantastic five parts company for the last time. Suzie is heading to Helsinki, I'm off to Thailand, Kev is going home to Canada, and Jenna, Georgie and Joel are heading back to Oz. It's been an amazing 2 months in this part of the world - I'm never going to forget it. Seeing how excited the others are to get home makes me a little jealous, and I am going to miss everyone over Christmas and New Years. Very excited about Thailand though :)

All the very best to all for Christmas and New Years, wherever you are in the world, and I can't wait to catch up with everyone when I get back on Jan 9th.

Namaste!