Hi everyone,

As promised (or threatened, depending on which way you look at it) here is the first update of our travels in India.



Our departure from Tanzania was a difficult one, not least because we'd enjoyed ourselves so much and also because the plane broke down ... Most of you will know that Andrea is a little bit of a nervous flyer and I have been getting edgier over the years as well (too many trips in short haul Chinese domestic carriers, I suspect) so we had lots of fun. The first time we had an inkling of what was going on was at Killimanjaro airport. We had flown out of Dar-es-salaam with Ethiopian airlines at 6am and were scheduled stops at Killimanjaro and Nairobi before arriving in Addiss ababa for our connection to Bombay. I might add now that I won't lower myself to suggest the obvious jokes about Ethiopian air (nicknamed Emaciated Airlines - "was the inflight meal filling har har" "do they have any wide body jets?" etc etc) I'll leave that to Dave and Elv, I'm sure that they'll enjoy sharpening their pencils on that one. We weren't unduly concerned, then, when we touched down in Killi, The nervous twitching started when we were all asked to disembark from the plane and wait in the lounge for a "while.



Like Lott's wife, I knew I shouldn't have looked back whilst crossing the tarmac, but, equally so, I was bound to. They had stripped the port side engine and were busy pumping something into it with what looked suspiciously like a bicycle pump ... What made me more nervous than anything else was the prevailing impression, from looking around me, that a bike pump was probably about the most sophisticated tool that they had in their arsenal of tools. Images of the engineer warning the captain not to push the engine too hard because it was held together with chewing gum and bogeys ... and meaning it ... came unbidden to mind and refused to leave, even with the application of lager. The other thing that struck me was the likelihood (or severe lack thereof) of Ethiopian Air sending a replacement plane, given that they probably only have two of them and the other one was probably busy being broken down in some other provincial airport somewhere. It seemed, therefore, that we would have to suck it and see. After and hour or so, the flight staff called us back on board and I noted, with some relief that the engine was back together and that the flight crew were not showing any visible signs of stress (nervous ticks, eyeing the parachutes and the like) I put this down to their confidence in their technical crews and ignored the demon in my head telling me that they were just used to there planes breaking down and all probably had large life insurance policies.



The rest of our journey with Ethiopian was uneventful, save that by the time we got off in Addiss, the tech crews were swarming all over the aforementioned engine, although this time with bigger tool boxes. I would say that, given that Business class only costs about 20% more than cattle with Ethiopian, it was well worth the investment (especially the champagne that they offered us every time we took off, which was 4 times all told - helped dull the panic.)



On arrival in Bombay (or Mumbai, as it's now known - just to confuse us I'm sure, I'll keep to Bombay here as I feel like an oversensitive beardy traveller type saying Mumbai ...) we made our way down town and discovered - on the way - that it was the first day of the Diwali festival. For those of you who have lived in the far east, this may be more familiar as Deepavali and is sort of new year for Hindus. I thought the Chinese knew how to let off fireworks. Well ... they do, but they should send a delegation to India and check out the festivals here, cause these boys know how to blow stuff up. The next morning, there hadn't been a quiet second all night, our ears were constantly ringing and the streets seemed knee deep in charcoaled cardboard tubes. We spent a day just hacking around the Fort area of the city and didn't actually see much more than that in our stay. Bombay is a mad, noisy, smelly city with far too many cars in it, great food, expensive hotels (by normal India standards) which is to say that we felt right at home after Beijing. Bombay is only really distinguishable from other major Asian cities (Beijing, Bangkok, KL, etc) in as much as it's coastal, and has lots of Indian people in it, as opposed to Chinese Malay or Thai.



