Hello all!

Well we left you in Jodhpur post-camel trek. We've come quite far since then. We were thinking about it the other day and came to the conclusion that our travelling so far has been overwhelmingly intense. We haven't stopped for a breather yet! We've done the whole of the Himalayas in northern India, Kashmir, been to both Delhi and Mumbai, Punjab and the whole of Rajastan (some of which on camel) all in 8 weeks! So now things start to get a little less intense. (please excuse any spelling mistakes as for some reason the writing on my page is about a quarter of a millimeter in size!)

From Jodhpur we took a short but uncomfortable bus to Mount Abu which was beautiful except for the vile people there. There are amazing wildlife sanctuaries and we hired mopeds to go to the peak of the different mountains to watch the sunsets and explore the wildlife. It was truly beautiful. The more we stayed there though the more the thought dawned on us that with the amusement arcades and snobby city-types coming for a quick and easy holiday - Mount Abu was slowly turning into Blackpool. We started to notice, in the town center, that everything was completely tacky and souless. We even visited the meditation center which we thought might be somewhere we could do a workshop. However, in the museum downstairs there was a huge picture of the 'Age of Kali' which is the hindu version of hell on earth and at the top of the illustration were 2 rats with human heads holding blowtorches and American and Soviet flags. I came to the conclusion that anything that promotes this ludicrous sense of blame towards more comercially developed and westernised places was not the place to search for spiritual enlightenment! Since when was nationalism involved in meditation?!

We soon left Mount Abu and travelled to Udaipur which is a beautiful and colourful little city surrounded by a lake in the middle of which is a rather impressive hotel and temple. It was the town in which the Octop**** Bond movie was filmed. One day we went to a restaurant and ate our meal while watching Roger Moore in action in the movie! The views were breath-taking and I thoroughly enjoyed relaxing there for a few days. However, we went to the City Palace museum and just became more and more aggrevated at how tacky they were choosing to make a symbol of the amazing Mughal Dynasty! They had the same poster of a painting of the Mughal emperor in 5 different rooms, no explainations of any of the artefacts and some tacky pop-up cardboard cutouts of various nobel men. It was truly awful. Although the arcitechture was out of this world.

From there we got an overnight bus to Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal. Agra is the dirtiest, loudest and ugliest place I have ever seen in my life; a vileness that seems to have captured the people of the town and in which it has personified itself. It was just awful. We payed 750 rupees (a ridiculous fee of around 9 pounds - extortionate in india; we could stay in a guesthouse for around 5 days for that!) to see the Taj Mahal which, although a spectacular sight by any means, was pretty boring after a while and had nothing inside it apart from 2 tombs of the Emperor that built it and his wife who he built it for. It's surprisingly small inside. Agra was also rip-off central so we left there on the same day and took an overnight train (which we almost missed after getting stuck in traffic in an unbelievably uncomfortably rickshaw for an hour) to Varanasi, where we are currently residing!

Our current location of Varanasi is on the banks of the ganges Varanasi is where the dead are brought to be cremated and there is a ghat called the burning ghat which we went to yesterday. There is a great deal of time and consideration required for the cremations. Nobody is allowed to cry and the way you are cremated/buried depends on how you died as well as your age. The Ganges is amazing. It's so vast and there are so many people dotting it's banks. Sometimes it's nice to just sit on the huge steps by the water edge and observe. I wouldn't dare go in though. In normal, healthy, clean water there are just 500 types of bacteria. In the Ganges there are 150 millon! People still bathe in it and even drink the water for spiritual enlightenment!

Varanasi itself is a vast and winding higeldy piggeldy patchwork of tall houses and temples which fortunately shade you from the immense sun throughout the day. It is so intensely hot here - you need to be walking to generate a tiny breeze so that you can keep cool. If you sit in the shade, within 2 minutes you will be sweating profusely! We plan on going on a sunset boat-ride today and then getting up early at 5am to go on a sunrise one tomrrow.

So, that's about it. The next time I write I plan to be in Darjeeling. We are planning on leaving here for Nepal on Saturday so I will report back all about Katmandu!

Love to you all,

El x