Bombay train station was unmistakably Indian, though. Absolutely packed, apparently chaotic, but actually relatively organised, once you worked out where everything was and at which of what you were supposed to be (no great feat as it turned out - just look for the palest que...) Like China, India treats tourists and locals differently and tourists have to que at a special que. This is in no way discriminatory (except, perhaps towards local people) it seems to be a practical solution to a sticky problem. The seats on trains (and some busses, we have since found) are split up into quotas. There are quotas for Government officials, quotas for the army, quotas for freedom fighters(!), cancer victims and various other special groups and there are quotas for tourists. Locals appear to be forced to buy their train tickets at least 2 months in advance to be guaranteed a seat from what I guess you would call the public quota (or what's left over) and the system for getting one less than 2 months in advance appears to be complex (ie, us foreigners wouldn't be able to work it out - which is probably fair comment.) In order to get your ticket from the Tourist quota, you have to que in the Tourist quota que, of which there is ... one. It was a bit of a wait then, but no real drama, we are sure to suffer more frustration than an hour and a half in a ticket at some point during our travels (obtaining a Tibetan visa is one joy I particularly look forward to...) We were informed on arriving at the front of the aforementioned que, however, that you can only buy tickets one day in advance and so we had to return on Friday to get our tickets out on Saturday night. Another day, another que and we were ticketed and ready to go. A quick trip through the market (bought a shiny new Swiss army knife, as I'd mislaid my old one somewhere in Tanzania) and some superb kebabs at a street stall near our hotel and we were at the train station raring to go.



For those unfamiliar with the Indian train system, they actually plaster a list next to the door on each carriage, with the names of all those who have reserved seats or berths. The Lonely Planet (nicknamed the Beardy Traveller's Guide to Where all the other Beardy Travellers are or LP-BTGWOBTA for short) suggests that this is the Indian train service at its most efficient and I would tend to agree, although the fact that, like the Chinese trains, nothing much short of derailment stops these trains running on time is also quite an achievement. The journey itself was fairly uneventful, mostly due to the fact that we left at night, I suspect, as this avoided the reserved carriages being swamped with passengers (as happened when Shaun and I went to Varanasi all that time ago - when reserving a berth didn't necessarily guarantee the use of more than a small part of it...) We slept like babies and were very gently woken by the guard (as our stop was at 4 am) and arrived spot on time. Being as the train was on time and therefore 4am when we arrived in Jalgaon, there isn’t much going on in the town, except the picking up of other passengers from the train that we had been on. Fortunately there was a "chai" stand so we stopped for a couple of glasses of masala tea (which, among other things, had nutmeg and a bucket of sugar in it) and awaited sun-up and the awakening of the town (not to mention the opening of the restaurants for breakfast - we were both starving... After a couple of hours and as much caffeine and sugar as we could reasonably stand in one morning, we got bored of waiting for the restaurants to open and got an auto-rickshaw (commonly known as tuk tuks to beardy travellers of the South East Asian persuasion) and found the local bus to the Ajanta caves, our first stopping off point.



The Ajanta caves are a series of around 30 or so temples and sanctuaries cut from the cliff face in the side of a ravine. Some are a couple of stories high and all have been cut from the bedrock, rather than built. Needless to say they are quite impressive. Apparently carved between the 1st century BC and the 7th century AD, they are quite mind bogglingly old and the fact that many of the painted frescos in them are still visible makes them that much more interesting. The caves were abandoned eons ago, in favour of the newer and larger caves at Ellora and apparently lay unused and forgotten for some 500 years until, in the early nineteenth century, a group of Brits, probably on a Victorian style 18-30's precursor holiday (Lots of tigers to kill - only 2 pound 50 for bed, board and all the gin you can drink - naughty servant girls included sort of thing) quite literally stumbled across them and were immediately mobbed by postcard sellers and "guides. That must have been quite a discovery. I wonder how much they had to pay to get in...



On the subject of paying to get in (good link eh?) this is a bit of a bugbear with us at the moment, as the Indian Government decided that Foreigners don't pay enough to see their monuments (a sentiment that I actually have some sympathy with - as 5 rupees or about 7 pence isn't going to cover maintenance etc) and has decided to increase the entrance fee for almost ALL historical sites in India by ... wait for it ... about 9,000%. Barstewards. Worse still they decided to institute this change immediately after the Diwali festival (remember when we arrived in India?) That's right, we were amongst the first lucky tourists to pay 10 US$ (nice that they convert it into easy to understand foreign money for us, don't you think) instead of 10 Rs (they have upped the price for locals as well, although by slightly less than 2 orders of magnitude...) Of course, we had come all this way and so coughed up for the entrance, but couldn't quite fight off the feeling that we'd been soundly rogered. I'll leave off moaning about the price of the sites for now, as I'm sure that there's a good rant to be had out of it at a later date (when I have thought up enough expletives to describe how we felt.) Apparently, The BIG sites (Taj Mahal, Ellora caves, everything in Rajastan, etc) are now 10 US$ and everything else is a snip at only 5 - oh joy...



From Ajunta we got the bus to Aurangabad and the Ellora caves, an even more impressive (although younger by 500 or so years) collection of Jaian, Buddist and Hindu caves, again all cut from a rock face. Ellora includes allegedly the largest monolithic rock carving in the world - The 3 storey, 100 ft high Kailash temple, which was frankly fucking enormous (excuse french mum and dad and any others of sensitive constitution.) We took HUNDREDS of pictures, which will probably take about a month to upload on the 1kbps connections that we are getting here, but I'll email an address for them once they're available. We were again asked to cough up 10 US$ for entrance into the Kailash temple (although all the others were free (oh happy days) and actually chose not to go in as you could walk all the way round the edge, above the level of the top of the temple for nout and we were running out of film by the time we did that anyway. There was one particular set of caves, jaian I think, which were particularly stunning as they were set at the top of a 150-or-so foot waterfall. Sadly, the wet season having ended, the waterfall was not performing when we were there.



Ellora lays about 20 km from Aurangabad, a medium sized town, which seems to have little to offer anyone accept a bus station, train station and taxi stand from where you can get ripped off going out to the caves. Actually that isn't quite fair, we had a very nice walk around the old town and a semi-frustrating trip to the post office and an excellent couple of meals in a restaurant called food lovers, who have the most complex discount card system I have ever seen. On receiving our bill, we were presented with a chit to the value of 150 rupees, which could be redeemed against 40% of a subsequent bill of the same value (I assume that means you get 60 Rs off a 150 Rs bill) anytime in the next 6 years. Not only that but you could, if you wish, elect to present the chit, at anytime AFTER 6 years at the restaurant and receive cash OR you could even have the cash paid to you in 100 monthly instalments. I wonder how many people take them up on that offer...



From Aurangabad we took another train to a town called Bidar, which gets about 5 lines in the LP-BTGWOBTA and no map - which was handy. We figure that this would mean that there wouldn't be many beardy types about and we were right, unfortunately all the hotels were full so we ended up staying in a lovely little place, where they liked the desk staff out of the room that we were to stay in and then neglected to change the sheets (although, given the state of them, I somewhat doubt if they have ever been changed. Bidar was an odd town and Andrea, particularly didn't get a very good feeling from it. It took her a while to work out exactly what it was about the town that bothered her and it finally dawned on us that, once dusk had come, there were NO women ANYWHERE. Some might say no shit sherlock, it's a massively religious country, where women are considered at best an adjunct to men and more commonly as some sort of inferior race (I'll withhold my own opinion as there are ladies present, and Andrea has a knife...) but in most towns we had been through up until now there were still women about at all times of day or night, but not a one in Bidar. There's quite a nice set of ruins outside of Bidar, which the Indian govt obviously forgot about, as it's still free to get in, so we "did" that and then blew town for Hyderabad, or "Cyberabad" as it is allegedly being nicknamed. One thing worth noting was some amusing foodstuffs available in Bidar, as all the restaurants seem to have had their menus proof read and printed by the same people - the snack menus were invariably titled "TIT GITS" and the "CHINESE BOWEL" I will let you decipher on your own...



Hyderabad was uneventful, except for a trip out to the fort (5 more of your American dollar, please thank you...) an afternoon spent frustrating the hell out of myself in an internet cafe (4 computers all sharing one snail like connection - I hope this improves, or text is all you're gonna get...) and a trip to the cashpoint. HSBC, contrary to what the LP-BTGWOBTA states, have cashpoints all over India and wonderfully helpful staff who will give you the addresses of all their branches, etc. From here we're off to Hampi, which is some old collection of ruins out in the middle of nowhere (sounds marvellous...) and where we're likely to bump into our first real Beardy traveller hangout (home of the monkey temple, etc.)



On a final note We met up with a Scot in Hyderabad, who pronounced Hampi as "humpi" which I found amusing for no apparent reason so we're off to Humpi, for some titgits and a chinese bowel and from there directly to Aihole via Manki (more amusing place names in Karnataka)